PoliticalWarfare.org

Display bin Laden's body. Then make it disappear. Then destroy the al Qaeda legacy.

What fortuitous timing - no sooner do Arab protesters across the Middle East repudiate al Qaeda's revolutionary model, than a CIA hit team eliminates Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani mansion and snatches the body.

Now it's important to keep the momentum going, and to deny the enemy any propaganda victory.

That means finishing off bin Laden's ideological legacy and the popular appeal he enjoyed among Muslim extremists. In doing so, we can stomp out al Qaeda even in places where we can't see or find its operatives.

First, a repetition of the first point: Al Qaeda stood discredited in the eyes of Muslim Arabs from Tunisia and across North Africa, up the Levant to Syria. The mass protests against authoritarian regimes, several backed by the US, had stolen away much of al Qaeda's appeal, and proved that much of that appeal was fundamentally quite shallow.

Secondly, the US and its allies have to decide what to do to destroy bin Laden's legacy, both as an individual and as an ideological vanguard.

Here are some immediate thoughts of what should be done next:

1. Display the body. The free world, particularly the United States, has a right to make sure Osama bin Laden is really dead. Every American has a right to walk right up to bin Laden's corpse and view it. We are entitled to know for a fact that the witch is dead. No shroud for dignity's sake, please - bin Laden's naked, bullet-riddled corpse should be put on display in lower Manhattan for all the world to see. The entire body should be digitally scanned, inside and out - and made available for everyone to take his or her own picture.

This isn't as morbid a thought as it might seem. Bodies are routinely scanned and photographed during autopsies, their digital images preserved. And across most of the world's cultures they are placed on display prior to burial or cremation. For us Doubting Thomases out there - we need to see in order to believe.

No future Elvis sightings, please. Leave no room for conspiracy theories that the CIA faked bin Laden's death, that bin Laden is living in comfortable exile somewhere, or that 20 years from now he'll still be out there, calling the shots. All of us is entitled to see that the beast has indeed been killed.

2. Make the body disappear. The US made mistakes in the past by returning the bodies of dead terrorists to their families or hometowns for burial. This is a nice and sentimental gesture, but it had the net effect of spawning more extremism and terrorism. The graves that contained the physical bodies became shrines for extremist pilgrims, educational tools to propagandize young people, and models to inspire future terrorists.

Even though they were atheists, the Soviets understood the propagandistic importance of bodies. That's why they mummified Lenin, put the remains in a mausoleum, and turned the corpse into the core of a personality cult. That's why, too, the Soviets ordered the physical destruction of Adolf Hitler's corpse, burning it and burying it and re-burying it before ultimately dumping the ashes in a river. There would be no pilgrimage point for future Nazis.

And so, after a thorough public examination, bin Laden's body should be burned, its ashes flushed into the New York City sewer system.

3. Describe how bin Laden spent his last days and died. In what type of luxury did the al Qaeda leader live as his fanatical devotees crawled around their rabbit holes and scratched out a miserable existence? What did he surround himself with in that mansion outside Islamabad? Was he Spartan-like? Or did he live, perhaps, like the Tunisian and Egyptian strong men overthrown by their own people?

Was bin Laden, the puritanical Islamist, really just another religious phony? A total hypocrite whom it would prove shameful to follow? Did the CIA find the types of disgusting double lives that our military discovered among the many suicide bombers who murdered in his name - the liquor, the cyber porn, the pederasty? What about his body? Did the autopsy reveal symptoms of the anal gonorrhea so prevalent among his totally un-gay followers in rural Afghanistan?

Did he go down fighting, or did he cower and plead for his life?

No need to give bin Laden a clean bill of health here - we're looking at destroying his legacy, not being fair and balanced. If there's anything truthful that can be used to discredit him, let's use it.

If there isn't, then it isn't important to know. This is political warfare, not public relations.

Bin Laden may be dead (I'll believe it when I see it), but al Qaeda is still alive.

I'm going to raise a mug of beer and munch a Hebrew National pork sausage to celebrate the brave CIA men who took bin Laden down.

Then it's back to work to destroy what the al Qaeda leader left behind. That means piling dirt on bin Laden's legacy, destroying his appeal, and providing the world with all the necessary facts to heap humiliation on anyone who insists on continuing to follow his cause.

Great blog on public diplomacy in Afghanistan

Just discovered through Facebook a magnificent blog called Public Diplomacy in Afghanistan. It's run by Mahtab Farid, a US State Department public diplomacy officer in Kabul.

Mahtab is a hugely capable diplomat and communicator, and it's really gratifying to see how the State Department public diplomacy shop is allowing its officers to make more use of unofficial online media.

"Public Diplomacy in Afghanistan" contains compelling, upbeat human interest stories about individual Afghans as well as about US and Coalition troops and their relations with Afghans.

The blogger shows a particular interest in Afghan children, both in their own development as people and in their interactions with the Coalition.

I find the blog refreshing because it contains the personal observations of a US diplomat, free of the sterile processing of traditional State Department messages. It's also pleasant to read something different from the hard-hitting, often miserable stuff that I normally cover on PoliticalWarfare.org. I've bookmarked this blog and put it on my Google homepage. It's a great reminder of the many positive aspects of the Good Fight in Afghanistan.

Special ops forces should snatch WikiLeaks founder, counterspy says

(My article reposted from BigPeace.com)  The United States government should issue an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Australian who published tens of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on his website, and try him on espionage charges. And if Assange doesn’t face the charges voluntarily, the U.S. should send in a commando team to snatch him anywhere in the world.

That’s what a senior former U.S. counterspy is urging.

In an exclusive interview with BigPeace.com, former Deputy National Counterintelligence Executive Kenneth E. deGraffenreid says that Assange should be arrested and charged as a spy for revealing more than 90,000 secret and top-secret U.S. military documents on his website.

But Assange has made it a point not to enter the United States since he posted a segment of a secret U.S. military combat video last May, in which U.S. troops are purported to be seen firing at civilians in Iraq. The military has detained an Army intelligence analyst, PFC Bradley Manning, whom it believes illegally copied the video and passed it to Assange.

The publishing of tens of thousands of classified military documents so that the enemy can see them is a far more serious crime than the video case currently under investigation, says deGraffenreid. “This is espionage by internet. If we can get Assange on U.S. soil, he should be arrested,” he tells BigPeace. Earlier, deGraffenreid told BigPeace that Manning should be tried on espionage charges instead of the lesser crime of mishandling classified information. Assange says he has another 15,000 documents yet to post online.

And if Assange won’t come to the U.S. voluntarily? “We have a Special Operations Command that can capture Assange anywhere in the world, and bring him to the U.S. where he can be arrested and charged with espionage,” deGraffenreid says.

That’s what the U.S. did to apprehend terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [pictured], the architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. “Receiving U.S. classified documents, as part of a conspiracy to steal classified information and put them in the public domain where our enemies can see them, is a crime,” according to deGraffenreid, now a professor of intelligence studies at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of national security in Washington, DC.

Assange and his source or sources acted conspiratorially, deGraffenreid notes, citing a report in the Guardian, a leading British newspaper. “Assange was doing intelligence tradecraft. He appeared in different cities, using secret ‘paroles’ or recognition signals so that he and his sources can identify one another, and went to a variety of news outlets to make sure that, once started, the dissemination of the classified information could not be stopped. The conspirators went to different editions so that if publication got stopped in one place it wouldn’t be stopped in another,” says deGraffenreid.

“Illegally giving or receiving 100,000 secret files about our counterterrorism efforts, and making them available to the terrorists to read, is clearly aiding and abetting terrorism,” the former counterspy asserts.

Under the post-9/11 counterterrorism statutes, it would be easy to prosecute Assange as well as his source or sources within the U.S. military. “Our counterterrorism laws are breathtaking in their worldwide applicability,” according to deGraffenreid, who served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy after the 9/11 attacks. “The United States has asserted that it has the right to go to other countries, capture suspects, bring them back here and arraign them.”

Spy hunter says WikiLeaks should be treated as espionage case

(My article reposted from BigPeace.com)  One of the nation’s highest-ranking former spy hunters says that the individuals responsible for the theft and publication of tens of thousands of secret military documents should be prosecuted under federal espionage laws.

The Obama Administration is pursuing the disclosure of more than 90,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks.org as merely the mishandling of classified information – a far less serious offense than espionage.

Administration supporters say that the leak was not espionage. But one of the country’s most successful counterintelligence officials argues the contrary – and says that legal precedent proves it.

“We have an excellent precedent in the case of Samuel Loring Morison,” the naval intelligence analyst who compromised top secret U.S. imagery intelligence capabilities, says Kenneth E. deGraffenreid [pictured], who as Deputy National Counterintelligence Executive from 2004-2006 was the nation’s second-ranking counterintelligence official. Morison served a two-year sentence on conviction of espionage for having compromised U.S. secrets – not to a foreign intelligence service, but to a British publishing company.

“The Morison case was an espionage case. Morison was charged with espionage because he provided classified information to a foreign power,” deGraffenreid tells BigPeace.com. It doesn’t matter that the foreign power was a private media company housed in one of the most solid and reliable American allies: “Morison stole U.S. secrets and provided them to Jane’s, the British military publisher. It was like taking U.S. defense secrets and laying them out in the street in front of the Russians.”

Morison was convicted in1985 of taking only three classified images and providing them to Jane’s, where he was a contributor to the annual reference work, Jane’s Fighting Ships, about the world’s navies. Manning, and perhaps others, provided at least 90,000, and perhaps more than 100,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Morison said he had a policy motive, to leak the satellite imagery of the construction of a Soviet nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in order to convince the public to increase defense spending. By contrast, Manning, as an active-duty soldier, is reported to have stolen the classified files and provided them to WikiLeaks in order to undermine the war effort.

“If you’re trying to hurt the United States, that’s part of the crime. That’s why it’s espionage,” deGraffenreid says. “If you put this stuff out on the Internet or in the New York Times or the Guardian, any sentient being knows that the bad guys – the Taliban, the Russians, the Chinese or al Qaeda – can read the secrets. It doesn’t matter if he says he didn’t mean for them to get the information because he was just trying to influence U.S. policy.”

DeGraffenreid was White House Senior Director of Intelligence Programs and Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan on the National Security Council from 1981 to 1987, and an architect of the successful decapitation of the Soviet KGB stations in the U.S. after the “Year of the Spy” in 1985. During the administration of President George W. Bush, he served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and later as Deputy National Counterintelligence Executive.

WikiLeaks is an international website operated by Julian Assange, an Australian citizen. As such, those who provided the documents to WikiLeaks should be charged under the Morison precedent, according to deGraffenreid. Under that precedent, it does not matter that Assange does not work for the Australian government or that Australia is a staunch U.S. ally.

The prime suspect in the leak is reported to be Private First Class Bradley Manning, age 22, of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. Manning is an intelligence analyst with a top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) security clearance who served in Iraq, but used military computers to download classified information concerning Iraq and Afghanistan. He is presently under military detention at an Army facility in Kuwait, where he is suspected of leaking military combat video to WikiLeaks.

Army investigators are treating Manning as their main suspect in the much larger document leak, but have not officially named him or made the formal allegation. An investigation is underway. Manning’s military-appointed lawyer routinely refers media inquiries to Army public affairs in Baghdad, which is not commenting on the documents case.

News organizations howled at the Reagan Administration’s prosecution of Morison and decried the conviction as a blow to free speech, but the conviction was not overturned and now serves as a precedent to prosecute the WikiLeaks case, deGraffenreid says.

According to deGraffenreid, the national secrets that Manning and perhaps others provided to WikiLeaks is almost beyond comprehension. “If you’re providing 100,000 files, at some point quantity has its own quality about it. One is compromising so much material that it’s devastating. This is what happened when John Walker provided the crypto key for 20 years to the Soviets. He simply allowed the KGB to read so much that it’s not even possible to do a serious damage assessment.”

“Morison was probably more confused than malicious, in terms of motivation,” says deGraffenreid. The spy’s defense was that he was trying to impress editors at Jane’s, where he was angling for a job after retiring from the U.S. government.

“Morison was doing the wrong thing, and it was appropriate that he was tried and punished. But Manning is actually mal-motivated. In terms of scope, what he is alleged to have done is far worse than the Morison case, because he was trying to undermine the war effort. If we are at war and a soldier is helping the other side, if that isn’t espionage, then what is it?”

Adding to the confusion of the case is the fact that espionage laws – and the public’s perception of spying – haven’t kept up with technology. “If he had stolen a single document and gave it to someone with the intention that it spread to our enemies or potential enemies, it would be seen as espionage. But because it’s on the internet, somehow there’s a failure to identify this for what it is,” says deGraffenreid, who is now a professor of intelligence studies at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, DC.

Like our counterterrorism laws were in 2001, U.S. espionage laws are obsolete and need to be modernized, deGraffenreid says. “Most U.S. espionage laws were written during World War I, and they sound archaic if you read the legislative history. They still sound a little archaic. Not a few people in government fear that if they use the espionage laws on the books, some left-wing judge would strike them down. When I was in government we had to back off putting the blocks to people because Justice Department lawyers didn’t believe in what they were doing or that the espionage laws could be sustained.”

Morison was convicted in 1985 under a World War I-era statute. With the support of mainstream media organizations, he appealed his conviction. In 1988, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case later that year, thus upholding the statute and the use of the espionage statute in unauthorized disclosure. President Bill Clinton pardoned Morison on January 20, 2001.

“One has to be childishly naïve to think when you put this out for the whole world to read, that terrorists and hostile foreign intelligence services would not read it, and that that doesn’t matter. The fact is that the bad guys got these U.S. military secrets. It’s the same as if the perpetrator went into a safe and took secret and top secret documents and physically handed them to a foreign national. Had Manning done that, it would have looked exactly like the espionage cases for which others are serving life sentences. But the fact that he allegedly transmitted electronic files, it looks different.”

There is also the idea that the theft and publication of classified documents is somehow legitimate under whistleblowing principles to expose alleged wrongdoing. “Most of the people who commit espionage use weak defenses, like whistleblowing. Those defenses don’t work. If some of the documents contain top-secret codeword material applicable under what is called the comment statute – United States Code 18, Section 798 – it doesn’t matter who you give the information to. If you give it to someone who’s unauthorized, it’s an espionage crime.”

The federal investigation of the WikiLeaks case is being handled by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, not by military counterintelligence or the FBI, which handles civilian spy cases. “You need the Criminal Investigation people, but it’s far easier in the bureaucratic culture to go after someone for mishandling classified information than espionage,” he adds, reflecting on his tenure as the nation’s Deputy Counterintelligence Executive. “The moment prosecutors start an espionage case, a lot of the military lawyers and generals turn to jelly. It’s very hard to push these things in such bureaucratic cultures.”

DeGraffenreid says there is a big difference between mishandling classified information, which is what the U.S. appears to be pursuing against Manning, and espionage. “The punishments are much lighter for mishandling classified information. If you and I were obligated to protect information and we lost it, or were negligent and allowed the janitor to pick it up, that’s ‘mishandling’ classified information. Espionage is different: you are illegally distributing the classified information on purpose to aid a foreign entity or government.”

Judges and juries tend to be harsher on spies than federal prosecutors are, says deGraffenreid. “Most juries convict on espionage and most judges throw the book at spies who get convicted. Often the judges hand down stronger sentences than the government asks for.”

The Case for Calling Them Nitwits (The Atlantic)

Hats off to Daniel Byman and Christine Fair, who write in The Atlantic about what nincompoops many of our terrorist enemies are. In a piece titled, "The Case for Calling them Nitwits," Byman and Fair note, "They blow each other up by mistake. They bungle even simple schemes. They get intimate with cows and donkeys. Our terrorist enemies trade on the perception that they’re well trained and religiously devout, but in fact, many are fools and perverts who are far less organized and sophisticated than we imagine. Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?"

Some highlights from the article:

• "Even in the aftermath of the botched Times Square bombing earlier this spring, the perception persists that our enemies are savvy and sophisticated killers."
• "But this view of the jihadist community is wildly off the mark. To be sure, some terrorists are steely and skilled—people like Mohamed Atta . . . but the quiet truth is that many of the deluded foot soldiers are foolish and untrained, perhaps even untrainable. Acknowledging this fact could help us tailor our counterterrorism priorities—and publicizing it could help us erode the powerful images of strength and piety that terrorists rely on for recruiting and funding."
• "Nowhere is the gap between sinister stereotype and ridiculous reality more apparent than in Afghanistan, where it’s fair to say that the Taliban employ the world’s worst suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself. And this success rate hasn’t improved at all in the five years they’ve been using suicide bombers, despite the experience of hundreds of attacks—or attempted attacks."
• "If our terrorist enemies have been successful at cultivating a false notion of expertise, they’ve done an equally convincing job of casting themselves as pious warriors of God. The Taliban and al-Qaeda rely on sympathizers who consider them devoted Muslims fighting immoral Western occupiers. But intelligence picked up by Predator drones and other battlefield cameras challenges that idea—sometimes rather graphically."
• "One video, captured recently by the thermal-imagery technology housed in a sniper rifle, shows two Talibs in southern Afghanistan engaged in intimate relations with a donkey. Similar videos abound, including ground-surveillance footage that records a Talib fighter gratifying himself with a cow."
• "Tawdry though this predilection for porn may be, it is not necessarily trivial. There is, after all, potential propaganda value in this kind of jihadist behavior. Current US public diplomacy centers on selling America to the Muslim world, but we should also work to undermine some of the myths built up around our enemies by highlighting their incompetence, their moral failings, and their embarrassing antics. Beyond changing how the Muslim world perceives terrorists, we can help ourselves make smarter counterterrorism choices by being more realistic about the profile and aptitude of would-be attackers."

It's great to see this view hitting the mainstream. Arguing that we should be tearing apart the terrorist enemy by mocking him, ridiculing him and pointing out his hypocrisies, has been a bit lonely. Or as Kim Jong-il says in  Team America, "so ronery and sadry arone."

(OK, someone has dared me to refer to the infamous infrared US military gun camera of an Iraqi local - civilian or insurgent is unclear - having inappropriate relations with a farm animal. Our military people have captured a lot of video of insurgents and terrorists engaging in such behavior. I won't embed the actual video on this site, though I did post a still on the top left. For the morbidly curious - and you know who you are - click here for a tasteless, crass, narrated version of the video. A less tasteless, more humorous version, set to music, is available here, to Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch," popularly known by the song's catchy refrain, "Let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.")

Images, top to bottom: (1) innocent donkey being victimized by Iraqi targets, as seen through US military infrared gun camera; (2) Christmas underwear bomber Abdulmutallab, with his malfunctioning explosive underwear; (3) Taliban with mismatched shoes, being ridiculed on Pakistani military website; (4) Islamic radical who mistakenly sets himself afire after torching the American flag; (5) Kim Jong-il, as seen in Team America; (6) the Saudi butt bomber who failed to kill Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism chief but blew himself up with a pound of plastic explosives and a cell phone detonator jammed up his bottom.

Not getting it in time for Kandahar

It began as a brilliantly executed operation near the Taliban's main stronghold: the Marine-led campaign to take Marjah, Helmand province, Afghanistan, earlier this year.

Now we're finding that the operation is bogging down and that the Afghan people aren't helping us as we had anticipated. Somewhere along the way, the Marines apparently diverged from the playbook. They engaged the population very well in the initial successful offensive. But now, according to senior Pentagon officials who just returned from the area, they have failed to constructively engage the locals.

And Marjah was supposed to be a template for the much bigger Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

Here's what AP is reporting, based on leaks from two senior Pentagon officials who recently came back from Marjah:

"The drive this summer to secure Kandahar was supposed to build on the success of the much smaller Marjah operations.

"But so far the U.S. and NATO haven't achieved their goals in Marjah, military and civilian officials said, as the government has been slow to provide services and villagers have not rallied in large numbers to the Kabul-based government.

"'We're still moving forward more slowly than the people would like,' Mark Sedwill, NATO's senior civilian representative, said on a trip to Marjah this month.

"Sedwill still sees overall progress, and other civilian reconstruction specialists said it was unrealistic to expect a smoothly operating local government little more than two months after the initial assault on Marjah.

"Two senior Pentagon officials who visited Marjah in recent weeks said the Marines who provide the backbone of security in the district are not getting enough tips from the villagers or spending enough time with local leaders.

"People are hanging back, afraid to throw their lot with the government even if they hate the Taliban, military officials said, and the opportunity to win their trust is fading.

"The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

"The worry among military strategists is that if their tactics don't take hold in Marjah, with a population of roughly 80,000, what will happen in Kandahar?"

The Marines appear to have missed a very simple formula that the Army appears to have learned: Build and maintain the support of the local population through confidence-building measures that will prove to the locals that they can trust us, that we won't abandon them, that they'll be safe from the Taliban once we're gone, and that we will deliver on our promises.

Corrective action is needed now. I'm becoming less optimistic now. US military commanders in Afghanistan are issuing contracts to badly-needed subject-matter experts - not hiring the best people available, but hiring the cheapest. That's a very bad sign. Not a way to win a war.

(USMC Photo: US Marines in Marjah, 10 March 2010)

The Taliban's Abu Ghraib

WARNING - GRAPHIC, DISTURBING VIDEO

There's no better way to take down an ultra-pious enemy than to prove that its leaders and members are depraved sociopaths. Here is one of the greatest vulnerabilities of the Islamist extremists who preach rigid morality but often act quite differently. Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan are exploiting that vulnerability to help the Taliban tear itself apart.

The target: The notorious Haqqani Network, based in northern Waziristan, Pakistan, and active in eastern Afghanistan.

The US has yet to exploit its full capabilities in this area, with terrabytes of damning captured videos under lock and key.

Fortunately, conservative clergy in Afghanistan and Pakistan have not been so reticent. Key Taliban leaders - Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son, Siraj Haqqani - had their own personal pornography ring. The Haqqani Network offered free "medical care" to rural Afghan women and girls, and then Haqqani's people raped them on video. Other Taliban figures, including a physician, were involved.

Once discovered, the Haqqanis tried to cover up their crimes. They had all the women and girls murdered, as well as their physician. However, they couldn't destroy all the video evidence, which enemies recovered. A Pakistani mullah produced a DVD, currently being distributed in Afghan and Pakistani bazaars, to discredit the Haqqanis. Click here for a downloadable link to the video. Even though the worst scenes have been blacked out for modesty reasons, the videos are graphic and disturbing. All the women and girls pictured in the video are now dead. An English translation of the transcript is available here.

The video is of low production quality by Western standards, but is entirely appropriate for local standards. Making media products to discredit the enemy in rural South Asia is not an expensive undertaking.

Here's the payoff from a political warfare point of view: Under local interpretations of Islamic law, the Haqqanis and all others involved must be killed as punishment, with worse torments to follow in the afterlife.

The mullah called for a jihad against the "House of Haqqani" - the leadership of the Haqqani clan.

This is exactly the type of product the US and its allies should be producing as part of their information operations and psychological operations in the AfPak theater and around the world. The Taliban is mainly Pashtun, and many rural Pashtuns have peculiar depravities that, if more widely known, could turn many devout Muslims against the movement and compel conservative mullahs to issue edicts ordering the imposition of traditional Islamic punishments.

A properly run psychological warfare campaign along these lines would also stigmatize Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda due to their decade-old "adoption" by the Taliban - with the terrorists' new fascination with butt bombs as a case in point. The campaign should be designed to morally compel some of those sheltering the terrorists to betray them or hand them over to the mullahs for old-fashioned sharia justice.

What the Taliban's response means for US Afghanistan strategy

The Taliban was quick to respond to President Barack Obama's December 1 announcement of a new strategy for Afghanistan. It's worth studying the response to learn about the Taliban's propaganda themes, at least as directed toward the outside world. The response shows that the Taliban pays close attention to American political debate, echoing US politicians and aware of splits in the president's political base.

Points to consider:

• The Taliban opened its statement by taunting President Obama with the word that former Vice President Dick Cheney used: "dithering." 
• The Taliban is trying to show that President Obama is not able to make decisions on his own, but is acting under pressure from those outside his natural support base.
• Obama is portrayed as being under political pressure from military generals, "neo-conservatives" (a term that critics use as a euphemism for Jews and for Jewish-oriented national security hawks close to President George W. Bush's administration, and specifically to Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Ironically, the Taliban is correct in saying that Obama's strategy is similar to the Bush policy; Cheney told the Center for Security Policy in October that he personally provided the Obama team with the policy options that President Obama was adopting in Afghanistan.
• Echoes of Soviet propaganda: The Taliban shows a Marxist analysis of US strategy, saying that the Obama policy is on behalf of "the wealthiest few . .. of America and for the protection of their interests. Hence is a strategy of colonialism aimed at securing interests of the American capitalists."
• The Taliban says that Obama is trying to appeal to two opposing constituencies: the military and political conservatives on one hand, and anti-war liberals on the other.

The point here is to show that the Taliban is becoming increasingly sophisticated about American politics and the president's own political base. The group is no longer as insular and provincial as it had been. 

This development follows the Taliban's declaration in August that it was going to lessen its abuse, torture and deliberate killing of civilians (a.k.a. become more respectful of human rights), recognizing that such methods smothered its possibility of winning significant support - as well as tactical allies abroad.

It will be interesting to see if fringe elements of the American "anti-war" movement end up reaching out to the Taliban, just as they have done with other US adversaries such as the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein. Or if the new and improved Taliban reaches out to them. Once this connection occurs, we should expect to see an organized "anti-war" movement in the United States in which American activist leaders coordinate their political action at home with enemy action abroad. Just as we saw in Vietnam and elsewhere in the past.

Click here for the full text of the Taliban's statement as issued in English.

By the way - hats off to the White House for so quickly providing official transcripts of the president's speech (plus fact sheets) in other languages, including in Arabic, Dari, Hindi, Indonesian, Pashto, Persian and Urdu, and in the languages of other Coalition forces including Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Spanish, Turkish and so forth.

Between counterinsurgency & counterterrorism

A winning strategy in Afghanistan isn't as black-and-white as advocates of counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism would have us believe. The solution is a hybrid - and the Army is already putting it in place. All the Army is waiting for is for the president to hurry up and make a decision.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post shows how solidly he understands the issue in his recent column from Afghanistan. The column is titled,"The Real Afghan Strategy: Will Obama Give It a Chance?"

Ignatius looks at the quizzical look on the face of an Afghan farmer who is speaking with US troops who understand his culture. Perhaps the farmer is wondering, Ignatius writes, "Can these pleasant, tea-drinking American soldiers really be the same people who are assaulting Taliban fighters in this region of eastern Afghanistan?"

"The answer is yes. Even as US forces show a gentler side with their new stress on people-friendly counterinsurgency, they continue to conduct devastating attacks on the enemy. It's this mix of hard and soft that's the essence of the US battle plan here, but this reality is not well understood back in America.

"The Washington debate about the Afghanistan war - pitting advocates of a broad counterinsurgency strategy against those who favor a narrower counterterrorism approach - has sometimes been misleading, at least in terms of what actually goes on here. The fact is that U.S. forces are doing both missions every day and night - and indeed are becoming increasingly effective at each one."

There's a danger, though, as Ignatius observes. "A strategy that combines stroking your friends and pounding your enemies runs the risk of sending mixed messages. The public, here and around the world, may conclude that for all their new talk about drinking tea, the Americans are ruthless killers. Meanwhile, the enemy may conclude that whatever its firepower, the United States is impatient and will eventually go away. The wires may get crossed, in other words, with people getting the opposite message from the one intended."

Very true. Ignatius is in Afghanistan to discover what he calls "both sides of this complicated and ambitious strategy."

The first is the soft, "population-centric" approach, which Ignatius demonstrates in a pilot project to improve local governance. The US hopes to show that the locals won't see the central Afghan government as "a distant and corrupt force in Kabul" but as a better-than-Taliban local presence. The problem, Ignatius correctly notes, is that the illusion defies reality: "the Kabul government is distant and corrupt."

Representatives of the first wave of a US "civilian surge" that President Obama promised are already on the scene (though this stability operations initiative predates the Obama administration by several years). The US Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, State Department and other agencies have been at work on this for quite a while, with valiant - and often very successful - efforts that remain almost unknown here at home.

The "hard" side of the US strategy consists of widespread use of special operations forces: the lethal "black" side that kills or neutralizes enemy forces, and the soft "unconventional" side consisting of "A-Teams" to work among the towns and villages with Afghan soldiers, police, and tribal leaders.

"These are creative operations, employing some of America's best soldiers," Ignatius notes. "They reflect a growing understanding of what counterinsurgency experts call the 'human terrain map.'" And mastery of the human terrain, as this blog constantly notes, is key to winning the war.

"It's like all the instruments in an orchestra," a US military commander tells Ignatius of the battle plan's varied parts. "You have to know how to play them together." (This is the very approach of the Institute of World Politics, the graduate school where I teach.)

So the choice between counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, Ignatius notes, "is a false argument. What the United States actually has in Afghanistan is a mixture. Obama must now decide whether to provide the resources - and take the risks - to test whether this combined strategy can succeed."

Photo: Human Terrain Team at work. An Afghan interpreter, left, and Jared Davidson, with Human Terrain Team, both attached to Regimental Combat Team 3 (RCT-3) and the Afghan National Army (ANA), talk with a villager during a mounted patrol in Nawa district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Sept. 23, 2009. The ANA and RCT-3 Marines are talking with village residents to try to gain public assistance in ridding the area of enemy forces. The Marines are deployed to conduct partnered counterinsurgency operations with Afghan National Security Forces in southern Afghanistan. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Gunnery Sgt. James A. Burks/Released)

Listen to this anti-war protester. He has a point. Now he should get back in the fight.

It's easy to dismiss the Washington Post's breathless, over-the-fold, front-page story that a "US official" had resigned in protest of Afghan war policy. The prominently placed headline implied that a senior figure in the Obama administration had quit. In reality, the official was a very low-level operational person on the ground who had been with the State Department for barely a year.

Anyone who remembers Post correspondent Karen DeYoung's shamefully biased reporting from Central America during the 1980s could hardly be blamed for disregarding her story about the resignation of Marine-turned-diplomat Matthew Hoh.

But they would be mistaken this time. Hoh has many valid concerns. Many of the most knowledgeable people are low-level operators on the ground. Hoh is a very well regarded public servant. He's no peacenik. He's worked in one of the most troubled parts of Afghanistan. If his resignation can do any good, it will be to highlight problems in Afghanistan and help us win the war.

As with many Post articles, the real meat of the story is buried deep within the text. In this case, it's in the next-to-last paragraph, which reads,

"[Hoh] also would suggest providing more support for Pakistan, better U.S. communication and propaganda skills to match those of al-Qaeda, and more pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to clean up government corruption -- all options being discussed in White House deliberations."(Emphasis added.)

Excellent ideas! This is where Hoh can still make his contribution to the war effort. Rather than withdraw from the fight completely, he should use his newfound fame to hammer away at the continued US inability to counter enemy propaganda - tactically, operationally and strategically.

General McChrystal and the White House are revising the Afghan strategy. They need the insights of operators like Hoh. (See the text of his resignation letter: Download Hoh letter)

I know what it's like to be on the ground helping a war effort, getting demoralized at how it's being carried out, getting extremely frustrated with the bureaucrats and the process and with less-than-stellar allies, and being worn down by lose-the-war reporting from journalists like Karen DeYoung - who, in the 1980s, was biased heavily in favor of the communist enemy. But we didn't quit. We stuck with the fight in one way or another. And our counterinsurgency effort in El Salvador succeeded, along with our support for the democratic insurgency against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Hoh's frustration is understandable. I don't agree with all his points. But he's right on the matter of how to deal with local Afghans and on our nation's dysfunctional counterpropaganda capabilities. He should be helping with the new strategy instead of sniping out of the Washington Post's turret.

[Photo: U.S Army Spc. Zackery Cely, of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment provides security for an air assault mission, after being dropped off, above Tacome Valley, in Zabul province, Afghanistan, Oct. 13, 2009. U.S. Soldiers, from 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army Europe (USAEUR) are deployed throughout southern Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Tia P. Sokimson/Released)]