Author: Jim White

photo: t.j. blackwell via Flickr

The Obama administration is engaged in an attempt to absolve itself of responsibility for illegal detentions in Afghanistan, but its efforts appear to be nothing more than a fairly simple shell game. In an article published yesterday at Truthout, Andy Worthington explains the two basic aspects of the deceit: the US is transferring control of the Bagram prison, which is publicly acknowledged, to the Afghan government while continuing to maintain multiple secret detention sites. Here is Worthington on the transfer issue:

This [new policy for reviewing a prisoner’s status] is depressingly close to the “new paradigm” of warfare introduced by Bush and Cheney, and it is, perhaps, no surprise that, as criticisms began to mount, the administration strategically announced that it was in the process of transferring control of Bagram to the Afghan government. It remains to be seen how swiftly the proposed transfer will occur, but it is unsurprising that the announcement has been made, for two reasons: firstly, because it diverts attention from current US policy, and secondly, because, as with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in Iraq, it allows the US government to abdicate all responsibility for the mistakes it has made. Signed in November 2008, the SOFA in Iraq has led to the transfer of thousands of prisoners in US control to the custody of the Iraqi government, even though what awaits them is not a review of whether their detention by US forces was a mistake, but the chaos of the Iraqi judicial system.

The agreement on transfer of control of the Bagram prison was signed on January 9 and could well represent the outcome of a review process first discussed last July:

A sweeping United States military review calls for overhauling the troubled American-run prison here as well as the entire Afghan jail and judicial systems, a reaction to worries that abuses and militant recruiting within the prisons are helping to strengthen the Taliban.

As Worthington points out, transferring control of the publicly acknowledged prison at Bagram is an attempt to deflect responsibility for occurrences at a prison that is known to “strengthen the Taliban”. The Times article notes the known issues with prisons already under Afghan control and points to efforts by the US to provide training to improve conditions in the prisons. Given the overall deficiencies known to exist in recruiting and training Afghan defense and police forces, it remains dubious whether any progress has been achieved in training those in charge of Afghan prisons.

In the same article, Worthington presents new evidence that the US maintains secret prisons in Afghanistan (see this diary for a discussion of the recent UN report on secret prisons and this article by Anand Gopal for more):

Late last year, a reliable Afghan source informed a lawyer friend of mine that there were, at the time, about two dozen secret facilities in Afghanistan, including three or four in Herat, four or five in northern Afghanistan, and three or four in Kabul. According to this source, the majority were US facilities, although a few were run by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan government’s domestic intelligence agency, and a few others were run by the Afghan Army. The source added, “They are all worse than Bagram. All contain a mix of combatants, criminals and totally innocent persons. The main difference is that those at the US prisons are fed better. No one has any rights.”

In addition, just last week, in response to my recent articles, a military insider let me know that, “Not only were there facilities in Bagram, but in Kandahar and Salerno as well. Saw them firsthand between 2006 and 2009, but was told not to speak of the jails.” These, it was noted, were “unsanctioned facilities,” which were off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Back in July, when the New York Times article linked above first came out, I seized on the second paragraph to note that Admiral Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was attempting to inoculate himself against involvement in torture and illegal detention with the statement he put out calling for proper treatment of prisoners. I still think that was the case, and an article this week by Jeremy Scahill provides further information on why we would have the strange situation of a Joint Chiefs Chair attempting to separate himself from actions expected to be undertaken by forces ostensibly under his control. Scahill is writing about recent events in Pakistan, but this passage speaks to the situation in Afghanistan as well:

With General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded JSOC from 2003-2008, running the war, forces–and commanders–accustomed to operating in an unaccountable atmosphere now have unprecedented influence on overall US military operations, opening the door for an expansion of secretive, black operations done with little to no oversight. “The main thing to take away here is a recognition and acceptance of the paradigm shift that has occurred,” says the former CENTCOM employee. “Everything is one echelon removed from before: where CIA was the darkest of the dark, now it is JSOC. Therefore, military forces have more leeway to do anything in support of future military objectives. The CIA used to have the ultimate freedom–now that freedom is in JSOC’s hands, and the other elements of the military have been ordered to adapt.”

Scahill’s article also speaks to a Bush-era concept of “preparing the battlefield”, continued by the Obama administration. Although different from the process Scahill described of sending in covert forces before sending ground forces, the actions with regard to prisons in Afghanistan also qualify as a preparation of the battlefield for McChrystal’s surge in Afghanistan.

The McChrystal/JSOC modus operandi is highly dependent on detaining large numbers of prisoners (see the Gopal article above for the effects on a family that was subjected to a nighttime raid to detain a family member). From the changes that have been announced in advance of the Afghanistan surge, it appears that the new detainees will be split between facilities under Afghan control and the remaining secret prisons under JSOC control, assuring that Mullen’s caution to treat prisoners according to international norms will be ignored.

If the surge does result in a large increase in prisoners to be disappeared into secret JSOC prisons or publicly transferred into poorly run Afghan prisons, then the surge will increase violence rather than decrease it. Avoid the rush and prepare now for a large helping of “who could have expected” when the violence increases.

Jack Goldsmith (photo: arcticpenguin)

In a very interesting Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post, Jack Goldsmith appears to slip and disclose new information about a US cyberattack on al Qaeda in Iraq. Since Goldsmith displays inside information about this attack, it is curious that the Post would neglect to mention Goldsmith’s service in the Bush Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Goldsmith opens the Op-Ed by pointing out the hypocrisy of the US position on cyberwarfare, quoting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s blanket condemnation of cyberattacks and then pointing out that the US has a highly developed offensive capability that it has put into use. It is in getting down to the details of this offensive capability that Goldsmith reveals new information on a previously disclosed attack. This new information raises the question of whether Goldsmith might have been involved, in his previous role in OLC, in delivering legal authorization for this attack or others like it. Given that possibility, it seems puzzling that the Post would only identify Goldsmith by his current Professorship at Harvard and his participation in the Hoover Institution while ignoring his OLC history.

Here is the critical part of the Op-Ed:

Finally, the U.S. government has perhaps the world’s most powerful and sophisticated offensive cyberattack capability. This capability remains highly classified. But the New York Times has reported that the Bush administration used cyberattacks on insurgent cellphones and computers in Iraq, and that it approved a plan for attacks on computers related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And the government is surely doing much more. “We have U.S. warriors in cyberspace that are deployed overseas” and “live in adversary networks,” says Bob Gourley, the former chief technology officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Note that Goldsmith says the US hacked into both cellphones and computers in Iraq. Yet, if we go to the New York Times April, 2009 article he cites, we find reference only to computers:

When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of Al Qaeda into a trap, they hacked into one of the group’s computers and altered information that drove them into American gun sights.

/snip/

So far, however, there are no broad authorizations for American forces to engage in cyberwar. The invasion of the Qaeda computer in Iraq several years ago and the covert activity in Iran were each individually authorized by Mr. Bush. When he issued a set of classified presidential orders in January 2008 to organize and improve America’s online defenses, the administration could not agree on how to write the authorization.

Because a date for the incident the Times reports is not given (it is merely “several years ago” in the April, 2009 article), it is not possible to determine whether it occurred during Goldsmiths’s brief tenure in OLC from October, 2003 to July, 2004. Note that Goldsmith is credited with having the worst of the initial OLC torture memos rescinded, only for new torture authorizations to be put into place after his departure. Also note that the Times states that the Iraq and Iran attacks were individually authorized actions, with the Bush administration still not achieving an overall authorization policy as late as January, 2008, long after Goldsmith’s departure from OLC.

In one sense, Goldsmith appears to be playing partisan games with his emphasis on the hypocrisy of the US position on cyberwarfare. What he really is doing with the Op-Ed becomes much murkier, though, when we realize that he is disclosing new information on previous attacks in which he might have played a role. I welcome any further insights that might be provided on what forces are in play with Goldsmith’s piece. Despite the uncertainty over Goldsmith’s motivations, his conclusion is good reading and appears to provide a useful framework from which to develop a cybersecurity policy:

Everyone agrees on the need to curb this race by creating proper norms of network behavior. But like Clinton, U.S. cybersecurity policymakers are in the habit of thinking too much about those who attack us and too little about our attacks on others. Creating norms to curb cyberattacks is difficult enough because the attackers’ identities are hard to ascertain. But another large hurdle is the federal government’s refusal to acknowledge more fully its many offensive cyber activities, or to propose which such activities it might clamp down on in exchange for reciprocal concessions by our adversaries.

Late last night, bmaz alerted us to a very disturbing report by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek regarding the pending Justice (sic) Department OPR review of the crafting of the torture memos:

While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.

My response after reading this passage from Isikoff and Klaidman was very similar to that of Eureka Springs, who compared it to “an old sucker-punch from Cheney”. After all, Isikoff himself had earlier reported that the OPR report would refer Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury to their state bar associations for disbarment. This was viewed by many as merely the first step of bringing the criminal actions of crafting and implementing a systematic program of torture into the legal system so that those responsible would be held accountable.

So how is it that professional misconduct has been downgraded to poor judgment? Jeff Kaye points us to troubling aspects of previous actions by the DOJ attorney who downgraded the conclusion, but the wider question becomes whether the entire government is standing in the way of accountability for the crime of torture. In viewing the situation, where we now have a President who vows to “look forward, not backwards” and an Attorney General who takes those words to heart, it is hard to escape the conclusion that prosecution will never occur.

That stance of the government standing directly in the way of prosecution for torture is just one aspect of the overall situation of immunity for those at the highest levels of government and large corporations. The financial sector nearly brought the entire world economy to ruins in late 2008, and yet its highest executives retained their outlandish bonuses while their firms were bailed out with taxpayer money. This week Obama followed that situation by stating that he doesn’t want to “punish the banks” despite reports as long ago as 2004 that there was an “epidemic of mortgage fraud”.

Yesterday also brought the UK inquiry into the start of the Iraq war into the news, and Glenn Greenwald did an excellent job of reviewing the terrible toll of this patently illegal act spearheaded by the US that will never see a single person held accountable in the legal system.

The UN published a report this week on the use of secret prisons at the same time as the US head of detentions in Afghanistan made a statement that seemed to leave open the question of whether the US still maintains secret prisons there.

In a book to be released next June, former covert CIA operative and author Barry Eisler incorporates many of these actual events into a fictional account of a variation on the destruction of the CIA videotapes of interrogation. Near the end of Inside Out, protagonist Ben Treven begins to understand the significance of a statement from an erstwhile opponent: How can there be a conspiracy when everyone is complicit?

In developing this theme of everyone being complicit, Eisler hits on a very convincing description of how it occurs. Branding our situation as being dominated by oligarchs, he points out that rather than being hidden, it is in plain sight. Also, “there aren’t any secret handshakes”. Rather, “It’s just a collection of people in business, politics, the military, and the media who recognize their interests are better served by cooperation than they would be by competition.”

Isn’t that a believable explanation of how Margolis downgraded the charge in the OPR report? I doubt he had explicit instructions from Holder or Obama to do so, but the steady drum-beat in the press of Obama looking forward and Holder not criminalizing policy differences, coupled with the report having multiple iterations of going back and forth between DOJ and those whose actions were reviewed, could leave Margolis with only one conclusion as to what he was expected to do. After all, he’s been in DOJ over 40 years and he knows what is in the interests of DOJ and those above it.

Eisler ends the book by dangling the possibility that a network of extremely capable undercover operatives might come together to lead a push for restoration of justice. If such a group exists in the real world, I’d have say that right now their cover is extremely effective and that their plans have not yet been implemented.

I thank Barry Eisler for a pre-publication copy of Inside Out and hope that he and the publisher will forgive me pushing the limits of the notice not to quote the uncorrected proof for publication.

photo: t.j. blackwell via Flickr

Yesterday, Vice Admiral Robert Harward, in a conference call with bloggers, responded to a question from Spencer Ackerman about the issue of secret prisons in Afghanistan. Harward has served under General Stanley McChrystal, the current commander of US forces in Afghanistan, for many years and his current position is “command, control, oversight, and responsibility for U.S. detention and correction operations in Afghanistan”. Here is Ackerman’s report on Harward’s response:

Harward said unequivocally that “all detainees under my command have access to the International [Committee of the] Red Cross.” The admiral suggested that The Times may have misconstrued “field detention sites” where detainees are initially in-processed for “a very short period” before transfer to detention facilities like the Parwan facility at Bagram, since the locations are undisclosed for operational security reasons.

“There are no black-jail secret prisons,” Harward said. “We do have field detention sites we do not disclose, but they’re held there for very short periods, and then they’re moved — if they’re determined to need additional internment, they’re moved to the detention facility at Parwan or released.”

Taken at face value, Harward’s response would suggest that the US has taken positive actions to put the bad history of secret detention sites behind us. However, given Harward’s personal role in that dark history, closer scrutiny of his response is warranted. Going back to the Harward biography linked above, we see that Harward now has command of Joint Task Force 435, while he most recently served in Joint Task Force 714. This Ackerman article is one of the very few public discussions of both of these task forces and also serves to provide more background on Harward’s association with McChyrstal:

More directly, McRaven and Harward share a professional fraternity with McChrystal. Before McRaven took over JSOC — an entity that operates almost entirely in secret — McChrystal ran it for five years, supervising stealthy teams in Afghanistan and Iraq that tracked down and killed senior terrorists like al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. One of McChrystal’s deputies during that period was Harward, and the bonds between the officers remain strong. “General McChrystal and Vice Admirals McRaven and Harward have established relationships through the special operations community,” said McChrystal’s spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis.

/snip/

As a result, McChrystal is turning to McRaven and Harward for critical tasks in Afghanistan. McRaven runs a secretive detachment of Special Forces known as Task Force 714 — once commanded by McChrystal himself — that the NSC staffer described as “direct-action” units conducting “high-intensity hits.” In an email, Sholtis said that because Task Force 714 was a “special ops organization” he “can’t go into much detail on authorities, etc.” But the NSC staffer — who called McRaven “McChrystal Squared” — said Task Force 714 was organized into “small groups of Rangers going wherever the hell they want to go” in Afghanistan and operating under legal authority granted at the end of the Bush administration that President Obama has not revoked.

Given McChrystal’s history with Camp Nama, it is not too big a stretch to presume that the secret prison operations also have been conducted under Task Force 714 along with the operations Ackerman described. Since Harward now commands Task Force 435, the “under my command” part of Harward’s response becomes interesting. Are only the publicly acknowledged prisons under Harward’s command in JTF 435, with secret ones still under McRaven’s (”McChrystal Squared”) control in JTF 714? It would be very informative to hear McRaven’s response to the same question posed to Harward.

The latter part of Harward’s response is equally troubling. He suggests that this article in the New York Times discussing a secret prison in Afghanistan has conflated temporary field holding facilities with secret detention sites. Although the Times article is indeed murky on this issue, a report released this week by the UN (see this press release for links to the full report and its executive summary) provides extensive documentation for multiple secret detention sites in Afghanistan and clearly distinguishes temporary holding sites from them:

Outside of the specific “high-value detainee” programme, most detainees were held in a variety of prisons in Afghanistan. Three of these are well-known: a secret prison within Bagram airbase, reportedly identified as “The Hangar” ; and two secret prisons near Kabul, known as the “Dark Prison” and the “Salt Pit.”

/snip/

The Experts heard allegations about three lesser-known prisons including a prison in the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul, and two other prisons identified as Rissat and Rissat 2, but it was not yet possible to verify these allegations.

The key question now becomes whether the sites documented by the UN are still in operation. Note that the UN report has parsed President Obama’s Executive Order calling for closure of black sites (and closure of Guantanamo) and does not like what was found,while also putting to rest the conflation of temporary sites (CIA in this case, though) with secret prisons:

The Experts welcome these commitments. They believe however that clarification is required as to whether detainees were held in CIA “black sites” in Iraq and Afghanistan or elsewhere when President Obama took office, and, if so, what happened to the detainees who were held at that time. Also, the Experts are concerned that the Executive Order which instructed the CIA “to close any detention facilities that it currently operates” does not extend to the facilities where the CIA detains individuals on “a short-term transitory basis”. The Order also does not seem to extend to detention facilities operated by the Joint Special Operation Command.

So, the UN working group notes that JSOC operations appear to have been left out of Obama’s executive order purporting to end the use of secret prisons. Everything now hinges on the credibility of Harward’s flat statement “There are no black-jail secret prisons”. Such a statement would carry much more credibility if it were accompanied by an admission of those sites which were previously used and documentation that all prisoners held there have been accounted for in shutting the prisons down. For now, the attempt to deflect attention to the temporary holding sites seems to put Harward on shaky ground, leaving open the distinct possibility of secret prisons still in operation, but not directly under his command.

U.S. Army soldiers on patrol near Khowst Province, Afghanistan (photo: DVIDSHUB via Flickr)

More than sixty nations will gather in London tomorrow for an important series of talks on the future of Afghanistan. General Stanley McChrystal, who heads US forces in Afghanistan, sat for an extended interview with the Financial Times in advance of the conference. His comments, when taken in total, amount to an admission that US strategy in Afghanistan has failed and yet he insists we must re-commit to this same failed strategy.

In a repeat of the Iraq surge strategy, President Obama’s extended review of Afghanistan strategy settled on the long-standing US reliance on counterinsurgency to reduce violence to a level that political reconciliation and government development take place. The recently leaked cables that Ambassador Eikenberry sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the strategy review show that he feels that President Karzai is not capable of leading a legitimate government and that little to no attention has been given to the near impossibility of achieving a Western-style central government in a region where such a thing has never existed.

In his interview with the Financial Times, McChrystal provided more evidence that US strategy in Afghanistan is failing. After an extended exchange with the interviewer to establish that one of the key features of the US strategy is to provide security for the government to take over, McChrystal then goes on to admit that the security situation is getting worse rather than better:

FT: I wonder if there is any specific thing that you would like to see come out (of London) that will be useful for your effort?

Gen McChrystal: There are some specific things that I hope that consensus is reached on. President Karzai is likely to announce his intent to implement a re-integration policy and then move forward to implementation, and I’m hopeful and very optimistic that the international community will completely back that. I believe that we will see proposed Afghan Afghan National Security Force target figures for 2011 for the next two years of growth. I’m hopeful that the international community will fall in behind those. There are some other development areas as well. But I think the over-arching thing is that after eight years of war, it’s clear that domestically many political leaders are having to answer questions, this has gone on a long time and it’s not better than it was in 2004, so why are we maintaining it, will it get better? In many ways it is better than 2004, but in security it is not. So what I will hope that we come out of there with is an understanding of what we have done in the last months, and how we have shaped the situation and postured ourselves to do in the next year that I believe will significantly improve the situation, and to give them a reason to have confidence that the path that our leadership has put us on is correct.

Emphasis added.

To repeat, the primary plan is to increase security and then support the development of a government that can take over the country as we leave. The problem is that we are going backwards on security and are essentially starting over, more than eight years into the effort.

Besides the fact that President Karzai is seen as illegitimate by much of the international community due to fraud surrounding the recent election and extensive corruption throughout his government, an additional problem is that he is opposed to the very actions McChrystal employs in his attempts to impose security. Here is McClatchy quoting a Karzai statement to Al Jazeera:

“We’re not going to ask for more cash. We’re going to ask the international community to end nighttime raids on Afghan homes, to stop arresting Afghans, to reduce and eliminate civilian casualties. We’re going to ask them not to have Afghan prisoners taken,” Karzai told Al Jazeera television early in the month.

McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy relies on nighttime raids and arrests as a central feature for removing “dangerous” elements from the population, as noted even in the New York Times editorial endorsing him to head the US effort in Afghanistan:

Reducing that toll will require tighter and more strictly enforced rules of engagement. That applies not just to airstrikes but to the search and detention operations that General McChrystal wants to expand this year with the help of 21,000 additional troops that President Obama ordered sent to Afghanistan. Ground operations are less likely to go astray than airstrikes. But as happened far too many times in Iraq, they can sweep up innocent civilians and turn local people against the American presence.

Who could have predicted that operations known to “turn local people against the American presence” would do just that?

Returning to the Financial Times interview, McChrystal provides more evidence of just how muddled our efforts have become:

FT: The implication seems to be that although it’s not your job to negotiate with insurgents, or determine the shape of a future government, your personal feeling is that it may be the case that one day members of the Taliban are in Kabul, and there’s some sort of peaceful settlement, and that’s acceptable.

Gen McChrystal: As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there’s been enough fighting, and that what we need to do – all of us – is to do the fighting necessary to shape conditions where people can get on with their lives, and everybody can make a decision where fighting’s not the direction that it needs to go in. You just really don’t make progress, politically, during fighting. What I think we do is try to shape conditions which allow people to come to a truly equitable solution to how the Afghan people are governed.

What a mess. Although “there’s been enough fighting”, we need to fight more. Although we need to shape the political landscape for a government to exist, the one that exists is illegitimate and during fighting, “you just don’t make progress, politically”. Our stated strategy for bringing stability is alienating the population and the President. Our Ambassador sees the President as incapable of governing. Other than that, things are great.

Ambassador and former Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry (photo: CENTCOM)

The New York Times has obtained full copies of two cables Ambassador Karl Eikenberry sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the most recent review of Afghanistan strategy. Although it was known at the time that Eikenberry opposed McChyrstal’s strategy based primarily on counterinsurgency, having access to the full text of the cables provides more detail on Eikenberry’s reasoning.

As the Times states in the accompanying article, Eikenberry’s warning in the cables is that Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner” and “continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden”.

Eikenberry’s primary conclusion, according to the Times, is that “deploying sizable American reinforcements would result in ‘astronomical costs’ — tens of billions of dollars — and would only deepen the dependence of the Afghan government on the United States.”

Lest anyone get the impression that Eikenberry’s positions on Afghanistan are merely representative of typical turf battles between the military and the State Department, it should be noted that Eikenberry comes from the military.

Furthermore, although this State Department biography obscures the point, both the linked Times article and the defense.gov site that was the source of this photo note that Eikenberry served as Commanding General for Combined Forces Command Afghanistan Army, or, in other words, Eikenberry previously held the post now occupied by McChrystal. That history gives more perspective to Eikenberry’s conclusion regarding the Karzai government:

They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending ‘war on terror’ and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.

Considering how long the US has been in Afghanistan and what US behavior in the “war on terror” has been since invading Afghanistan, how could Karzai believe otherwise?

Buried in one of the cables and not noted by the Times is another revealing statement by Eikenberry with respect to conditions in Afghanistan:

We underestimate how long it will take to restore or establish civilian government. The proposed strategy assumes that once the clearing and holding process has been accomplished in a given area, the rebuilding and transferring to Afghans can proceed apace, followed by a relatively rapid U.S. withdrawal. In reality, the process of restoring Afghan government is likely to be slow and uneven, no matter how many U.S. and other foreign civilian experts are involved. Many areas need not just security but health care, education, justice, infrastructure, and almost every other basic government function. Many have never had these services at all. Establishing them requires trained and honest Afghan officials to replace our own personnel. That cadre of Afghan civilians does not now exist and would take years to build.

What Eikenberry is telling us here is that our entire strategy is based on a false assumption. Although in theory US forces may well “clear” areas and turn them over to Afghan control, there are no Afghan personnel ready to provide a long-term “hold” and it would take “years” to train civilian personnel to do so. Eikenberry notes elsewhere in the same cable that his previous request for $2.5 billion to begin this training “was debated in great detail, only to be rejected.”

Sadly, Eikenberry is telling us that we are committing to spending additional tens of billions of dollars a year while sacrificing many Afghan and US lives and getting only a long-term engagement from which there can be no stable extraction. Current strategy is focused entirely on security while making a false assumption that a US-style government providing “services” to the citizens will magically appear once security is achieved. Instead, as Eikenberry points out that Karzai also understands, US strategy in Afghanistan is guaranteed to produce a permanent US “war on terror” presence.