U.S. President George W. Bush speaks to U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on Monday.

Michael Yon
National Review Online

Michael Yon, an independent reporter and author of Moment of Truth in Iraq, has just returned to the United States from Afghanistan. National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez checked in with him about the president’s trip there this weekend and his own findings (more of which he will be writing about on his website).

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: You just got back from Afghanistan with Defense Secretary Gates and I know you have a lot of writing to do. But to give us a preview: What were you most struck by there?

MICHAEL YON: Yes, there is much writing to do, but there is always time for NRO. What struck me about the trip was the straight talk from Secretary Gates — in a bit of a contrast with the administration’s typical cautiousness in discussing the situation there. On this trip, I found his assessments on Iraq entirely consistent with my observations — and I have been saying and writing for months that the Iraq war is over. Neither Secretary Gates nor Generals Petraeus or Odierno have put it so flatly, of course — and one can understand that they have good reasons for speaking conservatively. But the war is over nevertheless. At Manama, in Bahrain, I spoke for a couple hours with Fred Kagan, whose observations on Iraq I greatly respect. I don’t want to put words into Mr. Kagan’s mouth, but I suspect he would likely agree that the war in Iraq is over.

Iraq is now an ally of the United States. (Proof positive: Prime Minister Maliki tried to block that second shoe that was thrown at President Bush at their joint press conference over the weekend.) In Manama, Secretary Gates was advocating for lender countries to dismiss Saddam-era debt. The days are gone when Iraq and the United States shoot missiles at each other. The days of cooperation have already begun. I am very optimistic about our current relationship with Iraq.

On Afghanistan, I found Secretary Gates to be just as forthcoming and honest, as I am working hard to firm up my understanding of that war. But at this point, I am less optimistic about our prospects there. I’ll likely spend most of 2009 in that region, and will be watching closely.

Secretary Gates talked with me privately, and over the course of that conversation, my confidence grew that we have the right leadership team in place — leaders who will make the wise and often difficult decisions that are based on facts on the ground, rather than political realities back at home. I am confident in Secretary Gates and his top generals.

LOPEZ: In his press conference there, George Bush made reference to the potential for a flourishing democracy in Afghanistan. Is that remotely possible?

YON: Well . . . I’ve found President Bush’s recent comments on Iraq to be accurate. But I remain uneasy about Afghanistan, and my visit did not make me feel any better about the place, though it’s clear that our soldiers think they are making progress. I think this issue is one of framing: I see Afghanistan as a century-long effort, because Pakistan and the region as a whole need to be brought forward. On the military side, we’ve got the right general in charge — General Petraeus. I heard him speak last week in Manama and had a chance to ask a couple of questions, and he demonstrated a nuanced understanding of our problems there. His team is working on solutions. In the short term, I think the fighting will greatly increase during 2009, at a minimum. One thing is certain: NATO is proving largely worthless.

LOPEZ: What’s your best assessment of “Bush’s legacy” vis-à-vis Afghanistan?

YON: That Afghanistan is more akin to Jurassic Park than a modern country is not the fault of President Bush. I sounded the alarm from Afghanistan in 2006 that we were starting to lose the war, but at the time, Iraq was going so poorly that we did not seem to have the assets or attention span for the growing problems in Afghanistan. I would have blamed President Bush if we failed in Iraq, but we are succeeding. Afghanistan will be up to our new president — which is fitting enough, since Obama has expressed his opinion that that war is the one we should be fighting. Obama will have the troops at his disposal, and he’s already made a wise decision by asking Secretary Gates to stay on. So we’ll see. But Afghanistan will be Obama’s baby.

LOPEZ: What ought to be Barack Obama’s first priority there?

YON: Firstly, listen very closely to his military advisers, including Generals McKiernan and Petraeus. They don’t put lipstick on the pig, as it were. I see General McKiernan as a realistic commander and a truth-teller. Secretary Gates will tell you that we need more trainers to train the Afghan army and police, and our commanders on the ground will say the same. We need more money for infrastructure and development. We need roads, roads, roads. And more roads. We need to more vigorously address the poppy economy and find alternative livelihoods for the Afghan people. We need to work to not alienate the Afghan people because if we lose the wide approval that we still have, we likely will lose the war.

LOPEZ: Can you give us any insight into what Secretary Gates is thinking as he moves from serving President Bush to President Obama?

YON: Secretary Gates gets widespread approval from our military, and this is helpful in whatever he does. But I can say that he is definitely concerned about Iran. He is concerned about solidifying our progress in Iraq, and making a turnaround in Afghanistan. Piracy is a relatively farcical threat. Secretary Gates is concerned about getting more ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] assets in the field — and we need those badly. He did not seem concerned that budget cuts would undermine the fabric of the military, but leaders will have to make some tough decisions on big new weapon systems while we ramp up our efforts in Afghanistan while our economy continues to struggle.

It’s clear that Secretary Gates is working hard to make a smooth transition, so that there is no period when we let down our guard during the interregnum; and it’s also clear that if someone decides to test President Obama, Secretary Gates is prepared to make them wish they had not.

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U.S. Forces in Afghanistan.

Joe Klein
Time

“Things have gotten a bit hairy,” admitted British Lieut. Colonel Graeme Armour as we sat in a dusty, bunkered NATO fortress just outside the city of Lashkar Gah in Helmand province, a deadly piece of turf along Afghanistan’s southern border with Pakistan.

A day earlier, two Danish soldiers had been killed and two Brits seriously wounded by roadside bombs. The casualties were coming almost daily now.

And then there were the daily frustrations of Armour’s job: training Afghan police officers. Almost all the recruits were illiterate. “They’ve had no experience at learning,” Armour said. “You sit them in a room and try to teach them about police procedures — they start gabbing and knocking about. You talk to them about the rights of women, and they just laugh.”

A week earlier, five Afghan police officers trained by Armour were murdered in their beds while defending a nearby checkpoint — possibly by other police officers. Their weapons and ammunition were stolen. “We’re not sure of the motivation,” Armour said. “They may have gone to join the Taliban or sold the guns in the market.”

The war in Afghanistan — the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win — has become an aimless absurdity. It began with a specific target.

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Sebastian Rotella
Los Angeles Times

The Pakistani extremist group suspected in the Mumbai rampage remains a distant shadow for most Americans. But the threat is much nearer than it seems.

For years, Lashkar-e-Taiba has actively recruited Westerners, especially Britons and Americans, serving as a kind of farm team for Islamic militants who have gone on to execute attacks for Al Qaeda, a close ally. The Pakistani network makes its training camps accessible to English speakers, providing crucial skills to an increasingly young and Western-born generation of extremists.

Briton Aabid Khan was one of them. When British police arrested him at Manchester International Airport on his return from Pakistan in June 2006, they found a trove of terrorist propaganda and manuals on his laptop that the trial judge later described as “amongst the largest and most extensive ever discovered.” The haul included maps and videos of potential targets in New York City and Washington.

One video, shot deep in Pakistani extremist turf, shows the then-21-year-old Khan with a grinning young man who says he’s from Los Angeles — a mysterious figure in a case that apparently illustrates Lashkar’s dangerous reach.

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Reza Sayah | BIO
CNN Islamabad Correspondent

It’s getting ugly in Pakistan.

Last week a massive suicide truck bomb killed more than 50 and destroyed the Islamabad Marriott. Extremists are getting more aggressive and sophisticated than ever. Instead of working together against militants, U.S. and Pakistani troops are firing shots and accusation at one another.

On Thursday the Pentagon said Pakistani troops opened fire on a U.S. chopper flying in Afghan airspace near the Pakistani border. The Pakistani Army said they fired at the chopper because it violated Pakistani airspace. The chopper fired back, they said. Washington and Islamabad are supposed to be partners in the fight against extremists. It doesn’t take a military genius to know partners don’t shoot at one another.

The Pentagon called the incident a misunderstanding, but what’s clear is escalating tension between Washington and Islamabad and rising anti-Americanism among average Pakistanis because of incidents like this.

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Barbara Starr | BIO
CNN Pentagon Correspondent

The Pakistan-Afghanistan border has been a real problem for the U.S. military. With insurgents hiding out in Pakistan, the U.S. has been frustrated trying to stop them. Today we learned from a senior U.S. official that a number of U.S. military forces did something very rare, they landed at a compound in Pakistan to take out targets linked to recent attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The official declined to be identified citing the extreme sensitivity of the matter. The Pentagon has refused to comment officially on the attack, but several defense officials acknowledged that U.S. military activity had taken place inside Pakistan.

Why is all this so sensitive? Under former President Pervez Musharraf there was the well understood public fiction that the U.S. would never enter Pakistan. Any publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations inside Pakistan would have put more pressure on Musharraf from fundamentalists. But there were indeed secret agreements with Musharraf to do just that, especially if the U.S. had intelligence about the location of Osama Bin Laden. A recently retired senior U.S. military official confirmed those arrangements to CNN.

But now, with Musharraf gone, the Pakistani government in utter disarray and the US military furious that Pakistan isn’t stopping attacks against American troops and everyone is on even more fragile eggshells. The only way the US military can get any cooperation out of Pakistan is to promise not to talk about these operations publicly.

Top U.S. military officials met with Pakistani counterparts on board the USS Abraham Lincoln in the North Arabian Sea several days ago to talk about the problem of insurgents on the border, but it’s not clear to what extent they discussed operations like the one we learned about today.

The tactic was an uncommon one for the U.S. military. Generally, NATO forces do not enter Pakistan except when pursuing insurgents in Afghanistan who slipped over the border or, in an extreme case, to pursue a high value target. They have fired from the Afghan side or send in a drone to fire missiles along the border, though.

As we understand it, here is what happened in the border area. A small number of U.S. helicopters landed troops in the village near Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, where Taliban and al Qaeda fighters have hunkered down over the years. Local media reports said the attack used both helicopters and ground troops who came out of a chopper and fired on civilians.

The U.S. official said there may have been a small number of women and children in the immediate vicinity, but that when the mission began “everybody came out firing” from the compound. He said that the U.S. troops specifically attacked three buildings in the compound believed to contain high value individuals responsible for training and equipping insurgents who have been crossing the border in increased numbers in recent months and staging large scale high profile attacks against U.S. and coalition forces.

The official could not say if the troops were going after a specific individual. But he acknowledged the U.S. operation, although complex, was actually launched fairly quickly when it became clear there was sufficient intelligence to take the risk of putting U.S. troops on the ground in a potentially hostile area of Pakistan without formal permission from the government. This official and other sources told CNN there was no indication the target was Osama Bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri.

Supporters of the Pakistan People’s Party cheer during a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Pakistan is in many ways the central front of the war on terror. US officials say that both the Taliban and al Qaeda are headquartered there. Al Qaeda directed the 2005 attacks on London’s transportation system which killed 52 commuters from Pakistan. The unsuccessful 2006 plot to bring down ten American airliners with liquid explosives in the United Kingdom was hatched in Pakistan, and the alleged terrorists who planned to attack an American air force base in Germany last year trained in Pakistan.

Now the violence from the al Qaeda and Taliban militants is blowing back into Pakistan itself. In 2006 there were a handful of suicide attacks there. Last year there were 60 suicide bombings, mostly directed against Pakistani soldiers, policeman and government officials. The most prominent victim of the attacks was, of course, Pakistan’s most popular politician, Benazir Bhutto. Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, testified earlier this month that suicide attacks in 2007 had killed nearly 900 Pakistani forces and civilians, and another 500 deaths were caused by armed clashes with the militants. McConnell pointed out that “in 2007, Pakistanis’ losses [at the hands of the militants] exceeded the cumulative total of all the years between 2001 and 2006.”

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