The Good Harbor Report

Noodling about the internets yesterday I happened upon a reference to Richard Clarke. This reference included a link to a website called The Good Harbor Report so I clicked on it.

There are several very good articles and features there, including a report from Clarke entitled "While You Were At War" which seems to me to be a good substitute for the NIE the Senate keeps being stonewalled on. Good Harbor Report is also about to undergo a significant change. Very soon their name will change to Cold Hard Truth dot com and readers will be invited to submit articles because "We want to be the place where the smartest, most original, most unexpected ideas in global security, foreign policy and politics are proposed and discussed, where we don’t simply follow the news but lead the way to new concepts, new philosophies, new realities."

Anyway, the article that really caught my eye and got me looking further was the piece by Julie Sirrs, "Let The Afghans Lead".

Sirrs is a former DIA military analyst. She was the first, for a long time the only, analyst to recognize the significance of Bin Laden moving his base of operation from Sudan to Afghanistan back in the 90s. Gail Sheehy wrote about her in The New York Observer in '04. It's yet another tale of intelligence ignored and people threatened and ostracized by the intelligence and diplomatic communities in the US. (Why exactly do we believe anything they tell us about Arar again?)

Sirrs makes the observation that the Afghans have been fighting each other for centuries and more recently successfully fighting more traditionally organized modern military machines and defeating them.

And yet we don't consider them as capable of handling the fight against the Talibs because the Afghan army isn't enough like a modern army.

As she says, "It’s been five years since the U.S. supported Afghan fighters in overthrowing the Taliban. It boggles the mind that the Afghans who had been fighting the Taliban – and before that the Soviets and themselves – for over 20 years are just now becoming “nearly ready” to fight on their own. Could it be that the way we are “training” the Afghans isn’t really as effective as what they already know? Witness the Taliban’s resurgence. Obviously superior firepower and numbers – the combined U.S. and NATO forces total about 40,000 troops, the Afghan National Army is currently about 24,000, while the Taliban are estimated to have around 10,000 fighters – aren’t the way to win the war in Afghanistan."