Tacky War on Terror

Munitions merchants are not what they used to be. A century ago, in "Major Barbara," George Bernard Shaw gave us Andrew Undershaft, an intellectual who philosophized about war and poverty. Today we have 22-year-old Efraim Diveroli, who peddles useless used weaponry and keeps getting arrested for domestic violence.

After "repeated inquiries" by the New York Times, the Army this week finally suspended his company, AEY inc., from future federal contracts, after learning Diveroli had sold them Chinese ammunition that he claimed to be Hungarian.

The company, which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach with a licensed masseur as Vice President, had supplied $300 million of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces, much of which turned out to be more than 40 years old from stockpiles of the former Communist bloc, including some that the State Department and NATO had determined to be obsolete and spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

Diveroli's convoluted business dealings include allegations of bribery in Albania (where some of munitions blew up this month, killing 22 people and destroying hundreds of homes), a dummy company in Cyprus and illegal arms trafficking in the Czech Republic, all of which led to arming US allies fighting the Taliban with useless and dangerous weapons.

It's comforting to know that the war on terror is being run by the people who certified Diveroli as a reliable arms contractor.

Our Wobbly War on Terror

With President Bush's would-be successors squabbling over Iraq, they are neglecting the main threat of terror that will face one of them taking office next January.

In Pakistan, Musharraf is on his way out as leaders of the two dominant parties agree to reinstate the judges he fired and try to strip him of crucial powers.

"Afghanistan is slipping toward failure," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden warns. "The Taliban is back, violence is up, drug production is booming and the Afghans are losing faith in their government. All the legs of our strategy--security, counter-narcotics efforts, reconstruction and governance--have gone wobbly."

The schedule of staying or going in Iraq is dominating the foreign policy debate in the presidential campaign, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are becoming more urgent.

"If we should have had a surge anywhere," Sen. Biden wrote last week in the New York Times, "it is Afghanistan...In six years, we have spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction only what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq."

The border area between the two countries, according to Biden is "a freeway of fundamentalism: the Taliban and Al Qaeda find sanctuary in Pakistan, while Pakistani suicide bombers wreak havoc in Afghanistan."

The Bush-Cheney strategy of relying on Musharraf's unreliable assurances about rooting them out is collapsing, but this Administration is unlikely to face that fact.

Biden sums it up: "The next president will have to rally America and the world to 'fight them over there unless we want to fight them over here.' The 'over there' is not, as President Bush has claimed, Iraq, but rather the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Voters should be pressing Sens. McCain, Clinton and Obama to tell them what they are going to do about that.

Mission Creep in the Middle East

John McCain's hyperbole about keeping troops in Iraq for a hundred years is alarmingly echoed in a Washington Post OpEd by one of the saner foreign policy experts on the Washington scene.

"What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common," Anthony Cordesman writes, "is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war.

"Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020."

Only seven months ago, Cordesman was pointing out that some recent advances in Iraq were the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents and quoting a U.S. official as describing our situation as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."

Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman made a case then for phasing down troop levels starting early this year. Now, another trip to Iraq and Afghanistan has persuaded him that "these are wars that can still be won" if we stay another decade or more.

Does the word quagmire ring a bell? In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam and stayed another five years before accepting a humiliating defeat.

Now, once again, we are testing our will in places thousands of miles away against antagonists who are willing to do anything for as long it takes to get control of their own territory.

We started out to remove Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, a mission that has morphed into policing the entire Middle East, with Pakistan and Iran next on the horizon. Can Cordesman and John McCain explain how we do that without breaking our military and busting the budget?

Burritos and Botox Beat Sex

Hard to tell what cultural studies scholars will make of all this, but American web users are less interested in sex than their counterparts in Egypt, India and Turkey.

But our Internet searchers lead the world in curiosity about burritos and Iraq, and are second only to Australians in asking about botox and car bombs, according to Google data since 2004.

The Irish want to know about hangovers and Kate Moss, Italians are inquisitive about Viagra while people in Pakistan are understandably concerned about terrorism and the Taliban.

So in the long run, the average American is a lover of Mexican food who wants to erase frown lines caused by worries over the violence in the Middle East. Short term, if you check quickly, the preoccupation is with fires destroying castles in Malibu.

ABC's Leaky Terrorist Coverage

Al Jazeera West is at it again. ABC TV’s doughty “investigative team,” which specializes in Al Qaeda handouts, is reporting the impending Mother of All Terrorist Attacks, as gleaned from an exclusive interview with Taliban military commander Mansour Dadullah.

"You will, God willing, be witness to more attacks," he told a Pakistani journalist, according to ABC.

“Just last month,” the network notes, “Dadullah presided over what was termed a terror training camp graduation ceremony in Pakistan, supposedly dispatching attack teams to the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany.”

The question arises: Why are Dadullah and his “Pakistani journalist” being so good to ABC? Last month, they gave the network an exclusive on the “graduation ceremony,” which was dutifully reported without qualification.

No one would want to dampen the investigative team’s zeal for terrorist coverage, but perhaps Brian Ross and his crew are cultivating their sources a bit too much.

Terrorists must have their Scooter Libbys, too, and it would be a shame if American journalists hadn’t learned to be more skeptical of all leakers bearing gifts.

ABC's Terrorist PR

No American graduation ceremony has been as well covered as that of the Al Qaeda/Taliban training camp shown by ABC on its network news last evening.

The terrorist publicists must be thrilled with the PR return on inviting "a Pakistani journalist" to videotape their staged proceedings.

In passing, the network's promotion of its exclusive noted that "U.S. intelligence officials described the event as another example of 'an aggressive and sophisticated propaganda campaign.' "

So it was. The "intelligence officials" will be studying it, as they should, but why were millions of American TV viewers exposed to it. There was an uproar when the Bush Administration tried to pass off its political videos as news. Are terrorists a more credible source?