Final reaction paper.

Nicholas Laferriere
reaction paper 8
Rashid Chapter 16-19
The War Briefing
Ahmed Rashid and Dexter Filkins on Charlie Rose
The Triple Agent
John Meacham on Memorial Day
Coming Apart, from The New Yorker
This week we covered a lot of material and had our last class of the semester.  A lot of the material summarized what we have talked about in class.  The issue with Pakistan and other countries in the area was the main focal point of the material for this week along with the growing unrest inside of Afghanistan.  We watched one documentary, read the last 4 chapters of Rashid and watched a few news clips.  
Chapter 16 of Rashid’s book talks about the problems in Central Asia, following the USSR leaving the area.  Some countries in the area tried to reduce the chances of being taken over by extremist by having more of a hard-line policy similar to that of the Taliban, while still trying to be slightly moderate, like Kyrgyzstan.  The resulting problem was an overall lack of human rights that were on par with the western world.  After 911 the US was more willing to negotiate with moderate countries in the area.  The US wanted to use Uzbekistan as a place to launch attacks into Afghanistan, but Uzbekistan was playing both sides of the coin with Russia and the US and ended up kicking the US out.  
In chapter 17 Rashid talks brings up Pakistan again, and their involvement with the resurgence in Afghanistan in and around 2006.  From this reading it was quiet clear that the US and her allies knew that Pakistan was either highly supported of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and that these groups actually had control inside of the Pakistan government. The border issue was again brought up in this chapter.  The problem was the same old issue that the NATO forces would fight the Taliban fighters and than they would cross the border into Pakistan, which was basically a safe haven for them.  NATO was very limited in what they could do to combat these issues.  The other issue is that the US and NATO forces were often scared in combat of taking loses.  That mixed in with the fact that Rumsfeld cut troops at one of the worst possible times that he could.  
The second to last chapter in Rashid’s book chapter 18 is about Pakistan and how it is falling apart.  It highlights the fact that Pakistan as a whole isn’t unite and under one central leader.  There courts and the government are separated from the ISI and military and their own separate entities, inside of Pakistan.  This has lead to the fact that Pakistan as a country can’t control what happens inside of their borders and why it is a safe haven for terrorist.  When Musharraf would feel like the terrorist inside of the borders were starting to get a little out of hand he would employ the military to try and stop them.  They would than strike back with suicide bombings and other brutal attacks.  This led to further instability inside of Pakistan.  To try and gain some support back he started to work a little with Benazir Bhutto.  While Bhutto was campaign against Musharraf he was shot.  He became a martyr for his political part and they dominated the following elections and took control of the government.  
The last chapter of the book covers what has happened after the 2008 elections in Pakistan and some problems that the US was facing at the current time.  Pakistan still had a lot of the problems that were spelled in the previous chapter.  Now they also faced economic collapse along with the rest of the world, bad relations with the UN, and human rights violations.  When Gilani, the new president of Pakistan started a new military offensive but could control the what the military did.  The Military ended up making their own deal with the people that they were fighting.  And it appears that it didn’t even stop terrorist attacks against NATO.  It clearly showed that the Military inside of Pakistan is much stronger than the government and that they had their own agenda to follow.  At the same time the US like everyone else in the world was being devastated with by the global recession.  The war was starting to become vastly unpopular at the time and Obama still went ahead with the much needed troop surge in Afghanistan.  But it was too little too late in the war.  Their is still a lot of different that could play out in Afghanistan which could change everything that has been done there.  
Another reading that we did was an article from the New Yorker.  it was an interesting piece that had a few stories wrapped up into one article.  It bounced around the stories of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  I talks about how a few of them died and also a story about one who came back and faced hard times when he got back home.  He wasn’t able to get a job but everyone was proud of him serving and doing his part.  It also talked about a man Chris Berman who was trying to improve Humvees for the soldiers.  But like most things that involve the government he ran into a lot of political red-tape and seemed to be doomed before he could even start.  Another major part of the article was talking about how inflated the events around the war where.  Although he attack on 91 was bad it was portrayed as the beginning of world war 3.  It also says that the reason for this was because the current generation didn’t have any prior experience with war, so they made things in the wars seem way worse than they were.
John Meacham on Memorial Day was an interesting sort clip on how Americans have forgotten the meaning of memorial day.  A lot of this is due to the fact that fewer than 1% of people in the US are in the military so they don’t understand what it is like to not be at peace and actually be in combat.  He really emphasised the point that we need to give more respect to the soldiers that are currently serving.  
The second small clip that we watched was a story of a triple agent that bombed CIA agents.  He was originally an Al Qaeda agent that was recruited to the work for the Jordanian intelligence.  As a result he was also in contact with the CIA.  But in reality we was still working with Al Qaeda as a triple agent against the CIA.  He blew himself and took a few CIA agents out with him. The informant gave a lot of information to the Jordan security services that seemed valid.  The CIA was so interested in talking with the person that they allowed him to get through a few security systems and do devastating damage.  
We also watched an interview with Ahmed Rashid and Dexter Filkin about Afghanistan, hosted by Charlie Rose.  The two talk a lot about things that Rashid talked about in his book that I have already covered.  The US is having great military success against the insurgents and has killed over 10,000 fighters.  But at the same they are also losing respect with the local people for doing night raids and running kill/capture missions.  Their is also an increase in violence following these missions led by the US.  Both guest agreed that the the Taliban are just waiting for the US forces to leave and take back the areas just after the US forces have left.  Part of this is due to a lack inferstucture to control the area after the US left.  Also it is hard to get people to step up into leadership positions to grow the government because the Taliban are assassinating public figures.  Rashid also brings up a point that the Taliban are more going towards a semi legitimate government in Afghanistan, where they make a deal to get some power and try and get some public support from the common people.  Both said that their is a chance for a nightmare scenario where Pakistan government might get into a war with Indian government and lead to a possible world war.  
The one documentary that we watched this week was The War Briefing.  It covers a lot of information that was covered in the two books we read in this class.  It was a good summary of the issues that are going on currently in Afghanistan.  It highlights the points that their is an increase in violence in the area and the situation has gotten progressively worse.  One of the phrases that was constantly brought up was “the forgotten war”, as the American government seemed to care more about Iraq most of the time instead of focusing on Afghanistan.  The documentary than goes on to explain that because the US forgot about this war is why the Taliban were able to mount a resurgence.  Again in this documentary like most things that we have read or watched in this class a finger is pointed to the ISI and Pakistan government for supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  The last thing the documentary covers is the possibility that Pakistan might become a failed state that is a nuclear power.  This is a huge problem due to the fact that most likely an exterminist group would take power and than have control over the weapons.
The last class we talked about a few different things.  One of them was the poor reporting on the war by the American press.  Everyone agreed right off the start so it wasn’t much of a discussion.  Next we talked about the whether the US should go into Pakistan and other countries in the area to bring stability to the region in hopes that it will help Afghanistan and will hopefully eliminate any safe havens for both Al Queda and the Taliban.  The class was split on the subject pretty evenly.  The main concerns were the nuclear weapons in Pakistan and were would all the soldiers and money that would be needed come from to support the new war.  Personally I think that we need to do it in order to bring stability to the area but I don’t it is feasible to do it at the moment.  The only way I can think of that would have allowed us to achieve this, we would have had to accept all the help that was offered to us following 911.  We could have gotten every country in NATO to go to war with us and provide the man power and money to fix the region and solve a lot of the problems that came up.  We were to focused on doing it for the glory of America that we got in over our heads way to fast.