In his latest move to insure his permanence in power and control over loyal forces, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has established nation-wide armed civilian militias that are answerable only to him.

According to the El Universal newspaper, the Bolivarian Militia of Peasants will become operational very soon.

For a country about to go on line with an AK-47 assault rifle factory, and with a government that has spent some $6 billion on weapons (publicly announced, without counting those that are not disclosed) in the past four years, this is a worrisome development, especially given Chávez's deep and growing authoritarian tendencies.

Yet it fits perfectly with Chávez's conception of the coming asymmetrical battle agains the United States and the need his forces will have to retreat to the hinterlands to wage guerrilla warfare. Here is my posting on this concept and actions.

There is no ambiguity on where the militias' loyalties lie. Not with the Venezuelan state, not with the military, but directly and personally with Chávez.

"We will start training (the militia) next week. We will establish some centers in the farms that have been seized, in the Zamoranos farms (named after Ezequiel Zamora, a leader of the Venezuelan Federal War) and in the fields and plants that have been seized, to defend the farmers and the fatherland, if necessary, against the imperialist occupation," said Jaua, who was in the event as Minister and Vice President of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) for the Venezuelan plains region.

Further, Orlando Zambrano, a leader of the Simón Bolívar National Front of Peasants, said, "We must solidify the militia – the people's armed power- to defend ourselves. We are voicing anger, joy and willingness to support Commander Chávez."

Nor is there any ambiguity about where the militias will be operational. Many of them will be formed and armed along the Colombia-Venezuela border, where the FARC is increasingly seeking sanctuary from the Colombian military's offensives.

If one has armed Bolivarian militias, with access to a steady stream of new weapons, on the border where the FARC is (and Chávez has already demonstrated his determination to arm the FARC with Swedish rocket launchers etc.), it is not much of a stretch to see who will be significantly helped by this development.

One can be relatively sure that it will not be anyone who has anything critical to say about Chávez. Nor those who own the land and have no judicial recourse when armed mobs take their property.

Every dictator or dictator in the making wants his or her own armed groups that can act outside the more disciplined military structures and are loyal to the Leader above all else. This step usually happens when the Leader is feeling threatened and cannot be sure of the full support of the armed forces, or the security forces' ability to keep a lid on dissent.

Chávez, with control of the judiciary and a compliant legislature, got what he wanted. One can only imagine how much easier the FARC commanders are breathing, and how much fear now resides in the Venezuelan countryside.

As the New York Times recently pointed out, the proposition of serious enforcing sanctions against Iran, particularly in the financial field, are not bright.

The reasons are multiple, but the basic one is that there are too many people and countries that simply want to make money and are happy to help evade sanctions. The second is that there is very little the international community can actually do to penalize sanctions busters. I lived through the global sanctions on Haiti in 1994, and if a desperately poor, isolated country like Haiti, with no real allies, could figure out how to break the sanctions, see the odds of meaningful actions against Iran.

Another reason is that, no matter what Western Europe and the United States -- heck, throw in China and Russia just for fun -- want to do, there are many countries that simply will not comply and in fact will go out of their way to aid Iran.

If one is searching for an answer as to what Iran wants with its expensive and sustained push into Latin America, at least part can be found in the desire to build an alternative structure to avoid sanctions through use of its Bolivarian allies. Venezuela has already agreed to sell Iran 20,000 barrels of gasoline a day, something Iran will desperately need if sanctions were to really kick in.

It is not likely to be a coincidence that Iranian banks operate in Venezuela as Venezuelan banks, or that Ecuador is allowing Iran's central bank in to operate. Nicaragua is hosting Iranian financial structures as well. Imagine Hugo Chávez or Daniel Ortega deciding not help Ahmadinejad out of a sense of international pressure. Can't do it? Neither can they.

But one does not have to look to Latin America to see how the sanctions will be circumvented. Ras al Khaimah, a small and poor emirate in the United Arab Emirates, has opened itself as an offshore haven and is busily registering hundreds of Iranian companies. Its airport is little encumbered by such things as strict cargo inspections or rigorous passenger manifestos, one of the reasons Viktor Bout operated there.

Dubai and Sharjah, also emirates of the UAE, slumbered through the registration and utilization of front companies for Pakistan's nuclear program and the network of A.Q. Khan, as they did with the Bout aviation empire. The list of places where Iran can go (and likely already is going and has long been) is endless.

As the Times noted:

Black market networks have sprouted up all over the globe to circumvent the sanctions. A typical embargo-busting scheme was detailed in a plea agreement filed in federal court here on Sept. 24, the day before Mr. Obama and European allies announced the existence of a previously undisclosed Iranian nuclear enrichment facility near Qum.

In the court filings, a Dutch aviation services company and its owner admitted that they had illegally funneled American aircraft and electronics components to Iran from 2005 to 2007. Under the scheme, Iranian customers secretly placed orders with the company, which served as a front, buying the parts and having them shipped to the Netherlands, Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates. The materials were then quietly repackaged and shipped on to the real buyers in Iran.

The Dutch company was eventually caught. But the ease with which it had operated until then illustrates a key hurdle facing the United States: even if diplomatic challenges can be overcome to persuade countries with significant economic ties to Iran, like China, to approve sanctions, it is virtually impossible to make an embargo airtight.

So one should be extremely careful about making statements about how sanctions will bring Iran to its knees and violators will be prosecuted. The hollowness of that statement will ultimately be shown, and credibility lost. At best they are one tool in a larger tool box.

Today I testified in the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on the interconnectedness of terrorist and criminal organizations, especially the truly transnational groups. (You can access the testimony of the rest of the panel here.)

The central point we all drove home, from different perspectives, was that of the pipeline, or recombinant chains that increasingly allow criminal to co-mingle different types of activity while merging with terrorist organizations that are becoming more criminalized.

At the root of many of the reasons for this is the absence, ineffectiveness or grossly corrupt governments in the regions where these pipelines operate. Without some ability of the government-usually after decades or centuries of absence-to convince people there is a reason to support it, the insurgencies/drug traffickers/non-state actors win by default.

The timing was interesting because the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was reiterating the need to significantly increase the number of troops in Afghanistan to fight the growing Taliban-led insurgency. The Obama administration is in the beginning of a crucial debate on Afghanistan policy.

What McChrystal's strategy cannot address is the mass corruption that has so thoroughly discredited the Karzai government and turned hope to dispair in much of Afghanistan. The perception of massive fraud (even if the fraud was only significant) in the elections may have been the final straw in the ability to generate the necessary trust in the government to make any difference.

As my fellow panelist David Mansfield noted in the hearing, while the Taliban is undoubtedly heavily involved in opium trafficking, so is the government. People expect the Taliban or other non-state actors to engage in criminal activity, in part because they are not the government.

But when the government acts as the enemy while claiming legitimacy for its actions, the population is not fooled. Rebuilding lost credibility is an enormous and time consuming enterprise.

I remember in the late 1980s, when the war in El Salvador was in full bloom, spending time on patrol with an army unit in northeastern Morazan province. The colonel in charge said the biggest change, after 10 years of war and intense efforts to rein in the official abuses of the civilian population, was that, finally, the people had lost their fear of the military.

Not that they loved the government forces, which had for decades carried out summary executions and other abuses. But, after a decade of modified behavior, people were just beginning to move away from their fear.

In Afghanistan, the process of rebuilding that trust has not yet begun, and government behavior is getting worse, not better. Trying to build a serious counterinsurgency effort in those circumstances is simply not viable, no matter how attractive or necessary such an effort seems to be.

One thing is clear. The United States cannot and will not stay in Afghanistan forever. Our troops, even with significant civilian support to help in the nation building process and deployed at the levels McChrystal asks, can still only have a limited impact if the country's own government is viewed by the enemy by much of the population.

I am not arguing that McChrystal's request should be dismissed. I am arguing that, unless we significantly work on the non-military side with credible allies in the government of Afghanistan there is little reason to think that strategy can be successful.

Gen. McChrystal knows what he needs militarily to take on the military side of the Taliban. The other half of the equation is beyond his control, and perhaps the control of the NATO alliance. Unless we think through what we can realistically expect as a counterpart from Afghanistan's government, the military action will be ephemeral at best.

Iran's somewhat outsized global ambitions are finally getting some of the scrutiny they deserve. The decision to test fire its most advanced mid-range missile as pressure mounts because of hidden nuclear facilities is the most visible action.

But less noticed was Venezuela's surprise acknowledgment that Iran is helping it find uranium, of which Venezuela may have a good deal. Such help from Iran had previously been announced as possible, but not recognized as currently underway.

Mining Minister Rodolfo Sanz said Iran has been assisting Venezuela with geophysical survey flights and geochemical analysis of the deposits, and that evaluations "indicate the existence of uranium in western parts of the country and in Santa Elena de Uairen," in southeastern Bolivar state.

"We could have important reserves of uranium," Sanz told reporters upon arrival on Venezuela's Margarita Island for a weekend Africa-South America summit. He added that efforts to certify the reserves could begin within the next three years.

The announcement came as revelations that Iran has secretly been building a uranium-enrichment plant provoke concerns among countries including the U.S., Russia, France, Britain, Germany and China.

The announcement comes as Venezuela, which had been rebuffed at several turns (particularly by Brazil and Argentina) in trying to get nuclear technology because of its insistence of including Iran in any deal, has undertaken to build a nuclear village with Iran. Russia is willing to work with the rogue coaltion.

Brazil and Argentina rebuffed Venezuelan overtures in 2005 because of the insistence of Chávez that Iran be allowed to participate, despite international sanctions.

This is hardly the repudiation by an anti-Chavista bloc. After all, Chávez helped finance the successful election of the president of Argentina and Lula has more credible credentials with the Latin American left than Chávez ever could or should.

But they realized that any help of to Iran's nuclear program would be a violation of UN sanctions. In addition, Venezuela, although Venezuela is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has signed a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, has refused to sign the Additional Protocol, which would give the agency broader inspection powers and obligate Venezuela to provide "the location, operational status and the estimated annual production capacity of uranium mines."

An expansion of Iran-Venezuela ties are necessary "given their common interests, friends and foes," Ahmadinejad said after a meeting with Chávez last month in Tehran, according to Iran's semiofficial FARS news agency.

Unfortunately, their common interests are the destruction of the United States, Israel, Colombia and other, their common foes are the same and their common friends are Hezbollah and other non-state terrorist and criminal organizations such as the FARC.

Given that Iran has lied at every step on its nuclear program and Chávez has gone out of his way to avoid any semblance of transparency in his dealing with Iran, one cannot assume that this is simply an alliance for the good of humanity, or for the peoples of either nation. Venezuela does not have an energy deficit, nor the ability to easily build nuclear power plants.

It can, with Iranian help and oil money, acquire nuclear technology. But it is among the least economically viable methods for generating power, as Chávez claims.

Which leads one to wonder why the insistence on spending scarce resources for the least viable option. Or could it be there is something Chávez is not disclosing? I would be shocked, shocked I say.

However, the Wall Street Journal-available here for a limited time only) has a story today which shows the limits of such an alliance, at least for now.

It is clear that, unless the deal is directly related to the diplomatic recognition of Iran and the building of mechanisms to bypass international sanctions, Iran is hard pressed to fulfill its obligations.

Its bicycle plants don't receive needed parts, a car factory produces only 20 cars in three months, rather than several thousand. Angry Nicaraguan's drive visiting Iranian dignitaries away etc.

The vast promises of Venezuelan aid (unless it is to the FARC) are also largely only in the imagination of Chávez. Yet Iran is able to make functional missiles and Venezuela is able to purchase sophisticated weapons, trainers and training. When the system chooses to be efficient and productive, it can be. And that is the danger.

The bleak assessment by NATO and U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, of the Afghanistan conflict is strikingly similar to a bleak assessment given by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the Colombia conflict in 1998.

While one must be careful not to overdue comparisons of conflicts that have significant differences, I think the parallel shows two things in conflicts where the non-state actors receive haven in neighboring countries and derive much of their funding from the drug trade: 1) One should listen carefully to Gen. McChrystal, particularly on the loss of legitimacy of the Afghan government and 2) the situation is not irreversible, as Colombia has shown.

As a reporter for the Washington Post at the time, I was given access to the report, which predicted the Marxist FARC rebels could take over the country within five years. At the time this is what I wrote, and see if it sounds vaguely familiar:

The Colombian military has proved to be inept, ill-trained and poorly
equipped. Of the 120,000 armed forces members, only 20,000 are equipped and prepared for combat, according to U.S. intelligence sources. Standard military doctrine holds that a regular army needs a 10-to-1 advantage in size to defeat a well-equipped and steadfast insurgency.

The pessimistic assessment of the situation in Colombia, which
produces 80 percent of the world's cocaine and a growing share of
the heroin consumed in the United States, was echoed by Gen.
Charles Wilhelm, chief of the U.S. Southern Command, which is
responsible for U.S. security in Latin America.

"The primary vulnerability of the Colombian armed forces is their
inability to see threats, followed closely by their lack of competence
in assessing and engaging them," Wilhelm told a congressional
hearing on March 31.

At the time, Colombia's electoral campaign had been badly tainted by the fact that the victor, Ernesto Samper, had taken $6 million from the Cali cartel for his electoral campaign. The government had lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of the middle class, and had already lost it in much of the rural areas where the FARC was strongest.

McChyrstal, in his assessment, echoes the weakness of the local forces and the lack of credibility of the the Karzi government.

"The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government," McChrystal says.

If there is not a government worth fighting for, people will not fight. It is a basic fact of counterinsurgency and of life. The corrupted electoral process in Afghanistan has, as has been noted, one clear victor: the Taliban. Those who run such systems do their country a deep disservice for the unforgivable goal of perpetrating themselves in power.

Colombia survived because of timely and well-directed US aid in addition to a radical restructuring of the Colombian armed forces. The senior officer corps at the time, many with ties to violent and illegal paramilitary groups, were swept aside and a new group of radical thinking officers emerged. What was important about that effort, in addition to the results, is that it was led from within the Colombian military and was an internal process which the United States had little to do with.

That is what must happen in Afghanistan, or the war will be lost. The tainted government must regain a modicum of legitimacy or perish. The armed forces must decide it is their fight, not the fight of NATO or the US, and lead their reforms themselves. If not, they will lose, no matter how much money and blood outsiders pour in there.

Colombia had the political will to move back from the precipice. Afghanistan may not. Gen. McChrystal is right. Without a legitimate government people are willing to fight for, there is simply no way to win.