Center for a New American Security

General McChrystal's assessment of the war in Afghanistan was forwarded to the Secretary of Defense and the NATO Secretary-General today, so it's as good a time as any to flag two must-reads from yesterday and today. In the first, Tony Cordesman writes just how easy it would be to lose this war -- though he admits there is also no clear path to victory. Not surprisingly, given that Tony and I traveled through Afghanistan together for a month, I am sympathetic to his analysis. In the second, Dexter Filkins gives us an idea of how hard it will be to win the war. I have never met Filkins, but I think he gets it right too.

The next several days could prove decisive, and in more ways than one. The votes are expected to be counted by the second week of September. By then, officials on the Election Complaints Commission should have a better sense of how substantive the election fraud was. And this week, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in the country, is expected to deliver his assessment of the Afghan situation to President Obama. That report could lay the groundwork for a request for more troops.

 

The situation on the battlefield is difficult on its own. But it is, of course, inevitably bound up with the political stalemate in Kabul. As American commanders and diplomats have said repeatedly here, no amount of troops can substitute for a lack of political consensus among ordinary Afghans.

 

In this way, the politics in Kabul and the fighting in the south feed off of each other, for better or worse.

 

“If people decide that we could not give them anything through the democratic process, then the insurgency will be strengthened,” Mr. Abdullah said. “And then the United States will need to bring more troops and more resources here — and for what?”

 

That’s a question that President Obama, General McChrystal and, ultimately, the American people, will have to decide.

Pretty interesting panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation. I was wondering what Barno's thoughts on all this were...

In other news, Hamid Karzai is doing his best to exhaust the patience of the United States.

Case in point: a now widely reported exchange the day after the elections last week between Mr. Karzai and Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, at Mr. Karzai’s presidential palace in Kabul.

 

American officials initially described the meeting, which also included Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, and his deputy, Francis Ricciardone, as routine. The three men, the officials said, told Mr. Karzai that the United States was maintaining a neutral position on the elections and was leaving decisions about whether there needed to be a run-off to the Afghan elections commission and the electoral complaints commission.

 

But a few days later, reports surfaced in international and Afghan news outlets that Mr. Holbrooke had demanded a run-off election in the “explosive” meeting with Mr. Karzai, a charge which the Americans deny. Administration officials accused Mr. Karzai’s agents of leaking select portions of the meeting to make it look as though the Obama administration was trying to force Mr. Karzai into holding a run-off.

 

Mr. Karzai, a senior administration official said, “has a longstanding pattern of creating a straw man of America’s positions, and rallying people around that.”

 

“But contrary to those reports,” the official said, “no one shouted, no one walked out” of the meeting.

 

Mr. Holbrooke, administration officials said, did not demand a run-off during the meeting but did express concern about the complaints about fraud and ballot-stuffing. The Associated Press quoted Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada, as refusing publicly to discuss the meeting.

 

Whatever the case, the atmosphere may now have become so poisoned between the United States and Mr. Karzai that the Obama administration will be hampered no matter what course it takes. Administration officials said that initial characterizations of the success of the elections referred solely to the fact that they took place at all, despite threats by the Taliban and more than 200 rocket attacks that rained on southern Afghanistan on election day.

You know, Hamid Karzai is playing a dangerous game. There are plenty of senior-level folks in the Obama Administration questioning our continued involvement there, and the president himself seems to be worrying Afghanistan could be his Vietnam. I have made the case that both the United States and our allies have clear interests in Afghanistan, but I do not think this administration is nearly as enthusiastic about this war as I am. (And I'm not that enthusiastic.) I wonder if Karzai understands this. I wonder if he gets that while Bush was willing to bet his entire presidency on Iraq, Obama does not appear ready to bet his entire presidency on Afghanistan?

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It doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on it, apparently:

“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Admiral Mullen wrote in the critique, an essay to be published Friday by Joint Force Quarterly, an official military journal.

 

“I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all,” he wrote. “They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”

JFQ doesn't have the essay online yet, and I can't find this YouTube video Shanker is writing about. There's a video of some pirates stone cold fighting the U.S. Navy, though.

Josh Foust -- who, as Spencer Ackerman memorably put it, "never misses an opportunity to critique a side he agrees with" -- has stepped up to the plate and begun an effort to address some of the strategic concerns people have about Afghanistan. Josh is a smart (if not collegial) guy who has spent some time in the country, so I'll be following his posts with interest.

I just printed the whole thing off to read on the Metro (.pdf). All kinds of good stuff, as usual, and with more geographic diversity than this blog has sported of late.

One author in the Indian Defense Review has drawn lessons from Sri Lanka's campaign against the LTTE. They are a far cry from FM 3-24. But are they better? Or even an alternative we Americans and our allies could opt for?

SECOND FUNDAMENTAL: GO TO HELL

 

Following from the first, the second principle of Rajapaksa’s ‘how to fight a war and win it’ is telling the international community to “go to hell.” As the British and French foreign ministers, David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner, found out during their visit. They were cold shouldered for suggesting that Sri Lanka should halt the war and negotiate with the LTTE. As Rajapaksa said during the post-interview chatter “we will finish off the LTTE, we will finish terrorism and not allow it to regroup in this country ever; every ceasefire has been used by the LTTE to consolidate, regroup and re-launch attacks, so no negotiations.” Eliminate and Annihilate – two key operational words that went with the “go to hell” principle of the ‘Rajapaksa Model’. After Colombo declared victory the Sri Lankan Army Commander Lt Gen Sarath Fonseka used words used by Rajapaksa. That the SLA will not allow the LTTE to “regroup”.

 

FIFTH FUNDAMENTAL: NO CEASE-FIRE

 

Rajapaksa’s brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who consistently maintained that military operations would continue unhindered. “There will be no ceasefire,” was Gotabaya uncompromising message. The clear, unambiguous stand enabled other prominent personalities in the Rajapaksa cabinet to speak in a uniform voice. “Human rights violations during war operations and the humanitarian crisis that engulfs civilians caught in the cross fire have always been the trigger points to order a military pull-back,” asserted Mahinda Samarasinghe, Minister for Human Rights and Disaster Management. “The LTTE would always play this card in the past. They would use the ceasefire to regroup and resume the war.”

 

President Rajapaksa was clear that he did not want to go down that route. That was the traditional way of fighting the LTTE – two steps forward, four steps back. The Rajapaksa brothers’ commitment to a military solution was cast in stone. And it was anchored in a deft political arrangement. But first it is important to reveal the idea behind the political arrangement. “It was to ensure that there would be no political intervention to pull away the military from its task of comprehensively and completely eliminating the LTTE,” says a senior official in the President’s Office. “Prabhakaran was aware of the political contradictions in Sri Lanka and so was confident that the SLA will not indulge in an adventurous, all guns blazing, a full onslaught against the LTTE.”

Eli Lake was right to profile Derek Harvey, the widely respected intelligence officer now starting a center in U.S. Central Command for the study of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Harvey has this right:

"We have tended to rely too much on intelligence sources and not integrating fully what is coming from provincial reconstruction teams, civil-affairs officers, commanders and operators on the ground that are interacting with the population and who understand the population and can actually communicate what is going on in the street," he said. "If you only rely on the intelligence reporting, you can get a skewed picture of the situation."

The only problem with this, you all will have noticed, is that this kind of cultural change often takes years to develop, and we have, what, 18 months to get things right in Afghanistan?

Jerry Warner and Pete "Robots Boy" Singer on defense energy strategy (.pdf).

The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest consumer of energy, using more energy in the course of its daily operations than any other private or public organization, as well as more than 100 nations. There may be no aspect of American defense planning that is as important, and yet little understood and acted upon, as our defense energy security strategy. Increasing our energy efficiency is often framed as an environmental issue, when it has actually become a core national security concern for America in the 21st century.

Okay, here you go. Greatest. Source on Hizballah. Ever. The rest of my dissertation should be quite easy to complete now. (Thanks, Mitch.)

Rep. Peter King wonders whose side Eric Holder is on with respect to the investigation into alleged torture conducted by our intelligence agencies. That's all fine and good, and I am glad Rep. King is so tough on Islamist terrorism, but I imagine there are those in the United Kingdom who wonder whose side King was on in the 1980s when he shamelessly carried the PIRA's water.

"You will have thousands of lives that will be lost, and the blood will be on Eric Holder's hands," he said.

Civilians killed during The Troubles (1968-1998): 1,857 (and an additional 705 from an army currently fighting alongside U.S. Marines in Helmand Province, Afghanistan)

From a political science professor (and avid blog reader):

No. No. And No. Or at least no more than having a policy inevitably means official Washington will back that policy and debate about small variations in that policy, rather than fundamental questions. Is the China debate being "stifled" since we don't discuss anymore whether or not to economically shun China due to their human rights practices? Was the nuclear weapons debate "stifled" in the Cold War -- or did most people just agree that it was good for the US to have a big nuclear arsenal given the threat from the Soviet Union?