Abu Muqawama: Post
Abu Muqawama retains its autonomy and the views and beliefs expressed within the blog do not reflect those of CNAS. Abu Muqawama retains the right to delete comments that include words that incite violence; are predatory, hateful, or intended to intimidate or harass; or degrade people on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. In summary, don't be a jerk.
Linkage to some Readage
I have been crashing on a new paper on Afghanistan, which just went to the copy editor last night, and have not been blogging (or answering phone calls or emails) as a result. I have, though, been reading in my spare time, and if you are not one of the nearly 1,000 people who subscribe to this blog's Twitter feed, here's the best of what I have read recently:
1. Yesterday, CNAS released a new report that I edited. The team we put together explored several international peace operations in order to determine some of the risks of a peace operation in a future Palestinian state. This was a really fun project, because it was think-tankery at its best: a bunch of people with a variety of experiences gathered in a room to discuss something that might never happen but which is worth sorting through anyway because it might very much concern U.S. policy in the future. I learned a lot from reading and editing the chapters written by the other contributors, and I think you will especially enjoy Marc Lynch's concluding chapter, but Lebanon geeks should read what Kyle Flynn and I wrote about UNIFIL. (Kyle, by the way, is perhaps the most kick-ass intern in the history of interns. He served two tours in Afghanistan in 3rd SFG as an 18E before matriculating to Georgetown. I don't mean to brag, but how many other think tanks in this town enlist Green Berets to assist with their research, do you think?) Initial reaction to our report can be found here and here.
2. Just when CNAS takes up the cross, a very broken Aaron David Miller puts it down. It's not hard to see how a good guy like Miller could have grown so discouraged by U.S. peacemaking efforts in the Middle East given the many disappointments of his career. But mine his essay in Foreign Policy, and you'll actually find quite a few good warnings for any U.S. policy-maker who wades in the mess that is Israel and the Palestinians. (ex. "Negotiations can work, but both Arabs and Israelis (and American leaders) need to be willing and able to pay the price.")
3. Joe Klein has written a wonderful article on the trials and tribulations of Captain Jeremiah Ellis in southern Afghanistan. So many questions popped into my head while reading this article, like how the hell a general officer could, at this stage in the war in Afghanistan, convince a unit of soldiers that they would not be doing COIN but would instead serve as "storm troopers," thus sending units into Afghanistan better prepared mentally to kick ass kinetically than to do all the other things one has to do to be successful. Regardless, Joe's excellent piece is also a reminder to advocates of COIN that doing it on the ground is significantly more difficult than advocating for it from Washington or explaining it on CNN.
4. What the hell is Holman Jenkins going on about in this public relations memorandum for Goldman Sachs disguised as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal? If the SEC was really trying to wage war on shorts, as Jenkins alleges, would they not have sued John Paulson rather than Goldman Sachs? That said, Jenkins is probably correct when he argues that the SEC has a tough case to prove, as my friend Binya (C'01) helpfully explained yesterday in the New York Times. This is a blog on counterinsurgency, national security, and security issues in the Middle East, not finance, but the most readable three books I have read on the financial crisis over the past several months are:
- The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
- Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves
- Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
That last book isn't about the current crisis at all, actually, but just won the Pulitzer for non-fiction and sheds some light on a previous generation of central bankers and their financial crisis. Anyway, now you know way too much about what I read when I'm not reading Flashman novels or books about Afghanistan. On the positive side of things, I was able to explain, in English, what a collateralized debt obligation was to Lady Muqawama over the weekend. (It helped that she has a math-oriented brain as well as an advanced degree in engineering. And is way smarter than me.)
Hah, welcome to Middle East
Hah, welcome to Middle East hell, Exum. Get ready for the weight of the "Obama-is-antichrist and CNAS are his minions" propaganda machine.
Bracing myself now...
Bracing myself now...The article by Joe Klein
The article by Joe Klein says this about the Vietnam War:
"In another war — Vietnam, for certain — an American officer might have cleared the Taliban-controlled area with air strikes. But that sort of indiscriminate bombing doesn't happen in Afghanistan;"
Of course the implication here with this reference to Vietnam is that firepower doesn’t work in Coin but hearts and minds through better programs like building schools (as long as the typical trope notes those bastards up at brigade or division don’t get in the way of the small unit innovators on the ground) might just do it.
Actually with regard to the Vietnam War as current primary source research based on Vietnamese sources conclusively shows (e.g., David Elliot's masterly multi volume work on revolution and social change in the Mekong Delta from 1930 to 1975) that it was in fact firepower delivered through military operations between the US and SVN Military against the VC that brought about death and destruction and the depopulation of the countryside that "pacified' the countryside, albeit not completely and only temporarily.
My point: the theory that links cause to effect in population centric counterinsurgency is not proven in history and current practice also calls it into serious doubt. Yet articles like these by Klein that rely on the typical Coin tropes imply that it can if only the big stupid army would get out of the way and let the innovators on the ground make it happen.
Good strategy demands a clear eye as to what military force can and cannot accomplish on the ground. Yet the illusion that population centric coin can work continues to delude us to its dubious possibilities. Unless of course we want to stay in the place forever.
Thanks for this comment,
Thanks for this comment, Gian. You wrote: "the theory that links cause to effect in population centric counterinsurgency is not proven in history and current practice also calls it into serious doubt." I think the evidence is actually mixed, but you certainly cannot say that population-centric COIN is faith-based and devoid of any serious research backing up its conclusions. I have to do some work today, so I'll link to just a few pieces of scholarship that either underpin contemporary thinking on COIN or have worked to refine our thinking since the publication of FM 3-24: http://bit.ly/bN6yN9; http://bit.ly/4BuJ7p; http://bit.ly/cEs5Nt; http://amzn.to/b995xD; Again, this is just some of the work that has been done, and though I suspect your conclusions have already been reached and can't be shaken, some of this might provoke some additional thought.AM, What evidence would
AM,
What evidence would convince you that Colonel Gentile was right? If there is no such evidence, your conclusions are indeed faith-based. Ie, not falsifiable. Ie, "already been reached and can't be shaken." What would shake them?
For instance: if your strategies fail in Afghanistan and the US loses the war there, as everyone now expects it to, will you agree that COIN has failed? Or will the defeat be best ascribed to some other cause - Israel? Human-rights violations? Trotskyist wreckers? Or will it not be a defeat at all, but a strategic disengagement?
Alas - our side may strategically disengage. But to the other side, it still looks like a victory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsyNvgDvvQw&feature=player_embedded
Certainly, if I was rooting for the Taliban, I'd be cheering. In fact, seeing that video almost makes me want to root for the Taliban. I like a strong horse, too...
Take another look at
Take another look at population-centric COIN in the Sahara:
Mohamed ben-Madani, editor of the London-based Maghreb Review, said it would not be easy to police the region, also known as the Maghreb. He said the move had come "too late because al-Qaeda and the Tuareg in the Maghreb have established their bases" in the region.
"They have penetrated the security services in all countries and there is very little they [authorities] can do to control [them]," ben-Madani told Al Jazeera. Security experts say better regional co-operation is key to containing al-Qaeda in the Sahara because its fighters often evade capture by slipping from one country into another.
That's from Al Jazeera. As predicted, the push is on to link the Tuareg to Al Qaeda so that uranium extraction can continue unopposed in the Sahara region. Al Jazeera has really gone downhill over the past year or two, I must say - a mish-mash of anti-American rhetoric coupled to the same kind of shady two-faced agendas seen elsewhere. The fact that they'd print that nonsense (Tuareg and Al Qaeda working together? What bull!) is just more proof of it.
Any honest expert would note that in this modern world, the real flashpoints are going to be over resources - in the Sahara, it's all about water, which can go to the local population or to the uranium mining concerns - but not to both.
In India and Pakistan, the flash point is going to be the Indus River water supplies. That could easily lead to large scale conventional war, and the losing side would deploy nukes out of desperation - but hey, sell them more reactors anyway, because if we don't the French and the Russians will...
In Israel and Lebanon and Syria, it's the same deal. Israel has made it very clear to Syria that any upstream interference with water flows is grounds for military assault - and the southern Lebanon issue is really mostly about access to the Litani River - the key border areas - Taibeh, Metula, Har Dov, Shaba Farms - are only some 10 km from the river in Lebanon, which Israel has desired for decades now.
This is unsurprising to those of us from the American West - where whiskey if for drinking, and water is for fighting over.
How can "population-centric COIN" deal with this? The only non-hypocritical solution would be to give the local population control over water rights, correct? As per "Quantum of Solace"...
(Whiskey is for drinking,
(Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.)
Welcome to the world of
Welcome to the world of finance... I told you it was interesting. Despite trying really hard not to learn about it, I am (secretly) glad the good people at Reuters beat it into my head.
There is definitely linkage between money, national security and foreign policy. Note the British politicians who say the country has to match its international ambitions to its resources.
It would be better if US FP
It would be better if US FP were based on monetary and mercantilist calculations. At least then we'd be on solid ground, have a solid plan, and be predictable to friend and foe. We'd also be a more reliable ally, up to a well definable point.
Better and ultimately kinder administrators and occupiers as well. The Sunni and the rest would have instantly known where the lines are, we would not have thrown 500,000 Sunni into the insurgent camp by denying them a livelihood. Iraqi politics could have been decided and divided up based on solid economic footing - which in the end so much of it is anyway.
The heady mix mash of competing us ideologies, idealism, social engineering and politics that produced Phase IV would not have come to pass, probably. At least it would have been mitigated.
If this seems cynical - look at DC.
"There is definitely linkage
"There is definitely linkage between money, national security and foreign policy. "
See this on recent China naval exercises...
"Reports of a transit by the [Chinese] PLAN forces close to Okinawa only remind US allies in Japan and throughout the Asia-Pacific, that China's future course is unclear," said Abraham Denmark, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC. "It is important to retain a military hedge against the possibility that China could become confrontational and militarily aggressive."
Now, is that code for pushing more arms sales to Taiwan or something? Is that really wise, considering that in finance, China has a hand on the American purse strings, not the only hand, but a big one?
From businessweek global biz
On the Chinese side, the initial accommodating approach by Obama, although met with a level of caution and skepticism, was perceived as a potential new approach to China that respects the rise of China and its more equal status with the U.S. After all, many argue, China continues to buy U.S. Treasury bonds and now shoulders the largest amount of U.S. debt, thus financing whatever the Americans are doing...
So Beijing felt a sense of betrayal when Obama, shortly after an all-positive visit to Beijing, went on with the arms sales to Taiwan and the meeting with the Dalai Lama."
And as far as Netanyahu's call for "crippling sanctions" against Iran? See dailymarkets.com
Apr 20 2019 The state-owned China National Petroleum Corp’s (CNPC) trading unit- shipped two cargoes totaling 600,000 barrels of gasoline to Iran in exchange for $55 million, according to Reuters. The cargoes were Chinaoil’s first direct sales to Iran since at least January 2009, according to Reuters data.
The neocons & the banksters remind me of Brezhnev... the Soviet Union was also "too big to fail", wasn't it? If you want the history lesson... wiki ain't bad on this:
Brezhnev was responsible of increasing the Soviet Union's global influence and for equlizing the military strength of the Soviet Union and the United States. However his tenure as leader has often been criticised for starting the economic stagnation which would eventually lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
"What evidence would
"What evidence would convince you that Colonel Gentile was right?"
I must honestly say that I dont see the point Gentile is making, unless its that COIN is not a magic bullet and that killing lots of people sometimes is effective in making people shut up. For those of us who prefer not to kill lots of civilians on purpose I have yet to see a better plan than FM 3-24 and all the rest of it...
My point is that FM 3-24
My point is that FM 3-24 doesn’t work, it is broken Counterinsurgency doctrine. It is a rehash of the counter-maoist method that was developed 50 years ago. And the bigger problem with it is that not only is it outdated but it didn’t work even when it was applied back then. So we are stuck with a broken and outdated doctrine, and more bothersome is that after four years with this doctrine the Army has decided recently to cancel a revision of FM 3-24. Can anybody explain why the Army would do that? If after four years of experience in Afghanistan and Iraq doesnt it make sense to revise it now and incorporate that experience even if it might mean some fundamental reshaping of it? Shoot it only took the German Army two years of trench warfare to figure that they needed to revised their operational doctrine for the western front in World War I.
I highlight the history of the Vietnam War because it has become stock "wisdom" that Pacification under Abrams worked and had pacified the rural countryside through better hearts and minds programs like rebuilding schools, other forms of infrastructure, establishing local governance, and increasing presence of territorial forces in villages and hamlets. In fact what pacification did occur was the result of the depopulation of the rural countryside through the use of firepower and military operations. Rural folk therefore left the contested areas and moved to safer areas controlled by the government (my reference to David Elliot’s work shows this quite conclusively and I hope Andrew as an intellectual can find the time to consult it).
I am not making an argument to "kill them all" through superior American firepower. What I am trying to point out are the dubious possibilities that Coin can work as FM 3-24 prescribes and what really happens when a military force tries to change an entire society “for the better” at the barrel of a gun. The promise of Coin therefore becomes a salve so to speak to soothe over the hard hand of war by holding out the promise that by building a new school in an Afghan village that that will somehow be the crossover point for a new Helmand.
I know it may be verboten to
I know it may be verboten to use AM's twitter feeds to launch a discussion on his Comments boards. But I wish to call attention to the Lemann New Yorker piece. Put bluntly, I thought it was terrible. It made very little discussion of terrorism versus insurgency, and it ignored seminal works such as, of course, "Logic." I thought it was shoddy journalism, and it made me wonder whether Lemann had done his spade work properly (call professors and subject matter experts?). Does anyone share my opinion?
ADTS
g.p.g says "In fact what
g.p.g says "In fact what pacification did occur was the result of the depopulation of the rural countryside through the use of firepower and military operations. Rural folk therefore left the contested areas and moved to safer areas controlled by the government"
You sure you aren't talking about the effects of the surge in Baghdad as well?
BAGHDAD -- The number of Iraqis who have fled their homes and become refugees within their own country has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to new data collected in Iraq by two major humanitarian groups.
The rapidly accelerating dislocation of Iraqi citizens has taken place despite the troop increase, and in some cases as a direct result of it, surveys with thousands of the Iraqis have shown.
Statistics collected by one of the two groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, from 499,000 to 1.1 million, since the start of the troop "surge."
Those figures are broadly consistent with data compiled independently by an office within the United Nations that specializes in tracking wide-scale dislocations.
Visitor, Yet somehow, we
Visitor,
Yet somehow, we have the strictest ROE since Gandhi invaded Heaven, and civilians keep getting their guts all over the road. Accidentally, of course. But have you ever heard of risk homeostasis>? The more American troops behave like Gandhi invading Heaven, the less worried your average Pashtoon is about being mistaken for a Taliban. You'll note that they drive pretty recklessly, too.
What's needed is not to incinerate the civilians, but to conquer them. The art of conquering Pashtoons, or other warlike tribes, is no big secret. Make every Pashtoon responsible to a sheik, who is responsible to the Viceroy. If the Pashtoon causes trouble, his sheik hangs him. If his sheik doesn't hang him, the Viceroy hangs both Pashtoon and sheik. Or at least, fires the sheik and replaces him with his cousin.
Can General McChrystal fire his traditional leaders? Or his non-traditional leaders? Or, God forbid, hang them? See - that's your first problem. Fix that problem, then get back to me. Or tell me, with a straight face, there's no one in Kabul who needs hanging.
A little suspension will not put any great strain on your execution machinery, either. Eldon Gorst in Egypt used to muse that if he could hang one Egyptian a year, chosen at his sole personal discretion, all disturbances would end for all time forever. Alas, the mysterious art of colonial government was moving in the exact opposite direction. With what result, we now see!
Bet you don't even know who Eldon Gorst was. See - there's your problem. Arrogant ignorance, plain and simple. Americans are dying because of it. They will continue to die.
Our troops have all the technical devices anyone could ever need to conquer a country. At their feet lies the most pissant country ever conquered - inhabited by the most backward peasants in the known universe. But we can't do it. We are institutionally incapable of knowing how to do it. Google Books has scanned the entire Second British Empire, all written in English and accessible at a click. No one goes near it.
Today, in 2010, it would be far easier for USG to put a man on the moon, than nail up a gallows in Kabul. And we couldn't put a man on the moon, either! Alas, it will be a long time before civilization returns to the Korengal. All I can say is one thing: when it comes back, it will come back with a rope and something tall.
Just to straighten things
Just to straighten things out, didn't AM say that the population-centric COIN track record was "mixed". In that case, what are the "pro" cases and what are the "con" cases?
Mencius Moldberg is,
Mencius Moldberg is, incidentally, a bitter old ex-Soviet soldier...
"Our troops have all the technical devices anyone could ever need to conquer a country. At their feet lies the most pissant country ever conquered - inhabited by the most backward peasants in the known universe."
The Graveyard of Empires...
COL Gentile, With 500,000
COL Gentile,
With 500,000 troops in SVN aided by 800,000 ARVN troops, how come we weren't able to defeat the Viet Cong? Might it possibly be that we alienated the populace who then continued to both passively and actively support the VC? Is it possible had we focused on providing security to the population and isolating them from the insurgency that we might have cut off the insurgency from its base, allowing for a victory?
Is not the goal of every insurgency to gain the will of the people? Certainly Mao made this point. As did Che. And Castro. And Grivas. And many other leaders of successful insurgencies. If the center of gravity around which they operate is the population, doesn't it make sense from a strategic point of view to make that the aim of your war?
As a counter-point to your claim that COIN has never been proven successful, I would argue that COIN is exactly what caused the British to succeed in Malaya and the American Marines to succeed in the Phillipines. They realized that as long as the insurgents could move freely through the population, they could attack their forces whenever they wanted and quickly retreat, slipping back into the safety of the general populace. So they cut off the insurgent from his base.
On the other hand, when exactly has firepower been linked to success in a small war, short of destroying the entire population? It didn't work in the Phillipines, it didn't work in the Indochinese War, it didn't work in the Vietnam War (you said yourself, the positive results were only Temporary. That is to say, the insurgent would move away, then return as soon as we'd left. Clearing territory and then moving on doesn't accomplish anything in a revolutionary war.), it didn't work in Algeria, it didn't work in Ireland, it didn't work in Cyprus, and it didn't work in China (to name a few examples).
Firepower doesn't work if you can't find the enemy on which to apply it. The whole strategy of the guerilla is to pick and choose his fights and then disappear into the population. Short of wiping out the population, focusing solely on applying firepower to the enemy isn't going to accomplish anything, save alienating the population resulting in a net-gain of insurgents to the enemy (yes, you killed five, but made 50 ready and willing recruits for the insurgency).
COIN is intuitive. Imagine yourself a regular civilian in a country with a foreign occupying power being attacked by a band of national rebels. Who would you be more inclined to support, an occupying power that roles tanks down your streets knocking over your neighbor's buildings and firing indiscriminiately at anyone that "might" be a bad guy? Or a power that polices the area, defends you from the rebel attacks, and even helps your community by restoring the school that had been destroyed by the rebels?
Strategy involves more than looking at an enemy's order of battle and deciding what kind of firepower to throw at it. Strategy involves looking at the overall aim of the war, i.e. the political goal to be accomplished, and then applying everything in your arsenal to accomplish that goal. Contrary to Jominian theory, the ultimate goal of a war isn't always the complete destruction of the enemy, and in a counterinsurgency (not the doctrine, the type of war, i.e. a war against an insurgency) it should be to isolate the insurgent by gaining the will of the populace.
COL Gentile, One more point:
COL Gentile,
One more point: it isn't only the small unit leaders that advocate COIN. In fact, the current MNF-I, ISAF, and CENTCOM Commanders all agree on it.
GEN Odierno was the commander of the 4th ID in 2004, notorious for the way they conducted a war seemingly in exactly the manner you advocate, using tanks and focusing on overwhelming firepower. The results weren't exactly "successful" and GEN Odierno shortly did a 180. He got completely behind the COIN concept when he took over as MNC-I Commander and after GEN Casey left, he threw out his plan and came up with his own based on what he learned and this is what he briefed to GEN Petraeus when he came on as MNF-I Commander. There was no greater advocate than Odierno (save perhaps GEN Franks) for the kind of warfare you claim we should use and he completely abandoned it after a year on the ground as a Division Commander dealing (unsuccessfully) with an insurgency.
Hey Andrew, On a completely
Hey Andrew,
On a completely unrelated note, I was hoping you could provide some analysis of the three U.S. Navy SEALs on trial for the assault and subsequent cover up of suspected terrorist Ahmed Hashim Abed. Great blog.
Hooah,
Go B.U.
Scott Wedman: I don't know
Scott Wedman:
I don't know about "pro" versus "con," but I don't think that population-centric COIN was utilized in the Boer War, nor, if Colonel Gentile is correct about the recent issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies (which I'm sure he is), nor was it used in the Malaya Emergency. Whether population-centric COIN was used prior to other methods is a question I don't know the answer to, but which might worth asking.
ADTS
If I was unclear (quite
If I was unclear (quite possible) what I meant to say was, I think population-centric COIN might have been used first, and then "non-population-centric COIN" was ultimately used, but I don't know if that was the case.
ADTS
First, it shouldn't be
First, it shouldn't be necessary to state this, but I obviously don't advocate mass killing, nor do I think anyone on this board does, either.
Second, I pasted the below because it seems apropos to the discussion at hand.
Third, the below was taken from Valentino et al, "Draining the Sea: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare, " International Organization (Spring 2004, Volume 58), pages 403.
Fourth, this is a largely quantitative article, and the below is in the authors' discussion of their results.
"Counterinsurgency theorists have often touted “hearts and minds” strategies designed to win public support through the promise of material benefits and political reforms as more humane alternatives to counterinsurgency. These strategies may be effective when insurgent groups lack strong public support, but strategies such as this are seldom practical for regimes facing mass-based insurgencies. Few regimes possess the resources necessary to provide meaningful, lasting improvements in the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of disaffected citizens. For leaders determined to stave off defeat and unwilling to make major political concessions to the opposition, therefore, mass killing simply may appear as the most attractive choice among a set of highly unattractive options."
ADTS
This will, I assure you, be
This will, I assure you, be my last post.
To be extraordinarily obsessive, the quote was taken 402-403, not just 403.
ADTS
To my Arabic named
To my Arabic named friend:
You should read David Elliot's recently published and masterly multi volume work on the Mekong Delta. If you don’t have the time to read both volumes then suggest you have a look at his abridged version. Have you read either of these two? If so you will understand what I am saying. In fact what Elliot argues, rightly I think too, is that not only did American Coin hopes of hearts and minds not pacific the countryside but neither as he argues to the Communist's hope for Maoist revolution. What he argues radically transformed the countryside was the hard hand of war applied by American and south Vietnamese firepower.
Chiefs, how many times do I have to say that I am not advocating mass killing. I am trying to show what actually happened on the ground in Vietnam, and the larger point that even with the effects of firepower it still really didnt have utility because it was unable to completely pacify the country and once its lifeblood was pulled from the RVNAF they collapsed fairly quickly in 1975. Sure firepower in Vietnam could have produced "victory," but we would have had to destroy the country to save it. As a matter of strategy, which is the essential level of war, doing such a thing simply wasn’t worth the cost. Moreover once we reached stalemate in 68 staying and dying for three more years became highly dubious as well. Are there lessons from this for Afghanistan today? You bet and it is such things through the reenactment of history that I am trying to work through.
Lastly, there is new scholarship out that suggests quite persuasively that pop centric coin as touted by works like Nagl and Krepinevich and Rupert Smith did not work in Malaya and what actually broke the back of the insurgency was the hard hand of war applied by Briggs combined with resettlement of hundreds of thousands ethnic Malayan Chinese, who by the way were largely happy to be resettled.
Coin is "intuitive" huh? Is not war in general intuitive? Was not war for a rifle battalion commander in the hedgerows in summer 1944 intuitive? Or no, that is right, that kind of war was easy and simply and did not require the use of intuition by those who fought it.
Your post betrays all of the Coin tropes that have been so heavily used over the past four years. Please, Jomini?? You sound like John Nagl in his book and the attempted co-opting of St Carl to the Coin side while labeling the non-believers (us conventional, knuckle dragging, non gets it, dolts) as the fruit of the Swiss Planner.
gian
I'm not sure the narrative
I'm not sure the narrative of Odierno coming to the COIN Jesus is quite what happened. I think it's been explored here and elsewhere that getting hammered between Shite militias, the American's and a crazed AQ joker in the deck had a lot to do with the mutual "awakening" that took place. And there was quite a lot of "kinetic" operations that took place on the American's part during the "Surge" (TM). We did have better intel to target who we were "Kineticizing".
This is not to say you don't "secure" the civilian population. Sure you do. Then you squeeze them for intel, bribe or forgive whoever wants to quit, kill or imprison the rest. Which is what happened.
Still think Roger Trinquier had it best. He also kept it to 120 pages. Had we followed his advice of how to divy up our troops into 3 parts and what the roles would be (pogues guard the civilian safe areas, grunts beat the desert and swamps, elite forces hunt the enemy in his safe and safest havens) then we would have gotten much better mileage out of our troops.
[Listen I drank the COIN Kool Aid too...for a minute.]
Hah, welcome to Middle East
Hah, welcome to Middle East hell, Exum. Get ready for the weight of the "Obama-is-antichrist and CNAS are his minions" propaganda machine.
Obama is antichrist........Well, I don't really believe there is antichrist. Really, I would like to see Obama's birth certificate to figure that one out. Not sure what the hub-bub is about. It is contitutional law that a sitting Pres. be a US citizen and every US citizen has a right to verify......or at least see that some governement wee nee did their back gorund check correctly (you know we have had some really botched national security breaches with folks that gov. wee nees did back ground checks on....so we know the wee nees do not always do their jobs....mortgage meltdown.....dahh).
CNAS are their minions.......You are aren't you? Exum worked the campaign and from the postings on this blog, I would say that there is a slant. One of the founders of CNAS is in the Obama administration....or at least in the chain of command. That is pretty close.
Either way, what I have seen posted is not very objective. I would call that a minion.
Rest I will leave up to higher powers to determine.....still would like to see the birth certificate.
Arabic Visitor, Your list of
Arabic Visitor,
Your list of examples is highly selective and suspiciously strawman-shaped. I'll bet you've given no consideration whatsoever to (a) Bugeaud's war in Algeria; (b) the suppression of the Indian Mutiny; (c) the Norman Conquest; (d) any Communist suppression of a guerrilla movement, except the Soviets in Afghanistan; etc, etc, etc.
Conquering a hostile population is historically routine. With superior force, it should be trivial. When it can't be done, something is very, very wrong. Anyone from the Victorian period or earlier, reading this debate, would conclude that he had entered some kind of Alice-in-Wonderland reality.
As for why the Soviets failed in Afghanistan, this is largely opaque to me. I have tried to come to a conclusion, but the information available is simply too poor in quality. What's certain, though, is that the Soviet Union of the '80s was (a) a very ineffective organization, at least compared to its father's Soviet Union; and (b) a lot more politically correct than you might think.
The Soviets, despite their tremendous capacity for atrocities, came to Astan with the same line of crap that the Americans are pitching now - they came to liberate, not conquer. When Stalin's men, or for that matter the Russian colonialists of an earlier age, came to Central Asia, they came to conquer. And they did. And they certainly didn't come with any Karzais in their saddlebags. My suspicion is that Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan reveal institutional incompetence and brutality, not a policy of consistent and determined force.
Gaining the support of the population is indeed the goal of counterinsurgency. History demonstrates that the most effective way to win the hearts of the people is to, first, win their minds. To win their minds, demonstrate to them that the Empire will win and the Rebels will be defeated. A gallows works wonders in this regard. One gallows will win the support of the Afghan people faster and more easily than a thousand girls' elementary schools.
You'll note that the Taliban have no compunctions about executing traitors and spies. Yet somehow, the People do not rise up and reject them! Quelle surprise! How could it be?
The cult of the guerrilla is the cause of the guerrilla phenomenon. No guerrilla movement can exist against a competent government that believes in its right to rule. USG fails in Afghanistan because it is unwilling to rule Afghanistan - as perhaps it should be. But USG's whole institutional history is bound up in the romance of rebellion - after all, it's why we have a USG in the first place! Thus, we simply cannot say to the Afghans: as with all people at all times, you owe unconditional obedience to the government in power, which is us.
Ever watched an episode of "The Dog Whisperer?" It's pretty much the same thing. COIN is a fake recipe for winning the heart and mind of your poodle, by placating it rather than dominating it. The result: a poodle which is the terror of the household. This is not only Afghanistan, but the whole "war on terror." A natural outcome of a century of calculated Anglo-American imperial weakness. In retrospect, by 1900 it was already clear that Liberal Imperialism was going this way. Hopefully the thing is near its nadir.
"pop centric coin as touted
"pop centric coin as touted by works like Nagl and Krepinevich and Rupert Smith did not work in Malaya and what actually broke the back of the insurgency was the hard hand of war applied by Briggs combined with resettlement of hundreds of thousands ethnic Malayan Chinese, who by the way were largely happy to be resettled."
Pop centric coin does not necessarily mean put on a nice smiling face and build schools. Pop centric coin, as its name emplies, means focus on the population. That is the center of gravity that matters most often in an internal war. Briggs focused on the population. He resettled the Malayan Chinese (from whom the MCP relied on for support and recruitment) into concentrated areas (concentration camps, resettlement camps, new villages, whatever terminology people would prefer to use) so that they could be Protected. They conducted a census, issued identification cards, applied a curfew, sealed off the borders of the new villages, even took away all foodstuffs from the population and centralized food distribution. They combined this with a propaganda campaign directed at the population explaining these measures are temporary and necessary to defeat the Communists. Once they've been defeated, you'll be free again. This physically isolated the population from the insurgents, and it also served to do so in their minds. The British gave the population a viable excuse to use not to support the insurgency - "I can't share any of my food with you because I dont' have any, the British have it all," "I can't bring you into my village to meet with people, the British have checkpoints at every entry point." "I can't meet with you, the British have a curfew up." The Malayan Chinese overwhemingly supported the British by enlisting in the Home Guard. They had hundreds of thousands of recruits from the populations in these new villages because the Chinese were happy to help once they were no longer under the control of the insurgency.
The Sons-of-Iraq were a success because the Americans finally listened to Iraqis. This was largely an Iraqi idea to begin with, and American counterinsurgents deserve credit for working with the local population instead of continuing just to assume that enough patrols with enough troops and enough firepower will eventually take care of the problem.
War in 1944 was a much simpler occassion. Anyone wearing a German uniform was the bad guy, so it became largely a question of wear to mass firepower in order to destroy the enemy. There largely was a clear front line, as you push into NAZI territory, you continue the fight. In an internal war, the enemy strikes at you from within in a sea of people before vanishing again. Unless you get the sea to tell you where the enemy is, you'll be wasting your effort like an angry bull continually charging the Matador's cape.
No one ever argued against use of kinetic operations. To the contrary, they're essential to a COIN strategy. To go back to the tenets expounded on by Galula, when you move into an area (a city for example) you have to use an aggressive campaign to begin with. It is important to break the insurgent's hold on the population before attempting to win the population over. Even then, what do you do with the information the population gives you? You use it to destroy the enemy. Kinetic operations are integral, but the aim of your overall strategy is to gain the support of the population.
The Marines just did this in Marjha. They announced a deliberate campaign ahead of time to hopefully clear the city of civilians before beginning a large sweep to clear the city of insurgents. Once this is complete, you secure the city and begin building the ties with the population. This knocks the insurgent off his base and prevents him from ever getting back up again, and it is classic counterinsurgency doctrine.
I have not read David Eliot's book. I will though. I don't presume to know everything, and I'd certainly like to hear his argument.
Which is never off thread
Which is never off thread around here...re the Court Martial in Iraq of Navy Seals...Seals 1, Lawfare 0.
"A military jury cleared U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Julio Huertas of all charges, a military spokesman said"
"http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/04/22/navy.seal.verdict/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn"
Quote: "Contrary to Jominian
Quote: "Contrary to Jominian theory, the ultimate goal of a war isn't always the complete destruction of the enemy, and in a counterinsurgency (not the doctrine, the type of war, i.e. a war against an insurgency) it should be to isolate the insurgent by gaining the will of the populace."
No, the ultimate goal is often seizure of the natural resources for the benefit of the occupying power.
Here's USMC General Smedley Butler, describing the rationale behind the American campaign in the Phillipines (writing in 1935):
We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.
Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war -- a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit -- fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.
That's the story of Iraq in a nutshell.
Colonel Gentile: I should
Colonel Gentile:
I should not have posted what I posted. I apologize.
ADTS
Arabic Visitor, What a game
Arabic Visitor,
What a game of bait and switch you're playing!
Pop centric coin does not necessarily mean put on a nice smiling face and build schools. Pop centric coin, as its name implies, means focus on the population. That is the center of gravity that matters most often in an internal war. Briggs focused on the population. He resettled the Malayan Chinese (from whom the MCP relied on for support and recruitment) into concentrated areas (concentration camps, resettlement camps, new villages, whatever terminology people would prefer to use) so that they could be Protected. They conducted a census, issued identification cards, applied a curfew, sealed off the borders of the new villages, even took away all foodstuffs from the population and centralized food distribution.
Yes. This is exactly what needs to be done in Afghanistan. Plus the gallows. Briggs had that technology, too. We also have some great technology that Briggs didn't have - drones, iris scans, GPS tracking...
So - are we doing it? Are you proposing it? The hell we are. The hell you are. So, when it needs to work, if nothing else so that your history comes out right, PC-COIN magically expands to include un-PC tactics that that no one in 2010 is even considering using.
What Colonel Gentile is saying, as I understand it, is that the homeopathic sugar pill of PC-COIN works if, and only if, it contains actual medication - ie, involuntary state coercion, government without consent. Concentration camps. Free-fire zones. You know - war.
When PC-COIN does not work is when it's just a sugar pill, ie, war without war. As a student of history, frankly, it offends me to see people proposing the theory that there can be war without war. For one thing, it's an offense to all the good men, past and present, who knew there was such a thing as war and gave their lives for it.
COL. Gentile is so bad ass,
COL. Gentile is so bad ass, it's not even funny. He's right up there with GEN. Mattis and SGTMAJ. Wambaugh (and that Air Force EOD SGT. that just broke some record running in full EOD gear). When these guys talk we should all listen. When Foust or Amil talk, it's like EHHH... talk to me when you've gargled diesel and picked your nose with the pinky fingers of those you've slain. 'Til then theories are like assh0les, everybody's got one.
On another note, but related to the subject of BADASSERY, what does GEN. McChrystal eat?
I know he only eats once a day. Does he just eat a bowl of Quinoa, sprinkled with raisins? Shashimi? Does he drink Muscle Milk throughout the day? I think CNAS owes it to the troops to share GEN. McChrystal's extraordinary diet. CNAS should release a .pdf report detailing his diet and maybe title it, "What Mr. COIN Eats" OR "Eat Simply, so Others May Simply Eat" (you guys should be all over that last one, you can't get anymore Pop-Centric COIN than that, then have an accompanying documentary: "Food Inc.: Hungry for Change?")
On a separate note: CNAS should come out with action figures, not the Lego kind, but the full on McFarlane Toys quality (as a matter of fact, commission McFarlane to do your action figures). I'm sure Josh Foust would love to have a Nate Fick Marine UDT Swim Trunks edition figure on his table (it's not all about Bacha Bazis, Josh). C'mon guys, strike while the Iron is HOT! Market this shit! If you make it, they will BUY.
For instance: The Marines
For instance:
The Marines just did this in Marjha. They announced a deliberate campaign ahead of time to hopefully clear the city of civilians before beginning a large sweep to clear the city of insurgents. Once this is complete, you secure the city and begin building the ties with the population.
Now maybe you know things I don't, but it sounds like you're describing Fallujah, not Marja. Did the Marines really clear Marja of civilians? Or did they "hopefully clear" Marja? And how are those "ties with the population" working out?
The thing to do with a Fallujah is to evacuate it, obliterate it safely from the air, and resettle the residents somewhere else. Why does there need to be a New Fallujah? The natives need something to do - they can build new houses for themselves, somewhere else. Five miles down the road, maybe. But don't call it Fallujah. Cheneyville, perhaps, or Bush City. Or - I know - Helvenston. That'll really get the message across.
At least, that's what Saddam would do. Saddam would probably also pull out a lot of fingernails, etc, etc. We don't need to do that. But we do need to do the other things. We're not doing them - so we're losing. Simple as that.
To see how USG used to
To see how USG used to handle these kinds of issues, I invite all AM readers to join me in perusing a classic text of American imperialism: Elihu Root's speech, American Policies in the Philippines in 1902.
Proponents of PC-COIN can ask themselves: what would Secretary Root think of my ideas? What would he make of my results? If I showed him my PowerPoint, what would he say? If he could comment on my blog, what would he say?
The Sovs leaped into a civil
The Sovs leaped into a civil war with both feet, thinking to stabilize the situation, leave the fighting to the DRA's army, and be out in 3 years.
Sound familiar? They weren't trying to conquer the country; they were trying to prop up a puppet government. Of course, they were also fighting a proxy war against a superpower. We don't have that problem, unless you count Iran.
Brutality can be an expression of weakness. The Soviet general thinks: we'll hurt these people so badly, they'll never screw with us again. The mujahedin sees: they hurt us, because they do not have the will to actually conquer us. Wogs they may be, but that doesn't make them stupid.
Of course, there are a lot of other ways to express weakness. We're trying most of them right now!
In the end however, the Afghan desire to be left alone
An inappropriate intrusion of revolutionary cant. The Soviets were not fighting Greta Garbo. Nor are we.
Men fight, by definition, for political power. Afghans fought the Soviets because they wanted power, and believed (correctly) that they could get it. They fight us for the same reason. You cannot stop men from wanting power - but you can stop them from expecting to get it. That way lies peace.
No one cares about your
No one cares about your ideas. No one cares about your results. No one wants to see your PowerPoint. And no one's going to comment on your blog. You're a mental midget.
Mencius "The Soviets were
Mencius
"The Soviets were not fighting Greta Garbo. Nor are we." Touché, in retrospect, I was wrongly imposing my own libertarian motivations. There is always the Roman way: kill the men, sell the women & children into bondage, then plough the earth with salt. I don't think the commonweal has the intestinal fortitude for that type of campaigning though.
Visitor, you may well be
Visitor, you may well be right (except for the comments). Unfortunately, the people who are winning the war in Afghanistan care about my ideas - although they don't need me to tell them, since they know them already. They live in the real world. They don't have advanced degrees. And they don't need to be reminded that two plus two makes four.
Unfortunately, these people are barbarians. It will be a long time before they, or their descendants, are as civilized as you or I. But perhaps it will happen. History is patient. The Mughal dynasty was spawned by just the same hadjis.
L0b0t, There is always the
L0b0t,
There is always the Roman way, but that's a false dichotomy. There's also the Elihu Root way. Read the link.
It doesn't bother me that Americans don't have the stomach for the Roman way. It does bother me that Americans don't have the stomach for the Elihu Root way. But still, they want to maintain the empire that guys like Root created.
COL...blow: Funny you should
COL...blow: Funny you should mention Gen. Mattis as he is one of the main proponents of pop-centric COIN. He and Petraeus oversaw the writing of FM 3-24 together.
Mencius: while not required to form an opinion, actually having experience in war tends to give a man a better understanding of it's realities. Maybe leave this discussion to the big boys?
"The Muj, flush with cash
"The Muj, flush with cash from the US, Iran, China, Gulf States, etc. (all funneled through Pakistan's ISI ) focused on destroying Soviet logistics."
You're talking about the proto-Taliban elements, not the Northern Alliance, which in reality got very little from the U.S. or from the Saudi-Pakistan cash train (Osama bin Laden was on that train, if not helping drive the engine). There's a great photo from that era of Ronald Reagan sitting before the picture of George Washington surrounded by proto-Taliban - freedom fighters!
See Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, on the 1980s period:
Massive forcible conscription drives inflated the Afghan army's reported size but did little to improve it's effectiveness [deja vu?]. Gradually Soviet units took the war on for themselves.
Massoud and his Panjshiri rebels stood near the top of their target list. The Panjshir valley contained only about eighty thousand residents in a country of 15 million, but for the Soviets the valley proved vital. Just to the east of the Panjshir, through a forbidding mountain range, the Salang Highway cut a path between Kabul and Termez, the Soviet transit city on the Afghan border beside the Amu Darya River. For the Soviets to retain their grip on Afghanistan, the Salang Highway had to remain open. There was no other reliable overland supply route between the USSR and Kabul.
Who supplied Massoud the most? The Soviets! [Deja vu?]
"We do not regard an attack on a convoy as successful, even if we destroy many trucks or tanks, unless we bring back supplies, Massoud declared in 1981.
In contrast, Hekmatyar and the Pakistani ISI were supplied with hundreds of millions of dollars from Charlie Wilson, Bill Casey and Prince Turki - and Hekmatyar worked side-by-side with Osama bin Laden during this time - while launching attacks on Massoud's forces.
Hekmatyar is still at it - see LATimes Mar 30 2010
Clearly, the biggest blunder the U.S. made in Afghanistan in the 1990s was not backing the Northern Alliance in the post-Soviet era. If Massoud had managed to gain control of the country, the Taliban would have been entirely forced into Pakistan - but the Pakistanis and the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs with close U.S. ties were more set on backing the Taliban. Hence, official U.S. policy was to deny aid to the Northern Alliance - right on up to 9/11. The State Department in particular, plus Congress, backed this approach.
The biggest blunder of the 2000's, of course, was not going into Afghanistan with full force after 9/11 - why didn't they surround OBL instead of allowing him to escape over the border? Why wasn't the border closed off by airborne troops? Then, they allowed the Taliban to come back in and more or less retake the country! Incompetent blowhards.
Methinks that Cheney and Rumsfeld were more focused on getting their grubby paws on Iraqi oil then they were on defeating Al Qaeda and capturing Osama bin Laden - which might have actually hindered their planned seizure of Iraqi oilfields. That's how it looks, anyway:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/02/60minutes/main4494937.shtml
I think that مايك بن
I think that مايك بن مايك. has some very valid points. Kinetics are always going to be a necessary part of COIN. No matter how nice you play you are always going to need to have men willing to be aggressive and to control areas with force.
What I am looking for in any strategy is flexibility, that ability to utilise whatever doctrine or stratagem works at the time. Now in a complex battle space like Afghanistan that may actually require a verity of techniques, from pure COIN hearts and minds to laying snake and nape.
I recognise that a healthy debate is good for the soul, and that’s what appeals about this blog.
But some facts are unchangeable, and one I can’t shake is that increasingly whether we like it or not the war is won or lost on the ability to convince the local population that we can keep them safe.
And that means safe from Them and Us, it means that we avoid the costly mistakes of mass bombardment and free fire zones, it means we accept that the task is so much harder if you can’t simply spray and pray your way through fire fights.
As the conflict drags and becomes more complex I find my initial enthusiasm and blind faith in new ideas somewhat dampened. But I still remain convinced that PC COIN provides the best way to manage the local population to a point where they will be better prepared to help us, rather than help them.
Arabic Visitor, I'd be happy
Arabic Visitor,
I'd be happy to leave war to the military professionals, if the military professionals gave any objective indication that they knew what they're doing. Call me back when you win something.
I am a student of history, not a military or diplomatic professional. I am not expressing my own opinions on the difficult task of war. I am bringing you opinions from military and diplomatic professionals of the past, who happen to be dead - and therefore, can't post comments for themselves.
It would be nice if you could express your contempt personally to Secretary of War Elihu Root. I'd love to hear his response. Unfortunately, you have no interest in Secretary Root's thoughts, and he has no ability to tell you what he thinks of 2010's "big boys."
Oh, also, by the way, I am an American citizen. I'm not so sure about the way the "big boys" are using my country's blood and treasure. They seem to regard these resources as infinite. I'm not so sure. Is there, like, a form I can send in?
By the way, for any military
By the way, for any military professionals who may be reading, excellent and (by the test of results) effective counterinsurgency theory and practice is easily found in any US Army field manual dated before 1950. For example, these Rules of Land Warfare from 1934. Which state clearly and unambiguously:
Uprisings in occupied territory -- If the people of a country, or any portion thereof, already occupied by an army, rise against it, they are violators of the laws of war, and are not entitled to their protection.
Of course, the US has not (formally) occupied Afghanistan. Quite the contrary - we've liberated it. With what results, we see. Greta Garbo is pretty happy about the matter, however.
Mencius: If they're not your
Mencius: If they're not your own opinion, then what is your point in posting them? Why stop at doing only Root this favor? Surely Hitler and Hirohito would disagree with our position, yet they have no forum with which to express their views. Stalin would surely disagree as well, he was willing to slaughter even his own people for victory.
What a dead man would think about the current situation is irrelevant because it is unknown. Root lived during His time and in His world. The situation has changed. What matters now is what We should do in the current situation, not what Root would have done. What matters now are the opinions of those alive who have learned from the past. If you're not expressing your own point of view, then shut up.
That Secretary Root's
That Secretary Root's opinions aren't mine doesn't mean I disagree with them. I find them quite sensible, and I'm certainly willing to defend them. In fact, I have done so. I am willing to continue doing so. Shit, nobody else is.
It is quite obvious, if you read the past, that the people in it were living human beings with real philosophies. I have no trouble in extrapolating your philosophy back to 1902. It is in fact quite similar to that of Secretary Root's critics in that year. I also have no trouble at all in translating Secretary Root's ideology, which are clearly not specific to the Philippines, Cuba, etc, into the 21st century. If you object to my translation, of course, you may do so.
It is quite remarkable, if you don't mind me saying so, that you compare Elihu Root to Stalin, Hitler and Hirohito. He would no doubt have his own comparisons as well.
"I am not expressing my own
"I am not expressing my own opinions on the difficult task of war. I am bringing you opinions from military and diplomatic professionals of the past, who happen to be dead - and therefore, can't post comments for themselves."
Just read the speech. You
Just read the speech. You used a political speech made by a politician trying to defend his party's policies to make an academic point about military strategy?? Visitor was right; you are a mental midget.
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