Center for a New American Security

Her testimony from the House yesterday (.pdf).

The problems, as she (and Old Boy Vikram, I guess) sees them:

1. Threat perception.
2. A trust deficit.
3. A lack of COIN/CT capabilities on the Pakistani side.

The solution? Something called the PCCF -- the Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund. This sounds a lot like a CERP in that it would give a lot of funds to the combatant commander -- with very little oversight.

And while I understand the need to not have to ask Congress for money for each and every expense, I have some reservations:

1. The American people have already invested $10 billion in the Pakistani Army since 9/11. What do we have to show for our investment? (Answer: very little.) So maybe oversight provided by representatives of the U.S. tax-payer, while undesired, is warranted.
   
2. Is the Department of Defense asking for this money to fund military-military partnerships because it doesn't have the authorization to do military-police partnerships? Or because this is, honestly, where we see the most pressing need?

Personally, I think we need to be investing more in the Pakistani 5-0 than in a military that has proved incompetent -- when not, you know, HELPING THE OTHER SIDE. So there are a few things -- aside from Admiral Mullen's weird man crush on General Kiyani -- that I cannot figure out. And I worry that the reason OSD is asking for this money to fund the military is because they know they cannot do anything aside from what they are allowed to do under 1206 authorization and don't trust State or whoever to get the job done vis a vis the Pakistani police.

Look, I have been more or less staying out of this brouhaha caused by Tom's argument that we should shutter the service academies. But I'll back Tom up on one thing: in my experience, service academy graduates are indeed a little socially awkward -- at least when compared to their ROTC peers.

• One theme that surprised me was that West Pointers were socially awkward. "ROTC, OCS graduates were much better at dealing with the real world, much more socially aware," stated one commander. "The Military Academy guys were at a distinct disadvantage in this area."
  
• This social ineptness actually would alienate others so much that it affected their ability to lead. "Technically, they had the skills to be as good as anyone else, but they lacked the people savvy that made them good leaders," said one commander. "Whether it was rolling their eyes, or arrogance, or standoffishness, those sorts of things to me are leadership aspects, and that to me is probably one of the biggest places where Military Academy graduates did not always do very well . . . They demonstrated a degree of social immaturity that directly impacts their ability to lead."

Some of my best friends from the service are academy guys, and they are pleasant enough to drink an occasional beer with, but I suspect many of you out there are nodding your heads when I say that sometimes service academy graduates can be ... just ... weird. I guess when you take four years (~18 to ~21 years) in which their peers are experimenting and expanding horizons and experiencing freedom and instead put kids in wool uniforms with regimented schedules, it has an effect on where they end up in comparison with their peers. I can confirm being amazed by how much the guys from West Point enjoyed drinking to excess at the Infantry School -- as if alcohol was this amazing new discovery!

One surprise to me is that almost every report mentioned that West Pointers tend to abuse alcohol more than other young Army officers. "Binge drinking seemed to be a favorite activity," said the 2004 survey of battalion commanders.

Another of the 2004 reports contained this troubling quote from a commander:

I will tell you that a lot of the young, more specifically West Point lieutenants, seem to live together, hang out together, and party together. It was almost like letting someone out of a cage and watching them get into trouble. Those that stayed out late and had several alcohol problems were all West Point lieutenants."

By contrast, said another officer, the ROTC and OCS officers seemed to have gotten all that out of their system by the point they became second lieutenants.

Here's a tip to recent USMA graduates: re-%$#@ing-lax. Just chill. Enjoy your freedom and treat it like you have just been released from prison. Be thankful for your release, sure, but don't do anything that's going to get you in trouble. Just be pleasant and laid back and listen to your NCOs. Hang out with them instead of your fellow officers, because the last thing you need to do right now is to hang out with people just like you. Read. Spend as much time in civilian clothes, in civilian environments, as possible. Try to go to graduate school if the army lets you. Because in the same way that I think ROTC graduates might be a step or two behind USMA graduates in the first few years of service with respect to military acclimatization, USMA graduates are a step or five behind with respect to being normal functioning Americans. And again, I like you guys and girls. But just, you know, recognize that you are the products of a unique institution that may have socialized you in such a way that renders you a little "off" compared to your peers. Recognizing that will help you get along better with civilians and your soldiers both.

h/t Spencer

I have not linked to this provocative article by Nir because I had not had time to read it. It is worth your time.

Sunni civilians have no interest in backing a new insurgency after their own bitter experience – and they no longer feel targeted by Shiite militias.

The occasional al Qa’eda suicide attack can still kill masses of innocent civilians, but it has no strategic impact; in fact it is difficult to understand what motivates such attacks today, since their effect is almost nil.

A reader writes in:

Just some thoughts from my time working with Afghanistan. No one would dispute that the opium industry needs to be shut down. But the poppy has as much to do with the farmers as it does with the Taliban. It’s actually not all that complicated. It is the lightest crop available (it can be moved on the backs of motorbikes), which is crucial when you have no paved roads going in and out of your region. It requires very little irrigation, which is essential when you have very low rainfall where you live. It commands a high price for smaller amounts – essential when you can only grow limited amounts and can’t move your crop in bulk to markets. You don’t have to refrigerate or preserve it in any way, also fundamental when you have no storage systems in the region for real cash crops, and the only markets are extremely far away, meaning everything else will spoil. Sure they use it to finance their activities, but there are also farmers out there whose families are starving to death who have told people they will fight for the right to grown enough to feed their families. And with whom do you think they fight?

And Foust has more here.

The very simple fact underscoring the difficulties of curtailing opium cultivation in Afghanistan is that, put simply, opium is the local economy in many areas of the country. Because USAID can’t provide direct cereal crop assistance to other countries, it also can’t give farmers realistic alternatives to growing poppies. The money is simply too attractive. Similarly, almost no other crop, including cereal crops or fruits or other cash crops, has an industry willing to front the capital necessary for large-scale cultivation—making poppy one of the only financial options for cash-strapped farmers.

The folks at 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue NW enjoyed a good staff debate on Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday morning. (I'm speaking of CNAS here -- not Ducks Unlimited.) We were talking at one point about what it would really mean to engage in population-centric COIN in Afghanistan and how you would have to make some tough calls -- perhaps, just to give one example, you would pull out of the Korengal Valley to better protect Wardak Province. What none of us discussed, though, was that U.S. and allied commanders would -- instead of pursuing a population-centric strategy -- pursue a counter-narcotics strategy.

American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.

The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. The additional troops, the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to reverse the course of the seven-year war, will roughly double the number already in southern Afghanistan. The troops already fighting there are universally seen as overwhelmed. In many cases, the Americans will be pushing into areas where few or no troops have been before.

Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.

“Opium is their financial engine,” said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. “That is why we think he will fight for these areas.”

But then, in the next breath...

The Americans say that their main goal this summer will be to provide security for the Afghan population, and thereby isolate the insurgents.

Well, which is it?

But because the opium is tilled in heavily populated areas, and because the Taliban are spread among the people, the Americans say they will have to break the group’s hold on poppy cultivation to be successful.

Oh, well, okay. I guess that makes sense.

Incidentally, real "War in Afghanistan" nerds are keeping their eye on BG Nicholson. He is a highly respected up-and-coming officer who was hand-picked for his position as deputy commander in RC South. That said, "John Nicholson" is an awesome if tragic name for a brigadier general wandering around South and Central Asia looking for ass to kick. That's why this one's friends call him "Mick."

Crashing on work projects at the moment, so blogging will be light today. (Hint: Spencer knows what I am working on.)

Friend of the blog Nicholas Schmidle has a really good op-ed up on Slate right now:

If there's any hope of containing the insurgency, it's by building a wall along the Indus River. Not a physical wall, like the one Musharraf proposed constructing along the Pakistani-Afghanistan border, but an imaginary barrier that the Taliban wouldn't be able to breach. How would you go about building such a thing? First of all, the United States would immediately divert much of the $1.5 billion it is planning to spend annually in FATA and NWFP to Punjab. While development projects in South Waziristan are futile at this point in terms of building confidence in the state, they may still accomplish that goal in the villages and towns of Punjab, and even down in Karachi. Since these places are the next battlegrounds between the Taliban and the Pakistani state, U.S. funds could also be diverted to train the Punjab police, who will probably become embroiled in the insurgency over the coming months. Moreover, U.S. military advisers may be able to secure a more prominent role working with the Punjab police than with, say, the units stationed along the Afghan border, where some suspect that the Pakistani intelligence agencies are still backing certain aspects of the insurgency.

Dammit, Nick, you are now preempting our report! (You suck, Schmidle!) For this echoes an argument advanced by David Kilcullen last Thursday and one that I will also advance soon enough in a yet-to-be-released report (that Nick has been kind enough to help out with). There are just two immediate problems with this line of thinking, though: what about the logistical lines which run through Pakistan and into Afghanistan? Are we going to perform some kind of limited route-protection operations on these? (Dave K. raised this question to me last week. I had no good answers at the time.) The second issue is the little problem of authorization. The U.S. military does not -- with the exception of USSOCOM, which does under 1208 authorization -- have the authority to train police. I think transferring some of our aid to the police in the Punjab, though, is a smart idea.

So this has nothing to do with counter-insurgency per se, but I noticed in the Post this morning that the Swine Flu is especially hammering young adults. One explanation for this is that we youngish folks tend to have really strong immune systems, and those immune systems go into overdrive trying to fight the flu and end up destroying throat and lung tissue in the process. Our only real hope, then, is to weaken the hell out of our immune systems. Some tips:

1. If you don't smoke, now is a good time to start.
2. Christopher Hitchens says that martinis are like breasts: One is one too few, while three is one too many. Well, to hell with that rule. Have at least four tonight.
3. If you got a lot of rest this weekend, bully for you. But you now need to stay up for the next 72 hours living off a diet of black coffee and cigarettes. Oh, and gin.

I should now point out that I am a specialist in small wars and not in medicine or infectious diseases. If you are reading this blog in search of medical advice, God help you. But I, for one, am taking a weeklong break from the vitamins on my desk. And I have just given you an excuse to live like Iggy Pop for the next week.

Okay, this requires some cheek:

David Gregory, by forcing King Abdullah to make a statement here, is also forcing him to make a statement about what constitutes lawful and illegal ways to treat detainees. My question is, where do Jordan's police and mukhabarat stand in this "important battle" to which the king refers?

In other news, I had lunch this weekend with one of the most knowledgeable people I know on the law and terrorism, and his quote to me about the terror memos was priceless:

"They were thinking like lawyers -- and not human beings."

Speaking of Australians of whom the Anzacs would be proud, this will be in tomorrow's paper:

“The Accidental Guerrilla” is not an easy book. It’s best when Kilcullen uses narrative to recount his personal experiences. Then, he becomes a military adventurer, a modern Fitzroy MacLean: wandering through volcanic jungles; or flying in a Blackhawk over northwest Baghdad when an improvised explosive device detonates on the ground below, nearly plunging him to his death.

Kilcullen’s knowledge of warfare is highly sophisticated, but he does himself and his readers no favors when he weighs his book down with acronyms and digressions. For those not willing to put in the time and effort, reading “The Accidental Guerrilla” could be like a junior high school student’s attempting “Ulysses.”

Even so, this book is essential. One of the larger mistakes America has made in its handling of the Long War against Al Qaeda was ignoring the details of small conflicts that are so important to Kilcullen. What is needed, he points out, is to develop strategies that deal both with global terrorism and conflicts at the local level.

Kilcullen skillfully interprets the future of counterinsurgency, the proper use of military force and what we must learn from our losses and mistakes.

After reading “The Accidental Guerrilla,” one is left to wonder why the Pentagon did not listen to his sage advice back in 2003, instead of that of all those cheery optimists who predicted the Iraqis would greet the American forces with flowers.

Man, oh man. Just look at Mutassim Qaddafi with Secretary Clinton. How. Awesome. Is. This. Suit? (Answer: very.) Does the Qaddafi Family have the greatest fashion sense in world history? Or is Mutassim Qaddafi just his father's ambassador from The Future?


h/t Bitch Ph.D.