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In case you haven't gotten your fill of the incomparable Abu Muqawama, fear not! You can check him out in his interview with Charlie Rose and on the World Politics Review podcast with Judah Grunstein.
UPDATE: Judah just passed along his interview transcript.
A month in Afghanistan was not enough of a break from the sweatshop Nate and John are running (just three blocks away from the White House!), so I am off for a week's vacation, traveling back across the Atlantic to one of those Arabic-speaking countries I tend to favor. I'll try to link occasionally while gone.
Who wants to watch me run my cakehole on Charlie Rose when you can hear it from McChrystal instead?
You have said that in Afghanistan protecting the population is the top priority. What does that mean you stop doing?
It means we put as much of our effort as we can to establish security for the population and we stay there so those other critical parts, governance and development, can happen. Obviously everything comes at a cost. So it means we don't have as many forces to maneuver in the country. So we have to rigorously prioritize and then some things come later.
Is the lonely fire base in the mountains fighting Taliban a thing of the past? Are you pulling out to get . . .
In some cases it might be -- in some cases. Some it might not be. If the population is in the valley, sometimes putting the small fire base in the mountains accomplished the ability to accomplish security for the population. What I don't think you will see as much of is big unit sweeps or operations where you sweep them, then come out. Historically it doesn't work, but almost every counterinsurgency tries it and relearns the lesson.
I just filmed a long interview with Charlie Rose for tonight's show. I'll be talking strategy in Afghanistan and sharing observations from my trip. I do not think I have ever taped a remote interview this long before, so hopefully I am coherent. Consult your local listings in order to watch and make fun of me in the comments section.
I generally approach op-eds in the Guardian on Afghanistan with a degree of fear and trepidation. (How many variations of the "Afghanistan is the Graveyard of Empires™! Get out now!" routine can one publish?) But this commentary from Julian Borger strikes me as highly relevant.
What distinguishes the foreign secretary's speech from earlier summaries of the Afghan strategy is the palpable impatience with the Kabul government at what he described as "a testing point" for the country. Miliband made it clear that while the troop-contributing countries were already restless, the pressure on Kabul to perform as a government will increase exponentially once the August elections are over.
One critical part of that performance will be the appointment of the roughly 400 officials who actually run the country day to day – the 34 provincial governors and 364 district governors. In the past, these posts have often been distributed as favours and political bargaining chips. The emphasis, Nato states are saying, should now be on competence.
The trouble is, it is far from clear whether anyone in Kabul is listening. Karzai believes Nato needs him as much as he needs Nato, and bristles at being told what to do. Relations between Britain and the Karzai government have been frosty in recent years mostly for that reason, and this speech will do nothing to improve them.
I expect this to emerge as a theme in the coming year. There is a growing realization that we can run the greatest counterinsurgency campaign in the world's history in Afghanistan and that it will all be for naught as long as the government of Afghanistan remains weak, catastrophically corrupt, or both. Assuming Karzai wins next month, one thing to watch will be the degree to which the international community uses its leverage to protect effective ministers and provincial governors from the chopping block -- either because they did not support Karzai during the election or because Karzai has made too many promises to those who are supporting him.
Our friends at Blogging the Casbah have an amusing post on surfing in Lebanon. These look like surprisingly good waves. I say surprising because the surf in Lebanon is not generally very good. There is good wind surfing, sure, but I think the best waves I have ever seen in Lebanon are in the north near Tripoli. My friend Nate used to surf the world's more dangerous places -- like, Somalia -- for a magazine, and he says the best surfing in the Middle East is off Socatra near Yemen.
From today's Washington Post:
He bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35 jet if the contracting giant lobbied to build more F-22s. Lockheed Martin's chief executive, Robert J. Stevens, told employees he supported Gates's call "to put the interests of the United States first -- above the interests of agencies, services and contractors." That left the powerful lobbyists to sit on their hands.
I highly recommend this article on how the Obama Administration -- and Sens. McCain and Levin -- killed the F-22 program. While I was away in Afghanistan, I read the text of Sec. Gates's speech in Chicago and his comments to the press afterwards regarding the F-22. I had no idea the speech and his comments were so coldly calculated and part of a larger, well-organized effort to undermine support for the F-22. Silly me.
Also in the Post today, my boss has an excellent review of a new biography of Donald Rumsfeld. Within the halls of 1301 Pennsylvania Avenue, I take it upon myself to be the one to make the most merciless fun of Nate and John, but one has to give credit where credit is due, and Nate's review is really quite good:
During the summer of 2003, a squall of snowflakes and counter-snowflakes blew through the offices of Rumsfeld and Gen. John Abizaid, the newly appointed head of U.S. Central Command, about the definitions of "insurgent" and "guerrilla warfare." Rumsfeld, over Abizaid's objections, resisted acknowledging the enemy in Iraq as an organized force because doing so would have suggested that the U.S. presence there was likely to be long and costly. But his denial merely delayed the inevitable, and, as in a real snowstorm, the cleanup began only after the last flake fell.
I got talked into playing a sevens tournament tomorrow, so posting will be light over the weekend. I came across this bit o' genius via Spencer today, though, and ... well, it's just too good not to share. My office mate and I have watched it maybe 17 times. Have a great weekend.
A reader of the blog flagged this interview conducted by Salon's Glenn Greenwald with Jonathan Horowitz, a researcher in Kabul, on detainees in Afghanistan and the detention facility at Bagram. It will surprise exactly zero members of this blog's readership to learn that at the time Horowitz was on the phone with Greenwald conducting this interview, I was in an adjacent room enjoying a really excellent gin and tonic.
I do not know Horowitz well, actually, but I was talking with him (and a friend of his, who I do know) about detention before the interview. Our concerns, as you might expect, are quite different. I have all the sympathy in the world for folks like Horowitz who worry U.S.-sanctioned detention policies are harming the U.S. and allied mission in Afghanistan. I am thus anxious to see what my buddy Phil does with Bagram, and I am similarly anxious to see what impact Gen. Stone's report has.
But one of the things that I worry about that Horowitz probably does not is not so much the procedures under which we detain but rather whether or not ISAF can detain at all. (It cannot.) As ISAF begins a pretty intense year of operations, it would be nice to have the ability to detain -- to take combatants off the battlefield and then exploit them for intelligence. Removing the enemy from the battlefield is a pretty common-sense thing to do, and the exploitation that comes with a well-run detention center and legally and morally appropriate interrogation procedures (.pdf) is invaluable. Instead, we are banking on the Afghans detaining and not releasing combatants -- and our ability to build up effective Afghan detention facilities. But how long will that take? How much longer do we have left in Afghanistan to defeat this insurgency?
The questions into what happened at Wanat a year ago have gathered pace thanks to the blogging of my colleague Tom Ricks and a new study for the Combat Studies Institute. I read a draft of this study a while back, actually, but did not blog about it because it had not yet been released and I do not like to blog on unfinished documents. A criticism of the study that a COIN-skeptic friend of mine had -- for the sake of anonymity, I will refer to him as "Fran Frentile" -- was that the report included a largely subjective night-and-day judgment about the previous commander in the area as compared with the commander at the time of the incident. The previous commander -- U.S. Army Col. Chris Cavoli, now standing up a new light infantry brigade at Fort Bliss -- was portrayed by the author of the study as everything you could possibly want in a counterinsurgency strategist and commander. As it happens, I am a friend of Chris, think immensely highly of him (despite the fact that he went to Princeton), and rather like to think that my friends are indeed God's gifts to counterinsurgency warfare. (Chris is The Man, in my opinion, and comes off as such in Dave Kilcullen's book for those of you who have read it.) But there is probably something to Fran's criticism of the study as being a bit cartoonish in the way it highlights the difference between Chris and the commander at the time of the incident -- Bill Ostlund.
That said... at the time of Tom's original posts on what happened at Wanat, a whisper campaign started suggesting the U.S. Army was not looking more closely into the Wanat incident because it was trying to save the career of Ostlund -- a man I do not know but an officer of whom many people think quite highly. Ostlund is part of that Social Sciences mafia which includes a number of COIN luminaries -- including my boss. People really like the guy, and I have no reason to think he isn't a capable and intelligent officer. I did not blog on the whisper campaign at the time, but in light of this new report, can we now say there was nothing to it and that the U.S. Army is indeed capable of criticizing even its supposed golden children?
If so, then we can perhaps start to draw lessons from what happened at Wanat, and they might not have as much to do with personalities of commanders as they do with how we employ counterinsurgent forces in Afghanistan. How, exactly, do you operationalize a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy when you can't use joint security stations in the way we used them in Baghdad in 2007? One hint might be found in the way that a brother battalion commander of Ostlund's in the 173rd, Col. Chris Kolenda (disclosure: also a friend I admire), managed the fight in AO Saber during the same time period and in a year when violence dropped 90% in his AO. Considering the fact that Kolenda is now one of Gen. McChrystal's advisors, I suspect those lessons are already being internalized and processed.
Update: I have been writing back and forth with "Fran" this morning, and he noted that he had published his criticisms of the report on SWJ yesterday. I disagree with most of what Gian has to say regarding counterinsurgency doctrine and its employment, and I am not going to get into those disagreements here. Instead I want to focus on a concern Gian has that I share, which is the danger of quickly dividing officers into two neat categories of those who "get" COIN and those who do not. This blog has probably exacerbated that trend, for which I apologize. And although I fear Gian himself is in danger of becomming the go-to apologist for any and all commanders who go to Iraq or Afghanistan and do a crappy job, I think it is indeed a negative tendancy of COIN gurus to pass hasty judgements on commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan before a more careful study can be conducted on what did and did not take place and why. (That said, I am not convinced the U.S. Army's OER system is any less subjective or hasty in its judgement of officers.) Anyway, here is part of Gian's criticique:
There are a few serious flaws, however, to your work. First, the narrative portion reads like a hatchet job against Ostlund and parts of his subordinate leadership. It reads as if you are putting him in the docket and have him on trial, and have then judged him to be guilty of a failure at Coin. You at the same time elevate to sainthood the previous unit under Colonel Cavoli. Although I don't doubt the competency of Cavoli's outfit you seem to discard some facts and conditions that muddles the clean break between the two that you set up. For one, Cavoli himself has stated in other forums the large numbers of kinetic actions that took place in the valley under his watch. Your narrative suggests that almost as soon as the new battalion (Ostlund’s) gets in, because it hadn't been properly prepared, and because they didn't get coin, that it was those conditions that led to the drastic turn around combined with other things to produce the Wanat engagement. Yet your own narrative points out that the months before the transition between the two battalions and even during it there was a huge amount of enemy activity which suggests to me that Cavoli's unit for all of the successes it had really didn't pacify the area using proper coin techniques; that is was violent under his watch and that violence simply continued under the new battalion's.
The study reads like a primer for the true believers of population centric coin religion. That is to say, Douglas, you seem to accept blindly the whole set of theories, propositions, and assumptions that premise this religion. You seem to accept without question that if a combat outfit is nice to the locals, if it buys them things, if it says nice things about them in reflection, then that indicates that the unit gets coin and therefore their actions will produce certain effects. Well I don't think your study shows in practice that theory at all and my own personal experience suggests to me that one can be nice, build bridges, understand culture, etc and bad things still happen.
Update II: Click here to read Ostlund's take on his battalion's year in Afghanistan.
Steve Biddle of the CFR has long been a friend and mentor, and I have often felt that his central criticism of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine -- first raised, to my knowledge, last year in Perspectives on Politics -- is the most relevant to understanding the difficulties of Iraq and Afghanistan. Biddle's problem with FM 3-24 is that it assumes our interests align with those of the host government. We, as Americans, typically wage counterinsurgency campaigns as third parties -- that is, we fight them on behalf of another government. As Rupert Smith
What happens, Biddle wants to know, when our interests are not theirs?
Many threatened governments are more committed to their own subgroup’s interests than they are to some abstract idea of national well-being. The existence of an insurgency in the first place is often a signal of an illegitimate government with strong leadership interests in an unrepresentative distribution of wealth and power. In many cases, leaders will see U.S.-sponsored reforms as a greater threat to their personal well-being — or even survival — than the insurgency. One thus cannot assume that the U.S. interest and the host government’s interest are aligned in COIN; what the United States wants is not necessarily in the self-interest of the host leadership.
Many of those who have studied Afghanistan closely over the past several years have come to the conclusion that a corrupt Afghan government represents as big a threat to U.S. and allied mission success as the Quetta Shura Taliban or the Haqqani Network. U.S. and allied efforts over the next year, then, will hinge on the ability of the international community to bring leverage to bear on Hamid Karzai following the election -- assuming Karzai wins, of course -- to retain effective governors and ministers and to not use the ministries to reward incompetent or corrupt cronies. Two problems there:
All of this, though, points to the need to actually have a post-election plan for Afghanistan. The United States and its allies must have a coherent strategy for making the Afghan government realize, in Biddle's words, "its own best interest by making itself into a legitimate defender of all of its citizens’ well-being." This goes beyond protecting effective ministers and governors, but that's a start.
The final truth is that even the most disciplined counterinsurgency operations in the world's history will fail in Afghanistan so long as the government of Afghanistan remains weak or illegitimate in the eyes of the people it aspires to govern.
While in Afghanistan over the past month, I found myself reading a lot of U.S. Civil War history. Despite the fact that I am from Chattanooga, Tennessee, I have never really been too interested in the U.S. Civil War. (And when I have read U.S. Civil War history, I have often found myself more drawn to heroes of the North like Buford and Grant and Reynolds -- and the more skeptical Southern generals like Longstreet. I am 100% East Tennessean in that way, I guess.) But I had been meaning to read Grant's memoirs
I was intrigued, though, to read what Lee had ordered of his army in terms of civilians on the battlefield in advance of the Gettysburg Campaign:
It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.
The commanding general therefore earnestly exhorts the troops to abstain with most scrupulous care from unnecessary or wanton injury to private property, and he enjoins upon all officers to arrest and bring to summary punishment all who shall in any way offend against the orders on this subject.
Now there existed good moral reasons for Lee to have ordered his troops to behave in the way he ordered them to behave. But there was also some strategic shrewdness there. Lee, as Foote notes, had one eye on encouraging the northern peace movement when he told his troops not to harm civilians or their property.
In the same way, General McChrystal's directions to allied troops with respect to civilian casualties are both morally correct and operationally wise. My friend Erica Gaston has laboriously catalogued the way in which rising civilian casualties have harmed U.S. and allied objectives in Afghanistan (.pdf). McChrystal understands that the rule of law and principles of proportionality allow you to do a lot on the battlefield. But you might be technically correct and operationally stupid. The reason we do not drop compounds in Afghanistan has more to do with operational considerations than it does with some high-minded moral code or the laws of land warfare. Opponents of COIN doctrine who claim the U.S. Army has gone "soft" would best remember that. If dropping compounds helped us to advance the ball down the field in terms of mission success, we might be more tolerant of civilian casualties and "collateral damage." But the evidence suggests that killing civilians and destroying their property actually harms the mission more than it helps.
Greetings, readers. I apologize for being out of the loop for these past four weeks. About five weeks ago, I was asked by General McChrystal to be part of a small team of scholars and practitioners helping to conduct his 60-day review of strategy and operations in Afghanistan. So I have spent the past month traveling around Afghanistan conducting interviews and trying to evaluate ISAF's operations.
Obviously enough, much of what we observed and concluding during my time in Afghanistan will remain confidential. But I filled two notebooks with over 160 pages of hand-written notes, and I suspect that much of what I saw and observed will leak out onto this blog over the next few months.
In this first post back, though, allow me to just make a few observations:
1. Winning in Afghanistan will be really, really difficult. I was and am still haunted by one of the last paragraphs in David B. Edwards' majesterial Heroes of the Age:
Afghanistan's central problem [is] Afghanistan itself, specifically certain profound moral contradictions that have inhibited this country from forging a coherent civil society. These contradictions are deeply rooted in Afghan culture, but they have come to the fore in the last one hundred years, since the advent of the nation-state, the laying down of permanent borders, and the attempt to establish an extensive state bureaucracy and to invest that bureaucracy with novel forms of authority and control.
Ooph. With that paragraph in mind I set about examining ISAF operations and strategy, which will largely succeed or fail based on the degree to which the institutions of the Afghan state are capable of defeating this insurgency. To say we are facing an uphill struggle in Afghanistan is an understatement. But as a famous commander once said, hard is not hopeless.
2. I was tremendously impressed by the quality of the men and women working for General McChrystal at ISAF. There is a joke going around that when Petraeus took charge in Iraq, he gathered the smartest people he could find to help him win. When McChrystal took charge in Afghanistan, meanwhile, he gathered ... well, a bunch of guys from the 75th Ranger Regiment. The truth is, General McChrystal has assembled a team of smart officers and advisers who understand the challenges of Afghanistan and are willing to speak unpleasant truths. Many of these officers are indeed men who served with McChrystal in either the Ranger Regiment or the Joint Special Operations Command. Others are men and women hired sight unseen but with reputations for exceptional intelligence or hard-won experience in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. Col. Chris Kolenda, for example, an armor officer who successfully commanded a battalion in northeastern Afghanistan, led our team. Sarah Chayes, meanwhile, was retained from General McKiernan's staff. There are other examples -- many, in fact -- and they all speak to a commander who has cast a very wide net in search of talent to help win in Afghanistan.
3. General McChrystal understands population-centric COIN. Forget all that nonsense about a guy with decades of direct-action special operations experience not being mentally limber enough to adapt to protecting the population. About five minutes into a discussion of civilian casualties in my first week in Kabul, I watched McChrystal stand up and spell out for his staff in explicit terms exactly why killing civilians makes one operationally ineffective in an environment like Afghanistan. McChrystal is not inclined to draw attention to his storied history as a special operator. But when he tells you that it's impossible to kill your way out of this war, you believe him -- because Lord knows, he's tried.
4. My experience in Afghanistan was made great by the incredible team with whom I worked and all of those outside ISAF who invited me into their homes or over for dinner and coffee to talk about the situation in Afghanistan. As someone who is trained in the languages, history and politics of another region of the globe, I am always eager to hear from those with knowledge of Afghanistan and its peoples more nuanced and complete than my own.
Consider this, then, the first of many posts I'll be writing on the war in Afghanistan in the coming weeks. For now, though, I am jet-lagged, in dire need of another cup of coffee, and behind on many emails. Thanks to the readership for putting up with my absence, and thanks to Ibn Muqawama for keeping this blog going while I was away.
Uh oh, Meghan O'Sullivan has something to say about Iraq...
While visiting Iraq this month, Biden spoke of a need to broker a grand bargain between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and to resolve disputes between "the different confessional groups." He made clear that he -- and, presumably, the United States -- saw Iraq's challenges and solutions largely in terms of sectarian or ethnic groups. Discussing Iraq's problems in such terms pushes Iraqis back toward the boxes they have been trying to leave behind -- and undermines incipient movement away from the dominance of sectarian political identities toward issues-based politics.
To many Iraqis, such language is familiar. The failure in security from 2004 well into 2007 crystallized sectarian and ethnic identities; Sunni extremists and Shiite militias identified both their targets and those they protected on sectarian grounds. But this language is also increasingly outdated. Security improvements over the past two years have created space for Iraqis to begin moving away from seeing themselves and their problems in such terms. Indeed, in the provincial elections held in January, issues seemed to matter to voters at least as much as identities...
The current tensions between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government are frequently presented simplistically as manifestations of historical animosities between Arabs and Kurds. Certainly, cultural factors do matter, and Iraq's long history -- including, of course, Saddam Hussein's brutal efforts to eradicate the Kurds -- shapes the nature of the problems and the lens through which they are viewed.
But the reality is that Iraq's most difficult problems are primarily about substantive issues. Iraqis and their leaders are divided on fundamental questions about the nature of the state -- specifically, whether the locus of power should be in Baghdad or in the provinces. Should Iraq be a more traditional Arab state, where power is centralized in the capital? Or should the regions and the provinces -- i.e., the KRG -- have substantial authorities and autonomy?
Now, I don't think this is bad advice--I've also questioned Biden's "appointment" as the de facto special envoy to Iraq. In a lot of ways his--and, more broadly, America's--conception of power-sharing and national reconciliation in Iraq seems trapped in the Bosnia paradigm of divvying up territory along ethnic lines and calling it peace. I don't think that's particularly helpful for Iraq. We have to avoid policies that reinforce the country's ethno-sectarian divisions (which, to be honest, O'Sullivan and some of those she advised played a role, even if inadvertently, in exacerbating in the early years of the war).
But do you really think the average Kurd or Arab in the street, let alone their respective leadership in Erbil and Baghdad, is thinking about this in terms of abstract federalism? I think it's likely that the identity issue is salient. There's a long history there that predates Saddam, and nobody's forgotten it. That doesn't mean that Kurds and Arabs are destined to fight for eternity, but it does make the situation much more dangerous and harder to solve than a federalism dispute between Washington and Sacramento.
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I've also been keeping track of the apparent controversy over Iraq's (gasp) tough enforcement of the SOFA terms to limit U.S. operations. Is this really that much of a surprise? It shouldn't be--I'm not sure what else we were expecting. It was clear from the beginning of the SOFA negotiations that the Iraqis were deadly serious about it. They want to run the show, and we have to respect that. They might not be as "ready" or effective as U.S. forces, but it seems like we really have to learn to let go a bit on the security front. Let's wait a bit and see how this shakes out before pronouncing it a disaster.
Rambling, unscientific, and possibly inaccurate analysis from me as I try to keep up with news from Afghanistan:
It seems like the serious criticisms of the campaign increasingly fall into two main camps. The first, which I'll term the "humanitarian camp," which argues that we're losing because our approach is too military-oriented, hasn't embraced the necessity for long-term institutional and economic development, and doesn't provide the populace with the security and services it needs. These arguments generally come from IGO- and NGO-types who recommend reducing direct military involvement, increasing nonmilitary assistance, and (surprise) relying more on locally-based IGOs and NGOs to lead on development issues.
The other position, which I'll call the "not important camp," point out that al-Qaeda isn't really in Afghanistan anymore, argue that Afghanistan lacks intrinsic strategic importance, and emphasize the futility of "nation-building" in a country that doesn't seem to have much recent history of either nations or buildings. This camp generally recommends avoiding a large-scale troop commitment to Afghanistan while focusing on eliminating al-Qaeda through direct action (mainly drone strikes) and improving Pakistani security and governance capacity.
Keeping in mind that I've just glossed over some differences within these general categories, I've got a couple quick thoughts:
--First, these dueling critiques actually have interesting points of agreement. Both call for reducing the emphasis on ground troops in Afghanistan and on the general idea that we need to do a better job of letting the Afghans determine their own methods of governance.
--I find the existence of the humanitarian camp in this particular case interesting because it seemed so notably absent in the Iraq war. A "not important" camp tends to crop up for virtually every military engagement, but not every war generates a vocal group of humanitarians like Clare Lockhart or Sarah Chayes. The IGOs and NGOs were much more reluctant to get involved in Iraq. Afghanistan seemingly captured the humanitarian imagination in a way that Iraq never did. I suspect that has something to do with how the differences between how the United States entered Afghanistan and how it entered Iraq, but that's probably an incomplete explanation.
--In my view, both also tend to underestimate the danger posed by the Taliban. A common refrain I hear is that the Taliban has limited appeal, they're fragmented, the Afghans don't want them back, they're not that strong, etc. The humanitarian camp seems to think that IGOs and NGOs can effectively conduct reconstruction without more security by helping the population (a rather extreme take on "winning hearts and minds") while the "not important" camp seems to say, "Why are we wasting our time running around after a bunch of backward, bearded guerrillas who aren't a direct threat to us?" While the past isn't necessarily a predictor, I do think it's important to remember that between 1994-2001, the Taliban was able to take over nearly all of the country. Its leadership proved adept at exploiting Afghan disenchantment and religious symbolism to attract supporters, and at gaining the allegiance of numerous warlords to bolster its ranks. Once in power, it facilitated the expansion of violent extremist groups in other Central Asian countries. Obviously things have changed a lot since 2001, but if we were to withdraw combat troops I'm not sure what prevents that from happening again. The Taliban is not an unstoppable army of holy warriors and they may not directly attack the United States, but I don't think we should underestimate their ability to reassert themselves in a way that undermines regional security.
--Who thinks the Obama administration's current policy is a good idea? Stephen Biddle does, but in a very torturous, kind-of-sort-of-maybe way that suggests he himself isn't convinced of his arguments.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see of these critiques of U.S. Afghan strategy gets louder over the next few months.
Doing my daily reading on the interwebs and found a couple nifty things on Foreign Affairs. Strategic studies guru Eliot Cohen weighs in with his own counterinsurgency reading list and Haider Mullick analyzes Pakistan's shifting counterinsurgency strategy.
Now here's a future combat system that exemplifies "balance."
UPDATE: The truth is stranger than fiction, as two readers revealed with this link. Who comes up with this stuff?
Secretary of Defense Gates has been beating the drum of "balance" between conventional and irregular warfare as an organizing principle for quite awhile now, but despite the defense budget proposed a few months back, we'll have to wait until the QDR comes out to see how he plans to operationalize this. In the meantime, check out a couple interesting pieces on this (aside from Krepinevich's Foreign Affairs article) to tide you over:
In his treatise on the lessons from the beef between Jay-Z and The Game for American foreign policy, Marc Lynch has just uncorked what has to be one of the most ridiculously awesome blog posts in memory. Despite my West Coast roots, I'm rooting for the "superpower" Jay-Z over the "insurgent" The Game. In counterinsurgency terms, I guess that's kind of like a Sunni insurgent joining the Sons of Iraq.
Maoist insurgency remains alive and well in India. Clearly the solution is to send surplus copies of FM 3-24 to New Delhi. Who wants to organize the book drive?
Iranian penetration of Latin America is a serious concern. Except, you know, when it doesn't exist:
MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- For months, the reports percolated in Washington and other capitals. Iran was constructing a major beachhead in Nicaragua as part of a diplomatic push into Latin America, featuring huge investment deals, new embassies and even TV programming from the Islamic republic.
"The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in May. "And you can only imagine what that's for."
But here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.
Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing. Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce chief Ernesto Porta laughed and said: "It doesn't exist." Government officials say the U.S. Embassy complex is the only "mega-embassy" in Managua. A U.S. diplomat in Managua conceded: "There is no huge Iranian Embassy being built as far as we can tell."
The mysterious, unseen giant embassy underscores how Iran's expansion into Latin America may be less substantive than some in Washington fear.
Iran's proposed investments in Nicaragua -- for a deep-water port, hydroelectric plants and a tractor factory -- have also failed to materialize, Nicaraguan officials say. At a time when Iran's oil revenue is falling, the same is true of many projects planned for Latin America, according to analysts.
U.S. officials emphasized that there is plenty of reason to be concerned about Iran, which they consider a state sponsor of terrorism. But the Iranian activity has revived Cold War-style rhetoric in Washington that at times doesn't match what is evident in places such as Managua.
Last month, Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) even told reporters in a call organized by the Israel Project that "the growing influence of Iran in the Western Hemisphere reminds me of the relationship between Russia and Cuba when we dealt with the Cuban missile crisis."
It is not clear where the report of the embassy in Managua began. But in the past two years, it has made its way into congressional testimony, think tank reports, press accounts, and diplomatic events in the United States and elsewhere.
Hey, maybe we just haven't sent the right man to find this super-secret base. But seriously, this seems like a pretty ridiculous flashback to the days when we saw Soviet conspiracies behind everything. Iran is certainly no friend of the United States and not to be underestimated, but let's not blow it out of proportion. Iran is no Soviet Union. I doubt its capacity to build a mega-anything, let alone a mega-embassy on the other side of the world. And I find it hard to believe that Iranian TV would catch on in Nicaragua.
...with some weekend reading:
--The Marines try to do some counterinsurgency in Helmand, but still without any help from Afghan forces. I'm increasingly pessimistic about Afghanistan, and the inability of the ANA to rally (despite previous assertions that they're supposed to be fairly competent) is a big reason why. The situation reminds of a comment made by an officer I interviewed about Iraq in early 2007: "How do you convince someone to fight for their country?" In that light, it's somewhat troubling that the U.S. focus is on expanding the Afghan forces when we can't seem to get many of the existing ones into the fight. Or do the Afghans have a different strategy than the Americans do?
--Robert McNamara passed away this week, and Bradley Graham, author of this hefty tome, wonders whether we'll see a mea culpa from Rumsfeld on Iraq in same way McNamara admitted his failings in the Vietnam War. There's certainly no indication that Rumsfeld is pondering what happened in Iraq; it's hard to see him becoming a tragic, McNamara-like figure haunted by his past decisions. But I agree with Graham's punchline: "More important than hearing Rumsfeld say he's sorry for what he did may be getting a frank explanation of why he did it."
--Is this China's chief counterinsurgent?
Foreign Policy has an interesting profile of Baitullah Mehsud up. He's clearly a prime candidate to receive a visit from a Predator drone. But when I read this article, I can't help but remember our earlier preoccupation with taking down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. We expended a lot of time and resources to get him, but it didn't seem to prevent AQI from escalating its attacks through the second half of 2006. Would knocking off Mehsud cripple the Pakistani Taliban? It couldn't hurt, but we should probably not expect too much impact from the killing of any single bad guy or make his elimination a centerpiece of U.S.-Pakistani counter-Taliban strategy.
I can't lie, I like awesome military technology like the F-22. It's freakin' rad, especially when you see it in person. But I do think we should probably reconsider our investment in it, even if Congress manages to ignore the latest round of questioning of the program:
"The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show...
""It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure" that jeopardizes success of the aircraft's mission, said a Defense Department critic of the plane who is not authorized to speak on the record. Other skeptics inside the Pentagon note that the planes, designed 30 years ago to combat a Cold War adversary, have cost an average of $350 million apiece and say they are not a priority in the age of small wars and terrorist threats.
"But other defense officials -- reflecting sharp divisions inside the Pentagon about the wisdom of ending one of the largest arms programs in U.S. history -- emphasize the plane's unsurpassed flying abilities, express renewed optimism that the troubles will abate and say the plane is worth the unexpected costs."
Well, I'll be honest: I don't think the plane is worth the unexpected costs. I think that's just sentimental loyalty to a sexy airframe without regard to its actual strategic impact. If you believe that our next war will be a high-tech one against a near-peer adversary like China or Russia, you have to question why exactly that near-peer adversary would even bother letting awesome jet fighters even get off the ground as Andy Krepinevich notes in his latest piece:
"The Chinese approach would entail destroying or disrupting the U.S. military's communications networks and launching preemptive attacks, to the point where such attacks, or even the threat of such attacks, would raise the costs of U.S. action to prohibitive levels. The Chinese call the military capabilities that support this strategy "assassin's mace." The underlying mantra is that assassin's mace weapons and techniques will enable "the inferior" (China) to defeat "the superior" (the United States).
"Chinese efforts are focused on developing and fielding what U.S. military analysts refer to as "anti-access/area-denial" (A2/AD) capabilities. Generally speaking, Chinese anti-access forces seek to deny U.S. forces the ability to operate from forward bases, such as Kadena Air Base, on Okinawa, and Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam. The Chinese are, for example, fielding large numbers of conventionally armed ballistic missiles capable of striking these bases with a high degree of accuracy. Although recent advances in directed-energy technology -- such as solid-state lasers -- may enable the United States to field significantly more effective missile defense systems in the next decade, present defenses against ballistic missile attacks are limited. These defenses can be overwhelmed when confronted with missile barrages. The intended message to the United States and its East Asian allies and partners is clear: China has the means to put at risk the forward bases from which most U.S. strike aircraft must operate."
We really need to rethink our entire concept of airpower. I don't think it lies in F-22s, but in the persistent presence and low-observability offered by the next generation of unmanned and relatively inexpensive drones, operating from longer ranges with a wider variety of weaponry and strike capabilities. That's the real future, not our efforts to build a new generation of fighters that do the same thing but better and with a pointier nose.
Tom Ricks gives props to my hometown and its nasty defense contracting corruption habit.
