Center for a New American Security

I read Tom Friedman's column today, and though I usually find something to complain about in a Tom Friedman column, this one hit home. Because the scariest thing I have heard in my week and a half here in Israel was a comment by one Israeli that the current political climate in America reminded him of the climate in Israel in the months leading up to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

%$#@. So depressing. There are plenty of valid criticisms of the president, but the extreme right in the United States is just so ugly and angry. Our extreme left is pretty ugly, too, I guess, but they're also unarmed. And as a secret service agent recently told a friend of mine, "People didn't like Bush, sure, but they really want to kill this guy."

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Dave Chappelle, as usual, cheers me up (slightly) with some extremely politically incorrect and NSFW humor. (Oh, and some classic, pre-Doctor Dolittle Eddie Murphy.) I know there are things one should not joke about, but I feel we have a patriotic duty to keep our senses of humor. I also tend to believe the best way to treat wingnuts like this assus jackus and others is to mercilessly mock them. Because seriously, "men" who dip flavored freaking Skoal get stone cold beat up where I'm from.

UPDATE: Really, readers? Really? I mean, this blog stayed out of the 2008 presidential elections -- and had kind things to say about both candidates and their positions at times -- because politics should stay out of operational discussions. But is my call to not kill the president of the United States or start a military coup really such a partisan breach of protocol? I guess I thought this blog's readership -- containing a refreshing number of libertarians -- would have been more or less united against wingnuttery.

I agree:

“I don’t think I can defend him for being out of touch with his commander,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. “He has other people who advise him. But there’s no one else with the feel on the ground that McChrystal has.”

As you might imagine, I have spent a lot of time in the bars and cafes of Beirut talking with journalists, analysts and other friends about Hizballah and its strategy. It's a new experience doing the same thing here south of the Blue Line. The other day, though, just before Yom Kippur, I sat down with a Jerusalem-based analyst, and though we had some (polite) disagreements about the motivations of Hizballah and its relationship with Iran, we both agreed on one thing: that Hizballah's strategy toward Israel since the latter's 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon has been incoherent.

For an indigenous insurgent group seeking to expel a foreign power from a territory -- think the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Viet Minh in Indochina -- a strategy of exhaustion makes obvious sense. This strategy is more or less the strategy that Hizballah pursued in the 1990s against an occupying Israeli army in southern Lebanon: keep causing Israeli casualties, remind the people of Israel that such casualties will never stop so long as they occupy southern Lebanon, and wait for Israeli popular opinion to turn against the war.

But to this observer, it appears as if Hizballah has maintained this strategy in recent years. And what was appropriate in the 1990s is no longer appropriate today. Hizballah leaders continue to talk of Israeli society as if it is weak and will break at any moment if the right pressure is applied. But breaking Israeli popular will for continuing the occupation of a foreign country is one thing; breaking Israeli will to continue being Israel is another. I think Hizballah leaders have misread the nature of the Israeli state. Continued militancy on the part of Hizballah toward Israel will, I believe, cause serious ruptures within Lebanese society before they ever break the will of the Israeli people or fracture the state. Again, without making a value judgement on either side, it is increasingly difficult to argue that Hizballah's strategy since 2000 makes any sense at all.

In my opinion, Ross Douthat (with Vinegar Joe Lieberman) gets a lot right in this column. Namely:

1. In a conversation last week, the Connecticut senator was careful to avoid taking the president to task for pausing before he escalates. After seven years of war, Lieberman noted, we’ve only now “begun the first serious national debate about Afghanistan: whether we should be there and what we should be doing there. In that regard, it’s entirely appropriate that the president is deliberating.”
2. But if Obama takes us deeper into war out of political necessity rather than conviction, the results could be disastrous. That’s because the counterinsurgency strategy he’s contemplating is the worst possible option — except for all the others. It looks attractive only because the alternatives involve abandoning southern Afghanistan to the Taliban’s tender mercies, playing Whac-a-Mole with Al Qaeda from afar with hopelessly inadequate intelligence and pushing the nuclear-armed Pakistani military back into a marriage of necessity with a resurgent Taliban next door.
3. “My hope,” Lieberman told me, is that once Obama finishes his “very public process of deliberation, he will have brought the public along with him” — and placed the war effort on a firmer footing in the process. But the president can only bring the country with him if he really believes in the war that he’s inherited. For now, that remains an open question. And if Obama takes us deeper into a conflict for which he doesn’t really have the stomach, then the outcome will almost certainly be tragic — for him, for us, and for Afghanistan.

It's fair to say you guys know my thoughts and my worries about this war. But while I have my own preferences on policy and strategy, the most important thing now is for the president to carefully deliberate, make an informed decision weighing the risks and chances of success of various courses of action, and to then stick to that decision with Churchillian stubbornness.

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By the way, did any of you read this trash? Spencer says most of what needs to be said but not all. I'm not going to start hitting below the belt, and coming as I do from the field of strategic studies, I believe those who have never seen combat nonetheless might have a lot of intelligent things to say about conflict. But all I'm saying is that if you're going to write sentences like "Gen. Stan McChrystal conformed to the Obama Way of War by imposing rules of engagement that could have been concocted by Code Pink," you better, in light of Gen. McChrystal's own curriculum vitae, have a glittering combat resume of your own. If you have never, in fact, been to war yourself, you might want to be a bit more measured in your criticism.

It's a little odd being in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur. Because cars are banned from the roads, you can literally walk down deserted four-lane arteries in the middle of the day, which is kinda eerie.

For a long time, this blog has steered clear of all things related to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and that policy is likely to continue. Normal, sane human beings just go full retard when anything related to the Holy Land, Right of Return, Jerusalem, Settlements, etc. are mentioned. Some great examples of this can be found in the comments section of this post, which had nothing to even do with Israel or the Palestinians. But I mentioned that I ate some kunafeh with some friends in Nablus and then went to the beach in Herzliya, and this is what happens. What is wrong with you people?

1. "For someone who has said previously that they have only spent 8 days in Israel sure seams to be spending a lot of time there. The West Bank may be under Palistinian control but it is still part of Israel. From what I have heard on the news I would not want to go anywhere near the West Bank or any of the Palistinian controlled parts of the region. Hamas has said repeatedly that they would like to wipe Israel of the map. And it's not just Hamas. It's every country in the region particularly Iran. ... So for someone who claims to have held the rank of captain (after obtaining said rank a full 8 months before the law allows) and a U.S citizen why are you spending so much time in a place you've said you've only spent 8 days at? And of the time you've spent in that area why have you spent it with those who seek to destroy America and Israel? Why spend time with those who say America is the "Great Satan" and Israel is the "Little Satan?" Do you not love freedom that you swore an oath to defend? I think you're better suited as a diplomat for Hamas."
2. "Are Tenneseans allowed to use the "Israeli only" roads in the West Bank? How foul was the stench of American subsidized apartheid?"
3. "Wondering who "some friends" are. Fatah or Hamas? While you stomp around with Palestinian terrorists, I wonder why it is that you ignore the elephant in the room that is Islamic human nature. Does COIN have its place? Sure. Will it work in countries of people who do not believe in borders, and whose objective (according to the Koran) is to die in jihad? HELL NO!"

I spent yesterday driving around the West Bank with some friends -- I'm sorry to say the famous kunafeh at al-Quds in Nablus was not, I did not think, as good as that at Sea Sweet in Lebanon -- and then going to the beach at Herzliya, so I apologize for not posting. In between tourist activities, I have actually been researching and writing quite a bit.

Anyway, there has been a lot of good Afghanistan commentary and analysis lately, so I'm going to link to some of it. Not all of these analysts are Afghanistan or military specialists, but that does not mean that they cannot ask the tough, relevant questions that I feel are on the minds of a lot of Americans -- particularly those within the administration -- these days. So...

D.B. Grady

David Brooks

Frank Rich

Rajiv Chandrasekaran

George Packer

Eli Lake and others are now reporting a resource request for Afghanistan will come on Friday, while Spencer Ackerman is at the Marine Corps University's COIN Leadership Conference blogging the procedings here, here, and here. Spencer reports predictable anxiety -- and even anger -- with the president in some quarters of the small wars community. (Even the New York Times, today, admits to being nervous.) I imagine most speakers, though -- and seriously, like half of CNAS spoke at this thing -- focused on operations or institutions as opposed to the politics, and the guy I would have wanted to hear speak would have been the pride of Rome, Georgia, Col. Dale Alford. Spencer reports:

Although some progressive critics have argued that the Obama administration has moved the Afghanistan war too deeply in the direction of counterinsurgency, Marine Corps Col. Dale Alford, a former adviser to McChrystal’s predecessor as U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan — whom he called “a great soldier” — said that U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan are insufficiently positioned to conduct so-called “population-centric” counterinsurgency. “We’re completely an enemy-centric force,” Alford said, noting that most U.S. bases in Afghanistan were constructed in 2003 and 2004 to support counterterrorism objectives like raiding discrete enemies. Alford, who also fought in Iraq, called for a “significant repositioning” of U.S. forward operating bases and combat outposts in Afghanistan to provide for population security and partner closer with Afghan security forces.

 

“If you’re not not sleeping with them, eating with them and crapping in same bucket as them, you’re not partnered with them,” Alford said.

I know this comes as a surprise to those who think U.S. ground forces are now a "COIN Army", but my own observations line up closer to those of Col. Alford. Without question, counterinsurgency is the ascendent "way of war" within the officer corps of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, meaning it is the prism through which officers observe and reflect upon the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the force is still a long way from being set up to wage this kind of war effectively. Again, this will strike you as incredible if you have been reading only this blog for the past two years, but there would not have been all that stuff in the McChrystal review about changing operational culture if the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were really and fully committed to population-centric counterinsurgency. In June, I had a senior -- and now departed -- officer in Afghanistan tell me, "But that's exactly how you protect the population! By going after the enemy!"

This leader, in other words, thought that he was doing population-centric counterinsurgency by essentially fighting in exactly the same way he had been taught to fight by the U.S. Army over the previous 2+ decades.

Targeting and killing the enemy is a key component to most forms of warfare, COIN included. But the question is where your central focus is. And I think Col. Alford is right that for the majority of U.S. and allied units fighting in Afghanistan, the focus remains the enemy. Which just goes to show that making promulgating one's ideas is relatively easy compared with effecting change to organizational culture.

Currently watching President Obama speak to the UN General Assembly. Of note to readers of this blog, he reiterated his stance about not allowing al-Qaeda the use of any safe havens from which they can plot attacks. "We will permit no safe-haven," the president said, "for al Qaeda to launch attacks from Afghanistan or any other nation."

I have written on safe havens before, and I'm still not sure if the president realizes the ambition of what he's saying. Are we going into Yemen next? The Horn of Africa? What does this mean for U.S. operations abroad? Will we use commando raids? Drone strikes? Indirect approaches? Again, because I'm not a real strategist and tend to think operationally, when I hear him say stuff like this I wonder how, exactly, we're going to execute the polcy he is articulating. There is a big difference between disrupting al-Qaeda activities in safe havens and denying them the use of safe havens to begin. And -- and here's a bone for all you realists out there -- it's not as if we have unlimited resources to do all this with.

In other news, I apologize for the Afghanistan-centric nature of this blog of late (there are better Afghanistan blogs out there), but here are some quick-hit links to some recent pieces of note:

1. Fred writes a typically smart piece in Slate
2. Blake interviews Khalilzad
3. Laura notes a backlash to the McChrystal report
4. Robert crunches some numbers on troops
5. Though this blogger was against the AP's decision on the dying Marine, this historical reflection offers a great counterargument
6. And finally, Rep. Ike Skelton -- a man always worth listening to on defense issues -- and his letter to the president on Afghanistan and the need for a properly-resourced counterinsurgency strategy.

Skelton Letter to President AFG 22Sept09

Population-centric counterinsurgency puts soldiers lives at risk. That's the truth.

Members of Congress have voiced concern about the increase in U.S. deaths, one of the factors behind growing public dissatisfaction with the war. President Obama and his national security advisers are considering McChrystal's assessment, which calls for intensifying the counterinsurgency strategy and dispatching additional forces, among other options.

"I am troubled if we are putting our troops at greater risk in order to go to such extremes to avoid Afghan casualties," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who at a hearing last week urged Pentagon leaders to determine whether new rules of engagement -- the classified directives that guide the use of force -- are unnecessarily endangering U.S. troops.

The trolls who sometimes lurk in the comments section of this blog have gone so far as to accuse me of being part of some Hizballah/al-Qaeda/Taliban plot to make U.S. soldiers and Marines more vulnerable on the battlefield. (This is when I'm not being accused of being a bood-thirsty Zionist imperialist, of course.) But they are right that population-centric counterinsurgency strategies raise the short-term risk for soldiers and Marines by exposing them to greater dangers and limiting what kind of munitions with which they can respond to incoming fire. It's a gamble, right? On the one hand, any time you send a soldier to war, you are exposing them to risk in the hopes that military action will help lead to the realization of a political objective. In COIN, meanwhile, you are asking the soldier to expose himself to even more risk up front in the hopes that violence will decline in the longer term. We do ourselves no favors by not being honest about that...

I got the press release for this new report from Kim and Fred Kagan on force requirements for Afghanistan and started laughing: "Dr. Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Dr. Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have joined forces to produce a thoughtful and detailed presentation on the necessary troop requirements needed for for a proper counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan?"

Joined forces? Like, what, the Super Friends? I thought they were, uh, married or something?

Anyway, this is no substitute for a troop-to-task analysis conducted by a military staff, but this is, as advertised, a thoughtful and detailed presentation that is worth your time. It shows where U.S. and allied troops are in Afghanistan and offers a number for how many more brigades might be needed. So if you're looking for a hint as to how many more troops Gen. McChrystal will request, this is as good a primer as any. Nothing here on civilian resources, sadly, but aside from the fact that this was written in PowerPoint, I found myself nodding my head in agreement as I read this. Solid work, and good food for thought.

Meanwhile, this may or may not be a video of Kim and Fred's wedding day:

Hahahaha, Lt. Col. W. Thomas Smith, Jr... This guy never fails to amuse me. He's still cranky some journalists in Beirut outed him as a fabulist, ending his gig with the National Review:

According to the FOX segment, Friday, “Hizballah reportedly has operatives in the United States. Two years ago, a Hizballah agent was arrested after infiltrating the FBI and CIA.”

True. Though few Americans are actually aware of this, thanks to a heavily financed counter-media, propaganda, and disinformation campaign aimed at soft-soaping the Lebanon-based, Iranian-Syrian-supported terrorist organization as simply a Lebanese political party with guns; and – as a part of that campaign – discrediting or destroying anyone who might aggressively take Hizballah to task.

You can read more about the on-again, off-again relationship Colonel Junior has with the truth here, here, here, and here. But let's take what Colonel Junior says about Hizballah seriously in order to get into a broader question. How big a threat does this organization represent to the United States and its interests?

First off, let's dismiss the idea that some conspiracy is somehow keeping news of Hizballah's capabilities out of the news. When Colonel Junior defended his rather incredible and hilarious claim that 5,000 (!) Hizballah gunmen had staged a show of force in (Christian) East Beirut in 2007, he and his defenders maintained he was only reporting something that was "taboo" and that other journalists were paid not to report. Yet when Hizballah actually did take over neighborhoods in Beirut the next year (in real life, as opposed to in someone's imagination), it was front-page news around the world. (1, 2, 3, etc.) Second, there are, in fact, plenty of journalists in Beirut who do receive regular stipends from parties both within and outside of Lebanon. These parties, however -- and let's see if I can put this delicately -- aren't exactly allies of Hizballah. They, in fact, have agendae in Lebanon quite opposed to Hizballah. Speaking more openly, much of the media in the Arabic-speaking world is backed by Saudi funders. This may come as news to Colonel Junior, but those funders do not exactly share common cause with Iran and Hizballah and have no interest in keeping anti-Hizballah news out of the public discourse.

Moving on, the notion that Hizballah somehow represents an equal or greater threat to the United States and its interests than al-Qaeda is wrong. On the one hand, I agree with Michael Chertoff, Richard Armitage and even Colonel Junior when they argue Hizballah's capabilities exceed those of al-Qaeda. This is almost certainly true. But they have thus far not demonstrated the same intent as al-Qaeda to conduct large-scale expeditionary operations outside the Arabic-speaking world. (The 1992 and 1994 bombings stand out as aberrations. I hope Hizballah is not planning on seeking revenge for Imad Mughniyeh in a similar way, because that would be pretty stupid.)

Having spent a good deal of time in Lebanon and now writing from Jerusalem, I believe Hizballah represents the greatest threat to, primarily, the peoples of Lebanon and then, secondarily, the peoples of Israel. The "culture of resistance" that Hizballah has developed over the past 30 years, I fear, condemns both the Lebanese and the Israelis to a war without end. Studying statements made by Hizballah officials down through the years, it is hard to conclude that Hizballah's raison d'être is anything other than armed conflict with the State of Israel. That should worry Israelis and Lebanese -- including many of Hizballah's supporters in southern Lebanon, who suffered more than anyone in 1993, 1996 and 2006 -- that even if Hizballah's leadership should decide that armed conflict is no longer in the rational interests of the organization or the Shia of Lebanon, it will be awfully difficult to change the organizational culture. All of those young men who signed up with Hizballah in the wake of the 2006 war, for example, did not do so merely to direct traffic in the Dahiyeh. For the Israelis, meanwhile, Hizballah will likely never constitute an existential threat. But they will be a rather annoying and deadly violent non-state actor on its northern border for whom no real military solution exists. You can march north and beat Hizballah around for a few weeks, sure, and you can even level the Dahiyeh. But in doing so, does that merely feed into the narrative Hizballah tries to sell its constituents and other Lebanese? In this light, we're right to pity both the residents of Kiryat Shimona and the residents of Bint Jbeil.

From the perspective of the United States, meanwhile, I think Hizballah does constitute a threat to our interests, though not in the alarmist way it is reported on Fox News. (I know two wonderful people who report from abroad for Fox News, but my colleague Bob Kaplan justly evicerates the channel's ability to explain the world to Americans: "Then there is Fox, with its jingoistic, meatloaf provincialism straight out of an earlier, black-and-white era. Could Fox cover the world as Al Jazeera does, but from a different, American-nationalist perspective? No, because what makes Fox so provincial is its utter lack of interest in the outside world in the first place, except where that world directly and obviously affects American power. What use does Fox have for Niger River rebels or dispossessed Indian farmers?")

The threat posed to U.S. interests, as I see them, is two-fold:

1. Hizballah has been strategically adrift since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. One of the many mistakes they have made is to take a more regional approach to activities. This includes everything from the train-and-equip missions they ran for Shia militias in Iraq to the similar mission they run for Palestinian groups. Hizballah, in other words, is employing the indirect approach against U.S. interests in the region. They are not conducting attacks themselves, but they have most certainly been helping those who would. I think this is a terrible mistake for Hizballah and is not in the interests of Lebanon or its Shia community, but Hassan Nasrallah doesn't really ask me for advice. If he did, I would have similarly counseled against kidnapping Israeli soldiers and using one's arms against other Lebanese parties as well.

2. Hizballah continues to be the model organization for those violent non-state actors which seek to challenge the United States and its allies. They have provided a blueprint not just for Hamas or militias in Iraq but for "resistance" groups everywhere. So even though U.S. defense analysts probably overstudy the 2006 war, they are right to suspect that in the future, opponents of the United States will try to emulate Hizballah's successes.

You'll note that at no point in this rambling post did I discuss Hizballah activities in West Africa or South America. I hear Hizballah is active in these regions, but a) I do not know enough about them and b) I have not seen much evidence that Hizballah is doing more than what the U.S. government would classify as terror financing as opposed to terror operations. I know, in other words, that Hizballah sends money back from the United States, South America, West Africa and elsewhere. But I have not seen any compelling evidence that they are plotting actual attacks in any of those regions. Maybe I'm wrong, but again, I have not seen any compelling evidence.

Pages 2-1 (9) to 2-22 (30) of this .pdf. This was written with about a dozen talented and good-natured co-authors (and the world's most intense lead author) who put up with my smart-assery -- often in enclosed spaces -- for a whole month. I look forward to both your judgment of our efforts and the effect it has on the policy debate in Washington and the allied capitals.