Center for a New American Security

A few months ago, I was sitting around on a Saturday morning before a rugby game when I got an email on my blackberry from Greg Jaffe, who was in Afghanistan. I started reading this email aloud to some of my teammates, pausing every few seconds because I was laughing too hard to continue. I told Greg that he had to publish this email in some format or else I would post it on Abu Muqawama. Greg finally dressed the email up for publication in the Washington Post (meaning he deleted several items: the F Word about 34 times, a not-fit-for-the-Post story about coming home from war and seeing a girl you knew from high school working in a strip club, and -- most sadly -- the self-mocking references to his own condition as a print journalist in a war zone), and you can read it here. This dialogue will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever spent any time stuck in some godforsaken place with an infantry platoon filled with 19-year old American men. Hilarious.

[I like Greg a lot, not only because he had the sense to marry a nice girl from Chattanooga, but also because he is one of those smart, humble journalists, completely lacking any ego, who really take the time to get to know soldiers, officers and U.S. Army culture. One of the good guys.]

Gah!!!

Chris: I do not care how many civilians drone strikes actually kill. And I do not care how many civilians Americans think drone strikes in Pakistan kill.

I care only about how many civilians Pakistanis think drone strikes kill. As one of the world's experts on Pakistani public opinion, you should be able to provide that number to me, right? Because all you can tell me right now is the Pakistani press is dutifully reporting whatever the Taliban tells them ... and I already know that. I don't care in the slightest about what Pakistani generals or the CIA is telling you behind closed doors. It does not matter. I care about what those Pakistani generals are telling their public. I care, in other words, less about reality as defined by verifiable facts and figures and more about reality as it is interpreted in Pakistan and within Pakistani diaspora communities.

Honestly, I have been making this point over and over again for a year now. But the only thing the CIA and other agencies and departments have done since then is to have stepped up their information operations campaign aimed at U.S. public opinion -- i.e. to have convinced Americans that drones are a good idea. But who cares, honestly, whether or not the Americans who read www.foreignpolicy.com know how many civilians die in drone attacks or think drones are a good idea? I certainly don't. I care more about the people who stand to be most easily radicalized by the strikes.

C'mon, dude, get out there, do some polling, crunch some numbers, and then come tell me I'm wrong. Until then, stop telling me what I and everyone else in America already knows.

Update: Some good commentary on drones from Mosharraf Zaidi here and here. (h/t Abu A.)

Update II: And this is exactly why drone strikes should be carried out by the military. This is actually a good news story. Mistakes were made, mistakes were acknowledged and investigated, and people were held accountable.

Update III: Hey, here's some damn good advice from a journal article co-authored by one C. Christine Fair:

Third, there is an urgent need for focused analyses of the impacts of policy interventions on both the supply of and demand for violence. U.S., Pakistani, and international agencies are not configured to rigorously evaluate the impacts of their programming. Given the state of knowledge in this area, policy implementers should be building impact evaluation into their programming, and they ought to establish a more robust process for disseminating the lessons learned.

I'll have a longer post when I get the chance about how students and practitioners of counter-insurgency operations and strategy need to constantly question and test our assumptions about the state of the art lest we fall prey to treating COIN like some unfalsifiable ideology like Marxism rather than as an operational choice in need of constant refinement and study. Until, then, though, check out this summary report from a conference held in the UK a few months back (at which I presented an early draft of "Leverage"). There is some great stuff in here about the actual effectiveness of some of the non-kinetic lines of operation in COIN (that we tend to blindly assume are good things but in cases do nothing and in others make the problem worse). Kudos to Andrew Wilder, Edwina Thompson and Robert Grant for putting this together.

On the other hand, who can we send in to make sure Adm. Olson walks the line? Malcolm Tucker, perhaps? (NSFW)

"If I am lying by the road bleeding, I don't care if the medic coming to save me is gay. I just hope he is one of those buff gay guys who are always in the gym so he can throw me over his shoulder and get me out of there."

-- Blogger Jim Hanson, of Blackfive fame, via Matt Gallagher.

...from the House Armed Services Committee version of the fiscal year 2011 Defense Authorization bill. Allowing officers "off-ramps" and "on-ramps" to their careers is a good way to both retain good officers and allow them to take time off to have kids, travel, or pursue an academic course:

ALTERNATIVE COMMISSIONED OFFICER CAREER TRACK PILOT PROGRAM

In an effort to create an officer corps that is better prepared to assume the responsibilities of waging war, peacekeeping, stabilization, and other critical missions carried out by our military, the Committee created in this year’s bill a pilot program to offer an alternative career track for commissioned officers. This new program will offer a broader range of experiences and opportunities and extend over a longer career, providing more time for officers to experience a greater variety of training and education.

This article by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek on how Obama tamed his generals is great and worth reading -- although not necessarily for the reasons the author intended. I'm going to offer up my bottom line conclusion up front and then use the article as a starting point to consider some other issues.

BLUF: President Obama has brought civil-military relations back into line in a way that would have made Samuel Huntington proud. There are problems with this, as I will note later on in this post, but overall, this is a really good thing. Alter:

Deputy national-security adviser Tom Donilon had commissioned research that backed up an astonishing historical truth: neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War featured any key meetings where all the issues and assumptions were discussed by policymakers. In both cases the United States was sucked into war inch by inch.

I have spent a little time recently with Paul Pillar, a man whose intellect and record of service I really respect. Paul has made a point similar to Tom Donilon's regarding the Iraq war -- that there never really was a coherent governmental decision-making process. Obama's decision-making process on Afghanistan, by contrast, is to be applauded for the way in which it differed from the "decision-making process" (if you can even call it that) of 2002 and 2003. Why?

First, do what Dick Betts does when writing about Huntington's so-called "normal theory" for civil-military relations and draw a big triangle on a sheet of paper. Now draw three horizontal lines on the triangle, dividing it into four levels -- political, strategic, operational and tactical. In the normal model, civilians have responsibility for the top section. They decide the policy aims. Then civilians and the military decide on strategic goals and resources. (Betts adds a fifth layer, actually, for ROE.) The military has responsibility for everything else under Huntington's model.

If you look at the decision-making process in 2009 on the war in Afghanistan, things more or less proceeded according to the normal theory. The president commissioned a review of policy and strategic goals in the winter of 2009, which resulted in this white paper. Gen. McChrystal then thought about how to operationalize the president's policy and strategic goals and submitted his own assessment along with a request for more resources. That assessment, combined with a corrupt Afghan presidential election, caused the administration to re-think its assumptions and prompted another strategic review. This was, on balance, a good thing that made me feel good about the president. The president then re-affirmed his policy aims, articulated new strategic goals, and committed more resources to the war in Afghanistan. (I write more about this process here.)

The good news in all of this is that whether or not you agree with the decisions made by the president and his team in 2009, the national security decision-making process more or less worked, and the civilians were in charge every step of the way. This is as both Sam Huntington and the U.S. Constitution intended.

Now for the problems...

1. Jonathan Alter allowed himself to be spun like a top for this article. Reading Alter on Obama is like reading Muhammed Hassanein Haykal on Gamal Abdul Nasser. As veteran media critics have noted, a growing number of "journalists" have exchanged ridiculously uncritical coverage of this administration for the kind of high-level access necessary to write "insider" books on the administration. This article is -- surprise! -- an excerpt from one of those insider accounts. Nothing in this article seriously challenges the administration's version of events, which leads to some humorous moments. In Alter's narrative, for example, Obama courageously stood up to his general's request for 80,000 more troops for Afghanistan. In reality, of course, Gen. McChrystal offered the president several options, and the president chose the middle path. Making it seem like Obama was fighting his generals over every infantry company, though, presumably makes the troop surge Obama authorized more palatable to his base. (It also conveniently ignores Obama's rather consistent campaign rhetoric in 2008 about how President Bush had ignored the war in Afghanistan and how he, Obama, would more fully resource the war.) In Alter's narrative as well, the generals are all media-savvy leakers trying to box in the administration, while the Obama Administration is filled with media "neophytes" (he honestly wrote that) who would presumably never leak anything to a reporter ... and just fell off the turnip truck yesterday. I shouldn't criticize Newsweek when it's run by a Chattanooga boy-turned-good who has had a bad enough week already, but Alter's "journalism" more closely resembles court stenography than a public service.*

2. We've still a long way to go before civil-military relations get as healthy as they should be. On the one hand, the U.S. military and its officer corps is seriously sick in terms of its relations with the elected civilian leadership. I subscribe to many of Richard Kohn's worries that the officer corps is overly politicized. My cousin, who serves as an officer in the Marine Corps, just returned from Iraq and reports that officers there regularly make disparaging remarks about the president in front of subordinates. Have any of these guys ever heard of George C. Marshall? (The fact that these soldiers are serving in Iraq yet spare the younger President Bush any criticism is kind of hilarious if sad.) On the other hand, it seems clear the Obama Administration thinks "us vs. them" more appropriately describes the administration's relations with the uniformed officer corps than it does the fight against the Taliban. Why, I have to ask myself, have members of this administration -- I'm looking at you, Mr. Vice President -- seemingly gone out of their way to cast the June 2011 decision as a zero-sum game between the civilians in the administration and the uniformed officers in the Department of Defense and at NATO/ISAF? Shouldn't we all be in this thing together and reconvene to assess our strategy as one team this winter? I'm encouraged the president apparently likes Stan McChrystal, because honestly, if a Democrat can't get along with Gen. McChrystal, there's not much hope he can get along with any U.S. general. But below the president I sense this paranoia in the administration's staff that the military is out to get them. And that's not healthy, because...

3. The normal theory of civil-military relations is not enough for Afghanistan. This was the theme of my most recent policy paper at CNAS. When I first read Eliot Cohen's book on civil-military relations, I thought he had lost his mind. I now realize Eliot Cohen is simply much smarter than I am. For starters, it is highly unlikely Huntington established his normal theory as prescriptive. Dick Betts has convinced me he instead established it as more of a theoretical reference point. The problem is, military officers (and sometimes civilians) look at it and think it's the way things should be because it basically leaves the execution of war at the operational level up to the military with little to no civilian oversight. (And what military officer wouldn't want that!) When fighting counterinsurgency campaigns as third parties, though, civilian leaders need to stay involved during the execution of the campaign. They need to convince and cajole the leadership of the host nation, for example, to act in ways that serve both their interests and our own. I think the Obama Administration has realized this about Afghanistan and Hamid Karzai, if belatedly. But the administration does not have the luxury of just putting the war on auto-pilot and allowing the military to win or lose it. It has to stay involved. Which means it has to work with its uniformed officers.

Anyway, I think I have succeeded in writing something in this blog post to offend nearly everyone in Washington, DC, so I'll be surfing the internet for jobs back home in Tennessee for the rest of the afternoon. To sum up my points above, though, I think the president has restored some much-needed balance between the civilians and the officer corps on national security decision-making in the past year. But the U.S. military's officer corps and the administration are both going to have to do a lot more work to repair civil-military relations back to where they need to be. And Jonathan Alter ... well, I'm sure his book will be a best-seller.

*If Jon Meacham had gone to Baylor instead of McCallie, of course, I wouldn't even think twice about giving him grief.

I received a note last week from a former USAID administrator lamenting the fact that while the U.S. Department of Defense annual budget remains comfortably north of $700 billion, the U.S. Department of State struggles to keep its measly $58 billion per year. There are a lot of reasons why it's easier to pass a mammoth defense budget than to protect money reserved for foreign aid and diplomatic operations. If U.S. foreign service officers were constructed in as many congressional districts as the F-22, for example, I suspect we would have a lot more congressmen fighting to increase their ranks.

But in their excellent book Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home, Gordon Adams and Cindy Williams offer another explanation:

The State Department's dominant culture -- the Foreign Service -- takes pride in [the department's] traditional role as the home of US diplomacy. Diplomats represent the United States overseas, negotiate with foreign countries, and report on events and developments. Diplomats, from this perspective, are not foreign assistance providers, program developers, or managers. As a result, State did not organize itself internally to plan, budget, manage, or implement the broader range of US global engagement ... State department culture focuses on diplomacy, not planning, program development and implementation.

They go on to lament that "Foreign Service Officers increasingly have responsibility for program planning, budgeting, and implementation, tasks for which they receive minimal training."

There are a number of ways in which military organizational culture changes, and the literature on the subject is extensive. (For an introduction, you can hardly do better than Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff's The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology.*) Strong leadership and emulation of other organizations are two ways in which change comes about, and external shock is another. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, to a large degree, functioned as external shocks that have changed elements of the U.S. military's organization culture. I could be wrong, but I do not think those wars have had a similar effect on the Foreign Service.

*There is, of course, a much larger body of "rationalist" explanations for military change and innovation, starting with this book and this book. I am pretty well read in the corpus, but the best guy to explain the various explanations dispassionately is my buddy Mike, who is wicked smaht and who I am meeting for beers in about half an hour. (Yes, I know what time it is in the afternoon, but give me a break: I have just returned from Saudi freaking Arabia, and happy hour will begin this week when I want it to.)

I am just back from a ten-day trip to the Arabian Peninsula, so expect posting to remain lighter than usual for the next few days. I want to highlight, though, the unclassified U.S. government assessment on the war in Afghanistan which the executive branch is required by law to submit to the Congress every six months. The bottom line:

The continuing decline in stability in Afghanistan, described in the last report, has leveled off in many areas over the last three months of this reporting period. While the overall trend of violence throughout the country increased over the same period a year ago, much of this can be ascribed to increased International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) activity. Polls consistently illustrate that Afghans see security as improved from a year ago. At the same time violence is sharply above the seasonal average for the previous year – an 87% increase from February 2009 to March 2010.

Translation: We have halted the Taliban's momentum. Violence is up, but we expected this to happen as we escalated our activities.

The president's December 2009 speech, we should note, explicitly called for halting the Taliban's to be the #1 goal of our military efforts. So that's good news. But for me, this report is not nearly as important as the one that will be delivered after the next Friedman Unit. The next FU will really and truly be important because a) we will be able to actually assess the full effects of the as-yet-incomplete Obama surge of troops and b) we will likely use that assessment to decide how fast and in what way we will begin to withdraw U.S. and allied units beginning in June 2011.

That having been said, if you are one of those -- and I have heard this the most from military officers -- who complains we do not have a strategy for the war, this report is instructive because it lays out, in detail, the strategy. You can then turn around and argue that the assumptions underpinning the strategy are faulty or that counterinsurgency is a poor operational choice, but you can't argue that folks have not thought about ends, ways and means.

Anyway, this report should keep you busy. It's loaded with interesting stuff, such as the fact that insurgent groups consider 2009 to have been their most successful year but that a majority of Afghans continue to blame them for the security problems in the country. (Only 1%, by contrast, blame the ANSF.)

Enjoy. (And thanks, Laura, for sending this along.)

Report Final SecDef 04-26-10

I've avoided posting on the recent attempt to bomb Times Square as I'm not in Pakistan at the moment, and couldn't honestly say from London what Pakistanis think about it. However, a profile of suspect Faisal Shahzad printed in the New York Times brings up points which I think are worth expanding and putting into context.

Many people still believe that extremists must be poor and badly educated. It's almost the polite thing to believe because it seems we only have two options in explaining terrorism carried out in the name of Islam. If extremists aren't poor and angry then we have to find another common thread that might explain their ideas and actions, and the only other option seems to be Islam. Of course, this reading of events is the one preferred by bigots and so reasonable people would like to steer clear of it.

However, we have more than two options. Islamist extremism has had a long evolutionary process. It can be argued that it started in the late 1700s in Arabia, found its modern voice through Syed Qutb in 20th century Egypt and tested itself on the field of battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That fairly slow process was supercharged after 9/11 and the international events that followed. It is reported that Osama Bin Laden wanted the attacks on the United States to serve as a catalyst. To some extent he got what he wanted. What we are seeing now is the mainstreaming of Islamist extremism. The language and aims of Islamist extremism have become the premier mode of expressing anger at the world around you.

In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, the angry young men of London's inner cities were drawn to crime, the language of black supremacy movements in the US or radical leftwing politics. My favourite quote from a friend about Islam was "a bunch of Indian men in beards bowing to radiators". Now, to many of those young men's younger brothers and sons, Islam is a shadowy force capable of scaring "the establishment", "the man" etc.

What strikes me about the profile drawn up by the New York Times is not that Shahzad was from a well established and well connected professional Pakistani background, but rather that he seems to have made the same transition that I have seen taking place in Egypt, Sudan, inner city London and Pakistan. Shahzad came from a comfortable background and he and his family seemed on an upwards trajectory until something went wrong and he ended up facing "financial troubles". He then became sullen and withdrawn and "started talking more about Islam". My guess is that he wasn't talking about Ghazzali's classic The Alchemy of Happiness, or someother such work that is considered traditional Islam. Chances are that "talking more about Islam" means he was talking about war, invasion, drone attacks, Palestine, Kashmir and how the Western world was intent on making life miserable for Muslims.

A clue to this is in the observation of an acquaintance of Shahzad's:

"His personality had changed - he had become more introverted," Dr. Anwar said the classmate told him. "He had a stronger religious identity, where he felt more strongly and more opinionated about things..."

The genius of the al-Qaeda-type extremism that we see today is its ability to seize on the inner turmoil of a diverse range of people (from Texas to Brixton to southern Punjab) and link them to its central world view and then motivate them to take action to they believe will lead to change - change they are not likely to live to see.

During three months with radicals in London and six months in Pakistan as well as various trips to Palestinian refugee camps, I have marvelled at the genius of a simple and powerful message that needs only the most minimal promotion - taking full advantage of the modern world, it's viral and encourages recruits to "self start". "Dr. Anwar said he had asked the classmate whether this change had come through association with a group, and the friend said it seemed to be "on his own that he was learning all these things."

There's no one thing that results in someone trying to kill civilians in the name of Islam. Among the clever al-Qaeda messaging, the personal turmoil, individual personality and a host of other elements, there's the unavoidable connection to Pakistan.

Another family friend in Pakistan, Kifayat Ali, called Mr. Shahzad "emotional" and said that he used to carry a dagger around with him as a boy. He speculated that Mr. Shahzad had become enraged by the United States' military actions, fuelled by the Pakistani press blaring conspiracy theories and anti-American vitriol.

Pakistan is a country of 170 million people that used to value it's status as a US ally. Although, the government is still technically a key ally and relations between Islamabad and Washington seem to have improved, Pakistanis live amid violence and economic catastrophe much of which they blame - directly or indirectly - on US intentions towards their country. I work on a project that aims to remove the plank of religious legitimacy from the call of extremists in Pakistan. And in the past six months I have seen that we have our work cut out for us as that call finds followers and sympathisers in upper income urban areas as well as impoverished villages.

Preventing more Shahzads, underwear bombers, Ft Hood Shooters and Jihad Janes will involve challenging the wrong and simplistic view of the West as the ultimate source of all problems and of Islamist extremism as the only force capable of challenging it.

Who knew Michael Caine was a veteran of the Korean War? I sure didn't. I thought this quote of his from an article in the New Yorker, though, was pretty awesome:

“When I was nineteen and a soldier, I often wondered how I was going to be if I knew I was going to die. At one point, we were ambushed in the paddy fields, just four of us surrounded by Chinese. And my instinct — which has lasted me the rest of my life — was: All right, I’m going to die. And that’s O.K. But” — he paused and levelled a heavy finger at the recollected enemy, and at any future adversaries — “as many of you as possible are going to die with me. I’ll take the whole fucking lot.” He grinned. “I’m going to die expensive.”

By the way, if you're looking for a primer in the effects of massed firepower delivered by disciplined infantrymen, you could do worse than to watch this Caine classic.*

*One amusing feature of this movie is listening to Caine -- born and raised in working-class South London -- trying to affect a middle-class Home Counties accent. Almost as good/awful as Sean Connery's infamous Russian accent.