Center for a New American Security

I literally could not wait for Londonstani's take on this corruption scandal surrounding Pakistan's cricket team*, so I'm jumping the gun here. My father was a sports writer and my mom a basketball coach, so I grew up surrounded by sports, and I am ecumenically enthusiastic about them. I can take as much interest in an American football game as I can in a rugby game and as much interest in a cricket match as I can in a baseball game. A few years ago, I watched New Zealand play England in a cricket test match at Lord's Cricket Ground, which is as hallowed a ground as hallowed gets. (For Americans used to baseball, think Yankee Stadium combined with Fenway Park combined with Wrigley Field combined with Cooperstown and you get a sense of the place's importance in the game of cricket.) So the news that Pakistan's cricket team had possibly rigged the proceedings somewhat last weeked -- at Lord's of all places -- threw the world of sport (outside America) into chaos.

I have wondered, on this blog, whether or not the world has been holding back from donating to Pakistan due to allegations of corruption and terrorism. Were the people of Pakistan being collectively punished due to the culture of corruption in Pakistan's government and the government's ties to violent extremists? I have only anecdotal evidence to support this, including the testimony of one friend who refuses to donate to the relief efforts in Pakistan because, in his words, "At least when a Hatian power broker embezzles my donation I know he's not going to try to kill me with it."

I wonder, though, if this cricket scandal -- which trust me, America, is a big deal in the Commonwealth nations -- will just re-inforce the world's view of Pakistan as a place hopelessly corrupt and therefore not the kind of place we should be giving money to, even for humanitarian purposes. As Steve Coll argued in the New Yorker this week**, Pakistan has a serious image problem in the eyes of the West. (And we the United States in the eyes of Pakistan.) The people of Pakistan might very well be paying the price right now for that image.

(For more on corruption and the floods, check out this post by Max Fisher at the Atlantic.com.)

*Londonstani can still count on me to bowl for Team Khan vs. Team Ms Henley-on-Thames in the much-awaited 20/20 match. But why do I have to tell his "cousin" when I plan on bowling a no ball? ... Too soon?

**I actually did not agree with the general thesis of Coll's argument, which is that economic development would reduce violent extremism. This sounds true-ish, but where is the evidence to support causality between violent extremism and economic prosperity? I have not seen it.

As bad as the flood damage is in Pakistan, there is a positive side. My latest article on the afpak channel is about the young Pakistanis with the skills and connections to do what their leaders can't.

"Pakistan is beset by a serious lack of good governance. Analysts such as the scholars at the Pak Institute of Peace Studies have argued for some time that this absence is a driving force behind whatever support extremists in Pakistan can claim. In recent weeks, the Air Blue crash in Islamabad and the government's poor reaction to the floods have drawn more attention to this fracture at the heart of the country. No matter how much aid flows into Pakistan from the outside, Pakistanis themselves must ultimately ensure the formation of governments that serve the people they claim to represent. And surprisingly, possibly the one positive thing to emerge from the floods is growing evidence that young Pakistanis - the educated sons and daughters of well-off families - are willing and able to show that collective action for the public good is not something that is only possible in other countries."

For all its problems there are assets Pakistan has that can serve it well in the future. This includes a tradition of public debate, appreciation for a free press, a healthy culture of dissent against unfettered executive power and a fairly independent civil society. The military in Pakistan is hugely influential but doesn't define the state - possibly because it wasn't instrumental in its inception. The idea of Islam defines the state, but at the same time it remains a vague concept that the people who call the shots don't agree on. That's a problem but also an opportunity for Pakistan. Those who say Islam is all about fighting Kafirs can't completely silence those that say its about raising living standards and providing medical relief.

The question about engagement in Pakistan isn't about whether or not potential partners exist.

UPDATE: I'm not the only optimist. Read Mohsin Hamid's article in the FT.

"Countless individual responses to the floods also inspire hope. Massive collections are under way in Lahore. Virtually everyone I know is donating money, time or goods - or all three - to the relief effort. Societal safety nets, the welfare micro-systems of families and friends that bind Pakistanis together in the absence of a strong and effective state, are doing what they can to help with the unprecedented load.

Hope also comes from the rise of a powerful and independent news media, and from a judiciary that has fought for - and won - remarkable freedom. Pakistan's airwaves and front pages, blogs and cafés are full of the debates of a rambunctious multi-party democracy, one of precious few in the region between India and Europe."

Gary Schmitt and Cheryl Miller have a really fantastic op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal that is, alas, password-protected on the Journal's website.* The money quote:

Much ink has been spilled over the fraught relations between the military and the Ivy League. But while the good military vs. the bad Ivies makes for good political theater, it isn't the whole story. While ROTC has been banned from many Ivy League campuses since the Vietnam War, the military has also drawn down its ROTC programs in the Northeast and in urban areas. ROTC has become increasingly Southern and rural.

 

In Virginia, for example, there are 7.8 million residents and 11 Army ROTC programs. New York City, home to over eight million people and America's largest university student population, has two Army ROTC programs. The entire Chicago metro area, with its 10 million residents, is covered by a single Army ROTC program, as is Detroit. Alabama, population 4.7 million, has 10.

After my first year at the University of Pennsylvania, the U.S. Army decided our ROTC program should merge with and move down the street to Drexel University, which admittedly made some sense because Drexel had a National Guard Armory on their campus. It is thus one of the quirks of my biography that I was Drexel University's ROTC commander as a college senior despite having never attended Drexel.** But the U.S. Army has made a lot of decisions based solely on monetary cost-benefit calculations that have resulted in ROTC withering on the vine in the urban areas of the Northeast and, as Schmitt and Miller point out, a disproportionately small number of military officers hailing from the large middle-class suburbs of our nation's urban centers in the North.

Schmitt and Miller end their column sharing President Obama's lament that "every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan ... That's not always the case in other parts of the country ... [It's] important for the president to say ... that if we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some."

The U.S. Army, then, needs to be more intentional about recruiting officers outside the American South. It is no coincidence that the only combat arms officer commissioned into the U.S. Army from my class of 2,000+ at Penn was a white southern male. (The other officer commissioned graduated from Penn's top-ranked nursing school.) There is nothing wrong with white southern males, of course (we Scots-Irish are, after all, America's warrior class), but we can hardly claim to accurately represent our nation's awesome cultural, racial, social and ethnic diversity, and there is an argument to be made that a nation's officer corps should do that to some degree. The burden for making that happen falls more heavily on the U.S. Army than it does our nation's university presidents.

*I know it makes a lot of sense for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to charge their customers for the news services they provide. But the op-ed and editorial pages are ostensibly meant to spark public debate, and I fail to see how keeping opinion pieces behind a paywall does that.

**Many thanks, though, to all the cadets of the "Dragon Battalion" for their service. I am a proud alumnus and made a lot of good friends through the program -- who I would not have met had I remained south of Chestnut Street!

UPDATE: @dianawueger pointed me toward this earlier op-ed in the Washington Post that made some of the same points. Depressing fun fact: "the Army's self-imposed target for officer-training programs in the New York City region is roughly 30 new officers per year."

What constitutes success or failure in counterinsurgency campaigns is controversial and has sparked much informed (and uninformed) discussion in the policy and academic communities. (It has also generated this priceless article in the Onion.) Yesterday, I posted a quote from David Galula's Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958 and asked the readership to determine whether or not Galula's definition of success can be accurately applied to the United States in Iraq. Here is Galula's definition:

Victory is won and pacification ends when most of the counterinsurgent forces can safely be withdrawn, leaving the population to take care of itself with the help of a normal contingent of police and Army forces.

The debate sparked in the comments thread was a good one, and I promised my own thoughts today. First, though, I need to be up front about some qualifications:

1. My thoughts on whether or not the United States was successful in its counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq does not mean I think the 2003 decision to go to war in Iraq was a wise one. Quite the opposite. I think the 2003 decision to go to war in Iraq was a blunder, and counterinsurgency operations were only necessary, in my view, once the Bush Administration and the U.S. and British militaries had badly mismanaged the war from 2003 to 2006.

2. I am critical of U.S. and British military performance in Iraq from 2003 until 2006 (and beyond). This does not mean that I believe all units performed equally poorly. Some units and commanders performed exceptionally well. So if you were yourself a U.S. officer or troop on the ground between 2003 and 2006 -- and I myself served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 -- do not take my criticism personally. I do, however, believe that the U.S. military began a difficult and bloody learning process in 2003 that started to show some real fruits by 2006 and that the Bush Administration made a number of wise decisions before and after the midterm elections of 2006 that had a positive effect. The U.S. military deserves credit for learning, and the Bush Administration deserves credit for correcting course.

3. U.S. counterinsurgency operations were not -- I repeat, were NOT -- the only variable which led to the dramatic drop in violence in Iraq in 2007. A bloody civil war in 2006 combined with Moqtada al-Sadr's decision to largely keep his forces on the sidelines and a tribal "awakening" all had an effect on the drop in violence, and it is impossible to determine with relative certainty which variables were most important to the drop in violence. So I am not arguing that the surge in U.S. troops was solely responsible for the drop in violence, and I am also not arguing that counterinsurgency as practiced by the U.S. military in Iraq in 2007 is the only appropriate counterinsurgency strategy or could be replicated with ease elsewhere.

4. I have a very limited view of what success in Iraq looks like. A secular democracy, free from violence, in which individual rights and civil liberties are protected by a robust legal system? That would be nice, sure. But nations wage war in their own interests, and my view -- which is perhaps cynical -- is that in 2006, the United States was looking for a way to a) reduce the levels of violence in Iraq in order to b) build up key Iraqi institutions so that we could c) transition to a security force assistance mission and largely depart the country. (This is almost precisely what we are attempting to do in Afghanistan today, with less success.)

Given and based upon those qualifications, I believe the United States (and its allies, Iraqi and international) were successful in Iraq from 2006 onwards in serving U.S. interests. I believe the desired policy outcome of U.S. decision-makers has largely been realized through a combination of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, actions taken by the Iraqi government and non-state actors, and wise policy decisions made by the Bush and Obama Administrations between 2006 and 2010.

Today, a series of brutal insurgent attacks tore through Iraq, killing scores in some of the worst violence Iraq has seen since the dark days of 2007. And Iraq's political class remains deadlocked, unable to form a government and frustrating its people. Yesterday, though, the number of U.S. troops in Iraq dipped below 50,000 as the United States credibly transitioned to a smaller security force assistance mission. So while Iraq continues to be wracked by violence and suffers from political instability, U.S. interests have been served in the sense that the conflict in Iraq is now an Iraqi conflict that will be largely settled and fought by Iraqi actors. It's a curious, tragic and selfish definition of victory, I know. But it's victory.

ESV Slide March 9204

I like both Anatol Lieven and Tom Ricks and always listen to them both on matters related to Afghanistan, even when I disagree with them. (I currently disagree, for example, with Tom's assessments of both Iraq and Afghanistan.) I first met Tom, actually, in a tent at Bagram in between missions during Operation Anaconda in March 2002, and we now work together at the Little Think Tank That Could. And I always really enjoyed listening to the well-traveled Lieven speak on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia when I lived in London.

I was disappointed, though, to listen to Lieven's broadside against Ricks here (at the 17:00 mark, to be specific). A more careful graduate student would never criticize a professor at the department from where he hopes to be granted a degree in the near future, but Lieven looks foolish when he brusquely dismisses Tom as a "Washington commentator" (what, because the view of Kabul is clearer from the Strand?) proffering "rubbish ... unqualified garbage" who has never "lived in an Afghan village" and is thus apparently unable to say anything of substance on Afghanistan. Lieven comes out of this looking bad, and not only because, ahem, Tom GREW UP IN AFGHANISTAN and spent 25 years covering the U.S. military at war. Lieven adopts the most condescending tone in this interview. As a public service to this blog's many readers in the United Kingdom, listen to this and realize that when you start speaking this way and using phrases like "obviously" and "of course" (not to mention "Northern Ireland"), we Yanks usually stop listening to whatever you're trying to tell us.

Anyway, even though I manage to disagree with both Tom and Lieven on Afghanistan at the moment, I came out of listening to this interview thinking a little less of a man whose reporting and analysis I normally respect.

It's very hard work to run an organization, let alone one that's constantly being spied upon and sued.

Julian Assange, on why his organization does not publish donor information.

What is the over/under on current or former U.S. government officials who read that sentence in today's Wall Street Journal and choked on their coffee? 2,000? 5,000?

It's obviously pretty rich to hear Julian Assange admit that sometimes, secrecy has advantages. Assange wants a standard of transparency where he alone is the arbiter of what remains secret, and I suspect he has a pretty black and white view of things: big governments, bad; plucky leftist internet interests, good. The former have little to no right to secrecy, while the latter have all that they themselves deem necessary. The hypocrisy, here, is on full display.

There has been a lot written about the failure of large organizations, governmental and non-governmental, to adapt to the internet age. But the more I look at internet-age organizations, they more it looks as if they too can't quite figure out how they themselves fit into the world. I was reminded of a friend who spoke with some executives at Google and asked why they posted this or that image of U.S. military installations on Google Earth. "Hey," the answer came back, "information wants to be free."

Okay, my friend asked, then why don't you publish the exact locations of your data centers? His question was met with nervous laughter.

At the moment, the street-view imagery on Google Earth is causing a controversy in Germany, where folks are less enthusiastic about their homes being photographed and put on the internet in high resolution than we Americans have been. Reading about the controversy in the FT over the weekend, I was struck by this quote from Peter Schaar, Germany's data protection chief:

I sometimes get the impression that Google in some areas still acts like the quirky garage start-up that's driven by the sheer enthusiasm of its founders.

This will be cold comfort to governments around the world, but it's becoming more and more apparent that the organizations that should feel most comfortable in the internet age are having as much trouble adjusting to it as everyone else.

I saw this Wall Street Journal article on a Taliban sniper is the most-viewed article on WSJ.com. It's worth pointing out, then, that the myth of the great Afghan marksman is just that: a myth. Marine-turned-journalist C.J. Chivers* wrote a great blog post last spring for the New York Times in which he explained, in great detail, why Afghan marksmen -- Taliban and allied -- are actually quite awful. Worth keeping in mind if you hear people talk about wily Pathan snipers.

*Chivers is a real aficionado of firearms and marksmanship. I just filed a review of his new book on the AK-47, and though I don't want to spoil what I wrote (the review will be published when the book comes out, in the fall), I thought it was fascinating.

Drew Conway was promoted to the faculty of New York University (uh, by the New York Times, at least), for these neat charts he helped make using the Wikileaks data.

Visualisation of Activity in Afghanistan using the Wikileaks data from Mike Dewar on Vimeo.

I am in awe of and humbled by the life this man lived.

I thought Fred Kaplan's profile of Sec. Gates was very solid work and enjoyed reading it. Gates said some very reasonable stuff about when he might like to retire:

"I think that it would be a mistake to wait until January 2012," he said. It might be hard to find a good person to take the job so late, with just one year to go in the president's current term. And, he added, "This is not the kind of job you want to fill in the spring of an election year."

August in Washington, though, man: I'm already getting requests for comment on WHAT THIS ALL MEANS. What this means is that everyone needs to act like Fonzie and chill. (Especially you, Yolanda.) Sec. Gates is not resigning tomorrow, and there will be plenty of time between now and his departure to both assess his legacy and handicap his likely successors.

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782