Center for a New American Security

John Tirman has an important if flawed op-ed in today's New York Times. He urges U.S. military and political leaders -- as well as the general public -- to be honest about civilian casualties in war. Tirman argues that U.S. military officers need to be wary of civilian casualties for strategic reasons, and here the two of us are in violent agreement. Tirman also argues that the U.S. public and its leaders need to consider the total human cost associated with war for moral reasons, and here too we are in violent agreement. Whenever I speak about the war in Iraq -- whether it is over dinner with friends last night or on NPR a few weeks ago -- I always make sure I mention the terrible loss of Iraqi lives. We Americans have to be honest about this. Last night, someone asked me if I thought the Iraq War had been worth it, and though I said the Iraq war had accomplished certain things (the fall of Saddam, a nascent democratic system of government), it most certainly had not been worth it. The three pieces of data I went on to cite were a) the $1 trillion spent, b) the 4,484 U.S. military lives lost, and c) the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives lost. I could have gone on to cite coalition casualties, the Iraqi refugee crisis, and wounded soldiers and civilians, but you get my drift: I am sympathetic to the aim of Tirman's op-ed.

But then Tirman writes this:

In 2006, two separate household surveys, by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, found between 400,000 and 650,000 “excess deaths” in Iraq as a result of the war. At the time, however, the commanding general in Iraq put the number at 50,000 and President Bush had claimed in late 2005 that it was just 30,000.

As Tirman has to know, that Johns Hopkins / Lancet survey was incredibly controversial when it was released and remains controversial today. It relied on cluster sampling, in Iraq, at the height of that country's civil war. I cannot think of a poorer environment in which one could do that kind of survey. Yes, it was peer-reviewed, but an academically sophisticated methodology cannot compensate for poor data. (Garbage in = garbage out.) Both Gen. Casey and Pres. Bush were likely much closer to the mark, as the iCasualties figures from the very height of the war in Iraq -- 2005-2007 -- are way lower than the figures from either of the studies Tirman cites. (And if Tirman thinks the Iraqi Min. of Health had the capacity, in 2006, to accurately measure the cost of the war on the Iraqi civilian populace, he needs to spend more time in peacetime bureaucracies in the Arabic-speaking world. I apologize for painting with such a broad brush, but those with experience dealing with large state bureaucracies in Egypt or Syria know of what I speak.)

Tirman's op-ed is basically a call for the United States to use violence more selectively, and it's a pity he overstates his case (as tends to happen in New York Times op-eds), because I agree with him. As has been demonstrated time and again, the use of indiscriminate violence in civil war environments confuses the population, scrambles incentive structures for behavior, and tends to inflame the population against the force using the violence. Selective violence is much more effective.

That's the strategic argument. The moral argument is that the U.S. public needs to understand the total human costs associated with its wars. That may lead the United States to be more selective as to when it applies U.S. military power abroad and how it does so. On the other hand, it might also lead the United States to think carefully about how it ends its wars as well. There is a fashionable sign in my neighborhood, for example, that reads "End the War in Afghanistan." I assume this sign is meant to read "End U.S. Involvement in the War in Afghanistan," because I myself am unsure as to whether or not the U.S. withdrawal will ameliorate or worsen the conflict there. Progressives like Tirman should keep that in mind: the U.S. military is only one actor in environments like Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. presence is not the only driver of conflict. It is even possible -- whisper it -- that increased U.S. combat presence and operations might actually serve the interests of the civilian population in some cases. That's certainly the case, at least, in most stabilization operations.

Anyway, my congratulations to John Tirman for this important op-ed.

UPDATED: One of the folks in the comments section points out that Tirman directed the funding for the Lancet/JHU study. Well, that explains it! (I wish he would have disclosed this small but significant point in his op-ed.) Tirman apparently believes between 800,000 and 1.3 million Iraqis were killed in the war, which is a simply incredible claim. No one else puts the number that high. The Associated Press (110,600), the Iraq Body Count Project (103,536 — 113,125), and the Wikileaks logs (109,032) all put the number much, much lower. At what point does someone admit that their numbers just might be off and that their own study had deep flaws? I mean, only 87,000 death certificates were issued in the worst years of the war (2005-2008). Tirman might be the only guy left who references the Lancet/JHU study as having been sound.

LTG Dave Barno, Matt Irvine and I have a new policy paper out at CNAS, which you can read here. This paper is in a lot of ways the logical follow-on to our Responsible Transition report from December of last year, which, looking back, still seems quite relevant. (Check it out if you have the time.)

LTG Barno and I sat down with about a dozen journalists this morning and went over the particulars of new report. Our primary concern -- and the reason why we felt the need to write this report -- is that U.S. and allied commanders in Afghanistan have not yet made the mental leap that, whether they like it or not, the United States and the rest of the NATO coalition are transitioning in Afghanistan. In 2008, the situation in Afghanistan may have required large-scale counterinsurgency operations to buy time and space to build up Afghan security forces. (And I argued, in 2009, that it did.) Some would argue the situation still demands such large-scale operations, but with the transition already under way, the time to make the switch from counterinsurgency to security force assistance is sooner -- while you still have the relevant enablers in the country -- rather than in 2014. If those Afghan units you have been building are lemons, you also want to know that sooner rather than later.

Some U.S. and allied officers might argue the United States and the rest of the coalition are already working by, with and through the Afghans, but the reality on the ground suggests that is the exception, not the rule. In 2009, the NATO/ISAF command in Afghanistan stood up NTM-A to train Afghan soldiers and police, and that effort, while flawed, has been a lot more successful than what came before it. But the old training-and-advisory component of the mission was folded into the combat command in Afghanistan, and that work has since been uneven. "Partnering" -- which Gen. Stan McChrystal felt would allow Afghan units to fight alongside U.S. and allied units and thereby increase the development of the former -- never really materialized. U.S. combat units have been more proficient at finding and killing the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, so they have done the jobs themselves.

But developing security forces is like any other development work. What matters most is not whether or not the school or dam gets built but rather the process through which you take the host nation government to build a school or dam. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan now need to take short-term security risks in order to get Afghan units into the lead. The time to do this is now, not in 2014. Among the forcing mechanisms available to a president are to change the mission, change his commander, or change the resources. President Obama has already done the second and third this year. He should now do the first as well.

Anyway, read the whole report here and sound off in the comments section. 

Reading through the 76-point resolution produced by Afghanistan's Loya Jerga, I was struck by how welcome so many of these points will be inside the White House. Afghan leaders, I often think, do not realize how closely Americans pay attention to what they say -- hence the insults Hamid Karzai periodically lobs at his U.S. sponsors, much to the annoyance of U.S. military officers, diplomats and tax-payers. But this administration has been particularly masterful at actually holding Afghan leaders to that which they say they want. That 2014 deadline for transition, for example? The origins of that date were not in President Obama's 1 December 2009 speech to West Point but in President Karzai's second innaugural address earlier that fall. Karzai likely threw that date out there for Afghan consumption -- but it was picked up on by folks in the White House, who essentially held him to it.

In the same way, Afghan leaders have now, in this 76-point resolution, pretty clearly demanded a rapid "Afghanization" of the conflict in Afghanistan. They want Afghans in the lead, now, and U.S. and coalition units subordinate to those Afghans. LTG Dave Barno, Matt Irvine and I are about to argue in a new paper for CNAS that it is wise for the United States and its coalition allies to make the switch from counterinsurgency to security force assistance in 2012 -- while the United States and its allies still have a lot of resources on the ground -- rather than later on, closer to the 2014 transition. So I agree with many of the Loya Jerga's points on merit. Many of the points in the resolution, though, provide the United States and other reluctant coalition allies with a great excuse to precipitously reduce their presence and operations in Afghanistan.

There is a lot of other stuff in this resolution that provides U.S. diplomats with plenty of ammunition in negotiations toward something that looks like a Status of Forces Agreement. The Afghans ask for a lot from the United States -- more military equipment and training, financial and monetary assistance, scholarships, etc. That gives the United States room to ask for a lot in return. Otherwise, the United States can rapidly modify its combat operations against the enemies of the government of Afghanistan -- and can claim it is just carrying out the will of the Afghan people in doing so. 

Bing West, of course, described it the most eloquently:

For a man to charge into fire once requires grit that is instinctive in few men; to do so a second time, now knowing what awaits you, requires inner resolve beyond instinct; to repeat a third time is courage above and beyond any call of duty; to go in a fourth time is to know you will die; to go in a fifth time is beyond comprehension. 

 

Meyer's performance was the greatest act of courage in the war, because he repeated it, and repeated it, and repeated it.

As either Reinhold Niebuhr or Brother Mouzone once said, "The game is the game."

Ahmed Wali Karzai, long a case study for how U.S. government agencies and departments pull in different directions in Afghanistan, was killed today in Afghanistan. 

I am neither the pro's pro on Ahmed Wali Karzai or southern Afghanistan, but let me direct you to Mattieu Aikins' excellent recent profile of AWK and also to Matt's Twitter feed, which I will be watching today for further news and cogent analysis.

Finally, you will note that our tech-support team at CNAS has added CAPTCHAs to the comments section in order to combat the spam. Fans of cut-price NFL jerseys may be upset, but I hope this makes the blog more reader-friendly for the rest of you.

Ready?

1. This nonsense about adding new medals to recognize service in Iraq and Afghanistan is just as ridiculous as people have been saying, and for even more reasons. The way the U.S. military has divided up the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into arbitrary phases is unnecessary and confusing. Ask a soldier if they have served in either country, and they will likely say, "Yes, two deployments to Iraq and three to Afghanistan" or something similar. They do not say, "Well, let's see, I had one deployment as part of the Liberation, one as part of the Transition, one deployment that overlapped between the Surge and Iraqi Sovereignty ... and then I deployed to Afghanistan as part of the Consolidation." That's silly. Just award one medal for service in each combat theater, and if you want to keep score beyond that, well, that's why God invented service stripes and valor awards.

2. I have mixed feelings about the news that the White House will now issue condolence letters to the families of soldiers who have committed suicide. First off, I care a lot less about condolence letters than I do about investing in psychological screening and counseling to reduce the number of suicides in the first place. Second, not all suicides are the result of combat stress. (One study demonstrated that "79 percent of army suicides occurred within the first three years of service, whether soldiers were deployed or not.") I have known soldiers who have died in Afghanistan in helicopter accidents and soldiers who have died in stateside helicopter crashes. Although neither crash was directly caused by enemy action, the families of the former received condolence letters. The families of the latter did not. If you're going to start writing letters to the families of all soldiers who commit suicide (where indirect cause of death cannot be clearly determined), should you not also start writing condolence letters to the families of all servicemen who die while serving on active duty? And what about the soldier who returns home from war, horrified by what he has seen, gets really drunk and dies (and maybe kills a few others) while driving under the influence? Does that guy's family get a letter? I mean, where do you draw the line between those who receive condolence letters and those who do not? My man Yochi Dreazen gets deeper into these questions in this National Journal article.

3. Speaking of PTSD, if a U.S. soldier wrote a difficult, painful-to-read, searingly honest essay on his or her struggle with PTSD, no one would tell that soldier that he or she does not have the right to write such an essay because they failed to also consider the effect of the war on innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. People would just accept that everyone has the right to share his or her own personal narrative, and that when people are brave enough to open up about their personal experiences, we should all give them the space to do so. Which is just one of the reasons why the outrage over Mac McLelland's essay annoys me.

CNAS is closed for the week, so I am at home catching up on my reading and workouts. A few random thoughts, though:

1. The Dutch are justifiably ashamed of what happened -- and what did not happen -- at Srebrenica, but someone explain to me how today's ruling is good for peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. If you can be held responsible in a court of law for things you did or did not do in a peacekeeping operation, what incentive is there for top-flight military organizations such as those that belong to the NATO countries to participate in peacekeeping operations? Will you not be left with only those countries who need the money? I am not trying to say military organizations in peacekeeping operations should not be held accountable for their actions. I just see today's ruling unhelpful. When the United Nations next goes around looking for participants in peacekeeping operations, we might see fewer hands go up. Or rather, we might see fewer hands go up from among the better militaries.

2. 197 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan in the first six months of this year.* 195 were killed in the first six months of 2010. Does this mean anything? Well, not really. First off, let me start off by saying that those 197 men and women are "statistically significant" to the mothers, fathers, friends and other family they left behind in the United States. We Americans all mourn their passing and honor their sacrifice. But in terms of trying to wrap our heads around the conflict, an increase of two is statistically insignificant. Or maybe it is significant when you consider there were roughly 30,000 more U.S. troops in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2011 than there were in the first six months of 2010. So you have more troops in the country, contesting more areas, and the number of U.S. casualties more or less held steady. That might be good news, then? But we have a real problem with data in Afghanistan. Most of the data we do have actually tells us little about the direction of the conflict. And much of the data we want to have is uneven, unstandardized, and has massive gaps in it.

3. The security services of the Pakistani state are an annoyance to the United States. They are a hazard to the people of Afghanistan. And they are an absolute menace to the people of Pakistan itself.

*A number of readers pointed out that this figure is lower than the one tracked by iCasualties. That figure is 203, which I do not think changes anything. (Though, again, I realize every single one of these fallen soldiers is someone's son or daughter, so I am not trying to be insensitive here.)

There are two items of note I want to highlight to which I was not able to draw attention while traveling. The first is this post by my friend Steve Negus on Issandr's blog on how Libyan rebels are learning to fight by ... playing video games. Alternately fascinating and hilarious.

The second item to which I want to draw your attention is this paper by Doug Ollivant* for the New America Foundation challenging the "new orthodoxy" about what led to the dramatic drop in ethno-sectarian violence in Iraq in 2007. This is an excellent paper. Doug knows enough to know that we cannot definitively determine what caused the 2007 drop in violence, but he advances what he calls "an alternative, counter-narrative" to those offered by Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward, Kim Kagan, Linda Robinson and others.** (Which is in itself interesting in part because Doug is one of the heroes of these other narratives -- most especially that of Robinson.)

Doug is one of the smartest thinkers on counterinsurgency I know***, and his piece is littered with interesting observations, though again, it is as tough to prove Doug's narrative is any more valid, given the lack of evidence, than that of Tom Ricks or, say, Peter Feaver. There are just too many variables out there, and as I have argued ad nauseum, the best we can hope to do in the absence of causality is to establish correlation among all the things that happened.

Some of the more interesting observations, though, concern Afghanistan, from where Doug recently returned after a year spent as John Campbell's counterinsurgency advisor. Here are a few choice excerpts. This first one echos a point I made yesterday:

The President’s statements have been ambiguous, ever since his West Point speech of 2009, during which he both authorized an increase in troop strength, and gave a July 2011 date for the beginning of their withdrawal, recently confirmed in an address on the future of the war. This mixed message from the President (which continues to resonate despite post-Lisbon Conference messaging about 2014, and not 2011, being the key date) has been echoed by his administration. This ambiguity is almost certainly driven by the desire to reconcile the largely incompatible goals of permanently and decisively denying al Qaeda safe havens and Taliban establishment in Afghanistan, while simultaneously avoiding long-term intervention and nation building at astronomical cost. So in short, while the troops have arrived in Afghanistan, the unambiguous message of support and presence that accompanied the 2007 Iraq surge has not. We should not be surprised when politicians in both Afghanistan and Pakistan react accordingly.

This second bit is more sobering:

...it is unlikely that a push of more forces, better tactical counterinsurgency, and the arrival of a highly talented commander can compensate for a lack of political commitment and absence of shared goals between the host nation and the intervening power.

Read the whole paper here, watch Doug run his yap here, and many kudos to the New America Foundation for giving such a smart scholar-practitioner a home.

*Hahahaha, I love Doug like a brother, but he needs to change his profile picture. "Oui, c'est moi. Je suis au musée du Louvre parce que je suis un homme de culture. Regardez l'angoisse sur mon visage parce que je ne peux pas se permettre une coupe de cheveux."

**Carl Prine dings me for citing Robinson and Ricks in my recent IFRI paper (in his otherwise very touching, thought-provoking post), but I did write that this was an incomplete sample and not a full review of the literature. At least I did in the initial draft I turned in.

***It struck me as so weird and stupid that Doug is set up as some kind of anti-COIN rival to my boss (and his longtime friend) John Nagl in this snarky, argumentative National Journal piece. Doug is as much a card-carrying COINdinista as anyone, and those who understand the continued scholarly and policy development of counterinsurgency know there are genuine operational and strategic differences of opinion concerning COIN and how it should be applied in Afghanistan. (Big footprint with lots of general purpose forces? Small footprint with more special operations trainers? Some combination of both? All of that is counterinsurgency -- it's just different ways of doing it.) More to follow on this...

I was unable to hear the president give his speech on Afghanistan, but it does not seem to have pleased many people. Reading it a few days later, I had a similar reaction of dissapointment to the one I had to the 2009 speech at West Point. 

In that earlier speech, the president blunted a lot of any possible advantage he might have drawn from a renewed commitment to Afghanistan by simultaneously announcing we were going to begin a withdrawal in July 2011. On the one hand, that promised withdrawal provided reassurance to the peoples of the United States and other troop-contributing nations, who obviously wanted their men and women home from Afghanistan as soon as possible. But it was a terrible blunder in terms of the way it played in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It offered no reason to the people of Afghanistan to choose to support the institutions of the government of Afghanistan -- such as the security forces -- if the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan was temporary. It convinced the Taliban that their strategy of waiting us out was the correct one, and it also did nothing to persuade the Pakistani security services that their hedging strategy of continuing to arm and train insurgent groups in order to safeguard Pakistani interests after a U.S. and allied withdrawal was anything but wise. So the Surge of troops into Afghanistan was consigned to have less of an effect than it otherwise might have had.

In this speech, meanwhile, I thought the president was well within reason to withdraw all the Surge troops by the end of 2012, and I myself co-wrote a paper on the mechanics of transition. But forcing commanders to remove all the Surge troops by the end of the summer just made no sense to me. No sense at all. Why not give commanders an extra 60 days until the end of the "fighting season"? As it turns out, administration officials confessed they think this whole "fighting season" thing is a bit of a false construct -- which it is, to a degree. Anyone who says the conflict in Afghanistan is like the baseball season, starting in the spring and ending in the fall, is simplifying things a bit too far. But there is an annual rhythm to the conflict -- if you measure the conflict by violent acts against either NATO and Afghan security forces or against Afghan civilians. The conflict is at its strongest in terms of violence in the summer and at its weakest in the winter. So why demand commanders withdraw so many forces right when things are getting most violent? Why? Why not give commanders a 180-day window or a target at the end of the year? One can only conclude the administration simply does not trust its generals in the field. But like Hew Strachan and for the same reasons, I think the administration itself is largely to blame for the disconnect between civilian leaders and field commanders.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for many of the national security professionals in this administration but have been frustrated with the way the administration has handled both the conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya. In both conflicts, the administration has failed to provide clear strategic guidance to military commanders, and in Afghanistan, it has concentrated its message on voters at home at the expense of hearts and minds abroad.* That's hardly a recipe for success in this kind of conflict. I would give the Obama Administration higher marks on overall defense policy and on counter-terrorism operations than on waging wars, which demand the kind of resolve and strategic clarity from above that the president and his advisors do not seem very comfortable giving.

*There is a tremendous amount of confusion, both within and outside the U.S. military, about what "hearts and minds" means. For more on this, read my latest essay in the French journal Politique étrangère. (It's in both English and French.)

If today goes as planned, I will be sleeping in a refuge high in the Italian Alps when the president gives his address on Afghanistan tonight. So please go elsewhere, including my peers at CNAS, for comment. Thanks.