Center for a New American Security

Hard-hitting analysis from the Washington Post:

"His reputation is pretty good," one Pentagon official said. "He's savvy about Washington, worked the Hill," and at a lean 6-foot-4, the former Georgetown basketball player "looks great in a suit."

Well, thank goodness for life's little blessings, I guess.

Sports writing often compares great contests to epic battles.

But perhaps in our efforts in Afghanistan, the reverse is a better comparison.

Reporting on the Beijing Olympics puts China's expenditure on those games at about $44 billion.

Meanwhile, total US expenditure on aid to Afghanistan barely merits a place on the podium: a total of $26 billion in seven years.

Of course, we have come nowhere near the Marshall plan promised Afghanistan in 2002--an effort whose proportions are worthy of consideration as we try to correct course. One year of the Marshall Plan (1948-1949) cost approximately $7.4 billion. A similar effort in today's dollars would cost just over $64 billion (adjusted by the Consumer Price Index), or put differently, $14 billion more than the total requested by the Afghan government in the Afghanistan National Development Strategy over the course of five years instead of one.

This would not cost nearly as much as the Marshall Plan as a share of the GDP. A nation at war spending similarly in order to support its security in response to the largest attack on US soil in history would have to fork out in assistance about $382 Billion--1.5 to 2 times the annual cost of the first major US tax cuts in a time of war.

Kip has watched recently the emerging debate over whether the 21-Year-Old drinking age in the USA causes binge drinking on college campuses with interest.

A report in the NY Times reports that two college presidents dropped their names from a petition after the MADD mafia began to shout (and several more added to the list).

Kip remembers vividly when Governor Corzine of New Jersey said a couple of years ago that he would support lowering the drinking age to 18 as men and women were dying in Afghanistan and Iraq at that age--and then reversed position faster than a "Time Line" transforms into a "Horizon."

Kip could frankly give a damn whether or not college students are allowed to drink. But he thinks it remains fundamentally unfair that soldiers can die in a war for their country, but their countrymen can't buy them a drink. It's too bad that our Congress will allow MADD to run roughshod over our ability to treat these soldiers as adults; it will entrust our servicemen and women to decide life or death at the tip of the spear but not allow them to have a drink responsibly when they come home. Furthermore, Kip is sure that the drinking age contributes to a whole host of problems in the military from preventing those who need substance abuse counseling from going to get it because of fear of punishment for underage imbibing to leading to non-reporting of sexual abuse for fear of punishment for illicit drinking.

Kips not even asking for a wholesale change in drinking laws, just an addition that says 21 unless you present a valid military ID.

But then my namesake said it much better than I:

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.

The NY Times reported last week on the arrival of a milestone in Afghanistan, 500 American soldiers killed in the war.

What Kip thought was most interesting about this "milestone" was not that Americans are dying in Afghanistan (Kip thinks this is old but continuing bad news) but that the US military's limited focus on Afghanistan can be seen in that the NY Times had to do its own count of the numbers to figure out how many had died:

The Pentagon says that 563 American service members have died in Operation Enduring Freedom, the umbrella term for the global American-led antiterror campaign that has the Afghanistan war at its center and includes deployments in the Philippines and Africa. Of those deaths, according to an analysis by The New York Times, 510 have occurred in Afghanistan or are directly linked to the war there.

The other piece that stuck out was the decimation of the Afghan National Police by the Taliban. Based on the numbers provided by the Ministry of Interior to the NY Times and Kip's back of napkin calculation somewhere between 2 and 4 % of the ANP were KILLED in fighting last year.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, once the "Drug Czar" and now a professor at West Point as well as regular intellectual talking head, offers his After Action Report of his recent visit to Afghanistan.

While his account is, shall we say, extremely aware of the political sensitivities of an election season and sensitive to the feelings of our commanders in theater, it offers some important conclusions on our efforts there. He offers six conclusions. You can read more on them at the Small Wars Journal. Kip comments on some of his key points:

There is no unity of command in Afghanistan. A sensible coordination of all political and military elements of the Afghan theater of operations does not exist.

It is important to realize the incredible depth of this problem for it runs down and across two complex international military organizations operating in Afghanistan (and a third, not discussed here, although briefly mentioned by McCaffrey, which runs Special Operations Forces in the country).

The first of these organizations is the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, which oversees the advisory effort of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police--except those efforts led by the Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams, which are ostensibly overseen by the International Security Assistance Force, the other, NATO-led military organization in theater (it is understandable if you have to re-read that sentence several times). Two recent reports (here and here) by the Government Accountability Office assert that even within this organizationally less complex command, a coordinated political, military effort does not exist. From one of the GAO reports:

Defense and State have not developed a coordinated, detailed plan with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, milestones for completing and sustaining the ANSF, and a sustainment strategy...In the absence of a coordinated, detailed plan that clearly defines agency roles and responsibilities, a dual chain of command exists between Defense and State that has complicated the efforts of mentors training the police.

Force, within this one command then, operates essentially without a policy purpose set and defined by the US government. Were this not bad enough, the military side of this command has an overly complex arrangement where a National Guard Brigade, now set to an eight month deployment schedule even as we ask the international commanders in Regional Command South to extend their rotations to a year to provide better continuity, oversees in duplicate the advisory effort in the field.

While we have not been able to get our own house in order (and we should recognize that many of these shortcomings are the result of policy decisions or indecision, not the hard work of commanders on the ground), the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO-led Coalition of more than 30 countries operates almost entirely without political direction or context. No organization with real teeth oversees the political aspects of the utilization of force in the country. Additionally, national caveats within that force, as General McCaffrey points out, prevent the ISAF commander from commanding much outside of his compound in Kabul. US forces in the East essentially operate with their own set of caveats (although the US does not call them caveats) by effectively reporting not to the ISAF commander but instead to CENTCOM.

The outlook with business continuing as usual is bleak:

There is no clear political governance relationship organizing the government of Afghanistan, the United Nations and its many Agencies, NATO and its political and military presence, the 26 Afghan deployed allied nations, the hundreds of NGO’s, and private entities and contractors.

The solution? McCaffrey believes that "Without NATO we are lost in Afghanistan." Kip probably takes the largest exception to the report here. While acknowledging the failure of diplomacy with respect to gaining a greater NATO commitment to Afghanistan, Kip is skeptical that winning requires NATO--indeed Multi-National Forces-Iraq has not required NATO to turn around the situation in Iraq.

Increasingly Kip suspects that WITH NATO we are lost in Afghanistan. NATO may be a political alliance as McCaffrey writes, but it is a political alliance maladaptive to conducting post-Cold War stabilization missions. Experience in Afghanistan and the Balkans does not inspire confidence that this Alliance can deploy force with utility in these types of operations. Certainly without wholesale reform of the political and military organization of the Alliance within Afghanistan and the adjunct components of the ISAF Coalition, NATO's continued lead of ISAF will be the main obstacle to achieving Unity of Command rather than an enabler of the mission.

General McCaffrey's other key point is about the scale of the mission if we are to succeed. "This is," he writes "an attempt to create a state, not a battle to save one." "This is a 25 year campaign." Of the magnitude of effort required to succeed he says:

The battle will be won in Afghanistan when there is an operational Afghan police presence in the nation’s 34 provinces and 398 Districts. The battle will be won when the current Afghan National Army expands from 80,000 troops to 200,000 troops with appropriate equipment, training, and leadership and embedded NATO LNO teams. (Afghanistan is 50% larger than Iraq and has a larger population.) The battle will be won when we deploy a five battalion US Army engineer brigade with attached Stryker security elements to lead a five year road building effort employing Afghan contractors and training and mentoring Afghan engineers. The war will be won when we fix the Afghan agricultural system which employs 82% of the population. The war will be won when the international community demands the eradication of the opium and cannabis crops and robustly supports the development of alternative economic activity.

Of the Afghan Army Air Corps he writes, "We are off by an order of magnitude" and offers a robust assessment of needs approximately 10 times as large as the current projected size.

Kip thinks that as our politicians pontificate on a paltry 2 or 3 Brigades added to the country, McCaffrey is right to give a shot in the arm to talk about the scale of effort that is needed to prevent Afghanistan-Pakistan from emerging as a terrorist state from whence Takfiri groups will regroup and re-attack, reinforced by the narrative of having defeated two Superpowers in two decades. This is particularly important as Rory Stewart and others offer dangerously seductive and ultimately wrongheaded (although well-meaning) soliloquoys on needing less, not more in Afghanistan.

Kip believes McCaffrey does not go far enough in his assessment. The Afghan National Police may be the right size for protecting district centers and some public officials. The Afghans require local police, however, throughout the country in the villages on the order of 200,000 in addition to the 200,000 man Afghan National Army. In addition, Afghanistan requires a force of about 500,000 Islamic Sons of Afghanistan to provide local security against the Taliban resembling Afghanistan's arbakai (tribal policing) tradition--but fundamentally focused on (re-)building the country. Literacy and technical training would accompany this type of work and facilitate a more effective transition into a modern state. This would be a low-paying, conscript force.

Roads are indeed vital to Afghan's long-term prospects as a state whose comparative advantage, as recognized in the Afghan National Development Strategy, is its location as a transit point connecting South, East, and Central Asia and the Middle East. Such a force would facilitate local capacity to build and maintain roads and build on some of the successes of the UNOPS sustainable road-building program.

While McCaffrey is right to invoke the Hippocratic oath when dealing with Pakistan, the US must increasingly focus at the strategic level on regional approaches to Afghanistan. This includes better navigation of the relationship with Iran, confronting the issue of Kashmir, and developing some semblance of policy for dealing with the Central Asian states. Anything short of a regional approach will leave US policy mercy to old hands who are far more adept at the new Great Game than we have proven to date. With Pakistan, the US must more wisely use its largesse, which has become an unconditional trust fund to expand Pakistan's capabilities against India rather than defeat the Taliban in the Frontier. At the very least, we should insist that Pakistan respect the Durand line and not allow the establishment of military border posts inside of Afghan territory.

At the political level within Afghanistan, there is likely to be little progress in winning support of the Afghan people so long as hated warlords continue to be the real power brokers and so long as real efforts are not made at repairing governance in the country. (McCaffrey's somewhat sanguine view that 90% of the people reject the Taliban doesn't recognize just how many also reject the government based on the presence of warlords and six years of divide and rule.) CSTC-A's recent campaign for "Focused District Development" which focuses only on developing the police within a district without a concerted effort to repair district administration (the result of no unified political-military command) is an example of the dearth of efforts to date. In Vietnam, military advisors worked hand-in-hand with political leadership at the district and province level.

While this is perhaps not the ideal situation, until the number of Foreign Service Officers in the US State Department is trebled and a body is re-installed on the dusty skeleton of USAID, military advisors are going to be required in the political arena in order to develop unity of effort at the district level. Organizing political-military efforts, including "battle space ownership" around the PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams), and organizing the PRTs under CSTC-A would significantly increase their utility and the coordination of the military and political.

As a stop-gap for the current situation, Afghanistan requires a surge of US troops (and NATO if they decide they'd like to do more) dedicated to stopping the bleeding by protecting the population, rapidly improving physical and communications infrastructure, and developing the Afghan National Security Forces. In the rural countryside of Afghanistan, we are likely talking about at least 10 Brigades and as many as 20 to include increasing by a factor of five to ten aerial surveillance and air lift assets in the country. This of course requires a regional approach to deal with the risks of underresourcing efforts in Iraq compared to continued neglect of Afghanistan.

Overall, McCaffrey's report is a good wake up call on the magnitude of effort needed and how far we are currently from the mark. Kip is aware that Americans may have little desire to carry on this effort at the scale required given the imperatives of a deteriorating economy and frustration over the length of these wars. He is even more aware that the desperate organizational reform required for success doesn't make for sexy sound bites.

Girding America for the Long War has been a key political failing of both Congress and the President. America must decide how much its cities and its way of life are worth--Al Qaeda left unchecked in Afghanistan will seek to acquire and employ Pakistani nuclear weapons. Nor will nuclear deterrence work against an amorphous non-state actor. Which city, exactly, would we nuke in response to an Al Qaeda attack?

We need an effort commensurate with our responsibility to protect America. In response to more effectively resourcing the fight in Afghanistan, we will hopefully see some changes. Some parting thoughts then to keep in mind for next year under the leadership of a new Administration:

As the spring thaw comes, we expect cells of trained killers to try to regroup, to murder, create mayhem and try to undermine Afghanistan's efforts to build a lasting peace. We know this from not only intelligence, but from the history of military conflict in Afghanistan. It's been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.

Generally, the NY Times doesn't take its cues from the Daily Show, but in this case it can be excused.



In one foul swoop, Jon Stewart devotes as much time discussing war coverage on his comedy news show as CBS news has spent covering Afghanistan on its supposedly real news show this year according to a NY Times' article this past Monday.

In the most important election year in decades, perhaps we could ask our news networks to give Americans an understanding of a war that remains interested in them, whether or not they remain interested in it. Instead, all three major news networks have cut down reporting on Iraq by 80% from last year.

Meanwhile, recent news in Afghanistan including the seizure of an important district in Kandahar (Arghandab) by the Taliban, its retaking in Afghan-led operations, the retaking of a disctrict in Farah (Baqwa), the implementation of focused district development (something to be discussed in a future post here), the Kandahar prison break, the largest suicide bombing to date (at a Kandahar city dogfight), the attempt on the life of Hamid Karzai, and numerous other stories have merited....wait for it...46 minutes of total coverage this year.

The NY Times notes that this marks perhaps a slight increase from last year in Afghanistan coverage.


Kip would be fascinated to know how much total time was devoted to American Idol coverage or Britney Spears--are those issues 10% or 200% as important.

I was once at a seminar in which Katie Couric, then still on the Today Show, spoke about her desire to improve the seriousness of TV news. She's had her chance. CBS coverage of Afghanistan and Iraq has totaled 59 minutes this year, and CBS is shuttering its Baghdad bureau (none of the networks even have an Afghanistan Bureau). Where's the seriousness Katie?

Good thing we don't have to make any important decisions about the prosecution of these wars in the coming year.

Probably not, but maybe. Using a rhetorical device that would make unreliable narrators everywhere proud, Feith reviews the debate surrounding Iraq war rhetoric in mid-2003.* And while the debate itself doesn't strike Charlie as particularly interesting, Feith's grasp of the strategic importance of that rhetoric is, well, a little surprising:

But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president's shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president's words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.

Charlie's going to be really disappointed if Doug Feith is the only Bush Administration official who recognizes this.

*The most galling element of this assessment is Feith's criticism of CIA (mis)estimates of Iraqi WMD, saying that the inability to find any such weapons undermined public support for the war. Which is true enough, though it omits the small detail of Feith's Office of Special Plans and their effort to gin up more evidence of Iraqi WMD than the CIA had found. Ie, Feith thought the CIA was wrong because they were underestimating Iraqi WMD. It takes a special kind of skill to to blame the Agency coming and going.

Memorial Day is for most Americans a long weekend in which, but for the occasional story on World War II and the liberation of France, there is little thought of what it is we ought be memorializing or why.

For me, it has become a somber, annual reminder of friends and familiars lost too young--of others still recovering from wounds that will serve as a reminder of wars which they are not afforded the luxury to forget. I think of Lenny Cowherd, who wrote his West Point history thesis on the Muslim Brotherhood, the first contemporary I knew well to die in Iraq--the first one who's death could not be undone by resetting MILES gear. Lenny was extended due to our inability to anticipate the Shiite uprising in Najaf. He left behind a young bride to whom he had been married less than a year.

I remember Andy Stern, a Marine forced to endure Army training who really believed that an Abrams could swim because the US Marine Corps told him it was so.

I think of another who sits today in a hospital with the question unanswered as to whether he will awake from his IED-induced coma. Another will never fully recover from shrapnel wounds that left him bodily a skinny caricature of his former self.

These, you see, are my wars and my compatriots' wars (and many of AM's readers' wars). But they are not America's wars. Listening to NPR this morning on my day off, reading through the newspapers, looking at the most emailed and read articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NY Times, and LA Times, I feel increasingly that service in Afghanistan and Iraq is little regarded and little understood.

What is it that defines these wars for the American people?

Once, service was seen as gallant and bravery lauded. Even in Vietnam, that most hated of wars, 242 were awarded the Medal of Honor. Today's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in fewer of the nation's highest award for valor in seven years (4 awards) then did a single month in Haiti in 1915 (6 awards including the famous Smedley Butler). And while only 18% of Medals of Honor have been awarded posthumously, none have been awarded to a living US warrior in any theater of the "Global War on Terror." So bravery does not define the war for most Americans--we, the Armed Forces, have taken that one out of the equation.

In the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, national mobilization resulted in a nation at war in which war was defined by family in harm's way and a nation committed to victory. In response to 9/11, America was asked to pay less in taxes and continue to go to the movies and spend as much as possible in order to keep the economy going. The cost of the war was literally passed on to our children and their children so that we could continue life uninterrupted.

War for most Americans, although not for Iraqis and Afghans, remains a spectator sport to which they can feel little emotional attachment. Fewer than one half of one percent of Americans have seen service in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even if we include the broadest reckoning of their friends and loved ones in the equation, 95% or more of all Americans remain profoundly untouched by these wars--even as their long-term security and way of life remains intimately tied to the outcomes.

For most Americans I am growing increasingly to believe, service is defined through the prism of recent reports on PTSD and the failures to provide adequate health care to our wounded warriors at Walter Reed and elsewhere. In a society that has not served, veterans have become a class of victims--a yellow ribbon magnet on your car reminds of the perils of service just as a pink ribbon reminds of the peril of breast cancer and a red ribbon of AIDS.

Of course, service is a choice, not a disease, a choice increasingly required of a citizenry separated by a wall of indifference from the real threat posed by the international takfiri movement.

This Memorial Day, in addition to remembering fallen comrades, I'll hope for a time when the nation again believes its security worth fighting for, its wars worth winning, and its warriors brave.

A NY Times' article on the weakest job market for teenagers in half a century provides a crucial test of the all volunteer force in a time of war.

The story's beginning:

Mr. Stallings, 18, says he has been looking for three months, burning gasoline to get to the mall, then filling out applications at stores selling skateboard T-shirts, beach sandals and baseball caps. He likes the idea of working amid the goods he covets. But so far, no offers. “I’m going to go to Iraq and get a job,” he says acidly. “I hear they’ve got cheap gas.” He grins. “I’m just playing. But I’ve been all over, and nobody’s hiring. They just say, ‘We’ll call you tomorrow.’ And no one ever calls back.”

Whether we can get Mr. Stallings and his friends to join up to go to Iraq to serve (and not for cheap gas) will be a testament to whether we have the right recruiting strategy for American youth to grow our Army in a time of war.

For those civilians who hoped after President Bush's 2007 State of the Union address that the President was finally opening an avenue for a nation not at war to support a military (except the Air Force) at war, don't hold your breath.

In the words of the President, "Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time."

(Now when the President spoke, Kip hadn't yet spent a year serving under a Reserve command, so he didn't realize that when the President said "function much like our military reserve," it was code for "will not function at all")

According to a Washington Post article this morning, the corps, after a year of laying fallow, is supposedly gaining some steam.

"Are you a road engineer who speaks Urdu? A city planner fluent in Arabic? Maybe a former judge who happens to know Pashto and seeks foreign adventure?," asks the article.

"Then don't bother applying," the authors answer themselves without realizing it. (Anyway you won't get a security clearance.)

This civilian corps a grand whopping total of 2250 strong is going to be drafted internal to the federal government from its own agencies. (Agencies, Kip may add, that are reluctant to participate in the war and even more reluctant to leave secure bases where they may be threatened. In Afghanistan, this differentiates USAID and the US State Department, for instance, from UNOPS. A very senior State official once told Kip, "How can I be expected to send my people off the base when it's not safe out there?")

Kip recognizes an urgent need to bring in civilian capabilities to construct a nation, develop civil society, and develop an economy that offer worthy alternatives to fighting foreign occupation and dominance by the wrong tribe or ethnic group.

He also recognizes the value of a nation mobilized for war in response to the largest attack against civilians in our nation's history over a nation mobilized to go to the movies.

He is therefore deeply disappointed, although not surprised, that the Civilian Response Corps seems a hollow endeavor.

Update: AM here. Be sure to check out Matt Armstrong's (MountainRunner) post on this.