From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"... My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owens' ghastly homage to youth and war, written in the dark winter of 1917-1918, sprang to mind recently as I flew into Columbia, South Carolina. I sat beside a teenager wearing a buzz cut, a Transformers Autobot T-shirt, baggy jeans and a nervous grin. He chattered nonstop until our little commuter jet touched down. He told me he was on his way to Fort Jackson to begin basic training, and that he'd enlisted for the steady income, to support his wife and baby back home in small-town Kentucky. He was 20 years old and that was his first airplane ride, ever"
Showing posts with label Pundits Military Nat'l Security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pundits Military Nat'l Security. Show all posts
Friday, November 27, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Inside Pakistan
TW: Londonstani is a pseudonym for a reporter from the Abu Maqawama blog. His stories reflect the challenges we face in Pakistan. No doubt our use of targeted missile strikes inside Pakistan does not curry favor with many locals. Nor does our support of the Pakistani elites who are frequently corrupt (kind like many of our elites). On the other hand, Pakistan's comfort with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda means we are bound for a certain level of conflict. Oh the conundrums...
From Abu Muqawama blog:
"...Part of the reason for Londonstani's tour was to find out what the much-mentioned "real" Pakistanis think. In Londonstani's mind this phrase is used when people mean "poor, probably illiterate and unexposed to Western media, outlooks or views". There is a nagging feeling then that wealthy, literate (at least in English) and Western educated/travelled Pakistanis are then "unreal", however, that is another discussion.
What follows is a summary of many conversations had in Punjab, Pakistani Kashmir, NWFP and Sindh:
In very stark terms; the army has lost its traditional authority as the only neutral and relatively competent public institution. Previously, the army stepped in to separate warring tribes in FATA. Now the tribes gang up to take on the army. It's previous aura has gone.
The government is full of incompetent crooks, installed by the Americans, who are like rabbits in headlights when it comes to the country's many economic and political problems (not even counting security). While the country slides off a cliff, the ruling party guys line their pockets and wait for the last plane to Dubai/London. The government is not providing educational services, electricity, water, jobs or anything else. At the same time, for the average man or woman any interaction with the government is likely to be short and brutal or long and grindingly painful. This is true whether to you getting paperwork done or are stopped for a driving offence.
Outside the main cities, the army/police is not in control. Even in the towns where they have garrisons, they are boxed in. There's a definite sense that "ungoverned spaces" are expanding and government control is shrinking. On certain main roads in Punjab (let alone NWFP or Sindh) locals advise against driving at night in case of banditry.
In terms of perception of religious observance and its role in public life, there seems to be a shift towards the more severe and less tolerant. This doesn't necessarily translate always into practice, but more a shared understanding that more severe and more rigid must equal more righteous, and that those who are very severe (or even just look it) must be deferred to.
Now, where this gets scary is when you hear a conversation like:
Person 1: "The Taliban couldn't have blown up the market in Peshawar because a Muslim wouldn't do that."
Person 2: "No, the Americans did it. But you know, the market that got blown up catered for women. And you know it's haram for women to go out of the house."
http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/11/pakistan-dispatch-state-nation.html
From Abu Muqawama blog:
"...Part of the reason for Londonstani's tour was to find out what the much-mentioned "real" Pakistanis think. In Londonstani's mind this phrase is used when people mean "poor, probably illiterate and unexposed to Western media, outlooks or views". There is a nagging feeling then that wealthy, literate (at least in English) and Western educated/travelled Pakistanis are then "unreal", however, that is another discussion.
What follows is a summary of many conversations had in Punjab, Pakistani Kashmir, NWFP and Sindh:
In very stark terms; the army has lost its traditional authority as the only neutral and relatively competent public institution. Previously, the army stepped in to separate warring tribes in FATA. Now the tribes gang up to take on the army. It's previous aura has gone.
The government is full of incompetent crooks, installed by the Americans, who are like rabbits in headlights when it comes to the country's many economic and political problems (not even counting security). While the country slides off a cliff, the ruling party guys line their pockets and wait for the last plane to Dubai/London. The government is not providing educational services, electricity, water, jobs or anything else. At the same time, for the average man or woman any interaction with the government is likely to be short and brutal or long and grindingly painful. This is true whether to you getting paperwork done or are stopped for a driving offence.
Outside the main cities, the army/police is not in control. Even in the towns where they have garrisons, they are boxed in. There's a definite sense that "ungoverned spaces" are expanding and government control is shrinking. On certain main roads in Punjab (let alone NWFP or Sindh) locals advise against driving at night in case of banditry.
In terms of perception of religious observance and its role in public life, there seems to be a shift towards the more severe and less tolerant. This doesn't necessarily translate always into practice, but more a shared understanding that more severe and more rigid must equal more righteous, and that those who are very severe (or even just look it) must be deferred to.
Now, where this gets scary is when you hear a conversation like:
Person 1: "The Taliban couldn't have blown up the market in Peshawar because a Muslim wouldn't do that."
Person 2: "No, the Americans did it. But you know, the market that got blown up catered for women. And you know it's haram for women to go out of the house."
http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/11/pakistan-dispatch-state-nation.html
Monday, October 12, 2009
Are American Able And Willing To Pay the Price Of An Escalation in AfPak
TW:
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
" The Taliban's response to the Afghan war strategy proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal could be shocking and grim, with insurgents redoubling suicide attacks and ambushes against American troops, aircraft and road convoys, triumphantly setting up "liberated zones,'' and executing Afghan police and collaborators in areas abandoned by U.S. and allied forces. The first months of the new strategy, rather than feeling like a winning new campaign, could feel a lot like losing.
tweetmeme_source = 'politicsdaily';
In the short term, at least, that's the dismaying expectation of a wide range of counterinsurgency and Afghanistan experts if President Obama authorizes McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to implement a wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign with as many as 40,000 additional U.S. troops. Pentagon and White House officials say that decision will be made within weeks.
The United States is likely to be badly bruised in the coming months no matter what strategy it adopts in Afghanistan, according to military and civilian experts, many of whom asked to remain anonymous because of the political sensitivity of the current strategic review. But between the extremes of making no change in war strategy, and cutting back troops and other resources, the McChrystal plan is said to entail the fewest -- but still significant -- dangers.
Most public attention has focused on the pending request by McChrystal for troop reinforcements. But more significant than the troop numbers is his blueprint for a radical shift in the way the United States and its allies intend to fight the war.
Key among his proposed changes: rather than trying to fight everywhere, shifting forces to "critical areas,'' where the Afghan population is most at risk. Another key change: getting American troops -- and increasing numbers of U.S. civilians -- out of their armored vehicles and fortified bases into Afghan communities, and getting them to shuck body armor and helmets and to walk among the population unprotected, like the Afghans themselves do.
"Once the risk is shared, effective force protection will come from the people,'' McChrystal wrote in the strategy proposal now under consideration at the White House. "Accepting some risk in the short term will ultimately save lives in the long run.''
But as the overworked yet accurate phrase in vogue at the Pentagon has it, "the enemy gets a vote.'' And this particular enemy, as the Jihadist fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, is highly adaptive, quick to learn to blunt the impact of American precision weapons and to emasculate the U.S. doctrine for mass conventional warfare. Cheap IEDs, for instance, have demolished the U.S. advantage in armored vehicles, field commanders say.
McChrystal and his top aides, together with a dozen counterinsurgency experts, put together the 66-page proposal for a new counterinsurgency strategy this summer – and then set up an aggressive "Red Team'' to play the Taliban, looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Satisfied that he knew the risks and found them acceptable, McChrystal sent the proposal on to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the White House.
Yet, the public may feel differently about the risks, especially in the short term. And that gives the Afghan insurgents a pressing motive to surge American casualties, to mount spectacularly bloody attacks, to impress on the American and European public the high cost of the campaign, analysts say.
"Nobody I know thinks this war can be won in a year or two years,'' said
Stephen Biddle, a senior analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of McChrystal's strategy brain trust. "You could certainly lose political support for the war in the U.S. much sooner than that.''
Politically savvy insurgents are familiar with that timeline. And, because it would take a year to get U.S. reinforcements in position, the 68,000 American troops now in Afghanistan will be at risk. The Taliban will respond with "a cheap campaign of IEDs, mortars and rocket and mortar attacks'' on clusters of U.S. troops, said T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and counterinsurgency expert. Others expect the Taliban to deepen their infiltration of the Afghan army and national police force; already, insurgents have been discovered with Afghan police uniforms and vehicles. "You have one of them 'go postal' and kill an American – that just poisons the relationship between our military and their security forces,'' said David Isby, a Washington-based defense expert and author of several books on Afghanistan.
Experts also express worry that the insurgents yet could find a supply of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, perhaps from Iran, to use against troop-carrying cargo planes and helicopters, the lifeline of U.S. forces in the country.
Under the McChrystal campaign plan, some regions of Afghanistan would be left sparsely defended if at all, opening new opportunities for Taliban propaganda victories. Some senior U.S. military officers are worried about how to blunt powerful Taliban messages that would say, in effect, "Look, we forced the powerful Americans out and they have abandoned you, just like they abandoned Afghanistan before.'' There is concern as well about reprisal killings of Afghan police and others who cooperated with U.S. forces before they were withdrawn.
A Taliban "surge'' across large swaths of undefended rural Afghanistan would mirror the strategy they used in the mid-1990s in their successful sweep to power, building bases of support from one village and rural district to another while rival Afghan militias tried to defend large towns and cities. That strategy was "innovative and ruthlessly effective,'' Seth G. Jones of Georgetown University writes in a new book about the Afghan war, In the Graveyard of Empires.
"Afghanistan is fundamentally about legitimacy, and having the Taliban set up liberated zones would be huge,'' said Isby.
The largest Afghan insurgent group, the Quetta Shura Taliban, already has set up shadow governments in most Afghan provinces, complete with grievance boards, courts, tax levies and military conscription. U.S. officials say they have only a superficial knowledge of the depth and breadth of these networks.
Senior military officers also expressed concern that insurgents might use existing shadow networks in the major southern city of Kandahar or even in the capital, Kabul, to stage a spectacular attack similar to the 1968 Tet offensive. That was a surprising but largely bungled series of attacks across South Vietnam by Viet Cong insurgents. Although the insurgents suffered huge losses, scenes of fighting inside the U.S. embassy in Saigon and elsewhere shocked the American public and helped turn opinion against the war.
Even short of such drama, the costs of any Afghan war strategy, "to have any reasonable chance of success, are going to be high,'' said Biddle. He and others believe it will require a major effort by Obama and European leaders to convince the public on the necessity of accepting high up-front costs. "I suspect it will probably require a very systematic, deliberate attempt by the executive branch to make the case to the public'' he said, "that on balance, the costs are worth paying.''
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/06/how-the-taliban-might-respond-to-mcchrysals-new-war-plan/
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
" The Taliban's response to the Afghan war strategy proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal could be shocking and grim, with insurgents redoubling suicide attacks and ambushes against American troops, aircraft and road convoys, triumphantly setting up "liberated zones,'' and executing Afghan police and collaborators in areas abandoned by U.S. and allied forces. The first months of the new strategy, rather than feeling like a winning new campaign, could feel a lot like losing.
tweetmeme_source = 'politicsdaily';
In the short term, at least, that's the dismaying expectation of a wide range of counterinsurgency and Afghanistan experts if President Obama authorizes McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to implement a wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign with as many as 40,000 additional U.S. troops. Pentagon and White House officials say that decision will be made within weeks.
The United States is likely to be badly bruised in the coming months no matter what strategy it adopts in Afghanistan, according to military and civilian experts, many of whom asked to remain anonymous because of the political sensitivity of the current strategic review. But between the extremes of making no change in war strategy, and cutting back troops and other resources, the McChrystal plan is said to entail the fewest -- but still significant -- dangers.
Most public attention has focused on the pending request by McChrystal for troop reinforcements. But more significant than the troop numbers is his blueprint for a radical shift in the way the United States and its allies intend to fight the war.
Key among his proposed changes: rather than trying to fight everywhere, shifting forces to "critical areas,'' where the Afghan population is most at risk. Another key change: getting American troops -- and increasing numbers of U.S. civilians -- out of their armored vehicles and fortified bases into Afghan communities, and getting them to shuck body armor and helmets and to walk among the population unprotected, like the Afghans themselves do.
"Once the risk is shared, effective force protection will come from the people,'' McChrystal wrote in the strategy proposal now under consideration at the White House. "Accepting some risk in the short term will ultimately save lives in the long run.''
But as the overworked yet accurate phrase in vogue at the Pentagon has it, "the enemy gets a vote.'' And this particular enemy, as the Jihadist fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, is highly adaptive, quick to learn to blunt the impact of American precision weapons and to emasculate the U.S. doctrine for mass conventional warfare. Cheap IEDs, for instance, have demolished the U.S. advantage in armored vehicles, field commanders say.
McChrystal and his top aides, together with a dozen counterinsurgency experts, put together the 66-page proposal for a new counterinsurgency strategy this summer – and then set up an aggressive "Red Team'' to play the Taliban, looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Satisfied that he knew the risks and found them acceptable, McChrystal sent the proposal on to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the White House.
Yet, the public may feel differently about the risks, especially in the short term. And that gives the Afghan insurgents a pressing motive to surge American casualties, to mount spectacularly bloody attacks, to impress on the American and European public the high cost of the campaign, analysts say.
"Nobody I know thinks this war can be won in a year or two years,'' said
Stephen Biddle, a senior analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of McChrystal's strategy brain trust. "You could certainly lose political support for the war in the U.S. much sooner than that.''
Politically savvy insurgents are familiar with that timeline. And, because it would take a year to get U.S. reinforcements in position, the 68,000 American troops now in Afghanistan will be at risk. The Taliban will respond with "a cheap campaign of IEDs, mortars and rocket and mortar attacks'' on clusters of U.S. troops, said T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and counterinsurgency expert. Others expect the Taliban to deepen their infiltration of the Afghan army and national police force; already, insurgents have been discovered with Afghan police uniforms and vehicles. "You have one of them 'go postal' and kill an American – that just poisons the relationship between our military and their security forces,'' said David Isby, a Washington-based defense expert and author of several books on Afghanistan.
Experts also express worry that the insurgents yet could find a supply of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, perhaps from Iran, to use against troop-carrying cargo planes and helicopters, the lifeline of U.S. forces in the country.
Under the McChrystal campaign plan, some regions of Afghanistan would be left sparsely defended if at all, opening new opportunities for Taliban propaganda victories. Some senior U.S. military officers are worried about how to blunt powerful Taliban messages that would say, in effect, "Look, we forced the powerful Americans out and they have abandoned you, just like they abandoned Afghanistan before.'' There is concern as well about reprisal killings of Afghan police and others who cooperated with U.S. forces before they were withdrawn.
A Taliban "surge'' across large swaths of undefended rural Afghanistan would mirror the strategy they used in the mid-1990s in their successful sweep to power, building bases of support from one village and rural district to another while rival Afghan militias tried to defend large towns and cities. That strategy was "innovative and ruthlessly effective,'' Seth G. Jones of Georgetown University writes in a new book about the Afghan war, In the Graveyard of Empires.
"Afghanistan is fundamentally about legitimacy, and having the Taliban set up liberated zones would be huge,'' said Isby.
The largest Afghan insurgent group, the Quetta Shura Taliban, already has set up shadow governments in most Afghan provinces, complete with grievance boards, courts, tax levies and military conscription. U.S. officials say they have only a superficial knowledge of the depth and breadth of these networks.
Senior military officers also expressed concern that insurgents might use existing shadow networks in the major southern city of Kandahar or even in the capital, Kabul, to stage a spectacular attack similar to the 1968 Tet offensive. That was a surprising but largely bungled series of attacks across South Vietnam by Viet Cong insurgents. Although the insurgents suffered huge losses, scenes of fighting inside the U.S. embassy in Saigon and elsewhere shocked the American public and helped turn opinion against the war.
Even short of such drama, the costs of any Afghan war strategy, "to have any reasonable chance of success, are going to be high,'' said Biddle. He and others believe it will require a major effort by Obama and European leaders to convince the public on the necessity of accepting high up-front costs. "I suspect it will probably require a very systematic, deliberate attempt by the executive branch to make the case to the public'' he said, "that on balance, the costs are worth paying.''
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/06/how-the-taliban-might-respond-to-mcchrysals-new-war-plan/
Friday, October 9, 2009
AfPak an Empire Sapper?
TW: Kaplan makes fair points below but free riding is what just about anyone who is not the superpower does. There are degrees, of course, but with few exceptions our allies have always spent less than the U.S. and committed fewer troops and other resources. That said in return we have decision supremacy in almost all situations. If you are going to be the leader, there are costs. The day we choose (and it will come some day) to pull back, the world will be different, not necessarily worse but much different. As the superpower the question is always about managing our still very much finite resources optimally. We have done a bad job recently with the Iraq situation amongst others. We have a huge decision currently to make in AfPak.
From Robert Kaplan in NYT:
"In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.
Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.
Of course, one could make an excellent case that an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight.
But as much as we hone our counterinsurgency skills and develop assets for the “long war,” history would suggest that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and air power from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others."
From Robert Kaplan in NYT:
"In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.
Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.
Of course, one could make an excellent case that an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight.
But as much as we hone our counterinsurgency skills and develop assets for the “long war,” history would suggest that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and air power from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others."
Comparing Surges: Iraq v. AfPak
TW: Engel who has spent as much time as any journalist in Iraq and AfPak over the past 8 years compares and contrasts the Iraq surge with a potential AfPak surge. Somewhat similiar but mainly different.
From Richard Engel at NBC:
"...The situation in Afghanistan, however, is completely different[than Iraq]. There is no unified group asking for protection. There is no Afghan Awakening Movement. McChrystal, Petraeus’ man on the ground in Kabul, wants Afghans to take up arms with him against the Taliban and other militants, but many Afghans see no reason why they should. Afghans aren’t asking for American protection.
The Taliban and other militant groups are unpopular in Afghanistan, with opinion polls suggesting that the Taliban has support only among six percent of Afghans. But most people here don’t feel threatened by the Taliban in their daily lives. There are no bodies in the streets of Kabul. The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets. If they kill civilians, they deny it. They are actively trying to win hearts and minds.
It makes a difference on the ground. In Baghdad and Iraqi villages I constantly saw Iraqis walk up – or even run up – to American soldiers and plead with them for help.
“I received a death threat under my door.”
“My cousin was kidnapped.”
“My brother was just killed.”
“I want a visa to so I can work with my uncle in New Jersey.”
“Help us!”
U.S. soldiers were mobbed with these kinds of requests.
This hardly ever happens in Afghanistan. Most American patrols are met with blank stares and silence. Most Afghans don’t have cousins in New Jersey. They don’t want to be like Americans.
Afghans want to be left alone. Iraqis love Lionel Richie and Oprah Winfrey. Most Afghans have no idea who they are. Afghans have a traditional society isolated for centuries by xenophobia, strict religion and the high peaks of the Hindu Kush.
The different dynamic raises the question: How do you protect Afghan people – the core of the U.S. counter-insurgency strategy – if they don’t seem to want it as much as we want to give it to them?
...So why have a surge?The U.S. military in Afghanistan says it needs to both change the long term approach to fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan and to stop the Taliban’s momentum. Momentum, like luck, is intangible – but matters. The Taliban has momentum now.
The surge may help stop the Taliban’s expansion, but it seems unlikely to create a ground swell movement that could, as it did in Iraq, quickly turn the tide of the war. The surge might help bloody the Taliban’s nose, but don’t expect it to be an Iraq-style quick fix."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33208943/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/
From Richard Engel at NBC:
"...The situation in Afghanistan, however, is completely different[than Iraq]. There is no unified group asking for protection. There is no Afghan Awakening Movement. McChrystal, Petraeus’ man on the ground in Kabul, wants Afghans to take up arms with him against the Taliban and other militants, but many Afghans see no reason why they should. Afghans aren’t asking for American protection.
The Taliban and other militant groups are unpopular in Afghanistan, with opinion polls suggesting that the Taliban has support only among six percent of Afghans. But most people here don’t feel threatened by the Taliban in their daily lives. There are no bodies in the streets of Kabul. The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets. If they kill civilians, they deny it. They are actively trying to win hearts and minds.
It makes a difference on the ground. In Baghdad and Iraqi villages I constantly saw Iraqis walk up – or even run up – to American soldiers and plead with them for help.
“I received a death threat under my door.”
“My cousin was kidnapped.”
“My brother was just killed.”
“I want a visa to so I can work with my uncle in New Jersey.”
“Help us!”
U.S. soldiers were mobbed with these kinds of requests.
This hardly ever happens in Afghanistan. Most American patrols are met with blank stares and silence. Most Afghans don’t have cousins in New Jersey. They don’t want to be like Americans.
Afghans want to be left alone. Iraqis love Lionel Richie and Oprah Winfrey. Most Afghans have no idea who they are. Afghans have a traditional society isolated for centuries by xenophobia, strict religion and the high peaks of the Hindu Kush.
The different dynamic raises the question: How do you protect Afghan people – the core of the U.S. counter-insurgency strategy – if they don’t seem to want it as much as we want to give it to them?
...So why have a surge?The U.S. military in Afghanistan says it needs to both change the long term approach to fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan and to stop the Taliban’s momentum. Momentum, like luck, is intangible – but matters. The Taliban has momentum now.
The surge may help stop the Taliban’s expansion, but it seems unlikely to create a ground swell movement that could, as it did in Iraq, quickly turn the tide of the war. The surge might help bloody the Taliban’s nose, but don’t expect it to be an Iraq-style quick fix."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33208943/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/
Friday, October 2, 2009
Damn Right We Should Take Some Time On This One (cont.)
TW: More excerpts from the Wood piece from this morning. But he frames two crucial issues. One is that over and over especially in the Muslim world (and this was also a huge issue in Vietnam) the insurgent, nationalists have massive advantages over the occupying or legacy government in providing basic security. The Taliban are radicals and misogynistic but they have provided certain types of internal stability that the previous and current Afghan governments have not. Corruption in Afghanistan and surrounding areas is rife not least amongst our local external and internal allies. For the average Afghan male who could give a crap about our problems the Taliban are a viable and in certain ways superior option to the Western allies and their domestic Afghan partners.
Hamas and Hizbollah employ some of the same approaches to win over indigenous voters within Gaza and Lebanon. Weak, ineffectual and most of all corrupt local governments create a void into which their radical Islamist based security becomes an attractive alternative.
Secondly, COIN is hard. Any foreign force starts out with massive disadvantages as the relatively ignorant outsiders. Regardless the time, money and blood necessary to effectively implement COIN is tremendous. Should the U.S. and its allies decide to double down with our commitments, folks should understand we are talking about years, hundreds of billions of $ and thousands of casualties. I say implement not win COIN. Few can define what "winning" a counter-insurgency when the variables are so broad even means.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...The "deliberative'' strategy review, which the White House said would take "several weeks,'' has been complicated by the hard-to-miss corruption in last month's Afghan elections, widely viewed as stolen by President Hamid Karzai. It's not that the voting "irregularities" were a surprise, said a U.S. official involved in the issue, but that they highlighted what McChrystal believes are two principal enemies in Afghanistan: the spreading insurgency and the fast-eroding confidence of the Afghan public it its government and, by association, in the United States and its allies. This "crisis," McChrystal wrote, springs from non-performing national government ministries and district offices, "the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power-brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement, and a longstanding lack of economic opportunity.''
By contrast, Taliban insurgents have a reputation of intolerance of corruption and for swift, brutal justice. Many local Taliban shadow governments include panels to weigh citizen complaints against Taliban officials. The United States must do at least as well to protect the Afghan people from the scourge of their own government, as well as protecting them from insurgent attacks and intimidation.
Clearly, most of these problems cannot be solved with military force. "Our conventional warfare culture is part of the problem,'' McChrystal acknowledged to the White House. Despite years of experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military hasn't mastered counterinsurgency, and the "surge'' of American civilian experts to help train police, farmers and government officials hasn't fully materialized.
That leaves field commanders scrambling to fill the gaps. At Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan, Col. Howard made sure I noticed that in his top-secret daily briefings, two civilians sit with him as joint commanders of the fight: a State Department diplomat and an official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "They don't just sit there – they are in charge of things and make decisions,'' Howard told me last month.But his frustration was clear. "Protecting the population – it's easy to throw that term around but it's hard to turn it into an operation,'' Howard told me. "Does it mean putting all the people in a corral and putting soldiers around them? No. It means doing a lot of things we've been doing already: going after people planting IEDs, disrupting infiltration routes across the border from Pakistan, partnering with police so they can secure the streets, working with the governors so they make good decisions ... all that's protecting the population. It's almost a mentality versus a single operation...''
Hamas and Hizbollah employ some of the same approaches to win over indigenous voters within Gaza and Lebanon. Weak, ineffectual and most of all corrupt local governments create a void into which their radical Islamist based security becomes an attractive alternative.
Secondly, COIN is hard. Any foreign force starts out with massive disadvantages as the relatively ignorant outsiders. Regardless the time, money and blood necessary to effectively implement COIN is tremendous. Should the U.S. and its allies decide to double down with our commitments, folks should understand we are talking about years, hundreds of billions of $ and thousands of casualties. I say implement not win COIN. Few can define what "winning" a counter-insurgency when the variables are so broad even means.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...The "deliberative'' strategy review, which the White House said would take "several weeks,'' has been complicated by the hard-to-miss corruption in last month's Afghan elections, widely viewed as stolen by President Hamid Karzai. It's not that the voting "irregularities" were a surprise, said a U.S. official involved in the issue, but that they highlighted what McChrystal believes are two principal enemies in Afghanistan: the spreading insurgency and the fast-eroding confidence of the Afghan public it its government and, by association, in the United States and its allies. This "crisis," McChrystal wrote, springs from non-performing national government ministries and district offices, "the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power-brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement, and a longstanding lack of economic opportunity.''
By contrast, Taliban insurgents have a reputation of intolerance of corruption and for swift, brutal justice. Many local Taliban shadow governments include panels to weigh citizen complaints against Taliban officials. The United States must do at least as well to protect the Afghan people from the scourge of their own government, as well as protecting them from insurgent attacks and intimidation.
Clearly, most of these problems cannot be solved with military force. "Our conventional warfare culture is part of the problem,'' McChrystal acknowledged to the White House. Despite years of experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military hasn't mastered counterinsurgency, and the "surge'' of American civilian experts to help train police, farmers and government officials hasn't fully materialized.
That leaves field commanders scrambling to fill the gaps. At Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan, Col. Howard made sure I noticed that in his top-secret daily briefings, two civilians sit with him as joint commanders of the fight: a State Department diplomat and an official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "They don't just sit there – they are in charge of things and make decisions,'' Howard told me last month.But his frustration was clear. "Protecting the population – it's easy to throw that term around but it's hard to turn it into an operation,'' Howard told me. "Does it mean putting all the people in a corral and putting soldiers around them? No. It means doing a lot of things we've been doing already: going after people planting IEDs, disrupting infiltration routes across the border from Pakistan, partnering with police so they can secure the streets, working with the governors so they make good decisions ... all that's protecting the population. It's almost a mentality versus a single operation...''
Damn Right We Should Take Some Time On This One
TW: Some folks are urging Obama to commit the U.S. to a substantial escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan immediately without further review and without significant new strategies. This would be a foolish approach to what could be a seminal inflection point in American history. Afghanistan and Pakistan are strategic and our path chosen there will have ramifications for decades.
Post 9/11 in a fit of almost universal passion and anger (I amongst them) charged into Afghanistan to push out the Taliban but then we proceeded to wallow without a clear strategy and certainly without an effective policy. Eight years later we face a smorgasbord of shitty options. Wood does a nice job of framing the conundrum.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...Even as criticism mounted that this "strategic review'' is taking too long, the officials sitting around the Situation Room conference table were confronting what may be the most complicated conflict the United States has ever become engaged in. Consider these brain-stunners, drawn from the views of senior commanders and national security officials:
-- The war cannot be won with military force alone. Yet, military force is virtually the only tool available to the commander in chief.
-- The war can't be won by the United States and its allies; it must be won by Afghans themselves and, specifically, by their government and security forces. Yet, they are demonstrably unable to do so.
-- Time is quickly running out, as the patience of Americans, Europeans and Afghans themselves wears thin. Yet, if there are strategies and tactics that will win the war, they each require years to take effect.-- Even to establish a holding pattern, to arrest the insurgent gains, will require tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops. Yet, manpower is the one resource that Americans and Europeans are most (and increasingly) reluctant to provide.
-- If something isn't done soon, the United States could lose.
--'Losing' would mean not only abandoning the American goal of preventing further attacks from the region on the United States, but more important, could accelerate the destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan next door.
So, it is not simply a matter of deciding whether or not to approve the request for 40,000 more troops, forwarded to the Pentagon two weeks ago by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal himself emphasized that point in the strategic assessment he forwarded to Washington last month: "Additional resources are required,'' he wrote, "but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate...''
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/01/obamas-war-take-your-time/
Post 9/11 in a fit of almost universal passion and anger (I amongst them) charged into Afghanistan to push out the Taliban but then we proceeded to wallow without a clear strategy and certainly without an effective policy. Eight years later we face a smorgasbord of shitty options. Wood does a nice job of framing the conundrum.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...Even as criticism mounted that this "strategic review'' is taking too long, the officials sitting around the Situation Room conference table were confronting what may be the most complicated conflict the United States has ever become engaged in. Consider these brain-stunners, drawn from the views of senior commanders and national security officials:
-- The war cannot be won with military force alone. Yet, military force is virtually the only tool available to the commander in chief.
-- The war can't be won by the United States and its allies; it must be won by Afghans themselves and, specifically, by their government and security forces. Yet, they are demonstrably unable to do so.
-- Time is quickly running out, as the patience of Americans, Europeans and Afghans themselves wears thin. Yet, if there are strategies and tactics that will win the war, they each require years to take effect.-- Even to establish a holding pattern, to arrest the insurgent gains, will require tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops. Yet, manpower is the one resource that Americans and Europeans are most (and increasingly) reluctant to provide.
-- If something isn't done soon, the United States could lose.
--'Losing' would mean not only abandoning the American goal of preventing further attacks from the region on the United States, but more important, could accelerate the destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan next door.
So, it is not simply a matter of deciding whether or not to approve the request for 40,000 more troops, forwarded to the Pentagon two weeks ago by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal himself emphasized that point in the strategic assessment he forwarded to Washington last month: "Additional resources are required,'' he wrote, "but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate...''
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/10/01/obamas-war-take-your-time/
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Morass in AfPak
TW: The more I read on AfPak the less clear I am on how to proceed. Less clear because despite looking very hard I see no attractive options. Former CNN Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre frames some of the issues well. I inserted additional comments of my own within his piece.
From Jamie McIntyre at Line of Departure Blog:
"If you are wondering why the Obama administration is suddenly having serious second thoughts about poring more troops into Afghanistan, here’s the short version. A lot has changed in the past few months. Here are the big three:
1. The Flawed Afghan Election
Instead of the recent elections conferring legitimacy on the government of Hamid Karzai, the widespread fraud has undermined confidence in the central government, in a country by the way, that has never really had any functioning central government. So instead of supporting a popularly-elected regime, the U.S. is seen even more as the outside occupying force that has installed a puppet president. No matter the reality, the perception is very problematic.
[TW: the notion that we were going to impose democracy in Afghanistan was fanciful and worse destructive to our pursuit of bringing stability to the region. That Karzai committed fraud is not the big problem, the big problem is the lack of viable, coherent, strong central leadership in Afghanistan other than perhaps the Taliban]
2. The More Effective, Resurgent Taliban
The Taliban has been on the rebound for years, but in the just last few months it’s shown an amazing ability to plan and execute increasingly sophisticated attacks. It is well-funded, and has installed a shadow government in may provinces that has been able to intimidate or in some cases win over the civilian population. My Pentagon sources say the shadow government even has a system of “ombudsmen” to whom average Afghans can lodge complaints if they feel mistreated. If a Taliban leader is judged guilty of abuse, he is punished. The power and influence of the Talban has grown dramatically, just since Gen. Stanley McChrystal took over.
[TW: Over and over both in the Middle East and elsewhere (e.g. Vietnam) we wonder why the other side can bring more stability than we can. We always underestimate nationalism and we get twisted up trying to impose stability whilst reconciling back to our values. Furthermore, despite any public comments to the contrary our ostensible allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are on various levels funding and supporting the Taliban combined with drug related funding the Taliban are well supplied].
3. The Sobering McChrystal Assessment
President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates dispatched Gen. McChrystal to Afghanistan because, as an expert in counterinsurgency, they thought him best equipped to figure out how to turn things around. They asked McChrystal what needed to done, and what he needs to do it. And they got clear-eyed assessment of how bad things are how long it will take to turn the tide. Now Mssrs. Obama and Gates are asking the key question: what will this massive and potentially long-term investment achieve? If the goal is keeping al Qaeda on the defensive, and preventing a safe haven for terrorists, is building Afghanistan into a nation really the way to achieve that.
These are not easy questions. Gates was at the CIA, and helped funnel money to the Mujahedeen fighters to defeated the Soviet army. He’s well aware of how a well-funded insurgency can defeat a superpower, especially if it is seen as an occupying force. And despite the best efforts of the brightest military minds, increasingly, that’s how U.S. and NATO forces are seen.
No significant new troops will be coming from NATO countries who already feel hoodwinked into a bloody protracted war under the false pretense that they would be peacekeepers in war that was already won, and in the mopping-up stage. That was another eye-opening aspect of McChrystal unvarnished report. NATO, despite the valiant efforts of a few countries, such as Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands, has been an abject failure in adapting to counterinsurgency tactics.
The feeling at the Pentagon is “all in or all out.” Both courses have real, significant risks for the future security of the United States. But the president also knows other commanders-in-chief have blindly followed the advice of top military commanders with disastrous results.
I don’t envy the president on this one. I hope he makes the right call. (I wish I knew what that was.) But we may never know. Or if we do find out, it could well be too late."
http://www.thelineofdeparture.com/2009/09/27/hitting-the-pause-button-on-afghanistan/
From Jamie McIntyre at Line of Departure Blog:
"If you are wondering why the Obama administration is suddenly having serious second thoughts about poring more troops into Afghanistan, here’s the short version. A lot has changed in the past few months. Here are the big three:
1. The Flawed Afghan Election
Instead of the recent elections conferring legitimacy on the government of Hamid Karzai, the widespread fraud has undermined confidence in the central government, in a country by the way, that has never really had any functioning central government. So instead of supporting a popularly-elected regime, the U.S. is seen even more as the outside occupying force that has installed a puppet president. No matter the reality, the perception is very problematic.
[TW: the notion that we were going to impose democracy in Afghanistan was fanciful and worse destructive to our pursuit of bringing stability to the region. That Karzai committed fraud is not the big problem, the big problem is the lack of viable, coherent, strong central leadership in Afghanistan other than perhaps the Taliban]
2. The More Effective, Resurgent Taliban
The Taliban has been on the rebound for years, but in the just last few months it’s shown an amazing ability to plan and execute increasingly sophisticated attacks. It is well-funded, and has installed a shadow government in may provinces that has been able to intimidate or in some cases win over the civilian population. My Pentagon sources say the shadow government even has a system of “ombudsmen” to whom average Afghans can lodge complaints if they feel mistreated. If a Taliban leader is judged guilty of abuse, he is punished. The power and influence of the Talban has grown dramatically, just since Gen. Stanley McChrystal took over.
[TW: Over and over both in the Middle East and elsewhere (e.g. Vietnam) we wonder why the other side can bring more stability than we can. We always underestimate nationalism and we get twisted up trying to impose stability whilst reconciling back to our values. Furthermore, despite any public comments to the contrary our ostensible allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are on various levels funding and supporting the Taliban combined with drug related funding the Taliban are well supplied].
3. The Sobering McChrystal Assessment
President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates dispatched Gen. McChrystal to Afghanistan because, as an expert in counterinsurgency, they thought him best equipped to figure out how to turn things around. They asked McChrystal what needed to done, and what he needs to do it. And they got clear-eyed assessment of how bad things are how long it will take to turn the tide. Now Mssrs. Obama and Gates are asking the key question: what will this massive and potentially long-term investment achieve? If the goal is keeping al Qaeda on the defensive, and preventing a safe haven for terrorists, is building Afghanistan into a nation really the way to achieve that.
These are not easy questions. Gates was at the CIA, and helped funnel money to the Mujahedeen fighters to defeated the Soviet army. He’s well aware of how a well-funded insurgency can defeat a superpower, especially if it is seen as an occupying force. And despite the best efforts of the brightest military minds, increasingly, that’s how U.S. and NATO forces are seen.
No significant new troops will be coming from NATO countries who already feel hoodwinked into a bloody protracted war under the false pretense that they would be peacekeepers in war that was already won, and in the mopping-up stage. That was another eye-opening aspect of McChrystal unvarnished report. NATO, despite the valiant efforts of a few countries, such as Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands, has been an abject failure in adapting to counterinsurgency tactics.
The feeling at the Pentagon is “all in or all out.” Both courses have real, significant risks for the future security of the United States. But the president also knows other commanders-in-chief have blindly followed the advice of top military commanders with disastrous results.
I don’t envy the president on this one. I hope he makes the right call. (I wish I knew what that was.) But we may never know. Or if we do find out, it could well be too late."
http://www.thelineofdeparture.com/2009/09/27/hitting-the-pause-button-on-afghanistan/
Monday, September 21, 2009
Making Good Decisions Instead Of Pounding Our Chests
"Suitably handled by Obama, with the right timing...We are now right-sizing according to the threat, and moving faster instead of slower with proven technology instead of hoped-for."
--Uber security analyst Tom Barnett on the Obama BMD change
TW: The usual suspects amongst the conservatives came out shrieking last week when SecDef Gates and POTUS came out with a revised approach to BMD relative to Iran. Just remember many of these critics were the same fools who led us into the morass of Iraq whilst simultaneously taking their eye off the Afghan ball. These sames folks would also have us increase our defense spending even further towards the stratosphere. The knee jerk on the right is to call "pussy/wimp" any move by a Dem on national security. This not only is insulting it is just bad and destructive policy.
We need smarter policy making not louder, harder chest pounding.
From Jamie McIntyre at Line of Departure blog:
"...I’ve...have concluded this is NOT a “shelving” or “scuttling” of European missile defenses, as was widely characterized in reports this morning.
This is more of a recalibration of the plan, which appears designed to downplay, the future land-based system, and possibly fool the Russians into thinking the U.S. has pulled back.
Defense Secretary Gates is as crafty as they come, and the plan he outlined at the Pentagon today sounds like he wants to have his cake and east it, too.
Here’s how he described it:
“In the initial stage we will deploy Aegis ships equipped with SM- 3 interceptors [Standard Missiles], which provide the flexibility to move interceptors from one region to another if needed. The second phase, about 2015, will involve fielding upgraded land based SM-3s. Consultations have begun with allies, starting with Poland and the Czech Republic, about hosting a land-based version of the SM-3 and other components of the system. Basing some interceptors on land will provide additional coverage and save costs compared to a purely sea-based approach.”
Later Gates says, “I would also note that plans to cover most of Europe and add to the defense of the U.S. homeland will continue on about the same schedule as before.”
So while there is an effort to appease the Russians, it looks more like smoke and mirrors, and so I guess Moscow really won’t be all that reassured.
Because while the debate ranges in the U.S. about whether missiles defenses really work, the Russian are area convinced they do, and could potentially someday, neutralize the threat from their vast nuclear arsenal. So to answer my own question, this looks more like a calculation than a capitulation."
http://www.thelineofdeparture.com/2009/09/17/scuttling-the-shield-calculation-or-capitulation/
--Uber security analyst Tom Barnett on the Obama BMD change
TW: The usual suspects amongst the conservatives came out shrieking last week when SecDef Gates and POTUS came out with a revised approach to BMD relative to Iran. Just remember many of these critics were the same fools who led us into the morass of Iraq whilst simultaneously taking their eye off the Afghan ball. These sames folks would also have us increase our defense spending even further towards the stratosphere. The knee jerk on the right is to call "pussy/wimp" any move by a Dem on national security. This not only is insulting it is just bad and destructive policy.
We need smarter policy making not louder, harder chest pounding.
From Jamie McIntyre at Line of Departure blog:
"...I’ve...have concluded this is NOT a “shelving” or “scuttling” of European missile defenses, as was widely characterized in reports this morning.
This is more of a recalibration of the plan, which appears designed to downplay, the future land-based system, and possibly fool the Russians into thinking the U.S. has pulled back.
Defense Secretary Gates is as crafty as they come, and the plan he outlined at the Pentagon today sounds like he wants to have his cake and east it, too.
Here’s how he described it:
“In the initial stage we will deploy Aegis ships equipped with SM- 3 interceptors [Standard Missiles], which provide the flexibility to move interceptors from one region to another if needed. The second phase, about 2015, will involve fielding upgraded land based SM-3s. Consultations have begun with allies, starting with Poland and the Czech Republic, about hosting a land-based version of the SM-3 and other components of the system. Basing some interceptors on land will provide additional coverage and save costs compared to a purely sea-based approach.”
Later Gates says, “I would also note that plans to cover most of Europe and add to the defense of the U.S. homeland will continue on about the same schedule as before.”
So while there is an effort to appease the Russians, it looks more like smoke and mirrors, and so I guess Moscow really won’t be all that reassured.
Because while the debate ranges in the U.S. about whether missiles defenses really work, the Russian are area convinced they do, and could potentially someday, neutralize the threat from their vast nuclear arsenal. So to answer my own question, this looks more like a calculation than a capitulation."
http://www.thelineofdeparture.com/2009/09/17/scuttling-the-shield-calculation-or-capitulation/
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Why Cutting Any Spending Is So Damn Hard
TW: I am posting a couple of things on defense spending. There are two primary reasons why slowing the rate of growth in defense spending is insanely difficult. Reason #1 is: "any time someone proposes the slightest slowdown they are accused of leaving 'Merica open to the enemy" (tomorrow will post #2).
This has been going on since WWII (before that we meandered more or less blissfully amidst our own isolationism whilst the heathens and Europeans messed amongst themselves). Until about 1990 any hint of lessening the growth was met with ferocious accusations of leaving "Merica vulnerable to the Commies", since 9/11 the Commies have been replaced by Jihadists with the Chinese now emerging as the next great engine to expand defense spending.
Defense spending is a metaphor for all federal spending, everyone bitches about spending too much but few, far too few, are willing to step up and assume responsibility for spending less. Our own armed forces, POTUS and the most highly respected Defense Secretary in decades oppose adding more of these particular programs...and yet.
From Fred Kaplan at Slate:
"...Gates was presenting what he called a "reform budget," reflecting the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, emphasizing the needs of today over the dubious musings of what might be needed 20 years from now, and recognizing that money is far from limitless.
The legislators, especially some Republicans (and Joe Lieberman), were wringing their hands as if Gates' budget—more than a half-trillion dollars, not counting another $130 billion to sustain the two wars we're fighting—amounted to a pittance and as if even slight cuts in marginal weapons systems would plunge America into serious danger.
Take the secretary's exchange with Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama. Sessions was worked up over cuts in the missile defense program. Gates was cutting back the number of Alaska-based interceptors from 44 to 30; he was canceling the multiple-kill vehicle and the airborne laser. What, Sessions asked, is going on here?
Gates replied that he's supported missile defense ever since President Reagan started the program back in 1983 but that the Pentagon had to consider practicalities. The Alaska interceptors are good for one thing—shooting down missiles launched from North Korea—and 30 interceptors are more than enough to deal with that (still hypothetical) threat. The multiple-kill vehicle was designed during the Cold War to ward off a huge attack by the Soviet Union. The policy for the past eight years has been to counter small attacks by rogue nations or terrorists, so a weapon designed to shoot down lots of missiles at once isn't needed, even if it were to work (which, though he didn't say so, is extremely unlikely). The airborne laser—a 747 airplane fitted with a laser beam that would destroy enemy missiles as they blasted out of their silos, before they entered outer space—has a basic conceptual problem. First, we would have to buy 28 planes just to keep enough of them in the air at one time. Second, to get within range of the enemy missile bases, they'd have to loiter inside the airspace of, say, Iran and North Korea—and that just isn't going to happen.
Finally, Gates was recommending a mere 10 percent cut in the missile-defense program, from $10 billion to $9 billion. This was hardly a slash job.
...The salient fact is that Gates had scrutinized the program and taken out elements that were plainly unnecessary or absurd. Sessions was looking at the program as an abstraction and its budget-figure as a symbolic show of strength. If this were anything other than the defense budget, Sessions would be derided as a paragon of senseless waste.
As Gates put it, a lot of the cuts he'd imposed were "kind of no-brainers … poster children for an acquisition program gone wrong..."
http://www.slate.com/id/2218407/pagenum/all/#p2
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Pakistan the Challenge For Which No Answer Exists
From WaPo Interview with David Kilcullen*:
"Q: What is the real central front in the war on terror?
Ans: Pakistan. Hands down. No doubt.
Q: Why?
Ans: Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn't control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don't follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today."
TW: Many allude to the instability and risk associated with Pakistan. As Kilcullen mentions, it is huge, nuclear-armed, and governed loosely. It is also riven by tribalism and generally consider India its primary enemy far more so than any other potential threat. So many fear a blow up with really interesting consequences. I really do not have any suggestions on this one. The only good news is that I do not think any countries would benefit from a blow-up so they are presumably not stirring the pot as is often the case (i.e. note India did not retaliate for Mumbai bombing, Iran hardly wants a Taliban Sunni group at the head of 175MM neighbors etc.).
*Kilcullen is an Aussie counter-insurgency expert who was heavily engaged in developing the US counter-insurgency effort known as the "surge".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR2009031903038_pf.html
"Q: What is the real central front in the war on terror?
Ans: Pakistan. Hands down. No doubt.
Q: Why?
Ans: Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn't control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don't follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today."
TW: Many allude to the instability and risk associated with Pakistan. As Kilcullen mentions, it is huge, nuclear-armed, and governed loosely. It is also riven by tribalism and generally consider India its primary enemy far more so than any other potential threat. So many fear a blow up with really interesting consequences. I really do not have any suggestions on this one. The only good news is that I do not think any countries would benefit from a blow-up so they are presumably not stirring the pot as is often the case (i.e. note India did not retaliate for Mumbai bombing, Iran hardly wants a Taliban Sunni group at the head of 175MM neighbors etc.).
*Kilcullen is an Aussie counter-insurgency expert who was heavily engaged in developing the US counter-insurgency effort known as the "surge".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR2009031903038_pf.html
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Reading List
1) For those still eager to learn more about macro-economics and the stimulus, Dave Leonhardt did a nice piece on why the stimulus pacakge looks the way it does, why not bigger? why not smaller? etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/business/04leonhardt.html?_r=3&ref=business
2) Anthony Zinni is a former Marine general for whom I have a great deal of respect. He is a moderate with extensive knowledge of the Middle East. Obama has unfortunately really pissed him off by reneging allegedly on an offer for him to become Ambassador to Iraq...oops.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/02/more_on_anthony_zinni.cfm
3) Big fan of Chuck Todd from NBC, he gives his take on the first big political battle for Obama, the stimulus bill, lessons learned etc.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29062698/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/business/04leonhardt.html?_r=3&ref=business
2) Anthony Zinni is a former Marine general for whom I have a great deal of respect. He is a moderate with extensive knowledge of the Middle East. Obama has unfortunately really pissed him off by reneging allegedly on an offer for him to become Ambassador to Iraq...oops.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/02/more_on_anthony_zinni.cfm
3) Big fan of Chuck Todd from NBC, he gives his take on the first big political battle for Obama, the stimulus bill, lessons learned etc.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29062698/
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Good News In Our Military Leadership
TW: Knowing that guys like McMasters are thought leaders within the army is comforting. McMasters wrote a great book, "Dereliction of Duty", about Vietnam era military leaders deferring to civilian leadership without asking the right questions about our involvement there. Col. McMasters is a close colleague of Gen. Petreaus, if we are to extract ourselves from Iraq and prosecute the war in Afghanistan effectively people like McMasters will lead the way.
From Tom Rick's blog at Foreign Policy:
"...Reviewing aspects of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, McMaster demolishes the view that the U.S. military had a great plan for invading Iraq but that bad old L. Paul Bremer III and other civilians subsequently blew it. In particular, McMaster spanks former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his partner in the invasion planning, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks.
In Iraq, as in Vietnam, observes McMaster, "the way the United States went to war influenced everything that followed. A fixation on American technological superiority and an associated neglect of the human, psychological and political dimensions of war doomed one effort and very nearly the other."
The original war plan assumed that the United States could start pulling out shortly after the invasion. "Five years later, it is clear that the initial planning for the war misunderstood the nature of the conflict, underestimated the enemy, and underappreciated the difficulty of the mission."
McMaster hits it out of the park in discussing how inadequate troop levels undercut the war effort. Despite its overly Latinate style, this is one of the most insightful comments I have ever seen on Rumsfeld's botched oversight of the Iraq war from 2003 to the end of 2006:
Decisions against deploying coalition forces in numbers sufficient to secure populations left many commanders with no other option than to adopt a raiding approach to counterinsurgency operations -- an approach that tended to reinforce the perception of coalition forces as aggressors and conflated tactical successes with actual measures of strategic effectiveness. Inadequate troop strength and the approach it impelled created opportunities for the enemy.
The article is especially interesting because word around the Pentagon is that McMaster is running a comprehensive review of U.S. strategy in Middle East for Petraeus, who recently took over as chief of Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for that troubled part of the world. McMaster played a similar role when Petraeus took command in Iraq in early 2007 and presided over a radically new approach to the war. In addition, he commanded the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment when it conducted the first successful large-scale counterinsurgency operation in the Iraq war, in 2005-2006..."
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/node/15116
From Tom Rick's blog at Foreign Policy:
"...Reviewing aspects of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, McMaster demolishes the view that the U.S. military had a great plan for invading Iraq but that bad old L. Paul Bremer III and other civilians subsequently blew it. In particular, McMaster spanks former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his partner in the invasion planning, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks.
In Iraq, as in Vietnam, observes McMaster, "the way the United States went to war influenced everything that followed. A fixation on American technological superiority and an associated neglect of the human, psychological and political dimensions of war doomed one effort and very nearly the other."
The original war plan assumed that the United States could start pulling out shortly after the invasion. "Five years later, it is clear that the initial planning for the war misunderstood the nature of the conflict, underestimated the enemy, and underappreciated the difficulty of the mission."
McMaster hits it out of the park in discussing how inadequate troop levels undercut the war effort. Despite its overly Latinate style, this is one of the most insightful comments I have ever seen on Rumsfeld's botched oversight of the Iraq war from 2003 to the end of 2006:
Decisions against deploying coalition forces in numbers sufficient to secure populations left many commanders with no other option than to adopt a raiding approach to counterinsurgency operations -- an approach that tended to reinforce the perception of coalition forces as aggressors and conflated tactical successes with actual measures of strategic effectiveness. Inadequate troop strength and the approach it impelled created opportunities for the enemy.
The article is especially interesting because word around the Pentagon is that McMaster is running a comprehensive review of U.S. strategy in Middle East for Petraeus, who recently took over as chief of Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for that troubled part of the world. McMaster played a similar role when Petraeus took command in Iraq in early 2007 and presided over a radically new approach to the war. In addition, he commanded the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment when it conducted the first successful large-scale counterinsurgency operation in the Iraq war, in 2005-2006..."
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/node/15116
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Some Sound Advice Re Afghanistan
TW: Andrew Bacevich is a very good national security analyst. If you want to read some insightful stuff on the Middle East, call up some of his articles. This piece addresses Afghanistan. Afghanistan is another quagmire in the making. It has received far less publicity than Iraq, one because it has been a lower intensity conflict with relatively poor media coverage (too expensive and dangerous which is not the media's fault, it just is). And most importantly unlike Iraq ,there was and is much stronger support for our being there hence far greater patience and willingness to absorb casualties and cost.
Yet it remains an unresolved, interminable and dangerous conflict. Unlike Iraq there is a consensus that we need to win even at a high cost but like Iraq just what winning means remains nebulous. Most discussion (inc. from the POTUS elect) has centered around deploying more troops, Bacevich argues that deploying more troops will do little solve the problems but merely exacerbate them. He does not propose withdrawal but new tactics focused less on democratization and more on dealing with the actual power players there, e.g. the warlords. I agree.
The neo-cons believe spreading American style democracy will solve all the world's ills, the bleeding heart left just wants everyone to get along and stop killing themselves, they are both wrong. Cold hearted power politics underpinned by as many rule sets as we can apply should drive our policy. It is not pure and pristine but it may be feasible.
From Bacevich and Newsweek:
"In Afghanistan today, the United States and its allies are using the wrong means to pursue the wrong mission. Sending more troops to the region, as incoming president Barack Obama and others have suggested we should, will only turn Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Obligation. Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste...
One of history's enduring lessons is that Afghans don't appreciate it when outsiders tell them how to govern their affairs—just ask the British or the Soviets...But we're now discovering that the challenges of pacifying Afghanistan dwarf those posed by Iraq. Afghanistan is a much bigger country—nearly the size of Texas—and has a larger population that's just as fractious. Moreover, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan possesses almost none of the prerequisites of modernity; its literacy rate, for example, is 28 percent, barely a third of Iraq's. In terms of effectiveness and legitimacy, the government in Kabul lags well behind Baghdad—not exactly a lofty standard. Apart from opium (last year's crop totaled about 8,000 metric tons), Afghans produce almost nothing the world wants...
All this means that we need to change course. The war in Afghanistan (like the Iraq War) won't be won militarily. It can be settled—if imperfectly—only through politics. And America's real political objective in Afghanistan is actually quite modest: to ensure that terrorist groups like Al Qaeda can't use the country as a safe haven for launching attacks against the West. Accomplishing that won't require creating a modern, cohesive nation-state...
..real influence in Afghanistan has traditionally rested with tribal leaders and warlords. Offered the right incentives, warlords can accomplish U.S. objectives more effectively and cheaply than Western combat battalions. The basis of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan should therefore become decentralization and outsourcing, offering cash and other emoluments to local leaders who will collaborate with us in keeping terrorists out of their territory...
http://www.newsweek.com/id/171254
Yet it remains an unresolved, interminable and dangerous conflict. Unlike Iraq there is a consensus that we need to win even at a high cost but like Iraq just what winning means remains nebulous. Most discussion (inc. from the POTUS elect) has centered around deploying more troops, Bacevich argues that deploying more troops will do little solve the problems but merely exacerbate them. He does not propose withdrawal but new tactics focused less on democratization and more on dealing with the actual power players there, e.g. the warlords. I agree.
The neo-cons believe spreading American style democracy will solve all the world's ills, the bleeding heart left just wants everyone to get along and stop killing themselves, they are both wrong. Cold hearted power politics underpinned by as many rule sets as we can apply should drive our policy. It is not pure and pristine but it may be feasible.
From Bacevich and Newsweek:
"In Afghanistan today, the United States and its allies are using the wrong means to pursue the wrong mission. Sending more troops to the region, as incoming president Barack Obama and others have suggested we should, will only turn Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Obligation. Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste...
One of history's enduring lessons is that Afghans don't appreciate it when outsiders tell them how to govern their affairs—just ask the British or the Soviets...But we're now discovering that the challenges of pacifying Afghanistan dwarf those posed by Iraq. Afghanistan is a much bigger country—nearly the size of Texas—and has a larger population that's just as fractious. Moreover, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan possesses almost none of the prerequisites of modernity; its literacy rate, for example, is 28 percent, barely a third of Iraq's. In terms of effectiveness and legitimacy, the government in Kabul lags well behind Baghdad—not exactly a lofty standard. Apart from opium (last year's crop totaled about 8,000 metric tons), Afghans produce almost nothing the world wants...
All this means that we need to change course. The war in Afghanistan (like the Iraq War) won't be won militarily. It can be settled—if imperfectly—only through politics. And America's real political objective in Afghanistan is actually quite modest: to ensure that terrorist groups like Al Qaeda can't use the country as a safe haven for launching attacks against the West. Accomplishing that won't require creating a modern, cohesive nation-state...
..real influence in Afghanistan has traditionally rested with tribal leaders and warlords. Offered the right incentives, warlords can accomplish U.S. objectives more effectively and cheaply than Western combat battalions. The basis of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan should therefore become decentralization and outsourcing, offering cash and other emoluments to local leaders who will collaborate with us in keeping terrorists out of their territory...
http://www.newsweek.com/id/171254
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Listen To This Guy On Afghanistan
TW: Kilcullen was an early voice for the type of politically oriented initiatives that have likely provided the most value in reducing the temperature of conflict in Iraq. When it became clear Petreaus was using guys like Kilcullen in Iraq I started having some hope that mess might improve. To be clear it is still a mess, a patently unnecessary mess and a mess into which the US should have never gotten involved. Nevertheless it is better now than it was and Kilcullen is one of the reasons why. If you have time read the 2006 New Yorker article focused on Kilcullen.
He now turns his attention to Afghanistan. Some of his key points include: not trying to replicate an Iraqi type surge in Afghanistan (different place and people) and not just dumping more combat troops into the fray without changing the strategies (e.g. banging your head harder against the wall will not knock the wall over).
From the New Yorker interview with Kilcullen:
"...It’s bad: violence is way up, Taliban influence has spread at the local level, and popular confidence in the government and the international community is waning fast. It’s still winnable, but only just, and to turn this thing around will take an extremely major effort starting with local-level governance, political strategy, giving the Afghan people a well-founded feeling of security, and dealing with the active sanctuary in Pakistan. A normal U.S. government transition takes six to nine months, by the time new political appointees are confirmed, briefed, and in position. But nine months out from now will be the height of the Afghan fighting season, and less than a month out from critical Presidential elections in Afghanistan. If we do this the “normal” way, it will be too late for the Obama Administration to grip it up.
The classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall wrote, in 1965, that a government which is losing to an insurgency isn’t being out-fought, it’s being out-governed. In our case, we are being both out-fought and out-governed for four basic reasons:
1) We have failed to secure the Afghan people
2) We have failed to deal with the Pakistani sanctuary
3) The Afghan government has not delivered legitimate, good governance to Afghans at the local level
4) Neither we nor the Afghans are organized, staffed, or resourced to do these three things
...There has been an emphasis on fighting the Taliban, which has led us into operations (both air and ground-based) that do a lot of damage but do not make people feel safer
...I doubt that an Anbar-style “awakening” is likely in Afghanistan."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2008/11/kilcullen-on-af.html
The 2006 story:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/18/061218fa_fact2
He now turns his attention to Afghanistan. Some of his key points include: not trying to replicate an Iraqi type surge in Afghanistan (different place and people) and not just dumping more combat troops into the fray without changing the strategies (e.g. banging your head harder against the wall will not knock the wall over).
From the New Yorker interview with Kilcullen:
"...It’s bad: violence is way up, Taliban influence has spread at the local level, and popular confidence in the government and the international community is waning fast. It’s still winnable, but only just, and to turn this thing around will take an extremely major effort starting with local-level governance, political strategy, giving the Afghan people a well-founded feeling of security, and dealing with the active sanctuary in Pakistan. A normal U.S. government transition takes six to nine months, by the time new political appointees are confirmed, briefed, and in position. But nine months out from now will be the height of the Afghan fighting season, and less than a month out from critical Presidential elections in Afghanistan. If we do this the “normal” way, it will be too late for the Obama Administration to grip it up.
The classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall wrote, in 1965, that a government which is losing to an insurgency isn’t being out-fought, it’s being out-governed. In our case, we are being both out-fought and out-governed for four basic reasons:
1) We have failed to secure the Afghan people
2) We have failed to deal with the Pakistani sanctuary
3) The Afghan government has not delivered legitimate, good governance to Afghans at the local level
4) Neither we nor the Afghans are organized, staffed, or resourced to do these three things
...There has been an emphasis on fighting the Taliban, which has led us into operations (both air and ground-based) that do a lot of damage but do not make people feel safer
...I doubt that an Anbar-style “awakening” is likely in Afghanistan."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2008/11/kilcullen-on-af.html
The 2006 story:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/18/061218fa_fact2
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