Pentagon Assertions of "Progress" In Afghanistan Are a Bad Joke

By Derrick Crowe

The Pentagon wants you to ignore some inconvenient facts about the failure of the escalation strategy in Afghanistan.

The latest Petraeus/Gates media tour is under way in preparation for the general's testimony to Congress next week, and they're trotting out the same, tired spin they've been using since McChrystal was replaced in disgrace last year. Despite the most violent year of the war so far, despite the highest civilian and military toll of the war so far, and despite the continued growth of the insurgency, they want you to believe that we're "making progress." While they spend this week fudging and shading and spinning, we'll waste another $2 billion on this brutal, futile war, and we won't be any closer to "victory" than we are today.

Let me make a couple of predictions about Petraeus' testimony based on experience. He will attempt to narrow the conversation to a few showcase districts in Afghanistan, use a lot of aspirational language ("What we're attempting to do," instead of, "What we've done") and assure the hand-wringers among the congressional hawks that he'll be happy to suggest to the president that they stay longer in Afghanistan if that's what he thinks is best. Most importantly, he will try to keep the conversation as far away from a high-level strategic assessment based on his own counterinsurgency doctrine as possible, because if Congress bothers to check his assertions of "progress" against what he wrote in the counterinsurgency manual, he's in for a world of hurt.

Here's what Petraeus' own U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual says about the main goal of a COIN campaign:

"I-113. The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government."

Not by any stretch of the imagination is the counterinsurgency campaign under Petraeus' direction serving what his own field manual says is the primary goal of his campaign. If we were looking for a legitimate government in Afghanistan, it's crystal clear that we backed the wrong horse. Hamid Karzai and his family are neck-deep in any number of corruption scandals, the most glaring of which involves the largest private bank in Afghanistan and a sweeping control fraud scheme that has already resulted in unrest across the country. (That scandal, by the way, is likely to result in a U.S.-taxpayer-funded bank bailout for Kabulbank, according to white-collar crime expert Bill Black.) The Karzai administration is an embarrassment of illegitimacy and cronyism, and the local tentacles of the Kabul cartel are as likely to inspire people to join the insurgency as they are to win over popular support.

Even if the Karzai regime where a glimmering example of the rule of law, the military campaign under Petraeus would be utterly failing to achieve what counterinsurgency doctrine holds up as the primary way in which a legitimate government wins over support from the people: securing the population. From the COIN manual:

"5-68. Progress in building support for the HN ["host nation"] government requires protecting the local populace. People who do not believe they are secure from insurgent intimidation, coercion, and reprisals will not risk overtly supporting COIN efforts."

The United Nations reports that 2010 was the deadliest year of the war for civilians of the decade-long war, and targeted killings of Kabul government officials are at an all-time high. Petraeus often seeks to deflect this point by citing insurgent responsibility for the vast majority of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, but that is largely beside the point. As his own field manual makes clear, reducing the number of civilians killed by your forces is insufficient according to COIN doctrine. If you can't protect the population (or the officials within the host nation government!) from insurgent violence and intimidation, you can't win a counterinsurgency.

Petraeus and Gates like to talk around this blatant break in his own strategic doctrine by narrowing the conversation to what they call "security bubbles." In his recent remarks following his trip to Afghanistan, Gates spoke of "linking zones of security in Helmand to Kandahar." But those two provinces have seen huge spikes in violence over the course of the past year, with attacks initiated by insurgents up 124 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Today's New York Times explains one of the main reasons for these jumps in violence as U.S. troops arrive in new areas:

"[G]enerals have designated scores of rural areas 'key terrain districts.' The soldiers are creating, at cost of money and blood, pockets of security.

"But when Americans arrive in a new area, attacks and improvised bombs typically follow -- making roads and trails more dangerous for the civilians whom, under current Pentagon counterinsurgency doctrine, the soldiers have arrived to protect."

The military escalations in Afghanistan have failed their key purpose under counterinsurgency doctrine, which is to secure Afghans from insurgent violence and intimidation.

While the U.S. government is failing to achieve its military objectives in Afghanistan, it's also failing to make good on the other components of counterinsurgency strategy, especially the civilian/political component. Here's what The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual says on p. xxix, emphasis mine:

"Nonmilitary Capacity Is the Exit Strategy

"The [counterinsurgency] manual highlights military dependence not simply upon civilian political direction at all levels of operation, but also upon civilian capabilities in the field. ...[T]he primacy of the political requires significant and ongoing civilian involvement at virtually every level of operations."

To meet this prerequisite for a successful counterinsurgency strategy, the administration promised a "civilian surge" to accompany the military escalation. But the March 8, 2011 edition of The Washington Post shows that the civilian surge has so far been a flop that's alienating the local population:

"Efforts to improve local government in critical Afghan districts have fallen far behind schedule...according to U.S. and Afghan officials familiar with the program.

"It is now expected to take four more years to assess the needs of more than 80 'key terrain' districts where the bulk of the population lives, based on figures from Afghan officials who said that escalating violence has made it difficult to recruit civil servants to work in the field.

...

"...Of the 1,100 U.S. civilian officials in Afghanistan, two-thirds are stationed in Kabul, according to the State Department.

"'At best, our Kabul-based experts simply reinforce the sense of big government coming from Kabul that ultimately alienates populations and leaders in the provinces,' a former U.S. official said."

As with the military side of the equation, the civilian side of the strategy is so badly broken that it's actually pushing us further away from the administration's stated goals in Afghanistan.

The costs of this pile of failure are huge. It costs us $1 million per troop, per year to maintain our occupation of Afghanistan. That's $2 billion every week. Politicians at the federal level are contemplating ugly cuts to social safety nets, while politicians at the state level are already shredding programs that protect people suffering in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In this context, the admonitions from the White House and the Pentagon to be patient while this misbegotten strategy limps along the progress-road-to-nowhere seem perverse. The American people have been patient for roughly a decade now, but that patience has run out.

Petraeus and Gates want to you to ignore the ugly truths of the Afghanistan War: it's not making us safer, and it's not worth the costs. The escalation strategy isn't working. It's not going to work. Enough is enough. End it now.

If you're fed up with this war that's not making us safer and that's not worth the costs, join a local Rethink the Afghanistan War Meetup and follow Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook and Twitter.

Hope

By Derrick Crowe

This evening, I spent a couple of hours at Central Market in downtown Austin, Texas, with 7 other people in one of the first Meetups to Rethink the Afghanistan War. I've been involved in a serious way in the struggle to end the war for a little more than two years. This was the most positive, hopeful experience of my time in this movement.

It's cliche these days to talk about the isolation that can occur when one participates in a movement largely based online. It's cliche for a reason: even in the age of social media, movement participation through online means can lead to slactivism and lonely vigils in front of computer screens, such that even while blogging, tweeting and Gchatting, one can feel thoroughly, coldly alone. Though I am a firm believer in "going online to go offline," tonight was the first time in years that I'd gathered in a real place with real people wearing their real bodies to talk about the issue I'm most passionate about (except, of course, in-person meetings at work, but that's a slightly different animal).

This isn't to say that the work we do online at places like the Rethink Afghanistan Facebook page isn't powerful and important. It's just that when you get together with your fellow travelers face-to-face, that's when the magic happens.

As the organizer of the local Meetup, I had very simple objectives for the first meeting: I wanted to get to know the attendees and find out what would bring them back to the next meeting, and I wanted to know what they wanted from the group. For the latter, there was a unanimous answer: action. We didn't want to sit around and blow off steam about what was wrong with U.S. policy in Afghanistan. We were all already converted. We wanted a group that would dive in and agitate for an end to the war through effective local events and actions. Austin is a music town, so some of our ideas tied local music and local speakers on the war. Austin is also something of a movie town, so we also raised the idea of a screening of the Rethink Afghanistan documentary at the Alamo Drafthouse. The group was forward-leaning, down-to-earth, and seemed to share a positive attitude about the work ahead.

Sitting there with a handful of people willing to give up their Friday night for this issue, I got the sense we were tapping into a much larger phenomenon taking place all across the country. Polls show that opposition to the war has sharply increased, and the "Inauguration Hangover" is wearing off. Whereas once Americans opposed the war, yet gave President Obama high marks for his handling of it, these days people are unreservedly unwilling to give "Our President" a free pass on a brutal, costly policy, post-9/11 rhetoric notwithstanding. It's a phenomenon now on display in Congress, as described in today's L.A. Times:

The moment has been long in coming, but it may finally have arrived.

For the last year and a half, on issues including healthcare, financial regulation and climate change, Democrats in Congress have bent for President Obama. Liberals swallowed hard to accept compromises that fell short of their long-sought goals, and moderates cast tough votes that now threaten their reelection prospects as voters revolt against government overreach.

Then, last week, the president asked them to bend yet again � this time to approve more money for his troop buildup in an Afghanistan war that many Democrats oppose.

And once again, lawmakers went to work. On the eve of the vote last week, Democratic leaders compiled a complicated $82-billion package of war funding, disaster aid and domestic spending that achieved the seemingly impossible � meeting the president's request while accommodating the needs of its politically diverse members.

Obama responded with a one-word message that sent shudders through his party on the Hill: veto.

In that exchange, the tension between the White House and the president's Democratic allies spilled over.

The President isn't up for election this year, but Members of Congress and many Senators are, and they are heading into a stiff wind carrying the stench of dead civilians and soldiers from the longest war in U.S. history. The honeymoon is over, and what was once a clever anti-Republican rhetorical strategy--Iraq bad! Afghanistan good!--has been revealed as morally and strategically bankrupt nonsense. People in Congress and people across the country get it, and they're finished with their post-2008 break, and they're not content to let made-for-swagger campaign rhetoric kill people any longer.

Tonight, with Rattletree Marimba playing steel drums in the background (yes, in Austin, we have live--and good!--music at the grocery store cafe), I made some new friends with whom I plan to share important work. I also had my hope renewed that, struggling together in small groups all across the country, we can end this war and set our country onto the paths of peace.

I cannot recommend Rethink the Afghanistan War Meetups strongly enough. Many local groups' first meetings will take place this Saturday and Sunday. I hope you'll join us.

Love the Afghanistan War in Public at Your Peril

By Derrick Crowe

One of the gems buried in Michael Hastings' now ubiquitous Rolling Stone article is a senior adviser to General McChrystal thanking his lucky stars for public ignorance of the state of the war:

Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says.

Well, mission accomplished, gentlemen. Your little frat party managed to get everyone's attention and, combined with a never-ending stream of gruesome milestones, it caused the bottom to drop out of public support for the Afghanistan War. According to the newest polling from Newsweek:

• Only 37 percent of those surveyed approve of the way President Obama is handling the war. 53 percent disapprove. That's a major reversal from prior results that showed support/opposition solidly in the president's favor by a 55/27 margin.


• Only 26 percent of those surveyed believe we're winning in Afghanistan. 46 percent believe we're losing.


• This crystallizing opposition isn't due to disagreement with the way President Obama handled the McChrystal/Rolling Stone flap, either. Most Americans agreed with his decision to dismiss the general by a 50/35 margin.

McChrystal's statements in the Rolling Stone piece probably weren't enough to cause his ouster on their own, but as the latest in a series of insults and missteps, they were the straw that broke the camel's back. Similarly, the McChrystal flap probably wasn't enough to turn Americans against the war, but as a tawdry new development at the end of a string of gruesome events transpiring on the periphery of the national consciousness, the episode was enough to cause the electorate to push their chair back from the kitchen table and stomp over to see just what the hell you kids are doing in here that's making all that racket?!

Mommy and Daddy obviously didn't like what they saw:

• The thousandth U.S. death of the war;


• The trillionth dollar spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars;


• That the war had surpassed Vietnam as the longest war in U.S. history, by some counts;


• That the pivotal campaigns in the counterinsurgency strategy were ridiculously bogged down; and


• That June 2010 had already become the deadliest month of the war.

Pentagon officials are now running around trying on some of their most Orwellian rhetoric to date (No! Really! We're not bogged down!) trying to sooth Congress and the extraordinarily cranky electorate, but it's too late. The tanks are rolling into Baghdad, despite Bob's insistence to the contrary.

For their part, the hawks in Congress are dangerously misreading the tea leaves. Some are calling for scrapping the July 2011 withdrawal date and for staying in Afghanistan indefinitely. Others are insisting that protections for civilians in the war zone should be loosened. But these vicious chest-thumpers are missing the point: Americans don't want more and more brutal war. We want our troops home, yesterday.

Prior polling had shown a strange dichotomy: Americans didn't support the Afghanistan War, but they approved of President Obama's handling of the war. The White House could wave away dismal polling numbers for support/opposition to the war by pointing to the high approval numbers for Obama's handling of the war, and Congress could hide behind "supporting the president." No more. Americans are fed up with this brutal, costly war.

Memo to politicians: Love the Afghanistan War in public at your peril.

Had enough? Join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook as we fight back against this war.

Before the COINdinistas Start Spinning the UN Report...

By Derrick Crowe

You're going to hear a lot of crowing about the
reduction in NATO-caused civilian casualties in Afghanistan during the
last few months compared to the same time last year. (Read the full
report here
in PDF format.) This reduction took place in the context of a
massive spike in overall violence and a continually degrading security
environment in that country. Before the supporters of the
president's brutal, costly counterinsurgency strategy (referred to
without affection as "COINdinistas") get started this week, I want to
reiterate a
point I made a couple of months ago when the last round of silly,
disingenuous pro-counterinsurgency celebrations took place:

Selective Interpretation

COIN doctrine as interpreted by [COINdinistas] with the aid of the
stats [they] used asserts something like this: McChrystal and friends
reduce by 28 percent the number of civilians they kill, while the
Taliban increase the number they kill. The local population's animosity
builds toward the Taliban, triggering a shift in political support to
the U.S. and allies, a withdrawal of support for the Taliban and an
influx of intelligence to the counter-insurgents.

This interpretation, however, is a very academic exercise with major
blind spots as to the actual dynamic in Afghanistan and [and it's a
gross distortion of] the actual COIN doctrine described in the U.S.
Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual:

"Progress in building support for the [host nation]
government requires protecting the local populace. People who do now
believe they are secure from insurgent intimidation, coercion, and
reprisals will not risk overtly supporting COIN efforts. The populace
decides when it feels secure enough to support COIN efforts. (p. 179)"

"During any period of instability, people's primary interest is
physical security for themselves and their families. When [host nation]
forces fail to provide security or threaten the security of civilians,
the population is likely to seek security guarantees from insurgents,
militias, or other armed groups. This situation can feed support for an
insurgency. (p 98)"

"Counterinsurgents should not expect people to willingly provide
information if insurgents have the ability to violently intimidate
sources. (p. 120)"

Here's
Stanley McChrystal explicitly stating that COIN doctrine requires you
to protect the population from the insurgents.

Note that all of these statements deal with the importance not just
of the protection of civilians from killings by counterinsurgents, but the
protection of the people in general. Counterinsurgency doctrine
says that people aren't going to switch to your side if they think
they'll get killed for it, no matter how low you drop the rate at which
you cause civilian deaths. In other words, a drop in casualties caused
by U.S. and allied groups is not sufficient for the hoped-for dynamic
to take hold, according to COIN doctrine. It must be paired with an
increase in security from insurgent violence as well.

...

So, even if ... McChrystal and Co. were killing fewer civilians,
they still hadn't managed to increase security for civilians in
Afghanistan as measured by the total civilian deaths caused by the
parties to the conflict. ...Even if McChrystal proved he could drive
down civilian casualties when he puts his mind to it, he's also managed
to prove over the last year that he can't protect the population.

People who claim to actually believe in the efficacy of and the
necessity for actual counterinsurgency in Afghanistan need to start
screaming, right now, about what's going on in Afghanistan under General
McChrystal because their credibility is now unambiguously on the line.
...The problem is, though, that an honest reading of counterinsurgency
doctrine should have indicated that the system was already blinking red
in 2009, but for whatever reason people continued to sing the praises of
Saint Stanley McChrystal and took up gross distortions of COIN doctrine
to do so. Numerous prerequisites for success as articulated by COIN
doctrine remained absent and/or further degraded over 2009, including
host nation government legitimacy and security for the local population,
yet many writers focused on one particular statistic
(casualties caused by pro-government forces) because it let them tell
the story they wanted to tell.

If you see a person crowing about how the new U.N. reports shows
the "strategy is working" and we're on our way to victory, know that
you're looking at a disingenuous snake-oil salesman who's hoping you
can't read.

Secretary Gates, Backpedaling

By Derrick Crowe

Defense Secretary Gates wants to extricate himself and the president from the impending P.R. disaster shaping up around the flailing Kandahar operation set for this Summer Fall.

"I think it's important to remember that Kandahar is not Afghanistan," Gates said in comments that appeared to play down a U.S.-led operation for control of the area, known as the birthplace of the Taliban.

...

"Kandahar and Helmand are important but they are not the only provinces in Afghanistan that matter in terms of the outcome of this struggle," he said.

From the Pentagon's most recent Afghanistan report to Congress, here's a chart showing how optional Kandahar and Helmand are for the success of the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy being pursued by U.S. and allied forces.

From p. 126 of the Report on Progress Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan (April 2010), emphasis mine:

8.1: ISAF Strategy

Under the ISAF concept of operations, the main effort is to conduct decisive clearing operations concentrated on the most threatened population in the southern part of the country to establish population security and implement measures that diminish insurgent influence over the people. As described in Figure 23 - ISAF Concept of Operations, the main effort in RC-South, by province, is in Helmand and Kandahar, where efforts are focused on clearing districts most threatened by insurgents.

No reporter should let Secretary Gates, General McChrystal, or President Obama off the hook in the coming months regarding the make-or-break nature of the Kandahar operation for their (poorly) chosen COIN strategy in Afghanistan. As described in the report to Congress, Kandahar/Helmand is the main effort, and everything else is either a "shaping," "supporting," or "economy of force (read: leftovers)" operation. Kandahar/Helmand is the COIN strategy. If ISAF fails there, it fails, period.

Members of Congress considering funding the ongoing Kandahar/Helmand/escalation strategy should read these comments from Secretary Gates with alarm. He's hedging and trying to set expectations because he knows the COIN effort is in serious, "bleeding ulcer" trouble. Congress should save us all a whole lot of trouble and vote against the $33 billion war spending supplemental under consideration. As Daniel Ellsberg says in the most recent Rethink Afghanistan video, this war can be infinitely prolonged, but "winning" through military force is a pipe dream that's killing people.

UPDATE: ISAF and the Pentagon are now comically denying that they ever planned an "offensive" in Kandahar, emphasis mine:

The commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, insisted that there never was a planned offensive. �The media have chosen to use the term offensive,� he said. Instead, he said, �we have certainly talked about a military uplift, but there has been no military use of the term offensive.�

Sure, the media chose the word "offensive." Specifically, the American Forces Press Service (in a story cross posted on the Pentagon website and the ISAF website!), quoting one Maj. Gen. Nick Carter:

The general stressed that the planning and execution of an offensive in Kandahar are Afghan-led initiatives directed by President Hamid Karzai. The provincial governor is reaching out to his city and district mayors to engage the population and build relationships with the population, he said.

Carter said he expects the offensive to begin in the "next month or two," and that by Ramadan, which begins in August, security improvements will begin to be apparent. It will take some three months before a strong, credible government is formed in Marja, he said, leading him to believe that it could take just as long, if not longer, to sway public support and perception in Kandahar.

For more use of the word "offensive" in posts on ISAF's website, see here and here.

The box is broken

By Dave Anderson:

Marjah was supposed to be the template for the 2010-2011 US counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.  It would be a trial run for General McCrystal to use his surge forces to clear Pashtun Taliban heartland areas, force the insurgents to either flee if they were smart or fight stand-up battles where US heavy firepower could grind the opponents into the ground, and then install a government in a box.  The government in a box is key to the clear-hold-build process.  It would be responsible for the long-term holding and building up local governments who were legitimate to the immediate population and loyal to the Karzai government.  

So what is supposed to be in the box?  It is supposed to contain the System Administrators of the kinder, gentler, and more effective COIN.  The Afghan government, with US/NATO support, was supposed to fill that box with highly competent civilian administrators,transparent redevelopment and police that were trustworthy, effective, culturally competent and non-corrupt.  

Whoops, the box is broken.  We first started to see clues that the box was broken when the newly appointed district leader was an Afghan expat who spent fifteen years in Germany running a laundromat and stabbing his step-son there before being chosen as the new district chief. 

That could be tolerable if the rest of the components of the box were working well.  Figurehead leaders sometimes are acceptable if the rest of the government works to prove its legitimacy.  

However the New York Times looks at the keystone of the Marjah government in a box, and thus the keystone of the US counterinsurgency effort, the deployment of new police, and it is a disaster.  As you read the quotes, please remember that the police in US COIN doctrine are the front-line counter-insurgents who provide stable, predictable, non-corrupt, transparent governance services to the neutral or antagonistic population.  Over time, the police are supposed to build trust and an informant network that works to undermine the insurgents' ability to gather intelligence, intimidate and mass before conducting operations.

Marja�s police officers, members of the Afghan National Civil Order Police, or Ancop, are from a cadre of roughly 5,000 officers who have been more thoroughly screened and trained than the rank-and-file in the 104,000-officer national police force...

The cadre, billed as superior or even elite, was created after years of Western exasperation with the Afghan police. The Pentagon hoped to develop a core of better officers who could be assigned to high-priority duties....

They still required intensive attention, the Marines said. Sometimes they set up unofficial checkpoints and shook down motorists, taking cash or cellphones. �And at official checkpoints they were charging people for head-of-the-line privileges,� another American who works beside the police said....

The police also said that establishing connections with residents had been difficult. Part of their problem, they said, was that many sergeants are Tajik, and do not speak Pashto, southern Afghanistan�s dominant language....

So the police are still corrupt foreigners who are harassing the locals.  They are a little less corrupt and a little less harassing than the police force that the local Pashtun militias and Taliban ran out of town a couple of years ago, but they are still corrupt and they are still culturally foreigners who don't speak the local language.  And this is the "elite" police force that is supposed to be the COIN fire brigade that can be dropped into an area to stabilize it until main-force police and military units are formed to hold the region under legitimate and popular governance.  

The box is broken.  

The Brits, COIN and coins

By Dave Anderson:

Ian recently noted that Great Britain will soon be undertaking austerity measures despite the fact that its economy is still performing significantly below trend.  This action is being taken to hold onto the hot money and to please the potential bond market vigilantes who have not made an actual appearance yet on British debt.  That means higher taxes, fewer public services, and generally a nastier times for the bottom 97% of the population.  Oh yeah, it also significantly increases the chances of a nasty double-dip recession.

The Independent reports that austerity may actually impact British military operations as the Afghanistan deployment is expensive and does not do much to directly add to British security.  At this point it is a matter of tagging along in the special relationship in the hope that the US pays attention to Great Britain.  

With the Ministry of Defence facing a �36bn budget black hole over the next decade and savage cuts likely under the defence review, politicians are warning that the war has become financially untenable. 

"It is unsustainable for this number of troops to be in Afghanistan and Pakistan for an indefinite period. The forces just aren't large enough, and I know the Secretary of State for Defence is more than aware of this," said the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer.

A shift in UK government policy was outlined by Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, on Friday, when he said that Britain was not a "global policeman", that he would like to see troops return "as soon as possible", and that Britain needs to "reset expectations and timelines". He added: "We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy of a broken, 13th-century country. We are there to see our global interests are not threatened." 

The comments are a clear statement of intent, according to General Sir Hugh Beach, former deputy commander of British land forces. "Words like 'timelines' and 'expectations' � if that isn't a clear message that we're planning to get out early then I don't know what would be."

COIN is expensive and time consuming. Steve has estimated that a fully funded COIN campaign would last a decade and cost $1.2 trillion dollars.  Others estimate a fully funded COIN campaign cost north of $2 trillion dollars and last a decade  or more.  This is an illustration of the grand Clauswitzian failure of Western COIN doctrine as it neglects the political level in pursuit of operational aims.  

The political is the supreme level of importance. Tactical and operational successes can feed into political successes as long as they operate within a context that is aligned with a coherent overall grand strategic goal set. If tactical and operational successes do not align or are counter-productive to the overall grand strategic goal sets, then those apparent successes are not successes. At best they are side-shows of no import; at worse they are enablers of grand strategic failure as the political OODA loop is seduced by the appearance of excellence in the lower realms...

Using Algeria and Vietnam, the political costs of the COIN strategy were very high; promises of ten to twenty year wars, consumption of the society's productive surplus... and domestic political instability... 

COIN today promises the same type of inputs --- ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis --- with the same type of outcomes --- weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest. 

And shockingly the public of democracies don't like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security...

It is politically extraordinarily difficult to tell the voting public that they will have to "suck on it" while fully funding an unpopular war where the optimistic estimate is that there will be another five to ten years of fighting and funding at the current level before anything that could approach 'victory' could be declared.  

Austerity should mean cutting out the luxury expenditures first.  And in the minds of most voting publics, Afghanistan as it is currently funded is a luxury expenditure.  Great Britain is not the first country to think about leaving Afghanistan (or Iraq) due to budget constraints, nor will it be the last.  

President Obama, Bringing the Truthiness on Afghanistan

By Derrick Crowe

President Obama told reporters on May 12, 2010, that "we're beginning to reverse the momentum of the insurgency" in Afghanistan.

According to his administration's own report given to Congress last week, that's not true. The insurgency is growing in size and capabilities. Simply put, the president's continued troop increases aren't working.

It's time to change course. Tell your Member of Congress that you want an exit timetable for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The president�s assertion was more fully fleshed out by Undersecretary for Defense Michelle Flournoy before the House Armed Services Committee last week:

"We�ve seen other positive indicators in the last year, as well. Of the 121 key terrain districts identified by ISAF in December 2009, 60 were assessed as sympathetic or neutral to the Afghan Government. By March, 2010, that number had climbed to 73 districts. Of the 121 key terrain districts identified by ISAF in December 2009, 60 were assessed as sympathetic or neutral to the Afghan Government. By March, 2010, that number had climbed to 73 districts."

That�s a statistic in the sense of a �lies, damn lies, and statistics� statistic from the Defense Department's "Progress Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan (PDF)," delivered last week to Congress. First, note that they surveyed an additional 28 districts in March compared to December. But here's the real meat: between December 2009 and March 2010:

• No district at all shifted to being �supportive� of the government. In fact, no district was classified as �population supports the government.� The number of districts where the population �supported the insurgency� did increase from 7 to 8, however.


• The number of districts classified as �sympathetic� to the government increased by 10. What Flournoy didn�t point out, however, was that the number of districts classified as �sympathetic� to the insurgency increased by 14 over the same period.

By my count, that puts the administration in the hole by 1 additional district �supporting� the insurgency and 4 additional districts �sympathetic� to the insurgency.

Twenty-nine districts are sympathetic to or support the Afghan government. Forty-eight are sympathetic to or supportive of the insurgency. Forty-four are neutral. Violence is up 87 percent.

That's called failure.

Had enough? Join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook.

But By All Means, Continue the Afghanistan Happy Talk

By Derrick Crowe

By a variety of measures, U.S. military policies in the Afghanistan war are failing.

You probably haven't heard much about this, in part because of the justified media focus on Haiti, but a confluence of very bad indicators point to failure even by the military's avowed yardsticks. The civilian casualty rate in Afghanistan rose significantly in 2009. War-related violence is at its peak since 2001. The armed resistance to the Kabul government is spreading rapidly and can now "sustain itself indefinitely" according to the top military intelligence officer in the region. Efforts to build the Afghan National Army are flailing, as are pro-government efforts to rebuild infrastructure. In short, despite the happy talk from General Stanley McChrystal and Admiral James Stavridis, a great many signs indicate that the U.S.-led pro-government coalition is headed for failure.

The Primary Benchmark: Civilian Casualties

In his confirmation hearing, McChrystal said:

Although I expect stiff fighting ahead, the measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed. It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence.

According to this measure, the U.S.-led military mission in Afghanistan is failing. The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim reports:

Civilian deaths in Afghanistan climbed in 2009 to their highest number since the fall of the Taliban, the United Nations says in a recent report.

The rising number of innocent Afghan casualties constitutes a major failure for the American forces if judged by the standards set out by General Stanley McChrystal in the summer of 2009, when he testified before Congress.

Here are the specifics from the UN report Grim references:

“At least 5,978 civilians were killed and injured in 2009, the highest number of civilian casualties recorded since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001...UNAMA Human Rights (HR) recorded a total of 2,412 civilian deaths between 01 January and 31 December 2009. This figure represents an increase of 14% on the 2118 civilian deaths recorded in 2008. ”

Several bloggers have touted the fact that the U.S.-led, pro-government forces killed about 28 percent fewer civilians than last year: 596 in 2009 compared to 828 in 2008. This sort of self-congratulation is as myopic as it is callous. The pro-Kabul-government coalition killed roughly 600 people whose right to life exists independent of the U.S.'s desire to eliminate Al-Qaida and the Taliban. Only the most idiotic messengers would cheer about this statistic in public. Imagine a man cheering that he only beat his wife six times this month compared to eight times last month. That's what chief ISAF spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks means when he says, "Statistical kinds of things don't play that well [in Afghanistan].'' Journalists, bloggers and public officials who tout this statistic like it's some sort of victory should have their pulses checked and their canines examined.

The same goes for comparisons between the number of combatants killed by the pro-government forces and the number killed by the armed opposition. U.S. policymakers rationalized the addition of more U.S. troops in Afghanistan by claiming the new forces would be able to protect the civilian population. Noting the ratio of casualties attributed to either side of the conflict is a weak salve if the addition of new forces did not lead to an overall drop in the civilian death rate. If coalition leaders can only point to the ratio of civilians killed by either side, they are tacitly admitting that they new troops cannot protect the population from the insurgents. That admission would fit with the facts in the UN's report.

Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine claims that putting troops among the local population while exercising restraint versus the enemy will allow an actor to win the local support. But when the inserted troops fail to protect the population - i.e., if their insertion is followed by an increase, not a decrease, in civilian casualties - COIN tactics can backfire. Consider the analogy of a neighborhood plagued by gang violence: Locals are outraged by the violence of the local gangs. If the police, as representatives of the legitimate authority in a community, show up on the streets in force and protect the bystanders while taking down the gang, they and the city government win the citizens' support. However, if police claim to be representatives of the legitimate authority in town, but their arrival on the streets in force is followed not by a decrease in local violent deaths but an increase, police will not only get the blame for the deaths they cause, but also for the total situation which they've promised to rectify as it spirals out of control. That's exactly what's happening in Afghanistan. As Grim notes:

[N]o matter who's actually causing the violence, the people hold the coalition forces and central government responsible -- as veteran combat reporter David Wood wrote on Friday for Politics Daily.

Wood's article quotes Col. Shanks confirming this dynamic:

As a result, he said, "When the Taliban blow up a bunch of people, you don't see a lot of protest. But when we screw up and accidentally kill somebody, you get riots in the streets.''

Cheering that we're killing fewer innocent bystanders than anti-government elements is a losing argument. Referring back to the gang violence analogy: If police officers declare they are moving into a neighborhood to deal with a gang problem, touting the fact that today they're killing fewer innocent bystanders a) is just another way of saying "We're killing some bystanders," and b) tells you absolutely nothing about their success or failure in dealing with the gang problem. But, it turns out that the U.S. military has some very good statistics on the state of the "gang problem" in Afghanistan. It's spiraling out of control.

The Strengthening Insurgency

Major General Michael T. Flynn ruffled some feathers earlier this month when he released a scathing critique of U.S. intelligence operations in Afghanistan through a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Less attention was given to a far more consequential presentation authored by Flynn in late December 2009: The State of the Insurgency [h/t Wired's Danger Room blog]. The graphics in the slide show are time lapse images of creeping yellow and red smears, ever-escalating bar-chart waves of mayhem. It shows an insurgency on the wax and a dynamic of violence that grows as we add troops.

Here are just a few key statements from the presentation:

"The Afghan insurgency can sustain itself indefinitely"

"The Taliban retains required partnerships to sustain support, fuel legitimacy and bolster capacity"

"Organizational capabilities and operational reach [of the insurgency] are qualitatively and geographically expanding"

"Taliban influence expanding; contesting and controlling additional areas."

"The Taliban now has “Shadow Governors” in 33 of 34 provinces (as of DEC 09)" ...up from 11 in 2005.

"Regional instability is rapidly increasing and getting worse"

"Kinetic events are up 300% since 2007 and an additional 60% since 2008."

Also notable is what Flynn's presentation does not describe: there are no mentions of a swing in momentum brought on by the significant increase in U.S. troops over the last year. It certainly does not describe the beginnings of a dynamic hoped for by the COIN pushers; absent is any mention of a population throwing its lot in with the Kabul-centered government. To the contrary, Flynn notes that detained insurgents were motivated by a "Karzai government universally seen as corrupt and ineffective" and pervasive crime and corruption amongst security forces.

If You Don't Have a Dream, How You Gonna Have a Dream Come True?

In an interview made public on January 11, 2010, ABC's Diane Sawyer asked McChrystal, "Last we heard you said we needed a 'quantum shift.' We needed something dramatic, something to shift the momentum. Have you done it? Have you turned the tide?"

McChrystal answered, "I believe we're doing that now...I believe we are on our way to convincing the Afghan people that we are here to protect them."

Sawyer plays the skeptic for about one second in this interview when she responds, "Already?"

McChrystal answers, "We've been at this for about 7 months now."

The general is either deceiving himself or Sawyer. There has been no quantum shift, according to Flynn's presentation. The cyclical, seasonal spikes in violence are steadily worsening and the Taliban retains the momentum. And, various other indicators aside, McChrystal himself pointed to a singular measure for our success in Afghanistan during his confirmation hearings: "the number of Afghans shielded from violence." The United Nations' latest report shows that the U.S.-led coalition is failing by the very measure proposed by its commanding general.

McChrystal's statement that "we've been at this for about 7 months now" is a two-fold assertion. On one hand, he's asserting that we're moving towards success in Afghanistan, an assertion flatly refuted by the information in Flynn's report. On the other, he's asserting that his "new" policies have been in place long enough to lead to have measurable effects on the ground in Afghanistan. With the first assertion being such a transparent untruth, McChrystal's (and the wider Obama Administration's) policies are damned by the second. If having been "at this for about 7 months now" has produced causal links rather than simple correlation between U.S. actions and the various indicators on the ground, the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is leading to failure, along with massive human suffering purchased at enormous cost.

As I complete this, there are reports of a major Taliban attack in Kabul.

But by all means, gentlemen, continue the happy talk about the Afghanistan war.

Originally posted at Rethink Afghanistan.

An Interview with Matthew Hoh

By Derrick Crowe

If Matthew Hoh could tell you one thing to help you understand the U.S.'s predicament in Afghanistan, he'd tell you:

The presence of our ground combat troops is not doing anything to defeat al-Qaida.

Think about that for a moment. We are paying roughly $1 million per troop, per year in Afghanistan. That's roughly twice the per-troop cost in Iraq. We've suffered well more than 800 deaths in Afghanistan. And yet here is the former top civilian official in Afghanistan's Zabul province, a former Marine who served in Anbar province in Iraq, telling us that the presence of our ground forces does nothing to defeat the organization that's supposedly the target of our operations in that country.

So, if we're not going about the business of defeating al-Qaida in Afghanistan, what are we doing?

We're involved in a civil war in Afghanistan. We're only taking one side in that civil war. And, our presence there is only encouraging the civil war to go on.

Hmm. This is all sounding very familiar.

I spoke to Matthew on Friday afternoon by phone. My first call to him went straight to voicemail, where I learned that apparently he'd had so many press calls about his resignation letter that his voicemail message directed inquiries on that topic to his email address. If you recall, the State Department took his letter seriously enough that it prompted job offers from Ambassadors Eikenberry and Holbrooke to get him to stay. Since then, Hoh has been the focus of a great deal of media attention, and for good reasons:

• With all the rhetoric about the "success" of the so-called "surge" in Iraq and its supposed lessons for Afghanistan, the opinion of a person with experience with both has a lot of heft.


• The fact that his feelings about the situation were strong enough to provoke a resignation and a subsequent rejection of a position in Washington gave him moral authority.


• And, Hoh was the beneficiary of good timing: his resignation came at a time when the media and policymakers had been cajoled into a willingness to entertain views outside the Washington, D.C. conventional wisdom that failure to send more troops immediately would lead to disaster.

Over the course of the past year, groups opposed to deepening U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan (such as Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan project, the Get Afghanistan Right coalition and many other groups and individuals) worked relentlessly to keep a critical perspective on the war in Afghanistan in the public debate. These escalation opponents relentlessly hammered the proponents of a counterinsurgency (COIN) effort for their inconsistencies and self-contradictions, especially with regard to the COIN doctrine's need for a legitimate host-nation partner. By the time the Afghan presidential elections exploded into a showcase of abject corruption and illegitimacy, these activists had laid the groundwork that helped the American people interpret the events of late August 2009 as a serious blow to the assumptions underlying the rationale for a deep military involvement. At the same time, President Obama refused to be rushed into a second troop increase in Afghanistan by an increasingly abrasive Pentagon whisper campaign, allowing the nation to take a collective breath and widen the debate about options. These factors, combined with cratering public support for the war effort, pushed policymakers and the media into a willingness to entertain views dissenting from those presented by General Stanley McChrystal. Enter Matthew Hoh.

Matthew's letter is a four-page punch in the gut to the rhetoric of pro-counterinsurgency factions. It wrecks the idea that the U.S. will ever have a legitimate partner (referred to by the COIN field manual as a "north star") in Afghanistan or that our strategy will lead to the destruction of al-Qaida. He ends the letter with regret that assurances can no longer be given that those who died in Afghanistan gave their lives in a mission worth the cost in "futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept."

Hoh sees our presence driving the conflict in at least two ways. On one hand, our military support for the corrupt Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan assures the Kabul cartel that we will not allow them to be overrun by insurgents. Because of that perception, the GoIRA is not willing to work out a political settlement with their opponents to form a true national government. The support we have given thus far (which is very close to the maximum possible support we can give), however, is not enough to allow the GoIRA to crush the insurgency totally. Thus, within the constraints on U.S. and Afghan national power, the only possible solution to the conflict other than strategic failure is a political solution negotiated between GoIRA and it's opponents--and that's precisely what the GoIRA won't seek as long as they can be assured of our continued military support.

[T]he only way to end this civil war is through political reconciliation, through some kind of political negotiation reaching to some kind of settlement. ...The Afghan officials who are on our side have no interest in doing that. ...They have no interest in giving up the position they have right now. And our presence there keeps them in power that way. I don't really see them having any interest in taking Afghanistan into, you know, a modern age or a progressive country, all of the things we believed we were doing there for the past 8 years.

On the other hand, the U.S. presence fuels the ever-expanding insurgency, pulling people who resent our support for a corrupt, predatory government and who intensely resent outside interference in their lives into conflict with coalition troops.

In both the east and the south, where our troops were heavily engaged in combat...on a daily basis, those are areas populated by rural Pashtuns...The bulk of those people were fighting us just because we're occupying them--not out of any ideology, not out of any real ties to the Taliban, not out of any hatred for the West. It was just because they did not want foreign troops, or, for that matter, the Afghan national army or Afghan national police, which do not represent them, in their valleys and villages.

...If you take the Korengal Valley, for example, which is well-known to the American people as "The Valley of Death," ...it's 15-20 miles long, it only has about 10,000 residents, they speak Korengali...these are people who are not interested in things outside their valley. They prefer to be left alone. Of course, putting more troops in their valley is something they're going to rebel against, especially troops from the central government, which does not represent them. ...It's really a question of these people wanting to determine their own existence and ...govern themselves. For every Korengal we're in, there's a hundred that we're not in, and if we were in [them], it would be the same issue of us having to fight them only because we're occupying them.

On the topic of that corrupt, unrepresentative government, Hoh offered a couple of anecdotal examples of the corruption that permeates every level of government in Afghanistan:

I know a USAID official who got into a plane...with the governor of his province, and the governor had about $300,000 in a duffel bag with him. ...The governor that I worked with had been removed from another province as the governor because he had been caught red-handed in a fairly extreme corruption case. Now this governor, Governor Sari, has been a friend of President Karzai for 35 years. So, after the U.S. embassy exposed this and complained about it, all Karzai did was move this governor...from one province to another province....To believe that the vast majority of Afghan officials that you're working with have any allegiance to what we're trying to do other than to enrich themselves or to make out in some manner is wrong.

I asked Hoh about the recent report on the quadrupling of the insurgency since 2006. According to at least one estimate, 10 percent of the estimated 25,000-man-strong insurgency were hardcore religious extremists, while the rest accepted training and funds from the "Taliban," but lacked ties to their ideology or broader agenda beyond throwing out the invaders.

I completely agree. The number I've seen is that there are 25,000 "Taliban" (which I believe is an incorrect term to apply to the people who are fighting us because it makes a reference to the Taliban regime of pre-September 11, 2001, and I think that misleads people and causes confusion, particularly among the American public about who we are actually fighting there.). But if you go with that 25,000 number...only a few thousand of those are actual hardcore "Taliban" with a capital "T." The majority of the rest of those groups are local fighters who are pretty independent of one another, just primarily concerned with their local areas, their valleys, their village, and who are tied to the Taliban with a capital "T" only through monetary or funding allegiances, and through a desire not to be occupied by a foreign power or by the other side in a civil war.

...But, if there are 25,000 troops now, Derrick...if we put more troops into the south, if we put 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 troops into the south, next year there will be 30,000, 35,000 or 40,000 enemies fighting us. As we move into more valleys and more villages...people are going to rebel against us.

So, the continued presence of massive numbers of U.S. troops removes the incentives for the GoIRA to negotiate a political settlement while providing the fuel for the growth of the insurgency. Hoh's advice to policymakers? End combat operations and sharply reduce U.S. troop levels. Doing so would pull U.S. troops out of areas where locals fight us just because we are there and would compel the GoIRA to negotiate with their opponents. Otherwise the U.S. presence will continue to fuel an unsustainable dynamic whereby the GoIRA has a near-term upper hand but cannot decisively defeat their opponents while the opponents use our presence as a recruiting tool for the resistance movement.

You're either characterized as all in our all out, and that's wrong. I don't think anyone is calling for us to completely wash our hands of Afghanistan and just walk away. When I call for withdrawal I call for stopping combat operations because it just doesn't make any sense; all it does it just prolong the conflict. I call for some kind of political reconciliation to end the fighting there. So a withdrawal would have to be somewhat gradual while negotiations were going on.

But wait, one might ask: what about al-Qaida? Hoh's policy prescription deals mainly with settling the civil war between the "Taliban" and the GoIRA. How does al-Qaida fit into this? Aren't they the reason we're in Afghanistan in the first place? Wouldn't our withdraw allow them to reestablish "safe havens" and allow them to keep the ones they have in Pakistan?

I don't believe al-Qaida needs or wants safe havens [like they had in 2001]. They just don't operate that way. they recruit worldwide. They are really an ideological force that exists on the Internet. They influence individuals or their operations are carried out by these small, independent, autonomous cells that really don't require much to operate other than a couple of rooms and a satellite phone or an internet connection. and if you look at the vast majority of attacks that have happened over the last decade regarding al-Qaida, they've been carried out by people not from the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, but residents of North Africa, residents of the gulf states or citizens of Europe or citizens and residents of the United States who do their preparation and their training in countries where the attacks occur. So this idea of a safe haven and their requirement for it is not borne out by any evidence of the way al-Qaida has operated for at least the last decade. After 2001, they evolved. They don't need a safe haven. It would be great for the United States if they did have safe havens because then we could bomb them. So we have to attack al-Qaida as the organization as it exists and not as we want it to exist.

The concern that our presence their encourages people to respond to their ideology is a valid one. We're currently occupying two Muslim countries, and we have to understand that lends credence to al-Qaida's argument that it is defending the Muslim world from Western invasion.

How many recruits do they [al-Qaida] get per year? A hundred? Two hundred? The Muslim population is over a billion. You're talking about such a small fraction. It's really associated with such a fringe movement that we have to attack using human intelligence and using law enforcement techniques. Army brigade combat teams do not affect al-Qaida. Having 60,00 troops in Afghanistan is not affecting al-Qaida. ...[T]he destruction of al-Qaida should be our priority...but we need to go after that organization as it exists and not with ground combat troops in Afghanistan.

Matthew said he's pleased with the state of debate following his resignation and return to the United States.

I can tell you that one of the things that pushed me to resign was this feeling that I had, and I think most people had, or a lot of people had, particularly guys I was serving with in Afghanistan, that an escalation of troops and an open-ended commitment to supporting the Karzai regime seemed almost like a done deal all throughout the summer...There was no discussion of any other type of strategy...it seemed almost like a guarantee...I got home in September and that's when I first heard there were debates on this within the administration...I'm very pleased the way the debates have been going. I'm not sure what's going that's going to happen with [the troop ]increase--I'm sure we're going to get one. The best thing though ...is that we're going to get some kind of withdrawal date, which is what we need. If we can get a withdrawal date within a year or two I'll be very happy, because that's so much better, so infinitely better, than some type of open-ended commitment or some type of 4- or 5-year plan. My thoughts are hopefully we can get some type of commitment to withdraw and stop combat operations within the next year or two.

I guess that's being a realist. I'd like to see it stop tomorrow.

Brave New Conversations recently filmed a conversation between Hoh and Daniel Ellsberg. Here's a clip:

You can find the full episode on the Brave New Conversations website. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.

Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. He blogs regularly at Return Good for Evil.

Civilians Ebb instead of Surge

By Dave Anderson:

In March, President Obama authorized an additional deployment of 17,000 US combat forces as well as a large scale push for more civilian advisors and reconstruction experts.  These additions were supposed to help stabilize the Karzai government, improve basic service delivery and contribute to the material legitimacy of the political process. 

The New York Times is reporting that the civilian component of the March mini-surge is failing:

many civil institutions are deteriorating as much as the country�s security.

Afghanistan is now so dangerous, administration officials said, that many aid workers cannot travel outside the capital, Kabul...

Advisers to the administration said the
military was likely to do much of the civilian work in the foreseeable
future, at least until Afghanistan is more secure....

The judiciary is so weak that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow
Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, �a lot
of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something.�

The Karzai government does not have sufficient presence or capacity to project its legitimacy past Kabul is how I am reading this report.  Basic governance and dispute resolution functions are undertaken by the insurgents which illustrates the legitimacy gap as well as the capacity gap.  This has long been observed as a key indicator --- the population seems to have decided that the Taliban may be brutal, but they are either fair or the only ones present with the power to compel local dispute resolution. 

The COIN community argues that COIN is successful when the local, host government is seen as legitimate by almost all interested parties, the insurgents are isolated and deprived of the sea of passive support to swim in, and the public is anti-insurgent.  These goals are reached when the government is able to provide a high level of material well-being, most notably in complex public goods and general economic growth, as well as possessing a security apparatus that is trusted, competent and non-corrupt. 

a January Defense Department report assessing progress in Afghanistan
concluded that �building a fully competent and independent Afghan
government will be a lengthy process that will last, at a minimum,
decades...�

Administration
officials reported some success in training the Afghan Army, but
acknowledged a failure to build up the Afghan police force, which is
widely considered corrupt and feckless.

Is propping up the Karzai government, whose legitimacy is a joke after the August elections, and whose competence has always been in question worth several trillion dollars, several decades and tens of thousands of lives lost or massively disrupted?

Replicating the Awakening

By Dave Anderson:

The local IraqiSunni Arab insurgencies flipped in 2006/2007 in the Anbar Awakening because the local elites thought that one group of meddlesome foreigners with declining and increasingly minimalist goals would be more useful to them in accomplishing local political/economic objectives than the other group of meddlesome and heavily armed foreigners who maintained maximalist goals.

The 1920 Brigade, the neo-Baathists and other local Sunni Arab Anbaris were seeking to maintain security rents and local dominance over their own communities.  During the first three years of the Iraqi insurgency, the foreign jihadis were useful cannon-fodder and suicide bombers, but their goal set was not in complete accord with the goal set of the local fighters.  Once the foreigners and takfiri fighters began to displace local elites by muscling prohibitions and moral restrictions as well as attempting to collect taxes on local and long-standing smuggling routes and routines, their usefulness was greatly decreased.

At that point, the local fighters who constituted the bulk of the Iraqi Sunni Arab insurgency went out to protect their local interests and began to cut deals with the US where the US received assurances that the locals would not shoot at US patrols, and the locals received security and political rents and firepower assistance to beat up on the other group of annoying foreigners who were seeking to impose maximalist goals on the local population. 

And it worked, as long as "working"  is defined as dramatically decreasing violence directed against US troops and the recognition that these deals weaken any Westphalian claim of statehood for a weak central government as the local elites maintained their militias and the local legitimacy of violence.  The maximalist, non-local fighters lost the sea in which they needed to swim in. 

Last week, the Boston Globe reported that US military believes the vast majority of the Afghans who are shooting at US forces are doing so for purely local reasons.  They are in the words of COIN advocate Col. Kilcullen 'accidental guerrillas' who will not want to engage in inter-continental urban guerrilla or terrorist strikes because that does not serve their local needs.

Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan
are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new
generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral
wealth, and smuggling routes...�Ninety percent is a tribal, localized
insurgency,�� said one US intelligence official in Washington who
helped draft the assessments. �Ten percent are hardcore ideologues
fighting for the Taliban...."

the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family
and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting,
and they see themselves as opposing the United States be cause it is an
occupying power, the officials and analysts said.

The London Times reports that the US is thinking about cutting a number of deals with local fighters, commanders and elites who are fighting for purely local reasons.  This would be a replication of the Anbar Awakening strategy where the US recognizes that there is no vital or even sort-of kind-of important national interest in and of itself as to whom controls a particular timber smuggling route.  Instead the locals who possess a vast sorting advantage of whom belongs and whom does not, can take care of their own security against other maximalist goal seeking groups. 

Afghans are known for changing sides back and forth during their long years of
war � there is an old saying that �you can rent an Afghan but never buy one�
� and battles have often been decided by defections rather than combat.

Paying Taliban foot-soldiers to switch sides could spare US lives and save
money, say its advocates. A recent report by the Senate foreign relations
committee estimated the Taliban fighting strength at 15,000, of whom only 5%
are committed idealogues while 70% fight for money � the so-called $10-a-day
Taliban. Doubling this to win them over would cost just $300,000 a day,
compared with the $165m a day the United States is spending fighting the
war.

Loyalty leasing and minimizing the goal set to regional pockets of stability whose elite understand that the US maintains a very credible deterrant of pounding the snot out of fixed and high value targets in the case of long-distance "far enemy" terror strikes originating from certain sections of Afghanistan would be a viable glidepath to a reduction of violence as well as decreasing US commitments to maximal goal sets. 

COIN and Force Protection

By David Anderson:

Bernard Finel makes the very simple and astute point that being out-numbered 10:1 means a very bad day for any unit involved in a slug fest, even when artillery and air support is readily available:

It is simply-put a different war when your adversary can concentrate 200-300 men in a sustained ground operation.  The risks change.  The operational response changes...

failing to grasp a structural transformation in the conflict.  Our adversaries are no longer just operating in small groups, terrorizing the unarmed� but rather they have developed the capacity engage in sustain small-unit operations.  No matter how well led a platoon is, it still is going to face rough going when faced with 300+ fighters willing to go toe-to-toe.

American COIN doctrine has US and other ISAF security forces dispersed through an ink-spot and the ink-spot boundary area in small and very small units.  These units are supposed to integrate and almost become one with the local social mileau in order to gain trust, legitimacy and effective operational intellgience in order to provide the basic security and population sorting process that is the prerequisites for host-nation government legitimacy enhancement. 

A US squad or platoon is more than adequate to beat back an assault on fixed positions when the assault element is no more than a few dozen men.  Unless artillery and air support is readily available and collatoral damage is not a concern in built-up areas, the same US units would be in severe trouble against two or three hundred men. 

This is the dilemna that Steve has been pounding on.  US COIN doctrine requires significant exposure of small units to potential over-run attacks.  US force protection imperatives will either not allow those small units to be dispersed as COIN doctrine dictates, or will disregard COIN's imperative to minimize heavy firepower when the dispersed units are in danger of being over-run. 

As a side note, one of the items from the two large engagements in Wanat and Kamdesh was a significant local militia presence that was pissed off enough to fight because of recent US airstrikes or check-points that killed local medical teams. 

The Afghan Draft?

By Dave Anderson:

To fight a traditional counter-insurgency campaign, the counter-insurgent forces needs lots of troops with lots of discipline and discretion.  The estimate is the counter-insurgent force needs to be able to field 2% to 3% of the population in arms and those men in arms need to possess high levels of cultural awareness and intelligence as well as excellent fire discipline combined with a willingness to take casualties from hidden insurgents instead of dishing casualties out without regard to civilian deaths.

That is a very tough nut to crack in any army.  It is an even tougher nut to crack in a multi-generational civil war.  It is even more difficult to field such an army when a good chunk of that army does not want to be there. The Telegraph reports that the Afghanistani government is thinking of instituting a draft to raise force levels:

It [the Afghan National Army] should then reach 240,000 as soon as possible, which commanders
admit would need the recruitment and training of 5,000 men each month.

Afghanistan's
ministry of defence said it was now drawing up plans for compulsory
military service under a constitutional clause stating all Afghans have
a duty to defend their country.

Zaher Azimi, spokesman for the
ministry, told Afghan television: "We consider preparing a plan to
revive the obligatory military service one way or another.

"We
plan to have our volunteer army soldiers take part in the combat
activities while the soldiers serving under obligatory military service
work in the logistical and administrative areas.

If an individual soldier is just serving his time for a very corrupt government that may or may not pay him on time, I have a hard time seeing what incentives he has to fight hard, to fight smart or not to sell stuff (weapons, supplies and information) on the black market.  Conflicting primary loyalties to a tribe or group will supersede any weak loyalties to a government that is amazingly corrupt and illegitimate.  This may not be a good idea after all.......

The Cossacks work for the Czar

By Dave Anderson:

Dave Schuler makes a very good point in response to Steve's recent post concerning the McChystal leak; the policy options being discussed in the leak should not be surprising as this is where the policy debate has been ambling along for a while:

Having appointed Gen. McChrystal to his post, with the full knowledge
the Gen. McChrystal would advocate a counter-insurgency strategy in
Afghanistan, and given conventional counter-insurgency doctrine, I
think it will be difficult for President Obama to deny him more troops....

As I and others noted two months ago, the writing was on the wall as to what McChystal would recommend just be examining his advisory group.  Everyone of his advisers either are full fledged COINistas or advocates for the Iraqi Surge who conveniently forget that the Iraqi Surge while tamping down violence through a combination of factors, failed in its grand strategic intent of creating a peaceful window for a comprehensive political settlement agreeable to all parties to be hashed out.  The range of acceptable discourse within that advisory group was small, and mainly limited to means and not ends; much like the range of discourse in our foreign policy in general.

Again, the Overton window of potentially plausible options under
discussion is very narrow. And getting the argument that an open-ended
system and society transforming effort that optimistically will take a
decade or more and cost several trillion dollars may not be a good idea
has been damn difficult because there is no "credentialled" and
"legitimate" figure who will make that argument.

And we have been seeing the steady drum-beat of officially unofficial leaks from that advisory group.  First Anthony Cordesman wrote that he thought the US needed to deploy another 40,000 to 45,000 more troops in addition to the current (and newly ratcheted-up) baseline of 68,000 US soldiers. Now we have the Kagan family mentioning the same number, despite the fact that the US Army and Marines do not have a spare brigade available for another six months unless someone takes a sledgehammer to the deployment schedule. 

These trial balloons have been filled with hydrogen, and besides bloggers asking pertinent questions without answers, none of them have burst into flames.

And again, none of this should have been a surprise, for the second most important thing a leader can do besides promulgate a clear vision and objective set for an organization is ensuring that his subordinates are on the same page and working towards the same objective set.  I know if I interviewed for a major position with significant discretion,  the individual with ultimate hire/fire authority over me would want to know whom I would be seeking advise from in order to judge whether or not my vision coincided with the greater strategic vision.   If the person holding the hire/fire authority sees the advisory group built for a strategic review and does not object to its composition as well as the highly probable outputs given past history, then I have to assume that the advisory group and its probable conclusions are acceptable to the organization's leadership.

So while the Sunday leak timing is a bit odd, the policy conclusions are not particularly surprising given the signals that have been telegraphed for the past eighteen months. 

The Cossacks work for the Czar

By Dave Anderson:

Dave Schuler makes a very good point in response to Steve's recent post concerning the McChystal leak; the policy options being discussed in the leak should not be surprising as this is where the policy debate has been ambling along for a while:

Having appointed Gen. McChrystal to his post, with the full knowledge
the Gen. McChrystal would advocate a counter-insurgency strategy in
Afghanistan, and given conventional counter-insurgency doctrine, I
think it will be difficult for President Obama to deny him more troops....

As I and others noted two months ago, the writing was on the wall as to what McChystal would recommend just be examining his advisory group.  Everyone of his advisers either are full fledged COINistas or advocates for the Iraqi Surge who conveniently forget that the Iraqi Surge while tamping down violence through a combination of factors, failed in its grand strategic intent of creating a peaceful window for a comprehensive political settlement agreeable to all parties to be hashed out.  The range of acceptable discourse within that advisory group was small, and mainly limited to means and not ends; much like the range of discourse in our foreign policy in general.

Again, the Overton window of potentially plausible options under
discussion is very narrow. And getting the argument that an open-ended
system and society transforming effort that optimistically will take a
decade or more and cost several trillion dollars may not be a good idea
has been damn difficult because there is no "credentialled" and
"legitimate" figure who will make that argument.

And we have been seeing the steady drum-beat of officially unofficial leaks from that advisory group.  First Anthony Cordesman wrote that he thought the US needed to deploy another 40,000 to 45,000 more troops in addition to the current (and newly ratcheted-up) baseline of 68,000 US soldiers. Now we have the Kagan family mentioning the same number, despite the fact that the US Army and Marines do not have a spare brigade available for another six months unless someone takes a sledgehammer to the deployment schedule. 

These trial balloons have been filled with hydrogen, and besides bloggers asking pertinent questions without answers, none of them have burst into flames.

And again, none of this should have been a surprise, for the second most important thing a leader can do besides promulgate a clear vision and objective set for an organization is ensuring that his subordinates are on the same page and working towards the same objective set.  I know if I interviewed for a major position with significant discretion,  the individual with ultimate hire/fire authority over me would want to know whom I would be seeking advise from in order to judge whether or not my vision coincided with the greater strategic vision.   If the person holding the hire/fire authority sees the advisory group built for a strategic review and does not object to its composition as well as the highly probable outputs given past history, then I have to assume that the advisory group and its probable conclusions are acceptable to the organization's leadership.

So while the Sunday leak timing is a bit odd, the policy conclusions are not particularly surprising given the signals that have been telegraphed for the past eighteen months.