counterinsurgency - Tag Search

U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates deserves some credit for his fairly reasoned and non-triumphal public statements during this week's trip to Afghanistan. He warned against over-optimism in Afghanistan, stressing that there are "dark days" ahead and that the quick "clear" phase in Marja doesn't suddenly mean the war is won (or even that Operation Moshtarak is won).

In Now Zad yesterday, he commended soldiers and Marines for clearing the area of Taliban, but then said "you own it" -- and warned of a complicated path ahead.

I'm trying to figure out the logic behind NATO's latest rhetorical pivot.

I expected the Marja triumphalism -- the arrival of NATO's hand-picked governor, Haji Zahir, and the well-publicized flag-raising ceremony. Commanders said today that they've finished the "clear" phase of "clear-hold-build-transfer"; a press release from ISAF said NATO and Afghan soldiers have "cleared the last major pocket of resistance," though -- as with past Helmand surges -- the definition of "cleared" isn't necessarily what you think.

Dexter Filkins, who Josh Foust recently dubbed "ISAF's official spokesman at the New York Times," has a remarkably upbeat analysis of the war in Afghanistan in today's week-in-review section. Filkins mentions several times that he, personally, feels optimistic about the direction of the war -- and builds to this conclusion (emphasis mine).

At week's end, by all accounts, the Marja operation was going well. In Pakistan, Mr. Baradar was said to be talking. After four long years, the initiative, at least for now, had returned to the Americans.

The U.S. is fighting a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Much ink has been spilled over the last few months about how the war is now population-centric, not enemy-centric; how "hearts and minds" matter more than body counts.

The coalition leadership in Afghanistan spent months publicizing the just-launched offensive to clear and hold the alleged Taliban stronghold of Marja. This intense flag-waving left us pondering the benefits of hyping such an offensive: Given the overwhelming NATO force brought to bear, wouldn't the drawbacks of a possibly prolonged, bloody fight outweigh the public-relations benefits of a victory everyone saw coming?

A British press release (flagged by the Long War Journal yesterday) offers a concise if unsurprising justification, courtesy of U.K. spokesman Major General Gordon Messenger:

There were three reasons for signalling the operation in central Helmand in advance. First, to give the Taliban a choice. Second, to make the population aware that the operation was about to unfold. Third, it allowed a much greater level of Afghan involvement and ownership, and subsequently Afghan participation.

But I think there's a fourth, unspoken reason.

If you go to Google News and search for "Marja," you'll find (literally) about 4,000 stories, most of which are rewrites of the same set of ISAF talking points: 20,000 NATO and Afghan troops are gearing up to attack the Taliban; Marja is the Taliban's last refuge in southern Afghanistan; the battle will be the most important military operation in eight years; etc., etc.

Very few of these bother to point out the inherent contradictions in Operation Moshtarak -- like the conflict between this enemy-centric offensive and NATO's stated population-centric strategy.

One other item jumped out at me from the latest U.S. intelligence community threat assessment, released yesterday. Remember last month, when U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates urged Islamabad to launch a new offensive against the Taliban in North Waziristan? I called that irrational and suggested Pakistan needs to focus on consolidating its existing gains.

The threat assessment seems to agree!

President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other military planners in the Pentagon withheld potentially key resources from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan because they disdained "nation building," feared a Soviet-like quagmire and couldn't siphon troops away from the invasion and subsequent war in Iraq, according to an unpublished Army history obtained by the New York Times.

The folks over at Danger Room posted a truly incredible video clip from Fox News. I'm sure most of you, dear readers, do not have high expectations for that network -- but this report by Greg Palkot, on aerial Special Forces raids, really sets a new standard for jingoism.

We've never placed much stock in Barack Obama's July 2011 "deadline" for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. As we've noted before, that date merely marks the beginning of a withdrawal of indeterminate speed. Obama could withdraw a single squad -- or, as Steve Kroft suggested on 60 Minutes last week, only half-jokingly, "the military band and a few cooks" -- and claim he met his "deadline."

Recent events in Afghanistan only cast further doubt on that target. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the second-in-command of U.S. and NATO forces, told reporters yesterday that it would take until November to finish "surging" new troops into the country. Obama said it would only take six months in his West Point speech earlier this month.

Barack Obama will announce his new Afghanistan strategy at West Point at 8:00 p.m. It will be an anticlimactic announcement, because the important stuff has already leaked out. Obama will announce a roughly 34,000-troop escalation, which we already knew about; he'll reaffirm that the war is necessary to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda," which he's been saying for months; and he'll talk vaguely about "exit strategy" and "off-ramps" without offering any specifics.

The speech, in other words, will be mostly an exercise in political theater.

It's Sunday afternoon and I should probably be watching football, but this Cowboys-Redskins game was so dreadfully boring that I found myself reading about Yemen instead.

I imagine the Obama administration is starting to think about a "Yemen policy" (if it hasn't already). The country is making headlines because of the insurgency in the north and an ongoing problem with al-Qaeda, which reportedly kidnapped a Japanese engineer last week (though the Yemeni government denies this report). And Yemen is also starting to get some attention on the D.C. think-tank circuit -- most recently from the Center for a New American Security, which published a paper on Yemen last week.

Against that backdrop, it's worth asking a fundamental question: Just how much can the U.S. hope to influence events in Yemen? The answer, I think, is "not much at all."

David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru who advised Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, gave an hour-long talk tonight at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The talk was broadly about counterinsurgency in U.S. foreign policy, but Kilcullen spent a good deal of time on the big story of the day: Afghanistan.

Kilcullen told The Guardian last week that Obama should either go big or go home to avoid a "Suez-like" disaster in Afghanistan. He elaborated on those comments tonight, explaining why he felt the middle ground was so dangerous. And he argued -- perhaps inadvertently -- that the strategies reportedly being considered by the Obama administration move too slowly, and give the Taliban time to adapt.

There's some speculation in Washington that Obama might stop in Afghanistan on his way home from Asia to deliver an ultimatum to Hamid Karzai: Clean up your government, or else.

I would emphasize the word "speculation." It's clear that Karzai's corruption and the lack of a U.S. exit strategy have become two of the most divisive issues in the Afghanistan debate. But it's not clear where Obama stands on those issues: Will he commit more troops to Afghanistan without a clear plan for getting out?

Reliable chronicler of Washingtonian long-war/small-wars/counterinsurgency/counterterrorism culture Spencer Ackerman has penned an overview of the Obama administration's Afghanistan debate for the National, and he does an admirable job of summing up the reasons for the current state of limbo.

Ackerman's piece is basically a clip job, but in this case I don't mean that derisively, since he manages to bring a number of subtle contradictions and details into focus. I was particularly struck by his description of the events following the September leak of the classified Stanley McChrystal Afghanistan assessment. Remember, the Washington bureaucracy had already been set in motion six months earlier, when the Obama administration released the results of a strategy review for Afghanistan and Pakistan laying out specific goals.

Obama's reaction [to the McChrystal leak] was to announce that his cabinet would begin a series of internal debates about what strategy to adopt before addressing McChrystal's much-telegraphed [troop increase] request. The move stunned many midlevel and lower officials. Hadn't the white paper been the strategy? Wasn't that the whole point of sending McChrystal to Afghanistan? It's well and good to revisit strategy in the face of setbacks, some thought. But was the administration returning to square one after the bureaucracy had begun the slow and arduous process of mobilizing for counterinsurgency? Had Obama truly understood his own strategy? And if not, how could he be trusted to craft a new one?

I'm quoting Spencer Ackerman a lot today. He has a short item in the Washington Independent about Obama's Afghan strategy review, which will continue despite Karzai's "re-election."

Ackerman speculates that Obama was influenced by Richard Fontaine and John Nagl, who wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed last month urging Obama to ignore what happens in Kabul and focus on provincial and local governance.

In other words, it doesn't matter if Karzai is corrupt, so long as Afghanistan has strong sub-national institutions.

Matt Yglesias wonders how many of the American officials working on Afghanistan actually speak the languages they use in Afghanistan (answer: very few).

Certainly the U.S. would benefit from having more Pashto and Dari speakers working on Afghanistan. Speaking the local language gives you an added degree of understanding: Arabic, for example, has a depth of meaning that is often lost in translation.

The New York Times reports today that the Obama administration is considering a city-centric strategy for Afghanistan, one that would withdraw U.S. troops to a handful of population centers.

Steve Coll wrote about this theory last month -- the so-called oil spot strategy. He described it as "the best of a series of bad military choices." It's also reminiscent of Pakistani Maj. Mehar Omar Khan's Small Wars Journal article from Oct. 12.

David Brooks thinks the Obama administration shouldn't impose salary caps on bailed-out banks because the economy is too complex to be re-engineered by a bunch of government bureaucrats.

I'm not an economist; I can't really judge the merits of his argument. (I will say, on a personal level, that I'm all for punishing bankers.)

Instead, I want to talk about the connection between Brooks' column and escalation in Afghanistan. Brooks ardently supports escalating the war, so he obviously doesn't see the connection.

The bloggy set in D.C. is buzzing about a statement from Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary-general of NATO, in which he says European defense ministers support Gen. Stanley McChrystal's proposed counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Big deal. Rasmussen presents a binary choice: Either continue the current failing strategy, or endorse McChrystal's COIN request. And then he announces that NATO backs the new strategy -- which is already supported by the defense establishment in the U.S., NATO's biggest member. Why is this surprising? I don't think anyone outside of Ralph Peters thinks we should continue our current approach to the war.

Rasmussen also goes on to say that European ministers haven't discussed the "resource implications" of switching to a COIN strategy. So they support it in the abstract, but they haven't discussed decided whether to commit more troops to it. (As Kevin Drum notes, some of these same ministers are looking for ways to withdraw their troops.)

Supporters of population-centric counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan are fond of pointing out its historical successes.

The latest entry in this category comes from Max Boot, the neoconservative American writer, who has an essay in next month's Commentary magazine titled "How We Can Win in Afghanistan." Most of the essay is a cut-and-paste job from Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategic review. Towards the end, though, he mentions an often-cited study which looked at insurgencies from throughout the 20th century.