counterinsurgency - Tag Search

No blogging yesterday while I worked on a couple of reported projects -- so I'll spare you any day-after thoughts on President Obama's choice to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus. You've read enough of those already, I'm sure.

Instead, let's pivot back to what's actually happening in Afghanistan. As I said in my Al-Jazeera piece about McChrystal's departure, the change of command isn't likely to mean a major change in strategy: McChrystal was hardly the only counterinsurgency believer in the military, and many elements of his "new strategy" actually began under his predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan.

(Updated w/article excerpt) I just finished reading the new Rolling Stone profile on Gen. Stanley McChrystal that's generating so much controversy. (It's not yet available online; if you're interested in a copy, e-mail me.)

Here's my quick reaction: Very little about the article is surprising! I think we all knew that McChrystal has a tense relationship with Karl Eikenberry; that he didn't think much of vice president Joe Biden's light-footprint counterterrorism strategy; that the military command feels hamstrung by the summer 2011 withdrawal timeline; and so on.

I'm a little late in responding to Michael Cohen's cri de coeur about liberal silence on Obama's increasingly-on-the-wrong-track Afghan strategy. I agree with his basic premise -- the left, particularly the left-wing media, has been quiet about Afghanistan -- though I think he ignores some contradictory evidence.

Spencer Ackerman outlines most of the reasons for the left's quietude. I would add one other point: It's difficult to outline a good alternative, and it requires a certain degree of local knowledge to do so.

Apologies for my non-existent blogging over the last few days! I've been swamped with work -- blogging/interviewing people at the Al-Jazeera forum here in Doha, and brainstorming on a new project we're launching in the next few weeks (details to come...).

Anyway. One of the people I interviewed was Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan (his new autobiography is a worthwhile read).

We were talking about the Kandahar offensive (sorry, process) after the interview, which elicited a laugh from Zaeef. He held out his right hand to signify the US troops pushing into Kandahar, then drew a semicircle in the air to symbolize the Taliban. "They will not find us in Kandahar. We will go around them and attack them from behind."

A United Nations report released yesterday concluded that Pakistan has the highest number of internally displaced people in the world in 2009. Three million people fled their homes last year, according to the study.

"The military operations of governments and armed non-state actors caused most displacement, and many people were displaced more than once."

Most of the displacements were temporary: Two million people returned to their homes, and Pakistan's IDP population at the end of 2009 was "only" 1.2 million.

Still, the numbers are staggering, particularly when you realize that nearly all of Pakistan's IDPs are coming from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (nee NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Those two regions have a combined population of roughly 25 million -- so one out of every eight residents became an IDP, at least temporarily, in 2009.

A few months ago, one of the hottest topics among Afghanistan watchers in Washington was a previously little-known Pashtun tribe called the Shinwari, which signed a pledge to fight the Taliban. Dexter Filkins reported excitedly on the pledge in November and January; David Rohde went further, calling tribal militias "America's new hope" in Afghanistan.

How's the initiative working out, several months later? McClatchy's Anand Gopal checks in with the Shinwari in the Achin district of Nangarhar province, and the results aren't encouraging (long excerpt, sorry, but it's important stuff).

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?