John Nagl - Tag Search

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.

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.

Not with every word. But Friedman highlights the key problem with nation-building in Afghanistan.

Because when you are mounting a counterinsurgency campaign, the local government is the critical bridge between your troops and your goals. If that government is rotten, your whole enterprise is doomed.

The counterinsurgency enthusiasts tend to gloss over this inconvenient fact. Richard Fontaine and John Nagl -- both from the Center for a New American Security -- actually argued, in a not-very-convincing Los Angeles Times op-ed on Monday, that Karzai's corruption helps the COIN strategy.

But even Gen. Stanley McChrystal admits that Karzai's corruption greatly undermines U.S. efforts, according to the AP.

A few days ago, Gregg mentioned the much-ballyhooed Afghanistan debate, put on Tuesday by Intelligence Squared in New York City, where some notable scholars debated the assertion that "America cannot and will not succeed in Afghanistan/Pakistan." For those of you who have better things to do than follow up on which talking heads are scoring points these days, the folks who support a commitment to Afghanistan - meaning more troops and a sustained counterinsurgency - thrashed their opponents.

Steve Coll, John Nagl and James Shinn convinced 45 percent of the debate audience that success is possible, increasing their share of supporters by 20 percent from the pre-debate vote. The undecided population decreased from 27 to 12 percent, and the team of Steve Clemons, Patrick Lang and Ralph Peters, given the task of arguing that success is impossible, lost 5 percent of their supporters.

I haven't finished reading the transcript, but from what I've seen so far, Clemons, Lang and Peters didn't have much of a chance.

Folks in Washington are hyping tonight's debate in New York on whether the war in Afghanistan is doomed to failure. I finally got around to taking a look at the participants, and I'm a little horrified.

The pro-war speakers include Steve Coll, the author of Ghost Wars, and John Nagl, the "high priest" of counterinsurgency and a staunch supporter of escalating the war.

On the other side, participants include Steve Clemons, a Japan scholar who apparently has no expertise on Afghanistan, and Ralph Peters, a slightly unhinged retired colonel who recently claimed Gen. Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy was "concoted by Code Pink."

Is it too late to make a trade? Are these really the best anti-war speakers out there?

4:58 p.m.: Biddle has gone back to the issue of safe havens several times. His basic argument is that Al-Qaeda needs a "safe haven" to avoid detection by intelligence agencies.

What havens do is not to provide real estate for the construction of tent farms where you run training seminars... protect terrorists from human intelligence collection on the ground, which is the primary threat to their survival.

I've said this before, but I think it's crucially important to consider the counterfactual in Afghanistan. The country has a very limited intelligence and security apparatus. Can a pro-Western Afghan government really keep tabs on Al-Qaeda? Or will the group be able to establish safe havens anyway, right under the government's nose?

4:27 p.m.: The senators keep dropping the names of lesser-known Afghan provinces and villages (Zabul! Kunar!). I guess this is an effort to demonstrate their expertise? It's getting annoying.

Oh well. At least they can find it on a map.

The New York Times is beginning to write about a trend we here at The Majlis identified more than two months ago - an increase in Iraqi violence since around the time of the official U.S. withdrawal from the cities in June.

Maliki is getting criticism for decisions he has made about security that seem to reflect his political desires rather than on-the-ground necessities, like removing protective T-barriers, the Times reports.

Money quote: "The prime minister and the Iraqi people paid the price for their reach exceeding their grasp," said John A. Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert and president of the Center for a New American Security, a research institution in Washington. "The insurgency is not over."