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Out of sheer laziness and a nod to public service, I will re-post this notice from Lexington Green in its entirety:

Early Notice: Thomas E. Ricks at the Pritzker Military Library on September 10, 2009.

Thomas E. Ricks will be in Chicago at the Pritzker Military Library to discuss this most recent book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. The event will be free and open to the public.

Ricks is the author of the widely-acclaimed book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, e.g. this review.

Ricks is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Ricks has a blog, The Best Defense.

I hope to read The Gamble before the date, and I plan to attend the event.

I hope the weather is better than the downpour on the night that David Kilcullen spoke at the PML.

Barring any unforseen, work-related, commitments, I will be attending this event and will blog about it. Perhaps some live twittering as well.

Had a pleasant and interesting email conversation with the always thoughtful Dr. Bernard Finel of The American Security Project ( that link is the blog, here is the main site for the org). Dr. Finel has been blogging vigorously and very critically of late about COIN becoming conventional Beltway wisdom, a premise he does not accept nor believe to be a useful strategic posture for the United States. It was a good discussion and one that I would like the readers to join.

Due to space limitations, I’m going to give the links and some small excerpts for each of Dr. Finel’s posts, but I strongly recommend reading his arguments in full before going on to my assessment:

Did we Really Ever Have an Afghanistan Debate?

The issue isn’t that people like Exum haven’t considered the issue individually.  I am sure he has.  Many others have also considered the issue, and many have shared their concerns with one another, but it has been, for years, in the context a shared consensus that has actively sought to exclude real disagreement.  It is not about doing due diligence on the policy, it has been about reinforcing the group identity about supporters of expansion of the war in Afghanistan.

The Incoherence of COIN Advocates: Andrew Exum Edition 

But unfortunately, the prerequisites are actually virtually impossible to achieve.  The Afghan government does not have the tax base, infrastructure, expertise, or – significantly – the inclination to build the kind of military and institutional capacity that our strategy requires from the local partner.  Furthermore, the desire to curtail corruption runs counter to the desire to secure the cooperation of provincial leaders.  We are setting the Afghans up to fail.  And unfortunately, setting the Afghans up to fail is a win-win scenario for the COIN theorists.  If, by some miracle, the Afghan government is able to meet our needs, we will claim credit for having given the Afghans a model to achieve.  If the Afghans fail, then any negative consequences will be the fault of the Afghans.

Important Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan

Defeating the current “population security” focused COIN approach is not that hard conceptually.  All the insurgents have to do is reverse the dynamic, by making a U.S. presence synonymous with increased violence.  The logic of population security then forces the counter-insurgent to move the population into more secure locations – minimally with checkpoints and controls over movement, but historically often also into fortified camps or villages (which quickly take on the characteristics of a prison).  Either way, the costs of the American provided “security” begins to look worse than the risks from the insurgents, who – if they are smart – are looking for little other than tolerance from the population.

Tom Ricks and COIN

So, I am confused.  Does Ricks think that the new COIN doctrine works, but is not always well implemented?  Does he believe that it produces short-term security improvements, but no long-term political benefits?  Does he think COIN is a failed doctrine, but nevertheless the best chance we have to rescue bad situations? Is he a closet COIN skeptic, but under pressure to toe the party line at CNAS?

Widening the Debate on COIN

Fourth, it behooves those of us who would like to see the debate transformed to actually include a list of potential alternate experts.  With all due respect to Matt Yglesias (Politico Only Knows Conservative Experts), who often writes about how progressives are often labeled as something other than “serious,” he’s not on the list.  He’s smart, but if I were putting together a list of people I’d like to see advising McChrystal, he wouldn’t be on it.  But here is who I would like to see on it, along with a representative example of their arguments:

1. Andrew Bacevich (The Petraeus Doctrine);
2. Chris Preble (The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous and Less Free)
3. John Mueller (How Dangerous Are the Taliban?)
4. Mike Mazarr (The Folly of ‘Asymmetric War’)
5. Col. Gian Gentile (Our COIN doctrine removes the enemy from the essence of war)
6. And even… if I may… little old me (Afghanistan is Irrelevant)

At the very least… McChrystal would benefit from having some members of this group formally “red team” his evolving strategy… before the Taliban does

In the last post, Dr. Finel cites a blogfriend, Fester at Newshoggers, whose post merits inclusion here- Closing the Overton Window on COIN.  Nothing wrong with red-teaming ( add John Robb to that list).

I shared my initial reaction with Dr. Finel and have continued to think about the subject of COIN and the anti-COIN banner that he and others like Col. Andrew Bacevich and Col. Gian Gentile have raised.  Here is more or less what concerns me in this debate.

First, it is not my impression that Andrew Exum is trying to set up a blame-shifting scenario with the Afghans to vindicate COIN. Exum may not always be correct, I certainly am not, but his written arguments strike me as straightforward and inellectually honest even when I disagree with them ( such as his predator op-ed with Dr. Kilcullen). Some of the questions re: Afghanistan/COIN/Iraq are speculative/experimental in nature and do not come with a hard and fast answer until a policy or tactic is implemented, tried and evaluated.

Has the debate been closed or limited to those in favor of intervention? I don’t think so, though one side was better organized and more effective at addressing concrete problems. I’m certain Dr. Finel is referring here to the broad community of defense intellectuals-military theorists- national security think tankers and the MSM figures covering that ground rather than the public at large, but even there, COIN gained policy ascendancy because:

1) The  “Big Army, the artillery, B-52’s and Search & Destroy=counterinsurgency” approach proved to be tactically and strategically bankrupt in Iraq. It failed in Mesopotamia as it failed in the Mekong Delta under Westmoreland – except worse and faster. Period.

2) The loudest other alternative to COIN at the time, the antiwar demand, mostly from Leftwing extremists, of immediately bugging-out of Iraq, damn the consequences, was not politically palatable even for moderately liberal Democrats, to say nothing of Republicans.

If there was a third alternative being effectively voiced at the time before “the Surge”, please point it out to me, I am not seeing it.

Fast forward to today. The problem with COIN is that it is an operational  “How to”doctrine whose primary advocates are very reluctant to step up and deal with formulating a strategic, global, framework for the use of COIN.  Or if they are contemplating the strategic “Why/When” angle right now at CNAS, they are not yet finished doing so. Possibly, some of the reluctance to deal with the plane of strategy stems from most COINdinistas coming from a professional “Powell Doctrine” military culture that emphasizes -no, indoctrinates – thinking at the tactical level and demands that strategic thinking be studiously left to civilian policy makers. Getting a coherent operational paradigm in order, proselytized and grudgingly accepted by the DoD establishment was no small achievement by the COINdinistas. It’s huge.  Unfortunately,with a few exceptions, our civilian policy makers and even moreso our political class are collectively not up to the task of strategic thinking by education, training and political culture (to say nothing of formulating grand strategy) they do not like making choices, accepting risks, setting realistic goals or even think in these terms. Nor is our media making the sort of intellectual contribution to public policy debate that Walter Lippmann made in critiquing George Kennan’s early advocacy of Containment

The critics of COIN, such as Col. Bacevich are largely arguing for a non-interventionist foreign policy as a strategic posture ( a well argued example of that school of thought would be Dr. Chet Richards’ latest book If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration) for the United States, largely waving away the messy tactical and operational realities. Such a position has legitimate pros and cons that deserve being debated on their own merits for the future but for our current difficulties their advice amounts to closing the barn door 8 years after the cow wandered away. It may be time to leave Iraq; Afghanistan, by contrast, presents unsolved problems with al Qaida’s continuing as a functional organization in Paktia and in Waziristan-Baluchistan across the border in Pakistan. While circumstances do not require our turning Afghanistan into the Switzerland of the Hindu Kush, al Qaida is not business that we should leave unfinished.

Debate is healthy and helpful and critics of COIN improve the doctrine by their articulate opposition. America’s problems are a seamless garment that need solutions from the tactical level where practitioners and shooters live, up to the world of strategy and grand strategy inhabited by statesmen and national leaders – who have yet to provide the clear and coherent policy objectives that our military requires to be most effective.

Comments, criticism, complaints welcomed.

ADDENDUM:

Exum responds to Bacevich on the need for an Afghanistan debate. Good post. (Hat tip to Arabic Media Shack)

Nuristan, “The land of Light” (formerly Kafirstan), was the last pagan region of Afghanistan to accept Islam, only in 1895 after a long struggle with “the Iron Emir” Abdur Rahman Khan. It was also one of the first provinces to rebel against the Soviet invasion. The Taliban fared no better there than did the Russians. More or less, Nuristan and the Korengal valley in Kunar province are “Afghanistan’s Afghanistan”.

The Institute for the Study of War has a recent PDF on American COIN operations in this difficult region. They pick up on Frank Hoffman’s “hybrid war” concept:

Kunar and Nuristan Report: Rethinking U.S. Counterinsurgency Operations (PDF) by Michael Moore and Maj. James Fussell

Excerpted findngs:

In the Korengal, the presence of U.S. forces exacerbates tensions resulting in hostility and facilitates violence in the region, negating the U.S. efforts to bring stability and security.

A type of hybrid warfare should be implemented in Kunar and Nuristan; a combination of counterinsurgency warfare, with its focus on the populations, and mountain warfare, whereby the U.S. forces seize and hold the high ground.

Additional emphasis must be placed on U.S. forces demonstrating the immediate and tangible benefits of their presence in the region. Short term humanitarian assistance such as medical and dental aid, radios, and blankets must be paired with long term economic development projects.

• Although counterinsurgency doctrine was successfully implemented in urban Iraq, it has proved more difficult to apply in the sparsely-populated mountains of Kunar and Nuristan.

• U.S. forces are disproportionately committed to defending marginally significant areas in these remote provinces.

• U.S missions in eastern Afghanistan, specifically places like the Korengal and Pech River Valley, must be re-examined and forces must be re-deployed to areas where they will have greater effect.

• The Korengal Valley in Kunar province is the deadliest place in Afghanistan. The population is historically hostile to any outside influence, including any Afghans from outside the valley.
  • The Korengalis have successfully fought off every attempt to subdue their valley, including the Soviets in the 80s, the Taliban rule in the 90s, and currently, the U.S. military. 

• The presence of U.S. forces in the Korengal generates violence and undermines U.S. efforts to bring stability and security.   
  • The current U.S. force disposition in the inhospitable valleys, like the Korengal, relies too heavily on isolated outposts that require massive amounts of artillery and airpower to defend
  • U.S. forces are not denying the enemy the high ground, allowing insurgents to attack and terrorize the population.  
  • Artillery and airpower are counterproductive in dealing with the insurgency in this part of the country because their use alienates the very population the U.S. is trying to secure.
  • Committing additional forces in order to hold this remote terrain would be tactically and operationally imprudent. The resistance in this area is confined to locals in the valley.  It does not accelerate the insurgency beyond the valley.

• Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan requires less interdiction on the borders and greater security in the population centers.  Resources must flow to areas that are strategic priorities in order to allow force densities high enough to practice counterinsurgency effectively.      
  • Rather than maintaining positions in the Korengal and many of the small, ineffective posts that dot the Pech river valley, U.S. forces should conduct active patrols in the populated areas of the lower Kunar River Valley.
  • U.S. forces must protect the specific populations that oppose the enemy and support the government, rather than fighting populations that historically resist the government.  U.S. forces in Kunar should concentrate efforts in places like Mara Wara, Sarkani and Khas Konar Districts where the population actually desires U.S. support and presence, unlike the Korengalis. 

• Counterinsurgency requires short-term economic support, as well as a dense and mobile force presence.  U.S. forces must pair long-term development projects, such as building roads, with short-term, immediate humanitarian assistance and quick-impact projects.

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia by James Palmer

The 20th Century was remarkable for its voluminous bloodshed and civilizational upheaval yet for inhuman cruelty and sheer weirdness, Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian Ungern von Sternberg manages to stand out in a historical field crowded with dictators, terrorists, guerillas, revolutionaries, fascists and warlords of the worst description. Biographer James Palmer has brought to life in The Bloody White Baron an enigmatic, elusive, monster of the Russian Civil War who is more easily compared to great villains of fiction than real life war criminals. Palmer’s bloodthirsty Mad Baron comes across like a militaristic version of Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or perhaps more like Hannibal Lecter with a Mongol Horde.

Ill-tempered, impulsively violent, insubordinate and socially isolated even among fellow aristocratic officers, Baron Ungern was, as Palmer admits, without much wit or charm, a complete failure in Tsarist society and the Imperial Army until the coming of the Great War. As with many “warlord personalities“, the chaos and ruin of the battlefield was the Baron’s natural element and for the first time in his life, he experienced great success, his maniacal bravery under fire winning Ungern promotions and the highly coveted St. George’s Cross. This is an eerie parallel with the life of Adolf Hitler, and numerous times in the text, Palmer alludes to similarities between the Baron’s apocalyptic views on Communists and Jews, and that of Baltic-German refugees like Alfred Rosenberg and Max Scheubner-Richter who contributed eliminationist anti-semitism and theories about “Jewish- Bolshevism” to Nazi ideology.

A fanatical monarchist and philo-Buddhist fascinated with far-off Mongolia and Tibet, the Baron regarded the Russian Revolution as the greatest of calamities and joined the Whites under the leadership of the gangster-like Ataman Semenov to rape, loot, torture and murder with a hodgepodge Cossack horde across the Transbaikal region of Siberia. The Baron’s fiefdom under Semenov was a macabre, bone-littered, execution ground ruled by reactionary mysticism and ghoulish exercises in medieval torture visited upon the Baron’s own soldiers scarcely less often than on hapless peasants or captive Reds.

Dismayed by Semenov’s corruption and dependence on the Japanese and the collapsing fortunes of Russia’s White armies, Palmer recounts how the Baron fled with a ragtag band of followers to Chinese occupied Mongolia, where, in a series of bizarre circumstances, the Baron managed to destroy a sizable Chinese army (charging on horseback straight into enemy machine gun fire and emerging unscathed), seized the fortified capital, restored the “living Buddha” the Bogd Khan to the throne and become celebrated the eyes of the Mongolians, variously as the reincarnation of Ghengis Khan and/or the prophesied coming of the “God of War”. Naturally, to further his dream of building a pan-Asian Buddhist Empire, Baron Ungern unleashed a nightmarish reign of terror in Mongolia, taking especial and personal delight in the executions of Jews and captured commissars.

Ungern’s final foray in battle, before his capture, trial and execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks, is like something out of the Dark Ages:

With this final defeat, Ungern shed any trace of civilization. He rode silently with bowed head in front of the column. he had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms hung on a bright yellow cord. He looked like a prehistoric ape-man. People were afraid to look at him.

Despite the best efforts of the Bolshevik prosecutor to focus upon political motives, even the Soviet revolutionary tribunal that condemned him to death on Lenin’s orders, considered the Baron to be a dangerous madman.

James Palmer has shed a great deal of light on one of the darkest corners of the Russian Civil War, Baron Ungern von Sternberg, a subject that largely eluded prominent historians like W. Bruce Lincoln, Orlando Figes and Richard Pipes. The Bloody White Baron is a fascinating read and a window into the life of the 20th century’s strangest warlord.

Or perhaps the analogy of Cain and Abel?

Remains Show Human Killed Neanderthal

Newly analyzed remains suggest that a modern human killed a Neanderthal man in what is now Iraq between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago. The finding is scant but tantalizing evidence for a theory that modern humans helped to kill off the Neanderthals. The probable weapon of choice: A thrown spear.

The evidence: A lethal wound on the remains of a Neanderthal skeleton. The victim: A 40- to 50-year-old male, now called Shanidar 3, with signs of arthritis and a sharp, deep slice in his left ninth rib. “What we’ve got is a rib injury, with any number of scenarios that could explain it,” said study researcher Steven Churchill, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University in North Carolina. “We’re not suggesting there was a blitzkrieg, with modern humans marching across the land and executing the Neandertals [aka Neanderthals]. I want to say that loud and clear.” But he added, “We think the best explanation for this injury is a projectile weapon, and given who had those and who didn’t, that implies at least one act of inter-species aggression.”

What is interesting about the disappearance of the Neanderthal is that it is hard to explain simply in terms of competition for resources with early Homo Sapiens, given that the global human population was astronomically low. The Neanderthal too, would have had many physical advantages, given their more robust physiology, over their evolutionary cousins. Speculation has ranged from climate change, to immunological differences to the cognitive and cultural.

Could a key cultural difference have been a propensity of Homo Sapiens to make war? To seek out, rather than avoid conflict?