zenpundit.com

Dr. James Joyner, Dave Schuler and Col. Pat Lang discuss the Apache video, COIN, ROE, war in an information age, Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Sys Admin-Leviathan split and Hamid Karzai at OTB Radio. A good discussion.

Andrew Exum said the Surge succeeded. Dr. Bernard Finel says “prove it“.

From Abu Muquwama:

Just Admit It: The Surge Worked

….We can argue about how many other factors aside from U.S. diplomatic and military operations led to the stunning drop in violence in 2007. There was a civil war in 2005 and 2006, tribes from al-Anbar “flipped” in 2006, and Muqtada al-Sadr decided to keep his troops out of the fight for reasons that are still not entirely clear. Those are just three factors which might not have had anything to do with U.S. operations. But there can be no denying that a space has indeed been created for a more or less peaceful political process to take place. Acts of heinous violence still take place in Baghdad, but so too does a relatively peaceful political process.

From BernardFinel.com:

Did the Surge Succeed?

….Violence was a problem for Iraqi civilians and for the U.S. military.  Reducing violence has unquestionably served humanitarian purposes in Iraq and has also saved American lives.  But that has nothing to do with “conceptual space” or the broader “success” of the surge.

I mean, come on, if you’re going to write a post that essential expects to settle a debate like this one, snark and assertions much be balanced with rigorous analysis.  But Exum doesn’t demonstrate any real understanding of the dynamics of violence in civil conflicts.

My suggestion is that you first read each gentleman’s posts in their entirety.

The first part of the dispute would be what is the standard of “success” that we are going to use to evaluate “the Surge”. I’m not certain that Exum and Finel, both of whom are experts in areas of national security and defense, would easily arrive at a consensus as to what that standard of measurement would be. Perhaps if they sat across from one another at a table and went back and forth for an hour or so. Or perhaps not. I have even less confidence that folks whose interests are primarily “gotcha” type partisan political point-scoring on the internet, rather than defense or foreign policy, could agree on a standard. Actually, I think people of that type would go to great lengths to avoid doing so but without agreement on a standard or standards the discussion degenerates into people shouting past one another.

In my view, “the Surge” was as much about domestic political requirements of the Bush administration after November 2006 as it was about the situation on the ground in Iraq. In my humble opinion, COIN was a better operational paradigm that what we had been doing previously in Iraq under Rumsfeld and Bremer, but the Bush administration accepted that change in military policy only out of desperation, as a life preserver. That isn’t either good or bad, it simply means that measuring the Surge is probably multidimensional and the importance of particular aspects depends on who you are. An Iraqi shopkeeper or insurgent has a different view from a USMC colonel or a blogger-political operative like Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga. Ultimately, the standard selected involves a level of arbitrary judgment. I can say the Surge was a success because the US was not forced to execute a fighting withdrawal from Iraq as some, like William Lind, was likely to happen but that’s probably not a narrow enough standard to measure the Surge fairly.

The second part of the dispute involves methodological validity, or “rigor” in making the evaluation, which was raised by Dr. Finel. I agree with Finel that in intellectual debate, rigor is a good thing. Generally in academia, where social scientists frequently suffer from a bad case of “physics envy”, this means unleashing the quants to build a mathematical model to isolate the hypothetical effects of a particular variable. I freely admit that I am not certain how this could be done in a situation as complex as the Iraqi insurgency-counterinsurgency in 2007 and still retain enough reliability to relate to reality. The act of isolating one variable is itself a gross distortion of the reality of war. There would have to be some kind of reasonable combination of quantitative and qualitative methods here to construct an argument that is comprehensive, rigorous and valid. I think Bernard should propose what that combination might be in approximate terms.

The third part of the dispute involves the medium for the rigorous argument over the Surge. I’d suggest that, generally, a blog post is not going to cut it for reasons intrinsic to the medium. First, blog posts have an unspoken requirement of brevity due the fact that audience reads them on a computer screen. While you can say something profound in just a few words, assembling satisfactory evidentiary proofs in a scholarly sense requires more space – such as that provided by a journal article or book. Blogging is good for a fast-paced exchange of ideas, brainstorming, speculation and, on occasion, investigative journalism. It’s a viral, dynamic medium. While there are examples of bloggers rising to levels of greater intellectual depth, these are exceptions rather than the rule in the blogosphere.

This is not a dispute that is going to be resolved because the parties are unlikely to find a common ground on which they can agree to stand.

From John Robb:

JOURNAL: Mexico’s Mercado of Violence Heats Up

Open source warfare often combines market-based functions to accelerate its innovation rates and expand its operations beyond the primary players.  These markets, or bazaars (as I called them) are very efficient.  For example: the price of violence plummets as the number of entrants increases and the capacity for violence improves as the market’s participants specialize and hone their skills.  

Usually, the military/law enforcement response to the surge in the sophistication and quantity of violence is to assume some outside source of training or support rather than something that is the natural byproduct of rapid marketplace development.  

So, it’s no surprise with the growing availability of the street/prison gangs (Barrio Azteca and the Artistic Assassins) as sources of cheap, violent labor the marketplace is heating up. Note the excellent quotes below from a WaPo article on the growth of the market for contract killings: 

From Joseph Fouche at The Committee of Public Safety:

Containing Mexico

….Mexico, showing more concern for its sovereignty than their northern neighbor, has launched a brave if thus far futile attempt to win control of its territory from large and powerful narco-traffickers. Large parts of Mexico are in disorder and large parts of Mexico threaten to descend into chaos. The Mexican Army has been brought in to take over from Mexico’s corrupt local and federal police. The well-armed and well-equippednarcotraficantes have counterattacked against the police and even the Mexican Army. The government is riddled with gang informants and corrupt officials. An already uninspiring government has pulled off the unique trick of becoming even more uninspiring.

In the long run, I believe the Mexican state will win. Colombia was in a similar pickle ten years ago but eventually found enough institutional resilience to fight back and win control of most of its territory. But the road back is long and, in the meantime, Mexico’s troubles will inevitably leak north, involving and corrupting American law enforcement even more than it already is, drawing entrepreneurs on both sides of the border to profit from America and Mexico’s shared misery, and applying negative pressures on Mexican residents in the United States to cooperate with the narcotraficantes. ¿O plata o plomo? (silver or lead?) the Colombian drug gangs used to ask their victims. Profit or death, a choice will be put to many Mexican Americans in the years ahead, or as Mexico’s own Porfirio Diaz put it, ¿Pan o palo? (bread or a beating?). Illegal immigration, perhaps deliberately induced by Mexican drug gangs in an ironic echo of the strategy of  Mexico’s incumbent elites, will destabilize American local governments and drain their resources. Violence in Mexican communities in America will increase and inevitably spill over to non-Mexicans. Political correctness and diplomatic niceties will paralyze American responses.

The historical significance of the War in Iraq will be revealed: COIN on American streets. Containment, if it can be described as such, will occur house by house, block by block, city by city, state by state. The traditional American response to crisis, the inspired muddle, will produce more corruption of American institutions and society, already weakened by the last round of containment….

An ineffective or inappropriate state response will make this tactic go viral:

….Last week, at least 30 Mexicans from the town of El Porvenir walked to the border crossing post at Fort Hancock, Texas, and asked for political asylum. Ordinarily, their claim would be denied as groundless, and they would be turned back. Instead, they were taken to El Paso, where they expect to have their cases heard.

No one doubts that they have a strong claim. Their town on the Mexican side of the border is under siege by one or more drug cartels battling for control of the key border crossing. According to Mike Doyle, the chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas, one of the cartels has ordered all residents of the town of 10,000 to abandon the city within the next month.

“They came in and put up a sign in the plaza telling everyone to leave or pay with their own blood,” Doyle said. Since then there has been a steady stream of El Porvenir residents seeking safety on the American side of the border, both legally and illegally. Among them are the 30 who are seeking political asylum.

In recent days the situation in the impoverished, dusty border town has grown worse. According to Jose Franco, the superintendent of schools in Fort Hancock, the cartels have threatened to execute children in school unless parents pay 5000 pesos in protection money.

And on Wednesday night, according to Doyle, several houses in El Porvenir were set on fire, and there were reports of cars loaded with furniture leaving the town.

I saw this coming. I’m sure that so has anyone else studying insurgency or military history who stopped to give the matter five minutes of serious thought. There’s nothing magical about geographic proximity to the United States that would prevent this tactic, if applied widely and backed by lethal examples, from working. What has been done in the villages of Bosnia or Dar Fur can be done in towns of northern Mexico.

Foresight, apparently, does not include governmental officials though:

Authorities fear that an incident might spark a mass exodus by the residents of El Porvenir that might cause them all to surge across the border at once.

Doyle says there are no plans yet to set up camps for an influx of refugees. “There is just no way to plan for that,” he said. “We are waiting to see what happens. We will use the standard natural disaster procedures if it happens — the Red Cross and housing at the schools, and if it gets worse, the state and the federal government will have to step in.”

I would not bet my mortgage that the Feds would step in – at least not until the situation became an unmitigated, if entirely avoidable, humanitarian disaster. Here’s a hint: Very large numbers of people + a desert + no planning – Food – Shelter – Water = Dead children on CNN. Human physiology is the same on the Rio Grande or in Arizona as in Sudan.

“No way to plan for that”? WTF? There’s no examples of handling influxes of war refugees anywhere in world history? Give me a break. What they really meant is that this kind of contingency planning is politically unacceptable to national security officials because it would offend the Mexican government, a few members of Congress and some activist constituencies in the Democratic Party’s base.

Political Correctness in national security affairs is the autoimmune disease of our body politic.

ADDENDUM:

Mexico drug gangs turn weapons on army – latimes.com ( Hat tip to Morgan)

In coordinated attacks, gunmen in armored cars and equipped with grenade launchers fought army troops this week and attempted to trap some of them in two military bases by cutting off access and blocking highways, a new tactic by Mexico’s organized criminals.In taking such aggressive action, the traffickers have shown that they are not reluctant to challenge the army head-on and that they possess good intelligence on where the army is, how it moves and when it operates.

HG’s World – Zenpundit asks! The End of Mexico? or The End of U.S. Sovereignty?

The bigger question looms, how will this impact the sovereignty of the United States to secure our borders and ensure tranquility?

….You will note after you read the link embedded above that this blog concurred and wrote on the same issue twice last year and the year before.

….When I read each day that the cancer of lawlessness gains control like a reverse “Oil Spot Strategy” right on our southern border; and then read about this and this from the President of a country where we are spending our most precious resource to secure.

ADDENDUM II. –NEW! (hat tip to “The Warlord”):

WaPo – New adversary in US drug war: Contract killers for Mexican cartels?

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO — A cross-border drug gang born in the prison cells of Texas has evolved into a sophisticated paramilitary killing machine that U.S. and Mexican officials suspect is responsible for thousands of assassinations here, including the recent ambush and slaying of three people linked to the U.S. consulate.
The heavily tattooed Barrio Azteca gang members have long operated across the border in El Paso, dealing drugs and stealing cars. But in Ciudad Juarez, the organization now specializes in contract killing for the Juarez drug cartel. According to U.S. law enforcement officers, it may have been involved in as many as half of the 2,660 killings in the city in the past year.

Officials on both sides of the border have watched as the Aztecas honed their ability to locate targets, stalk them and finally strike in brazen ambushes involving multiple chase cars, coded radio communications, coordinated blocking maneuvers and disciplined firepower by masked gunmen in body armor. Afterward, the assassins vanish, back to safe houses in the Juarez barrios or across the bridge to El Paso.
“Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people, intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization,” said David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso division. “They work day in and day out, with a list of people to kill, and they get proficient at it.”

The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in El Paso, Joseph Arabit, said, “Our intelligence indicates that they kill frequently for a hundred dollars.”
The mayor of Juarez, José Reyes Ferriz, said that the city is honeycombed with safe houses, armories and garages with stolen cars for the assassins’ use. The mayor received a death threat recently in a note left beside a pig’s head in the city.

I take a very skeptical position toward America’s alliance with Pakistan, whose elite, to put it as charitably as I can, have a myopic policy toward the Taliban and Islamist extremist groups. That said, the DoD has in previous decades, had standing mil-mil exchanges with Pakistan’s Army that were usually better and far more productive than our diplomatic relationship with Islamabad  ( a situation that is mirrored in Latin American relations). This tradition generally involves talented Pakistani officers partaking in training and educational programs with their American counterparts or studying in our war colleges.

Going back through recent articles at SWJ leads me to recommend the following judicious analysis of the Taliban by LTC. Ehsan Mehmood Khan, currently a student at National Defense University. It’s an excellent survey of the Taliban’s strengths at formulating and implementing their political-military strategy within the context of different strategic schools of thought and it should have attracted more attention than it received when it was first published at SWJ Blog.

 A Strategic Perspective on Taliban Warfare

Taliban Warfare has occupied news headlines in the global information expanse for over a decade. It is also a topic of choice for academics and scholars. However, the subject is often viewed and analyzed in a subjective rather than objective manner. It is mostly looked at across the prism of terrorism – atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by a group of non-state, though not stateless, bandits. Seldom has a theorist or practitioner picked up the pen to draw on the military aspects of the war so as to reach correct conclusions as to how could this war come to an acceptable-by-all end. This line of thought and reasoning might hold good for a given category of politicians but the students of military strategy and those involved in kinetic operations in a counterinsurgency campaign remain bewildered on the nature of the war. There is a need to understand Taliban as people, not monster, and as warriors not gangsters. Likewise, Taliban Warfare is required to be understood in correct military perspective rather than a mere act of crime, terrorism or banditry.