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Nothing like dueling Steves (see previous post).

Dr. Steve Metz of SSI compares the surges of Obama and Bush and finds them to be cut from the same cloth. Hat tip to SWJ Blog.

How Obama”s Surge is Like Bush’s

….Ultimately, though, the Obama strategy in Afghanistan and the Bush strategy in Iraq are more alike than different–variations on a theme rather than stark alternatives. Both were attempts to give a beleaguered ally an opportunity to reverse its slide into disaster. And both were gambles. In Iraq, President Bush bet that the Maliki government would rein in sectarian violence, and that the Iraqi Security Forces were nearly ready to assume responsibility for their nation’s security. This panned out. Now President Obama is making the same bet. His strategy is contingent on the Afghan security forces, bolstered by increased assistance from the U.S. military, being able to conduct counterinsurgency on its own by 2011. Even more importantly, Obama’s plan is contingent on the Karzai government’s reining in its crushing corruption and addressing the myriad problems that the Afghan people face. If the Afghan security forces or the Karzai government are not up to the task, nothing the United States can do will matter. A surge of 20,000, 30,000, or 100,000 would be equally irrelevant. Unfortunately, only President Karzai and the Afghan security forces can determine whether the Obama strategy works. Our fate is in their hands.

Read the rest here. 

Steve has spotted a poor contingency for the administration to rely upon. Putting the war strategy on Karzai’s performance is akin to building a house on quicksand. It might look a little like wet cement but it is not going to harden into a foundation no matter how much time passes. We need to work within the parameters of our own capacities and with realistic and not utopian options.

We’d garner more goodwill giving every Afghan child a pony than by waiting for villagers to see honest officials from Kabul appear. It’d be cheaper too.

Steve Schippert, my national security amigo from Threatswatch.org, scored an op-ed in The Washington Times. He’s not happy.

Counterinsurgency incoherence: President Obama prefers an Exit Strategy to Victory

In war, and particularly in an Afghanistan counterinsurgency effort, there are always three sides to the coin: the good, the bad and the ugly. This is especially true in President Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy, finally announced to the American public Tuesday from a West Point backdrop.

The prescribed influx of much-needed American warriors onto the battlefield is clearly and rightly the good. And the good can withstand the bad, a Taliban enemy in the absence of reliable partners in the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

But the glimmering light of the good will surely be eclipsed by the ugly, an incoherence of strategy beneath the surface sheen of a surge. The devil is always in the details.

….For a counterinsurgency effort to succeed, the willing partners aren’t in Kabul or Islamabad, no matter the demands made upon each. Rather, they reside in the villages and towns spread through the provinces of Afghanistan. Winning over the local leaders will strengthen our position and ultimately lead to the Afghan people demanding better governance from Kabul.

This requires – in both word and deed – clear demonstration of presence and resolve, not in intellectual arguments for an exit strategy. There are no exits for the Afghans we seek to defend in parallel with our own security and interests.

Read the rest here.

Arm the tribes. Where there are no tribes, create loyalist paramilitaries from whatever networks are at hand for district and village self-defense. A heavily Tajik and Uzbek Afghan National Army will never fight the Taliban half as eagerly as Pushtun villagers defending their own homes and fields.

I’ll be frank, as I am short for time until Dec. 7th, so I riffed this straight from SWJ Blog  which also posted a critique by Robert Haddick here.

My reader’s digest take – the president split the difference between the myriad factions in the national security community in a way that ultimately leaves his options open. A cautious, calculating, choice unless he gave General McChrystal carte blanche on new black ops inside Pakistan. That would not be unimportant – al Qaida safe houses in Quetta and rural Baluchistan blowing up would not be insignificant.

For what it is worth, in terms of domestic politics, President Obama is well to the right of the Democratic Party on Afghanistan, at least in terms of the activist base. The self-described “progressives” are not happy tonight.

That was my two cents. Fire at will in comments section….

ADDENDUM:

Will there be a “Revolt of the Progressives?” Here is one reaction to the speech from an important leftwing blog.

I’ve enjoyed a sporadic conversation with Steve Pressfield , author of Gates of Fire and Killing Rommel, ever since he started his Tribes site. While most of our discussions had to do with COIN, tribalism, ancient history and Afghanistan, Steve is also generous with his time and advice with those who aspire to become better writers. Pressfield distilled his philosophy of writing, learned from the school of hard knocks, into a short handbook, The War of Art which I heartily recommend. Steve also features a “Writing Wednesdays” as a weekly tutorial in the writer’s craft and the acquisition of a professional mindset.

In the spirit of “Writing Wednesday”, Steve invited me to pose three questions to him based on my impressions of The War of Art. Here are my questions and Steve’s answers:

ZP: You write in The War of Art about “the muse”and Socrates‘ “heaven-sent madness”. It sounds very much like the “flow” described by creativity theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Does the intensity of that experience ever lead the artist astray ?

SP: In my experience, Mark, the writing process bounces back and forth between two poles.  One is the let-‘er-rip mode, which could be called “flow,” or “Dionysian.”  That’s the one when the Muse possesses a writer and he just goes with it.  But yes, as you suggest, it can lead you astray.  It’s the like the great ideas you have at three in the morning after two too many tequilas.  This mode has to be balanced by a saner-head mode, which sometimes to me almost feels like a different person–an editor, a reviser.  That’s really when you put yourself in imagination in the place of the reader and ask yourself, as you’re reading the stuff that this “other guy” wrote: “Does this make any sense?  Is this any good?  Have I got it in the right place, in the right form?  Should I cut it, expand it, modify it, dump it entirely.”  Then you become cold-blooded and professional.  You get ruthless with your own work.  This is the time, I think, when “formula” wisdom can help, when you can ask yourself questions like, “What is my inciting incident?” or “What is my Act Two mid-point.”  Not when you’re in the flow, or you’ll censor yourself and second-guess yourself.  But now, when you’re rationally evaluating what you produced when you were in flow.

This back-and-forthing, I imagine, would be true in any artistic or entrepreneurial venture.  It’s great to let it rip and really get down some wild, skatting jazz riffs.  But then we have to come back and ask ourselves, “Is this working for the audience?  Is this working for the work itself?”

ZP: Amateurs reach a tipping point where they “Turn pro”. Is turning professional more from innate character or from the lessons of experience?

SP: Some people are born “pro.”  I have two friends, identical twins, who are both tremendous producers of excellent work and they’ve never suffered a minute of Resistance in their lives.  The lucky bastards.  For the rest of us though (at least this is my experience), only after many painful hard knocks … really when it becomes simply too excruciating to continue living as an amateur (and thereby suffering the agonies of never completing anything, always screwing up, forever feeling inadequate in our own eyes and just plain not respecting ourselves) do we finally, out of sheer emotional self-preservation, say to ourselves, “This crap has gotta stop!  We gotta get our act together!”

ZP: Artists run straight into hierarchies, filled with gatekeepers, between ourselves and a goal. Go through or go around?

SP: There’s an axiom in Hollywood that if you write a truly great script, it will not go unrecognized.  I think this is true.  What I mean by that is that gatekeepers can be our friends.  They can open gates as well as close them.  In fact, I vote for jettisoning the term “gatekeeper.”  It’s negative and self-defeating–and it’s an insult, I think, to the editors, agents, publishers and development executives whose agenda is not to exclude us, the artists.  In fact they’d like nothing more than to discover fresh talent, a hot new manuscript, a great pitch or biz proposal.  In my own experience, I got shot down again and again when my stuff wasn’t ready and wasn’t good.  But once I had done the work and elevated my material to the professional level, I found open doors and helping hands.

All that is not to say that “going around” can’t be a good idea too.  Look at Seth Godin, who’s the poster boy for damning the torpedoes and taking his stuff straight to the marketplace with incredible success.  In my own career though–now that you’ve made me think about it, Mark–I realize I’ve always gone the traditional route.  And the “gatekeepers” I’ve met have become, almost within exception, great friends and allies–and I’ve wound up helping them, in other ways, almost as much as they’ve helped me.

Thanks Steve!

If you have visited SWJ Blog today then you have already seen that novelist and blogger Steve Pressfield is running an important paper by SF Major Jim Gant at his Tribes site:

One Tribe At A Time #4: The Full Document at last! 

I’ve been promising for several weeks to have a free downloadable .pdf of One Tribe At A Time. Finally it’s here. My thanks to our readers for their patience. On a personal note, I must say that it gives me great pleasure to offer this document in full, not only because of my great respect for Maj. Jim Gant, who lived and breathed this Tribal Engagement idea for years, but for the piece itself and for the influence I hope it will have within the U.S. military and policymaking community.

One Tribe At A Time is not deathless prose. It’s not a super-pro Beltway think tank piece. What it is, in my opinion, is an idea whose time has come, put forward by an officer who has lived it in the field with his Special Forces team members-and proved it can be done. And an officer, by the way, who is ready this instant to climb aboard a helicopter to go back to Afghanistan and do it again

Here is Major Gant’s PDF:

One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan

This matters because the Afghanisatan debate has been too much a COIN or CT or COIN/CT Hybrid discussion and this paper puts forward a strategy option based upon decentralization, which given the strongly localist tradition of Afghani politics, should have been on the table from the inception.  The nation-building, NGO, IGO community love to think in terms of “top down” or “capital city outward” but not every country has that kind of political tradition embedded in their national culture.