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Are all the strategic objectives in Afghanistan clearly defined and acheivable by military force?

Of the operational activities that might support our strategic objectives that require civilian expertise, why in nine years have we not sent adequate civilian agency representation and funding?

If military operations in Afghanistan require a single commander, why does the civilian side of the COIN campaign have authority divided between at least a half-dozen senior officials without anyone having a deliverable “final say” reporting to the President?

If Pakistan’s “partnership” is officially a requirement for strategic success (and it is), why would Pakistan be a “partner” in helping stabilize an independent regime in Afghanistan that would terminate Pakistan’s ability to use Afghanistan as “strategic depth”?

Is the Taliban more important to our national security than is al Qaida?

If we can’t get at al Qaida after nine long years to finish them off, why is that?

If Pakistan’s ISI is sponsoring the Haqqani Network, the Quetta Shura Afghan Taliban and other extremist jihadi groups, doesn’t that make the ISI as a critical component – the strategic “brains” – of the Enemy’s center of gravity?

Shouldn’t we be targeting the Enemy center of gravity if we are to acheive our strategic objectives? (If we are going to be squeamish and pants-wetting about that, how about the retired and bearded “plausibly deniable” ex-ISI guys running around FATA as “advisers” and fixers to jihadi and tribal factions?)

Should we be sending the Enemy’s strategic brains billions of dollars annually?

For that matter, is the size of our own logistical tail effectively funding the guys in black turbans shooting at American soldiers and burying IEDs? Would less be more?

Can we ever gain the initiative if the Enemy has safe sanctuaries – oh, has anyone noticed that Pakistan has twice as many Pushtuns as Afghanistan and how does that affect the odds for winning a purist COIN campaign….in 18 months?

Are COIN warfare and proxy warfare the same thing to be treated with the same policy?

If we assume the Enemy has read FM 3-24, shouldn’t we make certain that a considerable percentage of our tactical moves in AfPak are not coming out of a “cookbook”? Is the element of surprise something we can use, or is it considered unsporting these days in warfighting doctrine?

Given that most of Afghanistan’s GDP is derived from US military spending, how is the Karzai regime going to afford an ANA of the requisite size that COIN theory requires for an operational handoff at our arbitrary political deadline of 18 months?

And on a related note, if the Karzai regime in it’s entirety was suddenly frozen in carbonite like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, how much more efficient and popular would the Afghan government instantly become with ordinary Afghans compared to how it is now?

If we can’t work with Karzai why can’t we work with somebody else? It’s not like he was, you know, actually elected 😉

If political authorities are not effectively linking  Ends, Ways and Means – some old-fashioned gadflys call this state of affairs “not having a strategy” – and are unlikely to acheive our objectives and said political authorities will not consider changing the objectives, what practical actions can we take in the next 18 months to seize the initiative,  maximize the harm inflicted on our enemies, ensure help for our friends and the furtherance of our own interests?

This strikes me as an exceedingly unwise media strategy for General McChrystal:

(AP)  WASHINGTON (AP) – The top U.S. war commander in Afghanistan told an interviewer he felt betrayed by the man the White House chose to be his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.An article out this week in “Rolling Stone” magazine depicts Gen. Stanley McChrystal as a lone wolf on the outs with many important figures in the Obama administration and unable to convince even some of his own soldiers that his strategy can win the war.A band of McChrystal’s profane, irreverent aides are quoted mocking Vice President Joe Biden and Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.McChrystal himself is described by an aide as “disappointed” in his first Oval Office meeting with an unprepared President Barack Obama. The article says that although McChrystal voted for Obama, the two failed to connect from the start. Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops.“I found that time painful,” McChrystal said in the article, on newsstands Friday. “I was selling an unsellable position.”Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House’s troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.

The profile, titled “The Runaway General” emerged from several weeks of interviews and travel with McChrystal’s tight circle of aides this spring….

Jesus.

If this story sounds eerily familiar, it is.

The general has a reputation as a straight shooter and a workaholic commander who is 100 % committed to his mission. Anyone even casually paying attention to Afghanistan is aware of the strain between McChrystal’s HQ and the US Embassy in Kabul under Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, himself a retired lieutenant general with tours of duty in Afghanistan in charge of state and military building programs. The leaking of a confidential cable from the Ambassaador that was extremely critical of US strategy under McChrystal most likely poisoned their relationship for good ( though the leak could easily have been from State Department, White House or NSC officials eager to engage in slimy intrigue and ingratiate themselves with the MSM, rather than from the Embassy itself).

I also agree that the timetable and resources that McChrystal must labor under have been deliberately mismatched to the strategic objectives by the Obama administration to a degree best described as “asinine”.

That said, frustrated, straight shooting, honest to a fault and zealous Army commanding generals should not be encouraged to vent their grievances on the record to reporters. Especially about their civilian political superiors. Good things are not going to happen.

Still less should their intensely loyal inner circle and brain trust staff officers come across as “A band of McChrystal’s profane, irreverent aides ” mocking the Vice-President of the United States. While there’s no shortage of things to mock about Joe Biden, active-duty military officers should not be doing it in major media publications. These are the guys who should be running interference for their boss with the press, not making him look worse.

I have sympathy for General McChrystal. There are people in DC who do not have to be accountable as he does, but possess enough authority to get in his way, demand information, waste his people’s time, leak criticism, impose restrictions or whisper in ears and they do not have to accept any responsibility whatsoever for the results of their machinations. It must be intensely aggravating.

But going out and handing these folks knives ain’t smart.

ADDENDUM:

Danger Room reports McChrystal has issued an apology.

ADDENDUM II.

SWJ has a round-up.

ADDENDUM III.

Rolling Stone – The Runaway General

ADDENDUM IV.

Tom Barnett says this interview is not like what Admiral Fallon did

ADDENDUM V.

Dr. James Joyner is reporting this morning that General McChrystal is out after his meeting with President Obama.

WAR by Sebastian Junger

I just finished reading my courtesy review copy of WAR by journalist and author Sebastian Junger, on his firsthand observation of the war against the Taliban in the Korengal Valley, waged by the soldiers of the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company. I cannot say that I found WAR to be an enjoyable read – though Junger is a polished writer – a more accurate description is that WAR is powerful, thought-provoking, at times moving and, ultimately, a very disturbing account of the war in Afghanistan.

Junger, whose previous works include The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea and Fire, was embedded along with photojournalist Tim Hetherington, with 2nd Platoon during their COIN campaign in Korengal, a mission that resulted in some of the bloodiest firefights and highest American casualties of the Afghan war and withdrawal from a rugged valley sometimes known as “Afghanistan’s Afghanistan”. The Korengalis, related to the people of Nuristan, are noted for their xenophobic hostility to outsiders, which was directed at times toward the Taliban as well as Americans. Junger reports that the US only succeeded in controling a quarter of Korengal and contesting roughly half of the six mile by six mile valley with the Taliban and local “accidental guerrillas”motivated by money, excitement, religious zeal or revenge to attack the Americans.

WAR is not an especially “political” or “policy” book discussing the war from some remove. Junger’s primary interest are the men of second platoon at Restrepo, an outpost dedicated to the memory of a valorous medic who had been killed. O’Byrne, Anderson, Stitcher (who has “INFIDEL” tattooed across his chest), Jones, Moreno, Bobby to name just a few soldiers Junger interviewed and witnessed how they lived in the moment. That moment could comprise the adrenaline high of combat, agonies of grief, anticipatory tension before the next ambush, the angst of boredome behind the wire and especially the iron bonds of brotherhood in a small unit tempered by fire.

What comes through in War, aside from the extremity of the terrain and the uncertainty of ever-present danger, men being shot without warning by the enemy, even in Restrepo, is how very few men are actually involved in combat. Battle Company is the vaunted “tip of the spear” but when only a few hundred men were taking a wildly disproportionate percentage of all combat contacts in a nation the size of Afghanistan ( Junger cites 20 %) the spear begins to look more like a tiny sewing needle connected to a Leviathan-like noncombatant-administrative tail, surreally outfitted with fast food courts.

There’s a peculairly granular quality to Junger’s WAR, the grittiness of the squalid conditions in which soldiers live, the depths of their physical sufferings and mental exhaustion, their primal fear of letting their comrades down in battle and being responsible for getting friends killed. There are also epiphanies of bravery and carrying the day against the odds, men living who but for chance would have died on some rock strewn hill and lusty celebration after the deaths of their enemies. The sort of politically incorrect, atavistic, jubilation that is culturally frowned upon by people who are comfortably safe and far away.

What disturbed me most about WAR was not just how few Americans are carrying the burden of the combat in Afghanistan but how disconnected these few soldiers and their sacrifices are from the rest of the military itself. Junger’s epilogue with O’Byrne, a fine soldier who is a major figure in the book, and his inability to readjust and shift from the battlefield to garrison or civilian life is deeply depressing. “The Army’s trying to kill me” O’Byrne declared, finding a momentary refuge in alcohol, but little help from the military bureaucracy.

Junger attempted to show the war in Korengal as seen from the perspective of the privates, NCO’s and junior officers of Battle Company who lived and died there, from his interviews and his own participation in their patrols as they came under fire or as they gingerly parleyed with Korengali elders in isolated villages. Eschewing theory or a historian’s search for causation, Junger attempts to let the soldiers words and actions drive the narrative.

Sebastian Junger’s WAR is raw and undecorated by sentiment.

From the Strategy Conference…..

I continue to be impressed with Dr. John Mackinlay‘s  The Insurgent Archipelago . You might not agree with everything Mackinlay has to say on insurgency or COIN theory but his book is deeply thought-provoking the way The Pentagon’s New Map, Brave New War or The Genius of the Beast are thought-provoking books. As a reader, you highlight. You underline. You scribble praise, condemnation or some relevant factoid in the margins.

This is going to be an influential text.

In Mackinlay’s view, America and the West have failed to adequately understand what and whom they are fighting in the War on Terror. The phenomenon that has eluded them is that alongside older, Maoist iterations of guerrilla warfare, the cutting edge of insurgency has evolved up into a decentralized, networked, partly virtual, Post-Maoism. General staffs, intelligence services, national security officials and diplomats remained hypnotized by the Maoist model that was so frequently aped in the 60’s and 70’s by secular leftists and Third World Marxists in Vietnam, Algeria and subsaharan Africa.

Some excerpts, followed by my analysis, which you are free to disagree with or just put in your own two cents about in the comments section:

Mackinlay writes [p. 164]:

….NATO governments and a majority of their security staff did not recognize post-Maoism as a form of insurgency either. Although they lived in a post-industrial era and directly experienced its social consequences, they dealt with post-9/11 insurgent phenomenon from a Maoist perspective; they neither saw it nor engaged it as a global movement that involved a greater array of dispersed supporters. They also failed to recognize it as an insurgency.

Very true. Even though if the organizational behavior of al Qaida and its affiliated movements had taken place within one nation-state, Cold War era graybeard officials and international law NGO activists of 2001-2004 vintage would have called them a guerilla movement; that al Qaida’s activities took place across many international borders seriously confounded them in an intellectual sense. Obviously, they must be common criminals, no different than junkies who stick-up a 7-11, to be properly mirandized! Call the FBI and have OJ’s dream team ready when we make an arrest! Or Osama is a state-sponsored terrorists of Saddam! No, wait, of Iran!

And so it went, and still goes on to this day as the USG contorts itself into a legal pretzel  in order to never have proper war crimes trials or execute convicted war criminals. Or even admit they are “Islamists” motivated by a reified ideology (Mackinlay’s term “Post-Maoist” may soon come in to vogue at the NSC).

America is like the Gulliver of COIN, bound fast by the cords of politically correct nonsense.

….Because few academics had explained insurgency as a multidisciplinary, as opposed to a narrowly military, process they failed to see how their own populations were vulnerable to insurgent movements, and that when it happened to them it would not look like its classic Maoist antecedent. Countering insurgency required a counterintuitive effort and making this intellectual leap was problematic when military planners had such an idee fixe of insurgency as eternally Maoist form.

I interpret this paragraph as Mackinlay blending the Euro-Anglo-American state of affairs, but it does not apply equally to all, in my view.

Humanities and social science academics are simply not as good at or as intellectually comfortable with true multidisciplinary thinking as are their counterparts in the hard sciences. Nor are the social science faculty particularly friendly, in most universities, toward the US national security and intelligence communities or the Pentagon (though I suspect the situation in 2010 is better than in 2000 or 1990). Nor are American universities oversupplied with military historians or scholars of strategic studies.

Academia, however is not at fault as much as Mackinlay indicates. Even if we had Clausewitz collaborating with Ibn Khaldun and Marshall Mcluhan to write our white papers, the USG interagency process is fundamentally broken and could not execute their recommendations. State is grossly underfunded, institutionally disinclined to turn out FSO’s in the mold of Errol Flynn and is in need of a systemic overhaul. USIA and USAID need to be reborn as heavyweight players. The CIA has problems almost as severe as does State and does not play well with others, including the DNI. There is no “whole of government” approach present that could approximate an “operational jointness”, so presidents increasingly rely on the military as the hammer for all nails ( the military may not do the right thing but at least it does something, as the saying goes).

Mackinlay writes [p. 164-165]

….By 2008 the most up-to-date doctrine was still stuck in expeditionary form, in other words focused on a campaign epicentre that lay in a particular overseas territory and its traditional, or at best modernising, society. The following characteristics that distinguished post-Maoism had not been engaged:

• The involvement of multiple populations which challenged the concept of a center of gravity
• Mass communications and connectivity
• The migration factor
• The virtual factor
• The centrality of propaganda of the deed in the insurgent’s concept of operations
• The bottom-up direction of activist energy
• Absence of plausible end-state objectives in the insurgent’s manifesto

Mackinlay gets much right here but some things wrong – and what is incorrect is arguably quite important – but as an indictment of the failure of the West to adequately address globalized insurgency, it is spot on in many respects.

First, in regard to Mackinlay’s attack on Clausewitzian theory, I am not persuaded that a “center of gravity” for our enemies does not exist or apply so much as its form is not a particularly convenient one (i.e. -easily targetable) or politically comfortable for our elites to acknowledge.

We could conceive of al Qaida’s CoG being Bin Laden’s inner circle hiding somewhere in Pakistan – probably Rawalpindi – that we do not yet dare to strike. Or we could say that the CoG is al Qaida’s “plausible promise” that the “far enemy” of radical Islamism, the US, can be brought down, as was the USSR, by being bled to death by drawing America into endless and expensive wars. Or that the CoG is al Qaida’s peculair, Qutbist-inspired, takfiri, revolutionary Islamist ideology. Our elites recoil from openly confronting any of those possible scenarios but that does not mean that a CoG is not present, only that we lack the will to attack their CoG head-on.

US COIN doctrine is expeditionary – essentially internal COIN for America ended with the Compromise of 1877 and the end of three centuries of “Indian Wars”. Political correctness, not doctrinal rigidity, precludes recognizing Islamist lone wolf terrorists like Maj. Hasan as anything other than mentally ill spree killers, no different from the school shooters at Columbine or Andrew Cunanan. The USG would not recognize an insurgency in the states as an insurgency even if it had flags, a government-in-exile, an air force and armored divisions. Even the capture of verified and admitted members of al Qaida inside the United States, who are covered by a properly authorized AUMF, causes an epidemic of pants-wetting among the elite, if we proceed to try them with military tribunals or commissions.

We do not have a political elite as a national leadership who are prepared to entertain the full strategic ramifications of the existence of a “globalized insurgency”. They do not ignore it completely – the COIN doctrine articulated best by David Kilcullen and John Nagl is to de-fang al Qaida as a strategic threat by isolating it from the “Accidental Guerrilla” groups whose Islamist concerns are parochial and national in character rather than global. So, al Qaida is seen by the American national security community as a de facto globalized insurgency with a reach that extends everywhere – except of course inside the United States. Unless we intercept foreign Islamist terrorists crossing the border or boarding a plane, any violent actions committed here resembling terrorism are purely a law enforcement issue and must be wholly unrelated to Islamist extremism.

It’s a bizarrely illogical strategic worldview – and I fear its’ ostrich-like mentality has already spread from War on Terror policy to matters related to the empirically demonstrable, but continuously downplayed, spillover effects of Mexico’s growing narco-insurgency, where high officials prohibit unvarnished “truth telling” from practitioners in the field from reaching the ears of key decision-makers. It’s no way to run a war – or a country – unless the intent is to lose the former by systematically crippling the ability to respond of the latter.

Mackinlay’s characteristics of “Post-Maoism” strike directly and the political and methodological nerve clusters of a Western elite whose power and status are invested in hierarchical, bureaucratic, institutional structures that are defended from urgent demands to reform, in part, by their ideology of political correctness.