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Exum has some interesting reads on his desk and in his kindle that readers might find intriguing.

 Andrew is, it would seem, a closet linguist of the vanished, old-school, variety that study real languages instead of investigating the neurocognitive building blocks of language:

Traveling and Reading and Travel Reading

1. Someone sent me a complimentary paper copy of Greg Gause’s new book on the international relations of the Persian Gulf states, and I cannot think of a better introduction to the region. I have only met Gause once, back in 2007, and thought him both really smart and also kind of a smart-ass. So naturally, I liked him. I also have a reading packet prepared by the CSIS, which is leading this trip, crammed full with useful CRS reports and such.

2. I convinced the team here at CNAS to buy me a paper copy of Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays for Its Global Role and Safety at Home, which readers of this blog will remember I’m excited about. Cindy Williams and Gordon Adams are both really smart and write about something — the national security budgeting process — that is rarely understood by policy geeks like me but really important.

3. I’m also about halfway through an advance copy of Megan Stack’s beautifully written new memoir, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War. More on this book later.

4. On the Kindle, I have two new books on Lebanon written by two journalists I very much respect. Both David Hirst and Michael Young have taken the time to tutor me on occassion during my time in Lebanon, and I answered a few technical military questions for David when he was writing his book. Their two books are, respectively, Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East and The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle. You can read a glowing review of the former here and a glowing review of the latter here.

5. Also on the Kindle are two books that have nothing to do with the Middle East: Louis Begley’s Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

6. Finally, I downloaded the ESV Study Bible and Phil Ryken’s commentaries on Ecclesiastes alongside Tarif Khalidi’s new translation of the Qur’an. That may seem like an odd combination of books, but both Ryken and Khalidi have been mentors* of sorts through the years: Ryken was a pastor at the church I attended in college, and Khalidi is, well, my scholarly hero. Despite his wicked sense of humor and light-hearted spirit, Khalidi is the most intimidating intellectual I have ever met. His command of English, Arabic, Greek and Latin is simply awe-inspiring, especially for someone like me who struggles with all four, and his new translation of the Qur’an is a remarkable achievement. I’m not about to get into the different ways in which Protestant Christians and Muslims approach their respective holy texts, but I will say that I someday hope to approach at least the New Testament with the erudition with which Khalidi tackles the Qur’an. Really impressive. Khalidi’s humility** and interest in younger scholars also sets an example for others to follow.

Just heard about this not-yet-released film, RESTREPO tonight. It looks to be quite powerful.

At present I do not have any background information as to the storyline but encourage you to visit the site and take a look, and form your own opinion ( Hat tip to Kanani). Feel free to sound off on the comments section.

RESTREPO: One Platoon. One Year. One Valley

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.

Matt Armstrong has a must-read, incisive, take on the manipulatively edited propaganda popularly known as the “Wikileaks video”:

The true fiasco exposed by Wikileaks

….The Wikileaks release apparently caught the Defense Department flatfooted. Even today, three days after its release, there is largely silence from DOD, save a brief public comment and a link to documents and photos at http://www.centcom.mil/ (hidden in plain sight through the link labeled “Link to FOIA documents on July 2007 New Baghdad Combat Action“). Don’t bother going to http://www.defense.mil/ as that site, and hence the Pentagon, has nothing readily available either. The April 6 briefing pack did not include the explanatory imagery and there is no news release explanation the Department’s position. It’s as if nothing happened. When asked about the situation, senior official at DOD pointed me to the “great piece” in The New York Times explaining how trained soldiers view and operate in these events differently than civilians. This, however, misses the point.

Despite the vigorous discussion online and over the air whether there was a violation of the laws of war, the old belief that if you ignore a problem it will go away continues to dominate.

Read the rest here.

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.