zenpundit.com

Fouad Ajami’s The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon was among the first books I read about matters Islamic, and the close parallel between the vanishing of Musa al-Sadr and the vanishing — or, more properly speaking, Ghayba or occultation — of the Twelfth Imam or Mahdi struck me forcibly at the time.

I don’t have my copy to hand, so I can’t tell how strongly Ajami himself made the comparison — but I was certainly not alone. Daniel Pipes, in his review of Ajami’s book writes:

What made the Imam’s vanishing so significant is that it exactly fit the millennial expectations of Shiism, a faith premised on the disappearance of righteous leaders and their reappearance at the end of time.

And now it may be — the report has yet to be confirmed — that Imam Musa is back among us.

@rallaf is an Associate Fellow at London’s Chatham House.

*

The mind sees one thing, which reminds it of something else. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and it depends on the recognition of pattern, or you might say, parallelism.

The return of Imam Musa would be significant not merely for his admirers, not only for what he might have to say or what role — now aged 82, after 30 years in prison — he might yet play, but also, I suspect, for the vivid premonition of the Mahdi his return might stir…

National security, or some of the inside-baseball politics thereof, is shifting.

Within hours of the polls closing and buried in the noise over politics:

Control of intelligence budget will shift

NEW ORLEANS – Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Tuesday that he has won a “conceptual agreement” to remove the $53 billion national intelligence budget from Pentagon control and place it under his purview by 2013, as part of an effort to enhance his authority over the U.S. intelligence community.

“To me, it’s a win-win,” he told an audience at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation conference here. Clapper’s deal with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would take “$50 billion off the top line” of the Pentagon budget and give the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “more authority and oversight” of the budget. The $27 billion military intelligence budget would remain under the Defense Department, Clapper said.

….With his trademark wry humor, he also said he is bringing back “a certain unnamed intelligence officer from Afghanistan” who wrote a report critical of intelligence gathering there; this officer will help improve intelligence sharing among federal agencies and with state and local agencies. “Hey buddy,” Clapper quipped, “you can help me fix it.” The “buddy” is Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who wrote his report for the Center for a New American Security. He will become an assistant director at the ODNI

The DNI, who garnered a colossal $ 50 billion in budgetary authority over the IC that formerly resided with Defense, gave up turf on “cybersecurity”, seen as a future gold mine by Pentagon contractors.

It is noteworthy, that among the Democratic fallen in the House yesterday was Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a true expert in military affairs with a passion for strategy. Exiting with him are three other moderate Southern Democrats, putting the minority Democrats on Armed Services most likely under the leftist Pelosi ally, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, as new GOP members take over.

Presumably, this intel agreement moves oversight over a vast chunk of sensitive IC activity away from Armed Services to the House Intelligence Committee. Hard to say now exactly to what extent. It would also take defending these programs off of Secretary Gate’s plate when the budget knives come out and into the lap of the DNI and the White House.

Finally, I will add that CNAS is emerging as the equivalent of the RAND of the 21st century.

Andrew Exum on negotiation in AfPakland in Foreign Policy:

Smoke and Mirrors in Kabul

….But Afghans are perfectly comfortable talking while still fighting. So too, at least in practice, are the United States and its allies: In insurgencies from Vietnam to Northern Ireland, we have negotiated with insurgents while combat operations were ongoing. In the American public’s mind, however, wars take place sequentially: First, you fight; second, you negotiate a settlement. The word “negotiations” conjures up hopes for an end to the conflict in the minds of Americans and other Westerners — when all that really might be occurring is another round of jockeying for position between Afghanistan’s warring political forces.

….All that, to make matters worse, assumes the insurgent groups are independent actors. The reality, though, is that negotiations between the insurgent groups and the government in Kabul will only go so far as the Pakistani security services allow. Some Western analysts took heart in Pakistan’s decision in February to arrest Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. At the time, however, the arrest of Mullah Baradar, who was in negotiations with the government in Kabul, was interpreted by the Taliban rank and file to be a stark warning to those who would negotiate without the permission of the Pakistani government, under whose patronage and protection the Taliban has operated east of the Durand Line since 2005. Today it is widely accepted that this was indeed the case and that Pakistan deliberately thwarted negotiations between the Quetta Shura Taliban and the government in Kabul to serve its own parochial interests. Since that event, there is no sign that Pakistan’s powerful military has taken a softer line on negotiations between the Taliban and the government in Kabul.

Exum wrote a good op-ed. Go read it.

That said, the above paragraph makes me want to ask Andrew why the United States is not negotiating directly with Pakistan/ISI instead of wasting valuable time kabuki-ing around with plausibly deniable and expendable members of proxy groups over which Pakistan holds a demonstrated veto?
 
What is particularly curious in this situation is that  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in his memoir From the Shadows, made laudatory remarks about George Schultz (with whom Gates bumped heads) as “the toughest secretary of State I knew” who was willing to negotiate with the Soviets in one part of the world while bleeding them in another ( paraphrasing here). A lesson from history that bears revisiting.

Pakistan is our real adversary in Afghanistan and the party with the power to actually make agreements that stick. Negotiations 101: bargaining should not take place with powerless intermediaries.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen

I purchased a copy of The Accidental Guerrilla, intending to read it last summer but, being buried under my own academic course work, I was forced to put it aside until recently. I am not finished yet but I can say that Col. Kilcullen has written a seminal, if idiosyncratic, work on the theory and practice of counterinsurgency – no doubt why some reviewers found The Accidental Guerrilla be difficult book to read, one that “…could be like a junior high school student’s attempting “Ulysses.” Or were aggravated by Kilcullen’s format through which he enunciated a more nuanced understanding of the war and COIN than they found politically tolerable. Most readers in this corner of the blogosphere  will find The Accidental Guerrilla an intellectually stimulating book from an author well grounded in the realities of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is the leading theorist of counterinsurgency today.

I would like to take a look at one section where Dr. Kilcullen discusses the merits of “presence” vs. “raiding” in the context of road-building operations in the Kunar and Korengal vallies of Afghanistan by American troops under, successively, LTC. Chris Cavoli and LTC. Bill Ostlund [p. 96]:

Cavoli contrasts this “permanent-presence” methodology with the “repetitive raiding” that has characterized operations at some other times and places. He argues that persistent presence is essentially a “counterpunching” strategy that relies on a cycle of defense and counterattack, in which the presence of the road and Coalition forces protecting and interacting with the population draws the enemy into attacking defended areas, causing him to come to the population and the government – the opposite of the “search and destroy” approach in which security forces “sweep” the countryside looking for the enemy within the population, as if for a needle in a haystack, and often destroy the haystack to find the needle. More particularly, search and destroy operations tend to create a popular backlash and contribute to the “antibody response” that generates large numbers of accidental guerrillas and pushes the population and the enemy together. The persistent-presence method avoids this.

My Comments: 

The context that Kilcullen is writing here is a tactical one but the conceptual conflict of “presence vs. raiding” scales up easily to one of strategy and engages ( or should engage) consideration of how you want to position yourself at the mental and moral levels of war. Colonel  John Boyd, in Patterns of Conflict recommended principles to create strategies and tactics that would: 

• Morally-mentally-physically isolate adversary from allies or any outside support as well as isolate elements of adversary or adversaries form on another and overwhelm them by being able to penetrate and splinter their moral-mental-physical being at any and all levels.
• Pump-up our resolve, drain-away adversary resolve, and attract the uncommitted.
• Subvert, disorient, disrupt, overload, or seize adversary’s vulnerable, yet critical, connections, centers, and activities that provide cohesion and permit coherent observation-orientation-decision-action in order to dismember organism and isolate remnants for absorption or mop-up.
• Operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops, or get inside his mind-time-space, to create a tangle of threatening and/or non-threatening events/efforts as well as repeatedly generate mismatches between those events/efforts adversary observes, or anticipates, and those he must react to, to survive

Abstractly, Kilcullen’s “persistent-presence” has superior strategic qualities – it isolates and demoralizes the enemy and daunts the latently hostile while connecting our side to the population and “pumping up” the morale of allies and sympathizers. The initiative is seized and control of the battleground is determined. Most of the time, this is an advantage, so long as the chosen ground is also tactically defensible, unlike, say at Dien Bien Phu. When Julius Caesar was carrying out his conquest of Gaul, he often divided his legions for their winter quarters, even though this entailed some risk, because doing so reinforced the political spine of Rome’s local allies in tribes of uncertain loyalty and intimidated the malcontents or secured the population against  raiding by still hostile Gauls or Germans from across the Rhine. Caesar did a lot better in Gaul than did the French in Indochina.

The problem, is not Kilcullen’s theory of COIN, which seems to me to be solidly based upon his empirical observation and deep experience in counterinsurgency warfare. Nor is tactical execution by American troops the issue either; while the US/ISAF have had successes and failures, the principles of COIN seem to be widely understood, if not always perfectly implemented. The dilemma is at the intermediate level of “state building”, one Kilcullen’s primary strategic goals in Afghanistan, that is supposed to support the progress made in the villages by COIN operations.  

On COIN specifically, Boyd wrote:

Counter-guerrilla campaign  

Action

• Undermine guerrilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of people-rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.*
• Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate grievances and connect government with grass roots.*
• Infiltrate guerrilla movement as well as employ population for intelligence about guerrilla plans, operations, and organization.
• Seal-off guerrilla regions from outside world by diplomatic, psychological, and various other activities that strip-away potential allies as well as by disrupting or straddling communications that connect these regions with outside world.
• Deploy administrative talent, police, and counter-guerrilla teams into affected localities and regions to: inhibit guerrilla communication, coordination and movement; minimize guerrilla contact with local inhabitants; isolate their ruling cadres; and destroy their infrastructure.
• Exploit presence of above teams to build-up local government as well as recruit militia for local and regional security in order to protect people from the persuasion and coercion efforts of the guerrilla cadres and their fighting units.
• Use special teams in a complementary effort to penetrate guerrilla controlled regions. Employ (guerrillas’ own) tactics of reconnaissance, infiltration, surprise hit-and-run, and sudden ambush to: keep roving bands off-balance, make base areas untenable, and disrupt communication with outside world.
• Expand these complementary security/penetration efforts into affected region after affected region in order to undermine, collapse, and replace guerrilla influence with government influence and control.
• Visibly link these efforts with local political/economic/social reform in order to connect central government with hopes and needs of people, thereby gain their support and confirm government legitimacy.

Idea

• Break guerrillas’ moral-mental-physical hold over the population, destroy their cohesion, and bring about their collapse via political initiative that demonstrates moral legitimacy and vitality of government and by relentless military operations that emphasize stealth/fast-tempo/fluidity-of-action and cohesion of overall effort.

___________

* If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides! 

Arguably, we cannot realize this kind of political program without a) significantly altering the political culture of Afghanistan which is historically exceptionally hostile to an efficient, centralized state, and b) getting a better set of clients to run the state. Or, c) changing our objectives to ones that are realistic for our time frame, resources and national security interests.

Hamid Karzai is our more humane version of Barbrak Karmal, equally incompetent but more corrupt. Frankly, having stolen the last election and forfeited whatever legitimacy he had in Afghan eyes, Karzai is now a net negative on our efforts and by extending the reach of his government, we alienate every villager and tribesman with whom his officials come into contact. If we are serious, then we should either abandon state-building in Afghanistan and concentrate all our efforts on localities until we secure al Qaida’s destruction in neighboring Pakistan or we should remove Karzai from power and find more effective clients. We need to choose.

If a piece of territory, be it province or nation-state is of no particular intrinsic value to the national interests of the United States, it becomes hard to justify, except upon exigent humanitarian grounds – say, intervening to stop a genocide – a “permanent-presence” COIN operation that lasts for years. It might be better in such places if determined enemies, who are likely to be state supported or at least tolerated non-state actors, faced swiftly dispatched “repetitive raiding” but in a more robust form more properly termed a “punitive expedition“. The the infrastructure that makes the territory militarily useful is systematically and thoroughly destroyed, along with any enemy combatants who assemble to contest the field. Raids, other than neatly targeted assassinations, should not be cruise missile pinpricks but destruction on a scale that General Sherman would find recognizable. 

Is state-building in Afghanistan and appeasing Pakistan’s military elite our primary national objectives in this war?

If our interest in a regime’s survival is vital, then by all means dig in with a “persistent-presence”. If not, then scale down to a more appropriate level of response.

ADDENDUM:

Dr. Kilcullen has a new book out, Counterinsurgency.

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.