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On Pakistan policy, credit where credit is due: the Obama administration has found the stones to respond to evidence of systemic and brazen bad faith on the part of our Pakistani “allies” and show their displeasure by witholding $ 800 million dollars in aid from Islamabad. There are already squeals of Pakistani unhappiness at this modest decrease of aid that all too frequently gets diverted to preparing to make war on India or, for that matter, on American soldiers and Marines. Former dictator General Pervez Musharraf, who cannot go back home to Rawalpindi for fear his brother officers will assassinate him, told a well appointed crowd in Houston that the aid cut “will be disastrous….if Pakistan is weakened, how will it fight terrorism?“.

Cynics might note that we could replace “fight” with “fund” in the former Pakistani ruler’s question and achieve greater historical accuracy.

On Afghanistan, it might be advisable for the new American commander, Lieutenant General John Allen, in carrying out his extremely difficult mission of “Afghanization” and “punitive raiding” the Taliban, to first ponder history and  “Remember Herat“.

In 1979, before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the entire garrison of Soviet advisers in Herat was slaughtered, including the dependent women and children, by an angry mob that was aided by the local Afghan Communist Army units who, led by Ismail Khan, conveniently revolted and turned on their Russian allies. If British military history is more to Lt. General Allen’s taste, the Afghans massacred British garrisons in Kabul twice in the 19th century, Major Cavagnari’s in 1878 and that of Sir William McNaghten and Sir Alexander Burnes in 1841, though most of the British died to all but the last man on the retreat to Jalalabad in 1842.

The cape wearing, election-stealing, lotus-eater whom we thanklessly prop up, may be more incompetent than Nur Mohammed Taraki and less legitimate a client than Shah Shuja, but he has a demonstrated talent for inciting anti-western violence exceeded only by his enterprise in looting aid money. Is crazy Karzai above lighting a match to a tense situation the US military itself has already described as a “rapidly growing systemic threat“? Not in my view.

When the American drawdown begins in earnest, General Allen will need to watch the backs of his troops

ADDENDUM:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the notorious fixer and feared enforcer of the Afghan regime and the brother of President Hamid Karzai was assassinated today. The Taliban claimed credit, but AWK has too many enemies to be certain yet.

Top Billing! Crispin Burke –Be honest: Who actually read FM 3-24?

The past year has done little to bolster the COINdinistas’ cause.  General David Petraeus, the lead architect of counterinsurgency theory, has ramped up airstrikes and night raids, and has even begun to re-institute body counts as a measure of effectiveness.  Last week, a UN report undercut US claims of success, pointing out that civilian deaths in Afghanistan increased twenty percent in the last year alone, with the ten-year campaign displacing over 400,000 Afghans.  And let’s not forget a recent scandal involving a beloved counterinsurgency text, “Three Cups of Tea“, which, to this day, still features in some military organizations’ recommended reading lists.

All this has led some to proclaim the “death of COIN“, and others to muse how to save the COIN baby from the bathwater.  In light of all the COIN resentment, noted COINtra Carl Prine has even quipped, “Everyone is Gian Gentile now“.

But is all the criticism deserved? Let’s take a look.

A tour de force by Starbuck. Hat tip to Adam.

Joseph Fouche –Unhappy Medium: The Perils of Annoyance as Your Strategic Default

…The U.S. system of government is designed around the institutionalized stasis of factional trench warfare. Governmental power derives from the consent of contingency, built on system of representation heavily tilted towards votes cast by catastrophe. Based on the rule of crisis, not of men, the U.S. federal government creaks limply forward only under the lash of perceived calamity. In such an environment, without a crisis (real or manufactured) at hand, strategy leans imperceptibly towards the unhappy medium of a strategy of annoyance. Reasons of state demand that strategically substantive and consequential action be taken from time to time. But the inertia of the system demands that nothing be done within the system to raise an inconvenient stir or distract the American public from its patriotic consumption. This places two constraints on strategically significant action:

1. It must be small enough to escape sustained public awareness.
2. It must be big enough to have real strategic effect.

The result of struggling to square these two incompatible constraints is settling by default on a strategy of annoyance. A strategy of annoyance is big enough to irritate an enemy but not big enough to produce real strategic effect. It produces increased friction for the U.S. from the enemy so irritated without the compensating strategic effects that build toward real strategic gain…

JF has been en fuego – this is just one of many excellent strategy posts he has written lately.

Lexington Green –Democratic Party of Oak Park Grassroots Planning Session, Oak Park, IL; Tea Party/American Majority Grassroots/Activist Training, Oak Lawn, IL; 50th Wedding Anniversary Party, USA

Part investigative reporting, part anthropology and part analysis, Lex hears trial balloons for 2012 being floated by emissaries from the Party machinery to the well-to-do, liberal activist base, observes their reaction and ponders where the presidential election is headed.  A must read for political junkies.

Bruce Kesler –The Immorality of Scapegoating Greece’s Jews

European anti-semitism is on the rise again, as the economic crisis in Greece makes old stereotypes politically fashionable on the Left and Right.

Galrahn –Israeli Soft Power Crushing Free Gaza Movement

….Israel appears to have operationalized the Adapting, Adopting, and Adeptness model with the latest Gaza flotilla. As Melanie Phillips laid out, by targeting INMARSAT and maritime insurance companies with advisory letters ahead of the flotilla, Israel set the bar very high on the issue of compliance to law. Israel has essentially leveraged a lawfare model often effectively leveraged by NGOs against states back against the Free Gaza Movement. The media has frequently discussed the behind the scenes pressure by the United States and Israel, but they have been short on details regarding the pressure points. You see, the Israeli’s and US are pressuring Europeans to rigidly enforce their own laws. That puts a lot of pressure on organizations like the Greek Coast Guard not to make any mistakes, and the resulting red tape is burying the flotilla every time a vessel makes port. Pardon me while I laugh that the most leveraged weapon by Israel against the flotilla so far is European government bureaucracy….

An important analysis by Ray.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

John Robb speaks on the business model he is developing.

[ by Charles Cameron — UBL, global warming, elephants, and Al-Shabaab ]
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“Natives with ivory tusks, Dar Es Salaam, Tanganyika” ca 1900, LOC

I’d like to quietly propose a few dots or data points…

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Alex Shoumatoff has a fine article titled “Agony and Ivory”, in Vanity Fair:

The riverbank is littered with elephant dung. Andrea kicks apart one of the boluses, and it is full of big, hard-shelled seeds — Pandanus, Drypetes, and Gambeya. A new study has found that forest elephants are essential to central Africa’s forests for tree-seed dispersal. They can carry heavy seeds like these (which wouldn’t get very far on their own) in their gut for 50 miles before voiding them. Another study measures the rapid, prodigious growth of the forest trees and concludes that central Africa is the second-most-important equatorial sink for atmospheric carbon after the Amazon, so elephants are important for controlling global warming, on top of everything else.

Here is Shaykh Usama bin Laden, in his radio message “The Way to Save the Earth” from As-Sahab Media:

This is a message to the whole world about those who cause climate change and its dangers — intentionally or unintentionally — and what we must do. Talk of climate change isn’t extravagant speculation: it is a tangible fact which is not diminished by its being muddled by some greedy heads of major corporations. The effects of global warming have spread to all continents of the world. Drought, desertification and sands are advancing on one front, while on another front, torrential floods and huge storms the likes of which only used to be seen once every few decades now reoccur every few years.

From UBL’s perspective, this is clearly a moral issue:

First, the corruption of the climate stems from the corruption of hearts and deeds, and there is a close relationship between the two types of corruption.

And here’s Shoumatoff again, on the situation in Kenya:

A few weeks ago, two poachers were killed and a ranger was wounded in a firefight in Meru National Park. Al-Shabaab, the Islamist youth militia which is in league with al-Qaeda and controls most of Somalia, has been coming over the border and killing elephants in Arawale National Reserve. Ivory, like the blood diamonds of other African conflicts, is funding many rebel groups in Africa, and Kenya, K.W.S. director Julius Kipng’etich told me, “is in the unenviable position of sharing over 1,700 kilometers of border with three countries with civil wars that are awash with firearms: Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan.” Nothing less than a full-scale military operation is going to stop the poaching in the north.

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Now, as EM Forster suggested, Only connect!

Robert Haddick agrees with me, albeit with greater eloquence and length ( hat tip to Colonel Dave).

From SWJ Blog:

This Week at War: Rumsfeld’s Revenge

….Rumsfeld’s and Schoomaker’s redesign of the Army into a lighter, more mobile, and more expeditionary force seems permanent. Gone is the Cold War and Desert Storm concept of the long buildup of armor as prelude to a massive decisive battle. Instead, globally mobile brigade combat teams will provide deterrence, respond to crises, and sustain expeditionary campaigns. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the current Army chief of staff (and soon to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) recently described a sustainable brigade rotation system, an expeditionary adaptation that the Navy and Marine Corps have employed for decades. In addition, both the Army and Marine Corps have drawn up plans to shrink their headcounts back near the Rumsfeld-era levels. Rumsfeld’s concerns about personnel costs sapping modernization are now coming to pass.

There now seems to be a near-consensus inside Washington that the large open-ended ground campaigns that Rumsfeld resisted are no longer sustainable. The former defense secretary’s preference for special operations forces, air power, networked intelligence, and indigenous allies is now back in vogue. Even Gen. David Petraeus, who burnished his reputation by reversing Rumsfeld’s policies in Iraq, will now implement Rumsfeld’s doctrine in eastern Afghanistan. According to the New York Times, the U.S. will counter the deteriorating situation there not by shifting in conventional ground troops for pacification, but with “more special forces, intelligence, surveillance, air power … [and] substantially more Afghan boots on the ground.”

While we agree that this is “Rumsfeld’s revenge”, unlike Haddick, I would not choose “doctrine” to describe it. This is really about a “Community of Operators” across services , agencies and their White House superiors adopting a culture of punitive raiding for at least the medium term. A doctrine might come along later but there are downsides to institutionalizing punitive raiding that have already been very well expressed by others (see comments section at SWJ). I’d prefer punitive raiding remain a flexible tool rather than a reflexive response ( it might help if we created a “Community of Thinkers” before we get too comfortable as an international flying squad).

At this point, I will stop and recommend a fine piece by Adam Elkus on the subject of punitive raiding, From Roman Legions to Navy SEALs: Military Raiding and its Discontents. A good primer on the history, implications and drawbacks.

Why is this happening?  Economics and the subsequent electoral politics of a finance-sector driven global depression. The same thing that brought COIN to an end and then finally killed it as an operationally oriented policy.

Punitive raiding is relatively cheaper. It permits defense cuts in the size of the Army and Marine Corps that are badly desired by the administration and Congress. It preserves and justifies investments in naval and air striking power that will bring joy to the Lexington Institute and satisfy many MoC concerned about defense jobs for constituents. On a point of genuine importance, this also hedges against near peer competitors (ahem…cough…China).

Is it a done deal? Unless the economy roars back, yes.

ADDENDUM:

Check out these two directly related posts by Pundita and Joseph Fouche:

America’s Light Footprint Era (Revised) 

Unhappy Medium: The Perils of Annoyance as Your Strategic Default

Generally, the comment section here is a genteel place. Most of the commenters “know” each other (internet sense) or at least visit many of the same blogs, sites and social networking services. My general philosophy is one of free speech and welcoming contrasting viewpoints, including those that disagree with my own, because the expertise and questions that the readers bring to bear make ZP worth reading.

As a result, I moderate with a very light hand and 99.9 % of the time, the only comments deleted by me are spam ( though some get delayed due to the spam filter until I approve them). Yesterday, there were signs that the tone here was changing and I have had several complaints offline, so I would like to nip things in the bud.

ZP won’t be nearly as enjoyable if foodfights begin breaking out in the comments section and it would be better if we remember to exercise enough restraint to keep discussion civil. We’re all out of grade school, are reasonably experienced at life and have an acceptable command of English – criticism can be frank and blunt, but let’s try to keep our attacks to other people’s arguments and not the people making them.

If someone has difficulty, I will step in and remind them and show them the door if they persist. Charles Cameron and Scott Shipman will determine what is out of line in terms of comments on their own postings and I will remove comments or commenters as they request.