Kelly Vlahos Spoons John Nagl Over COIN
There is quite a buzz going in mil and defense blogger circles over the recent op-ed savaging in The American Conservative by Kelley Vlahos regarding Dr. John Nagl and COIN. Unfortunately for Vlahos, little of it that I have seen online or privately is favorable – including from some people who I know are less than well-disposed toward COIN or the COINdinistas.
Speaking as someone who was one of the earlier voices to remark that the political moment of pop-centric COIN had passed, I found Vlahos’ post to largely be ill-tempered, context-distorting, schadenfreude.
But hey, judge for yourself. My comments will be in normal text:
Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon
….Then Tom Ricks, Washington Post correspondent-court scribe, conducted a full-blown high school popularity contest, literally ranking the “brains behind counterinsurgency’s rise from forgotten doctrine to the centerpiece of the world’s most powerful military.” In this cringe-worthy “top ten” published in Foreign Policy in December 2009, Ricks places “King David” Petraeus at Number 1, and then Nagl, whose Oxford dissertation-turned-Barnes-and-Noble-bestseller Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife made him a counterinsurgency “scholar,” among other bright lights of the time. Nagl, Ricks predicted, would be “in a top Pentagon slot within a year or two.”
That was just three years ago. Today, there is no better symbol for the dramatic failure of COIN, the fading of the COINdinistas and the loss that is U.S war policy in Afghanistan than this week’s news that Nagl is leaving Washington to be the headmaster of The Haverford School, a rich preparatory school (grades k-12) for boys on Philadelphia’s Main Line.
Hmmmm. I guess General Petraeus as CIA Director and General Mattis as Combatant Commander of CENTCOM are therefore examples of a rare form of career failure.
And really, only a subpar military officer would involve himself in educating young people. Shame on you, John Nagl, for joining such a shady group of misfits.
….That’s right — Nagl, once called the Johnny Appleseed of COIN, who reveled in his role as face man, tutoring reporters with practiced bookish charm on the “the new way of war,” and burnishing his personal story to convince everyone that he was a counter-insurgent before his time — a modern T.E. Lawrence — is packing up for good. Turns out that despite all the high hopes, the COINdinistas hit the brass ceiling with a smack, especially once it became clear that the magic they sold was a bag of beans….
Again, most of the COINdinistas, so-called, have not hit some kind of brass ceiling nor are they secretly running the Army or the administration. Most are in perfectly respectable but unremarkable ranks, institutional positions or jobs in the private sector. HR McMaster is now a brigadier major general, Con Crane is a director at the US Army Military History Institute, Kalev Sepp is a lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, Montgomery McFate holds the Minerva Chair at NWC, General Jack Keane sits on several corporate boards, Fred Kagan is still at AEI, Andrew Exum is at CNAS, David Kilcullen is the CEO at Caerus Associates and so on.
By Washington standards, this is a relatively modest level of policy influence or promotion (Petraeus and Mattis excepted). If you want to look at rapid advancement through political connections, consider Al Haig rising like a rocket from LTC to full general and NATO Supreme Commander due to his proximity to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Or the unusually gilded career path of Colin Powell.
That said, there are many grounds, theoretical and practical, to find fault with pop-centric COIN theory and FM 3-24, from an anti-empirical legacy assumption of a Maoist model of insurgency, to a fundamental confusion of tactics and operational art with strategy to the hardening of COIN from a fairly flexible emergent doctrine in Iraq into a rigid, micromanaging, ROE dogma in Afghanistan. COIN is ripe for revision, not excision and substantive, informed, critiques of the wars of the past decade are sorely needed by scholars, military officers and defense intellectuals. Irregular conflict is never going away any more than war will go away.
Unfortunately, Vlahos was too busy with gossipy smears on Nagl’s character to make any substantive points of that nature which would have made her column something more than ad hominem rubbish.
September 3rd, 2012 at 7:30 am
I agree the article was gossipy smear. BTW, H.R. McMaster is now Major General.
David
September 3rd, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Hi David,
.
Thank you for the head’s up – fixed!
September 4th, 2012 at 4:31 pm
One must always keep in mind Westmoreland serving as Army Chief of Staff after his stint in Vietnam. Failing up is not exactly unknown in the military, or other locations.
September 4th, 2012 at 7:08 pm
Zen,
I read the Petraeus appointment as CIA director as a way to keep him out of the political limelight, and before that he was demoted from CENTCOM to run the war after McChrystal got fired.
September 4th, 2012 at 11:45 pm
Oh come now Mark, what Kelley was really getting after was accountability of these people who stridently recommended an absolutely stupid and broken strategy in Afghanistan (based on the Surge triumph narrative that they helped to build between 2007 and 2010) that is clearly in tatters today. Why is it that nobody now thinks that they mattered back in those heady days of summer and fall of 2009 when the strategy was being locked in place for afghanistan. People like Exum, the Kagans, and others were on the special advisory team that put together McChrystal’s strategy. Do they not owe us some kind of answer for the broken strategy that they had a hand in putting into place especially considering that blood has been shed in carrying it out? Nope, instead they get to ride off into the sunset and silent. Kelley’s piece was not an ad hominem attack but a forceful call for some kind of accountability and a statement that these people were all about coin just a few years ago and now, quitely, they have left the scene. I still write about these matters, why dont they?
I dont really care where Nagl goes or what he does, that is his business, but i do care about his role in the construction of one of the worst military doctrines that have ever been adopted by an army, and the strategies put into place that tried to make this broken doctrine work. That is what Kelley Vlahos’s article was about.
September 5th, 2012 at 2:01 am
Hi Themurr,
.
That is a theory that has a wide application. Gian however might disagree in regard to Westy.
.
Hi Negro Diente,
.
Well, I confess that the drop from CENTCOM to ISAF came across as a kick to me as well but the CIA post contradicts it. If you are the POTUS and you have a potential political rival that you don’t trust much and you have just elbowed him in public, CIA directorship is not a smart appointment to put said rival in – too much sensitive information passing through his hands daily, too much ability to shape admin options through PDB and NIE and congressional testimony or monkeywremch things with leaks. I would wager the CIA post was a carrot to entice Petraeus to make a smooth switch in the aftermath of McChrystal’s embarrassing exit and the story of him just getting the nod for Langley later is just BS for public consumption.
.
Hi Gian,
.
Always good to see you in the comment section here.
.
Accountability is a good thing and I don’t have a problem with Kelly Vlahos taking Nagl or the COINdinistas generally to task on the substance of their advice and policy advocacy for Afghanistan – they’re big boys and it comes with a territory. My problem with Kelley’s piece is twofold:
.
1) Of all the ways to go about calling for accountability as to Afghan strategy, Kelly opted for the intellectual equivalent of heckling from the bleachers. True, she writes for a political mag and not a policy journal but this effort was a high noise to low sound ratio even by those standards.
.
2) Kelly’s centering all the blame for Afghanistan on the late term operational-tactical COIN plan and the COINdinistas is a serious distortion because it whitewashes our civilian leadership for their responsibility for the strategic decisions and policy regarding Afghanistan and -more importantly – Pakistan. In fifty years, military historians are not going to be kind to the Bush and Obama administrations and it won’t be Nagl, Exum, Kilcullen who will be in their bullseye
.
Gian , you are a serving officer and I appreciate that you have limits as to where you can freely criticize, even in an academic appointment, current officials, but I don’t labor under those restrictions and neither does Kelly. The strategic decisions made since 2001 up until and including 2012 regarding American “partnership” with Pakistan has rendered the war in Afghanistan unwinnable with any kind op operational plan short of turning the AfPak border into a model of the Korean DMZ.
.
I agree with many of your criticisms of pop-centric COIN but the repeated affirmation of a policy of appeasement toward Pakistan by two administrations(!), to permit safe havens, to tolerate ISI sponsorship of the Quetta Shura and de facto al Qaida operatives and allies and to fund the enemies war effort against ourselves with aid and skimming from contractors virtually guarantees defeat for any ISAF campaign conducted primarily within Afghanistan. It is a a strategic choice made at the highest levels of the USG to tolerate Pakistan’s covert war against American interests that closes it’s eyes to all evidence to the contrary.
.
Kelly is right to to be unhappy about Afghanistan but her jeremiad against Nagl is like reaming out the carpenter working on your house when the architect never put in a foundation.
September 5th, 2012 at 5:13 am
Zen,
let me pose another angle. Why the CIA directorship and not the DNI? the CIA director now reports (technically) to the DNI. Obama Petraeus, a 4 star combatant commander, underneath Gen Clapper who’s an intel professional but has nowhere near the same level of experience as Petraeus. in my view he took Petraeus out of a combatant commander position with lots of press and media coverage into an intel billet. the potential for political damage is there but it’s a more sensitive billet and Petraeus would have to keep a lid on the media hound dogging.
September 5th, 2012 at 11:48 am
Mark —
.
Bravo your comments re U.S. strategic decision about Pakistan coloring the entire ISAF-counterinsurgency effort — Bravissimo!
.
Col. Gentile —
.
Kelley Vlahos’s observations could be dismissed purely on the grounds that she is uninformed about the Afghan War. Now allow me untangle the ball of yarn called the Afghan War as it’s existed post- 2008.
.
1. After the financial crisis hit Europe, there was no way that West European and other NATO troops could remain in Afghanistan as part of the ISAF because the open-ended length of the war, coupled with budget crises in European governments, meant that the voting publics in those nations would not support continuation of the exercise.
,
2. What these EU governments could do was shift expenditures from the defense column of their national budgets to non-defense items, such as humanitarian aid, reconstruction, training, and so on.
.
3. Then the challenge was to fold all these disparate budget items into an overarching military strategy for Afghan War, which was done. Thus, the famous Surge-POPCOIN-Nation Building-Kitchen Sink strategy.
.
4. Thusly, all the COIN experts advising on Afghanistan, including John Nagl, were never anything more than useful idiots from the viewpoint of the NATO command — and from the viewpoint of the US command, which was determined to keep the NATO-ISAF coalition going at any cost.
.
5. In other words, if Nagl et al. hadn’t existed, COIN experts from the Malayan Emergency would have been exhumed and given an office at CENTCOM.
.
6. Here we come to the part where no one should blink, and which Mark has already alluded to. The Surge and POPCOIN were NEVER INTENDED to work. I repeat: NEVER INTENDED TO WORK. Now why is this? Because any kind of NATO strategy in Afghanistan — big military footprint, small footprint, COIN, POPCOIN — was emptying the ocean with a sieve unless Pakistani’s military was first put in its place.
.
7. This was known at least as early as 2006. I repeat: 2006. In that year the British defense ministry had announced that most of the insurgency in Afghanistan was being orchestrated by Pakistani’s military/ISI — an observation publicly backed by Hamid Karzai and the NDS during that very same year.
.
8, So by the time the Surge-POPCOIN strategy was designed, every NATO defense minister knew that there was no way for ANY kind of military strategy to work at tamping down the insurgency because most of it wasn’t an insurgency: it was a proxy war fought by Pakistan’s military against NATO and primarily U.S. forces.
.
(While many insurgencies of course have a foreign-backed proxy war element, this one was almost wholly orchestrated by Pakistan’s military.)
.
9. Thusly, while I am not a fan of POPCOIN (which arose from the colonialist mindset) it never got a chance to work in Afghanistan.
.
10. From all this you can see why I observed that Ms Vlahos is misinformed. If she wants to call for accountability, she needs to turn her questions to NATO defense chiefs and EU and other ISAF foreign ministers. This she can’t do because she does not know wow the world works, and Rupert Murdoch would never have allowed her to work for FNC if she did.
.
And as with the vast majority of the American public, Ms Vlahos hasn’t a clue as to what the NATO Afghan War policy is about; as to why she doesn’t: all you have to do is closely follow the mainstream media in the United States for a couple months to understand that galactic-sized chunks of reality have been edited out of the American public’s knowledge of the war and much else.
.
There is very little reporting in the USA on NATO’s doings, and on the way the European Union works — even though there has been much reporting on the EU financial crisis in recent years, reporting that does more to confuse than enlighten. And there is virtually zero reporting on the way what I call Worldbankia Civilization has shaped the modern world.
.
That last gap in knowledge is understandable because IMF-World Bank policies and the policies of other influential development banks are directed outside the USA. Yet without knowledge of how all these organizations and related mind-sets work and mesh, the Afghan War seems completely insane. It is insane, after a fashion, in the way Wonderland is insane — but once inside Wonderland, it has a logic of its own.
.
The great irony is that having set in motion the systems that shaped the modern world, Americans don’t know how the systems work and interlock. That’s because they didn’t follow the evolution of the systems, which was occurring outside American shores.
.
Thus ends my exercise at playing White Rabbit. Now I turn to your statement, ” … an absolutely stupid and broken strategy in Afghanistan (based on the Surge triumph narrative that they helped to build between 2007 and 2010) that is clearly in tatters today.”
.
By this I assume you’re saying that the Surge-Counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq was blindly transposed to Afghanistan. If that’s indeed your meaning, I’d urge you to take a closer look at the POPCOIN approach that was deployed in Afghanistan. In my view, the COIN approach the US devised for Iraq was NOT transposed to Afghanistan.
.
I think what was transposed — and not blindly — was the British approach in Basra. And I think that refinements to the Afghan POPCOIN approach were lifted from the British government’s counterinsurgency handbook for quelling the rebellion in Northern Ireland, although this transposition was never made explicit, for an obvious reason:
.
The centerpiece of the British approach in Northern Ireland was that there was to be as little loss of life on both sides as possible. But this meant the British military deliberately taking considerably more losses than the IRA. While the Taliban have continued to sustain considerably more losses than NATO combat troops, the new rules of engagement designed to go with the Afghan War Surge-POPCOIN reflected the British approach in Northern Ireland — not the U.S. approach in Iraq.
.
Whether or not my observations about the transposition of British strategy in Basra/N. Ireland to Afghanistan are fully correct, I think this part is inarguable:
.
It so happens that British strategy in Northern Ireland manifested in the new rules of engagement that Stanley McCrystal was directed to lay down for U.S.-ISAF troops in Afghanistan, ostensibly as part of the POPCOIN approach.
.
The new rules boiled down to U.S. combat troops being ordered to act in the manner of police in a large American city; i.e., not shooting unless they were certain that a presumed Taliban was armed, and so on.
.
When complaints from soldiers about having to play LAPD cops against Taliban fighters began to reach the ears of the British and American publics, President Obama suddenly announced that U.S. combat troops would be removed from Afghanistan earlier than he’d previously announced.
.
So, once caught in the act of turning their combat troops into target practice for Taliban, NATO governments launched a scramble to remove combat troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.
.
None of the above explains why the US government and military command were willing to think of killed and maimed American soldiers as collateral damage in the U.S. effort to keep ISAF together at all costs.
I made a stab at answering the question in a recent essay, Meet the new US defense policy.Same as the old policy. Zenpundit highlighted the essay, and I gathered from comments Mark made to me in an email that he thought well of the thesis I outlined in the essay.
.
I argue in effect that the different eras in U.S. defense policy — e.g., post-Korea, post-Vietnam, post-Soviet, etc. — are an illusion, and that the only real policy has been the same one established in 1946; i.e. post-WW2 policy.
.
I further argue that the effects of this policy, which have been to avert another global war on the lines of WW2, have been America’s greatest accomplishment, but left unclearly stated and examined, the policy has brought forth situations that are now harmful to U.S. interests. So the policy is now America’s Achilles Heel. Unless this is confronted American defense policy can’t move forward in constructive fashion; this on the theory that nothing constructive can be achieved unless one knows exactly where one stands at present.
.
As to how all this ties in with U.S. war policy in Afghanistan, I invite you to read the essay.
September 5th, 2012 at 9:17 pm
There’s probably no empirical answer to this question since it’s highly politicized but I’ll ask it anyway: has anyone in our defense picked out what the best rules of thumb for controlling an enemy population during military conflict are yet based on the last decade’s experience? “Not going to war with an enemy population to control” is not an answer.
There seem to be some general techniques for population control, some of which appear in FM-324 even with all of its flower power bits. A network of mutually fixed reinforcing positions seems to be a constant going back to the early nineteenth century with flying columns periodically sweeping the spaces in between. The overall point is securing the population, not in the sense of “giving the population security” as much as a sense of “controlling the population sufficiently to fulfill political objectives”.
September 5th, 2012 at 10:52 pm
Hi L.C.,
.
Your comment rings true. I have a 1939 copy of Infantry in Battle. During a brief office clean-up this afternoon, I pulled the copy and grazed through the scenarios. There is a chapter on “miracles,” so this sort of “thinking” has been around a while.
September 6th, 2012 at 12:13 am
Gian: “Oh come now Mark, what Kelley was really getting after was accountability of these people who stridently recommended an absolutely stupid and broken strategy”
And by “accountability” of course you mean punishment. You want people who you disagree with on issues of policy and strategy to be punished. So describe the exact forms of accountability/punishment you want exacted on these people. This kind of thinking is extremely dangerous and it operates on the assumption that the answers to policy and strategic dilemmas are perfectly clear and obvious and anyone who offers different views deserves to be punished.
September 6th, 2012 at 12:16 am
Hi Scott:
Nice discovery there. A chapter on miracles seems appropriate for any military handbook. Many warplans should be honest and ship with a special section labeled INSERT MIRACLE HERE. A WWII-era German general staff officer looking up the Third Reich’s super-secret strategy for winning the war in the index of Hitler’s master plan probably found the following entry: See Brandenburg, Miracle of the House of.
Another site I follow linked to this 1967 RAND compilation of Japanese counterinsurgency documents used in Manchuria from 1931-1940. The Japanese material captures an odd mixture and flux between the relatively enlightened government the Japanese exercised in Formosa from 1895 and the muleheaded BANZAI!!! hypermilitarism that became popular after 1925.
September 6th, 2012 at 4:04 am
Much thanks Miss P. – the complexity and implicit overemphasis of maintaining transnational technocratic relationships ( and the pull of geoeconomics) that happens mostly behind closed doors generally eludes the public or most of our elected representatives whose inquiries are directed at secretaries and high profile deputies who farm out the technical-legal-diplomatic long haul work to SES and GS-15 civil servants or ex-political appointees who wormed their way into civil service status and hunkered down in the bureaucracy.
.
Negro Diente
.
Well, would you rather be DNI or CIA director? Being DCI, except for a couple of men, was seldom more than an empty title for the CIA director and DNI is DCI without having a CIA. There is a nominal protocol irritation here, you’re right, but unless the DNI has tremendous “juice” with the POTUS, his real authority over the CIA, NSA and DIA is light. Negroponte found the position, nominally so important, so wanting that he returned to a much lower rung at State
.
LC
.
” The overall point is securing the population, not in the sense of “giving the population security” as much as a sense of “controlling the population sufficiently to fulfill political objectives”.
.
Good point.
September 6th, 2012 at 8:51 am
Zen – No mention. I went to the Wikipedia article about Gentile before I decided whether to jump into the discussion. From that read it seemed his heart was in the right place. But people can only fight at the level they can see. If he was seeing the large picture his remarks to you gave no indication of this, and so Pundita school swung into session.
.
Regarding the rest of your comment to me: I’m thinking of embroidering it into a sampler and hanging it on the wall. You tied it all in bow. As to dealing with what’s inside the package, that’s for your generation to sort out.
.
To return briefly to your remarks about the teaching of strategy to officers, I’m getting a bad feeling about all this. Maybe I’m seeing things in too dark a light but I’m wondering whether the military isn’t creating a Frankenstein with its increasingly heavy reliance on contractors. They’re growing a powerful mercenary force, one that might be inexorably kicking the military command upstairs. In that event, of course there would be no need for officers to study of history or strategy.
September 6th, 2012 at 4:45 pm
Col. Gentile often discusses the importance of strategy, and how, if you don’t get the strategy correct, all else may be for nought….
.
Doesn’t seem like he needs the lesson. To me, anyway 🙂 He’s written beautifully about the need to take apart FM 3-24 (in the past, it’s been taken apart recently, I gather?) and look at it with fresh eyes. I really like those writings.
.
Miss P, in the context of the manual (which I guess I get hung up on, it doesn’t necessarily reflect reality), Vietnam and CORDS seems to be important, too. But there are so many NATO cooks in the kitchen, you’d need to look at records of specific commands in specific areas at specific times and knit the info together to know what “really happened.”
.
So, I can’t find much about the Punjab insurgency and dealing with the border (blocking the holes in the sieve, as it were.). I’ve seen it mentioned, but can’t find any good papers. I’m sure I’m not looking correctly.
.
Anyone? Also, the Green Revolution and its contribution to both insurgency and counterinsurgency within the context of the Punjab insurgency is quite interesting….
.
First insurgency I “watched from afar” in that area. I’ve been thinking about this stuff my whole life, and it never really dawned on me until recently. In my youth, the Khalistan movement and its supporters in the West frightened me, including academics concerned about human rights abuses, because I saw it as stirring up trouble when the situation was so bad already, poverty and other things-wise. That is why I am naturally distrustful of some do gooders, heaven help me. They mean well, they do well, but sometimes, people get hurt.
September 6th, 2012 at 4:54 pm
Sigh, I forgot to draw a few points together, which is that perhaps there was a way to make things less sieve-like via dealing correctly with Afghanistan, but the counterfactual is one we will never know.
.
What exactly happened within the military regarding all of this is something that only time and declassified records will answer, if that….
September 6th, 2012 at 5:14 pm
And yet one more thing: I wasn’t a fan of the Vlahos article, either. It’s fine to discuss as a topic, but it’s an incomplete rendering of what happened and she hasn’t moved the ball forward. The discussion as she has framed it is “stuck.”
September 6th, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Sorry, Zen, I’m in the mood to multi-comment and multi-post: Yikes, the whole border was fenced? Wonder if it did any good or if other things settled/broke the insurgency.
.
When I said the Khalistan movement frightened me, what I meant was the propensity for even pacifist types to inadvertently contribute to violence, without meaning to do that. The whole thing was a mess–not excusing government violence–and lots of people were scared, and not just the types that wanted separation. It was a collective breath-holding if you lived abroad, and if you lived there. But you know, the diaspora of one group captures the imagination abroad and that is the only reality allowed.
September 6th, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Hi Madhu,
.
Your get-away sentence in comment 18 is spot-on. Myopic thinking, and our tendency to focus on one group/one cause (often romanticizing said cause) to the exclusion of the whole, and more specifically, reality. Sir Frances Bacon said it best:
.
.
The utter complexity of the more tribal areas leads policy makers to “pick a winner,” often the lesser of all the perceived evils. And I attribute this an American tendency we inherited from the Brits. Jon Sumida in DeCoding Clausewitz captures nicely the phenomena:
.
.
If we’re not relying on pixie dust and magic, we rush headlong without regard to ground truth, and the inherent complexities—because even an illusion of “doing something” is “preferable to waiting,” and to watching and taking trouble to at least have some sense of contextual realities.
.
Now in Afghanistan, we’re doing a slow motion version of “run away, run away” from the Monty Python’s Holy Grail…
September 6th, 2012 at 9:15 pm
The historian Thomas Fleming was the son of a political boss in Jersey City’s Democratic party machine during its FDR-era heyday. This experience fed the development of his particular formulation of an idea other observers (American or other) have had:
<quote>
Starting with the Revolution, Fleming says, Americanas have been torn by what he calls “the great dichotomy:” the clash between American ideals and brutal political and economic realities. It was a conflict he saw firsthand as a sailor aboard the warship USS Topeka in the Pacific at the close of World War II, and later while he was conducting research for a history of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He lived at West Point from 1964 to 1968, and interviewed officers and their families as the controversy over America’s involvement in Vietnam intensified.
“
That was my first really strong exposure to America’s secular idealism. These guys have this ideal of duty, honor, country, but in the real world, in the Army, a lot of other things are going on. There’s throat-cutting careerism, hostility from the civilian community, and always the possibility that at the bottom line, there’s going to be a body bag.
</endquote>
The basic demands and techniques of statecraft, its non-violent arm politicking, and its violent arm war have remained relatively constant over time. There are certain things a successful polity must do in spite of its particular cultural, ideational, or ideological makeup if it is to survive. But the conflict between cultural priorities and political necessities produces strange contortions as a polity and its constituent cultural movements and political factions try to reconcile two things that are often irreconcilable except with potent mixes of Scott’s “pixie dust and magic”.
While self-proclaimed “realists” in many fields make things easier for themselves and focus just on the seemingly harder, less diffuse, and more quantifiable truths of politics and its process of dividing power, this overlooks the Thomas’ Theorem: If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. The mere fact that pixie dust and magic are believed in and injected into a situation changes the situation. All cultural beliefs only exist inasmuch as they find expression in the reality of politics and its continuations like politicking and war but the peculiarities of those beliefs modify the reality of politics for good or for ill.
The form post-World War I and post-World War II American hegemony took reflects something of Fleming’s great dichotomy: the United States suddenly had a whole world in its hands, that world required at least some of the timeworn techniques of statecraft to tackle “brutal political and economic realities”, and yet something of the Old Republic and its “normalcy” had to be preserved. After World War I we tried using financial, diplomatic, legal, and economic techniques to exercise some measure of indirect influence on global affairs but that fell down in the wake of the Great Depression. After World War II, the United States sought to create a system of independent republican states with itself as the benevolent primus inter pares, perhaps drawing from an idealized version of the relationship between the US and the nominally independent Latin American republics during the first three decades of the 20th century.
America liked to think of itself as the moral leader of the American “republics” even though many of those republics were RINOs (Republic in Name Only) and their internal affairs were often heavily manipulated by American power, sometimes in less than idealistic ways despite idealistic talk and even aspirations. The free world was “Latinized”, even former Great Powers like Britain. It’s a two-way street as nominal American satellites reach back and use idealistic talk and skullduggery to manipulate the political process of their supposed master. As Jugurtha observed of Rome, in many cases almost everything in America is for sale assuming the proper forms are followed.
The danger is that the realities of politics on a global scale will erode the peculiar configuration of America’s great dichotomy. The real expressions of American ideals have had great political consequences, oftentimes in ways we don’t understand or even know about. The impulses driven by that collection of notions that make up American culture ended up giving American political power a potency that contemporary polities lacked.
A society where the struggle for power becomes more and more visible and more and more intense sets off an arms race that erode existing American values as more and more of the more unpleasant side of statecraft are used because of necessity. In Rome, over a hundred fifty years you went from Marius thumbing his nose at political traditions to Sulla violently destroying his enemies in an attempt to rebuild those political traditions to Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar developing extra-state resources that dwarfed those of the Republic in the name of political competition to Caesar attempting to keep even his enemies alive in a curated Senate and Republic to young Augustus’ wiping out of the last vestige of independent political opposition in the empire to old Augustus’ long life euthanizing what was left of the Republic until the people begged him to rule to a young untried pup like Caligula having so much absolute authority based on his lineage that he could make his horse co-head of state. A analogous process seems to happening within the American republic at the moment as old norms, both those on the books and off the books, disintegrate under the weight of increasingly naked battles for power.
September 6th, 2012 at 10:54 pm
Pundita:
I dont know who you are because i only read a handful of blogs, but you overthink and over write on this problem. I am an associate professor of history at west point, i hold a PhD from Stanford University, and for the last five years of my life i have been immersed in the issue of strategy and the wars in iraq and afghanistan. I have a book coming out by the New Press in April 2013 titled “The Better Wars that Never Were: Exposing the Myth of American Counterinsurgency.” Cut me a break little sister, i do have a clue as to what i am writing about. Moreover i know the face of these wars, i imagine, much more intimately than you do as i did two combat tours in iraq; the second one in command of a cav squadron in west baghdad in 2006–we bled–and we were in the middle of a virulent civil war which bled the iraqi people to in front of our eyes. Sadly, and i will never forget, i have seen.
Sister Pundita, you write as a post modern deconstructionist, evidently one of the elite intellectuals who sees the truth under a veneer that the rest of us meer mortals cant get past.
So let me break through your linguistic turn and tell you the basic facts: the core policy objective all along for the US in Afghanistan has been the destruction of al Qaeda. Yet all along too the US has sought an maximalist operational method of armed nation building to achieve it (and that is where Nagl has his hands in the pie), so in effect we have had a broken strategy from the start because that core objective could have been achieved with much blood and treasure spent. You can overthink and overwrite the problem all you want, but there, little sister, is the essential problems.
September 7th, 2012 at 12:20 am
“So let me break through your linguistic turn and tell you the basic facts: the core policy objective all along for the US in Afghanistan has been the destruction of al Qaeda.”
.
“On March 27, 2009, the President announced a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan that is the culmination of a careful 60-day, interagency strategic review. During the review process, we consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani governments, partners and NATO allies, other donors, international organizations and members of Congress. The strategy starts with a clear, concise, attainable goal: disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens. The President’s new approach will be flexible and adoptive and include frequent evaluations of the progress being made. A Regional ApproachFor the first time the President will treat Afghanistan and Pakistan as two countries but one challenge. Our strategy focuses more intensively on Pakistan than in the past, calling for more significant increases in U.S. and international support, both economic and military, linked to Pakistani performance against terror. We will pursue intensive regional diplomacy involving all key players in South Asia and engage both countries in a new trilateral framework at the highest levels. Together in this trilateral format, we will work to enhance intelligence sharing and military cooperation along the border and address common issues like trade, energy, and economic ”
.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Whats-New-in-the-Strategy-for-Afghanistan-and-Pakistan/
.
Core policy objective 1, meet core policy objective 2, and so on, and so on. Also, I seem to see the phrase “and safe havens” in there….
.
You’re kinda all correct, but, apparently, that answer is not allowed.
September 7th, 2012 at 12:22 am
Also, it says, “the strategy starts” with….where it ends, less clear….
.
Again: Miss P and Col. Gentile, both correct, after a fashion, I reckon 🙂
September 7th, 2012 at 12:30 am
Blessed are the peacemakers….
.
J Scott: Great line about “magic” and all that.
.
L.C. Rees: That is not very reassuring. Yikes.
September 7th, 2012 at 1:49 am
L.C. Rees captured the essence in this:
.
.
I would submit we (as Americans) have trouble with this, because, at our core “securing the population” is antithetical to our ethos. We’re a reluctant colonial power when real “control” is required. We have a mythical national standard at home that is disconnected from reality (Korea, Vietnam, (Iraq—still too early to tell)), and avoid violating that standard to our voting population—for they have a pesky habit of “calling us home” when things don’t go well. We’re not suited the mission we all to often assume.
.
Punditas speculation about the evolution of a constabulary force in lieu of traditional military comes into play here. Colin Powell’s “break things and kill people” and Mattis’ famous “be prepared to kill everyone you meet” don’t make for good television or long careers for politicians pursuing said policies. We are adrift, strategically. With the power L.C. mentions, and the self-absorbed burden of “policing the world”—something we cannot afford, and on a large scale are not capable of doing we are a super power increasingly unable to build things or speak in language understandable to those who pay the bills. For instance, Who is the enemy? What do we need to prevail over said enemy? and how do we get there from here in the current economic and political situation we find ourselves…
.
BTW L.C., I read Fleming’s book Liberty—thought the name was familiar.
September 10th, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Colonel Gentile —
.
I understand the explanation I gave you about the Afghan War conflicts with what your superiors told you, but I gave you the straight goods. Your reply insinuates that I made up the explanation or was guessing. No guesswork was necessary; I culled my statements in the numbered paragraphs I wrote out for you from countless news and open-source intelligence reports published over a period of seven years.
.
To my knowledge no academic institution, no think tank, no investigative journalism organization has yet published a report that spells out the Afghan War in the way I did for you — at least, not with such precision. I haven’t even spelled it out that clearly for the readers at my blog. I’ve scattered the points I listed for you across hundreds of essays I’ve written since 2009 about the U.S.-Pakistan relationship and the Afghan War.
.
Why didn’t I spell it out? Because my aim all along has been to see a situation stopped, not dredge up the multitude of flaws in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. The situation is that never before in the history of warfare has a government paid another to murder its own troops. Stopping this situation should be the absolute top priority for active-duty and retired American officers because the very soul of the American military is at stake.
.
I also understand you’re outraged about the COIN angle (justifiably so, in my opinion) and that the debates about it are important. But in the context of the situation I addressed the debates amount to squabbles over the remains of the day.
.
As I write these words Afghan War Two is winding down (the first Afghan War having been won in a matter of weeks by a handful of CIA officers and special forces with help from U.S.-British air support and remnants of the Northern Alliance) and Afghan War Three is gearing up.
.
AW3 will switch out ISAF regular combat troops in Afghanistan for special forces drawn from nations all over world (see this USA Today report, 5th paragraph, for more detail). These forces will fight in coordination with U.S. and Afghan special forces, which have now merged, and with private ‘security’ firms stuffed full of mercenary fighters. So it seems the gloves will be coming off, as it’s doubtful these forces will have to operate by the very stringent rules of engagement that have greatly hampered NATO combat troops.
.
Yet AW3 is still facing the same problem that characterized AW2, and which a US commander in Afghanistan spelled out for 60 Minutes a year or so ago: U.S. forces were killing the enemy that poured across the Pakistan border by the thousands, and these were replaced by thousands more pouring across the border.
.
Yes. This is population control, Pakistani military-style. The population there is getting set to double, but many being born there from polygamous marriages are so brain-damaged from the mother’s malnourishment during pregnancy and inbreeding that they can’t be any use to society, and their special needs have overwhelmed the government’s slender social services programs and public education sector. So the ISI and Frontier Corps outfitted them with suicide vests, showed them how to work an AK47, and sent them across the border to die by the thousands at the hands of the U.S. military.
.
So it’s absurd to say the U.S. has been fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan. It’s been fighting a zombie army. A proxy zombie army.
.
The task all along has been to thin the forest — stop the zombie proxies so the Afghans who have a genuine beef with Kabul can be effectively dealt with. This can only be done by stopping Pakistan’s security forces from orchestrating the zombie army and from aiding and abetting the real professionals such as the Haqqanis, al Qaeda and LeT.
.
But here we come to a snag. The U.S. government and its most powerful allies in NATO haven’t wanted to stop the Pak military’s proxy war in Afghanistan. So you were flat wrong when you told me that “The core policy objective all along for the US in Afghanistan has been the destruction of al Qaeda.” That objective was abandoned in late 2001, just prior to the fall of Kunduz, reportedly on orders from Vice President Dick Cheney, who managed the Pakistan portfolio for the White House. Since then all statements from the Pentagon about the core policy in Afghanistan have amounted to enough bull crap to fill the Augean Stables.
.
Re your statement: “Yet all along too the US has sought an maximalist operational method of armed nation building to achieve [the core policy] …so in effect we have had a broken strategy from the start because that core objective could have been achieved with much blood and treasure spent.” —
.
You do understand, don’t you, that 2,000+ dead troops is far too much American blood spent on Afghanistan on account of the fact that the U.S. government has been paying Pakistan’s military to murder Americans?
.
It’s the same with the amount of American treasure spent so far on the Afghan War. It’s still a matter for debate how many Qaeda and Taliban fighters were airlifted from Kunduz. I have seen estimates ranging from 1,000 to 10,000. In any case so many were removed to Pakistan that the airlift was actually an air bridge. But the point is that Pakistan’s government then turned around and over a period of years killed or sold to the United States some of the Taliban and al Qaeda it’d relocated to Pakistan with U.S. help. It did this whenever it wanted to put on a show of hunting al Qaeda, etc., or collect on a high dollar bounty the U.S. had established for certain fighters.
.
Yet stopping the pepetual-motion war would have cost the United States comparatively little in money and virtually nothing in U.S. lives. Nor did this require invading Pakistan. What it required was to —
.
A. Suspend every kind of U.S. aid to Pakistan and training for Pakistan’s military, and ask the IMF and World Bank behind closed doors to hold up loan disbursements to Pakistan’s government.
.
B. Ask President Vladimir Putin to help the U.S. establish an alternate supply route to moving U.S. materiel through Pakistan (something that was not done until mid- to late 2008). Additionally, contact heads of state in Central Asia about setting up legs of an alternate supply route.
.
C. Immediately start repairs to the Salang Tunnel and begin construction of a second Salang tunnel to adequately handle supplies shipped to Afghanistan through a northern route. (To this day this hasn’t been done although State/USAID is reviewing plans for building a second tunnel.)
.
D. Keep the ISAF nations to a bare minimum until the issue of Pakistan’s support for al Qaeda was dealt with. At the least, this would have kept supply convoys through Pakistan to a minimum and thus, not spawned a veritable cottage industry of robbing convoys to help support al Qaeda/Taliban activities.
.
E. Forcefully ask the House of Saud to lead the other Gulf Arab kingdoms in pressuring Pakistan’s government to give up its support for al Qaeda. (2002 would have been the perfect year for this because the Saudi government was reeling from worldwide criticism; this was because the 9/11 attack was bringing to public attention the extreme radicalism of Saudi state-supported Islamic teachings.)
.
F. Wrest the Pakistan portfolio from Cheney’s hands and President Bush order Colin Powell to call Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf and say, ‘Give us back every one of those Qaeda and Taliban airlifted out Kunduz, or we will do worse than bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age; we’ll sic Treasury on your country’s financial sector.”
.
Bush might have had to make the order to Powell strong because as with Cheney, Powell’s priorities were still in the Cold War. But with the will to do it, it could have been done.
.
I’m going to break off there, although I could use up most of the alphabet with listing other non-kinetic tactics, which the U.S. government could have deployed if destroying al Qaeda had actually been its primary objective after 2001. Yet from the tactics I listed it’s tragically evident that the United States was juggling so many ‘geostrategic’ objectives in the earlier part of this century that it was unable to use any more than a fraction of its tools in the quest to destroy al Qaeda.
.
I can’t remember for sure who said it, but it might have been Jimmy Doolittle who advised that a country should not go to war unless it’s willing to use every weapon at its disposal. Again, the above list shows the U.S. had plenty of powerful options that it could have directed at the task of getting Pakistan’s military to roll up al Qaeda — which had been operating openly in Pakistan for years, and which by 2000 was so entangled with the highest levels of Pakistan’s defense sector that President Bill Clinton could only spend five hours there during his South Asia tour, and that was five hours more than the Secret Service had wanted him to spend.
.
Yet neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush and Obama ones deployed any of those non-kinetic weapons. They didn’t even threaten to deploy them. After al Qaeda and Taliban leaders regrouped with the help of Pak military advisors and ISI bomb-making experts, increasingly large numbers of American soldiers were sent into Afghanistan, where too many of them died or were maimed by IEDs.
.
Finally, your complaints about me are so silly that I’d be sillier still if I addressed them. But from my reading of the article on you in Wikipedia, I am quite sure I’m considerably older than you. While I can’t expect that you would have known this, it means I can’t be your little sister. So if you still like to think of me in familial terms, how about Auntie Pundita? As in Dutch Aunt. As in “Wake up.”