Leslie Gelb, distinguished diplomat, journalist, and scholar, professes befuddlement over President Obama’s strategy with respect to Afghanistan:

I’m lost on President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan policy—along with most of Congress and the U.S. military. Not quite eight months ago, Mr. Obama pledged to “defeat” al Qaeda in Afghanistan by transforming that country’s political and economic infrastructure, training Afghan forces and adding 21,000 U.S. forces for starters. He proclaimed Afghanistan’s strategic centrality to prevent Muslim extremism from taking over Pakistan—an even more vital nation because of its nuclear weapons. And a mere three weeks ago, he punctuated his commitments by proclaiming that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity,” not one of choice. White House spokesmen reinforced this by promising that the president would “fully resource” the war.

Yet less than one week ago, Mr. Obama said the following about troop increases: “I’m going to take a very deliberate process in making those decisions. There is no immediate decision pending on resources, because one of the things that I’m absolutely clear about is you have to get the strategy right and then make a determination about resources.” He repeated that on Sunday’s talk shows.

I am befuddled over Dr. Gelb’s befuddlement and even more so by those who are surprised at the course that President Obama has pursued with respect to Afghanistan to date. As a candidate Barack Obama ran on Afghanistan as a war of necessity. As president he re-affirmed the importance of winning in Afghanistan, which we can now say with some confidence is to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qa’ida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future”. In pursuit of those ends he appointed Gen. Stanley McChrystal as U. S. commander in Afghanistan. Gen. McChrystal was well-known to advocate a strategy of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.

The counter-insurgency doctrine that currently prevails in the U. S. military is that, in order to prosecute a strategy of counter-insurgency successfully in Afghanistan, we need more troops there. Eventually, some of those troops might be provided by Afghanistan itself. However, the troops are needed now and that means that we must supply them.

As a spine-stiffener, people in the Pentagon are apparently signaling that Gen. McChrystal will resign (hat tip: Bill Roggio) if he’s not given the resources he’s requested. He was put there to do a job, his approach to the job was well-known in advance, and, if he’s not going to be given the resources to do the job in that way, he shouldn’t be there at all. That only makes sense. The military is a profession and he’s ethically required to do so.

If President Obama refuses to give Gen. McChrystal what he’s asked for, it would be foolish or, at the very least, confused. However, it’s too early for befuddlement. Even if President Obama turns Gen. McChrystal down, it won’t be particularly confusing. Either, having become fully informed on the situation, President Obama has changed his mind or he’s yielded to political pressure, as you prefer.

Either way it is likely to be politically damaging to President Obama, leaving him open to charges of naïveté, lack of resolution, or political motivation. But it won’t be confusing.

“[General Stanley] McChrystal is not inclined to draw attention to his storied history as a special operator. But when he tells you that it’s impossible to kill your way out of this war, you believe him — because Lord knows, he’s tried.” – Andrew Exum, reporting back to Abu Muqawama after a month working on a project for ISAF in Afghanistan

I do a massive roundup of the news coverage of the massive show of force in Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley that kicked off in the wee hours this morning in my New Atlanticist post “U.S. Launches Major Afghan Offensive.”

My detailed take at the link but what’s most remarkable is not so much the sheer size of the undertaking — which is the biggest since the Fallujah campaign in 2004 — but the absolute emphasis on COIN tactics.  Most notably, the extraordinary lengths the mission planners went to in order to prevent civilian casualties.

It may well be too late for success, however that’s defined.  But it’s a huge step in the right direction.

I’m guessing Dave Schuler will have more to say later.

Image: BBC

Mark Safranski has a mini-review up of Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers.

Not having read the book, I don’t have anything substantive to add.  I had previously mentally noted that Horse Soldiers was also the name of a classic John Wayne movie but figured it was a coincidence — until I saw the bottom blurb that he had previous written a book called In Harm’s Way which, of course, is also the name of a classic John Wayne movie.

Any guesses as to the next book?  Marry up a John Wayne movie title with a one-sentence subtitle in Stanton’s genre to play along.  The Green Berets is hereby ruled ineligible on account of being too obvious.

Andrew Exum moved to CNAS a while back and now his blog, Abu Muqawama, has moved, too.   All your COIN belong to us and all that.  No word on whether Erin Simpson et al will be moving along with him.

Update your links, feeds, and whatnot accordingly.

The Defense Department is finally getting somewhat serious about COIN and other forms of nontraditional warfare, signaling major priority shifts with its new budget proposal.

Gen. George W. Casey last year displayed a vehicle from the Army's Future Combat Systems program, which is expected to be heavily cut. (By Haraz N. Ghanbari -- Associated Press)

Gates’s aides say his plan would boost spending for some programs and take large whacks at others, including some with powerful constituencies on Capitol Hill and among influential contractors, making his announcement more of an opening bid than a decisive end to weeks of sometimes acrimonious internal Pentagon debate.

Among the programs expected to be heavily cut is the Army’s Future Combat Systems, a network of vehicles linked by high-tech communications that has been plagued by technical troubles and delays; with a price tag exceeding $150 billion, it is now one of the most costly military efforts.

Gates also is considering cutting a new $20 billion communications satellite program and reducing the number of aircraft carriers from 11 to 10, and he plans to eliminate elements of the decades-old missile defense effort that are over budget or considered ineffective, according to industry and administration sources.

[...]

Gates has signaled for months that the Pentagon’s resources are misallocated, but his embrace of the budget increase proposed by President Obama represents an abrupt turnaround. Late in the Bush administration, he blessed a military-service-driven budget proposal for 2010 packed with $60 billion in spending beyond what the Pentagon had earlier recommended. Much of the added funds would have accelerated the production of existing ships, airplanes, Army vehicles and missile defenses.

My graduate mentor, Don Snow, drummed into me that “policy is what gets funded.”  Presidents and cabinet secretaries frequently announce priorities that people mistake for policy but, unless said priorities are reflected in the budget, they’re just talk.

This is definitely a move in the right direction although, frankly, not nearly enough of one.  Given that this is an opening bid in what is likely to be a very contentious debate, one would think much more drastic reforms would have been warranted.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell cited the current financial crisis as a rationale for these cuts.  The problem, however, is that Congressmen whose districts make these systems could reasonably argue that this is precisely the sort of stimulus the economy needs right now.  It’s going to be very difficult to get these cuts through, especially with the sunk costs in FCS.

Even beyond the tactics of negotiating this through Congress, the proposed moves are a baby step. Cutting FCS makes sense, certainly, but only mothballing only one carrier group?  There are those who argue that carriers have been outmoded since roughly the Battle of Midway.  Do we really need 10 of them?

UPDATE: The above notwithstanding, Andrew Exum “has never been so excited about a freaking budget.”

John Nagl’s classic book on counterinsurgency is called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Less insightful, perhaps, but easier to implement is Neil Strauss’ survivalist video, “How to Turn a Cigarette into a Knife.”

Via Noah Shachtman, who has an interview with Strauss and several other videos. (Also, one of the most annoying pop-over ads I’ve yet to encounter.)

“No one who really understands COIN wants to do it.” – Andrew Exum (aka Abu Muqawama)

Erin Simpson:

I’m working on a longer post on “what jury duty can teach you about counter-insurgency.” It revolves around the following observation: prosecutors believe about 50 people witnessed the “urban gun battle” at the heart of the case I sat for; *3* eyewitnesses ultimately testified, all of whom had to be relocated due to concerns expressed about their safety. The long arm of the law doesn’t even extend the five miles from the US Capitol to Anacostia. Something to think about when establishing the “rule of law” in Kandahar and Kabul.

Indeed.

Photo by Flickr user Elvert Barnes under Creative Commons license.

Tony Blankley, former press secretary to Newt Gingrich and editorial page editor of the Washington Times, has a new book out that, among other things, argues for reinstatement of the military draft.  Unlike liberals like Charlie Rangel or even centrist Phil Carter, he doesn’t do so on the basis of “fairness” or spreading the burden but rather on the sheer need for manpower.

John Hawkins interviews him. Here’s an excerpt:

Let me give you, to me, the biggest argument and that is the almost 4500 troops that have been killed in Iraq and more thousands than that that have been seriously injured. All of that came after we defeated the Republican Guard. Rumsfeld was correct that we only needed about 80,000 troops to knock off the Republican Guard. They were wrong to think that we could occupy that country with only those 80,000 or 100,000 troops. In Germany, after WW2, we flooded the zone. When the 80,000 elite forces finished their fighting, we needed to flood the zone with 300,000 or 400,000 ground occupying troops. Every village, every main intersection, every building guarded — the resistance would never have arisen. We would have saved 4000 lives if we’d had enough troops. We sacrificed lives.

[...]

This was a relatively small war. Now, what happens if the Jihadis overthrow the Pakistani government — a very unstable government. …They have nuclear weapons. If we want to stop the Jihadis from getting nuclear weapons, we’d have to go into Pakistan and try to stop that. We don’t have remotely the number of troops to do that.

Moreover, as the years unfold, according to the intelligence community — the day before I sent my manuscript to the printer — we’re likely to have resource wars over water and oil in the coming decades. China already has a lot of troops in Sudan guarding their oil fields right now.

So, I think it’s obvious that we can’t raise enough troops by the voluntary method. I’ve got a young son, a new 2nd Lieutenant in the Army — I’ve met his friends, …I’ve talked with the generals, and I know how wonderful the volunteer service is, but there just aren’t enough of them.

Blankley, with whom I’ve had conversations and genuinely like and respect, is almost certainly right that, if we need a radically larger force than we now have for some future contingency, we’re not going to be able to achieve it through the current system.  But a slightly plausible future emergency strikes me as a weak rationale for a definite present infringement on personal liberty and weakening of the morale of a military that he admits is superb.

Beyond that, the most manpower intensive missions are those like we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan: post-combat or combat-plus operations like COIN and SASO that require a large, continuing presence.  The scenarios he envisions would likely be met with massive aerial strikes, not infantrymen fighting door-to-door.

Photo: Sharing Miracles.

Over the weekend, Dave Schuler closed his post “Winning in Afghanistan” with three very good questions:

• What are our strategic objectives in Afghanistan?

• What tactics will effect those objectives?

• What are the logistical requirements of implementing the objectives?

Today in New Atlanticist, my former graduate advisor, Don Snow, gives an extensive response with “Are We Losing in Afghanistan.”    He frames the questions thusly:

The problem in Afghanistan is conceptualization. What is the United States (and the NATO allies) doing there? There are two possible answers. One is that the United States is engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban, who are attempting to overthrow the Karzai government the United States helped put in power and now supports. The other is that the United States is engaged in a counterterrorism campaign, the object of which is the destruction of al Qaeda. The two are by no means the same thing, either as a conceptual objective or as a military problem. In fact, they may even be contradictory goals if pursuing one makes the other worse (which it may well be doing).

He fleshes out the answers in some detail at the link.

Michael J. Totten weighs in on the  Iraq War is Over and We Won argument and decides that, while he’s “reluctant” to answer that question in the affirmative, “The war in Iraq is all but over right now, and it will be officially over if the current trends in violence continue their downward slide. ”

[Michael] Yon is braver than the rest of us for declaring the war over, but it’s important to understand that there are no final battles in counterinsurgencies and it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact dates when wars like this end. The anti-Iraqi insurgency – a war-within-a-war – really is effectively over. As long as another such war-within-a-war doesn’t break out, Yon will appear more perceptive than the rest of us in hindsight when the currently low levels of violence finally do taper off into relative insignificance.

The problem, which I noted in my post on the subject, is that, given the possibility that the Mahdi Army could end its ceasefire at any moment or another spectucular event could reignite sectarian fighting (Totten notes that there have been zero such fatalities since April), there’s no way to distinguish a lull from closure.  He observes that NATO has not fully secured Kosovo nine years after the end of major combat operations there, and that conflicts in Lebanon, Algeria, and Palestine have an on again, off again nature that’s almost wholly unpredictable.

What most of us still think of as “war” in Iraq is, at this point, a rough and unfinished peacekeeping mission. Whether it is officially over or not, it has certainly been downgraded to something else, and it’s about time more analysts and observers are willing to say so.

The problems with that are manifold.  While there’s relative peace at the moment, there has been no cessation of hostilities.  Terrorist attacks continue, obviously.  More importantly, it’s not even clear who the parties are who would have the ability to negotiate and sign an armistice.  It simply doesn’t feel like a peacekeeping mission.  Until we’ve got a better handle on Muqtada al-Sadr and company, it’s just too early  to break out the blue berets.

Moreover, we haven’t achieved our mission.   Once Saddam’s regime was toppled and it was clear that his WMD program was more notional than real, the tangible goals of the war were achieved.  We’ve remained in the last four plus years, and took the lion’s share of our casualties, fighting for something more abstract and elusive: a stable democracy capable of governing a unified Iraq without our assistance.

Security is a precondition for that goal, which was the impetus behind the Surge.  But, thus far, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that the Maliki government has built much sectarian consensus.   Elections are scheduled for October 1st that could conceivably be a major step in that direction but, alas, they can’t even agree on the rules for said election.  Of course, there’s only so much that the United States can do to move that process along.  Horses, water, and all that.  There’s even less that the United States military can do.

If  the primary purpose of American combat troops at this stage is simply continuing to give the Iraqi politicians breathing room to build consensus, then Totten’s right: it is mostly a stability and security operation at this point more than a traditional counterinsurgency.

Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said this yesterday:

“I won’t go so far as to say that progress in Iraq from a military perspective has reached a tipping point or is reversible — it has not, and it is not,” Mullen told a Pentagon press conference.  “But security is unquestionably and remarkably better. Indeed, if these trends continue I expect to be able early this fall to recommend to the secretary and the president further troop reductions,” he said.

At the same time, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates was warning against the militarization of foreign policy and stressing the need for civilian leadership under the State Department and moving the military to a support role.

So maybe, just maybe, we’re making the transition from Thomas Barnett’s Leviathan force to the SysAdmin force.  Time will tell whether we’ll need to switch back into kinetic mode.

U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Timothy Kingston

H.R. McMaster has been officially nominated by the president for brigadier general and is “currently enroute to serve as director, concepts development and experimentation, Army Capabilities Integration Center, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Virgina.”

Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell reports that,

The ARCIC is a relatively new center that has the potential to be very influential in setting Army doctrine. As the Washington Post’s Ann Scott Tyson suggests, the promotion indicates that the counterinsurgency types in the Petraeus mold are gaining the upper hand against the big war crowd.

While I’m not entirely sanguine about involving ourselves in more small wars, I nonetheless hope we’re reading the tea leaves correctly on this one.  Regardless of whether doing counterinsurgency and stability ops is a good idea, it’s rather clear that we have a bipartisan tendency to engage in them.  We may as well do them right, then.  And putting highly competent men like McMaster in charge is a huge step in that direction.

Photo:  PBS Frontline

Stilgherrian has attended one too many Future of Media conferences and he has a long tirade for Old Media journalists whining about bloggers and professional standards.

What’s tiring about this false dichotomy is that it compares the highest ideal of journalism with the lowest grade of personal blogging about what the cat did yesterday and — lo and behold! — they’re not the same. Gosh.

How much everyday journalism actually conforms to the high ideal? Not much. For every Walkley-nominated episode of Four Corners there’s a hundred tawdry yarns about miracle fat cures or shonky builders with a camera shoved in their face. For every investigative scoop there’s a thousand mundane little 5-paragraph yarns that merely quote what someone said at a press conference, and then quote their opponent. Or recycle a media release, putting the journo’s byline where the PR firm’s logo used to be. Or misappropriate statistics to beat up some shock-horror non-existent “crime wave”. Or either fawn or tut-tut over some “celebrity” and their antics — more often than not because that same celebrity is appearing in a TV show or movie that’s completely coincidentally owned by the journalist’s employer.

[...]

The shape of your craft and the form of your stories was determined by the technology used to deliver those stories. Newspapers, for instance, worked to their daily cycles, and stories had the length and structure they did, because of the physical and operational constraints of putting ink onto paper. Some bloke called McLuhan said something about this, ages back — but I wouldn’t know for sure, because I’m not a proper journalist. Still, it strikes me that the very industrial scale of printing a metropolitan daily or producing a 6pm TV bulletin also shapes the way you go about making your stories: all that mechanism between you the journalist and your audience.

[...]

There’s still a role for Real Journalism, of course, with your research and storytelling skills and, yes, with your Code of Ethics too. No-one’s saying there won’t be. And you know what? You too can use all these wonderful new tools to create wonderful new forms of Journalism — if only you’d stop whinging about how your world’s falling apart and actually learn to use them. A hint: You don’t have to wait for your grumpy old chain-smoking editor to show you, either, because he’s a dinosaur and will soon be dead.

I’ve left out most of the good bits of the rant — click the link for entertainment value — but that’s the essence of the argument itself.  And he’s right, of course.

The need for professional, full-time journalists isn’t going away.  But we no longer need them simply to spread easily-obtained information; there are just too many faster, less filtered ways of doing that nowadays.  Nor do we need them anymore as opinion shapers; there are simply too many outstanding pundits out there to read them all, so people can pick and choose based on their interests and tastes.

We do, however, need pros to do longer form journalism.  Sure, there are blogs and bloggers who do that (Josh Marshall and TPM are an obvious example) but they’re simply independent professional journalists. The beauty is that this is precisely the kind of work that most journalists worth their salt want to do.  The trick now is to persuade their editors, producers, and publishers that letting them do that is the future of their business.

Story via Duncan Riley. Cartoon via  Dana Blankenhorn.

Apropos our value of foreign languages discussion earlier, Andrew Krepinevich, a highly regarded military analyst, says the Pentagon needs to commit far more resources to just that.

“If the experience of the last seventeen years tells us anything, it is that we are likely to continue to find our armed forces deployed… in operations among the indigenous populations, rather than around them,” he argues. “This in turn suggests that the military must be prepared to operate ‘among the people’ much more than in the past. Language training and cultural awareness will therefore be critical enabling capabilities.” In a stand-off war, you might be able to afford to understanding the enemy you’re bombing from on high. But when that enemy is mixed in with the people you’re trying to secure, you can’t afford to be monolingual and culturally deaf.

Therefore, Krepinvech suggests, we should reduce “the military’s continuing relatively high emphasis on conventional operations… in order to support language and cultural training, as well as other ’soft’ skills that are particularly useful in irregular warfare.”

I’m a much less renowned military analyst than Krepinevich and I’ve been saying this since 1992.

UPDATE:  Bernard Finel counters that maybe we’d be better off not engaging in the kind of conflicts that need these skill sets to begin with:

What we forgot since the Vietnam War was not so much how to wage counter-insurgency, but rather the tremendous costs and small benefits that accrue from engaging in these sorts of conflicts at all.

I fully agree. The problem, though, which I reconciled myself to in the 1990s, was that we’re going to do it anyway. Because we define our interests globally, we seemingly can’t not intervene in crises that either have a plausible security domino effect (Republicans, mostly) or offend our humanitarian sensibilities (Democrats, especially, but also neocons and “national greatness” Republicans).