Commentary: Mr. President, take your time on Afghanistan
Joseph L. Galloway
Friday, November 13, 2009
The word is that none of the options contains what the president wants to see — an estimate of how many more years beyond the eight already invested would be needed and an exit strategy.
Bravo!
Simple question and a vital requirement: How much longer will it take, and how do we get out when that time is up?
Let's call that Military Planning 101 and, like the president, we're left to ponder why that basic first step in committing a nation and its military and its treasury to a war wasn't taken before now and was missing from all the alternatives offered at this critical junction in a war that's now in its ninth year?
Kilcullen: Send either lots of troops or none at all
November 12th, 2009
Some quick notes from Georgetown, where David Kilcullen has just addressed students and faculty at the Center for Peace and Security Studies. Highlights below:
The oft-touted 1:50 (or 20:1,000) ratio is “flawed.” It was based on post-war reconstruction studies done by the Rand Corporation, not on actual insurgencies. Successful COIN campaigns have employed ratios that vary widely. It also refers to total security forces, not just — in our case — American troops. Finally, it’s better to think about the military presence functionally, rather than numerically.
“Where local officials sleep” is a good indicator to track progress. In the film, I Am Legend, Will Smith must get home before the vampires come out to feast. Similarly, in Afghanistan today some 70% of provincial governors sleep in Kabul instead of the provinces they govern. This is bad.
Phi Beta Iota: Blessed commons sense from a Captain and intelligence professional in the U.S. Army. When we first entered Iraq we were told to avoid the immams and tribal chiefs, and this wasted at least four years of key leader engagement. Neither the secret world nor the military “Human Terrain Team” program have gotten a grip on cultural intelligence or a coherent holistic matrix for strategic, operational, and tactical exploitation of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic Essential Elements of Information (EEI). We still have not integrated provincial team civil reporting with military tactical reporting, and still have both hugh gaps and costly overlaps. This monograph, this captain, are the tip of the spear not just in leadership engagement, but in reconcilation–there is a reason why “truth” is included “Truth & Reconciliation Commission.” BRAVO ZULU.
Unraveling the mysteries of Vietnam may prevent us from repeating its mistakes
By Evan Thomas and John Barry
Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The two friends chatted for a while, then Holbrooke said, “Let me pass you to General McChrystal.” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, came on the line. His question was simple but pregnant: “Is there anything we learned in Vietnam that we can apply to Afghanistan?” Karnow's reply was just as simple: “The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place.” [Emphasis added]
Chuck Spinney Sends… America's diplomatic recipe for winning the hearts and minds of “furriners” in the 21st Century:
Mix – Blind unreasoning fear with the
Domestic politics of privatizing embassy protection and the
Domestic politics of huge construction contracts
into neat grand-strategic soufflé, then bake it in the domestic political-economic oven of heated by the coals of the MICC's Long War Against Terrorism and serve hot to a world that hungers for American values.
For those readers who question the political relevance of such a tasty dish, I offer the following op-ed by Simon Tisdall of the Guardian
In 2008, notes Stanger, roughly 80 percent of the State Department’s requested budget went out the door in the form of contracts and grants. The Army’s primary support contractor in Iraq, KBR, reportedly has some 17,000 direct-hire employees there.
The U.S. military is now proposing a huge nation-building project for Afghanistan to replace its dysfunctional government with a state that can deliver for the Afghan people so they won’t side with the Taliban. I might be more open to that project if we had a true global alliance to share the burden of an effort that will take decades. But we don’t. European publics do not favor this war, and our allies will only pony up just enough troops to get their official “Frequent U.S. Ally Card” renewed. We’ll make up the difference by hiring private contractors.
The election in Afghanistan has turned into a disaster for all who promoted it. Hamid Karzai has been declared re-elected as president of the country for the next five years though his allies inside and outside Afghanistan know that he owes his success to open fraud. Instead of increasing his government’s legitimacy, the poll has further de-legitimized it. . . . . . . .
In Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, the government was democratically elected by a huge majority in 2005. There was a savage civil war because the fifth of the population, who are Sunni Arabs, did not accept that victory of four fifths who are Shia Arabs and Kurds. The Shia did not relish US occupation, but they were prepared to cooperate with it while they took power. Only the Kurds were long term US allies.
