Many thanks to the folks at Blogspot for hosting me and my crew these past 2+ years, but this blog has a new home at
http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama
Continue the conversation there. Bloggers, please update your blogrolls.
I was hoping to roll out the new CNAS report on Afghanistan and Pakistan with the new and improved Abu Muqawama. Alas ... the new and improved Abu Muqawama is still dealing with a few glitches. Expect that online later today or over the weekend. (I will just say this, though: Old Abu Muqawama is to Blue Steel what New Abu Muqawama is to Magnum.)
In the meantime, digest the new report -- authored by me, Dave Kilcullen, Nate Fick, and Ahmed Humayun -- on Afghanistan and Pakistan that will be formally released next week.
When I arrived at CNAS, I was a bit hesitant to lead the team working on this report. As you all know, I last served in Afghanistan in 2004 and have spent most of the past five years in the Arabic-speaking world. One of the great things about developing expertise about one region of the world, though, is that when you look at new regions, you more quickly -- to borrow a favorite phrase of Donald Rumsfeld -- know what you do not know.
So with the blessing of CNAS, I hired Christian Bleuer, Josh Foust, and Nick Schmidle as consultants and to make sure I got my facts straight. I am not the "pro's pro" on Afghanistan, but luckily, I know plenty of people who are. This report, then, benefited greatly from the many readers -- some in the United States, some in Europe, some in Central Asia -- who took the time to provide suggestions and tell us where we were getting things wrong in earlier drafts.
The second reservation I had about this project was that the administration, U.S. Central Command, and the Joint Chiefs had already conducted three strategic reviews on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it looked as if the president had already settled on his policy and a strategy. How, then, to be useful?
What we agreed to do was to offer four operational recommendations -- two for Afghanistan, two for Pakistan -- and to then provide metrics for gauging whether or not the U.S. and allied strategy was succeeding or failing. In the end, I think we have managed to write both a provocative and useful policy paper.
This next week, LTG (Ret.) David Barno will lead a discussion on this paper at the CNAS annual conference. Andrew Bacevich and COL Chris Cavoli will also be there to provide critiques and to contribute to the discussion. I tried to recruit co-panelists who would both provide a balanced assessment of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the tactical, operational, strategic, and political levels. I also tried to find people who might disagree with parts of our argument. It should be a lively discussion. In the meantime, read the report and sound off in the comments.
Okay, it was a really good speech. I finally listened to it -- I had read it on paper yesterday morning -- and he nailed it. I mean, he botched a lot of the Arabic words (hijab, al-Azhar, etc.), but it was good. I suspect that I agree with the Washington Post that all anyone will remember will be the Israel stuff, and that's too bad. And I even agree with the very end of Krauthammer's unintentionally hilarious and epic whine about settlements today (in Israel, only far-right MPs struck the same tone as Krauthammer yesterday) when he says this might cause some leaders in the Arabic-speaking world to just sit on their hands and expect Obama to deliver Israeli concessions with no movement on their sides. (Because this was exactly the vibe I got during Abu Mazen's press conference with Obama last week.)
But still, it was a really good speech. I watched it using this cool interactive feature provided by the New York Times, so if you have not seen the speech yet, click here.
I love it when readers contact me with "You've probably already seen this, but..."
No, no, the odds are I have not already seen it. I really appreciate the tips from the readership, such as the one pointing toward this IISS briefing on drone strikes. (Thanks, JP.)
...that Obama's big speech in Cairo today is a bigger deal in the Western world than it is in the Arabic-speaking and Islamic worlds? The speech is only the #2 story on al-Jazeera right now, behind the clash between Palestinian security forces and Hamas in Qalqilya.
Marc Lynch, meanwhile, has as good an immediate analysis as you are likely to read anywhere.
I have said before that -- now that I am no longer based in Beirut -- this blog is probably not the go-to place for in-depth commentary on the Lebanese elections. But in the next few paragraphs I am going to make a case for continuing aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) no matter the outcome of this weekend's poll.
The arguments against continuing aid to the LAF are well known and will be advanced by both Israel's more hard-core supporters in the Congress as well as some thoughtful people out of government who follow this issue closely. Elections matter, they will say, and Lebanon cannot expect us to continue to provide arms and training to the LAF if Hiz-bu-freaking-allah is leading the government. Additionally, David Schenker -- who worked this issue for the Department of Defense and who continues to follow Lebanon closely -- has a series of grave and not unreasonable concerns about the direction in which the LAF is heading.
These are persuasive arguments. In the following few paragraphs, though, I am going to lay out a case for why the United States should continue its support to the LAF along pre-2009 levels.
Where, dear readers, would you like me to start with this one?Over at abu muqawama, Andrew Exum makes an audacious claim about the proper metric for success in Afghanistan. In responding to a WSJ article about the military's growing use of body counts to measure succes in Afghanistan, Exum writes:
In the context of a counterinsurgency campaign -- which we can all agree we're engaged in -- enemy body count is a poor metric. Civilian body counts, by contrast, are a better metric -- the fewer civilians dying, the better. . . I know the public affairs officers in Afghanistan are trying their best, but by publicizing enemy body counts as part of one's communications plan, you create the impression that we ourselves are using enemy body count as an effective metric to track success and failure. Which I hope to goodness we are not.First of all, we don't all agree that we're engaged in a counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Indeed, I'm pretty sure President Obama would not agree that we are engaged in a full-fledged counter-insurgency campaign. (Perhaps COIN-lite or Skim COIN).
Beyond that point, forgive me for asking the obvious question - and at risk of being derided as an old fashioned, lost in the weeds, conventional warrior - but isn't the point of war-fighting to kill the enemy?
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General McChrystal said the measure of American and allied effectiveness would be “the number of Afghans shielded from violence,” not the number of enemies killed.If we were fighting, oh, Nazi Germany, the killing of the enemy might be enough to win the war. In an irregular fight in which the enemy does not have a fixed number of troops or when killing civilians might actually create more new enemy combatants than you can kill, that's not really an option.
The political object -- the original motive for the war -- will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires.For goodness sake, that's on the eighth friggin page of On War! Could you not read at least that far? Now this, from Chapter Two of Book I:
The purpose in question may be the destruction of the enemy's forces, but not necessarily so; it may be quite different.A few weeks back, a political scientist I know broached the theory that Michael Cohen is a secret GOP plot to re-convince voters to never take Democrats seriously when they talk of defense policy. I laughed when he said this, but I am now thinking he might be right. C'mon, man, we get that you don't like counterinsurgency. Great. But give me this: surely the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the pundit has to make is to establish the kind of war about which he is running his mouth off.
Those of you who do not live in the DC area or could not attend yesterday's event can listen to Thomas Rid and me discuss his important new book here. (Pardon the scratchy audio.)
Afghanistan is all over the news today, and not all of what is reported is good. To begin, a U.S. military report has concluded that U.S. soldiers and airmen were at fault for civilian deaths in a 4 May air strike which provoked outrage among Afghans.
It is worth noting that the investigating officer for this report was not some cuddly JAG officer who has never seen combat but rather one of the most respected special operators in the U.S. Army -- a man who has no problem, I can assure you, killing bad guys. (His ridiculous bio is here.) On the one hand, it's nice to see the U.S. military step up and admit fault. On the other hand, if this incident is emblematic of a culture in the U.S. forces in Afghanistan that plays free and loose with 2,500-pound bombs, that's not good at all.According to the senior military official, the report on the May 4 raids found that one plane was cleared to attack Taliban fighters, but then had to circle back and did not reconfirm the target before dropping bombs, leaving open the possibility that the militants had fled the site or that civilians had entered the target area in the intervening few minutes.
In another case, a compound of buildings where militants were massing for a possible counterattack against American and Afghan troops was struck in violation of rules that required a more imminent threat to justify putting high-density village dwellings at risk, the official said.
“In several instances where there was a legitimate threat, the choice of how to deal with that threat did not comply with the standing rules of engagement,” said the military official, who provided a broad summary of the report’s initial findings on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry was not yet complete.
And finally, this might be the worst news of the day. Yesterday's hearings on Capitol Hill were kind of important, right? I mean, the confirmation of a controversial new commander for the war in Afghanistan should have attracted as much attention as the Spring 2007 hearing with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, right?The insurgents’ modern gear and the relative sophistication of their tactics and marksmanship indicated that these were not local guerrillas. The use of body armor, helmets and smoke grenades is “fairly rare” anywhere in Afghanistan, and “most likely indicates a skilled group [of] … foreign fighters with funding and previous experience [and] training,” an Army source in Afghanistan said.
This view was supported by the fact that coalition interpreters monitoring the guerrillas’ communications said they heard two non-Afghan languages. One was Farsi, Cannata said, adding that the interpreters had specifically identified the language as such, rather than Dari, a language spoken in northern and western Afghanistan that is closely related to Farsi but is not usually spoken by the Pashtuns from whom the Taliban draw their recruits.
Farsi, or Persian, is the principal language spoken in Iran. But Cannata was quick to caution against assuming that the presence of Farsi-speaking insurgents indicated that Iranian operatives were fighting U.S. troops. “That doesn’t necessarily mean ‘Iranian,’ I wouldn’t want to lead anybody down the wrong route on that,” Cannata said. Versions of Farsi are also spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Talkin' sense. Read the transcript and watch the video here.
In Afghanistan, we have a lot of support from the local population and we have, you know, a very large level of international community commitment. In Pakistan on the other hand, we've got 100 nuclear weapons, we've got Al Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the part of the country that the government doesn't control. We've got a huge developed country and the potential for extremist takeover if this doesn't go well, and that's a problem that should really keep most of us awake at night because of the number of nuclear weapons involved and the fact this is a central part of South Asia, not some kind of backwater.
Gang,
Allow me to take a break for one moment from all my counterinsurgenting to highlight two worthy causes to which I am tied. The first is that I will be going for an early-morning run on Saturday with some members of my local rugby team for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. You can donate here. (Search for my name -- Exum, not Muqawama. Oh, and I'll be running in a pack and for fun, so please don't go expecting me to run sub-18:00.)
Second, that same local rugby team is running a casino night on 13 June that will benefit the Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund. If you live in the DC area, paying $65 for an open bar and some ridiculous donated prizes is a great deal and benefits a worthy cause. Let me stress again the most important thing about that last sentence: open bar. Anyway, click here for a ticket.
Thanks,
Abu Muqawama
NYT:
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General McChrystal said the measure of American and allied effectiveness would be “the number of Afghans shielded from violence,” not the number of enemies killed.
I have been in a meeting for the past hour and a half and returned to read my comments and discover that John McHugh, a Republican congressman from upstate New York, will be the next Secretary of the Army pending confirmation. My initial thoughts on this are, first off, relief that a defense industry executive such as Arnold Punaro was not named. (No disrespect to Mr. Punaro, by the way -- for all I know he is a great American. I am just very wary of putting executives with responsibility for weapons systems like the Future Combat Systems in charge of the services trying to decide whether or not those weapons systems are good investments.) Second, I am really excited about this particular choice. McHugh is the latest of many pragmatic, centrist Republicans and Democrats to be installed or retained in President Obama's Department of Defense, and I have first-hand experience of Rep. McHugh's knowledge of defense matters and concern for our nation's fighting men and women. (I was once stationed at Fort Drum, near Rep. McHugh's hometown, and closely followed the degree to which he served as an advocate for soldiers in the Congress.) Third, this seems like really smart politics. The odds favor McHugh being replaced in his district by a centrist Democrat, wouldn't you say? Or at least a Republican set to get rolled by redistricting? (These are crafty folks, these Chicagoans occupying the White House.)
In the end, I think this is a good choice for both the U.S. Army and the country.
Like many of you, I too will be watching today's examination of General Stan McChrystal by the Senate Armed Services Committee. I expect the Senate to erect four obstacles for McChrystal to negotiate before being confirmed:
Well, CNAS loses a great intern, but the Naval Postgraduate School gains a new research assistant. Nick Masellis has left CNAS, but he has another contribution on SWJ:
...when I first arrived to the city and noticed the massive golden domes, I knew nothing of their significance; I knew nothing of the story behind the shrines and the history behind them; and I was still ignorant of the general cultural milieu. I was not at all unique – we all were mesmerized by the mosques and the culture around us, but had no clue where to begin in order to understand what they meant in the context of our presence among the people apart from: 1. do not get near the mosques; and 2. do not fire on them if fired upon from its vicinity. But more importantly, the prevailing attitude at the time seemed to be that we didn’t really have to understand anything beyond the latter. That seemed to be a reasonable tenant; after all, why would it be necessary to know such things about any given area, people or buildings? How, if at all, is it pertinent to the mission?
Okay, you all know I make a point of never blogging about Israel and the Palestinian Territories, but this paragraph from Akiva Eldar, tongue firmly in cheek, made me laugh today:Instead of dismantling settlements, [Obama] would do better to dismantle the Iranian nuclear program. Otherwise Jerusalem will reassess its special relationship with Washington, and will reconsider its commitment to ensuring the qualitative advantage of the United States. If this situation continues, we may even stop vetoing anti-American decisions in the United Nations Security Council.
I just finished moderating a great conversation with Thomas Rid about his new book, War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Those of you in the below post on Afghanistan had some good questions about information operations and how to measure their effectiveness. More than any other book or article I have read, Thomas and his co-author (Marc Hecker, the French scholar) explain the importance of information operations in contemporary insurgent conflicts and how some military organizations perform with skill while others fail. I have added this book to the counterinsurgency reading list we maintain and, again, would encourage you all to buy it (despite the prohibitive Praeger price).
The book, after carefully examining information operations of counterinsurgents and insurgents alike, puts forth several provocative theses, among them the idea that al Qaeda, because of the way their message only appeals to a small elite, will never grow to be a popular movement -- a true insurgency -- but that the governments of the West will never be able to eradicate the terror threat. The "long tail" idea at the end -- and how al Qaeda will always be a "terror" group appealing to a niche audience and never a true popular insurgency -- is really interesting.
For those of you who were unable to attend today's event -- and many of the blog's readers were there and were kind enough to say hello afterward -- we might get a sound recording of the event to post on the blog. Irony of ironies, we had a technological malfunction while discussing information technology, but hopefully the recording is still audible.
I'm a bit late to this new website featuring lessons learned for leaders deploying to Afghanistan. A reader tipped me off, but I have not linked to it until now. Promising, and needed.
Goodness gracious, what is going on my country? My co-religionists are assassinating people in their churches and the U.S. and Canadian governments, by the end of today, will own 72% of General Motors. Is there any good news out there? Maybe, uh, in Afghanistan?
Well, yes and no.
On the one hand, this encouraging article from yesterday's New York Times shows the way effective population-centric counterinsurgency operations can affect a region in Afghanistan.
“Compared with last year, it’s 100 percent different,” said Muhamed Zaker, an apple farmer from the area.On the other hand, another article, in today's Wall Street Journal, explains the way in which the U.S. military, channeling Westmoreland apparently, is now using body counts as a metric in Afghanistan.
As far as I am concerned, Chris Cavoli has it right and the well-meaning gang in Afghanistan now is misguided. In the context of a counterinsurgency campaign -- which we can all agree we're engaged in -- enemy body count is a poor metric. Civilian body counts, by contrast, are a better metric -- the fewer civilians dying, the better. In our soon-to-be-released paper from CNAS on Afghanistan and Pakistan, we will have an entire chapter dedicated to metrics you can use to track the administration's new strategy. Enemy body count, I can assure you, is no where to be found. I know the public affairs officers in Afghanistan are trying their best, but by publicizing enemy body counts as part of one's communications plan, you create the impression that we ourselves are using enemy body count as an effective metric to track success and failure. Which I hope to goodness we are not.In Afghanistan, counting bodies is now more prevalent than it ever was in Iraq.
After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, the military saw itself as fighting a few holdouts and, as often as not, reported their deaths. By 2005, however, commanders decided to avoid body counts, largely on the grounds they had proved unreliable, according to James Yonts, military spokesman at the time.
By 2007, it was apparent that Taliban, al Qaeda and other holdouts were actually conducting a full-fledged insurgency. The U.S.-led coalition realized that it -- and the Afghan government -- had to win the battle for legitimacy. At that point, public-affairs officers usually eschewed casualty reports because they feared that by focusing on killing, they would distract from the improvements Afghan authorities and their coalition backers were bringing to people's lives.
Body counts were "kind of a politically sensitive issue," says former Lt. Col. David Accetta, director of the 82nd Airborne Division's media operation at Bagram Airfield in 2007. Death tallies aren't "any kind of measurement or metric of success," says Mr. Accetta, who has since retired from the military.
Col. Cavoli, the former battalion commander, says his men fired thousands of rounds of artillery at insurgents along the Pakistan border during a tour lasting more than a year, ending in 2007. But "making the enemy irrelevant in the minds of the people was a much more profound defeat for the enemy than killing some of his members or even killing a lot of his people," says Col. Cavoli, who went on to teach counterinsurgency techniques to North Atlantic Treaty Organization officers.
The Army began a rethink when the 101st Airborne Division took over Afghan media operations in April 2008. Commanders worried the U.S.-led coalition appeared to be losing ground. The U.S. military routinely releases information about Americans killed in action. Since Sept. 11, 2001, 618 Americans have died in and around Afghanistan, 456 killed in combat. Remaining silent about enemy deaths gave the false impression that the U.S. was losing, says Lt. Col. Nielson-Green, spokeswoman for the 101st and a proponent of the new approach.
A clutch of anonymous intelligence and military officials -- no doubt stung by the degree to which the efficacy of drone attacks in Pakistan has been questioned of late -- have hit back in defense of the strikes in an article written by the reliable Karen DeYoung in today's Washington Post.
The article did not question the claims made by the officials or offer counter-claims. It did, however, leak this classified memorandum written by General Petraeus just four days ago:Judging by reports from the region through late April, the Obama administration authorized about four or five Predator attacks a month, maintaining a pace set by the Bush administration in August. The CIA, which does not publicly acknowledge the attacks, operates the aircraft, chooses the targets -- ideally with the cooperation of Pakistani intelligence on the ground -- and has White House authority to fire the missiles without prior consultation outside the intelligence agency. A senior Pakistani official said the rate has not diminished in recent weeks, although "you don't hear so much about it" because the strike areas have been more isolated.
"There are better targets and better intelligence on the ground," the Pakistani official said. "It's less of a crapshoot."
A second U.S. military official agreed, saying, "We're not getting civilians, and not getting outrage beyond the usual stuff."
"Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan . . . especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties," Petraeus wrote. Nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis oppose counterterrorism cooperation with the United States, he said, and "35 percent say they do not support U.S. strikes into Pakistan, even if they are coordinated with the GOP [government of Pakistan] and the Pakistan Military ahead of time."First off, it is my understanding that there is a growing divide in the special operations community about these strikes. No surprise, the direct-action side of the house is in favor of them, while the indirect-action guys are more skeptical.
