How to kill a perfectly good lunch hour fiddling with an essentially meaningless thought experiment; Or: How this graph mathematically proves withdrawal is a good idea

Step 1: Browse Abu Muqawama

Step 2: Observe new post positing a simple graphical model for Chinese and Iranian engagement in Afghanistan

Step 3: Immediately assume that this model is fundamentally flawed in extremely simple, easily illustrated way

Step 4: Second-guess, equivocate, hedge, rethink, repeat

Step 5: Sink an hour into playing around with your own draft

Step 6: Refresh browser, notice that Ex has appended explanatory update that basically resolves concerns

Step 7: Review Step 3, revise conclusion to reflect that Gulliver's brain is fundamentally flawed in an extremely simple, easily illustrated way

Step 8: Choke yourself

Seeing as I've now spent so much effort demonstrating my high nerd quotient and talent for auto-distraction, I suppose I ought also own up to being a blowhard and a popinjay by sharing the product of my scribblings. (N.b.: the time I spent carefully modifying Ex's graph was meant to have been dedicated to a far more substantial post, one illustrated by yet another semi-original visual aid. That one will have to wait.)

I promise this made sense a few hours ago

So there it is: my redrafting of Ex's graph and some explanatory notes. What the hell does it all mean?

First of all, I think the original depiction suffers from a well-intentioned attempt at parsimony and elegance. The concept being depicted is too complex to be accurately rendered with just two lines. I understand the attempt, and the logic behind it is so simple as to be nearly self-evident: as U.S. engagement in Afghanistan decreases, other states will likely become more involved in the country so as to protect their interests. In the near term, those states that view the U.S. as a competitor will try to bandwagon off American efforts -- taking advantage of the stability dividends of NATO presence in Afghanistan to serve their own economic and geopolitical interests -- while enjoying the relative benefit of reduced U.S. readiness and flexibility attendant to the commitment of a substantial force. As the American footprint shrinks, countries like China and Iran will seek to assert themselves in Afghanistan so as not to suffer an interruption to the largely beneficial status quo.

Ex lays all of this down in two simple assumptions. (There are certainly more implicit in the model, but it's a good beginning.)

Let's start by assuming both China and Iran have an interest in U.S. military assets remaining in Afghanistan at great expense. Let's also assume that neither country, both with interests in Afghanistan, wants more instability.

Ok, so let's double back: Here he's saying that Iran and China want instability in Afghanistan to continue at present levels so as to ensure the U.S. continues to dedicate resources and military assets to it, but that China and Iran have broader interests in Afghanistan such that increased instability would be detrimental to them (outweighing whatever benefit is derived from continued heavy U.S. involvement). Put another way: an increase in Afghan stability would benefit those interests that exist independent of the relationship with the U.S., while harming the specific interest those countries have in continued U.S. involvement in the conflict.

This is all predicated on the idea that the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan contributes to stability, and that their departure will likely presage instability (absent other mitigating circumstances), or at the very least that a precipitious withdrawal of all American forces would threaten whatever stability currently exists. The Chinese and Iranians, then, want instability so much as it's required to cement American presence (and thus enhance their own position vis-a-vis the U.S.), but not so much as to threaten their own independent interests.

But what if decisions about U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan were made independent of assessments about the country's stability? What if the timeline for withdrawal was not controlled or impacted significantly by the security situation, and American troops were to be brought home without a care for whether or not the Afghan government could be counted on to secure predictable political outcomes? Because as it happens, that's our reality: NATO has pledged to turn over primary responsibility for the country to its own government by 2014, a benchmark that's helpfully highlighted on the graph. With a withdrawal timeline set, we can't argue that stability impacts force sizing in any meaningful sense. So U.S. troop levels aren't going to increase, and in fact are going to decrease on a generally predictable schedule. As such, we can eliminate that variable from our assessment of Chinese and Iranian interests and say that stability in Afghanistan is an objective "good" for those countries.

This is worth repeating: because China and Iran benefit from Afghan stability in a broad sense, and because the only detrimental effect those countries suffer from Afghan stability is increased U.S. flexibility and readiness, and because U.S. troop levels (and thus flexibility and readiness) are determined by an independent political decision and are thus not connected to Afghan stability… we can ignore U.S. troop numbers and say that all things which increase Afghan stability benefit China and Iran.

Still with me?

If Afghan stability benefits Chinese and Iranian interests – that is, if there’s a directly proportional relationship between the two – and if it’s assumed that stability will decrease after 2014, then China and Iran will seek to engage in behaviors that either counter this decline or mitigate the relationship between Afghanistan and their other interests. (This means that their options are to make Afghanistan less impactful on their other interests or to try to make Afghanistan more stable. This is the same choice the U.S. is facing right now, and we’ve determined that the threat of terrorism makes it impossible to pursue the first option. At least until 2014.) So as U.S. troop levels go down, Chinese and Iranian willingness to take stabilizing actions must increase in order to keep the “Afghan stability” indicator from spiking downwards. This is a decidedly different concept from what the original graph is meant to represent.

Of course, I wrote all that before Ex made his "clarification" (which is really a correction!). So you can see on my chart that I've redlined "Chinese and Iranian interest in a stable Afghanistan" on the original graph and replaced it with "Chinese and Iranian willingness to take actions to ensure stability." The conflation (or at least confusion) of these two variables was a major flaw. I addressed this by adding a new line which you can see across the top of my version: "Chinese/Iranian interest in Afghan stability." Over a limited timescale, this measure should stay relatively flat. The dotted line that scoops upward from "willingness" to "interest" is meant to illustrate the mistake we make if we fail to consider the intended U.S. withdrawal timeline: our adversaries' enduring interest in Afghan stability is only variable if a decrease in stability is met with a flexible U.S. response -- meaning an escalation and the attendant consequences for readiness.

Does this new graph have any broader meaning or explanatory value? Well, it ought to indicate that so long as we're willing to assume that other countries have an interest in Afghan stability, reducing our troop presence is certainly the correct decision. It prevents potential competitors from continuing to bandwagon and coattail, and we reap benefits from improved readiness and increased strategic flexibility. (But we already knew this, right?) It also means that those states that perceive a threat to their interests from uncertainty in Afghanistan should be lining up to get involved in a productive, stabilizing capacity -- both now and after the U.S. heads for the exits. (An predictable and unfortunate side-effect is that the internationalizing of the conflict absent strong U.S./NATO leadership is likely to have negative outcomes for the Afghan people, if not for "stability.") So why isn't that happening? Well, there are a few options: either A) those other countries don't perceive a similar level of threat from instability; B) they feel as though they're sufficiently shielded from the negative effects of instability or that the U.S. will continue to shield them in some way, even without troops on the ground; or C) they simply don't believe the U.S. is really going to leave.

That's what spits out at the end of all this? Fuck, what a waste of time.

Wait, the administration wants WHAT?

According to Josh Rogin at The Cable, "U.S. military aid to Lebanon [is] under the microscope as Hariri visits Washington." He explains:

As Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri makes the rounds in Washington today and tomorrow, he faces deep questions in Congress and in the Defense Department about the future of the U.S. military aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces.

Supporters of the funding, mostly at the State Department and the White House, argue that strengthening the Lebanese military is the best way to bolster Hariri against the mounting influence of both Syria and Hezbollah, the radical Shiite militant group, inside Lebanon. The Lebanese military, this faction argues, is the most representative of the country's civic institutions and continuing the funding can help convince Hariri that working with the U.S. is a beneficial and defensible strategy.

But many lawmakers and some at the Pentagon, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, are extremely skeptical that continuing to funnel large amounts of cash and supplies to the LAF is really a good way to approach the Lebanon problem. They are angry about statements Hariri has made about Syria's alleged transfer of long-range missiles to Hezbollah, and question whether the military aid to Lebanon is part of a coherent strategy.

Ok, basically tracking so far. Military aid to Lebanon is a controversial and widely misunderstood subject, and it's true that there's no consensus in the USG on how exactly that assistance should be rendered, and to what end.

That said, the Obama administration is continuing in a direction that's basically consistent with the Bush administration on this issue, one that's informed by the understanding that the Lebanese Armed Forces are NOT capable of disarming Hizballah or fighting Syria or Israel, and that our efforts vis-a-vis the LAF are not meant to change that.

Rogin (or Andrew Tabler, who he quotes; it's not clear from the way the paragraph is written) seems to disagree:

"The number one issue now is arms transfers from Syria to Hezbollah and this confounds our policy of supporting the Lebanese military," said Andrew Tabler, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The Obama administration wants Hariri to use the state's instruments of power, such as the LAF, to confront Syria over the alleged arms transfers, but Hariri is in no position to confront Damascus.

The Obama administration wants the Lebanese government to use its armed forces to pressure Syria on arms transfers to Hizballah, and our military assistance to the LAF is directed towards that objective? I think Rogin (or Tabler) has got this one dead wrong, and I think basically all Lebanon/Levant-watchers will agree.

Security assistance and military aid are imperfect tools, I'll admit, and often suffer from a failure to nest assistance programs and other engagements within a long-term, strategic plan for a country or region. That said, our engagement with Lebanon is not reorganized and reprioritized based on the political flavor of the moment, and the entire LAF assistance plan isn't being reworked or redirected as a result of a few news stories about Syrian materiel transfers to Hizballah.

The U.S. is not aiding the LAF in the hopes that it will destroy Hizballah, nor that Beirut will use the LAF to pressure Syrian decisionmakers. It's just not what the assistance program is about. (What it is about is counterterrorism and territorial control/sovereignty, but basically only in those areas that Israel and Hizballah are not already preeminent. Which is to say that we support the LAF so that it can shut down terrorist activity in its Palestinian refugee camps and elsewhere.) No one is interested in destabilizing the country and the region by playing kingmaker, arming a proxy force to the teeth to take on Iranian-backed groups across the Levant. It's just not happening.

If you want to hear this from a real Lebanon expert, check out this talk by David Schenker (who is actually quoted at the end of the Rogin piece) at the Middle East Institute (h/t Abu Muqawama). It's in nine parts and also includes Aram Nerguizian, and it's worth watching the whole thing.

On the bright side, at least these weirdos at MPRI don't know who we are

So apparently the U.S. Army pays contractors to surf the internet looking for blog entries that mention the service. (Because that's not creepy or anything.) If the government wasn't so damn stupid, they'd just have some E-5 reading Small Wars Journal.

Danger Room reports:

You’d think all the criticism from left-wing websites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Salon would royally piss off the Army. But at least one Army report finds the sites’ posts to be consistently “balanced.”

Every week, the defense contractor MPRI prepares for the brass a “Blogosphere and Social Media Report,” rounding up sites’ posts on military matters. It’s meant to be a single source for top officers to catch up on what’s being said online and in leading social media outlets. Items from about two dozen national security and political blogs are excerpted, and classified as “balanced,” “critical,” or “supportive.” The vast majority of the posts are considered “balanced” — even when they rip the Army a new one.

But let's get to the important part, and the question you're all asking yourselves: How often do they talk about Ink Spots?!

Well, never, now that you ask. And I don't mind telling you that I'm sort of pleased at that fact. Friends of the blog Abu Muqawama and Armchair Generalist aren't so lucky, nor are SWJ, Attackerman, Michael Yon, Blackfive, and some of your other standard big-timers. (Oh yeah, and Danger Room.) So just in case you think we've gotten too big for our britches, the Army is still blissfully unaware of our existence.

(OK, I'll admit it: me calling the government "stupid" is a really thinly-veiled effort to get included in the "Critical" section of the next one of these things.)

Tactical tribal engagement

While I'm posting today, I'd like to draw your attention to a piece that Abu Muqawama and I put together on tribal engagement at the tactical level. This abbreviated planning framework was the result of our discussions in the tactical working group at the Tribal Engagement Workshop that the boys at Small Wars Journal put together. We had a great group of experienced officers and civilians - many of whom have done this mission in Afghanistan. So head on over and give it a read!

UPDATE: You can also find it at SWJ where you can see it in all of its PDF glory.

Hot quant on qual action

Over at Abu Muqawama last week, Ex posted a quantitative analysis manifesto that he thinks quantitative analysts in security studies should follow - a post that has generated a moderate amount of buzz around the interwebs. I'm not going to through each of his six points individually, but I encourage you to read the whole post. Suffice it to say and not surprisingly, this has really pissed off a lot of the IR community, with interesting commentary here, here, here, here, and here. I didn't look too much, but here is a supportive post on Ex's position and I'm sure there are others.

I certainly appreciate Ex's position on this, there are few things more irritating than some social scientist who creates models completely at odds with reality. So my interpretation of Ex's manifesto is that social scientists who employ quantitative measures should use humility in describing their systems and recognize and acknowledge the downsides of their models. On the other hand, I understand why these IR folks are upset - specifically about the last three points (which strike me as unnecessary swipes at social scientists, but hey, flippant statements are a hallmark of blogging).

I've written on a related topic before (metrics specifically), and having an undergraduate in math, I firmly believe there are uses for quantitative analysis in security studies. As long as that analysis framed with qualitative analysis to better describe these complex human endeavors. In fact, I would argue most social scientists would agree with this. But I think the same goes for qualitative analysts - while logic and common sense can often win a debate, those two things could often simply be conventional wisdom. Qualitative analysis is much more persuasive when backed by quantitative analysis, otherwise it's pretty much somebody's opinion.

This whole argument strikes me as silly. Both factions need to (and many do) understand and state the limitations of their chosen methods of analysis. I firmly believe bad analysis is and will be identified for what it is, no matter if the analysis uses words or graphs. As for me, I like both.

Two different ways of thinking about war movies

I just saw "The Hurt Locker" for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was a reasonably good story, and that it did a pretty good job of capturing the look and feel of the Iraq War (or at least how I imagine it to be/to have been, as I've never been to Iraq). Recently a number of people have expressed to me their disappointment in the movie, particularly the feeling that aspects of it were not realistic; as several of these folks have spent time in theater, I took those objections to heart. At the end of the day, though, I feel like it was a reasonably entertaining movie that didn't do any great violence to the truth, and that's enough for me.

In this post on Abu Muqawama, Ex seems to agree: war movies are about entertainment, even though they're always going to miss a few details.

But I do not understand my fellow Iraq veterans complaining the Hurt Locker isn't realistic enough. When did war movies suddenly have to be realistic? Did Blackhawk Down start this? Was it the bank robbery scene in Heat? The reason I say this is that one of my best childhood friends was walking through a Walgreens in Nashville, passed a $9 DVD Double Feature of Kelly's Heroes and the Dirty Dozen and immediately thought, correctly, "Oh, man, this would make Ex's year if I bought this and sent it to him." Now there is very little that is realistic about either movie, but c'mon, they are surely two of the greatest war movies ever.

The comment thread there is interesting, as it covers a wide range of views: Ex is right, movies are entertainment; Ex is wrong, war movies should get the war parts right; and basically everything in between. Like I said before, I don't have a really strong opinion about this, but as a historian I suppose I trend towards favoring realism and authenticity.

So it was with great interest that I read this op-ed from yesterdays online Times. It was authored by Michael Jernigan, an Iraq vet who was severely wounded in Mahmoudiya. Jernigan isn't so much concerned with whether war movies are realistic or unrealistic (though he does say that he "saw a lot of reality" in "The Hurt Locker"), but rather with the entire genre's fundamental theme: that there is something commendable or positive about war. I'm going to excerpt the article at length here, because I think it helps you to understand Jernigan's criticism.

Later in the deployment my Humvee was hit by a large I.E.D. I had my forehead crushed in, lost both eyes, had to have my right hand fully reconstructed and took severe damage to my left knee. One buddy lost a foot; one of the others took shrapnel to the forehead but lived; one took superficial shrapnel wounds to the arm and one of my best friends died.

On a later deployment to Iraq that I did not go on, I lost three more friends to I.E.D.’s. One of them was the Navy Corpsman (Marine medic) who saved my life on the battlefield back in Mahmudiya. I have a tattoo over my left breast (where my heart is) that says “Semper Fidelis,” the Marine Corps motto. It is Latin for “Always Faithful” and refers to always accomplishing the mission. Around the “Semper Fidelis” are four names. “Thompson,” “Belchik,” Cockerham” and “Hodshire.” All great guys that I would let date my sister.

“The Hurt Locker” and all the other movies I mentioned, whether they are good or bad as entertainment, are still war movies and war movies glorify the acts of violence that I described above. How do you feel about that? Would you bring your children out to the battlefield to witness it live and in person? There is no happy ending. Kelly does not get the gold, Stryker does not make it to the top of Mount Suribachi and 8-Ball gets cut down by a sniper. Please remember that when you watch a war movie you are watching stories about young Americans who went far from home and risked their lives; some of them died there with only their brothers in arms to witness. Hollywood is now taking our money by walking on their graves.

Maybe that’s extreme. Of course I understand why people watch war movies. I watch them, too. But I have seen my friends die and most of the movies just bring up very painful memories.

While I agree that "taking our money by walking on their graves" is a bit "extreme," it's hard to ignore the kernel of truth in what Jernigan says: war movies, at least in some part, are profiting by offering to viewers a tiny slice of some imagined simulacrum of war, a taste of what it's like "being there" without any of the downsides. Sure, a lovable character might die, or the mission might go bad, but at the end the lights come on and you can walk away. Jernigan didn't just walk away.

It's almost certainly true that modern war movies, with more realistic effects and less societal censure for graphic violence, do a better job of at least hinting at the horror of war. "Saving Private Ryan," for example, does a better job of showing exactly how much it sucks to be an infantryman than did "Patton" or "A Bridge Too Far." Is that an improvement, or just an indulgence in the fantasy that anyone who's not been there can ever really understand just exactly how much it does suck?

It's probably not fair to suggest that these are two ends of a spectrum of opinion about war movies, because Exum and Jernigan are really answering two different questions. So do you think that the makers of war movies have a responsibility to authenticity, to exposing the awful realities of war and whatnot? To convince young people that war isn't fun, and that soldiering isn't a great adventure?

Answering these questions isn't really about movies, I don't suppose, but about morality: even in a world that needs soldiers, and that knows it needs soldiers, do writers, filmmakers, and other entertainers have some responsibility to create art that refuses to glorify war? Would it even be effective if they did? After all, we've had Stephen Crane and Robert Service and so on, and "Platoon" and "The Thin Red Line" and "Dances With Wolves" and others that make it clear that war's no picnic. But there will always be Virgil and Tennyson and John 15:13. And what about art for its own sake? Should we be similarly critical of literature and film that deals with drug abuse, or murder, or suicide?

Take a look at the AM thread and the Times piece and let us know what you think about this stuff. This is one of those rare instances where I don't have a firm, calcified opinion on the issue at hand, so take advantage!

Relatedly, here's Thomas Rid's "Great Films on Small Wars" post from Kings of War a couple of weeks ago. I should probably be embarrassed to admit I've only seen four of them.

Cool uni-nerd tidbits from Charlie in Afghanistan

First of all, a belated Happy Thanksgiving to everyone here in the States. Hope yours was as good as mine, and that you're enjoying the second day of a very long weekend (or at least that your office is as quiet as mine today).

So Erin Simpson, formerly professor of COIN at MCU and contributor "Charlie" on Abu Muqawama, is now in Afghanistan doing COINish things. She has a new blog, "Charlie Simpson's War," which we've had listed over in the blogroll for a couple of weeks. It seems to me that it's intended primarily to be a sort of online diary of Erin's time in the 'Stan and is directed to friends and family more than war nerds like us, but it's still a fun read. (Ricks and Exum have already linked over there, so I don't feel badly about directing a bunch of yahoos to her blog.)

In a post from this week we learn about a couple of really interesting uniform details (well, interesting, at least, to weirdos like me who care about this stuff):

What really throws me is people in full Army or Marine utilities with “DOD Contractor” on their service tape. It’s like we’re so frustrated that the Taliban don’t wear uniforms that we put our civilians in them instead.

On the flip side, I saw an Army soldier wearing a 1st Marine Division patch on his right arm the other day. (In the Army, that’s where you put the patch for the unit you served in combat with.) I had never seen that before. Pretty freaking sweet.

I've never even heard of either of these things -- "DOD Contractor" nametapes or Marine combat patches on Army ACUs (or really Marine patches of any kind).

I'm was initially a little confused about the latter bit; why would a soldier have done a combat tour with the 1st MarDiv? After a little digging around on the internet, I found (via a militaria forum) this piece from a 2004 issue of Leatherneck magazine. Apparently a company of the 9th Psychological Operations Battalion (Airborne) was attached to the 1stMarDiv at Camp Blue Diamond in Iraq (as just one example).


Others on the militaria forum speculate that prior Marines who did combat time before switching over to the Army may wear Marine patches, though this isn't authorized. (Ironically, because the Marine Corps and Navy don't authorize combat patches for their personnel, the only way to earn the combat patch of a Marine unit is to be a member of the Army and get attached to it.) Anyway, really interesting.

Abu Muqawama goes dark

To the disappointment of a legion of followers, friend of Ink Spots Andrew Exum has called time on his day-to-day involvement with the blog. Says Ex:

I may have a certain talent for writing clever 200-word blog posts and offering sound bites on television, but I enjoy neither doing so nor the effects of doing so. In my heart, I would much rather do research, read more books, play more rugby and take on a more active role in my community than be some public figure sprinting from television interview to radio spot, twittering in the cab along the way.

So how will this blog change? First off, let me tell you how it will stay the same. This blog will remain an active website hosted by CNAS, and it will remain a home for Londonstani's awesome field reports from such dangerous places as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the ends of the Victoria Line. Second, I aim to use this blog in a different way than I have so far done. I look to friends like Marc Lynch and Reidar Visser and admire the way they use their blogs to highlight ongoing academic and policy research. I aim to do the same, which means you can expect me to post far less often but in a more considered way.

I don't think it's going to come as a surprise when I tell you that Abu Muqawama was the inspiration for this blog; it's probably even fair to say that we're a derivative site. Each of our contributors was once a frequent commenter on Ex's blog, and it's fair to say that we wouldn't know each other today (much less be friends) if it hadn't been for the outstanding forum that those threads provided.

When we decided to start our own pseudo-COIN blog, it was mostly to try to fill a void: Ex had gone to Afghanistan for the summer, and Abu Muqawama had started to suffer some of the ill effects of his increasing visibility (with the attendant spike in readership and, unfortunately, increasingly inane commentary from the fleet of unpleasant "Visitor"s). None of us had any illusions about matching AM's readership, but we all agreed that a best-case scenario would be to produce content and dialogue that came close to approximating the old brown-and-green blog. We still have that to aspire to.

So anyway: thanks, Ex. And, yeah, practice rugby more.

The soundtrack to the descent into chaos?

To complement Londonstani's excellent reporting over at Abu Muqawama on what's happening the other side of the Durand Line, this New York Times video feature on how Pakistani pop stars and the educated youth regard the TTP and the West is worth 9 minutes of your time.

Money line at about 3:40:

You talk to a musician over here and you ask him what's the problem, he won't come out with the most fantastic insightful answer for you. He'll come out with the most rhetorical, most cliched crap.

If only that was limited to Pakistani pop stars. Or musicians.

SFA = (COIN + SFA) ??

Since Abu Muqawama's software seems to hate my comments these days, I'm just going to post a response over here.

Exum has a brief post this morning about Richard Haass' op-ed today on U.S. options in Afghanistan. Here's his comment about one of Haass' proposed courses of action:

[Haass:] "One would reduce our troops’ ground-combat operations and emphasize drone attacks on terrorists, the training of Afghan police officers and soldiers, development aid and diplomacy to fracture the Taliban."

[Exum:] I don't know how much Haass knows about training security forces, but his first "alternative" would require an investment in Afghanistan as massive as the one we're already making. So I think it's more an operational alternative than a strategic one.

I guess I know a fair bit about training security forces, at least from a policy perspective if not a practical one. But more importantly, I know a fair bit about math. So I guess what I don't understand here is how a security force assistance/foreign internal defense mission (in which a complement of U.S. forces would focus on training ANSF, without engaging in combat operations except as an embedded component of the units they're training and advising) plus development assistance could possibly cost as much as SFA/FID plus development assistance plus a counterinsurgency campaign.

SFA/FID = $A
COIN = $B
$A + $B = $A ???

We're already training ANSF and waging a COIN campaign (including combat operations, obviously). Exum doesn't think that halting the COIN campaign would save money? The only way the math works on this is if you believe that we're not really doing that much training right now, or devoting that many resources to the mission.

4/82 might disagree. (More on this later.)

Andrew Exum on the Charlie Rose show (UPDATED)

Starting in about twenty minutes here in DC on WETA (PBS affiliate), Exum talks with Rose about his experience over the last month on GEN McChrystal's assessment team in Afghanistan.

I just filmed a long interview with Charlie Rose for tonight's show. I'll be talking strategy in Afghanistan and sharing observations from my trip.

We've managed some traffic, but we ain't on TV.

Depending how bored I get (and how much Jim Beam I drink), I might live-update while watching.

2301: Interesting: Ross Douthat's name is pronounced "DOW-thut." For some reason I always figured it was "DOUBT-hat."

2303: I have the exact same suit that Exum's wearing. And Charlie Rose just pronounced "Abu Muqawama" correctly. I think he's the first talking head that I've heard do that.

Exum says that the assesment process since President Obama's inauguration has been "pretty coherent." Then he tells us that we set policy before determining a strategy. Really?

2305: Two vital U.S. interests in Afghanistan are 1) denying transnational terrorists use of territory to strike at the U.S., and 2) prevent Afghanistan from destabilizing Pakistan. Interesting to hear him elaborate the second interest while noting that the President is focused on the first.

2308: "Good news" is that no enemy elements present an "existential threat" to the government of Pakistan at present.

2310: Exum says that he has no "equities" involved in Afghanistan, and that one of the things that the outside, think-tank folks had to offer to the assessment team is that they could speak without worrying about saying the things that their bureauracies want. Hmm.

First I'm hearing of this: Tony Cordesman feels very negative about the Afghanistan enterprise.

TELEGENICS UPDATE: Ex seems to have eliminated his annoying habit of bobbing his head up and down while his interviewer is speaking. Performance thus far seems confident and polished. Now let's just hear something interesting.

2315: Rose: "Is everything you've just said an indictment of the strategy of the last eight years?" Exum: strategy, leadership, and resourcing have all been failures up to this point.

Idea of a "fighting season" in Afghanistan is goofy -- "there may be a season where they shoot at us more," but even in winter Taliban's influence campaign is in full effect.

Exum says as a former Army officer, he finds the way that McKiernan was dismissed to be disappointing. First I'm hearing of that one.

2318: Exum gives a shout-out to the WSJ's Yochi Dreazen (also, like Ex, a Penn grad).

2320: LTG Rodriguez "may have a tougher mission than GEN McChrystal." Um, ok. Not sure I really understand that one.

Re: the laws of land warfare: "You may be technically correct, and operationally ineffective -- operationally stupid." If you kill civilians, you'll be operationally ineffective, etc etc. "Killing civilians pushes the goalposts farther away."

2323: When America wages counterinsurgencies, we "usually do it as a third-party." Usually? I guess he's watching his words because of the Sioux, or something.

"In Afghanistan, we've got a real problem with interest alignment." I think it's fair to say that's true in Pakistan, too -- probably more true. It's like everyone suddenly discovered this when Biddle wrote an article about it. Hasn't this been obvious for a long time? Don't we know that there are a lot of host nation political leaders who are more interested in maintaining power and its attendant benefits than eliminating corruption or otherwise stabilizing the country?

2328: August of 2010 a good time to gauge progress, according to Exum. Be interesting to hear what exactly we're meant to have accomplished in that time.

And here we've got a reprise of CNAS's Triage: "a good measure is to what degree we're able to protect the people of Afghanistan." So a "good short-term metric" is a negative metric, according to Ex. Not sure I have tremendous confidence in a vague measure like that, which is consistent with my general disappointment with the CNAS report.

Better: "gauging success a year from now" will be based on level of civilian casualties and the capability -- not just number -- of trained Afghan security forces.

2330: Defeat looks like parts of Afghanistan being made inhospitable to government authority. We're a long way from that happening, says Ex. But then again, "in counterinsurgency, if you're not winning, you're losing." Isn't there some contradiction here? Aren't we losing by a thousand cuts already?

Rose asks if we can be successful without a change in tactics by the Pakistani army. Exum responds that a reduction in safe havens across the Pakistani border is essential to success in Afghanistan. Ruh-roh. Pakistan thinks that the elimination of Afghan safe havens (and/or Afghan-to-Pakistan militant flows) is essential to success in its own counterinsurgency. Or maybe we'll just squeeze the balloon from both sides and everyone will squirt out into Baluchistan.

Now Ex is being asked whether McChrystal is Lee or Grant, which is a freaking idiotic question and a meaningless waste of time. Ex says "I wish I knew the answer to your question because it would save us a lot of time." Really? If we knew whether McChrystal was Grant or Lee? What, because we'd know whether he was a winner or a loser? Uh, ok.

Welp, that's it for Exum. And I'm not gonna live-blog Ross Douthat, who I've got to be honest kind of creeps me out a little bit with his ideas of Republican ascendancy in the working class and his odd, over-manicured goatee. So that's it for tonight.

UPDATE: Jari thinks I was dogging Ex a little hard, I guess, so here's the disclaimer/hedging that I posted on his site:

I didn’t think I was being super-critical or anything, but I guess it looks a bit like that when reading back.

Let me just say that doing interviews is hard, being recorded is hard, and being on camera is even harder, so any criticisms about delivery or presence or any of that stuff is pure BS on my part.

I think maybe the so-called “strategy” that Ex discussed might’ve been more satisfying to people who aren’t particularly fluent in the subject, seeing as the whole “protect civilians” thing might’ve seemed more novel and substantial to them.