The G.I. Bill and the veteran gap in CMR studies

A few weeks ago I wrote a post disdainful of a new reality show that I felt was taking advantage of America's current love affair with its veterans. That same week, friend-of-the-blog Andrew Exum wrote his weekly column at World Politics Review on the unhealthy and dysfunctional relationship  between the American people and its military. The crux of the problem, as Exum sees it, is that too many Americans engage in hero-worship with regard to its military instead of dispassionately examining the society's transactional responsibilities to an all-volunteer force. This is an important issue that should be addressed, but I think the answer should be different than the one Exum comes to.

Exum compares the war zone risks and compensation of soldiers to diplomats, aid workers, and civilian contractors (his conclusion is that all of these have the same risks, but the military enjoys much better compensation) before posing the following option on the nature of the military: is it a public service or is it a profession? The former would limit military compensation to that of similar public services such as police officers. The latter would limit compensation to a contractual situation more similar to the private sector, which by my interpretation means that benefits afforded the military but do not have a private sector equivalent are probably in excess of what the contract should entail. Obviously, the U.S. has come to a hybrid solution to this problem since the advent of the all-volunteer force. The question then is how to compensate the military under this solution. This is where I think there are some flaws in Exum's analysis of civil-military relations.

Fundamentally, military service is not like other public services in one significant way. Yes, other forms of public service entail risk to individuals' lives, limbs, and eyesight. However, the functional imperative of military service is to inflict violence upon our enemies and this is unique to the military (the functional utility of the military, i.e., SFA, HA/DR, etc, is not the same as its functional imperative). This is true of military service whether you're a cook or an infantryman - the latter may use force much more often but the cook is trained and expected to at times as well (in other words, I don't buy this load of nonsense on two societies within the military). Police forces may be authorized to use force in the execution of their functional imperative (maintain law and order), but it is not their primary or most desired tool. USAID workers are exposed to the same (or at least similar) risks and traumas as soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, but society not only does not expect them to inflict risks and traumas upon others, society forbids them from doing so by law.  This is not an insignificant difference in service as anyone who has had his enemy in his weapon's sights can tell you. So how do we compensate for this?

Before we begin to answer that question, we need to examine two more aspects of military service and civil-military relations. The first is the issue of professionalism and the two societies that do indeed bifurcate the military: officers and enlisted. For this, Samuel Huntington, in "The Solider and the State", a work that Exum himself called the canonical text on civil-military relations (and he's right), uses the term "professional" in a sociological sense (not in the "I do this well for a paycheck" sense): a vocation that requires expertise, responsibility, and corporateness. In Huntington's construct officers are professionals and enlisted are not according to the definitions he provides (which are much more involved than standard dictionary definitions - please read this section of the book before berating me for being an officer snob). Enlisted personnel are more like skilled craftsmen. There is a lot of merit to this argument, particularly around UCMJ authorities and the different education systems for officers and NCOs (although NCOs have made a lot ground in the past couple of decades in this regard). This important distinction is manifest in combat duties: officers are responsible for the management of violence and enlisted personnel are responsible for the acts of violence. Of course officers often pull triggers and enlisted NCOs independently manage violence, but these acts are borne of necessity on the battlefield and not their inherent responsibilities within the organization. The point of this discussion is that while military service is different public service because of the responsibility to commit acts of violence, society only expects enlisted personnel to commit those acts of violence. This must be a factor in calculating compensation for this unique public service.

The final issue we need to examine here is civil-military relations as it relates to veterans. Frankly, there is no "The Veteran and the State" (although I'd love to take a stab at it - hint, hint publishers...) to guide how society interacts with its veterans because of their previous military service. "The Solider and the State" deals almost exclusively with the interactions of the civilian government (and in a couple of places civilian society) and the military's officer corps. It was also written before our modern, all-volunteer force. Yet as it remains the capstone doctrine of civil-military relations, Huntington is our only guide.  We must infer civil-veteran relations based on our understanding of the nature of military service and how the military interacts with society. But that extrapolation can be difficult.

We have already established that the functional imperative of military forces is to exact violence on the country's behalf. We have an understanding of how civilian control, military expertise, and transactions between the two parties work in order to optimize military effectiveness for society. But we have no idea who owes what once these skilled craftsmen of violence are no longer in the military. Their very unique individual functional imperative for society no longer exists for them individually and their skills can translate very poorly to civilian society. Should society not be responsible for helping these men and women to essentially reprogram their functional imperative into an function that aids society in new ways? To reintroduce them into society where risks may exist, but the need to commit violent acts is not? Yes, they volunteered for this unique service, but military personnel cannot stay in service indefinitely (up or out!) or even until a natural retirement age in their 60s. Society does owe these men and women something to retrain them to again be useful to society.

The G.I. Bill is the most obvious example of reintroduction benefits for veterans.  Alex Horton of the Department of Veterans affairs wrote an excellent article this week in The Atlantic about the challenges of going to college after being in an Army at war. Horton focuses his article on the differences between war veterans and the "traditional" students who comprise the majority of the university body. But when I read his piece I was struck by how similar these two seemingly disparate groups are. They are starting from different points in life with different challenges, but they are all forging their minds and identities in ways that will define (in part) who they are and what they will do with the rest of their lives. In other words, how they will be useful to society for the remainder of their professional, productive lives. College is a moderately safe environment to acclimate to American society, for both 18 year-old kids and 32 year-old combat veterans. After what we've asked these service men and women to do - to commit acts of violence on our behalf - providing the opportunity to reintegrate into society in this way is a small price to pay to erase their previous utility (which obviously has no place in civilian society - and we should note that erasing utility is not the same as not recognizing their previous service) and create new utility, even if these types of benefits should not be unlimited. I'd rather it happen on the taxpayer's dime in a university setting than on the streets of some city.

And yet the G.I. Bill is a benefit that Exum seems to think should not be given to military veterans because no other public servants have the same benefit. As discussed, different service merits different benefits. Should the G.I. Bill be more limited than it is now? Probably, but not based on whether the veteran is a general's kid or not. Instead it should be freely given to our enlisted veterans - those whose purpose to society was violence - in order to reintegrate them into society. Former officers probably do not need it as their societal function was not committing acts of violence. They also probably do not need the G.I. Bill because they all already have a bachelor's degree, have more tangible civilian skills, and are at a social level that often negates the need for this type of societal reintegration.  The distinction is a bit academic of course, but we have little else from which to base our sense of fairness when determining the terms of compensation transactions.

With looming austerity all military benefits and compensation should be under scrutiny. Some benefits may decrease for future service members and veterans, remembering that our society has a contract with current members and veterans. When the public and our government examine these benefits in this understudied area of civil-military relations, they need to remember that military service is an unique form of public service that has no place in society after soldiers and Marines depart military service. They need to remember that the transactional costs and benefits are not just about fairness to the veteran, but the effects on society as a whole. Alex Horton and those he discusses in his article will most likely benefit personally from a G.I. Bill-funded degree. But society also benefits from paying for that degree because Alex Horton and his cohorts will probably be better integrated into society because of it. This is not about hero worship or praetorian guards. Veterans benefits are about taking care of individuals who fulfill a unique role in society and ensuring that they are able to provide new, useful roles to society.

The COIN wars: a toe in the water

The gentlemen of On Violence are the latest to raise the whip over the carcass of that old glue-pot COIN, taking aim this week at what they've callled "the Chicago School of Counterinsurgency." The post is filled with generalizations, mischaracterizations, and the spurious received wisdom of second-rate popularizers and third-rate social scientists, but those errors are mostly peripheral to the main theme. This strange little essay is in fact a subtle confirmation of the rational choice theory the authors mean to criticize. The purportedly contentious assertion of what is in fact an entirely uncontroversial banality – that war is not a wholly rational, predictable phenomenon – gives the authors a platform to draw tendentious normative conclusions in purposeful contrast to the ostensible COIN orthodoxy. This serves to situate On Violence on the side "of the faction they assess to be the one most likely to win" the battle for influence and credibility in our new post-counterinsurgency era. It's almost 2012 – every blog needs to have something on record saying look, I told you they were doing it wrong!

Semantic carelessness is often the sign of poorly-formed ideas, and the post in question is rife with lexical errors. Beginning with the assertion that "the Chicago School [of economics] believes that humans always act rationally when it comes to money," the authors on several occasions use words in misleading or ambiguous ways. (Warfare in place of war is another frequent mistake.) The excerpted quotation is a simple mischaracterization of rational choice theory, which is based on the idea that people survey the choices available to them and select the one most likely to maximize gains. To assert that individuals "act rationally" is not to say that they always choose wisely, but rather that they base their choice on some expectation of benefit.

The On Violence guys clearly misunderstand this: their pronouncement that "rational investors frequently make irrational decisions, believing they are rational" is utterly nonsensical to an economist, for whom the actor's willful effort to maximize utility is precisely what defines "rationality." Of course, rationality does not imply perfect information or foreknowledge of consequences; rational actors can take decisions that turn out disastrously for them thanks to a failure to properly account for context or an imprecise evaluation of various costs and benefits. Richard Posner – who knows a fair bit about the dogmas and creeds of the Chicago school, and whose biography one might like to investigate before crowning David bloody Brooks as "our greatest living conservative commentator" – wrote an entire book about the calamitous conspiracy of rational acts that led to the recent financial crisis. (SPOILER ALERT! He does not conclude that "rational investors [made] irrational decisions, believing they [were] rational.")

On Violence further confuses the "rationality" issue by inexpertly applying the lessons of cognitive psychology (or at least Brooks's retelling of Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky) to behavioral economics. According to OnV, Kahnemann and Tversky "proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old, rational models, revealing flaws in the machinery of cognition." But about this, too, they're mistaken. The "old, rational models" say nothing at all about the machinery of cognition; they merely model the way cognition manifests as action. It's certainly true that emotion, unconscious bias, and other so-called cognitive "flaws" may interfere with the exercise of pure reason, but – as we've discussed above – that's not the same thing as irrationality. To put it rather more simply: the rational actor model may not be perfectly descriptive, but it is adequately predictive.

So who are these folks that populate "the Chicago School of Counterinsurgency"? Who accepts "the idea that in warfare—with death and subjugation on the line—mankind's rationality trumps his unconscious thoughts and emotions"? Who fails to consider how social context and personal psychology may influence the decisions of the enemy or the population held at risk? The only person named among the "military theorists [who] continue to ignore humanity's underlying irrationality" – by which the authors seem to mean the influence of emotion and other cognitive and psychological elements – is Andrew Exum, whose unsourced quote concerning "cold-blooded calculations about their self-interest" is reproduced out of context. Who are the rest?

What of the military theorist who wrote this?

[W]ar is not an exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter, as is the case with the mechanical arts, or at matter which is animate but passive and yielding, as is the case with the human mind and emotions in the fine arts. In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts. It must be obvious that the intellectual codification used in the arts and sciences is inappropriate to such an activity [as war]. At the same time it is clear that continual striving after laws analagous to those appropriate to the realm of inanimate matter was bound to lead to one mistake after another. (149)

Later in the same work, this theorist argued that

The effects of physical and psychological factors form an organic whole which, unlike a metal alloy, is inseparable by chemical processes. In formulating any rule concerning physical factors, the theorist must bear in mind the part that moral factors may play in it; otherwise he may be misled into making categorical statements that will be too timid and restricted, or else too sweeping and dogmatic. Even the most uninspired theories have involuntarily had to stray into the area of intangibles; for instance, one cannot explain the effects of a victory without taking psychological reactions into account. (184)

You'll surely have figured out by now that we're talking about Clausewitz. (The page numbers given above are from the Paret/Howard 1984 translation of On War.) The much-misunderstood "remarkable trinity" (pdf) introduced at the close of Book 1, Chapter 1 (89) is indeed composed of "(1) primordial violence, hatred, and enmity; (2) the play of chance and probability; and (3) war's element of subordination to rational policy." To repeat: the foremost theorist in the history of western military thought contends that emotion and chance make up two of the three vital considerations in any useful theory of war. Let's get straight to the point: any analyst who fails to consider the importance of moral factors in war – including the interplay of what On Violence misleadingly dichotomizes as "emotional reactions" and "rationality" – is a failure.

There is, of course, some irony to all of this, what with me here advocating Clausewitzian nuance and balance to a blog that has made a habit of gleefully slaying Clausewitzian straw men; claiming the Prussian's relevance to a form of war that the On Violence men have called "our style of warfare" as they scramble to distance themselves from it, ever in tune with the zeitgeist. I know, I know – try to keep it together. While we're on the subject of irony, how 'bout the OnV guys taking Pape at face value and citing his spurious conclusions as fact in an essay questioning the very legitimcy of the rational choice model?

Unsubstantiated assertion is unfortunately something of a theme in this post, and its conclusion is centered on the grand-daddy of them all: "people aren't rational when it comes to killing and death," an unequivocal pronouncement that is both demonstrably false (why then the persistence of instrumental violence?) and patently at odds with the authors' own previous acknowledgement that "war is about people, politics, and ideology."

The problem with On Violence's Gladwell-deep survey of behavioral economics is that bounded rationality cannot as yet meaningfully inform our models of human agency in conflict. We may recognize that rationality and utility maximization fail to perfectly explain all human behavior, but we have no better predictive model on which to base our efforts to influence the choices of others -- the most extreme of which is war. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, perfect realism may be impossible, but predictive accuracy is still the coin of the realm in social science. Until Kahnemann, Tversky, Thaler, Becker, et al can present a coherent, predictive theory of human choice that can be plausibly applied to economic and political behavior and which definitively falsifies the rational choice model – which is, let's remember, a model, not an attempt at descriptive realism – all this bleating about "humanity's underlying irrationality" is worse than useless: it distracts us from efforts to improve the valid models we have today and the policy prescriptions we may derive from them.

When boiled down to its essence, the message here is a simple if deeply controversial one. The authors of this essay mean to assert that the failure of rational choice theory to completely explain the whole of human behavior renders it useless as a guide to action. Because we cannot perfectly comprehend our interlocutor's decision calculus and cannot be sure his choices will be sensible to us, we must instead assume that calculus will be entirely insensate to our behaviors. If "people aren't rational when it comes to killing and death," then how can we possibly hope to exert our will in predictable ways through violence?

To accept this contention leads the thoughtful man down a dangerous path, at least so far as the anti-Clausewitzian OnV brothers are concerned: to the conclusion that predictable, willful influence is an impossibility, that the choices of an adversary or neutral cannot be shaped, and that our own alternatives are reduced to disengaged indifference to the other or his total annihilation. If we can't persuade, influence, or coerce in a predictable way that's consistent with human reason and our perceptions of causality, we are left to compel by destruction of the enemy's means to resist. This conclusion is perhaps closer to the truth than the chimera of calibrated influence offered by the many proponents of the indirect approach, but I'm quite sure it's not the one the On Violence men would like us to reach.

I'm quite conflicted about the whole thing, in spite of my stridency. The utility of force or its threat for any purpose short of compulsion is something about which I have less and less confidence every day, and I loathe the multivariate philosophies of international engagement that are founded on an unexamined faith in security through transformational change to our operating environment – whether the composition of polities or the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit them. But I see this On Violence post as reinforcing the very worst lessons of the recent COIN era: men can be changed, if only we understand what really drives them, and violence is at best a necessary complement to that transformative action. I fear COINdinistas and COINtras may both be missing the point, and if we throw out the hard-won lessons of counterinsurgency's history and present – that violence is essential to effecting needed change, however temporarily in the absence of legitimacy and consent of the governed – then this decade of "institutional adaptation" will have indeed been a waste.

UPDATE Thurs 22 Dec @ 1125: I see that Ex has responded to the original On Violence post here. I actually took out a fair bit of a draft that dealt with Kalyvas' work, so I'm glad to see that he touched on it.

Back to the future: time to renounce panaceas in Afghanistan

My friend Andrew Exum and two of his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security, retired LTG Dave Barno and Matthew Irvine, published a new paper this week calling for a shift in the primary emphasis of the Afghanistan war effort.

It is time for a change of mission in Afghanistan. U.S. and coalition forces must shift away from directly conducting counterinsurgency operations and toward a new mission of "security force assistance": advising and enabling Afghan forces to take the lead in the counterinsurgency fight.

This change, the authors suggest, is necessary to solidify security gains made by coalition forces in recent years and ensure the continued protection of Western interests after NATO forces leave the country. While the report marks an analytical step forward, environmental and institutional constraints are likely to blunt the effectiveness of its policy prescriptions if not block their enactment altogether. It's difficult to escape the conclusion that what passes for creativity in our contemporary efforts to "save the war" has in fact come as much too little, and far too late.

A simple rendering of the report's main argument goes as follows: of the several courses of action available to U.S. forces between now and their ultimate withdrawal date in 2014, the one most likely to produce lasting positive effects entails an immediate, aggressive, and committed effort to increase the capability of Afghan forces. The other alternatives are presented as unpalatable caricatures: 1) continued emphasis on coalition-led counterinsurgency operations through 2014, then sudden and complete cessation of combat activities by NATO forces and transition to predictably incompetent ANSF; 2) unilateral abandonment of the agreed-to drawdown timeline and indefinite continuation of the presently inconclusive western-led status quo; and 3) a rapid and immediate withdrawal of all coalition forces, leaving 2015 Afghanistan both bereft of capable security forces and denied the potential security gains from 36 more months of sustained NATO counterinsurgency operations. The authors assert that their preferred course "will protect long-term U.S. security interests without a never-ending commitment of immense U.S. resources":

[W]e believe that the most prudent option for U.S. policymakers is to adhere to the Lisbon framework for transition in Afghanistan and accelerate the change in mission. By doing so, the United States and its allies will have more time and resources to support the ANSF ahead of the coming transition in 2014, increasing their capabilities and providing vital support as they take ownership of the fight.

Considering they've characterized the other options as expensive, slow failure; very expensive, very slow failure; and inexpensive, rapid failure, I don't suppose we're left with much choice.

A great deal of hay has been made over the past 48 hours of the fact that Exum was a vociferous advocate for escalation back in 2009, when the president grudgingly accepted GEN McChrystal's proposal for a so-called "fully-resourced counterinsurgency campaign." His many critics imply that Andrew should be embarrassed, should show some shame, should prostrate himself before the we-knew-better masses and ritually cleanse his analytical sins. As they would have it, he is advocating in 2011 for a transition that would've been similarly effective two years ago, and which would've saved lives (and billions) to boot.

Bollocks. The war is not the same. Afghanistan is not the same. America is not the same. I was a critic of escalation in 2009; my views are unchanged with hindsight. It simply does not follow, however, that the historical fact of escalation is irrelevant to the operational and political context of today.

That said: this should've happened two years ago.

Announcing his decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, the president said that those forces would "increase our ability to train competent Afghan Security Forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans." The Army had started deploying specially augmented brigades to Afghanistan to focus on the train-advise-assist mission. When a brigade from the 82d Airborne was tapped as the first of these, CNAS honcho John Nagl told the Washington Post that compared to previous SFA efforts, "the change couldn't be more dramatic." So one might fairly wonder why Barno, Exum, Irvine, and even Nagl are now essentially telling us that what Afghanistan needs is a fully resourced security force assistance campaign.

They know the answer, of course: COIN advocates insisted the 2009 escalation would be accompanied by a renewed commitment to generating and training capable Afghan security forces, but it didn't happen; the "surge" in combat and stability operations instead starved those efforts of the personnel, resources, and command emphasis they needed to succeed in parallel. The authors have diagnosed the problem properly, though they don't clearly state this conclusion. Instead we get this:

Evidence suggests that some ANSF units are failing today because they commonly operate in the field without embedded, continuous coalition support. Despite the importance of the security force assistance mission, no senior U.S. headquarters, organization or senior commander is currently dedicated to advising Afghan forces. (One can only observe the way in which the initial training of Afghan forces improved after the appointment of a U.S. three-star general officer in 2009 to appreciate the effect organizational changes can have on priorities -- and results.)

Another excerpt is more to the point: "Because U.S. units can execute counterinsurgency operations better and faster than their Afghan counterparts," the authors write, "they are continuing to do so despite the looming transition." Don't let the obfuscatory syntax fool you: individual units are not making this decision for themselves. ISAF has made a determination to focus on combat operations, to try make as much progress as quickly as possible, and then to transition to ANSF "lead" when the Lisbon deadline hits.

The authors can point to an improvement in initial training thanks to reorganization and re-prioritization, but that, too, came at a cost: by focusing on the rapid expansion of the ANSF to meet benchmarks on the "transition" timeline, the coalition tacitly accepted that the Afghan combat formations they stood up would be of inferior quality. The training and advisory effort became a sideshow, a supporting line of operation to the main effort of Western-led counterinsurgency: ISAF leadership knew that "showing progress in the training mission" would be essential to sustaining political support for the campaign, and that 350,000 mediocre troops brief better than 100,000 capable ones. Combine that with the reality that even exceptionally capable host-nation forces would still require the combat support provided by American enablers -- aviation, precision fires, communications, medical support, and so on -- and it's easy to see why quality and competence were sacrificed to rapid expansion. But let there be no doubt: that's what happened.

The paper's authors' bemoan the fact that the American military lacks "the institutional roots to support specialized combat advisor capabilities," as if this is the reason ISAF chose to emphasize initial training over embedded mentoring and assistance. Even if directed at general purpose forces (and ignoring SOF), it's a misleading and inaccurate suggestion: the Army and especially the Marine Corps may be resistant to specialization, but recent U.S. experience in Iraq forced the institutions to adapt. It is patently false that "neither service has devoted a portion of its U.S.-based force structure to training, organizing, equipping, or championing the delivery of dedicated advise and assist capabilities to Afghanistan." The Army dedicated U.S.-based force structure to training combat advisors in 2007; that function has been institutionalized and continues to this day. The 162nd Infantry Training Brigade (and before that, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division) has prepared individuals for deployment as part of Military Transition Teams and with dedicated advisory brigades (called Advise and Assist Brigades in Iraq and Modular Brigades Augmented for Security Force Assistance -- a tellingly short-lived designation -- in Afghanistan). Upon the transfer of SFA training mission (pdf) from Ft. Riley to Ft. Polk in 2009, the commander of its new home even remarked that the Army sought to avoid "let[ting] the good functions and training and art and science of this task atrophy and die out like we did after Vietnam -- the last time we made a concerted effort to train combat advisors." Much of this "art and science" was codified in doctrine with the Army's publication in May 2009 of FM 3-07.1 Security Force Assistance (pdf), an imperfect manual that nonetheless provided tactical guidance both to AABs and to individual combat advisors. This institutional commitment of more than two years ago looks very much like the one Barno, Exum, and Irvine would like the Army to make today.

The purported institutional shortcomings highlighted in the paper -- such as a failure to offer sufficient promotion and assignment incentives to encourage the most capable officers to volunteer for advisory roles -- were considered and addressed years ago, when the U.S. military first had this conversation with itself during the Iraq war. Most were discarded as unworkable or counterproductive, as was the transformational fantasy of a permanent advisor corps. (Consider the budget and force structure debate currently taking place in Washington, but imagine it's happening in a world where the Army's end-strength includes the equivalent of two-dozen infantry battalions dedicated solely to training and advising foreign military forces -- a task they're not even legally permitted to perform outside of war zones and other exceptional circumstances. Who do you think is first on the chopping block?) The Marine Corps has continued to provide capable personnel for MTTs, while the Army has supported the training and advisory mission through the creation and deployment of MB-SFAs.

This is not a service problem. This is a combatant command problem. It's not a matter of force generation, but force employment. When things went bad in the Arghandab River Valley as the president was finalizing plans for escalation, U.S. commanders threw 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment into the breach to replace Harry Tunnel's Stryker brigade and sustain counterinsurgency operations. Back to COIN for 2/508 -- one of the battalions of the 82d's SFA brigade, whose deployment for the train-advise-assist mission John Nagl had lauded mere months before.

Recognizing that a continuation of the status quo was unsustainable and unlikely to be effective, the U.S. faced very much the same set of questions in Afghanistan in 2009 as it had in Iraq in 2006. Was it still possible to accomplish American objectives? Could more troops or a new concept of operations improve the situation? Would precipitous transition to host-nation lead be too dangerous, risking the collapse of indigenous forces and jeopardizing U.S. interests? In 2006, a very serious and intelligent man wrote a memo for the president entitled "Transitioning to an Indirect Approach in Iraq" (pdf) in which he argued that success was still attainable if lead security responsibility were transferred to Iraqi forces. I want to share with you the meat of his argument, so I hope you'll forgive me quoting at length.

Given Iraq's unsettled politics, it is highly unlikely that American forces, even with growing Iraqi security force assistance, will be able to defeat the insurgency within the next 2-3 years. The current level of insurgency, moreover, is likely to be insensitive across a wide range of force levels. The assertion by many critics that more troops in 2003 could have nipped this insurgency in the bud or fundamentally altered its course are not credible. Likewise, increading the number of U.S. troops now is highly unlikely to be decisive. The insurgents will still control the initiative, and they can always temporarily decline to fight. Insufficient intelligence and continued strong support for the insurgency among the Sunni population will limit the strategic success of any near-term efforts. As long as the political grievances fueling the insurgency remain, the insurgency will remain.

Because of the direct approach's inability to produce decisive near-term results and its increasing cost, the longer we stay with it, the more we place our long-term goals in Iraq at risk. Continuing with this approach, moreover, does not play to American strengths. The insurgents and the states supporting them (i.e., Iran and Syria) retain the strategic initiative in Iraq, while we suffer from significantly reduced strategic freedom of action.

It is imperative that we accelerate our shift to an indirect approach, with Iraqis in the lead and Americans in support. Transitioning to an indirect approach will require that we begin and continue the drawdown of U.S. forces while the insurgency is still raging. It will require additional resources for Iraqi security forces. Most importantly, we must make our stated "main effort" our actual main effort.

Mike Vickers was not alone in his analysis, but the president disagreed. How much of the improvement in Iraq is attributable to his decision to escalate is and will continue to be a matter of debate. Perhaps the indirect approach, too, would have succeeded, but we can't know.

The same is now true in Afghanistan. The "change of mission" advocated by Barno, Exum, and Irvine might have been successful in 2009, with five years to take hold and show progress. (It seems unlikely to me, but I'm skeptical about our "strategy" and the no-safe-havens approach to antiterterrorism.) Or perhaps the course the president did choose for Iraq would have been similarly successful in Afghanistan had it been implemented with the "surge": a comprehensive foreign internal defense campaign that included elements of U.S.-led counterinsurgency and stability operations, SFA, and broad based nation assistance that cemented the authority of the legitimate civilian government and helped enable the exercise of that authority. (I doubt that, too, but it's a thought.) Instead what we got was a shadow of that, a mockery, an example of what happens when military leaders commit wholesale to a mission their government is too afraid to definitively refuse.

U.S. commanders are reaping what their predecessors have sown: giving short shrift to the essential enabling efforts that should have been a key part of their campaign plans, trying to "move the needle," show progress, and convince an indifferent public, an unimpressed president, and perhaps themselves that a war without a plausible strategic rationale is worth waging into infinity. SFA will not save us now. It is likely to be less effective than it would have been if comprehensively administered in 2009 by embedding advisors along with the troop surge, as this would've allowed the U.S.-ANA relationship to proceed along roughly the same path as the U.S.-IA relationship did before: first with U.S. units leading operations and owning battlespace, supported by host nation units with embedded American advisors; then partnered operations, where a more capable host nation unit with U.S. advisors owns its own battlespace and functions as part of a combined operation with U.S. forces; then eventually to host nation lead, where U.S. combat formations no longer operate independently and American advisors really live up to their name -- advising their foreign counterparts in independent operations as opposed to teaching and coaching them. This model may be followed to good effect in a few key districts, but reduced operational tempo with the beginning of the troop withdrawal makes it an unlikely template for the entire country.

Just the same: no matter how capable Afghan security forces may be today or in 2014 or in 2024, there will come a day where the western world forgets that it once seemed normal to spend billions of dollars sustaining an army in a place where a dead terrorist used to live. This day can perhaps be delayed, but it can't be avoided.

All of this may sound like I disagree with the paper's bottom line, but I don't. "By continuing to place its forces in the lead in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, the United States is ultimately working against its long-term security interests." This is almost certainly true. Look back at what Vickers wrote to the president five years ago: "Because of the direct approach's inability to produce decisive near-term results and its increasing cost, the longer we stay with it, the more we place our long-term goals in Iraq at risk." Combat operations in Afghanistan are costing a fortune, depleting our force, wearing out equipment, and reducing our strategic flexibility to little evident effect. Anything that constitutes a step away from that -- even if it's still expensive and unlikely to succeed -- is something I can get behind.

Three cups of WHAT? How about a nice tall glass of FM 90-8 COUNTERGUERRILLA ASS-KICKING?

The less I add to the whole Mortenson imbroglio, the better. You've already heard a lot of opinions about this, I'm sure. Mine doesn't matter, but it's pretty close to what Ex said: it would be stupid to pretend like the lessons learned by the U.S. military about counterinsurgency are somehow invalid because Mortenson is a self-interested fabricator; it would be stupid to imagine that Mortenson influenced that institutional adaptation determinatively, instead of simply offering a clean popular referent for the military's COIN shorthand; and it would be stupid to believe that without Mortenson, U.S. soldiers and Marines would never have comprehended the importance of understanding the operational environment. Foust has a good take, reprinted in Greg Jaffe's piece on the subject:

“I’d say the biggest value of Mortenson’s work was in creating the ‘don’t be a jerk’ school of counterinsurgency,” said Joshua Foust, who worked as an Afghan analyst for the Army. “I think it would be a shame to abandon the idea of trying to respect the people you’re trying to reform with guns and money just because one of the people promoting the concept is shown to be a fraud.”

Plenty of people are going to try to tell you what all of this means for the military and whatnot, and I'll leave it to them. But Jaffe generally overstates, I think, the way Mortenson influenced the U.S. military's operational approach, and one of the anecdotes he offers as evidence of that influence in fact risibly demonstrates the tenuous connection between tea-drinking and tactical-level counterinsurgency.

Mortenson’s biggest impact, however, is evident in the writings of Army officers who embraced his call to tea. Last year, Lt. Col Patrick Gaydon and Capt. Jonathan Pan wrote of their alliance with Haji Abdul Jabar, a district governor in Afghanistan’s violent Arghandab district.

“Like Greg Mortenson’s best seller, Three Cups of Tea, our relationship with Jabar was forged over chai during the late summer and fall of 2009,” the two officers wrote in a piece for Small Wars Journal, a Web site where military officers debate battlefield strategy.

Jabar was courteous but reserved when he first met the two earnest soldiers. Once he came to know Gaydon and Pan, his reserve melted away, according to the officers, and Jabar treated them as family.

Jabar was killed as he drove home from work last June, a sign that “stabilization was working in Arghandab,” according to Gaydon and Pan. (The somewhat tortured thesis is that the Taliban killed him because his work with the Americans was winning the support of previously indifferent locals, thus threatening the Taliban’s power base.) The story could have been lifted right from the pages of Mortenson’s collected works.

It's appropriate that Jaffe references the "writings of Army officers" and chose the word "story" to describe Gaydon and Pan's tale, evocative as the term is of narrative and moral. (Anecdote, for example, connotes something different, and we should, I suppose, be thankful that it was merely the "writings of Army officers" that were greatly influenced, not their behaviors.)

Here's the big joke about Gaydon and Pan: when they were "forging relationships over chai during the late summer and fall of 2009," they were working at the brigade headquarters of the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division (and writing occasional apologia for the boss). If that unit sounds familiar, it should: they took some of the heaviest casualties of any American unit in Afghanistan while conducting what brigade commander COL Harry Tunnell called a "counter-guerrilla" campaign. Tunnell's mentality was summed up by one of his soldiers, who later told Army investigators "if I were to paraphrase [a speech the colonel gave] and my impressions about the speech in a single sentence, the phrase would be: 'Let's kill those motherfuckers.'"

(5/2 SBCT might also ring some bells as the parent unit of one Calvin Gibbs and his "kill team," which has made news recently.)

Whatever will Harry Tunnell and his aggressive acolytes do now, what with the precipitous fall of their tea-drinking tactical messiah? Sorry, Jaffe, but you picked the wrong SWJ article.

Police development: more bang for your buck

This morning, Andrew Exum highlighted a throwaway piece in the Washington Post on the police in Egypt. Like many unstable and/or despotic states, the police forces are among the greatest threats to the citizens of those countries. Whereas in most Western countries the police exist to protect the people, in most of the rest of the world the police exist to protect the state from the people. As you can imagine, governments love and people hate this setup. In cases like Egypt, changing the police forces to protect the people can go a long a way to improving the stability of the country - especially after they've tried and failed to suppress the population.

Change of this nature requires significant work on not just the training of police, but cultural adaptation and development. Evolving the mindset of established forces can take a long time, if it's not a generational effort. Sacking the police and starting over usually fails as well. Just like disbanding militaries, firing armed and trained policemen introduces a destabilizing force onto the streets; a force that had had better luck with the previous regime (see Iraq). It also presents the difficulty of vetting new police, often in countries with low literacy (see Afghanistan). Mere training programs from the U.S. also do not even begin to address the problem - often the police are already moderately trained. While improving their skills and capabilities are necessary, developing them as professional police requires a change in mindset and should be the focus of U.S. police assistance. The entirety of the literature on this topic supports this, even if development doesn't always do the trick (obviously, the host nation needs to really want to change its ways).

Ex is right in the gist of his post - if we're invited to help these newly-democratizing nations, we should start with the police. I diverge from his position in that we shouldn't start a training program, we should initiate a police development program (again, if invited to do so). Funding-wise, a small team of police development experts that help the Egyptians revamp their police structure, policies, and police academy curriculum would provide dividends much greater than the investment. This should be our focus in the region, not military aid, which is expensive for the USG and provides little return in stability or U.S. national objectives.

For those of you not in the small circle of people and organizations that work on police development issues, the USG's primary organization for doing this is the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP). (Disclosure: With my previous company I did some work with ICITAP, but they were never a client.) This is a fantastic program within the Department of Justice that I was very impressed with, both here in Washington and in the field. And they really get it, which is why I'm giving them this free advertisement. They also come in a quite cost effective as they have relatively small staff and are funded by other USG agencies when implementing programs abroad. The challenges to getting them out into the field, though, is that they have a relatively small staff and are funded by other USG agencies when implementing programs abroad. In spite of their good work in many places (see Kosovo, Iraq, Panama, and a host of others), they aren't always the first agency used for U.S. police programs. Often, train and equip contracts are used first - sometimes succeeding, but often not and then require ICITAP expertise to sort things out. Another challenge for ICITAP is that police development often takes 10 or more years if done correctly, which is often beyond the political and budgetary horizons of the U.S., so the U.S. often chooses haste over right. We need to stop doing that.

The point of all of this is to say that police development is what the U.S. should focus their efforts on if we're asked to asked to help out in these countries. And we're asked to do so, the USG should support ICITAP missions to conduct these development and reform operations (in conjunction with their their DoJ OPDAT brethren and DoS INL training programs). In these days of governmental austerity, it is a cost effective way to meet USG objectives and the needs of the local governments and people.

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.

We haven't retired or died, and other things to be excited about in 2011!

Just wanted to take a moment to let everyone know that we're not dead, we were just on vacation. And/or lazy. (And/or dead. Not totally clear on the facts here, as it's been a while since I've heard from MK.) But now we're back, and lemme tell you: it is time to blog the hell out of 2011. Starting January 4th. Like, January 4th at 1000, not 0045. Or maybe January 5th. But seriously, soon!

Really, though, thanks for having the patience and commitment and interest level to keep coming back here every day or week or month or however often you check in. We do very much appreciate everyone who stops by, and we especially appreciate those of you who contribute to the conversation. I'm looking forward to a great year for the blog, a year of renewed commitment and energy and blah blah blah, and I really hope we can reward your persistent presence. If anyone's even reading this, that is.

But in all honesty, there are about two dozen topics floating around in my little pea brain right now, and some of them have even been committed to text streams of various lengths. I've drifted away from frequent low-content updates over the last several weeks and end up getting trapped beneath the idea of some massive essay, so you'll have to excuse the virtual silence. I've still got to spit out my criticism of Michael Cohen's recent COINtra piece in The Nation, and I've been promising Matt Gallagher a smackdown of his pro-draft goofiness for about six months now. (Seriously, I've got like 3,000 words on that one.) So I hope you'll stick around with us as we try to move this thing in a more content-intensive direction. One of these days.

In the meantime, I want to draw your attention to an outstanding essay/speech that Ex linked to earlier today: "Solitude and Leadership," by literary critic and former Yale professor William Deresiewicz, as delivered in October 2009 to the U.S. Military Academy's plebes of the class of '13. It's a really excellent elaboration of why independence, genuine thoughtfulness, moral courage, and true conviction are such important traits for leaders of men (and particularly modern military officers). I've seldom read something so meaningful and thought-provoking in the last few years, and that's no exaggeration. I hope you'll enjoy it.

So, there. That's just a taste. Keep coming back in 2011, and I promise you won't be disappointed. Thanks for reading, and happy new year, wesolych swiat, feliz ano nuevo, bonne annee, blwyddyn newydd dda, and so on.

Thoughts on others' thoughts on "Responsible Transition" (EDITED)

I'm not going to offer a comprehensive critique of Dave Barno and Andrew Exum's new report on the path forward in Afghanistan, because I'd like to spend a little more time going over it before I comment in depth, and because I'm not interested in spending a lot of time on it right now. But I'd like to say a few things about what other people have said, because it's easier to criticize than to do any kind of deeper analysis.

First of all, full disclosure: I'm not going to make any disclosure statements. FFS, you don't even know my name! Why would I disclose anything else? Seriously though: Ex and I are friends, but we have significantly different ideas about the war in Afghanistan. I read a draft of this paper two months ago and gave some very brief but critical feedback. So let me just say up front that 1) my friendship with Ex doesn't keep me from busting his balls and telling him when I think he's wrong, and 2) if I had any organizational or philosophical fealty to CNAS, I'd be at their Christmas party right now instead of defending their institutional integrity on the internet.

That said: it is very, very bizarre to criticize CNAS or the paper's authors for failing to recant previously articulated support for a broad-based, well-resourced counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. Here's Bernard Finel:

Finally, about CNAS.  I know it has no “institutional positions” and hence no obligation to explain shifts in analysis.  But that is wildly disengenuous [sic]. We are seeing a major reversal in CNAS’s position on COIN issues — which are their signature area of research and influence – and refusing to acknowledge past mistakes or address new assessments is, well, creepy.  It is vaguely Stalinist — you know, we’ll just rewrite history and pretend nothing happened.  I am pretty sure that if Heritage new year started promoting higher taxes they would feel obliged to explain why their views had changed. The “no institutional positions” line from CNAS leaders is just a cop out.  Own your past mistakes. Acknowledge them and learn from them.

And then there's Michael Cohen, who tweeted that "CNAS has gone 180 on COIN and offers no explanation." [EDIT: Let me clarify here that I'm not dealing with Cohen's criticism of the report in any kind of comprehensive way. He feels like he's been unfairly lumped in with Finel here, and that's probably true. So go read his criticism of the paper, which repeats some of Bernard's goofy lament about how wrong Ex was a year ago, but also makes an important point about how he and Barno have mostly overlooked the reconciliation process.]

"Bizarre" is probably not the right word for this; that suggests that this kind of criticism is unexpected and inexplicable. Anyone who's read Bernard's blog (or Cohen's, for that matter) could've predicted this sort of overwrought critique --- "major reversal," "creepy," "vaguely Stalinist, "rewrite history," etc. -- simply by observing how many of those who have been advocating withdrawal for some time seem so aggrieved at never having been suitably acknowledged. In fact, that seems to be some critics' main takeaway from "Responsible Transition": not satisfaction that formerly outspoken advocates of an expanded effort in South Asia have come 'round to their point of view, but rather outrage that CNAS seems not to have been sufficiently punished for giving a home to those advocates who, in Bernard's words, "were simply wrong based on the available evidence at the time." Finel is pissed, and not just at the fact that there are still people who disagree with him, or that the U.S. is still in Afghanistan -- he's pissed that everyone didn't agree with him in the first place. After all, "[d]evelopments in Afghanistan since the 2009 surges have been exactly as any informed observer would have expected," he writes. They were wrong "based on the available evidence at the time"! By this line of thinking, anyone who pushed a different policy course than he and his fellow sober pragmatists must be a charlatan, "a courtier (and worse)," a war profiteer, or a liar.

But what of CNAS' "disingenuous" refusal to excoriate its very own institutional self for "past mistakes" and a "shift in analysis"? For a "180 on COIN" with "no explanation"? Well, Bernard's own words satisfy this nutty complaint: "I know it has no 'institutional positions'..." What further need is there for qualification? They don't have institutional positions! The analysis of their employees does not constitute the analysis of the organization! To say that COIN is CNAS' "signature area of research and influence" simply because Nagl and Exum have been vocal in support of that operational approach is just as absurd as saying that Brookings' "signature area of research and influence" is the Bush Doctrine because it employs Pollack and O'Hanlon. And to say that CNAS has undergone a "major reversal in its position on COIN issues" when it DOESN'T HAVE AN INSTITUTIONAL POSITION ON ANY ISSUES is just damned goofy.

So is this the great "reversal" that Bernard is trumpeting, the "180 on COIN" of Cohen's dreams? Well, in short, no. First of all, as the report notes, the COINdinistas didn't get everything they wanted out of the so-called "surge": the president offered a more limited vision and rejected a massive, protracted troop presence. Exum and Barno are adapting to the reality of 2010: the president has elaborated his strategy, we've had an additional year to observe the progress of the war, and the U.S. government, NATO, and the Afghan government have demonstrated over that period their collective seriousness about the drawdown-by-'11, transition-by-'14 timeline. The authors aren't saying "my bad, this COIN stuff is a bunch of nonsense and it's not working, so listen up while I pimp some other plan." They're saying "look, no matter what anybody said before, these are the decisions the president has made about the near and mid-term, so here's how we get the best results out of that over the long term." To put it simply, anyone who is painting this as a "reversal" or "180" on COIN is completely full of shit.

Now, are the recommendations themselves any good? As I said before, I've got my own complaints. [EDIT #2:] For what it's worth, here's a snip of what I wrote about the draft that I originally saw:

So I guess in conclusion, I like what you're trying to do here, and I very much like the acknowledgement that the current strategy doesn't have a real, concrete end point. But I have some major concerns about a) your justification for continued involvement (i.e. WHY winning is important); b) your explanation for how this approach actually works better to achieve our goals in Afghanistan (i.e. HOW we win this way); c) your apparent willingness to sacrifice on the big picture (not getting Americans blown up by al-Qaeda) in order to meet with some limited success in the small picture (keeping Afghanistan from collapse to the Taliban) (i.e. WHAT the point of what we're doing here is).

I objected to the bits about increased leverage on the Pakistanis, both because I think we're already trying pretty hard on that one and because there's no concrete elaboration of exactly how to do it. I'm a bit uncomfortable with the sizing of the "residual force" for the same reasons: it's not that 30K is necessarily the wrong number, but I'd like to see them show their work. Why 30,000 and not 25,000? Or 15,000? Or 40,000? And then there's the bit about shifting investment away from the central government in Kabul and increasing support for local government, which I think is plainly inconsistent with an indirect approach that will necessarily be largely dependent on Afghan Security Forces... that are organized, trained, equipped, and directed by the national government. How do you keep building up ANSF while shifting investment to local government? How do you support decentralized militias/arbakai without getting them shot at by previously U.S.-trained and -equipped ANSF? Without creating yet more unpredictable conflict dynamics? And so on.

But all in all, "Responsible Transition" is something to be happy about. People with influence are taking a pragmatic approach to post-"surge" Afghanistan and trying to understand how we get from where we are and where we will be to where we need to be. They're not saying they wish the last year hadn't happened, they're not arguing that the president is dumb and shouldn't have made the decisions that he did, and they're not working with fantasy counterfactuals about woulda, coulda, shoulda or if only we hadn't. They're trying to understand America's vital and enduring interests, to make sense of what those mean in South Asia, and to move the state of play in the region from where it is now to where it ought to be under the resource and political constraints we can all feel confident will obtain in coming years. We ought to applaud that, not act butt-hurt about the fact that nobody listened a year ago.

Other criticisms of "Responsible Transition":

• Keith Boyea, "For Afghanistan, a Wind of Change From Washington," guest post at Newshoggers
• Josh Foust, "'A Responsible Transition'," Registan.net
• Herschel Smith, "Afghanistan: Responsible Transition," The Captain's Journal (LULZ)

Gingrich/bin Laden: your respective Civilizations aren't interested in your Clash

I've tried to avoid weighing in on this subject in any depth, simply because I get too outraged and find it nearly impossible to think, speak, or write clearly after that. But as you'll surely have heard, Newt Gingrich made a speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute entitled "America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan" (pdf). Take a look at it if you like, or just trust my summary: Gingrich thinks we're at war with Islam (or as he would draw the difference-less distinction, with "Islamism") and believes it's necessary to mobilize all of our national resources to combat the creeping destruction of our civilization. Sounds like someone else I know. William Saletan and Max Fisher do a great job of drawing out the parallels. Here's Saletan:

In the years since 9/11, Osama Bin Laden has issued more than 20 audio and video statements to spread his view of the conflict between the United States and al-Qaida. According to his worldview, the United States represents Christianity, al-Qaida represents Muslims, Christians won't protect Muslims, the West hates mosques, peaceful coexistence is a fraud, and the "war on terrorism" is really a war on Islam. By spreading this message, Bin Laden works to turn Muslims against the United States and rally them to al-Qaida.

Now Bin Laden has an ally in this propaganda campaign: Newt Gingrich.

Over the past two weeks, in a series of articles and speeches, Gingrich has declared a religious war that suits al-Qaida's agenda almost perfectly. While denouncing "Islamists" rather than Islam, Gingrich has blurred the distinction by selecting as his initial target the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. Everything Bin Laden says about the United States, Gingrich validates.

He then presents a side-by-side comparison of bin Laden and Gingrich's thoughts on the subject of culture/civilizational war. The similarities are striking. Read it.

Max has more here on how Gingrich's speech fits into the broader picture of his own political ambitions and divisions within the GOP on security policy.

As I've said in the comments to this post, I think this issue is a vitally important one. I'm going to continue my policy of relative silence, though, because as I've said, I lose my mind when I start thinking about Newt effing Gingrich or the people opposing Muslim Day at Six Flags as the vanguard of a civilizational army fighting for ME. F that noise.

(And while we're on the subject, check out what Ex has to say about the mosque controversy. I think he's a little too focused on the Establishment Clause but completely agree on the broader sentiment.)

CNAS action: it's FAAAAAAAAAANtastic!

(If you don't understand this post title, what the hell have you been watching on TV for the last 30 years?!)

This afternoon is CNAS' big annual blowout at the Willard in downtown DC. Along with Michele Flournoy, Exum, and the other usual suspects, 80% of the Ink Spots crew will be in attendance (or alternatively, 100% of the people who actually post at Ink Spots. BURN!). I'll be trying to tweet some updates (@InkSptsGulliver), though cell service is pretty terrible down in that basement.

Say hello if you see me. I look just like the dude in the tri-corner hat on my Twitter page.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, you can watch the whole thing on the internet here.

Anybody interested in a really, really stupid definition of "victory"?

Because I can show you one, courtesy of Lee Smith, author of The Strong Horse. He and Andrew Exum have been having a little back-and-forth about the fundamental, conceptual underpinnings of Smith's new book -- which, you won't be surprised to learn, I think are catastrophically flawed -- via Abu Muqawama and Michael Totten's blog. Smith's latest riposte came today, in a post entitled "The Trouble With Proxy Wars." Read the whole thing if you want (or don't), but I want to highlight the specific section in which Smith seems to reveal exactly what he thinks about the limits of military force (or rather, the almost completely unlimited nature of what can be achieved by effective use of force, I guess):

Whether or not the American counterinsurgency waged in Iraq’s Sunni regions was successful, Bush did not win Iraq, and Washington has no intention to win Iraq. It’s not me who says so, but rather a broad cross-section of America’s political, military and intelligence classes. Back in July 2008, Andrew himself wrote the following:

The past year and half have demonstrated that despite impressive gains in Iraq and a truly heroic effort by our soldiers and diplomats, a large portion of that country’s security environment is determined by the Iranians, who have leverage with nearly all of Iraq’s political parties and factions. If Iran desires to turn the heat up there or elsewhere in the region, it can.

Even Gen. David Petraeus, the man credited with a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, acknowledged in his senate testimony in March that "the Iranian regime has embarked on a broad campaign led by the IRGC-Qods Force to influence Iraqi politics and support, through various means, parties loyal to Iran. The Qods Force also maintains its lethal support to Shia Iraqi militia groups, providing them with weapons, funding, and training."

If the Iranians are capable of heating up Iraq, if they are able to embark on a broad campaign including both political and military aspects, then the US did not win in Iraq. The test of victory is simply whether or not you are capable of imposing terms on your adversaries; if you can’t, if rather they shape your strategic decisions -- e.g., if they determine your security environment by funding, arming and training militias -- then you have not won.

Or think of it like this: after VE Day what capacity did the Nazis have to heat things up for US troops in France and Italy and consequently determine US strategy? American society may have changed during the last half century so that we no longer know how to describe victory, but the objective standards for defining victory have not changed, nor have they changed at any time during the course of human history. The Iranians are able to shape our regional strategy because we did not win.

It bears repeating that it is not me who says we did not win, but rather our decision-makers. Of course, they do not explicitly say that we did not win, only that the Iranians can hurt us in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is the same thing.

This is really, really flawed. I could go into all the reasons why, or I could just take Smith's view to its logical historical extension and see how sane the whole thing seems to you. I'll do the latter. And so:

After VE Day, what capacity did the Soviets have to heat things up for US troops in Germany, or to deny them access to central and eastern Europe? What capacity did the Soviets have to deny the US complete dominion over Europe, or unipolarity, or limitless determination of the postwar geopolitical landscape? (Hint: if you said "nearly total," or at least "really, really high," then you're right!)

Postwar Germany is a really bad comparison for Iran for one simple reason: as much as it may disappoint Lee Smith, we haven't been fighting a war against Iran, and we haven't invaded Iranian territory! If "winning" means the exclusive, limitless ability to shape the postwar battlespace in any way we like, then we're very rarely going to "win" anything at all without engaging in total, regional war. It seems that Smith would probably agree with this analysis, and support that policy option. His stated support for aggressive action against Tehran and Damascus certainly doesn't suggest otherwise.

And so we're back where we started, really: Lee Smith is just another guy who thinks of the military instrument as a means to crush in their entirety the enemy's will and means to resist, not so much shaping outcomes as dictating them in toto. Must've been sick the day they taught Clausewitz.

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.

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.

Two reviews of Krakauer's new Pat Tillman book

So now that I've positively recommended a book that I haven't read, it's time to share with you some reviews of another new book I haven't read, one that sounds like it might not be that great: Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.

Everyone knows the story of Tillman by now: the NFL player who left a multimillion dollar contract to join the Army, killed in Afghanistan, lauded as a hero and recommended for a Silver Star... only for it to later be revealed that the Army had cooked the story, that the medal was a fraud, and that the man who had become a symbol of patriotism and broad public support for the "Global War on Terror" had been mistakenly killed by his own comrades. Sounds like it has the makings of a great book, right?

Jon Krakauer is a talented writer, and I really enjoyed Into Thin Air, the story of a disastrous 1996 expedition to summit Everest. (Incidentally, I read that book after learning about it from my mom, a nurse, who cared for one of the climbers during his recovery from surgery related to injuries he suffered as a member of the ill-fated party.) But from the sounds of these two reviews, he didn't really do justice to the Tillman story.

First we've got Andrew Exum's "He Didn't Come Home," from Sunday's Washington Post. Ex's criticisms are mostly related to the way that Krakauer approaches the Tillman drama as a political story, an exemplar for the failures and dishonesty of the Bush administration.

If Krakauer had committed himself to telling Tillman's story, "Where Men Win Glory" might have been the latest in an unbroken string of superb books. But his book falls flat -- not least because he is more eager to launch an inquisition into the crimes of the Bush administration than to explore this single extraordinary life.

War takes place at four levels -- the political, the strategic, the operational and the tactical. The Bush administration deserves the lion's share of the blame for the political and strategic blunders of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For too many years, U.S. troops were spread too thin to accomplish mission-essential tasks in either country. But the errors that led to Tillman's death were all operational and tactical -- and the responsibility for these mistakes must be placed on the men making decisions under stress. Why or how an army was sent into combat is often irrelevant to the men on the ground. Their lives are, for the most part, in the hands of the enemy and their fellow warriors.

I am no fan of many of the Bush administration's decisions. I did not vote for the former president in either 2000 or 2004 and was so cynical about the U.S. invasion of Iraq that my platoon went so far as to engrave my judgment of the war -- "This is (expletive, gerund) ( expletive, noun)" -- on my going-away plaque. All of this would surprise Krakauer, who, among other things, labors under the misimpression that U.S. military officers are mainly political conservatives better at following orders than thinking critically. In reality, the men and women who serve in the U.S. military are as diverse as the people they defend.

Blaming the Bush administration for all that has befallen the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan unfairly excuses the military itself for the many errors it made.

The real story, Ex suggests, is more about the military messing up, not the politicos covering up:

An Air Force officer I know likes to say that whenever one seeks to understand an epic failure of our nation's military, one must first draw a line on a sheet of paper and write "conspiracy" at one end and "buffoonery" on the other. Those who have spent time in the military and have seen it struggle not just with war but with everyday barracks life tend to err on the side of incompetence, while those who never have -- such as Krakauer -- tend to suspect conspiracy.

Dexter Filkins -- the outstanding war correspondent for the New York Times and author of what I believe to be probably the best book to come out of America's post-9/11 military adventures, The Forever War -- takes a different approach. In his review, Filkins is critical primarily of Krakauer's decisions on the structure of the book (not to mention factual errors).

The biggest problem with “Where Men Win Glory” is that nearly all the drama and
import — Tillman’s death and the cover-up — are saved for the last hundred pages. The first two-thirds covers Tillman’s early life, his ascent into the National Football League and his decision to quit and enlist. Tillman doesn’t arrive in Afghanistan until Page 230.

It’s not that his life was dull — he emerges as a man of exceptional character, who lived according to a set of principles he had developed from deep thinking and reading. Still, that life, as described here, is not large enough to carry the reader to the momentous events that we already know are on the way.

Krakauer skillfully sketches Tillman’s singular personality, laying the groundwork to present his remarkable decision to take the Army over the N.F.L. Tillman was very much his own man: he wore his hair to his shoulders, rode his bicycle to training camp each morning and “never went anywhere without a book.”

But after the 9/11 attacks, Tillman found his professional life suddenly hollow. "Sports embodied many of the qualities I deem meaningful,” he wrote in May 2002. “However, these last few years, and especially after recent events, I’ve come to appreciate just how shallow and insignificant my role is. . . . It’s no longer important.”

So Tillman said goodbye to the N.F.L., to stardom and to the three-year, $3.6 million contract the Cardinals had offered him to stay. In deciding to enlist, he moved hard
against the grain of contemporary wartime America, which demands extraordinary
sacrifice from a few while asking almost nothing of everyone else.

Unfortunately, too many of the details of Tillman’s life recounted here are mostly banal and inconsequential. Do we really need to be told, at extended length, how Tillman — or “Pat,” as Krakauer cloyingly refers to him — jumped off a granite ledge in Sedona, Ariz.? How he got drunk and threw up with his pals in Paris? How he beat up a guy at the pizza parlor in high school? It feels like padding, and so do Krakauer’s long digressions about Afghanistan and Iraq and the Bush administration, most of which are only tangentially related to his subject’s life (and some of which are inaccurate: Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, was not a major mujahedeen commander during the war against the Soviets; Ismail Khan is not a leader of the Hazaras). This would have been a better book had it been a hundred pages shorter.

Filkins does commend Krakauer for assembling in one place the many already-revealed details of the Tillman drama, particularly those related to the cover-up. He has more patience than Exum with Krakauer's decision to focus on the political or propagandistic elements of the story, but similarly seems to come away from the book disappointed at what might have been.

Considering the negative reviews from two people whose opinions I respect, I'm unlikely to pick the book up. Read the reviews and see what you think.