Trombly and Foust on R2P, sovereignty, Libya, and a rational basis for U.S. foreign policy

I haven't had time to write about this subject (though if you follow me on Twitter it should be plain that I have strong feelings about it), but Dan Trombly and Josh Foust are absolutely killing it on Libya and the so-called "responsibility to protect."

First, see Anne-Marie Slaughter at The Atlantic.

Now read Foust at PBS Need to Know.

And finally, check out Trombly's comprehensive take-down of R2P opportunism at Slouching Towards Columbia.

I like Anne-Marie Slaughter -- I think she's charismatic and engaging, and her enthusiasm to correspond with analysts and students on Twitter is an admirable example for other policy big-wigs to emulate. But Foust and Trombly are so effective in categorically dismantling the philosophical and logical foundations of her argument that the reasonably-minded can only lament their comparative distance from the levers of power.

(It seems like an appropriate time to offer this aside: Dan Trombly is a freaking superstar. I don't know the guy personally, but if this kid spends his 20s making copies for the Michael O'Hanlons of the world, it will be a damned tragedy. It's depressing to consider how completely the so-called "foreign policy establishment" is walled off to original thinking, but I hope he gets an opportunity to do meaningful work. Read his blog. Every day. (No, seriously.))

Don't expect much from me over the long weekend, as I'll be on a train to New York this afternoon. (Hopefully I can get through the last 300-ish pages of The Makers of Modern Strategy, but I'm not holding out a ton of hope.)

"COIN Stars": Columbia Journalism Review

A few weeks ago, I answered some questions over email for an Afghanistan-based freelance journalist working on a piece about the rise of the COIN blogs. The piece that resulted -- which quotes Old Blue, Tim Lynch, Josh Foust, and the gents of SWJ, but apparently needed to include at least one dilettante -- went live last week. A taste:

Ideologically, the “COIN Commentariat” can generally be split into two groups: What some call the “COINdinistas,” those that supported the military’s adoption of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and believe fundamentally in COIN doctrine; and “COINtras,” who are skeptics of COIN or its applications in Afghanistan. But no matter where they fall on the spectrum, most members of the COIN blogosphere seems united in their disdain for the mainstream media’s coverage of the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. “Most journalists wouldn’t know the difference between good COIN and bad COIN when they saw it,” said Old Blue of Afghan Quest. “The mainstream media has largely if not completely missed the opportunity to bring accountability through the wider conversation.”

Newspaper opinion pages too often give platforms to influential people with definite political agendas, according to some. “It’s 90 percent boosters of COIN, and a few cranks, and no substantive discussion,” said Joshua Foust. Others criticize the media for having accepted what they see as a facile explanation of counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasizes “winning hearts and minds” over the more aggressive or coercive tenets of counterinsurgency strategy.

Gulliver at Ink Spots, however, thinks that the popular understanding of COIN might finally be evolving. “There seems to be a general consensus settling over both the policy world and the media,” he said. “We have a better idea of how to do COIN well than we used to, and that understanding has helped to convince us that we ought to do it as rarely as possible, and only when it’s absolutely necessary.” So long as the war in Afghanistan continues, debate and dialogue over the counterinsurgency will undoubtedly thrive in the blogosphere. As the founders of the SWJ Blog write, “We do this in our spare time, because we want to. McDonald’s pays more. But we’d rather work to advance our noble profession than try to super-size your order or interest you in a delicious hot apple pie.”

Read the rest here. Most of what's covered will be familiar to our readers, but it's definitely worth a look. Especially since we're so, um, costive these days.

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.

Josh Foust's book launch - a couple takeaways (UPDATED)

For those of you who didn't know, yesterday Josh Foust (of Registan fame, Central Asia expert, and a great guy) held a launch for his new book, Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. I bought the book at the event and thus haven't yet read it, so hopefully a review will happen once I've finished it. However, the event was very good, with Ambassador Ronald Neumann (US Ambassador to Afghanistan 2005-2007) conversing with Josh. Their discussion covered off on a number of topics related to Afghanistan: the Human Terrain System (HTS), the Afghan people, Karzai and the presidency, the ANA, and US policy and operations. All of which was very interesting. As was the idea of Just World Books turning his blog and other writings into a book.

There are a couple of things that stood out for me from this talk that were probably peripheral to the main talk. The first was Josh talking about the inability of the military to transition their records and knowledge of their area of operations to their follow-on units. Josh recounted that the U.S. Army's Center for Lessons Learned has to send people to units that had rotated home to get copies of their hard drives to provide data to units in the field. This simply blows my mind. I hope this info is dated and doesn't still occur, but the idea that transfers of authority are or have occurred in Afghanistan without digital records is damned near criminal on the part of both units involved. The outgoing needs to provide that info and the incoming needs to ask for it if they don't get it. It's simply common sense. Hopefully, some of you who are there now or recently can let us know if this has changed and transferring data is SOP in a transition.

The second topic that really hit me was the discussion of the HTS and their Human Terrain Teams (HTT) embedded at the brigade level. Josh had worked for them until 18 months ago and had some interesting perspectives. Like all organizations have to deal with, he reported that some teams were really good and some were really bad. Recently, DoD has been moving from a contractor solution to an institutionalized civilian solution to propagate HTS beyond our current wars. I'm actually slightly distressed at this.

I'm a big supporter of the work that the HTS does even if I never had them supporting my units in Iraq. Understanding the locals seems like a pretty good idea to me in any conflict. However, I do question the need to keep large numbers of civilian personnel on the rolls to study areas that we may have conflicts with in the future. Some regional or cultural experts, sure. But not lots. It seems to be a large expenditure that has a small likelihood of ever being practically used.

This may be the former military side of me, but I've always looked at "human terrain" as an intelligence function. Intelligence used to assist the unit commander in making decisions on what activities his unit should conduct. Understanding that a lot of intelligence agencies employ cultural experts, this needs to be done in the military at the unit level. Military intelligence needs to be able to analyze non-combatant locals like they do the enemy. We don't keep civilians who are experts on every enemy we might face and deploy them with BCTs - we train our intel folks to be able to analyze an enemy, however he is and irrespective of that analyst's previous knowledge of them and their organization, so that analyst can give the commander the best information he has. I don't understand why the military is still failing to do this with human intelligence. Granted, there are my intel officers who are leaning forward in the saddle and are doing this on their own, but it needs to be an institutionalized process. Otherwise all that touchy-feely human stuff will remain a civilian role and quite possibly civilians who don't necessarily understand the commander's intelligence needs.

So those are my take aways from the talk. There was, of course, much, much more. Followed by even more engaging discussion at the after-party (#foustfest for your twitter types) with lots of smart and fun people. It was great to meet all of you who I've only conversed with over the interwebs and to see some old friends. Now go buy the book.

UPDATE: Josh has posted a very helpful and insightful response to this post at Registan.