Steve Biddle on CFR podcast on Afghanistan

A friend sent me a link to this podcast/media call with CFR's Stephen Biddle. He just got back from Afghanistan and since I wasn't on the call and I haven't heard it yet (and it's Friday and kind of slow and I should listen to it for work anyway), I thought I could listen and live blog it (so to speak). If this turns out to be total crap, well I'll have tried a different way of blogging. The plan is to hit post when I'm done listening.

First, he argues that COIN is less like painting a house and more like doing complex surgery. He argues that it takes just over a year to figure out whether a village has stabilized or not. He adds that in complex surgery, the patient may get a lot worse before you know whether the surgery will actually work. That strikes me as the way I would explain something to my grandmother but ok, I get it.

He says casualty rates at the national level don't help much, that we need to disaggregate the levels of violence and whether levels of violence match whatever phase of COIN a particular area is currently experiencing. In his opinion, figuring out how an area is doing requires going through an entire year (or in some cases 18 months depending on when in the traditional Afghan fighting season you started the clearing process) to figure out how that place is doing. He says in part of Helmand, it's been that long and things are clearly stabilizing while in others (like Marja), we're just at the counter-attack part post initial clearing.

Then there's a less interesting discussion of timetables, public support and the change of command. Seriously, there's not much there in my opinion, so skipping ahead.

Concerning Wikileaks, he argues that it's been damaging because of the effect of having names of people who cooperate could endanger them. He doesn't think these documents as as important as the Pentagon Papers or that the documents, which stop before Obama announced the surge, are counter to the Administration's narrative. This was before Wikileaks announced they were posting more, I wonder if he'll say something different then.

He's then asked how he would explain the rationale for the war to a parent whose child was headed to Afghanistan. He says the first rationale given by the Administration, that we can't allow Afghanistan to become (again) a haven for terrorists isn't very compelling. He calls the second more persuasive: that Afghanistan is a base for destabilizing Pakistan (and that this would be a problem for the war in Pakistan). He goes into details about how Pakistan is a nuclear power etc (this part struck me, again, as useful for someone who doesn't track this super closely, otherwise, a bit boring)

When pressed about this "domino theory", he says that people use domino theory when they oppose a war (zing, sort of). He says that regional instability is a wide-ranging international problem and that countries do worry about. He recognizes that Afghanistan are important but indirect. He says it's not a slam-dunk for either side of the argument and it's a value judgment about costs. I think that's fair enough but I also think he should have more of an opinion...I agree that it's a value judgment and I agree that the Pakistan disaster scenario is really scary. He also didn't discuss (here) whether it matters to think of it as Afghanistan destabilizes Pakistan or the other way around.

Ok, that's it for his initial intro...there's more in the Q&A but to be honest, I got a bit bored so I skimmed through the transcript and I couldn't find something that really grabbed my eye. So what do you think of his arguments?