John Nagl and Nathaniel Fick, both of the Center for a New American Security, had an op-ed in last Sunday's NY Times. They're both former military officers, now big think-tank executives, and they decided to report on the Great Progress our armed forces are making in Afghanistan. Mind you, the Afghan government still sucks and the Afghan security forces are still ineffective, but our boys are aces!

One of us, Nathaniel, recently flew into Camp Leatherneck in a C-130 transport plane, which had to steer clear of fighter bombers stacked for tens of thousands of feet above the Sangin District of Helmand Province, in southwestern Afghanistan. Singly and in pairs, the jets swooped low to drop their bombs in support of Marine units advancing north through the Helmand River Valley.

Half of the violence in Afghanistan takes place in only 9 of its nearly 400 districts, with Sangin ranking among the very worst. Slowly but surely, even in Sangin, the Taliban are being driven from their sanctuaries as the coalition focuses on protecting the Afghan people in key population centers and hubs of economic activity, and along the roads that connect them. Once these areas are cleared, it will be possible to hold them with Afghan troops and a few American advisers — allowing the United States to thin its deployments over time.

A significant shift of high-tech intelligence resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, initiated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander, is also having benefits. The coalition led by the United States and NATO has been able to capture or kill far more Taliban leaders in nighttime raids than was possible in the past.

The United States certainly can’t kill its way to victory, as it learned in Vietnam and Iraq, but it can put enough pressure on many Taliban fighters to encourage them to switch their allegiance, depriving the enemy of support and giving the coalition more sources of useful intelligence.

Ahh... if you have jets dropping bombs on Taliban positions and had to surge US forces to 100,000 troops because NATO didn't want to grow its presence and Afghan forces aren't capable, you ARE in fact trying to kill your way to victory. I'm not going to dissect this op-ed, I'll refer you to Joshua Foust for that analysis, but I'll tell you what discouraged me about this pollyannish article. First, the two authors want us to be encouraged that after more than nine years of fierce combat in Afghanistan, we might - just might - be able to get down to 25,000 combat forces four years from now. If we're lucky and Karzai leaves office and a competent Afghan government takes his place.

Second, they use the opportunity to suggest that the counterinsurgency tactics are responsible for a shift in momentum that will allow the "Long War" to get shorter. There's been nothing new that I've seen that suggests anything other than bone-grinding attrition has been the overwhelming tactic here. As much as they cheer on the military operators, and I am sure that our military operators are skilled and efficient killers, the Taliban isn't giving up and the Afghan population isn't throwing its trust behind Karzai. It's a slog, an attrition-based battle with no end game. As TwS points out, "Tactical success shouldn’t be used as a predictor of strategic success."

But here's the bottom line. Let's assume Nagl and Fick are right, that everything clicks, that we're able to drop US combat presence in Afghanistan to 25,000 by 2014. So what? What exactly have we gained? What strategic interest has been achieved? So we cleared out one country of AQ (which, oh by the way, they left  years ago and operate out of Pakistan now - and Yemen and Somalia and other countries...). It's not as if Afghanistan is going to be a valued partner in the War on Terror. No, that country is going to patch its wounds and hope that it can achieve a living condition similar to Pakistan - if it tries real hard for about twenty years while sucking down billions of dollars in American financial aid. Great stuff.

But hey, I suppose Nagl and Fick are just supporting SecDef Gate's view on life, as misguided as that point of view is.

LTG (ret) Dave Barno and Andrew Exum recently released a CNAS report titled "Responsible Transition: Securing U.S. Interests in Afghanistan Beyond 2011." In this report, the two men outline how the US government should move from a heavy counterinsurgency operation that is led by the US military to a counterterrorism operation that supports an Afghan-led counterinsurgency operation in 2014. I'm not going to get into the report itself, other to say that I'm really not that impressed (go read Gulliver's two cents), and that I'll probably lean toward Finel's and Cohen's take. There are few options left to the United States other than to draw down and let the Afghans take over security operations, unless there is a desire by the Repub politicians to dramatically increase US forces and funding in that conflict (since I have no faith in the Dems doing anything positive or negative here).

Interestingly, Mr. Exum has returned from the faraway land of Afghanistan lately and brings back good news and bad news. The good news is that our military intel services are crackerjacks and doing great things. Counterinsurgency is going just swell at the tactical levels, at least. And the special forces guys are working well with the general purpose forces. Always a good thing.

The bad news is that we still don't have an Afghani government that can rule the provinces with any degree of confidence and the Pakistani government still lets the Taliban do pretty much whatever they want. Our government doesn't really focus on this aspect of Afghani "governance", and we're probably going to lose international support as well as that of the Afghani government. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

There was this story about how Karzai appointed a buddy for a governance position, but in 2005, the British military found that he had a little 9-ton heroin problem in his basement. He's gone, but very vocal about how he was framed. And now Karzai thinks the US government is the enemy, not his friend (more mad ranting for public consumption?). There's no indication that Pakistan is addressing its inherent challenges with the Taliban.

I still don't see why anyone would think that there are serious national security interests in Afghanistan, now that al Qaeda is in Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and probably Germany. Here's the thing about non-state actors - they don't rely on one state to thrive. They're funny like that. But Very Serious People in Washington DC will disagree and insist we continue spending more than a hundred billion a year on this operation.

My final question. So how long after 2014 will the US government be pouring billions into Afghanistan's drug lords convoy protection Dubai accounts economy? Is this another $3 billion a year investment like Egypt, Pakistan, and Israel? How many failed states are we going to keep on life support using US billions?

As U.S. and coalition forces mass outside of Khandahar, Afghanistan, for another major combat operation, a spokesman for NATO forces decides to try some Newspeak on Reuters' journalists.

"We would like to call it a process that is encompassing military and non-military instruments," Brigadier General Josef Blotz, the spokesman for NATO forces, told reporters this week.

Ominously, there has been a surge in attacks and political assassinations in Kandahar city recently. Residents fear more bloodshed as some 10,000 troops move into their neighbourhoods.

Most of the troops will stay in rural areas trying to cut off access routes into the city while a 3,500-strong U.S. army brigade will aim to push into Kandahar city, accompanied by almost 7,000 Afghan police.

And for those who would like to consider the former Helmund province offensive process a success, there is this note in the Reuter's article.

A report by policy think tank the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) this week found that 61 percent of 400 men interviewed in and around Marjah felt more negative about NATO forces than before the operation.

"In other words, the objective of winning 'hearts and minds' -- one of the fundamental tenets of the new counter-insurgency strategy -- was not met," ICOS said in the report.

Meanwhile, CNAS analyst Andrew Exum insists that the failure to progress in Afghanistan is due to political, not military, strategy shortfalls. Really. I'm not sure if he's referring to President Obama's decision to continue the Bush legacy or the continuing lack of a cooperative government in Kabul with which to work. But hey, let's keep rolling those military campaigns until the political leadership figures out what it wants to do in Afghanistan. Maybe we can surpass the Vietnam war record of 12 years of continuous engagement with insurgent forces using "the process."

I don't usually comment on a blog post that comments on another blog post, but I believe Matt Yglesias hits on an important issue in his observations on Andrew Exum's interview with Washington Post reporter and author Greg Jaffe.

Greg Jaffe, speaking to Andrew Exum, says “This whole conventional vs. irregular debate is stupid.”

War is war. And we waste far too much energy trying to categorize it. I think most lieutenants, captains and majors are beyond this false conventional vs. irregular frame that we try to impose on war. I wish I could say the same for the more senior people in the Pentagon.

I think there’s a lot of truth to that. At the same time, just because things look one way to “lieutenants, captains and majors” and another way to “senior people in the Pentagon” doesn’t mean we should take a dismissive view of the senior people’s outlook in a rush to celebrate the insights of the practical warfighter.

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And when you get down to the guts of defense budget politics, these high-level strategic concepts matter a great deal. Nobody, of course, is going to say that the U.S. should somehow completely abandon its ability to fight conventional wars. But the choice between a mindset that says “the main purpose of the military is to scare China & Russia” or a mindset that says “the main purpose of the military is to intervene effectively in third world backwaters” has very real implications for what kind of hardware purchases look cost effective.

There is no doubt in my mind that the issue of "hardware purchases" looms very large in the minds of senior military and civilian decision makers. Conventional warfare means lots of tanks, armored vehicles, stealthy jets, next generation bombers, submarines, destroyers, and aircraft carriers. And let's not even get into the care and feeding of that massive military machine. Counterinsurgency operations, or COIN, is completely the opposite, with a focus on maintaining security and diminishing the insurgent grasp on the population without destroying real estate. Also a no-brainer that the DOD budget is already too bloated, and that in managing two wars, protecting the homeland, and trying to modernize its equipment, there's going to be some in-fighting.

But more importantly, the issue is also in the theory and execution of national strategy. The basic idea of military doctrine is that small military units execute tactics on the ground that must support the overall plan of operations within a theater. The theater commander needs to ensure that he has adequate numbers of personnel, that operations continue toward a particular set of goals, and that the logistics support those operations - and his operations must support the overall national strategy for that region. If your tactics and operations don't align against the strategic goals and expected outcome, then you're doing something wrong - even if you're General McChrystal.

Now under the Bush administration, strategic goals and outcomes changed every Friedman unit (six months), which made it difficult to effectively plan operations or execute tactics. But one thing that was certainly clear was that conventional tactics that destroyed the Taliban in 2002 and that took the Iraqi army out in 2003 didn't support the post-conflict goals. You can't prosecute military operations with a conventional frame of mind when what one really needs is an approach to irregular warfare. That's why we failed in Lebanon in 1983.

Greg Jaffe is a good journalist, and I look forward to reading his book. On the other hand, making a statement like "War is war. And we waste far too much energy trying to categorize it" is a remarkably stupid statement. Nuclear war is not the same as conventional war. Conventional war is not the same as irregular war. Our military needs to be able to operate across a range of different operations, and needs to be equipped properly to execute its operations quickly and efficiently. But what we really need is national leadership that understands the nature of war, that knows how to develop a strategy that is executable, and that knows when it's time to go. From Sun Tzu:

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Thus ends the lesson.

Tom Ricks, hagiographer to generals and much-lauded fellow of the Obama administration's "counterinsurgency HQ" at the Center for a New American Security, finally comes out and says it: the US has accepted the White Man's Burden from previous colonial empires and will be meddling in the Middle East for centuries, "following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British".

For thousands of years, it has been the fate of the West's great powers to become involved in the region's politics. [as if they had no choice - C] Since the Suez Crisis of 1956, when British and French influence suffered a major reduction, it has been the United States' turn to take the lead there. And sitting on that wall, it struck me that the more we talk about getting out of the Middle East, the more deeply we seem to become engaged in it.

President Obama campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq, but even he has talked about a post-occupation force. The widespread expectation inside the U.S. military is that we will have tens of thousands of troops there for years to come. Indeed, in his last interview with me last November, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told me that he would like to see about 30,000 troops still there in 2014 or 2015.

...So, to address the perceptive question that Petraeus posed during the invasion: How does this end?

Probably the best answer came from Charlie Miller, who did the first draft of policy development and presidential reporting for Petraeus. "I don't think it does end," he replied. "There will be some U.S. presence, and some relationship with the Iraqis, for decades. . . . We're thinking in terms of Reconstruction after the Civil War."

He goes on to explain that, no matter when the US eventually leaves, there'll be a civil war in Iraq.

Toby Dodge, a British defense expert who was an occasional adviser to Petraeus, "the current Iraqi government is full of Iranian clients. You'll almost certainly end up with a rough and ready dictatorship . . . that will be in hock to Iran."

...Maj. Matt Whitney, who spent 2006 advising Iraqi generals, predicted that once U.S. forces were out of the way, Iraqi commanders would relapse to the brutal ways of earlier days: "Saddam Hussein taught them how to [suppress urban populations] and we've just reinforced that lesson for four years," he said. "They're ready to kill people -- a lot of people -- in order to get stability in Iraq."

..."When you got to know them and they'd be honest with you, every single one of them thought that the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq was absolutely ludicrous," said Maj. Chad Quayle, who advised an Iraqi battalion in south Baghdad during the surge.

So can someone explain to me how squandering "blood, treasure, prestige and credibility" for decades to simply delay the inevitable is better than getting out now? And if that explanation is forthcoming from military-enamoured liberal COIN hawks, maybe while they're at it they can explain why, in extolling the virtues of their new and improved war-fighting and nation-building formula, they keep neglecting to be specific about the generations-long colonialism it entails.

Crossposted from Newshoggers