Center for a New American Security

These past few weeks have brought a fresh torrent of bad news from Afghanistan: a governor in a key district assassinated, U.S. and allied operations in flux, Afghan leadership in question. Policy-makers in Washington and allied capitols are wondering if the U.S. and allied counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan can succeed. These are reasonable concerns. Tony Cordesman, one of the U.S. defense analysts who has advised the command in Afghanistan, wrote today that “There is nothing more tragic than watching beautiful theories being assaulted by gangs of ugly facts. It is time, however, to be far more realistic about the war in Afghanistan. It may well still be winnable, but it is not going to be won by denying the risks, the complexity, and the time that any real hope of victory will take. It is not going to be won by ‘spin’ or artificial news stories, and it can easily be lost by exaggerating solvable short-term problems”.

Researchers – whether in think tanks or in the academy – are loathe to admit error or display genuine humility. But as the preacher-king in Ecclesiastes warned us, “Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice”. Humility pays, which is why John Calvin instructed us all to have a “teachable spirit”.

I cannot think of any place where humility pays as much as in Afghanistan. One of the smartest military analysts I know arrived in Afghanistan this past spring having never been there and promptly announced he could not understand how anyone who had not spent at least a year in Afghanistan could say anything of consequence about the country. And the longer I spend time away from Afghanistan, the less confidence I have that I can even understand operations there or the challenges facing U.S. and allied officers, diplomats and aid workers – to say nothing of ordinary Afghans. This is one of the reasons why I have been reluctant to say anything in the media or in a policy paper on the tactical and operational levels of war in 2010. And having spent a good many years of my life studying one sub-region of the Arabic-speaking world, I have always been quick to point out that my lack of Dari and Pashtu language skills or time spent in Afghanistan as a civilian researcher really means that I am confined to observing and offering comment on NATO/ISAF operations and U.S. and allied policy and strategy rather than on Afghan culture or society.

Judge what follows with that massive caveat emptor in the back of your head.

The purpose of this post is to revisit some assumptions we – to include this analyst – have made about the environment in Afghanistan as well as U.S. strategy and operations. A year on from President Obama’s “white paper” outlining U.S. policy and strategic aims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, what assumptions remain valid and what assumptions need correction?

Wags like to joke that when you “assume” you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”. Very funny, sure, but the reality is that assumptions are necessary for strategy, the social sciences, and everyday life. The economist Greg Mankiw writes that assumptions help us “simplify the complex world and make it easier to understand … The art in scientific thinking – whether in physics, biology, or economics – is deciding which assumptions to make”.

In war, getting your assumptions right does not necessarily mean you win, and getting them wrong doesn’t necessarily mean you lose. As with all things, the ability to execute matters most, and in war, setting priorities and allocating sufficient resources matters quite a bit as well. In Afghanistan, it is unclear that the United States and its allies have allotted sufficient resources (time, troops, money) to execute a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. It is also unclear whether or not the United States and its allies can execute such a strategy in southern Afghanistan if given sufficient resources. We have to be honest about that, as well as about the possibility that we could somehow end up with a favorable policy outcome regardless of those concerns.

This post, though, is about assumptions. In Afghanistan, leaders at the political, strategic, operational and tactical levels of the war have made and continue to make assumptions that allow them to plan and execute a strategy and operations. Some of the assumptions made in 2009 have proven correct in 2010. Some have proven in need of correction, and that means leaders need to revisit their plan. Here are some of them:

1. "The United States and its allies will devote the time, money, and troops to execute a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan". Probably False. For a variety of reasons – some good, some less good, some having to do with massive oil spills that didn't exist in 2009 and a financial crisis that didn't exist in 2007 – the United States and its allies will likely not provide the resources necessary for a long-term counterinsurgency effort. They might have in 2003. But in 2009? In retrospect, it was always going to be unlikely, and I think I personally overestimated U.S. and allied resources available (including but not limited to political will).

2. "The United States and its allies have vital interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan". Probably True. Tony Cordesman is correct when he writes that we have no reason to maintain a long-term presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia. But disrupting networks of violent non-state actors is a vital U.S. interest, and allowing these non-state actors to establish a safe haven in Afghanistan is not in our interests. As with anything, the trick is weighing marginal costs versus marginal benefits. I do not have faith in my ability to accurately assess either.

3. "Afghanistan is a binary conflict between the government and the insurgents".* Certainly False. Take a close look at Helmand Province or read the chapter written by Tom Coughlin in this book. On the one hand, you have a binary conflict between insurgents and the government. On the other hand, you have inter-tribal rivalries layered on top of that conflict. And on someone else’s hand, you have the drug trade layered onto both. Try to imagine a battalion commander who speaks only English figuring all that out by June 2011. And if most counterinsurgency strategies are about extending the reach of the government, should we still do that if the government is known to be corrupt and predatory?

4. "The provision of social services leads to a reduction of violence". Mostly false. Theorists and practitioners of counterinsurgency had long argued, as Galula did, that “the counterinsurgent should … seize every opportunity to help the population with his own resources and equipment”. And as Eli Berman and David Laitin demonstrated, insurgent groups do in fact benefit from providing social services. But how about counterinsurgent forces? There the evidence is weaker. Berman & Co. have demonstrated that CERP funding – and CERP funding alone among aid and development spending – likely had an effect on the drop of violence in Iraq. But Andrew Wilder argues that even CERP funding is destabilizing in Afghanistan. Whether or not any of the $70b the United States and its allies have spent on aid and development has had a stabilizing effect seems to be unproven. This has, I think, some serious implications for U.S. aid and development strategy going forward.

5. "What we do is what matters".** Mostly false. I think we drew some false lessons out of the Baghdad security operations of 2007, thinking it was what we did that caused the dramatic drop in violence that allowed for a political process to take place and allows us to consider the Surge to have been a success. As I have pointed out several times here on the blog, there was a lot of stuff going on in Iraq in 2007 – a Jaysh al-Mahdi ceasefire, the effects of a brutal civil war, the Sahwa, etc. U.S. military operations most certainly had an effect on levels of violence, but correctly portioning out causal responsibility for the drop in violence among all those factors is impossible. One lesson from the Surge, though, might have been that in order for us to be successful in Afghanistan, a lot of stuff outside U.S. and allied military operations was going to have to go right. Another lesson might have been that conditions might change on the ground without us having the ability to accurately explain why. Regardless, in Afghanistan, it is always worth remembering that we are waging a war on behalf of a host nation. What the leaders of that host nation do or fail to do matters more than what we do or fail to do.

6. "Population-centric counterinsurgency is appropriate for Afghanistan". Mostly true but perhaps false in one key way. The enemy in insurgencies can control his loss rate and is fluid – while the population is fixed. That’s why we’re population-centric. But does population-centric mean protecting the population or controlling the population? And if you do not have detention authority and the population is 70% rural, can you even do the latter? I’m not sure.

I still think, as echoed in this New York Times editorial, that "General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy still seems like the best chance to stabilize Afghanistan and get American troops home." But for a lot of the same reasons Tony outlines in his most recent paper for the CSIS, I am not sure we can pull it off. I think we need to reexamine our assumptions, reconsider our strategy, and do both with the requisite epistemological humility about the environment in which we’re fighting.

*I didn’t actually make this one, but as I read a lot of policy documents from 2009, I feel like the United States and its allies largely did.

**Okay, I didn’t make this either, and I do not know any operational decision-makers who did, but I think this most certainly applies to many legislators in the U.S. Congress and to much of the U.S. public.

Update: Cohen and Boot respond. I respect the heck out of Max Boot and consider him among the smartest of the thinkers often lumped under the label "neoconservative". (He has also been intellectually brave, unafraid to take on members of his own party.) But I think Boot, like many other neoconservatives, overestimates the importance of U.S. actions and downplays the agency of others. So Afghanistan will definitely be a success if we will it? Sorry, but that's not how third-party counterinsurgency campaigns work. The actions of others matter as much or more than our own. (Though Boot is right, to a degree, about political will.)

Update II: Now Spencer, with some kind words regarding my intellectual honesty. (Hey, if you don't have much intellect, you might as well have intellectual honesty.)

Update III: The military analyst I mentioned in the third paragraph wrote in to say that he thinks an intelligent analyst would have something of consequence to say about Afghanistan after as little as 90 days on the ground -- but agreed with me that knowledge is perishable. He also pointed out regarding Assumption #3 that we often assume both the government and the insurgents to be unitary actors. Not true -- neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan. And Joe Klein wrote in to say that his worries -- only partially articulated in this column for TIME -- dovetail with my own.

Update IV: Max Boot has penned a very thoughtful response to my, er, response. I did not write that the United States and its allies will not be successful in Afghanistan -- merely that I am having my doubts, in part because I am not sure how much I can really "know" about the battlespace and that some of my earlier assumptions have proven either wrong or in need of slight revision. As far as the success rate of counterinsurgents fighting as third parties -- that is, not on their home turf and in the service of a host nation, like the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is concerned, I would point Boot in the direction of the freshly defended doctoral dissertation of one Erin Simpson (Doctor Charlie to this blog's readers). Once you're done coding everything out, it turns out it doesn't so much matter whether or not you're a democracy or an authoritarian regime. But counterinsurgents are a whole lot less likely to be successful if they are fighting as third parties as opposed to on their home territory. Boot also references my service on Gen. McChrystal's assessment team last summer. Surely he remembers that we* concluded the United States and its allies were losing the war at the time, right? We found the overall situation to be deteriorating. What was needed, we felt, was a new strategy and more resources. In 2009 and 2010, the president has devoted many more troops and resources. But that changes the cost-benefit analysis I referenced in #2 above. I want to thank, though, Max Boot and all the others who have used this post to engage in some really good (and civil) debate.

*The report, of course, did not reflect the consensus of the group and only reflected the opinion of the commander. I largely agreed with everything that was written in the first 22 pages (which were the only pages I helped draft), but there were some really dynamic debates among the various experts and strategists (and one smart-ass blogger) that were not reflected in the final text.

I was not among those who criticized the article James Risen wrote about the $1 trillion mineral find in Afghanistan. I was content to fret about the conflict trap in which countries dependent on primary commodity exports often find themselves. But if James Risen -- one of the nation's leading national security journalists, to be sure -- seriously thinks those who criticized his reporting are simply bloggers "jerking off in their pajamas" he could use an extra dose of humility today. In this Yahoo! interview with John Cook, Risen is apparently oblivious to the fact that some of his pajama-clad critics include serious scholars and analysts who, while younger than Risen and hip to teh interwebs, have studied Central Asia and spent a lot more time on the ground there than he has. Just read what a self-important jerk he sounds like when asked to defend his reporting:

"The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people's stories ... Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think."

What phenomenal arrogance. What a jerk.

I really respect the men and women who report on national security issues for our daily newspapers and still subscribe to an old-fashioned newspaper that arrives on my doorstep each morning. And I grew up in the newspaper industry. (My first job, at 14, was running text through the old wax machines at our family newspaper and pasting stories to the pages with an exacto knife and scissors.) But one of the things I love about the blogosphere is that instead of reading soundbites from experts in a 1,000-word story (cut down to 400 words to make room for an advertisement), I can read lengthy commentary by subject matter experts. Have a question about depression-era economics and their connection to the contemporary financial crisis? Click here. Want in-depth, informed commentary on what's happening in Kyrgyzstan? Click here. This may come as a shock to James Risen, but some of the people he is mocking know a hell of a lot more about minerals in Afghanistan than he does.

You want to hasten the end of your industry? Then by all means, keep doing what you're doing: consider yourself unaccountable and scoff at the blogosphere. Yes, I understand bloggers are changing the newspaper industry in fundamental ways. (Ezra Klein, to use one example, does not blog with the same tradition of objectivity in which the Washington Post's print journalists report. How that changes the culture of the newsroom, then, is interesting.) But if you think you don't need to answer to bloggers, some of whom have spent years doing field research or working in Central Asia and now blog as a hobby, the invisible hand of the market is going to find you out. And before you know it, you'll have taken a buy-out from the New York Times and be teaching creative writing in Maryland. And, let's face it, probably blogging on the side.

I was reading Ex's link to Chris Fair and Daniel Byman's piece about idiotic jihadis and thought some thoughts that I thought were probably fairly relevant. But more importantly, I saw a golden opportunity to link to a clip I've been wanting to share for ages (more on that in a bit).

So, are jihadis cunning, resourceful, steel eyed shadow warriors, or are they a bunch of bumbling fools? Chris and Daniel make a great case for the idiot argument with tales of would-be suicide bombers hugging their comrades one last time and accidentally vapourising everyone, Talibs engaging in frolics with farmyard animals and - my personal favourite - the weed smoking Miami wannabe jihadis.

I've been drawn to the bumbling-fools line of argument since the time I attended a rally organised by al Muhajiroon in London. On the shared bus from the mosque to the site, I was stifling laughter when the teenage demonstrators started cracking open the neatly packed lunches their mothers had prepared thinking their sons were off on training courses. Followed by the full-on jihadi fashionista behind-the-catwalk bitch-fest when it came time to fix on the face-covering Palestinian scarves.

The point was only enhanced for me a few months later when I saw the video testaments of the failed airline bomb plotters...I mean seriously, I'm pretty sure at least two of them couldn't read the script. 

At about the same time, I interviewed a 15-year old in London who told me, "Amil, the war is coming. I'm a soldier. But, bruvver, you gotta pick your side." He then got stoned, tried to rap for me, forgot the words and asked to borrow money for the bus ride home."

This might all sound fairly reassuring, but I think the ineptitude is just one side of a wider trend. Keeping the argument to Britain for now; before 9/11, to become an extremist, you had to be fairly committed. There was none of the reflected glamour of being associated with people capable of scaring polite society. In those days, extremists were overzealous, a bit nerdy, waay too into religion and generally uncool. As Chris and Daniel's example of 9/11 lead attacker Mohammed Atta suggests, in such an environment, a potential recruit is more likely to possess a certain awareness, commitment and focus. Of course, there are examples of pre 9/11 Jihadiots, but in general terms, the cause was as cool as chess club and membership reflected that. 

Now that the cause is much more glamorous, many more people want some of the action. So the fact that there are numerous instances of idiocy means that extremists have been able to lots of idiots. And, just one idiot who manages to press the right button at the right time is a huge problem.

But more than that, if you are going to get lots of recruits, most will be idiots but you are also going to get a larger proportion of useful people. i bet something similar happens in conventional fighting forces like the British army. Thinking of which, I'm reminded of an occurrence related to me by an army guy I was hanging around with who told me of a young recruit from the north of England who after a session of learning about grenades put a live one in the pocket of his camo jacket and blew himself up. So, for every few dozen Sargodha type recruits you get someone who can devise complex strategies, hack computer systems or influence millions. In Pakistan, these types of recruits have been busy running double agents, expertly executing raids on Pakistani army installations and running circles around everyone else's communication efforts.

There are further differences amongst extremists than just their level of competence. Britain, for example, and Afghanistan are two totally different environments. The threat coming from them does not manifest itself in the same way. However, the general principle probably still holds; if porn-loving young Afghans have signed up to the Taliban, it suggests that the group is growing in popularity and attracting followers because it is successful and not because of whatever it is seen to stand for.

Daniel and Chris mention the importance of denying extremists havens to limit their capacity to train followers, and I'd totally agree. I'd also add if we accept that extremists can gather more recruits than before 9/11, and that some of these people have to be competent, that means that more safe havens will result in many, many more potentially lethal extremists.

So, should we laugh at the Jihadiots? Absolutely! I mean, sometimes, it's really hard not to. Check out this trailer for a recently released British film to see what I mean:

I got up at 0315 this morning and am about to head to the Burlington airport in order to be back in Washington, DC in time for the annual CNAS conference, which promises to be pretty awesome. There are lots of good speakers and panelists lined up, but if you cannot attend, fear not: you can follow the webcast live via the interwebs here. And if you are attending the conference and are a regular reader of the blog, do say hello at some point. I promised Gen. Barno I was going to get a haircut this morning once back in DC, but otherwise, I'll be my normal charming self. And I'll be wearing a nametag. Which should make it easier to pick me out. (Sorry, though, despite regular requests from readers, I will not be wearing regimental PT shorts. And neither will Fick be wearing UDT shorts. In both cases, this is a good thing.)

I am in Vermont, in Basin Harbor, at a conference sponsored by Eliot Cohen and the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University. (It is so ridiculously gorgeous here that I am putting everything I see to “the 20-inch test” – that is, I am imagining how all this greenery must look with 20 inches of snow covering everything.) The conference, a follow-up to one held several years ago, is on counterinsurgency warfare, and tomorrow I’ll share a panel with Con Crane and Brian Linn on the state of the art.

It seems as good a time as any, then, to write a “State of COIN” post, which I have been meaning to do for quite some time. When this blog started, in February of 2007, counterinsurgency was very much in the ascendant, but the U.S. community studying it was still improbably small given the nature of the wars the U.S. military was fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. So very much has changed in the years since. For one, this blog is now less about counterinsurgency and more about national security and the Middle East (and Central and South Asia) more broadly. For another, counterinsurgency and its defenders are no longer the plucky underdogs in the national security community.

A few weeks ago, I was at USIP listening to the secretary of state speak with Hamid Karzai, and Sec. Clinton, at one point and in response to a journalist’s question, went on at length about the theory and practice of counterinsurgency operations. It struck me then – but not for the first time – that the things theorists and proponents of counterinsurgency had wanted in 2005 have largely come to pass: counterinsurgency is accepted as an appropriate operational choice for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, policy-makers and platoon leaders are conversant in its principles, and the academic community from anthropology to economics is taking it seriously as a field worthy of inquiry.

As such, if I had just one message for the counterinsurgency community today, it would be the following: stop being so defensive. Up until about a year ago, I myself could still be really prickly with some of those would criticize counterinsurgency as an operational choice, taking it upon myself to crankily respond to every Tom, Dick and Henrietta who said something either ignorantly critical or incorrect about counterinsurgency. Today I am less likely to get into a flame war on the blogosphere or to write a 600-word critique of some newspaper article. Other than the fact that I don’t like the nastier side of me when I just go off on someone (save California politicians who claim global warming isn’t a national security issue), this development can be explained by two reasons:

1. The critics of counterinsurgency have gotten better. Sure, there are still some yahoos out there whose criticisms can be safely dismissed. But I have always said that I thought people like Gian Gentile made counterinsurgency theory better, and this is also true for other critics – not all of whom want to throw the baby out with the bath water and just want to make counterinsurgency more effective. (And I genuinely think people like Gian are in the latter camp.) Some, for example, like Eli Berman and Andrew Wilder, have poured all kinds of cold water on our earlier assumption that the provision of social services inevitably benefits the counterinsurgent force, leading folks like me to conclude that insurgents actually benefit from providing services to the population in a way that counterinsurgent forces – especially those fighting as a third party – do not. Others, like Michael Cohen, quite reasonably fret that casual observers will look at the drop in violence that took place in Iraq in 2007 and decide that rather than insurgencies being sui generis phenomena, the U.S. military can replicate those effects elsewhere with the same step-by-step, send-more-troops template. (The reality, of course, is that the successful troop surge of 2007 benefited from several other factors – the “Awakening”, the brutal effects of a horrific civil war in 2005 and 2006, Moqtada al-Sadr’s decision to keep his troops on the sidelines – and that it is quite impossible to definitively parcel out causal responsibility for the dramatic drop in violence. We may never know why exactly “the Surge” was so successful, but we can safely say that anyone pointing toward just one variable is off the mark.) If we were still fighting for acceptance, it might be tempting to spend more pixels and ink fighting back against all the criticism. But our time is better spent carefully reading the criticism and separating out the wheat from the chaff. Some of our critics, after all, have some damn good points.

2. For counterinsurgency to remain relevant as an art, its practitioners and theorists must be its harshest critics. In effect, we need to join the Gian Gentiles of the world. (Or at least the Eli Bermans.) I have no doubt, for example, that a lot of what is in the literature on counterinsurgency is simply wrong. What assumptions, when tested by Iraq and Afghanistan, have proven in need of amendment? How do we need to examine wars against insurgents differently? Have we gone too “soft” in Afghanistan? Have we spent too much time fretting over tactics and operations and not enough time thinking hard about the politics? (My answers would be “no” and “yes”, respectively, to those last two questions.) What are we missing? And what are we too timid to challenge for fear of giving the more unreasonable critics (the baby + bathwater folks) ammunition? These are just some of the questions this blog and the rest of the community needs to think about.

Counterinsurgency theorists and practitioners, though, should enjoy their moment in the sun. (Although that sentence will ring hollow for those who are in eastern Afghanistan at the moment rather than Vermont. The people actually fighting the counterinsurgent’s fight downrange, let us remember, continue to deserve our immense respect.) For though irregular warfare will endure, the third great age of counterinsurgency will likely draw to an end after U.S. and allied involvement in the Afghan civil war winds down. We must work hard in the meantime, then, to ensure that we have learned all that we can expect to have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan and to get all of these lessons down on the internet and in our journals in order to be better prepared for the day – hopefully many decades from now – when we will need them again.

I know I usually steer clear of Israeli and Palestinian stuff -- for reasons most sane human beings will understand. But this recent flotilla nonsense forces me to get two things off my chest. I write this in the spirit Max Boot describes whereby Israel's friends have an obligation to constructively criticize it when things go off the rails.

1. A few days ago, I linked via my Twitter account to George Packer's excellent take on this fiasco at sea. Packer noted, comparing the Israeli and U.S. militaries, the following divide:

At one time, Israelis understood counterinsurgency much better than Americans, which is why U.S. officers looked to their Israeli counterparts for advice in the early years of the Iraq war. At one time, the Israelis understood that self-interest demanded subtlety, restraint, and attention to perception. As others have pointed out, these qualities have been disappearing from Israeli strategy and tactics, and the current right-wing government seems determined to isolate and destroy itself with the unbending principle of self-defense.

This paragraph especially struck me, because I know how true it is. In the early years of the GWOT, I remember reading Israeli after action reports from combat actions in the Second Intifada, paying especially close attention to what tactics they felt were working and which ones the Israelis felt were ineffective. Other guys in my unit at the time described exchanges they had made to Israel and how they had always learned something from their peer units over there.

I still think the U.S. military has a lot to learn from the IDF in terms of tactics, techniques and procedures. But since I left the active duty army in 2004, I have interacted quite a bit with Israeli military officers both through formal interviews and informal discussions over beer or coffee. I still learn a lot whenever I talk to them, but I am increasingly struck by the very real differences that have emerged between them and their U.S. military peers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. One difference concerns the atittude toward the population within which they operate. Last fall, I was in Israel for a two-week visit and conducted a few formal interviews with various Israeli officers, journalists and scholars. I met for coffee one morning with a retired Israeli general officer to discuss the fighting in southern Lebanon during the 1990s, and before too long, the two of us were engrossed in conversation about guerrilla warfare, Lebanon, the learning process that militaries go through in combat, and a host of related subjects. One hour became two, and two hours became three. The two of us must have downed three cups of coffee apiece, and my hand cramped from all the notes I was taking. At the end of the conversation, though, this retired officer took my hand, squeezed it hard, and said, "Andrew, just remember one thing: the Muslims are like shit. They stink, and there are plenty of them for all of us."

Now in 3+ years of living in the Arabic-speaking world, I have to admit I have heard some pretty horrifically anti-Semitic things said in both polite and not-so-polite conversation. But pardon me if I was a little struck by hearing this language from a retired, educated military officer rather than from, say, a taxi driver in Beirut or some 16-year old Palestinian kid who grew up in Bourj al-Barajneh. Anyway, I shook the man's hand, thanked him for his time, and went on my way shaking my head. Could I imagine a senior U.S. military officer, post-Iraq, saying something like that to a guy with a notebook at the end of a formal interview? I could not. (Though I know quite a few military officers who may have made an Iraqi friend or two while deployed but left the country with little affection for its people or culture.) Fast forward two days to another formal interview, this one at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv. I was meeting with a colonel there, again discussing southern Lebanon, and with us was a young PAO from the IDF. The PAO, I discovered, was of Iraqi Jewish descent. I had my notebook open, and the PAO had a tape recorder as well as a notebook. Again, the conversation was going great, and I was learning a lot about the learning process the IDF went through in southern Lebanon in the 1990s. But halfway through the conversation, with two notebooks open and tape recorder running, this officer then started on an off-color riff about why the Jews had managed to win so many Nobel Prizes and the Arabs and Muslims, despite their numbers, had won so very few. I was shocked -- not because someone might say such things but because someone might say such things to a visiting researcher with an open notebook. I looked at the PAO to my right, and this Iraqi-Israeli was obviously growing uncomfortable. (I went back into my notebooks as I was writing this post and discovered, to my amusement, that I had written "this guy is an idiot" in Greek script during the interview. If you are ever in a meeting with me and I start writing something in Greek or Arabic, it's because I am writing something I do not want you to be able to read. I have notes from a meeting with a senior staff officer in Afghanistan from last summer that are, sadly, literally half written in Greek. I have a friend who does the same thing in Russian.)

This flip side to these stories would be the many conversations I have had with Israeli officers -- including some very impressive public affairs and combat arms officers -- who managed not to go off on anti-Muslim or anti-Arab riffs during their conversations with me, even after several rounds of beer or wine. I left my most recent research trip to Israel, though, openly wondering a) whether or not anti-Arab or anti-Muslim sentiment was widespread within the officer corps and whether that might have an effect on Israeli operations in the territories and b) whether or not a) was true, whether or not Israel would ever be able to effectively carry out information operations with officers so willing to say crazy stuff to a researcher with an open notebook and a tape recorder.

2. It sometimes upsets my many Arab friends when I write things like this, but I really like Israel and most Israelis. Tel Aviv reminds me a little of Beirut, and I have often thought that when peace breaks out (in the year 2300?) they would make great sister cities. A buddy and I are even planning to start a Beirut-to-Tel Aviv party shuttle for bachelor parties, which I think is a genius idea. But I have often wondered if the nature of Israel's coalition politics forces its government to make short-sighted politically expedient decisions that are not thought out from within a strategic context. Whatever you may think of the QDR or NSS, at least the U.S. government articulates a strategic vision for its security. By contrast, a journalist friend of mine was in a roundtable discussion with three ministers in the Israeli government during Operation Cast Lead. He asked these ministers what their five-to-ten year strategy was to protect their people, i.e. ensure the state. "They stared at me as if I were a unicorn."

What is so shocking about this most recent fiasco, though, is not just the lack of any coherent strategy. (If you're trying to ensure Iran does not become nuclear-armed, might you not want to ensure strong relations with the United States and other key allies -- Europe, Turkey -- in pursuit of that goal? Wouldn't you avoid anything that got in the way of that existential challenge?) What is most shocking is the tactical and operational incompetence of the Israelis. Check out the comments in this post and read the reactions -- many of them from U.S. and allied officers, who make up a large portion of this blog's readership -- chuckling at the expense of the Israelis. When did the IDF -- the elite units in the IDF, even -- become such a laughingstock?

I'll be happy when this storyline fades to the background, but I do not think the dynamic Packer describes -- the new way in which the U.S. military views its Israeli peers -- will. Your guess is as good as mine as to how that might affect U.S. strategy and operations in the region. But when even Meir Dagan starts wondering if Israeli and U.S. interests and attitudes are divergent, we have a crisis in the relationship. And I think most Israelis would concede it matters a lot more for them than it does for us.

After about 600 words of apologetics and a bunch of stuff tangential to the core of the issue, Max Boot finally arrives at the point of his op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, and it is, for me, the key take-away from this fiasco at sea -- and an excellent warning to we Americans as we consider our own campaigns against violent non-state actors and the problem of terrorism:

Israeli officials are right to say the operation was justified and that the blood was on the hands of the pro-Hamas activists. Right, but irrelevant.

 

As it does too often, Israel took a narrow military operational approach to what is a broader strategic problem. Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups are conducting a skillful "information war" that is making Israel a pariah state in the international community. Israel, like the United States and other democratic nations, is at a severe disadvantage trying to combat a ruthless foe willing to sacrifice its own people to score propoganda points.

 

There are no perfect counter-tactics available, but whenever Israel does use military force it needs to be more aware of the political ramifications. That awareness appeared to be lacking during the botched 2006 war against Hezbolla -- and in the boarding of the Gaza flotilla.

Max Boot's advice to Israel could be turned around and similarly offered to U.S. and allied policy-makers as they consider everything from direct-action SOF raids into Somalia to drone strikes into Pakistan. Military operations cannot substitute for a comprehensive strategy. Just because the military is willing and able, and just because direct-action raids appear to be quick and easy, does not mean that second- and third-order effects cannot bite you hard if not properly thought through and mitigated by effective information operations and other supporting operations.

Okay. Back to working on my dissertation, so go elsewhere for your hot drone and Gaza commentary for a while.

A few months ago, I was sitting around on a Saturday morning before a rugby game when I got an email on my blackberry from Greg Jaffe, who was in Afghanistan. I started reading this email aloud to some of my teammates, pausing every few seconds because I was laughing too hard to continue. I told Greg that he had to publish this email in some format or else I would post it on Abu Muqawama. Greg finally dressed the email up for publication in the Washington Post (meaning he deleted several items: the F Word about 34 times, a not-fit-for-the-Post story about coming home from war and seeing a girl you knew from high school working in a strip club, and -- most sadly -- the self-mocking references to his own condition as a print journalist in a war zone), and you can read it here. This dialogue will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever spent any time stuck in some godforsaken place with an infantry platoon filled with 19-year old American men. Hilarious.

[I like Greg a lot, not only because he had the sense to marry a nice girl from Chattanooga, but also because he is one of those smart, humble journalists, completely lacking any ego, who really take the time to get to know soldiers, officers and U.S. Army culture. One of the good guys.]

Gah!!!

Chris: I do not care how many civilians drone strikes actually kill. And I do not care how many civilians Americans think drone strikes in Pakistan kill.

I care only about how many civilians Pakistanis think drone strikes kill. As one of the world's experts on Pakistani public opinion, you should be able to provide that number to me, right? Because all you can tell me right now is the Pakistani press is dutifully reporting whatever the Taliban tells them ... and I already know that. I don't care in the slightest about what Pakistani generals or the CIA is telling you behind closed doors. It does not matter. I care about what those Pakistani generals are telling their public. I care, in other words, less about reality as defined by verifiable facts and figures and more about reality as it is interpreted in Pakistan and within Pakistani diaspora communities.

Honestly, I have been making this point over and over again for a year now. But the only thing the CIA and other agencies and departments have done since then is to have stepped up their information operations campaign aimed at U.S. public opinion -- i.e. to have convinced Americans that drones are a good idea. But who cares, honestly, whether or not the Americans who read www.foreignpolicy.com know how many civilians die in drone attacks or think drones are a good idea? I certainly don't. I care more about the people who stand to be most easily radicalized by the strikes.

C'mon, dude, get out there, do some polling, crunch some numbers, and then come tell me I'm wrong. Until then, stop telling me what I and everyone else in America already knows.

Update: Some good commentary on drones from Mosharraf Zaidi here and here. (h/t Abu A.)

Update II: And this is exactly why drone strikes should be carried out by the military. This is actually a good news story. Mistakes were made, mistakes were acknowledged and investigated, and people were held accountable.

Update III: Hey, here's some damn good advice from a journal article co-authored by one C. Christine Fair:

Third, there is an urgent need for focused analyses of the impacts of policy interventions on both the supply of and demand for violence. U.S., Pakistani, and international agencies are not configured to rigorously evaluate the impacts of their programming. Given the state of knowledge in this area, policy implementers should be building impact evaluation into their programming, and they ought to establish a more robust process for disseminating the lessons learned.

I'll have a longer post when I get the chance about how students and practitioners of counter-insurgency operations and strategy need to constantly question and test our assumptions about the state of the art lest we fall prey to treating COIN like some unfalsifiable ideology like Marxism rather than as an operational choice in need of constant refinement and study. Until, then, though, check out this summary report from a conference held in the UK a few months back (at which I presented an early draft of "Leverage"). There is some great stuff in here about the actual effectiveness of some of the non-kinetic lines of operation in COIN (that we tend to blindly assume are good things but in cases do nothing and in others make the problem worse). Kudos to Andrew Wilder, Edwina Thompson and Robert Grant for putting this together.

On the other hand, who can we send in to make sure Adm. Olson walks the line? Malcolm Tucker, perhaps? (NSFW)

"If I am lying by the road bleeding, I don't care if the medic coming to save me is gay. I just hope he is one of those buff gay guys who are always in the gym so he can throw me over his shoulder and get me out of there."

-- Blogger Jim Hanson, of Blackfive fame, via Matt Gallagher.