Center for a New American Security

Michael Hastings and Rolling Stone had a bad weekend. First, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post (who is obviously a shill who would never under any circumstances criticize the military when it deserves it), did a little actual reporting on what happened in Afghanistan:

The problems began on March 22, 2010, when Maj. Vanessa Hillman, a public-affairs officer in the training command sent an e-mail to Holmes asking his team to help provide weekly assessments of the prior week's meetings with visitors. "How did we do with our communication efforts and messaging," she wrote in the e-mail, obtained by The Post. "What results did we get."

 

Holmes fired back an hour later. "No - we cannot. We are not set up (at all!) to do assessments - nor should we assess the effects of information engagements on US or Coalition allies. We are focused on the adversary, and on the Afghan population - by both joint doctrine and US Law."

 

That prompted Hillman's boss, Col. Gregory T. Breazile, to respond with what Holmes calls an illegal order: "Mike, You will do the assessment piece for the IEWG [Information Effects Working Group]. You are are directly tasked to support the IEWG and all of the DV [distinguished visitor] visits."

 

The following day, Holmes wrote to a military lawyer, who called the order "a bad idea and contrary to IO policy."

 

But independent specialists in military law said Holmes's position as an information operations officer, regardless of whether he was formally reassigned, does not mean he cannot be asked to perform other legal tasks. "If you're being asked to chip in and help someone else, that's a lawful order," said Jeffrey Addicott, who was as an Army lawyer for 20 years and now is a law professor at St. Mary's University in San Antonio.

 

That is the same conclusion the top lawyer for Caldwell's command reached.

Read the entire article. What you have here is one disgruntled staff officer who didn't like the way he had been re-tasked by his commanding officer. Chandrasekaran also revealed that Holmes had no psychological operations training whatsoever and that the St. Petersburg Times in Florida had this information a month ago (again, leaked from the same disgruntled staff officer) and decided not to report it. (Probably because the St. Petersburg Times famously shies away from controversial reporting.) Holmes griped to Hastings, who deeply reported and wrote this article in, uh, well, actually less than a week.

‘Illegal Psyop’ Neither Illegal Nor Psyop, General’s Lawyer Ruled was the says-it-all headline of a post written by friends-of-Hastings Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman* on Wired's Danger Room. If Hastings did not have such an obvious axe to grind, he might have reached a similar conclusion. Instead, he was too busy taking cheap shots at respected officers.

Politico's Morning Defense has a similar take on all of this worth reading.

*In the interests of full disclosure, Spencer and Noah are also friends of this blogger -- and Caldwell.

It comes from noted defense policy specialist Al Franken*:

While the briefings provided me with a helpful update on what was happening on the ground, I knew that I would have to cross-check their assessment by talking to other military officials, diplomatic officials, outside experts and troops in the field, and I always raise skeptical questions when discussing this topic.

Any time you receive a briefing from a senior military officer or civilian official, you should walk in assuming they are trying to present their activities and accomplishments in the best positive light. As a defense policy analyst, you will sometimes develop close relationships with officers and officials and can walk in expecting a higher degree of candor. And if you yourself happen to be a former officer, you will often find yourself interacting with commissioned and noncommissioned officers with whom you had previously served. In his new book, Bing West quotes Robert Barrow as saying he never saw a crowded battlefield: you always run into the same guys again and again. If, like me, you first deployed for OEF in 2001 (back when it was Operation Infinite Justice!) and for OIF in 2003, trips to Afghanistan are all too often opportunities to catch up with guys you've known for a decade.

But what Sen. Franken says here is really good advice for any defense policy analyst or researcher examining the war in Afghanistan. You need to check everyone's homework. You need to ask critical questions about the information you are being briefed on -- especially the statistics people trot out to support their arguments.

I do not have the years of experience as an analyst like Tony Cordesman -- who seemingly always asks the toughest questions -- or the brain power of a guy like Steve Biddle. But one of the things I try to do whenever I am participating in a sponsored research trip is to schedule lots of meetings and interviews on the side and after whatever scheduled agenda I have been given. In December, for example, I went to Afghanistan and traveled around Afghanistan for 10 days at the request of Gen. Petraeus. Now, I like and am predisposed to trust the guys he has on his staff. Some of his staff are among the more intellectually honest men I know. And in the course of traveling around eastern and southern Afghanistan, I ran into a lot of commanders I knew from either the Rangers or from previous trips to Afghanistan. I like those guys, too, and want to trust what they are telling me. But after I had completed my 10 days traveling around under the auspices of ISAF, I nonetheless spent an additional three days in Kabul talking with civilian analysts from organizations like Crisis Group and the Afghan Analysts Network in addition to journalists who have been based in Afghanistan for a long time. What I heard from those analysts was often very different from what I heard from NATO military officers and diplomats. That doesn't mean the latter are lying or are setting up Potemkin Villages for me to inspect. But it does mean that the reality presented from within the "bubble" often looks different from the outside. So my recommendation to any young analysts, researchers or aides out there would be to always seek out dissenting opinions and analysis. You might end up agreeing with what you were first presented with anyway, but your own analysis will end up sharper.

*I have actually heard from people I trust that Sen. Franken, the former comedian, takes his job admirably seriously, so I should not tease.

One of the ugliest sentences you will ever read in a piece of journalism:

Caldwell seemed more eager to advance his own career than to defeat the Taliban.

That is not a quote from someone else -- those words belong to the journalist himself. Classy. I would recommend reading Michael Hastings' dispatches for Rolling Stone not as sober journalism but as particularly poorly sourced policy papers. Essentially Michael Hastings is doing bad think tank policy analysis with a little character assassination thrown in for extra measure.

When policy analysis is done well, it starts with a research question and then constructs methodology and accumulates data to test an initial hypothesis. When policy analysis is done poorly, the researcher just cherry-picks data to support his desired argument and doesn't ask basic epistemological questions that might call into question the researcher's assumptions or conclusions. Michael Hastings is doing the latter. He obviously has a desired policy preference, and he is cherry-picking the sources that would support that preference. He's obviously not above taking a grotesque cheap shot at a respected senior officer, either.

[In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that Joe Buche, who is one of the officers mentioned in the cited article, is a friend of mine. Also, I once met with LTG Caldwell at CNAS before he took command of NTM-A. But the number of times I have met LTG Caldwell at CNAS is equal to the number of times I have met Michael Hastings at CNAS.]

I arrived back in the States to some sad news: Jean Lartéguy, author of The Centurions and The Praetorians, has passed away in Paris, and the publisher of his books in America, my friend Jamie Hailer, has passed away in Florida. I imagine the two of them are having one incredible conversation with Marcel Bigeard right now.

The third part of my trip report to Egypt concerns a few of the worries I expressed in the first part of my trip report. Specifically, I worry about how the Egyptian Military will handle what seems like inevitable labor unrest.

As I argued earlier, the incentives are in place for every Tom, Dick and Harry in Egypt with a grievance to now protest to see how they might improve their lot in life before the new government is formed. All of Egypt has seen -- and continues to see, on al-Jazeera each day -- the effect of "people power." People all over the Arabic-speaking world, and especially in Egypt, are changing even that which seemed set in stone only weeks ago. So if the government has not been paying you all the bonuses they promised, or ifnit owes you back pay, or if it will not recognize your union, why on Earth would you not strike while the iron is hot and try to get something from this transitional military government?

If you're the military, meanwhile, you've already begun to lose your patience with all of these demonstrations and have no way to really address grievances in the first place. Besides, a Friday afternoon demonstration is one thing, but when people start clogging up the streets of Cairo, Mahalla and Alexandria with strikes in the middle of what is supposed to be a workweek, that gets frustrating quick.

The tragic thing is, this dynamic has played out before in Egyptian history. In 1952, after the Free Officers revolted and took charge, labor unrest at Kafr al-Dawar led to fighting between the Army and laborers. (See Vatikiotis, The Egyptian Army in Politics, Indiana University Press: 1961.) The Revolutionary Command Council actually executed two labor leaders. The new military government was poorly prepared to deal with grievances and lost patience, resulting in violence that would have been quite the scene on al-Jazeera had it taken place sixty years later.

This evening, I was traveling by taxi to a hotel to see a friend from Lebanon in town to cover the events here in Egypt. Driving through Midan Tahrir, traffic ground to a halt, and the Military Police -- not the regular traffic police -- was directing traffic. A tall, young, clean-cut Egyptian soldier stepped out into traffic to push the cab in which I was riding back a little bit so pedestrians could more easily cross the street. My equally young taxi driver started protesting and then, whether because his foot slipped off the clutch or due to malice, he bumped into the soldier with his taxi. "Oh, crap," I thought. "I'm about to watch this soldier drag my driver out of the taxi and beat him senseless."

But instead, the soldier just yelled at my taxi driver -- "What are you, crazy? You hit me!" -- and my driver yelled right back that he was trying to back up but that it was stupid what he was telling him to do anyway.

The look on that young Egyptian soldier said a lot, and using my telepathic ability to translate Arabic thoughts into English, I could see he was thinking something along the lines of "FML." There was no place that young soldier wanted to be less than on traffic duty, in the middle of Cairo, arguing with taxi drivers -- much less getting hit by them!

The Egyptian Military does not want to be in the situation in which it finds itself. It thinks it has bought itself six months with which it can get things in order for a transition to a new government. But the demands of the people are outpacing the ability or willingness of the military to respond to those demands. And while the military has made good decisions thus far, it's losing patience. Kids are still getting their pictures taken on tanks in Cairo, sure, and the people and the army are still "one," but I worry what happens when some young Egyptian soldier tires of getting yelled at by taxi drivers, or a unit trying to calm rioting workers fires a few warning shots and ...

All the more reason to get the police back onto the streets, form a coherent transitional government, and to stop reacting to the demands of the people and instead chart a course toward the new government that assures people their grievances will be met -- not now, perhaps, but in the future and soon.

If you've been following my Twitter feed, you'll know I arrived in Cairo a few days ago and will be here for another few days doing some research. I tacked this short visit onto a trip to Europe to help train a unit preparing to deploy to Afghanistan, and I must say it's good to be back in the Arabic-speaking world during what continues to be an exciting time in the region.

This is my first trip back to Egypt since living here for seven months in 2006, and since I am no one's idea of an expert on Egypt and Egyptian politics, I am grateful to my friends here in Cairo for hosting me and providing me with plenty of people to meet with.

The research questions I'll be trying to answer here concern the position in which the Egyptian Army and other security forces now find themselves. I have two broad concerns: one is political, and one is tactical/doctrinal.

Politically, it is correct to note that the Egyptian military has more or less been one with the regime since the 1950s when the Free Officers Revolt replaced the monarchy here. But the military is at the same time in a position it has not been in for 40 years, directly involved with the day-to-day politics and decision-making in Egyptian life. Yezid Sayigh concisely and cogently explained the interests of the Egyptian Army after Mubarak in an op-ed that ran in Financial Times a week before Hosni Mubarak stood down as president. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that Yezid is my advisor at King's College, where he is doggedly pushing the submitted thesis of his most wayward student through the arcane bureaucracy of the University of London at the moment -- thanks, Yezid! -- but he is also one of the world's foremost experts on soldier-state relations in the Arabic-speaking world.) I agree with his analysis of the Egyptian military and have further concerns about the seemingly inevitable clash between its interests and the interests of the young revolutionaries on the streets as well as those of everyday Egyptians who have wildly inflated expectations about life after Mubarak.

First, there is a sense you get that many Egyptians honestly feel the only thing standing in between the Egyptian nation and greatness was the sclerotic Mubarak regime. Now that Muabark is gone, the military -- and whatever government that follows -- will naturally struggle to meet those expectations.

Second, the Egyptian people have now witnessed a dramatic display of people power: mass demonstrations effectively removed from power a man who seemed immovably secure in his post just one month ago. The incentives are there for every group of people in Egypt with a grievance (which is to say everyone) to now strike or demonstrate to see, in effect, what they can get. The military is growing increasingly frustrated with these demonstrations and has ordered them to cease. But the incentive structure is all wrong: even if you don't think you'll get anything, why would you not demonstrate right now? The worst case scenario is, you get nothing. But heck, you might get something!

One of the sources of the military's frustration leads to my third concern, which is the fact that even if the people have a valid grievance, there is no real authority to negotiate with at the moment. Egypt needs a transitional government of some sort, but right now, you've got people agitating for higher wages, back pay, and more reforms on the one hand, and a military on the other hand that is not prepared in the least to hear these concerns and act on them.

That all leads to my second broad concern, which is, as I said, more tactical or even doctrinal. The Egyptian military, like most militaries, is configured for major combat operations against the armies of other states -- not for what are, in some ways, stabilization operations on the streets of Egypt itself. And as an American who fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan after the conclusion of "major combat operations," it's possible to feel for the Egyptian Army at the moment.

First, the Egyptian Army is not prepared for and has no doctrine to support stabilization operations. The M1 Abrams tanks you see in downtown Cairo are as useless as the M1 Abrams tanks we had on street corners in Baghdad after the invasion. As we saw during the violence which preceded the fall of Mubarak, they're not exactly the best weapons for crowd control! (We Americans, of course, eventually made good use of those tanks in Iraq, but let's hope and pray things don't get that bad in Egypt.)

Second, we Americans paid -- and are paying -- a heavy price in Iraq and Afghanistan for the way in which the development of competent local police lags behind the development of the Army in both countries. In Cairo, at least, the police are rarely seen these days. The police officers you do see, usually directing traffic, never much respected anyway, have lost their ability to intimidate the people, who now periodically hurl abuse at them and who see themselves as having "defeated" the police during the demonstrations -- and not just in Tahrir Square but all over the countryside, where police stations burned from Upper Egypt to the Delta. But the Army trying to serve the functions of the police in preserving law and order is as awkward here as it is anywhere else. You need local police to preserve order, and though things in Cairo at the moment reflect a kind of good-natured anarchy, things might not stay that way if demonstrations continue and expectations remain unmet. (That having been said, Cairo has always been a city of neighborhoods, and locals in these neighborhoods usually do a damn fine job of preserving order on their own, thank you very much.)

Many analysts have, correctly, focused on the importance of the Army going forward. But the reconstitution and development of the police, in my mind, is probably even more important for Egypt's internal security.

So that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about as I wander around pestering old friends and observing post-Mubarak Egypt. As anyone who follows this blog knows, I'm always more interested in what happens after a conflict or change in regime than in the conflict or regime change itself. Unfortunately for Egypt, I see more -- not less -- internal conflict and instability on the horizon. Let's all hope my initial analysis proves incorrect.

I was in Beirut when Rafik Hariri was assassinated and lived in Lebanon for the next 12 months as well. The March 8th and 14th demonstrations, and the popular movement that led to the end of the Syrian military occupation of Lebanon, were all very exciting to live through and witness -- especially as a young guy, fresh out of the Army and studying the politics of the Middle East. (I learned more on the streets than I did in the library that year!) But in so, so many ways, the six months that followed the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon were more interesting than the frantic weeks that led up to the withdrawal itself. In those six months, we saw what had really changed in Lebanon, and the answer was not much at all. If the rumors are true, and if Hosni Mubarak steps down today, the most interesting "Friedman Unit" will be the six months starting now. We will see what kind of order replaces -- or doesn't replace -- the current regime, and we will see how the disorganized opposition groups fracture and fight among themselves about the way forward. The true meaning of this uprising will be found not in what happens today or what has taken place in Tahrir Square over the past three weeks but in the weeks and months ahead.

Issandr doesn't pull his punches:

Andrew Exum touches on an academic issue here worth mentioning: that the events in Egypt have been poorly predicted by North American academia, perhaps because political science departments largely focus on quantitative analysis. Andrew, as ever (and I blame living in Washington as well as his southern roots for this), is very polite about not bashing the "quants", as he calls them.

 

Personally, I would be more blunt. Quantitative analysis and the behaviouralist approach of most American PoliSci academics is a big steaming turd of horseshit when applied in the Middle East. Statistics are useful, yes, when you are in a country that has relevant statistics or where polling is allowed. But things like electoral statistics tell you very little about the political reality of dictatorships, because the data sets are inherently flawed, since they're either unavailable, fraudulent, or irrelevant.

This is not a new problem, right? Garbage in equals garbage out. If the data you are plugging into your analysis is unreliable, your conclusions are not going to pass muster -- not with the political scientists using "soak and poke" methods or, for that matter, any dude you happen to pass on the street. A buddy of mine commented this is less about the divide between quantitative methods and qualitative methods as it is an epistemogical debate. But any debate over methods is ultimately a debate over epistemology: how does the researcher "know" what he or she knows? If he or she is relying on laughably poor data harvested from a semi-closed police state, Issandr points out, he or she can't claim to know much at all. All of this has direct relevance to the study of conflict, of course. Conflict zones are really difficult places to gather reliable data. On the one hand, the U.S. military harvests all kinds of data from its wars. But on the other hand, studying the war in Afghanistan, I have come to trust the data less and less over time and the more I have asked questions about how the data was collected. The numbers look neat on a PowerPoint slide, sure, but when you start asking hard questions, they are less impressive.

(This all reminds me of that quote/warning about how all government statistics are ultimately generated by a civil servant somewhere writing down whatever the hell he pleases on a sheet of paper. Help me out with the exact quote, readers.)

I have been greatly entertained by the debate between Daniel Drezner and Arpoova Shah over the question of whether the situation in Egypt says anything about the strength of political science in the United States. I encourage you all to read what the two of them have written, but there is something going on here that neither Drezner nor Shah deal with. I was standing in line a few hours ago, waiting on a sandwich at Potbelly's, when I read this, from Greg Gause, in a volume of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies last year:

Over the past five years, from volume 37, number 1 (February 2005) to volume 41, number 3 (August 2009), IJMES published thirty-seven articles that deal with politics in the contemporary Middle East, broadly understood. This is my count, of course, and others might add or drop some articles. I define contemporary as post World War II and have a relatively expansive definition of politics. My count does not include short features, only full articles.

 

Eighteen of the authors of these articles are identified as having academic appointments in political science departments, fewer than 50 percent of the total (some of the articles are co-authored, so there are more than thirty-seven authors involved). The other authors are concentrated in the discipline of anthropology (with one sociologist and one historian) or have appointments in religious studies or Middle East studies departments. Of the eighteen political scientists who have published in IJMES during this period, only eight were employed in North American universities. The majority of the political scientists appearing in IJMES during this period have appointments in European or Israeli universities; one political scientist working at an Arab university appeared in the pages.

 

Although those North American political scientists who did publish in IJMES during this period did some very good work, and it was my pleasure to review many of their articles, these numbers lead me to the troubling conclusion that there is a growing gap between the professional requirements for disciplinary success in political science in North America and the standards and forms expected of the best Middle East studies work. Increasingly, particularly at the best research universities, advancement in political science requires work concentrated in formal and statistical methods. There are, of course, exceptions. Some political scientists working on the Middle East who use postpositivist methods have secured leading jobs at top research universities. There is a refreshing recent trend toward encouraging mixed-methods research in dissertations, with large-n statistical and/or rational-choice formal mathematical components supplemented by case studies based on field work and more classic discursive and qualitative approaches. However, professional advancement in the field is driven by publication in journals that are heavily weighted toward quantitative and formal methods. In the subfield of comparative politics, where most Middle East work is done in the discipline, there are also strong currents arguing that cross-regional work, not intense concentration on a single region, is preferred. In promotion and tenure decisions, publication in regional-studies journals, although not actively discouraged, is not credited as highly as publication in disciplinary journals. The sad fact is that, for ambitious political scientists looking to get the best North American jobs, publication in IJMES is not a great career move. ...

 

The professional situation of political scientists outside of North America is not as constrained. Good area-studies work that is informed by the epistemology of social science but relies on “old-fashioned” area-studies methods of qualitative analysis and considerable field work is more highly respected in the discipline in Europe and elsewhere. One can advance professionally at the best universities in Europe and the Middle East doing such work. Because of these different incentives, and different financial-support systems, graduate students at European universities who are interested in the Middle East tend to spend more time in the field and produce work that is more accessible to cross-disciplinary Middle East studies audiences. The significant representation of European-trained political scientists in the pages of IJMES over the last five years is testament to this different set of career structures and incentives.

I am not trying to demonize quantitative methods here. Although I tease "Quants" because I myself am an area studies geek, let's be honest: the more "tools" you can bring to bear on a question, the better. And I am not trying to say -- and neither is Gause -- that one cannot publish smart scholarly work on the Arabic-speaking world outside of IJMES (which is the flagship journal of Middle Eastern Studies). But I am trying to say that American political scientists are, by and large, rewarded for doing work that does not immediately lend itself to relevance in situations such as the one in which we currently find ourselves.

There are some excellent American political scientists working on the Arabic-speaking world. Greg Gause is one of them. So is Marc Lynch, whose writing during this most recent crisis has been excellent and necessary. So too is Josh Stacher, who published a great essay in Foreign Affairs over the weekend. So it is unfair, Drezner is correct to point out, to start bashing political science. I actually think American political scientists -- from Samer Shehata to Nathan Brown -- have been quite prominent in offering informed commentary during this crisis. But that's not a reason not to fret that political scientists trained in America might not be doing the kind of field work necessary for both top-flight area studies as well as providing policy-relevant insights onto events on the ground when crises arise. I spoke at THE Ohio State University last week, and one of the professors there similarly worried to me that students trained in the American academy would not be able to "keep up" with their European peers on regional expertise. That, to me, might be worth American political scientists thinking about. 

Work cited (emphasis mine):

Well, this is depressing, but I guess it was inevitable that in Washington, people would start asking "Who Lost Egypt?" before it was even clear what, exactly, is happening there.*

As I have tried to make clear, I am not an expert on Egypt. (Though not having expertise has hardly kept anyone from going on television and radio to talk about Egypt this week!) I served, though, on the Levant and Egypt team during the 2008-2009 CENTCOM Assessment Team. And looking back on that experience today, one of the things that has struck me is how long ago the U.S. government had identified the fall or death of Hosni Mubarak as a likely contingency to plan toward. Everyone knew this was going to happen eventually. So I think the blame being heaped on the intelligence community here is a little silly. Intelligence cannot predict the future, though it can assist policy-makers in gaming out possible contingencies, and I think our intelligence services did that here. It's hardly the fault of our nation's intelligence agencies that successive U.S. administrations from both parties decided it made more sense to continue backing a strongman than to prod Egypt's ruling party toward real and accountable democratic processes -- even though we all knew Mubarak would not be around forever. Even when administrations have decided to pressure Mubarak, by the way, they have found that the ~$1.5b we give Egypt annually has been a largely ineffective source of leverage. (Though it has, I would argue, helped foster now-invaluable connections with Egypt's military. Those last two sentences should serve as a warning for any legislators out there threatening to cut our aid.)

*If you are one of those people who think debates in Washington are a bit silly and are instead curious about what is actually taking place in Egypt, you could do worse than to follow the reporting of Charles Levinson of the Wall Street Journal, who in my mind has been the outstanding print reporter of these events. (And there have been many, many candidates for that title, from Graeme Wood of the Atlantic to Anthony Shadid of the New York Times.) Charles and I met in Cairo in 2005 and have been friends since, so I am a little biased toward the guy, but ask any journalist on the ground in Cairo which westerner speaks the best Arabic (Egyptian Arabic, no less) and knows Cairo the best, and they'll give you the name of Charles Levinson. Read this report from Tahrir Square that ran in today's Journal and tell me it's not absolutely first-rate journalism, taking you inside the anti-government protesters in a way I have not seen elsewhere. In related news, I passed by the office television a few hours back. The anchors at CNN were chuckling about a turkey attacking a mail truck. And you wonder why Americans are so poorly informed about the world?