His take makes sense to me. So I am less worried by the prospect of a military coup, but no less concerned about the general drift of Pakistan.

Since the 1950s every political crisis Pakistan has faced has been a result of civilians trying to wrest power and control from the military. This crisis is no different except for one important aspect - the military has no intention of seizing power. Instead it has allied with the Supreme Court in an attempt to get rid of a government that is widely perceived to be corrupt and irresponsible.

But in an era when hope of democracy is spreading through the Arab Muslim world and powerful armies in countries such as Thailand and Turkey have learnt to live under civilian control, Pakistan is an ongoing tragedy. Its military refuses to give up power, its huge stake in the economy and its privileges, while its politicians refuse to govern wisely or honestly and decline to carry out basic economic reforms such as taxing themselves.

This observation is worth keeping in mind as you consider how we got so deep into Vietnam:

Neither of them had the kind of feeling that it was politically okay for him to simply tell the generals what they ought to do, that for different reasons, both General Eisenhower, because he had more stars than they did, and Mr. Truman, because he just didn't give a damn, really did have. I've exaggerated in both cases, but still on balance, Truman and Eisenhower, and indeed FDR, had more self-confidence in dealing with their senior military advisors than either Kennedy or Johnson did." (From pp. II, 4-5, McGeorge Bundy Oral History, Interview II, 17 February 1969, LBJ Library.)   

Hey, speaking of bygone aides of rotten White Houses: How did Bill Moyers manage to go from being LBJ's spokesman to being the moral arbiter of American journalism? Pretty good maneuvering there, considering he was the mouthpiece for the man who was the most damaging president we had in recent decades, at least until George W. Bush. The jury is still out whether the younger Texan's choice of a poorly run war and fiscal mayhem ultimately will outweigh the older Texan's choice of same. I wonder if Karl Rove will have a PBS series in 20 years. ...

Idea for file: What say we put a constitutional moratorium on Lone Star presidents, kind of like a penalty box in hockey? (And no, I don't consider Eisenhower a Texan, even though he was born there. Plus, he kept us out of a war in Vietnam.) I'm usually against constitutional amendments, but I might sign up for this one. 

What an interesting, thoughtful book.

I've had this memoir, The Lost Battalion of Tet, on my shelf for a couple of years but had waited to read it in order of my research for the book I am working on. I am now, finally, studying the Vietnam War in 1968, so I turned to it. It is mainly about a 1^st Air Cavalry infantry battalion that suffered 311 casualties in a few weeks, most of them after being surrounded outside Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive, cut off with dwindling ammunition but without artillery support.

First, it strikes me as unusually honest in its relation of events and its depiction of people. This is a characteristic that it shares of one of my all-time favorite books, E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Another similarity: Both books were written several decades after the events described, yet remained vivid.

In one passage, set in Quang Tri, Charles Krohn's battalion commander recommends to another battalion commander who is just arriving not to store any ammunition near a building with a shiny tin roof that was being used as an enemy aiming point. "You command your battalion and I'll command mine," responded Lt. Col. Herlihy Long. And then, writes Krohn, "A few hours later, Long was killed when an NVA rocket scored a direct hit on the ammunition." (78)

Then there is the rattled chaplain, Capt. Dan Klem, who asks to offer a prayer for a group of men about to undertake a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. "Instead of saying something inspirational . . . he asked God to be with the boys who were going to die," recalls the company commander, Capt. Robert Helvey, who was leading the reconnaissance mission. (210)

Krohn meditates well on the systemic failure and command failures at the brigade and division level that led to his battalion being cut off without much support. Near the end he offers this wise advice to commanders:

Try training for failure-system failure. Train under the assumption that one or more systems supporting you won't work knowing beforehand it reduces your probability of success. (281)

I'm always amazed at how refined field craft can become. Here are a couple of things that struck me in that essay by Col. Hoang Ngoc Lung, a former senior South Vietnamese intelligence officer, from Sorley's The Vietnam War: An Assessment by South Vietnam's Generals:

Floors, too, were good candidates for caches. The most effective way to detect them was to pour water over the dirt floor. Places that had been excavated would absorb more water at a faster rate than those that hadn't...

"The sapper threat was recognized and given high priority by security units. Small outposts took inexpensive measures for detecting infiltration which were nevertheless effective, such as raising dogs, geese and ducks on the outer perimeter of their positions...To deal with geese and ducks, they [the sappers] attached a stalk of blackened water potato plant to the end of a walking stick and dangled it upwind in front of the birds. Thinking they saw snakes, the birds did not dare make a sound. Another way they distracted the ducks and geese was to run green onion leaves on the sappers' bodies. The smell frightened the birds because they thought they smelled vipers." (pp. 118-119) 

I finally got a chance to read James Robbins's relatively new book on the Tet Offensive. It is an odd volume, because it doesn't have that much new in it, and the core argument seems to be that Tet '68 would have been a strategic victory if only Lyndon Johnson had recognized it as such. In fact, I think the American people did understand what happened and concluded that if that was going to be the cost of victory, they were not interested. As former South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky wrote in a 2002 memoir, "Because they had been told that victory was just around the corner, Tet shook America's confidence in the war and in its government." (P. 271, Ky, Buddha's Child.) Also, the fact that the Communists were able to reduce their engagements and casualty levels in 1968 and 1969, after taking a tactical beating in Tet, calls into question the entire attritional strategy the United States pursued.

Robbins thinks different. I still think he is wrong. Even so, two major points from the book struck me as worth pondering:

• He is right to insist that the Communist killings of several thousand people at Hue should be better known. And he is correct to emphasize that those killings were a result of policy, not the result of a company gone off the reservation, as at My Lai. (But, I wondered as I finished this chapter, what about the 9th Infantry Division's killing of thousands in the Delta, also as a matter of policy? I looked in vain in the book for the name of Gen. Julian Ewell.)
Read on

First, what a good book. Dang. I am amazed the Army let him publish it while he was on active duty. His conclusion on the U.S. Army in Vietnam is that:

It expended human resources at a relatively high rate and material resources in a profligate manner as part of a strategy of attrition. Yet the Army achieved neither a quick victory nor the maintenance of support on the home front for a continued U.S. presence in Vietnam.… Furthermore, in attempting to maximize Communist combat losses, the Army often alienated the most important element in any counterinsurgency strategy -- the people.

If you haven't read the book, do yourself a favor …

By the way, COINhatas to the contrary, Krepinevich does not seem to me to be riding on the "Better War" Abrams bandwagon. To the contrary, he approvingly quotes Robert Komer as saying that, "I was there when General Abrams took over, and remained as his deputy. There was no change in strategy whatsoever." Krepinevich continues: "In the two years following the Tet Offensive, Army main-force units continued to operate as they always had." (P. 257)

Meanwhile, not so impressed was I with Yuen Foong Khong's Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965. Not unreadable, but I did wonder why I was reading it. I mean, got it!: Analogies can be misleading, especially when unexamined. Good blog item. But a whole belabored volume? On the other hand, this is a good book to have in hand every time someone invokes one of these analogies in discussing foreign policy issues, as happened with me just the other day in a discussion of what to do the next time the NoKos make trouble.

Books like this make me glad I am not an academic, and especially not a "political scientist" -- what an ugly, inaccurate term, like "biological artist." That said, I bet Andrew "Logic of Violence in Civil War" Exum liked the Khong book.

Finally, I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but a new book is out this week from Free Press titled Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars, and edited by Army Col. Matt Moten. It looks really interesting, with an all-star lineup of authors. I'm told that Roger Spiller's "Six Propositions" essay is terrific. And I'll read anything new by Joseph Glatthaar on the Civil War, by Brian Linn on the Philippines War, by Edward Coffman on World War I, or by Gerhard Weinberg on World War II. Plus chapters by George Herring, Conrad Crane and Andrew Bacevich. And Gian Gentile on how the Vietnam War ended. This is the 1927 Yankees of military historians, folks. As if that were not enough, the introduction is by the singing general, Martin Dempsey, whom I am betting will be the next Army chief of staff. Start spreading the news.

Here is a conversation with my officemate, Robert Kaplan, who has written a lot of interesting books, and has a new one out today, titled Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, about the growing political importance of the Indian Ocean basin.

If after reading this you want more, come on down the evening of Nov. 9 to his CNAS book rollout, hear him talk, buy a book, and get it signed. And if you mention "Best Defense" Bob might give you a free beer. Register here.

Best Defense: What made you turn to the Indian Ocean as a book subject?

Robert Kaplan: In 2006, I saw a few references to the Indian Ocean in military journals. So I did what I always do when hunting for a new project, I consulted an atlas. As I stared at the map, the book began to emerge in my mind: Here was the entire arc of Islam from the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago. Here was the global energy interstate, through whose waters pass the hydrocarbons from the Middle East to the middle class cities of East Asia. Here was a vehicle to get beyond Islam as strictly a phenomenon of Middle Eastern deserts and take in its green, tropical allure in the Far Eastern seas as well. Here was a way to connect the issues of Islam and China in one book. Another influence upon me was the teaching post I had at the time at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, where I met colleagues who had experience on warships in these waters, and they told me their stories.

BD: What do you think will be the biggest surprise in the book for readers of this blog?

RK: This blog has tended to concentrate, as it should, on the wars of the moment, in Iraq and Afghanistan, messy land wars where counterinsurgency is a doctrine that the U.S. military is pursuing. This book takes military issues beyond those of the day, and suggests a future where our challenges may be primarily maritime. China and its naval rise, and the possible threat it poses to the Indian Ocean and adjacent South China Sea, figure prominently in this book, while Iraq and Afghanistan figure barely at all. Central Asia figures, though, because it will one day be linked by roads and energy pipelines to the Indian Ocean. Pakistan figures heavily, but here, too, I concentrate on what the media has generally ignored: the restive provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh on the Indian Ocean. The surprise of this book is that future wars and conflicts may be vastly different than the ones of the moment. Instead of fighting neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad or Kandahar, we may in the future have to influence vast spaces on the map through naval maneuvers.

BD: Some of your previous books have had dark scenarios and descriptions. Is this book also pessimistic?

RK: No. This is my most optimistic and -- hopefully, that is -- nuanced work. Of course, the reader will be the judge of that! The interweaving of civilizations in the Indian Ocean is incredibly complex, and it was a real struggle for me to adequately communicate it. It was certainly the hardest book I ever wrote -- the book where I did more reading and research than any previously. As I get older, writing just gets more difficult and complicated. I did not set out to be an optimist. But my conclusion is that the Greater Indian Ocean is evolving into a vibrant, multipolar trading system reminiscent of the Muslim and Chinese trading systems that preceded Vasco da Gama in these waters. And for the United States to maintain its power it will have to listen more to the yearnings of hundreds of millions, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, who are not concerned with al-Qaeda, but with attaining a middle class standard of living. If you want to hear the authentic voice of the emerging, former third world, watch Al Jazeera, and maybe dip into my book.

BD: What do you think you will write about next, and why?

RK: I have started writing a book about geography, about the great geographers of the past and how to incorporate their sensibilities in order to approach places like Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey in hopefully a new and original light. Whereas, Monsoon involved enormous traveling, this next book involves endless reading. I don't believe we have overcome geography, despite the jet and information age. The Hindu Kush, the Tibetan and Iranian plateaus, and the riverine wastes of Siberia, to name a few examples, still matter to international politics, as they deeply affect the behavior of nations. As Napoleon said, if you want to know a nation's foreign policy, inspect its geography. That's what I am now trying to do.

The other day I was looking back at Bernard Fall's terrific speech on counterinsurgency to the Naval War College, delivered I think in 1964, and the following quote struck me. This comes right after a section in which he has asserted that tracking which side is collecting more taxes, the government or the insurgents, is a good way to understand which is winning. The italics are his.

I have emphasized that the straight military aspects, or the conventional military aspects of insurgency, are not the most important. Tax collections have nothing to do with helicopters... I would like to put it in an even simpler way: When a country is being subverted, it is not being outfought; it is being outadministered... [W]e can win the war and lose the country.

In 100 words or less: How would you apply that thought to Afghanistan today?