Here is an excerpt from the testimony yesterday of Gen. John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

This last year we had about 2,200 night operations. Of those 2,200 or so night operations, in 90 percent of them we didn't fire a shot. On more than 50 percent of them, we got the targeted individual, and in 30 percent more we got the next associate of that individual as well. So 83 percent, roughly, of the night operations we got either the primary target or an associate.

In all of those night operations, even with 10 percent where we fired a shot, there was less than 1.5 percent civilian casualties. Now, I don't diminish any civilian casualties by reducing it to a percentage point. Every one of those is tragic. But after 9,200 night operations, 27 -- 27 -- people were killed or wounded in night operations. That would argue for the power of night operations preserving life and reducing civilian casualties in all other kinds of operation than necessarily being a risk of creating additional civilian casualties. That's in my mind, sir, as we go through the process of negotiating an outcome for the Afghanization, if you will, of night operations.

Scroll down on the page to this discussion of the CONOP process in Afghanistan.

I wouldn't normally go all Assange-ish and post such a highly classified video, but there is a higher good here -- we all can learn from studying this discussion.

Longtime readers know that I think the U.S. military ought to fire generals more often than it does. I think we should reward success and punish failure. I don't think we should be "fair" to generals when the lives of our soldiers and the nation's interests are at stake. I think we should move out people when we think we have someone better ready to move in. I think we should even fire generals for simply having too long a run of "bad luck."

Now, in Afghanistan, we've had a painful run. First, Marines pissing on the bodies of enemy dead -- and being stupid enough to video the action. Then U.S. soldiers putting Korans in the burn pit. And then a soldier running amok and shooting Afghan civilians.

So why am I not calling on General Allen to get the big heave-ho? Basically, I don't see a pattern of poor leadership on his part contributing to the three events. With Abu Ghraib in Iraq, by contrast, there was clearly a pattern of poor leadership by General Sanchez that helped create the conditions at Abu Ghraib. But I don't see that here. And while he has had some bad luck, it has not been long enough by itself to justify jettisoning him.

In addition, he might be just about the best guy to deal with these problems. From what I saw in Iraq, I suspect he may be the most culturally sensitive combat general we have. So, if he retains the confidence of his superiors, both military and civilian, I think he should remain. 

By "_B_"

Best Defense frequent commenter

I'd like to analyze the riots currently going on in Afghanistan by breaking down who did what and why.

1. Some ISAF guys (presumably detainee handler MPs) attempted to dispose via burning some Qurans that had been written in by detainees in an attempt to pass each other notes. Being idiots, they didn't inquire about proper Quran disposal procedures. Being REAL idiots, they didn't burn them thoroughly but just sort of scorched some of them.

2. Some Afghan garbage haulers working on the FOB found the half-burned Qurans. Being Muslim, they got riled up and snuck them off-base. (I presume the scorched Qurans seen in some photographs of demonstrations comes from Bagram and was not purposely burned by Afghans for propaganda purposes.)

3. The gate guards let them through without a proper search. You have to presume that all kinds of other paperwork is walking through the gate (and not being publicized).

4. Presumably, the trash haulers brought this material to someone who made the call to publicize it. Either local political or religious authorities, or the Taliban. After some kind of analysis, these guys decided to exploit the scorched Qurans in their hands as a PSYOP.

5. At this point, if the U.S. had a functional and integrated SIGINT, HUMINT and Counterintelligence providing coverage in the vicinity of Bagram, they would have been inside the enemy's OODA loop and known what was going on. They apparently don't have such an operation and were caught by surprise. It's completely understandable -- Bagram is only ISAF's biggest base. Apparently, the talent and resources are pooled to support the pipe hitters who are snatching and killing Talib leadership, and there's not enough left to let anyone know what's going on outside the front gate. The fact that HUMINTers have been FOB-bound for at least the last half-decade due to retarded safety considerations which became a self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't help much.

Had military leaders known what was going on, they would have theoretically been able to stop it by showing up to the key players' houses and making them offers they could not refuse, e.g., "take this money, give me the burned Qurans and forget this ever happened, or we'll kill you and your whole family," and/or come up with a PR plan to discredit these guys and make them look like liars (Hey, it's a war -- bad things happen.) Or they could have used a brute force approach and bribed the tribal leaders of the Afghans living around U.S. bases to have them keep their guys from protesting. In practice American PSYOPs mostly consist of printing up hackneyed agitprop and posting it on walls/dropping it from aircraft/reading it through loudspeakers at the local populace.

6. Upon having this information publicized and being invited by their local Taliban representatives to engage in rioting, thousands of Afghans did so. They did this even though every ISAF base has a well-defended perimeter and crowds, no matter how fervent, are notoriously bad at stopping 7.62 and even 5.56.

As a guy who's once faced down an angry Afghan mob (small, about 120 guys,) I'd like to point out that contrary to common wisdom, they are not, in fact, irrational rage-monkeys. Afghans do not survive in a harsh, Malthusian environment by being bad at cost-benefit analysis. They knew that ISAF soldiers, driven by their fear of their commanders' response, would try to avoid lighting them up. And they were right. The fact that some of the posters were in English during this first wave of protests makes me think that this was a fairly carefully planned Taliban PSYOP aimed at the American media. But from the standpoint of the average rioter, outrage and rioting are fun and potentially profitable -- there's good loot to be had from overrunning a U.S. base.

7. The ISAF commander, General Allen, apologized profusely to "to the president of Afghanistan, the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and most importantly, to the noble people of Afghanistan" and assured everyone that measures were being taken to ensure this would never happen again, ever. I personally suspect that GEN Allen, deep down inside, has not drank the COIN Kool-Aid and does not really care about the noble people of Afghanistan. Contrary to the tone of this message, he is not wrought with remorse and contrition and would, if he could, empirically prove the above thesis about how bad crowds are at stopping 7.62 and 5.56. At the very least, given free rein, he would follow the classic PR algorithm when confronted with embarrassing facts -- lie, deny and make counteraccusations. But GEN Allen has learned the lesson presented by GEN McChrystal -- give the U.S. media something juicy to dig into, and they'll tell the president to fire you -- and he will. Therefore, some public belly-crawling was in order, despite its predictable effects on the Afghan people's behavior.

8. Emboldened by the commander of ISAF setting the tone for subsequent crowd control and public relations efforts, more Afghans joined the riots. A few of them finally got themselves shot by U.S. troops forced to decide whether to get overrun and lynched or risk their careers. Of course, had we firmly established right off the bat that as long as there's a war on, any demonstrations in the vicinity of U.S. bases will get brutally crushed, none of this would have happened.

9. Also, some insurgent infiltrators of the GIROA and ANSF capped a few Americans. Nothing new there, it's been going on for a while, and presumably without the Quran burning controversy these infiltrators would have done the exact same thing eventually, but it's being used synergetically for maximum PSYOP impact. Not being constantly distracted by red-faced sergeant majors, reflective belts and hourly powerpoints, even the Taliban can figure this stuff out. Effective PSYOPs -- so simple, even a caveman could do it!

The problem of unreliable Afghan troops is inherent in the relationship between ANSF and ISAF, where the latter "advise" the former instead of being integrated into a mixed colonialist structure. But such structure is politically impossible. Any senior officers publically advocating one will be set upon by the American media and academia, which will say mean things about them, compare them to King Leopold and other bad colonialist oppressors of the past, and get them fired by their civilian leadership. Therefore the sham of "independent" Afghan security forces continues. These forces vet their personnel about as well as they do everything else, with the result that they are full of guys with either mixed or treasonous loyalties. The advisors embedded in these security forces have no command authority or any real leverage over their advisees, and are reduced to publically praising the whole arrangement while waiting out their tour and praying they don't get capped in the back of the head.

10. The president apologized to Afghans via a note sent to Hamid Karzai. Possible reasons for this action: 1) The president's well-documented penchant for apologizing to the world for American actions. 2) Having been elected by the American media, the president is afraid that he might get unelected by it, and is propitiating its representatives by doing what they expect. 3) The president (or his advisors) plan to use the predictable result of demonstrating to the Afghan people that our weakness runs all the way to the top to incite them to keep rioting and attacking U.S. bases. This will be used to demonstrate to the U.S. press and think tanks that the war has failed and the only thing left to do is to pull out. Beginning a pullout of all or most conventional U.S. forces from Afghanistan around the spring or summer would give the president a popularity boost, assuming the Taliban could be bribed or induced to hold off on any mass offensives until after the election. While seemingly farfetched, this scenario would be well within the time-honored American political tradition where the Progressives and the guys killing American troops make an informal and unspoken alliance for mutual benefit (see: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq.) I wouldn't put something that wicked past our leadership, but it does seem a bit too complicated and well-planned.

11. Most likely outcome -- a negative feedback loop, where an intensification of mob violence causes the sense of self-preservation of U.S. troops on the ground to override their fear of a career-ending incident and they start lighting the Afghan mobs up. The Afghans' sense of self-preservation will in turn prevail over the great fun and potential for loot that are to be had in rioting, and they will calm down. A return to the status quo for the time being.

To "_B" is to do.

I just noticed this comment, posted the other day by "Hunter." I believe Anthony Shadid's ashes were scattered on Wednesday around his ancestral home in southern Lebanon:

Every night as we prepped for mobilization and deployment I read from Night Draws Near to my CO CDRs, 1SGs, and Staff. I have the dog-eared copy in my lap as I type right now.

His moving account was in no small part responsible for making it clear to my soldiers that the Iraqis are people too, just like you and I. Caught in the middle of something they really wanted no part of.

Nearly three million truck miles in Iraq over nine months with only 9 rounds fired in 5 escalation of force incidents ... but no one was ever hurt, coalition or Iraqi. 60 IEDs for our predecessors became 2 IEDs for us. No one was hurt on our watch....thanks in part to Anthony. RIP."

Hunter also gets off a good line in the discussion of Lt. Col. Danny Davis: "If you are going to bring the pain, you best have your ducks in a row."

By Ethan B. Kapstein

Best Defense directorate of military-economic affairs

Will Afghanistan collapse after the departure of American troops in 2013? That grim outcome appears all too likely. But the reason why Afghanistan may be heading toward anarchy is not simply due to the Afghan National Army's lack of military preparedness to fight an insurgency without foreign support. Rather, some of the most challenging problems that the government must face once the U.S. leaves will be economic.

Today, the United States and its allies provide the government of Afghanistan with the vast majority of its operating budget. American taxpayers have not only built up schools, hospitals, government ministries, and the Afghan National Army and police force; they have also paid the salaries of those who man these institutions. Further, U.S. military and foreign assistance operations in Afghanistan support many thousands of soldiers, foreign aid workers, and contractors, who pump millions of dollars into the local economy.

What will happen when the last Americans depart? If history is any guide, "foreign assistance follows the flag," meaning that aid spending will flee in the absence of a strong military presence. First, Americans will inevitably lose interest in Afghanistan and redirect spending to the next crisis zone; today, for example, the calamity in Syria is dominating the airwaves. Second, without American troops around to provide a modicum of security, foreign aid workers will have no choice but to leave the country; they won't be able to work in safety (and it shouldn't be forgotten that several hundred aid workers have already been killed during the war). As a result of the American withdrawal, both the motivation for aid spending and any possibility of monitoring aid effectiveness will quickly disappear.

An abject lesson in how economics can shape a war zone is provided by Vietnam. During the early 1970s, there were some glimmers of hope in South Vietnam following the North's severe military defeat during the 1968 Tet offensive. The United States, however, had already grown tired of the war, and the Nixon administration embarked upon a path of Vietnamization. As America's military and economic commitment to Vietnam declined, the weak Saigon government had no choice but to raise taxes and impose austerity measures. These policies fueled popular opinion against the regime, helping smooth the way for the North's successful invasion in 1975.

In preparing for its eventual departure from Afghanistan, there is much the United States could have done on the economic front but has tragically failed to implement. Incredibly, after more than ten years of war, the U.S. has no free trade agreement with Kabul, inadvertently promoting cross-border flows with Iran and Pakistan instead. Worse, these flows consist largely of needed imports, since the U.S. has promoted a strong Afghan currency that makes it near impossible to produce goods competitively within the country. The lack of an export-oriented industry, in turn, means that Afghanistan lacks a strong and forward-looking entrepreneurial class that could have served as a foundation for an anti-Taliban society; this is an even greater shame when one recognizes the tremendous craftsmanship that Afghan society is capable of in such sectors as woodworking and glassmaking.

The U.S. has also failed after more than a decade's presence to help Afghanistan create a credible statistics agency or a system of "national accounts" that would track how the government's money is being spent. This lack of transparency, in turn, enables corrupt practices to flourish. A cynic might think that America's failure to develop more robust Afghan economic data has been one of commission rather than omission.

When the history of America's involvement in Afghanistan is written, there will be much ink spilled over military strategy and tactics. Analysts will debate whether the U.S. should have been more aggressive in Pakistan or risked higher numbers of civilian casualties when taking the fight to the Taliban. Less attention, sadly, will be paid to the economic policies made in Washington and Kabul that were also instrumental in bringing about the demise of the Afghan regime.

Ethan B. Kapstein teaches global strategy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. A retired naval officer, he has served as an academic advisor to the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Kabul. The opinions expressed in this piece are strictly his own and do not reflect the views of any organization with which he is or has been associated.

This is the best article I've read about how to think about American moves in the war in Afghanistan.

My friend Michael  Yon comments from Afghanistan, "If Anonymous were cyber heroes, they'd go after drug cartels without blinking."

By Doyle Quiggle

Best Defense department of classical studies

A few minutes before the beginning of a Greek mythology class at FOB Fenty, Jalalabad, for which I'd prepared to lecture on Alexander the Great's swift invasion but treacherous occupation of Afghanistan, my best student stomped into the classroom, slammed his M4 down on the table, and announced, "I can't take their shit anymore!"

After his classmates and I had calmed him down, he explained that the walls, stall door, and floor of the toilet he'd just used were smeared with feces. They were always smeared with feces, he complained. He was furious about being forced daily to use facilities that were, as he put it, "Inhumanely, barbarically unhygienic and filthy." He and his unit shared their toilet with the ANA, as they had been ordered to do by their commanding officers-"hearts and minds." And it was the custom of the ANA to wipe themselves with their hands, smear their excrement on the walls of the toilette, and rinse their hands in the sink, which left the sinks reeking, a reek made especially acrid and pungent by the Afghans' high intake of goat meat and goat milk. While brushing his teeth, my student often had to struggle to keep down his gorge.

The outraged student, who, despite TSIRT, knew dangerously little about the cultural habits of any of the many Afghan tribes, had begun to take the ANA's toilette habits personally. I wanted to get my student to explore the source of his outrage. But I did not want to relativize or dismiss his outrage because I have learned that outrage always points toward a perception of injustice. It, therefore, also implies a healthy and intact sense of justice, which is something I encourage in students. So, I suggested to him that he was being faced (in the toilet customs of the ANA) with what Alexander's Macedonian Greeks would have called "borborygmus," a word that Plato and Aristophanes and Homer used to describe the filthy, excremental sewage of the underworld of Hades. For was he not in a kind of underworld (Hades or hell) on deployment in an Afghanistan he barely understood? Borborygmus not only means "shit." It also connotes "shit fearing." Borborophoba was known as the Goddess of the realm of death. She had the power to keep shit from flowing, but she also possessed the power to make it flow in the face of mortal fear and threat of death. Every combat soldier has been struck by her bowel- and bladder-releasing powers at least once in his life.

We then recalled what we'd read of David Grossman in On Killing, "the physiology of the fight: the body's role in combat and the skill to kill," where he explains in the modern language of physiology what the Greeks described in the metaphorical language of myth:

"Homeostasis is the balance struck between SNS and PNS during normal routine behavior, and can be thrown completely out of synchronicity when confrontation occurs, with PNS systems largely shutting down. One result of this can be the body ‘blowing the ballast', that is the dumping of unnecessary bodily substances which are of no benefit in combat - urine and feces, a rather unseemly but wholly natural bodily response to confrontation. This loosening of muscles which would be potentially drawing energy without contributing to the immediate task of survival is associated with the recession of PNS systems as the SNS is in the ascendancy."

Now, the smeared feces that my student had been dealing with daily in his ANA-USA shared toilet was not the result of a loss of homeostasis due to threat, but it did point to the realm of Borborophoba, and it pointed most directly to the underlying cultural void between soldiers like my student and the Afghan Army. As every anthropologist or mythographer knows, shit is the great leveler. It marks a psychic and cultural border. How a culture treats excrement, waste (all of that which it discards) speaks volumes about that culture. And when we are confronted with another culture's treatment of excrement, we are often pushed to the threshold and outer border of our own most deeply held, highly cherished values.

On the day of my student's enraged expression of borborophoba, I asked him and his classmates to link his I-can't-take-their-shit-anymore outrage to that of Alexander and his men when they arrived in Bactra where they discovered dogs roaming the otherwise highly civilized city, dogs feeding upon human bodies. According to the religious practices of the Bactrians, they threw not only their dead to the dogs but also their sick, lame, and invalid elderly-anyone considered social excrement or waste. Alexander and his men observed that the normal, healthy citizens of Bactria went about their daily business even as dogs devoured human bodies in the streets. An upstanding Bactrian merchant might walk past a pack of dogs feasting on a corpse as nonchalantly as a Greek merchant would walk past a fish stand.

Although Alexander and his men had been exceptionally tolerant of the strange cultural and religious practices of the many tribes they'd conquered since defeating Darius at the Battle of Granicus, the use of devouring dogs was one cultural bridge too far for the Macedonian Greeks. They simply could not imagine disposing of the dead in any form other than a tomb or a funeral pyre. Their invention of a Goddess like Borborophoba itself speaks to how ornately and vividly they'd imagined the world after life. Alexander and his men could not imagine anything more barbaric than encouraging dogs to devour the dead. Contrariwise, the Bactrians could not imagine anyone being barbaric enough not to do so with their dead.

The devouring dogs brought Alexander to a classic cultural impasse. And here Alexander drew a strict line. He would no longer tolerate what he viewed as a barbaric practice. He'd arrived at an I-can't-take-their-shit-anymore point of outrage, and he banned the use of devouring dogs from Bactria. At this historic moment, Alexander's real epic struggle began, the struggle to civilize Afghanistan. And by civilize we mean simply that he enacted policies that sought to force Afghanistan's tribes out of the bronze age and into the iron age.

We spent the rest of the class drawing analogies from Alexander's occupation of Bactra to the current ISAF mission in Afghanistan. That discussion involved our detailing as many incompatible differences between the primary cultural habits of US soldiers and those of the ANA, as well as the cultural habits of Afghans that US soldiers had observed on off-base patrols. We discussed everything from the treatment of excrement to the treatment of women. Many of my female soldier-students could not see any difference between the two as far as Afghan men were concerned. In order for our anthropological discussion to make any difference whatsoever to my students, we had to "keep it real," as they would say. To bite into the marrow, our discussion had to begin with harsh differences, like the handling of shit in latrines, that had evoked an acute emotional response from the soldiers. Only thereafter could we move on to the academic observations made of Afghanis by such notable authors as Thomas Barfield or Maratine van Bijlert or Antonio Giustozzi.

In other words, the professor treated his own students as if they were an alien culture, working from within their value system and emotional matrix, oscillating between their perceptions of an alien culture (Afghans) and that culture's perceptions of them. I'd assiduously gathered the latter perceptions from many chai-tea conservations with my tent mates, who were Afghan interpreters, Pashtun, Nuristanis, and Pashais.

My pedagogical aim for my students was to encourage cultural intelligence toward Afghans without encouraging any kind of soft-minded, limp-wristed relativism of values (cultural relativity) in which their own commitment to classical military core values such as loyalty, courage, selfless service, integrity, moderation, and justice might be diluted or weakened. On the contrary, my goal was to help them strengthen their commitment to those core values by showing them that they can withstand the outside challenge of culture to which they are wholly alien; they can, so to speak, "take their shit."

Doyle Quiggle taught oratory, rhetoric, and the classics to U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in two different war zones, at Camp Lemonnier (Djibouti, Africa) and at Forward Operating Base Fenty (Jalalabad, Afghanistan). The honor of contributing to the education of war fighters on the battlefield was granted to Quiggle by the U.S. Army through a contract with the University of Maryland, University College. Quiggle received his PhD from Washington University.

My old friend Marine Col. (ret.) Gary Anderson writes from somewhere overseas that, "No poor dumb son of a bitch ever won a counterinsurgency by sitting on his FOB. He won it by making the other poor dumb son of a bitch sit on his FOB."

Meanwhile, here is a guest column on COIN issues:

By "Ford Prefect"

Best Defense asylum for COIN bitter-enders

I know and respect Col. Gian Gentile from our years teaching at USMA and afterwards.  I think he's off on this -- just like the uber-COIN pundits of the 2004-2007 era were as well. There were a few people (John Nagl and some others come to mind) that were thinking about COIN in the decade prior to 9/11 -- they were very few, and very far between.  Others piled on the COIN train as it left the station, and tend to be the first to jump off as soon as it stops.  Just an observation. 

COIN should not be an organizational "design tool" to build the U.S. armed forces around.  It is a method of conflict -- with its own doctrine, tactics and strategy -- that is applied when it is needed.  Conventional, armored ground warfare is much the same. As is sub-surface, surface, cyber, and so on.  The key point is to maintain a cadre of competent NCOs and Officers capable of doing those missions when needed.  How many Coast Guardsmen are competent in ASW? My bet is less than 10. But if the Coasties ever get the mission, those 10 guys/gals will be worth their weight in gold.   

COIN is not "dead" -- it isn't something that can die.  It will exist as long as you send your armed forces to deal with populations outside of fighting their organized armies.  COIN isn't counter-terrorism; the former is a military mission, the latter at its core a law enforcement mission.  CT will continue on as long as terrorism is a tool of a weak adversary; the same with COIN. 

The real question, I think, is how to we keep enough folks around to serve as a cadre for those 'esoteric' missions (like COIN, but also including tactical nuclear warfare, amphibious operations, mass airborne operations and so on) while doing what the Nation expects the armed forces to do -- provide the 'common defense' of the Republic.  Smart reorganization, with a clear understanding of possible future missions, is the key, not dancing on the grave of COIN.

"Ford Prefect" is hitchhiking around Afghanistan. Or sitting in the cubicle to your right. Feeling lucky, punk? Well do ya?

By Mark Hammel

Best Defense guest columnist

As in all human endeavors, knowledge is power. Therefore, in treating an individual unfortunate enough to be suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I begin by explaining that PTSD is neither an illness nor a weakness, but rather, an injury. As with all injuries, it is due to exposure to a force that undermines the integrity of a biologically adaptive system of the body. In the case of an injury to the musculoskeletal system, the force is typically of a kinetic nature, such as with a badly sprained ankle. In the case of PTSD, the force is initiated by the perception of mortal danger giving rise to a wave of neurological activity so great that the stress response system of the brain is damaged. Think of this as a power surge.

The stress response system is one and the same as the system that responds to the perception of danger with the fight-freeze-or-flight response. I've found it useful over the years to refer to this system as the danger-monitoring-and-response system of the brain. It is the malfunctioning of this injured system that gives rise to the symptoms that we have come to know in the aggregate as PTSD.

Under normal conditions, our five senses work tirelessly in the background, monitoring the environment for any change in ambient conditions that might represent danger, such as a novel sound or smell, or perhaps movement on the periphery of our visual field. When such a change occurs the system initiates an immediate IFF, consulting its own knowledge base of previous experience, i.e. memory, and at the same time readies itself to unleash the fight-freeze-or-flight response should our memory turn up a match for something that could do us harm.

When the system is impaired, as in the case of PTSD, it enters a sort of safe mode, where the danger-monitoring-and-response function supersedes all other normal functioning. The victim becomes preoccupied with danger, accompanied by an impaired ability to muster the attention and motivation to engage in the myriad of biopsychosocially adaptive activities that uninjured humans accomplish with relative ease.

I hope this explanation makes it easier to grasp the source of two major groups of PTSD symptoms: hyperarousal (e.g. hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response, sleep disturbance, etc.), and avoidance and numbing.

A third group, reexperiencing symptoms, among them so-called flashbacks, is perhaps less easy to grasp, but surely the most salient to victim and clinicians. Normally, when we experience something it brings about a change in the brain that results in the formation of a memory. When we recall it, it is clearly in the realm of having occurred in the past, the there-and-then. In the case of a traumatic experience, the transformation into a memory is incomplete. It exists in a kind of limbo where it is maddeningly reexperienced as occurring in the here-and-now.

Read on

"When you do 'Henry V' for a roomful of men in uniform with guns on their hips and M-9s under their chairs, it takes on a whole different meaning.''

-- Tyrus Lemerande, a Navy reservist, quoted in the Boston Globe after entertaining troops with a one-man show featuring selections from Shakespeare. 

The new issue of Vanity Fair has a good overview piece by Mark "Black Hawk Down" Bowden about the Wanat battle and its effect on those who fought it, oversaw it and questioned it. Here's a link to the article.

Meanwhile, Rand Corporation surfaces with a report on what Wanat might tell us about small unit operations in Afghanistan. I gave it a skim and can't tell what, if anything, to make of it. I don't want to keep on beating up on poor Rand, but I find their reports tend to be mushy. I read so much stuff that I want people to get to their essential points clearly, quickly and emphatically -- as Col. Creighton Abrams did in an Army War College paper that I was reading yesterday in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. More on that later.

As a public service, Best Defense is offering this primer for generals on their way to Afghanistan.

Here is a list of 19 things that many insiders and veterans of Afghanistan agree to be true about the war there, but that generals can't say in public. So, general, read this now and believe it later-but keep your lip zipped. Maybe even keep a printout in your wallet and review before interviews.

My list of things to remember I can't say

• Pakistan is now an enemy of the United States.

• We don't know why we are here, what we are fighting for, or how to know if we are winning.

• The strategy is to fight, talk, and build. But we're withdrawing the fighters, the Taliban won't talk, and the builders are corrupt. 

• Karzai's family is especially corrupt.

• We want President Karzai gone but we don't have a Pushtun successor handy.

• But the problem isn't corruption, it is which corrupt people are getting the dollars. We have to help corruption be more fair.

• Another thing we'll never stop here is the drug traffic, so the counternarcotics mission is probably a waste of time and resources that just alienates a swath of Afghans.

• Making this a NATO mission hurt, not helped. Most NATO countries are just going through the motions in Afghanistan as the price necessary to keep the US in Europe

• Yes, the exit deadline is killing us.

• Even if you got a deal with the Taliban, it wouldn't end the fighting.

• The Taliban may be willing to fight forever. We are not.

• Yes, we are funding the Taliban, but hey, there's no way to stop it, because the truck companies bringing goods from Pakistan and up the highway across Afghanistan have to pay off the Taliban. So yeah, your tax dollars are helping Mullah Omar and his buddies. Welcome to the neighborhood.

• Even non-Taliban Afghans don't much like us.

• Afghans didn't get the memo about all our successes, so they are positioning themselves for the post-American civil war .

• And they're not the only ones getting ready. The future of Afghanistan is probably evolving up north now as the Indians, Russians and Pakistanis jockey with old Northern Alliance types. Interestingly, we're paying more and getting less than any other player.

• Speaking of positioning for the post-American civil war, why would the Pakistanis sell out their best proxy shock troops now?

• The ANA and ANP could break the day after we leave the country.

• We are ignoring the advisory effort and fighting the "big war" with American troops, just as we did in Vietnam. And the U.S. military won't act any differently until and work with the Afghan forces seriously until when American politicians significantly draw down U.S. forces in country-when it may be too damn late.

• The situation American faces in Afghanistan is similar to the one it faced in Vietnam during the Nixon presidency: A desire a leave and turn over the war to our local allies, combined with the realization that our allies may still lose, and the loss will be viewed as a U.S. defeat anyway.

Thanks to several people who contributed to this, from California to Kunar and back to DC, and whose names must not be mentioned! You know who you are. The rest of you, look at the guy sitting to your right.