I found this article by the father of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," moving. It has never been clear to me why Lindh was sentenced to decades in jail. Here is a response from the father of Mike Spann, the CIA officer killed in the uprising of Taliban prisoners, of which Lindh was one.

Maybe it is just the father in me, but Lindh strikes me as having been a poor deluded kid. Sure, sentence him to a few years -- but is there any good reason for him still to be imprisoned?

Paula Broadwell asked Lt. Col. David Flynn, star of a guest column earlier this week, to respond to Registani Josh Foust. (And here is an XM/Foust discussion of Paula's files.)

Ms. Broadwell corresponds, "I thought I'd ask LTC David Flynn, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th in Kandahar Provence, Afghanistan to clarify the Afghan Local Police initiative skepticism and punditry on one blogger's mind. Here's what Flynn had to say in response to Joshua Foust's blog.":

Tom comment: No matter where you come down on this, I am impressed to see Lt. Col. Flynn respond in real time -- very unusual for an Army that still likes to move 2.5 MPH in media engagements.

So, duck and cover, and here goes:

Flynn: It has been with great pleasure that I've had the opportunity to read the orator Joshua Faust report from his desk in the U.S. via Registan.net. It seems, unfortunately, Mr. Faust lacks the context to editorialize in a way that enables his readers to ascertain an objective view. My name is LTC David Flynn and have been operating in the Arghandab District since June 2010. This is my second deployment to Kandahar and have over 20 months of experience in the Arghandab. Allow me to explain the nascent ALP in one of 4 villages that we have stood up in my Area of Operations in response to Foust's punditry.

Foust: LTC Flynn decided to give one elder in a district the power to build his own militia, which that elder liked. The men he chose for that militia could not be vetted by the Ministry of the Interior quickly enough, so the LTC decided to abandon General Petraeus' orders and the legal restrictions on arming militias and give them weapons and training anyway. LTC Flynn's trainers are having a hard time convincing these men not to beat people in the street, but are hopeful they can be "smarter than the TB."  

Flynn: The men chosen for this particular ALP were vetted by senior Afghan Police Officials, who are subordinate to the MOI, and vectored my way to begin a training process that is led by some of my finest infantry NCOs and mentored by an ODA Team operating in my AO. The ALP members have been approved also by the village Shura and are led to training by their Malik. We will issue them weapons to operate on their own after they have completed background checks, biometric screening, medical checks, District Chief of Police and District Governor vetting and final approval by the MOI. I expect this process to take a few more weeks before we are ready to issue weapons. The weapons are issued by MOI officials and at that time the District government will issue identification cards with the serial numbers matching the weapon issued. 

Read on

Counterterrorism without counterinsurgency is alluring -- it seems cheaper and easier -- but it is usually pretty meaningless and in fact can be very counterproductive. People who advocate just doing counterterror generally don't understand that. This is one of the best explanations I've read of why the short, easy way just doesn't work, from a friend who can't be identified, but who is in a position to understand this.

If you work at the White House, please read this slowly.

By Mr. XYZ
Best Defense terrorism columnist

To avoid killing the wrong people, you need intelligence. Good intelligence demands you have very close contact with, and cooperation from, the very constituency the Terrorists are seeking to mobilize. These folks won't cooperate unless they have security of person and property AND believe you won't abandon them after the next presidential election. That means that you can't CT without COIN.

Oh you can try. Clinton made a sport of it -- firing several hundred million dollars worth of cruise missiles into the deserts of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Predictably, fire weapons and fire weapons alone not only did not compel the enemy to surrender, it caused them to multiply.

No serious student of strategic aerial bombardment I know of still believes that bombing a civilian population -- short of nuclear weapons -- will do anything more (or less) than awaken a sleeping giant -- Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are perfect examples, but so too are the largely failed terror-bombing campaigns of the Luftwaffe of Britain (1940-41 and ‘44-45) and the British reply to Germany (1942-1945).

The reason terror bombing does not work, is it causes predictable outrage in the survivors. Even if you use precision weapons -- no, especially if you use precision weapons -- killing anyone in my family will make of me an implacable enemy. I say this because if you use precision weapons you purportedly have the ability to avoid killing the wrong people and yet you killed one of mine. Hence, you MEANT to kill my relative. And now, I will have to return the favor -- especially if I am from a Shame Culture.

Used alone, navies and air forces cannot, therefore, win against insurgents. Why? Because they are fire weapons -- and fire weapons alone can never compel the enemy to surrender. The enemy may choose to surrender -- as happened in Serbia in 1999 and Japan in 1945, but the decision is left to the enemy. True decision in war comes from shock forces -- Marines/ infantry. Once shock forces go into action the enemy must repel the attack or leave. If they can't leave or defeat the attack they must surrender.

If you're going to employ shock forces, you are now going to be in and among the population. If you are going to have a population that is at least neutral, if not supporting you, then you will need to understand their language, culture, and aspirations, and help to provide for their needs. You must also be prepared for a long and costly war, in both money and casualties.

Read on

There are certain events that are made for certain reporters. For example, everything in Anthony Shadid's career prepared him to cover post-invasion Iraq. Likewise, if you want to understand the guy who tried to bomb Times Square, you need to read the New Yorker‘s Steve Coll, the only person I can think of who has written books about the South Asian subcontinent, the Taliban and Islamic extremism terrorism, but who also understands New York City, and indeed co-authored a book about Wall Street.

Take it away, Steve:

Last week, before the Times Square incident, I was talking with a former U.S. intelligence officer who worked extensively on jihadi cases during several overseas tours. He said that when a singleton of Shahzad's profile -- especially a U.S. citizen -- turns up in a place like Peshawar, local jihadi groups are much more likely to assess him as a probable U.S. spy than as a genuine volunteer. At best, the jihadi groups might conclude that a particular U.S.-originated individual's case is uncertain. They might then encourage the person to go home and carry out an attack -- without giving him any training or access to higher-up specialists that might compromise their local operations. They would see such a U.S.-based volunteer as a ‘freebie,' the former officer said -- if he returns home to attack, great, but if he merely goes off to report back to his C.I.A. case officer, no harm done.

I have a lot of respect for the work of Ahmed Rashid, for my money the single best journalist on the Afghan war and on Pakistan as well. So when I saw that he was speaking in Philadelphia, I was pleased when a CNAS colleague was able to have a pal from War News Radio cover the event.

I'm especially struck by his criticism of a timetable for getting out of Afghanistan, which parallels what I have been thinking about Iraq lately. 

By Emily Hager
Best Defense Philadelphia deputy bureau chief

Ahmed Rashid opened with a run down of the situation in Afghanistan.

It was not encouraging.

Taliban influence is expanding, he said, and it has come to control a wide swath of the country, including provinces near Kabul. Last year's election fraud undermined the credibility of President Karzai for taking part and of the West for not noticing sooner and fixing it. Afghanistan and Pakistan have become training grounds for other regional Taliban-type groups, mainly fighters from other Central Asian countries, China, Russia, and Europe. The Afghan economy is still primarily donor-driven, not a true national economy, and so it furnishes few lasting job opportunities for Afghan citizens. And though the Pakistani army has started to take on the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda still find refuge in that country. (Rashid said last week's arrests of top Taliban leaders by Pakistani forces were more due to chance than to a major shift in Pakistani policy). Still, he says the presence of Western forces offers at least the hope of rebuilding the country with continued international interest -- infinitely more appealing than the fear that he sees as still the main currency of the Taliban.

How do Obama and his administration measure up? Rashid said that for the most part, they have the right ideas: building a regional strategy that includes key players from Pakistan to Iran to Saudi Arabia; investing in the Afghan economy, especially in agriculture; improving governance; and using troops to secure population centers. But because Indo-Pakistani relations fell apart after the Mumbai bombings in 2008 and the situation in Iran has deteriorated, the regional strategy piece is falling through. Rashid said the biggest mistake the administration has made, on a foreign policy level, was to set a timetable for withdrawal. Right now the draw down of American forces is set to start in July, 2011. That leaves very little time to build up the Afghan economy and promote good governance. Worse, Rashid argued, it will promote panic in the Afghan government, encourage a wait-it-out mentality among the Taliban, and prompt neighboring countries to send in the proxies and begin sorting out potential lines of influence in a post-war Afghanistan. Still, Rashid recognized that domestic politics in the West make ending the war as soon as possible a political imperative, citing the collapse of the Dutch government earlier this week.

This brings me to perhaps the most interesting point of the talk. Given the pressure to end the war coming from Western countries, Rashid believes a true defeat of the Taliban will be impossible -- so he stressed that efforts towards serious negotiation should begin now. The key partners, he said, can only be the Afghan government and the Taliban.

Why would the Taliban go for a negotiated solution, with the Western withdrawal date practically set on the calendar? First, Rashid said, the Taliban is tired. They are using forced conscription when they go into some villages in Afghanistan -- a sure sign of recruitment troubles. Second, unlike the Soviets, Western forces will not abandon Afghanistan in one day. As long as there are some Western forces in the cities, the Taliban will never take them because NATO firepower is so overwhelming. That means a military takeover by the Taliban would still be far off, even if Western forces began to withdraw. Third, the Taliban has been dependent on -- and manipulated by -- Afghanistan's neighboring countries for years. Rashid believes the Talibans are getting tired of what he called those countries' "micromanagement." By heading to the negotiating table, the Taliban might get a chance to put their demands first. Case in point: note the conspicuous absence of Pakistani involvement in the under-the-radar negotiations in Saudi Arabia. And finally, just as the Afghan people do not want to return to life under the Taliban in the late 1990s (no jobs to speak of, oppressive regime, public executions), Rashid argued that the Taliban don't want to return to a rule state like the one they controlled in 2000. Isolation and international sanction are unappealing. Rashid did point out that the more hard-line among the Taliban would never negotiate -- but he thinks there's a large enough crowd of what he calls "sensible Taliban leadership" to make negotiations a worthwhile option.

Workable negotiations would be an enormous challenge -- for instance, even if the Taliban agreed to disconnect from Al Qaeda, as he believes they might, how could they prove it? Still, he argued that given the urgency on the part of Western countries to get out, it's important to begin the process now so that negotiations might have fruit in time to leave Afghanistan and Pakistan moderately stable in the long run.

We bring Kilcullenpalooza to an end with his observations on a few ways of judging the performance of your local Taliban unit. Significantly, only near the end of the essay does he focus on the enemy. You listening, S-2s of the world?

So here are some ways to know your enemy:

• "High-technology inserts." When you see the enemy using satellite phones, sniper optics and high-end roadside bombs, those indicate that the group may have access to external sponsors, and is a mainline Taliban outfit, rather than just the local minor league team.
• "Insurgent medical health." What shape are detainees arriving in? The local wannabes tend to suffer from afflictions like malnutrition, parasitic diseases, TB, and such. "Main force units, on the other hand, often have a better general level of health," especially if based in Pakistan.
• "Presence of specialist teams and foreign advisers." If you are facing a Taliban group with mortar teams, intelligence teams, and more, then you are facing the major leaguers. Doubly so if they have foreigners with them.
Read on

Susan Glasser, who was there, says that one of the biggest mistakes of the last 10 years was letting Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora:

The disaster flowed from one bad idea: that the United States could win in Afghanistan without a "big footprint," using locals who wouldn't trigger the renowned Afghan hostility to foreign invaders. Not to mention that deploying a small contingent of special forces armed with cash would prove Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's ideological point about the need to transform the U.S. armed services from a lumbering Cold War conventional force into a leaner, meaner, high-tech military capable of lightning strikes.

Rumsfeld may have been right about the need for transformation. But Tora Bora was a case study not in innovation but in the arrogance of a superpower that made bad decisions in the face of overwhelming evidence that they wouldn't work.

Peter Feaver, who was on the staff of the National Security Council, responds that she is wrong wrong wrong. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan succeeded, he says, because of the "light" approach used. Losing OBL at Tora Bora was the price of that light approach, he concludes. "We had bin Laden within reach at Tora Bora precisely because we were willing to try the very light-footprint approach they denounce," he writes.

Interesting argument, made all the more so because both Ms. Glasser and Prof. Feaver are friends of mine. Also, both are crackerjack smart.

So who is right: the White House aide turned professor or the foreign correspondent turned bigtime editor? I think Susan is, and not only because she is my boss. My reasoning is that the CIA's Bernsten asked for a battalion of Army Rangers (a light force, Prof. Feaver) to be deployed and was turned down.

But I decided to ask someone who was in the middle of this operation. His bottom line, I think, is that this was indeed a terribly screwed up operation, but that Rumsfeld's philosophy was the least of its problems. So he thinks Glasser's facts are correct but not her conclusion, and Feaver's analysis is correct but it misses what was really the lesson of this operation. 

Here is his response:

A boy runs to his father and breathlessly shouts, "Paw, come quick. The hired man and sis are up in the haymow, and he's a-pullin' down his pants and she's a-liftin' up her skirt. Paw, they're getting ready to pee all over our hay!."

To which the father replies, "Son, you've got your facts absolutely right, but you've drawn a completely wrong conclusion." That is, both authors do have some facts correct, though not necessarily their conclusions.

With respect to Susan Glasser:  Yes, Bin Laden escaped. To make the leap from that fact to the many other tidbits offered, such as it was a bad idea to think that we could win without a big footprint and that this was about proving Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's ideological points tells more than a little about her perspective (from amongst the many journalists who outnumbered the U.S. Forces). Full disclosure, I was not there at Tora Bora. But I was down the road a little at the intersection where the collection of senior leaders from varying organizations collided with modern technology (which as I recall were predominately venerable LST-D's ... forgive me if a wax nostalgic for a moment). As such my recollection of "what really happened" differs some from hers.  I would also argue that she misses the mark with the comment that we are still suffering the consequences of the decision not to fight at Tora Bora. I for one would not be willing to bet that much would be different today regardless of a different outcome there.

With respect to Peter Feaver:  I happen to agree with his assessment of the options available, either deploy now with a light 'more unconventional' force or wait until 2002 with a more conventionally footprint. I also personally believe that we had multiple chances under this construct to capture/kill Bin Laden.

Where I tend to differ from many is that I believe most critical observations to be symptomatic of the command relationships at the time and not the ends unto themselves.  I think that our proverbial Achilles heel was, and perhaps still is, unity of effort. Gary Bernsten and BG Dailey "arguing" describes to a tee what I see as the Achilles heel of the entire war at that point -- unity of effort.  While Gary was the commander on the ground the vast preponderance of resources being utilized at the time were obviously military. When his request for additional resources was denied (Rangers and others) I vaguely recall Gary offering to the military leadership to take over the operation (at that time it wasn't just BG Dailey on deck, but also BG Harrell and RAdm Calland - which no doubt helped simplify the situation immensely). What has forever stuck in my mind was the collective response: "Conditions had not been met for the military to assume responsibility for the operation."

Pakistan's top female squash player hails from Waziristan. She has had to defy the Taliban to play.

Photo: Defense.Pk

A French official who conducted investigations in Pakistan adds more weight to charges that Pakistani intelligence officers are in bed with the Taliban and even with al Qaeda.

In a new book, What I Could Not Say, to be published next week in France,  Jean-Louis Bruguiere says that he came away with the impression that some Pakistani officials don't even consider al Qaeda to be a terrorist organization, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. He is quoted as writing, "The central government has lost control of certain elements of the army and the ISI, an intelligence service that no longer has the trust of its foreign partners." French investigators in Pakistan also were physically intimidated, he charges.

Bruguiere now works in Washington on terrorism financing issues, the newspaper said.

(HT to Barnett Rubin)

Kash if/Flickr

I think we all tend to criticize too much and praise too little, especially with public officials. So I was impressed today to see proven provider John McCreary, who has forgotten more about intelligence than I will ever know, commend Hillary Clinton for her sharp comments in Pakistan yesterday:

"The US secretary of state questioned Pakistan's commitment to the fight against al-Qaida, saying she found it hard to believe that no-one in the Pakistan government knows where senior figures are hiding.

"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to," she told a group of newspaper editors during a meeting in the city of Lahore on Thursday.

Bravo for Secretary Clinton.  Either the Pakistani security services contain senior officers who know where bin Laden is and are lying or they are incompetent and ought to be dismissed. There are no other explanations for Pakistan having become the headquarters for al Qaida and the base area for international Islamic terrorism.

‘Nuff said.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

While we're all wanking away waiting for the White House to get off the dime on Afghanistan, some of the smart money stays focused on the real issue: the future of Pakistan. This is the real center of gravity in this mess. What does it profit a man if Pakistan falls apart while Afghanistan is stabilized?

David Rohde's fascinating series on being kidnapped by the Taliban concludes today with his escape. Good to read especially for how the Taliban has evolved in recent years. Or devolved.

Another David, Mr. Ignatius, continues his good reporting out of Pakistan, giving the strategic overview. This guy is so good, he should have his own blog!

I've been struck recently by the relative optimism about Pakistan from Iggie and another smart guy, Peter Bergen.

nicksarebi/flickr

If the Taliban took over Afghanistan, would al Qaeda again have a safe haven? I think so. The time to drive a wedge betwixt the two was back in 2002-2003, after the American invasion, when both groups had fled Afghanistan in disarray, and were licking their wounds and reproaching each other as they hid in Pakistani frontier villages.

That thought is provoked by an article in today's New York Times and by a  series of interesting interviews with Taliban members recently carried by Newsweek. After the U.S. arrived, notes one Talibaner interviewed: 

The Arabs were disappointed the Taliban hadn't stood and fought. They told me they had wanted to fight to the death. They were clearly not as distressed as the Afghans. This was understandable. The Arabs felt they had lost a battle. But the Afghans were much more devastated-they had lost a country."

The groups began rebuilding, the same Talibani recalls, by using raids and even funerals as recruiting and fund-raising tools. After one cross-border raid against an American outpost, he recalled:

We carried the stiff and bloodied bodies of our martyrs back to Wana. Thousands of locals attended their funerals. ... As the news traveled, a lot of former Taliban began returning to Wana to join us.

Another Taliban member says they benefited from American violence and the abuses of the Kabul government:

The Afghan Taliban were weak and disorganized. But slowly the situation began to change. American operations that harassed villagers, bombings that killed civilians, and Karzai's corrupt police were alienating villagers and turning them in our favor. Soon we didn't have to hide so much on our raids. We came openly. When they saw us, villagers started preparing green tea and food for us. The tables were turning. Karzai's police and officials mostly hid in their district compounds like prisoners.

As the old John Hiatt song laments, this is the way we make a broken heart. Or rather, this is the way we allowed a medieval bunch of Afghan hillbillies to re-group while we distracted ourselves with an unnecessary war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, someone tried to blow up the Indian Embassy in Kabul today. I wonder who doesn't like Indian influence in the Afghan capital?

SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images

 
All around, it was a tough weekend in Afghanistan. Someone in the uniform of an Afghan soldier killed two Americansoldiers. The next day eight Americans were killed in fighting in Nuristan, inan event that was quickly labelled Wanat II.

I have nothing good to say about it all, except that I was particularly impressed with David Kilcullen's contribution to a Sunday New York Times round up of opinion on what to do in Afghanistan:

Counterinsurgency is only as good as the government it supports. NATO could do everything right -- it isn't -- but will still fail unless Afghans trust their government ... If we see no genuine progress on such steps toward government responsibility, the United States should "Afghanize," draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster thatwill come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban -- which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.

"I would characterize the Taliban strategy in very simple terms," said retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno. Speaking at the Marine conference on counterinsurgency last Wednesday, Barno, who was the overall commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, and was one of the more competent generals we've had there, said the Talibian think that they are winning and that the war is nearly over, and so "their strategy is simply to run out the clock."

Robbert van der Steeg