When David Kilcullen is at his best, he is unexcelled at discussing how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign. And I think the Australian infantry officer turned political anthropologist/COIN guru is at his best when he gathers field observations, boils them down to distilled principles, and then describes those rules in a clear, practical manner. 

So I want to take some time to go through a paper he wrote recently in Afghanistan. (I didn't get it from him, by the way.) While it ostensibly is about metrics in COIN campaigning, it amounts to a thorough discussion of what works in such warfare, what doesn't, and -- especially -- how to tell the difference. It is written about the current campaign in Afghanistan, but clearly has broader applications. ...

After some initial throat-clearing (one of my rules when I was an editor was to see if I could cut the first three pages of any long article), Kilcullen's first major section is about metrics to be avoided. These are:

• "Body count." As he says, when you have 100 enemy and kill 20 of them, you may wind up with 120 live enemies, because you just created 40 more. It's more algebra than arithmetic. ‘Nuff said? Sure, but as Sean Naylor's excellent reporting in Army Times lately has shown, there are still some Army commanders who disagree with this basic point.
• "Military accessibility." Yes! One of my many peeves in Iraq was when a battalion or brigade commander would say that a route was "green" because his up-armored Humvees generally could use it without getting blown up. That may have been true, but it also was irrelevant to the security experience of the average Iraqi on the street. When I asked about that, he just didn't seem to know, or care. So I was pleased to see this high up on Kilcullen's list of don'ts. His point is a bit different from that here. It is just because you don't get hit on a road doesn't mean it is under your control. Rather, it may just mean that the enemy doesn't care to engage you there. This may be because it lacks support there, or conversely because it doesn't want to fight in an area where it is popular. Why risk blowing up your own peeps? 
• "SIGACTs, especially those involving violence against the coalition." This is a related point. Be wary of SIGACTs trends. Violence may be low in an area simply because it is in the uncontested control of the enemy.
• "Dialog with the enemy." An interesting point, because there has been so much talk lately about various parties talking to the Taliban. In our tradition, we stop talking to the enemy when the fighting starts. Not so the Afghans, Kilcullen notes. Also, he adds, "the mere fact that our local partners are in dialog with the enemy is not an indicator, in and of itself, of disloyalty to the government."
• "Any input metric." Megadittoes. This was another thing that used to drive me nuts in Iraq, listening to Americans boast about money spent, projects initiated, patrols conducted, and such. "These indicators tell us what we are doing, but not the effect we are having." Rather, he advocates, look at outcomes, and especially the effect on the population. How to measure those will be the subject of our next installment on this insightful essay.

One of the more interesting presentations at the conference I attended recently in Tampa on the Anbar Awakening was by Brig. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who as a colonel commanded an Army brigade in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, in 2006-2007. At a time when top American commanders were telling their subordinates to disengage and pull back onto big bases, MacFarland did the opposite, working with tribes, establishing outposts, and encouraging tribal sheikhs to turn against al Qaeda. When Gen. Petraeus arrived in Iraq in February 2007, one of the first things he did was fly out to Ramadi to see what MacFarland was doing -- which turned out to be an updated version of what Petraeus's protégé H.R. McMaster had done in Tel Afar in 2005-2006.

Gen. MacFarland gave me permission to quote from the unpublished paper he presented. Here goes.

• First, he argues that all counterinsurgency is local. That makes sense because it is a form of politics.
• Second, the people are indeed the key to the solution. But, he adds, "It is not enough to protect the population, they must be given the means to protect themselves." (Interesting point for whoever revises the Army/Marine COIN manual to mull.) "Bottom line: We promised them the means to secure themselves in a way that did not disrupt their cultural order." That is, he explains, they didn't want police directed by Baghdad because they feared Iranian infiltration of Iraqi security forces.
• Third, to engage in genuine COIN is to grab the tail of the dragon. You can't lead the local uprising, "All you can do is enable it." And you will operate not only on very incomplete knowledge, you often will know less than the other people in the room-like who and where the bad guys are.
• And don't expect to rest on your laurels. One fix creates another problem. If you succeed, your problems are hardly over. "As the threat receded, old rivalries began to re-emerge."

How could the former British prime minister have no regrets over the Iraq war? C'mon -- at least just a few? Time for Tony to do some quiet thinking in the Tower, I think.

Speaking of Brits, here is the best new blog I've seen out of the UK in awhile. I like the way this guy thinks, and writes. Good take on Marty Amis, too, who I have heard is related to a good writer.

Many of readers of this blog have done time in Iraq. And almost any American who spent time in Iraq was helped by an Iraqi. Now some of those people need our help. Many are moving here, and need help with basic stuff like finding an apartment, getting kids into a school, getting a driver's license, and learning to negotiate a Costco. Or how to talk to an American cop. 

If you are in the DC area, one way to pitch in is to help the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Collaborative. To find out more, send an e-mail here.

I wonder if something fundamental is going on in the Middle East. That is, Iran is getting more powerful, and that scares the Arab states. So they seem to be turning away from worrying about Israel and focusing more on Iran as it moves toward becoming a nuclear power. The Bush administration actually helped strengthen Iran a lot by knocking down Iraq as the great bulwark against the expansion of Persian power westward. Also, by occupying Iraq, it effectively gave Iran tens of thousands of potential hostages, lessening Western leverage and so the West's ability to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Bottom line: Will AQ Khan and the Bush administration together inadvertently have brought Arab-Israeli peace to the Middle East?

Here is more from that terrific speech retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington gave on the disastrous recent history of American interrogation operations. The talk, given at Fort Leavenworth late last year, was sponsored by the CGSC Foundation, which plans to publish the speech in a book this spring about ethics and law in contemporary conflict. I am quoting from the speech with the CGSC Foundation's permission.

The U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was worse than a crime in his view, it was a blunder. "Guantanamo was the diametric opposite of how I would have set up a facility," said Herrington, a seasoned interrogator who advocates treating prisoners with respect and decency -- not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the most effective way to gather intelligence.

"Iraq was worse," he continued. He arrived there in December 2003 on an official trip to review U.S. military intelligence operations in the new war there. He was shocked by what he found. "I reported, in writing, that the Special Operations Task Force was brutalizing detainees at their Camp Nama facility before turning them in to the Baghdad Airport confinement facility." He was surprised to have his warning disregarded:

"I expected a major investigation of rogue activity, but a feeble attempt to investigate was quickly dropped. Investigations into Camp Nama were unwelcome, because, we know now, the excesses that I and others reported were sanctioned at very high levels of the U.S. government . . . .

He also inspected the Abu Ghraib prison and reported that it was a disastrous mess, "a squandered and lost opportunity." So it was no surprise, he said, a few months later when the news of the abuses broke, with "the sheer depravity of mistreatment, [and] the idea that American soldiers would descend to such depths of conduct," that the global media seized on it.

Here's a report from my CNAS colleague Matt Irvine, who trekked up to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to hear experts Richard Clarke, Juan Zarate, and Steve Coll tell the House Armed Services Committee what to think about al Qaeda.

By Matthew Irvine

Best Defense chief congressional correspondent

What the witnesses delivered was a long-term forecast reading: more of the same. The conflict against al Qaeda and its ideology will not be won when American forces leave Iraq or begin drawdowns in Afghanistan in 2011.

Read on

Here is a comment from Saif Abdul-Rahman, former chief of staff for the Iraqi ministry of industry, and more recently an advisor to the Iraqi vice president. I ran into him last week in Tampa, just before I had dinner with a retired Iraqi major general and some other folks, and asked him to contribute a comment on the current political situation in Iraq, in which hundreds of Sunni candidates have been excluded. He thinks the United States government should keep its powder dry so it can intervene at the crucial point after the election, when the new government is formed. 

By Saifaldin D. Abdul-Rahman

Special to Best Defense

The issue of candidates being excluded from election roles in Iraq has captured the Iraqi political scene for the last week or so. It has also captivated administration folks here in Washington, who by allowing Vice President Biden to visit Iraq are throwing their weight in on the subject. VP Biden made positive public statements by saying that the Iraqis will handle the issue. Privately, VP Biden should keep to the same message. There needs to be a calculation made by the US in weighing whether or not it is in the interests of the United States to intervene. I would argue in this particular situation the short-term and long-term costs would outweigh any gains made by any US involvement in this issue.

My argument is based on the supposition that this issue will not break the political process nor irreparably damage it. The candidates that have been excluded don't necessarily have a chance at winning a seat in an election. Some may try to argue that this would disenfranchise the Sunnis and may lead to a boycott, something I seriously doubt. The Sunnis learned their lesson from the 2005 boycott and will not repeat that mistake again because of the costs they paid in doing so. Today, there is not one credible call for a boycott of the elections, nor will there be because it just will not work; even if candidates were excluded the major parties are still there and people would still vote for them undermining the whole idea of a boycott. The only real candidate to be excluded is Saleh Al-Mutlaq, who was losing support in recent days and was only able to reinvigorate his party by teaming up with Ayad Allawi. In doing so he has actually damaged Allawi, who was hoping to garner Shia votes in the South.

Based on the aforementioned suppositions, lets do a cost /benefit analysis about getting involved:

• The US intervenes: If the US and UN intervene and bring pressure to bear on Iraq's political establishment, we may succeed in reversing part of the order and therefore get some candidates reinstated; adversely we would reinforce a rallying call by Shia sectarian coalitions who have accused the United States of bringing back the Baath Party or its cohorts. This harms us in the short term because the rallying call will reinvigorate a stagnating political platform of the Shia Islamists. In the medium term, by reinvigorating that campaign it will cause a government to be elected with a sectarian Shia majority and that government will be very unhappy about the US intervention on this matter. And in the long term, it will set back efforts to encourage grassroots nationalist parties, by strengthening the already well-funded Baathists and having the adverse effect of strengthening the sectarian parties, therefore lessening the opportunities of real nationalist Sunni and Shia grassroots efforts to be established.
• The US does not intervene: If the US does not intervene, it will not significantly impact any political party, even Allawi's (there is quiet talk that Allawi benefited from Mutlaq's exclusion because it helps him with the voters of the Southern provinces, and because it leaves him completely in charge of their joint political party). We have already presupposed that this is not a structural problem for Iraq's political process and it will not harm it significantly. And, as I said, the candidates being excluded are not significant and therefore the outcome of the elections will not be impacted significantly by the exclusions. 

What is most important about the second point above is that by not getting involved the US retains leverage over the parties when it comes time to actually create the government, which is more important than wasting energy and resources now. That leverage will be increased by the US reminding parties that we did not intervene before the elections and that the legitimacy of the government will be in doubt if there is not a broad representation of Iraq's political and ethnic groupings. The aforementioned argument will not be available if we intervene now, and the elections result in a resounding victory for the sectarian coalitions and they decide to create a majoritarian government excluding the Sunnis, therefore undermining the principal purpose of our intervention.