The top commander vs. Mr. "Supreme Command"

Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Thursday, September 24, 2009 - 7:52 PM Share

In the closing talk of the COIN conference, Gen. David Petraeus said that 70 percent of the violence in Afghanistan is in just 10 percent of the country's districts. (Meaning that a troop-intensive counterinsurgency campaign might not need as many troops as you might think.)

I guess he missed the opening talk by former State Department counselor Eliot Cohen, author of the terrific study Supreme Command, about civilian leadership in war. One metric that drives him batty, he said, is when officials say, "Well, 75% of the violence occurs in 10 percent of the country," an approach Cohen said he finds, "profoundly misleading." First, he said, if we aren't there, we don't know how much violence is occurring. Second, he said, the place might be "completely quiet" because the Taliban have already won in that area.

Irony alert: Cohen was one of the people -- and I think the first one -- who, at a meeting in the White House in December 2006, advised President Bush to dump Gen. Casey and pick Gen. Petraeus to replace him as the top commander in Iraq.

Cohen, fwiw, remains a Petraeus fan. Speaking of him and Gen. McChrystal, he said, "I think they are both truly exceptional commanders, and exceptional human beings."

Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the Press

EXPLORE:AFGHANISTAN, MILITARY, STATE DEPARTMENT

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PCDE

10:29 PM ET

September 24, 2009

Hypocrisy alert

Your post at 1:56 questions why Judy Miller has not been relegated to a life of professional exile due to her false claims of Iraqi WMD during the run-up to the invasion of March '03. We now know that Miller was being fed bogus or at least cherry-picked intel from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and Cheney aide Scooter Libby.

Your post at 4:21 mocks Joe Biden by asking "when was the last time he (Biden) was right about anything."

The post at 2:21 plugs an upcoming seminar at AEI and you also point out their mistakes about the Iraq war. However, you also absolve them of their errors by indicating "everyone makes mistakes."

In the "Gamble' Eliot Cohen is portrayed in a shining light, a man that knew how to fix Iraq before most others ever heard of COIN. He was described as a steely intellectual who knew that the ineffectual Generals Sanchez and or Casey should be fired.

But your book and your post at 3:52 do not mention the fact that Eliot Cohen was a signatory of the 1997 PNAC letter to Bill Clinton that called for more aggressive action against Saddam. You never mention that Cohen was a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Cohen was a huge backer of the invasion of Iraq, an event you correctly describe as America's largest foreign policy disaster.

Why do you trash Judy Miller and Joe Biden for their errors but look past the errors of AEI and Eliot Cohen? How come Judy Miller should be exiled and not Eliot Cohen? If Eliot Cohen is so smart, why did he promote a war that is the biggest disaster in our nation's history?

ADMIRAL

11:47 PM ET

September 25, 2009

Solid Post

There are some in journalist circles that see "The Gamble" as Mr. Ricks's "Coming out party." The Ricks of "Fiasco" appears to no longer exist. Ricks like Cohen supports the pentagon junta over our elected civilian leadership. Why Mr. Ricks is working so hard to undermine our President and help the junta's information warfare campaign against the American people is disturbing. It is obvious that the junta despises President Obama completely and will do anything in their power to ruin him. I fear for his safety.

PHIL RIDDERHOF

4:31 PM ET

September 25, 2009

Measuring Violence

Cohen has a point. In Iraq it was, and remained, controversial on how we acccounted for violence. If we only accept coalition reporting that could be verified, then we risk undercounting, or completely missing that which occurs where there is no coalition presence.
Low violence can also mean that the area is "pacified", but for the other guy, not for us.
Basra prior to the 2008 Iraqi counter-offensive is a good example of both phenomena. We didn't have verifiable sources in the city, and the local government/security forces had worked out a cease-fire deal with the Mahdi Army. The result was continually low violence counts. That doesn't mean it was stable or pro-government by any measure.