The military view of future policy in Afghanistan

"On the McChrystal plan, Alford added, "We've got to do some real math and tell some real truth ... if we are going to do population-centric COIN.""

Population-centric COIN works towards a strategic objective of establishing a legitimate (read: democratic, market economy) and stable government. If that is our strateic objective, through which we pursue other national interests, then the preferred COIN approach is appropriate and the stated resource requirements are logical.
The real question is whether this is, or should be, our strategic objective. If we choose something else, or less than a stable legitimate government, then the strategy/approach could be different.
For the military, are we placing the cart (the doctrine) before the horse (the strategic objective)? The complaint going into these conflicts was that the military only supported pursing strategic objectives that fit its preferred "defeat/destroy the enemy armed forces" approach. Have we merely exchanged preferred doctrines? Does this provide the nation the necessary strategic flexibility?

That McChrystal (Petraeus-2012-campaign) plan and its active marketing all around only shows that, as Clemenceau said, war is too important to leave it to the military.

Obama and the civil leaderships have many more things to consider that about doing COIN or not.

- What is achievable in Afghanistan (McChrystal doesn't say)
- At what price (McChrystal doesn't say)
- Are there more urgent problems (McChrystal doesn't say)
- ...

MoonofA is exactly right. But it's a combination of punches. First Odierno in Iraq then McChrystal in Afhanistan. Nowhere is there a realistic assessment of the situation. Someone might want to educate us on the 610millionreal combat ready troop strength of U.S. forces to man the two wars, and what if anything, really exists in the Afghani security forces.

From what I've been reading: the military has no government to partner with in Afghanistan. Karzi and his crew are corrupt and (worst) ineffective.

This country isn't like Iraq; there aren't the governmental institutions and memories of these bodies to cobble back together and provide real services to the citizenry.

The elections and the fraud resulting seem to me to be a serious wake up call. And it's not something I'm seeing addressed. You asked in an earlier post what has Biden gotten right, okay, well how is he wrong in this?

Well I direct you to a paper produced in 1963 by James Farmer. The title is " Counter-Insurgency: Viet-Nam 1962-1963, as an aside this corresponds to my time in the military as a draftee so I had friends sent to the "big muddy". If you read this an then perform a global change to replace the key words about Viet-Nam with new key words about Afghanistan it is a strange experience. The report starts with the key motivating forces. 1. People desire to "win" independence 2. "war weariness", 3. Desire for higher standard of living, 4. Ngo-Dinah-Diem desire to found a dynasty 5. The clash of culture. So what was needed was a Strategic Hamlet Program. Well, no sense going on we all know how well that turned out. So why is this any different? Oh yes when you read this Farmer report walk along the Viet-Nam Memorial Wall, just to put into perspective. One final thought to do what McChrystal calls for we will need to begin the drafting of personnel.

So why is this any different?

This time Russian and Chinese won't stand behind Taliban, as they did last time in Viet-Nam.

You are kidding yourself!

From CS Monitor:

"Today's Taliban continues to receive funding, he adds, some of it from rich Arab donors, but much of it from the intelligence agencies of Russia, Iran, and Pakistan. "There are some countries that are against the polices of the US and the United Nations, and they support the guerrillas. The most important role belongs to Russia, Iran, and Pakistan."

They don't get weapons out of whole cloth.

CS Monitor lost most of its status after it became a complete free online newspaper. Even if what it said is true, well, you only have yourself to blame.

At first, everyone is supporting you, Iran lets you pass its sky, Russia allows you build bases in central asia, and PK gives you full support. Only if you claimed "mission accomplished" and left at the time...but longer you stayed, more suspicious others felt about your motives. So they might just equip the militia again to keep their own influence intact. Now probably they want you to stay longer to inflict more blood and treasure.

Commanders are always asking for more troops; it allows them to do things and go places they otherwise couldn't - good or bad.

If al-Qaeda (and Hezbollah who operates in our own southern hemisphere incidentally) are forward thinking, then in the past, the Taliban were the block-heads who could be counted on to think backwards.

That's not the case anymore, as they seem to be out maneuvering the the Karzai government, and by doing so, us also. (I noted someone over at SWJ picked-up on this.)

It won't matter what we do with pop-centric COIN unless the population we're trying to stablize, and see to it they can make a living, have no faith in their government.

In his thesis Heroes of the Age, David B. Edwards states Afghanistan’s problems come from the moral incoherence of the country itself, in that Afghans share a myth of the nation, but not an idea of the state. The crux being that the principles of Islam, honor and state governance are all respected, but too often incompatible.

Time to think of the minimalist approach before making a hasty decision on sending more infantry (an infantry trained to close with and destroy the enemy). In the meantime however, send the support troops home and replace them with trigger-pullers. The manning-levels remain the same.

Firstly, it is pointless to criticize the armed forces seeming bewilderment about how to proceed in Afghanistan. Our nation and NATO as a whole are frustrated and confused about progress in that unhappy land. As is common these days the military has been thrown into a mission whose strategic objectives are completely unresolved. Public support will continue to deteriorate in light of the fact that it is almost impossible to convincingly demonstrate any conclusive and positive results in exchange for the blood and financial sacrifice.

The prior administration was astoundingly incompetent in its six-year management of the war and the current administration in order to establish its national security credentials for electoral purposes too quickly and lightly adopted this quagmire as the poster child for a ‘good war’ in comparison to the duplicitous ‘bad war’ in Iraq.

Until the political class can make a clear and convincing argument that we need to spend probably a decade or more in Afghanistan, accept thousands of casualties and spend hundreds of billons of dollars then all the military symposiums about effective operational methods and tactics are moot.

First, in Afghanistan there is no mission or objectives. In the current jargon there are only "strategies."

In other words, they skip down to paragraph 3 of the standard army ops order.
1. Situation, enemy and friendly
2. Mission, Who, What, When, Why and Where
3. Execution
But I started in the brown-shoe army so what do I know. Anyhow, they talk about strategies -- "what we must do."

McChrystal: "NATO's Comprehensive Strategic Political Military Plan and President Obama's strategy to disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al Qaeda and prevent their return to Afghanistan have laid out a clear path of what we must do."
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/assessment_redacted_092109.pdf

But that wasn't the strategy that President Obama laid out in March.

Obama: "The strategy starts with a clear, concise, attainable goal: disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens."

See the difference? Obama said defeat AQ and its safe havens, McChrystal said "prevent their return." Big difference, because preventing their return apparently requires nation-building while trying to deal with a government in Kabul that is more a US enemy than a friend.

And then Obama complicated matters further on Sep 20, 2009: The fight in Afghanistan must be narrowed to its original intent of stamping out al-Qaida and hunting down Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama said today. “We’re there because al-Qaida killed 3,000 Americans and we cannot allow extremists who want to do violence to the United States to be able to operate with impunity,” Obama said this morning on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=55909

"we cannot allow extremists who want to do violence to the United States to be able to operate with impunity.” What does that mean, in terms of Afghanistan, and all the other places where AQ has a presence, and how will it involve the US military?

So if there's no agreement on a mission, or even an intelligent discussion of it, we're fucked. If you don't know where you're going, any path will take you there.

Col. Alford's revelation that the USMC ain't close to the Afghan security forces is just one more evidence that the military have been locked into a losing strategy in that theater for years. The only thing that will get the US military outa there, it's officially suggested, is bringing up the Afghan security forces to speed. The current physical separation Alford describes means only one thing: the USMC doesn't trust the locals. It suggests the Corps never will.

It also prompts a simple question: Could the US military ever hope to overcome the current estrangement built up over years between their forces there, and the locals? The McChrystal approach seems to be based on the romantic idea that all the bad stuff will just be forgotten by the Afghans if US policies and practices change there. But it's the American public that has short memories about what's going on in Afghanistan. Afghan memories about who attacks them are very, very long indeed.

US Generals want more troops in Afghanistan?
Alexander the Great is the only one to come close to victory in Afghanistan. He paid dearly for fighting there.

Afghanistan's area is 250,000 square miles; 1.5 times the size of California. And like CA, many armed people dwell in Afghanistan. How many million soldiers would it take to control CA? How many million to secure Afghanistan?

We have 70,000 troops in Afghanistan. At any time half are asleep. Then if one deducts military overhead (medics, commo, mechanics etc); how many 'shooters' remain to secure Afghanistan's quarter million square miles?
Not to mention---most officers Captain and above know that religious mass movements cannot be put down solely by military means. See Christians and Romans, Islam, etc.

These two factors and others lead one to ponder just how much tragic “We Can Do It” lying has been mouthed by general officers the last eight years. And, this swill came from generals who are the most formally educated, but maybe the most ineffective, most politicized military leaders in our history. (Would any of them, one star and above been promoted if they weren't politically vetted and consecrated by the Bush Administration?)

If Obama does not discover that the politically-bent, look-cute-be-glib-on-TV generals he inherited are full of kolbasi faster than Pres Lincoln did; our young soldiers are in for greater tragedy. So is our nation.
A purge of our politically-bent, religiously-bent, vocal military leadership is long overdue. That military leadership handed the Middle-East Victory Cup to Iran years ago---a victory cup filled with innocent American and Iraqi blood.
Floyd McGurk, (elder combat veteran in a family of four combat-vetted members who’ve done seven tours in Iraq since early 2006.)

It's because of the rationality of citizens like Floyd McGurk that foreign policy decisions should not be based on classified reports but should receive the attention of all citizens, many of whom like McGurk make a lot more sense than "the most ineffective, most politicized military leaders in our history."

At least one of McGurk's "look-cute-be-glib-on-TV generals" formerly had more sense (in 1987, before his political involvement).

The Vietnam experience left the military leadership feeling that they should advise against involvement in counterinsurgencies unless specific, perhaps unlikely, circumstances obtain -- i.e. domestic public support, the promise of a quick campaign, and freedom to employ whatever force is necessary to achieve rapid victory.

In light of such criteria, committing U.S. units to counterinsurgencies appears to be a very problematic proposition, difficult to conclude before domestic support erodes and costly enough to threaten the well-being of all America's military forces (and hence the country's national security), not just those involved in the actual counterinsurgency."”

David Howell Petraeus, The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam; PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 1987. Page 305
http://www.hnn.us/blogs/entries/42627.html

TR,
What is that book that Petraeus is reading?

General officers who press ahead with 'strategies' to meet 'goals' without the backing of a mission mandate are nothing but careerist weenies. One of them - all of them - should cry Stop!

The military does not have the authority to determine what 'victory' means, absent national guidance. Not there but needed is a clear, definitive, authoritative, and achievable statement of ' this is how we want this to turn out.' ALL the discussion above is pointless and sad...

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it's a marketing problem, according to a WaPo article.

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan must "wrest the information initiative" from the Taliban and other insurgent groups that have undermined the credibility of the Kabul government and its international backers, according to the top U.S. and NATO commander in the country.

As an initial step, McChrystal wants to change the goal of public relations efforts in Afghanistan from a "struggle for the 'hearts and minds' of the Afghan population to one of giving them 'trust and confidence' " in themselves and their government.

One way to accomplish that, McChrystal wrote, is to target insurgent networks "to disrupt and degrade" their effectiveness. Another is to expose what he calls the insurgents' "flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran," including indiscriminate use of violence and terrorism, and attacks on schools and development projects.

McChrystal recognized in his report that Afghans traditionally communicate by word of mouth. He called for better exploitation of those "more orthodox methods" -- getting "authoritative figures" such as religious leaders and tribal elders to deliver the messages "so that they are credible."

McChrystal also called in his assessment for the coalition to develop its own print, radio and television systems, and to take steps to "partner more effectively with the Afghan commercial sector."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/26/AR2009092601748.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-090924stantis-cartoon,0,454454.cartoon

Amen.