Canadian officer: Yes to McChrystal, and here's why

Wed, 10/21/2009 - 12:29pm

I've been reading an unusually candid report on the Afghan war a Canadian military intelligence officer delivered earlier this month in Ottawa. Capt. G.B. Rolston, who served in Kandahar from September 2008 to April of this year, offers several striking observations about the state of the war that go a long way toward explaining why the current approach has been so unproductive. They also speak to the crucial question of why Gen. McChrystal's proposals are about much more than just adding more troops and in fact amount to a call for radical change in the conduct of the war.

  • Welcome to an Afghan army brigade headquarters: "The table is [the brigade commander's] CP. His cellphone is their primary comms link. The G2 is off somewhere playing chess with a source, the G3 is driving around the city by himself looking for troops to jack up and the G4 is taking a nap. Most of the rest of the headquarters are off playing cards or chess or watching Bollywood videos on a cellphone."
  • The Afghan treatment of detainees is so lax as to verge on bizarre. "The Afghans are, I am happy to report, exceedingly hospitable to detainees. You can see [in an accompanying photo] these men are neither restrained nor blindfolded. This picture was taken shortly after I suggested to the Canadian operations mentor, seated, that he remove the magazines from their weapons."
  • Detainee operations around Kandahar actually probably help the Taliban more than they do Afghan government forces. "[I]t's fair to say that every high level insurgent in the province has been through the mill at least once. More problematic to me was the disposition of detainees while in custody, either left to sit around in the intelligence office, or sometimes next to the brigade commander as shown here for extended periods. It's fair to say that any bona fide insurgent in ANA custody probably learned more from the experience than the other way around."
  • Afghan National Army military intelligence officers brought an interesting perspective to signals interception: "rather than passively listening [to enemy radio traffic], the ANA had a tendency to get into arguments with insurgents."
  • In one remote village, strong Afghan commanders worked hard to deny the area to the Taliban, and also gained a remarkable amount of intelligence. But then the outpost "was closed just after the end of our tour due to its sustainment difficulties, in all likelihood dooming many of the locals who had collaborated with us there." This is the opposite of protecting the population -- it is endangering them.
  • He also takes a small whack at the Americans, saying that the safest police stations in southern Afghanistan were those where Canadian mentors lived and slept. "The American PMT approach, which involved teams driving out in the morning to visit, regrettably was far less effective in this regard." 
  • After years of training and advising, "we were still very much at year zero." (Are you listening, Senator Levin?) The Afghan forces he knew couldn't control a district, he said. "And that's a big problem, because the whole definition of victory in a counter-insurgency, as defined in FM 3-24 and elsewhere, is getting the battle to the point where indigenous forces can take over, and you can leave. ... All [the enemy] has to do is deny you that indigenous force development, by making things so kinetic that you can't focus on mentoring."
  • Under the way we currently operate, he says, most allied units think that dealing with Afghans is someone else's job. "Mentors in effect become the excuse for Western soldiers to avoid contact with Afghan soldiers."    
  • That last issue, the failure of mentoring, leads to his strong endorsement of Gen. McChrystal's recommendations for a radical new approach to the war. The most significant aspect of the general's plan, he says, is to have Americans and other foreign troops co-located with Afghan forces, living, eating and sleeping alongside them. He advocates giving up mentoring and going instead to this flat-out partnering.

His conclusion: "The key, the absolute key aspect in McChrystal's words is co-location."

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

Thomas E. Ricks | Permalink | | Comments? Login or register
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Capt. Flit

by Zathras on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 12:59pm

More striking observations on the Afghan war from a Canadian perspective can be found at Rolston's blog, Flit: http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/

He's maintained this site for years, with time off while on active duty, and is one of the best writers on military affairs on the Internet.

..do not clutch at straws..

by Bill Keller on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 1:21pm

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/910740ee-bda9-11de-9f6a-00144feab49a.html

This is a comment of John Kay in Today's FT..The Stockdale Paradox is moving to the business sector...maybe it will flow into military strategy.

Give him what he wants, but. . .

by JPWREL on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 1:45pm

Well, it seems that via McChrystal the uniforms want Obama to agree to a significant escalation of manpower connected in theory at least to a change in technique as described by our Canadian friend. I hesitate to call McChrystal’s ideas a change in strategy since my gut tells me soldiers and politicians alike are in total confusion about goals and objectives hence defining a real strategy is nearly impossible.

However, I am beginning to think that Obama should go ahead and give McChrystal what he wants. Put the onus on the brass hats to perform and if they don’t then all that extra rope we have given them might find some use around their necks. One thing though, I would tell McChrystal to make sure to ask for all he wants now because he is not coming back whining that he needs more and more, that is just not on.

How much time allowed

by Tyrtaios on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 2:06pm

How much available time are you going to allow for tangible results to appear? Even many in uniform have difficulty accepting strategic patience, let alone the American population.

Sun Tzu sent a messenger to the King of Wu saying, “Your Majesty, the soldiers are now correctly drilled and perfectly disciplined. As sovereign, you may choose to require them to go through fire and water and they will not disobey.”

The King responded, “Our commander should cease the drill and return to his camp. We do not wish to come down and inspect the troops.”

With great calm, Sun Tzu said, “This King is only fond of words and cannot carry them into deeds.”

Well, I doubt if even the

by JPWREL on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 4:12pm

Well, I doubt if even the brilliant Sun Tzu would have found the invasion of Afghanistan a tempting proposition. I would give McChrystal a three-year time frame (a private and not a public understanding) but in fact we probably would know if we were going to see meaningful results within two years of reaching the peak of the reinforcement. McChrystal may be right, it is a speculation, but if he is wrong then we don’t need the military to come whining about how they were let down. We have enough contention in politics without a rerun of post Vietnam finger pointing

I must admit that I have a personal stake in this decision in that my son-in-law of whom I am very close to and admire deeply is a Navy SEAL officer in command of a platoon of outstanding young men unlike anything else in the U. S. armed forces. They will eagerly go wherever they are ordered and do a superb job. However, I do not have their youthful enthusiasm for battle and would much prefer that they be assigned missions that actually serve their nations interests and make the risks they cheerfully accept in both training and combat worthwhile to both themselves and their countrymen.

It will be very-very

by Tyrtaios on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 6:01pm

There can be no secrets. It will be very-very important to explain to the American public (if in fact we implement Gen. McChrystal's plan fully) that we will need to show patience. We must have the public behind this - no secrets!

Navy SpecWarfare has come along way since they finally learned to patrol beyond the high water mark. I wish your son-in-law well. Though I believe like Marines, their mission should be around salt water, it appears we will be land-locked for awhile. cheers

What's the Downside

by PrahaPartizan on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 8:44am

So, we're expected to give McChrystal three years to carry out his program with what downside for his career if he fails. So far, all I've seen from the Pentagon in our entire "war on terror" is that generals get promoted no matter how badly they've failed in either preparing plans or executing them. The nation is expected to pay an enormous price in treasure and lives and no one gets called to account.

I would like General McChrystal to give us the full worst-case assessment in terms of troop requirements and cost. I don't want "mark to magic" estimates based on the very best results comparable to the plus six-sigma side of the curve. I want to know what the real down-side costs could very well be.

We haven't been given those numbers yet and I suspect we haven't gotten them for a very good reason: no reasonable person would follow the good general's recommendation if they knew the truth. The US electorate has been misled too often during the last eight years by mendacious military leaders. Enough! Time to end the shadow play by puppets.

How does this relate to the # of American soldiers and marines?

by Norwegian Shooter on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 4:08pm

I have no idea how somebody can cite the miserable state of the Afghan Army and then go on to say our exit strategy is to increase the size of the Afghan Army. Wait, they don't actually talk about our exit strategy, do they.

Co-location equals co-dependence.

This really pisses me off

by Norwegian Shooter on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 4:14pm

Where is the discussion about Afghan politics? Military men have military solutions. Doesn't anyone every apply institutional theory to the military? Bureaucracies want to increase their power - more, more, more.

McChrystal’s strategy

by Watson on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 4:15pm

Counterinsurgency theorists generally espouse goals such as “winning hearts and minds”, and “nation building”.

According to the NYT, “At the heart of [Gen] McChrystal’s strategy are three principles: protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state and make friends with whomever you can, including insurgents.”

I’m sure that the military planners are sincere, and that achieving those objectives would be essential to success, but the likelihood of an honest, sustained US commitment to such goals is slight, given that our hawkish faction consists of an establishment that substantially (not totally) embraces the clash-of-civilizations worldview, and which cultivates in its nativist base a contempt for foreigners in general, and for “diaperheads” in particular.

I'm not convinced...

by drlake777 on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 4:31pm

I'm not convinced that the sorry state of the Afghan security forces is adequate justification for increasing the US commitment. The presumption here is that if McChrystal gets his troops, he will use them in such a way as to rectify many of these problems. Even if he does manage to improve the quality of the ANA, so what?

There are four big issues I see off the top of my head that an increased American commitment won't do anything meaningful about, and all of them are significant obstacles to creating the stable Afghanistan that we are trying to leave when we go.

First, weak central authority. Afghanistan has never really been a centralized state, though it probably was closest during the Taliban era. Instead, the poor infrastructure, rough terrain, lack of development, and strong tribal identities have meant it was always fairly decentralized, with the writ of the central government being very limited. The fix to this is extensive infrastructure construction that results in development of a more modern economy, and presumably a national identity. That isn't going to happen any time soon, because no one is willing to spend the time or money.

Second, no national identity. As noted above, tribal identities are very strong in Afghanistan. That wouldn't be a problem if there were a national identity, but there isn't. Instead, Afghan Tajiks, Pashtuns, Baluchis, Uzbeks, etc. all see themselves as having more in common with their fellows across national borders than they do with each other. A national identity that is stronger than tribal identities is not likely to form for many years, no matter what the US does.

Third, the lack of central government legitimacy. Karzai has the dubious distinction of being viewed as both the pawn of the US and corrupt. Even if he loses, Abdullah is going to be viewed as illegitimate by those who supported Karzai, and is more likely than not to preside over a regime as corrupt as the current one. We need an Afghan Pericles, and we aren't going to find one.

Fourth, the cost of the ANA we are trying to build. If we succeed in building up the ANA to the desired size and quality, the Afghan government will never be able to afford to maintain it. While exact figures are not available, I've seen estimates as high as $5 billion per year to maintain the ANA we are trying to build. While that is a rounding error in the US budget, the GNP of Afghanistan is under $20 billion, and government revenues are measured in the millions, not billions. Even if we could develop the bureaucratic apparatus to collect taxes more effectively, Afghanistan is decades away from an economy strong enough to support that kind of military budget.

Basically, I don't see any actual value in sending more troops. I'd rather not throw away hundreds of our soldiers' lives and billions of dollars to demonstrate that this is a bad idea.

Personally, I am very

by JPWREL on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 7:35pm

Personally, I am very sympathetic to the points you make. However, my feeling is that the highly contentious debate going on in this country about expanding our effort in Afghanistan is at its core political and not military. The new Obama administration probably does not have the political fortitude to turn its back upon its own electioneering rhetoric followed by it’s premature acceptance of a general strategic outline in March.

McChrystal in my view seems to have come up with what a general would be expected to do and that is recommend a military solution to what is essentially a political problem. Should we be in the business of telling the Afghans what type of country they should have? Have we inadvertently broadened the war from a fight against a specific terrorist threat into a crusade to remake Afghan society? I think we have fallen in to the latter camp and thus have taken our eye off the anti-terrorist ball in favor of nation building.

However, we will never know if McChrystal is right unless we accept his views and escalate the war. A cautious Obama has just not developed the political sway within his own party let alone with the feckless and bellicose Republicans who resent and detest his very presence in Washington to do otherwise. The political risk of failure is thus partially shared by the GOP hawks and the generals where it belongs. And on the other side of the coin any success as problematic as is sounds will be largely Obama’s.

The main effort

by Walking Wounded on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 10:58pm

in the 'play it funky, Stan's way' debate appears to have worked out to be a fill while the election scandal leverage agin Karzai developed. Abdullah is on NPR this week shilling for the new 'surge', and our Prez is on the telly saying 'we need a podner we can trust before we surge...' I'm sensing a "TILT".

Vlad's old boss Andropov was rumored to say that it's good to have more than one number in Kabul.

Coupla other loose thoughts:
-Why would we trust the ISI to be picking Predator targets for us over in the nuclear Islamic Republic?
-The US economy still runs on oil, which is priced over in the Gulf, where the bulk of our naval and expeditionary land force is still deployed. Identify the main effort by the budget, not the casualties.

feckless and bellicose? Well,

by Oldpilot on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 8:40am

feckless and bellicose?

Well, better that than oxymoronic!

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

No to McChrystal, and here's why

by Don Bacon on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 7:28pm

Now, based on the evidence, that makes more sense.

It's also consistent with the will of Canadians. This war is even less popular in Canada then in the US and there will be no Canadian troop increases. In fact Canada will pull its combat troops by December 2011 because 56 per cent of Canadians oppose military operations involving Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, whereas 51 percent of Americans now say the war is not worth fighting.

Let's say the Canadian is 100% correct

by kunino on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 8:40pm

Does this give us any reason to believe that McChrystal or any other non-Afghan general can do anything to improve things? There seems no suggestion of it.

Small point of clarification

by BruceR on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 9:48pm

Mr. Ricks, if I may I'd just like to reiterate for some of your commenters that the speaking notes of mine you've excerpted related to a requirement identified by Gen. McChrystal for a "radical" change in institutional culture as regards ISAF-ANSF relations, not his or anyone's projections of troop strength going forward, which I would regard as a separate issue.

Indeed, the General's assessment states quite clearly that in the absence of such a dramatic culture shift (from where things were a year ago when I was an ANA mentor), any questions of increasing contingent size would be practically irrelevant. As you have correctly related in your original post, my remarks were strongly supportive of that point of view.

Regards,

G.B. Rolston

What does McChrystal expect?

by Zathras on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 10:13pm

Indeed, and it would be more difficult to effectuate this kind of "radical" change in the institutional culture of the multinational force in Afghanistan than it was in the almost exclusively American force in Iraq.

I'm not sure how much progress we could expect if only the American, Canadian, and perhaps Dutch contingents in the NATO force in Afghanistan made this change, seeing that we could expect to continue losing ground in areas where forces from other NATO countries were deployed. Actually, I'm not sure how much progress Gen. McChrystal thinks we could expect, or how he proposes to get non-Anglophone units deployed in Afghanistan to make the dramatic change in approach he is urging on the American army there.

Rolston's report is a powerful vote AGAINST McChrystal, IMO

by alex_lerman on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 4:02am

These Afghan soldiers sound like they have no will to fight, and nothing to fight for - very similar to the despised ARVNs who were to be the building-blocks of "vietnamization" back in the day. And they're matched up against men who are willing to die for their cause - right or wrong.

How is McChrystal - or anybody - going to inspire the men described here to fight to win?

I've resisted Viet Nam comparisons - but Karzai and his cronies stink to high heaven, the same smell as the gang of pimps and whackjobs we sent our sons to die for in Asia in the 60's and 70's.

'the despised ARVNs' suffered

by Oldpilot on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 8:47am

'the despised ARVNs' suffered about 200,000 combat deaths, which, relative to the size of the two nations, would equate to 2.6 million American fatalities (Joes: Resisting Rebellion, p.137).

That doesn't count militia fatalities--nor civilians, of course.

Karzai==Diem?

by PrahaPartizan on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 9:42am

Kabul certainly does exude a rancid odor reminiscent of Saigon, doesn't it? The Afghan army condition seems even more redolent of that in South Korea when the North Koreans invaded and the entire South Korean Army had to be rebuilt.

What bothers me about McChrystal's plan is that the immediate military force required doesn't match what's available or possible at all. I've seen estimates on the active Taliban/AQ in the range of 15K insurgents. Afghanistan's population is estimated by the CIA at around 29 million, so that number would most likely be the lower bound. Every COIN policy I've ever seen described calls for government force ratios in the range of 10:1, so McChrystal's program achieves that level marginally, if we believe that all of the NATO and other forces remain at their current level and that the Afghan forces can participate in the effort. Of course, if the number of active insurgents "jumps" from 0.05% of the population to 0.1%, then the plan will need another 150K troops to begin to be effective, immediately. Training the Afghan army will not be an immediate affair and even US troop deployments to Afghanistan are limited to about 5K-10K per month, so any major build-up takes months to accomplish. We're going to be running behind the power curve for months because of the time lost by incompetence over the last seven years, with only the slimmest probability of achieving anything like marginal success in the offing. We need to be calling for a major regional conference to enlist the aid of others in this area if we expect to have any chance at all of pulling these chestnuts out of the fire.

Of course what you describe

by JPWREL on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 10:44am

Of course what you describe are military and operational realities, which likely are incidental to the real political realities of waging war in Afghanistan. For those who worship at the temple of ‘COIN’ it must be difficult to rationalize the recommended 10:1 ratio or even a more likely 20:1 ratio with what is politically possible. My guess is that COIN like all religious doctrines would be bent and shaped to match the political realities.

In a sense the United States has the resources to flood the country with troops. We could even reinstitute conscription in order to reinforce our infantry component and have a tax surcharge to pay for the war. That policy of course would begin to touch the personal lives of American families (suffering and risk is now confined to a relatively few military families) and more importantly the pockets of tax adverse Republican war hawks.

But the question then arises how important is a ‘victory’ in this nation building experiment in land locked Afghanistan in relation to all our other world wide naval and military commitments. I ask what are our strategic priorities? What are we willing to give up in the Congressional playground of procurement, and other global security responsibilities in order to concentrate our resources and manage some sort of triumph in Afghanistan?

sorry but this doesn't

by saintsimon on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 10:43am

sorry but this doesn't address cause - if mentoring can't amend problem of Afghans inability to 'rally round the flag' as it were that does not mean that ineffective mentoring is the cause of the dysfunction, it may simply just be another symptom - to fix the problem you have to find the cause - and if the cause is cultural and not procedural good luck trying to fix it by forcing hardass American jarheads to sleep with the enemy. I have yet to talk to a Marine much enthused by that prospect.

More from Capt. Rolston

by MarkOttawa on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 10:59am

An article in "SITREP, The Journal of the Royal Canadian Military Institute", on problems operating with, and mentoring, the ANA. A particular difficulty is the effective inability to shift units from quieter parts of the country to more heavily contested ones:

http://www.rcmi.org/archives/SITREP/09/09-5%20Sitrep.pdf#page=8

Mark
Ottawa

whats the war all about?

by factual on Fri, 10/23/2009 - 2:18am

whats the war all about?

whats stopping the americans from staying undistracted from these issues and focus on the primary objectives instead.

the allies are not going to be in afganistan forever, they should have realised that by noe. time isnt their friend anymore.

face the war like brave generals. take the decisions when you must. deploy the necvcessary tool and equipment. do anything . just win the goddamm war

Another Afghan-Viet parallel ...

by kunino on Sat, 10/24/2009 - 8:19pm

... and there are more and more all the time. The Canadian colonel who reports that "[T]he safest police stations in southern Afghanistan were those where Canadian mentors lived and slept .... 'The American PMT approach, which involved teams driving out in the morning to visit, regrettably was far less effective in this regard.'"

This both presents a parallel with Vietnam, and shows that the US military command learned little or nothing in the past 45 years.

In the afternoon briefings in Saigon during the hostilities (known by trusting reports as the Five O'Clock Follies), daily claims of successes in the preceding 24 hours usually included a number of claimed captures of Viet Cong airstrips.

Reporters in what we no know as the Stephen Colbert stenographic tradition dutifully wrote this down and the press reported it as fact, or, at best, claim.

Then a young guy sent out by The New York Times asked himself why the Viet Cong would have airstrips, since they had no aircraft. His brief and simple inquiries establiahed that every day along sundown, US forces would pull out of ARVN and US airstrips up and down the country, returning the following morning after dawn. No Viet Cong seen either time. These returns were the claimed VC airstrip captures.

Are today's early-morning returns in Afghanistan now being similarly misrepresented? Do the Canadians have a better grip on understanding the nation and its people; and winning their trust; by having their troops spend the nights, with attendant probabilities of continuing informal socializing, than do US forces?

That young NYTimes guy was David Halberstam, whose airstrip report made his name in one day. Some 11 or 12 years before the US forces came home.