Do we have to read the report? Not knowing all the facts has never before stopped us from having opinions.

Oh its only about 25 pages or so nothing to onerous and certainly in college you put away a lot more pages than that in any given evening.

Flynn writes: “Leaders must put time and energy into selecting the best, most extroverted and hungriest analysts to serve in the Stability Operations Information Centers. These will be among the most challenging and rewarding jobs an analyst could tackle.”

My question would be do we really have the ‘best and brightest’ in these critical jobs or just the best in the pool of available talent? During the Second World War as a result of conscription we had access to high power gray matter from the Ivy League and technical university’s for such work. Today, we rely upon volunteers who while certainly dedicated perhaps do not have similar intellectual capacity. People with that kind of analytical skill certainly will find more lucrative opportunities in investment banking, law or medical school.

The really top tier schools do not seem to be sending their graduates into the military so I am wondering where all these super analysts Flynn is looking for are going to come from? Having worked on Wall Street for thirty years I had opportunities to meet some really brilliant people even if at times they were ethically challenged. Frankly, I just don’t see these kinds of minds in the armed forces today.

People such as this are usually iconoclastic and difficult to manage. Certainly most of them are egoists with contempt for authority but they know how to look at complex masses of data and derive substance. Bletchley Park was a perfect example of how these kinds of often-difficult people were mobilized to the aid the allies in penetrating German cryptology. I have always wondered how long would an eccentric but brilliant T. E. Lawrence survive in the modern U. S. Army or British Army for that matter?

There are some great quotations in the article. After describing how intelligence information usually flows from top to bottom during conventional conflicts, the authors state:

"In a counterinsurgency, the flow is (or should be) reversed. The soldier or development worker is usually the person best informed about the environment and the enemy. Moving up through levels of hierarchy is normally a journey into greater degrees of cluelessness."

"Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency."

The American military looks at war as an engineering problem. Collect enough data, apply the right tool, add cement, and we win. Counter insurgency is art. This is why Flynn's comments are so cutting. if we cannot feel the environment, we cannot make the right interactions. There has to be a way to get US intelligence officers off the compound?

DoD Official Welcomes Report as ‘Candid Assessment’
By John J. Kruzel
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6, 2010 – A report this week from a top U.S. military intelligence official criticizing the state of intelligence in Afghanistan is a “candid self-assessment” that enriches debate on U.S. strategy, the Pentagon press secretary said today.

The need for a sweeping reform of intelligence practices in Afghanistan underlines proposals Army Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the deputy chief of staff for Intelligence in Afghanistan, and his advisors published this week through the Washington-based think tank Center for a New American Security.

Though Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had not yet read the report, Pentagon Spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters it typified the kind of “candid, critical self-assessment that the secretary believes is a sign of a strong and healthy organization.”

“This kind of honest appraisal enriches what has been a very real and hearty and vigorous debate that, frankly, has been taking place within this building, within this department and within this government for years now,” Morrell said.

I disagree. Reformattiing the intel doesn't make it more accurate. Pushing core collectors off the compound, into the real world, may accidently cause surprising information to develop.

Once you get past the exciting quotable quotes, there are a few things that seem to have missed the attention of commentators in the Flynn piece that are worth highlighting. Remembering his distinction between 'red' and 'white' intelligence, he made it clear redint is well resourced and doing ok, whiteint was where there was weakness. The bottom line is that the US military does not have a whiteint culture that is so fundamental to COIN. It is remarkable that after all this time whiteint is an afterthought.

Whiteint is broad political, economic, social, and cultural SA at the local, provincial and finally national level (in that order). No computer can generate that for you. As Flynn rightly stresses, you need thinking human sensors and its a bottom-up int process/loop where the troop on the ground ‘tasks’ themselves and thus decides what the general sees, not the general in the arm chair tasking the troops. You also need adept analysts who can see the mass of tiny data sets and find the patterns. This is where the PhD looking for a job could make a big difference if s/he was given sufficient authority to get stuck into the data.

The boys over at danger room rightly asked where is the Human Terrain System in all this? No mention from Flynn. We all know HTS has had problems but that is their bailiwick. An inf Bn commander commented to me – “the Bn 2 shop does not answer to Flynn” implying that the paper is nice but wont change a thing. Redint uber alles! The fact is redint and bombs are not delivering long-term results. In fact it is contributing to an emphasis on kinetics over McChrystal’s Sun Tzu approach (namely winning without fighting, as one might characterize his strategy, which avoids CAS etc and gets troops among the people).

What really struck me and as far as I know has not been commented upon, is that the new system Flynn is putting in place reports to State, not Flynn or DoD. Could this be the first time a DoD mandate from on high has created and supported a State function?

It seems to this reader that the war has transitioned through the following phases
*from going after AQ and the Talibs in 2001 and then balancing against them with unpalatable others interested in controlling Afghanistan and keeping AQ out (which will be the objective to which we return in 2011),
*to top-down nation building that actually has not faired too badly but is unsustainable in whiteint terms because up to 8 nations are in competition and the guy we picked is corrupt and weak (why do we always do that?). That is not to imply any others had a better shot BTW. Indeed, we seem to miss the key strategic whiteint point that the only ones powerful enough to seize and largely hold the chaos that is Afghanistan was the Talibs.
*to getting stuck fighting the Talibs who were bad guys but did not have an agenda outside Afghanistan, while AQ (who do have a global agenda) found sanctuary over the borders and not just in Pakistan. Thus pushing the war out not just to Pakistan but all around Afghanistan, to eastern Iran and wider southern central Asia.
*to fighting anyone in the valleys that shot at us, irrespective of Talib or AQ (redint over whiteint again)
*to now de-emphasizing kinetics, protecting key hamlets, reversing the power distribution to a bottom-up model (previously Karzai appointed everyone in Kabul right down to provincial police chiefs etc), and facilitating the nation-building program, again with a bottom-up focus. This is a great approach but far too late in the process. Had we done that in 2002 we might have had a shot at success. As it is, with the political timelines we are working under, we are kidding ourselves.

The Presidents biggest blunder was not taking his time to think through all the options before making his decision, it was not being creative enough in adopting a truly fresh approach in keeping with the timelines within which he chose to work. Consequently, I will wager a dollar to a penny that we will end up doing a deal with the Talibs hoping they stay local, and supporting anyone else who will balance against AQ (and maybe the Talibs).

The fight is no longer about Afghanistan anyway. US national interests are much more threatened by events in Pakistan. Paradoxically, the key to success might lie in Pakistan where so much of this trouble has originated because of its fears of India.

It seems to me that the only viable solution is to go back to enabling those local forces that seek to keep the Talibs from power and stand back and strike anyone who has an agenda that seeks to attack the US. I am reminded of TE Lawrence (to paraphrase) "do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Afghans do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Afghanistan, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.".

The same can be said for the Pakistan effort. The problem current US strategy does not address, nor does my vision of the small footprint CT option, is getting official Pakistan and India to understand that they both now face a common enemy (albeit of Pakistan's creation). I am not sure DC policy makers can have that impact within the region - indeed this is the whole point and source of frustration to our long term goals.

The President's strategy of basically MORE - suggests to me that we have not thought through what our goals truly are. Given the financial position we face and the severe weakening of US power economically, politically and morally (having not won quickly), I have a very narrow objective.

1. Refocus on AQ to stop attacks on the US, first, and then to eradicate/marginalize them, second. (It should have always been "a war on AQ", such a label would have short-circuited Iraq from the outset)

2. Explain we did our best to bring democracy to Afg but we see now that such a project is beyond the fractured ethnic/political divides within the territory and that our interests require us to support those who would seek to keep the Talibs from power. But also accept that to the extent the Taliban has domestic ambitions only, that we can live with that, so long as they all understand that any threat against the US will be met with overwhelming military force.

Gen Jones says there are 100 AQ in Afg. If this is true, we continue to engage in a disproportionate, expensive (human/otherwise), and unwinnable war because the bottom line is they are there, and we have to leave at some point. Its not like Afg is the only place AQ might seek sanctuary. They and their associates who want to attack the US are in Somalia, PI, Yemen, Saudi, etc. You don’t see us invading and bringing democracy as the solution to those places. If we had a few hundred years, endless money and a 10 million-man army we might have a shot at that. Its not that we don’t understand the culture - its that the culture will not accept our solutions - even the most culturally attuned solutions.

Indeed, given our infrastructure (human as well as physical) in country, withdrawing to provide a space for AQ to fill might not be so bad - we could follow them back in and use our networks in country to pursue them. Of course that is premised on the idea that they are now still interested in Afg VICE the much more lucrative target of Pakistan. I note here even the northern 'stans' (and eastern Iran) are all starting to experience their own islamist issues that have overflowed from Afg into their territories.

Pakistan is the key, and our policies do not seem to do anything to alter that escalating problem. Only because the islamists have focused attention on Pakistan have the Pak Army really woken up. Given the fact the Pakistani's haven't fallen over, I think in time we might view the islamist escalation inside Pakistan as a major miscalculation on their part. What Pakistan has that's lacking in Afg is a powerful middle class that is now holding the military's feet to the fire. Whether together they can hold the line against the radicals and those sympathetic to them remains to be seen, but experience shows that current policy options serve only to worsen the situation. If we were genius enough to do this deliberately to make life hard for the Pak elite so they would get buy-in to the anti islamist agenda then we are much smarter than I realize! However, the trend of destabilization in Pak is not slowing and that has major consequences.

If AQ were really smart, they would mount another Mumbai and let India and Pakistan duke it out - this is an increasingly real threat that our policy does not (and to an extent) cannot address.

America is no longer a superpower. Despite the appearance of 'debate' about what to do about Iran (for example), the cold hard reality is that America cannot do a single effective thing to stop Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. Likewise, in stateless territories contested by multiple groups, such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Mindanao, and so on, all power is local and thus resides with the insurgent. Often because of the balance of terror among insurgents these will be places of endless conflict. Should a great power be duped into intervening in such territories, its political will cannot hope but to follow the decline of its coffers as imperial overstretch becomes more and more apparent. The problem becomes more acute when the great power is in debt and its way of war is the most expensive in the world.

This is the world in which the US finds itself. America has been dramatically weakened over the past decade to the point where it appears perilously close to attaining the state of exhaustion that Osama bin Laden dreamt about in 1996 when he issued his first fatwa against America. Strategy is context dependant. There are serious consequences for American and global security arising from this development.

Critics of the small footprint CT option (as I envision it here anyway), have said that we have had 9 years of the small footprint CT strategy. I see why they might say that but I think they mischaracterize what has happened. We started right, enabling anti-Taliban forces to take the fight to the Taliban. But we let mission creep and the idealist impulse for spreading liberty everywhere turn the war into attempting to nation build within a territory filled with at least 8 major nations and not understanding any of them well. We also diverted vital resources to Iraq at a critical time. But the biggest mistake was turning the US effort into fighting anyone who would resist us buy aerial attack from a distance because we didn’t have enough land forces to close with and discriminate among targets and civilians. In terms of pashtunwali this earned us no friends and many enemies - hence fighting the valleys. Meanwhile AQ quietly slipped out of town while we kept doing the same thing hoping for a different outcome.