Griffin is a cultural anthropologist, who is working with the U.S. Army as part of the Human Terrain System in Iraq. He is presently taking a year's leave of absence from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, where he has been professor of anthropology and sociology since the fall of 2000
He opens.
The AAA did not systematically study the HTS project but determined that they should disapprove of it anyway? Their statement is "based on information in the public record" which means not much because HTS has barely started and the public record (internet?) is full of uninformed notions of what the US military is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and is crippled by paranoia that we engage in clandestine work as if we are living a spy novel. If anyone looks at various posts of mine, this is hardly the case...
On Lebanon, Andrew Exum and Stephen McInerney provide background and analysis on Lebanon's future and U.S. policy towards that country in their New York Times commentary Beirut is Not Tehran.
A couple of key excerpts.
... U.S. efforts have largely backfired. Hezbollah has scored political points by painting Hariri's coalition as tainted by its association with the U.S. And U.S. military assistance has generated suspicion.
... the administration cannot afford to view the possible selection of a consensus candidate acceptable to Hezbollah as a greater danger than the failure to select anyone at all.
While promoting their own interests in the power vacuum created by the Syrian military withdrawal in 2005, some of America's closest allies in the Lebanese government and nearby Saudi Arabia and Jordan are believed to have supported the growth of the Sunni extremist groups. Moreover, thanks to a steady stream of Sunni militants from Iraq -- the types responsible for the most horrific attacks there -- continued growth is expected for the foreseeable future. At least, as long as the U.S. continues to look the other way, and as long as U.S. efforts to help the Lebanese military confront such groups are viewed with suspicion.
Long War Journal's Bill Roggio takes on the new U.S. counterinsurgency strategy for Pakistan in his Weekly Standard piece -- The Pakistan Problem, And the Wrong Solution.
This strategy was first reported on by the New York Times and Washington Post.
Roggio takes exception and points towards the differences in using the U.S. COIN lessons garnered from Iraq's Anbar province as a model for northwestern Pakistan.
Several key excerpts.
... the situation in Anbar is not comparable to the situation in the Pakistani northwest, and there is little reason to believe that a strategy like that reported in the Times will succeed in this more hostile environment.
The conflicts in Iraq's Anbar province and Pakistan's tribal areas are fundamentally different, and while both provinces are dominated by a strong tribal culture, al Qaeda's draws support in each for different reasons...
... the counterinsurgency campaign proposed for Pakistan is not at all similar to that executed in Anbar province. In Anbar, the tribes organized to fight al Qaeda only after they realized the error they had made in aligning with them. And the tribes openly fought al Qaeda of their own accord before seeking help from the U.S. Marine and Army units in Ramadi.
The Pakistani counterinsurgency plan, on the other hand, explicitly calls for U.S. forces to take a hands-off role in the Northwest Frontier Province. Unlike Anbar, the closest U.S. troops would come to direct involvement in Pakistan would be the embedding of Special Forces trainers into the Frontier Corps and Pakistani military. U.S. forces would not be able to come to the direct aid of Frontier Corps units.
Phillip Carter also addresses the new counterinsurgency strategy at his Intel Dump blog in A Formula for Blowback.
Our qualified success in Anbar has resulted from many lines of operation (in military parlance) — security, economic, political, legal, etc. On the security front, arming the tribes was one piece of the plan. It was a way to make permanent the security gains achieved with U.S. and Iraqi forces by replacing those forces with armed local militias, and a way to provide a measure of perceived security to local sheikhs (warlords), who felt they would be threatened in the absence of U.S. forces, unless they had their own protection. However, this only worked because we also had significant reconstruction carrots to use, and because we had a series of multilateral and bilateral agreements with the sheikhs for the employment of these forces and the abstention from violence. Not unlike 6-dimensional game of chess.
The big $64,000 question for me has to do with "blowback." It seems to me that the secondary, tertiary and unintended consequences of this plan will almost certainly outweigh the benefits...
Westhawk chimes in too in his U.S. to Try Divide-and-Conquer in Pakistan post.
Turning Pakistan's frontier tribes against their long-time al Qaeda guests seems like an improbable idea. However, the thought in, say, 2005 of turning Iraq's Anbar tribes against their al Qaeda allies seemed equally ludicrous. But today al Qaeda is about as popular in Anbar province as it is in Tel Aviv.
As with Iraq, the Americans are forced to proceed with a divide-and-conquer approach in Pakistan because every other strategy has failed. Most particularly, the Pakistani state, just like the Iraq's central government in Baghdad, is unable to govern its territory. Thus, as a matter of urgent necessity, the U.S. must largely bypass the Pakistani government in order to accomplish its security objectives...
From Hugh Levinson of the BBC: 'War on Terror' Flashpoints Identified. Levinson interviews newly appointed adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, recent counterinsurgency adviser to MNF-I commander General David Petraeus, and of course SWJ blogger David Kilcullen. Kilcullen is quoted as identifying the three key critical future flashpoints for militant jihadists -- Pakistan, Bangladesh and Europe.
On Pakistan.
... "unequivocally" that future conflict will spike in Pakistan. He described the Taleban as a Pashtun movement that is trying to control the Pashtun areas straddling the border of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
On Bangladesh.
... "disturbing trend in growing radicalism and Islamisation and a fairly capable network of terrorists and insurgent groups."
And Europe.
"the potential for subversion, radicalisation, a fair degree of social unrest and, of course, Europe and North Africa have a symbiotic relationship in demographic terms."
On LTG Ricardo Sanchez's Democratic radio address to be broadcast tomorrow see Abu Muqawama's And General Custer Will Give the Response to the State of the Union.
SWJ has more here and here and will be commenting after Sanchez has his say.
SWJ friend and Council member ZenPundit has a new url and a new look.
While you are visiting ZenPundit be sure to check out his 21 November post Ralph Peters on the Myths of Modern War. Here's an excerpt.
Peters is arguing for America taking a "Jacksonian" (in Walter Russell Meade taxonomy) posture toward our Islamist and terrorist enemies in particular and toward the world in general. It's an argument that may appeal to members of the American Legion [Peter's article appeared in their magazine], in particular the GI Generation of WWII vets who experienced fighting a total war, but it's not a helpful strategy unless our enemies manifest a sufficiently targetable center of gravity, like, say, taking over Pakistan and making Osama bin Laden Grand Emir.
Frankly, our goal should be to never permit let our enemies reach such a position of strength in the first place. That means peeling away Muslim and tribal allies of convenience to pitch in killing the al Qaida network, not lumping the Saudis in with al Qaida, the Iranians, Musharraf and whatever itinerant Middle-Eastern types seem vaguely dysfunctional in a civilizational sense (personally, I like reading about dead terrorists and I think their supporters, financiers, intellectual cheerleaders and mosque recruiters are all fair game for rendition or assassination, wherever they are. Doesn't that give us more than enough of room to work with without attacking the entire Arab-Islamic world ??). I won't even bother to go into the geoeconomic lunacy of bombing or attacking Saudi Arabia.
Hat Tip MountainRunner.
Congrats to John Robb on being named one of Esquire Magazine's Best and Brightest for 2007. Job well done John and much deserved.
Tom Barnett authors the write-up on Robb. Here is a brief excerpt.
Now an industry consultant on new information technologies, Robb's Global Guerrillas blog serves as an "open notebook on the first epochal war of the twenty-first century," which is his way of saying Iraq is to the Long War what the Spanish Civil War was to World War II: a preview of coming disruptions.
Finally, concerning an issue much discussed here at SWJ and the Small Wars Council, Max Boot comments in his Contentions blog post The Right Promotions.
One of the biggest impediments to transforming the U.S. government for the Long War is personnel policies that were designed for a different kind of world in which we faced very different kinds of enemies. The armed forces, for example, tend to reward officers who come from a very conventional mold. They may be world-class at defeating, say, the Iraqi Republican Guard. But can they deal with the threat posed by Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Jaish al Mahdi?
On the evidence of more than four years of war, a lot of officers have not been up to the challenge. Some have been—but they are not necessarily the ones getting promoted to general officer rank. For instance, two of the most outstanding and accomplished colonels in the U.S. Army have been passed over for promotion. Both Peter Mansoor and H.R. McMaster have history Ph.D.s, both successfully commanded brigades in Iraq, and both have been instrumental in crafting the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine. Mansoor serves as General David Petraeus's executive officer, or right hand man; McMaster, who is currently a fellow at a think tank in London, has been called back to Baghdad frequently for consultations. The fact that neither one has yet been raised to brigadier general indicates to a lot of people that there is something wrong with the entire promotion system.