When we think of Foreign Internal Defense (FID), we most often think of conducting missions "by, with and through" a Partner Nation's government and patrolling alongside partner nation security forces who are embroiled in yet another conflict in a "bad" region of the world. But, in some conflicts, this very direct method of training and advising is inadvisable at best, and foolhardy at worst. In Pakistan right now, "by, with and through" represents just such a foolhardy approach.

This thesis will not only substantiate that assertion but by presenting the "menu" of training and advisory choices the United States and other nations have will point to a "third way"- a method of training and advising that should not be as unfamiliar as it seems to be, since the United States used it very effectively just thirty years ago, and in the same general vicinity.

Download the full thesis.

Senator John Kerry - Download Statement

Senator Richard Lugar - Download Statement

The Honorable Ryan C. Crocker -- Download Testimony

Ms. Zainab Salbi - Download Testimony

Dr. David Kilcullen - Download Testimony

Security Experts Urge Reconciliation with Insurgents -- CNN News.

Key U.S. Senator Downplays Afghan War Documents Leak - Cindy Saine, Voice of America.

... A former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Pakistan, Ryan Crocker, said a long-term counterinsurgency strategy is needed in Afghanistan, but that it requires time and patience - two things, he said, that are in short supply in America. "Our friends are unsure of our commitment and hedge their bets; our enemies think they can outlast us. We need to make it clear to both that our determination is equal to theirs," he said.

David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency analyst at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security, said it is important for Afghan reconciliation to try to include rank and file members of the Taliban. He also said it would be wise to try to negotiate from a position of strength. Kilcullen added that international and Afghan forces need a big, tactical hit on the Taliban. "We need to kill a lot of Taliban, and we need to disrupt their organization. And it is unpleasant, but it is just unavoidable. You have to do that kind of damage to a terrorist organization before it becomes —to talk," he said. Kilcullen said history shows that it is very difficult to defeat a counterinsurgency and that time and patience are essential.

Senator Kerry expressed some frustration with the lack of progress after almost 10 years of U.S. operations in Afghanistan, saying he believes Afghans need to realize that it is their fight, and that the American people are not —to have combat troops in the country indefinitely...

More at Voice of America.

The Pentagon Papers they're not. The New York Times and the Guardian, among others, are touting the massive leak of 92,000 classified documents relating to the Afghanistan War, which was unearthed by the Wikileaks website. What bombshells do these secret memos contain? Pretty much none, if you are an even marginally attentive follower of the news. In fact, the only new thing I learned from the documents was that the Taliban have attacked coalition aircraft with heat-seeking missiles. That is interesting to learn but not necessarily terribly alarming because, even with such missiles, the insurgents have not managed to take down many aircraft - certainly nothing like the toll that Stingers took on the Red Army in the 1980s.

-- Max Boot

A swelling chorus of voices is pondering the roles of New and Old Media in the Wikileaks disclosure, with its effect being compared to that of Tet and the Pentagon Papers (see here, here, here, and here, for example). These analogies are overblown - wildly so, in my view - but there is nevertheless an important New/Old Media dynamic to watch in this case. The question in the coming days will be whether the Old Media - of which Time, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, et al. are members - can establish a counterfactual narrative and make it politically decisive. Will Congress, for example, consider itself bound to accept the narrative that this massive leak amounts to a set of game-changing revelations? I predict not. Although John Kerry has stated already that the leaked documents "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," my sense is that there is simply too much knowledge of that reality, both in Congress and among the public, for the political gambit to go anywhere. Much credit for that knowledge must go to New Media - independent online reporters like Michael Totten, Michael Yon, and Commentary's Max Boot, websites like Long War Journal and Small Wars Journal - which has labored to bring the war to the average reader in a level of detail unimaginable even two decades ago.

-- J. E. Dyer

Anyone who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other documents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I'm a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that's the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper.

-- Andrew Exum

Just because some documents are classified doesn't mean that they're news or even necessarily interesting. A case in point is the cache of 92,000 secret documents about the Afghanistan war that someone leaked to WikiLeaks, which passed them on to the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, and Der Spiegel in Germany. All three published several of these documents - presumably the highlights - in today's editions. Some of the conclusions to be drawn from these files: Afghan civilians are sometimes killed. Many Afghan officials and police chiefs are corrupt and incompetent. Certain portions of Pakistan's military and intelligence service have nefarious ties to the Taliban. If any of this startles you, then welcome to the world of reading newspapers. Today's must be the first one you've read.

-- Fred Kaplan

A huge leak of U.S. reports and this is all they get? I know of more stuff leaked at one good dinner on background. I mean, when Mother Jones yawns, that's an indication that you might not have the Pentagon Papers on your hands. If anything, the thousands of documents remind me of what it is like to be a reporter: Lots of different people telling you different things. It takes awhile to learn how to distinguish the junk from the gold.

-- Tom Ricks

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization's latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to "opening the Stasi archives" in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also compared the leak to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers. Both claims are a bit difficult to swallow. The Stasi were famous for creating a total surveillance state and gathering comprehensive evidence of political "crimes" against their own citizenry; the Pentagon Papers revealed Kennedy's involvement in the overthrow of Diem, and Nixon's decision to illegally bomb Cambodia and Laos. The WikiLeaks archive is... daily incident reports. Incident reports can be revealing, if they say something new. But these don't.

-- Joshua Foust

By now it isn't news that Wikileaks has leaked tens of thousands of war records in what they call the Afghanistan War Diary. It consists of a catalog of thousands of daily incident reports (each incident of an IED, contact with the enemy, casualties, etc., is summarized in an incident report). The reports make for a choppy and stilted read, but for those who are —to endure it, there is information here and there that compromises operational security. Joshua Foust points out that the names of certain collaborators are in these reports, but that likely doesn't matter to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. All of the information is classified and it should not have been released.

-- Herschel Smith

Longtime readers of The Long War Journal will not be shocked by these reports. For years, Tom Joscelyn and I have been documenting the involvement of the Pakistani military and intelligence services with various terror groups. See Pakistan's Jihad and Analysis: Al Qaeda is the tip of the jihadist spear for summary reports from 2008 and 2009. Also, Hamid Gul has long been known to support the Taliban and al Qaeda. For a summary of the activities of Hamid Gul and others, see US moves to declare former Pakistani officers international terrorists.

-- Bill Roggio

Longtime Afghanistan watchers are diving into Wikileaks' huge trove of unearthed U.S. military reports about the war. And they're surfacing, as we initially did, with pearls of the obvious and long-revealed. Andrew Exum, an Afghanistan veteran and Center for a New American Security fellow, compared the quasi-revelations about (gasp!) Pakistani intelligence sponsorship of Afghan insurgents and (shock-horror!) Special Operations manhunts to news that the Yankees may have lost the 2004 American League pennant. It's a fair point, but it conceals what's really valuable about the leaked logs: they're a real-time account of how the U.S. let Afghanistan rot.

-- Spencer Ackerman

"The War Logs" (Continued)

Leaks Add to Pressure on White House Over Strategy - New York Times

Bin Laden Among Latest Wikileaks Afghan Revelations - BBC News

Afghanistan War Logs - Time

The AfPak Papers - Wall Street Journal

WikiLeaks Disclosures Unlikely to Change Course of War - Washington Post

'War Logs Could Shatter Hopes of Success in Afghanistan' - Der Spiegel

'Weeks to Assess' Afghan War Leak - BBC News

Leak Leaves White House Defensive About War Policy - Los Angeles Times

White House Blasts Wikileaks for Documents Leak - Washington Times

Document Leak May Hurt Efforts to Build War Support - New York Times

New Fodder for War Critics - Philadelphia Inquirer

Tensions Increase After Revelation of More Leaked Files - The Guardian

Afghan War Leak Sets Off Effort to Control Damage - Wall Street Journal

Documents Cause Little Concern over Public Perception - Washington Post

The Fallout of the Afghanistan Files - New York Times

Pentagon Assesses Leaked Documents - American Forces Press Service

Huge Leak of Secret Files Sows New Afghan War Doubts - Agence France-Presse

Pentagon Eyes Accused Analyst Over WikiLeaks Data - Wall Street Journal

U.S. Military Investigates Leaked Afghan War Documents - Voice of America

U.S. Hunts For Leaker Of Afghan War Documents - Reuters

Task Force 373 and Targeted Assassinations - Der Spiegel

Is WikiLeaks the Pentagon Papers, Part 2? - Washington Post

Not the Pentagon Papers - Slate

WikiLeaks Founder Defends Releasing U.S. Documents on Afghanistan - VOA

Afghan, Pakistani Reactions at Odds Over Leaked U.S. Documents - VOA

Pakistan Decries Release of Documents on Afghan War - Washington Post

Pakistani Spy Agency Denounces U.S. Intel Docs - Associated Press

Analysis: Leaks Only a 'Snapshot' of Afghan War Effort - Voice of America

Analysis: WikiLeaks Fuels Negative War Debate For Obama - Reuters

Who Is Pvt. Bradley Manning? - ABC News

WikiLeaks Emerges as Powerful Online Whistle-blower - Los Angeles Times

A Reading List to Put the WikiLeaks 'War Logs' in Context - ProPublica

WikiLeaks: Group Vows to Put More Documents Online - Associated Press

Documents Explosive, But No Pentagon Papers, Yet - Christian Science Monitor

Reaction to Disclosure of Military Documents on Afghan War - New York Times

Wikileaks' Reports on War Reveals Not Much - Washington Post

WikiLeaks Wasn't Wrong - Los Angeles Times

Pakistan's Double Game - New York Times

This Was Secret? - Washington Post

Getting Lost in the Fog of War - New York Times

Telling Us the Obvious - Washington Post

What's New About the WikiLeaks Data? - Columbia Journalism Review

Wikileaks, Insignificant - Commentary

Wikileaks and the Final Defeat of Tet - Commentary

Underwhelmed by Wikileaks Leaks - Best Defense

The Wikileaks Document Dump Changes Nothing - Shadow Government

Wikileaks and the Afghanistan War Diary - Captian's Journal

On Wikileaks & the Pakistan Memos - The Long War Journal

Are the WikiLeaks War Docs Overhyped Old News? - Danger Room

Does My Leak Look Big in This? - Kings of War

An influential Pentagon advisory board will recommend that Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates slash the civilian work force by more than 111,000 people and drastically pare the military's combatant command structure as ways to save billions of dollars.

The Defense Business Board task force also will urge Gates to initiate a hiring freeze for the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD), all Joint Staff directorates and all combatant commands. It also is calling for DoD to shut down OSD's Networks and Information Integration (NII) directorate and the contractor-heavy U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM).

According to the Defense News article, the Defense Business Board task force has focused its efforts on finding contractor positions within OSD and at the combatant commands which it believes are redundant or wasteful. The goal of the task force is to cut at least $100 billion over the next five years in overhead expenses, savings that the Congress would redirect to weapons acquisitions. To reach this savings target, the task force aims to eliminate over 111,000 of the Defense Department's 743,388 civilian billets.

What are the odds of such savings occurring? One can find precedents in history to argue either way. Regarding the alleged bloat in the intelligence community, I recently argued that such bloat (if it really is bloat) is understandable because of the American tendency to spend whatever it takes to save lives. Thus, when it comes time to consider such ideas as shutting down Joint Forces Command or winding up program offices or staff positions during wartime, such efforts could run into resistance if the condemned billet-holders can convincingly show how they save American lives on current or future battlefields.

We have recently witnessed the consequences when stock market and real estate bubbles burst. Is there a defense contractor bubble worthy of bursting? Many of us know some of these contractors, who are real people doing serious and sometimes dangerous work. A lot of their work we would not consider to be a bubble. Perhaps some is. If the Defense Business Board and Secretary Gates get their way, some of us will watch friends and their families suffer personal and financial pain, in the name of a stronger defense and national solvency.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization's latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to "opening the Stasi archives" in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also compared the leak to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers.

Both claims are a bit difficult to swallow. The Stasi were famous for creating a total surveillance state and gathering comprehensive evidence of political "crimes" against their own citizenry; the Pentagon Papers revealed Kennedy's involvement in the overthrow of Diem, and Nixon's decision to illegally bomb Cambodia and Laos. The WikiLeaks archive is... daily incident reports. Incident reports can be revealing, if they say something new. But these don't...

Assange's justification for putting hundreds of lives at stake—"All of this material is more than seven months old, so it has no operational significance... there is no danger"—is as false as it is naí¯ve. Many of the operations he details through these leaks are still ongoing, and many of the people involved in them are still there, hoping these leaks don't make them into targets for assassination. Indeed, Adam Serwer, a staff writer for The American Prospect, tweeted this morning, "Former Military Intelligence Officer sez of wikileaks, 'Its an AQ/Taliban execution team's treasure trove.'" ...

Much more at Columbia Journalism Review.

More

Massive Leak of Secret Files Exposes Truth of Occupation - The Guardian

Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It - Der Spiegel

Leaked Files Lay Bare War in Afghanistan - Washington Post

90,000 Classified Documents Revealed - Daily Telegraph

U.S. Documents Leaked Online Give Inside Look at War - Associated Press

Leaks 'Reveal Afghan War Details' - BBC News

Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010 - WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks Drops 90,000 Secret War Docs - Wired

The Big Leak - Politico

Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan - New York Times

In Disclosing Documents, WikiLeaks Seeks 'Transparency' - New York Times

Wikileaks New Approach in Latest Release of Documents - Washington Post

White House Responds to Disclosure - New York Times

White House Decries WikiLeaks' Release - Los Angeles Times

Afghan War Logs: Inquiry Launched into Source of Leaks - Daily Telegraph

U.S. Denounces Publication of Classified Documents - Bloomberg

Jones Lashes Out at Wikileaks for Putting Lives at Risk - The Hill

Strategic Plans Spawned Bitter End for a Lonely Outpost - New York Times

Afghanistan War Logs: Shattering Illusion of a Bloodless Victory - The Guardian

Afghanistan War Logs: Secret War Along the Pakistan Border - The Guardian

The Secret Enemy in Pakistan: Problems with an Supposed Partner - Der Spiegel

Pakistan Spy Service Aids Insurgents, Reports Assert - New York Times

Pakistan Secretly Helping Taliban - Reuters

Pakistan Denies Wikileaks Reports it 'Aided Taliban' - BBC News

Afghanistan War Logs: Iran's Covert Operations in Afghanistan - The Guardian

Afghanistan War Logs: Fear Taliban Could Tap Mobile Phones - The Guardian

Afghanistan War Logs: Taliban Listening in to Top-secret Phone - The Guardian

Afghanistan War Logs: 'Green on Green' Fights - The Guardian

Afghanistan War Logs: CIA Paramilitaries' Role in Civilian Deaths - The Guardian

Afghanistan War Logs: Civilians Caught in Firing Line - The Guardian

Task Force 373 : The Secret Hunters - Der Spiegel

German Naivety : Growing Trouble in the North - Der Spiegel

The Flaws of the Silent Killer: When Drones Fail - Der Spiegel

Intelligence Agents Drowning in Data - Der Spiegel

WikiLeaks' Afghan Documents and Me - Mother Jones

Reaction to Disclosure of Military Documents on Afghan War - New York Times

The top U.S. military officer is on a visit to Afghanistan, where he says the coalition effort is in its execution phase, after months of preparation to implement President Barack Obama's new strategy. With the U.S. government and the military facing criticism for not achieving dramatic results in the eight months since the president announced his strategy, Admiral Mullen spent part of his day appealing for patience, at least until the end of the year.

He told diplomats at the U.S. embassy that he and the new U.S and NATO commander here, General David Petraeus, agreed it is time to start delivering. "Where he and I believe we are now is we are in execution. We know what we need to do. We know how to do it. We have the people, the resources. Now we have to execute, and it is where we are. And this next 12 months, from my perspective, will be as critical a 12 months in terms of turning this around as any," he said.

A December review is designed to ensure the strategy of sending more troops and taking control of civilian areas from the Taliban, is at least beginning to show results. By next July, President Obama says he will begin what is expected to be a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops. The admiral says the key dates can be met, and he has been reassuring every audience he has spoken to on this trip that the United States will not run for the exits next year...

More at Voice of America.

... Gen McChrystal had planned a summer conquest of the Taliban in Kandahar to reinvigorate the battle against the Taliban. But the operation has been repeatedly delayed by concerns that it would not adequately restore the confidence of city residents in the security forces.

Gen Petraeus is reported to believe that the operation must be a broad-ranging counter-insurgency campaign, involving more troops working with local militias. The plan he inherited was criticised for placing too much emphasis on targeted assassinations of key insurgent leaders and not enough on winning over local residents. Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said yesterday that the US-led strategy in southern Afghanistan was undergoing sweeping changes...