When military officers and diplomats gathered in a secure room in the Pentagon on a recent Friday to get a video briefing from the Afghan battlefield, they were startled to see a youthful British diplomat in an open-neck shirt, rather than the familiar face and camouflage fatigues of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander.

The diplomat's name is Mark Sedwill, the new senior civilian representative of NATO in Afghanistan, and on that day, he was acting as General McChrystal's proxy. It is a role Mr. Sedwill, 45, has taken on with increasing regularity in recent weeks, forging a tight relationship with the general that associates say carries echoes of the one in Iraq between Gen. David H. Petraeus and the American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker.

Their mission also bears striking similarities to the "surge" those men carried out in Iraq: forging a combined military-civilian offensive to drive out a stubborn insurgency and allow a competent local government to take root. As the protracted struggle to bring order to the southern Afghan town of Marja demonstrates, it has been an uphill battle so far...

More at The New York Times.

Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information - some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence...

More at The New York Times.

How do wars end in the tribal society of Afghanistan? That's one of the interesting questions that was highlighted by President Hamid Karzai's visit to Washington last week. During their well-scripted news conference at the White House, both Karzai and President Obama said they favored a process of outreach to the Taliban. And both presidents endorsed, as a start, the "peace jirga" that Karzai will host in Kabul in several weeks.

Obama described a framework for this peace process. He said it must be "Afghan-led" and that it should "open the door to the Taliban who cut their ties to al-Qaeda, abandon violence, and accept the Afghan constitution, including respect for human rights." But these public comments skirted the hard questions about reconciliation. Of the 1,400 Afghans who will be invited to the jirga, will there be any senior Taliban leaders who could actually explore a deal? What role will Pakistan play in bringing to the table a Taliban leadership it helped create and sustain? How soon do Karzai and Obama see this process moving toward real negotiations? ...

More at The Washington Post.

Topics include:

1) Obama hopes that good Afghan policy will mean good U.S. politics,

2) Is the Marine Corps just another army?

Obama hopes that good Afghan policy will mean good U.S. politics

A month ago, the Obama administration's relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai were broken, with the insulted Afghan president threatening to join the Taliban. Today, early April seems like a lifetime ago. In a White House meeting this week that was almost canceled in April, U.S. President Barack Obama decisively allied himself with Karzai.

During his news conference with Karzai, Obama reaffirmed his intention to begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011. Obama undoubtedly wants to run for re-election in 2012 with the message that he wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He may be using Richard Nixon's first term as a model. Nixon reduced the U.S. head count in Vietnam from more than 500,000 to just a few thousand by election day in 1972. That wind down of the war, combined with an economic rebound and a weak opponent, resulted in a landslide re-election.

The dangers of Obama's July 2011 withdrawal declaration are well known. The Taliban, with ample sanctuaries, can easily conserve their resources and adjust the tempo of their operations to extract maximum political effect. Once a U.S. withdrawal begins, it will become irreversible. Political events might even lead to its acceleration. The United States' remaining coalition partners surely won't dither on the tarmac. Another risk is that Afghanistan's security forces will not be ready to accept heavy responsibility in 14 months.

Obama undoubtedly understands this. Doesn't his policy of a quick U.S. withdrawal risk creating an even bigger mess, a debacle of his making that he would have to fix in his second term?

We have to assume that Obama and his advisors have thought this through. Obama's statements indicate an intention to gradually transition from the current large-scale manpower-intensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign to a small-scale advisor-based security assistance program. In addition, they have likely concluded that the 2010 troop surge and its suppression of the Taliban in Afghanistan's south further reduces the risk of transitioning from COIN to purely security assistance.

The best military strategy isn't very good if it can't maintain political support. A small security assistance program might be riskier than a well-staffed counterinsurgency campaign, but that comparison is irrelevant if the COIN campaign is no longer politically realistic. Seeing what happened to the political support for the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq on election day in 2006 and 2008, Obama apparently doesn't want to take any political chances with his campaign in Afghanistan. Better to end it on his terms than risk having the electorate end it for him.

Some may see Obama's withdrawal plan as a cynical move to get reelected in 2012. If it works, he will have to live with the consequences. Obama and his advisors have apparently concluded that a smaller advisor-based and open-ended security assistance program will keep Afghanistan from becoming a headache in his second term. If he gets re-elected, he will get a chance to experience that theory.

Is the Marine Corps just another army?

On May 7, during a discussion with students at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed that he is interviewing candidates to replace Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway, who will retire this fall. Gates said he will expect the candidates to explain to him what in the future will make the Marine Corps unique and not just a second -- and by implication, wastefully redundant -- Army. "We will always have a Marine Corps," Gates said. "But the question is, how do you define the mission post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan? And that's the intellectual effort that I think the next commandant has to undertake."

The Marine Corps has long sought to differentiate itself from the Army by specializing in amphibious operations -- the ability to project military power from ship to shore. But during his talk to the students, Gates wondered whether large-scale amphibious landings would ever again be practical in the age of relatively cheap, numerous, and precise anti-ship missiles. If not, then what will make the Marine Corps unique?

Some analysts have already attempted to answer Gates's questions. Many of these analysts have concluded that security assistance, with numerous small detachments of Marines providing training and support to allied military forces, will be a major mission in the future. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Novack, then a staff officer at Headquarters Marine Corps, described a plan for Marine Corps regiments to each specialize in a particular region of the world, learn its culture, and then deploy security assistance training teams to build partnerships and indigenous military capacity. Analysts at Rand Corp. called for the both the Marine Corps and the Army to permanently designate up to a third of their combat units for security assistance work. Echoing Lt. Col. Novack's plan, Steven Metz and Frank Hoffman suggested assigning Latin America and the Pacific Rim to the Marine Corps and the rest of the world to the Army. Alternatively, Metz and Hoffman would have the Marine Corps be the Pentagon's primary assault force, with the Army specializing in stabilization, security, and counterinsurgency.

By contrast, Dakota Wood, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, thinks the Marine Corps can still perform offensive combat operations from its traditional naval platform. Wood believes Marine units deployed on Navy ships and equipped with air power and landing craft will be useful for counterterrorism raiding and for direct action against nonstate adversaries. Against nation-state adversaries, Wood concludes that Marine Corps operations against adversary shipping lanes are feasible. However, Wood thinks that the Navy and the Marine Corps need to adopt a more decentralized structure to be effective against the most capable opponents.

Gates's candidates will no doubt explain why the Marines' sea-based tradition will remain relevant into the future. But as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, that argument for what makes the Marine Corps different from the Army will not stop the Marines from jumping into any kind of land war. Even when far from the ocean and appearing to be just another army, the Marine Corps has its own particular way of doing things. That, more than sea-basing, is what makes the Marine Corps unique and a value to the country.

... With the end of the Cold War - and especially since 9/11 - we have been faced with a still more complex world. From Afghanistan to Mexico, irregular threats have replaced the classic nation-on-nation or bloc-on-bloc confrontations we had grown comfortable with. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Colombia catapulted the United States and its allies back to irregular efforts spanning the gamut from the high tempo operations inherent to counterinsurgency and counterterrorism to the seemingly more sedate but often no less intense commitments required for whole-of-government stability operations and nationbuilding. Ironically, despite efforts to push forward in our "full spectrum" capabilities, we remain hampered by legacy attitudes of compartmentalization and linear thinking. Even more problematic and disturbing is our willingness to engage in operations and deploy forces without fully grappling with the implications of the shift to population-centric warfare as prominently assessed by General Sir Rupert Smith in The Utility of Force. As a result, our leaders can place the military in harm's way without knowing what it is they should achieve and whether it is in fact achievable through military means. This constitutes a denial of strategic thought and results in a subsequent disjunction between the operational level of force employment and the national interests of the country...

More at Prism.

Do Three Ds Make an F? The Limits of "Defense, Diplomacy, and Development" - Ethan B. Kapstein; Prism, National Defense University.

... On its surface, the notion of joining the 3Ds into a more comprehensive whole-of-government strategy toward the world's trouble spots is more than enticing; it seems downright obvious. After all, did the United States not match the Soviet threat in postwar Europe through the purposeful employment of all three tools, as exemplified by the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? Why, we may ask, are we not executing a similarly holistic approach toward the challenges we face in such places as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen?

Unfortunately, the idea that the arrows of defense, diplomacy, and development can be joined into one missile, much less hit a single target, may be misleading. To the extent that this concept seeks to replicate the contours of American foreign policy in the late 1940s, it suggests the limits of historical knowledge in the U.S. Government, for it is solely with the benefit of hindsight that a narrative of a seamless and coherent U.S. approach to the bipolar world can be constructed...

More at Prism.

Mindanao: A Community-based Approach to Counterinsurgency - William A. Stuebner and Richard Hirsch; Prism, National Defense University.

... Since the U.S. incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, scholars, strategists, and policymakers seem interested in discovering how to fight smarter or, preferably, how to win without fighting. Americans have been rediscovering writers such as David Galula, author of Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, whose experiences in the Algerian civil war helped guide counterinsurgency thinking during the Vietnam War. They have also unearthed long-forgotten publications such as the U.S. Marine Corps Small Wars Manual and issued a plethora of new doctrines, manuals, joint publications, and directives. More recently, David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One offered an indirect approach to counterinsurgency that emphasizes local relationships and capacity-building in light of efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. This approach, he asserts, is most effective in complex environments that include accidental guerrillas - individuals who enter into conflict not as an existential threat to another nation-state but as defenders of their own space...

More at Prism.

Military Planning Systems and Stability Operations - William J. Gregor; Prism, National Defense University.

On September 21, 2009, the Washington Post published an article entitled "McChrystal: More Forces or 'Mission Failure.'" The basis for the piece was a leaked copy of General Stanley McChrystal's "Commander's Initial Assessment," dated August 30, 2009. In asking for additional forces for Afghanistan, General McChrystal stated that his conclusions were supported by a rigorous multidisciplinary assessment by a team of civilian and military personnel and by his personal experience and core beliefs. A week before the Washington Post article appeared, Senators Lindsey Graham, Joseph Lieberman, and John McCain made a similar call for more forces in the Wall Street Journal. In an editorial labeled "Only Decisive Force Can Prevail in Afghanistan," the senators argued that General McChrystal was an exceptional commander and that he, the new Ambassador, and a new deputy commander composed a team that could win the war...

More at Prism.

... and many more thought provoking articles in the current issue of Prism.

Counterinsurgency (COIN) requires an integrated military, political, and economic program best developed by teams that field both civilians and soldiers. These units should operate with some independence but under a coherent command. In Vietnam, after several false starts, the United States developed an effective unified organization, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), to guide the counterinsurgency. CORDS had three components absent from our efforts in Afghanistan today: sufficient personnel (particularly civilian), numerous teams, and a single chain of command that united the separate COIN programs of the disparate American departments at the district, provincial, regional, and national levels. This Paper focuses on the third issue and describes the benefits that unity of command at every level would bring to the American war in Afghanistan. The work begins with a brief introduction to counterinsurgency theory, using a population-centric model, and examines how this warfare challenges the United States. It traces the evolution of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and the country team, describing problems at both levels. Similar efforts in Vietnam are compared, where persistent executive attention finally integrated the government's counterinsurgency campaign under the unified command of the CORDS program. The next section attributes the American tendency towards a segregated response to cultural differences between the primary departments, executive neglect, and societal concepts of war. The Paper argues that, in its approach to COIN, the United States has forsaken the military concept of unity of command in favor of "unity of effort" expressed in multiagency literature. The final sections describe how unified authority would improve our efforts in Afghanistan and propose a model for the future.

Read the entire Letort Paper at SSI.

The military relies too much on technology, and soldiers need to practice more "with the radios turned off," a key general said.

"We must be able to operate when systems go down," Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, head of Joint Forces Command, told a luncheon audience Thursday at a joint war-fighting conference. "It is much more important for officers to get comfortable operating with uncertainty rather than to keep grasping for more certainty." ...

"I don't think we have turned off our radios in the last eight years. What kind of systems are we creating where we depend on this connection to headquarters? While we want the most robust communications, we also want to make sure we can operate with none of it." ...

"Mission-type orders rather than bandwidth are the key to the future," he said. "We need officers who can operate off a commander's intent, understand what the boss several levels above wants, and carry them out to suffocate the enemy's hopes." ...

More at Marine Corps Times.

The leak I got yesterday from Kandahar expressing skepticism that counterinsurgency can bring the nine-year war in Afghanistan to a successful conclusion has inspired another one. This time, a former CIA counterterrorism operative who has served on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq agreed to pass along a memo he has briefed to top military leaders since the fall debate over Afghanistan strategy. It's crossed desks at the White House, the Pentagon, U.S. Central Command and even Gen. Stanley McChrystal's command in Afghanistan.

While I can't go into the sourcing of this memo, it's penned by someone who began embracing population-centric counterinsurgency to mitigate the deterioration of the Iraq war as far back as 2005 — something that not a lot of CIA operatives bought into, then or today. Despite that pedigree, the CIA operative contends that attempts to protect the population from the insurgency and facilitate the delivery of Afghan government services are fatally undermined by the persistent corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan government and its institutions.

His counterproposal, similar to a controversial approach advocated by an Army Special Forces major named Jim Gant, is to use Afghanistan's various tribes as a proxy for both political legitimacy against the Taliban and a more effective and relevant structure for the provision of governance and economic development. He's taken to calling it "Tribe-Centric Unconventional Warfare/Foreign Internal Defense." ...

More at The Washington Independent.

... I'm pleased to be here this week to participate in President Karzai's visit to the United States. It's been a productive visit, and I thought it would be good if I spent a few minutes with you this morning, to share my thoughts with our ongoing efforts in Afghanistan. I know most of you have been covering this for years. So I'll try and measure my remarks with that in mind.

Our strategic priority is the development of Afghan national security forces. While both the army and police have demonstrated considerable growth, significant challenges remain. The bottom line is, there's much more work ahead to mature Afghan security forces. But I'm pleased with the progress made thus far.

While our strategic priority remains building the ANSF, our operational priority lies in securing the southern part of Afghanistan, an area that includes Kandahar, the spiritual center of the Taliban, and Helmand, an economic hub for the insurgency and for Afghanistan overall.

Ten months ago, we began a series of operations into Taliban-controlled parts of the central Helmand River valley, expanding the Afghan government's influence in key areas.

There's been considerable progress in security and governance. But as is expected in counterinsurgency, progress is often slow and deliberate.

This reflects the challenge of changing not only the dynamics of security, governance and development but also the attitudes of a population long pressured by insurgents.

As additional forces flow into Afghanistan, we'll -- we will reinforce ongoing efforts to secure Kandahar, an environment that's uniquely complex and will require a unique solution. This effort is being led by the Afghans and will focus on the complex political and governance aspects of Kandahar.

I suspect you'll have several questions regarding Kandahar, but I also want to make a point that there will be considerable efforts in other areas of the country as well that I'd be happy to discuss further.

Ultimately, our efforts across Afghanistan are about changing the perceptions of people. Afghans believe more of what they see than what they hear.

This is a process that takes time. It will demand courage and resilience. We should expect increased violence as our combined security forces expand into Taliban-controlled areas. Over time, security responsibilities will transition to Afghans...

Read the full transcript here.

Sometimes, rumors can be informative - in fact, more than one soldier has discovered his unit was deploying based on a rumor or a news article. More often, though, rumors create undue anxiety and anger.

Fortunately, Jeff Schogol of Stars and Stripes is here to confirm and debunk all sorts of rumors in a new blog. His first post served to dispel the rumor that the Army was getting rid of the term "battle buddy", and replacing it with "combat companion". Too bad we didn't have Jeff around when those rumors of "stress cards" were going around.

If you've got a rumor you'd like Stars and Stripes to debunk, just contact Jeff at schogol@stripes.osd.mil.