From the ISW press release:

As US, NATO and Afghan allies prepare for a new military offensive in Kandahar province this summer, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has released a fifth report, Politics and Power in Kandahar by Carl Forsberg from the highly acclaimed Afghanistan Report series. This report reveals ISAF's persistent inconsistencies in dealing with Ahmed Wali Karzai's consolidation of power and proposes a new political-military strategy that is necessary for successful counterinsurgency operations.

"ISAF must implement a coherent and coordinated governance strategy in both Kabul and Kandahar for kinetic operations to be successful in the long-term," Afghanistan scholar Carl Forsberg explained. "The popularity of Ahmed Wali Karzai has dramatically decreased in Kandahar because of gross mismanagement and lack of good governance; this only fuels the insurgency and gives legitimacy to the Taliban as an opposition."

The 2 page executive summary and 57 page report by ISW provides a detailed and authoritative overview of the historical governance structures in Kandahar, Kandahar's current powerbrokers, the serious weakness of government institutions and Afghan security forces in Kandahar, and the rise of the Karzai family.

Key finding and recommendations:

- Kandahar is strategic terrain for the Quetta Shura Taliban and the Karzai family, and a central focus of ISAF's 2010 counterinsurgency campaign.

- Ahmed Wali Karzai's influence over Kandahar is the central obstacle to any of ISAF's governance objectives, and a consistent policy for dealing with him must be a central element of any new strategy.

- While most actors in Kandahar call themselves tribal leaders, few influential actors in Kandahar derive their influence from this position. Control over guns, money, and foreign support have become more important as sources of power.

- Anti-government sentiments are exploited and aggravated by the Taliban. Many of the local powerbrokers who are excluded from Ahmed Wali Karzai's network see the Taliban insurgency as the only viable means of political opposition.

Read the full report at the The Institute for the Study of War.

By chance, when I reached into my ragged black Land's End bag for my "subway reading file" during my commute home yesterday afternoon, out popped Military Capabilities for the Hybrid War: Insight from the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon and Gaza, by David E. Johnson of RAND Corp. I'd printed it out a few days ago and forgotten about it.

It is a good short summary piece, and speaks right to some of the questions I had after reading Col. Gentile's worries about the US Army's tank force. In Lebanon in 2006, Johnson concludes, the Israeli military "was largely incapable of joint arms fire and maneuver." Tank training especially had been neglected because it had been "deemed largely irrelevant." ...

... In other COIN news, I am impressed that David Kilcullen's forthcoming book on counterinsurgency, out from Oxford in June, is appropriately dedicated to Dave Dilegge and Bill Nagle, the founders of the Small Wars Journal. If you are not regularly checking that website, you should be, little grasshoppers...

And a key quote from Russell Weigley's History of the United States Army in Weigley's discussion of the forgotten Seminole War:

A historical pattern was beginning to work itself out: occasionally the American Army has had to wage a guerrilla war, but guerrilla war is so incongruous to the natural methods and habits of a stable and well-to-do society that the American Army has tended to regard it as abnormal and to forget about it whenever possible. Each new experience with irregular warfare has required, then, that appropriate techniques be learned all over again.

More at Best Defense.

Adding to earlier commentary at World Politics Review, Judah questions an armor-rich China scenario but notes here:

In the meantime, it looks like China and Turkey are two other places where the job prospects for tank commanders are bright. The fact that China still place such a heavy doctrinal emphasis on armor is certain to embolden the COIN-skeptic tank defenders.

Michael Yon's recent post on his

Facebook page regarding

the

end to his embed is causing a stir in the milblog community: McChrystal's

crew has declared an information war on me. No complaints here. McChrystal's attention

is welcome. It indicates that my posts have hit steel further underlines that McChrystal

is over his head...

In

Michael

Yon Wake Up Call, Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive writes:  There comes a time

when you have to look in the mirror and accept responsibility. It is not a collection

of incompetent public affairs officers or some conspiracy to silence truth telling,

it is his own fault. He has broken the rules time and time again and then when that

bit him in the ass, he bit back.

Herschel at the Captain's Journal is inserting into the fray on the other side,

In Defense of Michael Yon: An Open Letter to Milbloggers.  He notes the

strength of Michael's past work (some of which we have been privileged to feature

here), and states: 

Michael will continue in my estimation to be the

Ernie

Pyle [link added] of our generation and this incident will pass. 

It's also my estimation that these open letters to Michael are a lot of sound and

fury signifying nothing.  We Milbloggers have better ways to spend our time

than cannibalize our own.

We have no privileged source in this instance and will not weigh in here. 

Thanks to the authors for their balance in providing the good and the bad as they

see it and voice their opinions.  Both are worth the read, as are the many

links they provide to more commentary on this item.  This, too, shall pass.

Update:

Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement has more in his post Yon Flap. What makes this different is that it is not just another dumb blogosphere flap, but apparently involves some serious issues potentially compromising a vital asset for anyone trying to understand these wars of ours.

Is the Army's Armor Branch Defunct? - Tom Ricks, Best Defense

COINtras Off Their Game - Starbuck, Wings Over Iraq

COIN and Hybrid War: The Demise of Armor? - Judah Grunstein, World Politics Review

The United States will continue to face security threats from failed states, writes Robert M. Gates, U.S. secretary of defense, but it is "unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Afghanistan or Iraq anytime soon--that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire." To face the threats of the future, then, Washington will need to "get better at what is called 'building partner capacity': helping other countries defend themselves or, if necessary, fight alongside U.S. forces by providing them with equipment, training, or other forms of security assistance." Currently, the resources to build partner capacity are spread across many parts of the government and military. What is needed, argues Gates, is a pooled fund for capacity building that is shared between the Defense Department and State Department. Such a fund would be able to deal with failed states more effectively and would "create incentives for collaboration between different agencies of the government."

"For the most part, however, the United States' instruments of national power-military and civilian-were set up in a different era for a very different set of threats. The U.S. military was designed to defeat other armies, navies, and air forces, not to advise, train, and equip them. Likewise, the United States' civilian instruments of power were designed primarily to manage relationships between states, rather than to help build states from within."

Read the full article at Foreign Affairs.

The Army's Starfish Program evolved through an opportunistic collaboration between the USA Training and Doctrine Command and Ori Brafman, best-selling author of The Starfish and The Spider. A select group of leaders took part in the pilot program earlier this year and are now reaching out across the Army to share their insights from this unique experience. On 26 April, Ori Brafman will be joined by select students at a Town Hall Meeting at Fort Monroe in the post theater where they will discuss the tenets of the program, their experiences, and the results.

The Town Hall Meeting is open to all servicemembers, their families, and garrison personnel. For those unable to attend due to geography, it will be webcast at http://pl.pscdn.net/003/02467/live3.asx. For those unable to attend the townhall or see the webcast, a tape of the townhall will be hung on the TRADOC webpage in the days following the townhall.

We encourage you to join us to get a sense for how the Army is seeking to learn from its experiences after 8+ years of war.

GEN Martin E. Dempsey

-----

SWJ Editor's Note: General Martin E. Dempsey is Commanding General of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

We already know that neither the Bush nor Obama administrations have gained any traction with this issue. According the NYT article, "the United States would ensure that Iran would not 'acquire a nuclear capability.'" None of the policy options aimed at preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power have much chance of success. Protected by China and probably Russia, the UN Security Council will not pass economic sanctions that will change the decision calculus in Tehran. Iran's mullahs appear to have crushed the Green movement, so regime change appears off the table. But those hoping for relief through a new government forget that Iran's nuclear program is very popular inside Iran; a new government is very likely to continue the program. Finally, even if some deal were to lead to an expansion of IAEA inspections, events from the past few decades have soiled the reputation of inspectors to thwart the aims of determined proliferators. Gates was at the top levels of the CIA and National Security Council when both his agency and the IAEA missed Iraq's nuclear progress in the late 1980s. Gross intelligence errors the other way followed 10-15 years later. As a career intelligence officer, Gates knows all too well the fallibility of that profession.

Starting with his service on the Iraq Study Group and leading up to the present, Gates no doubt believes his job is to extract the U.S. military from Iraq and Afghanistan under conditions resembling success. For him, this is undoubtedly a satisfying way to end a long career in government. Seeing how all other courses of action regarding Iran are doomed to fail, his January memo to Jones may have emerged from a fear that he and his department would soon be called on to execute "the last resort" against Iran, even when everyone knows that an air campaign would not be decisive but would result in another open-ended entanglement.

Having worked so hard to clean up the other messes, Gates undoubtedly doesn't want to end his career having ordered the start of another. Did his memo help avoid that? Maybe Gates will instead arrange his retirement before "the last resort" arrives on his desk.

... But if "global war" isn't the right approach to terror what is? Experts on terrorism have produced shelves' worth of new works on this question. For outsiders, reading this material can be a jarring experience. In the world of terrorism studies, the rhetoric of righteousness gives way to equilibrium equations. Nobody is good and nobody is evil. Terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not psychotics or fanatics; they're rational actors—that is, what they do is explicable in terms of their beliefs and desires—who respond to the set of incentives that they find before them. The tools of analysis are realism, rational choice, game theory, decision theory: clinical and bloodless modes of thinking.

That approach, along with these scholars' long immersion in the subject, can produce some surprising observations. In A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (Yale; $30), Mark Moyar, who holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the Marine Corps University, tells us that, in Afghanistan, the Taliban's pay scale (financed by the protection payments demanded from opium farmers) is calibrated to be a generous multiple of the pay received by military and police personnel (financed by U.S. aid); no wonder official Afghan forces are no match for the insurgents. Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor of strategy at the National War College, reminds us, in How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton; $29.95), that one can find out about Al Qaeda's policy for coí¶rdinating attacks by reading a book called The Management of Barbarism, by Abu Bakr Naji, which has been available via Al Qaeda's online library. (Naji advises that, if jihadis are arrested in one country after an attack, a cell elsewhere should launch an attack as a display of resilience.) In Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism (M.I.T.; $24.95), Eli Berman traces the origins of the Taliban to a phenomenon that long preceded the birth of modern radical Islam: they are a direct descendant of the Deobandi movement, which began in nineteenth-century India in opposition to British colonial rule and, among other things, established a system of religious schools...

Much more at The New Yorker.

Despite a post-9/11 surge of Westerners learning Arabic, the world's fifth-most-spoken language, English and Arabic speakers are still largely segregated on the Web.

A new translation website called Meedan aims to close that gap. Meedan ("public square" in Arabic) is creating a public forum for English and Arabic speakers to translate, read, and debate Middle East news.

"There was a real dearth of opportunities [after 9/11] for Arabic speakers in the Middle East and English speakers in the US and elsewhere to interact and share their viewpoints on world events and to see where those viewpoints diverged," says George Weyman, community manager for Meedan. "It's crucial that we open up channels of communication between the West and the Middle East."

Relying on a combination of machine and human translation, the site offers Middle East news on pages split between English and Arabic. When users comment on a story, responses are automatically translated into either English or Arabic...

More at The Christian Science Monitor.

Meedan - Bilingual News Sharing Site

... two other items serve as anecdotal illustrations of what I've previously flagged as another consequence of COIN-centric thinking, namely, the decline not so much of conventional warfare, as has often been posited, but of armor, in particular, as a central pillar of ground operations. According to Jean-Dominique Merchet, as part of a budget-induced reorganization of its armored regiments, the French army will be reducing some from four to three squadrons of AMX 10 RC light tanks. Meanwhile, Ajai Shukla reports that following successful tests against the Russian T-90, the Indian army will be increasing its orders of the indigenously produced Arjun main battle tank.

The contrast illustrates the kinds of environments in which tank commanders enjoy promising career perspectives. India and Pakistan seem like obvious bull markets, as does Russia. (Georgia, too, although the career perspective is somewhat mitigated by the less-promising outlook for life expectancy). But I'm not so sure the same holds for Western Europe or the U.S. Again, that's not to say that we no longer need to prepare for conventional war with a nation-state, but rather that even in the conventional wars we're most likely to fight, massive armored formations are unlikely to play a role...

More at World Politics Review.