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The Challenges of Reconstruction in Afghanistan - Judah Grunstein, World Politics Review.

With all eyes on London and the high-profile Afghanistan Conference, a quieter gathering that took place this week in Prague might have shed more light on the opportunities, challenges and uncertainty that lie ahead for the war-torn country.

The conference, co-sponsored by the Prague Security Studies Institute and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, brought together military and civilian practitioners of reconstruction and development work in Afghanistan, ostensibly to discuss the future of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan. But the wide-ranging panel discussions also addressed the broader challenges of reconstruction, as well as the urgent need for overcoming them, if the effort to stabilize Afghanistan is to be successful.

PRTs emerged in Afghanistan in 2003 as an ad hoc response to the inherent security challenges presented by reconstruction work in an ongoing conflict zone. Made up of personnel from both civilian development agencies and the military, they represented the first efforts at interagency, whole-of-government stability operations upon which a counterinsurgency approach depends. Their ability to respond quickly to local needs by bypassing bureaucratic and chain-of-command bottlenecks soon led to wider applications. Now, as Mark Ward, special adviser on development to the chief of the U.N.'s Afghanistan mission, observed, with $1 billion in funding and roughly 30 teams operating in the country, the PRTs are collectively one of the biggest international aid donors to Afghanistan...

More at World Politics Review.

U.S. Marines Make Fragile Progress in Helmand - Balint Szlanko, World Politics Review.

Marine Capt. Scott Cuomo of Fox company, 2nd battalion, 2nd Marine regiment, must have felt very confident. How else to explain his climbing into an armorless Afghan army truck -- a coffin on four wheels -- next to Haji Abdullah Jan, the Afghan district governor, with only a few Afghan army soldiers for protection, to speed down empty dirt roads almost certainly mined by the Taliban?

But Cuomo's confidence is not misplaced. The men make it safely to their destination: a destroyed compound beside which the barren, twisted remains of three dead trees point grotesquely to the sky. The district governor, clearly moved, walks to the building. It is his house, which he is visiting for the first time in four years because of the war. Cuomo grins excitedly. The governor is home.

"This is a big success," Cuomo says. "It may be harder to quantify than counting the number of bad guys we have killed, but it is success."

Garmsir district lies in the southern-central part of Helmand, Afghanistan's most war-torn province and home to a massive, opium-fed insurgency. Since 2006, most of the district had been Taliban country. Forays by the British army, until recently the NATO nation in charge of Helmand, had never quite managed to dislodge the insurgents, in part because the British never had enough troops to hold and build the areas that they had cleared of insurgents...

More at World Politics Review.

Military Partnerships May Be the Nation's Best Path to Peace - David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal this week expressed a truth that military commanders know better than anyone: "A political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome," he told the Financial Times. The problem is getting to that political settlement in a way that the combatants find acceptable. This can take years, even decades. The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting Muslim extremists around the world. People sometimes wonder whether America has learned anything during this painful time, or whether we are condemned to keep digging deeper holes for ourselves. Certainly, we're still digging in Afghanistan, where McChrystal, the U.S. commander there, believes that an acceptable political settlement won't be possible unless we squeeze the Taliban harder. I think he's right about that.

But I sense there's a growing recognition, especially within the U.S. military, that America has to get out of the business of fighting expeditionary wars every time a new flash point erupts with al-Qaeda. The Pentagon has adopted this proxy strategy of training "friendly" countries (meaning ones that share with us the enemy of Islamic extremism) from North Africa to the Philippines. This "partnership" approach hasn't been articulated by the Obama administration as a formal strategy, and it doesn't get much media coverage. But it's worth a careful look, because it may offer the best path toward a world where the United States isn't always operating as an anti-terrorist Robocop...

More at The Washington Post.

Afghan Tribe Vows to Fight Taliban in Return for U.S. Aid - Dexter Filkens, New York Times.

The leaders of one of the largest Pashtun tribes in a Taliban stronghold said Wednesday that they had agreed to support the American-backed government, battle insurgents and burn down the home of any Afghan who harbored Taliban guerrillas. Elders from the Shinwari tribe, which represents about 400,000 people in eastern Afghanistan, also pledged to send at least one military-age male in each family to the Afghan Army or the police in the event of a Taliban attack.

In exchange for their support, American commanders agreed to channel $1 million in development projects directly to the tribal leaders and bypass the local Afghan government, which is widely seen as corrupt. "The Taliban have been trying to destroy our tribe, and they are taking money from us, and they are taking our sons to fight," said Malik Niaz, a Shinwari elder. "If they defy us now, we will defeat them." The pact appears to be the first in which an entire Pashtun tribe has declared war on Taliban insurgents...

More at The New York Times.

Reintegration, Reconciliation: What Do We Mean? - Simon Shercliff, UK's First Secretary of Foreign Security and Policy, Washington, DC

After comments by Secretary Gates on his recent India/Pakistan trip, and by General McChrystal in the FT, the topic of the moment here in DC is reconciliation/reintegration. Regular readers will know that I have highlighted this issue often in the past. Discussion of reintegration and reconciliation, and indeed simple definition of the terms themselves, is fraught with sensitivity. But given that this discussion will clearly take up much of the London conference, it is important that we are as precise as we can be with the language.

This is my take on what we mean - and crucially what we don't mean - when we talk about these issues.

Some excerpts follow:

Reconciliation is the end game, and it needs the right conditions...

Which can be reached by a combination of military and civilian means -- pressure and incentives...

... one of which is reintegration...

And none of which is striking a power-sharing deal with the Taliban, or anyone who follows their practices...

Which means that reintegration, leading to reconciliation, will not catch everyone...

More at The UK in the USA.

The HEAT being in this case High-End Asymmetric Threats.

Two examples of HEAT in recent news.

First, writing in his column at Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin tabulated the ten worst Chinese cyber attacks on the United States, at least the ten worst known to the public. Making the list were attacks that penetrated and stole vast amounts of data from U.S. military laboratories, the State Department, NASA, the Naval War College, and the Joint Strike Fighter division of Lockheed Martin. Rogin specifically implicates the Chinese government in these attacks.

Today's New York Times featured an article on a cyber war game recently conducted by the U.S. government. Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn led the exercise with the top unified commanders participating. According to the article, the exercise resulted in confusion and paralysis among the decision makers.

Another high-end asymmetric worry is the global positioning satellite network. Last week, General Norton Schwartz, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, the service responsible for operating the GPS system, advised the U.S. military to reduce its reliance on GPS. He said the system remains vulnerable and war planners and commanders should not expect it to function during a war. Schwartz's warnings come after many decades of proliferation of GPS receivers across the military, which now seem present on every airplane, ship, boat, vehicle, soldier, missile, and bomb.

To indicate to potential adversaries that they do not possess leverage over U.S. military operations in this regard, perhaps U.S. Joint Forces Command planners should organize large joint "no GPS" training exercises and invite outsiders to observe. But only after they are sure U.S. military forces could pull off such a thing.

U.S. Envoy's Cables Show Concerns on Afghan War Plans - Eric Schmitt, New York Times.

The United States ambassador in Kabul warned his superiors here in November that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan "is not an adequate strategic partner" and "continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden," according to a classified cable that offers a much bleaker accounting of the risks of sending additional American troops to Afghanistan than was previously known.

The broad outlines of two cables from the ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, became public within days after he sent them, and they were portrayed as having been the source of significant discussion in the White House, heightening tensions between diplomats and senior military officers, who supported an increase of 30,000 American troops.

But the full cables, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time just how strongly the current ambassador felt about the leadership of the Afghan government, the state of its military and the chances that a troop buildup would actually hurt the war effort by making the Karzai government too dependent on the United States...

More at The New York Times.

Britain, Japan to Help Reintegrate Taliban Foot Soldiers - Karen DeYoung, Washington Post.

Britain and Japan have agreed to head an international fund, expected to total up to $500 million over the next five years, as part of a broad plan to help lure Taliban fighters away from the insurgency with the promise of jobs, protection against retaliation, and the removal of their names from lists of U.S. and NATO targets.

Establishment of the fund will be announced Thursday at a high-level international conference on Afghanistan in London, according to U.S. and British officials. Representatives from nearly 70 nations, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, will attend.

The fund will help support a proposal by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to be announced at the conference, to begin the reintegration of low-level fighters. Karzai will also outline his strategy for reconciliation with amenable insurgent leaders...

More at The Washington Post.

On Tuesday and Wednesday (Jan. 26-27), Radio Free Europe / Radio LIberty (RFE/RL) will provide live video streaming of the international conference, "Provincial Reconstruction Teams: Challenges of Reconstruction in Afghanistan." To view the live webstream, go to this link.

The conference will run for two days, with Tuesday's proceedings being broadcast from 9:00 to 17:45 Central European Time (CET), and Wednesday's from 9:00 to 13:00 CET. The full conference program and participants list is available here.

PRT conference participants from RFE/RL include: Jeffrey Gedmin, President; John O'Sullivan, Chief Editor; Akbar Ayazi, Director of Radio Free Afghanistan (Radio Azadi) and Mohammed Amin Mudaquiq, RFE/RL's Kabul Bureau Chief. RFE/RL's Afghan service, known locally as Radio Azadi, is the most popular radio station in Afghanistan, with a weekly audience of 7.9 million people and a market share of about 50%.

Conference organizers say their goals are to contribute to a coherent Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) strategy in Afghanistan based on an assessment of their operations to date and to identify the challenges PRTs face. The conference also aims to increase awareness among policymakers, the media, and the broader public of the challenges and the critical importance of reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.

Contested Commons: The Future of American Power in a Multipolar World - Abraham M. Denmark, Dr. James Mulvenon, Frank Hoffman, Lt Col Kelly Martin, USAF, Oliver Fritz, Eric Sterner, Dr. Greg Rattray, Chris Evans, Jason Healey, and Robert D. Kaplan; Center for a New American Security Report.

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released today a major report on American power in the sea, air, space and cyberspace: Contested Commons: The Future of American Power in a Multipolar World. The report, authored by CNAS Fellow Abraham M. Denmark and nine additional experts, advocates that the United States renew its commitment to the global commons by pursuing three mutually supporting objectives: build global regimes that preserve the openness of the commons; engage pivotal actors that have the will and ability to protect and sustain them; and develop the hard-power tools and capabilities necessary for the United States to defend the global commons.

Read the full report at CNAS.

The Post-COIN Era is Here - Mark Safranski, Zenpundit

There has been, for years, an ongoing debate in the defense and national security community over the proper place of COIN doctrine in the repertoire of the United States military and in our national strategy. While a sizable number of serious scholars, strategists, journalists and officers have been deeply involved, the bitter discussion characterized as "COINdinista vs. Big War crowd" debate is epitomized by the exchanges between two antagonists, both lieutenant colonels with PhD's, John Nagl, a leading figure behind the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and now president of the powerhouse think tank CNAS , and Gian Gentile, professor of history at West Point and COIN's most infamous arch-critic.

In terms of policy and influence, the COINdinistas ultimately carried the day. COIN advocates moved from a marginalized mafia of military intellectuals who in 2004 were just trying to get a hearing from an indifferent Rumsfeld Pentagon, to policy conquerors as the public's perceptions of the "Surge" in Iraq (masterminded by General David Petraeus, Dr. Frederick Kagan, General Jack Keane and a small number of collaborators) allowed the evolution of a COIN-centric, operationally oriented, "Kilcullen Doctrine" to emerge across two very different administrations. Critics like Colonel Gentile and Andrew Bacevich began to warn, along with dovish liberal pundits - and with some exaggeration - that COIN theory was acheiving a "cult" status that was usurping the time, money, talent and attention that the military should be devoting to traditional near peer rival threats. And furthermore, ominously, COIN fixation was threatening to cause the U.S. political class (especially Democrats) to be inclined to embark upon a host of half-baked, interventionist "crusades"in Third world quagmires...

More at Zenpundit.