Nine years ago we went to war with the enemy we had, not the enemy we wanted. For several years after 9/11 we struggled to comprehend how military superiority failed to translate into strategic victory. We created labels like "irregular" and "hybrid" to describe adversaries that did not conform to our structured view of international affairs shaped by the second half of the Cold War. Today, conflict is democratized, not in the sense of bicameral legislatures but strategic influence in the hands of non-state actors empowered by falling barriers to information acquisition, packaging and dissemination as well as easy access to the means of destruction and disruption, physical and virtual.

This new "democracy" is messy and yet we continue to formulate, plan, and execute engagement using "regular" and "homogeneous" bureaucracies and budgets. Today's threats are increasingly complex, often stateless, and rarely conforming to neat lines of authorities and responsibilities across, or within, government agencies, most of which were designed in and for previous eras.

Calls for "smart power" and a "whole of government" approach has resulted in countless articles, memos, and reports on updating the State Department, the Defense Department, and other agencies to confront the challenges of today and tomorrow. A few more reports -- each significant -- will come from the Administration over the next several weeks, including the Defense Department's so-called "1055 Report" (named after the section in the Congressional report requiring it), a new strategy on public diplomacy from the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and a strategic direction from the National Security Council. Each report is likely to call for the blending of planning and execution across executive branch agencies. The focus on improving the operational elements of national power, while necessary, ignores a critical national security actor that has received little to no attention or pressure to adapt to the new and emerging requirements: Congress...

More at Budget Insight.

December was the first month since the Iraq war began in which there were no American combat deaths, a milestone hailed by military officials Friday as they inaugurated a new name for the U.S. force at the start of the year that will see the war wind down in earnest. Henceforth, the Multinational Force-Iraq will officially be called the United States Force-Iraq, in belated recognition of the fact that for some time there have been no other nations serving alongside U.S. troops in the nearly 7-year-old conflict. British, Australian and Romanian soldiers pulled out in July, leaving Americans as the last surviving members of what President George W. Bush once called "the coalition of the willing." A small number of foreigners are serving with a NATO training mission, but they were not part of the multinational force.

At its peak, the coalition included 32 nations, but the term often drew snickers because many of the members, such as Estonia and Tonga, were among America's smallest allies and contributed fewer than 100 troops. And now the U.S. is preparing to pull out too, adding an end-of-era feel to the renaming ceremony held at one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces on the sprawling Camp Victory complex outside Baghdad. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the troops and diplomats assembled in the palace's marble foyer that the new name signaled a new phase for the military as it prepares to halt all combat operations and scale back from the current 110,000 troops to fewer than 50,000 by August. The remaining troops, who will provide support and training,are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011...

More at The Los Angeles Times.

The CIA officers at FOB Chapman were very likely in the business of making contact with Afghan and Pakistani citizens in the area with the goal of recruiting agents who could nominate targets for either missile strikes or direct action raids. It is wholly appropriate that the CIA was there for this purpose -- it is a core function of the Clandestine Service to recruit and manage such agent networks.

Naturally, the very fact that CIA officers were out making contact with the locals made them vulnerable to counter-infiltration. The origins of this dilemma date back thousands of years so we must assume that the CIA was well aware of the risks and had procedures in place to mitigate those risks. According to a story in today's Washington Post, the Taliban claimed that the suicide bomber who infiltrated the inner CIA compound was an officer in the Afghan army. Although unconfirmed, this claim seems realistic. The Taliban handler of the infiltrator could have spent many months or even years building up a trusting relationship with the Americans. If the infiltrator was an Afghan army officer, this attack is likely to create additional difficult strains between Afghan and U.S. forces.

Might misguided American assumptions about class and social-economic status now be a security vulnerability? The CIA may never declassify its internal investigation of the FOB Chapman attack, so for now I can only speculate on what actually happened. It is easy to see how the Americans could remain suspicious of a common Afghan soldier, no matter how long they had known him. But an Afghan army officer, perhaps one who had travelled to the West, maybe gone to school there, would more easily find a place inside the CIA's small circle of camaraderie.

Might a similar misguided American assumption about class and social-economic status at least partly explain how Major Hasan -- an officer, medical school graduate and mass-murderer at Fort Hood -- escaped scrutiny? We can assume that the State Department's Consular bureau would resist issuing a multi-entry visa to a common Nigerian military-aged male from a Lagos slum. But the State Department did issue such a visa to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who nearly succeeded in downing an airliner on Christmas Day. Abdulmutallab came from a wealthy Nigerian family, lived in a multi-million dollar flat in London, and was an honors graduate from University College London. For a U.S. consular officer with perhaps a similar pedigree, someone like Abdulmutallab might not seem like a risk.

While the U.S. escalates its military operations in the dusty hinterlands of Afghanistan and Yemen, adversaries might be focusing their terror recruiting efforts at British universities. Which makes one wonder which side is better at learning and adapting, and exploiting his enemy's blind spots and cultural weaknesses.

Insurgency and counterinsurgency are radically different sides of the same coin - a truly asymmetric conflict. The intelligence demands for both sides are equally dissimilar. Effective intelligence for counterinsurgency has historically been a great challenge for those schooled in traditional military intelligence with its emphasis on fighting peer enemies in a symmetric conflict. Even with the modern gamut of collection and analytic capabilities, successful intelligence against insurgents remains difficult. History has good examples of effective counterinsurgency intelligence, notably the British experience in Malaya and more recently in Northern Ireland. British success owes more to effective organization and information management than to technology. Integrating their proven methods with contemporary technology offers the possibility of an intelligence system possessing far greater speed and flexibility, and requiring relatively low investment in equipment and training. Employing such a system is expected to drastically skew the battlefield in favor of the counterinsurgency effort, offering faster conflict resolution.

21st Century Counterinsurgency Intelligence.

In the fall of 2003, the new commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, decided on a new strategy. Known as counterinsurgency, the approach required coalition forces to work closely with Afghan leaders to stabilize entire regions, rather than simply attacking insurgent cells. But there was a major drawback, a new unpublished Army history of the war concludes. Because the Pentagon insisted on maintaining a "small footprint" in Afghanistan and because Iraq was drawing away resources, General Barno commanded fewer than 20,000 troops.

As a result, battalions with 800 soldiers were trying to secure provinces the size of Vermont. "Coalition forces remained thinly spread across Afghanistan," the historians write. "Much of the country remained vulnerable to enemy forces increasingly —to reassert their power." That early and undermanned effort to use counterinsurgency is one of several examples of how American forces, hamstrung by inadequate resources, missed opportunities to stabilize Afghanistan during the early years of the war, according to the history, "A Different Kind of War." ...

More at The New York Times.

The US Army/USMC Counterinsurgency Center is pleased to host Dr. Michael Weltsch from the Human Terrain System Reachback Center for a COIN Center Webcast from 10:00 CST, (1100 EST), (16:00 ZULU) on Fri, 29 Jan 2010.

Dr Weltsch's Briefing is entitled 'My Cousin's Enemy is My Friend: A Study of Pashtun "Tribes" in Afghanistan', It challenges our preconceived notions of the role that tribal affiliation plays in Afghanistan and questions the wisdom of trying to win the insurgency through the tribal structure.

Those interested in attending may view the meeting on-line at https://connect.dco.dod.mil/coinweb and participate via Defense Connect Online (DCO) as a guest. Remote attendees will be able to ask questions and view the slides through the software.

Ex-CIA Operative Comes Out of the Shadows - CBS News.

You don't hear from people like Henry Crumpton very often. That's because "Hank," as he's known, spent most of his adult life as a spy for the CIA. Now he has stepped out of the shadows to tell how just after 9/11, at age 44, he masterminded the downfall of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

He did it with just a handful of CIA officers, military special operations teams and an army of Afghan tribal warriors. Crumpton probably knows more about the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban than almost anyone else.

And now that he is out of the CIA, he makes no secret anymore about what he did to defeat them in 2001...

More at CBS News.

The United States spent 2009 at war again - with its own troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and as a major, indirect supporter of Pakistan in its internal counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism campaign as well. On balance, I would judge it a moderately successful year in all three places to varying degrees. But that is admittedly a subjective judgment and also obviously requires a great deal more discussion.

First, the basics: The year was one of gradual drawdown in Iraq together with intensification of operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet it was still Iraq that occupied the most American troops and cost the most for the year. The American uniformed presence there started the year at about 142,000 troops and will end it at around 115,000, with total budgetary costs of more than $100 billion in 2009. But Afghanistan became the clearly deadlier war; more than 300 Americans died there in the year, compared with 150 in Iraq. And of the three countries, it was Pakistan that probably constituted the greatest potential long-term threat to the United States, with its nuclear weapons arsenal the ultimate desired prize for Al Qaeda and other extremists in the region. Accordingly, U.S. expenditures there rose a good deal, to $3.3 billion or so in the form of economic and security aid - though this is obviously a far cry from the 12-figure costs of Iraq and the expected 12-figure costs of Afghanistan in 2010 as U.S. troop totals there rise to nearly 100,000.

What about life in each of these places for the local citizens? Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, civilian fatalities attributable to war violence were roughly comparable in each place...

More at The Los Angeles Times.

The Obama administration has outlined a three-pronged strategy in Afghanistan, focusing on security, governance and economic development. But the implementation of those elements has been woefully lopsided. Since 2002, 93% of the $170 billion the United States has committed to Afghanistan has gone to military operations. As the country prepares to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, we also need to focus on providing a surge in the quality of life for the Afghan people. U.S. Agency for International Development workers are tremendously dedicated, but there are not nearly enough of them, which means the agency is heavily dependent on private contractors. There have been some commendable achievements, such as helping reduce Afghanistan's infant mortality rate and rehabilitating nearly 1,000 miles of roads. Still, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lamented in March, the lack of results for the Afghan people is "heartbreaking."

The Obama administration has pledged a new, improved approach to development aid. Yet USAID has been without an administrator for 10 months, and the president's nominee, Rajiv Shah, has yet to be confirmed. It's now time, with the president's commitment in his West Point speech to "focus our assistance in areas, such as agriculture, that can make an immediate impact in the lives of the Afghan people," to heed the experience of successful social entrepreneurs who, with far fewer resources at their disposal, have achieved impressive progress on the ground...

More at The Los Angeles Times.