The Tenacity Question - David Brooks, New York Times opinion.

Today, President Obama will lead another meeting to debate strategy in Afghanistan. He will presumably discuss the questions that have divided his advisers: How many troops to commit? How to define plausible goals? Should troops be deployed broadly or just in the cities and towns? For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do. I've called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies.

I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested. Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level. They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination...

More at The New York Times.

On the War's Front Lines - David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion.

Here's what you would see if you traveled this week to Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the two big battlegrounds of the Afghanistan war: a conflict that is balanced tenuously between success and failure. The United States has deployed enough troops to disrupt the Taliban insurgency and draw increasing fire, but not enough to secure the major population centers. That's not a viable position. I visited four US bases in the two provinces this week, traveling with the military. I was able to hear from local commanders and talk with a few Afghans. I'll describe what I learned, positive and negative, so readers can weigh this evidence from the field. Then I'll explain why my conclusion is that President Obama should add some troops.

We began in Kandahar city, at the headquarters of what's known as Regional Command South, which oversees the battle in the two provinces. It's a city on the edge of the desert, surrounded by jagged, slate-gray mountains. Just over the border to the east are the Taliban's supply lines in Pakistan. America's NATO allies have been running the war in Kandahar province, but they have been badly outgunned. So several months ago, the United States sent an Army brigade of about 4,000 troops with Stryker armored vehicles. That disrupted the Taliban insurgents, but they have responded with more roadside bombs along Highway 1, the main route that connects Kandahar to Afghanistan's other major cities...

More at The Washington Post.

Troop Level in Afghanistan is the Easy Part - Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times opinion.

President Obama's in-house debate on troop levels in Afghanistan isn't over yet, but it's a safe bet what he'll do: split the difference. Obama's military commander, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, requested between 10,000 and 40,000 additional troops. The president appears headed toward a number in the middle. But the number of troops, as both McChrystal and Obama have said, is not the most important thing. More important are the answers to three questions: Will US goals be limited to make them more achievable? Will Obama make it clear that this troop increase is the last one the Pentagon will get? And can the US succeed in nudging Afghanistan toward a more functional, less corrupt government, without which the whole enterprise will fail?

First, the mission. Last March, when he made his initial decision to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, Obama declared what he apparently thought was "a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." The problem was that the military's counterinsurgency strategists took the president at his word and began planning a strategy to prevent Al Qaeda's return to Afghanistan, which in turn meant they would have to prevent Al Qaeda's ally, the Taliban, from controlling Afghan territory. Defeating the Taliban required a counterinsurgency campaign over most of the country. For such an ambitious mission, McChrystal's request for 40,000 US troops atop the 68,000 deployed seems too modest...

More at The Los Angeles Times.

For Every Iraqi Party, an Army of Its Own - Najim Abed al-Jabouri, New York Times opinion.

Sunday's coordinated suicide bombings in Baghdad, which killed more than 150 people, were a brutal reminder of how far Iraq still has to go in terms of security. While things are far better than a few years ago, one huge task remains: getting the public to trust the Iraqi security forces. From 2005 to 2008, I was the mayor of Tel Afar, a town in Nineveh Province in northern Iraq that become the model for the "clear, hold and build" strategy credited with turning the war around during the surge. In some ways, the story of Tel Afar is indicative of what we are now seeing on a larger scale in Iraq. In 2004, Tel Afar was plagued by insurgency and terrorism, the result of missed chances and poor decisions by both the American and the Iraqi governments. In early 2005, however, I was approached by Col. H. R. McMaster, an innovative American brigade commander (he is now a brigadier general) who agreed with me that security efforts should focus on gaining the confidence of the people and not only on killing the enemy. We went to work building bridges with the population...

The Iraqi government needs to apply these same principles to the national security forces. Both the military and the police remain heavily politicized. The police and border officials, for example, are largely answerable to the Interior Ministry, which has been seen (often correctly) as a pawn of Shiite political movements. Members of the security forces are often loyal not to the state but to the person or political party that gave them their jobs...

More at The New York Times.

Makeshift Bombs Spread Beyond Afghanistan, Iraq - Thom Shanker, New York Times.

American military officers are expressing concern over the spreading use of makeshift bombs beyond the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan to other countries in the region, as well as in East Asia and South America. Improvised explosive devices, as the military calls them, have been the largest killer of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing up with devastating effect in Pakistan and India, but also with less notice in Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Colombia, Somalia and parts of North Africa. Even Russian security forces have faced the devices in the republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, although attacks in Chechnya have fallen.

"There is a robust and constant IED effort among violent extremists who are using it as their weapon of choice," said Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, director of the Pentagon's organization in charge of seeking ways to counter improvised explosives. "That won't change for decades. We are in this fight for a long time." General Metz, who will discuss the spread of improvised bombs during testimony on Thursday before a House Armed Services subcommittee, said global IED cases outside Iraq and Afghanistan averaged about 300 per month. The count includes detonations and the discovery of intact devices. The military's global statistics on the bombs remain classified, to prevent extremists from knowing what the United States knows. But a compilation of worldwide episodes from private-sector security consultants illustrates the threat...

More at The New York Times.

Obama Seeks Study on Local Leaders for Troop Decision - Scott Wilson and Greg Jaffe, Washington Post.

President Obama has asked senior officials for a province-by-province analysis of Afghanistan to determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help, information that his advisers say will guide his decision on how many additional US troops to send to the battle. Obama made the request in a meeting Monday with Vice President Biden and a small group of senior advisers helping him decide whether to expand the war.

The detail he is now seeking also reflects the administration's turn toward Afghanistan's provincial governors, tribal leaders and local militias as potentially more effective partners in the effort than a historically weak central government that is confronting questions of legitimacy after the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election. "This is obviously a complicated security environment in Afghanistan, and the president wants the clearest possible understanding of what the challenges are to our forces and what is required to meet that challenge," said a senior administration official who has participated in the Afghanistan policy review and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. "Any successful and sustainable strategy must clearly align the resources we provide with the goals we are trying to achieve." ...

More at The Washington Post.

My friend and CCISS colleague Tom Quiggan just wrote an excellent piece at GlobalBrief called The LTTE is targeting Canada. While Tom focuses on the LTTE or Tamil Tigers and, in particular, the October 16th seizure of the Ocean Lady, the piece highlights a critical problem for democracies: when do the structures of a democracy encourage the support of international organizations using terrorist tactics? As Tom notes:

Notwithstanding the recent finding of the Government of Canada that the LTTE is a terrorist group, we still see MPs supporting it in public. The MP for the riding of Bramalea-Gore-Malton, Gurbax Singh Malhi, was on Parliament Hill this year telling demonstrators waving LTTE flags that "I'd like to let you know I'm helping you guys. I'm behind you because you are fighting for a right cause." At the same time, elected officials from various levels of government are still seen in public in 2008 and 2009 supporting yet another banned terrorist group, the ISFY.

This is just one illustration of a larger problem: Members of Parliament, Congressmen or whatever we call the local representatives in our various democracies are elected to support and represent their constituents and, increasingly, these constituents are members of diasporic communities that have strong ties (blood, family, emotion, politics) back to their countries of origin (often defined by going back multiple generations). This problem is not new -- it has been around in both Canada and the United States since at least the 1860's (cf the Fenian Raids), and diasporic communities have also been drawn on to support later military operations such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

While not new, the problem has both grown and, at the same time, become an increasingly potent battlespace that is poorly understood and strikes at the very root of many democracies asking the existential questions of "Why and when do we as a society fight?" and "For what causes?".

Part of the reason why it has become an increasingly potent battlespace can be found in the simple observation that many post-Westphalian states were built around an assumption of control over information and centralized control of information dissemination, a tendency that was accelerated with the development of state controls over broadcast technologies such as radio and television. This centralized control has, however, been diminishing over the past 20 years, and that diminution has accelerated since ~2000 with the increasing global adoption of net 2.0 technologies and smartphones. Increasingly, people are able to form and maintain "communities" that are not geographically bounded as their primary attachment groups while, at the same time, using the geographically bounded areas in which they happen to live as conveniences to support their "real" communities.

So, what is a poor politician to do with people who happen to geographically reside in the area that forms their electoral boundaries, but who "live" in another country entirely?

Take Your Sweet Time, Obama - Andrew Exum, The Daily Beast

President Obama is entering the final stages of his deliberations of Afghanistan. He's deciding whether to send more troops, or reframe U.S. policy to allow for something less than the counterinsurgency campaign he promised in March. As he ponders, it's hard not to feel a little sympathy for the commander in chief. He and his administration are trying to find a path to victory in a difficult war in Central Asia while at the same time navigating treacherous political terrain at home.

Popular support for the war has fallen rapidly over the last six months—the product, in part, of a near-decade of constant war that has left large portions of the American public drifting toward neo-isolationism. At the same time, the president is coming under pressure from political opponents and concerned moderates who worry Obama's caution is wasting a very short window of opportunity in which the United States can affect the situation in Afghanistan through the application of more resources to both train Afghan security forces and protect population centers targeted by insurgent groups in places like Khost and Kandahar. "Obama is dithering on Afghanistan" was the headline for the normally temperate Financial Times columnist Clive Crook Monday, and my colleague Tom Ricks, an Obama supporter and seasoned observer of military affairs, has expressed similar concern about the administration's decision-making process.

But there are two very good reasons why the Obama administration should take its time on its decision with respect to our Afghanistan policy. There are also reasons why both sides in the current debate should give the White House the time to do so...

More at The Daily Beast.

A Prescription for Tragedy in Afghanistan - Max Boot, Commentary

If media leaks are to be believed, President Obama will attempt to chart a middle way in Afghanistan, sending more soldiers but not as many as General Stanley McChrystal would like. The New York Times describes the emerging strategy as "McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country," a blend of the diametrically opposed approaches advocated by the general (who favors a counterinsurgency strategy) and the vice president (who wants to do counterterrorism operations only). The Times writes that "the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Maza-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said." In the rest of Afghanistan, presumably, operations would be limited to a few air raids and Special Operations raids. Other media reports suggest that the administration is looking to send 10,000 to 20,000 troops -- not the 40,000 that McChrystal wants.

To Washington politicians, this no doubt sounds like a sensible compromise. To anyone steeped in military strategy it sounds as if it could be a prescription for tragedy. The administration seems intent on doing just enough to keep the war effort going without doing enough to win it. That is also what the U.S. did in Iraq from 2003 to 2007, and for that matter in Afghanistan from 2001 to today. The ambivalence of our politicians places US troops in harm's way without giving them a chance to prevail...

More at Commentary.

The great folks at the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center have launched their completely revamped Counterinsurgency Leaders Workshop, which runs through Thursday. They've lined up an impressive array of speakers for the event, including General James Mattis, reporter Trudy Rubin, and Major Ali Iqbar (Pakistani Army), among others.

The local FOX news affiliate covered the opening day of the conference, featuring comments by Canadian exchange officer and deputy director Lieutenant Colonel J.J. Malevich and branch chief Lieutenant Colonel "Storm" Savage, both of whom have recent Afghanistan experience.

 

While you're at it, the COIN Center Blog has taken an edgy move with some controversial posts, if you haven't visited it in awhile, check it out.