All in. All out. Double down. Withdraw. The language of the Afghanistan debate is stark, as seem the choices. But at least the debate has begun, forced by the blunt recent comments of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It is overdue. At the very least, less than a full airing of all the facts, realities, challenges and possibilities in that region shows insufficient respect and gratitude toward those we've put in harm's way. Nobody, really, is certain what to do, or wherein lies wisdom. It isn't a choice between right and wrong or "clearly smart" versus "obviously stupid" so much as a choice between two hells, or more than two.

The hell of withdrawal is what kind of drama would fill the vacuum, who would re-emerge, who would be empowered, what Pakistan would look like with a newly redrawn reality in the neighborhood, what tremors would shake the ground there as the US troops march out. It is the hell of a great nation that had made a commitment in retreat, abandoning not only its investment of blood and treasure but those on the ground, and elsewhere, who had one way or another cast their lot with us. It would involve the hell, too, of a UN commitment, an allied commitment, deflated to the point of collapse.

The hell of staying is equally clear, and vivid: more loss of American and allied troops, more damage to men and resources, an American national debate that would be a continuing wound and possibly a debilitating one, an overstretched military given no relief and in fact stretched thinner, a huge and continuing financial cost in a time when our economy is low. There is no particular guarantee of, or even completely persuasive definition of, success. And Pakistan may blow anyway. The debate is over which hell is less damaging in the long term, which hell is more livable...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

In 2008 I commanded a team of US Army combat advisers in northern Afghanistan's remote Chahar Darreh district. We patrolled with about 50 Afghan police troopers, conducting ambushes, reconnaissance, law-enforcement tasks and reconstruction. These missions had one purpose: to build trust between the police and the people and thereby isolate the insurgents moving among them. Some Afghan troopers were thieves and Taliban infiltrators. Most served with honor and courage. A growing chorus of Americans rejects operations of this kind. Opposition has hardened in response to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's call to launch a fully resourced counterinsurgency effort. Naturally, the peaceniks want us to leave Afghanistan altogether. Other opponents of the McChrystal plan urge President Barack Obama to select a safer, cheaper cleaner method of defeating al Qaeda.

Some conservative isolationists, joined by Vice President Joe Biden, argue that we should rely on commando raids and missile strikes to zap terrorist targets from afar, thereby sparing infantrymen like us the risks that go with living among the Afghans. Tellingly, the Biden camp has yet to offer any details about the sources of real-time intelligence needed to execute precision strikes, or the locations of the bases from which they would be launched. In the years prior to 9/11, our leaders gambled with the nation's safety by employing "surgical" cruise missiles attacks (that blew up only abandoned tents) and organizing specialized counterterrorism forces (that never deployed due to a poverty of intelligence). Nowadays, any talk of returning to this over-the-horizon concept is shockingly naí¯ve...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

--Colonel David Maxwell

Topics include:

1) Blame James Jones for fraying civil-military relations,

2) A Pakistani officer recommends an archipelago for Afghanistan.

Blame James Jones for fraying civil-military relations

A series of articles in the Washington Post this past week has revealed more than just a contentious White House debate over Afghanistan strategy. These reports have also exposed confusion and misunderstandings among top policymakers which have led to fraying relations between civilian and military officials. These misunderstandings, confusion, and fraying relationships are symptoms of inadequate staff work within the White House. And that staff work is the responsibility of James Jones, the national security adviser.

Writing in the Oct. 8 edition of the Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran chronicled the history of the Obama team's deliberations on Afghan strategy, starting from last winter. According to Chandrasekaran, Gen. Stanley McChrystal's call for up to 40,000 additional U.S. soldiers inflicted "sticker shock" on some at the White House. This quote from Chandrasekaran's piece sums up the feeling:

"It was easy to say, 'Hey, I support COIN,' because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes," said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency.

According to the article, McChrystal and his staff prepared their assessment with the assumption that President Barack Obama and his team at the White House had agreed to a counterinsurgency campaign. The "sticker shock" induced by McChrystal resulted in at least one anonymous verbal attack in the Washington Post on McChrystal's "assumptions -- and I don't want to say myths ..." This then led Army officers gathered at a convention in Washington to rally to the general's defense.

Chandrasekaran's account of the White House staff's Afghanistan policy reviews portrays senior officials seemingly unaware of the costs, implications, and risks of the policy choices under consideration. The White House staff and McChrystal's staff then compounded this error when they apparently failed to confirm with each other the assumptions under which McChrystal would prepare his assessment. If many at the White House suffered from "sticker shock," it is only because they didn't first understand some basics about counterinsurgency and didn't establish adequate communications with McChrystal from the start.

Who is to blame for this string of foul-ups? The official responsible for national security staff work in the White House is the national security advisor. Jones and his staff should have ensured that all participants were well briefed on the options and that communications between civilian and military officials were clear. As a former NATO commander, commandant of the Marine Corps, and political liaison officer in Washington, it is hard to imagine someone more qualified for organizing the policy reviews.

Perhaps Jones and his staff did actually prepare the briefing books and establish communications with the field only to find those efforts unused. If Jones and his staff ever start feeling the heat for Afghanistan, I'm sure we'll read an anonymous defense someday in the Washington Post.

A Pakistani officer recommends an archipelago for Afghanistan

As Obama and his advisers debate U.S. policy for Afghanistan, it is worth a moment to consider the recommendation of a Pakistani army officer who may soon find himself in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province leading soldiers against the Pakistani Taliban.

Major Mehar Omar Khan is currently a student at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Kansas and is a graduate of Pakistan's Command and Staff College in Quetta. Writing at Small Wars Journal, Khan pleads for the United States to not give up in Afghanistan. But he also advises U.S. policymakers to give up on the notion of reforming all of Afghanistan. Instead, he recommends an international strategy that would build up an archipelago of secure and prosperous model districts inside Afghanistan. In addition to improving the well-being of their inhabitants, these model districts would provide convincing evidence of the international community's good intentions. Most important, they would contrast favorably with the Taliban's mismanagement and cruelty, helping to win the battle of ideas.

But before the United States and its allies can build the model district archipelago, Khan asserts that the Coalition needs to accept some unalterable characteristics about Afghanistan. These include:

1) Afghanistan cannot be governed, at least not in the Western sense of that term.

2) Coalition and Afghan security forces cannot hope to protect all Afghans.

3) Afghanistan has always suffered from some level of civil war.

4) Afghanistan's poverty is so deep it has stunted the development of any national aspirations.

5) Whether there is a Taliban movement or not, Afghanistan's Pashtuns will fight until they gain the country's leadership positions.

Khan proceeds to describe his archipelago proposal, which would be the focus of coalition security and development efforts. What does Khan believe this project would achieve?

A few examples of model districts would unmistakably mean this: that the USA means good and only good; that Islam is not the sole monopoly of Mullah Omar; that Islam and Quran can co-exist with banks and schools and hospitals and businesses; that life without bloodshed is a good life and that what Americans do is better than what Taliban do or plan to do. The approach will give Pashtuns an irresistibly attractive reason to ditch the message and manipulation of the Taliban in addition to stripping Mullah Omar and his Al Qaeda cohorts off their narrative and their manifesto.

There was a time when U.S. policymakers hoped to implement this vision for all of Afghanistan. But even if he gets his requested reinforcements, Gen. Stanley McChrystal intends to withdraw U.S. military forces from rural areas in order to provide security for populated areas. Khan's plan would concentrate efforts on even fewer areas, abandoning large sections of the country to Taliban control, at least over the medium term.

Afghan leaders in Kabul and the provinces have understandably resisted this "ink blot" strategy. Once informed of their abandonment by U.S. and NATO forces, villages outside the "ink blots" would have three choices: self-organized defense with whatever weapons they can scrape together; displacement as refugees into an "ink blot" area; or submission to the Taliban.

Major Khan's model district strategy hopes to win the battle of ideas over the long term. In the short term however, it will give the Taliban a significant propaganda victory as they capture significant portions of the countryside. Are Afghans and the coalition strong enough to weather that storm?

Is there an "Obama Doctrine" lurking among the zigs and zags of the president's foreign policy over these first nine months? I think there is, in his repeated invocation of global rights and responsibilities. The problem is that this lawyerly framework hasn't been applied to the really tough issues, such as what to do in Afghanistan. I have been looking for a "doctrine" because, frankly, strategic thinking has been this administration's weak spot. A pragmatic president has surrounded himself with pragmatic advisers - a retired Marine general as national security adviser, a former senator as secretary of state, a career intelligence officer as secretary of defense. None are grand strategists on the model of Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Reviewing Barack Obama's major speeches, I do find one theme that he returns to again and again. To take the version that the president used in his inaugural address: "What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility." This involves a reciprocal exchange - "mutual interest and mutual respect" is how Obama put it that cold day in January, and he has returned often to that formulation. This idea - of balancing rights and responsibilities - strikes me as a central pillar of Obama's foreign policy. Iran has the right to civilian nuclear power but the responsibility to abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty; Israel has the right to live in peace but the responsibility to refrain from building settlements, which Obama rejects as illegitimate...

More at The Washington Post.

President Obama's national security team is moving to reframe its war strategy by emphasizing the campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan while arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States, officials said Wednesday. As Mr. Obama met with advisers for three hours to discuss Pakistan, the White House said he had not decided whether to approve a proposed troop buildup in Afghanistan. But the shift in thinking, outlined by senior administration officials on Wednesday, suggests that the president has been presented with an approach that would not require all of the additional troops that his commanding general in the region has requested.

It remains unclear whether everyone in Mr. Obama's war cabinet fully accepts this view. While Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has argued for months against increasing troops in Afghanistan because Pakistan was the greater priority, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have both warned that the Taliban remain linked to Al Qaeda and would give their fighters havens again if the Taliban regained control of all or large parts of Afghanistan, making it a mistake to think of them as separate problems. Moreover, Mr. Obama's commander there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has argued that success demands a substantial expansion of the American presence, up to 40,000 more troops. Any decision that provides less will expose the president to criticism, especially from Republicans, that his policy is a prescription for failure...

More at The New York Times.

In early March, after weeks of debate across a conference table in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the participants in President Obama's strategic review of the war in Afghanistan figured that the most contentious part of their discussions was behind them. Everyone, save Vice President Biden's national security adviser, agreed that the United States needed to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency mission to defeat the Taliban. That conclusion, which was later endorsed by the president and members of his national security team, would become the first in a set of recommendations contained in an administration white paper outlining what Obama called "a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." Preventing al-Qaeda's return to Afghanistan, the document stated, would require "executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy."

To senior military commanders, the sentence was unambiguous: US and NATO forces would have to change the way they operated in Afghanistan. Instead of focusing on hunting and killing insurgents, the troops would have to concentrate on protecting the good Afghans from the bad ones. And to carry out such a counterinsurgency effort the way its doctrine prescribes, the military would almost certainly need more boots on the ground...

More at The Washington Post.

But White House officials are resisting McChrystal's call for urgency, which he underscored Thursday during a speech in London, and questioning important elements of his assessment, which calls for a vast expansion of an increasingly unpopular war. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting, said, "A lot of assumptions -- and I don't want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions - were exposed to the light of day."

Hey senior admin official - I'd like to take you outside for a talking to - yea - that's the ticket.

Yes, I know -- there you go again Dave -- a SWJ guy who does not post much concerning his personal opinions -- doing just that. That said, Gen McChrystal and his assembled group provided us ground truth on the situation in Afghanistan and by extension Pakistan. I for one am glad he has been pressing this assessment in the mainstream news media. Ground truth trumps all and the average Joe should be just as informed as the senior admin official.

How the Taliban Might Respond to McChrystal's New War Plan

The Taliban's response to the Afghan war strategy proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal could be shocking and grim, with insurgents redoubling suicide attacks and ambushes against American troops, aircraft and road convoys, triumphantly setting up "liberated zones,'' and executing Afghan police and collaborators in areas abandoned by US and allied forces. The first months of the new strategy, rather than feeling like a winning new campaign, could feel a lot like losing.

In the short term, at least, that's the dismaying expectation of a wide range of counterinsurgency and Afghanistan experts if President Obama authorizes McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to implement a wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign with as many as 40,000 additional US troops. Pentagon and White House officials say that decision will be made within weeks...

Obama's War: Take Your Time

Out on Afghanistan's dusty battlefields, the war is so complicated that some of America's most hardened, experienced counterinsurgency warriors are stymied and frustrated. Frustrated that they don't have the right tools or enough manpower or, most of all, enough time. Frustrated at the difficulty of grappling with IEDs, corrupt Afghan officials and contractors, and a sullen and skeptical population. Frustrated that their troops don't speak the local language or understand the local culture. Frustrated at trying to manage battles without harming civilians, and struggling to coax signs of life from a flat-lined economy and an inept and sometimes venal government.

One brigade commander, Col. Michael Howard, is on his fourth tour in Afghanistan and understands it like few others. Still, there are pieces of this war that stop him cold. One of them is government corruption. "It's a cancer without a cure in Afghanistan, and if we don't come up with a cure, it will cause us to fail,'' Howard told me last month, biting off his words angrily.

A battalion commander in eastern Afghanistan, also fed up with the war's complexity, confessed: "Sometimes you just want a good, old-fashioned firefight to settle this whole damn thing.'' ...

Afghanistan: How the Kunduz Air Strike Shapes the Debate

The bombs fell about three hours before dawn. Two seven-foot-long steel torpedo shapes sliced silently through the darkness, each packed with 192 pounds of Tritonal high explosive, released and guided by American F-15E strike fighters high over Kunduz province, Afghanistan.

Hours later the news broke, briefly interrupting reports of the latest bickering over health care reform, Michael Jackson's memorial service and unrest in China. Two gasoline tanker trucks, hijacked by the Taliban, had exploded in the attack, killing dozens of insurgents and perhaps civilians. The incident in early September ignited a brief flare-up of questions about air strike policy and civilian casualties, before attention turned back to point scoring on health care and speculating when Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghan war assessment would be unveiled. Maybe there's no other way to think about the Afghanistan war except in the most abstract terms. Air strikes or "boots on the ground"? Nation-building, or population-centric security? Counter-insurgency strategy, or counter-terrorism strategy? ...

Much more at David Wood's Afghanistan Journal.