The aftermath of Afghanistan's elections has been uglier and more consequential than the campaign that preceded the voting. It has become clear that President Hamid Karzai's bid for reelection was tainted by widespread fraud, a development that represents the Obama administration's first significant failure in foreign affairs...

The disputed elections are not simply a political embarrassment. They pose significant questions about the new US counterinsurgency strategy of population protection, which was initially keyed to clearing areas contested by the Taliban - largely the Pashtun-inhabited southern region - to enable people there to vote freely.

But even in many of the "cleared" villages, Afghans refused to come out to vote, apparently fearing that in a matter of weeks or months the Taliban would seep back into their zones and seek vengeance on those who went to the polls...

More at The Washington Post.

... There are two sides to the military's foray into the freewheeling world of the interactive Web. At the highest echelons of the Pentagon, civilian officials and four-star generals are newly hailing the power of social networking to make members of the American military more empathetic, entice recruits and shape public opinion on the war.

Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of American forces in Iraq, is on Facebook. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has a YouTube channel and posts Twitter updates almost daily.

The Army is encouraging personnel of all ranks to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of its field manuals. And on Aug. 17, the Department of Defense unveiled a Web site promoting links to its blogs and its Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites.

The Web, however, is a big place. And the many thousands of troops who use blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to communicate with the outside world are not always in tune with the Pentagon's official voice. Policing their daily flood of posts, videos and photographs is virtually impossible - but that has not stopped some in the military from trying...

More at The New York Times.

More on Secretary Gates 4 September interview with Al-Jazeera:

Secretary Gates Interview with Al Jazeera at the Pentagon - Transcript

Pakistan Tops List of Challenges, Gates Says - American Forces Press Service

Gates Praises Pakistan's Grip on Extremists - Agence France-Presse

Gates Reaffirms US Commitment to Afghanistan - Washington Post

US Cannot Think of Afghan Withdrawal - American Forces Press Service

Gates Corrects Holbrooke on Afghanistan Metrics - Washington Independent

Gates Speaks Frankly on Pakistan, Iraq - American Forces Press Service

US Enlists Arabs to Pressure Tehran - The Australian

Gates: Arab World Should Arm Against Iran - Jerusalem Post

Gates Labels Iran as Problem - American Forces Press Service

Gates: Arab World Should Unite to Counter Iran Threat - Voice of America

Gates Urges Arabs to Strengthen Military Ties - Agence France-Presse

According to a story in Sunday's Washington Post, TIDE information, in theory at least, is currently available to the public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The intelligence community wants to end that possibility through legislation that will exempt TIDE information from FOIA disclosure. According to the story, several privacy interest groups are lobbying against passage of such an exemption.

What's the problem? An excerpt from the article:

"Here's the problem," [an intelligence] official said, discussing the matter on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. "If you've got somebody, including a suspected terrorist, who can FOIA that information, you're making intelligence-gathering methods vulnerable. You're possibly making intelligence agents and law enforcement personnel vulnerable. Suspects could alter their behavior and circumvent the surveillance."

The privacy interest groups opposing the TIDE FOIA exemption are well-meaning and are doing what they see as an important job, protecting the public against government intrusion into private lives. In my judgment this is not a case of "lawfare," where terrorist sympathizers attempt to use the legal system to thwart society's ability to defend itself. Further, I have much sympathy for those unfortunates who are wrongly listed on TIDE and cannot get on an airplane or open a checking account and must wrestle for years with a faceless bureaucracy to demonstrate their innocence.

Yet in spite of these problems, the greatest threat to safety would occur if legal or bureaucratic processes ground down over time the utility of the TIDE database and its applications. As I explained in an earlier post, even if General McChrystal could tomorrow turn Afghanistan into a Switzerland, that would not reduce by a fraction the need for TIDE. For even a Switzerland can be an unwitting host to a terror cell. The U.S. itself has hosted terror cells in the past, likely has some hanging around today, and will so in the future. A database, not a brigade combat team, is the only solution to that problem.

... most specialists on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, inside and outside the government, say terrorism cannot be confronted from a comfortable distance, such as by airstrikes or proxy forces alone. It may take years to turn Afghanistan into a place that is hostile to Al Qaeda, they say, but it may be the only way to keep the United States safe in the long term. Many agree with the classified strategy for a troop buildup that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has presented to Mr. Obama and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in recent days.

They say a large American-led NATO ground force is needed to clear Taliban-held territory and hold it while instructors train sufficient, competent Afghan soldiers and police officers to secure those areas. The allied force, the argument goes, will buy time and space to help the Afghans build more effective local, provincial and national governments, and create some semblance of an economy. Since many polls in Afghanistan show little support for the Taliban, a stable, peaceful country would not be likely to become a home for terrorists...

More at The New York Times.

By Allison Brown

Everyone has read by now that Afghanistan's poppy production is down for the second year running because the farmgate price is too low for farmers to bother planting. Production has become ever more concentrated in Helmand and other southern provinces where the national government has no hold. Oliver North (Blooming Financial Support at Fox News) does not address the dynamics of these changes, only a few current policing actions from a rather narrow, US- and militray-centric point of view.

Here are some shortcomings in North's presentation:

1. Unlike Colombian coca farmers and most of the poppy farmers in the Golden Triangle, relatively few of the poppy farmers in Afghanistan are isolated. Most Afgan poppy is grown in larger plantations adjacent to the urban centers of Helmand, Kandahar and two other southern provinces where there is favorable topography, irrigation, and anarchy. Isolated farmers in any Afghan region are statistically more likely to grow poppy because the crop provides good returns to water investment and because there is no other crop to sell from their land. [See my previous SWJ posts] In contrast, in other countries better local markets and better law enforcement push drug cropping farther away from urban centers.

2. The field in the photo is not typical of poppy fields in the south but more like the isolated fields of the north. Small, situated at the base of a hill to catch night fogs and underground water and lots of rocks. See the difference with this photo of Helmand (courtesy of the UK government.)

3. "... took down a heroin-hashish "bazaar" and bagged more than a dozen narco-terrorists." The article, like many others, makes no distinction between insurgents and criminals. Saying that all poppy profits go to terrorists is counterfactual.

4. "...the [Taliban] has derived newfound wealth from the heroin trade." The Taliban, like other Afghan criminals, have always been involved with drugs. The shift to in-country heroin processing is new.

5. The $70 million estimate is from the CIA, not UNODC, who put it at $125 million. The CIA and UN numbers are as well researched as these numbers can be and are not even close to each other. What these numbers, and others you might see, fail to factor in is the high cost of doing business in Afghanistan. Cars, fuel, personnel, security (yes, even the Taliban need security), farm inputs, bribes, management, marketing, etc. eat up the drug revenues and the remaining profit to spend on weapons and training is not nil, of course, but very much less. Methamphetamines are much more profitable.

6. The reported value of precursor chemicals includes ones used for methamphetamine production in addition to those used for heroin processing.

7. "This nexus of narcotics, crime and terror has prompted a dramatic change in allied strategy that provides new opportunities for success in Afghanistan." Well, no, the complete failure of the previous strategy prompted the change.

8. "DEA intelligence experts and a growing network of informants — something other U.S. agencies have been unable to duplicate — are now providing detailed "actionable" information; "target sets" that can be rapidly exploited in "capture-kill" missions." No other U.S. agencies are tasked this way so no other agency has duplicated DEA efforts. More interesting is DEA's past unwillingness to heed recommendations from "networks of informants" used by other agencies. The "hit the kingpins not the farmers" strategy was suggested as early as February 2004 Kenefick and Morgan in a think piece for USAID (and perhaps earlier from sources I do not know). The US has not pursued this strategy till now. The works of David Mansfield and his colleagues on lowering incentives to produce poppy are cited in previous posts on this site.

9. "Interdiction operations such as these are not being conducted in a U.S.-NATO vacuum. U.S. trainers are now deployed to train, mentor and advise Afghanistan's fledgling counter-narcotics police. The Afghan Sensitive Investigation Unit and National Interdiction Unit now number more than 275 law officers — many of whom accompany DEA agents and Spec Ops forces on raids". Mr. North neglects to mention that many, if not most, of these Afghan forces are trained by the British or by multi-national teams.

10. "The country still has only one paved highway and the near total collapse of basic infrastructure is indicative of how badly the U.N. and the "international donor community" have squandered billions here." Guess who the biggest international donor has been? Guess who has deemphasized infrastructure rehab?

And there are plenty of paved roads in Afghanistan just maybe none that Mr North considers a highway.

Allison Brown has over twenty-five years professional experience providing business development services to urban and rural development projects in developing economies. She is also a technical specialist on the use of agriculture and economic interventions in Counter Narcotics programs. Ms Brown in 2008 worked as the Counter Narcotics Advisor for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, Government of Afghanistan. In 2004-5 she was Team Leader of a worldwide impact evaluation of Alternative Development practices against drug crops for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Ms Brown served as a USAID staff officer in Sri Lanka from 1987-1990 the height of the civil war.

One of the most perplexing problems facing the PSYOP community is measuring the effectiveness of Psychological Operations. The larger the scale of the PSYOP effort, the more complex the problem grows, thus making operational PSYOP of a national or regional scope more difficult to measure than tactical efforts of limited scope.

Units often rely on measures of performance, or MOP, - showing what and how much they did - in lieu of measures of effectiveness, or MOE, because the former are comparatively easier to ascertain. But MOP alone do not answer the critical question, "Is the PSYOP effort working?" Although MOP serve a purpose, the greater emphasis should always be on obtaining valid, accurate MOE, since they provide decision-makers with the information necessary to determine which efforts deserve continued funding, which should be used as templates for future efforts and which should be adjusted or even abandoned.

Solving the MOE riddle requires that PSYOP planners and analysts do the "heavy lifting" before initiating PSYOP. Establishing the criteria for assessment requires solid planning and analysis. Unfortunately, those activities are often dispensed with in the name of expediency...

More at Special Warfare.

In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, the U.S. military experienced a revival of interest in irregular warfare, or IW, similar to the one that is occurring today. In both of the previous periods, the topic enjoyed a celebrity-like popularity in professional military forums until such time that circumstances allowed it to be relegated back to the margins in favor of a return to "proper soldiering."

Both previous revivals produced high-quality doctrine and curriculum in professional-education courses. So why, then, did IW fail to become ingrained as part of the military mainstream? The manner in which a topic is framed can significantly influence the opinion of the target audience. Suggesting that IW is the graduate level of warfare, while clearly expressing the topic's difficulty, fails to recognize the considerable effort that the Army has invested in mastering major combat operations, or MCO. Given the imbalance between the Army's investment in MCO and in IW, it's not surprising that, by comparison, IW appears more difficult and complex. Over the last several decades, old IW concepts have often been reintroduced or reinvented under new names, such as "low-intensity conflict" and "military operations other than war." While there is no question that those concepts are complex, presenting them as new byproducts of emerging and changing world conditions, such as globalization, urbanization and radicalization, brings into question not only the enduring nature of the IW requirement but also whether these conflicts are, in fact, merely anomalies to be weathered. While labels and marketing techniques may be helpful in reconciling our collective discomfort with the topic, they undermine the overall integration of the topic by further entrenching skeptics...

More at Special Warfare.

Back in January when he took office, Barack Obama had amassed a very considerable pile of chips. Events since then have appreciably reduced that stack. Should he wager what remains on Afghanistan? That's the issue the president now faces.

The first true foreign policy test of the Obama presidency has arrived, although not in the form of a crisis coming out of nowhere announced by a jangling telephone at 3 a.m. Instead, a steady drip-drip of accumulating evidence warns that Afghanistan is coming apart...

Obama's advisors - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen and Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander on the ground in Afghanistan - have been quite candid in arguing that half-measures won't suffice. The war is going badly. The Taliban is gaining in strength. Seven-plus years of allied efforts in Afghanistan have accomplished very little.

Even if the military's recently rediscovered catechism of counterinsurgency provides the basis for a new strategy, turning things around will take a very long time - five to 10 years at least. Achieving success (however vaguely defined) will entail the expenditure of vast resources: treasure (no one will say how much) and, of course, blood (again, no one offers an estimate)...

More at The Los Angeles Times.