Who better to ask than Ryan Crocker for advice on what to do about Afghanistan?

Crocker is a 37-year veteran of the Foreign Service and spent virtually his whole career in the Middle East and South Asia. He was U.S. Chief of Mission to six countries: Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He is a Career Ambassador and was awarded the Medal of Freedom.

Does Crocker have the answer to Afghanistan? Well, no easy answer. In this essay for Newsweek, in which he recaps his career, Crocker says:

1) Don't expect what worked in Iraq to work in Afghanistan,

2) The Taliban and al Qaeda have strategic patience; the U.S. better get some, too.

3) The world, and the bad guys, won't allow the U.S. to walk away.

So no simple answer, even from Ryan Crocker. But his Newsweek essay is still worth reading.

This just released by the Institute for the Study of War: Building Security Forces and Ministerial Capacity: Iraq as a Primer by LTG James M. Dubik (U.S. Army, Ret.). Full report here. Overview below:

This report discusses how U.S. commanders in Iraq vastly accelerated the growth of the Iraq Security Forces as part of a broader counterinsurgency strategy to supplement the Surge of U.S. forces into the region.

The author, Lieutenant General James Dubik (ret.), who served as the commander of Multi-National Security and Transition Command -- Iraq (MNSTC-I) from mid-2007 to mid-2008, oversaw a rapid growth in the quantity of Iraqi Security Forces, an improvement of their operational capability due to the partnership and training with the U.S., and a reformation of the Iraqi Ministries of Interior and Defense to help institutionalize the growth of these indigenous security forces. Despite the success in developing security forces during the Iraqi Surge, our current military doctrine does not reflect the lessons learned or best practices used in 2007 -- 2008.

Future conflicts will likely arise in failing states and will therefore involve the Army in counterinsurgency (COIN) or stability operations. The conventional forces of the United States Army will have an enduring requirement to build the security forces and security ministries of other countries. This requirement is consequently not an aberration, unique to Iraq and Afghanistan. Planning, training, doctrine, and acquisition must take account of this mission and support it.

And from the Conclusions:

In fragile, failing, or failed states, it may take a generation for an indigenous force to reach a level of self-sustainment, in which case the U.S. must prepare to engage in a long-term cooperative security arrangement with the host nation.

Nations that require security force assistance and security sector reform are likely also to require external funding for these tasks. Foreign contributions are necessary for success and can have a double benefit -- by contributing to the growth of state finances as well as security forces.

Organizations with responsibilities like MNSTC-I have to be staffed with leaders experienced in operating large, institutional organizations and staffed with members able to link their tactical, day-to-day actions to strategic effects. The Army must train its officers and its general officers better to meet these management requirements.

Building Security Forces and Ministerial Capacity: Iraq as a Primer.

Last paragraph from Secretary of Defence Robert Gates' letter to Thomas Curley, President and Chief Executive Offer of The Associated Press, concerning the publication of a photograph of Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard, United States Marine Corps, as he lay fatally wounded in Afghanistan.

I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard's death has caused his family. Why your organization would purposefully defy the family's wishes knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right - but judgment and common decency.

The Associated Press statement concerning this affair can be found here. A Small Wars Council discussion on this issue can be found here.

The Afghanistan Abyss - Nicholas Kristof, New York Times opinion.

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

The group's concern - dead right, in my view - is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.

"Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem," the group said in a statement to me. "The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct. "The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome," the statement said...

More at The New York Times.

A Stable Pakistan Needs a Stable Afghanistan - Frederick W. Kagan, Wall Street Journal opinion.

Winning the war in Afghanistan - creating a stable and legitimate Afghan state that can control its territory - will be difficult. The insurgency has grown in the past few years while the government's legitimacy has declined. It remains unclear how the recent presidential elections will affect this situation.

Trying to win in Afghanistan is not a fool's errand, however. Where coalition forces have conducted properly resourced counterinsurgency operations in areas such as Khowst, Wardak, Lowgar, Konar and Nangarhar Provinces in the eastern part of the country, they have succeeded despite the legendary xenophobia of the Pashtuns.

Poorly designed operations in Helmand Province have not led to success. Badly under-resourced efforts in other southern and western provinces, most notably Kandahar, have also failed. Can well-designed and properly-resourced operations succeed? There are no guarantees in war, but there is good reason to think they can. Given the importance of this theater to the stability of a critical and restive region, that is reason enough to try...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

In Afghanistan, Let's Keep It Simple - Ahmed Rashid, Washington Post opinion.

For much of the 20th century before the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan was a peaceful country living in harmony with its neighbors. There was a king and a real government, which I witnessed in the 1970s when I frequently traveled there. Afghanistan had what I'll call a minimalist state, compared with the vast governmental apparatuses that colonialists left behind in British India and Soviet Central Asia.

This bare-bones structure worked well for a poor country with a small population, few natural resources and a mix of ethnic groups and tribes that were poorly connected with one another because of the rugged terrain. The center was strong enough to maintain law and order, but it was never strong enough to undermine the autonomy of the tribes. Afghanistan was not aiming to be a modern country or a regional superpower. The economy was subsistence-level, but nobody starved. Everyone had a job, though farm labor was intermittent. There was a tiny urban middle class, but the gap between rich and poor was not that big. There was no such thing as Islamic extremism or a narco-state...

More at The Washington Post.

Why We're Getting it Wrong in Afghanistan - Anthony King, Prospect.

Writing in this month's Prospect, Stephen Grey details the political and military mistakes that have been made in Helmand. Perhaps most importantly, he identifies the role of the institutional culture of Britain's armed forces: "cracking on"—the unshakeable determination of Britain's troops. Grey is right that the ethos of "cracking on" is the army's greatest quality; effective armies require fortitude and morale in order to endure the losses that they will inevitably suffer. Yet, as he notes, it may be the army's greatest weakness too...

A new Afghan strategy is essential—and the announcements from US General McChrystal and Gordon Brown at the end of August recognise this. However, their new strategy in Helmand also requires a reformation of Britain's armed forces themselves. The success of General Petraeus in Iraq rested finally on a common recognition by the US Army and Marine Corps that the way in which they trained, planned and conducted military operations required profound revision. In short, operational success demands institutional reform at home. While valuable at the tactical level, the culture of "cracking on" needs to be expunged from operational command. The armed forces, the ministry of defence and government need to develop more mature criteria on which to assess the performance of commanders—judging them by their political contribution to the campaign, not by the number of air assault operations they have conducted....

More at Prospect.

Cracking on in Helmand - Stephen Grey, Prospect.

... Even in chaos and dysfunction, the British army is good at preserving a belief in order and purpose. And when men die their officers steel them and move onwards with poetic speeches, just as Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thomson did on 10th July 2009, after a dreadful day near the town of Sangin in Helmand in which five of his men were killed. In his eulogy Thomson wrote about men saluting the fallen, and returning to the ramparts. "I sensed each rifleman tragically killed in action today standing behind us as we returned to our posts, and we all knew that each one of those riflemen would have wanted us to 'crack on'... And that is what we shall do."

Crack on. From Basra to Sangin, I've heard that phrase as regularly as Amen in church. Cracking on: the army's greatest quality, and perhaps its greatest weakness. I remember standing vigil on Sergeant Johnson's body at dusk on a hilltop, after he had died in the battle for the town of Musa Qala in December 2007. His fellow soldiers were silhouettes, drawn close to their commander. On the horizon muffled bombs flashed through the drizzle. Major Jake Little told his men to put their grief to one side, to deal with it later. After the battle.

Cracking on could also mean failing to challenge impossible orders, or unwillingness to expose a flawed strategy...

More at Prospect.

Here is the latest edition of my column at Foreign Policy:

Afghanistan and civil-military relations

General Stanley McChrystal's report on the situation in Afghanistan is likely to strain relations between the Obama administration and the uniformed military. The arrival of McChrystal's report in Washington in likely to spark its own low-level war of finger-pointing and blame-shifting between civilian policymakers in the White House and McChrystal's staff and defenders in the Pentagon. This strain in civil-military relations could last through the duration of the U.S. military's involvement in Afghanistan and beyond.

McChrystal's report is supposedly secret, but anonymous staffers have already revealed its themes to the Washington Post. The goal of these staffers is to protect McChrystal and the uniformed military against White House officials they likely don't trust. These staffers have evidently concluded that they need to leak first in order to establish their position and put White House staffers on the defensive.

The first task for McChrystal's report (and its leaking defenders) was to show how President Barack Obama's supposedly limited war aims actually result in broad, expensive, and open-ended goals for Afghanistan:

Although the assessment, which runs more than 20 pages, has not been released, officials familiar with the report have said it represents a hard look at the challenges involved in implementing Obama's strategy for Afghanistan. The administration has narrowly defined its goal as defeating al-Qaeda and other extremist groups and denying them sanctuary, but that in turn requires a sweeping counterinsurgency campaign aimed at protecting the Afghan population, establishing good governance and rebuilding the economy.

McChrystal's report has thus shifted responsibility over to the White House to either the rally the country and the Congress around a big nation-building campaign or to explicitly scale back the desired war aims.

Next, according to the Washington Post, McChrystal's report lists numerous obstacles that could prevent success, barriers that are outside of the U.S. military's control:

For instance, McChrystal thinks a greater push by civilian officials is vital to shore up local Afghan governments and to combat corruption, officials said. He is emphatic that the results of the recent Afghan presidential election be viewed as legitimate, but is also realistic in acknowledging that the goals of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the coalition are not always as closely aligned as they could be, they said.

Separately, officials said, McChrystal's assessment finds that U.S. and other NATO forces must adopt a less risk-averse culture, leaving bases and armored vehicles to pursue insurgents on foot in a way that minimizes Afghan civilian deaths.

In others words, McChrystal is saying, don't hold me responsible for success if Karzai's election is a fraud, civilian officials don't show up, or European soldiers are not allowed to patrol.

The report illustrates the basic struggle between civilian policymakers and military commanders. Each side looks to the other to solve its problems. The White House staff is hoping that McChrystal will deliver a clear, high-probability war-winning strategy, a strategy that would reduce Afghanistan as an issue of concern. McChrystal, like all field commanders, wants his political masters to give him a realistic and measurable objective, with the resources needed to accomplish it.

McChrystal's report implies a pessimistic outlook for U.S. success in Afghanistan. If he and his staff had an optimistic view about the Afghan challenge, there would have been no need to be so diligent about clarifying responsibility for what comes next. In the case of success, all would share the glory. McChrystal's report is a preemptive defense against blame and recrimination. That does not bode well for either the U.S. mission in Afghanistan or for civil-military relations.

Communication breakdown

In the latest issue of Joint Forces Quarterly, Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen shouts down the concept of "strategic communications." Mullen implies that the concept of strategic communications is condescending. What really matters, he believes, are U.S. policies and how they are executed. Communicating the results of those policies is not the problem. Mullen says:

Our messages lack credibility because we haven't invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven't always delivered on promises ... That's the essence of good communication: having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves. We shouldn't care if people don't like us; that isn't the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time ... To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate.

In his essay, Mullen mentioned happy moments for the United States's public image: the voyage of the Great White Fleet, the Marshall Plan, and disaster relief missions. If that was the only type of interaction the U.S. government had with the outside world, then Mullen makes a good, but trivial point -- the State Department would not need an Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government has not found a way to limit its interactions in the world to just economic reconstruction, disaster relief, and harmless publicity tours. Long before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States found it had to defend its interests, protect its citizens abroad, oppose revisionist powers, supports its friends, and occasionally attempt to prevent human suffering. Taking a side in a conflict means making an enemy out of someone. Mullen apparently believes that clever communications cannot compensate for "what our actions communicate." He is probably correct. But he never explains how the United States, a great power with global responsibilities, can avoid taking consequential actions in the first place, actions that will anger somebody somewhere.

Writing in FP, James Glassman, the last Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, agrees with Mullen on one thing -- the U.S. should stop bothering with whether various aggrieved people like the U.S. Instead, Glassman suggests, U.S. public diplomacy efforts should encourage the citizens of countries to focus on their own bad guys instead of the U.S. For Glassman, it's okay if most Pakistanis hate the U.S. as long as even more hate the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Having experienced the harsh reality of being the U.S. government's public diplomat, Glassman's minimalist strategy may be the best he could salvage. Its success depends on having an enemy who is politically incompetent, out of touch with the populace, and incapable of adaptation. That is a good description of al Qaeda. But counting on such an adversary is not a formula for success.

The U.S. government continues to have trouble with strategic communications. Mullen and Glassman's essays show more ideas are needed.

From time to time we get asked about the image SWJ and SWC uses in the upper left hand corner of all the main pages... The image is called Tracking Bin Laden and was painted by U.S. Army Center of Military History, Museum Division's staff artist Sergeant First Class Elzie Ray Golden, US Army.

SFC Golden produced fourteen works of art as a member of the Soldier-Artist Team 25 in 1990 that documented ROTC training at Fort Lewis, Washington. He designed the May 1992 cover of Soldiers magazine featuring women in the Army during World War II, the 1991-1994 Army Aviation Association Commander's Conference posters, and the Armed Forces Day posters for 2001 and 2002. His works of art are featured in the Center of Military History books, Portrait of an Army and Soldiers Serving the Nation. The Army Historical Foundation also featured his work in the book The Army, published in 2001. SFC Golden has been the subject of articles and interviews for ArtForum and Der Spiegel magazines, German public television and public radio, and the Hartford Courant newspaper.

He won first place in 2000 in the fine art category of the first Military Graphic Artist of the Year (MILGRAPH) competition, and again in 2002.

SFC. Golden studied fine art at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the University of Arizona. He entered active military duty in October 1984. His assignments include the 13th Support Command, Fort Hood Texas; 2d Infantry Division, Camp Casey, South Korea; Training Support Activity, Eighth Army, East Korea, Yongsan, South Korea; and the 10th Aviation Brigade, Fort Rucker, Alabama.

Tracking Bin Laden won First Place - DINFOS MILGRAPH 2002, Military Graphic Competition, Fine Art category.

Here are several examples of SFC Golden's work:

TRACKING BIN LADEN

SATAN'S SANDBOX

STREET FIGHT

THE HIZARA PROVINCE

Can the US Lead Afghans? - Mark Moyar, New York Times opinion.

The Afghanistan debate is increasingly focused on two words: troop numbers. Those numbers certainly deserve serious attention as President Obama decides whether to raise them even further this year. But in Afghanistan, as in past counterinsurgencies, it is important to remember that all troop numbers are not created equal. When it comes to indigenous forces, quality often matters more than quantity, and quality often declines when quantity increases.

Current recommendations of American and Afghan troop strengths are, for the most part, based on the size of the Afghan population. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, has produced figures using a ratio of 25 troops for every 1,000 Afghans. His methodology assumes that increasing American troop strength by, say, 20 percent will increase counterinsurgency capacity by roughly the same amount. That assumption is correct, because the quality of the additional American units will be broadly similar to that of the others. Where the methodology fails is in its assumption that doubling Afghan troop strength, as many now advocate, will double counterinsurgency capacity by roughly the same amount.

Where the methodology fails is in its assumption that doubling Afghan troop strength, as many now advocate, will double counterinsurgency capacity. In reality, such an increase is likely to cause quality to fall. With Afghan security forces already two-and-a-half times as large as the American forces, and America lacking the political will to reduce that ratio, the counterinsurgency cannot afford such a drop...

More at The New York Times.