Is Obama channeling Bush in Afghanistan?

On July 1, more than 4,000 U.S. Marines charged by helicopter and armored vehicle into southern Helmand province, the heart of Afghanistan's Taliban insurgency and the home of the poppy crop that supports the rebellion. Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, the commander of Operation Khanjar, described the effort:

What makes Operation K[h]anjar different from those that have occurred before is the massive size of the force introduced, the speed at which it will insert, and the fact that where we go, we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build, and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces.

A week into of the operation, there are now questions about when those Afghan forces, so vital to Nicholson's planning, will arrive. In an interview with the Pentagon press corps, the brigadier general said that only 650 Afghan soldiers have accompanied the Marines into south Helmand. "I mean, I'm not going to sugarcoat it," said Nicholson. "The fact of the matter is, I -- we don't have enough Afghan forces, and I'd like more." Nicholson could not give a specific answer when asked when more might be on the way.

As if he saw this coming, Gen. James L. Jones (ret.), President Obama's national security advisor, warned Nicholson against asking for any more U.S. forces before Operation Khanjar began, according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. The warning came after Nicholson stated that he did not have enough troops.

Everyone agrees that the preferred solution is more Afghan soldiers and police. But Afghan forces are not missing from the battle due to some sort of oversight. They are missing because they cannot be spared from elsewhere in the country. That there were only 650 Afghan soldiers available at the start of the Obama administration's first big military operation in Afghanistan also tells us that something is amiss with the effort to expand Afghanistan's security forces.

There is an eerie resemblance here to the Bush administration's military strategy in Iraq during 2004 and 2005. In that case, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, along with Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, sought to limit the number of U.S. troops in Iraq (Abizaid called U.S. troops in Iraq an "antibody" stirring up a reaction). Rumsfeld, Abizaid, and Casey planned to quickly turn responsibility over to Iraq's security forces, but the local troops were developing much slower than expected. As violence spiraled out of control in 2006, Bush had to gamble with the "surge" -- substituting U.S. reinforcements for what should have been competent Iraqi soldiers and police.

Today, it is Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Jones who wish to cap the U.S. headcount in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in spite of several increases and reorganizations of the Afghan training program, Afghan soldiers are scarce and the local police are generally corrupt and unhelpful against the Taliban.

One notable difference from the early days in Iraq is the focus now in Afghanistan on protecting the population. But as I recently noted in this space, a population-centric approach, when combined with insufficient security forces, will leave some communities under the Taliban's control. Although the population-centric tactics in Afghanistan are an improvement from what the United States was doing in Iraq through 2005, the result still might be the perfect storm: enough foreign forces on the ground to catalyze a rebellion but too few to provide security.

Come 2011, might Obama be forced to gamble on a big U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan the same way Bush had to in Iraq? Such a decision would come 10 years into the Afghan military campaign and on the eve of Obama's run for reelection. Will either he or the electorate be ready at that time for one more military gamble?

Why insurgencies lose

As the Marines settle into their new combat outposts in Helmand province, they might ponder why some insurgencies succeed and why other fail. Writing at Small Wars Journal, Donald Stoker, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, explained why, according to one study, nearly 60% of insurgencies since World War II have failed. Stoker identified six factors contributing to failed insurgencies, five of which are self-inflicted. How do Afghanistan's Taliban rebels measure up on Stoker's factors?

1) Insurgents typically have fewer resources than the government. Certainly, the Taliban's funding and equipment do not match the Pentagon's.

2) Insurgencies are fractious. Bloody infighting among an insurgency's factions or leaders is a common weakness. I have seen little discussion of whether this a problem inside the Afghan Taliban.

3) Insurgencies are often dependent on a single leader. My guess is that the sudden demise of Mullah Mohammed Omar, should it occur, would not have much effect on the war. In fact, the Taliban's apparent lack of strong centralized leadership seems to be a significant asset.

4) An insurgency's tactics often alienate the people. The Taliban seem to be feared, not loved. Taliban leaders must be hoping that their resistance to the foreign presence in Afghanistan will find enough favor to facilitate their return to power. Although that has yet to work, intimidation has kept them in the field for eight years.

5) The people dislike the insurgent's ideas or rule. The Taliban were able to achieve power in 1996 because they offered the hope of stability during a very chaotic period of civil war. That precursor of civil war does not exist today and memories of the Taliban's terrifying period of rule linger on.

6) Insurgents sometimes employ bad strategies. During the first few years of resistance, the Taliban attempted to mass its fighters for conventional assaults on coalition positions. Roadside and suicide bombings were rare. Today, the Taliban's strategy is to avoid large-scale contact with U.S. forces. Instead, roadside and suicide bombs are causing a steady drip of casualties while the Taliban wait for U.S. domestic support of the war to fizzle.

Using Stoker's framework, it's clear that while the Taliban's ideas and tactics are unpopular, the militants have a resilient and adaptive structure. Most important, they are now employing a strategy that takes advantage of what they see as their adversary's biggest weaknesses: the U.S. public's impatience and aversion to casualties. Thus, unlike most modern insurgencies, the Taliban may not be making enough mistakes to lose.

Military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated.

--Clausewitz

General Sir Gerald Templar's admonition during the Malayan Emergency that "the answer [to the insurgency] lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and the minds of the people" has echoed through the ensuing half-century and has become the basic precept on which counter-insurgency campaigns are - or apparently should be - designed. Nowadays, hardly a day passes in which some journalist or general is not reminding us that there is no military solution to the war in Afghanistan. Echoing this proposition, in January 2009, the Secretary General of NATO argued that good governance "would suck the oxygen out of the insurgency". Similar statements were made about the war in Iraq; to argue against Bush's 2007 "surge" of troops and to emphasise that here lay a "quagmire" - dreaded by all in the US Congress and the New York Times - from which immediate withdrawal was the only solution.

This essay argues that aspects of the above propositions may be true - but they are irrelevant. That, in reality, there is no military solution to any war; that "hearts and minds" might hold the solution but they are beyond our immediate reach; that good governance (and its corollaries of law and order and national infrastructure meeting the physical needs of the community) might suck the oxygen out of an insurgency but is at best a secondary factor unattainable for many years; and that we are, in our timeless way, attempting to fit square Malayan pegs into round Middle Eastern holes. The essay concludes that until there is security there be no real progress and, as a result, we should be doing more fighting and fewer good deeds.

It is not clear from where our present woolly thinking emerged. It is a characteristic trait of humans that we try to understand events and decide on actions by the application of metaphor: "this situation looks like the one last week, Action A worked then, I'll try Action A again today". In many situations this works perfectly well, in some it does not. The present application of the "British Model" of counter-insurgency to quite different contexts may be an example of this approach to problem solving. Certainly, the media, the public and politicians find it easier to argue for the benefits of reconstruction, education, political reform - hearts and minds - than they do for the remorseless hunting down and destruction of insurgents.

Equally, perhaps, part of our problem may be that, because of some its specific attributes, the military has tended to conceptually separate counter-insurgency from the rest of its understanding of war, giving it a level of uniqueness which it does not warrant and perhaps clouding our understanding of it. Although in both Iraq and Afghanistan, on the balance of probabilities, we will eventually muddle through and bring the war to some kind of acceptable conclusion, it would be better if we understood what it was that we were about...

Much more at Quadrant.

Bonus - Brigadier Justin Kelly on How to Win in Afghanistan - Quandrant videos - six parts:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that Afghan security forces will have to expand far beyond currently planned levels if President Obama's strategy for winning the war there is to succeed, according to senior military officials.

Such an expansion would require additional billions beyond the $7.5 billion the administration has budgeted annually to build up the Afghan army and police over the next several years, and the likely deployment of thousands more US troops as trainers and advisers, officials said.

McChrystal has not yet completed a 60-day assessment of the war due next month. But Defense Department officials in Washington and in Kabul said he has informed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, including in a status update this week, of the need to increase the Afghan force substantially. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss findings that have not yet been made public.

The Afghan army is already scheduled to grow from 85,000 to 134,000, an expansion originally expected to take five years but now fast-tracked for completion by 2011. Several senior Pentagon officials indicated that an adequate size for the Afghan force might be twice the expanded number...

Much more at The Washington Post.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki struck a conciliatory tone ahead of his trip to Washington, talking about his gratitude for US sacrifices in Iraq, and offering to negotiate a settlement between Iraq's federal government and the country's Kurdish enclave as tensions heighten between the two.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal as he prepared for a visit to the US on July 21, Mr. Maliki said he planned to thank America for its shared sacrifice with the Iraqi people in the tumultuous post-Saddam Hussein years since the US-led invasion in 2003.

"We have [achieved] a combined victory against terrorism, and there have been sacrifices from both sides that brought fruitful results and democracy to Iraq," Mr. Maliki said.

During the June drawdown of US troops from Iraqi cities, Mr. Maliki praised the Iraqi security services' ability to take over from American forces. But he shied away from offering praise or thanks to US soldiers.

Some American commanders have said they understood that Mr. Maliki's seeming slight was driven by domestic politics. Still, a gesture by Mr. Maliki acknowledging US sacrifice could help to placate some rankled American commanders on the ground...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

Also like us -- and more on this later concerning SWJ -- CCO operates on a shoe-string budget -- but is kept alive by and large through the foresight and passion of its small cadre of dedicated personnel. Seems to be the norm right now -- those who offer up more on our most important issues -- operate on less resources and support -- or in some cases -- next to nothing.

With that I'll temporarily get off my soapbox as to draw your attention to a short but important CCO event:

Center for Complex Operations: 2nd Annual Conference

July 28, 2009

National Defense University

Washington, D.C.

The Center for Complex Operations Second Annual Conference will introduce the CCO's latest initiatives, including lessons learned collection efforts, a complex operations journal, and fourteen new case studies written for teaching and training.

Date and Time: July 28, 2009 at 2:00PM. The conference will be followed by a cocktail reception.

Agenda

1:30 PM Registration

2:00 PM Opening Remarks

Dr. Hans Binnendijk

Director, Center for Technology and National Security Policy

Ambassador John E. Herbst

Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, Department of State

Dr. James Schear

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense

2:45 Keynote Address

Lieutenant General David W. Barno, U.S. Army (Retired)

Director, Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies

3:15 Break

3:30 Lessons Learned from the Three Ds

Moderator: Michael Miklaucic, CCO (USAID)

Panelist 1: Ambassador James Dobbins, RAND

Panelist 2: Colonel (P) H.R. McMaster, TRADOC, Army Capabilities Integration Center

Panelist 3: Dr. David Kilcullen, Crumpton Group

4:45 CCO Research Initiatives: Complex Operations Case Studies Series

Moderator: Bernard Carreau, CCO

Panelist 1: Colonel Peter Curry, Marine Corps War College (Invited)

Panelist 2: Dr. Volker Franke, McDaniel College (Invited)

5:30 Closing Session

Ambassador Robin Raphel, Senior Vice President, Cassidy and Associates (Invited)

6:00 Reception

Registration

Please RSVP to Jacqueline Carpenter at CarpenterJ5@ndu.edu or (202) 685-6348.

Location

Lincoln Hall Auditorium, National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C.

For additional Information: Check the CCO Portal for event updates: ccoportal.org.

By General Peter W. Chiarelli

Cross-posted at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center Blog

Good leaders understand that they cannot train on everything; therefore, they focus on training the most important tasks. Leaders do not accept substandard performance in order to complete all the tasks on the training schedule. Training a few tasks to standard is preferable to training more tasks below the standard.

--FM 7-0, 2-46

Transformation is truly a never-ending journey. In the midst of fighting two wars, the Army has organizationally recreated itself within a modular formation and doctrinally ground itself in the capstone operational concept of Full Spectrum Operations.

Our combat leaders balance the probabilities of offense, defense, and stability tasks within a shifting landscape of nuanced transitions. Through the capturing and leveraging of experience they have learned how to orchestrate and dominate the human terrain much the way same way we orchestrate and dominate the physical terrain. They are savvy in manipulating all the elements of national power -- kinetic and non kinetic - and can recognize and act upon shifts in the strategic environment. They are versatile and agile. Those in Iraq in and Afghanistan today find their formations involved in combat operations for short, intense periods of time, but just as quickly can reorient across the spectrum of non-kinetic tasks to exploit created opportunities and keep the momentum.

It is an amazing transformation that has leveraged the experience of combat to compensate for the compressed periods of dwell afforded by the demands of the Nation and the finite resource of Army Forces. The Army's Force Generation model (ARFORGEN) becomes a different organizational fight at home. ARFORGEN at the unit level becomes a cyclical endeavor to orchestrate and synchronize the flow of people and equipment to a training strategy that gives our Soldiers and leaders the confidence in their capabilities, their equipment, and their leaders.

As those leaders develop a training strategy, the debate that established a C-METL and D-METL may have allowed the drift induced by eight years of war distract us from fundamentals that have always defined our excellence in mission focused training. Today, a precise understanding of the true nature of the Mission Essential Task - balanced against 'full spectrum operations' - is more important than ever. As General Marty Dempsey wrote in last month's Army Magazine: If we are true to our claim to be an expeditionary, campaign-quality, full spectrum force, then our METL is the constant and the conditions are the variable in our training and readiness reporting.

I cannot agree more. Our concept of a METL is the ultimate expression of commander's intent, and unfortunately the one resource we cannot buy more is time. FM 7-0 states clearly that training a few tasks to standard is preferable to training more tasks below the standard. Quality must override quantity. Though modern METLs are combinations of offense, defense and now stability, a balance must be achieved where leaders have enough time to train their formations to standard rather than to time.

To get the harmony in music each instrument must support the others. To get harmony in battle, each weapon must support the other. Team Play Wins.

--George Patton, 1941

The Gordian-like knot presented by complex operational environments over extended periods has unearthed an inevitable conclusion that must be recognized as we create unit training strategies. In a hybrid world our adversaries will always meet us where we are not both tactically and operationally. If you willingly accept this premise, then the ability to 'cut the knot' lies in creating organizational agility, or rather the ability to rapidly assess, adjust to, orchestrate and synchronize kinetic and non-kinetic effects across the operational environment. To paraphrase George Patton's remarks: 'To get harmony in the full spectrum operating environment, each warfighting function and each element of national power must support the other.

If the enemy is going to go where you are not, how can a leader say his force is ready if it is not trained to go where the enemy takes the fight? Col John Boyd knew this as he convinced the Air Force to create airframes with a higher thrust to weight ratio and taught pilots that winning meant anticipating and turning inside the enemy aircraft's abilities. It is simply impossible to plan and train for every possible scenario our Soldiers and their leaders may encounter within the complex reality of the contemporary operating environments. The simple evolution of adversary ways and means and the rapid exponential growth and leveraging of technology are all telling us something if we just listen.

In the late 80's as a young Major, I had the privilege of resourcing and providing oversight to the U.S. Army's Canadian Army Trophy (CAT) team. It was a truly revealing experience watching an Armor Company focus with an intensity and drive on a single task - Platoon Level Gunnery. They trained for a single battle run consisting of three defensive and two offensive engagements. A total of 32 main gun targets (with as few main gun rounds as possible but no more than 40), and 20 machine gun targets (with as few 7.62 rounds as possible but no more than 200) -- that's all they trained for. They did not qualify or even carry their individual weapons. They conducted no maneuver training. Their protective masks and GDP battle books stayed locked in storage. Through 18 months of complete mission focus the unit eclipsed the competition and took home the trophy.

I thought I had learned a lot as I watched the unit train, help resource, and come home victorious. Unbeknownst to me the most important lesson revealed itself later. With a little more than a month between the end of the CAT competition and an impending Combat Training Center rotation, the unit aggressively turned its focus and attention away from gunnery to mastering the tactical fundamentals they would need for the upcoming rotation. With the steady ease of a team well trained in a few collective tasks, the CAT team leveraged the organizational dynamics and short-hand they had developed over 18 months of intense gunnery training to adapt to the emerging operating environment - in this case the Combat Training Center at Hohenfels.

The CAT team flat-out dominated the rotation. It was there that I realized a few mission essential tasks - well trained - by far exceeded the need to train a whole lot of everything. The quality of a mission essential training approach created the base mechanics by which the unit could adapt to the changing environment.

'Team play wins' is the confidence of good organizational dynamics that lay on a bedrock of a few perfected mission essential battle tasks creating the agility to proactively react and dominate transitions in the operating environment. Units who focus on fewer full spectrum battle tasks (that matriculate into a prioritized set of collective and individual tasks) build the individual, collective and staff mechanics and dynamics needed to rapidly adjust and orchestrate within the complexity of contemporary operating environments achieving Patton's harmony.

We must refocus the 'why' behind in training, and then integrate the cutting edges of learning theory and technology to the block and tackle of building a unit to fight and win. It is not just the building of skill sets, but the human dimension of team mechanics and fundamentals that can adapt and orchestrate all the instruments of national power within the hybrid environments that demands full spectrum operations.

When the compression of time available between deployments begins to ease, the pressure to expand a commander's mission essential task lists will become apparent. But a mission focused re-evaluation of the anticipated operating environment, senior/junior leader dialogue and guidance, doctrine and orders should not result in more essential tasks, but a simple refinement tailored to the analysis and balanced to create unit agility and versatility.

As far back as 1963 General Bruce C. Clarke figured out in Guidelines for the Leader and the Commander that: There is not enough time for the commander to do everything. Each commander will have to determine wisely what is essential, and assign responsibilities for accomplishment. He should spend the remaining time on near-essentials. (Later, this quote would headline the chapter on METL development of the 1988 version of FM 25-101, Battle Focused Training, as a compendium to the FM 25-100, Training the Force.)

Leaders have to maintain the discipline to identify and eliminate nonessentials that steal time required for training essentials. Our Chief of Staff, General George Casey, has given us very definitive guidance: We need to leverage the combat experience of our Army and think about what that means as we develop our training plans. As young leaders do just that - leverage the experience in our mid-grade non-commissioned and commissioned officer corps as a risk mitigation strategy during this era of decreased dwell - senior leaders must counter the seemingly benign risk mitigation strategy of trying to cover every possible contingency with directed training tasks which only creates incredible turbulence at the unit level.

At the same time, we leaders cannot discount the value of an individual leader's education and broadening experiences to creating versatility. As a force that is persistently committed, it cannot in good conscious hold on to talent as a short term risk mitigation strategy in an era of persistent conflict. Instead, we must take a cumulative, longitudinally broader view towards building the bench of smart, talented leaders who will see problems through different lenses because they have had the time to reflect and expand on their experiences.

Commanders develop their organization's mission essential task list.

--FM 7-0, 2-3

Building unit agility and versatility comes from a focused approach to training. The uncertainty and volatility of fighting in a hybrid environment demands that our leaders and their units develop the capacity to 'shift from a known point'. The 'known point' becomes the mission focused attention to a few tasks identified by a commander as mission essential. The harmony we desire in our formations within full spectrum operations, and the ability to turn inside an adversary's decision cycle, is more a product of the quality of training rather than the quantity. As an expression of commander's intent, METL focused training creates teams that ultimately dominate the shifting complexity of modern wars.

General Peter W. Chiarelli is the Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.

SWJ Editors' Note: Be sure to check out the healthy conversation on this post in the comment section at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center Blog.

The death of Robert McNamara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit - he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share - to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three members of Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth of the current president, who is the owner and, he is serenely sure, fixer of General Motors.

Today, something unsettlingly similar to McNamara's eerie assuredness pervades the Washington in which he died. The spirit is: Have confidence, everybody, because we have, or soon will have, everything - really everything - under control...

More at The Washington Post.

A McNamara Lesson: When to Walk Out - Jeffrey H. Smith, Washington Post opinion.

Beginning with "In Retrospect" in 1995, Robert S. McNamara began publicly to explain his doubts about the Vietnam War and his break with President Lyndon Johnson. It's not clear when he first had these doubts, but he expressed them to Johnson, in memos, in May and November of 1967. In the May memo, he referred to the war as "a major national disaster." But the public knew little of his dissent.

Why did it take him so long to recognize something so obvious? If he had questioned the war even sooner, as he later asserted, why didn't he speak out?

To most Americans, Vietnam is "McNamara's war." McNamara was haunted by the war long after he left office in 1968 and repeatedly tried to explain what went wrong. He wrote several books spelling out the "lessons" (his word) we should learn from the tragedy of Vietnam. Many Americans brushed them aside because of the deep anger they felt toward McNamara and the war...

More at The Washington Post.

McNamara in Context - Errol Morris, New York Times opinion.

... His refusal to come out against the Vietnam War, particularly as it continued after he left the Defense Department, has angered many. There's ample evidence that he felt the war was wrong. Why did he remain silent until the 1990s, when "In Retrospect" was published? That is something that people will probably never forgive him for. But he had an implacable sense of rectitude about what was permissible and what was not. In his mind, he probably remained secretary of defense until the day he died.

One angry person once said to me: "Loyalty to the president? What about his loyalty to the American people?" Fair enough. But our government isn't set up that way. He was not an elected official, he said repeatedly. He served at the pleasure of the president.

This brings us to the question of what, if any, were Mr. McNamara's lasting contributions as secretary of defense? Mr. McNamara saw his central role as preventing nuclear war. During his tenure as secretary of defense, there were conflicts that could have escalated into nuclear war - the confrontation over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis. All of this must be seen against the backdrop of the prevailing ideas of the time, the domino theory and the cold war...

More at The New York Times.

McNamara and the Liberals' War - Wall Street Journal editorial.

Robert McNamara died on Monday at age 93 like he lived most of the latter half of his life, scorned and derided by his former liberal allies for refusing to turn against the Vietnam War as early as they did. As the New York Times put it in a page-one obituary headline, McNamara was the "Architect of Futile War."

In historical fact, Vietnam was the liberals' war, begun by JFK, escalated by LBJ, and cheered on for years by giants of the American left before they turned against it. In his 1995 memoir, McNamara apologized for the war. But he probably sealed his reputation on the left by also quoting the New York Times and liberal antiwar reporter David Halberstam for having opposed U.S. withdrawal as late as 1965. "To be fair to Halberstam," McNamara wrote dryly, "the hawkish views he was expressing reflected the opinion of the majority of journalists at the time."

Like JFK and Averell Harriman, Halberstam also supported the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, a misguided foray into Vietnamese politics that led to deeper US involvement. Only later as the war dragged on did these liberals lose their nerve, and they never forgave McNamara for fighting on - even years later after he finally agreed they were right...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

One week after several battalions of Marines swept through the Helmand River valley, military commanders appear increasingly concerned about a lack of Afghan forces in the field.

"What I need is more Afghans," said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province. He accompanied the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, during a visit with troops at Patrol Base Jaker here on Monday.

General Nicholson and others say that the long-term success of the operation hinges on the performance of the Afghan security forces, which will have to take over eventually from the American troops.

General Nicholson said the American force of almost 4,000 had been joined by about 400 effective Afghan soldiers...

More at The New York Times.

Due to the dramatic failure of NATO to conduct out-of-area operations, making NATO irrelevant as a military force, the US has taken over the Afghan war, and is trying very hard to resource it. NATO had an adequate strategy but failed to resource it due to lack of will and experience. The US has extraordinary experience, will have less trouble resourcing its strategy but is unlikely to get near an adequate number of troops until about 2011.

The current reinforcement of 21,000 US troops is not a 'surge' in the Iraq sense but a small start of what must become a large US build-up. Compared to the magnitude of Afghanistan's problems, 21,000 is better than nothing, but is a drop in a bucket.

It is only fair to see the current US Marine operation in southern Helmand (Operation KHANJAR) as the first operation conducted under the March 2009 Obama strategy, the military part of which was 'disrupt, dismantle and destroy'. The Marine operation is complemented by UK operations to the north and Pakistan operations to the south, with a strong rhetorical focus on protecting the population, controlling collateral damage and re-establishing governance.

There is unlikely to be anything like a decisive result out of this operation, even in the local area in the short term. Marine commanders will talk up the operation because that is what you do, and the media, Congress and commentators will project their own hopes and desires onto the operation, and then castigate the Marines for not meeting them...

Much more at The Interpreter.