Election Security Planning in Afghanistan

The US Army/USMC Counterinsurgency Center is pleased to host Mr. Nick Maroukis at the COIN Center Virtual-Brownbag from 1200 to 1300 CST (1300 - 1400 EST) on Wednesday, 1 July 2009. Mr. Nick Maroukis, security advisor to the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan (IEC), will be discussing Election Security Planning in preparation for 2009 Afghan Presidential and Provincial Council Elections which will take place on 20 Aug 09.

The IEC has the authority and responsibility to administrate and supervise all kind of elections; as well as refer to general public opinion of the people, in accordance the provision of the law. The IEC consists of nine members, including a chairperson and a deputy chairperson, appointed by Presidential Decree No.21, dated 19 Jan 2005.

Those interested in attending may view the meeting on-line at https://adobe.harmonieweb.org/coinvtc/ and participate via Adobe Connect as a guest. Remote attendees will be able to ask questions and view the slides through the software.

I suggest that the U.S. government's abortive dealings with Somalia since 1992 merit equally intense study.

Last Thursday Stephanie McCrummen, a Washington Post reporter who has covered Somalia and east Africa for many years, revealed that the U.S. government is now supplying weapons and ammunition to Somalia's government (such as it is) in an attempt to thwart a takeover by Islamist rebels with alleged ties to al Qaeda. Her source was an anonymous U.S. official who seemed cleared to discuss this on background.

Since 1992, the U.S. government has tried nearly the full range of policy options in an attempt to prevent Somalia from becoming what Afghanistan became between 1996 and 2001. During that span, the U.S.:

1) Mounted a division/MEF-sized humanitarian intervention,

2) Supported a large-scale armed UN relief mission,

3) Conducted a robust SOF-led direct action raiding campaign,

4) Attempted a policy of sustained benign neglect,

5) Covertly supported certain Somali warlords to hunt down suspected al Qaeda affiliates,

6) Mounted an ISR and air strike campaign against al Qaeda suspects,

7) Supported a proxy conventional campaign into Somalia by the Ethiopian army,

8) And now is attempting a foreign internal defense arm-and-equip strategy.

None of these approaches has yet to establish stable governance in Somalia. A manpower-intensive U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign in Somalia is out of the question. With the toolbox seemingly empty, the U.S. government now fears that the local al Qaeda affiliates will strengthen and that al Qaeda central" figures now in tribal Pakistan could displace to a new sanctuary in Somalia.

The scope and scale of the Somalia problem extends beyond intelligence agency covert action. Other ungoverned spaces will also require the involvement of U.S. military resources and thus supporting doctrine and strategy from the Pentagon policy office.

Ungoverned spaces and the Somalia prototype" circle back to the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. U.S. policymakers would no doubt be ecstatic if Afghanistan would transition to another Colombia: a strengthening central government with improving security forces, making progress against an insurgency with the assistance of a very small U.S. advisory team.

But the darker outcome for Afghanistan also looms, the Somalia prototype. This could occur after the U.S. public becomes exhausted with the current effort and after Afghanistan's central government fails to come together. The Pentagon would then have to create a new doctrine, how to manage a post-COIN" conflict.

The Pentagon is right to study Israel's hybrid war against Hezbollah. But it should also give equal attention to America's own flailing history in Somalia. During that time a long list of strategies has failed to achieve the U.S. government's security goals. What the OSD policy office learns from that and what lessons it may need to apply someday to Afghanistan or ungoverned spaces elsewhere seems just as timely as hybrid warfare.

This five-part series is about war in Afghanistan, ancient and modern. I'm not doing this for money or politics. I'm a Marine and I don't want young Marines and soldiers going into harm's way without the full arsenal of history and context.

What's my thesis? That the key to understanding Afghanistan today is not Islamism or jihadism. It's tribalism. The tribal mind-set (warrior pride, hostility to outsiders, codes of honor and resistance to change) permeates everything. Think of these videos as a mini-course in tribalism. I invite discussion. Tell me I'm crazy, tell me I'm wrong. If you agree, tell me too.

Visit It's the Tribes, Stupid.

Pakistan's military offensive against the Taliban has slowed the flow of arms and fighters into Afghanistan, US officials say, and has prompted intelligence analysts to issue cautiously upbeat new assessments of Islamabad's ability to contain the threat of violent extremists.

US intelligence and military officials said the revised outlook reflected a series of developments over the last few months, including not only the Pakistani military campaign in the country's Swat Valley, but shifting political currents that have prompted many Pakistanis to turn against extremist groups and back their government's anti-insurgency efforts.

"All of a sudden military operations [against militants] are being imbued with a kind of legitimacy, popular support and political support they have never had before," said a senior US intelligence official who oversees analysis of the region, describing the evolving view on condition of anonymity...

More at The Los Angeles Times.

Topics include:

1) Will protecting part of Afghanistan's population mean losing the rest?

2) Hezbollah captures the Pentagon's war-planning process.

... Does that ability of troops to shift back and forth seamlessly between different types of operations hold across the board? I would argue that it's not always the case. For example: there was a clear difference in competence between Sallee's soldiers doing a cordon and knock operation and an artillery company temporarily converted into a motorized rifle company doing the same task. The 11 Bravos, the infantry, were just much better at basic infantryman skills, which stands to reason. Special operators, who relentlessly train to take down a house or roomful of enemy, are much better than the 11 Bravos, although that gap has narrowed considerably in recent years as the rank-and-file ground pounder has accumulated a mass of experience doing cordon and knock operations during combat tours in Iraq.

Speaking earlier this month at a CNAS conference in Washington, Gen. David Petraeus weighed in on the issue. Our troopers can still very much fight," he said, but instead of preparing just for the big battles, current and future wars require troops prepare for a constantly shifting mix of conflict, across the low and high intensity scale, he said. We're not doing the big tank armies colliding in the central corridor anymore, we're doing continuous complex counterinsurgency which sometimes requires very significant kinetic ops, often requires very significant stability and support, all integrated." Readying units for a major force on force fight might mean a couple of weeks spent brushing up on shooting big metal targets at the NTC, he said.

The Army is wrestling with the issue. Trainers at the Army's premier training center are mindful of a potential atrophy of high-intensity skills and try to include some training in those tasks for units preparing for Iraq and Afghanistan, said Maj. Michael Burgoyne, co-author of an excellent book on adapting to counterinsurgency: The Defense of Jisr Al-Dorea. It's about finding a balance... somewhere in between counterinsurgency and high-intensity conflict, some kind of mix of capabilities where we can do a lot," he told me...

Much more at DoD Buzz.

As the Army's senior leader on suicide prevention, I would like to add a few comments regarding Robert Haddick's Small Wars Journal post Army's 'suicide watch' report is spineless (SWJ 16 June 2009).

I am glad that we agree on certain points. Congress and the Army should aggressively implement and fund suicide prevention programs. Commanders at all levels must give sincere attention to the issue. We need to prioritize improvements to the welfare of Soldiers and their Families. Attention to suicide, its causes and prevention, are part of force preservation. All of these points appear in the Army Campaign Plan for Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, and Suicide Prevention (ACPHP), which the Army published on April 16, 2009.

The Army's collection and dissemination of suicide data is intended to be helpful in not only understanding the issue, but also in keeping awareness of the issue at the forefront of our leaders' minds. It is in no way disrespectful or depersonalizing to Soldiers. It is meant to save lives. You may not realize that senior Army leadership receives a briefing, in painful detail, about every Army suicide so that we can learn lessons on what might be done to prevent future suicides. Those briefings occur on a monthly basis, and I attend every one of them. Let me assure you, each suicide represents an anguishing, heartbreaking tragedy. The details of those briefings include personal information about the deceased Soldier that is subject to privacy laws and considerations for next of kin, and so are not released to the public. But they absolutely reinforce the necessity of being transparent in our discussions about suicide and learning from the cases in order to prevent further suicides.

Also, gauging the scope and nature of the suicide problem absolutely requires data collection, including counting the number of suicides. In October, the Army entered into a memorandum of understanding with the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a longitudinal study to ascertain the factors involved in suicide and to identify effective suicide intervention techniques. Any statistical or epidemiological analysis to assess causation and remedies involves data collection.

I should also mention that the number of suicides is public information that the Army provides to Congress on a monthly basis. Simultaneous press briefings on the subject foster transparency in the Army's approach to the suicide problem and relay lessons learned that may actually help society as it wrestles with the same problem.

The statistical summary never purported to be more than just that -- a summary. We have frequently cited the Army's suicide rate as you suggested and compared it to the like civilian population. The Army's rate for 2008 was 20 per 100,000; however, the latest suicide rate for the demographically adjusted civilian population from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) - 19 per 100,000 - dates from 2006, as their statistics lag by two years. It marked the first time the Army's rate was above the CDC rate. After 2006, no comparison data is yet available from the CDC. It may be that the civilian suicide rate also spiked from 2007 to date. In any case, however one measures the rate, it is unacceptable, and we are committed to bringing it down.

I appreciate your interest about the suicides within the Army, and hope that these comments help address your concerns.

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

Although U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates's keynote address touched on piracy and Afghanistan and included a plea to support Iraq, his remarks left little doubt about the U.S. government's goal for this forum. The U.S. is preparing a containment strategy against Iran and it needs to organize the front line of that containment cordon. The Gulf states will obviously be that front line.

A recent report from the Brookings Institution comprehensively discussed a full range of options available to the Obama administration concerning Iran. The report grimly concluded that none of the diplomatic, covert action, or military options showed much promise. The default option pursued haphazardly by the U.S. government for the past three decades has been one version or another of containment. The Brookings report made no recommendations but hinted that the Obama administration will likely settle on containment just as have all U.S. administrations since 1979.

By Brookings' definition, containing Iran means accepting Iran's theocracy and accepting Iran's eventual emergence as a nuclear weapons state. During the early years of the Cold War U.S. statesmen had to make very similar concessions, which led directly to containment strategies against the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Once the U.S. settled on containment, the task then became organizing the front-line alliances in Europe and East Asia. An explicit containment policy aimed at Iran means organizing the Gulf states. Thus Centcom's conference this week at the Fairfax Hotel.

A successful containment effort requires broad international support. According to the Brookings report (see page 135) a U.S. containment strategy would attempt to weaken Iran's economy, thwart Iran's ballistic missile capabilities, and counter Iran's attempts at regional subversion and proxy warfare. Under a containment strategy the U.S. government would enlist Europe, Russia, China, India, and East Asia to restrict trade with Iran, especially investment in Iran's energy sector, a topic I recent discussed. Thwarting Iran's missile and irregular warfare threats will require greater regional military and intelligence cooperation with the U.S. which once again brings to mind this week's Centcom conference.

Is the Obama administration preparing the way for an explicit containment of Iran along the lines described in the Brookings report? In order to increase international cooperation with a containment strategy, the Obama administration needs to convince the international community that the Iranian regime is a distasteful menace. The Obama team may hope that its repeated eagerness to engage Iran, an effort it may calculate Iran's leadership will scuttle, would demonstrate to the international community that Iran and not the U.S. is the problem. The U.S. may hope that this gambit clears the way for an effective containment strategy.

According to Brookings, a containment strategy means accepting Iran as a nuclear weapons state. If the region is to avoid a subsequent nuclear and ballistic missile arms race, the Gulf states will have to have great confidence in U.S. security guarantees. Gates and General Petraeus are likely hoping that forums like the Gulf States Chiefs of Defense Conference will eventually remove the urge for countries like Saudi Arabia to hedge with their own strategic programs. Whether Arab states will be —to bet their possible survival on U.S. promises remains to be seen.