President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won Iran's presidential election in a landslide, officials of Iran's election commission said Saturday morning. But his main rival, Mir Hussein Moussavi, had already announced defiantly just two hours after the polls closed on Friday night that he had won and charged that there had been voting irregularities."

I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin," Mr. Moussavi said during a news conference with reporters just after 11 p.m. Friday, adding: It is our duty to defend people's votes. There is no turning back."

More at The New York Times.

Iran Election In Dispute as 2 Candidates Claim Victory - Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post.

A pivotal presidential election in Iran ended in confusion and confrontation early Saturday as both sides claimed victory and plainclothes officers fired tear gas to disperse a cheering crowd outside the campaign headquarters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

With votes still being counted in many cities, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was leading by a 2-1 ratio in early returns, according to Iranian Interior Ministry officials. But Mousavi's supporters dismissed those numbers, saying the ministry was effectively under Ahmadinejad's control.

"I am the winner of these elections," Mousavi declared late Friday, after heavy turnout resulted in a two-hour extension of voting across the Islamic republic. "The people have voted for me."

More at The Washington Post.

Ahmadinejad Takes Big Lead, Opposition Media Wing Shut - Farnaz Fassihi and Roshanak Taghavi, Wall Street Journal.

Iranian state media reported a big lead in election results for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Saturday morning, but by noon hadn't yet released a final, official tally.

Meanwhile, campaign officials for his top challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, said the communications wing of their candidate's election operation had been shut down early Saturday by court order. Eye witnesses reported violence around Mr. Mousavi's campaign headquarters and the interior ministry, saying riot police were beating some people near the buildings. It was unclear how extensive the violence was and who the victims were.

Midmorning Saturday, Iran's interior ministry, responsible for running elections and counting ballots, had announced partial results showing Mr. Ahmadinejad as the projected winner of the race, with a landslide lead.

More at The Wall Street Journal.

Ahmadinejad Poised to Win Reelection in Iran - Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim, Los Angeles Times.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holds a decisive lead in his reelection bid, Iran's Interior Ministry said this morning, while his main rival claimed victory and alleged election irregularities.

Ministry officials said that with more than 75% of ballots counted, the incumbent had received nearly two-thirds of the vote. More than 46 million people were eligible to vote, officials said.

Official results are expected today, but news outlets loyal to the president claimed that he had scored a decisive victory over moderate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who had received about a third of the votes counted. This morning, security forces shut down Mousavi's offices, his campaign said.

More at The Los Angeles Times.

By His Own Rules: The Story of Donald Rumsfeld

By Bradley Graham

Book Description

A penetrating political biography of the controversial Defense Secretary, by a longtime military affairs correspondent for the Washington Post.

Once considered among the best and brightest of his generation, Donald Rumsfeld was exceptionally prepared to assume the Pentagon's top job in 2001. Yet six years later, he left office as the most controversial Defense Secretary since Robert McNamara, widely criticized for his management of the Iraq war and for his difficult relationships with Congress, administration colleagues, and military officers. Was he really the arrogant, errant, over-controlling Pentagon leader frequently portrayed--or as his supporters contend, a brilliant, hard-charging visionary caught in a whirl of polarized Washington politics, dysfunctional federal bureaucracy, and bad luck?

Bradley Graham, who closely covered Rumsfeld's challenging tenure at the Pentagon, offers an insightful biography of a complex and immensely influential personality. What emerges is a layered and revealing portrait of a man whose impact on U.S. national security affairs will long out-live him.

Decline and Fall

By Bradley Graham, Washington Post

Face time with the president is political gold in Washington, so Donald Rumsfeld moved quickly after taking charge at the Pentagon to secure weekly private meetings with President George W. Bush. Now, nearly six years and many meetings later, the defense secretary arrived in the Oval Office prepared to raise a delicate, and personal, matter.

His opportunity came as the talk that day, in September 2006, turned to Iraq. The conflict there was going badly. Violence had metastasized into a civil war. Plans to begin a major drawdown of U.S. troops had stalled. Iraqi forces still appeared unready to assume charge of security, and the Iraqi government, riven by sectarian strife, was doing little to unite the nation. In Washington, much of the responsibility for the mess in Iraq had fallen on Rumsfeld. He had failed to plan adequately for the occupation, was slow to develop a counterinsurgency campaign and had alienated too many people with his combative, domineering personality...

Much more at The Washington Post.

Bradley Graham will be online Monday, June 15 at 12 noon ET to take your questions and comments about "Decline and Fall," his Washington Post Magazine cover story about the dramatic end of the former defense secretary's tenure. The article is adapted from his book, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld, published this month by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

Graham served as Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post for more than a decade.

When Lieutenant Colonel Jim Crider arrived in the Doura neighborhood of Baghdad in February of 2007 as the commander of 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment out of Fort Riley, Kansas the Sunni neighborhood appeared beyond hope. The streets were largely empty of life and the air was filled with the foul smell of burning trash and open sewage. Improvised explosive devices, small arms fire, hand grenades, and dead bodies were a normal part of every 1-4 CAV patrol in the spring and early summer of 2007. However, through the ruthless implementation of the counterinsurgency principles outlined in Army Field Manual 3-24 and several pragmatic decisions along the way, the neighborhood began to turn in July of 2007. By the end of September, the unit had seen the last attack on its forces. Businesses reopened, the streets were full of people, and there was hope. This paper contains some of the primary lessons learned during their 14 month combat tour. In his foreword to the paper, CNAS Senior Fellow and author of the New York Times best-seller Fiasco Tom Ricks calls Crider's work the first in-depth review offered by an American battalion commander about post-invasion operations in Iraq."

More at CNAS.

Commander Maps New Course in Afghan War - Peter Spiegel, Wall Street Journal.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in his first interview since being named the US commander in Afghanistan, said his front-row seat for the wars there and in Iraq has altered the view of combat he has held since training as a Green Beret to kill enemies quickly and stealthily.

After watching the US try and fail for years to put down insurgencies in both countries, Gen. McChrystal said he believes that to win in Afghanistan, "You're going to have to convince people, not kill them.

"Since 9/11, I have watched as America tried to first put out this fire with a hammer, and it doesn't work," he said last week at his home at Fort McNair in Washington. "Decapitation strategies don't work."

In the interview, Gen. McChrystal noted he's unsure whether the planned troop levels for the job he envisions will be adequate - despite the Obama administration's commitment to raise the US presence to 68,000 by year's end, to go along with 35,000 allied forces. Iraq surge commanders had more than 170,000 US forces...

More at The Wall Street Journal.

By Mike Innes (Cross-Post with CT Lab)

Two posts on strategic focus helped crystalize a major criticism I've had of the kind of work done in the puzzle palace... natch, make that the kind of work required of the big thinkers sitting in the puzzle palace, who are ultimately responsible for answering the requirements laid out by the stars and bars who run the place.

Drew Conway, picking up on Robert Haddick's weekly This Week at War report at the Foreign Policy website, writes about stated military interest in developing decentralized, autonomous fighting units. I disagree with some of Drew's observations. "From my experience," he writes, "most terrorist networks are organized as highly clustered layers, with central leadership forming the center, pushing orders downrange to the periphery." OK. "Terrorist foot soldiers are rarely, if ever, allowed to act without explicit consent from agents connect to the leadership." Here I think Drew overgeneralizes, since there are few givens linking intent and implementation - a.k.a. command and control - and outcomes vary considerably.

Drew goes on to make some excellent points in his discussion of network specialization and niche expertise, which makes for a useful basis for comparison of terrorist networks and proposed military networks. A point not made, and that I would add to this, is that deliberately enabling and accepting real tactical unit autonomy is a catch-22. Modern technology enables very senior people to focus on very very granular issues. Many have argued that that's a recipe for nano-management and inhibits strategic thinking - producing a peculiar counterpart to the proverbial strategic corporal: the tactical flag officer.

This is at the heart, I think, of what the other Drew - Andrew Exum - asks at Abu Muqawama. Citing Nir Rosen, Ex asks whether mass casualty events like yesterday's truck bombing in Iraq have any strategic significance. Rosen's analysis is worth revisiting:

The occasional al Qa'eda suicide attack can still kill masses of innocent civilians, but it has no strategic impact; in fact it is difficult to understand what motivates such attacks today, since their effect is almost nil. It would be naive to say that Iraq's future is certain, or even likely, to be a peaceful one, but the war between Sunnis and Shiites is now over.

Some of the logic that pre-dates 9/11 and that was amplified by it has been that terrorism does what it does by virtue of the fact that it's a form of psycho-theatre, so its impact is contingent on both the extent of damage done, and more importanly, on how much attention we pay to it (through fear, sensationalism, politicization, or what have you). Mass casualty incidents certainly emphasize the former, but I think there's probably an argument to be made even in such cases that it's the latter that amplifies things - and begs questions about quantitative thresholds and serious cost-benefit analysis of appropriate countermeasures and responses.

The short version is that least likely though most dangerous scenarios - say, bin Laden himself deploying a backpack nuke - require a tactical level focus on individuals and their movements. So, the network fight at the core of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency may, under certain well-defined circumstances, involve a high-level focus on microscopic detail. But I've heard silly statements like "tactical events with strategic effect" applied way too many times to the most mundane details to believe that it's anything more than an excuse, a default setting, for getting and staying stuck in the weeds.

I'm not sure that there's any way out of the conundrum. Better filtering of information is always a good thing to strive for. Better judgement, too. In both legal and ethical terms, military commanders also have a responsiblity to be as well informed as possible; the consequences of being ill-informed, much less wilfully so, are potentially disastrous. So where to draw the line between command level situational awareness, and the imperative to impose control over units, right down to the tactical level? Do we need to turn off the technology that enables it? That's tantamount to turning a blind eye to what goes on below strategic level; is it a necessary pre-condition for accepting small unit autonomy? Somewhere between cyberneticism run amok and autonomous battlefield tonka toys - things we've debated extensively at CTlab - there's got be a more effective, if not exactly happy, medium.

The new American commander in Afghanistan has been given carte blanche to hand pick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans, as he moves to carry out an ambitious new strategy that envisions stepped-up attacks on Taliban fighters and narcotics networks.

The extraordinary leeway granted the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, underscores a view within the administration that the war in Afghanistan has for too long been given low priority, and needs to be the focus of a sustained, high-level effort.

General McChrystal is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside the Special Operations community, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With his promotion approved by the Senate late on Wednesday, General McChrystal and senior members of his command team were scheduled to fly from Washington within hours of the vote, stopping in two European capitals to confer with allies before landing in Kabul...

More at The New York Times.

by Judah Grunstein (Cross-Post with World Politics Review)

After flagging this very valuable post by Tim Lynch on conditions in the southeast of Afghanistan, Joshua Foust observes, "[T]here is a fundamental disconnect between what we are doing in Afghanistan and what we expect to happen." Lynch's post is a long but essential read, and I second Foust's assessment. The question is, Will the added troops and vaguely hinted-at shift in operational priorities be sufficient to recouple what we're doing with what we expect to happen?

With that question fresh in my mind, I clicked through to the new CNAS report (.pdf) on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which offers proposals for metrics and operational priorities on both sides of the border. In all fairness, the CNAS authors (David Kilcullen, Nathaniel Fick, Andrew Exum and Ahmed Humayan) chose to title the report "Triage," meaning they know that there's more job to do than resources to do it with. And between the principle authors and the analysts they got input from (Joshua Foust, Nicholas Schmidle and Christian Bleuer), it's a high-powered braintrust that is both well-informed and intellectually honest.

But there's something about the report that's vaguely un-nerving, especially after reading Lynch's narrative. Clearly Kilcullen and Exum are advocating for a particular approach to waging the war. They are, after all, proponents of COIN doctrine and tactics. But the report seems to paper over the fact that the very COIN methods they're advocating for do not suffer prioritizing on the cheap. As a result, though they acknowledge that progress is urgently needed, their proposals read as much like a recipe for creating a positive feedback loop for measuring it as they do a recipe for actually achieving it.

The argument, for instance, comparing civilian casualties in Iraq to those in Afghanistan as a metric of progress is apples and oranges. In Iraq, violence against civilians was the end, in Afghanistan, violence against civilians is a means. So while the goal articulated is a valid one, I'm not convinced it qualifies as a useful metric. Instead, shifting operational priorities might very well achieve the objective without significantly advancing our strategic position. (On the other hand, districts under government control, spontaneous tips from civilians and defused-to-casualty ratios on IEDs all seem like sensible ways to measure progress.)

Their proposal to focus limited development resources not on the outcome (e.g., a new schoolhouse to meet needs), but on the process (e.g., how the contract to build it was awarded to promote transparency) is both creative and intriguing. That certainly seems necessary, but I'm not convinced it's sufficient, especially given the one-year time horizon they give for showing results. Also, in light of other reporting, I'm not sure how realistic it is.

I'm hesitant to critique the operational recommendations for the problems on the Pakistani side of the border, mainly because I'm not convinced they're solvable. What's more, I'm not convinced that they pose the kind of threat that the authors assume, and even if they do, I think that trying to contain them is preferable to trying to eliminate them.

That said, the proposal to de-emphasize Pakistan's military, compared to its other security forces, in the fight against extremism makes plenty of sense. The paramilitary Frontier Corps might be a better place to start than the police force, but then again, a stronger police force would meet the demand for law and order otherwise filled by the Taliban's Sharia courts.

As for the great debate over drone strikes, I'm agnostic. I don't think we'll end up stabilizing the FATA or Afghanistan, so I don't share the operational concerns raised in terms of COIN doctrine. It seems obvious, though, that there are quieter, more effective ways to go after the high-value targets, and that implementing them is a major part of what Gen. Stanley McChrystal will be spending his time over there doing.

Other than that, the metrics for Pakistan all strike me as spot on. Unfortunately, they also strike me as reasonably certain to reflect very little progress in Pakistan. Now pessimism isn't the same thing as analysis. But I've yet to read anything that suggests it's realistic to expect a marked increase in civilian oversight of the Pakistani military over the course of a year. What's more, I've yet to read anything that suggests convincingly that it would make a difference in terms of our COIN priorities in FATA.

A more significant problem with the report is that, to paraphrase Foust, there is a fundamental disconnect between what we've said we will do in Afghanistan and what the CNAS report expects to happen. The political/strategic goals articulated by President Barack Obama (quoted in the report, no less) are "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan." That does not support the authors' operational prescription for Counterinsurgency with a big "C", as opposed to tactical counterinsurgency with a small "c."

Neither the strategic mission articulated, the resources invested, nor the partner government in Kabul make a Counterinsurgency campaign a realistic goal. What we're left with is counterinsurgency tactics, spread thin, with a one-year time horizon for shifting the momentum in the war.

Triage implies tending to problems upon which our intervention will have a determinative impact, under the assumption that some are beyond saving, while others can get by on their own. I don't see too much of the third category in Afghanistan, and after reading Lynch's narrative, I'm not sure how the CNAS report's proposals can definitively enlarge the first. That leaves us with the second, which is not an encouraging prospect.