In recent days, the Pentagon has made two major changes in its strategy to defeat the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their affiliates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. First came the announcement that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal would take over as the top United States commander in Afghanistan. Next, Pentagon officials said that the United States was giving Pakistan more information on its drone attacks on terrorist targets, while news reports indicated that Pakistani officers would have significant future control over drone routes, targets and decisions to fire weapons (though the military has denied that).

While we agree with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that fresh eyes were needed" to review our military strategy in the region, we feel that expanding or even just continuing the drone war is a mistake. In fact, it would be in our best interests, and those of the Pakistani people, to declare a moratorium on drone strikes into Pakistan...

The appeal of drone attacks for policy makers is clear. For one thing, their effects are measurable. Military commanders and intelligence officials point out that drone attacks have disrupted terrorist networks in Pakistan, killing key leaders and hampering operations. Drone attacks create a sense of insecurity among militants and constrain their interactions with suspected informers. And, because they kill remotely, drone strikes avoid American casualties.

But on balance, the costs outweigh these benefits for three reasons...

Much more at The New York Times.

Updates:

Jules Crittenden on Death From Above

Andrew Exum on Killing Civilians Remains Bad

Noah Shachtman on Calls for 'Moratorium' Hit New York Times

Spencer Ackerman on Stop The Drones

Andrew Sullivan on The Trouble With Predators

With overwhelming firepower, Western armies rarely lose in combat to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. But in the communications battle, the militants appear to hold the edge. The gap has grown especially wide in the Afghan war zone, analysts say. Using FM transmitters, the Internet, and threatening notes known as "night letters" (TIME), Taliban operating from the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan have proven effective at either cowing citizens or winning them over to their message of jihad. U.S. special representative Richard Holbrooke told journalists in March 2009 that "the information issue--sometimes called psychological operations or strategic communication" has become a "major, major gap to be filled" before U.S.-led forces can regain the upper hand. As part of its new strategy for the Afghan war, the White House has called for an overhaul of "strategic communications" in Afghanistan "to improve the image of the United States and its allies" and "to counter the propaganda that is key to the enemy's terror campaign." But U.S. officials have acknowledged an institutional weakness in coordinating strategic communications across agencies, as well as broader disagreements on definitions and tactics. "A coordinated effort must be made to improve the joint planning and implementation of strategic communications," says the Pentagon's 2008 National Defense Strategy.

Much more at the Council on Foreign Relations.

When Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Monday that he was dismissing Gen. David McKiernan as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan and replacing him with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, he signaled his support for an intellectual movement that in a few short years has come to dominate military thinking in Washington. Both McChrystal and his new No. 2, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, Gates emphasized, have a "unique skill set in counterinsurgency."

Counterinsurgency is king. Once the province of graduate students and historians of the conflicts in Vietnam and Algeria, this resurgent doctrine of how to wage a type of unconventional war has become the lens through which the American defense establishment analyzes what happened in Iraq, what to do now in Afghanistan, and the very future of warfare.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command and the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, is the inspiration and leading light of this movement. In 2006, he coauthored the Army field manual on how to conduct counterinsurgency operations, stressing the need to provide security for the local population and support the host government, among other imperatives. A vocal cohort of students and adherents of counterinsurgency -- now given the inevitable military acronym "COIN" -- has emerged to advance the cause. New think tanks and blogs propagate and debate counterinsurgency research, and tomes exploring insurgencies past, present and future are on every cognoscente's reading list. Even the State Department has embraced the concept, composing its own counterinsurgency manual for U.S. civilian agencies...

Much more at The Washington Post.

A Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Afghanistan operates as a combined military-military-military-military-civilian unit. The idea is that counterinsurgency and stability operations required civilian agency capabilities. In reality, PRTs are almost entirely military, even though many of the officers are air force pilots and ship drivers with little or no experience in reconstruction operations. PRTs are supposed to have a State, USAID, and USDA representative in their command group but often these civilians have not shown up, are on TDY, go on leave or transfer every three months, or don't work effectively on the PRT.

A strong exception to this stereotype of PRT dysfunction is the Laghman PRT. The PRT Commander, LTC Steve Erickson, USAF, really impressed us with his description of how he and his USAID rep talk through COIN and development principles in their operations. Laghmanis are known as particularly clever and well educated Afghans, particularly the Pashtuns along the southern branches of Alingar and Alishing rivers and the fertile plains around Mehterlam. The more remote parts of the province do offer some pockets of insurgency and Erickson and his team have responded with a popular COIN reconstruction strategy focused on roads. Roads are a popular project because they effectively address multiple issues and needs -- allowing security forces more rapid and secure transit throughout the province, enabling commerce through much faster delivery of goods or customers to market, building government capacity by extending reach of health clinics or schools, and by putting people to work. Although Erickson confessed that he and his USAID rep do not always agree, he described a healthy relationship of communication, dissent and debate, and decision-making that are the hallmarks of good teams.

Why would this military aviator and USAID development worker form such a strong working partnership? When I ask those in the field why a civ-mil partnership works (or doesn't work), the answer is usually personality." While I think that is true, it also illuminates a bigger problem: organizations dependent on personality for effective team work are rolling the dice. Military officers, Foreign Service diplomats, and development professionals are three different tribes each with unique cultures, dialects, and belief systems and not an insubstantial amount of rivalry. We throw members of these tribes into a difficult, cramped, stressful environment and expect them to operate with unity of effort and minimal friction. And then we pin our hopes on personality?

It shouldn't. Organizations that effectively and consistently address the challenges of teamwork and leadership do not depend on personality as much as they depend on clarity of responsibilities, clarity of process, and clarity of mindset. If all the players clearly understand who is supposed to do what, why each of their roles is critical to the whole, how to make decisions that properly weigh each perspective, and why they must bring a mindset of collaboration and cooperation, personality becomes much less of an issue (although never a non-issue). This type of organizational clarity and mindset requires clear communication and training/mentoring programs. As a trainer of military units and, just recently, PRTs heading to Afghanistan, we are working hard on the clarity of roles, staff processes, and a mindset of collaboration. Building effectively cooperation will be especially important as the civilian surge in Afghanistan increases the civilian presence in PRTs. Hopefully these efforts will improve the civil-military and PRT-maneuver unit cooperation in Afghanistan and make success less dependent on personality.

As for the impressive LTC Erickson, his situation underscores another weakness in our current system. In just a couple more months, he will leave Afghanistan and return to other USAF duties. Will DoD and the USG capture and leverage his knowledge of and relationships in Laghman province and his understanding of how to blend defense, diplomacy, and development in the Afghanistan COIN environment? Almost certainly not. Instead, LTC Erickson's reward will be a return to his role as an Air Force pilot and have little further to do with the political and economic challenges in Afghanistan. Success in Afghanistan requires that we better leverage the knowledge and talent of human resources with this type of experience and understanding. We can do better.

Nick Dowling is a small wars policy wonk with experience in OSD, the NSC Staff, NDU, and the contracting sector. He has worked on stability operations for 16 years, most prominently on Bosnia and Kosovo as a Clinton Administration appointee and Iraq and Afghanistan as a DoD contractor. He is currently President of IDS International, a leader in interagency and soft power" types of support to the US military. He is a graduate of Harvard, got his masters at Georgetown, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Although a veteran of print and television media interviews and publications, this is his first foray into SWJ.

... Gates's experience at Dover offers a window into what is driving him as he seeks to remake Washington's biggest and most ponderous bureaucracy. For decades, the Pentagon's focus has been on building expensive, high-tech weapons programs for conventional wars. Gates has embarked on an ambitious effort to force the department to focus more of its energy on developing arms and equipment that can help troops on the ground as they battle insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His push to refocus the department comes as the war in Afghanistan appears in stalemate and violence against US troops and Afghan forces is on the rise. In neighboring Pakistan, where the Taliban and al-Qaeda have carved out a haven from which they can launch attacks on US troops, the government's hold on power throughout the country has grown shakier.

Last week, Gates fired the top US commander in Afghanistan. The new commanders will be responsible for fighting the war and implementing President Obama's new strategy. Gates sees his job as making sure they have the tools they need...

More at The Washington Post.

Iraq is currently in the early stages of a negotiated end to an intense ethnosectarian war. As such, there are several contingencies in which recent, mostly positive trends in Iraq could be reversed, threatening U.S. national interests. This Center for Preventive Action Contingency Planning Memorandum by Stephen Biddle assesses four interrelated scenarios in Iraq that could derail the prospects for peace and stability in the short to medium term and posits concrete policy options to limit U.S. vulnerability to the possibility of such reversals. It argues that the effectiveness of mitigating the consequences of a reversal is uncertain and that, therefore, a vigorous preventive strategy in the form of slowing the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is less costly both politically and militarily in the long run.

More at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

By Craig M. Mullaney

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty Seconds' worth of distance, run,

Yours is the Earth and everything in it,

And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling, "If"

This Isn't About You - Craig M. Mullaney, Vanity Fair.

"Having served as a platoon leader in the Afghanistan war, Craig M. Mullaney—an Obama-administration adviser and author of the new best-seller The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education—understood full well the dangers that his younger brother, Gary, would face when he deployed to Baghdad. Watching from the audience at Gary's Ranger School graduation, Mullaney reflected on his own experiences, and lessons learned, during three rigorous months of training."

Much more at Vanity Fair.