A simple question

While criticising former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the government’s appointment of historians Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman to the Iraq War inquest, Oliver Miles makes this contribution to the debate:

Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism.

It may be legitimate to ask whether prior political commitments are a good reason for someone not to be appointed to a committee that is supposed to be impartial and dispassionate. One wouldn’t necessarily appoint George Galloway or Dick Cheney either.

But in the case of Lawrence Freedman, Miles is saying that there is something suspect about him not only because of his role in shaping Blair’s foreign policy, but because he is Jewish.

Alternatively, he is saying that the presence of two Jews will be ‘ammunition’ to be used against the inquiry.

Why? What is wrong with being Jewish?

Is Miles actually pandering to the fiction that Jews are uniformly of one political persuasion, or that there should not be too many of them in official positions in public life, or that being Jewish is a barrier to being fair and impartial? Would Miles indulge any similar rhetoric about Muslims, or women?

I note with alarm that Miles was once a British diplomat.

The changing face of Abu M (and KoW)

Andrew Exum/Abu Muqawama is giving up blogging. Or, rather, he’s changing his blogging style. He writes:

I aim to use this blog in a different way than I have so far done. I look to friends like Marc Lynch and Reidar Visser and admire the way they use their blogs to highlight ongoing academic and policy research. I aim to do the same, which means you can expect me to post far less often but in a more considered way.

I’d say that blogging like Lynch is likely to involve a lot of work: I’ve no idea where he finds the time to post so often, at that length. Regular posting is a key feature of most successful blogs – if AM is posting far less often I wonder whether that still counts as a blog.

AM’s decision raises some interesting questions for the bloggers here at KoW. I think we manage a decent blend of longer, considered pieces, and more pithy, off-the-cuff commentary. And we’re an ad hoc sort of place – there’s no house style, except to be polite and interesting.

But blogging is its own medium – the language tends to be more informal, posts often short – those over 700 words tend to be less widely read. And blogging takes a surprising amount of effort, even for short, punchy posts. How well does that fit with academic life? Sometimes, I think, not well. Exum notes, for example, that polishing his short prose style has come at the expense of his longer form writing.

On the other hand, Thomas Hegghammer urges him not to underestimate his blog’s contribution to academic research. I agree with that wholeheartedly, and with a more general point that blogging and academia can work well together. Our solution (too grand a term for our making-it-up-as-we-go philosophy) has been to rope in ever-more colleagues, like me. In War Studies, at least, blogging seems to be a growth industry.

Anyway, Andrew Exum was a blogging pioneer, and I hope he finds a way to continue posting and entertaining his readers in some way or another.

How comprehensive is the Comprehensive Approach?

One of the hallmarks of good COIN is that it is not focused solely on military factors.  Indeed, politics and development are meant to take centre stage, with support from the military.  According to those in the know, like David Kilcullen, COIN should resemble ‘armed social work’. 

This concept is embedded in current US doctrine.  FM 3-24 clearly states

The integration of civilian and military efforts is crucial to successful COIN operations. All efforts focus on supporting the local populace and HN government. Political, social, and economic programs are usually more valuable than conventional military operations in addressing the root causes of conflict and undermining an insurgency.

 

For it’s part NATO speaks of a Comprehensive Approach, which

is a structured and effective coordination at the local, national and institutional level, where each organisation’s efforts are complemented and mutually reinforced.  This should be with a view to achieving common, or at least similar, goals.

Sounds groovy.  How is it working in practice?

Frankly, not so well.  Take, for example, a single case of a single country trying to implement its version of the comprehensive approach.  This should allow us to see how things can be coordinated, without the difficulties of multiple actors (eg. how an Italian army unit works together with the Swedish Development Agency), let alone the chestnut of the ‘non-national’ NGOs. 

Canada has been active in Afghanistan since 2002.  It created a 3D Strategy to deal with the complex reality there: it would harness Diplomacy, Development, and Defence to provide a coordinated effort at countering the insurgency and helping to build a stronger state.

But look what happens when they try to operationalise (don’t you just hate that bureaucrat jargon?) this strategy:

[Canadian] officials in Afghanistan and Ottawa say the crucial element in the strategy – long-term development – is not happening because the Canadian International Development Agency has failed to issue the contracts and cash that are the lynchpin of success for Canadian and coalition forces.

How is it supposed to work?

The idea behind the plan, which has been running since the summer, is that the military moves into a village at the invitation of local chieftains, clears out any insurgents and the roadside bombs or weapons caches they left behind. Then military engineers perform a few quick-fix projects.

Sounds reasonable.  So what’s wrong?

CIDA money and contracts haven’t followed in sufficient volume to boost local employment and start the long-term development envisioned in the model village plan.

Oh.  That is strange, isn’t it?  Isn’t Development one of the D’s?

As it turns out, in 2005 during the last international policy formulation exercise, the minister responsible for CIDA did take an active role in the ‘whole of government’ process.  In her forward to the Development part of the 3D strategy she said:

I am pleased to present Canada’s International Policy Statement-A Role of Pride and Influence in the World: Development. It is an ambitious but achievable plan for enhancing Canada’s role in the fight against global poverty…I look forward to working with Parliament and all Canadians to make this vision a reality. 

Ah, but that was then, and this is now.  Note the disclaimer on the current CIDA website hosting the 2005 document:

Please note that this document was never officially adopted by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). It is available for reference only.

Upon closer inspection, it seems that the surface gloss of the Comprenhensive Approach, so vital to any modicum of success in COIN, belies a host of ‘conditions’.  For example, NATO tempers its commitment to the Comprehensive Approach with the following ‘yeah, but’:

…it must be done in a way that doesn’t compromise any organisation’s independence.  Nor must it infringe on the humanitarian space to which Non-Governmental Organisations understandably attach great importance.

Well, with that kind of a caveat the risk of a dis-integrated approach far outweighs the likelihood of a joined up strategy.  Magnify that across all Alliance and Coalition members and coherence is just about doomed.   This does not bode well as the Alliance and its constituent parts look to move away ahead.  The move (at least in some quarters) seems to be a transition from a military-led effort to a development-led one.  Will the dynamic change or will turf wars continue?

In the end, we are left with the familiar conundrum:

3D or not 3D, that is the question.

Talk Softly, Carry Big Stick

Is it just me or has November 2009 been a hellish month for everyone? So, so busy and not much time for KOW. Anyway, I shouldn’t complain.

Via Danger Room I came across this interesting article in the the Army Times ‘Army tries to supplant Taliban in infowar‘.  There’s a lot to like about it.

Coalition officials have long despaired over the Afghan insurgents’ skill at turning what appear to be tactical defeats into strategic victories by virtue of their ability to push their version of events out to the local and international publics first, and by inflicting coalition casualties that often dominate U.S. and other western news coverage of engagements.

To counter the insurgents’ tactics, French devised an information operations campaign based upon the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine, which, he said, “emphasizes isolating the insurgent from the population.”

A former instructor of military history at West Point, French also drew from his studies of insurgencies, and from a study of Afghan culture and military history done by him and other leaders in Task Force Legion before deploying.

The first step in carrying out French’s plan was to take a page from his enemy’s book and make every combat mission first and foremost an information operation.

Exactly right, in my view, and good to see units like COL French’s Task Force Legion thinking first and foremost about how their operations shape the information environment. So why does it make me uneasy?  There are a few reasons:

1. It’s been done before. The history of counterinsurgency is littered with examples of the security forces parading captured insurgent arms (and insurgents, dead or alive, for that matter). The greater the delight of the counterinsurgent force with such fanfare, it seems to me, the closer the population is to the tipping point. See Vietnam ca. 1964, for example; also Algeria; and for that matter when the Bear went over the mountain in Afghanistan 20+ years ago. I can see this is psychologically rewarding but is it otherwise helpful? 

2. What exactly is the message here? I wholeheartedly agree that we need to deal with the apparent belief of the Afghan peasantry that the Taliban are more resolved in the long-run than we are. Unfortunately, it looks to me that their belief is pretty well-founded. In any event, does calling the Taliban cowards make us seem more or less sure of ourselves? Whatever else they might be the Taliban are not cowards–gangsters, intimidators, bomb-vest wearers with too much heaven on their minds, woman-oppressing girl-murderers, music hating banners of kite-flying, etc and so on, yes, but not cowards. Some of the villagers being loudspeakered here are themselves Taliban or are brothers and fathers of them. Shouldn’t we be focusing on those people whom we are trying to reconcile not kill. Surely the dullest Afghan peasant will be asking themselves on sight of NATO forces bristling with firepower, behind heavy armour, with helicopter gunships, jet bombers and robot planes above ’how brave would you be with an AK, a bag full of grenades, and a pajama top?’

3. Why are we getting into a pissing contest? Galula it was who wrote ’The counterinsurgent is endowed with congenital strength; for him to adopt the insurgent’s warfare would be the same as for a giant to try to fit into a dwarf’s clothing.’  I think it worth emphasizing that the insurgents aren’t meant to be able to beat a Western regular army toe-to-toe. The gross disconnect between the insurgent’s military means and his political aims is in large part what makes an insurgency an insurgency. It is assumed to be inherent in the nature of the thing that their ‘conventional’ capability is lacking. I fear that it diminishes an army as well-trained and led and equipped as the American to crow about its ability to kill large numbers of Taliban in a straight fight. Surely the implicit message should be ‘Bad boys will be punished in accordance with the law which we represent’ not ‘Cowards come and fight!’

4.  It doesn’t seem to be working. As it is noted in the article ‘The Taliban don’t even talk to the villagers, he added. Instead, they impose a 9 p.m. curfew on the village — only farmers working in their fields are exempt — and communicate with the locals by posting letters at night in the mosque.’ In other words, in the night time when the American parade has passed who walks the streets whispering to villagers ‘we’re not going anywhere—it’s your choice’? And who do the villagers believe?  I know it’s a truism that at the end of the day actions speak louder than words but literally at the end of the day who is still in the village talking softly and carrying the big stick?

I should emphasize that I know nothing about what Task Force Legion is doing beyond what I’ve read in the Army Times. Their commander seems very clever and, as I have said, there is a lot in the activities which the article reports upon which I think is very good. I’d like to know more about it. KOW readers are probably familiar with Sun Tzu’s aphorism ‘Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.’ I feel it very likely that your average illiterate Afghan villager after thirty years of war has become a very astute reader of body language. What does ours say about our strategy?

Renewing Trident?

Dr Nick Ritchie, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre, presented his developing ideas on the options for renewing Trident to a recent workshop at the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies.

In a period of economic recession, mounting UK national debt and pursuit of the ‘Global Zero’ option being manifested in the United States and elsewhere reducing the UK’s nuclear deterrent might prove to be an attractive objective for a future government. If so, a number of possible options present themselves:

• ‘Trident Lite’:  involving a drop in the number of submarines from 4 to 3, and/or in the number of missiles or warheads they carried, but would not necessarily mean the end of a continuous at sea deterrent [CASD] although it could significantly reduce force flexibility.
• ‘Reduced Alert’: the effective abandonment of CASD with 2/3 submarines and reduced patrols, with further reduced missile and warhead numbers.
• ‘De-mated Alert’: 2/3 submarines, reduced missile and warhead numbers and with still further reduced patrol frequency, and with the warheads routinely stored ashore and open to verification.
• ‘Emergency Alert’: as above but with stored warheads kept in a disassembled state and open to verification.
• ‘Cruise Missile Emergency Alert’: replacing ballistic missiles with cruise missiles deployed on the Astutes and the Successor SSBNs with warheads once again stored ashore.

The subsequent discussion on present and future technologies revealed how complex these apparently simple options were. There was widespread scepticism amongst the participants about the level of real savings that some of these options would actually achieve, although all agreed that it was virtually impossible to make hard predictions either way. Submariners in the workshop were particularly sceptical about the cost-saving notion that the Successor SSBNs could be used for activities and options normally associated with SSNs, or that such patrols would prove a means of maintaining training standards in a regime of reduced deterrent patrolling. All of this seemed to most to make the prospect of re-generating CASD, once abandoned, prohibitively expensive, even if a future government thought world conditions justified it.

Leaving aside the possible political advantages of such a shift of policy within the UK, the political ramifications of such a policy seemed almost as complicated. Whether such options would have a significant dissuasive effect on the various countries contemplating developing their own nuclear programmes or expanding existing ones seemed problematic. Moreover some members of the workshop felt that the advantages of a continuous at sea deterrent were that it removed the necessity for a deliberate and necessarily public political decision to put a deterrent SSBN to sea in a time of crisis, a move that could be seen as highly escalatory.

Why he done it

On 5 November, Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people at a military base.

In the US, this event has already become deeply and divisively political.

Its still not entirely clear what his motives were. Some stress that he was an Islamic religious extremist. Others that he was angered by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may have been victimised for this faith.

Some broad thoughts:

Militant religious extremism can find a grievance if it wants one. If its not Iraq, or Afghanistan, its East Timor, or Chechnya, or Palestine, or the Sudan, or headscarves, or heresy, or apostasy, etc.

But wars can very powerfully energise ideologies. Clearly, radicals can be motivated even if we are not ‘over there’ en masse. Yet that doesn’t mean the current wars are irrelevant. It seems highly unlikely that being at war is irrelevant to the momentum and will of these killers.

Does that in itself mean that we shouldn’t fight these wars? I have always been uneasy with this line of argument. By definition, being at war does invite hostility on oneself. Australia could have forestalled Al Qaeda’s anger by not supporting East Timorese independence. Britain could have prevented the carnage of the Blitz by reaching a diplomatic settlement with Hitler, but that doesn’t mean it should have or that it would have been wise or prudent.

If armed force is one necessary way to disrupt and weaken the capability of highly seasoned and expert killers who are at large ‘over there’, then it isn’t necessarily wrong to wage war, even if one cost is that it fires up radicals at home. The overwhelming majority of attempted terrorist attacks on home soil fail or are prevented. Would it be better not to fight abroad, leaving domestic radicals less angered, but the most hardened terrorists far more free to operate? There are difficult tradeoffs here.

Whatever one thinks about that problem, it still seems clear that expeditionary wars do bring this cost attached, and that this must be factored into our decisionmaking. As a matter of causation, war does often radicalise, and not being at war in these countries would probably have made Major Nidal Malik Hasan less likely to carry out this killing. Not impossible, but less likely.

This isn’t about our intentions. I agree that the US and its allies do want to leave behind a stable, democratic and prosperous society in Iraq and Afghanistan, that this isn’t intended to be some kind of bloody-minded assault on Islam. A glance at the history books shows that America has very often fought on the side of Muslim populations against their enemies, and a country that was determined to annihilate Islam would not go to the trouble of extensive humanitarian effort, from earthquakes in Pakistan to tsunami relief to billions in aid to Egypt, nor would it take in so many Muslim immigrants, many of whom have made proud lives in America. And yet…

…it is just so easy for radical clerics and propagandists to portray the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as unjust attacks on Islam. There is so much footage to be manipulated, so much unintended killing of civilians, so many images of foreigners patrolling foreign soil. Whether we like it or not, this is a propaganda dream.

Does this mean there is a domestic insurgency underway in the United States? Readers will disagree on definitions. But one horrific shooting spree does not make an organised, sustained armed uprising. I base this not only on the assumption that concepts like ‘insurgency’ should be delimited to have coherent meaning. Its also on the assumption that the vast majority of Muslims are strongly against blowing people up. So before we rush to the excited conclusion that this is evidence of a domestic revolt, lets beware of characterising a mass of ordinary, unremarkable, human beings in our midst as potential fifth columnists.

The real difficulty with this case is that it has so quickly been wrapped up in the toxic politics of the ‘culture wars’, the ongoing and bitter struggle over the nature of American society, and the origins of violence within and against it. The simple question, ‘why did he/ they do it’ is now so ideologically loaded, that it is hard to tackle in a cold and analytical way. But we’ve got to try.

JDP 3-40 weighs in

The new Joint Doctrine on Stabilisation is out, and it’s a brick. Lots in there worthy of comment, but here’s my initial reaction:

1. It’s intriguing, and perhaps unfortunate, that this is published just as the Prime Minister announces his intention to craft a timetable to leave Afghanistan. Here’s what he said last night:

[We] should identify a process for transferring district by district to full Afghan control and set a timetable for transfer starting in 2010.

That’s not much of a ringing endorsement of our ability to stabilise Afghanistan. Still, there is a good chapter on influence in the manual, and I reckon the PM may just have designated the British electorate as a target audience for the purposes of his influence activities.

Lots of effort went into this doctrine, and I suspect it’s going to feature heavily in my classroom. But has the high tide of stabilisation already passed? What do you think?

2.There’s a line in there that suggests we’re going down the James Mattis route on Effects Based Operations – and good riddance too, I say:

This is not a reprise of a mechanistic form of Effects Based Approach to Operations, which simply does not work for complex and variable human systems.

3. The doctrine is an amalgam of theoretical approaches. I’m intrigued particularly by the blending here of two distinct literatures: that on governance and state-building,  honed during the messy wars of the 1990s; and that on COIN, where most of the big thinking happened during the era of decolonisation in the fifties and sixties. One is the literature of the anguished liberal, the other that of the cynical colonist. Happy bedfellows?

4. As you’d expect of our august institution, there was a healthy KCL involvement – Tim Bird helped write the thing, while KoW’s own David Betz and Theo Farrell chipped in to good effect. Our path to world domination continues.

5. The process of writing this manual, and the result itself, seem a conscious emulation of the genesis of FM 3-24. Lots of academic engagement, both in person and with the literature. It’s doctrine, but not as we know it. That’s great for us eggheads, but does it make for good doctrine? It certainly seems to slow the process down – having stabilisation doctrine is a great thing, but we’ve been trying to stabilise Afghanistan for the better part of a decade now.

Any thoughts from you all?

Update: Another thought occurred while cycling to the library. This behemoth might be a bit big for practically minded officers – I recall hearing about one brigadier, who opined that any doctrine which didn’t fit in his pocket was staying behind; and I recall FM 3-24 gathering dust in the battalion commander’s office in David Finkel’s recent fly-on-the-wall account of the surge. Like FM 3-24, then, isn’t the real purpose of this doctrine to act as a big stick with which to beat institutional change into the British military? And change in the direction of low-intensity operations. Doctrine, I suppose, becomes the institutional memory of military organisation: if you write it, it will be so.

What rule did you shoot him under?

Edward Woodward who played Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant in the 1980 Australian film Breaker Morant has died. A great film. The scene in which he explains the rules of engagement which he applied ‘out on the veldt, fighting the Boer the way he fought us’ can hardly fail to resonate. Based upon a true story, see Scapegoats of the Empire.

 

 

Talking sense on Cyberwar

In the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review there is a very useful graphic threat/capability matrix which I often use in lectures and seminars.

Usually what I like to do is illustrate each element of the matrix with a photo overlay which I hope captures the character of the threat–you know, Osama bin Laden in the upper left square, something big and metallic bristling with firepower in the lower left, the Twin Towers collapsing in the upper right. But to be honest I always struggle with what to put in the lower right quadrant. What exactly does the Pentagon mean by a ‘Disruptive’ threat? It’s not exactly clear in the QDR itself and I’ve long assumed it to mean, more or less, some form of cyber attack. And how does one illustrate a cyber attack? Well, since a shot of a microchip isn’t really all that visually exciting, I have tended to use the movie poster below from Die Hard 4.0 (the crappiest of the Die Hards but at least it purports to be about cyberwar–sorta).

Which is kind of stupid because, as my friend and coilleague and PhD student Tim Stevens writes in today’s Guardian. ‘Keeping ‘digital 911′ fears in check‘ Die Hard 4.0 is pretty much exactly the opposite of a helpful illustration of the concept.* The reality:

Apocalyptic visions of “cybergeddon” or a “digital 9/11” are overblown but there is little doubt that the digital networks on which British innovation and economic growth have relied over the last decade are as much an achilles heel as they are its foundation. 

Tim talks a lot of good sense about Cyberwar. If this issue is on your research agenda too you would do well to read his article and hang around his excellent blog ubiwar too.

*Which isn’t to say that this isn’t how the Pentagon conceives of the disruptive threat/cyberwar.

Mugged in Barcelona…on the way to Copenhagen

Following on from Pat Porter’s licence to stray a bit (but perhaps as I can demonstrate in the conclusion to this post, only a bit) I wanted to share the following thoughts on the current negotiations on climate change.

A diplomat from a country in sub-Saharan Africa went to Barcelona for an important conference.  He was, perhaps, expecting to find a warm welcome from the developed world and a place in which to work seriously on the issue at hand.  Instead, he found himself mugged three times in the space of thirty minutes: once by a pickpocket, then by two fraudsters purporting to be police coming to his aid, and finally by another who lifted his bag whilst he was distracted dealing with the first two incidents.  By the end of his visit he left bewildered, bitter, and angry.  He was not alone, and the rough treatment was not restricted to a dark corner of the busy train station.

During the week of 2-6 November, Barcelona was home to negotiations held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  These were the final talks before Copenhagen in December and represented the 5th in a series of ‘ad hoc working group’ sessions this year.  Working to the Bali Action Plan, the talks aimed at establishing the agreed upon structure for what could be signed on to in Copenhagen, itself merely a waypoint on the road to replace the Kyoto Protocol by 2012. 

By the end of the week, after a whirlwind of meetings, statements, contact group sessions, and the like, the Barcelona Climate Change Talks did not produce much in terms of substantive achievements.  But what they did do is cement the feelings of distrust, bitterness, and anger in the developing world. 

I, like many of you, first look at the topic of climate change, from two perspectives.  The first is that is it a dreadfully technical field, debating the technological fixes to the problem of human-induced climate change.  Enter scientists with slide rules and competing models.  The second is that there are many debates about the validity of these models, with people divided into those believing that ‘the end is nigh’ or those believing that ‘wolf is being cried’. 

It turns out that I was wrong on both counts.  The topic, somewhere along the road, transformed from a technical one to an eminently political one.  This is in accordance with Harold Lasswell’s definition of politics. “who gets what, why, and how”.  Because that is what these talks are about: who gets technological transfers, who gets billions of dollars in assistance, who gets the bill; why these payments are made (equity, historical responsibility, noblesse oblige); and how they get them (a tax on growth, offsets, other market solutions).   It is not technocrats that are attending these talks, but rather tough-minded negotiators, who are clear on what to give and what to take. 

Which leads to my second erroneous assumption.  There is no debate about the impact of climate change at these conferences.  It is assumed, or rather subsumed, within the discourse.  “Climate is happening and will get worse, but what are we going to do about it?” is the question being debated.  Now, that does mean that a) the claims about climate change are true nor that b) they are accepted wholeheartedly by all parties.  It just means that they are not up for debate in these fora. 

What does this have to do with KOW?  Well, the level of animosity created over this very real political problem will not be easily compartmentalized.  The bitterness and distrust expressed, for example, by the G77 and China and the Africa Group, has spillover implications for issues such as Darfur.  If those feelings of having been cheated—or perhaps worse, ignored—fester, and if climate change is real and it leads to increased pressure on water and food security, then reasonable, peaceful solutions may not be possible. The ’scarcity breeds conflict’  thesis is a well-developed, if not entirely accepted, one. 

If we think a war between the West and radical Islam, for example, is bad, surely we cannot look forward to a war between the Haves and the Havenots, based not on religion, but on deprivation and grievance (real or exploitative). 

As the APEC summit shows, there is little hope of anything concrete coming out of Copenhagen.  The Core countries of the North, and those of the semi-periphery, have made a decision on the matter of addressing climate change.  For those in the periphery of the South, expecting a considerable amount of money as part of then process, this will be seen as yet another robbery in broad daylight.  

What happens when they decide to fight back?