Why are the United States, Britain, and the Atlantic Alliance fighting in Afghanistan? On the face of it, the justification is simple, and it has been repeated often enough: the goal is to stop the place from again becoming a launch-pad for jihadi terrorism. The West is defended at the Hindu Kush.

The controversy really begins with the means, not the end. Those means are on a downward slide. First, in its pure and optimistic neo-conservative version, the goal was Afghan (or Iraqi) democracy. Then the goal was downgraded: not democracy any more, but stable governance, with functioning political institutions. After a while that also seemed too ambitious. Then the goal was stable local security forces, the Afghan army and police. Eventually an even more watered-down option would be local militias, something like the sons of Afghanistan.

Let us assume — as Patrick Porter did in the previous post that should get you thinking (don’t miss the discussion) — that this downgrading is not finished yet. That the link between “security and liberty,” as he put it, has to be questioned. That it is still too optimistic. That, to put it in more provocative terms, population-centric counterinsurgency equals tactical-level neo-conservatism. And to make it waterproof: that even a success in Afghanistan would not end global terrorism (few, if anybody, can disagree with this last assumption).

Then what?

Well, add one element. Europe’s stakes in Afghanistan are higher than those of the United States. President Obama said as much yesterday,

The mission in Afghanistan is one that the Europeans have as much, if not more, of a stake in than we do. … The likelihood of a terrorist attack in London is at least as high, if not higher, than it is in the United States.

I would add a different dimsension to that statement: not only is the risk of a terrorist attack perhaps higher in Europe. There might even be a trend: the costs of a protracted, dragged out campaign in Afghanistan are higher in Europe and they arrive earlier in Europe, particularly in Britain. Europe has far more personal, cultural, and historical links to the hotspots in Central Asia and the Middle East; it is geographically closer; it is easier to get to for extremists (who probably find it nicer to be there); it is a more fertile recruiting ground; and it is on the jihadis’ target lists. If America shoots at Afghanistan, the recoil hits harder in Europe.

You would expect this to be reason enough for politicians, military leaders, and experts in Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere to start thinking hard about strategy. About alternatives. About the next step in the downgrading of the goals. Perhaps along the lines sketched out in the post below. Instead most politicians repeat their rationale in stale phrases; officers largely do not participate in the debate; and many academics perhaps might find thinking about such alternatives too “realist.” As a result General McChrystal, gossip has it, even had trouble filling the (two?)  spots for European experts on his strategic review team currently in Afghanistan.

The irony is that the outcome of a progressive lowering of the bar in Afghanistan is distinctly un-American: the problem, global Islamic terrorism, probably cannot be solved for good, it can only be managed. But even if it is self-defeating, violent extremism is likely to persist at the outer fringe of society. Counter-terrorism then looks more like crime prevention, where statistics go down, up, or stay flat — but criminal activity doesn’t stop. Doesn’t that sound almost European?

Is democracy an antidote to terrorism? Today’s Observer is skeptical about our ability to make this happen, but approves of the logic:

“On a theoretical level, the moral and strategic goals are joined. A democratic Afghanistan would be less likely to incubate terrorism. If there were no Taliban, there would be no need for the occupation.”

And so, goes the argument, to disrupt the chain of terror that links the Afghan mountains with British streets, we must midwife free elections, non-corrupt institutions and human rights. Ballots are the enemy of Islamist bombers.

In the popular mind, that language was tainted by the war in Iraq, where the idea of liberating and democratising a nation that had just emerged from the nightmare of a psychopathic despot was damaged by subsequent anarchy, communal bloodletting, a refugee exodus, rampant criminality, and outrage over the lack of WMD, Saddamist links with AQ, torture, and incompetence in high places.

Nevertheless, this idea persists. Its advocates, at least in the UK, recast it in a more anodyne developmental language: ‘delivering sustainable governance’, ‘instituting nonviolent political processes’, and bringing order into ungoverned spaces – you’ve heard the vocabulary. At its core, there is still a working assumption that combating Al Qaeda is bound up with a profound liberal project of transforming failed states. One can’t help but suspect that the use of the watered-down language of foreign development appeals because it puts the same idea in less inflammatory language.

(If I were a bereaved parent of one of the British soldiers killed in the past few days, I wonder whether I would be satisfied with the consolation that my son was killed to ‘deliver governance’ and ‘build capacity’? Either we use the words ‘liberate’ and ‘liberalise’ plainly, or we ask ourselves why we euphemise it with the bloodless talk of technocratic jargon.)

The military men I’ve met who do believe in what they are doing put it more eloquently: they are fighting to offer the Afghans a better and freer life and lift Afghanistan out of being an impoverished hothouse for AQ. Right or wrong, at least that describes it directly.

But must we democratise to defend ourselves? Putting aside the vast issue of expense and difficulty, is the actual assumption correct?

Thanks to its own overreaching brutality, the crackdown by the state, and some quite sophisticated as well as quite unpleasant methods used against it, Al Qaeda is now an endangered species in the society of…Saudi Arabia. Not exactly a nirvana of pluralist, liberal, open politics, of women’s emancipation or a healthy Enlightenment spirit of intellectual freedom. But militant jihad is no less unwelcome in Saudi Arabia for that. Even people living under tyranny dislike being blown up, and tyrants don’t necessarily welcome the presence of terrorists in their midst.

As for ‘incubation’, what of free-market, open, democratic societies like Britain in the 1990’s? Being a free country did not prevent the growth of backyard terrorist cells in the First World.

On the other side of the coin, Lebanon has a good measure of democracy in its politics. Imperfect, sure, and often poisoned by outside interference. But democratic certainly. One party involved in Lebanon’s democracy is Hezbollah, an armed movement, a welfare provider, and a participant in national elections. This doesn’t stop them using classic terrorist methods when it suits them – kidnappings, attacks on civilian populations for political purposes, suicide bombings. Being democratic is not the enemy of being terroristic – in fact the former can be invoked as a mandate to justify the latter. Hezbollah can claim a powerful mandate from the masses, to use a Monty Pythonism, as it justifies its grisly methods.

There are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world who share our distaste for AQ’s global jihad, including Islamists themselves, many of whom wish to keep their jihad local and not pick a fight with the American superpower and its allies. And there are terrorists who win elections.

The broad hypothesis that liberalisation and democratisation is the path to counter-terrorism seems more based on unproven assumptions about world-historical patterns of economic and political teleology – a kind of Hegelian and Atlanticist vision of progress and modernisation – than about the links between security and liberty.

This has very direct policy implications. The commitment to democracy and anti-corruption, and a strong central state, will tie us down vastly more with our resources, money and manpower, than a more minimal commitment to backing local powers whose interests coincide with ours.

In the case of the Taliban, while their ultimate position on elections is not clear, they do pose as a credible counterstate, offering services and ‘governance’ to the masses. They are fighters but they are also judges, law-and-order providers and economic regulators. And they can also pose as the protectors of a threatened agrarian class, growing the only highly profitable crop. They can claim some kind of legitimacy rooted in popular will. An Afghanistan animated by popular political passions will not necessarily be one hostile to illiberal and jihadist forces, in other words.

I’ve been a little critical of evasive language here. So its only fair that I state my own unheroic position clearly: Al Qaeda is a non-trivial and malign force but ultimately one that is self-defeating. Our objective in Afghanistan should not be to purge it via the medicine of democratic governance, which is too hard, too expensive, too dangerous and too unnecessary. (that is not to deny that Afghans may well decide to develop their own democracy with or without our assistance. It is to question whether we should be engaged in a large-scale military campaign to do so on our own timetable.)

Instead, our goal should be to leave Afghanistan as a place where AQ cannot operate safely or unmolested. They may seek to set up shop again there, but they will be hunted, harassed and permanently trying to stay alive. To do this, we need to craft a coalition of all those, no matter how unpleasant, who share this minimal aim. It means cutting deals with bastards, keeping a lighter presence, and doing rough work in the shadows, and feeding money and material support to those willing to help out. Not a perfect or humane alternative, and one where innocents will be killed, but a more realistic and affordable one.

Illiberal? Absolutely. But thirty years of endless war sounds like an even worse illiberal state.

Can you help me? In his statement today about the latest British deaths in Afghanistan, Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup argues that Helmand is the key to defeating the Taliban:

the Taliban have rightly identified Helmand as their vital ground. If they lose there then they lose everywhere and they are throwing everything they have into it.

That’s strong stuff. Is it right?

Second – a tactical question. I’ve now seen in two tv reports from Helmand, what looked like British soldiers firing RPGs. In both shots the lighting was poor, and they could well have been ANA, though their body armour and helmets looked distinctly British. Did you see the reports too, or have you been there and seen it done first hand?

Stephen Grey, Times journalist and author of Operation Snakebite (recommended reading), gave testimony to the Defence Select Committee on the ‘Comprehensive Approach’ . You can download the transcript on his own blog. This is the gist of it:

… I think we owe it to all those that are sacrificing themselves in Helmand, to be brutally frank about what is going on there and what is going wrong, because it is only with that frankness that I think certain things can be put right.  From the perspective of those on the ground, I think the Comprehensive Approach has largely been a parody of reality.

But there’s a lot of good stuff in there and I recommend reading it in full. A couple of things which caught my eye were the words of an officer with whom Grey had corresponded which I’ve used to title this post the other was this:

There was a story from one worker in a Helmand PRT described as going to spend time with an Afghan official who said, “You know, it is great what you do”, I am paraphrasing, obviously, “but why can you not be a bit more like the Russians?  Because you sit here for one hour a day before you are whisked away by your security.  The Russians used to stay with us day after day and mentor us in a comprehensive way.” 

Seven years into this war we should not be in a position where our efforts compare unfavourably with those of the Soviet Union.

The War in Afghanistan, as the opening campaign of the War on Terror, has now gone on for longer than World War Two. As Ken points out below, Richard Holmes amongst others has made this point.

My polite answer is, so what?

World War Two was horrific but not particularly long, if we are saying this in a meaningful, relative way. Compared to other major conflicts – the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years war, the Iran-Iraq war - it is not especially protracted. It was unbelievably intense, but that is a different thing.

As a less intense campaign of counterinsurgency, policing and nationbuilding, Afghanistan has not yet reached a historical level of exceptional duration, if we compare it to other similar campaigns.

What should give us pause is not the empty comparison with World War Two, but the problem that a resolution, political settlement or emerging strong allied state in that country seems so far away from where we are now. In that regard, Afghanistan looks like a long war in the making. It is not inflicting enough attrition to accelerate active public opposition to involvement, but inflicting enough to erode national will steadily. So domestic impatience may take some years yet before it undermines political will. As will attrition by the Taliban. Of course, nothing is guaranteed. But it is these factors which might help explain the feeling of fatigue around the Afghan war.

Of course, crass comparisons with major conventional conflicts are also the fault of those who spoke prematurely of decisive victories in those prehistoric days of 2001-2003.

Having had a discussion with Dave Betz (over a few beers, as I recall) on this topic recently, I was pleased to see this article on the state of the academic book. 

Is the academic book dead?  Have quality blogs (like this one, bien sur!) replaced the stodgy tome?  Or have journals, with their heightened prestige and (slightly) faster press lead times, stolen the high ground?

The president of Princeton University Press cites William Germano, who claims that

the book is the form in which we scholars tell our stories to one another. … it is the form of the book, that precious thought-skeleton, that holds a project together.

As erudite consumers and producers of knowledge, what say you?  Is the book, and perhaps especially the scholarly book, passée?  Or does it still fill a niche?  Has Chicago University Press got it correct, by picking up titles such as Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup With A Spoon and the new Counter-Insurgency manual?  Or are even these popular titles not enough to save the industry?

It happened again. A broad and persistent cyber attack. Its targets seemed to be the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and — why not? — the Washington Post. Or, to be more precise, their websites. Good news is, they still worked. Today, when the story was sizzling hot, I got an interview request from a well-known tech-journal. Would I have something to say? Urgent, right now. And yes, punchy please.

Sometimes it is good to lean back, look at the sky, take a sip of espresso. What would the classics think? Say, Hobbes: would a cyber war make life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”? Or Clausewitz: could cyber-force be used to compel somebody to bend to our will? Hardly.

Yet martial metaphors are highly valued in all things cyber. Neil Munro, in 1995, started a trend: he warned of an “electronic Pearl Harbor.” That same year the Air Force released its “Cornerstones of Information Warfare.” Strangely, in the last dozen years, not so much seems to have changed. We still read about “digital trench warfare” and “cyber-blitzkrieg.” The Air Force even wanted to “fly and fight” in cyberspace. General Kevin Chilton, head of the United States Strategic Command, was more explicit in a Congress hearing on 27 February 2008:

We look forward to the day when we have trained and equipped Service organizations (e.g., brigades, battalions, wings, groups, and squadrons) assigned to [the United States Strategic Command] conduct network warfare.

These are dizzying metaphors. A newly created cyber-command, supposedly with freshly trained and equipped squadrons, has so far not clarified that confusion. So perhaps a bigger question needs to be raised: is it really so useful to apply analogies from the battlespace to cyberspace? Has there ever been a casualty as a result of a cyber-attack? What does it mean to “fly” in cyberspace or to hunker down in a digital “trench”? Often it’s not even clear who attacks.

Two things worry me: companies can be expected to downplay such attacks on their own networks, if possible — most would likely lose customers if they would be seen as vulnerable. The opposite is true for some governmental agencies. Companies may lose money when they highlight an attack — the government agencies in charge may get money when they highlight such attacks, as do contractors. The scramble for cyberspace is a scramble for new resources and influence. Therefore official leaks should be treated with caution. And secondly, the press coverage of these issues, and to an extent also the policy debate on cyber-attacks, is notoriously short on detail and technical insight. With some exceptions (pdf), of course.

This is not to downplay a potential threat. Or to say no defense is needed. To the contrary. Having a well-designed IT security architecture is vital. But here lies perhaps the heart of the problem: if you’re the head of IT of a bank or a government agency in serious trouble, who would you call? Google or the Air Force?

Vivid reporting from the BBC’s Ian Pannell with the Light Dragoons and others, under fire in Helmand province this week.

In a previous thread ‘Her Majesty’s Wasting Assets‘ we have been having a lively discussion on the looming crisis in British defence policy. Says Anthony in comments:

Sorry, I’m losing track of the thread of the debate a bit. Too many issues being raised to disaggregate into non-essay-length replies.

Ask and ye shall receive. This article in the latest International Affairs by Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman on ‘National Defence in the Age of Austerity‘ goes some way to disaggregating the issues. I recommend that you read it. I am still pondering their conclusion. What it comes down to, I think, is that the government needs to decide the purposes for which they have armed forces in the first place, ‘…to take the lead in articulating a national vision from which defence can derive its mission and then it is for government to support the subsequent defence effort.’  Well, yes, indubitably. But they also say ‘Neither should the defence debate be overly influenced by esoteric discussions about the evolution (or otherwise) of modern strategy.’ Which confuses me because I think we need a lot of debate and much of it necessarily esoteric because there are so many issues and all complex and intertwined. A couple of weeks ago a publisher sent me a copy of The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It. I’ve barely cracked the spine because while I do enjoy these Gladwell-esque sorts of books I usually only allow myself to read them when I’m on holiday or an air plane. The title has been preying on my mind, however. I think the problem is not so much that we are making choices in an Age of Austerity (admittedly a large problem) which makes policy formulation a very negative exercise in cutting one capability in order to preserve another but, to put it crudely, that we really don’t fracking* know what is going on. On just about every level, political, economic, social, and technological, we seem to be in the midst of some wrenching change from something comprehensible to something so far not so much. That being the case it’s awfully difficult to make any sort of reasoned choice with a high degree of confidence.

Here’s what underlies my thinking. First, as Dorman and Cornish point out, ‘a careful strategic assessment might well reveal that the United Kingdom will need aircraft carriers and fast attack aircraft as well as men on the ground.’ That would be my assessment, at any rate. Therefore we should double defence spending, for a start, thereby covering our bases as much as possible and insulating ourselves as much as possible from the consequences of judging the future catastrophically wrongly. But I can’t really see this happening. Anybody disagree? That being the case, second, you need to take your best guess on the basis of the available evidence which, for me, says pretty clearly that cutting infantry battalions is a really bad idea.

*In honour of the last season of Battlestar Galactica which, in contrast with the book of Joshua Cooper Ramo, I actually made time to watch over the last week. Too bad really because it was kind of disappointing.

…because my book’s finally come out! The good folk at Amazon now have it and are willing to hawk paperback copies. A bargain at triple the price.

But be warned, its aimed at a very specific market.

It will only appeal to people interested in the following subjects:

strategy, culture, strategic culture, war, Alexander the Great, the Taliban, Aztecs, Conquistadores, Apaches, Samurai, George Bush, America, Islam, Islamism, Hezbollah, Israel, Human Terrain Teams, realism, Iraq, Iran, Clausewitz, Homer, Genghis Khan, John Kerry, Colin Powell, ancient hatreds, the Balkans, Somali warlords, Samuel Huntington, empire, Edward Said, suicide bombing, televised beheadings, counterinsurgency, David Kilcullen, David Petraeus, Vietnam, Anthony Zinni, John Keegan, Colin Gray, nuclear deterrence, Greco-Persian wars, martial races, Kipling, and the circumference of Highlanders’ thighs.

ok, I made the last one up.

A nice front cover too, to enrich the coffee table and spice up a romantic dinner.

For folks and fans in the US, its out soon with Columbia University Press.

Ok that’s enough. Now everyone read Ken’s more substantive post below.