Between the strategic and the heroic

Between the strategic and the heroic

Either this sort of thing gives you a lump in your throat, or it doesn’t.

Two thoughts come to mind when watching this film (or for me, anyway). First, that we are moved by brave and unyielding soldier-politicians of the likes of Churchill, Roosevelt or even the white-haired veteran, John McCain. A little defiance against the enemies of liberal society, against those who delight in the weakening of America and all it stands for, is uplifting. Like Lincoln, McCain has staked his election campaign on a firm belief in victory, a word deeply unfashionable in the post-modern discourse of war studies. To his credit, McCain also believes in preserving something to defend, committing to shutting down the disgrace of Guantanamo. The spirit of his advertisement is not only one of granite belief and determination. It is that heroism sometimes entails persistence against ridiculous odds. In recommitting Americans morally to a cause that may be unlikely to succeed, heroism cuts against calculated common sense. If Winston Churchill said ‘Never give in, never give in…except to convictions of honour or good sense’, the part of our instincts that loves heroism pays little heed to Churchill’s ‘good sense’ caveat.

Yet in being part of ‘war studies’, we insist and tell our students that war must be approached strategically and cautiously, as an exceedingly unpredictable and dangerous instrument. Take national security policy and Iraq. There are very good arguments for believing that we need to limit and tighten the conditions in which we would commit ground forces anywhere. A war of 2 billion US dollars a week is hardly sustainable. And there are too many dead people. Even if Iraq becomes an Arab Switzerland tomorrow, or even if Afghanistan became a gentle Islamic Republic with the Taliban routed, the large-scale military occupations in those countries have resulted in crises on the flanks, in the menace of nuclear theocracies in Tehran and Islamabad. Sure, we didn’t ‘make’ the Iranian leadership say what it says, but having troops stationed on either side of a paranoid regime has mobilised it, stifled domestic dissent, and accelerated its quest for nuclear capability. Politics in Pakistan is unquestionably radicalised by the war raging on its frontier. Like Austria-Hungary in 1914-1918, we could start with a war against an underground terrorist movement, and end with war against powerful states.

In other words, we can be caught between two instincts, the heroic and the strategic. So in Iraq, American and local forces have struck hard against Al Qaeda, in offensives that mark a staggering shift in the struggle. Building on a bottom-up revolt by former Sunni insurgents and tribes and powers who have learnt to hate AQ’s brutality (not to mention its competition for crime markets), the coalition has pulverised the tv beheaders and amputating thugs. In a virtuous cycle, their atrocities have alienated Muslims everywhere, even their own old allies. Then reduced to ineffectual and sporadic violence, they are further discredited. They look worse than bad. They look weak. Iraqis are tired of the violent onslaught on their civil society, their constitutional government is holding on and getting stronger, and violence is being lowered. Under General Petraeus, the US has helped drive a heroic turnaround, with unbelievably brave people creating a critical space in which some now talk of victory. As Margaret Thatcher might say, ‘just rejoice.’

Yet the strategist in us never ‘just rejoices.’ We recall that triumphalism is often premature. That these gains may be reversed and snuffed out by new waves of ethnic cleansing and sectarian killings, by AQ’s ability to regenerate itself in new training camps. Even in the best-case scenario, if AQI is decisively beaten, the newly empowered northern tribes are flush with weapons, cash and experience, and may turn this new strength against other Iraqis. The dream of a stable federal democracy, freed by new alliances of Americans and Arabs, may go the way of the confidence that was building amongst US troops who were steadily mastering the art of counterinsurgency in Vietnam, circa 1969.

This is one of the real problems faced by the ‘big story’ of the war on terror, which was then rebranded as the Long War, and lately, the Global Counterinsurgency. It is based on the view of a long-term, complex and shifting struggle, where we won’t have the clarity of victory and defeat. Yet politically, and as humans, many people haven’t lost their instinct for the climactic language of heroism. There remains something down in our gut where we can’t only think in terms of pure strategy. The leader who announces that this war, unlike those of our grandfathers, will not be settled by a formal surrender and a fixed terminus, is the same man who declares combat operations over against a banner saying ‘Mission Accomplished.’

General Dannatt’s speech at RUSI Land Warfare Conference

I just received a copy of General Sir Richard Dannatt’s speech to the RUSI Land Warfare Conference, 12 June 2008. It strikes me as a model of clear thinking which very much is in accordance with my own as expressed here in Redesigning Land Forces for Wars Amongst the People (with the obvious caveat that Dannatt rejects the term ‘war amongst the people’ , wrongly in my view and for the wrong reason). There’s a lot to like here. Some excerpts:

At the risk of going against the flow of public opinion, I do not agree with Rupert Smith when he says: ‘A paradigm shift in war has undoubtedly occurred….the old paradigm was of interstate industrial war. The new one is the paradigm of war amongst the people.’ In accepting what Rupert said we run the risk of a binary response – and life is not so straightforward.

I also don’t think that there has been a paradigm shift in war. More to the point, I don’t think Smith really does either. That’s the worst single sentence in the book. I wish his editor had warned him off talk of ‘paradigm shift’. It’s the biggest red flag you can imagine. In any case, that’s not what he shows in the rest of the book. Had he written there has been a ‘large shift on a continuum of war from armies with comparable forces doing battle on a field to strategic confrontation between a range of combatants, not all of which are armies, not all of which are armies, and using different types of weapons, often improvised. I call that war amongst the people’, then there would be no dispute between the generals. Perhaps they read this blog? (Hey, its possible!) If so sound off in comments.

Continuing on, however:

… as we withdrew from Empire, I think there were two critical factors that still impact on us today. The first is that the balance of resources and priority in thinking shifted dramatically to the Cold War and to defence in a possible war of national survival. Insurgencies still occurred as we withdrew from Empire, but as the Army became smaller, so these operations (less Northern Ireland) took on a second priority as far as national defence priorities were concerned. Our policy was to disengage and return from East of Suez. So even our residual ‘Out of Area’ capabilities needed to be dual-roled. Additionally, in a desire not to be considered to be still colonial, I sense that we lost the mindset and skills across Government that our fathers and grandfathers instinctively understood and there was perhaps – and still is in some quarters – a reluctance to do anything that appeared to be colonial in nature.

Indeed. It is one thing to refuse to get involved in the manner of affairs and governance of other countries because don’t want to impose your ideas about such things upon others, or don’t care how malgoverned and mistreated some people might be. That’s logical enough. It is another thing to meddle in the manner of affairs and governance of other countries because you care (or profess to care) about how malgoverned and mistreated some people but not to be realistic about the requirements of governing such places out of shyness of one’s colonial past. That’s logically inconsistent.

We can no longer be prescriptive about taking part in either Major Combat Operations or Stabilisation Operations, the boundary between them has become increasingly blurred – the antithesis of the beloved binary response. I cannot envisage a conflict where there will be no role for stabilisation operations, but equally stabilisation is highly likely to involve combat as it does today.

Yes, as I have said before, its not either major combat operations or stabilization operations its both, possibly simultaneously in the same place. The trouble is finding the optimum configuration of forces to cover the whole spectrum.

Look how foolish those who claimed the end of history in 1991 look now.

A small point but it always bugs me. What Fukuyama wrote was this:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affair’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.

Call me crazy but I don’t see this as foolish. Premature, maybe. He doesn’t talk enough about the challenge of Islam, surely; though what he writes about that seems fair:

In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Dannatt:

So if that is the context of the debate, where do I, and my fellow Generals, want the Army to go over the next ten years? Critically, the start point of this journey is firmly rooted in the present. We will not be setting our aspirations for 2018 in a far flung technological age or in an ill defined strategic context. In a break from traditional defence planning, we would like to see planning go from today as the start point and work forward. This may seem slightly at odds with current practice, but we must be flexible enough to take account of shifting current operations and to veer and haul our capabilities and resources accordingly. We must get away from blue skies thinking and from programmes that take a generation to introduce – current pressures do not give us that luxury.

If I interpret this correctly he is saying ‘let’s not lose the war we’re already fighting by spending huge amounts of time and money preparing for a more conventional war which would be more to the liking of miltechno-fetishists and defence industry.’ If so, I approve.

We must have an increasing capacity to endure, which implies not only greater mass of people, but enough depth in joint enablers to allow wider concurrency together with greater endurance. In order to do this, I need a structure that is capable of the wide range of tasks in great numbers, which means that we will not be going down the path of a two tier specialised Army. We might need 30,000 for an MCO operation, but equally Stabilisation might require even more in certain stages. And I think it is also important to consider the inescapable fact that some Stabilisation Operations could be greatly shortened if large numbers are deployed. I have taken a lesson of the past 5 years of conflict that if you have an economy of force operation it will take far longer to reach your endstate – it is therefore a false economy.

I think this is a vital point. We can do MCO with relatively small forces. But translating military operational achievements into desirable political outcomes requires Stabilization Operations which, not incidentally, are manpower intensive. Ergo, Stabilization Operations must be the job of the ‘big Army’. I love the part about false economy of economy of force which I must remember to reuse.

In support of the Defence Strategic Guidance 08 work, I have directed an Army study to look at the feasibility of forming permanent cadres of stabilisation specialists. These small units would specialise in the training and mentoring of indigenous forces – the type of tasks conducted by OMLTs in Afghanistan or MiTTs in Iraq. But I see these organisations as being far more. My vision is that they would form the spine of our enduring cultural education and understanding. I can envisage a multi-disciplined and inter-agency organisation that would be capable of both fighting alongside local forces, and delivering reconstruction and development tasks in areas where the civil agencies cannot operate. I believe we should develop a career path that would see an officer spending a tour with indigenous forces, followed perhaps by an attachment to DFiD overseas, or a local council at home or a police force in Africa or elsewhere. Perhaps, this is where we start to embed our deep language and cultural training, not just for our current areas of operation, but potential future conflict zones. This is the stuff of our grandfathers and great uncles but, as I have argued, we are in a continuum, not in a new paradigm – so these skills are still very relevant.

I think this is very sensible on a number of levels. The part I think particularly useful and sage is the idea of a career path in which officers would serve on attachment in a ‘local council at home‘. That is because, for me, one of the biggest things which needs to be understood is the interaction between images and ideas about what happens on operations abroad and what happens domestically in places like Bradford and Dewsbury. When I see on the news the British Army patrolling and fighting in Helmand I think things like ‘those guys have their s**t together’ and ‘that’s a good section attack’ and so on. Many Muslim Britons see ‘crusaders’ illegally oppressing their co-religionists; some of those Britons decide they should strap on a canvas vest full of TNT and ball bearings and blow up a bus.

Finally, he concludes:

I am afraid that this has been a canter through some very detailed developing work. What I want to leave you with is the sense that the British Army is determined to continue to adapt and develop from our start point on current operations. We have spent the past 5 years transforming to meet the demands of our current wars and the potential conflicts of the future, but I do not believe that anything I have outlined changes the course of that transformation in contact; it is merely a clarifying of the endstate. The developing concurrent nature of both Major Combat Operations and Stabilisation Ops means that the most likely is the most demanding. Therefore – and this is key to what I am saying - we must continue to optimise for the most likely – which is Stabilisation Operations – whilst maintaining our ability to dual role and meet the demands of Major Combat Operations – while remembering that at the lowest level fighting can be very intense whatever label you have applied to the operation.

Absolutely. The general’s diagnosis of the problem and recommended course of action are, in my view, accurate. The problem, of course, is the cost of the cure. There should be (should have been!) a large jump in defence expenditure but that seems unlikely in the current political and economic environment as a result of which there will not be enough money to go around. Dannatt clearly senses this and anticipates the internal battles that may ensue:

I am also conscious that I have only talked about the Land Environment and the Army in particular, but the land environment is more than just the Army. This is a joint and increasingly inter-agency activity and I would welcome the widening of what has been a largely Army debate to include the role that all environments can have in these most demanding and likely of operations. As I have said, I am sure that we will end up with some down arrows in our existing resource requirement in the Army, and I am ready for that debate right across Defence, where I expect to see other down arrows. Overall, we must recognise that we are unlikely to have enough to do all that we would like – we must now look seriously at what we really, really need.

Don’t count your chickens until they are hatched…

A couple of articles caught my eye in today’s Times. The first by Magnus Linklater is a short account of a recent visit to southern Afghanistan ‘It was a battlefield last time I was here. The progress is remarkable’

Linklater gives credit for the progress in no small part to the USMC who fairly recently arrived in the area by force, although they are due to pull out in September:

A few weeks ago, Garmsir was a no-go area for all but the hunkered down British troops in their heavily guarded forward operating bases, and for the US Marines, beginning to arrive in force. Known as the “snake’s head” because of the distinctive shape of the area – a broad expanse of fertile country in the north, tapering to a long tail of farmland, supporting a rural population, mostly cultivating opium poppies – Garmsir was, until recently, held by the Taleban.

“The last time I was here, I wasn’t able to come into the town at all. It was a full-scale battlefield,” Sir Jock said. “Now we’ve just come twice through the main street. I wouldn’t say for one moment that we’ve restored Garmsir to total peace and security, but the progress we’ve made over the last few months is remarkable.”

This is excellent news and accords with reports from colleagues and students in Afghanistan that progress is being made there, that the campaign is being fought more intelligently than it was, and that the Taliban is hemorrhaging support through indiscriminate attacks which make it look as though it is they and not ISAF which is violating the ancient codes of fighting in this area.

Seizing it back was due in part to the surge of the US Marines, with their massively resourced Marine Expeditionary Unit. But it was also achieved through a classic piece of soldiering by A Company of the Argyll and Suther-land Highlanders – the kind of infantry operation that hasn’t changed much in character since the Second World War. In the cramped forward operating base of Delhi (these FOBs, a key part of the Helmand strategy, mostly bear classic names from Britain’s military past, like Inkerman, Balaklava and Nijmegen) Major Neil Den-McKay took me up to his tiny observation post, protected by sand-bags, with a thin slit looking out over a 120-degree arc of the countryside. He pointed to an open field, falling away to a ditch, barely 300 yards away.

“The Taleban were there,” he said.

“We knew they were there because they kept attacking us. So we had to clear it.” He did so by taking a company of jocks in point formation, with bayonets fixed, straight down the ditch until they encountered the Taleban head on. “I don’t think they were expecting us,” said Major Den-McKay drily. “They certainly seemed surprised.” The Argylls drove the Taleban out, inflicting heavy casualties, and without losing a man. It may not have been more than a skirmish, but it sent out a powerful message about the determination of the British forces to make the territory their own.

Earlier, I had sat with Sir Jock and the commanding officer of the Helmand task force, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, listening to the commander of the US Marine Expeditionary Unit, Colonel Lewis Henderson, who spoke of how a combination of military might and civil resources had taken and held the snake’s head itself. He talked of the use of powerful armoury to defeat the Taleban, including blowing up more than 200 bunkers, seizing caches of weaponry and destroying the infrastructure, together with tactics designed to win over the local population once victory had been achieved.

But here’s the rub, you see. Now that you’ve driven the Taliban out how are you going to keep them from coming back?  You’re all familiar with the raging debate over force structure, training and organization. Should we have a  ‘COIN-oriented’ force or a ‘warfighting’ force? I don’t want to rehash it here except to say that the dichotomy is crude and unhelpful because it’s not an either/or situation . You need to do both because dealing with the immense and perpetual problems of imposing (or reimposing) political control throughout and beyond combat operations is the core and essence of making war an effective instrument of state policy. Fact is that right now ‘nation-building’ and ‘war-winning’ are cognate terms. This may not be to your liking but you can’t always pick your wars.

Back to Linklater, though, who illustrates how the flow of ‘COIN-best practice’ which once flowed from the UK to the USA (justifiably, or not) now goes the other way. I do not think Brigadier Aylwin-Foster could have written his seminal essay in the Military Review Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations today. However right it was at the time (and I think it was pretty accurate), it is clear that the US military has come a long way since then. Is the British Army keeping up?

“To sustain and secure,” was the way he described it. It was the sustaining part that provided a fascinating insight into how far American counter-insurgency tactics have developed since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Aware of the danger of suicide bombers, one of the first things they did was to carry out random finger-printing of suspicious-looking civilians in the outlying areas of the snake’s head. It suggested that the Marines had good local knowledge, whereas in fact they had encountered what Colonel Henderson described as “black holes of intelligence”.

He admitted that they knew very little about local power bases and the complexities of tribal allegiances. So instead the marines went out into the villages with grapes. Why grapes? “They give off a nice smell, and they’re not threatening,” he said. They also sent out leaflets – not warning the local people about the Taleban, but explaining what the Americans were trying to do. Reckoning that many residents of Garmsir were underinformed about the war, they distributed 400 clock radios. And they began compiling data – about the number of shops, the distribution of farms, the availability of schools. They discovered things they didn’t know before, like the fact that although this was a very poor rural population, it was surprisingly well-educated, with some of the villagers speaking two or more languages.

The British listeners were clearly impressed by Colonel Henderson’s presentation, but some of the flies in the Garmsir ointment emerged almost immediately. In the first place, the US Marines are due to pull out of the area in September, leaving this experiment in winning the peace open-ended. Could the British maintain the momentum without the kind of resources that the Americans had deployed? “The commander of the Helmand task force will deploy his units as he sees fit to ensure that we can hold on to and sustain the progress that’s been made here and bring it forward,” said Sir Jock, in the clipped manner of one who is not certain of the answer.

My sense is that the British Army is trying (and don’t get me wrong, I remain strongly of the view that the British Army is the best there is). But the tradition here is to try to do twice as much as the Americans in half the time with half the resources–a situation which, quite predictably, results in failure at least half the time. The US I think leaves less to chance because it is more prepared to match resources with the scale of the real mission requirements. I am reminded of Edward Luttwak’s sharp reminder that ‘the West has become comfortably habituated with defeat.’  He was talking mainly about the US, I reckon, but it applies equally here where, says Brian Bond in The Pursuit of Victory, ‘The British will forgive defeat, but never victory.’

But why am I banging on about defeat when Linklater is saying things are looking up in Afghanistan and others, like Gerard Baker recently tell us to Cheer up. Were Winning this War on Terror? Because I think it’s really premature. Afghanistan is a multi-decade commitment and I’m not sure we’ve enough gas in the tank to sustain it–nor do I see the government really putting enough money into changing that (in fact, this government seems to have been drained of all will entirely beyond that of its own immediate political survival). Moreover, in the broader context while it is great that Al Qaeda no longer has a territorial base in Afghanistan, as Michael Evans also writes in today’s Times, they have other places to go Al Qaeda finds three safe havens for terror training:

Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organisation, driven out of Afghanistan and defeated in Iraq, is re-emerging in strength in three alternative safe havens for training, operational planning and recruiting – Pakistan, Somalia and Algeria – according to Western intelligence and defence sources.

The core al-Qaeda headquarters in the tribal areas of Pakistan pose the gravest threat to the United Kingdom. But in Somalia and in Algeria, where the so-called al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was set up in 2004 as a powerful bin Laden offshoot, the organisation is recruiting energetically and its leaders are believed to have aspirations to hit Western targets.

The basic problem is that we need to face up to a world in which adversaries capable of causing great harm require a very limited territorial base and flourish in the disaffected elements of our domestic population. We’re a long way from figuring out how to deal with that; so it’s way too soon to start declaring victory. Related thoughts at Abu Muqawama The Order of AQ.

Pakistan’s Fighting the Taliban

Following a drumbeat of criticism for its less-than-bellicose approach in the tribal areas, outrage of America’s more bellicose approach to that part of the world,  fresh allegations of ISI assistance to the Taliban, and Afghanistan’s accusation that the ISI assisted in the assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai, the Pakistani government is supposedly getting tough on the Taliban.  The NYT reports:

Pakistani forces bombarded suspected militant hideouts with mortar shells Saturday as the government launched a major offensive against Taliban fighters threatening the main city in the country’s volatile northwest, officials said.

The offensive in the Khyber tribal region marked the first major military action Pakistan’s newly elected government has taken against the militants operating in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

I’m still a neophyte to the world of Pakistani politics.  Truth be told, most the experts I speak to about it in advance of my research there warn me that it’ll take about a decade to progress beyond the neophyte-level.  By which point I’ll be a “beginner.”  So while I’m not ready to wade with answers regarding all the machinations that led the government to begin shelling militants, I do have some questions:

1. As we learn more about the government’s volte face, what will the analysis say in terms of the internal and external factors that tipped the balance?   Musharraf’s diminishing role meant less connection between the government and military, with Kayani hanging back a bit. This was good in that it appeared the military might actually let the civilian government govern.  Except that civilian government was a bit tied up with its own issues. So the concern that no one is really, you know, running Pakistan is understandable.  Which brings me to my question of whether this action is a realization that the external drumbeat of criticism has reached the point where the government needs to act, whether the different players in government acted in concert, and whether a particular internal agenda is being served and how?  Or did the threat of instability amidst rising threats to Peshawar just become too great? It’s never one thing or another, but I’m curious to see what the tipping points and breakdown of priorities were. Though it is questionable if we’ll ever really know for sure.

2. How serious and comprehensive a military effort are they going to make? In other words, is this the real deal?

3. And the million dollar question is, of course, if this is the real deal will it work? Are the Frontier Corps really willing and able to do the job?  How big a role will the regular army play?  And are these guys ready for this kind of fight? And what kind of resources is Pakistan ready to divert from the other front, if necessary?

I’ve actually got more questions than that.  But I’m running out the door for my wife’s boss’ engagement party.  And if I’m the reason we’re late, there’s going to be an attack in North London tonight.

Update: The NYT reports:

The action was limited, with security forces shelling territory outside Peshawar held by an extremist leader. Army forces were not used, and the intent apparently was merely to push the militants back from the city’s perimeter.

But the shelling was the first time the new civilian government, which has been committed to negotiating peace accords with Pakistani Taliban and other Islamic militants, resorted to military action.

In response, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, announced that he had suspended his participation in peace talks.

The Pakistani channel Samma TV reported that Mr. Mehsud had threatened to take the fight against the government to the heart of Pakistan, the provinces of Sindh and Punjab, if military action continued.

In Peshawar, senior military officials said that a regional security force had fired mortar shells against two bases of an Islamic militant known as Mangal Bagh, whose well-armed fighters have taken control over much of Khyber agency adjacent to the city.

Mohammed Alam Khattak, Inspector General of the Frontier Corps, said the operation was in response to growing public demand after weeks of daily kidnappings and intimidation by militants.  The army was not involved, but General Pervaiz Kayani, the Army Chief of Staff, has been given full authority by the government to conduct whatever operations are necessary to secure Peshawar.

 Mangal Bagh, leader of Lashkar-i-Islam (Army of Islam) was apparently the main target of the attack.  Lashkar-i-Islam is approximately several thousand fighters strong.  For those interested in what Bagh has had to say in the past, the NEFA Foundation has posted a copy of a recent interview with him here.

According to General Khattak, the operation is primarily intended to destroy Bagh’s bases in the Bara area of the Khyber agency and is expected to last approximately 5 days.  So stay tuned…

 

 

Face value

What do you get when you cross a mafia boss with a hostile religious militant?

A facial makeover, according to the New York Times:

‘One of the first targets of the Taliban are usually criminals with whom they often fashion a symbiotic relationship, officials here said. Often the Taliban attack criminals and in that way increase their social standing with local people.

And then to win favor with the Taliban, the criminals grow their hair and their beards, and join forces with the militants, they said. In this way, the criminals get protection from the militants for the money they give to the Taliban from their extortion rackets.’

Organized crime is a very large part of the complex wars we face today. But our knowledge of criminal networks is often discussed separately from our analysis of the enemy’s strategic culture.

This is a gap that needs more work. One of the difficulties with cultural analysis is the need to separate material context from what people claim about themselves.

When we talk about the importance of religious concepts and tribal lore, are we sometimes falling prey to the propaganda of canny crime lords, rebranding themselves and adapting to a new and deadly environment?

Of course, the distinction is often a bit false. AQI are fighting other Iraqis in the Sunni triangle over crime fiefdoms and banditry markets, while there are probably crime lords who think of themselves as devout believers.

But there are also opportunists, ready to grow their beards and nod to the rhetoric of jihad. Its good for business.

Pakistani military training Taliban fighters

Canada: Ex-Taliban fighter tells of training from Pakistani military

Afghanistan - A former Taliban fighter has provided a gripping first-hand account of being secretly trained by members of the Pakistani military, paid $500 a month and ordered to kill foreigners in Afghanistan.

Mullah Mohammed Zaher offered a vivid description of a bomb-making apprenticeship at a Pakistani army compound where he says he learned to blow up NATO convoys.

Earlier this month RAND released a report by Seth Jones Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan which claimed that Pakistani intelligence and military were providing training, intelligence and other support to Taliban fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan. If corroborated the account of the former Talib above would have major strategic implications.

Read this

From the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy: no one in PD conducts PD overseas - MountainRunner

Readers of this blog probably already read Matt Armstong at Mountain Runner and so have already seen this report on the soon to be presented Report in Public Diplomacy. On the off chance that you have not, you should. Click on the link above. Writes Matt:

Nearly ten years after the merger, or “abolishing”, of USIA, dozens of public diplomacy officers at Main State, Washington, D.C., headquarters, are administrators and liaisons that do not perform public diplomacy.

The report also points out these significant shortcomings:

• State does not recruit for public diplomacy
• State does not test for public diplomacy
• State does not train for public diplomacy

State has a glass ceiling for public diplomats

Methinks in fact that State does not know what public diplomacy is or what it is for which is rather a large problem.

Al-Qaeda’s Propaganda Machine

Craig Whitlock followed up his excellent piece on the failings of al-Hurra with a look at al-Qaeda’s own Internet propaganda abilities.  Excerpts are below under bolded headings, along with a few of my own niggling comments. The piece, which is worth reading in its entirety, is here.

Al-Qaeda’s Proficiency of Distribution

The war against terrorism has evolved into a war of ideas and propaganda, a struggle for hearts and minds fought on television and the Internet. On those fronts, al-Qaeda’s voice has grown much more powerful in recent years. Taking advantage of new technology and mistakes by its adversaries, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has built an increasingly prolific propaganda operation, enabling it to communicate constantly, securely and in numerous languages with loyalists and potential recruits worldwide.

Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda’s commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network’s in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005. (As-Sahab means “the clouds” in Arabic, a reference to the skyscraping mountain peaks of Afghanistan.)

2 points here:

1. We need to be careful about conflating the ability to disseminate a message with the strength of the message.  Al-Qaeda has had some PR problems of its own with regard to its message, particularly regarding the killing of innocent Muslims. Just something to always keep in mind so we don’t start thinking the only thing that can defeat al-Qaeda is kryptonite. 

2. Terrorism is about propaganda, so to suggest it has evolved into this is incorrect. It is also incorrect to assume that the only thing we need to do is communicate better on TV and the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the counter-narrative.  But this is a multi-tool endeavor: foreign policy, CT operations, public diplomacy… all of these things count too. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to get better at communicating, something those prosecuting the War on Terror seem to finally be coming to grips with. 

That said… We still have a “Failure to Communicate”

U.S. officials have also acknowledged their inability to counter al-Qaeda’s ideological arguments, despite a multibillion-dollar investment in public diplomacy and covert propaganda efforts aimed at Muslims.

“It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a speech in November. “As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago, ‘How has one man in a cave managed to outcommunicate the world’s greatest communication society?’ “

No real argument there.

Message vs. Medium

Some U.S. lawmakers are trying to attack the distribution system anyway.

Last month, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, wrote to Google officials, urging them to take down YouTube videos produced by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. YouTube said that it pulled some videos but that others targeted by Lieberman were not violent or did not qualify as “hate speech.”

Other officials said such an approach was unlikely to be effective because the videos are so widespread and can resurface almost immediately on other sites.

“Initially, that was reflexively the first option people came to –’Let’s not let Osama bin Laden speak’ or ‘Let’s not let the extremists on the Internet,’ ” the senior U.S. counterterrorism official said. “I don’t think that’s possible. Yes, we could go around shutting down Web sites, but it doesn’t really work as a strategic weapon against al-Qaeda.”

Yeah… methinks that approach would be akin to trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.  

 

 

“Life After the Fall”

In 2003, Iraqi director Kasim Abid, who had been living abroad for 30 years, returned home to start a film school in Baghdad. Reunited with three generations of his family after three decades away, he began filming  daily events in their lives.  The result is a documentary tracing the arc of experience for a typical middle class Iraqi family in the years following Saddam’s fall. 

As one would expect, “Life After the Fall” is not a happy movie, though it is at times a very funny one. His nieces, all of whom are around college age, provide some of the sharpest analysis.  And serve as yet another reminder of how important empowering women can be when trying to do COIN and/or nation-building.  

The film is in two parts, and it is the second one that illustrates an Iraq we have all become too familiar with. Foreshadowing the degree to which violence spiraled out of control and Iraqi’s lost faith in the U.S. to protect them, Abid’s oldest brother asks: If the Americans can’t even secure the road to the airport then how do they hope to secure the country?  You don’t really need to be a COIN expert – I’m not and presumably neither is his brother – to understand that logic. The film ends before the surge really has a chance to take effect, but by this point Abid has already had another brother murdered and seen his sister’s family flee to Damascus to join approximately 1.4 million other Iraqi refugees. 

With all of the news and analysis coming out about Iraq, and the  U.S. government debating its own metrics for measuring progress in Iraq, Abid’s film is an important reminder of the people behind the numbers. 

 

 

 

Blaming Britain First

Seriously, this ungainly form of World War Two revisionism, and this extreme reaction against the Churchill cult, is getting ridiculous.

According to Counterpunch,

“It was Churchill, not Hitler, who first targeted civilian populations in World War II and caused the structure of civilized warfare to collapse in ruins.”

Um, actually not one word of that is true. The Reich bombed civilians in Warsaw and Rotterdam, starting on 25 September 1939 and 14 May respectively. Various other Polish towns were terrorised from the sky before even then.

Churchill was not even prime Minister until 10 May 1940. The first RAF bombing on the interior of Germany took place on 15 May.

Sometimes chronology helps to clarify things. A search engine, or even a book, can help.