Editorials
Strategy, Cost, Risk: The Economic Imperative or the Security Imperative?
Foremost on the minds of most Americans is the state of the economy and the budget deficit; with a mandated "super committee" expected to cut expenditures by more than 1 trillion dollars above current cuts.
A dissenting view of the war-winning capabilities of stand-alone air-power: The Kosovo Air-War of 1999 and its prescription for Libya in 2011?
As an old fashioned military historian, I am compelled to bring some more exacting light on a rather popularly held fantasy concerning NATO air-power in the so-called Kosovo War as it has been trundled out for public consumption as a wonderful example of what the joys of stand-alone airpower can do for you, especially when one is confronted with a certain recalcitrant Libyan Colonel who wants to hang on to power.
When Lack of Knowledge Render Seasoned Journalists like Lyse Doucet etc Answerless
Agha H. Amin
Lyse Doucet has a reputation of being an eminent BBC journalist.
However lack of knowledge rendered her answerless while interviewing Inspector General Frontier Corps on 5th August 2010.
The Idea of Pakistan-Myth and Reality
Agha H Amin
Pakistan today stands in the eye of the storm and every act of Islamic extremism can be traced to Pakistan or persons of Pakistani origin.Resultantly a battle of ideas has started in Pakistan about ascertaining the true role of Mr Jinnah and his political ideas.
The political use of religion was started after 1857 by Muslim aristocracy of United Provinces of Agra and Oudh and Punjab once they saw that Muslims were under threat of being reduced to zero because of introduction of competitive examinations and European style political representation.Thus the origins of Muslim politics in India in the period 1858-1947 was safeguarding the class interests of Muslim aristocracy and middle class in Punjab and UP.
Saigon 1963 in Kabul 2010 by Dr. Geoffrey D.T. Shaw - President – the Alexandrian Defense Group
The ghost of the betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, 1963, is rattling the old chains of Jacob Marley's Democrats in Kabul, 2010.
We have heard recently how the Obama Administration and Hamid Karzai's Afghan government are at increasing logger-heads. Washington drones on about Karzai's lack of democratic operation and transparency (re: corruption) while Karzai continues to fume about the killing of innocent Afghans by US/NATO forces. This ugly, and near terminal process, warrants serious consideration because it bears an uncanny similarity to what happened with Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.
Are we Winning in Afghanistan? - By Andy Wehrle
After returning from a fifteen month stint in Afghanistan this is the single most often asked question as I make the rounds to reestablish old acquaintances and friendships. Most times it’s hard to give a complete answer in a social setting so here is a more complete answer based on my experience.
The Other Side of the Obama COIN by Dr. Geoffrey D.T. Shaw - President – the Alexandrian Defense Group
Planning a counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy is as complex or as simple as you want to make it, but the results will be dramatically divergent depending on which of these two approaches one takes. As matters stand right now, it would appear that the Obama administration has opted for a quasi-cerebral COIN plan of complex half-measures fraught with much risk and little pay-off.
Comment on Ralph Peter’s Article, “Afghan Graveyard: Burying Military Reputations” published May 14, 2009 at http://www.nypost.com/seven/05142009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/afghan_graveyard_169185.htm?page=0 by Dr. Geoff Shaw, President, Alexandrian Defense Group, LLC
I don’t have too many quarrels with Peters’ first few contentious paragraphs in this piece other than to wonder what was so particularly brilliant about General McKiernan, et al. following the yellow brick road laid out for them all the way into Baghdad? Could it have been any clearer to Tommy Franks and crew that they were being ushered into an urban guerrilla war when there was absolutely nothing, in the way of even meager conventional force, to oppose them at the Karbala Gap? That was the natural choke-point on invasion but there was no choke – critical minds would have been asking a lot of questions about that and even putting the brakes on plans to charge into Baghdad. But this is an argument for another time, suffice it is to say at this point that just because Peters, Petraeus, McKiernan and McChrystal declare Iraq an unmitigated success – does not make it so. We were reminded of this fact just two days ago when a massive bomb wiped out another Mosque. Then again, maybe I am mistaken; maybe Peters et al see the cataclysmic destruction of Mosques as success in and of itself?
I do take some minor exception to Ralph Peters’ implication that he was right in the thick of things with the special-ops forces in Iraq when he states: “We turned the blood tide during the hours of darkness, while journalists snored in their bunks.” Forgive my ignorance – but isn’t Ralph a journalist too?
Enough petty griping - let’s get into some serious issues about what constitutes counter-insurgency warfare/operations versus mass assassination. For Peters has crowed far too soon about Iraq in that, by his estimation, it was all that good blood letting that did the trick. This reminds me of the old story that Sir Robert Thompson loved to tell about a very amiable but overly enthusiastic US general he met in South Vietnam all those years ago: i.e., Thompson had just finished lecturing the general about the absolutely critical need to gather top quality intelligence from the locals before proceeding to make judicious arrests of Viet Cong terrorists - to which the general replied: “let’s go out and kill us some Viet Cong first and then we can gather intelligence later.”
Over and over again, one of the fundamental lessons of countering insurgents/terrorists is that indiscriminate killing produces more enemies than you can kill; of course, that is presuming you have something in mind other than a Carthaginian-styled demise for the country and people in question. Dare we ask the good Lt. Colonel Peters (USA ret.) why we are still seeing massive bombs going off in Iraq if all that, to quote him directly: “killing works?”
The accepted ratio/formula for the indiscriminate killing of civilians (in most developing world locales with large extended families) is that of one to ten: i.e., you will create ten terrorists for each one you slaughter; and this was formulated from within the US armed forces analysts who studied these questions – not by the CommSymps up at the New York Times! How much greater that ratio will prove to be in revenge-based societies, such as what the Pushtuns have carefully cultivated over the decades in Afghanistan and Pakistan is anyone’s guess; but I would suggest a serious upping of the ante as we are talking about a people who have the weigh-scales of revenge all carefully calibrated such as in the case of a clan/family feud – one uncle is worth two nephews (this is actual Pushtun blood accounting from the frontier area)!
Before moving on with these issues, let’s step back a bit further into history and take a look at what serious blood-letting begat in the Balkans in WWII. For example, you can find archival photographs of Belgrade’s lamp-posts decorated with the hanged corpses of dozens of Serbian Partisans. The Germans were nothing if not absolutely ruthless in how they dealt with partisans, guerrillas, or any non-uniformed ‘freedom fighter.’ Their rules were their word and their word was their bond; as such, they informed the citizenry that their rule pertaining to partisan activities was that for every German killed by illegal forces – ten male citizens would perish. They kept their word! But did such massive blood-letting have much of a deterrent effect in the long-run? If anything, the resolve of the Balkans partisans seemed to have been strengthened and hardened. To be fair though – they did enjoy some short-term peace and quiet from the graveyard they had created.
Now, let’s move forward again to Baghdad 2009 – are we seeing the same effect as we can see from the Balkans example of the 1940’s? Notwithstanding the good Lt. Colonel Peters’ remonstrations to the contrary, it is far too soon to tell but certainly all is not right as rain just yet in the ancient land of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers!
We have dabbled on the shore of Peters’ Afghanistan analysis too long and its time to deal with his arguments directly. He argues that, while Iraq is a state – Afghanistan is but an accident and, as such, the US can kill indiscriminately so as to take care of all their enemies contained within its ‘accidental’ borders (and beyond – into Pakistan). There is not enough room here to explain why Peters’ might want to revise such a shaky historical account (indeed, if anything, the Afghan tribes have been where they are considerably longer than the current-day Arab tribes have been in the land of Mesopotamia). But what he is really trying to do here is simply declare open-season on Afghan tribesmen as the US can no longer afford to waste time or personnel in a country that’s not a country. He declares all of the classical understandings of counter-insurgency to be ‘old-styled’ i.e., wherein you actually attempt to leave folks better off than you found them – such as what the British did in Malaya where, thanks to their long-suffering (at least twelve years in prosecution), low-key “police emergency” they bequeathed to the Malayans a land free of Communist insurrection, a land with a stable government based on the rule of law, and, as such, a land that was able to grow and prosper into one of the wealthiest nations in Asia.
Peters disparages what he calls ‘huggy bear” programs – i.e., civilian aid programs for Afghans and suggests that what the US really needs to be doing is digging less wells for the people there and, instead, cause the tribesmen to dig more graves. How precisely he thinks they are going to target the right tribesmen without the consent, co-operation and, subsequent, intelligence flowing from the Afghans themselves is beyond the ken of this curmudgeon. Perhaps the same hi-tech devices that unceremoniously deposited some of America’s finest special operations men, US Navy Seals, into waiting ambushes of the Taliban is what he has in mind? If he (and his hi-tech worshipping ilk) has not learned yet that satellites and UAV drones cannot read the mind of a man – then I suppose that is a lesson that will have to be driven home with abject failure!
I do agree, though, with Peters’ argument pertaining to the politically mismanaged war in that country as he does suggest that President Obama’s promises to ‘fix’ Afghanistan may be nothing but vanity. For this is the land of blood-revenge and, in that very context alone, one needs to pay particular attention to what the Soviets said about the Afghans: i.e. they admired their bravery and fighting skills but they also said that they could never fathom the horrific cruelty that the Afghans displayed toward their captured prisoners and to each other. These were Russians talking – a people so inured to cruelty from hundreds of years of a history of the most cruel blood-letting and for them to be shocked at the Afghans ‘talent’ in this area – well then, I can assure you that captured my undivided attention! The real question then becomes: how do you “out-tough” and “out-cruel” one of the toughest, cruelest peoples on the face of the earth and all with a civilized armed force that must answer to a civilized democratic government? For this seems to be what Peters’ is ultimately arguing when he suggests that all the do-gooder civilian programs be cast to the wind in favor of just killing us some Afghan ‘gooks!’ If ‘killin folks’ works so well then, surely, the British with their terrible revenge visited on Kabul and its environs after the destruction of the British garrison there, or the Soviet mass-slaughter of Afghans would have produced some more satisfactory and indelible results?
The Soviets stampeded at least 3 millions Afghans out of the country (probably a lot more as some agencies have put the figure at closer to 5 million), they mined every square inch of land they thought might need a mine, they killed tens of thousands of Afghan civilians (as did the Afghan mujahedeen too) and to what end? The final recognition that it simply was not worth it –as one high-ranking Soviet soldier told a reporter “we weren’t defeated – we simply gave up on the place.” The constant intra-Afghan murderous intrigues, betrayals, switching of sides, switching back again, corruption at all levels of government, finally convinced the hard-headed Soviets that they had met their match in societal incompetence (and, of course, in cruelty as well).
My overarching impression of Colonel Peters’ position in this article is that he is, with considerable justification, fed up with the inordinate political influence that the left and the liberal press have on US policies, this certainly seems to bubble-over with his crack at the slumbering news media types. Personally, I could not agree more with him on this but, here’s where I must differ with him, sound counter-insurgency policy has nothing to do with the left and if they happen to hop onto the band-wagon of the low-lethality necessity of properly executed COIN - so what? They will also hoot and holler when they think the Afghan engagement is taking far too long without demonstrating any tangible results – all the while ignoring the fact that low-lethality COIN, by its very nature, must take a long time if the incumbent government is to have a shred of political legitimacy amongst the people it purports to govern. The human terrain, which is the only valuable terrain in COIN, requires delicate encouragement – not the sharp end of a speeding bullet, if it is to be ‘won’ over in any meaningful sense. For let’s never forget that the lib/left were the same irascible folks who screamed for quicker results in the Vietnam era when good people and sound policies where in place and then ditched along with the Ngo Dinh Diem government – just to appease the political clamor these folks have always drummed-up.
The final question still remains – can Afghanistan be brought into the fold of supposedly civilized nations? Even after the serious bouncing of Afghan rubble took place back in 2002 – I expressed my immediate doubts then and they have not changed. This is because the root of America’s terror problem remains safely in place – just as much now as then; and that ‘root’ is Saudi Arabia. Killing every last Afghani and Pakistani will not change this equation one iota.
Geoff Shaw, PhD
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