Pretty Realistic

Ranger Definition of the Day:
COIN -- The tunnel at the end of the light
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The News Hour with Jim Lehrer recently hosted the two Andrews -- Bacevich and Exum (nee, Abu Muquwama) -- to speak on the war in Afghanistan. Two former army officers, both smart men with different views (interview @ OnlineNewsHour, "Grim Military Report Stirs Questions on Afghan Strategy.")

Exum is now a consultant who gets paid government dollars, and naturally is in favor of the war. Bacevich doesn't have a horse in the race, so his evaluation is not based upon his wallet. One wonders if Exum is now a paid Department of Defense stooge, or if he really believes his line. If he is so dedicated to the cause, why isn't he still carrying a rifle and serving on Active Duty?
Here is what Ranger would have said if he were part of the interview:

• Building institutions in Afghanistan is not a gurantee that U.S. objectives will be achieved

• U.S. objectives are not the same as Afghan goals

• Corruption and drugs are the institution called "Afghanistan". A separate Afghanistan cannot be built exclusive of this fact

• U.S. policymakers cannot describe the cause or the effect of their policies

• How will building up key institutions change anything in Afghanistan?

• Building institutions must be accomplished by the Afghans. Democracy cannot and will not be forced upon a country

Exum says, "What we're trying to do is build up certain key institutions in Afghanistan that we believe will make that country inhospitable towards transnational terror groups." He "believes", but beliefs are unverifiable, subjective and often faulty. We do not share in his beliefs.

He continues, "I think the assessment that we put forward was -- was pretty realistic." In Exum's Counterinsurgency fantasyland, there are gradations of realism. Is there a "pretty realistic" and a "really realistic"? Please define what pretty realistic means -- sounds like a description of historical fiction.

Ranger wonders why this critical Afghanistan report was written by soldiers and government tit suckers rather than the State Department. Shouldn't nation building be a State Department function, or is that even an institution of any relevance in our phony little world?

One must also wonder how a man of brilliance like Bacevich ended up as only an O-6. This speaks volumes about the modern action Army promotion selection process.

Bang Your Head

We’re lousy at recognizing when our normal
coping mechanisms aren’t working.
Our response is usually to do it five times more,
instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new
--Vicious Stress Loop, Dr. Robert Sapolsky
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Few would argue we have had a stressful eight years. Maybe as Dr. Sapolsky suggests, we are hardwired like hamsters running their wheels. Perseveration is the behaviorist's term for uncontrollable repetition; maybe the U.S. has turned into a nation of perseverationists.

Debate is broadening concerning the presumed imperative nature of the War in Afghanistan -- the once Good War gone bad.

President Obama will deploy 68,000 American troops there by year’s end, and calls Afghanistan"'a war of necessity' to prevent the Taliban from recreating for Al Qaeda the sanctuary that it had in the 1990s" (Crux of Afghan Debate: Will More Troops Curb Terror?).

Clearly the Taliban are radical Islamists that provide a safe haven for the Al Qaeda operatives. Clearly the 9-11 hijackers received military training in Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. What is lost in translation is: The skills learned in these camps had absolutely nothing to do with the success of the attacks carried out on 9-11.

The ability to shoot an AK-47 and throw hand grenades is moot. These operatives were sophisticated well beyond training camp standards. Their trade craft was gleaned in the West. In addition, Afghans are conspicuously missing as terrorists on the world scene. Simply: The problem is Al Qaeda, and not the Taliban.

The Times story continues, "[counterterrorism experts] point out, the CIA has killed more than a dozen top Qaeda leaders in the lawless Pakistani tribal areas, disrupting the terrorists’ ability to plot and carry out attacks against the United States and Europe." But how do we know the dead are actually Al Qaeda operatives, and not simply Taliban personnel? The two entities are not necessarily interchangeable.

"The administration’s “clear, hold, build” strategy is meant to win over Afghans. It is based on the counterinsurgency principle of protecting the population — or, in this case, at least Afghan population centers — to win confidence and support, before isolating remaining insurgents to be killed or captured. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have maintained that the United States cannot fight terrorists from afar."

U.S. policy is to isolate then kill or capture remaining insurgents, but we have never figured out what to do with those we capture, because we are short on clarifications -- because insurgents are not necessarily terrorists (though that is what the briefcase-toting, money-sucking experts would lead us to believe.)

It is absurd to be killing Afghani insurgents because there might be a chance that their deaths might save an American life. Why are Afghani lives less valuable than American lives?

Terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman says, "the success of strikes from Predators in killing Qaeda suspects in Pakistan depended on accurate information on terrorists’ whereabouts from Pakistani intelligence. In Afghanistan, without such sources, 'we’d be flying blind'."

Basing Predator targeting on Paki intelligence is a joke -- why would U.S. officials believe anything they tell us? This is reminiscent of the old War on Drugs tactic where a little dealer is sacrificed and the DEA agents claim strategic success. If intel is not A-1 and confirmed by U.S. sources, we are fooling ourselves with phony successes in a phony war.

Speaking for many advocates of an interminable war, Hoffman continues his fantastical thinking with, "Disengagement from Afghanistan could destabilize Pakistan and 'guarantee' a future attack on the United States from the region." This is reminiscent of a Domino Theory war in which Ranger served.

The entire Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is based upon unverifiable beliefs and faulty assumptions regarding the nature of the threat. Al Qaeda is a threat, but not one which will be resolved via extensive military action.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal opined, "The simplistic case for NATO's mission in Afghanistan is that it's the country that harbored al Qaeda when the plans for 9/11 were hatched. ... But Afghanistan matters not because that's where 9/11 was conceived. It matters because that's where it was imagined (The Afghan Stakes)." Now there's a reason to attack a nation -- because someone had a thought to do something bad.

The question really is, "Who had that thought?" The answer, probably an Al Qaeda member. That requires finding the persons who had that thought, an operation better done with a fillet knife than a sledgehammer.

Unfortunately, as Andrew Bacevich said, "despite the Obama administration’s assertions that it has a new approach, 'the truth is they want to try harder to do what we’ve been doing for the last eight years.'" Perseverationsists are us.

Jumping the Shark

This much we can say with certainty:
Bush is as much in the dark as you are
--Andrew Bacevich
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Andrew Bacevich sounded the death knell this week for the Phony War on Terror (PWOT©) ((Picking Up After the Failed War on Terror). He's not the first, but his reasoning is as follows:

"War requires adherence to principles. Once a conflict becomes an exercise in improvisation, it ceases to be meaningful. It becomes the antithesis of war -- killing without political purpose or moral justification.

"The Bush administration is no longer engaged in a principled effort to address the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism. In lieu of principles, the administration now engages in crisis management, reacting to problems as they pop up. Last week, it was Turkey's threat to invade Iraqi Kurdistan. This week, it's Pervez Musharraf, key ally and beneficiary of $10 billion in U.S. aid since 2001, imposing naked military rule on Pakistan. Next week, who knows what surprises await?"

But reactionary crisis management is not the sole mode of conducting the PWOT. It also requires the skills of consummate spinmeisters contorting logic and reality to fit the paradigm PWOT. The war is as phony as every justification given for it. Justifying a war is not the same as winning it.

"During the heady run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the president was boldly promising that the United States, drawing on its 'unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence,' would not only 'defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants' but also 'extend the benefits of freedom across the globe.'"

Fighting terrorists and tyrants has expended our military strength, destroyed U.S. economic viability and discredited our political influence. Other than those miserable failures, all is well in Crawford, Texas.

On Condoleezza Rice: "Because the United States 'has always been, and will always be, not a status quo power but a revolutionary power,' the Bush administration was going to engineer a democratic revolution, thereby creating what Rice called a "new Middle East." "This revolution has demonstrably failed. In such places as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, it never got off the ground. "

To borrow Alice Randall's title, the wind done gone out of those once revolutionary sails. In any event, a revolution is effected by an impulse upwelling from within a society. A nation can inspire via example and assist from the boundary, but to enter unbidden and smash a country's leadership and then impose one's own ideology is fascist. Obvious, right?

"Policymakers such as Rice, who once disdained mere stability, are now frantically trying to prevent the greater Middle East from sliding into chaos. As the clock runs down on the Bush era, the administration preoccupies itself with damage control."

Professor Bacevich, not even a military scholar, ends with some sound suggestions on how the U.S. might comport itself via a vis Islamic radicalism. The last one is priceless.

"The essence of these principles can be expressed in a single word: realism, which implies seeing ourselves as we really are and the world as it actually is." What this administration needs is not spinmeisters, but opthamologists.

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Erratum: Prof. Bacevich is most certainly a military scholar. Mea culpa.