In his recently released book, Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal comments on the frequently affirmed importance of understanding your environment:

To many this will appear obvious and as hardly meriting separate treatment. Yet it is striking just how absent, beyond the superficial and glib acknowledgement that ‘history matters’, the significance of complex historical legacies has been from the deliberations of Western governments contemplating interventions in societies which, while fractured and traumatised by war, retain a profound sense of their own history and cultural worth, and whose basis of social order often differs sharply from those of the intervening powers.

I agree wholeheartedly: there is a difference between saying that ‘history matters’ or that ‘culture matters’ and doing the difficult work to understand, to really understand, the areas in which interventions are to take place or are currently ongoing.

Another Norwegian academic, Reidar Visser, takes this argument further, in a challenging but also very interesting post on the Obama administration’s experience with counterinsurgency in Iraq and its plans for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Most of the blog entry focuses on internal political wranglings in Iraq and will be fascinating for anyone, such as myself, keen to follow these developments. The part that really stuck with me though, because of its wider implications, is where Visser takes the American leadership to task for failing to acknowledge their own poor understanding of politics both in Iraq and Afghanistan and the limiting effects their lack of understanding will have on their ability to ‘conduct state-building’ in either country. He says: “these people cannot know what is right for Afghanistan because they lack a profound cultural understanding of those countries”.

Vissar then raises a bunch of thorny yet for the most unanswered questions about the Afghans’ preferred form of government, and adds that:

No attempt will be made to answer these complicated questions here. Rather, that is something that should be left for true Afghanistan experts who know the languages, the religions and the history of the country. The question today is whether such experts were ever consulted before President Barack Obama made his decision on strategy.

There is a sense of frustration, if not of anger, here, but it may not be wholly unjustified. While we cannot expect Obama and Biden to develop a ‘profound cultural understanding’ of Afghanistan, we may ask for area specialists and regional experts to be consulted — but are they? Planning for the Somalia intervention in 1992 infamously ignored the advice of area experts and ethnographers; the Iraq invasion was made without consulting, or at least listening to, those well versed with the country’s politics and society; and the same could fairly be said for the Afghanistan invasion of 2001. I would be interested in seeing whether, after so many years of experience with counterinsurgency and with so many injunctions to ‘understand the human terrain’, it is now really déjà vu all over again?

I encourage you to check out Mats Berdal’s book here and to read Vissar’s blog post here.

I think that the video, the slides and the transcript together provide an excellent overview of the full complexity of conducting full-spectrum counterinsurgency operations. Given this complexity, I have immense respect for anyone able to operationalise the precepts thrown around in COIN doctrine and theory — even more so given the risks involved.

It is difficult to summarise the entire presentation, but I think the key lies in the brigade’s interpretation of its mission statement as needing to ‘break the cycle of violence’. That leads to an effort to ‘understanding the population base that we were dealing with in northwest Baghdad’ and, finally, a willingness to do what it would take to have an enduring effect there: to build new JSS, disperse among the population and operate from where it mattered, despite the very real risks and dangers involved. Well, read it and see it for yourselves.

Update: I see that parts II and III of the video don’t seem to be up anymore: what a shame. Still, the transcript is well worth a read.

I was really taken by this paper on Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Iraq, in which Colonel Fred Johnson talks about his 15-month tour as the Deputy Commander of 3-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT) and comments on its configuration, as stands, for operations across the spectrum.

Certainly from the lay-out of its structure, and from anecdotal evidence, I was convinced that the SBCT was not that well configured for  stability operations, so it was interesting to hear Col Johnson explain how through the inspired command of Colonel Steve Townsend and through the effective task organising of his brigade, his Stryker BCT was apparently able to become a highly successful stability operations unit.

I am all for building a ‘full-spectrum’ force, but I also have trouble imagining ways of hard-wiring the required adaptability and broad base of expertise within one unit. Based on his operational experience, Colonel Johnson suggests that “the Army does not require unique skills beyond those needed for conventional operations to perform stability operations”. To me, that sounds dangerously like making stability operations a ‘lesser-included’ eventuality again, like saying that any soldier trained for war can manage those pesky insurgents and guerrillas as well.

Is it also possible that Colonel Townsend’s leadership made the difference? Certainly all comparative success-stories from Iraq and Afghanistan involved conventionally-structured units, task-organised for the challenge at hand? So is building a full-spectrum force more a matter of leadership than of structural change to the Army’s units? That would probably be the contention of Mark Moyar, whose book A Question of Command, I am currently reading.

That raises the question of how to train and educate the force to produce good leaders. In that regard, this quotation from ‘Arrowhead Ripper’ is very intriguing:

“an embedded reporter asked me what special training I had to prepare me for leading the reconstruction effort. After thinking about it, it occurred to me that my military training really did not teach me anything about how our CMO team conducted operations in Baqubah. Some extremely talented people, who pointed me in the right direction, surrounded me, but any success I personally enjoyed in Baqubah was a result of what I learned in my dad’s bar in Southern Illinois and as a point guard on my college basketball team. Being a good listener and reading Baqubah like a playing court was more important in directing the reconstruction effort than anything I learned at the Command and General Staff College.”