Jonathan D. Caverley has quite an interesting piece on Vietnam and what it really says about counterinsurgency in the latest issue of International Security. Consider this another sequel to Andrew Krepinevich’s study, The Army and Vietnam. Krepinevich made the argument that ‘Big Army’ was unable and unwilling to adapt to the operational realities of counterinsurgency and therefore persisted with the ‘Army Concept’ – conventional warfare – even when the situation on the ground called for something else. If you pardon this sequel analogy, the second instalment is typified by Dale Andrade’s ‘Westmoreland Was Right‘, published in Small Wars & Insurgencies, in which he argued that, because of the coexistence of an insurgent and a conventional threat, it was reasonable, even justified, for Westmoreland to concentrate on the latter at the expense of the former.

Both of these texts are relevant to today’s campaigns, because, in Krepinevich’s case, it shows institutional intransigence vis-à-vis COIN and, in Andrade’s case, the difficulties of drawing lessons from history without due attention to specific historical context. Caverley’s piece is a sequel in the sense that it adds a third interpretation of what happened in Vietnam, and of what it means for today’s wars.

His thesis is that Vietnam was fought conventionally rather than through COIN because such was the preference of the U.S. electorate, which would rather send hardware (capital) than men (labour). Keenly aware of this preference, President Johnson acquiesced, even though doing so compromised U.S. objectives in Vietnam.

The article, entitled ‘The Myth of Military Myopia Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam’ is old-school academic: it oozes primary sources (or just sources in general), successfully locates itself within the existing literature, throws in some statistics for good measure (if you haven’t already, read Abu M’s recent post ‘Quantitative Analysis Manifesto’), uses models, and has a clearly defined sample space (democracies vice autocracies). In terms of historical analysis, Caverley convincingly shows how Johnson and McNamara persisted with a strictly ‘conventional’ approach all while seemingly aware that it would fail to counter the insurgency. In his own words, Caverley ‘offers a theory of how a rational actor, the average voter in a democracy, can favor what appears to be a nonstrategic policy’.

It is an interesting read, one that leans heavily on economic theory (rational-actor voter; ‘capital’- versus ‘labour’-driven wars; ‘cost internalisation’ etc.).  Also, the historical research should offer something to those well versed with the Vietnam War. For example, Caverley cites Westmoreland as stating to his Pentagon colleagues that the U.S. military was fighting the war too conventionally, that ‘Vietnam is no place for either tank or mechanized infantry units’. Similarly, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Harold Johnson is quoted as saying that ‘The presence of tank formations tends to create a psychological atmosphere of conventional combat’. To Caverley the generals’ understanding of operational requirements was dismissed by an administration more concerned with appeasing an electorate instinctively resistant to the deployment of additional troops to Vietnam. In a similar vein:

Contradicting both McNamara’s recommendations and the claims of the military myopia argument, Westmoreland proposed a new concept of operations in August 1966 that devoted “a significant number of the U.S./Free World Maneuver Battalions” to pacification missions, which “encompass base security and at the same time support revolutionary development by spreading security radially from the bases to protect more of the population. Saturation patrolling, civic action, and close association with ARVN, regional and popular forces to bolster their combat effectiveness are among the tasks of the ground force elements.

This, certainly, is another interesting addition to the overly crude dichotomy of Westmoreland as the Vietnam baddie and Abrams as the saviour of U.S. strategy (until the rug was swept away from under his feet). As the same time, how significant are these quotations? Another general to whom history has not been so kind, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, recommended in an August 2003 interview that rather than mount repeated raids, U.S. troops ought to adopt a ‘cordon and knock’ procedure by which they would ’seek permission to enter accompanied by an Iraqi representative, instead of breaking down the door’. He also correctly assessed that U.S. heavy-handedness had ‘in this culture [created] some Iraqis that then had to act because of their value systems against us in terms of revenge, possibly because there were casualties on their side and also because of the impact on their dignity and respect’. People really do say all sorts of things.

For me perhaps the most interesting reason to read this article was for its broader implications. Caverley makes the voter’s interest the prime determinant of military strategy, as the ‘government assesses military doctrine in light of public preferences over outcomes… and the costs in blood and treasure’. Because the electorate favours capital-driven (machines) rather than labour-driven (soldiers) wars, the government is in a self-imposed straitjacket, leading to bad strategy being consciously implemented. Even more bleakly, whereas the Krepinevich perspective could plausibly envisage an organisation doing better, learning, adapting, Caverley concludes that ‘short of reducing the average voter’s influence, a democracy is unlikely to “learn” to conduct effective COIN’. So we’re all doomed.

For example, Caverley concludes, ‘fixating on reforming the armed services (or even the civilian tools of foreign policy) in an effort to improve democratic performance in small wars is its own form of myopia’, as ‘if a rational, fully informed electorate views [an unsuccessful] military doctrine as its best option, the prospects for change are’ minimal. From this, Caverley draws the obvious conclusion: ‘the distribution of costs and benefits affects not only how a state should fight a small war, but whether it enters such conflicts in the first place’.

Certainly food for thought, but it bears noting that there are some pretty questionable aspects to the argumentation here. First, how new is this apparently revolutionary finding? Clausewitz himself wrote of ‘triniterian wars’, encompassing that special relationship between the government, the military and the people. That the people in a democracy limit the alternatives available to the government is the way it has always been; in fact, isn’t it the way it is supposed to be?

But more importantly, the article is at times in danger of getting lost in its own assumptions and in its use of Vietnam as its one case-study. For example, if a government can coolly calculate public support when designing its COIN strategy (or lack thereof) why would it intervene in the first place? Consider the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Can we seriously contend that the Bush administration consciously screwed up the ‘post-conflict’ phase because he was scared of losing votes? Wouldn’t a more ‘labour-‘ as opposed to ‘capital-based’ approach to the ensuing insurgency have served him better politically? Certainly, despite adhering strictly to a ‘capital’-dominated way of fighting, the Republican lost heavily in the 2006 Congressional elections, primarily because of the mismanagement of the war in Iraq… How does this square with Caverley’s argument?

Second, assuming voter preferences militate against proper COIN, how do we explain changes in strategy toward COIN, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in previous campaigns too? What public rhetoric, what change in voter preference, determines the change? In fact, most COIN campaigns are marked by an initially botched effort. It is historically typical. We can ascribe that trend to profit-calculating politicians counting the vote deficit of conducting proper COIN or to institutions that are ill-configured for and unfamiliar with the complex challenge of political violence. Take your pick…

Finally, and most damningly, how can the Johnson’s administration’s war in Vietnam, which cost the U.S. a combined total of almost 36,000 lives be seen as as ‘capital’-driven, or as concerned with losing machines rather than men?

I suspect my main problem with the article is that it uses the economic theory of the ‘rational actor’ to understand not only voter preferences but also the selection of how exactly to prosecute a war. Even presenting the latter as a matter of ‘choosing’ one strategy among many is to reduce the complexity of war-fighting to a caricaturesque degree. The article is too theory-driven and too clever, but in the sense that it will provoke and maybe challenge established wisdom on Vietnam, it is worth reading. In another sense, it is simply a very sophisticated and perhaps overly academic explanation for why ‘muddling through’ is such a popular recourse in COIN.

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I am sure many KoW readers also read Abu Muqawama, but let me nonetheless draw your attention to the video linked there this morning, a compilation of CCTV and security-camera footage from the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The video reminds me of something from Spooks, or, like AM says, Munich, but here it is of course real.

Ps. I wonder what was said to the female hotel employee at 10:57 to prompt that reaction… some light flirtation in the middle of the wetwork?

[H/T Abu Muqawama]

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The first volume, first issue (rare, that) of Prism, the journal of the Center for Complex Operations, has been out for some time but features some articles with long shelf lives. Consider, for example, Hans Binnendijk and Patrick Cronin’s article on the dangers of militarising U.S. foreign policy, where they also propose ways of addressing this problem. The authors succinctly and usefully summarise the dangers of letting DoD, with its resources, manpower and money, do the heavy-lifting in stability operations, at the expense of less well-prepared and resourced civilian agencies. I’ve adapted their list below:

1. the imbalance creates the impression internationally that U.S. foreign policy is being ‘militarized’;
2. the military performs functions that trained civilians with reachback to civilian agencies could perform more effectively;
3. it encourages a belief within the military that only DOD is at war, not the Nation;
4. civilian voices in interagency policy discussions carry less weight because they lack operational resources;
5. as a result, civilian agencies balk at the dominant role played by DOD; and finally
6. as ground forces come to focus almost exclusively on irregular warfare, some analysts grow concerned that inadequate attention is being paid to preparing for major combat operations.

With the possible exception of DoD’s ‘almost exclusive’ focus on irregular warfare, they are of course 100% right. Out of the four ways out of this dilemma (1: seek to avoid stability operations altogether; 2: allow continued DoD dominance; 3: rely on civilian contractors; 4: boost civilian government capabilities), Binnendijk and Cronin go for the latter and present a fairly ambitious proposal for a civilian surge, including the transformation of USAID into a much more robust operational ‘U.S. Agency for Development and Reconstruction’.

The proposal merits close attention, but will also require tremendous change and boosted funding for those civilian agencies with a role to play in stability operations. The recent and hugely informative RAND report on ‘Integrating Civilian Agencies in Stability Operations‘, by Thomas S. Szayna, Derek Eaton, et al., provides several reasons to be sceptical about such change. As the study concludes ‘the problems that underlie low collaborative capacity for SSTR operations are structural and deeply connected to a way the U.S. public administration functions’. The book, particularly chapter four, indicates the nature of the problem. Consider, for example that:

• ‘in the past five yeras, the total USAID appropriation has grown by 6 percent‘;
• ‘the operating expense appropriations of USAID have remained at approximately 7 percent of the total appropriation since FY00′;
• ‘USAID’s share of U.S. net official development assistance has dropped from 72 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2006′;
• or that ‘the Army’s Civil Affairs (CA) community has an authorized MTOE strength of 7,278 personnel… nearly equal to the entire USAID and significantly larger than its roughly 2,227 FSOs and U.S. Civil Service (USCS) professionals’ .

Added to the list of financial, resource and structural constraints is the lack of contingency funding and of any ’slack in the system’ (preventing the creation of new positions without eliminating others), a hiring freeze, and the fact that USAID’s crisis-response offices (OFDA and OTI) represent a mere 2.5% of USAID’s total hire staff of approximately 1,500.

Now consider that all of these problems, along with the resistance on the part of many to a perceived ’securitisation’ of U.S. development work, are all present in an organisation that is in fact directed toward foreign engagement; imagine achieving change in civilian agencies with no traditional role to play internationally.

The latter chapters of the RAND study provide some proposals of how the incentive structure can be changed so as to foster greater integration of civilian agencies in stability operations. But given the scale of the problem, and their apparent intractability, I think that the authors are right to advocate an approach that relies not only on boosting the civilian agencies, but that also recognises the need for the Army and DOD to prepare for a continued and potentially dominant role in such engagements, ’should civilian agencies not be able to meet some of their obligations’ under the NSPD-44 process. It is not an entirely uncomplicated balancing act, as the RAND study also notes:

Planning for the possibility of the NSPD-44 process failing has the potential of helping to bring about that very effect, since such planning will remove the incentives for greater effort by the civilian agencies to meet the goals of NSPD-44.

While contradictory and possibly counter-productive, are there really any viable alternatives? Something to bear in mind in future discussions of the militarisation of foreign policy…

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So many things about this short film, ‘Malaya Patrol’, are just classic, from the tea-drinking in the 90 degree jungle, to the 1950s’ stern narration of ‘bandits’ and ‘red terrorists’. Still the mention of ‘15 month tours in the jungle’ should give pause. All in all, things sure have changed…

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You can find more details, and possibly even access, some of the articles here (the uncertainty being that the site is currently down).

A copy of a draft version of the 2010 QDR was leaked last week via Inside Defense (you can read the whole document over at Small Wars Journal).

As the real thing is expected next week, I have only given this draft a cursory read, focusing specifically on the provisions intended to make the U.S. military more suited toward the wars they are currently fighting, which I believe are in many ways representative of operations to come. Now, those of you familiar with my writing will know what I mean here, though you may not necessarily agree. My point is not that counterinsurgency is the future and that all capability and capacity ought to be reoriented toward preparing for and waging such campaigns. That would be a bad idea. Instead, my contention is that global urbanization, the West’s enduring superiority in conventional combat, the attractiveness and effectiveness of asymmetric tactics to militarily inferior adversaries, the increased frequency of state-building and the ‘securitisation’ of state failure following 9/11, all point to a future of irregular operations conducted among civilians and, most often, with the objective of building government capacity. So while we may not see a ‘counterinsurgency’ or ’stability operation’ on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq in the near future, I do believe that campaigns to come will call for similar skill sets and capabilities, which must therefore be institutionalised.

It was with this conviction in mind that I skimmed through the 2010 QDR. What would the first QDR under the reform-minded Secretary of Defense Robert Gates deliver? Well, let’s have a look.

Defense News made much of the fact that the QDR replaces the old force-sizing construct of ‘two peer militaries simultaneously’ in favour of ‘a new construct for a wider set of threats and mission’. I don’t think that this is very accurate.

It is true that the 2006 QDR stated that the U.S. military ought to be able to ‘conduct, simultaneously, either two major combat operations or a major combat operation and a prolonged irregular engagement’. In this sense it was harking back to, but adapting, the decade-old two-major-war construct (which, Fred Kagan argues in Finding the Target, the U.S. military has actually been unable to meet ever since the early 1990s).

But more generally, the two major-combat-operations (MCO) concept was already on the way out in the 2006 QDR, which instead adopted a three-fold focus on Homeland Defense, War on Terror / Irregular (Asymmetric) Warfare and Conventional Campaigns. So in terms of broad vision and force sizing constructs, not much has changed between 2006 and 2010.

Now what about the stuff relating specifically to COIN. Under the rubric of ‘Conduct Counterinsurgency (COIN), Stability, and Counterterrorist (CT) Operations’, the 2010 focus is welcomingly emphatic:

The U.S. armed forces will continue to require capabilities to create a secure environment in fragile states in support of government authorities and, if required, provide essential government services, emergency infrastructure restoration, and humanitarian relief until the appropriate civilian authorities are able to do so.

In order to ensure that America’s armed forces are prepared for this complex and taxing mission, it is vital that the lessons emerging from today’s conflicts are further enshrined in military doctrine, training, capability development, and operational planning.

That certainly sounds like Robert Gates. Yet, let us return to the 2006 QDR. Naturally, not the same clarity and emphasis, but what to make of its vision of a force as ‘proficient in irregular operations, including counterinsurgency and stabilization operations, as they are today in high-intensity combat’? The point is that it is necessary to look less at the broad vision and more at the specific provisions: how does rhetoric translate into action?

The 2010 draft QDR sets out some important decisions (and here I am focusing specifically on force structure issues and skill sets, not kit). These four strike me as particularly relevant:

• Converting heavy BCTs to Stryker BCTs
• Better security-force assistance capabilities within general purpose force
• Boosting civil affairs (including the ‘first active duty civil affairs brigade’)
• Enhance language and cultural ability

All good, important and long-overdue stuff, right? My only worry is that much as with the force-sizing construct, a lot of this was already mentioned in the 2006 QDR and has not had a lot of effect since. On security-force assistance, the 2006 QDR talked a very similar game, introducing the whole ‘indirect approach’ concept and promoting the ‘one step right’ idea whereby GPF take on more advisory activities. On civilian affairs, the 2006 QDR tried something similar, opting for an increase in PSYOP and CA by 3,700 personnel (then a 33% increase). And why does the 2010 QDR not give an equal focus to other ‘HD/LD’ MOS such as PSYOP, military police, engineers, counter/human intelligence? On the enhancing of language and cultural ability,  the 2006 QDR stressed the need for U.S. forces to ‘understand foreign cultures and societies and possess the ability to train, mentor and advise foreign security forces and conduct counterinsurgency campaigns’…

I guess the main change, of the ones I have listed, is the rebalancing from HBCTs to SBCTs. That is certainly needed and overdue, and contrasts with the major force-structure provisions in the 2006 review, which sought simply to cut the end-strength of the ground forces. Still, the move toward SBCTs does beg the question of whether these units are in fact particularly well configured toward counterinsurgency and stability operations? It’s an issue I alluded to on my former blog. I remain unconvinced: perhaps there is a need for a more fundamental rethink about force structure for modern operations. Today’s BCTs simply are not configured for the attendant mission components.

I like some of what I see in the 2010 QDR, really I do, but I am quite sceptical about how, when and whether the associated changes will take place. I’m also concerned by the fact that many of its main points were already in the 2006 QDR, which has not, to my mind, done much by way of implementing its promising rhetoric. Maybe it is all a matter of time, or maybe it is this troubling inconsistency between visions, provisions and real, concrete actions. Of course that leads of to trade-offs, and I guess that’s where the trouble begins.

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This quotation from early on in the report is quite representative:

The growing frequency and significance of operations amid populations suggests a regular—rather than rare—need for U.S. military forces to be able to gain control of situations, perform their tasks, and protect themselves without using deadly force. Although nonlethal options have long been essential in law-enforcement missions, in which ensuring public safety with minimum violence is stock-in-trade, they have been regarded by the military as having only limited utility in only exceptional circumstances. … Although foreign insurgents present dangers exceeding those that police face in American cities, U.S. military forces could remedy a major shortcoming they face in COIN and other important missions if they had nonlethal capabilities that could produce a range of effects and the skills to use them. Such options would offer typical small units more flexibility, self-sufficiency, and speed; less risk of making mistakes with wide political repercussions; and better odds of accomplishing their missions.

As the report also makes clear, the distinction between lethal and non-lethal is itself too crude, as it implies that everything below the threshold of lethality can be grouped together. This simplistic notion is pushed aside in the report, which instead argues for a continuum of non-lethal to lethal force, and with the understanding that even if a weapon does not kill, its unintelligent use can still have devastating consequences for a force operating with transient legitimacy and limited public support:

“Pain, shock, or injury may turn a crowd into a mob, a mob into a confrontation, or a confrontation into a cause célèbre that can fuel insurgency. Therefore, the ability to calibrate nonlethal force from none to mild to moderate to intense can be as important as simply not causing death. The need is for a continuum of force.”

The challenge is knowing and deciding which intensity of force to use when and where, so the problem is still fundamentally a human one. There is, in other words, no technological fix here, but nonetheless an appreciation that when military operations are conducted among populations whose support or at least acquiescence is necessary, it behooves the relevant armed forces to develop more options than simply ‘inactivity’ or ‘death’. It is intriguing to me that after years operating in urban environments – in Iraq, to a lesser degree in Afghanistan, but also throughout the 1990s – these issues have not attracted more attention.

You can read the rest of this report here.

As a final thought, I wonder whether it is at all coincidental that this report was commissioned by the Office of the Secretary of Defence, rather than by the Army.

Reviewed by David H. Ucko

In A Question of Command, Mark Moyar argues that “counterinsurgency is a ‘leader-centric’ warfare,… in which the elite with superiority in certain leadership attributes usually win” (p. 3). These leadership attributes are gleaned through nine historical case-studies: initiative, flexibility, creativity, judgment, empathy, charisma, sociability, dedication, integrity, and organization. Moyar argues that, together, they produce the ideal counterinsurgency commander and, more forcefully, that it is the quality of leadership that determines the outcome of any counterinsurgency campaign.

Moyar helpfully underlines the importance of good leadership and the demands placed on a commander in counterinsurgencies. The case-studies are thoroughly researched and engaging. Moyar also strays beyond the over-cultivated campaigns of Malaya and Vietnam to explore settings rarely seen in the counterinsurgency literature, such as the American Civil War and the Reconstruction of the South. Throughout, Moyar illustrates how good leaders, and the sacking of bad leaders, has made the difference. A forceful conclusion is that raising security forces is not a numbers game: host-nation forces require competent commanders to have a positive effect. In the conclusion, Moyar usefully elaborates on the leadership practices derived from his case-studies and indicates how these lessons may be used, today and tomorrow.

The case-studies emphasize the role of leadership far above the conflicts’ political context. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Moyar argues that “major social, economic, or political changes” have ‘historically had much less impact’ on a conflict’s outcome than leadership (p. 4). At times, however, the analysis appears slanted to prove this contention. Progress, at any level, denotes good leadership; upsets, or good decisions implemented badly, mean poor leadership; and if the counterinsurgents are failing, it is because they are “still held back by a shortage of good leaders” (p. 181). Ultimately, the explanatory power of ‘leadership’ depends on its definition. Yet as the leaders in A Question of Command range from heads-of-state, senior officials and corps commanders to lieutenant-colonels and captains, the conclusions drawn lack precision. Leadership explains everything, but also nothing.

The somewhat forced focus on leadership, not as an important factor, but as the decisive variable in the outcome of campaigns, also sidelines counterinsurgency’s intensely political nature. The chapter on El Salvador, for example, ascribes the outcome there to leadership factors yet barely mentions the critical role played by the Cold War’s passing. Also, a solution in El Salvador was not to be found purely in professionalizing the military, but by addressing a century-long history of socio-economic bifurcation, requiring the ‘negotiated revolution’ of the Chapultepec process (and even then, the results were uneven). Similarly, Gen. Templer was an exemplary leader in Malaya, and good commanders helped defeat the guerrillas there, but absent an appropriate strategy, these examples of superior leadership would mean little: critical in this instance was the British willingness to leave Malaya and the formation of a new Malaysian state in which ethnic Malay and Chinese populations could coexist. Here and elsewhere, the political essence of counterinsurgency loses out to overly personalized stories of individual leadership, important and fascinating though they may be.

This brings us to Moyar’s theory of leadership, where detail is regrettably lacking. If the ten leadership attributes are truly the winning formula behind counterinsurgencies across time and space, some elaboration might have been useful. Why exactly ten attributes? Why not ‘decisiveness’, ‘boldness’, ‘courage’ or ‘intelligence’? What constitutes a leader and how are we to understand the effects of leadership when good leaders coexist with bad ones? Moyar snipes at the Army for being less adaptive than the Marine Corps, yet provides no indication of how these services deal differently with leadership issues. How does the recent FM 6-22, Army Leadership, play into the debate? Space that might usefully have been allocated to these questions is instead devoted to historical case-studies, which, for their richness, do little to justify the categoricalness of the ten leadership attributes listed in the introduction.

Moyar’s book might have been narrower, focusing on the development and shared characteristics of counterinsurgency commanders, both American and foreign. Such a focus would have greatly added to the literature, without necessitating the bold claims of newness that accompany the elaboration of ‘leader-centric’ warfare. Yet Moyar does not seek to add to the literature but to displace it. He effectively challenges the emphasis in FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, on “social and economic programs” as “counterinsurgency tools” (p. 283). Too often, however, the critique disappoints, as it misconstrues current doctrine. Moyar claims that FM 3-24 sees security forces being used “only to protect the population from exploitation” (p. 3), when it really envisages a full range of military and civilian tasks. He claims that ‘recent theorists’ believe that ‘counterinsurgents should use as little force as possible’ (p.2), when the language in FM 3-24 and elsewhere is consistently of employing appropriate levels of force. Moyar finally plucks one sentence from FM 3-24’s appendix regarding outreach to women, and uses it to deride the manual’s softness and naïve devotion to do-goodism. In the same spirit, Moyar presents a thinly veiled and inadequately defended faith in the use of overwhelming force, approvingly citing one commander’s advice that ‘the more violent you seem and the more scared they [the population] are, they more they cooperate’ (p. 245). In absence of greater elaboration, this challenge to the extant ‘consensus’, such as it is, is a step backward rather than forward. In fact, Moyar’s ‘leader-centric’ approach to counterinsurgency can readily justify a return to an ‘enemy-centric’ paradigm rather than create a new one.

Moyar provides a useful illustration of the challenges of leadership and of developing leaders for counterinsurgency. Its historical analysis is valuable, though occasionally slanted; the author’s phrasing when he tells us he is out “to find supporting evidence from a wide range of cases” may be unintentionally revealing (p. 3). As an exposition of new counterinsurgency theory, or as a defense of a ‘leader-centric’ paradigm, A Question of Command is unconvincing, falling somewhere between historical analysis and theoretical deliberation.

“The ‘clear, hold, build’ thing that we’re supposed to be doing … we’re not doing that,” Hughes said. “If any commander in this brigade goes to sleep at night thinking after we’ve walked through that orchard over there that it’s clear, he’s a f—— idiot.”

As the article explains, the split culminated in the early replacement of Capt. Joel Kassulke and a later change of mission for the entire company. Those events are described as terrible blows to the unit’s morale.

More broadly, this is another article describing U.S. military difficulties in conducting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which again makes me wonder what happened to the COIN savvy on the part of the U.S. military that we saw during the so-called ’surge’ in Iraq. Are more positive accounts of operations in Afghanistan simply not being written about, have I not seen them, or did the operational learning in Iraq somehow dissipate as the focus shifted to Afghanistan? It should be mentioned that the battalion in the article (1/17) trained for Iraq before then being deployed to Afghanistan and it is clearly not as if the operational environment in the two theatres are the same. Nonetheless it seems to me that some of the fundamentals have been lost: whereas reports abounded of commanders at all levels in Iraq who understood counterinsurgency, I am getting almost the polar opposite impression when reading about Afghanistan.

It complements an article I came across earlier in the week: “The Unravelling of Pakistan“, by John R. Schmidt, published in Survival earlier this year. Schmidt lays out the typical reasons why Pakistan’s cooperation is essential to the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan, and to regional stability more broadly, but reminds us, through a compelling review of Pakistani political culture and the performance of the Pakistani political class since the founding of the state, that there are no real grounds for optimism on this front.

What I liked about the article is that it posits the behaviour of the Pakistani government within its national, historical and social context. For someone like myself – no expert on Pakistan – it also provided a useful illustration of the competing forces and interests that influence eventual Pakistani policy. Those of you with access to Survival can read the article here.