The Civilian Component of COIN

The New York Times has a dour report on the civilian component of COIN operations in Afghanistan. One of the many difficulties of counter insurgency is that it necessarily implicates non-security disciplines, technical and governance capacity building. Without those components, the security component of COIN is simply tilting at windmills. Without providing security stability is impossible, effective governance and technical capacity building become irrelevant—and, particularly in the American division of labor, results in gross stagnation of those efforts. The two prongs of COIN are bound-up together and both are necessary for any successful effort.

The Times report describes a deteriorating situation, though it reads as it may be a bit of hyperbole. More worrying is that the civilian efforts themselves—aside from the question of those efforts reaching the Afghan people due to security concerns—may be insufficient:

Henry Crumpton, a former top C.I.A. and State Department official who is an informal adviser to General McChrystal, called those stepped-up efforts inadequate. “Right now, the overwhelming majority of civilians are in Kabul, and the overwhelming majority never leave their compounds,” said Mr. Crumpton, who recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan. “Our entire system of delivering aid is broken, and very little of the aid is getting to the Afghan people.”

While the number of civilian advisors seems doubtlessly anemic, the harsh Afghan winter and the regularized annual fighting season gives the United States nearly a six month window of opportunity to not only revise the strategy brought to bear in Afghanistan but to deploy the troops and technocrats necessary to implement that strategy effectively.

Holbrooke in the New Yorker

Last week's New Yorker has an excellent profile on Richard Holbrooke, the United States Special Representative to Af-Pak:

Kissinger once said, “If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just
say yes. If you say no, you’ll eventually get to yes, but the journey will be
very painful.”

Strategic Depths

Over the weekend the New York Times published an article analyzing the evolution of American strategy in Afghanistan through the lens of a firefight that occurred a year ago in Nuristan province. That firefight featured a large, well coordinated assault on an American outpost, nearly overrunning that outpost and killing 9 US troops. The next day, an eerily similar assault occurred in the same province – this one, a coordinated assault on two American outposts – killing 8 US troops.

This weekend’s assault, coming during the Obama administration’s high-profile Afghan strategy review, will doubtlessly focus attention on the controversial question of whether to deploy more US troops to Afghanistan. I’ve advocated for that as part of a broader counter insurgency strategy in the past – and I continue to believe that that is the correct approach for the situation at hand.

In fact, the New York Times article reporting this weekend’s assault on the American outposts featured comments from the Governor of Nuristan, Jamaluddin Badar:

The fighters had come from Pakistan, [Mr. Badar] said, after military operations pushed them out of their bases there. He said the strike was led by a Taliban commander named Dost Muhammad, whom he described as the shadow commander for the Taliban in Nuristan.

I have argued in the past that, as the Afghan Taliban have used Pakistan for safe-haven and strategic depth, so will the Pakistani Taliban, should the United States abandon Afghanistan. I have also argued that which side of the border functions as a safe-haven for the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban depends on the level of pressure exerted by anti-Taliban forces in the neighboring state. Mr. Badar’s comments apparently bear this argument out and demonstrate that Pakistan’s on-going push against the Pakistani Taliban is having an effect.

Rather than react to the coordinated assaults on its outposts in Nuristan, the United States should recognize that the fight in Pakistan and the fight in Afghanistan are integrally related. Here, now, the stability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan are at stake. The United States should reinforce its position, provide sufficient troops and civilian assistance to wage an effective counter insurgency, and to aid Pakistan by denying the Pakistani Taliban Afghan breathing room.

Being Named Mehsud May Be Hazardous To Your Health

The AFP and BBC report that the younger brother of Kalimullah Mehsud, younger brother of Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed in a clash with Pakistani forces in North Waziristan on Monday. Hakimullah Mehsud, the late Kalimullah’s older brother, is the current leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban – commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban. Hakimullah inherited his job from Baitullah Mehsud who was killed by a drone strike in August.

Faced with the ongoing joint US-Pakistani pursuit of Pakistani Taliban, it’s becoming quite dangerous to be a Mehsud in Pakistan.

Protecting the Population

The crux of counter insurgency strategy is coaxing the population to support you rather than the insurgency – the winning of hearts and minds. To do this, the counter insurgency force must protect the population; the counter insurgency force must also define itself in opposition to the insurgency: counter insurgents can provide security, insurgents cannot; counter insurgents can provide justice, insurgents cannot; counter insurgents protect the population, insurgents cannot.

On this last point, protecting the population, NATO’s forces in Afghanistan have been dreadful. Instances of ISAF airstrikes killing dozens of Afghan civilians have been abundant over the last eight years. It is to Gen. McChrystal’s credit that in response to the disastrous airstrike in May that he issued an order acknowledging the counter productive nature of airstrikes and heavily restricting their use.

So, one would think, today’s report of 30 Afghan civilians killed when their passenger bus struck a roadside bomb near Kandahar would work to NATO’s favor, beginning to wean the population of Kandahar from the insurgents. However, in today’s bombing, we can see the paradoxes of counter insurgency well illustrated. While the population will turn against NATO for collateral damage emanating from its use of air strikes, a bombing like today’s will not compel the same reaction vis-à-vis the insurgents. Rather, the population will look at today’s bombing and ask, “Why can’t NATO secure the highways, and prevent bombings of passenger busses?” The question is a fair one. NATO cannot secure the highways for many reasons, not least of which is that there are too few NATO troops in Afghanistan generally, and in Kandahar province in particular.

Afghans will not countenance the indiscriminant killing of their brothers and sisters by either NATO or the Pashtu insurgency. But, the technological advantage, the foreign origins, and the transitory nature of the ISAF sets the standard of conduct for NATO much higher – and for the insurgency, much lower. The careful, conscientious use of force by a sufficiently large contingent of NATO troops is the only way forward in Afghanistan.

Generals Kelly and McChrystal

This past Monday, the same day that Gen. McChrystal’s confidential report was leaked, I had the pleasure of speaking with Major General John Kelly, USMC. Gen. Kelly is currently serving as deputy commanding General of Camp Pendleton. Prior to his current posting, he served three tours in Iraq, from the invasion until last year. During his most recent tour, he commanded the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Anbar Province. Effectively, from February 2008 until February 2009 he was running the show in the province where the Sons of Iraq – or Awakening Councils – were born, and where the tide against the nationalist, Sunni insurgency began to break.

Gen. Kelly was remarkably candid throughout his discourse and, when asked whether we can win in Afghanistan, his answer was simultaneously cautious and unequivocal. Gen. Kelly averred at the notion of winning but he stated without equivocation that the ultimate endorsement of COIN strategy in Iraq – the sort of thing I’ve argued for in this space previously – is absolutely reproducible and necessary in Afghanistan. Which, unsurprisingly, is the sort of thing that Gen. McChrystal has argued for and is why the request for additional forces is necessary must be fulfilled. Additional forces are not sufficient, however; they must be tasked with protection of the population not simply hunt-and-kill operations, the commitment must be long-term, and the commitment of more troops must coupled with civil-society and works projects.

Online Polls Redux

Finally, an example of a good online poll question.

CNN Quickvote: What is your favorite dinosaur?

Tyrannosaurus Rex

Brontosaurus

Triceratops

Barney

I'm going with triceratops.

The Equivalency of Death Threats

Joe Klein’s latest article in Time reveals a stunning misunderstanding of counter-insurgency. In a broad attack on NATO’s current strategy in Afghanistan, Klein points to Lt. Col. John Nagl who says the heart of the Pashtu insurgency is in Kandahar, not in neighboring Helmand where the US has concentrated forces since this past spring. Lt. Col. Nagl is probably right that the heart of the Pashtu insurgency is in Kandahar but his analogy to Fallujah is flawed. Unlike the Sunni Arab insurgents in Iraq, the Pashtu insurgency has strong links to the opium trade and disrupting their ability to collect rents from opium is integral to turning the tide.

But Joe Klein makes an even more fundamental error. He writes:

It will resist any suggestion to leave Helmand and redeploy to Kandahar. "That
would be a death sentence for all the people in Helmand who have supported us,"
a military expert told me. It is a compelling argument but, ultimately, a flawed
one; death sentences are being delivered every night in Kandahar.

Klein is wrong. Counter-insurgency demands gaining the local population’s trust. For the local population to work with, let alone trust, NATO forces, it must believe that NATO will stick around – it cannot believe that NATO forces will be transitory, moving into an area, taking advantage of local support, and then leave, abandoning the local population to returning Taliban fighters and exposing it to reprisals. For most of NATO’s 8 year history in Afghanistan, it was undermanned to provide the sort of guarantee of long-term presence and involvement to warrant local support and trust. Only now is NATO beginning to reach areas of the country long controlled by the Taliban – to leave those areas, as Klein suggests, would be to destroy any goodwill earned and reinforce the local population’s belief that NATO is transitory and cooperation is a death sentence. In this way, death threats in Helmand and death threats in Kandahar are not equivalent. NATO should not abandon Helmand. Kandahar should come next, but not at the expense of Helmand and NATO’s ultimate goals.

Is Society Becoming Less Civil?

Online polls frequently get on my nerves because, instead of asking for pure opinions, they ask people to hazard uneducated guesses on questions that are ultimately empirical. Case in point is a CNN.com Quick Vote poll from earlier today, which asked:

“Is society in general becoming less civil?”

Respondents, who for the purposes of this post I will assume were predominantly American, overwhelmingly answered “yes.” I am skeptical of this assessment. My cynicism about the role of deliberation in liberal democracy aside, situating the current state of American discourse in historical perspective gives us no reason to believe we have become less civil. Certainly the tenor of the health care debate, taken as a whole, is not more contentious than the discourse that characterized the Iraq debate, or even Bill Clinton’s health care plan. Going back two more decades, it may even be safe to say we’ve made serious improvements since the Vietnam controversy and the civil rights debate in the 60s.

Fortunately, we have relatively objective measures of civic attitudes and behavior. The World Values Survey has compiled data on political and social attitudes with hundreds of survey questions to hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of countries since the early 1980s. I’ve compiled summary data for a few indicators (many of which are commonly employed in political behavior research) of civic attitudes in the US that were available for multiple years. A casual analysis of the results below provides some interesting, if ultimately inconclusive insights about variation in civic attitudes in America. First, interpersonal trust, one of the most widely used indicators of civic-ness in comparative survey research, has stayed remarkably constant since 1995. Second, the proportion of people that identified members of another race as people they would be uncomfortable having as neighbors has stayed relatively constant as well. Third, the proportion of people identifying with their local geographic unit, as opposed to the country as a whole, has not changed significantly. As anomalies, active membership in charitable organizations seems to have decreased, as has the proportion of people that report a high level of life satisfaction (although this effect could be from my aggregation of the responses). In short, although none of these indicators directly measure the vitriol of discourse, they do suggest that political and social behavior in the US has changed little, at least since 1995. I suppose it’s always possible that this particular health care debate brings out the worst in people, but I think that’s a tough case to make. (By way of caveat, I have not performed any statistical tests on these data, and I use “significant” in the colloquial, and not statistical, sense.)

	1995	1999	2006
Total Sample	1542	1200	1249
Interpersonal Trust
Most People Can Be Trusted	543(35%)	431(36%)	491(39%)
You Can’t Be Too Careful	968(63%)	757(63%)	750(60%)
Member of charitable/humanitarian organization
Not a member	895(58%)		847(68%)
Inactive member	233(15%)		170(14%)
Active member	399(26%)		198(16%)
Would not like to have as neighbor- members of different race
Mentioned	110(7%)	97(8%)	48(4%)
Not mentioned	1432(93%)	1103(92%)	1192(95%)
Life satisfaction
1-3	68(4%)	38(3%)	51(4%)
4-7	513(33%)	436(36%)	537(43%)
8-10	953(62%)	726(61%)	653(52%)
Geographical identification
locality	486(32%)	384(32%)
region	147(10%)	128(11%)
country	606(39%)	405(34%)

That said, the CNN poll is interesting because it can be used as an indication of people’s perceptions. If relatively objective indicators of civic attitudes have not changed significantly, a really interesting question is why people perceive behavior to have done so. By way of one speculative hypothesis, the internet is a non-costly form of communication that facilitates the distribution of extreme discourse, even if the absolute number of people that harbor those opinions is relatively unchanged. Other thoughts?

The Repudiation of Rep. Joe Wilson

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has introduced a resolution disapproving of Rep. Wilson's outburst during the President's speech to a joint Congressional session last week. The text of the Wilson Resolution reads:

Whereas the conduct of the Representative from South Carolina was a breach of
decorum and degraded the proceedings of the joint session, to the discredit of
the House:

Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives disapproves of the behavior of the Representative from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson, during the joint session of Congress held on September 9, 2009.

In anticipation of the Wilson Resolution, RNC Chairman Michael Steele released this statement:

[C]ongressional Democrats are wasting taxpayers’ time and resources . . . so they don’t have to talk about their exceedingly unpopular health care plan . . . .

If we are going to march members down to the well of the House to apologize, Joe Wilson is going to have to get in line behind Nancy Pelosi, who attacked the intelligence community who protects us, Charlie Rangel who cheated on his taxes, Jack Murtha – a walking scandal, and we all know how the Democratic leadership tried to protect William Jefferson.

Steele's statement is of course nonsense. Not only is the healthcare reform not unpopular - it is, as Nate Silver pointed out yesterday, at best a matter of confusion for the American people - none of the individuals he mentioned embarrassed the House of Representatives - and in doing so, violated House rules - with such a grave breech of decorum as Rep. Wilson did last Wednesday. If any of those individuals have violated House rules it is up to the House to punish them, as it is doing with Rep. Wilson, and as it has done in the past.

re: The President's Healthcare Speech

Bret wrote a good post discussing the impact - or lack thereof - of the President's healthcare speech before he delivered it last week. While it is too early to tell what if any impact that speech has in fact had on the healthcare reform debate in Congress, several polls since the speech have measured a notable bump in the President's approval rating, both generally and for healthcare reform specifically. You can find the most recent poll, conducted by CNN/Opinion Research, here.

UPDATE: Shorter Nate Silver: the American people are confused. (h/t Bret)