Matthew Rosenberg. New York Times, 20 January 2012.
http://pulse.me/s/5a33j

Excerpt:

American and other coalition forces here are being killed in increasing numbers by the very Afghan soldiers they fight alongside and train, in attacks motivated by deep-seated animosity between the supposedly allied forces, according to American and Afghan officers and a classified coalition report.

Editor’s Comment:

Seems like very strong evidence that U.S. forces have overstayed their welcome!

Abubakar Siddique. Radio Free Europe, 25 October 2011.
http://www.rferl.org/content/afghan_opposition_grows_to_next_stage_of_us_military_presence/24371170.html

Excerpt:

Experience has shown us that foreign forces cannot bring peace to Afghanistan. We will have peace when we remove the causes of conflict among [Afghan] people,” [protest organizer] Mozhdah said. “One of the key reasons for fighting here is that we don’t trust each other. We need to sit and talk to each other to gain each others trust.

The White House. September 2011.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/66998459/WH-Report-on-Afghanistan-and-Pakistan-September-2011

editorial. Boston Globe, 30 June 2011.
http://articles.boston.com/2011-06-30/bostonglobe/29722652_1_panetta-pentagon-government-discretionary-spending

When Leon Panetta takes the helm at the Defense Department tomorrow, he will be facing difficult choices about the US military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. But an equally pressing — and potentially even more intractable — problem is the Pentagon’s budget and spending. Outgoing secretary Robert Gates was good at paying lip service to the need to control spending; he noted recently that “the United States should spend as much as necessary on national defense, but not one penny more.’’ But the department’s baseline budget has risen every year since Gates took over — from $450 billion to more than $550 billion four years later. This year alone, the Pentagon is seeking a 3.4 percent increase from its 2010 budget.

It’s not just the wars; they represent less than 30 percent of the Pentagon’s enormous budget request. In the context of other government spending, the Pentagon is a behemoth. For every $100 of government discretionary spending, over $30 goes to non-war defense expenditures. The scope is overwhelming; the need for more than piecemeal cuts of failed systems is urgent.

Gates recently claimed that the Pentagon has already cut $300 billion, but the math suggests otherwise. That money came from programs already scheduled to be terminated. The savings were simply put into other military priorities. After noting that the Navy’s 11 carrier battle groups were excessive, Gates refused to eliminate a single one.

Panetta will need to take a more disciplined and systemic look at the budget. There is no shortage of advice from influential think tanks and independent studies, including last year’s report of the Sustainable Defense Task Force, a bipartisan group convened by Representative Barney Frank. Their recommendations would trim $960 billion between 2011 and 2020, if only the Pentagon would act on them.

Cutting the number of deployed nuclear weapons by half — to 1,000 warheads — is consistent with a reduced emphasis on nuclear warfare and the efforts of arms control advocates. This move alone would save over $100 billion over 10 years. Reducing conventional forces by 50,000, which would still leave 100,000 personnel deployed in Europe and Asia, is more realistic force structure. Cancelling just a few systems that are neither cost-effective nor essential would save more. The MV-22 Osprey and Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle are long on trouble, and short on capability. In addition, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office both have proposed changes to support efforts, such as maintenance, supply, and infrastructure, that could save $100 billion in the next decade.

All this could be accomplished without compromising national security. Panetta needs to push back on the political forces that claim any cuts make the nation vulnerable to various enemies. The deficit is a much greater security risk.

Unfortunately, the Pentagon remains the largest federal agency that simply cannot pass an independent auditor test; when subjected to the normal bookkeeping procedures, it cannot, with any accuracy, track spending, fraud, waste, or redundancy. It has given itself a September 2017 deadline for audit “readiness.’’ That’s not soon enough. Panetta, who, as the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, has a reputation as a rigorous fighter for fiscal discipline. He will need to get the Pentagon’s house in order on day one.

William Hartung. Huffington Post, 28 June 2011.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-hartung/afghanistan-for-real-savi_b_886241.html

Excerpt:

There won’t be large scale savings from the winding down of the Afghan war until virtually all U.S. forces are withdrawn. Even then there are still likely to be ongoing costs for training, equipping and possibly even paying Afghan security forces, which could cost up to $10 billion or more per year if current rates are maintained. But the vast bulk of the $120 billion per year now being spent on the war will be freed up for other purposes: deficit reduction, or public investments, or some combination of the two.

An end to the Afghan and Iraq wars may also open the way to a more comprehensive public debate on the Pentagon’s $550 billion-plus annual base budget — a sum over four times as large as what we spend on the wars. Politically, making real cuts in Pentagon spending during a time of war is a tough sell, even given our current budgetary predicament. But an end to the wars combined with the pressure from the deficit could lead to real cuts in the Pentagon’s base budget as well, especially if we adopt a new strategy that forswears major wars of occupation or large-scale insurgency campaigns of the kind our nation has waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we cut the war spending and bring the Pentagon’s larger budget into line with reality, then we’ll be talking real money.

Joshua Thiel. Small Wars Journal, 12 April 2011.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/732-thiel1.pdf

Excerpt:

Maneuver warfare at its core is a mechanistic endeavor and fits with a corresponding necessity of top-down hierarchies. Conversely, counterinsurgency is a more ambiguous environment that varies in its complexity and context; it is the chess match of war. It is different in every locale and can cover the entire spectrum of war simultaneously. Consequently, counterinsurgency is difficult to put on a bumper sticker, to trademark as a catch phrase, or sell to a population and their representatives. In 2006 the United States (U.S.) public’s perception of success or failure of the Iraqi counterinsurgency strategy was concentrated around the concept of massing combat power in time and space, often called the “The Surge.” The term, “The Surge,” condensed a new counterinsurgency strategy into a simple and quantifiable slogan for the sound bite culture surrounding current affairs in the modern world. Unfortunately, counterinsurgency is more complex than “add more and then you win.”

Comment by Gian Gentile:

Joshua said this at the end of the piece:

“…in Afghanistan in 2011, will the victor once again write the history by touting the Afghanistan troop surge of 2010-2011 rather than the decisive operational changes.”

What evidence, I mean hard evidence (and beyond what officers who were part of the Surge recall)that there was a “decisive operational change.”? How much “decisive” operational change can there be in an area security mission where combat forces are dispersed widely and operate in a decentralized manner? This operational framework was in place in Iraq from spring of 2003 on. The answer is that there was not a decisive change in the operational framework. Oh to be sure there were some tweaks made here and there, a few more outposts here and there, but by and large it remained the same.

Unfortunately a narrative has been constructed that posits that a savior General named Petraeus came on board, reinvented his field army operationally and combined with an increase of troops was the primary cause of the lowering of violence. This is a chimera.

Yet folks, especially us in the Army who have spilled blood in these places, want to believe that what happens or doesnt happen is because of us and what we do or dont do, or because of savior generals riding onto the scene.

Yet the foreign policy elite (and many military leaders) in this country love this narrative and want it to stick because it places emphasis and criticism on the mechanics of doing these wars of intervention and state building and away from the strategy and policy that put them into place. Since success in these wars and conflicts are simply a matter of getting the right number of troops on the ground with the right tactics and with the savior general, then they can be won again and again.

As senior Army generals in Afghanistan argue “the right inputs are finally in place,” so too are we already seeing calls in certain quarters for bog in Libya.

But in Iraq it was neither the increase in troops as part of the Surge (as Joshua effectively argues) nor was it a decisive change in operational framework (as he incorrectly asserts) and instead the lowering of violence had to do with other more critical conditions (the spread of the Anbar awakening, the Shia militia stand-down, the physical seperation of Baghdad into sectarian districts) occurring.

Budget Memo by Charles Knight. 14 February 2011.

For several years now White House budget projections have included a “placeholder for outyear overseas contingency operations” most of which are accounted for by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This placeholder number has been and remains $50 billion. Every year actual OCO (overseas contingency operations) spending turns out to be several times that number. FY11′s OCO is $159 billion and FY12′s is $118 billion.

Adjusting for the effect of the new OCO for FY12, the $68 billion budgeted above the placeholder of $50 billion eats up most of the $78 billion in Pentagon cuts that Secretary Gates offered up in January to fiscal responsibility (only $76 billion actually shows up in the 14 February budget release.) The remaining $8 billion (and much more) will go to the war budgets when reality collides with placeholder projections.

On 14 February Pentagon Comptroller Hale confirmed that the $50 billion placeholders for FY13 and beyond was the “best we can do.” Others make an attempt to be more realistic. The high tech industry association called Tech America annually projects DoD budgets for ten years out. In their 2010 projection they estimate that OCO spending will be $102 billion in FY13, $69 billion in FY14 and $57billion in FY15. When we subtract the $50 billion placeholder for each of those years and total the remainder we find that the Pentagon is likely to spend $78 billion more in the years FY13 through FY15 than in the White House budget projections.

In sum, not only does the President’s FY12 budget plan give an exemption to the Pentagon from contributing anything substantial to deficit reduction, but the likely cost of the war in Afghanistan will push up the national debt substantially higher than the White House budget projections.

Reva Patwardhan. Peace Action West Groundswell Blog, 29 July 2010.
http://blog.peaceactionwest.org/2010/07/29/wikileaks-war-logs-roundup/

Michael Hastings. Rolling Stone, 22 June 2010.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

Excerpt:

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France’s nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose.

Report of the Afghanistan Study Group, June 2010.
http://www.afghanistanstudygroup.org/?page_id=27

Excerpt:

The bottom line is clear: Our vital interests in Afghanistan are limited and military victory is not the key to achieving them.

On the contrary, waging a lengthy counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan may well do more to aid Taliban recruiting than to dismantle the group, help spread conflict further into Pakistan, unify radical groups that might otherwise be quarreling amongst themselves, threaten the long-term health of the U.S. economy, and prevent the U.S. government from turning its full attention to other pressing problems.

Roy Gutman. McClatchy Newspapers, 14 March 2010.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/14/90083/weve-met-the-enemy-in-afghanistan.html

Excerpt:

Today, although the United States and more than three dozen NATO allies and other countries are supporting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Taliban dominate a growing swath of territory, and their power trumps the government’s in three-quarters of the country.

Although they’re often portrayed as mindless fanatics, the militant Islamists’ “life experience” from their years in the wilderness, their study of American military tactics and their analysis of the Karzai government’s shortcomings have helped reverse their fortunes, U.S. intelligence experts say.

Steve Coll. The New Yorker, 15 February 2010.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2010/02/strategic-withdrawal.html

Excerpt:

I have also heard it suggested, however, that the big and visible Helmand operation is being conceived as a sort of “demonstration project” of joint U.S. and Afghan security and governance capabilities – that “clear, hold, and build” there will be constructed as a sort of theme park of revived counterinsurgency practice.

Whatever the durability of the current operation, the Helmand River Valley is not likely to be this war’s decisive locus.

Bernard I. Finel. Armed Froces Journal International, February 2010.
http://www.afji.com/2010/02/4387134

Excerpt:

A fundamental challenge in devising a strategy for the use of American military power is that the world has literally never seen anything like it. The U.S. today has military capabilities at least equal to the rest of the world combined. There is virtually no spot on the globe that could not be targeted by American forces, and at most a small handful of countries that could thwart a determined U.S. effort at regime change — and some of those only by virtue of their possession of nuclear weapons.

American military capabilities are not a potential form of power, subject to use only following a lengthy mobilizing and requiring a long campaign to achieve significant goals. Instead, the U.S. can destroy fixed locations in a matter of hours or at most days, and implement regime change in a matter of weeks or a few months.

Because this capability is so novel — dating only to the end of the Cold War — American strategists lack a clear framework to guide the utilization of this force. They have sought to match capabilities to conceptions of the use of force from a different era, one in which the Cold War made regime change unpalatable due to the risk of escalation and that tended to make localized setbacks appear as loses in a perceived zero-sum competition with the Soviets.

The reason, in other words, that the U.S. didn’t simply remove Fidel Castro from power was that after 1962, the international consequences seemed too high and the goal too risky. The reason American leaders felt compelled to engage in a lengthy counterinsurgency in Vietnam was the concern that a communist victory would have been a setback in the broader struggle. But imagine a world in which there were few or no international consequences to removing Castro from power, and imagine a world in which the commitment to Vietnam was strictly commensurate to the threat that the Vietnamese communists could pose to the U.S. That is the change in context that has occurred over the past 20 years, and the U.S. has not yet adapted.

Editor’s Comment:

And so many in the U.S. choose to ignore how this dominant military power motivates other nations to seek nuclear weaponry or hold tightly to those they have acquired already!

Anne Flaherty and Anne Gearan. Los Angeles Times, 13 January 2010.
http://www.startribune.com/templates/Print_This_Story?sid=81277532

Excerpt:

The administration’s Quadrennial Defense Review, the main articulation of U.S. military doctrine, is due to Congress on Feb. 1. Top military commanders were briefed on the document at the Pentagon on Monday and Tuesday. They also received a preview of the administration’s budget plans through 2015.

The four-year review outlines six key mission areas and spells out capabilities and goals the Pentagon wants to develop. The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with the goals of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expanding Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013.

Winslow T. Wheeler, Director, Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information has written a commentary on this report entitled “Just What We Need: More Pentagon Spending” for the Huffington Post, 13 January 2010.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/winslow-t-wheeler/just-what-we-need-more-pe_b_422297.html

J. Sigger. Arm Chair Generalist, 31 December 2009.
http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/12/why-coin-will-fail-in-afghanistan.html

Meteor Blades. Daily Kos, 30 December 2009.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/30/820467/-A-Leak-About-the-Phantom-Army

Excerpt:

…the Afghan National Army is a farce; there’s little chance of turning it into a cohesive fighting force; and there’s zero chance of doing so on a speedy timetable…

Majority Staff, Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, 16 December 2009. Hosted on the Commonwealth Institute website.
http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/2009-12-16StaffMemo.pdf

Excerpt:

[The] number of Defense Department Contractors in Afghanistan May reach 160,000. There are currently 104,000 Defense Department contractors working in Afghanistan. The increase in troops may require an additional 56,000 Defense Department contractors, bringing the total number of Defense contractors in Afghanistan to 160,000.

H.D.S. Greenway. Boston Globe, 16 December 2009.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/12/16/afghanistans_never_ending_challenge/

Excerpt:

The enemy, then as now, always rallied to the reliable call of “jihad’’ against the infidel invaders no matter who they were. Of all the tribes, those of the Pashtuns were the most feared.

The motives for fighting in Afghanistan were fear, prestige, and retribution. The British feared Russian expansion, and always sought to put their man on the throne to do Britain’s bidding. Retribution always followed military setbacks, and national prestige was used as the reason to fight on. British control over Afghanistan was thought necessary for the defense of India.

Russia followed the same scenario, fearing that if Afghanistan’s pro-Communist government should fail, it would endanger Russia’s Muslim regions.

The United States invaded Afghanistan out of fear of Al Qaeda, and retribution for 9/11. And today you often hear the national prestige argument that we cannot let the Holy Warriors believe they can defeat a second superpower. More and more, America’s Afghan policy is tied into protecting the stability of Pakistan, once part of British India.

Moshe Schwartz. Congressional Research Service, 14 December 2009.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24124212/CRS-Contractors-Study-12-09

Sheryl Gay Stolberg. New York Times, 12 December 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/us/politics/13obey.html

Excerpt:

“It is stunning,” he remembers telling Mr. Obama, “to listen to Johnson talk to Dick Russell, the conservative old wise head in the Senate from Georgia — it is terrible, gut-wrenching to listen to them both say, ‘Well, we know this is damn near a fool’s errand, but we don’t have any choice.’ ”

Nir Rosen. Boston Review, January/February 2010.
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.1/rosen.php

Excerpt:

Perhaps McChrystal’s most crucial assumption—also endorsed by Obama—was that the failure to create a unified, centralized state in Afghanistan will lead to al Qaeda’s return. This claim is widely contested. Al Qaeda is already ensconced in Pakistan, where it is better protected from the United States than it would be in Afghanistan. And the Taliban are not interested in global jihad.

PA Consulting Group. Chart published by Talking Points Memo, 08 December 2009.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/12/the_militarys_plan_for_the_afghan_war_surge_in_one.php

Editor’s Comment:

The folks at Talking Points Memo don’t seem to know for whom or why PA Consulting drafted this chart. I am enjoying imagining that it was drawn for a new magazine called Popular Complexity and Chaos Illustrated and that the White House is a charter subscriber.

Barry R McCaffrey. McCaffrey Associates, 05 December 2009. Hosted on the Commonwealth Institute website.
http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/0911McCaffrey.pdf

Excerpt:

Most Afghans are also dismayed at the injustice and corruption of the government (in particular the ANP) compared to the more disciplined and Islamic Taliban.

Twice in recent months we have seen battalion sized units of Taliban fighters conduct highly successful (not-withstanding catastrophic losses by the attacking insurgents) complex attacks employing surprise, reconnaissance, fire support, maneuver, and enormous courage in an attempt to over run isolated US units. This is not Iraq. These Taliban have a political objective to knock NATO out of the war —backed up by ferocious combat capabilities.

Andrew J. Bacevich. Los Angeles Times, 03 December 2009.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bacevich3-2009dec03,0,3209129.story

Excerpt:

So the war launched as a prequel to Iraq now becomes its sequel, with little of substance learned in the interim. To double down in Afghanistan is to ignore the unmistakable lesson of Bush’s thoroughly discredited “global war on terror”: Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism

David Bromwich. Huffington Post, 02 December 2009.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/the-afghanistan-parenthes_b_377141.html

Excerpt:

… the president spoke as if Al Qaeda were the name of a distinct, finite, searchable entity that can be subdued by an intensification (lasting exactly 18 months) of American fighting in the country that was once its camp. As for the Taliban, whatever else they may be, they are native to Afghanistan. This cannot be said of Al Qaeda, but it cannot be said, either, of the soldiers, trainers, advisers, and contractors sent by the United States.

There is a misjudged air of precision in the idea of a renewed and extended war that closes at 18 months because that “benchmark” was settled in advance. How can anyone be sure that the scale of so entangling a mission, with so many pitfalls, will fit neatly into the shape of a year and a half?

as prepared for presentation at West Point, full text as provided by the White House to the Los Angles Times, 01 December 2009.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/12/obama-speech-text-afghanistan.html

Christopher Hellman. National Priorities Project, 01 December 2009.
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/12/01

Excerpt:

Prior to Fiscal Year 2010, combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded outside the normal Defense Department budget through “supplemental” spending bills. The Obama Administration pledged that it would end this practice after Fiscal Year 2009 and included, as part of its Fiscal Year 2010 budget request, a $130 billion request for “Overseas Contingency Operations,” the majority of which was dedicated to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The Fiscal Year 2010 funding, which awaits final approval from Congress, does not include the funds that will be required to support any further increase in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan. Thus it is very likely that the White House will again resort to a supplemental spending bill to secure additional war funding in the coming year.

Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 30 November 2009.
http://foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Tora_Bora_Report.pdf

Excerpt:

The reasons behind the failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and its lasting consequences are examined over three sections in this report. The first section traces bin Laden’s path from southern Afghanistan to the mountains of Tora Bora and lays out new and previous evidence that he was there. The second explores new information behind the decision not to launch an assault. The final section examines the military options that might have led to his capture or death at Tora Bora and the ongoing impact of the failure to bring him back ‘‘dead or alive.’’

Stephen M. Walt. ForeignPolicy.com, 30 November 2009.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/30/why_they_hate_us_ii_how_many_muslims_has_the_us_killed_in_the_past_30_years

Excerpt:

Yet if you really want to know “why they hate us,” … the fact remains that the United States has killed a very large number of Arab or Muslim individuals over the past three decades.

Editor’s Comment:

And no amount of “public diplomacy” or “American narrative” will win friends when the U.S. is responsible for killing sons and daughters of people in their home land. That is a basic piece of strategic wisdom!

Philip Giraldi. antiwar.com, 26 November 2009.
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2009/11/25/the-cost-of-war/

Excerpt:

Why are these wars so expensive? It goes back to Napoleon: logistics. US bases in Iraq are supplied by a 344-mile road running north from huge depots in Kuwait and by another artery running south from Turkey, both of which require convoys of trucks with armed guards dramatically raising the costs of everything being brought in. It is similar in Afghanistan but worse.

International Crisis Group Asia Briefing N°96, 25 November 2009.
http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-asia/afghanistan/B096-afghanistan-elections-and-the-crisis-of-governance.aspx

Excerpt:

The electoral fraud was a direct consequence of failure to build the capacity of government institutions. Since the 2004 presidential vote, the international community – UNAMA in particular – repeatedly turned a blind eye to the looming crisis of credibility rooted in an unsound process. The August vote laid bare disagreements between different international actors and within the new American administration, whose lack of clear policy in Kabul undermined their ability to press for necessary changes ahead of the elections. The polls severely damaged UNAMA’s ability to function effectively, weakening its internal morale and sharply eroding Afghan confidence in Kai Eide, the Special Representative of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (SRSG). The UN’s mission to bring stability to the country has been severely jeopardised. His effectiveness as head of mission will always remain in doubt. If UNAMA’s credibility is to be restored, Eide must step down.

Christi Parsons and Julian E. Barnes. Los Angeles Times, 23 November 2009.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-troop-costs23-2009nov23,0,3233273.story

Excerpt:

…in a memo early this month, obtained by The Times‘ Washington bureau, the Pentagon’s own comptroller produced an estimate that broke with the customary Defense formula and did include construction and equipment.

That memo said the yearly cost of a 40,000-troop increase would be $30 billion to $35 billion — at least $750,000 a person. An increase of 20,000 would cost $20 billion to $25 billion annually, it said — a per-soldier cost equal to or greater than the White House estimate.

Derrick Crowe. Return Good for Evil, 21 November 2009.
http://returngood.com/2009/11/21/an-interview-with-matthew-hoh/

Excerpt:

How many recruits do they [al-Qaida] get per year? A hundred? Two hundred? The Muslim population is over a billion. You’re talking about such a small fraction. It’s really associated with such a fringe movement that we have to attack using human intelligence and using law enforcement techniques. Army brigade combat teams do not affect al-Qaida. Having 60,00 troops in Afghanistan is not affecting al-Qaida. …[T]he destruction of al-Qaida should be our priority…but we need to go after that organization as it exists and not with ground combat troops in Afghanistan.

response by Michael Brenner to question posed by James Kitfield on National Journal Expert Blog, 19 November 2009.
http://security.nationaljournal.com/2009/11/are-american-muslims-a-threat.php#1393085

Excerpt:

…all it would take to restore sanity is some slight reflection on our dismal performance everywhere we have tried our hand at manipulation in the Greater Middle East since 9/11. We have been consistently arrogant, incompetent, corrupt – in all senses, callous to the pain inflicted on the natives and ourselves alike, and abject failures.

John Byrne. 70news.com, 18 November 2009.
http://www.70news.com/2009/11/18/gen-wesley-clark-calls-for-exit-from-afghanistan/

Excerpt:

You’ve got to “figure out where you’re going,” Clark told the House Armed Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations. “How do we get out of here? Because our presence long term there is not a good thing. We’re playing into the hands of people who don’t like foreigners in a country that’s not tolerant of diversity. And that’s not going to change.”

Editor’s Comment:

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” ~ Lewis Carroll. (English Logician, Mathematician, Photographer and Novelist, especially remembered for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1832-1898)

Spencer Ackerman. The Washington Independent, 18 November 2009.
http://washingtonindependent.com/68174/army-data-shows-contraints-on-troop-increase-potential

Excerpt:

[Lawrence] Korb … said a more realistic troop increase for Afghanistan would be 10,000 soldiers until the drawdown of troops from Iraq “begins in earnest.” There are currently 120,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq, almost twice the total in Afghanistan, though Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, told Congress in September that he plans to reduce that total to around 50,000 by August 30, 2010. Alternatively, Korb said, Obama could speed up the pace of redeployment out of Iraq in order to relieve the stress on the force… But under current Pentagon policy, soldiers would still need to receive at least 12 months of recuperation time back in the U.S. before potential assignment in Afghanistan.

Stephen M. Walt. Foreign Policy, 16 November 2009.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/16/building_on_2_blunders_the_dubious_case_for_counterinsurgency

Editor’s Comment

Walt makes a fundamental strategic point. The Bush wars involved operational and grand strategic errors, so why institutionalize a shift in defense planning that in effect has the U.S. military prepare for more strategic errors by our leadership? Why not opt to correct the error? It is really an elemental point of strategy: Don’t compound error!

I understand how military professionals who have been ordered to take on foolish strategic missions might feel that counterinsurgency theory is an attractive way out of their tactical and operational dilemmas. But there is really no excuse for civilian leaders, including Sec Def Gates, chasing the mirage of COIN as if it were an answer for our current problems dealing with the consequences of a disastrous Bush national security strategy. Change the strategy and there will be no need for investments in COIN!

Christopher Drew. New York Times, 14 November 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15cost.html

Excerpt:

…even if Mr. Obama opts for a lower troop commitment, Afghanistan’s new costs could wash out the projected $26 billion expected to be saved in 2010 from withdrawing troops from Iraq. And the overall military budget could rise to as much as $734 billion, or 10 percent more than the peak of $667 billion under the Bush administration.

Steve Hynd. News Hoggers, 12 November 2009.
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2009/11/obama-to-ask-for-greater-chinese-involvement-in-afghanistan.html

Adam L. Silverman. Sic Semper Tyrannis, 12 November 2009.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/11/conceptualizations-of-insurgency-and-its-effects-on-the-counterinsurgency-policy-process.html

Excerpt:

Given the reality that the US faces in Afghanistan; the historic lack of functional centralized government, exceedingly high number of societal elements, many of which are geographically isolated or semi-isolated, the illegitimacy of the current Afghan government, and the fact that groups we are fighting are not all insurgents makes successfully reaching the COIN end state of tethering Afghan society back to the Afghan state very, very difficult. The debate on the use of COIN really needs to be focused in on this difficult set of Afghan circumstances and whether they allow any chance for a positive counterinsurgency outcome.

David Rogers. Politico, 10 November 2009.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29357.html

Excerpts:

Under almost all scenarios before Obama, billions more than the contingency funds requested in his 2010 budget will be needed…

Most estimates of how much more the Pentagon may need now run in the range of $30 billion to $40 billion.

Karl E. Eikenberry. Embassy of the U.S.A., Kabul, 08 November 2009.
http://static1.firedoglake.com/37/files/2009/11/Winning-in-Afghanistan.pdf

Karl W. Eikenberry. The The New York Times has published two cables authored by the U.S. Ambassador to Kabul addressed to Secretary of State Clinton. The first is dated 06 November 2009 and is entitled “COIN Strategy: Civilian Concerns”. The second is dated 09 November 2009 and is entitled “Looking Beyond Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan”.
http://documents.nytimes.com/eikenberry-s-memos-on-the-strategy-in-afghanistan

Editor’s Comment:

Quibble: COIN is a tactic, not a strategy. Non-quibble: Wars are rarely decided at the tactical level.

Charles Kupchan and Steven Simon. Financial Times, 03 November 2009.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1e98cbae-c8c6-11de-8f9d-00144feabdc0.html

Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason. Military Review, November/December 2009.
http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20091231_art004.pdf

Excerpts:

By misunderstanding the basic nature of the enemy, the United States is fghting the wrong war again, just as we did in Vietnam. It is hard to defeat an enemy you do not understand.

Elections don’t make democracies; democracies make elections.

As Jeffrey Record … notes, “the fundamental political obstacle to an enduring American success in Vietnam [was] a politically illegitimate, militarily feckless, and thoroughly corrupted South Vietnamese client regime.” Substitute the word “Afghanistan” for the words “South Vietnam” in these quotations and the descriptions apply precisely to today’s government in Kabul. Like Afghanistan, South Vietnam at the national level was a massively corrupt collection of self-interested warlords, many of them deeply implicated in the proftable opium trade, with almost nonexistent legitimacy outside the capital city. The purely military gains achieved at such terrible cost in our nation’s blood and treasure in Vietnam never came close to exhausting the enemy’s manpower pool or his will to fght, and simply could not be sus-
tained politically by a venal and incompetent set of dysfunctional state institutions where self-interest
was the order of the day.

No Pashtun would ever identify himself by his province, where we are attempting to impose external governance. Rural Pashtuns thus have no perceivable political interest in this keystone of international military and political effort in Afghanistan.

“Extending the reach of the central government” is precisely the wrong strategy in Afghanistan because it is exactly what the rural people do not want. The level of coercive social change that would be required to actually implement this radical social revolution in Afghanistan is beyond our national means.

Gilles Dorronsoro. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2009.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/fixing_failed_strategy.pdf

Excerpt:

…the International Coalition, with its limited resources and diminishing popular support, should focus on its core interests: preventing the Taliban from retaking Afghan cities, avoiding the risk that al-Qaeda would try to reestablish sanctuaries there, pursue a more aggressive counterinsurgency strategy in the North, and reallocate its civilian aid resources to places where the insurgency is still weak.

Editor’s Comment

Some would say that Pashtunistan is already a nation which can’t yet fully establish itself as a state (although there is already considerable local governance, both Pashtun tribal and Taliban.) Presently Punjabi (Pakistani) and US/NATO military intervention prevent the establishment of a state.

Dorronsoro’s Afghan war strategy would seem to be a step in moving the Pashtunistan national cause to within a decade or so of success. Of course, the cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad would have to fall under Pashtunistan governance eventually, even if Western forces resisted for some years.

Gian P. Gentile. New York Times, 31 October 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/opinion/31iht-edgentile.html?_r=1

Excerpt:

History shows that occupation by foreign armies with the intent of changing occupied societies does not work and ends up costing considerable blood and treasure.

The notion that if only an army gets a few more troops, with different and better generals, then within a few years it can defeat a multi-faceted insurgency set in the middle of civil war, is not supported by an honest reading of history.

Algeria, Vietnam and Iraq show this to be the case.

Yaroslav Trofimov. Wall Street Journal, 30 October 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125686434305817635.html

C-Span.org, 29 October 2009.
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2009/10/29/Terr/A/24975/RAND+Forum+on+US+Policy+Afghanistan.aspx

Paul Rogers. Open Democracy, 29 October 2009. Hosted on the Commondreams website.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/03-6

Excerpt:

If there is a way ahead, it rests not on short-term calculations about troop numbers but on a larger reassessment by the Barack Obama administration of the entire US security posture in the middle east and southwest Asia. This will have to do more than crisis-manage the dire problems inherited from George W Bush; what is needed is no less than a move beyond military-led thinking to an integrated understanding of what security in the 21st century actually is.

Michael A. Cohen. The New Republic, 29 October 2009.
http://www.tnr.com/article/world/disputations-false-dichotomy

for Biddle article see: http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/is-there-a-middle-way-biddl

Excerpt:

In poker terms, Biddle’s argument is the equivalent of betting all your chips on an inside straight draw. And then doing it again on the next hand.

Karen DeYoung. Washington Post, 27 October 2009.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603394.html

For the fulltext and a key excerpt from Matthew P. Hoh’s resignation letter see http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/resignation-letter-of-matthew-p-hoh.

Michael T. Klare. Tom Dispatch, 26 October 2009.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175131/michael_klare_the_great_superpower_meltdown

Excerpt:

How much longer will Washington feel that Americans can afford to subsidize a global role that includes garrisoning much of the planet and fighting distant wars in the name of global security, when the American economy is losing so much ground to its competitors? This is the dilemma President Obama and his advisers must confront in the altered world of 2025.

article references http://www.comw.org/wordpress/dsr/global-trends-2025

Paul McGeough. The Age, 24 October 2009. from an address at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/afghan-insurgency-given-new-life-by-their-enemies-20091023-hd58.html

Excerpts:

Afghans do want governance – they want good governance. But they have been ripped off every time it’s been within their grasp. And the worst rip-off has been in the last eight years, because democracy and good governance were the gifts offered by the West – by governments that supposedly knew about these things.

In their refusal to back Kabul or the Coalition, Afghans are not saying yea or neigh on the Taliban in isolation – the call they make as they try to go about their daily existence, is on the credibility of the Taliban as compared with that of the Karzai government and the Coalition.

It’s too late for McChrystal to make protecting the most-threatened sections of the Afghan population the key objective, because both the Kabul Government and the coalition lack credibility in the eyes of the people. In the absence of any significant Afghan government presence, much beyond Kabul, it is American military and aid workers – and those from several other coalition countries – that are seen as the face of government and as keepers of the cash, of which there is not enough and which takes forever to translate into meaningful development.

Selig S. Harrison. The Nation, 21 October 2009.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/harrison

Excerpt:

…to offset Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, replace the present “Af-Pak” strategy with a broader regional strategy that encourages India, Iran, Russia, China and Tajikistan–all of which oppose a Taliban takeover–to play a more active role in shaping Afghanistan’s economic and political future and in setting the terms for a gradual US-NATO withdrawal.

Stephen M. Walt. The Nation, 21 October 2009.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/walt

Stephen Biddle. The New Republic, 20 October 2009.
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/world/there-middle-way

Harvey Sapolsky. Defense News, 19 October 2009.

Seven months ago, the U.S. military was being praised by many security specialists as finally having gotten it: It un­derstood that its future was coun­terinsurgency best practices, which means nation-build­ing under fire from insur­gents in the world’s tough­est neighbor­ hoods. Yes, it had taken a while, but the mili­tary’s top lead­ership had fi­nally seen the light. Future war would mean fighting insurgencies, and counterin­surgency was an intera­gency mili­ tary/civilian team effort requiring skills in building governments, putting in the national plumbing — lights, roads, sewers, schools — and protecting the citizens from insurgents while training the local military to conduct se­curity operations and to think and behave democratically.

U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus wrote the manual. All the big think tanks and study groups had called it. America needed to nation-build to fight terrorism. Defense Secre­tary Robert Gates had cut the pro­grams of the old thinkers who wanted Cold War-type systems in­stead of signing up for the new fight. The neo-cons had been ban­ished, but their democracy­spreading anti-al-Qaida strategy had melded nearly seamlessly with liberal internationalist doc­trine stating that terrorism was bred in the hopelessness of failed impoverished states.

Afghanistan was to be the test case. Iraq was the bad war, but Afghanistan was the good one. Our allies were there, NATO somehow being tricked into showing up. The United Nations was there. Humanitarian groups were there. Next door was a threatened Pakistan, the Muslim nation with nuclear weapons and an extremist presence. We had to get Afghanistan right.

The new administration was for it. The new security team was filled with advocates recruited from the think tanks and academia, people who had done the articles and con­ference volumes on the subject. Most of the correspondents cover­ing the war were on board. There was a consensus as much as con­sensus exists these days.

Nation-Builders Vanish

And today it all seems so long ago. There is hardly anyone be­yond the few neo-cons left stand­ing and some Republican com­mentators who is willing to en­dorse the military’s plan for the full nation-building deal. Counterinsur­gent advocates are silent. Liberal interventionists are silent. We hear only how corrupt the Afghan gov­ernment is and how backward Afghanistan is, as if this is news.

The Obama administration is supposedly mulling its options, ignoring the nation-building goals it was proclaiming for Afghanis­tan in March and still giving speeches about as late as August.

I think the U.S. health care de­bate did it. The Obama administra­tion is having a much harder fight to gain enactment of health-care reform than seemed likely in the spring. The big Democratic ma­jorities it has in Congress are ap­parently not big enough to get it done. The cost of reform is being questioned, especially after the se­ries of expensive bailouts for the nation’s banks, housing market and auto industry. War and domes­tic reform don’t mix well.

In the modern parade of Demo­cratic Party presidents, Franklin Roosevelt did reform first, then war; Harry Truman did war, not reform; Lyndon Johnson tried re­form and war simultaneously, and essentially lost both and a Demo­crat majority for a generation. Jimmy Carter did nothing, and President Bill Clinton tried but gave up on both reform and war.

I think President Obama is go­ing to downplay the war, not sur­rendering outright but finding a way to make the war less impor­tant politically than reform or less visible until reform is secure domestically. More troops per­haps, but deployed more slowly than requested. More aid for Afghanistan, but dependent upon the demonstration of the Afghan government’s own improvements. Most of the nation-builder advo­cates are loyal Democrats and will hold their tongues. The war, and certainly the application of the full counterinsurgency manu­al, has been postponed until health care reform is in place. ■

James Kitfield. National Journal, 17 October 2009.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20091017_2858.php

Jon Ward. Washington Times, 15 October 2009.
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/15/obama-weighs-more-than-afghan-troop-buildup//print/

Syed Saleem Shahzad. Asia Times, 15 October 2009.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ15Df03.html

Caroline Wadhams and Colin Cookman. Foreign Policy, 15 October 2009.
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/15/why_the_us_shouldnt_put_all_its_security_eggs_in_the_al_qaeda_basket

Daniel L. Davis. U.S. Army (unofficial and unclassified), 14 October 2009. Hosted on the Sic Semper Tyrannis Website.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/files/go-deep-_14-oct-09_.pdf

Excerpt:
In 2009 Afghanistan today, conditions on the ground are nothing like that of Iraq of early 2007 and there is little reason to believe the tactical success achieved by the Iraq surge could be repeated today in Afghanistan. There is presently no successful “Sons of Iraq”- type operation that would remove large numbers of enemy fighters from the streets, valleys and mountains. No large segment of the insurgency has indicated any interest in establishing a ceasefire with allied forces. The insurgency in Afghanistan today is spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles of inhospitable terrain and even 40,000 additional fighters would likely be insufficient to militarily stem the tide.

Tom Hayden. The Nation, 14 October 2009.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091102/hayden/single

Dexter Filkens. New York Times Magazine, 14 October 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/magazine/18Afghanistan-t.html

Comment:

…our military leadership in Afghanistan acts, to judge by Filkins piece, as if winning were a hard but typical thing to do, if only things were done right this time. (By the way, if Filkins had written a piece similar in tone about LeBron James, it would be considered embarrassingly fawning. Why is it that our objective reporters for major newspapers regularly fall in love with their military subjects and cast them as stars? And why is such work never considered embarrassing?)
~ Tom Dispatch
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175130

James Vega. The Democratic Strategist, 12 October 2009.
http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/_memos/tds_SM_Vega_Afg.pdf

Andrew J. Bacevich. Boston Globe, 11 October 2009.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/10/11/afghanistan___the_proxy_war/

Gordon Adams. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 08 October 2009.
http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/gordon-adams/afghanistan-and-pakistan-the-graveyard-us-foreign-policy-plannin

Melvin A. Goodman. truthout, 08 October 2009.
http://www.truthout.org/10080910

Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Washington Post, 08 October 2009.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/07/AR2009100704088.html

Robert Scheer, truth dig. 06 October 2009.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091007_a_war_of_absurdity/

General Stanley McChrystal, Commander ISAF, speech on Afghanistan to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 01 October 2009.
http://www.iiss.org/EasysiteWeb/getresource.axd?AssetID=31537&type=full&servicetype=Attachment

from flit, 29 September 2009.
http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2009_09_29.html

The following charts show combat KIAs per province, starting in 2006. It indicates where the truly heavy fighting is, and where insurgents are making inroads.

Fighting has just started in Helmand and Kandahar provinces in earnest. Fatalities are observed throughout the west and eastern regions, while the north is immune. Konar, Nuristan, Uruzgan and Kabul provinces (the little comma-shaped one) are the next highest.

The first coalition KIAs in the north, around Mazar and Kunduz. Helmand gets worse, while Kandahar and Uruzgan stay about the same. The fighting in the east worsens as well in Nangarhar, Paktia and Paktika provinces.

Again, Helmand worsens. Kandahar and Uruzgan and Zabul stay about the same. Coalition casualties increase in all regions over the year before, but particularly in Konar and Kabul provinces. Ghazni and Wardak provinces also see increases in fatalities as attacks on and around Highway 1 between Kandahar and Kabul trend up.

Partial results for the first three-quarters of this year show where the fighting continues to intensify. (Keep in mind that some of these provinces will get pinker still.) Notably Wardak and Kabul provinces have become significantly more dangerous to Coalition forces this year, as well as Kunduz in the north. Kandahar has also had more combat KIAs this year than last (49 vs 46) so by the end of the year it will likely end up redder than before, as well. But Helmand, which has seen 129 fatalities this year, up from 76 the year before, is still well ahead of all the rest. Helmand’s growth in KIAs (as well as Kandahar’s and Zabul)’s are obviously somewhat due to increased Western resources being applied there (more targets) in successive years, but as the majority of these fatalities were due to IEDs, and thus insurgent-initiated, the difference in fatality figures between provinces is very much going to be a reflection of where insurgent strategic-level efforts are on the increase as well, rather than purely changes to coalition op tempo.

Katherine McIntire Peters. Government Executive, 28 September 2009.
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=43682&dcn=todaysnews

Douglas MacGregor. Defense News, 28 September 2009.
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4296926&c=FEA&s=COM