Foreign Policy In Focus

"We have now cleared and held a great deal of insurgent-held territory that the insurgents have never lost in."
-- Col. Art Kandarian, a brigade commander with the 101st Airborne Division

So . . . let me get this straight. The new metric for success in a COIN environment is to clear and hold ground? 

Gosh, what’s next? Strategic hamlets? The Maginot Line? Pikes and crossbows? 

And this is what secdef describes as progress that has exceeded his expectations?

A friend of mine has a T shirt I love. It says

Southeast Asia War Games
1959 – 1975 

SECOND PLACE

Drop 'east', change the date, and you have a franchise.

Anybody got a screen printer I can borrow?

(Pictured, wildfire reaches a main road in Ein Hod, Israel on December 4.)

Someone asked me after an earlier FPIF post (Fireground Rules, Part 1) why I use so many firefighting analogies to explore foreign policy / security issues. The answer is simple.

It was wildland firefighting that started me studying complexity science. Because other than global weather (and bipedal hominid groups!) I think wildfire is the most complex natural phenomenon around. Like Mongol cavalry, it's fast, mobile, dynamic and fierce. The interplay of dozens of factors, and millions of variations in each, can generate manifestly different outcomes.

Also, to a fire, you and your crew are just another fuel type. It's not personal, but given the opportunity, it will kill you. So dancing with it calls for some serious agility and adaptiveness, and a different way of thinking – which I would hope someday to see in US foreign policy.

Long before David Petraeus and the FM 3-24 COIN manual called for teaching warfighters how to think, rather than what to think, fireground commanders were developing algorithms to keep their crews alive while taking down the beast. To be effective, they had to be relatively simple, allow wide latitude in behaviors and responses of leadership and crews, and continuously update. 

Here's another example. We called it the ICG – Incident Commander's Guidelines. It's a simple decision tree that works in a variety of emergency response situations, whether wildland, structure, mass casualty, hazmat or rescue. In my experience, it works pretty well in non-emergency situations, too, not least organizational leadership. 

1. Visualize Desired Future State
2. Gather Companions (no 'freelancing'– you always go as a team!)
3. Identify Objectives
4. Prioritize Objectives
5. Base Assignments on Priorities
6. Allocate Resources based on Assignments
7. Ensure Communications
8. Follow Up

Now, in the fire biz, some of this is pretty simple. The vision is typically not much more complex than, 'No one gets hurt and the fire goes out with minimal damage to the environment.' But it does drive all the other decisions on down the line.

So when we wonder how, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan got to be the total clusters they are, the fireground analysis is pretty simple – No one knew what the desired future state was! And if you don't know what it is, you can't bring it forward. Or as songwriter Bruce Cockburn put it so well, 'In the absence of a vision there are nightmares.'

The rest of the list is simply a handy way to prosecute the effort of achieving that desired outcome / future state. But do you notice any other major gaps when it's applied to IrAfPak? I would argue pretty much all of them.

Because the US didn't know – and so couldn't articulate – what it envisioned, it couldn't

• gain the wholehearted participation and support of allies
• determine or prioritize intelligent, achievable objectives
• commit appropriate force levels
• allocate personnel properly
• provide adequate equipment
• get all the appropriate people talking to each other
• or even decide if what they were doing was working

That, sports fans, is how you get 'burned over'.

If the US hopes to accomplish anything positive with its foreign (and domestic) policy, it needs to start every proposed endeavor at Number 1 on the ICG, and genuinely answer that question – what do we envision as our Desired Future State?

If the answer is a good one – such as liberty and justice for all – it won't have trouble selling the idea to congress, the American people, and even those citizens at the receiving end.

If the answer is a bad one – such as greater hegemony or another Halliburton contract – don't even start. It's gonna end ugly.

And thanks to singer / songwriter Leonard Cohen for the line, 'A scheme is not a vision.' 

Remember when the United States was said to be in negotiations with the Taliban a few months ago? But, Gareth Porter at IPS News reminds us that "the Taliban leadership was firmly denying that they were negotiating with the Afghan government. During the three-day Muslim holiday that began Sep. 9, Mullah Omar had said the Taliban would 'never accept' the current government." Furthermore, writes Porter: 

On Sep. 29, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Majahid said Petraeus's claim that the Taliban were negotiating with the Afghan government was "completely baseless", and that the Taliban would not negotiate with "foreign invaders or their puppet government". 

As we now know, what happened was:

. . . a man claiming to be Mullah Mansour somehow persuaded U.S. officials, including Petraeus, to help him go to Kabul to talk with Karzai [as a replacement for] Mullah Baradar last March after Baradar was detained by Pakistani intelligence, according to a Taliban spokesman quoted in Newsweek. 

It wasn't long before he began to look like a ringer:

The first warning signal that the man was an imposter was that he gave Karzai regime officials terms for peace that bore no resemblance to the public posture of the Taliban. He suggested that the Taliban merely wanted to be allowed to return safely to Afghanistan, along with promises of jobs and the release of prisoners, according to the Times account. There were no demands for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces or for a change to the constitutional system. 

Nevertheless . . .

. . . instead of finding the sudden disinterest in bargaining over those demands suspicious, Petraeus apparently approved giving the man a considerable amount of money to continue the talks.

How could he have been fooled with such ease?

That decision was evidently influenced by Petraeus's strong desire to believe that the vast increase in targeted raids aimed at killing or capturing suspected Taliban officials that had begun in March had caused top Taliban officials to give up their fundamental peace demands -- and that he was now on his way to repeating what was believed to be his success in Iraq.  

Surge Afghanistan: The Sequel -- Petraeus obviously hoped it would cement his reputation. (And pave the way for a presidential run? Gulp.) It may not be grounds for tendering his resignation. But, in the end, doesn't this make Petraeus look even more ridiculous than McChrystal did for allowing a Rolling Stone reporter to record his and his inner staff's indiscreet remarks?

(To left, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.)

On Saturday, at the NATO summit in Lisbon, officials announced 2014 as the target date for withdrawing combat forces from Afghanistan. Afghanistan is already America’s longest war. As of next Saturday, at nine years and 50 days, it will also have exceeded the length of the Soviet’s war in Afghanistan. In 2014, this will have been a 13-year war.

Eleven years sounds like a long time, but the U.S. presence in Afghanistan will almost certainly be even longer. While NATO secretary general, Anders Rasmussen framed 2014 as the end of NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan, Obama made sure to refer to 2014 as a target date rather than a deadline. The withdrawal of U.S. forces would, he noted, depend on the readiness of Afghan forces to take responsibility for their country’s security. 

Writing for Politico, Josh Gerstein described the NATO announcement as little more than spin. It “seemed intended to generate headlines or at least a public perception of a plan for withdrawal.”

In all likelihood, that media strategy will continue well into the future, and will become especially apparent when we arrive at previously announced target dates. In July 2011, we can expect the cameras to be rolling when the official drawdown of soldiers begins. As in Iraq in 2010, in Afghanistan in 2014, we can expect the president to announce the formal end of America’s combat mission and applaud the soldiers for a job well done. As in Iraq, the official end of the combat mission in Afghanistan will not mean the removal of all troops, but rather the continued presence of thousands of soldiers serving as advisors and trainers. And as in Iraq, the line between advisor and combat soldier will continue to be murky.

In the end, press conferences about Afghanistan tell us much more about the official media strategy than they do about the administration’s actual plans. Currently, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch has reported, the U.S. has over 400 military bases in Afghanistan and plans for a mega-embassy, the largest in the world. The administration would not embark on a building boom of this scope unless it had plans to be there for a long, long time. 

U.S. Special Operations forces night raids may be scaring the wits out of Afghans, but they're not the only ones freaked out. General David Petraeus professed to experience "astonishment and disappointment" when Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently called for an end to them because, aside from imperiling their lives, the raids drive Afghans into the arms of the Taliban.

In a Huffington Post article, Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy writes that the tactic of night raids "has been the subject of almost no public debate in the United States. Newspaper columnists aren't inveighing against the night raids. Members of Congress aren't demanding that the night raids stop." What if, he asks, "Afghans adopted a strategy of nonviolent resistance against the night raids? Could they be stopped?" Naiman explains. 

Let's suppose . . . that there were a well-organized popular movement in Afghanistan against the night raids. Let's suppose that this movement went around to respected Islamic scholars and got legal judgments that the night raids are an offense against Islam. Let's suppose that this movement prepared to defend villages where U.S. night raids are being carried out, and organized committees of unarmed women to implement this defense. And let's suppose that when a U.S. night raid began, a call would go out from the mosque, and a group of unarmed women would surround the house and say to the US soldiers: you're not coming in, and if you try, we will not move. And let's suppose that some Western NGO issued these women video cameras, as the Israeli human rights group B'tselem has issued Palestinians video cameras. And let's suppose that a group of people in the United States and Western Europe agreed that they would try to support this movement, by vigorously raising their voices in protest whenever US special forces tried to break the line of protesters. 

Nonviolent resistance is employed by thousands of Palestinians, along with sympathetic Israelis. Naiman cites the citizens of Budrus, who in 2004, used nonviolent resistance to force Israel to re-route the West Bank Barrier around its village. Do Focal Points readers think that this tactic has failed to achieve wide success in Palestine because it's an impotent act -- or because it hasn't been fully implemented? Can Gandhi's satyagraha work in Afghanistan as outlined by Naiman?  Let us know in the comments section.