High Ground: A Review

I rose this morning and intended to sit down and write a remembrance of Memorial Day that reflected on those whom have given their lives in the service of all of use who live under the flag of the United States. I pondered some past posts, 2011 2010, then remembered an email I had gotten last week from good friend and fellow blogger, Kanani Fong offering to let me view a preview copy of a new film she was helping to publicize. The film, was about a group of wounded warriors who took on the challenge of scaling 20,165 foot Lobuche Peak near Mount Everest in Nepal. Retiring to our study/library, I put on headphones to keep the sound from disturbing my wife, taking the opportunity from her busy life to sleep in. That turned out to be fortuitous, in that I found myself inserted into the story as it unfolded; where the only sound was that of voices of the dozen souls, accompanied by the sounds of war, bleeping horns as they traveled the rural roads to the airport, and a short but hair raising flight, before beginning their trek up the ever inverting slope of Lobuche.

High Ground:The Journey Home is an Uphill Battle was produced by Don Hahn, directed by Michael Brown, five time climber of Mt. Everest, and led by Blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer and his history making team of Everest climbers, led by Jeff Evans.

The film opens by introducing each team member, with scenes of chaos caused by IED's and gunfire, to add understanding to how they came to be at this point in their lives. Some were missing limbs, others suffered from traumatic stress and brain injuries, one was a Gold Star mother, and most remarkable of all, one was blind, and had a severely injured left hand. Each brought their own reasons for taking up this challenge that went far beyond what even the film makers might have hoped for. Beneath the physical effort to traverse the rock strewn pathways, and vertical stairs built against inclines that would bring vertigo to anyone pausing to look back down the steps that seemed to slide off into the valley floor, was the pain that many of those drawn this mountain, related during the outtake interviews that helped setup the next leg of the journey, but added insights into what happens to a warrior, when there are no more wars to fight.

Dan Sidles

One of  those moments came when former Marine Dan Sidles related that he felt making a warrior was similar to creating a nuclear bomb, where training to kill was like releasing nuclear fusion to be an effective soldier. He went on to explain that after the fighting was done, someone had to put out the fire to keep if from bursting into flame time after time. Listening to his reflection on how difficult that transition had been and how it affected his own life, gave immeasurable insight to how thousands of men and women have come home from past wars and felt the same sense of disconnect from society.

Steve Baskis

Chad Jukes

Joining Dan as a vividly memorable member of the team was Steve Baskis, blinded by an IED in Baghdad, who indelible desire to see (feel) the world, and experience all life has to offer, will make you marvel at how strong his heart and spirit shines. And then there is Chad Jukes who bears not only a slight resemblance to actor Owen Wilson, but conveyed the same uber-optimistic joy at being in the mountains, in a voice and delivery you would swear was Wilson's. You will see what I mean when you hear him exclaim in profane joy as he marveled about who had built the steps up the side of an almost vertical incline.

The film allows the viewer a very small window with which to understand that just because your don't wear scars that you are not wounded. Examples abound throughout the film of those who suffered the stress of not being physically injured but came to have what can't be fully understood by many including the military. It seemed that when the summit was at hand, it was the mental challenge that was harder to overcome than the physical challenges of missing limbs and sight, when the final assent was at hand.

For me there have been two really good documentaries made about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first, Restrepo was about a platoon in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, that captured men at war in a gritty portrait, told in much the same format as High Ground, using post combat interviews to support the story. High Ground, is the bookend of what happens to those soldiers who come home, wounded inside and out, and how they feel trying to belong and sensing that as Dan Sidles noted. "Thanks for your service, now go away." I can reflect that much of the same happened forty some years ago, when I returned from my own service. I did not display overt symptoms, but little things occurred to make me in hindsight, feel and act different. I can also reflect back on my fathers service in World War II; with five amphibious landings, and service later on an aircraft carrier off Japan in the final months of the war, left him different and feeling out of place when he returned. Confronting those times, takes awareness that you need to find a way to cope. They say that when one is an alcoholic or an addict, that you are never really cured, only learning to cope. Former soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines know that feeling; the forging of a warrior and the imersion in war, that Dan Sidles said was like nuclear fusion; that leaves spent fuel rods radiating inside even the most stoic warrior until their last breath.

I would strongly recommend going to see High Ground. Watch it, and let yourself join this fine group of Americans as they make their journey home by seeking the high ground.

Without a Trace: A Decade of Nation-building

protesters at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan

This is a follow up to the previous post, where I proposed that the United States follow Bismark's advice and dramatically change their strategy in Afghanistan, I came across this column by Mark Steyn, whose rapier sharp pen has cut to the core of where a decade in Afghanistan has left the United States. Steyn's column is at once both caustic and refreshing in it's honesty.

Say what you like about Afghans, but they're admirably straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn't put it any plainer:

"Die, die, foreigners!"

And foreigners do die. U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Loftis, 44, and Army Maj. Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a "secure room" that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan "intelligence officer." Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues.

Crusader fort

He goes on to compare our current bases as they now exist, to Crusader forts  in the 12th century, but from there the similarity ends.

In the past couple of months, two prominent politicians of different nations visiting their troops on the ground have used the same image to me for Western military bases: crusader forts. Behind the fortifications, a mini-West has been built in a cheerless land: There are Coke machines and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Safely back within the gates, a man can climb out of the full RoboCop and stop pretending he enjoys three cups of tea with the duplicitous warlords, drug barons and pederasts who pass for Afghanistan's ruling class.

The last crusader fort I visited was Kerak Castle in Jordan a few years ago. It was built in the 1140s, and still impresses today. I doubt there will be any remains of our latter-day fortresses a millennium hence. Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there...

Steyn then takes aim on our original strategy, and how each year it seems to not just drift, but blindly charge about, like some sightless Leviathan, that instead of laying waste to those who make war; chooses to carpet bomb with dollar bills that conveniently land in the pockets of the ruling class.

As much as any bailed-out corporation, the U.S. is "too big to fail": In Afghanistan as in the stimulus, it was money no object. The combined Western military/aid presence accounts for 98 percent of that benighted land's GDP. We carpet-bomb with dollar bills; we have the most advanced technology known to man; we have everything except strategic purpose.

Read the whole post:America's longest war will leave no trace

Steyn's final paragraph again made reference to the "crusader forts," and the broader symbolism in what he describes as a post-American world. As a nation, we have been blessed to have what Howard Bloom calls the pendulum of repurposing built in to our nation's DNA, which has led us to re-build from the ashes of miss-guided adventures or disasters. We can only hope that this time we have the money to re-start our vision.

I have long supported the mission both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it troubles me to no end to see that progress is mired in choosing the wrong weapons to deal with what nature, geography, and a people, who only understand the ancient pre-religious tenets of revenge and blood honor, to guide their every move; has seen our best hopes dashed on the rocks of reality. As politically in-correct as it might sound, looking back at the original strategy of surgical strikes, should have also carried the accompanied effort to risk what ever troops necessary in the beginning, too capture or kill every leader from Osama, to the entire Taliban and AQ leadership.

Then make it crystal clear that any future sanctuaries would bring a rain of carpet bombing upon that region until all are gone. That, as harsh as it sounds strategy, would send a "straightforward" message in a language all Afghan's and their allied cohorts understand, and have used to settle disputes for millenniums. An old friend and mentor, whose military and historical credentials are as deep as the sea, predicted the outcome the US is currently experiencing and a decade ago, suggested the most politically in-correct path, would have resulted in surgically cutting out the cancer, much like we rely on radiation and surgery as proven tools. Then following up with check-ups and changes in behavior to keep the cancer from returning. Finally, if the cancer of terrorism returns, more surgery, and if needed, doses of radiation to kill those dangerous cells.

Time to follow Bismark's advice and Stop

How Afgan's view America and NATO

Adios, Afganistan

Diplomacy by cruise missile

From the outset of this blog, I have remained a supporter of the efforts of our government and NATO nations to try and change the course of a culture mired in a medieval epoch that retarded it's advancement into modernity and even more troubling and dangerous for humanity, remained a refuge for those who wished to destroy and retard the advancement, that most of the world has seen in the past half-century.

That is why after careful consideration of the events of the past year, coupled with the total lack of progress in changing the political landscape in Afghanistan, and the failure of our own forces to be able to both penetrate the mindset, as well as understand the most basic tenants of the culture they are trying to nurture, has led me to conclude that is is time to stop, and dramatically change course in Afghanistan.

I ignored the call to change courses two years ago, when George Will wrote this in the Washington Post, August 31, 2009.

U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.

At the time, I took Will to task for abandoning the children, and especially the future generations of young women of Afghanistan to a life with no future.  Several things have happened in the past two years to finally bring me to declare that Will was right in his recommendation to pull back and in a phrase, practice what could be termed "diplomacy by cruise missile." Harsh and unfeeling as that appears, it makes sense that if we pull back, and make it plainly known to whoever ends up claiming to govern Afghanistan, that as long as they don't harbor those factions that threaten the world, including growing opium, or terrorists, that how they govern their countrymen is the choice of the people, whom have proven able to cast off any faction who tries to impose an unpopular rule set. Breaking those conditions, will bring a rain of missiles, or surgical strikes by special Op's teams to eliminate the threat. Hence we would be operating under the same rule set that Afghan's have lived with since before the Age of Alexander the Great.

Several events, including this from Tim Lynch, who's experience in Afghanistan is legendary, and sums up ten years in Afghanistan with three pictures.

Ten years ago, Afghans were thrilled to see us and thought that finally they could live in peace and develop their country

Five years ago they watched us flounder - we stayed on FOBs and shoveled cash by the billions into the hands of a corrupt central government that we insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary, was a legitimate government - one that had to be supported at all costs. We raided their homes at night and shot up civilians who got too close to our convoys, we paid for roads that did not exist and, because of the "force protection" mentality, most Afghans thought our soldiers were cowards because they never came to the bazaar off duty and unarmored to buy stuff like the Russians did. In fact, every bite of food our soldiers consumed was flown into country at great expense, so in a land famous for its melons and grapes our troops ate crappy melon and tasteless grapes flown in by contractors from God knows where.

Now, they want to shoot us in the face. Except for the klepocratic elite who want us to give them billions more and then shoot us in the face.

We are not innocent in this relation deteriorating to the point that saw our President apologizing yet again for American behavior colliding with the sensitivities of the people of Afghanistan and those of the Islamic faith. The fact that after ten years, we can't seem to educate our own forces about these sensitivities seems to point to a growing lack of discipline and the old saying, CRS, "can't remember shit. The continued desecration of the enemy, add to this perception by a people who have been raised in a culture that has placed their religious icons to a point of veneration beyond the highest of any on earth. Add to that reality, when things spin out of control, and American officers are murdered inside the most secure Afghan government ministry, President Karzi, ignores their deaths, and continues position himself against the US in a effort to survive after our exit.

It is high time we obliged him, the Taliban, and the Afghan people so intent on being left to their own devices. We should announce our withdrawal with clear conditions that hell in it's most vivid images will rain down on Afghanistan or any country harboring the seeds of terrorism. Also that we will provide assistance to any nation that abides by the conditions of acknowledging human rights in their most basic form. I was part of the Vietnam Experience, and our options to influence the aftermath was limited by external forces.  Today, conditions would dictate a different outcome, that would secure our security against attacks like 9/11, by making the source-code country on notice that hell will come their way if they abide those who wish us harm.

A roadmap for dealing with Pakistan

Gunmen in southwestern Pakistan attacked three NATO supply trucks on Tuesday, officials said. The New York Times reported on Tuesday evening that Pakistanis had been responsible for a 2007 ambush on U.S. soldiers.

 

The summer as waned and fall will soon usher in our second decade in the long war in Afghanistan. Last week troubling news about the often suspected and now confirmed involvement against our forces by Pakistan have come to light. Thomas Barnett has this excellent analysis of the situation and offers up five reasons for walking away from Pakistan and leaving her next door neighbors to checkmate her regional miss-behavior. Tom wrote this to introduce his column for Esquire's Political Blog.

In the wake of Admiral Mike Mullen offering such electrifying testimony last week, various commentators — and respectable ones, like Christopher Hitchens and Dexter Filkins — are circling the "long war" question of the moment: What to do about Pakistan? And it's clear to anybody with a brain at this point that Pakistan has abused our trust and military assistance as much as — or worse than — we have long abused that fake state in our pursuit of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. So now, as the West's fiscal crisis kicks into high gear, progressively denuding us of NATO allies while Congress finally gets serious about reining in the Pentagon's vast budget, we've come to a clear tipping point in the whole Af-Pak intervention as its tenth year of operations draws to a close.

My advice here is simple: It is time for both Afghanistan and Pakistan to stop being our problem and ours alone to solve. The Bush-Cheney unilateralism segued right into the Obama-Biden version: We simply refuse to deal with the regional powers, all of which want a far bigger say in how this whole thing settles out. Instead of working with India, China, Russia, Turkey, and Iran — and accepting that their more vigorous management of the situation would mean "victories" for them and not us — we've chosen consistently to side with Pakistan, which not only wants but is committed to keeping the region unstable.

Barnett continues by serving up five reasons, outlined below:

1. Focus on the Arab Spring instead.
2. Follow Al Qaeda elsewhere where it's really going.
3. Make new friends. And make China babysit.
5. Leave 'em be.

Now take a few minutes to read over what he is proposing and see if the logic floats?


Read More:
Pakistan America Relations

Another Strategic Forehead Slapping Moment in Afghanistan

Outpost Restrepo

Korangal Valley

Restrepo

One year ago yesterday, the United States Army closed the Korangal outpost in the Korangal Valley of northeast Afghanistan. This valley was the scene of almost constant combat after an outpost was established in April of 2006 by the U.S. Marines. Over the next four years the valley saw soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade duel with the the local mountain people supported by the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters slipping across the nearby Pakistan border. The valley was the scene for the Academy Award nominated documentary Restrepo and later written about by Bing West. in his best selling The Wrong War.

The main reason given for pulling back and abandoning the valley after two score and two deaths and hundreds of wounded was that the very presence of American forces was causing the locals to join the Taliban. The logic was these clannish mountain people would shun the Taliban and the Taliban would leave. Well folks, get ready for that forehead slapping moment.

The Wall Street Journal in an article last week reported that six months ago in September, 2010 that air strikes were conducted in the valley that resulted in dozens of Al Qaeda fighters and two senior leaders being killed. The article lays it out this way.

In late September, U.S. fighter jets streaked over the cedar-studded slopes of Korengal, the so-called Valley of Death, to strike a target that hadn't been seen for years in Afghanistan: an al Qaeda training camp.

Among the dozens of Arabs killed that day, the U.S.-led coalition said, were two senior al Qaeda members, one Saudi and the other Kuwaiti. Another casualty of the bombing, according to Saudi media and jihadi websites, was one of Saudi Arabia's most wanted militants. The men had come to Afghanistan to impart their skills to a new generation of Afghan and foreign fighters.

Over the past six to eight months, al Qaeda has begun setting up training camps, hideouts and operations bases in the remote mountains along Afghanistan's northeastern border with Pakistan, some U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials say. The stepped-up infiltration followed a U.S. pullback from large swatches of the region starting 18 months ago. The areas were deemed strategically irrelevant and left to Afghanistan's uneven security forces, and in some parts, abandoned entirely.

The article goes on to point out that contrary to military claims, the Taliban and in particular Al Qaeda have maintained their ties and continue to draw recruits from around the world.

Interviews with several Taliban commanders bear out that assessment. The commanders say the al Qaeda facilities in northeastern Afghanistan are tightly tied to the Afghan Taliban leadership. "In these bases, fighters from around the world get training. We are training suicide bombers, [improvised explosive device] experts and guerrilla fighters," said an insurgent commander in Nuristan who goes by the nom de guerre Agha Saib and who was reached by telephone.

The U.S. military has countered that raids by small elite units have been effective in countering the Al Qaeda presence in the valley. But they admit that those forces are stretched thin across the globe.

"We do not have an intelligence problem. We have a capacity problem. We generally know the places they are, how they are operating," said the senior U.S. military official, speaking of al Qaeda. The problem "is our ability to get there and do something."

Read more:
Al Qaeda Makes Afghan Comback!

Where do we go from here. Is this a window on the future of Afghanistan operations? Why did it take six months for this to information to surface? I can't imagine how the soldiers who fought in the valley and especially the parents of the slain feel today knowing that it appears that like the re-occurring nightmare of tactics in Vietnam it was all in vain. Does the answer lie in a Machiavellian or Curtis LeMay strategy of carpet bombing the valley or continued insertion of small forces that sooner or later will take more casualties in an never ending conflict.

"The Wrong War" A must read for 2011

Bing West

Cpl. Dakota Meyer

I normally don't stop while reading a book to make a recommendation. But in the case of Bing West Marine combat veteran of Vietnam and current author of this unvarnished critique that author Steven Pressfield said was so gritty and real that, "you could practically scrape the dirt off its pages." The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and The Way Out of Afghanistan needs to be in the hands of every member of Congress, the Joint Chiefs and the President as well as every American who has supported our men and women these past decade since 9/11.

There are many fine reviews of this work, so I will let such esteemed voices as Dexter Filkins, Andrew Exum, and Col T.X. Hammes, USMC (ret) reviews stand as testament to the quality of this work.

Two stories stood out thus far in the first 100 pages. Amid the many trips that then 68 years young Bing West undertook, was one in the summer of 2009. Orders had come down, pushed from Karzai's office through General McChrystal to retake a small town surrounded by four hills leading into the Hindu Kush. The day before the unit was with was to move into the town, West became violently ill, vomiting and racked with diarrhea. After three trips to the latrine, West was taken by his tent mate Staff Sgt. Eric Lindstrom to the medics who after trying to stop the loss of body fluids from every orifice, evacuated West to the hospital in Jalalabad where a Dr. pronounced the verdict, "Cholera." Later that night as Bing lay connected to IVs, an officer from the company going into the valley, hobbled in dripping blood from an RPG round. The officer began to relate how the company was met by plunging fire of the worst kind and then after a while told West that the Sgt Lindstrom had not made it. The passage that Bing West writes a few paragraphs later about the randomness of death in battle and most poignantly about how Sgt Lindstrom had so carefully packed his gear as he was being evacuated to the hospital, leaves you with a still feeling that makes you want to pause and collect your thoughts before trying to read more.

This second story, has only officially surfaced a few months ago, when it was announced that a young Marine Cpl. with an all American name of Dakota Meyer, had been recommended to be the second living person in the Afghanistan War to receive the Medal of Honor. the official story until Bing's riveting account has been that Cpl. Meyer braved intense fire on at least two occasions in a vain effort to save four fellow Marine comrades who had been trapped in an ambush by over 150 Taliban. This story when fully told, will place Dakota Meyer's name alongside such legendary Marines as Sgt. Dan Daly, John Basilone, and soldiers Audie Murphy and Sgt Alvin York. I will not even try and paraphrase the story of Cpl. Meyers on that day in September of 2009 except to draw a thin outline of his bravery. When a carefully laid ambush by over 150 fighters brought in from Pakistan for the purpose of setting the ambush caught 13 Marines, 2 soldiers and 80 Afghan soldiers and border police in a three sided ambush without hope of breaking free. Meyer and a two companions over a period of six hours, made four trips into the firestorm in armored hummers each time returning with wounded and trapped Afghan soldiers. After almost every trip the hummers were so shot up that they would switch and plunge in again. Finally on the fifth trip guided by a Blackhawk, they got close to where the four marines lay. Meyers braved fire again on foot to fight to their position only to find they had been killed. It it this final action Meyers is nominated for the medal. Bing West wrote that Meyers had preformed the greatest act of courage ever displayed in this decade long war. There are no medals for saving the Afghan soldiers, but the story put together by West from interviews with Meyer and his fellow Marines at the time will make this young unassuming man's name a legend.

In closing, I would again urge anyone reading this to take your next twenty dollars and buy The Wrong War regardless of how you think about the politics, the "honor, patriotism and sacrifice", displayed in those pages will live as a testament to the valor of those who serve.

UPDATE:
An Interview with Bing West, by Small Wars Journal

A Sirocco wind of change blows across the Middle East

Bahrain Protests

Lybian Protests

Egypt after the fall

Changes are afoot in the Middle East, or are they? As millions of what Professor and author Oliver Roy, has called the post-Islamist generation have taken to the streets to protest and call for immediate change in the governments that for some, have ruled since aniquity. Professor Roy writing in the New Statesman declares what we are witnessing is not an Islamic Revolution that threatens to underpin the West.

Look at those involved in the uprisings, and it is clear that we are dealing with a post-Islamist generation. For them, the great revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s are ancient history, their parents' affair. The members of this young generation aren't interested in ideology: their slogans are pragmatic and concrete - "Erhal!" or "Go now!". Unlike their predecessors in Algeria in the 1980s, they make no appeal to Islam; rather, they are rejecting corrupt dictatorships and calling for democracy. This is not to say that the demonstrators are secular; but they are operating in a secular political space, and they do not see in Islam an ideology capable of creating a better world.

The same goes for other ideologies: they are nationalist (look at all the flag-waving) without advocating nationalism. Particularly striking is the abandonment of conspiracy theories. The United States and Israel - or France, in the case of Tunisia - are no longer identified as the cause of all the misery in the Arab world. The slogans of pan-Arabism have been largely absent, too, even if the copycat effect that brought Egyptians and Yemenis into the streets following the events in Tunis shows that the "Arab world" is a political reality.

Read More:
This is not an Islamic revolution

And along the same line, comes this first of several reports that will be filed by Andrew Exum, whose blog Abu Muqawama, has been a daily read since Andrew was a student at Kings College in London. Today, Exum is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is currently in Egypt where he filed this report.

First, there is a sense you get that many Egyptians honestly feel the only thing standing in between the Egyptian nation and greatness was the sclerotic Mubarak regime. Now that Muabark is gone, the military -- and whatever government that follows -- will naturally struggle to meet those expectations.

Second, the Egyptian people have now witnessed a dramatic display of people power: mass demonstrations effectively removed from power a man who seemed immovably secure in his post just one month ago. The incentives are there for every group of people in Egypt with a grievance (which is to say everyone) to now strike or demonstrate to see, in effect, what they can get. The military is growing increasingly frustrated with these demonstrations and has ordered them to cease. But the incentive structure is all wrong: even if you don't think you'll get anything, why would you not demonstrate right now? The worst case scenario is, you get nothing. But heck, you might get something!

One of the sources of the military's frustration leads to my third concern, which is the fact that even if the people have a valid grievance, there is no real authority to negotiate with at the moment. Egypt needs a transitional government of some sort, but right now, you've got people agitating for higher wages, back pay, and more reforms on the one hand, and a military on the other hand that is not prepared in the least to hear these concerns and act on them.

Read more:
Egypt Trip Report Part 1

UPDATE ON EGYPT TRIP
Report Part II

How this will all play out is transformational history in the making. Will leaders emerge to consolidate the youthful passion and start the Egypt down the long road to connecting with the greater global community? As Exum points out the army of Egypt like our own army in Iraq and now Afghanistan is not equipped for nation building. As a measure of the kind of security needed to secure a country and begin recovery, we can pause and look at the U.S. Army in Germany after World War II. We had two armies made up of 12 divisions from 1945-1948 just in the American Sector. Troop strength in Iraq and Afghanistan were spread to the thickness of cellophane in comparison.

After many wobbly starts Iraq seems to have a functioning government that is counting the days to when the last American soldier leaves. Afghanistan is a horse of a different color and a people historically and socially operating in a different universe that either Iraq or Egypt and any other Middle East country. Afghanistan a country whose fractured mountain ranges make it's people as remote from each other as if they were living on islands.

Two things caught my eye this week about Afghanistan. Bing West has a new book The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan that looks at the war, the people who are fighting and the way out. Andrew Axum from the the previous piece reviewed West's book for the Wall Street Journal.

Bing West's "The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan" is one of the best books yet written on the war in Afghanistan. I disagree with the way Mr. West characterizes the war at times, but "The Wrong War" is filled with both vivid descriptions of the Afghan fighting and sound advice concerning how counterinsurgencies should be waged.

First, the grit. "The Wrong War" contains some of the most compelling descriptions of small-unit combat that I have ever read. Mr. West has argued in the past that the U.S. armed forces have lost their "warrior ethos" and calls them here "a gigantic Peace Corps." But these claims in no way square with what he depicts.

Read more at.
Small Wars Journal

Going hand in hand with West's book is this article from U.S. Army Combined Arms Center's Military Review. Lt. Colonel Michael C. Veneri, USAF wrote this about his tour of duty training officers at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan this past summer. His observations are the basis for what he describes is a metaphor for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

I spent a summer as the physical education (PE) mentor to the National Military Academy of Afghanistan’s (NMAA) Physical Education department. My predecessor had recommended that I bring some equipment, so I brought along 30 basketballs, 12 volleyballs, and 12 soccer balls, as well as a few American footballs. Another previous U.S. mentor had provided the PE department with an electric air compressor, one that charges a car battery, has a floodlight, and probably retails for about $50 at any auto store. I used this to pump air into a few balls when I first arrived. About a month later, I needed to fill up a few basketballs for some drills I planned to show the PE instructors. One of the Afghan PE instructors, a lieutenant colonel and the overseer of the air pump, grabbed the balls and began to fill one of them up.

I had been talking with my interpreter for a few minutes when I noticed the basketball was not getting any air. I pulled the pin out and found the clamp at the end of the fabric hose had come loose and some of the fabric had frayed. The pump was pushing air out but, because of the frayed fabric, air was not making it into the ball. The Afghan lieutenant colonel came over and told me it was not broken but that it would take time to fill up the basketball. I told him the pump was broken. He said no, it would take time. The equipment manager, a 47-year-old senior NCO who had been a colonel prior to Karzai’s arrival, came over to see if he could fix the pump, as did the boxing instructor. For the next ten minutes, three men, all 40-odd years old, sat befuddled before this air compressor as if it were some sort of an oracle.

After turning the air pump on and off several times, turning it upside down, and shaking it, the Afghans’ perplexity seemed to diminish when, through my translator, I said the fabric hose was frayed and was preventing a good seal. Ah, they could fix this problem. The boxing instructor knew what to do. He grabbed a role of scotch tape, provided courtesy of the U.S. government, and wrapped the frayed end with scotch tape—not duct tape or maybe even masking tape. While those products may have had a chance at temporarily fixing the problem, such items were unavailable at NMAA, unless a U.S. mentor provided them. In the spirit of the often-cited Lawrence of Arabia—that better they do it tolerably rather than I do it perfectly—I kept my mouth shut, waited, and watched as these three men worked the problem.

Lt. Col. Veneri goes on to discuss a fundemental difference between American and Afghan decision making.

Initiative.

Initiative, as a value, permeates American culture. In every aspect of U.S. society, someone thinks there is a better way; not so with the Afghans. I did not get any sense of a “can do” attitude from the PE department or from any other Afghan I encountered. They readily took what I provided— lesson plans, equipment, textbooks—but when I asked them how they planned on improving their lessons or expanding their curriculum or figuring out a supply system, they had no answers, no notion of how to improve, and no institutional mechanisms to foster improvement. The PE instructors told me I could provide them with improved lesson plans, but they would not do it themselves. I finally figured out that the level above them had to approve every change, which ultimately made the dean the one who determined what was best for the PE department, not the PE instructors themselves. This strict hierarchy prevented any type of decentralization of authority or primary level decision making. It also quashed any initiative from bubbling up from the bottom. While hierarchy is not new to military organizations and is a fundamental trait throughout Afghan culture, it proved incapacitating when I was trying to make changes within the PE department. Instructors could not change their syllabi or their method of teaching without supervisor approval.

Read the whole article
Multiplying by Zero
Major H/T to Kanani at Kitchen Dispatch for sending me this article. She has a major stake in what we are doing in Afghanistan as her "hubs" an army surgeon, just started his second deployment

Reports of the Death of a Blog have been greatly exaggerated!

Mark Twain penned a response to the New York Journal after they published an obituary reporting his death advising them that they had mistaken the death of his cousin for him. At our last post we reported that Thomas Barnett had announce that he was ending his blog after a long run. Since then Tom has decided to change the Blog's format and go for content instead of the daily broadcast of comment and response to MSM news stories.

In that vein, GLOBLOGIZATION as Tom had dubbed his site, will continue as a platform to report on the major stories and events that shape our future. True to form, Tom Barnett offers up this on the recent release of Bob Woodward's new book Obama's War. Here are a few of the key observations.

Reading through the excerpts, about the only people who come off as calculating and restrained are Clinton, Gates and Petraeus. Obama and his civilians, to including his retired generals, all come off as rather interpersonally nasty, quick to panic, quick to point fingers, etc.

...My take-away: if voters don't like or don't trust Obama on the domestic/economic side, then this book does a number on any perceived salvation to be found in his foreign policy....

...I see a lot of energy being directed toward this book by insiders eager to be viewed positively by history (although none will on this score), but I don't see any of that anguish leading to any innovation....

The bottom line; Tom ends on this note.

And it ain't working. Not at all.

And frankly, at some point, Clinton needs to start thinking about what's good for her country and not just this administration, because she's big enough to force the issue.

Time to stop being satisfied with "keeping all the balls in the air," Madame Secretary. Time to issue some ultimatums--as in, "Either we get bold on this or I get gone and make my own case to the American people."

Woman-up, Hillary. Because you will be judged severely for not doing more.

All I can say, is get yourselves over to read the whole piece by clicking on the link.
Woodward's latest makes the Rolling Stone piece look tame by comparison

In a related post, Small Wars Journal linked this next piece by Robert Haddick in his continuing series This Week at War, where he continues the along the same path as Tom Barnett, by looking at the impact that Obama's War may have on the conduct of the war.

Read more:
This Week at War: Obama vs Team Surge

H-Day Reads

After the somewhat depressing post, looking back from 2050 at how our experence in Afghanistan will end. and entering a second decade of crisis after passing the first, trying to plant western style democacy in the ancient cradle of civilization where the region never really advanced beyond the despots that ruled for the past 5,700 years. Two articles attracted my attention and deserve a deeper look.

The first is from an Op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ms. Ali reminds us of what the late historian Samual Huntington once wrote, and how it relates to the recent controversy surrounding the mosque in New York and other small ripples of conflict between the West and Islam.

What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.

Huntington's argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.

Ms Ali ends her comments with this observation.

The greatest advantage of Huntington's civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. And it helps us to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historic rivalries between Arabs, Turks and Persians for leadership of the Islamic world.

But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.

Read more:
How To Win The Clash of Civilizations

Iraqi Tribal Map

Afghan Tribal Map

This next read will surly stir some response at least mentally, since it challenges most of the narrative that has been taught the past forty years in U.S. History classes from elementary to the university.

Phillip S. Meilinger a retired Air Force colonel with a PhD in military history penned this next article, posted over at Small Wars Journal. Meilinger takes a unvarnished updated look back at the native societies that populated North America during the Pre-Columbian Era. Backed up by the latest archeological data, Meilinger serves up a concise if somewhat narrow view of tribal culture as it relates to war. In this vein I think it is needed to convey the theme without becoming bogged down in the minutia of this tribe was not as war like at that one. Meilinger opens with this intro.

There is an old saw among political scientists that democracies seldom fight other democracies. Although the accuracy of that statement often hinges on definitions—was 1914 Germany an autocracy because of the Kaiser, or a budding democracy because of an elected Reichstag—it is nonetheless largely valid. It has thus been a tenet of US diplomacy to urge the spread of democracy worldwide. Richard L. Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, said recently in an interview: “every President except John Quincy Adams has been involved in the belief that the world is made better by a U.S that is involved in the protection of human freedoms and human rights across the board.” He went on to assert that “every postwar President has believed we have a duty to spread democracy.”

Cutting to the chase Meilinger contrasts what we now know about the Pre-Columbian cultures living in North America and what most have been taught in the past forty years.

Recent books capitalize on a new cycle of research that began a decade or so ago when archeologists and osteologists looked into Indian prehistory—the two thousand or so years before contact with Europeans. The results have been startling. Researchers discovered that prehistoric hunters/gatherers and indigenous peoples were violent and warlike. Most Indian villages, all over the continent, were surrounded by timber stockades, earthen palisades and berms, and other defensive fortifications.6 Indeed, the supposedly most peaceful of all Native Americans, the Anasazi of the southwest, did after all, often live in barely accessible cliff dwellings carved out of mountain sides. Why would they go to the trouble of hiding their homes and making them so indestructible if they had nothing to fear from each other?

What does this have to do with the war in Afghanistan.

It appears that President Obama also believes that peace and democracy can and sometimes should be imposed on lawless areas, but we need to rethink such a strategy and its implementation. Is democracy a realistic goal in Iraq, Afghanistan or other Islamic countries, and if so, how can it be achieved? Will 34,000 more American ground troops in Afghanistan provide the security and institutions needed to nurture democracy? It would appear that the goal should be to change the mindset and culture of ethnic groups—to accept the notions of diversity, tolerance, freedom and peaceful coexistence. These are not unworthy aims, and their achievement could go a long way to removing the hatred and violence than now reigns in too many areas of the world. The challenge is to determine a methodology for achieving these positive goals.

Read the whole piece
Primitive Violence, Culture, and the Path to Peace

Afghanistan, 2050

August 15, 2050 marked the 35th Anniversary of the fall of Kandahar when the fundamentalist Taliban reclaimed the city and began imposing Sharia Law across the southern half of what had been pre-2015 Afghanistan. The fall of Kandahar marked the end of a fourteen year effort by the United States and a coalition made up of NATO countries to prevent the return of the Taliban regime after the September 11, 2001 attack in New York. The war, by far the longest in U.S. history had claimed 3,149 American wars dead, and had cost over $900 billion in an attempt to keep the frayed and fractured country together while it tried to stop incursions by the Taliban, who were supported by militants in Pakistan and the wealth of oil rich Middle East countries.

The separation, led to a buffer zone extending southwesterly from the Hindu Kush to the Iranian border. Pakistan saw their western tribal region begin to seethe in an attempt to break-away to join in a greater Pashtunistan. After fighting a short war to save face, Pakistan eventually saw this as a positive move, as Pashunistan became a buffer state on its western border and a source for allies in the event of war with India.

An Afghanistan confederation sponsored by the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the United States, survives today, in the old territory of the Northern Alliance and in the enclaves of Tajik, Baluchi, and Hazara. This area encompassed most of the oil and gas reserves and where many discoveries of lithium deposits were found. The foundation for this confederation came from the efforts of the United States to provide what some had dubbed, “Diplomacy by cruise missile” where the threat held to the Taliban’s throat was conventionally assured destruction via missiles and bombs if they violated the rules of the armistice, by undermining or attacking the non-Pashtun areas or sponsoring any kind of global terrorist camps.

The only caveat to this arraignment was that it gave an enormous boost to those elements who believed that they had defeated the infidels. Within two years of the brokered armistice other pan-Islamic fundamentalist groups taking heart in the perceived defeat of modernity, began to strike at the more moderate Gulf States and across Africa. The United States had entered into a period of isolationism brought on by extended long term unemployment and falling revenues that caused a drastic cutback in military spending after the collapse of the dollar as the foreign reserve currency.

This came about as a maturing China, began to see the benefit of creating the world’s largest consumer society that within half a decade, replaced the falling market demands of an economically weakened Europe and America. They realized that by backing other currencies and the Yuen, and ending massive purchases of Treasury bonds that they could constrict the United States ability to project its power, leaving Asia and the Western Pacific under their own sphere of influence.

The resurgence of the United States came after a horrific attack occurred on September 11, 2021 on the twentieth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. A cruise missile attack was launched from ocean containers hidden aboard an unsuspecting container ship, and struck the newly constructed Freedom Tower in New York. The attack came during a Saturday memorial service attended by over 250,000 people. At least 12,604 were killed and 98,000 injured, as four cruise missiles rained down on the tower and gathered crowd. At the same time, suicide attacks occurred in Moscow, Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai and Paris, killing over 10,000 and leaving 150,000 injured from the attacks and panic that followed. Outrage was immediate and the United States began to mobilize in an effort not seen since the beginning of World War II, eighty years earlier. President Hillary Clinton, eight months into her second term, had already earned the title of America’s Margaret Thatcher for her strong foreign policy stand, first revealed during a stint as President Obama’s Secretary of State, made a stirring speech to the nation echoing words spoken eighty years earlier by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. President Clinton had spent her first term trying a blend of old “New Deal” projects and tax incentives to spur education and a return to the work ethic that had brought the United States to the pinnacle of world power. Moderate successes had led to her re-election against strong challenge by Senator Bobby Jindel. In her seventies, Mrs. Clinton rose to the occasion by leading a mobilization of America and enlisting the G-20, to confront those who wanted to send the advancing world hurtling back in time. Clinton’s foreign policy adviser Thomas Barnett had lobbied hard for a “Department of everything else” that could lead efforts to integrate developing nations by creating jobs; the true path to draining the swamp of despair. Clinton and Barnett teamed with Secretary of State Petreaus, created a team reminiscent of Nixon and Kissinger, or Truman and Marshall, as they wove a network of core nations into an alliance to confront the root cause of dissatisfaction among the burgeoning populations of the nations caught at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid.

China came to confront the reality that her aging population and dropping demographics was causing her consumer society dreams to rapidly diminish. She was faced with a need for a strong partner to help secure her global markets and who would not threaten her borders. China chose to return to the one source they recognized as a safe investment, the United States. The mobilization of Americas work force and a growing military, had the same effect World War II had had on the Great Depression. The Decade of Despair (2010-2020), as it was known, quickly ended. Americans feeling truly threatened as never before, banded together to confront the crisis. China recognizing this, and moved to shore up her alliance and protect her markets by forging a security alliance with the United States and the former combatants of World War II, Germany and Japan. In the next chapter, we will discuss how America regained her status as the most advanced and free society known to history

....................................................................................................................................................................
When I was invited to participate in this endeavor, the first thing I thought was that given my age 63, that it is unlikely that I will be around in 2050 to see how history will judge Afthanistan and whether America is mortally wounded by sudden course changes that has left today's Americans disgruntled more than any time since the 1960's. But, my children and grandchildren will be there to witness what really happened and whether it was worth it or just a footnote in a dusty unread history book telling of the end of the American Experience or whether we remain a symbol of hope for the rise of the common person borne on the winds of a multinational economic and political union. So in that vein I remain confident that we will re-purpose our society and hence continue to lead the world towards hope and prosperity.

I fell back to use history as a rhyme instead of repeating itself. If one has read William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations, Thomas PM Barnett’s Great Powers, David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear, John Robb’s Brave New War or Joel Kotkin’s The Next 100 Million: American in 2050, you will get a prism with which to view and ponder the future.    

Afghanistan in 2050 is an enigma that may in 2050, look like the last lines of this old cowboy poem.



REINCARNATION

What is reincarnation? The Cowpoke asked his friend

His pal replied it happens when your life has reached its end

They comb your hair and wash your neck and clean your fingernails

And lay you in a padded box away from life's travails

And the box then goes in a hole that's been dug in the ground

And reincarnation starts in when your're planted neath the mound

Then clods melt down, just like the box, and you who is inside

And then you're just beginning on your transformation ride

Meanwhile the grass will grow upon your rendered mound

And soon upon your lonely grave a single flower is found

And then a horse will wonder by and graze upon flower

That once was you and now become your vegetated bower

The posie that the horse done eat along with his other feed

Makes bone and fat and muscle essential to the steed

But some is left that he can't use and so it passes thru

And finally lays upon the ground this thing that once was you

And say by chance I wanders by, and sees this on the ground

And I ponders and wonders at this object that I've found

And I thinks of reincarnation and life and death and such

And I come away concluding you ain't changed all that much.

Crossposted at chicagoboyz

Link to the whole series AFGHANISTAN 2050 ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

"I hate newspaper men." General William T Sherman, 1863

General William T Sherman

The title of this post will become apparent as you read down further and absorb all the facts swirling around this last week as our military regroups after losing its field commander in Afghanistan. General McChrystal is not the first general taken from the field. During the Civil War we lost general officers as they were fired or shot down in battle. The Army survived and went on to win, actually coming out stronger whether the loss was intentional or the fortunes of war.

Amid the focus on Afghanistan, and the blizzard of analysis of how General Petreaus will turn the tide of war; is the continued back wash of what was McChrystal thinking? This post from Andrew Exum AKA, Abu Muqawama generated a bloom of over 70 comments that as Abu notes, are worth the price of admission.

Now that Gen. McChrystal is gone and consensus has formed that Preisdent Obama was well within his rights to have fired him, it's worth going back and looking anew at the Rolling Stone piece that got him fired. On the one hand, David Brooks in today's New York Times and Schumpter in the Economist lament the fact that public figures are now all the less likely to actually open up in front of journalists and speak freely. I don't think this excuses the mistake of thinking you could speak freely to a reporter from Rolling freaking Stone whose opposition to your strategy had already been established, but I take their points. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald and others seized on a comment in the Politico that this would likely not have happened had Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter, not been a free-lance. The logic is that a reporter from the New York Times or the Washington Post would have been more servile to the people they cover because they do not want to burn their sources. After enduring some members of the White House press corps who do, frankly, seem to exchange favorable coverage of the administration for access, I can understand their complaint.

Read more:
Beers on the table, Journalist and the public figures they cover

This fine follow up over at Zenpundit calls attention to the rogue pachyderm in the basement of the White House.

Miss P. bangs pots and pans, shoots off fireworks, uses her knee to pound a bass drum while blowing a vuvuzela in an effort to draw attention to the Elephant in the policy room no one wishes to address.

It won’t work until a Pakistani-sponsored terrorist pulls off an act of catastrophic terrorism inside the United States and kills a large number of elite Americans in Manhattan or the Beltway. After that point, we’ll get serious and these views will become conventional wisdom.

I just hope the terrorists don’t succeed in Arizona or Kansas - the story will only make page 2, then and policy will stay the course:

Read More:
Pundita on Pakistan

Finally, comes a post from excellent blog friend Lexington Green, who offers this musing on a possible motive behind McChrystal's supposedly lasp in judgement in letting his subordinates pound back beers with the folks that General William T Sherman had this to say about:

"I hate newspaper men.They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.”

Lex offers this to begin his analysis of what might have been on McChrystal's mind that night in Paris.

… I think I would find that he set himself up intentionally to let the Rolling Stone guy get quotes that would end his tenure.

Gen. McChrystal is anything but a stupid or careless man. He is a cold and calculating strategist, both against the enemy, and in terms of his career and his rise to three star rank. He was also a warrior who would expend lives as needed to destroy the enemy and to win. And he was willing to take personal physical risks as well. Sacrifice was something he was willing and able to demand from himself and others.

The article tellingly notes that, over his career, he had a genius for knowing exactly where the lines are, and how much he could get away with. Yet, here, he stepped firmly over that line. We are supposed to believe this was inadvertent? That is not plausible. I cannot conceive of Gen. McChrystal making the Homer Simpson “d’oh!” noise.

He had to know he was doing that.

But why?

Read more:
If I could read Stanley McChrystal’s mind …