HG's Saturday Night Gazette

Saturday Even Post 1949

Egypt in turmoil, 2011

Years ago, a famous magazine was the Saturday Evening Post which was a staple in millions of American homes offering up short stories and serials on pre-television evenings. The Post eventually faded from the coffee tables to now re-appear six times a year and  now on line. The blogs have taken over from the post and even the Main Stream Media in being source for stories and information. Keeping with the tradition started first by Benjamin Franklin when he ran the fore-runner of the post the Pennsylvania Gazette, this blog offers up reads of the week or for a Saturday evening.

Egypt continues to dominant the attention of most of the world less China where fear of similar protests has brought censorship of non-official new about Egypt.

As the popular uprising ends it's second week, attention already begins to turn to ask how the signals were missed. The New York Times reports that President Obama is already faulting our spy agencies for not reading the tea leaves.
Obama Said to Fault Spy Agencies

This post from Small Wars Journal points to information first published in 2004 that posed that question.

With the recent turmoil in North Africa and unrest in the Middle East, we decided to dust off and revisit several previously published articles by friends of Small Wars Journal. The intent is two-fold: 1. To determine if some of these events were predictable given open source research and analysis and 2. To better understand the causal factors leading towards small wars. In the Middle East, some of these factors are self-evident: oppressive regimes, lack of personal and religious freedoms, lack of jobs, and lack of hope in the future; however, scarcity of resources remains an understudied area.

Read more:
Revolt in North Africa, Was it Predicted?

This article seems to mirror much of what geo-strategist Thomas Barnett has been writing about since publication of the best selling The Pentagon's New Map that growing discontent in places like North Africa would occur as the youth bulge, begins to fray against the suppression of decades of suppressive didictatorship's. The past few weeks has seen Barnett on top of the developments as he share his experience in a series of posts and video links. Barnett called the root of the recent uprisings an outgrowth of the Big Bang theory.

For an up to date source of news about Egypt and other political boils, blisters and scrapes worldwide, I recommend Small Wars Journal's Roundup where major news stories are cataloged and linked at one source.

Finally, if watching the events in Egypt unfold didn't make you feel like a cast member of Sanctum , then read this next and final piece.

Gerry Garibaldi worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter and executive before becoming a high school teacher at an inner city high school. His story in City Journal.org  is depressing, and a mirror held up to society that reveals the bounty of a over indulgent society.

In my short time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine—already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations—are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.

Read on as the article drills into the reason that after all the above effort, it appears to be for naught.

Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.

Garibaldi pulls no punches in describing why this has become such a problem.

Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.

Read on:

From the FBI: 63 percent of all suicides are individuals from single-parent households. From the Centers for Disease Control: 75 percent of adolescents in chemical-dependency hospitals come from single-parent households. From the Children’s Defense Fund: more than half of all youths incarcerated for criminal acts come from single-parent households. And so on.

And now if you have not run out of breath, read the whole story.
“Nobody Gets Married Any More, Mister”

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

Ironic Military Musings

Roman Legion

American Citizen Soldiers

It's ironic how unrelated posts will appear simultaneously in the blogosphere only to be recognized as sharing a common theme. This past week’s offerings were no exception. The war in Afghanistan and in turn the military is the focus of this post on recommended reads and commentary.

Mark the master of Zenpundit posted the following as well as his comments on Dr. Bernard Finel's essay entitled, The Fall of the Roman Republic: Lessons for David Petraeus and America.

Mark adds this mid way through his comments:

Could we get a “man on horseback” or a “triumvirate”? Americans have repeatedly elected generals as President, including some of Civil War vintage who were, unlike U.S. Grant, of no great distinction and Teddy Roosevelt, a mere colonel of the volunteers, was a Rough Rider all the way into the Vice-Presidency. (Incidentally, I don’t see General Petraeus or any other prominent Flag officer today being cut from the mold of Caesar, Antony or Pompey. It’s not in the American culture or military system, as a rule. The few historical exceptions to this, MacArthur, Patton and McClellan, broadcast their egomania loudly enough to prevent any Napoleonic moments from crystallizing). Never have we had an ambitious general in the Oval Office in a moment of existential crisis though - we fortunately had Lincoln and FDR then - only after the crisis has passed and they were elected them based on the reputation of successful service. It is unlikely that we would, but frustrations are high and our political class is inept and unwilling to contemplate reforming structural economic problems that might impinge upon elite interests. Instead, they use the problems as an excuse to increase their powers and reward their backers.

When in Rome....

One of the themes in Dr. Finel's essay is the decline of the participation of free rural citizens in military service. This caused the following:

...At the time of the Cimbrian War (113-101 BC), the threat of foreign invasion by Germanic tribes forced Gaius Marius to replace the traditional Roman Army soldiered by land-owning citizens with one built around landless volunteers for whom military service was a career and who owed loyalty primarily to the general paying the bills rather than the state. Marius’ legions defeated the Germans, but a new instability had been introduced into the Roman state due to the tendency of these new volunteer forces to be loyal to personal patrons rather than state institutions.

Small Wars Journal sponsored this next essay by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, who lays out a good argument for the return of conscription as a way to spread the experience and civic responsibility for defending the nation to all strata’s of American society.

"The U.S. should therefore abandon the all-volunteer military and return to our historic reliance on citizen soldiers and conscription to wage protracted war. This approach proved successful in both world wars and offers several advantages over the all-volunteer military. First and most important, this approach demands popular participation in national security decisions and provides Congress with powerful incentives to reassert its war powers. Unlike the all-volunteer force, a conscripted force of citizen soldiers would ensure that the burdens of war are felt equally in every community in America.

Second, this approach provides the means to expand the Army to a sufficient size to meet its commitments. Unlike the all-volunteer force, a conscripted force would not rely on stop-loss policies or an endless cycle of year-on, year-off deployments of overstressed and exhausted forces. Third, conscription enables the military to be more discriminating in selecting those with the skills and attributes most required to fight today's wars.

Unlike the all-volunteer force, a conscripted force would not rely on exorbitant bonuses and reduced enlistment standards to fill its ranks.

The All-Volunteer Force: The Debate

LTC Yingling, raised valid points that carried the echo of the previous article by Dr. Finel. I would add that in the age of never ending commitments such as Afghanistan or Iraq, having an citizen soldier force structure would have shortened our commitment, by providing the manpower to have put over half a million boots on the ground as soon as the major combat was over. This would allow us to do as we did in post-war Germany and Japan; totally disarm the society and seal off any chance for outsiders to start trouble.

If we look to history, two branches of service the Navy and Marines have traditionally been staffed with volunteer enlistments. These services by their nature, should remain volunteer. The Army bending itself into a hybred force that has to meet COIN and SysAdmin demands while avoiding dulling the Leviathan tip of the spear, would be enhanced by a return to citizen soldiers.

And while we are on the military and how one of the requirements of living in a Republic means standing up to serve one's country. That leads to this segway to whether military officers should voice a political opinion.

Schmedlap posted this Military service and political office do not go together. His post dovetails right into Dr. Finel's post and Zenpundit's comments about relying on former military leaders to fix the countries woes.
Politics and the Military Profession

And bringing up the rear on whether today's officer corp is showing proper concern for the troops is this from Tom Ricks.

Wanat Why it Matters

All this comes after finishing Sebastian Jungers latest book WAR which provides the backstory to the documentary RESTREPO and devotes considerable thought to considering why men go to war. I will be writing more on my impression of the movie and Junger's book in the coming week. I will say that the similarities, like fleeting nightmares of a long ago experience were haunting reminders of my own brief interlude with war.

A Trumpet Hearlds the Need for the Return of History

The trumpet is a metaphor for a call from a military officer urging the return of the study of history to add another avenue of ideas to sound out a clear strategy about the conduct of current and future wars. Army Special Forces Major Grant Martin, who is currently serving in Afghanistan penned an essay posted by the editors of Small Wars Journal. Major Martin, begs the indulgence of David Brooks upon whose March 25 New York Times op-ed he builds his thesis.

As I was reading David Brooks’ March 25 New York Times op-ed, The Return of History, I couldn’t help but play a game I have come to enjoy ever since reading Eric D. Beinhocker’s book The Origin of Wealth. What I do is every time I come to the word “economist” when reading a work on economics, I substitute the words “military theorist” in my mind, and every time I come to the word “economics” I replace it with the words “the study of warfare”. Since the switch seemed to fit so well with Beinhocker’s book, I was not too surprised when it seemed to fit Brooks’ article as well.

At the risk of appearing to plagiarize and with apologies to Mr. Brooks, I have replaced most of the words in his article below that dealt with economics with a word or words that had more to do with warfare. I have left his words in italics, except for the title of books, and put my words in regular font.

Read More:
The Need for the Return of History:Why Studying History and Human Motivations is the Key to the Future of Warfare.

Major Martin's independent voice, joins the voices of many who have questioned the logic of marginalizing history both at the secondary, post secondary, and graduate level institutions, as well as in the service academies where management and systems management has trumped the focus of history and particularly military history. The fact that many voices have been raised in the past two years holds merit that the pendulum is finally beginning to gradually swing back, pushed along by the concerted efforts of many whom have come to realize that it is time for the return of history. This blog and its author, and many of my blog friends, have been active in promoting the importance of history and understanding it's consequences and lessons.

The warning also sounds from the direction of West Point, courtesy of Tom Ricks Foreign Policy Blog who posted this, a  West Point faculty member worries it is failing to prepare tomorrow’s officers . This officer is defining the total systems managment approach of cover your A-hole and keep your Pie-hole shut to avoid rocking the boat. That makes another officer at West Point who has the guts to speak his mind.

Recently Thomas Barnett called attention to why he wrote an 85 page of history of America supporting the thesis of his book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, during a recent book review. For
anyone interested, this is one of the most concise one chapter histories of the U.S. describing the really important themes and characters that made our world today possible. I wish Barnett would consider writing a more extensive history of the United State for his next endeavor, given his ability to gin up themes and link them altogether in a seamless narrative.

The drums and trumpets across the blogs, have been sounding a clarion call to academics to heed the warning before we march over a another cliff, blinded by our hubris or self loathing naval gazing. We must stop and counsel with the historians and teach our young the value of knowing the road traveled, before charging blindly ahead. We must measure our progress by looking to our past with its glories and it's warts, then re-energizing ourselves in the fields of business, economics, war and diplomacy, so the security of the institutions and the nation is not blind to the folly of not being aware of the past.

The Week in Review

One of the most often asked questions I get from friends and students is how do I keep up with all the information that flows out across this medium dubbed the blogosphere. I must admit that it takes discipline and a careful eye to pick what for me is the better jewel out of a basket of jewels presented each day. I decided then to try and find the post or posts that stood out each week and gather them together here to offer a taste of what stood out.

First off, a post over at the U.S. Naval Institute Blog took top honors for generating a blizzard of comments that often grew heated amid the more thoughtful responses. Read on: Showing One's Throat to the Wolf

At this point perhaps Aesop may have a lesson that rymes.

A stray Lamb stood drinking early one morning on the bank of a woodland stream. That very same morning a hungry Wolf came by farther up the stream, hunting for something to eat. He soon got his eyes on the Lamb. As a rule Mr. Wolf snapped up such delicious morsels without making any bones about it, but this Lamb looked so very helpless and innocent that the Wolf felt he ought to have some kind of an excuse for taking its life.

“How dare you paddle around in my stream and stir up all the mud!” he shouted fiercely. “You deserve to be punished severely for your rashness!”

“But, your highness,” replied the trembling Lamb, “do not be angry! I cannot possibly muddy the water you are drinking up there. Remember, you are upstream and I am downstream.”

“You do muddy it!” retorted the Wolf savagely. “And besides, I have heard that you told lies about me last year!”

“How could I have done so?” pleaded the Lamb. “I wasn’t born until this year.”

“If it wasn’t you, it was your brother!”

“I have no brothers.”

“Well, then,” snarled the Wolf, “It was someone in your family anyway. But no matter who it was, I do not intend to be talked out of my breakfast.”

And without more words the Wolf seized the poor Lamb and carried her off to the forest.

The tyrant can always find an excuse for his tyranny.

The unjust will not listen to the reasoning of the innocent.

Next, is a book review by Mark at Zenpundit that caught the eye of the folks at the Small Wars Journal who linked it with comments.

John Robb weighs in with this edgy post on the ongoing sovereign default crisis in the EU. Here is a sample below:

Most analysts (at least the ones that are worth reading) contend that the sovereign default crisis (Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc.) in the EU is about the collapse of a system that created monetary union without a political union. It isn't. That's actually a narrow, parochial view. Instead, the current sovereign debt crisis about something much more interesting: it's another battle in a war for dominance between "our" integrated, impersonal global economic system and traditional nation-states. At issue is whether a nation-state serves the interests of the governed or it serves the interests of a global economic system.

This week also saw the return of Galrahn to regular posting at Information Dissemination where he promises a make-over as he marks the third anniversary of this excellent naval centric blog.

Two other favorite blogs announced changes are afoot in the coming week.

Thomas PM Barnett announced the roll out of a new blog link beginning Monday.
Basic blog design already in place, with some posts teed up. Currently fleshing most the pages I want on the site. Not everything will be done by Monday.

In moving over the old, I bring along all the posts and pix, and manage import the comments and the links inside the posts. Comments from 5/5 through 5/9 will be lost to the universe!

Weird to basically have two entire sites up for five days. Even more strange is going through some of the old posts (the ones that get linked because they're important in some way) and fixing the screwed-up bits. But no, I won't fix everything, because the first 2-3 years just didn't travel well the last time and it's just not worth my time. Annoying to read but the record's intact.

Anyway, see you over there on Monday. The link to the blog will now be:

www.thomaspmbarnett.com/globlogization

Finally this change coming over at It's The Tribes, Stupid" where Steven Pressfield announced the launch of a blog dedicated to writing as the former continues on under a new name and author.

Next week I’m launching a new site, which will be a better fit for all of my writing, titled “Steven Pressfield Online.” “Writing Wednesdays” will have its new home there. We won’t stop. In fact, we’ll add a couple of new features. The site overall will be more of a Pressfield/Writing site.

“It’s the Tribes” will continue too—under a new name, “Agora.” It will be edited and run by MAC McCallister. MAC will take the site to the next level for sure. He was a key participant in al-Anbar, Iraq, when the Sunni Awakening happened, and he hasn’t backed off since. He is outspoken, passionate and opinionated. I love him. He’ll be great.

Lastly, the blog links took on a couple of new sites, well worth the time to check out.

Pileus Blog Pileus describes itself as, "a group of scholars who examine public policy and philosophy in light of our respective disciplines."

Matt Gallagher, Former Army officer and Iraq veteran turned writer and author of Kaboom has launched the Kerplunk Journal where he holds forth on issues related to his former job.

And one final note. A quote to live or die by.
Hardcore Quote: Veteran of the Day

The Gangs Who Couldn't Shoot Straight!

Taliban Marksmen Training

Afghan National Army

My apologies to author Jimmy Breslin for borrowing from the title of a book he wrote. But a series of reports from New York Times correspondent CJ Chivers about Afghan marksmanship has a comedic thread only tempered by the occasional lucky shot.

In this first article Chivers uncovers the truth about the fable about legendary Afghan marksmanship.

The recent Marine operations in and near Marja brought into sharp relief a fact that contradicts much of what people think they know about the Afghan war. It is this: Forget the fables. The current ranks of Afghan fighters are crowded with poor marksmen.

Thissimple statement is at odds with an oft-repeated legend of modern conflict, in which Afghan men are described, in clichés and accounts from yesteryear, as natural gunmen and accomplished shots. Everyone who has even faintly followed the history of war in Central Asia has heard the tales of Afghan men whose familiarity with firearms is such a part of their life experience that they can pick up most any weapon and immediately put it to effective work. The most exaggerated accounts are cartoonish, including tales of Afghan riflemen whose bullets can strike a lone sapling (I’ve even heard “blade of grass”) a hilltop away.

Read more:
Afghan Marksmen Forget the Fables

Taliban Gear

Chivers continues to zero in on this subject by taking a closer look at the Taliban fighters and why their rifle fire has been less than stellar.

We plan more posts about the nature of the fighting in Afghanistan, and how this influences the experience of the war. Today this blog discusses visible factors that, individually and together, predict poor shooting results when Taliban gunmen get behind their rifles.

It’s worth noting that many survivors of multiple small-arms engagements in Afghanistan have had experiences similar to those described last week. After emerging unscathed from ambushes, including ambushes within ranges at which the Taliban’s AK-47 knock-offs should have been effective, they wonder: how did so much Taliban fire miss?

Read more:
The Weakness of Taliban Marksmanship

Now just when we all could take a sigh of relief that the fabled Afghan enemy can't hit the broad side of a barn with a shotgun, Chivers offers up this report about the Afghan National Army, the guys who've been the recipients of billions of dollars of training.

Puncturing some of the legends of Afghan fighting prowess has value for at least two reasons.

First, when assessing the Taliban and other insurgent organizations — which few people dispute form a resolved and adaptive force – it is important to be wary of exaggerating their traditional fighting skills, as opposed to their social and political skills, their effectiveness as criminal organizations, and their shift in recent years toward improvised explosives. The Taliban’s shoddy marksmanship also raises questions about how fighting in Afghanistan has evolved. Is the Taliban’s shift toward using improvised explosives an indication that they have learned from the insurgents’ experience in Iraq? Or is it an indication that the Taliban realized that their rifle fire was usually ineffective? Both?

Second, when the discussion turns to deficiencies in the marksmanship of government troops, the conversation has another use. It provides insights into the overall state of the government security forces. And it leads to a natural question: What return has the United States received in Afghanistan on its extraordinary investment in the Afghan National Army? More on that in a moment.

Read more:
Afghan Marksmanship: Pointing not Aiming

Now before we all get ourselves up in a dither about wasting billions in what seems to be an unteachable excercise, we should reflect that our own forces haven't focused on long range shooting skills for decades.
Tactical Tidbits from Afghanistan and The Return of an Old Friend. We can look back at the experience of our own military in trying to teach shooting skills to soldiers post Civil War, when as few as ten rounds per man were allocated for practice per year. It will take decades of training to build a cadre of marksmen, something that might be beyond the scope of our timetable. There may be a third way as explained in this article from the Small Wars Journal by Col. Gary Anderson.

When Ralph Peters of the New York Post and the editor of the New York Times actually agree on something, it is both an unusual occasion and a cause for reflection. In the case of Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan, we have one of those rare confluences of agreement. Both concur that Karzai has become more of a liability than an asset. His poorly thought out threat to throw in his lot with Taliban in response to Western disapproval, combined with his inept handling of the war, has lost him critical support in Washington and in Europe. Some Afghans think he may have lost his grip on reality; whatever the cause, he has made few friends in recent weeks among those he needs if he hopes to retain power. None of this bodes well for American strategy in Afghanistan. It is one thing to have an unstable ally in a war; we have dealt with shaky allies in the past. However, an ungrateful and unstable ally may well be too much to ask the American people to bear. It may be time to explore a third option between abandoning Afghanistan and enduring Karzai’s ungrateful and demonstrably corrupt regime.

Read more:
A Third Way in Aftghanistan



UPDATE: Uncut: Lessons learned from Six and a Half Years in Afthanistan

Too Important Not to Read

Selling women in ancient Babylon

Long Pross, Trafficking Victim

Actress Maggie Grace (L) and jounalist Nicholas Kristof present Somaly Mam of Cambodia with the Human Rights Award at the Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on March 19, 2009 in Washington, DC.

This week I have posted a few reads that delve into the nature of culture, women at risk and how we all can make the world safe for women.

Leading off is this post from Steve DeAngelis who blogs about the power of culture to either hinder or advance the human experience.

The Victorian Scottish historian and essayist, Thomas Carlyle, once wrote: "Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being." In past posts, I've noted that culture can either be used as a platform for progress or it becomes an anchor that keeps people mired in the past. According to a recent study, culture has played a more important role in humanity's evolution than once thought ["Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force," by Nicholas Wade, New York Times, 1 March 2010]. Wade explains:

Read the rest:
The Power of Culture

Related to culture is how women are treated in this world. For those of us living in a society that protects and values women, it is vital to read these next two posts to see how we can contribute to making the world safe for women.

Steve DeAngelis continues in this post to introduce Nichlos Kristof whom I have written about here and here.

One of the oldest objects of worship known to man is small figurine carved out of oolitic limestone that has been labeled the Venus of Willendorf. Displayed at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, the Venus of Willendorf was created sometime between 24,000-22,000 BCE. The figurine was probably carved by a man. Although it is not a particularly flattering depiction of a woman, it reminds us that men have always been in awe of the power of creation. Unfortunately, the awe that mankind has demonstrated for the process of procreation has not extended to the women who carry it out. When it comes to history, might makes right and the gentler sex has felt the brunt of that might for far too long.

Facts don't lie. Only one percent of the landowners around the globe are women. Widespread participation by women in politics is a modern development. Often in the past the only way that women could influence politics was between the sheets. The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes knew this and penned his famous play Lysistrata to demonstrate that although they were under-appreciated in the male-dominated Athenian society, women were nonetheless well-informed and capable of pursuing political agendas. The play was performed in classical Athens in 411 BC. The play is a comic tale of Lysistrata's mission to end the Peloponnesian War. Her strategy is to convince the women of Greece to withhold sexual favors from their husbands and lovers until they agree to negotiate peace. At the beginning of the play, Lysistrata says to her friend Calonice, "There are a lot of things about us women that sadden me, considering how men see us as rascals." To which Calonice replies: "As indeed we are!" Even back then, women were more appreciated for their beauty than their brains and more for their sexual prowess than their other life skills. Twenty-five hundred years later the world's women are still suffering at the hands of men.

The husband and wife team, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, remind us that women continue to be ill-treated in many places around the world ["The Women’s Crusade," New York Times, 23 August 2009].

Read the whole post:

Making the World Safe for Women



Finally comes this post from the outstanding blog and online magazine devoted to military matters Small Wars Journal who turned their attention to spotlighting an organization that is making a difference.

Innocents at Risk is a 501©(3) nonprofit founded to fight child exploitation and human trafficking. Our mission is to educate citizens about the horrific global and local problem of human trafficking and work to prevent it. In order to increase the visibility of the severity of the issue, Innocents at Risk established partnerships with the Department of State, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Custom Border Patrol and the D.C. Task Force. We work with a vast number of non-government organizations and service providers.

Human Trafficking is 21st century slavery. It is happening throughout the world in every country and across the United States in every major city and small town. According to the Department of State, every year over 2,000,000 men, women and children are taken, trafficked and thrown into this cruel world of slavery. Traffickers use force, fraud or coercion to obtain their victims.

Read the whole post.
Very Good People Doing Great Things

If any one is serious about stopping this scourge, please visit the links under Honoring our Commitments links on the right of this blog. As Steve DeAngelis noted in the end of his post on culture, none of us will live to see the results of how the information age will influence future cultures, but properly used it can be a powerful tool for doing good and making the world safe for women.

Tactical Tidbits from Afghanistan

U.S. Marines shielding an Afghan father and child

The war in Afghanistan has burned in a sporadic fashion, bursting on the news scene whenever a suicide or car bomb explodes in crowded streets killing dozens. The butcher's bill for soldiers and Marines lost in combat has been at a level that only the loss of several at the same time garners any attention by the MSM. Only the most tuned in to military and strategic affairs are aware of the daily efforts of those we ask to step into harm's way.

A few years ago, General David Petraeus coined the most famous phrase of the Iraq War, "Tell me how this ends." when he made an off hand comment in 2003, to author Rick Atkinson who included it in his book, In The Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat. Those words were partially answered this week by a no less critical forum of the war than Newsweek magazine, when they declared Rebirth of a Nation: Something that looks an awful lot like democracy is beginning to take hold in Iraq. It may not be 'mission accomplished'—but it's a start. What does this then mean for Afghanistan? The war is of a different scale; and tactics that worked in Iraq may not work in what many continue to argue, is a template of tribal culture, unbending to the efforts of conquerors for thousands of years.

U.S. Marines meeting with tribal elders

One recent article posted by the editors of the difinitive go to source for information Small Wars Journal who linked this article by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, of the Washington Post, At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?

The Marines are pushing into previously ignored Taliban enclaves. They have set up a first-of-its-kind school to train police officers. They have brought in a Muslim chaplain to pray with local mullahs and deployed teams of female Marines to reach out to Afghan women.

The Marine approach -- creative, aggressive and, at times, unorthodox -- has won many admirers within the military. The Marine emphasis on patrolling by foot and interacting with the population, which has helped to turn former insurgent strongholds along the Helmand River valley into reasonably stable communities with thriving bazaars and functioning schools, is hailed as a model of how U.S. forces should implement counterinsurgency strategy.

The Marines have so upset the Army centric chain of command that some are calling their area of operations, "Marineistan." This has prompted retired U.S. Army General and current Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry to declare that, "The international security force in Afghanistan feels as if it comprises 42 nations instead of 41 because the Marines act so independently from other U.S. forces." It seems from this old ex-soldiers prospective that the old interservice rivalry is alive and kicking in 2010. One only has to possess a smiggen of histoical memory to remember how General William Westmoreland put the U.S. Marines up in I Corps as a static blocking force against the DMZ, instead of down in the Meokong Delta where the Marines amphib experience would have paid major dividends. Istead Westmoreland deployed his beloved 9th Infantry Division to turn itself into a riverine force working alongside the U.S. Navy.

TAO for US Marines in I Corp Vietnam

US Military Rifles 1873-2010

Coupled with this story is another post from SMJ, that raises real concerns that the infantry is having trouble reaching out and touching the enemy. "Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer" by by MAJ Thomas P. Ehrhart.

Operations in Afghanistan frequently require United States ground forces to engage and destroy the enemy at ranges beyond 300 meters. These operations occur in rugged terrain and in situations where traditional supporting fires are limited due to range or risk of collateral damage. With these limitations, the infantry in Afghanistan require a precise, lethal fire capability that exists only in a properly trained and equipped infantryman. While the infantryman is ideally suited for combat in Afghanistan, his current weapons, doctrine, and marksmanship training do not provide a precise, lethal fire capability to 500 meters and are therefore inappropriate.

Comments from returning non-commissioned officers and officers reveal that about fifty percent of engagements occur past 300 meters. The enemy tactics are to engage United States forces from high ground with medium and heavy weapons, often including mortars, knowing that we are restricted by our equipment limitations and the inability of our overburdened soldiers to maneuver at elevations exceeding 6000 feet. Current equipment, training, and doctrine are optimized for engagements under 300 meters and on level terrain

This is an interesting series of recommendations that clearly states that if you are going to fight at long distances, you need to adapt by resurrecting the lost art of "marksmanship" along with weapons that can kill the enemy. Imbedded in this report are references and a hat tip to the Marines for teaching not only distance shooting, but for using the heavier and more accurate M16A2 rifle.

The Marines are the only service that still qualifies to a distance of 500 meters, though not under realistic conditions.91 They also retained the full size M16A2 rifle when others adopted the M4 carbine. Though it is more lethal, its overall length makes it less practical.

 
The article is a good source of historical data recounting the "Capability of the Infantry from 1917 to 2003."
Stepping further back in history one can review the tactics and efforts of General Nelson Miles who led the 5th Infantry armed with the long range Springfield Model 1873 Rifle in the Infantry in the Indian Wars:1876-1891.
 
 

Closing out this foray into tactics and strategies in Afghanistan is this remarkable series of reports coming from author, historian and good blog friend, Steven Pressfield who recently returned from Afghanistan where he accompanied Marine General James Mattis on an inspection tour. Steve's vivid description of his journey places the reader right alongside him and gives a fresh prospective. Downrange: An Informal Report on a trip to Afghanistan with Marine Gen. James N. Mattis. I urge all to read it and follow the rest of the four posts.
Part Two, Part Three.

Afghanistan, A Cause or A Curse?

Afghanistan, like the physical mass of her landscape, continues to defy the best intentions of military forces arrayed within her artificial borders to wrest a people who for the past 2500 years have chosen to live by a code dictated by conditions of tribal custom kept safe from intrusions by the geographic characteristics of a desolate landlocked society cutoff from outside influence. The challenge of trying to impose Western style democracy in the span of less than a decade is meeting with a resistance that first confounded the Bush Adminstration and continues to suck the Obama Presidency into it's moral and ethical quicksand.

The central question is Afthanistan a cause worth pursuing, or a curse that will continue to eat at the fabric of resolve until America and their allies quit leaving a vacumn for the Taliban to return? Will quiting become an example to others who see profit in the strategic defeat of the great powers. Can America singlehandedly manhandle 28 million people, 15 million of which are under 30, into the modern world without destroying the tribal culture. These questions have kept the midnight oil burning in Washington for over two months and right along side, the soft glow of monitors have reflected the thought of experts from all corners of the spectrum.

I am no expert and will not pontificate on what we should do or not do. It troubles me as someone who willingly fought for a cause that at the time seemed just, will again see thousands of American and families from many nations, stand over their childrens graves and wonder what hath their nation done to waste their childs life.

In a continuing effort to inform, I offer the following posts that reflect the breadth of this issue.
First from the field>Michael Yon who up until a short time ago was embedded with the 2 Rifles of the British Army in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. The British became sensitive to Michael's honest reporting and ended his embed. He wrote this troubling post.

In 2008, I was trekking in the Himalayas in Nepal preparing for a return to Afghanistan. A message came from a British officer suggesting to end the trip and get to Afghanistan. Something was up, and I didn’t bother to ask what. Days of walking were needed to reach the nearest road. After several flights, I landed in Kandahar and eventually Helmand Province at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. The top-secret mission was Oqab Tsuka, involving thousands of ISAF troops who were to deliver turbines to the Kajaki Dam to spearhead a major electrification project. The difficult mission was a great success. That was 2008. During my 2009 embed with British forces, just downstream from Kajaki Dam, it became clear that the initial success had eroded into abject failure. And then the British kicked me out of the embed, for reasons still unclear, giving me time to look further into the Kajaki electrification failure.

READ MORE: Afghanistan: Electrification Effort Loses Spark

To illustrate that all is not lost, we turn to the United States Marines and this measurement of progress that prove the Marines the most innovative of our forces, have made since being deployed to the same Helmand Province that Michael Yon reported about above. It is heartening that the Marines are again proving as they did in Vietnam with their Combined Action Program (CAP) that success means getting up close and knowing the people you are tasked to protect.

There’s No Substitute for Troops on the Ground by Max Boot, New York Times Opinion

“I hope people who say this war is unwinnable see stories like this. This is what winning in a counterinsurgency looks like.” Lt. Col. William F. McCollough, commander of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, is walking me around the center of Nawa, a poor, rural district in southern Afghanistan’s strategically vital Helmand River Valley. His Marines, who now number more than 1,000, arrived in June to clear out the Taliban stronghold. Two weeks of hard fighting killed two Marines and wounded 70 more but drove out the insurgents. Since then the colonel’s men, working with 400 Afghan soldiers and 100 policemen, have established a “security bubble” around Nawa. Colonel McCollough recalls that when they first arrived the bazaar was mostly shuttered and the streets empty. “This town was strangled by the Taliban,” he says. “Anyone who was still here was beaten, taxed or intimidated.”

Small Wars Journal sponsored this essay by Dr. Tony Corn. Toward a Kilcullen-Biden Plan?

At this particular juncture, the U.S. simply cannot afford a 500 billion dollar open-ended escalation. Nor can it opt for an incremental (“middle road”) strategy which would fail to create the psychological effects required in both the West and Afghanistan.

A temporary 40,000 surge is doable, but only if the core of the Obama strategy is a “Kilcullen-Biden” plan combining convocation of a loya jirga domestically with a regionalization of the Afghan question diplomatically. Let’s go massive for a limited time, and “clear, hold, and build” as much as we can. If it does not work, a regional negotiation provides ample cover for a drawdown.

Rounding out this weeks discussion is this post from It's The Tribes Stupid! where Steve Pressfield continues his interview with Afghan tribal leader, Chief Zazai. Here a little taste of this informative interview.

Welcome back, Chief Zazai, after last week’s break in our ongoing, multi-part interview. As you know, we took that space last week to post an open letter to Gens. Jones, Petraeus, McChrystal and Adm. Mullen, alerting them to your formation of a Tribal Police Force in the Zazi Valley and asking for help in aligning that force with the American troops (10th Mountain Division) whose Area of Operations (AO) includes your district. Respect for confidentiality prevents me from publishing particulars, but I’m happy to say that we got an immediate response and that it was just what we hoped for. The top U.S. commanders are listening. More on that as it develops– and as confidentiality permits. Now back to our talk!

READ MORE: Interview with a Tribal Chief #4: Warlords and Taliban

This week will bring more news and comment along with the solemn knock, followed by the mournful cry as another family learns that their son or daughter has fallen in the dusty gravel of far off Afghanistan. I learned first hand that war is every bit as exciting as Patton described, and as hellish as Sherman penned. For many in Afghanistan, the lure of conflict is a rite of manhood, exploited and provoked by both sides who seek to impose their own brand of governance on a people who have lived for centuries as if they were the only people on the earth. The answer lies somewhere far down the road, alas, a road strewn with the corpses.