Afghanistan/Pakistan

Kilcullen on COIN “Persistent-Presence” vs. “Repetitive Raiding”

by

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One by David Kilcullen

I purchased a copy of The Accidental Guerrilla, intending to read it last summer but, being buried under my own academic course work, I was forced to put it aside until recently. I am not finished yet but I can say that Col. Kilcullen has written a seminal, if idiosyncratic, work on the theory and practice of counterinsurgency – no doubt why some reviewers found The Accidental Guerrilla be difficult book to read, one that “…could be like a junior high school student’s attempting “Ulysses.” Or were aggravated by Kilcullen’s format through which he enunciated a more nuanced understanding of the war and COIN than they found politically tolerable. Most readers in this corner of the blogosphere will find The Accidental Guerrilla an intellectually stimulating book from an author well grounded in the realities of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is the leading theorist of counterinsurgency today.

I would like to take a look at one section where Dr. Kilcullen discusses the merits of “presence” vs. “raiding” in the context of road-building operations in the Kunar and Korengal vallies of Afghanistan by American troops under, successively, LTC. Chris Cavoli and LTC. Bill Ostlund [p. 96]:

Cavoli contrasts this “permanent-presence” methodology with the “repetitive raiding” that has characterized operations at some other times and places. He argues that persistent presence is essentially a “counterpunching” strategy that relies on a cycle of defense and counterattack, in which the presence of the road and Coalition forces protecting and interacting with the population draws the enemy into attacking defended areas, causing him to come to the population and the government – the opposite of the “search and destroy” approach in which security forces “sweep” the countryside looking for the enemy within the population, as if for a needle in a haystack, and often destroy the haystack to find the needle. More particularly, search and destroy operations tend to create a popular backlash and contribute to the “antibody response” that generates large numbers of accidental guerrillas and pushes the population and the enemy together. The persistent-presence method avoids this.

Read more

Strategic Failure

by

Lee Smith:

How did this come to pass? How did it happen that adversaries like Iran and Syria are able to shape US strategy, so that we have failed to win in Iraq and will fail in Afghanistan and have deterred ourselves from taking action against the Iranian nuclear program, and have jammed up our strategic alliance with Israel? It is because American leadership of the last two administrations failed to act against those states that have attacked our troops, allies and interests. We did we not win in Iraq because states like Syria and Iran did not pay a price for the acts of force they used to shape political effects to their own advantage; when we failed to do so we abandoned our Middle East policy to the mercy of our enemies, who, as we are repeatedly told, can ruin Iraq and Afghanistan whenever they decide to take off their gloves. We did not win because our leadership, abetted by Washington policy intellectuals, is more interested in political effects in Washington than strategic victories in the Middle East. Seen in this light, the only American victory in the region is a pyrrhic one, the bitter harvest of which we may well be reaping for many years to come.

(There’s more commentary at Belmont Club.)

Smith’s argument applies also to some extent to our dealings with North Korea, where China and North Korea have used our reluctance to confront the Kim regime to control us.

Bush erred by not bringing the war directly to the Syrian and Iranian regimes. Maybe he thought we were stretched too thin in Iraq and Afghanistan or that he couldn’t pull it off politically, or maybe it was a failure of vision. Either way we are going to pay for this mistake by continuing to suffer Iranian-backed attacks on our forces, or in a future war with Iran or its proxies, or by being forced to accommodate a resurgent Iranian empire armed with nuclear weapons. Obama is compounding the error by doing nothing and pretending that everything will be OK if we pull the covers over our heads. Sitting back while gangster regimes arm up, or (at best) attempting to delegate our defense to third parties whose interests do not entirely overlap ours is going to get us attacked, repeatedly, until we decide to confront our enemies and make them pay a price for their aggressions.

ADDED: “If the Iranians get the bomb, we will not be entering an era of containment but leaving it.”

“Under a dusty hospital tent where doctors yell over the roar of jet engines, Dr. John York studied an electronic image of a blood vessel in the neck of a soldier wounded by an improvised bomb. It looked like a balloon ready to pop.”

by

“Under a dusty hospital tent where doctors yell over the roar of jet engines, Dr. John York studied an electronic image of a blood vessel in the neck of a soldier wounded by an improvised bomb. It looked like a balloon ready to pop. Too delicate to operate on directly. Dr. York would have to try a procedure that had rarely been attempted so close to a battlefield.” – Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal

First-rate article in the WSJ. (via Abu Muqawama Twitter feed)

I attended a conference a couple of weeks ago, where I had the chance to hear a few military surgeons discuss their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Amazing work being done.

The Post-COIN Era is Here

by

Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon Again……

There has been, for years, an ongoing debate in the defense and national security community over the proper place of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine in the repertoire of the United States military and in our national strategy. While a sizable number of serious scholars, strategists, journalists and officers have been deeply involved, the bitter discussion characterized as “COINdinista vs. Big War crowd” debate is epitomized by the exchanges between two antagonists, both lieutenant colonels with PhD’s, John Nagl, a leading figure behind the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and now president of the powerhouse think tank CNAS , and Gian Gentile, professor of history at West Point and COIN’s most infamous arch-critic.

Read more

Afghanistan (Arghandab, etc) links….

by

– “The Taliban launched their initial attack into Arghandab in October 2007, after the natural death of Mullah Naqib. This assault marked the beginning of an intense campaign to erode the will of the population in Arghandab to resist Taliban control.

The Taliban gained control of Arghandab by using targeted violence to intimidate local leaders, supplemented with an intimidation campaign and the implementation of a judicial system to increase the Taliban’s legitimacy.”

– “The Dahla Dam and irrigation system, located in the heart of the province of Kandahar, is Afghanistan’s second largest dam. Eighty percent of Kandahar’s population lives along the irrigation system. Since it was built in the 1950s, years of disrepair have left the dam and irrigation system functioning at reduced capacity.”

– “The Kunar Provincial Reconstruction Team visited the Kunar Prison construction site Jan. 14 to conduct a quality assurance check and address security issues.

PRT leaders and engineers met with Afghan National Police representatives and the construction site engineer and foreman to discuss the progress on the prison.”

– “As U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is visiting Pakistan for the first time in three years to encourage greater cooperation between Washington and Islamabad and ask what the country’s plans are for a possible military offensive against extremists in the tribal region of North Waziristan, a Pakistani Army spokesman said any action there would not happen in the next 12 months, citing the Pakistani government’s desire to consolidate current gains.”

– “Images from the most-talked about place of 2009.“