Iraq

The best war correspondent since Ernie Pyle ?

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When I was about 10 years old, my parents had a copy of Ernie Pyle’s book about his life in World War II. I read it and was impressed, inexperienced as I was. Ernie Pyle was killed by a sniper at Okinawa. There were great war correspondents in Korea. I remember Marguerite Higgins, who was probably the model for the woman war correspondent in WEB Griffin’s books about that war. The later reporters in Vietnam, from what I know, spent most of their time in Saigon. Higgins was walking next to Robert Capa, the greatest war photographer, when he stepped on the land mine that killed him. She didn’t hang around bars.

The only real war correspondent I know of now is Michael Yon. I read his book, Moment of Truth in Iraq and wrote a review. The only other book that compares with it is Bing West’s The Strongest Tribe but this is because West can add a lot of background from his long history going back to Vietnam. Yon had his troubles, mostly with officious PA officers in Iraq, but has had strong support from the soldiers.

With Iraq winding down, he went next to Afghanistan. Most of his reporting has been on his blog or, more recently, on his facebook page. He has had a lot of trouble with the generals in Afghanistan. Some of us who have doubts about the progress and the chances for success, tend to take his side. He was suddenly expelled from his embed with a US unit several weeks ago. Many of us believed this was due to his harsh criticism of the Canadian general who commanded the sector where a critical bridge that had been left unprotected, was blown up by the Taliban.

Please stay with me. This matters.

And so it goes like this:

Major General Nick Carter (UK) commands RC-South.

Brigadier General Daniel Menard (Canada) commands Task Force Kandahar.

Under BG Menard’s command are three U.S. Battalions and just over 2,800 Canadian forces. (U.S. battalions: 1-12 Infantry Reg.; 2-508th Parachute Infantry Regiment; 97th Military Police Battalion). American combat forces comprise a substantial portion of Menard’s force structure, leaving his command and Canadian civilian leadership open to fair scrutiny, just as American leadership is open to Canadian inquiry. Moreover, while Canada increasingly shies from combat, American units under Canadian command will spill blood under Canadian military leadership that answers to Ottawa.

Kandahar Province is apportioned into battle spaces. As mentioned, TF-Stryker has responsibilities that include Spin Boldak and FOM on Highway 4 that crosses the Tarnak River Bridge. TF-Stryker, however, is not responsible for the bridge itself.

The British Royal Air Force (RAF) is responsible for something called the GDA. The GDA is the Ground Defense Area, and is responsible for security immediately around KAF. By all accounts, the RAF is doing a fine job. The GDA includes the area around the Tarnak River Bridge.

TF-K is responsible for Kandahar, but the specific area of the bridge belongs to the RAF. However, the bridge itself is guarded not by RAF but by ANP (Afghan National Police) mentored by the American 97th MPs. The 97th is under Canadian command through TF-K. And so, at the time of the attack, TF-K was responsible for the physical security on the bridge itself, while GDA had responsibility for the land around the bridge.

Which Coalition partner has final responsibility for this strategic bridge? Is it the RAF who “own” the ground, or TF-K who mentor the ANP guarding the bridge? If an officer were to say this vital bridge is solely the responsibility of the ANP, his judgment would be deemed unsound.

This kind of frankness got him expelled. He was accused of releasing names of KIA before families had been notified. He was accused of disclosing security information that violated OPSEC. None of this was true.

The general who got him expelled ? He was court martialed and convicted. Not for the bridge incident but for other offenses.

The other general Yon has been very critical of is McChrystal.

he writes, “McChrystal is bent over the coffin of the Afghan war with a hammer in his hand and a mouth full of nails”? When asked for his thoughts on the general state of the war, he says one must be intuitive rather than deductive. “Innumerable wild cards are always flying and so the best that one can do is study hard and watch and listen and give it time to mix.” If a reliance on feelings alone is hardly the metric from which one should draft a war plan, consider the recent words of General McChrystal. The purpose of the Marjah operation was to create an “irreversible feeling of momentum,” but, “You don’t feel it here but I’ll tell you, it’s a bleeding ulcer outside.”

Yon believes the war can still be won, but that a change of command is in order. At this level of warfare, he says, “McChrystal is like a man who has strapped on ice skates for the first time. He might be a great athlete, but he’s learning to skate during the Olympics.” Yon adds that publicly denouncing the commanding general of a war is not an easy thing for him to do, especially considering it means crossing swords with General Petraeus and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, two men he greatly admires. Indeed, if anyone can turn this war around, Yon believes it is General Petraeus. He concedes such a return to the battlefield is unlikely, and suggests another general whose name fewer people have heard. “General James Mattis from the Marines. I get a good feeling about Mattis but I don’t know. General Petraeus is a known entity and he is solid gold.”

Now, we have the new developments with McChrystal. If you want to know what is happening, read Michael Yon.

Defeat in Afghanistan? The View from 2050

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xyz

Voices from many quarters are saying dire things about the American-led campaign in Afghanistan. The prospect of defeat, whatever that may mean in practice, is real. But we are so close to the events, it is hard to know what is and is not critical. And the facts which trickle out allow people who are not insiders to only have a sketchy, pointillist impression of the state of play. There is a lot of noise around a weak signal.

ChicagoBoyz will be convening a group of contributors to look back on the American campaign in Afghanistan from a forty year distance, from 2050.

40 years is the period from Fort Sumter to the Death of Victoria, from the Death of Victoria to Pearl Harbor, from Pearl Harbor to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It is a big chunk of history. It is enough time to gain perspective.

This exercise in informed and educated imagination is meant to help us gain intellectual distance from the drumbeat of day to day events, to understand the current situation in Afghanistan more clearly, to think-through the potential outcomes, and to consider the stakes which are in play in the longer run of history for America, for its military, for the region, and for the rest of the world.

The Roundtable contributors will publish their posts and responses during the third and fourth weeks of August, 2010.

The ChicagoBoyz blog is a place where we can think about the unthinkable.

Stand by for further details, including a list of our contributors.

Review of Senator’s Son: An Iraq War Novel

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“The sergeant kept the lower half of his body still and raised his flashlight attached under his rifle barrel. He cautiously squeezed the handle grip shining light at his feet. Sure enough, he stood on what the Marines called a burrito wrap. The insurgents quickly planted these IEDs by throwing them out in the street.”

Senator’s Son: An Iraq War Novel by Luke S. Larson

Some months ago, the author (Luke Larson served as a Marine infantry officer and saw action in two tours to Ar Ramadi, Iraq in 2005 and then again in 2007) left a comment on my blog asking me to review Senator’s Son. After I agreed to review the book, he e-mailed me a few sample chapters. Based on what I read, I ordered a copy of the novel.

I finished the book by reading a page here and a page there, late at night, after long days at the hospital. I kept circling back over what I’d previously read, underlining passages and writing in margins, engrossed by the written word:

Golf mobile one pushed to Ramadi Med with the senior corporal and two other badly injured corporals. Rogue and Doc V rounded the corner of the gun truck heading back towards the seven-ton. The only Marine still in constant consciousness was the burned private. The private in his combat boots and boxers wandered in a daze talking to himself. The Marine stared at the lieutenant. His eyes pleaded to him. “Sir, you have to get me out of here.”

It’s a high-wire act of tense action mixed in with hesitant calls home to family, doctrinal discussions on counterinsurgency, stories of suffering Iraqis – told with real empathy, and the absurd teasing humor of young Marines far from home. One mini-monologue by a “been there, done that,” character named Rock had me rolling. Very funny.

The novel does have some problems: the prose can be confusing, there are unnecessary flashbacks, and a framing device that just plain doesn’t work. None of this matters, really. The heart of the book is a page turner, a story well told, and most importantly, an education for the reader.

As Zenpundit says in his review, “As an explanation of COIN, I think the book is a must read for anyone unfamiliar with the subject and the nuanced complexities that COIN entails. The gritty, unforgiving, human suffering and moments of triumph of soldiers waging “pop-centric” COIN that gets lost in powerpoint slides, in the dry abstractions of journal articles and blogospheric arguments far removed from the ground is present in ample measure in Senator’s Son.”

It’s an education I think more people should be eager to undertake – like keeping a kind of faith. The least you can do is read the stories, right?

I encourage you to read this novel. (Thanks for the link Instapundit!)

Strategic Success

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We have won our war with Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. That’s who we declared it against and we won it.

We have won the peace after that war insofar as Iraq’s post-Saddam political arrangements are broadly democratic and not exclusively sectarian based. The authoritarians of the region do not like this and it is a good sign.

The objections to Iraq at this point seem to be that we have not had an outbreak of unicorns and free beer in the region and different countries who are badly ruled have not immediately seen the error of their ways. By that standard, the US did not win WW II because Stalin and Mao did not turn into just rulers and were also not overthrown.

We have budgeted for a certain size foreign policy mouth, that is a certain capacity to take on major problems and solve them. We have fully engaged said mouth and are chewing in our usual mix of brilliance and incompetence. It is our enemies’ strategy to induce us to over-extend ourselves and thus fail on all fronts. We should not go a bridge too far.

It is in our best interest regarding Iran that it be a full member of the civilized community of nations, that it fully exploit its energy resources and its geographic position to transit central asian energy resources to world markets. This is orthogonal to the issue of Iran being a nuclear power. Russia’s interest is to have Iran a pariah, forcing central asian energy flows to go through it. The PRC’s interest is also for Iran not to have central asian energy transit flows. Our major beef with Iran is that its internal stability currently depends on it being a pariah. Too much global connectivity leads to regime change and the mullahs know it. They will threaten and do any sort of thing to maintain tensions sufficient for them to continue to rule. Add nuclear weapons to this mix and you have a danger to the US because, for historical reasons, we are convenient scapegoat number one.

So let us not adopt the intellectual framework of our enemies. Our strategic task as americans and allies is to conceive of how to limit our reach to go no further than our grasp. So far we haven’t made this mistake. That’s what victory looks like for a military hegemon.

Strategic Failure

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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.”