Population-Centric COIN in Afghanistan

Anonymous,

There are many paths up the mole hill.

SWJ Peeps, I'm going to take a knee and drink water. You can continue the hump.

No more comments from me, but thanks for sharing your opinions.

Of course it didn't, Tom. Like Gian Gentile, for the past year I've been immersed in the documents of the Vietnam War. I'm fascinated by those texts that illustrate cardinal moments in history, especially those written by relatively junior officers with a great deal of experience in the field, good or bad.

This might very well be one of those ur-documents. We should pause and admire it in all its inconsistencies, in all its heady assumptions, in its loops of logic and rhetoric.

Should it be a blimp, we could pivot about it, staring at all the features of its bloated immensity. It deserves that, but, alas, it's only a text, and one that must be placed into some context, usually by people like Gian and me.

And of course you weren't part of any consensus about it, Tom Frist, for you're not on the email chain. This is hardly an exclusive club, so we'll probably get to you soon enough for membership.

"We all want the same thing here, lets keep it positive. "

I'm not convinced of that at all.

"The only thing that is 'fundamentally flawed' with this article is how you interpreted who the target audience was."

Well, it's been a pretty wide audience that has reviewed it. I'm also part of a COIN reading circle, mostly of Army and Marine practitioners from O-5 to O-8, some retired.

They had different perspectives, but the final verdict seemed to be that it was struggling with itself to say something meaningful about the war as it now exists and likely shall emerge in the coming months.

But it wasn't universal.

COL Gentile,
<p>Yikes, I think theres been a communication breakdown. Either I did a poor job of articulating or you did a poor job of reading - probably my bad. I do not regard <em>"what we should do at the strategic level as being irrelevant."</em> Quite the contrary. You and I are in agreement. Heck, only four days ago I pointed out that I think were drawing very near to the day <em>"when we will pronounce that <strong>'we're all Gentiles now (even the Jews)</strong>."</em> (emphasis added) (see <a href=http://tachesdhuile.blogspot.com/2010/05/does-anyone-remember-us-having…;). Only two days ago, I mocked those who <em>"assumed that population-centric COIN is the way to go in Afghanistan and, from that assumption, have attempted to craft a strategy around it."</em> (see <a href=http://www.schmedlap.com/weblog/post.aspx?id=100526-3>here</a&gt;). And just yesterday, I reiterated my belief that pop-COIN is a <em>"faith-based"</em> solution to Afghanistan (<a href=http://www.schmedlap.com/weblog/post.aspx?id=100527-1>here</a>).</p&gt;
<p>Back when the "strategic reassessment" was being finalized, I was continually asking (and getting no response) the question: <em>"What options were considered, other than counter-terrorism and population-centric COIN?"</em> (<a href=http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/08/afghanistan-strategy-dial… 18</a>, <a href=http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/09/on-general-krulaks-email-to-ge… 11</a>, <a href=http://www.schmedlap.com/weblog/post.aspx?id=090915-1>Sep 15</a>, <a href=http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2009/09/praise-sobriety.html#comm… 21</a>, and <a href=http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/09/go-allin-or-fold/#c004651>Sep 27</a>). Incidentally, I never did get an answer. I later lamented, <em>"Now that we've determined that pop-COIN is the solution, let's devise a strategy to connect some objectives to the tactics."</em> (<a href=http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/05/political-blindspot-in-america…;) and expressed similar contempt for the neglect of strategy <a href=http://zenpundit.com/?p=3411#comment-17954>here</a>.</p&gt;
<p>Okay, all the links and quotes were probably a bit much, but I just want to make it clear that we're on the same wavelength in terms of the importance of strategy and the startling lack of strategic planning that preceded the decision to go forth with pop-COIN. Our disagreement is on a very narrow issue.</p>
You typed:
<blockquote><em>"The military does in fact have a critical role in the shaping of strategy to achieve policy ends. I wonder if what you really meant to say was that "policy" has been decided for us by the President, of which i fully agree. But then that leaves us back to the level of strategy and of determining the ways and means of war, of which one (BUT NOT THE ONLY ONE) is population centric coin. Why not as a matter of strategy discuss alternatives to it?"</em></blockquote>
Perhaps policy would have been a better word? I dont know. What I do know is that if we all come to a consensus that pop-COIN is not the correct method that should be used and it is an utter disaster waiting to happen, that will not change our approach in Afghanistan. The method has already been chosen. We are going to fight a population-centric COIN even if the enemy insists upon simply waging a guerrilla fight that makes the country ungovernable and, thus, unwinnable for counterinsurgents relying upon a nation-building, population-centric approach. Yeah, the strategy sucks because it doesn't exist. But that, to me, seems like complaining about the weather. The decision has been made. It's being implemented. We can't undo that. What we can do is influence <em>how</em> it gets implemented.
<p>Sorry for the long-winded post.</p>

Gian, to be fair to MAJ Springer, setting the strategy of OEF is outside his lane.

But above his rank, this isn't necessarily so. One of the things I admire about Dave D is that he pays homage on this site to the USMC's Small Wars Manual, one of the most fascinating documents our nation has ever produced and certainly a piece as well-reasoned and wise as Callwell's distillation of British best practices.

The Marine authors of the manual waited all of 11 pages before they began to talk about strategy.

"In small wars, either diplomacy has not been exhausted or the party that opposes the settlement of the political question cannot be
reached diplomatically. Small war situations are usually a phase of, or an operation taking place concurrently with, diplomatic effort. The political authorities do not relinquish active participation in the negotiations and they ordinarily continue to exert considerable influence on the military campaign. The military leader in such operations thus finds himself limited to certain lines of action as to the strategy and even as to the tactics of the campaign. This feature has been so marked in past operations, that marines have been referred to as State Department Troops in small wars. In certain cases of this kind the State Department has even dictated the size of the force to be sent to the theater of operations."

The manual goes on to discuss how Marines might be called upon to restore order, prop up a government, obtain redress, enforce treaty obligations, halt propagandists or quash revolutionary doctrines that indirectly could harm our own national security.

But principally, it was assumed, this would be guided by political experts for political ends.

In Afghanistan, however, we've ended up with outstanding operational experts (Springer certainly springs to mind) either untethered from the political ends (whatever they are) or toiling in a vacuum that doesn't fuss with this sort of mental dickering. The institutionally has forced them to default to a suite of tactics instead of understanding the larger political endpoints (whatever they are).

The goal apparently now seems to be "pacify your AO in whichever way works best but try to transition your efforts toward strangling the phased revolutionary stategy of your enemy." At least that is within Springer's lane because, obviously, other military operational gurus are working on Afghanization in the armed forces, rural economic development, border interdiction, theater intelligence, direct intervention and yada yada yada.

Or, one might suggest, a million years away from the prudence expressed by the Small Wars Manual, itself a compilation of hard-earned best practices in irregular wars overseas.

I contend that the word you and I hear from ground commanders in OEF expressing the problems limned above showcase just why Springer's essay is so fundamentally flawed. It doesn't take into account how US efforts might be at cross purposes to each other, how perhaps some assumptions about economic development/ hearts & minds might actually be kindling a larger rebellion and perhaps some erroneous underlying notions about the true prizes in this contest and how they might be achieved.

Even at Springer's operational level, these complaints from ground commanders are obvious. A cynical man might then say, "Well, they also know that they only have to suck it up for a year and then hand it off to someone else, or let Obama's timeline trickle out in its own measure, much as stormwater peters out of a ditch in the hot months to a meaningless trickle."

Some of that is true, but most of the commanders you and I know are searching for some understanding of how they might use all the tools in their kit to achieve pacification and, more important, when they shall know when what they're doing will appear successful or otherwise.

It doesn't help them to suggest certain other AOs have been a "success" when they contest that very appraisal. It doesn't help to tell them where they should be going when they doubt the mountain top to which the path travels will take them to the precipice of pacification.

How unfair, it seems to me, to leave these ground commanders in the dark, fumbling about the room, crashing into furniture, looking for the switch that will illuminate the bulb of Strategy.

For all the talk about "strategy" and all the Joint Strategic Assessment Teams (or whatever the beasts were called) prowling the Hindu Kush, nearly nine years into this war we still haven't really given them a "strategy" that appears obtainable or empirically operational, given the domestic and international political realities.

Most fundamentally flawed seems to be (as the USMC manual would put it) a psychological understanding of the "people" and the "enemy" and the host "nation" and their sectarian constituencies and how our operations might influence them one way or the other.

Indeed, it's our inability to understand their motivations (or a lack of empathy for them) that's led to some declaring Marjah a "success" when, well, the people there don't seem to frame it like that and haven't responded as we assumed that they would.

Neither, I suggest, have the "people" in this democracy nor especially those of our allies.

But these are outside of MAJ Springer's lane, and it's unfair to burden him with it.

In regard to comments about "what we should do" at the strategic level - I think that is irrelevant. The civilian leadership has made its decisions on the general course that we are pursuing. I don't like the general course we're taking any more than anyone else does, but I think the manner in which ISAF goes about can span a wide spectrum from disastrous to not too bad. We are clearly making this up as we go along, so it is possible for those of us who are current and former practitioners to influence the thinking of how that is accomplished. That should be the focus of discussion, imo. We have no influence over the bigger decisions because they have already been decided and are now unfolding.

Mike,

It was a dangerous bit of mission creep when we converted from "defeat AQ" to "conduct population centric COIN and preserve Karzai's regime by developing Afghanistan while protecting the populace, etc, etc,..." phew!

I really don't think we want to expand that creep into "fixing" Pakistan and India as well; and I am quite sure none of the three feel they are particularly broken, and certainly don't want us to come "fix" them.

Bob

Mike, it's interesting that you mention Nuristan.

In a previous SWJ essay, so did MAJ Springer.

What's so interesting is how eerily similar the most recent SWJ offering was in tone and concept to his after-action spiel on Northeastern Afghanistan, the place he claimed to have enterprised with COL Chris Kolenda "the successful implementation of population-centric counterinsurgency strategy" in 2008.

In the earlier work, he presented "a battlefield calculus in terms of the time, patience, and personal relationships required to immediately empower the traditional Afghan leadership and population, from the village and the tribal levels on up, and at the same time marginalize and isolate the insurgency."

No one wants to be unfair to either COL Kolenda or MAJ Springer, two of this nation's finest officers. But I don't know, honestly, how we can say that their AO became a "success" today.

Perhaps a key reason for the lack of success, counter-intuitively, is because of the economic development and other Hearts & Minds projects, the emphasis on pop-centric assumptions about the "people" and Afghan security forces and government agents who were considered illegitimate to those very "people."

Kamdesh, Kunar and other parts of NE Afghanistan (in many ways indistinguishable from NW Pakistan)have become obvious examples of failed American efforts to pacify recalcitrant peoples, despite many different efforts by quite cunning commanders.

Kamdesh and Kunar have this notoriety perhaps because they involved large, lethal attacks against US forces, but I suspect that this misses the mark. The attitudinal reality, the causative forces of rebellion, weren't necessarily created by these attacks so much as allowed them to flourish.

And they came to flourish during the time COL Kolenda and others were trying -- without sufficient resources, one might concede -- pop-centric experiments.

Sometimes, I fear we default to the operational side of the house without fully considering the strategic. There seems to be an assumption that a suite of tactics, unified operationally, will not only properly identify the nature of the war and the center of gravity to which a commander might apply his efforts, but solve them.

So we arrive at metaphors about chefs and paths and whatnot. But I don't need to tell practitioners who have more experience in this than I have that it's an inapt metaphor.

In these murky irregular wars, one often doesn't know for cultural reasons what these ingredients are. One might mix in the wrong ones and cause the pie to explode. One might not even be trying to make a pie, but a roast. Some of the herbs could turn out to be toxic, and others just nasty to the tongue. A dish might begin to smell great in the oven the whole time one was cooking it, but when it comes out it satisfies no one.

The diners arriving to feast on one's pie, however, tend to understand how long they need to eat, what sorts of flatware to bring to the table and often find themselves eating with spoons while we scratch away with knives.

I admire MAJ Springer for trying to write a terse essay that realizes the need to experiment, that each AO is quite different, and that commanders have orders to follow, eventually.

But I fear you, Schmedlap and Maj K are hitting closer to the mark.

*MikeF*,

You're spot on brother, on 2 points:

1- <i>"We are not chefs with all the appropriate ingredients necessary to make a dish. That's not our job. That's up to Karzai. It is outside of our control. We can merely advise, assist, coerce, poke, and prod.</i>

and,

2- <i>"We transition from JSOC to SF command. Dont be fooled. McChrystal equals JSOC. Appoint a commander preferably from OEF-P that better understands the indirect method. Downgrade the military folks from 100,000 to 5,000 advisors. Advisors being a mixture of SF trained folks and Regular Army guys proficient at FID based off previous experience backed by one brigade of light airborne and an aviation brigade of Chinooks in support. We commit to a 20 year COIN endeavor.</i>

What you've highlighted here are several glaring inconsistencies with our current strategy. First, we want to have our cake and eat it too. Our GPF can't train a central security apparatus and gov't who answers to a strong sitting president and ministers while at the same time pursuing a bottom-up security strategy through CFSOCC-A and LDI. The central gov't will always look at this route as nibbling away from their span of control. On the one hand we're saying, '<i>yes, you need to monitor and defend your own villages and your traditional shuras are the mechanism.</i> From the bottom up, as it's always been done. On the other hand, we're nurturing and advising a central government who, beyond anything else, probably wants to maintain their seat in power. A heavy top-down solution to provide security and governance. While these two COAs will probably be fairly successful in the short-term, they will, at some point, meet and conflict. That will be the point in time that the Taliban can again exploit and stress due to foreign engineering away from a traditional system. That, again, will be a problem of our own making and one that will likely be another existential question Afghanistan will need to answer on its own before it ever moves forward.

Second, I agree that the GPF surge is the wrong way to go and in no way whatsoever benefits a COIN "strategy." The effects of 100K+ boots on the ground are counterintuitive to making the Afghans as self-sufficient in as short a time as possible. What we're doing is creating another welfare state. Advisors, Afghan Hands, or whomever need to remain at the Ministerial level and with the ANA to further groom training and doctrine. SF need to regain their position as the proponents for FID and in this country. This is largely an SF mission but the GPF, for want of funding, face-time, or general lack of mission, have been wedged into it. The DoD, and especially the GPF of the DoD, need to take a back seat and let State and UNAMA do what is largely a governance job. It shouldn't be Afghan Hands who are advising essentially civilian wings of government, it should be civilians trained in language and culture from State, etc, advising Afghan government civilians. But, if after 9 yrs of this war we are still trying to teach the MoI how to govern, <i>and they've got the same President throughout that time</i>, that dog might not be able to fight and that's not our problem.

What Afghanistan needs isn't another Shah Soojah. Whether Karzai can govern is not our concern nor should we ever think of replacing him. He's what they've got. What we can do and where we <i>can</i> have an effect is focusing on the bottom-up. Matching up local requirements with the district governors and larger MoI and Afghan national security strategy is where we can make our money to get out in the shortest time possible and leave the most stable "state" possible. We might need to reassess the way we advise the ANA/ANP and how they should be fielded and organized, but a hulking security apparatus designed to defend the central gov't isn't it.

Taken along with ADM Olson's comments on PC COIN yesterday, your COA, Mike, is the most feasible, suitable, and acceptable. PC COIN, however its defined or indoctrinated to the Services, isn't a replacement for good strategy. And what Afghanistan needs isn't a good military strategy; its a small military effort while the other Departments and int'l organizations pick up and do their job. If that takes temporarily slashing the DoD budget to fund State, Agriculture, etc, so be it. Let SF do what SF does to get the FID and CT ball rolling, and let selected *few* military advisors work some magic hand-in-hand with their missing US civilian partners in the larger Afghan gov't.

So, basically, we're modeling our selection of high-ranking officials off of American Idol? Awesome. I nominate Sanjaya for NSA.

<em>Unfortunately, as much as I admire and respect Dr. Nagl, we are unlikely to hear a reponse from CNAS or him defending the flaws in his dissertation or his stated positions on Afghanistan.</em>

I acknowledge that he's influential. That's as far as I'll go precisely because <em>"we are unlikely to hear a reponse from CNAS or him defending the flaws in his dissertation or his stated positions on Afghanistan"</em> here or anywhere else.

But I would be curious to know what resources MAJ Springer feels are lacking and then compare this to the hopeful argument from Nagl.

MAJ Springer typed: <em>"Completely agree with your larger point on not having all the resources we need in country and that the Afghan government has to make its own way."</em>

This might be a topic for another thread, but I'd be curious to know what resources are lacking. John Nagl is quoted <a href="http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/05/economist-debate-afghanistan/"…; stating that <em>"The war in Afghanistan is winnable because for the first time the coalition fighting there has the right strategy and the resources to begin to implement it."</em>

The two statements are not necessarily contradictory, but they suggest different viewpoints from two people with views generally worth considering (Nagl, because he's in the bubble; Springer, because he's not).

"The point you just made on the importance of Commanders analyzing their AOs and concluding one size does not fit all is EXACTLY THE POINT OF THE ARTICLE."

But it's a point that then is subsumed by other parts of the essay. It's an essay that is sparring against itself.

The Marjah paragraph is merely the grand irony in it. The essay posits the need to look beyond pop-centric COIN bromides and media-generated -- but likely simplistic -- narratives and then serves up your description of Marjah as a best case example of the real deal.

It's not that I can't look beyond that example, nor even concede that all your points about what made the planning and initial execution of the Marjah operations are about right. Rather, your Marjah description calls into question a great deal about how a commander understands the COIN battlefield before him.

The examples I later posed came from ground commanders -- USMC and USA -- in or recently out of OEF. Those are their vignettes, not mine.

They either perceive a quite different institutional reaction to their concerns (not so much "do it," I guess) or they concede that they have no ready means of measuring accurately the pacification efforts they're attempting to achieve.

This means that the straitjacket they're in is one of confusion: They don't know if what they're doing is working and fear that some of the best practices they're trying might actually be harming overall efforts. It's the stages toward pacification that don't seem to be coming.

Frankly, if a commander continues to clear and clear and clear and never transitions, it might be because assumptions about the pacification model aren't working.

But you know all of this or you wouldn't have written your essay, most of which I really enjoyed. It's an important piece, but one that seems to contradict itself at certain points.

Mike, I'm not making the assumption that a battalion commander has read seriously beyond Nagl, much less Douglas Porch or the French masters.

Heck, I don't think most of them have read FM 3-24, even if they have absorbed much of the doctrinal assumptions through TRADOC fiat and institutional osmosis.

Rather, I'm pointing out a few commonsensical observations that they might make as they apprehend the COIN battlefield they've been assigned. Where did I get these nutty assumptions? By talking to many of them.

As a practitioner, I never got higher than E-4, so I moreover concede that the decisions likely to be made within an AO shall be by people quite different from me, their assumptions and chosen tactics conditioned by all sorts of career, institutional and cultural biases far removed from what also might determine their counter-responses -- the battlefield sitrep that presents itself.

The enemy, as one might say, tends to get a vote.

In order to convey a sense of empathy for these officers, however, I just typed out these words with a knife.

If I didn't, the terrorists would win.

Certainly, MAJ Springer, violence is seasonal and the warmer and longer the days become, the more likely we shall see rising rates of attacks, intimidation and whatnot. This as true in COIN and conventional warfare as it is in criminal policing.

Your follow-on disclaimer reads almost like one of those voiced over warnings on Viagra commercials -- all sorts of bad symptoms that might occur in pursuit of a good thing.

With Viagra, however, I probably could count soon enough on a stiffy. Here, I just get the hope for one someday, that ISAF hasn't exactly lost "the initiative" and, eventually, the "area will end up a success story. Time will tell."

Hope, as some of us once said, ain't a plan. It's not a "success." It might never be a "success," even if the local commanders do everything "right," even if we hope really hard for it to happen.

Part of the problem might be the fact that for all our bluster about applying pop-centric best practices, it really boils down, as Mike put it, to the proxies. Liddel Hart would term this the "indirect approach," but Captain Hart wasn't saddled with the Karzai kleptrocray and the gaggles of Afghan security forces. Should he had been told of their help, he might have invented a different term for the phenomenon.

So let's turn this around and follow the Springer advice for commanders. Let's ask why the golden model might or might not be working, and what you might do to make it so.

What if the commander in his AO comes to conclude that his economic development projects actually are leading to more guerrilla activity because the Taliban taxmen were skimming the aid to feed their own terror machine?

What if the commander in his AO comes to conclude that the feckless Karzai flunkies sent to expand government and "out govern" the bad guys are actually harming the pacification process, turning off the locals and spurring on the rebellion?

What if the commander in his AO comes to conclude that the single greatest hurdle to quashing violence is that locals consider his battalion to be an illegitimate occupier? That the chief causative force behind the insurrection against any central state authority is his very presence there, which also taints the government agents sent to rule?

What if his tracking of battlefield metrics show that there's no correlation between civilian casualties and pacification, but there is a link between increased guerrilla activity against him and the "people" and his own increasingly restrictive ROE to protect them?

What if the commander in his AO determines that the ANSF and ANPs attached to him tend to behave in ways that make them poor partners for pacification? That their very presence and mix of ethnicity conspire to harm his ability to pacify the area? That they've become completely dependent on his battalion, to the point that they aren't taking any initiative on their own? And that the people there are now MORE receptive to Taliban propaganda that says this is an illegitimate foreign occupation on behalf of ethnic rivals in a civil war?

I get the niggling feeling that should the commander come to these conclusions, he would not be allowed to carry out -- on his own -- commonsensical innovations as Lyautey did when he realized that his pacification assumptions weren't working.

I have a feeling that instead he shall be told "the protection of the population, enabling of ANSF, supporting the extension of governance and socio-economic development, a focus on reduced civilian casualties, and an effort to remove malign influences that hobble progress" are proven best practices that eventually will make a "success" of it all.

And if it doesn't work, well, he just didn't figure it out like they did in Marjah.

MAJ Springer,

I'm not super critical of anything that you wrote, but I would just throw one more comment out there. Your praise for Moshtarak included that it...
<blockquote><em>... clearly displayed a fundamental shift in how we approached the enemy, the operating environment, and the planning process to address both.</em></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>... was planned much differently...</em></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>... used all of our available lines of effort to defeat the enemy...</em></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>... forced planners to think through the problem more thoroughly and utilize our lines of operation more effectively.</em></blockquote>
These are all indicators of how well it conforms to some doctrinal or TTP ideal, but not indicative of whether the operation will achieve any intended purpose. Whether conforming to that doctrine or TTP will translate into success seems to depend upon whether the doctrine/TTP are both sound and appropriate for the situation. That they are sound and appropriate seems to be assumed in this case. For many of us - current and former practitioners - that is the sticking point.

Well, I think we can agree that the heart (if not the mind) of MAJ Springer's essay is here, where he compares a commissioned officer to a chef and, mixing his metaphors like a tossed salad, the dish to a craggy path to someplace:

"You are a chef of sorts, with all the ingredients necessary to peace laid out before you. Your country may call upon one of you to whip up a strategy to counter a religiously motivated, externally organized insurgency, while a mere ten miles from your AO, another leader must skillfully blend a strategy to counter a tribally motivated, internally organizing insurgency, all with the ultimate aim of achieving a Population-Centric (a la) mode of daily operations. There is no brightly illuminated path to success here; rather, the path is muddy and convoluted and it is up to you to make your own way and your own success."

It all devolves, however, to pop-centric warfare, which preaches the centrality of the "people" as the prize that, upon seizing, pacification follows.

This most certainly is based on nothing but theory, especially in Afghanistan, and should be considered as little more than faith-based, but it's the pot o' gold apparently nestled under the Classic COIN rainbow in Kandahar.

The reason why I mentioned Porch was because he was writing about Lyautey's experiences in Morocco. In his public writings on the concept of irregular warfare, Lyautey posited a "colonial school" that fixated on the subject populations and how to cleave the guerrillas from their midst.

There were strong institutional reasons for Lyautey to discuss the promises of the "colonial school" and sell the pursuit of often expensive, dubiously profitable adventures overseas as part of a "sensible and humane approach," one that like pop-centric warfare decries the "destructiveness of war," and one that eventually leads to the prosperity all concerned.

The problem is that the French experiences rarely aligned all that well with the salesmanship. Lyautey, Gallieni and the rest ended up doing all sorts of nasty and brutal things that didn't square with the theory, and certainly not with their public writings on the issue, but nevertheless tended to work.

Now, I don't suppose that most of America's battalion commanders shall prove to be as supple or sophisticated in their operational arts as Lyautey. When Springer tells them to ask themselves, "What, specifically, is precluding me from executing the Population-Centric Strategy in my AO?," is he not really calling on them to get to the bottom of the causative forces shaping the rebellion in their AO and then attacking them?

Probably. Maybe. My beef is that he nevertheless seems to believe that these causative forces remain what Marjah and other efforts have sought to cure -- what in Classic COIN would be a lack of state governance. The solution, therefore, is spreading that state control to the population, who will slide off the fence to the government side once they're sated with all that great leadership, economic development and whatnot.

Therefore, he embeds within his essay what I think any sane person would conclude to be either inanity of high Panglossian myopia or an insincere attempt to paint a happy picture of Marjah that would make Gallieni and Lyautey smile broadly.

But the hard reality, beyond the press-punditry's "narrative," is that the clear-hold-build model for Marjah, albeit early in its unspooling, hasn't exactly, well, worked. So then one wonders if the larger pop-centric model also will work.

Which then should lead a commander in the field -- staring at perhaps a center of gravity and a nature of this war that are at odds with the official prescription -- to mull over his options: Do I continue to pay lip service to hearts & minds and the pop-centric nature of my work here? Or do I actually attend to the causative forces as I see them?

Springer seems to suggest both "paths," which should hardly satisfy anyone. His out seems to be for commanders to apply proper CYA protocols as they deduce some pop-centric measures to try and track, letting others that might not work or can't be measured or could be counter-productive fall into the TOC's round file for proper storage.

Of course, if the commander who fails to pacify his AO nevertheless can trot out some Springeresque line about how -- reality be damned! -- it's as great here as Marjah apparently is, no harm and no foul, right?

"On the surface, at least, 'Du role colonial de l'Armee' offers a sensible and humane approach to the problems of colonial conquest and development. Who could fail to applaud the functionary who castigated the idiocy of bureaucratic practice, the colonial soldier who decried the destructiveness of war, who envisaged a colonial world of happy and prosperous natives guided by enlighted colonial soldiers and administrators? However, the obvious question is, 'Did it work?' Was the 'role colonial' simply a vision of an ideal world, a piece of propaganda ... or was it a realistic description of French colonial methods abroad?"

Douglas Porch

I don't understand what the author is trying to argue/convey. Is the basic point that commander's don't need to feel like their TTPs are being dictated to them?