Joshua Foust's newest article, "Migrating violence in the Caucasus", is now posted at PBS.
Comments
Ann, I'm the last one to mention this because I'm something of a brawler, but I don't think that you really meant to write that the way you did.
Just because Foust was rude doesn't mean that you should your exceptional skills as a writer to pare him to whittles.
Your arguments were strong enough without resorting to listing credentials, which I suspect you don't much blandish or I would've heard of them years ago.
You're a gracious person. Don't sacrifice a trait I much envy for a rash moment I too often reveal.
Joshua Foust ought to read more closely if he is going to "run his mouth". The province I wrote about, Khost, is one of Afghanistan's smallest, the size of the Bay Area. Not a "vast swath". What happened in Khost between 2007-8 was an experiment, flawed, but suggestive. Many elements were copied elsewhere, mainly with less success. But since it is hard to disentangle the COIN strategy in Khost from the larger national and international factors impacting security there and in other parts of Afghanistan, we can't conclusively say it failed or not. I am starting to wonder how culturally relative COIN may be, and said so, quite speculatively, in the freeflowing environment of a blog. Not exactly written in stone.
As to my credentials compared with Mr. Foust's, well, he's what, 4 years out of a third tier college and has one trip to Afghanistan under his belt and doesn't speak or read Farsi or Pastu, as far as I am informed. I've had a bit more experience of the world and of Afghanistan (14 trips, 6 embeds),have studied Farsi (reading, speaking, writing) as well as 8 other foreign languages, graduated magna from Harvard,spent a year in the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Harvard, got an MBA in finance from Columbia. I have a monograph on David Galula coming out with the Army War College this summer, reflecting archival research, interviews and reading in French.
It's rather touching after all this time that Joshua Foust still finds fulfillment in attacking me and my supposed "friend" Scott Custer, who retired a couple of years back as a LTC and is now running Fort Bragg. I wrote about Custer as a journalist and had and have no social relationship with him, haven't seen him since he left Afghanistan in spring 2008 and have had no contact with him other than a couple of one or sentence emails. I'm not sure how that makes us "friends". But Foust seems to be unable to separate approving of someone's tactics or strategy as a commander from being their "friend". Chalk one up to the Facebook generation, perhaps?
You're charitable. I strongly doubt the article is even reasonably accurate. There are numerous errors of fact as revealed in other open sources, not least the origin, purpose and current manning of the HTTs.
I have long wondered at the presumed and often stated credibility of the magazine that carries him. This article and others like it are the reason for my cynicism. One could almost divine the author is essentially ignorant on the topic and was fed some information to purposely drop a few random Dimes in a national forum in a flawed attempt to sow hate and discontent...
RE: Ann Marlowe, big words from a woman Mr. Dilegge <a href="http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/11/on-anthropology-goes-to-war-1/… called out</a> for ignorantly running her mouth off at a topic she had clearly never studied seriously. She also, in that same essay Mr. Dilegge rightly highlighted for getting everything wrong save the conclusion, declared vast swaths of Afghanistan perfectly safe and successful because of her friend's COIN efforts. Only now, now that there's data and her friends aren't involved, now she sees that a few months of good doesn't really equal success.
World Affairs Journal remains a prestigious journal, but honestly, the crowd here can do themselves more favors than reading Ann Marlowe. Like most amateurs at this game, she is comfortable making grand pronouncements in the severest of terms - this is totally successful, wait now it's totally a failure - with no acknowledgment or even possibility that words and ideas matter, and when you advocate one thing that fails you should not blithely advocate your next bright idea without a modicum of reflection on why you were wrong.