How the U.S. military fell in love with 'Three Cups of Tea'

I vote for Gulliver, not because I agree with him, but to reflect my embarrassment that an O6 (even if he studied at Berkeley) insists on addressing people he disagrees with as "dude".

Bob,

I actually agree with most of your points, but where I think we may diverge is in the so-what of our views. I suspect in most countries where there are insurgencies based on my genetic make up and personal values if I was a local I would probably be an insurgent, so I don't simply view the conflict through a U.S. centric lens. I also don't think I would give two cents about the enemy's CMO efforts to win my affections, because that doesn't address the reason I'm fighting. Do we really think our forefathers during the American Revolution would have quit fighting if the British built schools and medical clinics in the colonies? Our COIN philosophy assumes people are shallow and easily bribed/persuaded, and yet we're always surprised to find that isn't the case.

However, moving ahead to our fight, as an American Soldier my (and our) job is to struggle to accomplish our stated objectives (regardless of whether or not I think they're realistic or not), and I think your proposals fail to nest with our objectives.

Jonathon asked a great question, and my personal view at this time is 5/2 did the right thing by conducting effective counterguerrilla operations and suppressing the Taliban. Unfortunately the Afghan officals failed to effectively exploit the opportunity created by the Inf Bde, so while the counterguerrilla operations were effective (and I wish more units were as aggressive), but in the end their effective had limited duration because nothing followed. It is systematic of the larger problem, and that is we're not organized correctly as a coalition with the host nation in the lead to achieve durable results. We cop out when we revert to a bottom up approach and ask young NCOs and officers to conduct the strategic level political work and "hope" it ties into some larger strategy, while generals get over involved in tactical level operations. Enable the infantry to effectively conduct counterguerrilla operations, and have then follow closely with civil governance officials to establish good governance that is clearly linked to the national government (since that is our strategy). Right now we're executing a strategy of hope. We hope the Afghans will like us, we hope they'll support the national government, we hope they'll reject Al Qaeda from returning (but our occupation for years has probably made this more likely), etc., and we don't have an effective strategy to achieve any of this. 5/2 did their job, their higher HQs failed to do theirs.

Jonathan,

A very popular mantra these days is that insurgency must be resolved from the bottom up. This is the "strategy of tactics."

As you describe, our soldiers are performing admirably in harsh conditions against a smart and resiliant foe, and to what effect?

The bitter pill that no one wants to swallow is that in fact, insurgency starts at the top and radiates down, and in turn, must be resolved at the top as well. Our embarrassing problem in Afghanistan is that we cannot escape the fact that we both created, and now protect, that problem. Insurgency is politics, and far more often than not the primary source of radicalizaion is that very form, nature, policies and implementation of policies by the very governments we dedicate ourselves to protect.

We carry a huge rock in our rucksacks, and that rock is our Western historical perspective on insurgency and COIN. Pop-centric are just new tactics to employ the old strategy. We need a new strategy.

Bill and Jonathan.

Harry sat in my office at KAF and loudly proclaimed that he had "defeated the Taliban in the Arghandab!!" I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.

I like Harry, and he ran a great counter-guerrilla campaign in the Arghandab, but the Taliban was not defeated there then or now. Counterguerrilla operations can suppress an insurgency in an area for a period of time. But that is not victory for the government, defeat for the insurgent, nor stability for the populace.

The insurgency in the Arghandab is a resistance movement. The very presence of the Coalition there, and the very suppression of the Taliban fighters by Harry's BDE quite likely made the insurgency worse. Such is the nature of resistance. The harder one presses their boot upon the neck of the people, the harder the people press back.

Now, can one go into that same valley and hand out cookies and electricity and win the populace over with "pop-centric" approaches? No, particularly when it is coming from the same guys who came here dealing death a few months earlier.

The revolutionary insurgency in Afghanistan will begin to resolve once the causal factors radiating outward from the Karzai/Northern Alliance government are resolved. The resistance insurgency in Afghanistan will begin to resolve once the overt foreign presence that this there to protect that same Karzai/Northern Alliance government is reduced as well.

This does not mean there is no place for security operations or even counter guerrilla operations in a smart COIN campaign. But first we need to have a smart COIN campaign.

South, Middle, and North I believe; but the French unified them as one colony and Ho's goal was to bring that unified state under Vietnamese, rather than foreign, control.

We don't need to talk about how many separate states were pulled together to form the US, or Germany, or any number of other modern countries do we?? True facts, but not facts material to discussions of insurgencies within those "new" combined states.

I think you focus on the wrong facts and look at them with the wrong perspective, but yours is one that is both reasonable and widely held.

I think when we step back and look at things through lens less clouded by our western perspective on insurgency and less skewed by our US perspective (and US military perspective) one gets closer to the realities of the situation.

South, Middle, and North I believe; but the French unified them as one colony and Ho's goal was to bring that unified state under Vietnamese, rather than foreign, control.

We don't need to talk about how many separate states were pulled together to form the US, or Germany, or any number of other modern countries do we?? True facts, but not facts material to discussions of insurgencies within those "new" combined states.

I think you focus on the wrong facts and look at them with the wrong perspective, but yours is one that is both reasonable and widely held.

I think when we step back and look at things through lens less clouded by our western perspective on insurgency and less skewed by our US perspective (and US military perspective) one gets closer to the realities of the situation.

Bob wrote,

""If one only watches the middle of a foreign film lacking sub-titles, it is little wonder one walks away with an understanding overly shaped by ones own perceptions of the meanings of what it is they saw.""

I agree with this comment and of course Vietnam's history didn't begin during WWII or even WWI, and they were divided into North and South Vietnam long before the French arrived on the scene. To claim that Ho "re"-united Vietnam is a bit of a stretch. Nationalist ideas started forming only after WWI.

Jonathon I know COL Tunnell too and agree with your assessment. He is one the Army's most innovative leaders, and fully prepared his BDE to conduct population centric in Iraq. Hell, I thought he was producing a SOF organization with all the language training, HUMINT, etc, but when they were in NTC doing their final FTX prior to deployment they receiveed notice at the 11th hour they were going to Afghanistan. Always professional he adapted with the remaining time he had left. In Afghanistan his unit moved into an AO where the former unit allowed Taliban almost complete freedom of action, and in in response the Taliban gave them a pass. When 5/2 Stryker rolled in they took the fight to the Taliban and of course the Taliban responded back and casualties mounted on both sides. Of course the population-centric COIN crowd lamented this was because 5/2 weren't doing population centric COIN. All too often history is horse crap, and personally I read historic accounts of our operations in northern Iraq that I participated in that were obviously false, but also obviously this falsified account appealed to someone. I'm not as anti-population centric COIN as Gian, because addressing the populace is important, but it doesn't replace fighting the insurgents, rather allows you to do it more intelligently. I applaud all who get outside the wire and intelligently take the fight to the enemy. That is what Soldiers should be doing.

Bob,

I agree with your assessment of 1945 Vietnam, but that was not the same Vietnam when the South fell in 1975. I think our previous and perhaps current foreign policy of exculsion has failed us repeatedly. Yes, we should have stay engaged with Ho, even if he believed in communism. Funny we could embrace friendly dictators as friends, because he was a bastard, but our bastard, but we couldn't embrace a communist. Imagine if we actually divided the communist block by having pro-America communist countries? Cuba is more complicated, but having our foreign policy high jacked by right wing Cuban fanatics in Florida has done nothing to increase our security in the region. Besides they were thrown out of Cuba for a reason. We would have had much more leverage in Cuba if we didn't isolate them and allowed our businesses to invest in Cuba. We'll pay the price in the next decade or so when Cuba emerges from the dark ages into an economic power in its own right, and we won't have a seat at the table. The Europeans will be there (they're there now) and reap the benefits.

However, my argument still stands (Vietnam and other locations) that the insurgent group doesn't represent the people writ large, it represents a select group of people, and just because they are at odds with the government doesn't mean the government is bad, it may have everything to do with power, greed and fear on the insurgent group' side. Why do you assume the government is always the problem? Why should the government capitulate power everytime some radical and his group wants a change in government? Not all insurgencies are just and well meaning. One size doesn't fit all.

Bill M.

While I suspect my assessment of the history of Vietnam will stand the test of time; I also appreciate very much that most look at the conflict as beginning in 1965 with the arrival of major US combat forces and ending in 1972/3 with the suppression of the VietCong and the withdrawal of those same US Forces.

If one only watches the middle of a foreign film lacking sub-titles, it is little wonder one walks away with an understanding overly shaped by ones own perceptions of the meanings of what it is they saw.

I know you know Ho was our ally in WWII; I know you know we screwed him and his people to put the French back in control of Indochina. I know you realize we cancelled the national elections, convinced the Vietnamese to withdraw their forces north of the ceasefire line (they fairly held the entire country upon the defeat of France), coordinated the migration of thousands of Catholics to the South, and then designed and oversaw a newly tailored "south only" election where Diem was able to win 110% of the vote in Saigon, and (as I recall) some 90% across the south. I know we did this due to our experience in Korea and our overall concerns with Soviet-Sino advances in the height of the Cold War.

We made a conscious decision to subjugate the nationalist goals and aspriations of the Vietnamese people to our own nationalist interests in our Cold War struggle in that region. Major powers do such things. We could have avoided all of that by simply respecting the reasonable nationalist ambitions of the Vietnamese people in 1945, and honoring the commitments we had made to them during WWII. Making Ho an ally early and stinking with the people would have avoided many of the harsh extremes of communism that later were brought to bear in an effort to overcome our support to the regimes we created and protected in the south.

I won't re-write history, but I'll call it bovine excrement when I know it is a mix of lies, half-truths, and perspectives shaped by the concerns of era in which it was written, and biases of the people who wrote it. I've read Giap's account, he has plenty of bias of his own as well. Such bias is natural. As historians we need to look to the bigger picture and find the greater truth.

Douglas,

You have me at a disadvantage. My understanding is that Spartacus led a slave revolt, and that is a very different thing from an insurgency. I believe that insurgency is best defined as:

"Insurgency is an illegal political challenge to government, rising from a base of support within a significant and distinct segment of the populace, and can employ any mix of violent and non-violent tactics."

Reasonable minds can differ as to definitions, but I purposely focus on the illegal nature and political purpose; and steer away from the degree of violence in the tactics adopted.

Slaves were brought to Italy from across and outside the empire; so such a revolt is much more like prison riot to be put down, rather than an insurgency to be resolved. Certainly the Romans did not consider them citizens.

Secondly, building wells and schools is not really COIN, but rather are tactics adopted and promoted by the current COINdinista belief that a populace can be bribed by such trifles and trinkets into ignoring and submitting to the poor governance over them. Governance that is committed to not addressing real concerns of legitimacy, justice, respect, and the provision of trusted, legal and certain means of recourse to the populaces they serve. Certainly such bribes of development offered by the very external power that raises the greatest questions among the people as to who their government truly answers to (legitimacy) are unlikely to produce any enduring stability effect.

Our COIN doctrine in the US has always been heavily influenced by the lessons learned from the efforts of European Colonial efforts and our own. These operations were all about sustaining and protecting governments that had the sole purpose of serving the interests of the Colonial power, and that is not COIN. Following that mindset got us into the dark pit of protecting Diem and his successors in Vietnam; and similarly to protecting Karzai in Afghanistan.

Once we escape the inertia of our history of such interventions we will begin to shape, think about and execute such operations very differently than we have to date.

Douglas, I agree with you, I dont think there are many (if any) examples where insurgencies were defeated by addressing the grievance. On the other hand, many insurgencies have been defeated through the application of effective military tactics. Bob frequently argues that the civil rights movement in the 60s was an insurgency, and that the Civil Rights Act was COIN strategy. The Civil Rights Act was good governance, not COIN, because the legal movement pushing for civil rights was NOT an insurgency, anymore than gays pushing more rights today is an insurgency. It is simply part of our political process. However, while I dont buy Bobs one size fits all argument, in some cases addressing grievances is necessary and desirable, while in other cases it is not feasible. Bob appreciates the complexity and nuances involved in all insurgencies, so I dont know why he pushes "good governance" approach, or that bad government is always the cause for insurgency. History doesnt support this argument. If a relatively small population percentage of a moderate Muslim nation is pushing for Sharia law in a nation-state where the state is effective and most people are content, then the grievance of a few doesnt represent the interests of the majority, but if the few are anywhere around 10% of the nation they can be significant threat. Addressing the grievance would not have been effective, but rather it simply would have been capitulation dooming the majority of the populace to Sharia law that it didnt desire. He also frequently distorts the history of Vietnam by assuming that most S. Vietnamese wanted to be united with the N. Vietnam, yet the facts indicate otherwise. Their government didnt fall due to poor governance, they fell when N. Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. Our national leaders have bought into this good governance argument to the extreme and the related 3D approach without any evidence that it will work, and frankly Im not aware of any situation where it has worked. Maybe we can have a national security narrative based on hope, but when we commit to action we need to be more pragmatic.

Robert C. Jones said:

"All good COIN is executed by the Host Nation, and ultimately focuses on understanding and addressing the grievance. Everything else is noise. I have to chuckle at the very common position that Gian promotes (sorry, but I do) that governments can only make such changes after first waging a campaign against the populace that defeats the militant arm of the populace. I think that is a historically common approach due more to the military being given the lead and doing what they do best first, prior to the government finally making the concession that they need to evolve as well."

Robert, there are many historical examples where this is not the case. The Romans didn't build Spartacus any wells or schools. Hell, they didn't even give him freedom.

Bill-

I don't think that is the overarching goal of the U.S. and its allies- at least not today. I think our overarching goal today is "change". I think that "change" means domestic issues have priority and foreign issues won't really have that much of a central playbook- we will be more pragmatic, less uniform (and thus more confusing), and less ideological (although we may at times sound like we are).

Therefore, I submit we don't need 3-24 for our current ops- although it will be used for STRATCOM purposes, we will selectively use its tactical precepts and defend its strategic concepts while only following them on the fringes. If it still looks like we are following 3-24's assumptions it will only be because of intellectual laziness and the complexity of trying to explain what we are really doing.

If Afghanistan's post-2014 narrative successfully spins that we won and that 3-24 was the reason, then we'll nation build the "next time" and prep for it to a degree until then- and 3-24 won't be re-written. It will be interesting to see- regardless of what really happens in Afghanistan- what the post-conflict narrative is.

If the post-2014 narrative is that we lost, then we might take the lesson that ops need to have limited objectives in the future- and if Libya is a "win"- then maybe that will be our template for success. Air power, no ground forces, and limited objectives. Sound familiar?

Bill C. (and COL G in the last paragraphs about 3-24 revision),
I believe that the idea was that we could knock out the regime, hold elections, and be gone. That assertion can be viciously attacked, but if I'm wrong, where was the planning, concept, etc that proves that there was a different strategic vision?

The idea was "the end of history." Once you hold elections and give license to the thymos and no one is a "slave," everyone will be happy and there won't be any wars or need to fly planes into towers. A gross oversimplification, yes, but this was the underlying idea. So, once we realized that quick application of democratic and economic liberalization wouldn't allow us to leave Afghanistan and Iraq better places, it became a muddle-through of constantly changing tactics and operational "art" (for lack of a better term). What is more, there was no strategy to tie these up and unify them. I think there are significant parallels to be drawn to... wait for it (Vietnam?)... World War I. No strategic vision leads to stalemate and tactical-operational muddle. Journalists make their name on calling out those that don't match the big name ideas, but in reality, every Bn is doing something different. There are some headline examples, but there are plenty of units that haven't made the press (at least as exceptions to the COIN rule) that have gone out on their own path with both excellent and tragic consequences.

Furthermore, when there's no strategic vision and no clear national interest at stake, it becomes a battle of battalions and below, with each commander trying to make his stones or grind his stone in his own way. Plus, in the environment of the military anymore, we all think the other guy is an idiot, so why listen to anyone else when they're all pushing an agenda that doesn't make sense? This sounds like an arrogant thing to say, but how many times have those of you in uniform heard something to the effect of "What the f- are they thinking?" That starts to sink in and eventually, why should we listen? This is not to say that we shouldn't listen, it is to say that the leadership needs to conserve its credibility, rather than wasting it on snow shovel training.

My train of thought wanders, but so does the operational guidance and the tactics. So, how do you capture that in a revised 3-24? And how the heck do you read that if you're also told to read Three Cups of Owen Wilson Wearing Afghan Garb and do a hundred modules of computer-based training, including going to Janie's office to figure out what you should do when you get an email about porn from Brazil (if you are in DoD, you know what I'm saying, if you're not, trust me that this isn't crazy talk)? And even if you are able to do all that reading and your job, then how do you change the doctrine, especially if you aren't on a staff totally disconnected from reality. And on those staffs with enough time to come up with good ideas, they're talking about how to make joint professional security education for the Afghan forces, not COIN. Seriously? Maybe I come across as a nut, but at my level, the amount of anger is incredibly and unhealthily high over stuff like this. Maybe if more audience was given to the guys at the pointy end of the spear than to aggrandizing nuts like Mortensen, we'd have revised already.

ADTS,
Rank is not important to me as a marker of respect, so no caveat required. I know that Peters is capable of intelligent analysis, but he's the worst kind of telephone tough guy and constantly changes his position on things. In a conversation in Monterey once, a student much like him was talking tough about killing people as a policy solution. Another student said something to the effect of saying to the intel officer, that's just mouse clicks and powerpoint slides to you. In other words, big talk with little to back it up. I'm not a shooter myself, but I instantly cringe when non-shooters talk tough with little rigor to back it up: telephone tough guys.

And his prevarication negates the quality of any good analysis he may have done.

Am I out on a limb here, or should Ralph Peters never be named in a debate about military affairs except as a mortal insult to whoever you lump him in with?

And while we're on the subject, I'd just add one more thought: What Hack has identified as the "temporal fallacy" and "spatial fallacy" both serve to highlight just exactly why it is so simple for COL Gentile, Michael Cohen, Ralph Peters, and other critics to heap scorn on 3-24: doctrine is by its very nature NOT context-dependent. It distills best practices across a general type of activity (while allowing for circumstantial discretion). Doctrine almost necessarily will give the impression "that policies abstracted from one defining moment might be equally valid in qualitatively different circumstances"... except to those people who exercise discretion and intelligence and reason, those who make a good-faith effort to understand that doctrine is not a prescriptive template.

But then, that doesn't fit with the narrative that the U.S. military is trying to pull a snow job of kindler, gentler war on the American populace, so why bother making that good faith effort?

My favorite part of COL Gentile's consistent refrain is the way he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that population control, offensive operations, economic and infrastructure development, and good governance measures are phased, time-sequenced portions of an overall campaign. No less an authority than Karl Hack, COL G's very own imaginary COINtra prophet, made that very point <a href="http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2011/02/setting-the-record-straight-on… on SWJ several months ago</a>:

<em>That is a bit like asking, 'In making a cup of tea, which action is the game-changer: the heating of the water, the addition of the tea bag, or the correct amount of steeping? If you dont heat the water, or dont add the teabag, or under or over-steep, you dont get a drinkable cup of tea. In addition, if you do things in the wrong order, it may turn out disgusting. You cant just skip a stage and go to the one and single 'really important bit of tea-making.

The same goes for counterinsurgency. You cannot, for instance, go straight to a comprehensive approach for 'winning hearts and minds and expect it to work, if you have not first broken up the larger insurgent groups, disrupted their main bases, and achieved a modicum of spatial dominance and of security for the population in the area concerned. Local fence-sitters are, quite rightly in terms of family survival needs, likely to regard personal safety and avoiding 'collaboration with you as overriding concerns, especially after contractors and officials who help you are assassinated or tortured.

Yet for counterinsurgency, people do sometimes ask 'what is the one key ingredient? The answer is, menus do not work like that, and neither did the Malayan Emergency. There were distinct phases or stages. I would argue that many other insurgencies are also likely to have distinct stages, and indeed that within a single insurgency different provinces or regions may be at different stages at any one time. It is quite possible that Helmand and Herat, Kandahar and Nangarhar, could simultaneously be at very different stages, requiring very different policies.

The question above, therefore, encompasses what I would like to dub the 'temporal fallacy (that policies abstracted from one defining moment might be equally valid in qualitatively different phases), and the spatial fallacy (that different geographic regions will be in the same phase, so allowing a single strategy for a country no matter how fractured and diverse).

In Malaya, each stage was mastered by a particular set of responses. But in classical Marxist fashion, each set of counterinsurgency policies called forth an antithesis, which required yet another set of game-changing policies.</em>

The U.S. can, of course, determine in which phases of another country's counterinsurgency campaign it wants to be involved, and there's no imperative for American soldiers to stick around for the building-good-governance-institutions phase in every instance. But this doesn't change the simple reality that governance reform (or whatever you want to call the part of this that's bigger than offensive military operations) will in most cases be a required part of the <em>host nation's</em> efforts to sustainably quell an insurgency over the long term. To pretend otherwise is just fantasy.

But then, we're going somewhat off-topic.

Just because one guy made up some stories does not invalidate a particular tactic any more than if the stories had been all true validated that same tactic in the first place.

Any effort overly focused on killing the insurgent element of one's populace; or providing development to the supportive element of one's populace (which is where it typically goes..Too dangerous to take it to the element of the pop. supporting the insurgents) is apt to fall short.

At the end of the day insurgencies are illegal political challenges to government emerging out of some segment of the populace that feels substantially aggrieved and that also feels it has no legal recourse to those grievances. No amount of physical punishment or bribery will cure that situation, but may in fact suppress it for some time.

All good COIN is executed by the Host Nation, and ultimately focuses on understanding and addressing the grievance. Everything else is noise. I have to chuckle at the very common position that Gian promotes (sorry, but I do) that governments can only make such changes after first waging a campaign against the populace that defeats the militant arm of the populace. I think that is a historically common approach due more to the military being given the lead and doing what they do best first, prior to the government finally making the concession that they need to evolve as well. The cases where the government made such changes first and either avoided the conflict, or resolved it short of great violence are far less sexy, typically not recorded in history as COIN, and far smarter operations.

Security operations are a critical component of a smart campaign, but are best kept from the very beginning as a supporting effort and narrowly tailored.

Intervention is not COIN

COIN is not war or warfare

COIN is government dealing with a situation, ofen violent, where a segment of the populace has opted for illegal means to effect political change. Just because the Pols tend to punt to the military, and the military tends to do what militaries do, does not somehow convert this to war. The long history of colonial and neo-colonial powers that are dedicated to preserving the political status quo in some far and troubled land severly clouds our thinking on this topic.

Just because one guy made up some stories does not invalidate a particular tactic any more than if the stories had been all true validated that same tactic in the first place.

Any effort overly focused on killing the insurgent element of one's populace; or providing development to the supportive element of one's populace (which is where it typically goes..Too dangerous to take it to the element of the pop. supporting the insurgents) is apt to fall short.

At the end of the day insurgencies are illegal political challenges to government emerging out of some segment of the populace that feels substantially aggrieved and that also feels it has no legal recourse to those grievances. No amount of physical punishment or bribery will cure that situation, but may in fact suppress it for some time.

All good COIN is executed by the Host Nation, and ultimately focuses on understanding and addressing the grievance. Everything else is noise. I have to chuckle at the very common position that Gian promotes (sorry, but I do) that governments can only make such changes after first waging a campaign against the populace that defeats the militant arm of the populace. I think that is a historically common approach due more to the military being given the lead and doing what they do best first, prior to the government finally making the concession that they need to evolve as well. The cases where the government made such changes first and either avoided the conflict, or resolved it short of great violence are far less sexy, typically not recorded in history as COIN, and far smarter operations.

Security operations are a critical component of a smart campaign, but are best kept from the very beginning as a supporting effort and narrowly tailored.

Intervention is not COIN

COIN is not war or warfare

COIN is government dealing with a situation, ofen violent, where a segment of the populace has opted for illegal means to effect political change. Just because the Pols tend to punt to the military, and the military tends to do what militaries do, does not somehow convert this to war. The long history of colonial and neo-colonial powers that are dedicated to preserving the political status quo in some far and troubled land severly clouds our thinking on this topic.

<a href="http://tachesdhuile.blogspot.com/2011/04/three-cups-of-what-how-about-n…;

For some reason I never bought or read that book. Prior to deploying I read:

- <EM>The Bookseller of Kabul</EM>
- <EM>The Places in Between</EM>
- <EM>The Kite Runner</EM>
- <EM>Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics</EM>
- <EM>Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda</EM>
- <EM>Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban</EM>
- <EM>The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan</EM>

Agree with you, Bill- the USAID guy hit the nail on the head.

Whether we are building schools for them or supplying police with ammunition- that kind of charity work hasn't helped any African nations rise up into self-sustaining nations that no longer need charity. If anyone at the "tactical" level isn't able to articulate- including this group- their "transition" plan in detail and how it turns over a larger percentage every month to the Afghans- then I'd say they need to pack up and leave.

At the operational and higher levels that's a little harder- as Miklaucic notes: it is our war.

COL M: agree with you too- I found that most IAs never heard of the book and the Afghans I talked to weren't too impressed with it. I'll never forget a Navy officer saying to an Afghan businessman when first meeting him, "Oh, I have read Two Cups of Tea!"

The businessman corrected the title and went on to describe for 10 min. how he did not like the book.

COL G: agree with you too- I think a lot of units did get that pushed onto them.

I really enjoyed the last paragraph, I think he hit the nail on the head, but it is truth we continue to ignore. Our war isn't their war, and while definitely shouldn't act like jerks, neither should we assume we can bribe people to fight our war with acts of kindness.

"No amount of tea with Afghans will persuade them that we are like them, that our war is their war or that our interests are their interests," said Michael Miklaucic, a longtime official with the U.S. Agency for International Development who is currently serving at the Pentagons National Defense University. "The war in Afghanistan isnt about persuasion or tea. It is about power."

This should probably more accurately say how SOME in the US military fell in love with "Three Cups of Tea." Not everyone did. And as I have said previously there are many across the military, USAID, and State Department who knew as much about this kind of work as Mortenson and did not need to be told about "the don't be a jerk school of counterinsurgency." But then there are many of us who continue to search for the silver bullet or holy grail of COIN, but I guess Mortenson has turned out to be a false prophet.