Afghanistan

In comments at a university appearance in Ohio, Gen Stanley McChrystal (Ret.) stated that COIN is a "math problem."  While the article likely removes much of the context, the quotes are nonetheless memorable.  Emphases are mine.  Read more of this story from Mary Ellen Hare at the Newark Advocate.

Is counter-insurgency viable if it requires a groundswell of troops, asked a student, alluding to McChrystal's own request for additional troops.

"The answer is mathematical. .... History teaches us that to succeed, we need 20 security forces for each 1,000 people. Afghanistan has 28 million people, so that would require 500,000 security forces. In Iraq we had too few troops and the insurgency was too thin. It ... (counter-insurgency) is the only way because you have to change the attitudes of the people."

"When we retaliated with Tomahawks after our embassy was hit in Afghanistan, President Clinton said we were 'not at war,' but if we had been on the receiving end of those missiles, we might have seen the situation differently. If there is no risk to us personally, war becomes too easy, and those actions affect our relationships with other countries."

Ryan Evans offers a scathing indictment at Foreign Policy's Af-Pak Channel of the op-ed penned by Bruce Reidel and Michael O'Hanlon.  The below sentences sum it up, but you should read the rest found here.

The mission and objectives O'Hanlon and Riedel envision are of the never-ending variety: creating a viable, stable nation where none has previously existed. They also ignore their former, wiser caution on the future of the war. ... Two years later, reading their article on "finishing the job" in Afghanistan (which recycles the same old arguments) it is clear to me that O'Hanlon has not fulfilled his promise to call for a re-assessment, and Riedel has not been frank about our lack of success. 

In a developing situation, a single U.S. soldier has reportedly massacred up to 16 Afghan civilians, including women and children, in two villages in the Panjway district of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.  The Washington Post report can be found here.

I will attempt to post major updates here, but the blog entry is not so much to keep readers informed, as this will be all over the internet, as it is for readers to comment on the developing situation.  

Missy Ryan, a Reuters correspondent, tweeted that villagers were reporting multiple soldiers took part in the massacre and that they were drunk.  The claims are not important so much for their possible veracity as they are for the narratives that will resonate in Afghanistan.  The U.S. military claims a single participant is already in custody.  The Embassy has released condolence messages in English, Pashto and Dari.  ISAF has released a statement as well.  Note that the Embassy statements are on YouTube, perhaps a more effective means for a largely illiterate population, but I'm unsure how much reach even these statements will have.

Update 1:

The NY Times article from Monday's paper is one of the most thorough accounts to this point.

Early on Monday, with the attacker in the custody of American forces, the public mood in Kandahar and Kabul seemed subdued with no immediate sign of protests on the streets. ...

In Panjwai, a reporter for The New York Times who inspected bodies that had been taken to the nearby American military base counted 16 dead, including five children with single gunshot wounds to the head, and saw burns on some of the children’s legs and heads. “All the family members were killed, the dead put in a room, and blankets were put over the corpses and they were burned,” said Anar Gula, an elderly neighbor who rushed to the house after the soldier had left. “We put out the fire.”

A new RAND occasional paper by Brian Michael Jenkins takes a look at Al Qaeda and what it means to different people. Note - you can click on the read online link to download a free PDF version.

More than ten years after 9/11, there is still remarkable lack of consensus among analysts' assessments of al Qaeda's current condition and future capabilities. Almost every issue is debated: Whether America has won the operational battle but lost the ideological contest; whether homegrown terrorism is a growing threat; whether maintaining American troops in Afghanistan is essential; whether the United States ought to declare on its own an end to the war on al Qaeda. Part of the debate is driven by political agendas, but the arguments derive from the fact that al Qaeda is many things at once and must be viewed in all of its various dimensions. This essay examines a number of these issues in light of recent developments — the death of Osama bin Laden, the Arab Spring, and the American withdrawal from Iraq. In each case, it drives toward a bottom line. In the final analysis, it is a personal view.