Afghanistan

The full text of President Obama's speech on Afghanistan can be found here.

The White House's summary is as follows:

"Today, President Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan -- to meet with President Hamid Karzai and sign a strategic partnership agreement that will help to guide our future relationship with the country.

"For more than a decade, U.S. troops have served in the region as part of the NATO mission. In a televised address, tonight, the President talked about the progress they've made and the new relationship between the United States and Afghanistan:

[We've] begun a transition to Afghan responsibility for security. Already, nearly half of the Afghan people live in places where Afghan security forces are moving into the lead. This month, at a NATO Summit in Chicago, our coalition will set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year. International troops will continue to train, advise and assist the Afghans, and fight alongside them when needed.  But we will shift into a support role as Afghans step forward.

As we do, our troops will be coming home. Last year, we removed 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Another 23,000 will leave by the end of the summer. After that, reductions will continue at a steady pace, with more and more of our troops coming home. And as our coalition agreed, by the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country.

"The President also discussed how the end of two wars will allow us to focus on a new set of national priorities:

As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at home, it’s time to renew America -- an America where our children live free from fear and have the skills to claim their dreams. A united America of grit and resilience, where sunlight glistens off soaring new towers in downtown Manhattan, and we build our future as one people, as one nation.

Excerpts from Owen West's book "The Snake Eaters" are published at Slate.

By the fall of 2005, reservists like Mark Huss had become, haphazardly, the main effort in America’s exit from Iraq. Unable to identify insurgents posing as civilians in the complicit population, the befuddled Pentagon recruited indigenous troops, embedding small teams of U.S. advisers as coaches. With the right support, local soldiers can far better expose the insurgents among them. President George W. Bush explained the strategy in an address to the nation, saying, “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

It was a decision that would be repeated by President Obama in Afghanistan five years later. No matter how America entered its 21^st-century wars among the people, all roads out led through advisers and their foreign protégés.

These orders had precedent. Throughout the 20^th century—from the Banana Wars, when small bands of Marines helped indigenous troops put down Central American insurrections, to World War II, Korea, and Panama—the U.S. military successfully employed similar adviser models.

Editor's Note: While soldiers sometimes believe that military programs and military operations should be held in some rarefied atmosphere protected from domestic politics, there is no such world. Hard choices always have to be made and it is worth considering how different people view these choices.

As the United States prepares to wind down operations in Afghanistan, the last high profile conflict in the War on Terrorism, and seeks a so-called strategic pivot towards Asia, it is important to assess the impacts of the war at home and the prospects for engaging future national security issues. While the War on Terrorism (hereafter referred to as GWoT) did not produce the 2008 recession in the United States, it greatly exasperated the severe economic crisis already faced by the American middle class that has been brewing since the middle of the 20th century. This has led to the current financial emergency in government where radicalized ideologies harden political positions and make progress difficult on economic and national security reform.

Estimates vary about the financial costs of the War on Terrorism. One assessment suggests approximately three trillion dollars. However, if one includes the annual defense budgets, homeland security expenditures since 2001, veteran programs, and the interest on the principal borrowed for military spending, the cost balloons to an astronomical eight trillion dollars. Using 2010 census figures about the number of households in the United States, this equates to about $70,000 owed by every American family.  This is nearly double the size of the national average income. Combined with the stagnation of middle class incomes, the inflation of health, education, food, and fuel prices, and record low tax revenue from upper income families and corporations, the middle class now bears the heaviest burden of financing the war and its consequences. It is no wonder that American families are buried in debt.

Compounding the problem is the increasingly expensive and incapable military establishment. As the defense budget continues to grow, the military is less able to deliver desirable political outcomes in America’s conflicts. The high spending of the GWoT did not produce a correlating increase in American security; instead, it hastened the coming crisis facing the military. Increasingly expensive and complex weapon systems reduce the availability of military forces, and restrict their flexibility by requiring them to operate equipment and execute doctrines ill-suited for the demands of war. Last year, the Department of Defense announced that the Army alone will lose 50,000 personnel in an effort to reduce costs. Predictably, just last week, it was announced that the cost of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will increase by 20 billion dollars and that it’s lifetime cost is expected to be at least 1.45 trillion dollars. As the military continues to break its own suicide records and maintain higher-than-average domestic violence, divorce, and sexual assault rates, it decides to decrease the number of personnel available for worldwide military operations in favor of over-priced military platforms incapable of performing basic military tasks like surviving contact with the enemy.

But this problem is disingenuously framed as class warfare and therefore receives little attention. Instead, the political leadership focuses on diminishing, eliminating, or privatizing key middle class programs in order to preserve the regressive tax code and the inefficient defense budget. The high costs of the GWoT are to be paid by sacrificing middle class benefits instead of balancing the obligations of all American taxpayers. Just last week, the Republican-controlled House passed in a partisan vote Paul Ryan’s budget that effectively privatizes Medicaid, and reduces federal retirement programs, food stamps, and college tuition aid, among other programs, while increasing defense spending and expanding tax cuts for upper income-earners. At the same time, the House also rejected a two-year Senate proposal to fund transportation spending, and instead passed, in another partisan vote, a 90-day extension of current spending. This was done despite America’s failing infrastructure, which has had notable failures in New Orleans and Minnesota. The classic debate about guns vs. butter rages on, and currently the guns are winning at the expense of the American Dream.

The cost of the War on Terrorism, or even the annual defense budget, could provide all of the funding necessary for repairing America’s infrastructure, reforming its failing education system, or even providing health-care to every American citizen. Instead, the costs of the war has forced America into political deadlock, where popular and essential public programs alike are being discarded in favor of retaining decaying institutions. Now, Americans are being asked once again to pay up for expensive military programs in pursuit of confrontational policies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. We have already toppled the regime in Libya, Syria and Iran may be next, and we are posturing for a future conflict with China. The American public should be informed by its experiences in the GWoT. War is expensive, and it has long-term consequences beyond its immediate outcomes. One of those consequences should be the realization that nation-building at home must precede nation-building or -destroying abroad.  

A new RAND monograph from Ben Connable suggests that all those metrics may not be as metric as they seem.  Please note you can download the eBook for free at the RAND page.

Campaign assessments help decisionmakers in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Congress, and the executive branch shape what tend to be difficult and lengthy counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns. Assessment informs critical decisions, including the allocation of resources and major shifts in strategy. The complex and chaotic environment of the typical COIN campaign presents vexing challenges to assessment, and efforts to overcome these challenges are mired in an overreliance on aggregated quantitative data that are often inaccurate and misleading. This comprehensive examination of COIN assessment as practiced through early 2011, as described in the literature and doctrine, and as applied in two primary case studies (Vietnam and Afghanistan), reveals weaknesses and gaps in this centralized, quantitative approach. The author proposes an alternative process — contextual assessment — that accounts for the realities of the COIN environment and the needs of both policymakers and commanders. Since this manuscript was completed in mid-2011, various elements of DoD have published new doctrine on assessment, some of which addresses criticisms raised in this report. The International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan has also revamped its assessment process.

The New York Times asks if the recent list of troubling cases from Afghanistan stem from a fundamental breakdown in discipline.  Worth your time to read and consider.

Officers and analysts express concerns that some of these isolated units are falling prey to diminished standards of behavior and revert to what one combat veteran described as “Lord of the Flies” syndrome, after the William Golding novel portraying a band of cultured British schoolboys reverting to tribal violence when severed from society.

“Some of these incidents certainly seem to be the fault of a breakdown in leadership at the small-unit level,” said Andrew Exum, a defense policy analyst at the Center for a New American Security who teaches a course on irregular warfare at Columbia University.

Kwasi Kwarteng, a Conservative member of British Parliament and author offered an interesting op-ed at the New York Times today:

THE Arab Spring, the threat of Iran as an emerging nuclear power, the continuing violence in Syria and the American reluctance to get involved there have all signaled the weakness, if not the end, of America’s role as a world policeman. President Obama himself said in a speech last year: “America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs.”

America’s position today reminds me of Britain’s situation in 1945. Deep in debt and committed to building its National Health Service and other accouterments of the welfare state, Britain no longer could afford to run an empire.

Read it all here.