COIN

The venerable Foreign Affairs offers two pieces worth clicking through to.

First, Ivo Daalder has a discussion with Gideon Rose and Rachel Bronson on the NATO summit.

First, with regard to Afghanistan, we took stock of the transition process and agreed it was on track. And indeed, the leaders of the 50 ISAF countries decided that there was a next phase in this transition process, that by the middle of 2013 we would reach a milestone at which every district and province in Afghanistan would have started the transition process, meaning that the Afghan security forces would be in the lead for security. And as a result, the ISAFs -- the Afghanistan international mission would shift from a combat role to a support role. ...

Then by the end of 2014, we should be in a position in which Afghan forces are fully responsible for security, and enable the ISAF mission that has been in place since 2004 to end. So we agreed here that we are winding down the war, as President Obama put it yesterday.

We also looked at what post-2014 or post-transition commitment NATO should make. 

Second, Paul McGeough writes on the struggle to succeed Iraqi Shi'a Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani.

As Sistani ages, a struggle to succeed him has begun, putting the spiritual leadership of one of the world's foremost faiths in play. But with neighboring Iran moving to install its preferred candidate in the position, the secular political foundations of Iraq's fledgling democracy are at risk. Consequently, what amounts to a spiritual showdown could pose a challenge to Washington's hope for postwar Iraq to serve as a Western-allied, moderate, secular state in the heart of the Middle East. 

Shia doctrine requires that an incumbent die before jockeying can begin in a succession process that is as opaque as it is informal. But Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the 64-year-old cleric who is widely seen as Tehran's preferred choice, has jumped the gun by sending an advance party to open an office in Najaf.

Sorley, Lewis. Westmoreland:  The General Who Lost Vietnam. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2011. 395 pp., $30

Editor's Note:  This review originally appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette, 96, no. 4, p 84.  It is reprinted here with the permission of the Gazette.

Lewis Sorley’s eviscerating biography of General William Childs Westmoreland is long overdue, powerful for its restraint and careful annotation, a complete treatment of a man who caused tremendous damage to his Army and his country. Sorley guides us with steady hand down the fast-running river that was Westmoreland’s career, sweeping us along as we hear with mounting horror the roar of the falls ahead. When the ship of American state is sunk in Vietnam, Westmoreland is still sure he was right, rewarded by promotion upstairs, dedicated to his last unhappy breath in 2005 to justifying his deeply wrong strategy of bloody attrition in that war.

Sorley is a retired Army officer, a West Point graduate and veteran of both Vietnam and the Pentagon, and with four previous books on Vietnam and Army generals he can get right to the point. Within five pages we are into Westmoreland’s incandescent and uniquely American career: handsome, jut-jawed small-town Eagle Scout matriculates into one of history’s most successful West Point classes (six four-stars); rises swiftly to battalion command in combat at age 28 known to his men as “Superman”; Colonel at 30; regimental command at 31; four-star theater command at 52; Army Chief of Staff; no small threat for the presidency, which LBJ himself took seriously enough, Sorley asserts, to keep Westmoreland in Vietnam. Yet Westmoreland is “awed by his own magnificence,” stubborn, incurious or even “dumb,” prone to fall asleep in briefings and - far worse - to blame subordinates for his own lethal mistakes. His belief, hardened in World War II, was that throwing more men with larger weapons into a war would solve challenges from the tactical to the strategic. For Vietnam this was a very serious problem, the basis for all the others, in conducting a campaign described by one of his generals as “eighty percent ideas”.

Westmoreland, said his executive officer and future four-star general Volney Warner years later, quite simply “didn’t understand the war then, doesn’t understand it now.”  To the highly complex Vietnam insurgency question, Westmoreland’s confident, one-word answer – “firepower” – led to America’s ten years gone and more than 57,000 lives lost. Rather than try to understand the war in his four years commanding MACV, Westmoreland spent himself impressing Washington patrons who could get him the top slot in the corporation rather than listening to his generals warning of military disasters, or to his civilian advisors documenting the South Vietnamese government’s corruption and incompetence which Westmoreland insisted America bankroll. It is more heartbreaking and infuriating that he ignored soldiers and Marines in the field, who beginning with the 1965 disaster in the Ia Drang Valley were outmatched in the running jungle war to which they brought Westmoreland’s beat-the-Nazis tactics, weapons and training.

The Naval War College’s Dr. Don Chisholm has pointed out that as a leader matures into high-level positions his courage must move from the realm of the physical to that of the moral. General William Westmoreland in his years in Saigon and as Army Chief of Staff demonstrated neither type. “He had a way of creating a truth in his own behalf,” said a junior officer of General Westmoreland’s. Lewis Sorley at last sets the record straight. 

The Center for National Policy has published a new report titled, "NATO Strategy in Afghanistan: A New Way Forward."  Coauthored by Scott Bates and Ryan Evans,

This strategy calls for an accelerated and substantive transition that puts the Afghan government and security forces in the lead across the country and leaves approximately 30,000 NATO and partnered troops in the country by April 2013 under a special operations command structure. It also calls for a bolstered United Nations role in governance and development programs.

You can download the full report here.

Global Politics' Bob Tollast posted an interview with former COIN advisor Emma Sky.  A short excerpt:

One of the main issues for us resulted from our conceptualization of non-legitimate extremists battling against legitimate government. This conceptualization led us to focus our main effort on building up the capacity of "government", particularly its security forces, and helping it to crush its opposition through force, rather than on brokering political consensus among the competing groups or helping build up the institutions or the processes to manage conflict and competition. What we are witnessing today in Iraq is in part the result of our building up the “security state” at the expense of the “democratic state”.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we created ‘elite bargains’ which excluded key constituents. The excluded groups refused to accept their marginalization, and turned against the Coalition as well as the new elites that we had put in power and who they did not regard as legitimate.

#1:  Context and nuance: Focus changes on updating and improving the understanding of insurgency itself.  This will put current content into a more appropriate context and nuance in general, and address the primary shortfall of the current manual.  All lessons learned on COIN are corrupted by the policies and purposes of the times they occur in, but provide insights into strategic understanding.

#2:  Define for success:  Defining key terms with an eye toward criteria that lend themselves to similar approaches for solving the problem.  Purpose for action and relationships between parties are key. Move away from definitions based on degree of violence, type of ideology, or status of parties.

#3: COIN is a domestic operation:  Limit COIN to domestic operations (unless dealing with resistance following the military defeat of some state with the intent to bring it under US governance). Casting support of someone else’s COIN as FID promotes proper roles and the enhancement of legitimacy.

#4:  Types of Insurgency matter:  It is critical to clarify the unique aspects of the three broad categories of insurgency (Revolution, Separatism, and Resistance).  Insurgencies range from war to civil emergency and often occur in a blend of types, or morph over time.  No single COIN approach works for all, but blended, evolving approaches tailored for each can be very effective (and in many ways occurred during “the surge” in Iraq, but not during “the surge” in Afghanistan, with predictable results).   The blend of perceptions of US physical and policy “presence” driving resistance against the US among populaces also feeling internal revolutionary motivations toward their own governments is central to the past 20 years of turmoil.  Al-Qaeda conducts UW to leverage this energy and cannot exist without it.

#5:  Conditions of Insurgency:  Recognize the underlying conditions of insurgency that exist in every society, how to relieve such pressure through good governance, and the critical distinction between natural stability and the artificial stability achieved through state security forces. This facilitate better prevention, greater civil responsibility, more appropriate military roles,  and less operational surprise.

#6:  Human Nature:  Appreciate how universal and timeless human nature is, and those aspects most important for understanding the strategic context of any insurgency.  These are constants in the human domain that provide keys for solving complex, adaptive problems between people and governance.

#7:  Ideology & Narrative: Clarifying the role of ideology; the role of social media (and info tech in general); and narratives. These are essential tools to initiate and facilitate action, but are not causal.

#8:  Sanctuary:  Shifting the focus on “Sanctuary” from terrain to being more about legal status and popular support.  Deny enabling status and popular support, particularly for regional groups like AQ.

#9: Causation:  Recognize that causation primarily radiates out from government, and that it is the perspective of the recipient individuals and populace groups that matter, not governmental intent.

#10:  “Winning”: Not preserving some regime or defeating some threat, but expanding the percentage of the total populace that perceives governance works to support their reasonable ambitions.