COIN

SWJ contributor Bob Tollast interviewed me last week on a few points regarding the developing transition in Iraq.  An excerpt of one of my answers is below.  The whole interview can be found here.

The tenets of pop-centric COIN have come under increasing question recently, as has FM 3-24. I do not want to try to enter that debate in a few sentences here. I will just say that FM 3-24 is written from an outsider’s perspective as to how to conduct COIN, which is one of its major flaws – that being, conducting COIN on behalf of someone else instead of letting others take care of their own problems with some assistance (e.g., foreign internal defense as the military terms it). I question how much AQI is really conducting, much less winning, a campaign to win over the Sunni populations. While there are increasing references to Maliki’s growing strongman status and his relationship to Iran, I don’t see that as driving the Sunni population into the arms of AQI.

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.

SWJ-regular Gian Gentile reviews Lewis Sorley's Westmoreland at The National Interest​, attacking Sorely's support of the "better war thesis."

Did General Westmoreland lose Vietnam? The answer is no. But he did lose the war over the memory of the Vietnam War. He lost it to military historian Lewis Sorley, among others. In his recent biography of William C. Westmoreland, Sorley posits what might be called “the better-war thesis”—that a better war leading to American victory was available to the United States if only the right general had been in charge. The problem, however, is that this so-called better war exists mostly in the minds of misguided historians and agenda-driven pundits. ...

Westmoreland’s failure, like so many others during that tragic war, was his inability to see that the war could not be won at a cost that was acceptable to the American people. Just like the American generals of today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Westmoreland in the end put too much faith in the efficacy of American military power when he should have discerned its limits.

CSIS's Anthony Cordesman argues that the strategy embarked upon by Gen Stanley McChrystal is now dead and that the U.S. and its allies must construct and resource a strategy to transition to an Afghan "muddle through" that doesn't greatly jeopardize U.S. interests.  While I'm not sure that there has ever been a strategy in Afghanistan, or how to state it, Cordesman argues that four threats have been killing any such strategy from the beginning. (h/t Nathan Finney)

The key reasons shaping uncertainty as to whether the mission could be accomplished—whether it would be possible to create an Afghanistan that could largely stand on its own and be free of any major enclaves of terrorists or violent extremists—went far beyond the problems created by the insurgents.

It was clear that there were four roughly equal threats to success, of which the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar were only the first. The second was the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan government. The third was the role of Pakistan and its tolerance and support of insurgent sanctuaries. The fourth was the United States and its allies.

I highly recommend that you also see Jim Sleeper's "How the Debacle in Afghanistan Disgraced its Cheerleaders" at the Huffington Post, h/t anonymous you know who you are.