What's happening to the monarch of the Sea?

Yesterday the British government launched Iraq Inquiry committee, just as the last troops were pulled back to Kuwait by today in compliance with the British-Iraqi SOFA, charged with”

…considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country…

The Inquiry is not a court of law and nobody is on trial. But I want to make something absolutely clear. This Committee will not shy away from making criticism. If we find that mistakes were made, that there were issues which could have been dealt with better, we will say so frankly.

The Washington Post is reporting that those called will be former Prime minister Tony Blair, and in contrast to what had previously been discussed sessions with be public whenever possible. The article also stated:

John Chilcot… said that "the Anglo-American relationship is one of the most central parts of this inquiry" and that the panel hoped to have "discussions" with Americans involved in the war.

I was reminded forcibly of Patrick Porter’s piece on Kings of War from earlier this week, discussing the role that the “special relationship” has played in continued British involvement in both wars:

For the UK, the war in Afghanistan, like the war in Iraq, is part of a grand strategic goal – to sustain a relationship with the United States.

In the debate over invading Iraq, Tony Blair was explicit on this point. The UK was not only supporting the US because it agreed with its case for removing Saddam. Britain was participating also to shape, lead and advise the American superpower – to promote British influence, to integrate America’s war effort within a multilateral (if not formally sanctioned and legal) coalition, to guard against a reversion back to American isolationism, and to align America’s war against terrorism within an internationalist and liberal framework…

At the level of defence policy and military capability, senior officers articulate a parallel desire to make Britain’s military power deliver the UK a seat at the top table, to help Britain ‘punch above its weight’...

For the Anglo-American relationship, there is a paradox in the war on terror. Though Britain participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan partly to keep its credibility and pay a ‘blood price’ to sustain the relationship, the strain and difficulty of those wars effectively endangers that credibility. Britain’s political will, the muscle and effectiveness of its armed forces, and its capacity to translate highly-regarded military force into strategic success, all of this is placed on the line, and repeatedly. Undertaken to fortify the Atlantic alliance and Britain’s status as a heavyweight junior partner, the war instead jeopardises it, and the Brits feel forced to rescue it.

I think the specific note this early in the proceeding of the inquiry board that the “special relationship” is within the bounds of the investigation speaks, a least to some degree, to a more serious desire to question whether the relationship should remain as prominent in calculations of British Strategic interests in the future. Given the way the political climate is leaning in Britain, I think that decision is going to rest with David Cameron and the Tories, rather than the beleaguered Brown administration. If Obama wants to keep our strongest ally, this might be a good time to make nice.

Crossposted to http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/07/31/old-friends-sat-on-a-park-bench-like-book-ends/

Afghanistan review: the comparison edition (corrected)

As Spencer has already reported, the past week has been filled with chatter from the think tank advisors returning from Gen. McChrystal’s Afghanistan review. Quite a lot of blog-o-sphere rage has focused on Andrew Exum’s remarks , noting striking differences in policy recommendations and observations he is articulating in this newest round of interviews and those he espoused before leaving. Josh Foust in particular has a nice side-by-side piece showing key changes in Ex’s recommendations (as well as some serious internal inconsistencies in his articulation of them).

Jari over at The Stupidest Man on Earth also points out that these statements are very different in tone from those made by Tony Cordesman over the last few days. One possibility here is certainly that Ex has drunk the Kool-Aid. But as Josh points out in his post, spending time on the ground can create very real changes in attitude, so I thought it was worth doing some comparison work between Ex, Cordesman, and Biddle’s before and after statements, to see where the changes are, particularly given the boss-man’s reporting that those in the review was far from united in their perspectives.

While Cordesman has reams of publication devoted to Afghanistan, the most substantial analysis and policy recommendation paper from the last few months in my mind is Winning Afghanistan*. While the total report is nearly 200 pages long, key recommendations and observations include the integration of “the civil and military dimensions of the war into sustainable efforts that take account of the real world conditions in both [Afghanistan and Pakistan]” (pg vi); more, and more honest, governance from all levels of the Afghan government; more development aid; and “far more coherence in international effort to make this possible” (p vi). While speaking to the need for a radical expansion of both the ANA and ANP, the report is particularly concerned with the need to provide training to police units with both the specific paramilitary skills and the loyalty to the duties and responsibilities of their position and national government that they need to do their jobs. There is also a substantial discussion of the failure to define what the ‘hold’ and ‘build’ phases will look like, and how to prepare the Afghan Security Forces to take them over in a reasonable amount of time. Finally, he notes that there is a decisive need to change if we want to be on track for even a ‘slow win,’ and that the necessary resources and direction for that change must come from the US rather than relying on coalition partners.

So what did we hear at yesterday’s press conference ? (Note: There isn’t a transcript available yet, so I’ve transcribed a good-sized chunk here sorry for any errors):

The fact is, we have to go far beyond the normal limits of counterinsurgency, we’re involved in an exercise in armed nation building, and we’re doing it at a time when we have to see Afghanistan find ways to… create an effective government, create effective forces, and simultaneously meet challenges like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and pressures from outside powers.

Above all, this is a war shaped not by strategy, but by systematic neglect and years of under-resourcing… Seven years after we entered the war what is most striking about Afghanistan is how many people are still acting like this was the first year in Afghanistan. How many of the exercises are disconnected and theoretical, or are involved with experiments... And you see these problems are much more critical on the civil side then they are on the military side...

… What should be an integrated civil-military effort, and a focus on winning the war in the field, is a dysfunctional wasteful mess, focused on Kabul and crippled by bureaucratic divisions. It is further crippled by Afghan corruption, power brokering, and by the individual national caveats and tensions within and between the individual members of ISAF and NATO.

…You need to refocus the intelligence effort to focus on the nature of the insurgency, not simply finding threat forces in the field and defeating them...

We, the United States, are going to have to provide the resources if we want to win. Most of the incremental resources will have to come from us. This means very substantial budget increases, it means more bridge combat troops, and it means financing both the civilian effort need in the field, and a near doubling of Afghan National Security Forces. Those forces not only have to be doubled to provide a minimum level of coverage, we have to face the fact that we do not need civil police in a country that has no courts in something like 95% of the villages… and where the police cannot survive unless they have paramilitary capabilities and outside support…

And finally, let me just make one last point. When we talk about winning, we are not talking about transforming Afghanistan into some mirror image of the West, or accelerating it to the point where it becomes a developed country within the foreseeable future. We’re talking about basic security, basic stability basic economic opportunity for the Afghans, and creating a country which will be free of international terrorism. One of the problems we all face in Afghanistan is that we have set impossible goals, according to impossible time frames, which Afghanistan cannot possibly meet. We need to serve the real needs of the people in achievable ways. If we pursue a dream, we will lose the war.

What’s striking here is that very little has changed other than Cordesman’s level of aggravation. The key flaws that he points to are the same, but no one seems to be following through. After seven years of experimentation, we are still forced to “experiment” in Helmand to figure out necessary troop levels and strategies for the ‘hold’ and ‘build’ phases.

One small change in position that showed up in the Q & A which I think is worth highlighting is Cordesman’s point that Pakistan is not the only country that shelters terrorists, and that we ignore growing situations in countries like Yemen and Somalia for the sake of presenting a conveniently unified description of Af-Pak. Given that Cordesman was one of the first to push for the inclusion of Pakistan as a necessary second side of the coin, I think this is a point that is worth paying some serious attention to as we keep talking about our CT and COIN goals in the conflict that he sees a need to turn to a more international CT agenda rather than one that looks only at Af-Pak.

So what is so different about Exum’s after action reports? Actually, in general I think he’s often saying very similar things to Cordesman, but because there is more of a disconnect between his recommendations in Triage and the post-review interviews, he is sounding less coherent. I think the changes in his conception of what a metric of population stability should be have, in fact, changed, most likely because “the population may not be targeted kinetically in the way that it was in Iraq, but it’s certainly being targeted.” This is why we do fieldwork, kids, so we know when it’s appropriate to draw analogies to previous conflicts and when it’s not.

On the question of what the future ‘hold’ and ‘build’ stages should look like, I think again what we’re seeing is that Ex has not really changed his opinion, so much as he can’t reconcile facts on the ground to the way he thinks things should run. The plan as laid out in Triage called for an ink spot approach, which is what seems to be working in areas where we’ve had some success (see this great article from the Army Times about life on one of those remote bases), but now that we have a major kinetic operation underway in Helmand, the situation on the ground is going to require some other approach. I think that this illogical sting of assertions:

We’ve got very limited international forces in Afghanistan, and we’re actually not using them to their best effect if we’ve got them ‘holding.’ So if the Marines in Helmand are holding terrain right now, that’s a waste of resources. The ‘hold’ function should be executed by a robust Afghan national security force.

is actually the result of Ex now agreeing with Cordesman about the necessity of a massive surge of Afghan forces to a greater degree then Triage articulated, but having to deal with what is looking like a premature major operation. Frankly, I think neither man has much hope we’ll hold the ground we’re taking now, although neither says it. The only reason Cordesman doesn’t sound as discombobulated is because he is speaking about these issues from a much broader perspective than Ex, which allows him to write Helmand off as another ‘experiment’ needing ‘improvisations,’ pointing out that the operation was planned before the new team was in place. However, during the Q&A he too argues for a focus on ANA involvement in ‘hold’ ops in later operations.

Another point the men seem to now agree on that was not really discussed in Triage is the need to change how we conceive of what relevant intelligence is. Ex now claims that:

Our intelligence and the way that we gather intelligence continues to be focused on the enemy. What we need to know to be successful in Afghanistan is not just the size, disposition and composition of the Quetta Shura Taliban, or the Haqqani network, but we need to understand local dynamics.

Again I think this represents a growing realization of just how different Iraq and Afghanistan are, and how that has twisted strategy recommendations. This is a very old hobby horse of Cordesman, particularly to the extent it involves poor government reporting and assessment, so I’m not surprised he got there first.

Prior to the review, Biddle had been perhaps the most negative of the three on the future of the conflict, and his piece in The American Interest drew plenty of critiques over the last month. Asked specifically if he had revisions to make to his comments given what he had seen, he stated:

My sense of the situation is stronger now than it was certainly before leaving. My basic view remains, however, that the case for making a go at this is stronger than that for cutting our losses and withdrawing. But the argument I made in the American Interest article was that it was a fairly close call, that this wasn't a slam dunk either way… And I certainly continue to think that either course of action--staying or withdrawing--has important problems. On balance staying is the better course, but only if we're prepared to resource it correctly. The weakest argument is staying and under-resourcing it. That creates the opportunity to lose slowly, which is the worst of the three possible approaches.

Basically, I think he has changed the least, and that both Exum and Cordesman have come to agree with Biddle. His frank assessment that the necessary triage approach is going to include losing territory in order to hold what we have really isn’t all that different from what Ex’s triage report called for, but it is willing to articulate costs in much less idealized terms.

And that generally seems to be the takeaway. We have the right plan, but there is going to be a substantial (and possibly unbearable) cost to implement it, and facts on the ground are going to mean we lose some of our current half complete missions before we can start winning.

*Full discloser: my boyfriend was one of the coauthors of the report. However all analysis here is my own. [ed apologies for neglecting to have the disclosure on the original post]

Crossposted to http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/07/31/theres-something-happening-here-but-what-it-is-aint-exactly-clear/

I can haz real blog?

Hey gag, sorry for the short notice but for today and tomorrow I'll be guest blogging for always awesome Spence Ackerman over at http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/. I'll cross post things here, but you should come say hello, and check out the work of my coblogger Tyson.

Catagories are important (or "In which I jump up and down on Michel Cohen")

The COIN community has gotten a bit insulare for its own good, and Michel Cohen as played a useful role as a precictent naysayer (though I think these pieces by Rory Steward and Andrew Bacevich are more compelling in general). However, he frequently seems to have issues understanding current catagorizations in way that make him talk past many of the other serious people writing on the issue.

One of Cohen's recent posts points to why the question of classification is actually very very important, even when it seems like an internal, circular point of utter nonsense (which dont get me wrong, it is sometimes). Over the course of the post Cohen points to both the US involvement in the Philippines and the American Civil war as instances of successful counterinsurgencies campaigns that did not utilize modern pop-centric COIN models. Problem is, neither is.

While both conflict would probably class as Irregular Warfare under modern conventions, the Philippines were a war of colonization, and the American Civil War was... well, a civil war. in both cases America was committed to long term projects of governance, either through pseudo-colonialism (at levels that are just nowhere in the current reasonable discussion about the futures of Iraq or Afghanistan), or through the direct manipulation of the political and economic system of the South that was achieve but Reconstruction Legislation. But these aren't COIN related political strategies, any more then the fairly brutal suppression of the population through events like Sherman's March to the Sea are in line with COIN related military tactics. By miscatagorizing the conflicts, really false analogies are being drawn that just don't serve to advance a very legitimate debate about how we should proceed.

Critique of Gourley

Sean Gourley’s work presented in a TED lecture looks at a wide range of conflicts and finds a surprisingly regular pattern, claiming the number of people killed in a attack is dependent on the frequency of the attack, because the tactics necessitated by insurgency nudge organizations to a ‘ideal’ organizational structure (α=2.5), which allows for optimization of capabilities.

He then shows a break-down of how this hypothetical “organizational structure” variable, which claims to represent the coherence and size of the various subgroups, has shifted in Iraq. Starting with a relatively unified opposition to the US’s invasion, his model shows that by 2002/3 the number of splinter groups within the insurgency had spiked up to what his finding show is an ideal level of ‘structure’. Following the ’06 elections, his model than shows a further splintering of groups for the next year, until the start of the surge, at which point α drops back down, only to rise back up. (Chart is at 6:48 in the video).

His theory is that when α is high or low, we are better able to best insurgencies, either by bringing unified groups to the negotiating table or crushing small groups, and that the ideal organization of insurgencies, revealed in the patterns of attacks, will be consistent in all conflicts. While intriguing, there are some quiet serious questions I have about this theory.

First of all, the idea that violence as a broad concept follows power-law distribution is not only not new (as noted by Drew Conway regarding violence more generally, and this study that looks at terrorist attacks only, both worth a glance in their own right), but also not terribly surprising. Smaller incidents generally cost less than larger ones. In a shot out, killing more people needs you need more men, in the case of an IED more casualties require a higher level of technical proficiency and more materials. Man, experience and materials are all expensive so can only be used a finite number of times.

That of course doesn’t mean that the work couldn’t still be useful to the discipline, particularly the idea of a mathematically ideal type of organizational structure; however, I think it is this ability to intuit the basic finding that there are likely to be more small attacks and fewer large attacks that Ricks is responding to in his pieces, when he asks why this research should be seen as useful. Gourley responds to these critiques by claiming:

With this new approach… We can understand the underlying structure of an insurgency i.e. how an insurgency 'decides' to distribute its forces (weapons, people, money etc). Further, we can explain why this kind of insurgent structure emerges in multiple different conflict zones around the world. We can estimate the number of autonomous insurgent groups operating within a theatre of war. We can monitor and track a conflict through time to see how either side’s strategies are affecting the state of the war. Finally we can compare the mathematical patterns of current ongoing wars with past wars to estimate how close they are to ending.

Well all this sounds great, but does it actually work?

The first problem is the source of the data. Not only does media usually not report ‘failed’ attacks, potentially lowering the reported number of incidences, they often miscode violence in confusing ways. Kalyvas (article gated but abstract here, or in book form) has done a lot of work highlighting the extent to which micro level killings are coded by elites (including the media) to read as 'insurgent' or 'ethnic' violence, instead of homicide or gang violence. Expecting that bias, the problem in the data is not just that failures are excluded, but also that successes are over reported.

The second issue is partially caused by a lack of clarity in the data presented. Because the data tables aren’t available on the lecture slides and I couldn’t find a paper citing this data, I’m actually unclear on what exactly he means by number and size of incidents. Given the difficulty he had in obtaining date from the Pentagon, he has to be looking at more than just coalition casualties*. Assuming that they include other security personnel, insurgent dead, or even civilians, how are Gourley and co. coding the number killed? This isn’t just nitpicking, the study means deferent things when placed in actual context depending on what variables he’s using.

Is the question about the number of casualties on the side of the Counter insurgents (which in and of itself is going to be a contentious definition when coding), as inflicted by the insurgents? Given that the causal story that is told about the relationship is one about the organization of the insurgency, that coding would make some sense (and seems to be the reading that Drew is taking). However, he’s applied the same model to conflicts with 2, 3, or more independent and active parties involved in the war, with no attempt to distinguish what’s going on. Given that there are often multiple factions that are just as often fighting each other as the COIN force (which isn’t necessarily unified itself) assuming a simple binary conflict is intensely problematic, particularly in cases like Iraq where there is quite a lot of insurgent on insurgent violence. To me, that either indicates that the models is being applied without really thinking about how the case fits into the parameter, or that in fact what he is interested in is the total number of deaths, on both sides and including civilians that occur during a conflict.

Leaving this problem aside for a moment, Drew Conway (who is much better at modeling then me) points out the gap between the observed distribution of attacks, and the causal mechanism that Gourley suggests:

Power-law distributions can provide a categorical approximation of a network's underlying structure because in these cases the distribution in question refers to the frequency of edge counts among nodes, a structural measurement. Even for networks, however, the actual underlying structures of networks following a power-law can vary wildly. Attack frequencies, on the other hand, have nothing to do with structure. In what way, then, is this metric valid for measuring the structure or distribution of insurgent forces?

In many ways this in not only a modeling problem, it goes back to my point about insurgencies not being as simple a structure as this model assumes. Gourley’s understanding of insurgent structure is far too simplistic; when the reality is that the social networks that support these groups vary widely in sophistication and resources without necessarily varying in size. Because there is no effort to compare α to any other indicators of insurgent structure one could look at (ex. Number of groups claiming credit for attacks, existence of sections of the organization devoted to nonviolent efforts like social services, or qualitative accounts from intelligence about the nature of the structure) there is little effort made to see if the narrative α presents holds up. To take the example of Iraq, the fragmentation of the insurgency following the 06 elections that is seen in Gourley’s findings doesn’t match up terribly well to the narrative that has been told by observers. Without some qualitative work to back up the narrative, its hard to take such sweeping findings too seriously.

*At least I assume such based on colleagues’ attempts to gather data of a similar nature

New fighting force agains al-Qaeda?

BBC reports that a major Tuareg faction in Mali is cooperating with government forces in order to take out al-Qaeda, who uses the deserts that the Tuareg traditionally travel to hid bases

The BBC's Martin Vogl in Mali's capital Bamako says the Malian and Algerian governments will both be pleased to have Tuareg forces as part of their offensive against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The Tuareg know how to operate in the desert perhaps better than anyone else and could be the government's best hope of beating al-Qaeda in the region, he says...

Under the deal, special units of fighters from the Alliance for Democracy and Change (ADC) are to be sent to the desert to tackle al-Qaeda.

Although the ADC signed a deal to end its rebellion three years ago, one of its factions is still active.

The Tuareg, a historically nomadic people living in the Sahara and Sahel regions of North Africa, have had militant groups in Mali and Niger engaged in sporadic armed struggles for several decades.

They have argued that their region has been ignored by the government in the south of the countries.

But there has been a history of animosity between the Tuareg groups and al-Qaeda.

I haven't seen this covered much in the usual insurgency/terrorism roundups, but this is both a really good example of how different insurgent groups can be turned against one another. Hopefully, we can keep going with this type of tactic in or CT efforts against al-Qaeda.

While it may be naive on my part (for starters, i dont know a whole lot about Tuareg insurgencies), this also seems to be a case where CT collaboration may help ease other cleavages in the society that lead to insurgency. Given that participation in military efforts are going to require that money and equipment from the government make it out to the desert, these operations may be able to ease the resource gap that is perpetuating the conflict. or it may be another Sons of Iraq program, in which little real integration or resource distribution is achieved.

What maybe Friedman should have writen

Spencer did a nice job pointing out the stupidity of Friedman's column on Mon to prevent what would have been the blog equivilant of watching my head explode, but just to make it even more apparent how idiotic the colum was I thought the contrast between what old TF chose to turn out, and what DangerRoom produced from the same press trip was worth a look.

TF's big takeaway from a trip to see a girls school opened?:

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Nathan Hodge uses the same event to discuss:

The relatively secure environment of the Panjshir means that the PRT can undertake and oversee more reconstruction projects than any other team. Burns said his team had done 80 site visits in three months; sometimes they can visit a dozen project sites in one day. In Kabul, by contrast, he was lucky if he got out once a week...

Not everyone is fan of the military’s embrace of the humanitarian mission. Since their inception in late 2002 as “Joint Regional Teams,” many in the aid and development community have worried that the PRTs were encroaching on a traditional humanitarian space, blurring the line between civilian aid work and military operations...

In the Panjshir, however, the aim seems to be keeping this mission as low-key as possible. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t risks. In late May, a convoy carrying members of the Panjshir PRT was hit by a suicide car bomber while it crossed through neighboring Kapisa province; four members of the team were killed, including the commander, Lt. Col. Mark Stratton.

Hmmm... you mean you can report on things that the public may not know about? particularly when you write for one of the most widely read periodicals in the world? Interesting...