Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Last Call for 2009

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Well, this is probably it for the year – we’re off on holiday from this weekend and aren’t planning on resuming normal services until the first week of 2010 although, if I get time, I may schedule some tuning signal posts over the close down period…

The misuse of the term ‘COIN’ for the environment we face today has always annoyed and as most will know my preferences are for the more accurate Countering Irregular Threats or, even better, Countering Irregular Activity. There is a great thread developing on Small Wars Journal on The Myth of Hearts and Minds [PDF: The Myth of Hearts and Minds – Comments – Small Wars JournalThe Myth of Hearts and Minds – Small Wars Journal] – I’ve already said my little bit and encourage you all to as well…I think this is important as the proponderant focus on COIN in the last four to five years has been a significant doctrinal red herring.

Both Coming Anarchy and Lex Neptunus offer comment on a recent Wall Street Journal piece on the alleged ability of insurgents to hack the feeds from US UAVs (drones are something totally different)…while it is simply so totally unamazing that the bad guys might target a weakness in the US comms hierarchy (you could build a whole doctrine around targeting weakness and call it ‘asymmetry’ – oh, yeah, they did that already…), this is not hacking: it sounds more like it is not much more than tuning into your neighbour’s unsecured wifi connection – more his problem that yours if he is too dumb/lazy/cheap to do the job properly…the Russians must be so upset that this $25 software, developed for legitimate and peaceful use, is being abused in this way…

On The Strategist, there is a note on the Brits punting up the success of their next big push in Afghanistan – before it happens – it’s either a cunning (of weasel proportions) information operations campaign – or just another sign of how much they just DON’T get it anymore and are still hankering for the halcyon days of the British Army on the Rhine where it was all so much simpler, lots of small maps, big arrows and bigger hands…I’m also not sure if you can have “…classic behind the lines fighting…” on the non-contiguous battlefield…?

And, finally, some food for thought from a Blunty of a few months ago: Are we better than them?

Accidental Guerrilla Part 2

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Well, that did get better as it progressed…I found the first two chapters close to interminable, loved Chapter 3 on Iraq and the last Chapter on the way ahead; I didn’t like the chapter of allegedly supporting case studies: nothing annoys me more than someone flogging a dead horse of a model when the evidence in the case studies simply doesn’t supply the model, in this case, that of the Accidental Guerrilla.

I agree that foreign fighters and Rupert Smith’s ‘franchisers of terror‘ are significant forces in the irregular activity world, however I simply do not accept that national guerrillas become such ‘by accident’. Opportunist, reactive or responsive would be better adjectives for national guerrillas in that they react to and/or seize an opportunity presented by the actions of national or international interventions (civil and/or military).

The other major factor that detracts from The Accidental Guerrilla is its over-fixation on Islamic terrorism, instead of upon more general terrorism and insurgency. By labouring the Islamic angle, the author may be going some way to further the rift between Islamic communities and the rest of the world.

Similarly, the whole concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ just grates…war is by definition is a complex activity that resists simple definitions – one which also tends to punish those who fail to respect this fact. To postulate that hybrid war is either new or different from any other form of war is illustrative of a concept inability to consider and learn from history. Another contribution to the global game of buzzword bingo…

David Kilcullen writes very well when recounting his own experiences, and considerably less well when trying to support his theoretical model. To get the most out of The Accidental Guerrilla, read the preface,  Chapter 3 The Twenty-First Day, and Chapter 5 Turning an Elephant into a Mouse in conjunction with Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq. It’s probably entirely coincidental that both books are written by Australian Army officers – or maybe not – maybe that slight aspect of distance from US and NATO issues provides an subtle but important difference of perspective. These readings will give a reader from most backgrounds a firm grounding in issues and approaches for the complex environment. I have a dozen or so pages of notes and will write a more detailed review in the next week or so…

The bottom line on The Accidental Guerrilla is that it is worth reading – the preface, Chapters 3 and 5 outweigh the slog through the other chapters…having said that, down here we have a beer company called Tui which sponsors a range of topical billboards across the country, using the Tui slogan “yeah right“…here’s some Tui moments from The Accidental Guerrilla (yes, I really do like it but these were too good to pass up):

Buy a crate on the way home tonight…

The Accidental Guerrilla

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The nice people in G7 loaned me a copy of David Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla to read on the promise that I would give them a book review in return – fair trade, I think, and one which provides me an opportunity to assess the actual time required to review and read a book for future jobs. I missed David Kilcullen’s briefs when he visited in October, having been required to save the free world at the CLAW in the UK that week. While I enjoyed that professionally and personally, I would much rather have had the afternoon listening to him talk…

First impressions of Accidental Guerrilla are that the author has not been well served by his editor…the sections where he talks about his own experiences flow very well; where he launches into more academic discourse, he becomes verbose and complex – if in doubt, use short sentences and don’t be shy to bullet lists – some parts so far (have just finished Chapter 1) are like playing literary Where’s Wally? when trying to filter out key points and themes. I’ve noticed the same in the other book I am struggling with at the moment, Brain Taafe’s The Gatekeepers of Galatas, a great story that deserves to be told – but told better than Taafe does…I track a number of writing blogs and I think it was John Birmingham who couldn’t emphasise enough not only the importance of a top editor but also the need for writers to retract their egos and take aboard the value an editor provides to a successful product…

I have no problem with the concept of the accidental guerrilla but do debate that it is anything new – almost by definition most guerrillas are accidental, born when the outside world, usually brutally, intrudes into their lives….the little people = the little war…Nor is the concept of global terrorist/guerrilla networks that new either…as far back as the American Revolution, global communications have been adequate to support international networks and the Great Game of international espionage and intelligence has been played across the known globe since that time. I agree with Rupert Smith that there are those who might be best described as the ‘franchisers of terrorism’ who target the disaffected and essentially sell their brand of terrorism, with commensurate training, networks and support. These are the people who need to be tracked and targeted a la Michael Scheiern’s ‘individual-based tracking’ concept – manage them and you open up a range of alternate approaches to mitigate potentially accidental guerrillas.

One of the problems I have with The Accidental Guerrilla to date is that it describes Al-Qaeda as an aberration, an exception, to the rules of guerrillas and terrorism, but keeps drawing upon AQ-based examples to support arguments in the book. While it is true that Islamic terrorism has a firm base in the tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan that includes strong family links as well and that this extends back over a number of generations, I think it is a big leap to state this as standard practice for these type of organisations. This weakens the Infection, Contagion, Intervention, Rejection cycle that Kilcullen proposes, again relying on an AQ example. I agree with the takfiri model and think this would be a better one to promote over specific groups  like Al-Qaeda – more so since his definition of takfir lends itself to causes beyond those based upon an interpretation of Islam…takfir holds that those whose beliefs differ from the takfiri’s are infidels who must be killed. Takfir might apply to ANY hate-based xenophobic cause around the planet and if The Accidental Guerrilla achieves nothing else beyond bringing this phrase into more common usage, it will have achieved something.

In all fairness, I am only at the end of Chapter 1 and should suppress of any feelings of ‘old brass for new‘ and ‘publish or perish‘ til I get into the meat of it…onwards into Chapter Two…

Get over it!

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I’m pretty picky when I subscribe to Facebook pages – last thing I really need is a constant stream of trivia through my Live Feed. I prefer to use Facebook as a situational awareness tool and so my limited number of subscribed pages includes Steven Pressfield, my favourite bach and the Small Wars Journal (note: you need to be a Facebook member to see these pages). Last night, there was a post headed Afghan Corruption Concerns US Policy Planners linking to this Voice of America ‘news’ item about which I thought Please!!! Get over it!! Some places they do things different to how we would like – is the war on terror or to inflict the moral high ground on another nation’s culture and mores?.
 
The responses were pretty scary (names have been removed to protect the stupid):
  • On the contrary – the international community’s insistence that government leaders adhere to some basic level of anti-corruption standards is because terrorism is less likely to be a course of action undertaken. It’s not that “they” do differently than “we” would like; corruption is not a part of any culture’s mores, it’s pretty well established in every culture that stealing from one’s people never turns out well. What? Have you ever been anywhere in the world? Across the non-Western world, ‘wheel greasing’ in some shape mor formed is not just tolerated by accepted.
  • I’m also pretty convinced that the “moral high ground” offers as much tactical advantage as the physical terrain’s high ground. Yeah, perhaps, but not if you bring your own high ground from home…
  • Remember, when some Afghan cop steals $ 2.00, he’s taken someone’s wages for a day. And the Karzai family steal millions. You’re wrong, Simon, we’re not trying to ‘inflict’ our culture on them, as you so incorrectly phrased it, we’re trying to keep them from stealing every dollar the West sends them. Then stop sending money and do something useful instead – the same thing would happen in the US, UK and Europe if all of a sudden somebody began handing out great dollops of cash.
OK, so it’s only three responses (but that’s a lot for the SWJ Facebook page) but they are fairly consistent with the self-righteous tone of the original article on VOA. There’s also an interesting article on a similar theme on Coming Anarchy, questioning why corrupt officials from Equatorial Guinea are allowed to live in palatial estates – in Malibu. Apparently US law forbids the granting of visas to ‘corrupt’ officials. My question is: Whose corruption laws/values do you apply? Outside of the First World, such practices are pretty accepted – to any extent that argues that they are at least as successful and sustainable than the squeaky-clean-green moral high ground philosophy.
 

Do these people just not ‘get it’?  You cannot go to someone else’s country, say we’re going to make everything better but you’re going to have to do things our way from now on? Isn’t that what we are (apparently) fighting the Taliban to prevent. Haven’t we gone to war over this very principle? In fact, it would not be unfair to say that a goodly lot of the wars we have engaged in have been in opposition to someone throwing their weught around and trying to enforce ‘their’ ways on someone else…?

The simple sad fact is that most of the world, including a sizable chunk of western societies, thrive on ‘wheel-greasing’. When I was in the UK in October, the Attorney-General was being pressured to press corruption charges against BAe for ‘greasing the wheels’ in order to secure international contracts. As BAe pointed out in its defence, ‘…this is how the world spins: if we don’t do it someone else from France, Israel, Eastern Europe etc etc etc, will wing-in in our place; if we don’t do it, then we will be forced to shut down a number of UK plants due to lack of work – and, if you smack us with a £1billion fine, we will just be forced to shut down more…‘ When you think about it, if the UK was really into this moral high ground thing, it wouldn’t be letting BAe sell weapons across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Would they…?

COIN doctrine tells us a successful campaign needs to address the core issues behind the insurgency, ultimately giving the insurgents some or all of what they want but under controlled conditions.

5GW?
 
Meanwhile, back at the Real World Ranch, The Strategist has developed his alternate generations of war model:

1GW: the mercenaries
Early 16th century to late 18th century.
Powerful monarchies, supported by increasingly efficient state bureaucracies, field “hybrid” armies of elite professional troops, mercenary contingents and transnational military specialists (such as siege engineers and artillerymen). In the 18th century, hybrid armies evolve into more homogeneous forces of cavalry, artillery, and infantry regiments of the line, recruited from the aristocracy and the rural poor within a state’s territory. These forces owe allegiance to the sovereign, not society.


2GW: the conscripts
 1790s to 1970s.

Nation-states fight each other with large armies of conscripted citizen soldiers. The nation becomes synonymous with the army – “the people-in-arms”, as Clausewitz described it. Universal conscription is a rite of passage for generations of young Europeans, who are animated to serve by patriotism, national and racial identity, and warrior myths.  The apogee of the nation-in-arms occurs in the two world wars of the 20th century, when nations mobilize all their resources – human and material – for total war.

3GW: the volunteers
1980s to early 21st century.

Armies become all volunteer and professional forces of career soldiers who are relatively well-educated and highly trained. These forces recruit people from ethic minorities, immigrant groups, decaying industrial cities and hardscrabble rural regions. These people enlist because they see the army as a route to advancement and acceptance in society, not out of patriotism. Meanwhile, the scions of the wealthy elite and the prosperous middle class shun military service.

4GW: the champions

Emerging in the early 21st century.

Armies become caste-based – an increasingly distinct and detached element within society. They comprise highly skilled “champions”, specialists in esoteric skills such as counterinsurgency, special operations, and cyber-war, who owe primary allegiance to their castes and combat leaders. The distinction between armies and civilian agencies blurs. The state outsources military responsibilities to private military companies. These also safeguard the interests of powerful corporations and wealthy elites.

Peter, in a week, has probably applied more real intellectual effort to the GW construct than did the originator! I really like it although I would offer that his 4GW is actually 5GW with 1GW being the Braveheart style, every tribesman for himself, hope-it-all-works-out-on-the-day form of warfare that kept the trade alive for millenia before it all got organised.

In terms of applying the generational model across history and societies, it DOES work if you apply to individual societies/cultures instead of taking a global macro approach e.g. while the Romans make have been at 3GW, many of their adversaries may only have be 1 GW. The model works even better if you remove the time frame from under each heading.

The Judge Dredd approach to COIN

So it’s out. The super-uber COIN strategy for Afghanistan. If you blinked, you may have missed it. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much – kinda like finding you’ve fallen asleep in the car (as a passenger!) and missed Hamilton…we’re going to fortify the urban areas where the insurgents AREN’T, and only engage selectively in the rural areas where the insurgants ARE. I have visions of Afghanistan becoming a real word escapee from 2000AD: a few isolated Mega-Cities surrounded by the feral hordes of the Cursed Earth. Sylvester Stallone has already filmed in both locations: with some clever editing of Rambo 3 and Judge Dredd, we could have the movie out for Christmas…

…John Dredd or Judge Rambo?

Jacks

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A ‘jack’ is someone who makes sure that they are OK over anyone else. I believe the linkage originally comes from the 1959 Peter Sellers movie “I’m All Right, Jack“. This is one example of a jack:

Kirk the Jack 003

This is big dog Kirk. There are two bean bags because there are two dogs. Our other big dog, Lulu, likes to rest on a bean bag because she has a sore hip (hopefully not the dreaded displasia!!). Kirk knows this. Does he care? No, he’s alright. Kirk is a jack big dog.

Here’s another example of a jack: LIND ON 4GW AND THE FORT HOOD KILLINGS. I mean, it’s nice that William Lind shares with us on his visits to this planet but this time he really just needs to get a grip! The reason that I posted a link to John Birmingham’s commentary on the Ft Hood shootings, and probably the reason that JB’s commentary quoted in full the earlier commentary by Stephen Murphy, (sorry if that’s a bit cumbersome), is that the Murphy commentary is as insightful a one that you will find on this tragedy – AND that it cuts directly to the chase on the core issue.

MAJ Nidal Malik Hasan was simply an individual struggling within himself. An individual no different really than any of those other individuals who faced similar struggles and ultimately directed their frustrations on those around them. I don’t know if there is a single nation on this Earth that has not had at least one such incident. Even here in quiet little New Zealand, we have had at least five in the past twenty years : Aramoana, Masterton, Pukekohe, Raurimu and Dunedin. It is something that happens, regardless of the best or the worst mental health, intelligence and law enforcement systems. Any system so efficient as to keep such people at risk off our streets would be so draconian as to sacrifice the freedoms our societies hold dear.

The reason that Mr Lind is a jack is that he is making sure that HE is alright by capitalising on the Ft Hood tragedy so further justify and validate his own 4th (would $th be more accurate perhaps?) Generation Warfare, aka 4GW, model. Mr Lind would have us believe that what happened in Ft Hood was a result of 4GW and the harbinger of waves of similar attacks across the US, and that the only way to prevent such attacks is for America to shed its ‘Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free…’ heritage in favour of becoming a WASP state living by the moral minority’s own sharia law…

Not so, Mr Lind, not so, at all…if there is one thing we HAVE learned since 911, it is that our adversaries, individually and collectively,  in this war are very bit as intelligent, as skilled and as capable as we are: a gaping hole in the New York City skyline, hundreds of casualties in Madrid and Bali,  and 4000 flag-draped coffins out of Iraq are proof of that. Only in the UK have these forces been stymied to date – the one nation with decades of experience successfully facing a dedicated, vicious and evolving internal adversary. If MAJ Hasan’s attack in (not on) Ft Hood was what Mr Lind paints it as:

  • Would his tradecraft been so loose as to already be on the FBI’s and the military risk radar?
  • Would he really be overtly trying to contact known Al-Qaeda supporters?
  • Might he not have made better use of his access to Ft Hood to employ more lethal forces than a couple of pistols?
  • Would there not have been at least one simultaneous event somewhere else in the US, even one frustrated by circumstance or law enforcement?

Think about these things before blindly calling for the restriction or even expulsion of those with different belief structures. Remember what ‘Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free…” once meant. Do not under-estimate an enemy who is smarter than this. Be a leader, not a follower.

Because if we follow jacks like Mr Lind and his cronies, we become no better than those who preach a litany of hate from the safety of their religious status….

A sobering thought

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I’ve deliberately held off on any comment on the shootings in Fort Hood last week. Every man and his dog has been all over the event from every possible angle. Of all the commentary to date, one of the best is John Birmingham’s Blunty column in the Brisbane Times, largely quoting a commentary from US writer and historian, Stephen Murphy. Please read the comments under the article as well.

  • This was one individual who snapped, not an organised planned attack.
  • We should focus on why he snapped and NOT his culture or religion.
  • America and its friends and allies must resist the temptation to discriminate against other Muslims or people of Arabic descent because of this incident. One of our greatest strengths in the war on terror are those rights and freedoms that we fight so hard to protect but which also provide the opportunities for individuals to act as MAJ Hassan did.
  • It is not about having greater or lesser access to firearms.
  • It could have happened anywhere – not just in the US or the US military.

I think that perhaps were should be less amazed that this tragedy occurred and more mazed that it has not occurred more often: regardless of issues regarding the Islamic jihad, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have fought in COMBAT operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Only ONE has taken issues to this extent: if nothing else, surely that is a good indication that the checks and balances ARE already in place AND that they are working well…As far back as 2005, the USMC had already identified the destabilising behavioural effects of minor traumatic brain injuries (MTBI) and introduced a robust screening programme to identify and treat at-risk individuals. The US Army has introduced similar programmes. Although GEN Casey has pledged more resources for mental health programmes, I do believe that the US DOD does need to credit itself for the steps that it has implemented already.

MTBI is a hot topic for me as I have had to deal with ACC and CRM (ACC managers contracted to NZ Police) to ensure that family members suffering from MTBI and TBI get a fair shake of the stick. So often victim of TBI do not get a fair shake because the effects of these injuries can be difficult to diagnose and may present themselves in a broad range of symptoms and effects. If nothing else, the one thing I did learn from a number of years battling with both organisations (those who think ACC is bad, wait til you try the privatised version like CRM!! Be careful what you wish for when you clamour for ACC privatisation!) is that screening and identification early definitely contributes to a faster recovery, mitigation and treatment of the injuries, reduction of long-term issues, and reintegration into society. At least the US DOD has learned this lesson and has no doubt saved many lives already  – it’s unfortunate that we fixate on the one who slipped through the system…