Reality

Posted on 8 December 2009 by SJPONeill

According to Phillip K. Dick, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

My reality today is that the sun is finally out, things are drying out and I can finally dig down and fix the storm water feed into the water tank – realities of rural life are than it is not cool to run out of water in summer…happy reality is that we now have four chicks that have survived at least one night in the unshelled world and were last seen stepping out of their coop with mum to enjoy some sun as well…

When I visited on Friday, the Air Power Development Centre loaned me some reading in the form of a collection of recent RAAF papers and my mission when the sun goes down (that’s me, the doctrinal vampire that only comes out after dark or when it is raining…) is to devour the first paper and start to form some thoughts on air power, COIN/CIT/CIA and the COE…I think that it is very interesting that the aircraft shown is not an F/A-18, F-111 or even the F-35O but the trusty Herc; similarly the ground vehicle is not an M-1 or ASLAV but the less glamorous Bushmaster…is this a deliberate statement? If so it is a very powerful one when evolving to meet the realities of the complex environment…

Should I stay or should I go now?

Posted on 7 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Should I stay or should i go now?
if I go there will be trouble
and if I stay it will be double
so come on and let me know
The indecisions bugging me

~ The Clash

I’ve been busy with other matters the last week or so and a bit lax in monitoring the blogspace…John Birmingham’s Blunty had an article last week on Australia’s commitment to Afghanistan and, in the comments, refers readers to “…a great piece by my old boss, Gen. Jim Molan…” Interesting to get some more local opinions on the global debate on Afghanistan and the way ahead. I googled for the lyrics from The Clash and was amused to see this comment on the web site – although posted years ago, it’s still pretty pertinent to today’s discussion:

Mr. Peabody	08/03/2006 07:59:18
Really getting sick of this overplayed tune. Should you stay or should you go? Here’s a clue: If you have to ask, get off your knees, salvage what little you have left of your dignity, and GO!

Although anyone who is genuinely interested should read the original articles, there’s couple of extracts I considered worthy of quoting direct. Firstly from Blunty:

Mr Flinthart’s comment bears a stand alone response. The definition of war aims has never been settled in Afghanistan, and from that has flowed much waste and tragedy, including a new and wholly unnecessary war in Iraq, a war which has crippled our ability to win this first conflict, and to deal with the Iranian regime’s pursuit of WMDs.

So what are the aims?

To destroy the Taiban and AQ? If so, FAIL. As long as the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Agency is using Omah and bin Laden as their glove puppets, there will always be a competitor for the Afghan government, such as it is.

To contain them, denying Fascist Islam a state from which to plot and launch more attacks? More reasonable and defensible as a strategy, and yet it also rides the Fail Whale because the Bearded Enemy already controls a number of significant state actors, some of which are pursuing WMD capabilities quite openly. Why do they get a free pass when Afghanistan doesn’t. It’s best if war aims are internally consistent.

As for the ‘Afghan’ people, Mr Flinthart is correct. This conflict, or rather this element of the wider conflict, is lost without them. But rather than asking what do they want, a precursor question is probably ‘Who the hell are they, anyway’. Desk Jockey, I think, made the telling point about long standing and often hyper local ethnic and religious enmities underlying the greater geo-strategic architecture. Afghanistan does not have ‘a people’ it has an atomised, massively riven enclave of tribes, families, ethnic groups, war lords, state sponsored criminal gangs, foreign jihadi and so on. Is it even possible to speak of enough of them wanting enough in common to begin building a coalition from which a rough patchwork state might be fashioned? Probably, but it’d be a helluva job.

And in the end, pointless, because we’re not willing to fight.

JB | Outer Angrystan. – December 03, 2009, 9:40AM

And from Gen Molan’s piece in The Australian:

Australia is assisting Afghanistan for any number of reasons: as part of our alliance responsibilities; for our own self-interest in combating terror; for humanitarian and moral reasons, and because we are there and it is harder to withdraw than to not commit initially…If we think that we have a special relationship with the US, and every aspect of our defence and security policy is based on this assumption, then now is not the time to hang back, hoping not to be noticed.

The crux of the matter remains what are we there for? I have to agree with JB “…The definition of war aims has never been settled in Afghanistan, and from that has flowed much waste and tragedy…” Operation Enduring Freedom achieved its aims in dealing to Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan by the end of 2002 – sadly it seems that more people hung their hats on the name of the operation and not it’s objectives. The most common justification for maintaining commitments to ISAF is now the difficulty of extraction although it is a fairly safe call that many will learn from the US drawdown in 18 months as the pressure starts to come on to those nations that have been dragging the chain…did someone say Europe and the Islamic states?

The absolute #1 rule of warfare is to have a clear and visible mandate…no one ever said it better than Princess Leia “When you broke in here, did you have a plan for getting out?” The #1 rule of COIN/CIT/CIA is to address the underlying causes of the conflict. The #1 rule of COIN is NOT to promote the rule of government! That is but one of many means to the end of addressing the core issues and creating governance as an absolute leads directly to the mess that Afghanistan has become – how do you promote the rule of something that simply does not exist? One of the comments to the Blunty article asks “…why not Balkanise this so-called nation? There are minority groups who would probably be delighted with that outcome. Maybe it would be easier to define and defend the aspirations and rights of, say, the Hazara and allow the Incredibly Medieval Bearded Nutters to concentrate in one place? Surrounding and relatively enlightened statelets might provide a refuge for the perpetually oppressed (women, gays, atheists etc)…” Not quite as polished perhaps, but certainly a similar theme to that of Jim Gant’s One Tribe at a Time proposal: instead of building something new that is not working, why not build on what is already there?

Even though, 18 months is not nearly long enough to develop anything sustainable which brings us back to the original question: Should I stay or should I go now?

FFS!

And under the FFS heading this morning, there has just been an article on Breakfast that the NZ Army is adopting a crocodile from the aquarium in Napier as it’s new mascot…google a little more and it’s actually all of the Army, not even all of Linton Army Camp…in fact, just one little movements company..see Stuff here…

We call it COUNTERING IRREGULAR ACTIVITY

Posted on 2 December 2009 by SJPONeill

And it starts at home…

…it has the unfortunate acronym of CIA, no matter where you put a hyphen e.g. CI-A, C-IA, -CIA, CIA-, whatever, etc…CIA is CIA is CIA wherever you are…so what? Just don’t have your CIA handbook in your back pocket when backpacking through countries ending in -stan…

Some call it COIN, the Marines called it Countering Irregular Threats (CIT), and the Brits call it Countering Irregular Activity (CI-A, note the hyphen, apparently it is important, like anyone cares – who is going to say CI Hyphen A? It’s CIA, get over it!). CIT and CIA take a broader focus than focusing purely on insurgency. The essence of CIA is that any activity that affects the regularity and stability of our normality is irregular. The key to countering irregular activity is the Comprehensive Approach – identifying the appropriate mix of measures from all of those available from across Clausewitz’s Trinity:

Government/leadership. Government agencies and ministries, incentives for programmes, supporting legislation.

‘The People‘. The community, including the business community, aid and welfare organisations, churches and agencies, the media.

The action arm. Military or police involvement, the threat or application of force and occupation.

I was just over at Crimestoppers and read this blog piece about a BMX park in Papakura being abandoned by the community. The community was unable to manage criminal activity there by a group of 8-11 year olds. 8-11 years old? Why not? In other parts of the world, they’d probably have their own AK-47s by now…So what?

Well, here’s the so what: this type of activity destabilises our communities. If unchecked, these little thugs just go on to become bigger thugs. Without intervention, this is NOT something that they will grow out of. The Trinity in and around Papakura needs to get together, decide what the underlying real issues are and do something about it. And here’s a heads-up, the solution is unlikely to be one that can be enforced by the Police…curfews etc only cover the symptoms…what this requires is a comprehensive approach within the community otherwise it might as well withdraw into its walled compounds and abandon Papakura to the Cursed Earth…

The Accidental Guerrilla

Posted on 1 December 2009 by SJPONeill

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…