And today at the rocket scientists club…

Posted on 11 February 2011 by SJPONeill

…Hamid Karzai says it is time foreign troops left his country because the troops are now “hindering progress.”

It's not a large picture as the vacuum between the ears causes a steady implosion of the head...

At the same club meeting, Oxfam said it is time the PRT’s got out because it is putting aid workers at risk as they are too often linked to the military. Yes, I am sure that is why they are being attacked and certainly not because they are soft unarmed targets from whom decent ransoms can be earned…or because the decreased military component of reconstruction teams means there is less of a local deterrent to errant bandits…news flash!! Afghanistan has been a dangerous place to visit or work for the last 31 years…

Mr Karzai’s comments are not the first time he has called for foreign troops to exit. He is under pressure at home from locals who want to control their own country. Now, there’s a surprise…surely not because they tire of a foreign force propping up what many Afghans consider a puppet government attempting to inflict central control over cultures that have always (well, since before Alexander’s Afghanistan Tour) been quite happy thank you very to do their own thing without so much as a nod towards any notions of central government…

There's the door...go on...leave!! I dare you, I DOUBLE-dare you...

“Afghanistan wants control of its own affairs by all means in the security sector. Whether Afghanistan is ready or not must not be a reason,” Karzai said. “The Afghans don’t want a European government, the Afghans don’t want an American government. . . . Afghans want an Afghan government.”

What is even more amazing than Karzai’s latest is that every contributing nation didn’t seize this exit strategy golden egg by the horns and fill the Afghan night with ripples of pops as as the vacuum left by each exiting force was filled by something else…

The spin on the exit strategy goes round and round, round and round...

Regardless, though, of when and how, ISAF depart Afghanistan, each contributing nation (yes, that include you EU folk too!) needs to ante up and accept responsibility for the cultural and social changes that it has supported in Afghanistan. Even assuming that the Karzai government or its ISAF-backed successor lasts beyond the first night of independence, it’s unlikely that it will last much past when the money runs out which will more likely be when the last suitcase packed full of dollars goes through the luggage check-in at Kabul International than when it is expended on running the country…and when the darkness comes, those nations and agencies that thought it was so ‘right’ to introduce democracy and free speech and equal rights and all that other good Western ideology need to step up to the plate and do right by the vulnerable people they left behind…

GEN Petraeus also looks to be gearing up for that day when the last helicopter lifts off the roof of an embassy…from the Financial Times via Michael Yon:

Petraeus defends plan to arm villagers

By Matthew Green in Kabul

Published: February 7 2011 18:42 | Last updated: February 7 2011 18:42

General David Petraeus, the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, plans to triple a scheme that has armed thousands of village recruits, dismissing fears that the strategy could nurture a new generation of warlords. [Comment: the current warlords don’t seem to have a shortage of weapons now…]

With violence in Afghanistan rising and Nato allies anxious to hand over to Afghan forces in 2014, Gen Petraeus wants to bolster security, in part by sending 12-man teams of US special forces to train locals. [Comment: that’s 2014 THIS century or in three years time; like, only one third of the time that we haven’t been able to sort Afghanisatn out in since November 2001]

Human rights groups and aid agencies have called for the plan to be scrapped, fearing it threatens to fuel conflicts and empower the kind of militia commanders who ravaged Afghanistan during years of civil war in the 1990s. The government of Hamid Karzai, the president, has also been wary of similar initiatives. [Comment: damn right it’s ‘wary’ – last thing Uncle Hamid wants is more people able to resist central government – it’s a bit of an ask to consider it ‘governance’.]

But Gen Petraeus said the scheme was vital in enlisting the support of locals.

“The idea is that these actually mobilise not just individuals, but communities,” he told the Financial Times. “Elders support it. The elders also police it to a degree.”

The plan has echoes of the approach Gen Petraeus adopted while commanding the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, where he encouraged the Awakening movement of Sunni tribes that helped curb violence.

But he said the Afghan Local Police – as the plan is known – would be a very different exercise. It aims to work with the government to reach often isolated areas where people wanted help to resist the Taliban.

To critics, the scheme represents a quick-fix solution adopted to meet political pressures for withdrawal in western capitals.

Since Gen Petraeus took command of international forces in Afghanistan in July, the programme has been started in 17 sites, with a total of more than 3,100 paid recruits, he said. The Nato-led force is awaiting Afghan government approval for more than 40 additional sites, and hopes to add another 4,500 men by spring, a US military official said.

The recruits, whose biometric data is recorded, are given a salary, registered weapons and khaki uniforms. Their primary role is to man checkpoints or patrol their home areas.

General Petraeus says the training is being conducted with the oversight of Afghan authorities, local government, police and elders. “They work for the district chief of police, not a local warlord or elder or power-broker,” he said.

Nato allies have launched a sucession of similar schemes with scant success, but US officials believe extra resources and closer collaboration with the government will deliver results. A similar programme, the Local Defence Initiative, ran into problems last year when it donated $1m to the Shinwari tribe in the eastern Nangahar Province, which became embroiled in a land dispute last year instead of fighting the Taliban, according to Oxfam.

ca. 1850 --- Afghan Soldier --- Image by © Christel Gerstenberg/CORBIS

Probably too little, too late…even though Jim Gant’s plane got diverted from Iraq to Afghanistan after Steven Pressfield published his excellent One Tribe At A Time paper, tribal engagement is s campaign that needed to have been continued and expanded from 2001 after the Northern ‘Alliance’ was used to gain an initial upper hand on Terry Taliban…

Colour Me Scared…

Posted on 23 April 2010 by SJPONeill

Aaaaah…the words of the great Sledge Hammer…in response to Mike Yon accusing me “…Simon — the writings on your website have been dishonest. You seem like a basically dishonest person…” I’m flattered to now be in the elite group as GEN McCrystal and others who have tired of the whining of a 19-year-old PFC who never grew up…here’s a guy who spent a whole four years in the Army in the mid-80s accusing professional soldiers of dishonesty and incompetence but who has yet to actually offer any positive alternatives to the current strategies…

I’m not a big believer in GEN McCrystal’s Cursed Earth approach and think that Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement stratagem would be more suited to both the physical and human terrain of Afghanistan but I’m not on the ground in-theatre and GEN McCrystal is…if Mike Yon really cared – or had anything worthwhile to say – he would have joined the ranks of the COIN information militia to rub conceptual shoulders with the likes of Jim Gant, Josh Wineera, John Nagl and David Kilcullen in fora like the CAC COIN Center and the Small Wars Council…

This did scare me…

While I’m not working we’ve tightened the budget a bit and I’m working through ‘dead stock’ in the pantry to clear the shelves…my experiment on Wednesday night was Chili Sardines…yep, sounds scary alright and didn’t smell too hot while I was preparing it – thought I might have to cook via waldo for a while – but the result was worth the initial discomfort…

Ingredients

2 tins of sardines in tomato sauce

1 big onion, finely chopped

2 tablespoons of vinegar (preferably malt vinegar)

50g of peanuts

1 tablespoon brown sugar

A bird’s-eye chilli or teaspoon of dried chilli flakes ( I used this much but next time will increase by 50-100% as the chili flavour was a bit inconsistent)

2 tablespoons of frying oil or peanut oil.

1 teaspoon of coriander seeds

Method

Heat the oil and fry the onion, coriander seeds and chilli together until the onion is golden, then add the vinegar, sugar and sardines all at the same time. Continue cooking for another 3 or 4 minutes and then throw in the peanuts and cook for a further minute until the peanuts are warm. Serve with rice.

Eyjafjallajokul

Amid much bleating and moaning from the airlines, air services across Europe are returning to normal – what’s the next show-stopper , Iceland, first the banks, now the airlines…maybe this?. I’m fascinated that the same airlines that are clamouring for compensation to cover the effects of the grounding are probably those that would have continued to fly until there were more safety incidents or a crash.

An insight already emerging from the chaos in Europe in the last week is the reminder that destabilising (irregular?) activities are not necessarily man-made: even only a week of the no-fly ban has placed even more strain on the tottering economies of Greece, Portugal and Spain, and further weakened the EU and the euro…Germany must be wondering why it just doesn’t ‘unify’ Europe the old-fashioned way and have done with it this time…

More disruptive than Osama Bin Laden

The New War #3 Normalcy

Posted on 22 March 2010 by SJPONeill

I’ve just been doing a final read of some parts of David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla, specifically his contagion model, before returning it to the library.

The Accidental Guerrilla syndrome is presented as a cycle however the cyclic nature of the model is not from Rejection back to Infection but is more likely as cycles between Contagion, Intervention and Rejection. Any spread of the insurgency within the host nation or theatre is more a factor of expanding Contagion than more Infection, although both may run alongside as other factions, groups and movements exploit the destabilised environment.

Please not that as much as possible, I am seeking to avoid use of the terms ‘insurgency’ and ‘counter-insurgency’ in the broader context in which they are too frequently employed today. In the absence of a suitable broader and manageable term that covers destablising activities, of which ‘insurgency’ is a subset, I am using ‘issue’ and ‘problem’. The lack of a suitable noun is one of the weaknesses in the adoption of Countering Irregular Activity (CIA) as a descriptor the the contemporary environment.

A medically-based analogy has considerable relevance for CIA and there is no arguing the with ‘accidentalness’ of many of the players in irregular campaigns. However, Kilcullen’s contagion model is flawed in a number of areas, most notably in its over-specific focus on Al Qaeda.

In focusing on AQ and its associate organisations, the models is of limited utility in considering other forms of irregular activity. AQ is but one of the current or potential irregular threats and the risk is that in concentrating too much on the current known evil, we will miss the rest of the forest. This is supported by two of the case studies in The Accidental Guerrilla, Pattani and East Timor, which do not conform to contagion model and are essentially ‘home-grown’ problems. More so, there has never been so much as a whimper from the intelligence community or any other source of Al-Qaeda/AGIM/JI involvement in East Timor.

‘Infection’ does not necessarily occur in “…remote, ungoverned or conflict-affected areas…” That may be the case in some places like Afghanistan but it does not hold true in Iraq, Vietnam, or Europe where the breeding ground for irregular activity has been the urban areas, ranging from universities to slums, from upper to lowest classes.

‘Infection’ also implies an external catalyst or driver for the problem which is not always the case, although it might be argued that global media coverage of insurgencies and other irregular activities promotes imitation. Rupert Smith’s ‘franchisers of terror’ definitely exist but I think that it is misleading to present external agents as key to the development of a problem. As detailed in The Accidental Guerrilla, movement leaders in Pattani have deliberately opted out of any alignment or support from AQ and its ilk. As an aside, this may an indication that at least some Islamic movements perceive association with AQ as counter-productive.

The ‘safe haven‘ implies a geographic sanctuary from which the insurgency spreads but insurgency ink blots tend to spread from those environments where the physical and ideological elements of the ’cause’ can take root and be nurtured. Geographic safe havens may be more for the safekeeping of key personalities e.g. the Ayatollah Khoumeini in France, than as a direct linear progression in the development of the insurgency. AQ’s alleged sanctuaries in Pakistan, for instance, have only really assumed prominence after US/NATO operations in Afghanistan rendered Afghan bases untenable.

The influence of ‘outside forces‘ is not a necessary element in the Intervention phase; in fact, outside forces, whether organic to the host nation or as part of external support, may not become involved until well into the Rejection phase. The initial intervention will more likely be through the internal national power of the host nation government and, while it may include military, police or other security forces, it may equally be built upon political and economic initiatives – any or all of which may have unintended consequences and contribute to escalation of the problem.

The population that reacts and thus contributes to the escalation of the problem, or the weakening of the host nation government (two different effects that contribute towards the success of the dissenting movement). might not necessarily be that of the host nation:

The global outrage expressed at perceived US outrages during the battles for Fallujah and other US application of force during and after the warfighting phase on OEF is an example of this.
The classic irony-laden example is that of the US response to the Tet Offensive in 1968 where the Viet Cong and NVA were decisively defeated but which led to a widespread public perception that the war was lost.
Had the Soviets adopted a less brutal philosophy in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, it is possible that the Charlie Wilsons, Bob Browns and Osama Bin Ladens of this world would have lacked the platform upon which to build growing tangible (Stingers) support to the mujihadeen.
International condemnation and sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa greatly weakened the security forces of both nations, reduced the options available to them to suppress internal dissent, and led directly to an insurgent victory in Rhodesia in 1980, and a greatly weakened South Africa today.

A more applicable medical analogy for the CIA environment than that of an infection as used in the Accidental Guerrilla syndrome might be that of cancer. The catalyst or carcinogen that causes the cancer may be an external element or one drawn from an internal issue. As in COIN and CIA, there are few hard and fast rules defining what causes cancer of one sort or another, nor how it chooses its victims. Elements that we may have previously thought to be benign may be redefined as high risk, usually a lesson learned the hard way. Similarly, growths may lie dormant for years, considered benign or so far below the radar that they are not noticed, and explode across the host without warning.

A quick sketch of how I think it should be

Unlike a germ-based infection, cancers can rarely be vaccinated against and even for those that can, there is a statistical probability of harm for a percentage of those vaccinated. Antibiotic treatments against infection are usually non-intrusive, and have limited or no side effects although over time some germs may develop partial or full immunity against particular treatment regimes. The treatment for cancer is usually traumatic and causes harm to the host – a case of determining the lesser of a number of evils. Like insurgencies, cancer is not inherently contagious – the contagious or exportable aspect of both lies in the exploitation of the causes or carcinogens.

Untreated, cancer invariably causes the host to eventually succumb; treated, the host may still succumb if the cancer is too widespread, if the treatment has unintended adverse consequence, if the treatment is simply ineffective, or if the treatment regime lies beyond the available resources to fund it. As many doctors are aware, there are no golden rules that what works for one cancer patient will work for another – each case must be assessed and treated on its merits.

The Accidental Guerrilla model lacks a Recovery option; as writ in the book, it is a vicious downward spiral with an implied statement that intervention only worsens the situation. Somewhere along the path, there needs to be an off-ramp that breaks the cycle and leads to a recovered state. This state is unlikely to be a full recovery and even less likely to be a dramatic improvement upon the pre-problem situation. It is more likely that the host will take many years to recover and may not fully recover ever:

The long-term effects of the US War between the States remain issues for some even today 150 years on.
Similarly, New Zealand is still resolving the issues arising from the New Zealand Wars that were ‘won’ from a military perspective by 1873.
As a result of friction (irregular or destabilising activity) between Muslim and non-Muslim populations, Pakistan and Bangladesh were split off from India. The ongoing antipathy between India and Pakistan still occasionally erupts into violence, as it did in 1999, and arguably, in 2008 in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
The insurgents in the Malayan Emergency that officially ended in 1960 were primarily ethnic Chinese and the relationships between Malays and Chinese continued to decline int eh early 1960s. As a result, the nation of Singapore was created as a home for the Chinese, leaving Malaysia primarily for Muslim Malays. The relationship between both nations continues to have its ups and downs and may come to a head when Singapore hits the lebensraum wall in the next decade or so.
35 years after Vietnam was reunified, it has still to reclaim its position as ‘the rice bowl of the world’ or fully resolve long-standing issues between North and South arising from the 1954-75 campaign.

From this, it is safe to take as a given that the outcome of any treatment regime should not aim to do any more than restore the ‘patient’ to the condition that it recognised as ‘normalcy’ before the problem became apparent. It is also safe to assume that, like a remitted cancer patient, normalcy exists with an element of uncertainty regarding it durability and endurance.

Normalcy is one of the three most common key outcomes that have been the objectives of conflict over the past two to three centuries.

Conventional state versus state, force on force war generally seeks to compel change, the most simple exhibition of Clausewitz’s war as an extension of policy:

The Allies in WW2 sought not merely a return to the pre-war status quo but decisive change in Germany and Japan to prevent, not merely deter, future aggression.
Likewise, the objectives of OIF in 2003 were clearly to force a regime change in Iraq.
While British objectives in the 1982 Falklands War were a return to prewar understandings, it was well understood at the time that the party that lost the war would undergo a domestic change of regime.

One of the truisms of post-WW2 COIN has been that the object of any COIN campaign revolves around securing and maintaining the legitimacy of the host nation government. This has been a less successful process, often because the government in question has left much to be desired in terms of its culture and ethos:

Early US attempts to bolster the Thieu regime in South Vietnam did generate David Kilcullen’s Rejection reaction and had the Ky government not been able to govern with a strong hand, it is likely that the Vietnam War might never have got to the 1965 surge.
Currently US/NATO forces struggle to promote the legitimacy of Karzai’s government in Afghanistan, partially due to its lack of ownership amongst the Afghan people, partially because the notion of strong central government has never really been accepted in Afghanistan. In attempting to promote legitimacy, ISAF is actually trying to compel change inappropriately.
Iraq is an example of a successful campaign where the legitimacy of the government is both a primary and achievable objective. In fact, Iraq in the first decade of the 21st Century is an interesting blend of all three outcomes of compelled change in toppling Saddam’s regime, promoting the legitimacy of a democraftic government, and restoring a state of normalcy (less one dictator and corrupt regime) for the people of Iraq.

This leaves us with normalcy which is a pragmatic, realpolitik objective that accepts that the world will never quite be exactly as we like it and which accepts that idealism may take second place to long term (but achievable) goals and objectives. Normalcy seeks to return the host nation or environment as closely as possible top the state it was in prior to the problem merging:

Thus, for Afghanistan, this may be a return to the loose confederation of tribes, possibly even under a degree of Taliban control, that existed in the mid-90s – with the strong and enforced proviso that sponsorship or harbouring of jihadist or similar takfir elements will not be tolerated.
In East Timor, this was a return to the pre-referendum stability of 1999, albeit without Indonesia control, nothing that this change was mandated by the referendum and was not a result or objective of the INTERFET or UNTAET missions.
Much as many were sympathetic to Bougainvillean aspirations of autonomy in the late 1990s and early part of the last decade, the objective of the BEL ISI mission in Bougainville 1997-2002 was a return to pre-rebellion normalcy under Papua New Guinea governance. While Bougainville may still achieve self-determination, that will be as a result of other processes and not of the intervention.

In developing objective prior to an intervention and reviewing them periodically during an intervention – what are we here to do? what are our freedoms and constraints? has the situation changed since the last time we thought about this? – commanders and planners at all levels must be considering which of these outcomes they are there to achieve:

To compel change in structures and governance?

To promote the legitimacy of the current government?

To restore what was ‘normal’?

Normalcy (PDF Version)

From these things we draw strength

Posted on 11 March 2010 by SJPONeill

This is Kirk, the “…55kg of concerned canine citizen…” I referred to in Lex’s Angel post the other day. Kirk and his half-sister Lulu live with us. Kirk is concerned that readers understand that he is not responsible for the mess in the background and is really a gentle giant…Kirk and Lulu are a bit miffed with me tonight as their dinner was an hour later as I had a catch-up call from a friend that covered an awful lot of ground.

We bemoaned, as are a growing number in the US, that officer training especially seems to have been dumbed down in favour of operational deployments. The inevitable result is that we have a great many officers experienced in operations, many of whom would rather go on more operations and avoid ‘boring’ activities like tertiary study or staff appointments, and who are losing their ability to think and articulate outside operational scenarios.

Apart from the value of just having a general catch-up, one of the outcomes of this chat was a link to a paper in the Fort Leavenworth Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) written by a Kiwi officer, MAJ ‘TJ’ Johanson, Changes in Maori warfare between the period prior to first European contact and the end of the New Zealand Wars. It’s an interesting read, although I am only half way through it at the moment. My thoughts so far are that I would extend the period of the New Zealand Wars out by another four years to 1872 to include the COIN campaign (does anyone still really think COIN was invented by the Brits in Malaya?) against Te Kooti; and that this paper begs for someone to overlay it with Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement Concept and David Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla model.

While not essential, surviving a domestic COIN campaign is certainly a valuable keystone in developing not so much the tactics but the ethos of a capable COIN force, and, as per my comment a couple of days ago, this is one reason why I think that the Australian LWD 3-0-1 CounterInsurgency has trouble getting off the ground. It’s unfortunate that more Kiwis officers aren’t producing contemporarily-relevant material like this.

Another important outcome of this chat was that it reminded of the value of mates. Yes, Kirk, you’re my mate too but this is different. I find myself incredibly lucky to have friends that go out of their way to keep in touch, especially since I think they know that I’m not the greatest at reciprocating and have a tendency to allow the op tempo to distract me away from things that are truly important.

Much as we love where we live, it is a bit isolated and more so while Carmen is working away from home. I’m not that impressed about being out of work and even less so by how this circumstance came to pass – but that’s another story that will probably keep for the memoirs – and so appreciate even more that contact with the wider world. Today I’ve made a conscious effort to re-establish comms with old friends and been rewarded by renewed contact with a guy I first met on an RNZAF 727 bound for Singapore in August 1987, when he and his wife were struggling with three very small and very unhappy toddlers, and a friend in the USAF who I am absolutely rapt to find is now a Brigadier-General – and still flying fast jets…!

Training and education

@ Small Wars Journal yesterday there is a thread headed up “Army Learning Concept for 2015 – Thinking Soldiers – Learning Army!!” The aim is to “…augment the most effective aspects of our current learning system while ensuring relevant and rigorous training and education is available and accessible…” While I support the aim, I am not yet convinced that “…in order to prevail in future conflict we must first win in the competitive learning environment…” nor that the Army has “…a future characterized by its persistent learning environment...” While the future may be characterised by many things, outside the minds of a few chalkies, a ‘persistent learning environment‘ is unlikely to be one of them. The learning environment is what may characterise the Army, for better or worse…whether or not it prepares it for the future is another story entirely.

For over a week I have been working on an item based upon two commentaries, one of which I quoted in The Plot Thickens. Speaking at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) last week, GEN James Mattis, Commander US JFCOM, cautioned that “…the only thing worse than obsolete weapons in war is obsolete thinking…” and advocated a broader more contemporary approach to education, especially for the officer corps. While clearly directed at the US military, his comments could apply with equal weight to the other members of the Anglosphere. He “…bemoaned that senior-ranking military members aren’t allowed ample time to reflect critically on important issues…” GEN Mattis’ comments cover an 80-page study released by CNAS at the same time, entitled Keeping The Edge: Revitalizing America’s Military Officer Corps.

The same week, William J. Astore criticises what he perceives as the US military’s ‘German fetish’ at TomDispatch.com. He attributes America’s poor performance in recent conflicts to its fascination with the operational art of war which he links directly to “…a flourishing “Cult of Clausewitz…” The strength of his argument seems to be that “… the German Blitzkrieg of World War II ended with Germany’s “third empire” thoroughly thrashed by opponents who continued to fight even when the odds seemed longest…” Applying the same logic one would wonder why we don’t all follow the French who, apparently, ‘won’ two world wars in the 20th Century… While his discussion goes on to bemoan the apparent loss of America’s citizen soldiers, this essay does imply some significant gaps in training and preparing for the contemporary environment.

Astore is correct when he points out flaws in the technology-dominated ‘shock and awe‘ philosophy that arose from the coalition ‘victory’ over Iraq in 1991; and that operational philosophies succumbed to the lure of ‘templatisation’ in the last decade of the 20th Century. Coupled with these flaws, was the distortion of the philosophies of directive control and mission command, allowing weak commanders an ‘out’ in lieu of intervention when subordinates head off the path of truth, light and their commanders’ intent.

The simple fact is that we have still to really make the philosophical shift from the familiar and more comfortable doctrine of the Cold War. Too many personnel are still lining up at the Fulda Gap Railway Station. In the past, I have referred to the Cold War as ‘easier’ than our contemporary environment…that’s not correct and I shouldn’t do it. Halting the Soviet juggernaut as it steamrolled across Europe was never going to be an easy task but it is a different task from those faced today. I’m also very conscious of the rapid rate of change in the contemporary world and the subjective nature of terms like ‘today’.

The nature of the differences between Cold War and contemporary is key to the issues identified by GEN Mattis and William Astore, for which the Army Learning Concept 2015 MAY be a solution. That these significant differences exist was also the first significant finding of New Zealand’s COIN doctrine review. At that time, late 2007, we considered it crucial that these differences be incorporated as a key element in the training and education foundation for operating in the contemporary environment. Soon after, these findings were independently validated by Josh Wineera’s early work on Interbella, challenging extant methods of considering the missionspace in the IPB process.

Tomorrow, I’ll start to work through the differences that fell out of the review…

Bridgegate

The reason that I have rather abruptly postponed the remainder of the previous item is that Michael Yon has just, in the past hour, released his Dispatch on the Tarnak Bridge bombing and subsequent drama vis-a-vis who was/is actually responsible for the security of this important link out of Kandahar. Regardless of his propensity for shooting from the lip sometimes, I have to admit that the guy can write and has made excellent use of graphics to illustrate the cloud cuckoo wunderland of coalition warfare in the 21st Century. One might even go so far as to wonder ‘how could this bridge NOT have been attacked?’ when you see the incredibly complex command and control arrangements in place around KAF.

I, for one, am comfortable with the apology to BGEN Menard…”In apology to BG Menard, I should not have demanded that he be fired so early in the process, despite that my assertion that he was responsible has proven true. I should never have mentioned hockey, as that created room for a diversion from the central importance. Brigadier General Menard clearly was not the only responsible party for this strategic bridge that his soldiers depend upon. To single out BG Menard was a mistake, despite that he was ultimately responsible for the ANP…”

This is an article well worth reading (both pages!!), if only to see how, not satisfied with the natural complexity of the contemporary environment, we have entangled ourselves in even greater complexity regarding the C2 arrangements under which a War is meant to be conducted… if I was heading to Afghanistan any item soon (I’m not, just in case anyone was wondering), I’d be wanting to read this Dispatch if for no other reason than to get a feeling for the command relationships in this theatre…

Take the blue pill

Posted on 20 February 2010 by SJPONeill

It must be blue pill day.

A friend in the US is undergoing cancer treatment at the moment and commented on her Facebook page yesterday that the blue pills she has to take as part of her chemo have a very “blue pill” side effect…

This morning while sifting through comments in the blogs spam trap, I followed up one trackback to an interesting site that harvests articles and posts relating to Afghanistan – it is chock-full of advertising but had some links to interesting articles….including this anti-Olympic rant. While the guy does note the irony that 30 years ago we used the Moscow Olympics as a platform to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and points out at great length the gross over-commercialism of the Olympics the total loss of the ideals they once represented. But often more is less and this article would be way more effective if it was half the length.

Another site I followed from the spam trap took me to this great item from the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, based on an article in the Washington Post in 2008. The CIA found that Viagra was a great form of incentive payment for informers in Afghanistan, especially those who might be feeling the effect of advancing years and numerous young wives…certainly it shows that someone is thinking a bit out of the square over there.

The usual bribes of choice — cash and weapons — aren’t always the best options, Afghanistan veterans say. Guns too often fall into the wrong hands, they say, and showy gifts such as money, jewelry and cars tend to draw unwanted attention…“If you give an asset $1,000, he’ll go out and buy the shiniest junk he can find, and it will be apparent that he has suddenly come into a lot of money from someone,” said Jamie Smith, a veteran of CIA covert operations in Afghanistan and now chief executive of SCG International, a private security and intelligence company. “Even if he doesn’t get killed, he becomes ineffective as an informant because everyone knows where he got it.” Joby Warrick, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, December 26, 2008.

Viagra is probably allowed under Islamic law. A book I read (can’t remember who or what) a couple of years back commented that while alcohol was specifically forbidden in the Koran, along with a great many other pleasures, tobacco is not mentioned and therefore generally accepted:

The general underlying principle of Islamic law is that everything is permitted, except that which is explicitly prohibited, and since there is no direct mention of tobacco smoking in either of the primary sources of law (the Koran and Sunna), jurists have historically regarded tobacco smoking as an acceptable sociable activity. www.tobacco.org

While there have been various calls for smoking to be banned under Islamic law, the majority of these have been from the medical profession and a number of Islamic nations have implemented anti-smoking laws similar to those in effect across the Anglosphere. The British Medical Journal has interesting study on the influence on smoking in Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities in the UK which concludes “…Although there are some culturally specific contexts for smoking behaviour in Bangladeshi and Pakistani adults—notably the influence of gender and religion—there are also strong similarities with white people, particularly among younger adults. Themes identified should help to inform the development and appropriate targeting of smoking cessation interventions…” However this study does identify that “…the Koran does prohibit intoxicants and addictions…” and tobacco certainly qualifies as the latter. What would the effect be upon the nutjobs and troublemakers of the Islamic world is smoking was declared haram (forbidden) under Islamic law?

Getting back to our blue pill, perhaps there is scope for this ‘aid’, being neither intoxicating nor addictive (never proven in court) to become a key enabler in the hearts and minds programme in Afghanistan…after all, we are trying to fight a nice war and what could be nicer than spreading the ‘love’…? New Zealand’s next PRT contingent has just commenced predeployment training – perhaps a couple of pallets of NZAID blue pills should accompany them when they deploy…?

Such was the case with the 60-year-old chieftain who received four pills from a U.S. operative. According to the retired operative who was there, the man was a clan leader in southern Afghanistan who had been wary of Americans — neither supportive nor actively opposed. The man had extensive knowledge of the region and his village controlled key passages through the area. U.S. forces needed his cooperation and worked hard to win it, the retired operative said. After a long conversation through an interpreter, the retired operator began to probe for ways to win the man’s loyalty. A discussion of the man’s family and many wives provided inspiration. Once it was established that the man was in good health, the pills were offered and accepted. Four days later, when the Americans returned, the gift had worked its magic, the operative recalled. “He came up to us beaming,” the official said. “He said, ‘You are a great man.’ And after that we could do whatever we wanted in his area.” Joby Warrick, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, December 26, 2008

Don’t make me angry

Posted on 25 January 2010 by SJPONeill

You wouldn't like me when I'm angry...

The Willy Apaiata story has received quite a bit of coverage since the NZ Herald’s publishing faux pas last week:

there is now a Facebook page Boycott NZ Herald for publishing Photos of SAS in Action

My old mate, Dusty, from 2/1 RNZIR Sigs Platoon days, back when Reagan was in charge and someone else was getting their rocks in Afghanistan, discusses some of the implications in Those Photos! Dusty concludes “Time for the country to wake up & grow up.“

Neptunus Lex in the US has picked up on the story in VC Willie and makes a comparison with Prince Harry’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan after a similar action by UK media.

The Strategist, unusually, loses the plot and misses the point entirely: there is little connection between a tactical action in Afghanistan and the strategic defence of New Zealand and its environs, certainly not the way it is written here.

On Facebook, some loser wannabe mouths off “…Lets be clear on this Apiata’s NZVC is just that an NZVC not a VC his was the first ever issued the last ever Victoria Cross ever issued to a Kiwi was at the end of WW2. He served with me in 6 Hau i didnt think much of him then and it doesnt sound like he has changed much since then. Just because he has been awarded this honor everyone thinks he’s a saint well a lepord doesnt change his spots because he gets an award. He did a brave act, But just read his citation and then compare it to Beharry VC or any other VC for that matter it just doesnt stack up. To me it was an political award look at how the Army media swang into action, Reluctant hero? my god he has a DVD, Kids book, Adults book and was and is highly publisised it just doesnt stack up does it? just my opinion tho...”

I would love to know John Birmingham’s thoughts on the subject but Cheeseburger Gothic has blown its bandwidth cap and is down for the moment – too much action in the Birmoverse over the weekend…? Oh no….

The latter two bullet points did get me thinking though…on the deeper issues surrounding the award of honours like the Victoria Cross and Medal of Honor…I think we must take it at a given that not all acts of comparable gallantry will be recognised in the same way, much as we might like to thinks so. This would have the effect of either diluting the recognition to the point where it becomes meaningless…or…we end up with the perception, faced by UK special forces in 2002, where only posthumous awards might be considered: anything else reflects, in some warped way, a lesser bravery…

That there may be political factors surrounding awards is neither new nor unusual…11 VCs were awarded to the defenders of Rorke’s Drift following the disastrous (for British forces) engagement at Isandhlwana – this in no ways takes anything from the valour of those men on that day; two Delta Force snipers, Master Sergeant Gary I. Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randall D. Shughart, were awarded the Medal of Honor for their parts in the action in Mogadishu in october 1993, captured in the book and movie Blackhawk Down – any spin attached to their posthumous awards takes nothing away from their sacrifices that day.

In thinking about Willie Apaita’s VC award, there is a bigger picture to be considered on a number of fronts…Kiwis are known and great tall poppy slayers, when we punch above our weight, we tend to get all shy about it and play the issue down, to and past the point of rudeness at times. We are not good at recognising those of us who do well and exceed expectations. From Vietnam until East Timor the New Zealand had not been involved in combat operations – operations, yes; combat operations, no. In East Timor, NZ troops were again active, although not a great scale, in the two-way range. The NZSAS deployed to Afghanistan until an opsec veil for good reasons – in some ways, however, it is unfortunate as it obstructs the public of New Zealand from any great awareness of the feats that these troops are capable of. The contact with Taliban forces that resulted in New Zealand’s first VC since WW2 was one such feat. The description of the action in the citation reads as well any of those from WW2, WW1 and the Boer War, and is on a par with similar citations from our friends and allies.

Good on Chief of Defence Force (at the time) Bruce Ferguson for recognising Willy Apiata’s actions for what they were and taking the original recommendation a lot further. Were there political considerations? Undoubtably but this award could not have been used to help popularise an unpopular deployment to Afghanistan for the simple reason that this deployment was that unpopular, if at all, with Joe New Zealander (apart from the Minto nutjob minority out on the fringes of reality).

Was there a strategic effect from the action or the award? Obviously a massive national pride in a local lad doing well and if those actions can be used as role models and inspiration for ordinary New Zealanders, then great! But what of impact in the geopolitical arena? Not really – because Willy Apiata acted as he did – but just think for a couple of seconds on what the implications may have been had he NOT acted as he did…What effect might one or more combat casualties, and from our most elite special troops, had upon the Government, its commitment to overseas alliance and coalitions, the people of New Zealand and the NZDF? Maybe this guy actually did more than ‘just’ run across 70 metres of bullet-swept ground with his mate his back, see him OK, and then get back into the fight…? By acting as he did, although it is most unlikely such considerations ever crossed his mind that night, Willy Apiata’s actions introduced the people New Zealand to combat operations again without the trauma of flag-draped coffins…

But these remain side issues to the one of the moment i.e. the ‘right’ of the media to print/say what they want, regardless of potential consequences – for others. As MaxDamage points out on Neptunus Lex:

Not too long ago, during the Great Concealed Carry Battle, newspapers found it newsworthy to publish the name and address of concealed carry permit holders in several states, it being public information.

That it might place these folks at risk was side-stepped. Public information, freedom of the press, they’re simply reporting.

Name and addresses of the editorial board were stapled to lamp posts shortly thereafter. A matter of public record, you know.

That shut them up.

I’d suggest the same with reporters embedded — their pic goes out on every submission, and if they want to send directly they wear the same uniform everybody else does. If they want to send uncensored they wear their civvies. If they want the protections of being a civilian they dress as such and military gets censorship privs over the transmission if that is too harsh an occupational hazard.

I’ve nothing against the press reporting a story, I simply refuse to place others at risk for their supposed right to tell the tale.

I guess it’s a different story when the boot is on the OTHER foot…NZ Herald editorial staff take note…

Holy Lessons Learned, Batman!

Steven Pressfield introduces a new series this week with Tribal Engagement Tutorial which will focus on providing soldiers and Marines practical, battle-tested information, which can help them on the ground. Sound familiar? Full kudos to Mr Pressfield, Maj Jim Gant, William S. “MAC” McCallister and Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai for sharing their knowledge and doing what mainstream militaries seem to STILL be struggling with…getting the right information to the right people at the right time – and ensuring that they know what to do with it….blending the knowledge (lessons, intl, doctrine) with the training and command system instead of treating the information as an entity in its own right.

Would WE recognise them?

Like, you know, if a military fleet from 80 years in the future just popped out of a wormhole, helped us out with an immediate problem e.g. takfiri jihadists of all sorts, and then started to throw their moral and cultural weight around the place…wanting to have the same rights that we have in our timeline? Or would we draw a line in the sand somewhere? The battle for the Birmoverse, specifically the post-WW2 Presidency, continues – personally I think that Sweet Jane Says hits the nail right on the head with her stance on “No Sky People!” No people from the future of a different timeline should have any influence on our timeline.”

Direct from a dank dark cave near you

Osama Bin Laden claims credit (finally) for the Undies Bomber…sorry, dude, it’s old news now – next time use a faster camel…

I haven’t seen that many arrows since Agincourt

Posted on 6 January 2010 by SJPONeill

What a great line!! Coming Anarchy a couple of days ago offers some insight into the military’s subservience to the Great God of PowerPoint – check out the slide on the link – “…yup, we know the problem is complex...” Oh yeah, you think…? or do you…? One really has to wonder why someone even bothered to create the slide, because it’s pretty certain that not too many people are going to attempt to decypher it and even less across a darkened briefing room. Once upon a time there was a simple acronym about simplicity – yup, you got it…KISS…Keep It Simple, Stupid. Now it seems to be Keep It Stupid, Simple…

When we were first briefed on Interbella in 2008, the very first thing that leapt out at me was ‘Wow, baby, what a great tool for illustrating complex issues and relationships…!” But even Interbella is somewhat limited if the audience doesn’t have at least a grasp of the core issues to start with. I think that our reliance on PowerPoint is symptomatic of our growing intellectual laziness where we want information to be served up in a nice tidy PowerPoint slide and free ourselves of the onerous task of actually reading and extracting relevant material for ourselves.

And here’s a link to the original brief which includes the branding for the contacted consultants responsible. Consultants? We have to pay people to develop crap like this? Have we so much lost or given away the ability to think for ourselves…?

Standing up

I’ve been offline (and loving it) since a few days before Christmas – I see that some nutcase (let’s not point fingers by naming religions or anything and just keep this guy where he belongs in the dangerous nutcase box) tried to blow himself up while airborne on Christmas Day.

How about just for once, we don’t go all idiot and lambast the intelligence community for yet another failure. You think that they’re not away of it already without having every commentator (few, if any, of whom have actually been in the hot seat themselves) on the planet point it out? Maybe we all need to have a good hard look at ourselves and do some internal finger-pointing? At what point do WE stand up and start to take personal responsibility for what goes on around US and not just expect ‘someone else to look after it’?

There was an interesting article in the inbox last night, comparing the Israeli approach to airport security to that of CONUS. While the grass is always greener and everyone else always does it better, this article has a subtle implication that WE all could contribute to OUR own security a little more by paying attention to what goes on around US and NOT taking the soft option when something concerns US. The Information Militia in action again…this isn’t just about Crimestoppers, this is about US taking ownership of the world WE live in and if not making it better, certainly helping to stop it getting any worse…

Peter over at The Strategist has been busy over the holiday period and published a number of articles on self help in the interest of both the environment and personal wellness – sometimes it is just as simple as getting ‘on yer bike’. I enjoyed his short article on the restored railway station in Waverley – we are lucky to have a similar restored station just up the road in National Park and I may shoot up there for a coffee once I get this online.

Understanding the Environment

Steven Pressfield has the latest in his series on engaging the tribes in Afghanistan – still IMHO, the only solution for that country – with Shame and Honor, not Hearts and Minds: an interview with William S. “MAC” McCallister, #2 Not too many arrows in this one…

Circles, triangles and squares…

Posted on 15 December 2009 by SJPONeill

It’s all about understanding…yesterday, we worked with the grand-twins and understanding circles, triangles and squares…lots of fun in the sun…I wish understanding COIN, CIT and CIA could be as easy and as much fun…

I seem to have mildly upset some people…in the case of Patrick Lang’s entry on COIN as a failed strategy, I think that we both actually agree – our issue is more other the semantics of COIN than whether COIN has worked in Afghanistan or not; neither of us believe that it has but my stance is that because the current campaign in Afghanistan is not the same campaign as the original OEF that went into deal to Al-Qaeda training bases and cadres. Somewhere along the way OEF evolved from a Direct Action on a large-scale to a pseudo-COIN campaign. I say ‘pseudo’ because there never was an insurgency to counter until the end of the direct action phase of OEF, say, from the end of 2002 onwards. That insurgency was directed primarily against US/NATO forces that had, in the eyes of Afghans, invaded their nation. Thus the ‘logical’ way to neutralise that insurgency would be to remove the cause. Once the Al-Qaeda training camps and cadres in Afghanistan had been neutralised by the end of 2002, anti-terrorism efforts should have continued to pursue Rupert Smith’s ‘franchisers of terror’ wherever they may have gone, to apply those resources that have essentially been wasted in Afghanistan against the real threat.

A COIN strategy has been (mis)applied in Afghanistan: it’s not about a struggle for the people, it’s not about hearts and minds and it’s certainly NOT about trying to inflict our culture and values on another society – is that one of the reasons that WE have gone to war to fight against? That bit of unpleasantness 1939-45 springs to mind…for two millennia and more, Afghanistan has been a loose confederation of tribes with a vaguely ineffective central government – the government leaves the tribes alone and vice versa; the only time there is anything remotely resembling a unified Afghanistan is when there is the perception of an invader and no occupation of this country has succeeded in 2000 years.

It all comes down to the same issue in the end: what are the strategic objectives for the campaign in Afghanistan? What are the troops there to do? Those are the two questions that needed to be asked in late 2002. The current campaign will not address historical issues with the border with Pakistan and the tribal areas(next to religion, the most common cause of war in the last century must be British imperial surveyors!!); it will not change the power bases in Pakistan; and it certainly is not going to address issues of Pakistan’s membership of the nuke club. If the aim is to develop a stable governance structure (possibly in lieu of a government) then the Taliban must be engaged with more than small arms and JDAMs: as the force that will (and is) filling the vacuum of control in Afghanistan, they must be encouraged to come to the table. What do we want? An Al-Qaeda-free Afghanistan under a Taliban-controlled/led alliance or another decade of what we’ve got now? The ‘secure the cities’ Cursed Earth approach may be sustainable but it brings us no closer to resolution.

So the problem that Patrick Lang identifies is not the failure of COIN as a means of statecraft but the application of the wrong tool for the job. In his post on the historical failure of COIN he uses a number of examples. Malaya and Kenya are written off as failures because of the resources in terms of time, blood and treasure applied for little return, more so since the UK let both nations go at the end of the respective campaigns. He misses the point that both Malaysia and Kenya have, since their independence, been islands of relative stability for the succeeding four decades. From the Malayan Emergency came the establishment of the state of Singapore as a separate home for dissenting Chinese from Malaysia – Singapore is now a prime source of economic, political and security stability across the ASEAN region with strong relationships around the globe. Similarly the 70s campaign in Oman, which led to a number of reforms in that nation, also left an island of regional stability. That there are still ripples in the Cyrean pond are not due to the failure of the British COIN campaign there but to periodic posturing between the ethnic Greek and Turkish populations – but Cyprus has been pretty stable for decades. Northern Ireland is a classic example with few of the advantages that Commonwealth forces had in Malaya like ethnic differences between ‘the people’ and the insurgents, lack of offshore support, etc; others include Belize; East Timor, Solomon Islands and Bougainville; and Hungary and Czechoslovakia (you do not have to like the Soviet methods but you can not deny their effectiveness).

Did the COIN campaign in Vietnam fail? Only in that, like in Afghanistan, the campaign did not take into account the key issue: in the end, it was not about defending the South against the North: it was about reunification. Perhaps if the reunification of Vietnam had been the primary objective from the first advisor to set foot in that country, it may have worked out so differently. Let’s not forget that Ho Chi Minh originally wanted to align with the US to expel the French (the nation that is REALLY despised in Vietnam) but was screwed over in favour of bolstering the tottering remnants of French Empire. That was when the Communists (franchisers of terror?) stepped into the void. So long as reunification was not on the table as an objective, Vietnam was probably never winnable – what are we really here for? – but is the failure to clearly identify the issues and the eventual erosion of political and domestic support a failure of COIN? We can and will argue about it for years but I am on the side of not – a good workman never blames his tools – and here, as in Afghanistan, the workman is not so much the soldier ( as I inadvertently applied on Sic Semper Tyrannis) but the political arm that decides such adventures are or are not a good idea…the biggest war amongst ‘the people’ is always at home….

This is one of the reasons the COIN Review adopted the USMC term Countering Irregular Threats (CIT) over COIN as a descriptor for the Contemporary Operating Environment: COIN is a subset of CIT. One of the main reasons for this decision was that as soon as COIN is mentioned the two immediate response are “Malaya” and “Winning hearts and minds” and we are off down the slippery slopes of assumptions and misapplied lessons. Exploring the CIT concept further brought us to the British (and they do have some experience in this area, overseas and at home) term Countering Irregular Activity (CIA). This works on the premise that we should be thinking in terms of countering irregularity before it becomes a threat let alone a war and by starting to consider an irregularity before it becomes a threat, we are much more likely to NOT discount non-kinetic courses of action to address that irregularity. When you consider that there are only really two types of operation: stability (what else might you call operations to counter destabilising activities – counter-destability?) and warfighting. Perhaps stability operations should be led by ‘not the military’ in order to be able to consider other options, just as warfighting operations, by definition, should be military-led – both, of course, in support of clearly defined national objectives.

Patrick asked me if I thought that this was just a game played by academics in journals. My first response was denial but it is exactly that. What greater endorsement for a comprehensive approach to the problems of the COE than to be able to have such discussions outside of in-house military think-tanks; to be able to put one’s opinions and thoughts to the world without fear of formal censure (some harsh words perhaps at worst between differers of opinion); and perhaps by virtue of that openness to be able to contribute in some small way to the intellectual horsepower assembled to address those problems. Hence the Information Militia concept: loosely organised; often fractured and factionalised; following a general direction but often only through the sum of a number of tangents – but still useful to have around. There was a post recently on the Small Wars Council Blog entitled Where is Our Kilcullen? that was critical of the Marines for not having developed its own Kilcullen – as a number of posters have pointed out, the US has its fair share of COIN thinkers and one of David Kilcullen’s big advantages was that, as an outsider, he probably had greater freedom to say the unpalatable. But there is no denying that many of these thinkers both exist and exist outside the formal structures of the Army (or Marine Corps, if you have one). It is this rich and robust discussion, that we encourage, foster and nurture that maybe gives us an edge over the takfiri who strive to suppress any and all who don’t agree, conform or comply…how else would our Gants and Wineeras ever get a word in otherwise…?

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I am reviewing the RAAF’s Friends in High Places publication and one of the themes emerging from this an awareness of retaining, because we can, the old single service stovepipes and continuing to do what we do in isolation from other operators in the same environment…becoming dumber as we become smarter. The two posts by MattF and MikeF in the Kilcullen thread proposing that field-grade officers be posted on tours outside their service or the military as part of broadening cultural horizons are good ideas – and again examples of where we may have had a good thing in place once and allowed it to lapse…we don’t know what we don’t know and often the only way to find out is to get out and find out. So as military professionals perhaps we need to be getting out and getting our boots dirty, not in the field where we lead, but in areas of commerce, politics, diplomacy, aid, etc where we do not lead…and by doing so make ourselves better stronger and faster for dealing with irregular activities.

Police and COIN

The other person I have upset a little is one of the chaps from Coming Anarchy – in this case, that was my intention as I think that he had leapt a little before thinking – the whole concept behind COIN (still in a misuse of the term) is that it is solely not a military operation and often, the military might not even have the lead in what is more correctly a CIA (no, not that CIA!!!) campaign in Salinas. Thus the COIN doctrine being employed in Salinas might quite plausibly include no military courses of action at all – and rightly so for a domestic policing campaign. That campaign will probably include a strong element of law enforcement (and regardless of how some might dress, there are not the military), civil aid, political action at the town and possibly state levels, support initiatives from commercial and corporate entities e.g. jobs, etc etc. All these are approaches that can be find in most contemporary Western COIN doctrine – the adoption does not bring the advent of martial law any closer. If anything, the Salinas initiative is an indication that some traditional barriers have been eroded to allow the adoption and implementation of someone else’s good ideas…Equally, there is much that we can, should and are learning from how police operate in some situations…

If there is one major issue arising from the Salinas initiative, it is the one identified last month as “..a tradition of police officers who “love the chase. They get into this business to kick ass and take names, by and large. We’re at odds with ourselves because of the people we hire...” So before we get into any discussion of the rights or wrongs of what doctrine is used, we need to seriously consider who we recruit to apply it…I don’t know but I would be interested to learn how much ethos and values training is included in both formal police entry (recruit) training and also post-graduation on the job…

Up, up and away

I visited Palmerston North the Friday before last and caught up with a mate who is using flight simulation technologies in his work…he took me for a ‘flight’ out of RNZAF Ohakea in a Vulcan B.2, thundering through the valleys around home…only minor thing wrong was that a Vulcan coming out of Ohakea should look like this:

Avro Vulcan B.2, 75 Sqn RNZAF, 1972

So what if…

Posted on 12 December 2009 by SJPONeill

…we all got together as a planet and deliberately decided to make it worse…?

At Blunty the other day John Birmingham offers comment on the Swiss’ totally mindblowingly stupid decision to ban minarets on buildings…”Switzerland’s Muslims, for instance, are reported to be mostly refugees from the Balkans who had already been thoroughly Europeanized over many centuries and who would have been almost perfectly suited to demonstrating that Islam and Western, secular modernity can live in harmony.” Hands-up any person who wouldn’t be offended and feel victimised and discriminated against after this dumbness…Across Europe, Muslim communities that are decades, sometimes centuries, old are being isolated and driven into the arms of the jihadists and takfirists – those whose other passion is hate…

I’ve commented before on the Islamic Brotherhood’s stark and blatant reluctance to get involved and sort out problems in its own backyard – if they could get up off their diamond-encrusted backsides to do so – if only 1% of all the aid that Saudi poured into the various Palestinian liberation movements over the decades was invested into modern day Palestine, it would be, per capita, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. Spread the wealth around carefully and the unemployment, unrest and lack of hope that feeds the jihadists would blink out of existence overnight – Palestine might even become the reborn centre of Islamic study, learning and science as Islam once lead the world before the takfir nutjobs took over.

That Saudi is not interested in helping the Palestinians and is in fact quite happy keeping them marginalised as third class global citizens is quite clear in this article from Coming Anarchy “…As many as a quarter of a million Palestinians live in Saudi Arabia, but they are prohibited to hold or even apply for Saudi citizenship because of Arab League instructions barring Arab states from granting them citizenship in order “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.” Yeah, right…The palestinians have been used and abuser by their Arab and muslim ‘brothers’ for decades and they have the balls to refer to the US as ‘The Great Satan”? You really have to wonder if it occurs to OBL and his ilk that if they want the US to butt out of Middle Eastern affairs, the way to do it is to promote STABILITY in the region. They are quite right when they say that Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are Arab/Muslim problems…jolly good, but when it’s time to step up to the plate and do something about it, everybody remembers they had something else to do in their gold-plated swimming pools…of course, when the Saudi water table finally dies, and the gold-plated swimming pool is full of sand, it’ll probably be too late…

Last month The Strategist made comment, as did I in Rattatattatat… on the Salinas Police Department’s request for assistance from the US Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey to assist in countering its gang problem (7 murders in 11 days!!). Coming Anarchy has just picked up on Washington Post article on the same story but instead of recognising the initiative for what it is, Coming Anarchy has disappointingly misused it to leap on its own little bandwagon of police militancy…it’s not hard to see why the planet might be going to hell in a hand basket when simple innovative initiatives like those in Salinas are used as just another excuse to beat the police. The simple fact is that COIN doctrine (from the top to the lowest TTPs) is eminently employable in law enforcement and that not only should that concept be fostered and nurtured but we should be encouraging the military to pass on its lessons from expeditionary COIN campaigns – who knows they might even learn something in return…? How might Jim Gant’s tribal strategy be employed to counter the gang culture? It’s all about stability in the end…perhaps this is an idea for a paper to complement Josh’s one on fighting P in New Zealand? I don’t have a copy of this on hand but will see if I can upload it next week…

Falklands ’47

The actual idea for the title of today’s post came from Paper Modelers…I looked at this aircraft, an indigenous Argentinian redesign of the Mosquito and wondered…what-if the Falklands War had taken place some three or four decades earlier – might we have seen Argentinian Calquins forcing strikes against a small British fleet armed with the latest in naval aviation, the Supermarine Attacker; Sikorsky R-4s conducting early airmobiles; and the Black Buck missions conducted by the original Vulcans (before they did all those horrible things to the leading edge!)…I had thought that this might fit into the Axis of Time Birmoverse model but couldn’t get it to fly with the high tech edge that Allies had at the end of that WW2…

The 2 Ds…

I really like this post on children at play from The Strategist – Peter I think has turned off the commenting option but I think that the underlying theme in his humour is important enough to offer my own thoughts here: the two D’s of developing children: dirt and danger…if they don’t know it’s OK to get dirty and take risks as children, then they won’t as adults and will always want the nanny-state to be there for them… Yes, yes, yes to all the mindless nanny-statist chorusing the need for supervision…it’s not like we’re proposing that all newborns be left out in the wild to see if they can survive on their own – if we did that, we’d never get a National Caucus together – but let children figure things out for themselves instead of pushing the panic button every time they try to add a bit of dirt and dead bug to their diets…I remember, many many years ago, when Guy Fawkes was still fun, the rich kid up the road made his own nebelwerfer using a milk crate with (holding 5×5?=)25 bottles, each with a skyrocket linked to a central fuse – ABSOLUTELY spectacular when launched at a 30 degree angle!!! We used to make our own cluster bombs by attaching strings of crackers to skyrockets so they would scatter and explode after the rocket burst…all good clean Kiwi fun…and we turned out OK…

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…