Canadian Cincinnatus

Why the US soldier snapped in Afghanistan

The American staff sergeant who murdered 16 Afghan civilians is provoking questions about how it could have happened. The distinguished military historian Max Hastings provides some much needed perspective by reviewing some of the many military atrocities committed by US and British forces since World War II. He concludes that the potential for this sort of thing is inside all of us. It is just that military training and combat operations can brings it to the surface, especially in counter-insurgency operations.

Personally, I think this atrocity cannot be understood without keeping items like this in mind. Embedded journalist Michael Yon states, “We’ve taken about 200 Coalition casualties that we know of from insider attacks.  How many do we not know of?” The thought process of a Coalition soldier is easily imagined: “WTF? I have to risk my life to train these A-holes, and they turn on me the first chance they get?” When Afghan soldiers go postal on their Coalition trainers, trust is not bred.

This does not, of course, excuse what happened (the sergeant apparently saw his comrade get his leg blown off the day before, probably by an IED that he likely believed was laid by the villagers he killed), but it goes a long way to explaining it.

War puts men under incredible stress but conventional war - though much deadlier than guerrilla war – has the advantage of moral simplicity: the enemy is over there; we must kill them any way we can; and that’s that. The only time when this moral structure is conflicted are those rare occasions when prisoners are taken.  In counterinsurgency operations, soldiers face severe moral conflicts every day. This is only exacerbated by Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s restricted rules of engagement. I believe the psychological stress it induces (trying to help a group of people while locked in combat with their kinfolk) is underappreciated. When morality is simple, people cope with stress better. When it is complicated, morality is not the same source of strength. As a result, some solders snap.

Perhaps counterinsurgency just asks too much from our soldiers (at least those who aren’t in special forces). 

For some time, I have championed an alternate strategy for Afghanistan (here, here and here). Don’t nation-build in a country where none existed before. Instead, work with the existing tribal structure: shower favours on friendly tribes and treat uncooperative tribes as the enemy. In this way, the enemy is clear to everybody and most of the fighting is done by other Afghans, who fight for reasons they understand. By attempting to woo Afghans with civil aid, we end up bribing enemies while neglecting friends. We present the Afghans a perverse incentive structure: fight us and get all the goodies (and the apologies). All we really want is for their territories to not be terrorist havens. Tell them that if they manage that, we will leave them alone and give them military aid (which they prize much more highly than schools and roads). Fail to do that, and we will hammer you - while aiding your ancient blood enemies.

I think such a mission would be more understandable to the Afghans and our solders as well.

 

Helicopter shootdown in Afghanistan: revenge for Osama bin Laden’s death?

Twenty of the casualties in the Chinook shot down in Afghanistan over the weekend were from SEAL Tem 6, the same unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden. Perhaps, the man who killed bin Laden was among the dead (though the Pentagon denies it at this point).

While it is impossible to say at this point if Taliban intelligence is good enough that they had the ability to target a specific CH-47 with specific troops on board (I have my doubts about their capabilities) or whether it was just a wartime coincidence, it is worth noting that it is standard procedure - or at least it was standard procedure until the bin Laden raid - to withhold the details of all special operations missions until much later. This policy dates back to the British government in the 1970’s, who withheld the identities of SAS operators in order to prevent the IRA from going after their families.

This leads naturally enough to speculate that perhaps, if the Obama administration hadn’t preened so much about the bin Laden raid and been so free with operational details to paint a vivid picture for the public, that Chinook would not have been shot down – as the public in general, and the Taliban in particular, would have remained ignorant of the men who pulled off the bin Laden hit.

What a reckless, selfish President.

 

Of downed helicopters: the Afghan War in perspective

Over the weekend, a US CH-47 Chinook helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. The loss of 30 US soldiers and 8 Afghans made this the deadliest helicopter crash of the war.

A news item from Strategy Page, about a helicopter shootdown from a couple of weeks ago, provides some much needed perspective on this weekend’s incident:

In a rare incident, an American Ch-47 helicopter was hit by an RPG rocket and forced to crash land near a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan. Two of the twenty people on board were slightly wounded (by RPG fragments). The RPG is a rocket launcher, and the rockets are unguided. Hitting anything as large as a helicopter, at more than a hundred meters, is mainly a matter of luck.

This is the 17th helicopter to be brought down by hostile fire in the last ten years in Afghanistan. Another 84 have crashed for non-combat reasons. In Iraq, 46 helicopters were brought down by enemy fire (in addition to 76 that crashed for non-combat reasons) during seven years of much heavier combat.

That’s a grand total of 224 lost choppers for both Afghanistan and Iraq (from all causes, and most not by enemy action). In contrast, the total US helicopter losses in Vietnam were 5,498. That’s right; the US lost more than 20 times the number of helicopters in Vietnam – that’s more than an order of magnitude more.

So when people excitedly exclaim that Afghanistan is America’s longest war (at 10+ years), understand why the US has been able to maintain the pace of operations there for so long: it’s because - at least when compared to other American wars - Afghanistan is just not that intense.

 

Memo to General Petraeus: If you want to win the ‘hearts and minds’, you need cultural confidence

After the wacky Florida pastor’s Koran burning inspired some excitable locals in Mazar-e-Sharif to murder 7 UN workers, General Petraeus declared the Koran burnings – not the mass murder - “hateful, extremely disrespectful and enormously intolerant”. Earth to the good general, if you want to build a modern nation state out of Afghanistan, you can’t be indulging the country’s most barbaric elements.

I understand what Petraeus is thinking: he believes that insensitivity on our part repels the hearts and minds that our Afghan mission is trying so desperately to woo. While the pastors Koran burnings are not making things easier for him, there is nevertheless a mistake in the good general’s logic: If you want the Afghans on your side, stop sucking up to them. Condemn the murderers; round them up and kill them; and then tell the rest of the Afghans in no uncertain terms that actions committed half-way around the world do not excuse murder and that this kind of behaviour will be put down violently and vigorously in the future. As Osama Bin Laden himself once put it, people gravitate to a strong horse not a weak horse. Craven accommodation is what the weak horse does.

Mark Steyn was quite correct when he opined that the Afghan mission is better off channeling General Charles Napier, who put an end to the custom of suttee in India by declaring: 

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

As a result of Great Britain’s 19^th century cultural confidence, not only is suttee no longer practiced in India, but India is a modern nation with a 60 year parliamentary tradition, British common law and a developing free market economy. In short, today’s India is an integral part of the civilized world. As far as India is concerned, thank God that the old time Brits weren’t as sensitive as General Petraeus.

 

 

What If Only Liberals Want to Be Multicultural?

The prefered assumption of liberals and the left is that all new Canadians want to embrace multiculturalism and only aging, racist white men are standing in the way of utopian harmony.  I've always been suspicious of this assumption, mostly because I've met racists all over the world, from Pakistan to Romania, from Japan to St. Petersberg, so I find it hard to believe that everyone who immigrates to Canada is ready to embrace everyone else's culture with tolerance and respect.

But this article in the Toronto Sun about Muslims protesting on Remebrance Day raised even my eyebrows.  I have no argument with them protesting the war in Afghanistan, although I'd like to remind them of who helped them during the decade the Soviets occupied the country, and while burning a poppy is culturally insensitive and shows they have no knowledge of Canadian history or where that symbol came from, that kind of drama is the stock and trade of protests, an art perfected by the left.

What struck me dumb was their chant: "Islam will dominate!" and "Our dead are in paradise.  Your dead are in hell."

Now I traveled briefy with the mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1988, just as the Soviets were getting ready to make their escape from that disasterous war, so it doesn't surprise me that they believe we're going to hell or that Islam (and by extension the protesters) will "dominate" in the end.  What amazed me was that they were utterly shameles and open about it.

White males who chant similar intolerant rubbish publicly usually belong to neo-Nazi skinhead clubs, and the thought-police of human rights tribunals would be all over them in seconds for such an outburst.  Stiffer hate crime legislation would be dusted off and enacted, and existing hate crime laws would be prosecuted with extreme prejudice.

With Muslims, of course, the human rights groups fear to tread.  These Islamists are serious, and if you try and charge one of them with a hate crime then you'd better have the RCMP open your mail with a bomb squad robot, let alone brace yourself for a barrage of bad press from the MSM.

The Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, all the Europeans after WWII, the Vietnamese, the Hindu Indians--all these ethic groups and many others came to Canada and for the most part lived and let lived.  They may have felt superior to established Canadians, and some may have even thought they had superior religions or morals, but they were relatively quiet about it.  In the long run, they became Canadians.

But there is a branch of radical Islam that wants to conquer and convert Canada. They shout "Islam wil dominiate!"  Dominate.  Rule.

Jack Layton thinks he can win these people over to the NDP cause by sending them Ramadan greetings, but he'd better be ready to toss away the NDP stand on equal rights for women, homosexuals and anyone whose religion isn't Islam.  There has already been a rise in anti-semetic attacks on everything from synagoges to grave yards, and no one is pointing the finger at skin heads anymore.  Sadly, no one is brave enough to point a finger at all.

If multiculturalism dies in Canada, it won't be white males who killed it.  Indeed, it was Pierre Trudeau and his cronies who pushed the idea in the first place.  It just didn't occur to them that some people would come here and not agree with them that we should all live shoulder to shoulder and respect one another's culture.

It was a nice idea.  So is banning war.  Try that and see how long you last as a country when things go bad.  These ideas fail because there are always some radical groups out there like fundamentalist Muslims who will see it as weakness and exploit it to the max.

Get ready Canada.  The wolves are in the sheep pen.

Mike Downtown

Ralph Peters agrees with the Cincinnatus strategy on Afghanistan

A couple of posts ago I reported on Henry Kissinger’s agreement with my Afghan strategy - that the key to victory there is to work with the traditional tribal culture, not against it. Now New York Post columnist Ralph Peters is drinking the same kool aid:

Pick your tribes: We want to be friends with everybody. It doesn't work. Our guys are the old Northern Alliance crowd (who we've treated like dirt in order to woo our enemies). If we want Afghans to fight on our side, they need Afghan reasons for fighting.

We dream of a unity government, but the Raj-era Brits figured out that you have to employ tribes against their rivals. Our goodwill won't overcome ages of hatred. In poor tribal societies, life is a zero-sum game. To win, you back your guys.

Exploit the existing culture: Don't embark on a costly fool's errand to change the nature of a tribal society. Leverage what you find. Stop obsessing on what you want long enough to consider what the locals want. If the desires differ significantly, you must change.

This is absolutely right. Keep your goals modest, realistic and achievable. And then achieve them. War is no place for utopian social engineering. Also, as Peters correctly notes, the conventional wisdom that nobody every conquered Afghanistan is wrong. The British Empire did, as Peters acknowledges. (Or rather, it was able to exercise suzerainty over Afghanistan for an extended period of time, which is all that we need to do.)

Then Peters introduces a few rules of his own for the conflict: 

Recognize your own limits: It doesn't help to complain that "counterinsurgency takes a generation" if political circumstances won't grant you that much time. We should never expect our armed forces to achieve ideal solutions that exist only in academic theories.

Except in existential struggles, such as World War II, we must do cold-blooded cost-benefit analyses: Are the realistic goals we might achieve worth the cost in blood and treasure?

 To me, George W Bush’s biggest military failure was acting like his wars had no shelf life. At the time I reckoned that Bush had a maximum of 3 years after 9/11 for the ‘hot phase’ of the War on Terror to begin winding down. And there isn’t light at the end of the tunnel by then, the public will begin to lose patience. This is why pursuing the WMD case through the UN was so wrong. President Bush did it to get Tony Blair on side (who, it has to be said, did provide significant aid). But it cost two years of wasted time. As Napoleon once said, “I would rather lose a battle than a minute.”

Another good rule from Peters:

Aid those already on your side, not your enemies: Our attempts to bribe our enemies with wells, make-work and welfare are doomed to failure. Reward your allies with aid projects; let the hostiles envy them -- and figure it out on their own.

Reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour. It’s amazing how applicable this principle is and how often we ignore it.

Here’s a rule for our negotiators: 

Your enemies must seek negotiations first: Olive branches are worthless against fanatics convinced they can win. If negotiations are to play a role, it can only be after you've pounded the insurgents so ferociously that they seek talks. If you move first, it's read as desperation. Your enemies will act accordingly.

To negotiate successfully with tribesmen, you must be feared.

The reason peaceniks invariably make such bad negotiators, even though they profess to love negotiating, is that they do not understand this point. They imagine a negotiation to be a kumbaya love-in. Bargaining isn’t a love-in and never have been. There are countless examples from Munich on down to the local used car dealer to illustrate this point, but never underestimate the power of wishful thinking to obscure the plain truth.

I am glad Peters is coming around, and, if his article is to be believed, so is General Petreaus. Even better. With the right strategy, I believe victory in Afghanistan is eminently achievable.

Henry Kissinger agrees with Canadian Cincinnatus on Afghanistan

I have argued many times on these pages that the key to victory in the Afghan War is the right strategy. Trying to create a modern nation-state out of a hodgepodge collection of tribes inhabiting a buffer zone created by the British and Russians in the 19^th century to separate their empires is a fool’s errand - especially as both empires concluded that this no-man’s land is worthless and ungovernable. However, if the goal of the Afghan War is merely to deny Al Qaeda and the Taliban a safe haven, victory in this war is quite achievable. All you have to do is to employ the existing tribal structure for your purpose: i.e. you tell the tribes that you will leave them alone (and turn a blind eye to their opium trade) if they don’t dabble in international terrorism. But if they do, your fast reaction force in Kandahar will come down on them like a load of bricks. Also, if they play nice, they get some ‘development money’ that nobody will audit. In other words, basically give them thinly disguised bribes. (Psst! Afghan warlords come cheap.)

After observing the Afghanistan war debate steadfastly ignore this option, I read Henry Kissinger’s Washington Post article with great pleasure, as he argues for basically the same thing. Read the whole article, but here are the relevant passages (emphasis added):

“Afghanistan is a nation, not a state in the conventional sense. The writ of the Afghan government is likely to run in Kabul and its environs, not uniformly in the rest of the country. The attainable outcome is likely to be a confederation of semi-autonomous, regions configured largely on the basis of ethnicity, dealing with each other by tacit or explicit understandings. American counterinsurgency strategy -- no matter how creatively applied -- cannot alter this reality.”

“All this leaves only a narrow margin for the American effort. We are needed to bring about the space in which non-jihadist authorities can be established. But if we go beyond this into designing these political authorities, we commit ourselves to a process so prolonged and obtrusive as to risk turning even non-Taliban Afghans against us.”

“We have a basic national interest to prevent jihadist Islam from gaining additional momentum, which it will surely do if it can claim to have defeated the United States and its allies after overcoming the Soviet Union.”

“Afghan strategy needs to be modified in four ways. The military effort should be conducted substantially on a provincial basis rather than in pursuit of a Western-style central government. The time scale for a political effort exceeds by a wide margin that available for military operations. We need a regional diplomatic framework for the next stage of Afghan strategy, whatever the military outcome. Artificial deadlines should be abandoned.” 

Kissinger added the following feature to this strategy that I didn’t think of:

“Afghanistan becomes an international issue whenever an outside power seeks to achieve unilateral dominance. Inevitably, this draws in other parties to establish a countervailing influence, driving events beyond rational calculation. A regional diplomacy should seek to establish a framework to insulate Afghanistan from the storms raging around it rather than allow the country to serve as their epicenter.”

 

What does Michael Ignatieff want us to do with the prisoners captured by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan?

I suppose Canada could send them to Club Gitmo, or if that isn’t cool with the Liberals, we could make our own equivalent camp, say, Camp Baffin Island.  But I can’t think of a course of action that would prolong the legalistic (and defeatist) nitpicking by the opposition.

Of course, I realize that the reception that the Afghan Police give to the insurgents we capture is a little, ahem, more robust than that given by the Metro Toronto Police to a gangbanger in Scarborough, but we have to remember: Afghanistan is not Canada. Being like Canada is not one of the options for Afghanistan. In Afghanistan there are two options, the corrupt, far-from-ideal government of Hamid Karzai or those crazy Islamist kids we call the Taliban. It is a fact that how they – the Taliban - treat their prisoners is several orders of magnitude worse than the current rulers in Kabul.

 What the Canadian Forces are doing there is helping to secure option one. Given that we are already there, any decision we make about our troops there is at its root, a choice between these two options. In other words, if Harvard Mike and Taliban Jack decide to pull our boys out of the sandbox, then they are, in effect, choosing option two. They will be enabling the inevitable atrocities that the Taliban will commit after we depart in the same way that the Democrat controlled Congress contributed to the Killing Fields and the atrocities inflicted on the boat people after they failed to supply the South Vietnamese government when North Vietnam blitzkreiged through the country with their tank divisions.

Ralph Peters is right about Afghanistan (this time)

Last week, I disagreed with Ralph Peters’ New York Post column lambasting General McCrystal’s Afghan strategy. This time I think he is right on the money when he states that it is a mistake for the US to try and erect a modern nation state in Afghanistan out of a bunch of independent tribes. 

“Our obsession with creating a centralized, Westernized state extends to our efforts to build an Afghan military. Our model is the romanticized WWII squad in which every possible ethnic group's represented, all Americans.

 

But people fight for different things, and Afghans aren't interested in fighting for a foreign-backed government or for ethnic groups other than their own.

 

The Brits cracked the code on how to get tribesmen to fight for them: You give them a substitute tribe that's an extension of their hereditary tribe. The Indian Army's regimental system fit the bill perfectly: Recruited from an exclusive tribal network or ethnic group, the regiment could count on soldiers performing well to avoid shaming their families (think Gurkhas). Plus, the regiment offered its own tribal rituals.

 

If you want to succeed in a tribal society, you exploit tribal identities. Our officials insist that would undercut our goals. Well, perhaps our goals should be more realistic.”

He agrees with my analysis that one of the keys to victory is to work with the tribal structure of Afghanistan rather than against it. As I have said before, the word of the day in Afghanistan should be suzerainty, not sovereignty. NATO - and Hamid Karzai – should be content with the nominal allegiance of the Afghan tribes. As long as they are not hospitable to international terrorist organizations, the tribal leaders should be given a modest amount of military and development aid, and then let alone. If they let in the Taliban or Al Qaeda, that’s when you slap them upside the head. Otherwise stand back (but watch carefully).

 The other key, which Peters has not mentioned, is the War on Drugs. As I have also said before, you cannot win a War on Terror and a War on Drugs at the same time in Afghanistan. It is no coincidence that the two provinces that give NATO 80% of the trouble (Helmand and Kandahar) is where 90% of the poppies grow. If you want to win the War on Terror in Afghanistan (which I define as the denial of Afghanistan as a base of operations for international terrorists) you have to turn a blind eye towards the drug trade.

But unlike Peters, I am an optimist, in that I believe Afghanistan is the easiest country in the world to conquer - as long as you are not interested in governing it.

Ralph Peters is wrong about Afghanistan and General McChrystal is right

I have the greatest respect for the New York Post columnist and former US Army intelligence officer, Ralph Peters. Normally he is spot on. But in this article he errs in his analysis. For instance, Peters says:

“Bewildered by the lack of local support for our efforts to "help," Gen. Stan McChrystal and his staff decided that our problems in the Taliban stronghold, Kandahar, are all about electricity shortages.

 So, with the fate of our ballyhooed Kandahar offensive in doubt before it starts, the general wants to spend $200 million on generators and diesel fuel to improve the power supply.

It's a desperate ploy to make our politically correct counterinsurgency doctrine succeed: If we do nice things, the locals are supposed to rally to us and solve our problems with a minimum of violence. The only problem is that it doesn't work.

Would Kandaharis like to have more juice in their shambolic power grid? You bet. But the Eliot Spitzer Law of Foreign Affairs applies: You can't buy enduring love, just quick sex. And in Afghanistan, quick sex can get ugly.” 

Peters’ error is to assume that all the warm and fuzzy “hearts and minds” stuff is a bunch of PC hooey and we should get on with killing our enemy as robustly as possible. This thinking follows Ulysses S. Grant’s rule of war, “I find out where the enemy is, and I hit him there with everything I’ve got.” In conventional war, this is very true.

But counterinsurgency (COIN) operations are a very peculiar sub-species of war where a lot of the rules governing conventional warfare do not apply. The hearts and minds stuff is important because in a guerilla struggle, the side that the locals support will inevitably be the winner. They will support the side that offers them the best deal, in the form of security and living conditions, and who are perceived by them to be the strong horse. To that side, they will provide the aid and – most importantly - the crucial intel that allows the side receiving the information to target the enemy effectively. Guerrillas can no more operate among a hostile populace than the occupying army.

History is replete with examples of this sort. The most instructive is the Vietnam War, which is really a tale of two generals. When General Westmoreland was in command, the US Army crashed through the jungle in battalion sized formation, deluded itself with juked-up, body count stats and blasted the country indiscriminately with huge free-fire zones. Westmoreland was a pompous martinet who was more interested in his reputation in the Pentagon than he was in winning. After the Tet offensive proved that the emperor had no clothes on, he was replaced by the taciturn but effective Creighton Abrams. He immediately scaled back the bombing (at least in the South, the country he needed to win – he hit the Ho Chi Minh Trail much harder than Westmoreland ever did), eliminated the free-fire zones and concentrated his efforts on low-profile village security efforts. In his Saturday morning intelligence briefs, his philosophy was bad news first, good news later - if there’s time. And Abrams was spectacularly successful. How many of you know there were another three Tet offensives in his watch? You probably don’t because they all fizzled. By the time the US pulled out, the communist guerilla war was completely defeated. Don’t be deceived by the “US lost Vietnam” mantra. It is totally without foundation. The North captured the South the same way that Germany captured Belgium in 1940 - with a mechanized conventional assault. My point is that if you read what Abrams did, it bears a striking resemblance to what McChrystal is doing today.

Another example is the Surge in Iraq. The clear-and-hold strategy employed so successfully by General Petraeus is what McChrystal is replicating in Afghanistan.

One of the things I always hear asked is how can the US win in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union, with its atrocity-filled, no-holds-barred approach, couldn’t? What these people don’t get is that the Soviet Union failed because of its atrocity-filled, no-holds-barred approach. There are many examples in history of countries who failed COIN warfare for the same reason. Another example is Nazi Germany in Yugoslavia in World War II. Every Nazi reprisal on civilians strengthened Tito’s resistance.

Another instructive example is Northern Ireland. As long as the Republic of Ireland was poor, the Troubles in Northern Ireland kept going. But when Ireland slashed its top marginal tax rates and became more prosperous than the North, the IRA shriveled up into an ordinary run-of-the-mill mafia. Why fight the poorer Protestants when there is money to be made at home? What General McChrystal is trying to do with things like building power plants is to create a functioning economy. When people see hope, they are less likely to side with apocalyptic religious lunatics.

Of course, the elephant in the room, one Peters did not mention, is the heroin industry. Something like 90% of the world’s heroin is grown along the Helmand River. This is their only cash cow, and NATO is at least nominally hostile to this industry. This is a big problem and the real force behind the Taliban in Helmand and Kandahar Province. As I have said before, in Afghanistan, you can have a War on Terror or a War on Drugs, pick one. You can’t have both. Unfortunately, McChrystal’s hands are tied on this issue. If the US loses Afghanistan, it is because it failed to make a clear choice here.