Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
Often, I find, when faced with difficult, often emotion-laced, problems, it is better to ask questions than it is to offer suggestions. To that end, the embedded slide is from a recent presentation I gave.

In an age of strategic uncertainty, it is far too easy to rely heavily upon what one is very good at, or comfortable with. When one then designs their metrics around those "comfort programs" one can easily mislead one's self over time that doing something well -and locally suppressing the symptoms of a problem for some period of time in some discrete place in the process - is the same as doing good.

But when one steps back and looks at the larger picture over a longer period of time, the flaws of this tactical logic become increasingly apparent.
This is an interesting question, but one that basically compares apples with truck tires. Both Columbia and the Philippines are on an upward trend overall in many respects, but both still have serious problems (their problems, not ours, but we still share some common interests). Our support in both cases is helpful, but it far from being the decisive factor in sustaining the reduction of the violence and facilitating economic growth. As in most of these cases it appears electing the right leaders who actually convince the people they're acting in their interests had the most fundamental impact. However, we should appreciate that in both cases the insurgencies still exist and at any time an event could trigger them to flare up to their previous level of intensity.

In Columbia and the Philippines our "assistance" was and remains appropriately limited, but this also implies we didn't embrace on a major social engineering project to remake these countries in our image (at least not in the 21st Century). Most importantly the threats in both countries were not a significant threat to the U.S. interests and their governments shared our concerns for the most part, so we could work together. There was no need to invade those countries and oust their governments. In other words we didn't disrupt the existing norms.

The contrast with Iraq and Afghanistan is so stark it isn't worth highlighting the key differences since they are apparent. We were successful in both locations initially (so called decisive operations against our armed opponents and ousting the governments), but quickly started stumbling after this. We could argue the merits of invading Iraq to begin with, but in the end we have to accept our political masters will lead into wars of choice occasionally, and our job after debating the issue is to support the decision once made, so for now lets focus on that. Quite simply we failed to plan for and resource the consolidation phase (stability). The policy guidance we received once it was realized we were going to be there for a while consisted on unrealistic policy objectives. Finally, we refused to accept our role as an occupying power and gave the forces who eventually rise against us plenty freedom of movement.

In short comparing our minimal role FID role in the Philippines and Columbia with our direct roles as an occupying power and major combat stability force in Afghanistan and Iraq isn't overly helpful. Furthermore, conducting FID like we did in the Philippines was never an option in Afghanistan or Iraq, so again why the comparison?

Posted by David,
...a US policy community and military who have repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan the mistakes made in Vietnam. These include a failure by the military to scope out the nature of the threats they are facing, and the propensity of the policy community to either ignore or shoot the bearer of unwelcome tidings.....
I have no idea who this policy observer was, but I think comparing whatever mistakes we made in Vietnam with Afghanistan and Iraq is a bit of stretch. Vietnam was very much about containing communist expansion as part of the Cold War. We were drug into that particular location based on a number factors that converged, and not least among them was the political situation on the home front that demanded politicians to be tough on communism.

These were completely different wars. Afghanistan was a counter strike and an attempt to destroy our AQ adversaries. Iraq was presented as a preventative war, and an argument by some that it was somewhat tied to the war on terror. Our engagement in Vietnam on the other hand was much more complex.

Despite the difference there are similarities:

Both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice, arguably in hindsight driven by poor policy decisions.

In Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq (in that order), we allowed the adversary to find safe haven in a neighboring state.

In all three we pursued unrealistic policy objectives tied to social and political engineering.