Countering Lind-dinistas - if the mission is impossible, don't blame me

[Fuchs]

Probability.

I remember some probability estimates, though only vaguely.
They were about the probability of the commies winning the Cold War because of the softness and defensiveness of the West.

I think I read those in the mid-80's. Those probability figures were rather high.

[davidbfpo]

Curmudegeon's first post cited in part:

My basic argument I have. Three points:

1. The requisites for democratization did not exist in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

2. Attempting to create a democracy where one was not possible created instability perpetuating the conflict

3. COIN could not overcome 1 and 2. Pop-Centric COIN is correct, but it cannot create legitimacy. It must adapt to the desires of the population.

Now a few years ago I attended a conference on the Middle East and a number of Arab speakers stressed to them 'democracy' did not mean first and foremost 'representative democracy'. To them accountability was far more important whether by the rule of law, less corruption etc.

My "armchair" understanding of Afghanistan is that in the rural areas there was a form of direct democracy, mainly exercised by elders and in jirgas. I suspect it helped that the state had very little power or functions beyond the cities - long before Soviet or allied intervention. Carter Malkasian's book covers this well.

I wonder what are 'the requisites for democracy'. One thing for sure in either Afghanistan or Iraq they are not what we have or thought they should have.

[slapout9]

Curmudgy,
This is a link to a thread I started in 2010 after starting my own assessment of Lind and his concept of 4GW. I started by getting a copy of Lind's book on Maneuver Warfare and reading several of his articles from various sources. This man has been the victim of one of the most vicious slander (Political Correctness) Campaigns that I have ever seen.


http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=9484

[TheCurmudgeon]

Curmudgy,
This is a link to a thread I started in 2010 after starting my own assessment of Lind and his concept of 4GW. I started by getting a copy of Lind's book on Maneuver Warfare and reading several of his articles from various sources. This man has been the victim of one of the most vicious slander (Political Correctness) Campaigns that I have ever seen.


http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=9484

Slap, while Lind is my current target, he is simply a representative of a wider group of civilians who want to place the blame for the failures of the last 12 years squarely on the military. I don't care if they choose to blame us for their failures. Just don't tell me I need to fix what is not broken.

We have problems, don't get me wrong. But looking at why we failed to create a democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not our problem. It was beyond the capabilities of the resources and time put against the problem.

[slapout9]

Slap, while Lind is my current target, he is simply a representative of a wider group of civilians who want to place the blame for the failures of the last 12 years squarely on the military. I don't care if they choose to blame us for their failures. Just don't tell me I need to fix what is not broken.

We have problems, don't get me wrong. But looking at why we failed to create a democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not our problem. It was beyond the capabilities of the resources and time put against the problem.

You might want to recheck your Targeting. Lind was one of the first to openly oppose Nation Building. One of his famous quotes was "We are trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland" or something close to that. If you get the chance listen the radio interview from 2007 I think he starts with a discussion about Somalia.
Here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hjQOMlpH9A

[TheCurmudgeon]

Curmudegeon's first post cited in part:

Now a few years ago I attended a conference on the Middle East and a number of Arab speakers stressed to them 'democracy' did not mean first and foremost 'representative democracy'. To them accountability was far more important whether by the rule of law, less corruption etc.

My "armchair" understanding of Afghanistan is that in the rural areas there was a form of direct democracy, mainly exercised by elders and in jirgas. I suspect it helped that the state had very little power or functions beyond the cities - long before Soviet or allied intervention. Carter Malkasian's book covers this well.

I wonder what are 'the requisites for democracy'. One thing for sure in either Afghanistan or Iraq they are not what we have or thought they should have.

The definition of "Democracy" causes many problems.

The original article is here. Essentially, they were income level (wealth), education, industrialization, and urbanization (from memory). Much more study had been done particularly in the 1990s to explain why democracy beat out communism. In any case, most of this was well known.

Isolated localities often use some form of "democracy" in that the heads of the local households get together to decide matters that concern all. But this is not the liberal democracy as we know it with universal human rights.

Rule of Law is problematic, because that translates into procedural legitimacy, which simply means that you are following the social norms and rules of the society . Stoning a women for being raped may represent the appropriate action. Interfering with that stoning may be seen as failing to uphold the rule of law. To often these vague terms are tossed around like they have a common meaning. They do not.

[wm]

The definition of "Democracy" causes many problems.

Also problematic, by the way, is the scope of application of the term. As was pointed out, at some level, some inhabitants of parts of Afghanistan may have had democracy. However, the so-called nation state Afghanistan did not (and I suspect probably never will) have democracy. I say so-called nation state because it and many other problematic nations in the world today, had their nationhood handed to them (or forced upon them) by their former imperial masters/colonial overseers/occupiers.

In what follows I am taking a lead from what Fuchs pointed out in post 32,

The West has managed to ensure a mess in a lot of the so-called 3rd world by the way it realigned the world after the last 2 world wars. Now they are trying to defend their bad past by trying to fix their mistakes. But, surprise, surprise,they are using almost the exact same means as they used to create the first problem.

First, the West told folks, rather forcefully in many cases, what nation they were by telling them where their boundaries were, rather than letting them figure that out for themselves. Now the West is telling them, again rather forcefully, what kind of governments they must have.

This seems like two failures in observing the principle of self-determination. I suspect each is derived from some sense of guilt for having caused problems in the first place and now trying to assuage that guilt by "fixing" things. But why we do it is less important than that we do it and will not stop.

I seem to remember that the definition of madness is doing the same thing twice and expecting different outcomes.

So, perhaps the 1st world nations could stop telling people outside their own borders where to draw their boundaries or what kind of governments to have. If enough of those other people can get their act together long enough to create a self-governing entity that seems to have staying power (what counts as self-governing and for staying power for how long are as yet to be determined), then viola, we have a legitimate nation that may ask for help from the "stable" first world nations and expect to receive it. Any other form of invitation should be politely declined. Any impulse to intervene without an invitation should be immediately suppressed, hopefully by the citizens of the nation whose leadership has the impulse. If the majority of the nation has succumbed to lunacy, then the other first world nations must intervene, just as any family would with when Uncle Wally starts dancing in the street naked.

Dealing with non-state actors who are not attempting to engage in nation building is a job for police forces, not the military. So is dealing with would be nation builders who use terrorism outside their own planned national boundaries as a technique for trying to get what they want.

The devil, of course, is in the details--like what happens if/when the Pashtuns want part of Afghanistan, part of Iran, and part of Pakistan. But even details need a basic framework to contain them, first, don't they?

How does this respond to Lind? I suggest he is just one of those crazies who try to get different outcomes with the same method.

[Bill Moore]

Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture if strategy is aligning ends, ways, and means using all elements of national power and our stated ends were stable democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan what exactly did our military fail to do when it comes to the use of military power to set conditions for this to happen?

I think most agree those ends are laughable, but that is what they were. I will be the first to self criticize and critic my military, but for criticism to be valuable it should be constructive. If our military did what differently exactly, then how would it have changed the outcome?

[TheCurmudgeon]

Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture if strategy is aligning ends, ways, and means using all elements of national power and our stated ends were stable democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan what exactly did our military fail to do when it comes to the use of military power to set conditions for this to happen?

I think most agree those ends are laughable, but that is what they were. I will be the first to self criticize and critic my military, but for criticism to be valuable it should be constructive. If our military did what differently exactly, then how would it have changed the outcome?

That is the basic statement I would like to make.

[Dayuhan]

Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture if strategy is aligning ends, ways, and means using all elements of national power and our stated ends were stable democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan what exactly did our military fail to do when it comes to the use of military power to set conditions for this to happen?

It would be interesting to have opinions on what conditions would have allowed those ends to be achieved, and whether those conditions were at any point achievable through the application of military force.

[AmericanPride]

Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture if strategy is aligning ends, ways, and means using all elements of national power and our stated ends were stable democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan what exactly did our military fail to do when it comes to the use of military power to set conditions for this to happen?

I'll throw out a few ideas:

(1) Not emphasizing to the political leadership the military resources that would be required to conduct such a mission; one general did that in his testimony to Congress and was promptly fired. Everyone else subsequently cowered.
(2) Not having a long-term plan of occupation; in Iraq, the plan was to push the regime out of power and hope for spontaneous democratization, which failed to materialize after the whole Iraqi government was dismantled indiscriminately. And in Afghanistan, the reliance on the Northern Alliance and ANSF proved equally problematic in a state with very little history of centralized political control. Notwithstanding the political policies aimed at making good politics instead of good strategy, someone somewhere in the military bureaucracy should have placed a contingency plan of some kind on the shelf rather than wait until orders from their political masters.
(3) The ad-hoc and troublesome pattern of 6-18 month rotations that destroyed any operational continuity in whatever plan that was visualized.
(4) Focusing on the political end-state (democratization) at the expense of the military end-state (disarmanent and/or defeat of the opposition). Victory on the battlefield comes before the collection of the spoils of war!
(5) Minimizing the enormority of the conflicts at hand while gathering all the benefits (i.e. budget, new powers, etc) that came with it. Institutionally, DoD was never put on a 100% war-footing - there was still competing priorities with the "small wars" (i.e. in procurement) that shaped strategic decisions. Following procedures and future force visions were never completely subordinated to the war effort.

[AmericanPride]

Just some other thoughts on this conversation:

If war is policy by other means, then military officers, at least general officers, are also to some extent responsible for policy. GOs are not simply managers of a large military enterprise only concerned with how military resources are managed, thus absolving them of all responsibility when policy fails, but also have significant input into how those resources should be managed, and towards what ends they are utilized. We should be careful about constructing a myth with the 'stabbed-in-the-back' theme between the military and the political leadership.

And, as many have mentioned in this thread already, since the war effort is subordinate to the political ends, the concept of the 'strategic corporal', et al, is not a perversion of political-military relationships, but that relationship taken to its logical extreme in an era of satured information where now tactical decisions have a direct impact on the political ends itself. But this is also to some extent the nature of 'small wars' that focus on combating non-state actors embedded in the social and political fabric of the operating area; securing local alliances or providing services and infrastructure can shape the battle as much as eliminating key leaders or capturing enemy equipment.

I also disagree that understanding war is exclusive or independent of political science or sociology; we have already agreed that war is a political act, and it is also intensely human endeavor, which places it firmly within both fields of study. There is no excuse in the modern, complex world for senior military officials to be ignorant of either science; this only reinforces the argument that military leaders bear responsibility to some extent for the failures of the wars.

Perhaps the problem is that our generals are managers, not leaders.

[Bill Moore]

I'll throw out a few ideas:

(1) Not emphasizing to the political leadership the military resources that would be required to conduct such a mission; one general did that in his testimony to Congress and was promptly fired. Everyone else subsequently cowered.
(2) Not having a long-term plan of occupation; in Iraq, the plan was to push the regime out of power and hope for spontaneous democratization, which failed to materialize after the whole Iraqi government was dismantled indiscriminately. And in Afghanistan, the reliance on the Northern Alliance and ANSF proved equally problematic in a state with very little history of centralized political control. Notwithstanding the political policies aimed at making good politics instead of good strategy, someone somewhere in the military bureaucracy should have placed a contingency plan of some kind on the shelf rather than wait until orders from their political masters.
(3) The ad-hoc and troublesome pattern of 6-18 month rotations that destroyed any operational continuity in whatever plan that was visualized.
(4) Focusing on the political end-state (democratization) at the expense of the military end-state (disarmanent and/or defeat of the opposition). Victory on the battlefield comes before the collection of the spoils of war!
(5) Minimizing the enormority of the conflicts at hand while gathering all the benefits (i.e. budget, new powers, etc) that came with it. Institutionally, DoD was never put on a 100% war-footing - there was still competing priorities with the "small wars" (i.e. in procurement) that shaped strategic decisions. Following procedures and future force visions were never completely subordinated to the war effort.

AP,

First off apologies for the delay in responding. I don't think any of the above comments reflect on our professional military education. Not to defend the numerous military errors that were made by an excessively conventional military whose leaders at the operational level failed to adapt to their environment, we ultimately failed at the strategic level and even if our officers were better at the operational level (and they need to be) I believe we still would have failed because our strategic aims were unrealistic and our civilian leaders as you stated above didn't mobilize sufficient forces or ask Americans to pay for the war (war tax). It was a half hearted effort politically.

Taking your points one by one,

1) Some uniformed leaders spoke up, and as you said they were not listened to by the likes of Rumfield. This doesn't represent a failure of our military education system. Other factors point to where our education should be improved, but this isn't it.

2) Absolutely, but I suspect if we dug into this we didn't have a plan based on civilian guidance. Also hard to develop an occupation plan when you didn't have the forces to facilitate effective occupation operations.

3) Different schools of thought on this, but according to some studies soldiers begin losing their combat effectiveness if they're in combat more than 6 months at a time. This may not apply to the non-combat arms types, and the conclusion of these studies may be flawed, but at least there was a reason for it. Also doubt we could have retained our recruitment levels if Joe, Mike, Bob, etc. thought they were going to be deployed for multiple years without a break. The professional force has a lot of advantages, but also some disadvantages if you think you need to employ them like conscripts. I think the real argument isn't so much the annual rotations (quicker for SOF), but the lack of continuity in approach/objectives between the different units.

4) Agree that we pursued a very politically correct doctrine that didn't address the reality of the enemy has a vote, and the reality that not everyone in the world desires to be like us. I still it is imperative that the political objective be supreme and that all military operations ultimately support achieving that objective. If the political objective was flawed and I believe it was critically flawed and couldn't be achieved, then our military operations were doomed to fail before they started. I also think you may be under estimating how much fighting we did, but to what end? The same can be said about our aid projects, a lot done, but to what end? Both were executed based on false assumptions. Our biggest fault was not admitting it sooner. We kick ourselves for pulling out of Beirut and Somalia after minor set backs, but maybe in hindsight we should applaud the strategic decision makers that realized the limited utility of military force in these situations and decided to cut our loses? I don't know, but being stubborn is not the same as being courageous, and in fact it can be cowardly.

5) Generally agree, but the reality is we are/were the global cop and the security interests/threats we had prior to 9/11 never went away, so based on the scope of our self-imposed responsibilities we couldn't afford to focus entirely on OIF and OEF-A, but we definitely could have done more and should have in my opinion. We executed both wars on the cheap relying our asymmetric advantage in kinetic fight, while forgetting that advantage would do little for us once we transitioned into the occupation phase. We shocked and awed ourselves more than our adversaries. On the other hand, I disagree with Secretary Gates comments about the Pentagon not purchasing the mine resistant vehicles quick enough. I think they're were good reasons for doing so, because those vehicles were hardly decisive and simply reinforced our bad tactics of drive by COIN. If you want to defeat IEDs you need to control the populace and terrain, and that means sending in sufficient forces to do so. We never had the political will or wisdom to do this, and instead passed blame to the Pentagon for not wanting to dedicate limited funds (again no war tax) on a vehicle that had limited utility.

[TheCurmudgeon]

Also problematic, by the way, is the scope of application of the term. As was pointed out, at some level, some inhabitants of parts of Afghanistan may have had democracy. However, the so-called nation state Afghanistan did not (and I suspect probably never will) have democracy. I say so-called nation state because it and many other problematic nations in the world today, had their nationhood handed to them (or forced upon them) by their former imperial masters/colonial overseers/occupiers.

In what follows I am taking a lead from what Fuchs pointed out in post 32,

The West has managed to ensure a mess in a lot of the so-called 3rd world by the way it realigned the world after the last 2 world wars. Now they are trying to defend their bad past by trying to fix their mistakes. But, surprise, surprise,they are using almost the exact same means as they used to create the first problem.

First, the West told folks, rather forcefully in many cases, what nation they were by telling them where their boundaries were, rather than letting them figure that out for themselves. Now the West is telling them, again rather forcefully, what kind of governments they must have.

This seems like two failures in observing the principle of self-determination. I suspect each is derived from some sense of guilt for having caused problems in the first place and now trying to assuage that guilt by "fixing" things. But why we do it is less important than that we do it and will not stop.

I seem to remember that the definition of madness is doing the same thing twice and expecting different outcomes.

So, perhaps the 1st world nations could stop telling people outside their own borders where to draw their boundaries or what kind of governments to have. If enough of those other people can get their act together long enough to create a self-governing entity that seems to have staying power (what counts as self-governing and for staying power for how long are as yet to be determined), then viola, we have a legitimate nation that may ask for help from the "stable" first world nations and expect to receive it. Any other form of invitation should be politely declined. Any impulse to intervene without an invitation should be immediately suppressed, hopefully by the citizens of the nation whose leadership has the impulse. If the majority of the nation has succumbed to lunacy, then the other first world nations must intervene, just as any family would with when Uncle Wally starts dancing in the street naked.

Dealing with non-state actors who are not attempting to engage in nation building is a job for police forces, not the military. So is dealing with would be nation builders who use terrorism outside their own planned national boundaries as a technique for trying to get what they want.

The devil, of course, is in the details--like what happens if/when the Pashtuns want part of Afghanistan, part of Iran, and part of Pakistan. But even details need a basic framework to contain them, first, don't they?

How does this respond to Lind? I suggest he is just one of those crazies who try to get different outcomes with the same method.

Boundaries are another part of the problem, and the unwillingness to redefine them. Look at the mission statement: "Our goals are for Iraqis to take full control of their country as soon as possible and to maintain its territorial integrity." Territorial Integrity is code for keeping the borders where they are.

[TheCurmudgeon]

I am also looking for attempts to "solve" Iraq and Afghanistan via constructive or destructive attempts to "fix" the Army or its doctrine. There is the long running fight between Gentile and Nagl over COIN, the concept of Disruptive Thinkers, and Lind's latest attack. Can anyone think of others?

[TheCurmudgeon]

Probability.

I remember some probability estimates, though only vaguely.
They were about the probability of the commies winning the Cold War because of the softness and defensiveness of the West.

I think I read those in the mid-80's. Those probability figures were rather high.

I never saw any probability estimates of success of creating a democratic Iraq or Afghanistan. If you find any, let me know. All the ones I have found, dating back to 2004, say it was not possible.

If you find anything saying that it was possible, I would love to see it.

Essentially, what I am finding is that every academic said it was not possible, but the administration ignored that and gave the military their marching orders. If you find anything counter to that let me know.

[Fuchs]

Very quick google search
http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/...h-22383-31.pdf

There are always at least a few optimists.

[TheCurmudgeon]

Very quick google search
http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/...h-22383-31.pdf

There are always at least a few optimists.

How do I translate this?

[Fuchs]

How do I translate this?

Give the 2nd page a try...

I can't agree with that. State has no more capacity for "nation-building" than the military does. As far as I can determine the US Government has no such capacity, which is why the job got dropped on the military.

Nation-building takes decades.

The establishment of a political system and quasi-consensus on the other hand can be largely accomplished in two years. State Dept. could have drawn together the various factions through diplomacy -with many career diplomats and politicians- towards such a quasi-consensus.

The military was fighting symptoms of political failure, not doing policy itself until it was too late. Bremer et al treated the challenge as an administration challenge when it was in fact a challenge of drawing diverging parties towards a quasi-consensus on how to run the country (how to distribute the spoils).

[TheCurmudgeon]

Fuchs,

Read "Schizophrenic Doctrine: Why We Need to Separate Democratization Out of Stability and COIN Doctrine" It was simply not possible to create a democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I know people in the West want to believe that. They want to believe that everyone wants freedom. That is not the case. Sometimes they just want to survive.

I wish the answers I keep coming up with were different. But blaming the Army for the failures of the political elite is not going to change human nature.

Oh yeah, the second time I got the English. Thanks