Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
Similarly, when I speak of what we are lacking in terms of strategic intelligence, it is not a quest for a country-wide perspective, or even a geographic combatant command -wide perspective, but rather a perspective that takes into account and places into context seemingly unrelated factors as they in fact do interact and interrelate globally.

So, in pursuit of tactical victory in Afghanistan, what effect to US National security as a whole if the approach chosen (say, clear-hold-build; that is short on hold and build as described above) provokes the hell out of muslim populaces in 12 other countries and actually builds the base of support for AQ globally? How could the approach be tailored to mitigate those undesired and unintended effects? Is "victory" even necessary to secure US national interests?
I don't think it's possible to answer your questions since future effects will NOT be determined solely, or even - one might argue - primarily, by a particular tactical strategy. It's more likely that other unknown and unpredictable factors will have a bigger effective impact on your question than clear-hold-build vs something else. There's also the definitional problem in that "clear-hold-build" can be implemented in a variety of ways. How such a strategy is implemented is likely to have just as big an effect (if not more so) than the strategy itself. What assumptions should a strategic intel analyst make? That's a critically important question because the assumptions will determine the results of the analysis. Who decides what the assumptions are?

For example, let's set the wayback machine to before OIF and try to ask similar questions. With the benefit of hindsight, is it possible to determine if a different operational ground campaign would have affected Muslim populaces any differently? Suppose we did what Saddam expected - a long air campaign followed by a ground invasion. How would things be different? What effect would that different approach have on Muslim populations and support for AQ? Maybe with a long air campaign we might have killed Saddam before the ground invasion. Maybe with a long air campaign we would have killed a ton of civilians with errant bombs, inciting even more world and Muslim hostility than already existed. Even with hindsight and knowing how one path turned out, it's impossible to know how things would be different today if another path was taken.

Of course, some effects of the invasion surely were predictable and were predicted (and ignored), but some of the biggest effects resulted from events that were not anticipated or planned for - Abu Ghraib is the most obvious and perhaps most far-reaching as an event that provoked Muslim populaces (and continues to do so). An assessment of the strategic effects without accounting for unknowables like Abu Ghraib and other incidents would turn out to be wrong. How useful would such analysis be to you since it would have to be heavily caveated?

In short, I don't believe there is a predictive method or any means, short of being lucky and correctly guessing, that can account for such vagaries, so I have to question the utility of that kind of far-reaching strategic analysis. Since the analysis would be reliant on an extraordinary number of assumptions, it is likely to prove wrong and would provide leaders and policymakers with a false sense of security about the effects of potential actions and policies. Policymakers want the path paved for them. They want intelligence to lift the fog from the future, but Intelligence has limits as a predictive art and science. Intelligence which makes the future only appear less certain is worse than useless - it's dangerous.

Finally, I think there is a general problem when attempting to do analysis across the tactical/strategic divide. What I mean is that it's extremely difficult to predict what will happen at the tactical level based on an analysis of differing strategic alternatives. The reverse is also true - it's extremely difficult to estimate the strategic effect of one tactical course of action vs another. Hope that makes sense.