This is what happens when one calls virtually every type of problem "war" and sends the military out to wage "warfare" to solve the problem. Yet one more reason why I believe "Irregular warfare" to be such a dangerous construct. To make the operations we were in make sense as war we had to invent IW; when in turn then led to this odd idea in current Army doctrine that what the Army does today in Afghanistan is as much "major warfare" as what it did in WWII, I or the Civil War. The military is chasing its tail and eating itself because senior leaders, as Bill Moore mentioned, lacked either the understanding of the nature of the problem they were tasked to solve, or the moral courage to stand up and say "hang on, let's talk about what this is really all about," or both.
If Ken is right (and he usually is on these things), that this author is a former member of the Clinton administration, I find that very rich indeed. They say Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Well, certainly Clinton played the sax and chased chubby interns while America's Cold War foreign policies for engaging the post Cold War world he inherited grew increasingly obsolete and inappropriate. To the point that when he handed off power to President Bush, the attacks of 9/11 were well into the planning and execution process.
When I developed my model for thinking about insurgency and transnational terrorism in a fresh light, it was based on a handful of fundamental concepts.
1. That the primary source of causation for political instability radiates outward from government, in domestic policies and actions for insurgency, and foreign policies and actions for transnational terrorism; and it is the perceptions of those impacted by such governance that matters most, not the intentions or perceptions of the governments themselves.
2. That these dynamics are a continuous process, that ebbs and flows, with most populaces being largely satisfied most of the time.
3. That the role of the military is not unlike the role of the military in other civil emergencies. Last in, first out; not here to solve the problem, but merely additional capacity to help a failing civil government bring a problem back within the span of their civil capacity. Also to provide time and space for that same government to identify where it is going wrong and make appropriate changes in policy and action so as to remove the causal drivers. Otherwise the efforts of the military only serve to suppress violence for some period of time, that will inevitable reappear in due time.
The US Civil political and policy leadership of the entire Cold War and post Cold War era by in large refuses to be truly introspective and self-critical. Sure, the Liberals will rip up the Conservatives and vise versa; and both will be quick to beat up on "the intelligence community" for not identifying the growth of the threats our policies were provoking, or upon "the military" for not simply making the problems go away.
The hard facts are, while Containment worked, it was not all hugs and kisses for those with the misfortune to be part of the ring of containment. A great discussion of this is in these two articles that look at the thinking of Walter Lippmann who was a loud, and wise voice for avoiding "excessive Western Fundamentalism" and other such flaws.
http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.co...eme=home&loc=b
http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.co...cle=1299&loc=r
Our Generals are not to be held harmless though. We are promoting a crop of senior leaders who have been "effective" but only at implementing long, costly, temporary suppressive effects. Those same generals, as Fuchs points out, have fired countless subordinates for not being "effective enough." Here is a news flash for the generals, in most instances, when one is working to help some other nation attain some semblance of sovereignty, legitimacy and true stability not sustained through massive internal security forces - efficiency and effectiveness of foreign military tactical operations are the enemy of achieving the strategic level effects one is after. But it is counter-intuitive, and certainly counter-military culture, to do less or be less effective in order to achieve better results.
Presidents Clinton and Bush both were big proponents of the idea that we "make America safer by making others more like us." The ideological roots of the Cold War are deep. To believe that the world yearns for US brand "democracy" or "universal and enduring values" or "leadership" is a mix of being a bit too full of what we see as our role in causing the Soviet collapse, and also buying into our own PSYOP narrative that we adopted in the early 1950s when we abandoned our historic stance on "self determination" in favor of a theme designed to compete with the Sino-Soviet theme of Communism as a vehicle for throwing off Western colonialism and attaining better governance.
Idologically we need to get back to our roots. Let others find their own paths, while ensuring we have access to the resouces and markets necessary to sustain our own economic well being. In terms of how we see the world we need to recognize the primacy of the role of policy in creating the conditions that produce the symptoms we send our military out to address, and we need to recognize the role and limitations of military effort in dealing with such symptoms and almost always counterproductive effect on the base problems.
I doubt we are ready for such a remarkable change of course. Certainly not judging by articles that seek to simply pin this rose solely on the lapel of the military.
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