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aesop081
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edit : Nevermind, misunderstood the post.
Petamocto said:I had a BMOQ-L candidate ask me a good question when I gave the COIN lecture to this course: "Is there ever an example of an insurgency actually winning and taking over as a legitimate government?".
My response: "Well yes, actually...perhaps you have heard of a little country called the United States of America".
Tango2Bravo said:Unless I have totally misread the candidate's question, I believe that there are plenty of insurgencies that were successful and formed a government (China, Vietnam, Algeria, Rhodesia, etc).
Petamocto said:Mr Paterson,
As per above, this was an intro to insurgency/COIN to these poor candidates and I was more than happy to have had them interested enough to even ask questions.
Tango2Bravo said:Unless I have totally misread the candidate's question, I believe that there are plenty of insurgencies that were successful and formed a government (China, Vietnam, Algeria, Rhodesia, etc).
Danjanou said:Toss Rhodesia/Zimbabwe into the same category as South Vietnam, the Insurgents failed to win a military victory. The present result was more due to political posturing, an inept UN/Commonwealth monitored election and of course a fair deal of intimidation at the polling station. the Rhodesian Defence Froces had battled the ZANU/ZAPU Patriotic Front insurgents and their various backers to a standstill by 1978-79.
For purer examples of the insurgents winning by mainly military means try that favourite Canadian vacation spot Cuba. Fidel did it in 1959, and the guy he replaced former Sgt Batista pulled it on his predecessor Machado if memory serves. Stretching it a bit the locals took the place from the Spanish in 1898, mind they had a bit of help from a certain soon to be US President. 8)
Tango2Bravo said:I'm just surprised that the candidate couldn't think of any successful insurgencies.
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.
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.
Will jihad jump the shark?
Stewart Baker • July 24, 2010 5:06 pm
We’ve seen a rash of homegrown Islamist terrorists in recent years, and there has been a lot of agonizing about why. One explanation that I haven’t seen elsewhere still strikes me as plausible: The attraction that adolescents and the disaffected feel toward groups that their parents and teachers fear. If you’re feeling marginalized, after all, why not choose the margin? And while you’re at it, why not choose a marginalized group that inspires fear and unease on the part of mainstream society? At least then you’ll get a kind of respect.
In the past fifty years, adolescents have joined a host of marginalized groups their parents found dangerous – juvenile delinquents, mods and rockers, punks, skinheads, and Goths. So why not jihadis? Islamist terror certainly scares authority figures; why wouldn’t Western adolescents and misfits be attracted to violent Islamism — at least as a symbolic stance?
I’m sure that’s not the only explanation for the appeal of homegrown Islamist extremism to a handful of youngsters in this country. Some of it has to do with ties to a home culture among second generation immigrants. But second-generation adolescents may also be tempted to affiliate with a strong, feared movement tied to their background.
Most of us think that Islamic terror is just too serious to be trivialized into a pose for disaffected Western youth. But we may have underrated the effects of a decade of political correctness and anti-Americanism in popular culture, where the search for transgressive shock value never ends.
Take M.I.A.’s new album. It lacks much of the raw energy and boogey rhythm that enlivened her first two albums, so transgression is pretty much all she has to fall back on. And transgress she does. One cut, “Illygirl,” manages to rhyme (and identify the singer with) three cultural lodestars – her “tight jeans,” “Bruce Springsteen,” and the “muhahedin.”
For M.I.A., in other words, Islamic terrorism is already a kind of life-style fashion item, a marginalized-and-proud, third-world stance that can be easily worn to parties in Brentwood by a wealthy former British art student. And if it works for M.I.A., why shouldn’t it work for an immigrant kid in New Jersey?
Let’s assume that this is part of the appeal that Islamic extremism holds for Westerners. What does that mean for policymakers? It doesn’t mean that these “Springsteen mujahedin” won’t turn out to be very dangerous. But it might suggest a different approach to the problem of turning them away from terror. Some of them will just plain outgrow their infatuation. Others will turn out to be unreliable fighters, prone to abandon the cause when they get tired or frightened by the risk. And best of all, if the tight-jean mujahedin lose their power to shock, they’re likely to go the way of the mods and the rockers. So maybe we should be looking for ways to speed that process by making all these Western jihadis look, well, silly and unfashionable.
Mockery may turn out to be the key to breaking the movement. That’s what finally destroyed the mystique of the KKK. (Steven Levitt tells the story in Freakonomics — how Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan, learned its secrets, and leaked them all to “The Adventures of Superman” radio series. One Klan member who came home to find his kids playing “Superman against the Klan” later said “they knew all our secret passwords and everything… I never felt so ridiculous in all my life.”)
Maybe it can happen to Al Qaeda too.
Adam Savage, of “MythBusters,” took a photo of his vehicle using his smartphone. He then posted the photo to his Twitter account including the phrase “off to work.”
• Since the photo was taken by his smartphone, the image contained metadata reveling the exact geographical location the photo was
taken.
• So by simply taking and posting a photo, Savage revealed the exact location of his home, the vehicle he drives and the time he leaves for work.
• “I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhonesembed geodatainto photos that users upload to Flickror Picasa, iPhoneshots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickrmap, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostreamand determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location.
Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room.
Now I know where she lives.”
Wired Magazine in 2009
Read the full storyhere:
http://bit.ly/bJqYmm
Nerds No More: Darpa Trains Troops to Be PopularBy Noah Shachtman March 10, 2011 | 4:59 pm | Categories: DarpaWatch
The Pentagon’s biggest geeks are getting ready to turn you into the ultimate social animal.
Darpa, the military research division that helped create cyberspace, now wants to master meatspace’s tricky interpersonal dynamics. The program is named, innocuously enough, “Strategic Social Interaction Modules.” And it “will provide warfighters with the basic human dynamics skills they need to enter into any social encounter regardless of the culture, group, or situation,” according to a Darpa announcement.
“After such training,” the agency adds, “soldiers will be able to approach and engage strangers in unfamiliar social environments, orient to unfamiliar patterns of behavior, recover from social mistakes, de-escalate conflict, rigorously practice transition in and out of force situations and engage in the process of discovering and adapting to previously unknown ‘rules of the game’ encountered in social engagements.”
To our ears, that sounds an awful lot like the plot to The Game, Neil Strauss‘ best-selling tale of transformation from awkward writer to professional pick-up artist. The book inspired a VH1 reality show, starring “Mystery,” Strauss’ guru of seduction. Mystery’s methods for turning virgins into lady-killers were deceptively simple: dress outrageously, memorize pickup lines and strategically put women down (especially if they’re sexy).
Presumably, Darpa will take a slightly different approach in its social skills training.
It’s been years since the military cognoscenti realized that the key to unconventional conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan is grokking their social and cultural networks. But gaining that understanding hasn’t been easy. The Army’s flagship project for mastering this material — the Human Terrain System — stumbled badly in its early years. Hundreds of people hired for the program were unqualified, according to HTS’ former chief.
But while HTS relies on a relatively small number of social scientists to take Afghanistan and Iraq’s pulse, hundreds of thousands of average infantrymen patrol the battlefields, often with little or no experience interacting with a foreign culture. For many troops, going to war is their first trip outside the country.
Darpa wants to aid these “young, inexperienced warfighters” by enabling them to “achieve positive outcomes during the difficult social encounters inherent in current military activities.” Darpa’s solution, though, is just what you’d expect from the agency that helped bring you everything from the Predator drone to the computer mouse: “an innovative computer-video training simulation for social interactions.” Because interacting with actual humans? That might be just a little too nerve-wracking.