COIN is dead, long live the COIN

By Ryan Evans

When the U.S. Army and Marine Corps released their FieldManual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency, in2006, key military leaders and civilian advisers promised a different kind ofwarfare. Written as Iraq crumbled, the manual institutionalized key tacticaland operational methods that were geared to fighting against irregular armedfoes, rather than the maneuver warfare most of the U.S. military had preferred.The new theory was based around several key principles, including proportionateand precise use of force to minimize civilian casualties, separating insurgentgroups from local populations, protecting populations from the insurgents, theimportance of intelligence-led operations, civil-military unity of effort, andsecurity under the rule of law.

Some of these methods had already been practiced in Iraq byinnovative commanders, but Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw the process of writingFM 3-24 and later went on to command U.S. forces in the country, was key to theirinstitutionalization and broad implementation in the context of an overalltheater-level strategy.

As President Barack Obama decided to "surge" forces intoAfghanistan in late 2009, former Joint Special Operations Command head Gen.Stanley McChrystal was tasked to follow the Petraeus playbook in Afghanistan.When he was relieved, Petraeus, the man many saw as having helped bringstability to Iraq, was called upon to do it again in Afghanistan. However,success has eluded the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), whichhas been unableto translate operational progress into strategic success. A number oftriumphant obituaries for counterinsurgency have since emerged, as it becomesclear that the campaign in Afghanistan is failing to deliver on its promises.

There are five inter-related drivers of this cauldron ofdiscontent with COIN: First, the rise of counterinsurgency as a standardpractice in the U.S. military left skeptical American officers and institutionswho preferred emphasizing conventional capabilities (large-scale armoredwarfare, for instance) feeling disenfranchised. Second, the common narrative ofthe war in Iraq viewed (and somestill view) Gen. Petraeus as the hero who brought counterinsurgency (andsubsequently stability) to the country. This narrative alienated some officerswho had already been using some counterinsurgency methods effectively beforethe introduction of FM 3-24. Third, among the commentariat, the caustic domestic political divisions from thefirst phase of the Iraq War, divisions that were aggravated in the lead-up tothe Afghan "surge", remain unhealed. Fourth, the military officers and thinktank scholars who became most closely associated with COIN's rise developed apartially-deserved reputation for cliquishness, self-reference, and conceit.And finally, there has been a dearth of clarity on the goals of the Afghancampaign on the policy and strategy levels.

Col. Gian Gentile (who represents the first, second, andfinal strands of anti-counterinsurgency discontent) presents one of his standardarguments in "COINis Dead: U.S. Army Must Put Strategy Over Tactics." He argues the UnitedStates military has failed in Afghanistan and Iraq because it allowed afascination with the tactical and operational methods of COIN to supersedeimplementation of an actual strategy in those conflicts. In fact, looking atoperations in Iraq and Afghanistan for lessons is a fundamentally misguidedventure, he argues. Rather, we can only view our experiences of the lastdecade as lessons in failure and return to embracing our conventionalcapabilities.

Others are preoccupied with the political battles behind counterinsurgency.Michael Cohen, a vocal critic ofthe war in Afghanistan, refusesto acknowledge that counterinsurgency lessons are worth keeping andinstitutionalizing until advocates of the population-centric approach inAfghanistan "loudly acknowledge - indeed even shout to the hills - that everytime someone recommends fighting a counterinsurgency this is [a] really,really, really bad idea...." This seems akin to arguing that we cannot updateour doctrine on nuclear warfare, expeditionary warfare, and other capabilitiesthat are far more costly until we "shout to the hills" that to use these wouldbe a "really, really, really bad idea." Advocates of maintaining counterinsurgencycapabilities have been happyto acknowledgethese campaigns tendto be long, hard slogs, but Mr. Cohen's criticism does not address the military'sneed to be able to adapt to contingencies as ordered. We cannot wish away theagency of our enemies.

Still others see those who support counterinsurgency's place inthe toolbox of American power as being part of a new "military-industrialcomplex." Major Mike Few, an armor officer (like Colonel Gentile) and editor ofSmall Wars Journal, arguesthat some think tanks and defense contractors have formed a "cottage industry"that champions counterinsurgency for ego and profit at the cost of "trillionsof dollars, thousands of lives and abandoned security projects elsewhere thatcould have benefited our republic exponentially more..."

For one thing, the weaponssystems, equipment, and capabilities necessary for modern "conventional"campaigns are far more costly and more lucrative for defense contractors (the2009 defense industry-subsidized congressional debateabout the F-22 reminded the world that the original military-industrialcomplex is alive, well, and costing the U.S. taxpayer for over-budget,malfunctioning weapons systems of questionable utility). Further, the use ofconventional capabilities against a major power may well take more militarylives than those we have lost in Iraq andAfghanistan. But this aside, our abilities to conduct counterinsurgencyoperations and major combat operations are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, aspeople like Maj. Few understand, John Nagl's Centerfor a New American Security -- the unnamed bogeyman in his critique andothers -- did not decide to go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nagl was merely oneof many in the U.S. Armed Forces who sought to make the campaigns of twoconsecutive Commanders-in-Chief work.

Indeed, the debate surrounding counterinsurgency has becomehighly personal, emotional, and angry. This has been most recently demonstratedby the snideand personal rejoindersto a recent articleteasing out the lessons of Iraq by Dr.David Ucko of the National Defense University. Increasingly for somecritics of counterinsurgency, their opponents are not just wrong, but immoralliars. Yet for all of the heat this debate, it has produced little substantivediscussion of the future of counterinsurgency after the wars in Iraq andAfghanistan, or more broadly the appropriate uses of limited funds andmanpower.

Before declaring the death of counterinsurgency and maligningthose who see value in some of its precepts, analysts should ask if insurgencyis dead. Indeed, the most significant failure of these anti-COIN arguments istheir shared focus on the response to a problem -- counterinsurgency tacticsand strategy -- at the expense of the problem itself. None of these articlesproclaim that "insurgency is dead" because to do so would be absurd. Insurgencylives, and has proven itself throughout history as the best means by which tooppose established political and military power. AsAndrew Exum recently observed, about 80 percent of all conflicts since theend of the Napoleonic Era have been insurgencies or civil wars. Futureinsurgencies are all-but-certain to challenge American interests to the pointthat our civilian political leadership will need to decide if our military willbecome involved in countering them. And if insurgency lives, then so must counterinsurgency.

Critics also make the mistake of particularizing a form of counterinsurgencydesigned during a specific historical period meant to counter a distinctiveform of insurgency known as popularprotracted warfare. If anything, the key failure of counterinsurgency inthe past decade has been the myopic view of the military and key counterinsurgencyproponents that counterinsurgency could only take the form advocated byscholar-practitioners like the French officer David Galula (who developed histheories in Asia before implementing them in Algeria) and the British officerSir Robert Thompson in Malaysia, who were both grappling with different, lessevolved forms of violent struggle than what we have seen in Iraq andAfghanistan. Thus, for critics to proclaim the death of counterinsurgencymakes them guilty of the same error that they often pin on their opponents: relyingon an expired intellectual framework.

The real question is: what form will American counterinsurgencytake in the future? It seems reasonable to argue that "big footprint," "population-centric"counterinsurgency is dead, but "small footprint" counterinsurgency that focuseson security force assistance, Special Operations, and/or foreign internaldefense lives on (see Yemen,the Philippines,and Somalia).But is it really inconceivable that we will ever again conduct another large-scalepopulation-centric counterinsurgency campaign? Those who think it impossible mightconsider how the United States would respond to violence spilling over theborder from catastrophic state failure and humanitarian crisis in Mexico, forinstance.

As always, our choices will be structured by the agency ofour competitors. Therefore, we would be foolish to avoid learning the tacticaland operational as well as the policyand strategic lessons of the last ten years. We must maintain our capabilities and competencies for counterinsurgency,if only because history has shown that they will come in handy again.

How we do this is what we mustdebate and discuss.

Ryan Evans is anassociate fellow at the International Centre for the Study ofRadicalisation and Political Violence and served in Helmand Province, Afghanistan as a Human Terrain TeamSocial Scientist. The views and opinions expressed here do not represent those of theDepartment of the Army, Training and Doctrine Command, or the Human TerrainSystem.

AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images

Counterstrike

By Michael Waltz

Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker's Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al-Qaeda,traces the evolution since 9/11 of U.S. counterterrorism strategy within themilitary, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement, the results of which are nowat work in combating al-Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide. Schmitt and Shankerdo a thorough job of pulling together all of the bits and pieces of the effortsacross the myriad agencies and departments now dealing with terrorism, and presentingthem in a fast paced, gripping story. The authors personalize the often mundanebureaucratic policy initiatives such as Presidential findings, resources, andauthorities needed to gradually shift our approach to terrorism through thestories of key individuals working on these issues over the last ten years.

The pair further put flesh on the bones of our counterterrorismcampaign by highlighting key milestones such as the raids on al-Qaeda leaders andsafehouses in places like Taji and Sinjar in Iraq. These battlefield detailsshow the reader how policy initiatives and technology developed in Washingtonand elsewhere actually played out on the ground, and how the treasure trove ofintelligence gained from such operations then, in turn, helped our policies shiftand enhanced our knowledge of al-Qaida's operations and leadership.

Shanker and Schmitt describe in detail how people like thePentagon's former Assistant Secretary for Special Operations and Low IntensityConflict (now Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence) Michael Vickers and then-JointSpecial Operations Command chief Gen. Stanley McChrystal pushed for the droppingof information barriers and the massive influx of resources that allowed forceson the ground to "find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze" information gainedfrom the battlefield. This push in turn made the discovery of al-Qaeda's "Rolodex"at Sinjar and their "database" at Taji possible. The information proved sovaluable that it changed our diplomatic approach to countries producingterrorist recruits and harboring facilitation networks. Rather than keeping theinformation gleaned classified, McChrystal:

Decided to break down more walls.He believed that effective pressure could be mounted by sharing the informationwith the countries of origin for the jihadists -- even those countries withwhich the United States had little or no alliance in the struggle. And, evenmore, he thought the pages of the highly classified intelligence findingsshould be thrust into the very public marketplace of ideas to shape theinternational debate on terrorism.

From my own experience commanding Special Forces unitsduring multiple tours in Afghanistan, the authors' description of how themilitary and intelligence agencies grappled with integrating the various "INTs"(signals intelligence, human intelligence, imagery intelligence, etc) islargely accurate. Throughout my tour in 2006 we had to request these assetsfrom the theater headquarters level. However, by my next tour in 2009, not onlywere the various types of intelligence pushed out to my forces in the field,but we had actual representatives from the various intelligence agencies aswell as the FBI attached directly to my command, representing a sea change inour ability to exploit intelligence and target insurgent leadership.

The pair then turn to how our counterterrorism campaign hasgrown and developed beyond kill-capture missions to executing increasinglysophisticated counter-messaging campaigns, as well as efforts to counter all aspectsof terrorist networks, such as their ability to recruit and train, theirability to raise funds, and the legitimacy of their actions within the broaderMuslim world. The authors are critical of the Bush Administration for itsinitially narrow focus on kinetic missions, the lack of an overall strategy andthe paucity of resources applied to the campaign, and in turn, credit the ObamaAdministration for our now more expansive approach. Yet I would argue, based onmy time in the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations and Low IntensityConflict and later in the White House, that the current, more sophisticatedcounterterrorism campaign is a natural progression that benefitted greatly fromthe trial and error of previous years.

But setting these details and descriptions aside, perhaps thecentral theme running throughout Counterstrikeis the application of deterrence theory from the Cold war to the issue of counteringterrorism. Schmitt and Shanker do a masterful job of explaining the important elementsof the theory and the problems key Bush Administration officials had with usingtraditional tools to possibly deter a person willing to die for a cause. Theearly post-9/11 thinking was that terrorists did not seize or want to hold territoryin the traditional sense, were not afraid of retribution, and did not have resourcesthey needed or wanted to protect. In keeping with that thinking, theintelligence community's initial focus was to shift resources to fill itsinitial intelligence gaps, while the military focused on enhancing its abilityto kill or capture individual al-Qaeda leaders.

However, Schmitt and Shanker trace how a small group of formerCold War theorists slowly began gaining traction with their idea of a "newdeterrence." Douglas Feith, Barry Pavel, Tom Kroenig and others promoted thenotion that terrorists do indeed have issues they care about, issues that canbe used to pressure individual terrorists and whole groups. The advocates ofthe new deterrence argued that the "terrain" extremist organizations need tohold is the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. In a pivotal briefing toPresident Bush, Gen. James Cartwright, then head of America's nuclear arsenal,applied Cold War-era deterrence theory to terrorism, stating "If you canintroduce ambiguity and uncertainty into the minds of the attacker...if you canremove a certainty of success in striking an objective, if you make the pricetoo high, then you increase the opportunity the adversary will notstrike."

Furthermore, terrorist networks hoping for large-scaleaction and sustained campaigns need a constant stream of fresh recruits, fundsto operate, sanctuary in physical locations to train and prepare, and to knowthat their efforts will have an effect on the United States or other targets. Isaw these efforts first hand during my participation in the White House's CounterterrorismSecurity Group, where we worked to develop and implement a whole of government --military, diplomatic, intelligence, homeland defense, and development --approach to pressure, deter, and harden against terrorist groups, techniques thatcould indeed minimize the threat in the short term while slowly eroding it inthe long term. Over the course of time, as Schmitt and Shanker accuratelydescribe, we moved our efforts beyond reforming our bureaucracies andintegrating our streams of information to undermining the legitimacy of the extremists'ideology (later known as counter-messaging), disrupting financial flows, andworking through military or diplomatic means with other countries(as well asextending development aid to ungoverned spaces) to deny terrorists thesanctuary they need to operate.

Schmitt and Shanker, carefully following key individuals inthis process, go on describe how al-Qaeda began metastasizing and reacting toour initiatives by shifting their efforts onto the Internet. The authors giveinsight into enormously complicated issues of military versus intelligenceauthorities and the long-running debates within government about whether todestroy an extremist website facilitating the killing of Americans or continueto monitor the sites for additional information. The authors reference a numberof government sources to describe how we have purportedly gained the ability togo on to radical websites and post information and orders that areindistinguishable from legitimate orders issued by al-Qaeda's leadership,resulting in dissent and confusion among supporters and operators.

Finally, they describe the speed with which the cloak anddagger of counterterrorism on the Web is evolving and changing in chillingdetail. The most dangerous trend to emerge is the recruitment of home-grownfanatics to attack the West from within. Schmitt and Shanker highlight thecases of Najibullah Zazi, Nidal Hassan, and Faisal Shahzad to call attention toal-Qaeda's new dual track strategy of radicalizing individuals in the West throughthe internet to conduct smaller scale and harder to detect attacks with ahigher probability of success while still aiming to repeat a massive 9/11 styleattack.

*****

Counterstrike willbe a revealing and informative read to the average reader, who may have spentthe last ten years only vaguely aware of simplified terms and governmentclichés popularly used in the media, from "drone strikes," to "intelligencefusion," and "connecting the dots." Schmittand Shanker effectively bring to life the confusing vernacular that mycolleagues in Washington national security circles use as part of theireveryday speech. The authors also effectively tell the story of ourcounterterrorism campaign by personalizing the struggles of key individuals whorecognized the need to radically change the way our law enforcement agencies,intelligence agencies, the military and our policy-making bodies did -- andstill do -- business.

Curiously, however, the vitally important issue of detaineeinterrogations and their significant contribution to the counterterrorismcampaign is missing from the book. I was surprised to not see an entire chapterdevoted to the detainee issue, given its centrality to the effort to understandterrorist networks, the important intelligence gained from the capture ofal-Qaeda members and fellow-travelers, and the controversy surrounding detaineetreatment and proper interrogation practices that persists to this day. In my own experience in eastern Afghanistan in2009, the information gained from detainees -- from that dealing with thecomplicity of the Pakistani Army with insurgent networks to tribal motivations behindindividual support for the insurgency -- was critical to our counterinsurgencyand counterterrorism efforts. In fact, at the strategic level, one of the maindrivers behind the push within the last administration to conductcross border raids into Pakistan rather than kinetic strikes, even with theinevitable diplomatic fallout they caused, was to create the possibility forcapturing key al-Qaeda leaders for the information they could provide.

Also left unexamined are the hugely significant implicationsof the Arab Spring on al-Qaeda's legitimacy. Schmitt and Shanker conclude Counterstrikewith a discussion of ‘How this Ends,' and the authors rightly discuss thetransformation of al-Qaeda from being an individual man and highly-ordered butsmall vanguard group to being an inspirational philosophy and a movement. However,I disagree with the authors' conclusion that "you can't destroy the idea of al-Qaeda."The philosophical underpinnings of the organization are currently crumbling inthe midst of peaceful protests in the Middle East rather than the violent jihadit preaches, which by nearly all measures has failed. Most damning is that the protestsmovements have not made the introduction of Islamic law a central point of contention.The much decried corrupt governments in North Africa and the Middle East arefalling one by one, and al-Qaeda is becoming less and less relevant on the ArabStreet. This could be the beginning of ‘How this Ends,' much as perestroika andthe solidarity movement marked the beginning of the end of communism as apopular ideal.

Overall, the educated lay reader who is going to pick upCounterstrike will find this book to be a well reported, well written dive intothe arcane world of counterterrorism over the past decade. It largely comportswith my own experiences both in the field and in Washington, and is asignificant contribution to our body of knowledge regarding our campaign thusfar in the "Long War" against al-Qaeda and affiliated groups.

Michael Waltz formerlyserved as a senior advisor for counterterrorism to Vice President RichardCheney and still serves as a U.S. Army Special Forces officer in the reservecomponent. He is currently Vice President for Strategy at Metis Solutions, LLC.

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Al Qaeda in Iraq's Swedish connections

By Brian Fishman, December 13, 2010

The apparent suicide bombing in Stockholm this past weekend has again raised the specter of jihadi terrorism in the West, but key details about the attack-especially whether or not the bomber, Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, was working independently, with a cell in Sweden (or Britain), or on the orders of a formal al-Qaeda-linked group-remain ambiguous. Such questions have real world importance, not just because a support network might commit follow-on attacks, but because the United States and the West are struggling to determine what elements of the jihadi movement-formal organizations or loosely distributed jihadi supporters-pose the largest threat and how those elements motivate and organize violence.

Read on

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Staying for the longer-term in Iraq and Afghanistan?

By Gerard Russell, August 16, 2010

George Soros says investment is alchemy, not science. Big enough investments, made with lots of fanfare, are likely to draw in other investors after them, and thus succeed.

The administration did this with the bank bailouts, but it is doing the opposite in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's going to make an investment, of money and lives for years to come, but it seems to prefer not to talk about it. That's a pity, because this silence raises the risk that Iraqis' and Afghans' panic and despair will make that investment fail.

Some people think the U.S. administration is bound to refuse Iraqis' requests for American troops to stay there after 2011. That's not clear from its public reactions to the latest requests, from the unlikely duo of Tariq Aziz and Babiker Zebari -- that is, Saddam's former deputy and an anti-Saddam rebel who now heads the Iraqi armed forces.

Instead Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the U.S. official most outspokenly in favor of a longer-term presence in Iraq, said "If a new government is formed there and they want to talk about beyond 2011, we're obviously open to that discussion." His stance reflects the U.S. military's interest in keeping a continued foothold in Iraq. But no definitive rebuttal has come from any other official source.

Read on

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AfPak Behind the Lines: al-Qaeda in Iraq

This week's AfPak Behind the Lines assesses the state of al-Qaeda in Iraq with analyst Brian Fishman.

1. What is the current status of al-Qaeda in Iraq, following the deaths of its leaders Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in a U.S. airstrike in Tikrit earlier this year? How has the group adapted to these losses, organizationally and ideologically?

Since the deaths of al-Masri and al-Baghdadi, AQI (operating as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)) has demonstrated that it can still cause death and destruction in Iraq. Nonetheless, since its dramatic decline in 2007, the ISI's operational profile has changed significantly, from attempting to control and dominate territory unilaterally toward more intermittent large-scale attacks. No doubt this shift was a concession to the reality of decreased influence and authority in Iraq, but by 2009 ISI was finding ways to use major attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere to discredit and undermine the Iraqi state. This trend has continued since the deaths of al-Masri and al-Baghdadi, though one might argue that the group has focused more on attacking Awakening Councils rather than the formal Iraqi state. It is too early to draw that conclusion, in my opinion, but it is interesting because it raises questions about ISI's sense of self and purpose. Little is known about the new Emir of the ISI, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi al-Husayni al-Qurashi and his deputy Abu Abdullah al-Husayni al-Qurashi. They have given little indication of their strategic focus or background.

Read on

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All al Qaedas are not created equal

By Brian Fishman

By Brian Fishman

Using a counterinsurgency strategy to achieve success in Afghanistan will be more difficult than it was in Iraq because the forces that threaten core American interests in Afghanistan are more durable and more dangerous. Comparing al Qaeda in AfPak to al Qaeda in Iraq illuminates some of those differences and illustrates both the pros and cons of building U.S. strategy in South Asia around a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Readers should remember that focusing on al Qaeda offers an incomplete picture of both wars because it obscures the primary roles played by other groups in both military contests. I do so because al Qaeda and its ideological allies play a critical role in our casus belli in Afghanistan, and because the comparison illustrates some of the key strategic and political differences between Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, the United States' main focus was establishing a reasonably stable and cooperative government that could productively engage the international community. In Afghanistan, building a stable and cooperative government is really a means to two ends: preventing Afghanistan from again becoming a terrorist safe haven and mitigating risks to Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Defeating insurgents via population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) is an interim step to policy success, not success itself, and this critical point has been missing from much of the debate about a troop increase in Afghanistan. In Iraq, the surge was very successful destroying and co-opting insurgents that threatened the central government -- and creating space for the development of a viable government -- but terrorism remains a real problem. A COIN campaign in Afghanistan may very well be necessary to protect U.S. interests in South Asia, but it is certainly not sufficient on its own.

Insurgents and terrorists: not interchangeable

In theoretical terms, a key difference between ‘insurgents' and ‘terrorists' is the focus for each group: for insurgents it's the population, but for terrorists it's self-preservation, namely the ability to train effective operatives while maintaining operational security. Terrorists generally do not have nearly as much influence over a population as do insurgents, nor do they need as much support from it. Unlike an insurgent group that recruits among the population, al Qaeda in AfPak has rarely recruited among Afghans.

U.S. strategic and operational concepts in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) should reflect the differences between insurgents and terrorists. Gen. McChrystal's leaked memo about the war in Afghanistan describes "defeating the insurgency" there as "a condition where the insurgency no longer threatens the viability of the state." This definition (or something close to it) has been suitable thus far in Iraq, and it largely makes sense in regard to the three primary threats to the Afghan government Gen. McChrystal notes in his memo: Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, and Hizb-e Islami Gulbuddin.

But the full scope of enemies in South Asia extends beyond these relatively well-established insurgent groups. Indeed, it is the smaller terrorist organizations that are most likely to strike outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Proponents of COIN in Afghanistan rightly point out that counterterrorism missions sometimes require counterinsurgency tools. That's true. But policymakers should not make the mistake of assuming that the results of a counterinsurgency necessarily meet the needs of a counterterrorism mission. Terrorist groups are often structured to operate within societies that have functional security and legal systems; insurgents operate in parallel to those systems. States capable of defeating insurgents are often still vulnerable to terrorism and certainly can be used by an innovative terrorist group as a safe haven.

The term "viability" in the definition of success above is critical. If "viability" in Afghanistan means something like "stable" and "enduring" governance, this may not describe a government authoritative enough to effectively crack down on al Qaeda and its allies -- even if it is strong enough to reliably defend Kabul from Mullah Omar. Al Qaeda does not need to control Kabul to utilize mountainous hideouts to train and plot against the West. Nor do Pakistani militants need bases in Kandahar to project power in the FATA. This is important because it suggests that to undermine U.S. interests -- by threatening terrorism abroad and putting Pakistani nuclear weapons at risk -- these groups need to achieve less than traditional insurgents, and thus the Afghan government must be more effective to defeat them. This is a very different situation than in Iraq, where AQI had aspirations and excesses -- and the vulnerabilities that go along with them -- that far exceed AQ in AfPak.

Al Qaeda in Iraq vs. al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Despite their shared brand, AQ in AfPak operates very differently from AQI (even in its heyday) and it has very different strategic aims. AQI aimed to control territory in order to discredit the Iraqi government and establish the first blotch in a jihadi oil-spot strategy aimed at redeveloping the caliphate. To achieve this end, AQI built a broad infrastructure that it tried to scale up dramatically, attacked U.S. forces daily, demanded that local insurgents and tribes swear allegiance to a formal State that it declared, provided a detailed -- though ridiculous -- description of the State's responsibilities, named a cabinet (that included positions like a Fisheries Minister), and directly imposed judicial punishments. AQI's aspirations of governance (and, critically, delusions of grandeur) put control over the Iraqi Sunnis at the heart of its strategy, which meant that the group was very vulnerable to a COIN approach designed to separate the group from the population writ large. AQI's strategy was fundamentally dysfunctional because it adopted the goals of an insurgent group without an entrenched social base and despite the fact that non-Iraqis composed its leadership and provided general direction. This mismatch is what Petraeus, McChrystal, McMaster and others so skillfully exploited in Iraq.

(Read on)

Afghanistan vs. Iraq media coverage, the redux

By Katherine Tiedemann

In today's New America Foundation/Foreign Policy launch event for the AfPak Channel (which you can watch live here at 12:15 p.m., though registration is now closed), Peter Bergen, Steve Coll, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran will be talking about what it's like to report from the region that U.S. President Barack Obama has made the focal point of his foreign policy agenda: Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obama's focus contrasts starkly with his predecessor's, who concentrated mostly on the war in Iraq. I wondered, in light of the difference, what has really changed in the way the media covers these two wars since Obama took office on January 20.

Fortunately, my Foreign Policy colleague Michael Wilkerson has already picked up on this, and was kind enough to send me the latest batch of raw data from the good people at the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, who track how much coverage various topics get weekly as a percentage of the total, which they call the "newshole."

The short answer as to how much has changed is: a little, as Michael observed last month. Afghanistan is slowly gaining ground on Iraq: since the first week of August, Afghanistan has gotten about four times the total coverage as Iraq has, and the percentage of the newshole devoted to Afghanistan peaked during the week of the August 20 presidential election at 10.2 percent. And coverage also bumped up a little during the week of Obama's March 27 Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy speech.

From the beginning of June 2008 until last week, Afghanistan averaged 1.97 percent of the newshole, compared to Iraq's 2.51 percent. But if you only look at the time period that Obama's been in office, Afghanistan jumps up to 2.93 percent, versus Iraq's 2.06 percent. Obama's foreign policy focus has accordingly apparently dictated a slight uptick in the amount of U.S. media coverage devoted to Afghanistan -- though the total still remains under three percent. A larger version of the chart is available here.

The American Journalism Review has an excellent survey of how Obama's focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan has led many big news outlets to ramp up their correspondents' reporting on and from the region, which I highly recommend. I also recommend tuning in to our event today; Peter Bergen and Rajiv Chandrasekaran are both recently back from big reporting trips to the region, with Rajiv breaking the news that the NATO airstrike in Kunduz that killed as many as 125 including several dozen civilians was based largely on a single Afghan intelligence source, and Peter corresponding for CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 from Helmand province.

The Afghan phoenix

By Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, Afghanistan

The first surprise is the Kabul airport. The new terminal -- "a gift of the people of Japan" -- appears to have been airlifted in from a small American city; light-filled, modern and staffed by young men in uniforms of khaki pants and blue shirts who politely answer travelers' questions as they direct traffic through the quiet, marble halls of the terminal.

This is quite a change from the old Kabul airport terminal, which was not much more than a big shed that broiled in summer and froze in winter with one wheezing baggage belt disgorging luggage to a chaotic press of travelers.

I have visited the Kabul airport since 1993 and it has been an accurate barometer of Afghanistan's shifting fortunes. In the mid-90s the country was in the grip of a civil war in which hundreds of thousands died and the airport of the capital was littered with the carcasses of airplanes large and small that had crashed on landing or takeoff during the past decade-plus of war.

Under the Taliban -- whose fantasies about establishing a 7th century utopia here on earth did not extend to the simplest acts of real governance -- no effort was made to clear up this mess. Once their regime fell in 2001, gradually the rusting hulks of the crashed planes were cleared from the runways.

Then came the mine sweepers. Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world and the strategically significant Kabul airport was mined particularly heavily. It took years for the mine sweepers to clear the airport runways but now they are long gone, as they are from much of the country.

Lost in the deluge of the recent media coverage of the rising violence and the flawed presidential election in Afghanistan are the markers of real progress over the past eight years, which in a small but important way is exemplified by the turnaround at Kabul airport.

Consider that:

More than five million refugees have returned home since the fall of the Taliban. This is one of the most substantial refugee repatriations in history, yet it is little remarked upon because it has largely gone so smoothly.
One in six Afghans now has a cell phone. Under the Taliban there was no phone system.
Millions of kids are now in school, including many girls. Under the Taliban girls were not allowed to be educated.
In 2008, Afghanistan's real GDP growth was 7.5 percent. Under the Taliban the economy was in free fall.
You were more likely to be murdered in the United States in 1991 than an Afghan civilian is to be killed in the war today.

Some reading this may be thinking -- can this really be right? But do the math: In 1991, almost 25,000 people were murdered in the United States at a time when the American population was approximately 260 million. In Afghanistan today some 2,000 Afghan civilians are killed each year by the Taliban and coalition forces out of a population of around 30 million.

A comparison with Iraq is also instructive. As the violence peaked in Iraq in early 2007 more than 3,500 Iraqi civilians were being killed every month. Adjusting for population sizes, civilians in Iraq were 20 times more likely to be killed two years ago than they are today in Afghanistan.

Of course none of this is to deny the existence of epic corruption in Afghanistan, the massive drug trade, the scandal of billions of dollars of aid wasted on failed aid projects that have principally enriched giant American contractors like DynCorp, and the resurgence of the Taliban.

These are all too real, but they are only part of the story, and for Afghans who have lived through an invasion by a totalitarian superpower that killed one in ten of their family members, then a civil war that killed many more, and then the Taliban who brought security at the price of living in a completely failed theocratic state, the most important fact is that history is now behind them and that the future promises something better.

Peter Bergen, the editor of the AfPak Channel, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and at New York University's Center on Law and Security, and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader. He is CNN's national security analyst, where this was originally published.

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Predator vs. Max Weber in South Asia

By Austin Long

By Austin Long

The recent death of Baitullah Mehsud from a missile attack launched by a U.S. drone and the ensuing succession controversy for the leadership of the TTP can rightly be scored a tactical success for the United States and Pakistan. It also provides an opportunity to reflect on one of the major elements of U.S. counterinsurgency since 2001, a set of operations against so-called "high value targets" (HVTs) or "high value individuals" (HVIs). These operations are intended to capture or kill key leaders or facilitators of insurgent activity.

In addition to the drone attacks in Pakistan, these operations have been conducted by special operations task forces and CIA in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, these operations have achieved numerous tactical successes, most notably the death in 2006 of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Similar results have been achieved in Afghanistan, including the death in 2007 of senior Taliban (meaning here Quetta Shura affiliates) commander Mullah Dadullah.

However, these tactical successes have not always translated into more operational or strategic level success. According to a leaked 2006 Marine Corps intelligence assessment, the killing of Zarqawi had "little impact on the structure and capabilities of AQI, especially in al-Anbar." Likewise, the death of Mullah Dadullah had minimal effect on the Taliban, as it overran the district center of Ghorak in Kandahar province the month after his death. This limited effect is in stark contrast to the effects of Baitullah Mehsud's death, which has at a minimum caused serious disruptions to the internal unity of the TTP.

The explanation for this disparity is in the differing nature of insurgent organizations and leadership. Both AQI and the Taliban are what German sociologist Max Weber termed "bureaucratic-rational" organizations. They are characterized by functional specialization, hierarchy, and the crucial ability to quickly promote individuals to replace killed or captured leaders. AQI also had robust internal reporting mechanisms with dedicated "administrative emirs" to oversee logistics.

The Taliban may not quite be to that level but nonetheless has considerable organizational acumen. The TTP, in contrast, combines elements of what Weber termed "traditional" authority, in the form of tribal links, with "charismatic" authority, embodied in Baitullah Mehsud. Rather than an integrated chain of command as with AQI or the Taliban, the TTP relied heavily on Baitullah's personal authority to hold together a confederation of tribes and subtribes. Unless Baitullah's successor can replicate his charisma and ability to mediate disputes the organization will likely splinter.

Understanding the implications of organizational structure for high-value targeting is important for at least three reasons.

First, high-value targeting is not cost-free. It often requires the commitment of large quantities of scarce resources, principally intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets and special operations personnel. If the pay-off from these operations is of limited strategic significance, then these assets may be better used elsewhere.

Second, there are often collateral effects of high-value targeting, be it civilian casualties caused by a missile strike or the disruption of efforts to build local trust caused by a raid. Prioritizing high-value targets above other counterinsurgency operations can exacerbate these collateral effects.

Third, the arguments above apply to U.S. and Pakistani allies as well as adversaries. Tribal lashkars and other militias rely on traditional and charismatic authority, making them vulnerable to high-value targeting by insurgents.

These organizations should be replaced by or incorporated into the state bureaucratic structure as quickly as is feasible to reduce this vulnerability.

Austin Long is an assistant professor at Columbia University's School of
International and Public Affairs and co-author with William Rosenau of The
Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency (RAND, 2009).

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

Iraq vs. Afghanistan: Which war gets more U.S. news coverage?

By Michael Wilkerson

In an FP piece Monday, Morton Abramowitz argued that the U.S. media have been too soft in covering the shift in policy toward the war in Afghanistan, and that the war in general has received too little scrutiny.

The article made me wonder if there had been an increase in coverage of Afghanistan since the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, given his professed focus not to lose there and his changes in policy.

Fortunately, the Pew Research Center's Project on Excellence in Journalism [PEJ] keeps weekly tallies of which topics are covered in the U.S. media, or as they call it, the "newshole." In one interesting graph, they show how much less coverage of Iraq there is now than two years ago.

At my request, the wonderful people at PEJ provided their raw data on how much coverage Iraq and Afghanistan were getting as a percentage of the "newshole" over the last year. Using my extraordinarily rudimentary Excel chart skills, I decided to examine if much had changed since President Obama was inaugurated and started implementing changes in policy.

The short answer is: not a lot. Although there are occasional spikes, the total coverage of Afghanistan jumps over 5 percent only once, in July, corresponding with a major offensive in Helmand under the newly appointed command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And the average is low. From January through July, Afghanistan received an average of 1.92 percent of coverage, while Iraq got 2.01 percent.

That Afghanistan and Iraq are now nearly equal in coverage is a change. From June-December 2008, Iraq averaged 3.26 percent and Afghanistan 1.17 precent. Still, with the amount of U.S. taxpayer money going into both places, and the amount of reconstruction funds wasted, one has to wonder about the low percentage devoted to both wars. The sad part is, even if average media consumers were more interested, which they are not, only a few huge media outlets could afford to cover the wars constantly, and most of them are already losing money anyway.

A bigger version of the chart is viewable here.

Michael Wilkerson is a researcher at FP. This item has been cross-posted on Passport and the AfPak Channel blog.