The United States military is attempting to transfer its recipe for "success" in the conflict in Iraq to the war in Afghanistan. In Iraq, after many years of stumbling to relearn the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare gleaned from many years of staggering in Vietnam, the United States happened upon a technique that attenuated the Sunni …
Continue reading “Learning From History: Can the US Win the Afghan War?”
Parts I and II discussed how our counterinsurgency doctrine’s requirements for a reliable host-nation government, a reliable host-nation security force, and reliable intelligence are impossible to achieve in our present wars. The third and final part of the series focuses on the futility of counterinsurgency itself as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. Our counterinsurgency …
Continue reading “The COIN Myth, Part III”
Kelley Vlahos on how the in crowd wore out its welcome
The U.S. military’s fabled counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24) is an authoritative-sounding 281-page volume of balderdash. Even the legend of its origin is a fabrication. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of forces in Iraq and now in charge of Central Command, supposedly "wrote the book," but the book was actually hammered together from plagiarized material …
Continue reading “The COIN Myth”
Kelley Vlahos looks back on 2009
Although we already know what President Obama is going to be selling this Tuesday – a radical escalation of the Afghan war involving 30,000 or more troops – we don’t yet know what his sales pitch will be like. Can the peerless rhetorician apply his skills to the task of mobilizing a war-weary nation around …
Continue reading “The Galula Doctrine”
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” – Bertrand Russell Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on the Sunday gab circuit that rooting al-Qaeda out from Afghanistan is our only goal in that country. That’s interesting, considering that …
Continue reading “Our National Cognitive Dissonance”
In recent history, very few counterinsurgency wars have ended in success. Guerrillas are often outgunned by a wealthier invading power, but they do have two powerful advantages. One is that they are fighting on their home turf, which they usually know much better than the invader. Guerrilla warfare at the strategic level is defensive, even …
Continue reading “Why Most Counterinsurgency Wars Fail”
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has become the point man for the long-war mafia, delivered his ultimatum to President Barack Obama on Friday, Oct. 9. As has been his practice over the past several weeks, McChrystal proxy-leaked details of his demands through the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other sources. The Journal says …
Continue reading “Long Wars and Peace Prizes”
There is no such thing a "victory" in the kinds of wars we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The best one can hope for in these types of conflicts – counterinsurgency efforts in far-flung corners of the globe with fuzzy objectives and vague necessity – is to not be seen as having "lost." For that …
Continue reading “McChrystal’s Myth” 
