Vice Admirals William McRaven and Robert Harward (navy.mil)

Two senior military officers from the shadowy world of Special Operations are playing a large and previously unreported role in shaping the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, a move that underscores that the internal debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive missions to provide security for Afghan civilians and narrowly tailored missions to find and kill terrorists.

[Security1]Navy Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command  (JSOC) at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward, the deputy leader of the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., are attending and informing the strategy meetings that the White House began in September to refine its approach in Afghanistan. Both men have deep ties to Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the war. They are said to favor large infusions of U.S. troops to Afghanistan for performing counterinsurgency operations in select population centers, but they also advocate marshalling forces to pursue terrorists across Afghanistan’s rugged, mountainous terrain — a task in which McRaven plays a key role.

Debate about a “purely counterterrorism strategy” advocated by Vice President Joseph Biden was “bounced around at one point, but that has been cast aside,” said a National Security Council staffer who attends the meetings and who asked for anonymity because the debate is still ongoing, “mostly because JSOC has said ‘We’re going to do this anyway.’ And it’s not like they’re going to be in a supporting role.” Biden’s advice, which had practically no support from the armed services, was that the military should shy away from protecting the Afghan people and helping build Afghan governing institutions, and instead focus on the JSOC specialties of going after terrorists directly.

Yet the fact that JSOC veterans like McRaven, Harward and McChrystal favor an overall counterinsurgency strategy with a counterterrorism component demonstrates that the military no longer believes distinguishing between the two is tenable in the Afghanistan war. “Special Operations Forces that were traditionally used for counterterrorism better understand how their capabilities fit into a counterinsurgency campaign than perhaps they did when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began,” said Andrew Exum, a veteran of both wars and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security who over the summer advised McChrystal in a review of Afghanistan strategy.

More directly, McRaven and Harward share a professional fraternity with McChrystal. Before McRaven took over JSOC — an entity that operates almost entirely in secret — McChrystal ran it for five years, supervising stealthy teams in Afghanistan and Iraq that tracked down and killed senior terrorists like al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. One of McChrystal’s deputies during that period was Harward, and the bonds between the officers remain strong. “General McChrystal and Vice Admirals McRaven and Harward have established relationships through the special operations community,” said McChrystal’s spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis.

In his Afghanistan review, McChrystal said that a key goal for him would be to increase coordination between his NATO command and the independent command of JSOC, which suggested that the dichotomy between using Special Operations Forces for counterterrorism and conventional forces for counterinsurgency was eroding. “One of General McChrystal’s priorities is seeking greater unity of effort across all military activities in Afghanistan, which includes regular interaction with ISAF Joint Command, regional, and task force commanders,” Sholtis said, using the acronym for NATO’s military command in Afghanistan.

As a result, McChrystal is turning to McRaven and Harward for critical tasks in Afghanistan. McRaven runs a secretive detachment of Special Forces known as Task Force 714 — once commanded by McChrystal himself — that the NSC staffer described as “direct-action” units conducting “high-intensity hits.” In an email, Sholtis said that because Task Force 714 was a “special ops organization” he “can’t go into much detail on authorities, etc.” But the NSC staffer — who called McRaven “McChrystal Squared” — said Task Force 714 was organized into “small groups of Rangers going wherever the hell they want to go” in Afghanistan and operating under legal authority granted at the end of the Bush administration that President Obama has not revoked.

In a move signaling his own importance to McChrystal, Harward will arrive in Afghanistan later this month to command a new task force, known as Task Force 435, that will take charge of detention facilities in Afghanistan, “primarily the new one at Bagram that will open this month,” Sholtis said. In his famous August strategy review, McChrystal wrote that detention operations are “critical to successful counterinsurgency operations” and need to work toward “the long-term goal of getting the U.S. out of the detention business” through transition to Afghan control — a counterinsurgency task not traditionally given to a Special Operations veteran like Harward. McChrystal’s strategy recommended creating a new command, which Harward will now lead, of “approximately 120 personnel” focused on “defeat[ing] the insurgency through intelligence collection and analysis,” prisoner de-radicalization, and working with the Afghan corrections apparatus to “employ best correctional practices [and] comply with Afghan laws.”

Last month, McChrystal delivered a request for additional troops to the Obama administration for the Afghanistan war. The request, structured as a palette of options from which the president could choose, included so-called “high-risk” options of numbers as low as 10,000 new combat troops and a so-called “low-risk” option of an 85,000-troop reinforcement. Participants in the discussions have said on background that they viewed the 85,000-troop request as an unserious option meant to clear the way for Obama to approve a middle course of around 40,000 new troops.

But while the media has typically discussed a counterterrorism approach in Afghanistan as a low-troop option, the two counterterrorism-experienced admirals are both said to favor “as many troops as we can muster,” according to the NSC staffer, who specified that McRaven and Harward were pushing for McChrystal’s largest resource option of 85,000 new troops. A senior administration official who requested anonymity said that the Obama administration was not considering a troop escalation of more than 40,000 combat troops. (It is possible that support and logistical units could increase any troop number that the administration cites as the total estimate, as happened when President Bush announced a troop surge to Iraq of about 20,000 troops in January 2007 but about 28,000 new troops actually deployed.) On Saturday, McClatchy Newspapers reported that Obama is leaning toward an increase of 34,000 troops. An announcement is expected shortly after Obama returns from a trip to Asia on Nov. 20.

The advice of McRaven and Harward to the White House strategy review, the staffer said, was to push for a “heavy, heavy, heavy COIN [counterinsurgency] presence” in select population centers like the capitol city of Kabul, while relying on new or expanded counterterrorism units like Task Force 714 for hunting and killing terrorists outside of those population centers — particularly in areas like the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a key transit point for Taliban and al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents.

“They’re focusing on the main population centers that they think they can save with manpower on the ground, and everything else will be crossborder,” the NSC staffer said. An executive order signed by George W. Bush in mid-2008 and not revoked by Obama authorized special forces to, in some cases, cross the Afghan border into Pakistan in pursuit of top insurgent targets. “JSOC is already ramping up for that. … These are what they call kinetic, direct-action task forces,” military terminology to describe intense fighting with small units. The prospect of crossborder raids by U.S. military forces has been greeted in Pakistan as an offensive violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

The two admirals are also said to be influential with Jim Jones, Obama’s national security adviser. McRaven, at least, worked with Jones in a previous assignment, commanding Special Operations Forces in Europe in 2006 while Jones was ending his tour of duty as NATO commander. “A lot of people think Jones is not taking military counsel, that he’s anti-surge, he’s this, he’s that,” said the NSC staffer. “In reality, he’s taking counsel from pretty much a purely military palette of people, including McRaven.”

Asked about McRaven’s role in the strategy debates, Ken McGraw, a spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees JSOC, said, “It would not be appropriate for us to comment on who may or may not be involved in discussions at the White House or what may or may not have been the substance of conversations at the White House.” A spokesman for the Joint Forces Command did not return repeated phone and email messages seeking comment about Harward. A spokesman for the National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment about Jones’ interactions with Harward and McRaven.

The bonds between McChrystal and the two admirals may not have been widely known because of the secrecy surrounding almost all aspects of JSOC, but the Obama administration is getting a sense of their strength. “Harward and McChrystal were running JSOC,” said the NSC staffer, “and all three of them [have been] in the nether regions forever.”

“Safe havens do not [offer al-Qaeda] real estate for construction of tent farms for training seminars,” he said, but instead they protect al-Qaeda from “human-intelligence penetration on the ground,” upon which such targeted counterterrorism strikes depend. With regard to the drone strikes in Pakistan against al-Qaeda — which the CIA claims has seriously eroded al-Qaeda’s freedom of movement in the tribal areas and which some counterinsurgents fear will ultimately alienate Pakistanis — “control of the government underneath the drones” was an additional prerequisite for success, Biddle said. Take away human intelligence and host-government complicity through an offshoring strategy, and counterterrorism would be a non-starter.

And yet the Somalia success occurred, in an impermissive environment. On a conference call this morning, Col. Daniel Roper, the director of the Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center at Ft. Leavenworth, addressed the issue, prompted by Greg Grant from DODBuzz. In Roper’s view, counterterrorism is a prophylactic measure, a treatment of the symptom after the patient has fallen ill, while counterinsurgency addresses root-cause economic, social, legal and political failures that contribute to insurgency. Counterinsurgency is about “addressing political dynamics at the local level, through existing or adapting governance structures,” Roper said. “If we focus on the symptoms we’ll never solve the causes.”

It was impossible to divorce Afghanistan from its regional context, Roper continued, citing “profoundly transnational dynamics.” To discuss extremism in Afghanistan without discussing “the dynamics in Pakistan” was folly, and you “can’t have a coherent talk about the dynamics with Pakistan without [discussing] India” and other regional players. At the same time, Roper praised “increasingly successful attacks of drones that are killing militants, not civilians.”

So all of that regional talk is well-taken. But the fact remains that the Somalia strike succeeded. I asked Roper if there was some specific condition in Somalia that allowed Special Forces to acquire sufficient intelligence to execute the strike that doesn’t exist in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Roper was justifiably hesitant to speak to the Somalia raid before all the facts were in. “Within the borders of Afghanistan,” he continued, “there are places where [insurgents] are inaccessible, for whatever reason, collectively, either getting the intelligence we need to have sufficient confidence to conduct an operation or we may not have the resource to take advantage” of that intelligence. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are “not either/or, and you have to have an appropriate combination of raid-type activity … to complement some long-term dynamics that [will] ultimately enable us to be successful.”

Shift from COIN to containment: Rather than a heavier presence, the United States should limit its military operations in southern Afghanistan and consolidate existing gains. Where possible, U.S. officials can negotiate with Taliban in the south if they will turn against global jihadists. Many Afghans supporting the Taliban can be bought out — requiring financial incentives to persuade and empower populations to reject extremism. While several years ago major troop increases could have worked in southern Afghanistan, more troops now may be dangerously counterproductive. Increased presence in the south risks pushing Taliban over the mountains and into nuclear armed Pakistan. Meanwhile, previously secure areas of northern Afghanistan are falling under Taliban and al Qaeda influence — encircling Kabul and threatening NATO supply lines.

Align strategy and tactics: Containment will not be easy against an unconventional threat. A softer footprint that emphasizes army and police training, economic progress in key cities, and supporting non-corrupt local leaders is the best route. Redeploying forces to consolidate gains in stable areas is a more effective use of troops than sustained combat operations. The promised civilian surge must be resourced, recruited, trained, exercised, and deployed. Continued pressure from Pakistan against the Taliban remains crucial. Counterterrorism efforts should be redoubled — mainly as an intelligence operation with military support. Pentagon and other planners need to develop clear operational concepts for an effective containment regime for southern Afghanistan — and, once established, implement plans for a steady decrease in overall troop numbers.

Couple of points here. First, the point about pushing the Taliban over the mountains back into Pakistan is what motivated Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) into calling for a withdrawal timetable, and it’s one that those who base support for the Afghanistan war on the dangers of Pakistan’s internal collapse rarely address. Second, it’s very hard to understand on this analysis why a Taliban that sees itself as winning would be willing to negotiate with the Kabul government or the NATO coalition, or why it would distance itself from al-Qaeda. It’s possible that fighting the Taliban won’t succeed in that goal either, but not fighting them offers little reason why the Taliban would change its behavior.

Third, and most important: Kay doesn’t get around to saying what “containing” the Taliban means, or what it requires. What’s the goal of containment? Does it mean accepting that the Taliban can have the run of various provinces, but no more than what it currently holds? When would a confrontation with Taliban forces be justified? Are we really talking about bifurcating Afghanistan between Kabul-controlled and Taliban-controlled areas, and buttressing the “green” zones that Kabul controls? If there’s a counterterrorism mission set to intensify, why would a populace that’s getting precious little from the U.S./Kabul coalition provide the intelligence tips necessary to sustain such missions? And what if, as Matthew Yglesias’ commenter DTM wonders, a greater, not smaller, troop presence is necessary for containment?

Yglesias himself observes:

The aim is basically to try to stabilize the situation, shore up the Afghan government, help defend the people who are friendly to us, and keep a lid on the Taliban. That, it seems to me, can accomplish a lot at a pretty reasonable price. The escalation alternative seems to me to drastically raise the costs we need to bare in exchange for some pretty small gains.

Kay’s plan is at least more rigorous than George Will’s column, so it seems odd that Will’s is getting more attention.

ABC’S TERRY MORAN: Define victory in Afghanistan, or maybe that’s not the right word.

OBAMA: I’m always worried about using the word “victory” because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.

You know, we’re not dealing with nation states at this point. We’re concerned with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s allies. So when you have a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like al-Qaeda, our goal is to make sure they can’t attack the United States.

Now I think that’s going to require constant vigilance. But with respect to Afghanistan, what that means is — or Pakistan, for that matter. What that means is that they cannot set up permanent bases and train people from which to launch attacks. And we are confident that if we are assisting the Afghan people and improving their security situation, stabilizing their government, providing help on economic development so they have alternatives to the heroin trade that is now flourishing.

There is and should be a debate over whether whether that goal is in the national interest; whether that goal is achievable; whether that goal is achievable under the current counterinsurgency strategy;  and, if those first three questions are affirmatively satisfied, whether that goal is properly resourced. But there shouldn’t be any debate over the fact that seeking “victory” is a category error in this context. al-Qaeda will not surrender or be made to surrender. We are not at war with either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The goal is to erode the capabilities of al-Qaeda so that it no longer threatens the United States or its allies. Therefore, as people who what they’re talking about on Afghanistan observe, because the path to eroding al-Qaeda’s capabilities runs through the active support of the Afghan and Pakistani people, stuff like the widespread corruption of the Afghanistan government is a strategic challenge to U.S. goals. Is “victory” a useful concept when applied to anti-corruption?

There is nothing defeatist or blinkered about this perspective. On the contrary. It’s the beginning — not the end, but the beginning — of strategic thinking about the war in Afghanistan.

I asked about the proportion of Afghan forces — soldiers and police — that had received the training, since I’ve seen Afghan police officers treat the population as a target for plunder, not protection. Agoglia didn’t have figures handy, but he said the percentage is “fairly small,” though starting to increase. He said the center had “little mentorship” with the police force in particular and that needed to improve in particular. With the Afghan National Army, Agoglia said he was looking to bring 15 Afghan instructors to the center in “120 to 150 days.”  Given that this is the force the United States is relying on to hold areas that the coalition clears of the Taliban, that seems like a particularly striking training issue. And that’s not meant as a criticism of Agoglia, who appears to be doing his utmost to disseminate best counterinsurgency practices and hard-won lessons throughout the coalition and Afghan forces, but rather a systemic problem of attention being paid to bring qualified Afghan forces into the fight.

But a new study wonders whether military intelligence operations in a counterinsurgency context is really so different from law enforcement. Admittedly, this isn’t about point-of-capture concerns, which the July 7 panel grappled with, but Gretchen Peters’ piece for the new edition of The CTC Sentinel, the publication of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, is still a case study in how applied counterinsurgency is eroding an old distinction. (Unfortunately it’s not online yet, but check out the Sentinel’s website in the coming days.)

Peters, a former Associated Press reporter with extensive experience in Afghanistan, writes that soldiers are increasingly considering the actions of the Taliban-led insurgency to “more closely resemble the mafia than a traditional military force.” And if the point of counterinsurgency is to cleave a population from a rebel faction through protecting its security, then there’s some reason to propose, as Peters does, that soldiers take cues from police work in patrolling a beat and acquiring intelligence leading to the takedown of certain insurgent targets. She suggests that soldiers study the Army Field Manual on Interrogations’ approaches to building rapport with interrogation subjects and learning through close contact with a given area about who represents reliable sources of information. Peters ends with this pungent quote:

“Soldiers don’t join the military because they want to become cops. I understand that,” said one law enforcement adviser. “But this model works. We need to retrain our troops for this model and lose the mentality that they are someday going to be landing on Omaha Beach.”

Peters doesn’t get into the legal implications of her study. But if counterinsurgency operations move soldiering closer in the direction of law enforcement, it’s worth asking what that implies for the courtroom admissibility of evidence collected from such operations.

So why’s he releasing this tape now? Because for weeks, Pakistan has been saying that it’s on the verge of expanding its fight against the Taliban to the tribal areas that birthed it (and where Zawahiri and his friends are believed to be). But according to Bill Roggio, the coming offensive in the tribal areas won’t be a test of the Pakistani military’s emerging counterinsurgency capability, but rather a “punitive” campaign of air strikes.

“The South Waziristan operation is punitive in nature,” one [U.S. intelligence] official told The Long War Journal. “You won’t see COIN there, ” the official continued, referring to the counterinsurgency techniques of driving out insurgents, holding territory, and securing the local population.

“They think they can win this via the air, like the Israelis thought they could beat Hezbollah [in Lebanon in 2006],” the official observed.

A different official tells Roggio that the Pakistanis insist the Taliban will collapse as soon as leader Beitullah Mehsud is killed. Pretty much every painful lesson of counterinsurgency that the United States has learned over the last eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan is that insurgent movements are designed to survive in the event of decapitation. Removing the root causes of the insurgency is the only way to backstop the military action necessary to fracture it. Pakistan shows few signs of moving in that direction. And Zawahiri’s tape is designed to broaden the critique that the Taliban is making.

What does McHale believe? Her first speech in office is delivered to CNAS’ conference, and it’s about public diplomacy’s place within the national security pantheon. (CNAS’s Kristin Lord notes that no undersecretary for public diplomacy has ever delivered an inaugural speech to a national-security audience.)

McHale calls “innovative” public diplomacy “part of smart power” — as makes sense for one of Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s deputies — and gives the standard line about technology enabling more thorough opportunities for distributing American messages. She quotes Defense Secretary Bob Gates on the need for credible messages, as judged by foreign publics. She also mentions al-Qaeda’s use of “old and new” media to spread its propaganda. “This is not a propaganda contest, this is a relationship race,” McHale says, “and we need to get back into the game.” I don’t really know what that means.

“Move beyond messaging,” McHale urges. “Listen more, lecture less … We need to explain our positions and policies up front.” She urges increased cultural and educational exchange programs. She’s happy that State Department officials texted and blogged the Obama Cairo speech around the world and hosted speech-watches and visited mosques “putting a local face” on the speech. “Local voices and local aspirations must drive these vessels.”

While she’s saying all this, a bunch of Tweetpeople note across my feed that this is a speech full of jargon and little substance. Instant “relationship building,” as McHale says. Those relationships will “counter extremists,” she says. Not the extremists who dislike the speech …

OK, she mentions the Pentagon’s role in public diplomacy. Says the Defense Department’s involvement has “bolstered” State’s understanding, and tells a story about Defense-State partnership on Nigerian anti-HIV/AIDS work. “We cannot build a civilian capacity [for public diplomacy] … without adequate resources, and at the State Department we just don’t have one.” But it’s not just money: “a strong emphasis on achieving real results” will mark her tenure, putting public diplomacy and “sound research” into policy debates. McHale wants to launch pilot programs to see what works. “The bottom line is results matter,” she says.

On Afghanistan and Pakistan: enhanced public diplomacy is “a key component” of the new strategy. “We will have to tailor our approach… valley by valley, village by village.” New strategy from McHale will support “democratic institutions and civil society.” Part of the task is to reassure Afghans and Pakistans that the U.S. has their interests in mind. She talks about “cell phone penetration” in both countries, and talks about texting as a mechanism to help persons displaced by the Swat fighting.

But there’s nothing about, for instance, U.S. efforts to counter the Pakistani or Afghan Taliban’s wide ranging radio broadcasts, as Amb. Richard Holbrooke has called an imperative — either through jamming their frequencies or by confronting their messages. Maybe that’s not strictly a function of her job, but it’s conspicuous that in a speech ostensibly about national security that no such practical public-communications about the war issues arose.

She gave a lot of public praise for the Defense Department, counterinsurgency and Petraeus. But the text of her speech was pretty orthogonal to their concerns. McHale’s appearance here appears to be an act of diplomacy of her own.

Two things he said are worth emphasizing. First, “There’s not going to be a civilian surge” in Afghanistan — a point Gen. David Petraeus made earlier — since there aren’t enough deployable and available regional-expert U.S. civilians for such a thing, so instead it makes sense to focus on placing civilian advisers in the ministries. Relatedly, Exum wonders whether the Obama administration is really going to devote sufficient resources to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Fick reiterated a point made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in his confirmation hearings: a potent measurement of success is going to be the reduction of civilian casualties, both those caused by the Taliban and those caused by U.S. and NATO troops. “Killing noncombatant civilians fundamentally undermines” U.S. goals, Fick said. Retired Lt. Gen. David Barno offered some caution about that, saying that the “military opponents of the coalition” are trying to “take the air strikes off the table” by emphasizing the civilian casualties caused by the air strikes. That may strike COINdinistas as a good but problematic point.

More thorough criticism comes from Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, perhaps the most salient academic critic of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars out there. He first mentioned the Kennedy administration’s lessons-learned effort after the Bay of Pigs, which resulted in reaffirming all the faulty assumptions that led to the disaster, thereby contributing to the near-miss apocalypse of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then Bacevich said it’s “wrong” that Afghanistan is a critical security interest of the United States and that counterinsurgency can help. Why’d 9/11 succeed? “Federal, state and local agencies responsible for domestic security fell down on the job,” Bacevich said. Preventing the next 9/11 “does not require the semi-permanent occupation” of Afghanistan and other countries. Why not “fix Mexico” first? “Anyone who came to a gathering like this and proposed to send 60,000 troops to Mexico” and spend billions to “fix the endemic corruption… would be laughed out of the room.”

Bacevich then urged a “minimalist” approach. He disputed that the United States ought to be in “a global counterinsurgency campaign.” We “don’t need to undertake such a grandiose effort, and we can’t afford such a grandiose effort” while still ensuring that al-Qaeda “poses no more than a modest threat to U.S. national security.”

Here’s Army Col. Christopher Cavoli, who’s about to command an infantry brigade in Afghanistan, with some minor criticisms. “I don’t have real big problems” with much of Fick and Exum’s report. But Cavoli pointed out that Afghans’ “definition of security might be different than ours.” You need “a pretext” — “a political event or a material benefit” — for a U.S. or NATO unit to just show up and start population-protection operations. In other words, you’ve got to bring the Pashtun villages something if they’re going to accept nearby foreign forces. “There’s a level of external direction and control to ensure that what happens… is consistent,” Cavoli said. “Who is going to benefit and in what order from this counterinsurgency” is a “big question,” since a peaceful area that doesn’t receive as many resources from the U.S. as a violent one is going to raise questions among the populace about their incentives for continued cooperation. “That makes it difficult for me to see how [Fick and Exum's proposals] will generate momentum,” Cavoli said.