COIN

I’m in an overstuffed ballroom at the Willard hotel for the third annual conference of the Center for a New American Security, where the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, Gen. David Petraeus, is delivering the keynote address. It’s an appropriate venue: Petraeus is effectively the leader of the counterinsurgency [...]

First, look into a mirror and say three times, “I will not interpret events in Afghanistan and Pakistan through strained analogy to Iraq, because doing so is sure to misinterpret organic and specific developments and the circumstances that gave rise to them.” Then note that Pashtun tribesmen near the Swat Valley are organizing a tribal [...]

After initially promising to come up with benchmarks for judging the success or shortcomings of its Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy — the term preferred by the administration, I understand, is “metrics,” which I’m cool with — the Obama administration has yet to come up with any, and has resisted Congressional efforts to put them in the recent [...]

Critics see retrenchment on Obama’s pledge to rebalance the foreign policy apparatus away from the military.

Great piece from The New York Times’ Jane Perlez about the Pakistani army’s impending urban combat with the Taliban in the Swat Valley city of Mingora. About 10,000 civilians remain in the mostly empty city, if the government’s claims are to be considered credible, and the Taliban appear to be awaiting an army that has, [...]

Take a look at this New York Times op-ed call for a moratorium on the Pakistan drone strikes by counterinsurgency luminaries Andrew Exum and Dave Kilcullen. (This, if I’m not mistaken, is the furthest Kilcullen has gone: in a recent discussion of his book, “The Accidental Guerrilla” at a Center for a New American Security [...]

About two weeks ago I was talking to an Obama administration official about the prospects for Pakistan accepting a larger contingent of U.S. counterinsurgency trainers. The administration was pressing somewhat gingerly, the official indicated, not wanting to push the Pakistani military too far — it would be counterproductive to imply too strongly that the Pakistanis [...]

Has anyone written an essay about the misery that deja vu yields? Because:
Four U.S. contractors affiliated with the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide fired on an approaching civilian vehicle in Kabul earlier this month, wounding at least two Afghan civilians, according to the company and the U.S. Army.
The contractors were off duty, apparently. One [...]

So, keeping up on the Pakistani military’s offensive against the Taliban, there’s this:
The government claimed 700 insurgents had died and the Taliban were on the run.
And good for that. But how does that statistic sound compared to this one:
The United Nations said 360,600 refugees had fled Swat and neighboring Dir and Buner districts since operations [...]

To adapt, clumsily, one of the more memorable quips of what used to be called the War on Terror: in Afghanistan, we set up the military command structure that we can, and in Iraq, we set up the military command structure that we must. Except maybe not anymore. (You see that piece of writing right [...]