Bruce R.'s 'the big "What Must Be Done?" post'

Today's essential Afghan reading I'd say. Excerpts from Flit to get you going:

You want to know what I think? I'll tell you what I think

Herschel Smith from Captain's Journal linked to a recent post here. His comments suggest he feels I'm guilty of a little ambiguity on my Afghanistan position, so maybe now's a good time to clear it up. My "Afghan position" and $1.50 will buy you a coffee at Tim's, of course, but it's fair to say my own thoughts have been crystallizing of late anyway. So here we go...Continue reading if you dare.

I think I have to start by reiterating the framework I come to the problem from. Back in mid 2007 I was told my Afghan tour would be as S2 for the Operational Mentoring and Liaison effort in Kandahar Province. I spent over a year reading everything ever written relevant to what the Americans called Foreign Internal Defense, and every personal memoir I could find of working with indigenous forces in both the insurgent and counterinsurgent role. Then for seven-and-a-half months* I worked embedded in an Afghan ANA Brigade HQ, at the time rated one of the best in Afghanistan, with daily contact with that brigade's intelligence staff and senior leadership...

...the definition of victory for the foreign assisting forces in a COIN situation is when the local security forces can handle the job on their own. That's not a strategy or a metric. More like an objective criterion for departure...

...in 2008 and early 2009 [there] was some truly dangerous self-deception on the part of ISAF's leadership. Mentors in the field were all saying the same thing: that the army could not be described as doing anything that an objective Western soldier would consider fighting at higher than company level (100 men or more), let alone conducting effective counter-insurgency, and that the surge in size was leading to an observable decline in quality, not an improvement. Nowhere in the country were Afghan forces being trusted to hold an area of operations on their own. But still units were continually being rated higher and higher on the Capability Milestone 4-point scale, with CM1 meaning they needed very little help from the West at all. So you ended up with a CM1 battalion in Eastern Afghanistan having a completely incompetent CO and being riddled with hash-smokers. Or you had my CM1 brigade in Southern Afghanistan, who while vicious chess players all, could not be relied upon absent us to remember their tents (or maps) when their headquarters moved.

Incredibly, by the middle of this year, half of what in the spring was to any objective eyes a manifestly incompetent army was rated at CM2 or higher. Only the change in ISAF commanders this summer has brought some reality back into higher command assessments of Afghan security force capability. The previous ISAF commander was not fired for reason of having a command culture that had been promoting a completely misleading view of the progress on this key deliverable, but to mind he could have and probably should have been, if only on the "buck stops here" principle.

The new commander, Gen. McChrystal, has said some encouraging things about what needs to change in that command structure. The proof is in the pudding, of course, but he's right that only radical change right now will get security sector improvements back on track and offer some reasonable prospect of victory here. He states quite clearly that in the absence of those changes, among others, it doesn't matter how many more Western troops are thrown at the problem...

I'd...say that my limited experience leaves me highly skeptical of solutions that see a reduction in the number of Western troops at this point. To say our efforts have been misapplied is not to say that we were of no value. It would be hard to see anything of commensurate value coming out of a total Western pullout in the next 1-2 years...

So, in short, the American response in this point should include a radical change in the way Afghan security sector reform is being conducted, to get that back on track. The troop level for now should probably stay steady or increase, depending on the best balance between theatre and strategic requirements. And a delay of weeks or months to any reinforcement in an effort to secure local government commitment to political reforms is justified, and is unlikely to carry any huge military risks.

As far as the Canadian commitment goes, I would personally argue for a sustainable extension of the mission, with "sustainable" defined on the basis of the three principles I tried to outline here...