The Quatto Zone

My Wife is Amazing!

2010-08-02T10:39:00.009-04:00

This short blog post is brought to you under federal requirements established by the Spousal Tolerance for On-Line Interest (or STOLI) Act of 2009. Of course, I'm stuck in the wi-fi tent at Kabul Airport at the moment, so I'm not really cutting into "us" time. That is apparently the job of the United States Air Force, which in its infinite wisdom requires you to redeploy through a base only serviced by reliable flights from other air bases in Afghanistan. Wouldn't want to make things easier for those who rejected their proud heritage as Airmen by taking a joint assignment more than 100 yards from an active runway. The next thing you know, you'll have the officers aspiring to be something more than air component commanders.

As you can tell, Quatto is tired and not amused. Hang in there, Mrs. Quatto.

Return of the Crazy Monkey

2010-07-29T14:09:00.006-04:00

This is probably my last post from Afghanistan, since I'm heading home soon. I'm past the 365-day mark, and even an invitation to stay on working for Team Petraeus from the Gun-dog hisself is a pale substitute for getting back together with my family.

You'll notice that, once again, it's been more than a month between posts. The excuse this time wasn't the job but some bile-spewing from Michael Yon, who rallied his readers in a call for my resignation and a DOD investigation into my authorship of this blog and its linked posts on Facebook. Finally the truth can be told, sports fans: I am using my privileged access to information as a public affairs officer to do the bidding of Stan McChrystal and conquer the Internet one former girlfriend at a time. The charge was ridiculous, but I was dealing simultaneously with the Michael Hastings First Amendment Salvation Show. I only have room in my life for one glory hound at a time, so I took down the blog until we got through the transition.

I started this blog for the purpose of spending time every few days reflecting on things that interested me. I wasn't concerned about building an audience. I was flattered to have The QuattoZone named a "blog to watch" by Small Wars Journal and the Blogger's Expo last year, but I've actively resisted offers from journalists and other bloggers to plug it. For me, making the posts public was mostly a way to enforce better discipline on the writing and the thoughts behind it. I also wasn't concerned about spreading official views. I do enough of that in my job. Most of all, I wasn't interested in scooping anybody. I did what almost every other blogging hobbyist does: I commented on content provided by reporters who actually work for their stories. I made it a point not to use information that hadn't been reported from events that weren't witnessed by journalists.

I'm going to break that rule now, once, to make a point. Yon is upset with me because I answered questions and provided an honest, informed opinion about his last embed in Afghanistan at the request of several military bloggers. The truth in that case turned out to be a not-so-great thing for Yon, since the people I responded to used the information to question his motives for criticizing General McChrystal. Because I failed to remember the lesson from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and helped bloggers print the truth rather than the legend, I became part of the vast anti-Yon milblogging conspiracy and had to be punished when the opportunity arose.

Now, here's the privileged information: Yon will be back in Afghanistan in the future not because anyone believes he has brass balls or because he has been engaged in the verbal equivalent of kissing the ring since General Petraeus was picked to command the operation here. Yon will be back because of the public affairs officers whom he derides. Because we're professionals, because we don't hold grudges (for long), because we work our asses off in the often disappointed hope that opening doors for Yon and those who would violently disagree with him will actually help people understand what's going on. Yon will be back, too, because in the end he needs the crazy monkeys in PA more than we need him.

Michael Yon doesn't know anything about what I did or didn't do with respect to the Rolling Stone article -- or, if he does, he has acted like he doesn't, which is worse. He doesn't really know much about my work in support of him and hundreds of other people trying to bring Afghanistan to the rest of the world over the past year. What he does know is that I crossed him, and nothing else matters. That's a healthy attitude for a mafia don. It doesn't work as well for someone peddling truth or wisdom about the complexities of war.

Looking toward the next 12 months for General Petraeus in Afghanistan, I can only hope God saves him from the people who know rather than the people who think. Forgetting Yon, take the "Afghan War Diary," launched by the good folks at Wikileaks who know that public transparency is an unalloyed good, who know that government officials lie to you all the time and who know that American soldiers are just murderous psychopaths in uniform. Except ... it turns out (as Doyle McManus and many others have observed) that the system that ostensibly has been screwing you all along is actually staffed by folks with integrity who have been doing a pretty good job of telling you the truth. And this without the Information Age equivalent of dumping a garbage truck on your front lawn and maybe getting some good people killed in the process.

When I get back to Washington, I'll probably have one more post looking back on this rollercoaster year. After that, I'll be moving the blog away from its focus on recent developments in the war and admittedly petty beefs with the media coverage. Since I'll be spending the majority of my time writing my dissertation, I'll be using this space to talk about how recent news and events in history illustrate my theme: how the way that Americans have come to talk about war completely fails us in our ability to understand the wars we fight. I hope you'll stick with me.

Finally, if you haven't, please read General McChrystal's retirement speech. This was a graceful exit for a soldier who wasn't perfect but whose service to the nation shone through the tarnish that others slathered on him. That's an opinion, but it's one I'm allowed to have and express as freely if not as loudly as Yon expresses his. Even crazy monkeys can sometimes think and write just for themselves.

The Only Thing I'll Write About This

2010-06-25T15:37:00.010-04:00

Sometimes you can be too close to something to write about it well, so I'll encourage you to continue reading better pieces about the resignation of General McChrystal from pros who have a good grasp of the basic situation, like David Brooks or the BBC's John Simpson. But here goes.

The most striking fact of this incident won't be found in the pages of Rolling Stone, although I won't blame you if you buy it for the cover (right). What is most significant is that media hype drove admirable policymakers to decide to change leaders in less than 48 hours. Perhaps that's a demonstration of decisiveness, but -- if so -- media owe the deciders and the public something better than what they got in this case.

Readers of the blog will know that I'm critical of media failures but I'm no enemy of the press -- at least, I wasn't a few days ago. The degree of transparency afforded to journalists covering the war in Afghanistan has been unsurpassed. I would like to believe that the public's understanding of the war has been improved as a result of this access; however, it's much tougher to believe that now. Looking back, I see too many similar cases where access has been manipulated to pursue predetermined agendas, caricatured to emphasize its most sensational aspects, or squandered by lazy instincts to follow the herd. It may be too early to tally the effect of our media culture on national security policy and its implementation in Afghanistan. This week, the human cost, to our shame, is all too evident.

The reporter has made a show of professing his integrity, mostly by pointing out that he hasn't been challenged. Maybe that's simply because, for a dwindling number of people on this planet, there are more important things than covering your own ass. When you've given offense to those you serve and admire, apologizing and taking responsibility for mistakes come first. Righting wrongs done to you in the process comes second, if it ever comes at all. Sometimes staying true to yourself is more important than having the right PR strategy, even in the face of a hatchet job.

The most offensive comments appearing in the Rolling Stone article -- by what I believe were a few people of relatively low rank and limited experience with reporters -- were inappropriate and deserved rebuke. They should not have been made in the presence of a reporter, regardless of the ground rules in place. But no extended exposure to staffs at any level of government could have failed to produce the kinds of comments reported in the piece: comments made not out of ingrained malice toward the Constitution, but out of a kind of sour humor that emerges under conditions of intense work and constant scrutiny. That doesn't justify the remarks, but it puts them squarely in the realm of the forgivably human -- which is to say, somewhere below the level at which senior military and civilian leaders must keep up appearances.

In the end, no unanswered questions about the quality of the article or the nature of the offense impeded a rush to judgment everywhere at once, which is fairly damning evidence of how much media have conditioned us to react before we think. The article that prompted General McChrystal's resignation did not even hit the stands before media personalities arriving on scene with promo copies of the piece in hand decided that he had to go. It did not need to happen this way. With the rapid rise of Rolling Stone and the sudden fall of General McChrystal, journalists and public servants who consider their positions a sacred trust have made it harder for themselves to hold out against the barbarians of secrecy, superficiality or sleaze. Once we stop to breathe on this story, we need to ask ourselves why.

Ralph Peters, Special Operations and the Perils of Secrecy

2010-06-19T06:38:00.005-04:00

The latest exercise in Karzai-bashing from media curmudgeon Ralph Peters is an interesting case study in confusing cause with effect. As usual, you can ignore Peters's assertions. President Karzai really doesn't want to stop night raids by special operations forces, and SOF activity in Afghanistan actually has increased dramatically under the leadership of the "conventionally minded generals and Are-we-there-yet? pols" that Peters derides. What you should pay attention to is Peters's anonymous source within the SOF community and that source's intent -- to demonstrate the effectiveness of SOF operations. Then ask yourself why such a leak was necessary.

The answer is secrecy. Because special operations are conducted outside the view of independent observers with outcomes reflected only in classified documents, they are highly vulnerable to insurgent propaganda and manipulation by lazy, gullible or dogmatic journalists. No one can say what happens during night raids except the raiders -- who are sworn to secrecy -- and the raidees -- who aren't predisposed to a charitable view of events. Add in sloppy operational reporting and military communicators who are ill-equipped to monitor and respond to rumors spreading among Afghans and you are left with the distortions of homicidal SOF running amok in Gardez and Nangahar, among other recent examples. You can't blame politicians, particularly Afghan politicians, for responding to these alleged atrocities in a reflexively political way. You also can't infer that public opposition from these politicians equates with private rejection of effective means to achieve necessary ends.

The blame for anti-SOF rhetoric rests less with public figures than with a lack of transparency in SOF operations that cannot effectively refute critics. (In much the same way, opposition to air strikes and detention operations stems from strangled information flows within those communities.) Special forces willing to accept all manner of risks do not often risk opening themselves to reporting in any meaningful way, even though such access can be managed with ground rules on releasable information and the various identity protections available to print, radio and television journalists.

No one should be surprised that this ends badly for SOF. Nor should we be surprised by the ironic denouement. A community that has resisted legitimate attempts at dialogue with credible third parties by abusing the provisions of operational security finally finds itself violating those same OPSEC provisions to stoke the sympathetic fumings of an apologist with little credibility among SOF's critics. To protect their freedom of manuever against those who would curb it, special forces don't need to convince Ralph Peters or the people who read him about the utility of violence. They need to convince -- which means they need to engage -- everyone else.

Paying Retail for Peace

2010-06-15T09:43:00.005-04:00

Once you get past the "my porridge is too hot" tone and lack of specificity inherent in the parable form chosen by the author, a recent post on ISAF's Afghan Hands blog by Col. Chris Kolenda makes an important point about Taliban reintegration and the politics of conflict resolution in Afghanistan. The most successful efforts at bringing insurgents back into their communities take place through individual initiatives at the retail level, as does the most effective modeling of official behavior to address community grievances that fuel the insurgency. When enough local efforts begin to flourish, momentum starts to shift. Effective national efforts -- rather than being sui generis solutions -- tend to reinforce local success.

The retail aspect of reintegration has important implications for media coverage of Afghanistan. International reporters tend to cover the peace process the way they would a national political contest between a wavering executive and an uncompromising opposition party. But the question of whether President Karzai is in a stronger or weaker negotiating position in relation to the Taliban, if not irrelevant, is at least premature. It lags grassroots efforts that will negotiate local complexities and subvert entrenched positions in a way that no national effort could, eroding Taliban claims to legitimacy rather than eliminating them at one stroke. When it comes to explaining the politics of peace in Afghanistan, we should distrust anyone who claims that they can get it for us wholesale.

The Comfort of Opinion

2010-06-14T13:32:00.008-04:00

News becomes news because the people who create it make subjective judgments about the importance and meaning of objective facts. Recent gloomy op-eds about Afghanistan in The New York Times and Washington Post follow an editorial tradition of trying to reverse engineer that process by deconstructing a few weeks of news -- a collection of subjective judgments -- into something resembling an objective trend. What the editors and reporters from the media that I choose to inform me have themselves chosen to tell me is that many bad things have happened in Afghanistan recently. That must mean that things in Afghanistan are going badly.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this system as long as it's governed by people who do their homework and retain the capacity for critical thought rather than reflexive criticism. Too often, though, media become enamored with their own narrative to the point of ignoring contrary evidence or the simplest explanation of events. With military assistance, journalists spun a story about a quick, decisive operation in Marjah with helicopter assaults and the regurgitation of pithy phrases like "government in a box." Because military leaders have changed their rhetoric heading into the larger effort in Kandahar, there must have been a fundamental flaw in the Marjah operation. Certainly the adjustment couldn't be something as simple as the military's reaction to reporters' flawed presentation of the previous action. Or, to take another example, what really matters to the cognoscenti about a high-profile report on Afghanistan's mineral wealth is not the strategic implications of the resources or the challenges of exploiting them for the benefit of the many rather than the few. What really matters is the political motives that can be inferred from the report's glaring dissonance with the current narrative, which has no room for delayed hope beyond the latest casualties of war or politics.

"The great enemy of the truth," President Kennedy warned us, "is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." Our Afghanistan policy faces real challenges but perhaps no greater challenge than myth-makers who try and convict that policy from a comfortable physical and intellectual distance. Yesterday six pros who have faced the discomforts of thinking about Afghanistan's complexities and of reporting from its less comfortable quarters -- Dexter Filkins, Nic Robertson, Corey Flintoff, Nick Schifrin, James Bays and Deb Riechmann -- did just that, and brought us a vision of President Karzai engaging if not yet solving the problems in Kandahar. A few more stories like that, and we may be looking at a trend.

Unfortunate Quote of the Day

2010-03-11T23:00:00.003-05:00

From a Corey Flintoff NPR piece on the challenges of training the Afghan army:

When asked why he had led his men ahead without telling the Marines, the Afghan captain, Mohammed Gharib, said his men had spotted a teenage boy in the area and wanted to check him out.

McChrystal in Brussels

2010-06-11T03:59:00.001-04:00

For more from the NATO defense ministerial, see BBC News or the transcript of the ISAF commander's roundtable with media accompanying U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Tempus Fugit or Fuggedaboutit?

2010-06-10T14:44:00.009-04:00

When did the Second World War start, and when did it end? There was a time when I could have answered that question confidently, dating the war from the invasion of Poland in 1939 to the surrender of Japan in 1945. But didn't the fighting really extend back to the Second Sino-Japanese war in 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931? And if we consider stabilization to be a necessary final chapter to armed struggle, can we say the war "ended" before the end of the occupation of Japan (1952) or Germany (1955)?

The war in Afghanistan, to judge by recent news reports, faces no such ambiguity. The war will end in July 2011, the date when President Obama pledged to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Never mind that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq after the surge there, which officially ended in July 2008, has only recently reduced the number of Americans serving in that country below the number serving in Afghanistan. The political clock is ticking. There are no alternatives 12 months from now but to declare victory or go home.

Assuming that our time in Afghanistan is truly limited, how best to make use of it? In Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 1, the French schemer Reignier advises "Defer no time; delays have dangerous ends." But the even more politically adroit Edgar in King Lear reminds us that, when it comes to time, "Ripeness is all."

Again, no need for subtleties when it comes to reporting the war. "Full speed ahead!" is the obvious answer. Any suggestion that there's value to be gained by moving more deliberately is untenable. A slower pace in places like Kandahar is an admission of weakness rather than wisdom. Our blitzkrieg into Baghdad, as these reporters well remember, is a testament to the fact that faster is always better.

There is undeniably growing impatience with what the calendar tells us will be a nine-year-old war in Afghanistan. The 46-nation coalition here needs to demonstrate progress soon if it hopes to sustain political support. But the newsrooms that bring us the world need to remember that the world is not a newsroom. It's difficult if not impossible to impose deadlines on wars, statesmen or nations -- even deadlines that are self-imposed. Reflecting on the time we have left in Afghanistan, and the chances for success between now and then, we're perhaps best guided by the immortal words of Yogi Berra: "It ain't over till it's over."

The Sound of Guns

2010-06-09T00:24:00.019-04:00

More than 170 media representatives are expected to be embedded with military units in southern Afghanistan this summer, a statistic that is at best a mixed blessing for public understanding of the war. At a time when coverage of world events is being eviscerated by the economics of the news business, any commitments made to report from farther afield than the oil-slicked Gulf Coast are heartening. Ultimately, though, the bulk of reporting from Kandahar Province this summer will be done by war tourists pursuing what the trade calls bang-bang.

Media's relentless march (or digital-age sprint) toward the sound of guns is nothing new, as seen in Punch's take on W.H. Russell (right), who made his name covering the Crimean War in the 1850's. The long tradition of chronicling men's courage, compassion, cruelty or cowardice under fire serves many purposes. It can rally us to support the troops or cause us to regret the loss of their bodies and souls. What traditional war reporting too often fails to do, though, is explain what purpose is served by this violence.

In February of this year, the public relations machine that is the United States Marine Corps descended on Marjah with a massive helicopter assault followed by 60 days of hard fighting against insurgents who had dominated the area for years. Then the cameras went away, because the work yet to be done -- replacing the Taliban's rough justice and taxation with more humane, more inclusive and less corrupt governance, able to deliver the basic services that the local community had long been denied -- was like watching paint dry. The lack of immediate results proved an infuriating tedium for reporters, who grew surly in their predictions of failure despite slow progress in Marjah and greater progress across larger swaths of the Central Helmand River Valley. If not for the killings carried out by insurgents -- now significantly on the margins of life in Marjah, trying to get back in -- there would have been no good copy.

As forces flow toward Kandahar Province in the coming weeks, everyone seems eager to make the same mistakes. Patient followers of events in Afghanistan's southern provinces like the New York Times may be warming to the essential political and economic components of the stability effort, but don't count on the Times or other reporters to cover this story effectively, for two reasons.

First, journalistic impatience and an obsession with the violence are part of a larger bias toward conflict narratives that in political terms depend on outsized personalities and fork-tongued sources who mainly reside in Kabul. Reporters' attention therefore centers on the wholesale (national) level of politics rather than the retail (local) level that matters most to the majority of Afghans. The exceptions are usually those cases where local politicians can be linked to national-level intrigue, as with Ahmed Wali Karzai. For American readers, Bob Woodward is a good source for gossip about Washington politics, but he probably would not be the reporter of choice for explaining the dynamics of a city council race in Des Moines. Unfortunately, even Western media outlets who maintain a more or less permanent presence in Afghanistan are using the Kabul-based equivalents of Bob Woodward to cover politics in the South -- with only a few selectively connected and variably objective Afghan stringers and self-proclaimed experts to guide them.

Second, nearly a decade of hand-wringing about the state of public diplomacy has not given us a communication capability that represents diplomats or aid workers to even the modest level of their typically tight-lipped military partners. Although military forces schooled in counterinsurgency are willing to acknowledge the centrality of governance and development, there are too few civilians in Afghanistan able to back up that sentiment and put their collective mouth where their nation's money is. What's not said in Washington or London or Berlin or Paris or Ottawa about the political and economic end state of our efforts in Afghanistan and our progress toward that end is often not said at all.

Impatience and ignorance have bred a sense of impossibility about our efforts in Afghanistan. The death and disruption caused by military action against insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to exert undeniable pressure, but any attempt to seal the deal with a political solution seems insane to many -- in no small part because the associated media narrative has all the coherence of a schizophrenic. Afghanistan is plagued by poverty, crime, illiteracy and social oppression, but the current Afghan government fails to meet expectations that far exceed anything an alternative arrangement could provide under these conditions. A stable Afghanistan requires credible leadership, but the unredeemable Karzai government begs for immediate, heavy-handed political intervention by foreigners. Afghan leaders must be independent, except when they must be pliable. Legitimate governance must be more inclusive, but dissent or disagreement with the government is a sign of internal weakness. It is both necessary and reprehensible to engage in political negotiations with the Taliban.

It is the job of policymakers to negotiate these choices, but it is the job of journalists to help light the way. Neither side has played its role particularly well since we finally started caring about Afghanistan. After herds of reporters go on patrol in search of the next Big Bang in Kandahar this summer, here's hoping that this time a few more stick around to describe what that explosive moment creates.

Where's Quatto?

2010-06-05T00:26:00.006-04:00

The long break in the blog has been the result of the practical application of the Department of Defense's social media policy in the Afghanistan theater. Ostensibly designed to expand government transparency, improve information sharing, boost morale and cure cancer, the real local impact of the policy has been to allow military communications specialists to exercise their basest bureaucratic instincts. By declaring that government systems should permit access to social media except in cases where operational security, bandwidth or other considerations require local limitations, the policy has served mainly to identify exemptions that can justify widespread restrictions on access. The exceptions have become the rule, with the result that unofficial bloggers in Afghanistan are forced to turn to a limited number of clogged commercial lines. Where blogs once could be knocked out around 15-minute mental breaks from the daily grind, they're now published in the wee small hours of the morning after 18-hour work days. Or, in the case of those who prefer to spend the off-hours catching up with their families, their friends and their sleep -- including yours truly -- they're not published at all.

Thanks to some gentle encouragement from readers in Kabul, Washington and Europe, though, I'm making an effort to put out a few posts each week during my remaining months in Afghanistan. As much as I'd like to look back in anger at some of the grosser media misadventures I've been a part of during the past couple of months -- the telenovela of a fearless blogger's self-imposed alienation and exile, the manufactured controversy over the suggestion that sometimes soldiers who don't kill people can be considered brave, the inexplicable position of otherwise sane and responsible editors that somehow an inaccurate headline isn't a big deal -- I won't try to cover lost ground. There's plenty of substance and silliness to write about here and now.

More Marjah Madness

2010-03-10T15:00:00.005-05:00

One of the things that most disturbs me about my job is how otherwise thoughtful people somehow manage to jump off the Reason Train short of Plausible Junction, taking a sizable number of otherwise sane bloggers with them.

Case in point this week is Gareth Porter at Anti-War.com, who has somehow managed to convince himself and a bunch of people repeating his post that briefings and press accounts describing the rural community of Marjah as a "town" or "city" was somehow a misinformation campaign by the evil militarists of 40-plus nations who are committed to eroding their political support by duping the public into extending an unpopular war in the hopes of killing as many brown people as possible. Or something like that. A search for clear motives tends to muddle an otherwise pristine paranoia.

Gareth's argument is supported by an ISAF official "who asked not to be identified" confirming that Marjah is a "rural community" -- which adds to the air of a secret plot revealed. Except there's no secret. The official was me, and I didn't ask to be quoted anonymously.

The rest of my dismay is in my email to Gareth, quoted here in full:

Gareth,

I swore to myself I'd just drop this, but your earnestness on a fairly trivial matter is irresistible. You do in fact have small cities or large towns roughly the size and population of Marjah as the Marines described it. Not normally where I come from in Pennsylvania, true. But my wife's hometown -- Lawton, Oklahoma, home of the US Army's Fort Sill -- is described by its residents as a "city" of 93,000 people spread out over about 195 square kilometers--in other words, almost exactly like Marjah in size and population density. And typing in "town 200 square kilometers" in Google, I clicked right through to Shuangshui "Town" in Guangdong Province, China (about the same size and population of Lawton) and the "town" of Markham, Ontario, Canada (which really should be a "city" if there's a definable standard for the term, since it has more than twice the population of Lawton spread over 212 square kilometers).
I'm sure all these locations are guilty of "information war" in the sense of civic boosterism, but I also think it demonstrates that the terms have no precise meaning and therefore don't imply some kind of malicious intent when used with respect to Marjah.

At this point, I think any further objections will only serve to fuel greater suspicions of some kind of linguistic conspiracy on your part. I just have to say that for someone who strikes me as a very thoughtful guy, you've done your readers a disservice by creating a pseudo-issue when so many real issues about Afghanistan are under-reported.

Rocket's Dead Blare

2010-03-07T20:00:00.003-05:00

James Bays of Al Jazeera English is probably the best television reporter working on any given day in Afghanistan, which is why I was disappointed to watch the public unspooling of his obsession with a dud rocket that landed 4 kilometers from Marjah during President Karzai's historic visit there today. You get some taste for it in the Al Jaz print story, but on live TV it resembled a hymn to the intelligence and operational effectiveness of the Taliban.

Like the Western reporters I escorted on the visit, I can confirm there was never any danger. Beyond establishing the facts on the ground, though, the report is illustrative of the interpretive bias of too many reporters here.

Let's say the President attends a public meeting, and many people -- including his opponents -- know about it. If the President is Obama, then that's publicity. If the President is Karzai, then that's the sign of a sophisticated intelligence network. A large number of heavily armed men hate the President, want to kill him, and are able to express their rage impotently, miles away from their target. If we are talking gun-toting wingnuts and President Obama, then we assume the good guys did their job. If we are talking Taliban and President Karzai, then we attribute it to the prowess of the bad guys. People venting their frustrations to an American politician is a healthy exercise in civic responsibility. People venting their frustrations to an Afghan politician is an indication of hopelessness, corruption ... pick your malaise.

This is not to say that Marjah is completely secure and without deep social problems. It is neither of those things. And precisely because it is neither of those things, it's not necessary to peer at places like Marjah through shit-colored glasses to convince people you're being objective. Leave the rockets where they lie: far away from the real story.

How Is Ravin' Like FP's Writing Desk?

2010-03-02T08:00:00.009-05:00

I don't agree with the "Down the AF-PAK Rabbit Hole," but props from one reformed Victorian lit student to Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason in Foreign Policy for going deep in the first quarter to come up with this lede:

The release of Tim Burton's new blockbuster movie, Alice in Wonderland, is days away. The timing could not be more appropriate. Lewis Carroll's ironically opium-inspired tale of a rational person caught up inside a mad world with its own bizarre but consistent internal (il)logic has now surpassed Vietnam as the best paradigm to understand the war in Afghanistan.

Other than the English geek observation that Alice wasn't so much inspired by opium use, why disagree with the authors? Because Marjah is not as they claim a "nearly worthless postage stamp of real estate" that is being secured in "a giant public affairs exercise, designed to shore up dwindling domestic support for the war by creating an illusion of progress." The geographic area of Operation Moshtarak -- much larger than the town of Marjah that has become the media shorthand for the offensive -- connects two larger areas of the Central Helmand River Valley previously secured by U.S. and U.K. forces. Insurgents had turned the area into a safe haven for operations against Afghans and international forces, including what was the primary point of manufacture for the improvised explosive devices used in southern Afghanistan.

In other words, the Marjah "postage stamp" was on a letter bomb addressed to the Afghan people as well as the young men and women of more than 40 nations serving here. Securing this area means establishing a contiguous zone of security in the popular and economic heart of the Taliban insurgency -- which is exactly what the political and military strategy laid out for Afghanistan says we should do. Operation Moshtarak isn't the alpha and omega of stability in Afghanistan. But it's not a bad start.

There's no shame in using real success consistent with strategy to boost public support of the strategy, because you're not creating false hope. You're reflecting real hope. What's being peddled in Afghanistan right now is not the illusion of progress but the gen-u-wine article. How long will our policy and media elites remain so bitter about the Bush era that they're unwilling to buy it?

McChrystal on Moshtarak

2010-02-26T12:00:00.001-05:00

Money Talks

2010-01-30T07:05:00.007-05:00

Where would we be without the moral compass of punditry? This week, we would be in a world where it was O.K. to "buy off" the Taliban with the $500 million reportedly pledged at this week's London Conference for reintegration efforts in Afghanistan. Thank you, pundits, for saving us from this error. How silly to think that after eight years of trying to solve the country's problems with violence that something as simple as a little more money might be worth a shot.

Although critics have done their best by using loaded terms such as "bribe" to discuss reintegration, the actual arguments against the initiative aren't very strong.

The first is that reintegration hasn't worked yet in Afghanistan. In Newsweek, for example, Ron Moreau contends that past Taliban defectors "now live hand-to-mouth in Kabul, exiled from their home villages." Well, yes, because without an adequate national reintegration program and forces sufficient to clear and hold areas from Taliban control, bringing former fighters back into their local communities with alternative means of economic support wasn't an option. Now it is.

The second argument is that reintegration of Taliban fighters is not possible because of their extreme worldview. Although this is doubtlessly true of a minority of insurgents who will choose to fight to the bitter end, General McChrystal is also right to observe that "a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome." Canada's Globe and Mail chided McChrystal for dipping his toe into politics and history with that remark, citing Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II as an example of violence alone ending a conflict with a population seized by a totalitarian ideology.

Assuming for a moment that the Afghan equivalent of 60 million dead from this kind of total war was desirable, what would come after such a bloodier victory? There is always a price tag for stability. In the case of World War II, stability in Europe alone cost $13 billion for the Marshall Plan (5% of the U.S. GDP at the time, or the equivalent of $710 billion today), plus another $12 billion in aid granted before the start of the Plan, plus (if you want to take the long view) the cost of the Cold War. If a lot of money after six years of devastation cured Europe of fascism and produced the greatest foreign policy success of the century, then after 30 years of devastation is there any reason to dismiss reintegration funds so readily as a cure for Talibanism in Afghanistan?

The third argument against reintegration is the most persuasive: that it is simply too early to negotiate. Taliban insurgents are arguably at the height of their power since 2001. Why talk now? The gamble is that the Taliban recognize that there already has been a clear shift in momentum toward Afghan and coalition forces -- signified most clearly by U.S. and European commitments of thousands of additional personnel and an Afghan force increasingly able to thwart and contain insurgent violence, as demonstrated during recent attacks in Kabul and Lashkar Gah. As insurgents feel the squeeze from increasingly effective operations against them, they may come to covet what reintegration offers: not simply cash, but a way out of the fight through job skills they can apply to projects that will help them rebuild shattered communities.

It may indeed be too early for many insurgents to reach this conclusion. But it's also not clear that backing them into a corner -- offering them no alternative but to fight, kill and die for a lost cause -- is a better solution.

Watchmen: Cable Guy, the Sequel

2010-01-25T08:00:00.003-05:00

Here is my favorite line from this morning's New York Times story by Eric Schmitt on the two cables sent in November by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry to senior officials involved in President Obama's Afghanistan strategy review:

... the strong language of the cables may increase tensions between the ambassador and the Karzai government, especially as world leaders meet in London on Thursday to discuss a much-debated Afghan plan to reintegrate Taliban fighters.

At least, we can only hope that the leak will increase those tensions, because any fireworks at the London Conference and the ensuing recriminations in Kabul would make for great copy in the Times.

I had started to get over my previous sour note about the quality of reporting on Afghanistan, until I came across this example of conflict obsession, political category. The substance of the Ambassador's cables leaked when they mattered: during the strategy deliberations. What's the purpose of leaking them in full this week? Because it's "important for the historical record that Mr. Eikenberry’s detailed assessments be made public," as the high-minded Times source suggested? Because if the Times didn't, someone else would? Because the putrid stench of a dead controversy remains irresistible, even on the cusp of a possible political breakthrough that would help resolve the conflict in Afghanistan?

We can only speculate on the motivations, but one thing is clear. Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., now has the inside track on next year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Political Surrender

2010-01-23T20:00:00.002-05:00

From an editorial entitled "Fear of the Citizen" in today's Die Welt, a timely reminder to attendees of this week's London Conference that the skeptical pragmatism in international affairs is often a mask for domestic political convenience:

Democracy doesn't live by its politicians not straying too far from the popular will but instead being in the forefront on important questions and managing to persuade their voters. Little can be felt of this ambition, which is why for years the talk shows have been full of comments that everything is already lost anyway in the Hindu Kush. After all, that is the easiest thing: If everything is in vain anyway, there is no reason why one should make the effort to make it better.

Those Fingers in My Hair...

2010-01-12T12:12:00.005-05:00

Following some long hours working on ABC World News Tonight coverage from Afghanistan -- a rough, long, cold slog for everyone involved -- here's a look at Diane Sawyer in more carefree (if somewhat creepier) times.

Watchmen: The Buzkashi Blues

2010-01-21T07:00:00.003-05:00

The national sport of Afghanistan, buzkashi, involves riders wrestling over the corpse of a headless calf or goat. The game is therefore the perfect metaphor for recent press coverage of Afghanistan.

No lover of language can fail to appreciate the allure of good combat reporting. No lover of freedom can fail to acknowledge the value of a skeptical press. In Afghanistan today, though, we're seeing too much of a good thing: chasing conflict for the sake of writing breathless accounts of conflict, or enshrining skepticism above any constructive virtue to prove to the world that you are nobody's fool. Like buzkashi, the rewards for these current modes of journalistic sport are money, the acclaim of your peers and, well, something about as valuable to the future of Afghanistan as a headless carcass.

It's a tenet of General McChrystal's approach to counterinsurgency that the operational environment is inherently complex. A lack of any fixed point of reference beyond conflict and doubt, however, makes most journalistic descriptions of the operational environment needlessly complex:

A daring attack in Kabul heralds a resurgent Taliban. Roll the tape. Boom! Bang!
Bang! Except what's shown but never described faithfully is a botched suicide attack in the capital of a war-torn country -- foiled by allegedly inept security forces, and roughly equal in both its grim inevitability and its grisly outcome to any college-campus shooting spree.

It's time to face the facts in Afghanistan. General McChrystal is a fearless truthteller for reinforcing my own doubts in his initial assessment of August 2009, so we know he is lying when he expresses a scintilla of optimism five months later. You can also rest assured that the civilian effort in Afghanistan is a shambles, but any effort by NATO to strengthen it must reflect European resentment of American leadership.

This is how many of us spend our days here, fighting for the honor of dragging the body of truth around in the dust of Afghanistan. But don't worry. It's only a game.

The Backbone's Connected to the ... What?

2009-12-29T03:42:00.007-05:00

Six days ago, I suggested that President Karzai's ability to connect with the Afghan people -- a compassion and charisma evidenced in his visits with army casualties and police cadets -- could be an important source of the government's public rehabilitation. After the government's reaction to allegations of civilian casualties in Konar Province, it is clear that another important source must be political backbone.

Among the early reports of the incident, the only one that touched on the true significance of the government's reaction was the New York Times. The others played a game of follow-the-bouncing demagogue.

The first reports by Afghan radio, TV and print outlets on Sunday paired statements from local officials that 10 "militants" were killed with Taliban propaganda claims that said 10 members of the coalition force were killed (although not before the coalition apparently had managed to kill an unspecified number of civilians with an air strike that, according to all other sources, never occurred). After representatives from Konar and other eastern provinces walked out of a parliamentary session in protest of alleged civilian deaths, President Karzai announced an investigation into the death of 10 "civilians," including 8 "students" or "schoolchildren" (depending on the translation). In the Western reports that followed the President's announcement (including the inevitable burial procession on Al Jazeera), the police chief and governor of Konar -- early proponents of the 10 "militants" line -- reversed themselves, although other Afghan officials insisted that the casualties were militants.

Of course, public officials have the right to change their minds, and "civilian" casualties in counterinsurgency operations are notoriously hard to categorize. In the end, every insurgent is someone's angelic son or neighbor. But if the Western reaction to this ambiguity is obsessed with procedural detail ("we cannot comment until we investigate"), the Afghan reaction -- at least of late -- is obsessed with political denunciation ("we feel the foreigners have done a horrible thing, so we must investigate"). This is not a good foundation for a partnership.

No one should envy President Karzai's position or belittle his instinct for compromise, but political opportunism is virtue that falls easily into vice. ISAF forces have made mistakes that have earned them the presumption of guilt in some quarters, but the Afghan government cannot be one of those quarters. Unless those supporting the allegations of civilian casualties in this case possess more evidence than has surfaced to date, government officials seem to be pushing an anti-coalition line to curry short-term favor with local interests that ultimately seek their demise. That seems unwise. Leaders know when not to be led.

Christmas in Kabul

2009-12-25T11:35:00.000-05:00

Every morning while I'm shaving, there's a ritual sideways glance and a muttered "Good morning" to the other NATO officers shuffling up to the sinks in our latrine. This morning, the guy beside me turned to look me in the eye and boomed, in heavily accented English, "No 'good morning.' Merry Christmas!"

Well, yes and no. The military certainly does its best to make holidays away from home special. Dinner last night and lunch today was like a supermarket ad for Christmas: a long table of decoratively arranged fruit, another of assorted breads, carved meats, pies served up with generous dollops of whipped cream. Whitney Houston glissandoed her way through "Do You Hear What I Hear?" from speakers everywhere. The gym hosted an oxymoronic 5K fun run at 8:30 a.m., which featured lots of Santa hats. Smiles and jokes were more frequent, and most of them weren't forced.

But still. Last night, I talked to my seven-year-old son. He launched into an excited description of everything he'd been doing with the extra three days off from school that the recent snowstorm had given him. Then he remembered why I was calling. "I miss you, Daddy," he said. "I won't like Christmas that much without you." As tough as the rest of that conversation was with him, my daughter and my wife, they will probably have me home for Christmas next year. Other wives, husbands, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers won't be so fortunate.

Those of us working in Afghanistan have disembodied relationships with our loved ones -- the stuff of phone, email and Skype -- but there are high times and low times when we can feel their faith and support. Because of our parents, we know what the world is, that goodness grows in the soil of difficult and sometimes dangerous things. Because of our children, we have confidence in what the world can become, if enough of us will make the choice to do those things. We fight because we live in a world where we have to. With care and luck, we rush home to the world we've created because we want to. It's not always easy to live with these contradictions, but even on a Christmas far away from home it's tougher to think of a better way to live.

Santa is tougher than IEDs

2009-12-25T10:27:00.001-05:00

Local Boy Makes Good

2009-12-23T12:01:00.003-05:00

Observing President Karzai's visit to wounded Afghan soldiers and the national police's training center in Kabul today, I was reminded of a passage in Bing West's The Village, the story of a small group of Marines who lived and fought among the people in a group of villages along the Tra Bong River in Vietnam.

In the scene, the Marines are denounced by a visiting group of South Vietnamese university students, who cite Martin Luther King and Senator James Fulbright's opposition to the war, as well as General Westmoreland's controversial support of Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky. One of the Marines responds:

Look...you want to know what we're doing here? Ask Suong. Ask Khoi. Ask anyone. Ask the [Viet Cong]. We're here to fight VC. We're here to help people who seem to be friends of yours. If you don't like what I've done here, or what my men are doing, O.K., let's have it. But don't yell at me about General Westmoreland or Senator Fulbright. My job is in this village. I'm not a general, and I'm not a politician.

The point of this passage is that great men and movements are what the newspapers and the history books (and the intelligentsia who read both) care about the most, but ultimately the politics of counterinsurgency are local.

Unlike the agitated Marine in West's book, President Karzai is a politician -- one who has drawn the wrath of the commentariat for the questionable circumstances of his re-election, the rampant cronyism of his government, and the shady-to-deadly doings of his family and political appointees. Although it's fashionable to chatter disapprovingly beside the graveside of Afghan political leadership, the President still could manage a resurrection, in part by adopting and fostering a local approach.

Today, President Karzai left his palace. He talked to men who have made enormous sacrifices in defense of Afghanistan, and those who are about to. He shook their hands -- every hand, in fact. He consoled them, amused them, and inspired them. Even after the armored convoys had rolled away, a lot of Afghans kept talking with tears and smiles about what it meant to meet their President.

Whether Karzai's sins have been venal or the price of what little stability Afghanistan has managed so far, they clearly have alienated many would-be successors of King and Fulbright. What matters most to the future of Afghanistan, though, is not the moral approval of the West but the connection of the President, his ministers, and government officials at every level to the people. By continuing to set the example he set today, President Karzai makes it just a little more likely that when the international community asks what he's doing here, he can answer "Ask Farshad. Ask Zarmina. Ask anyone."

Smoke 'Em If You've Got 'Em (Bad Guys, That Is)

2009-12-22T01:04:00.010-05:00

I put off reading Noah Shachtman 's recent story for Wired, "How the Afghanistan Air War Got Stuck in the Sky" (now rewritten for today's New York Post), because I suspected that as an Airman in Afghanistan it would pull me in contradictory directions. I was right, but if you want insight into how our troops wrestle with the idea of using lethal force you should read the piece. Sean Naylor's recent Army Times article on the trials of a Stryker Brigade in the Arghandab River Valley is another important variation on this theme.

Both articles, however, perpetuate a false dichotomy common to the debate over General McChrystal's tactical directive. Commentators tend to contrast what they see as the ISAF Commander's Afghan-hugging, nation-building counterinsurgency agenda with the proud American tradition of being able to create smoking holes in the ground where our enemies once stood.

In reality, General McChrystal's directive does not stand in opposition to killing the enemy. The rules don't deny soldiers the lethal force necessary for self-defense. Targeted special operations against insurgent networks are up. For better and worse, contact between friendly forces and insurgents have and will increase as Coalition and Afghan forces push to establish their control of contested areas. In the short term, Afghanistan is getting more violent in key areas under the current strategy, but for the right reason. Coalition forces are cutting a metastasizing insurgency out of the body of the Afghan public, providing time and space for Afghanistan to develop security forces, local governance and other ways to fight possible remissions.

Yes, the directive does seek restraint and precision in the use of violence to limit the kind of popular anger that feeds the insurgency. But such constraints are a common feature of most modern wars, and unlike other conflicts fought in the past four decades the constraints in Afghanistan have the virtue of being enforced primarily through the judgment of local commanders.

What we see in Schatchman and Naylor's articles, then, is not so much the tension between commander's intent and the need to apply violence as it is the tension between commander's intent and the ability of subordinates to translate that guidance in their daily operations. Schatchman's sources seem to think that counterinsurgency means no (or at least insufficient) air or artillery support. The commanders criticized by Naylor seem to think that protecting the population roughly equates to killing the enemy that threatens them. Both positions find some support in the language and experience of COIN, but not enough to be valid interpretations of the current strategy.

Although they arrive at different conclusion, Schatchman and Naylor both address the most common question about the tactical directive: whether it is appropriate to handcuff (to use the critics' formulation) our troops. A better question in the months ahead is whether -- in the way ISAF communicates and applies COIN guidance -- our troops are doing too little or too much to handcuff themselves.