Out of Touch...?

As long as there has been war, there has been disgruntlment among the troops, sometimes aimed at the leaders. Here's a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel's take on OEF and ISAF. Is this that observation of someone who's out of touch with digital warfare, or is there some ground truth?

When I was a young officer in training, we mocked the European “chateaux generals” of the First World War who gave their orders from elegant headquarters without ever experiencing the reality faced by the troops in the trenches. We never thought that we’d have chateaux generals of our own, but now we do. Flying down to visit an outpost and staying just long enough to pin on a medal or two, get a dog-and-pony-show briefing and have a well-scripted tea session with a carefully selected “good” tribal elder, then winging straight back to a well-protected headquarters where the electronics are more real than the troops is not the way to develop a “fingertips feel” for on-the-ground reality.

Add in the human capacity for self-delusion, and you have a surefire prescription for failure.

Right now, our troops are being used as props in a campaign year, as pawns by dull-witted generals who just don’t know what else to do, and as cash cows by corrupt Afghan politicians, generals and warlords (all of whom agree that it’s virtuous to rob the Americans blind).

Read the full commentary here.

The Strategic Staff Sergeant

From the NYT:

PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Displaced by the war, Abdul Samad finally moved his large family back home to this volatile district of southern Afghanistan last year. He feared the Taliban, but his new house was nestled near an American military base, where he considered himself safe.

But when Mr. Samad, 60, walked into his mud-walled dwelling here on Sunday morning and found 11 of his relatives sprawled in all directions, shot in the head, stabbed and burned, he learned the culprit was not a Taliban insurgent. The suspected gunman was a 38-year-old United States staff sergeant who had slipped out of the base to kill.

Read the article here.
In contrast, read USMC Gen. Charles C. Krulak's original 1999 article on the Strategic Corporal here.

Hearts and Minds

A report prepared for ISAF's RC-East claims the rising number of coalition forces being killed by Afghanistan National Army and Police partners is indicative of a deeper animosity growing between the allies' lower ranks.

“Lethal altercations are clearly not rare or isolated; they reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern military history),” said the report. Official NATO pronouncements to the contrary “seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest.”

Read the article here.

Europe After the War; JPB on the Ground

Ben Shephard's The Long Road Home documents  jus post bellum issues arising in the efforts to manage mass migrations of displaced persons after WWII:

One heart-rending chapter deals with the efforts to reunite children with their mothers and fathers. On the face of it, this sounds like an incontrovertibly good thing, in particular for those infants who had been stolen from their families by the Nazis on account of their “Aryan” looks and reassigned to German foster parents. Yet was it right to wrench children away from their new families against their will, especially in cases when it was not clear that the true parents could be found or that they wanted their children back? U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration staffers divided on the issue, some feeling that the effort had to be made by way of atonement for the original wrong, and others skeptical that returning children to their birth countries was necessarily in their best interests.

Read the NYT review here.

Criticizing COIN

NYT reviewed Bing West's The Wrong War, which offers and account of the U.S. Military's COIN strategy from the soldiers' perspective:

“The Wrong War” amounts to a crushing and seemingly irrefutable critique of the American plan in Afghanistan. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand why the war there is so hard... [The] basic argument can be summed up like this: American soldiers and Marines are very good at counterinsurgency, and they are breaking their hearts, and losing their lives, doing it so hard. But the central premise of counterinsurgency doctrine holds that if the Americans sacrifice on behalf of the Afghan government, then the Afghan people will risk their lives for that same government in return. This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them. Afghanistan’s leaders, from the presidential palace in Kabul to the river valleys in the Pashtun heartland, are enriching themselves, often criminally, on America’s largesse. The Taliban, whatever else they do, fight hard and for very little reward. American soldiers, handcuffed by strict rules of engagement, have surrendered the initiative to their enemies. Most important, the Afghan people, though almost certainly opposed to a Taliban redux, are equally wary of both the Americans and their Afghan “leaders.” They will happily take the riches lavished on them by the Americans, but they will not risk their lives for either the Americans or their own government. The Afghans are waiting to see who prevails, but prevailing is impossible without their help.

Read the review here.