The COIN Myth

The U.S. military’s fabled counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24) is an authoritative-sounding 281-page volume of balderdash. Even the legend of its origin is a fabrication. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of forces in Iraq and now in charge of Central Command, supposedly "wrote the book," but the book was actually hammered together from plagiarized material in 2004 by Dr. Conrad Crane and others at the Army War College.

This was during the time frame that "King David" Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, a tour during which he lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols and other combat equipment that without question wound up in the hands of militants. The part of the manual Petraeus "wrote" was his signature on the manual’s endorsement letter when he was in command of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center in 2006.

There’s nothing new in the military about generals taking credit for the hard work of underlings, of course, especially when the general in question is a fast-rising self-promotion genius like "Teflon General" Petraeus. And plagiarism is so common in military publications that it’s the norm, not the exception. Like I used to say in my active-duty days, if you really think the brass want you to think out of the box, you’re out of your mind. Military doctrine is loaded with copy-and-paste palaver that goes back decades, sometimes more than a century, reflecting the expert perspective of experts who died so long ago that nobody can tell you who they were. That way, nobody swings in the wind for having an original idea that doesn’t work out.

That’s much of the reason we nearly always execute tactics and strategies that apply to wars other than the ones we’re actually fighting. Our present counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine is a perfect example. It is inadequate in many ways, but four aspects of it are particularly at odds with today’s conditions on the ground.

Bastard Stepchildren

The COIN manual states, "The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government."

We have clearly failed to meet this objective in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and we’re not likely to achieve it in either country unless we stick around with a six-digit troop presence long enough to influence the local gene pools.

Iraq’s Shi’ite-controlled government, led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is a catastrophe. As Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team chief Col. Timothy Reese recently noted, "The ineffectiveness and corruption of [Iraqi government] ministries is the stuff of legend." The anti-corruption campaign is a farce, nothing more than a Maliki campaign tool. Iraq’s government is failing to improve its electrical infrastructure and its oil industry. There has no progress in resolving the Kirkuk situation. Sunni militiamen are not being transitioned into government service as promised. Sunni reconciliation is "probably going backwards." Political violence and intimidation is "rampant in the civilian community as well as military and legal institutions." A recent study by Transparency International rates Iraq as the fifth most corrupt country in the world. That makes it almost as corrupt as Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is the second most corrupt country in the world, surpassed in this category only by Somalia, a country that can hardly be said to have a government at all. Though Afghan President Hamid Karzai held on to power by stealing two elections, the Obama administration tripped all over itself in declaring him the "legitimate" leader of Pakistan. Karzai is a former warlord who has blood ties to the Afghan opium industry. Obama has told Karzai better clean up his act, to begin a "new chapter," but if our president really believes Karzai’s going to change, he needs to step away from the hookah.

Army Training, Sir

The COIN manual emphasizes the need to use host nation forces in a variety of roles, either as the "hold" force in a clear, hold, and build strategy; as part of a "combined force"; or as the main force supported in a "limited" degree by U.S. forces. The problem with the theory is that it assumes a certain level of competence and integrity, or at least a potential to become competent and integral, on the part of the host nation forces, virtues we see little of in the security forces of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Col. Reese notes of Iraq’s army that, "If there ever was a window where the seeds of a professional military culture could have been implanted, it is now long past." Corruption in the officer corps, he says, is "rampant," as are cronyism and nepotism. Laziness is "endemic," and lack of initiative is "legion." Reese describes the "ineffectiveness" of Iraq’s army and national police force as "near total."

Mohammed Hussein, the Iraqi head of the newsroom of the New York Times Baghdad bureau, laments, "Some will probably say that the government got rid of the sectarian violence … [but] after six years we have the same results as if there were still a sectarian war going on: Iraqis are being killed in cold blood."

Worse news: it looks like Iraq’s police and army have been infiltrated by militants. Maliki himself revealed that more than 45 members of his security forces were involved in the December Baghdad bombings that killed 112 people.

Speaking of untrustworthy, Afghan forces are a full-blown Wild West show. In a recent confrontation between Afghan and Western troops, an Afghan soldier, who was refused access to a landing pad where a helicopter was about to set down, raised his rifle and started squeezing the trigger, wounding two Italian soldiers and killing an American Army combat medic. When U.S. company commanders meet with their Afghan counterparts, they wear body armor and helmet, and an armed security detail tags along.

David Wood of Politics Daily describes numerous other accounts of Afghan forces attacking and killing or wounding U.S. and NATO forces.

When it comes to combat, the Taliban routinely kick the uniformed Afghan forces’ teeth in. The hapless Afghan army commanders complain that the police are on the Taliban’s payroll. The police and the Taliban are "from the same area" says Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahmani. "They collude with each other."

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, says that mission success “will require trust-based, expanded partnering" with the Afghan army and police force.

It sounds like Stan the Man needs to step away from the hookah, too.

In Part II: The search for intelligent life in our intelligence apparatus.

Old Blackwater Keeps on Rollin'

You know about those five Blackwater guards who shot up 17 Iraqis in Sept. 2007 for no apparent reason and who recently got their case dismissed by a federal judge on a technicality? Well, the U.S, prosecutors knew their case would go down like the Hindenburg from the get go. (Blackwater has officially changed its name to "Xe" but everybody still calls it "Blackwater," so we will too.)

The prosecutors based their case on statements the Blackwater guards had made in an initial report on the massacre. As government contractors, the guards were required to make those statements. The Constitution protects defendants from having to testify against themselves, so the statements in the required report couldn’t be used in a prosecution. But the prosecution built its case around the statements anyway.

Less than two weeks after the bloodbath occurred, lawyers at the State Department cautioned that the prosecutors might be poking the pooch by basing their case on the mandatory statements. Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court in Washington, in handing down his decision to throw the case in the dumpster, said the prosecutors had failed to take "common sense precautions" to avoid the self-incrimination problem.

One can’t help but wonder if the prosecutors failed to apply common sense on purpose. The prosecution team, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kohl of the District of Columbia, "purposely flouted" repeated warnings of a Justice Department "taint team" not to rely on compelled statements from the guards, Judge Urbina wrote.

Kenneth Kohl worked for the Bush administration’s Justice Department, which primarily existed to define anything Dick Cheney wanted to do in Bush’s name as "legal." Blackwater founder and ex-Navy Seal Erik Prince is a wealthy, fundamentalist Christian Republican who comes from a powerful Michigan Republican family. Prince was a member of the Bush/Cheney ‘04 Organization in Arlington, Virginia, and has been a generous contributor to GOP candidates and organizations.

And five of his employees just got away with murder because of a foul up by a Bush administration Assistant U.S. Attorney that could have been easily avoided.

Spies of Fortune

Two of the seven "CIA officers" killed in Afghanistan on Dec. 30 were Blackwater contractors. The CIA considered the Blackwater mercenaries to be CIA officers. A former top CIA officer says that the agency and Blackwater have developed a "brotherly relationship" and that the mercenary group has become "an extension of the agency." One has to wonder if these spies of fortune had to take an oath of office, or if they were subject to the same rules and laws as real CIA agents. I doubt it. Mercenary security guards like the ones who just skated in federal court are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as the Baghdad slaughter case Judge Urbina just threw out clearly illustrates.

The bomber who killed the CIA folks in Afghanistan was being courted as an intelligence source, and was invited on base and was not searched. It’s both ironic and disheartening to realize that eight years and change into the Af-Pak project our intelligence apparatus there is still so broken, despite its brotherly relationship with mighty Blackwater, that seven CIA agents got blown away by someone they thought they could trust. The narrative, dictated by the CIA, originally blamed the Taliban for the bombing (the Taliban took credit for it). Later, the bomber became a "double agent," for al-Qaeda. The latest twist has the Associated Press telling us the bomber was actually working for Jordanian intelligence, that the Jordanians coerced him into trying to penetrate al-Qaeda for them. I can’t wait to see whom gets blamed next. This is starting to sound like a satiric spy novel by Graham Greene or John Le Carre, isn’t it?

In that vein, an unnamed U.S. intelligence official told news agencies that "This attack will be avenged through successful, aggressive counterterrorism operations.” Given the way our intelligence agencies have performed from the skivvy bomber affair clear back to missing the signs that Iraq was about to invade Kuwait, the vengeance for the Afghanistan bombing is likely to resemble the vengeance we took on Saddam Hussein for having nothing to do with 9/11: The CIA will hire Blackwater to fly its remote controlled zeppelin (yes, they really have one) over Yemen and carpet bomb it.

In 2004 the CIA, then headed by Porter Goss, hired Blackwater contractors as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top al-Qaeda operatives. This was the program that Dick Cheney told the CIA to withhold from Congress for seven years. Cheney told the spy agency it didn’t need to inform Congress of its activities because it already had authority to kill al-Qaeda leaders. As with so many other sins of the Bush era, Dick Cheney had no legal or constitutional authority to make this kind of decision or issue orders to the CIA. The vice president is president of the Senate, and that’s all, folks. He doesn’t even get to vote on legislation unless there’s a tie.

The story on this program gets fuzzy. Leon Panetta, current director of the CIA, supposedly canceled the program before he told Congress in June that it had ever existed.

Blackwater supposedly contributed planning, training, and surveillance to the program, and in August 2009 the New York Times reported that the program never really got underway because of "logistical, legal and diplomatic hurdles."

Pavlov’s Dog of War

Current and former CIA officials told the NYT in August that the spy agency did not issue Blackwater employees with a "license to kill," but hired it merely to collect intelligence, carry out surveillance, and train for "possible missions."

But lo and behold, a Dec. 10, 2009 Los Angeles Times article reported that "Staffers with [Blackwater] sometimes operated side-by-side with CIA field officers in Iraq and Afghanistan on missions to kill or capture insurgents, according to a former government official and a source familiar with the operations."

A Dec. 11 piece in the New York Times reported that Blackwater personnel participated in so called "snatch and grab" operations and provided security for extraordinary rendition flights.

A former senior Blackwater executive confirmed to The Nation in Nov. 2009 that Blackwater also provides personnel to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the assassination squad formerly commanded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and that reported directly to Cheney’s office.

A January 2010 Vanity Fair article on Eric Prince was even more revealing. For the past six years, Prince has been leading a double life: one as Blackwater’s CEO and chairman who raked in more than $1.5 billion in government contracts from 2001 to 2009, the other as a CIA asset, "helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into ‘denied areas’ — places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating — to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies."

Blackwater also hires former special-forces commandos and CIA agents. As Vanity Fair author Adam Ciralsky puts it, to get his "jobs done — protecting, defending, and killing, if required — Prince has had to employ the services of some decorated vets as well as some ruthless types, snipers and spies among them."

Blackwater represents the very worst of what Dwight Eisenhower warned would become the "unwarranted influence" of the military-industrial complex. Prince hires former government operators to fill contracts to do work for the government that they would have done on active duty for less pay. Oh yeah, and Prince is a GOP big shot who contributes a lot of money to the party and its candidates and is himself a vetted CIA asset. Interests don’t get any more conflicted than that.

To make things even more frightening, Prince is said to be a Gordon Liddy-class right-wing nutcase. On top of that, in August, two former Blackwater employees filed sworn statements in federal court connecting Prince to behavior ticks that range from illegal-arms sales to wife swapping to murder.

It may well be that America — the country that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined — can no longer wage the kinds of wars we’re now fighting without the help of Prince and his crew and their type. As former chief of staff to Colin Powell Lawrence Wilkerson says, "We’ve outsourced nearly everything." On the use of mercenary Special Forces and covert intelligence operators, Lawrence says. "Part of this, of course, is an attempt to get around [congressional] constraints." Use of mercenary outfits like Blackwater provides "plausible deniability" to the military and intelligence agencies for deeds they aren’t supposed to be doing.

Adding to that deniability, much of Blackwater’s efforts were financed "off the books." Prince provided the funds up front and the government reimbursed him later. Further distancing government troops and agents from dirty deeds, Blackwater operatives performed on an "ad hoc" basis in roles not specified in their contracts. (One of Blackwater’s favorite non-denials, as delivered by spokesmodel Mark Corallo, goes, "Blackwater was never under contract to participate in covert raids with CIA or Special Forces troops in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else." So the legal and moral standard has become that we can’t hold a contractor responsible for anything it did that it didn’t do under contract, I guess.

If we need the likes of Prince to fight our wars, it’s time we took a hard look at why we’re fighting the kinds of wars that require the likes of Prince before what’s left of our national soul vanishes like a wet wicked witch.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

The Next Quagmire

Non-G.I. Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney’s fellow Vietnam-era draft dodger turned warmonger, said on the Dec. 27 edition of Fox News Sunday that "Yemen is now one of the centers of that fight." It’s difficult to tell from reading the transcript of the interview between Joe and Chris Wallace what exactly Joe means by "that fight." Does he mean the fight against al-Qaeda, or the fight the military-industrial-congressional complex is waging to ensure that we have a Long War of 50 years’ duration or more?

"If we don’t act preemptively," Joe warned, "Yemen will be tomorrow’s war. That’s the danger we face." Yet, as Joe acknowledged, we already have a "growing presence" in Yemen: "Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence [i.e., CIA]." We have also carried out carrier-based and cruise missile air strikes on Yemen, so Joe obviously has something more robust in mind, like a Yemen surge.

The U.S. Army, including its head honcho, "King David" Petraeus, will be all in favor of that. What better excuse to make the Army an even bigger force than we’re already making it by entangling ourselves in another boots-on-the-ground quagmire we can never extract ourselves from?

"Conservative of the Year" Dick Cheney accused the Obama administration of "trying to pretend we’re not at war." I think it’s safe to say that the Obama administration is well aware that we’re at war – two wars, in fact, that the Cheney administration stumbled into, couldn’t win, and kept going long enough to dump into their Democratic successors’ laps.

If you treat Pakistan as a separate country from Afghanistan, like the rest of the world does, we’re in three wars. We’re in four if you consider what we’re already up to in Yemen, five if you tack on the villages we’ve blown the smithereens out of in Somalia. And if you count our involvement of one sort or other in every whack-a-do the Israelis pull, you’ll lose count of how many wars we’re in.

If we surge in Yemen, we’ll have to conduct counterinsurgency operations, of course, because that’s what takes the most troops and the most time and costs the most money and has the least effect on the supposed objective of disrupting international terrorist networks.

Lieberman says we have a good relationship with the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has in essence been president of Yemen since 1978. Some say Saleh played a role in the plot to assassinate the previous president, Ibrahim al-Hamdi, who in turn was leader of a coup that overthrew the regime of President Abdul Rahman al-Iryani in 1974. So Saleh is just the kind of enlightened guy we want to cuddle up with.

Joe apparently thinks our "good relationship" with Saleh is a portent of successful escalated military operations in Yemen. Joe must have forgotten the great relationship we’ve had with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, who just stole two elections and who runs the second most corrupt country in the world. The most corrupt country is Somalia, which doesn’t actually have a government at all but which is another country Bill Kristol and the neocons want to invade. What better place to nation-build than in a country that isn’t a nation?

We were sleeping-bag buds with Gen. Perez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president and virtual military dictator, until he stepped down in the face of impeachment charges in 2008. We were cordial with the follow-on president, Asif Ali Zardari, until Army Chief Ashfaq Kayani stripped Zardari of his powers and reestablished the military as Pakistan’s permanent ruling establishment. As recently as July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ruled out the possibility of a military government coming back into power in Pakistan. Now that Zardari is facing criminal charges and is little more than a figurehead, Hillary appears to be cutting dope deals with Kayani.

We were thick as thieves with Saddam Hussein for decades and backed him during the nearly nine-year long Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), even after one of his jets destroyed the USS Stark with two Exocet missiles.

Yemen’s Saleh, no matter how far he lets us run our hand up his thigh, has a tentative hold on his country. He has Shi’ite and Sunni rebels in the north, separatists in the south, and, of course, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), who may or may not be operating in connection to Osama bin Laden’s al -Qaeda, the one we’re supposedly fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

However AQAP is or isn’t related to bin Laden’s bunch, it’s the least of Saleh’s worries. There are "maybe hundreds of them" says Yemen’s Foreign Minister Abu Bakr Al-Qirbi, "200, 300…."

For the sake of going after two or three hundred Islamo-fabulists who brag about failed terror attempts like the one where the rich Nigerian kid’s underpants failed to blow up on an airplane bound for Detroit, lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman and his fellow Long Warriors in Congress and the Pentagon would like to stick American troops in the middle of another civil war we won’t be able to dig them out of for many, many years.

And then, to paraphrase Howard Dean, it’s on to Nigeria, and Somalia, and we’re going to Sudan, and Ethiopia, and Eritrea, and Syria, and then on to Lebanon, and then all the way to Iran…Yahoo!

Historical analysis shows that military action is by far the least effective means of combating terrorism, the most effective solutions being policing and political action. In July 2008, analysts at the RAND Corporation recommended that we "minimize the use of military force" in our efforts against terrorism, and that the most effective way to counter terrorism is with "a light U.S. military footprint or none at all."

Yet we continue to enlarge our military footprint throughout the Muslim world, a course of action that produces more new terrorists – like the rich kid with the skivvy bomb that didn’t go off – than it captures or kills. Of course, there’s no better way to sustain a Long War than by making your enemies multiply.

In his weekly Saturday radio address on Jan. 2, Obama vowed retribution against al-Qaeda for the Christmas bombing attempt.

Anything to get Dick Cheney off his back, I guess.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

I See London, I See France, I See Bombs in Underpants

So this Lonesome Luke rich Nigerian kid, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, hops on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day with a bomb sewn into his underpants. As the plane begins to land, the kid tries to set off the bomb and it does little more than give him third-degree burns on his tallywhacker, and the entire civilized world goes snake guano.

Many observers have compared the rich Nigerian kid with the skivvy bomb with shoe bomber Richard Reid who tried to blow up an airplane over the Atlantic in 2001. The explosive in Reid’s shoes was the same type the Nigerian kid had in his drawers, PETN. Had Reid been able to detonate his shoes, he presumably would have blown his toes off. The rich Nigerian kid had twice as much of the explosive in his boxers as Reid had in his shoes. Federal authorities say if the kid’s panties had gone boom like they were supposed to, they would have blown a hole in the side of the aircraft. That would have caused something called "explosive decompression," which isn’t as horrible as it sounds. Unlike what you may have seen in thriller entertainments, decompressions don’t suck everybody out of the airplane — unless, of course, the hole is big enough to break the airplane in half, in which case being sucked out of it becomes a minor concern.

The media have been frothing over the prospect that the rich Nigerian kid is connected to al-Qaeda. The kid himself told authorities that he has ties to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). That could mean just about anything. It could mean some huckster recognized him as a screwed up rich kid with radical Islamic leanings, sidled up to him, and said, Psst. Young Man. I am with al-Qaeda. We’ve had our eye on you for some time now, and we like what we see. You want the martyrdom, the virgins, the seat beside Allah? Well, I have a lovely little bomb you can sneak onboard an airplane in your Fruit of the Looms, and for you I’ll part with it for a mere $100,000 US, and believe me, I’m losing money on the deal.

Who are these AQAP hooligans, anyway? They’re described as an al-Qaeda "offshoot." Does that mean they’re a subsidiary of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, kind of like KBR is an offshoot of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton? AQAP formed in January 2009 when al-Qaeda in Yemen merged with Saudi Arabia’s al-Qaeda. Whatever you do, don’t mistake AQAP or Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which more than anything else resembles a Pittsburg garage band that calls itself "The Rolling Stones of Pennsylvania."

AQAP has taken credit for the rich Nigerian kid’s bombing attempt, which tells us the outfit is a gang of losers. Taking credit for the Detroit plane bombing is like Winston Churchill bragging about his role in Gallipoli: yeah, I’m the schmuck who arranged that unmitigated disaster.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who never met an issue he couldn’t be partisan about, criticized Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for appearing "bored" on the Christmas weekend political gab-athons. "There was no intensity, there was no show of emotion," King said. King obviously would have preferred the female Democrat to appear hysterical and disoriented.

As it was, Napolitano did more than sufficient damage to herself by claiming that "the system worked." Yeah. A rich Nigerian kid who’s on a watch list and whose respected banker father has warned authorities may be a terrorist risk manages to board an airplane headed for America with a pant load of bomb and no passport and the freaking system worked? Napolitano later retracted her statement, but the damage had been done. Like President Obama finally said, there was a "systematic failure" of America’s security apparatus.

Speaking of saying stupid things: I have two graduate degrees in bull crap, I know exactly what it sounds like, and I hear it every time lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman opens his mouth. Like Dick Cheney, Lieberman managed to get himself deferred out of the Vietnam conflict, first for attending Yale and Yale Law School and then for managing to get his wife pregnant. Joe’s only real warmongering credentials are his conspicuous displays of smoking John McCain’s stogie, but that appears to be enough for him to get by. Joe never met a war he didn’t like: except, of course, for the one he managed to dodge when he was of draft age.

Joe told FOX News "Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war." Joe’s always been one for acting preemptively. He was a leading proponent of going off half-cocked into Iraq. He still thinks preemptive deterrence is an enlightened method of foreign policy. Joe might want to stitch his pie hole shut on the subject of military actions and look into what’s wrong with the Homeland Security structure, seeing as how he’s the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and all.

Joe doesn’t seem to understand, however, that we’re already doing preemptive things in Yemen. The US was involved in a pre-Christmas air strike on Yemen’s Sa’ada Province. CIA agents and Special Operations forces began covert ops in Yemen a year ago. This has all been done, of course, without a declaration of war or an authorization for use of military force (AUMF) from Congress, much as the Bush administration blew villages in Somalia to smithereens without authorization from the legislature. We don’t have presidents any more. We have emperors.

Non-G.I. Joe says Yemen is now one of the "centers" of the fight against terrorism, and Joe’s not the only war dog who thinks Yemen is the next military-industrial mother lode.

"Yemen’s security problems won’t just stay in Yemen," says Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "They’re regional problems and they affect Western interests."

Lest you think the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is actually interested in peace, be advised that another of its associates is Robert Kagan of the neocon Kagans who include father Donald Kagan and brother Fred Kagan who played a major role in designing both the Iraq and Afghanistan surges. Robert Kagan is also the long-time publishing and ideological partner of Weekly Standard editor and Project for the New American Century founder Bill Kristol.

Keep in mind, then, that Christopher Boucek’s real job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is to start a full-blown war in Yemen, and the job of everyone else at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is sustain international warfare for as long as humanly possible.

And now we’re all hot to trot off to war in Yemen because of some spoiled, screwed up Muslim kid who, by the way, comes from Nigeria, not Yemen, just as the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, not Afghanistan.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Another Surgin' Safari

Devotees of President Obama’s plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan hope to repeat the "success" of our surge in Iraq. That’s likely to prove easier to accomplish than even the most rabid Afghanistan surge proponent dares to hope.

The Iraq surge was already in motion in January 2007, when Bush and Cheney flipped off the Iraq Study Group and decided to escalate the war with David Petraeus, the "Teflon General," at the helm of the operation. A shameless self-promoter, "King David" created the illusion of a successful surge by lowering violence statistics through his usual method of operation: hand out weapons to the bad guys, bribe the bad guys not to use the weapons, and pretend to be shocked, shocked when the bad guys take the bribes and use the weapons anyway.

Petraeus’ personal stenographer, former journalist Thomas E. Ricks, admits that Petraeus misled Congress and the public into thinking he was trying to end the war when he was in fact laying "the groundwork for a much more prolonged engagement in Iraq."

Three years after the surge began, violence shows no signs of disappearing. Holiday attacks were especially brutal. Mosul Mayor Zuhair Muhsen al-Aaraji escaped an assassination attempt on Christmas Eve. (Mosul is the town Petraeus supposedly "tamed" during his first tour in Iraq. Within weeks after he left and the graft well ran dry, Mosul went up for grabs and has been a trouble spot ever since.)

Also on Dec. 24, as the Shi’ite religious festival of Ashura approached, five attacks killed at least 19 people and wounded over 100. The Iraqi government was quick to blame al-Qaeda in Iraq, but I’ll bet you a shiny new Ohio quarter that the Sunni-based Awakening movement that Petraeus armed and funded had more than a little something to do with the attacks.

On Christmas Day, a roadside bomb killed six Shi’ites during a religious ceremony in Baghdad. In several parts of the country, fights broke out between Christians and Shi’ites over competing religious decorations.

Many Iraqi Christians were afraid to make any public celebration of Christmas. Midnight mass had to be observed in daylight. A bomb exploded near a historic Christian church in Mosul on Dec. 23, killing two people and wounding five. Security around Christian churches was the heaviest it has been since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.

On Dec. 22, a series of coordinated car bombings killed 112 people in Baghdad. This was the third coordinated attack on Baghdad in four months; the bombs struck areas near justice buildings, a Finance Ministry office, and a police checkpoint, symbols of government authority all under tight security after the earlier bomb attacks.

On Oct. 18, a roadside bombing and other attacks killed 10 U.S. troops, making it the deadliest day for American forces in 10 months. (We have, by the way, spent over $14 billion on programs to defeat roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices [IEDs] and have yet to find a solution. The Army’s Joint IED Defeat Organization [JEIDDO] rather symbolizes our entire war on terror: mind-numbing amounts of treasure poured down a rabbit hole to no avail.)

Iraqi security forces have proven unable to provide the security necessary to keep the peace. That should come as no surprise: the man in charge of training them in 2004 and 2005 was Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who, in that capacity, lost track of over 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols that without question found their way into the hands of militia groups. This happened while the staff at the U.S. Army War College was assembling the new field manual on counterinsurgency operations that Petraeus later took credit for writing, a myth that Ricks and other media sycophants helped propagate.

The best summary of the "success" of the Iraq surge came in the form of a July memorandum from Army Col. Timothy Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Advisory Team, titled "It’s Time for the U.S. to Declare Victory and Go Home."

Reese describes the "ineffectiveness and corruption" of the Iraqi government as "the stuff of legend." The so-called anti-corruption initiative is merely a campaign tool for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki’s government is taking "no rational steps" to improve the country’s infrastructure or oil exploration. Sunni reconciliation is "at best at a standstill and probably going backwards." The Kurdish situation "continues to fester." Political violence and intimidation is "rampant."

There is no possibility of implanting a "professional military culture" in Iraq’s security forces. Corruption in the officer corps is "widespread." Enlisted men are neglected and mistreated. Cronyism and nepotism are "rampant." Laziness is "endemic." Lack of initiative is "legion." Iraq’s security force’s "near total ineffectiveness" prevents it from becoming self-sustaining.

Gen. Ray "Desert Ox" Odierno, Petraeus’ handpicked successor as overall commander in Iraq who Ricks laughably claims was the real brain behind the Iraq surge, calls Reese’s concerns mere "tactical issues."

Gen. Stan "The Man" McChrystal, whom Petraeus handpicked to command in Af-Pak, has been charged with leading a successful surge in that theater of operations. Given the corruption that exists in the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the incompetence and corruption in their militaries, and the seemingly uncontrollable levels of violence in both countries, I’d say McChrystal is well on his way to surpassing the accomplishments of Petraeus and Odierno by a wide margin.

In fact, I see no reason why President Barack Obama shouldn’t fly aboard an aircraft carrier tomorrow and declare "mission accomplished" in Af-Pak.

Obama's AfPak Vagina Monologues

(Scene: The Bizarro Universe, January 1942. Bizarro Adm. William Leahy, chief of staff to Bizarro President Franklin Roosevelt and de facto first chairman of the Bizarro Joint Chiefs of Staff, enters the oval office of the Bizarro White House.)

Bizarro Leahy: Mr. President, your national security team has just adjourned after agreeing on what we think is the perfect Pacific strategy.

Bizarro FDR: That’s excellent, William. Let’s hear your plan.

Bizarro Leahy: The entire strategy rests on the vital geostrategic importance of Alaska, sir.

Bizarro FDR: (Pauses.) But, uh, William, what about the Philippines and New Zealand and Singapore and Midway and the Solomon Island chain and so forth?

Bizarro Leahy: Sir, Alaska is definitely the center of gravity of the war in the Pacific.

Bizarro FDR: But it’s not exactly in the center, is it? It’s more toward the top, wouldn’t you agree?

Bizarro Leahy: Yes, Mr. President, but it’s like they say, a fish rots from the head down.

Bizarro FDR: (Stroking his chin.) They do say that, don’t they?

Bizarro Leahy: You see, Mr. President, Midway and the Solomons and Singapore and so forth are important strategic targets, but the Japanese can’t capture them unless they have a sanctuary in Alaska from which to plan their operations.

Bizarro FDR: By George, William, you’ve explained it all perfectly. Thank goodness I have the expertise and experience of you and your Bizarro Chiefs of Staff to explain things to me. Order another 30,000 of our troops to Alaska then, and I’ll speak with Bizarro Winston Churchill about sending an additional 10,000 Australians and New Zealanders and Canadians to help out.

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Barack Obama’s Af-Pak strategy must have the real FDR clawing at his coffin lid. The new strategy was cooked up by the same group of stooges Robert Dreyfuss laughably described as "Obama’s Chess Masters" in the April 2009 edition of Rolling Stone, one of the country’s most authoritative voices on military and foreign policy matters.

In March, the pawn pushers announced a strategy that promised to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda, give Afghanistan a real government and security force, establish civilian control of Pakistan, and involve the "international community" in achieving all of these "realistic and achievable" objectives.

Within months of assuming command of Af-Pak, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose previous combat job had been to command the Joint Special Operations Command, then-vice president Dick Cheney’s personal assassination team, decided he needed a new strategy.

So Obama sent his chess masters back to work on the project and they met and met for weeks and weeks in a "deliberative process," and here’s what they came up with.

The main objective, as before, was to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda’s ability to plan and execute terror operations. This part of the deliberative process largely resembled the deliberative process from March, which included a debate on what the center of gravity might be.

Many of the brainiacs in and around the five-sided puzzle palace considered the Taliban to be the center of gravity. Stan McChrystal and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen considered the Afghan people to be the center of gravity, but that’s largely because they buy the balderdash Gen. David Petraeus’ underlings wrote in the new plagiarized Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual. Sen. John Kerry, not exactly known for his ability to devise and execute winning strategies, thinks the center of gravity in Afghanistan is Pakistan. Now the top dogs with the brass plates in their skulls are saying the center of gravity is southern Afghanistan.

Poppycock. None of these guys would recognize a center of gravity if it pitched a tent in their heinies.

Carl von Clausewitz described the center of gravity as "the point against which all our energies should be directed.” That point must of necessity be the thing most closely associated with our objective. So if our objective is to end al-Qaeda’s ability to plan and execute terror operations, a slow child could correctly conclude with little deliberation at all that the center of gravity is al-Qaeda. Funny how Obama’s chess champs couldn’t reach such an obvious conclusion through their advanced decision-making processes. Maybe the problem was too simple for them. Or maybe it was too hard. Maybe they should take up checkers, or better yet that childen’s card game where you play one card at a time. What’s it called again? Oh yeah – War!

War is, in fact, exactly what Obama’s security team is playing. Long War, to be specific, the Pentagon’s grand strategy to keep low-level conflicts active for another half-century or longer to justify the military budget. That’s why they don’t want to come out and call al-Qaeda the center of gravity. National Security Adviser James Jones admits there are at a maximum 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, and probably fewer than 400 in Pakistan. Other studies estimate that there may be fewer than 10 core al-Qaeda members left. It’s pretty hard to justify a 50-year war for the sake of taking out fewer than 500 Islamo-hooligans (at most) who are on the run. The other problem with that approach is that with modern mobile communications technology, al-Qaeda needs a safe haven in Af-Pak to plan terror attacks on America even less than the Japanese needed a sanctuary in Alaska to plan Pearl Harbor.

So we’re sticking with the same game plan as before, even though it’s even more farcical now than it was then. The Afghan president, who is as crooked as the Snake River, stole two elections, his hand-picked election inspectors declared him "reelected," and the Obama administration tripped all over its collective sex organ declaring Karzai the "legitimate" leader of Afghanistan so we can say we have a reliable partner for our counterinsurgency effort that now includes timelines that mean absolutely nothing. ("Depending on conditions on the ground." Where have we heard that load of snot rag before?)

Pakistan’s military and intelligence service have made President Asif Ali Zardari as much of an empty hat as George W. Bush was, and Pakistan is becoming as corrupt as Afghanistan is.

As for international involvement, Obama has managed to bully NATO countries into sending more troops to Afghanistan, but the second our bureaucratic twit Secretary of Defense Bob Gates complains for the umpteenth time that NATO doesn’t know how to fight guerrillas, NATO’s going to tell Gates where he can stick his guerrillas and go home.

Those weeks of "deliberative process" were little more than cover for the fact that Obama was once again going to put on his kneepads and give his generals everything they wanted. I shriek every time Obama gives a speech in which he talks about how brilliant Petraeus is when the facts are that all Petraeus knows how to do is hand out guns to bad guys, bribe the bad guys not to use the guns he just gave them, and then act surprised when they use the guns anyway.

Here’s what Obama needs to change right now. He needs to drop the vagina monologues, get his generals under control or fire them, start acting like the commander in chief, and quit acting like Bizarro FDR.

Bring Back the Bad Guys

By Jeff Huber

Conquerors immemorial have known that the secret to successful occupations is to let the guys who surrender stay in charge of the yokels. We are presently bogged down in two quagmires because we haven’t learned that lesson.

Iraq’s government and security forces are incompetent and corrupt, the Kurdish situation remains unresolved, and nobody seems confident that the country will ever be able to function as an independent state again. Oh, for the good old days under Saddam Hussein! Whatever you want to say about the son of a sand dune, he didn’t need a field manual to figure out how to run his country. Neither did Mohammed Omar’s Taliban need a book on how to run Afghanistan. They have lived in the neighborhood for a very long time.

Decapitating regimes through military force is the most foolhardy of foreign-policy acts. The Prussians discovered this the hard way in the Franco- Prussian War. They defeated the French Army at Sedan and took Napoleon III prisoner along with 140,000 of his soldiers. But the war dragged on for months because the French formed a new government and a new army and kept fighting. They didn’t like the idea of Germans occupying their country. Imagine that.

Few military victories have been more stunning than the fall of Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom, but the fighting continues almost seven years later. We supposedly ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan eight years ago, and we’re still trying to oust them. We’d be better off by far if we had never invaded either but worked instead with the power structures already in place. As Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.”

See the rest at The American Conservative.

ON the Rapid Mend

Thanks to all for your expressions of concern. I'm on the mend. Just my second full day at home, I ran several errands, cleaned the house, walked the dogs, did about 15 minutes of tai chi, wrote a complaint to the State Department of Health regarding my (former) cardiologist, and got a good start on Monday's article.

So fear not. I'll be back!

Best,

Jeff

Sick Leave

I'll be taking some time off to get over the flu. Talk to you soon.

Jeff

Get Real about Iran

Iran has announced that it will build 10 new nuclear facilities. Big deal.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the facilities are necessary to meet the country's goal to one day generate up to 20,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, a grand ambition.

That program would require 500,000 centrifuges. Iran presently has 8,000, only half of which are currently producing reactor grade uranium. Experts predict the Iranians can’t get there from here, at least not any time soon.

“We’re looking at an extremely costly 20- or 30-year program, at best," says Gary Sick, a professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University who served on the National Security Council during Iran's 1979 revolution.

Ahmad Shirzad, an Iranian nuclear scientist who is often critical of his government, says Iran has neither the industrial ability to create 500,000 centrifuges nor the basic ingredients to operate them. He says the announcement was a "political decision to make an impression."

The announcement came in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency resolution that said Iran was bad, bad, bad for not exporting the majority of its reactor grade uranium to Russia and France. That was a bogus deal that Iran was wise to stiff-arm. France has screwed Iran on nuclear deals in the past.

No one wants to grant that Iran, like many countries, wants to improve its situation in the world, and that the prize, for them, is a nuclear energy program. To have nuclear weapons would be, for them, a death sentence. Both Israel and America would go snake spit and bomb them back to the Bronze Age.

The impasse revolves around demands by the west that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program. That’s an outrageous demand, one that Iran says it will never accede to, and well it should not. Having a nuclear energy program that relies on other countries to provide your nuclear fuel is like not having a nuclear energy program at all.

The Iranians will stand their ground. They will not be bullied into giving up their “inalienable right,” as guaranteed in the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty, to refine their own uranium. So why bother pursuing that aim?

The hoopla over their “secret” enrichment facility at Qom, buried under a mountain, the one they revealed before we accused them of keeping it a secret, is not a big deal. As they explain, they wanted a back-up, bombproof facility in case the Israelis blow up their main facility in Nanantz, something the Iranians have ample reason to believe might happen.

To review the bidding, Iranians don’t have a nuclear weapons program. They have never invaded another country. Their conventional forces have limited capability. Their army has never deployed more than about ten miles from its border, and that was only during the eight-year war with Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded them. Their navy is a coast guard and their air force is a junkyard. Their defense budget is less than one percent of ours. Iran is a pismire.

Iran’s president says unfortunate things; most of them, one strongly suspects, are for domestic Iranian and Muslim world consumption, the equivalent of “Bring ‘em on.” But the Iranian’s are, well, paper Persians. Their growl is much worse than their bite. They are, in fact, toothless.

Iran is part of the multi-tined Long War strategy that the Pentagon and its supporters are cramming up our noses. They’re digging their heels in on Iraq. Gen. Ray Odeirno has been making noises about how we need to keep 30,000 or so troops in Iraq until 2015 or so, and says the insurgency in Iraq may go on for another 15 or so years. So much for the “successful” surge.

Afghanistan, where it looks like we’re going to re-re-escalate in order to develop an exit plan, has become the Long War’s center of gravity. We’ve never seen the Pentagon and its confederates make such a media play to force a president to keep a war going indefinitely. MacArthur’s antics with Truman were tame in comparison.

Iran serves several purposes. It gives the Air Force and the Navy a reason to exist. We won’t bother to invade Iran; we’ll schwack it with air power. Iran is a convenient scapegoat. Whenever something goes wrong anywhere in the region, we blame it on Iran, even though we never have managed to prove any of our allegations. Most importantly, the Iranians give us a perfect excuse to maintain presence in the Middle East, so we can guard Israel from them and keep them from shutting down the Straight of Hormuz.

In all, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan form our Long War trifecta.

I don’t propose that we turn our backs on Iran. There is a possibility that they someday will develop nuclear weapons behind everybody’s backs if we don’t keep an eye on them.

But the sound and fury we generate every time Iran jerks our chain is silly.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.