Panetta responded by saying that we will only “end those wars” when people in those countries who threaten to attack America are no longer there:

Q: Good morning, Mr. Secretary. I’m David Henderson, an economist, an economics professor also in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy. Ohio State University Professor John Mueller stated in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, quote, “An al Qaeda computer seized in Afghanistan in 2001 indicated that the group’s budget for research and weapons of mass destruction, almost all of it focused on primitive chemical weapons work, was some $2,000 to $4,000.” In your previous job, you yourself pointed out that there are fewer than two dozen key operatives left in al Qaeda. Given our huge budget deficit that you referred to, when do you say enough is enough? Let’s end those wars because the costs are so much higher than the hypothetical small benefits?

SEC. PANETTA: The answer to that question is you end those wars when those individuals that have threatened to attack this country no longer are there to threaten this country. We have an obligation coming out of 9/11 to defend this country. That’s what we’re here to do. That’s what we’re all about is to make sure that al Qaeda and their militant affiliates never again attack this country.

Panetta’s suggestion that the United States expend any amount of resources to be at war in Afghanistan until there is no one left there who threatens “to attack this country” would not only have us fighting in that country for years to come, but also implies that we would have to be at war in many other locations. The Congressional Research Service pointed out in a report earlier this year that one terror group alone, al Qaeda, now exists in 70 countries and largely consists of autonomous actors rather than militias or armies:

The Al Qaeda network today also comprises semi-autonomous or self radicalized actors, who often have only peripheral or ephemeral ties to either the core cadre in Pakistan or affiliated groups elsewhere. According to U.S. officials Al Qaeda cells and associates are located in over 70 countries. Sometimes these individuals never leave their home country but are radicalized with the assistance of others who have traveled abroad for training and indoctrination through the use of modern technologies. In many ways, the dispersion of Al Qaeda affiliates fits into the larger strategy of Bin Laden and his associates.

It certainly wouldn’t be desirable to be at war in so many countries. So how should the United States orient itself to combat individuals who are trying to harm the country? The RAND Corporation published a ground-breaking study in 2008 where it analyzed how 268 different terror groups ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that the overwhelming majority of them were defeated either by smart police and intelligence work and/or integrating their movements into the political process and de-radicalizing them. It illustrates this in the following chart:

Certainly, it appears to be much more effective to focus on smart policing and policies that de-radicalize people in order to battle terror. And it is certainly desirable to avoid wars that often radicalize local populations and expend enormous resources in both blood and treasure.

If casualty numbers are of any significance to Kristol and Cheney then they should examine the dramatic increase in American deaths occurring during the Obama administration’s 30,000 troop surge announced in December 2009. At the time, Kristol and his fellow hawks embraced the president’s announcement and heralded him as a “war president.” Recent casualty figures show 1,002 U.S. troop died in Afghanistan under Obama and two-thirds of all American casualties in Afghanistan occurred during this presidency.

The contradictions in the ad go even deeper when examining the role played by neoconservatives, such as Kristol, in diverting U.S. troops and resources from Afghanistan by advocating for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Middle East Progress director Matt Duss wrote in 2009 that neocons like Kristol were asking the U.S. military to, as Keane put it, “do more with less”:

The broad consensus among national security analysts and aid officials is that the diversion of troops and resources toward Iraq beginning in 2002 was one of the main reasons the Taliban and Al Qaeda were able to to re-establish themselves in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, facilitating the collapse of the country back into insurgent warfare.

The conclusions worth drawing from the latest Keep America Safe ad is that individuals like Kristol and his allies care very little about American casualties, oppose any withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan and will attack Obama for exercising his constitutional authority instead of handing all decision making powers to his generals. Unfortunately, their arguments rely on the ad’s viewers having a very short memory about the history of U.S. involvment in Afghanistan and the unhelpful role played by Kristol.

Noah Wyle plays an academic forced to implement his theories in TNT's 'Falling Skies.'

There are fairly obvious compromises. A criminal can be a useful addition to society if he knows how to cook, bringing some solace to everyday life — and if he’s developed a better theory of fighting the invaders. We’ll tolerate deviant behavior by doctors if they lead to medical innovation that can be an effective response to new threats. Shreds of normality, like a skateboard, can unify entire communities. Thank God America manufactured so much canned food.

But one of the things that’s most interesting to me so far is the debate over whether academic knowledge and theory or military expertise matter more in the current environment. That conflict’s embodied by Tom Mason (Noah Wyle, finally finding a decent outlet for his penchant for playing bookish action heroes), a military history professor, and Captain Weaver (Will Patton), an actual veteran of both the armed forces and the military reserves. Mason’s not a fantastic commander: he gets his squad captured, he brings back an alien prisoner of war without a sense of whether it’ll be feasible or wise to hold one, and it’s not necessarily clear that his theories about whether the Skitters (as the invaders are known) can be harassed off Earth the same way the British were harassed out of the colonies during the Revolutionary War carry water. But Mason does understand that in order to win, the human survivors need more than a military campaign, telling one of his fellow survivors, “I think civilians are a liability and a hindrance. I also think they’re the best motivation we have to fight.” When he has to choose what books he wants to take with him, he picks A Tale of Two Cities.

Weaver rather profoundly doesn’t understand that, complaining, “There’s too many of us. If it was just the fighters, we could stretch our provisions,” and bitterly declaring to a doctor who suggests it might be wise for the long-term stability of the group to make sure everyone gets a chance to sleep indoors sometimes, not just the soldiers, that “If they want the protection of my soldiers, they can minimize their whining and be grateful for the oatmeal.” It’s also not clear that he has a viable long-term plan to deal with the Skitters, either. But even though he’s callous about the need for societal cohesion, Weaver knows how to organize people at least into the basics of maneuvers and teams, and he’s probably right to be suspicious of Pope, the captured convict who knows how to cook. At some point, this little fledgling society’s going to need order as well as compassion and innovation, and while that’s undervalued now, it seems like Weaver will be the only person who’s actually prepared to provide it.

I don’t know that there’s a direct relationship between the debate Falling Skies is setting up and questions about how to successfully prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, the Americans are the invaders in those conflicts, much like the Skitters, and academics both with military experience and without have played a variety of useful and unuseful roles in the debates about how to prosecute them and the likelihood of success. But that question of what level of irritation it takes to get an invader out of your country is an interesting one. It’s not clear what it’s going to take for us to decide to completely get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s not clear what it would take to expel the Skitters either.

There was a very interesting article in the Times over the weekend about India’s decision to step up efforts to combat a growing Maoist insurgency centered in the state of Chattisgarh, but now spreading to surrounding areas as well:

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

I don’t know much of anything about the subject other than what’s in the article. It did, however, serve as a reminder that there’s a difference between this kind of situation and the kind of thing that tends to go under the term “counterinsurgency” in the American context. What India has is an insurgency. So the insurgency is being fought by India, which is trying to counter the insurgency.

A lot of what makes the Afghanistan situation problematic is that we’re not there providing assistance to an Afghan government’s counterinsurgency strategy. Instead, we seem to be trying to coerce/cajole the Afghan government into adopting what we think of as a sound approach. That’s a tricky needle to thread.

Steve Metz has an excellent TNR piece making the case that pious talk aside, we’ve done nothing to actually build the civilian capabilities that all our defense policy planners and political leaders say we need in order to conduct the sort of counterinsurgency operations it’s claimed that we need to do. What to do about it. I’m going, however, to quote the very end of the article where I think he doesn’t lay the conclusions out just right:

There are only two solutions. We could belly up and provide the resources for a serious expeditionary civilian corps. But a few hundred or even a couple of thousand people is not enough. We would need many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of advisers with linguistic skills and cultural knowledge willing to leave home and live under risky conditions for years at a time. And we are not talking about 20-somethings paid a pittance and fueled by idealism, but skilled professionals demanding serious pay for their expertise and sacrifice. (The difficulty that the State department had convincing even its hardened professionals to volunteer for duty in Iraq showed what a challenge this is.) Of course, if the pay is high enough, the experts will come. But, at a time of massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis, this is simply not in the cards.

What, then, is Plan B? If we are unwilling to pay the price for a serious civilian capability–and admit that foisting the job of development and political assistance on the military is a bad idea–the only option is to alter our basic strategy. We could find a way to thwart Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states. We could, in other words, get out of the counterinsurgency and stabilization business. This is not an attractive option and entails many risks. But it does reflect reality. Ultimately, it may be better than a strategy based on a capability that exists only in our minds.

I think the situation is actually much less bleak than Metz makes it out to be. For one thing, the massive government budget deficits and a persisting national economic crisis really shouldn’t be a barrier to doing this. If the things that leading Pentagon officials claim to believe about American national security are true, what we ought to do is draw up a bill of what it would cost to properly finance the civilian side of things and cut that much money from the Defense Department budget in order to pay for it. But of course the Pentagon won’t actually agree to that, which sets up the more realistic option of the Pentagon paying lip service to the need for civilian capabilities while in practice building those capabilities in-house.

That’s not a great idea, but it’ll probably work out okay anyway because there’s really very little reason to believe that “thwart[ing] Al Qaeda and other terrorists without trying to re-engineer weak states” is really all that hard. Al-Qaeda is a very small number of people with what appears to be an extremely limited capacity to damage western interests. What’s more, even on the rare occasions when al-Qaeda achieves tactical success at murdering westerners, there’s no sign these murders do any real damage on a strategic level. It’s not as if the July 2005 bombings in London have displaced the U.K. from its ranks as wealthy, medium-sized country with highly competent armed forces.

Representative David Obey, the top appropriator in the House, has a hot new letter out expressing deep skepticism about the wisdom of an ambitious COIN mission in Afghanistan. I think some of the points about military strategy are wrongheaded, and I especially think Obey overplays the argument that COIN would be futile. But what he says here is true, profound, and weirdly radical in the context of our present-day bizarre politics:

As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it? We are now in the middle of a fundamental debate over reforming our healthcare system. The President has indicated that it must cost less than $900 billion over ten years and be fully paid for. The Congressional Budget Office has had four committees twisting themselves into knots in order to fit healthcare reform into that limit. CBO is earnestly measuring the cost of each competing healthcare plan. Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan?

And again:

Lastly, after the healthcare reform effort is completed, this country still has four huge long-term challenges that will require a sustained national effort:

1. The need for further action to repair the fragility of our own economy and rebuild the capacity of our economy to provide desperately needed job growth;

2. The need for a long-term commitment to strengthen our national security by dramatically reshaping our energy policy – an effort that will require sustained and meaningful sacrifice by all elements of our society;

3. The need for long-term action to restore fiscal soundness by reining in the federal deficit; and

4. The need for long-term action to extend the fiscal soundness of Social Security and Medicare.

To me, these points about costs and tradeoffs get especially pointed when we start talking about ambitious full-spectrum counterinsurgency. It would do Afghanistan a lot of good to provide better economic opportunities for its population and high-quality effective public services. But they could also use better economic opportunities and effective public services in Baltimore. The citizens of Detroit are lacking in physical security, viable infrastructure, and corruption-free governance.

Bundeswehr photo by Martin Stollberg

Unfortunately, nobody in the German government seems to have any interest whatsoever in talking to a room full of American journalists on anything other than off-the-record terms. Nevertheless, a few points emerged:

One is that there’s disagreement about terminology. It was explained to me that one challenge NATO has is that sometimes different national militaries will agree on an idea but have different names for it, or else will be agreeing on some words but actually mean quite different things. German public opinion is very pacifistic and the German military doesn’t like the term “counterinsurgency” which I think it regards as too alarming. They prefer to say that you need a comprehensive approach, rather than just killing the bad guys.

They also seem to sort of resent the idea circulating in the American press and apparently to some extent in the U.S. government that (to exaggerate a bit for effect) COIN doctine was something invented in the U.S. military in 2004-2005 then perfected in 2007-2008 and now General Petraeus has come down from the mountaintop to enlighten the allies. As the Germans see it, these had been familiar ideas in Europe for a while.

There’s also some really evident bitterness about the way the US government handled the Kunduz aistrike situation. I deliberately tried to not ask about this since I figured I’d just get a defensive response, but Germans wanted to drag the conversation about COIN doctrine back to this point. Few people really dispute the basic point about the need to avoid civilian casualties, but I think there’s a feeling that the Bundeswehr was being made into an example by American commanders and publicly humiliated in a way that would never have been done to an American military unit operating in a hostile situation.

Josh Marshall did a very thoughtful and interesting post this morning following up on some of my earlier doubts about the focus on the idea that preventing an al-Qaeda “safe haven” in Afghanistan should be the ne plus ultra of American national security policy.

Since Josh’s post will probably kick attention to this issue up a few notches, I thought I might add that I think there are other perfectly good issues for the United States to remain in Afghanistan. For one thing, I’m enough of a squish that I think “not abandoning the population of Afghanistan to civil war and Taliban rules” makes perfect sense. And it’s also very reasonable to see the situation in Afghanistan as tied in with the situation in Pakistan and to see preventing the collapse of the Pakistani state as an important American policy goal.

But if these are our real objectives, then certain things follow from that. Consider air strikes. If you define the goal as “eliminate safe havens” then maybe airstrikes that accidentally kill Afghan civilians aren’t that big a deal. By contrast, if we’re there to help Afghan civilians, then killing Afghan civilians is a very big deal.

Kevin Drum makes a key point about the apparent defeat of the Tamil Tigers:

And now the hardest part: can the Sinhalese majority bring itself to treat the defeated Tamil minority charitably after a quarter century of brutal war and nearly 100,000 deaths? Stay tuned.

Insurgencies, even when defeated, oftentimes have a way of coming back. Anti-Russian insurgents in Chechnya, for example, have been active on-and-off for about 200 years. Lasting resolution of the situation will require a measure of real reconciliation and wise magnanimity. “With malice toward none, with charity toward all,” and that sort of thing.

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

In my mind, this is one of the big problems with using the phrase “war on terror.” It gets people in a frame of mind where they’re thinking of analogies like “what would I do to a Nazi tank column?” rather than “what would I do to a crime-plagued neighborhood?” And when trying to figure out the right approach here, the right thing to do isn’t to ask yourself whether international terrorism is “really” a kind of warfare or “really” a kind of crime. The right thing to do is to ask yourself what kind of strategic goals you have and what kind of tactics are likely to achieve them. What we want is for Muslim communities around the world to cooperate with various governments around the world to smoke out and apprehend would-be violent extremists. That’s more like a crime-fighting mission.

Praising the promotion of former joint special operations chief Lt. Gen. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Peters writes that “Petraeus’ deservedly lauded performance in Iraq appears to have inhibited his ability to think clearly about Afghanistan”:

[Petraeus] doesn’t seem to grasp that, while al Qaeda was a foreign and ultimately unwanted presence in Iraq, the Taliban’s the home team in Afghanistan. Afghan tribesmen just don’t share our interests. And Iraq’s a state. Afghanistan’s an accident. [...]

Will McChrystal, our special operator without peer, be allowed to do what’s necessary — and to jettison huggy-bear programs that sound good but don’t work? Can he focus on the destruction of our enemies?

While recognizing that violent kinetic operations such as those that McChrystal oversaw in Iraq are often an underplayed aspect of counterinsurgency — and McChrystal’s promotion strongly indicates that such operations will play a major role in Afghanistan — it’s important to note here that we spent a number of years doing “what’s necessary” in Iraq, (as Peters wrote so charmingly at the time, “if we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies… Give therapeutic violence a chance.”) and only managed to incite a violent insurgency and midwife a sectarian civil war that killed tens of thousands and utterly changed the face of the country. Of course, Peters’ view was that we weren’t doing enough of “what’s necessary” — we just needed to do more of it, and harder.

He was, of course, proved wrong on that, just as were many on the other side like myself who were skeptical that any strategy conducted under the auspices of a U.S. occupation could actually succeed in bringing violence down. (It still remains to be seen, however, whether that strategy will result in a stable and unified Iraqi state.) While I think it’s correct to note the difference between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, it seems to me that the fact that the Taliban (or the various insurgent factions that are often carelessly referred to together as “the Taliban”) are more deeply embedded in Afghan society argues even more for a careful population- and governance-centric approach to isolate the irreconcilable hardcore from the reconcilable opportunists.

Peters’ basic argument, though, is that protecting the population was all fine and nice in Iraq, but in Afghanistan it’s time to get back to the KILLIN’. Add this to the tendency of people like Bill Kristol to diminish or dismiss the role that public relations and symbolism play in counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency and you really have to question whether they really understand or believe in the strategic approach that they’ve been hailing so vociferously for the past couple years. I have my own concerns about the Cult of COIN that’s been developing here in Washington, but I think it’s becoming clear that, for many pro-war conservatives, what Petraeus and the COINdinistas really deserve praise for is helping them save face.

Benjamin Friedman notes new Afghanistan commanding general Stanley McChrystal’s background in the “sharp” or “kinetic” end of special forces work and raises some concerns:

In the (recently released!) book on the post Cold War evolution of the US military that I co-edited, Colin Jackson and Austin Long have a chapter discussing the politics of special operations command. They argue that the direct action theory of victory in counterinsurgency is a close relative to the air force’s theory of decapitation, which says you can defeat a nation by attacking its leaders from the air. They explain that direct action has long been the favored tactic of secret or “black” SOF organizations like Delta Force, but that the wars made it the dominant mission in SOCOM as a whole, crowding traditional “white” counterinsurgency missions like population protection, force training, and civil affairs. To them, that is a problem, because the direct action theory of victory is badly flawed. You can’t kill your way to victory in these sorts of wars, they argue. That’s particularly true in Afghanistan, I’d add, where distance and poor roads make the exploitation of intelligence far more time-consuming.

I don’t know to what extent McChrystal shares the black SOF worldview. He would probably say that direct action is just part of the toolkit. It is possible, however, that his appointment reflects a decision to downplay nation-building in Afghanistan and focus more on killing raids and training Afghan soldiers.

I think the use of the term “nation building” probably obscures more than it reveals in this context. The real crux of the matter is that in a geographical sub-portion of Afghanistan where there’s insurgent activity happening, US forces face a choice at the margin between trying to identify and kill insurgents, and trying to identify and protect civilian population centers.

One interesting sub-plot thus far in the Obama administration has been the not-quite-official disavowal of the term “war on terror.” This saw another flair-up recently when a civil servant named Dave Riedel emailed Pentagon officials to tell them “OMB says: ‘This Administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT]. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’” But according to Brian Beutler, when Peter Orszag was asked about this he distanced himself from the distancing saying “I’m not aware of any communication I’ve had on that issue. It was a communication by a mid-level career civil service.” Brian observes:

So GWOT it is. That doesn’t mean the Riedel email didn’t go out, though, and some (me, for instance) wonder if some at the Pentagon might stick with the supposedly new moniker (Overseas Contingency Operation) leading to some amusing confusion on the Hill.

This has been a problem for the government for some time, and to such an extent that even George Bush was willing to admit error. “We actually misnamed the war on terror,” Bush said in August 2004. “It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.” Touche.

I think this is a more important issue than people realize. Names of programs matter. The fact that the Future Combat Systems project is named “Future Combat Systems” allowed John McCain during the campaign to try to get people to believe that Barack Obama had some kind of blanket opposition to funding future combat systems, rather than opposition to a specific boondogglish program. Similarly, it sounds and feels a lot more reasonable to say that Pentagon requests for money to use in overseas contingency operations need to be weighed against other priorities than it does to question funding requests aimed at winning a “Long War” or a “War on Terror.” Completely non-military endeavors have often tried to leverage the term “war” into increased funding (War on Poverty, War on Drugs) but obviously this works a lot better for the military which is in the business of fighting wars.

But reducing the world’s exposure to terrorists is neither an enterprise with a defined beginning and end, nor is it mainly a military undertaking. “War on Terror” and “Long War” thinking distort our policy approaches, distort our budgetary priorities, and encourage the problematic idea that we need to fight a hazily defined “global counterinsurgency” and can’t afford to think about the costs of doing so.

One of the things I have always maintained is that realists of the Andrew Bacevich school and counter-insurgents of the David Kilcullen school have more in common than they realize at first glance. No one who really understands COIN wants to do it. Liberal interventionalists and neo-conservatives are likely to be much more enthusiastic than the practitioners themselves. Counter-insurgents, often knowing something of what they speak through practical and hard-won experience, realize all too well just how difficult and costly big schemes drawn up in Washington become when they have to be operationalized. Counter-insurgency is hard. Best to avoid it, actually.

I’m torn between wanting to write “I think this is true” and wanting to write “I hope this is true.” But the fact that Exum, who’s on the inside of the COIN clique looking out, is writing it makes me more hopeful that it actually is true. It’s always seemed to me that the clear implication of giving due consideration to the issue of how to eat soup with a knife is that you should do your damn best to avoid putting yourself in that kind of situation. In other words, if at all possible find something else to eat.

But at the same time that this has seemed to me to be the clear implication, I’ve also worried that actual practitioners may be disinclined to draw the implication in practice. After all, active engagement in counterinsurgency operations tends to boost demand for counterinsurgency experts while a foreign policy that aimed to avoid such scenarios might reach the conclusion that it can afford to simply ignore the subject. Thus you could see a certain structural bias in COIN circles toward wanting to see COIN-needed situations lurking under every rock.

The ongoing Afghanistan strategic review process will, I think, be a practical test of whether or not Exum’s ideas about a realist/counterinsurgent synthesis can be made to work. It seems to me that it’s a scenario in which we need to simultaneously apply COINish insights about the tactics employed by our troops (relying on manpower rather than firepower, seeing public opinion as a key center of gravity, etc.) with realist insights about the need to set priorities, define interests, and establish realistic goals. There’s a big risk of tumbling too far into one side or another—either pulling back and just lobbing occasional bombs at bad guys in a manner that radicalizes the entire population, or else committing ourselves to an unnecessary and probably impossible decades-long effort to build a modern state structure in Afghanistan.

I think we’ll see soon enough how well the administration does on this score, but the blogging lifestyle has turned me into an impatient person.

I know he disagrees with this interpretation, but I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to dwell on the fact that the title of COIN guru John Nagl’s excellent book on the subject is Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. One thing you might ask yourself, of course, is why would you do that? And it’s hard to say. I mean, even a starving man with a bowl of soup and no spoon is just going to drink directly from a bowl. Of course you can devise some kind of scenario in which it might be necessary to eat soup with a knife, but your basic gameplan in life is going to be to avoid being in those kind of situations. And much the same, it seems to me, with the lessons of counterinsurgency. This is very difficult stuff. Like eating soup with a knife. Your top policy priority should be to avoid the situations in which it arises.