Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 163

19 true things generals can't say in public about the Afghan war: A helpful primer

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on November 9, 2011.

As a public service, Best
Defense is offering this primer for generals on their way to Afghanistan.

Here is a list of 19 things that many insiders and veterans
of Afghanistan agree to be true about the war there, but that generals
can't say in
public. So, general, read this now and believe it later-but keep your lip
zipped. Maybe even keep a printout in your wallet and review before interviews.

My list of things to remember I can't say

Pakistan
is now an enemy of the United States.




We
don't know why we are here, what we are fighting for, or how to know if we are
winning.




The
strategy is to fight, talk, and build. But we're withdrawing the fighters, the
Taliban won't talk, and the builders are corrupt.




Karzai's
family is especially corrupt.




We
want President Karzai gone but we don't have a Pushtun successor handy.




But
the problem isn't corruption, it is which corrupt people are getting the
dollars. We have to help corruption be more fair.




Another
thing we'll never stop here is the drug traffic, so the counternarcotics
mission is probably a waste of time and resources that just alienates a swath
of Afghans.




Making
this a NATO mission hurt, not helped. Most NATO countries are just going
through the motions in Afghanistan as the price necessary to keep the US in
Europe




Yes,
the exit deadline is killing us.




Even
if you got a deal with the Taliban, it wouldn't end the fighting.




The
Taliban may be willing to fight forever. We are not.




Yes,
we are funding the Taliban, but hey, there's no way to stop it, because the
truck companies bringing goods from Pakistan and up the highway across Afghanistan
have to pay off the Taliban. So yeah, your tax dollars are helping Mullah Omar
and his buddies. Welcome to the neighborhood.




Even
non-Taliban Afghans don't much like us.




Afghans
didn't get the memo about all our successes, so they are positioning themselves
for the post-American civil war .




And
they're not the only ones getting ready. The future of Afghanistan is probably
evolving up north now as the Indians, Russians and Pakistanis jockey with old
Northern Alliance types. Interestingly, we're paying more and getting less than
any other player.




Speaking
of positioning for the post-American civil war, why would the Pakistanis sell
out their best proxy shock troops now?




The
ANA and ANP could break the day after we leave the country.




We
are ignoring the advisory effort and fighting the "big war" with
American troops, just as we did in Vietnam. And the U.S. military won't act any
differently until and work with the Afghan forces seriously until when American
politicians significantly draw down U.S. forces in country-when it may be too
damn late.




The
situation American faces in Afghanistan is similar to the one it faced in
Vietnam during the Nixon presidency: A desire a leave and turn over the war to
our local allies, combined with the realization that our allies may still lose,
and the loss will be viewed as a U.S. defeat anyway.

Thanks to several people who contributed to
this, from California to Kunar and back to DC, and whose names must not be
mentioned! You know who you are. The rest of you, look at the guy sitting to
your right.

Two ways to access that 1983 Army War College paper on bad brigadier generals

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on November 10, 2011.

In response to popular demand by you demanding Best
Defenders, the Army has created two ways to read that 1983 report I discussed
the other day about how one-quarter
of new brigadier generals were considered stinkers by battalion commanders who
had served under them.

One way is to click on this
link for a PDF. Or, if you are feeling particularly adept, you can follow
these instructions offered by the friendly folks at the Army's Military History Institute:
"Actually, anyone can access it from any computer. Just lead them to the
research portion of our website www.ahco.army.mil & have them follow the instructions:

1. Click on the big "Digitized Materials" button

2. Enter the name "Reid, Tilden R." in the white
search box & click the "search all digitized material" box
immediately below

3. Scroll down the
results list and open the document!"

Rape and the ethics of adultery, or how the military hides its rape problem

He probably wishes he was
back in Afghanistan. Last month, Major General Gary Patton became the new
director of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, as
details of the latest scandal involving sexual assault in the ranks broke. The Air
Force has identified 38 women as victims of rape and sexual misconduct at their
training facility at Lackland Air Force Base. Two instructors have been
convicted, one sentenced to twenty years, and the unit's commander has been
relieved.  The investigation continues as
the courts consider the latest lawsuit filed by a group of sexual assault
victims who allege that the military mishandled their complaints.

The scope of the problem is startling. A 2008 survey by
the Government Accountability Office put the rate of sexual assault at 7 percent of
women and 2 percent of men. As women make up about 15 percent of the military, most victims
are male. Because of underreporting and the stigma attached to the crime,
estimates vary widely. Some VA hospitals report as many as 30 percent of their female
patients are victims of sexual assault.

Many victims do not come forward for fear of reprisal.
Attackers often outrank their victims, making reporting difficult. Some
commanders bully victims into keeping quiet about their attacks. In documentaries
like Invisible War and In There Boots: Outside the Wire, victims have described
how they were threatened with spurious court martial charges and had their
careers derailed by their chains of command. Lawsuits filed by victims
described how they lost their security clearances for seeking mental health
treatment, damaging the only advantage many of them have in the toughest
veteran job market in decades.

The problem has even tainted the military's mental health
system. A recent CNN investigation revealed that while women are make up 16 percent of
the Army, they account for 24 percent of the mental health discharges, with similar
disparities for the other services. The report went on to profile sexual
assault victims from all four services who claimed to have been discharged after
seeking assistance after their attacks.

The military's legal system has twisted itself in knots
trying to deal with problem. In 2008, the GAO reported that only 17 percent of sexual
assault cases were prosecuted. 
Commanders and prosecutors responded by increasing the rate of
prosecution by 70 percent in 2009.

One troubling tact
commanders have taken is to pursue adultery charges in rape cases.  For the victims, this means that their
attackers will get off on a misdemeanor conviction and do not have to register
as sex offenders. More disturbingly, perhaps, is the tremendous pressure for
the accused to plead guilty to adultery to avoid rape charges.  There is a body of academic work in both Game
Theory and the Reid Technique, a commonly used interrogation method, which
suggests that innocent people will confess to crimes they did not commit to
avoid more serious charges. In either case, commanders can plausibly claim that
their units do not have a rape problem. In a twist reminiscent of the Iranian
justice system, commanders have even threatened victims with adultery charges.

An adversarial justice system involves winners and
losers. Prosecuting alleged rapes as adultery produces neither. Rape victims
are denied the satisfaction of the military acknowledging the crime and
properly punishing the attacker. Those falsely accused are forced to plead
guilty and deal with the shame of being drummed out of the military with a
dishonorable discharge. The only winners in these cases are the careers of the commanders
involved. There is little resembling justice for anyone.

To his credit, the Secretary of Defense has instituted
much needed reforms on how the military handles rape cases. In a tacit
acknowledgement of mid-level commanders' inclination to bury rape investigations
for career purposes, all such cases are now handled by more senior commanders
already eligible for retirement.

Still,
there is more that could be done to reform the military's handling of sexual
assault. Perhaps General Patton should look into commanders' use of adultery
charges in rape cases. If he does not, perhaps Congress could do it for him.

Matthew Collins spent ten years as a Marine
Intelligence Officer, including a tour as a company executive officer on Marine
Corps Base Quantico. He is now an MBA student at St Louis University. If you
are a service member who has been the victim of sexual assault, confidential
help is available through the DOD Safe Helpline at 877 995 5247.

What would realistic ethical training be like? And why don't we have it?

There's a terrific, thoughtful piece
on the need for realistic ethical training in the November issue of Army magazine. It is by Kevin Bell, who
was an Army captain and left to do graduate work in Middle Eastern studies at
Princeton.

Why, Bell wonders, do we have tough and realistic combat
training, but not equally realistic ethical training? Here is what I think the
nut of the piece is:

As a profession we have to adjust our training so that we
know what to do when rage tells us that it's OK to go beyond the limits of
tactical questioning with a captive. We can't stop there, though. We need to
talk to our peers and subordinates about the real challenges of ethical
leadership in a way that acknowledges how our job culture can warp our
understanding of morality.

There is a lot more to quote in the article. First, he says,
let's stop pretending that there is a huge distance between someone who
tortures and someone who is a good officer. Also, don't make people think
through the ethical distinctions for the first time when they are seized with
rage and grief over the death of a comrade. But, he continues, "lack of realism
in detainee training is only the most obvious problem."  

Don't just preach to small unit leaders, he says. Give them
concrete support that enables them to operationalize ethical standards. "It isn't
enough to know the rules if we are still unsure in a time of weakness what to
do with detainees who might have tactically useful information."

Bell's only misstep, I think, is his last sentence, about
how if these changes are made, "The next generation of junior leaders will
thank us." This rings false to me. Actually, if he is right -- and I believe he
is -- I doubt they will thank anybody, they will just assume this is the right
way to do things. (As a writer, I think people often go on a little too far in
their conclusions.)

But that's a minor gripe. It is an article worth reading,
and Army magazine is to be commended for running it. I hereby award it The Best
Defense prize for best defense commentary of the month. 

Blog comment of the day: ‘Tom Kennedy’ says he is sick of hiring lazy, whining vets

This
is a well-written,
thoughtful blog post that made me think -- as did the entire discussion.
Thanks to all who participated, not just Mr. Kennedy. It also meets my metric
of being better than most of my own posts:

--

"I
left the Regular Army as a captain and went to work for a global corporation. I
have several colleagues at work who also left the Regular Army as captains and
now have good jobs (more on the officer side later). That is why it pains me to
write this below:

I
have had very limited success with hiring vets. The positions I need to fill
are entry level and require a high school diploma only. Starting out several
years ago, I thought that these jobs would be perfect for the typical 21 to 24-year-old first- or second- term enlistee who decided to get out and start laying
roots. So I hired a few people like that.

Without
getting into the details, my experience has been that the vets I hire expect
too much from the employer while also expecting high praise for no
accomplishments. We offered full medical and dental coverage, 401K, three weeks
paid time off to start, and a 40 hour work week. Nearly all the vets I hired
failed to learn how to manage their benefits. They didn't understand why they
had a $20 co-pay at the doctor. They didn't participate in the matching 401K
because they didn't want to see the deduction on their pay stub. They didn't
understand why they couldn't all take two week's vacation at the same time
(Christmas). Et cetera.

Worse,
the typical vet was not ready to work. We track productivity by employee and I
consistently found the vets near the bottom. After speaking and working with
these guys, it's apparent that their attitude and work ethic is lacking. Many
of them had a standoff-ish attitude among their coworkers because they'd
deployed and so-and-so stayed home. Generally, their work habits were focused
on avoiding tasks and generally hanging back to allow others to accomplish
their work for them. They very much prefer to find a small task and extend it
as long as possible in order to give the appearance of productivity.

I
haven't given up, but the last three years have been a big wake-up for me as a
civilian employer who also has military experience.

On
the officer side: Just because CPT so-and-so got out after commanding a company
and got an MBA does not mean he will step into an executive position. Officers
might have to take a pay cut from their O-3 grade to get into a new career.
And, you will never step into a position over 120 employees like you had as a
commander.

The
biggest fear of a civilian employer (at least, me) is that you will get hired,
and then drone on in your office without learning anything about your new
career and without managing your own advancement. You can not just wait out
your civilian position, take a professional development course, and then get an
automatic promotion.

So,
here are some ideas for the guys getting out:

-
Use the headhunter recruiting companies to get connected if you don't already
have an 'in' somewhere. Simple, but they stay in business because they work.

- Don't copy your OER duty description or award bullets into your resume. It's
lazy and we can tell.

- Emphasize your accomplishments over your technical duty description. If you
were rated as a 'top 3 platoon leader in the battalion,' put that in your
resume instead of your property book value. Signing for $1 million in equipment
is not an accomplishment.

- Don't talk down to civilians who don't have military experience. Sounds
simple but I hear it a lot. Also, you might not even know who you're talking
to. (I've had an AF vet try to tell me that his four month deployment was
harder than the Army's twelve month deployment because he 'couldn't get settled.')

- Have a good reason why you are leaving you military career. It can't be
because it's too much work or you can't get promoted. We know how easy it is to
get promoted and we don't want to hire a drone."

--

 

Generals should not be potted plants for candidates on the campaign trail

This
phrase in an article in the Fayetteville
Observer caught my eye:  ".
. . . Sharing the stage with Ryan were . . . . retired Army Gens. Dan McNeill and
Buck Kernan."

I have nothing against either of those
generals. But I wish they would not allow themselves to be used by political
figures. The Army chief of staff should ask all retired generals to stop
appearing with candidates who are campaigning. I especially hate it when they
trot out a coupla dozen at political conventions.  In the long run, this sort of partisan
activity can only hurt the Army, and the nation.

Quote of the day: In our age, 'Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive'

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on October 26, 2011.

"We
now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is
cheap, but meaning is expensive." — George
Dyson. (I'd heard of his pop and his sister but not of him.)

This
wasn't always the case. I remember reading in Braudel's
history of the Mediterranean that in 16th century Europe,
information was mighty expensive. One example that struck me (if I am recalling
Braudel correctly) was that sending a letter from Spain to Paris cost the
equivalent of a university professor's annual salary. Now sending that e-mail
is basically free. On the other hand, no one got spammed back in 1550.

I think that what this blog should try to be about is making
sense of new information. I march forward with new resolve!

What makes this blog fun to do: A robust exchange between Hammel and Hunter about the meaning of that Marine photo

[image error]

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on November 2, 2011.

I really liked this exchange
between "Hunter," whom we know to be an Army officer, and Eric Hammel, about
Hammel's guest column Monday about his favorite Marine photo of World War II. I
don't know who is correct, but both made me think. I suspect Hammel may be
right here. I remember a guy who had been an intelligence officer in the
Pacific in World War II recounting how he decoded a message and saw that he was
going to be involved in the planned invasion of Japan. He thought, Well, that's
it, I am going to die this year. Then he vomited.

I wonder if a counterintuitive metric of blog quality is how often the
comments are better than the average post. (Speaking of blogs, wouldn't "The
Burn Pit" be a good name for a blog about daily life while deployed to a
combat zone?)

Anyway, Hunter wrote:

While it's
nice to think well of these folks, and they certainly did their job and did it
well...but I can't help but think, through my cynical eyes, that the thoughts
running through these guys heads were "1) this shit sucks 2) we're all
gonna die 3) we're skylining like mofos." In no particular order.

Sorry it's not
the prettified version, but it's probably pretty real.

Eric Hammel replied:

I thought
about the above comments all day. What I conclude is that you don't think the
way American troops in the Pacific thought during the spring of 1945. This
takes nothing away from your experience, and it adds nothing to theirs. The
times are not the same.

The men in the
photo knew that they were nearing the end of a long war. They thought they
would die on Okinawa or Kyushu or Honshu, so they felt they had little to lose
by rushing across open ground or a skyline. In fact, getting killed or wounded
on any day on Okinawa was better than the pain of living in order to be killed
or wounded later. My father, who had barely escaped the claws of the Holocaust
and had already fought on Leyte, ended eighteen days in the line on Okinawa
with a shattered hand. He felt for the rest of his long life as if, by virtue
of just the last, he had won the ultimate lottery.

The Japanese
on Okinawa had built a hedgehog defense within a hedgehog defense in twisted
hill country composed of one skyline after another. They knew what they were
about. Once the Americans engaged the outer hedgehog, they were all in a war of
attrition. But the Japanese had no recourse to troops--or anything--that wasn't
on Okinawa on the first day of battle. The Americans had unlimited resources to
bring up and bring in as needed, which they did--two army infantry divisions
and a Marine regimental combat team were added to the original Tenth Army OOB.
Both sides knew how the cards had been dealt. The four Marines in the photo
knew it. So the thing I think the four were going over in their heads were: Can
I drop fast enough if the other side opens fire? If not, will it be quick?
Because, with me or without me, we are winning.

Rebecca's war dog of the week: Summer postcard series: Kiara and Keilman get the Bronze Star

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent



U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. and MWD handler,
Christopher Keilman, was awarded the Bronze Star Medal July 31 in correlation
with his deployment to Afghanistan with U.S. Army special forces from 2010 to
2011. I met Keilman when I was in Yuma last March and spoke with him
about his tour -- he and his dog were outside the wire everyday: 

..."Keilman conducted over 100 combat operations to capture,
kill and disrupt Taliban and anti-Afghan forces throughout the Panjwayi
District of Kandahar Province." He was responsible for ensuring all
dismounted routes the detachment utilized were swept for mines and improvised
explosive devices, which led to the discovery and destruction of 24 IEDs.



Before Keilman returned home from his deployment to
Afghanistan with U.S. Army special forces, he heard rumors he was being put up
for a bronze star.



'Being an E-5, I wasn't too hung up on it and I
didn't put too much thought into it,' he said. 'The recognition of someone
saying 'thank you' is good enough for me. I don't need a pat on the back to do
my job; it's my job.'"

You can read the full article here.

The seven steps of American officials dealing with the puzzles of Pakistan

 

[image error]

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a
few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until
he returns. This originally ran on September 20, 2011.

By Tom Lynch

Best Defense department of
dysfunctional diplomacy

Recent
comments
by Senator Kirk from Illinois exemplify a familiar pattern by senior
U.S. political, military and diplomatic officials struggling to understand
the devilish intricacies and deep challenges of South Asian politics
through the constrained access portal of experience in or focus on Afghanistan.
This struggle all too frequently takes
the pattern of a seven-step process of "discovery learning"
regarding the complexities of South Asia security by Americans first introduced
to Afghanistan without background in the wider region. That process goes
something like this ....

STEP
1 - MEET Afghans, find them engaging, look for the quick way to help them with
a "hand up," ignore the vexing, decades-long regional security
dilemmas underpinning their plight.

STEP
2 - DISCOVER Afghans suffer from multiple internal and external challenges --
take the (northern) Afghan viewpoint that theirs is all a problem of
Pakistan's making.

STEP
3 - BLAME Pakistan for all Afghanistan's ills and despair of American engagement
with Pakistan or Afghanistan, throw out the "I" word suggesting that
more India in Afghanistan would "teach" Pakistan a lesson (and
presumably save some cash).

STEP
4 - DISCOVER Pakistan already believes there is an Indian under every rock in
Afghanistan - and that threatening a quicker Coalition departure and greater
Indian involvement won't faze Pakistan.... Rawalpindi will move more quickly to
bolster its Afghan Taliban allies for a proxy war.

STEP
5 - DETERMINE that India isn't really interested in bailing out the Coalition
(or American politicians and diplomats) on western terms, has
its own regional objectives and timetables, and isn't
much responsive to boisterous American rhetoric accelerating the
timelines on a Pakistan-India proxy war in Afghanistan. That proxy war may
come, but India will work to prolong its onset as long as possible.

STEP
6 - RECOGNIZE that a rapidly-accelerating proxy war between two nuclear-armed
nations encouraged by a precipitous withdrawal of US/Coalition forces before
some political mechanism in place to limit the possibilities for that
war is irresponsible, an approach that is all too similar to America's
walk away from Afghanistan and Pakistan back the early 1990s that led to a
proxy war in Afghanistan between India and Pakistan before both
were fully tested nuclear-armed states.

STEP
7 - RESOLVE either to remain engaged with Afghanistan, Pakistan and
India for a lengthy and challenging diplomatic-military process (including some
level of non-trivial economic and military aid to both Afghanistan and Pakistan
for some time); or, SUCCUMB to the personal frustrations of it all
and quit the field, making room for the next nouveau American to start
the process at STEP 1.

Tom Lynch is a
research fellow for South Asia & Near East at NDU. A retired Army
Colonel, he was a special assistant focused on South Asian security for
the CENTCOM Commander and later the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff during 2004-2010. The opinions here are his own.