Thomas E. Ricks's Blog, page 166

Pashtun hard-core rap: A report on the messages carried in Taliban chants

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 March 9, 2011.

There's an interesting article on Taliban chants in the new issue of Small Wars and Insurgenciesby Thomas Johnson and Ahmed Waheed of the Naval Postgraduate School. It's kind of Pashtun rap. Some have even been posted on the YouTube, they say.

One, which reminds me of Peter Tosh's old Downpressor, kicks off this way:

Oh Western dragon! Where will you go when we shut all the ways? 

Oh Western dragon! Where will you go when we shut all the ways? 

Oh Western dragon! You have an opportunity to run away now. 

Hurry and get out of Kabul so that you don't regret when you are captured.

There's also some surprising content: In this one, which I take as a response to American counterinsurgency efforts, the Taliban also take on fire worshippers.

The enemies have come in the shape of friends. They look like human beings but they are wild animals. The act of disuniting people stays in their blood and their messages are look like flowers but they are full of poison. They have come under the banner of the friends but they are murderers.

The enemies have come in the shape of friends. They look like human beings 

but they are wild animals. I have always made the destiny of this country. I 

have brought happiness and beauty to my country. They have come under the 

name of sympathy but they are muggers. They have come under the name of 

sympathy but they are muggers.

The enemies have come in a shape of friends. They look like human beings but 

they are wild animals. They are Jewish but half of them are idolaters. They are 

fire worshippers who came from East and West.

When we have intelligence officers who routinely listen to this sort of thing, we will actually be able to operate in Afghanistan with effectiveness.

 

Our first openly gay general

Brig. Gen. Tammy Smith became our first
openly gay general on Friday when she was promoted from colonel. It is an
interesting moment, in part because it is so uncontroversial.

Rebecca's War Dog of the Week: Summer postcard series -- A little 29-Palms pick me up

By Rebecca Frankel

Best Defense Chief Canine Correspondent

Military working dog handlers with 1st Law Enforcement Battalion, I-MEF, have been participating in Large Scale Exercise-1, Javelin Thrust 2012. From left to right: Cpl. John Brady, with his patrol explosive detector dog, Tesa. Cpl. Fidel Rodriguez, with his combat tracker dog, Aron. Cpl. Dwight Jackson, with his patrol explosive detector dog, Hugo. Lance Cpl. Isaiah White, with his specialized search dog, Moxie. This photo was taken in July at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, CA.

Rebecca Frankel, on leave from her FP desk, is currently writing a book about military working dogs, to be published by Free Press.

 

How Rumsfeld misleads and ducks responsibility in his new book

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 March 1, 2011.

Few people know the ins and outs of the Bush Administration as well as the
Washington Post's Bob Woodward, who is flat-out disgusted with the
evasions and elisions in Donald Rumsfeld's new book. Here he explains why:

By Bob Woodward

Best Defense guest columnist

On page 527 of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld recounts
what he says was an exchange on Oct. 14, 2003 with Condoleezza Rice who was then
Bush's national security adviser. She apologized for a flap over Iraq policy at
the time.

You're failing," Rumsfeld said.

"Don, you've made mistakes in your long career," she replied.

"Yes, but I've tried to clean them up," he said.

Rumsfeld's memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to
others -- including President Bush -- distort history, ignore the record or
simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away. It is a
travesty, and I think the rewrite job won't wash.

The Iraq War is essential to the understanding of the Bush presidency and the
Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon. In the book, Rumsfeld tries to push so much off on
Bush. That is fair because Bush made the ultimate decisions. But the record
shows that it was Rumsfeld stoking the Iraq fires -- facts he has completely
left out of his memoir.

For example, I reported in my 2004 book, Plan of Attack (p. 25), that
at 2:40 p.m. on 9/11, with the smoke and dust still filling the Pentagon,
according to the notes of two of Rumsfeld's top aides, Rumsfeld mused about
whether to hit "S.H. @ same time," not only bin Laden. One note taker reaffirmed
this in an interview with the 9/11 Commission, and said that "S.H." referred to
Saddam Hussein. (p. 335 of Commission report, and p. 559 footnote 63). None of
this is in Rumsfeld's book. But he does cite the aides' handwritten notes for
other quotations he uses in his book to recount that day. (p. 343 of his book,
and p. 759 notes 30, 31 and 32. The notes are of senior Rumsfeld aides Victoria
Clarke and Stephen A. Cambone.)

 

On January 9, 2002, four months after 9/11, Dan Balz of The Washington
Post and I interviewed Rumsfeld for a newspaper series on the Bush
administration's response to 9/11. According to notes of the NSC, on
September 12, the day after 9/11, Rumsfeld again raised Iraq saying, is there a
need to address Iraq as well as bin Laden?

When Balz read this to Rumsfeld, he blew up. "I didn't say that," he said,
maintaining that it was his aide Larry DiRita talking over his shoulder. His
reaction was comic and we agreed to treat it as off the record. But Balz
persisted and asked Rumsfeld what he was thinking.

"Yeah," Rumsfeld finally told us. "I wanted to make sure that -- I always ask
myself, what's missing. It's easy for people to edit and make something slightly
better. But the question is, what haven't we asked ourselves? So I do it all the
time. I do it here, I do it in cabinet meetings or NSC meetings. It was a fair
question."

"I don't have notes," Rumsfeld insisted. "I don't have any notes."  His
memoir cites his personal handwritten notes dozens of time.

One of the important questions about the Iraq War has always been about
when and who started the Iraq clock after 9/11. On page 425, Rumsfeld
alleges that Bush on Sept 26, 2001 -- just 15 days after 9/11 -- called him to
the Oval Office. "He asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans
on Iraq..."  Rumsfeld provides no footnote for this scene.

When I interviewed Rumsfeld at his Pentagon office on Oct. 23, 2003, Rumsfeld
had a different story. "I do not remember much about Iraq being discussed at all
with the president or me or the NSC prior to when the president asked me to --
asked me what I thought of the Iraq contingency plan -- that I believe was
November 21st of '01." He was confident of the date because six days later he
went to talk with the combatant commander for the region, Gen. Tommy Franks.
"And I would not have waited long from the president asking me."

White House records and President Bush's recent memoir, Decision
Points, support the Nov. 21 date. "Two months after 9/11 I asked Don
Rumsfeld to review the existing battle plans for Iraq," Bush wrote, placing the
request in November 2001 (p. 234)

The question of the date is not just a matter of whether something occurred
on a Monday or a Thursday. On Sept. 26, 2001, the Bush administration was
focused on Afghanistan. The first CIA team had just entered and the bombing had
not yet begun. By his own account Rumsfeld was intensely trying to figure out
how to begin the military aspect of Afghanistan War with bombing and inserting
Special Operations teams.  

At a Camp David meeting on Sept. 15 -- eleven days before Rumsfeld says Bush
made his first Iraq war plan inquiry -- Bush rejected going after Iraq. In fact,
Rumsfeld himself writes, that "at the September 15 NSC meeting at Camp David
days earlier when Iraq had been raised he [Bush] had specifically kept the focus
on Afghanistan." (p. 425)

According to Rumsfeld, on Sept. 21, he and General Franks "drove over to the
White House to present his initial operational concept" for Afghanistan (p. 370)
and a more detailed approach was given to Bush on Sept. 30 (p. 373). It is
inconsistent with everything known that in the middle of all that planning and
anguish over Afghanistan, Bush would raise Iraq on Sept. 26.

However, by Nov. 21, the United States had had unexpected success in
Afghanistan and controlled half the territory. Thousands of Taliban and al Qaeda
fighters had fled the capital Kabul into Pakistan. If Bush were looking for
another target -- and he clearly was -- that would be the time, not on Sept. 26.

Another key question: When did Bush finally decide to commit the United
States to war? Rumsfeld writes, "Up until the very minute the president
authorized the first strike [March 19, 2003] there was no moment when I felt
with razor-sharp certainty that Bush had fully decided." He does describe a
meeting Jan. 11, two months earlier, when he met at the White House with Cheney,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, and Prince Bandar, the
Saudi ambassador to the United States. Rumsfeld quotes Cheney telling Bandar,
"The president has made the decision to go after Saddam Hussein." In his book
Rumsfeld adds, "Of course, Bush would not irrevocably decide on war until he
signed the execute order." (p. 450)

According to my reporting, Cheney went further in that meeting, telling the
Saudi ambassador, "Saddam is toast." In addition, General Myers outlined the
battle plan from a Top Secret map.

When I interviewed Rumsfeld on Oct. 23, 2003, less than a year after that
meeting, he said he "looked him [Bandar] in the eye and said, you can count on
this. In other words at some point we had had enough of a signal from the
president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you
can take that to the bank this is going to happen."

All other evidence shows that at least by Jan. 2003, Bush had decided on war.
Earlier that month he told Rice, "Probably going to have to, we're going to have
to go to war." That month he also told Karl Rove, his top political adviser, who
was planning for the re-election campaign the next year, "We got a war coming."

 

As numerous accounts have documented, the post-war planning and
organization was close to a disaster. Rumsfeld blames the lack of "effective
interagency coordination" and "the way the United States government is
organized." (p. 487)

As secretary of defense he was responsible. Under our system, he was next in
the chain of command after the president, effectively making him the deputy
president for war. But he sidestepped his responsibility time and time again.

Some six weeks after the invasion Rumsfeld visited Iraq and was leaving on
his plane. He had been notified by General Tommy R. Franks, who was retiring as
combatant commander for the region, that Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan "would be
the senior commander in Iraq for 90 days." (p. 497) He then recounts this scene,
which would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic:

On my flight heading back to Kuwait City I was startled to see McKiernan
onboard the C-130 aircraft. I asked him where he was going.

"To my headquarters back in Kuwait," he said.

"Well, aren't you in charge of what's going on in Iraq?" I asked.

McKiernan told me he went in and out of Iraq once, sometimes twice a week to
check on things. It struck me that in the crucial weeks following the fall of
Saddam, McKiernan did not seem to think of himself as the command in charge of
the ground operations ... McKiernan seemed to have removed himself from the
critical daily responsibilities in the country.

Rumsfeld makes no effort to explain how he, the well-known control freak,
would allow such drift and ambiguity about who was in charge. 

By June 2003, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the junior three-star in the Army was
made commander in Iraq (p. 500-01). "I do not recall being made aware of the
Army's decision to move General Sanchez into the top position," Rumsfeld writes.
The Army's? It was an abdication of his own, clear responsibility.

 

Though Rumsfeld occasionally praises Bush, a careful reading shows that he
clearly feels that Bush did not lead enough. "NSC meetings with the
president did not always end with clear conclusions and instructions," he wrote
on page 319, seemingly directing his fire at Rice. "The core problems the NSC
faced resulted from the effort to paper over differences of views."(p. 329). But
then he takes aim right at Bush, "I thought it unlikely that Rice was managing
the NSC as she did without Bush's awareness and agreement."

And so the book marches to the end. Chapter 49, the seven pages covering his
firing by Bush as the secretary of defense, is called "Farewells." He launders
the whole episode. Because he was willing to resign, he makes it sounds almost
voluntary when Cheney calls to tell him that Bush wants "to make a change." When
he meets with Bush (p. 707) to submit his resignation letter, Rumsfeld writes
with classic condescension, "I tried to make the situation easier for him." It
was almost, he subtly and deceptively suggests, as if Bush didn't want to do it.
He writes that Bush told him, "This is hard for me. You are a pro. You're a hell
of a lot better than others in this town."

Rumsfeld is indeed a pro -- at ducking and weaving and dodging
responsibility, a reflection of much of what is worst in Washington.

Near the end of the Oct. 23, 2003 interview -- page 39 of my transcript --
this interchange took place, illustrating the worst and the best of him:

Rumsfeld: "And you lie, you told people I stuck a finger in your chest. I
never stuck a finger in your chest."

Woodward: "Yes, sir, yes, yes."

Rumsfeld: "I never touched your chest."

Woodward: "I swear you did."

Rumsfeld: "Did I?"

Woodward: "Yeah, you did."

Rumsfeld: "Physically?"

Woodward: "You did, physically, it wasn't hostile you were illustrating a
point."

Rumsfeld: "Good."

Woodward: "I explained that. I thought you scored a very good point."

Rumsfeld: (laughter)

Woodward: "Which was about surprise and off balance."

Rumsfeld: "Oh yes, I did. I remember that you're right ...Yeah, right, you
are right ...I said you got to get a little off balance -- I've done that. He's
right, I'm wrong."

He had moved from calling me a liar to acknowledging that my memory was
correct and his wrong. He probably should have been more tentative at both the
front end and the back end, but there it was, Rumsfeld in full.

 

On July 7 and 8, 2006, I conducted nearly three hours of interviews with
Rumsfeld. Near the end, I heard the final denial.  I quoted Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara who had said, "Any military commander who is honest with
you will say he's made mistakes that have cost lives."

"Is that correct?" I asked.

"I don't know. I suppose that a military commander --"

"Which you are," I interrupted.

"No, I'm not," Rumsfeld said.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"No, no well ..."

"Yes, yes," I said, raising my hand in the air and ticking off the chain of
command. "It's commander in chief, secretary of defense, combatant commander."

He said, "I can see a military commander in a uniform who is engaged in a
conflict having to make decisions that result in people living or dying and that
that would be a truth. And certainly if you go up the chain to the civilian side
to the president and to me, you could by indirection, two or three steps
removed, make the case."

I quoted this interchange in my third Bush book, State of Denial, and
then wrote: "Indirection? Two or three steps removed?" This was truly
inexplicable. It was as if he could not see himself and realize that he was
avoiding his duty. When all the records are available, the other memoirs written
and the history complete, this failure to accept responsibility will likely be
his legacy.

Former German foreign minister Fischer: Ex-CIA chief George Tenet is more or less lying about Curveball

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 February 18, 2011.

[image error]

The mystery deepens. Joschka Fischer says that it isn't plausible that George Tenet didn't know
that "Curveball" may have been a fabricator, and that the Germans had grave
doubts about him.

I think Tenet may owe a big fat Greek apology to Colin Powell for ruining his reputation.

(Several BD HTs to PL)

How to talk to a vet

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 February 15, 2011.

It has come to this: Alex Horton, who gives a hoot, has written a piece on
his VA blog about how to talk to a veteran without insulting him or pissing him
off.

The whole piece is worth reading, but here are his basic five dos and three don'ts :

1. Do: Ask About Our Buddies

2. Do: Listen

3. Do: Try To Learn Something

4. Do: Have an Open Mind

5. Don't: Talk Politics

6. Don't: Be Cavalier with Questions. (Especially that old favorite about
how many people you killed.)

7. Don't: Assume Everyone Is Crippled With PTSD

8. Do: Something

Exporter or importer? It is time to secure U.S. leadership in robotics

By Andrew Borene

Best
Defense office of non-human resources

In
the coming decade we face an economic choice. If America buys robots from the
world, America saves millions of dollars and nets some efficiency gain. If we
make and sell robots to the world, America creates millions of jobs in a
technology revolution.

Let's
exert some national energy on developing a U.S. strategy for global leadership in
robotics. Like computer science in the 1980's, today's robotics technologies
are becoming an important piece of our economic infrastructure -- if we
ignore this trend it will be a great lost opportunity for our nation.

The
time is now to secure America's place in the supply-side of the global robotics
economic curve. America's leadership needs to start thinking about how we can
design, build, and service robots in the U.S., and sell them around the world.

Global demand for robotics is surging. In our lifetime, all developed countries
will be forced into positions as net robotics consumers or net robotics
producers. All will benefit, but the robotics producers will be on the
receiving end of millions of high-paying jobs to be created in the coming
decades.

Europe, Japan, and South Korea are well aware of these 21st
century opportunities. The South Koreans have already committed government
investment on the order of $750 million into the very broad mission of becoming
the world's #1 robot exporter. This year, the U.S. is looking at about $70
million in a narrowly-focused president's National Robotics Initiative.



Predator drones have increasingly grabbed international headlines, but the
urgent need for government action in robotics is not on military frontlines --
it's on American assembly lines.

The
Economist magazine's recent quarterly technology report included a breakout
section on robotics in war and the important considerations about using deadly
force and international humanitarian law. The documented rapid proliferation of
military robotic systems raises important policy and ethical considerations as
these technologies become larger parts of military, security and police force
structures around the world.

Yet a narrow focus on military robotics will distract us from the enormous
benefits robots and robot-assisted solutions already also provide in
agriculture, medicine, manufacturing, and other industries around the world.
Soon robots will also move into U.S. civilian transportation arenas, whether by
air (as a result of the recent FAA bill which opens civilian U.S. airspace to
drones) or on the ground (with self-park technologies embedded in automobiles
and Google's driverless cars).

American
leadership should be focused on developing more stories like the headline, "From
Rust Belt to Drone Belt" in the Atlantic magazine, which
highlights one Midwestern community college's efforts to train workers for the
robotic economy of the future.

What's needed now is action to establish the United States as a strong leader
in the robotics industry. Improved science education, forward-looking
industrial development, and partnerships that bring international elements from
the private sector together with government and scientific community leaders
are well advised.

Andrew Borene is an executive at ReconRobotics, Inc. in Edina, Minnesota
and adjunct professor of political science at Macalester College. He is the
Executive Director of  RoboticsAlley.org

Thoughts on the similarities between bird-watching and counterinsurgency

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 February 4, 2011.

The fun I had helping a neighbor at Christmastime with the Audubon annual
census of birds on our island inspired me to read Sibley's Birding Basics. As I did, I was struck by how you
could read some of his instructions as a supplement to David Kilcullen's recommendations on observing insurgents.

--"Watch the edges of the flock and pay special attention to outlying birds
or those that act differently; they may be a different species."

--"Consider the time of day."

--"Anticipate the birds' needs."

--"Follow the birds. If you find a number of birds in an area, consider why
they might be there. Is there a concentration of food? Is it a warm or cool
spot?"

--"Another important point for beginners to understand is that bird
identification is not an exact science and often does not involve absolute
certainty."

--"Looking at a bird with prejudice, having already determined that it is
likely to be one species and leading only to confirm that identification, will
lead you into error.… Guard against forming an opinion until all of the evidence
is in."

Also, be ready for the unexpected: I was surprised that Sibley lists Central
Park, smack in middle of the concrete canyons of New York City, as great
bird-watching spot. The reason, he writes, is that migrating birds gravitate
toward it, as "the largest patch of natural habitat in the area" -- not unlike,
he writes, a desert oasis.

Of course, both bird-watching and dealing with insurgents began by hunting
them down and killing them, until those doing the shooting realized there often
might be a better approach. With knowledge comes the understanding that hawks
act differently from shrikes, and a strong tribe differently from a marginalized
one.  

Speaking of growing understanding, I finished reading Senator's Son, which takes that as its theme. I enjoyed it
enormously. More next week about that.

Spiller's 'Six Propositions': Some mighty tasty observations here

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 January 27, 2011.

On the metro into DC I read Roger Spiller's essay on how wars end, in the
Col. Matthew Moten volume about how wars end that I mentioned a few weeks ago. Spiller is a mighty quotable
writer, so here are some of the things I underlined:

--"military doctrine is above all a modern army's way of thinking out loud
about what it must do next." (p. 20)

--"wars are defined not by their extremes but their limitations" (p. 25)

--"The Civil War was to all intents and purposes a West Pointer's war:
Academy graduates commanded on both sides in fifty-five of the sixty largest
battles, and on one side in the rest." (p. 28)   

--"From Tet onward the United States was on the strategic defensive." (p. 39)

--"the course by which a war ends, if embarked on without care, can be as
dangerous to a nation's vital interests as the war itself, regardless of the
war's military results." (p. 41)

The Vietnam War explained as never before, in hard numbers and good facts

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 January 12, 2011.

Hey, how come no one ever mentioned to me Thomas Thayer's War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam? What do I pay the frequent friers for, anyway? (You know who you are.) I finished reading it over the weekend, while it snowed in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and I think it is one of the best books I've ever read on the war, with page after page of good, usable, dispassionate data, much of it counterintuitive.

Here are just some of the things that surprised me:

The enemy was simply not going to give the Americans the war they wanted. Out of 37,990 enemy attacks in 1968, just 126 were of battalion size or larger. And that was the peak year for large attacks, which declined to 34 in 1969, 13 in 1970, and 2 in 1971 -- before rebounding in the 1972 offensive. (P. 44)
In terms of spending, it was more of an air war than a ground war. In fiscal 1969, for example, U.S. land force operations cost $4.6 billion, while air operations cost more than twice that, some $9.3 billion. (P. 25)
American bombers hit Laos hard, with 8,500 B-52 sorties in 1970 (more than twice the 3,697 sorties over South Vietnam that year) and even more the following year. (P. 84) Yet all that bombing, with virtually no political constraints, was unable to interdict the flow of supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which raises the question of whether more firepower applied against North Vietnam would have made any difference. (P. 86)
The cost of bringing in a Communist defector under the "Chieu Hoi" program averaged out to $14. The cost of killing the same enemy combatant with firepower was $60,000. (P. 202) Which method do you think American commanders focused their attention on?
In terms of productivity per dollar expended, "the most effective" allied military force was the much maligned militias, the "Regional Forces and Provincial Forces," aka " Ruff Puffs ." (P. 165)
Two-thirds of Army soldiers killed ranked E-3 or E-4. (P. 111)
More soldiers and Marines were killed by indirect fire (artillery, mortar, rocket, land mines, etc.) than by small arms fire. (P. 117)
Some 613 of the Marines who died in Vietnam were draftees. (P. 115)

The book poses a mighty hurdle to those who say that, despite much proof to the contrary, the Army was a learning organization in Vietnam. Here is much evidence that there was good, solid information about how the Army's approach was profoundly counterproductive -- and also that this information largely was available internally at the time. Indeed, the author notes in an afterword that the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice tried to stop dissemination of the internal reports on which the book is based. (P. 259) He suggests that Westmoreland was particularly peeved by these analyses.