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Today In Productive Counter-Political Action

by Adam L Silverman| September 20, 20218:31 pm| 118 Comments

This post is in: America, Crazification Factor, Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Political Action, Politics, Silverman on Security

The Oregon Democratic legislative majority is doing the most productive counter-political action that can be undertaken right now at the state level. They’re going to extreme gerrymander Oregon’s congressional delegation!

NEW: House Speaker Tina Kotek is about to back down on her deal to grant Republicans parity on redistricting. She told her caucus today she'll appoint a new committee, with Dems in the majority, to pass a Congressional, plan. #orpol #orleg

— Dirk VanderHart (@dirquez) September 20, 2021

There’s a lot of legislative shenanigans that the Oregon Republican legislative minority can still take to try to stymie this, but this is the counter-political action that needs to happen in every state where the Democrats have a a trifecta and control of the redistricting process this year.

As it stands now, just through redistricting in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas, the Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives in January 2023 before a single vote is cast. The only way to neutralize this is that every place the Democrats have control over redistricting, like Oregon and New York, they have to redistrict an extreme gerrymander. If New York would do that, they take Florida’s redistricting plan to create five new safe Republican congressional seats right off the table making it a wash. These five planned safe Republican congressional seats in Florida is all it takes right now to flip the House! If the other states where Democrats control redistricting also do this it would negate the redistricting gains that are also planned for Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Last year’s Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering, which effectively and essentially removed the issue from being within the purview of the Federal courts, means that there are only two ways to overcome the extreme malapportionment that will be created as a result of redistricting. The first is to fight it in state court, but in a lot of these Republican controlled states, the state judiciary has been captured by the same Leonard Leo financed conservative and Republican interests that are now causing problems in the Federal judiciary. The second is to negate the effects of these extreme gerrymanders by putting equally extreme gerrymanders in place where Democrats have control to negate this as a way of taking control of the House of Representatives by picking the voters for the Republican candidates rather than having the voters pick the candidate they want to represent them.

Since we’re on effective counter-political action, let me skip over to effective civic action. It’s great that we’re going to have another women’s march. You want to really make it effective as civic action, here’s how. The march route needs to begin and end in front of Leonard Leo’s house. It needs to go past his office. From there it needs to go past his church. Then past his country club. And then culminate back at his house. You want to put fear into the conservative majority he has created on the Supreme Court? You don’t do it by demonstrating in front of Brett Kavanaugh’s house, you do that by demonstrating in front of Leo’s. You do that by making him afraid that his ability to manipulate the Federal courts and elections and redistricting from the shadows will be taken away from him. And you do that by taking it away from him.

You do not threaten his well being or his life or that of his family. Rather you make it clear that his days in the shadows are over. That no matter where he goes he will be politely and civilly protested. He doesn’t believe women have a right to privacy that allows them to make their own reproductive health care decisions. Nor does he believe people have a right to privacy that allows them to choose to use artificial methods of birth control. And he does not believe there is a right to privacy that would allow LGBTQ people the same rights to live, love, marry, live with, and/or have sex with anyone they want who consents to it. He thinks these decisions should all be subject to public scrutiny. If that’s the case, then his life should be subject to public scrutiny too. If you want to make sure that a message is heard loud in clear in the Supreme Court’s chambers that what the conservative majority is planning on doing, what they were hand picked by Leo to do, is not going to be acceptable, then the way you do that is you take Leo’s privacy away from him. If he steps outside, he needs to be in the spotlight. He shouldn’t be doxxed! He shouldn’t be SWATTed! He shouldn’t be touched! He shouldn’t be screamed at! His family members shouldn’t be bothered in any way! No one should trespass on his actual property! No one should be offensive or obscene! But he should not be able to go get a cup of coffee without demonstrators following him with signs, filming him and his response, and broadcasting it all over social media. He doesn’t believe you have any rights that are not subject to his theocratic fascist delusions of grandeur. He needs to learn that he doesn’t have the right to make that determination and that his attempts to do so have consequences.

Again: protesting Leo should be, needs to be, and must be peaceful, civil, polite, and in line with all applicable laws. The point is to make him uncomfortable by peaceably assembling and demonstrating, not by violent intimidation or threats.

This is all contingent, of course, on us getting through the next two weeks or so without both breaching the debt ceiling, which will crash both the US and the global economy, and having the government shut down. McConnell has learned that his strategy of complete and total obstruction and opposition when a Democrat is president provides him with great rewards. He will not change that strategy now because if either, let alone both of these things happens, he knows that President Biden and the Democrats will be blamed, not him or his Republican majority in the Senate.

Time is running out…

Edited to Add at 11:15 PM:

Since people keep asking if this strategy of peacefully protesting Leo will make any difference, the simple answer is no.

That’s the point I keep trying to make to get people to understand whenever someone says we’re going to have a demonstration. Or Group X is going to do action Y.

It won’t achieve anything. Just like a Women’s March in October won’t achieve anything.

I keep explaining it and you refuse to accept it, but here goes one more time…

The only thing that matters is the exercise of raw political power. What Oregon Democrats are doing, what I advised the Democrats do in the states where they control redistricting, that will achieve something.

Marches, demonstrations, bringing stuff in the Senate up for a vote without a snowball’s chance in hell that it will pass, including a stand alone debt ceiling increase bill to make the Republicans “own voting no”when it will clearly fail and the US will still crash through the debt limit and default, none of it makes a damn bit of difference.

There are only two things that will make a bit of difference. The first, and the only one that should be under consideration, is the unilateral employment of raw political power. The second is the use of counter-revolutionary violence. The latter is off the table. So that just leaves employing raw political power.

Other than what the Democrats in Oregon’s legislature are doing regarding redistricting, do you see any Democrats in any elected or appointed office at any level of government employing raw political power? Do you see any outside groups supporting them calling for it, generating support for it, making sure that Democrats will be rewarded for it electorally and in terms of fundraising and punished for failing to employ raw political power? No, no you don’t.

Thus, at least for this night because I’m sure I’ll be back here having to provide it again and again and again, here endeth the lesson.

Open thread!

Today In Productive Counter-Political ActionPost + Comments (118)

Everyone Needs To Stop the Hysterics Regarding General Milley and Read What Is Actually Being Reported

by Adam L Silverman| September 15, 20217:40 pm| 70 Comments

This post is in: America, An Unexamined Scandal, Crazification Factor, Domestic Politics, Media, Military, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security

For the better part of the past two days I’ve been watching people – some smart, some earnest, and a lot who are disingenuous – freak out that GEN Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has somehow single handedly destroyed over 240 years of civilian control of the US military. He hasn’t. The feeding frenzy, however, will continue because it provides the political reporters, the pundits and commenters, Republican elected officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media elites what they want the most: the opportunity to make Woodward and Costa’s reporting about anything that is not how deranged Trump might have actually been between October 2020 and January 2021; just how badly he and his political appointees had degraded, warped, and twisted the Federal government over their four years in office; and just how craven, anti-American, anti-republican, and anti-democratic the Republican Party and the conservative movement and news and media systems that sustain the party have become to allow this to happen. And before we jump to the next paragraph, the word reporting in regard to Woodward and Costa’s new book is doing a lot of work. Because while it is being reported that Woodward claims to have a transcript of Milley’s call with Speaker Pelosi, the reality is, as is the case with every one of these books Woodward has done for decades, there is NO WAY TO CHECK THE SOURCING because ALL OF HIS SOURCES ARE ANONYMOUS!

The two items regarding GEN Milley that have everyone up in arms are in regard to conversations that Woodward and Costa report that he had with his Chinese counterpart and his guidance regarding orders to launch a nuclear strike. In both cases the people now in hysterics are not actually paying attention to what was either published in the excerpts or what has been subsequently reported today.

Let’s start with the nuclear strike stuff. The argument being made is that GEN Milley, who has no command authority and is the senior uniformed administrator and military advisor to the president, proactively inserted himself into the chain of command for ordering a nuclear strike to block any potential order to conduct one. And, by doing so, he broke civilian control of the military. But here’s what, according to the excerpt published at CNN, Woodward and Costa are actually reporting that GEN Milley said:

In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.

“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.

“Got it?” Milley asked, according to the book.

“Yes, sir.”

‘Milley considered it an oath,’ the authors write.

Notice what GEN Milley told the senior military officials he wanted them to do: “No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book.” Here’s what the actual book, Air Force Doctrine Publication 3-72: Nuclear Operations say is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s role in the procedure and the process:

To maintain credibility, Airmen must be ready at all times to respond to requests from the President and his or her advisors via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to employ nuclear weapons. The inability of nuclear forces to respond quickly could undermine the value of deterrence and assurance. (p. 3)

The President may direct the use of nuclear weapons through an execute order via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the combatant commanders and, ultimately, to the forces in the field exercising direct control of the weapons.

Execution of these orders through emergency action procedures allow for a timely response to an emergency action message and ensure the directive is valid and authentic. Air Force personnel involved in the actual employment of nuclear weapons are intensively and continuously trained and certified in these procedures so they can quickly and accurately respond to the order. (p. 9)

The US Air Force’s own doctrine places the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the process, not to countermand orders, not to contradict them, but to transmit them from the president and/or the president’s advisors (Assistant to the President-National Security Advisor, Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense) to the appropriate combatant commanders. Provided Woodward and Costa’s reporting is correct, what GEN Milley appears to have done was to clarify the doctrinal process and procedure. And there’s a very good reason he did that. There was no lawfully, Senate approved Secretary of Defense. There was no lawfully, Senate approved Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. In the White House, Mark Meadows was the Acting Chief of Staff, whatever acting really means in regard to a position that does not require Senate confirmation and in which the person holding the job serves at the pleasure of the president. Additionally, the Acing Chief of Staff, to the acting Secretary of Defense, was Kash Patel, who is one of Devin Nunes’ stooges.

I think a good argument could be made that the civilian portion of civilian control of the military had broken down. The only people in the chain of command at that point who were lawfully in their positions were Trump who was president and the senior uniformed leadership. The only Senate confirmed civilian leadership at the Pentagon at that point was Secretary of the Army McCarthy. As a result, GEN Milley wanted the appropriate senior commanders in the chain to follow the doctrinal process and procedure regarding command and control over the use of nuclear weapons. He didn’t want them to take such an order if it was passed on by unlawfully serving Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, unlawfully serving Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick, or unlawfully serving Acting Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kash Patel. The orders either came through the doctrinally prescribed channel, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is part of that doctrinally prescribed channel, or they weren’t orders. Between the language in the excerpt, which is the language from Woodward and Costa’s book, and the language in the doctrine for how nuclear launch orders are transmitted, it is very clear what the process and procedure are. What GEN Milley did was to reinforce that to the senior uniformed leadership. That isn’t undermining civilian control of the military. It is insisting that the civilian control be followed precisely as defined in doctrine.

The hysterics over GEN Milley’s reported conversations with his counterpart in the People’s Republic of China is also overwrought and silly. Leaving aside that GEN Milley speaks to his counterparts in a number of nation-states – from allied and partnered to peer competitors to hostile foreign powers – on a variety of matters all the time, We now know, because it was reported today, that GEN Milley was working under instructions from Mark Esper, who was the last actual lawfully serving, Senate confirmed Secretary of Defense.

In mid-October 2020, top Pentagon officials grew concerned about intelligence they’d seen. It showed the Chinese were consuming their own intelligence that had made them concerned about the possibility of a surprise U.S. strike against China, three sources familiar with the situation tell Axios.

One of the sources said: “I think they [the Chinese] were getting bad intelligence… a combination of ‘wag the dog’ conspiracy thinking and bad intel from bad sources.”

Then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper worried the Chinese were misreading the situation and that their misperception could lead to a conflict nobody wanted.

Esper directed his policy office to issue a backchannel message to the Chinese to reassure them the U.S. had no intention of seeking a military confrontation. The message: Don’t over-read what you’re seeing in Washington; we have no intention to attack; and let’s keep lines of communication open.

These backchannel communications were handled a couple of levels below Esper, one of the sources said. U.S. officials involved thought the Chinese received the initial message well. Milley followed up later in the month with a call to his Chinese counterpart to reiterate the message, two of the sources confirmed.

It’s unclear whether anyone at the Pentagon told President Trump or the White House what they were doing.

Around the same time Esper learned of the Chinese concerns, he also learned that a long-planned deployment to Asia had been moved up a couple of weeks earlier than previously planned, to accommodate COVID quarantine protocols.

Esper told colleagues the last thing the Chinese needed to see at that moment — when they were already misreading Washington’s intentions — was more planes, according to one of the sources.

Esper went so far as to delay this long planned exercise in Asia until after the election, to lower the temperature.

Axios has not independently confirmed that Milley told his Chinese counterpart he would give him a heads up if the U.S. planned to attack China.

One source familiar with Milley’s conversations with his Chinese counterpart would only broadly characterize them as Milley saying something to the effect of: “We’ll both know if we’re going to war… there’s not gonna be some surprise attack and there’s no reason for you to do a pre-emptive strike.”

Finally, given that the excerpt published at CNN reports that GEN Milley was in regular contact about these concerns with not just Speaker Pelosi, but also former Secretary of State Pompeo and former Director of Central Intelligence Haspel, there was no breakdown in civil military relations. Speaker Pelosi, former Secretary Pompeo, and former DCI Haspel were all legally and constitutionally in their respective offices. Yes, they are not in GEN Milley’s chain of command as he reports to the president as his senior uniformed military advisor, but this makes it clear that GEN Milley was not off the reservation free lancing. Rather, faced with a complete breakdown in legitimate, constitutional civilian control of the Department of Defense at the most senior levels other than the Secretary of the Army, GEN Milley consulted and coordinated with other legitimate, constitutional officers within both the executive and legislative branches, reviewed and reinforced the doctrinal process and procedure regarding nuclear strike authorization with the senior uniformed leadership in that chain of command, and in regard to the PRC, carried out the orders he had been given by the last legitimately appointed and serving Secretary of Defense.

This is what the excerpts from Woodward and Costa’s new book are actually telling us. Was this the high water mark of civil military relations in the US? No. Should there be legitimate inquiry into this by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees? Yes. Should this include GEN Milley having to answer some tough questions in front of those committees? Definitely.

This wasn’t a mutiny. It was not an attempt to break the chain of command or get other senior uniformed leaders to do so. It is, however, right now an opportunity for political reporters, the political pundits, current and former Republican elected and appointed officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media figures to change the subject to cover their own hugely exposed tuchases. We’re going on seven years now where almost every member of each of these groups has managed to completely misrepresent, misreport, excuse, explain away, and/or divert attention from their failures to report or act on the fact that Donald Trump was not just grossly unqualified to be president, but that he presented and still presents, a clear and present danger to the United States as a self governing democratic-republic. Focusing on what GEN Milley did, and misrepresenting it, allows them to not focus on all the terrible things Woodward and Costa are reporting about Trump and the sycophantic enablers he surrounded himself with. It allows them to slide right on by the fact that Mike Pence was actively looking for a way to make Trump’s coup attempt actually happen because Trump was mean to Pence. It allows them to ignore or hand wave away their own culpability in failing to use the simple terms in their reporting that actually describe Trump, his behavior, his actions and the behavior and actions of his senior appointees, advisors, surrogates, benefactors/funders, enablers, and his supporters. A failure which continues to this day!

A scapegoat must be found. Phoney baloney jobs must be protected. Access to sources and funding and sinecures must be preserved. And the role of Azazel, the scape goat for this community’s sins on this Yom Kippur, will be played by GEN Milley. Because the political reporters, the political pundits, current and former Republican elected and appointed officials, conservative movement leaders, and conservative news and social media figures are unable to and incapable of atoning their political sins of commission and omission.

Open thread!

Everyone Needs To Stop the Hysterics Regarding General Milley and Read What Is Actually Being ReportedPost + Comments (70)

Robert E. Lee Is Trending, That’s Never a Good Sign…

by Adam L Silverman| September 9, 202112:49 pm| 192 Comments

This post is in: America, domestic terrorists, Goddamned Traitors, Military, Open Threads, Politics, Silverman on Security, War

In the wake of Richmond, VA removing the monument statue to Confederate General Robert E Lee this week, Trump decided to do one of his favorite things: issue a stupid statement rooted in his gleeful ignorance of just about everything. In this case he managed to max out the stupidity in regard to not only why the statue was put up in the first place, why it is coming down, but also why the US was unable to achieve a successful battlefield termination in Afghanistan. Trump’s statement, of course, has led to a tremendous amount of hot takes on Lee, on Confederate memorials that aren’t on Civil War battlefields, the Confederacy, and just about anything and everything in the US of 2021.

As a result of what I do professionally, I have a few thoughts regarding Lee.

The first is we don’t actually know a lot about Robert E Lee. Before everyone asks if I’ve lost the plot given all of the biographies, military histories, popular histories, historical novels, etc where he is either the singular focus or one of the major foci of the research and analysis, there’s a reason we know very little about Robert E Lee. Specifically, his descendants have restricted a significant amount of his professional and personal writings and those of his immediate family. Critical portions of his journals, notes, diaries, and correspondence have never been properly archived and made available to researchers, as have those portions of his wife’s and children’s concerning him. They’re not available to historians of any type, nor are they available to students of strategy or leadership or the Profession of Arms. As Glenn W LaFantasie, the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, recounted in 2011:

It was during the late 1980s that I first encountered how protective the Lee descendants are about their great ancestor. Having gained some previous experience on some historical editing projects, I gave a great deal of thought to the possibility of initiating a Lee Papers project. In those days, I was working in Washington, D.C., and I learned that Lee’s granddaughter, Mary Custis Lee deButts, lived in Upperville, a tony little village in Virginia horse country, not far from the nation’s capital. So I wrote her a lengthy letter spelling out my plans and asking only for her endorsement of my efforts. A couple of weeks went by with no answer, and then those weeks turned into more than a month. I decided to call her, but that phone call proved to be one of the most bizarre I’ve ever had as a historian.

To the best of my recollection, the telephone conversation went something like this: She answered the phone, I explained who I was and mentioned my letter, and she said abruptly, “We are never, I repeat, never, going to let those papers out of the family. They are safe in a bank vault. I don’t even have them here. No one is ever going to see them.” She was polite enough not to hang up on me, but the conversation did not last more than a couple of minutes. It was, of course, the first clue I had that the Lee descendants were in possession of documents relating to Robert E. Lee that no one outside the family knew about.

As it turned out, my plans for a Lee Papers project never got off the ground. Since then, other historians have also attempted to launch such a project and, for various reasons, have failed. When deButts died in 1994, at the age of 94, I figured that the letters in the vault had been passed on to a trustworthy next-of-kin — someone who would also take the Lee family secrets to the grave.

Fast forward to 2002, eight years after deButts’s death. On Nov. 27, the Washington Post reported that after more than 80 years following the death of Robert E. Lee’s daughter, Mary Custis Lee, two steamer trunks full of her papers had been “found” in a bank vault in Alexandria, Va. The trunks “came to light” after E. Hunt Burke, the vice chairman of the Burke & and Herbert Bank & Trust Company discovered them in the silver vault of the bank’s Alexandria branch. Five years later, six Lee descendants, including Robert E.L. deButts and Robert E. Lee IV, formally deposited the trunks at VHS; two years later, two of the descendants, according to a VHS archivist, “donated a quarter share of the title to this collection to the Virginia Historical Society.”

Click across and read the whole essay, it’s fascinating. But Professor LaFantasie’s thesis should inform all attempts to understand Robert E Lee: we simply know too little about him from his own accounts and the accounts of his immediate family to really have a good understanding of him as a person and as a senior military leader.

The second point is that Lee’s reputation as a brilliant general who was both a strategic and tactical genius as well as a great leader of men, as LaFantasie recounts in his essay, is largely ahistorical and was largely made up as part of the creation of the Lost Cause mythology that ultimately becomes the Dunning School of American history. From LaFantasie’s essay:

But something strange later happened concerning the photostats at the Library of Congress (LC). In 1977, Thomas L. Connelly, who had already established himself as a historian with little good to say about Robert E. Lee, published his book, “The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society.” Connelly argued that Lee’s public image had been largely shaped after the Civil War by a “Lee cult” that worshipped the general like a god and rewrote history according to a Southern interpretation of the Lost Cause. In making his case, Connelly quoted the Civil War reminiscences of Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee that revealed her sharp bitterness toward Lincoln and the Northerners who had defeated her husband. Through some administrative error at LC, Connelly had been allowed to see the reminiscences despite the restriction on the document’s use. According to LC records, after the publication of Connelly’s book, Mary Custis Lee deButts wrote again to LC and reiterated her intention and that of her sister that Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee’s reminiscences should be off-limits to researchers. In 1981, LC placed the document in a separate, restricted container, where it has remained ever since.

Despite the purposeful attempts by Lee’s children and descendants to obscure him as both Soldier and person, it is important to remember what we do know about Lee’s military career. That as the slave holding states were reaching the point of no return in their ultimatums regarding slavery, as well as how the entire US should be run to cater to their preferences, Lee was a US Army colonel. He was posted in the New Mexico Territory and he was disaffected and burned out. An excellent historical recounting of this period of Lee’s career, a period where he had basically given up and decided he was done with the Army, can be found in the beginning of Hampton Sides Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West. It was partially because of his disaffection that he was home in Virginia when John Brown raided Harpers Ferry. When the Great Rebellion does finally occur, he was offered a command in the Union army and he turned it down. When Virginia seceded from the Union he was offered a generalship in the newly forming Confederate Army, which he ultimately accepted. His first posting, however, was not as commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia. After a series of lackluster performances commanding Virginia troops in western Virginia and then mixed results in organizing the coastal defenses in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Lee was brought to Richmond, VA. In Richmond he was placed in charge of the defenses of Richmond and served as a senior military advisor to Jefferson Davis. Lee hated this assignment. It seems that the disaffection and burn out that he had experienced in New Mexico was carried over to his initial service to the Confederacy. He was in an assignment he didn’t like, in a place he didn’t want to be in, and he was convinced he knew better than those commanding armies or parts of armies in the field. In the case of the latter he was most likely right.

But this isn’t the full story, given what we know with the limitations that his descendants have placed on what we can know about Lee, of his military reputation. Lee was a weird, transitional senior military leader during the Civil War. He was wedded to an understanding of the character and characteristics of war and warfare that had largely ceased to exist by the 1860s. So while he had a mastery of the classical literature on strategy and tactics and how to employ them, he was unable to transcend his now obsolete understanding and see what war had become and what it was becoming. This eventually came back to bite him in a big way, especially once President Lincoln was able to find a theater commander – Grant – who would carry out Lincoln’s strategic vision for the eastern theater. Specifically, find General Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, fix them in place, and reduce their capacity to conduct any further operations. It took Lincoln a long time to find a theater commander who could do that. By all accounts LTG Reynolds could have, but he turned down command when his one requirement – that he not be micromanaged by GEN Halleck – was denied. As a result LTG Reynolds was the second general officer in the Army of the Potomac to arrive on the battlefield of Gettysburg where he was killed on the morning of the first full day of battle not far from his home.

Lee was a great leader. Specifically, in the sense that he had an ability to inspire his Soldiers to believe they could do things that they should never have been able to do. At the same time, however, he was also a terrible leader in that he was not a very good manager of talent within his command. This is related to his being a senior military leader stuck in a time that no longer existed. Lee was a general officer out of time and, therefore, out of place. The character and characteristics of war in the 1860s had passed him by. Here too the events leading up to and at Gettysburg bring Lee’s genius and his failings into focus. Prior to Gettysburg Lee relied on two subordinate general officers: LTG Longstreet and LTG Jackson. Jackson was, to be very blunt, nuts. He was a religious zealot, held all sorts of bizarre ideas about food and diet and health, and was a tactical savant. He worked the Soldiers in his command ruthlessly and they responded. Longstreet was different. He was quieter, more methodical. The jokes were that he was slow. The truth was he was deliberate. Jackson may have been a straight to the jaw you never saw. Longstreet was definitely the body blow that you saw, could not stop, and that ended the fight. Longstreet also had a strategic vision that neither Lee nor Jackson had. Longstreet understood that while the nature of war may be enduring, the character and characteristics of it had changed going into and during the Civil War.

Unfortunately for Lee, Jackson was killed prior to Gettysburg and Longstreet’s frustration with Lee’s inability to grasp what seemed to be intuitive to Longstreet placed them more and more at odds. Lee replaced Jackson with two other generals, neither of whom could perform at the corps commander level. But they were loyal men, Lee believed them to be good men, so no matter how badly they failed, he didn’t remove them. And at Gettysburg, they failed him miserably. Lee’s personal and professional understanding of loyalty and honor prevented him from managing his talent effectively. This is why JEB Stuart was never properly disciplined for leaving Lee functionally blind in regard to intelligence and information in the summer of 1863. It was also at Gettysburg where the head butting with Longstreet fully bloomed and bore tragic fruit for the Army of Northern Virginia. The mentee had finally outgrown his mentor.

There’s one final point I want to make about Lee and it is, frankly, somewhere between pure speculation and an informed guess. By 1863 Lee was at times erratic and this carried on throughout the war. It is well documented that he’d had some health issues and while there are professional medical disputes about what they were, it appears these included some form of cardiac condition. Whether it was angina and hypertension, just angina, or even something else is still in dispute and there will probably never be a settled history because almost none of the things we do to check for hypertension or angina or other cardiac conditions were done in the 1860s. I’m not a medical doctor, but in terms of the history, I’m in the camp of those that think that the description of Lee’s illnesses in 1863 and throughout the rest of his life seem to be cardiac related. If that is the case and he was experiencing they effects of cardiac problems, it would help to explain some of the decisions he made beginning in the spring of 1863 and carrying on through to the end of the war.

Until or unless his descendants finally make the bulk of his personal writings and those of his immediate family available to scholars and researchers, we will never have a comprehensive understanding of him as a person or as a senior military leader. What we do have is based on his and his family’s incomplete primary materials that have been made available, primary and secondary sources of those that knew him, the myth of Lee as a general par excellence created as part of the Lost Cause mythology and then put to use to fight Reconstruction, ultimately overturn it, and institute Jim Crow in its place. All of it filtered through the Dunning School of American history, which was itself created to institutionalize the Lost Cause mythology as the real and actual history.

We do, however, know some things about Lee that are not in dispute. He was an unrepentant and often cruel slave owner. That for all the tales of his vaunted personal and professional honor, when presented with the options of either upholding his oath of service or breaking it, he chose to break it. He did so in service of preserving the power to keep other humans as chattel slaves. That once he broke his oath he then willingly took up arms and led other oath breakers against his own former countrymen. That his understanding of the character and characteristics of war had been surpassed and made irrelevant by the reality of the changed character and characteristics of war in the 1860s. And that while he did have an amazing ability to inspire those under his command to do things as soldiers and as an army that they should never have been able to do, he was also a terrible manager of personnel. He was also blessed for three years with Union commanding generals who were not up to the tasks they had been assigned. Once Lee faced a commanding general of the Army of the Potomac who both understood and had the ability to execute Lincoln’s strategic vision, his ability to inspire his soldiers was simply no longer adequate to the task he had been assigned. From that point on Grant and the Army of the Potomac slowly and methodically chewed up the Army of Northern Virginia. We also know that after the war, despite being hailed for calling for reconciliation, Lee vehemently and publicly opposed Reconstruction. Finally, it is important to note that if it were not for the intervention of Grant, Lee would have been prosecuted for treason and most likely executed as a traitor to the United States. Instead, his citizenship was stripped – he was allowed to reside in the US until his death, though he was officially stateless – and it was not restored until 1975! The Richmond, VA monument erected in Lee’s honor was erected to memorialize him in 1890, twenty years after his death and twenty-five years after his citizenship as an American was revoked and purposefully not restored by President Johnson despite Lee’s signing the amnesty oath.

Open thread!

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Today’s Bombing In Kabul: Islamic State Khorasan’s Objectives In Today’s Attack In Regard To the US Are the Same as Those of ISIS Overall

by Adam L Silverman| August 26, 20217:21 pm| 165 Comments

This post is in: America, Foreign Affairs, Military, Open Threads, Silverman on Security, War

Today’s suicide bombing in Kabul has been claimed by Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K).

ISIS in Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, claimed that an ISIS militant carried out the suicide attack, but provided no evidence to support the claim

President Biden confirmed this in his remarks earlier this afternoon.

At the remarks at the White House later in the day, the president said the bombings were the work of fighters from the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan, known as ISIS Khorasan, or ISIS-K. The attacks marked one of the single deadliest days for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the 20 years since the allied invasion.

President Biden also made it clear that the US will continue the Non-combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) until it achieves the delineated objective of getting all the Americans who wish to get out of Afghanistan out of Afghanistan, as well as to get out as many of the Afghans who have assisted the US over the past twenty years and those whose work over the past twenty years might put them at risk as possible. President Biden also made it clear that the US would not forgive nor forget about today’s attack and that an appropriate response would be forthcoming.

On Monday I wrote:

The real outstanding concerns right now need to be the ability of spoilers, such as Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), which is a serious enemy of the Taliban, attacking Kabul airport to derail the NEO and cause problems for the Taliban as a result of the US responding to such an attack.

The window of opportunity for today’s attack has two roots. The first is that large numbers of Afghans are constantly approaching Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul attempting to get into the airport in order that the US can get them out. The second is that Islamic State Khorasan’s leadership, like that of Islamic State proper, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and all of our non-state and state adversaries actually watch our broadcast and cable news and read our newspapers. They’ve seen the slanted reporting in every major US newspaper and on every US news channel about what President Biden is or is not doing and should or should not be doing. They’ve seen every tweet and quote from every Republican elected official, think tank denizen, and pundit delineating everything the Biden administration is doing wrong and calling for more US military personnel to be sent to Afghanistan, an indefinite extension to the Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation, and in some cases a complete repudiation and abrogation of the deal the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban. Today’s attack was directly intended to take advantage of both of these realities. The physical one – all the Afghans attempting to get to the airport in Kabul – and the informational/psychological ones resulting from the execrable and irresponsible news media reporting and the politicization of the withdrawal by both Republican officials and an entire ecosystem of people who have gained fame and fortune solely by commenting about the war.

IS-K is violently opposed to the Taliban. The reason for this is that the extreme, politicized version of Islam that the Taliban follow is rooted in Deobandi Islam with a much later added overlay of Saudi tawheed as a result of contact with the Saudi mujahideen who flocked to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Deobandism is an austere, anti-colonial focused version of Islam that originated in British controlled India in the late 1860s. The Saudi concept of tawheed, the radical unity of the Deity, is the central teaching and foundation of Adbul Wahhab’s theology that provided the doctrinal focus for ibn Saud’s conquest of the Arabian peninsula and formation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For all that we see the Taliban as being extreme and unyielding, the Islamic State perceives them as not being pure enough in their understanding and application of tawheed.

In December 2015, in the wake of the Islamic State attack in St. Michael, France, I completed a strategic assessment of ISIS’s doctrine, its strategic objectives, and what the US needed to do to adapt its own strategies to counter the threat from ISIS. I had already been working on the research when the attack in St. Michael happened and the first draft of the assessment, if you will, was actually a post here. The formal assessment was prepared for the then Director of Force Protection at Headquarters Department of the Army. It was also briefed directly by me to the Commanding Generals of I Corps (in full) and XVIII Airborne Corps (as part of a larger strategic assessment for the Command Group, Senior Staff, and Multinational Coalition Senior Staff) between January and May 2016 and a copy was sent to the Commanding General of III Corps who was already deployed forward as the Commander of Combined Joint Task Force Inherent Resolve. Most of what follows is directly from that assessment.

The Islamic State, whether the original movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and al Shams (ISIS), or its offshoots like Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), is simply the most extreme, hardcore, politicized evolution of tawheed as an organizing doctrine and driver for violent extremist Islamic movements that we have yet see emerge. They are far more extreme than al Qaeda, who they are also in competition with and violently opposed to. For ISIS, IS-K, and the other IS offshoots, their doctrine is built around the teachings of Abdul Wahhab. Wahhab asserted that not only was the Deity one, which is not in and of itself a particularly radical idea in Islam, but that any innovation that took away from this glorious reality counted as shirk or polytheism. As a result he inveighed against the building of shrines and monuments, as well as the tradition of subordinate, intercessory prayers in addition to the mandated salat or Islamic understanding of prayer. Those who engage in such innovations are, at best, engaged in kufr and ridda – unbelief in the one G-d and apostasy. Moreover, Abdul Wahhab’s conceptualization of tawheed teaches that unbelief and apostasy must be stamped out, through violence if necessary. It also teaches that one can only be a real Muslim, a muwaheedun, if one lives where tawheed has been established as the rule for the ummah/community of the faithful. As Moussalli interestingly asserts*, the Wahhabi muwaheedun have been arguing for over 200 years that they are the true defenders of Sunni Islam, while at the same time being in direct and active opposition to 90% of Sunni Islam.

What makes this extreme understanding of tawheed, as the core doctrine, theology, and ideology of the Islamic State so dangerous is its unwillingness to tolerate non-muwaheedun Muslims and its ability to travel. Unlike bin Laden’s underlying doctrine for al Qaeda, which was partially rooted in bin Laden’s personal adherence to and understanding of tawheed as practiced in Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State’s application of tawheed and its theological component calls for targeting non- muwaheedun Muslims. While bin Laden did call for the removal, by violence if necessary, of the leaders of Muslims states and societies who were themselves unbelievers and/or apostates, he also made it clear that non-muwaheedun populations were off limits for targeting. The Islamic State makes no such distinction.

The second danger within the concept of extreme tawheed at the heart of the Islamic State doctrine is that it is capable of traveling throughout the Muslim world in a way that other forms of Islamic extremism are not. The popular conception of Wahhabiya or tawheed is that it is an offshoot of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence. However, as Commins describes, tawheed is not a concept of Islamic jurisprudence. Rather it is a doctrinal and theological system. As such it can travel throughout the Sunni Muslim world and subvert any of the four Sunni schools of Islamic Jurisprudence. Tawheed, precisely because it is doctrine and theology, but not jurisprudence and legal application, has the ability to take root throughout the Sunni Muslim world.

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ISIS has two strategic objectives. The Islamic State, organized around the doctrine of tawheed, seeks to destroy the civil space, often referred to as the grey zone, in which Muslims live their day to day lives as the citizens and residents of Muslim and non-Muslim states and societies alike. This civic space, especially in Western liberal states and societies that allows people from different religious and ethnic background to have membership in the state and society despite not necessarily belonging to the majority ethnic or religious group. The concept of extreme tawheed obliterates this space. It tells Muslims, specifically Sunni Muslims, that they cannot separate their religious lives from their civic ones and promotes this idea to non-Muslims. Moreover, its focus on being unable to be a good Muslim, a muwaheedun, unless one lives where tawheed has been established as the governing concept reinforces the argument that proper Muslims must relocate to the Islamic State and its self declared caliphate. It is also the Islamic State’s argument for expanding the caliphate. Additionally, it supports the assertion that Muslim communities in the West cannot assimilate, are susceptible to ISIS’s information operations, and are a threat to the domestic security of the states in which they reside.

The application of extreme tawheed to destroy the grey zone also seeks to set Muslims against Muslims. One of the hallmarks of Sunni Islam is ijma. Ijma, or consensus, is the belief that each community of Muslims determines how to organize themselves as Muslims. It is very similar to the five point Calvinist inheritance of the Evangelical denominations that developed within the US that each congregation determines how to organize its religious life for worship and adherence to the Gospels. Applying tawheed to Sunni Muslim life destroys the localism that is its hallmark. Additionally, it seems to pit the adopters of extreme tawheed against their friends and families. Any Sunni Muslim who does not accept and practice this form of tawheed is engaged in kufr and ridda and their apostasy and unbelief/incorrect belief must be corrected or they must be eradicated. Concepts of inclusion, tolerance, and multi-culturalism are anathema as a result of this extreme understanding of tawheed and to the Islamic State.

The Islamic State’s internal, or near geographic goals, are to consolidate their control over the territory they currently control and establish their version of tawheed within it. They then seek to expand their geographic holdings – the self declared Islamic State and caliphate – and enforce tawheed wherever they expand. They also seek to expand their version of tawheed throughout the Sunni Muslim world by destroying the grey zone for Muslims that live in Western states, as well as for those living throughout the Islamic world outside of ISIS’s control.

ISIS’s external, or far geographic, goals are to engage the far enemy and destroy it. The far enemy, as was the case with bin Laden, is the US and its allies. The Islamic State, however, has introduced an apocalyptic twist. Graeme Wood, reporting in The Atlantic, indicates that a central portion of the Islamic State’s theology is a belief in the Dabiq Prophecy. The Dabiq Prophecy is an apocalyptic prophecy found in Kitab Al-Fitan wa Ashrat As- Sa`ah/The Book Pertaining to the Turmoil and Portents of the Last Hour. The Dabiq Prophecy is specifically found in Chapter 9: Pertaining to the Conquest of Constantinople and the Appearance of the Dajjal and Descent of Jesus Son of Mary (Jesus Christ). These sections follow on from earlier hadith that retell more familiar end times prophecy, such as of Gog and Magog. The Islamic State’s leaders seem to equate the US with the antagonist described in the prophecy and place the location of the final battle in Dabiq, Syria.

The Islamic State does not have the ways and means to fully achieve their ends unless they can get the US and its allies and partners to provide the ways and means for them. ISIS cannot make Muslim citizens or residents of the US, France, or other EU states feel unwelcome. Only the citizens of the US, France, other EU states, and other states can do so. Moreover, the Islamic State cannot make the US, its allies, and its partners commit to a significant enough application of Landpower to allow them to claim that the Dabiq Prophecy is actually coming to pass.

The ways and means that the Islamic State does have at its disposal are to entice the US, its partners, and its allies into providing the ways and means to ISIS’s ends of destroying the grey zone, convincing Muslim citizens and residents of the US and other states that they are unwanted so that they relocate or undertake terrorist acts where they live, and to draw the US into a significant ground war in locations of ISIS’s choosing. Originally this was Syria because of the Dabiq Prophecy, but in the case of IS-K, it is Afghanistan. Engaging in terrorism as Psychological Operations is the Islamic State’s principal way of achieving the end of getting the US to provide it with the ways and means it does not have.

Psychological Operations are defined as: planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of Psychological Operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives.

The Islamic State has developed an extensive and highly professional Information Operations and Psychological Operations capability. Part of this was no doubt learned from the former Ba’athist Iraqi Sunni military and intelligence personnel who aligned themselves with the Islamic State as part of the ongoing Iraqi sectarian conflict. This could be clearly seen in the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks in suburban St. Michael, France in 2015. Within ten days the History Channel cable network was airing a documentary dealing with the Islamic State and the Paris attacks that included footage from embedded personnel reporting from within the portions of Syria and Iraq controlled by the Islamic State. The documentary included footage of fully stocked markets, police in uniform with clearly identified Islamic State markings, and people going about their daily lives. Exposing anyone in the US to these images would have been impossible without the attacks in Paris.

Today’s attacks seek to advance Islamic State Khorasan’s goals against both their near (the Taliban) and far enemies (the US). By successfully attacking Afghans attempting to reach and get into Hamid Karzai International airport (HKIA) and the US Marines conducting the security operation on site, IS-K makes the Taliban look weak and ineffectual. It both challenges the Taliban’s legitimacy in regard to governing Afghanistan and attacks their honor by making them look ineffectual in providing security. IS-K also seeks to draw the US back in to Afghanistan to prolong the conflict as part of engaging the far enemy/the US. The purpose here is to increase political pressure on President Biden to surge more US military personnel into Kabul in order to reinforce and extend the US’s security footprint. This would both abrogate the Biden administration’s adherence to the Trump administration negotiated withdrawal, putting the US and the Taliban back into conflict, while increasing the number of American targets for IS-K to attack.

Part of the reason IS-K undertook this attack is because like ISIS, like al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist Islamic movements, they read and watch the American news. They’ve seen the reporting bias about what the Biden administration is doing. They’ve seen the calls by reporters, pundits, the think tank denizens, former Trump administration officials, and Republican members of Congress for the Biden administration to send more military personnel back in, to retake Bagram and move operations there (this would be strategically irresponsible and tactically stupid!), and to create an open ended commitment to stay until every single US citizen and Afghan who wants to leave is out.

The leaders of Islamic State-Khorasan saw an opportunity to undertake a low risk to themselves – two suicide bombers – high reward operation to leverage the current information environment in the US to increase the pressure on the Biden administration. I expect there will be further attacks to both further capitalize on the news media and political feeding frenzy in the US right now in order to try to force the Biden administration to giving IS-K what it wants: more American military boots on the ground to both attack and to also become targets for the Taliban. I do not think this is going to work. I think that IS-K, like the American news media and Republican members of Congress, as well as other Republicans with presidential ambitions, have seriously misjudged President Biden. He is not going to budge. He will order and authorize exactly what he feels is necessary to complete the Non-combatant Evacuation Operation and when he has decided that this strategic objective has been met, he will end it. That may be on schedule for 31 August. It may be a week later. But it is not going to entail a surge of American military personnel to expand the operation. Finally, I do expect that US Special Operations Command has already been tasked with undertaking a focused, targeted mission against IS-K as an appropriate response to their attacks today.

Open thread!

* Ahmad Moussalli, Wahhabism, Salafism, and Islamism: Who is the Enemy, A Conflicts Forum Monograph, Spring 2015

Today’s Bombing In Kabul: Islamic State Khorasan’s Objectives In Today’s Attack In Regard To the US Are the Same as Those of ISIS OverallPost + Comments (165)

The Failure In Afghanistan Was the Result of Everyone Wanting to Grade Their Own Homework

by Adam L Silverman| August 23, 202111:35 pm| 63 Comments

This post is in: America, Foreign Affairs, Military, Open Threads, Silverman on Security, War

In the comments to my post last Friday about President Biden’s remarks on Afghanistan, Y_Y Sima Qian asked if I’d write a post addressing the question of whether there was or was not an intelligence failure in regard to Afghanistan. The short answer is both from what I’ve seen reported and the professional work I was involved with that dealt with Afghanistan there was not. Or at least not in the sense that the term is generally used.

My professional opinion as someone who has provided assessments to senior leaders serving in Afghanistan or working on issues pertaining to it, pre-deployment preparation and training for units deploying to Afghanistan at brigade and echelons above brigade, reach back research support for personnel deployed to Afghanistan, and as a technical subject matter expert assigned to a working group about how to better handle cultural information for elements deployed to Afghanistan is that the intelligence and information work, especially at the tactical and operational levels, was not and has not been a failure. One of the problems, as was very well described in this interesting and excellent article, is that quite often we had the information, but we didn’t have the context to make sense of it. Another part of the problem is that just because the information was accurate, does not mean that the senior leaders and decision makers understood it, accepted it, wanted to hear it, or acted on it an appropriate manner. This itself follows from a related problem, the collection, analysis, and preparation of the intelligence may have been done correctly, but it may not have been briefed to the senior leaders and decision makers the way the product was prepared by the actual subject matter experts. This is a major problem with what we call the intelligence cycle. Because everyone knows the policy preferences of the senior leaders and decision makers, this can skew any and all parts of the cycle from collection to presentation. Another major problem, as a former boss refers to it, is the Legion of Frightened Men (LOFM). These are themselves senior personnel who refuse to speak up to contradict more senior leaders or at all because of their professional conditioning over 20 plus years of service.

I think another major problem is that everyone wants to grade their own homework. So the Intelligence Community has a set of metrics for progress or success and the military has a separate one. And as long as you’re meeting those metrics or exceeding them, then you’re successful. I had this discussion as part of a panel in 2009 on counterinsurgency hosted by NYU’s Center for Law and Security that included John Nagl as one of the other three panel members with me. I was on the panel to talk about the gap between our theory of counterinsurgency as delineated in US Army/military doctrine and the actual application in Operations in Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. I also discussed the implications of the failure of the Bush 43 administration to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqis, as well as the debacle that were the provisional elections and what would be the forthcoming national elections based on the work I’d done in Iraq on how Iraq’s electoral system was then structured and functioning. After I went through all the disconnects and complications, Nagl then made his presentation where he explained that because we’d just spent X amount in Y locations in Iraq and Afghanistan building all sorts of infrastructure, that we were succeeding in the hold and build phase of operations (Phase IV of conventional operations), and that, as a result, the US would maintain at least 100,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely and a smaller, but still significant number in Afghanistan indefinitely as well until we completed remaking both states and societies, as well as the region. Leaving aside that this was completely delusional in terms of what the US would do in the long term, especially given that at that point the US was on a ticking clock to withdraw from Iraq in 2010, it also is a very good example of the dynamic I’m trying to describe. Nagl, and some of the other top names within in the public perception in regard to counterinsurgency, had a set of outcomes for success and metrics that they had delineated for Iraq and Afghanistan, and as long as positive progress was being made on those, then were making progress and success was achievable. This doesn’t make them bad people, it just made them wrong. Then and now.

Another major contributing problem is related to and a result of the Legion of Frightened Men problem. One of the things that senior leaders and decision makers need is someone who not only can tell them what they need to know, not what they want to hear, but whose job is to do just that, who is not afraid to do so, and who is empowered to so. This was what my job was for the commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division, for the 48th, 49th, and 50th Commandants of the US Army War College, for the Commanding General of III Corps, and for the Commanding General of US Army Europe (same general officer). Not every commander, senior leader, and/or decision maker has someone who can or will do this. I’m sure there are some that don’t want it. Often we see, both in terms of senior military personnel and senior elected and appointed officials, that senior leaders and decision makers have a team of trusted personnel that they take from assignment to assignment, elected office to elected office, appointed position to appointed position. While this is often a good thing as it provides the senior leader with a cohesive and coherent team that he or she can trust. However, it also can cut in the opposite direction leaving the senior leader without someone who can bring them information and give them and their staffs advice they don’t want to hear.

The last point I want to make on this issue is that we also do a good job of lying to ourselves. Everything we’ve been trying to do in Afghanistan once operations shifted to counterinsurgency and what is popularly being called nation building, has been based on Army Field Manual (FM) 3-24: Counterinsurgency. FM 3-24 is a mess. It has numerous, significant historical and factual errors. One striking example is the completely inaccurate narrative around the Tupamaros and their campaign in Uruguay. The basic historical events recounted are correct. The placement of them within Uruguayan history, including what the Tupamaros actually did or did not accomplish and why, is historically/factually incorrect.

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Another significant problem is the complete lack of historical context as to the concept of the spreading ink spot. The spreading ink spot concept – a description of taking, clearing, and holding a location to force the insurgents to reconcile with the government through a negotiated settlement – is something that comes to us from the French campaign in Algeria. The spreading ink spot worked in Algeria because it refers to the French seizing the oases and forcing all the Algerians that needed the water to reconcile in order to access and continue to access them for water. It worked in Algeria because there were, and still are, oases. It failed when the French tried to adapt it into the strategic hamlet during their war in Indochina. And it failed us in Iraq when it became the strategic lily pad. It also failed when we adapted it to Afghanistan. And the reason is that Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan DO NOT have oases! What the French or the US substituted for oases in the concept in each of those places was a poor substitute and failed for reasons of different human geographies. Unfortunately, this concept has itself spread, if I may use that term, from FM 3-24 to other related Army doctrine, such as Mass Atrocity Response Operations and Stability Operations, where it is still historically contextless and makes no conceptual/doctrinal sense.

Another example is that FM 3-24 describes either establishing or reestablishing a legitimate government. Unfortunately it doesn’t define legitimate. Is it the government that existed before whatever crisis precipitated our intervention? Is it the government recognized by the UN and/or the international community? Is it the government that the people of that state and society accept? Some combination? I cannot tell you how many war games, planning sessions, and meetings where I’ve asked this question. No one has a good answer. The final example I’m going to give is that FM 3-24 describes three different operational footprints – heavy, medium, and light – that could be employed to conduct counterinsurgency. Unfortunately, at least for a 3rd party counterinsurgent force like the US has been in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no empirical evidence that anything other than the heavy footprint actually works and now almost twenty years of evidence that light and medium do not! To be perfectly honest, I still can’t count more than three – and that’s being generous – 3rd party counterinsurgencies that were ever successful. And each of those used heavy footprints. And the only one that is considered an outright success – the British counterinsurgency in Malaya – cannot be replicated because that counterinsurgency was basically the classic example of destroying the village to save it. This is something we’re not going to do.

Right now the Non-combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) is going very well. There was two or three days at the outset that were bumpy, but I don’t think that’s surprising. The first few days of almost every operation are. That’s not an excuse, it’s just reality. Since then we’ve evacuated almost 40,000 people from Afghanistan. I expect that by the time those of us in the US, Canada, and Mexico are awake tomorrow that we’ll be around, if not over, 50,000 evacuated.

It is also important to keep pointing out that despite everyone in the news media, the punditariat, and the various national security experts that have spent the past week to ten days screaming the Biden administration is failing, President Biden has lost the plot, why wasn’t Biden and his team prepared, and why didn’t they do something earlier, THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE ISSUED AN EVACUATION ORDER FOR AMERICAN CITIZENS IN AFGHANISTAN BACK IN MAY!!!!!!

Security Alert – U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan (May 15, 2021)

Location: Throughout Afghanistan

Event: Historically violence has increased in Afghanistan following the Eid holiday. Therefore, U.S. citizens are reminded to exercise caution in places where people are known to congregate, including public celebrations, markets, places of worship, and banks. The U.S. government remains concerned that insurgents are intent on targeting foreigners via kidnapping schemes and attacks at locations such as hotels, residential compounds, security checkpoints, government facilities, and airports.

The Embassy reminds U.S. citizens that on April 27, 2021, the Department of State ordered the departure from U.S. Embassy Kabul of U.S. government employees whose functions can be performed elsewhere due to increasing violence and threat reports in Kabul. The Travel Advisory for Afghanistan remains Level 4-Do Not Travel due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, armed conflict, and COVID-19. Commercial flight options from Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) remain available and the U.S. Embassy strongly suggests that U.S. citizens make plans to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited.

Actions to Take:

Make plans to depart Afghanistan by commercial airlines

Have evacuation plans that do not rely on U.S. government assistance

Stay alert in places frequented by foreigners

Be aware of your surroundings

Keep a low profile

Notify a trusted person of your travel and movement plans

Be aware of your surroundings and local security developments

Monitor local media

Review your personal security plans

Assistance:

American Citizen Services Unit, U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan, Located at Great Massoud Road between Radio Afghanistan and the Ministry of Public Health in Kabul.
+93-700-114-000 or +93 -700-108-000 (after hours)
KabulACS@state.gov
https://af.usembassy.gov/

State Department – Consular Affairs
888-407-4747 or 202-501-4444

Afghanistan Country Information

Afghanistan Travel Advisory

Enroll in the Safe Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) to receive security updates

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter

If Americans in Afghanistan ignored these instructions, even for the best of reasons so they could continue their work with Afghans on a variety of projects from education to governance, this is not the fault of the Biden administration. We can’t send a SEAL Team to round up every American who decides not to evacuate when told to evacuate. Not least of which because we don’t have that many SEALs.

Clearly Secretary Blinken and his people were not ignoring the intelligence, or confused by it, when they issued this order. Nor, as I wrote about on Friday, did Secretary Blinken and the Biden administration ignore the dissent cable sent by Foreign Service officers in Afghanistan on 13 July warning that the Taliban could take over the country much more quickly than expected. While that dissent cable estimated 31 August, within 36 hours of the cable’s receipt, by 15 July, the Biden administration announced Operation Allies Refuge, which is currently being carried out quite effectively. So here too there was neither an intelligence failure in term of collection and analysis nor of receiving it by senior leaders and decision makers and acting upon it.

The real outstanding concerns right now need to be the ability of spoilers, such as Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), which is a serious enemy of the Taliban, attacking Kabul airport to derail the NEO and cause problems for the Taliban as a result of the US responding to such an attack. Another is the Taliban’s recently announced 31 August deadline for the US to complete the NEO. I think this is likely going to be less of a concern than some are making given that right now Afghanistan’s funds are frozen and being held by the Federal Bank of New York. This provides significant leverage over the Taliban, which both needs to access those funds and wants to do so. The Taliban still might not budge, but leverage, if it is used correctly, can be very effective.

I think the largest problem is one that Josh Marshall highlighted in Ryan Noble’s reporting from earlier this evening:

understandably people are reluctant to talk about this. but pretty soon there’s going to have to be a discussion of how we’re defining these terms. But I wld imagine that by some definitions this cld be a significant percentage of the population of the country. pic.twitter.com/z5GW399Fyg

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 24, 2021

I don’t think it is a problem in terms of America’s, as well as our closest allies like Canada’s, ability to absorb this number of refugees from Afghanistan. I’m not even sure the politics is a problem given that the one thing the hysterically overreacting news media and punditocracy wants is all of these people relocated. I think the problem is where do we draw the line on who – as in which Afghans – we will bring out and who does not qualify for relocation. I think it will be a problem in and of itself because at some point a decision delineating this will have to be made and some Afghans are going to be on the wrong side of it. But I also think it will be a problem for Afghanistan’s long term viability to eventually move past the Taliban. This is going to be a huge societal drain that will have long term consequences for Afghanistan as a state and a society and for the region. The Afghans we are going to get out, no matter how many, are going to enrich the states and societies they are relocated too. And they’re going to have far better lives even as they become exiles beginning new lives in very different places than those they’re used to. But Afghanistan, as a state and a society, is going to be significantly impoverished as a result. And that, in and of itself, is going to create new risks and future problems.

Open thread!

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Saturday Just Past High Noon EDT Open Thread & Housekeeping Notes

by Adam L Silverman| August 21, 202112:26 pm| 123 Comments

This post is in: America, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Silverman on Security

Since we need a new open thread, here’s one.

And since I’m going to go out and see if I can avoid heat stroke doing today’s workout before the heat index gets above 105, I don’t have time to do a full post. But I do want to put in two quick housekeeping notes as teasers.

I am tracking on both YY_Sima Qian’s and lowtechcyclist’s request for more information in the dead, bitter dregs of the comments of my post on Biden’s remarks yesterday. The former for some explanation on whether there was or was not an intelligence failure regarding the stability of the Afghan government and security forces and the latter on what the US has been doing in or in regard to Yemen.

I’ll try to get to these in the next couple of days. A quick, short answer is that in regard to the intelligence about Afghanistan, from what has been publicly reported there both was and was not an intelligence failure. What do I mean by this? Specifically that senior leaders went on the record with assessments that the government was stable and the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces would not simply stop functioning. GEN Milley actually provided the following assessment to Congress this past July:

“A significant amount of territory has been seized over the course of six, eight, 10 months by the Taliban, so momentum appears to be — strategic momentum appears to be — sort of with the Taliban,” Milley said.

Milley said that while the Taliban are attempting to create the impression that their victory over the U.S.-backed Kabul government is inevitable, he believes the Afghan military and police have the training and equipment to prevail. He said he would not rule out a negotiated political settlement with the Taliban, nor would he exclude “a complete Taliban takeover.”

“I don’t think the end game is yet written,” he said.

He covered every possible outcome there. At the same time that GEN Milley was being optimistic, we had the assessments from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction that were far, far, far more pessimistic about how the Afghan government and the ANSDF would function.

In regard to the US and Yemen, that role has changed a lot over the years. A lot of it has involved providing logistics and acquisition support to the Saudis in their war against the Houthis and al Qaeda in Yemen/al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There was also the ongoing and often expanded use of drones* to attack high value terrorist targets, like Anwar al Awlaki, from over the horizon. We’ve also had Special Operations raids, such as the one that went tragically wrong during the first month of the Trump administration back in 2017. A lot of the Yemen problem set, for lack of a better term, is constant for decades. The British had an al Awlaki problem, we have an al Awlaki problem. The British had a Yemeni tribal problem, we have a Yemeni tribal problem. The British had an unstable and not always trustworthy government they were partnered with, we’re dealing with a not always stable and not always trustworthy government. Etc, etc. The difference is that the British had the ability to redefine where Yemen fit within their strategic objectives. They decided they did not need a coaling station in Yemen, declared victory in what was up to that point a fairly unsuccessful counterinsurgency campaign to protect Aden and the coaling station, and went home. We can’t just do that. And, as a result, we lurch along year to year in regard to Yemen.

More to follow.

Obligatory given the heat index:

Open thread!

* Edited to add the drones.

Saturday Just Past High Noon EDT Open Thread & Housekeeping NotesPost + Comments (123)

President Biden Just Presented the Clearest and Most Concise Strategic Assessment of the US, Its Actions in Afghanistan, and American Interests In Regard to Afghanistan

by Adam L Silverman| August 20, 20213:09 pm| 211 Comments

This post is in: America, Foreign Affairs, Military, Open Threads, Silverman on Security, War

In his response to the first question asked after his formal remarks, a question asked by Zeke Miller from the Associated Press. President Biden stated (I’ve transcribed this directly from the video):

Look, let’s put things in perspective here. What interests do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al Qaeda gone? We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as, as well as getting Osama bin Laden. And we did. Imagine, just imagine, if that attack, if bin Laden had decided with al Qaeda to have launched an attack from Yemen, would we have ever gone to Afghanistan? Would there ever be any reason we’d be in an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban? What is the national interest of the United States in that circumstance?

This is the clearest and most concise strategic assessment of the US’s interests both against al Qaeda and in Afghanistan that I’ve seen any senior elected or appointed official articulate since September 2001. And the answers to his questions, which are obvious, is that the US would never have begun Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan if bin Laden hadn’t used it as a base of operations to attack the US on 9-11. Absent that, the US has no national interests in Afghanistan.

It is long past time that an American leader – elected, appointed, uniformed – stated this clearly. Good on President Biden for doing so.

I want to make two additional quick, related points. Especially as one of them came up in the second question asked by Justin Sink from Bloomberg. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that two dozen or so State Department officers at the US Embassy in Kabul had written and transmitted a cable through the State Department’s dissent channel on 13 July warning that the Afghan government and military could collapse quickly after the US completed its withdrawal on 31 August 2021 leading to the Taliban quickly retaking control in Afghanistan and, as a result, evacuation operations should begin no later than 1 August. Everyone has latched on to this as evidence that the Biden administration, especially his national security principals, should have known that the Afghan government and military would collapse and the Taliban would quickly retake Afghanistan. As I type this David Ignatius is making this point on MSNBC. But there’s a chronological fallacy in this criticism. The dissent cable’s focus is on what might happen shortly after 31 August. Today is 20 August. Everything initially went sideways between 10 and 12 August, with the Non-combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) beginning on 12 August. While what the Foreign Service officers in Kabul warned did happen, it happened almost three weeks before they had assessed that it would happen. It is important to note here that someone in the Biden administration took the dissent cable seriously because the day after it was transmitted, they announced Operation Allies Refuge, which is the name for NEO mission that is currently ongoing.

This is a non-controversy that a variety of pundits and reporters are trying to turn into a scandal. That President Biden and his team failed to heed the dissent cable and prevent the Afghan government and military from collapsing after 31 August. Which is eleven days from now! I’ve seen this used, by people who should know better, to demand all of President Biden’s national security principals resign or be fired immediately and that they, themselves would have gone to Afghanistan and easily planned this out from the pointy end rather than a bunch of people with advanced degrees in DC wasting time drawing up plans. There is a reason we don’t let people with massive amounts of tactical and operational experience, but with limited strategic experience develop strategy or set policy.

The second point I want to make actually relates to the attempt to use what has happened as a way to beat up on President Biden and his national security team. That national security team is not fully in place. Almost none of the senior appointed positions at the Department of State and USAID have been filled and neither have most of the key ambassadorships. This is not because President Biden hasn’t made the nominations; he has. It is because Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has put a blanket hold on all State Department and USAID nominations, including ambassadorships, which has led to dozens of key positions still unfilled. As a result Secretary Blinken does not have his team in place either at State proper, at USAID, nor in our embassies. Instead he is relying on career Foreign Service Executives to cover down on key jobs in addition to their actual duties, as well as Foreign Service officers below senior executive rank. Ordinarily a Foreign Service Executive from USAID’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) would be on site in Kabul coordinating the Special Immigrant Visa relocations of our Afghan allies. It is unclear if this is the case or if a more junior USAID officer who may not be a PRM specialist is covering down.

At the Department of Defense, it wasn’t until 10 August that the Senate finally confirmed the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities. Up until that point she was serving as an acting Assistant Secretary covering both the position she has now been confirmed too, as well as those for the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy as Senate Republicans were holding up the now confirmed Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Kahl because they didn’t like his tweets. There are at least a 1/2 dozen other of President Biden’s defense nominees still waiting for confirmation in addition to all the State Department ones that Senator Cruz is holding up. If you do not have your full national security team in place, it is going to negatively impact the ability of the Departments of State and Defense to properly function.

Open thread!

President Biden Just Presented the Clearest and Most Concise Strategic Assessment of the US, Its Actions in Afghanistan, and American Interests In Regard to AfghanistanPost + Comments (211)

indycat32 on Monday Evening Open Thread: Complaints Dept. (Sep 27, 2021 @ 8:48pm)

Geminid on 1 + 1 = 3 (Open Thread) (Sep 27, 2021 @ 8:47pm)

Jeffro on Monday Evening Open Thread: Complaints Dept. (Sep 27, 2021 @ 8:46pm)

Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) on Monday Evening Open Thread: Complaints Dept. (Sep 27, 2021 @ 8:45pm)

indycat32 on Monday Evening Open Thread: Complaints Dept. (Sep 27, 2021 @ 8:44pm)

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

We still have time to mess this up!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Not all heroes wear capes.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

No one could have predicted…

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

This fight is for everything.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

What fresh hell is this?

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

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Saturday Just Past High Noon EDT Open Thread & Housekeeping Notes

President Biden Just Presented the Clearest and Most Concise Strategic Assessment of the US, Its Actions in Afghanistan, and American Interests In Regard to Afghanistan