Review of the CNAS report- Triage

Posted by Admin on Warriors Legacy FoundationFighting an insurgency is one of the toughest tasks there is. Doing so as an occupying power is tougher yet. My first mission was 20 years ago in the Philippines and a Maoist insurgency called the New People's Army assassinated COL Nick Rowe, a Special Forces icon, while we were there. I had a chance to ask some questions of the current head of Philippine Special Ops Command last year and he said that same group is still their greatest problem. A long war indeed.The Center for a New American Security has released a report on US efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan called "Triage: The next twelve months in Afghanistan & Pakistan". The report represents a look at what the concept of Smart Power means when applied to this situation. There is plenty in the report to agree with, but it also showed why CNAS is thought of as the Obama administration's go-to think tank.Michèle Flournoy is the Co-Founder of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). She served as President of CNAS until February 9, 2009, when she was confirmed as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Secretary Gates in the Obama administration..That is not a bad thing, but worth noting as we look at this report. The authors are Andrew M. Exum, Nathaniel C. Fick, Ahmed A. Humayun, David J. Kilcullen.They begin with some policy recommendations.In Afghanistan:Adopt a truly population-centric counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes protecting the population rather than controlling physical terrain or killing the Taliban and al Qaeda..They present this as an either-or and that is fundamentally flawed. Any policy must be a combination of both balanced due to the particularities of each area. In addition physical terrain control is a major part of how you protect a population. You can't control all of it, but there are always key pieces that must be dominated to even consider safeguarding a populace.Use the “civilian surge” to improve governance and decrease corruption in Afghanistan. Place civilian expertise and advisers in the Afghan ministries and—to a lesser degree—the provincial reconstruction teams, rather than in the embassies..I wholeheartedly agree with this, but I doubt the ability to implement it. The risk-averse mentality of the State Department and most other civilian agencies is the main reason the military has taken the lead in virtually all elements of our policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The military does not want to do this and we heard this directly at a journalism seminar from LTC Brian Mennes CDR, 1st Ranger Battalion who stated that he was forced to do many of the tasks that should fall under these agencies because they would not leave the embassies. I also asked the State Department official directly responsible for these efforts Amb. John Herbst if they were willing to get some foreign service officers killed, because if not they were not going to be effective. His stammered answer was not really, but we are working on it. They are attempting to recruit several hundred more civilian experts but not having much luck. That has been the problem with our efforts in far too many conflict zones and is unlikely to change significantly. Many of the people they have been able to recruit for these positions are military reservists who have the civilian specialties necessary.In Pakistan:Strictly curtail the counterproductive drone strikes on non-al Qaeda targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). The expansion of the approved target list for U.S. drone attacks to include non-al Qaeda individuals should be reversed.I would challenge the assertion that the drone attacks have been counterproductive. We have killed scores of senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders and that is quite productive. The question is whether they create more ill will among the populace than their value in eliminating terror leaders and greatly hampering their ability to plan. It is a question worth considering, but to present it as a decided issue is not helpful. The enemy attempts to influence the information war by misrepresenting civilian casualties in these strike and we have been deficient in countering those claims.To say we should categorically restrict a very effective tool is not good advice and speaks again to the smart/soft power mentality espoused in this report. Read the rest here.