COIN of the Realm

Ah. Good context for blogwhoring. I'm talking to James Fallows on my interview program this week. Those who prefer webcasts to Second Life can find it on BlogTalkRadio. Thursday, 9pm Eastern. This website is a clearinghouse for the program:

http://virtuallyspeaking.ning.com/

Among the topics with Fallows will be Petraeus, and Iraq. He did a piece in the Atlantic about him before Petraeus was assigned to run the "surge."

how the counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics that helped turn around the situation in Iraq
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Yeahhhhhhhh, still not getting this line. Haven't something like 200 people been killed since the new year?

American casualties are the only relevant metric, duck.
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Mr Klein, thank you for this post and especially for the link to FP. It certainly helped my understanding of COIN in general and, potentially, of Obama's plan for Afghanistan.
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I've advocated COIN principals, often unknowingly, and suggested here that we should focus on building infrastructure while supporting the Afg government, its army and local police forces. I believe that this can be accomplished with less troops than what is necessary to fight and capture the enemy, therefore, I opposed a troop surge in Afghanistan. However, regardless of the troops required in combat vs COIN, Nagl and Fick say more troops are necessary to achieve our goals:
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Counterinsurgency strategy suggests that victory requires 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 residents. Current troop strength in Afghanistan, including Afghan forces, are about a third of that level. The stark alternatives are to deploy more troops or to change the mission.
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The article gave me some optimism that there may yet be an acceptable outcome to our involvement in Afghanistan and that PE Obama has a grasp of how we may get there.

Joe Klein:
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There are two glaring issues with this post.
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First, when are you going to stop lionizing David Petraeus, as is the habit of the Beltway pundit class?
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It doesn't make you any more of an insider, Joe. It doesn't demonstrate to anyone how Serious you are. It doesn't mean that your critical reasoning skills are any more apparent to anyone. Nobody thinks you're a hippie, Joe -- nobody credible, that is. You have nothing to prove to anybody with respect to your work being "anti-military". The Republicans have made electoral toilet-paper out of the idea that Democrats and liberals are "reflexively anti-military", despite the best efforts of both sides (especially in Congress).
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Reasonable people look at a David Petraeus interview about the situation in any particular theater in which he's been given responsibility, and take whatever his "assessment" is at that time with enormous grains of salt. We recall "assessments" like these (circa late 2005)
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"Huge Progress" Made In Training Iraq Troops : US General
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Washington (AFP) Nov 07, 2005
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"Huge progress" is being made in training Iraqi combat troops, and 24 homegrown battalions have now taken control of assigned territory, the general formerly in charge of the massive program said Monday.
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Lieutenant General David Petraeus said in an address that by the time of Iraq's looming election in December, it was hoped to have 230,000 trained and armed Iraq security forces operational.
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The status of Iraqi army forces, and the speed at which they have been trained and deployed, has been disputed in Washington, and some opposition Democrats have accused the Bush administration and Pentagon of obscuring the true picture.
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President George W. Bush has said that only when Iraqi troops are capable of maintaining security, will US troops, which last month suffered their 2,000th death in Iraq, be able to come home.
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New debate flared in September, after the US commander in Iraq General George Casey admitted that only one Iraqi battalion was able to operate completely independently of US forces.
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Petraeus said that according to latest declassified figures, 40 battalions of Iraqi soldiers were capable of leading counter insurgency operations with the help of US or coalition troops.
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"Twenty-four of their battalions had assumed their own battle space. That is very, very significant," Petraeus, who handed over control of the training effort in July, said.
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The latest figures, represent "huge progress over the course of the last 15 to 17 months" and there was "clearly still much work ahead," Petraeus said, in the speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.
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"There is very substantial momentum in this effort," he said, as he unveiled figures showing that 211,026 Iraqi security forces had now been trained -- 99,800 of which were ministry of defence forces comprising regular army units, special forces and combat support units.

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, and like these
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U.S. General Says Iraqi Security Forces Making "Huge Progress"
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07 November 2005
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Former training chief Petraeus says forces now number more than 200,000
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By Phillip Kurata
Washington File Staff Writer
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Washington -- The Iraqi security forces have made "huge progress" in the past year and half in developing their capacity to fight insurgents, according to the U.S. general formerly in charge of their training.
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"[H]ere's the bottom line," Army Lieutenant General David Petraeus said in Washington November 7, "they're in the fight, and they're increasingly leading it." He said "huge progress" has been made during the past 15 months to 17 months.
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HELPING IRAQI FORCES, NOT DOING IT FOR THEM
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The general stressed that the goal of the MNSTC-I is similar to that of T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, who played a pivotal role in helping organize the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule in World War I.
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"Our tasks were to help the Iraqis, and we underscored the word ‘help' because we very, very much believed in what Lawrence of Arabia wrote back in ... 1917, when he was out helping Arabs, where he discussed about helping them, rather than doing it for them," he said.
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The way that the multinational force is helping the Iraqi security forces is by providing organization, training, rebuilding and equipment, Petraeus said.
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With regard to organization, the general said, MNSTC-I is drawing up tables of organization that spell out who gets what weapons, who gets how many vehicles, what radios and all of the elements that make up a unit.
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"There is now in fact a very well defined force structure for the short term, the midterm and the long term," Petraeus said.
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He said the equipping effort has resulted in the delivery of "tremendous quantities" of weapons, vehicles, ammunition and other goods.
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With regard to rebuilding, the general said that the multinational forces have rebuilt hundreds of border forts, hundreds of military bases, police academies, military academies, military training centers, ministry buildings, and battalion, brigade, division ground forces headquarters, and "all the pieces and parts that link them together."
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Regarding military training, Petraeus highlighted what he called "a very important program" involving placing 10-man adviser teams to work with Iraqi military units at various levels.
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"They are with every single battalion, brigade headquarters, division headquarters, ground forces headquarters, even in the ministries, the joint force headquarters and so forth, and they're helping enormously," he said.

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Did you get that, Joe? In 2005, prior to putting his counter-insurgency genius on display for the world to applaud, Petraeus compared our occupation to Lawrence of f*cking Arabia.
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This guy's glowing accounts of his own glorious record implementing the previous strategy always need to be taken into account. Maybe you can distinguish a moral difference between cheerleading and rank dishonesty, Joe, but regular people can't tell the difference. More importantly, this guy's role in muddying the public waters enough so that the American people couldn't get a reliable picture of what was objectively happening in Iraq (remember when teebee media stars couldn't say "civil war" or "occupation" or "ethnic cleansing" out loud?) before we committed resources we now don't have to help our citizens can't be minimized.
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An interview with Petraeus shouldn't be treated with less skepticism than an interview with Rumsfeld, despite the need in the Beltway press corps to establish "True American Hero" characters to fit their storylines. It makes you look like you're trading free public relations work for insider access, Joe.
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The second problem is perhaps even more fundamental than whether we can expect public honesty from our career military officers with respect to their own efforts. It's that you've somehow assumed that it's worthwhile for the US to continually involve itself in theaters in which COIN is required.
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Why exactly are we to be so transfixed with admiration at anyone's grasp of the "zen-like creative paradoxes of counterinsurgency doctrine", Joe? Why does our military need to be prepared to wage counterinsurgency wars? Are we Victorian Britain now?
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I fully understand that we're occupying two countries right now. I fully understand that Petraeus looks like Sun Tzu in contrast to that blustering idiot Odierno. Unfortunately, the reason why the US military wasn't prepared to successfully wage long-term counterinsurgency in a long term occupation is because it usually isn't in the national interests of the US to occupy other countries.
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Let me repeat that:
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It usually isn't in the national interests of the US to occupy other countries.
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Why are you allowing the question of relative competence at nation-building in a hostile environment to obscure the real question, which is "What is the relative value of foreign occupation to the US versus the costs?"
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Not once have you (or anybody else in the Serious Foreign Policy Community) explained to us (like we're intelligent people) why it is better for us to occupy other nations with hostile populations than it is not to do so. The implicit assumption of analysis like yours seems to be "Well, we're doing it, so that's the end of that question". Where's the cost versus benefit analysis? Isn't that question more important than "Is it working?"
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You write "It's cause for some optimism in what is still a near-impossible situation.", and for that I applaud your willingness to set aside whatever sick notions the Beltway press corps has about cheerleading, patriotism and honest coverage.
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But doesn't this sentence desperately beg the question "Why is our nation choosing to be mired in near-impossible situations like occupations in the first place?"

JK:
" .. the counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics that helped turn around the situation in Iraq .. "

Let us presume that JK of the 'free and fair' MSM, endeavors to be a neutral observer.

"helped turn around"?
What happened? Did the COIN help find the WMD - the reason that we were there for? If not, then yours is - to use an extreme but good example - the praise of the COIN tactics of a victorious Saddam Hussein (Kuwait) Pol Pot(Cambodia) or Hitler(Europe).

Even if they did, does it justify the rapes and torture and slaughter of innocents that engulfed the invaded region?

Suppose JK endeavors to be an independent observer.

COIN tactics and the attendant mass slaughter were used by the British during the anti-British uprising in Kenya (in the early 1950s) and the Middle East.
Do these result in long-term success for the aggressor?
What would the Kenyans who still remember the times, make of your praise of COIN tactics?

Would you praise the use of COIN tactics by the British during our own war of independence?