Attackerman

I Wake Up In The Morning With The Same Unanswered Questions

 

I felt like I checked out of music in 2010 -- and film, and books, and most everything else I used to enjoy -- so it wouldn't be honest to compile a top-ten-of-the-year.  But "White Crosses" was easily the song this year I came back to the most. When I was feeling up -- or needing to -- I'd play this; when I was feeling down -- and acquiescent to it -- I'd play Tom Gabel's "Harsh Realms." Hope 2011 is more "White Crosses" for you.

Never Mind What's Been Sellin

I have a lot of respect for Col. Lawrence Sellin, as you can tell from my Danger Room piece in August reporting how he got unfortunately shitcanned from ISAF for the crime of bemoaning its bureaucracy in public. His SWJ piece today... I dunno. The argument that Pakistan is the center of gravity of the Afghanistan war is incontrovertible, unless you unmoor the war from its al-Qaeda-centric goals (not a good idea). It's also not particularly controversial. His controversial point, though, is a bit orthogonal to the actual point:

The counterinsurgency approach currently being executed in Afghanistan will not by itself achieve the goals of defeating al-Qaeda and denying the Taliban an ability to overthrow the Afghan government, even within the recently announced expanded time-frame to 2014.

That's true, but. Focusing on counterinsurgency makes less sense here than focusing on war. Sellin is really expressing the generally-accepted point that there's no military solution for a war like Afghanistan. When it comes to evaluating the actual warfighting strategy in place, counterinsurgency theory does a better job of recognizing that insight than its more-kinetic competitors*, something on my mind as I've been working on a piece on reintegration efforts lately. So if we're going to discuss the particular impropriety of COIN for Afghanistan within a framework of the war being a poor tool for Afghanistan, then it's necessary to compare COIN to other warfighting strategies that stand a better chance of mitigating the central flaw. Personally, I'm unconvinced they exist.

In the interest of not taking my own side in the argument: I suppose a rejoinder could be, Well, no, because we're not talking about a hypothetical war, we're talking about what the Afghanistan war actually is, so it's appropriate to focus on the war's central lacunae as a problem counterinsurgency fails to address. Fair point, but! Again, that's not a problem unique to counterinsurgency, it's a problem for the Afghanistan war, full-stop; and since there's a meta-debate about the value, wisdom and propriety of counterinsurgency, it's better not to conflate the two. If you really want to point to the shortcomings of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, then look no further than Gen. Petraeus' recent emphasis on the kill-capture-bomb aspects of COIN, however much he'd argue that all that stuff is as much component of counterinsurgency as the tea-drinking is. That's not wrong -- see below -- and every counterinsurgency strategy is different, but it does represent an implicit rejection of the High COIN tactics of Gen. McChrystal.

*Points we should all be able to agree on: counterinsurgency is war; war is inescapably violent; counterinsurgency's observation that violence is insufficient for achieving a war's political objectives and sometimes counterproductive to them does not make counterinsurgency a sanitized, "Kinder, Gentler" method of warfare. I should write a manual or something so we can spare a lot of needless lexicographical argument.

So Ivey

This is an unfortunate argument against restoring ROTC to elite schools now that DADT is (beginning to be) overturned:

It should not be forgotten that schools have legitimate and moral reasons for keeping the military at bay, regardless of the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell." They can stand with those who for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts.

They can stand with Martin Luther King Jr. and his view of America's penchant for war-making: "This madness must cease," he said from a pulpit in April 1967. Even well short of the pacifist positions, they can argue the impracticality of maintaining a military that has helped drive this country into record depths of debt. The defense budget has more than doubled since 2000, to over $700 billion. They can align themselves with colleges such as Hobart, Earlham, Goshen, Guilford, Hampshire, George Fox and a long list of others that teach alternatives to violence. Serve your country after college, these schools say, but consider the Peace Corps as well as the Marine Corps.

Except that keeping ROTC off Ivy campuses doesn't send the message that the Peace Corps isn't a valuable way to serve your country. It sends the message that military service is inconsistent with the values of scholarship, service and dedication -- and, perhaps unfairly but inescapably, that military service is for the less-fortunate corners of the country who don't qualify for the ivies. Including ROTC on campus doesn't amount to an endorsement of militarism. It merely offers another civic choice to a cohort of intelligent/hard-working/motivated/privileged/well-off youth* (*Not all of these adjectives apply to every Ivy student, of course.)

I might also add that robust militaries deter wars as well as wage them, a point that ought to get at least some consideration from an advocate of a "peace studies" curriculum. At the risk of being tendentious, if it's correct to say that being anti-ROTC isn't to be anti-soldier, then it's also true that being pro-ROTC doesn't mean being pro-war.

When There's Nothing On The Horizon, You've Got Nothing Left To Prove

Introduction to this feature: the Defense Department emails reporters notices of fallen troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. For the past four-plus years, at my various personal blogs, I've published them, so that the internet has a searchable record to commemorate the war dead. This headline, taken from a Dropkick Murphys song, I use for notices from Afghanistan; "All The Beating Drums, The Celebration Guns," from a Stars track, I use for notices from Iraq. I'm going to keep the tally in the URL from the FDL version of Attackerman for consistency's sake.

RIP Cpl Nguyen.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

No. 1187-10

December 29, 2010

DOD Identifies Marine Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Cpl. Tevan L. Nguyen, 21, of Hutto, Texas, died Dec. 28, while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.

He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.

For additional background information on this Marine, news media representatives may contact the 1st Marine Division public affairs office at 760-725-8766.

Welcome to Attackerman 3.0

So: here's the rollout of the next generation of Attackerman. We're going back to a stripped-down format, less formal, less torrid. My eternal thanks to Firedoglake and Jane Hamsher for supporting me and this blog for the past two and a half years; to ThinkProgress and Faiz Shakir for supporting me and this blog during its 1.0 incarnation; and to the Washington Independent and now Wired (in particular my friend-and-now-boss Noah Shachtman) for not being bothered that their reporter kept a frequently obnoxious personal blog.

Some in the blogosphere have bemoaned the professionalization of the enterprise over the past several years. It was surely inevitable: blogging lends itself well to iterative online journalism. But in this case, we're going to unwind that professionalism -- you can find that from me at Danger Room -- formatting-wise at least.  I haven't yet figured out how to get the timestamps off of Pacific time, for instance. If you'd like to help me make the thing look as cool as it did at FDL, great, I'd appreciate the assistance, but otherwise, let's stay amateurish. Who knows what'll happen when I try to upload a video.

What should you expect here? To modify the old tagline: National Security; Punk Rock; Real Talk. (I write much less about Iraq these days, but miss the subject, so check out this excellent Jack Healy dispatch from Khanaqin.) Much of the last two versions of Attackerman were built around anger, though, and I'm not as angry as I used to be; credit for that goes to my wonderful fiancee. Still, the world is still an evil place, so expect whinging, complaining, venting and all that, built around a general national-security interest. If it doesn't fit on Danger Room for whatever reason, it might end up here.

Still, this is going to be a pretty slow beginning for the next couple of days -- we're amateurish again, so I don't have to feel guilty about a low volume of posts, right? -- as I've got something personal I need to deal with, and we're still in the holiday season, after all.