Attackerman

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

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

No. 159-11

February 28, 2011

DOD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Spc. Andrew C. Wilfahrt, 31, of Rosemount, Minn., died Feb. 27, in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit using an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 504th Military Police Battalion, 8th Military Police Brigade, 8th Theater Sustainment Command, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

For more information, please contact Schofield Barracks public affairs office at 808-438-0944.

Time Isn't On Their Side

Peter Beinart has a smart column on the wisdom of U.S. strategic patience while the Arab revolutions undo al-Qaeda's central arguments.

Now we may be witnessing the end of the “war on terror” as well. The rise of democratically elected Arab regimes that are less beholden to the United States represents Osama bin Laden’s and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s worst nightmare. The only source of their appeal was their opposition to American foreign policy at a time when other Middle Eastern leaders looked like corrupt flunkies for the U.S. and Israel.

America will still face huge challenges in the Middle East, mostly because Arabs and Muslims no longer stand in awe of our power. But they won’t be the challenges of discredited, destitute tyrants. They’ll be the challenge of politically accountable, economically modernizing regimes that throw in their lot with China, India, Russia, or Brazil, and question America’s right to patrol the Middle East and cheaply consume the oil under its soil.

Of course, patience isn't the same as disengagement. This counterargument notwithstanding, a NATO no-fly mission over Libya makes sense, at least while Qaddafi's repression crests. Whatever-comes-next will have to deal with the U.S., but it would be preferable for the U.S. to come to the aid of Arab dissidents when they're at their time of extreme peril. Right now, the region sees the U.S. declining to criticize its Yemeni or Iraqi allies and positively endorsing the Bahrani hosts for the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

But Peter is right that this is unfathomably worse for al-Qaeda, who now have a central argument discredited by people who don't buy into its critique at all. Don't miss Scott Shane's analysis knitting it all together.

Too Hot For Top Chef

  This WTF-ready video, courtesy of Metal Lungies, introduced me to Action Bronson. When he's not got his shirt off, he's appearing on his album Bon Appetit... Bitch!, a full meal's worth of culinary inspired rap. Songs include "Shiraz," "Dabble In Truffles," "Aged Manchego," "Roasted Bone Marrow" -- a favorite of mine, both the track and the delicacy -- "Bronson Hard Lemonade" (!), "Ceviche" and "Chili Chicken Hakka Style."

It's Easier With Your Enemies

Tommy Vietor, NSC spokesman:

The United States strongly condemns the Iranian government's organized intimidation campaign and arrests of political figures, human rights defenders, political activists, student leaders, journalists and bloggers.  The Iranian government also continues to deny its citizens access to information by jamming satellite transmissions and blocking internet sites.   

 The United States and the world will continue to bear witness to the Iranian government's blatant violation of the universal rights of its citizens and its ongoing hypocrisy.  The Iranian government should allow active dialogue among its citizens, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly without fear.  Iranians deserve the same justice and rights that their government extols the virtue of abroad. 

One of the more conspicuous aspects of Obama's response to the Mideast upheaval is the appearance of promoting a universal series of standards (no violence, respect for human dignity, communications access) for hostile and friendly states alike. But you don't see this kind of blunt rhetoric directed at, say, Yemen, where counterterrorism officials are genuinely afraid for loss of access to AQAP in the event of "President" Saleh's departure/removal. And it took quite a long time to get to a clear series of statements on Egypt.

Obviously this kind of garden variety double standard is unsurprising to the point of banality. But if your policy is predicated on upholding a single standard then it's pretty nakedly problematic. It would make a lot of sense for Obama to deliver a speech laying out what the U.S. expects for its partners' behavior toward their citizenry as part and parcel of receiving U.S. aid and sponsorship. We're already invested in these countries; being put in a position where we're perceived as invested in the regimes and not the citizenry is a net loss for U.S. interests.

Freedom

Iraq, you break my heart like that girl I once knew.

Iraqi security forces detained about 300 people, including prominent journalists, artists and lawyers who took part in nationwide demonstrations Friday, in what some of them described as an operation to intimidate Baghdad intellectuals who hold sway over popular opinion.

On Saturday, four journalists who had been released described being rounded up well after they had left a protest of thousands at Baghdad's Tahrir Square. They said they were handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with execution by soldiers from an army intelligence unit.

"It was like they were dealing with a bunch of al-Qaeda operatives, not a group of journalists," said Hussan al-Ssairi, a journalist and poet who described seeing hundreds of protesters in black hoods at the detention facility. "Yesterday was like a test, like a picture of the new democracy in Iraq."

Perhaps the U.S. Embassy has something to say about the acceptability of brutalizing intellectuals? No? We're going to have 17,000 people working for the embassy after December, and no one has a word of criticism for the next repressive regime the U.S. is supporting, even as millions across the Middle East and North Africa are making their perspectives known on their willingness to submit to repression?

At this point, you really have to make a realpolitik case for even-just-rhetorically supporting the Mideast dissidents. Eventually -- as in Tunisia, as in Egypt, and soon in Libya, insh'allah -- these guys are going to win. Might not be in dramatic revolutions, but some real serious deck reshuffling is happening. The U.S. can either roll with the winners and be in an advantageous position when they win, or it can be viewed by them as a reluctant, nervous advocate.

Now: yeah, yeah, you can flip this around, like Gates did during WikiLeaks, and point out that being a superpower means that other people don't have to like us, they have to make decisions about whether or not to accomodate us. And that's true enough. But we're coming on a moment when great-power patronage is going to be available on an open market, as evinced by China's evac ship arriving in Libya. It happens to help that the Chinese will under no circumstance back the revolutionaries, so there's an opportunity to draw a distinction between Chinese patronage and the American sort.

Obviously the test of all this is what we say and do to Iraq and to Bahrain and to Jordan and to Yemen and to Saudi and so forth, the pro-American regimes we rely on to promote our interests, where our commitment to human rights runs along the continuum bounded by Would Be Nice and Sick Joke. And look: I just spelled out a case for American support to the protesters that's entirely agnostic to anyone's feelings about human rights or democracy promotion.

 

Armor Wars

Want to read a subtle take on Bob Gates' Friday West Point speech? David Ucko makes nearly every point worth making about it. At the risk of belaboring one of them, it's a mistake to view the speech along a COIN-vs-its-critics continuum. Gates adopts some critiques that COIN makes (the primacy of civilian solutions, the emphasis on small-unit warfare, the need to refit a sclerotic [Gates' term is "constipated"!] Army bureaucracy and promotion system to the needs of those pursuing unconventional careers) and rejects others (that whole fighting-a-resource-intensive-land-war-for-unbounded-duration thing). My guess is neither Yingling nor Giantile will be pleased with the entire speech, but will probably recognize and embrace different points of wisdom contained within it.

But really, Ucko puts it better, so read his post.

One point I'd add: the guys whose ox really gets gored in the speech are the armor corps. Gates gives them a kind of "yeah, yeah, you're important" line. But then he says that the Army has to come to terms with the Navy and Air Force's primacy in "the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military." And then he says nice things about the infantry, and looks at the "likelihood of counterterrorism, rapid reaction, disaster response, or stability or security force assistance missions" as the near-term offerings for a ground force.

Everyone's had fun with the doctrinal meaninglessness of "full spectrum operations," which hold that the Army has to be prepared to... do everything, from state-on-state warfare to advisory n' training missions, a blandishment that doesn't help set service priorities. And I remember being at Leavenworth in 2008 to read a copy of Armor magazine that rent its pages with woe over the sacrifice of armor on the altar of counterinsurgency.

But there are also a lot of inertial forces that ought to reassure armor officers. Gates ain't pulling big heavy corps out of Europe -- the political panic from within NATO would be severe -- or downsizing them significantly from the Army in general. Everyone wants a hedge against the unexpected, which is prudent. We rarely decide that because a military specialty is in a moment of eclipse, we should chop it down to its proportionate need. Armor will survive. The question is if and how armor officers will reinterpret their relevance, or simply rely on the likelihood that at some point, we'll end up in another ground war, Gates' warnings notwithstanding.

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

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

No. 156-11

February 25, 2011

DOD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Staff Sgt. Jerome Firtamag, 29, of Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia, was medically evacuated from Kandahar, Afghanistan, to the United States on Dec. 1, 2010, for treatment of a non-combat related illness. He died Feb. 24 in Pembroke, Ky. Firtamag was assigned to the 96th Combat Support Battalion, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.

For more information, the media may contact the Fort Campbell public affairs office at 931-561-0131 or 270-798-9966.

Hysteria

One day Rick Perlstein will get around to assessing the late 2000s/early 2010s in his Gibbon-like life's work of explicating American hysteria. It'll be hard to write anything of greater value about this "creeping Sharia" jackassery, so I let it go. But the sublime introduction of this noxious Tennessee bill to restrict the civil rights of Muslims is Perlstein bait of the highest order:

The General Assembly finds as follows:

(1) The threat from terrorism continues to plague the United States generally and Tennessee in particular.

Never forget when the terrorists knocked down the Grand Ole Opry. Vengeance for the anthrax'd Graceland. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to melancholy folk standards of the sort NPR culturally denudes. 

 

The Silence of Leaving The Pech Valley

A couple days after I arrived at Bagram last August, I lined up an interview with Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the commander in eastern Afghanistan, so I could ask him if he was going to keep his forces in the seemingly intractible violence of Kunar Province hellholes like the Pech Valley. Then I googled and saw Dianna Cahn had scooped me in Stars & Stripes. Did the Campbell interview anyway and hopefully built on her work.

Read this beautifully written New York Times piece for an overview of the impending departure, and then read Joshua Foust for a subtle and straightforward assessment of its merits. Campbell's reasoning is simple: the Pech is marginal to U.S. interests; the people only fight the U.S. because we're there; the costs of staying are high and the benefits are dubious; why are we here again? If only that kind of thinking could rise from the tactical level to the strategic. (...He said as he endorses this call for a no-fly zone over Libya)

What's striking is the silence surrounding it. Afghanistan, for all it's meant as a repository of U.S. lives and treasure, remains a war few people actually give a shit about. Abandoning territory to an area rife with insurgents could be expected to generate controversy. People could argue a perspective and other people would critique it, even using harsh language. That's all the more expected in an area as painful to soldiers and Marines as the Pech has been. But instead... nothing. Unless, that is, you've served in what the Times calls the "slotlike canyons" of Kunar:

As the years passed and the toll rose, the area assumed for many soldiers a status as hallowed ground. “I can think of very few places over the past 10 years with as high and as sustained a level of violence,” said Col. James W. Bierman, who commanded a Marine battalion in the area in 2006 and helped establish the American presence in the Korangal Valley.

Not to be sentimental, but perhaps we should build a monument? It seems cruel that the overwhelming suffering of the Pech -- "at least 103 American soldiers have died in or near the valley’s maze of steep gullies and soaring peaks, according to a count by The New York Times, and many times more have been wounded, often severely" -- should be obscure. Perhaps such a monument could encourage us to think more strenuously about the wisdom of going into places like the Pech from the outset.

Finally, one of the Times reporters on this story is Wesley Morgan, a guy I was lucky to come across at Bagram when I was assigned to the same Hotel California bunk he was staying in. An exceptional reporter, he's crisscrossed eastern Afghanistan for the paper and I don't think he's graduated college yet. Keep an eye out for everything he writes. You won't be disappointed.

Housekeeping

I've had some personal and family issues to attend to over the past few weeks, and that's led me to continue my nine-month trend of being a poor steward of Attackerman. Relative disinterest is overtaking me, leaving me to doubt that I have any value to add, or even why I'd believe I would in the first place. That's not a very healthy thing for someone in my line of work. But it feels good -- healthy, even -- to express it. Still, I want to turn this thing around, including with a migration away from Typepad (what a mistake it was in going for a blog-throwback feel); an incorporation of my FDL archives; and ultimately the establishment of Attackerman.com. If you're a designer, email me at spencerackerman-at-gmail and let's talk. Coming soon: a healthier balance of Danger Room and Attackerman work. You've heard it all before, so thanks, again, for bearing with.