"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

I realized that in my last entry I left off a book. I've also finished another since then.

Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam by John A. Nagl (24) Originally his doctoral dissertation, this book by John Nagl (a lieutenant colonel in the US Army and former Rhodes Scholar) compares the organizational learning behaviors of the British Army during the Malayan Emergency and the US Army during the Vietnam War. As a reworked thesis might be expected to be, it's a bit dry for the casual reader and a bit academic for the average military history reader, but nonetheless it does a good job of douign what it sets out to do--documenting how different organizations adapat to situations that they're not accustome to, in this case armies fighting a different sort of war than they have been prepared to fight through training, doctrine, and equipment. The British took a few years but adapated and successfully developed the capability to fight a counterinsurgency campaign. Nagl suggests that this has a lot to do with the sort of conflicts that the British had historically fought, though I think he discounts the historical focus in the regular Army on conventional warfare. The American Army, even with the experience ot the British Army in Malaya to call on, did not adapt to the challenge of dealing with unconventional warfare, continuing to try to fight guerrillas in the jungle using equipment and tactics developed to fight the Russians in Germany and ignoring the political element of the conflict as long as they could.

Roman Blood by Stephen Saylor (25) The first (both in order of publication and chronologically) of Stephen Saylor's novels about the detective Gordianus the Finder, set in late Republican Rome, starts the reader (if not Gordianus's career, which is well underway when the story opens) off with a bang. A brutal and gory murder, political intrigue, incest, and the introduction of an unknown advocate, one Marcus of the Tullii, named Cicero, make this an exciting introduction to this wily and charming investigator. Decent and honest but cynical and world-weary, Gordianus will appeal to most readers. He's clever, but not too clever, and he may take advantage of the wealthy and corrupt, but he's kind and fair to those less fortunate. A good mystery as well as a good read, the plot keeps twisting right up to the end. I've read this before, but I enjoyed it jsut as much the second (or third?) time around.

In progress:

The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World by Greg King and Sue Woolmans
How Can Man Die Better: The Secrets of Isandhlwana Revealed by Mike Snook
Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory by MG Julian Thompson
Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz

500/500 for my term paper in Professor Thistlebottom's class. His comments on this and the last previous essay were quite friendly and devoid of picky grammar comments. Perhaps, as with horses, one just needs to be firm and decisive.

I won't bore you with the entire 11-page paper, but it raised an interesting question: if the Afghan security and intelligence system becomes weaker, what else can the US do to shore up the situation there? It's a hypothetical based on a counterfactual premise; while there continue to be problems with the military and police there, I think there's been tremendous progress. The problem, IMO is the national political part. Karzai has been compared to Diem in Vietnam, and I think it's a fair comparison. He's not very popular; he's not very capable; we more or less put him where he is. In addition, he seems to have lost confidence in the US and NATO--probably because we've been very frank about criticizing his government's corruption and election cheating--and is flailing around wildly for an alternative. But the terms that his enemies want before they will talk to him are higher than he's prepared to go. We can't possibly get rid of him, because we'll get just what we did when Diem went down--a chaotic mess where any hope of a credible national government supported by the people goes by the wayside.

My essay argued that we have to look at what is keeping the insurgents going. It's not popular support--people in Afghanistan HATE them, and while they don't like the Karzai government either, they're prepared to tolerate it *if* it can protect them and let them go about their business, even make things a little better here and there. I think we have to look at the basic nature of Afghan warfare and peel off the insurgent groups that can be peeled off. They're run by some pretty loathsome people, but loathsome people are who, in the final analysis, run things in that part of the world. If we can bribe (to be frank) the Hekmatyars, maybe even the Quetta Shura with NATO withdrawal and a chance to participate in ruling the country, I think we could get them to stop fighting (with guns).

But only if we don't have someone egging them on. And right now, Pakistan is doing that. They are afraid that if we withdraw, Afghanistan will go back to civil war, and so they want the major factions that will predominate in such a war to owe them. They are deathly afraid of India gaining a foothold there and surrounding them. And they have their own insurgents (that IMO have grown out of the vipers they've nursed in their bosom) that they do not have the resources to defeat. I think we need to engage much more fervently with Pakistan. Stop sanctioning them and making them question whether or not we support them. Pressure India (who owe us a lot IMO, after the boosts that they got from Bush) to make it clear they have NO ambitions in Afghanistan. And we need to provide serious (hands-off) COIN support to Pakistan to help them squelch their own Taliban. The people in the FATA don't like these folks, but if the only way the government can deal with them is to clear all the villages and drive people out of the hills, guess who they will like less? So we need to supply the Paks with helos, comms, and most of all training, training, training. We simply cannot send troops in there to partner with them the way we have in Afghanistan--they wouldn't be tolerated. So we have to help them learn how to do modern COIN: presence, patrolling, making friends with the population, building infrastructure that people need, working with local government instead of dictating to it, building local self-defense forces instead of insisting that "foreign" troops (Punjabis instead of Pathans) should guard them.

I think if we're prepared to throw our weight behind Pakistan, they can be convinced to stop supporting the Afghan Taliban. And if they AT don't have that support *and* they have a chance to participate in Afghan decisionmaking, they will talk.

Now, how we get the Paks to stop supporting LeT and the Kashmiri militants, which would probably be India's price for backing off, I have NO idea....

For today's essay*, we return to Dhofar. We're not traveling far, maybe 30 miles, but we're jumping ahead two years. Instead of a sultan's palace in a leafy coastal city, we find ourselves in a dry, dusty,mud-brick fort, worthy of Beau Geste. And instead of the short, Strackenzian combat of a near-bloodless coup d'etat, our objective is the middle of a blistering, deadly firefight.

( Read more... )

I was browsing through Wikipedia this afternoon and a name caught my eye. Back in the day, I remember a scenario of the old SPI game "Patrol" featured British troops trying to track down the Faqir of Ipi. So when I saw that title again, I had to take a look.

Wikipedia's summary of that gentleman's military exploits reads, in part:

The Faqir of Ipi [ born Mirza Ali Khan in 1897] was a Pashtun from today's North-Western Pakistan, then British India. ... The village of Ipi is located ...in North Waziristan Agency, Waziristan, from where the Faqir of Ipi started his self styled jihad against the British government. He waged a highly effective guerrilla warfare against the British Empire throughout the 1930s and 1940s until the British departure in 1947. At one point nearly 40,000 British and Indian troops were reported to be in the field trying to capture him, while he succeeding in evading the tight net surrounding him. His own force of armed tribesmen, probably not exceeding one thousand men, armed with rifles and a few machine-guns, and occasionally one or two pieces of antiquated cannon were fielded against this much larger British army equipped with modern artillery, tanks and aircraft. The Faqir of Ipi was always short of ammunition, had no radio communication, and relied upon a traditional network of informants and messengers for his intelligence while the British had much more sophisticated communications and intelligence capabilities developed in World War II.

As Kipling would probably remind us, nothing much changes in that part of the world.