In this May 20, 2010 photo, U.S. Army Stryker vehicles kick up dust as they roll across a rocky road to pick up troops from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Stryker Brigade who were on patrol in the Shah Wali Kot district of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. Twenty-two men in the U.S. Army’s 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment of 800 died in a yearlong Afghan tour ending this summer. Most were killed last year in the Arghandab, a gateway to the southern city of Kandahar. About 70 were injured, all but two in bomb blasts. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

The AP has a report up on 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Stryker Brigade that bears some thought (Google news rarely if ever maintains their news URLs indefinitely; for another URL see The Washington Post).  The article reads much like a journal, but some salient points are lifted out and reproduced below.  I will provide running commentary, with a summary at the end.

Twenty-two men in the U.S. Army’s 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment of 800 died in a yearlong Afghan tour ending this summer. Most were killed last year in the Arghandab, a gateway to the southern city of Kandahar. About 70 were injured, all but two in bomb blasts.

The death toll was one of the highest in the Afghan war, and the tough fight in the Arghandab drew the attention of America’s leaders. President Obama was photographed saluting the coffin of one of the soldiers on arrival in the United States. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told soldiers at their base in March that their efforts had helped push back the Taliban.

However, the battalion failed to dislodge insurgent cells entirely. A similar outcome is emerging in the southern town of Marjah after a bigger operation led by U.S. Marines in February. An even larger campaign is unfolding in Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital …

The battalion is part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, which originally trained for urban combat in Iraq. But the mission changed in the final months of training, and the brigade’s 130 Arabic students took a crash course in Pashto, the language of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic community.

As a reading of the category Language in COIN will demonstrate, this last paragraph is simply exaggeration.  The Brigade didn’t have 130 Arabic “students.”  They might have had 130 or more Soldiers who had been given short classes in basic Arabic, focused on Phonetics, and rehearsing key phrases important to certain tactical tasks, but they didn’t have Arabic “students.”  The language training is so poor that little was lost, whether they went to Iraq or Afghanistan.

… the battalion had very little intelligence. The soldiers didn’t know it, but they faced an entrenched enemy willing to stand and fight for a sliver of territory vital to the Taliban’s goal of seizing Kandahar. They needed more manpower …

“You can’t get from one side of the river to the other easily. You can’t do anything on vehicles,” Neumann said. “We didn’t know it was going to be saturated with enemy. Nobody was tracking that it was a Taliban sanctuary.”

These last paragraphs are spot on.  Intelligence has routinely failed the Army and Marines, and the deployment of a Stryker Brigade in an area not amenable to the vehicle is absurd.  Such blunders touch on rudimentary logistics, planning and knowledge base of the mission.  The Stryker Soldiers should have been humping 120 pounds of gear up hills for 20 miles in preparation for this deployment, not sitting in situationally worthless fighter vehicles.

One September night, two dozen suspected insurgents appeared with bags around an American post, then pushed into the orchards before dawn. Coalition rules of engagement barred the Americans from opening fire unless there was obvious hostile intent.

The paltry role of Afghan forces was also frustrating. Chaplain Lewis, a 37-year-old father of four from San Diego, California, once boarded a Stryker with two Americans who survived an IED strike. In back were two Afghan soldiers, one of whom had shot himself in the foot. A commander told Lewis: “Keep an eye on those two. Make sure their weapons remain on safe.”

We’re going to have to forget the Afghan National Army if we are going to focus in winning the campaign.  As for the incident above, the Soldiers should have immediately descended upon the insurgents, hazed them, muzzle-thumped them, and held them until they obtained the information they wanted.  The effeminate can cry a river over my barbaric counsel, but failure to implement harder tactics likely cost American lives.

It was hard to separate civilians from insurgents. On village patrols, the Americans probably shook hands with unarmed fighters. The battalion struggled for traction in civil outreach. One platoon delivered a generator on a pallet outside a medical clinic; gunmen shot holes in it overnight …

Grousing is common in any army, but a deeper resentment brewed in the 1-17. In November, brigade chief Col. Harry Tunnell replaced Capt. Joel Kassulke of Charlie Company, which had suffered the most deaths — 12 men — of the four companies.

The soldiers fumed. They thought the captain was made a scapegoat.

In December, the battalion took a new mission to secure area highways. Fighting had ebbed, and a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division took over most of the Arghandab. Some 1-17 soldiers were emotional — they thought they were winning, and felt defeat at leaving.

A month later, an Army Times newspaper article included assertions by Charlie Company junior leaders that they had not trained adequately for the Afghan mission, and that the battalion had not focused enough on civilian concerns.

Neumann said civil development was hardly the first option in a heavy combat zone, but acknowledged he could have done more to convey command thinking down the chain. As for Kassulke’s transfer, he said, the brigade command believed the man and the company were close to a “breaking point” and needed change.

“That was a bitter pill for that company to swallow,” Neumann said. The Army Times article, he said, “tore at the fiber of this unit and I was proud that we shook that off too.”

I have read in full the Army Times article in which Staff Sergeant Jason Hughes figures so prominently.  Color me unpersuaded and unimpressed.  A generator gets delivered, and its gets shot to hell.  So much for reconstruction and civilian concerns while killers are on the loose.

The Stryker Brigade was unprepared alright, but not because of what Staff Sergeant Hughes charges.  They were not trained to the terrain in Afghanistan because they were not intended to go there.  That failure belongs with senior leadership, i.e., above Colonel, not the Brigade command.  As for training in COIN, my coverage and commentary on Wanat and Kamdesh shows that it’s best to focus on kinetics and force projection before the population and good governance.

In this manner, the advocates of population-centric COIN (in their higher chain of command) also failed the Brigade.  They have lost twenty two men in the quest to secure the terrain of the population.  They should have been pursuing and killing the enemy.  If they had done so, maybe by now they would have been sitting in homes drinking chai and discussing grievances.  First things first, as they say.

Missed by much (or most) of the media, the Obama administration published a new National Security Strategy.  I would otherwise have attempted to conduct a serious review of said strategy, but it isn’t a serious document.  It talks about the American commitment to the two-state solution, while ignoring the fact that Palestinians are increasingly rejecting the two-state solution.  The strategy document discusses the fact that America will underwrite international or global security, while ignoring the fact that we are flat broke and in need of printing more money in order to pay our debts.

The strategy waxes almost poetic concerning the prevention of nuclear proliferation, while at the same time we have implemented the most weak-kneed, pitiful, powerless and naive strategy concerning Iran since the Carter administration.  Iran will go nuclear during this administration’s watch and under the purview of this national security strategy.  The strategy document goes on about our commitment to human rights, just after Obama bowed to the Chinese Premier (the monster who continues to implement the forced abortion policy in China), and while we also ignore the possibility of a Northern logistics route for Afghanistan because of human rights violations in Turkmenistan.

Then there is this wonderful statement on page 8.  “Climate change and pandemic disease threaten the security of regions and the health and safety of the American people.”  Well there you have it.  Anthropogenic global warming poses a national security threat – after the revelations of complete falsification of data in the presumed intellectual power centers of the AGW religion.

The new national security strategy promotes a just and sustainable international order:

Our engagement will underpin a just and sustainable international order—just, because it advances mutual interests, protects the rights of all, and holds accountable those who refuse to meet their responsibilities; sustainable because it is based on broadly shared norms and fosters collective action to address common challenges.

Don’t trust my analysis.  You can go read the document for yourself (grab a stout cup of coffee first – or maybe a stout beer).  But it reads like it was written by a college sophomore in international studies for a contest named “Imagine: Tribute to John Lennon – What Do You Want the World to Look Like When You Grow Up?”

From Military.com:

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, sat gazing at maps of Marjah as a Marine battalion commander asked him for more time to oust Taliban fighters from a longtime stronghold in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

“You’ve got to be patient,” Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. “We’ve only been here 90 days.”

“How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?” McChrystal replied.

A charged silence settled in the stuffy, crowded chapel tent at the Marine base in the Marjah district.

“I can’t tell you, sir,” the tall, towheaded, Fort Bragg, N.C., native finally answered.

“I’m telling you,” McChrystal said. “We don’t have as many days as we’d like.”

The operation in Marjah is supposed to be the first blow in a decisive campaign to oust the Taliban from their spiritual homeland in adjacent Kandahar province, one that McChrystal had hoped would bring security and stability to Marjah and begin to convey an “irreversible sense of momentum” in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan.

Instead, a tour last week of Marjah and the nearby Nad Ali district, during which McClatchy Newspapers had rare access to meetings between McChrystal and top Western strategists, drove home the hard fact that President Obama’s plan to begin pulling American troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011 is colliding with the realities of the war.

There aren’t enough U.S. and Afghan forces to provide the security that’s needed to win the loyalty of wary locals. The Taliban have beheaded Afghans who cooperate with foreigners in a creeping intimidation campaign. The Afghan government hasn’t dispatched enough local administrators or trained police to establish credible governance, and now the Taliban have begun their anticipated spring offensive.

“This is a bleeding ulcer right now,” McChrystal told a group of Afghan officials, international commanders in southern Afghanistan and civilian strategists who are leading the effort to oust the Taliban fighters from Helmand.

“You don’t feel it here,” he said during a 10-hour front-line strategy review, “but I’ll tell you, it’s a bleeding ulcer outside.”

Throughout the day, McChrystal expressed impatience with the pace of operations, echoing the mounting pressure he’s under from his civilian bosses in Washington and Europe to start showing progress.

Is this a bad joke or a sorry episode of The Twilight Zone?  It’s a serious question.  Names are supplied, so the author apparently doesn’t mind us fact-checking him.  Is this report for real?  Did McChrystal really say those things and interact with another officer in this manner?  Seriously?  This is an important milestone in the campaign.  Apparently, we now know the real expectations for the campaign.  No one can seriously continue to claim that the withdrawal date is a mere ruse for the American public.  They really believe it.  They really intend for it to obtain.

Did General McChrystal not cover the basics of classical counterinsurgency doctrine with his civilian bosses?  Did he or any of his reports mislead the administration into believing that Marjah or any other town in Afghanistan would be pacified in 90 days?  Did he or his reports – or anyone in the administration – really believe that this government ex machina we brought to Marjah would work?

Forgetting classical counterinsurgency doctrine which normally presumes that COIN will take ten or even more years, for anyone who has been listening and watching for the past several years, the most successful part of the campaign in Iraq, i.e., the Anbar Province, took about three and a half years from the inception of Operation Al Fajr until late 2007 when Fallujah was finally stable at the conclusion of Operation Alljah.

Security in Ramadi preceded Fallujah slightly, Haditha preceded Ramadi by a little and Al Qaim was secure before Haditha.  But the whole of the Anbar Province took over three years and the efforts of the best fighting force on earth, the U.S. Marine Corps, in which more than 1000 Marines perished and many more were wounded or maimed.  No one in his right mind would claim that the U.S. Marine Corps did not understand or implement a successful strategy in the Anbar Province, where the Marines had to fight their way through an indigenous insurgency (finally co-opting their services) to get to the 80-100 foreign fighters per month flowing across the Syrian border.  Iraq is still not entirely stable, and its security will be a direct function of the extent to which we confront Iran in its quest for regional hegemony.

This report is so bizarre, so jaw dropping, and so disturbing, that it naturally leads to many other very important questions.  Does McChrystal believe that the COIN operations will be successfully concluded within a year or even a year plus a few months?  Did he communicate that to the administration?  If so, does the administration believe it?  Was time frame ever brought up?  Did the administration simply lay down expectations without reference to historical precedent for successful COIN campaigns and without asking General McChrystal?

The notion that Marjah is a bleeding ulcer is preposterous when compared to Ramadi in 2006 or Fallujah in 2007.  Someone or some group is not thinking clearly, and this lack of clarity may be the doom of the campaign when it finally becomes apparent to everyone else that we are in the “long war.”  It will not be finished for a long time to come, even if America stands down.  The enemy gets the final vote.

Mr. Obama plans to send up to 1200 National Guard troops to the Arizona-Mexico border.  It’s important to realize what this is – and what it isn’t.  The solution to immigration is rather simple,  but involves actions that we deem too painful.  I have pointed out before that piracy exists because we want it to.  Rather, we want it more than we want to implement the solution (which we deem to be too violent for our sensibilities).  The same holds true for illegal immigration.

One such cornerstone in the undoing of illegal immigration is to imprison the CEOs of companies who hire illegal aliens.  Add to this the imprisonment of those who hire illegals as nannies, house workers, and gardeners, and those construction superintendents who drop by Home Depot or Lowe’s early in the morning to pick up their workers, and we will begin to make a dent in the illegal population in the U.S.

But illegal immigrants is big business in America.  It is a form of corporate welfare.  Rather than pay for benefits, the cheap CEOs (and construction superintendents) can rely on the U.S. taxpayers (and medical insurance premium payers) to pay them for him.  It’s a win-lose arrangement.  The CEO wins and the taxpayer loses.  There are even seminars that teach these cheap CEOs how to get away with it.

But there is another supremely important issue for border enforcement, one that has gotten scant attention.  It has to do with whether the National Guard can in any way really help the border guards, and in fact, whether the border guards themselves can even do their job.  When National Guardsmen were deployed to the border before, they were attacked and overrun by a small army on the payroll of the drug lords.  They weren’t even allowed to fire warning shots according to the rules for the use of force.

The war on the Southern border is being treated as an exercise in law enforcement, and the stipulations of the SCOTUS decision in Tennessee v. Garner 471 U.S. 1 (1985) apply.  Deadly force can only be used in self defense, and thus did Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean serve time in prison (until their sentences were commuted by President Bush) for shooting a known drug dealer who was both threatening these two former border guards and fleeing arrest.

Whether one agrees with the SCOTUS decision, its application on the border with hundreds of thousands of illegals flowing across combined with a heavily armed drug army is dubious at the very best.  There simply aren’t enough border agents or National Guard troops to effect arrest by hand – chasing and apprehending them without deadly force – while following the stipulations of decisions intended for U.S. citizens.  The flow of immigrants across the border must be treated as an invasion, and until it is, there will be no effect on the problem.

We can equivocate until there is no more border, we can legislate until the lawyers cannot decipher it.  There are even those who do not care.  But among those who do, there is nothing – NOTHING – these 1200 National Guardsmen can do.  Their presence is mere window dressing as pointed out by Michelle Malkin.  It is for appearance, and the hemorrhaging at the border will continue unabated.

From The New York Times:

MIAN POSHTEH, Afghanistan — The young Taliban prisoner was led blindfolded to a sweltering military tent, seated among 17 village elders and then, eyes uncovered, faced a chief accuser brandishing a document with the elders’ signatures or thumbprints.

Capt. Scott A. Cuomo, a United States Marine commander who was acting as the prosecutor, told the prisoner: “This letter right here is a sworn pledge from all of your elders that they’re vouching for you and that you will never support the Taliban or fight for the Taliban ever again.”

After a half-hour “trial,” the captain rendered the group’s judgment on the silent prisoner, Juma Khan, 23, whom the Marines had seized after finding a bomb trigger device, ammunition and opium buried in his yard. Mr. Khan’s father and grandfather, who was one of the elders, were among the group. “So on behalf of peace, your family, your grandfather,” Captain Cuomo solemnly said, “we’re going to let you go.”

Thus was justice dispensed on a recent Saturday evening, deep in the Taliban heartland of the Helmand River Valley, where the theory behind the American effort to “reintegrate” the enemy meets the ambiguous reality of a nearly decade-old war.

Captain Cuomo, a 32-year-old Annapolis graduate from Long Island who is not related to the New York political family, acknowledged the hazards of the trial and others like it unfolding in Afghanistan. “Do I know that Juma Khan is not going to turn back around and be the Taliban?” he said. “No.” Nonetheless the effort is proceeding.

Even as Washington and Kabul debate their plans to reconcile with senior members of the Taliban, military commanders on the ground in Afghanistan are reintegrating insurgent foot soldiers on their own. The reason is simple, Captain Cuomo said: While Marines are “trained to fight, and we don’t mind fighting, the problem with fighting is that it doesn’t bring stability to your home.”

Six days after Mr. Khan’s May 1 release, another Marine commander, Capt. Jason C. Brezler, got pledges from 25 former insurgents to sign up as police recruits in the northern Helmand village of Soorkano. A week later in Marja, where clashes between the Marines and the Taliban continue in the wake of an American offensive there in February, Lt. Col. Brian Christmas released two young men who admitted to fighting for the Taliban, after the pair and two elders signed pledges promising the men would not fight again.

Acting under military guidelines aimed at persuading low-level fighters to lay down their arms, commanders repeat the mantra that the United States will never kill its way to victory in Afghanistan. They say that in a counterinsurgency war intended to win over the population, reintegration is crucial because the Taliban are woven so deeply into the social fabric of the country.

Ridiculous mantra, this idea that we cannot kill our way to victory.  Now, it may be more complicated than that, where at least some cooperation from the population is necessary in order to identify the insurgents, but people cooperate for all sorts of reasons.  I reject the idea that poverty or disenfranchisement in and of itself creates insurgents.  There are countless poverty-stricken countries in the world where large scale insurgencies do not exist, Bangladesh being one of them.

Our experience in the Anbar Province demonstrates that the most effective order of things is for the insurgents themselves to decide to put down arms because it becomes too dangerous for them.  When it is certain death to continue the fight, the end is near.  In this case the end is nowhere to be found because the proper force projection has not been in effect.

If Juma Khan had decided on his own to reintegrate and had approached the U.S. Marines about doing so, then it would be more persuasive than this display, sincere though it is (on the part of the Marines).  Where has this ever happened?  It happened in the Anbar Province many times.  During Operation Alljah in Fallujah in 2007, the Marine brought such force to Fallujah that the foreign fighters died (or fled North to Mosul), while the indigenous insurgents gave up and returned home, many of them to al Qaim where local elders vouched for their future lawful conduct.

Both accounts involve local elders vouching and making promises, but it is only one instance of these two examples where the insurgents themselves approached the government or U.S. Marines.  We want to take the milestones in successful COIN and move them up in date to meet our own wishes without adequate commitment and forces.  It simply won’t work.