First up, regular comment contributor to The Captain’s Journal Roy Keyes gives us:

Hezbollah: The Party of God

Viewed as both hero and villain, Hezbollah is possibly the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world today. Hezbollah’s worldview is fueled by the perception that the Muslim world is experiencing a period of deep crisis and as a result, members of the organization are encouraged to strike at the forces of evil in the world in order to accelerate the final battle between Muslims and the West (Hezbollah Dossier, 2009).

This is a good one and is well worth some time today or this weekend.

Second, another paper on Hezbollah:

Hezbollah in South America

Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Iran-sponsored Shi’i Muslim terrorist organization, has established global networks in at least 40 countries. Its growing presence in South America is increasingly troublesome to U.S. policymakers, yet there are few experts on Hezbollah and fewer still on Hezbollah Latino America. Hezbollah’s operatives have infiltrated the Western Hemisphere from Canada to Argentina, and its activity is increasing, particularly in the lawless Tri-Border Area (TBA) of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. This research was conducted to expose the actions and objectives of Hezbollah in the TBA. The majority of US officials and operators believe that Hezbollah’s terrorist wing is separate from its political wing, but these are misconceptions from people who “mirror-image” the American experience when assessing Hezbollah. Unfamiliarity with the organization makes these assessors vulnerable to its propaganda, which is a severe problem that permeates the US government and its operatives. People who think Hezbollah is or could be compartmentalized or disunited are not familiar with the organization and perceive Hezbollah through the lens of the organization’s extensive propaganda effort. Hezbollah has a large operational network in the TBA, which generates funds for the party, but its primary mission is to plan attacks and lie dormant, awaiting instructions to execute operations against Western targets.

And one more must read from the Center for Security Policy:

Sharia: The Threat to America

Team B II believes that the role played in this regard by shariah’s most sophisticated jihadists, the Muslim Brotherhood, is of particular concern.  Steeped in Islamic doctrine, and already embedded deep inside both the United States and our allies, the Brotherhood has become highly skilled in exploiting the civil liberties and multicultural proclivities of Western societies for the purpose of destroying the latter from within. As America’s top national security leadership continues to be guided by its post-modernist, scientific, and high-tech world-view, it neglects the reality that 7th Century impulses, enshrined in shariah, have reemerged as the most critical existential threat to constitutional governance and the freedom-loving, reason-driven principles that undergird Western civilization.

I found especially pleasing that the authors were scholarly in their approach.  They traced the contemporary jihadist movement not only back to its original theological roots, but also back to its temporal and contemporary roots in Sayyid Qutb, whom I have know about a long time.  Interestingly, he inveighed:

“`The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity,` he wrote. `She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.` These curvy jezebels pursued boys with `wide, strapping chest[s]` and `ox muscles,` Qutb added with disgust.”

Seems that Qutb is giving us a little more information than we need if he actually believes that all of this is true, no?  Is he enjoying this discussion a little too much?

In my younger years I trained quarter horses.  Naturally, I was both surprised and excited to see an article about taking rodeos from Texas to Afghanistan.  I expected stories about how the Afghans learned of the utility of the quintessential horse – the quarter horse – in barrel racing, roping, ring riding, and just about everything else.  Lord, I love the quarter horse.  I do.  I was very disappointed and saddened to read the report.

What I wasn’t expecting to see was such a stark and honest appraisal of the degrading security situation in Afghanistan.  Remember, too, it was during this time that we killed and captured so many high value targets with the ultra-secretive night raids by SOF troopers.  Surely at risk of repeating myself for the millionth time, I guess that strategy isn’t working, huh?

Iraqi military officials have had some buyer’s remorse over the U.S. exit, calling for more troops for an extended period of time.  The knowledgeable ones know the drill, and they know that Iraq is not ready.  Conditions continue to be problematic in Iraq, and AQI appears to be courting Shi’ite gangs for membership.

Shiite gangs are joining the Sunni extremists of al Qa’eda to form new and dangerous alliances that threaten stability in southern Iraq, government officials and community leaders have warned.

A series of deadly attacks last month in once secure areas, including the southern cities of Kut and Basra, caught the Iraqi authorities by surprise and, they say, indicate that al Qa’eda has made contacts with Shiite groups willing to carry out strikes in the region.

The cooperation, driven by a mixture of money, fear and a mutual hatred of Iran, represents a stark reversal. Since the formation of al Qa’eda in the late 1990s, the radical Sunni Muslim group and its affiliates have regularly targeted Shiites, whom they consider heretics. That hostility continued following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the factional fighting that broke out soon thereafter.

There are signs, however, that this longstanding acrimony has given way to the desire of al Qa’eda sympathisers to penetrate Iraq’s Shiite-dominated southern provinces. To that end, they have found willing Shiite allies, according to regional officials.

“It is unfortunate but we understand that some Shia people are involved with and support the work of al Qa’eda,” said Shamel Mansour Ayal, chairman of Wasit provincial council’s security commission, which is headquartered in Kut.

Some might say that this is a sign of desperation, but at what point has AQI not be desperate?  That’s not the point.  The point is that Iraq needs U.S. troops and they know it, but even if the troops are deployed, they are essentially powerless without renegotiation of the SOFA.  Witness the most recent stupidity in a long line of them.

Gone are the days when U.S. soldiers kicked in doors and searched for insurgents and weapons, U.S. officers say, adding that they cannot even enter towns now unless invited and escorted.

However, a tip-off that a suicide bomber from the Iraqi affiliate of al-Qaeda planned to attack a joint Iraqi-U.S. checkpoint in western Nineveh during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which started on Friday, led U.S. troops to take the initiative in a raid last week.

“Being that it is a credible threat specifically against U.S. forces, we kind of have to act,” said Captain Keith Benoit, a squadron commander in the 7th Cavalry Regiment, at the checkpoint a few hours before the raid.

The mission was planned by U.S. forces but it was to be carried out by the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga security forces, while U.S. soldiers stood about 100 meters away, said Benoit.

“If we were to capture these folks alive tonight, I have a specific interest in this … so I would probably join in the questioning, but there is no unilateral questioning by U.S. forces any more,” he said.

Then there is no point in U.S. forces being deployed there.  There are no kinetic operations, and the patrols and questioning necessary to develop atmospherics and good intelligence networks are non-existent.  Bring the troops home now or renegotiate the SOFA.

Joshua Foust recently excoriated the Afghanistan Study Group Report.  I’ve pretty much ignored the report, it being yet another dumb small footprint, attack of the drones, CT v. COIN, send in the “special boys” SOF to kill all of the HVTs, etc., etc., ad nauseum, document.  Josh does a good job of exploring all of its inconsistencies.  Logical contradictions are death to an argument, and this report is chock full of them.  Consistency is not the hobgoblin of small minds.  It is the stuff of life.  Logical inconsistencies are to me a complete turnoff.  I close my mind quickly to someone who can’t maintain logical attention to detail.

Josh and I agree on many (and most) things, except for one important thing I will mention.  He argues that Afghanistan’s problems are not, per se, due to Afghanistan, but other things, including the messy way in which we have waged this campaign.  Josh and I agree on the messiness of the campaign, but I will continue to hold that Afghanistan’s problems are due to a multitude of things, not all of which but not the least of which is Afghanistan.  With my more enemy-centric view of counterinsurgency, I see a limit to the extent to which we are going to be able to convert their governance, ensure domestic tranquility, and bring them into the 21st century.  I believe that Josh sees more cultural engagement as necessary for Afghanistan than I believe we have the time or resources for.  That said, Josh is a smart Afghanistan analyst and his assessment of the report should be your next reading assignment.

Shortly after weighing in on the report, Josh catalogs various folk calling him a dumb ass.  Well, it happens, and I’ve had my fair share of folk calling me a dumb ass.  It rarely changes my mind on the facts of the matter, but sometimes amuses me.  On a related note, one particularly amusing comment to Josh’s post comes from Bernard Finel, with whom I rarely agree on anything.  He says:

I suspect that we have different definitions of “anything substantial.” We cannot wage a COIN campaign with 30k troops. But NO ONE claims we can.

As for the drones issue. Yes, I agree. The problem with an off-shore drone campaign is the intelligence challenge. I have never argued otherwise, but the report does not suggest striking individuals. It suggests striking essentially pre-9/11 style AQ facilities which we DID have good intel on despite having little ground presence.

So again, you are making a false argument. 30k is not enough to do what YOU want to do in Afghanistan. It is likely sufficient to do what the study authors believe is necessary for US national interests.

Strange comment.  He must mean 30k additional troops, not 30k troops.  And yes, Petraeus et. al., do indeed claim that we can wage a COIN campaign with what we currently have in Afghanistan.  As for the supposed intelligence pre-9/11, he must be joking.  I cannot seriously comment on this because it isn’t a serious point.  Moving on to his solution, most readers know what I think about the SOF high value target campaign, but just in case anyone has missed it, let me be clearer.

It doesn’t work.  Period.  Neither does the drone campaign.  I am not opposed to killing Taliban.  That’s what I want to have done anyway – from the bottom up, thereby marginalizing Taliban “leaders” because they cannot recruit fighters.  I am not compassionate over either the Taliban or those who harbor them.  But searching out HVTs didn’t work in Iraq, isn’t working in Afghanistan, and won’t ever work in any serious insurgency (to be clear, other things caused us to succeed in Iraq).  If the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan – and here I am including leaving a small SOF footprint of several thousand troops, perhaps 10k to 20k, even though we don’t have than many to give – here is the list of things that would happen.

Within several months the Afghan National Police would dissociate, leaving nothing but an empty shell for local security.  The ANP who weren’t high on opium would have scattered.  The ANA would last a little longer, maybe half a year, but many of them would be high on opium or would scatter.  That corrupt bastard Ahmed Wali Karzai would have his carcass thrown out into the road, and Kandahar would fall to the Taliban within months.  The ANA would soon desert and run for home.  The Northern Alliance would crank up again in earnest, but wouldn’t be able to stop the surge of Taliban control.  Kabul would fall within a year.  It would take a SOF campaign just to save the SOF troops who had stayed in Afghanistan.  Except they would all be in Afghanistan, so someone else would have to do it.

All who had cooperated with the U.S. would be drug into the streets and shot.  Intelligence would be non-existent.  Most contractors who had provided logistics to U.S. troops would be shot within several months, and the rest would scatter.  The only logistics would be via air, and the only bases which would continue to be open would have to engage in force protection around the clock.  There would be no SOF raids because they wouldn’t know whom to target.  The drone campaign would cease and desist because any intelligence asset within Pakistan would quickly figure out that the U.S. had cut and run, and that the Taliban were clear winners.  Intelligence in Pakistan would  evaporate overnight, as if it had never existed.  Only the ghosts would be left to talk to us.

Now.  It isn’t true that I simply want more troops and more of the same while we try harder this time around, a potential charge and one that Col. Gian Gentile makes of Josh.  I have advocated against population-centric COIN and in favor of chasing the insurgents where they live.  I have advocated distributed operations and small unit maneuver warfare, less restrictive ROE, getting off of the FOBs, and around the clock contact with both the population and the insurgency.  The Marines are doing this in Helmand, and part of the Army is doing this in Kunar and Nuristan.  But we’re not doing this everywhere, and we should be.

Finally, others know solutions that are not being implemented.  SFC Jeromy Henning comments:

The smaller footprint argument is simply ridiculous. A true surge is needed on this side in order to support the Pakistani initiatives. Every time they had conducted a major action on their side (into the territories along the border) the porous border and minimally-manned US Zones became safe-havens for the bad guys. We need plenty more troops in Afghanistan to secure the border districts/provinces in order to destroy insurgents as they seek safety from Pakistani efforts. Afghanistan needs the same footprint achieved in Iraq to accomplish this.

One of the places we are continuing to ignore is the support of the Afghan Border Police (ABP). Of all ANSF, they maintain more kinetic contacts than anybody else, yet they are mostly ignored and barely mentored by a token US presence at the Zoon(BDE) level and higher. They could use better training and mentorship as they live and serve on the border. As long as they feel that they are of no importance to the overall cause against the insurgents and remain under supplied, under-equipped, undermanned, and poorly led, they will be vulnerable to corruption resulting in a continuance of poor border security.

So there are several things you won’t hear from either Joshua Foust or me.  You won’t hear advocacy for the small footprint, you won’t hear advocacy for SOF raids, and you won’t hear stupid advocacy for negotiations and reconciliation with the Taliban (big T).  What you will hear is advocacy for doing things smarter, for better language training, and for more troops.  One area where Josh and I disagree has to do with distributed operations versus population centers.  But at this point we are gilding the lily.  We need more troops and more force projection before that issue becomes relevant.

From Strategy Page:

Between April and July of this year, U.S. and allied (including Afghan) special operations forces killed nearly 400 Taliban leaders, and arrested another 1,400 Taliban. All this was mostly done via night operations by commandos (mainly U.S. Special Forces and SEALs) and missile attacks by American UAVs. This is part of a trend.

In the past two years, SOCOM has been shifting forces from Iraq (where it had 5,500 personnel two years ago) to Afghanistan (where it had 3,000 troops two years ago). The ratio is now largely reversed. Most American allies have moved all their commando forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, where they not only do what they were trained for, but also train Afghans for special operations tasks. This has already been done in Iraq, where it worked quite well. As a result, there are now nearly 10,000 special operations troops in Afghanistan. The SOCOM troops in Iraq and Afghanistan account for about 80 percent of American special operations forces overseas. The rest are in places like Colombia, the Philippines and Djibouti (adjacent to Somalia).

Special operations troops not only participate in most of the attacks on the Taliban leadership (and key technical people building and placing roadside bombs), but also conduct a lot of the surveillance missions that locate safe houses where Taliban leaders operate from, as well as those used for bomb making workshops. Many Special Forces troops speak the local languages, and can negotiate with village and tribal leaders for information and assistance.

This “decapitation” campaign was successful in Iraq, and earlier, in Israel (where it was developed to deal with the Palestinian terror campaign that began in 2000.) Actually, the Americans have used siimilar tactics many times in the past (in World War II, 1960s Vietnam, the Philippines over a century ago and in 18th century colonial America.) But the Israelis developed decapitation tactics customized for use against Islamic terrorists.

In some cases, the Special Forces efforts have been so successful that the Taliban has been unable to get anyone to take the place of dead leaders. In some cases, the Taliban have called on friend and kin in the Afghan government, to try and get the Americans to stop. This puts these Afghan officials in a tight spot. While they are officially on board with this campaign against the Taliban, they also have members of their tribe, or even close relatives, who are in the Taliban. That’s not unusual in Afghanistan, where even the most pro-Taliban tribes have members who are not only pro-government, but actually work (most of the time) for the government. That’s how politics works in Afghanistan.

Ooooo.  Wow.  I’m sure this will end the insurgency in Afghanistan just like killing Zarqawi brought an abrupt end to the insurgency in Iraq.  Uh … er … nevermind, maybe not.  Maybe it’s not really killing several hundred “leaders” of what is already a disaggregated and decentralized insurgency that ends it.  Maybe, like Iraq, it’s operations against the insurgents themselves, thereby rendering the “leaders” embarrassed, irrelevant and powerless when they can’t get fighters to join their cause because they are seen as the losing side.

I continue to advocate reassignment of SOF to be matrixed directly to infantry (their skills could be put to good use), and I continue to advocate the ideas that the HVT campaign did not work in Iraq, is not working in Afghanistan, and will not work anywhere. You may disagree, but you must give me data that shows the effectiveness of this strategy.  I have yet to see any such evidence.  And as for the use of the term “strategy” to define this approach, it’s exactly in line with the facts.  Our strategy in Afghanistan at the present seems to be use of the GPF for force protection for logistics, medical personnel and air power, while the SOF boys take out leaders.  Pitiful strategy, this is.  If we cannot do any better than that we need to come home.

So how is Afghanistan now that we have killed or captured (and then released) all of those leaders?  Well, this doesn’t speak so well of things.

Even as more American troops flow into the country, Afghanistan  is more dangerous than it has ever been during this war, with security deteriorating in recent months, according to international organizations and humanitarian groups.

Large parts of the country that were once completely safe, like most of the northern provinces, now have a substantial Taliban presence — even in areas where there are few Pashtuns, who previously were the Taliban’s only supporters. As NATO forces poured in and shifted to the south to battle the Taliban in their stronghold, the Taliban responded with a surge of their own, greatly increasing their activities in the north and parts of the east.

Unarmed government employees can no longer travel safely in 30 percent of the country’s 368 districts, according to published United Nations estimates, and there are districts deemed too dangerous to visit in all but one of the country’s 34 provinces.

The number of insurgent attacks has increased significantly; in August 2009, insurgents carried out 630 attacks. This August, they initiated at least 1,353, according to the Afghan N.G.O. Safety Office, an independent organization financed by Western governments and agencies to monitor safety for aid workers.

An attack on a Western medical team in northern Afghanistan in early August, which killed 10 people, was the largest massacre in years of aid workers in Afghanistan.

“The humanitarian space is shrinking day by day,” said a CARE Afghanistan official, Abdul Kebar.

And likewise, neither does this.  Maybe we just aren’t killing the right high value targets, or something?  Or maybe we just need to focus on chasing and killing insurgents where they live by troops in contact with them every day.  You know, distributed operations and small unit maneuver warfare.  Some troops are doing that.  All of them should be.