Quotes of the Day:
"There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words."
- Thomas Reid
“But there is another reason: science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an American in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, no one representation the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influence media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentation on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
- Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World
"This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate."
- Simone de Beauvoir
1. Reflections on 9/11 Twenty Years After
2. Less door-kicking, more resistance: Inside Army SOF’s return to unconventional warfare
3. White House approves partnership with vets evacuating U.S. citizens, Afghan allies
4. Afghanistan Is Not Done With Us; Four Long-Term Dangers Await
5. Failed U.S. Afghanistan Withdrawal Is Ammo For Disinformation Attacks
6. Between Then and Now, They Did Not Die in Vain
7. Army Chief Calls for Afghanistan Review: ‘Let the Cards Fall Where They Fall’
8. Opinion | The Islamic world has changed over the past 20 years. The Taliban is about to feel it.
9. How to prevent future Afghanistan-like disasters
10. The war in Afghanistan is over but military leaders are still trying to hide their failures
11. It’s been twenty years since 9/11. The US Army still hasn’t learned to speak Arabic or Dari.
12. Opinion | Christopher Wray: Hard-earned lessons from 9/11 offer a playbook for combating today’s threats
13. Serving in a Twenty-Year War
14. American soldiers today: Lions led by donkeys
15. How 9/11 helped China wage its own false ‘war on terror’
16. How Active-Duty Officers Should Criticize Policy and Practice
17. Michelangelos of Strategy: Linguistic Chisels, Sculptural Forms, and the Art of Strategy
18. Back to the Future: Rediscovering Operational Art in an Era of Great Power Competition
19. The Real Lesson of the Afghanistan Debacle
20. 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.
1. Reflections on 9/11 Twenty Years After
Excerpts:
For both these reasons, the cultural momentum of 9/11 rolls forward. The result in 2021 is the public image of the enemy that the commission described in 2004: “Al Qaeda and its affiliates are popularly described as being all over the world, adaptable, resilient, needing little higher-level organization, and capable of anything. The American people are thus given the picture of an omnipotent, unslayable hydra of destruction.” The paradox of adjustment is that efforts to right-size, to normalize, a reduced risk seem … too risky.
Yet the reality is that the most serious threats are posed by a relatively tiny number of people, fewer in number and less well-organized than the production crew of any one of Hollywood’s larger films. A handful of deluded people derive most of their power not from their strength or the power of their ideals. They get their power from us — from our society and our culture.
This paradox of adjustment also is genuinely tough to solve. If there is a way out, it may just be a gradual process of the kind that has slowly unfolded during the last ten years. A catalytic event noticed by many millions, like the death of bin Laden, helped politicians to turn the page.
Contemporary societies will remain vulnerable to the abilities of even a few people to do terribly disruptive things. As the Jan. 6 assault by American extremists on the U.S. Capitol illustrated so well, that feature of our age is not unique to the danger posed by Islamist fanatics. A principal function of 21st century government will be to manage a process of healthy adjustment to the kinds of risks that are endemic to this generation, developing more systemic and transnational defenses to more systemic and transnational threats, which include other kinds of transnational criminal organizations.
Reflections on 9/11 Twenty Years After - War on the Rocks
We all have our own memories associated with the tragedy of 9/11. In my case I can remember going to Ground Zero shortly after the attacks and noticing that awful, pungent smell of the place, as if the terrorists had opened up some special, sulfurous path to hell. Later, directing the commission investigating what happened, I have vivid memories of tramping through the Tarnak Farms camp in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had once had a headquarters. Or there we were in a Washington office, leaning toward a loudspeaker to listen one more time to the cockpit voice recording recovered from United Flight 93, matched up with our reconstruction of the behavior of the aircraft, painstakingly trying to reconstruct moments of agony and astonishing courage.
We all have a need to construct meaning from occasions like these. In the rare cases when a historical event, especially a traumatic event, stirs emotions on a massive scale, touching many millions of people, it enters popular culture. Great numbers of people soon form beliefs about what happened and why. People usually try to make sense of events in ways that fit their prior understanding of how the world works. But sometimes a catalytic event opens their mind to new possibilities — in this case the scale of danger that might be posed by an organization of zealots based on the other side of the planet in one of the most primitive countries on earth.
At its core, though, the 9/11 operation was an effort to deform the actual nature of the struggle going on within the Muslim world. These extremists, relatively powerless within their world, sought to elevate themselves by waging war against the United States, launching an attack that Americans could not ignore. In that sense, they were successful. That success was meant to elevate their faction of violent Islamists in their local struggles for cultural power. But every characterization of this war that reinforces a “United States versus Islamists” picture can divert and distract from the main story.
Consider the faces that the Muslim world has presented to the world. During the 1990s and culminating on 9/11, some Islamist extremists preferred to place the root of their troubles elsewhere, in America or Europe. This agenda was sometimes attractive to clusters of alienated expatriates living overseas and others whose restless energy is displaced onto a distant, enemy abstraction. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance, was truly a man without a country. On 9/11 the world was introduced to one face of this struggle: a set of fanatical mass killers. That image lingers.
But flash forward ten years later, to September 2011, when for six months the world watched Syrians protest against their tyranny. These unarmed men and women gathering in the streets faced every horror that a clever, malignant regime and its creatures could devise. They suffered the deaths and terrifying disappearances of family members and friends, a toll then numbered in the thousands. Then — against all odds — they turned out again the next Friday, and the next. For this American, raised to black-and-white television images of civil rights protesters facing their oppressors, the smuggled, fragmentary images of what the Syrian protesters endured, week after week, month after month, presented as astonishing and heroic a display of raw, sustained civic courage as I have ever seen, anywhere in the world. This image should linger too.
Flash forward again, ten years after that, to September 2021. Amid the recent chaos in Afghanistan, a global view of the continuing civil conflicts wracking the Muslim world, from Niger to Indonesia, invites a broader historical perspective. My lifetime has coincided with a generational struggle in the Muslim world about how to cope with modernity and globalization. The contemporary and most violent phase of this struggle began in 1979, with revolts and revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. These immediately ignited major wars and defined often violent contests for leadership in the Muslim world.
Over the past 42 years these struggles have flamed or merely smoldered — they never ended. As a historian, I am reminded of the struggles — internal and transnational — that wracked the Christian world for more than a hundred years across the 16th and 17th centuries, or the long 19th and 20th century struggles about how to organize modern industrial societies. It took a long time for those struggles to subside. The Muslim world has not yet found the ingredients of civilizational peace.
The United States was always secondary to this primary struggle in the Muslim world. The main participants sought America as villain or as ally. For a time, reacting understandably to the 9/11 attacks but then adding the catastrophically misjudged invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States seemed to place itself at the center of this struggle. But now, as the United States has receded from such a central place in the Muslim struggles, there are fresh opportunities to reassess whether, where, and how the United States and other outsiders can play some constructive role in helping the Muslim world find that civilizational peace.
A terrible crisis is also an occasion for discovering more about ourselves, about the worst and the best that it brings out in our society. We saw that Americans can produce the war crimes symbolized by the 2003 abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And Americans produced the daring professionalism displayed by an “Abbottabad,” the May 2011 operation that killed bin Laden. Thus we can use the anniversary of 9/11 to reflect once again on who we are, about who we can be, when our society confronts violent extremism.
Before the 9/11 attack there was a classic paradox in thinking about the terrorist danger, a paradox of prevention. As the 9/11 Commission observed in its 2004 report: “It is hardest to mount a major effort while a problem still seems minor. Once the danger has fully materialized, evident to all, mobilizing action is easier — but it then may be too late.” Al-Qaeda was most vulnerable in the years before 9/11. But before the catastrophic scale of the potential threat was manifest, massive action to counter it — like serious U.S. military efforts against the Afghan sanctuary — seemed so disproportionate as to be inconceivable. This was a genuine paradox. It did not have an easy or obvious solution.
That pre-9/11 paradox of prevention about the Islamist danger is long gone. (It now applies to other problems, like the global response to the pandemic danger.) A different kind of paradox has now taken its place: a paradox of adjustment.
The danger of global Islamist terrorism is greatly reduced from what it was on 9/11. An attack could still happen at any time. A really large-scale gun massacre — like that in Mumbai in 2008 or in Norway in 2011 or Paris in 2015 — is another obvious danger. Any attack will be publicized sensationally.
Thus any president who downplays the danger, trying to right-size the enemy and put the danger into a more normal proportion, invites humiliation if there is an attack. If there is no attack, public acts of reassurance invite an unwanted dulling of concern.
For both these reasons, the cultural momentum of 9/11 rolls forward. The result in 2021 is the public image of the enemy that the commission described in 2004: “Al Qaeda and its affiliates are popularly described as being all over the world, adaptable, resilient, needing little higher-level organization, and capable of anything. The American people are thus given the picture of an omnipotent, unslayable hydra of destruction.” The paradox of adjustment is that efforts to right-size, to normalize, a reduced risk seem … too risky.
Yet the reality is that the most serious threats are posed by a relatively tiny number of people, fewer in number and less well-organized than the production crew of any one of Hollywood’s larger films. A handful of deluded people derive most of their power not from their strength or the power of their ideals. They get their power from us — from our society and our culture.
This paradox of adjustment also is genuinely tough to solve. If there is a way out, it may just be a gradual process of the kind that has slowly unfolded during the last ten years. A catalytic event noticed by many millions, like the death of bin Laden, helped politicians to turn the page.
Contemporary societies will remain vulnerable to the abilities of even a few people to do terribly disruptive things. As the Jan. 6 assault by American extremists on the U.S. Capitol illustrated so well, that feature of our age is not unique to the danger posed by Islamist fanatics. A principal function of 21st century government will be to manage a process of healthy adjustment to the kinds of risks that are endemic to this generation, developing more systemic and transnational defenses to more systemic and transnational threats, which include other kinds of transnational criminal organizations.
At the cultural level, a process of adjustment includes adjustment to failures. For there will be failures. The supreme measure of a mature, professional institution — or government — is how it handles failure: its capacity for honest self-examination and thoughtful accountability. This is one reason why my commission colleagues and I took a hard view of the poor quality of work exhibited by parts of the government in their initial reconstructions of what happened on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. This dimension of institutional integrity is, in the long run, vital to the country’s well-being.
In air travel, for example, where societies have adjusted to constant risks of catastrophic failures, maybe the greatest virtues of America’s National Transportation Safety Board are cultural and political. Aside from the particular talents of its employees, the board represents a habit of thought and earned trust. Something goes horribly wrong, and many people lose their lives. A respected institution will examine what happened professionally, rigorously. It will explain to the community what it learned. The community will further reduce the risks. And millions of people will board airplanes each day. They go on with their lives.
Philip Zelikow, a dean and historian at the University of Virginia, was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission.
2. Less door-kicking, more resistance: Inside Army SOF’s return to unconventional warfare
Not only "uniquely suited," Special Forces is the only military organization that is organized, trained, equipped, educated, and optimized for the conduct of unconventional warfare.
Excerpt:
Even the Army’s top leaders are signaling their support for the idea.
“We are rethinking our overall strategy for the special operations community,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers in a June 29 hearing. “I think you’ll see us…putting an emphasis on unconventional warfare.”
“Our special forces are uniquely suited to do that,” said Gen. James McConville, the service’s chief of staff, in agreement with Wormuth.
Less door-kicking, more resistance: Inside Army SOF’s return to unconventional warfare
For much of the past two decades, the American public has associated the Army’s special operations forces with counterterrorism, often conjuring images of night-time direct action raids.
But as the Global War on Terror draws down in scope and scale, and as senior Pentagon leaders and White House officials turn their attention towards the next potential conflict — ARSOF is shifting its priorities. Their new mission: Create resistance networks that make invasions by Russia or China too costly for those powers to even attempt.
For many of the Army’s special operators, that means a return to their unconventional warfare roots, which stand in contrast to conventional forces’ own renewed focus on large-scale combat operations.
Army Times reviewed new publications, spoke with forward-deployed leaders and caught up with other SOF officials to provide a look behind the curtain at how the Army’s most elite forces are embracing the new “Resistance Operating Concept.”
Even the Army’s top leaders are signaling their support for the idea.
“We are rethinking our overall strategy for the special operations community,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers in a June 29 hearing. “I think you’ll see us…putting an emphasis on unconventional warfare.”
“Our special forces are uniquely suited to do that,” said Gen. James McConville, the service’s chief of staff, in agreement with Wormuth.
“We want the Baltics to present a deterrent to Russia. And part of what we can do in the Army is have our special operations forces work with the Baltic militaries to help them in terms of…developing what I would call resistance capabilities,” Wormuth later explained, referring to the small countries on Russia’s western border adjacent to the Baltic Sea. “I think the Baltics can do that relatively inexpensively, but they would benefit quite a bit from our expertise and deep [unconventional warfare] knowledge base with our special forces.”
What is the ROC?
The Resistance Operating Concept centers around building up the capacity of friendly countries to mount an effective civil and military resistance if they were to face invasion and occupation from a hostile great power, such as Russia or China.
The ROC is “a planning guide” for the U.S. and potentially vulnerable partner nations that ensures “each side speaks the same [operational] language, and they can go ahead and plan together for resistance,” according to its primary author, Dr. Otto Fiala, who explained it in a July podcast released by 1st Special Forces Command.
Estonian and U.S. special operations forces conduct a combined direct action mission during exercise Trojan Footprint 18 near Moe, Estonia, on June 2, 2018. (Army)
Fiala, who is also a retired Army Reserve civil affairs officer, led the drive to codify the ROC while working at Special Operations Command-Europe.
The published book-length version of the ROC is available online through Joint Special Operations University.
The ROC “bridge[s] the understanding between unconventional warfare and resistance,” he said.
Nations supported under the ROC are encouraged to establish the legal and organizational framework for a resistance and bring it under the official control of their armed forces. One such example is the Estonian Defence League, a volunteer paramilitary organization whose 16,000 members are organized under Tallinn’s defense ministry and receive training from U.S. special operations.
Resistance movements — especially when coordinated and organized under the authority of a county’s legitimate government — have historically made it difficult for invading forces to consolidate and secure their gains. And U.S. forces have supported such efforts in the past.
The French Resistance from World War II, which features as a case study in Fiala’s book-length ROC, inflicted casualties and sabotage on occupying Nazi forces for years. Their network also played a pivotal role in enabling the successful D-Day invasion of Northern France in 1944. These efforts, though, took years to organize and bring under coordinated control.
U.S. and NATO forces also conducted clandestine preparations for “stay-behind” guerilla networks across Western Europe, such as Italy’s Operation Gladio, in the event of Soviet invasion and occupation. But those efforts trained and empowered right-wing paramilitaries, critics said, and their clandestine nature resulted in politically-explosive public revelations during the 1990s.
The key lessons from these scenarios, according to Fiala and other SOF thought leaders, is the need to coordinate and prepare for such resistance movements ahead of time — unlike WWII France — while also working within the legal frameworks of partner nations to provide public-facing preparatory support, unlike secretive Cold War-era “stay-behind” efforts.
Focusing on building resistance capabilities allows the nations to “put their own face on their national defense,” said Master Sgt. Frank Miller, a decorated Green Beret and Army Special Operations Command staffer, on the podcast. “They’re not a puppet — their defense is that country’s defense, and we’re just assisting with their own project.”
One experienced civil affairs officer, Lt. Col. Matt Quinn, described the role of SOF in competition and resistance preparation as a Venn diagram.
“One circle is U.S. military objectives, and the other circle is U.S. [diplomatic] objectives, and the last circle is the host nation objectives,” Quinn, commander of the Europe-focused 92nd Civil Affairs Battalion, said in a phone interview.
“And then where they overlap,” he added, “that’s where we operate.”
Frozen conflicts
When it comes to the national objectives of countries in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region, the threat of invasion and occupation isn’t just real — it’s their lived reality.
Russia sponsors a number of so-called “frozen-conflicts” in post-Soviet states where pro-Moscow separatists have managed to hold off the legitimate government thanks to support from Russia. Moscow’s troops currently occupy territory internationally recognized as belonging to Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia.
Georgian special operations forces and a notional Georgian guerrilla force navigate to an objective during the 10th Annual Agile Spirit Multinational Exercise in Senaki, Republic of Georgia, Aug. 1, 2021. A goal of Exercise Agile Spirit is to promote a whole-of-society approach to resistance. (Army/Spc. Preston Hammon)
The reality of the Russian threat makes many of those nations — and other Western-aligned states in the region — eager to develop a “total defense” strategy, to include planning in advance for resistance.
“Twenty percent of [Georgia] is currently occupied by Russia, and the people here are very cognizant of that,” a Green Beret officer told Army Times on background during Agile Spirit 21, a recent exercise that included a resistance-driven special operations training scenario. “This concept of total defense is not new to Georgia, and they’re very proud to embody it.”
Setting the conditions for total defense and resistance requires gaining and maintaining the support of the civilian population by “inoculat[ing] and hardening” them against enemy disinformation, 4th Psychological Operations Group commander Col. Christopher Stangle told Army Times.
RELATED
The Army special forces community is embracing resistance operations as a driving concept for training with partner forces.
Senior ARSOF officials in the Pacific theater also see building resistance capability as a key component of countering rising Chinese influence in the region.
“Our allies and partners here in the [Pacific] are in this conflict space [with China] right now,” said Lt. Col. Erik Davis, commander of 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group, which is stationed in Okinawa, Japan. “They’re having to assert their sovereignty and reassert their sovereignty as China pushes everywhere it can in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.”
The ROC doesn’t yet have the same influence over Special Operations Command-Pacific’s exercise schedule as in Europe. But one of the command’s planners, Lt. Col. Ron Garberson, said they’ve been collaborating with their Europe-based colleagues for “quite a few years” to implement aspects of the approach.
To that end, SOCPAC hosted a formal working group in February 2020 to discuss potential uses for resilience and resistance planning in upholding sovereignty for partner nations in the Indo-Pacific.
Fiala, the ROC’s author, said effective preparations for resistance and total defense can help prevent the next war.
“It’s difficult to measure deterrence,” he said in the podcast. “But an adversary knowing that you have this resistance capability, there is an organization that exists [to execute resistance], and that your people are willing to resist is a strong message of deterrence.”
“It has to do with their commitment to their own sovereignty and survival as a nation,” he said. “Putting together an organization and being willing to resist is their up-front commitment, which makes it much easier for [the U.S.] to support long-term.”
The Green Beret officer in Georgia put it succinctly — “The whole point of this is that you hopefully never have to use it.”
Training and preparing
In recent months, U.S. forces have placed new emphasis on training would-be resistance organizations as the ROC is implemented across much of Europe.
A U.S. Army Special Forces soldier assigned to 20th Special Forces Group and members of the Lithuanian National Defence Volunteer Forces conduct a raid during exercise Saber Junction 2018 at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, September 17, 2018. (Army/1st Lt. Benjamin Haulenbeek)
Initially, implementation of the ROC began with tabletop exercises and wargames focused on Nordic and Baltic states, which have a strong resistance tradition stretching back to the Soviet occupation after World War II. But the concept has since expanded to other parts of Special Operations Command-Europe’s area of responsibility and stepped from the tabletop into the field.
An ARSOF cross-functional team featuring special forces, civil affairs and psychological operations troops embedded with Georgian special operations forces for a week-long resistance training scenario in August as part of Agile Spirit 21.
“The SOF aspect of the exercise [was] anchored on the resistance operating concept,” a second SOCEUR official told Army Times on background in order to freely discuss the exercise. “So the concepts that go within the ROC are being trained and stressed by SOCEUR.”
Polish, British and Romanian special operations troops also participated in the SOF portion of the multinational exercise.
The event marked the first-ever special operations exercise hosted by Georgia while “work is ongoing” in Tbilisi to establish the legal and organizational framework for a resistance-driven total defense strategy, according to the Green Beret officer who represented SOCEUR at the exercise.
During the training event, special operations troops practiced providing support to a notional Georgian resistance movement “to prevent the occupying enemy from consolidating their gains within the recently occupied territory,” the Green Beret officer said.
“A lot of the scenario skillsets center around the basic infantry tasks, but doing them on a consistent, professional basis,” the second SOCEUR official said. “Within the exercise, you see stuff like interdiction scenarios, ambush scenarios [and] personnel recovery scenarios.”
“It’s also doing things like sabotage,” said the Green Beret. “The focus is doing [these tasks] with and through an attached partner force.”
Members of the Lithuanian National Defence Volunteer Forces and a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier assigned to 20th Special Forces Group conduct a raid during exercise Saber Junction 2018 at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, September 22, 2018. (Army/1st Lt. Benjamin Haulenbeek)
Other exercises in recent years have included similar invasion and resistance scenarios.
U.S. Army Europe’s Saber Junction exercises frequently rehearse such concepts, including 2018 and 2020 iterations where members of the Lithuanian National Defense Volunteer Forces partnered with Green Berets to conduct irregular warfare behind enemy lines.
The 2018 version of the Trojan Footprint exercise had NATO special operations forces enter notionally-occupied territory. There, they linked up with SOF troops from the Baltic states “to assist with their defensive capabilities, such as working with organizations like the Estonian Defense League, Latvian National Guard and the Lithuanian National Defense Forces,” according to a SOCEUR release.
Hearts and minds
While tabletop exercises and training events play a key role in preparing for a resistance scenario, civil affairs and psychological operations soldiers play a large part, too.
Quinn, the Europe-focused civil affairs commander, said that his teams across the continent are doing many of the same things he did when forward-deployed during the height of the Global War on Terror.
“When I was a company commander, the focus was countering violent extremism,” he told Army Times. “The objectives laid out by higher headquarters — [they’ve] been adjusted. ... However, the way we do business from a tactical and operational perspective is very similar.”
Quinn says civil affairs assets can help strengthen the bonds and coordination between the government, security forces, volunteer resistance organizations and other nodes of community organization ahead of a resistance scenario.
“Very often, civil affairs is a matter of herding cats,” said Fiala. “It’s bringing different groups together and getting them to understand their roles.”
The battalion commander also described how the relationships and networks built through the “persistent presence” of civil affairs teams can help to counter the influence of hostile actors, especially among vulnerable populations affected by the specter of unresolved frozen conflicts.
In one European country, he explained, the civil affairs team was able to implement “civilian perspective” resistance-oriented exercises that focused on the civil resistance of non-military actors.
“The majority [of resistance] is non-violent,” Quinn noted. “The population is already the primary actor — or at least a significant actor — in the whole-of-society approach. … From the civil affairs perspective, a lot of the activities and engagement are very non-lethal.”
Psychological operations soldiers see preparing for the resistance mission in the same way.
Stangle, the 4th Psychological Operations Group commander, explained that it’s “largely about building the partnerships within the countries abroad that enable those host nations to either be resilient or inoculated to be resistant against foreign adversary efforts.”
Soldiers from the Lithuanian National Defense Volunteer Force and a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier discuss plans for a high value target mission during Saber Junction 20 at Hohenfels, Germany, August. 15, 2020. (Army/Spc. Uriel Ramirez)
Those initiatives look different in different parts of the world, Stangle said.
“Depending on where we are, we may be helping a foreign [partner] government legitimize their activity…[or] we may be attempting to…enable them to push back against adversary mis- or disinformation,” he said. “We’re not so much focused on selling [U.S. government] narratives as we are legitimacy, open transparency with democracy [and] open freedom of the press.”
“Our preference,” he said, is to “teach our foreign partners to lean forward and to be aggressive in their narrative.”
“Being responsive [to adversary disinformation] is always difficult,” he added. “You have to visualize what the adversary is going to use against you, and then undermine those negatives up front and take away those argument[s] early on so that they can’t be used against you.”
Fiala also mentioned the central role of messaging the ROC in the podcast.
“Do [partner nations] have their narratives ready to go to dominate the information environment immediately if an adversary starts giving indications and warning [of invasion]?” he asked.
“There are narratives that you do now, in order to go ahead and put out the message that you’re willing to resist, that you are a resilient society, and then you have your [information warfare] stack ready to go in case problems come out,” he added.
If conflict breaks out, psychological operations forces would transition to a “very aggressive” direct messaging approach, Stangle explained.
That’s also where deception operations intended to facilitate the resistance would come into play.
Another aspect of sustaining resistance through psychological operations is getting the message into occupied areas, he added.
“We would look at how we bring hope, sustain their efforts, and promote additional partisan or resistance efforts on their part,” Stangle said.
Ultimately, Army special operations planners have argued, the goal is to establish “unconventional deterrence,” discouraging an enemy from invasion and occupation.
This creates a “bitter pill” for the enemy to swallow in the form of a well-organized, effective resistance movement.
Davis Winkie is a staff reporter covering the Army. He originally joined Military Times as a reporting intern in 2020. Before journalism, Davis worked as a military historian. He is also a human resources officer in the Army National Guard.
3. White House approves partnership with vets evacuating U.S. citizens, Afghan allies
Some potentially good news here. Now we may be able to see a whole of society approach.
White House approves partnership with vets evacuating U.S. citizens, Afghan allies
Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair, met with leaders for the first time at the Pentagon on Tuesday.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley participates in a news briefing at the Pentagon. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
09/09/2021 11:50 AM EDT
Updated: 09/09/2021 02:07 PM EDT
The White House has approved a recommendation by the nation's top military officer that the administration intensify cooperation with the ad hoc groups that have been working to evacuate American citizens and at-risk Afghans from the country, a White House and two State Department officials told POLITICO.
On Tuesday at the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley met for the first time with representatives from a number of the groups, according to eight people familiar with discussions and an informal readout sent to volunteers.
Under the proposal discussed at the meeting, the U.S. government, including both the Pentagon and the State Department, would act as the central point of contact for the various groups coordinating rescues.
“Once approved, we would then work as a fusion center for all of our organizations to deconflict the ground and air space,” according to the readout. “This will permit us to move people and get them to safety — providing top cover for all that we do.”
Representatives from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s office and the National Security Council attended the meeting, along with five three-star officers on Milley’s staff, but no one from the State Department attended, the people said. When asked why, a senior State Department official would say only that the department was "working closely" with the Pentagon.
The original Milley proposal called for a "public/private partnership," according to the readout of the meeting. But after this story was published, a White House official clarified that President Joe Biden had not approved a new endeavor, but rather an intensification of existing coordination efforts.
While the military evacuation effort ended on Aug. 31, the State Department has taken the lead in continuing to help Americans and Afghan allies get to safety. But at the same time, outside groups have mobilized resources, chartered aircraft and worked with third-party countries to evacuate the Americans and Afghans independently of the government.
That work is “tremendously valuable,” yet the challenge is that the Taliban often won’t permit people to leave the country without the proper documentation, the senior State Department official said.
“There is a lot of overlap, there is a lot of fuzziness about status,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal issues. For example, the State Department has seen a number of cases in which one group will include the names of American citizens who are ostensibly on the ground trying to get out, but after investigation it turns out those people are actually already in the United States.
The new effort will focus in part on deconflicting the various lists of potential evacuees that each of the groups has independently put together, and verifying each person’s status, the official said.
“We need to get a better structure in place for us to communicate with these groups, for these groups to communicate with us, and try to put a bit more consistency and focus around it so that if ... we have opportunities to get groups out, if and as we see opportunities where the Talibs are going to be a bit more flexible for whatever reason, we are all working to a common set of parameters and hopefully off of a common set of priorities,” the official stressed.
A spokesperson for the Joint Staff declined to comment for this article.
Dozens of grassroots volunteer groups made up of former U.S. special operators, congressional staffers, aid workers, intelligence officers and others with experience in Afghanistan sprang into action in mid-August after Kabul fell. Some of the members coordinated meetup points at the Kabul airport over WhatsApp from thousands of miles away, and others on the ground in Kabul launched daring missions to shepherd evacuees to safety.
The members often worked directly with the Defense and State departments to coordinate what they called “snatch and grabs,” alerting them when potential evacuees had arrived at the airport so troops posted at the gates could quickly retrieve them from the crowd.
“It’s really an underground railroad,” said Scott Mann, a retired Army Special Forces officer leading a group that calls itself Task Force Pineapple, in a video message to supporters in August. Mann attended the meeting on Tuesday, along with representatives from Task Force Dunkirk, and EVAC, which runs a program that helps support Afghan women’s education, according to the people.
Together, the groups helped thousands to safety, and are still working to evacuate people more than a week after the American military evacuation formally ended.
During the meeting, Milley was “complimentary” about the volunteer effort, and told attendees to expect “regular meetings” going forward, one group member said. He also said he understands the desire by veterans to help those who fought alongside the U.S., the person said. The withdrawal is deeply personal for Milley, who commanded troops in Afghanistan and often speaks about his experience.
It is not yet clear the extent of the Pentagon’s involvement in continuing evacuation operations. While attendees speculated that it could involve air support or funding, others said that was unlikely.
“It’s important to try to manage expectations. This is about coming up with good data and coming up with a common operating picture about really what the pool of people are that outside advocates are most worried about, where are they and how can we try to ... position ourselves to help them depart Afghanistan,” the senior State Department official said, noting that the challenges until now have involved “physically securing access for these people to leave.”
Securing airlift and temporary housing locations have not been a problem, the person said.
4. Afghanistan Is Not Done With Us; Four Long-Term Dangers Await
The four:
Captured data.
Waves of refugees.
A world flooded with weapons.
A long credibility shadow.
Conclusion:
However, the defeat and precipitate withdrawal are facts that cannot be talked away. Credibility comes from actions. For years into the future, US policies will be measured against this need to maintain credibility, and the administration will feel the need to prove its steadfastness. If the administration is lucky, it will have a “Mayaguez moment” that allows them to show with military action that the United States is still a global military and diplomatic force. The drone strikes against ISIS-K may provide that signal if they continue, but it will take time and effort. It will be a while before the “Afghanistan syndrome” goes way.
Afghanistan Is Not Done With Us; Four Long-Term Dangers Await - Breaking Defense
Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division stand security at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul on August 15. CREDIT: Marine Sgt. Isaiah Campbell
The message was clear, from the mouths of military officials, the State Department and President Joe Biden himself: Aug. 30 marked the official end of the US war in Afghanistan. But, as Mark Cancian writes below, just because the US has decided it is done with Afghanistan does not mean Afghanistan is done with the United States.
With the departure of the last aircraft from Kabul, most Americans were ready to be done with the Afghanistan misadventure. However, Afghanistan is not done with us.
Even putting aside the fact there are reportedly still American citizens stuck in the country, along with tens of thousands of Afghans who desperately wanted to leave but were unable to make it onto the last flights out of HKIA, there are going to be long-term effects of the Taliban takeover. Among them: Captured data, waves of refugees, the weapons on the global market, and emboldened radical Islam.
As with our experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan will shape our politics and diplomacy long after the last servicemember withdrew.
Captured data. Given the rapid collapse of Afghan forces, it is unlikely that our Afghan allies took the effort to destroy all sensitive material. Thus, the Taliban likely captured many computers and now have access to databases that the US and its coalition kept in Afghanistan. This captured data, both electronic and hard copy, includes details of military, diplomatic, and intelligence activities, not only in Afghanistan but across the entire region.
This will make interesting reading when the Taliban publishes them, as they certainly will. Some items will merely be embarrassing, such as the many complaints about corrupt Afghan government officials. This will resemble the WikiLeaks publication of documents stolen by then-Private Manning, where the gossip about world leaders was tantalizing but ultimately of little significance. More serious will be publication of the names of Afghan and US intelligence officials and details about ongoing operations, because these will damage US security and may be fatal for the Afghans. The precedent here is the 1979 Iranian revolution, which painstakingly reconstructed shredded US Embassy documents and published sensitive and sometimes embarrassing details about US intelligence operations.
The material will also provide the Taliban with a bargaining chip to trade with the Chinese, Russians, and the Iranians, all of whom could use the material to disrupt US operations in their area of interest.
Waves of refugees. The United States and its allies have moved about 100,000 Afghan refugees who will need resettlement someplace. That will be a challenge, but the numbers are likely manageable, other countries have committed to help, and there is a sense of responsibility to people who helped us.
More challenging will be the millions who may flee Taliban rule in the future, as happened in the 1990s. Already, 2.6 million Afghans are refugees. That number could double. As Erol Yayboke, a CSIS expert on global refugees, commented, “millions of displaced Afghans in 2021 could make the 2015 migration crisis seem like a geopolitical walk in the park.”
As a reminder, that earlier surge of Syrian and North African refugees overwhelmed the European Union (EU), which initially tried to accept them all. However, countries eventually had to erect barriers when the numbers and cultural conflicts threatened to destabilize not just the host countries but the entire structure of the EU as well. The United States might accept the initial wave of refugees but, given ongoing tensions over refugees from Central and South America, accepting large numbers of Afghans who did not directly work for the United States would be problematic. Thus, an Afghan refugee surge could destabilize Europe and cause a political backlash in the United States.
A world flooded with weapons. Given how much of the Afghan military simply surrendered, it is fair to assume that the majority of its equipment is now in the hands of the Taliban. This inventory potentially includes 22,000 HMMWVs, 600 gun trucks, 170 armored personnel carriers, 64,000 machine guns 16,000 night vision goggles, 170 artillery pieces, and 358,000 assault rifles. In addition, there are helicopters and transport aircraft, although many flew over the border to escape, and most of the remaining aircraft are inoperable.
Much of this equipment will decay with time. Captured aircraft, for example, will not operate long without trained maintainers and a steady flow of spare parts. However, the Taliban could keep a number of vehicles, artillery, and small arms operating indefinitely, cannibalizing some to keep the others operating.
These weapons are not going to appear in the United States; all are illegal for private individuals to own and getting them into the country in large numbers would be difficult. However, these weapons will be available on the world market, and a cash strapped Taliban might well put them up for sale. Further, they could be sent to any terrorist organization that the Taliban (or Pakistani intelligence) may want to support. India and the ‘Stans should be very worried.
An emboldened radical Islam. Al Qaeda, ISIS-K, and all the related Islamist extremist groups are already celebrating their second victory over a global superpower. HR McMaster cites 20 such groups, which “remain determined to murder Americans and our allies.” Just as their victory over the Soviet Union energized them in the 1980s, so this victory will also.
The United States and its allies have been very successful in the last two decades in preventing major terrorist attacks. Law enforcement deserves great credit, and US operations overseas likely had a dampening effect. However, radical Islam’s surge in confidence, plus the possibility of a sympathetic regime to provide a base, may translate into future terrorist attacks. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz notes, “the enemy gets a vote.”
A long credibility shadow. The Chinese, Russians and Iranians are celebrating the US defeat. Beijing in particular has seized on the withdrawal as a propaganda cudgel, and wasted no time in hitting Taiwan with broadsides that America cannot be trusted. As the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated, “The US withdrawal from Afghanistan shows that wanton military intervention in other countries and imposition of values and social systems onto other countries’ policy will lead nowhere and is doomed to end up in failure.” Meanwhile, questions about the solidity of US commitments are appearing widely, including in the European and US press.
Many commentators point out that leaving a small and isolated country like Afghanistan after a 20-year commitment does not constitute a major retrenchment of US power and influence. The US military is still strong, the economy is reviving, and the government has reiterated its commitments to allies and partners. This is true.
However, the defeat and precipitate withdrawal are facts that cannot be talked away. Credibility comes from actions. For years into the future, US policies will be measured against this need to maintain credibility, and the administration will feel the need to prove its steadfastness. If the administration is lucky, it will have a “Mayaguez moment” that allows them to show with military action that the United States is still a global military and diplomatic force. The drone strikes against ISIS-K may provide that signal if they continue, but it will take time and effort. It will be a while before the “Afghanistan syndrome” goes way.
Despite the many statements about “the end of America’s longest war,” it is only one phase of the war that is over. Another phase is beginning. Expect to see Afghanistan — directly or indirectly — on the front pages for many years to come.
Mark Cancian, a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, is a retired Marine colonel now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
5. Failed U.S. Afghanistan Withdrawal Is Ammo For Disinformation Attacks
A BFO (blinding flash of the obvious).
Lithuania offers a useful "case study."
But we can either inoculate ourselves against these attacks or we can be part of the problem and play into them.
Failed U.S. Afghanistan Withdrawal Is Ammo For Disinformation Attacks
Adversaries are trying to make Lithuania doubt America’s commitment to its NATO partner.
VILNIUS, Lithuania—The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has given NATO’s adversaries ammunition for misinformation attacks intended to sow doubt about America’s reliability as a security partner, officials here say.
As Americans and Afghans alike struggled to get to the airport and evacuate amid disorder and violence, hostile actors spread the idea that the United States would abandon Lithuania, a NATO ally, as it left Afghanistan, said Col. Gintaras Koryzna, head of the Lithuanian Armed Forces' Strategic Communications Department.
Disinformers are also seeking to convince people that Lithuania could not manage its own withdrawal from Afghanistan and left allies behind—when in fact the country withdrew all of its citizens and the Afghans who worked for them and wanted to leave, Koryzna said.
Defense One was briefed by Koryzna on a trip to Lithuania that was organized and funded by the Atlantic Council.
Lithuania is a long-time target of Russian disinformation. In 2019, Russian operatives sought to discredit NATO by starting a rumor that the United States intended to move nuclear weapons from Turkey to Lithuania. The month before that, Russians posted a false claim that German troops had defaced Jewish gravestones with swastikas in Kaunas while serving on a NATO mission.
To combat these types of attacks, Lithuania established its Strategic Communications Department 10 years ago to assess the information environment, coordinate cooperation among the military, and help citizens develop critical thinking to better recognize and fight disinformation.
Lithuania has also asked NATO for more help. Officials asked the alliance to send a “counter hybrid support team” to counter Russian disinformation operations, Polish Ambassador to NATO Tomasz Szatkowski said.
"It's a new concept [that] encompasses a number of experts stemming from cyber, information operations, internal security. This is one of the ways the alliance can respond right now," Szatkowski said.
Last year, the Lithuanian department tracked 3,412 disinformation incidents intended to shape society’s perception, including seven distinct sophisticated hostile information operations against the American military, NATO, and the Lithuanian government. Koryzna said Russian propagandists and their proxies have repeatedly attempted to discredit the leadership of Lithuania, the European Union, NATO and the United States among the Lithuanian public.
In July and August alone, he said, the department tracked 485 and 433 incidents respectively. The top themes were the migrant crisis on the border between Lithuania and Belarus, relationships between those two neighboring countries, and the relationship between Lithuania and China after Beijing recently removed its ambassador in Vilnius over Lithuania’s support of Taiwan.
Other common themes in past disinformation attacks that were tracked by the department include the ideas that NATO provokes Russia and Belarus and that the Lithuanian military is not prepared to defend the country.
Patrick Tucker contributed to this report.
6. Between Then and Now, They Did Not Die in Vain
Between Then and Now, They Did Not Die in Vain
I was among the first to parachute into Afghanistan in 2001. This is how I will remember the war.
Army Capt. Dan Whitten was a young West Point officer serving in Afghanistan when I met him for the first time.
One of his friends noted that he was outgoing and energetic, with enough personal charisma to mount a national campaign. We spent the better part of 2007 and 2008 together in Afghanistan, where he served as my aide-de-camp. Dan was the same age as my two sons and, as they do between people who spend nearly all their time together, our relationship took on many similar qualities. We kept a close relationship after returning from Afghanistan.
In February 2010, while leading a parachute rifle company in Zabul province, Dan was killed in action trying to help evacuate one of his wounded soldiers. He left behind a beautiful young wife, a loving family, and a large contingent of friends and admirers.
I have been thinking hard about Dan and his family in light of the tumultuous events of the last few weeks in Afghanistan, especially with the cacophony of voices pronouncing our efforts over the previous 20 years as a waste of national treasure.
Afghanistan started as a noble mission. I had the opportunity to be among the very first troops on the ground in October 2001. I remember very well the feeling of pride and patriotism as we boarded the aircraft from which we would parachute into southern Afghanistan. With the images of the 9/11 attacks so fresh in our minds, we all felt a sense that this is what our nation needed: an opportunity to strike back at those who attacked us. And we accomplished things. With our intelligence and diplomatic partners, we decimated al-Qaeda, we kept the nation safe from further attack, and we importantly provided hope and opportunity for generations of Afghans.
Our mission in Afghanistan certainly did not turn out the way many of us who served there wished that it would. It is not my intent to litigate that today. I am confident we will analyze this in great detail soon. But I believe our sad ending in Afghanistan can never be allowed to diminish the contributions of so many. I think we must view service and sacrifice in the context in which it is rendered.
Dan Whitten did not die in vain. He did what many heroes before him have done. Dan went to the point of danger, put himself at risk for a fellow soldier, and paid with his life. I can think of nothing more noble or honorable. His sacrifice meant something then, and it does now. Nothing that has transpired in Afghanistan since that day has diminished that one bit.
This sentiment extends to all those who served, were wounded, or now carry the invisible injuries of combat.
I think it is essential for all Americans to appreciate this point as we commemorate this 20th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. When I went to West Point in 1976, most, if not all, of the military instructors were Vietnam veterans who also served in an unpopular war that did not end the way intended. But that did not diminish the respect and admiration we cadets demonstrated towards them. They were role models and mentors. We learned from their experiences. Their service and sacrifice mattered at the time, just as it does for those who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, or any number of other locations since 9/11.
This anniversary will generate many stories.
First, there is the story of the beginning—the horrific attacks that killed many of our fellow citizens in their workplaces or as they went about their normal daily activities.
And there is a story about the sad ending of a long war that did not achieve all of our desired objectives, and the tortured and painful evacuation from Afghanistan that played out in plain view.
In between is the 20-year story of those who stood up and played their role when their fellow citizens were in peril or need. They fought back aboard aircraft being hijacked. They meticulously recovered their neighbors from the wreckage of the Twin Towers and evacuated their comrades from the ruins of the Pentagon. They cared for grieving families and greeted soldiers returning from war zones. And they served honorably and nobly in far-flung locations when our nation asked them.
Those are the stories I will be thinking about this 9/11.
Retired U.S. Army General Joseph Votel is the president and CEO of Business Executives for National Security, or BENS, and a distinguished fellow at the Middle East Institute.
7. Army Chief Calls for Afghanistan Review: ‘Let the Cards Fall Where They Fall’
Excerpts:
The chief said the U.S. military still “has a role” to retain capabilities that break terrorism groups and to help allies with counterterrorism and intelligence sharing, seeming to caution against turning backs away from one mission for the sake of great power competition.
“I see the future—when I take a look at where the Army's going and transforming—we're certainly cognizant of the strategic competition that's happening in the world with places like China and in Russia, and we're certainly concerned about Iran and North Korea. But the violent extremist threat, in my eyes, it's not going away, and we need to have the appropriate forces committed to that to make sure they don't attack our homeland.”
McConville bristled at the rhetorical use of “forever wars,” but described a similar frame for the global security threats the U.S. Army faces.
“I think we're going to have infinite competition,” McConville said. “There's always some type of competition going on in the world that we have to participate in and we would hope that would not get to conflict. And it's the same thing with with terrorism and violent extremist groups—we would hope they wouldn’t be positioned to attack the United States. And again, that becomes a strategy: how do you get after and how do you guard against organizations that are committed to killing Americans? We need to have the capability, and it's not always a military solution.”
McConville said there are three end-state conditions the U.S. needs to pay attention to before going into another conflict: a source of security, a government, and economic development.
“And as we look at the lessons learned, you know, let's look at all decisions, let's put them on the table. The way we get better is doing very detailed after-action reviews, and then let the cards fall where they fall.”
Army Chief Calls for Afghanistan Review: ‘Let the Cards Fall Where They Fall’
McConville says lessons must be learned because “terrorism is not going away.”
The Army’s chief of staff wants a review of the decisions that led to the fall of Kabul and the U.S. military’s withdrawal.
The last few weeks have been “heartbreaking” for soldiers who fought there, including members of his own family, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said during the Defense One State of Defense event, his first extensive public comments since the war’s end. “Let the cards fall where they fall.”
But the general also stressed that the Army and Americans concerned about “forever wars” should be prepared for “infinite competition” against terrorism and nation-states, and that leaders should reconsider what happens when American forces who have trained and supported foreign armies are pulled out.
“The capacity was there,” McConville said of the Afghan armed forces who eventually gave up, and so was the equipment. But, he continued, “did they have the will to fight” after 20 years?
“I think that's a lesson to be learned,” he said. “The thing I've also learned in my time, my time in Afghanistan, is—with many of our allies and partners, when American troops are on the ground with them, they will fight. And, you know what happens after we’re gone? We have to take a look at it.”
President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces, the collapse of Afghanistan’s government, and the disintegration of Afghan armed forces that Americans had spent billions to train and equip have sparked worldwide criticism and commentary about the worth of the entire war. As Taliban leaders in Kabul begin to establish a government of once-wanted terrorists that Americans were fighting just weeks ago, McConville said he hopes U.S. soldiers remain “proud” of their service.
“We know why we went to Afghanistan. We went to Afghanistan because Osama bin Laden attacked our country and killed thousands of innocent Americans. Al Qaeda was a terrorist force that had pledged to continue to try to kill Americans,” McConville said. “So we went to Afghanistan to hold Osama Bin Laden accountable and that mission was accomplished.” McConville said Afghanistan benefitted and was improved because of those missions.
“They did their job. They did extremely well, they served their country during a time of conflict, and I am personally very proud of what they did, and they should be too,” McConville said. The general said his two sons, daughter, and a son-in-law all served in Afghanistan.
Asked whether the war was a failure, McConville said, “We need to take a look at what the outcome was...there's gonna be a lot of folks that will say certain things. I think we need to take a hard look at it.”
For now, he said, the Army has been tied up executing the evacuation from Kabul, facilitated largely by soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division.
Beyond Kabul, McConville said the United States and the Army will have to continue preparing for and fighting terrorism.
“Terrorism is not going away,” McConville said, “at least in my eyes. There's groups of people out there who have committed to wanting to kill Americans and if they have the opportunity, to attack our homeland. So we need to be cognizant of that. We need to work very closely with our allies and partners, because we all share the same goal. To me, you know, these terrorists are almost like a cancer, you know? And sometimes they go into remission, and it kind of slows down, but they can come back. And when they come back they are committed to harming a country.”
The chief said the U.S. military still “has a role” to retain capabilities that break terrorism groups and to help allies with counterterrorism and intelligence sharing, seeming to caution against turning backs away from one mission for the sake of great power competition.
“I see the future—when I take a look at where the Army's going and transforming—we're certainly cognizant of the strategic competition that's happening in the world with places like China and in Russia, and we're certainly concerned about Iran and North Korea. But the violent extremist threat, in my eyes, it's not going away, and we need to have the appropriate forces committed to that to make sure they don't attack our homeland.”
McConville bristled at the rhetorical use of “forever wars,” but described a similar frame for the global security threats the U.S. Army faces.
“I think we're going to have infinite competition,” McConville said. “There's always some type of competition going on in the world that we have to participate in and we would hope that would not get to conflict. And it's the same thing with with terrorism and violent extremist groups—we would hope they wouldn’t be positioned to attack the United States. And again, that becomes a strategy: how do you get after and how do you guard against organizations that are committed to killing Americans? We need to have the capability, and it's not always a military solution.”
McConville said there are three end-state conditions the U.S. needs to pay attention to before going into another conflict: a source of security, a government, and economic development.
“And as we look at the lessons learned, you know, let's look at all decisions, let's put them on the table. The way we get better is doing very detailed after-action reviews, and then let the cards fall where they fall.”
8. Opinion | The Islamic world has changed over the past 20 years. The Taliban is about to feel it.
Some interesting analysis and data in this short OpEd from Fareed Zakaria.
Conclusion:
It is not surprising that the Taliban is seeking out China as its most important partner. My bet is that it will have a much harder time finding easy allies in the Muslim world.
Opinion | The Islamic world has changed over the past 20 years. The Taliban is about to feel it.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Fareed ZakariaColumnist Today at 7:00 p.m. EDT · September 9, 2021
If you want to understand what Islamist militancy today is really about, pay attention to this statement by the Taliban’s spokesman last week: “China is our most important partner, and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us.”
Let me remind you that China is credibly accused of massive and pervasive persecution of its Muslim population — including mass incarceration, systematic “reeducation,” 24/7 surveillance, and in some cases, forced sterilization. In other words, the world’s most ideologically committed Islamist government has said that its closest ally will be a nation engaged in what many observers call cultural genocide against Muslims. Lesson: The Islamist militant movement has always been more about power than about religion.
Twenty years after 9/11, we are still not clear on how to think about radical Islam. It is real, it is evil, but over the past two decades, it has lost the ideological argument. The real clash of civilizations was never between the West and Islam. It was within the world of Islam, between the existing regimes and their Islamist opposition movements, and more broadly between moderates and radical religious groups.
Recall Osama bin Laden’s original fatwa of 1996. In it, he explained that the reason to go after the “far enemy,” the United States, was that it supported governments such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which were the “near enemy” and the true focus of bin Laden’s strategy. The goal was to sweep out dictators, which would then bring Islamist movements to power that would rule the Muslim world like the caliphate of old.
But bin Laden’s strategy was based on a fantasy — specifically, that hundreds of millions of Muslims were pining for sharia rule, and that their dislike of dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad translated into support for the mullahs who opposed their regimes. In fact, while much of the Arab world was ruled by unpopular tyrants, what their people really wanted, it turned out, was greater openness, more democracy and an accommodation with modern life, not a rejection of it. We saw this in the massive demonstrations of 2011 that came to be known as the Arab Spring. We have seen it in many elections in the Muslim world, in Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia. Even when Islamist parties have won, they tend to be the ones that work within the democratic framework, are reasonably moderate and have rarely advocated strict sharia.
Public opinion polls have long established this trend. In 2009, the scholar Fawaz Gerges found that polls conducted in dozens of Muslim countries showed the same — a collapse of support for Islamist militancy and terrorism. He pointed out that just 29 percent of Jordanians thought suicide attacks were “often or sometimes justified,” down from 57 percent in 2005. In Indonesia, 74 percent agreed that terrorist attacks are “never justified,” up from 41 percent in 2004. Even in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent opposed any terrorism, up from 43 percent in 2002. (To give these numbers some context, Gerges noted that 24 percent of Americans believed “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” were "often or sometimes justified.” Only 46 percent said these kinds of attacks were never justified.) Subsequent Pew Research Center surveys have confirmed this broad aversion to Islamist militancy.
Consider the changing role of some nondemocratic Muslim countries — Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. For decades before 9/11, Saudi Arabia had been the ideological, political and financial heart of Islamist fundamentalism. It had exported mullahs, money, mosques and madrassas across the Muslim world, all imbued with an intolerant and puritanical brand of Islam. Then came 9/11 and, more importantly for the Saudis, the terrorist attacks of 2003 and 2004 in Saudi Arabia itself. Soon the monarchy began changing course, a process that David Petraeus described to me as “one of the most important, least reported positive developments in the war on terror.” That development has continued. Even though he has cracked down hard on dissent and opposition, the Saudi crown prince has also opened up Saudi society to foreign cultural and educational influences, weakened the power of the dreaded religious police and expanded women’s rights significantly.
In 2001, the United Arab Emirates was, along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, one of the only three governments on the planet to recognize the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Today, the UAE has not yet recognized the Taliban, but it has established diplomatic relations with Israel and is building stronger economic and social ties with that country — without facing great fallout in the Muslim world. Gulf cities such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha are open, diverse and modern by comparison with most places in the Middle East and even many in Asia. These are all absolute monarchies, of course, but the fact that they have stopped pandering to fundamentalists and are now openly embracing Western and modern values is telling.
It is not surprising that the Taliban is seeking out China as its most important partner. My bet is that it will have a much harder time finding easy allies in the Muslim world.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Fareed ZakariaColumnist Today at 7:00 p.m. EDT · September 9, 2021
9. How to prevent future Afghanistan-like disasters
Joshua Sinai outlines 10 measures of effectiveness for COIN.
How to prevent future Afghanistan-like disasters
The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The quick and relatively easy takeover by the Taliban of the Afghanistan state, following the precipitous collapse of the government and its security forces, could have been prevented. This would have avoided the current political and humanitarian catastrophe facing the country and its population. This is especially pertinent today during the 20th anniversary of al Qaida’s catastrophic 9/11 attacks, which, like the current precipitous failure of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, could have been prevented had the proper counterterrorism campaign measures been in place at the time.
Many lessons have been assembled over the years from previous counterinsurgency campaigns in which a Western country intervened to support a local government and its military forces to counter its threatening terrorism and guerrilla army insurgencies, whether in Vietnam or Somalia, with ten crucial measures of effectiveness standing out that are required to defeat a protracted insurgency.
In the first measure of effectiveness, the intervening government must formulate a political-military campaign plan with clearly defined objectives in realistic timeframes and end-states. It also needs to incorporate an understanding of the underlying causes that drive the insurgency and the necessary solutions to resolve them.
Since late 2001, however, when the U.S. military intervened in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government and defeat and disperse al Qaida’s terrorists, which was initially successful, over the next 20 years, it appeared that each presidential administration would come up with its own ad hoc campaign plan, with the end-states continuously being extended without concrete achievements to resolve the Taliban insurgency. The military intervention by the George W. Bush administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in March 2003 also served to divert attention from the primary objectives in Afghanistan.
In the second measure of effectiveness, it is crucial for the intervening country to upgrade the local government’s governing capability with a political elite that is committed to effective governance. This is crucial in nation-building as it results in political legitimacy and popular support. Unfortunately, in Afghanistan, any talk about the U.S. supporting ‘nation-building’ was continuously dismissed, with government officials stating that “we do not engage in nation-building.” Many members of the Afghan political elite were also apparently not interested in ‘nation-building’ as they were reported to have used the illicit gains from their corrupt activities to purchase luxury homes in foreign countries if they had to flee Afghanistan.
Third, the local government’s military capability was continuously over-estimated, despite numerous Department of Defense Inspector General-type reports that the Afghan forces were incapable of taking over the American military campaign to fight the Taliban forces on their own – an important measure of effectiveness.
In a fourth measure, the local government’s forces must secure the local population from insurgent attacks. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were always able to attack the local population anywhere, including in Kabul, the country’s capital.
Fifth, in what is known as winning ‘hearts and minds,’ it is crucial for the local government to win the ideological narrative against the insurgent force’s extremist ideas and practices to exponentially increase popular support for the government’s side. However, without attaining its own political legitimacy, the Afghan government never succeeded in winning this narrative battle, despite the Taliban’s extremist and harsh theocratic ideas and practices.
Sixth, winning the ideological narrative also enables the local government to increase the rate of defections from insurgent forces by increasing their disillusionment with the insurgency’s objectives. In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s forces kept replenishing and growing, with some of their ‘supposed’ defectors turning out to be double agent suicide bombers who blew themselves up with their American and Afghanistan intelligence handlers.
Seventh, the intervening foreign power and the local government must gain international and regional support for their counterinsurgency campaign. While most of the world’s nations supported the U.S.-led intervention, the crucial neighboring country of Pakistan kept wavering, with a government’s component continuing to provide covert support to the Taliban, which also enabled it to maintain safe havens in Pakistan’s ungoverned border regions.
Eighth, it is crucial to decrease the insurgent’s funding sources, limiting its capability to fund its managers, operatives, fighters and acquire weapons and ammunition. In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s involvement in narcotrafficking was never seriously challenged – with even government and local warlords’ complicity in narcotrafficking – making it one of the world’s wealthiest insurgent forces and enabling it to pay its managers, operatives, and fighters and acquire new weapons and ammunition for its fighters.
Ninth, it is crucial for the local government’s military forces to exponentially decrease the territory under insurgent control. According to a United Nations Security Council report, in Afghanistan, by June 2021, the Taliban contested or controlled an estimated 50 percent to 70 percent of Afghan territory outside of urban centers.
Finally, if possible, it is crucial to encourage the insurgent’s leadership to moderate their extremist objectives and join a negotiated settlement to the conflict. This was attempted by the Trump and Biden administrations but was never seriously followed up by the Taliban’s leadership.
The twin failures to succeed in achieving these ten measures of effectiveness in counterinsurgency and with the United States government issuing a mid-September 2021 deadline for the withdrawal of its forces from the country, were quickly seized upon by the Taliban, which embarked on a series of military offensives against the demoralized and weakened government forces. The Taliban’s forces quickly grew stronger than their government adversary’s military forces, whom they easily defeated in battle or caused them to desert en masse, thereby easily defeating the government’s forces and taking control of the government in Kabul and the rest of the country.
Hopefully, these lessons in effectiveness in responding against terrorist and guerrilla insurgencies, which unfortunately appear not to have been learned since 9/11, will be learned by government policy-makers to avoid future catastrophes that affect our country’s national security.
• Joshua Sinai is a Professor of Practice in Counterterrorism Studies at Capitol Technology University, in Laurel, MD.
10. The war in Afghanistan is over but military leaders are still trying to hide their failures
A critique of military leadership.
Excerpt:
The secrecy continued after President Joe Biden took office. Defense officials have often declined to provide a rough count of the number of troops left in Afghanistan during the drawdown, citing security reasons. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby acknowledged in late July that U.S. military aircraft were continuing to strike the Taliban, but he would not say where.
Military leaders no longer have an excuse to withhold information about what went wrong in Afghanistan now that no U.S. troops remain on the ground. They need to finally show their homework after years of claiming the dog ate it.
The war is lost. The country deserves to know why.
The war in Afghanistan is over but military leaders are still trying to hide their failures
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With the Taliban in total control of Afghanistan, Americans deserve to know how the Afghan security forces collapsed in little more than a week despite a nearly 20-year and $88 billion effort by the U.S. military to train, equip, and mentor Afghan troops and police.
Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the last commander of all U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, could provide lawmakers with some of the answers when he testifies next week before Congress – but the broader American public won’t hear any of that. The hearing will be behind closed doors.
This enforced secrecy has become the norm for Miller and other military leaders, who made it nearly impossible to get basic information about the state of the war in Afghanistan for at least the past three presidential administrations.
Army Gen. Scott Miller, the former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, waves upon his return on July 14, 2021 at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland. Miller stepped down on July 12, 2021 and transferred command duties to Gen. Kenneth McKenzie as the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan continues. (Photo by Alex Brandon – Pool/Getty Images)
Miller never briefed the Pentagon press corps while he served as the top commander in Afghanistan from September 2018 until this July. While he spoke to Afghan media often, it was rare for him to engage with American or western reporters.
There may be good reasons why Miller’s testimony will take place in a closed session. That means there won’t be television cameras – which are an invitation for all lawmakers to grandstand about issues that have nothing to do with Afghanistan, such as critical race theory. (When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other top defense officials testify in an open hearing scheduled for Sept. 28, expect lawmakers’ opening statements to last for hours as each senator attempts to hold the beer of the previous speaker.)
It’s also fair to say that military leaders have gone out of their way for several years to avoid any sort of conversation with the American public about what was happening in Afghanistan and why.
Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., who led all U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan at the time, abruptly ended an August 2018 Pentagon news conference after being pressed on whether military leaders had been too optimistic when they claimed Afghanistan had turned the corner.
An Afghanistan flag is seen waving in front of the U.S. Capitol on August 28, 2021 in Washington, DC. The protest comes on the heels of a deadly bombing in Kabul this week as the U.S. and its allies rush to evacuate people from Afghanistan before the August 31st withdrawal deadline. (Photo by Liz Lynch/Getty Images)
Reporters in the Pentagon’s briefing room, who were listening to Nicholson speak from Kabul, had no idea that he had left until one of his aides claimed, “The general had a hard stop.”
For too long, top military leaders have dealt with Afghanistan like parents trying to shield their children from any news of their impending divorce.
A man sells Taliban flags in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 30, 2021. Many Afghans are anxious about the Taliban rule and are figuring out ways to get out of Afghanistan. Some street vendors have managed to turn the Taliban’s arrival into a money making business selling their white flag emblazoned with a Quranic verse. (AP Photo/Khwaja Tawfiq Sediqi)
The secrecy continued after President Joe Biden took office. Defense officials have often declined to provide a rough count of the number of troops left in Afghanistan during the drawdown, citing security reasons. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby acknowledged in late July that U.S. military aircraft were continuing to strike the Taliban, but he would not say where.
Military leaders no longer have an excuse to withhold information about what went wrong in Afghanistan now that no U.S. troops remain on the ground. They need to finally show their homework after years of claiming the dog ate it.
The war is lost. The country deserves to know why.
More great stories on Task & Purpose
is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for 15 years. You can email him at [email protected], direct message @JeffSchogol on Twitter, or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488. Contact the author here.
11. It’s been twenty years since 9/11. The US Army still hasn’t learned to speak Arabic or Dari.
On the one hand does an infantryman need to know a foreign language to close with and destroy the enemy? What training does an infantryman forgo to learn and sustain a language? And then which languages, Mandarin or Cantonese or other Chinese language? Russian? Korean? Persian-Farsi? Bahasa or Malay? Tagalog (or which of the 30-40 tribal languages through the Philippines)?
Blanket statements about learning language are unhelpful. We need the right types of personnel with the right language in sufficient numbers. And then we need a personnel management system that can ensure those with the right languages are assigned to the right positions where they can be best employed for the needs of the Army based on their capabilities.. But not everyone has the will or the aptitude for languages.
It’s been twenty years since 9/11. The US Army still hasn’t learned to speak Arabic or Dari.
Wed, Sep 8, 2021
MENASource by Jon Tishman
Sergeant Jeffery Iburg from the US Army's Alpha Company, 2-508 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team takes photos of a location during a patrol near Combat Outpost Kowall in Arghandab District, north of Kandahar July 13, 2010. REUTERS/Bob Strong
As the Taliban retook Afghanistan just as the United States completely departed the country on August 31, US military leaders seeking to better understand their faults should ask themselves a simple question: how well could I communicate with my security partners?
The August withdrawal ended close to twenty years of combat operations in Afghanistan, while the US aims to end seventeen years of combat mission in Iraq by the end of this year. After such lengthy conflicts, one might expect the US Army to be overrun with soldiers fluent in Arabic and Dari. Despite repeated deployments and enough time to educate current senior leaders in the ranks from grade school skills to bachelor’s degree-level, the overall rate of soldiers conversant in target languages remains abysmally low in combat arms, even among codified linguist positions.
While military leaders may lament nation-building and Counter Insurgency (COIN) operations, the fact remains that the army has always been at the forefront of such efforts. Even in operations where the US plans to forego such nation-building, stability operations remain a critical task for the army, as it maintains a monopoly on the conflict until a new security force is developed. Upon cessation of offensive operations, stability operations take priority to “maintain or reestablish a safe and secure environment and provide essential governmental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief.”
The language deficit
Despite updating the Language, Regional Expertise, and Culture (LREC) Program in 2016, the US military—the army in particular—is far behind the curve. The LREC Program assesses individuals who are novices with no local expertise to experts with native fluency. Despite infantry and armor formations making up the bulk of the deployed force over the years, anecdotally, most soldiers remain novices, as noted in a 2008 Congressional report. Despite this acknowledgement thirteen years ago, no meaningful changes have occurred. The lack of skills creates an information transfer choke point, where only a few leaders can interact with partners through an interpreter. Even the army’s Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFAB) do not train language skills. According to the former commander of the SFAB, Brigadier General Scott Jackson, the unit learns organizationally, not individually, how to advise partner nations, ensuring that no advisor gains skills in keeping with the LREC program.
For officers without previous experience in a region prior to commissioning, there is no available opportunity to develop regional proficiency. Infantry and armor officers—those that manage the bulk of the initial transition to stability operations—have no programmed regional proficiency education. Besides special forces officers, the opportunity to develop language and culture skills only occurs if an officer elects to become a foreign area officer, a career path outside of the typical “boots on the ground” environment. The Defense Language Aptitude Battery 2 is only administered at initial entry processing sites for those looking to join as linguists and on a prerequisite basis for application into the army special operations forces branches and foreign area officer program. No such requirement exists for infantry or armor branches—soldiers who will initially manage post-conflict stability operations.
The special forces branch puts a premium on language training but has shown troubling trends in its commitment to language development. According to a 2020 report, There is an Identity Crisis in Special Forces: Who are the Green Berets Supposed to Be?, 29 percent of special forces soldiers believed that language was not an important skill. Additionally, 62 percent did not practice their language regularly, 52 percent did not speak their target language on their most recent deployment, and 42 percent were not operating in a fashion that aligned with their assigned theater.
Director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs, William Wechsler, and Director of the Modern War Institute, Dr. Liam Collins, attested to this language and cultural problem as a major cause of the army’s inability to make headway in irregular conflict. They argued that the only times advisor missions worked in the US’s favor is when the same advisors repeatedly deployed to the same theater.
Aforementioned, though regionally aligned, the SFAB receives no language training besides how to employ an interpreter. Reviewing the instruction program with the commander of the training course, it was confirmed that would-be advisors are not even briefed on campaign goals by the geographic combatant commands they will ultimately be aligned to. The military, as a whole, attempted a program similar to the SFAB during the Afghanistan war, focusing on repeated advisor deployments and language training with the AFPAK Hands Program. Bureaucratic resistance to the long training pipeline doomed the program to inefficiency and limited results.
Anecdotally, most combat arms personnel in the ranks are puzzled by the complete lack of investment in language skills despite repeated deployments to the same regions over the past twenty years. The current exfiltration crisis of Afghanistan interpreters draws attention to this issue. Nearly twenty thousand evacuated interpreters represent a brain drain of human capital that was used solely to enable American operations. This theft of intellectual services is a major concern of development projects but rarely seems to be part of the calculation for the army. Most retorts to this issue bring up programs like the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest. However, this program focuses on recruiting military interpreters and intelligence professionals, not combat arms soldiers. The program’s abysmal performance record limited its value and impact on operations.
Similarly, there is no real incentive to develop these skills amongst the other combat arms branches. The Army Strategic Language List for General Purpose Forces is a memorandum that identifies the required languages that the army currently pays a Foreign Language Proficiency Bonus (FLPB) for to provide to non-special operations forces. However, because of cost concerns, the FLPB is not paid universally, but is limited in eligibility for language specific assignments like foreign area officers or linguists. The Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) is an annual requirement to maintain access to the bonus, which can range up to $500 per month for critical languages. Unfortunately, because the requirements exclude most combat arms job skills, an infantry captain who is a native Iraqi Arabic speaker has no incentive to take the DLPT. This inability to engage with all leaders of a partner force emphasizes engagement with partners that speak English since information transfer is easier, regardless of tactical competency compared to non-English speaking peers.
Looking ahead
Even if the US can avoid another major combat campaign in the near future, combined operations with multinational elements will remain. Dr. Mara Karlin, the current Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans and Capabilities, notes in her book, Building Militaries in Fragile States: Challenges for the United States, that many US advising efforts throughout the Cold War failed due to an over-reliance on becoming a co-combatant rather than being an astute observer and recommender of partner personnel and combat formation changes. This requires a keen grasp of the local culture, warfighting style, and host nation goals that cannot be readily understood through just an interpreter.
Nearly twenty years of continuous combat operations with a culturally deaf force has proven that the mirror-imaging US troops pushed onto their security partners caused grave blunders. As Robert Ramsey of the Combat Studies Institute points out in his summation of the American advisor experience in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador: “[i]t is almost impossible to find a complaint by any advisor in the three experiences surveyed who felt tactically, technically, or militarily unprepared for his duties…However, almost to a man, advisors felt compelled to talk about the demanding challenges posed by language, cultural differences, and host-nation institutional barriers.”
This is not just an army problem. According to a 2020 Council on Foreign Relations report, the State Department “still has more Portuguese speakers than Arabic and Chinese combined and more Albanian speakers than Urdu, Dari, or Farsi. Language-designated positions overseas are 15 percent vacant, and 24 percent of those staff are filled by officers who do not meet the minimum language requirement.” In short, even if the army thinks it can offload its responsibilities onto the State Department for stability operations, it has unrealistic expectations of inter-agency capabilities.
Despite all the literature of post-WWII army diplomacy, Cold War combat and advising operations, and now repeated COIN surges since 9/11, the US Army has still failed to learn the necessity of language and cultural skills amongst the combat arms force.
Jon Tishman is a former US Army infantry officer with multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Follow him on Twitter: @tish_jon.
12. Opinion | Christopher Wray: Hard-earned lessons from 9/11 offer a playbook for combating today’s threats
Excerpts:
Today’s realities demand recognition that we’re all in this together. The men and women of law enforcement are being asked to do more now than ever — at a time when their jobs are becoming increasingly dangerous. They need our support. To develop the next generation of those willing to run toward danger to protect others, we must rekindle the spirit of unity on display after 9/11.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, we mourn the people we have lost, extend our sympathy to their families and loved ones, and express gratitude for those who sacrificed — both at home and abroad — to keep us safe. We owe it to them to recommit to the lessons learned through blood, sweat and tears in the aftermath of 9/11.
Opinion | Christopher Wray: Hard-earned lessons from 9/11 offer a playbook for combating today’s threats
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Christopher Wray Today at 11:25 a.m. EDT · September 9, 2021
Christopher Wray was an associate deputy attorney general in the Justice Department on Sept. 11, 2001. He currently serves as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Those of us who lived through 9/11 will always remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the United States was attacked. As a new Justice Department official, I spent much of the day in a jam-packed command center at FBI headquarters. There was a swirl of activity and emotion — concern for loved ones, anger toward those who attacked us, uncertainty about what might be next. But I will never forget the incredible sense of solidarity in that room. We were united in our resolve to find those responsible and determined to prevent another attack.
Now, two decades later, the threats have evolved, but the hard-earned lessons of Sept. 11, 2001, still provide the playbook for confronting today’s challenges.
After 9/11, the country united behind a common purpose. We focused on disruption — gathering intelligence to stop bad actors before they could attack. All levels of government removed barriers that had stifled collaboration and prevented information-sharing. Federal agencies strengthened relationships with state and local partners, whose front-line observations proved essential. And with the backing of the American people, a generation of public servants answered the call to tackle the new terrorism threat.
As a result of changes made in response to 9/11 — and thanks to a lot of hard work by the FBI and our partners and some good fortune — we have not experienced another large-scale attack from a foreign terrorist organization on American soil. But make no mistake: As the Islamic State attack and tragic loss of 13 brave American service members and nearly 200 Afghans in Kabul last month painfully reminded us, the threat has not disappeared. To the contrary, over the past 20 years, as technology advanced and the world became more interconnected, familiar threats transformed and new ones emerged.
Terrorist attacks once required extensive communications and planning — which took time and created leads for investigators to pursue. Now terrorism moves at the speed of social media. Foreign groups spread propaganda online to inspire lone actors to attack using easily accessible tools — as in October 2017, when Sayfullo Saipov, an alleged Islamic State supporter radicalized online, plowed a rented truck through a crowd on a Manhattan bike path, killing eight people and injuring more than a dozen others.
But the risk of online radicalization is not limited to foreign terrorist ideologies. An expanding array of radical beliefs is increasingly inspiring domestic terrorists. Racial and ethnic ideologies, anti-government and anti-authority sentiments, conspiracy theories and personal grievances — the extraordinary range of dangerous narratives circulated online compounds the challenge of identifying and stopping violent extremists.
In addition to making attacks harder to detect, technology has enabled new threats. Twenty years ago, a team of terrorists would have had to successfully execute a complicated plan with a bomb or other conventional weapon to try to cripple the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye Brook, N.Y., or shut down operations at Colonial Pipeline. But today, we have witnessed Iranian government hackers and ransomware criminals, respectively, do just those things from behind computers in safe havens abroad.
There is no question the threats have become more complex. Thanks to the dedication and sacrifice of the thousands of men and women who stepped up after 9/11, we know how to respond — by focusing on disruption, strengthening partnerships and renewing a sense of shared responsibility.
Stopping the next attack remains the priority. But those who wish us harm continue to think of new ways to use technology against us. To guard against these ever-changing challenges, the intelligence and law enforcement communities have to innovate and think creatively.
As we learned after 9/11, collaboration is essential. Increasingly, that means law enforcement partnering with private citizens and companies. Interrupting fast-moving threats such as lone actors requires individuals to share information with the authorities when something seems amiss. Countering sophisticated cyberattacks requires companies to work with the FBI and not go it alone. Developing such relationships necessitates a joint commitment to building trust and improving communication.
Today’s realities demand recognition that we’re all in this together. The men and women of law enforcement are being asked to do more now than ever — at a time when their jobs are becoming increasingly dangerous. They need our support. To develop the next generation of those willing to run toward danger to protect others, we must rekindle the spirit of unity on display after 9/11.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, we mourn the people we have lost, extend our sympathy to their families and loved ones, and express gratitude for those who sacrificed — both at home and abroad — to keep us safe. We owe it to them to recommit to the lessons learned through blood, sweat and tears in the aftermath of 9/11.
Watch the latest Opinions short film:
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Christopher Wray Today at 11:25 a.m. EDT · September 9, 2021
13. Serving in a Twenty-Year War
This explains one of the many things wrong with the war (and more importantly our personnel management system):
To reduce the strain on Army units deploying repeatedly, Robert M. Gates, then the secretary of defense, directed the other branches of the armed forces to send sailors, airmen and Marines to fill in gapped positions. They were called I.A.s — individual augmentees — and many had specialties that did not naturally match the skills needed to fight a land war in Central Asia.
One of the I.A.s was Tim Patterson, a Navy lieutenant who had finished a tour on a nuclear-powered attack submarine in Groton, Conn. After a brief stint of Army training, he landed in Jalalabad in May 2009 to mentor Afghan police officers in the rural areas near the city.
Serving in a Twenty-Year War
Nine veterans reflect on two decades in Afghanistan and the dramatically changing U.S. missions.
Nine veterans reflect on two decades in Afghanistan and the dramatically changing U.S. missions.
By John Ismay. Photographs by Greg Kahn.
Sept. 8, 2021
In its early days, America’s war in Afghanistan consisted mostly of specialized units hunting Qaeda fighters as they fled across Afghanistan and into Pakistan. There were few of the typical trappings of past American land wars — no static bases with guard towers, no U.S.O. shows for entertainment.
But soon enough, the number of troops rose significantly and the missions they were assigned grew as well, sprawling ever wider over two decades in a war that consumed nearly 2,500 American lives and cost taxpayers $2.3 trillion.
To learn how those missions changed so drastically, we talked to nine current and former service members — most of whom did multiple tours — and asked what they had been sent to Afghanistan to do.
Tony Mayne, Army
“We were there no more than a few hours from jump to extraction.”
Weeks after the twin towers fell, Tony Mayne stepped out of a C-130 transport plane flying over southern Afghanistan on a moonless night in October.
He floated 800 feet down to the desert floor, then “hit like a sack of bricks,” he said. “As soon as my feet hit, my head hit shortly thereafter.”
Mr. Mayne, then a 25-year-old sergeant in the Third Ranger Battalion, and about 200 other soldiers packed up their parachutes and began searching for enemy fighters in a series of buildings nearby. Encountering little resistance, they quickly took over their target: a dirt airstrip called Objective Rhino.
“We were there no more than a few hours from jump to extraction,” he said.
It was the kind of mission the Rangers, a group of special light-infantry troops, were designed to carry out: a parachute jump at night to take over an enemy airfield with overwhelming force.
And it was the first major combat operation in the war in Afghanistan.
Tony Mayne's parachute kit bag marker, which displays the iconic Thomas E. Franklin photograph from Sept. 11, 2001, and his combat helmet.
He returned home to Fort Benning, Ga., just before Christmas that year. But Mr. Mayne, who was medically retired as a major in December 2020, would deploy seven more times in what became known as the global war on terror, spending most of his 20-year career in combat.
Matt Komatsu, Air Force
“At the time I could recall being very angry at what was going on.”
When the war was in its first year, no one could be certain how long it would last. As a young first lieutenant at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Matt Komatsu, who is now a colonel in the Alaska Air National Guard, was concerned he might miss out on it.
But in August 2002, he was sent to Bagram, a massive air base that served as a hub for the small numbers of Americans searching for Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, and Taliban fighters. When Mr. Komatsu arrived, the base still had not been cleared of old Soviet land mines, and just a single strand of barbed wire marked its perimeter.
For months, he led a team of intelligence specialists who talked to local Afghans in the hope of getting advanced warning of any potential attacks on Bagram. The work felt righteous.
Soon though, it became clear that many of his senior officers were shifting their priorities to someplace else. His commander relocated from Saudi Arabia to Qatar. And the military rations they ate at Bagram suddenly were in short supply. An officer explained that the food was being sent to Kuwait to prepare for an invasion of Iraq.
“At the time I could recall being very angry at what was going on,” Col. Komatsu, 44, said. “I felt like we were declaring victory in Afghanistan before we had a right to.”
“It felt like we had unfinished business there.”
Stephen Hopkins, Army
“I started in 2002 thinking Afghanistan was a beautiful country, and in 2007 I’m fighting for my life.”
Shortly after Mr. Komatsu left the country, Stephen Hopkins deployed to Afghanistan for the second time as a captain leading an Army Ranger platoon. Most of his battalion was held back at the last minute for the coming invasion of Iraq, leaving his company short-handed as they chased enemy fighters in Kunar Province.
By mid-2003, when American leaders declared major combat operations to be over in both Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces in Afghanistan turned their attention toward nation-building and training local soldiers and police officers.
In 2007, Mr. Hopkins returned to Afghanistan for his fifth combat tour — this time as a Green Beret — and quickly found himself in a very different kind of war. Instead of special operations troops running the country, the conventional Army — with its heavy brigades of infantry troops and artillery battalions built to fight large-scale land battles — was in charge.
Small bases that had been left partly open to local Afghans were surrounded by tall concrete blast walls. And infantry commanders were looking for gunfights with the Taliban. “I started in 2002 thinking Afghanistan was a beautiful country, and in 2007 I’m fighting for my life,” said Mr. Hopkins, 50, who retired as a major in 2017.
Tim Patterson, Navy
“Most of the U.S. Army units, their frame of mind was to stay alive, kill some bad guys and get out.”
To reduce the strain on Army units deploying repeatedly, Robert M. Gates, then the secretary of defense, directed the other branches of the armed forces to send sailors, airmen and Marines to fill in gapped positions. They were called I.A.s — individual augmentees — and many had specialties that did not naturally match the skills needed to fight a land war in Central Asia.
One of the I.A.s was Tim Patterson, a Navy lieutenant who had finished a tour on a nuclear-powered attack submarine in Groton, Conn. After a brief stint of Army training, he landed in Jalalabad in May 2009 to mentor Afghan police officers in the rural areas near the city.
The Afghan police stations he visited lacked working sewage systems, and even basic supplies like sandbags to protect officers from attack. At the Jalalabad police headquarters, Afghan police officers were growing marijuana in front of their counternarcotics office, he said. Once a month Mr. Patterson traveled to the American base to meet with the senior Army officers in charge of the area, but said they seemed uninterested in the corruption he saw daily.
A photograph of Tim Patterson, who arrived in the city of Jalalabad in 2009, with Afghan police officers.
“All they cared about was how many suspected Taliban we killed, how many airstrikes we launched and how much artillery we had fired,” Mr. Patterson, 41, recalled. “They showed zero interest in developing the Afghan Police.”
“Most of the U.S. Army units, their frame of mind was to stay alive, kill some bad guys and get out. And there was no attention to: Are we actually achieving anything?”
Rob Imhoff, Marine Corps
“We felt like we were about to do something big.”
Around the time Mr. Patterson left Afghanistan in late 2009, with 50,000 American troops in the country, President Barack Obama unveiled a new strategy for the war during a speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to wear the Taliban down, in the hope that he could then withdraw the forces relatively quickly.
Rob Imhoff, a Marine infantry lance corporal, watched the president’s address in a packed barracks room in Camp Lejeune, N.C. Days earlier, he had been in the field training. Two weeks later, he was in Afghanistan with 1st Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment and preparing for the invasion of Marjah — one of the Corps’ bloodiest battles in the war.
“We felt like we were about to do something big,” Mr. Imhoff, 31, remembered. His mission in early 2010 was briefed using the jargon of counterinsurgency: Clear. Hold. Build.
A song Rob Imhoff wrote in a notebook before he was sent to Afghanistan, and a bandana that he wore while deployed.
“First, we would go in very kinetic and aggressive and clear out the city, going door to door with Afghan soldiers until the whole city was cleared,” he recalled. “Then hold, to bring in the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police to build up the security in the city. The long-term objective was to pass that over full time to the Afghan soldiers and police officers that we set up.”
After 10 days of fighting, the Marines had largely taken Marjah. Three weeks of relative calm followed. Then the Taliban came back.
The Marines continued to fight sporadically in Marjah for the rest of their deployment. A quarter of the 37 Marines in Mr. Imhoff’s platoon were wounded. Some of his fellow Marines were still shooting at Taliban fighters just hours before he lifted off in a helicopter to begin the trip home.
Matt Archuleta, Army
“It would be difficult to come up with a solution in a short amount of time.”
In 2012, First Lt. Matthew Archuleta arrived in Ghazni Province, having been inspired to seek out duty in Afghanistan by Mr. Obama’s speech during his senior year at West Point. The number of American forces in Afghanistan reached its high-water mark: 100,000.
“Our instructions were to partner with the Afghans, to lead the fight but train them to lead themselves,” recalled Mr. Archuleta, 34, who later became a Green Beret and left the Army as a captain in 2020. “It was always in my mind that we’re not going to be here forever, so we have to help them help themselves.”
A fragment of a water jug that was in a vehicle with Matt Archuleta when it was hit with an I.E.D. during a mission in Afghanistan.
By the time he left in September, Mr. Archuleta knew that eastern Afghanistan could easily come apart at the seams. “Based on the tribal differences there, it would be difficult to come up with a solution in a short amount of time,” he said.
Platt Weinrick, Army
“A grenade detonates and I’m on the floor. The tent collapsed around me.”
The 303rd Military Police Company, a reserve unit from Michigan, deployed to Old Kandahar in 2012 and set up living quarters on a small Afghan police outpost.
Platt Weinrick, then a sergeant first class in the 303rd, said the unit’s superiors ordered the troops not to put up protective walls of sandbags outside of their tents, lest it send the wrong signal to their Afghan trainees.
His team arrived soon after one of the largest American atrocities of the long war, when a staff sergeant named Robert Bales wandered off a small patrol base in Kandahar Province and killed 16 Afghan civilians, including women and children. Mr. Weinrick feared the Afghan Police might try to exact some kind of revenge.
Just before 6 a.m. on June 19, a police officer sympathetic to the Taliban launched an attack. Amid the gunfire, Mr. Weinrick grabbed his assault rifle and began shouting orders. He was assisting a wounded medic when he heard multiple hand grenades rolling down the sloping sides of his small living quarters.
“A grenade detonates and I’m on the floor,” Mr. Weinrick, 45, said. “The tent collapsed around me.”
A metal fragment from one of those grenades is still lodged an inch from the back of his skull. It came to rest there after it destroyed his left eye and passed most of the way through his brain’s occipital lobe.
The glass eyes that Platt Weinrick has worn since he was injured in an attack launched by an Afghan police officer.
Mr. Weinrick said he gives that memory one day a year to come back.
“I only give it five minutes to overtake me,” he said. “I let my mind go, I’m away from my family. When it’s done, you lock back in and get back to life. And hope each year it gets better.”
The insider attack on his soldiers was the second of three that day in Afghanistan, he recalled. Such attacks killed 150 American and NATO troops from 2011 to 2014.
As Mr. Weinrick left the country bloodied and bandaged, lying in a metal bunk bed strapped to the deck of a cargo plane, the drawdown of U.S. forces was underway, even as the Taliban continued growing stronger.
Mercedes Elias, Marine Corps
“Why did we even come here to begin with?”
Mercedes Elias arrived in Afghanistan as a 26-year-old Marine first lieutenant four months after a Navy SEAL team killed Bin Laden in Pakistan and his body was dumped in the ocean miles offshore. Her job was to track the movement of supplies to small outposts in southern Helmand Province, but that soon changed.
Just three months after deploying to a base called Camp Dwyer, Ms. Elias was fielding daily orders to send Marines back to the United States.
A guidon made by Marines deployed with Mercedes Elias to commemorate her promotion, and her quilt with patches.
“I thought we came here to do a certain mission, and now you’re telling me we just need to start sending people back?” she remembered thinking at the time. “Why did we even come here to begin with?”
When she left Dwyer in April 2012, civilian contractors were still building new facilities that American forces would never use.
Eric Terashima, Marine Corps
“They didn’t want the Taliban to think if we got rocketed we’d leave.”
Eric Terashima arrived in Afghanistan in 2019 for his third tour, the same year that people born after the Sept. 11 attacks became old enough to enter the military.
Mr. Terashima, then a 50-year-old Marine colonel, was sent to a small base on the southern edge of Lashkar Gah, where he led about 90 Americans mentoring Afghan police officers, who would soon truly be on their own.
By autumn, Mr. Terashima’s mission had essentially wound down and his troops were ready to leave. But then the Taliban rocketed their base in Bost.
“When that happened, the generals decided the optics would look bad if we left after being attacked, so we stayed a little longer,” he recalled. “They didn’t want the Taliban to think if we got rocketed we’d leave.”
Eric Terashima's U.S. Marine Corps tattoo, on his left arm, and a paddle that was given to him when he left the service.
Soon after Mr. Terashima returned to the United States in February 2020, his old base was handed over to the Afghans.
A few months ago, he packed up his pickup truck for the 17-hour drive between his home in North Carolina and the Dallas-Fort Worth airport to pick up one of his former interpreters, an Afghan man who had reached out through Facebook to ask for help in getting out of the country before the Americans completed their withdrawal.
As he drove down the highway, Mr. Terashima was on the lookout for pharmacies so that he could wire money to seven other former interpreters who asked for financial assistance.
He set up an online fund-raiser so he and his wife would not have to keep paying for immigration expenses, and he doubled his goal twice as more interpreters reached out for help.
“I’m not sure that’ll be enough, but I’m committed to just taking care of my guys,” he said.
14. American soldiers today: Lions led by donkeys
Shot over....
A lot of attacks on our senior leadership.
American soldiers today: Lions led by donkeys
The Hill · by William Moloney, opinion contributor · September 9, 2021
The phrase “Lions led by donkeys” has an ancient provenance but is most associated with World War I, where it so aptly described the appalling contrast between the astounding bravery of the ordinary soldiers, whose corpses by the millions filled the bloody trenches of the Western Front, and the stunning incompetence of the callously hidebound and unimaginative leaders — political and military alike — who sent them to their deaths.
The phrase comes to mind now in the agonizing aftermath of the dark August days we have just witnessed in Afghanistan, as well as the futility and needless sacrifice of the preceding 20 years of an inexplicable and retrospectively pointless war. Delighted enemies and despairing friends alike are seeing the emergence of a new global strategic calculus. Free peoples who long had viewed the United States as reliable and capable have watched in shock as events clearly demonstrated that we sometimes are neither.
Yet, amazingly, in the wake of the chaos, panic and unjustifiable deaths of 13 American soldiers in Kabul’s final tragic hours, the donkeys at the top of the American hierarchy were declaring victory, asserting that the messy endgame was inevitable, insisting that the evacuation was one of the greatest achievements in military history and, most bizarrely, stating that no one would be held accountable because no mistakes were made. In fact, the only individual willing to sacrifice his career in the cause of truth was Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who publicly called on the top brass to accept accountability for the debacle, particularly the disastrous abandonment of Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night without notifying either NATO allies or Afghan commanders, thus depriving the U.S. of the only defensible perimeter that could have allowed for an orderly and properly sequenced evacuation. For this impolitic act, Scheller was removed from his command and left with no choice but to resign from the Corps.
So, while our donkeys continue to disgrace themselves, and by extension their country, in heretofore unimaginable ways while compounding their folly through breathtaking mendacity, what has been the fate of our lions?
Sent to distant wars both unwarranted (Iraq) and unwinnable (Afghanistan), the American soldier invariably has fought with bravery, skill and resourcefulness. Through deployments at once too long and too frequent, they gave up their lives, their limbs, and their peace of mind and souls on behalf of causes their leaders told them were necessary and important until suddenly, it was apparent to all that they weren’t.
However, the greatest betrayal was saved to the very last, as these remarkable men and women who sacrificed so much were told by their leaders that they were now part and parcel of the greatest threat to national security — domestic terrorism. In astonishment, they heard the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff assure Congress that he was “reading widely” and arduously working to understand “white rage.” Baffled, they heard the Secretary of Defense solemnly declare that he was forming committees and developing strategies to root out and punish the many white supremacists and other extremists in uniform.
Years ago, cartoonist Walt Kelly gave us the delightfully wise little possum, Pogo, who memorably informed us that “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Apparently Pogo was just a little ahead of his time.
That our donkeys are disproportionately drawn from our elites and our lions disproportionately from our working class should not go unnoticed, because this bespeaks an important truth regarding our country’s ominous and worsening class conflict.
In 1854, during the Crimean War, England’s Alfred Lord Tennyson penned one of the most famous poems in the English language — “The Charge of the Light Brigade” — celebrating the remarkable courage of ordinary soldiers whose lives were sacrificed by the ineptitude of higher-ups. The stanzas that speak to us across the centuries are these: “Into the valley of Death Rode the Six Hundred. … Someone had blundered. … Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.”
American soldiers, past and present, and the American people deserve to know “the reason why” and to see accountability for those at the top who “blundered.” Failing such, our country’s present mortal peril may be far graver than any of us would like to think.
William Moloney, Ph.D., is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.
The Hill · by William Moloney, opinion contributor · September 9, 2021
15. How 9/11 helped China wage its own false ‘war on terror’
Excerpts:
The CCP’s conflation of Uighur dissent and demands for rights and freedoms with “Islamic fundamentalism” and “terrorism” reflects the logic of the US “war on terror”, which automatically equates Muslim political activity with terrorism.
In the past few years, the plight of the Uighurs finally attracted international sympathy, especially after revelations about the abhorrent conditions Uighur detainees face in internment camps. In 2020, the US finally removed the ETIM’s designation as a “terrorist organisation” and went as far as declaring suppression of Uighurs a genocide.
This, however, cannot erase the key role the US government played in leading international acceptance of Beijing’s repressive measures against the community. The US “war on terror” has been truly devastating for millions of Muslims, who have had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, including Uighurs.
How 9/11 helped China wage its own false ‘war on terror’
The US’s embrace of Chinese claims of ‘Uighur terrorism’ enabled the massive repression of the community.
Over the past two decades, the crisis in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has drastically worsened. This has much to do with the major expansion after 2001 of repressive measures directed at suppressing dissent among Uighurs, dressed in the rhetoric of anti-terrorism.
Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States launched the global “war on terror”, which supported efforts in other countries to dismantle terror organisations. It is following these events that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defined Uighur resistance as part of the worldwide “terrorism” emergency and not as a local issue of “separatism” as it used to in the past.
This definition was directly validated by the US government when it classified the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an obscure armed group operating in Afghanistan, as a “terrorist organisation” and imprisoned Uighurs in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Thus America’s “war on terror” helped China launch a massive crackdown on the Uighur population, which has gone as far as the imprisonment of 1 million ethnic Uighurs in a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”, according to the United Nations.
For centuries, Uighurs have been living in the region alternately known as Altishahr, East Turkestan, or Xinjiang. In 1759, they came under the rule of the Qing Empire, which called their homeland the “New Territory” (Xinjiang). Despite several rebellions in the early 20th century, the province remained part of China and, in 1955, it was granted autonomy by CCP leader Mao Zedong.
In the following decades, economic and material investment in the region raised the standard of living and provided some advantages for its non-Han inhabitants, but these services came at a cost. Increasing Han migration displaced Uyghurs from their indigenous lands and started causing tensions.
It is these changing social dynamics that set the scene for unrest in Xinjiang, not a religious drive to wage “jihad” as has been claimed. Thus, in the late 20th century, ethnic tensions in the province were rooted in Uighur concerns over self-governance, cultural preservation, educational opportunities, or labour and health issues.
The disparities between Han immigrants and Indigenous people played a significant role in fuelling separatist sentiments and movements in the region. Uighurs had legitimate concerns about their sovereignty and freedoms but had little power to enact change. Often local demonstrations against government policies were suppressed, with state violence intensifying after the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Throughout the 1990s both local and transnational movements calling for Uighur independence were established, most notably the East Turkestan Information Center and the World Uyghur Youth Congress.
By the late-1990s, a series of bombings in public transportation and at a police station in the Xinjiang capital Ürümqi and were attributed to “East Turkestan separatists”. In 1997, the CCP launched the “Strike Hard” campaign to combat separatism. It gave security agencies the green light to enact massive arrests and swift executions of suspected separatists.
Uighur activists argued that the government was using accusations of separatism to suppress any form of Uighur dissent and criticism of state policies. Some even claimed that violent incidents were falsely attributed to Uighur separatists in order to justify ramping up repressive measures.
The 9/11 attacks gave this anti-separatism campaign a whole new direction. In their aftermath, US President George W Bush warned world leaders that they had to make a choice: be with America or on the side of the terrorists. China made its choice clear: It voted in favour of UN Security Council resolutions urging international action against terrorism and expressed its commitment to the “war on terror”.
The US reciprocated this sign of cooperation by identifying the little-known ETIM as a worldwide terrorist organisation and adding it to the US Terrorism Exclusion List in the summer of 2002. The UN followed suit on the one-year anniversary of 9/11.
The basis for the designation was flimsy at best. Beijing accused ETIM of violent terrorism causing numerous deaths in the 1990s but there was little evidence to support these claims. US intelligence maintained they gathered relevant information about the group’s alleged terrorist activity during interrogations of 22 Uighurs at Guantanamo Bay, who were detained in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their testimonies revealed that in 2002, ETIM was a small group of fighters based in Afghanistan with no real ties to global “jihadist” networks that posed no serious terror threat.
This did not matter, however. With official international support of “war on terror” proponents, the legal and political apparatus had already been set in motion to frame and justify the CCP’s crackdown on any Uighur dissent as an anti-terrorism effort. The ETIM’s designation as a terrorist organisation thus became the linchpin of US complicity in the CCP’s oppression of Uighurs.
The frequency of Uighur protests within Xinjiang decreased throughout the 2000s, in part due to the increasingly repressive measures enacted after 9/11. However, in July 2009, the social tensions between Han and Uighur residents of Ürümqi boiled over. A complex set of labour issues, public rumour, racial biases, and communal frustration resulted in inter-ethnic violence that killed almost 200 people and injured more than 1,000, according to the Chinese government.
CCP officials and Chinese state media claimed the unrest was catalyzed by Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uyghur Congress, which they also asserted was a “terrorist” group working with ETIM.
The Uighur terrorism narrative has also justified harsher practices of social control in Xinjiang. Securitisation efforts drastically intensified with the promotion of Chen Quanguo to the CCP Committee Secretary of Xinjiang in 2016. After years of developing surveillance techniques, grid management policing, and re-education programmes in Tibet, Chen brought his blueprint to Xinjiang.
Uighurs have faced extreme counterterrorism measures, including eye scans, unrestricted searches of smartphones, blocking of external media sources, and mass internment in detention centres.
Social, cultural and religious norms deemed incompatible with Han majority life have been criminalised, including women wearing face veils and men having long beards. Any display of religiosity among Uighurs has been considered suspicious and a sign of potential “terrorist” intent.
The CCP’s conflation of Uighur dissent and demands for rights and freedoms with “Islamic fundamentalism” and “terrorism” reflects the logic of the US “war on terror”, which automatically equates Muslim political activity with terrorism.
In the past few years, the plight of the Uighurs finally attracted international sympathy, especially after revelations about the abhorrent conditions Uighur detainees face in internment camps. In 2020, the US finally removed the ETIM’s designation as a “terrorist organisation” and went as far as declaring suppression of Uighurs a genocide.
This, however, cannot erase the key role the US government played in leading international acceptance of Beijing’s repressive measures against the community. The US “war on terror” has been truly devastating for millions of Muslims, who have had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, including Uighurs.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
16. How Active-Duty Officers Should Criticize Policy and Practice
An analysis of Lt Col Scehhler's recent actions and the ability of active duty personnel to speak truth to power.
How Active-Duty Officers Should Criticize Policy and Practice
By Major Brian Kerg, U.S. Marine Corps
September 2021 Proceedings Vol. 147/9/1423
Disagreement, debate, candor, and criticism are not just permitted but encouraged within the sea services. However, Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller’s recent relief from command risks giving the appearance that this is not true. Can debate exist when military leaders who challenge policy are immediately cashiered?
Yes, it can—when done professionally. There is a fine line between honest critique and undermining faith in the chain of command. On one side, service members are given wide latitude to vigorously debate policy and practice. On the other, members risk conflating private opinion for official policy, can abuse the privilege of their office, and set bad examples to those they are charged to lead. This issue is simultaneously simple and complex.
The Video
Lieutenant Colonel Scheller, then the commanding officer of Advanced Infantry Training Battalion–East, posted a video on social media criticizing the decisions of the most senior leaders in the Department of Defense regarding foreign policy. He made this post shortly after the 26 August ISIS-K attack against U.S. military members and civilians at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. Specifically, Scheller named or implied failures by the Secretary of Defense, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and the commander of U.S. Central Command. Scheller claimed that none of these leaders advised the President against certain courses of action during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Ultimately, he demanded accountability for what he claimed were foreign policy failures. Within hours, he was relieved from his position for a loss of trust and confidence in his ability to command.The video and its consequences went viral and engendered heated debate. Like many others, I have watched the discussions and comments play out on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and message boards. I also have fielded questions from peers and protégés attempting to understand this episode’s many factors. Some camps celebrated Scheller for his willingness to sacrifice his career for his principles, or for giving voice to some service members who share his opinion of the handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Other camps have roundly condemned Scheller for daring to question policy out of turn. Analysis of this discussion reveals significant confusion about the essential issue: Is honest, frank critique of policy and practice truly permitted?
Yes, it is! Examples abound. Then–active-duty Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling offers a stark contrast to Scheller in how to do so through two routes—publicly and within the institution. Publicly, Yingling published the article “A Failure in Generalship” in the Armed Forces Journal in 2007. He criticized general officers for perceived failures in their conduct of the post-invasion occupation of Iraq. While it certainly got a lot of attention—and he took a lot of flak for his views—it did not preclude him from being selected for promotion to the rank of colonel (though he chose to retire as a lieutenant colonel rather than accept promotion and stay on active duty). Inside the institution, and prior to the publication of the article, he expressed similar arguments in interviews for the Army’s oral history archives.
Some may claim that times have changed since 2007, making the contrast between Yingling and Scheller less relevant in today’s hypercharged social media environment. Criticism today can be seen more rapidly not just by more senior individuals, but also by their subordinates. The immediate and wide visibility of Scheller’s video, one could argue, got it in front of too many people, too soon, prompting the system to shut him down.
So, what’s the difference? What makes one case worthy of relief while other cases face no adverse consequences?
Standards of Conduct
The essential point is largely addressed in Department of Defense Directive 5500.7-R: Standards of Conduct. The pertinent section is paragraph 2-207, which concerns disclaimers for speeches and writings:
“A DoD employee who uses or permits the use of his military grade or who includes or permits the inclusion of his title or position as one of several biographical details given to identify himself in connection with teaching, speaking, or writing . . . shall make a disclaimer if the subject of the teaching, speaking, or writing deals in significant part with any ongoing or announced policy, program or operation of the DoD. . .”
Specifically, the speaker or author, “shall expressly state that the views presented are those of the speaker or author and do not necessarily represent the views of DoD or its Components.”
Regarding speeches or oral presentations, “the disclaimer may be given orally provided it is given at the beginning of the oral presentation.”1
In addition, authors should always be aware of the classification of any material they are discussing. If the information is classified or sensitive in any way—even unclassified information that may, in aggregate, lead to a compromise of classified information or disclosure of operational security—then a security review is required.2 If authors intend to discuss the official positions of their command, a public affairs review is necessary.
In reading Standards of Conduct, it is immediately apparent that service members have significant leeway in their speech and writing. The greatest restraint involves partisan political speech, to avoid the politicization of the military. The restrictions on political speech are covered in Department of Defense Directive1344.01: Political Activities by Members of the Armed Force. The dangers regarding such speech on social media are analyzed in detail in Dr. Heidi Urben’s Proceedings article, “Partisan Activity on Social Media Hurts the Military Profession.” Dr. Urben discusses several elements present in the Scheller case. In sum, service members must avoid partisan and insubordinate speech in the public sphere. Beyond that, though, active-duty military members are free to say and do a lot. They can even openly criticize policy and call for reform. Honest and open feedback is possible and common. It just must be done in the right way.
Thankfully, the professional military journals generally have disclaimers printed in every issue and on their digital platforms, extending this disclaimer to online material and associated podcasts. In the case of Proceedings, this disclaimer is found on page three of every issue. Other professionally run outlets include a disclaimer as a matter of course; the Center for International Maritime Security operates the Sea Control podcast, and the hosts issue the required verbal disclaimer at the top of each episode. This illustrates an essential benefit of expressing criticism in professional publishing outlets—they know the norms of the profession and serve as guard rails that can protect authors and speakers from themselves, especially as they are learning the ropes of public presentation in any format.
In the case of social media, each service has produced social media guidebooks that offer guidance nested within the Standards of Conduct. While they address the nuances of the social media landscape that the authors of Standards of Conduct did not anticipate, this guidance reasonably expresses the limitations imposed on conduct on social media platforms to avoid the appearance of partisan political activity or conduct or endorsement of activity contrary to any service policy. For example, just as service members cannot distribute literature on behalf of a partisan political activity, neither can they post direct links to a political party, campaign, group, or cause on social media.3
Finally, service members are not limited to public venues in offering lawful criticism. DoD and the military services have mechanisms that allow feedback to rise up the chain of command without assuming the risks addressed in the Standards of Conduct. Submitting materials to centers of excellence, centers for lessons learned, and historical branches, as well as writing information papers and after-action reports are just a handful of the many ways available to service members. Each has a different reach and scope, yet each offers its own utility to service members who want to make a difference.
Walking the Line
Debate and discussion are prerequisites for the growth and improvement of the U.S. military. Senior leaders encourage frank examination of service policy and practice, including writing in professional journals such as Proceedings. Junior and midgrade military leaders are challenged to “enter the arena.” But even cage matches have rules, and for good reason.
While I refer to the recent Scheller case, my argument is not about that case or the people involved. Rather, it is about teaching service members how to share their insights responsibly and professionally, because the military needs their thoughts now more than ever. In offering their thoughts, they must also be taught—most importantly through the example of those senior to them—to do so while respecting their obligations as leaders who have sworn oaths to the Constitution. Honest criticism and professionalism are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they are complementary. In criticizing, we must remain, first and foremost, responsible leaders.
17. Michelangelos of Strategy: Linguistic Chisels, Sculptural Forms, and the Art of Strategy
Elena Wicker is doing some interesting work with AI and Clausewitz (and jargon!). Follow her on twitter: @ElenaWicker
Excerpts:
The more subtle lesson is how the relationship between strategist, medium, and viewer creates a trinity of mutual constitution: each of the three is created through interaction, visibility, and exchange with the other components. The artist applies the technical skills and processes developed in training, putting chisel to marble or pen to paper, but each piece of art is constrained by the sponsor’s vision, the medium, and the tools and molds made available. The medium is shaped by the artist’s hand, but the marble’s occlusions, fault lines, and veins can reject the artist’s plans upon contact, rebounding to shape the artist’s approach in turn. The viewer experiences and interprets both sculpture and sculptor, their responses and interjections modifying the final product or inspiring the sprinkling of marble dust.
Strategy, like art, requires a unique talent and disposition, an eye for both minute detail and overall composition, time, training, and the uninhibited opportunity to create. There is no lack of talent, artistry, or creativity in the guild of American strategists. When given a block of marble and the latitude to truly innovate, the results can be astounding works of art. American strategy attempts to present a contrapposto, the relaxed confidence of a superpower with the slight twist of dynamic responsiveness to external actors or new challenges. The interplay of sculptural style, artistic license, qualities of the medium, and external comment are perpetual. As Carl von Clausewitz stated, “In war the result is never final.”[31] Artists from poets to filmmakers share this view, often repeating the adage that “art is never finished, only abandoned.”[32]
Michelangelos of Strategy: Linguistic Chisels, Sculptural Forms, and the Art of Strategy
Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked university and professional military education students to participate in our fifth annual writing contest by sending us their thoughts on strategy.
Now, we are pleased to present one of the essays selected for Honorable Mention, from Elena Wicker, a student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Strategy is often described as both an art and a science. Complete oeuvres on the art of war litter military reading lists, and a professional education would be inadequate without a military science component. Yet, as Bernard Brodie stated in his lecture to the Naval War College in 1958, but for a few exceptions “both art and science have generally been lacking in what is presumed to be strategic studies.”[1] A great deal of attention has been paid to the scientific aspects of strategy, and processes abound to steer strategists through stepwise methodologies to calculate capabilities and answer strategic problems. Given that strategy is as much art as it is science, how is the art of strategy trained? Furthermore, what can critique of art reveal about strategy?
Sculpture, like strategy, is a three-dimensional art form that relies on spatial relations and perspective to alter and reflect its environment. As opposed to a painting that can only be viewed from a single plane, sculpture can be seen and experienced from infinite points of view. Sculpture moves the intellect and the senses; strategic sculpture moves armies. Just as Michelangelo Buonarroti worked in marble and fresco, the strategist shapes orders, concepts, memos, white papers, budgets, and strategies. Michelangelo’s tools were hammer, chisel, and paintbrush, and the tools of the strategist are language and logic. This article draws lessons from four classical sculptural techniques—casting, carving, modeling, and assemblage—to illustrate questions and challenges for the modern artist of strategy. These styles are not mutually exclusive. Over the course of a lifetime an artist is likely to draw on multiple styles, media, and subjects, just as the strategist will encounter a variety of questions, assumptions, and challenges over the course of their career.
First, historical contexts and assumptions have created a set of molds from which both strategists and their work is cast. Second, Michelangelo’s belief that statues exist in the marble and the artist’s task is to release these angels through carving relates to positivism: the idea that generalizable rules about the world and war exist and can be identified. Third, the American modeling of strategy has segmented the battlefield into domains, distributing strategic development for each domain to different corners of the workshop. This is done with the assumption that when those pieces are returned to the shared armature, each segment will fit together seamlessly. Fourth, and finally, is assemblage or the art of complex systems. The adhesives that attempt to glue disparate service contributions together are called by many names—jointness, multi-domain, integration, synergy—yet the cracks and seams between services remain points of weakness, and if one component fails, the entire structure may crumble.
Yet, art is so much more than connecting chisel to marble or paintbrush to paper. Brodie submitted to his Naval War College audience that strategy is undervalued in the U.S. military because of a false belief that strategy is easy.[2] Art has been similarly evaluated. As one critic of Pablo Picasso’s work commented, “I have seen the work of insane persons confined in asylums who lean toward art, and I will say that the drawings of these insane artists are far superior to the alleged works of art I saw at the exhibition.”[3] Reducing strategy to an axiom of fog and friction or to ends, ways, and means is not art per se, just as slapping paint on paper was not the genius of Picasso. Strategy, like art, is an interplay of actors, produced through the interactive trinity of artist, medium, and audience. Just as sculptural masterpieces are exhibited in galleries to shape the senses of a public audience, strategy is displayed in an international gallery where it shapes a global audience’s sense of security or lack thereof.
Casting: The Molds of History and the Command Track
A contemporary mold for a cast bronze sculpture (Tizzano Sculpture)
When casting a sculpture, liquified medium is poured into a mold and allowed to solidify. The final sculpture is revealed once the mold is cut away or removed. There are two critical molds in modern strategy: that of the strategist, and of strategy itself.
The first type of mold creates a service member. A soldier, airman, sailor, or marine is liquid potential, first cast in the mold of the tactician through their service’s basic training. This mold emphasizes the implementation and mastery of existing doctrine and accepted practices of warfare. A newly cast soldier attempts to master their craft and excel in tactical positions until they reach a level of experience that qualifies them for functional areas. If selected, the soldier enters Functional Area 59, the Army’s strategist program. Just as Michelangelo shone as a sculptor, painter, and prolific poet, so the newborn FA59 strategist must now perform as an academic, researcher, planner, and artist of strategy. Having first been cast as a tactician, becoming a strategist requires that the soldier be re-forged.
To become a strategist, the soldier passes through a series of crucibles intended to heat and hammer the soldier out of the shape of their first tactician cast into a new strategic form. Strategists are asked to envision the future battlefield, forecast unforeseeable threats, question and modify existing doctrine, and embrace change and experimentation. Despite heavy investment in the development of these soldiers, historically strategists almost never see the critical command positions for which they were intentionally forged.[4] Retired General Robert Scales argues the Army promotion system “grinds these officers off at field grade.”[5] According to a 2020 study by the RAND Corporation, general officers are frequently selected from the ranks of combat branches due to proven success in small unit tactical leadership, or, how well they fit the cast of the tactician.[6] This was not always the case. By today’s standards, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s undistinguished career and extended time as a staff officer prior to 1941 should have undermined any possibility of his appointment to general officer, much less Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.[7] Today, despite the strategic responsibilities of command, the shape of command is the mold of the tactician.
This is not to say that the strategist is superior to the tactician. Militaries require both, and likely fewer strategists than tacticians. Rather, it is necessary to recognize that the attributes intentionally inculcated in strategists to develop creative analytical thinkers may be the exact reasons why they are deemed poorly suited for command. There are few true Michelangelos of strategy: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini, Mahan, Corbett, Mitchell, and Douhet among others.
Michelangelo was recognized as a genius of his day, yet few strategists receive that same regard, instead tending to exemplify the difference between tactical and strategic genius. Alfred Thayer Mahan was a Navy misfit whose dislike of steam-powered vessels led him to avoid sea duty whenever possible.[8] When Mahan was placed in command, he had an unfortunate predisposition that would likely have ended his military career in present times—he presided over the collision of nearly every ship under his command with anchored vessels, dry dock caissons, even other ships on open seas. He was not the only Michelangelo who ran contrary to the molds of his position. Giulio Douhet was imprisoned for a year after being court-martialed for his criticisms of Italian leadership.[9] Billy Mitchell’s aggressive pursuit of new strategic approaches led to a demotion, conviction in a court-martial for insubordination, and finally resignation. If past masters of strategy were not perfectly cast from the mold of their time and place, how should the military protect misfit virtuosos within their ranks today? Are there any procedures in place for identifying and protecting the next Mahan or Douhet?
The second type of mold is that into which the language of modern strategy is cast. As the medium of strategy is language, the molds in which strategic art is cast are formed from assumptions and beliefs. The molds of modern strategy are created in the syllabi of strategic education courses: the War Colleges, and to continue the example of the Army, the Basic Strategic Arts Program and the School of Advanced Military Studies. Modern strategy has been cast in the historical images of the plains of Gettysburg, the trenches of the Western Front, the beaches of Normandy, the Persian Gulf, and the streets of Saigon. Alongside the staff of the War Colleges, Thucydides and Napoleon serve as instructors. Despite thousands of conflicts throughout human history, these seven select historical contexts define the education of a generation of strategic thinkers. Do these molds, shaped by terrain, sovereignty, and conventional capabilities still hold true for wars in space and cyberspace, or for irregular war?
Theories and strategies are a snapshot of a time and place, each cast in a mold created from the historical, political, and social context of its temporal moment. Just as single-use molds are destroyed in the process of releasing the final piece of art, the context of any single theory or strategy will never be entirely recreated at a future time. Furthermore, strategies are created with the intent to shape environments and change the context in which they were created. As a result, strategy is a sculpture intentionally designed to break the mold in which it was created.
Other types of molds can be reused, but these will degrade with time and repeated use. Artists cannot ignore the continuous degradation of their sculptural molds; they are continuously examined, evaluated, and if necessary, remade. Mold creation is a constant dynamic interplay between the artist, their tools, the medium, and the final sculpture. Recycling strategic concepts, formats, and approaches can provide a false sense of artistry and risks importing outdated historical assumptions. As the world evolves, a static mold of strategy that attempts to recapture historical genius will become less and less applicable. Strategists cannot disregard the natural deterioration of lessons and assumptions drawn from historical contexts, lest the United States find itself attempting to fight a Napoleonic land war over the ephemeral terrain of cyberspace.
Carving: Positivism as Subtractive Sculpture
Michelangelo's unfinished carving "The Atlas," circa 1530-1534 (Galleria dell ‘Accademia)
In subtractive sculpture, the artist begins with a large piece of the medium and painstakingly removes pieces of the medium to eventually reveal the work of art. To Michelangelo, sculpture was the art of taking away.[10] Pope Benedict XVI described Michelangelo’s view of the artist’s task as removing that which covered an image already set in the stone. He described Michelangelo as seeing art as “a bringing to light, a setting free, not as a doing.”[11] The idea that every block of marble contains a statue is the essence of positivism. Positivism suggests there are generalizable laws that can be identified with the right question, approach, and rigor.[12] Essentially, this world is full of statues and, with the right approaches, they can be discovered.
The U.S. military approaches warfare in a similar manner to Michelangelo. To date, the U.S. military has named dozens of unique types of war. Adjectival war includes conventional, irregular, hybrid, cold, trench, proxy, asymmetric, cyber, and otherwise. Naming war, or types and subsets of war, bounds a set of instances and suggests there is something unique about each category of conflict. According to positivist thinking, each category should have a set of generalizable rules, and, through application of the scientific method, those rules can be identified. [13] Identification of the rules allows for the optimization of strategies. Each adjectival war is a statue.
Colin Gray pushed back against this linguistic segmentation of warfare with a simple statement: “War is war.”[14] When considering the nature of war, other strategists saw a pantheon of statues, while Gray saw a single angel in the marble. War is war. As for the character of war, war is “more than a true chameleon,” and in more modern terms, the joint environment is “fluid.”[15,16] If, in fact, war is a perpetually changing chameleon, efforts to identify general laws will nearly always be fruitless. Analysts may say that words matter, but frequently this focus is on the meaning of one term versus another rather than the naming process itself. Whenever a new type of adjectival war is introduced, there is an implicit suggestion that this new type is categorically unique from the preexisting forms of war. In Michelangelo’s notes for the carving of David, he describes carving as simple, “you just go down to the skin and stop.” Where does the United States’ carving of war stop?
The interaction of artist and medium not only sculpts the medium, the interplay develops and shapes the artist as well. In the process of carving, the artist will come across unexpected occlusions and veins in the marble, shifting their approach to highlight different features. The interaction of strategist, strategy, and context are mutually constitutive. Strategists are shaped by their apprenticeships to other strategists, the strategies upon which they were trained, their prior experiences, and repeated interaction with their medium. American strategists are both the sculptor and the sculpted. This means the strategist must recognize their lack of objectivity. The strategist exists in the same context as their art—molded by the same assumptions, context, and pressures as the strategy they are attempting to craft. Essentially, as an artist, a military strategist is not viewing the marble from an external stance, they are themselves embedded in the same block of marble as the statue they seek to reveal.
Strategic artwork is not only created for those embedded in the American marble matrix, but also for an external audience who are sculpted from a different set of values, experiences, cultures, assumptions, and biases. If the American strategist is a sculptor, allies and adversaries may be metalworkers, glassblowers, or printmakers. In recognition of the embedded strategist, scientific approaches to strategy should embrace an “attitude of doubt.”[17] This approach vocalizes and emphasizes the choices made while crafting strategy. No assumption is so obvious as to escape questioning, even supposedly simple questions of war and peace. As General Joseph F. Dunford stated, “We think of being at peace or at war… our adversaries don’t think that way.”[18] A reflexive attitude embraces ongoing self-questioning, unearths and examines deeply institutionalized assumptions, and ultimately illustrates the matrix of American marble.
Modeling: Armatures of History and The Segmentation of War
Maquette of a horse (Pinterest)
As opposed to subtractive processes, modelling is an additive technique. Pliable materials are added to a framework and molded to build the final piece of art. A common first step for a sculpture of this type is the creation of a maquette or a scale model.[19] The maquette informs the creation of the armature. Armatures provide a stable framework upon which the sculpture is constructed. The maquettes and armatures of modern strategy are the skeletons of past strategy: the instruments of national power; ends, ways, and means; strict formatting requirements; and oblique wording recycled from one strategy to the next.
What are the segments added to the armature to craft strategy? I offer the domains of war. Each service is responsible for conquering or contesting a domain of the battlefield. The ground battle has remained with the U.S. Army, the segment containing air targets has been apportioned to the U.S. Air Force, space is newly granted to the U.S. Space Force, and any sea-based warfare or coastline assault is kneaded into shape by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Within these segments, even greater partitioning occurs as specialty units claim their areas of expertise. Yet, domains are not fundamental to warfare. In fact, the term itself is not defined anywhere in doctrine. In almost off-hand notation, domains are described as an area of activity within the operating environment.[20] While shared knowledge and activity are a more recent definition of the term, etymologically, the word domain is derived from a Latin root for ownership and households.[21] Domains are that which belongs to a lord or authority.[22] Domains encompass that which belongs to the services.
A close study of segments can inform a greater understanding of the whole. Michelangelo studied human anatomy through the dissection of cadavers, building his deep knowledge of anatomy that would later be expressed in marble and bas-relief.[23] Just as Michelangelo studied musculature, strategists study the specifics of the historical cases that comprise a strategic education. In this same vein, strategists of each service specialize in the domains over which they have been given dominion. But as Clausewitz warns, “In war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.”[24] Strategy and sculpture are complex systems. If any single piece of the final sculpture is inadequate, the entirety of the complex system will fail. “Even when the likelihood of failure in each component is slight, the probability of an overall failure can be high if many components are involved.”[25] If any section of the strategy fails, the entirety of the campaign is at risk.
Ideally, each service would sculpt their segment of the strategy and, when complete, return that piece to the center of the workshop where it would be seamlessly joined with the portions created by the other services. In reality, regardless of intentions, this segmentation and distribution of segments of the battlefield invariably creates boundaries. These boundaries between domains are less walls between services than they are chasms—capabilities that exist at the edges tend to fall into the void. The plight of the A-10 Warthog and other service-bridging capabilities illustrate these crevasses. Domain strategies developed in isolated corners of the workshop may become delinked from their counterparts—an air campaign delinked from the fight on the ground. When returned to the armature, the parts reassembled no longer resemble the ideal whole. Rather than Michelangelo’s David, the final result is Frankenstein’s monster.
Assemblage: The Kintsugi of Jointness
Pablo Picasso's “Guitar,”1912 paper assemblage (Museum of Modern Art)
The last technique of sculpture is assemblage, a technique made famous by Pablo Picasso during the cubist movement. Assemblage is like collage—numerous pieces are combined to create the final work of art. Assemblage is perhaps the closest analogy to modern strategy of all classical sculptural techniques. As the battlespace has expanded, portions of campaigns have been delineated and distributed to the services. Each service was deemed best suited to optimize strategy in their area of expertise. As a result of the partitioning and distribution to those deemed expert, strategies have proliferated in number but contracted in scope. Rather than an intricate complex system, the map of all of these existing strategies has come to resemble bricolage or patchwork.
Efforts to assemble the pieces of warfighting are called by many names—jointness, combined, all-domain, multi-domain, cross-domain, et cetera. All are efforts to bridge severed connections. Rather than question the organizational and strategic decisions that severed the connective tissue between the segments of war, the services have latched onto technical solutions such as Joint All-Domain Command and Control. These are often ideas for how to bridge gaps rather than close the distance between fragments. These terms proliferate jargon and play into the buzzword bingo that plagues the U.S. military. Strategy does not knit back together stronger at the fracture. Rather, every point of segmentation creates a fault line and a potential weakness. Strategy and sculpture share this tendency—they are most likely to fracture at the points where they have been joined.
Combining the branches of the military is not a feasible recommendation and is not one that this article is making. The vested interests, diverse service cultures, and organizational habits would make reunification of forces extraordinarily difficult, as past Canadian efforts at unification clearly demonstrated.[26] When the Goldwater-Nichols Act was signed, joint assignments were hotbeds of friction and surveillance. Congress noted that military officers are “pressured or monitored for loyalty by their services while serving on joint assignments” and “joint thinkers were likely to be punished, while service promoters were likely to be rewarded.”[27] Decades later, jointness is still challenged. It may not be possible to unify the sprawling bureaucracies and responsibilities of the various armed services, but it may be possible to reunify the United States’ picture of war.
Tea bowl repaired using the Kintsugi method (Wikimedia)
American jointness is the stitching on Frankenstein’s monster—ugly but effective. Jointness would be better served if it were treated as kintsugi. The Japanese art of golden joinery is a technique for repairing broken pottery in which gold, silver, or platinum are mixed into the lacquer used to reconnect the broken fragments. Jointness is not broken in the sense that it is defective. Culture, habit, and isolation have severed the connective tissue between the services, fracturing the overall sculpture of American strategy. Rather than hiding breakage, kintsugi embraces the repair, draws the eye to the beauty of imperfection, and treats the fractures as opportunities for growth and improvement.[28]
A kintsugi approach to jointness would mix gold dust into the epoxy used to fill the gaps between services by incentivizing joint positions, assignments, and programs. Goldwater-Nichols made the first attempt to mix gold dust into the cracks between the services by making joint assignments a requirement for promotion to general officer. But what further precious metals could be mixed into the joint assignment system? Requirements for earlier career joint assignments, increased inter-service officer exchanges and rotations, and extending the depth of joint commands could begin to incentivize inter-service cooperation. But the military should also consider how to protect against further fragmentation. Rather than breaking cyber officers out into yet another service, perhaps the military should maintain the distribution of cyber expertise throughout the joint force. Even more radically, it could rotate cyber specialists across services periodically so that individuals develop deep knowledge of various systems, build relationships and cultural competency in several services, and most importantly, gain the trust of multiple services. A distributed, multi-service cyber corps may be a concrete opportunity for digital golden joinery. Such a solution would place people first and create a culture of jointness rather than further divide the military in search of technical solutions. When incentives and attention are shifted to the chasms between service fragments, rather than mainly service specialization, the programs and people who work in those spaces may close the distance between the services.
The Strategic Galleria dell ’Accademia
Today, David stands in contrapposto in the Galleria dell ‘Accademia in Florence, Italy. Contrapposto is a sculptural position in which the subject places their weight on the leading leg, and twists the upper body slightly off of a central axis. The figure appears relaxed, yet the pose implies movement and dynamism. Psychological research has shown this slight twist is one of the most pleasing presentations of the human form.[29] Strategy is this same deceptive balance. There is the appearance of relaxation and confidence, yet an implied dynamism and capability for movement. While conducting peaceful freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea with a determined confidence, the U.S. Navy maintains the ability to rapidly shift to a dynamic warfighting posture. As Michelangelo balanced David in contrapposto, so the strategist crafts in counterbalance and counterforce. The strategist is perpetually seeking the equipoise of power, the demands of the present and the requirements of the future, and the tendencies of reason, passion, and chance.
Strategy is cast in the molds of history, carved from the environment, assembled in the workshop, and finally displayed to an international audience. This last feature of art must not be overlooked. Unclassified strategy, like art, is intended to be displayed and seen. Both sculpture and strategy signal aesthetic decisions, priorities, and choices. A further feature of art is its interpretability. Art is not only a physical object; it is an experience. The global community shares an international gallery, displaying strategic masterpieces to signal priorities and focal points. Just as art draws different emotions from its viewers, strategy seeks to convey different messages to ally and adversary.
Upon David’s completion, Piero Soderini, a representative of the guild that commissioned David, is believed to have critiqued David’s nose—saying that it was too thick and required revision. On the high scaffolding, Michelangelo tapped gently and tossed marble dust in a performance of alteration that left the original nose untouched. When asked about the new nose, the sponsor commented that it was much improved and truly brought the statue to life.[30] While perhaps apocryphal, the lesson from this story is two-fold. The simple lesson is that the sponsor made an ignorant request and Michelangelo fooled him to protect an irreplaceable work of art.
The more subtle lesson is how the relationship between strategist, medium, and viewer creates a trinity of mutual constitution: each of the three is created through interaction, visibility, and exchange with the other components. The artist applies the technical skills and processes developed in training, putting chisel to marble or pen to paper, but each piece of art is constrained by the sponsor’s vision, the medium, and the tools and molds made available. The medium is shaped by the artist’s hand, but the marble’s occlusions, fault lines, and veins can reject the artist’s plans upon contact, rebounding to shape the artist’s approach in turn. The viewer experiences and interprets both sculpture and sculptor, their responses and interjections modifying the final product or inspiring the sprinkling of marble dust.
Strategy, like art, requires a unique talent and disposition, an eye for both minute detail and overall composition, time, training, and the uninhibited opportunity to create. There is no lack of talent, artistry, or creativity in the guild of American strategists. When given a block of marble and the latitude to truly innovate, the results can be astounding works of art. American strategy attempts to present a contrapposto, the relaxed confidence of a superpower with the slight twist of dynamic responsiveness to external actors or new challenges. The interplay of sculptural style, artistic license, qualities of the medium, and external comment are perpetual. As Carl von Clausewitz stated, “In war the result is never final.”[31] Artists from poets to filmmakers share this view, often repeating the adage that “art is never finished, only abandoned.”[32]
Elena Wicker is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations at Georgetown University and a 2021-2022 Predoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. She researches military innovation, jargon, and the past, present, and future of strategy.
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Header Image: Section of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” a panel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, The Vatican (Wikimedia)
Notes:
[1] Bernard Brodie, “Strategy as an Art and a Science,” Naval War College Review 11, no. 6 (1959): 2.
[2] Brodie, 12.
[3] “Medical Science’s Protest Against New ‘Art,’” The Washington Times, October 9, 1921.
[4] Kimberly Jackson et al., “Raising the Flag: Implications of U.S. Military Approaches to General and Flag Officer Development” (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 2020), 58.
[5] Robert H. Scales, “Are You A Strategic Genius?: Not Likely, Given Army’s System for Selecting, Educating Leaders,” Association of the United States Army (blog), October 13, 2016, https://www.ausa.org/articles/army-system-selecting-educating-leaders.
[6] Jackson et al., “Raising the Flag: Implications of U.S. Military Approaches to General and Flag Officer Development,” 45–50.
[7] U.S. Army Center for Military History, Dwight David Eisenhower: The Centennial (U.S. Army Center for Military History, 1990).
[8] Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Princeton Paperbacks (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986), 445.
[9] Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari, 2019 Air University Press Edition (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 1921), ix.
[10] Michelangelo Buonarroti, “Lettera a Messer Benedetto Varchi,” XVI Secolo, G. Milanesi, Firenze 1875.
[11] Cited in Paolo Gulisano, Tolkien. Il Mito e La Grazia (Milano: Ancora, 2007), 134.
[12] Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences, BCSIA Studies in International Security (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2005), 131–32.
[13] Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes, Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 47.
[14] Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt? (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2006), 4.
[15] Carl Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 89.
[16] Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Joint Publication 3-0: Joint Operations” (The Joint Staff, October 22, 2018), ix.
[17] Markus Haverland and Dvora Yanow, “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Public Administration Research Universe: Surviving Conversations on Methodologies and Methods,” Public Administration Review 72, no. 3 (May 2012): 401–8, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02524.x.
[18] Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Joint Doctrine Note 1-19: Competition Continuum” (The Joint Staff, June 3, 2019), 1.
[19] “Sculpture: Three-Dimensional Art Made by One of Four Basic Processes: Carving, Modelling, Casting, Constructing,” The Tate Modern (blog), accessed May 19, 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/sculpture.
[20] “Multi-Domain Battle: Evolution of Combined Arms for the 21st Century 2025-2040 Version1.0” (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, December 2017), 75.
[21] James Donald, ed., Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1874), 117.
[22] Walter W. Skeat, Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Oxford at the Clarendon Press (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1927), 149.
[23] Domenico Laurenza, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy: Images from a Scientific Revolution (New York : New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art ; distributed by Yale University Press, 2012), 15.
[24] Clausewitz, On War, 75.
[25] Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185, no. 4157 (1974): 1124–31.
[26] “Bill C-243 Canadian Forces Reorganization Act” (1966).
[27] James R. Locher, Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the Pentagon, Texas A&M University Military History Series (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 444.
[28] Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Point Reyes, Calif: Imperfect Publ, 2008).
[29] Farid Pazhoohi et al., “Waist-to-Hip Ratio as Supernormal Stimuli: Effect of Contrapposto Pose and Viewing Angle,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 49, no. 3 (April 2020): 837–47, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-019-01486-z.
[30] Story recounted in Richard Duppa and Quatremere de Quincy, The Lives and Works of Michael Angelo and Raphael (London: Bell & Daldy, York Street, Covent Garden, 1872), 25.
[31] Clausewitz, On War, 80.
[32] Originally attributed to Paul Valéry, “Au Sujet Du Cimetière Marin,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, March 1933, 399–412.
18. Back to the Future: Rediscovering Operational Art in an Era of Great Power Competition
Some interesting food for thought. Interestingly the army has cut the red team course at Ft Leavenworth (along with others focused on the human domain and critical thinking).
There is the potential, in the early 2020s, to reinvent the US approach to war in the same way that DePuy and Starry did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There are parallels beyond the desire to put counterinsurgency in the rearview mirror between now and then. Today, as in the post-Vietnam years, the US military is viewed with decreased respect by a fractious and polarized country. Just as precision-guided munitions led to killchains that transformed conventional warfare in the 1980s, so too can successful exploitation of cyber and space domains, as well as their integration with air, land, and sea, give the US military an advantage over even a numerically superior foe today.
What will be crucial in the years ahead is a deeply rooted grasp of the reality that tactical victories amount to little or nothing when they are not aligned with strategy, and when they are not supported sufficiently to sustain or exploit gains. The importance of stimulating holistic and divergent thinking through tools such as the Army Design Methodology, other approaches to design, and red-team methods, in order to frame and reframe the problem and the ecosystem in which it exists, will also be central to improving in war.
Back to the Future: Rediscovering Operational Art in an Era of Great Power Competition - Modern War Institute
At the Munich Security Conference in February, US President Joe Biden confidently declared, “We are not looking backward; we are looking forward, together.” Yet, even as he foretold a better future, he invoked the ghosts of the country’s Cold War past: “We must prepare together for a long-term strategic competition.” Great power competition, largely now a distant memory of America’s past, was roaring back.
Unlike halcyon days bygone, however, the competition to shape the international order is focused mainly on the United States and China, with Russia often left lurking in the shadows. The competitive norms of the old Cold War have been replaced with those of the new Cold War: the nine-dash line and the South China Sea, conflict across the cyber domain, and widespread diffusion of military technology. Understandably, debate has raged over the inevitability of military conflict, defense budgets are rising in response, and emergent concepts are framed around a vision of large-scale conflict unimaginable since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Whither Operational Art?
Largely missing from that conceptual visualization, though, is the idea of operational art. Deeply rooted in Soviet military theory and long a mainstay of the grand campaigns envisioned on the plains of Europe, operational art is an inescapable component of large-scale military operations, especially those at the center of any discussion of a potential conflict with another great power. Operational art connects tactical capabilities with strategic goals. It is conceptual, in that it involves framing and understanding the problem to which military power is being applied. It is concerned with coordination, in that activities removed from each other in time and space support each other. And it is concerned with execution, not only of the tactical actions needed to achieve strategic goals but of the supporting activities on which they depend, including logistics, command and control, and force flow.
While the tacit coordination of tactical activities toward strategic goals has existed since warfare expanded beyond a single battle fought on a single day, most military historians consider the origins of operational art to be in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. The term “operational art” was coined in the early twentieth century by Russian staff officer Alexander Svechin, who analogized operational art to a path connecting the steps of tactics to the ultimate goal set by strategy. While the scale of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan did not lend itself to operational art as it has traditionally been understood, if the United States and its allies are to prepare for large-scale combat operations, more rigorous thinking about the discipline at echelons above the brigade level, as in the AirLand Battle concept that emerged in the 1980s and the Soviet schools of operational art, will be necessary.
One way of framing the importance of operational art is that properly connecting tactics to strategy is one way to avoid doing the wrong things extremely well. Harry Summers reports the (possibly apocryphal) exchange during negotiations after the Vietnam War, when an American officer said to his North Vietnamese counterpart that US forces had never been defeated in combat by the North Vietnamese. The response: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.” Without a clear understanding of how tactical engagements relate to theater strategic goals, a series of tactical victories can amount to little, or in fact to failure. The German spring offensives in 1918 are another example, in which the German army made significant territorial gains in France while exhausting itself and becoming less able to fight the incoming American Expeditionary Forces. There are also clear parallels with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty-first century, in which despite having almost every conceivable material advantage, the US-led coalitions achieved few or none of the goals for which they first went to war almost two decades ago.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets developed Deep Battle, an approach to operational art built on the lessons of World War I and the Russian Civil War. Deep Battle prioritized the destruction of enemy forces and resources throughout the battlefield, not only at the front line. It also relied upon deception, and both drove and took advantage of the industrialization of the Soviet economy and the mechanization of the Russian army in the years before World War II. Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944 was the most effective example of its implementation. Over two months, the Soviet Union destroyed twenty-eight of the thirty-four divisions that made up the German Army Group Center and took not only the territory Soviet forces had lost in previous operations but also eastern Poland.
American historian Michael Matheny identifies US operational art in World War II as the product of deliberate study and education in the Army and Navy in the 1930s. The United States fought so effectively, he argues, because it developed a joint and expeditionary approach to warfighting that took advantage of the country’s tremendous resources and industrial capacity. In the postwar period, as the focus shifted to nuclear war and the conflicts that accompanied decolonization, US operational art waned. The setbacks of the Vietnam War, among others, prompted the reinvigoration of operational art.
AirLand Battle, associated most closely with the first two directors of the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, General William DePuy and General Donn Starry, was driven both by the need to reform the Army and how it fought after Vietnam, and the vulnerabilities in previous doctrine exposed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was codified in the 1982 edition of Field Manual 100-5, Operations, and became the basis for NATO plans for a war in Europe. Alongside upgrading command-and-control technologies to exploit the increased lethality of conventional munitions, AirLand Battle included two significant conceptual shifts.
The first was the idea of the extended battlefield. Destroying the Soviet reserves would be crucial to any active conflict in the European theater. Coordinating movements at the brigade and division level in time and space could enable the destruction of these forces, while avoiding crossing the nuclear threshold. In this sense, AirLand Battle was similar to deep battle. The second was the true integration of ground and air forces. AirLand Battle was the first doctrine explicitly to define the relationship between the Army and the Air Force in supporting each other, and in coordinating to attrit the Soviet reserve while directly counterattacking.
Operation Desert Storm was the first episode in which US forces fought as imagined in AirLand Battle. The war was considered a stunning victory, despite the military failure to destroy the Republican Guard and the political decision not to topple the Iraqi government. The latter was not an objective of the campaign, but the survival of the dictator and his praetorian guard both had dire consequences for Operation Iraqi Freedom more than a decade later. However, Operation Desert Storm was so overdetermined a conflict—given superior US resources, intelligence, equipment, morale, leadership, and international support—that the victory has been described as a catastrophic success. The validity of AirLand Battle against a near-peer adversary was never tested. More importantly, the relative ease with which US forces destroyed a large (if poorly trained and led) military blinded many to the reality that winning a war involves more than simply destroying the enemy’s forces.
The US military thus went into Iraq in 2003 with a false sense of security in its understanding of how the war would be fought. Senior political and in some cases military leaders did not grasp that the destruction of enemy military forces promised by AirLand Battle would not be sufficient to achieve the theater strategic goals. Nor did they fully appreciate the role of logistics, force flow, and strategy as inputs to operational art. Additionally, the problems they confronted after the initial invasion were in many cases unsuited to existing doctrine and mindsets.
The Army You Have
In a 2013 Wired article, journalist Spencer Ackerman offered a particularly scathing review of Rumsfeld’s Rules, the collected leadership lessons of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “Who better to impart life lessons than the only defense secretary in U.S. history to screw up two wars at once?” Ackerman wrote. One of those lessons, “You go to war with the Army you have—not the Army you might wish you have,” is uniquely representative of the abandonment of operational art that marked the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This was in stark contrast to the Gulf War, where General H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s “Hail Mary” maneuver across southern Iraq was firm grounded in operational art. Even against a less-than-capable foe, operational art and the cognitive underpinnings of AirLand Battle were instrumental in bringing a quick, and arguably decisive, conclusion to the ground phase of the war.
One of the hallmarks of operational art and a linchpin during Operation Desert Storm was the logistics infrastructure necessary to assure operational reach. In his book, Moving Mountains: Lesson in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War, retired Army Lieutenant General William Pagonis recounted the challenges presented by the task of mobilizing a force of 550,000 troops and seven million tons of supplies.
That effort, sometimes derisively recalled as “just in case” logistics, ensured that coalition forces could maneuver almost at will across the vast theater of war, knowing that the necessary logistics were always within reach. Pagonis’s sustainment plan leveraged tight movement control along main supply routes and vast logistics bases to support the hub-and-spoke system that made possible the hundred-hour ground war.
A decade later, a force attuned to “just in time” logistics, where UPS and FedEx ensured that the right supplies were in the right place at the right time, answered the call. Gone were the mountains of Pagonis’s time, as were the tight movement-control measures he used to such great effect. The close synchronization and sequencing of tactical maneuver were still present, but the coordination of logistics so important to operational art was not. “You go to war,” Rumsfeld so aptly remarked, “with the army you have.”
That force launched into Iraq on March 20, 2003—a second invasion expected to bring a quick end to the rule of Saddam Hussein. However, just seven days later a combination of bad weather and logistics issues forced Lieutenant General William Wallace, commanding the Army’s V Corps, to order an operational pause to consolidate forces, secure supply lines, and prepare for the final assault on Baghdad. It was a brief, but noteworthy respite. Wallace was a brilliant commander with a deep appreciation for logistics; rather than risk early culmination, he elected to seek an operational pause to allow his forces the time necessary to resupply and refit.
Wallace’s pause is generally relegated to a footnote in most accounts of the invasion, but it foreshadowed a collapse of operational art following the fall of Baghdad. Where the close synchronization of time, space, and force is clearly evident in the march to Baghdad, the same cannot be said for the postwar phase.
When General Tommy Franks, commander of US Central Command, failed to produce a viable postwar plan for the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq, Rumsfeld turned to retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, who had led the relief effort in northern Iraq following the Gulf War. But that effort, initiated just two months prior to the invasion, and the organization Garner established, never set foot in Iraq. Instead, Rumsfeld ultimately replaced Garner with diplomat L. Paul Bremer, whose plan for Phase IV operations, Eclipse II, was built around a set of fundamentally flawed assumptions. On his first day in country, Bremer issued Coalition Provisional Authority Order 1, the de-Baathification of the Iraqi government, the first in a series of ill-conceived and poorly planned directives that would fuel the nascent insurgency.
In retrospect, it is difficult to say with any certainty whether an adherence to the tenets of operational art might have produced different results. However, it is fair to assume that doing so would not have made the situation any worse than it was. If bad policy spawns bad strategy, then maybe operational art would not have made a difference. But one thing is certain: the gap was noticed, and an effort to regain the cognitive edge was already on the horizon.
The Post-9/11 Era
Drawing on the initial lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army launched an effort to update its capstone operational doctrine, Field Manual (FM) 3-0, during the summer of 2004. The 2001 edition of the manual, which introduced the concept of full-spectrum operations, predated the attacks of 9/11. Though the manual was only three years old, there was a palpable desire among senior Army leadership to translate contemporary wartime experiences into emergent doctrine. To that end, Wallace, now the commanding general of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, assembled a core team of writers who brought that experience: all were veterans of either Afghanistan or Iraq, each having held a key leadership position in combat during the previous year.
In early 2005, the writers produced a series of white papers that represented the key areas of focus for the new doctrine. Among those papers was a proposal to commit an entire chapter of the manual to a discussion of operational art, a topic that had received scant attention in doctrine since the AirLand Battle era. Other than a brief section on the various elements of operational art in FM 100-7, Decisive Force, in 1995, little effort had been applied to broadening understanding on the subject. When the 2001 edition of FM 3-0 reached the force, the subject of operational art received only minor attention and lacked any substantive discussion whatsoever.
The first indicators that this effort would produce the necessary increased emphasis on operational art came with the release of an update to Joint Publication 3-0, Joint Operations, in 2006. Working closely with writers from Joint Forces Command, the FM 3-0 team introduced a broader discussion of the tenets of operational art in the manual. This was an important first step, since the primacy of joint doctrine often sets the tone and tenor for service doctrine. A deeper discourse on operational art in joint doctrine would provide the impetus to do the same in Army doctrine.
But operational art would take on a more substantive role in FM 3-0. That document would expand on the discussion of the elements of operational art, but it would also do something never before attempted in doctrine: provide a comprehensive framework that would add richness and context to the application of both operational art and the emergent design methodology.
To do so, however, required a more expansive approach to the underlying cognitive threads of operational art rooted in AirLand Battle. The first of those was what was known as the battle command framework: visualize, describe, and direct. While this was a sufficient model for well-structured problems, the challenges presented to coalition forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq were decidedly unstructured, or what University of California, Berkeley professors Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber described as “wicked problems” in a 1973 paper on social planning dilemmas. Rittel and Webber asserted that planning theory had evolved to address structured or “tame problems,” whereas those that involved societal issues—the norm in both Iraq and Afghanistan—were anything but tame.
A thorough understanding of both the problem and the situation are fundamental to solving wicked problems, which are by their nature dynamic as a result of the complex interactions at play in human social systems. To address this, the writing team added “understand” as an element of the battle command framework, then further expanded on it by including “lead” and “assess” to emphasize both the role of leadership in the process as well as the need to continuously frame and reframe the problem and situation as circumstances changed over time. This modest change to doctrine allowed for the codification of Army Design Methodology in FM 5-0, The Operations Process, in 2010.
Understanding is also fundamental to the application of operational art, and the expanded discussion of the topic allowed writers to directly link cognitive framing with operational art for the first time in doctrine. In turn, this fostered a much more thorough exploration of operational art, one that introduced critical language and ideas to the dialog necessary to adequately address both the changing character of conflict and the evolved cognitive framework that change required. Writers introduced the concept of stability mechanisms—a companion to the more traditional defeat mechanisms—to address the human and societal factors presented by wicked problems. The manual also replaced the term “logical lines of operation” with the more appropriate “lines of effort” and significantly expanded on their role in contemporary operations. Finally, the writing team deliberately fused the constituent elements of operational art to what would become the Army Design Methodology, ensuring that the necessary foundation was in place to further expand on emergent thinking in the coming years.
Although much of the attention on the new manual at the time focused on the return to a commander-centric doctrine, the increased emphasis on the cognitive dimension of warfare was both timely and necessary. There were instances of adaptation in Iraq, in which commanders developed a new understanding of how to link tactical capabilities with theater strategic goals. The Second Battle of Fallujah, as well as the experiences of Colonel H.R. McMaster and Colonel Sean MacFarland in Tal Afar and Ramadi, respectively, illustrate this adaptation, and the lessons drawn from these engagements informed FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency. What is notable about the latter two especially, though, is that they derived their own visions of how their areas of operations could contribute to achieving theater strategic goals that was independent of, and in some cases contradictory to, the vision of the senior military leadership in Iraq.
As the focus of US professional military education, doctrine, and planning shifts away from counterinsurgency and stability operations and toward great power competition, FM 3-24 will become less relevant. Arguably, it was less relevant even in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, being the particular product of the Iraq War. The processes that led to better warfighting in Iraq, though, will remain germane. The coordination of tactical actions in time and space, with the logistical support and capacity those actions require, toward strategic goals will be central to any conflict the United States fights in the future, as they were in the past.
The Future is Now
There is the potential, in the early 2020s, to reinvent the US approach to war in the same way that DePuy and Starry did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There are parallels beyond the desire to put counterinsurgency in the rearview mirror between now and then. Today, as in the post-Vietnam years, the US military is viewed with decreased respect by a fractious and polarized country. Just as precision-guided munitions led to killchains that transformed conventional warfare in the 1980s, so too can successful exploitation of cyber and space domains, as well as their integration with air, land, and sea, give the US military an advantage over even a numerically superior foe today.
What will be crucial in the years ahead is a deeply rooted grasp of the reality that tactical victories amount to little or nothing when they are not aligned with strategy, and when they are not supported sufficiently to sustain or exploit gains. The importance of stimulating holistic and divergent thinking through tools such as the Army Design Methodology, other approaches to design, and red-team methods, in order to frame and reframe the problem and the ecosystem in which it exists, will also be central to improving in war.
Dr. Rebecca Jensen is an assistant professor at the Canadian Forces College. She studies warfighting, particularly operational art and planning, coalition warfare, doctrine, service culture, and military change.
Image credit: Lt. Col. Brian Fickel, US Army
19. The Real Lesson of the Afghanistan Debacle
Key quote: Afghanistan has proved once again that even a superpower cannot win a war against a proxy as long as it refuses to confront the power that supports it.
The Real Lesson of the Afghanistan Debacle
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,150, September 10, 2021
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Afghanistan has proved once again that even a superpower cannot win a war against a proxy as long as it refuses to confront the power that supports it. This is of vital importance to Israel, which is facing a proxy war being waged against it by Iran via its regional proxies Hezbollah and Hamas.
The seeds of the humiliating American withdrawal from Afghanistan were laid shortly after the post 9/11 US invasion of the country, when it refrained from confronting Pakistan over its continued support of its Taliban proxy.
The Taliban was founded in 1980 as a joint US-Pakistani-Saudi effort to combat Soviet troops in Afghanistan shortly after the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Pakistan provided the geographical base and an almost endless supply of manpower, primarily Pashtuns, who comprise about 40-45% of Afghanistan and approximately 20% of Pakistan. About 85% of them live in “Pashtunistan,” which straddles the Durand line. The US provided the weapons while Saudi Arabia provided the funding to buy those weapons and cover the costs of maintaining Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.
The Pashtun-dominated Taliban rapidly emerged as the biggest and best-armed component of the mujahedeen, the umbrella organization of Afghan rebels fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
After the Soviet withdrawal, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence () continued to support the Taliban in the Afghani civil war that followed, despite the fact that the Taliban had already begun cooperating with al-Qaeda. Pakistani aid proved vital in ensuring the Taliban victory over its former less radical mujahedeen partners.
Pakistan made a great show of abandoning the Taliban after 9/11, but in reality never turned its back on its Afghani proxy. Realizing that any attempt to confront US forces would be suicidal and could spell the end of Pakistan’s vital alliance with the US, the Pakistan military convinced the Taliban to retreat without a fight to Pakistan, where, under ISI supervision, they were allowed to set up camps and training facilities.
Pakistan, with Saudi financial backing, continued to maintain the Taliban as a viable force to be deployed when, in the fullness of time, the US would tire of the neverending war in the country and begin extricating itself. In addition, Pakistan continued to play a double game with the US by allowing the ISI-backed Haqqani network to continue to operate in Pakistan. Khalil Haqqani, who, despite having a $5 million bounty on his head as a wanted terrorist, had long been a regular visitor to ISI HQ, is now is one of the new rulers of Afghanistan.
It is clear that even as late as June 2021, had the US made clear to Pakistan that if it didn’t ensure that the Taliban would permit a peaceful and orderly withdrawal of all US personnel and their Afghan allies who wished to leave the country there would be hell to pay, this debacle would never have happened. The US has almost unlimited leverage over Pakistan, from applying crippling sanctions to broadly hinting it would give India a green light to retake the parts of Kashmir () that have been under unrecognized Pakistani occupation since 1948. Given the huge disparity between Pakistani and American capabilities, Pakistan’s limited nuclear capabilities would have been irrelevant, because 165 warheads mounted on relatively short range (2,650 kilometers) Shaheen-3 missiles do not compose an actual threat to the US. Pakistan’s generals might have chutzpah but are competent professionals, not suicidal maniacs. In the face of a credible US threat, they would seek a diplomatic solution.
This is not the first time the US has lost a war against a proxy by refraining to take any meaningful action against the power behind it. The most obvious case is Vietnam, which was a Soviet proxy. Despite several years of directly assaulting North Vietnam, it was unable to force Hanoi to stop assisting the Vietcong. Only the cessation of Soviet aid could have achieved that, and because the US was justifiably unwilling to risk a crisis with its rival nuclear superpower, Vietnam was able to eventually force the US to realize that short of a full-scale invasion of North Vietnam, it would never decisively defeat the Vietcong. The result was a humiliating American withdrawal followed by a North Vietnamese victory.
The lesson for Israel is clear and ominous. For almost two decades, Iran has been conducting a two-front proxy war against Israel. Hezbollah is a total proxy of Iran and Hamas a partial one, as it also has to take into account the interests of the Turkish-Qatari-Muslim Brotherhood axis which do not always align with those of Iran.
Despite ongoing Israeli efforts, including significant attacks against Iranian forces in Syria, the threat posed by Iran’s proxies continues to evolve into an ever more menacing one. Though clearly incapable of defeating Israel, their ability to exact an increasingly dear price from Israel continues to grow, with Iranian assistance. This will not change as long as Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei knows he can fight Israel to the last drop of Lebanese blood and be confident of his and his regime’s safety in Tehran. Indeed, despite enjoying a significant conventional weapons qualitative edge over an Iranian military that has been hobbled by decades of tight international sanctions, Israel has so far refrained from actions aimed at decisively defeating either of the proxies or exacting a high enough price from Iran to force it to reconsider its proxy war against Israel.
Militarily, the main reason has been the Iranian missile program, which, though still equipped entirely with conventional warheads, has seemingly succeeded in sufficiently deterring Israel. This is despite the fact that Israel possesses the world’s only fully operational multi-layer missile defense system (Arrow, David’s Sling, and Iron Dome).
This is not, however, the only reason, as militarily, Israel has the capacity to defeat both Iranian proxies. In order to destroy Hamas, Israel would have to resume the status of Gaza’s occupying power, or ensure in advance that a multinational force of some kind would be available and capable of assuming responsibility for Gaza. No such force is likely to come into existence any time soon. A unilateral Israeli occupation of Gaza is possible, but would exact a prohibitive price economically, diplomatically, and in terms of public opinion.
Destroying Hezbollah would require Israel to destroy half of Lebanon, since Hezbollah is a state within a state that is more powerful than the legitimate state itself. Militarily it can be done, but would create a humanitarian and public relations disaster. Israel has therefore based its policy on containment and management, having concluded that the economic, diplomatic, and military sacrifices and ramifications the alternative would entail are too expensive.
Afghanistan provides a compelling reminder of the futility of fighting a proxy war while refraining from confronting the power supporting the proxy, even if you are the preeminent global power, which the US still is.
Israel’s priority must be to ensure it does not reach a situation where it ends up facing a proxy backed by a nuclear-armed power. In order to achieve that, it must, without delay, reassess its current containment policy. It must formulate a new policy based not on threat containment but threat neutralization. That means confronting Iran.
As heavy as the costs of such a policy might be, it is clear that the costs of not adopting such a policy will, very possibly and unfortunately in the not too distant future, be much higher. The question Israel’s strategic policymakers should be asking themselves is not whether it can afford to bear the costs of threat elimination, but whether it can afford not to.
Jonathan Ariel is a South African native who served as an intelligence officer with the ANC and subsequently worked with Nelson Mandela. In Israel he was News Editor of Makor Rishon, Editor-in-Chief of Ma’ariv International, and Editor-in-Chief of Jerusalem Online’s English-language website Channel 2 News.
20. 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.
This is an interesting critique.
We should never forget these words and we should be keeping them in the forefront of our strategic thinking:
“The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for,” the report asserts. “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up for its values.”
This affirmation of American idealism is one of the document’s more opinionated moments. Looking back, it’s also among the most ignored.
9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.
Illustrations by Patrik Svensson
Updated Sept. 3 at 6:00 a.m.
Originally published Sept. 3, 2021
Deep within the catalogue of regrets that is the 9/11 Commission report — long after readers learn of the origins and objectives of al-Qaeda, past the warnings ignored by consecutive administrations, through the litany of institutional failures that allowed terrorists to hijack four commercial airliners — the authors pause to make a rousing case for the power of the nation’s character.
“The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for,” the report asserts. “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up for its values.”
This affirmation of American idealism is one of the document’s more opinionated moments. Looking back, it’s also among the most ignored.
Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades — the works of investigation, memoir and narrative by journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror. Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.
Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand. The betrayal of America’s professed principles was the friendly fire of the war on terror. In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.
It was an emergency, yes, that’s understood. But that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.
It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority. And it has lasted long. The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.
“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.
The literature of 9/11 also considers Osama bin Laden’s varied aspirations for the attacks and his shifting visions of that aftermath. He originally imagined America as weak and easily panicked, retreating from the world — in particular from the Middle East — as soon as its troops began dying. But bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity. “We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”
Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. But neither did we. To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.” Bush was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Only we could do that to ourselves.
I.
“The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials in “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” For a country still basking in its post-Cold War glow, it all seemed so far away, even as al-Qaeda’s strikes — on the World Trade Center in 1993, on U.S. Embassies in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000 — grew bolder. This was American complacency, mixed with denial.
The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass. Their starting points vary. Wright dwells on the influence of Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb, whose mid-20th-century sojourn in the United States animated his vision of a clash between Islam and modernity, and whose work would inspire future jihadists. In “Ghost Wars,” Coll laments America’s abandonment of Afghanistan once it ceased serving as a proxy battlefield against Moscow. In “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” Peter Bergen stresses the moment bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed first pitched him on the planes plot. And the 9/11 Commission lingers on bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States, particularly his 1998 fatwa calling it “the individual duty for every Muslim” to murder Americans “in any country in which it is possible.”
Yet these early works also make clear that the road to 9/11 featured plenty of billboards warning of the likely destination. A Presidential Daily Brief item on Aug. 6, 2001, titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” became infamous in 9/11 lore, yet the commission report notes that it was the 36th PDB relating to bin Laden or al-Qaeda that year alone. (“All right. You’ve covered your ass now,” Bush reportedly sneered at the briefer.) Both the FBI and the CIA produced classified warnings on terrorist threats in the mid-1990s, Coll writes, including a particularly precise National Intelligence Estimate. “Several targets are especially at risk: national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol, and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street,” it stated. “We assess that civil aviation will figure prominently among possible terrorist targets in the United States.” Some of the admonitions scattered throughout the 9/11 literature are too over-the-top even for a movie script: There’s the exasperated State Department official complaining about Defense Department inaction (“Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”), and the earnest FBI supervisor in Minneapolis warning a skeptical agent in Washington about suspected terrorism activity, insisting that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.”
In these books, everyone is warning everyone else. Bergen emphasizes that a young intelligence analyst in the State Department, Gina Bennett, wrote the first classified memo warning about bin Laden in 1993. Pockets within the FBI and the CIA obsess over bin Laden while regarding one another as rivals. On his way out, President Bill Clinton warns Bush. Outgoing national security adviser Sandy Berger warns his successor, Condoleezza Rice. And White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, as he reminds incessantly in his 2004 memoir, “Against All Enemies,” warns anyone who will listen and many who will not.
With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings, emphasizing that intelligence collection on al-Qaeda was hampered by the “institutional warfare” between the CIA and the FBI, two agencies that by all accounts were not on speaking terms. Coll writes that Clinton regarded bin Laden as “an isolated fanatic, flailing dangerously but quixotically against the forces of global progress,” whereas the Bush team was fixated on great-power politics, missile defense and China.
Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”
The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.
II.
A last-minute flight change. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane’s wings before impact. If the books about the lead-up to 9/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death. “The ferocity of the attacks meant that innocent people lived or died because they stepped back from a doorway, or hopped onto a closing elevator, or simply shifted their weight from one foot to another,” Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn write in “102 Minutes,” their narrative of events inside the World Trade Center from the moment the first plane hit through the collapse of both towers. Their detailed reporting on the human saga — such as a police officer asking a fire chaplain to hear his confession as they both flee a collapsing building — is excruciating and riveting at once.
Yet, as much as the people inside, the structures and history of the World Trade Center are key actors, too. They are not just symbols and targets but fully formed and deeply flawed characters in the day’s drama.
Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.” Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.
Under the new rules, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was able to rent three-quarters of each floor of the World Trade Center, Dwyer and Flynn report, a 21 percent increase over the yield of older skyscrapers. The cost was dear. Some 1,000 people inside the North Tower who initially survived the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 could not reach an open staircase. “Their fate was sealed nearly four decades earlier, when the stairways were clustered in the core of the building, and fire stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space.” (The authors write that “building code reform hardly makes for gripping drama,” an aside as modest as it is inaccurate.) The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.
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The assault on the Pentagon, long treated as an undercard to New York’s main event, could have yielded even greater devastation, and again the details of the building played a role. In his oral history of 9/11, “The Only Plane in the Sky,” Garrett Graff quotes Defense Department officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a part of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated. This meant it was not only stronger but, on that morning, also relatively unoccupied. “It was truly a miracle,” Army branch chief Philip Smith said. “In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.” Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Chance and preparedness came together.
The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject of countless 9/11 retrospectives, but these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders. Port Authority workers Frank De Martini, Pablo Ortiz, Carlos da Costa and Peter Negron, for instance, saved at least 70 people in the World Trade Center’s North Tower by pulling apart elevator doors, busting walls and shining flashlights to find survivors, only to not make it out themselves. “With crowbar, flashlight, hardhat and big mouths, De Martini and Ortiz and their colleagues had pushed back the boundary line between life and death,” Dwyer and Flynn write. The authors also note how the double lines of people descending a World Trade Center staircase would automatically blend into single file when word came down that an injured person was behind them. And Graff cites a local assistant fire chief who recalls the “truly heroic” work of civilians and uniformed personnel at the Pentagon that day. “They were the ones who really got their comrades, got their workmates out,” he says.
The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana. But one offhand detail in the 9/11 Commission report underscores just how American their defiance was. The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”
They voted on it. They voted. Even in that moment of unfathomable fear and distress, the passengers took a moment to engage in the great American tradition of popular consultation before deciding to become this new war’s earliest soldiers. Was there ever any doubt as to the outcome of that ballot?
Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Commission called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon be dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.
III.
Lawyering to death.
The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done, laws and rules be damned. Anti-terrorism efforts were always “lawyered to death” during the Clinton administration, Tenet complains in “Bush at War,” Bob Woodward’s 2002 book on the debates among the president and his national security team. In an interview with Woodward, Bush drops the phrase amid the machospeak — “dead or alive,” “bring ’em on” and the like — that became typical of his anti-terrorism rhetoric. “I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win,” Bush explains. “No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death.” In “Against All Enemies,” Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international law looked askance at military force as a tool of revenge. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass,” the president retorted.
The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism. Worrying about procedural niceties is passe in a 9/11 world, an annoying impediment to the essential work of ass-kicking.
Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the law, the Bush administration enlisted it. “Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror,” Jane Mayer writes in “The Dark Side,” her relentless 2008 compilation of the arguments and machinations of government lawyers after the attacks. Through public declarations and secret memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president’s conduct of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter effort, “more directly cleared the way for torture than this.”
To comprehend what our government can justify in the name of national security, consider the torture memos themselves, authored by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 to green-light CIA interrogation methods for terrorism suspects. Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” legally and linguistically contorted to avoid the label of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC acknowledged in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such pain really really meant to do so: “Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent.” It’s quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the mind of the interrogator.
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After devoting dozens of pages to the metaphysics of specific intent, the true meaning of “prolonged” mental harm or “imminent” death, and the elasticity of the Convention Against Torture, the memo concludes that none of it actually matters. Even if a particular interrogation method would cross some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it “impermissibly encroached” on the commander in chief’s authority to conduct warfare. Almost nowhere in these memos does the Justice Department curtail the power of the CIA to do as it pleases.
In fact, the OLC lawyers rely on assurances from the CIA itself to endorse such powers. In a second memo from August 2002, the lawyers ruminate on the use of cramped confinement boxes. “We have no information from the medical experts you have consulted that the limited duration for which the individual is kept in the boxes causes any substantial physical pain,” the memo states. Waterboarding likewise gets a pass. “You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm,” the memo states. “Based on your research . . . you do not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard.”
You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.
Yet the logic is itself tortured. In a May 2005 memo, the lawyers conclude that because no single technique inflicts “severe” pain amounting to torture, their combined use “would not be expected” to reach that level, either. As though embarrassed at such illogic, the memo attaches a triple-negative footnote: “We are not suggesting that combinations or repetitions of acts that do not individually cause severe physical pain could not result in severe physical pain.” Well, then, what exactly are you suggesting? Even when the OLC in 2004 officially withdrew its August 2002 memo following a public outcry and declared torture “abhorrent,” the lawyers added a footnote to the new memo assuring that they had reviewed the prior opinions on the treatment of detainees and “do not believe that any of their conclusions would be different under the standards set forth in this memorandum.”
In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring under U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA’s creation of detention sites in other countries renders the convention “inapplicable.” Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not apply to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially convicted of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates constitutional protections. In his introduction to “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable,” David Cole describes the documents as “bad-faith lawyering,” which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.
Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more brutal than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA’s information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector general. It explains that the CIA purported to oversee itself and, no surprise, that it deemed its interrogations effective and necessary, no matter the results. (If a detainee provided information, it meant the program worked; if he did not, it meant stricter applications of the techniques were needed; if still no information was forthcoming, the program had succeeded in proving he had none to give.)
“The CIA’s effectiveness representations were almost entirely inaccurate,” the Senate report concluded. It is one of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked by an official government investigation and public report, but just one of the many documented in the 9/11 literature.
IV.
Officials in the war on terror didn’t deceive or dissemble just with lawmakers or the public. In the recurring tragedy of war, they lied just as often to themselves.
In “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” Robert Draper considers the influence of the president’s top aides. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (long obsessed with ousting Saddam Hussein), Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld (eager to test his theories of military transformation) and Cheney (fixated on apocalyptic visions of America’s vulnerability) all had their reasons. But Draper identifies a single responsible party: “The decision to invade Iraq was one made, finally and exclusively, by the president of the United States, George W. Bush,” he writes.
A president initially concerned about defending and preserving the nation’s moral goodness against terrorism found himself driven by darker impulses. “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust,” Bush confessed to religious leaders in the Oval Office on Sept. 20, 2001, Draper reports. It was not a one-off comment; in Woodward’s “Bush at War,” the president admitted that before 9/11, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency [about al-Qaeda], and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”
Bloodlust, moral certainty and sudden vulnerability make a dangerous combination. The belief that you are defending good against evil can lead to the belief that whatever you do to that end is good, too. Draper distills Bush’s worldview: “The terrorists’ primary objective was to destroy America’s freedom. Saddam hated America. Therefore, he hated freedom. Therefore, Saddam was himself a terrorist, bent on destroying America and its freedom.”
Note the asymmetry. The president assumed the worst about what Hussein had done or might do, yet embraced best-case scenarios of how an American invasion would proceed. “Iraqis would rejoice at the sight of their Western liberators,” Draper recaps. “Their newly shared sense of national purpose would overcome any sectarian allegiances. Their native cleverness would make up for their inexperience with self-government. They would welcome the stewardship of Iraqi expatriates who had not set foot in Baghdad in decades. And their oil would pay for everything.”
There are lies, and then there is self-delusion. The Americans did not have to anticipate the specifics of the civil war that would engulf the country after the invasion; they just had to realize that managing postwar Iraq would never be as simple as they imagined. It did not seem to occur to Bush and his advisers that Iraqis could simultaneously hate Hussein and resent the Americans — feelings that could have been discovered by speaking to Iraqis and hearing their concerns.
Anthony Shadid’s “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War,” published in 2005, is among the few books on the war that gets deep inside Iraqis’ aversion to the Americans in their midst. “What gives them the right to change something that’s not theirs in the first place?” a woman in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood asks him. “I don’t like your house, so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it, with your money?” In Fallujah, where Shadid hears early talk of the Americans as “kuffar” (heathens), a 51-year-old former teacher complains that “we’ve exchanged a tyrant for an occupier.” The occupation did not dissuade such impressions when it turned the former dictator’s seat of government into its own luxurious Green Zone, or when it retrofitted the Abu Ghraib prison (“the worst of Saddam’s hellholes,” Shadid calls it) into its own chamber of horrors.
Shadid understood that governmental legitimacy — who gets to rule, and by what right — was a matter of overriding importance for Iraqis. “The Americans never understood the question,” he writes; “Iraqis never agreed on the answer.” It’s hard to find a better summation of the trials of Iraq in the aftermath of America’s invasion. When the United States so quickly shifted from liberation to occupation, it lost whatever legitimacy it enjoyed. “Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land,” Clarke writes. “It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’ ”
The foolishness and arrogance of the American occupation didn’t help. In “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains how, even as daily security was Iraqis’ overwhelming concern, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bush’s man in Baghdad, was determined to turn the country into a model free-market economy, complete with new investment laws, bankruptcy courts and a state-of-the-art stock exchange. In charge of the new exchange was a 24-year-old American with no academic background in economics or finance. The man tasked with remaking Iraq’s sprawling university system had no experience in the Middle East — but did have connections to the Rumsfeld and Cheney families. A new traffic law for Iraq was partially cut and pasted from Maryland’s motor vehicle code. An antismoking campaign was led by a U.S. official who was a closet smoker. And a U.S. Army general, when asked by local journalists why American helicopters must fly so low at night, thus scaring Iraqi children, replied that the kids were simply hearing “the sound of freedom.”
Message: Freedom sounds terrifying.
For some Americans, inflicting that terror became part of the job, one more tool in the arsenal. In “The Forever War” by Dexter Filkins, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel in Iraq assures the author that “with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.” (Filkins asked him if he really meant it about fear and violence; the officer insisted that he did.) Of course, not all officials were so deluded and so forthright; some knew better but lied to the public. Chandrasekaran recalls the response of a top communications official under Bremer, when reporters asked about waves of violence hitting Baghdad in the spring of 2004. “Off the record: Paris is burning,” the official told the journalists. “On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.”
In “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” Bergen sums up how the Iraq War, conjured in part on the false connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, ended up helping the terrorist network: It pulled resources from the war in Afghanistan, gave space for bin Laden’s men to regroup and spurred a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. “A bigger gift to bin Laden was hard to imagine,” Bergen writes.
If Iraq was the war born of lies, Afghanistan was the one nurtured by them. Afghanistan was where al-Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, had made its base — it was supposed to be the good war, the right war, the war of necessity and not choice, the war endorsed at home and abroad. “U.S. officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war,” Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes in “The Afghanistan Papers,” a damning contrast of the war’s reality vs. its rhetoric. “Yet leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield.” As the years passed, the deceit became entrenched, what Whitlock calls “an unspoken conspiracy” to hide the truth.
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Drawing from a “Lessons Learned” project that interviewed hundreds of military and civilian officials involved with Afghanistan, as well as from oral histories, government cables and reports, Whitlock finds commanding generals privately admitting that they long fought the war “without a functional strategy.” That, two years into the conflict, Rumsfeld complained that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” That Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, acknowledged that “we didn’t have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking.” That U.S. officials long wanted to withdraw American forces but feared — correctly so, it turns out — that the Afghan government might collapse. “Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario,” Whitlock observes. “To lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.”
All along, top officials publicly contradicted these internal views, issuing favorable accounts of steady progress. Bad news was twisted into good: Rising suicide attacks in Kabul meant the Taliban was too weak for direct combat, for instance, while increased U.S. casualties meant America was taking the fight to the enemy. The skills and size of the Afghan security forces were frequently exaggerated; by the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, U.S. officials concluded that some 30,000 Afghan soldiers on the payroll didn’t actually exist; they were paper creations of local commanders who pocketed the fake soldiers’ salaries at U.S. taxpayer expense. American officials publicly lamented large-scale corruption in Afghanistan but enabled that corruption in practice, pouring massive contracts and projects into a country ill-equipped to absorb them. Such deceptions transpired across U.S. presidents, but the Obama administration, eager to show that its first-term troop surge was working, “took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false,” Whitlock writes. And then under President Donald Trump, he adds, the generals felt pressure to “speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed.”
Long before President Biden declared the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan this summer, the United States twice made similar pronouncements, proclaiming the conclusion of combat operations in 2003 and again in 2014 — yet still the war endured. It did so in part because “in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to admit that the United States was slowly losing,” Whitlock writes. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict.”
It’s not like nobody warned them. In “Bush at War,” Woodward reports that CIA Counterterrorism Center Director Cofer Black and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Moscow shortly after 9/11 to give officials a heads up about the coming hostilities in Afghanistan. The Russians, recent visitors to the graveyard of empires, cautioned that Afghanistan was an “ambush heaven” and that, in the words of one of them, “you’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you.” Cofer responded confidently: “We’re going to kill them. . . . We’re going to rock their world.”
Now, with U.S. forces gone and the Taliban having reclaimed power in Afghanistan, Washington is wrestling with the legacy of the nation’s longest war. Why and how did America lose? Should we have stayed longer? Was it worth its price in blood and billions? How does the United States repay the courage of Afghans who worked alongside U.S. military and civilian authorities? What if Afghanistan again becomes a haven for terrorists attacking U.S. interests and allies, as the airport suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members last month may signal? Biden has asserted that “the war in Afghanistan is now over” but has also pledged to continue the fight against terrorists there — so what are the limits and the means of future U.S. military and intelligence action in the country?
These are essential debates, but a war should not be measured only by the timing and the competence of its end. We still face an equally consequential appraisal: How good was this good war if it could be sustained only by lies?
V.
In the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has often attempted to reconsider its response. Take two documents from late 2006: the report from the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, which argued that Washington needed to radically rethink its diplomatic and political strategy for Iraq; and “The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual,” written by a team led by then-Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, which argued that U.S. officials needed to radically rethink military tactics for insurgency wars of the kind it faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They are written as though intending to solve problems. But they can be read as proof that the problems have no realistic solution, or that the only solution is to never have created them.
“There is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq,” the ISG report begins, yet its proposed fixes would have required plenty of fairy dust. The report calls for a “diplomatic offensive” to gain international support for Iraq, to persuade Iran and Syria to respect Iraq’s territory and sovereignty, and to commit to “a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts.” Simple! Iraq, meanwhile, needed to make progress on national reconciliation (in a country already awash in sectarian bloodletting), boost domestic security (even though the report deems the Iraqi army a mess and the Iraqi police worse) and deliver social services (even as the report concludes that the government was failing to adequately provide electricity, drinking water, sewage services and education).
The recommendations seem written in the knowledge that they will never happen. “Miracles cannot be expected,” the report states — twice. Absent divine intervention, the next step is obvious. If the Iraqi government can’t demonstrate “substantial progress” toward its goals, the report asserts, “the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support” for Iraq. Indeed, the report sets the bar for staying so high that an exit strategy appears to be its primary purpose.
The counterinsurgency manual is an extraordinary document. Implicitly repudiating notions such as “shock and awe” and “overwhelming force,” it argues that the key to battling an insurgency in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is to provide security for the local population and to win its support through effective governance. It also attempts to grasp the nature of America’s foes. “Most enemies either do not try to defeat the United States with conventional operations or do not limit themselves to purely military means,” the manual states. “They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms. Instead, they try to exhaust U.S. national will.” Exhausting America’s will is an objective that al-Qaeda understood well.
“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the manual proclaims, but the arduous tasks involved — reestablishing government institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening local security forces, enforcing the rule of law — reveal the tension at the heart of the new doctrine. “Counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment,” the manual states. Yet, just a few pages later, it admits that “eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers.” How to accomplish the former without descending into the latter? No wonder so many of the historical examples of counterinsurgency that the manual highlights, including accounts from the Vietnam War, are stories of failure.
The manual seems aware of its importance. The 2007 edition contains a foreword, followed by an introduction, then another foreword, a preface, then some brief acknowledgments and finally one more introduction. (Just reaching Chapter 1 feels like defeating an insurgency.) But the throat-clearing is clarifying. In his foreword, Army Lt. Col. John Nagl writes that the document’s most lasting impact may be as a catalyst not for remaking Iraq or Afghanistan, but for transforming the Army and Marine Corps into “more effective learning organizations,” better able to adapt to changing warfare. And in her introduction, Sarah Sewall, then director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, concludes that its “ultimate value” may be in warning civilian officials to think hard before engaging in a counterinsurgency campaign.
At best, then, the manual helps us rethink future conflicts — how we fight and whether we should. It’s no coincidence that Biden, in his Aug. 16 remarks defending the decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, specifically repudiated counterinsurgency as an objective of U.S. policy. “I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation-building,” the president affirmed. Even the longest war was not long enough for a counterinsurgency effort to succeed.
In his 2009 book, “The Good Soldiers,” David Finkel chronicles the experiences of an Army battalion deployed in Iraq during the U.S. troop surge in 2007 and 2008, a period of the war ostensibly informed by the new counterinsurgency doctrine. In his 2013 sequel, “Thank You for Your Service,” the author witnesses these men when they come home and try to make sense of their military experience and adapt to their new lives. “The thing that got to everyone,” Finkel explains in the latter book, “was not having a defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief.” It’s a powerful summation of battling an insurgency.
Adam Schumann returns from war because of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, “the result of a mortar round that dropped without warning out of a blue sky,” Finkel explains. Schumann suffers from nightmares, headaches and guilt; he wishes he needed bandages or crutches, anything to visibly justify his absence from the front. His wife endures his treatments, his anger, his ambivalence toward life. “He’s still a good guy,” she decides. “He’s just a broken good guy.” Another returning soldier, Nic DeNinno, struggles to tell his wife about the time he and his fellow soldiers burst into an Iraqi home in search of a high-value target. He threw a man down the stairs and held another by the throat. After they left, the lieutenant told him it was the wrong house. “The wrong f---ing house,” Nic says to his wife. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house.”
Hitting the wrong house is what counterinsurgency doctrine is supposed to avoid. Even successfully capturing or killing a high-value target can be counterproductive if in the process you terrorize a community and create more enemies. In Iraq, the whole country was the wrong house. America’s leaders knew it was the wrong house. They hit it anyway.
VI.
In the 11th chapter of the 9/11 Commission report, just before all the recommendations for reforms in domestic and foreign policy, the authors get philosophical, pondering how hindsight had affected their views of Sept. 11, 2001. “As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer,” the report states. “Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes.” Before making definitive judgments, then, they ask themselves “whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time.”
It’s a commendable attitude, one that helps readers understand what the attacks felt like in real time and why authorities responded as they did. But that approach also keeps the day trapped in the past, safely distant. Two of the latest additions to the canon, “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman and “Subtle Tools” by Karen Greenberg, draw straight, stark lines between the earliest days of the war on terror and its mutations in our current time, between conflicts abroad and divisions at home. These works show how 9/11 remains with us, and how we are still living in the ruins.
When Trump declared that “we don’t have victories anymore” in his 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he was both belittling the legacy of 9/11 and harnessing it to his ends. “His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself,” Ackerman writes. “That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness.” And if greatness is lost, someone must have taken it. The backlash against Muslims, against immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened by the open-ended nature of the global war on terror. In Ackerman’s vivid telling — his prose can be hyperbolic, even if his arguments are not — the war is not just far away in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it’s happening here, with mass surveillance, militarized law enforcement and the rebranding of immigration as a threat to the nation’s security rather than a cornerstone of its identity. “Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11,” Ackerman writes, “that the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”
Both Ackerman and Greenberg point to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, drafted by administration lawyers and approved by Congress just days after the attacks, as the moment when America’s response began to go awry. The brief joint resolution allowed the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against any nation, organization or person who committed the attacks, and to prevent any future ones. It was the “Ur document in the war on terror and its legacy,” Greenberg writes. “Riddled with imprecision, its terminology was geared to codify expansive powers.” Where the battlefield, the enemy and the definition of victory all remain vague, war becomes endlessly expansive, “with neither temporal nor geographical boundaries.”
This was the moment the war on terror was “conceptually doomed,” Ackerman concludes. This is how you get a forever war.
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There were moments when an off-ramp was visible. The killing of bin Laden in 2011 was one such instance, Ackerman argues, but “Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.” The author assails Obama for making the war on terror more “sustainable” through a veneer of legality — banning torture yet failing to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and relying on drone strikes that “perversely incentivized the military and the CIA to kill instead of capture.” There would always be more targets, more battlefields, regardless of president or party. Failures became the reason to double down, never wind down.
The longer the war went on, the more that what Ackerman calls its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism would move to the foreground of American politics. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate — and using that lie as a successful political platform. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation’s urban streets as a “battle space” to be dominated. Trump was a disruptive force in American life, but there was much continuity there, too. “A vastly different America has taken root” in the two decades since 9/11, Greenberg writes. “In the name of retaliation, ‘justice,’ and prevention, fundamental values have been cast aside.”
In his latest book on bin Laden, Bergen argues that 9/11 was a major tactical success but a long-term strategic failure for the terrorist leader. Yes, he struck a vicious blow against “the head of the snake,” as he called the United States, but “rather than ending American influence in the Muslim world, the 9/11 attacks greatly amplified it,” with two lengthy, large-scale invasions and new bases established throughout the region.
Yet the legacy of the 9/11 era is found not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but also in an America that drew out and heightened some of its ugliest impulses — a nation that is deeply divided (like those “separated states” bin Laden imagined); that bypasses inconvenient facts and embraces conspiracy theories; that demonizes outsiders; and that, after failing to spread freedom and democracy around the world, seems less inclined to uphold them here. More Americans today are concerned about domestic extremism than foreign terrorism, and on Jan. 6, 2021, our own citizens assaulted the Capitol building that al-Qaeda hoped to strike on Sept. 11, 2001. Seventeen years after the 9/11 Commission called on the United States to offer moral leadership to the world and to be generous and caring to our neighbors, our moral leadership is in question, and we can barely be generous and caring to ourselves.
In “The Forever War,” Dexter Filkins describes a nation in which “something had broken fundamentally after so many years of war . . . there had been some kind of primal dislocation between cause and effect, a numbness wholly understandable, necessary even, given the pain.” He was writing of Afghanistan, but his words could double as an interpretation of the United States over the past two decades. Still reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue sky, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.
About this story
Copy editing by Jennifer Morehead. Design and development by Andrew Braford.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
