This Week at War, No. 15

May 8, 2009

Military advisors for Pakistan: too little, too late?

On May 6, U.S. President Barack Obama hosted a hastily arranged summit with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration’s objective was to improve coordination among all three governments in their common fight against Taliban insurgents. The U.S. team also sought to demonstrate that this was more than a military problem; at a meeting with the two visiting presidents at the State Department, Secretary Hillary Clinton brought in officials from the Department of Agriculture, the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ruled out the deployment of U.S. troops inside Pakistan. Our goal is to work with [the] Pakistan Army and Pakistani government as they deal with this problem, and we are doing all that we can to help them, he said. In his remarks after his meeting with Zardari and Karzai, Obama renewed his plea for Congress to approve $400 million in immediate assistance for Pakistan’s security forces.

It was very timely then for Gen. Martin Dempsey, the commander of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, to announce at Small Wars Journal the release of the Army’s new field manual on security force assistance. As Gates has prescribed, the U.S. military would play only an advisory role in helping the Pakistani government confront its security problems. The field manual is a cookbook for soldiers assigned as advisors to foreign military forces, especially soldiers from general-purpose units whose training in past years did not include being an advisor.

By contrast, advising foreign military forces has always been a core duty for U.S. Special Operations forces. Writing at the Journal of International Security Affairs, Adm. Eric Olson, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, reminds us that the indirect approach of assisting foreign partners, though usually the best solution to irregular security challenges, is not a quick solution:

The key to success in applying the indirect approach is persistence. Building partnerships requires the development of meaningful military-to-military relationships. That effort is long-term, and the effects are enduring.

Is it too late for Pakistan? Last week, Gen. David Petraeus reportedly said the Pakistani government might fall to the Taliban within two weeks. With a week remaining, it seems as if Zardari will outlast Petraeus’s speculation. Even so, it might be too late in the game to hope for much from an advisor surge in Pakistan.

How to speak truth to power about Afghanistan

As the United States embarks on a military buildup in Afghanistan, what process has been put in place to assess whether the new strategy is working? How much patience should decision makers show for the arrival of favorable results? What specifically are the favorable results decision makers are looking for? How will the president find out if his strategy for Afghanistan is not working? Is there a procedure for honestly finding the bad news and truthfully reporting it up through the bureaucracy?

Bing West, a former Marine Corps officer, former assistant secretary of defense, and author of three books on the Iraq war, pondered these issues in an essay for the Marine Corps Gazette (reprinted with permission at Small Wars Journal).

West starts by dismissing as facile and factually incorrect the notion that willfully deceptive military officers (in the case of Vietnam) or civilian officials in the George W. Bush administration (in the case of Iraq) were the cause of poor judgments and risk assessments in those wars. West argues that in Vietnam and Iraq, the military leadership and the military’s civilian masters agreed on the strategies and cooperated on measuring and assessing progress. Thus, according to West, both the military and civilian decision makers in Vietnam and Iraq shared responsibility for flawed strategies and risk assessments.

How did this happen? West blames the poor outcomes in Vietnam and Iraq to organizational and cultural problems in both the military and civilian oversight.

First, he describes the problems inherent in the culture of large guild organizations:

Officers at all levels of command and staff knew one another; they had served together and come up the ranks together. Given that cultural context, it was unreasonable to expect evenhanded candor from the commanders charged with controlling a battlespace. The military rewarded progress. … At one point [during the Iraq war], a senior general told me, the issue was in doubt. He asked me not to write that, and it was not included in the campaign assessment because he was concerned about the political and morale effects. Although I have no doubt that he verbally informed [then Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld about the tenuous situation, he was determined to succeed. That is why our military is the best in the world. Yet that same organizational culture causes a dilemma in candidly assessing risk.

Second, he identifies the diffusion of risk-management responsibility. According to West, until Secretary Gates arrived at the Pentagon, no independent risk assessor on Iraq regularly reported to Bush. In theory, the defense secretary and national security advisor, among others, should have performed this duty. But diverging agendas and other interests prevented them from doing so.

Finally, West asserts that when the Bush administration finally got serious about assessing progress and risk in Iraq, it chose irrelevant or constantly shifting measures of progress and risk. The resulting confusion did not help decision makers.

What are the lessons for the Obama team in Afghanistan? West advises Obama to chose one senior military officer outside Afghanistan to be the president’s honest assessor of the campaign. That officer should choose relevant criteria and stick with them as unbiased evaluators of progress.

Perhaps most importantly, West recommends a hedge strategy, or Plan B, for Afghanistan. Here, West reveals his own assessment of the daunting task awaiting the United States and his skepticism about the announced U.S. strategy for Afghanistan. If West is right, we will know soon enough if Obama’s national security staff is being honest with the boss.