Man, I bet this guy was pissed when Randy Lerner bought the club

Birmingham ain’t that nice, but it’s got to be better than Helmland. From today’s London Times:

There are even reports of British Muslims on the battlefield, with one dead Taleban fighter in Helmland found recently sporting an Aston Villa football club tattoo.

There is some kinda crazy-ass irony to the fact that one of Villa’s managing directors is Chuck Krulak. How wild is that coincidence?

Oh yeah, and the article is worthwhile even without this little tidbit, so check it out.

Late comments on “Triage” and the CNAS Conference

The Center for a New American Security held its annual conference last Thursday at the Willard Hotel. The event featured GEN Petraeus as the morning keynote speaker, followed by a series of panels related to the rollout of several new policy papers. The one I’m most interested in, pretty obviously, is Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Andrew Exum, Nate Fick, Ahmed Humayun, and Dave Kilcullen. Fick and Ex participated in a panel discussion — moderated by the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, LTG (ret) David Barno — alongside noted counterinsurgency skeptic Andrew Bacevich and COL Chris Cavoli, who commanded a battalion of the 10th Mountain in RC-East in 2006-07.

Chivers takes on SFA in Afghanistan

CJ Chivers has done some outstanding reporting from Afghanistan lately, most notably his series of stories from the Korengal valley (but also on weapons accountability in the Afghan Security Forces). Now he takes on the subject of security force assistance, outlining the problems that American mentors face — both institutional and situational — in trying to stand up a capable Afghan force.

What makes this piece better than most of the media analysis on mentorship and training teams is that Chivers spent his twenties as a Marine infantry officer. You can’t miss the disdain in his tone when he describes a poor Afghan officer sheltering himself in a latrine while his men are mortared, or in this sentiment:

On patrols observed by The Times this year, many Afghan soldiers wore their equipment, remained alert, walked with weapons ready and moved by bounds across dangerous ground. These are not difficult tasks, but on patrols in past years Afghans often neglected them.

Anyway, read this piece. (And check out all the multimedia on the Times website associated with the Chivers stories — there are some amazing photos.) I’m looking forward to the thoughts of Blue and other experts on this subject.

News flash: ETTs have a really hard job

This video, courtesy of Christian Bleuer at Ghosts of Alexander, helps to illustrate exactly how difficult it is to be an Embedded Tactical Trainer in Afghanistan. Some language NSFW.

Why Afghanistan is important: flashback to April 2007

UPDATE: This post has been linked and excerpted by John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review. Brown is a PD expert and former Foreign Service officer who is now associated with Georgetown University. This is kind of a thrill for me, because — even though I know he’s just Googling “public diplomacy” and then linking to all the new results, probably — at my first job in DC I read his listserv/blog (cited as one of the 10 Best Blogs of ‘06 by U.S. News and World Report’s David Kaplan) every single day. Funny how things loop back around like that.

There’s a whole lot to write about lately — mostly on the President’s announcement of a new Af-Pak strategy, some ongoing and complementary discussion of CT vs. COIN, risk-avoidance in strategy and tactics, and a weirdly unfocused Andrew Exum on an anti-safe havens approach, but also a really, really bad article in Armed Forces Journal (inexplicably, the headliner of the April issue!) on conflict avoidance as national security strategy — but I’ve been dealing with computer issues for much of the last two nights (my usual reading and writing time), so my energy and patience are waning right now.

I’m hoping I can get the ol’ analytical juices flowing with a little stroll down memory lane — I’m going to post a few excerpts of a piece I wrote almost two years ago for a blog called the Weekend Economist, in which I responded to another writer’s argument about the relative perceived strategic importance of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brookings Stability Operations event

This afternoon I attended a panel discussion held at the Brookings Institution that focused on the new Army field manual for stability operations, FM 3-07. The discussion was moderated by Janine Davidson, and the panel was composed of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (and former president of the Center for a New American Security) Michele Flournoy, Brookings Director of Foreign Policy Studies and reputedly soon-to-be-announced U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual, and LTG William Caldwell, commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center.

UPDATE: CSPAN has the video up here. My question is around the 1:22 mark if you’re interested. My voice doesn’t sound like that in real life, I promise.

I might write more on this later, but for now I’ll just post what I wrote in the comments section at Abu Muqawama regarding the question I asked USD Flournoy:

Thoughts from a combat advisor in Afghanistan

Over the last several days, I’ve been corresponding with a senior NCO currently serving as a combat advisor in Afghanistan. He’s on his second tour, and he has some pretty strong opinions about both the way the war is being fought and the way that our advisor personnel are being used. Our communication began after he commented on my post from last week about a “successful” but counterproductive raiding mission in Logar Province.

Vengeance 7 — the name he has commented under on this and other blogs — sent me an email this morning with some cobbled-together thoughts from other postings he’s made (here and here). I asked if I could share, and so here are some excerpts with very slight editing and my limited commentary. I lost about 500 words to a browser crash earlier, so we’re going to do this thing in installments.

A cause in Afghanistan that’s worth your cash

I am the biggest sucker in the world. I should say this up front. Yesterday some punky kid from the eco-terrorist outfit Greenpeace (ha, just kidding… mostly) came to the door with a petition and a poorly-memorized schpiel. He’s going on and on about how we need to stop environmental degradation and the U.S. is a world leader and now we’ve got a president who will do something and we have to DEMAND that Congress take action; meanwhile I’ve got a thought bubble coming out of my head with Totino’s pizza rolls in it and the kid sounds mostly like the teacher from Charlie Brown. But I signed his petition. Why? Mostly to get him out of my face. And also because I thought it would get me off the hook from giving money.

Tactical Success, Strategic Defeat (Updated)

Update 1: Afghanistan scholar Joshua Foust at Registan.net links approvingly in this direction. (Update 1.5: Man, I’m stupid — I accidentally had the original link pointing towards an article by the insipid Ann Marlowe, towards whom Joshua rightfully directs a torrent of criticism. Link is now fized and points toward Registan.)

Update 2: I can’t seem to make the link work for the mechanization-in-COIN paper, so just google the title if you’re interested and pick the search result that’s hosted on princeton.edu.

The Washington Post ran a story about Afghanistan under this headline yesterday, relating the fallout from an American raid in Logar Province one night last month. One man was killed and four were detained by U.S. forces, and angry locals demonstrated the next day. So long as I’m criticizing Ricks for this “tactical success, strategic defeat” formulation, I might as well use this example to elaborate on why it’s so meaningless.

Excellent — and depressing — Afghanistan cartoon

This is a really outstanding cartoon, though the reality that it reflects about Afghanistan is less than encouraging. Find more of Clay Bennett’s work here.