Field Notes, First Drafts, & Foreign Correspondence
Apparently, for the Biosphere 2 project, it’s the latter option. Check out friend Geoff Manaugh’s review of the now run-down state of the facility, including some recent pictures of the site, which construction has basically been left to rot. Feral cities, indeed. Check out the glossy official Biosphere website; the pictures below tell a distinctly less upbeat story.
If you haven’t already read Peter Bergen’s TNR piece on the late 2001 battle for Tora Bora, Afghanistan, you should. It’s a page turner, and offers a “definitive account” of “how Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp.” It definitely lives up to the strapline. In my opinion, it’s also a fine example of good use of source material, as Bergen plumbs the wealth of memoirs published since then by key players.
Excerpt:
What really happened at Tora Bora? Not long after the battle ended, the answer to that question would become extremely clouded. Americans perceived the Afghan war as a stunning victory, and the failure at Tora Bora seemed like an unfortunate footnote to an otherwise upbeat story. By 2004, with George W. Bush locked in a tough reelection battle, some U.S. officials were even asserting, inaccurately, that bin Laden himself may not have been present at the battle.
The real history of Tora Bora is far more disturbing. Having reconstructed the battle–based on interviews with the top American ground commander, three Afghan commanders, and three CIA officials; accounts by Al Qaeda eyewitnesses that were subsequently published on jihadist websites; recollections of captured survivors who were later questioned by interrogators or reporters; an official history of the Afghan war by the U.S. Special Operations Command; an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and visits to the battle sites themselves–I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Read the rest here.
Anyone interested in tracking that other interested party to AfPaK issues – namely, India – should really read friend Eric Randolph’s blog, The Kikobor. Eric just left his job as an editor with Jane’s Country Risk and relocated to the subcontinent a couple of months ago to work on his freelancing career. He’s been posting and publishing regularly, at the blog, in Britain’s Guardian newspaper and in Jane’s Intelligence Weekly.
If his new profile photos are any indication, it’s been a maturing experience, too. Seriously, he’s grown a very distinguished beard. It makes all the difference, I think…
Michael Crowley’s piece raised an interesting point about how counterinsurgency thinking is sold and received in Washington, zeroing in on CNAS President John Nagl’s central role in giving it the slick gloss that ensures even skeptics buy into it. Contrast that with CNAS efforts to prove it’s more than just a one-trick pony: CNAS reports on national security issues that have nothing to do with counterinsurgency fail to convince…. indeed, the response to such efforts lies somewhere been patronizing smile and cruel snicker. How to fix it? It probably doesn’t help that CNAS is led by one of the most recognizable faces in what Crowley dubbed the “cult of counterinsurgency.”
I wonder: if Nagl were to be replaced with, say, a scholar or practitioner with broad and fair expertise across the range of security issues – or even with someone who’s a recognized authority on anything but counterinsurgency and counterterrorism – wouldn’t that boost CNAS credibility by visibly redistributing its eggs from one basket to several?
Alternate title: “why smart people diversify, and why those who don’t go splat face-first into the pavement”. An interesting piece in The New Republic from Senior Editor Michael Crowley, on COIN-love. Crowley writes about how CNAS has staked its claim as guru-central for counterinsurgency, and throws a few subtle barbs about the quality of its salesmanship vice the gloss of its ideas.
Excerpts:
Washington’s current enthusiasm for counterinsurgency is based largely on its apparent success in stabilizing Iraq–even though it’s not clear that the doctrine’s sophisticated tenets deserve all or even most of the credit. Indeed, an argument is brewing in military circles about whether the doctrine’s potential has been oversold. What happens next in Afghanistan could settle it.
and
Though CNAS is loath to be known as a one-trick pony–it recently completed a report encouraging U.S. cooperation with China and runs an energy and climate-based “natural security” program–it is effectively cornering the market on counterinsurgency thought.
and
The stakes for the United States in Afghanistan are enormous. But, in a more parochial sense, so are the stakes for CNAS and what you might call the cult of counterinsurgency.
and
… if Afghanistan doesn’t turn around soon, the Democrats who founded and support CNAS, and who have come to embrace the Petraeus-Nagl view of modern warfare, may find themselves wondering whether it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Or they could just read some history. Yes, yes, of course I mean Algeria, Malaysia, and Vietnam. But really I mean that decade between the end of the Cold War and 2001 that everyone ignores. You know, the 1990s, the decade that offered reams of lessons learned about civil-military cooperation, good governance, official corruption, armed non-state actors and the like, before we decided to reinvent the wheel – again (Ed’s Note: Gasp… blasphemer!) for Afghanistan and Iraq.
I mean no ill will to the CNAS crowd. A smart and accomplished group of people, just a little too smug, smarmy, and overinflated about their special understanding of the nature of conflict and the poor schmucks who just don’t get it (not to mention their own qualifications for proclaiming how others don’t get it). In my unkinder moments, I think of COIN obsession as the fetish of those waaayyyyy too young for Vietnam and pissed off that they missed such a groovy fight (and the ability to claim a really great soundtrack as their own, in the bargain). Or those dissatisfied with the prohibition on proactively killing things absence of bona fide warfighting that was part and parcel of…. wait for it… peacekeeping. Remember that?
Next time you read a current or ex- military bio that includes the words “fought” or “combat” in relation to service in Bosnia, give it some thought. Only a handful of individuals can actually claim it with integrity, and only if they were in this place, did this, or participated in the rare mission of this kind that actually resulted in a shot fired (there weren’t many). Kosovo was much the same, except for a short bit in 1999, and that was mostly air power at work. Short version: it just wasn’t that kind of intervention. But I’ve been seeing some revisionist verbiage creep into some biographical characterizations of Balkan deployments as late as 2004 and 2005. That, and COIN-fetishization, reinforce a sneaking suspicion that we’re stuck in the midst of a convoluted memory hole and positively deluded about at least two things: the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of what we think we’ve learned about them and the lessons of “the past”.
Rant over. Go read the rest of Crowley’s article here.
Originally published at CTlab.
MICHAEL A. INNES 