Civilian Irregular Information Cyber Scout and Auxiliary Extraordinaire suek designates an HVT for your reading pleasure: Russian Footprints, an oldie but goodie that I hadn’t seen, written by a former Romanian DIE general I have referenced on this blog before. The Left and Islamic terrorism have common gene pools. Terribly politically incorrect of me to dare question anybody’s patriotism, but I’m not running for anything and I don’t care if you vote for me or not. This Soviet-Syrian-PLO-Black September-Hamas-Fatah-Hezbollah-Iran-anti-Israeli-anti-American-anti-Western connection that the Left and powerful elements within the Counterinsurgent’s polity share is the reason Regulars can’t effectively engage external adversaries in the War of Ideas. Debunking the Far Enemy’s ideology is unacceptable to the Near Enemy, who deny legitimacy and exercise veto.

Interesting comments over at Flopping Aces, who found this for suek.

Saw something that needed doing, and did it. Didn’t do it perfectly, and I wouldn’t recommend hiring me as a transcriptionist, but this ought to be good enough for non-government work.

purpleslog was on Covert Radio last Friday, 9 May, 2008 and he and I both agree that his words from that interview deserve cut & pastable dissemination.

Welcome everybody to a brand new edition of Covert Radio. I’m your host, Brett Winterble. Over the next 25 minutes or so we’re going to be visiting with somebody who explores the theoretical angles of warfare. This isn’t a policy-maker or any kind of a head of state or any kind of a participant in any think tank. This is a gentleman who blogs in a different kind of area, an area that deals with the theory of warfare, that being Fifth Generation Warfare. So, without any further ado, let me go to an interview that I did with purpleslog. I don’t know his name, I just know his handle. purpleslog runs a blog, I don’t mean for that to rhyme, and he breaks down what he thinks will be the next arena of warfare. The next school of thought in warfare. It’s a kind of warfare called Fifth Generation Warfare, or 5GW, or 5G Warfare. Over the course of the next 15 minutes of so, he’ll take us into that sort of thinking, and into what he thinks wil be the challenges as we move forward in this country. I invite you now to join me in my discussion with purpleslog on the challenges of Fifth Generation Warfare, here on Covert Radio. I’m Brett Winterble, and this, is tomorrow’s headlines today. This is Covert Radio. Welcome to the show, purple.

purpleslog: Hi, thanks a lot, Brett.

Brett: Now, for the benefit of my listeners out there who might not be familiar with this, what exactly is Fifth Generation Warfare and how does that relate to things going on in the world today?

purpleslog: We’ll get you there quick. A guy named Bill Lind a bunch of years ago came up with generations of war for a modern war framework which implies that First Generation Warfare in his point of view was more muskets and things like that, Second Generation Warfare was more attrition warfare, you got manuever warfare, it’s just an interesting category framework for describing conflict modes. In my little corner of the blogosphere we’ve kind of moved past Lind’s definition and [unintelligible] came out to that currently many of the wars and battles and conflicts the United States was in and has been in in the last say, thirty years, our opponents have been Fourth Generation Warfare opponents. They’ve moved beyond just fighting on the battlefield, and it’s more the weaponization of things that are not weapons and using that against us, and what’s the best way for the United States. I am a a U. S. citizen, you know, yay United States! How is the best way for the United States to respond to Fourth Generation Warfare? With more Fourth Generation Warfare or is there a Fifth Generation? You know if there is a Fourth Generation what would a Fifth Generation of warfare look like that could be used to counter it? And we start from there and have been fully mapping out the possibility for some other ways to combat Fourth Generation Warfare opponents and our extrapolation was to, well we’ll call it Fifth Generation Warfare. I’m actually going to read off the definition we’re currently working on, I say “our” I’m also a co-blogger at Dreaming 5GW. The current working definition we’re using is Fifth Generation Warfare is the secret deliberative manipulation of actors, networks, institutions, systems, and any other First Generation through Fourth Generation forces to achieve a goal, or set a goal, probably a combination of socio-economic and political domains while trying to avoid or minimize the retaliatory or defensive actions of your opponent.

Fifth Generation Warfare is when [unintelligible] is really very small actors that are not going to be trying to explicitly, there not going to necessarily be involved with fire fights. What they’re going to be trying to do they’re going to change the world around them in secret. They’re going to try to take a lot of institutions because global actors, whether states or non-states, are still working around in a sea of global institutions and they’re going to effect the results they want by manipulating these institutions and other actors out there. The Fifth Generation Warfare actor is not very powerful in the sense they don’t have a lot of guns, they don’t have weapons, so they’re willing to use secrecy and once they’re discovered, once their Fifth Generation Warfare activity is discovered, the force placed before it’s results are there, it’s pretty much destroyed. Exposure destroys the ability of the Fifth Generation Warfare effort. [crosstalk]

Brett: Now, I know that the typical Middle Eastern terror group would be considered Fourth Generation Warfare, right? Like al Qaeda, Hezbollah, things like that?

purpleslog: Right. And there are different variations of it too, you know, some of them are more centralized than others. I mean, you look at the PLO and how it is very centralized and Hezbollah is much more decentralized and they’re very effective at what they do. The last Israeli war with Hezbollah, I don’t want to say that Israel lost necessarily, they didn’t get the, they certainly didn’t achieve the strategic goals they wanted to. Hezbollah proved to be very adept at fighting them and pre-planning it. They’re good light infantry fighters but they’re also very decentralized. Their small maneuver groups, very small units, ten or twelve guys, and once the war started they didn’t get instructions from commanders above, they had areas they could operate in freely, maneuver in, and I hate to say they did a pretty good job. I’m not trying to say Yay, Hezbollah! but

Brett: No, no, no, but certainly, certainly you’re applauding at least the tactical innovation, you’re not applauding what the group’s trying to do. I understand. My name is Brett Winterble, this is Covert Radio, talking to purpleslog, our special guest this segment, talking about Fifth Generation Warfare. Here’s my question, though: so if al Qaeda or these little cellular groups are operating as Fourth Generation Warfare people, would domestically, would like ELF or ALF be a Fifth Generation incarnation? Because these are small groups that rely on secrecy, that may not even know each other. Would ELF and ALF be considered like a fifth Generation entity?

purpleslog: No, I would still consider them, they’re playing with Fourth Generation Warfare states, for the most part. They’re still the cellular organization, they’re using . . . , violence isn’t the end in itself. The terrorist action isn’t really what they’re trying to accomplish, it’s the message they’re trying to send to people. They’re trying to send some messages to those who are going to directly oppose them “hey, don’t mess with us, we’re powerful, we can cause mischief” but they’re also trying to draw attention to their cause, they’re going to try to get the government to overreact and whomp on them so they can, so other people go “that was way too much reaction by the U. S. Government, we feel bad for them.” Try to get the scrappy underdog effect. “Look at us! We’re the only ones out there fighting for animals, or for the environment, you should be sympathetic toward our cause, and perhaps give us money and take upon those views yourself.” That’s what they’re going after. That’s all Fourth Generation Warfare. It’s really Information Warfare, it’s message sending, trying to shape perceptions and minds there and get sympathy. It’s still Fourth Generation Warfare.

Brett: Can states harness Fifth Generation Warfare? Can you think of an instance where states can harness Fifth Generation Warfare to their advantage?

purpleslog: It won’t be states directly. It will be people outside the state doing for the benefit of the state, or one of these samll groups inside the state, and i’ll give you an example of the United States did this. This was the post World War II group that set up the institution and the framework that really let us to win the Cold War. By the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union actually fell, if you were around then, around the U. S. population, most of the U. S. population really wasn’t that sympathetic toward fighting the fight against the Soviet Union anymore. people weren’t really interested in confronting them. There was large [unintelligible] looking at many U. S. institutions and across academic communities, ther were people overtly, openly sympathetic with the opposition cause. But the guys, the 1947′ers, let’s call ‘em that, they put in play the institutions, the military-industrial complex, they got national and global institutions in place so we kind of fought the Cold War in some ways on automatic. Even as support and sympathy for that effort fell, it was still in place and kept going. If you look at it in some ways that effort they put in place, the military-industrial complex, is still there now. The opponent it was put in to place to fight is gone, but it was such a strong set of tools it still exists even though it’s primary mission now is gone.

Brett: So you’re saying these guys, for example, at the end of World War II when OSS was about to be disbanded, Harry Truman indicated that he did not want a Central Intelligence Agency kind of a framework to happen, the guys who kind of quietly labored behind the scenes in secret at the pentagon and the old OSS who gave birth to that Cold War fighting situation, that would be 5GW?

purpleslog: Truman and his guys put together the containment strategy, and help set up NATO, and doing all those things. NATO and the other institutions like that around the world, which were meant in some ways to put a institutional boundary around the Soviet Union from the rest of the non-Soviet world. Those guys put in place the institutions, the military-industrial complex to build the weapons, to actually fight the Soviet Union if need be, and to challenge them economically. Those things that were put in place were soon ran on automatic in the ’50’s and the ’60’s and the ’70’s. I’m not sure that’s the only reason the Cold War was won but it certainly increased the chances of eventually the West triumphing over the Soviet Union. That’s an example of Fifth Generation Warfare. They did small changes, they were behind the scenes, nobody at the time really fully understood at the time I think what they were doing and what they were accomplishing, and when they wer long gone and out of government the changes they made, the steps they put in place, the programs they did, ran on automatic, and even when I say a plurality, it’s not even a majority of U. S. citizens [unintelligible] there was a re-vote on the whole anti-Soviet program in 1976, i don’t know if it would have won. But it didn’t matter, because these 5G’ers back in th elat ’40’s put in place where it didn’t need to be re-voted on. Even if the U. S. population’s morale and will wasn’t there what they put in place was going to work and run on regardless. Now we can do the same sort of thing nowadays today. One big deficiency the United States has is short-term thinking and i don’t think we have a will to be in a decades long fight. If you want to fight al Qaeda, or some other similar type groups, you need to put in a counterterrorist/anti-terrorist/anti-al Qaeda Fifth Generation Warfare effort put in place now, today, to fight that kind of fight long-term.

Brett: Do you believe the United States has the will power to do that, or are we so short-sighted that we want the quick resolution?

purpleslog: I think the U. S. for the most part we want the quick resolution. U. S. citizens, we, we tend to not, I don’t think we like to begin wars. I think when we’re in ‘em we like to win ‘em and win ‘em fast and move on to the next thing, making some money, that sort of thing, living our lives. And that’s where a Fifth Generation Warfare effort can come in here, is to behind the scenes, put in place the institutions and and things you need to fight. One area in my part of the blogosphere where we kind of read like the Thomas Barnett stuff [unintelligible] United States, and what you can probably do is set up the institution to do in Barnett’s phrase, the SysAdmin type work that can be used to shrink the gap, shrink the dangerous places in the world, all the dangers to the United States comes from these gap areas which for the most part doesn’t include the Middle Eastern areas. A Fifth Generation Warfare effort to fight the Middle Eastern sorts of terrorism would be to set up a military-industrial SysAdmin complex, to put in, to be in place now, the institutions needed to shrink the gap so even there isn’t the will that’s there to do it, the leaders 20 years from now will already have the tools in front of them.

Brett: This is very revolutionary thinking, and what I’m visualizing is legions of civil libertarians going out of their minds saying “The U. S. Constitution does not provide for perpetual motion machines fighting terrorists.” So how would you then, even though you’re right, I believe you’re right, how would you answer those charges, that all this sounds very extra-Constitutional, that these become institutions that are not accountable to the elected officials in Washington?

purpleslog: Well, you know, NATO was set up [unintelligible] treaties [unintelligible] approval by the Senate. [unintelligible] SysAdmin, military SysAdmin complex, you’re just going to be giving leaders at the federal level additonal tools. The thing is right now they see a lot of nails. They got hammers, so things look like nails to them. Leaders, when a crisis come up, they have a problem to solve, they don’t have time, then, to spend say, with the U. S national security establishment, you don’t have five years to rebuild and reshape your institutions at that time. When 9/11 came up the united States really had a Second Generation military, big industrial, attritition might. And some small manuever forces and some Special Ops type forces. We didn’t have time at that point to over night rebuild what the United States needed as far as mostly a counterinsurgency force, so we went to war in Iraq and what not with the forces we had. If your view is that the grand strategy of the United States needs to be shrink the gap going forward, that’s going to be what our generation’s involvement for the next twenty years, let’s get the leaders who 10-15 years from now are going to have to be making what is to them a short-term decision, let’s get them tools now that they’re going to need then, to do that mission. That’s the way we’ll have to do it. If they have the tools available they will make short-term decisions to use those tools to solve problems. If they don’t have the right tools then, they will use tools that are not perfect for the job to try to achieve perhaps the same effect without much result.

Brett: Well this is very cool. This is almost reminiscent of like an Eastern mindset, where the war takes a hundred years to win and you’ve got to be willing to fight that war for a hundred years in a variety of ways.

purpleslog: Absolutely [unintelligible]. This is for United States citizens to get their state, the United States, to win this longish type war that we’re fighting.

Brett: Final question for you. I’m talking to purpleslog about Fifth Generation Warfare. I’m Bett Winterble. This is Covert Radio. Is there a Sixth Generation Warfare?

purpleslog: Well, you know, we’ve discussed that a little bit. I think the consensus among our group and my personal conclusion is no. In our view the Generation Warfare, I’m not really discussing technology at all here. So, ou can see the Generations of War in our way kind of existing throughout time, perhaps. I’m not sure wher the next place is going. We’ve mapped it to like the uh the Boyd OODA loop and I’m really not sure where you go from here to Sixth Generation Warfare. Perhaps, when there’s a technological singularity in a number of years the world will change so much we’ll have to reset and start everything from scratch, but right now I don’t see what would come next. If right now you’re looking at the situation in warfare as perhaps the atomic unit, the atomic actor being individual, how do you get smaller than that? How do you disperse kinetics more? I’m not sure where you would go from that.

Brett: Well I’ll tell you, this has been an incredibly insightful conversation, and purpleslog, where do people go to your blog, obviously if they’re on my blog they can link to your blog directly, but where can my audience go and find the stuff thast you’re working on here?

purpleslog: My own personal blog is at http://purpleslog.wordpress.com/ and i co-blog with a bunch of other Fifth Generation Warfare theorists at Dreaming 5GW dotcom.

Brett: That’s fantastic. purp, thanks so much for your time. I really want to come back and visit with you from time to time as we move forward here on Covert Radio. I think you brought a whole new kind of insight into this and i’m really appreciative for the pink.

purpleslog: Well thanks a lot.

Brett: What a fascinating interview we just had with purpleslog. I do appreciate his time and I hope he’ll come back again in the near future. I would invite you to continue to listen to this show, to learn and to exploreareas that you might not otherwise be familiar with. I would invite you to expand your horizons. and to enjoy the fruits of the labor of the staff here at Covert Radio. Don’t forget, coming up, later in the week, it’ll be the special show we do every week with Long War Journal.org’s Bill Roggio, wher we’ll take a look at the Long War from his perspective. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for listening. And we’ll see you next time here on Covert Radio.

Damn. I’m tired. Yankee isn’t my first language. That was tough for a bitter clinging in-bred banjo-picking canoeist-sodomizin’ typical white person like me. Brett, if there is a copyright issue I’ll take this post down. Be glad to post it over on your blog. purp, come edit the [unintelligible].

Read The Ghosts of Vietnam at The Belmont Club.

I will not stand silent while the events of February, 1968 and April, 1975 are reenacted.

Never Again
Tet Comes Early This Year
The Terrorists’ Tet
Anybody who questions Our Patriotism is a NAZI 

What politicians can we trust? What major, or 3rd or 4th party, has no powerful figures that have not been bribed to manage our perceptions?
Heard this read out loud on the radio and it really hit me how We The People have been played like fiddles in a massive influence operation. Read the whole thing, with particular attention to:

Big bucks are allowing the oil sultans and dictators to intimidate US allies, buy politicians and academics, and purchase election outcomes.

I cringe every time I see that pic of Bandar’s brother smooching The King.

The oil sheikhs can “tweak” attitudes towards extremism and terrorism, and buy access to politicians through lobbying and campaign contributions.

Unindicted co-conspirators. Think about how much your Representative spends on getting re-elected. They only make $338,600 honest dollars in a two-year term.

Al Jazeera, the Qatari Arabic and English language TV is a propaganda arm with global reach. Viciously anti-American, it talks to tens of millions of Arabic speaking Muslims worldwide, as well as audiences in Pakistan, India, London and Detroit.

See Al Jazeera Has 2432 videos on YouTube. Up to 4081 now.

Riyyadh also employs an army of lobbyists and other “influencers” in Washington, London, Brussels and elsewhere around the world. These shadow mercenaries promote a benign image for the Kingdom.

They appear on TV, write newspaper and journal articles, direct university programs on Islamic or Middle Eastern studies. Saudi princes have poured tens of millions into prestigious universities, from Georgetown and Harvard to Cambridge and Edinburgh.

Former senior government officials and ambassadors are on the royal payroll influencing their colleagues in the diplomatic service. This is how the Saudi “peace plan” calling for undermining Israel through a massive influx of Palestinian “refugees” received US support at the highest levels.

This is how the Carter Center in Atlanta ended up taking millions in Gulf oil money. This is why Jimmy Carter looks like he’s shilling for the Iranian-Saudi client, Hamas.

So who is clean?

I violate Article 88 so that you Regulars don’t have to. Plausibly deniable auxiliaries beyond the reach of retribution have their uses, you know.

Stole that title from Rush. Been thinking along those lines for years.

Made this comment over at The Jawa Report.

The greedy, money-grubbing, vote-for-us-because-the-other-side-is-worse Republican Party treats “conservatives” like Democrats treat blacks, and 91% of “conservatives” keep voting Republican.

Give up on the idea of political parties. Build Coalitions of the Like-minded instead. Become a non-hiearchical, entrepreneurial, distributed swarm of attacking Irregular Culture Warriors, making life miserable for Cultural Marxists, and multi-culti carbon dispensationalist tranzies while providing aid and comfort to American Exceptionalists, rugged individualists, Constitutionalists, and the rest of the bitter clingers who have turned their backs on the Republican party but yet cannot abide what the Democrat Party has become.

Don’t vote for incumbents. Period.

What are you “conservatives” trying to conserve?

I need to figure out a way to incorporate that into my Grand Unified Field Theory of Counterinsurgent Supportive Communications magnum opus that I failed to interest greater talents than mine in writing.

Counterinsurgent Supportive Communicators have to fight the Culture War and the Cold Civil War in America to get their messages past the Insurgent Supportive Communicators who control so much of the vocabulary and media. Insurgent Supportive Communicators are powerful operatives of one major American political party’s agit-prop al-Sahab apparat. The political appointees, career bureaucrats, career officers, and contracted ex-career officers who get paid tax money to be Regular Counterinsurgent Supportive Communicators can’t/won’t/don’t want to deal with the consequences of admitting their own impotence to defend the Constitution of the United States from domestic enemies, and are not particularly appreciative of Irregulars who mention the unmentionable.

UPDATE:

I saw some of these guys. We pissed away valuable talent when we disbanded them. How many went to the heroin cartels?

“MAKING RIFLEMEN FROM MUD”: RESTORING THE ARMY’S CULTURE OF IRREGULAR WARFARE by Lieutenant Colonel James D. Campbell Ph.D. United States Army

During the winter and spring of 2006, the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A) went through a laborious process to demobilize its Afghan surrogate force, called the Afghan Security Forces (ASF). This process involved the largest formal demobilization of U.S. surrogate or irregular forces since 1945.95 The ASF were composed of a variety of tribal or local militias, anti-Taliban volunteers and Afghan mercenaries. Many of them had been working with the Special Forces since 2001, as they were originally members of the Northern Alliance, the coalition of Afghans which overthrew the Taliban with U.S. help. The ASF provided local security to Special Forces firebases and camps throughout Afghanistan, and prior to 2006, were also used extensively to assist Special Forces units in convoy security and small-scale combat operations.96

The ASF also provided a deeply important component to U.S. counterinsurgency operations, one which experienced American soldiers have valued and seen as central to success in many campaigns. From the Pequot War in 1637, to the Seminole Wars in the early nineteenth century, the Apache campaigns after the Civil War, and in twentieth century small wars from the Philippines to Vietnam, this component is one of the main reasons American soldiers have always sought out cooperation with local irregular forces. This critical component is human intelligence; the local knowledge of geography, culture, language and personality that any outsider cannot ever hope to have without such cooperation with local forces - this was the very asset provided by the Seminole, Apache, Macabebe Scouts and others that has been lauded by so many soldiers in our past. The ASF were an invaluable resource for local intelligence, one that even the Afghan National Army or police could not provide, since they were nationally recruited forces without the local or sometimes even provincial connections possessed by the ASF.97

Given their importance, military value and proven record of success, why were the ASF demobilized? There are a complex set of answers to this question, many dealing directly with concerns held by the Afghan government and coalition command about non-government militias, sovereignty and legitimacy. Those officers who were involved in planning and carrying out the demobilization understood that there was also another important reason, one which was perhaps not so clearly articulated. It was an enduring discomfort with the existence and military use by the coalition of irregular forces.98 Questions of loyalty, brutality, cost and effectiveness all played a role in this distaste, much as they have throughout our history of cooperation with and employment of irregulars. Many of the concerns felt within the Army and elsewhere about cooperation with these irregulars had not changed since the operations at Tora Bora and Shalikot in 2002.99 In spite of these questions the fact remains, however, that these irregular soldiers contributed enormously to the ongoing campaign in Afghanistan. Saying nothing of the fact that in many instances they were the ones who had fought against and overthrown the Taliban, often since then their contribution was the crucial factor deciding between the success or failure of an operation.

96

From December 2005 to May 2006, the author was the CJSOTF-A project officer responsible for planning and carrying out the bulk of this demobilization.

97

The Afghan National Army and Police are centrally trained, centrally controlled, and their units are deliberately kept ethnically and regionally mixed.

98

In the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, FM 3-4, the words “Irregular Warfare” are mentioned only twice, in the Introduction. “Unconventional Warfare” is not mentioned at all – a glaring omission, pointing out this reluctance and the lack of doctrinal emphasis on this deeply important aspect of current operations. The fact that the only joint, Department of Defense-level publication that explicitly deals with irregular operations was only published in draft form in December, 2006, is another indication that the military as an institution is still far from any kind of comfort with this type of mission (Department of Defense, Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept (JOC), Pre-Decision Draft Version 0.5, December 2006.).

99

See Sean Naylor, Not a Good Day to Die; The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (New York: Penguin Group (USA), 2005). Naylor discusses in this book some of the problems of effectiveness and loyalty evident in the performance of Afghan auxiliaries during the early period of fighting in Afghanistan. See also Charles Briscoe, Richard L. Kiper, James A. Schroder, and Kalev I. Sepp, Weapon of Choice; ARSOF in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 2005), for an exhaustive account of Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan from 2001-2002.

From early 2006, The waiting game By Sean D. Naylor

The best-paid, best-trained, best-equipped and most highly motivated Afghan troops fighting the Taliban are to be found in neither the ANA nor the ANP. They go by the name of the Afghan Security Forces, or ASF, and they work exclusively for, and are paid by, the Special Forces A-teams.

The organizational descendents of the militia forces hired by the Central Intelligence Agency and trained by SF troops in late 2001 and early 2002, the ASF function as the security force for the A-teams at their firebases and on some combat missions. Bolduc said that he was not permitted to reveal the exact number of ASF men employed by TF 31, but he is authorized to contract for up to 100 per firebase. At one firebase visited by Army Times, there were between 40 and 50 ASF fighters and an equal number of ANA soldiers.

But the ASF troops are better paid than the ANA troops they fight beside when on missions with the A-teams. The average ASF fighter makes between $125 and $150 per month, whereas a junior enlisted ANA soldier makes between $62 and $70 per month, plus $2 extra for every day he is deployed away from his home base. Because ASF troops are essentially U.S. military employees, they don’t have to share the worries of their ANP counterparts about their pay being skimmed off at each level of bureaucracy.

And unlike the ANA forces at each firebase, who hail from all over Afghanistan, many ASF troops are locally recruited and therefore have a better feel for the region’s people and geography.

But because the ASF represent the most lucrative option for any adventurous young Afghan man looking to earn a living with an assault rifle, the force is a drag on recruitment for the Afghan government’s principal security forces: the ANA and the ANP, as well as the smaller highway police and border police forces. For that reason, plans are in place to demobilize the ASF in 2006, giving each ASF fighter a parachute payment and the option of joining one of the Afghan government security forces. Ninety percent of the ASF are projected to take up that option, Bolduc said.

We’re trying to build a modern, Western-style, ethnically balanced Army and National Police loyal to Kabul, and Kabul is supposed to be the capital city of the newly-empowered Westphalian nation-state that monopolizes the legitimate use of force, so friendly Pashtun Irregulars, tribal levies, militias, lashkars, Kit Carson Scouts and MIKE Forces are out of the question.

Just the kind of guys we need for cross-border ops.

I support whatever the hell we’re calling the war these days.  I support the troops.  I support the mission.  I served on active duty in my youth and I’ve actually been to Afghanistan.  I respect and admire and envy our Police Mentoring Teams. 

BUT

I respectfully disagree with COL McMahon.

We just added the responsibility for developing –
really building from scratch a police force about a year and a half ago.

If by “we” the good Colonel means ARSIC, that’s likely true, but building an Afghan Police Force should have been a fundamental element of Internal Defense and Development since November 13, 2001. Somebody screwed that pooch. My perception has been managed to blame Kamerad, but anybody who really thought he was up to the job overestimated his abilities and enthusiasm for the task.

We are also procuring for them and will train them on the up- armored
humvees. Actually, the state of the art of what we have is what we’ll field to
them.

The more we try to make them clones of American motorized infantry the wronger we are. Bernard Fall warned us about road-bound, over-motorized, hard-to-supply battle forces. Unarmored pickup trucks are what they can keep running. The more M1114’s and MRAP’s we bestow upon them the more dependent they are on Pakistani POL and the American military-industrial complex.

But real good story on the army. Let me turn to the police, because
they’re quite a bit farther behind at every level, from the ministry of interior
level all the way down to the police in the districts. The police have never
been very strong in Afghanistan. They’ve certainly been second fiddle to the
warlords’ armies. And in fact, the police force that exists right now is a
vestige of the warlord armies. The warlords, when they threw the Soviets out,
essentially occupied the area, had their militia, which they called the army,
and we’ve pretty much gotten rid of, and then they put other people into the
police. We have not gotten rid of that yet, and we’re working very hard to fix
that now.

So you have a police force that is very much local, and it’s also very
much tied to the power brokers in the local areas and subject to their whims,
not to the whims of the people or to the national government. Those are the
things that we’re trying to fix right now. There’s corruption, there is — it’s
just not a good story right now.

We’re working on really two levels to try to fix this. First level is
to try to reform the Ministry of Interior headquarters. It’s still designed
essentially in the Soviet style, a very, very centralized control, which doesn’t
work in a society where there is no centralized control. This is very much a
decentralized society, so they’ve got exactly the wrong organization.
It’s also been accused, in some cases rightfully so, of being extremely
corrupt itself. And in fact, some people have said they don’t want a good
police department because that will mess up their ability to accept graft and
that kind of thing.

So we’re working to reorganize and then — and fix the headquarters so
that they can be an effective management headquarters for a national police
force.

Then we’re also working at the low level, the grassroots level of the
police to reform them. The problem with the low-level policemen is exactly what
I mentioned earlier, that they are the vestige of the warlord society. So they
believe their allegiance is to whoever hired them, which includes going out and
collecting illegal taxes if that person tells them to out and collect illegal
taxes, which includes going into another district and bothering another tribe if
that’s what that boss tells them to do.

So those are the things that we’re dealing with, in addition to an
incredibly low literacy rate among them, which makes it harder for them to
really understand what they’re supposed to do. So we’re executing a program
called focused district development, which works at the district level, takes a
district at a time, totally revamps them, recruits new people, new policemen –
ideally nationally, we’re working on that as we speak — getting new leaders for
them, giving them new equipment, sending them all together to a training center
where they go through eight weeks of basic training and some advanced training
on policing techniques, then put them into their district and have a police
mentor team of coalition policemen and military folks as well to stay with them
and bring them up to speed and then make sure they continue to stay on the good
side.

We also are building a special police force called the Afghan National
Civil Order Police. We call them ANCOPs. The ANCOPs receive 16 weeks of
training, so they’re much better trained than the average policeman. They’re
all volunteers. They get paid a little bit more by virtue of being higher rank
than the average policemen and they have better equipment than the average
policemen. So those — we’re about — we built about 10 battalions of ANCOP and
extremely rave reviews so far of how they do out in the field.

Because they’re so good, we’re using them in conjunction with the
focused district development program by putting them into the districts while
the police are pulled out. So a couple weeks before you would send the new
district police to the training center, these ANCOP unit — an ANCOP unit goes
in, they establish what right policing is. And then eight weeks later when the
district police come back in, the people now have an expectation of what police
are supposed to do. Again, very, very good reviews on how ANCOP is doing and
how it’s setting the stage for the police to come back in.

We’re in the third cycle of the focused district development, so it’s
still early to guarantee that it’s the right way, but so far all indications are
that it is exactly the way to reform the police here. And we’re definitely going
to continue it.

There are 365 districts. And we are on number 23 now, so this has a
long way to go. But it’s going to take a very deliberate program to fix the
police here, by far the major problem.

23 down. 342 districts to go. I’m sorry, sir, but the clock will run out at this rate. If America and NATO is going to force Western-style notions of law, justice, good government and Westphalian nation-state monopolies on the legitimate use of force on people who have never bought-in to such concepts, they are going to have to quit asking and start telling.

How a Westphalian nation-state polices itself is a reflection of its dominant culture, history, traditions, and mores. Afghanistan has never really been a functioning Westphalian nation-state. We seem to be arrogant enough to try to turn them into one but not arrogant enough to impose a colonial administation and ex-pat officered constabulary upon them. The will to colonize Afghanistan and impose good government upon them isn’t there and likely never will be.

My gripes are all above COL McMahon’s echelon to resolve, and my beef is not with him personally. He is the strategic communicator designated to give me warm and fuzzies, which, supportive as I am, I’m not getting. This is due to deficiencies in the product that salesmanship can’t fix.

The way I see it,

Karzai has outlived his usefulness.

All the caveated contingents need to man up or leave, they’re a drain on the supply system.

The Taliban in Afghanistan is 95% ethnic Pashtun. Their auxiliaries and supporters and aiders and abettors are Pashtuns. Pashtun Irregulars, in many cases turned Taliban or former war lord types, are going to be more valuable in defeating the Taliban than politically correct, multicultural, ethnically
balanced MRAP-mounted motorized infantry.

Start a real Chieu Hoi program, to replace the half-vast PTS.

Pashto-fluent Human Terrain Teams are more important than PMT’s/ETT’s, who should have a higher priority than trigger-pullers.

Only so much sinews of war can come up from Karachi through Chaman and Torkham. Fewer non-indig trigger-pullers, more non-indig trainers and mentors.

Not much is going to change until after regimes change in Washington and Kabul.

More on the ANP:

Seconded to the Afghan Constabulary
“We don’t need to make these cops as good as the 82nd Airborne,”
The police in Shahjoy no longer resemble a “posse,”
No Sons of Afghanistan Need Apply
Maintiens le Droit
Abdul Hakim Jan — Cop, Alokozai Arbakai, Militia Chief
Focus District Development
CLC’s Good, Arbakai Bad
The Law in RC West
In a counterinsurgency environment the best force to use is generally taken to be indigenous security force
The Law West of the Hindu Kush

Despicable.  The reason the Code Pinkos and their fellow travelers put old, ugly, fat, ditzy hippy chicks out front is because honorable men won’t beat the shit out of them.  Kind of like setting up mortars in school yards to deter counterbattery.

Anti-war wounds,  via Sarah, by way of Mrs. G.

“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.’”
  —  George Orwell

The Cold Civil War in America is another Campaign of World War IV.  Hier ist Der Schwerpunkt.

Whatever the hell we’re calling the Third Great Counter-Jihad these days, Israel is an ally of ours in it, and their particular piece of it is a campaign of the same conflict being waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Philippines, Horn of Africa, Algeria, Chechnya, Pakistan, Kashmir, and India. The Tactics, Techniques and Procedures common to one geographical campaign tend to be shared. Variations of whatever works on Israelis usually gets tried on Americans.

Read Israel’s War On Despair for a great illustration of a Morale Operation.  Israel is not America, but we have much in common, like

an intelligentsia that is no longer confident of the nation’s right to its own . . . identity.

and

revisionist historians have told corrosive lies about their country’s history, portraying it as having been born in sin.

Read the whole thing.