One of Britain’s foremost colonial administrators, George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India 1899-1905, took office in the wake of the largest frontier tribal uprising in British Indian history. The Great Frontier War of 1897 pitted British and Indian troops against tribal lashkars and religious fanatics in exactly the same places — Bajaur, Malakand, Swat, Dir — where the Pakistani army is fighting the Taleban today. Lord Curzon is well known for his observation that ‘No patchwork scheme and all our present and recent schemes: blockade, allowances, etc, are mere patchwork — will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine.’

The question is whether Pakistan’s current operation (President Asif Zardari launched a new offensive against the Taleban in April) is the military steamroller finally going into action, or whether this is another patchwork scheme. Oddly, it may turn out to be both — a patchwork steamroller.

What’s bizarre about this is the mix of accurate truisms with leaps of logic that aren’t quite supported by his argument. For example:

Yet this is not quite Curzon’s steamroller. The Pakistani army lacks a true counter-insurgency doctrine. It treats the conflict like a conventional offensive: applying heavy-handed tactics that have repeatedly backfired, turning local populations against the military. Pakistan has no equivalent of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the civil-military governance and development organisations that have proved so effective in Iraq and Afghanistan as a temporary bridge between military operations and the return of civil administration. While the army can temporarily clear areas, it cannot hold them: the police are intimidated, under-equipped, underpaid and often outgunned by the Taleban, and as troops move from Swat to Waziristan, Taleban re-infiltration into currently ‘cleared’ areas is highly likely. And the governance and administrative structures needed to build on security successes are entirely lacking.

That’s all very true… except the part about PRTs being effective in Afghanistan (and since when is the presence of PRTs considered an appropriate measurement of counterinsurgency?). It almost sounds like he’s channeling Cohen and Khanna. While governance is an enormous problem and need in Pakistan, and especially Northwest Pakistan, the call for PRTs based on their record is baffling.

Advocating the use of a tactic or policy without a discussion of its effectiveness is the COIN version of the underpants gnomes. We have PRTs, right, so they have to be effective, right? Step one: send PRTs to Pakistan. Step two: ? Step three: victory!

In the real world, PRTs have at the most optimistic, a mixed record. As a recent Congressional study found:

PRTs and e-PRTs are not subject to a unified or comprehensive plan for stability, security, transition, and reconstruction in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Think about it. Because PRTs were initially deployed in a scattershot manner, there is no central mission, and oversight and review is extremely difficult. In other words, there were never any SOPs developed to govern how PRTs handle their missions, so their projects, whether it’s building roads in Khost or trying to run a medical clinic in Zabul, receive little or no central coordination. Similarly, there is a lack of continuity—as new personnel filter in, there is no standardized way of getting them up to speed on operations and history. Such handover is absolutely vital to effective operations, and even Big Army units, which try to do this on an annual basis, aren’t very good at it. But the Congressional Review went further:

The bottom line, however, is that until PRTs receive consistent and clear direction from higher headquarters, they will not be able to maximize their efforts or judge their success. In this environment, resources cannot be programmed or applied effectively. The heroic tactical work being done by PRTs will go for naught without more coherent strategic and operational level guidance and oversight. In the absence of such guidance and oversight, resources, instead of supporting strategic agility, may be poorly prioritized and coordinated and, in some cases, squandered.

And this is the model Cohen, Khanna, and Kilcullen want to import into Pakistan? Maybe if they’re going to assert that PRTs have succeeded in their missions in Afghanistan, they could actually try explaining why they think so. Because right now, there is nothing beyond assertion that says PRTs have been effective at anything beyond short term (and often reversed) gains.

Oh, and maybe not wishing the return of British colonial administration to Pakistan.

But while U.S. and British officials in Helmand told U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry during a day-long visit that the Khan Neshin operation could be a “model” for Washington’s new counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, they also cautioned that an equally important element — the effective establishment of Afghan authority and services in former insurgent strongholds — is still badly lacking.

The officials said several factors, including a lack of qualified and educated workers in the remote province, a shortage of housing and office facilities for professionals from larger cities like Kandahar or Kabul, and a series of tensions and rivalries among various Afghan agencies, were impeding the kind of follow-up needed to convince residents that the Afghan government is credible, committed and a better alternative than the Taliban.

With a start, I realized that I’ve seen this in other areas, as well—we are very very very good at “sweeping” areas of Afghanistan. We are not good, eight years on, at leaving an Afghan presence in our wake. It’s what I’ve been saying all along: they really didn’t seem to understand at first just how enormous their challenge even was. But this has been the story of the Marines in Afghanistan so far: caught out, and given terrible preparation for their mission.

But then look at Eikenberry:

Eikenberry, a retired Army general who often mingled with the public when he was senior military commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, decided to take a short stroll in the Lashkar Gah bazaar, wearing a sport shirt and no flak jacket but surrounded by armed guards. He astonished shopkeepers as he bought tea and asked their children whether they were going to school. After 10 minutes he was whisked away in a convoy of bulletproof vehicles.

I’m curious how long it’s been since a U.S. official did that… umm, anywhere, but especially in Lashkar Gah… and especially considering how much Seth Jones blames Eikenberry for things going to hell in his new book. Interesting.

In the fall, Major General Tariq Khan, at the time commanding a squadron of the Pakistani army’s paramilitary force, the Frontier Corps, realized that his troops needed to radically change tactics. With that in mind, he launched Operation Shirdil (Lion Heart) in Bajaur, a tribal area that abuts Afghanistan and was a hub of the Taliban. With the aid of junior officers, he shifted from clearing operations to population security. He ordered troops to patrol the streets and worked with tribal lashkars (militias) and jirgas (councils) to identify and capture irreconcilable Taliban. Most importantly, he worked to build troop morale and encourage camaraderie between Punjabi officers and Pashtun soldiers. What might be called the Bajaur Experiment was a success; at the same time the Pakistani government and military were signing a peace deal with the Taliban in the Swat Valley, top Taliban commanders surrendered unconditionally to the Frontier Corps in Bajaur.

Well, it hasn’t been quite that simple. Despite a similar “population-centric” approach in the Swat Valley, there remain millions of refugees who fled in terror as the Taliban ran away and the government swept through—hardly what one would normally consider a success. While Mullick is right to note that the U.S. should try to help Pakistan in every way in its fight against the extremists in its Northwest, there is surprisingly little buy-in from the U.S. on that front (for a variety of reasons).

But then there’s the question of whether Pakistan’s new strategy is really a counterinsurgency in the first place. A few months ago, Frontline World aired a report from the NWFP and FATA in Pakistan which featured video of entire villages in Bajaur erased from the land. The Pakistani Army said they had to destroy these villages to save them, essentially admitting that the Taliban was so entrenched the only way to remove it was utter devastation. It’s why tens of thousands fled to refugee camps during the worst of the fighting.

The Globe and Mail recently noted that the Pakistani military’s plans for Waziristan are quite different from its policies in Swat:

However, while the much-lauded Swat operation saw some 20,000 ground troops sweep across the area and surrounding districts, the plan for Waziristan is a wholly different type of military operation. It will use artillery, jet fighters and attack helicopters to pound the Islamic guerrillas, with limited use of “boots on the ground” in the treacherous terrain of Waziristan, where the Taliban are deeply entrenched in mountainous landscape that strongly favours guerrilla warfare.

U.S. pilotless drone aircraft, armed with missiles and sophisticated technology to home in on individuals, are likely to also be used to augment the Pakistani air power.

Such an operation is unlikely to destroy the enemy, analysts believe, and it will leave in place some Taliban warlords that international forces in Afghanistan regard as a significant cross-border threat. It will also raise questions about the seriousness of Pakistan’s fight against insurgents after the country won international praise for its efforts in Swat.

That is decidedly not a population-centric counterinsurgency, as Mullick argues the Pakistani Army is adopting. Newsweek drove the point home further still. After interviewing many of the refugees nervously awaiting a return to their homes, they say:

Even if the Army keeps its pledge to stick around for a while, it runs the risk of appearing as an occupying force in this region unused to centralized control. It is also unclear if the government could deliver better governance, and access to justice, relief, rehabilitation, and economic opportunity—the main agents in turning popular support away from the militants.

Indeed, as RAND analyst Christine Fair argued recently, one of the big problems is the Pakistani military spent the last several billion dollars of aid ignoring the development of any sort of actual counterinsurgency capability. The U.S.’s solution is to throw yet more money at the problem and hope this time it’s not squandered again. They need police, administrators, all the institutions that build a civil society. But they haven’t spent any time developing those things.

So, what is Pakistan’s deal? Is it going to do the very difficult, very dangerous work of creating a permanent absence of the Taliban from this area? Or is it going to go halfway, bomb the tribal areas like a British imperialist, and flee back to Rawalpindi? Unfortunately, right now it looks like the latter. Pakistan, despite all the pretty talk to the contrary, has not demonstrated a strong interest in really destroying the extremists along its border with Afghanistan.

However, if Afghanistan is unwinnable, there must be some sort of mitigation factor, since Afghanistan and Pakistan remain the “global epicenters” (as David Kilcullen would put it) of transnational terrorism. And this is where I step back in horror: what I find absolutely reprehensible is how many in the questioning crowd pretend drone strikes in Pakistan are an acceptable substitutes for actual strategies… and worse, write off civilian casualties as honest mistakes we pink swear not to make again because we have better machines now.

I’ve run across this mindset before, but never as openly-expressed as in this Steven Simon double-review at Foreign Affairs:

Thus, if the core concern is terrorism, Washington should concentrate on its already effective policy of eliminating al Qaeda’s leadership with drone strikes. In what amounts to a targeted killing program, the United States uses two types of unmanned aerial vehicles — the Predator and the faster, higher-altitude Reaper, which can carry two Hellfire missiles and precision-guided bombs — to attack individuals and safe houses associated with al Qaeda and related militant groups, such as the Haqqani network. Most of these strikes have taken place in North or South Waziristan, as deep as 25 miles into Pakistani territory. There were about 36 against militant sites inside Pakistan in 2008, and there have been approximately 16 so far in 2009. Among the senior al Qaeda leaders killed in the past year were Abu Jihad al-Masri, al Qaeda’s intelligence chief; Khalid Habib, number four in al Qaeda and head of its operations in Pakistan; Abu Khabab al-Masri, al Qaeda’s most experienced explosives expert, who had experimented with biological and chemical weapons; and Abu Laith al-Libi, the al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan. Some 130 civilians have also been killed, but improved guidance and smaller warheads should lead to fewer unintended casualties from now on.

Four al Qaeda leaders are, in Steven Simon’s world, worth 130 innocent lives, barely worth the middle clause of a compound sentence. Of course, more innocent people have died as the number of drone strikes in Pakistan have increased.

And it remains a mystery why the U.S. has such an enormous credibility deficit in Pakistan? It’s not that we must conduct a casualty-free war—that would be a silly demand. But the sheer callousness with which these innocent lives are written off is morally repugnant. Even feigning concern over their loss—which does have strategic implications, it is important to remember—would be better than “meh, we have better weapons now.”

Making things worse, Simon then notes approvingly that the drone strikes have driven al Qaeda leadership from the tribal areas into the settled areas of Pakistan like Quetta. Here, he notes approvingly that President Obama has decided to accept the costs of bombing major cities in Pakistan because he might grab a terrorist here or there.

Again: the prospect of killing a lot of innocent people in the process is “meh”—we have the budget, we have the robots, so whatever, right? How disgusting. These are not people we want in charge of our foreign policy.

Afghans appreciate Western forces risking their own lives to protect Afghan communities, even if doing so results in civilian casualties. In fact, given the Coalition’s tragic history of abandoning entire regions when they become too hostile, the directive to withdraw under fire seems at odds with the primary counterinsurgency goals of holding or building territory.

Gen. McChrystal’s directive, therefore, is fundamentally contradictory: It requires U.S. troops to protect undefined population centers, unless threatened by the very forces that endanger them.

Even more ironic is the subtext of Gen. McChrystal’s new directive, which speaks not to protecting the people of Afghanistan, but to protecting the Western troops inside of it. Withdrawing from a populated area when fired upon does not “protect” it any more than dropping bombs on it does. Afghans want America’s protection, not necessarily its absence — and confusing the two will make the situation worse.

As always, I welcome comments and hate mail on the topic.

That being said, I can’t disagree more strongly with his FP piece, co-written with fellow New American Foundation fellow Parag Khanna, about why Pakistan is really the central front in the war on terror:

To be sure, Pakistani nation-building will not succeed without Pakistani support and ownership. Until the country’s political and military establishments commit more resources to meeting this objective, any short-term security gains — both in Afghanistan and Pakistan — will quickly be erased. The Pakistani tribal areas, for example, don’t need the stillborn pipe dream of U.S.-backed “reconstruction opportunity zones.” They need provincial reconstruction teams of their own, such as those that have jump-started local governance reform and economic activity in parts of Afghanistan.

I was kind of sort of going along with it until I read that paragraph. Though we part ways on the issue of drone strikes (they actually make us worse off overall, despite the temporary counter-terrorism gains—see here and here, for example), it’s not a bad thing to argue the necessity of a focus on Pakistan. It’s just… that won’t do us much good if we also ignore Afghanistan, which is kind of what they’re arguing.

But the unforgivable thing here is the assertion that Provincial Reconstruction Teams have “jump-started local governance reform and economic activity in parts of Afghanistan.” There is actually very little evidence of that (see here and here, for example). PRTs have done some good in some places at some times, but there is literally no evidence that PRTs have been effective at their stated purpose. Why would we want to important into Pakistan, and how would Cohen and Khanna propose they avoid the same limitations that have strangled Afghanistan’s PRTs?

I wish they had the chance to develop that idea further. Because without it, their entire premise stands on pretty shaky ground. I’ll give this to the New America Foundation, though—especially given the thinking of their other senior fellow Peter Bergen, it certainly can’t be called monolithically ideological. It has to be healthy to have that much diversity of thought within the organization.

• While Afghanistan’s health care system would be mostly horrifying to Westerners, it has made leaps and bounds since 2001, when it was mostly non-existent. The majority of it remains foreign funded and operated, but it at least is there, and is steadily improving.
• Balint Szlanko’s dispatches from Wardak for World Politics Review have been very interesting. His latest might suffer a bit from selection bias, but he at least does a really good job of keeping some sort of reporterly tradition alive down there.
• Michael Yon, despite still using ethnicity as a singular proper noun (”a Japanese asked”), notes that in Ghor, a village has electricity. The real success is the growing number of small scale, sustainable micro-hydroplants being built all over the country.
• The guys at Task Force Warrior, my very excellent hosts at Bagram earlier this year, have done some good work with their Agricultural Development Team. ADTs, much like embedded trainers, are the ones laying the foundation for Afghanistan’s future, but they get almost no attention. the USFOR-A Facebook link also has some good pictures, too.

Well, it’s been a harrowing week on the good news front. I’ll try to keep the good news updated as best I can, but it’s an uphill battle.

But really, just what the hell is this?

Most Uighurs practice Sunni or Sufi Islam, infused with a fair amount of local folklore and tradition. Uighur Islam is traditionally extremely moderate on social issues, though in recent decades, more fundamentalist traditions were introduced by students who studied abroad in Central Asian and Pakistani madrasas.

That is practically meaningless. Can someone help me understand what “extremely moderate” means? Keating is trying to communicate a pretty straightforward concept, it’s just remarkably unphrased for the editor of a highly-decorated magazine. And I’m only pointing this out because it seems to be a pattern there. In an attempt to lower itself to the least common reader demographic, the Time Magazine of national security, as some have called the transition, Foreign Policy has managed to expunge itself of clarity or meaning.

Way to go, guys. Enjoy your National Magazine Awards.

I’m sure most reasonably educated people are aware of Puccini’s masterwork Madame Butterfly. What’s so extraordinary about the work is it played itself out, in a way, in real life, when Shi Pei Pu, a male Peking opera singer, seduced French diplomat Bernard Boursicot in the 1960s. Their story, of Boursicot’s self-hatred and betrayal of his country and Shi Peipu’s epic genderbending, became a hit Broadway play, M. Butterfly. Naturally, an art-house movie, starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone, was almost unbearably awkward, but nevertheless compelling.

Here’s where the story gets fun. Part of Shi Peipu’s story is when he followed Boursicot back to his home in Paris after presenting him with a child that was the supposed result of their many encounters. In his obituary earlier this month in the New York Times, we learn that Shi’s fake Sino-French lovechild was, in fact, a Uighur:

Mr. Boursicot spent most of his life outside China and was romantically involved with men and women. On his rare visits to Shi Pei Pu, sexual contact was circumscribed. On one visit, Mr. Shi presented him with a 4-year-old boy, Shi Du Du, who Mr. Shi said was their son.

In 1982, Mr. Boursicot — then living openly with a male companion, Thierry Toulet — was able to arrange for Shi Pei Pu and Shi Du Du to live with him in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu were arrested. Mr. Shi first told the police he was a woman, but he admitted the truth to prison doctors, showing them how he hid his genitals.

Shi Du Du explained the mystery of where he came from in his statement to the police: he was from China’s Uighur minority, he said, and had been sold by his mother. “It was not that my mother did not love me,” he said. ”We were starving.”

Mr. Boursicot, hearing that Shi Pei Pu was a man and always had been, sliced his throat with a razor blade in prison.

There is little more to add to this little gem of wonder, aside from something mentioned at New Dominion, who kindly pointed out this story in the first place: “I wonder if Shi Dudu’s assertion – “It was not that my mother did not love me. We were starving.” – is the belief of a very small boy, maybe one of the many half-Russian children of Xinjiang, sold as much out of shame as out of need.”

Indeed. At this time, there remained a few White Russians left in China at least up until the 1950s, mostly hiding in the environs near Dihua, which was later renamed Urumqi in 1954. Several of those Russians helped CIA agents Douglas Mackiernan and Frank Bessac escape from the Chinese Revolution in Dihua to the border of Tibet in 1950. Mackiernan’s death there was vividly captured in the otherwise uneven book Into Tibet by Thomas Laird.

ISAF put together a helpful video about the progress Kabul has made since 2001. While under the Taliban there were maybe a dozen phone lines in or out of the city, now there is a vast cellular phone network. There are enormous construction projects all over the place, including a standard-issue gaudy mall, and even plans for ridiculous impossible new neighborhoods.

Of course, this being an ISAF propaganda video, we must tempter it with a bit of reality. Only Kabul is booming—most other parts of the country, despite some construction projects, are not nearly as connected, powered, or safe (yes, safe). While it’s true half of Kabul has electricity 24 hours a day thanks to a brand new transmission line droped from Uzbekistan, the other 93% of the country still must scratch and scramble for a few hours of juice per day. Even so, the widespread use of micro-hydro plants is a great idea, and one many Afghans asked me to provide for them when I was there (obviously I couldn’t, but the PRTs were swamped with requests).

Similarly, while there are now cars a-plenty, the status of the roads remains miserable. But there are cars, fuel is available, and even though the cars are unsafe and exported there because they fail basic safety and maintenance tests in their home countries, they are a booming industry.

So while the rest of the country still faces enormous problems of infrastructure, development, security, and governance, Kabul seems to be doing really well for itself. Which is nice—a spot of mostly good news amidst all the doom and gloom. But the vast majority of all aid money goes to Kabul and either doesn’t leave, or it goes right back to the donating country through high expat salaries. With so much money concentrated on a relatively small area, it’s no surprise that there’s been remarkable progress.