Back into the Shadows: The Sudden Demise of a General

President Obama has dismissed the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, amidst an uproar caused by an article published in the Rolling Stone magazine. McChrystal, who carried the hopes and expectations of many in spite of the marked escalation of the conflict, lasted little more than a year.

This was my bottom line when he took command last June (I’ve taken the liberty of re-publishing the post in question):

The implicit expectation, of course, is that McChrystal and his hand-picked team of officers and advisers will do for Afghanistan what David Petraeus and his team did for Iraq. Given the dismal situation on the ground, that would be an amazing achievement. But don’t hold your breath. McChrystal might have arrived just in time – or much too late. Last week was the worst ever in eight years of war, with over 400 insurgent attacks. Five years ago, that figure was lower than 50. It has been on the rise ever since. Turning Afghanistan around will be a daunting task – it might be beyond the capacities of even the most gifted general.

It was beyond his capacities alright. But that’s not what cost him his job – not directly, anyway. In fact, had he been able to produce more tangible progress on the ground — and, frankly, I doubt anyone else could have done so — a couple of careless remarks published by a left-wing magazine would not have broken his neck quite so easily or quite as quickly.

Putting Force Back on the Table?

The Times of London has revealed today that Saudi Arabia is prepared to open part of its airspace for an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, quoting both Saudi and US defense sources. Apparently, the Saudi armed forces have run drills geared to avoiding any accidental engagements between Israeli planes and Saudi air defenses in case of an IAF attack on Iran, with the approval of the Obama administration. The timing of this leak — just three days after another round of sanctions was passed by Security Council in S/RES/1929 — is, of course, conspicuous. The Saudis’ prompt and categorical denial only lends credence to the report. (As the old proverb has it, “never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”) To my mind, this looks very much like an open admission, by the US and parts of the Arab world that are directly threatened by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, that inducements and sanctions won’t do the job — especially if they latter are subject to Russian and Chines approval — and need to be backed up by a more or less credible threat of the use of force.

Even before the fourth round of UN sanctions was passed, the tenor was that, while (a little) more substantial, it wouldn’t be good enough — not by a long shot, in fact. By the time it became public knowledge that, as part of securing Russia’s approval for the sanctions resolution, the US would be allowing the Russians to sell their S-300 SAMs to Iran after all (thus violating both the actual provisions and the spirit of the resolution before it was even adopted), counting on their continued self-restraint, it was already abundantly clear that the impact of the renewed diplomatic effort would be negligible at best.

With the tug of war within the Security Council over (for now) and the relative futility in terms of probable outcomes of the West’s achievement apparent to all involved, trying to put force back on the table in some form or other makes a lot of sense.

Legality, Legitimacy and the New Misdeeds of the “Jewish Pirate”

The debate surrounding the Gaza blockade and Mavi Marmara incident is in full swing and it’s getting both sadder and more ridiculous by the hour. I still find the sheer dimensions of the response you get whenever Israel does something “outrageous” hard to believe, way beyond anything even faintly resembling plausibility and more disproportionate than anything the IDF has ever done. If I were a social psychologist with even a passing interest in mass pathologies, I’d definitely look into it…:)

Anyway, I found this piece by CFR’s president emeritus Leslie Gelb quite interesting. His post is certainly biased (if not in the “biased beyond belief”-kind-of-way so common to debates involving Israel), the title is more than unfortunate and, in my view, he by and large gets it wrong, but his two main arguments are still worthy of examination:

First, he makes an argument almost diametrically opposed to mine, blaming the Navy special forces for “badly mishandling the situation”. Unfortunately, he doesn’t elaborate on this point. I still don’t see how a soldier with no escape route who is attacked by a mob of violent activists mishandles anything at all when he or she fires his or her weapon in self-defense. The videos I’ve linked earlier are as much in the way of proof as you’ll ever get of anything that was or was not mishandled on the high seas by night. The real question is and remains: Who put the soldier there, with what expectations and what assumptions leading to the decision in the first place?

Second, and much more importantly, he states that “Israel had every right under international law to stop and board ships bound for the Gaza war zone late Sunday. Only knee-jerk left-wingers and the usual legion of poseurs around the world would dispute this.” And further:

Regarding international law, blockades are quite legal. The United States and Britain were at war with Germany and Japan and blockaded them. I can’t remember international lawyers saying those blockades were illegal—even though they took place on the high seas in international waters. There would be a general violation only if the hostile actions against the ships took place in waters under the jurisdiction of another sovereign state. Thus, for example, if the Israelis stopped the ships in Egyptian waters, that would have been a violation.

Israeli Strategy-Making: Another Battle Lost…

Today, even the most cursory glance at the discussion fora of numerous quality papers, so-called, is enough to reveal that a) being a quality paper doesn’t mean having readers of the same, a similar or, indeed, any quality at all (but they reveal that 24/7/365),  and b) it’s Israel-bashing season and people love it.  (Doubtless, parts of the blogosphere are already following up with foam at the mouth.) While I don’t want any part of the bashing and have been able to hold my tears so far, it is obvious that the killing of at least 10 pro-Palestine “activists” constitutes Israel’s third major foreign security policy f*ck-up within 5 months.

With the fallout of the January 19 assassination of a high-ranking  Hamas member in Dubai having not yet blown over (whether Mossad actually killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh makes little difference, even if anyone had any doubts in their mind) and US-Israel relations still tense after a major flare-up over settlements last March, the government in Jerusalem has given the country it is supposed to serve a PR disaster of the first order that makes the Dubai incident look like a minor lapse by comparison and is likely to deal a fatal blow to one of Israel’s longest-standing alliances, namely, that with Turkey.

When al-Mabhouh was found dead in his hotel room in January, no-one seriously disputed the fact that the man was a dangerous terrorist wanted not just by the Israelis but by Jordanian and other security services as well. The damage done to Israel’s image — bad enough already — was severe, but manageable and Mossad as an institution took much of the heat. Similar things had happened in the past and, at least, Mossad had assassinated the right guy (unlike the 1973 killing of a Moroccan waiter who had been mistaken for Black September mastermind Ali Hassan Salameh in Lillehammer, Norway).

This morning’s shooting by Israeli naval special forces of 10+ activists (all or most of them Turks) aboard a vessel sailing in international waters under a Turkish flag  is a different affair altogether.

AfPak and the Limits of Air Power

This week, the number of American dead in Afghanistan and Pakistan reached 1000, according to icasualties.org. Against this somber backdrop, I’d like to return to a more familiar issue which figured prominently on the “old” Final Stand blog, namely, the use of air power in that theater of the GWOT, no-longer-so-called. Since I have last concerned myself with this matter, almost a year ago now, a new tactical directive on the use of air strikes has come  into force, imposing much stricter criteria for the use of air power in support of coalition ground forces. This, of course, was part of Gen. McChrystal’s new, more self-confidently “COIN” approach, emphasizing protection of the population and avoidance of collateral damage. As this directive — hardly the only one of this kind issued by McChrystal in his first year as COMISAF — is approaching its first anniversary, it’s time for an assessment of its efficacy. In a separate post, I will turn to the question of drone strikes and try to assess their contribution to the AfPak effort.

First of all, as far as collateral damage is concerned, there’s actually some good news: While the fighting has escalated sharply in 2009, the insurgency continued to gather speed and coalition deaths increased by more than 75% (with US and UK fatalities increasing by more than 100%), the number of Afghan civilian deaths caused by pro-government forces (PGFs) has fallen by more than a quarter, according to UN data. While 828 civilians were killed by PGFs in 2008, the figure for 2009 was 28% lower, at 596. In the same period, the number of civilians fatalities caused by air strikes has gone down by about 35%, from 552 in 2008 to 369 last year, despite some major and sometimes avoidable instances of collateral damage.

However, much could be said to qualify what at first sight looks like a modest success in terms of implementing the “new” strategy, which has defined the people as the main center of gravity in this not-so-new kind of war.

A Note on Educability and Guts

Just a brief comment on the apparent P5 agreement on a new Iran sanctions resolution: When the Turkish-Brasilian angle popped up the day before yesterday, I was confident that the Iranians — by now the world’s undisputed masters when it comes to stalling for time — had pulled it of once again. The clear implication would have been that both Western educability and Western educational ability are somewhere very close to zero.

Now, against the backdrop of Secretary Clinton’s rather surprising disclosure of P5 consensus, it seems to be within the realms of possibility — but no more than that, really — that the West’s ability to learn from the Iranian nuclear past, successfully frame the issue, and present its case convincingly (call it leadership, if you will) is intact after all.

I wouldn’t want to bet on it, though. Indeed, if those portions of the draft resolution leaked to the NYT yesterday are at all indicative, we’re going to have a very prudent resolution — from the Chinese point of view.

8 May 1945: Victory, But At What Cost…

Honor the fallen brave. We still remember.

Dire Straits: Area Denial and the Rise of Asymmetry

Conscious of the danger that some might get the impression that I’ve left terra firma behind for good,  I embark on writing the third naval strategy post in a row. Landlubbers may rest assured, however, that I will head back to shore after this one and stay away from the watery blue — and brown, and oily black, too –  for a good while. But first, I have to elaborate on some of the stuff I recently posted, the simple fact being that some aspects touched upon by my comments on Chinese naval strategy are way too interesting and important to not take them up and address them in more detail.

Specifically, I want to explore the background and some of the many parallels between Chinese and Iranian area denial strategies and technology geared towards offsetting superior U.S. naval assets in the Taiwan Straits and the Straits of Hormuz, respectively, and consider their implications at the strategic level, for the U.S. in particular. In addition to Chinese rumblings in the South China Sea, the second round of Iranian naval exercises in the Gulf within a single month and a recent speech by SECDEF Gates, in which he questioned the adequacy of capital ship acquisition programs while pointing to the coming of asymmetric threats and backing up the Littoral Combat Ship program (and which, of course, didn’t sit too well with the audience of naval and Marine officers), have fueled my interest.

Flexing Muscles in the South China Sea: “Just the Beginning”

As you will have gathered from the monster size of my inaugural post on the “new” Final Stand, I’m still working on the conciseness-bit of the new mission…:) However, while I’ve not yet done my homework, it certainly appears the PLA Navy has done hers — and more thoroughly than I realized at first. Meaning it’s time for a nice little follow-up.

In fact, it now appears that some of the naval activity I mentioned in my earlier post was actually part of a concerted string of exercises on a scale hitherto unseen. CNAS‘ Abe Denmark, in a post published yesterday (and even longer than mine), quotes the South China Morning Post as saying that

“destroyers, frigates, and auxiliary ships from the North Sea Fleet (…) passed through the Bashi Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan to conduct a major ‘confrontation exercise’ in the South China Sea. A few days later, Sovremenny guided missile destroyers, frigates, and submarines from the East Sea Fleet (…) passed through Japan’s Miyako Strait without warning Tokyo  and conducted anti-submarine warfare exercises in the Pacific waters southeast of Japan. (This, of course, is the same incident I mentioned in my earlier post. MH) There have also been reports of naval aviators from several bases in the Nanjing and Guangzhou military regions conducting long-range exercises that incorporated radar jamming, night flying, mid-air refueling, and simulated bombing runs in the South China Sea.

While provocative in their own right, these exercises are a sign that China’s Navy has taken a major step forward. The SCMP article quotes an unnamed Asian defense attaché: ‘We’ve never seen anything on this scale before – they are finally showing us they can put it all together.’”

China’s Naval Break-out Takes Shape. Or Does It?

It may seem a little odd that I should be kicking off the All New Final Stand with an assessment of Chinese military modernization, which hasn’t figured at all in my earlier commentary here and hasn’t been one of my principal areas of interest or expertise. However, I do find some of most recent developments rather interesting. And, after all, strategy is supposed to be universal. Meaning that the student of strategy knows something about everything. More or less…;)

Specifically, there is some evidence indicating that the PRC has started to put into practice a much more ambitious naval strategy and, while signs pointing in this direction have been accumulating for some time, this is now increasingly finding its way into the mainstream media. The day before yesterday, the New York Times (a favorite of mine, now as in the past) ran an extensive piece on China’s apparent naval break-out, saying that

“(t)he Chinese military is seeking to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast, from the oil ports of the Middle East to the shipping lanes of the Pacific, where the United States Navy has long reigned as the dominant force. (…) China calls the new strategy ‘far sea defense,’ and the speed with which it is building long-range capabilities has surprised foreign military officials.”

According to the Times, this new “strategy is a sharp break from the traditional, narrower doctrine of preparing for war over (…) Taiwan or defending the Chinese coast.” Quite apart from the fact that the concepts of “strategy” and “doctrine” should not be used interchangeably just to avoid using the same word twice in one sentence, it seems worthwhile to examine the empirical basis of this somewhat hyperbolic-sounding statement.