AFGHANISTAN

Given the ramp up of US military commitment to Afghanistan, it's important to remember the old saw 'lightning never strikes twice.'  Which means that the luck the US military had in Iraq in achieving a level of controlled chaos, after three years of flailing, isn't something we can count on in Afghanistan.  That previous luck, a combination of: 

• a low level civil war that put two front pressure on guerrilla groups and   
• a commander (Petaeus) that was able to abandon doctrine in favor of developments taking place on the ground (local commanders reporting that Sunni tribal groups were willing to work with the US).

Led to:

• a crack in the Iraqi open source insurgency that enabled the US military to turn hundreds of guerrilla/tribal groups into US funded/armed militias.*    

It's very unlikely that the Iraq strategy will be applicable to Afghanistan.  In contrast, it will require a new approach yet undiscovered before a relatively safe exit (meaning that the area doesn't descend into a chaos that is attributable to the US) can be made.  Unfortunately, the combination of a global economic shock (destabilizing Pakistan), a massive criminal economy (60% of Afghanistan's economy is tied to opium), and a punctuated evolution of warfare means that it will require more than a bureaucratic solution.  It's just too complex a conflict to assume otherwise.  Instead, it will require some amazing innovation to generate even an iota of success.

My suggestion is that we send the most innovative minds on warfare and strategy to Afghanistan in order to generate that required innovation.  People like (here's my very short list, suggestions welcome):

• Martin Van Creveld 
• John Arquilla 
• David Ronfeldt 
• Bill Lind    

It also might be useful to include some very innovative insiders (feel free to forward new names for this list):

• John Nagl
• Frank Hoffman 
• David Kilcullen  

Some outliers from the "grand strategy pool" and potentially some innovators in law enforcement, organizational theory, etc. would spice things up.  Names like Fallows, Singer, Barnett, Bunker, Peters, Richards, etc.

So, here's how it would work.  Give the team a couple of months on the ground in the country, with briefings/exploration of the conflict from the top to the bottom (with a side trip to Pakistan).  In short, the team needs to get a intuitive 'feel' for the conflict as it stands today to drive accurate theoretical modeling.   Next, allow them to debate topics as a group to generate ideas, models, frameworks, and methods that may yield a pathway to success.  Finally, boil this thinking down into a cohesive strategy. 

Hopefully, this effort would generate some extremely valuable, potentially crucial, thinking at the cost of very, very short dollars.   

* Perversely, the US military doesn't see what happened in Iraq as luck.  Revisionist history is now attributing it to the successful application of COIN doctrine and secret weapons (arg!).  As a result of these assumption errors, it isn't using the lull in the conflict as a window of opportunity to withdraw.  This would be the smart thing to do given the fiscal crunch in the US.