Afghanistan Mission Creep Watch - The What is CT Version? Posted by Michael Cohen

This paragraph from an otherwise pretty fascinating article on Afghanistan in the Wall Street Journal this weekend left me completely and utterly gobsmacked:

People familiar with the internal debates say Mr. Obama rejected a strictly counter-terror approach during White House deliberations in early October. One official said Pentagon strategists were asked to draft brief written arguments making the best case for each strategy, but the strategists had difficulties writing out a credible case for the counter-terror approach -- prompting members of Mr. Biden's staff to step in and write the document themselves.

How is it possible that the US military, which has spent the past 8 years fighting a Global War on Terror (i.e. counter-terrorism) incapable of drafting a credible case for a CT approach in Afghanistan . . . for the President of the United States? Seriously, how is that possible? I suppose the smart ass answer would be that there is no credible case for a CT approach in Afghanistan. But of course that is silly; as Austin Long pointed out recently at FP.

But I really have to question the kind of military advice President Obama is getting  if they can't even tell him what a counter-terrorism strategy in Afghanistan would look like. Have they become so inculcated with COIN doctrine that they simply reject the very idea that a CT strategy can succeed in Afghanistan or elsewhere? And how is the President being served when he is not being presented with every possible military and political scenario in Afghanistan? Look, whether you support COIN or support CT, the bottom line is that if the military is being asked by the President to develop military options for Afghanistan they have a pretty significant obligation to do it - whether they agree or disagree with the approach. The fact that they can't or won't do it is pretty disconcerting.

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Has it occurred to you that a pure CT strategy that forgoes the country just cannot be made to work?

If the guy who pioneered fusion cell CT in Iraq and helped wreck AQI cannot figure out a credible way to do it in the Afghan context, then maybe it's time to think that there's something wrong with a pure CT strat, no?

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