There are days when I think I should just pack this blog up, and today — when Tom Ricks finds the Army’s study of the battle of Wanat and Andrew Exum advises Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s review of the Afghanistan war — is most certainly one of them.  (Well, Ex wrote his post yesterday, but I’m seeing it today.) I thought I got the Iraqi prime minister to make some news today, but God, are these two posts the only things you should read today on the subject of national security. It’ll be hard to compete with quality like this, but as someone once said about something, hard is not hopeless. (Except for when it is.)

First, Wanat. For a refresher, read this. The report that Tom unearths finds that the unit operating in Wanat employed a "highly kinetic approach," which is to say its commanders focused on killing things rather than protecting people, and so they "rapidly and inevitably degraded the relationships between the US Army and the Waigal population." I am not sure from Tom’s post if the report, written by military historian Douglas Cubbison, says that such alienation led directly to the insurgent attack on the tiny Wanat Combat Outpost, where outnumbered soldiers and Marines fought in a superhuman fashion.

At the risk of stating the obvious, what’s striking about Tom’s post is that Cubbison’s victory seems to analyze the Wanat debacle through the prism of counterinsurgency. The soldiers talk about the Afghans they live amongst like this: "Everything about those people up there is disgusting. They’re worthless." You’re not going to be inclined to protect people you view in such a way. And they’ll have little incentive to cooperate with you against the Taliban or al-Qaeda. It’s refreshing to see Cubbison evidently write a root-cause explanation of Wanat when he could have focused on the battle itself. For those inclined to view counterinsurgency as problematic: I’m not really sure what a more restricted focus would have revealed. It’s less important to ask why the attack went so far to to understand the circumstances that gave rise to it, since its that latter question that has direct application for U.S. troops fighting today in Afghanistan.

But today Exum is the blogosphere’s Mark Buehrle, not so much for what he wrote yesterday but what he promises to write in the future. The response to McChrystal’s 60-day review has generally been a kind of smirking so-we’re-gonna-have-yet-another-review-huh, and I’ve been no exception. But it really inspires confidence that he asked Exum to take part. In a conversation a couple months ago about Obama administration
appointments, a friend of mine made the point that there were some people whose combination of expertise and temperament inspired confidence when placed in certain key roles. Exum is definitely in that category. He’s a counterinsurgent who sees counterinsurgency blindspots and approaches weighty questions with rigor and a recognition of the limits of his perspective. (One might call him the Sonia Sotomayor of COIN.) This point of his gives me confidence:

General McChrystal understands population-centric COIN. Forget all that nonsense about a guy with decades of direct-action special operations experience not being mentally limber enough to adapt to protecting the population. About five minutes into a discussion of civilian casualties in my first week in Kabul, I watched McChrystal stand up and spell out for his staff in explicit terms exactly why killing civilians makes one operationally ineffective in an environment like Afghanistan. McChrystal is not inclined to draw attention to his storied history as a special operator. But when he tells you that it’s impossible to kill your way out of this war, you believe him — because Lord knows, he’s tried.

Anyway, I think I’ve belabored the point sufficiently, so just read those two posts already.