Other than saying this, and my previous post, I've decided not to comment on this. I've given it long thought, and while I think it is more than appropriate that people speak up, I have a good reason not to. Many worthy points can be made about Major Hasan, his position, and the decisions that got such a man posted to Fort Hood to take care of soldiers. I have some knowledge of Ft Hood's psychiatric care, of soldiers who have been through it, and happen have become slightly acquainted with two who were under Maj. Hasan's care. Not only that, I was a kilometer away on Fort Hood from where he conducted his attack on fellow soldiers.

But I wasn't there. Someone who is close to an event is often granted extra credibility. Even if I strive not to imply it, people may infer it: "Porphy was there" or "Porphy knows people who Hasan treated, he knows that Major Hasan behaved inappropriately towards those under his care".

I don't really have any extra knowledge beyond that which you can get elsewhere. While it is often the case that people involved in an experience have greater knowledge of it, it is not always the case. Too often, I think, people trade on the credibility that is gained from being close to something, when they don't really know anything more (or less) than others can get.

Yes, blogging is often saying things other people are also saying. Few posts are truly unique, contain truly unique ideas or information, and I'm positive that in the future I'll babble about stuff that you could just as easily read elsewhere. In this particular case, though, I think I'll let others carry the water. A lot of things need to be said and thought about, and more power to those who are doing just that.

But I'm uncomfortable doing so, precisely because "I was there" without being there. I wasn't at the SRP site, and did not experience what those who were there experienced. I don't really have any additional information about Major Hasan and his behavior than is described elsewhere (I can say, though, that the experiences of the soldiers I'm acquainted with who were under his care, what little they told me supports rather than contradicts what you're hearing elsewhere. I guess I can go that far).

For me, a bit of reticence seems to be the responsible thing.

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"1. The shooter obviously was a low performer. Why was he shuffled along through the system, instead of simply being let go? I worry that the military often keeps the bottom 5 percent of performers simply because it is easier than getting rid of them.

2. Was he not let go for fear of appearing prejudiced? If so, someone is guilty of moral cowardice, of failing to do the hard right thing instead of the easy wrong.

3. If, as reported, he tended to rant instead of practicing medicine, keeping him on a disservice to the wounded soldiers he counseled. What was his record of treatment, compared to other therapists? Did soldiers complain about him? This should all be reachable information.

4. Did Walter Reed have such a file of complaints about him? If so, was Fort Hood made aware of this when he was transferred? Or was this a classic case of dumping a difficult soldier on another command, in this case with catastrophic results?

5. There appear to have been a number of warning signs. Obviously, it is easy in retrospect to see them. But is there anything that can be done differently? General Casey, the Army chief of staff, said over the weekend that he is worried about a "backlash" against Muslim troops. I think the best way to prevent such an overreaction would be to re-assure soldiers that the Army is uncovering and dismissing Muslim soldiers who veer into extremism."

I'll add that the obvious damage done by leaving this person in a position to counsel other soldiers in difficulty is also very much a part of the equation. And yes, political correctness idiocy has betrayed those he counseled, as well as the soldiers who died at Fort Hood.

It is not difficult to tell the difference between a believing Muslim, many of whom have served and continue to serve in the armed forces, and an advocate of shari'a, or sympathist with jihad. It was very easy for many of this traitor's colleagues to tell. It is similarly easy to tell if someone has white supremacist tendencies. In the military, it's actually pretty hard to entirely hide these things due to constant close contact under pressure.

The narrative of "Islam is a religion of peace" is dead outside of brain-dead politically correct circles. As Grim points out, it is instead of a religion of epic quest to convert the world, by means of both arms and persuasion, to the Muslim faith. Which, as an official component, includes the imposition of theocratic religious law on the population.

That's reality - and it's a reality that is fundamentally different from Judaism and Christianity.

It's also reality that many Muslims, like many Christians and Jews, have a fairly selective set of which religious beliefs they're serious about and which they ignore. But the question is NOT how to tell the difference between a shari'a advocate and a loyal officer. The question is how easy, or difficult, or even hazardous it is to report a problem, and whether it gets dealt with once reported. This is the question whether the problem is an Islamonazi, white power nazi (there have been some troubling reports of failure to deal with those, too, in the Army), black power fanatic, or whatever.

Large swathes of people in America are losing confidence that this process works, even in the Army, which clearly failed in its moral duty to protect its soldiers. Those failures push the default position - one of firewalling a religion whose current links to ubiquitous, organized violence around the world are consistent, widespread, and undeniable. A link that taints many people who may not deserve it - but the restoration of honor is a burden they will have to carry.

You may not like that reaction. You may consider it unjust, or unwise, or both. But unless people start to believe that threats will be dealt with, the backlash will grow. Oddly, you see, most people prioritize their own lives and safety, and the safety of those close to them, far above abstract considerations like the sensibilities of Muslims in countries where imams regularly preach hatred and war. And if the result of that backlash harms our society as a whole, the people involved in it will be, at best, only very secondarily to blame.

This is a fixable problem. Refusing to fix it has had consequences. And will have consequences.

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There is a connection between what these critics are calling "political correctness" and national security, but it runs in the opposite direction. The real linkage is that there is a strong security imperative to prevent the consolidation of a narrative in which America is engaged in a clash of civilizations with Islam, and instead to nurture a narrative in which al-Qaeda and its affiliates represent a marginal fringe to be jointly combated. Fortunately, American leaders -- from the Obama administration through General George Casey and top counter-terrorism officials -- understand this and have been acting appropriately.

It's worth walking through the connection once again, because how America responds to Ft. Hood really is important in the wider attempt to change the nature of its engagement with Muslim publics across the world. Get the response right, as the administration thus far has done, and they show that things really have changed. Get it wrong, as its critics demand, and the world could tumble back down into the 'clash of civilizations' trap which al-Qaeda so dearly wants and which the improved American approach of the last couple of years has increasingly denied it.

Note - importantly - that I flatly disagree with the notion that 'political correctness' had nothing to do with the reluctance of Maj. Hassan's peers to report his increasingly bizarre behavior up the chain of command.

I do believe that we need to accept that certain kinds of behavior are unacceptable - most of all in the Armed Services - and that whether you're white and sporting a Christian Identity t-shirt, black and wearing Rolling 60's tattoos, or Muslim and spouting Salafi and Islamist ideology - in any of those cases you've stepped over a line and need to pulled out of uniform.

But I do agree that firewalling between Hassan's Islamist craziness and his Muslim beliefs is important.

I believed in 2003 and believe today that the goal is to keep the conflict from widening into a "Muslim' v. "Western" one. Within the Muslim world, the Islamist crazies are a small minority, and the primary goal should be to make them a smaller one. By painting all Muslims with the murderer's beliefs, we make that harder.

I ask you; should we ban all white fundamentalist Christians from the Military because of the actions of a few extremists? All African-Americans so that no members of street gangs serve? You see where I'm going with this...no, of course not.

We need to ruthlessly seek out and stamp out Islamist believers who wear our uniform. We don't need to - and would be worse off if we did, morally and practically - do the same to pious Muslims.

Now the question is how we can tell the difference.
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The hero cop who ended the bloody rampage at Fort Hood by pumping four bullets into the crazed gunman even though she was wounded is known for her toughness, friends say.

...

"She was born and bred to be a police officer. If you were ever to be in a fight, she'd be the first person to stand up next to you and back you up. She's a tough cookie."

Munley's toughness and grace under pressure were on display Thursday when she and her partner responded within three minutes of reported gunfire, said Army Lt. Gen. Bob Cone.

Munley, who had been trained in active-response tactics, rushed into the building and confronted the shooter as he was turning a corner, Cone said.

"It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer," Cone said.

Munley was only a few feet from Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan when she opened fire.

Wounded in the exchange of bullets, the 34-year-old Munley was reported in stable condition at a local hospital.

The story's not all in, and we're a long way from the facts, but if she did stop the shooting by dropping Maj. Hasan, she's my hero. And if she didn't stop him and just entered the building and went to the sound of the guns, well ... she's my hero, too.
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One is that this model applies best to domestic or contiguous terror or guerilla fights, because those sorts of fights are the most existential, and control of territory for however long it takes is an inherent requirement. That doesn't mean it's impossible to apply to foreign fights, but the question must then be asked: "what for?" There's an answer in a colonialist framework, and there are answers within punitive expedition frameworks (like, "we're going to flatten towns involved in Somali piracy"). I'm not sure the Rajapaksa Model would translate in a place like Afghanistan, though elements of it could still be useful.

Another observation I'll make is the unspoken factor of Sri Lanka's cultivation of China as an alternate source of arms, removing dependency on (and hence pressure from) western suppliers.

That "no dependency" imperative is one I'm already seeing come to the fore in places like Indonesia and Brazil. Sri Lanka's experiences just add more fuel to an emerging consensus that the Western/UN approach just breeds disorder and failure. Now throw in the proliferation of new/revamped defense exporters around the globe in countries like China, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, et. al. Put that together, and I expect to see more countries take the Sri Lankan approach. The days of Western arms embargoes meaning much, or accomplishing much beyond costing Western jobs, are coming to a close.

Speaking of India, their naval intelligence cooperation, which allowed Sri Lanka to shatter the Tamils' supply network, adds an interesting wrinkle. At the distances involved, it looks like India used its fleet of TU-95 "Bear" long-range maritime patrol aircraft. Those could be considered a strategic national asset, so it was obviously a high priority task. The Tamil Tigers assassinated Rajiv Ghandi back when, so it's not surprising that there might be a bit of a grudge. As paybacks go, this turned out to be a pretty good one.

By the mid-2010s, when India has its new 737-derived P-8i patrol aircraft and a fleet of 3 carriers, it will be positioned to do this sort of thing in an arc extending from the Straits of Malacca to Suez and South Africa.

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If the center of this whole thing is Pakistan and its nukes, because we (correctly) believe them to be under threat in its current civil war, then Pakistan is now the main battleground. Afghanistan is now the secondary battleground, and important only to the extent that its collapse makes a Pakistani solution so difficult. As long as we can kill lots of enemies in place, or fleeing pressure from Pakistan, and maintain our ability to be in Afghanistan, that's all we want.

If that's the thesis, there are at least 2 approaches.

One is McChrystal's classic full-scale counter-insurgency approach (see his report). In terms of insurgency orientation, it's about enhanced legitimacy, and denied control. Protect the population, raise both a Afghan army and local armed networks that can make the Taliban's life hell, shore up governance so that there's a choice that's clearly better than the Taliban from an Afghan point of view (note low bar there). If you succeed, you have fashioned an anvil, against which the Pakistani state can strike a hammer into its own problem. Which, if successful, further eases the pressure on Afghanistan. Ideal result? 2 wins.

Another says: "You know what? We don't have an orientation. We don't want legitimacy OR control. We just want to make sure the Taliban are denied the ability to gain either in Afghanistan. And we'll work with anyone, anyone at all, if we think it will help us achieve that goal over the medium term - defined as 5-10 years." Ideal result: a win (in Pakistan) and a draw (in Afghanistan). Preferably a win in Pakistan that does not include the Islamist ISI going right back to supporting and assisting Islamonazis in Afghanistan, as a way of raising a backdoor army for a Pakistani coup.

What approach #2 needs on the Afghan end is a link between ends and means, that makes sense per Afghan situation and culture. It's ironic that the Obama administration may actually be leaning toward the Ralph Peters approach (shared by Brits like Rory Stewart, who has some experience in the area). But to work, there are some logical bugs between "sure, our forces could happily operate in that mode for a long time, even if the government comes apart" and "...this is how."

I'm actually happy to see that the Obama administration, and SecDef Gates, appear to be thinking this one through. They can't dither about it indefinitely, but now's the time.

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I still remember a typically dishonest and projection-ridden piece in The Economist a while back, which covered Chechnya shortly after the Russians won. While it did backflips to avoid open admissions that Putin had in fact won the war, it went on employ the a classic Economist approach of acknowledging the fact of it in backhanded ways. While saying that in the long run, Putin would pay a price, the situation was not as great as it seemed for Russia, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Did Putin pay a price? Not really, no. It was a classic example of a publication that has only way to look at a situation, and can't even openly acknowledge that others exist. Which is definitely The Economist's core stock-in-trade across the board, so perhaps they're an unfair example to pick. But they're not the only ones afflicted with this kind of blindness, and if the organization is a military, the consequences can be dire.

This is not to say that the American/Western legitimacy approach is necessarily ineffective. And the classical control approach can also fail, vid. the Russians' initial experience in Afghanistan. What one can say with greater certainty is that the legitimacy approach is usually far more expensive than the classical alternative, and inherently more fragile. It has worked, most notably in Iraq. In some circumstances, it can even work better than the classical control approach. Then you have the 50/50 options, like Colombia's war against the FARC narco-terrorists and their backers in Venezuela, which may form a category all their own.

So, it all starts with the acknowledgment that there are several approaches which could be effective.

The question worth discussing is, what circumstances favour one approach vs. the other.

That's a question with long-term resonance beyond Afghanistan, but it also has special relevance there. The Taliban's approach relies heavily on control, not so much on legitimacy. Widespread experiences with their own previous regime ensure that. In contrast, the allied forces rely more heavily on legitimacy, and less on control.

Each side has definite weak points in its stance, but that's the broad outline of it. The 3 key questions as I see them are:

• What local and regional conditions (geographic, cultural, political, ideological) make control more likely to be a losing approach for state forces? For guerillas?

As one example, In Iraq an armed populace and a culture of direct justice (tribal revenge in this case) both became a definite problem for al-Qaeda and their allies. Because a large potential backer (US Marines) existed in the immediate area, the tribes always had the option of going postal on the jihadists. Eventually, they had enough of the abuses and murders, and the jihadists' control strategy collapsed catastrophically. Boyd called this approach "swordlessness", using the enemy's own sword against him. Ironically, it's a classic component of most guerilla strategies.

On the state side, meanwhile, the Russian experience in Afghanistan is just one of many instances which showed that safe havens, plus significant foreign support, plus a perception of low gains to be had from the controller's victory (even if that's wrong, as it was here), will make a control strategy untenable - even one that went to extremes like using chemical weapons.

Fostering backlashes to the evil and ruthless won't work everywhere, however. Whether the issue is being viewed from the state or non-state side, arms availability, culture, and receptivity must all be aligned, or the backlash to a control strategy will either never happen, or will lack sufficient force. This is most emphatically not a one-size-fits-all approach.

What other factors influence this question? Which of those requirements exist in Afghanistan? Some do (armed populace, tribal revenge culture), and experiences in Pakistan suggest that fostering friendly tribal lashkars is possible. Given al-Qaeda's current control of western Pakistan, however, armed backlash in Afghanistan could be seen by the locals as taking the losing side of a long-term tribal war. Is it seen that way? What other inhibitors exist? What would it take to change that? Is that change possible or realistic?

• What legitimacy-based approaches are possible if local governments and/or forces are weak?

The most frequent counter-proposal to the current approach of boots on the ground is to leave Afghanistan as a tribal, semi-lawless region with no effective control. It becomes more of a "special forces war," using small forces backed by mobile strike (aircraft, airmobile groups, or what have you) that focus on arming the local populace, striking the Taliban/al-Qaeda when found, and denying the enemy a successful control strategy. Legitimacy has no connection to any national government, just local alliances. Drugs are a non-issue, though trading them with the Taliban can get you shot. Ralph Peters is probably the most visible advocate for this approach: see his Sept 22/09 and Sept 17/09 columns.

It's a classic smart war strategy, and it's different than the approach taken at the moment. The question is whether it will work if the Afghan government collapses, and the Taliban can shift from their remaining bases in Pakistan to Afghanistan. With a nuclear-armed Pakistan as the long term prize, the enemy force just sloshes from one bowl to the other within "the lawless frontier," enabled at every step buy high-ranking Pakistani collaborators and enablers like Hamid Gul et. al.

The flip side of a special forces reliant strategy should also be acknowledged. You're going to take very valuable casualties, including some real disasters and prisoner-takings, because small teams are vulnerable (read Lone Survivor). This can also hamper operations behind enemy lines in places like Afghanistan, if control is strong enough. Not to mention the fact that the air support they need will mean civilian casualties - something that must be accepted, because a special forces strategy doesn't work well with rigid rules of engagement (vid. Porphyrogenitus' recent post). Which brings us back to our earlier question of whether a "swordlessness" strategy really works if allied forces aren't on the ground in southern Afghanistan in some numbers. Or does it just create a safe haven that can be used to destabilize a nuclear-armed state (not a worry in Iraq)?

What are the options for a "legitimacy, but minimized" approach here? What are their drawbacks? Some serious discussion of those points is necessary, in Washington and beyond.

• What control-based approaches are possible if local governments and/or forces are weak?

Latin America suggests some models, but in a different area and a different culture, and from the opposite vantage point, this is the Taliban's problem. If they try to impose full control, they become vulnerable, as they learned to their sorrow. Their question is how much control needs to be imposed, in order to bring the situation to a correlation of forces that favors them.

Busting that requires either disruption of that control, or weakening of the underlying correlation of forces they're relying on. Which is mostly in Pakistan. But doing either of those things requires another step first: the ability to see and understand the situation from within a different insurgency framework.

The fact that there was a presentation on the Russian approach at the Naval War College is a small piece of encouragement there.

I'd feel better if I saw more evidence of that ability to grok the existence and efficacy of another framework in the US and allied militaries. Need I mention that the Amero-European political class is largely a write-off when it comes to any of these issues, something that surely doesn't help. We'll see.

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