IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 1017-10
November 05, 2010
DOD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Sgt. 1st Class Todd M. Harris, 37, of Tucson, Ariz., died Nov. 3 in Badghis province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit with small arms fire. He was assigned to the 87th Infantry Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y.

For more information media may contact the Fort Drum public affairs office at 315-772-8286, or after hours at 315-408-3087.

New START yes; DADT repeal… meh. Sure, right now the DADT repeal is in the defense authorization that Congress needs to pass, and the Pentagon wants that passed. But… well, read Geoff Morrell’s briefing transcript for yourself:

Q So right now, this department is urging congressional action on START, but not urging congressional action on “don’t ask, don’t tell.” That’s kind of what it boils down to, right?

MR. MORRELL: No. I — we are clearly urging congressional action, echoing the president, on START. I think you saw the president speak to “don’t ask, don’t tell” as an issue, as a priority for him yesterday. We have been very, very clear on this. Again, Julian, dating back to last February, when the secretary first and the chairman first voiced support for the president’s position on this, which is, they are for a repeal, but they want a study to take place in advance of that repeal to educate us about how to deal with this change. We have not yet completed that study, although we are very close. Let’s let that finish, let’s let the secretary get it and consider it, and then we’ll chart a course from there.

Q So the calculation could change for the second half of the lame-duck session, essentially the December session, because at that point the review will be done. So depending on the outcome of that review, the — this department might have more to say to Congress.

MR. MORRELL: I am not prepared at this time, Julian, to tell you what action we expect to take upon receipt of the report… [snip]

Q (Off mike) — the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” because it’s in the Senate bill. So how —

MR. MORRELL: Listen, I don’t know how, ultimately, the Congress is going to consider these bills. That’s for them to figure out. That’s not — we don’t opine on such things. We clearly want our appropriations. We clearly want our authorizations. How they construct those, I’m not going to tell them how to do their business.

Props to Julian Barnes of the Wall Street Journal for pressing on the clarification.

Lots of Twitter talk about this post on Tom Ricks’s blog about the counterterrorism/counterinsurgency relationship and Thomas Rid’s response to it. It seems like both talk past each other a bit — or would, if Ricks’s post knew about about Rid’s ahead of time.

Argument summary: Ricks’s anonymous pal “Mr. XYZ” says counterterrorism requires counterinsurgency, since killing terrorists requires intelligence that locals and locals alone possess, and they need something from you — security from reprisal, and maybe some other material benefits — if they’re to get it, because a grand don’t come for free. That requires a big resource commitment. Rid responds that counterterrorism operations in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan prove that Mr. XYZ is wrong.

But Mr. XYZ could respond to Rid that remote-based counterterrorism is an insufficient security strategy. Kill a couple people, sure, but you don’t know who their successors are going to be in a given terrorist organization or how you’re going to ultimately dislodge the group from where it is. Survivors, friends and family members of the hunted can form the next generation of warriors, and suddenly you’ve swatted at a hornet’s nest. Do that a couple times and you’ll likely reach a diminishing return in your intelligence source base. It’s less an issue of the feasibility of discrete-counterterrorism than the sustainability of it.

And then someone who’s sympathetic to Rid can point to this glaring hole in Mr. XYZ’s strategy to wrap up the Afghanistan war:

Surely, the world’s remaining superpower — despite the squandering of immense opportunities, treasure and too much blood over the past nine years — still has the clout and the savvy to make Pakistan and offer it cannot refuse to embrace with the proper sense of urgency.

“Surely” is not a plan. We’ve bribed, cajoled, coaxed and intimated that we’re leaving-but-really-staying-in-a-different-form. Someone could object that we haven’t cut off funding to Pakistan, but why that would make Pakistan more inclined to act on our goals requires further argument.

Then it gets much worse:

[W]hat if the U.S. finally decided to take into account the strategic culture of the region and decided to go over the heads of both the Pakistani and Afghan governments and make the following offer. The Durand Line is no more. We support the existence of a free and independent Pashtunistan and Baluchistan. Moreover, we could invite India to assist in this with Muslim Indian troops. It worked in Bangladesh. Why not here?

So the U.S. would threaten to redraw the map of a region we barely understand as a solution to a few dozen-to-hundred terrorists whose capabilities are dangerous but diminished? And this is to persuade people against half-measures and security false-dawns? Imperially abolishing the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and stoking a regional war would go according to plan? Anyone remember that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons? This is self-refuting.