Center for a New American Security

I got the heads up on a battle brewing in southern Afghanistan a few months ago. Not a battle between Marines and insurgents, mind, but one over the appropriate tactics to fight the Taliban. Specifically, I heard the staff of Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson's MEB was getting frustrated by being forced to essentially camp out on the population and, Marines being Marines, wanted to go chase the bad guys. Now this from today's Washington Post:

A week ago, I spent some time on the blog whining about Quants and their work on counterinsurgency. Since then, two scholars -- distinguished veterans of the war in Iraq -- have told me that while they share some of my frustrations, I should make some exceptions -- especially for the work being done by Jason Lyall, Eli Berman and Jacob Shapiro.

So the quants, not content with mucking up the financial world, have turned their attention to the dynamics of irregular war.

A few months ago, my buddy George Feese, a USMA graduate and two-time Iraq veteran with whom I attended both the infantry officer basic course and Ranger School, introduced me over email to Tim Harford, the consistently thought-provoking "Undercover Economist" who writes for the Financial Times. Tim was exploring areas in which contemporary conflict and economics intersect.

Nir Rosen and I had breakfast this morning and caught up over coffee and eggs, but that hasn't stopped us from going at each other in this month's Boston Review, which features an article by Nir and then a forum in which I participate along with Alex Thier, Andrew Bacevich, Aziz Hakimi, Syed Saleem Shahzad and Helena Cobban. In my contribution, I argue that Afghanistan will mark the end of what I'm calling the "Third Counterinsurgency Era".

I have not been posting much recently, enjoying my retirement from daily blogging, but Richard Fontaine and I got name-checked in the lead editorial from today's Washington Post on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on account of this policy paper we wrote on Yemen for CNAS, so if you have not read it, do. I re-read it today to make sure I still agree with what we wrote and ... yup, I still do.

I like to think our counterinsurgency reading list is pretty good, too, but this one, from the U.S. Army War College, is really comprehensive. (Thanks, Ross.)

On The Accidental Guerrilla

I mentioned how much I enjoyed this event at the Center for American Progress. I can't get the embed code to work for some reason, but you can now watch it online here.

I'll be out of town, but this is very much worth attending, if only to heckle Brimley about his cave etchings and why he hasn't gotten off his butt and finished the QDR yet. Sam Abrams deserves kudos for making this happen.