The first of occasional postings
Guest Post by Afghanistan Ag Man

On December 1 of last year, President Barack Obama spoke to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on the future of American military operations in Afghanistan.  In the course of outlining the resources that would be required to implement a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy, the President stated:

We will work with our partners, the UN, and the Afghan people to pursue a more effective civilian strategy, so that the government can take advantage of improved security…we will also focus our assistance in areas — such as agriculture — that can make an immediate impact in the lives of the Afghan people.

It is due to these lines in the speech that I am here in Afghanistan today. As an agricultural advisor from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), I have been assigned to a province in the mountains of the Hindu Kush in Eastern Afghanistan.

Ultimately, I hope to use these blog  posts as an outlet to tell the stories of local Afghans and the troops that I live with, as well as my own story as an average American farmer that is now part of a civilian-military (re)development strategy in Afghanistan.  

My identity and location will remain anonymous to protect not only myself, but also the Americans and Afghans that I am working with. I will, however, try wholeheartedly to report as completely and factually as possible…

For the next year, I will be embedded with the men and women of the US military as they go on their patrols and conduct missions in my provincial area of responsibility. I am, however, just one of the several hundred U.S. Government employees (primarily from the Department of State, US Agency for International Development, and USDA) sent here to Afghanistan to serve in various capacities, including as Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) and District Support Team (DST) members; Afghan minister/ministry mentors; technical experts in the fields of governance, rule of law, agriculture, and irrigation; and civilian counterparts and advisors to our military leaders at the brigade, battalion, and platoon levels.

To better access the local population, I have been placed on an outpost in a remote area of the province and will be travelling from district to district to better assess the agricultural situation of each village. Life out here is pretty basic, but the guys I live alongside are honestly the best “co-workers” I could ask for. My integration into my unit has been surprisingly quick.  I neither expected nor have been granted special treatment. I celebrated Christmas by taking inventory of ammunition in a mortar pit; carried equipment to the tops of mountains to survey a valley (and I assure you, these are not hills, but mountains!); “conquered” a burned-out Soviet tank (an explanation will come in a following post); and waded through a river on a New Year’s Eve night mission.

In addition to my role as a member of a military unit, the Obama administration’s new strategy tasked me with the job of “reinforcing positive [Afghan] action” throughout the populace of my designated province. To this end, it will be necessary to go “outside the wire” each day to conduct missions. Such missions include shuras (i.e. consultations) with village representatives and elders, discussions with local farmers on crop yields and technical improvements, and project site assessments to gauge the progress of agricultural and irrigation improvements.

Each day’s mission usually starts out with encouraging words from our fearless lieutenant that it is only “a short walk–a few clicks (i.e. kilometers) at the most.” As I have found out, our missions continually evolve and these “few clicks” could include anything from scaling a mountain, to traversing fields after dark because a key leader engagement (KLE) (i.e. a meeting with key leaders or representatives of a village that speak on behalf of that community) was delayed, to spending long hours keeping watch over old Soviet minefields until a team arrives to deal with them.

A willingness to be flexible is, therefore, key to surviving a tour in Afghanistan. I live in an environment that has no weekends and that runs on military time, which I am still trying to get used to. A typical workday starts at about 0600 and does not end until 0000 (i.e. midnight). My normal morning routine of reading the New York Times has been replaced by reading mission briefs and security reports. As I fall asleep at night, I think about the possibility of an apiculture (i.e. beekeeping) training session for local farmers or the consequences of a check dam series (i.e. a series of small, somewhat temporary dams that slow down rivers and create pools of water) on a stretch of a particular river.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I have never had an occupation that has brought so much satisfaction and exhaustion so early on. I look forward to getting up each day, working alongside American soldiers and Afghan interpreters, and doing my part to help stabilize the country so that we can ultimately leave. From my vantage point, the military has embraced the necessity of a civilian effort to complement their military efforts. For example, on occasions when I am not out on patrol with my base unit, I often return to dinner conversations with them that contain enthusiastic reports of their meetings with farmers that need to meet me or of potential agricultural projects to assess. I am often referred to the villagers as “an agriculture guy that is really smart and can help you with your crops” – a humbling moniker that I hope to live up to.

The Cable’s Josh Rogin and Global Security Newswire’s Elaine Grossman confirm what we’ve known for some time: verification, specifically telemetry, is delaying completion of the New START agreement.  

START I defined “telemetric information” as “information that originates on board a missile during its flight test that is broadcast or recorded for subsequent recovery.” It required both parties “to make on-board technical measurements during each flight test of an ICBM or SLBM; to broadcast this information using unencrypted telemetry, with limited exceptions; and to exchange copies of telemetry tapes acceleration profiles, and interpretive data from all flight-tests.”

The Russians are arguing that they should no longer be required to share (and broadcast unencrypted?) telemetric information because they are building new missiles while we are not.  The Obama administration is under pressure to retain START I’s provisions on telemetry in part because, as Travis notes, “certain [mostly Republican] senators will go nuts without access to the data.”  

I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind as we think about this issue – and verification more broadly…  

The first is that the U.S. has not negotiated a meaningful arms control agreement since the early 1990s.  As a colleague on the Hill put it to me, telemetry is “complicated, and very technical, and both sides are very short on people who remember how to construct this sort of a verification regime.”  This lack of expertise has undoubtedly slowed things down.

The second (and more important) point is that people who continue to attack the Obama administration on verification need to understand that while New START will draw upon much of what was in START I, the new treaty will contain new limits and rules.  This has important implications for how the U.S. and Russia go about determining what is and what is not necessary for effective verification.  As one arms control expert put it recently:

And so the verification provisions really need to be driven by the actual limitations that you agree to, and to the extent that you have different limitations than were in the START treaty, and I think in some ways this new agreement is going to be simpler than the START treaty.  That may impose, in some ways, less demanding verification requirements.  And that gives the side the opportunity, then, to eliminate the inspections if they make no contribution to the overall understanding of the other side’s compliance with the treaty.

Thus, while our intelligence community would probably prefer to retain such provisions as continuous monitoring at Votkinsk and the exchange of telemetry, they may not be necessary to verify Russia’s compliance with the new treaty – to say nothing about the fact that we have other ways of making up for the loss of much of the information provided by these provisions in any event.

For example, START I stated that “telemetric information…assists in verification of Treaty provisions concerning, for example, throw-weight and the number of reentry vehicles.”  Given that New START is likely to have new provisions on throw-weight (in fact it might not have any provisions on throw-weight because we don’t really care about it anymore) and new counting rules for delivery vehicles and warheads, we should be able to live with “simpler” and “less demanding” provisions on telemetry.

Of course, Jon Kyl and company don’t really care about this distinction; they want to score political points.  How else to explain the fact that when the Bush administration was in office, Republicans couldn’t have cared less about verification?  

In the most recent issue of Newsweek, Sharon Begley argues that Iran’s nuclear program has become an issue of national pride akin to Palestinian claims to Jerusalem. According to Begley, for many Iranians the nuclear program now constitutes a “sacred value” and trumps rational cost-benefit analysis, creating a barrier to further diplomatic engagement.

Begley’s argument is based on a new experiment by Morteza Dehghani, Douglas Medin and colleagues in the December issue of the journal Judgment and Decision Making. The study asked 72 young (average age, 28), Iranian, college graduates if Iran should give up its nuclear program. Twenty-two percent chose “I think this definitely needs to happen,” while 15 percent chose “I do not object to this,” and 52 percent chose “this is acceptable only if the benefits of stopping the program are great enough.” Good news, right? Not according to Begley.

Begley focuses on the 11 percent who chose “this shouldn’t be done no matter how great the benefits are.” This is the group for whom, according to the study, the nuclear program seems to constitute a sacred value.

Though the percentage seems small, Begley argues that “it is likely that more ordinary Iranians than educated, English-speaking Iranians—those surveyed for the study—view the nukes as a sacred value, suggesting that the 11 percent is an underestimate.”

Assuming this hypothesis is correct; it suggests a bleak outlook for current nuclear negotiations. But do they draw the rights conclusions from their experiment? Or are they overplaying the views of a fringe population that often exists at the margins of survery experiments?

Leaders of Iran’s Green Movement (which is arguably more engaged than the 11 percent of Iranians Begley speaks of and is made up of, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of Iranians) have repeatedly articulated their opposition to nuclear weapons, though they seem to favor a peaceful nuclear program for Iran.

Unfortunately, Dehghani et. al.’s experiment did not seek to ascertain whether Iranians also view nuclear weapons as a sacred value. For the purposes of negotiation, which is Begley’s main focus, this is a crucial distinction. All material incentives are not off the table, as Begley would have us believe, if 11 percent of Iranians view only peaceful nuclear enrichment – not nuclear weapons – as a sacred value.

Moreover, let’s not forget that twenty-two percent of those surveyed believe that Iran should “definitely” give up its nuclear program. Although “even a minority, if it is committed enough, can carry the day” it looks as if Begley’s minority is outnumbered in almost every way.

I’m still sifting through some of the nuclear headlines from the holiday break and wanted to address the hyperventilating in the blogosphere and the media about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin’s end of the year comments on missile defense.  In a visit to Vladivostok on December 29, Putin stated:

If we don’t develop a missile defense system, a danger arises for us that with an umbrella protecting our partners from offensive weapons, they will feel completely safe….The balance will be disrupted, and then they will do whatever they want, and aggressiveness will immediately arise both in real politics and economics.

The view from the U.S. press seems to be that this means missile defense is the main issue holding up completion of the New START agreement.

Maybe we’re in too much of a “don’t freak out mood” over here at the Center, but I don’t put much stock in Putin’s remarks.  The reality is that despite Russia’s initial positive reaction to the Obama administration’s new approach to missile defense in Europe, it remains deeply concerned about U.S. missile defense plans.  Putin didn’t say anything new…

While the Russians have certainly been more difficult negotiating partners than we would have hoped, I still don’t believe that missile defense is going to be a deal breaker during this round of arms reduction talks.

The U.S. has made it clear that limits on U.S. missiles defenses cannot be part of a START follow-on agreement.  In fact, Presidents Obama and Medvedev have stated that New START will deal only with strategic offensive arms.  As far as I know, this remains the official Russian position, Putin’s remarks notwithstanding.  As Linton Brooks put it at a December 8 press briefing the Center co-hosted with the Arms Control Association:

I think it is very unlikely that this treaty will constrain in any way ballistic missile defenses, first because I think that would complicate ratification enormously in this country, but secondly, because I don’t think the Russians are interested in doing that at this stage.

Could Putin’s comments have been a negotiating tactic to try and extract some additional concessions from the U.S. as the New START negotiations come to a close? I think there could be some truth to this, but I don’t think we should view them in the first instance as some kind of narrow instrumental means to an end.  

Rather, they reflect the standard Russian view on missile defense, which is that the current status quo of unconstrained U.S. development of long-range missile defenses is a threat to Russia’s deterrent and not tenable in perpetuity.  Pavel Podvig summed up the implications of this view nicely back in August:

There is, however, one common element to all positions – they all assume that deployment of U.S. missile defense in Europe is a fundamental issue in U.S.-Russian relations and cannot be reduced to technical arguments. Whether this is justified or not, this means that any changes of the system configuration that would try to address Russia’s concern in a narrowly defined technical way – e.g. changes in the deployment area or a move toward mobile or ship-based interceptors – are unlikely to change Russia’s position on missile defense in a substantial way. Rather, Russia might see it as an attempt to circumvent its objections and to altogether exclude it from the discussion of missile defense and larger security issues.

I think this explains a lot about why Russia remains wary of U.S. missile defense plans despite the cancellation of the Czech and Polish sites.  If anything, Putin’s comments are probably aimed at what we’ve been calling the follow-on to the follow-on, or the next round of much deeper nuclear arms reduction negotiations. Such reductions will almost certainly have to be accompanied by a far more formal and robust modus vivendi between the U.S. and Russia on missile defense than what we’re likely to see in the initial New START agreement.