Wanat: The Unasked Questions (updated)

"The questions into what happened at Wanat a year ago have gathered pace thanks to the blogging of my colleague Tom Ricks and a new study for the Combat Studies Institute. I read a draft of this study a while back, actually, but did not blog about it because it had not yet been released and I do not like to blog on unfinished documents. A criticism of the study that a COIN-skeptic friend of mine had -- for the sake of anonymity, I will refer to him as "Fran Frentile" -- was that the report included a largely subjective night-and-day judgment about the previous commander in the area as compared with the commander at the time of the incident. The previous commander -- U.S. Army Col. Chris Cavoli, now standing up a new light infantry brigade at Fort Bliss -- was portrayed by the author of the study as everything you could possibly want in a counterinsurgency strategist and commander. As it happens, I am a friend of Chris, think immensely highly of him (despite the fact that he went to Princeton), and rather like to think that my friends are indeed God's gifts to counterinsurgency warfare. (Chris is The Man, in my opinion, and comes off as such in Dave Kilcullen's book for those of you who have read it.) But there is probably something to Fran's criticism of the study as being a bit cartoonish in the way it highlights the difference between Chris and the commander at the time of the incident -- Bill Ostlund."
Abu Muqawama