In this month’s issue of Foreign Policy, Nathaniel Fick and John Nagl lay out a detailed pro-escalation argument. Given the critical importance of the issue, I’m going to respond point by point.

The authors present their counterinsurgency tactics as a series of paradoxes.

Paradox 1: Some of the best weapons do not shoot.

1-1. Afghanistan is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. Per capita GDP is $350, just one tenth of Iraq’s. Life expectancy is 44 years. Nearly three quarters of the population is illiterate. The country has 50 percent more land than Iraq, but a fifth of the paved roads. Security is crucial, but it is development—enabled by responsible governance—that will secure a lasting peace.

1-2. Afghans’ greatest concerns, according to polling by the Asia Foundation, are access to electricity, jobs, water, and education. Those who think the country is moving in the right direction can rightly cite instances of successful reconstruction efforts as the primary cause for optimism. For these reasons, security must not be seen simply as a necessary precondition for development efforts. Development often creates security by bolstering people’s confidence in their government and providing a positive, tangible alternative to the Taliban. Take the National Solidarity Program. Under this initiative, villages elect a community council to oversee a development project chosen by village vote. Local people contribute a portion of the capital, labor, or materials, and allocated aid funds are distributed transparently. The results of this bottom-up process have been remarkable: Although the Taliban has burned hundreds of schools across Afghanistan, almost no schools built under this program have been destroyed, largely because the Taliban knows it would win no allies by destroying them.

1-3. Although all development is critical in this impoverished country, roads are the single most important path to success in Afghanistan. In Ghazni province last summer, one of us spoke with an Afghan road builder whose shirt was covered in dried blood. He’d been shot by the Taliban a day earlier for working with the coalition, but he was back the next morning with his paving crew because he thought that finishing that road was the best way to bolster security in his village. Indeed, the U.S. general who was critical of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan pointed at Afghanistan’s ring road from the window of his Black Hawk helicopter, and declared, “Where the road ends, the Taliban begins.”

1-1. No one questions the seriousness of Afghanistan’s poverty. But talking about development rings hollow when persistent accusations of corruption have dogged international development efforts, and talking about responsible governance rings hollow when American- and Karzai-allied warlords continue to occupy positions of power throughout the country. To my knowledge, no American policymaker has yet posited an alternative to Karzai - probably because none are available. But with Karzai at the helm, “responsible governance” will continue to elude Afghanistan no matter how many US troops pour in.

1-2. The schools program sounds interesting and encouraging. But whatever progress is made in individual localities, such development programs don’t address the underlying issues raised above.

1-3. Joshua Foust of Registan has attacked the idea that roads equal security more effectively than I can. His thoughts are worth reading in full, but in summary he points out that the Taliban can use roads too, as can bandits and other forces targeting NATO troops as well as ordinary Afghans.

Let’s move on.

Paradox 2: Sometimes the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.

2-1. The U.S. military, designed to inflict overwhelming and disproportionate losses on the enemy, tends to equate victory with very few body bags. So does the American public. The new counterinsurgency doctrine upends this perceived immunity from casualties by demanding that manpower replace firepower. Soldiers in Afghanistan must get out among the people, building and staffing joint security stations with Afghan security forces. That is the only way to disconnect the enemy from the civilians. Persistent presence—living among the population in small groups, staying in villages overnight for months at a time—is dangerous, and it will mean more casualties, but it’s the only way to protect the population effectively. And it will make U.S. troops more secure in the long run.

2-2. This imperative to get out among the people extends to U.S. civilians as well. U.S. Embassy staff are almost completely forbidden from moving around Kabul on their own. Diplomacy is, of course, about relationships, and rules that discourage relationships fundamentally limit the ability of American diplomats to do their jobs. The mission in Afghanistan is to stabilize the country, not to secure the embassy.

2-3. Counterinsurgency strategy suggests that victory requires 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 residents. Current troop strength in Afghanistan, including Afghan forces, are about a third of that level. The stark alternatives are to deploy more troops or to change the mission.

2-1. Even with half a million troops in Vietnam, many of whom interacted in profound ways with the local population, we were never able to “disconnect the enemy from the civilians.”

2-2. Instead of asking mid-level American civilians to conduct street diplomacy and expose themselves to extremely high risk of death, why don’t we conduct high-level diplomacy within Afghanistan and within the region, and then remove all Americans in Afghanistan from harm?

2-3. Instead of tripling our forces in Afghanistan, at great cost and with no clearly defined exit strategy or criteria for victory, why don’t we change the mission?

Let’s take the next paradox.

Paradox 3: The hosts doing something tolerably is often better than foreigners doing it well.

3-1. The United States and its allies cannot remain in Afghanistan indefinitely. Building a capable Afghan security force and a credible Afghan government is the fastest, most responsible exit strategy. U.S. efforts so far have been mixed. An army can only be as good as its government, and the government of President Hamid Karzai has been crippled by corruption and connections to narcotrafficking. His recent decision to replace the much-reviled minister of the interior is a sign that persistent U.S. complaints about poor governance might be getting through. National elections scheduled for this year provide an incentive for the Afghan government to continue to improve, and serve as a major point of leverage for U.S. policy.

3-2. At the end of the day, the coalition’s performance is less important than how well the Afghans themselves perform. Every coalition decision and every operation should be guided by two questions: Does this further the legitimacy of the Afghan government? And is that government deserving of our support? As tribal elders in Ghazni province recently said, they feel “slapped on one cheek by the government, and on the other cheek by the Taliban.” The United States can and should take the lead in training Afghan soldiers and bureaucrats to be more effective, but even this task is not being given the commitment it deserves. Currently, the U.S. teams advising the Afghan Army are staffed at just half their authorized strength; the police mentor teams are manned at barely a third of the necessary staff. The low priority assigned to this keystone of any successful counterinsurgency strategy is an unacceptable flaw of U.S. policy to date.

3-1 and 3-2. It is too late to build an effective government out of the Karzai regime. Karzai, often dismissed as the “mayor of Kabul,” enjoys little legitimacy among the people. Personnel shifts will not change that. Afghanistan’s poverty along with endemic corruption suggest that no elections in 2009 can be fair or representative of majority will, and therefore the idea that elections constitute an incentive for change, or a point of leverage, is not persuasive. Karzai is an unacceptable leader, and the US has no alternative - suggesting that efforts to promote “good governance” or to train an Afghan force are largely wasted.

Here’s the fourth paradox:

Paradox 4: Sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is.

4-1. In 2005, the coalition conducted 176 close air support missions (in which aircraft conduct bombing or strafing in support of ground troops) in Afghanistan. In 2007, it completed 3,572 such missions. Bombs—even “smart” bombs—are blunt instruments, and they inevitably kill people other than their intended targets. Each civilian death at the hands of the coalition further diminishes the finite amount of goodwill toward the United States among the Afghan people. Each civilian death undermines the legitimacy of the Afghan government the United States seeks to support. Each civilian death, when refracted through the Taliban’s propaganda campaign, strengthens the narrative of America’s enemies.

4-2. If military units commit to using less force, then it is imperative that others on the battlefield, particularly civilian security contractors, do the same. One of us had a nightmarish experience recently while riding in a convoy protected by Afghan security contractors on a dark highway near Jalalabad. We repeatedly hurtled through national police checkpoints without stopping and finally crashed into a stopped minibus filled with people. The momentum of our heavily armored SUV threw the bus off the roadway, but the guards refused our orders to stop and help, citing fears of ambush. Afghan civilians do not distinguish between excessive force used by soldiers and excessive force used by contractors. In a war where perception creates reality, we all suffer the consequences.

4-1 and 4-2. We must absolutely halt the alarming rate of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. However, nothing is more likely to increase civilian casualties than an escalation of troop numbers. Anand Gopal shows how this trend has operated since 2007, and believes it likely to continue with further escalation. As for contractors, the incident detailed here exemplifies some of the problems that make the current situation untenable. There is no reason why incidents like this would not continue to happen even after a troop surge occurred.

And finally, the fifth paradox.

Paradox 5: Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.

5-1. Cross-border raids into Pakistan to pursue insurgents have strained U.S. relations with Pakistan at this critical juncture in the Afghan campaign. Pakistan is, of course, inextricably connected to the Afghan insurgency. The Pashtun belt, as the border area between the two countries is known, constitutes the real battleground in this war. Counterinsurgency operations in Pakistan, therefore, are a necessary component of any strategy in Afghanistan. Without Pakistani support, however, unilateral cross-border raids will create more blowback than they are worth.

5-2. A better strategy for persuading Pakistan to act as an ally—and not a spoiler—in Afghanistan involves giving up the short-term tactical gains of such raids in favor of the regional diplomacy necessary to broaden and deepen the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Even after Islamist extremists bombed the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in September in an attempt to assassinate the new civilian leadership of Pakistan, the Pakistani Army remains more focused on the perceived threat from India than on the actual threat from inside its own country’s borders. U.S. and international efforts to broker confidence-building measures between India and Pakistan are likely to have a far greater impact on Pakistani counterinsurgency efforts than any number of unilateral U.S. raids.

5-3. More U.S. troops are absolutely necessary to turn the tide in Afghanistan, but American troops are a short-term answer to a lasting set of problems. Supporting Afghan and Pakistani governments that can meet the needs of their own people—including security—must be the long-term solution. The paradoxes of counterinsurgency detailed here, counterintuitive though they may be, provide the best guideposts on the rocky trail toward success. It will not be the death or capture of every last enemy fighter that wins this war, but creating a position of strength from which to negotiate a lasting political solution to a cycle of conflict with no other end in sight.

5-1. I agree that we should stop unilateral cross-border raids into Pakistan

5-2. I agree that we should step up diplomatic outreach to India and Pakistan. I would add that we must take the crisis in Kashmir seriously and do our utmost to push for an equitable resolution.

5-3. It does not follow from the other points here that an escalation is necessary. No matter how long we occupy Afghanistan and how many troops we use to do it, we cannot impose a government on Afghans that lacks legitimacy and their support. Moreover, if the only criterion for victory in Afghanistan is the establishment of a thriving Central Asian democracy, we may remain there for quite some time, at precisely the moment when we can ill afford to do so.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Subscribe via RSS or Email  ::     ::  Leave a comment

Bookmark to: