Agree on much of that but...
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Eden
...Just keep in mind that NATO and the US public are unlikely to support an extended and expensive campaign that, twenty years from now, leaves Afghanistan as a semi-stable theocracy.
This last item is possibly true however, I'll point out that NATO to an extent and us to a great degree have supported extended campaigns (Kosovo; NATO and us, for one example) or expensive long duration stays in unkind locations (from Korea to Kuwait for us). Not theocracies per se but unpleasant regimes and not terribly stable on occasion. In any event, what will transpire is IMO impossible to predict at this point. We'll see.
Hmm. Those start with a 'K' -- Afghanistan doesn't, maybe it'll be a change. Which way... :wry:
Is McCaffrey's report ...
open-source, online ? I'd like to read what he says - not what he is said to have said. So, if there is a url to the report, please. :)
Otherwise, I'm staying out of this one, where I've found out that:
1. My French-Canadian ancestors and relatives started the American Revolution. Not so; but they could have prevented it if Coulon had executed Washington at Fort Necessity.
2. The Revolution was started by the Scotch-Irish. That I can believe, since my wife is 1/8th Scotch-Irish (Blair).
Seriously, an interesting discussion, which is most timely in light of current, breaking events.
Afghanistan: yes, it is a messy war, but this is our Great War
I read Chuck Spinney’s Counterpunch article, ‘Should Obama Escalate the War in Afghanistan?’ with concern. Chuck is a longtime friend and mentor, and a great public servant who is owed the gratitude of all Americans for his critiques of the corruption and inefficiency of the defense establishment. However, in this piece I fear he is going down the wrong road, arguing from some assumptions about the war in Afghanistan and about guerrilla warfare in general that are false. At the same time, I also see some dangerous elements in the potential Obama policies Chuck criticizes.
Both Chuck and Obama’s advisers I fear are being led astray by a very American misconception that the outcome of a guerrilla war is military victory. It is not, not usually. Insurgencies usually end in some sort of political settlement, although how and when military force is applied can have a big impact on who that settlement favors.
Clausewitz wrote that the most fundamental of all strategic decisions was the definition of what kind of war one is fighting, for all one’s actions flow from that definition.
In this regard, Spinney offers us a choice:
At the heart of this question is the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, specifically the question of whether or not it has mutated into something that is more akin to a classical guerrilla war as opposed to being part of a Fourth Generation War against al Quada.
This is a blinkered and narrow view of the war in Afghanistan which categorizes it by some of the tactics used to wage the war, not by its strategic nature. It was always much broader than our hunt for Al Quaeda, and the Taliban insurgency is just one aspect and the latest phase of a long-running conflict.
The war in Afghanistan is a civil war with a variety of Afghan factions resorting to force in their pursuit of power. As has become normal in failed states, it is an especially nasty and complicated war because of the great number of actors involved – state and non-state, domestic and foreign, regional and global. Not all the actors are party to the conflict – criminal gangs profit from the war and seek its continuation but are not actually combatants; NGOs and UN and other international organizations usually are not parties to the conflict but still have a role in resolving it.
The Afghan war to a certain extent pre-dated the Soviet occupation and provoked it, but today’s situation can best be seen as growing out of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, when the United States, having armed and organized the Afghans, walked away and left them to sort out their own post-war (dis) order. The result was a turbulent situation which produced the Taliban and provided the environment for Al Quaeda to base itself in Afghanistan.
Spinney today is one of a group of critics of US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan who argue that an outside power cannot defeat a nationalist insurgency because its support discredits its local collaborators. That may sometimes happen, but it is as much the result of defects in the collaborators’ legitimacy as of their association with the outside power. In Malaya, while the British were fighting a communist insurgency (1948-58), they never broke stride in their march to independence for Malaya. Malaya’s democratic politicians who participated in this process never suffered any damage to their legitimacy because of their cooperation with the British.
Today, in Afghanistan it is a fair question: is Karzai discredited by his dependence on the West, or is the West discredited by its support for Karzai? Since Pashtun tribal leaders have told me that for all their anger at how the US has treated them they don’t want the US to leave because they trust Americans more than Karzai, what do you think the answer is?
Karzai has not lived up to the hopes reposed in him in 2002 and there may need to be replaced, but the problem with western support for him is not that it is damaging his legitimacy but that it may be propping him up when his lack of legitimacy might otherwise force change.
The US and its allies have now been present in Afghanistan for seven years. By the time the Soviets had been there for that long, they were in deep trouble, facing a broad-based war of national liberation involving multiple ethnic groups across most of Afghanistan. This is a great contrast to what we face in Afghanistan today – the Taliban are a minority of a minority (although the Pashtun are Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, and they claim to be a majority, other groups question that – without a reliable census nobody really knows). While a third of Afghanistan’s provinces are affected by the insurgency, the majority are not. That is not to say there are no problems, security or otherwise, in the rest of Afghanistan, but that the Taliban are only part of the problem.
It is still troubling to hear the Obama camp talking about both increasing troop levels and using more precision firepower in a new offensive against the Taliban. This sounds like another Vietnam-style escalation, based on a continuing American belief in a chimerical military victory over insurgents.
Military power may be part of the solution to an insurgency, but it rarely the whole solution. If an insurgency appears to be defeated militarily, it is usually because other measures have pulled the rug out from under the insurgents.
Usually all the military can do in an insurgency is create conditions under which other measures (political, economic, etc., as appropriate) can resolve the conflict. The first requirement for this is for the military to secure the civilian population and isolate them from the insurgents. These security operations are exceedingly manpower-intensive, but firepower, even so-called precision firepower, is usually counterproductive.
British officers recently returned from Afghanistan have told me that there is a trade-off there between troops and firepower. Lack of troops leads to over-use of firepower, leads to civilian casualties and property damage, undermining the coalition’s moral superiority over the Taliban. Therefore, in their view, more troops are required, in order to carry out effective security operations, not to launch a new offensive against the Taliban.
Our war against violent Islamic extremists is our Great War, just as the Cold War was for our fathers, World War II for our grandfathers, and World War II for our great-grandfathers. It is the real war of today, and any other war we can speak of is hypothetical. Well-chosen or not, Iraq and Afghanistan are the battlegrounds. In Afghanistan we missed an opportunity in 2002 by declaring victory and moving on to Iraq, making possible the Taliban resurgence. Although our neglect has cost us, the situation is not irretrievable. Some of the steps which need to be taken sooner rather than later include:
The Pashtun may or may not be a majority of Afghans, but they are the largest ethnic group, so it is hard to imagine a lasting settlement to Afghanistan’s civil war that does not draw them in. Instead, Karzai and the US have treated them as the enemy. We have to reverse that. The tribal leaders are not the Taliban, and the Taliban do not have majority support among the Pashtun.
The coalition needs more troops, and some members need to step up to a more active combat role.
Civil and military efforts need to be coordinated, and civilian agencies need to move faster. Military entry into a district needs to be accompanied by rapid action to employ the locals in reconstruction programs that will make their lives better while priming the pump with cash in their pockets.
Since I am advocating more troops for Afghanistan, you might expect me to support Gates’s just-announced plan to double the size of the Afghan National Army. I do not. It is not an easy thing to build an army, still less a national army in as divided a society as Afghanistan. It does not take a very deep knowledge of our training efforts in Iraq to see how too-rapid a build-up compromised the quality, and effectiveness, of the output. The ANA can only grow as fast as we can produce quality.
An alternative to stand up Afghan forces rapidly is to draw on our experience with Popular Forces (militia) in Vietnam and with tribal forces in Iraq, and set up tribal militias in the hottest conflict zones in Afghanistan. This requires reposing some trust in the Pashtun tribes, but not a lot – we don’t have to give them heavy weapons, and they already have lots of small arms. At least try it and see what happens.
The corruption, inefficiency, and unprofessionalism of the Afghan National Police (ANP) is one of the major failures of Afghan reconstruction. This needs to be a litmus test for Karzai – if he is not willing to de-politicize and de-criminalize the ANP, then he has to go. The Germans, who took the NATO mandate for advising the ANP, have totally dropped the ball as well, and also need to either radically invigorate their program or be replaced by somebody who will.
This is not a complete program, but just these steps would materially improve the situation in Afghanistan and open the door to other measures o bring further progress.
The author is a management consultant based in London, England. He was formerly legislative assistant for defense to Hon. Dick Cheney, M.C. and program officer for Afghanistan in the Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.