Ralph Peter's Best to Worst COAs for Afghanistan
DOn't know how many have read this yet. Ralph Peter's has an interesting piece in the USA Today on COAs in Afghanistan. Peter's as almost always is candid.
His opener tells you exactly where he stands -
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The conflict in Afghanistan is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead of concentrating on the critical mission of keeping Islamist terrorists on the defensive, we've mired ourselves by attempting to modernize a society that doesn't want to be — and cannot be — transformed.
and why:
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Even if we achieved the impossible dream of creating a functioning, unified state in Afghanistan, it would have little effect on the layered crises in the Muslim world. Backward and isolated, Afghanistan is sui generis (only example of its kind). Political polarization in the U.S. precludes an honest assessment, but Iraq's the prize from which positive change might flow, while Afghanistan could never inspire neighbors who despise its backwardness
He goes on to lay out his view of best and worst COAs
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Best. Instead of increasing the U.S. military "footprint," reduce our forces and those of NATO by two-thirds, maintaining a "mother ship" at Bagram Air Base and a few satellite bases from which special operations troops, aircraft and drones, and lean conventional forces would strike terrorists and support Afghan factions with whom we share common enemies. All resupply for our military could be done by air, if necessary.
Stop pretending Afghanistan's a real state. Freeze development efforts. Ignore the opium. Kill the fanatics.
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Good. Leave entirely. Strike terrorist targets from over the horizon and launch punitive raids when necessary. Instead of facing another Vietnam ourselves, let Afghanistan become a Vietnam for Iran and Pakistan. Rebuild our military at home, renewing our strategic capabilities.
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Poor. Continue to muddle through as is, accepting that achieving any meaningful change in Afghanistan is a generational commitment. Surge troops for specific missions, but not permanently.
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Worst. Augment our forces endlessly and increase aid in the absence of a strategy. Lie to ourselves that good things might just happen. Let U.S. troops and Afghans continue to die for empty rhetoric, while Pakistan decays into a vast terrorist refuge
.
My questions - did he leave anything out? Is his view to narrow, too broad or just right?
Best, Rob
He always gives you plenty to consider
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Originally Posted by
Rob Thornton
My questions - did he leave anything out? Is his view to narrow, too broad or just right?
Best, Rob
That said I do wish he would have given more weight to the fact that despite many of the considerations he brought forth, in the end there is very much a certain level of requirement to do something.
The fact that so much is out of wack and could be approached differently doesn't change the reality of a need to do something. We are stuck looking for the best of bad solutions because at least for now that seems to be all thats available.
To do what needs to be done right will take a lot more time, and dedication of govt resources then we are likely to see anytime soon. It also doesn't help that so many of the "things" going on here contribute greatly to the perception of our ability to accomplish things over there.
Perhaps that would be something to really focus on. Third, fourth order effects of words and actions here on our ability to speak and act on the international front.
Uh, What was the question???
Looking at Ralph's option, I think:
- Best: Agree but would continue development
- Good: In the first place 'we' told them we would not do that * and in the second the OTH bit won't work.
- Poor: Agreed.
- Worst: Agreed.
Strongly agree with gh_uk
Also agree with Bob's World -- we're getting wrapped up in the minutia as we are entirely too prone to do...
* Thus I also agree with Ron Humphrey:
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"...in the end there is very much a certain level of requirement to do something...Third, fourth order effects of words and actions here on our ability to speak and act on the international front.
Add to that Old Eagle's comment re: what many Afghans want and consider the facts that we said we'd not abandon them and we need to restore the credibility of our words internationally -- that IMO, is a bigger hit on us with many than all the media rhetoric stuff -- and that the Afghans are just like anyone in else in that they will take every handout they can get and ask for more; that they will fix things in their interest when it can be shown that it is indeed going to be a benefit. They respect honor, pride and strength -- and we must show them that taking all you can get is ultimately counterproductive. They are not likely to come up with a strong central government but I believe they'll come up with something that works for them. We have opened a window for them to improve their situation. It is up to them and not up to us what they do with that opening. We should not try to sort it for them , we simply should continue to hold that window open for a bit and encourage but not push them to get it sorted.
I'm bothered that we are dispatching 17K more troops and as yet have no announced goal. That's why I believe Ralph's "Best" option is an excellent idea until we sort out what we're trying to do.
"Things to do in twenty-oh-two"
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Originally Posted by
John T. Fishel
The problem, then, is to get the information quickly, do the analysis, develop the strategy to include a unified C2, and execute it in short order - which, of course, will be longer than we would wish.
Whoops. We missed that suspense date. My, how time flies... :o
Very good post, John.
Gotta disagree with Peters....
Frankly, I find his analysis rather shallow - something that seems to afflict a lot of strategic thinking in our country today. He complains about substituting means for ends and then turns around and spends the rest of the article doing exactly that - writing about means, not ends, and making dubious comparisons to Vietnam. What is his end? What is his strategy? We don't really know. What interests do his preferred COA's serve? We don't really know that either. I'm not sure he's doing much of anything to further the debate here.
Rather than offer a strategy of his own on which to base coherent COA's, his solution is simply to reduce troops as much as possible - IOW reducing troops IS the strategy. To me that is not a very convincing argument. I think a reasonable argument can be made that one can do more with less in Afghanistan, but Peters doesn't make that argument. If the lack of a coherent and especially unified strategy is the problem, then I fail to see what his options do to solve that problem. Without that kind of basic analysis, what Peters advocates could turn out to be much worse than the present course. Every COA has downsides and risks - to Peters, and many others who've made pretty much the same arguments he makes here in reference to Iraq and Afghanistan, the downsides of their preferred positions are irrelevant or ignored. I read a lot of the same kind of arguments when Iraq was at its worst where people could seemingly see no viable solutions. In such cases those views become self-fulfilling because almost all options are eliminated but a few. Absent a more comprehensive examination or at least some minimal cost-benefit analysis, his four options are, to put it bluntly, wishful thinking.
I also have problems with the assumptions behind several statements in the piece:
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Expending blood and treasure blindly in Afghanistan, we do our best to shut our eyes to the worsening crisis next door in Pakistan, a radicalizing Muslim state with more than five times the population and a nuclear arsenal. We've turned the hose on the doghouse while letting the mansion burn.
Who is shutting their eyes? The problems in Pakistan have not been ignored, it's just that there isn't much the US can do about them. Furthermore, the implication of the final sentence is that the US is responsible for Pakistani radicalization. There may be some truth to that, but the unintended irony here is that the radicalization is not rooted in the nation-building Peters dislikes, but on punitive measures he does. There's a reason US operations inside Pakistan were secrets (until they were recently and stupidly disclosed).
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Even if we achieved the impossible dream of creating a functioning, unified state in Afghanistan, it would have little effect on the layered crises in the Muslim world.
Limiting our options to punitive ones is probably not going to ease these crises in the Muslim world Peters is worried about - probably the opposite. Again, every COA has costs and unless and until one examines the downsides of those costs, then they simply wishful thinking.
There is much more to criticize along similar lines in this piece and I could go on, but I'd like to get back to Rob's question:
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My questions - did he leave anything out? Is his view to narrow, too broad or just right?
Leaving aside his own lack of any strategy, I think his view is much too narrow and simplistic. As one example, he states we should, "Kill the fanatics." Who would those be? "Fanatics" is a meaningless term given the complexities in Afghanistan. Besides, we've been killing people for almost eight years now, how is that working out?
But let's look for a minute at other possible COA's. Operating under the assumption that our goal is primarily a negative one - deny AQ and its affiliates an Afghan-based safe haven - there is a continuum of possibilities where the extremes are probably the least tenable. In this case, I do agree with him that we (the US and NATO) cannot create a modern, unified, stable nation inside the territory that we call Afghanistan (something I've commented on here a few times), but that doesn't mean that attempts to create some unity and stability in A-stan are pointless. In other words, it's not an either-or choice - there is a LOT of room between his minimalist "best" and "good" COA's and the unrealistic ideal of Afghanistan as the next South Korea.
As I've said before in other threads, look next door at Pakistan to see an example of a nation where most of its territory is, in reality, not controlled by the central government. The central government is, to steal a book title, "The strongest tribe" in Pakistan which administers, to a greater or lesser extent, most of the country as colonial possessions. That is, IMO, the best we could hope to achieve in Afghanistan in terms of nation-building, but I don't consider even that an achievable goal within any reasonable time frame.
Even with that lesser alternative set as the upper limit there are still many options down the line before coming to complete disengagement. Even a weak central government, nominally loyal and dependent upon the US, could act as our long-term reliable-when-we-really-need-them-to-be proxy and keep the conglomeration called the "Taliban" in check.
Another alternative is greater decentralization where regions are largely autonomous (think Kurdistan). There is the strategy I've mentioned elsewhere of rebuilding and buttressing the old tribal power structures. There are others and they need to be considered as well.
Regardless of which COA(s) we choose, we cannot limit our options to the punitive expeditions Peters' advocates - ideally those would be rare. Various forms of aid (economic, development) as well as non-punitive military missions (security, training, etc.) are all tools we can use and it doesn't make much sense put most of them back in the shed without good reason, which is exactly what Peters would have us do.
Finally, this really annoyed me:
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If the impending surge fails to pacify the country, will we send another increment of troops, then another, as we did in Southeast Asia?
Surely Ralph Peters must know two things: 1. This isn't Vietnam, there is no draft and therefore the amount of escalating we can do is very limited 2. It's even more limited when one considers the logistical realities of operating in Afghanistan. The fear he gins up here and earlier in the piece is unfounded, IMO.
To close, I agree we need an "audacity of realism," but I think Mr. Peters' op-ed is as mired in the wishful thinking he opposes.
See where you're coming from ....
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from Ken
- Best: Agree but would continue development
- Good: In the first place 'we' told them we would not do that *....
If we (per Peters) are going to "support Afghan factions with whom we share common enemies", development for them would be a carrot. Or by "development" do you mean for all of Astan ? I assumed the former, but you have learnt me not to ass u me. :D
The other question goes to my ignorance of "In the first place 'we' told them we would not do that" - ignorance being my mind blank of any particular document that would create either (1) a legal commitment to stay; or (2) a moral or ethical commitment to stay. With all that's been written or said in the last 7 years, we might have committed to rebuild the entire country. :(
Anyway, links to any specific on what "we" told them ?
I'm coming from left field...
Who's on first? :D
Development for most of Afghanistan with special emphasis on the carotene. It's good for you!
"We" have said, IIRC, that "...we erred in the 1980s and just left, we will not do that again, we will not leave you alone..." and dozens of other similar statements over the years as you point out. There is no legal requirement to stay but to me we inherited an ethical requirement to do so by our words. As I've said before, I do not think we should've said we we would stay and fix it (whatever that means) -- but we did say it. Repeatedly. Since we said we would, in public, we really need to do that. One cannot be made to say anything but anything one does say becomes a commitment.
That's probably why Creighton Abrams said "Generals should be noted for their silences." :cool:
We have abandoned others before and it hurt us -- our abandonment of Viet Nam (another place where we should not have said "we will..."), of the Kurds, earlier (ditto...) and of the Shia in southern Iraq after Desert Storm (ditto again) among others hurt us more internationally than did invading Iraq. The message was you cannot rely on the Americans. That needs to be fixed
The "we'll stay" comments came early on. Here's a recent one:
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...And we could have replaced one power person with another. That would have been, I guess, the easy route, and then just left it behind, say we've done our duty and we've upheld the doctrine -- and said, okay, we're now going to take this group, replace them with this group -- and just got out of the way. But that's not -- that, one, didn't learn the lessons of the '80s and the '90s. And secondly, the interest is to build a flourishing democracy as an alternative to a hateful ideology. And it's not easy work. Afghanistan is a huge country. The road system is not nearly as well developed as a lot of other countries. You're just beginning to develop your resource base in a way that I hope benefits the people of Afghanistan -- after all, it's their resources.
...
told the President that you can count on the United States -- just like you've been able to count on this administration, you'll be able to count on the next administration, as well. It's in our interest that Afghanistan's democracy flourish. It's in America's interest that we forever deny safe haven to people who still want to kill our citizens.
LINK.
P.S.
Here's an early one: LINK
JMM, do not be too demanding regarding
international obligations incurred de facto by public statements that are not explicitly written out. Ken's right about the cost of not living up to a verbal committment.
I recall Pres Bush 41 saying publicly to Panama in the wake of Just Cause that the US would provide $1b to rebuild. Pres Endara, VPs Arias Calderon and Billy Ford and the people of Panama believed him. But when it was all done, the Administration had provided only about half that amount and then sought to show it had met its obligation through an AID report that was all smoke and mirrors. As I said in my SSI monograph in 1992 (also published by Praeger as part of Civil Military Operations in the New World - 1997), "Most Panamanians don't count that way." That incident may - or may not - have contributed to the outcome of negotiations over post 1999 basing rights in Panama where we gave up Howard AFB.
It all points to the classic lesson that people who work in development learned long ago: Never promise something you can't deliver. It wil always come back to haunt you. (Solid lesson for COIN, SFA, and SASO too.)
Cheers
JohnT
Request for clarification
1. Afghanistan is neither a state nor a nation. It is a geographic expression for a region wherein live a number of tribal groupings. There are a few neutral areas, e.g. Kabul, but they are not representative of either the region or the people living there. Confusing the educated minority living in Kabul, for example, as being representative of the entire region in terms of education, hopes, aspirations, modernity, etc. is a guaranteed route to failure. One of the first steps on the route is any notion of establishing any sort of Western model of a representative government in A'stan. Am I missing something?
2. The surge in troops didn't turn anything around in Iraq. The new strategy did. Successfully executing that strategy in the allocated time required more troops. A simple surge in troops into A'stan without a substantially revised strategy recognizing the points I made above, and establishing clear, achievable military and political goals is the worst kind of eyewash: the kind that gets good people killed to no useful effect. Again, am I missing something?
3. A lesson from an old course in International Relations: The best equipped and trained military in the world does not deter war. Prestige, the reputation for being able to effect one's will, does. In the case of A'stan, walking away is not an option: the message received will be that the US can be defeated by chipping away until it loses resolve, tucks tail and slinks home. (Anyone who doubts that is the message that will be received, PM me about terms for the bet. :D) I agree with Peters that we should "stop pretending Afghanistan's a real state." But I also think every one of his options damages US prestige to one degree or another. That loss of prestige will embolden the jihadis, and ultimately lead to a worse problem, broader based, than we face today. I think we can do better. Again, am I missing something?
I can get even more simplistic.
Plan A.
It is better to destroy submarines in port. That is much easier than trying to find them when they're in the sea...
Plan B.
Ya always have to have a plan B at a minimum. If major strategic raids are deemed not acceptable and / or if Pakistan does not move more rapidly, then:
Do not go to the cities; Afghans are essentially and psychologically a rural people.
Do not try to force a 'nation.' Let the Afghans sort it out but give them a sensible time limit -- say three years -- to come up with what they want to do and who is included in the governmental entities. That entails accepting their solution and not trying to get what we want (and quite probably do not need).
Continue to equip (sensibly but more rapidly) Afghan forces, continue the training regimen about as it is.
Decrease wheeled traffic by using deploying, contracting * and using more aircraft (including armed helicopters and A-10s).
Do not deploy more troops, remove some that are there. Train and equip those that are to stay to operate in platoon and even squad ** packets with nearby and rapidly available CAS plus rapid reinforcing Co size elements on strip alert. There must be interoperation with Afghan forces for several reasons to include their lead frequently but it will also be desirable in certain areas for us to have the sole responsibility for the AOR due to demographic / tribal constraints on the Afghan forces.
Lastly and more importantly -- pay more for development workers and Afghan national forces (and tribal or other 'militias') than the opposition is paying. For over seven years only SF and the CIA have had enough sense to do that.
If we're serious about fixing it, we can train up a force, Army GPF, Marines, SOCOM immaterial or combined (with a single chain of command). The air effort can rotate, it does not need the continuity and local knowledge required for the ground effort. Tell the ground force they'll train hard for almost a year then serve three years in Afghanistan or until we leave sensibly whichever is first -- and they'll not deploy again for a minimum of five years. You wouldn't get a whole lot of volunteers but you'd get enough. You'd have to pay them well but that would be cheaper than what we're now doing. Yeah, I know... :wry:
The personnel pogues and TJAG said what? :D
* developing and using local capability in the process.
** Yes, that can be done IF the troops are well trained and carry sensible loads. Yes, that means no Armor. Yes. I know we won't do that -- but he asked... ;)
Being prudent, I also have a Plan C -- whatever the Think Tank crowd du jour gens up.
All the foregoing, BTW and smileys not withstanding is a totally serious and considered answer to the question.
Any option selected must consider that 'clear and hold' is the best operational technique (it is not a strategy) but that neither NATO nor we can provide enough troops to do that; that Afghanistan cannot afford an Army large enough to do that and that the time to even approach getting the numbers to apply that technique is probably in excess of ten years; that even if Afghanistan could train and deploy an adequate number of troops to use that technique they would merely be training future insurgents as they had to release large numbers of said troops due to an inability to pay them.
That's a big sentence. It's a big problem. Realism bites...
I shall... stay alert, that is
What I would like to see out of American policy is a wide range of diversified and fundamentally cheap small projects that quietly, and inobtrusively address education, health and welfare issues, without demanding quid pro quo.
Mortensen's Central Asia Institute might offer a prototype.
