Afghanistan troop surge could backfire, experts warn

[jkm_101_fso]

Can our AFG vets lend any credibility to this?

Deploying additional forces could backfire, however, if the United States and its allies don't devise a coherent strategy to defeat the Taliban insurgency, strengthen the Afghan government, bolster the country's economy and deprive Islamic militants of their safe haven in neighboring Pakistan.

The calls for reinforcing the U.S.-led military coalition come amid the worst violence since the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, with the 7-year-old ''forgotten war'' in May and June claiming more U.S. dead than Iraq for the first time.

More foreign troops, however, would do little more than turn more war-weary Afghans against U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai if they are not part of a broader and more effective counterinsurgency strategy, some experts and U.S. officials warned.

"There is not one strategy with one person in charge,'' said a U.S. defense official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. "If we had asked the Taliban to draw an organizational chart for allied forces in Afghanistan, they would have drawn this one."

As a result, U.S. and NATO troop have had to cede areas to the insurgents or turn over newly reclaimed territory to poorly trained, ill-equipped and illiterate police who often flee when attacked, are in cahoots with the militants or abuse the local population.

''You win every battle but lose the war because you can't hold any ground,'' said John McCreary, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The U.S.-led coalition is also desperately short of soldiers who can mentor Afghan National Police units. An estimated 3,500 more advisors are needed to live and work with newly trained police units.

Another looming requirement is for more experienced U.S. combat troops to deal with what U.S. commanders think may be an influx of foreign militants who might have otherwise gone to Iraq.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/world/story/619363.html

[Old Eagle]

From the article --
"Deploying additional forces could backfire, however, if the United States and its allies don't devise a coherent strategy to defeat the Taliban insurgency, strengthen the Afghan government, bolster the country's economy and deprive Islamic militants of their safe haven in neighboring Pakistan."

Spent a tour as an advisor at the ministerial level.

Deploying forces without a strategy "could" backfire -- how 'bout WILL backfire. Killing Taliban cannot solve the problems of Afghanistan. Think I ought to get paid for that deep insight.

Sorry for the rant. Yes, the solution has to be holistic. We need to do better. A better wrap up of the challenges is at CSIS by Tony Cordesman.

[DaveDoyle]

Clearly an increased international effort that uses all instruments of national power is in order for Afghanistan. And reading political tea leaves, I would suggest the increased effort is in the works. The effort cannot be divorced from increased resouces of all types. Thus, leaders working in Afghanistan need more capability which can be provided in part by more Soldiers, Airmen and Marines from our country and others. Speaking from experience, many operations (if not most) are being run on a shoestring. I too am wary of the idea that the "surge" that worked in Iraq should easily work in Afghanistan. However, a "surge" at this point would merely add forces that are sorely needed for a baseline effort.

[Eden]

Clearly an increased international effort that uses all instruments of national power is in order for Afghanistan. And reading political tea leaves, I would suggest the increased effort is in the works. The effort cannot be divorced from increased resouces of all types. Thus, leaders working in Afghanistan need more capability which can be provided in part by more Soldiers, Airmen and Marines from our country and others. Speaking from experience, many operations (if not most) are being run on a shoestring. I too am wary of the idea that the "surge" that worked in Iraq should easily work in Afghanistan. However, a "surge" at this point would merely add forces that are sorely needed for a baseline effort.

Amen. Afghanistan has one-third the number of troops that are currently in Iraq - if you count all nations, some of which are doing very little to contribute to success. And they were short of everything from UAVs to artillery to helicopters. To give you some idea of the scale, when I was there in 06-07, there was the rough equivalent of an MP battalion, several infantry companies, and some SF trying to interdict the Afghan-Pakistani border. This incredibly rugged border, if placed in the United States, would stretch from Chicago to somewhere near Memphis.

So - absolutely right we are strategically bankrupt in Afghanistan; it certainly would make sense to have a plan for using any additional forces we send over there. But there is no conceivable plan that would work given the current troop levels. We need both a plan and the troops.

[Rank amateur]

We need both a plan and the troops.

Yes and the plan must eliminate - or at least severely curtail - sanctuary in Pakistan. One of the keys to defeating insurgencies is to remove their ability to control their loss rate and you can't do that if they can hide in Pakistan.

[Cougfootballfan]

perhaps with Gen Petraeus taking over as the head of CENTCOM there will start to be a broader plan for how to deal with the resurgent terrorists similar to his actions as head of the 101st and commander of Multi-National forces

[Tom Odom]

Think I ought to get paid for that deep insight.

Paid to think? You work at Leavenworth. Back on your head...

[Jonathan Mueller]

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.

[Ken White]

All relatively speaking of course -- and no intent to be derisory; merely to express some agreement and some disagreement. There have been messier wars, many -- and some we were involved in meet that standard. I doubt, by any measure it will ever be accorded 'greatness.'

I think any discussion of whether it's

"...classical guerrilla war as opposed to being part of a Fourth Generation War against al Quada."

is an esoteric and academic debate of little value. I also shudder when anyone mentions Malaya in relation to Iraq or Afghanistan. No corollary at all, I think -- mostly because our US preferred option is to establish a host nation government of whatever sort we can (preferably with a 'friendly' leader) and act as invitees of that government * . In Malaya, the British were the government, that fact alone, much less the size and numbers argue against any use of Malaya for much.

I strongly agree with you that a military victory is not possible; only an acceptable outcome can be obtained in any COIN operation. With that fact -- and it is a fact in today's world -- in mind, I believe that Obama, McCain, Gates, Spinney et.al. are wrong. We do not have enough troops to do the standard COIN model in a nation the size of Afghanistan. I further believe that even if we had the numbers, it would make little difference. There are other military options that could achieve success but we cannot and will not pursue them.

Afghanistan -- or that region -- has been the way it is for several thousand years. We are not going to change it. Period. They will chew up what is sent, spit it out and go right back to their way of life. Can incremental changes to improve the lot of the ordinary Afghan be pursued? Certainly. However, we should recognize up front those changes will be incremental -- and even those slight modifications will come slowly. While I essentially agree with the solutions you propose, I suggest that the entrenched bureaucracies (all of them, including the Afghan government, the NGOs, the other Nations involved, NATO, the US Army and USSOCOM) will not support the program, at least not to the extent required. Given the number of players, the possibility of achieving a consensus on procedures is unlikely. I also think you omit mention of the Pakistan problem and solution of that is critical.

Afghanistan will go the way of those who have the most will to stick it out. My reluctant and regrettable suspicion is that will not be the western nations.

* A solution that has never worked for us and one would think we'd learn better. Apparently not. Seems illogical to me to take on a job and willingly give the folks you're trying to change a veto over what you can do...

[Render]

Much talk from politicians and press of a “surge” into Afghanistan…

Very little talk of the logistical surge that must accompany such a surge in combat units.

It is my (civilian) understanding that the bulk of OEF’s heavy logistical supply arrives via truck convoys through Pakistan. Truck convoys that pass right through Taliban held Pakistani territory.

Given that we’re already conducting air strikes against Taliban training camps and leadership within that same Taliban held Pakistani territory, doesn’t this put us in the unhealthy position of attacking our own supply lines? Certainly at least one of the Presidential candidates has suggested that we do exactly that. Much as I would like to disagree with his stated strategy, he may very well be correct, if only by accident.

We may very well have to invade and occupy Pakistan, if for no other reason then to secure our supply lines into Afghanistan.

I don’t think two or three brigades will be enough…

A
BIGGER
BOAT,
R

[jkm_101_fso]

It is my (civilian) understanding that the bulk of OEF’s heavy logistical supply arrives via truck convoys through Pakistan. Truck convoys that pass right through Taliban held Pakistani territory.

Are you talking about US/NATO supply lines?

Given that we’re already conducting air strikes against Taliban training camps and leadership within that same Taliban held Pakistani territory, doesn’t this put us in the unhealthy position of attacking our own supply lines?

No. Most strikes have eyes on prior to/during strike, whether it's BOG, UAV or SAT. Think about what you asked. Attack our own supply line? Who else's supply line would it be? The Taliban's? A pretty far-fetched insinuation.

[Render]

Yes, I'm talking about US/NATO supply lines. It's my understanding that the bulk of the US/NATO supplies are trucked into Afghanistan - through Pakistan. Is this an incorrect assumption on my part?

=

My mistake and fair enough, that was poorly worded on my part.

I didn't mean to imply that we were actually attacking our own convoys in transit.

I was trying to point out that it seems as though we are attacking back down our own logistical tail, against an enemy whose current "safe" (loosely used term) havens inside Pakistan surround and in some cases sit astride our convoy routes.

I'm somewhat surprised that the Taliban haven't made a stronger effort to attack those convoys, although they seem to be more interested in attempting to extort the trucking companies involved, so I suppose my surprise is due mostly to my attempting to put a Western slant on Taliban strategy and tactics.

MISSION
FROM
GOD,
R