Winning the War in Afghanistan

[William F. Owen]

To focus on making this border mean more than that is to virtually ensure defeat by creating a task too large to accomplish that even if somehow accomplished serves solely to drive a wedge through the heart of the very populace who's support the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan need to attain some degree of stability.

OK, the use of the word border seems to be causing problems. Fact is we are not going to convince the Taliban that their military success is impossible, if they have freedom of action to move back and worth to their safe areas.

Yes, "closing" the border is probably impossible. Making it 90% more difficult to cross, than it currently is, is not.

[Eden]

In 2006, after NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps took over as ISAF headquarters, an ink spot strategy was seriously discussed and half-way implemented. It was classic COIN stuff, just as described in the piece that kicked off this thread, and we planners pushed it hard.

Here is why it was never fully adopted:
1. The Afghans didn't like it. It meant abandoning some areas, and that just upset too many special interests within the Afghan mafiocracy that passed for a national government.
2. The Americans didn't like it. It meant abandoning the operational design for victory they had already worked out and were halfway through implementing. They assumed it was just a fig-leaf strategy which would allow the NATO allies to hide behind the wire; they much preferred chasing insurgents around RC-East, building roads to nowhere, and pursuing a quasi-French Indochina program of placing outposts in regions of no particular worth.
3. Many NATO allies didn't like it. It meant, in several cases, moving out of their selected provinces - which they thought would look like defeat and reflect badly on them - into areas they had avoided in the first place because of high levels of violence. They much preferred to pursue their individual 'wars' using the tactics they thought best.

Here is why it probably wouldn't have worked anyway:
1. Oil spots need to be dropped in either areas of high enemy activity, or in places of exceptional and/or inherent worth. There are none of the latter in Afghanistan, and we did not have the combat power to do the former.
2. To sustain themselves, the insurgents in Afghanistan do not really need prolonged access to the population; they simply need to be able to strike at it. You can't prevent suicide attacks through heightened security, you can only reduce their effectiveness, and effectiveness isn't really what the insurgents are after. Activity begets support in this strange corner of the planet, and oil spots simply give the bad guys more room to maneuver.
3. It would have been a free pass to the drug lords.
4. Oil spot theory presupposes active and effective development of the secured terrain. In 2006/7/8, that was not a realistic prospect. Except for road-building, pretty much all development efforts during this period were abject failures.

Bottom line is that absent unity of command or unity of effort or adequate resources, pretty much any strategy will do as well as any other.

[Entropy]

Great comment Eden, thanks!

[Surferbeetle]

Second the attaboy for Eden..

A datapoint to consider, as we kick this can around, from the NATO website

The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.

They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area.

They are resolved to unite their efforts for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security. They therefore agree to this North Atlantic Treaty :

WSJ Opinon piece by Josef Joffe; Obama's Popularity Doesn't Mean Much Abroad

The point here is an old one, variously ascribed to Talleyrand, Palmerston or De Gaulle, about nations having everlasting interests rather than eternal friends or enemies. In today's language: interest beats affection any time. Mrs. Merkel surely knows how enthralled her country is with Mr. Obama. But that's not enough to place German soldiers in harm's way in Afghanistan, or to run up the national debt in a country that is traumatized by inflation.

[Ken White]

...WSJ Opinon piece by Josef Joffe; Obama's Popularity Doesn't Mean Much Abroad

That one in particular has some timeless truths that are too often forgotten. National interests trump all sorts of enmity or friendliness -- and righteousness...

[Surferbeetle]

From this weeks Economist: There was a lawyer, an engineer and a politician...

Why do different countries favour different professions? And why are some professions so well represented in politics? To find out, The Economist trawled through a sample of almost 5,000 politicians in “International Who’s Who”, a reference book, to examine their backgrounds.

As a side bar the term hydraulic empire might be of interest as well.

[Ken White]

Great comment Eden, thanks!

I'm old and slow, thus late, okay...

[William F. Owen]

Great comment Eden, thanks!

Slow old and in the a very different time zone. Good information Eden. Thanks again.

[Surferbeetle]

From this month's Atlantic, by Robert D. Kaplan, Pakistan’s Fatal Shore

The next people to set their sights on Gwadar were the Russians. Gwadar was the ultimate prize denied them during their decade-long occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s—the fabled warm-water outlet to the sea that formed the strategic raison d’être for their Afghan adventure in the first place. From Gwadar, the Soviet Union could have exported the hydrocarbon wealth of Central Asia. But Afghanistan proved to be the graveyard of Soviet imperial visions. Gwadar, still just a point on the map, a huddle of fishermen’s stone houses on a spit of sand, was like a poisoned chalice.

Yet the story goes on. In the 1990s, successive democratic Pakistani governments struggled to cope with intensifying social and economic turmoil. Violence was endemic to Karachi and other cities. But even as the Pakistani political elite turned inward, it remained obsessed with the related problems of Afghanistan and energy routes. Anarchy in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal was preventing Pakistan from establishing roads and pipelines to the new oil states of Central Asia—routes that would have helped Islamabad consolidate a vast Muslim rear base for the containment of India. So obsessed was Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s government with curbing the chaos in Afghanistan that she and her interior minister, the retired general Naseerullah Babar, conceived of the newly formed Taliban as a solution. But, as Unocal and other oil firms, intrigued by the idea of building energy pipelines from the Caspian Sea across Afghanistan to Indian Ocean energy hubs like Gwadar, eventually found out, the Taliban were hardly an agent of stability.

Then, in October 1999, after years of civilian misrule, General Pervez Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup. In 2000, he asked the Chinese to fund a deepwater port at Gwadar. A few weeks before 9/11, the Chinese agreed, and their commitment to the project intensified after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Thus, with little fanfare, Gwadar became an example of how the world changed in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks in ways that many Americans and the Bush administration did not anticipate. The Chinese spent $200 million on the first phase of the port project, which was completed on schedule in 2005. In 2007, Pakistan gave PSA International of Singapore a 40-year contract to run Gwadar port.

[William F. Owen]

Writing at Small Wars Journal, Bernard Finel, a senior fellow at the American Security Project, accepts neither the consensus about the worthiness of the war in Afghanistan nor the logic inferred by Petraeus. In his essay, Finel argues that keeping the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan does nothing to prevent another 9/11-type attack on the United States -- the 9/11 attack was simple to plan, inexpensive to fund, and required no sanctuary in Afghanistan to organize. Thus, counterterrorism is not a logical justification for the war in Afghanistan. Finel sums up his conclusions with this passage:

[W]e need to acknowledge that there is virtually no compelling evidence that military occupation of Afghanistan provides any significant protection against terrorist plots, even those arising from Afghanistan itself.

Regime change and military occupation can control the development of conventional military capabilities and of WMD programs that require a large physical plant to implement (notably nuclear programs). However, these sorts of interventions have minimal counterterrorism benefits because terrorist attacks rarely require state-level support to be effective.

Can't argue with much of that and it's another nail in the coffin of the supposed rational approach to strategic studies and political science. After 911 99% of the US population wanted vengeance. That needs to be admitted.

[jmm99]

should determine the course of action taken in the war; subject to morphing during that course of action (which may lose the thread of the initial reason) - my perception.

I don't see any problem in admitting the following as the reason for going to war in Astan (and for DAs in Pakistan) ...

from Wilf
After 911 99% of the US population wanted vengeance. That needs to be admitted.

since that is what I believed in 2001 and still do.

Finel's article attacks the logic of the syllogism laid out below - albeit getting somewhat tied up in comparing the simplicity of using airliners as cruise missiles with the complexity of using IEDs on a large scale (Wilf's AO on both; not mine).

Here is the syllogism:

We were, after all, attacked on 9/11 by al Qaeda which at the time was operating with impunity under the protection of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Given that history, allowing the Taliban to reestablish itself in Afghanistan seems self-evidently unacceptable.

Not necessarily. The real question to be asked is whether Taliban support of AQ was necessary to the 9/11 plot, or whether it was simply convenient. The bottom line of Finel's article is that it was not necessary, but convenient (e.g., from a BBC link by David today, the Afghan camps were very convenient).

Moving then to the question of revenge - payback to AQ, which in its simplest form involves killing the people involved in 9/11 (the lower echelon spared us that problem). If you do not accept revenge-payback as a valid reason to make war on these folks, then you have a different perception from me - many do.

In applying the formula "find, fix and kill AQ" (end goal)[*], the question to be asked is whether a military occupation (and nation-building) is a necessary component of obtaining payback, or whether that course of action is likely to be inconvenient for realization of that end goal. Again, answering that question is not my AO - legally, almost any course of action will stand scrutiny.

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[*] This formula is not suggested as the end-all, be-all solution to preventing future acts of "terrorism" (or, expressed another way, acts of violence by Transnational Violent Non-State Actors). It is simply the logical formula to have our revenge (or in more legalistic terms, our retribution).

[jcustis]

4. Oil spot theory presupposes active and effective development of the secured terrain. In 2006/7/8, that was not a realistic prospect. Except for road-building, pretty much all development efforts during this period were abject failures.

As many of you already know, I am spinning up for my next deploy, and it will be to Afghanistan. I will work much in the same vein that I did last time, as the lead for the non-kinetic effects team. As such, I am very interested in precisely what these abject failures were, and why, since development along the essential services line of operation will be a focal point.

[jcustis]

History, as short or as long as it can seem, can easily be forgotten. In this case, I never even knew it to be true in the first place, as I either had not seen this story or simply was caught up in the shock of 9/11:

Taleban authorities in Afghanistan say calls to surrender alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden are a "pretext" to destroy Taleban rule in Afghanistan. About 1,000 Afghan Muslim clerics have gathered in Kabul for a meeting to discuss the fate of Osama bin Laden, who is wanted by the United States for his alleged role in the attacks on New York and Washington.

In a defiant speech read out to the clerics, the Taleban supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said the enemies of Afghanistan view the Taleban Islamic system as a thorn in their eye and are seeking to finish it off.

In his speech to the gathering of the shura (council), Mullah Omar said Osama bin Laden is just the latest "pretext" being used by the enemies of the Taleban to destroy their rule. Mullah Omar said he wished to assure the United States and the rest of the world that Osama bin Laden had not used Afghan territory as a base for attacking anyone. However, the reclusive Taleban leader also repeated his offer of talks with the United States to settle all outstanding issues.

President Bush rejected the call for talks, saying now is the time to act.

There is a bit more at the VOA link: http://tinyurl.com/yfnw5xg

Was it hubris or vengeance that drove Bush's response? Could our nation have afforded then to open dialog to Omar, or had the issue become overcome by events? What if the august body of this Council had existed back then?

A choice was made back then, but I believe that this snippet documents an opportunity we need to go back to, if we are to achieve a decent interval in Afghanistan.

[Entropy]

There is a bit more at the VOA link: http://tinyurl.com/yfnw5xg

Was it hubris or vengeance that drove Bush's response? Could our nation have afforded then to open dialog to Omar, or had the issue become overcome by events? What if the august body of this Council had existed back then?

A choice was made back then, but I believe that this snippet documents an opportunity we need to go back to, if we are to achieve a decent interval in Afghanistan.

To add to what's already been said, much of the diplomatic summaries have been declassified and are available on the GWU archive.

This one, prepared in July 2001, provides a good short summary of all the diplomatic contacts.

I'm looking for ideas here, so that my key leader engagement script doesn't come off as the routine party line, "Well you know, the government is working to improve things, and the army is a key part of that. You need to be patient with them."

Official graft and corruption had a history behind it in Iraq, but unless I am reading things wrong, the Pashtun are either 1) just plain fed up with it in their areas, or 2) it has grown in a scale so great that it cannot be overlooked. Problems with the ANA and ANP seem to gain a lot of traction in the media and quasi-official observations, but are they really that significant compared to what has been the experience in Iraq?

This poll from earlier this year should provide some good source material for you to work through this problem. PM will be sent shortly with some additional info.

[jmm99]

Hi Steve, the Shark Killer

I've downloaded the two articles and will read them. My eye caught the chart in Welle's article which outlines C-M co-operation (proposed for ISAF), which is:

C-M Org Chart Astan.jpg

similar to the Vietnamese Pacification Program (including CORDS), except that a Vietnamese chart would have gone down another level to the villages. In Vietnam, the villages were where the action was at.

The VPP was reasonably successful in some areas (especially in the agricultural effort of introducing multi-cropping rice, etc.). It might have been successful (the "might" because of the problems with GSV governance), if the South had not been hammered by Northern invasions (1968, 1972 and 1975). So, thought BG Tran Dinh Tho, Pacification (1977; one of the Indochina Monographs - 7mb DL. See this post, CORDS-Phoenix - the South Vietnamese View.

However, as you correctly point out:

Successfully completing the mission is of course more important than organizational structure, however staffing and resourcing are deeply intertwined in completing the mission.

and:

... however we are ~7,000 miles away and very short on political experts who speak the local language and understand the local culture.

I'd add this up and infer that we (US civilian and military) are not capable of performing the political mission cuz we don't have the horses (political experts on Astan).

If that be so, then who will handle the political effort ? A rhetorical question, since the Astan government seems to get the ball by default. Is that government capable (competent, etc.) to prove itself the better alternative to the folks in the Astan villages. So far, it has not, even in so-called "secure" provinces (e.g., Kunduz).

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That current-events issue leads into my more general problem with FMI 3-24.3 and many proponents of "best practices population-centric COIN". Specifically, the mantra seems to me to be that: it doesn't matter what kind of HN government we have to deal with because by application of "best practices COIN" we can execute our mission. That's the only way I can read this:

1-18. Commanders must be prepared to operate within a broad range of political structures. The Host Nation’s form of government may range from a despotic dictatorship to a struggling democracy. Commanders at all levels, including platoon leaders and company commanders, need to recognize the importance of establishing and reinforcing the HN as the lead authority for all operations. This reinforces the legitimacy of the HN government.

Maybe you are going in that direction when you say:

Time for Git-R-Dun in my view we are back to the PRT and ePRT...

Originally Posted by jmm99
Thus, the political effort (just as the military effort) must reach down into the villages in each area which you want to secure. We win if we can keep ourselves and the villagers safe and if we have the better political message. If the political message is lousy (incompetence, corruption, venality), the political game is lost - regardless of how good the US is, cuz the HN "goodness" is the key variable.-emphasis SB

I am an advocate of oil-spot theory having both studied it as well as executed practical applications of the theory during OIF 1. Tailoring staffing and resourcing for our grid square/province in Afghanistan will be key to any future successes...

Now, I too like "oil spots" (key incumbant strategic base areas - adding some jargon); but that does not really answer my lines which you bolded. Sure, you as a CA officer and your team probably would execute your particular mission successfully (how's that for confidence in you); just as our member Mike in Hilo executed his mission well in his particular area of Vietnam. But, that does not equate to success nation-wide.

Looking back at Southeast Asia (yes, I'm back to the Jurassic again), I see failures in China and Vietnam (where the incumbant governments were not up to the political and military efforts), and successes in Malaya, Philippines and Indonesia (where the incumbants were up to those tasks).

Perhaps, the paradigm has changed and the "worth" of the HN government is not material to the end result - and that well-executed TTPs can overcome the HN government's deficiencies. If so, FMI 3-24.3 and "best practices population-centric COIN" do not suffer from "disconnects" ("contradictions" as Giap might well say). That really is my bottom-line question.

Best as always

Mike

[jmm99]

Jon,

There were a number of back-channel US-Taliban contacts before and after 9/11 re: extradition of UBL and where he should be tried. The Taliban proposal (IIRC post-9/11) was an Islamic court under Sharia law. Efforts by both the Clinton and Bush II administrations went around in circles. Steve Coll covers some of this in Ghost Wars; and also Mike Scheuer (Anonymous) in his books on UBL.

IMO, based on what I've read and the Web stuff I was following at the time, there was nothing there which we would want to go back to. Present negotiations (via proxies) with the Taliban might be another story; but the Taliban are pretty rigid (especially if they think they are winning and inflicting more pain than they are suffering).

My best shot at creating a time machine to move SWC back in time to 2001.

Regards

Mike