General Stanley McChrystal's request to send more troops to Afghanistan has induced sticker shock for many Americans--including, apparently, President Obama. The integrated counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy that McChrystal wants to pursue has many components: protecting Afghan civilians, rapidly expanding the Afghan army and police, reforming government, providing economic development assistance, weaning Taliban fighters and leaders away from Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, reconciling them into the new government, and targeting those who refuse. This makes it a demanding strategy that McChrystal reportedly believes will require providing at least an additional 10,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops and more than doubling existing Afghan forces to a total of 400,000 indigenous soldiers and police. (Full disclosure: I served as a member of General McChrystal's assessment team in June and July 2009, but I do not speak for his command, and the views expressed here are strictly my own.) This price tag has further galvanized opposition to a war whose support was already fading fast.
Few, however, actually want to leave Afghanistan outright. Instead, most pair their opposition to reinforcement with support for a middle way--a more limited presence intended to secure U.S. interests without the cost and risk of escalation. Opponents have proposed at least a half-dozen such "middle ways," ranging from greater reliance on drone-based counterterrorism strikes to early pursuit of a negotiated settlement to end the war. The specifics are often fuzzy; none has been articulated with the detail of McChrystal's proposal, particularly regarding troop requirements. But most are tantamount to splitting off a piece of McChrystal-style integrated COIN and executing it alone. Some critics propose pursuing pieces in combination, but none attempts the totality, and, especially, none includes McChrystal's large U.S. ground combat presence for protecting Afghan civilians. For all, the underlying idea is to reduce the cost of the war without abandoning the U.S. interest in denying Al Qaeda a base for attacking the West or destabilizing neighboring Pakistan.
It is easy to see why such middle ways are so popular. They could lighten the burden on the federal deficit. They could put fewer Americans in harm's way. They would seem to better fit the U.S. interests at stake, which are real but limited and indirect. They appeal to the centrism of many American voters. The problem is that they probably won't work.
The reasons vary from proposal to proposal, but the basic problem is that the pieces of COIN are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts; implementing just one or two pieces alone undermines their effectiveness. It might make sense to do less and accept a greater risk of failure, depending on one's tolerance for risk and cost. But there is no magic middle way between the McChrystal recommendation and total withdrawal that offers comparable odds at lower cost. In counterinsurgency, less is not more.
Train, Don't Fight
One of the most popular middle ways is to shift the U.S. role from combat to training and advising Afghan forces. This would put an Afghan face on the war effort, it would place the burden of the fighting on those with the most at stake, and it would ostensibly reduce U.S. exposure to casualties. Building the indigenous military is in fact a major element of General McChrystal's proposal. The real difference between his vision and that of his opponents is the latter's desire to accomplish this while reducing our combat presence. But training and combat are not exclusive of one another. The former requires the latter, and to field a large Afghan force faster will require more, not fewer, U.S. combat troops.
To build an indigenous security force in the middle of a war is not like teaching math to high school students--it cannot be done successfully by a handful of teachers in classrooms with chalk and blackboards. To field Afghan troops quickly without breaking them in the process requires close partnership on the battlefield, with experienced Western combat units that provide on-the-job training, mentoring, confidence-building, fire support, and stiffening in actual combat. And this requires Western troops, in large numbers, living and fighting together with Afghan forces at all levels of command. The faster the Afghans are to be fielded, the more Western combat forces are needed. If a large Afghan military is to be raised, then many tens of thousands of Americans will be needed, and those Americans will be exposed to combat, and to casualties.
And the process takes time even so. In the meantime, someone must protect not just key population centers but also the recruitment centers, supply depots, bases, and transportation connections needed to create the new Afghan formations in the first place. Close partnership with expanded indigenous forces is indeed the best way to pursue counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. But this is not a plausible route to reducing U.S. combat activity or troop strength there any time soon.
There are different ways to look at "a middle way" in Afghanistan. But when you start with the assumption that pulling out of the country is not an option, some might say the deck is stacked already. It's like saying that, sans the public option in the health care debate, how do we come up with a new "middle way" between the insurance industry and all the rest of us.
In the end of course the dots that Biddle connects above are just his own rendition of the dots Bergen already connected yesterday: the ones that lead directly to an escalation of the war.
Of course it almost goes without saying: The body bags being shipped over there now will be for the other folks loved ones. Right?
But at least they can take consolation in knowing the dead bodies will never be photographed.
And then we don't have to see them either, do we?
The intellectuals go to war. And at the Council on Foreign Relations, they don't make more committed to Wall Street, do they?
george walton
Excellent work by tnr--between Bergen and Biddle the facts have been pretty much laid on the table. Sorry folks, but when campaign rhetoric based on ignorance encounters the real world, one either adjusts or fails. And failure in this sort of thing can be spectacular.
This is like deciding what kind of health insurance policy to buy--a cheap one that may work, but if it doesn't you go broke and die in rapid sequence; or one that may be too expensive, but will cover you with reasonable effectiveness.
I continue to caution against inflated expectations. Even with a million troops, Afghanistan is still going to be Afghanistan. We had 20,400 foreign troops there three years ago, and now there are 103,000. As in Iraq and most everywhere else, the number of troops (within reason) is a lot less important than what they are tasked with doing. I think we have time to think this through.
powell:
Excellent work by tnr--between Bergen and Biddle the facts have been pretty much laid on the table. Sorry folks, but when campaign rhetoric based on ignorance encounters the real world, one either adjusts or fails. And failure in this sort of thing can be spectacular.
george:
The facts. Ignorance and the real world. I suspect the facts, like the truth, coincide with Mr. Powell's political agenda here. And you are ignorant of what is really happening over there if you don't share it.
The problem with that approach, however, is that many of those who dispute these "facts" are not just the wild eyed lefty wackos many assume I am. Some, like, say, Joe Biden have positions rather high up in "the establishment" and recognize another quagmire when they see one.
powell:
This is like deciding what kind of health insurance policy to buy--a cheap one that may work, but if it doesn't you go broke and die in rapid sequence; or one that may be too expensive, but will cover you with reasonable effectiveness.
george:
Healthcare. A perfect analogy.
Here in TNR...as in other mainstream publications...intellectuals bat words back and forth and form speculative conjectures about how the world works around them. But the "facts" they accummulate by and large come form reading each other's "facts". They are bascially an exchange of worlds that consist almost entirely of words. The word warriors.
In the healthcare debate they discuss the "facts" about the "public option". Intellectually. Whether the final legislation contains a public option is not something that will affect most of them them personally. It's the policy debate about other people's lives that is intriguing.
Same with Afghanistan I suspect. If Obama embraces the Bergen and Biddle "facts" and escalates the war----how does the conflict affect them, personally?
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