On July 4, 2009 Team Prowler, American soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, set off to patrol Highway 601, a key road in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. All trade entering the province passed through 601. It was the land supply route for British, American, and Afghan forces, and the “skuff” hall in the British-run base was getting low on food. The Taliban controlled villages along the road. “Nothing out there but the Taliban,” one soldier said. Civilian vehicles avoided 601 because of the roadside bombs, called IEDs.
Team Prowler followed 4,000 U.S. Marines who, a month earlier, launched a “mini-Surge” aimed at taking over Taliban-controlled villages in Helmand, the country’s largest poppy-producing province. Helmand had also seen the most attacks on American, British, and Afghan government troops. The plan called for an “Afghan face,” joining marines with the Afghan Army and Afghan National Police (ANP). The Afghans knew the language and the people, and they could provide intelligence. The marines also hoped that Afghan participation would convince locals that the Americans were fighting on their behalf, that this was not just another foreign occupation.
Sergeant Dyer, a thickly muscled former Navy Seal who took part in Team Prowler’s patrol, complained to me that the Afghan police knew where to find the Taliban but did not pursue them. “At one checkpoint they were still wearing their man jammies, not uniforms,” he said, referring to the salwar kameez, the long flowing tunic and baggy pants that Afghans often wear. “IEDs are placed two clicks from police checkpoints. They don’t go on patrol, and at the sound of the first shot they request air support. . . . They say, ‘if we don’t get air support we’re leaving.’”
After the Americans cleared an area of insurgents, Afghan security forces were supposed to hold it. But the security forces were too small and poorly trained to do their part. Despite the billions of dollars spent since the fall of 2001, the Afghan Army never showed up. Dyer and fellow officers complained bitterly—and openly.
Nor could Dyer hide his contempt for most of the coalition members. The British, Australians, and Canadians were aggressive, he said, but Americans joke that ISAF, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, stands for “I see Americans fighting,” or “I suck at fighting,” or “I stay at the FOB” (forward operating base).
It was Dyer’s third combat deployment in Afghanistan. The rules of engagement had changed since he first arrived, and he worried that his men were more at risk because of limitations on when they could shoot. “There’s too much talk of counterinsurgency and civil affairs. It requires security,” Dyer said, “You can’t build a school if you can’t protect the teacher.”
The new rules, issued in July by ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal, ordered soldiers not to pursue Taliban fighters at the risk of civilian casualties. McChrystal also ordered troops to drive more slowly and respectfully on Afghanistan’s roads. His predecessor, General David McKiernan, had issued similar orders, albeit with less media fanfare. Despite the increased caution, 1,013 Afghan civilians were killed in the first half of 2009, according to the UN, up from 818 for the same period of the previous year. Almost half died in American air strikes.
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McChrystal’s announcements of new rules of engagement were part of a larger change of strategy in the eight-year-old war: a move to counterinsurgency (COIN).
In March 2009 the Obama administration gave itself one year to “shift the momentum” in the war—meaning, to stop losing. Three months later, Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked for McKiernan’s resignation. He was replaced by McChrystal, who, in late August, recommended increasing U.S.-troop deployment by 40,000 and implementing a COIN strategy. In his December 1 speech at West Point, Obama did not give McChrystal everything he asked for, but he largely embraced McChrystal’s analysis and fully accepted his COIN recommendations.
More than a specific code of action, COIN is about priorities. In a population-centric counterinsurgency campaign, the chief priority is protecting the population, not killing the enemy. The idea is to win over the people with security and services attentive to local needs, thereby depriving insurgents of popular support, dividing them from the people, and eventually affording an opportunity to kill or “reconcile” them.
In a near-fanatical fight for influence, proponents of COIN spent much of the past decade exhorting the U.S. military and government to embrace the strategy in the global war on terrorism. COIN shaped the “Surge” in Iraq in 2007, and its alleged success in reducing violence earned its military proponents a dominant role in strategic thinking. COIN’s biggest proponent is General David Petraeus, who is credited with designing the Surge and now oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as head of Central Command. Petraeus coauthored the latest edition of The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a seminal book in the COIN community. The Field Manual cites the view of “General Chang Ting-chen of Mao Zedong’s central committee . . . that revolutionary war was 80 percent political action and only 20 percent military.” According to the Field Manual, “such an assertion is arguable and certainly depends on the insurgency’s stage of development; it does, however, capture the fact that political factors have primacy in COIN” (emphasis added).
The team of ‘experts’ who advised McChrystal on his report—only one was expert on Afghanistan—included many celebrity pundits.
Opponents in the defense establishment warn that this emphasis on “political factors” undermines conventional war-fighting ability. They point to the Israeli military, bogged down as an occupying army for years and defeated by Hezbollah in conventional warfare in 2006. Some of these skeptics acknowledge COIN’s successes in the Iraq Surge. But Afghanistan, they argue, is a different case.
One circumstantial difference is that while General Petraeus conducted his Iraq review with people who knew the country well, McChrystal, a “hunter-killer” whose background in counterterrorism worried some supporters of COIN, called in advisors already committed to a population-centric COIN strategy. The team of “experts” who advised McChrystal on his August report—only one was expert on Afghanistan—included many celebrity pundits from both sides of the political divide in Washington, including Frederick Kagan, Stephen Biddle, Anthony Cordesman, and Michael O’Hanlon. It was a savvy move, sure to help win political support in Congress, but it had little to do with realities on the ground.
More fundamentally, COIN helped to control violence in Iraq because sectarian bloodshed—which changed the conflict from an anti-occupation struggle to a civil war, displaced millions, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands—was already exhausting itself when the Surge started in 2007. The Sunnis were willing to cooperate with the Americans because the Sunnis knew they had been defeated by the time the “Sunni Awakening” began in Anbar Province in September 2006; the victorious Shias were divided, and militias degenerated into gangsterism. In comparison with al Qaeda in Iraq and Shia gangs, the Americans looked good. They could step into the void without escalating the conflict, even as casualties rose temporarily. Moreover, with more than two-thirds of Iraqis in cities, the U.S. efforts could focus on large urban centers, especially Baghdad, the epicenter of the civil war.
In Afghanistan, there is no comparable exhaustion of the population, more than two-thirds of which lives in hard-to-reach rural areas. In addition, population protection—the core of COIN—is more complicated in Afghanistan. The Taliban only attack Afghan civilians who collaborate with the Americans and their puppet government or who are suspected of violating the extremely harsh interpretation of Islamic law that many Afghans accept. And unlike in Iraq, where innocent civilians were targeted only by predatory militias, civilians in Afghanistan are as likely to be targeted by their “own” government as by paramilitary groups. Afghanistan has not fallen into civil war—although tension between Pashtuns and Tajiks is increasing—so the United States cannot be its savior. You can’t build walls around thousands of remote Afghan villages; you can’t punish the entire Pashtun population, the largest group in the country, the way the minority Sunnis of Iraq were punished.
McChrystal was not blind to these difficulties. His assessment of the war in Afghanistan, leaked to the media in September, accurately described the dismal situation in Afghanistan and identified the Americans’ foremost challenges as political, social, and economic. But his solution—now Obama’s—was to send more troops. He offered no details on what a successful COIN strategy will require, nor has Obama filled in the blanks.
McChrystal proposed more than doubling the size of the Afghan Army, even though his more modest goal of 134,000 had not yet been achieved. He did not explain why results might improve—neither did Obama.
McChrystal’s report correctly portrays the Afghan police as ineffective, but does not show how adding more of them, even with additional training, would solve the problem. “If I take drug dealers and gangbangers from the streets of D.C. to an eight-week program and then put them back in the same environment, can we expect it to change their activities?” one skeptical COIN expert working on Afghanistan asked me. The expert, whose government employment bars him from making public comments, added, “If the corrupt force is the problem, why put twice as many police out there?”
Nor does the assessment question whether ISAF (meaning primarily the United States) has the resources and the will to conduct a decade-long COIN campaign, the length history suggests is required.
McChrystal assumed that creating a centralized, functioning state in Afghanistan, which has never had one, is possible. Past efforts to extend the reach of a deeply unpopular central government in Afghanistan only caused instability. Prior to the recent elections, the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai’s government faced serious challenges even in areas it controlled. The botched vote makes clear that his government will never gain the authority it needs in order to function. Obama’s unpromising solution is to pressure the Afghans to create a state by announcing his exit strategy before the troops arrive.
Perhaps McChrystal’s most crucial assumption—also endorsed by Obama—was that the failure to create a unified, centralized state in Afghanistan will lead to al Qaeda’s return. This claim is widely contested. Al Qaeda is already ensconced in Pakistan, where it is better protected from the United States than it would be in Afghanistan. And the Taliban are not interested in global jihad. Their current alliance with al Qaeda is a result of convenience, not ideology, though the longer the Americans are in Afghanistan, the stronger that alliance will become. Any new al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan could be bombed by the Americans, and Afghans themselves might not be so welcoming. Even Pashtuns, who support the Taliban, are opposed to al Qaeda attacks. Most Afghans dislike the Arab extremist volunteers.
President Obama asks how our strategy serves U.S. security, but McChrystal’s report answered a different question: how can Afghanistan control its territory?
President Obama asks how our strategy in Afghanistan will serve U.S. security interests, but McChrystal’s report answered an entirely different question: how can Afghanistan control its own territory? He prescribed for the United States the impossible task of creating a new Afghanistan while engaging in counterinsurgency against the Taliban. COIN inevitably requires military action against a major segment of the Afghan population and, in doing so, undermines the project of state-building.
In Obama’s “all of the above” plan, the Americans in Afghanistan will not be engaged in counterinsurgency—or in reconstruction—at all, but in creating something out of nothing.
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As Prowler and the Provincial Police Reserve drove down 601, an insurgent with an itchy trigger finger detonated his IED. The police discovered the command wire and timidly fanned out to look for the bomber. Prowler’s leader, Captain Nate Westby, complained that they were “squirrelly” and would need a lot of “mentoring” to go forward.
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