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Afghanistan: Graveyard of Assumptions? (Updated)
These past few weeks have brought a fresh torrent of bad news from Afghanistan: a governor in a key district assassinated, U.S. and allied operations in flux, Afghan leadership in question. Policy-makers in Washington and allied capitols are wondering if the U.S. and allied counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan can succeed. These are reasonable concerns. Tony Cordesman, one of the U.S. defense analysts who has advised the command in Afghanistan, wrote today that “There is nothing more tragic than watching beautiful theories being assaulted by gangs of ugly facts. It is time, however, to be far more realistic about the war in Afghanistan. It may well still be winnable, but it is not going to be won by denying the risks, the complexity, and the time that any real hope of victory will take. It is not going to be won by ‘spin’ or artificial news stories, and it can easily be lost by exaggerating solvable short-term problems”.
Researchers – whether in think tanks or in the academy – are loathe to admit error or display genuine humility. But as the preacher-king in Ecclesiastes warned us, “Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice”. Humility pays, which is why John Calvin instructed us all to have a “teachable spirit”.
I cannot think of any place where humility pays as much as in Afghanistan. One of the smartest military analysts I know arrived in Afghanistan this past spring having never been there and promptly announced he could not understand how anyone who had not spent at least a year in Afghanistan could say anything of consequence about the country. And the longer I spend time away from Afghanistan, the less confidence I have that I can even understand operations there or the challenges facing U.S. and allied officers, diplomats and aid workers – to say nothing of ordinary Afghans. This is one of the reasons why I have been reluctant to say anything in the media or in a policy paper on the tactical and operational levels of war in 2010. And having spent a good many years of my life studying one sub-region of the Arabic-speaking world, I have always been quick to point out that my lack of Dari and Pashtu language skills or time spent in Afghanistan as a civilian researcher really means that I am confined to observing and offering comment on NATO/ISAF operations and U.S. and allied policy and strategy rather than on Afghan culture or society.
Judge what follows with that massive caveat emptor in the back of your head.
The purpose of this post is to revisit some assumptions we – to include this analyst – have made about the environment in Afghanistan as well as U.S. strategy and operations. A year on from President Obama’s “white paper” outlining U.S. policy and strategic aims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, what assumptions remain valid and what assumptions need correction?
Wags like to joke that when you “assume” you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”. Very funny, sure, but the reality is that assumptions are necessary for strategy, the social sciences, and everyday life. The economist Greg Mankiw writes that assumptions help us “simplify the complex world and make it easier to understand … The art in scientific thinking – whether in physics, biology, or economics – is deciding which assumptions to make”.
In war, getting your assumptions right does not necessarily mean you win, and getting them wrong doesn’t necessarily mean you lose. As with all things, the ability to execute matters most, and in war, setting priorities and allocating sufficient resources matters quite a bit as well. In Afghanistan, it is unclear that the United States and its allies have allotted sufficient resources (time, troops, money) to execute a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. It is also unclear whether or not the United States and its allies can execute such a strategy in southern Afghanistan if given sufficient resources. We have to be honest about that, as well as about the possibility that we could somehow end up with a favorable policy outcome regardless of those concerns.
This post, though, is about assumptions. In Afghanistan, leaders at the political, strategic, operational and tactical levels of the war have made and continue to make assumptions that allow them to plan and execute a strategy and operations. Some of the assumptions made in 2009 have proven correct in 2010. Some have proven in need of correction, and that means leaders need to revisit their plan. Here are some of them:
1. "The United States and its allies will devote the time, money, and troops to execute a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan". Probably False. For a variety of reasons – some good, some less good, some having to do with massive oil spills that didn't exist in 2009 and a financial crisis that didn't exist in 2007 – the United States and its allies will likely not provide the resources necessary for a long-term counterinsurgency effort. They might have in 2003. But in 2009? In retrospect, it was always going to be unlikely, and I think I personally overestimated U.S. and allied resources available (including but not limited to political will).
2. "The United States and its allies have vital interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan". Probably True. Tony Cordesman is correct when he writes that we have no reason to maintain a long-term presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia. But disrupting networks of violent non-state actors is a vital U.S. interest, and allowing these non-state actors to establish a safe haven in Afghanistan is not in our interests. As with anything, the trick is weighing marginal costs versus marginal benefits. I do not have faith in my ability to accurately assess either.
3. "Afghanistan is a binary conflict between the government and the insurgents".* Certainly False. Take a close look at Helmand Province or read the chapter written by Tom Coughlin in this book. On the one hand, you have a binary conflict between insurgents and the government. On the other hand, you have inter-tribal rivalries layered on top of that conflict. And on someone else’s hand, you have the drug trade layered onto both. Try to imagine a battalion commander who speaks only English figuring all that out by June 2011. And if most counterinsurgency strategies are about extending the reach of the government, should we still do that if the government is known to be corrupt and predatory?
4. "The provision of social services leads to a reduction of violence". Mostly false. Theorists and practitioners of counterinsurgency had long argued, as Galula did, that “the counterinsurgent should … seize every opportunity to help the population with his own resources and equipment”. And as Eli Berman and David Laitin demonstrated, insurgent groups do in fact benefit from providing social services. But how about counterinsurgent forces? There the evidence is weaker. Berman & Co. have demonstrated that CERP funding – and CERP funding alone among aid and development spending – likely had an effect on the drop of violence in Iraq. But Andrew Wilder argues that even CERP funding is destabilizing in Afghanistan. Whether or not any of the $70b the United States and its allies have spent on aid and development has had a stabilizing effect seems to be unproven. This has, I think, some serious implications for U.S. aid and development strategy going forward.
5. "What we do is what matters".** Mostly false. I think we drew some false lessons out of the Baghdad security operations of 2007, thinking it was what we did that caused the dramatic drop in violence that allowed for a political process to take place and allows us to consider the Surge to have been a success. As I have pointed out several times here on the blog, there was a lot of stuff going on in Iraq in 2007 – a Jaysh al-Mahdi ceasefire, the effects of a brutal civil war, the Sahwa, etc. U.S. military operations most certainly had an effect on levels of violence, but correctly portioning out causal responsibility for the drop in violence among all those factors is impossible. One lesson from the Surge, though, might have been that in order for us to be successful in Afghanistan, a lot of stuff outside U.S. and allied military operations was going to have to go right. Another lesson might have been that conditions might change on the ground without us having the ability to accurately explain why. Regardless, in Afghanistan, it is always worth remembering that we are waging a war on behalf of a host nation. What the leaders of that host nation do or fail to do matters more than what we do or fail to do.
6. "Population-centric counterinsurgency is appropriate for Afghanistan". Mostly true but perhaps false in one key way. The enemy in insurgencies can control his loss rate and is fluid – while the population is fixed. That’s why we’re population-centric. But does population-centric mean protecting the population or controlling the population? And if you do not have detention authority and the population is 70% rural, can you even do the latter? I’m not sure.
I still think, as echoed in this New York Times editorial, that "General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy still seems like the best chance to stabilize Afghanistan and get American troops home." But for a lot of the same reasons Tony outlines in his most recent paper for the CSIS, I am not sure we can pull it off. I think we need to reexamine our assumptions, reconsider our strategy, and do both with the requisite epistemological humility about the environment in which we’re fighting.
*I didn’t actually make this one, but as I read a lot of policy documents from 2009, I feel like the United States and its allies largely did.
**Okay, I didn’t make this either, and I do not know any operational decision-makers who did, but I think this most certainly applies to many legislators in the U.S. Congress and to much of the U.S. public.
Update: Cohen and Boot respond. I respect the heck out of Max Boot and consider him among the smartest of the thinkers often lumped under the label "neoconservative". (He has also been intellectually brave, unafraid to take on members of his own party.) But I think Boot, like many other neoconservatives, overestimates the importance of U.S. actions and downplays the agency of others. So Afghanistan will definitely be a success if we will it? Sorry, but that's not how third-party counterinsurgency campaigns work. The actions of others matter as much or more than our own. (Though Boot is right, to a degree, about political will.)
Update II: Now Spencer, with some kind words regarding my intellectual honesty. (Hey, if you don't have much intellect, you might as well have intellectual honesty.)
Update III: The military analyst I mentioned in the third paragraph wrote in to say that he thinks an intelligent analyst would have something of consequence to say about Afghanistan after as little as 90 days on the ground -- but agreed with me that knowledge is perishable. He also pointed out regarding Assumption #3 that we often assume both the government and the insurgents to be unitary actors. Not true -- neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan. And Joe Klein wrote in to say that his worries -- only partially articulated in this column for TIME -- dovetail with my own.
Update IV: Max Boot has penned a very thoughtful response to my, er, response. I did not write that the United States and its allies will not be successful in Afghanistan -- merely that I am having my doubts, in part because I am not sure how much I can really "know" about the battlespace and that some of my earlier assumptions have proven either wrong or in need of slight revision. As far as the success rate of counterinsurgents fighting as third parties -- that is, not on their home turf and in the service of a host nation, like the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is concerned, I would point Boot in the direction of the freshly defended doctoral dissertation of one Erin Simpson (Doctor Charlie to this blog's readers). Once you're done coding everything out, it turns out it doesn't so much matter whether or not you're a democracy or an authoritarian regime. But counterinsurgents are a whole lot less likely to be successful if they are fighting as third parties as opposed to on their home territory. Boot also references my service on Gen. McChrystal's assessment team last summer. Surely he remembers that we* concluded the United States and its allies were losing the war at the time, right? We found the overall situation to be deteriorating. What was needed, we felt, was a new strategy and more resources. In 2009 and 2010, the president has devoted many more troops and resources. But that changes the cost-benefit analysis I referenced in #2 above. I want to thank, though, Max Boot and all the others who have used this post to engage in some really good (and civil) debate.
*The report, of course, did not reflect the consensus of the group and only reflected the opinion of the commander. I largely agreed with everything that was written in the first 22 pages (which were the only pages I helped draft), but there were some really dynamic debates among the various experts and strategists (and one smart-ass blogger) that were not reflected in the final text.
Your points are well-taken,
Your points are well-taken, though I'd suggest that there were a number of people advocating AGAINST making these particular assumptions last summer and fall, when alternate COAs were still allegedly being considered.
The major point of contention here, I think, is point number 2, in which you suggest that it's "probably true" that the U.S. has vital national interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For one thing, I'm not sure it's useful to compound the two when "progress" one one side of the Durand Line seems so often to mark a step back on the other side. We ought to be realistic about the fact that a successful unified policy, a rising tide of security that raises all boats, is unlikely.
The problem with that, of course, is that we're undertaking CT operations in Afghanistan when our terror targets are in Pakistan. And the actions we need to take to be successful in Afghanistan are often the very opposite of the actions we'd take if we were pursuing what I believe to be the legitimate strategic objective of stabilizing Pakistan's government against its internal threats. (Counterproliferation of WMD, after all, is identified as one of about a billion top priorities in the terrible 2010 NSS.)
The reality is this: we have enduring interests in central and south Asia, and they are almost certainly more important than "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat AQ in Afghanistan and Pakistan" (which, to be clear, we can't even do by operating solely in Afghanistan).
You're missing the
You're missing the meta-assumption of US Afghanistan policy: the assumption that using military means to satisfy policy goals will work, especially long term. Just because the US military is the only actor with the resources doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job.
Good summary - although when
Good summary - although when you talk about "will", even if one can swing the U.S.'s political will, there's a lot of partners swimming their own ways when it comes to willingness to stay.
I try to read Michael Cohen
I try to read Michael Cohen and this blog closely if only to see a good-natured spar play out. I missed this post of his though somehow:
http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2010/06/if-hamid-has-lost-confidence-why...
the final lines of which read,
I have a tough time reading this post as other than a response (even if not directly spurred by it) to that one. If that's true (or even if not), this is still a rather remarkable moment.
Re Cohen's suggestion we encourage Karzai's desire to negotiate (always the end game of course), I do still question how a negotiated settlement now absent the establishment of some minimal Afghan security forces can rely on anything other than trust that the Taliban will not aid internationally aspirant jihadists. What leverage does Karzai have even to extract the promise at all if we announce we are preparing imminent withdrawals?
Sounds like the Pakistan
Sounds like the Pakistan Government needs to fully cooperate with the United States, if we are to win the war in Afghanistan and allow our military troops to operate within their boarders regions, detain, arrest and engage with deadly force any and all Taliban in their outer provinces / on the Afghan boarder.
What steps are the brass at the Pentagon taking to make this happen? How many U.S. Troops are operating in Pakistan now?
Andrew, Kudos to you for
Andrew,
Kudos to you for admitting some needed revisions, but it's not like there was a consensus on those assumptions last year. Indeed, I think you could make a case that the most controversial ones a year ago are exactly the ones that you say are now doubtful.
I'll just stick to item #1 on the list. I can't believe that anyone one year ago thought you could get substantially greater resources for Afghanistan out of NATO (window dressing, sure, but not anything like what was needed). This was hardly a secret. I know former and current US diplomats with European expertise, I know military officers and civilians from NATO governments, I know academics who follow Europe, and I keep up somewhat with the European press and public opinion data myself, and there was just no one who thought those additional resources would be forthcoming. No one outside of senior US political officials and their allies in the DC think tank/journalist community thought that was going to happen. I'm honestly curious what your basis was at the time for thinking otherwise, because that view in DC was certainly a head-scratcher for a lot of us. I hoped the reason was that no one really believed it but thought they had to say it for US domestic political consumption.
I'd say the same, though less forcefully, about US resourcing. Look at everything from opinion polls to the budget/economic data to Obama's personality and it's hard to see how one would expect a lot more resources (especially resources on the non-DoD side -- that was an easy "not a chance" call). Less clearly true than for the Europeans but that was still going out on a limb for the US, relative to what observers who weren't pushing the policy would have predicted.
From Afghanistan:Indian
From Afghanistan:Indian options (Raman's strategic analysis)
"....
9. The revamped US strategy in the Ad-Pak area consisting essentially of attempts at ground dominance in the Afghan territory and stepped-up Drone strikes in the Pakistani territory is nowhere near bringing about a turning point in the US battle against the Afghan Taliban. The efforts of President Hamid Karzai to identify and wean away the inadequately motivated elements in the Afghan Taliban through offers of money, perks and a share of power under his continuing leadership are not making headway despite reported secret contacts with claimed Taliban elements in places such as the Maldives and the recent jirga, which was a spectacular event, but nothing more. There have been no substantive political results and there are unlikely to be any.
....
11. The US is far from prevailing over the Afghan Taliban and being able to bring about a turning point on the ground which would facilitate a down-sizing of the US presence in time for it to make a favourable impact on Mr.Barack Obama’s bid for re-election in 2012. It looks as if the final outcome in the Af-Pak area will be determined by who has the better battle stamina and staying power. The stamina and staying power of the US-led NATO forces do not seem to be strong enough to bring about a turning point favourable to them." B. Raman's strategic snalysis
In one of those CNAS panels at the "CNASpalooza," (thanks SWJ for posting video!) a panelist said something about India slowly changing things in the past year, basically because they figure the US isn't going to accomplish certain ends and that changes the regional calculation.
Posted as food for thought, because I certainly have no clue.
http://ramanstrategicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/06/afghanistan-indian-op...
My question to other commenters is this: in what other ways can we project regional "stamina and will," so to speak? We are not going to continue with the same militarily, aid money seems - to me, anyway - mostly to be wasted or "corrupted away," and overall our basic position seems unchanged in relation to regional actors. Boy, that is a whole bunch of "seems" on my part.
Is this too pessimistic? I don't think we should be too pessimistic: it's a long game and there are always options.
Mike D wrote: "What leverage
Mike D wrote: "What leverage does Karzai have even to extract the promise at all if we announce we are preparing imminent withdrawals?"
Don't prepare imminent withdrawals. Make clear that the US will stay until the Afghan government and its security forces are in no danger or being overrun by the Taliban. Moreover, make clear to the Taliban leadership (all of them) that any AQ presence in Afghanistan will bring a military response from the US.
Since you quoted Mankiw, you
Since you quoted Mankiw, you should also consider opportunity costs. Could we, assuming the will to commit to 20-30 years of effort in Afghanistan gain some sort of victory? Maybe, though we need to pretty carefully define victory. Maybe we could leave Afghanistan with a somewhat functional government that is able to keep jihadist groups with an international focus out of the country. That might be achievable. Eradicating nationalist groups that want to make Afghanistan an Islamic theocracy? No way. Even if we "win" it still leaves Pakistan out of our reach. What does that actually gain us if our long term goal is national security? What the hell is our long term goal anymore?
Now, place all of those maybes and mights against areas of national security concern. Mexico and Latin America. The cartels have been much too active across our Southern border. North Korea, which no one has a good grip on, including its benefactor, China. The failed states of Africa which offer an alternative base for jihadists. Yet, we place huge amounts of money and personnel into a military resolution of a problem that is part criminal and part philosophical in a very circumscribed area of conflict. Are we using resources in the best way possible?
All future war/military endeavors of the current sort must also be evaluated from an economic perspective. If we are going to provide our soldiers with state of the art gear and support, our efforts are going to be difficult to sustain for the decades that these nation building exercises are likely to cost. The political will which Boot derides is just a manifestation of the invisible hand at work. Costs and benefits are being weighed, with benefits being found less convincing.
Steve
Uh, it's not a game and I
Uh, it's not a game and I wish I hadn't use that word in my last comment. Apologies, all.
Ex I think you let potus
Ex
I think you let potus off too easy here. I understand the need to appease the American left, but it came at the expense of the war effort. By announcing a timetable for withdraw at the start of operations, it sent the wrong message to the afghan population. After all if you were an afghan villager and you had to pick a side would you choose the Americans that are going to abandon you in 18 months or the Taliban that will remain after the americans leave?
'political will' is just fancy talk for potus ain't got the huevos to stick it out. When he was first elected in 2009 Obama had a 80% approval rating and was somewhere between g-d and Jesus on the left. He had the clout to announce a surge without a tmetable. But he didn't.
And not sure what the oil spill has to do with the war. After all the coast guard isn't exactly the tip of the spear in afganistan. Neither is British Petroleum ( sorry mates spill oil in my pool and you get your old name back).
I understand we can't be in afganistan for ever and ever, but we don't need to let the bad guys know the exact date do we?
Wzerbo
Good comments, gang. Wzerbo,
Good comments, gang. Wzerbo, I wonder how history will judge Obama. I have a feeling his key Afghanistan decisions are yet to be made, but I do think the 18-Month comment was a strategic blunder. The Afghans must know that it is rarely the winners who decide when wars end...But Mssr. Cohen does call
But Mssr. Cohen does call for us to get out of the south in his "Options" post. That's the contested territory, is it not?
There is nothing new here.
There is nothing new here. The faulty assumptions listed above were pointed out by many long before the latest "surge". There are no vital US interests in the area. There never have been. There are interests deemed important to various factions of the US defense establishment but nothing there is close to being vital and chasing after these is doing harm to the US economy and it's security.
The 18 month time line was always wishful if not purposefully deceptive thinking unless you parse it finely enough to allow the withdraw of one rifle squad to be 'some" forces". You should really question why Petreaus would support this fantasy. If he had been truthful with Obama he could have saved us a lot of unnecessary pain.
Here's my predication: Although some minor NATO allies will start to fall away (more rapidly if the Euro zone collapses) US troop numbers will not be significantly reduced until after the next US presidential election for fear of Republicans siting the move as defeatism and worse encouraging a serious primary challenger. After the election the campaign will drag on until Karzai is replaced at which point the end game will play out.
Domestic politics and not some fantastic "vital interest" will keep the waste going for three more years.
I think the whole country is
I think the whole country is "contested." The security situation in the West and North are deteriorating rapidly. The East and South are still ablaze. Areas that were once relatively secure, no longer are. For example, recent SIGACT analysis shows that Ghazni has one of the highest concentrations of IEDs, currently. RC-North has seen a recent spike in significant activities (although some of this may be the fact that SIGACTs are just now being reported with the increase in US presence in that part of the country).
I have seen, firsthand, a downward trend in security since 2006--which is not to say that success is unobtainable.
I wonder about the decision making process across the country though. Withdrawal from Nuristan and parts of Kunar provide the insurgency a sanctuary inside of Afghanistan and de facto legitimacy as they consolidate power in those areas. Concentration at more urbanized areas neglect the fact that we're fighting a rural-based insurgency, and further push that rural population into the arms of militant groups.
I think PC-COIN is still viable but needs to be adapted for the situation in Afghanistan. Population centric in Afghanistan actually means dispersed through the rural areas.
Jim Gant may have been wrong about the Tribal Engagement Strategy, but maybe he was also right that Afghanistan should resemble more of an SFFID/FID mission than 'classic' COIN.
-Andy
There are some additional
There are some additional assumptions that might have been discussed here, involving such subjects as the targets of drone attacks in Pakistan (we are only blowing up our own enemies, not someone else's), Gen. McChrystal's commitment to Helmand (this is the place in all Afghanistan to begin taking territory back from the Taliban, and we're not just there now because we had to bail out the British two years ago), and McChrystal's peculiar tactic of informing the enemy of exactly what he plans to do months in advance (the assumption here being, I guess, that putting McChrystal in command of the Afghanistan war was a sound assignment).
But, but...."2001-2008 didn't count." How's that for an assumption deserving of a revisit?
All this discussion of "political will" and so forth is very well from an academic standpoint. Obviously considerations like that are relevant to counterinsurgency in the abstract. In reality, they have to be evaluated in context. In this case, the context is a war that began almost nine years ago. It's asking a lot of the American people to summon up "will" enough to see a properly resourced counterinsurgency campaign through the ten, twenty or 100 years the experts now assure us is probably necessary, when most of these experts wear the same uniforms of the people who told them Afghanistan was going well in 2002, and 2004, and 2006, and 2008.
And it's not asking nearly enough of the men wearing those uniforms now, or of their predecessors, to conduct a discussion of the Afghan war without accounting for those eight wasted years, what they cost us, and what that cost means for our prospects of success now. Yes, I know the Commander-in-Chief gave orders shortly after the old Taliban government fell to prepare to put freedom on the march fighting terrorists in Iraq so we wouldn't have to fight them here. I know that left Afghanistan chronically underresourced in terms of money, men, weapons, and brainpower for many years, and during those years.....
Well, you tell me. What happened? What elements of the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated between the winter of 2001-02 and that of 2008-09, and how much of that deterioration can we realistically expect to reverse? That's the point of this comment -- not to insist on the validity of my own analysis, or even to recommend a specific course of action, but rather to suggest that the professional analysts start assigning to the failures of the American and NATO effort in Afghanistan before the summer of 2009 their due weight.
Looking at what Gulliver has
Looking at what Gulliver has said about point 2 got me to thinking about just exactly what we, that is the US and their allies can actually do in Pakistan.
The focus is far more CT than COIN, but while the US has a presence for better or not, in Afghanistan, that presence is sorely lacking across the border, so limited really to proxy pressure and drone ops and perhaps , perhaps, spec ops incursions, what can we do in terms of CT over the border.
As to W zerbos comments on sticking it out, I'm right there with you. Other will argue that the US has no mandate to fix that country, that it has no real politik reason to be there in the long haul. To that I maintain that you went in boots and all and you made promises.
Sure reality dictates that financial crises and oil spills will retard finances, but the commitment was made to help these people, to let girls go to school etc. And yes that's my dyed in the wool optimism speaking out, but really , if what you export to the world is a awesome military force, then you need to use it better.
No the burden for Afghanistan should not be yours alone, militarily or for any of the important support ops. That's why I think more needs to be demanded of the other player, currently sitting on the fringes waiting till you get sick and tired so they can swoop in, play be different rule sets and make a killing.
That ebbing said I know that that's not going to happen, that Karzai ain't going anywhere, that domestic politics will outweigh any interest in the regional affairs of a dirt poor country and that you, the Brits, us few Aussies et al will pack up and come home.
Why not a post about the
Why not a post about the deteriorating US-Turkey relations?
You know there is something
You know there is something far more scary than COIN (various dialects) failing ... it succeeds
Because if it somehow could become a perfect winning formula .. then HOW MANY PLACES WOULD THE US INVADE THEN?
Heck I'd bet we'd be fightiing US soldiers in Australia before 2020, just after Briitain was invaded and 'won'.
If we could get past the
If we could get past the assumption that we are a acting as a "third-party" in this counterinsurgency campaign, how would this change our thinking?
Re 715 visitor comment: "If
Re 715 visitor comment: "If we could get past the assumption that we are a acting as a "third-party" in this counterinsurgency campaign, how would this change our thinking?"
Whoa. That needs to be explored. I think in terms of what motivated us to invade, we are not a 3d party.
“Assumption is the mother
“Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups” (Pricilla Queen of the Desert)
If we are having a reappraisal lets go the whole hog. As I read Cordsman I was firstly thinking wrong, very wrong about many of the assumptions but even if you accept a re-re-re-definition of victory as ‘not being significantly worse than when we arrived’ – a tall order in itself – then I could not help mentally correcting all the timescales from months to years. Claims of US civilian and military readjusting to deal with Afghans as Afghans complete with the culture of palm greasing in a time scale that does not include the term decades seems (I am groping for the right word here – nope I am going to have to settle for) naive.
The first question I have not seen a satisfactory answer to is why are we there? Having blown up any tangible AQ assets in the very early kinetic phase then what?
The plan seems to be to bring democracy, Westphalian Nation States structures and some form of law which has more to do with the Magna Carta than Sharia – all of which are alien and require a change in culture. I would expect these to take root as a new generation grows up in the new system, but until that happens it requires someone familiar with these systems to be around to explain them. The British did this in India but then they moved in for the long haul with large numbers of civilian administrators training up the Indians in the British systems by working along side them.
What is the current situation today, compared to the likely situation had we not gone for regime change? The most significant effect of our Afghan adventure has been the destabilisation of Pakistan. AQ or AQ & the Taliban are insignificant threats compared to a radicalised Pakistan. While AQ were a threat to small numbers of US citizens within the continental United States the Pushtans who we removed from power, and are now trying to get their country back, number about 40 million. There are nearly as many Pushtan as there are English and they are not interested in global jihad but will keep killing foreigners in their lands or anyone else usurping their power base. Pakistan is a completely different proposition. It is two problems the aggrieved madrassa educated Muslim individual, now ripe for recruitment as suicide bombers, and the nuclear armed democratic state. The former is already a terrorist problem, one of the new AQ replacements of our own making, and is a danger not just regionally but globally, inc. ConUS. The Pakistani people, as evidenced by polling data, is now extremely anti-American and while their leaders have been happy to take the US aid and tow the line, where it was not too damaging to their interests, they are more interested in India and how US meddling in Afghanistan figures into its long-term balance of power with the old enemy. They are under no illusion that they and India are going to be around long after NATO have gone back to the North Atlantic. Drone strikes, and other public relations disasters, leave the danger of a democratically elected government that truly reflects the position of the Pakistani population. This should send shivers down the beltways collective occipital as polling data showed O. Bin Laden as marginally more popular than their own prime minister and most thought the US government ordered the Mumbai bombings. In comparison Iran would be a ‘best friend’ candidate.
So what is the plan for withdrawal? Leave Khazi in control with the police and army filling the void. The army are not ready and even if they were Afghanistan can not afford a standing army capable of holding back the Taliban. The police are unworthy of the name and are universally distrusted; if we were serious we would disband them and start again from scratch with having been a policeman an automatic disqualification from consideration. As for Khazi, aside form the dubious election, he does not have the power base to hold on unless we prop him up and if we do that delegitimises him.
Regime change in Afghanistan was morally and legally iffy and a strategic disaster.
So all-in-all SNAFU. If only the US was as nation of doctors not soldiers maybe they would adopt the maxim ‘first of all do no harm’.
“Assumption is the mother
“Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups” (Priscilla Queen of the Desert)
If we are having a reappraisal lets go the whole hog. As I read Cordsman I was firstly thinking wrong, very wrong about many of the assumptions but even if you accept a re-re-re-definition of victory as ‘not being significantly worse than when we arrived’ – a tall order in itself – then I could not help mentally correcting all the timescales from months to years. Claims of US civilian and military readjusting to deal with Afghans as Afghans complete with the culture of palm greasing in a time scale that does not include the term decades seems (I am groping for the right word here – nope I am going to have to settle for) naive.
The first question I have not seen a satisfactory answer to is why are we there? Having blown up any tangible AQ assets in the very early kinetic phase then what?
The plan seems to be to bring democracy, Westphalian Nation States structures and some form of law which has more to do with the Magna Carta than Sharia – all of which are alien and require a change in culture. I would expect these to take root as a new generation grows up in the new system, but until that happens it requires someone familiar with these systems to be around to explain them. The British did this in India but then they moved in for the long haul with large numbers of civilian administrators training up the Indians in the British systems by working along side them.
What is the current situation today, compared to the likely situation had we not gone for regime change? The most significant effect of our Afghan adventure has been the destabilisation of Pakistan. AQ or AQ & the Taliban are insignificant threats compared to a radicalised Pakistan. While AQ were a threat to small numbers of US citizens within the continental United States the Pushtans who we removed from power, and are now trying to get their country back, number about 40 million. There are nearly as many Pushtan as there are English and they are not interested in global jihad but will keep killing foreigners in their lands or anyone else usurping their power base. Pakistan is a completely different proposition. It is two problems the aggrieved madrassa educated Muslim individual, now ripe for recruitment as suicide bombers, and the nuclear armed democratic state. The former is already a terrorist problem, one of the new AQ replacements of our own making, and is a danger not just regionally but globally, inc. ConUS. The Pakistani people, as evidenced by polling data, are now extremely anti-American and while their leaders have been happy to take the US aid and tow the line, where it was not too damaging to their interests, they are more interested in India and how US meddling in Afghanistan figures into its long-term balance of power with the old enemy. They are under no illusion that they and India are going to be around long after NATO have gone back to the North Atlantic. Drone strikes, and other public relations disasters, leave the danger of a democratically elected government that truly reflects the position of the Pakistani population. This should send shivers down the beltways collective occipital as polling data showed O. Bin Laden as marginally more popular than their own prime minister and most thought the US government ordered the Mumbai bombings. In comparison Iran would be a ‘best friend’ candidate.
So what is the plan for withdrawal? Leave Khazi in control with the police and army filling the void. The army are not ready and even if they were Afghanistan can not afford a standing army capable of holding back the Taliban. The police are unworthy of the name and are universally distrusted; if we were serious we would disband them and start again from scratch with having been a policeman an automatic disqualification from consideration. As for Khazi, aside form the dubious election, he does not have the power base to hold on unless we prop him up and if we do that delegitimises him.
Regime change in Afghanistan was morally and legally iffy and a strategic disaster.
So all-in-all SNAFU. If only the US was as nation of doctors not soldiers maybe they would adopt the maxim ‘first of all do no harm’.
Very sorry for the double
Very sorry for the double post did not see anything happening and thought I had not gone through.
What's interesting about
What's interesting about this post is that you don't actually come out and say that you were mistaken, and that your erroneous advice shaped the COIN policy now in place. Don't you feel any responsibility/guilt for what the US has lost dues to these mistakes?
pls. ignore Marja-centric,
pls. ignore Marja-centric, he's an idiot. as you were.
I think you let potus off
I think you let potus off too easy here. I understand the need to appease the American left, but it came at the expense of the war effort. By announcing a timetable for withdraw at the start of operations, it sent the wrong message to the afghan population. After all if you were an afghan villager and you had to pick a side would you choose the Americans that are going to abandon you in 18 months or the Taliban that will remain after the americans leave?
Yeah, because before Obama said that, things were going so well.
Bottom line, the Taliban and all Afghans knew from the outset, and still know, that we were not going to stay there forever. The Taliban, however, will keep fighting us with a timetable, or without one, as they had for the previous 7-8 years before Obama set one. And ordinary Afghans would be just as disenchanted with Karzai's band of warlords and crooks, and just as weary of the endliess conflict. As Talibs are fond of pointing out, we have watches, they have time.
But yeah, we can pretend that we were "this close" to pulling off victory, but then Obama announced a timetable for withdrawal, and all our prior success washed away. Or that the pointless escalation was going to do the trick but for the timetable announcement.
However, that would prevent us from learning some of the important lessons from this venture, as well as the Iraq war, some of which Mr. Exum does a good job addressing in this post.
The guy who should at the
The guy who should at the top of the list for apologies from the Cointras is David McKiernan. A year and a bit later although not any any better at getting Afghans to respect the Karzai government than McChrystal at least under his command the mission was ~ 33% cheaper.
On top of the savings for the first quarter of last year ISAF killed fewer innocent Afghans than the same period this year. Presumably because they used more firepower and weren't so prone to withdraw from combat his forces killed more insurgents and took far fewer casualties.
M Shannon: It was still
M Shannon:
It was still going south before McKiernan left, just more slowly.
The interesting question to ponder would be what would have happened if the Kandahar force from a year ago had stayed roughly the same size, and all the extra U.S. efforts there had gone somewhere else. When I was there in early 2009, a couple thousand Canadians were having roughly as much positive influence, for considerably less expenditure. We weren't winning, but we weren't losing either. It was a slow fighting withdrawal but Kandahar wasn't going to be "lost" in any real sense that required huge reinforcements immediately. The only difference since has been an increase in ISAF casualties more-or-less tracking with the increase in the number of targets. For massive additional expenditure, there's been very little payoff in that part of the theatre.
Things always get interesting when you reinforce something that's in an equilibrium like that. Outputs tend not to equal inputs. The road not taken here was really both keeping McKiernan, and keeping the economy-of-force mission in Kandahar (and maybe the South generally) going and trying to make inroads in other ways with the same outlay of effort.
In the end, though, it was that election that killed us. It's too easy to blame the Karzais for stealing it... really, any other outcome, such as an Abdullah presidency, likely would have made things worse by now. The real problem was our contribution to making Karzai look so puppet-like and weak to his own people that he had no choice but to steal it, because he was never going to win it legitimately.
It's Vietnam 2.0. Persons
It's Vietnam 2.0. Persons interested in the 1.0 edition may consult one of the few informative English-language histories of that war, Background to Betrayal , by the incredible Hilaire du Berrier.
Note that as the moderate, pragmatic, realistic left-wing option (Diem/Karzai) is revealed as a complete and utter disaster, the Overton Window of DC shifts to include the radical left-wing option (helicopters on the roof). In other words, as the moderate left-wing quack cure (strength through weakness) fails, the extreme left-wing quack cure (victory through defeat) becomes a legitimate policy option. Since it is inevitable, hopefully it will be embraced as quickly as possible. Americans should prepare themselves for lots of good Afghan food in their diverse urban areas.
No apology is ever offered for completely ignoring the obvious and original strategy, ie, actual conquest, occupation, or any other form of right-wing domination, foreign or domestic. Hiring General Fonseka is not a legitimate policy option. No one in the reality-based community asks: how did Afghanistan/Vietnam work before we broke it? How have these kinds of problems been solved here in the past, or elsewhere in the present? Instead, the leftism response to the failure of leftism is always: the failure is caused by insufficient leftism. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It'll be interesting to see what the Taliban do with their state. At least there won't be any liberals there.
Shouldn't your post read
Shouldn't your post read more accurately as something like "Afghanistan: Graveyard of Exum's assumptions?"
Was it not Exum and the COIN lobby that was leading the charge on Afghanistan a year ago, making statements like "I wish someone could point out the alternatives."
Glad the scales are
Glad the scales are beginning to fall from your eyes.
I think you misunderstood
I think you misunderstood much of the post, Andy. It's not that scales are falling from my eyes but that I am being up-front about the scales. I am not sure how many of us can confidently assess the war in Afghanistan, hence the epistemological humility.Mr. Exum, Excellent and
Mr. Exum,
Excellent and refreshingly honest post, now if you would only stop being such a defender of the neocons and their tired philosophies.
" After all if you were an
" After all if you were an afghan villager and you had to pick a side would you choose the Americans that are going to abandon you in 18 months or the Taliban that will remain after the americans leave?"
Stop for a second and imagine that you are an Afghan villager. Knowing the history of your own country, what is the probability that you have EVER thought that the U.S. was going to stay? Same goes for the Pakistanis. We have left before, they know that we will leave again. That is our history.
Steve
Lets imagine the future .
Lets imagine the future . Does a ' modern ' Afghanistan have a sustainable economy ? Imports vs exports , gov spending vs taxes ?
Can we afford to bankroll their health and education , defence and public works , forever ? .
Are we helping the local populations exploit their own potential assets ( minerals , gemstones , morphine , windpower ) ?
Do we expect them to have sweat shops producing cheap tat for export , or to rely on expats sending money home ? Or does someone have a vision of highly educated Afghans producing high tech goodies to sell to the US ?
Reality check time . The Anerican Dream may not work in Afghanisatan . Maybe they need advisors from Detroit , Cuba , Somaliland : places with little aid and few assets , working out their own solutions , cutting their coats to fit the cloth .
Perhaps it's time to start
Perhaps it's time to start thinking what we'll do if we withdraw and they touch us again. And to have serious people advise them what the consequences will be for them.
The worst assumption was that we could beat them at their own game, and that we had the manpower and willpower to stay with it. I certainly don't mean just Astan, but the entire 10 year conflict globally. We know who's funding this, who's filling children's hearts with hatred. Who's training.
We could have ended this in an hour. Which is how it will end, it's a question of who wheels out the Taboo cannons.
If it's us, we're going to need people with the stones to fire them. I don't want to be insulting, really. But I doubt they work in this Administration, or this web domain.
@ Eric Martin - " Bottom
@ Eric Martin - " Bottom line, the Taliban and all Afghans knew from the outset, and still know, that we were not going to stay there forever."
Nice point Eric, one of the thing I have been studying of late has been the correlation between religion and extremist violence, and that religion of any strip, not necessarily extremist Islam.
Religion can help bracket a armed struggle in cosmic terms, which allows leaders of those groups to motivate their cadres far above and beyond the 4 year election cycle of most democratic continues.
If we fail to understanding that basic fact it's not surprising that we are looking fatigued while they look tired , broken , dispersed and fractured but still resolute.
The simplest and most
The simplest and most effective "Taboo cannon" is just to effectively prohibit travel between Salafist countries and the West. So if Pakistanis want to be able to travel to the West, they need to decide whether they want to build an Indo-Bangladeshi type barrier on the Durand Line, or have one built around them. Either way, it's cool with us! Commerce can continue, with balanced exchange, no aid or credits, at checkpoints. Old-school.
And under this regime, who cares how many terrorist training camps there are in the Hindu Kush? As many as possible, preferably. The backward fsckers can terrorize each other. Who can argue but that they deserve it?
Frankly, orthodox Salafi Muslims don't want or need cultural contact with the West, any more than the West wants or needs cultural contact with them. Isolation is a no-brainer here. The fact that noticing this requires a blast of the Taboo cannon is itself truly worrying. I'd really like to think the world was run by sane grownup people, who can see obvious things and act on them in the obvious way.
But no. But after 9/11, no one asked: what does America gain by allowing random dudes from Saudi Arabia to visit New York? Let alone Afghanistan? What - a billion dollars in tourist revenue? So instead we had to go spend a trillion dollars, not to mention thousands of our finest young lives, on turning the Hindu Kush into the 51st state. And we weren't even allowed to use any weapon sharper than a butterknife - no, the feat could only be performed by dropping Bibles and chocolate. And this was reality-based public policy in action.
Alas, genius has failed. So the reality-based community will have to come up with something new. I can't wait to see what that might be, but I'm quite confident it will be even more batshit crazy. And they call me a nutcase.
@ Eric Martin & visitor
@ Eric Martin & visitor 1:58
I think you are both missing the point it's not that the US needs to commit to staying in Afghanistn forever. It's that we need to stay long enough for the Afghan people to build a security architecture that is capable of defending themselves. It doesn't have to be all that good of a security force. the Afghan government doesn't have to uncorrupt either. They just need to be good enough to compete effectively with the Taliban (After all the Taliban are not very organized or uncorrupt either). And to do that takes time and a committed partner. Something that Bush provided in Iraq by not giving a timetable and Obama took away in Afghanistan when he announced one.
As far as Bush in Afghanistan we succeeded in toppling the Taliban and ushering in a democratically elected government which was far less corrupt and brutal. Then the military abandoned COIN and did what they do best, which is kinetic-centric operations. Keep in mind the revolution that took place within the pentagon when General Petraeus and President Bush did a total end around the miltary bureaucracy to implement COIN in the first place. And also remember it wasn't until the Iraq surge started to show results that COIN stopped being a dirty word at the pentagon.
"you are entitled to you own opinions, but not to your own facts" - Tip O'Neal
BruceR's comment about
BruceR's comment about Karzai upthread deserves, well, comment.
The Afghans know Hamid Karzai at least as well as we do. He's been president of the country for some eight years. I really don't think this aspect of our Afghan problem has to do with our (American, ISAF, NATO, whatever) contribution to making him look weak in the eyes of his own people. Karzai IS weak. He's clever but is not even the decisive voice in his own family. If that's apparent from 8,000 miles away I'd be really surprised if the Afghans haven't figured it out.
I agree about the election. At any rate, I think it was a mistake to hold one last year. However, some of the mistakes I had in mind when I posted upthread about the 2001-2008 period were the policy mistakes that left us with no alternative to Hamid Karzai. For years he represented the path of least resistance; now he looks like a road to nowhere.
Bruce R Karzai would have
Bruce R
Karzai would have won the election fair and square. The problem was his major supporters, many of whom had bought their jobs as district and police chiefs, couldn't take any chances he'd lose and their investment would become worthless so they cheated. This is what made a re-do futile. Even if Karzai wanted a clean election he couldn't control his crew.
Ex, Fair enough. My
Ex,
Fair enough. My cynicism gets the best of me sometimes, though i think for a while there you were under the influence of the koolaid. Nice to have the old Exum back.
Moldbug hits the nail on the
Moldbug hits the nail on the head. If we restrict immigration from these countries, they can't touch us. Sure, there will be guys like Londonstani upset that he can no longer obtain a visa, but our country has prospered for over 200 years with little emigration from the muslim world.
Faisal Shahzad came to America to attend college .... and then he tried to blow up Times Square. What benefit did our country gain by allowing Shahzad a student-visa? KSM attended college here as well.... and then he sent 19 guys with student-visas to blow up 2 cities.
Isolationism is not a dirty word. It's way cheaper than building roads, sipping tea, and having an IED blow your legs off.
Mencius mold bug for potus.
Mencius mold bug for potus. :)
Someone called it well here,
Someone called it well here, two years ago, when they said that the Obama defense crew shouldn't get too confident over how they suddenly had all the answers, lest they wind up the new Doug Feiths.
Well, hello Doug.
"Perhaps it's time to start
"Perhaps it's time to start thinking what we'll do if we withdraw and they touch us again. And to have serious people advise them what the consequences will be for them."
Except, Elf, this country, governed by these people, will never wheel out those cannons.
They'd rather lose ugly than win uglier.
And I do mean both parties.
Course, lest it be mistaken,
Course, lest it be mistaken, like Shannon, I don't think we really have a clear vital interest in Afghanistan anyway. Anymore than the majority of other places to which we're currently providing defense welfare in blood and money.
But if both parties want to play out their respective global fantasies, like it's some big game of risk, at least they could do it half competently.
Visitor: "The British did
Visitor: "The British did this in India but then they moved in for the long haul with large numbers of civilian administrators training up the Indians in the British systems by working along side them."
They also looted the country endlessly, held back economic development, played one side against the other and only finally allowed token democracy when they absolutely had to and finally left the country only when they were totally bankrupt.
You don't build the biggest empire in the World by being 'nice'. E.g: even into the early 1940's the biggest producer of opium (for export to China) were British Govt owned companies in the 'Empire'.
You want a big empire you gotta do anything to get it and hold it: war*, bribery, pit one against another (region against region, religion against religion, elite against the people, and so on), drugs, religion, you name it you use it.
And war means war: need to round up the women and children into concentration camps and starve them (South Africa) you do it. Use poison gas (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) you do it. Use starvation as a tool (India and others) you do it. Genocide/ethnic cleansing (Scotland, Ireland, etc and as many offsping children did, such as Australia and the US) you do it. Move huge numbers of different ethnic people into another area (such as Sri Lanka) you do it.
In fact you do anything necessary to get and hold your empire and get some money out if it.
Trouble is empires died when cheap rifles and automatic weapons became available, because the disparity in force closed. Then the costs of taking and holding them became too much. And if the native population is big enough (and you don't use nukes) then you cannot take them without taking on far greater economic costs than you will ever get back (ROI its called).
The difference in force between a spear wielder and someone with a rifle is imense, let alone a machine gun. But the difference between someone with an automatic rifle versus a force with tanks and aircraft is far closer, mainly because eventually you have to put soldiers in and if they can live through the bombardements then they can inflict serious losses when the troops arrive. Plus the economic costs of all the planes and tanks are excruiating, no matter what you might be able to extract from the country if you 'win' it will take decades to to pay for what you expend.
Now Britain got a huge dividend from India for well over a century, but by (at the very latest) the 1920's it was costing Britain far more to keep it than it got back. After WW2 when Britain was totally bankrupt it dumped it as fast as it could (and the rest).
So empires are out and any attempt to get one and/or hold one will fail.
The US model, copied from one of the Brit's models (they had many), was to put in your own (always brutal, always corrupt) 'local boss', who'd 'do anything' to hold power. This worked in many places (e.g. Iran) ... for a while. But eventually they crumble (and the time to crumble is getting less and less), since the interests the 'local bosses' (ie their foreign bosses) follow always end up so inimical to local people's interests that they go under .. or change. At that point you walk away or send in your own troops .. with the above mentioned results.
So that, last ditch, model is bust as well.
Hey, lets try something really radical, leave them alone and make and sell them things they want (keep it quiet though, "I just mentioned the war and I think I got away with it"), trouble with that model (the most successful model the US ever followed at times) is that if you are engaged at home with a full blown 'class war' .. then you can't do it.
By the way, you gals and guys here should really look up class wars .. and the aftermaths .. just a hint. The new frontier for COIN will be the US in a decade or so ... or less.
Visitor: "The British did
Visitor: "The British did this in India but then they moved in for the long haul with large numbers of civilian administrators training up the Indians in the British systems by working along side them."
They also looted the country endlessly, held back economic development, played one side against the other and only finally allowed token democracy when they absolutely had to and finally left the country only when they were totally bankrupt.
You don't build the biggest empire in the World by being 'nice'. E.g: even into the early 1940's the biggest producer of opium (for export to China) were British Govt owned companies in the 'Empire'.
You want a big empire you gotta do anything to get it and hold it: war*, bribery, pit one against another (region against region, religion against religion, elite against the people, and so on), drugs, religion, you name it you use it.
And war means war: need to round up the women and children into concentration camps and starve them (South Africa) you do it. Use poison gas (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) you do it. Use starvation as a tool (India and others) you do it. Genocide/ethnic cleansing (Scotland, Ireland, etc and as many offsping children did, such as Australia and the US) you do it. Move huge numbers of different ethnic people into another area (such as Sri Lanka) you do it.
In fact you do anything necessary to get and hold your empire and get some money out if it.
Trouble is empires died when cheap rifles and automatic weapons became available, because the disparity in force closed. Then the costs of taking and holding them became too much. And if the native population is big enough (and you don't use nukes) then you cannot take them without taking on far greater economic costs than you will ever get back (ROI its called).
The difference in force between a spear wielder and someone with a rifle is imense, let alone a machine gun. But the difference between someone with an automatic rifle versus a force with tanks and aircraft is far closer, mainly because eventually you have to put soldiers in and if they can live through the bombardements then they can inflict serious losses when the troops arrive. Plus the economic costs of all the planes and tanks are excruiating, no matter what you might be able to extract from the country if you 'win' it will take decades to to pay for what you expend.
Now Britain got a huge dividend from India for well over a century, but by (at the very latest) the 1920's it was costing Britain far more to keep it than it got back. After WW2 when Britain was totally bankrupt it dumped it as fast as it could (and the rest).
So empires are out and any attempt to get one and/or hold one will fail.
The US model, copied from one of the Brit's models (they had many), was to put in your own (always brutal, always corrupt) 'local boss', who'd 'do anything' to hold power. This worked in many places (e.g. Iran) ... for a while. But eventually they crumble (and the time to crumble is getting less and less), since the interests the 'local bosses' (ie their foreign bosses) follow always end up so inimical to local people's interests that they go under .. or change. At that point you walk away or send in you own troops .. with the above mentioned results.
So that, last ditch, model is bust as well.
Hey, lets try something really radical, leave them alone and make and sell them things they want (keep it quiet though, "I just mentioned the war and I think I got away with it"), trouble with that model (the most successful model the US ever followed at times) is that if you are engaged at home with a full blown 'class war' .. then you can't do it.
By the way, you gals and guys here should really look up class wars .. and the aftermaths .. just a hint. The new frontier for COIN will be the US in a decade or so ... or less.
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