A Better War in Afghanistan
Author(s): John Nagl
Original Post: A Better War in Afghanistan
Type: CNAS Commentary
Date: 12/30/2009
During the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign, it was common for then-Senator Barack Obama to portray Afghanistan as a necessary war in comparison to the misguided “war of choice” in Iraq. But what was once considered the “good war” has not been looking so good lately. Amid increasing violence and rising American casualties in Afghanistan, Americans are expressing more doubt and confusion about U.S. objectives in that country and uncertainty about whether those goals can be achieved at a reasonable cost in lives and treasure. An increasingly heated debate over U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan has overshadowed the post–September 11 national consensus on the need to ensure stability and security in that region.
A few short months ago, President Obama announced a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, supported by additional civilian and military resources. The President made the case that the nexus of al Qaeda and the Taliban in these two countries presents a serious threat to American security and outlined a more integrated and better resourced political-military approach to the conflict. Less than 2 months later, he authorized the replacement of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander General David McKiernan with General Stanley McChrystal. With these breaks from the previous administration, the war in Afghanistan has come to be seen as “Obama’s War.” At the very least, this campaign will be a central part of this administration’s foreign policy agenda and, perhaps, its legacy.
However, there is no unanimity that the administration’s commitment to Afghanistan is either absolute or correct. Critics point out that it is not for nothing that Afghanistan is known as a “graveyard of empires”; that the current U.S. campaign is overly ambitious, excessively costly, and doomed to fail; and that U.S. interests there could be more effectively addressed with more limited means. Skepticism is undoubtedly on the rise: Newsweek ran a lurid cover proclaiming Afghanistan as “Obama’s Vietnam” a mere 3 weeks following the President’s inauguration. Public opinion has increasingly soured on the war effort: a Washington Post/ABC News poll released in August 2009 found that 51 percent of Americans “now say the war is not worth fighting,” a 10 percent increase over March 2009. There is decreasing confidence in the body politic that America has a strategy in Afghanistan worthy of the name, that the United States can achieve its goals in Afghanistan at a price in proportion to the expected gain, or that it even knows what it is we are trying to achieve there.
In this light, a more thorough explication of ends, ways, and means in Afghanistan is necessary. Achieving success requires a careful appraisal of what America is trying to accomplish and an appreciation for the resources needed to get there—people, money, and time. Understanding the war in Afghanistan, maintaining domestic and international support for it, and prosecuting it well call for three things: a clear articulation of U.S. interests, a concise definition of what the coalition seeks to achieve, and a detailed strategy to guide the effort.
The Ends
American policy in Afghanistan over the past 8 years has suffered from the most fundamental of all strategic errors: insufficient resources to accomplish maximalist goals. Building a liberal democracy there may or may not be possible, but after 30 years of war, the country simply does not possess the human capital and institutions democracy requires. Creating that human infrastructure would be a noble long-term enterprise for the international community, but in the meantime, the United States is focusing on the more pressing challenges to international security: maintaining pressure on al Qaeda on both sides of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, ensuring that transnational terrorists do not regain a sanctuary on Afghan territory from which to launch attacks on the United States and its allies, and preventing the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan from further destabilizing its neighbors, especially fragile, nuclear-armed Pakistan.
America’s neglect of its relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan in the wake of the Soviet defeat facilitated the rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda’s subsequent establishment of a safe haven there that helped enable its global operations, most notably the September 11 attacks. The efforts of the past 8 years have largely eliminated al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Afghanistan, and the country should not be allowed to lapse into the condition it was in on September 10, 2001. The problem, however, has become even more complex: collusion among al Qaeda, the Taliban, narco-traffickers, and criminal gangs presents a real and growing threat to the region.
Coalition forces invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 with the objective of toppling the Taliban government and defeating al Qaeda. The Bonn Agreement and subsequent accords expanded Afghan and coalition aims far beyond these original objectives. After 8 years of strategic drift, coalition efforts have failed to persuade many Afghans that it is wise or safe to commit themselves and risk their families’ lives to defy the Taliban. Just as ominously, the lack of demonstrable progress is weakening popular support for the mission in many North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations, and even in the United States, site of the most vicious attacks launched from Afghan soil by al Qaeda. But the fact that progress has been hampered by confused strategy and insufficient resources is an indictment of the conduct of this war, not its objectives. It does not mean that the campaign in Afghanistan is fruitless or that America’s interests in this part of the world are unimportant.
The primary objective of American efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan remains the elimination of al Qaeda–associated sanctuaries and, if possible, top leaders who support transnational terrorist operations. Many in this shadowy alliance, which was originally based in Afghanistan but squeezed by allied military operations, have shifted to Pakistan’s cities and frontier areas beyond easy reach of the coalition. American efforts now focus on Pakistan as a launching pad for militants fighting in Afghanistan. But the problem runs both ways: a failed Afghanistan would become a base from which Taliban and al Qaeda militants could work to further destabilize the surrounding region. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have served as an inspiration for and sometime-ally of violent extremist groups targeting the resource-rich states of Central Asia. More dangerously, they also have ties to the insurgents seeking to overthrow Pakistan, and the ultimate prize in that contest would not be another ridge or valley, but possibly access to the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. An unraveling of Pakistan in the face of the Taliban insurgency, whether gradual or unexpectedly rapid, could spark a cascading regional meltdown and lead to nuclear arms falling into the hands of a terrorist group that would use them against the United States or its allies. This is, to be sure, widely considered a low-probability event, but the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is hardly clear, and U.S. visibility into events there is fairly low.
Because these threats of terrorist sanctuary and regional instability emanate from territory shared by Pakistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan must be encouraged to confront terrorism within its borders and curtail its military’s clandestine support for extremist factions. Stepping back America’s commitment to the theater would be a particularly odd choice at the present time, given the recent improvement in Pakistani efforts to conduct counterinsurgency against its own radical elements and in American-Pakistani intelligence-sharing. The course of 2009 saw dramatic changes in the Pakistani willingness to wage war against insurgents who increasingly threatened the survival of the government. In that sense, the alarming advances of Taliban-aligned forces in Pakistan during the early months of 2009 proved something of a blessing in disguise: the militants’ attacks into heartland provinces such as Swat and Buner galvanized a previously indifferent Pakistani public and military to stand up to the militants and drive them back. The United States should seek to encourage this momentum while working to overcome decades of Pakistani mistrust of an America that has not been perceived as a reliable or supportive partner.
Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, the United States curtailed virtually all of its assistance to Pakistan and was perceived by a generation of Pakistani leaders as having abandoned the region. In sharp contrast to the close security relationship that prevailed for the preceding decade, Washington quickly moved to distance itself from engagement and support of Pakistan, culminating in decisions to impose sanctions and ban military-to-military exchanges with Pakistan over its nuclear weapons programs and tests. Pakistani leaders, military officers, and policy elites have not forgotten these events, and our actions ensured that U.S. policymakers lost one of our most significant sources of understanding and levers of influence over events in the region for a generation. The improving but still fragile relationship of cooperation on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency would be damaged by an American pullback now: the Pakistani leadership would be further convinced that the United States cannot be relied upon for support and would be encouraged to maintain its ties to Islamist militant groups as a strategic hedge—both dangerous developments from a U.S. national security standpoint.
Preventing the Taliban’s return of control to Afghanistan, maintaining stability in Pakistan, and keeping up the pressure against al Qaeda are objectives worthy of American effort. U.S. policymakers must, of course, weigh all strategic actions against America’s global interests and possible opportunity costs. But in Afghanistan and Pakistan, low-cost strategies do not have an encouraging track record since the initial success of Operation Enduring Freedom. After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, the United States sought to limit its own involvement by working by, with, and through militia or tribal commanders to provide security and mop up the remaining al Qaeda presence. But in many cases, this approach empowered these commanders to act abusively and unaccountably, which alienated an Afghan population that had been promised a new “Marshall Plan” by the United States and thereby facilitated the Taliban’s reemergence as an insurgency against the new government and international presence. Drone attacks, which have been highly touted for their ability to eliminate Taliban and al Qaeda leaders, have certainly killed numerous terrorists and insurgents. But they have not prevented militant forces from making threatening advances in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they rely heavily on human intelligence and support facilities that may not be available without the current ground presence. This is not to say that drone strikes or alliances of convenience with tribal and militia commanders should not have a role in the U.S. campaign, but neither forms an independent basis for our strategy going forward. The “light footprint” option has failed to secure U.S. objectives. As the Obama administration and the U.S. military leadership have recognized, it is well past time for a different approach.
Toward a “Better War”
Preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a sanctuary for terrorists with global reach and keeping it from acting as the catalyst for a broader regional security meltdown are the key objectives of the campaign. Securing these objectives requires helping the Afghans build a sustainable system of governance that can adequately ensure security for the Afghan people—the keystone upon which a successful exit strategy depends. The United States, the Afghan people, and their coalition partners must agree on an achievable endstate, determine the intermediate objectives required to meet it, and allocate the resources necessary to achieve those objectives. This endstate should be something more realistic than a prosperous and modern representative democracy: it should be a sustainable system of governance that can effectively combat the insurgency, and in doing so prevent a reemergence of transnational terrorist safe havens.
To achieve this objective, the coalition and its Afghan partners must seek to build a state that reconciles some degree of centralized governance with the traditional tribal and religious power structures that hold sway outside Kabul. An internal balance between centralized and traditional power bases—not central government control everywhere—is a practical basis for assuring the country’s stability, much as it was in the years prior to the Soviet invasion. Achieving these minimal goals will be hard enough; it will require not only more military forces, but also a much greater commitment to good governance and to providing for the needs of the Afghan people where they live. The coalition will need to use its considerable leverage to counter Afghan government corruption at every level.
While an expanded international commitment of security and development forces can assist in the achievement of these goals in the short term, ultimately Afghans must ensure stability and security in their own country. Building a rudimentary state, even a flawed one, that is able to provide a modicum of security and governance to its people is the American exit strategy from Afghanistan. The successful implementation of a better resourced effort to build Iraqi security forces, after years of floundering, is now enabling the drawdown of American troops from that country as Iraqi forces increasingly take responsibility for their own security. A similar situation will be the definition of success in Afghanistan some years from now.
The classic “clear, hold, and build” counterinsurgency model was relearned over several painful years in Iraq, but at present there are insufficient Afghan soldiers and police to implement that approach by holding areas that have been cleared of insurgents. As a result, American troops have had to clear the same areas repeatedly, paying a price for each operation in both American lives and the support of the Afghan public, which suffers from Taliban reprisals whenever we “clear and leave.”
These lessons are well understood, but the question remains whether U.S., NATO, and Afghan forces can execute them. The paucity of Afghan security forces relative to U.S. Marines involved in the summer 2009 offensive in Helmand Province was troubling and indicative of a security force assistance effort that has not been taken seriously enough for much of the past 8 years. After an area is cleared of insurgents, it must be held by Afghan troops supported by American advisors and combat multipliers, including artillery and air support. These operations are intended to create the conditions that facilitate Afghan central government reconciliation with traditional local power structures to establish better secured communities that “freeze out” future Taliban infiltration. Since the additional troops we deployed in 2009 will not be enough to secure the whole country, ISAF and Afghan commanders will have to select the most important population centers, such as Kandahar, to secure first. These “oil spots” of security will then spread over time as more Afghan forces come on line and gain more competence.
Of course, all of this is substantially harder than it sounds and requires changes from how the United States prosecuted this campaign in years past. First and foremost, U.S. and allied forces must ensure that their uses of force are not counterproductive to the operational necessity of population security and gaining local support against the insurgency. As in the early years of the Iraq War, U.S. troops have sometimes tended toward heavy-handed tactics that have served to alienate the Afghan population. One assessment from early 2007 argued that:
the United States is losing the war in Afghanistan
one Pashtun village at a time, bursting
into schoolyards filled with children with guns
bristling, kicking in village doors, searching
women, speeding down city streets, and
putting out cross-cultural gibberish in totally
ineffectual [information operations] and
[psychological operations] campaigns—all of
which are anathema to the Afghans.
More recently, U.S. forces have attracted substantial criticism for excessive and insufficiently discriminating use of airstrikes, which have caused significant loss of civilian life. While the new American command in Afghanistan has taken steps to rein in counterproductive uses of force, these incidents have left a legacy of Afghan mistrust that will be difficult to overcome.
Second, while much of the focus is now on the direct counterinsurgency role of U.S. forces, more attention and resources must be devoted to developing Afghan security forces. More U.S. Soldiers are required now to implement a clear, hold, and build counterinsurgency strategy, but over time responsibility must transition to the Afghans. If the first requirement for success in a counterinsurgency campaign is the ability to secure the population, the counterinsurgent requires boots on the ground—and plenty of them.
The long-term answer is a significantly expanded, and more effective, Afghan security apparatus. The preexisting numerical targets for the development of Afghan security forces are not based on the actual security requirements for the country. The current end strength targets for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police are 134,000 and 82,000 men, respectively—not nearly enough to provide adequate security in a war torn country of over 30 million people with very rough terrain. The Obama administration’s interagency policy review team recommended a substantial expansion of the effort to build these forces up to those prescribed end strengths, but that will not be sufficient. Some argue that the international community should not develop an Afghan security force larger than what that country’s economy can support. Under peacetime conditions, that concern would be important, but basing our security force assistance efforts on the Afghan economy rather than a realistic estimate of the numbers needed to impose a reasonable level of security is not the appropriate course of action now. The United States should initiate a greater international effort to expand the Afghan national security forces. If that means the U.S. Government and international community have to help pay for them, that is what should be done—it will still be far cheaper than maintaining substantial numbers of American and international forces in Afghanistan for an even longer period to do the jobs that Afghans should do.
Unfortunately, the advisory mission has long been treated as a low priority in practice if not in rhetoric, with advisory teams being assembled in an ad hoc fashion and provided with insufficient training and resources before deploying. The Obama administration has bolstered the effort with the deployment of 4,000 additional troops to serve as advisors. But it remains unclear whether the U.S. military— and our government as a whole—have truly cracked the code on effectively developing host nation security forces. It is as important to address the qualitative problems with the current security force assistance program as it is to solve the quantitative ones. Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan must be reviewed to ensure that it has the best organization and sufficient capacity to do its job. The advisory effort must have access to the most talented and experienced personnel available— not just those left over after the regular units have picked first. It must be structured in a way that incorporates best practices for security force assistance and is most suited to the specific demands of the Afghan operating environment—not simply assembled in the fashion that is most convenient for America’s existing unit structure. It must focus on developing an Afghan security force that can fulfill the mission of countering the insurgency and providing a sufficient, if imperfect, level of internal security—not on mirror-imaging the force structure of a more advanced Western army dedicated to external defense. And ultimately the entire effort must be judged on the quality of its outputs—professional, competent, reliable Afghan forces—rather than simply how many armed men in uniform come out of its training centers, an approach that clearly produced poor results in the first 4 years of the Iraq War. The United States and ISAF also need to get smarter about the way they engage Afghan communities. Insurgencies can be won or lost at the local level because securing the support of the population requires understanding the specific issues that cause it to sympathize with one side or the other. Additionally, insurgencies are rarely monolithic; they comprise numerous local factions and individuals fighting for personal gain, revenge against real or perceived slights, tribal loyalties, or other reasons that may have little to do with the insurgency’s professed cause. The Afghan insurgency is no different in this regard. The Taliban is an amalgam of local fighters and mercenary and criminal elements around a hard core of committed jihadists. According to Antonio Giustozzi’s detailed study, 40 to 50 percent of the insurgency is made up of “local allies” fighting for tribal causes or opportunism.
Based on such analyses, U.S. commanders are interested in trying to “flip” less ideological factions and promoting the development of local self-defense militias to encourage the tribes to defend against Taliban infiltration. Exploiting divisions within an insurgency paid dividends in Iraq, where the emergence of the Anbar Awakening and Sons of Iraq played a major role in crippling al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and dramatically reducing violence. Again, this is a simple concept that is much harder in practice. Thus far, the insurgency has proven less susceptible to cooptation than its fragmented nature might suggest, partly because U.S. overtures have been limited and partly because the Taliban still holds some legitimacy in certain areas. Even in the case of Iraq, the more secular insurgents did not turn against the extremists until they were sufficiently alienated by AQI’s brutal tactics and disregard for local customs. The Taliban’s leadership may not make the same mistakes.
This experience suggests that emphasizing tribal engagement or flipping less committed insurgents is not a panacea that will enable the United States to achieve a modicum of security on the cheap. Local communities are unlikely to turn in favor of ISAF and the Afghan government until these entities demonstrate that they are fully willing and able to drive out the Taliban and provide some level of lasting security and competent (less corrupt) governance. They will not resist the Taliban or help the security forces as long as the insurgency appears to hold the upper hand and the government remains weak at best and abusive at worst.
Seizing the initiative from the Taliban and reestablishing the political order’s legitimacy require securing the population and developing a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of local communities, particularly the conflicts within them that insurgents can exploit to their own ends. Simply targeting militant leaders and foot soldiers and then leaving will not solve the problem because local populations know the insurgents will just go underground to avoid U.S. strikes and then reemerge to take vengeance on those who collaborate with the government once the security forces move on. Security forces that just pass through on sweeps and patrols will not gain the local knowledge necessary to understand the particular drivers of the insurgency within the community or the ability to identify when that community is being infiltrated by outside militants. Meanwhile, attempts to reassert central government authority without a clear grasp of local power structures and relationships will only engender more popular resentment against Kabul that plays directly into the hands of the Taliban.
In short, until the Afghan government, the United States, and ISAF get their approach to local communities right, those communities will not decisively turn against the insurgency. That means, of course, that while developing anti-Taliban tribal militias and coopting nonextremist elements of the insurgency will be aspects of the new Afghanistan strategy, they cannot be its primary components.
Cultivating an Afghan state that is legitimate in the eyes of its citizens and works with rather than against local communities is therefore a necessary element of the American approach. A renewed U.S. commitment to funding grassroots development and governance must accompany the influx of troops. The Afghan government’s National Solidarity Program (NSP) and programs like it deserve much more American support. The NSP has become one of the government’s most successful rural development projects. Under the program, the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development disburses modest grants to village level elected organizations called Community Development Councils (CDCs), which in turn identify local priorities and implement small-scale development projects. A limited number of domestic and international nongovernmental organizations then assist the CDCs. Once a CDC agrees on a venture, $200 per family (with a ceiling of $60,000 per village) is distributed for project execution. Afghans contribute 10 percent of project costs through cash, labor, or other means.
Under this model, the NSP has built schools for thousands of children, constructed village water pumps that have saved many hours of labor, and assembled irrigation networks that have enabled far higher agricultural yields. More than 12,000 village development councils have been elected, more than 19,000 project plans have been approved, and nearly half of these projects have been completed. The NSP is the only government program functioning in all 34 provinces, and it has affected nearly two-thirds of Afghanistan’s rural population. Moreover, women— whose inclusion is a mandatory component of the program—constitute 35 percent of the elected CDC representatives.
The NSP provides one example of how to establish positive links between the Afghan people and the government in Kabul, and there are undoubtedly other models that might offer success stories of their own. The point is that the insurgency and the international security threat it represents will not be defeated simply with armed force, drone strikes, and alliances of convenience with certain insurgent factions, although all of those things will play a part. It will ultimately be defeated when the Afghan people see tangible evidence that a non-Taliban political order can offer them a modicum of security and governance.
Learning from Mistakes
The United States played a role in creating the Taliban and al Qaeda: they grew and thrived amid the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal and subsequent international neglect. Saint Augustine taught that “the purpose of war is to build a better peace,” but America built nothing in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, and the Taliban filled the vacuum that U.S. inaction allowed. Afghanistan became the viper’s nest in which al Qaeda grew, and the United States paid a price for its strategic neglect of the region.
After the success of a lightning campaign that overthrew the Taliban and chased al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, American policy toward the country returned to benign neglect. Too few soldiers to secure the population, too little development assistance poorly coordinated, and too little attention to the Pakistan side of the Durand Line allowed the Taliban to regroup, gain strength, and return to threaten the young Afghan government that we created but did not adequately support, particularly in the development of an Afghan army large enough to secure itself from its (and our) enemies. Over time, the realization grew that the Taliban had stolen a march on us.
The objectives of American policy in Afghanistan are clear, although they have not been as well articulated as they should have. Over the next 5 years, we want to create an Afghanistan from which al Qaeda has been displaced and from which it continues to suffer disruptive attacks. Its government should be able, with minimal external help, to secure itself from internal threats such as the Taliban or the return of al Qaeda. It should have the support of its people, earned through the provision of a reasonable level of government services (particularly security) and reduced corruption, and be determined to never again provide a safe haven for terror.
The question now is not how to achieve our goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan; we know the answer to that question. It is whether America has the stomach to do what is necessary to achieve its objectives, or whether we are again determined to abandon an “unimportant” region in the hope that this time, it won’t blow up in our face.
Related:Topic(s): Regional Security Challenges, Terrorism & Irregular Warfare, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Military Forces & Operations, U.S. National Security Strategy
Project(s): Afghanistan
People: Dr. John A. Nagl
