When it comes to Afghanistan, the British have a special perspective: Every mistake the United States has made recently, they made 150 years ago. So it's worth listening to British experts in the debate over Afghan strategy. Afghanistan drove the British bonkers for much of the 19th century. They couldn't control the place, but they couldn't walk away from it, either. They found that there wasn't a military solution, but there wasn't a non-military solution. It was a question of managing chaos. Sound familiar?
The best answer the British came up with was working with tribal leaders in the border regions - paying them subsidies, wooing them away from the baddies who genuinely threatened British interests, but otherwise letting them run their own affairs. That was a cynical approach and it left Afghanistan a poor, backward country. But it worked adequately, especially compared with the alternative, which was unending bloodshed in a faraway country that refused to be colonized. A modern version of this "work with the tribes" approach is still the best answer. And it seems to be an important part of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategy that was leaked this week. It's dressed up in the language of counterinsurgency - he speaks of "population-centric" operations, and he uses the word "community" 44 times, by my count. But his assessment is basically a discussion of how to stabilize the country without just shooting people...
More at The Washington Post.
Comments
I think trying to find a parrallel between Britain's strategic situation in the 19th century and the US situation in the 21st century is a pointless exercise--other than the fact that Britain did face the challenge of dealing with a "full spectrum operation" requirement. They had to have an army to police their empire and an army to assist in maintaining a balance of power in Europe.
I like the part where he says:
The second caution from British experts is that the Afghan tribal structure is broken. The authority of the tribal elders as "a river to their people," as one old Afghan hand puts it, has been shattered by decades of war. Power has flowed to drug dealers, gunrunners and Taliban fighters.
Of course, "a river to their people" is a quote from the Lawrence of Arabia movie. It is still true but that movie has done more damage to our understanding of tribes than any other single thing.
The idea of bribing the tribes has long been seen as a viable policy but it doesn't work very well in practice. When T.E.Lawrence used it in the uprising it worked quite well and the idea of paying the Sunni Arabs as part of the Anbar Awakening principally through contracts and salaries as police worked as well but the challenge of doing this in Afghanistan and Pakistan requires we reexamine these two examples. In general, bribing or paying subsidies only works for short-term goals where the objective is clear and the outcome decisive. Even though Lawrence made bribing popular he was roundly criticized for it by his contemporaries (Alec Kirkbride being one of the most prominent) and others who had deeper experience with tribes such as John Bagot Glubb (36 years in Iraq and Jordan). While it is true that a salary will take insurgent recruits off the street such as occurred in Al Anbar, the reason the Awakening worked is that it engaged the moral qualities of the tribes such as honor, pride, and shame at not protecting their communities (this was also helped by Iraq adjusting its policies to the Sunnis among other factors). There was pride for an illiterate 18-year old resident of Fallujah putting on a uniform and protecting his community while he pulled a decent salary. The tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan know we are bribing them for our interests and not theirs and they will play us so easily we don't even know what's happening. We have to see things from the tribe's perspective and a minimalist approach can work but it needs to be resourced right and not be manned by short-timers. John Bagot Glubb's approach at building the Southern Desert Camel Corps in Jordan is a useful case study of how this might be done. Likewise, Robert Sandeman's work with the Baluch tribes is useful as is the implementation of the Forward Policy up to the Durand Line. When the British pursued a policy of "Benign Neglect" on the tribal region between the Administered Line and the Durand Line, the tribes continued to raid into the Indus Valley. The British would then lead punitive expeditions into the present day FATA and punish the tribes causing more bloodfueds than it was worth. This "Butcher and Bolt" strategy was eventually supplanted by Sandeman's Forward Policy which engaged the tribes in policing themselves (just like Glubb in Iraq and Jordan) and trying to understand things from their perspective. For example, the Mahsud tribe in Waziristan lives in the most inhospitable part of the FATA with little water and even less arable land. Raiding Gilzai nomads and the settled areas made good sense from their perspective. However, with the creation of the Frontier Scouts and other units much of this raiding significantly diminished, in part, because the British officers who implemented it approached the tribe from what their problems were. While this was done in the service of British policy it was a wise and more humane way of dealing with raiding. In a nutshell, bribing debases you as much as it debases the tribe and provides an altogether elusive and fundamentally flawed vision of success.
From an Information Operations perspective, it seems Information Engagement will continue to be a key task coalition forces will conduct in order to stabilize the country. The author discusses GEN McChrystal's strategy and the idea of increasing "population-centric" operations. Information Engagement will be key to this. We are already conducting IE at various levels right now, and a part of this new strategy will probably focus on engaging more of the local population, especially the trbal leaders that we are trying to influence to work with us and not with the Taliban. The author provided several examples and perspectives on how Information Engagement has been conducted in the past, what has worked, what hasn't worked, and most importantly, what could work in the future. It is important to understand that Information Engagement will be critical to our operations in Afghanistan. Stabilizing Afghanistan requires our concentrated efforts to engage all levels within the country.
As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. 'Managing the chaos' fits both the British as well as our experience in Afghanistan in an unfortunate, and near perfect way. The British wandered into a self-created problem and through three successive wars determined that their military strategy against the Afghans wasn't the answer to their larger geopolitical, regional problems. We have wandered into the same trap and made the same mistake.
Field Marshall Frederick Roberts, hero of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, eventually said: "The less they see of us, the less they'll dislike us." This is the best advice to come out of Britain regarding Afhanistan. In the end, both he and the British parliament realized after three consecutive wars for the same strategic purpose, Afghanistan wasn't as strategically important as they had supposed all along. The British would eventually conclude that if the Russians wanted to attack British India through Afghanistan, the British should let them. Invading Afghanistan was easy; the follow-on governing was impossible. The impossible effort of maintaining influence over the Afghans was inordinate compared to the cost of defending India at the gates of India, not the Hindu Kush. Somewhere during the past 150 years, the British "Forward Policy" which created this false assumption ('fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here') spawned the equally false assumption that would be safer fighting a non-existential Taliban threat at the Hindu Kush than fighting them 'here.' The British eventually saw the error of that policy, we just haven't spent enough blood and treasure to yet but I submit we will.
Finally, the British did not take "a cynical approach.." leaving "Afghanistan a poor, backward country." They took a pragmatic approach after finally coming to the ralization of what vital national intersts were. The Afghans left Afghanistan a poor, backwards country. They did that and they continue to be responsible for that today. They choose to live under the laws and customs which make that society a tribal peg trying to fit (or not trying to fit in actuality) into a Westphalian world. To a large extent, they choose to be the xenophobes that would wish to stand aside of globalization. I know that generalization doesn't account for all Afghans but we cannot take the full guilt in this and say all of Afghanistan's problems were created by us. Their history and culture play a large part of the result we see today. The British Aside from the Durand line, the British didn't cause Afhanistan's political/societal problems and neither did we.
More importantly though, I think, is that the British during this period of their history generally speaking did strategy right. That is to say (as their history in Afghanistan, India, and in Africa in the latter half of the 19th Century) that the British did not take the approach of maximalist military commitment to the maintenance of their empire (as it seems the United States Army is doing in Afghanistan with General McChrystals recent assessment). The British understood that using military power throughout the empire had costs that had to be paid. They also were generally quite adept (except arguably in the way they handled the second Boer War) in the realm of strategy in sensing when the use of military force became too expensive in blood and treasure and had no problems adjusting strategy and supporting military operations to meet policy goals.
Two excellent books on British strategy and military operations during the second half of the 19th Century that if read in a combined way really sheds usefull insights on problems of strategy and military operations today are Thomas Pakenhams contemporary "The Scramble for Africa" and CE Callwells older but still relevant minor military classic "Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice."