Hope and a Strategy Shift in Afghanistan

I am somewhat taken aback by the vehemence contained within the various pro or anti COIN arguments. It has to be said that the anti party definitely have the biggest chip on their shoulder but as they are taking the anti official line they probably cop a tough time.

People cite the lack of strategy as the great yoke which is threatening the whole Afghanistan TO. I assumed COIN was a strategy so is it the wrong strategy? Obviously as the nature of warfare (another mere word which can create denouncement) is always chaotic, it is a given that the COIN doctrine will have many flaws, so I assume the anti-COIN have a better alternative. I have not been able to lay eyes on it on this site and SWJ strikes me as being one of the best informed.

Several people have stated that one of the major flaws is "..the US can't do COIN." I mean this is repeated ad verbatim in several posts and implied in many others. This sentiment of shortcomings in one form or another has been expressed by foreigners at , Bataan, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, Mekong Delta, Mogadishu etc. etc. It is odd to hear it expressed by Americans; some of whom in uniform. So it stands to reason that the possibility exists that there could be considerable truth in this and hence the heated exchanges between opposing parties.

If COIN was applied by Afgans would it still be COIN? If you are countering an insurgency (another bouncing mine of a word on this site) in a different way using Afghan troops surely it would still be COIN and there would be enough direction in the FM to encompass/enhance the Afghan version. The target of nearly 350,000 trained Afghan Army, police and militia is fast approaching. Seems to me to be exactly the way the COIN strategy is supposed to be heading and it has been led and funded by Americans.

Another curious sentiment which occurs quite often is people equate modernization and westernisation as the same or similar things. I find that a difficult line of argument to follow. Nearly everyone in Asia craves modernization whether it be governance, public utilities, public services,civil liberties, etc. as long as it has an Eastern character. The suggestion that you cannot be wholly Eastern in appearance, mind, body and soul and completely modern as well is profoundly narrow-minded.

Another misconception is that there existed in Afghanistan a traditional form of governance, jurisprudence, way of fighting, system of trade etc which the application of COIN clashes with and thereby stokes the fires of the insurgency. When was this the case and how appealing was it to the populace? Obviously it is unfair to examine the last 30 years as the country was the victim of a proxy war and a massive depopulation. So prior to that what was there? Society in the rural areas was based on a feudal system where the landowners in the individual villages oversaw a serfdom and bonded labour society - and that was the men. God help you if you were born a female.

The poverty even in the plush river valleys was the worst in the world.

The adherence to traditional customs and values didn't last very long when in the 1960s & 70s the Sicilian Mafia moved into the AfPak region and trained landowners and their minions in the cultivation and processing of opium and turned it into the world's largest source of heroine. It was always an amazing experience to hear lingua sicilianu spoken by Pakistanis in the Peshawar bazaar.

I could go into the influx and acceptance of an even more alien and destructive culture - Wahhabism - but you've probably heard of that.

Regards
RC

So much focus has been put on the tool of COIN or not-COIN that there is too little consideration of the context in which that tool is to be used. The recent press hubbub about the amount of funding that will be required to prop up Afghanistan until 2025 highlights the larger problem. COIN cannot create a self-sustaining, self-defending entity. I don't think Afghanistan is a valid case study for arguing for or against COIN. Failure in Afghanistan wouldn't be caused by COIN or lack thereof or how we implemented it. The onus would have to be borne at operational and strategic levels, although tactical discussions could play as contributing factors.

Thus, could one simply -- but clearly -- say, that a counterinsurgency effort that WAS NOT fately incumbered (given the time and other resources one has available) with totally unrealistic and counterintuitive/counterproductive goals and tasks, such as: fundamentally changing the state and society's way of fighting, its way of life, its way of governance, its economic system, etc.; such a significantly less incumbered counterinsurgency effort would have a much better chance of success?

(These other goals and tasks [fundamentally changing the state and society's way of fighting, its economic system, etc.] -- if still considered necessary and prudent -- to be addressed at some point AFTER the insurgency has been defeated.)

If one wishes to review how we came/may have come to step off into the deep kimchi -- and why -- then this January 16, 2003, PBS interview of John Lewis Gaddis, historian of the grand strategy of the Cold War, makes interesting reading:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/interviews/gaddis.ht…

Herein, he discusses the grand strategic concept that has/may have got us where we are today.

May wish to specifically note what was believed -- at that very early date -- to be the "lessons of Afghanistan" (at the paragraph -- about 1/3 the way down -- which begins with the heading "But it disagrees to some extent with the old liberal position ... ").

I agreed with most Linda Robinson’s points individually, but collectively they didn’t add up. She states we only pursued a COIN centric strategy for the past three years; implying that we need more time (7-10 years) to successfully complete it. That may be true if historic models repeat themselves, but she went on to describe the military objectives for winning the conflict were for the Afghan security forces to secure three rather large geographical areas. If they can't secure these areas then they can't be successful (using the logic in the article).

This is conventional thinking incorrectly applied to an unconventional war. Assuming it is feasible to build enough ASF capacity, and then sustain it to accomplish this is the first error in this logic, second and more importantly achieving this will not result in a victory. The character of the war is predominantly political and psychological, yet we're focused on enabling the ASF to hold terrain? Most understand that holding terrain in this type of war is not decisive, and that the guerrillas will shift their efforts to areas we aren't securing, and when we chase them there, they'll return to the previously secured areas. If we're looking for a military solution, then we have to defeat the insurgents, and you don't do that by securing three geographical areas, which by the way won't do much to defeat the Taliban's shadow government and ability to threaten the population behind the scenes unless Afghans are capable of executing a Phoenix like program to excise this cancer.

However, she later adds (quoting an Afghan official) that the Taliban can't be defeated unless the safe haven issue in Pakistan is resolved, and since there is no resolution in sight, the Taliban can't be defeated. If you put these points together, it appears the argument is that we continue to spend billions of dollars to further build ASF capacity to secure three geographical areas, yet even if we achieve that objective it doesn’t matter because the Pakistan issue can’t be solved. Ms. Robinson was quoting others, so this isn’t an attack on her article, but simply pointing out that the points made collectively don’t add up.

She made one point that I suspect was missed by many of the COINdistas who embrace the measures of effectiveness logic, and that is numbers matter less than perception. She points out that ISAF can point to MOE that insurgent attacks have been reduced, and claim we’re winning, but the steady number of high profile attacks recently has an outsized impact on the population by eroding its confidence in the government. Measure that one objectively if you can, but better yet, instead of wasting your time doing that, focus on developing a strategy to defeat the insurgents.

Dave Maxwell’s points below are excellent. Why does John Nagl and others assume the ASF must be literate? That they must be able to call in close air support? Why are the Taliban effective without air power, artillery, and literate soldiers? I suspect one of the reasons we're not as successful as we should be (in comparision with the Taliban training camps) is we're trying to make the Afghans into a force that they're not, because we think capable means being like us. Our Army has evolved since 9/11 into a force that patrols on foot or in vehicle until they bump into the enemy, and then they call for supporting fires. That is hardly an effective means to defeat an insurgency. You may kill a few guerrillas every now and then, but the guerrillas are not the essence of the insurgency. ASF may be better off without these enablers in their future, and in many ways may be better off without our advise. I suspect they know how to defeat the insurgency and if we continue to fund them will be capable of doing so if we quit imposing our ideas on them. The question is do they have the will? If they don't, then it our strategy of relying on ASF is not feasible to begin with.

In the future should Pakistan provide sufficient support to the Taliban after we downsize (not leave) that the Taliban start massing troops and conducting a conventional war of movement, then I agree we should make and honor our commitment to provide conventional fire support in support of Afghanistan (something we failed to do when North Vietnam invaded S. Vietnam). Our Air Force would make quick work of these conventional formations, just as they did in 2001/2002. That would alleviate us from the self-imposed requirement to develop foreign Armies in our image in developing nations. A task we can’t afford, and the developing nation sure as heck can’t afford to sustain them. I don’t think all is lost in Afghanistan, especially if we would just think instead of blindly embracing western COIN theories. There are probably better strategies that we can pursue.

Alas as I was penning my missive to these two articles brother Dave Maxwell beat me to the punch so I had to read his excellent response before I posted mine. And as I read Dave's response it further reinforced to me how problematic these two articles are by Robinson and Nagl. Dave seriously gets at the mechanics of how the US will leave with a realistic view to the future, all the while framed by a reasonable US inspired strategic sensibility. Like most of his posts and responses on SWJ I am in agreement with brother Dave.

So my post that follows come at these two articles from a critical angle of the paradigm of pop centric coin and how that paradigm has been shaped over the last number of years by people like Nagl and Robinson and how folks in the defense community continue to try to keep the idea that coin has worked alive, when they should accept as a matter of American strategy that it is dead.

Linda Robinson in her article said this about sustaining a lowered but continuous US commitment to Afghanistan so that the US and Afghan governments might:

“might start winning the battle of perceptions”

then Robinson followed up that statement with one about US military efforts in Afghanistan over the last ten years (based on notions of what has happened in Iraq).

“As I wrote in my last book on the Iraq war, Americans need to be prepared for wars to last a decade. The Afghan war, which the United States attempted to fight largely through a counterterrorism approach for the first seven years, has only begun in earnest in the last three. There is a third choice between the current large-scale U.S. counterinsurgency campaign and reverting to a counter-terrorism approach, and that is an Afghan-led counterinsurgency effort that that the United States can support in a sustainable way.”

With Robinson, combined with the shorter article by John Nagl, we have two of the leading advocates of population centric counterinsurgency in the US defense circles for the last 5 years.

Yet dear Linda and John, here is the blunt fact that the two of you must confront: Pop centric counterinsurgency has failed, utterly, in Afghanistan. People on the ground seem to know that, yet their voices are not heard because the command message paints a much more favorable and hopeful assessment.

In his essay Nagl offers a much more pessimestic view than Robinson, although his is still blinded by the wrongful notion that coin can work in Afghanistan, if it is just given the amount of time that its tactical principles demand. Alas John Nagl seems to have learned nothing over the past 10 years of war: that time is an essential element of strategy and ultimately part of the calculation of political will. Yet in the article he seems frustrated that commanders are not being given the amount of time they need to “win” at counterinsurgency. The subtext to Nagl’s article is that hey the American military has the right operational approach in Afghanistan yet the politicians wont give them the time to carry it out so the best option is to now focus on Afghan security forces, but if that fails after the US departs, don’t blame the military because the politicians pulled the rug out from under us.

Robinson comes at it from a more optimistic view. However the subtext to her article is really a frantic desire to save the reputation of an operational method called population centric coin that she has helped to promote with the idea that it worked in Iraq, and could have worked in Afghanistan if those pesky politicians in DC had only given the military its way. Now she proposes some triage to the idea that coin works—let the Afghans do pop centric coin with modest US support.

Here is the bottom line that these two leading advocates of pop centric coin still don’t get: pop centric coin carried out by the US military as a choice of strategy has failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Coin is dead; that is to say that the idea of coin as an effective operational method employed by strategy to achieve policy aims is dead and buried. Alas Robinson, Nagl, (and others like David Ucko) want to revive it, even if that means putting it on life support and in the end at still much too large of an expense to US blood and treasure.

If they considered more carefully this blunt truth their analysis might be more useful as the US looks to the strategic future by breaking away from our flawed and recent strategic past.

While I fully agree that the future (and the recent past) has to be an Afghan fight for the security of their country, there are a couple of areas that I think need to be considered as illustrated by the two excerpts below.

Quote: "To continue to assist Afghan forces beyond 2014, the United States will need to leave behind a force of some 10,000 special operations forces and enablers, such as helicopter and close air support units. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is likely to demand a similar number of U.S. advisers to assist the fledgling Afghan army and police, according to officials in the region. Without such a residual force, the United States will have trouble confronting the continued threats of al Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and the Taliban, all of which would seriously jeopardize the staying power of an elected government in Kabul."

With all due respect to John and his counterinsurgency expertise if we are to be really serious about putting the Afghan National Army in front now then we have to change the mindset that it will be the United States that will have trouble confronting the continued threats. It is the Afghan National Army (and police and other security forces) that have to confront the continued threats of al Qaeda, the Haqqani network and the Taliban. I think this is one of our fundamental problems - we talk about the host nation (HN) military "being in front" but that often translates into a fig leaf for US operations – putting a HN "face" on operations and not really allowing them to operate in the lead and even more importantly independently. I know that John does not mean for that to be the case but the fact is that mindset exists among us. And this paragraph below tells me that our concept for the Afghan security forces seems to be to train them in our image and not in accordance with the customs, traditions, and a realistic understanding of their natural abilities.

Quote: "Although Afghan forces have come a long way in the past two years under the mentorship of U.S. Lieutenant General William Caldwell, they are not yet up to the task of protecting their country entirely on their own. The Afghan national army and police lack many of the skills required to succeed in modern warfare, chiefly, planning and executing air and artillery support and logistics. They are hampered by low literacy rates and years of neglect from the United States, which only began to dedicate itself to increasing the size and capabilities of Afghan forces two years ago, when Caldwell assumed responsibility for their development."

Perhaps that low literacy rate stems from the past 5000 years of culture and tradition and the past 30+ of war in that country. Is it really a result of "US neglect?" Is the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda an example of "modern warfare"? Do the Afghans need to be able to fight "modern warfare" to be able to secure their country or do they need to fight "modern warfare" because that is the way the US fights and thus to be able to employ and exploit US enablers they have to be able to fight this way? Of course if the strategy is to create Afghan security forces in our image then, yes, I suppose that the literacy rate is our responsibility. But I think this indicates a fundamental problem we have with forces conducting Security Force Assistance (that is generally thought by most conducting it to be solely focused on training) – we train forces the way we know how to – which, again, is in our own image. I would argue that may not be the best way to do it.

Of course I believe in the use of combat advisors but again, to have them in every unit at every level may create a dependency upon US advice and assistance worse – US enabling capabilities. As long as they have access to US enablers through US combat advisors they will never become independent fighting forces. If we are to execute such a plan as John has described I would ask for the plan for how to wean the Afghan forces from advisors and US enablers (which has to begin now and be understood by those executing it). One way is going to be "cold turkey withdrawal" yet at the time that decision is to be made we will have US advisors and those assigned to the mission arguing that the force is not ready (because it never will if we continue on the same path). The other way is to begin now by helping the Afghans to train themselves in an Afghan way of war –a way in which they are capable of independent operations that can be sustained by Afghans and not through access to US enablers. I agree with John that the US strategy to train and advise the Afghan forces has to change now – we need to be focused on independent operations without US enablers (knowing full well that those in Afghanistan will call such a notion naïve). But we have only paid lip service to trying to work ourselves out of a job and we do really need to know how to work ourselves out of a job.