Forget the Vietnam analogies. Influential Australian counterinsurgency adviser, David Kilcullen, says the Obama administration risks a Suez style disaster if it fails to deploy the troop numbers requested by Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
The deep divisions within the administration that have burst into the open in recent weeks along with the long delay in answering McChrystal's plea for more troops has created deep concerns among NATO allies and has presented an exploitable opportunity for the Taliban, Kilcullen tells Britain's Guardian newspaper.
Kilcullen, who is an adviser to the State Department, says it would be irresponsible for the administration to opt for any kind of middle ground option that sends less than the 40,000 troops requested by McChrystal. "Time is running out for us to make a decision. We can either put in enough troops to control the environment or we can credibly communicate our intention to leave. Either could work. Splitting the difference is not the way to go," he is quoted as saying...
More at DoD Buzz.
Barack Obama 'Risks Suez-like Disaster' in Afghanistan, Says Key Adviser - Ewen MacAskill, Guardian.
A key adviser to Nato forces warned today that Barack Obama risks a Suez-style debacle in Afghanistan if he fails to deploy enough extra troops and opts instead for a messy compromise. David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading authorities on counter-insurgency and an adviser to the British government as well as the US state department, said Obama's delay in reaching a decision over extra troops had been "messy". He said it not only worried US allies but created uncertainty the Taliban could exploit. Speaking in an interview with the Guardian, he compared the president to someone "pontificating" over whether to send enough firefighters into a burning building to put a fire out.
He was speaking as Obama left Washington for a nine-day trip to Asia without announcing a decision on troop numbers. The options being considered by the US have been narrowed down to four: sending 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000, the latter the figure requested by the Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. These would be on top of 68,000 US troops already deployed. The deep divisions with the Obama administration were exposed yesterday by leaked diplomatic cables from the US ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, who urged Obama to ignore McChrystal's request unless the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, cleaned up his corrupt government...
More at The Guardian.
Comments
MikeF:
I think you may be misjudging how bad things used to be in Afghanistan. From the about the beginning of the 20th century until things started to unravel in the 1970s, I believe they actually had a reasonable effective central gov. They were able to fight a short war with the British in 1919 and I don't know if disorder was all that bad. I just got done listening to a book by an Afghan and he said they were all shocked when people started getting robbed on the roads in the 70s.
I also don't think the Taliban chose to leave in 2001-2002. They got chased out. They came back because there was a power vacuum (for lack of a better term) in Afghanistan and the Pakistani Army/ISI decided it was in the interest of the Pakistani Army/ISI to sponsor their return. If we surge, they'll fall back into Pakistan, to be protected by...the PA/ISI. We gotta figure out this PA/ISI thing.
Notes taken by an attendee at Dr. Kilcullen's presentation at Georgetown yesterday and <a href="http://bellum.stanfordreview.org/?p=1464">posted on Stanford Review's Bellum blog</a>.
Weve suffered from only incrementally increasing the number of troops over the years. The Taliban has proven itself capable of absorbing the impact from an additional 10-30 thousand troops. We need to either "overmatch" them with a substantially larger deployment or not send any at all (or possibly draw down).
Whenever we send more troops, violence will spike almost by definition. This is for two reasons: a) the observer effect, more troops on the ground means more eyes on the ground, means more incidents get reported; b) more combatants means more combat. "Its like opening the fridge door and the light goes on."
The oft-touted 1:50 (or 20:1,000) ratio is "flawed." It was based on post-war reconstruction studies done by the Rand Corporation, not on actual insurgencies. Successful COIN campaigns have employed ratios that vary widely. It also refers to total security forces, not just -- in our case -- American troops. Finally, its better to think about the military presence functionally, rather than numerically.
There is "not much point" to negotiating with the Taliban right now. This is because the Taliban believe they are winning and so have no reason to bargain. Our goal should be to fight first and hard, to convince them that they should talk.
"Where local officials sleep" is a good indicator to track progress. In the film, I Am Legend, Will Smith must get home before the vampires come out to feast. Similarly, in Afghanistan today some 70% of provincial governors sleep in Kabul instead of the provinces they govern. This is bad.
Successful counterinsurgencies take 15-20 years. Unsuccessful ones take 9-11 years. Since 1816, 80% of counterinsurgencies have been successful, but when you control for whether those campaigns are being waged on domestic or foreign soil and whether the governments in question were willing to negotiate with the insurgents, the number can vary widely. Counterinsurgents have won only about 20% of the time when the government has not been willing to negotiate and when the intevening force was of foreign extraction.
There is "no universal silver bullet" for winning counterinsurgencies; "there are no templates." Counterinsurgency itself can best be described as "a battle for adapation... against an enemy who is evolving."
COIN should be viewed as "a subset of stability operations" because it is not a strategy.
I wrote this on registan.net (in response to some discussion about taliban and ANA) and I think it has some kind of tangential relevance here...btw, this is in the nature of testing out a hypothesis. I think things could turn out differently..
There is argument at the level of propaganda and we are all familiar with it, but I am going to put on my cynical cassandra hat:
1. The majority of the afghan people want peace and progress, but the majority cannot be said to automatically know how to get there (this is true of all people in some trivial sense). What Anand is saying about the ANA may have been true, but when the US signals withdrawal, things are bound to change. Most people do not support the taliban or the karzai regime. They support whatever option is marginally better than the rest in giving them peace and security. With full western support and creative and consistent effort, that MAY have been the ANA, it wont be once Obama completes his pullout dance. Support will then necessarily shift.
2. It will not shift all to the taliban. Where local warlords are capable of resisting the taliban, a lot of it will shift to them.
3. Obama and the West have probably not decided to pull out. WE can see that pullout, they cannot. This is a tragic but perhaps expected situation. Tragic because it means a lot of killing will be carried out on all sides while the Western powers figure out that they are leaving.
4. Of course, all that killing will be nothing compared to the orgy of violence that will come AFTER the withdrawal.
5. Jihadi propagandists (including the oversmart spin masters at GHQ, like Shireen Mazari and Ahmed Qureshi) will find that victory is sometimes much worse than defeat. Their objective interests (as a class) actually lie with the West and India (not with "the gap", as Barnett would say), they just dont know it. Eventually, they will be shunted aside or will change their tune OR "everything burns"...btw, I am not buying all of Barnett Bahadur's cheery theories either...
6. As always, I hope to be proved wrong. But watching the show unfold in the national security team in Washington, I now think this will all end sooner than we thought.
7. Finally, I dont think the average American taxpayer will be worse off (or at least, they will not be much affected by this whole business). It may be that the lives of average people will be materially better just as the lives of average Britons have been better since their empire moved on (at least for a couple of generations..nothing lasts forever), especially if the important parts of the world are still cooperating and in order. The places the US leaves behind may also be better off, but not ALL of them. I dont think there is some general rule that EVERY region is ready to rule themselves and cooperate with some kind of international order as well. Some will fall into anarchy until a new policeman takes control (chinese?)..Unfortunately, I think Afghanistan is in that category and could drag a chunk of Pakistan down with it. Worse case scenario, all of south asia is in trouble...And I am making no judgment about how much foreign "interference" has helped to bring things to this pass. Just describing things as they seem to be unfolding.
I respect Dr. Kilcullen, and I pay close attention anytime he speaks. But, I think he's off the mark on this one for two specific reasons. First, he stated,
"Well fight for two years and successfully transition or well fight for two years and fail and go home," he said at USIP. Moreover,
"As an analogy, you have a building on fire, and its got a bunch of firemen inside."
A'stan has been burning for decades if not centuries. Moreover, these people are a highly resilient society. There will be no decisive action in the next two years regardless of the COA chosen. The Taliban's reaction after our initial invasion should be case in point. We must respect that if we surge, then the Taliban will receed. I believe that we need to take a more Zen like approach as one SF officer suggested and consider the analogy of planting a tree.
Second, as explained by Gunslinger @ Inkspots, Dr. K suggested that the Taliban was a Focoast protracted war not a Protracted War. I believe the Taliban is conducting classic Mao Protracted War. This description of the enemy's strategy determines our perception of the fight and develops into our counter-strategy. I disagree with Dr. K.
Obviously, he could be the prophetic wise sage on this issue, but I don't think we should assume that.
v/r
Mike