This spring, following a 2 month strategic review, Obama sent 37,000 troops to the Afghan theater. The largest Marine offensive since Vietnam were launched to retake Helmand Province. Now the results of the Spring Surge are in: coalition casualties increased dramatically, Taliban areas of control expanded, and the Kabul government has been completely discredited following the failed presidential elections.
As the summer offensive stalled, Obama replaced the Bush era commander with General McChrystal, and asked him to submit his policy recommendations. In these recommendations McChrystal states that if the tactical initiative is not captured in the next year, defeat will become unavoidable, and calls for between 20,000 and 80,000 additional combat troops. Even before the determination is made, American forces have begun evacuating exposed combat outposts and pulling back to the cities. The Afghan elections, on which so much hope had been placed, were and remain a debacle.
Afghanistan is on a downward trajectory which will take many years to right under the most optimistic scenarios. In the absence of any viable opposition to the bipartisan war effort, all we can do is behold the bloody farce as from all over the world people hasten to die on the fields of Afghanistan, like moths to the flame.
When President Obama came into office, he was faced with rapidly deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan, mounting coalition casualties and an accelerating loss of territory to the insurgency. The insurgency has been spiraling out of control since at least 2005, after the Afghan government failed to win support from its citizens. The insurgents now number in the tens of thousands, and are composed of a wide cross section of Afghan society, with every ethnic group and political viewpoint represented, from hardcore Islamists declaring their loyalty to Mullah Omar and fighting for an Afghan emirate, local and international mujaheddin fighting to expel an infidel presence from the country, locals fighting for their homeland, regional forces fielded by warlords, tribal elders or narco traffickers to forces fighting purely private grudge wars or vendettas, as they have for centuries against their neighbors and outsiders. In the words of General McChrystal, "Three regional insurgencies have intersected with a dynamic blend of local power struggles in a country damaged by 30 years of conflict."
Though the Taliban movement compromises only a portion of the insurgency, they are its most organized and ideological members. The Taliban run shadow governments in nearly every Afghan province, providing courts, police, and other quasigovernmental functions and driving the Kabul government representatives out. While their power varies from place to place, they represent an orientation with which those who stand against the Kabul government, the Western coalition, or their local power structure, can align in their fight, regardless of how they feel about the ideas of the Taliban or their viability as an alternative governing power.
The Afghan government is wildly unpopular, especially following the catastrophe of the fraudulent presidential elections in August. Attempts to win over the population through reconstruction and employment projects have not achieved any positive results. The huge amounts of money misspent by the West in Afghanistan have not raised the standard of living for the average Afghan, which remains the second lowest in the world, but have contributed to the culture of rampant corruption which has undermined all Afghan governing institutions.
In the face of a falling military strategy and the lack of political progress, the Western military mission has lurched from one limited operation and stop gap measure to another for the last 8 years, trying in vain to secure even the most basic prerequisites for success.
One such prerequisite is a minimum level of forces to fight the insurgency and protect the civilian population. Modern counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) calls for a ratio of 50 civilians to one soldier, which in Afghanistan would require about a half a million boots on the ground, foreign and domestic. Naturally it would be best if the bulk were to be made up of locals, putting a native face on the effort, which is why training local forces has been a top priority from the start. But 8 years in, Afghanistan on paper has only about 200,000 soldiers and police. They have been trained by Westerners, with foreign advisers attached to many units to raise their effectiveness, they draw their pay from Western sources, and they have been known to turn on their Western minders with an alarming regularity. Even in the rare cases when units can be successfully deployed without melting away, their corruption makes their presence onerous to the residents, and leads only to more anger at the government and the coalition, leading to flare ups of violent insurgency. The shortfall in competent counterinsurgent forces, amounting to hundreds of thousands despite the doubling of the American contingent under Obama, can never, under any circumstances, be made up, since the West simply does not have and the Afghan government cannot provide, such numbers of soldiers.
Under the accepted COIN doctine, such a shortfall is fatal to any mission. But the fatal flaws of the Afghan mission do not end there. The second major, insurmountable advantage enjoyed by the Taliban, one which was never enjoyed by the Iraqi insurgents but one which ultimately delivered victory to the Viet Cong, is their access to safe havens across the border in Pakistan, where despite sporadic anti militant operations by the Pentagon military, vast areas are, and will remain, hospitable resupply and recruitment areas for Afghan insurgents. An insurgent force possessing safe havens where they cannot be pursued and engaged by the heavy weapons of the occupying powers, can hold out indefinitely, launching cross border offensives at will until the foreign expeditionary forces are forced to withdraw. This need to eradicate safe havens in order to have any chance of victory pulled the US across Southeast Asia, into Cambodia and Laos seeking to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And it has pulled the US into Pakistan, where the American forces are now engaged in a relentless bombing campaign against high value targets while funding complimentary Pakistani military operations. The expansion of the conflict into Pakistan dominates the thinking of the Obama Administration at this time, as it did back in March when it was the centerpiece of the previous escalation. American involvement in Pakistan obviously creates a host of new complications and adds additional costs to the operation.
Although Pakistan has had some limited success fighting against the Pakistani Taliban in some of its border regions, under no realistic scenario is it possible that the Pakistani government will be able to secure and maintain control over all, or even a majority of the enormous mass of mountainous terrain which makes up the Afghan-Pakistan border region, particularly in light of the fact that Pakistan has never before been able to establish direct control over the area. Thus, the safe havens are another fatal flaw which cannot be fixed, and must be overlooked or obscured in order to continue to believe in the possibility of victory.
As importantly, a successful counterinsurgency requires the existence of a legitimate and reasonably popular local government. That has never developed in Afghanistan, and the situation has deteriorated markedly since August, when a presidential election ended in fraud and scandal as a result of the widespread fraud perpetrated by the incumbent, Hamid Karzai. To secure victory, Karzai enlisted the aid of hundreds of local warlords, corrupt tribal chiefs and appointed teams of election officials loyal only to him to oversee voting in the nation’s far flung voting stations, which could not be observed by international monitors due to the poor security situation. Karzai’s supporters worked so hard to ensure his victory that in many voting districts, they received more votes then there were voters, and polling stations which were not even open on election day showed massive turn outs. The fraud was so blatant and obvious that even the UN mission, which worked very hard to give the victory to Karzai, to the point where its deputy chief resigned in disgust and blasted what he viewed as UN’s collusion in the massive fraud, was forced to intervene and invalidate almost a third of Karzai’s vote total, plunging him below 50 percent and necessitating a runoff. After some grumbling, all parties agreed to a runoff to take place on November 7th.
In the runoff, President Karzai will face his top challenger, perennial Afghan foreign minister, the Tajik Dr. Abdullah. The fact that Abdullah is viewed as a Tajik, though he is actually of mixed Pashtun ancestry, means that his candidacy is disfavored by the West, despite the fact that it was actually the Tajik dominated Northern Alliance which defeated the Taliban from the country in 2001 and handed control of the country to the Western picked government of Karzai. Karzai is a Pashtun aristocrat, and US strategy in Afghanistan is dominated by the hope that the Pashtuns, who currently provide the bulk of Taliban and other anti coalition forces, can be won over by putting a Pashtun face on the central government.
Because election officials have only two weeks to prepare for it as the harsh Afghan winter set in, closing off mountain passes and isolating many communities, the potential for new fraud is of course very high. In preparing for the next round of elections, the UN has ordered about 200 Afghan election officials removed, and are hoping that about 7,000 polling places where fraud was worst in the first round will be closed. However, the elections of necessity will still be still be overseen by Karzai appointees, those who have not be caught in the most egregious fraud. Voter turnout is expected to be lower, because the runoff is a standalone election, while provincial elections also took place in August, because of the widespread anger and disillusionment of the voters, because of the short amount of time left to publicize the election, and because of inclement winter weather closing many mountain valleys off from the outside world. As a result, what turnout there is will be driven largely by regional and ethnic loyalties, and by tribal chiefs whose loyalties have been assured by previous backroom deals with the national government. One might argue the obvious, that the only difference in the second round will be that Karzai's people will make the fraud harder to spot and to ignore, as the UN has been trying desperately to do from the beginning. Despite Karzai's obvious corruption and increasing hostility to his Western backers, he is likely to prevail again in the runoff election, and the Western allies remain ready to work with him again.
Dovetailing the political setbacks in the quest to gain legitimacy for the Western backed central government, the military operations launched this summer using the fresh troops sent by Obama achieved little. A task force of about 4,000 Marines was sent to push the Taliban back in Helmand Province, where British forces had been pushed back over the past few years. The cleared ground would be held, elections would be able to take place, and Taliban's control of vast opium revenues would be disrupted. Operation Khanjar achieved localized success at the cost of a very high level of casualties, but it did not altar the balance of power of snatch the initiative form the enemy. The Taliban, while ceding ground in Helmand, launched numerous operations in less protected areas of the country, expanding their influence along a vital NATO supply route, mauling the British allied contingent, and continuing to close in on Kabul itself. In the face of the Taliban resurgence, much of the ground gained during the summer offensive will likely be ceded back to the Taliban in the coming months as more combat outposts are evacuated, as discussed below. To add insult to injury, most of the votes coming from polling stations in the ground cleared by the offensive in Helmand had to be discarded in the face of massive fraud and low turnout.
The operations carried out by Western forces have not brought a strategic advantage, but have come at a high cost, both in human and material terms. July and August were record months for coalition casualties, and the tally for October has just shot up because of the recent loss of three helicopters in one day by the US. At the same time, the operations have resulted in a steady stream of Afghan civilian casualties, who perish at the rate of at least 200 a month, counting only the minority of casualties of which the Western press is notified. This has led to a simmering anger at the coalition and the Kabul government which is seen as a weak collaborator, and clashes between police and Afghans protesting the latest civilian killings by American forces are currently ongoing in Kabul.
The failure of such tactical offensives as Operation Khanjar to achieve meaningful results, combined with the anger of the Afghan people and the crippling flaws in the Western position, such as the existence of safe havens, the lack of a component local partner and the lack of forces, as discussed above, have forced the commanders on the ground to acknowledge that no military operation, regardless of how well planned and executed, can win the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. They are now circling the wagons, and urging the implementation of COIN principles espoused by Gens. Peteraus and McChrystal, in tandem with a military and diplomatic campaign in Pakistan to destroy the cross border safe havens.
The generals have delivered their ideas to Obama in McChrystal's strategic review, which Obama had requested when he first appointed MChrystal after the unceremonious sack of the Bush era commander, General MacKiernan. The review was delivered in August, and, ever since, the Obama Administration has been deliberating on what to do going forward. The process appears to be at end, and a new strategy is expected in a manner of weeks. Observers are in agreement that at least 20,000 new American, 500 new British, and an unclear number of European auxiliaries will be headed to Afghanistan for the 2010 fighting season as part of a dramatic realignment of forces in country in accordance with the new COIN strategy.
Based on what we know of the policy proposals before Obama, we are now able to form a rough idea of what the new strategy will entail. The options are limited to McChrystal’s proposals and certain counterproposals advanced by Biden and certain other advisers. McChrystal has already begun implementing those potions of his proposed strategy which do not require additional resources, most significantly ordering the pullback of NATO troops from exposed forward outposts, and putting in place new rules for ordering air strikes which require the commander to positively verify that no civilians are present in the target zone, and to disengage rather than bomb if civilians may be present. He also offered Obama three possible alternatives for increased troop levels – the low risk option of sending 80,000 new troops, the medium risk option of 45,000 and the high risk of 10-20,000. (When reading Pentagon troop requests, one must keep in mind that only combat soldiers are mentioned, not "enablers", meaning that the actual numbers of troops to be dispatched is roughly double the announced number.)
Most public debate has focused on McChrystal’s medium and high risk options. The Republican and Democratic war hawks have thrown their support behind the moderate risk option as the most robust of the feasible plans. The low risk option is more theoretical, because there is simply no way the American military can round up 160,000 troops to send to Afghanistan by next year. An interesting alternative was offered by Biden, who urged the option rejected by McChrystal in his review, the possibility of a almost purely counterterrorism mission, which would allow not increasing but even decreasing, the number of NATO forces, while reorienting the mission to a targeted campaign which would focus on assassination of high level insurgent and al Qaeda figures and disruption of their networks, and not the protection of the Afghan population or its government. Ultimately this counterproposal never had a serious chance of success, lacking support from the Pentagon and requiring too much of a visible retreat to be politically tenable.
A certain degree of retrenchment is unavoidable given the shift in the relative power and posture of the parties, with the US going on the defensive in the face of a growing insurgency. The notion of the inevitability of retreat is present in all of the options presented to Obama by McChrystal. None of the options include the possibility that the ground gained during the 2009 offensive will actually be held, although depending on the definition of "population center," some of Helmand's ghost towns, such as the nearly abandoned provincial capital of Lashkar Gar, may be garrisoned. Furthermore, the new strategy involves the evacuation of most coalition forward combat outposts such as the South Station. Once designed to disrupt Taliban operations and control disputed terrain, these have become basically besieged bastions, ringed by mines which every week take a leg or a life from the fort's defenders. McChrystal does not believe that they give the coalition any real command of the countryside, while they must be defended at a heavy price.
The evactuation, a massive undertaking which involves the destruction of an elaborate system of fortifications built up over the previous 8 years, is taking place even before the President settles on a final overall strategy, since there is no scenario under which they would be preserved. This painstakingly constructed network now represents only a liability which endangers needlessly the lives of the soldiers. In the worlds of Gen. McChrystal, ""Practically speaking, there are areas that are controlled by Taliban forces." Over time, McChrystal told the Los Angeles Times in late July, the command would "reduce" those areas, but the first priority will be to make sure populated areas are free of insurgent influence."
The evacuation of most such fortified outposts also involves the destruction of any Afghan government structures guarded by the outposts, and the complete collapse of government authority in that area. The evacuation has been for obvious reasons a scantly publicized aspect of McChrystal’s and Obama’s new strategy, since it is not only a repudiation of 8 years of policy under their predecessors, but also renders meaningless any of the hard won territorial gains achieved by this summer’s offensives and gives the Taliban valuable propaganda points. Surprisingly, the American right wing, eager to give McChrystal whatever he wants, has not noticed that he has quietly ordered the largest retreat in modern American military history.
I discussed the competing plans before Obama in more detail in a previous diary before Biden's plan was apparently discarded as being too politically costly. The options as they now stand are summed up again by the Wall Street Journal. It appears now that Obama is leaning toward McChrystal’s "high risk option" and that we have before us the grim reality of at least 20,000 combat troops, meaning about 40,000 soldiers total, at a rough cost of 40 billion per year (as it costs about one billion dollars per year to maintain 1,000 soldiers in the war zone), going in to a deteriorating situation in which record casualty rates are expected and hundreds will not make it back.
Their mission, as envisioned by McChrystal, is to guard the cities, particularly the volatile Kandahar and the now unsafe Kabul, creating defensive perimeters in order to "protect the Afghan population" (the infamous checkpoint and wall system implemented in Baghdad and other Iraqi population centers). Inside the cities, as during the Iraq Surge, individual neighborhoods will be walled off and flooded with American soldiers, allowing the US to briefly achieve or even exceed the coveted 50 to 1 ratio. Then the occupation forces will go house to house, many times over, cultivating a network of informants and recruiting a local protection force and bringing in the fledgling Afghan national forces to man yet more checkpoints. Effective cultivation of informant sources and rolling up insurgent cells through aggressive interrogation are key to an urban counterinsurgency, and McChrystal has a reputation as being adept at procuring and using intelligence to dismantle insurgent networks in Iraq.
McChrystal and Peteraus make these recommendations while warning that the failure to achieve a breakthrough in the next 12 months will make the war unwinnable. Contrary to how it has been portrayed in the media, at no point does McChrystal state that sending the additional troops will probably lead to success. He goes out of his way to emphasize that success, regardless of the size of the escalation, is highly improbable and is impossible without major improvements in the entire structure of the American military and civilian national building apparatus. The report does not even attempt to address how the Pakistani safe havens can be eliminated. Stating that this development is of vital importance, the general, lacking a solution, leaves the problem to others.
In the General’s own words:
The situation in Afghanistan is serious; neither success nor failure can be taken for granted. Although considerable effort and sacrifice have resulted in some progress, many indicators suggest the overall situation is deteriorating.
The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.
Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.
Overall, the report, and even the carefully edited portions which have been made public, is as close to an admission of defeat as somebody who has been tasked with preparing a recipe for success can make. Basically, instead of simply stating that the US has lost, McChrystal says that unless a host of entirely unrealistic developments take place within the next year, the US will lose. It's like telling a cancer patient that, while you should not lose hope, unless a unicorn donates his horn to you within the next year, you will definitely die. I suppose that is as good a bedside manner as one can expect from a general.
While many things about the war will change under the new strategy, one aspect that will remain. Massive counternarcotics operations, which over the past 8 years have not prevented Afghanistan from becoming the producer of 90 percent of the world’s opium, will continue. Indeed, a surge is being touted in this area as well, and the future counternarcotics strategy will focus on attacking drug kingpins and refining facilities, and not the local growers, while also trying to provide the farmers with alternative cash crops. However, as more territory becomes off limits for even armed American presence, an aggressive counter narcotics campaign inevitably creates a more dangerous environment for the troops and DEA agents who will be sent into areas controlled by the enemy. Not surprisingly, the DEA has just suffered its first battlefield casualties in Afghanistan, three agents lost when their helicopter went down under fire during a raid on a drug kingpin.
Despite the many glaring indicators, acknowledged fully by the Pentagon itself, that defeat has already occurred or has become inevitable, the new last ditch strategy is being implemented with broad support both within the US and among its European allies, who have also endorsed McChrystal’s proposals. It is clear that the Obama Administration, despite the warnings of is generals, the history of the region, and America’s desperate financial situation, has made a long term commitment to this war, and has made clear that, in his best FoxNewspeak withdrawal is not an option. And in this economy, the Pentagon will have no trouble finding ever new bodies to send into the meatgrinder. We, by which I mean the majority of people around the world already opposed to the war, are therefore going to see the new approach play out as a tragic farce conducted by Democratic politicians over the course of many years, at a cost of hundreds of American and thousands of other lives, and trillions of dollars.