The US is currently mulling over its Afghan strategy amid a a crisis of legitimacy and record casualties. The 21,000 troops sent earlier this year, a stop gap measure to bolster security for the Afghan elections, failed to accomplish even this limited goal, while the Taliban has grown significantly stronger.
Obama's appointee Gen. McChrystal is now arguing for reversal from offensive to defensive operations, evacuating exposed positions in more remote provinces, retreating from the positions gained in this summer's failed offensive, and trying to protect just the major population centers. He needs an additional 40,000 American troops to carry out this retrenchment. Some in the Administration find even this defensive posture unsustainable and envision a counterterrorism strategy of targeting only the most imminent terrorist threats, leaving the countryside to the Taliban, similar to the operations in Pakistan or Somalia.
Afghanistan’s presidential election debacle, which cost so many coalition and Afghan lives, has become an unmitigated disaster for the Western backed Karzai regime and a Taliban dream come true, as the last vestiges of legitimacy and democratic idealism disappear. The above linked editorial is from the top American UN official in Afghanistan, who was just fired for exposing the systemic flaws in the preparation and execution of the Afghan election by the occupation authorities, and alleging that he was specifically ordered to cover up fraud in Karzai's favor to ensure his victory. The current situation is that although Karzai appears to have the majority he needs to win the first round, nobody is willing to certify those results given the obvious fraudulent nature of the reported results. President Karzai, clinging to power now 6 months after the expiration of his official presidential term in April, continues to insist that he won and needs to be enthroned as soon as possible.
The Obama Administration has not reacted one way or the other, although the fact that Karzai has not been declared the winner indicates an American decision not to reenthrone their puppet just yet in the face of this scandal and to await developments on the ground. The fear is that while Karzai’s main challenge, Dr. Abdullah, is equally wiling to tolerate the occupation of his country in exchange for personal power and wealth, his independent power base with the Northern Alliance will make him less pliable than the completely American installed and protected Karzai.
The military situation has deteriorated sharply during the past year despite the influx of 21,000 new American troops and record Western casualties. Essentially, the Taliban’s summer offensive, whose major goals were to invalidate the Afghan elections, sever the Pakistani supply routes and seize control over the Afghan countryside, including the major roads, have succeeded, while the NATO offensive, which focused on clearling Pushtun areas so that Karzai could get votes there, and securing the opium growing hub of Helmand, have failed. Britain has lost so many soldiers trying to secure Helmand Province for the presidential elections that public opinion has swung sharply against the war, and the country has been forced to begin contemplating military defeat as the most realistic possibility there. The British leaders are still backing the American line, advocating escalation and denying failure, clinging to the "golden ratio" of 50 civilians to one soldier as the solution to the growing counterinsurgency. (This math requires about 600,000 total counterinsurgency forces in Afghanistan, whether local or foreign. The total operational forces right now total about 200,000, with attempts to expand the Afghan military failing repeatedly.)
Despite the official aggressive posture, the leaders of Germany, France and Britain are now bowing to popular pressure for the first time proposing a timetablefor disengagement from Afghanistan. Canada, which has the third largest contingent in Afghanistan, has already set such a withdrawal timeline, for 2011.
Meanwhile, analysts trying to analyze Obama's strategy review are reduced to Kremlinology trying to figure out who is on what side and why the review is taking so long even as the body count spirals out of control and ever more of Afghanistan is lost to insurgent control. During the second of at least five meetings Obama has planned to try to formulate a strategy, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and special Afghan and Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke appear to be leaning toward supporting a troop increase, while White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Gen. James Jones, Obama's national security adviser, appeared to be less supportive. Defense Secretary Gates is reported to be leaning toward McChrystal's plan. Vice President Joe Biden has been reluctant to support a troop increase, favoring a strategy that deemphasized occupation activities such as patrols, garrisons and reconstruction efforts and directly targets al-Qaeda fighters who are believed to be hiding in Pakistan.
The failure to formulate a strategy 9 months into the President's term, despite taking short term stop gap measures which have sent NATO casualties soaring, has been led to some criticism. More optimistic sources read this as a possible indication of an attempt to disengage from the debacle on the part of the Obama Administration. In reality, the delay appears to be caused by the unwillingness of the American giant to acknowledge defeat and to accept its consequences. This painful acknowledgment is now being obscured by a strange performance in which the world's most powerful war machine appears to be run by little girls who are mad at each other.
So let's discuss briefly the two opposing strategies which we are told are now being considered to stave off defeat and give us change and hope for victory, which is almost as good as victory iself. The two competing directions can be labeled as McChrystal and Biden's plans. In many ways they are similar, both involve a significant pullback by occupation forces from the Afghan countryside and concentration on more easily defended bases and major population centers, but neither is a strategy for withdrawal or deescalation of the confilct. In his strategic review submitted in August, parts of which have been made available, Gen. McChrystal comes to some interesting conclusions, and the changes he demands in the overall approach are in many ways revolutionary and would take US COIN capacity to a new level. Accomplishing even a few of the broad goals, such as "achieving a new unity of command" or "changing the operational culture" seem more like inspirational slogans for an occupation past its prime than implementable suggestions. Given how many people's lives will end based on the words of this document, you should peruse at least the executive summary and intro yourself, but some key points made by the General are:
Important progress has been made, yet many indicators suggest the overall situation is deteriorating despite considerable effort by ISAF. The threat has grown steadily but subtly, and unchecked by commensurate counter-action, its severity now surpasses the capabilities of the current strategy. We cannot succeed simply by trying harder; ISAF must now adopt a fundamentally new approach. The entire culture -- how ISAF understands the environment and defines the fight, how it interacts with the Afghan people and government. and how it operates both on the ground and within the coalition1- must change profoundly.
Our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population... However, progress is hindered by the dual threat of a resilient insurgency and a crisis of confidence in the government and the international coalition. To win their support, we must protect the people from both of these threats.
First, the fight is not an annual cyclical campaign of kinetics driven by an insurgent "fighting season." Rather, it is a year-round struggle, often conducted with little apparent violence, to win the support ofthe people. Protecting the population from insurgent coercion and intimidation demands a persistent presence and focus that cannot be interrupted without risking serious setback.
Second, and more importantly, we face both a short and long-term fight. The long-term fight will require patience and commitment, but I believe the short-term fight will be decisive. 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.
Our campaign in Afghanistan has been historically under-resourced and remains so today. Almost every aspect of our collective effort and associated resourcing has lagged a growing insurgency - historically a recipe for failure in COIN. Success will require a discrete "jump" to gain the initiative, demonstrate progress in the short term, and secure long-term support.
The practical upshot of McChrystal's findings is that he concludes that the changes NATO needs to make in order to win are so unlikely, it is best to begin a phased withdrawal to buy time and minimize casualties during the dark days ahead. Since the insurgents now control most of the countryside, the general concludes that it is suicidal and fruitless to continue with the current strategy of manning small fortresses in contested regions with Western and Afghan forces. These Forward Operating Bases, essentially the heirs to the forts and castles that have always been a Western trademark in areas of occupation, have not been successful in interdicting the movement of insurgents or their supplies, or of keeping the civilians loyal to the occupation regime. In theory this strategy puts the troops out there to mingle with the population and win their hearts and minds, while denying insurgents freedom of movement, but they have now turned into besieged outposts, any of which could be overrun on any particular day leading to high casualties.
A grim example of the danger faced by the soldiers in the FOBs comes out of Nuristan Province, where just this week, a small jointly manned hilltop outpost was nearly overrun, resulting in at least 8 American deaths. While the American fort held out until relief arrived, the nearby Afghan Police base was in fact overrun, with the police commander, his deputy and dozens of troopers being taken prisoner by the Taliban while the Americans were pinned down and unable to assist. The Pentagon actually blamed the attack on Nuristani tribal levies, implying that the local tribes are now in a state of open war with the US. This is a strange admission for the Pentagon to make, but it does lay the groundwork for this outpost, along with a network of similar outposts and most of the positions taken in this summer's bloody fighting, being evacuated in the coming months and the areas abandoned to Taliban control in accordance with both McChrystal's and Biden's plans.
With the troops relieved from pointlessly dangerous duty in the distant mountains, McChrystal hopes to cobble together a force sufficient to at least hold the cities. However, to achieve the golden ratio of 1 soldier for every 50 people even in the cities, McChrystal finds that another 45,000 troops will be required in the next 12 months. Implicit in his findings is the conclusion that, if the force levels are not met even in the cities, they will be soon lost just as the countryside was. This is where the urgent demand for more troops, which is currently roiling Washington, is coming from. If he can get anywhere close to the troop levels he finds necessary based on COIn doctrine, McChrystal advocates a classic counterinsurgency in Afghanistan's cities, similar to what Petreaus did in Iraq, establishing FOBs in every neighborhood, separating cities with walls and slowly rooting out the insurgents with patient development of informants and thorough sector sweeps.
Great and, it seems, genuine emphasis is placed by McChrystal on protecting the population and winning their loyalties, and away from hunting militants and racking up body counts. To that effect, enemy body counts for Afghanistan have not been reported by the Americans for several months now. While this task requires less manpower than garrisoning every hilltop in Afghanistan, the general estimates he will need tens of thousands of additional troops for this more limited counterinsurgency effort. Once this shift takes place and buys the Americans more time and the Afghan urban dwellers some security, McChrystal hopes that various unpredictable developments, such as the population turning on the Taliban, falling in love with their government or the coalition, or some other stroke of luck, will shift the momentum again in America’s favor. However, he is grimly realistic about what will happen if, even after he is given enough forces to secure the cities, no such stroke of luck occurs in the next year, basically during next summer’s campaign season: "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."
McChrystal's plan has been endorsed by the top Pentagon brass, by other commanders on the ground, by the British high command and the head of NATO. It also has the strange advantage that though it calls for revolutionary change in American counterinsurgency tactics and proposes a retreat and abandonment of hundreds of painstakingly and expensively constructed American outposts, it also calls for an increase in the number of overall American forces in theater, making it a call for escalation and thus, more palatable to American militarists as a plan based on strength, a "surge," or "doubling down" (a term McChrystal specifically rejects), or some other manly thing that real men do when the going gets tough. Paradoxically, because of its call for more troops, which ordinarily is a handicap in any military strategy, this plan, calling for a major American retreat from positions captured often after much bloody fighting, has become a darling of the American Right as an optimistic plan for victory from the commander on the ground.
Biden's plan, on the other hand, is more radical in that it represents a bigger change to current Afghan strategy, but is at the same time very conventional and conservative, because it would simply bring US strategy in Afghanistan in line with its global counterterrorism strategy, and requires no change in tactics of attitudes in the Pentagon. As in Pakistan or Somalia, the US would track high and medium level jihadis and attempt to kill or capture them in targeted missions. This would involve a predominant use of Special Forces hunter killer teams and targeted airstrikes. This conservative tactical methodology is in sharp contrast to McChrystal's new strategy, which tries to avoid air strikes at all costs for fear that the collateral civilian casualties only serve to antagonize the population. Biden's proposals, such as the federation partition of Iraq he proposed a few years ago, are often intriguing but shocking in their profound indifference to the preferences or the fates of the local population. There is a remarkable contrast between McChrystal's pervasive emphasis on the protection and improvement in the lives of the Afghan civilians and Biden's complete indifference to their fate under his proposed regime of laissez faire bombing.
Biden's proposal is bolstered by the recent successes of the assassination efforts in Pakistan and Somalia, where Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban recently died in an airstrike as he visited his wife and children, and a successful raid in Somalia took out a high level Kenyan terrorism suspect. Biden's party believes that "decapitation" strikes of this type and military assistance to Afghan and Pakistani forces would be sufficient to keep Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven from which attacks against Western targets can originate. And although each particular strike of this type involves the high probability of numerous collateral casualties, the fact that there would be fewer missions overall would probably mean that the total number of civilian casualties created by the implementation of Biden's "Death from Above" strategy might be similar to the level incurred under McChrystal's more hands on strategy. However, as Somalia has shown, in the absence of a strong local government, decapitation strikes do nothing to prevent the population from falling under a most brutal form of theocratic tyranny. There is a certain irony in the fact that McChrystal, formerly the head of all Special Forces assassination squads as commander of JSOC, is now arguing against this approach and for more boots on the ground.
Both suggested approaches represent major departures and repudiations of the previous strategy, not just of the Bush Administration, but of Obama's current policies. It is sad to think that American forces are as we speak dying in record numbers executing a strategy that has been admittedly failed and will be abandoned one way or another, a tragic consequence of Washington's tortured decision making processes applied to a live theater of war where the tempo is being set by the adversary. To acknowledge this reality is to acknowledge that the US can be militarily defeated, which is a thought that is difficult for the American mind to accept.
In contrast to Western confusion and delaying tactics, the Anti Coalition Militants (ACMs) of Afghanistan, as the Pentagon generically terms the forces arrayed against them, are aggressively and determinedly pursuing a set strategy which has given them a string of strategic victories, such as greatly restricting NATO's resuuply routes through Pakistan, threatening the alternative route through Uzbekistan, gaining firm control of the majority of Afghanistan's countryside, and inflicting a record number of casualties on Western forces during this year's offensive. Abdullah Sa'id, the purported commander of the Lashkar al Zil, al Qaeda's "Shadow Army" which has replaced Bin Laden's legendary Brigade 055, kindly released a statement concerning the strategy going forward in the fight in Afghanistan on one of the jihadist media sites. The strategy , as outlined in April, contains the following key elements:
Forces are to attack major provincial centers while simultaneously advancing on the capital of Kabul. Sa'id specifically mentions the Maidan-Wardak region just south of Kabul as being a pivotal area for staging attacks on the capital.
• Interdict NATO's supply lines in Pakistan and force the Western countries to rely on Central Asian nations for logistical supply lines. Sa'id believes the Russians will threaten NATO's resupply effort and force Central Asian states from cooperating.
• Leverage al Qaeda's knowledge gained in Iraq to train the Taliban for more sophisticated attacks. Al Qaeda has already "employed its military expertise in Iraq in to serve Taliban's project in Afghanistan and Pakistan, such roadside bombs which target the military convoys, and the suicide attacks which have never existed in Afghanistan before 11 September attack," according to Sa'id. He also said that al Qaeda has training camps in Northeastern Afghanistan, in Helmand province, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
• Bleed the US and NATO allies through "organized guerilla warfare" as the Western countries face a financial crisis. "Taliban relied on patience, while the Americans can not tolerate long wars and the good tidings are promised to the patient people," he said. "[T]this type of war causes languor to the fortitude of any regular army and leads to its exhaustion and depletion over time even when the Americans join forces with the NATO."
• Continue to plan attacks against the West.
• Take advantage of Afghanistan's porous borders to flood the country with foreign recruits, who will eventually "return to their countries and probably Europe and the West after undergoing military training and ideological mobilization."
• Take advantage of civilian casualties caused by Coalition forces in Afghanistan to turn the population against the government and Western forces.
• Take advantage of NATO and Afghan forces' focus on the main civilian centers and the lines of communication. The Taliban and al Qaeda will use the countryside to train, recruit, and launch attacks against enemy forces.
• Capitalize on US airstrikes in Pakistan for recruitment as well as for creating rifts between the two governments.
• Eschew negotiations with the Afghan government and the West. S
• Expand the jihad into neighboring countries. Sa'id discusses using the leverage gained in Afghanistan to affect the outcome in neighboring countries.
These strategic goals indicate a patient insurgent mentality well versed in Maoist revolutionary principles and historical lessons from the era of decolonization struggles. Unlike the speculative, hopeful goals set by McChrystal in his report (shift momentum, take the initiative, win hearts and minds), the Taliban's goals are all very pragmatic and realizable in the near future. It is very interesting that Sa'id in April already assumed that the Western forces will concentrate on the cities and leave the countryside to the insurgents, confidently anticipating the success of his planned summer offensive. He also anticipates the collapse of the Pakistan supply routes, which has also occurred. A retreat to the cities or bases is of course precisely whatt is currently being advocated both by Gen. McChrystal and Biden's competing camp within the Obama Administration which wishes to concentrate on counterterrorism rather than counterinsurgency operations. But timed as Sa'id's statemetn was, coming in the teeth of Obama's summer surge which sent troops into the countryside in large numbers, it appears prescient, an indication of just how much initiative the insurgency has in setting the tempo of this war through its tactical offensive operations.
The fact that both the ACM commanders and the American leadership have consigned the countryside and the tactical offensive to the Taliban, because that represents a shift from Mao's Second to Third (and final) Insurgency Phase, something the Iraqi insurgents never managed. It is very difficult to find an example in history in which counterinsurgent forces were able to prevail after the Third Phase was already reached. A short definition of Mao's phases is as follows, and informs all modern thinking on both the insurgent and counterinsurgent side:
Phase I, The Strategic Defensive: The insurgents will concentrate primarily on building political strength, Military action will be limited to terrorist actions, harassment attacks and selected, politically motivated assassinations.
Phase II, The Strategic Stalemate: The insurgents gain strength and consolidate control of base areas. They begin to actively administer some portions of the contested area. Military activity increases as dictated by political requirements. Control of the countryside is won by the insurgents and the government is delegitemated in the eyes of the people.
Phase III, The Strategic Offensive: Only after the correlation of forces has shifted decisively in their favor do the insurgents commit their regular forces in the final offensive against the government in its major urban strongholds.
Once we recognize, as the Obama Administration appears to have done with the help of its generals on the ground, the Afghan insurgency as having entered Phase III, fully exploiting their advantage of fighting an incredibly weak, corrupt and unpopular government, we have only two choices left - consolidate the forces in the cities and strongholds and fight a protracted and bloody rear guard action to deny the insurgents control of these vital centers (the McChrystal plan), or pull back even farther and attempt to delay the progress of the insurgency and weaken its reach by targeted assassinations and other destabilization operations (the Biden plan). Of the two, the Biden plan protects more American soldiers, but at the same time, is more obviously an admission of local defeat, and in the long term actually represents an even more open ended commitment to a perpetual global fight against all anti Western militancy.
One can see why Obama is hesitating in deciding, as both of these options will have him paying a heavy political price for withdrawing from a theater of war where he boasted during the campaign he would prevail after already committing additional troops and staking his reputation on a gamble that didn't pay off. No doubt his Republican opponents will make Obama pay a heavy political cost for not living up to his hawkish rhetoric, and already Biden’s proposed shift from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism operations has drawn fire and threats that it will bring defeat. This criticism rests on an a prior assumption of American invincibility and an inability to even imagine that the advantage now belongs to the insurgents.
Continuing on the current course of escalation, of striking out blindly at the most bothersome targets and sending Western soldiers on more deadly patrols into Taliban held territory will continue to bring well earned criticism from domestic and foreign war opponents and military experts alike who both recognize the new reality on the ground, and will result in more unnecessary deaths of Western service men and women, the Afghan people and the insurgents.
But at some point, regardless of how politically painful, the choice has to be made, because the Taliban are now setting the direction and their continued successes necessitate an American reaction. Regardless of the Kabuki theater in Washington, either the isolated outposts and patrols of far flung hostile villages will be rolled up by retreating to the center, or they will be terminated by the soldiers coming home in body bags. The question is, how long will it take America to swallow its price and actually react to the reality on the ground? And for how long after that first grim realization is made will the US continue clinging to wan hopes and engaging in protracted and bloody rear guard strategies which sacrifice human lives in order to obscure its defeat and to preserve its image of invincibility?