by John A. Nagl
The long-term presence of Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan for some five years prior to his dispatch by a SEAL team underscores the problems that the country poses. And the killing of Bin Laden, ironically, increased the challenge for the United States of staying the course in Afghanistan. U.S. public opinion, never much engaged in the Afghan War, turned even more negative toward the effort after the killing of Bin Laden and the effective dismantling of Al Qaeda by drone strikes inside Pakistan. Public opinion could be summarized as noting that Bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is no longer a threat to the United States, and it’s time to go home.
The war in Afghanistan is likely to end with a negotiated settlement that allows the Taliban some role in the Afghan government in return for verifiable Taliban commitments to renounce violence and Al Qaeda (and that will be easier to do as Al Qaeda fades more deeply into irrelevance) and to adhere to the terms of the Afghan constitution. As long as the United States remains committed to the security of the Afghan government over the long term, we are likely to accomplish our core national security objectives in the region, although at a much higher price than would have been necessary had we not taken our eye off the Afghan War for eight years to focus on an unnecessary one in Iraq.
America will leave a force of some thousands of troops to conduct counterterrorism operations, to support the Afghan government, and to advise Afghan security forces, particularly with intelligence assets, airpower, medical evacuation and assistance, and logistical support. These forces will be sufficient to prevent the Afghan government from falling to the Taliban, largely by making it too expensive for the Taliban to mass forces for a frontal assault on Kabul. Although the United States will no longer conduct counterinsurgency directly in Afghanistan, the Afghan government in Kabul will, with American help, continue to counter the Taliban’s insurgency. The remaining U.S. troops will focus on counterterror operations—part of counterinsurgency, and a part that can continue only if the Afghan government remains in control of its capital and airspace.
In 1975 Saigon fell not to guerrillas but to conventional forces from North Vietnam; a tank, the very icon of conventional war, broke down the gate at the U.S. embassy in Saigon. There is no danger of a conventional Taliban invasion of Afghanistan from its bases in Pakistan, only of continued infiltration and subversion—serious threats, to be certain, but ones that the Afghan forces, if enabled by American support, will likely be able to contain. The outcome will not be pretty; however, it should be marginally acceptable if we continue to provide sufficient support.
Great powers lose small wars for only one reason: they run out of will to continue the fight. After more than twelve years in Afghanistan, it is understandable that America is tired of war. But the commitment of a very small number of American troops and a relatively small investment of dollars may make the difference between the survival of a representative government in Afghanistan post-2014 and the return of the Taliban. At the end of the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, after American-backed mujahedeen have expelled the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, the Texas congressman and Naval Academy graduate pleads for a small investment in the future of the country. He failed. America chose to ignore Afghanistan after the war in that country had broken the Soviet Union, and in the power vacuum we left behind, the Taliban came to power and provided Al Qaeda with a base of operations that enabled it to attack us. It would be a shame to repeat that particular crime of neglect in the same place just a generation later.
This question of American support for Afghanistan over the long term may be the longest-lasting impact of General Petraeus’s affair with Paula Broadwell. I met Paula at a CNAS event sometime in 2009 and saw her around Washington at other events, including Dave Kilcullen’s wedding to Janine Davidson and a party at her brother’s house; I found her both impressive and ambitious.
I was apparently not the only one. Paula was writing her doctoral dissertation on leadership at King’s College, London, with General Petraeus as a case study; when he was unexpectedly assigned to take command in Afghanistan, she adroitly decided to turn her dissertation research into a book. Most of us do it in the opposite order, although I have been accused of similarly writing my book and then doing the research afterward, in Al Anbar. Petraeus developed a closer relationship with Broadwell than was proper over the course of her writing what became the biography All In and resigned from the CIA when it came to light.
The affair with Paula surprised many of us who had known Petraeus for decades and who believed him to be invulnerable. If an M16 round in the chest during a training accident and a collapsed parachute that resulted in a shattered pelvis couldn’t slow him down, what could? I was shocked to discover that Petraeus was human; I knew my own faults, but had imagined none in him.
And so one of the great Americans of our time was brought down by a sin that appears to have been more notable by its absence than by its presence in the great men of all eras past. Petraeus’s reputation will recover as, like President Clinton, he continues to serve the public interest. My friend and fellow baseball fan Paul Yingling has described Petraeus as having the most “wins above replacement” (the acronym WAR is particularly appropriate here) of any general officer in his generation. It is hard to imagine anyone else buying the time and space to turn Iraq around, or performing better than he did in the Afghan theater.
The real cost of Petraeus’s infidelity is the loss of a compelling advocate for the people of Afghanistan at a critical time in America’s involvement in that nation’s history. Over the course of 2014, the Obama administration decided how many American troops to commit to the security of Afghanistan after the formal end of combat operations in December 2014. The need is clear; without American help to check them, the Taliban are likely to regain control of much of rural Afghanistan and even threaten Kabul. Those concerned about stability in the region, the security of Pakistan’s growing nuclear arsenal, and the residual elements of Al Qaeda central want Afghan bases from which to conduct counterterrorism operations and intelligence gathering. The cost of those bases will be enough American advisers and airpower to give Afghanistan’s own security forces a fighting chance against the Taliban.
Petraeus would have been a powerful advocate for a strong and enduring American presence of perhaps some 15,000 troops; if the absence of his voice results in a considerably smaller force, the price of his private sins will be heavy indeed—and much of it is likely to be paid by the innocent people of Afghanistan, who have already suffered so much.
8.
Counterinsurgency Revisited
Learning from Our Mistakes
My military life began in Operation Desert Storm, a war that was heavily influenced by perceived lessons of Vietnam: fight with overwhelming forces, win the military conflict decisively, then withdraw rapidly regardless of the mess you leave behind. Desert Storm was the war that the Pentagon had wanted to fight ever since Vietnam—a war against a conventional enemy on a battlefield all but devoid of civilians and without jungles, mountains, or cities in which her enemies could hide from America’s overwhelming firepower. My first war was, on the surface, an enormous success, as tanks and airpower reduced the Iraqi Army from the fourth largest in the world to the second largest in Iraq in just one hundred hours. Satisfying as it seemed at the time, however, Desert Storm was a military triumph without a political victory; Saddam Hussein remained in power to threaten his neighbors, a low-level air war continued for a decade, and ultimately America chose to fight again to topple him from power, adding another decade of war with Iraq to the historical ledger.
The costs of the second Iraq war were staggering: nearly 4,500 Americans killed and more than 30,000 wounded, many grievously; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians wounded or killed; more than $2 trillion in direct government expenditures, with the possibility of another $2 trillion in indirect costs over the generations to come, and the significant weakening of the major regional counterweight to Iran and consequent strengthening of that country’s p
osition and ambitions. Great powers rarely make national decisions that explode so quickly and completely in their faces, and the nation and the world will pay a heavy price for our arrogance and hubris for many decades.
The first Iraq war, in which I led a tank platoon, was necessary; the second one was not. The second Iraq war was one that we did not need to fight but fought for dubious reasons that were eventually proved false. Iraq was not, as we were repeatedly told, developing weapons of mass destruction; even if it had been, deterrence, which prevented war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, might have worked against a nuclear Iraq. There was no substantive link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and no Al Qaeda presence in Iraq until the American invasion, which caused social order to collapse and provided the terrorist group with a powerful recruiting message and a dangerous new base from which to attack.
The invasion of Iraq and its bitter aftermath should remind politicians for generations of the high cost and unpredictable results for those who roll what Otto von Bismarck called “the iron dice,” and it should forever discredit the notion of “preventive war.” Reluctance to send American ground troops to intervene in Libya and Syria, while providing different levels of political and military support, gives some hope that the country will think more than twice before fighting another unnecessary war. Good intentions do not always lead to favorable outcomes.
In Vietnam, the U.S. military was typically slow to recognize and adapt to the demands of the counterinsurgency campaign it confronted. Over time it improved its performance under the command of General Creighton Abrams, who took command from William Westmoreland and changed his search-and-destroy strategy to clear, hold, and build too late, after the American people had already given up hope. But the lessons learned too late in Vietnam recur again and again in the pages of successful counterinsurgency campaigns, from the Philippines to the Malayan Emergency. They include the importance of building capable local forces, linking political and military lines of effort, conducting information operations, protecting the population rather than focusing exclusively on killing insurgents, and holding the terrain you’ve cleared rather than allowing the insurgents to reoccupy it. These old lessons had been codified in the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual of 1940, painful learning drawn from the Marines’ experience in the Banana Wars that had to be learned again in Vietnam at an enormous cost in blood and treasure.
Tragically, all these lessons were forgotten yet again in the wake of the Vietnam War. In fact, after Vietnam, the United States intentionally turned away from the counterinsurgency lessons it had repurchased, certain that it would never again fight a counterinsurgency campaign and instead deciding to focus on a kind of war it knew how to fight well, conventional tank wars against another tank Army. The American military can be justly proud of its renaissance after the debacle of Vietnam and subsequent triumph in the Cold War, but its historical amnesia left it grievously unprepared for the wars of this century.
The British historian Michael Howard noted that it is impossible to perfectly prepare military forces for the next war; what is important is to make sure that you have not gotten the preparations so wrong that the military cannot quickly adapt when it is next needed. The Department of Defense failed that test in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It ignored preparations for counterinsurgency operations and was all but criminally unprepared for the demands of occupying Iraq after the invasion caused its government to collapse and Saddam Hussein to disappear into hiding. American actions, including the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and excessive use of force early in the occupation, contributed to the raging insurgency that threatened to pull Iraq down into civil war.
After the American people made clear their displeasure with this state of affairs in the midterm elections of 2006, transferring both the House and the Senate from Republican to Democratic control, President George W. Bush made the bravest decision of his presidency, firing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and doubling down on Iraq under the leadership of Bob Gates and David Petraeus. Petraeus, who had written his doctoral dissertation on Vietnam and had prepared his whole career in case America needed him to conduct an irregular warfare campaign, applied the lessons of Vietnam to the Iraq campaign. The Army, which had too long neglected the need for a deep understanding of languages and cultures, changed its spots in a remarkable example of organizational adaptation under extreme pressure. Winston Churchill said that you can always count on the United States to do the right thing when it has exhausted all possible alternatives; with Petraeus’s selection to command in Iraq under Gates’s leadership in the Pentagon, it adapted in the nick of time.
As history would suggest, the principles of counterinsurgency worked, albeit at great cost and just as American patience with the war effort in Iraq was about to expire. American support for the Sunni Awakening proved crucial in rebalancing the forces on the ground that eventually changed the course of the Iraq conflict, and Petraeus received well-justified accolades for turning around a war that had seemed destined to be America’s second consecutive loss in the irregular warfare category. The cost was excessive, the pleasure momentary, and the posture ridiculous, as British diplomat Lord Chesterfield is reputed to have described another activity, but the outcome was far better than could have reasonably been expected.
Petraeus later had the chance to practice counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which had been starved of resources for many years by the overwhelming demands of the debacle in Iraq. Counterinsurgency worked where it was resourced, particularly in southern Afghanistan, albeit slowly and at great cost, as T. E. Lawrence and any other student of counterinsurgency would have thought likely to be the case.
The question is not whether the classic counterinsurgency principles of clear, hold, and build work; the fact that they do has been demonstrated repeatedly. The question is whether the extraordinary investment of time, blood, and treasure required to make them work is worth the cost. The answer to that question depends on the value of long-term stability in the country afflicted by an insurgency, and that answer varies by time and place.
The attempt to unify Vietnam under the North’s leadership was not, as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations argued, an attempt to expand Communism across all of Southeast Asia; it was instead largely a nationalist expression of anticolonialism and a desire for independence that should have sounded familiar to Americans who were themselves products of such emotions a scant two centuries prior. Ho Chi Minh quoting from the Declaration of Independence in 1945 should have been an indication that perhaps we were backing the wrong side. But the Democrats, who had absorbed the blame for “losing” China to Communism under Harry Truman, were not about to let another domino fall on their watch. Ironically, when South Vietnam did ultimately fall to North Vietnamese tanks, it was Democrats on Capitol Hill who refused to uphold obligations in the Paris Accords that we would come to the aid of our South Vietnamese allies in their hour of need.
The fall of Vietnam, despite its horrible repercussions throughout Southeast Asia, did not signal the triumph of global Communism, and ironically it was a similar counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan that ultimately exhausted the Soviet Union. Stability in Afghanistan was not as essential to Soviet security as the Politburo had believed it to be, but the costs of the war in blood and treasure were crippling. Afghanistan fell when the Soviet Union could no longer pay the bills to support Afghan security forces some three years after the last Soviet soldier had left the country, a lesson that should resound as we contemplate the future of our own efforts in Afghanistan twenty-five years later.
Unlike Vietnam for us or Afghanistan for the Soviet Union, a degree of stability in Iraq was a vital national interest for the United States. Even with the threat of Saddam Hussein’s bellicosity confined to the dustbin of history, Iraq’s impact on the pre-fracking global oil market and its position in the heart of the Muslim world meant that America could not simply withdraw her forces and hope for the best when a civil war erupted in the power vacuum we ha
d inadvertently created. After invading the country and toppling the government, not just morality but hard national interest demanded a degree of stability in Iraq that appeared unachievable in 2006 but that was clearly visible in the streets when I visited in the summer of 2008. It was hard to comprehend the change. The curbstones that had been shattered by bombs were already rebuilt and painted jaunty colors, and the guardrails we’d ripped out with tanks after an IED planted behind one killed Roger Ling and Jeff Graham had been reinstalled. Iraq mattered a lot, and although the invasion had been unnecessary and the subsequent occupation was a debacle, cleaning up the mess we’d made was the least bad option available.
Afghanistan is a rather different case. Sitting next to me before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, Steve Biddle had testified that continuing to invest in stability in Afghanistan after the toppling of the Taliban and scattering of Al Qaeda was a close call on the merits. An unstable Afghanistan would not disturb the global oil markets, and the neighborhood was not as susceptible to the contagion of Sunni- Shia conflict as had been Iraq’s. There was and is a danger that absent American support, Afghanistan could again be conquered by the Taliban and provide a new home for terrorists, including ones who might further destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan. That danger was worth making an investment in counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, but the case was never as clear as had been the decision to surge in Iraq in 2007, and even that had been something of a long shot.