by John A. Nagl
Still, candidate Obama had campaigned on Afghanistan as the good war, and to demonstrate his seriousness about national security despite his criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct in Iraq, he could hardly allow the Afghan presidential elections scheduled for the summer of 2009 to fail. During Obama’s first term, Democrats were still tainted with weakness by the long shadow of Vietnam. Determined to escape those ghosts and make the Democrats seem strong on national security, President Obama judged counterinsurgency to be the least bad option available during two separate rounds of White House deliberations over Afghanistan strategy in his first year. He nearly tripled U.S. forces committed to the war but simultaneously imposed a definite deadline of summer 2011 as the endpoint of the Afghan surge.
Much to the surprise of the U.S. military, he meant it. Obama was willing to give counterinsurgency a try, but the costs of the war clearly weighed on him, and he began the drawdown as scheduled. He was able to do so over the resistance of Secretary Gates and General Petraeus in no small part because of the killing of Osama bin Laden by a SEAL team in April 2011, the climax of an intensive counterterrorism campaign that had effectively defeated Al Qaeda as a strategic threat to the United States. Although Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq still had the ability to conduct local strikes of some significance, they had proven unable to replicate the effects of the September 11, 2001, attacks. They were unlikely to be able to regain that global reach given the more effective American intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities we had developed in the decade that followed.
Obama had proven his national security bona fides, and the Democrats actually earned an advantage on the issue over their Republican adversaries during the presidential campaign of 2012. The president was free to overrule his military advisers who recommended a larger and longer-term troop commitment to Afghanistan, and American-led counterinsurgency in that country came to an end early in his second term. Even at its peak the counterinsurgency campaign had not been sufficiently resourced to be applied across all of Afghanistan, and where the main effort was made in the south, American forces were withdrawn and Afghan troops thrust into the lead more rapidly than many would have recommended. Whether the Afghans will be able to hold what Americans and NATO troops have cleared of insurgents at such cost will depend largely on the American commitment to Afghanistan after the formal transfer of authority in 2014.
The endgame remains unclear. Will Afghanistan end like Vietnam—in an abject, helicopters-flying-out-of-Kabul, people-hanging-on-the-skids defeat—or in an unsatisfying and untidy sort-of victory like Iraq? While neither option seems particularly attractive, President Obama would welcome an Iraq-like end to Afghanistan. America can live with the current Iraqi government and its policies, and Iraq’s increasing oil output will help the global economic recovery. This is an unsatisfying return on the blood and treasure we poured into Iraq, but it is not a complete loss—and it is far better than we could have imagined in 2006, when Iraq was descending into civil war and Al Qaeda had established an important foothold there.
It is not unlikely that 2015 will see a similarly reasonable Afghan government that will hold together with American money and advisers—an unsatisfying end, but not a failure, and not without promise of greater stability to come. Like any successful counterinsurgency, Afghanistan’s is likely to end somewhat unsatisfyingly for Americans, with a corrupt but gradually improving government in Kabul, advisers helping Afghan security forces fight a weakening but still dangerous Taliban, and a schizophrenic Pakistan alternately helping Afghan and Taliban fighters. If not a good return on our huge investment in the country, it would be a reasonable outcome given the advantage we gave our enemies by taking our eye off the ball in Afghanistan for eight years while Iraq burned.
A reasonable outcome in both wars, unsatisfying as it seems, is about the best we can hope for in what is likely to remain an age of unsatisfying wars. This unsatisfying but not catastrophic outcome, however, is one of the reasons that modern critics of counterinsurgency have such an uphill battle in front of them, and why their critiques have failed to take hold of the military imagination the way Colonel Harry Summers’s book On Strategy did after the Vietnam War.
Summers argued that the reason the United States lost the Vietnam War was that it had practiced too much counterinsurgency in Vietnam, fighting with one hand tied behind its back; “A War is a War is a War,” he thundered, and only the complete use of all available force was acceptable. This attitude ignored the changes in the character of warfare since the deployment of nuclear weapons and the Cold War context in which the Vietnam War had been fought, as a smaller proxy war in a longer and larger global conflict against the Soviet Union. Never mind; it was a simple answer that made sense to Army officers, and On Strategy became for many years the Army’s answer to itself to why it had lost a long, hard war in Southeast Asia.
There are modern applicants to fill Harry Summers’s role for the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are hobbled not just because the outcomes of those wars are much more likely to be unsatisfying sort-of wins rather than abject defeats—indeed, the Army is rightly proud of its turnaround in Iraq after a horrible start that was largely bequeathed to it by its political leadership, and Afghanistan’s outcome is still too close to call—but also by the intellectual incoherence of their own arguments.
Thus Army Colonel Gian Gentile, the most strident voice against modern counterinsurgency doctrine and implementation, alternately claims that his own battalion was already implementing classic counterinsurgency principles in Baghdad in 2006 and that counterinsurgency is an inherently flawed policy in which the United States should never again engage. While he is certainly correct that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and that the United States has reaped a most meager return on the extraordinary investment of lives and treasure it made there, he has never said what the United States should have done once the decision to invade Iraq had been so unwisely made and so poorly implemented. The counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, once comprehensively implemented under the leadership of General Petraeus, was imperfect and left behind a deeply troubled country that remains violent and unstable, but absent the implementation of counterinsurgency best practices, it would have been far, far worse. Large-scale counterinsurgency is rarely a great option—it is in fact messy and slow and hugely expensive—but it may sometimes be the least bad option available.
Critics of counterinsurgency must do better than say that they would not have invaded Iraq in March 2003; I argued against the invasion as stridently as a serving officer could. But once Iraq had been invaded against my wishes, its government destroyed, its security forces disbanded, and fundamental splits in Iraqi society exposed and exacerbated by the occupation’s incompetence and willful blindness, there was no better alternative than a full-blown counterinsurgency campaign. As the great historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., liked to say, the right question is often, “Compared to what?” No critics of counterinsurgency have examined the situation in Iraq in early 2007 and presented an alternative answer that can be subjected to a cost and benefit comparison.
That absence matters, because there is every chance that America will fight another full-scale counterinsurgency campaign, in a generation or perhaps much sooner. This is true despite and perhaps even because of the Defense Department’s Strategic Guidance released at the Pentagon on January 5, 2012. Standing with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who had recently replaced Gates at the Pentagon, President Obama held a press conference to emphasize the importance of the Strategic Guidance. The document, titled Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, explicitly ordered “the end of long-term nation building with large military footprints.”
That goal seems laudable, but it ignores the reality that the United States is currently involved in a number of counterinsurgency campaigns: fighting insurgents in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the Horn of Africa, and rather halfheartedly s
upporting insurgents in Syria after having recently helped other insurgents topple the government of Libya. Insurgency and counterinsurgency are not going away, and it is essential that the Pentagon remembers that postinvasion stability operations, including counterinsurgency, are core military tasks for which America’s armed forces must always be prepared.
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Iraq and Afghanistan were not the only insurgencies to challenge the United States during the first decades of the twenty-first century. In fact, in the wake of the asymmetric September 11 attacks, challenges to state power in much of the world increasingly took the form of insurgencies, as conventional state-on-state warfare receded further into the realm of history. As rebellion and insurgency roiled the planet, the United States supported some insurgents and engaged in counterinsurgency campaigns against others, often by supporting the host nation in its efforts to defeat the rebels. There is no sign that the future holds anything but a continuation of this trend toward less conventional conflict and more insurgency and counterinsurgency.
The reasons are multifaceted and mutually reinforcing. They begin with a single big idea: that the information revolution is changing our world as dramatically as did the agricultural revolution of some five thousand years ago and the industrial revolution of 250 years ago. Both these revolutions strengthened the state against the individual, and for the three hundred years following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the state became the dominant force in international politics and in organizing the affairs of human beings.
However, that power dynamic changed with the beginnings of the information revolution in the wake of the Second World War. The rapid growth of computing power at an ever-decreasing cost—as described in Moore’s Law, which notes that computing capabilities double and costs are cut in half every eighteen months—shows no sign of diminishing and has given individuals and small groups a degree of power that has formerly been restricted to states. The ability of lone wolves like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to single-handedly damage international relations between the United States and her allies and expose intelligence operations and operatives worth billions of dollars is just one indication of the changing direction of the balance of power between the individual and state for the first time in three centuries.
The impact of the information revolution on the relative power of the state and the individual is not yet clear. Technologically sophisticated states can use digitized information to track the actions and locations of individuals within and sometimes even outside their borders; the raid that killed Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan was made possible only because some of his intermediaries were sloppy with their use of cell phones. But information technology also gives power to individuals who are wise in its use to apply that power against their own state or others in the international system; the Vietcong and North Vietnamese used the power of television to undermine U.S. support for the war in Vietnam, and the Green Revolution in Iran used Twitter and other social media to organize powerful (although ultimately unsuccessful, at least for now) demonstrations against the Iranian regime.
In fact, the entirety of the so-called Arab Spring revolutions against authoritarian or semiauthoritarian regimes can be seen as a consequence of the information revolution. With easy access to personal, demand-pull rather than command-push information technology, it became increasingly hard for regimes like Mubarak’s in Egypt, Qaddafi’s in Libya, and Assad’s in Syria to control their populations’ access to information about the performance of their government. Once they knew the truth, the Egyptian, Libyan, and Syrian publics could use that same information technology to mobilize demonstrations against the regimes they had detested for years but had never had the power to effectively confront. An earlier form of information technology, the photocopier, contributed to public discontent against the Soviet regime throughout the Communist bloc in the 1970s; photocopied samizdat versions of dissident manifestos like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago fermented discontent in an earlier spring of rebellion against autocracy, and the trend has only accelerated as technology to rapidly disseminate information has improved.
But globalization—the essentially instantaneous, essentially free transfer of information around the globe—is just one of the factors driving the new era of insurgencies around the globe. Others include nuclear weapons, conventional U.S. military superiority over any conceivable state enemy, urbanization and population growth, climate change, and resource depletion. Judged against the backdrop of the information revolution, this series of factors strongly implies a period of rapid strategic change, of which the Arab Spring is only the beginning.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker argues that human-on-human violence of all kinds has been declining over the course of history, particularly since the end of the Second World War. One does not have to fully buy into his argument to note that the seventy years since the end of that conflict have seen an impressive decrease in the number of conventional, state-on-state wars that saw their climax in the First and Second World Wars. In fact, since V-E and V-J days, the United States had engaged in only two significant primarily conventional wars against other states—the Korean War against North Korean and Chinese armed forces, and Desert Storm against Iraqi armed forces. Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Bosnia, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom have all included significant combat against irregular nonstate actors.
At least one reason behind the decrease in conventional combat has been the existence of nuclear weapons, which impose a kind of force cap on how far great powers are willing to pursue military objectives. It was his request for nuclear weapons that led to the relief of Douglas MacArthur by Harry Truman, who knew something about the employment of those systems; Dwight Eisenhower similarly refused to employ nuclear weapons in support of the French at Dien Bien Phu. John F. Kennedy’s refusal to face nuclear Armageddon correctly limited U.S. options during the Cuban Missile Crisis; LBJ similarly refused to escalate the Vietnam War to a point that threatened nuclear war with North Vietnam’s backers in the Soviet Union. In short, nuclear weapons have put a cap on how far nuclear powers have been willing to push the use of conventional force and have in some ways made the world safe for irregular war. There are now those who believe that the United States should turn away from the lessons of the past decade and focus on preparing to invade other great powers’ sphere of influence, despite their improved anti-access area-denial capabilities (A2AD in Pentagon parlance), using our Air Force and Navy comparative advantages in a strategy called AirSea Battle. They ignore the lessons of the Cold War, in which nuclear weapons made impossible conventional conflicts that would result in thousands of casualties directly attributable to another great power; instead, the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in expensive but indirect proxy wars. China and the United States are far more likely to do the same than to fight a single climactic battle in the Strait of Taiwan, no matter how much more the Pentagon and military-industrial complex would benefit from World War III in the Pacific.
Similarly, conventional U.S. military superiority has reduced the incidence of conventional state-on-state wars like Operation Desert Storm, which cast a heavy shadow across the military capabilities of lesser powers that realized conclusively that they could not compete with the United States in tank-on-tank warfare. Ironically, this very superiority of U.S. military muscle made the world safe for irregular warfare, particularly in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union after its own foray into irregular warfare in Afghanistan. The triumph of American arms in Desert Storm demonstrated the likely result of any conventional military aggression against American desires anywhere in the world. The very fact that we are so good at the American way of war makes it almost impossible for anyone to compete against us on a conventional battlefield—another factor behind the decrease in conventional combat in the decades since the end of the Cold War, and another factor making AirSea Battle more of a dream of defense planners t
han a real challenge worthy of primacy in Pentagon war planning.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that a number of factors are increasing the likelihood of irregular war, and those trends will only increase in years to come. A number of them have contributed to the uprisings of the Arab Spring. In addition to the information revolution that has empowered individuals worldwide with more and more easily accessible knowledge than has ever been available in human history, populations continue to increase in urban areas as people flock to cities for employment and the hope of a better life. However, living in cities exposes people to vast inequalities that mark the globalized world, and increased concentrations of humanity put more pressure on governments and make demonstrations larger, more frequent, and more dangerous.
Population growth continues in many of the least developed parts of the world, putting yet more pressure on governments that have to feed and house them or risk rebellion. The increased environmental energy infused into the global climate system by global warming is increasing the frequency and violence of weather patterns, further pressuring some of the world’s least capable governments; Bangladesh is likely to be a victim of all of these mutually reinforcing trends, but it is only the most obvious site of future unrest. Pakistan is another, with far more serious implications for global stability as a result of its nuclear weapons.
So, in a classic good news/bad news scenario, the world is less likely to see conventional conflict of uniformed armies clashing with peer or near-peer forces for the foreseeable future. Instead, we are likely to experience more of the kinds of rebellions and insurgencies that have marked the Arab Spring.