by Nir Rosen
Meanwhile, the Taliban were seamlessly embedded into communities. They were the locals. They did not need Kalashnikovs; a simple knock on the door could be as effective. The police were useless, timid during the day and terrified at night. Neither the Americans nor the Afghan security forces conducted night patrols. At night the Taliban controlled the communities, undoing whatever the Americans had tried to accomplish during the day. The Taliban took a step back in reaction to the American surge to measure their adversary. It did not matter if the Americans were effective here and there. “Emptying out the Titanic with a teacup has an effect, but it doesn’t stop the ship from sinking,” the Brit told me. The insurgents were learning, avoiding direct encounters. They could continue placing IEDs despite the increase in troops, which could make getting around close to impossible and easily neutralize police units.
The much-hailed operation in Helmand didn’t fail, but there was little to show for the tremendous amount of effort that went into it—the operation merely advanced the stalemate longer. The Taliban weren’t winning so much as the government was losing. Next the focus turned to nearby Kandahar, and there was talk of pouring troops in there. It was the same mistake. When the Americans were focused on the south, they let Logar and Wardak provinces slip under Taliban control; by the summer of 2009, it was clear that much of the formerly safe north, such as Kunduz, was falling to the Taliban as well.
Bill Hix, the commander of the American task force in charge of training Afghan security forces in southern Afghanistan, believed the Taliban had slid their Kalashnikovs under their beds and were waiting, observing their opponents, just as they did following a similar operation the Marines undertook in southern Helmand’s Garmsir district in 2008. The Taliban melted away to other districts in Helmand. This year the Marines were back in Garmsir again. According to Hix, the lack of Taliban was not a sign of weakness but of strategy. “Their target is the Afghan people, not the British or the Americans,” he said. “They are waiting and seeing.” Hix spent twenty months working with the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command, and he enjoyed his job. In his view the Afghan army should have been pushing the enemy away from the population while the police should have been protecting and controlling the population.
Control is essential to a successful COIN campaign. According to Stathis Kalyvas, a Yale political scientist and expert on civil war whose book The Logic of Violence in Civil War was very influential among counterinsurgency theorists, “The higher the level of control exercised by the actor, the higher the rate of collaboration with this actor—and, inversely, the lower the rate of defection.” Control leads to collaboration and allows the counterinsurgents to separate the insurgents from the community. But the Americans would never have enough troops in Afghanistan to achieve control. Unlike in Iraq, where the surge focused on Baghdad, a densely urban environment where a census could be conducted, neighborhoods closed off with Americans at the access points, in Afghanistan the war was rural. The Americans got lucky in Iraq, benefiting from sectarianism that changed the dynamics of the conflict from an anti-occupation struggle to a civil war. Millions were displaced, hundreds of thousands were killed. The Americans looked good in comparison, and they decided to focus on protecting the people. Then the Shiites defeated the Sunnis, and Sunni militias chose to ally themselves with the Americans. But a caricature of the surge dominated popular culture. Both Washington and the military came to believe that COIN just might be the magic formula in Afghanistan. While ignoring the right lessons from Iraq, such as the use of community outposts, there was much talk of bribing Afghan tribes, which misunderstood why Sunnis stopped resisting in Iraq and gave way too much importance to tribalism in Afghan society. The Americans were unable to grasp that material benefits were not the only thing that could motivate people. McChrystal called for a new focus on the urban population centers of the country and less on the rural areas. This was also the failed approach favored by the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Like the mujahideen, the Taliban are strong in the rural areas, in mountains and valleys.
McChrystal insisted that securing the people of Afghanistan was his goal. But why, then, were the Americans operating out of large bases and not in the communities? The community outposts that existed in Afghanistan were actually away from the population. In Iraq the Americans’ best success came with their use of community outposts. If they set up similar outposts in Afghanistan, they would not have to “commute to work” on roads vulnerable to IEDs in mammoth vehicles that keep them removed from the people, staring at them like aliens in spaceships unable to breathe in their atmosphere. It was a paradox of population-centric COIN in Afghanistan that the areas where the population was most concentrated were not the insurgent strongholds; instead the insurgents were based in the rural areas, away from population centers. The surge in Iraq was urban-based, and much easier. In Baghdad the Americans figured out who lived where, what they did, and what they wanted. That lesson didn’t make it over to Afghanistan.
THE AMERICANS’ OBSESSION with Afghanistan’s elections also resembled their Iraq approach, which erroneously focused on landmark events. Just as in Iraq, when elections helped enshrine sectarianism and pave the way to civil war, so too in Afghanistan the elections empowered warlords; enshrined a corrupt order; and, in the case of the August 2009 elections, completely discredited the government and its foreign backers. Strategy in Afghanistan was put on hold so that the elections could be held. Turnout in the south was less than 10 percent, and zero in some places. There was overwhelming evidence of systematic election fraud and ballot stuffing. The Taliban managed to reduce the turnout compared with previous years. There were seven thousand polling stations throughout the country, so the Taliban could not actually disrupt voting too much. It would have also been bad PR for them to kill too many civilians. Their lack of operations might have shown that even they knew the elections didn’t matter and that nothing could better serve their ends than letting the elections take place and ending up with a deeply flawed result. Meanwhile, the Americans and their allies immediately hailed the elections as a success, merely because violence was low, thus further associating themselves with a corrupt government. How could Afghans take Americans seriously when they backed a corrupt government and were deeply implicated in corruption? The failed elections were a message to Afghans that there was no hope of improvement or change.
In September 2009 McChrystal’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan was leaked to the media. He had been advised by a team of experts, many of them celebrity pundits from Washington think tanks. Only one of his advisers was an expert on Afghanistan. When Petraeus conducted his Iraq review, he called on people who really knew Iraq to join his “brain trust.” McChrystal called in advisers from both sides of the political divide in Washington who already believed that population-centric COIN was the solution to everything. It was a savvy move, sure to help him gain support in Congress. There was a cult of celebrity in the D.C. policy set. Many of the same pseudo experts who were once convinced that the war in Iraq was the most important thing in the world, even at the expense of Afghanistan, were now convinced that Afghanistan was the most important thing in the world, and were organizing panels with other pseudo experts in Washington think tanks. They offered trendy solutions, like an industry giving managed and preplanned narratives about what was going on. COIN advocates from DC think tanks were connected to political appointees who came from DC think tanks. There was an explosion of commentary on Afghanistan coming from positions of ignorance, quoting generalities. McChrystal himself had been chosen because he could drum up bipartisan support. He was another hero general like Petraeus, with an aura of infallibility—he was there to save the day. Fawning articles praised his low percentage of body fat, his ascetic habit of eating one meal a day, his repetition of simple COIN aphorisms that had already become clichés in Iraq by 2007. He was another warrior scholar the media could write panegyrics about.
Just as Petraeus replaced a discredited Gene
ral Casey in Iraq, and Abrams replaced a discredited General Westmorland in Vietnam, so too had McChrystal replaced a discredited McKiernan, and the media eagerly consumed the hype about the new general. The generals were manipulating public opinion, inviting celebrity pundits to take part in reviews and then write opinion pieces in newspapers in support of the conclusion that the pundits and generals proposed. The military was setting the agenda for the war, and in the end it came down to more troops. McChrystal and the military were playing Obama. They wanted billions of dollars and a war without end so they could experiment with COIN, the solution for all problems. McChrystal bluntly stated that if his strategy wasn’t followed, then the mission in Afghanistan would fail. Neither he nor his backers explained what the qualitative difference would be. They were not doing COIN properly with the troops they had already, so why bring in more?
Even though McChrystal’s assessment identified the biggest challenges the Americans faced as political, social, and economic, his solution was military. The generals were trying to make all of Afghanistan’s problems look like a nail, and they kept wanting to apply the hammer. They were saying they could fight a war by not focusing on the enemy, but they were not actually taking the steps to protect people, either. Instead of relying on civilian experts, the government ended up using the military even to solve problems that weren’t military. McChrystal advocated a war that was population-centric and not enemy-centric, and yet all the talk was over how many troops they would need, instead of what a successful COIN strategy would require. Despite all the talk of a civilian surge, the civilians—diplomats, advisers, trainers—to staff even the much lower requirements of the last seven years were not found. Nor were the civilians found to meet the requirements for the American mission in Iraq. Instead, McChrystal increased the number of special operators to kill Taliban instead of trainers for the police and army.
More than a specific code of action, COIN was a mentality. But it hadn’t really trickled down. Once you got down to the rifle squad, COIN didn’t make any sense. It was hard for the troops to keep the greater strategic picture in their minds. They were being asked to be Wyatt Earp and Mother Teresa at the same time. Most soldiers didn’t care about the mission; they just wanted to live through the deployment. Lip service is paid to COIN, but the military isn’t implementing its own plan very well. Officers speak of going into villages and “doing that COIN shit.” COIN required the Americans in their bases to learn about and live with the people in the villages. They couldn’t just go in for a few hours, call a shura with some elders, and then rush back to base before the chow hall closed. COIN was dangerous, and the military was risk-averse. In Iraq the American casualties peaked when the military got serious about protecting the people. The faces in charge of the war in Afghanistan had changed, but the strategy had not.
The American military and policy establishments were institutionally incapable of doing COIN. They lacked the curiosity to understand other cultures and the empathy to understand what motivated other people. In the military in particular, Afghans were still viewed as “hajjis.” Alternative viewpoints were not considered. Many journalists failed to understand that when you’re with the military you’re changing your selection bias. By showing up with the white guys with guns, you are eliminating all the people who don’t want to talk to the military, or talking to those who have an interest in engaging the foreign occupier. Regular people won’t relate to you in a natural or honest way. For the U.S. military, seeing something from a reporter’s or Afghan’s perspective is an exception. Even the media were perceived as the enemy. Military officers had been talking for a long time about being good at complex operations, providing aid while engaging in military operations, but they still made it up as they went and hoped that the previous unit had learned something. Units were terrible at handing over the knowledge they had gained, and relationships formed with Afghans were lost. Even when officers got it right, the system wouldn’t, because the military Weltanschauung could not account for complex social environments. The military’s way of thinking was still very conventional. All the officers could do was to try to take COIN and graft it onto conventional doctrine, putting a COIN face on the same old army. The Pentagon cultivated engineers, but Afghanistan could not be approached from a systems engineering perspective. COIN was hard to translate into PowerPoint, the military’s favorite language. The greatest advantage the Taliban had may have been not relying on PowerPoint.
COIN inevitably required military action against a major segment of the Afghan population, and in doing so it undermined the project of state building and national consensus that the international community was simultaneously involved in. The new American mantra called not for targeting the insurgents but protecting the population. But the population was attacked by the Taliban only to the extent that it collaborated with the Americans and their puppet government. Does protecting the population mean protecting them from the Taliban or the police or the Americans? The Americans in Afghanistan were like firemen attracting pyromaniacs.
McChrystal did have an academic “red cell” formed under the auspices of Harvard, but they were never sent the strategy to review, so these bona fide experts were never really consulted. Instead McChrystal’s team listened to urban Afghan expats, fluent in English, who “drank the Kool-Aid of the Kabulis,” as one academic participant described it to me. The center of gravity in Afghanistan are the rural areas, where the Taliban has its greatest strength and where the war will be won or lost. But these expats prioritized the urban, had never been out in the hinterland, a strategy, ironically, out of the old Soviet playbook. They were giving McChrystal the advice Kabulis wanted to hear.
McChrystal had a list of goals with vague suggestions about how they might be achieved. His job was to answer the question of how Afghanistan could control its own territory. But President Obama was busy asking an entirely different question, about whether the strategy itself was correct. He was asking whether the goal was valid. First they had to agree on what the problem was. Was it global terrorism, as Obama said, or was it a unified, peaceful Afghanistan? For the narrow goal of preventing Al Qaeda from having bases in Afghanistan, the United States has prescribed for itself the creation of a new Afghanistan and a never-ending counterinsurgency. So defeating Al Qaeda became building Afghanistan. McChrystal was concerned less with Al Qaeda, the original cause of the mission in Afghanistan, and more with the problem of the expanding Taliban. If Obama’s stated goal in Afghanistan was to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda, then why was McChrystal determined to fight the Taliban? Perhaps he believed that if the Taliban took over, Al Qaeda might obtain bases in Afghanistan. But Al Qaeda was in Pakistan, it was on the Internet, it was in Europe (the 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany, after all).
There was an impossible disconnect between the assessment and McChrystal’s plan. McChrystal provided an accurate assessment of the dismal situation in Afghanistan. But the plan he proposed failed to address the key problems he noted. He explained that building Afghan civilian government capacity was critical, but he devoted a single page in Annex C to what he thought would fix the government.
The assessment noted that the Americans needed a much larger Afghan army and proposed doubling it. Yet it did not address how to do that, given that after eight years the Americans still had not provided sufficient trainers to get the army to the earlier goal of 134,000.
The assessment noted that the Afghan police were a major problem. Yet it suggested no new ideas for how to eliminate police corruption. It never even mentioned the justice system. The proposed solution was to double the size of the police force, but it did not explain how doubling the corrupt and dysfunctional force could help with COIN. “If I take drug dealers and gang bangers from the streets of DC to an eight-week program and then put them back in the same environment, can we expect it to change their activities?” one skeptical COIN expert working on Afghanistan asked me. “This corrupt force is the problem, so why put twice a
s many corrupt police out there?”
The underlying assumptions were not addressed in the assessment. The most important assumptions were those dealing with the political situations in Afghanistan, the United States, and allied nations. One key assumption was that it is possible to create a centralized, functioning state in Afghanistan. The Americans wanted to extend the reach of the government, but in the past extending the reach of an unpopular central government in Afghanistan caused instability. And after almost eight years in power, the Karzai government was only one of several competing powers within the country.
Another assumption was that the Karzai government would be perceived as sufficiently legitimate to gain the loyalty of the population. Before the election, Karzai’s legitimacy faced two major problems: many Afghans felt his government represented and was imposed by foreign interests, and it was permeated by widespread, systematic corruption that severely undercut the government’s legitimacy even in those areas it controlled. After the 2009 elections it was clear that Karzai could never gain legitimacy. Associating themselves with an illegitimate government only discredits the Americans.
A third assumption was that ISAF (meaning, primarily, the United States) would provide the resources necessary to conduct a population-centric COIN campaign. But even with the infusion of seventeen thousand U.S. troops, ISAF had too few troops to meet the training program goal for the Afghan security forces and vastly too few to secure the population. The “civilian surge” simply did not occur, and there was no indication that it would.