Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  The assessment also assumed that the voters of ISAF nations, including the United States, would support this effort for the decade that historical examples suggest would be necessary for population-centric COIN to work. But Canada reaffirmed its intention to withdraw its 2,500 soldiers in 2011. The Dutch also stated they would withdraw. British public opinion was strongly against the war, and the validity and cost of the war was becoming an issue in the United States. To last for ten more years, the support would have to survive five more Congressional and two presidential elections.

  A final assumption was that failure to create a unified, centralized state in Afghanistan would result in it the country’s reverting to a major base for Al Qaeda. But there was widespread disagreement about whether this would happen. Al Qaeda was already ensconced in Pakistan. Bases in Afghanistan could be bombed, and Afghans themselves might not be so welcoming to Al Qaeda.

  If any of these five assumptions were not true or ceased to be true, then the Americans needed to rethink their strategy accordingly. This did not mean an immediate withdrawal, which could leave a vacuum that might make things even worse, but it required figuring out how to achieve the primary strategic ends in ways that could be supported by the means the Americans and their ISAF allies were willing to provide.

  The underlying assumptions of the invasion of Iraq were that Iraqis would greet the Americans with flowers, that the Iraqi institutions would remain functioning with the leadership merely replaced, that the war would pay for itself, and that fewer troops would be needed to secure the country than were needed to invade it. All these assumptions proved wrong, and the result was a catastrophic setback for the United States—not to mention the further destruction of Iraq and the creation of Al Qaeda where it previously had not existed.

  Assuming that Al Qaeda would set up bases in Afghanistan was like assuming Saddam would give his imaginary WMDs to Al Qaeda. It assumed that the Taliban were irrational and unaware of their interests. Their alliance with Al Qaeda was a result of common interests, but the Taliban were not interested in global jihad (though the longer the Americans are in Afghanistan, the stronger the alliance will become). Even Pashtuns who supported the Taliban were opposed to Al Qaeda attacks. And most Afghans disliked the Arab extremist volunteers.

  For the first time in its history, the U.S. army had created a new category of warfare: “stability operations” were now given the same importance as offensive and defensive operations. Despite this the COIN community felt like insurgents in their own establishment, combating the forces of “Big Army.” Many of the COIN pioneers in Iraq were very influential in Washington. But opponents feared that this focus on irregular warfare and low-intensity warfare was weakening the U.S. military. To bolster their case, the COIN critics pointed to the Israeli military, which after years of being bogged down as an occupying army was defeated by Hizballah in 2006.

  Some see Iraq as a victory that vindicated COIN and showed just how much the U.S. military can do, while others saw Iraq as a catastrophe demonstrating the limits of U.S. military power. If the U.S. military had learned lessons from classic imperialist counterinsurgencies such as the French campaign in Algeria, did that make the COIN doctrine any less imperialist? Of course, the most important questions were, Should the United States be involved in any of this? Should it act as an imperial power? Should the U.S. Army be doing stability operations in the first place? But these were questions for the politicians, not the military.

  In some ways COIN was a rejection of the neoconservative use of military power as the main tool of U.S. foreign policy, since COIN recognized that military force cannot solve conflicts alone. It was tempting to welcome the new doctrine, because tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians had been killed as a result of the U.S. military not knowing how to operate in complex environments where “the terrain is the people.” Just as the neoconservatives had taken over the Pentagon during the Bush administration, so it seemed that the proponents of counterinsurgency, former dissidents within the military, now held key positions and enjoyed a preponderance of influence over the Obama administration. Many were veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The lessons they learned from Iraq and Afghanistan were less about questions over strategy (such as whether to invade a country) and more about the practice. They criticized as counterproductive the overwhelming blunt force of the U.S. military, and maintained that repeated assassinations of senior insurgent leaders were not effective. They urged all the other civilian agencies of the U.S. government to contribute to the effort to win the support of the population and separate them from the insurgents. The best way to do this was to learn what people’s grievances were and respond to them. Chief among these needs was the provision of security. Another key element in winning a counterinsurgency war was the creation of an effective local security force. The COIN proponents urged a huge expansion of the Afghan security forces and the creation of many more military advisers to train the Afghan security forces.

  COIN advocates fought such a determined and near fanatical battle to gain influence over a calcified military establishment that they started believing in themselves a bit too much. Even if you implement a perfect COIN campaign, you can still fail to achieve your goals. President Obama’s new approach to Afghanistan was drafted by these counterinsurgency theorists. The idea was to get troops to where the population was, to deny the insurgents access to the population while increasing the number of aid workers and diplomats in the country who could improve governance. The focus would be on local leaders instead of the corrupt and incompetent central government in Kabul.

  For liberals these COINdinistas, as they call themselves, might seem like kindred spirits. They emphasize nonlethal means, humanitarian aid, development work, making peace with enemies instead of just killing them, and protecting the civilian population. But the end result was still a foreign military occupation. Sometimes the very locals the Americans were promoting were the ones oppressing the population. Other times the Americans harmed the population even while trying to help. The neoconservatives also co-opted COIN. Neocons didn’t care what it took; they just wanted an American combat presence on the ground. Though they preferred an enemy-centered presence, population-centric COIN was the best way to repackage and sell their goals. For liberal interventionists who think they can re-engineer societies—those who supported the U.S. interventions in the Balkans and elsewhere in the 1990s, some of whom supported the invasion of Iraq—COIN provides the perfect template, clearing and holding thousands of villages in the middle of nowhere, one at a time, on the road to civilization.

  In 2005 the respected COIN theorist and practitioner Kalev Sepp—a former Special Forces officer and deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations capabilities—wrote a seminal article, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” in Military Review. In the article Sepp claimed that a country’s political leaders (and not the military) must direct the struggle to win the allegiance of the people, that the “security of the people must be assured along with food, water, shelter, health care, and a means of living. These are human rights, along with freedom of worship, access to education, and equal rights for women. The failure of counterinsurgencies and the root cause of the insurgencies themselves can often be traced to government disregard of these basic rights.”

  In addition, he noted, “Intelligence operations that help detect terrorist insurgents for arrest and prosecution are the single most important practice to protect a population from threats to its security. Honest, trained, robust police forces responsible for security can gather intelligence at the community level. Historically, robustness in wartime requires a ratio of 20 police and auxiliaries for each 1,000 civilians. In turn, an incorrupt, functioning judiciary must support the police.”

  On each of Sepp’s criteria Afghanistan has been a study in abject failure. The civilian Afghan government is insignificant; it is the American military that is leading the war effort. The Afghan government does not provide any ser
vices or protect rights. Moreover, the U.S. military regularly kills civilians with impunity, arresting many more and holding them without trial. The Taliban have not been penetrated. There is no honest or well-trained police force, and the American-led coalition will never come near to the ratio that Sepp calls for.

  In the article Sepp also called for population control measures, but there are too few troops to control the majority of the Afghan population, who live in remote rural areas. He called on counterinsurgents to “convince insurgents they can best meet their personal interests and avoid the risk of imprisonment or death by reintegrating themselves into the population through amnesty, rehabilitation, or by simply not fighting.” This has been a total failure in Afghanistan. And why would the Taliban, who have all the momentum and are winning, contemplate an amnesty or rehabilitation program?

  Ironically, what Sepp describes as the American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet one in Afghanistan, in which military staff rather than civil governments guided operations, resembles Afghanistan under American occupation today. “Indigenous regular armies, although fighting in their own country and more numerous than foreign forces, were subordinate to them. Conventional forces trained indigenous units in their image—with historically poor results. Special operations forces committed most of their units to raids and reconnaissance missions, with successful but narrow results. The Americans further marginalized their Special Forces by economy-of-force assignments to sparsely populated hinterlands. Later, Spetznaziki [Russian Special Forces] roamed the Afghan mountains at will but with little effect. . . . The Soviet command in Afghanistan was unified but wholly militarized, and the Afghan government they established was perfunctory.”

  COIN was a massive endeavor, I was told by retired Col. Pat Lang, who had conducted COIN operations in Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere. There were insufficient resources committed to doing it in Afghanistan, but if the Americans didn’t plan on owning Afghanistan, he argued, why waste time on it? It was worth the expenditure of resources only if you were the local government seeking to establish authority, or an imperialist power that wanted to hang around for a while. There were thirty million people in Afghanistan, and they were widely dispersed in small towns. “You have to provide security for the whole country,” he said, “because if you move around they just move in behind you and undo what you did. So you need to have effective security and a massive multifaceted development organization that covers the whole place. COIN advisers have to stay in place all the time; they can’t commute to work. If you’re going to do COIN, it really amounts to nation building, and troops are there to provide protection for the nation builders. Afghanistan doesn’t matter. The Taliban is not part of the worldwide jihadi community at war with U.S. We need to disaggregate Taliban from Al Qaeda. The idea that Al Qaeda is an existential threat to the U.S., it’s so absurd that you don’t know how to deal with it.”

  Ariel David Adesnik, a defense analyst who works as a consultant for the U.S. government, has been critical of attempts to turn COIN into a science. “One of the hardest parts of COIN operations is measuring progress,” he says. “There is a strong temptation to measure progress with statistics, since numerical data imply a measure of objectivity. The counterinsurgency manual says you need twenty pairs of boots on the ground for every thousand inhabitants in the area of operations. This ratio has become an article of faith across the political spectrum. Yet the twenty-per-thousand rule is little more than a plausible guess based on a handful of historical examples, such as the British operations in Malaya and Northern Ireland. No one is exactly sure how to count either soldiers or inhabitants. Does a logistics officer at headquarters count the same as an infantryman on patrol? Does a rookie Afghan cop count the same as a battle-hardened Marine? What about contractors?

  “The population isn’t much easier to count. The population of an Iraqi or Afghan district is often a matter of guesswork. Should peaceful districts be included in the area of operations, or only those with a certain amount of violence? If you change the rules for counting, the ratio of troops to inhabitants can go up or down by a factor of two, three, or more. Using historical data, my research team tried to figure out the actual ratios employed in around forty COIN operations over the past sixty-five years. We found a rough correlation between higher ratios and better outcomes, especially at ratios of thirty to fifty troops per thousand inhabitants. Other researchers found no correlation at all.”

  In theory, success to McChrystal would result in a handover to the Afghan security forces. But there weren’t enough of them, they were hopelessly incompetent or corrupt, and the few good ones were too often killed. The Provincial Reserve police were not paid until they completed their training and took a urine test for drugs. Then they got their back pay. But out of the eighty men scheduled to take the test in July 2009, only fifty-three showed up, some refused to take it, and twenty tested positive. Meanwhile, of twenty-five new police recruits in Helmand, twenty tested positive for marijuana, opium, or both. An Air Force major conducting drug tests on police throughout the country told me that in some districts 60 percent of the police force tested positive. The south was the worst. Some police had tried to give him water instead of urine. Sergeant Kilaki thought the Provincial Reserve needed more training in tactics, techniques, and procedures as well as scenarios. “It sounded like they just dragged the eight-week curriculum to fourteen weeks,” Captain Westby said.

  The Taliban Is Everywhere

  In July 2009 a police checkpoint on Highway 601 had observed the Taliban destroying the road and constructing a four-foot barrier on it. Team Prowler and the Provincial Reserve went back on the road and clashed with twelve to fifteen Taliban, killing at least one. The team had no engineer assets, so they couldn’t take down the barrier. The Taliban cleverly diverted traffic through the village to shake people down and control who passed. Colonel Shirzad sent the Provincial Reserve, with Lieutenant Farid in command, without their American mentors to Highway 601.

  Lieutenant Farid’s Ford Ranger drove over an IED or was hit by an RPG and was blown to pieces. Farid was killed along with two other cops. Five PR men were killed and five wounded in action in seven days. “601 is the most insecure road in Afghanistan,” said Sergeant First Class Clark. “There’s nothing but Taliban out there. That road is the lifeline to Lashkar Gah. We’re being asked to deal with it with fifty-five men, and we lost five last night and five in the last fight.” Team Prowler was supposed to have eighty police with them, but the British had taken some for themselves. There weren’t enough police to go around.

  I had met Lieutenant Farid when I first arrived in Lashkar Gah. I had hoped to interview him at length. He was jovial and chubby and had a short beard, and he looked older than his twenty-eight years. Farid was Colonel Shirzad’s cousin from Helmand. Before he set off on his mission, his kids came to see him at the base. He was good-humored and an advocate for his men, apparently. At first he had a hard time delegating responsibility. NCOs were weak in the Afghan security forces, so he was a dominant figure and his loss was even bigger. The Americans took Farid’s loss heavily. “He was going to be a good commander,” said Westby. “It’s frustrating.” Staff Sergeant Enriquez had worked with Farid for seven months. “He’s one of the only noncorrupt officers there were,” he said. “I was pissed. He worked his ass off for his men. It felt like losing one of our own.”

  “We’re asking a lot from these men,” Westby said worriedly about the police. Westby was also frustrated by the British army, who controlled security in the Helmand province and who he had to report to, as well as his American masters in Kandahar. “The British attitude is ‘Go now, get your men out there and go.’ These are cops, not soldiers, but we’re treating them like soldiers.” Clark sympathized with them too. “We come out here for a year and we’re done. These ANP come out here until they get killed.”

  Despite the loss, the police were told to go on a mission the next night by the British to relieve four ch
eckpoints of highway police. The highway police were supposed to have been disbanded because they were committing highway robbery, but they still existed. The police would set up three checkpoints while the highway patrolmen were sent to training. “These ANP are mentored by the British,” I was told, “even the British say they’re shit.” One American added, “But all the cops mentored by the British are shit.”

  The British warned Team Prowler that Highway 601 was blown in three places and that there were IEDs all over, on and off the road. I wondered why eight thousand British soldiers in Helmand had such difficulty controlling one fifty-kilometer stretch of road. “601 is impassable,” a British officer had admitted to Clark. Many officers I spoke to complained about how imperious the British were to them and the Afghans.

  The British were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Jasper de Quincy Adams, who worked closely with Colonel Shirzad. The mission was to clear Popalzai, a Taliban-dominated village along the highway. Prowler and the police would take one side, while the British and the Afghan army would take the other side and deny the Taliban an escape route. “There’s nobody good left in Balochan and Popalzai,” Dyer told me. “They sent all the women and children away. There’s nobody good left. They’re really bad.” The police also said there was nobody good left in those towns. The Americans told me how odd it was that they never received a brief on the rules of engagement, which varied depending on what province they were in. It was as if there were no rules for Helmand. One American called it “an open-fire zone.”

  Clark was unhappy that Team Prowler was going in their more vulnerable Humvees and not in the Cougars, larger vehicles suspended higher above the ground. But the Humvees were necessary if they went off-road in villages. “We’re not a fuckin’ route clearance package,” said Dyer. “Who are we gonna send out to blow ’em?” “We can say we’re not going,” Westby said with frustration. But even if he didn’t go, his police would, and it was Prowler’s job as the mentor team to go with them. “I’m pissed at [Lieutenant Colonel] Jasper too,” he said. “I see people getting hurt or killed if we do route clearance with the police,” Dyer said. “The police should be given assets. If you’re not going to give us the assets, don’t fucking ask us to do it.”