There are moments that define a war.
Just such a one occurred on June 21, when Special Envoy Richard
Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry
helicoptered into Marjah for a photo op with the locals. It was to be a
capstone event, the fruit of a four-month counterinsurgency offensive by
Marines, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, and the
newly minted Afghan National Army (ANA) to drive the Taliban out of the
area and bring in good government.
As the chopper swung around to land, the Taliban opened fire, sending
journalists scrambling for cover and Marines into full combat mode.
According to Matthew Green of the Financial Times,
“The crackle of gunfire lasted about 20 minutes and continued in the
background as a state department official gave a presentation to Mr.
Holbrooke about U.S. and U.K. [United Kingdom] efforts to boost local
government and promote agriculture in the town.”
The U.S. officials were then bundled into armored cars and whisked
back to the helicopter. As the chopper took off, an enormous explosion
shook the town’s bazaar.
When it was launched in March, the Marjah operation was billed as a “
turning point” in the Afghan War,
an acid test for the doctrine of counterinsurgency, or “COIN,” a
carefully designed strategy to wrest a strategic area from insurgent
forces, in this case the Taliban, and win the “hearts and minds” of the
local people. In a sense Marjah has indeed defined COIN, just not quite
in the way its advocates had hoped for.
The Missing Cornerstone
In his bible for counterinsurgency, Field Manual 3-24, General David Petraeus argues,
“The cornerstone of any COIN effort is establishing security for the
civilian populace.” As one village elder who attended the Holbrooke
meeting — incognito for fear of being recognized by the Taliban — told Green, “There is no security in Marjah.”
Nor in much of the rest of the country. The latest United States assessment found only five out of 116 areas “secure,” and in 89 areas the government was “non-existent, dysfunctional or unproductive.”
That the war in Afghanistan is a failure will hardly come as news to
most people. Our NATO allies are preparing to abandon the endeavor — the
Dutch, Canadians and Poles have announced they are bailing — and the
British, who have the second largest contingent in Afghanistan, are
clamoring for peace talks. Opposition to the war in Britain is at 72
percent.
But there is a tendency to blame the growing debacle on conditions
peculiar to Afghanistan. There are certainly things about that country
that have stymied foreign invaders: It is landlocked, filled with
daunting terrain, and populated by people who don’t cotton to outsiders.
But it would be a serious error to attribute the current crisis to
Afghanistan’s well-earned reputation as the “graveyard of empires.”
A Failing Doctrine
The problem is not Afghanistan, but the entire concept of COIN, and
the debate around it is hardly academic. Counterinsurgency has seized
the high ground in the Pentagon and the halls of Washington, and there
are other places in the world where it is being deployed, from the
jungles of Columbia to the dry lands that border the Sahara. If the COIN
doctrine is not challenged, people in the United States may well find
themselves debating its merits in places like Somalia, Yemen, or
Mauritania.
“Counterinsurgency aims at reshaping a nation and its society over the long haul,” says military historian Frank Chadwick,
and emphasizes “infrastructure improvements, ground-level security, and
building a bond between the local population and the security forces.”
In theory, COIN sounds reasonable; in practice, it almost always
fails. Where it has succeeded — the Philippines, Malaya, Bolivia, Sri
Lanka, and the Boer War — the conditions were very special: island
nations cut off from outside support (the Philippines and Sri Lanka),
insurgencies that failed to develop a following (Bolivia) or were based
in a minority ethnic community (Malaya, the Boer War).
COIN is always presented as politically neutral, a series of tactics
aimed at winning hearts and minds. But in fact, COIN has always been
part of a strategy of domination by a nation(s) and/or socioeconomic
class.
The supposed threat of communism and its companion, domino theory,
sent soldiers to countries from Grenada to Lebanon, and turned the
Vietnamese civil war into a Cold War battleground. If we didn’t stop the
communists in Vietnam, went the argument, eventually the Reds would
storm the beaches at San Diego.
Replace communism with terrorism, and today’s rationales sound much
the same. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates described Afghanistan
as “the fountainhead of terrorism.” And when asked to explain why Germany was sending troops to Afghanistan, then-German Defense Minister Peter Strock argued
that Berlin’s security would be “defended in the Hindu Kush.” British
Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown routinely said that
confronting “terrorism” in Afghanistan would protect the home-front.
But, as counterterrorism expert Richard Barrett points out, the
Afghan Taliban have never been a threat to the West, and the idea that
fighting the Taliban would reduce the threat of terrorism is “
complete rubbish.”
In any case, the al-Qaeda operatives who pulled off the attack on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon got their training in Hamburg and
south Florida, not Tora Bora.
Hearts, Minds, and Strategic Interests
The United States has strategic interests in Central Asia and the
Middle East, and “terrorism” is a handy excuse to inject military power
into these two energy-rich regions of the world. Whoever holds the
energy high ground in the coming decades will exert enormous influence
on world politics.
No, it is not all about oil and gas, but a lot of it is.
Winning “hearts and minds” is just a tactic aimed at insuring our
paramount interests and the interests of the “friendly” governments that
we fight for. Be nice to the locals unless the locals decide that they
don’t much like long-term occupation, don’t trust their government, and
might have some ideas about how they should run their own affairs.
Then “hearts and minds” turns nasty. U.S. Special Operations Forces
carry out as many as five “kill and capture” raids a day in Afghanistan,
and have assassinated or jailed more than 500 Afghans who are alleged insurgents in the past few months. Thousands of others languish in prisons.
The core of COIN is coercion, whether it is carried out with a gun or
truckloads of money. If the majority of people accept coercion — and
the COIN supported government doesn’t highjack the trucks — then it may
work.
Then again, maybe not. Tufts University recently researched the
impact of COIN aid and found little evidence that such projects win
locals over. According to Tufts professor Andrew Wilder, “Many of the
Afghans interviewed for our study identified their corrupt and predatory government
as the most important cause of insecurity, and perceived international
aid security contracts as enriching a kleptocratic elite.”
This should hardly come as a surprise. Most regimes the United States
ends up supporting against insurgents are composed of a narrow class of
elites, who rule through military power and political monopoly. Our
backing of the El Salvador and Guatemalan governments during the 1980s
comes to mind. Both were essentially death squads with national anthems.
The United States doesn’t care if a government is authoritarian and
corrupt, or democratic — if it did, would countries like Egypt and
Honduras be recipients of U.S. aid, and would we be cuddling up with
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? The priority for the United States is whether
the local elites will serve Washington’s interests by giving it bases,
resources, or commercial access.
Afghanistan is no different. The government of Hamid Karzai is a kleptocracy with little support or presence outside Kabul.
In many ways, COIN is the most destructive and self-defeating
strategy a country can employ, and its toxicity is long-term. Take what
didn’t get reported in the recent firing of former Afghan War commander
General Stanley McChrystal.
COIN’s Long History
McChrystal cut his COIN teeth
running Special Operations death squads in Iraq, similar to the Vietnam
War’s Operation Phoenix, which killed upwards of 60,000 Viet Cong cadre
and eventually led to the Mai Lai massacre. The success of Phoenix is
best summed up by photos of desperate South Vietnamese soldiers clinging
to U.S. helicopter skids as the Americans scrambled to get out before
Saigon fell.
But COIN advocates read history selectively, and the loss in Vietnam
was soon blamed on backstabbing journalists and pot-smoking hippies. The
lessons were rewritten, the memories expunged, and the disasters
reinterpreted.
So COIN is back. And it is working no better than it did in the 1960s. Take the counterterrorism portion of the doctrine.
Over the past several years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been carrying out a sort of long-distance Phoenix program,
using armed drones to assassinate insurgent leaders in Pakistan. The
program has purportedly snuffed out about 150 such “leaders.” But it has
also killed
more than 1,000 civilians and inflamed not only the relatives of those
killed or wounded in the attacks, but Pakistanis in general. According
to an International Republican Institute poll, 80 percent of Pakistanis are now anti-American, and the killer drones are a major reason.
“Hearts and minds” soldiers like Petraeus don’t much like the drone
attacks, because they alienate Pakistan and dry up intelligence sources
in that country.
But McChrystal’s Phoenix program of killing Taliban “leaders” in Afghanistan is no better. As author and reporter Anne Jones notes, “Assassinating
the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers — those we
call the ‘bad Taliban’ — actually leaves behind leaderless,
undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns who are more interested in
living off the population we’re supposed to protect than being peeled
off into abject Afghan poverty.”
The “hearts and minds” crew have their own problems. McChrystal and
Petraeus have long stressed the counterproductive effect of using
airpower and artillery against insurgents, because it inevitably
produces civilian casualties. But this means that the war is now between
two groups of infantry, one of which knows the terrain, speaks the
local language, and can turn from a fighter to a farmer in a few
minutes.
As the recent Rolling Stone article
found, McChrystal was unpopular because his troops felt he put them in
harm’s way. Firefights that used to be ended quickly by airstrikes go on
for hours, and the Taliban are demonstrating that, given a level
playing field, they are skilled fighters.
In his recent testimony before Congress,
Petraeus said
he would “bring all assets to bear” to ensure the safety of the troops
and “re-examine” his ban on air power. But if he does, civilian
casualties will rise, increasing local anger and recruits for the
Taliban.
The Choice
The war in Afghanistan is first about U.S. interests in Central Asia.
It is also about honing a military for future irregular wars and
projecting NATO as a worldwide alliance. Once the United States endorsed
Karzai’s fraudulent election late last year, the Afghans knew it wasn’t
about democracy.
One of the key COIN ingredients is a reliable local army, but U.S.
soldiers no longer trust the ANA because they correctly suspect it is a
conduit to the Taliban. “American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for
their own security, they don’t tell their ANA colleagues when and where
they are going on patrol,” writes Jones. Somebody told those insurgents
that Holbrooke and Eikenberry were coming to Marjah.
Afghanistan is ethnically divided, desperately poor, and finishing
its fourth decade of war. Morale among U.S. troops is plummeting. A U.S. military intelligence officer told The Washington Times, “We are a battle-hardened force but eight years in Afghanistan has worn us down.” As one staff sergeant told Rolling Stone, “We’re losing this f---ing thing!”
The sergeant is right, though the Afghans are the big losers. But as
bad as Afghanistan is, things will be considerably worse if the U.S.
draws the conclusion that “special circumstances” in Afghanistan are to
blame for failure, not the nature of COIN itself.
There was a time when the old imperial powers and the United States
could wage war without having to bank their home-fires. No longer. The
United States has spent over $300 billion on the Afghan War, and is
currently shelling out about $7 billion a month. In the meantime, 31 states are sliding toward insolvency, and 15 million people have lost their jobs. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Huffington Post, “It just can’t be that we have a domestic agenda that is half the size of the defense budget.”
Empires can choose to step back with a certain grace, as the Dutch
did in Southeast Asia. Or they can stubbornly hang on, casting about for
the right military formula that will keep them on top. That fall is
considerably harder.
The choice is ours.
