Fighting and Losing: Thinking About Afghanistan

 20 years after the US and then its allies got into Afghanistan, they are getting out, and it may be that the Taliban will return to power.  Maybe the government of Afghanistan will hold on, but much of the terrain over which NATO and its partners fought is falling into Taliban hands.  This week, some of the places where Canadians died have fallen.  What to make of it?  

Lt. General Eyre, the Acting Chief of Defence Staff had a very good statement:

The fall of Panjwai, emblematic of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, has been painful for many of us. For current and former CAF members and your families, here are my thoughts. pic.twitter.com/Nw9T4seiOo

— Lieutenant-General / Lieutenant-général Wayne Eyre (@CDS_Canada_CEMD) July 13, 2021

My perspective, of course, is very different as I only spent a week in Afghanistan, and I didn't lose friends in battle.  The starting point, I guess, is thinking about what the troops and civilians were doing there.  In my book, I argue that the primary objective was to support an ally that had been attacked, that Canadians had no intrinsic interests in Afghanistan, but joined the effort to support the US and to support NATO.  And in that effort, Canadians, in and out of uniform, were mostly successful for the time they were there.  Canada left Kandahar before its allies left other combat zones, but while it was there, the CAF was more flexible and more helpful to the allied cause than almost any other ally.  And Canadians paid a higher price as a result.  

While the Canadians were in Kandahar, conditions improved, but there was a limit to what kind of sustainable impact they could make.  As Eyre says in his note, the job of the foreign militaries was to create the space for the political stuff.  No matter the Kandahar Action Plan or the Helmand Plan or the Uruzguan Plan and on and on, the outsiders simply could not change the politics of the place.  Ok, they could affect it, and did so often quite badly as the constitution was a poor fit for the place and as the outside forces often got played by the Afghans, with our "allies" providing tips that often were aimed at hurting their rivals for land, drugs, and power.  As I keep saying, third party counter-insurgencies are third-party for a reason--that the government of the place is not up to the task and that becomes pretty hard to fix.  

Was defeat inevitable?  I am still not sure as there were so many big mistakes early--the US going too light, becoming too quickly distracted by Iraq, putting into place a crappy constitution, and on and on.  But wars get lost--as far as I can tell, no country is undefeated.  How one grapples with that reveals as much or more character than the winning or losing.   The old saying is that victory has many parents but defeat is an orphan.  Everyone will try to disown this war, but we can look at the conflict and figure out what are the limits of power, what are the mistakes that we ought to avoid in the future, and what we do really well.  Trying to forget about this war and moving on, back to Great Power Competition, will only ensure that we are poorly prepared the next time.  The lessons of Vietnam came late to the battlefields of the Mideast, the lessons of Afghanistan may come too late down the road.

The focus now should be on helping those who helped us--the interpreters, the drivers, and the others who are at greatest risk of retaliation.  Of course, this will be one last bit of damage we do as we will be taking from Afghanistan some of the folks who might best contribute.  But our responsibility is to those individuals who we made promises to, more so than the long-term prospects of the place.  With all things in Afghanistan and in counter-insurgency, the choices are between bad and worse.   

It is natural to be angry and sad. The days ahead are going to be full of bad news.  In terms of the big Biden decision, I am not sure how this would be much different if it happened next year or the year after.  Sticking around would have made much more sense if there was evidence that there was progress being made, that the outcome would be different with a bit more time and investment.  I don't think Trump was wrong about wanting to get out of all of these wars--just about how to do it.  Nobody wants to lose a war on their watch, but deferring so that someone else can lose it on theirs is quite problematic.

There is much more to stay about all of this, so I will probably come back to it eventually.  Right now, I am just sad for the Afghans who were let down by their own leadership and by the outsiders. 

Let's Blame Pakistan!

So easy and so much fun to blame Pakistan.  Ptthththt!  I was at an Atlantic Council of Canada event today on Afghanistan, where I presented the lessons for NATO (as derived from the Dave and Steve opus).  Several of the speakers, including the Afghans as well as Chris Alexander, the former ambassador/UN special rep and now Conservative Minister, directed most of their fire towards Pakistan.

I get it and concur that Pakistan easily wins the Award for Worst Ally despite Israel's best efforts to get the US into yet another Mideast war.  However, it is too easy to blame Pakistan for all of Afghanistan's troubles.  Not all of the insurgents are born and bred in Pakistan.  Many of the factors undermining the counter-insurgency campaign had to do with things other than the sanctuary on the other side of the board and the ISI's support for the Taliban and other folks.  Some of these would be the constant changes in US/NATO strategy, under-resourcing the war, lack of coordination among the outsiders, Karzai, corruption, Karzai, and so on. 

The question I did not get to ask (except on twitter) was this: will the next President of Afghanistan own the war?  The current one sure as hell did not/has not.  Much of the time, especially since the election of 2009 but even before, Karzai ran against the international community and the war in his country.  It is easy to argue that he had to do this to win popular support, but I say feh to that.  Feh. Given the powers he had at his command--to appoint/replace officials throughout the country all the way down to the district level, the flow of money through and around the government, and so on--Karzai could have tried to defend the war and stand beside the international community.  That would have been brave, perhaps, but the international community for all its faults desperately needed a domestic ally to partner with in order to build support for the government of Afghanistan.  And we lacked that partner. 

Sure, we (the US) chose him, so the fault lies with the international community (especially the US).  But we cannot and should not absolve anyone who had responsibility.  NATO could have performed better. The US could have done far better (especially if it had not been distracted by Iraq).  Pakistan could have done better, or at least, could have been less awful.  And the government of Afghanistan, especially Karzai, could have done far better.  The sad news is that the people of Afghanistan will pay the price for the mistakes of the aforementioned actors.  How much of a price?  We do not know yet because we don't know what 2015 will look like, even as there is progress on a bilateral deal to keep the US (and thus other folks) in the country for a while longer.

Little America, Belatedly Considered

Rajiv Chandrasekaren's Little America got a heap of press this summer and deservedly so.  The author does an amazing job of traveling through some of the nastiest parts of Afghanistan and is able to discuss a lot of the key issues in play.  It reveals quite a bit about how the US dysfunctions when it intervenes.  I found it wanting, however for a variety of reasons, but that could be my bias.

That is, I loved his first book, Imperial Life in an Emerald City, because it was so convincing and horrifying about how a bunch of amateurs and hacks were given the keys to Iraq and screwed it up.  But I hated the Bush Administration and its chosen war in Iraq with a passion.  So, RC's first book played well to me.  The second book, on Afghanistan, did not hit me in such a favorable mood.  I didn't want to hear that the Obama folks screwed up Afghanistan, which they most certainly did.  So perhaps my reactions are a bit biased.  So, I am making clear here and now that my read of this book is coming from a different perspective.  It is also the case that I know a bit more about Afghanistan than Iraq (my ten days there equals expertise, right?  Oh no?  Never mind), having researched the NATO effort for the past five years or so. 

Anyhow, the book shows that there were heaps of smart people working in difficult areas on difficult problems (which makes the Obama administration less stupid than the Bush folks).  However, egos seemed to drive some things, like the conflicts between Richard Holbrooke and every person not named Hilary Clinton. RC tends to assert that Holbrooke might have been successful if not for the opposition from the rest of the government.  I find this to be not particularly credible.  Would the Taliban have agreed to a settlement in 2009 if the US had supported Holbrooke's efforts? No evidence for that.  Would the Taliban have kept its word?  Lots evidence against that.  Would Karzai have supported a real agreement that would have cost him some power?  Lots of evidence against that.  So, yes, Holbrooke faced heaps of in-fighting at home, but would it have made a difference if he was Secretary of State and had his way?  Almost certainly not.

The book does a great job of showing the Marines in Helmand and how they went about their business.  This is a central point to the book-- that the first increase in troops that Obama sent (pre-surge surge) were wasted in the poppy fields of Helmand rather than pop-centric Kandahar.  This is absolutely right, although his explanation sounds just wrong to me.  That is, the Marines went to Helmand and not Kandahar for two reassons RC avers: the Marines do not play well with others so they wanted their own hunk of territory, and the US was not willing to bruise Canadian feelings by asking them to take a smaller role in what had become the Canadian zone of Afghanistan.  I buy the first part somewhat (although civilian control the military should mean that the troops go where the strategy requires--more on that below).

The second is just silly.  It is clear that RC either did not talk to any Canadians or does not remember what they might have said.  The story takes place in 2009, but in 2008, Canada went through a process to extend the mission to 2011--the Manley Panel--where more troops from elsewhere were an explicit condition for extension.  Yes, getting more help than just a battalion (which is what the Canadians initially got from the US) would have probably meant giving up the lead in Kandahar (thanks to Andrew Exum for pointing this out to me).  And???  By 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was already letting go of Afghanistan and looking to get out.  The Canadian Forces might have been mildly upset at having to take a supporting position to the US's lead, but that happened in 2010-2011 anyway.  With more Americans in Kandahar, the flow of body bags back to Canada slowed down quite significant.  Finally, the Canadian Forces had the ability to have a lasting effect because they could stick around in the same spot rather than just running in and out when the alarm bell rang.

So, RC bought whatever the American general might have reported to him in this instance, but RC should have asked some Canadians (he did hang out with some of the CA diplomats so he could have asked).  If the US officers really believed this, then I am shocked that the system broken down--that if they had staffed the deployment decision properly, a Joint Staff officer (plus State Dept folks) would have contacted the Defense Attache in the US Embassy in Ottawa and been able to tell the folks planning the surge that the Canadians would not have minded a smaller role in Kandahar in 2009/2010 especially since that is what they had in late 2010 and thru the end of the mission.  In sum, I agree that sending the Marines to Helmand made little sense in pop-centric strategy and ran against Obama's intent, but I don't buy the "we didn't want to upset the Canadians" explanation.  I do buy the bureaucratic politics account--that the Marines wanted to control the Marines and did not want to work in a multilateral headquarters with other folks ordering them around.  But that raises other questions I get to at the conclusion of this already massive post.

The book does a nice job of showing how different American commanders put their own imprint on the mission, so policy/strategy varied from spot to spot and changing with every rotation.  The US, as a big machine, does not have everyone playing from the same playbook.  But it is not sure how much that matters, as RC does a great job of showing that the Marines in one spot, an Army unit more versed in COIN in a second, and an Army unit with little patience with COIN in a third, more or less got the same kinds of outcomes--lousy ones.  That they could with enough force and persistence create spots of order, but none of it was lasting because the US could not deliver the economic/governance stuff particularly since the Afghan government had its own agendas.

Ah, there is the rub.  The Afghans have agency (the theme of the Spew today).  The US could not get Karzai to focus on building institutions (such as respecting electoral ones), that accountability had little to do with good governance by district and provincial governors, and that the Afghans could reasonably consider the foreigners to be temporary, whether Obama pledged 2011/2014 or not.  Indeed, that is a huge contradiction in this and many other works on Afghanistan--arguing that the locals had limited patience for foreigners hanging around but also criticized the clearly temporary nature of the mission.

RC argues at the end that the US should not have gone big and short but kept smaller but remained longer.  First, this ignores much of the text which shows that the US was able to bring bits of order to where it deployed because it was big enough to have troops on every block.  I had an instructive conversation the other night with a Canadian Foreign Affairs person who served in Kandahar when the Americans surged.  How the number of troops changed the game since you had heaps and heaps of intel coming in all the time and heaps of deterrence as well.  But doing that for a long time was not sustainable.

Second, Obama in 2009 was not in a great position to say no more troops when the military asked for it.  The US had not yet tried doing COIN right in Afghanistan with anything close to sufficient troops, and the military advocated reinforcements.  It was not politically possible to bail on Afghanistan in 2009.  I think only by trying the military's way at first did Obama then have the ability to begin the path to leaving.  Yes, he could have been super-brave by pulling out in 2009 despite what the Generals were advocating, but that (a) might have guaranteed a one term presidency; (b) ignores his hands were full with the economy; (c) given the Afghans not enough prep for the post-2014 civil war.  It is easy to say now no surge at all, but Obama had few decent alternatives in 2009.

I think there is a larger point in this book that RC glosses over: there was some serious civ-mil relations problems.  There is a line in the book about how the military ignored the President's memo about focusing on the population and that this effort was not to be full out COIN but only focused in certain areas.  That sending the Marines to Helmand was not the intent of the President.  Where was Robert Gates on this?  The Secretary of Defense is responsible for making sure the military does what the President wants.  Where was Mullen on this?  The Chairman does not have the ability to order troops around, but he was watching what was going on, and could have notified the President and the SecDef that the troops were not going to where they were supposed to be going.  That the chain of command for the Marines went from Helmand to the US Marines stateside and not through ISAF is just awful, awful, awful from the standpoint of unity of command.  Who let this happen?  Why was CENTCOM (Petraeus) letting this happen?  Why was Mullen as Chairman not pushing back at the Commandant of the Marines?

So, if you are interested in Afghanistan and what went wrong there, read this book (and then read my book with David Auerswald whenever it comes out).  It is well-written, fascinating and compelling (I hope the Steve and Dave book is half as well-written and compelling).  RC sets expectations wrong in a few places (Taliban willing to bargain in 2009?) so that the story is just a bit off, but it does show that the bureaucratic dynamics at home did the Americans (and Canadians and Dutch and Danes and Brits and AFGHANS) few favors.  I do think there is heaps of blame to go around as long as one remembers a few things: that there were no good policy choices available then (or now, really); that 2009 was already fairly late in this game; that the Afghans and Pakistanis (and other neighbors) have a big role here; and that Afghanistan is a really hard place to operate given the terrain, the decades of violence and the incredibly low starting point for any development effort.

Yes, the US could have done this better, but I don't think it would have made much of a difference.  My ambivalence in 2009 during the surge decision (see here for representative post) remains.  How is yours?

Hardly Academic? Hardly!

A very good piece in the NYT today about the debate within West Point about the future of counter-insurgency and the US military.  The article covers the views of both COIN-istas and COIN haters.  This is progress.  Why? Because ten years ago, there was little debate about COIN at all.  Now, you have two sides engaged in an argument, which is one of the best things that can happen to the folks going through West Point--to be exposed to this argument.  They don't have be a COIN fan or foe, but to see that sharp minds can disagree is a valuable thing.  When these cadets some day get placed into harm's way or are in the chain of command, they will perhaps be more open to different points of view.

One of the critical problems in the US military has been the desire to forget unfortunate pasts and avoid skill sets that might end up being used.  After Vietnam, COIN was put away and not really considered except by some mavericks like Petraeus.  My hope is that this history is not repeated.  The reality is that politicians will put troops into situations that require many of the skills and tactics that the Army learned at great cost the past ten years, whether the military wants to do such stuff or not.  Better to remember these lessons with a slightly higher risk of having to use them than to forget and then have to re-learn while under fire.

War, as Clausewitz said, is politics by other means.  COIN doctrine takes that to heart.  US grand strategy may be better served by avoiding fighting any insurgents, but as long as the US remains the predominant conventional power, the opponents of the US will mostly try to fight via insurgency.  Well, the smart ones, anyway.  Shouldn't we be prepared for that reality?

Metrics of Confusion

A regular theme here has been the difficult of measuring progress especially in counter-insurgency.  So, my curiosity was peaked by this latest "progress" report on Afghanistan.  Mostly, it shows less violence compared to previous year.  That sounds good and is probably good. But given that last year was a peak year, perhaps getting back to 2009 levels is not that much progress?

Joshua Foust points out on twitter that some of the charts only focus on exploded IEDs but not IED attempts. I ruthlessly speculated and then suggested that finding the unexploded kind might be the result of increased tips from the Afghans, which would, indeed, be a sign of progress.  I take it that an Afghan giving NATO intel help is essentially a bet--that they are betting on the government and ISAF and not on the Taliban.  So, the more bets on ISAF, the better, right?  But then Erin Simpson dashed my hopes and dreams with the news that ISAF does not track tips well. 

So, perhaps the Taliban are increasingly incompetent?  That they put out roadside bombs in ways that are less hidden now?  Maybe this is a result of all of the road-building ISAF has done (harder to put IEDs under asphalt). 

All we can tell is that there are some trends, but what they mean?  I don't know.  I do know that the ISAF charts on violence certainly don't jibe with the events of the past year--assassinations of key figures in Southern Afghanistan, attacks as spectacle in Kabul (thinking of spectacular in a limited sense of the world), increased rate of Afghan security folks shooting at ISAF folks, etc.

Thus, violence may be declining in some measureable ways--maybe--but the politics is more focused on the appearance of violence, so ISAF's assertions with these figures just seem like lies even if they are not.  Things seem to be getting worse, even if the numbers suggest otherwise.  This can be purely a problem of perceptions defeating reality, of low expectations (failed attacks don't count, as JF suggested), or that we still are focused on the wrong numbers.  Perhaps, to use the baseball stat-head analogy, we are focused on batting averages and not on-base percentage (I listened to the Bill James appearance on the Bill Simmons podcast this week).

As always with Afghanistan, the more you know, the more confused you are.

Amnesia Worked So Well The Last Time

Let's forget what we learned about counter-insurgency again.  Starbuck at Wings over Iraq puts out quite well that the US military tried to avoid doing anything COIN-like after the bad experience in Vietnam.  They tried hard to forget the lessons and present politicians with reduced options to avoid another counter-insurgency campaign.  Gen. Petraeus was so distinct (a real maverick as opposed to pols posing as such) precisely because he looked back and sought to learn the lessons of Vietnam and other such campaigns.

Why?  Because he was smart enough to realize that the politicians would send troops into such situations, prepared or not.  So, better to be prepared, right? One of the themes of this week in various blogs and tweets has been: insurgency has been the most frequent form of warfare over the past decades/century.  Part of the recent insurgency "fad" (and I use "" sarcastically because this is one fad that is not going out of style soon) is precisely because the US and its allies have a commanding advantage in conventional warfare.  The two Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003, the bombing campaigns of Kosovo and Libya, and even Operation Medusa in 2006 (where the Canadians faced entrenched Taliban who did not run--but died instead) serve to remind intelligent opponents that conventional confrontations are to be avoided.

Which ones that the US military (and others) have two choices: cede all military confrontations to the adversaries that chose not to stand and fight or learn how to do COIN as one of many techniques in one's repertoire.  The former seems to be an unwise choice.  Yes, COIN is hard, especially with dysfunctional allies, but the alternative really is to surrender anytime an opponent is smart enough to choose insurgency as their main approach.

I have speculated that one lesson from Afghanistan is that NATO countries will avoid alliance warfare due to problems revealed by the the caveats and other challenges (analyzed in an amazing book coming to a bookstore near year eventually) of multilateral military operations.  But the reality is that politicians will want to use force when they face various pressures and they will often have a short memory about previous efforts.

So, the US Army can forget what it has learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they will just have to learn again and again.  While COIN may be losing popularity, the lessons were learned the hard way--through the lives of Americans and Afghans and Iraqis (and our allies as well).  It would be nice if we don't have to pay such a high price again to re-learn.

How Afghanistan is Like Vietnam

I hate it when Afghanistan gets compared to Vietnam because we have different lessons we can learn from the one to be applied to the other, but there are many differences that often get glossed over.   But, it is my blog, so I can break my rules.

I was reading Tom Ricks's blog, and he had a guest poster, Lewis Sorley, summarizing the reasons why General Westmoreland "lost Vietnam."  His number 1:

And the number one reason why Westmoreland lost the war in Vietnam: With his unavailing approach to conduct of the war he squandered four years of support by much of the American people, the Congress, and even the media.

Yep, while there are many reasons why the US and NATO may fail in Vietnam, wasting time--2002-2008/9--is a key part of the story.  I absolutely hate it (as frequent readers of this blog know all too well) when people say: we have been doing this (whatever this is) for ten years.  No, NATO/US have only been doing COIN seriously--for a couple of years.  And the conventional wisdom is that it takes ten or more years to do.  So, we wasted about half of the bare minimum time needed, and now the once patient publics are not patient anymore.  2014 is around the corner.  So, seeing this assessment of Vietnam reminds me that there are some general (pardon the pun) dynamics of fighting these kinds of wars, and wasting time seems to be one of them.

Pondering Failure in Afghanistan

Colonel Gian Gentle, a confirmed counterinsurgency [COIN] skeptic, raises questions for Col. Paul Yingling about the role of generals as COIN seems to be falling short in Afghanistan.  Yingling made much noise in 2007 by attacking American generals for poor leadership in 2007, as the US was losing in Iraq at the time.  Gentle is essentially pushing Yingling either to call Petraeus a bad general now (since Afghanistan is not such a happy place) or retract his earlier criticisms.

While this is an argument between two Colonels, I am stepping in because I received a similar question last week at a presentation in Los Angeles (at USC) on the current book project: did our work on caveats and other means by which countries influence how their troops are used in alliance operations explain mission failure on Afghanistan?

The answer to my question is also partly an answer to Gentle's question.  That is, (a) not so clear the mission has failed; (b) failure is over-determined.  First, there are lots of indicators that seem to suggest that the Taliban momentum of 2008-09 has been broken, even as violence continues.  NATO and the US may not be clearly winning (whatever that means, see below) but we are not so clearly losing as we were a few years ago.

Second, COIN and good generalship can only do so much.  Likewise, caveats and other overly blunt means to control troops in a multilateral damage can have an impact, but other stuff matters as well.  What matters?  I have long talked about the three Ps of Afghanistan: poppies, Pakistan, President Karzai.  Each one makes COIN very, very hard.  Poppies give the insurgents access to cash and facilitates corruption of police, courts, army, etc, which need to be the backbone of the COIN effort.  Pakistan serves as a sanctuary (although not from drones), making "defeat" of the Taliban very hard since they can rest, recover and re-arm there.  Plus Pakistan may just be doing more than providing space for these guys.  Karzai presents the third challenge to the NATO/US effort, as the military side of COIN is aimed at providing a safer environment so that the government can provide services and gain the confidence of the people.  Karzai has been focused on maintaining his grip on power, at the expense of building institutions and putting competent people into power. Generals McChrystal, Petraeus, and Allen had/have finite ability to get Afghanistan to do what is necessary to make progress.

The key difference between these generals running the Afghanistan war and the ones who ran the Iraq war before 2007 is that the current folks have proven adaptable to the circumstances.  While the newer folks may have tried to apply an Iraq template to Afghanistan and that may not be the best fit, they at least have a better grasp of the multi-dimensionality of the conflict.  The American generals in the first four years of the Iraq war had very little clue about how to prepare for the conflict, where to focus the efforts, and how to move from conventional war to counter-insurgency.  Franks was one of the worst generals in recent memory, Abizaid recognized the realities (I think) but could not get those under him to adjust, and Casey was mostly focused on preserving the Army rather than adapting to the realities on the ground.

Military experts can draw greater distinctions between the past and present crews (Yingling, I am sure, could roast Gentile's assertions pretty quickly).  But the conditions in Iraq with the AQ types overplaying their hands, the Sunnis realizing that the US was their best protection against Shiites and Sunni extremists, and somewhat more compliant local leadership enabled COIN.  In Afghanistan, these conditions have not really existed.  So, there is more going on here than generals.  Clearly so, as Gentile is really attacking counter-insurgency doctrine more than individual generals.   War is politics by other means, and COIN especially so.  Winning a COIN battle means getting the politics right, and that is largely although not entirely out of the hands of the military.  All the COIN stuff can do is enable the politicians, not work miracles despite the hype surrounding Petraeus.


Gentile's attack is actually a different war, one for the soul of the military.  What will be the future of the American army?  A smaller one for sure, hopefully avoiding these kinds of conflicts.  The reality is that politicians will continue to use force in ways that are inconvenient to conventional thinkers in the military.  There will be few conventional wars to fight as long as the opponents realize that the US can beat them at that game.  That is not going change even as these Colonels fight over the lessons to draw from the wars of the Aughts.

Indeed, this whole discussion reminds me of the most basic lesson of Vietnam--people will learn the lessons they want to learn, as these conflicts are complicated.  There is never one single set of lessons to learn, and so the fight afterwards is over which lessons do people want to learn.

Kabul? The New Tet

It is too soon to tell what is going on in Kabul right now, but folks are raising the Tet parallel all over the place, including on unrelated blog posts of mine. 

My first take: the Taliban aspire to Tet but are too late.  That is, Tet was a key turning point because it changed expectations about what was happening in Vietnam, forcing a series of political decisions and changes, including LBJ not running for re-election and the end of escalation.  In Afghanistan, the Taliban may be attempting to score a similar blow, but it will not affect US domestic politics in the same.  Why?  Because the US and its NATO partners have already begun the process of getting out.  In 1968, there was no end in sight, with the US commitment seemingly forever enduring.  In 2011, the clock has been ticking for a while, with 2014 very much on the horizon. 

My second take: the Tet parallel is apt in one way.  All that stuff we have been hearing about decapitation of the Taliban must be, ahem, exaggerated if the insurgents can coordinate this well.  To be clear, I am not saying that the US/NATO forces have been lying about how many middle-level managers have been getting captured or killed, just that the effects may have been overplayed.

My third take: war is bargaining by other means.  Lots of stuff lately about the Taliban meeting with the US and such.  The surge was aimed not so much at victory perhaps but stopping the insurgency's momentum--so that bargaining could proceed. This attack might be a way to re-shift the bargaining space as it shows that the Taliban's powers are not all gone. 

So, this might be Tet-esque but no more than that.  Still not good news for anyone, but we need to be careful about which parts of the analogy seem to apply.

Holy Socks! Somebody Found a Metric I Was Looking For!

I have often complained about how hard it is to measure progress in a COIN effort, especially Afghanistan.  And I have often said that if I knew what the trends were in actionable intel tips, I would have a clue about progress.  Well, it is a good thing there are grad students who are collecting this data because: TA-DA:

Using the infamous Wikileaks Afghan War Diary data, my advisor David Sobek and I found that collaboration between Afghan locals and U.S. forces, in terms of turning over or pointing out caches of insurgent forces has increased since the president ordered a surge in forces in early 2009. We also find that collaboration breeds collaboration. In other words, while there isn’t much cause to celebrate yet, U.S. forces are beginning to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan.

A problem with the link is making it hard to read their paper.   And I would use the phrase credibility rather than hearts and minds--the Afghans might have found American/NATO commitment more credible and as more credible partners but that they love us and think like us (hearts and minds)?  Not so much.  But this is really cool, if the info is right.  Of course, lots of other stuff going on, but if the patterns of intel tips is what is suggested here, then we have some progress.  The question then is--what is the pattern now as the US starts to reduce and after the Dutch and Canadians have, as they say in French, skedaddled? 

The Door is Over There

I took part in a panel on Peacebuilding yesterday at the Center for International Governance Innovation [CIGI], which was part of the larger Canadian Political Science Association annual meeting.  My panel was on Afghanistan, and it was most striking how most of the folks were already using the word "failure" to describe the mission.  I was uncomfortable with that, not because I am a wild-eyed optimist about the international effort to help Afghanistan become a semi-stable semi-self sustaining state, but because I am reluctant to call it a day quite yet. 


I have been arguing for a while that we have not really been doing "this" for nine or ten years, but that only in the past year or two have there been both enough troops and a relatively coherent strategy to do counter-insurgency.  Before that, the Canadians in Kandahar and the British and Danes in Helmand and the Dutch/Aussies in Uruzgan and the Americans all over the place were mostly "mowing the grass" or serving as fire brigades--clearing insurgents out of a spot but not enough of them to hold the territory.   The mantra of clear, hold, build was always problematic even before one factors in the Karzai government doing the building because there were not enough troops to do the holding.  Anyhow, with the Obama surge, there are now enough troops to be effective. 


So, the real test was not the violence last year but the violence this year.  Last year was more violent with the influx of troops, which produced more patrols, more contact, and thus more opportunities for violence.  This year, the expectation would be for less violence as the ISAF/Afghan National Army [ANA]would have more control over more territory (see Kalyvas for control and COIN).


Of course, the really big problem is that COIN and the surge are aimed at creating space for the politicians to do stuff to persuade the citizens that the government is deserving of their support--by providing services and improving their lives.  Or, at the very least, not being rapacious and exploitative.  We may be doomed to fail because our partners, Karzai and his pals, are so very flawed. 

Monday Book Review

I finished a couple of books over the past few week, and I have been blog a few thoughts.  But it has been a busy few weeks with Osama, Canadian elections, a new column at Current Intelligence and the end to a pretty fun TV season.

So, first, I read Bing West's book on Afghanistan, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy and the Way Out of Afghanistan.  As others have noted, the last part of the title is almost entirely missing from the book.  There is no new way out here.  But I will get to that in a minute.  The best part of the book is West's incredible effort to live with and document the experiences of American troops in some of the toughest spots in Afghanistan: Kunar and Helmand.  Grit, indeed.  West shows his own grit and and that of the Americans in harm's way.  He also does an excellent job of showing many of the contradictions involved in this war--trying to build up local capacity while distrusting the Afghan government.  He also shows quite clearly how under-manned the US is in the East.  There are simply not enough troops to hold enough ground out there.  It would have been nice for him to contrast that with Southern Afghanistan, where there is some progress (sustainable or not) in large part because that is where the commitment has been made of late.

It would have been nice for West to hang out with some of the other contingents, if only to help out my research agenda.  

West is quite critical of the war, especially of the civilians running it.   I think it s kind of strange that West notes many of the challenges but does not seem to recognize that the leaders have faced a series of bad alternatives.  There is no magic solution for getting Pakistan to be more helpful (we are constantly reminded), for instance.  Likewise, fighting a war against an enemy that seeks to endanger the civilians presents all kinds of challenges.  This has lead to fairly onerous procedures for calling in air-support.  But the alternative of dropping bombs in a carefree way seems a mistake as well.  Again, there are tradeoffs with no easy choices, but West does not seem to get that. 

And the choice is not really between killing and giving assistance. Population centric warfare involves a fair amount of "kinetic" efforts--killing the Taliban to clear and then hold.  So, rather than posing a false alternative between aid and fighting as West does, we need to figure out what kind of aid to deliver, how to deliver it, and fight the fight at the same time.

West ends with only a few pages on the "Way Out."  Negotiations will not work because we are not strong enough, he says I guess that leads training the Afghans, but the argument becomes distracted at the end.  The reality is that we are doing that already--every NATO contingent is now saying that it is focused on training so that the Afghans can do the job. But it requires some security for that to happen, which means that ISAF cannot thin down very quickly.

Finally, I cannot hep but get upset at the usual canard: "Our mistake in Afghanistan was to do the work of others for ten years...."  Ten years?  Really?  No, the US did not take this effort seriously until the past couple of years.  LTG Barno was told by Rummy in 2003-04 not to do counter-insurgency and then replaced him with someone who would not violate expectations. 

So, I would recommend this book for its depiction of modern combat in a difficult spot.  But not for its policy recommendations, as West notes all of the conflicting pressures and challenges, and then ignores them when it comes time to his recommendations.

West constantly notes that the Afghans are not standing up for themselves.  Really? How big is the Afghan National Army these days?  The Afghan National Police?  Given that both of these are softer targets than the ISAF forces, the indigenous forces have been taking huge and frequent hits.  So, we need to be careful about saying that the Afghans are not staying up for themselves.  True, we are not getting as much actionable intel as we would like (although probably more than West recognizes).  Why?  We have a credibility problem, not so much a hearts and minds problem--we say we are going to leave sometime soon.  Even if we did not say it, they would still fear it.  So, why side with the US and its allies now when they will be gone in three or five  or ten years, and the bad guys will still be around?  Only if they believed that the Afghan government would show up and use its powers effectively and without abusing them does it truly make sense for the Afghans to get off of the fence.

Fool Me Twice

Just to follow up on yesterday's post about the prison break, Graeme Smith reminds us that the real failure of counterinsurgency here is not at the prison but outside of it.  Sure, some guards might have been bribed, but the key failure is that none of the folks in the neighborhood tipped off the government or the internationals.  Such a significant operation would have probably been noticed by some of the locals in an area that had seen much investment and had been very much under the control of the government and ISAF.

One of the recurring themes here at the Spew is that progress is best measured by information that we outside observers cannot really see--patterns in actionable intelligence tips from the people.  Are people betting with their lives?  Do they see the government and NATO as the best option in town?  Or are they intimidated enough by the Taliban not to give the counter-insurgents the info they need?  While there may be classified collections of data to suggest that the US/Canada/NATO/Afghan government is getting more and more good information to target the Taliban and detect roadside bombs and suicide bombers, clearly this prison break is one of those kinds of things that we would want to get info about beforehand.  And we did not.

I always say we have not been doing COIN for eight or nine years, so we have to have reduced expectations.  BUT this is a hunk of land with which the government and the international community have had much interactions and even control for the past several years.  Yet none of the locals warned the relevant folks.  If COIN does not work in the heart of Kandahar City, how likely is it work out in the outer-lying areas of the province?

Now, more than ever, it seems like a decent interval is all we can hope for.  This one event (well, the second time) achieved its goal--of sucking all of the optimism about ISAF's latest efforts out of the country.  The Taliban may be bad at governing and may be bad at marketing itself, but they do a mighty fine job of making the government and its allies look bad.

As always, Afghanistan is the land of bad alternatives.  Which one is the least bad now?

Update: One addition: check out the debate in original Parliament.  The Brits have style, I must say.

Fool Me Once

Ok, first time there is a prison break, perhaps it is an oversight, an accident, whatever.  But when there is a second prison break at the same prison, that says a lot more.  What does it say:

• that the Taliban are not nearly as broken and disorganized as some would argue.  The first prison break seemed to indicate that the whole "these guys cannot organize anything of significance" myth was perhaps a bit off.  The second one clearly demonstrates that the Taliban, who spent months tunneling into the prison and found the right spot (GPS?), are not a random band of idiots.
• that the Afghan government has made very little progress.  This event happened three years after the last prison break with much international effort focused on this place.  Prisons can be generators of extremism.  Little did we know that that the Saraposa prison is more of a half-way house or bed and breakfast of extremism.  
• The international focus on improving the treatment of prisoners did not apparently stretch to focus on retaining them.  No tunnel prevention efforts?  While it is easy to second guess now, given that (a) this prison was a target for previous organized escape efforts; and (b) tunnels are the classic way to escape a prison (Great Escape anyone? Shawshank much?), one would think that there might have been some effort to detect tunneling.  

Of course, I lacked foresight.  In my imagining of a new Hogan's Heroes, I thought about Gitmo, I thought about allied POWs somewhere in the mountains, but I did not consider the Taliban to be the tunnel rats of the 21st century.  My bad.

So, where does this leave us?  Well, it undermines all of the claims made recently about progress.  In two senses: it shows that the government is incredibly inept (shouldn't the escape have been discovered somewhere along the way as 475 guys start disappearing?); and it tells the public that the Taliban are actually organized.  Would you now bet with your life by siding with the government?  Um, no.  If COIN is about control, what does this event suggest?  Not a good way to start the Spring fighting season unless one is a Taliban PR guy.

Cups of Tea and COIN

Lots of blogging about Greg Mortenson's book, its flaws, and what it means for counter-insurgency.  I have not read the book myself or even feel as if I read the book but not myself.  What I will say is this--there is a lot of mis-understanding out there about COIN.  The effort to get to know the area (which sounds Cups of Tea-ish) is fundamental to engaging in a war against an enemy that seeks to blend in with the locals.  Having shuras and councils with the local elites makes sense, whether you buy the Tea or not, as these folks are the ones who have a clue about the area, know who the strangers are, and so on.

COIN is not about hearts and minds, despite the slogan.  It is about credibility and confidence--do the locals view the outsiders and the government has being reliable?  Can they count on them for security? for the delivery of government services?  for justice?  Or do they have to rely on the insurgents or themselves?  The surge in Iraq "worked" in that the locals found the extremists to be too violent and a greater threat.  Having more troops on the ground made it possible for the US to seem more reliable than the alternative.  People are betting with their lives, so it is not about love (hearts) or ideology (minds), but about fear and survival.  The insurgents do not need to win the love of the locals, nor do the counter-insurgents.  The battle is for control (a la Kalyvas).

This does involve indeed a fair amount of "kinetic" warfare--shooting, killing, and such.  COIN is not about handing out candy bars, but showing that you can stick around and thwart the other side, including killing them.  But it works best if one is discriminate in the use of force--only killing the insurgents.  Indiscriminate force is not only immoral but counter-productive.  This is where the locals are so crucial--helping to identify the insurgents.  Of course, the problem is that they have multiple motives (he stole my goat, that guy hit on my girlfriend, this dude cheated me out of my savings, whatever), so the outsiders/government need to be discerning so that they do not get played.

Anyhow, COIN, like all war, is politics by other means.  The politics amidst the COIN is more obvious than the politics amidst a tank campaign, but the choices made in either can have significant ramifications beyond the immediate battle.  The key thing about COIN is that there is no simple solution, no single way to handle everything.  It requires the ability to adapt and adapt faster than the other side.

The Cups of Tea stuff with schools and the soft side of power has its role to play, but reading that book, whether it is fatally flawed or not, really did not handicap the war effort.  Petraeus, a noted fan of the book, has made the campaign in Afghanistan more violent than his predecessor, including allowing some folks to destroy villages in order to save the country a la Vietnam.  See this excellent piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (who wrote a great book I did read, Imperial Life in an Emerald City about the Iraq war).  So, the folks who like to bang heads and are critical of COIN for being soft and squishy are, well, talking out of their asses.  I am not a COIN expert, but I can see that the campaign has been violent and will remain so.  I have my doubts about it working because it ultimately depends not so much on American/NATO reliability and credibility but that of the Afghanistan government.  Oops, indeed.

With Great Power ...

The more I read about Afghanistan, the more frustrating it becomes.  I am currently reading Bing West's book, the Wrong War, and it is very critical of the effort.  Understandably so, as he was out and about with the patrols, seeing the costs for the war.  For the lawn-mowing--going out and clearing and then coming back and having to clear again. 

One of the biggest challenges has been one of the biggest lost opportunities.  Karzai has a tremendous amount of power, as he appoints and can remove governors of provinces and leaders of districts.  Most of his focus on selection has been, not too surprising, on fealty to Karzai rather than competence.  So, American, British, Canadian and other military folks have had huge problems trying to get stuff done because the guy in charge of the area is not so interested in performance but in providing votes to Karzai and in enriching himself (few females in this process).  If, on the other hand, Karzai had been interested in moving Afghanistan forward, he could have replaced the inept/incompetent/corrupt folks and supported the competent ones.  That might have been a bit risky in the short term, but it might have produced some governance and some stability.  Instead, his strategy just means he is more reliant on folks he is renting. 

This means that the government is on shaky grounds and that it is very hard to get the local folks to buy in.

Having said that, I will write a short review of West's book soon, as I do find it overly critical about some stuff.  To preview, he tends to assume that there are lots more choices all along the way.  Not so sure about that.  Still, pretty awesome to be a writer running out on patrols in Helmand and Kunar, some of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan.

Holy Principal-Agent Problems, Afghanistan, part 2

I blogged earlier about the problems facing the Taliban as the lower level folks develop some different interests from their superiors.  Well, the problem continues or at least to be covered yet again. 

Recent defeats and general weariness after nine years of war are creating fissures between the Taliban’s top leadership based in Pakistan and midlevel field commanders, who have borne the brunt of the fighting and are reluctant to return to some battle zones, Taliban members said in interviews.
He also cited divisions over a suicide bombing at a wedding in Kandahar Province last year that was organized by a more radical field commander, without the approval of the Taliban leadership. Some of the younger, more radical commanders have come up through the ranks to replace those who have been killed.

During the fighting in the fall, the Taliban commanders sometimes found their calls for help going unanswered, according to American military officials. One group, in Sia Choy, in the Zhare District of Kandahar Province, appealed for help from commanders to no avail.

Over time, there has been significant replacement of the guys who bear the risks and the new ones are less happy and less tied to their bosses.  This makes the war harder to conduct for the Taliban but any peace deal would be harder to keep.  Fragmentation seems inevitable, as a loss of control will mean that different individuals will push in conflicting directions.

And this is deliberate.  Petraeus understands that the clock is ticking away--that 2014, unlike 2011, is a real deadline.  NATO members and their partners are losing patience,  So, rather than trying to aim for the long haul of development and governance (especially with Karzai making that harder rather than easier), the goal is to hit the Taliban as hard as possible now since there is not much of a later to be had. 

Of course, the big test is ahead of us: after all this reputed progress, the tale will be told during the spring and summer fighting season.  If we see heaps more Taliban operations that do significant damage in the supposedly secure inkspots, that says one thing.  If we see heaps more violence, but it is at the initiative of NATO and Afghan forces, that means something else.  And if there is less violence, well, that would be great.

I wonder if folks will be patient enough to wait for the summer to evaluate how things are going?  I would not bet on it.

How to Write a Trip Report

See here for Abu Muqawama's (a.k.a. Andrew Exum) trip report for his tour of Afghanistan.  Nice model of a trip report: puts the key findings up front, is clear about his strengths and limitations, etc.

There has been so much conflicting information coming out of Afghanistan that it is still hard to see where things stand. His key findings with my reactions:

1. Exum says that tactical intel is greatly improved.  I heard the same at the Military Adaptation workshop in Germany/Switzerland that I attended earlier this week.  We know now the ground much better than we used to, especially the "human geography."
2. The troops are doing COIN really well.  And the idea that the American soldier or marine is losing his/her fighting edge while doing soft COIN stuff does not understand how much "kinetic" activity there is under very difficult circumstances.
3. Special Ops folks and conventional forces are now fighting the same fight: "The coordination between special operations forces and general purpose forces is the best I have ever seen it. This applies across the entire theater. I have been traveling with Col. (Ret.) Pete Mansoor, and I have been joking with Pete, who was a brigade commander in Iraq when I was a Ranger platoon leader there, how far we have come from the days when I used to make his life so miserable by conducting late-night raids and leaving him the mess to clean up. SOF and GPF are fighting one fight -- and they are together having a devastating effect on the leadership of the insurgency. Simply stunning."  I heard this as well from other folks who have toured the theater.
4. The problems are still the same: Afghan governance, Pakistan sanctuaries.  Exum sees way more emphasis on killing Taliban than on governance.  This is problematic.  But, as the folks at my meeting this week argued, if we only have three years or so left, then it makes sense to erode the capacity of the Taliban as much as possible since really making progress on governance in such a short time frame is unlikely. 

Exum is going to produce more interesting stuff resulting from this trip.  Keep an eye out.

Holy Principal-Agent Problems

Whether intended or not, it seems that the effort to take out the middle level commanders of the Taliban is creating some significant challenges for the Taliban leaders.  The guys (captured or killed) are replaced pretty quickly apparently, but the new generation may not be as easy to control as the previous one. 

In P-A terms (I am an amateur on p-a theory, but increasingly use it for the NATO-A-stan projects), leaders need to select agents to do their bidding and then the problem becomes one of making sure those agents do what they are supposed to do.  The first way to ensure that the agent complies with the principal's intent is to select agents who mostly closely share interests/attitudes/etc. with the principals.  One would expect that the first agents selected would be those that have the closest ties/views of the leadership.  As those agents are captured or killed, then the bosses will have to select agents who are not as close.  It would not make sense to start with agents who do not share as many views or ties, so elimination of the old does suggest that the new ones will be less control-able.

The second way to resolve the principal-agent problem is to shape the discretion of the agents.  Given the nature of insurgency and the terrain (as compared to the dynamics of multilateral counter-insurgency), it is probably quite difficult to impose restrictions (caveats) on the insurgents.

The third way is to conduct oversight.  To monitor closely the agents.  Well, in this case, it looks like the monitors may get killed by the agents:

But the new cohort increasingly decides how these beliefs are imposed on the ground: recently the Quetta Shura sent a Muslim scholar to chastise a group of youthful commanders in Paktia Province who were not following Mullah Omar’s directives; they promptly killed him.

The fourth way is to reward/punish agents when they comply or not.  The challenge for the Taliban leaders is that their capabilities in Afghanistan are mostly on the punitive side of things, and it is not clear that they pose as much of a threat to their local commanders as NATO is.

Is the decline of Taliban control over its agents and the potential fragmentation a good or bad thing?  I vote for both.  It might make the Taliban a bit more enthused about settling the conflict before they lose control as the NYT piece indicates.  But it makes it much harder for any decision to settle to be implemented.  Rather than killing one snake, we may find ourselves trying to kill a hydra.  Not good.

Progress? In COIN, Hard to Tell

Stories are coming out of Kandahar that the latest effort is pushing the insurgents back into Pakistan.  It does sound like this is an improved effort (interesting but not surprising that no Canadians are mentioned in the NYT article).  But there has always been little doubt that NATO can force the Taliban out of a particular hole.  The challenge is keeping them out. 

A Taliban fighter reached by telephone, who spoke to a reporter only on condition that he not be named, confirmed that the insurgents had pulled back but would seek to reinfiltrate once the main push was over. “We are not there anymore, we are not preparing to fight a big battle, but we are waiting,” he said. “We are waiting until this force has been exhausted and has done all they are supposed to do, and later on our fighters will re-enter the area.”

 The real issue is the longer term effort to protect the population and develop some kind of competence.  The series at Slate on training the police does not give one much confidence.

Still, to be fair, this stuff takes time, so it may be the case that progress is being made.  But the larger question remains--will the US and its pals hang out long enough to make a lasting difference.