By Michael Cohen
What to do in Afghanistan has become the dominant
question in Washington. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recently leaked strategic
review suggests more troops are needed; Democrats in Congress are assertively
counseling against such a move; and U.S. President Barack Obama's administration
appears increasingly concerned that mission creep is underway.
But the debate over troop levels is a distraction from the real problem in
Afghanistan -- a dubious counterinsurgency strategy that is based on faulty
assumptions and unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved. McChrystal's
leaked review only provides more evidence of the desperate need for a new
course in Afghanistan.
One of the fundamental precepts of any successful counterinsurgency operation
is the support of the host government: If the United States is to wage war for
a local government, the government must be a dependable ally. Yet, as
McChrystal's review makes clear, the Afghan government is anything but: "The
weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread
corruption and abuse of power by various officials ... have given Afghans
little reason to support their government."
To make matters worse, McChrystal sees serious holes in the capabilities of U.S.
and NATO forces to wage counterinsurgency. NATO, the review argues, "does not
sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the
insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all
combine to affect the Afghan population."
If the Afghan government is riddled with corruption and NATO doesn't fully
understand how to prosecute a counterinsurgency strategy, it is hard to
understand why McChrystal is advocating such an approach in the first place. Hamid
Karzai's government basically stole the recent presidential election. It hardly
seems on the verge of ending its corrupt ways. Moreover, there is little reason
to believe that a full multinational embrace of counterinsurgency doctrine can
be achieved in what is becoming an increasingly compressed time frame.
Throw in the problem of largely unmolested Afghan Taliban safe havens across
the border in Pakistan and the fact that in some parts of Southern Afghanistan
the Taliban are as popular as the Karzai government, and you have a situation
where the lack of U.S .troops and political will, as well as Pakistani and
Afghan support, is undermining the stated mission.
McChrystal offers smart ideas for how to turn the tide, but with declining
public support for the mission -- on both sides of the Atlantic -- it's
unlikely he will have the opportunity to implement the changes he is
recommending.
Instead, the president should demand his commander go back to the original
objective for the mission -- disrupting, defeating, and dismantling al Qaeda.
This means discarding the dream of nation-building in Afghanistan and focusing
instead on targeting al Qaeda in Pakistan (a process already occurring through
successful drone attacks on terrorist leaders there) and moving toward a more
realistic containment approach of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
To accomplish this, the United States must first prioritize training the Afghan
security services. This doesn't necessarily mean a huge force, which would be
difficult to achieve and potentially destabilizing for the region. Military
trainers should focus on building a smaller, more reliable force that can serve
as an effective military counterweight to the Taliban.
Second, General McChrystal has made it his top priority to "protect the
population," but the U.S. and NATO forces lack the resources and local support to
complete such a mission. Instead, the United States needs to place greater
priority on targeting the Taliban enemy and regaining the military initiative.
Along these lines, McChrystal must prioritize his operations to the north of
the country where the Taliban are making inroads but lack the support of the
local population. Ongoing combat operations in southern Afghanistan have done
little to shift the military balance, particularly as the Taliban have used
Western attention to the region as an opportunity to attack elsewhere in the
country. U.S. and NATO forces should consolidate the gains made elsewhere and
for now lessen the military footprint in the south.
McChrystal has laid out an ambitious, but unrealistic, counterinsurgency agenda
for Afghanistan. It is the president's job to step in and set a new more
counterterrorism-focused course that is realistic and that furthers U.S.
interests in the region. The uncertainty in Washington on what to do next has
given him just that opportunity. He must seize it.
Michael A. Cohen is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation.
MANAN VATSYAYANA/AFP/Getty Images
John Nagl made the wise point earlier this week here on the AfPak blog that Afghanistan needs more Afghan troops -- it is point of agreement shared across the political and policy spectrum all the way from the Stay the Course crowd to the Get Out Now crowd. The problem, however, in Nagl's argument is that he fails to connect the dots between the lack of current Afghan government support for U.S. and ISAF military operations and the continued prosecution of a U.S.-led counterinsurgency effort. If the United States does not have host country support to conduct counterinsurgency operations then why does Nagl believe we should continue engaging in an operational approach that is missing this vital ingredient?
John Nagl of course has written the book on counterinsurgency -- and I mean that literally. His argument for a larger Afghan army of 250,000 soldiers is at pace with the arguments made in his own book and in FM 3-24, the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. But what is less clear in Nagl's argument is how long it will take to get from where we are today to a fully trained and capable force of a quarter million soldiers and 150,000 police. As Nagl knows, this is not simply a question of slapping a uniform on a soldier and police officer and saying "do your job." It takes time to develop such a force.
In Iraq, it took roughly five years to create a somewhat functional security apparatus and that was in a country with a tradition of a professional army and a reasonably well-educated population -- Afghanistan has neither. How long will it take to train 400,000 police and military in Afghanistan? One can imagine years or even decades. And how exactly will this be paid for and sustained? Today, the current budgets of both the police and military exceed the Afghan government's revenues. Increasing the force at the levels Nagl is recommending could actually exceed the country's GDP. This hardly seems sustainable or even desirable, not only from a fiscal standpoint, but also from a geo-political standpoint. One can only imagine the trepidation of neighboring countries at the prospects of an Afghan army -- trained by American advisors -- of 250,000 troops. Training a viable Afghan army is important, but at the levels Nagl is recommending it may not be realistic or wise.
(Read on)
By Michael Cohen
This week, I had a virtual get together with Joshua Foust
over at bloggingheads.tv
to discuss the future of US-Afghan policy. Josh writes the must-read registan.net blog, which is all
things Central Asia with a particular focus on Afghanistan. Besides my day job at New America Foundation I blog at democracyarsenal.org
where I've been writing a regular feature: the Afghanistan Mission Creep Watch.
Josh and I spent more than an hour discussing a wide range of topics related to
the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, from the effectiveness of U.S. military strategy
and in particular counter-insurgency, the true nature of the security threat
that the Taliban and a potential al Qaeda safe haven represents to the United
States, rising indications of US mission creep, signs of success in Afghanistan
that need to be capitalized upon by the U.S. military and the changing nature of
military conflicts in the 21st century and whether the U.S. is ill-equipped to
fight them.
Michael Cohen is a fellow at the New America Foundation.
