Afghanistan needs more Afghan troops

Col. Nagl here gives me an uncomfortable feeling. If he believes that America's current troubles in Afghanistan were due to our having done things wrong before and that therefore our cause will succeed if we do things right now, it's a fair bet that many senior officers in the Army and Marines believe this as well.

The problem is that time changes everything. The long years in which the Bush administration left Afghanistan on the back burner while it pursued the adventure in Iraq had consequences. The most important of these was an establishment of an Afghan government incapable of doing anything on its own. The army Nagl wants to create would very quickly become the strongest political institution in the country; Afghan politics would become army politics, and that's if a NATO effort to build the Afghan army went well.

It is not, of course, a certainty that this would happen. Lots of things could go wrong during the period -- Nagl does not venture a guess as to how long it would need to be, so I'll guess five to ten years -- during which the United States would attempt to create the army he is calling for. In the meantime, the bulk of the fighting against the Taliban, against Haqqani's gang and its allies, would continue to be done by American troops and those of two or three NATO allies. This long holding action would require a substantial commitment of resources and political capital over the lifetime of the Obama administration as the United States struggles to emerge from the worst recession in decades. In brief, Nagl is recommending a solution to our Afghanistan problem sensible in the abstract if one ignores most of the relevant facts.

There is one other thing. I do not pretend to be an expert in counterinsurgency warfare or doctrine, but it has always seemed to me that the crucial asymmetry of force in this kind of warfare is not that between a conventional army and an insurgency, but rather the asymmetry between the insurgency and the unorganized civilian population. This turned out to be a crucial component of the progress made in Iraq in the 2007-08 period; the Sunni Arab insurgency found it could harass the American army and wreak havoc on (mostly Shiite) Iraqi civilians, but eventually learned it couldn't protect its own civilians (from JAM and AQI) any better than the Iraqi government could. American counterinsurgent efforts helped, indeed my understanding is that they helped a lot. But in Afghanistan no group is putting the kind of pressure on the Taliban or its allies that various Iraqi armed factions put on the Sunni Arab insurgency. Here again, Nagl appears to be hoping to replicate the progress made in Iraq using primarily American forces, and then eventually Afghan forces using American tactics.

I share the concern raised by many that critics of the current American course in Afghanistan are weak when it comes to devising a practical alternative. Nagl's suggestion does not represent that alternative. His call for a vastly larger and much more effective Afghan army is more an aspiration than a plan.