By John Nagl
George Will's argument that it is "Time for the U.S. to Get Out of Afghanistan" is based on a misunderstanding of the essential principles of counterinsurgency. The classic "clear, hold, and build" counterinsurgency strategy, which the United States ultimately adopted in Iraq, requires that counterinsurgents remain to hold areas once they have been cleared of insurgents. Given current force ratios in country, it is sadly true that today, "Taliban forces can evaporate and then return;" preventing this from happening is the key to the strategy that Gen. Stanley McChrystal recommends in his strategic assessment. The key change: building the Afghan Army to hold what we have cleared.
Because we have not properly resourced Afghan security forces, American troops have had to clear the same areas repeatedly -- paying a price for each operation whenever we "clear and leave." The answer is an expanded Afghan National Army of 250,000 soldiers and effective police forces numbering 150,000. The successful implementation of a well-resourced effort to build Iraqi security forces is now enabling the drawdown of American forces from that country as Iraqi forces increasingly take responsibility for their own security; a similar situation will be the definition of success in Afghanistan.
It's far too soon to declare defeat, take pressure off al Qaeda, and again abandon the people of Afghanistan to the harsh rule of the Taliban. We know how to conduct counterinsurgency successfully; the commander on the ground has recommended the right strategy. Now Washington must resource the strategy properly -- not with hundreds of thousands of American troops, but with thousands of advisors supporting tens of thousands of additional Afghan troops.
John Nagl is the president of the Center for a New American Security and the author of Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.
REZA SHIRMOHAMMADI/AFP/Getty Images
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.
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