Once Again It's "Strategic Review" Time For Afghanistan

While there is none of the delay and pseudo-drama of last year's "debate" over the Big Question of "Whether Afghanistan," there are definite and deep currents of difference regarding how well the US is doing in whatever it is purportedly doing in Afghanistan.  There is the ongoing contretemps between Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the US--particularly General Petraeus--over where American and other NATO or ISAF troops should be doing what.  And, not surprisingly there is the usual highly credentialed panel of self-designated experts damning the entire effort and the Obama ordered escalation as a total failure.

As if that were not a sufficient number of conflicting chefs to spoil the soup, the Pakistanis, which is to say the Army and Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has come roaring back demanding that Karzai enter into a power sharing agreement with Taliban and the Haqqani network without delay.  It borders on the ironic that the proposal set forth by Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Asfaq Kiyani is simply a more robust form of the conclusions drawn by the twenty-three academics, journalists, and former government officials.  Far less ironic and far more honest is the implicit admission by General Kiyani that Pakistan is and has been working both sides of the street in Afghanistan.

At the same time the Kiyani proposition underscores the major message of Karzai.  For years now the oft derided (by senior American diplomats and policy makers) Afghan president has argued that without ending the Pakistani support of Taliban, the Haqqani network, and al-Qaeda or sealing the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan hermetically, there will be no end to the war.  It is for this reason that Karzai has repeatedly and stridently demanded that the US and others deploy their combat power along the border rather than stage nocturnal raids on isolated Afghan homesteads or stage forcible entries into Afghan cities and towns.

While the US and its allies have seen the war in Afghanistan as one of counterinsurgency, Karzai and some others in both the Afghan government and military have seen it as one of an interstate nature.  The truth is that the war is a hybrid.  The war is an example of a very rare sort of conflict, the partisan war.  In a partisan war the combatants may be organic to the society under stress but do not have sufficient capabilities on their own to continue the war successfully.  The continuation of combat depends upon a direct cross-border supporter.

In the past century the best examples of partisan war are to be found in the several resistance movements in occupied Western Europe during World War II.  In none of the countries under Nazi domination could the domestic, organic resistance forces have accomplished the goal of ejecting the occupier on their own.  The French, the Dutch, the Danes, the Norse all relied not only on outside support from the Western Allies to continue their struggle but needed the outsiders to actually do the heavy lifting of killing Germans and destroying Germany.

The wars in South Vietnam contained partisan features when the North decided to answer the challenge of Operation Rolling Thunder by supplying and supporting the indigenous insurgents.  The partisan nature of the war became clear when Northern forces directly entered the war in sizable numbers thus relegating the insurgents to a supporting role at best.

While it is unlikely in the extreme that Pakistani forces will cross the border into Afghanistan, there has never been any lack of evidence regarding the degree to which Pakistan supports Taliban and others.  Nor has there been any doubt but Pakistan has established and controls the agenda behind the fighting in Afghanistan.  As a consequence, characterizing the war(s) in Afghanistan as a mixed state involving both insurgent and partisan features is the most accurate way of defining the war and the operational doctrines necessary to bring it to a successful (from the perspectives of Kabul and Washington) conclusion.

Ending the war will be a two stage process.  The first stage is that of hostilities termination.  The second consists of conflict resolution.  The first is primarily military in its accomplishment.  The second, the final stage, is completely political in nature.  It has been evident that the US at its senior decision making levels has never taken a firm grip on this reality.

Despite the impressive credentials of the "experts" and the cogency of their argument, their conclusion is fatally flawed at least in part.  The Obama ordered escalation has provided the manpower necessary to take the war directly to the insurgents.  The result has been a transfer in initiative from the Taliban to the US and its allies.  The increasing pressure on the insurgents has constricted both their ability and will to operate.  Even the resort to civilian casualty producing tactics such as the escalating employment of IEDs attests to this.  The Karzai decried nocturnal raids by Special Forces units and Afghan partners has done much to disrupt the organizational integrity of the Taliban and Haqqani network.

The overall effects of the offensive operations have been attenuated severely by the existence of the cross-border sanctuary in the Pakistani FATA.  Further attenuation has resulted directly from the on-going support and assistance provided by ISI and the army.  As long as these partisan war features continue, so also will the war.  It is just that simple.

The Predator and Reaper strikes against Taliban facilities and personnel in the FATA are not sufficient to offset the Pakistani assistance.  While these strikes send a nice number of trigger pullers and a small group of leaders to the Big Mo and seventy-two virgins, the net effect is not crippling to the Taliban and Haqqani network.  Crippling requires an end (or a serious reduction) of Pakistani support.

One can understand Karzai's frustration.  He has seen the problem for years with great clarity.  He has spoken and written to his American partners about it with force and moral courage.  At the same time he must deal with the internal political fallout from the nocturnal raids as he must with the collateral casualties of air strikes or artillery bombardments.  His political enemies (and he has many other than the insurgents) use every grievance real and pretended which results from a raid or air strike against him.  This has to become a real drag after a few years.

Karzai is a nationalist first and foremost.  This means he has to be treated as the head of a sovereign state.  Even when he is tossing one of his many hissy fits, he must still be treated with the respect which he believes he is entitled to and which demonstrates to the Afghan people that he and they are sovereign, respected, dignified, not the puppets and lackeys of foreigners.  General McChrystal understood this.  It is not at all evident that General Petraeus does so as well.

The matter of interpersonal relations factors directly into the problem of gaining Karzai's support for the current approach rather than attempting the utterly impossible--sealing the Pakistani border the air tight level which would be necessary to stop effective Pakistani support.  Karzai must be brought carefully on board.  He must be shown why even the advanced technology available to the US is not up to the task of securing the border.  At the same time he and his people must be given more approval rights with respect to the controversial nocturnal raids.  Again, this requires very careful handling and a willingness to forgo a raid or two in deference to local (and militarily irrational) considerations.

At the same time the US has to put pressure on the Pakistanis.  The new Pakistani "peace plan" gives adequate base to do so.  They have admitted they have the juice with Taliban and the Haqqani network.  They have effectively entered a guilty plea to Karzai's accusations.  Use it to get the ISI and army to turn the spigot down if not all the way off.

The reduction of support need not happen overnight to be effective.  It can be a process rather than an event as even a slight diminuation of Pakistani support will be reflected quickly by a degradation of insurgent combat capacity and will.  Coupled with a modest decrease of outside support and access to the sanctuaries of the FATA, the current offensive efforts (including the nocturnal raids) will prove effective in hostilities termination within a politically reasonable period (twelve to eighteen months.)

At this point--the point of hostilities termination which, to err on the side of accuracy, is more a process than an event--the politically oriented matter of conflict resolution takes over.  Importantly, as it the Afghans who must all live together in the years to come, the conflict resolution portion of the effort is almost entirely an Afghan owned procedure.  The nature and extent of power sharing is up to the Afghans alone--even if we are not pleased with the result.

It is true that problems of governance and governmental legitimacy are in play even before hostilities are terminated.  It is one more unpleasant ground truth that this is a matter for Afghans in which we outsiders play a limited role.  The degree of acceptable corruption is an Afghan matter not an American or European one.  As noted in a previous post bribery, graft, and corruption of both a political and economic nature are internal matters.  It is up to the locals to say how much is enough as well as to define what might be called equality of opportunity to be corrupt.

The way in which the several tribes, linguistic groups, and religious communities define political legitimacy, judicial independence, openness, and transparency or even fundamental honesty in government will be messy, convoluted, and probably throughly unpleasant when viewed from a Western perspective, but that is the way life is lived--get a grip on it.  Afghanistan is not, repeat, not, a contemporary Western polity and society in the making.  And, it never will be.  We have to get a grip on that as well.

Pace, experts, but we are not yet losing in Afghanistan.  The Obama escalation is not yet a failure.  Provided we do not make the fatal mistake we did in Vietnam of trying to take over both war and government, we will not lose, not militarily at least.  Provided we allow the Afghans to be effective stakeholders, we can actually reach a reasonable facsimile of winning--again at least through the hostilities termination phase.

To do this we need to keep on with our current operational doctrine.  We need to do a better job of bringing Karzai on board.  Most of all we must, repeat, must, lean on Islamabad to start the process of tamping down the partisan war aspects of the conflict.  Left to their own military and psychological resources, the organic insurgents can not hope to win.  Their only hope is to end the hostilities and seek the best accommodation in the conflict resolution process.

The road to peace in Afghanistan runs, in major part, through Islamabad but not in the way the Pakistani army and ISI hope.  The zealots in those two organizations must be brought to realize that without abandoning their duplicity in Afghanistan and getting right with Washington, they will lose access to the great American cash cow.  Since the Chinese will not play the same sort of obliging game which we have, this means they will be left very high and dry while still facing their own homegrown existential threat.

Survival is the name of the game for the men in Islamabad.  We just have to make certain that they understand it depends on the way in which they continue to play the game in Afghanistan.

Back To The Old Who-Is-Winning Question Again

The NYT, which as desperately wants to declare defeat in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq, has brought up the issue of just how much in the current estimate of success given by the US military should be believed.  With the upcoming review of American progress or lack thereof in Afghanistan the topic is both timely and important.

The military has a rather positive view of developments such the introduction of more boots on the ground due to the Obama surge approved a year ago.  The intelligence community is not so sure, some of its reporting is at sharp contrast with the military assessments.

This is not new.  The same dynamic occurred during the Vietnam War.  Repeatedly, and, as it turned out, accurately, CIA was the odd man out, the naysayer in the optimist's club.  CIA was so much of a "non-team player" that its reports were shuffled to the bottom of the pile throughout the administration of LBJ.  Not until a new Director of Central Intelligence demanded a "shading" of reports so that they might be read during the years of Nixon did anyone at the highest levels of the US government take a look at the findings of the lads in Langley.

Based on experience the Geek has a tendency to side with the gloomy bunch in the intel shop.  In the world, particularly in the war part of the world, all surprises tend to be bad ones.  Pessimism is a realistic way to view uncertain and highly flexible events.  Certainly the state of play in Afghanistan is filled with potentials for surprise as well as vast numbers of Rumsfeldian "unknowable unknowns."  No responsible intelligence analyst would be given to donning rose colored glasses when taking a dekko at Afghanistan.

Of course, the first order of business is defining what constitutes success.  As the experience in Iraq has made crystalline, success is not easy to define.  If the goal is overly expansive--as American goals tend to be--success will prove illusive or illusionary.  There was--and is--no way that the US or any coalition could succeed if the goal was that of producing a fully functioning Western style nation-state with all the requisite features thereof in either Iraq or Afghanistan.  Even though Iraq was at one time a reasonable facsimile of a modern, authoritarian nation-state with a reasonably advanced and complex economy supported by a similarly advanced technological base, the reality underneath the surface was far different, a fundamentally primitive society based on tribal and religious identifications further riven by decades of unsettled scores.

The best the US could hope to accomplish in Iraq was a temporary imposition of stability sufficient to allow nascent domestic institutions to take shape and root.  This was accomplished.  But it was all that was accomplished.  The later, internally driven political stasis and violence is not the responsibility of the US; it was not an American failure.  Insofar as any outside party is directly involved, it is Iran, and Iran is no ally of stability or peace in Iraq.

The situation is similar but not quite identical in Afghanistan.  The best that can be expected is the US and associated forces will reduce the violence to a point where indigenous institutions might survive and prosper.  Long term success is out of our control.  We cannot make the central government or the local ones legitimate, non-corrupt, and efficient.  Nor can the US and its allies in country assure that the Afghan security forces are fully up to the task of extending and maintaining internal security.  Neither can the US and its partners cleanse the FATA of al-Qaeda, Taliban, and Haqqani network commanders and trigger pullers.

If we define success in seeing Afghanistan a fully functioning nation-state of the Western sort, failure might as well be declared right now.  Given that Afghanistan is tribal in its social and political nature, riven by linguistic, religious, and provincial differences, and considering the evil hand played by Pakistan, there is no way that a mere military defeat short of total obliteration of the jihadists will lead to peace and stabiliity.

It deserves, even requires restatement, that the goal laid out by George W. Bush of "nation-building" in Afghanistan with all that implied was totally unrealistic in all respects.  That goal should not be used in assessing the relative success to date of the new American operational doctrine set forth barely more than a year ago.  Rather the correct base for evaluation is the degree to which the efforts of the US and its partners have neutered the capacity of the assorted groups to wage war effectively and to mount out of country operations.

On the more limited basis the indicators are all positive.  That does not imply success.  The advocates of violent political Islam have demonstrated tactical flexibility and high recuperative powers.  The cross border sanctuaries of the FATA as well as other assistance provided by the Pakistanis have gone a long way in assuring the hydra headed nature of the anti-government groups.

The uncertainties involving the Afghan government, the Afghan National Forces, the role of Pakistan all combine with the basic nature of the Afghan human terrain, its cultural values, and norms; the nature of tribal society and understandings of loyalty; and the deeply divided nature of the polity to make any but the most limited and pessimistic assessments of success the most rational and credible.  While it is possible, even probable, that General Petreaus, a man who is a PR genius but limited as a fighter of wars, has massaged the data: the recent trends in initiative, refugee generation, civilian collateral casualties and enemy tactics as all swinging in the favor of the US and its allies, including Kabul.

The takeaway?  Caution is appropriate as is limited, controlled scepticism but anticipations of American failure to achieve the limited goal, the goal of "not-losing" are way premature.  Much as the NYT and others of that ilk are chomping at the bit to announce one more US defeat, they are not likely to gain that goal.  If the US and its partners can keep on keeping on along the course plotted in recent months, success is far more likely than not--even with continued Pakistani pertinacity.