Can the Right War Be Won?
Defining American Interests in Afghanistan
Article Summary
Two new books offer insightful analyses of how to succeed in Afghanistan. But the sheer difficulty of the task points to the need for an alternative strategy -- one that defends U.S. interests without trying to rebuild a shattered country.
STEVEN SIMON is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he served on the National Security Council in various positions, including Senior Director for Transnational Threats.
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In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan
Norton
2009
432 pp.
9780393068986
$27.95
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
Oxford University Press
2009
384 pp.
9780195368345
$27.95
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on fighting insurgencies.
By 2007, Jones writes, the United States faced a "perfect storm of political upheaval." Al Qaeda bases were embedded in Pakistan, a "cancer of corruption" had undermined the Afghan government's legitimacy, and the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign had been "hamstrung" by the war in Iraq, which had absorbed the troops that would have been needed to quash the growing violence in Afghanistan. The anarchic setting testified to "America's inability to finish the job it had started." The Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, the Haqqani network, criminal groups, and tribal militias had "beg[u]n a sustained effort to overthrow the government." (On this point, Kilcullen disagrees: he was struck by the relative indifference of the Taliban toward Kabul; for the insurgents, he argues, it was the Pashtun countryside that mattered. To the degree that U.S. policy hinges on the expansiveness of the Taliban's goals, it matters greatly whether Jones or Kilcullen has this right.)
The immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion saw some successes. Jones attributes these to the unique combination of personalities in charge. Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador, had been born in Mazar-e Sharif. He was personally committed to Afghanistan's recovery, sensitive to its sociocultural idiosyncrasies, and possessed of a knack for working with military counterparts. He meshed well with General David Barno, then the U.S. military commander, who began immediately to put in place a "security halo" around Pashtun villages -- what Kilcullen much later called a "population-centric" approach.
This successful duo ended up being a casualty of the Iraq war. Khalilzad was reassigned to Iraq; Barno went to the Pentagon. They were replaced by Ambassador Ronald Neumann and General Karl Eikenberry. According to Jones, these were poor choices. Their shortcomings resulted mainly from their "stovepiped" management styles, which disengaged the political and military gears of the counterinsurgency campaign envisaged by their predecessors. And even if they had had the right intentions, the Iraq war would have starved them of the resources needed to carry them out. "American and other international assistance," Jones writes, "was among the lowest of any state-building mission since World War II." Insurgent attacks increased by 400 percent between 2002 and 2006; deaths rose by 800 percent. The use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), a tactic imported from Iraq, rose 100 percent.
Jones occasionally reverts to political science jargon, which hobbles an otherwise very readable style. Sometimes, however, this can work well, as when he reviews various explanations for violence offered by the literature on civil wars -- competition for resources, ethnic rivalry -- but concludes that these are not at work in Afghanistan. The primary factors, he argues, are bad governance and a mobilizing ideology.
Jones' time spent in Afghanistan also pays dividends. This is less because he was ferried by soldiers to Afghan villages for a bit of authenticity than because it gave him exposure to the soldiers themselves. Here, the anecdotes reveal something important about NATO relationships in the field. U.S. personnel, he reports, have assigned their own meanings to the acronym "ISAF" (for the International Security Assistance Force, which operates under the auspices of NATO): "I saw America fight" and "I suck at fighting."
A SAVAGE WAR OF PEACE
Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer, is the proverbial man who needs no introduction. A connoisseur of counterinsurgency -- with military experience in the field and senior staff and advisory experience with the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism -- he is a man who knows "where the dog is buried." (He is also fond of idioms and proverbs.) His book lurches from graduate-school anthropology to lyrical memoir to policy memo. In places, it is as impenetrable as the Indonesian jungles where he was once deployed and, as a doctoral student, interviewed remote villagers. Nevertheless, there is much that merits close attention.
First, there is Kilcullen's clear and detailed explanation of counterinsurgency tactics, as opposed to strategy. By now, the world understands that at the campaign level, the priority is supposed to be the nonmilitary sphere, in which the general population must be secured, and that cultural awareness is vital. Kilcullen powerfully describes what this means on the ground. For Afghanistan, the example he chooses is road construction. Far more effective than conducting large-scale search-and-destroy missions -- which catch a few insurgents but leave the population defenseless and alienate ordinary people -- is building roads in dangerous valleys, which serves the local population and gives it a sense of shared purpose with U.S. troops. Moreover, the cement road shoulders make it hard for insurgents to bury IEDs. In another context, this might look like a retreat to a defensive posture ill suited to the warrior spirit. In Afghanistan, it forces insurgents out into the open and engenders a sense of common cause between civilians and U.S. soldiers.
Kilcullen also mercilessly conveys the cluelessness of those working from sequestered headquarters, drawing on his experience in the Green Zone in Baghdad. An assiduous diarist, Kilcullen kept a record of the official reaction to the Sunni bombing of the Shiite Askariya shrine in February 2006. According to Kilcullen, it took four and a half months for the transformative effect of this atrocity to register within the Green Zone. Yet myriad news stories at the time -- The New York Times ran the headline "Iraq at the Precipice" that month -- were already pointing out that the attack had thrust Iraq into civil war.
The majority of the efforts to rebuild, modernize, and educate Afghans has to be conducted in Pashtun-dominated territory, with a view to driving a wedge into Taliban-controlled areas.
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