A Substitute for Victory

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Letter From

Letter From Kabul: Solving Afghanistan's Problems

Kim Barker

As the Obama administration prepares to send more troops to Afghanistan, what are the problems U.S. forces will face, and what, if anything, can they do to overcome them?
Part I: Corruption
Part II: The Warlords 
Part III: The Taliban

Review Essay

Can the Right War Be Won?

Steven Simon

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.

Essay

Flipping the Taliban

Fotini Christia and Michael Semple

The deployment of more U.S. troops to Afghanistan is necessary to tip the balance of power against the Taliban. But this military "surge" must be accompanied with a political one designed to persuade insurgents to give up their fight.

Postscript

Holding Pakistan

Haider Ali Hussein Mullick

Conventional wars are won by capturing territory, but counterinsurgencies are won by holding it. Rather than rushing to open new fronts against the Taliban, Pakistan must now focus on keeping the territory it has already cleared.

This past summer, as the Obama administration considered escalating the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, proponents of a surge argued that more troops were required to defeat the insurgency and prevent the Taliban's return to power. They justified their position by arguing that more troops -- and more time -- were necessary to implement the tenets of "population-centric counterinsurgency."

This form of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine is a novel concept born out of a peculiar interpretation of the U.S. experience in Iraq and grounded in nearly forgotten 50-year-old theories. Population-centric COIN holds that insurgencies are generally a secondary concern and that the key challenge in countries such as Afghanistan is establishing state legitimacy by providing concrete goods and services. In other words, effective governments may be able to outcompete insurgents in providing benefits to win over the loyalty of the population. But competent governance is often lacking -- in part because of gaps in security -- which causes a crisis of legitimacy that spawns insurgent challenges. Following this logic, the challenge of COIN is to create sufficient security conditions in which a responsive government can thrive. Population-centric COIN, in short, uses military force to foster the conditions for long-term economic development and good government. According to many prominent proponents of the Afghan surge  including John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution this approach represented the best opportunity to "fix" Afghanistan once and for all.

Critics of this approach cite three flaws. First, blaming bad governance for Afghanistan's problems, they say, ignores the importance of other factors driving the insurgency, including ethnic antagonisms, ideological disputes, and old-fashioned power struggles. Second, a theory of conflict focused almost exclusively on underlying factors, such as a lack of government goods and services, rather than enemy action seems at odds with the history of warfare, which suggests that the real challenge comes from the actions and decisions of the adversary. Third, critics point out, population-centric COIN requires building responsive governmental structures, promoting economic growth, and eliminating endemic corruption -- objectives that have almost never been successfully accomplished in the long, doleful history of international development.

President Barack Obama ultimately decided on escalation in Afghanistan but at the same time declared that within 18 months he would begin withdrawing troops. Proponents of population-centric COIN won half a loaf: they got their "surge" but not the time to make it work.

Given additional resources but a shortened time frame, General Stanley McChrystal seems to have adapted. Instead of focusing on providing security to the population in the hopes that a "civilian surge" might follow, he has decided to attack and destroy enemy strongholds. The recent offensive in Marja -- a relatively sparsely populated area with little economic potential -- was an unlikely target for a population-centric campaign. But given insurgent strength in the area, it made an ideal target for an enemy-centric approach. Likewise, the announced follow-up operation in the area of Kandahar -- another insurgent stronghold -- is also an enemy-centric program.

Although many COIN experts see enemy-centric campaigns as the second-best option, the truth is that such efforts are both more likely to succeed and to showcase the U.S. Army's strengths. Successful counterinsurgency campaigns are usually explicitly enemy-centric, focused on seeking out and destroying insurgent organizations. These campaigns can work in one of two ways. A counterinsurgent force can gradually steamroll an insurgency if it can also significantly restrict population movements. This is precisely how the Sri Lankan government recently wiped out the Tamil Tigers. These sorts of campaigns require a willingness to treat the population harshly, however. For both ethical and practical reasons, the United States is unwilling to pursue this course of action. Attempting to influence the decision-making calculus of insurgent leaders is more promising. By systematically attacking insurgents' strongholds, an army can erode insurgent combat power, overturn the narrative that the insurgency is winning, and ultimately compel the insurgents to compromise. Military force in this case becomes instrumental.

This approach is appropriate for Afghanistan because the conflict there is much messier than a typical two-sided battle. The Afghan government itself is loosely cobbled together, and the insurgency is composed of three major groups and perhaps a dozen minor factions. But even more fundamentally, the insurgent-counterinsurgent divide is itself mapped onto hundreds of purely local and historical conflicts among villages, local elites, families, and tribes. In the final analysis, regardless of who "wins," the resulting government will be composed of individuals and groups from both sides of the current divide. This is truly an Afghan civil war, and the goal of the United States should be to encourage reconciliation among Afghans while excluding foreigners, be they al Qaeda terrorists or government officials from India, Iran, Pakistan, or the United States.