Q&A with Stephen Biddle on Afghanistan

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GIDEON ROSE: We're delighted to have back with us today Steve Biddle, one of the country's sanest and most knowledgeable defense analysts, to tell us about what's going on in Afghanistan. Steve was just over there and is now back here. He says it's even hotter there than here and he was not referring just to the weather. So, Steve, tell us first what you saw and then we will get into a discussion of what it means.

STEPHEN BIDDLE: Well, with respect to observations, let me start with what I think is the biggest question about the war at the moment, which is whether we can win and whether we're winning. You know, that's behind a lot of the trends in public opinion. And my sense of the debate here has been that there's been a strongly pessimistic zeitgeist over the last couple of months, which I think is substantially overstated. I think we've been on a rollercoaster ride where the command in-theater, for a variety of reasons back in the spring, got substantially over optimistic and led people to expect unrealistically rapid progress.

Then they ran into reality and the result is that now everyone's excessively pessimistic. And I think what would be appropriate is if we all got back on the happy road in between.

Let me flesh that out a little by saying a bit on the security side of things and a bit on the governance side of things, because I think this rollercoaster ride is a response to stimuli on both of those scores.

On the security side of things, we tend to want counterinsurgency to be like painting a house. You start at the lower left-hand corner and make steady, continuous progress. Eventually, the whole house is painted and you've got success. The problem is that is a poor mental model for what's going on. COIN is a lot closer to surgery. It's a long, painful process where indicators of trauma go up before they go down. So the fact that trauma indicators are going up doesn't tell you very much.

It may be that they eventually go back down, the patient is cured, and you win. But patients die on the operating table, too. The fact that trauma indicators are going up doesn't mean that they're going to stay up or come back down. What it really tells you is that the violence statistics aren't worth much.

And in many ways, where we are in Afghanistan right now is a lot like where we were in Iraq in June of 2007, when the surge brigades had all arrived, violence was way up, and not a lot of good had been done that you could see in the casualty statistics. And at the time it was widely interpreted as evidence of failure -- which, of course, it wasn't. But it wasn't a sign of success either. The trouble is that you're in one of those moments where it's dark before the dawn and you don't know whether the dawn is coming or not.

ROSE: So when will you -- and how will you -- know whether dawn has arrived?

BIDDLE: Well, I think it takes at least a year, especially in Afghanistan, to know whether a given village or a given district has been stabilized and whether the model is working or not. The fighting there is very seasonal. So until you've had a whole fighting season and a winter, it is very hard to know.

Now, what that means is that there are places in Afghanistan where you can know something. And we spent some time in central Helmand on this last trip and there are parts where we've been for a year or more -- for example Nad Ali and Garmsir -- where the Taliban have been kicked out. They've tried to counterattack and reestablish themselves but that effort has largely failed and the places are reasonably stable at this point.

The war ain't over there by any stretch of the imagination, but the areas are reasonably stable because, to an important degree, we've been there for 18 months or more.

ROSE: So what I hear you saying is that you have a Potter Stewart definition of success, but not a Potter Stewart definition of failure. In other words, if it is working you'll see the levels of violence come down at some point. You'll see things start to stabilize and then you'll know things are going well. But if that hasn't happened yet, it is hard to distinguish between "It may happen down the road" and "It's not going to happen."

BIDDLE: Yeah. And eventually, there's a statute of limitations on this. I mean, you can't reasonably expect after five or six years to keep saying, "Well, it'll happen eventually." Again, I think about a year to 18 months is a reasonable time frame. You have to live through a whole fighting cycle.

ROSE: So, in effect, you are saying we should have some kind of mental clock ticking but we should have set it for when the new set of policies -- the Afghan surge -- essentially began?

BIDDLE: I think that's right. I also think we have to look at the details of the sequence of things that are happening, rather than just the aggregate casualty statistics -- especially at the national level.

If the model is working, if COIN is doing what it's supposed to do, a series of things should happen, more or less in this order: first you clear the bad guys out, then the bad guys are going to try and counterattack. You have to expect that and resist it. The counterattacks eventually tail off and then you have to build up governance. So there's a series of things that happen.