Can an Insurgency (and Counterinsurgency) Remain Static?
BY Herschel Smith
15 years ago
Our friend BruceR floats some ideas in a recent post, two of which are at least tangentially related. In the first idea he cites A. J. Rossmiller from TNR.
First, the insurgency does not have the capability to defeat U.S. forces or depose Afghanistan’s central government; and, second, U.S. forces do not have the ability to vanquish the insurgency. It’s true that the Taliban has gained ground in recent months, but, absent a full and immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, it cannot retake sovereign control. This is not to say that Afghanistan isn’t unstable; it clearly is. That has been the case for eight years, however, and, in the absence of some shocking, unforeseen development, it could be true for another eight or 18 or 80 years. An increase of tens of thousands of troops will not change that fact, nor will subtle tactical changes. Rather than teetering on the edge of some imagined precipice, the situation in Afghanistan is at a virtual stalemate.
I disagree, but let’s hold our response in abatement until we cover the second idea.
I am firmly convinced that a shift to a “small footprint” counter-terrorism mission is not only possible but will best serve U.S. national security. To use a military term of art, the bottom line up front is that the United States could successfully transition to an effective small footprint counterterrorism mission over the course of the next three years, ending up with a force of about 13,000 military personnel (or less) in Afghanistan.
BruceR is not advocating the CT position – perhaps, it’s hard to tell – but it appears that he is merely linking it as another idea in the long chain of ideas floating around about Afghanistan at the moment. Let’s go with that.
To buy into the first notion, i.e., that an insurgency (and counterinsurgency) can remain static for an undefined and protracted amount of time, you would have to believe that both sides are seen as equally righteous, virtuous and within their rights in conducting the campaign. U.S. troops (and the ISAF) are foreigners, and there would be, it seems, an element of expectation that foreign troops not continue to play a game to a draw, thus prolonging the misery and agony of war for the people.
I will grant the point that there is no particular rush (as in days or even perhaps weeks) in supplying more troops to Afghanistan. Readers can tool back through the archives and will fail to find a “sky is falling unless we supply more troops within the next two weeks” article. But if I haven’t advocated panic, I have advocated more troops all along just as I did with Iraq. I believe that the fear of too large a footprint is vastly overblown, and the more important element for population control and alignment with the counterinsurgent is force projection, progress and increasing stability.
Concerning the small v. large footprint, the element missing in all of the analyses which advocates the counterterrorism approach is the unstated assumption that we can continue to have basing rights, adequate logistics, ordnance, air support and intelligence while we leave the countryside (and urban centers) to Taliban control. Why, exactly, anyone would believe that there would be any Afghan truck drivers to deliver fuel, food, vehicles, etc., when they will have all been beheaded, is a complete mystery.
Logistics is the beginning, middle and end of a campaign. Without it, troops don’t succeed. I was among the first to point out the insurgent strategy of interdicting supplies one and a half years ago while stolid and incompetent U.S. Generals (like Rodriguez) were claiming that the campaign was going just swimmingly. As our logistics category shows, we have covered this ever since, and the problems continue apace.
To believe that we – the counterinsurgent – can continue to swim in the same sea of vehicles, air traffic, food, water, ordnance, weapons and intelligence support for SOF operators who are killing Taliban and al Qaeda HVTs, while at the same time we send nine tenths of the troops home is simply a fairy tale. It’s the stuff of children’s stories.
Finally, concerning the small footprint model, continuing the campaign for the next 18 or 80 years, as the stupid TNR article said, without properly resourcing the troops to do the job, introduces an intractable moral dilemma to the argument. Even if the proposal has been put forward as a straw man for the sake of debate, the argument presupposes that it’s acceptable to the American public to sacrifice the sons of America for a campaign that doesn’t have what it needs to succeed. This has never happened in American history, and it won’t happen this time either. It will be resource the campaign or get out – in the psyche of the American public, and in the countryside of Afghanistan. Both point to a nexus for the campaign.
On October 19, 2009 at 12:22 pm, BruceR said:
Hey, thanks for the linkage. My probably both overlong and overdue clarification of my own views can be found here: http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2009_10_19.html#006565
BruceR
On October 19, 2009 at 1:37 pm, Herschel Smith said:
BruceR has written a heady and thoughtful response. It’s your required reading for the day.
On October 20, 2009 at 8:28 am, TSAlfabet said:
OK, did the required reading per above.
BruceR: what makes arming the tribes a “nutty idea” ? Have you read Major Jim Gant’s work on his experiences working with the tribes in 2003 and the connections that have grown out of it since then?
There seems to be a consensus that Afghanistan is a largely tribal society. Has been for thousands of years and probably will be for the forseeable future. Yet BruceR’s approach would be to continue (or possibly even accelerate) the top-down, central government approach that has not been working since 2001.
In the approach favored by Gant (and others), the U.S. recognizes the tribal nature of Afghan society and accepts that as the immediate and attainable state, one that we can work within. We do NOT try to re-make Afghanistan into the image of a modern democracy. That is a bridge too far.
If, on the other hand, the U.S. can reach out to the tribes in a similar way that the Marines did in Anbar (while recognizing that the tribal dynamics are quite different in Afghanistan), a host of problems plaguing the U.S. effort will be solved: I.E.D.’s, ambushes, Taliban infiltration, population security, security for public works projects, corruption with the National government, corruption with the ANA, corruption with the ANP, warlords, drug gangs. The tribes are the key to solving all of these maladies. It’s time to by-pass the Karzai government. Let him be Mayor of Kabul and have some play money to keep busy with, but let’s stop wasting billions of dollars on his corrupt, national network of crooks and cronies and direct that money right to the ground commanders who can work with the tribes. We already know how to do this from Iraq.
I respect and appreciate BruceR’s perspective, but it is coming from a national, top-down, 7-month involvement. This national government approach has been tried now for 7 years. Trying to get the ANA or ANP into some kind of recognizable and reliable force for good is a Sisyphean project. BruceR makes many good points. Perhaps the best is when he recognizes that the central state model for Afghanistan is failing when he states, “Regrettably, it’s possible we may be looking at the terminal decline of the current version of the central Afghan state, something that seems beyond our powers to change.” Yet BruceR does not see that, far from being a negative, this realization is an open door to something that might work: a weak, national government that largely leaves the provinces to govern themselves in most matters. From the U.S. interest, so long as the tribes refuse to harbor the enemy, victory is achieved. Afghanistan can develop as a nation in its own time.
As Steven Pressfield says at his blog, “It’s the tribes, Stupid!”
On October 20, 2009 at 8:55 am, BruceR said:
TS: I can only speak for the Kandahar experience, of course. I actually think Afghanistan’s big enough to support a multiplicity of approaches. Same as Iraq: “arming the tribes” made sense in the Anbar context, and “strong central army” made sense in the Basra context.
In the Kandahar context, the “Afghan National Auxiliary Police (ANAP)” experiment, our version of the “arming the tribes” solution in 2007 was, it is generally conceded now, a dismal failure: to the point where the entire experiment had been disbanded by late 2008 when I arrived. It still wasted a lot of ISAF’s time and energy.
Kandahar City itself is not currently a city of tribes. Swelled by massive refugee flows and recent immigration, it’s more like a “Gangs of New York” era American city. Saying “arm the tribes” in that context is kind of like saying “arm the Irish,” or “arm the Sicilians.” The country around does have some areas of strong mono-tribal affiliation, such as Arghandab, and where possible those have been respected in the creation of trained ANP units for that area. That has its own problems of course: some of the best ANP we saw were the Hazara imports in Zhari district, who were not imbedded as deeply in local politics. But mileage certainly varies on that score from place to place.
One reason arming the tribes tends to fall apart in Afghanistan because of the “clear zones of fire” problem. There are more than enough people running around with guns now. At least with the “good guys with guns” limited to mentored ANP and ANA, and private security guarding road convoys, we have a reasonable chance of providing some “green” positional awareness. But an arming the tribes solution broadly adapted would extremely limit the ability of attack helos, UAVs, fast air and artillery, as the positional awareness checks required to avoid fratricide (are they Taliban, or tribes?) would become next to impossible. So we give up a lot of our technological advantages in exchange for dubious benefits. And you tend to risk more situations like earlier this year where the Kandahar Chief of Police was gunned down by an unidentified armed crew passing through the AO. (Here’s another question: say a tribal policeman captures a bad guy… now what? Tribal jail? Sent to the central court system and thrown out for the inevitable lack of evidence? A stern talking-to to his elder? You need to define these sorts of things better before you can put it broadly into practice.)
I think an Arming the Tribes experiment could well work in a tribally homogeneous low conflict area which is in relatively pro-government hands now and has an extremely limited Western presence, such as the Hazarajat or parts of the north, and any further experimentation on that score should be done in those areas, before trying to import the idea to a hot zone like Kandahar Province once again.
PS: In the Kandahar context, I’ll tell you right now that the first locals to get new guns, etc. from any new arming the tribes project we envision will be the already heavily armed local cronies of the President’s brother. There is no way to avoid that. You can’t ever “bypass the Karzai government” in K.C., any more than you could “bypass the Mafia” in Palermo.
On October 20, 2009 at 6:45 pm, TSAlfabet said:
BruceR,
we may be talking about two, different things here.
Giving weapons to people in Kandahar and calling them Auxilliary Police is not anything like the proposal by Major Gant, so let’s throw that right out.
Also, Kandahar is a bad example because the chief difficulty that the U.S. faces in A-stan (particularly as compared to Iraq) is that it is such a large, rural country. The U.S. simply does not have enough troops nor is it feasible to bring in enough troops to secure the rural population, which is primarily who the enemy feeds off of and recruits from. If this were just an issue of cities like Kandahar, that would be relatively easy. Afterall, the U.S. got Baghdad and its environs under control. The U.S. knows how to handle city fights, at least by past experience.
And “arming the tribes” is not simply giving them weapons. It is a partnership/alliance that involves Afghan culture and traditions for decision-making. It is the “Ugly American” in force.
As far as only working in homogenous tribal areas, Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai, recently hosted a large gathering of tribes representing every ethnic group in Afghanistan. This diverse group expressed great interest in banding together for security against the enemy.
“Clear zones of fire” may not be a problem as each AO will have U.S./ISAF advisors embedded with the tribal forces in order to call in CAS or fire support as needed. The “as needed” will pretty much be on occasions where the enemy masses for an attack. But then again, if the tribes are on your side, they know their area, they know who belongs and who doesn’t and they know if and when a large attack is brewing.
Kandahar may be a special problem, but if we have to invest tens of thousands of troops, let’s put a good chunk in Kandahar and divvy it up like Baghdad and start getting control of the population.
Call this wishful thinking, but, again, the U.S. knows how to deal with the Kandahar “mafia” as you call it. The same way it dealt with the Mahdi Army in Baghdad. You cut it to pieces. Al Sadr had the same racket going and it didn’t fly.
Sorry for the ramble, but we are making the same mistake the Soviets made in A-stan: giving up the countryside in favor of the cities and supporting a corrupt and unpopular central government. We can take and hold the countryside with the tribes and we can by-pass Karzai because, ultimately, we have the money and the guns, and he doesn’t.
On October 20, 2009 at 10:53 pm, BruceR said:
TS: This may come as a bit of a surprise but I actually have a lot of respect for Maj Gant’s ideas and accomplishments. It was partly with people like him in mind that I wrote here (http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2009_09_15.html#006531), specifically the part about “taking a good chunk of the country and letting them run it with a bare minimum of Western troop support, operating almost covertly within their ranks.” (If he ever answers you on his thoughts on my comments on Pressfield’s blog, please pass on my respects.)
There are other reasons I don’t think his current proposal would have worked in Kandahar when I was there. The Pashtun communal affiliations in Southern Afghanistan and Eastern Afghanistan are very different historically, to start with… yes they’re all Pashtuns, but comparing East to South is in many ways like comparing Scotland to England… and as I said before, what works well in one place won’t work well in another. But hey, Afghanistan’s a big place. By all means, give Maj Gant’s ideas a province and see how it works out.
I do think “arm the tribes” as a trope is generally better than “bribe the tribes,” which all the columnists are yakking about these days, it seems, and makes even less sense as a generally applicable solution. The title of his paper aside, though, and I admit I’ve only read the Pressfield excerpts so far, but I’d respectfully suggest he’s not really doing a tribally-based solution as much as a communally-based solution: basically giving the leader of a local qawm access to precision air power, etc. in return for him keeping a lid on things locally. Check.
Gant describes it himself as an “economy of force” operation and it might very well work in that context, particularly in the eastern mountains we’re pulling main force units back from as part of the current repositioning. I don’t think it would work as well in an area of operations like Kandahar that overlapped with main force Western and Afghan units any more than you could intersperse Lawrence’s Arabs (a man he and I both admire very much) with Allenby’s Brits and Australians on the same ground. So give him and the plan its own AO, I say. (And if he feels he needs another S2, give him my number.)
I only cited the ANAP failure because you mentioned Anbar, and that was clearly meant as an Anbar-type effort to arm the southern tribes, that failed largely because it was realized after the fact that Anbar and Afghanistan are different places. You’re right that Maj. Gant’s idea, call it an “arbakai with air power,” is different: but he himself also takes pains to say Afghanistan is not Anbar, too. I wish him only the best of luck in getting his ideas a hearing.