Here is yet another commentary opposing the notion of a troop increase for Afghanistan.  Listen to the logic.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s visit to Afghanistan this month — even before President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration — will underscore the new administration’s priority to ending the war there. But their planned “surge first, then negotiate” strategy isn’t likely to work.

The Obama-Biden team wants to weaken the Taliban militarily then strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. This echoes what the Bush administration did in Iraq, where it used a surge largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni tribal leaders and other local chieftains. Current Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen has already announced a near-doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, to up to 63,000, by mid-2009.

Sending more forces into Afghanistan is a losing strategy. The Soviets couldn’t tame the country with more than 100,000 troops.

So that’s the logic.  100,000 troops didn’t work for the Soviets, so a troop increase won’t work for the U.S.  But this is a non sequitur, and the author either knows it and wrote it anyway and is thus a liar, or doesn’t know it and shouldn’t be writing commentaries for anyone, especially the Wall Street Journal.

The comparison is void because of differences in the campaigns.  Many of NATO forces are unable to fight in offensive operations due to restrictive rules of engagement from their countries of origin.  Many of the countries whose forces are in Afghanistan aren’t practicing counterinsurgency, but rather are confined to Forward Operating Bases doing force protection.  Finally, there aren’t enough troops in general to contact the population and provide security, and thus the countryside is being lost.

This last point is critical.  Russian military strategy focused on urban population centers rather than rural terrain, and this was the determinative error made in their campaign.  To the extent that NATO and the U.S. forces are duplicating this error, we will lose.  The practice of counterinsurgency requires constant contact with the population, and not just in urban centers.

There is a variant of the criticism of a troop increase, and it is more sophisticated.  It comes from Amir Taheri.

On advice from Karzai, Khalilzad, and a number of other Afghan exiles, the Bush administration, which had little knowledge of Afghanistan, was sucked into a project founded on a number of illusions. The chief illusion was that Afghanistan could develop a system of highly centralized government headed by a U.S.-style president and a strong executive branch. That scheme ignored Afghanistan’s historical and geographical realities. Afghanistan emerged as a loosely knit independent state in the 18th century and was accepted as a buffer setting the limits of the Tsarist, Persian, and British empires in Central Asia. A patchwork of ethnic and religious communities, Afghanistan developed a system of rule in which tribal chiefs and Muslim clerics enjoyed a great measure of autonomy under the nominal suzerainty of a distant king who never tried to impose his will throughout his realm by force. The idea that Afghanistan is a land of unruly tribes was generally recognized in the Muslim world. It was not for nothing that Muslims always referred to Afghanistan as Taghistan (“The Land of Insolence”).

The Taliban knew all that and never tried to impose central control over the country. They preferred to secure the allegiance of local tribal and religious leaders with a mixture of bribery and deference. It is well known that the Taliban conquered more land with Samsonites full of crisp U.S. dollar notes than with Soviet-style AK rifles.

The best structure for Afghanistan is that of a loose federation in which its 18 ethnic and religious communities enjoy full economic, cultural, and administrative autonomy. Yet the system developed in Afghanistan since 2002 has gone in the exact opposite direction. The Afghan president today has powers that no Afghan king ever dreamt of. The problem is that these powers cannot be used without provoking violent resistance from a majority of Afghans — and such violence cannot be dealt with except by force. President Karzai, a member of a minor Pashtun (Pathan) tribe who lacks a constituency of his own, cannot master the force needed to impose central-government control throughout his unruly land. He has been trying to do so by relying on American power. The result is that the U.S. has been sucked into Afghan politics as another tribe, albeit one that has greater firepower than the rest.

So be it, and I am not disputing Taheri’s account of one of the failings of the campaign thus far.  But if Taheri doesn’t like the trajectory of our actions thus far in Afghanistan, I don’t like the trajectory of his critique.

It may never be known how bad and unworkable is the notion of a centralized government and how bad the security situation would have been if we had conducted counterinsurgency from the start.  Taheri’s recommendations are likely better than what we have been pursuing, but that misses the point in Afghanistan.

The point thus far is that there have been too few troops and too loose a coalition of forces with lack of central oversight committed to a singular strategy to conduct classical counterinsurgency.  That means that rather than counterinsurgency, we have conducted counterterrorism – a special operations campaign against high value targets.  Kill a mid-level Taliban commander, it takes two weeks for another to rise in his place, and for two weeks you have quiet human and physical terrain.  In two weeks all hell breaks loose again.  Kill the next commander, and the cycle repeats itself.

I have heard this cycle directly from SOF field grade officers from Afghanistan, these officers implementing the strategy even though they knew it would only succeed for a short duration.  We can implement Taheri’s strategy today, and it wouldn’t be able to be effected by the number of troops currently in Afghanistan because security cannot be provided for the population.  Neither, for that matter, can the tribes provide security in provinces such as Helmand where it is projected that there are between 8000 – 20,000 hard core Taliban fighters.

A re-visitation of the strategy will be necessary in 2009, and maybe Taheri’s approach is the correct one to take.  But no strategy will succeed without more troops.