War Council After Peace Prize

David Kilcullen, Paul McCartney to Stanley McChrystal's John Lennon for the COIN set, unsurprisingly thinks that an outright escalation is the only path to victory in Afghanistan.

(CNN) -- An influential adviser to the U.S. commander in Afghanistan declared Friday that anything less than 25,000 extra international troops in the country would not be enough to win.

David Kilcullen, who also advised U.S. commanders in Iraq, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour the window of opportunity to turn around the war is closing.

Kilcullen's comments came as President Barack Obama, only hours after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, again met with his top advisers to discuss strategy and troop levels in Afghanistan.

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is reportedly asking for up to 40,000 extra troops. Some reports say there is an option on the table to send 60,000 additional troops, almost doubling the U.S. force now in the country.

Kilcullen, who has just come back from Afghanistan -- said the Obama administration needs to finish the strategy review as soon as possible. While the war is not as bad as some say, "it's worse than any other time in the past," he said.

Kilcullen is also aware of the problems of governmental corruption and the lack of a partner in the civilian leadership in the country. But he's certainly foregrounding the use of military force to overcome the fact that we'd be protecting the population in service to an illegitimate government.

The discordance of the war council at the White House on the day Barack Obama was handed the Nobel Peace Prize was not lost on the Afghans.

"I'm not sure I understand -- this isn't for peace here, is it?" said bank worker Homaira Reza. "Because we haven't got any."

Irfan Mohammed, whose shop windows were rattled a day earlier by a massive blast outside the Indian Embassy in central Kabul, said he believed Obama was a good man, and perhaps deserving of the laurel.

"But so far as Afghanistan goes, he hasn't made up his mind what to do," Mohammed said.

I still think the Nobel Committee, consciously or unconsciously, is undertaking some behavioral economics here. I don't know if it will work, but clearly Obama is in some kind of box.

The Economics Of Military Action

Here's something you don't see everyday - a member of Congress asking to fiscally quantify endless war:

“There are some fundamental questions that I would ask of those who are suggesting that we follow a long term counterinsurgency strategy:

1. As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it? We are now in the middle of a fundamental debate over reforming our healthcare system. The President has indicated that it must cost less than $900 billion over ten years and be fully paid for. The Congressional Budget Office has had four committees twisting themselves into knots in order to fit healthcare reform into that limit. CBO is earnestly measuring the cost of each competing healthcare plan. Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan? If we add 40,000 troops and recognize the need for a sustained 10 year or longer commitment, as the architects of this plan tell us we do, the military costs alone would be over $800 billion. And unlike the demands that are being made of the healthcare alternatives that they be deficit neutral, we’ve heard no such demand with respect to Afghanistan. I would ask how much will this entire effort cost, when you add in civilian costs and costs in Pakistan? And how would that impact the budget?

Warmongers have had the great luxury in this country of never having to justify their costs. Not just the human costs, but the real financial costs to constant military buildup. The usual retort is that you can't put a price on human lives. If that was the case, there would be no requirement for budget neutrality in health care reform, something that could save as many as 45,000 lives annually - the people who die from a lack of health insurance.

Rep. Obey's full remarks are well worth reading - he makes all the points about the futility of nation-building in a country without a partner in the government, the danger of angering local populations with a heavier occupying footprint, the fantasyland strategy of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, the need for an achievable policy, the potential for the war to crowd out any other Presidential agenda item. But I wanted to highlight this part because it's so alien to the contemporary political debate. It's certainly nothing you'd ever hear coming from the mouths of one of the fiscal scolds. The Pentagon budget, the budget for perpetual war, is inviolable and somehow magic - it doesn't create deficits, it doesn't produce burdens on long-term spending, it is never "at risk of going bankrupt." David Obey at least is trying to change that misimpression.

Some insider leaked the idea that the top-level troop request is actually 60,000, in an effort to make the 40,000 number seem like the middle course. Maybe they can write down on paper how much that would cost. And do it in a ten-year budget window to make sure the costs are inflated as possible.


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The Narrowness Of The Afghan Debate

The White House, a day after stating that the only part of Afghanistan war policy off the table is ending it, is throwing up a trial balloon that they will pull back on their nation-building project there:

President Obama’s national security team is moving to reframe its war strategy by emphasizing the campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan while arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States, officials said Wednesday.

As Mr. Obama met with advisers for three hours to discuss Pakistan, the White House said he had not decided whether to approve a proposed troop buildup in Afghanistan. But the shift in thinking, outlined by senior administration officials on Wednesday, suggests that the president has been presented with an approach that would not require all of the additional troops that his commanding general in the region has requested.

It remains unclear whether everyone in Mr. Obama’s war cabinet fully accepts this view. While Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has argued for months against increasing troops in Afghanistan because Pakistan was the greater priority, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have both warned that the Taliban remain linked to Al Qaeda and would give their fighters havens again if the Taliban regained control of all or large parts of Afghanistan, making it a mistake to think of them as separate problems [...]

The White House appears to be trying to prepare the ground to counter that by focusing attention on recent successes against Qaeda cells in Pakistan. The approach described by administration officials on Wednesday amounted to an alternative to the analysis presented by General McChrystal. If, as the White House has asserted in recent weeks, it has improved the ability of the United States to reduce the threat from Al Qaeda, then the war in Afghanistan is less central to American security.

I'm glad that there's at least some pushback on the silly "safe havens" theory, which if allowed to predominate would lead us down a road of endless escalation. So scaling back the mission from one that is simply unachievable to a more achievable one makes sense. The counter-insurgency cult is quite dangerous. The best you can say about it is that it keeps warmongers away from an anti-China defense buildup.

Joking aside, it’s worth keeping in mind when you see arguments about counterinsurgency that there are really two different debates happening. One is the debate inside the military and the defense policy establishment which is really a debate about COIN versus non-COIN military activity. Another is a debate about that pertains to the larger question of the strategic and budgetary priorities of the United States. In my experience COIN enthusiasts tend to have the better of the limited argument about the relative allocation of military resources, but generally decline to engage in a serious way with the larger question of national priorities. In other words, a debate that ranges from “we should fight a series of small wars against Muslims” to “we should prepare for a big war against China” is really seen as “lively” rather than incredibly cramped and narrow.

Perhaps policymakers are coming to their senses about COIN, but not about the overall need to disengage from pointless wars. But they should. New liberal hero Alan Grayson, who's been saying this stuff for a while, effectively articulated the alternative the other day:

"I think that the aid program is a fig leaf trying to make congress and the American people feel better about the war and about killing. I think that diplomacy in the areas of fig leaf to try to make the American people think that there is some constructive alternative to the war when the war itself is destructive and not constructive [...]

If we wanted to rethink Afghanistan in our image, we’d have to destroy the north to save it, and I don’t think the American people are ever going to do that to anybody. So I think that the underline premise is simply wrong.

I’ve been to 175 countries all around the world including Afghanistan, including every country in that region, and what I’ve seen everywhere I go is that there are some commonalities everywhere you go, everywhere you go people want to fall in love. It’s an interesting thing. Everywhere you go, people love children. Everywhere, they love children. Everywhere you go, there’s a taboo against violence. Every single place you go. And everywhere you go, people want to be left alone. And that’s the best foreign policy of all. Just to leave people alone."

President Obama is holding a troop request in his hands and deciding between a big escalation or a small escalation. Nowhere is there a strategy for no escalation, to shut it down, in the words of Charlie Wilson, the original American interventionist in Afghanistan.

Bringing Afghanistan Back To Core Strategy

Yesterday's big bipartisan meeting on Afghanistan hasn't resolved the decision from the White House, although it clarified a few data points:

House and Senate leaders of both parties emerged from a nearly 90-minute conversation with Obama with praise for his candor and interest in listening. But politically speaking, all sides appeared to exit where they entered, with Republicans pushing Obama to follow his military commanders and Democrats saying he should not be rushed [...]

Obama said the war would not be reduced to a narrowly defined counterterrorism effort, with the withdrawal of many U.S. forces and an emphasis on special operations forces that target terrorists in the dangerous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Two senior administration officials aides say such a scenario has been inaccurately characterized and linked to Vice President Joe Biden, and that Obama wanted to make clear he is considering no such plan [...]

Obama may be considering a more modest building of troops — closer to 10,000 than 40,000 — according to Republican and Democratic congressional aides. But White House aides said no such decision has been made.

The New York Times confirms this. This seems to almost be the worst possible option. If you're continuing a counter-insurgency strategy, all of the literature on it dictates that it needs a certain amount of resources far greater than what exist in the country now. If you're shifting to counter-terrorism, you would necessarily need less ground troops. This just seems like a recipe for muddling through, and shifting really to the same kind of air war that we saw under George Bush. I know there's data that the drone attacks are working to disrupt Al Qaeda in Pakistan, but an air war in more populous areas, where the Taliban is essentially embedded with local populations, doesn't seem like a useful option.

This Quinnipiac poll has fairly good news for advocates of muddling through. While only 30% want to stay in Afghanistan "as long as it takes," 65% are willing to have soldiers fight there, at least for the moment. A plurality believe that the fight will not be successful in defeating any terrorist threat, however. So it's muddled as well. I think there's a base of support for antiwar actions, but that voice has been stilled for so long that I'd say the mass of the public is generally resigned to a seeming perpetual war, and will accept whatever decision the President makes.

It doesn't seem like Obama is seeking out voices apart from Congress and his staff of advisors. You know who he should ring up? Audrey Kurth Cronin from the US National War College, who is focusing on the core question of how the terrorist threat can be reduced.

The history of terrorist groups points to various ways they may decline and end: the destruction of leadership, failure to transition between generations, achieving their stated cause, negotiating a settlement, succumbing to military or police repression, losing popular support and transitioning to other malignant activities such as criminality or war [...]

American use of military force signified Western resolve, killed al Qaeda leaders and prevented attacks, all of which were vital; but force alone cannot drive this group to its end.

A loss of popular support has ended many terrorist groups, and it is a plausible scenario for al Qaeda. Support can be compromised through miscalculation, especially in targeting, and popular backlash. The Real Irish Republican Army and India's Sikh separatists come to mind. Or a campaign can fail to convey a positive image or progress toward its goals, which amply applies to al Qaeda.

While the group continues to be dangerous, the faltering popularity of this campaign with most Muslims provides clear evidence of this dynamic underway [...]

In this regard, it is counterproductive to consider al Qaeda as a global insurgency. This concept bestows legitimacy, emphasizes territorial control, encourages our enemies to join forces and puts the United States into an us-versus-them strategic framework that precludes clear-eyed analyses of the strategies of leverage that are being used against the United States and its allies.

In short, if we are thinking about classic pathways to the end, the secret to undermining this campaign is not "winning hearts and minds" but enhancing al Qaeda's tendency to lose them.

I read this to mean that the dynamic of military force to subdue the Al Qaeda threat is misplaced. They are diminishing of their own accord and we can accelerate that through strategic engagement and public diplomacy with the Muslim world. Obama has a foothold here - his presence has actually lifted the status of the United States to the world's most admired country again. But that can be fleeting. And intensifying a war in the Muslim world will sap at that goodwill. We can use intelligence capabilities to weaken Al Qaeda and allow their extremist rhetoric to play itself out among their constituency. None of this necessarily involves nation-building.

I don't think this framework is part of the discussions in the White House at all. And that's tragic.

Listen To The Afghanis

I guess there was a big confab of the War Council yesterday about what to do in Afghanistan, and clearly the team has split over a counter-insurgency or a counter-terrorism strategy. Now, in many ways that's two sides of the same coin, just a matter of how to explain the killing of foreigners. And I don't know if either strategy gets us closer to an exit - we're not going to kill every terrorist, as surely as we're not going to convert every Afghani into a tribune of democracy. But I do think it's clear that shifting away from a COIN strategy at least offers the possibility of getting us out of the region in a shorter period of time, and hopefully with less blood on our hands. So I'm rooting for the Biden faction. It appears that Bob Gates is the key swing vote here.

That said, the next War Council meeting could maybe have a representative of the people from the country whose destiny is being decided.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - Take advice from locals instead of trying to impose your own ideas on a tribal society. Invite the Taliban to the negotiating table. Use traditional governing structures rather than reinventing the wheel. And spend a lot more money on plowshares than on swords [...]

Afghans interviewed in their shops and on the streets have plenty of advice for the U.S. president and his allies: Don't necessarily leave, but for your sake and for ours, you'd better get a lot smarter about what you do here.

Several said they welcomed the presence of U.S. and NATO troops, whom they view as far more benign than the Soviets who occupied the country in the 1980s. They fear that a rapid withdrawal of foreign forces could throw the country into another civil war.

But they don't necessarily think a foreign military buildup is the answer.

"I'm afraid the Taliban will only get stronger," said Obiadullah Zahir, 30, a dress merchant, standing beside a row of attired mannequins with broken noses and missing arms. "I'm afraid America will leave and war return." [...]

Either you try to get the Taliban to buy in, said Amin Khatir, 24, a student in the capital, or you face an enemy that is increasingly entrenched, organized and more broadly distributed. That's a big problem, no matter how many pieces of fancy equipment foreign armies may wield.

"The Americans only want to deal with those they meet with, who speak English, not the ones farther away," Khatir said. "An election can't solve more than 1% of our problems. We must find a new way, and the main issue is security." [...]

Rather than sanction some minimally acceptable election, he said, Afghanistan should convene a traditional loya jirga, or meeting of power brokers from around the country, as it did after the Taliban was ousted.

"If you pile more bricks onto an unstable house, the whole thing will collapse," he said.

Are any of these sentiments making it into the War Council?

Mr. President, you're being very deliberative about this process. Be sure you get some local perspectives, too. It's their county, after all.

The Biden Plan For Afghanistan

This would be a serious strategy shift, and the right one, IMO:

President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.

The options under review are part of what administration officials described as a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare just six months ago. Two new intelligence reports are being conducted to evaluate Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said [...]

Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics [...]

A shift from a counterinsurgency strategy to a focus on counterterrorism would turn the administration’s current theory on its head....But the Afghan presidential election, widely marred by allegations of fraud, undermined the administration’s confidence that it had a reliable partner in President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden already had raised doubts about Mr. Karzai, which were only exacerbated by the fear that even if he emerges from a runoff election, he will have little credibility with his own people.

Counter-terrorism was the initial goal and is still cited as the main reason for being in Afghanistan, so I don't know if I'd call it a shift in strategy more than a return to the actual strategy, the only one with national security implications.

This is probably another trial balloon, but it's clear that there is no unanimity of opinion in the White House on Afghanistan. Some people look at a country with no functioning government and a fraudulent, illegitimate leader, and they wonder how you can run a counter-insurgency campaign around that. And they would be right. Heck, General McChrystal said they're right, basically (via K-Drum):

McChrystal's point is that it's not simply "resources," not just U.S. and NATO troops, that will settle the war. It's also whether the Afghan government earns the trust of its people — whether the Afghan president and his entourage of ministers, governors, and warlords are willing — or are willing to be lured — to clean up their act, end their corrupt practices, and truly serve their people.

When Obama says he needs to review the strategy before he decides on troop levels, he almost certainly means that he needs to assess whether a counterinsurgency strategy makes sense if the Afghan government — the entity that our troops would be propping up and aligning themselves with — is viewed by a wide swath of its own people as illegitimate.

Given this fact, the parallels to Vietnam and the Diem government become clear. They never had a popular legitimacy there, either, making the fight a losing battle.

America does not have a good track record of de-escalating a war in the face of the evidence. It would be a very bold maneuver for a President not inclined toward bold maneuvers, at least so far. But getting trapped in a war because of the tauntings of hawks, when there's so much else to get right, would be a disappointment. I'm pleased that he hasn't rushed to the conclusion of the generals here, and is seriously thinking about the reality of the situation instead of some fantasy world where America builds an oasis of democracy in a country that has never known it.

...by the way, this sounds like a really good cover story, showing Bob Woodward and the Washington Post's commitment to the safety of the troops, without addressing the elephant in the room, that whoever leaked the document wanted to force the President's hand and Woodward let them. That would be the opposite of the "Pentagon Papers," to which Woodward likened it. It's a propaganda ploy designed to embarrass the commander-in-chief into escalation. And Woodward played along. What a hero.

Stumbling Into Annihilation

Bob Woodward comes out of the mothballs today and produces a timely leak of an internal document designed to raise the spectre of "defeat" in Afghanistan and get all the serious types behind escalation.

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." [...]

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians.

He provides extensive new details about the Taliban insurgency, which he calls a muscular and sophisticated enemy that uses modern propaganda and systematically reaches into Afghanistan's prisons to recruit members and even plan operations.

We've heard this argument, or a variation of it, from military commanders for every war in my lifetime, and even before that. We cannot risk defeat, we need ever-increasing numbers of troops, the enemy is always more sophisticated and powerful than anyone ever expects but clearly inferior to us if we only don't "beat ourselves," etc. Gen. Westmoreland could have written this assessment. McChrystal also habitually confuses Al Qaeda and the Taliban, for good measure.

Spencer Ackerman makes the clearest connection and the most obvious: the strategy document was leaked by those who desire escalation and a broad counter-insurgency strategy:

The Washington Post’s headline — “McChrystal: More Forces Or ‘Mission Failure’” — does what the persons who leaked Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy review evidently wanted to do: box President Obama in to a static request for more U.S. troops and dare him to refuse his chosen commander’s recommendations. The moves to separate the strategy review, conducted for McChrystal by a group of (mostly) Beltway think tank security experts, from the request for resources and the expectation that the resource request will feature more than just that more-troops request may have been designed to keep the ends and means questions distinct, but they also had the effect of preserving Obama’s freedom of action. There’s going to be pressure on Obama to simply accede to any request for more troops, and the media will frame the request, and Obama’s decision, through that prism. So it’s worth remembering that while we’re reading about the strategy review’s details now, Obama read it weeks ago, and still told David Gregory that he refuses to add troops until he’s convinced that the strategy is correct. His advisers surely figured that it would only be a matter of time before the document leaked.

I would add that this article was mainly for Village consumption. Those who want more war - including that cadre of discredited neocons who still lurk behind every rock in Washington - need to create momentum for an inevitable escalation, such that any contrary action by Obama would produce shock and give an opening to the warmongers to call it a betrayal.

So far, Obama isn't biting, as Ackerman's link above shows. On virtually every Sunday talk show, the President was asked about Afghanistan, and he unilaterally pronounced himself a skeptic on more troops and noted that he didn't want a mission shift but one focused on the fundamental national security goals:

The question that I’m asking right now is to our military, to General McChrystal, to General Petraeus, to all our national security apparatus, is– whether it’s troops who are already there, or any troop request in the future, how does this advance America’s national security interests? How does it make sure that al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot attack the United States homeland, our allies, our troops who are based in Europe?

And I think that McChrystal, at least, wants to offer a bank shot, claiming that a "Taliban" in power in Afghanistan (I put it in quotes because this iteration of the Taliban is not the same as the one which came to power in 1996, and most of the home-grown fighters just want revenge instead of an Islamic caliphate) would necessarily invite Al Qaeda back to plot world terror attacks. As a result, McChrystal shifts the strategy from disabling Al Qaeda to building a nation durable enough to withstand Taliban pressue, and his strategy seeks practically a one-to-one relationship between military forces and members of the local population. To achieve his ends practically every able man between 19-24 in the United States would need to be conscripted.

The President has good reason for skepticism.

Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for "executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy," there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then. A disputed presidential election, an erosion in support for the war effort among Democrats in Congress and the American public, and a sharp increase in U.S. casualties have prompted the president and his top advisers to reexamine their assumptions about the U.S. role in defeating the Taliban insurgency [...]

In his 66-page assessment, McChrystal does not address other approaches to combating the Taliban. A senior U.S. military official in Kabul said the general was operating under the assumption that the earlier White House endorsement of a counterinsurgency approach "was a settled issue." ... The implicit recommendation is that the United States and its NATO partners need to do more nation-building, and they need to do it quickly [...]

But senior U.S. officials in Washington contend that much about Afghanistan has changed since March, when Obama stood before a row of flags, flanked by his secretaries of state and defense, and announced the new strategy. The dynamics have even shifted since McChrystal arrived in mid-June and began his assessment.

The principal game-changer, in the view of White House officials, was Afghanistan's presidential election last month, which was compromised by fraud, much of it in support of President Hamid Karzai. Although the results have not been certified, he almost certainly will remain in office, but under a cloud of illegitimacy that could complicate U.S. efforts to promote good governance.

Congressional Democrats have also expressed new doubts about sending more forces to Afghanistan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said last week that she does not "think there's a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or the Congress." Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl M. Levin (Mich.), an influential voice on military matters, said the administration should not send additional forces until more Afghan soldiers have been trained.

The American public, which had broadly supported Obama's determination to focus on Afghanistan instead of Iraq, has begun to question the wisdom of the continued U.S. commitment. The Afghan war was deemed "not worth fighting" by 51 percent of respondents in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The military is becoming impatient; the last line of the above article quotes one Pentagon staffer as saying "there is a frustration. A significant frustration. A serious frustration." I think they expected that, one the President signed off on the COIN strategy, he would listen to their every word and resource accordingly. They figured it was a Democratic President and he would want to look tough and obey the commanders and he would comply with their wishes. And that may be the case. But at this point, Obama looks reachable on the argument that it's unadvisable to engage in a mission creep and escalation in a country without a functioning government to build from or a desire to have Americans build it.

That may upset the military. It would also be, combined with a law enforcement and intelligence strategy to continue to protect from extremist attacks, completely rational and sound.

The Futility Of Counter-Insurgency In A Corrupt State

John Kerry had some good words in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday:

Kerry sets out a few principles for such refinement. “First it will be the Afghans that will ultimately win or lose the struggle against the Taliban.” The United States is in a “race against time” in a region “suspicious of foreign troops.” Recognize “the decentralized nature” of Afghan politics and society. Be flexible. “What works in Mazar-e-Sharif … is very different from what works in Kandahar.” Be “humble about our ability to bring large-scale change.” Put Afghanistan in a regional context. “Permeable borders are straddled by clans, ethnic groups and militants and what happens in one country can have profound implications for what happens in others.”

Finally: “Set realistic goals. The purpose of the mission is what the president said it was” — a struggle against al-Qaeda. Kerry, who has said the United States is involved in a “global counterinsurgency,” references the commando strike earlier this week against a Somali militant with ties to al-Qaeda. The success, he said, should cause policymakers to ask “how much counterinsurgency and nation-building is required to meet a sufficient set of goals?”

This kind of talk among policymakers is far better than those who demand a "war of necessity" with an unlimited commitment to the Afghan people, lest we leave them on the battlefield or some other such military metaphor. Expecting a democracy to flourish in Afghanistan, especially in the wake of a clearly fraudulent election and a leader who is completely ethically compromised by it, is expecting what will never be, frankly. While the US may want Karzai to run the government for explicitly ethnic reasons (it's just easier to have a Pashto heading the coalition than a Tajik) and may try to bring together a unity government by essentially buying off his rivals, that is unlikely to soothe concerns of stolen elections or inspire any defense of the government in fighting the insurgency. The election has basically sealed the fate of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, and not for the better.

I think Kerry's point about the purpose of the mission being focused on Al Qaeda and not nation-building is extremely important. Even the White House's own benchmarks, according to a document released yesterday, puts that at the top of the list. But from there it moves to a wide-ranging mission creep involving all sorts of tangential activities:

Objective 1: “Disrupt terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan to degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks.” It directs readers to metrics in a classified annex (not provided to POLITICO).

Objective 2a: “Assist efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan." It lists six metrics for measuring how progress is being achieved in that objective: from progress towards Pakistan's civilian government becoming stable and free of military involvement, to "demonstrable action by the government against corruption."

Objective 2b: “Develop Pakistan’s counterinsurgency (COIN) capabilities; continue to support Pakistan’s efforts to defeat terrorist and insurgent groups.” That objective is followed by four metrics: 1) Effectiveness of Pakistan civilian, intelligence and military in conducting counter-insurgency operations across the clear-hold-build phases to defeat insurgent groups. 2) Level of militant-initiated violence. 3) Extent of militant-controlled areas in Pakistan. 4) Effectiveness of Pakistani border security efforts.

Objective 2c: "Involve the international community more actively to forge international consensus to stabilize Pakistan."

Objective 3a: “Defeat the extremist insurgency, secure the Afghan populace, and develop increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces that can lead the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism fight with reduced U.S. assistance.” This is followed by 14 metrics, from “measuring the degree to which security operations are integrated into the overall COIN campaign,” to 14, the ability of the Afghan National Security Foces “to handle their own logistical needs.”

These goals are nice, and so are unicorns. But they ignore the reality of Afghanistan and the region. We need to make whatever deals we can with those who have the guns, shift to a counter-terrorism strategy of ensuring that no extremist can project power beyond their borders, and get out. The very fact that Pakistan factors more into these metrics than Afghanistan - since Al Qaeda actually exists there - points to the futility of a military COIN strategy in the other country in the region.

The President tried to put the brakes on any escalation talk yesterday, but given these wrongheaded metrics I can't see how we're headed for anything but that. The skeptics in Congress need to be encouraged to keep speaking out about this policy, or else another Democratic President will be defined by an increasingly unpopular war.

More Afghan Security Forces, Fine, But Question The Overall Mission Too

We heard more doubts from Democrats today about any escalation in Afghanistan, but I find myself unimpressed with Carl Levin's rationale.

The leading Senate Democrat on military matters said Thursday that he was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.

The comments by the senator, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, illustrate the growing skepticism President Obama is facing in his own party as the White House decides whether to commit more deeply to a war that has begun losing public support, even as American commanders acknowledge that the situation on the ground has deteriorated [...]

In the telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Levin said he was not ruling out sending more troops eventually, but rather insisted that the United States try again on a years-old project: finding a way to expand and accelerate the training of the Afghan security forces.

“I just think we should hold off on a commitment to send more combat troops until these additional steps to strengthen the Afghan security forces are put in motion,” he said.

Levin reiterated this in a speech. And maybe Afghanistan needs more security forces. But is it at all in the US national security interest to have 68,000 troops and all kinds of trainers and contractors on the ground in Afghanistan so they can strengthen their own security forces? This assumes that what is required in Afghanistan is an American presence and a general military buildup. That's really not our decision to make. The war started to drive out Al Qaeda. Eight years later, Al Qaeda has been driven out. There is no Al Qaeda presence in that country, and in general Al Qaeda is weakened and destabilized, particularly in Pakistan. So what is the rationale for staying? There is no question that we can accomplish the limited goal of denying Al Qaeda safe havens with a much smaller military footprint. Yet the mission has crept into a counter-insurgency for no justifiable reason.

Yet this is what administration officials have proposed: a counter-insurgency program, creation of a national government, a national army, a democratic process, an economy not based on narcotics. If our goal is foster a strong central government, then we are knowingly pursuing something essentially at odds with Afghan history. A strong Afghan national army would mean doubling the number of trained Afghan military personnel that the US is now struggling to field. According to metrics developed by Gen. David Petraeus, a counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan would require 1.3 million troops for a decade. That is five times the size of US, NATO, and Afghan government forces today. No one thinks this is feasible and we are not attempting to do so. A classic counter-insurgency strategy therefore is not in the cards.

We not only cannot undertake a counter-insurgency of this magnitude as a matter of resources, we have no need to do so. So you can surge with Afghan forces or surge with US military forces but it doesn't change the calculation - only a negotiated settlement with the insurgency and a counter-terrorism strategy to stop the remote potential of safe havens in the region makes any sense.

The Deepening Afghan Nightmare

This looks to me like a good pivot point to up and end involvement in Afghanistan.

A U.S. jet dropped 500-pound bombs on two tanker trucks hijacked by the Taliban before dawn Friday, triggering a huge explosion that Afghan officials said killed more than 70 people, including insurgents and some civilians who had swarmed around the vehicles to siphon off fuel.

Germany, whose troops called in the 2:30 a.m. strike in the northern province of Kunduz, said it feared the hijackers would use the trucks to carry out a suicide attack against its military base nearby.

We are completely in over our heads here. Once again we've allowed amorphous terms like "victory" to define our military involvement instead of achieving realizable goals. So a war initially based on dismantling Al Qaeda becomes a war to build a nation and protect an ethnic class. The country held an election that could lead to outbreaks of violence and unrest, as our man in Kabul is clearly corrupt and ineffectual. Tribal factions with no tradition of a central government have vowed armed conflict if Hamid Karzai is allowed to stand after multiple examples of election fraud. You could have a situation where the government is threatened by a popular uprising, leaving the US troops no clear guidance on how to react. And on top of that, dozens more civilians are bombed from above, leading to more alienation and more desire to drive out the occupiers. The latest in a series of after-the-fact inquiries will do us no good. Meanwhile, more Americans die every day without an articulated rationale.

The divisions in Afghanistan are mirrored by the divisions at home. Top advisers appear to be split on whether to add even more troops. Dick Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton look to be on the side of more troops. Robert Gates has been worried about the foreign footprint in Afghanistan but appears open to escalation. Joe Biden, no dove, is leading the group in the White House opposed to a long-term commitment, which is what escalation would signal. Inside the Pentagon, at least some officials will not acquiesce to Gen. McChrystal's request for more forces without major scrutiny. And in another sign that Obama would only have Republicans behind him if he orders more troops, Senate Democrats are not enthused by the prospect of deepening our commitment.

Speaking on a day when a U.S. bombed tanker trucks hijacked by the Taliban killing 70 people, including some civilians, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said the U.S. must focus more on building the Afghan security forces. His cautionary stance was echoed by Sen. Jack Reed, who is also on the committee and spent two days in Afghanistan this week with Levin.

The senators will return to Washington next week, just as Obama receives a new military review of Afghanistan strategy that officials expect will be followed up by a request for at least a modest increase in U.S. troops battling insurgents in the eight-year-old war [...]

"There are a lot of ways to speed up the numbers and capabilities of the Afghan army and police. They are strongly motivated," Levin said from Kuwait. "I think that we should pursue that course ... before we consider a further increase in combat forces beyond what's already been planned to be sent in the months ahead."

Levin said there is a growing consensus on the need to expedite the training and equipping of the Afghan army to improve security in Afghanistan, where 51 U.S. troops died in August, making it the bloodiest month for American forces there since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

In a separate call, Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, said the U.S. must use a multi-pronged approach: build up the Afghan Army, send more civilians to Afghanistan to provide economic and political assistance, and reach out to Taliban supporters who are willing to recognize the Kabul government.

This is actually just a fantasy, a hope that more Afghan security forces can reduce our troop numbers. It doesn't talk about the policy itself, which as a true counter-terrorism strategy would focus on intelligence and law enforcement and containing terrorist activity to within the borders. As Chuck Hagel said very expertly this week, foreign policy is not an abstraction. We are committing real lives and real treasure to this effort, and trying to impose our will on a nation which has no interest in mimicking us.

Accordingly, we cannot view U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan through a lens that sees only "winning" or "losing." Iraq and Afghanistan are not America's to win or lose. Win what? We can help them buy time or develop, but we cannot control their fates. There are too many cultural, ethnic and religious dynamics at play in these regions for any one nation to control. For example, the future of Afghanistan is linked directly to Pakistan and what happens in the mountains along their border. Political accommodation and reconciliation in this region will determine the outcome.

If the antiwar movement is truly planning a fall campaign, they should invite Hagel. He is as perceptive and cogent on this issue as anyone. Right now it appears that the DC establishment, while always tilting toward war, is split. The progressive groups who could engage the masses in a very powerful way are reluctant to challenge the President on his policy because, to be honest, they don't feel confident talking about foreign policy and national security. But the greatest organizing opportunity in recent progressive history, what brought Democrats the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, was opposition to the war in Iraq. It galvanized a movement and made history. Moreover, it was the right thing to do. It's time for Americans to decide whether to agree to what amounts to endless war or not.

And They've Lost George Will

I admit to being surprised by yesterday's George Will column, though given his status as a paleocon I probably should not have been.

U.S. strategy -- protecting the population -- is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about "deteriorating" (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible.

The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state [...]

U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor, such as Allen's, is squandered.

Will is basically laying out a containment strategy, consisting of buying out the local interests, shoring up the government through supporting the non-corrupt local leaders, and using law enforcement and intelligence to thwart Al Qaeda globally instead of assuming that denying them safe havens in Afghanistan would prevent them from popping up anywhere else in the world. I disagree with Will on the invisible destructors like drones and airstrikes, which tend to radicalize populations, even if they have succeeded at taking out more terrorists than under Bush. But in general, we can use human intelligence and global cooperation to a much higher degree of success than pursuing a war in Afghanistan without defined goals.

The elections were clearly rigged, and the fallout could be tremendous to an already crippled central government. And yet, we will not act because a Pashto President makes more sense to our COIN strategy than a Tajik. As a result, the countryside will lose more faith in America's ability to deliver on its promises, and the expanded footprint will be even harder to maintain. And despite a decrease in opium prices and a slashed crop, no alternatives for poor farmers have arisen, and cartels still control the trade and funnel money to the insurgency.

What's more, we're using the same Bush-era gimmicks to add more troops into the field without displaying the costs to the public. This stealth troop increase by replacing support personnel with "trigger-pullers," while vastly expanding the use of unaccountable private military contractors is exactly how Bush keep the troop numbers artificially low in Iraq.

Obama really only has the warbloggers with him in this strategy, idiots who call for "spirited realists" when a realist would assess the situation in Afghanistan and determine that escalation has no material national security benefit. And yet the Pentagon still fears that Obama will not agree to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's escalation demands. I hope the Pentagon is right.

...this will make us look fantastic to the local population, I'm sure:

Private security contractors who guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have engaged in lewd behavior and hazed subordinates, demoralizing the undermanned force and posing a "significant threat" to security at a time when the Taliban is intensifying attacks in the Afghan capital, according to an investigation released Tuesday by an independent watchdog group.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) launched the probe after more than a dozen security guards contacted the group to report misconduct and morale problems within the force of 450 guards who live at Camp Sullivan, a few miles from the embassy compound.

The report highlighted occasions when guards brought women believed to be prostitutes into Camp Sullivan and videotaped themselves drinking and partially undressed. It also outlined communications problems among the guards, many of whom don't speak English and have trouble understanding orders from their U.S. supervisors.

And Why Are We In Afghanistan?

The DFHs have convinced the nation about another misguided war.

A majority of Americans now see the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting and just a quarter say more U.S. troops should be sent to the country, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Most have confidence in the ability of the United States to meet its primary goals -- defeating the Taliban, facilitating effective economic development and molding an honest and effective Afghan government -- but very few say Thursday's elections there are likely to produce such a government.

When it comes to the baseline question, 42 percent of Americans say the U.S. is winning in Afghanistan; about as many, 36 percent, say it is losing the fight.

The new poll comes amid widespread speculation that the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, will request more troops for his stepped-up effort to root the Taliban from Afghan towns and villages. That is a position that gets the backing of 24 percent of those polled, while nearly twice as many, 45 percent, want to decrease the number of military forces there. (Most of the remainder say to keep the level about the same.) [...]

Should President Obama embrace his general's call for even more U.S. military forces, he risks alienating some of his staunchest supporters While 60 percent of all Americans approve of how Obama has handled the situation in Afghanistan, his ratings among liberals have slipped and majorities of liberals and Democrats alike now, for the first time, solidly oppose the war and are calling for a reduction in troops.

Overall, seven in 10 Democrats say the war has not been worth its costs, and fewer than one in five support an increase in troop levels. Nearly two-thirds of the most committed Democrats now feel "strongly" that the war was not worth fighting. Among moderate and conservative Democrats, a slim majority say the United States is losing in Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan issue has crept to the sidelines of the national debate, but thousands of families are still directly affected. People still die; 6 more Americans fell today, and August 2009 could be the deadliest month in Afghanistan of the entire war. The President calls it a "war of necessity" and "fundamental to the defense of our people" but cannot credibly articulate what that actually means. Juan Cole identifies three main points that Obama makes about the war, which seem fine in isolation, but not in practice:

1. "This strategy recognizes that al Qaeda and its allies had moved their base to the remote, tribal areas of Pakistan."

2. "This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war—that we also need diplomacy and development and good governance."

3. "And our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals—to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies."

These three are praiseworthy points in themselves, but the question is how they work together. I couldn't catch the significance of al-Qaeda's move to northwest Pakistan for US military operations in Afghanistan itself. I agree that the key to success in Afghanistan is diplomacy, development and governance, but worry that the major emphasis being is put on sending more troops there and on highly kinetic military operations? And I'm not sure that the Taliban can be effectively disrupted by military means; why isn't diplomacy being mentioned in this third part?

I'd expand on this critique. The goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda has almost no place in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, where many Al Qaeda leaders are now stationed. Gen. Petraeus admitted back in May that Al Qaeda is no longer operating in Afghanistan - we're fighting a home-grown Taliban insurgency more nationalist than religious extremist in nature. You could make the argument that a Taliban able to take over the country could usher in Al Qaeda safe havens, but the Taliban insurgents are small in number, and have been unable to gain acceptance in anything other than the Pashtun areas. I agree with Steven Walt on this:

First, this argument tends to lump the various groups we are contending with together, and it suggests that all of them are equally committed to attacking the United States. In fact, most of the people we are fighting in Afghanistan aren't dedicated jihadis seeking to overthrow Arab monarchies, establish a Muslim caliphate, or mount attacks on U.S. soil. Their agenda is focused on local affairs, such as what they regard as the political disempowerment of Pashtuns and illegitimate foreign interference in their country. Moreover, the Taliban itself is more of a loose coalition of different groups than a tightly unified and hierarchical organization, which is why some experts believe we ought to be doing more to divide the movement and "flip" the moderate elements to our side. Unfortunately, the "safe haven" argument wrongly suggests that the Taliban care as much about attacking America as bin Laden does.

Second, while it is true that Mullah Omar gave Osama bin Laden a sanctuary both before and after 9/11, it is by no means clear that they would give him free rein to attack the United States again. Protecting al Qaeda back in 2001 brought no end of trouble to Mullah Omar and his associates, and if they were lucky enough to regain power, it is hard to believe they would give us a reason to come back in force.

Third, it is hardly obvious that Afghan territory provides an ideal "safe haven" for mounting attacks on the United States. The 9/11 plot was organized out of Hamburg, not Kabul or Kandahar, but nobody is proposing that we send troops to Germany to make sure there aren't "safe havens" operating there. In fact, if al Qaeda has to hide out somewhere, I’d rather they were in a remote, impoverished, land-locked and isolated area from which it is hard to do almost anything. The "bases" or "training camps" they could organize in Pakistan or Afghanistan might be useful for organizing a Mumbai-style attack, but they would not be particularly valuable if you were trying to do a replay of 9/11 (not many flight schools there), or if you were trying to build a weapon of mass destruction. And in a post-9/11 environment, it wouldn’t be easy for a group of al Qaeda operatives bent on a Mumbia-style operation get all the way to the United States. One cannot rule this sort of thing out, of course, but does that unlikely danger justify an open-ended commitment that is going to cost us more than $60 billion next year?

There's more at the link. As Cole says, nobody disagrees that Al Qaeda may want to attack America, but we should wonder about their capability, and seek to thwart that. And that's not a fight that can be had in Afghanistan anymore - they have no presence there.

Actually, we have morphed our goals in Afghanistan, from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency, without anyone really challenging it. The commanders on the ground have decided that making America safe from potential safe havens in Afghanistan means ensuring the legitimacy of the government at every level, as if we can replicate this in every unstable government in the world or even in Afghanistan, a tribal society that has not really known centralized leadership. Indeed, we're only getting a minimal competence from the current government by allowing it to create laws that harm women and court Uzbek human-rights-abusing warlords to gain votes. If we really want to involve ourselves so deeply with a government like this, we should at least gain some semblance of a national security benefit, and yet none really exists, especially relative to the costs incurred in lives and treasure.

This, over everything else, is why public support is sapping. As long as this is a back-burner issue, that may not hurt the President - even in the poll, respondents give him generally decent marks for his performance on the issue, mindful of the knottiness of the problem. But I would argue it should hurt him to an extent. We have been in Afghanistan eight years, and at this point nobody can credibly explain our presence.

Eye Off The Ball

I've heard for seven years that George W. Bush had the chance to capture Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the mountains of Tora Bora, and we pulled out to focus on the invasion of Iraq. John Kerry ran on that point. Barack Obama ran on it. The whole idea was that Iraq was the bad, unnecessary war, and Afghanistan was the good war, and we needed to move our focus back on Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was, to disrupt their safe havens.

Turns out the commander in Afghanistan thinks we have focused too much on Al Qaeda in the war ostensibly designed to dismantle al Qaeda.

U.S. military leaders have concluded that their war effort in Afghanistan has been too focused on hunting Al Qaeda, and have begun to shift Predator drone aircraft to the fight against the Taliban and other militants in order to prevent the country from slipping deeper into anarchy.

The move, described by government and Defense Department officials, represents a major change in the military's use of one of its most precious intelligence assets. It also illustrates the hard choices that must be made because the drones are in short supply [...]

"We have been overly counter-terrorism-focused and not counter-insurgency-focused," said one U.S. official.

Senior government officials said Bin Laden remained a prime target but that they needed to focus on fighting the Taliban.

"We might still be too focused on Bin Laden," the official said. "We should probably reassess our priorities."

I think the proper response is that we've been counter-terrorism-focused because OUR MISSION IS SUPPOSED TO BE COUNTER-TERRORISM. Or at least it was, until the new Pentagon kewl kids decided you could hug the ones you bomb and make them love you.

Without consultation with the country, the military completely transferred the mission in Afghanistan. They are less concerned with dismantling Al Qaeda and more concerned with a counter-insurgency bank shot. Gen. McChrystal, a real white-whale chaser, described his strategy in the Washington Post today. And surprise, it'll take more personnel.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is preparing a new strategy that calls for major changes in the way U.S. and other NATO troops there operate, a vast increase in the size of Afghan security forces and an intensified military effort to root out corruption among local government officials, according to several people familiar with the contents of an assessment report that outlines his approach to the war.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who took charge of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan last month, appears inclined to request an increase in American troops to implement the new strategy, which aims to use more unconventional methods to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, according to members of an advisory group he convened to work on the assessment. Such a request could receive a chilly reception at the White House, where some members of President Obama's national security team have expressed reluctance about authorizing any more deployments.

Senior military officials said McChrystal is waiting for a recommendation from a team of military planners in Kabul before reaching a final decision on a troop request. Several members of the advisory group, who spoke about the issue of force levels on the condition of anonymity, said that they think more U.S. troops are needed but that it was not clear how large an increase McChrystal would seek.

"There was a very broad consensus on the part of the assessment team that the effort is under-resourced and will require additional resources to get the job done," a senior military official in Kabul said.

This is flat-out mission creep. We entered Afghanistan to deny a staging ground for attacks against America. And now we're there to nation-build. One isn't necessarily unrelated to the other, but we're admittedly nation-building only in the areas where the Taliban isn't already dug in, meaning we are allowing various safe havens and staging grounds. To the extent that we're trying to split the Taliban, counter-insurgency methods have their role; but this sounds really more advanced than that. Spencer writes:

But there's a big difference between that and a counterinsurgency strategy for a nation-building objective, and a still greater one between that and a counterinsurgency strategy for a prophylactic objective. The American people have never approved sending 68,000 troops to suffer for Hamid Karzai, and certainly never approved sending them to keep Pakistan from falling to the Taliban. (Which, by the way, seems like a distinctly unrealistic scenario, especially now that the Pakistani military moved into Swat. The Taliban-led insurgency is a threat to Pakistan. It's not going to rule the country. Westerners have a tendency of predicting the imminent fall of Pakistan every five years or so.)

Perhaps I'm misreading what it is the people around McChrystal are saying, but it seems fair to say that the balance of evidence favors an interpretation that Afghanistan strategy is coming unmoored from the actual objectives of the war, and the actual interests at stake, and the White House is being either deluded or outright dishonest about what's happening. "Our goal is to deal with the terrorist elements that are in that country and are making life for Afghans and potentially life for millions throughout the world more dangerous through their activities," Robert Gibbs said from the White House podium today. That is simply not what's coming from McChrystal's circle.

The White House either has to rein in this effort, or own it. And if they own it, they must explain their deception to the public, and why the policy became hijacked by a clique in the Pentagon.

McNamara And Afghanistan

If any situation in the world right now shows in stark relief the failure to learn the lessons of Robert McNamara it's the escalating war in Afghanistan. Six more troops died in clashes today, and with both the increased numbers as well as a continuing offensive in Helmand Province in the south, we can expect more. This Reuters report gives a good sense of the difficulties with the current strategy:

The mullah's message was blunt. We don't trust you and if you don't earn our trust, our first meeting will be our last.

With that, he stood abruptly and walked out of his first "shura," or council meeting, with U.S. Marines.

U.S. forces who have moved deep into formerly Taliban-controlled territory in southern Afghanistan this week say they are here to stay and will not leave until they have improved the lives of ordinary people [...]

The elders listened, clicking their prayer beads. Then Mullah Zainuddin, the village's religious leader, listed their demands.

They want the provincial authorities to allocate more water for their irrigation system. They want a health clinic, and they want a school. Produce these things or leave us alone, he said.

"I do not trust you. There have been international forces that have come through the village and promised schools, promised clinics. When you are already (delivering) that, then I will trust you," he said.

"We are out of patience here. If you do not do these things and solve these problems, we will leave this village. We will fight: every man, woman and child, we do not fear death."

"This is our last speech, and if you can't solve these problems, we will not have another shura. We will not sit like this again and talk with you," he said. He then got up and walked away, leaving the Marines to finish the shura without him.

Suddenly, a Marine could be heard up the road shouting "stop!" and pointing his rifle at a man driving a motorcycle with two women hidden in burqas sitting behind him on the bike.

The Marine summoned an interpreter. Afghan police searched the driver and allowed the motorcycle to drive on. The village elders and the other Marines holding their shura watched the tense incident in quiet.

"I know you think you are here for our security. But you have come here to disturb us," said one of the elders, Hajji Baluch. "The women on the motorcycle were on their way to a clinic."

I can jut tick off the McNamara lessons and apply them here. We have exaggerated the dangers of a largely local Taliban insurgency, which cannot harm the United States if we use proper law enforcement and intelligence methods. We seem to lack an understanding of the desires of the Afghan people, weary from decades of war and distrustful of foreign presence that has brought them nothing of substance. "We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values," a direct quote from McNamara. We use high-powered military equipment to blast our way to a victory on paper but fail to recognize the limitations of that approach. We have not hashed out a debate on the merits of escalation in public and with the support of the Congress. We have changed course into a high-intensity counter-insurgency mission after explaining that the goal of the war was to deny Al Qaeda safe havens, and the two are only tangentially related. We have not yet recognized the limits of American involvement to bring peace and security to Afghanistan. And,

We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

Afghanistan is maddeningly complex. Its relations internally among the ethnically diverse factions and with its neighbors across borders are not well-understood. And after seven-plus years of failed promises and millions of tons of ordnance, we must understand that our skills and abilities as a superpower cannot solve every problem. Nor does every problem want to be solved. Such is the conundrum in Afghanistan.

Such A Thing As Too Late

That was a line that Barack Obama used as a justification for running in the 2008 Presidential campaign, but he hasn't applied it yet to Afghanistan:

The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population.

Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.

On Thursday morning, 4,000 American Marines began a major offensive to try to take back the region from the strongest Taliban insurgency in the country. The Marines are part of a larger deployment of additional troops being ordered by the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, to concentrate not just on killing Taliban fighters but on protecting the population.

Yet Taliban control of the countryside is so extensive in provinces like Kandahar and Helmand that winning districts back will involve tough fighting and may ignite further tensions, residents and local officials warn. The government has no presence in 5 of Helmand’s 13 districts, and in several others, like Nawa, it holds only the district town, where troops and officials live virtually under siege.

The Taliban’s influence is so strong in rural areas that much of the local population has accepted their rule and is watching the United States troop buildup with trepidation. Villagers interviewed in late June said that they preferred to be left alone under Taliban rule and complained about artillery fire and airstrikes by foreign forces.

“We Muslims don’t like them — they are the source of danger,” said a local villager, Hajji Taj Muhammad, of the foreign forces. His house in Marja, a town west of this provincial capital that has been a major opium trading post and Taliban base, was bombed two months ago, he said.

The current strategy of "clear, hold and build" might have worked in 2002 or 2003. Instead, the Bush Administration neglected the country, broke every single one of its promises to develop it, and used deadly airstrikes when it did try to maintain order, in most cases just leaving the villages to the predations of the Taliban. Now the Taliban is deeply embedded in the Pashtun areas in the south, and those in the villages correctly perceive the only trouble coming when US forces try to enter. This Taliban insurgency has less connection to the Wahhabist Islam sect and more a connection to the response of revenge. Lots of fighters have had their houses bombed and relatives killed and are acting to deny the occupiers, if they're not simply being paid by the Taliban enough to take up their cause.

The result is essentially a stalemate; the US cannot penetrate the Pashtun areas, and for that matter, the Taliban cannot penetrate the non-Pashtun areas, owing mainly to ethnic disparities and memories of past civil wars. I'm happy to be proven wrong by this latest offensive into Helmand Province, but I think it can only work if we adopt a "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" approach. And that will accomplish nothing.

All Of A Sudden, 25 Years In Afghanistan?

The US military has begun essentially its first large-scale mission in Afghanistan in many years, an effort to retake Helmand province from Taliban insurgents and remain in the area to "clear, hold and build".

Almost 4,000 United States Marines, backed by helicopter gunships, pushed into the volatile Helmand River valley in southwestern Afghanistan early Thursday morning to try to take back the region from Taliban fighters whose control of poppy harvests and opium smuggling in Helmand provides major financing for the Afghan insurgency.

The Marine Expeditionary Brigade leading the operation represents a large number of the 21,000 additional troops that President Obama ordered to Afghanistan earlier this year amid rising violence and the Taliban’s increasing domination in much of the country. The operation is described as the first major push in southern Afghanistan by the newly bolstered American force [...]

The Marines say their new mission, called Operation Khanjar, will include more troops and resources than ever before, as well as a commitment by the troops to live and patrol near population centers to ensure that residents are protected. More than 600 Afghan soldiers and police officers are also involved.

“What makes Operation Khanjar different from those that have occurred before is the massive size of the force introduced, the speed at which it will insert, and the fact that where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces,” the Marine commander in Helmand Province, Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, said in a statement released after the operation began.

Whatever you think of this strategy, it should be mentioned that it's different from the stated goal of the President from back in March, which was more a decapitation strategy to capture and kill Taliban and deny Al Qaeda safe havens. This is a counter-insurgency strategy to "drink lots of tea," "eat lots of goat", and win the hearts and minds of the population. I understand how denying the Taliban freedom to operate in Helmand and denying them safe havens dovetail. But this sounds a lot like nation-building to me:

“Our focus is not the Taliban,” Nicholson told his officers. “Our focus must be on getting this government back up on its feet.”

I keep hearing that economic development is the key to success in Afghanistan, and not the military. But a COIN strategy in this fractured country that has practically never known a central government seems really flimsy. Especially when the civilian surge hasn't materialized, meaning that troops are being turned into psychologists and economic development experts.

Counter-insurgency operations are long-term and take large numbers of troops. Shouldn't we have a public debate about such a change in strategy rather than springing it on the public without discussion? I don't want to keep adding troops into a black hole, and the White House has appeared to draw the line on that, but their new strategy cuts against that policy. It's another version of war on the cheap to make it politically palatable.

Meanwhile, a Marine has been captured by the Taliban, and let's hope he can be returned safely.

Stalemate Sounds About Right

I got to listen to a talk about Afghanistan the other day from Anand Ghopal, a writer for the Christian Science Monitor, and soon, the Wall Street Journal. He offered a really detailed, comprehensive take about the challenges we face in Afghanistan, clearing up some misconceptions about the country. The Taliban, he said, cannot take over the country. They are confined to their ethnic Pashtun base, which represents maybe 40% of the population. The other ethnicities, perhaps because of lingering effects of past civil wars and repression, still hate the Taliban and want the American presence. However, the Americans have little ability to successfully remove the Taliban insurgency from those Pashtun areas, because they are deeply embedded there. It's basically a stalemate, and only a political reconciliation can resolve it. In the meantime, airstrikes and house raids make the US less and less welcomed in the region. And then there's the sticky problem of Pakistan, fighting the indigenous Taliban presence in their own country while continuing to offer aid and comfort to the Afghan Taliban. Ghopal had much, much more, but I think the word "mess" came to mind several times during the talk.

And that shines through in recent coverage of the war. The British launched a major offensive against Taliban forces, using just 350 troops and an enormous amount of air superiority. This is the precise OPPOSITE of what escalation would facilitate - and end to relying on airstrikes. As a result people just left the area and melted away. There was nothing left to hit, except the IEDs that the insurgents laid for the incoming troops. We actually got Kyrgyzstan to reverse their decision to deny air basing rights to US troops, albeit with higher rent (read: bribes), but the very fact that we continue to rely on air bases to resolve this conflict shows the dichotomy between trying to win hearts and minds while dropping bombs on the heads of villagers. In Pakistan, this is more intense, as a drone attack killed 60 mourners at a funeral for a Pakistani Taliban leader, in an effort to strike at Baitullah Mehsud, who earlier killed a key rival and the kind of moderate Taliban with whom a settlement could be reached. Clearly other rivals to Mehsud will be scared off from siding with the West after this incident.

Through all of this, the question of why we continue in Afghanistan persists. The country is desperately poor and we've exhausted practically all of our goodwill by the Bush Administration failing to follow through on any of their promises to the people. The country has never known a central government and shouldn't be expected to suddenly sprout a durable one. And the question of "denying safe havens to Al Qaeda" seems to me to be moot, considering that the current insurgency does not have the same radical view of Islam as the previous Taliban, and even Gen. Petraeus has acknowledged that Al Qaeda holds no footprint in the country. Today 138 House members called for an exit strategy in Afghanistan, and while they lost the vote as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill, I have a feeling that those numbers will grow.

Less Airstrikes In Afghanistan?

There's been a dichotomy during Barack Obama's tenure between the assumed rise of the counter-insurgents in Afghanistan, and their concomitant policy of winning the hearts and minds of the local population, and the rise of punishing airstrikes near local populations, which enrage the government as well as the people, turning villagers into martyrs and relatives into extremists. Stanley McChrystal, the newest commander of US forces in Afghanistan, claims that he will reduce these airstrikes going forward, which may be a little late.

The new American commander in Afghanistan said he would sharply restrict the use of airstrikes here, in an effort to reduce the civilian deaths that he said were undermining the American-led mission.

In interviews over the past few days, the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said the use of airstrikes during firefights would in most cases be allowed only to prevent American and other coalition troops from being overrun.

Even in the cases of active firefights with Taliban forces, he said, airstrikes will be limited if the combat is taking place in populated areas — the very circumstances in which most Afghan civilian deaths have occurred. The restrictions will be especially tight in attacking houses and compounds where insurgents are believed to have taken cover.

“Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use it responsibly,” General McChrystal told a group of his senior officers during a video conference last week. “We can lose this fight.”

I will have to believe this when I see it. The working theory about escalation used by the President and his staff was that more troops would be able to cover the country better so we wouldn't have to rely on airstrikes to paper over the lack of manpower. But 21,000 additional troops actually cannot cover a country the size of Texas in any meaningful way. What's positive here is McChrystal's rhetoric, mindful that continued airstrikes gone awry do real damage to winning over the local population.

Still, I think we need to articulate the mission better. Denying the Taliban safe havens, when those havens aren't really in Afghanistan, doesn't seem to be a reasonable goal. And nation-building a country that has had little in the way of a central government throughout its history doesn't make much sense either. If this is true, I'm very pleased for the safety of the Afghan people. But I still don't totally know what we're supposed to be doing there that could not otherwise be accomplished through law enforcement, intelligence and containment.

Dropping Bombs And Killing People - Amazingly, Unpopular

Andrew Exum, aka Abu Muqawama, is the coolest kid on the counter-insurgency block, so considering that the "good war" in Afghanistan and Pakistan is being revamped in the image of COIN, you'd think he'd appreciate the Obama Administration policy. But he manages to see the spectacle of mass killing from 30,000 feet as cutting against the policy of winning the hearts and minds of the locals. So he and David Kilcillen, another COINer, take to the op-ed pages of the NYT to criticize it.

First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists. The Islamists’ popularity rose and the group became more extreme, leading eventually to a messy Ethiopian military intervention, the rise of a new regional insurgency and an increase in offshore piracy [...]

Second, public outrage at the strikes is hardly limited to the region in which they take place — areas of northwestern Pakistan where ethnic Pashtuns predominate. Rather, the strikes are now exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion in Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two most populous provinces. Covered extensively by the news media, drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.

Third, the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic — or, more accurately, a piece of technology — substituting for a strategy. These attacks are now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective.

I've heard neocons like Fareed Zakaria (yes, he is one) claim that the Pakistanis like the drone attacks now, because they view the Taliban as a threat. But when you kill 14 terrorists and 700 civilians, a 2% hit rate, mass public opinion means little compared to reducing the threat. Hundreds of families experienced that loss, and hundreds of willing relatives will step up to replace those 14 dead. Meanwhile, we focus on these airstrikes at the expense of a larger strategy to win over the population. Insurgent commanders are simply easily replaced, so we would be better served by siphoning off recruitment.

I'm not even a COIN fan, and I think criticisms of the over-reliance on it in the military are well-founded. But you don't have to be a military expert to realize that killing civilians doesn't endear the population to your cause, nor does it make it any easier for an already-weak central government to maneuver.

Meanwhile, we're adding military trainers to Pakistan. This is how recent wars have begun - the trainers come in, and the mission expands. At some point, the war takes care of itself, no matter what the policymakers believe.

More Billions For Afghanistan

In other news taking the stars out of my eyes, the House overwhelmingly approved a $97 billion dollar supplemental appropriation, mainly for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with little debate and much less fanfare. 51 Democrats and 9 Republicans defied the Bush Obama Administration on this, while others approved it but did argue that they had little patience for the policy and wouldn't agree to an open-ended commitment.

Chief among them is Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., author of the House legislation as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. But for now he's giving Obama a chance to demonstrate greater progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"This is a bill that I have very little confidence in," Obey said. "I think we have a responsibility to give a new president — who did not get us into this mess — the best possible opportunity to get out of it."

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., is opposing the infusion of war funds. He's not impressed with Obama's plans on Afghanistan.

"Sometimes great presidents make mistakes, and sometimes great presidents make even great mistakes. I hope that doesn't happen here," McGovern said. "As the mission has grown bigger, the policy has grown even more vague."

We really haven't heard a clearly articulated policy in Afghanistan. The ostensible goal is to root out Al Qaeda camps, but the President's own top generals admit that they are no longer in Afghanistan. Furthermore, safe havens for terrorists could realistically be in a mosque in Newark or London or Brazil as easily as anywhere else.

Obama wants to avoid a failed state in Afghanistan. Yet his tactics of relentless bombing, exactly what he vowed to AVOID by adding new troops, only leads in the direction toward a loss of confidence in the central government, and an opportunity for the Taliban. We supposedly have a new general and a new strategy based on counter-insurgency and winning hearts and minds, yet airstrikes do the exact opposite, inflaming and angering local populations. And furthermore, this new general seems to have a nasty habit of lying to people to protect his own skin.

I just don't see the strategy beyond just Bush-plus in Afghanistan. The White House is giving it attention, and trying to implement a more regional strategy, but it makes sense to question the premises here.