This formulation ignores the obvious rejoinder that for US forces to stay and battle the “Taliban” (whatever that term is supposed to mean on any given day) means to target large swaths of that same Afghan population.  Some of the anti-government groups are remnants of the Pashtun-dominated Mullah Omar-led Taliban that hosted al-Qaeda, some are entirely unrelated tribal entities, some are ordinary Afghans radicalized by the presence of a foreign occupying army, some are narco-warlords defending their turf and revenue stream, some smaller group are foreign fighters, etc. 

Regardless of the exact identity and motivations, and aside from the small group of foreign fighters, the people that we are killing also count as the Afghan people.  In actuality, we are protecting certain Afghan factions while doing our best to kill others.  It is an unstated, reflexive act of dehumanization to associate our favored factions with the “Afghan people” while relegating those groups that oppose the Afghan government to some form of limbo status in terms of their humanity/national identity.

Not to mention the fact that in the crossfire, we are also unintentionally killing Afghans that we readily recognize as Afghans.  Here are some stories from some of the people that we are protecting:

At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was dead.

What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker’s fuel. Poor people in one of the world’s poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much as they could for the coming winter.

“We didn’t recognise any of the dead when we arrived,” said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. “It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this,” he brought his two hands together, his fingers curling like claws. “There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.

“The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone.”

So the elders stepped in. They collected all the bodies they could and asked the people to tell them how many relatives each family had lost.

A queue formed. One by one the bereaved gave the names of missing brothers, cousins, sons and nephews, and each in turn received their quota of corpses. It didn’t matter who was who, everyone was mangled beyond recognition anyway. All that mattered was that they had a body to bury and perform prayers upon.

“A man comes and says, ‘I lost my brother and cousin’, so we gave him two bodies,” said Omar Khan. “Another says I lost five relatives, so we gave him five bodies to take home and bury. When we had run out of bodies we started giving them limbs, legs, arms, torsos.” In the end only five families went away without anything. “Their sons are still missing.”

While on the homefront, many Americans are convinced that we are protecting the “Afghan people,” the view in Afghanistan can vary greatly with respect to the security benefits of our presence.  Obviously, the Afghans in the above-cited piece might not take such a rosy view of our mission – nor would Afghans in the regions targeted by US military action.  Further, as Joshua Foust recounts, some villagers in areas where we have taken up defensive positions have struck deals with US forces to stay outside of their population centers because the presence of US forces brings conflict to their doorstep. 

In other words, in Nuristan we had begun enacting the McChrystal policy over a year before it got pushed out as an order. Only, as we know from Want, it ended very poorly (rumor has it the villagers near Want asked the U.S. to withdraw from the region because their presence made security nearby substantially worse off). [...]

Moreover, as this Washington Post piece makes clear, in places like Kamu and Kamdesh the U.S. almost never interacts with the local population anyway (a little birdie told me the community of Kamdesh struck an agreement with the military that no one from its Observation Post 300 meters away will ever step foot inside their village). Needless to say, there’s not much “reconstruction” going on there, either—the provincial capital is still a dreary, empty nothing. It’s not like the people will really notice our absence.

Undoubtedly, our presence breeds conflict at least as much – though likely more – than it breeds stability. 

The narrative of US forces as peace-bringers, and defenders of the virtuous, is an archetypal story, a common form of wartime propaganda prevalent amongst warring populations intent on buttressing their efforts with some moral undergirding (also, often detached from reality – see, ie, US armed support for the “good guys” in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and elsewhere).  It’s a good war, after all, and we are the good guys, defending the foreign born good guys, in pursuit of a common humanitarian good. While there are elements of truth to this characterization, the story begins to break down upon closer scrutiny – as touched on above.  In truth, we fight wars to further our interests.  Sometimes those align with local groups.  If so, we champion their cause - often regardless of how “good” or “bad” that group is. 

Not only is it the case that the continuation of our mission involves both intentionally and unintentionally killing thousands of actual Afghan people (that we are ostensibly  there to protect), so too are the factions that we are championing far from the virtuous liberal-minded freedom fighters that the good guys vs. bad guys narrative demands.  For example, Afghan women’s groups have complained that the warlords cobbled together to form Karzai’s government are every bit as brutal toward women as the Taliban.

The U.S. military may have removed the Taliban, but it installed warlords who are as anti-woman and as criminal as the Taliban. Misogynistic, patriarchal views are now embodied by the Afghan cabinet, they are expressed in the courts, and they are embodied by President Hamid Karzai.

Paper gains for women’s rights mean nothing when, according to the chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court, the only two rights women are guaranteed by the constitution are the right to obey their husbands and the right to pray, but not in a mosque.

These are the convictions of the government the U.S. has helped to create. The American presence in Afghanistan will do nothing to diminish them. 

The staggering level of criminality and corruption rife in the Afghan government, in addition to proving a stubborn impediment to winning the population’s support, serves as a reminder of the moral ambiguity in terms of our allies and adversaries.  While it requires extra effort to keep track of these nuances from a distance, the Afghan people are confronted with these realities on a daily basis.  The results from a poll of Afghans commissioned by Britain’s Department for International Development are telling of the divergent views of this war and its moral justifications depending on one’s proximity to the violence:

Respondents could not understand why the Coalition forces were in Afghanistan. They reasoned that their objectives were clearly not to bring security to local populations, as their mere presence exacerbated violence and increased the numbers of civilians killed in air strikes. They also rejected the idea that Coalition forces were serious either about democracy or, separately, development. Democracy could not be an aim as the Afghan population had never been consulted about the occupation in the first place. And although western publics had been consulted about the recent surge ordered by President Obama the Afghan parliament and people had not (‘So if this is western style democracy we don’t want it’). The development efforts of international agencies was seen as delivering only very small projects which didn’t have significant impact and employed few people (demand for projects that created local employment was huge). The lack of clarity on US and Coalition motivations led to speculations about ‘real’ motives.

Further:

10. All respondents had ideas about what should be done to bring security. The responses were remarkably consistent across all groups and can be summarised as follows:

• The government should formally bring the Taliban and Hizb-i Islami into the democratic process and allow the leaders to stand for election. The leaders must first come off the UN black list (on the basis that some very violent warlords and abusers of human rights were already in government yet some on the black list were not guilty of such crimes). As one respondent said: ‘Even though the Taliban have a restricted idea of Islam and women’s rights they didn’t commit crimes against humanity but the Northern Alliance did, and many who committed such crimes are now in government.’ And: ‘If there are trials then it should be for both parties’.

• The military objectives of foreign forces should be made publically known. Two quotes reflect the general sentiment: ‘They say there are here to root out Al Qa’eda and Osama but we all know that these people are not in Afghanistan’. ‘There should be a legal agreement between the Coalition forces and the government which specifies what they are here for and what they are allowed to do – currently they have no legality from the government or the people of Afghanistan. This ambiguity about their mission and objectives has created a lot of suspicion in the minds of the public – some say they are here for revenge, some say they are after historical relics, some say it is oil or uranium. If their mission is known and people can understand their mission then it would be a lot easier for them as well as the people of Afghanistan’…

Obviously unaddressed in this post are our strategic interests for prolonging our occupation of Afghanistan.  Rather, this piece was intended to question some of the moral assumptions that are taken for granted when analyzing our mission in the region, and as a reminder that the situation on the ground looks vastly different to the Afghan people whose cause we are supposedly championing – at least those groups of Afghans that we are not actively trying to destroy (or end up killing mistakenly).

(See, also, conservative foreign policy wonk, Jim Henley)

Related posts:

1. We Chiseled and We Switched
2. Ingrates Abound
3. In Tatters, Shattered

The draft document focuses on three main objectives: disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan, working to stabilize Pakistan, and working to achieve a host of political and civic goals in Afghanistan. Each objective has a list of metrics beneath it, although many of these are more goals than concrete milestones that could be measured in any factual way. [emph. added]

The metrics span just about every conceivable issue, including progress towards Pakistan’s civilian government and judicial system becoming stable, to support for human rights, to public perceptions of security, to volume and value of narcotics.

A partial list of the cross purposes is as follows: A continued military operation in Afghanistan that (even if inadvertently) weakens Pakistan vis-a-vis India is not going to stabilize the situation in Pakistan (nor garner the full support of the Pakistani government).  Along those lines, operations against Pakistani Taliban elements in pursuit of eliminating supply lines and redoubts for Afghan Talibs is not going to stabilize Pakistan either.  Quite the contrary, such activities are creating a sizable anti-US, anti-Pakistani government backlash – pushing moderates and religious extremists together in common cause – and provoking Pakistani Taliban to attack the Pakistani government.  

In general terms, this radicalization and escalation are only logical: large foreign military occupations pursuing narrow, self-serving interests and in the process bending local powers to its purposes rarely bring about stability, peace and regional harmony.  Absent an unrestrained brutality that we will not and should not unleash.

As for the metric of achieving “progress towards Pakistan’s civilian government and judicial system becoming stable,” again, this aim is undercut by the underlying policy of military occupation of Afghanistan.  Consider the actual metrics:

1. Progress towards Pakistan’s civilian government and judicial system becoming stable and free of military involvement
2. Pakistan’s actions to take necessary steps to ensure economic and financial stability, job creation, and growth
3. Support for human rights
4. Development of an enduring, strategic partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan
5. Pakistani public opinion of government performance
6. Demonstrable action by government against corruption, resulting in increased trust and confidence of the Pakistani public

Our policy is wildly unpopular in Pakistan.  We are viewed by large swathes of the population as, alternatively, an imperial power and a Western crusader intent on weakening a powerful Muslim nation (and seizing its nukes).  The government in power is viewed as a quisling regime installed and/or controlled by us. 

How is a continuation of the policy that gives rise to such sentiment going to aid the “[d]evelopment of an enduring, strategic partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan”?  Further, in an environment like the one stoked by such policies, how can the US simultaneously support democracy and seek to ensure a compliant Pakistani government?  After all, it is at least likely that any government that emerges from a fair democratic process, if representative of public sentiment, would reject these particular US policies in the region.

Even Hamid Karzai had to engage in massive fraud to achieve his “free and fair” electoral victory – a testament to the complications elections and democracy can bring about.  A similar outcome (or perceived outcome) in Pakistan in order to preserve the opportunity to pursue an unpopular policy would directly undermine each and every one of the enumerated metrics above. 

Legitimacy is not won that way.  And if legitimacy is a prerequisite for success in counterinsurgency operations, well then, we’re doing it wrong.

Related posts:

1. Our Midas Guns
2. Start Another Fire and Watch It Slowly Die
3. We Chiseled and We Switched

With respect to Iraq’s COIN-borne “success,” violence in that country has not ceased, although it has declined considerably (hundreds of Iraqis are still dying each month, down from thousands).  But a large portion of those gains is attributable to several unrelated developments: the coopting of the majority of the Sunni insurgency (Awakenings), the Sadrists decision to lay low, walling off of entire neighborhoods and the fact that many neighborhoods had already been cleansed along sectarian lines, thus removing potential combatants from close proximity.  

Further, even the heretofore reduced levels of violence have begun to increase again, highlighting The Surge’s most glaring failure: it was supposed to be a vehicle for delivering lasting political reconciliation, compromise and accommodation such that warring factions would be content to pursue their objectives via elections rather than violence.  This broad-based accord has not materialized, and the Sunni groups that had held fire for a time are beginning to return to violent resistance, clashes along the borders of the disputed Kurdish regions are heating up, civilian bombings in various areas are occurring with a familiar regularity and a new Shiite coalition with maximalist sectarian underpinnings has emerged to challenge Maliki. 

Given the fact that The Surge/COIN doctrine has only delivered a qualified and possibly fleeting success in Iraq, and given the confluence of extenuating factors needed to bring about even that modicum of progress, it is highly doubtful that this doctrine will succeed in Afghanistan - a considerably harder nut to crack.  In fact, even the Afghanistan optimists – the COIN doctrine gurus that believe the mission should be pursued and can be achieved – believe that if all goes incredibly well, we will still need to maintain a robust troop presence in Afghanistan for the next 10-15 years at a price tag of a couple trillion dollars.  Oh, and even then, we will only succeed if we can also stabilize the situation in Pakistan and clear out all potential Taliban redoubts in the border regions.

So it is with a skeptical eye that the situation in Afghanistan should be viewed.  Afghanistan will need a skillful application of COIN doctrine as well as its own extenuating factors/good luck helping the cause, and even then, if Iraq is any indication, these efforts will only result in partial achievements. 

At the very least, success hinges on building up a government that is legitimate in the eyes of a vast majority of the people, efficient in delivering vital services and effective in terms of providing security.  Hearts and minds must be won in droves (and kept secure), or the whole edifice will collapse. 

This has been a constant struggle in Afghanistan given the corruption rampant throughout all levels of the Karzai government – provoking some elements of the population to pine for the return of the Taliban which, for all its innumerable flaws, had the virtue of imposing order and cutting down on graft.  Not to mention the taint associated with Karzai by virtue of his being propped up by a Western occupying power whose military causes hundreds of innocent civilian casualties with some regularity.

Considering these long odds, and the delicacy of the mission, the blatant electoral fraud in Afghanistan’s recent election may prove to be a fatal blow.  The perception that the elections were rigged has only served to emphasize the illegitimacy of a government that was already unpopular with large swathes of the population.  And the fraud was blatant:

Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here.

The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr. Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan.

“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”

Besides creating the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai, the officials said.

The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10. “We are talking about orders of magnitude,” the senior Western diplomat said.

The widening accounts of fraud pose a stark problem for the Obama administration, which has 68,000 American troops deployed here to help reverse gains by Taliban insurgents. American officials hoped that the election would help turn Afghans away from the Taliban by giving them a greater voice in government. Instead, the Obama administration now faces the prospect of having to defend an Afghan administration for the next five years that is widely seen as illegitimate.

“This was fraud en masse,” the Western diplomat said.

Andrew Exum, the blogosphere’s preeminent COIN practitioner (and supporter of ongoing military operations in Afghanistan), minces no words:

Before the Afghan elections, every assessment you could read and every opinion you could solicit from policy-makers was the same: the worst outcome of the Afghan elections would be one that, in either the first or second round of voting, delivered the election to Hamid Karzai with a narrow margin of victory amidst wide-spread allegations of corruption and ballot box-stuffing. The overwhelming fear was of “another Iran” — only with our fingerprints all over it.

The worst-case scenario now appears to have been realized.

In a more immediate sense, the election results threaten to touch off a mounting conflict between various Tajik factions and the Karzai government. 

Due to the complexity and tenacity of the multi-layered, multi-faceted conflict that we are seeking to address as an outside presence with limited resources and staying power, we are forced to bank on a miraculous combination of luck, good fortune and skill in order to pull off an outcome that, if all goes well, might come to fruition some 15 years and a couple trillion dollars down the road (with many thousands of NATO soldiers lost in the interim).  But all is not going well, far from it.  One of the most crucial political watersheds has played out in worst-case scenario terms.  COIN will not fix this.  It’s well past time we abandoned what George Kennan called the “stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives.”

Related posts:

1. I’m Creepin’ and I’m Creepin’
2. Engaging the Muslim World: Pakistan and Afghanistan
3. You Understand Less As the Pages Turn

In the course of the reporting, the article also ends up highlighting some of the primary contradictions and limitations at the heart of the Counterinsurgency ("COIN") Doctrine – the military doctrine that has been given too much credit for "winning" the war in Iraq (Iraqis are still dying each month in the hundreds as the war continues) and that supposedly lights the way forward in Afghanistan.

To generalize, COIN Doctrine – as embodied in the Army and Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual and other relevant texts – makes clear that a large number of troops are required for any successful COIN operation. Further, this large number must usually be kept in theater for 5-15 years, at least. The exact ratio varies, but is usually in the range of 1 soldier for every 50-200 members of the underlying population – a ratio that would have mandated more than double the 145,000 troops committed to the Iraq war at the beginning and, roughly speaking, throughout.

COIN Doctrine also requires that the soldiers involved develop (or already have) some level of cultural sensitivity/knowledge, that they show restraint in the use of force and that they win the loyalty of that same population (the infamous "hearts and minds").

Therein lies the tension: On the one hand, an extremely large force is needed – much, much larger than the force that our military has strained to maintain in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 7+ years. On the other hand, despite the sheer numbers involved, that force also has to be well educated (even if only contextually), well disciplined and capable of showing restraint despite the effects of combat.

Yet, all groups will inevitably have a few bad apples. When you expand the size of the group (especially through lowering standards and turning a blind eye to behavioral problem cases), you only increase the number of undisciplined soldiers capable of hindering efforts to win over the population. But here’s the kicker: even the non-bad apples eventually breakdown in a war zone. The stresses and psychological trauma of combat have effects on the decision making/moral faculties of soldiers, regardless – as a rule.

This is especially true when they are required to make multiple, prolonged deployments in the pursuit of those COIN-recommended troop levels. In Iraq, we didn’t even reach those vaunted ratios, and the effort to keep a lesser number of boots on the ground still wreaked havoc:

The psychological casualties may be particularly heavy in Iraq, he said.

“In the Civil War, if you experienced really traumatic fighting, chances are you didn’t make it,” he said. “Today, you can be blown up multiple times and go right back into the fight.”

In Vietnam, most draftees did one yearlong tour. Since the start of the Iraq war, some soldiers have been deployed three times for 12 to 15 months each.

Those soldiers will not be able to maintain the high level of discipline/restraint required by COIN Doctrine. From the article:

Soldiers said discipline started to break down.

“Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,” Freeman said. “You came too close, we lit you up. You didn’t stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley.”

If soldiers were hit by an IED, they would aim machine guns and grenade launchers in every direction, Marquez said, and “just light the whole area up. If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked ’em.”

Other soldiers said they shot random cars, killing civilians.

“It was just a free-for-all,” said Marcus Mifflin, 21, a friend of Eastridge who was medically discharged with PTSD after the tour. “You didn’t get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong. And that was hard. So things happened. Taxi drivers got shot for no reason. Guys got kidnapped and taken to the bridge and interrogated and dropped off.”

More from the same article:

In the quest to win, John Needham said, some in his platoon turned ugly.

The soldier said some loaded their rifles with hollow-point bullets designed to expand on impact, making them more lethal. These bullets are banned by international treaties.

It wasn’t just one platoon, either. Eastridge said soldiers in his platoon, including himself, used hollow-point bullets, too. It was easy to get them sent from home, Eastridge said. Both soldiers said some guys in their units carried illegal stun guns, as soldiers had in the first deployment.

The Army said it investigated Needham’s claims and found no evidence.

But there was more to the platoon’s tactics.

In a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General’s Office of Fort Carson, which investigates crimes within the Army, Needham told of the atrocities he saw. His father provided a copy to The Gazette.

One sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason, John Needham said. When Needham and another soldier rushed to deliver first aid, the sergeant said, “No, let him bleed out.”

Another sergeant shot a man in the head without cause while questioning him, Needham said, then mutilated the body, lashed it to the hood of his Humvee and drove around the neighborhood blaring warnings to insurgents in Arabic that “they would be next.”

Other Iraqis were shot for invented reasons, then mutilated, Needham said.

The sergeants particularly liked removing victims’ brains, Needham said.

Needham offered a photograph of a soldier removing brains from an Iraqi on the hood of a Humvee and other photos as evidence. His father supplied copies to The Gazette.

Therein lie some of the fundamental weaknesses of COIN Doctrine: the number of troops required is generally not available for the prolonged lengths of time required (at least, not as our armed forces are presently configured). By augmenting ground forces to accommodate those target levels (especially in a crisis where lower standards are applied), one also increases the risks of including larger numbers of ill-disciplined soldiers that will undermine the effort. Further, by keeping soldiers deployed for extended periods – and frequently redeploying them – in order to keep the proper troop-to-population ratios, it is likely that even well-disciplined soldiers will lose their self control.

That, completely aside from the grisly human costs on both sides of any conflict.

Related posts:

1. We Should Only Be So Lucky
2. Paper Kittens
3. Charm Your Way Across the Khyber Pass

While entirely too much has been made of the importance of Afghan safe havens in terms of conducting successful terrorist attacks (just as too little has been made of the ability to replicate similar safe havens elsewhere and our ability to disrupt any such haven from afar now that we are making such interdiction a priority), there is little doubt that Obama would pay a steep political price if he were to withdraw and an attack occurred that had some traceable connection to Afghanistan. While an attack emanating from hubs in, say, Europe or Yemen may be just as (or more) likely, those connections would not prove as damaging despite the underlying reality of the terrorist threat.

So it is that Obama seems to be trading Bush’s muddled vision of Afghanistan for his own, with a vague yet grandiose (if often contradictory) recitation of implausible goals and exaggerated fears, all buttressed by a refusal to acknowledge the costs of continuing our occupation. As if they were trivial (think trillions of dollars – less than the costs of health care that has Washington in a tizzy, but then wars never seem to count as spending). As Rory Stewart suggests, it’s almost impossible to decipher an actual policy direction from the pomp and flourish:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’, and promises a final dream of ‘legitimate, accountable governance’. The path is broad enough to include Scandinavian humanitarians and American special forces; general enough to be applied to Botswana as easily as to Afghanistan; sinuous and sophisticated enough to draw in policymakers; suggestive enough of crude moral imperatives to attract the Daily Mail; and almost too abstract to be defined or refuted. It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions. [...]

Policymakers perceive Afghanistan through the categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, state-building and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that you can put them in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don’t have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, ‘If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists.’

These connections are global: in Obama’s words, ‘our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others.’ Or, as a British foreign minister recently rephrased it, ‘our security depends on their development.’ Indeed, at times it seems that all these activities – building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al-Qaida and eliminating poverty – are the same activity. The new US army and marine corps counter-insurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank policy document, replete with commitments to the rule of law, economic development, governance, state-building and human rights. In Obama’s words, ‘security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project.’

This policy rests on misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state. Even if the invasion was justified, that does not justify all our subsequent actions. If 9/11 had been planned in training camps in Iraq, we might have felt the war in Iraq was more justified, but our actions would have been no less of a disaster for Iraqis or for ourselves. The power of the US and its allies, and our commitment, knowledge and will, are limited. It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban. The ingredients of successful counter-insurgency campaigns in places like Malaya – control of the borders, large numbers of troops in relation to the population, strong support from the majority ethnic groups, a long-term commitment and a credible local government – are lacking in Afghanistan.

He continues, highlighting some points that I have been making regarding the mythic importance of "safe havens":

Even if – as seems most unlikely – the Taliban were to take the capital, it is not clear how much of a threat this would pose to US or European national security. Would they repeat their error of providing a safe haven to al-Qaida? And how safe would this safe haven be? They could give al-Qaida land for a camp but how would they defend it against predators or US special forces? And does al-Qaida still require large terrorist training camps to organise attacks? Could they not plan in Hamburg and train at flight schools in Florida; or meet in Bradford and build morale on an adventure training course in Wales?

Furthermore, there are no self-evident connections between the key objectives of counter-terrorism, development, democracy/ state-building and counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for state-building. You could create a stable legitimate state without winning a counter-insurgency campaign (India, which is far more stable and legitimate than Afghanistan, is still fighting several long counter-insurgency campaigns from Assam to Kashmir). You could win a counter-insurgency campaign without creating a stable state (if such a state also required the rule of law and a legitimate domestic economy). Nor is there any necessary connection between state-formation and terrorism. Our confusions are well illustrated by the debates about whether Iraq was a rogue state harbouring terrorists (as Bush claimed) or an authoritarian state which excluded terrorists (as was in fact the case).

It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

Yet the current state-building project, at the heart of our policy, is justified in the most instrumental terms – not as an end in itself but as a means towards counter-terrorism.

With so convoluted a policy, with its mosaic of cross-purpose justifications and strategies, it is no surprise that Obama’s choice of McChrystal (a noted counter-terrorism practitioner – aka, a "killer") was curious given the underlying rhetoric and nod in the direction of counterinsurgency ("COIN", noted for its population centric concern and restraint in terms of the use of force). As Judah Grunstein suggests to explain this apparent contradiction:

…[It seems that] the COIN rhetoric is simply a scaffolding that’s been slapped over a strategy that has neither the resources, the political will, nor the local support necessary to succeed.

Those limitations are real. Even the Afghan optimists (the COIN experts that think that we must "succeed," and that we have a shot at succeeding) think that our only hope is to commit tens of thousands more troops for at least the next decade at a price tag (when combined with non-military outlays) in the neighborhood of several trillions of dollars. Oh, and even then we’ll only succeed if we also eradicate the poppy crop and reorder Pakistan’s society while we’re creating a stable Afghanistan.

As unrealistic an allocation of resources (and set of goals) as that may seem, it actually gets worse. Back to Stewart:

In pursuit of this objective, Obama has so far committed to building ‘an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000’, and adds that ‘increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed.’ US generals have spoken openly about wanting a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers (in a country with a population half the size of Britain’s). Such a force would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to maintain; the annual revenue of the Afghan government is just $600 million. We criticise developing countries for spending 30 per cent of their budget on defence; we are encouraging Afghanistan to spend 500 per cent of its budget.

Some policymakers have been quick to point out that this cost is unsustainable and will leave Afghanistan dependent for ever on the largesse of the international community. Some have even raised the spectre (suggested by the example of Pakistan) that this will lead to a military coup. But the more basic question is about our political principles. We should not encourage the creation of an authoritarian military state. The security that resulted might suit our short-term security interests, but it will not serve the longer interests of Afghans.

Given the unappetizing, politically unpalatable menu of options available in terms of crafting an Afghanistan policy, Obama seems to be picking and choosing ala carte, while vastly overselling the risk of starvation, as well as the sumptuousness of the feast – a meal that is doomed as much by the basic ingredients as by their haphazard combination. If the recent escalation is part of one last push to try to set a decent stage for fuller withdrawal, so be it. But mission creep is an omnipresent concern with so amorphous and ambitious a set of goals (already there is talk that McChrystal will request thousands more troops from Obama in the near future – one wonders what the response will be and under what rationale?).

Unless and until Obama scales back his goals, and takes a more measured reckoning of the actual costs of withdrawal (total or partial), the policy manifestations will continue to be plagued by an incoherent blend of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, targeting segments of the Afghan population while ostensibly under the rubric of population centric protection, air strikes and hearts and minds, nation building and piecemeal aid, erecting a centralized state and showing sensitivity to the local culture of decentralization, etc., all sold using the ominous rhetoric of an existential threat and the resource allocation of a middling concern.

Related posts:

1. I’m Creepin’ and I’m Creepin’
2. Our Midas Guns
3. Engaging the Muslim World: Pakistan and Afghanistan