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Afghanistan
Fight Less, Win More
2007-08-13
On a highway north of Kabul last month, an American soldier aimed a machine gun at my car from the turret of his armored Humvee. In the split second for which our eyes locked, I had a revelation: To a man with a weapon, everything looks like a threat.

I had served as an infantry officer in Afghanistan in 2001-02 and in Iraq in 2003, but this was my first time on the other end of an American machine gun. It's not something I'll forget. It's not the sort of thing ordinary Afghans forget, either, and it reminded me that heavy-handed military tactics can alienate the people we're trying to help while playing into the hands of the people we're trying to defeat.

My unnerving encounter on the highway was particularly ironic since I was there at the invitation of the U.S. Army to help teach these very principles at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy. The grandly misnamed "academy" is a tiny collection of huts and tents on Kabul's dusty southern outskirts. Since May, motley classes of several dozen Afghan army officers, Afghan policemen, NATO officers, American officers and civilians have been learning and living side by side there for a week at a time.

The academy does much more than teach the theory and tactics of fighting the Taliban insurgents who are trying to unseat President Hamid Karzai and claw their way back to power. It is also a rare forum for military officers, civilian aid workers, academics and diplomats -- from Afghanistan and all 37 countries in NATO's International Security Assistance Force -- to unite in trying to bring good governance, prosperity and security to Afghanistan. The curriculum is based on the Army and Marine Corps' new counterinsurgency doctrine, released in December. Classes revolve around four so-called paradoxes of counterinsurgency. Unless we learn all four well, we'll continue to win battles in Afghanistan while losing the war.

The first tenet is that the best weapons don't shoot. Counterinsurgents must excel at finding creative, nonmilitary solutions to military problems.

Consider, for example, the question of roads. When U.N. teams begin building new stretches of road in volatile Afghan provinces such as Zabul and Kandahar, insurgents inevitably attack the workers. But as the projects progress and villagers begin to see the benefits of having paved access to markets and health care, the Taliban attacks become less frequent. New highways then extend the reach of the Karzai administration into previously inaccessible areas, making a continuous Afghan police presence possible and helping lower the overall level of violence -- no mean feat in a country larger and more populous than Iraq, with a shaky central government.

Said another way: Reconstruction funds can shape the battlefield as surely as bombs. But such methods are still not used widely enough in Afghanistan. After spending more than $14 billion in aid to the country since 2001, the United States' latest disbursement, of more than $10 billion, will start this month. Some 80 percent of it is earmarked for security spending, leaving only about 20 percent for reconstruction projects and initiatives to foster good governance.

The second pillar of the academy's curriculum relates to the first: The more you protect your forces, the less safe you may be. To be effective, troops, diplomats and civilian aid workers need to get out among the people. But nearly every American I saw in Kabul was hidden behind high walls or racing through the streets in armored convoys.

Afghanistan, however, isn't Iraq. Tourists travel through much of the country in relative safety, glass office towers are sprouting up in Kabul, and Coca-Cola recently opened a bottling plant. I drove through the capital in a dirty green Toyota, wearing civilian clothes and stopping to shop in bazaars, eat in restaurants and visit businesses. In two weeks, I saw more of Kabul than most military officers do in a year.

This isolation also infects our diplomatic community. After a State Department official gave a presentation at the academy, he and I climbed a nearby hill to explore the ruins of an old palace. He was only nine days from the end of his 12-month tour, and our walk was the first time he'd ever been allowed to get out and explore the city.

Of course, mingling with the population means exposing ourselves to attacks, and commanders have an obligation to safeguard their troops. But they have an even greater responsibility to accomplish their mission. When we retreat behind body armor and concrete barriers, it becomes impossible to understand the society we claim to defend. If we emphasize "force protection" above all else, we will never develop the cultural understanding, relationships and intelligence we need to win. Accepting the greater tactical risk of reaching out to Afghans reduces the strategic risk that the Taliban will return to power.

The third paradox hammered home at the academy is that the more force you use, the less effective you may be. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are notoriously difficult to tally, but 300-500 noncombatants have probably been killed already this year, mostly in U.S. and coalition air strikes. Killing civilians, even in error, is not only a serious moral transgression but also a lethal strategic misstep. Wayward U.S. strikes have seriously undermined the very legitimacy of the Karzai government and made all too many Afghans resent coalition forces. If Afghans lose patience with the coalition presence, those forces will be run out of the country, in the footsteps of the British and the Soviets before them.

I stress this point because one of my many gratifying moments at the academy came at the start of a class on targeting. I told the students to list the top three targets they would aim for if they were leading forces in Zabul province, a Taliban stronghold. When I asked a U.S. officer to share his list, he rattled off the names of three senior Taliban leaders to be captured or killed. Then I turned and asked an Afghan officer the same question. "First we must target the local councils to see how we can best help them," he replied. "Then we must target the local mullahs to find out their needs and let them know we respect their authority." Exactly. In counterinsurgency warfare, targeting is more about whom you bring in than whom you take out.

The academy's final lesson is that tactical success in a vacuum guarantees nothing. Just as it did in Vietnam, the U.S. military could win every battle and still lose the war. That's largely because our primary enemies in Afghanistan still have a sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan. Rather than make a suicidal stand against the allied forces invading Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, many Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters melted away to create a parallel "Talibanistan" in the lawless tribal areas of western Pakistan. Last fall, Gen. James Jones, then NATO's supreme commander, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Taliban leadership now operates openly from Quetta, a Pakistani border city that's long been a hotbed of Islamic militancy. Karzai reiterated this point during his visit to Camp David last week.

Chasing terrorists and the Taliban around Afghanistan leads to little lasting progress as long as they can slip across the border to rest and regroup. Since 2001, the United States has tolerated this quiet reconstitution of the Taliban in Pakistan as long as Islamabad granted us basing and overflight rights, tepidly pursued al-Qaeda's leadership and cracked down on A.Q. Khan's nuclear-proliferation network. The Durand Line, which separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, is a mapmaker's fantasy. Without political reform, economic development and military operations on both sides of the border, we can do little more than put a finger in the dike that's keeping radicalism and instability in Pakistan from spilling back into Afghanistan.

On the last afternoon of the course, I asked my students to define victory in Afghanistan. We'd talked about this earlier in the week, and most of their answers had focused on militarily defeating the Taliban or killing Osama bin Laden. Now the Afghan officers took the lead in a spirited discussion with their U.S. and NATO classmates. Finally the group agreed on a unanimous result, which neatly expresses the prize we're striving for: "Victory is achieved when the people of Afghanistan consent to the legitimacy of their government and stop actively and passively supporting the insurgency."

Winning that consent will require doing some difficult and uncomfortable things: de-escalating military force, boosting the capacities of the Karzai government, accelerating reconstruction, getting real with Pakistan. It won't be easy. But the alternative, which I glimpsed while staring down the barrel of that machine gun, is our nation going zero for two in its first wars of the new century.

Nathaniel Fick, a former captain in the Marines, is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the author of "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer."
Posted by:Bobby

#7  All Clinton all the time. You cannot prepare for the next century by using a model of the past - especially if it fails consistently. This FP is a range of suspicious judicial killers.
Posted by: newc   2007-08-13 23:15  

#6  A look at the Board for the Center for a New American Security:

The Honorable Dr. William J. Perry
Chairman of the Board (Clinton Sec. of Defense)

The Honorable Dr. Madeleine K. Albright (Clinton Sec. of State)

The Honorable Richard L. Armitage (Colin Powell's er... handyman)

Norman R. Augustine (former head of Lockheed Martin)

Admiral Dennis C. Blair, USN (Ret.) (Military)

The Honorable Dr. Richard J. Danzig (Clinton Sec. of the Navy)

William J. Lynn (Clinton UnderSec. of Defense - Comptroller)

Lieutenant General Greg S. Newbold, USMC (Ret.) (Military)

John D. Podesta (Clinton Chief of Staff)
Posted by: Pappy   2007-08-13 21:37  

#5  This goes to "migrating" the battlefield back into a healthy country theory. Unfortunately, there have been some really great examples of how to do this that we have missed out on in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of these is to take as many unemployed men as possible and set them to work on government improvement projects at the prevailing (low) wage. Importantly, these projects are not make-work, but have to be designed to create small businesses and more efficient farms, like co-ops.

These type projects show they are working by running out of laborers--who go on to better jobs.

For instance, you hire 10,000 men to use hand labor to prepare a large area for farming. They clear and level the land, dig irrigation canals, and remove and break up rocks, which are then used to build fences to subdivide the land. For this they get paid a wage and food, with the wage going to their family or being kept in a bank. In their off work ours they both get classroom on how to manage such a farm, and get government speakers out there to encourage them and tell them the news.

When the land and buildings have been prepared, you split off perhaps 2,000 of them who will become the owners and workers of the prepared land. They get the agricultural co-op experts to take them through an entire season to show them how it is done.

The other 8,000 get another 2,000 newbies, and go on to the next project.

On top of that you have the really huge government projects that need 50-100,000 men, which are designed to improve a major region. It also keeps them from involving themselves in mischief, and pumps a lot of money into the economy. More so in setting up the support businesses to provide for this many employed people.

Ideally, you must shoot for 100% employment. The more troublesome an area, the more work is available. It neutralizes a LOT of the trouble making.
Posted by: Anonymoose   2007-08-13 17:46  

#4  Generals like force protection. It keeps them from having to be grilled by the congressional morons showing off about their concern for casualties.
That the force protection either makes the objective impossible or increases casualties later on can be blamed on the generals.

Senior officers don't come to value force protection by their own selves.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey   2007-08-13 15:06  

#3  Steve you are so very right.

"...insurgents inevitably attack the workers. But as the projects progress..."

And how do the projects progress with nothing but dead workers?

This is the same problem with Iraq. We fix the electricity, they blow it up. We fix the pipe lines, they blow it up. It's a lot easier to blow it up when there's no security to shoot them dead.
Posted by: AlanC   2007-08-13 14:13  

#2  The academy's final lesson is that tactical success in a vacuum guarantees nothing.

Particularly when you let the enemy, and their allies, shape and tell the story.

A corollary maybe, you can have all the OPSEC in the world, but if you don't tell the story, no one else will, and you'll still lose.

Time to get out of the mindset of the mid-20th Century. DO NOT out source the story telling to the MSM. They are not your friends. They have been the unquestioning mouth piece of the enemy.

Time to reinvent the PAO, presently organized and aligned to interface with the dead tree and crisis entertainment media. Exploit the internet to end round the news withholders and distorters.

Time to exploit that troop in the unit, who like the company clerk a generation ago who had the magical skill of typing and therefore regardless of Military Occupational Specialty was reassigned to the company orderly room, who has the skills to write and integrate the internet's technology to tell the story. You know, the real ones who've actually been in the dirt and sweat, not those who just transit assembly bases in Kuwait.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2007-08-13 13:41  

#1  Interesting how the two sides of this discussion -- 'hearts and minds' versus 'grab them by their balls' never seem to understand that both are necessary. Counterinsurgency tries to dry up the sea in which the insurgents swim, and at the same time make it really, really, unhealthy to be an insurgent. Mr. Fick makes a cogent case for 'hearts and minds', and he's right as far as he goes, but you also need security in the villages and towns (not to mention around your own firebases), and you need to introduce a healthy respect for your troops amongst the bad guys.

Spreading some reconstruction money around is good, as long as it does what it's supposed to do and not end up in some warlord's pocket. How do you guarantee that unless you have troops around (whether they do it personally or simply protect the USAID officer)? How do you make tribal chiefs play nice? Sure, offer them a good deal and remind them of how the bad boys treat them (aka, Anbar), but having enough firepower along to ensure said tribal chief knows who is the 'strong horse' is also necessary.

I get some fed up with these sorts of articles and the people who write them. They act as if doing just one thing will fix all our problems, and always claim that whatever we're doing, we're not doing the one thing.

It's not one thing. It's never one thing. If it were one thing we'd be done and home already. It's a hundred things, all orchestrated and done in the right order. That's the tough part.

I thank Mr. Fick for his service. If he's so smart, he could leave the think tank and sign onto our diplomatic staff in Kabul.
Posted by: Steve White   2007-08-13 13:09  

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