Afghanistan and Pakistan
Rising bloodshed is threatening the security of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
AMERICA’S commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is candid about the complexity of the war against the Taliban: “Every day I realise how little about Afghanistan I actually understand.” The country’s mountains and deserts are forbidding; its tribal make-up bewildering; and, after three decades of war, its communities broken, poor and ignorant. Well-meant actions often have unintended effects: fighting can create more insurgents than it kills; foreigners are blamed for attacks that hurt Afghan civilians; and schemes to win people over can deepen antagonism.
Take digging a well. In villages where irrigation is communal a new well can shift power to the owner of the land where it is sunk. Or it can strengthen the group paid to dig it. “You can create divisiveness or give the impression that you…do not understand what is going on or that you have sided with one element or another,” says General McChrystal. “Yet all you tried to do is provide water.”
Known in the military world as “M4” (from his surname and the number of stars he wears), the general offered this vignette to an audience of defence experts in London this month as he set out the “serious” risk of failure. That prospect has been brought closer by the bloodiest fighting season for NATO in eight years, a political crisis over the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai after a fraud-riddled election, falling support for the war in the West and palpable jitters in the White House.
General McChrystal’s speech, like his Afghan wells, had unexpected results. The explanation of his counter-insurgency strategy, which aims to “protect the population”, was consistent with his assessment (by then leaked), which had been drafted for President Barack Obama. But its timing looked to some in Washington like insubordination—an attempt to force his political masters to meet his request for tens of thousands of troops. He said that “uncertainty disheartens our allies [and] emboldens our foes”; dismissed as “short-sighted” those who, like Vice-President Joe Biden, want to limit the mission; and mocked those seeking troop withdrawal for pursuing a policy of “Chaos-istan”.
Precisely how many forces he wants on top of the 100,000-odd foreign soldiers already there is part of a secret document, of which few copies have been printed and hand-delivered to the general’s superiors. The options are said to range from a “high-risk” course of sending 10,000 more troops, to a “low-risk” approach requiring 40,000, or even 60,000 extra soldiers.
Whatever the request, Mr Obama has gagged. Until recently he called Afghanistan a “war of necessity”. But for more than six weeks now, Mr Obama has been debating options with advisers, testing the mood of Congress and conferring with foreign leaders. The discussion turns on two approaches: manpower-intensive counter-insurgency (COIN), which aims to win over the Afghan population and build a stable government; and counter-terrorism, which seeks to deal narrowly with threats to the West, mainly through air strikes or raids by special forces.
Mr Obama has tilted one way and then the other. Faced with accusations of prevarication, the White House said there would be no “dramatic” troop reduction. On October 6th, though, the president visited the “bat cave”, the hub of the National Counterterrorism Centre, where all intelligence on terrorists is pooled. “We will target al-Qaeda wherever they take root,” he declared. This looked like a nod to advocates of counter-terrorism, who hail the success of drone strikes in Pakistan and say al-Qaeda is short of money.
A big question is whether the West should be fighting the “Taliban”, a constellation of indigenous Pushtun groups, or just al-Qaeda, a transnational terrorist group whose main leaders are sheltering among the Pushtuns. An early review ordered by Mr Obama concluded in March that the movements were inseparable. Fighting al-Qaeda was America’s priority, but defeating it required a counter-insurgency campaign to hold the Taliban at bay.
Now that the cost of this approach has become clear, its assumptions are being questioned. The debate has thrown up some odd role-reversals: many Democrats are set against ambitious nation-building in one of the poorest countries of the world; key Republicans oppose excessive reliance on killing bad guys.
In large part, this is a legacy of Iraq. That war seemed lost at the end of 2006, but George Bush gambled one last time. He ordered a surge of troops and appointed a four-star general, David Petraeus, to implement a new COIN strategy. The outcome was the sharp decline in violence that has allowed Mr Obama to order a gradual troop withdrawal from Iraq.
Can M4 emulate P4? Next to Iraq, Afghanistan has long been starved of resources (see chart). It is bigger, more populous and more rugged, and yet even now there are more Western soldiers in Iraq (120,000) than in Afghanistan (100,000, including many war-shy Europeans). In terms of indigenous forces, vital for success, the imbalance is starker still: 650,000 local soldiers and policemen in Iraq, against 170,000 in Afghanistan. “Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it,” says General McChrystal’s report. He wants to expand the Afghan forces to 400,000.
The COINtras hit back
Critics of COIN such as Rory Stewart—a British former soldier and diplomat who walked the length of Afghanistan, served as a coalition administrator in Iraq and lived in Kabul—think that General McChrystal is “trying to do the impossible”. In contrast with the urban war in Iraq, he notes, Afghanistan’s insurgency is rural and spread out; its tribal structures are more frayed; and its government lacks the support of Iraqi-style political parties.
Mr Stewart told the Senate foreign-relations committee last month that America would succeed neither in building an effective Afghan state nor in defeating the Taliban. Deploying more troops would be a waste of money and lives; America’s failure would be magnified, increasing the danger of a rushed withdrawal. Better, he said, to have a less ambitious but longer-term effort of economic aid coupled with a small counter-terrorist force of 20,000.
His views have influence in Washington, though few in the White House would advocate as radical a policy as this. Giving up on fighting the Taliban would mean a defeat for America and NATO, the return of the Taliban to parts or most of Afghanistan and the emboldening of militants in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Failure, says the British army chief, General Sir David Richards, would have “a catalytic effect on militant Islam around the world”.
Even in narrow counter-terrorism, the loss of parts of Afghanistan would be a grievous blow. Drones need Afghan bases to operate from. Proximity to the border with Pakistan is invaluable for gathering signals and human intelligence. It will be hard to tell Pakistan to confront the Taliban on its side of the border if America will not do so in Afghanistan.
Such arguments may explain why Mr Biden, it is reported, now proposes a hybrid approach: keeping today’s troop levels while placing greater emphasis on counter-terrorism. Yet it is unclear that America can achieve much more through targeted killings. Drone strikes have already intensified under Mr Obama. Broadening the targets risks stoking anti-Americanism in Pakistan—particularly if, as is sometimes threatened, America goes beyond liquidating al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban militants in the tribal belt to killing Afghan Taliban leaders around Quetta.
General McChrystal knows more than anyone the strengths and weaknesses of counter-terrorism. He made his name as the chief of Joint Special Operations Command, the “black” special forces whose men took the scalp of, among others, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloody leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Special forces, especially in Afghanistan, heavily rely on air strikes, which often cause civilian deaths. Now in Afghanistan, the general has fully embraced counter-insurgency and has sharply reduced the number of air strikes.
He likes to talk about the oddness of “counter-insurgency maths”. In a conventional war, killing two enemy soldiers among a group of ten leaves just eight to deal with. With insurgents, though, ten minus two could equal zero (if the survivors decide to stop fighting); or, more often, it could equal 20 (if the dead men’s vengeful relatives join the struggle).
General McChrystal sees counter-insurgency as an “argument” between the Taliban and the Afghan government, backed by the West. The population will decide who wins, and must be wooed. In a struggle for legitimacy, politics is paramount. But institution-building, always difficult, has become much harder with the unresolved crisis over wholesale voting fraud. The poll was meant to relaunch Mr Karzai’s leadership; it has tarnished him more—and made it harder for Western governments to justify sending soldiers to die in Afghanistan.
For many Afghans, the politics of Kabul is a distant matter. Legitimate government is local: security, livelihoods and a sense of justice in districts and provinces. That is where NATO commanders think they can make progress. In any case, political reform and building some kind of working Afghan state need better security, which brings the question back to force levels.
Britain acts, America dithers
On October 14th Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, pre-empted the debate in Washington. He said counter-terrorism against al-Qaeda, without a counter-insurgency strategy to help Afghans take charge of their country, would not produce lasting security. Britain would send 500 more soldiers—on condition that the Afghan government deploys more Afghan troops to fight alongside them, and that other allies step up their contribution (probably at a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Bratislava on October 22nd).
Mr Brown said he was “dissatisfied” with the election; he had agreed with Mr Obama that the next president would have to abide by a “contract” to expand the Afghan army, tackle corruption, adopt “more inclusive” politics and draw in “reconcilable elements of the insurgency”.
But only America can change the direction of the war. Mr Obama knows that sending many more troops will hamper efforts to reduce the physical and mental strain on the American forces. Yet losing a war is even more likely to break an army. General McChrystal thinks a big reinforcement would send a strong signal of America’s commitment. And if he can regain the military initiative, more insurgent commanders might be induced to defect. By the same measure, the rejection of his request would send a message of weakness.
The Taliban cannot immediately dislodge Western forces from the towns. But this is a battle of will and perceptions. If Afghans think the Taliban are winning, they will be more likely to throw in their lot with them. Just now, as a British general says, “the Taliban think the elephant has fallen and all they need to do is shoot it.”
The Economist
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Full article and pbotos: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14652443&source=hptextfeature
