Afghanistan: Still Moving Sideways

The US Marines are undetaking a huge offensive in Afghanistan. It appears to be a regimental size operation.  I wish them well.  But isn’t this an anachronism, not so different from the Dewey Canyon and Junction City “sweep and clear” operations so favored by General Westmoreland in Vietnam?

Until now, it appears that Generals Petraeus and Matthis successfully disseminated the ethos that the more useful undertakings of counterinsurgency are the not-terribly-glamorous “small unit actions,” providing security to locals, and the work of advisory teams.  A regiment or more can easily sweep through a valley, secure some arms caches, and disrupt the enemy . . .  no doubt.  But it must stay, focusing less on killing the enemy and more on protecting the populace and spreading the government’s message ultimately to succeed.  And this technique must be done everywhere, or we’ll end up playing whack-a-mole as our forces did in Iraq from 2005-2007, when each new big sweep sucked up forces from quiet sectors in turn creating problems in those areas left under-policed.  To break it down as simply as possible:  counterinsurgency warfare is a big popularity contest.

There’s some big problems that this latest sweep-and-clear will not solve.  First, it’s not so clear what the Afghan government stands for.  Second, the population’s fortunes have become intertwined with the drug trade.  What these farmers could do that is equally lucrative is not so clear.  And no American-supported regime could easily look the other way on this issue.  And finally, there’s not enough troops.  There were not enough yesterday, and there won’t be enough tomorrow or the next day.  There won’t be even if they are tripled.

Right now we have 48,000 troops in Afghanistan.  It’s a huge, mountainous country that requires tons and tons of troops (ours and Afghani) to control while protecting the populace.  The Soviets had some 150,000 at their height of Afghan operations.  We had 160,000 in Iraq until recently.  The French had 400,000 or more in Algeria.  We had over 1,000,000 in the height of US involvement in Vietnam (where the counterinsurgency piece finally began to take effect under Abrams).

It takes a lot of troops to do all the things that need to be done in a counterinsurgency, the chief of which is to protect the populace and impress them that the government is worth supporting.  Rumsfeld never understood this, and that’s why our forces were so thinly spread in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He diagnosed the Soviet error in Afghanistan as “too many troops,” somehow missing their godless ideology and penchant for indiscriminate attacks on Afghan villages in his analysis.  So he figured, fewer troops, less frictions, and happier people.  It turned out to be totally wrong.

On top of all these tactical considerations, we should also ask:  What’s the big picture strategic reason we are even in Afghanistan?  If terrorists coalesce, could we not bomb them?  Are we just there out of inertia, some blood-lust for Osama bin Laden?  The latter does not appear terribly capable of doing anything to us any more.  It’s not so clear anything like what prevailed in the 90s could easily reemerge in Afghanistan, threatening America with another 9/11.  The Taliban’s goals are local and prosaic:  imposing Islam, oppressing people, and looking inward.  Al Qaeda is on the run and hiding.  They are impotent, and it seems we should aim instead to disentangle ourselves from this stone age ruin, free up our forces, and seek instead to engage al Qaeda there (and anywhere else they might appear) from arms length, with small special forces units, air power, and a goal of destruction-on-sight rather than the more elusive and overly ambitious goal of  “draining the swamp” by turning Afghanistan into a peaceful, democratic regime.

Indeed, a smaller footprint may aid us in keeping the support of Pakistan’s more moderate (i.e., not inclined to nuke us) elements.  As it stands, we piss a lot of nationalist Afghani and Pakistani people off by being in the neighborhood and killing so many civilians–this too an artifact of insufficient troops, excessive concern for force protection, and a related reliance on technology and air power in what should be a more granular and surgical exercise in counterinsurgency.

The whole idea that we must invade, occupy, democratize, and police Muslim lands because of terrorist attacks that met us because of our rickety border-protection strikes me as akin to the 1960s view that crime could only be fought with extensive anti-poverty efforts in the inner city.  In reality, cops, jails, and gated communities in the suburbs did most of the trick.   The most cost-effective means of addressing certain persistent problems is not to attack “root causes”–a technique which is both expensive and not terribly effective– but instead to address symptoms as they appear.  We now know that jails, cops, long sentences, and the like did a lot more to combat crime than “urban renewal” ever did.  In the case of terrorists, it may mean letting these countries fester, monitoring them as much as possible with our intelligence sources, keeping our borders secure, and bombing training camps and nation-state sponsors of terrorism vigorously as they reveal themselves.   This approach certainly beats the Bush-Obama policy of decades-long occupations of the world’s hell holes with very little to show for it.