Page 2 of 3 Why the US is losing in Afghanistan
By Anthony H Cordesman
somewhat obliquely, in his testimony to the House Armed Service Committee on
September 10, 2008:
We did not get to this point overnight, so some
historical context is useful. The mission in Afghanistan has evolved over the
years - in both positive and negative ways.
Reported insurgent activities and attacks have grown over the past
two-and-a-half years. In some cases, this is a result of safe havens in
Pakistan and reduced military pressure on that side of the border. In others,
it is the result of more
international and Afghan troops on the battlefield - troops that are
increasingly in contact with the enemy.
In response to increased violence and insurgent activity in 2006, in January of
last year we extended the deployment of an army brigade and added another
brigade. This last spring, the United States deployed 3,500 marines. In all,
the number of American troops in the country increased from less than 21,000
two years ago to nearly 31,000 today.
At the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, ISAF allies and partners restated
their commitment to Afghanistan. France added 700 troops in Eastern
Afghanistan. This fall, Germany will seek to increase its troop ceiling from
3,500 to 4,500. Poland is also increasing its forces by more than 1,000 troops.
The number of Coalition troops - including NATO troops - increased from about
20,000 to about 31,000. It appears that this trend will continue - as other
allies, such as the United Kingdom, add more troops. Thanks to success in Iraq,
we will increase US troop levels in Afghanistan by deploying a marine battalion
this November and in January 2009 an army brigade combat team - units that had
been slated for Iraq.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mike
Mullen, made it clear in the same hearing, however, that US force levels would
remain inadequate through at least the beginning of the 2009 campaign season,
and the next President would not only inherit a war being fought without
adequate resources, but one that did not have a coherent strategy:
I am
convinced we can win the war in Afghanistan. That is why I intend to commission
a new, more comprehensive strategy for the region, one that covers both sides
of the border. It's why I have pushed hard for the continued growth and
training of Afghan National Security Forces. It's why I have pressed hard on my
counterparts in Pakistan to do more against extremists, and to let us do more
to help them.
And it's why the Chiefs and I recommended the deployment of a marine battalion
to Afghanistan this fall and the arrival of another army brigade early next
year. These forces, by themselves, will not adequately meet General
McKiernan�s desire for up to three brigades, but they are a good start.
I judge the risk of not sending them too great a risk right now to ignore.
My expectation is that they will need to perform both the training mission and
combat and combat support missions simultaneously until such time that we can
provide additional troops. I cannot at this point say when that might be.
Again, we must continually assess our progress there and in Iraq, weighing it
against global risk and the health of the force before we make any more
commitments.
General David G McKiernan, the NATO ISAF
commander in Afghanistan, made similar points made about the need for more
forces in an interview published in the National Journal on September 13, 2008.
He stated later that the small increase in US forces that Bush announced in
September had still left him at least three brigades short of the US forces he
needed.
In some ways, bringing sustainable security to Afghanistan is
more difficult than in Iraq, starting with the fact that this is one of the
poorest countries on Earth, with a literacy rate estimated at only 30%,"
McKiernan said in an interview at his headquarters in Kabul. " ... there is a
lack of human capital in Afghanistan to do the things you expect of government,
whether that's serving as mayor or policeman, or running a budget, or managing
a labor force. In comparison, Iraq is a fairly rich and literate society, which
is why I don't find comparisons between the two conflicts all that helpful.
Building Afghan security and governance capability, from the bottom up at the
local level and from the top down at the national level, will be one of the
most important factors to winning in Afghanistan ... Military capability by
itself won't win this fight. After security is established, we have to build
governance and have reconstruction and development to meet the needs of the
Afghan people. Only when all three of those lines of operation work together in
tandem will we get the right outcome.
There is no doubt that Afghanistan has not received the resources from the
international community needed to meet its requirements for security,
governance, or development. Militarily, we have never had enough forces to
conduct a proper counterinsurgency campaign across Afghanistan. To do that -
clear out insurgents, keep them separated from the population, and set the
conditions for reconstruction and development - all of that translates to boots
on the ground, and we are short of them.
I'm happy to take contributions from as many partner nations as possible, but
what these national restrictions do is limit NATO's inherent advantage in
speed, mobility, intelligence-gathering, firepower, command-and-control, and
logistics. When nations restrict the use of their forces, it decreases those
advantages.
So did Major General Jeffrey J Schloesser, the
commander of the 101st Airborne Division and US forces in Eastern Afghanistan,
in an interview published on the Newsweek web site on September 10, 2008:
We
need more troops here in the east. I think General McKiernan has said the same,
speaking more broadly of Afghanistan. I don't want to characterize it as a
troop surge. But to clear, hold and build we will need more forces, and that
includes more Afghan forces, which are critical. Are two to three more brigades
the answer? It depends on our success as we increase the number of troops. And
then, what's the impact on the enemy? Some things are not knowable in the
coming months.
The problems in aid spending are complex and
difficult to summarize. The US was able to get a significant percentage of
allied aid contributions in terms of pledges, but cash flow was often slow, and
some pledges were not met or given in the flexible grant terms that Afghanistan
needed. National aid programs were diverse in character and dividing the
country into national Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) ensured a lack of
coordination.
Aid efforts also initially treated Afghanistan as if it were a secure exercise
in traditional economic development, rather than a war zone in which aid had to
be used to offset insurgent activity as part of a coordinated "win, build,
hold" activity that concentrated both military and aid resources in a joint
effort to contain and defeat a rising insurgency.
Even in 2008, it is sometimes difficult to find clear references to the fact
that Afghanistan is at war in the reporting by various aid efforts. In other
cases, the fighting is treated as an annoyance, or interference in peaceful aid
activity - regardless of the fact that the insurgent see aid workers as a major
target and the UN has expanded its maps of threats to aid workers to cover well
over half the country.
In many cases, however, most aid workers cannot or will not go into the high
threat areas where dollars are a critical complement to bullets, and aid is
critical. There are also basic shortages of qualified US aid workers. The
Department of Defense report to Congress on the war issued in June 2008
reported that 1,021 of the US aid worker in the PRTs were military. In
contrast, there were 11 Department of State aid workers, 12 of 13 authorized
USAID personnel, and four of 11 authorized Department of Agriculture personnel.
The situation is further complicated by trying to run a major drug eradication
program without adequate aid, aid workers, and Afghan government support to
provide alternative income. The aid agenda even lacks the broad emphasis on
agricultural development that is critical in a country where this is the major
source of employment, which has suffered from decades of war, and is now a
significant food importer. The end result has been to make many Afghans
dependent on growing opium while confronting them with the threat of
eradication without adequate options or compensation. Ironically, it has also
driven opium cultivation steadily into the Taliban-controlled areas in southern
Afghanistan, effectively funding the insurgency.
The lack of coordination in the aid effort has also been matched by far too
many efforts that do not spend their resources in Afghanistan, and which lack
validated requirements, fiscal controls, and measures of effectiveness. While
there are many dedicated and competent aid efforts, there are many failures -
compounded by the pervasive corruption of the Afghan government. There is no
lack of noble concepts and good intentions, but execution generally falls far
short of what is required.
The US did recognize the need to surge aid money into Iraq early in that war in
spite of the fact Iraq still had large reserves of capital left over from the
era of Saddam Hussein and significant oil export income. The US committed $3
billion in FY2003 - the first year of the war, and surged $19.5 billion in aid
funds in FY2004. The US spent a total of only $800 million in aid in the Afghan
War during FY2001 and FY2002, and only $0.7 million in FY2003. It never surged
aid during any year of the Afghan conflict, and its peak spending of $2.8
billion came in the fifth year of the war.
This underfunding takes on particular importance in the view of the testimony
that Gates gave to y to the House Armed Services Committee on September 10,
2008.
As in Iraq ... additional forces alone will not solve the
problem. Security is just one aspect of the campaign, alongside development and
governance. We must maintain momentum, keep the international community
engaged, and develop the capacity of the Afghan government. The entirety of the
NATO alliance, the EU, NGOs, and other groups - our full military and civilian
capabilities - must be on the same page and working toward the same goal with
the Afghan government. I am still not satisfied with the level of coordination
and collaboration among the numerous partners and many moving parts associated
with civil reconstruction and development and building the capacity of the
Afghan government.
Similarly, Mullen stated:
We can
build roads and schools and courts, and our Provincial Reconstruction Teams are
doing just that. We can build roads and schools and courts, and our Provincial
Reconstruction Teams are doing just that. But until we have represented in
those teams more experts from the fields of commerce, agriculture,
jurisprudence and education those facilities will remain but empty shells. Less
than one in twenty PRTs throughout the country are supported by non-military
personnel.
Afghanistan doesn't just need more "boots on the ground". It needs more trucks
on those roads, more teachers in those schools, and more trained judges and
lawyers in those courts.
Foreign investment. Alternative crops. Sound governance. The rule of law. These
are the keys to success in Afghanistan. We can't kill our way to victory, and
no armed force anywhere - no matter how good - can deliver these keys alone. It
requires teamwork and cooperation. And it will require the willingness by
everyone in the interagency and international community to focus less on what
we think we each do best and more on what we believe we can ALL do better
together.
Underresourcing the Afghan military
The impact of underresourcing the war goes beyond inadequate US force levels
and nation-building activity. The Bush administration made equally serious
mistakes in the timing and scale of its efforts to create effective host
country forces in both wars.
It came to see the need for large and effective host country forces only after
the insurgency had taken hold in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and it then
continued to underreact and under-resource the creation of both Afghan and
Iraqi security forces. Once again, however, these mistakes were corrected much
more quickly in Iraq than Afghanistan, and the US has never funded an adequate
effort in Afghanistan.
For years, the US pushed key parts of the Afghan mission off on allies who had
no real capabilities to create anything more capable than a conventional
European police force. It did not provide either the US money or US military
personnel to create an Afghan Army close to the size required. As the
Department of Defense reported in June 2008:
The 2001 Bonn Agreement
established the goal of a 50,000-person ANA and a 62,000-person ANP. The Bonn
II Agreement in December of 2002 expanded the ANA target end-strength to 70,000
personnel. Since the Bonn Agreements and the international declaration of the
Afghanistan Compact in 2006, security conditions have evolved, with a
resurgence of activity by insurgents and anti- government elements.
Consequently, in May 2007, the international community's Joint Coordination and
Monitoring Board (JCMB) approved an increase to 82,000 authorized ANP.
Similarly, with the endorsement of the JCMB on February 5, 2008, the authorized
ANA force structure increased to 80,000 personnel, with an additional 6,000
allotted for the trainee, transient, hospital, and student account.
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