Staring at the sun in Afghanistan
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - United States President Barack Obama and other top officials in
his administration have made it clear that there can be no military solution in
Afghanistan, and that the non-military efforts to win over the Afghan
population will be central to its chances of success.
The reality, however, is that US military and civilian agencies lack the skills
and training as well as the institutional framework necessary to carry out
culturally and politically sensitive socio-economic programs at the local level
in Afghanistan, or even to avoid further alienation of the population.
The US government does not even have enough people capable of speaking Pashto,
the language of the 14 million ethnic Pashtuns
who represent about 42% of the population of Afghanistan. It is in the Pashtun
southern and eastern regions of the country that the complex insurgency that
has come to be called the Taliban has been able to organize and often
effectively govern at village level in recent years.
"If all you are going to do is kill the bad guys, then you don't need a lot of
Pashto speakers," said Larry Goodson of the Department of National Security and
Strategy at the National War College, who was a member of the team assembled by
Central Command Chief General David Petraeus to formulate a proposal for
Afghanistan and Pakistan. But any effort to win over Pashto-speaking Afghans
cannot succeed without officials who can communicate effectively in Pashto.
According to Chris Mason, who was a member of the Interagency Group on
Afghanistan from early 2002 until September 2005, the Pashtuns of southern
Afghanistan are "proto-insurgents", meaning that they are "naturally averse to
the imposition of external order".
The United States needs "thousands" of Pashto speakers to have any chance of
success in winning them over, said Mason, recalling that 5,000 US officials had
learned Vietnamese by the end of the Vietnam War. "The Foreign Service
Institute should be turning out 200 to 300 Pashto speakers a year," he said.
But according to an official at the State Department's Bureau of Human
Resources, the United States has turned out a total of only 18 Foreign Service
officers who can speak Pashto, and only two of them are now serving in
Afghanistan, both apparently in Kabul.
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California trains roughly 30 to 40
military personnel in Pashto each year, according to media relations officer
Brian Lamar, most of whom are enlisted men in military intelligence.
That indicates that there are very few US nationals capable of working with
local Pashtuns on development and political problems. The National War
College's Goodson said the almost complete absence of Pashto-speaking US
officials in Afghanistan "belies the US commitment to a nation-building and
counter-insurgency approach".
It is also emblematic of a broader human resource deficit in regard to a US
political approach to counter-insurgency as distinct from the past military
approach in Afghanistan, according to Goodson. Winning over the Pashtun
population "requires a level of human capital that, even prior to the global
economic crisis was hard to come by", Goodson said. But in his view, "None of
that staff is really in place."
Obama announced in late March that the number of US civilian officials to be
involved in the new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy would be increased by at
least 50% to more than 900, as reported by the Washington Post. But even a
doubling of the civilian presence would not address the yawning human resource
gap in regard to a non-military approach to the insurgency, according to
Goodson.
That's because the additional civilians would be based on a model of "highly
paid contractors" who live far from the people they are supposed to be helping
to win over, Goodson explained. That creates friction with their poorly paid
Afghan counterparts and does nothing to establish relations with local people,
said Goodson. "You really do wonder if we are set up to do what we need to do
in Afghanistan."
Mason warns that increased US troop strength in Afghanistan is more likely to
further alienate the population than help win them over unless the troops are
trained for completely different operations than in the past. "Simply putting
in more imperial storm troopers who do not speak the language and who are going
to kick in more doors is just going to piss off more people," he said.
Mason believes many army officers do understand the need to avoid traditional
operations aimed at finding and killing or capturing insurgents, but are
hamstrung by the army itself. "The army needs to move away from its default
position, which has been war of annihilation, destroying the enemy, and focus
on civil affairs," Mason said.
Colonel David Lamm, who was chief of staff of the top US commander in
Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, Lieutenant General David Barno, is doubtful
about the willingness of the army leadership to shift to a counter-insurgency
strategy in Afghanistan. "The institutional army doesn't want to do this," he
told Inter Press Service in an interview last September. "There isn't a lot of
money in counter-insurgency. It isn't a high-tech war - it's a low-tech humint
[human intelligence] operation."
Lamm recalled that the army's role in Afghanistan before Barno took command in
2003 had been "counter-terrorism" rather than counter-insurgency. The army
"wanted to roll in, round up terrorists, drive them out of the country, kill
them," he said. Barno shifted the mission to one aimed at winning over the
Afghan population, but he did so on his own, without any guidance from
Washington, according to Lamm.
With the transition to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) responsibility
for Afghanistan that began in late 2005, the emphasis of US military strategy
was on "force protection", and keeping casualties low, Lamm said. After the
shift to NATO responsibility, most US troops in Afghanistan were still
committed to an explicitly "counter-terrorism" role of destroying al-Qaeda and
Taliban "holdouts".
One of the hallmarks of that role, which has continued since 2006, is heavy
reliance on airpower as a means of trying to weaken the insurgency. Barno, now
director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the
National Defense University, told IPS in an interview last September, "There is
a predilection to use airpower in lieu of close up encounters [with insurgents]
to avoid US casualties."
Barno recalled that he dramatically reduced reliance on airpower, because he
regarded the Afghan tolerance for the US military presence as a "bag of
capital" that was used up "every time we used airpower or knocked down doors or
detained someone in front of their family".
Barno's policy of curbing airpower was abandoned by his successor, General Karl
W Eikenberry, from 2005 to 2007, and the number of air strikes has continued to
grow exponentially since 2005. Eikenberry was nominated by Obama to be
ambassador to Afghanistan in March, an indication that the broad outlines of US
strategy in Afghanistan will continue to emphasize air attacks on suspected
Taliban targets.
Growing Afghan anger at the hundreds of civilian casualties from US air
strikes, often based on bad intelligence, has been exploited by insurgents
across the country.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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