Fighting the wrong fight in Afghanistan
By Philip Smucker
United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will tell almost anyone who
asks these days that the Taliban have the momentum in Afghanistan. Under
President Barack Obama, honesty is the best policy. That is reassuring.
After all, the American public was led to believe in late 2001 that a "victory"
had already been achieved in Afghanistan when the Taliban were driven from
power. That was - as we know now - just cover for the move into Mesopotamia.
What is more worrisome, however, is another recent statement by Gates to The
Wall Street Journal on the same subject. He said, "If they [American public]
think we're stalemated and having our young men and women killed, then patience
is going to run out pretty fast."
There are a number of implications. First, the "bad guys", along
with Osama bin Laden's trusted corps of advisors, are swarming in the valleys,
hills and mountains of Pashtunistan this summer. A risk-averse,
air-power-friendly US military has effectively surrendered the countryside over
the past three years along the porous border. Calling this a "stalemate" is to
smear lipstick on a pig.
If you doubt that, and you are a Caucasian, you might try taking a stroll
outside the three-meter, sand-filled walls of any American base in eastern or
southern Afghanistan. You'll be abducted by armed men and whisked off to
Pakistan in no time. An American-run radio station director in Paktika province
told me that the Taliban are winning the war of ideas hands down against
America and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Taliban have "financial
and economic means", he said. "They can easily scare the people by killing or
beheading them."
The insurgents have the momentum in Afghanistan. What could be worse is that
the world's most powerful military is worried that a petrified American public
is about to draw the line on US casualties of war.
Fortunately, the latter is a fallacy. Two Duke University political science
professors, Christopher Gelpi and Peter Feaver, have exposed this red herring
in a new book. In their volume, Paying the Human Costs, the two
academics argue persuasively that - while the US public worries about wartime
deaths, mostly its own - it is more wary of defeat and will support military
operations as long as "victory" is on the not-too-distant horizon. To be sure,
it would be hard to say that the US military is "losing" in Afghanistan since
actual loses of life on the US side have been well under 20% of those from
Iraq.
Right now, the hard cost of the Afghan war - 460 combat-related American deaths
- is amazingly low in relation to most wars, particularly Vietnam, the Asian
quagmire it is often compared to. That war counted 47,359 Americans killed in
combat. (To put the eight-year Afghan war figure in another light, consider
that in 2007, Los Angeles County had 712 deaths due to car accidents.)
Although the US is not technically losing, it would be extremely hard to argue
that Afghanistan's safety has not been sacrificed due to the policies of a
risk-averse American government. A basic premise of the US military's own
strategy is that ultimate success is gained "by protecting the populace, not
the counter-insurgency force". This principle is violated daily.
The Pentagon's high-tech-centric approach to the fight in Afghanistan has
produced - since 9/11 - a half-dozen gargantuan bases - with more on the way.
These are little more than anachronistic monuments to the US military's
superior firepower. At Bagram and Jalalabad air bases, aerial drones, commanded
by joystick pilots in the deserts of Nevada, circle and land. Invisible F-16s
and F-15s lay figure-eight smoke trails in the blue skies above Tora Bora. At
dusk, the snow line of the Hindu Kush is flush with Apache attack helicopters
and larger Chinooks. None of them are the key to victory.
In the last several months of living and talking to American soldiers and
officers in the field, particularly along the eastern front, I have been
impressed with their understanding of what it will take to win in Afghanistan.
One enthusiastic young Southerner, Major Tommy Cardone, boiled it down to a
useful campaign slogan, "It's the people, stupid!" Indeed, I was left with the
impression that the US military does have a strategy; if only the cautious
generals and politicians in Washington will allow it to be implemented.
To win in Afghanistan, the US military - and its Afghan partners - must follow
best-practices counter-insurgency down to the last of Afghanistan's 40,000
villages. Only by taking the fight - along with Afghan soldiers and policemen -
to the countryside will the Taliban be isolated and excluded from what Chairman
Mao Zedong once referred to as the sea of the people.
A radical shift from heavy air-power to more foot patrols and more mobile bases
is likely to bring with it far more bloodshed. The Taliban will attack American
soldiers outside the wire when they feel threatened by their bold outreach
efforts, but if the US's intentions are to oversee development projects and
provide security for the local population, they will be perceived - in the end
- as protectors, not invaders and mere occupiers. As Cardone, on his second
grueling tour here, also told me, the best way to upset the Taliban is "to
sneak into a village at night and have a cup of tea with the local elders".
Apaches escorts are not required.
There are signs that those working on the problem understand that Afghanistan
is not - in essence - a shooting war. You have to deliver the goods and empower
the young American and Afghan officers in charge. "It is necessary to kill some
of the insurgents, but that is not sufficient for victory," said Brigadier
General James C McConville, a hard-driving Bostonian and a former National
Security Fellow at Harvard who heads up the embattled supply chain for eastern
Afghanistan. "You need to get to the root of the problem: when you are a young
lieutenant, you would not want to wait 30 days for ammunition, so you should
not have to wait 30 days to implement a village project."
To be sure, any colonel or general hesitates and thinks twice when ordering
soldiers into harm's way. In this day of instant news flashes and journalists
who keep running tallies, a colonel can be made to look foolish when even four
or five US soldiers are killed in combat. But war is ruthless and victory is
not for those who sit and wait behind three-meter walls or fly at 3,000 meters
above sea level.
As sure as Americans remain dismayed not to have captured Osama bin Laden, they
still want the "victory" that was once promised them in Afghanistan. Losing is
not acceptable and even those on the left, who favor a withdrawal, are not
willing to fathom (or even define) its genuine political costs to a leader they
so admire.
By the end of the summer, the US troop levels will be up to 70,000. Along with
allied and Afghan security forces, the figure could rise to 200,000-220,000;
still only about a third of the totals in Iraq.
Nevertheless, as Michael O'Hanlon, a senior military analyst at the Brookings
Institute, has noted: "A mini-surge won't suffice as a strategy."
More troops are needed, but young platoon leaders in the field also need far
more small-scale project money to help Afghan villagers see a future and
isolate the Taliban. Big damns and major highways that go through third-party
contractors won't do the trick when it comes to reaching out to farmers and
laborers.
A drastic shift in American strategy requires a well-articulated stance from
President Barack Obama. It must include a stentorian call for sacrifice and
patience, the kind John F Kennedy knew how to deliver. As one young captain
training Afghan soldiers told me, "At times, this is going to look very ugly."
While Gates can get the soldiers and supplies to the battlefield, only a master
of the bully pulpit can prepare the public for the inevitable hardships ahead.
In the end, if counter-insurgency is done right, American taxpayers and
patriots will willingly bear the price for peace in South Asia.
Philip Smucker is a commentator and journalist based in South Asia and
the Middle East. He is the author of Al-Qaeda's Great Escape: The
Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (2004). He is currently writing
My Brother, My Enemy, a book about America and the battle of ideas in the
Islamic world.
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