Page 1 of 2 Counter-insurgency down for the count
By Ann Jones
United States President Barack Obama's Afghanistan strategy isn't working. So
said a parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander
General Stanley McChrystal's firing. But what does that phrase, so often in the
media these days, really mean? And if the strategy really isn't working, just
how can you tell?
The answers to these questions raise even more important ones, including: Why,
when Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his
failing war policy? And if our strategy isn't working, what about the enemy's?
And if nothing much is
working, why does it still go on non-stop this way? Let's take these one at a
time.
1. What do you mean by "it's not working"?
"It" is counter-insurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a
strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy. Counter-insurgency
doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies
forever, calls for elevating the principle of "protecting the population" above
pursuing the bad guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes
a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.
I just spent some time embedded with the US Army at a forward operating base
near the Pakistan border where, despite daily "sig acts" - significant activity
of a hostile nature - virtually every "lethal" American soldier is matched by a
"non-lethal" counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up
those civilians for "protection”.
McChrystal himself played both roles. As the US commander, he was responsible
for killing what he termed, at one point, "an amazing number of people" who
were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid
Karzai's palace to say "sorry”. Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent
apologies (each reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians),
though angry Afghans were less impressed.
The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be
counter-balanced by the "sorry" part, which may be as simple as dispatching US
officers to drink humble tea with local "key leaders". Often enough, though, it
comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic
COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad
guys and you have to make up for it by building a road. This trade-off explains
why, as you travel parts of the country, interminable (and often empty) strips
of black asphalt now traverse Afghanistan's vast expanses of sand and rock, but
it doesn't explain why Afghans, thus compensated, are angrier than ever.
Many Afghans are angry because they haven't been compensated at all, not even
with a road to nowhere. Worse yet, more often than not, they've been promised
things that never materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the
country as a whole in these past years, it might go like this: big men - both
Afghan and American - make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while
ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.)
And don't forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who have scarcely
been consulted at all: women. To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters,
Afghan men lock them up - the women, that is. American military leaders slip
easily into the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved perhaps to try to win
the "hearts and minds" of something less than half "the population”.
It's only in the past year or two that the US Marines Corps and the army
started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and
sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village
women. As with so many innovative new plans in our counter-insurgency war, this
one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost
guaranteed failure.
Commanders have casually sent non-combatant American women soldiers - supply
clerks and radio operators - outside the wire, usually with little training, no
clear mission and no follow up. Predictably, like their male counterparts, they
have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind. So when I went
out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new
army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a
promised delivery of vegetable seeds.
Imagine. This is hardly a big item like the "government in a box" that
McChrystal promised and failed to deliver in Marjah. They're just seeds. How
hard could that be?
Our visit did, however, open a window into a world military and political
policymakers have ignored for all too long. It turns out that the women of
Afghanistan, whom former president George W Bush claimed to have liberated so
many years ago, are still mostly oppressed, impoverished, malnourished,
uneducated, short of seeds and mad as hell.
Count them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof that
"it's not working" at all. Afghans, it seems, know the difference between
genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity
and self-interest. And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and
minds of "the population”, those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the US
military and Obama.
Moreover, it's not working for a significant sub-group of Americans in
Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I've heard infantrymen place the blame for
a buddy's combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement ("courageous
restraint”, as it's called) imposed by McChrystal's version of COIN strategy.
Taking a page from Vietnam, they claim their hands are tied, while the enemy
plays by its own rules. Rightly or wrongly, this opinion is spreading fast
among grieving soldiers as casualties mount.
It's also clear that even the lethal part of counter-insurgency isn't working.
Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false
information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores.
To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a
house in Logar province that they'd been told was used by terrorists. Another
case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan
agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The young man
had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to
become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher. The villagers, very
upset, turned out to vouch for him and the army hospitalized him with profuse
apologies. Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead
or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.
Reports coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun south,
once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal's cleared, held, built
and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally grim. Before his resignation,
the general himself was already referring to Marjah - the farming area
(initially trumpeted as a "city of 80,000 people") where he launched his first
offensive - as "a bleeding ulcer".
He also delayed the highly publicized advance into Kandahar, the country's
second-largest city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing
populace, which includes Karzai. Meanwhile, humanitarian non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) based in Kandahar complain that they can't do their
routine work assisting the city's inhabitants while the area lies under threat
of combat. Without assistance, Kandaharis grow - you guessed it - angrier.
From Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the well-advertised
securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is
stealing equipment - right down to bottled drinking water - from the US
military and selling it to the Taliban. US commanders can't do much about it
because the official American script calls for the ANA to take over
responsibility for national defense.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) soldiers have complained all along
about the ill-trained, uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity
between them seems to have grown deadly in some quarters. American soldiers in
Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don't tell their ANA
colleagues when and where they're going on patrol. In the 1980s, in the
anti-Soviet jihad the US supported, the US trained Afghan jihadis who have
today become the US's worst enemies and now it is happening again.
Factor in accounts of what McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys.
Reportedly, he was vigorously directing special forces' assassinations of high-
and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for "peeling off" the "good"
Taliban - that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money.
According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government
through internationally subsidized jobs.
But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers -
or those we call the bad Taliban - actually leaves behind leaderless,
undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the
population we're supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan
poverty. From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our
"good Taliban" are the worst of all.
I could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all
around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid
to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to
insurgents to buy protection for US supply convoys traveling on US built, but
Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing
both sides and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.
2. So why does Obama stick to this failed policy?
Go figure. Maybe he's been persuaded by Pentagon hype. Replacing McChrystal
with Central command chief General David Petraeus brought a media golden-oldies
replay of Petraeus' greatest hits: his authorship of the army's
counter-insurgency manual, updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era
edition and of Bush's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, an exercise in sectarian cleansing
now routinely called a "success". If you can apply the word "success" to any
operation in Iraq, you're surely capable of clinging to the hope that Petraeus
can find it again in Afghanistan.
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