And that escalation has nothing to do with being "distracted" by Iraq. Remember that in 2006, Pakistan opened up their territory to the Taliban for a sanctuary (and already, al Qaeda could hide in relative safety in Pakistan). And in 2007, al Qaeda in Iraq was finally beaten on the battlefield (where they had decided to make their main effort), leading them to return their focus to Afghanistan. You could fairly say that we lacked some assets in Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009 because we retained them in Iraq, but after many years of warfare, that shortage of needed units has far more to do with decisions made in Washington not to expand our forces in those areas.
Regardless, our enemies ramped up their efforts in Afghanistan by 2008 and we responded in 2009 and 2010 with new infusions of troops. We are only into the third year of the expanded war and only 1 or 2 years into our effort to defeat the enemy, depending on where you want to draw the line.
Since counter-insurgency takes time, stories like this are true but misleading. The theme?
An intense military campaign aimed at crippling the Taliban has so far failed to inflict more than fleeting setbacks on the insurgency or put meaningful pressure on its leaders to seek peace, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials citing the latest assessments of the war in Afghanistan.
So the lead paragraph implies that our counter-insurgency is failing. But read on:
Escalated airstrikes and special operations raids have disrupted Taliban movements and damaged local cells. But officials said that insurgents have been adept at absorbing the blows and that they appear confident that they can outlast an American troop buildup set to subside beginning next July.
This is really a sign that the alternate strategy of "counter-terrorism"--air strikes and special forces raids on terrorists--is not a long term strategy. And our current kinetic actions take place in an environment where the counter-insurgency strategy provides bases and intelligence with troops and friends on the ground feeding information to us to make those strikes. Alone, our counter-terrorist strikes would be meaningless and counter-productive as fake atrocities are constructed or real ones engineered by tricking us into bombarding a kitten and puppy sanctuary or baby milk factory (with English signs on the wreckage, of course).
And there is this:
"The insurgency seems to be maintaining its resilience," said a senior Defense Department official involved in assessments of the war. Taliban elements have consistently shown an ability to "reestablish and rejuvenate," often within days of routed by U.S. forces, the official said, adding that if there is a sign that momentum has shifted, "I don't see it."
Why yes, leaders step in. Just as we do when a platoon or company leader is a casualty or a senior sergeant is killed or wounded. That's what military forces, whether conventional or insurgent, are built to do--be resilient. Casualties are a fact of life in combat so obviously a military force can absorb casualties better than a newspaper office and continue functioning at high levels. But the quality of their leaders will suffer more than ours will because we suffer far fewer losses and have a deep bench of trained people to replace losses. And our enemies have to replace leaders far more often than we do.
One of the reasons the enemy is being resilient in the face of our far greater effort that is clearly hammering them is that they believe they only have to hang on another year:
U.S. officials said Taliban operatives have adopted a refrain that reflects their focus on President Obama's intent to start withdrawing troops in the middle of next year. Attributing the words to Taliban leader Mohammad Omar, officials said, operatives tell one another, "The end is near."
The fact is, the enemy will have to hang on for far longer than a year. We aren't leaving in July 2011 and the enemy is failing to understand the nuance of that "deadline." Yes, it was probably a mistake to announce that non-deadline deadline, but there may be a silver lining as long as domestic forces committed to retreating can be contained. We can exploit this enemy perception of our pending departure even if that perception makes it more difficult for our forces over the next year. If the enemy feels that they will get relief next summer, and if instead we intensify our efforts next summer and fall, the reality that the enemy doesn't really know how long they have to endure our pressure will likely batter the morale of all but the most committed jihadi. And even the committed jihadis will suffer doubt and fear under those circumstances.
The article also highlights the fact that while we can make more progress by focusing our military efforts inside Afghanistan, there are limits to how much progress we can make without addressing Pakistan:
A crackdown by Pakistan's military on those sanctuaries probably would have a greater impact on the war than any option available to Petraeus, officials said. But given the Pakistani government's long-standing connections to the Haqqani network and the Taliban, a move by Islamabad against those groups is considered unlikely, at least by the administration's timetable.
The United States has sought to compensate by ramping up Forces raids and military air patrols on the Afghan side of the border, and by sharply increasing the number of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan.
At some point, as we make progress in Afghanistan, the existence of the Pakistan sanctuary will provide a floor to how low Taliban strength can fall. They will be able to rest and train and return to Afghanistan to keep the violence bubbling along and making sure our forces can't fall below a certain level, just in case.
This complaint that we aren't obviously winning fails to appreciate the time it takes to win an insurgency. Remember, while military force used to kill the enemy is absolutely critical to winning a counter-insurgency, it is not the main effort of counter-insurgency. We have to convince the population to support our side and reject the enemy.
I've written before that focusing on the population is one that focuses on a continuum of views in the target population:
As I noted as the Iraq insurgencies and terror campaigns raged against our forces and the Iraqi government's forces, the object of the campaign is not to kill all the enemy.
You want to keep friends loyal (by rewarding and protecting them--from the enemy or your own firepower), push neutrals into friendly status with carrots and sticks, and move enemies into neutral status with bribes and threats of inevitable death as you pursue them and kill them. If you can push someone from enemy to friendly in one flip, so much the better. But the point is that there is a continuum of local attitudes that you have to work on and push in your favor. Keep doing this, and eventually you run out of enemies--you win the war. Then you have to win the peace, of course, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Marine Brigadier General Joseph Osterman addresses this issue:
Big-T Taliban are your ideologically driven folks, many of them from out of the area, who literally are the leadership and the financiers and all those folks involved in the insurgency.
And then you have the small-T taliban, which is essentially your local Taliban, who basically, for whatever reason, whether it be monetarily or for just vendettas or whatever it might be, decide to join the insurgency. Some of these, particularly like in Marja, are left over from previous days.
And what we're seeing is that, in fact, from a reintegration perspective, for the little-T taliban, which is mostly what we deal with, you're really not going to know whether or not they reintegrated or not, because they just decide not to fight. You know, they're the next-door neighbor; they're the guy that lives over in the next block, as in the case of the way that Marja's organized. So in that regard, we are getting indications that there are more the small-T taliban just being absorbed back into the communities, nothing that they do through a formal reintegration process.
However, the -- Governor Mangal and the provincial government is standing up the formal processes to allow for the big-T Taliban, if you will, to conduct formal reintegration and come in. He's conducted shuras with the local population to let them know that that is a national process that has been instituted by President Karzai, and that it is available to them in order to reintegrate back into society, you know, with, you know, various incentives, such as obviously many of them are concerned about their families and things like that, if, in fact, they decide to reintegrate. So accommodating those kinds of needs.
Here he is talking about moving enemies to "neutral" status (they simply stopped fighting rather than formally surrendering) and efforts to get more committed enemies to simply flip directly from "enemy" status to "friendly" status with negotiations, and give all of them reasons not to revert to enemy status.
There will be some who will not quit, and they must be killed. But ideally they are a minority and the combination of military efforts to kill them, security efforts to protect people from the enemy, and non-military efforts to provide an incentive to refuse to side with the enemy or actively assist in defeating the enemy, will mean that most enemy combatants will cease fighting without needing to be killed.
All this takes time. One thing that does shock me after 9 years at war is that our press corps still doesn't understand war or military history. They think they provide the masses with context, but they really don't--collectively, that is, with some individual exceptions--understand the context themselves.
UPDATE: Still, despite the need for patience, past efforts have created conditions where progress could be fast and obvious, although possibly localized:
The growing enthusiasm for "peace talks with the Taliban" is based on the fact that the Taliban (a diverse group with no real overall leader) have lost. Their attempt to recover from losing control of southern Afghanistan in late 2001 (they never controlled the entire nation) has led to one failure after another, and the tribes that supported the Taliban are tired of it. These tribes have been at war since the late 1970s, and have nothing to show for it. The growth of the drug business (opium/heroin) under the Taliban has made matters worse. While some warlords and Taliban leaders have gotten rich from the drug trade, millions more have suffered, mainly by becoming addicts. But the problem with negotiating with "the Taliban" is that there is no one Taliban leader you can make a deal with. There are dozens of clans and tribes that are "pro-Taliban," and these are the ones being talked to. That is nothing new either. Pro-Taliban groups have been making peace with the government for years. The one difference this time around is that some core Taliban tribes are ready to give it up.
Victory in Afghanistan certainly won't be perfect. But it will be victory. After all, victory in World War II led straight into the Cold War. We still call World War II a victory, right?
