My sense of the war is that we are winning and not losing. When reports of this author's assessment came out, I was skeptical. Especially when it was used to call for a group to "study" the war like the Iraq Study Group--an effort to justify retreat. Yet I can believe that there is spinning going on to justify a speedier withdrawal and turn-over of the job to Afghan security forces than our military would like.
Let me start with the author's assessment of what we need to do to win:
There are three key factors which must go our way in order to succeed in this war: 1. We must militarily degrade the insurgency to a sufficiently low level of capability that will enable the Afghan security forces to handle them alone; 2. The ANSF must concurrently be trained to a sufficiently high level they are able to handle the weakened insurgency; and 3. The GoIRA must be minimally corrupt and sufficiently able to govern, providing a viable economy, secure environment, and a fair judiciary.
This is absolutely correct. Our role doesn't need to be to defeat the Taliban. It is to weaken them to the point where a strengthened Afghan security apparatus can defeat them while a sufficiently capable government exploits that battlefield success to govern what is won without driving the people to generate resistance to that governance.
This is counter-insurgency 101.
As we looked ahead to our surge, I saw our role as working with the Afghan security forces to pound down the Taliban enough to allow Afghan forces to hold the line with far less of our support. The viable government was the biggest sticking point in my mind and I wanted to bypass Kabul as much as possible to minimize the problem of relying on a competent central government. I wrote:
The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.
So I'm with him at this point. The question is whether we are able to do those three things.
He says that there is a mis-reading of why the surge in Iraq worked and that trying to transfer the approach from Iraq to Afghanistan was flawed. What does the author say about the surge in Iraq? He devotes a tremendous amount of ink to this and I have to say he is right. Our success did not flow from the dispatch of 20,000 more troops. I wrote about that quite a bit back then. I described the efforts to "flip" the Sunni Arabs and could see it happening in Anbar in fall 2006. I noted that the surge of troops was not the key, but helped exploit the flip that began in Anbar and that we helped to spread in the Baghdad area.
But it was crucial that we go in to hammer the enemy and stay in the areas instead of commuting to the war in order to break the enemy and make them weak enough for strengthening Iraqi forces to handle. Counter-insurgency 101, right?
And I absolutely worried about thinking we could take what worked in Iraq where we teamed with Sunnis and Shias to combat the alien al Qaeda terrorists and expecting it to work in the Taliban heartland where the people supported the Taliban insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists. But counter-insurgency can handle that. Like I said, "hearts and minds" isn't about gaining the love and gratitude of the people by protecting them from insurgents. It is about separating the insurgents from the people so the people can't support the insurgents. That can be done whether the people love us or the enemy. It is harder. But it can be done.
So huge parts of this study on Afghanistan are devoted to refuting a narrative of Iraq that I never believed and bolstering his street cred as a critic of Army leadership on equipment and organization.
I can't boast of traveling Afghanistan and seeing the problems first hand. But when the author boasts--at great length--of his skepticism about the Future Combat System to bolster his assessment of the Afghanistan campaign, I can respond in kind, pointing to a published article of mine. Heck, as a bonus, I also wrote about organizing our Army and was worried enough about losing combat power to suggest hedging measures even as I accepted that our divisions should be more strategically mobile than they were when we needed large divisions to absorb a Soviet hammer blow in West Germany. The version I submitted to Military Review with the graphs I intended to support the text is even still around online with Reocities where I had put the submitted article. Heck, as a bonus, I even wrote about the problems of assuming our concepts of war assumed quick victory ("The First Gulf War and the Army's Future") and that our Army National Guard should be part of our war strategy in case we fought a bigger war than expected or if one of those major theater wars was longer or more difficult than we expected.
So what of his arguments that we are losing the war? That is really the heart of the piece despite the lengthy parts on Iraq, Army reorganization, and the Future Combat Systems.
One, I don't understand how he disparages the military's argument that it makes sense for our casualties to increase even as we say we are winning because we have more troops and used them more aggressively. His first argument actually bolsters this basic claim:
As of May 2010 the US had more than 94,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan. Thus, over the next year there were no more than 5 or 6% more troops deployed, yet the number of insurgent attacks, the number of IEDs (both found and detonated), the number of US wounded and US killed all continued to rise on a month-by-month comparison until this past summer – coincidentally when the number of US boots began to decline owing to redeployments.
Coincidentally? Probably not.
His complaint that it makes no sense for us to boast that we've killed and captured many of the enemy, took away sanctuaries, and captured weapons caches and still face an enemy that can increase attacks is itself nonsense. Who said that the enemy can't replace losses, find alternatives to the sanctuaries we've hit (including the biggest sanctuary still around in Pakistan), and get more weapons? Attacks went up in Iraq even as we beat down the various enemies, relying on IEDs that are safer to use than direct attacks. Eventually, continued progress in doing all those things will lead to the defeat of the enemy and drops in the attack statistics and even the number of the enemy. That happened in Iraq. I can happen in Afghanistan. It is silly to expect the enemy not to replace losses as we inflict them and claim their ability to replace losses refutes our victories. But as I noted during the Iraq War, did a huge uptick in our casualties in Europe around June 6, 1944 mean we started losing World War II?
His casualty assessments are not persuasive to me at all. One, the surge in Afghanistan has taken much longer, started from a much lower starting point, and ended at a much lower ending point than in Iraq. And simple percentages of troop increases compared to casualty increases--even if all other conditions are static--are not evidence of failure. If I have 35,000 troops in a war that includes four combat brigades in the field fighting the enemy and add another brigade of 3,500 to the fight, that's only a 10% increase in troop strength. Yet adding one more combat brigade is a 25% increase in my combat strength in the field. If my casualties rise 20% after that additional brigade joins the fight, is that a sign I'm winning or losing?
Further, the situation in Iraq in 2007 as the surge began and in 2009 after we won the surge offensive can't be used to argue that the surge in Afghanistan is failing. The surge in Iraq had the Awakening to exploit and had lots of Iraqi troops newly available. We can point to the fall of 2007 when we broke the enemy in Iraq and just because we haven't reached the point in Afghanistan where we have broken the enemy's resistance doesn't mean it won't happen. And it doesn't mean that the breaking point won't come after we hand over primary responsibility to Iraqis. I guess I find it kind of amusing that Iraq is now the gold standard to judge whether we are winning in Afghanistan.
And after arguing that the military is wrong to blame increased casualties on increased troops used more aggressively, he later says that increased casualties caused by more troops being used more aggressively are not leading to victory. What can I say about that shift within the study?
I'm not saying we will win in Afghanistan. But if we do win, you will be able to make nice charts showing a peak in casualties and violence and then a decline as the enemy is depleted and loses the capacity to fight as much as it once did. Just because you can't make that chart right now doesn't mean we are losing or are doomed to lose.
The author's reliance on NGO assessments of travel safety make no sense. If the Taliban control an area, it can obviously be fairly safe for NGOs to operate in that area if the NGOs come to agreements with the Taliban to travel around and do good things that don't offend the Taliban--or pay them, of course. If we are fighting for an area it is obviously going to be more dangerous in the short run for NGOs to operate. Why is that shocking to the author?
Cordesman objections I take far more seriously. I do worry about Pakistan sanctuaries. I do worry that we are trying to make the national Afghan government a strong central force when we should be enabling the real centers of power at the provincial and tribal level to carry on the fight with direct help from us bypassing the corrupt and ineffective central government. Polling that says Afghans don't have confidence in the central government isn't a sign that we are losing as much as it is a sign that we shouldn't rely on the national government as much. But even this doesn't say we aren't winning. It says we haven't won. And if I may be so bold, it even says that the progress is both fragile and reversible. You don't win a war until you win it--and even then the next war could reverse your win. Ask the French in 1940 how durable their 1918 win was.
Further, complaints that we haven't won yet and so can't ignore that the challenges escalated after 2006 when Pakistan opened up their border areas as sanctuaries and after 2007 when al Qaeda decided to focus on Afghanistan after losing in their main front of Iraq. Only in recent years have we tried to counter expanded enemy efforts to gain ground in the south and east and only in recent years have we tried to create Afghan forces capable of taking the lead in those areas.
Remember that the most recent Afghanistan surge (decided in fall 2009) to get us up to nearly 100,000 US troops wasn't even completed until the middle of 2010 and by the end of 2011 was already receding. To give the impression that we've had plenty of time for 100,000 troops to smash the enemy for good is highly misleading. You can argue that we don't need to stabilize Afghanistan. But you can't argue that trying to stabilize Afghanistan doesn't take patience.
The author also says we don't have enough troops density in Afghanistan to win. I disagree. Heck, I thought we had the numbers to win with only 68,00 US troops in the fight. Indeed, throughout the Iraq War I disagreed with the constant complaint that we had too few troops to win. We never did get the numbers that critics said we needed. Yet we won in Iraq. That I was right about Iraq does not mean I am right about Afghanistan, of course. But our troop strength is not a reason we might lose, in my judgment.
I still don't know if we can turn over the job to Afghan forces. But there were doubts in Iraq as well and we succeeded there in knocking down the enemy while building up the Iraqis to handle the threat. Granted, we had better raw material to build Iraqi security forces. But just by the casualty levels, the enemy isn't nearly as deadly, either. But I'll admit we might need advisors in Afghan units for a long time even though we didn't need to do the same thing for the same duration of time in Iraq.
Yet recall that in spring 2004, half the Iraqi security forces evaporated in the joint Sadr-al Qaeda offensives. In spring 2008, Iraqi forces carried out the Charge of the Knights offensive on their own to defeat the Iranian-backed Sadrists in the Basra region. It may not have looked pretty, but it worked. I have no doubt the report author can recite lots of horrifying anecdotes about Afghan performance. I bet the Taliban could nod their heads in agreement with their own tales of woe about their inadequate recruits. To win, one side doesn't need to be great. One side just needs to be better than the other side. That's the real question.
I don't even care to address the idea that our military is deceiving the public. They are under no obligation to publicly air the problems we face if they help the enemy. Further, the Obama administration has something to say about what the military reveals. I don't blame the military for putting on happy can-do faces about budget and force cuts. If the author wants to say that the military is lying to the administration in providing accurate assessments, by all means make that argument. If true, I'd be outraged. But otherwise, just why does the author expect the military to be a neutral judge in the middle when it is actually on one side trying to win? The military has public affairs people to shape public relations positively. Damning this as deception seems rather ridiculous to me.
Also don't forget that this is a Rolling Stone piece. That they might spin a tale of losing because they expect us to lose or think we should lose (even if they don't believe that is really losing as much as cutting our losses) should not be disregarded. Do the statistics the Pentagon presents really indicate we are losing?
At some level, the military's alleged "spinning" about Afghan capabilities is simply a reflection that it is folly to expect us to train them to our standards of effectiveness. Remember, they have to be better than the enemy and not better than us. Does it do any good to blast the effectiveness of the Afghan forces when they need the confidence to stand and fight against the Taliban? We need our enemies to fear tangling with the Afghan security forces, too. This is an element of information operations. "Hearts and minds" doesn't imply we have to get the people to love us. Don't disregard the need for our military to be a cheerleader when they are good enough even if they aren't objectively good at all.
I don't believe our leaders actually believe the Afghan forces are that good. I certainly don't. Grain of salt, people. Context is everything. Maybe if our Taliban enemies aired all of their problems, doubts, and fears we could afford to play on a level playing field of giving brutally accurate assessments. I only worry if our civilian and military leaders believe the literal statements of progress in the work of making the Afghan security forces better than they were in the past and--more importantly--better than the enemy.
Yet I can't disregard the possibility that our military has lost sight of expected spinning to bolster what we want to achieve and is spinning to hide reality even from themselves. I have had problems with some of our approaches just as the author of this study has related about abandoning border areas.
But our phased offensive that we really do seem to be continuing in Regional Command East makes me willing to trust the military is doing the right things given their resources. I don't buy the idea that we have too few troops to win this fight. But just because I was right about that question throughout the Iraq War doesn't mean I'll be right here. Or if I am, that being right about that question means we will win.
But this study is no reason to retreat. It may have some nuggets of valid criticism that we should address to win, however. And no amount of spinning should hide the fact that we have an interest in keeping Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for al Qaeda or other jihadis committed to killing us here at home.
UPDATE: Major General McMaster does not have a reputation for spinning. And he thinks we are winning and can win despite the challenges ahead:
"Our soldiers, airmen, Marines and sailors, working alongside Afghans, have shut down the vast majority of the physical space in which the enemy can operate," says Gen. McMaster. "The question is, how do we consolidate those gains politically and psychologically?" ...
Still, it's easy to get carried away by the glimmers of hope, and the general is very much a realist. For one thing, Pakistan remains a haven for insurgency, and Gen. McMaster says little more than that it "remains to be seen" whether Pakistan's leaders will conclude that their interests lie in defeating the Taliban.
Just as worrisome, though far less noticed, is the influence of Iran, which is pressuring Kabul to reject the Strategic Partnership Agreement.
The war isn't lost. And just because we are winning right now doesn't mean we will win. It is up to us as much as it is up to Afghans.
As an aside, McMaster did not command a tank regiment at the famous Battle of 73 Easting in the Persian Gulf War. He commanded a troop (in cavalry-speak, a company-sized combined arms unit) of an armored cavalry regiment.
[NOTE: I originally wrote above that McMaster commanded a battalion-sized squadron. I don't know what I was thinking, unless I confused him at the time of writing for Macgregor who commanded the squadron.]
