Nir Rosen has written a fantastic article on the current challenges faced by the US coalition in Afghanistan in this Boston Review forum, where he invited other respected journalists and analysts to discuss the issue. It's a lengthy piece and difficult to summarize, but let's just say that he paints a bleak picture of the situation. The bottom line is that our government has placed our military forces in a no-win situation, where the best they can do is just hold on until it becomes irrevocably clear that the United States isn't achieving the goals that it has laid out.
The military has been talking for a long time about being good at complex operations, simultaneously fighting and providing aid. But they still make it up as they go. Each unit takes its knowledge back home with it, leaving its successor to relearn everything. Relationships formed with Afghans—still viewed derisively in the military as “Hajis”—are lost.
The troubles with COIN are institutional. The American military and policy establishments are incapable of doing COIN. They lack the curiosity to understand other cultures and the empathy to understand what motivates people. The new counterinsurgency manual gets it right: political factors have primacy in COIN. But the military is not a political party, and the Surge is the exception to the rule: Afghanistan 2009 is not Iraq, certainly not Iraq 2007, and confusing the two cases—rural/urban; ungoverned/governed; history of expelling occupiers/no comparable history; largely organized insurgency/multiple, competing insurgencies—promises disaster.
The Americans have been ignoring the right lessons from Iraq—such as the use of community outposts—and internalizing the wrong ones. For example, all of the talk about bribing Afghan tribes shows that the Americans do not understand why Sunnis stopped resisting in Iraq (they lost) and overemphasizes the importance of tribalism in Afghan society.
This is a good, solid piece of reporting, and given its criticism of COIN, it's not unexpected that Andrew Exum (CNAS), long-time COIN proponent, says that Rosen is off-base in his criticisms. Exum believes that Roen needs to listen more to the Kagans, Stephen Biddle, and Anthoney Cordesman - that is to say, the analysts who supported Gen. McChrystal's "Teh Surge 2.o" plan. Exum says:
Rosen’s essay is also filled with generalizations about the conflict in Afghanistan, the kinds of generalizations that he regularly skewers in essays on subjects he knows well, such as the Arabic-speaking world and the conflict in Iraq. For example, he writes that Afghanistan is not yet the site of a civil war. I am not so sure, but I am sure that Rosen has neither the background nor the perspective to make such a judgment. Michael Semple —with two decades experience working in Afghanistan and Pakistan—believes that it is, and that the Taliban and its allies cannot win. The balance of power, he argues, has shifted toward the Taliban’s natural enemies, and the Taliban hides this reality by dressing their civil war in the clothes of an insurgency being fought against Western powers. If this assessment is right, there may yet be hope for U.S. and allied efforts in Afghanistan. Because President Obama has pledged to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan in eighteen months, time may be too short to execute a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign. But there may be sufficient time to build up key Afghan institutions and allow Afghans to fight a civil war that will no doubt continue after the United States and its allies begin to withdraw.
The one lesson we have all—military officer, politician, and journalist alike—learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, though, is that it is best to avoid such conflicts in the first place. I, then, am one of many hoping that the Third Counterinsurgency Era will soon draw to a close. And on this point, I think Rosen and I agree.
Like Spencer Ackerman, I don't find Exum's declaration to be a valid argument at all. Exum has good instincts and obviously can write, but his inexperience and naivete show just a little too much. To suggest that Rosen isn't experienced enough ignores his on-target evaluations of the past. Rosen's artice shows some deep thinking and clear research, and the lack of bias that Exum can't avoid demonstrating. That's why I turn to Andrew Bacevich, who also responded to Rosen's article.
In the Pentagon, they call this the Long War. With his decision to escalate the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama—effectively abandoning his promise to “change the way Washington works”—has signaled his administration’s commitment to the Long War.
Yet, as with the Cold War, the Long War rests on a false premise. To divide the world into two camps today makes no more sense than it did in Dulles’s time. Rather than creating clarity, indulging in this sort of oversimplification sows confusion and encourages miscalculation. It allows Americans to avert their eyes from the gathering forces—largely beyond the control of the United States—that are actually reshaping the international order. Sending U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan sustains the pretense that we ourselves, exercising the prerogatives of global leadership, are somehow shaping that order.
Violent anti-Western jihadism—a cause that has about as much prospect of conquering the planet as Soviet-style communism—is not going to define the 21st century. Far more likely to do so is the transfer of power—first economic, then political—from the West to the East, from the Atlantic basin to the heartland of Asia. In that regard, the tens of thousands of U.S. troops shipped to Afghanistan matter less than the hundreds of billions of American dollars shipped each year to China.
The shortfall of many MSM journalists and defense analysts is that they zoom in on Afghanistan (or Iraq, or whatever the most recent military conflict is) and they myopically examine the tactics or operations within a very short period (weeks to months). Very rarely do we get to see any reviews that examine the regional Middle East challenges or demonstrate an understanding of historical trends or cycles. Within the Beltway, people are conditioned to think within election year cycles and to develop incremental solutions to complex problems, rather than taking the necessary time to do the hard work of evaluating the defense policies and determining what it will really take over the long term to achieve US strategic goals.
And that is why it is taking such a god-awful time getting out of Iraq without really resolving the still inherent problems of that Shi'ite majority government, and why we aren't going to achieve the goals of stabilizing Afghanistan and taming the Taliban presence there. We lack the leadership - on both sides of the aisle - to want to change how US national security is developed and executed. And COIN tactics alone aren't going to achieve the solution we want in the Middle East, without decades of commitment and hundreds of billions of dollars that we can't afford.
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