Month: December 2008

by Eric Martin

Anand Gopal has an informative piece on the make-up of the "Taliban" movement in Afghanistan.  The piece reinforces a few concepts that should inform our future policy vis-a-vis Afghanistan: First, the Karzai government lacks a popular mandate and, in general, it is unrealistic to believe that the United States can establish a strong central government capable of enforcing its prerogatives on Afghanistan’s traditionally decentralized society.  Our support for the Karzai government drains it of legitimacy in the eyes of many Afghanis, not to mention taints the US with the corruption and criminality rampant within Karzai’s coalition.  Our presence is unsustainable (not to mention costly), and is itself helping to fuel the conflict by giving opposition groups a unified cause and interminable supply of motivated recruits.

Second, while we cannot prevail militarily, there may be openings to pursue negotiated arrangements with certain factions within a Taliban movement that is far from monolithic or uniform in its composition, objectives and worldview.  Third, any realistic framework for stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan will require engagement with Afghanistan’s neighbors who have the ability to play spoiler should their interests not be taken into account (but not necessarily made paramount to the interests of Afghanis).

Here is Gopal on the diversity within the ranks of the Taliban, and on the general unifying principle:

Who exactly are the Afghan insurgents? Every suicide attack and kidnapping is usually attributed to "the Taliban." In reality, however, the insurgency is far from monolithic. There are the shadowy, kohl-eyed mullahs and head-bobbing religious students, of course, but there are also erudite university students, poor, illiterate farmers, and veteran anti-Soviet commanders. The movement is a mélange of nationalists, Islamists, and bandits that fall uneasily into three or four main factions. The factions themselves are made up of competing commanders with differing ideologies and strategies, who nonetheless agree on one essential goal: kicking out the foreigners. […]

Meanwhile, a more pragmatic leadership started taking the reins. U.S. intelligence officers believe that day-to-day leadership of the movement is now actually in the hands of the politically savvy Mullah Brehadar, while Mullah Omar retains a largely figurehead position. Brehadar may be behind the push to moderate the movement’s message in order to win greater support.

Even at the local level, some provincial Taliban officials are tempering older-style Taliban policies in order to win local hearts and minds. Three months ago in a district in Ghazni province, for instance, the insurgents ordered all schools closed. When tribal elders appealed to the Taliban’s ruling religious council in the area, the religious judges reversed the decision and reopened the schools.

However, not all field commanders follow the injunctions against banning music and parties. In many Taliban-controlled districts such amusements are still outlawed, which points to the movement’s decentralized nature. Local commanders often set their own policies and initiate attacks without direct orders from the Taliban leadership.

The result is a slippery movement that morphs from district to district. In some Taliban-controlled districts of Ghazni province, an Afghan caught working for a non-governmental organization (NGO) would meet certain death. In parts of neighboring Wardak province, however, where the insurgents are said to be more educated and understand the need for development, local NGOs can function with the guerrillas’ permission.

While there are legitimate concerns about human rights abuses and brutality committed by Taliban elements, government forces have not been above reproach by any measure.  Further, from a national security perspective, the dangers of negotiating a peace with willing Taliban elements might be containable. 

Despite such foreign connections, the Afghan rebellion remains mostly a homegrown affair. Foreign fighters — especially al-Qaeda — have little ideological influence on most of the insurgency, and most Afghans keep their distance from such outsiders. "Sometimes groups of foreigners speaking different languages walk past," Ghazni resident Fazel Wali recalls. "We never talk to them and they don’t talk to us."

Regardless, reality has its say. Even if there is some admirable imagined idea of liberal democracy enforced from Kabul outward, the facts on the ground suggest that basing our policy on the expectations of reaching such outcomes is folly.  Gopal’s piece discusses some of the actions of the Karzai government, and his coalition’s inherent structural flaws.  While, ostensibly, aspiring to be a centralized, national political power, the Karzai government is riven by the same factionalism that it seeks to broach, and is rife with the same lawlessness it aims to eradicate:

When U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in November 2001, Afghans celebrated the downfall of a reviled and discredited regime. "We felt like dancing in the streets," one Kabuli told me…

Meanwhile, the country was being carved up by warlords and criminals. On the brand-new highway connecting Kabul to Kandahar and Herat, built with millions of Washington’s dollars, well-organized groups of bandits would regularly terrorize travelers. "[Once], thirty, maybe fifty criminals, some in police uniforms, stopped our bus and shot [out] our windows," Muhammadullah, the owner of a bus company that regularly uses the route, told me. "They searched our vehicle and stole everything from everyone." Criminal syndicates, often with government connections, organized kidnapping sprees in urban centers like the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar city. Often, those few who were caught would simply be released after the right palms were greased.

Onto this landscape of violence and criminality rode the Taliban again, promising law and order…The guerrillas implemented a harsh version of Sharia law, cutting off the hands of thieves and shooting adulterers. They were brutal, but they were also incorruptible. Justice no longer went to the highest bidder. "There’s no crime any more, unlike before," said Abdul Halim, who lives in a district under Taliban control.

As an aside, the following discussion of the United States’ role in funding and arming some of the extremist groups is relevant in terms of providing perspective with respect to some of the charges being hurled at the Pakistani government for its coddling of extremist groups in light of the Mumbai attacks.  While the Pakistani government deserves its fair share of the blame for having nurtured such radical agents, they are not the only government that has pursued such strategies in the region, nor the only government forced to reckon with the blowback.  The US is by no means guiltless.  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar:

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by Eric Martin

As alluded to in my prior post in what is now a three part series focusing on defense spending, this post will examine the topic of Pentagon spending priorities – and the larger strategic implications that stem from such allocations.  In that previous post, I excerpted the following passage from Travis Sharp’s piece:

The United States could take some current funding away from expensive high-tech weaponry, which may be useless in future Iraq-style conflicts, and redirect it toward enhanced intelligence, diplomacy, counterinsurgency training, language competency, humanitarian assistance, and nuclear nonproliferation programs.

A recent article by David Sanger (which Hilzoy and Publius touched on) suggests that just such a redirection could be in the works, as indicated by those selected by Obama to fill out his national security team:

[A]ll three of [Obama’s] choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — were selected in large part because they have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena.

The shift, which would come partly out of the military’s huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states.

For now, I’ll echo publius’ cautious optimism that Obama does, in fact, mean to follow through on such plans and that, in order to facilitate those efforts, he has surrounded himself with people whose centrist bona fides will provide some political cover.  But a lot depends on just where the redirected resources flow to, and to what extent the overall expenditures can be reduced and not just diverted.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of Obama campaign pledges that should temper the already timid hope that Obama intends to meaningfully alter the national security landscape.  First, Obama has suggested that he plans to continue the expansion of the size of the active duty military.  From the campaign website:

Obama and Biden will complete the effort to increase our ground forces by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines. They will also invest in 21st century missions like counterinsurgency by building up our special operations forces, civil affairs, information operations, foreign language training and other units and capabilities that remain in chronic short supply.

Second, and relatedly, Obama has promised to increase the number of troops deployed to Afghanistan.

These policies, if pursued in earnest, could undermine any effort to significantly reduce the prodigious size of the Pentagon budget and could render the redirection of resources a meaningless reshuffling of the deck chairs on a slowly sinking ship.  Allow me to explain.

Increasing the size of the our ground forces won’t be cheap, and even if Obama can succeed in trimming the Pentagon’s budget with respect to high ticket items, those savings could quickly be devoured by the considerable costs of maintaining an expanded force.  Further, while there are also potential savings to be realized by reducing our presence in Iraq, shifting those freed-up military resources to Afghanistan would reduce that fiscal advantage. And with little discernible benefit to be had in terms of the effort in Afghanistan. 

Put bluntly, the situation in Afghanistan does not lend itself to military solutions.  Even the optimists – the can-do counterinsurgency practitioners – acknowledge that Afghanistan presents a considerably more difficult set of problems than Iraq (and wasn’t Iraq easy!) and will take many years to get right (if at all, and that’s a big "if").  Trying to impose a centralized, Western-oriented system of governance on a country with little meaningful history of centralized rule and a dislike of foreign interference in general is a fool’s errand, and one that ignores the lessons obvious from the Soviets’ failed effort to remake Afghanistan with a vastly larger troop presence. 

Rather, a negotiated settlement that engages the various regional powers whose interests and concerns must be addressed is the far more prudent course. Although not an easy or guaranteed fix itself, it has the advantage of not requiring enormous military commitments for the next decade or so. 

The hope is that Obama recognizes the complexity of the conflict and the inadequacy of military tools to address it, and means to pursue the negotiated course rather than a troop buildup coupled with the implementation of optimized counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine.  The fear is that the Obama administration will be seduced by the putative efficacy of COIN doctrine and that, as a result, it will do more to realign Pentagon spending than reduce it and increase the costs of doing business in Afghanistan to such a point as to erase the savings to be had from withdrawing Iraq.  The expansion of ground forces can also be seen in this light, as that is seen as a necessary prerequisite to implementing COIN best practices.

While COIN can serve a purpose in limited settings, the fundamental lesson to be derived from COIN doctrine is  political: to avoid, at all costs, situations in which you would need to apply it.  When some of its leading practitioners and scholars liken COIN to "eating soup with a knife" the proper take away is to order something else from the menu.  Put simply, throughout post-WW II history, examples of truly successful COIN operations are few to none, and the prospects going forward aren’t any brighter.

"But what about the necessary counterinsurgency operations that we must engage in?" one might ask.  To which, I would hand the mic to Jim Henley:

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