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by Eric Martin

In a recent post, I took issue with Andrew Exum's claim that counterinsurgency (COIN) practitioners are reluctant to endorse undertaking COIN-based missions - a skepticism that stems from their first hand knowledge of the enormous costs and decades-long timetables involved, and of the uncertainty of achieving successful outcomes despite the considerable investments. As Fester recently wrote at Newshoggers:

COIN today promises the same type of inputs [as efforts in Vietnam and Algeria] — ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis — with the same type of outcomes — weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest. 

What's not to love?  While Exum is perhaps accurate in describing the position held by most COIN gurus with respect to new missions calling for the use of the military, many of the most prominent COIN practitioners tend to show a willingness – enthusiasm even – for applying COIN to ongoing military engagements such as Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Here, Exum might chide me for confusing "operational doctrine with strategy": COIN doctrine merely informs as to the best methods to conduct a military engagement, not whether or not the engagement makes sense/is worth it from a strategic point of view.  Thus, COIN practitioners are telling us how to best conduct our current operations, not whether or not it's strategically wise to continue those operations.  However, in practice, the majority of COIN experts are rarely, if ever, sticking to the strictly "operational" side of that equation. 

For example, in that earlier post, I linked to a CNAS report written by four of the leading COIN scholars arguing why a 5-10 year military/diplomatic commitment in Afghanistan was necessary.  It wasn't about operational doctrine – it was a strategic argument for maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan and warning of the outcomes if their plan is not followed.

In that same post, I examined certain claims made by one of the CNAS report's authors – David Kilcullen – in response to Andrew Bacevich's critique of Kilcullen's book, The Accidental Guerilla.  In defense of that book, Kilcullen pointed out that he warned that pursuing military intervention as counterterrorism policy "plays into the hands of the[e] [al-Qaeda] exhaustion strategy" that is designed to bleed us of resources by getting us to overreact by using military force in response to terrorist attacks/threats.  Further, in response to Bacevich's claims to the contrary, Kilcullen wrote in favor of "containment strategy" over attempts by the US to transform other societies. 

Yet those concerns are not evident in Kilcullen's counsel as to the ideal way forward in Afghanistan now. The Kilcullen who took umbrage with Bacevich's review seems to be at odds with the Kilcullen who co-wrote the January CNAS report which happens to bear the title: "Tell Me Why We’re There? Enduring Interests in Afghanistan (and Pakistan)."  Furthermore, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early February, Kilcullen staked out an even more ambitious agenda, with a longer timeline, than that set forth in the aforementioned CNAS report:

We need to do four things – what we might call “essential strategic tasks” – to succeed in Afghanistan. We need to preventthe re-emergence of an Al Qaeda sanctuary that could lead to another 9/11. We need to protect Afghanistan from a range of security threats including the Taliban insurgency, terrorism, narcotics, misrule and corruption. We need to build sustainable and accountable state institutions (at the central, provincial and local level) and a resilient civil society. Then we can begin a phased hand-off to Afghan institutions that can survive without permanent international assistance [ed note: Oh is that all!!!]. We might summarize this approach as “Prevent, Protect, Build, Hand-Off”. Let’s call it “Option A”.

Given enough time, resources and political commitment, Option A is definitely workable. But we need to be honest about how long it will take – ten to fifteen years, including at least two years of significant combat up front – and how much it will cost. Thirty thousand extra troops in Afghanistan will cost around 2 billion dollars per month beyond the roughly 20 billion we already spend; additional governance and development efforts will cost even more; in the current economic climate this is a big ask. The campaign will cost the lives of many American, Afghan and coalition soldiers and civilians, and injure many more. There are also opportunity costs: we have finally, through much blood and effort, reached a point where we can start disengaging some combat troops from Iraq. We need to ask ourselves whether the best use for these troops is to send them straight to Afghanistan, or whether we might be better off creating a strategic reserve in Central Command, restoring our military freedom of action and, with it, a measure of diplomatic credibility in the Middle East. [emphasis added]

As evident in Kilcullen's recitation of the four "essential strategic tasks," his testimony was not solely concerned with "operational doctrine." It was an effort to advocate for a particular strategy. However, one of the larger assumptions underlying that strategy – the notion that long term military occupation is an efficient means to deny terrorists room to operate and prevent attacks – is dubious at best, and mostly rejected by Kilcullen himself in his book.

As Kilcullen the author warns, it is an exceedingly expensive undertaking in terms of both blood and money. Steve Hynd grabs for the back of the envelope for some rough calculations in response to Kilcullen:

The DoD actually spends $2.7 billion a month in Afghanistan right now, but what's a few hundred million either way, right? Over fifteen years that bill comes to $846 billion while "additional governance and development efforts will cost even more." Basing some conservative guesstimates on what the ratio of military to reconstruction and other spending has been, those efforts will cost somewhere in the region of $35 billion, with at least another $17.5 billion to pay VA benefits for the inevitable toll in blood. Add in the $173 billion already spent and the $285 billion or so in debt servicing all that deficit spending will cost and the grand total will come to a cool $1.3 trillion. That's $1,300,000,000,000 for those who like to see all the zeroes. […]

And how about that cost in blood? Well, so far the war in Afghanistan has cost 667 US soldiers their lives. But the pace of casualties has been accelerating. 155 of those deaths were in 2008 alone and 2009 is set to be even deadlier. Afghan civilian casualties have been accelerating too – up over 40% in the last year – and somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 have already died, along with more tens of thousands wounded or simply displaced as refugees.

Extend those casualty rates onward for another 10 to 15 years. That's the butcher's bill.

To state the obvious, terrorist attacks on US civilians are horrible, horrible events that we should seek to prevent. Disrupting terrorist safe havens is a legitimate and worthwhile objective. But like all such objectives, the costs cannot be ignored. Again, that's stating the obvious, but then, the obvious is frequently absent from our foreign policy discourse.

Considering that the economic costs and death toll from even the most horrific of terrorist attacks (9/11) were lower and comparable, respectively, to the projected costs associated with ongoing operations in Afghanistan, the argument to pursue this strategy doesn't make much sense from a strictly cost-benefit computation. Some possible rejoinders are that the next attack could be bigger, attacks could occur more frequently with a safe haven in place and there is a value to the peace of mind of the civilian population that should be factored in (as a resident of lower Manhattan, I'm certainly sympathetic to the last prong).

But those responses all operate under some doubtful assumptions: (1) that there is no way to deny a safe haven absent the Kilcullen approach; (2) that terrorists require a safe haven as a base from which to launch attacks; (3) other than Afghanistan/Pakistan, there are no viable safe havens; and (4) despite our increased focus on the threat of terrorism, a safe haven in Afghanistan would enable future large scale terrorist attacks on US soil.

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by Eric Martin

Fareed Zakaria uses the recent accommodation between the Pakistani government and militants in the Swat Valley in Pakistan as a launching point to discuss the proper posture for the United States to adopt vis-a-vis Islamist movements of various stripes.  The short version: it is vital that we differentiate between al-Qaeda type groups and other Islamist groups that do not subscribe to theories of global jihad (and that we learn to live with the latter). 

Such realignment doesn't mean that we have to turn a blind eye to crimes against women and other brutal and oppressive policies that certain of the Islamist groups might espouse.  But those issues are better addressed through non-violent means.  After all, even targeted airstrikes end up killing the women and children that they are, ostensibly, meant to safeguard under such humanitarian justifications.

(Side note: These issues were discussed during this past Sunday's installment of Zakaria's CNN show – GPS – which I have enjoyed immensely.  Watching Hitchens get put in his place in the most recent episode is, alone, worth the price of admission):

Pakistan's Swat Valley…became a war zone over the past two years as Taliban fighters waged fierce battles against the Pakistani army. The fighting ceased because the Pakistani government has agreed to some of the militants' key demands, chiefly that Islamic courts be established in the region. Fears abound that this means girls schools will be destroyed, movies will be banned and public beheadings will become a regular occurrence.

The militants are bad people, and this is bad news. But the more difficult question is, what should we — the outside world — do?  How exactly should we oppose these forces?  In Pakistan and Afghanistan, we have done so in large measure by attacking them — directly with Western troops and Predator strikes, and indirectly in alliance with Pakistani and Afghan forces. Is the answer to pour in more of our troops, train more Afghan soldiers, ask the Pakistani military to deploy more battalions, and expand the Predator program to hit more of the bad guys? Perhaps — in some cases, emphatically yes — but I think it's also worth stepping back and trying to understand the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism. […]

The militants who were battling the [Pakistani] army…have had to go along with the deal. The Pakistani government is hoping that this agreement will isolate the jihadists and win the public back to its side. This may not work, but at least it represents an effort to divide the camps of the Islamists between those who are violent and those who are merely extreme.

Over the past eight years, such distinctions have tended to be regarded as naive. The Bush administration spent its first term engaged in a largely abstract, theoretical conversation about radical Islam as a monolithic global ideology — and conservative intellectuals still spout this kind of unyielding rhetoric. By the second term, though, Bush officials ended up pursuing a most sophisticated policy toward political Islam in the one country where reality was unavoidable — Iraq.

Having invaded Iraq, the Americans searched for local allies, in particular political groups that could become the Iraqi face of the occupation. The administration came to recognize that 30 years of the secular tyrant Saddam Hussein had left only hard-core Islamists as the opposition. It partnered with these groups, most of which were Shiite parties founded on the model of Iran's ultra-religious organizations, and acquiesced as they took over most of southern Iraq, the Shiite heartland. The strict version of Islam that they implemented in this area was quite similar to — in some cases more  extreme than — what one would find in Iran today. Liquor was banned; women had to cover themselves from head to toe; Christians were persecuted; religious affiliations became the only way to get a government job, including college professorships. While some of this puritanism is mellowing, southern Iraq remains a dark place. But it is not a hotbed of jihadist activity. The veil is not the same as the suicide belt.

The Bush administration partnered with fundamentalists once more in the Iraq war. When the fighting was at its worst, administration officials began talking to some in the Sunni community who were involved in the insurgency. Many of them were classic Islamic militants, though others were simply former Baathists or tribal chiefs. Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy ramped up this process. "We won the war in Iraq chiefly because we separated the local militants from the global jihadists," says Fawaz Gerges, a scholar at Sarah Lawrence College, who has interviewed hundreds of Muslim militants. "Yet around the world we are still unwilling to make the distinction between these two groups."

Anything that emphasizes the variety of groups, movements and motives within that world strengthens the case that this is not a battle between Islam and the West. In the end, time is on our side. Wherever radical Islam is tried, people weary of its charms quickly. All Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to today's problems. Unlike them, we have a worldview that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. That's the most powerful weapon of all.

This is classic "disaggregation" strategy (a counterinsurgency tool promoted by such well-respected practitioners as David Kilcullen) whereby each group within a given movement is treated as a distinct entity so as to determine how to best respond to each (discussed here and, more recently, here).   This analytical device can shed light on which groups can be coaxed to buy-in to a given government structure, and which groups can only be dealt with through the application of force. 

Disaggregation offered the only viable means available to us for stabilizing the situation in Iraq (not the surge of troops, as is commonly misinterpreted).  We weren't going to be able to keep fighting all militant groups, nor would the Iraqi government be able to persist for long without a broader support in the population at large. By working with various Iraqi Islamist and/or insurgent groups, the US has helped create an imperfect and tenuous momentum in the direction of stability.  

Similarly, disaggregation offers a glimmer of hope going forward in Afghanistan.  As my friend Steve Hynd points out, the "Taliban" is a multifaceted movement with its constituent parts often working at cross purposes on important issues such as hostility to the Pakistani government and support for global jihadism.  We need to do our best to peel away those factions that are not committed to furthering al-Qaeda's cause and provide them with enough incentives to participate in the new Afghan government.  Even groups that we might rightly label as "Taliban."

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