Afghanistan is not Iraq: Anbar Strategy Must Be Adapted to Intense Tribalism
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In Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus’ advanced counter-insurgency strategy worked because a large key population, in Anbar province, wanted it to work. Petraeus, the leading counter-insurgency intellectual among the American military brass, was elevated to Iraq operations commander, because there was a need to use his know-how in community-building-linked counter-insurgency. The Anbar Awakening, however, was a grassroots, local movement among clergy, police and communities that wanted to push insurgents out.
Petraeus was able to capitalize on that change of heart, by demonstrating that a new American strategy would not only help the locals achieve that goal, but reward them for their efforts and help to secure genuine peace and security, while building important infrastructure and social services into the fabric of the community. There is no such community movement in Afghanistan that can feed into the very effective Anbar civil-infrastructure strategy.
In Afghanistan, there is no civilian interaction or local logistical cooperation on that scale to make a Petraeus-style counter-insurgency strategy, as in Anbar, workable. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was brought in to speed the transition to a more Anbar-like model for the Afghan counter-insurgency effort. But McChrystal found something very different in Afghanistan: a more conventional war against a militia movement intent not on counter-occupation but on seizing control of the entire nation and re-establishing a Taliban government.
McChrystal also found that an airstrike-centered offensive strategy was taking huge numbers of civilian lives and quickly observed that civilian deaths would “lose the war” for the US, no matter how effective its tactical efforts or how sincere the efforts of its people to help the Afghan people. McChrystal ordered a near total ban on airstrikes against residential areas, and established the principle that the tactical advantage to be gained from such strikes is greatly outweighed by the strategic disadvantage that comes with widespread civilian resentment and anger.
Al Qaeda is not really based in Afghanistan anymore, which the former administration touted as a sign of the success of its Afghan war effort. But the failure of that effort is clear from the near total impunity with which Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have set up out-of-country safe havens, in Pakistan’s remote tribal regions. There was, in fact, no concrete plan to prevent collusion between fundamentalist elements in the Pakistan intelligence services and Taliban exiles or sympathizers, and the out-of-Afghanistan strategy simply dislocated the threat, without resolving the underlying crisis.
Taliban militia are not truly a terrorist network, though they commit terror-inducing atrocities against women, girls and other innocents, in order to gain ground. They are in fact more a well-armed conventional militia movement who are, like the US and coalition forces, using a “take, hold and build” strategy for conquering the nation. If their efforts are perceived by locals to more credibly represent a viable and lasting power structure (however undesirable) than the US and coalition war effort, the local population will not come over to the coalition side.
What’s more, Taliban militia in Afghanistan are reported to be getting support from Taliban milita inside Pakistan, something not seen on such a scale in Anbar province during the Awakening period. This is made even more problematic due to the immense size of Pakistan’s population, the world’s sixth largest, at 163.9 million, and the uneasy-at-best relationship between the government in Islamabad and the tribal societies of the Afghan border region.
Then, there is the quagmire question: without an effort to seriously re-orient toward an Afghanistan-specific strategy, the war effort could deteriorate into a long-term policing and counter-insurgency effort with no clear strategic benefit or constructive contribution to the well-being of the Afghan people, eroding support for the US military at home and abroad, vastly complicating other priorities of international peace and security, and ultimately eroding US national security.
Iraq gave the option of a highly developed, relatively modern country with education and experience with civil infrastructure, the support of a functioning national government, inclusive if flawed electoral processes and a well-trained military loyal to that national government. Afghanistan offers virtually none of these resources to craft a Helmand awakening strategy that would involve locals in the effort to rid the region of militia operations.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a Washington Post associate editor, responded just yesterday to a question about whether Afghanistan is really one conflict or an array of smaller, disparate localized conflicts, saying:
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and that’s also why the national government in Kabul (questions of its legitimacy aside) has only limited influence over much of the country. Afghanistan is really a collection of very insular, tribal communities. That means military officers and diplomats on the ground need to more carefully tailor their approaches to the communities were they are located. What works in Helmand doesn’t necessarily work in Khost, which makes sharing “lessons learned” so difficult in Afghanistan. Most importantly, it means that efforts at engaging tribes and trying to craft any sort of reintegration plan for insurgents — like what was done in Iraq with the Anbar Awakening — will be much, much more complex in Afghanistan. You’re not going to be able to come up with national or even province-wide programs. It’ll have to be at the district and village level, and it will have to be tailored to the unique tribal dynamics in each area. That will be tough and time-consuming.
Gen. McChrystal is a crucial figure, known for his Spartan lifestyle —living in small quarters with a general issue bunk and eating only one meal a day, while running an hour a day, and working virtually non-stop to study the battlefield and effectively communicate updates and strategy direction to hundreds of officers and civilians involved in the war effort—, crucial because he seeks to forge a strategy designed to work in Afghanistan, starting with an end to civilian casualties, and because he understands the logistical complexities involved in “commanding” a war effort with so many widely varying demands on overstretched resources in so unhelpful an environment.
McChrystal told CBS’ 60 Minutes he is less worried about leaks than about the risks of ignorance among commanders and officers operating across the field of coalition war fighting. He seeks to build trust, has nearly banned airstrikes in civilian areas, and is working to forge better relations between coalition forces and local community leaders, in hopes of turning the population against the still somewhat fractious insurgent movement.
The decision facing the US commanders, the Pentagon and Pres. Barack Obama, is how to best plan for the specific challenges of the Afghan war effort. While military chiefs are calling for more forces deployed to Afghanistan, the president has demanded that military commanders, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, put together enough reliable information to craft an aggressive but viable strategy for not only securing territory but building toward the peace.
Without such a strategy, the US will not be able to “win” the Afghan war and will be forced to remain in-country in significant numbers, for years or even decades, just to prevent the collapse of the government and the dangerous spillover of its internal conflict into neighboring countries. The unspoken open secret is that the plan must include some strategy for preventing Taliban factions from creeping toward Islamabad and/or taking control of any part of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.
The other unspoken open secret of the Afghan war is that in order to prevail, the US will have to engage in one of the most comprehensive ground-up nation-building efforts ever undertaken. Afghanistan has never been a fully integrated single-government state, and the fractious political movements tend to center on regional strongmen and the trending of the fortunes of militia for or against those warlords.
The nation includes some of the most mountainous and desolate terrain in the world, making it tactically complicated to trap or round-up militants. The famously failed efforts to locate “Bin Laden’s cave” is owing in part to the extreme topological complexity of the mountains that run along the Afghan-Pakistan border. While fighting to confine dangerous militants to such remote areas, the coalition war effort must succeed in building a sustainable nationwide system of government and civilian infrastructure, with the support and participation of the Afghan people.
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