State of the Afghanistan War

Afghan Stamp 1892

Barnett Rubin, who Juan Cole calls "perhaps our foremost Afghanistan expert", comments on the New York Times article by David Rohde and David Sanger on How the 'Good War' in Afghanistan Went Bad 08/12/07 and the early mistaken assumptions there. Rubin's post is at the Informed Comment Global Affairs group blog (a spinoff of Juan Cole's blog) in New York Times on Failure in Afghanistan 07/11/07.

Rohde and Sanger report:

Among some current and former officials, a consensus is emerging that a more consistent, forceful American effort could have helped to keep the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s leadership from regrouping.

Gen. James L. Jones, a retired American officer and a former NATO supreme commander, said Iraq caused the United States to "take its eye off the ball" in Afghanistan. He warned that the consequences of failure "are just as serious in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq."

"Symbolically, it's more the epicenter of terrorism than Iraq," he said. "If we don’t succeed in Afghanistan, you’re sending a very clear message to the terrorist organizations that the U.S., the U.N. and the 37 countries with troops on the ground can be defeated."

Rubin lists a number of major problems with the Afghanistan War, which is to a large extent cheerfully ignored by our "press corps". He writes:

The record of misjudgments is as familiar as it is complete: believing that the quick collapse of the Taliban regime in late 2001 constituted a resounding "victory"; a refusal to enlarge the international security presence to secure the country; a failure to follow up on boastful talking points about a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan with any strategic planning, coordinated leadership, adequate funding, or effective implementation; neglect and denial for years of the Pakistan military's permissive (at best) attitude toward the Taliban leadership; and, like a shiny silk thread of failure woven through the entire fabric, the constant diversion of military, political, intelligence, economic, and leadership resources to Iraq. As news reporters, the authors decline to make the obvious observation: more attention and resources from this administration meant a more comprehensive and disastrous failure in Iraq than in Afghanistan. (my emphasis)

One of the domestic political aspects of this is that the Democratic candidates are still pointing to the Afghanistan War as a high priority from which the Iraq War is diverting troops. The implication in such criticisms, and sometimes the explicit policy, is that a continuing counterinsurgency (COIN) effort in Afghanistan makes sense.

It's hard to see now after all these years that such a task is realistic, even with vastly larger numbers of troops. (Sometime in October, the Afghanistan War will have gone on longer than the Second World War.) The publics in NATO countries are more and more questioning the value of the continuing NATO presence in Afghanistan.

Rubin points out one thing that did go right in Afghanistan:

The article neglects one important aspect of the Afghan effort - the involvement of the United Nations, which the reporters do not even mention. Yet one of the major reasons for the limited successes in Afghanistan was precisely that, because of the low priority the administration assigned to it, it agreed to a recommendation from the State Department to empower the UN to take the lead in helping Afghans assemble a political transition. The UN organized and chaired the UN Talks on Afghanistan in Bonn that designed the transition, and it oversaw the Loya Jirgas (Grand Councils), constitutional process, elections, and adoption of the Afghanistan Compact, the successor to the Bonn Agreement, which the administration has unsuccessfully tried to copy in Iraq. It was the success of these UN political efforts as much as anything else that enabled the Bush administration to camouflage its strategic failure for so long. (Note: I have a personal bias in that I was involved in these UN efforts as an occasional adviser or consultant). (my emphasis)

The neoconservatives and the John Birchers and other Republicans who despise the UN will no doubt happily ignore that observation.

An important early study of the Afghanistan War is Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy Stephen Biddle (US Army Strategic Services Institute) 11/01/2002. Biddle's paper makes extensive use of oral and written histories of the early months of the war by participants collected by the Military History Institute.

Biddle's paper is a reminder that Rummy intended the Afghanistan War, at least in the form it was widely perceived by Americans to have been a brilliant success, to serve as a model for a high-tech, air-power-heavy form of warfare that would allow him to make blitzkrieg across the Middle East and be cheered as a hero for the ages. (My characterization, not Biddle's.) Biddle describes that theory as follows:

In particular, many now argue that in 2001-02, a novel combination of special operations forces (SOF), precision-guided munitions (PGMs), and an indigenous ally destroyed the Taliban’s military, toppled their regime, and did so while neither exposing Americans to the risk of heavy casualties nor expanding the American presence in a way that might spur nationalist insurgency. In this new "Afghan Model" it is argued, small teams of elite commandos on the ground provided the targeting information needed for precision weapons to reach dispersed, concealed opponents. Until the commandos arrived, high-altitude bombing could do little against a country with few large, fixed targets. But once coalition bombing was guided by friendly eyes on the ground, many claim, it became possible for airpower to annihilate the Taliban infantry and armor that had stymied the Northern Alliance for the preceding 6 years of civil warfare, enabling even an unsophisticated, outnumbered ally to liberate the entire country in a matter of weeks.

That was Rummy's dream of the United State as the invincible regime-changer of the world. It's worth noting that Biddle footnotes that summary to several articles, the first of which is by the notorious Pentagon stenographer, the New York Times' Michael Gordon.

The reality, as Biddle shows in some detail, escaped the great thinkers of the Cheney-Bush administration, who were never too keen on all this reality-based stuff, anyway. He writes:

Afghan Model proponents, by contrast, credit precision weapons with annihilating enemies at a distance before they could close with our commandos or indigenous allies. Hence the model’s broad utility: with SOF-directed bombs doing the real killing, even ragtag local militias will suffice as allies. All they need do is screen U.S. commandos from the occasional hostile survivor and occupy the abandoned ground thereafter. Yet the actual fighting in Afghanistan involved substantial close combat. Al Qaeda counterattackers closed, unseen, to pointblank range of friendly forces in battles at Highway 4 and Sayed Slim Kalay. Al Qaeda defenders eluded detection or destruction by American air attack and had to be overrun at Bai Beche, Highway 4, and Operation ANACONDA. At Tora Bora, failure to commit properly trained and motivated ground troops to traditional close combat probably allowed the al Qaeda quarry to escape.(my emphasis)

Biddle also drew a practical lesson of the option of invading Iraq - this was Fall 2002, so the invasion hadn't occurred yet:

Where we enjoy local allies with the needed skills and motivation, we can expect the Afghan Model to work, and we should use it. But we will not always be so lucky. In Iraq, for example, the lack of a credible, trained opposition bodes ill for an Afghanistan-style campaign without major American ground forces.

But Cheney and Rummy didn't care about how anything "bodes". They knew they were going to zap Saddam's regime within a few weeks and bring most of the troops home, slowed down in their return only by the abundance of flowers being showered on them.

Tags: afghanistan war, barnett rubin, stephen biddle