Afghan Awakening

IN SEPTEMBER of 2008, Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a remarkable statement. He said, “I'm not convinced we're winning in Afghanistan. I am convinced we can. That is why I intend to commission and . . . am looking at a new, more comprehensive strategy for the region.” Considering that the United States has been at war in Afghanistan for seven years now, clearly whatever our strategy is, it has not worked.

There has developed an unquestioning consensus that we need to do more. The Democratic Party, united in demanding a swift withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, supports expanding the war in Afghanistan. The same is true of the Republican Party and the Pentagon. The mainstream press, while savaging the White House for lacking a sensible plan and sufficient troops in Iraq, accepted without question sending more troops to Afghanistan. And now that the surge in Iraq is winding down, a surge for Afghanistan is in the cards.

While U.S. troop numbers will increase, we don't know whether other NATO countries will provide willing and able boots on the ground. Regardless of NATO Europe, America must deal with Pakistan and the sanctuary for al-Qaeda and the Taliban that has festered there like a infectious wound. The corruption attendant to opium continues to tear apart the fabric of trust in Afghan society. Local military and police forces must be trained. Above all, we need to define our goals and acknowledge our limitations on this vital front.

Washington is going to have to finally take into account the country's myriad intractable problems. As the United States is about to enter a larger war, it remains unclear where we are going, or why. How did we arrive at this point? What is the problem? And what are the alternative courses of action?

AFGHANISTAN IS essential to the war on terror. And because of this it is crucial that we get it right-but we cannot until we know just how we got it wrong. Mistakes were made from day one. A massive strategic revamping must come.

As we all know, sheltered by Taliban forces that controlled most of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda planned the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City that murdered two thousand nine hundred civilians on September 11, 2001. About a month later, the United States launched strikes on key targets in Afghanistan that were followed by a small number of American special forces calling in massive air strikes against the exposed Taliban and al-Qaeda positions, while the CIA funded various warlords loosely aligned with what was called the Northern Alliance, a collection of tribes opposed to the Taliban. Without cover, the Taliban forces were pummeled and the Northern Alliance swiftly seized city after city. Victory looked assured. Yet fundamental strategic and tactical errors soon followed.

The first set of American missteps resulted from Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban and in turn the United States' relationship with Pakistan. Since the mid-1990s, Taliban fundamentalists were supported by a Pakistani high command intent on preventing Indian geopolitical inroads into Afghanistan. The Taliban was a useful cat's paw for the Pakistani army. But post-9/11, fearing American wrath, then-Pakistani Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf and his military ostensibly withdrew their support for the Taliban.

After the initial invasion, the United States allowed Pakistan to pull out its advisers embedded with the Taliban, but at the same time, Pakistan also airlifted out several Taliban leaders, indicative of the two-sided game the Pakistani military was playing. Making matters worse, a much larger force of retreating Taliban and al-Qaeda members was located in the Tora Bora mountains near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Ignoring advice from CIA and army officers on the front lines, General Tommy Franks, the overall commander of U.S. forces, refused to deploy available marine and army-ranger task forces to seal the routes into Pakistan. Instead, he relied upon an untrustworthy amalgam of Afghani warlords to block off the area. Consequently, the core leadership of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, escaped into the tribal frontier lands of western Pakistan.

Nonetheless, on the home front, General Franks and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were feted as brilliant strategists. The unspoken but widely held assumption was that the Taliban and al-Qaeda had been shattered as cohesive fighting forces. Although their remnants remained dangerous terrorist cells, the mopping-up phase would not require a major infusion of U.S. conventional forces. Roughly one division of twenty thousand soldiers and a like number from the other twenty-five members of NATO combined seemed like more than enough to provide security across Afghanistan. Meanwhile, special covert teams would track down what was left of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders inside Pakistan.

It was as if the war was won, the Taliban routed, and the United States able to move on to fight (and win) another war with our vastly superior military. And thus the administration turned to Iraq. But as the Iraq War escalated and turned south, it demanded more money and attention. Afghanistan became a strategic afterthought.

So, while our attention was focused on the disintegrating situation in Baghdad, violence in Afghanistan was on the rise. Dire warnings began to appear in the press. Suicide-bomb attacks had increased from eighteen in 2005 to 116 in 2006, while direct-fire attacks grew from three per day in 2005 to more than ten per day in 2006. Violence forced many schools in southeastern Afghanistan to close. Several provinces teetered on the brink of collapse.

COALITION FORCES currently in Afghanistan have been unable to effectively redress the situation. For this, there are three broad reasons: NATO fortitude is questionable, Afghanistan's army and police forces are inadequate, and U.S. troop levels are not sufficient to pick up the slack.

NATO has neither provided enough troops nor are they actively engaged. When I visited Afghanistan in 2007, U.S. commanders expressed dissatisfaction with the number of troops provided by NATO nations, and the severe restrictions those governments had placed on troops taking part in combat operations. Although in the fall of 2008, the United States had thirty-one thousand troops in Afghanistan and other coalition members were contributing an additional thirty thousand, most were support forces that did not patrol or engage in war fighting. In the southeastern section assigned to NATO-which includes the Kandahar-Helmand area-the fighting had been heating up. And in an example of their lack of commitment, the primarily British, Canadian, Dutch and Romanian troops in the region did not stop the Taliban from infiltrating back into their tribal homeland; European troops were much less aggressive than the Americans and poppy farming in the region provided money to insurgent forces.

There has not been much help from the Afghan army either. In early 2007 it had about thirty-five thousand trained soldiers, a number grossly inadequate for a country of 30 million with a thousand-mile border along which the zealous enemy can attack. By late 2008, there were supposedly seventy-four thousand soldiers, although how many were really trained remains questionable. Afghan battalions seemed cohesive, with 90 percent present for duty, but 70 percent of the soldiers were illiterate. The army rushed into fights, did not plan, lacked a noncommissioned officer corps, bungled logistics and failed to coordinate among units. Counterinsurgency doctrines suggest that about three to four hundred thousand troops are needed in the security forces. The U.S. military has not yet trained an indigenous army in numbers anywhere near sufficient.

As for the American soldiers in Afghanistan, most of the combat units, plus the forces dedicated to support-and-training missions, were in the northeast, where numerous mountain passes from Pakistan offered a short route to Kabul. These troops were deployed as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, separate from NATO. But because of commitments in Iraq, it will not be until mid-2009 that the Pentagon will be able to provide the additional ten thousand U.S. troops that commanders have requested to fight a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Given these factors, even a modest increase of three brigades within twelve months was heralded as a “surge.” However, it was really only a first step. Thus we get to the question of “What next?”

IT IS clear we need more troops-actively engaged. And most of the burden will rest with the United States. NATO may contribute another five thousand troops, but most European governments are unenthusiastic about the mission. Hence, battlefield performance and willingness to take the risk inherent in patrolling aggressively are not apt to improve. We have implored NATO to send more troops for years-to no avail. In January of 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates explicitly urged the European nations to fulfill their pledges of money and troops. President Bush also prodded NATO, saying, “When our commanders on the ground say to our respective countries we need additional help, our NATO countries must provide it.” And though British General David Richards, upon relinquishing command of NATO forces in the southeast, may have quipped that “This is a good war,” it is unlikely the next administration will have more luck rallying the Europeans.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates worked with what was available. He streamlined the command structure, placing all U.S. forces under one four-star commander who reported to NATO. But so far, other than unifying the battlefield command structure, it appears that the new American approach is simply to double the size of the security forces while continuing with the same strategy. As we begin to make Afghanistan a priority, we need to rethink our basic strategy-beyond the troop increase.

TO DATE, our strategy has been one of containment aimed to repulse Taliban forces when they surge across the border. But shoring up Afghanistan to ward off cross-border attacks is just playing defense against the Taliban, a second-tier enemy. “We can hunt down and kill extremists as they cross over the border from Pakistan,” Admiral Mullen said in September, “but until we work more closely with the Pakistani government to eliminate the safe havens from which they operate, the enemy will only keep coming.”

The fundamental reason the war in Afghanistan heated up in the first place is the presence of a Taliban and al-Qaeda safe haven inside Pakistan. Both groups maintain several camps and headquarters in an area about the size of New Jersey, with a population of around one million. The Taliban is deeply rooted inside Pakistan's mountainous western frontier, called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Estimates of the Taliban's strength vary enormously, from five thousand to twenty thousand. The central core of the Taliban is perhaps five thousand, with thousands of auxiliaries and tribal allies joining and deserting as the mood strikes them. But with a population of 5 million, FATA provides the Taliban with a steady stream of recruits. The Pakistani government has ceded control of these areas.

Dealing with Pakistan, where America's mortal foe al-Qaeda is nestled alongside the Taliban, is clearly the most pressing problem we face. The Pakistani army is configured for conventional war against its archenemy, India. And the Pakistani intelligence service gave advice and training to the Taliban as a means of controlling politics inside Afghanistan and of preventing India from gaining influence. The Pakistani military understands that the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalists must be contained. But the military is not willing to deploy into the FATA region to eliminate their safe havens.

Given the complexity of politics and religiosity in Pakistan, it is doubtful if American advice, even when delivered along with aid by our most senior commanders, will be a decisive factor as the Pakistani leadership determines how to limit the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2008, following terrorist bombings deep inside Pakistan, the Pakistani army engaged in brigade-size conventional offensives against fundamentalist strongholds that seemed to have a punitive intent, rather than the counterinsurgency method of clearing in order to hold.

That leaves two unpalatable options. The first is to continue the current course that accepts the sanctuary until Pakistani forces solve the problem. Our military is trying to persuade Pakistan's military that Islamic fundamentalism is a growing danger to the state that requires a counterinsurgency campaign in the FATA aimed at assisting the tribes against the Taliban. But to date, the Pakistani army has lacked the motivation, internal unity, discipline, tactics, logistics and willingness to accept casualties needed to move decisively against al-Qaeda. Since the gambit of persuading the Pakistani army to take decisive action is unlikely to succeed, the fallback is a continuation of our defensive strategy.

The dilemma posed by these strategic choices is as disconcerting as it is obvious. The tribes inside the FATA must be organized and supported to throw out the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Pakistani government has shown neither the will nor capacity to do so. One option is to slowly but deliberately build up the size and intensity of American air and ground strikes inside the FATA, with the intent of destroying al-Qaeda as a distinct entity of Arab foreigners. The gamble is that the Pakistani government and people will gradually accept the strikes as a fact of life. A large raid merits serious consideration if the chances of inflicting major losses on al-Qaeda are high. But the downside risk is portentous. Such strikes may provoke riots that bring down the government.

Hence, President Bush allowed the problem of sanctuary to fester because there were no good options. It is likely that the new administration will launch a few more strikes on a selective basis, while the Pentagon holds in readiness a severe response if al-Qaeda succeeds in a second attack against American civilians. An intact al-Qaeda inside a sanctuary is literally a ticking bomb. The strongest message to Pakistani officials is to point to the response from an outraged America if there is a second severe attack on American soil.

GIVEN THAT the Pakistani sanctuary cannot be removed and that it will be years at best before the tribes inside Pakistan are organized to reject the Taliban, what U.S. conventional troops can accomplish will occur inside Afghanistan. With withdrawals from Iraq, it makes sense to take U.S. units that have years of experience in counterinsurgency in Iraq and deploy them to the contested provinces like Helmand and Kandahar. The marines, for instance, have volunteered to take responsibility for the southeastern provinces, where our NATO allies have been less than staunch. No one has ever accused U.S. Marines of ducking a fight. In Iraq they were able to turn Anbar Province around by patiently working with the Sunni tribes and by supporting the “Awakening” when it was first proposed by a sheikh named Abu Risha.

There is the argument that the Awakening does not apply to Afghanistan because the tribes are too fragmented. However, in Anbar in 2006-2007, the Awakening proceeded on a very local basis. What was happening in, say, the city of Husaybah differed from Haditha and that differed from Ramadi. In each case, the American soldiers and marines worked on a local level to improve security.

We should apply the techniques that worked in Iraq to Afghanistan. The operational concepts of small-unit outposts and aggressive patrolling should be applied universally. Because the Taliban can mass and fall upon such smaller outposts, living among the villagers requires quick-reaction forces and a willingness to tolerate risk. Assuming NATO skittishness persists, we will have to send troops that want to fight-i.e., U.S. troops. U.S. units should “homestead,” rotating on seven-month tours back, time and again, to the same areas, so that they get to know all of the local leaders. The troop-to-task ratio to do this on a large-enough scale undoubtedly exceeds the two to three brigades currently being discussed. And those units should partner from the first day with Afghan battalions permanently assigned to the same area. We can enlist the tribes and the villagers in self-defense units, and pay them modestly. The surest engine of local economic growth is the provision of local jobs.

Although NATO countries will object, a standardized operational approach has merit. For too long we thrashed around in Iraq, allowing each division, brigade and battalion to determine its own tactics and operational plan. Generals Petraeus and Odierno were the first senior commanders to lay down general operational principles to be followed by all combat units, with stress laid upon partnering with Iraqi units.

Similarly, American soldiers must patrol with Afghan forces. This is the most difficult of tasks-to train reliable Afghani soldiers and police when the Afghan political power structure is untrustworthy. As Admiral Mullen said in September, “Until those Afghan forces have the support of local leaders to improve security on their own, we will only be there as a crutch-and a temporary one at that.” The goal is to increase Afghan forces to about two hundred thousand by expanding the army to one hundred thirty thousand by 2014, at a cost of $20 billion, and increasing the size of the national police from sixty thousand (half of whom have received formal training) to eighty thousand.

This plan is also similar to the one executed in Iraq in many ways. There, U.S. commanders worked to knit together Iraqi commanders with the leaders of the Sunni tribes and Sunni irregular forces. The Americans slowly molded the local leaders, while weeding out the unfit. In turn, the American military gradually became an advocate for the local areas, pressuring the sclerotic and sectarian Baghdad government to deliver services.

Iraq has demonstrated that the embedding of American small units among the population, partnered with indigenous security forces, can bring about local security. This model would link Afghan police and army commanders with local leaders to build a more stable society. It also involves the Americans in local disputes, in arguments about imposing the rule of law and in insisting that the central government deliver services to the local level. In Iraq, corruption was rife and Prime Minister Maliki controlled all indictments. This ensured his influence over a host of politicians and officials. But there were ample petrodollars to disburse, and the American advisers could glimpse some progress, albeit faltering, in moving funds to the local level.

IN AFGHANISTAN, the problem is doubled. Sparse funds must be extracted from Kabul and restricted from the poppy trade, while not expunging the poppy fields without a substitute crop. Poppy cultivation has decreased by 20 percent since the 2007 record crop, and eighteen of the thirty-four provinces are poppy-free. But 50 percent of the world's opium is grown in Helmand Province in southeast Afghanistan, where the Taliban taxes the farmers an estimated $70 million. Poppy fields account for an estimated five hundred thousand acres, with a yield of eight hundred tons. In a country with an unemployment rate of 40 percent, the heroin/opium industry provides jobs for 3 million workers and produces $4 billion in total revenues, about 40 percent of the gross national product.

In January of 2006, CENTCOM declared the drug trade to be “the number one threat” to Afghanistan's democracy and freedom. Improving governance requires firing or arresting corrupt officials. The opium trade has corrupted all segments of Afghani leadership-from tribal and military rulers to individual warlords. Afghanistan's President Karzai, however, has strictly limited NATO and U.S. efforts to investigate and arrest drug overlords because the web of corruption entangles officeholders at all levels.

This is, of course, nothing new. In fact, in many countries, corruption-theft and bribery-has lubricated a functioning government and insured a stable order. The leaders of most Arab oil-exporting states dispense sufficient treasure to motivate a loyal bureaucracy, including the security forces, to perform their jobs. In the 1860s, the British in India granted local authority and property rights to landlords called zamindars. Permitted to tax and thus benefit, the zamindar bureaucracy ruthlessly stamped out anti-British movements because a rebellion meant the end of their livelihoods. Corruption and bribery actually ensured stability.

The trouble with Afghanistan is that corruption is having the opposite effect. What happened under Chiang Kai-shek in China in 1949 is similar to the goings-on in Afghanistan today. Chiang's government is cited in counterinsurgency theory as an example of how corruption corroded a regime, leading to victory by the guerrillas. It wasn't the corruption itself that destroyed the ruling class, but rather the actions of Chiang's subordinates. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Roger Myerson argued, “The problem was that highly connected government agents took profits from their positions without providing the governance and services that were expected of them.” So subordinates were rewarded when they performed their jobs correctly-and when they failed. Those failures then became the insurgents' gains, spreading the perception that Chiang's rule was doomed. The subordinates began to steal more and more before the window of opportunity closed. They did nothing to prevent the collapse they had engineered by their own ineptitude.

In Afghanistan, the warlords and the provincial officials profiting from the opium trade are working against the state by eroding its legitimacy. CENTCOM is correct in identifying the effects of the opium cabals, but has not advanced a strategy to counter them. The United States has to imprison insurgents and drug dealers if the Afghan government will not do so. This is the hardest part. Currently, there is no consensus inside NATO for prosecuting a serious strategy intended to destroy the opium trade. Afghan officials at all levels are dirty and have no moral credibility among the people. If American units, living alongside Afghan soldiers and local tribal gangs, are ordered to straighten out a corrupt mess, they can do it in a few years-if they have the power to arrest and to imprison. In essence, American units would be working against the interests of many in the Afghan government, which parallels the ironic situation of the U.S. military in Iraq.

AT THE end of the day, we have to face up to the reality of what it would take to achieve our goals, and to wrestle with our limitations. Afghanistan may be a war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but it is also a battle for the security, safety and prosperity of the Afghani people. This is about tracking down an enemy while building a society. And choices must be made. Is the goal of the U.S. military to shore up security along the eastern border, or to rebuild the entire nation? Can the former be done without the latter?

In 2001, the CIA and the Special Operations Command rented warlords to attack the Taliban. After al-Qaeda fled, America's goals changed radically. Five years later, the United States government was hatching ploys to manipulate those warlords into disarming, forsaking the profits of the drug trade and yielding power to officials in Kabul whose backgrounds were as shady as those of the warlords.

America's goal escalated into building a democratic, prosperous nation. In 2007, the NATO commander in Afghanistan explained that NATO's International Security Assistance Force facilitated reconstruction so the “Afghan people might enjoy self-determination, education, health, and the peaceful realization of their hopes and dreams.” Along that same line, Admiral Mullen also said in September of 2008 that Afghanistan needs highways, electricity, commerce, alternative crops to poppy, foreign investment, reliable provincial governors and a justice system based on the rule of law. “These are the keys to success in Afghanistan,” he said. “We can't kill our way to victory.”

It's strange to hear a military commander during war saying he can't kill his way to victory. Our police don't tell us they can't catch all the criminals. We expect our police to provide security even in impoverished areas. Similarly, we expect our military to destroy al-Qaeda by killing its members. The American military mission is not nation building. If poverty and poor government were the causes of insurgencies, most of the countries in the world would be at war. To prevent more recruits for the Islamic extremists, we'd like to have a tolerant democracy and a thriving economy in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. But if we make that a precondition for crushing al-Qaeda, we will be in Afghanistan for decades.

Only a few years ago, the Bush administration vigorously rejected the idea of involving the Pentagon in nation building. With a 20 percent literacy rate among men and 7 percent among women, Afghanistan faces staggering obstacles to development, even without an insurgency. But the United States sank over $20 billion into development projects in Iraq that disappeared. It's not at all proven that the United States can build another sovereign nation in our image. The broad goals Admiral Mullen outlined might be achieved in twenty or thirty years, if a coherent development strategy were devised and funded at several billions of dollars a year-that is, after security was established.

But nation building and economic development are distinct from the fundamental American mission of preventing the resurgence of al-Qaeda or its extremist affiliates. Our military strategy should treat development funds as a tool in achieving the mission of area security. Provincial Reconstruction Teams embedded in each American brigade and led by the brigade commander add value because they focus their efforts on local projects that give the local people an incentive to align with the American and Afghan security forces in the area. We should trim back our goals and our rhetoric about the end-state in Afghanistan. The U.S. military should focus on security, with economic development as a useful tool but not a mission.

THERE ARE proven methods from Iraq to establish local security, cultivate local leaders and hand off control to local Afghan security forces. It won't be quick and easy; we're talking years of effort by tens of thousands of American soldiers. But the techniques exist. Still, we need to understand that doing so is simply playing defense. It does not directly place pressure on al-Qaeda inside Pakistan.

President Bush failed to lead and to hold the United States together during the Iraq War. Because the war inside Afghanistan, plus raids across the border into Pakistan, will go on for years, the major challenge for the new administration is to win the steady support of the public and both parties in Congress. To avoid divisiveness at home, Afghanistan cannot be handed off to the generals and ambassadors. The political pressures going forward to reduce the defense budget will be intense, requiring the president to lobby constantly for the resources to fight the war. He must remain involved daily as the commander in chief of a nation at war, because the “good war” is going to get a lot bigger.

Francis J. “Bing” West is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.