In Afghanistan, We Know Failure When We See It

I've been mulling over the inability of Ambassador Holbrooke and Defense Secretary Gates to define success in Afghanistan or to speculate about how long Americans should expect to be fighting a war there. (In case you missed it, take a look at the video of these men dodging the question.)

Here's my problem: this is a very basic question, and the answer is very simple. We've chosen counterinsurgency as our strategy in Afghanistan. Here's the definition of victory according to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, page six:

"Victory is achieved when the populace consents to the government's legitimacy and stops actively and passively supporting the insurgency."

Also, not unrelated is this passage on page xxv:

"...civilians must be separated from insurgents to insulate them from insurgent pressure and to deny the insurgent "fish" the cover of the civilian 'sea.' By doing so, counterinsurgents can militarily isolate, weaken and defeat the insurgents."

Defining success in Afghanistan is thus a very simple matter: Because the insurgents are the Taliban (whom we seek to defeat because their victory in the Afghan civil conflict would supposedly create an al-Qaeda safe haven), and because the Taliban is a movement inside the Pashtun ethnicity, we can precisely define the target population as the Pashtuns, who form the "civilian sea" referenced above that actively and passively supports the insurgency. So, they are the population which we must separate from the Taliban. We can thus restate the manual's definition of victory by making it specific to the current conflict. According to counterinsurgency doctrine:

Victory in Afghanistan will be achieved when the Pashtuns consent to the government's legitimacy and stop actively and passively supporting the Taliban insurgency.

That took all of five minutes, and I don't have a government bureaucracy at my disposal to aid in my research, nor did my department publish the book. With that in mind, there are really only two possibilities:

1. The ambassador and defense secretary actually do not know how to define victory within the U.S.'s chosen strategic paradigm of counterinsurgency (in which case they are incompetent and should be dismissed immediately); or
2. They do in fact know the answer to this very basic question, and they don't want to give it.

I don't believe that #1 is true (although other criteria may prove them incompetent), and that leaves us with #2. That, in turn, leaves us with a question: why would these men not want to publicize the simple answer to the question of "success"? The answer, I believe, is that stating the definition for success out loud would allow for public discussion and evaluation of our strategy. U.S. policymakers want to avoid such an evaluation of where we are in relation to COIN doctrine's definition of success for a very simple reason: our attempt at counterinsurgency has already failed.

For those that are new to this discussion, here's a map showing the geographic distribution of Afghanistan's main ethnic groups.

That light green crescent in the south denotes the Pashtun homelands, which extend across the border into Pakistan.

Now take a look at this map from the BBC denoting the level of violence in each district in Afghanistan:

BBC explains:

The "areas of militant control" indicate Taliban strongholds; "high risk areas" where there has been major clashes with insurgents; and "medium" or "low risk" are where there has been some or little violence.

Reuters further explains that this map

was produced in April 2009, before a dramatic escalation of violence ahead of the August 20 ballot.

Note that the April 2009 date of the latter map means that it was produced before the launch of the major operation in Helmand earlier this year. The Afghan NGO Safety Office noted that the increase in troops in the first half of 2009 failed to disrupt insurgents abilities to plan and execute attacks against the U.S. and allies:

"attacks in Kandahar have grown >50% over the year and in Helmand they have stayed consistent with 2008 rates."

Not only do the insurgents continue to mount attacks from within the Pashtun "sea," but the Pashtuns have, by and large, rejected participation in the processes of the Afghan national government. In overwhelming numbers, they stayed home during last week's election.

Meanwhile, turnout was paltry in southern districts where British forces and U.S. Marines all but held the door for Afghan voters. Obama dispatched 17,000 additional combat forces to Afghanistan ahead of the election, but the threat of Taliban violence and reprisal apparently kept voters at home.

The Times of London reported Thursday that only 150 of the several thousand Afghans eligible to vote in the Babaji area of Helmand province cast ballots. Four British soldiers were killed there this summer, a toll the newspaper recalled with the blunt headline: "Four British soldiers die for the sake of 150 votes."

This is a disaster for a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. The Obama Administration and the COIN afficionados within it were banking heavily on the election to flip the Pashtuns, who, according to Bruce Riedel (one of Obama's trusted advisors on Afghanistan), had never bought into the central government's legitimacy in the first place:

The Pashtun belt in the south has been disaffected from the beginning. I think when we look back at this, the Pashtun majority in the southern provinces, to a lesser extent than the eastern provinces but certainly in the southern provinces, have never bought into the legitimacy of what happened at the end of 2001. They may not all support the Taliban, but they have never bought into the legitimacy of erasing the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan.

The administration was counting on the election to draw the Pashtuns into the political process. The widespread fraud and the refusal of huge numbers of Pashtuns to head to the polls, however, shows that the strategy failed.

A report from AFP puts a fine point on it, emphasis mine:

In some Taliban strongholds, such as Logar province south of Kabul, residents said turnout was negligible.

"In my village there are more than 6,000 people. Only seven voted," mechanic Mansour Stanikzai told AFP in the provincial capital Pul-i-Alam.

...

"The reason we had the election was to give legitimacy to the government, and we have failed in that goal," said analyst Haroun Mir.

Taken together, the ongoing use of the Pashtun homelands as the base for the insurgency and the Pashtuns' rejection of the processes of the central government show that after eight years, 807 U.S. military casualties, $228 billion dollars (so far; the full cost will exceed half-a-trillion dollars) and more than 20,000 Afghan civilian deaths, we have utterly failed to convince the Pashtuns in Afghanistan to "consent to the government's legitimacy and stop actively and passively supporting the insurgency."

In fact, as Dexter Filkins' article in The New York Times shows, the massive election fraud will make it impossible for even the United States to endorse the legitimacy of the Afghan national government until questions of election fraud are adequately addressed, putting the political element of counterinsurgency (referred to by the COIN field manual as the prime element of COIN) into indefinite limbo while more and more U.S. troops spill into the country.

In other words, the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan has been a total failure.

Reports indicate General McChrystal will soon ask for 20,000 more troops for this debacle. The President and Congress should say no and end our military involvement in Afghanistan as quickly as possible. Americans know failure when they see it.

(Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. You can learn more about how the war in Afghanistan undermines American security by watching the newest segment of Rethink Afghanistan, "Part Six: Security.")

Follow Derrick Crowe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/derrickcrowe

Comments

[Garvagh]

Great maps. (I would love to see Sarah Palin quizzed on the ethnic divisions in Afghanistan.)

Does anyone else wonder why the US has been taking the lead in dealing with Afghanistan? Why nbot let Iran, Russia and China work out the best solution for lowering the level of violence in that country? Why squander $500 billion of US taxpayer dollars on this adventure?

[joebaggadonuts]

Let's see. We have George Will saying get us out. Derrick Crowe is saying it.

I guess all we need now is the UN to say it.

Let's declare victory and leave.

[potrerohillman]

i still remain baffled as to why this president is so committed to what appears to be a wrongheaded continued involvement in afghanistan. he had the opportunity to break with the stupidity of the previous administration but ischosing to double down on a bad bet.

[LTBROWN]

It's time to bring our troops home. PERIOD! D@mn the politics, we're not needed nor wanted there or Iraq. THE USA is our responsibility, FIRST.

[rwe2late]

Plainly stated:

1) most Afghans don't want foreign military occupation

2) the US generals don't want to clearly state how long their 'job' will take, because that would also mean clearly stating what they intend to do.

3) they intend to kill Afghans (however many millions), until the only Afghans remaining will be those who like foreign military occupation.

4) any who call that genocide instead of "draining the swamp" will be labeled as 'enemy' sympathizers.

[watchTVgetSTUPID]

CSPAN had a panel of talking heads discussing the Afghan election. They ended up saying the corrupt election process had the opposite intended effect ... instead of increasing the legitimacy of the government, it verified the illegitimacy of the government. They said this is critical because it is tied to the perception the foreign troops are simply an occupying force. They also said we are fighting a lost cause if the foreign troops are seen as an occupying force.

To cap it off it was clear, the Afghan government vote is less legitimate than their 2004 vote. Obviously, the panel on CSPAN was supposed to put the best public face on the Afghan war for the sake of US public consumption. It turned out to be the opposite effect when they responded to the audience questions. Last time that panel takes questions from the audience

[DRaymond]

The problem is that if we pull out here the terrorists really do win, and it will provide them a safe haven to terrorize Pakistan too.

Several things need to happen. First, the Karzai government needs to cut out the corruption and abuse. Second is going to be to develop competent provincial and local government from the local population. Aiding both will be getting the economy off of a base of illegal opium sales. Frankly the best way might be to provide planting loans and price supports for any crop other than opium. The Taliban control the population because they control the planting loans, which are paid for with opium.

[Billy Hell]

Who are the terrorists in Afghanistan?

[rwe2late]

DRaymond
You are in a dream world.
The ONLY kind of government that will support the US occupation is a corrupt, unpopular, quisling government like Karzai's.
NO WAY would a honest, popular, patriotic Afghan government support what the US is doing.

If you want to know who benefits from drug production, you need look no further than Karzai, his relatives and allies, and the CIA.

[indy100]

If we don't pull out we continue to inspire more uneducated, radical Islamic men to become terrorists and fight against the invaders; aka The United States.

[discussant]

At first it seemed to me as if it is a republican talking point, but then I realized that they are asking us to withdraw too soon!
1. Taliban's legitimacy in Afghan's eyes comes from its eradication of drug traffic. They had wiped it out but Karzai our friend brought it back in. Money from drug proliferated. The allegations I've read somewhere else were that Talibans engage in drug profits. On the contrary, they eradicated it but President Karzai's government profits with drug money and US supports him. How awkward indeed. So, conclusively, we cannot have effective counterinsurgency when our fundamentals are not clear or clean.
2. We consider those fighters to be "cowards". I heard an interview of a 28 year old marine say those things. He said "these cowards are not like those hired fighters like Chechens in Iraq he saw." "These cowards use 13 year old kids and send them to paradise."
3. No wonder our military finds the enemy cowardly, and they find it too shameful to engage.
4. I have written earlier that their strategy is long term engagement in the mountain ranges. If we engage reluctantly without an exit strategy, eight years of war will not be prudent at all.
5. By the very definitions derived from the manual of counterinsugency, it is operationally ineffective when the population does not cooperate.

[regularmess]

Soldiers die. This is the right war. Remember: http://thehappeningstory.blogspot.com/

[webnuts4u2]

Vietnam release 2.0.

[Kai Holland]

Winning is not the goal - perpetual war is. People who own and run companies making war supplies and weapons, and supplying contractors, etc. are making a killing on these wars, as are the elected officials who vote for them. War is great business. (And it doesn’t hurt to control the oil in the region either.)

[HamletsMill]

Yep.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Shoup

[doneflyin]

And again yep. We like failure. We need it to continue the goal of perpetual war.
We've been in perpetual war since WWII.
That war got us out of the Depression and made gops of money for the war profiteers. We haven't looked back since. It's all we have left. 800 bases in over 130 countries.Yep, it's what we do.

We'll always have a war somewhere until this Empire collapses. History has shown us this. All empires eventually burn themselves out.
We run out of money, material, soldiers and little bitty third world countries to kick around.
If that sounds cycnical, it's really not. Just realistic.

[Mogamboguru]

Perfect assessment.

I reluctantly, yet wholeheartedly agree. Fanned.

[bacaja]

It appears that "terrorists" are destroying everything!

[Billy Hell]

They are. They need to come home. They've done enough damage there already.

[forurby]

It is now Obama's war.

[ScipioAfricanus]

Derrick's piece was indeed interesting, but more for what it left out than what it said. Let me quote now from p. 249 of Ahmed Rasheed's 2008 masterpiece, "Descent Into Chaos":

"In Quetta [Pakistan] the JUI [Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a radical Islamic party in Pakistan] virtually handed over Pashtunabad, a large sprawling suburb, to the Afghan Taliban. Thousands of long-haired, kohl-eyed, black-turbaned Taliban roamed the streets. They forced or bought out the local residents and soon owned every home, shop, tea stall, and hotel in Pashtunabad. New madrassas were built to house a new young generation, who banned television, the taking of photographs, and the flying of kites, replicating Kandahar in the early 1990s. Local people, including the police and journalists, were too frightened to enter the suburb."

Quetta is also the headquarters of the Pakistani Army's Command and Staff College, and a major center for Pakistan's Interservice Intelligence (ISI), which created, trained, and funded the original Taliban that terrorized Afghanistan for so many years and who gave aid and comfort to bin Laden and his band of merry murderers. As long as the Afghan Taliban leaders are able to maintain an unmolested presence in Pashtunabad--80 miles from the Afghan border--Americans will continue to die in Afghanistan...and that is why we're losing the war.

scipiothee­lder.blogs­pot.com

[xilduq]

The answer is obvious: invade Pakistan. Look at all the soon to be out of work soldiers with the coming withdrawal of Iraq. The bogus wars can be kept up forever.

[doneflyin]

Pakistan has nukes. We don't invade countries that have nuclear weapons.
That's one of the main reasons Iran wants nuclear power. They know that sooner or later we'll come for their oil.

[jaysea50]

Well, I stated over and over prior to our ever committing troops to this fiasco, and, by the way, Iraq as well, we should never put men on the ground in either of those countries. It was always my contention that neither was what we could call "winable" in light of our definition of the word. For the right strategy and a couple billion bucks we could make both countries regretful they had ever had thoughts about the tower bombing, and there wouldnot have been more than a handful of casualties. But, alas, who would listen to peon, when all the "pros" have all the right answers? So now we pay!

[salh]

Do we want to be attacked again like we were on 9/11/2001? We need to wipe put the nest of terrorists there!!!

[KUVVY]

Atomic bomb would do the trick,then we would be safe. Iraq would like not to be attacked again Afghanistan too. Maybe a more precise attack on our terrorist enemy would work better than the 'shot gun"technique

[Billy Hell]

You're still falling for that line? You think the invasions of either Iraq (who had nothing to do with 9/11) or Afghanistan which has been botched from the get go, have made America safer? Pffft!