Scott recently raised some skepticism about the potential impact of the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, former operational commander of the Afghan Taliban.

Today word is out that another high ranking Afghan Taliban was captured by the Pakistanis.  This time it was Mullah Abdul Salam, Governor of the so-called Afghan Shadow Government in the Province of Kunduz.

Add to this Jane Perlez’s brilliant piece last week in the New York Times and I think Pakistan’s strategy in the region begins to come into focus.

Perlez:

Pakistan has told the United States it wants a central role in resolving the Afghan war and has offered to mediate with Taliban factions who use its territory and have long served as its allies, American and Pakistani officials said…What the Pakistanis can offer is their influence over the Taliban network of Jalaluddin and Siraj Haqqani, whose forces American commanders say are the most lethal battling American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

So after reading the (chai?) tea leaves on this one, here is my take:

The Pakistanis are making their move and want to make clear to the Americans (and NATO) that they are going to be the power broker in the post-occupation government of Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s military appears to be deploying its own version of a “reconcilables” vs. irreconcilables” COIN strategy with respect to the various anti-Western insurgent groups in Afghanistan and even their own tribal territories. The Pakistanis have (I think) decided which Afghan Taliban (the so-called Quetta Shura) are unable to be converted/dealt with and are turning them in.  This puts pressure on the Taliban left in Afghanistan ito make the deals that the Pakistanis are now going to push for and that President Karzai has previously said he is willing to make—in essence amnesty, payoffs, and probably government/military posts.

Furthermore, the Pakistani Army has taken on the southern Waziristan strongholds of the so-called Pakistani Taliban (Tehri-i-Taliban), allowing the US to assassinate (via drone) various leaders within the movement–first Beitullah Mehsud and more recently, Hakimullah Mehsud.

The Pakistanis, however, have a long standing (since the anti-Soviet jihad) relationship with the Haqqani network and the Hizb i Islami party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyr.

The Pakistanis seem to be playing good cop/bad cop with the Haqqanis, telling them that they (the Pakistanis) are the only thing holding back more drone attacks.  If the Haqqanis and the Hekmatyr forces see the Afghan Taliban leadership as increasingly vulnerable, maybe this brings them to the negotiating table.

The Pakistanis did not participate in the Bonn Conference negotiations which brought to power the Karzai government, a deal that was largely struck with the Iranians and the Indians – in other words, Pakistan’s two biggest regional rivals.  The Pakistanis now see a couple of things:

1. The occupation has failed and the new COIN strategy, however effective militarily, is too heavily dependent on the corrupt Karzai government to be long-lasting.

2. The Bonn Conference paradigm of Afghanistan (2001-2010) is also a failure: cf the rigged elections from last fall.

The Pakistanis now see their opening to force the US (and other regional actors) to accept a post-Bonn Afghanistan, which will not be a total return of power of the Taliban as in the 1990s but will include a number of anti-Western insurgent groups in the eventual governing structure.

It’s a shrewd if very dangerous game on the part of the Pakistani military–who in everything but name is now back to running the country, at least with respect to foreign policy.

To answer Scott’s skepticism, all of this again points to the fact that the US should just eliminate the middle man by ignoring the failed Afghan national government in favor of buying off local groups.   Scott suggests the Taliban are practicing a form of 4th generation warfare, complete with their own version of “winning hearts and minds.” Still, the Taliban continue to rely a strategy of body count terrorism—roadside and suicide bombs, etc.   I believe the Afghan Taliban are vulnerable to a joint US military “surge” plus a program of buying off and even deputizing various insurgents and/or tribal leaders (including whole swathes of former Taliban operatives), keeping up the pressure on Taliban leadership with assistance from the Pakistani military, and accepting the likelihood of amnesty for the Haqqanis and Hekmatyr in Afghanistan.

It won’t be a pretty situation but this would probably allow the US to keep a sufficient presence in the area to prevent al-Qaeda’s re-emergence.  This strategy would also allow the US and NATO to exit (I would guess) within the next two to two-and-a-half years.  A strategy of clear, hold, build, and hand over to the Afghan National Government, however, is a complete non-starter and would give plenty of time for the Afghan Taliban to re-group, hide out, and bide their time, while preventing any movement towards a deal with Haqqani and/or Hekmatyr and their forces.

It’s been a while since Chris and I jumped on Skype and rambled on for a while about the state of the world and associated topics, so we decided to remedy that fact last night. What follows is the first part (approximately 35 minutes) of our discussion about Obama’s decisions around Afghanistan, counter insurgency strategies, and American foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East more generally.

Part 2 will follow in a day or two so as to break up what are usually hour plus conversations into smaller, bite sized chunks. Check out the audio below the fold. [Read more →]

Elrod at The Moderate Voice, writing in response to criticisms of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy for setting a withdrawal date, argues:  (h/t Matt Duss at WonkRoom):

Quite simply, the Taliban does not have the luxury of “waiting us out” for 18 months. If they survive that long then it is because we failed in our ground-level counterinsurgency policy, not because we telegraphed our intention not to stay indefinitely. And if they do try and lay low and wait us out, the Afghan army and government will have had that much more time to establish its legitimate control over the entirety of southern Afghanistan.

Duss adds:

If killing the enemy were the main goal, then their decision to hunker down and wait for the U.S. to begin leaving might be a problem. But as the main goal of the new COIN strategy in Afghanistan is to secure the population, build trust with local communities through effective delivery of services, all the while increasing Afghan capacity to continue doing those things when we leave, it’s really not. The Taliban “waiting us out” would just give the U.S. more time and space to make Afghanistan a more inhospitable place for the Taliban.

While I agree with both Elrod and Matt that the criticisms of a timeline for withdrawal are often misguided, their comeback has its own set of problems.

It’s true that while the COIN strategy is population-centric rather than enemy-centric, this strategy is still too focused on a nation-state as a self-contained territory.  The assumption being that if you get villagers on your side with better services and then train an army & police force to guard the country as we begin to leave, the Taliban will not find any willing hosts.

Of course, the Afghan Taliban themselves have a head start and have been perfecting their own form of population-centric (i.e. tribal or village-centric) insurgency these past few years.

To counter that trend, the US wants to initiate its own form of population-centric warfare.  This would entail a village by village strategy, but what is the relationship between the village-centric counter-insurgency and training a national army and police force?  Taking a population-centric strategy would lead to empowering local leaders to form tribal-based security outfits, but this will undoubtedly come at the expense of the national government’s influence, which to begin with doesn’t have much effective control outside of Kabul.  I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing as I’ve never been a fan of the state-building mission in Afghanistan, but there’s a zero-sum trade off between local militias and the country’s national government.

Max Weber defined the nation-state as having a monopoly on the means of legitimate force within its boundaries. At least in Afghanistan, population-centric counter-insurgency undermines that reality.   This is where (I think) Elrod’s response breaks down. The lack of centralized control undermines his last argument about the government (presumably via a national army) establishing “legitimate” sovereign control over the south of the country.  Of course, legitimate sovereign control assumes the modern Weberian nation-state as the prime locus of the country’s political identity.  [Read more →]

Spencer Ackerman points me to this Tom Ricks post on David Kilcullen’s speech re: Afghanistan.

Ricks on Kilcullen’s central argument:

His [Kilcullen's] bottom line is that there are two real options in Afghanistan: Either tell the Kabul government we are pulling out, or put in enough troops to actually break the cycle of corruption, which he said would be a minimum of about 40,000. “We either put in enough to control, or we get out.” The worst thing we could do, he added, is put in enough troops to get more people killed but not enough to do anything to break change the behavior of corrupt officials. Also, he said, it is more about what you do than the actual number of troops — “If you do it wrong, you could put it a million troops and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

Can someone explain to me how 40,000 troops breaks a cycle of political corruption in another country? And in this case, Afghanistan?

I don’t want to be mean here, but this reminds me of the classic economist in a rowboat with a can of beans joke—-”assume a can-opener.”

“Assume a non-corrupt government.”  Or assume somehow that troops and security will solve endemic corruption.

The only way I see troops “controlling” Afghanistan is through a direct, old-school colonial takeover, Vice-Regency style.  At the end of the day, though I think unintended, this is where Kilcullen’s logic may be leading.  At the very least, the US/NATO would have to install a strongman dictator.

A US surge in Afghanistan only delays the inevitable political confrontation that has to occur in that country.

The initial late 2001 US “shock and awe” invasion in a country as underdeveloped as Afghanistan created an opening moment that allowed for a quasi-political shakeup.  The Bonn Agreement was inked, the government was sworn in, the Taliban (at that point) had been ejected, and then the country was basically abandoned to make way for the invasion of Iraq.

While COIN thinkers like Kilcullen will point (legitimately) to the failed follow-up military strategy for securing the country, I think the deeper truth is that the Bonn Paradigm has failed in Afghanistan at the political level.  The recent elections in Afghanistan and the entire framework of an attempted centralized state build-up is central to that Bonn framework.  Whether this could have worked had it received more resources from 2002-2007 is worth asking as a hypothetical but at this point is academic.  The fact is that political consolidation has failed.

All of the discussion of an Afghanistan surge and COIN strategies simply dances around the edges and never gets what to what I believe is the core question:  what is the political endgame if the state-led operation has failed?

Here follows a list of many of the key native political actors in Afghanistan: [Read more →]

Part I here, Part II here.

The Obama administration has proposed a very, very narrow objective, which is counterterrorism, and a very maximalist, broad definition of how to achieve it, which extends to counterinsurgency and the defeat of the Taliban, and basically the fixing of the entire Afghan state. And the whole problem with this strategy is its very narrow aim is connected to this hugely ambitious means.

That’s Rory Stewart, laying out a very precise and well thought out criticism of the Obama administration (and by extension the military generals) in relation to Afghanistan.

Here he gets to the heart of it:

I think what we’re talking about is actually state building, not nation building, which is to say that it’s very blind to politics, to religion, to history, to culture, to context — the kinds of things from which nation [building] is composed.

Nation building could only be done by an Afghan Thomas Jefferson. It’s a job for a founding father. It’s an indigenous project. State building, in the view of the Pentagon, is a very technical, technocratic process where there are certain things just listed off: civil service; legitimate monopoly on the use of violence; good financial administration; the rule of law; a pragmatically regulated free market. It sometimes seems to be a little bit like the recipe for building a garden shed or baking a cake. It’s a management consultancy tool for fixing a state.

The COIN strategy advocated by many in the military (and some in the administration it would seem) talks about clearning, holding, and building. Clearing areas os insurgents, holding the territory (called population-centric warfare), and then building.  In many cases building a state.  But also building buildings, schools, roads, local government, and a whole host of other things.

But here’s the problem:

Counterinsurgency is the most fashionable thing at the moment because the U.S. military believes that’s what allowed them to turn around the situation in Iraq. Afghanistan, however much people claim otherwise, is really about Iraq. It’s really about the fact that people said it couldn’t be done in Iraq and it was done.

And a lot of the U.S. military think if we manage to pull it off there, we can pull it off again. … What they forget is that what made it work in Iraq is all about Iraq. It’s all about Iraqi politics; it’s all about Iraqi government; it’s all about Iraqi landscape. You try to move the same thing over to Afghanistan, where you don’t have that kind of government, you don’t have that kind of landscape, you don’t have that kind of politics, it’s not going to succeed.

What Afghanistan does not have is a history of a strong central state, a history of a large national army/police force, or a middle class, nor a heavily urbanized existence.

To wit: [Read more →]

For Part I here.

So I’m breaking my own rules in this second post (a little bit).  I said these posts would only be buitl around the interviews in this PBS documentary, but then Peter Bergen had to go and write a really important piece in TNR that merits some comment.

The central thrust of Bergen’s argument is:

“Today, at the leadership level, the Taliban and Al Qaeda function more or less as a single entity.”

Bergen here means the high leadership level of both the Afghan Taliban (or more properly Quetta Shura led by Mullah Omar) and The Tehrik-i-Pakistani, i.e. The Pakistani Taliban (now under the leadership of Hakimullah Mehsud).

The evidence he provides is substantial with Bergen arguing that al-Qaeda has essentially become a kind of embedded military trainer for The Taliban leadership.

Bergen then proceeds to knock down various counterarguments that for example al-Qaeda will move to Somalia or Yemen and thereby be as effective as in Pakistan-Afghanistan.  Or that the internet allows for more training or that urban centers in the West are grounds for the training of terrorist attacks.  As to the latter, the real operational training took place in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whatever logistical and coordinational plans were hatched in Western cities (e.g. Hamburg in 9/11).

Bergen is the Western world authority on al-Qaeda, so I think he makes a persuasive case that the leadership of the Taliban and al-Qaeda are in deep symbiosis.

However there is this point:

And it is also true that Taliban foot soldiers today are fighting for any number of reasons–ranging from cash payments, to tribal opposition to the government, to a hatred of foreigners.

This leaves a potential opening for what in COIN terminology is called separating the reconcilables and the irreconcilables.  The reconcilables being drawn from the “foot soldier” ranks, the irreconcilables being the top layer leadership.

Now reconciliation to what?  And here I think Bergen near the end of the article leaves something to be desired. [Read more →]

This weekend I finally managed to have the time to sit down and watch this excellent PBS Frontline documentary called Obama’s War. Highly recommended and hats off to the folks at Frontline for a very good piece of work on an extremely important topic.  I’m going to do a number of posts all branching out of this doc this week. One of the key strengths of this film is that it gets some very big name folks on all sides of this issue.

As Andrew Exum (who by the way has the greatest avatar in the blogosphere), one of the ones interviewed put it:

John Nagl, Bill Mayville and Stan McChrystal make a good argument for a counterinsurgency campaign, while Andrew Bacevich and an especially pithy Celeste Ward make a good argument against pursuing such a campaign. All sides, in other words, acquit themselves rather well. All sides, that is, save for the Pakistani officials.

Digging deeper into the Frontline site, there is a page with transcripts from all the interviewers.  There are a whole mess of them, but the best ones in my opinion are Steve Coll, Andrew Bacevich, John Nagl-Andrew Exum, and Rory Stewart.

Nagl, Exum, and McChyrstal are on the side of a full counterinsurgency (COIN) operation in Afghanistan following their work in Iraq, predicated on clearing insurgents, holding territory, and building infrastructure policy so that a central government might come into take over, thereby allowing a natural exit of US/NATO/ISAF forces.

Stewart and Bacevich, for various differing reasons, stand opposed to such a position.

While Steve Coll represents something of an in-between point of view.

So I’ll start with Coll.  His interview is here.  Coll has the best understanding of the history of Afghanistan, and as a guy with a history degree, I think it’s the best place to start.  [Read more →]

George Packer has been digging through books on Vietnam as to what they may tell us about Afghanistan.  (George is smart enough to know that actually Vietnam is probably not the best place to look but it does offer some relevant information).**

His most recent post on the subject involves the new book Why Vietnam Matters by Rufus Phillips. According to Packer, Phillips was the only American who really understood Vietnam as a place, as a people, its history and governance.

Phillips sent a note to Packer that is reprinted on the blog.  Some key excerpts–but please read the whole post (and especially the whole letter):

I’m afraid the President, who seems like a supremely rational being, is trying to find the most rational policy option on Afghanistan, without thinking about whether it is feasible given political conditions on the ground, as well as who is going to implement it and how. What seems the most rational option here could be likely unworkable over there.  This is part of what happened to President Johnson during Vietnam. He relied exclusively on policy ‘experts’ who understood military and geopolitical strategy in the light of World War II and Korea, but who had no direct experience combating a ‘people’s war,’ while underestimating the North Vietnamese and misunderstanding the importance of the South Vietnamese, who were treated as bystanders. His advisers constructed strategies whose feasibility never got tested by those who knew Vietnam first hand…

I don’t see evidence of any real political thinking about how to deal with Karzai and the local political scene, no matter what option is selected. As we swing between counterproductive table pounding and passive non-interference, we must muster the will to interfere quietly but firmly when we are on solid moral ground—standing up for the Afghan people and for principles of honest governance. (my emphasis)

I generally loathe Vietnam analogies to Afghanistan because of its politicization in American consciousness.  But as a marker, both countries are examples of fourth-generation warfare insurgencies.  In some ways Afghanistan is pushing towards a potentially fifth-generation or open-source form of insurgency.  In other ways not.

Regardless, the track record of superpowers in 4GW insurgencies (and then counterinsurgencies) is not very good to put it mildly.  The key is that the wars are won while the follow-up peace cannot be won, while the advising crew (as per Phillips’ comments) still thinks of everything in terms of war.  i.e. They are fighting the wrong battle both in their minds and then on the fields.  Counterinsurgency is part of winning the peace and therefore relies heavily on the local government.  In the Afghan case, I think this is particularly problematic and I see no way around that impasse.

The individuals pushing for a ramped up COIN in Afghanistan–Petraeus, Nagl, Mullen, McChyrstal–would all seem to fit the bill of the experts who understand military and geopolitical strategy but not Afghanistan proper.  Nagl studied Malaysia (and of course Vietnam) and Petraeus/McChyrstal are Iraq War II guys.

I’ll just re-type that essential Phillips line: “I don’t see any evidence of any real political thinking about how to deal with Karzai and the local political scene.” None.  Nada.  Full stop.  Well that about says that.  [Read more →]

Freddie thinks that those (like Reihan) who are nervous about new so-called modest (or lowered) expectations should be.  Br. F-reddie also raises an question of feasibility of non-lowered expectations given Afghan history.  (Also check out ED’s important comment regarding the volatility of democracy in societies without rule of law, culture of transparency, less black market economics, and the like).

Reihan’s post was in response to a post by Andrew Sullivan responding to this post by Christian Brose in Foreign Policy (on the Shadow Gov’t Blog).  Brose’s piece is a classic in the well-written and thought out but potentially missing the trees for the continent kinda thing.  Brose discusses the recent Munich Security Conference and details what came out of the Conference (in helpful numbered points).  The only problem is he never asks whether the CW coming out of the Munish Security Conference is you know right or not. Whether it’s you no realistically doable or not.

Brose’s conclusion:

On a trip that left me more optimistic than I had been initially, one concern I take away is the tension that might emerge between Obama and Petraeus if the former wants to trim his sails and focus more on killing terrorists in Afghanistan while the latter wants to expand his efforts to foster population security. Not only would this be a tragic and detrimental outcome, it would be an ironic one: The general who Bush tapped in Iraq to jettison a losing counterterrorism approach in favor of a winning counterinsurgency strategy becoming the general who falls out of favor with Obama because he doesn’t want to do the reverse in Afghanistan.

First off the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq wasn’t exactly winning.  As even COIN Jedi Master Abu Muqawama pointed out, if the surge failed politically then it failed period.  Do or do not, there is no succeeded militarily but failed politically Young Skywalker.  That’s a very relevant point bringing us back to Freddie’s concern given Afghan politicaly history.  i.e. One could easily imagine a scenario whereby some population-centric surge equivalent takes place in Afghanistan, with a potential Sunni Anbar-like pay off some of the Afghan Tribes tactic, that we hear “succeded militarily” but Afghanistan’s political reality does not much change.  Or changes only to the “lowered expectations” Obama camp mindset.

And what should in my mind be of even more concern to the anti-modest expectations crowd is this post from one of my all-time favorite bloggers China Hand, pointing out that (unfortuantely for the best laid plans of Afghanistan lowered or unlowered), the real war is now in Pakistan.  Read the whole thing as they say, but here’s a crucial graf (my italics):

There appears to be a major disconnect between U.S. and Pakistani strategies for dealing with the Taliban’s entrenched presence and its increasing reach into non-Pashtun areas. Pending a review by the Obama administration, the U.S. considers the battles in west Pakistan an adjunct to the faltering Afghan adventure. As I argued elsewhere, this is a fatal misreading of the facts on the ground and ranks as a strategic blunder of historical portions.

It turns out the war against the Taliban is a counterinsurgency operation across the entire Pashtun ethnic area, on both sides of the Durand Line that arbitrarily splits the Pashtun homeland into Afghan and Pakistani jurisdictions, and in which the Taliban have discovered that their key bulwark against NATO and U.S. operations is, unsurprisingly, the Pakistan side.

This is the real nightmare scenario.  Having won a quick war in Afghanistan in 2001 and bungling the post-war “peace” or “occupation” by failing to build a nation-state, that ship has passed.  Obviously letting OBL escape across the mountains was bad enough, but there was no way given the earlier Bonn Conference that the Pashtun could be basically completely left out of the Karzai government.

That ship has sailed and while I think there was potentially a chance to pull something of value off in say 2001-2003, that ship has sailed I think.  And it ain’t coming back.  And here’s why.

As even Reihan alludes to, you would have to re-jigger the entire regional apparatus in which Afghanistan has always been a pawn (sadly) in the regional power player game.  Simultaneous to drawing down from Iraq and having to do with the coming level of violence and chaos that will likely result from that “gamble (scroll down half way on page).”

After (or concurrent to) having perfectly handled the complicated Iraq drawdown, plus resetting the entire political structure of Central and Southwest Asia, and building a nation-state among the 2nd poorest nation on earth during the Greatest Financial Crisis since the Great Depression as the entire monetary order that has guided the liberalized world since 1973 comes crumbling down, and then and only then fight the real war in a country with nuclear weapons.  Nuclear weapons which have ended nation-state to nation-state warfare leaving only these insurgent groups that create some much havoc in the world.  And somehow bring the Pashtun people into political representative reality on both sides of the border–while Afghanistan and Pakistan currently have less than pleasant relations.

I just don’t see a way to work around the Taliban’s veto.  There’s no winning the peace at this point in Afghanistan (and the fact that people like Brose and more importantly the NATO folk at Munich still look at the situation through a war lens doesn’t leave me feeling any better) but there may be I suppose a scenario whereby total collapse is averted.  And some strongman or stronger man than Karzai is installed. Given the rife ethnic histories I’m not so sure that’s possible.  But even if it were, what about Pakistan?  Not one of Brose’s 6 points is directly related to Pakistan which for me is really telling.

–

Update I: The insufferable Fred Kagan has a piece up in Newsweek apropos this topic.  Total Larison Bait.  An absolute underhanded softball waiting for Daniel to blast it outta the park.

It begins:

Just three months ago, Afghanistan was the “good” war. It was, according to all the conventional wisdom, the “real” central front in the war on terror, the war we had to win, the place to fight Al Qaeda, and the war we should have been focusing on all along. Nothing much has changed in Afghanistan since Barack Obama won the election, but conventional wisdom is swinging fast to the opposite viewpoint.

And begins its precipitous decline from there.