From FPRI:
PARALLELS WITH THE PAST -
How the Soviets Lost in Afghanistan,
How the Americans are Losing
by Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson
On May 20, 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, then the
American commander in Afghanistan, referred to the operation
in Marjah, Helmand-an operation earlier touted as a
potential turning point for U.S. Afghan counterinsurgency
(COIN)-as a "bleeding ulcer."[1] Immediately, we were
reminded of a similar expression from an earlier Afghan War.
On February 1986, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev speaking
to the 27th General Congress of the Communist Party posited
that the Soviet war in Afghanistan had become a "bleeding
wound." Was McChrystal's comment just an unfortunate choice
of words or a harbinger that the United States faced a
Soviet-style disaster in Afghanistan?
This article assesses the startling and unsettling
similarities between Soviet strategies and tactics in
Afghanistan during their Afghan war of 1979-1989 and
American coalition strategies and tactics in Afghanistan
since October 2001. It concludes with the implications of
this dynamic.[2] These similarities are extremely
disturbing and, we believe, should be the focus of national
attention and debate. While numerous significant
similarities exist, this article will center on just three
of the most important.
SOVIET AFGHAN INVASION
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day of
1979 ostensibly to rescue a failing Communist government.
The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had
overthrown the Mohammad Daoud government in April 1978 and
then engaged in bloody infighting and ambitious reforms that
shocked Afghanistan's largely rural and conservative
population into rebellion. The Soviets brought with them, in
December 1979, a new president for Afghanistan, Babrak
Karmal, who they installed in the Presidential Palace as
soon as they had killed Hafizullah Amin, the existing
president. The rebellion quickly turned into a national
resistance movement and the Soviets responded with sweep and
clear tactics aimed at depopulating the countryside that was
supporting and aiding the Afghan mujahedeen. By 1981,
Afghanistan had the dubious distinction of producing the
world's largest single refugee population, most of whom fled
to Pakistan or Iran. Pakistan also became the base for most
of the fledgling mujahedeen, who were eventually aided by
the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other
countries aligned against the Soviet Union in the last great
battle of the Cold War.
By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was bogged down in
Afghanistan even as a new generation of leadership was
emerging in Moscow. The new Soviet leadership realized that
time was running out on their Afghan adventure, and they
made significant strategic adjustments to try to rescue what
they could from what was shaping up to be a failure of epic
proportions. First, they shifted their military strategy
away from combating a rural insurgency to controlling the
population centers and the road corridor that connected
them. Second, they tried to change the unpopular puppet
government they had installed and took measures to boost its
popularity, primarily through a reconciliation program.
Third, the Soviets concentrated on building a competent
Afghan army and security forces to which they could hand off
the job of Afghan security. It appears that the United
States is trying to do all of these things again today, as
if the Soviet experience never happened.
Below we address the similarities in the Soviet and U.S.
approaches to Afghanistan; the three similarities addressed
are central to current U.S. and NATO Afghan strategies: the
focus on key population centers, reconciliation, and the
development of "Afghan" solutions to a variety of security
concerns.
POPULATION-CENTRIC STRATEGY?
The vast majority of the Afghan population (75-80 percent)
lives scattered across the countryside, from which all
previous Afghan rebellions have originated. Soviet
strategies initially focused on controlling the cities and
key transportation routes, while launching search and
destroy missions into the countryside in an effort to
destroy insurgent sanctuaries and depopulate rural
Afghanistan. The Geneva Accords of April 1988 that
established a timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops
from Afghanistan prompted a switch to a strategy that kept
most Soviet troops on relatively secure bases and/or in
concentric circles around the larger towns and cities. In
addition to garrisoned soldiers, some Soviet troops, as well
as Afghan government forces, were used to hold the main
"Ring Road" that connects Afghan urban areas. This urban
population-centric strategy, in conjunction with a massive
aid program, helped facilitate the Soviet withdrawal and
also the continued (albeit temporary) maintenance of the
Afghan Communists in power through control of the towns,
cities, and main roads, while the mujahedeen operated
relatively freely in the remaining 80 percent of Afghanistan
- the Afghan rural hinterland. By fall 1991, nearly two and
a half years after the completion of the Soviet withdrawal,
Russian President Boris Yeltsin cut off supplies to
Afghanistan. The Afghan Communist government fell apart
almost immediately, although the mujahedeen did not take
Kabul until April 1992.
Shortly after being named the new commander of U.S. forces
in Afghanistan in 2009, General Stanley McChrystal asserted
that the situation in Afghanistan required a new strategy
that focused on the Afghan population. In practical terms,
this new strategy would mean that U.S., NATO, and allied
forces would concentrate their efforts on "key districts"
that included a "meaningful proportion of the Afghan
population" (that is, larger towns and cities), as well as
the road network that connects them. The old "enemy-
centric" strategy that produced multiple operations-multiple
maneuver element search and destroy missions every year,
often conducted in remote mountainous or rural areas by an
individual country's contingent of forces, would apparently
be relegated to the past.
McChrystal's focus on the key population centers, which for
the most part has been continued by General David Petraeus
who took over the command of U.S. and ISAF Forces from
McChrystal in June 2010, is very similar to the ineffective
city-centric strategy followed 25 years earlier by the
Soviets. Like the mujahedeen a generation earlier, this is
not where the Taliban primarily operate and when they do
they are extremely difficult to identify or separate from
the population. It is a military dictum that it is
virtually impossible to defeat a rural insurgency in a
largely agrarian country by securing the urban areas. The
Soviets eventually learned this; apparently the United
States has yet to do so.
UNPOPULAR GOVERNMENT ATTEMPTS RECONCILIATION PROGRAM
Despite the brutality of a Soviet war that cost the Afghans
more than one million killed to about 15,000 Soviet dead,
the Soviets and PDPA government pursued reconciliation
programs during the 1980s, especially in northern
Afghanistan where they attempted to promote common
traditions and practices as a way to pacify various ethno-
linguistic groups along the Afghan-Soviet Central Asian
border. Cultural delegations to promote understanding
between the Soviet occupiers and a variety of northern
Afghan ethno-linguistic groups appeared frequently in the
northern provinces, and the Soviets even tried to reconcile
with local religious leaders through a restored "Society of
Ulema" (Muslim legal scholars). In addition, the Soviets
pursued programs that allowed traditional Afghan leaders
(tribal elders and religious figures) to have some influence
in government in exchange for loyalty to it via
reconciliation.[3] Finally, Soviet resources were used in an
attempt to co-opt entire communities into the service of the
government. The Soviets often enticed through the
traditional system of patronage by providing a group with
money and armaments in exchange for its support, either in
the form of active operations against the resistance or
simply keeping the area free of mujahedeen.[4]
After the Soviets replaced Babrak Karmal with Najibullah in
1986, Najibullah made significant reconciliation overtures
to the mujahedeen until the early 1990s in an attempt to end
the conflict. An Afghan National Reconciliation program was
initiated that was based partly on a new constitution that
provided for legislative institutions of government and did
away with the single-party Revolutionary Council that had
previously helped rule the country. The mujahedeen were
even offered seats in the government, including control over
key ministries, but only if they would reconcile and end the
fighting; such offers were consistently rejected by the
mujahedeen.
Similiarly, since early 2003, President Hamid Karzai has
called for national reconciliation with the Taliban with the
express purpose to reconcile warring parties in an attempt
to bring peace to Afghanistan. Program Takhim-e Sohl
(PTS)[5] was established in 2005 and has been a keystone of
Karzai's strategy, although at times some of his support for
these programs appears to be little more than self-promoting
propaganda, or even disinformation. Despite the
reconciliation of a very few highly-placed Taliban and
insurgent leaders early on in the program, meaningful
reconciliation of influential Taliban has been minimal. And
few Taliban foot soldiers have laid down their arms.
Moreover, the highly touted peace assembly, or "Peace
Jirga," of tribal elders and powerbrokers was held in May
2010 to systematically address reconciliation, but its
success thus far has been more publicity than substance.
Even Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has "warned that the money
associated with reintegration risked 'creating perverse
incentives, short-changing individuals and communities that
have not fed the insurgency.'"[6]
Much of the failure of the reconciliation (as well as
negotiation) policies are because the Taliban insurgency is
best defined as an insurgency wrapped in the narrative of
jihad. History would suggest that secular insurgents
negotiate, jihadists do not. Rather, the Taliban that
matter most within the movement are jihadists with perceived
intense religious obligations (for instance, Mullah Omar,
the Amir ul-Momineen, or Leader of the Faithful). "Peeling"
such individuals away from the Taliban is virtually
impossible because they believe they are following the
mandates of a higher calling. Indeed, history suggests that
no jihad has ever ended with a negotiated settlement or via
reconciliation. Additionally, negotiation is not a tactic
of the strong in Afghanistan, so when a government
struggling with a resilient insurgency announces
reconciliation and negotiation efforts as a centerpiece of
its strategy, most Afghans figure the government is losing.
Why would the Taliban, emboldened in the belief they are on
the verge of victory (after all, the United States announced
that it would begin to withdraw in July 2011), want to
negotiate or reconcile? Nevertheless, the notion of
political settlements and diplomatic negotiations is
difficult for Washington to dismiss even when political and
cultural realities make them unrealistic because such
strategies are so ingrained in the American diplomatic
psyche.[7]
"AFGHANIZATION"
By 1988 the central strategy of the Soviet Union was to
withdraw its forces and turn the war over to the Afghan
government. The success of this strategy depended on the
strength and effectiveness of the Afghan security forces and
their ability to maintain regime continuity and stability
against the increasingly robust mujahedeen.
The Afghan security forces had been trained by Soviets and
organized on the Soviet model since the 1950s. Thousands of
Afghan military officers were trained by the Soviets. But
after the Soviet invasion desertion rates soared, with as
many as 55 percent of Afghan soldiers just melting away,
leaving only 50,000 regular army troops to complement the
Soviet force. Although the Soviets and PDPA waged an
aggressive recruitment campaign to refill the ranks, mostly
from peasant communities near large urban centers such as
Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-i Sharif,[8] recruitment
was only able to meet between 40 to 60 percent of its goals
during the first five years of the Soviet occupation.[9]
Conscription never really achieved the levels the Soviets
desired, although the Ministry of Defense (MoD) did reach a
high of 160,000 in 1987. One way the Soviets bolstered the
numbers of the regular army and Ministry of Defense was
through recruitment into the Sarandoy, the heavily-armed
special police of the Ministry of the Interior, which
supplemented the KhAD (Afghan Secret Police). Later, after
the Soviets withdrew, Najibullah "rented" various ethnic and
local militias to augment the weak Afghan security forces.
Nevertheless, none of these attempts were successful in
creating an indigenous Afghan force that could realistically
be expected to defeat the mujahedeen insurgents.
Like the Soviets, the United States and NATO have also found
that building effective Afghan national security forces is
fraught with problems. After the defeat of the Taliban
regime in late 2001, and as part of the Bonn Accords, a
Security Sector Reform program was planned, with a variety
of countries taking the lead for different sectors of
Afghanistan's security architecture. A Disarmament,
Demobilization, and Reintegration Program (or DDR, led by
Japan) was to rid the country of private militias, while
building the Afghan National Army (ANA, United States lead)
and Afghan National Police (ANP, initially Germany had the
lead) were key to transforming Afghanistan's security
provision back to the government. Initial plans were for
the ANA to reach 70,000 by 2009, a goal that many thought
too ambitious when by early 2003 the ANA numbered just over
1,700. By 2010, the Ministry of Defense was claiming to
have more than 100,000 troops and had revised its planned
total upwards to over 170,000. These numbers were critical
because by late 2009, the United States had embraced a
McChrystal (and later Petraeus) plan to "Afghanize" the war
by increasing the size of Afghan National Security Forces
(ANSF), primarily the ANA and ANP, to over 400,000 within
five years, including 240,000 ANA and 160,000 ANP (171,600
ANA and 104,000 ANP by October 2011).[10] Many of these
numbers have become a bone of contention. Parodoxically, at
the same time we are trying to expand the quantity and
quality of the ANA we are also attempting to use informal
and static militias and various community defense forces
much like the Soviets did with the Sarandoy and their
"favorite" tribes and associated militias.
With the Afghan government's total annual revenue hovering
around $4 billion and the Obama administration's budget
request for fiscal year 2012 of $12.8 billion to train and
equip Afghanistan's expanding army and national police
force, it will be extremely difficult for Afghanistan to
manage and sustain a force of that size and expense over the
long term without protracted external financial and material
support.[11] Although the United States has spent roughly
$18 billion since 2002 on the ANA, it is difficult to get
accurate numbers on the actual size of the force "present
for duty."[12] The U.S. Defense Department when referring to
ANA troop strength often uses the vague phrase of "trained
and equipped" when reporting ANA numbers in press releases.
This number does not equate to the number of ANA troops
present for duty. It is estimated that one third of the ANA
is now evaporating every year through desertions (18
percent) and non-reenlistment (60 percent). Interestingly,
the Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) in Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, had a statistician analyze ANA growth
and attrition rates in 2005 and concluded that the ANA could
never grow larger than 100,000 men, because at that point
the annual attrition losses would equal the maximum number
of new recruits entering the force each year. [13]
Moreover, as a recent study of the Afghan National Army
(ANA) suggests, "[t]he push to build a unified national
military in service of a civilian government has frequently
clashed with the tendency to create militias in a bid to
insulate the state from internal and external threats. The
tension between these polar conceptions has had far reaching
implications not only for internal security but also for
Afghanistan's relationships with external actors."[14] The
officer corps of the ANA that was developed after the
Taliban's ouster, as suggested above, was largely composed
of commanders from the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance
(Shura-e Nazar-e Shamali).[15] Mohammed Fahim, Karzai's
initial Defense Minister, who led the Northern Alliance
after the assassination of famous resistance commander Ahmad
Shah Massoud (by al Qaeda agents on September 9, 2001),
promoted his Panjshiri Tajik allies into officer positions
in the ANA. For example, "Ninety of the first 100 generals
appointed to the new army were from the Tajik dominated
Panjshir Valley, reigniting ethnic, regional and political
factionalism within the armed forces."[16] This same
promotion dynamic was also recognized during the UN-backed
Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program
and led to "uneven disarmament_ [with] units affiliated with
the Northern Alliance often_the last to be demobilized,"
which resulted in the targeting of non-Panjshiri units not
allied with the Northern Alliance.[17] While more Pashtuns
have joined the officer corps since Rahim Wardak, an ethnic
Pashtun, became Defense Minister in December 2004, the
Tajiks still have officer numbers that do not reflect
national population demographics. Similarly, the Afghan
military during the Soviet occupation also reflected an out-
of-proportion Tajik officer corps. The PDPA tended to select
officers from their leftist allies that were highly
concentrated in Tajik urban populations. Because of these
dynamics and others, the probability of the successful
"Afghanization" of the war effort must be questioned. This
has been painfully evident recently with reports coming of
sub-par performance by the ANSF units during the February
2010 Operation Moshtarak in Marjah. For example, USMC
Officers embedded with the ANA during this operation have
reported to us that 20-40 percent of ANA personnel in some
field units failed urinalyses indicating the use of drugs,
especially hashish. And this was only one of the soldiering
problems evidenced by the deployed ANA.
OTHER SIMILARITIES
While these three similarities are most troubling because
they involved dynamics that are central to current U.S. and
NATO Afghan strategies, we have noted at least seven
additional, important similarities that cannot be discussed
in depth in this short article.[18] Both interventions
have:
1. Seen meddling powers with other interests than those
of the occupying power.
2. Installed and backed a puppet government as part of
the intervention.
3. Attempted, through puppet governments, to
significantly change Afghan society from the top down.
4. Used military tactics that emphasized kill/capture
missions as well as battalion-size (or larger)
operations to seek symmetrical fights with elusive
guerrillas.
5. Featured different strategies for the north and south
of Afghanistan, exacerbating the ethnic divisions from
each region of the country.
6. Struggled to defeat the insurgents who have access to
cross-border sanctuaries (or safe havens) in Pakistan.
7. Found the length, cost, and difficulty of their
Afghan war corrosive to popular support, causing the war
to become increasingly unpopular back home.
CONCLUSIONS
In its present form, current U.S. Afghan strategy holds
little promise for success, especially if our assessment of
the parallels with the past is accurate. As with all
strategies, U.S. leaders must consider carefully the
intensity and depth of American interests-that is,
consideration of the ends must precede the ways and means.
Since 9/11, both President George W. Bush and President
Barack Obama have characterized defeating al Qaeda in
Afghanistan as a vital national interest of the United
States and have deployed increasing numbers of U.S. forces
and spent more and more money to achieve that goal. Prior
to 9/11, however, American relations with Afghanistan were
lukewarm, at best. The United States did not step in after
the post-World War II British disengagement from the Indian
subcontinent to counter Soviet influence in Afghanistan.
Instead, the United States aligned itself with Pakistan and
Iran. In the 1980s, the United States did seize the
opportunity presented by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in 1979 to use the Afghan mujahedeen as a proxy force to
bleed and ultimately defeat the Soviets there. However, the
United States did not deploy its own forces and was quick to
disengage from the region once the Soviets withdrew. Thus,
until recently the United States did not appear to have
vital interests in Afghanistan. Most of the al Qaeda
organization that once existed in Afghanistan has been
destroyed or relocated elsewhere, meaning that the stated
interest for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is no longer
relevant. Different reasons might now exist for the United
States to view Afghanistan as a vital interest, especially
the involvement of other major actors there in pursuit of
often divergent interests.
Ultimately, however, no strategy might be as important as
the Afghan societal and cultural factors that undercut it.
Any Afghan strategy has five critical and interrelated
pillars-security, governance, development, justice, and
regional. Success overall requires success on all, and from
the beginning of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan the
strategy has been deficient in several areas.
First, security is not the key for Afghanistan, although
insecurity undermines efforts on the other pillars. Rather,
we see the center of gravity as government legitimacy.
Historical analyses have suggested that success in a
counterinsurgency (COIN) is largely proportional to the
extent to which the regime is viewed as legitimate by the
population. If the government is legitimate then the
insurgency will likely not succeed, but counterinsurgency
will fail on behalf of a government that its own people hold
to be illegitimate. Indeed, the Counterinsurgency Field
Manual of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps says, "Victory
cannot be gained until the people accept the legitimacy of
the government_"[19] A government that is seen as legitimate
by 85 to 90 percent of the population is the sine qua non of
successful counterinsurgency.[20] It is extremely
problematic that the vast majority of people in Afghanistan
(and especially in regions outside of Kabul) today do not
view as legitimate the national authority from Kabul, due in
part to the allegations of rampant corruption associated
with central government authorities.[21] In numerous areas,
especially in the rural Southern Pashtun hinterlands, the
Taliban are not only doing a better job of governance and
providing justice than Kabul, they are also seen as more
legitimate than the distant and unpopular leadership in
Kabul.
The legitimacy of Afghan governance has traditionally been
derived from two sources: dynastic, usually in the form of
monarchies and tribal patriarchies, or religious, and
sometimes both. [22] This problem of legitimacy is
especially acute at the local and village level of rural
Pashtun society, for whom dynastic and religious authority
has been paramount for millennia.[23] Just as the present
Kabul government is having an extremely difficult time
establishing legitimacy, so too did the Afghan government
during the Soviet occupation struggle. The PDPA was never
popular with the vast majority of the Afghan people and
obviously could not derive any legitimacy from the sources
suggested above.
Security cannot come from a strong foreign force on behalf
of rulers that people view as corrupt, inefficient, and
ineffective. Nor can it come from a domestic army led by
those elites. Historically, the Afghan state could be
predatory and extractive, as long as it was not intrusive or
engaged in social engineering in the countryside. Even if
the government has dynastic or religious sources of
legitimacy, historically it still had to enter into a
bargain with local elites in the countryside and provincial
centers. Such bargains were lubricated with patronage, so
that local elites could have power and dispense goods and
services to their people, while simultaneously keeping the
unpredictable Kabul government at bay. The system of
government that was imposed on Afghanistan after 9/11 by the
West and those Afghan elites who benefitted from it was
highly centralized, although the initial economy of force
counterterrorism military strategy meant that local warlords
were allowed to persist as augmentation to the inadequate
outside and national forces engaged in security provision.
Also, while money has poured into the country for a
multitude of reasons, there has been little success in
connecting the economic largesse to the development of
governmental legitimacy. In fact, just the opposite has
occurred, whereby the new Afghan political elites at the
central levels have enriched themselves so obscenely that
the post-9/11 windfall has diminished rather than enhanced
governmental legitimacy.
Likewise, there has been almost no meaningful effort to
pursue justice, a concept at the core of Islamic notions of
good governance, and especially critical in post-conflict
societies. When so much blood has been spilled by so many
people within a society for such a long period of time, some
mechanism for transitional justice is needed to break the
cycle of bloodshed, such as the famous "Truth and
Reconciliation" approach of post-apartheid South Africa.
The 2002 Emergency Loya Jirga (Grand Council) that cemented
Karzai's position as President illustrates this perfectly,
and sadly, for Afghanistan. One author served as an
International Monitor and Technical Advisor for Elections
for that process. Weeks of hard and often dangerous work in
the provinces by Afghans and international monitors alike
occurred to sideline warlords, war criminals, drug dealers,
and many other dangerous characters from playing a role in
the leadership of the country. Yet, when the big meeting
finally occurred in Kabul, all the dubious characters showed
up and got credentials from the Loya Jirga Commission to
participate anyway. Once they were inside the big tent they
could throw their weight around and ensure a result they
wanted. Justice was sacrificed on the altar of expediency,
and has been repeatedly thereafter.
Finally, there is an important regional pillar to any
successful strategy for Afghanistan. Four of the world's
most important powers (United States, China, India, and
Russia) are engaged in Afghanistan now, as are Pakistan and
Iran, as well as NATO. Regardless of what diplomats and
politicians say, they do not all have similar interests, nor
is it as simple as one set of powers against another set, as
the alliances are shifting and multidimensional. Yet,
Afghanistan's ethnic groups straddle its borders with
neighboring countries, meaning everyone has a proxy militia
in Afghanistan if need be. Also, Afghanistan may possess
substantial mineral wealth, meaning that it might be a prize
for larger powers wanting what it has. And, Afghanistan has
long been the "crossroads of Asia," meaning that it is even
a bigger prize because it holds the key to anywhere else in
the region. For all of these reasons no strategy can be
successful that does not take into account the way regional
actors may act.
These are the realities of Afghanistan that shape the
environment in which a strategy must be constructed and
implemented. There is one additional factor of great
consequence, which is that public opinion in the West no
longer supports a long, expensive, and frustratingly
uncertain war in Afghanistan. For NATO to continue to act
out of area and the United States to stay long enough for
all of the strategic initiatives to ripen will require a
level of success that does not seem likely to occur.
Thus, there are probably three potential strategies left to
us. They are:
* Better Nation-Building through COIN - This approach
is predicated on a belief that only through nation-
building can the root causes of Afghanistan's problems
be resolved. It essentially accepts that a heavy
American presence is required to bring about enough good
governance and development for success. However, U.S.
and allied countries have found their support for a
continued, expensive engagement declining, and the
manifest corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan
government does not instill confidence that this
approach is working. Moreover, President Obama has
already announced a July 2011 timetable for the
beginning of an American withdrawal of combat forces.
* Counterterrorism is Enough - A counterterrorism
approach does not accept the necessity of nation-
building-or at least holds that such a commitment of
means is not justified by the ends. Instead, adherents
of this approach, increasingly in the ascendance in
Washington, believe that the United States and its
allies can achieve minimal national security goals
through the relatively secretive activities of
counterterrorism specialists. While such an approach
may not resolve underlying problems and, indeed, might
only be a variation of the containment strategy that was
employed against the Taliban in the 1990s, this is much
more sustainable than the big COIN nation-building
approach.
* Declare Victory and Disengage - It may be that the
only strategy worth considering is one that abandons
Afghanistan to its own fate. After all, the United
States has already spent $227 billion on Afghanistan (in
direct military spending),[24] a country whose rapid GDP
growth rates of the post-9/11 era have allowed it to get
its national budget up to $4 billion per year (almost
entirely based on foreign aid). Also, the United States
has achieved all of its initial objectives in
Afghanistan, at least to some extent. If U.S. interests
have changed and the ends now justify a greater
deployment of forces and more expenditure of money, then
such a case must be made with clarity and conviction.
We are reluctant to suggest complete abandonment, in part
because other key countries are now engaged in Afghanistan
in ways that threaten U.S. interests and partly because the
earlier era of U.S. disengagement saw the advent of the
Taliban, al Qaeda, and eventually 9/11. Moreover, there is
an argument to be made that Afghanistan presents the United
States with a remarkable opportunity for international
leadership that, despite some difficulties along the way, is
still not lost to us. However, we are not convinced that
the United States should pursue the expensive and obvious
strategy followed by the Soviets when it failed so miserably
for them. That leaves us unenthusiastically in favor of
using counterterrorism to achieve America's most pressing
security interests in Afghanistan, with regional diplomatic
and development efforts as critical enablers.
Afghanistan needs a good government that has legitimacy with
its population, dispenses justice, spreads economic
benefits, and lives peacefully with its neighbors as a hub
of Asian trade. Perhaps it needs a constitutional monarchy
with an appropriate role for the Ulema, as in other Islamic
countries, and a reconstituted, empowered system of local
governance. The projected mineral wealth and geostrategic
location might very well provide the foundation for an
economic miracle. And with proper investment in
infrastructure and human capital, Afghanistan could be built
into a functioning twenty-first-century country. But none
of this will happen quickly and history suggests that
economies built on extractive industries face their own
unique problems. Moreover, these otherwise admirable goals
cannot be provided by the United States or other outside
powers, and the Soviet experience shows that staying too
long in Afghanistan carries its own costs. Above all else,
the Soviet experience shows us the painful mistakes of the
past, and we ignore those mistakes at our peril. Otherwise,
as George Santayana once warned us, "Those who do not learn
from history are doomed to repeat it."
----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Dion Nissenbaum, "McChrystal Lights Fire Under Marjah
Commanders," McClatchey Newspapers, May 25, 2010. Accessed
at:
http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/kabul/2010/05/mcchrystal-sounds-alarm-in-marjah.html
on May 27, 2010.
[2] One of us has also written on the similarities of the
Afghan War with the Vietnam War: Thomas H. Johnson and W.
Chris Mason, "Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the
Vietnam Template," Military Review, November-December, 2009,
pp. 2-14.
[3] Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan,
1979 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005), pp. 179-182.
[4] Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in
Afghanistan: 1978-1992 (Georgetown University Press:
Washington D.C., 2000), pp. 210-18.
[5] This reconciliation program has been variously known as
the Peace Through Strength Program, Afghan Truth &
Reconciliation Commission, National Reconciliation
Commission (NRC), National Commission for Peace in
Afghanistan, or simply the Afghan Reconciliation Program.
[6] The Diplomat, April 8, 2011,
http://the-diplomat.com/author/david/.
[7] We would like to thank Chris Mason for suggesting this
argument.
[8] Antonio Giustozzi. War, Politics and Society in
Afghanistan, pp., 289. Map 1. "Main Areas of PDPA
Recruitment Among Peasants, 1980-89."
[9] Ibid, 264, Table 25. "Fulfillment of Recruitment Plans
Nationwide and at the Provincial Level."
[10] Nordland, Rod. "U.S. Approves Training to Expand
Afghan Army." New York Times, 14 January 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/world/asia/15afghan.html?_r=1
(accessed 12 April 2011).
[11] Thomas H. Johnson and Matthew DuPee, "Transition to
nowhere: The limits of 'Afghanization'," Foreign Policy,
March 22, 2011,
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/22/transition_to_nowhere_the_limits_of_afghanization.
[12] The number of soldiers present for duty is the key
statistic relative to the viability of the "Afghanization"
of the war.
[13] See Thomas H. Johnson and "Refighting the Last War:
Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template," with W. Chris Mason,
Military Review, November-December, 2009, pp. 2-14.
[14] International Crisis Group, A Force in Fragments:
Reconstructing the Afghan National Army, Asia Report No.
190, May 12, 2010, p. i.
[15] Ibid, p. 1.
[16] Ibid. p 10.
[17] Ibid, p. 8.
[18] We provide fuller treatment of these similarities in a
longer and more in-depth article.
[19] COIN Manual
[20] Thomas H. Johnson and W. Chris Mason, "Refighting the
Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template," Military
Review, November-December, 2009, pp. 2-14; Kalev I. Sepp,
"Best Practices in Counterinsurgency," Military Review, May-
June 2005, pp. 8-12.
[21] Holt, Ronald L. "Afghan Village Militia: A People
Centric Strategy to Win," Small Wars Journal.com, 2009.
[22] For an excellent review of political legitimacy in
Afghanistan, see: Thomas Barfield, "Problems of Establishing
Legitimacy in Afghanistan, Iranian Studies, Vol. 37, 2004,
pp. 263-69, and; Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural
and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2010).
[23] Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980).
[24] Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other
Global War on Terrorism Operations Since 9/11. (Washington,
DC: Congressional Research Service, September 28, 2009), p.2.
----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/).
PARALLELS WITH THE PAST -
How the Soviets Lost in Afghanistan,
How the Americans are Losing
by Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson
On May 20, 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, then the
American commander in Afghanistan, referred to the operation
in Marjah, Helmand-an operation earlier touted as a
potential turning point for U.S. Afghan counterinsurgency
(COIN)-as a "bleeding ulcer."[1] Immediately, we were
reminded of a similar expression from an earlier Afghan War.
On February 1986, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev speaking
to the 27th General Congress of the Communist Party posited
that the Soviet war in Afghanistan had become a "bleeding
wound." Was McChrystal's comment just an unfortunate choice
of words or a harbinger that the United States faced a
Soviet-style disaster in Afghanistan?
This article assesses the startling and unsettling
similarities between Soviet strategies and tactics in
Afghanistan during their Afghan war of 1979-1989 and
American coalition strategies and tactics in Afghanistan
since October 2001. It concludes with the implications of
this dynamic.[2] These similarities are extremely
disturbing and, we believe, should be the focus of national
attention and debate. While numerous significant
similarities exist, this article will center on just three
of the most important.
SOVIET AFGHAN INVASION
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day of
1979 ostensibly to rescue a failing Communist government.
The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had
overthrown the Mohammad Daoud government in April 1978 and
then engaged in bloody infighting and ambitious reforms that
shocked Afghanistan's largely rural and conservative
population into rebellion. The Soviets brought with them, in
December 1979, a new president for Afghanistan, Babrak
Karmal, who they installed in the Presidential Palace as
soon as they had killed Hafizullah Amin, the existing
president. The rebellion quickly turned into a national
resistance movement and the Soviets responded with sweep and
clear tactics aimed at depopulating the countryside that was
supporting and aiding the Afghan mujahedeen. By 1981,
Afghanistan had the dubious distinction of producing the
world's largest single refugee population, most of whom fled
to Pakistan or Iran. Pakistan also became the base for most
of the fledgling mujahedeen, who were eventually aided by
the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other
countries aligned against the Soviet Union in the last great
battle of the Cold War.
By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was bogged down in
Afghanistan even as a new generation of leadership was
emerging in Moscow. The new Soviet leadership realized that
time was running out on their Afghan adventure, and they
made significant strategic adjustments to try to rescue what
they could from what was shaping up to be a failure of epic
proportions. First, they shifted their military strategy
away from combating a rural insurgency to controlling the
population centers and the road corridor that connected
them. Second, they tried to change the unpopular puppet
government they had installed and took measures to boost its
popularity, primarily through a reconciliation program.
Third, the Soviets concentrated on building a competent
Afghan army and security forces to which they could hand off
the job of Afghan security. It appears that the United
States is trying to do all of these things again today, as
if the Soviet experience never happened.
Below we address the similarities in the Soviet and U.S.
approaches to Afghanistan; the three similarities addressed
are central to current U.S. and NATO Afghan strategies: the
focus on key population centers, reconciliation, and the
development of "Afghan" solutions to a variety of security
concerns.
POPULATION-CENTRIC STRATEGY?
The vast majority of the Afghan population (75-80 percent)
lives scattered across the countryside, from which all
previous Afghan rebellions have originated. Soviet
strategies initially focused on controlling the cities and
key transportation routes, while launching search and
destroy missions into the countryside in an effort to
destroy insurgent sanctuaries and depopulate rural
Afghanistan. The Geneva Accords of April 1988 that
established a timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops
from Afghanistan prompted a switch to a strategy that kept
most Soviet troops on relatively secure bases and/or in
concentric circles around the larger towns and cities. In
addition to garrisoned soldiers, some Soviet troops, as well
as Afghan government forces, were used to hold the main
"Ring Road" that connects Afghan urban areas. This urban
population-centric strategy, in conjunction with a massive
aid program, helped facilitate the Soviet withdrawal and
also the continued (albeit temporary) maintenance of the
Afghan Communists in power through control of the towns,
cities, and main roads, while the mujahedeen operated
relatively freely in the remaining 80 percent of Afghanistan
- the Afghan rural hinterland. By fall 1991, nearly two and
a half years after the completion of the Soviet withdrawal,
Russian President Boris Yeltsin cut off supplies to
Afghanistan. The Afghan Communist government fell apart
almost immediately, although the mujahedeen did not take
Kabul until April 1992.
Shortly after being named the new commander of U.S. forces
in Afghanistan in 2009, General Stanley McChrystal asserted
that the situation in Afghanistan required a new strategy
that focused on the Afghan population. In practical terms,
this new strategy would mean that U.S., NATO, and allied
forces would concentrate their efforts on "key districts"
that included a "meaningful proportion of the Afghan
population" (that is, larger towns and cities), as well as
the road network that connects them. The old "enemy-
centric" strategy that produced multiple operations-multiple
maneuver element search and destroy missions every year,
often conducted in remote mountainous or rural areas by an
individual country's contingent of forces, would apparently
be relegated to the past.
McChrystal's focus on the key population centers, which for
the most part has been continued by General David Petraeus
who took over the command of U.S. and ISAF Forces from
McChrystal in June 2010, is very similar to the ineffective
city-centric strategy followed 25 years earlier by the
Soviets. Like the mujahedeen a generation earlier, this is
not where the Taliban primarily operate and when they do
they are extremely difficult to identify or separate from
the population. It is a military dictum that it is
virtually impossible to defeat a rural insurgency in a
largely agrarian country by securing the urban areas. The
Soviets eventually learned this; apparently the United
States has yet to do so.
UNPOPULAR GOVERNMENT ATTEMPTS RECONCILIATION PROGRAM
Despite the brutality of a Soviet war that cost the Afghans
more than one million killed to about 15,000 Soviet dead,
the Soviets and PDPA government pursued reconciliation
programs during the 1980s, especially in northern
Afghanistan where they attempted to promote common
traditions and practices as a way to pacify various ethno-
linguistic groups along the Afghan-Soviet Central Asian
border. Cultural delegations to promote understanding
between the Soviet occupiers and a variety of northern
Afghan ethno-linguistic groups appeared frequently in the
northern provinces, and the Soviets even tried to reconcile
with local religious leaders through a restored "Society of
Ulema" (Muslim legal scholars). In addition, the Soviets
pursued programs that allowed traditional Afghan leaders
(tribal elders and religious figures) to have some influence
in government in exchange for loyalty to it via
reconciliation.[3] Finally, Soviet resources were used in an
attempt to co-opt entire communities into the service of the
government. The Soviets often enticed through the
traditional system of patronage by providing a group with
money and armaments in exchange for its support, either in
the form of active operations against the resistance or
simply keeping the area free of mujahedeen.[4]
After the Soviets replaced Babrak Karmal with Najibullah in
1986, Najibullah made significant reconciliation overtures
to the mujahedeen until the early 1990s in an attempt to end
the conflict. An Afghan National Reconciliation program was
initiated that was based partly on a new constitution that
provided for legislative institutions of government and did
away with the single-party Revolutionary Council that had
previously helped rule the country. The mujahedeen were
even offered seats in the government, including control over
key ministries, but only if they would reconcile and end the
fighting; such offers were consistently rejected by the
mujahedeen.
Similiarly, since early 2003, President Hamid Karzai has
called for national reconciliation with the Taliban with the
express purpose to reconcile warring parties in an attempt
to bring peace to Afghanistan. Program Takhim-e Sohl
(PTS)[5] was established in 2005 and has been a keystone of
Karzai's strategy, although at times some of his support for
these programs appears to be little more than self-promoting
propaganda, or even disinformation. Despite the
reconciliation of a very few highly-placed Taliban and
insurgent leaders early on in the program, meaningful
reconciliation of influential Taliban has been minimal. And
few Taliban foot soldiers have laid down their arms.
Moreover, the highly touted peace assembly, or "Peace
Jirga," of tribal elders and powerbrokers was held in May
2010 to systematically address reconciliation, but its
success thus far has been more publicity than substance.
Even Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has "warned that the money
associated with reintegration risked 'creating perverse
incentives, short-changing individuals and communities that
have not fed the insurgency.'"[6]
Much of the failure of the reconciliation (as well as
negotiation) policies are because the Taliban insurgency is
best defined as an insurgency wrapped in the narrative of
jihad. History would suggest that secular insurgents
negotiate, jihadists do not. Rather, the Taliban that
matter most within the movement are jihadists with perceived
intense religious obligations (for instance, Mullah Omar,
the Amir ul-Momineen, or Leader of the Faithful). "Peeling"
such individuals away from the Taliban is virtually
impossible because they believe they are following the
mandates of a higher calling. Indeed, history suggests that
no jihad has ever ended with a negotiated settlement or via
reconciliation. Additionally, negotiation is not a tactic
of the strong in Afghanistan, so when a government
struggling with a resilient insurgency announces
reconciliation and negotiation efforts as a centerpiece of
its strategy, most Afghans figure the government is losing.
Why would the Taliban, emboldened in the belief they are on
the verge of victory (after all, the United States announced
that it would begin to withdraw in July 2011), want to
negotiate or reconcile? Nevertheless, the notion of
political settlements and diplomatic negotiations is
difficult for Washington to dismiss even when political and
cultural realities make them unrealistic because such
strategies are so ingrained in the American diplomatic
psyche.[7]
"AFGHANIZATION"
By 1988 the central strategy of the Soviet Union was to
withdraw its forces and turn the war over to the Afghan
government. The success of this strategy depended on the
strength and effectiveness of the Afghan security forces and
their ability to maintain regime continuity and stability
against the increasingly robust mujahedeen.
The Afghan security forces had been trained by Soviets and
organized on the Soviet model since the 1950s. Thousands of
Afghan military officers were trained by the Soviets. But
after the Soviet invasion desertion rates soared, with as
many as 55 percent of Afghan soldiers just melting away,
leaving only 50,000 regular army troops to complement the
Soviet force. Although the Soviets and PDPA waged an
aggressive recruitment campaign to refill the ranks, mostly
from peasant communities near large urban centers such as
Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-i Sharif,[8] recruitment
was only able to meet between 40 to 60 percent of its goals
during the first five years of the Soviet occupation.[9]
Conscription never really achieved the levels the Soviets
desired, although the Ministry of Defense (MoD) did reach a
high of 160,000 in 1987. One way the Soviets bolstered the
numbers of the regular army and Ministry of Defense was
through recruitment into the Sarandoy, the heavily-armed
special police of the Ministry of the Interior, which
supplemented the KhAD (Afghan Secret Police). Later, after
the Soviets withdrew, Najibullah "rented" various ethnic and
local militias to augment the weak Afghan security forces.
Nevertheless, none of these attempts were successful in
creating an indigenous Afghan force that could realistically
be expected to defeat the mujahedeen insurgents.
Like the Soviets, the United States and NATO have also found
that building effective Afghan national security forces is
fraught with problems. After the defeat of the Taliban
regime in late 2001, and as part of the Bonn Accords, a
Security Sector Reform program was planned, with a variety
of countries taking the lead for different sectors of
Afghanistan's security architecture. A Disarmament,
Demobilization, and Reintegration Program (or DDR, led by
Japan) was to rid the country of private militias, while
building the Afghan National Army (ANA, United States lead)
and Afghan National Police (ANP, initially Germany had the
lead) were key to transforming Afghanistan's security
provision back to the government. Initial plans were for
the ANA to reach 70,000 by 2009, a goal that many thought
too ambitious when by early 2003 the ANA numbered just over
1,700. By 2010, the Ministry of Defense was claiming to
have more than 100,000 troops and had revised its planned
total upwards to over 170,000. These numbers were critical
because by late 2009, the United States had embraced a
McChrystal (and later Petraeus) plan to "Afghanize" the war
by increasing the size of Afghan National Security Forces
(ANSF), primarily the ANA and ANP, to over 400,000 within
five years, including 240,000 ANA and 160,000 ANP (171,600
ANA and 104,000 ANP by October 2011).[10] Many of these
numbers have become a bone of contention. Parodoxically, at
the same time we are trying to expand the quantity and
quality of the ANA we are also attempting to use informal
and static militias and various community defense forces
much like the Soviets did with the Sarandoy and their
"favorite" tribes and associated militias.
With the Afghan government's total annual revenue hovering
around $4 billion and the Obama administration's budget
request for fiscal year 2012 of $12.8 billion to train and
equip Afghanistan's expanding army and national police
force, it will be extremely difficult for Afghanistan to
manage and sustain a force of that size and expense over the
long term without protracted external financial and material
support.[11] Although the United States has spent roughly
$18 billion since 2002 on the ANA, it is difficult to get
accurate numbers on the actual size of the force "present
for duty."[12] The U.S. Defense Department when referring to
ANA troop strength often uses the vague phrase of "trained
and equipped" when reporting ANA numbers in press releases.
This number does not equate to the number of ANA troops
present for duty. It is estimated that one third of the ANA
is now evaporating every year through desertions (18
percent) and non-reenlistment (60 percent). Interestingly,
the Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) in Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, had a statistician analyze ANA growth
and attrition rates in 2005 and concluded that the ANA could
never grow larger than 100,000 men, because at that point
the annual attrition losses would equal the maximum number
of new recruits entering the force each year. [13]
Moreover, as a recent study of the Afghan National Army
(ANA) suggests, "[t]he push to build a unified national
military in service of a civilian government has frequently
clashed with the tendency to create militias in a bid to
insulate the state from internal and external threats. The
tension between these polar conceptions has had far reaching
implications not only for internal security but also for
Afghanistan's relationships with external actors."[14] The
officer corps of the ANA that was developed after the
Taliban's ouster, as suggested above, was largely composed
of commanders from the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance
(Shura-e Nazar-e Shamali).[15] Mohammed Fahim, Karzai's
initial Defense Minister, who led the Northern Alliance
after the assassination of famous resistance commander Ahmad
Shah Massoud (by al Qaeda agents on September 9, 2001),
promoted his Panjshiri Tajik allies into officer positions
in the ANA. For example, "Ninety of the first 100 generals
appointed to the new army were from the Tajik dominated
Panjshir Valley, reigniting ethnic, regional and political
factionalism within the armed forces."[16] This same
promotion dynamic was also recognized during the UN-backed
Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program
and led to "uneven disarmament_ [with] units affiliated with
the Northern Alliance often_the last to be demobilized,"
which resulted in the targeting of non-Panjshiri units not
allied with the Northern Alliance.[17] While more Pashtuns
have joined the officer corps since Rahim Wardak, an ethnic
Pashtun, became Defense Minister in December 2004, the
Tajiks still have officer numbers that do not reflect
national population demographics. Similarly, the Afghan
military during the Soviet occupation also reflected an out-
of-proportion Tajik officer corps. The PDPA tended to select
officers from their leftist allies that were highly
concentrated in Tajik urban populations. Because of these
dynamics and others, the probability of the successful
"Afghanization" of the war effort must be questioned. This
has been painfully evident recently with reports coming of
sub-par performance by the ANSF units during the February
2010 Operation Moshtarak in Marjah. For example, USMC
Officers embedded with the ANA during this operation have
reported to us that 20-40 percent of ANA personnel in some
field units failed urinalyses indicating the use of drugs,
especially hashish. And this was only one of the soldiering
problems evidenced by the deployed ANA.
OTHER SIMILARITIES
While these three similarities are most troubling because
they involved dynamics that are central to current U.S. and
NATO Afghan strategies, we have noted at least seven
additional, important similarities that cannot be discussed
in depth in this short article.[18] Both interventions
have:
1. Seen meddling powers with other interests than those
of the occupying power.
2. Installed and backed a puppet government as part of
the intervention.
3. Attempted, through puppet governments, to
significantly change Afghan society from the top down.
4. Used military tactics that emphasized kill/capture
missions as well as battalion-size (or larger)
operations to seek symmetrical fights with elusive
guerrillas.
5. Featured different strategies for the north and south
of Afghanistan, exacerbating the ethnic divisions from
each region of the country.
6. Struggled to defeat the insurgents who have access to
cross-border sanctuaries (or safe havens) in Pakistan.
7. Found the length, cost, and difficulty of their
Afghan war corrosive to popular support, causing the war
to become increasingly unpopular back home.
CONCLUSIONS
In its present form, current U.S. Afghan strategy holds
little promise for success, especially if our assessment of
the parallels with the past is accurate. As with all
strategies, U.S. leaders must consider carefully the
intensity and depth of American interests-that is,
consideration of the ends must precede the ways and means.
Since 9/11, both President George W. Bush and President
Barack Obama have characterized defeating al Qaeda in
Afghanistan as a vital national interest of the United
States and have deployed increasing numbers of U.S. forces
and spent more and more money to achieve that goal. Prior
to 9/11, however, American relations with Afghanistan were
lukewarm, at best. The United States did not step in after
the post-World War II British disengagement from the Indian
subcontinent to counter Soviet influence in Afghanistan.
Instead, the United States aligned itself with Pakistan and
Iran. In the 1980s, the United States did seize the
opportunity presented by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in 1979 to use the Afghan mujahedeen as a proxy force to
bleed and ultimately defeat the Soviets there. However, the
United States did not deploy its own forces and was quick to
disengage from the region once the Soviets withdrew. Thus,
until recently the United States did not appear to have
vital interests in Afghanistan. Most of the al Qaeda
organization that once existed in Afghanistan has been
destroyed or relocated elsewhere, meaning that the stated
interest for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is no longer
relevant. Different reasons might now exist for the United
States to view Afghanistan as a vital interest, especially
the involvement of other major actors there in pursuit of
often divergent interests.
Ultimately, however, no strategy might be as important as
the Afghan societal and cultural factors that undercut it.
Any Afghan strategy has five critical and interrelated
pillars-security, governance, development, justice, and
regional. Success overall requires success on all, and from
the beginning of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan the
strategy has been deficient in several areas.
First, security is not the key for Afghanistan, although
insecurity undermines efforts on the other pillars. Rather,
we see the center of gravity as government legitimacy.
Historical analyses have suggested that success in a
counterinsurgency (COIN) is largely proportional to the
extent to which the regime is viewed as legitimate by the
population. If the government is legitimate then the
insurgency will likely not succeed, but counterinsurgency
will fail on behalf of a government that its own people hold
to be illegitimate. Indeed, the Counterinsurgency Field
Manual of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps says, "Victory
cannot be gained until the people accept the legitimacy of
the government_"[19] A government that is seen as legitimate
by 85 to 90 percent of the population is the sine qua non of
successful counterinsurgency.[20] It is extremely
problematic that the vast majority of people in Afghanistan
(and especially in regions outside of Kabul) today do not
view as legitimate the national authority from Kabul, due in
part to the allegations of rampant corruption associated
with central government authorities.[21] In numerous areas,
especially in the rural Southern Pashtun hinterlands, the
Taliban are not only doing a better job of governance and
providing justice than Kabul, they are also seen as more
legitimate than the distant and unpopular leadership in
Kabul.
The legitimacy of Afghan governance has traditionally been
derived from two sources: dynastic, usually in the form of
monarchies and tribal patriarchies, or religious, and
sometimes both. [22] This problem of legitimacy is
especially acute at the local and village level of rural
Pashtun society, for whom dynastic and religious authority
has been paramount for millennia.[23] Just as the present
Kabul government is having an extremely difficult time
establishing legitimacy, so too did the Afghan government
during the Soviet occupation struggle. The PDPA was never
popular with the vast majority of the Afghan people and
obviously could not derive any legitimacy from the sources
suggested above.
Security cannot come from a strong foreign force on behalf
of rulers that people view as corrupt, inefficient, and
ineffective. Nor can it come from a domestic army led by
those elites. Historically, the Afghan state could be
predatory and extractive, as long as it was not intrusive or
engaged in social engineering in the countryside. Even if
the government has dynastic or religious sources of
legitimacy, historically it still had to enter into a
bargain with local elites in the countryside and provincial
centers. Such bargains were lubricated with patronage, so
that local elites could have power and dispense goods and
services to their people, while simultaneously keeping the
unpredictable Kabul government at bay. The system of
government that was imposed on Afghanistan after 9/11 by the
West and those Afghan elites who benefitted from it was
highly centralized, although the initial economy of force
counterterrorism military strategy meant that local warlords
were allowed to persist as augmentation to the inadequate
outside and national forces engaged in security provision.
Also, while money has poured into the country for a
multitude of reasons, there has been little success in
connecting the economic largesse to the development of
governmental legitimacy. In fact, just the opposite has
occurred, whereby the new Afghan political elites at the
central levels have enriched themselves so obscenely that
the post-9/11 windfall has diminished rather than enhanced
governmental legitimacy.
Likewise, there has been almost no meaningful effort to
pursue justice, a concept at the core of Islamic notions of
good governance, and especially critical in post-conflict
societies. When so much blood has been spilled by so many
people within a society for such a long period of time, some
mechanism for transitional justice is needed to break the
cycle of bloodshed, such as the famous "Truth and
Reconciliation" approach of post-apartheid South Africa.
The 2002 Emergency Loya Jirga (Grand Council) that cemented
Karzai's position as President illustrates this perfectly,
and sadly, for Afghanistan. One author served as an
International Monitor and Technical Advisor for Elections
for that process. Weeks of hard and often dangerous work in
the provinces by Afghans and international monitors alike
occurred to sideline warlords, war criminals, drug dealers,
and many other dangerous characters from playing a role in
the leadership of the country. Yet, when the big meeting
finally occurred in Kabul, all the dubious characters showed
up and got credentials from the Loya Jirga Commission to
participate anyway. Once they were inside the big tent they
could throw their weight around and ensure a result they
wanted. Justice was sacrificed on the altar of expediency,
and has been repeatedly thereafter.
Finally, there is an important regional pillar to any
successful strategy for Afghanistan. Four of the world's
most important powers (United States, China, India, and
Russia) are engaged in Afghanistan now, as are Pakistan and
Iran, as well as NATO. Regardless of what diplomats and
politicians say, they do not all have similar interests, nor
is it as simple as one set of powers against another set, as
the alliances are shifting and multidimensional. Yet,
Afghanistan's ethnic groups straddle its borders with
neighboring countries, meaning everyone has a proxy militia
in Afghanistan if need be. Also, Afghanistan may possess
substantial mineral wealth, meaning that it might be a prize
for larger powers wanting what it has. And, Afghanistan has
long been the "crossroads of Asia," meaning that it is even
a bigger prize because it holds the key to anywhere else in
the region. For all of these reasons no strategy can be
successful that does not take into account the way regional
actors may act.
These are the realities of Afghanistan that shape the
environment in which a strategy must be constructed and
implemented. There is one additional factor of great
consequence, which is that public opinion in the West no
longer supports a long, expensive, and frustratingly
uncertain war in Afghanistan. For NATO to continue to act
out of area and the United States to stay long enough for
all of the strategic initiatives to ripen will require a
level of success that does not seem likely to occur.
Thus, there are probably three potential strategies left to
us. They are:
* Better Nation-Building through COIN - This approach
is predicated on a belief that only through nation-
building can the root causes of Afghanistan's problems
be resolved. It essentially accepts that a heavy
American presence is required to bring about enough good
governance and development for success. However, U.S.
and allied countries have found their support for a
continued, expensive engagement declining, and the
manifest corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan
government does not instill confidence that this
approach is working. Moreover, President Obama has
already announced a July 2011 timetable for the
beginning of an American withdrawal of combat forces.
* Counterterrorism is Enough - A counterterrorism
approach does not accept the necessity of nation-
building-or at least holds that such a commitment of
means is not justified by the ends. Instead, adherents
of this approach, increasingly in the ascendance in
Washington, believe that the United States and its
allies can achieve minimal national security goals
through the relatively secretive activities of
counterterrorism specialists. While such an approach
may not resolve underlying problems and, indeed, might
only be a variation of the containment strategy that was
employed against the Taliban in the 1990s, this is much
more sustainable than the big COIN nation-building
approach.
* Declare Victory and Disengage - It may be that the
only strategy worth considering is one that abandons
Afghanistan to its own fate. After all, the United
States has already spent $227 billion on Afghanistan (in
direct military spending),[24] a country whose rapid GDP
growth rates of the post-9/11 era have allowed it to get
its national budget up to $4 billion per year (almost
entirely based on foreign aid). Also, the United States
has achieved all of its initial objectives in
Afghanistan, at least to some extent. If U.S. interests
have changed and the ends now justify a greater
deployment of forces and more expenditure of money, then
such a case must be made with clarity and conviction.
We are reluctant to suggest complete abandonment, in part
because other key countries are now engaged in Afghanistan
in ways that threaten U.S. interests and partly because the
earlier era of U.S. disengagement saw the advent of the
Taliban, al Qaeda, and eventually 9/11. Moreover, there is
an argument to be made that Afghanistan presents the United
States with a remarkable opportunity for international
leadership that, despite some difficulties along the way, is
still not lost to us. However, we are not convinced that
the United States should pursue the expensive and obvious
strategy followed by the Soviets when it failed so miserably
for them. That leaves us unenthusiastically in favor of
using counterterrorism to achieve America's most pressing
security interests in Afghanistan, with regional diplomatic
and development efforts as critical enablers.
Afghanistan needs a good government that has legitimacy with
its population, dispenses justice, spreads economic
benefits, and lives peacefully with its neighbors as a hub
of Asian trade. Perhaps it needs a constitutional monarchy
with an appropriate role for the Ulema, as in other Islamic
countries, and a reconstituted, empowered system of local
governance. The projected mineral wealth and geostrategic
location might very well provide the foundation for an
economic miracle. And with proper investment in
infrastructure and human capital, Afghanistan could be built
into a functioning twenty-first-century country. But none
of this will happen quickly and history suggests that
economies built on extractive industries face their own
unique problems. Moreover, these otherwise admirable goals
cannot be provided by the United States or other outside
powers, and the Soviet experience shows that staying too
long in Afghanistan carries its own costs. Above all else,
the Soviet experience shows us the painful mistakes of the
past, and we ignore those mistakes at our peril. Otherwise,
as George Santayana once warned us, "Those who do not learn
from history are doomed to repeat it."
----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Dion Nissenbaum, "McChrystal Lights Fire Under Marjah
Commanders," McClatchey Newspapers, May 25, 2010. Accessed
at:
http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/kabul/2010/05/mcchrystal-sounds-alarm-in-marjah.html
on May 27, 2010.
[2] One of us has also written on the similarities of the
Afghan War with the Vietnam War: Thomas H. Johnson and W.
Chris Mason, "Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the
Vietnam Template," Military Review, November-December, 2009,
pp. 2-14.
[3] Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan,
1979 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005), pp. 179-182.
[4] Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in
Afghanistan: 1978-1992 (Georgetown University Press:
Washington D.C., 2000), pp. 210-18.
[5] This reconciliation program has been variously known as
the Peace Through Strength Program, Afghan Truth &
Reconciliation Commission, National Reconciliation
Commission (NRC), National Commission for Peace in
Afghanistan, or simply the Afghan Reconciliation Program.
[6] The Diplomat, April 8, 2011,
http://the-diplomat.com/author/david/.
[7] We would like to thank Chris Mason for suggesting this
argument.
[8] Antonio Giustozzi. War, Politics and Society in
Afghanistan, pp., 289. Map 1. "Main Areas of PDPA
Recruitment Among Peasants, 1980-89."
[9] Ibid, 264, Table 25. "Fulfillment of Recruitment Plans
Nationwide and at the Provincial Level."
[10] Nordland, Rod. "U.S. Approves Training to Expand
Afghan Army." New York Times, 14 January 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/world/asia/15afghan.html?_r=1
(accessed 12 April 2011).
[11] Thomas H. Johnson and Matthew DuPee, "Transition to
nowhere: The limits of 'Afghanization'," Foreign Policy,
March 22, 2011,
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/22/transition_to_nowhere_the_limits_of_afghanization.
[12] The number of soldiers present for duty is the key
statistic relative to the viability of the "Afghanization"
of the war.
[13] See Thomas H. Johnson and "Refighting the Last War:
Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template," with W. Chris Mason,
Military Review, November-December, 2009, pp. 2-14.
[14] International Crisis Group, A Force in Fragments:
Reconstructing the Afghan National Army, Asia Report No.
190, May 12, 2010, p. i.
[15] Ibid, p. 1.
[16] Ibid. p 10.
[17] Ibid, p. 8.
[18] We provide fuller treatment of these similarities in a
longer and more in-depth article.
[19] COIN Manual
[20] Thomas H. Johnson and W. Chris Mason, "Refighting the
Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template," Military
Review, November-December, 2009, pp. 2-14; Kalev I. Sepp,
"Best Practices in Counterinsurgency," Military Review, May-
June 2005, pp. 8-12.
[21] Holt, Ronald L. "Afghan Village Militia: A People
Centric Strategy to Win," Small Wars Journal.com, 2009.
[22] For an excellent review of political legitimacy in
Afghanistan, see: Thomas Barfield, "Problems of Establishing
Legitimacy in Afghanistan, Iranian Studies, Vol. 37, 2004,
pp. 263-69, and; Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural
and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2010).
[23] Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980).
[24] Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other
Global War on Terrorism Operations Since 9/11. (Washington,
DC: Congressional Research Service, September 28, 2009), p.2.
----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
(http://www.fpri.org/).
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