Counterinsurgency
Down for the Count in Afghanistan…
But the War
Machine Grinds On and On and On
by Ann
Jones
President
Obama’s Afghanistan strategy isn’t working. So said
a parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander
General Stanley McChrystal’s firing. But what does that
phrase, so often in the media these days, really mean? And if
the strategy really isn’t working, just how can you tell?
The
answers to these questions raise even more important ones, including:
Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general,
does he cling to his failing
war policy? And if our strategy isn’t working, what about
the enemy’s? And if nothing much is working, why does it still
go on nonstop this way? Let’s take these one at a time.
1.
What
do you mean by “it’s not working”?
“It”
is counterinsurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a
strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy.
Counterinsurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending
to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle
of “protecting the population” above pursuing the bad
guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes
a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was
reminded.
I
just spent some time embedded with the U.S. Army at a forward
operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily “sig
acts” -- significant activity of a hostile nature -- virtually
every “lethal” American soldier is matched by a
“nonlethal” counterpart whose job it is, in one way or
another, to soften up those civilians for “protection.”
General
McChrystal himself played both roles. As the U.S. commander, he
was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, “an
amazing number of people” who were not threats, but he also
regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s palace
to say, “Sorry.” Karzai praised him publicly for
his frequent apologies (each, of course, reflecting an American act
or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less
impressed.
The
part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be
counterbalanced by the “sorry” part, which may be as
simple as dispatching U.S. officers to drink humble tea with local
“key leaders.” Often enough, though, it comes in
the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is
basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt
for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road.
This trade-off explains why, as you travel parts of the country,
interminable (and often empty) strips of black asphalt now traverse
Afghanistan’s vast expanses of sand and rock, but it doesn’t
explain why Afghans, thus compensated, are angrier than ever.
Many
Afghans, of course, are angry because they haven’t been
compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere. Worse yet,
more often than not, they’ve been promised things that never
materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the
country as a whole in these last years, it might go like this: big
men -- both Afghan and American -- make out like the Beltway Bandits
many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still
wish their kids had shoes.)
And
don’t forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who
have scarcely been consulted at all: women.
To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters, Afghan men lock them
up -- the women, that is. American military leaders slip easily into
the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved to try to win the
“hearts and minds” of something less than half “the
population.”
It’s
only in the last year or two that the Marines and the Army started
pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and
sending them out as Female
Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women. As
with so many innovative new plans in our counterinsurgency war, this
one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and
almost guaranteed failure.
Commanders
have casually sent noncombatant American women soldiers -- supply
clerks and radio operators -- outside the wire, usually with little
training, no clear mission, and no follow up. Predictably, like
their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions
and broken promises behind. So when I went out to meet village
women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new Army
FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for
a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.
Imagine.
This is hardly a big item like the “government
in a box” that General McChrystal promised
and failed
to deliver in Marja. It’s just seeds. How hard
could that be?
Our
visit did, however, open a window into a world military and political
policymakers have ignored for all too long. It turns out that
the women of Afghanistan, whom George W. Bush claimed to have
liberated so many years ago, are still mostly oppressed,
impoverished, malnourished, uneducated, short of seeds, and mad as
hell.
Count
them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof
that “it’s not working” at all. Afghans, it seems,
know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true
commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest.
And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of
“the population,” those angry Afghans are a bad omen for
the U.S. military and President Obama.
Moreover,
it’s not working for a significant subgroup of Americans in
Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I’ve heard infantrymen
place the blame for a buddy’s combat injury or death on the
strict rules of engagement (“courageous
restraint,” as it’s called) imposed by General
McChrystal’s version of COIN strategy. Taking a page from
Vietnam, they claim their hands are tied, while the enemy plays by
its own rules. Rightly or wrongly, this opinion is spreading
fast among grieving soldiers as casualties
mount.
It’s
also clear that even the lethal part of counterinsurgency isn’t
working. Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so
often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them
to settle local scores. To give just one example: American
troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar Province
which they’d been told was used by terrorists. Another
case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative
of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of
mine. The young man had just completed his religious education
and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi,
or religious teacher. The villagers, very upset, turned out to
vouch for him, and the Army hospitalized him with profuse apologies.
Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly
leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage
behind.
Reports
coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun
south, once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal’s
cleared, held, built, and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally
grim. Before his resignation, the general himself was already
referring to Marja -- the farming area (initially trumpeted
as a “city of 80,000 people”)
where
he launched his first offensive -- as “a
bleeding ulcer.” He also delayed the highly
publicized advance into Kandahar, the country’s second largest
city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing
populace, which includes President Karzai. Meanwhile,
humanitarian NGOs based in Kandahar complain that they can’t do
their routine work assisting the city’s inhabitants while the
area lies under threat of combat. Without assistance,
Kandaharis grow -- you guessed it -- angrier.
From
Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the
well-advertised securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan
National Army (ANA) is stealing equipment -- right down to bottled
drinking water -- from the U.S. military and selling it to the
Taliban. U.S. commanders can’t do much about it because
the official American script calls for the ANA to take over
responsibility for national defense.
NATO
soldiers have complained all along about the ill-trained,
uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity between them seems
to have grown deadly in some quarters. American soldiers in
Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don’t tell
their ANA colleagues when and where they’re going on patrol.
Back in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet jihad
we supported, we trained Afghan jihadists who have today
become our worst enemies, and now we may be doing it again.
Factor
in accounts of what General McChrystal did best: taking out bad
guys. Reportedly, he was vigorously directing Special
Forces’ assassinations
of
high and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for “peeling
off” the “good” Taliban -- that is, those
impoverished fighters only in it for the money. According to
his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through
internationally subsidized jobs. But assassinating the
ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers -- or those we
call the bad Taliban -- actually leaves behind leaderless,
undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living
off the population we’re supposed to protect than being peeled
off into abject Afghan poverty. From the point of view of
ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our “good Taliban”
are the worst of all.
I
could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of
failure is all around you, including those millions of American
taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and
Karzai relatives) and then handed
over to insurgents to buy protection for U.S. supply convoys
traveling on U.S. built, but Taliban-controlled, roads.
Strategy doesn’t get much worse than that: financing both
sides, and every
brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.
2.
So
why does Obama stick to this failed policy?
Go
figure. Maybe he’s been persuaded by Pentagon hype.
Replacing
General McChrystal with Centcom commander General David Petraeus
brought a media golden-oldies replay of Petraeus’s greatest
hits: his authorship of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual,
updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era edition, and of
Bush’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq, an exercise in
sectarian cleansing now routinely called a “success.”
If you can apply the word “success” to any operation in
Iraq, you’re surely capable of clinging to the hope that
Petreus can find it again in Afghanistan.
But
like David McKiernan, the general he ousted, McChrystal has already
misapplied the “lessons” of Iraq to the decidedly
different circumstances of Afghanistan and so produced a striking set
of failures. A deal to
buy off
the
Shinwari Pashtuns, for instance, a tribe mistakenly thought to be the
equivalent of the Anbar Sunnis in Iraq, ended in an uproar when they
pocketed the money without firing a shot at a single Talib. Not
so surprising, considering that the people they were paid to fight
are not foreign invaders -- that would be us -- but their Pashtun
cousins.
Moreover,
the surge into the Afghan south seems only to have further alienated
the folks who live there, while increasing violence against local
residents. It has also come at the expense of American troops
in the east, the ones I was recently embedded with, who face an
onslaught of hostile fighters moving across the border from Pakistan.
3.
What
about the enemy strategy? How’s that working?
It
seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and various hostile fighters in
Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus’s surge in
Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it,
but by meeting it with a surge of their own. An American
commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces
recently wiped out five border posts. “They opened the gate,”
he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge
into Kandahar, who’s paying attention? In fact, as the
battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are
running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties.
In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game
played largely for an American audience at the expense of American
soldiers.
And
all the while America’s “partner” in this strategy,
the dubious President Karzai, consolidates his power, which is
thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more
suspect half-brother, Ahmed
Wali. In the process, he studiously ignores the parliament,
which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest,
occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis. He now
evidently bets
his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American
forces, and extends
feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the
Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his “angry
brothers.” As for the Afghan people, even the most
resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say:
“This is our big problem.” They’re talking,
of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in
place, pay for, prop up, and pretend to be “partners”
with.
In
fact, America’s silent acceptance of President Karzai’s
flagrantly
fraudulent election last summer -- all those stuffed ballot boxes
-- seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had
about an American commitment to democracy. They know now that matters
will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents.
They probably won’t be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in
secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad, and elsewhere.
The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about
the resolution of the war -- though it consumes our wealth and our
soldiers, too -- than the Afghans.
Think
of what’s happening in Afghanistan more generally as a creeping
Talibanization, which Afghans say is working all too well. In
Marja, in Kandahar, in the east, everywhere, the Taliban do what we
can’t and roll out their own (shadow) governments-in-a-box,
ready to solve disputes, administer rough justice, collect taxes, and
enforce “virtue.” In Herat, the Ulema of the West issue a
fatwa restricting the freedom of women to work and move about without
a mahram,
or male relative, as escort. In Kabul, the police raid restaurants
that serve alcohol, and the government shuts down reputable, secular
international NGOs, charging them with proselytizing. Taliban
influence creeps into parliament, into legislation restricting
constitutional freedoms, into ministries and governmental contracts
where corruption flourishes, and into the provisional peace jirga
tent where delegates called for freedom for all imprisoned Taliban.
Out of the jails, into the government, to sit side by side with
warlords and war criminals, mujahideen
brothers under the skin. Embraced by President Karzai. Perhaps
even welcomed one day by American strategists and President Obama
himself as a way out.
4.
If
it’s so bad, why can’t it be stopped?
The
threatening gloom of American policy is never the whole story.
There are young progressive men and women running for Parliament in
the coming September elections. There are women organizing to
keep hold of the modest gains they’ve made, though how they
will do that when the men seem so intent on negotiating them away
remains a mystery. There are the valiant efforts of thoroughly
devout Muslims who wish to live in the twenty-first century.
When they look outward to more developed Islamic countries, however,
they see that their homeland is a Muslim country like no other -- and
if the Taliban return, it will only be worse.
American
development was supposed to have made it all so much better.
But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health
care, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to
leave their Embassy fortress in Kabul. Regularly, USAID now
hands over huge hunks of “aid” money to big, impossibly
ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual
no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence,
wastefulness, unconscionable profits, and outright fraud should be a
national scandal.
This,
too, is a process everyone knows but can’t speak about because
it’s not part of the official script in which the U.S. must be
seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it
reeling into the darkest of ages. Despairing humanitarians
recall that Hillary Clinton promised
as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had
become nothing but “a contracting shop.” Well,
here’s a flash from Afghanistan: it’s still a contracting
shop, and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who
have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent, and criminal.
Just
as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent
war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone -- except perhaps the
so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative
Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation -- Clinton
presides over a fraudulent aid program that functions chiefly to
transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the
pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies.
If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton
actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this
state of affairs continue, and why do the members of the
international community -- the U.N., all those international NGOs,
and our fast-fading coalition allies -- sign off on it?
You
have only to look around in Kabul and elsewhere, as I did this month,
to see that the more American military there is, the more insurgents
there are; the more insurgent attacks, the more private security
contractors; the more barriers and razor wire, the more restrictions
on freedom of movement in the capital for Afghans and internationals
alike; and the more security, the higher the danger pay for members
of the international community who choose to stay and spend their
time complaining about the way security prevents them from doing
their useful work.
And
so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating
ever more incentives for almost everyone involved -- except ordinary
Afghans, of course -- to keep on keeping on. There’s a
little something for quite a few: government officials in the U.S.,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense
intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines,
international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats,
members of the Afghan National Army, and the police, and the Taliban,
and their various pals, and the whole array of camp followers that
service warfare everywhere.
It
goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate
construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums
of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our
nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers, and for ordinary
Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by
them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage, and
moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of
despair.
Ann
Jones, a TomDispatch
regular, is the author of Kabul
in Winter. Her
new book, War
Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of
War,
about her work with women in post-conflict countries, is to be
published by Metropolitan Books in September. She is at work on
her next book about what happens when America’s wars come
home. To visit her website, click here.
Copyright
2010 Ann Jones
This
article originally appeared in TomDispatch.com
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