Repeating the Past & the Failures of NCW

Before the charge of repeating Soviet mistakes can be taken seriously, it helps to understand what those Soviet strategic mistakes were. Once that is realized, looking at how current U.S. and NATO policy both repeat and modify those strategic decisions can demonstrate how the military campaign is falling apart.

The first, and probably biggest, mistake was in fomenting the 1979 communist revolution in the first place. My guess (and understand it’s just a guess, I’m not pretending to speak authoritatively on this point) is the Kremlin thought the “Sovietization” of Afghanistan would proceed as it had in Turkestan—with scattered bands of nomads or impoverished villagers unable to resist the might of the Soviet mechanized army. Of course, there were other things at play: the changing balance of power in the Middle East, their low-key but healthy friendship with India, and so on. In addition to the other reasons at play, Afghanistan differed from Turkestan in one major way: it didn’t have a century of Russian occupation behind it. (Even in Turkestan, there was scattered resistance and mass starvation as the nomads were settled and forced onto collective farms.)

Indeed, the Uzbek scholar Baymirza Hayit consistently made the argument that Islam was inherently incompatiable with Sovietism—something many considered controversial, though considering the harsh anti-religious bent of Soviet ideology it should not have been surprising.

Beyond the initial decision to establish a puppet state in Afghanistan, the Soviets ran into another serious problem: the United States. For years, the CIA had funneled just enough weapons to the mujahideen to serve as spoilers to a foreign occupation (sounds familiar). The intent was never to form a countervailing government, though in the wake of Soviet withdrawal one was hastily put into place in Peshawar. The United States expended a lot of money, though far less than an open war, to achieve a priceless result: the military humiliation of the Soviet Union.

Tactically, the Soviets relied on air power and special forces (the Spetsnaz)—an incredibly powerful combination until the arrival of stinger missiles. That, really, is the story of combat in Afghanistan: by crippling Soviet air power, by denying them the opportunity to bomb or transport special forced with impunity, their entire war effort was undermined. It wasn’t stopped, it was merely turned hyper-expensive. In other words, as the CIA forced the costs to escalate, the Soviet Union was priced out of Afghanistan.

It is a pattern the United States has adopted, from the other side. We use mostly special forces backed up by overwhelming air power to handle most battles. Air and Naval power have always been American strengths, and long personnel-intensive engagements have always been American weaknesses. I’ll come back to this later, but in that light, we can see if the coalition is repeating the USSR’s mistakes in Afghanistan.

“Relying so heavily on air attacks to keep fatalities low is simply repeating the same mistake that the Russians made in Afghanistan a generation ago. The most stunning example was the futile battle of Tora Bora to capture Osama bin Laden at the end of 2001. As Jonathan Randal writes in his book, “Osama,” coalition troops did not fight on the ground at Tora Bora. It wasn’t a battle at all, just a hail of missiles and bombs that came and went…

I asked Edmund McWilliams, who was in charge of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in the late 1980s, about this. He confirmed that life under the doomed Soviet occupation wasn’t much different than it is today. There was a nightly curfew back then, when the KGB worked out of the same headquarters that the CIA uses now. The Communist president, Mohammad Najibullah, used to shut down air traffic for hours whenever he flew anywhere, just like Karzai does now. The Kabul sky teemed with armored helicopters and Mig fighters.

This comparison lacks nuance. Though it is true an over-reliance on air power and a deep aversion to “boots on the ground” have limited tactics and strategy, it is not the same mistake the Soviets made. Soviet forces were not shy of slaughtering thousands at a time to make a point, often erasing entire villages if a single mujahideen fighter was found. Similarly, they were not shy of massive campaigns along the border with Pakistan to try to stem the constant flow of American weapons. Plus, there are not nearly the same crackdowns on locals as under Najibullah, and from the start the government there has maintained a level of transparency not otherwise found in either Central or South Asia.

If anything, the coalition military is far less brutal than the Soviet military. However, unlike some of the more blood-thirsty analysts out there, I find this an unalloyed good, if only for the reduction of revenge-hatred. Furthermore, though they are brutal, oppressive woman-haters, the Taliban are not the indiscriminate butchers of, say, the Mahdi army: they have tended not to target purely civilian targets in their attacks, focusing instead on foreign and “collaborationist” targets. The most common victims of Taliban attacks are either soldiers, Afghan National Army troops, the police, or the local employees of foreign organizations (and the village elders who support them).

These differences between the Soviet and American invasions are very important to remember when looking at the macro picture.

So what kinds of mistakes, then, is the United States committing? Like the Soviets, we know that Pakistan is the primary base of operations for the militants, and like the Soviets we are wholly unwilling to cross the border (except for small, isolated operations) to do anything about it. We remain unwilling to fully pressure Musharraf to close the border, and we refuse to send in the military assets to establish a sufficient security zone. This is complicated by the complex relationship between the CIA and the ISI—when Pakistan announced its successful Uranium enrichment programs and carried out its first nuclear tests in the late 80s, the U.S. officially rebuked General Zia while the CIA winked and nodded and continued their collaboration. The message was clear: we’ll say what’s necessary in public, but where it matters we will defer to you. Such policy ambiguity has fostered a sense of untouchability among the ISI.

In a broader sense, too, the U.S. faces a problem of framework. Tied to the American over-reliance on air power is the problem of NCW, or Network-Centric Warfare. This is a concept invented in the mid-90′s by war theorists like Admirals Owens and Cebrowski, and has been brought to its logical conclusion by bloodthirsty pop-theorists like Barnett. The basics of NCW (sometimes called a “system of systems”) is leveraging an advantage of information onto the battlefield. Achieving total information superiority, so the theory goes, will give total battlefield superiority. This is accomplished by turning every battlefield asset (friend and foe) into a node on a network, allowing relevant information to be collected, analyzed, and turned into militarily-significant information like targeting acquisition (as part of the broad DODAF or C4ISTAR framework of operations). It is a framework primarily designed to fight large mechanized powers—China, Russia, even North Korea. It is also incredibly popular among both military brass and the military corporations that are fed multi-billion dollar contracts to develop the complex systems it requires.

Here’s the problem: while the theory behind NCW is sound, it is of severely limited use, and wholly inappropriate to low-tech guerilla conflicts. Put differently, signals intelligence (SIGINT), satellite recon, and gigantic flying phased radar arrays (the top level of NCW information gathering) don’t help you learn the influence of “blended in” insurgents in a critical village, or the concentration of militants in a cave network, or the number of villagers hiding explosives and guns in their huts.

This goes back to the American Way of War, which is super high-tech with reduced personnel and a low tolerance for combat casualties (on both sides, incidentally). Having a lot of gadgets is great if you’re fighting a heavily mechanized army; when you are battling a group of decentralized insurgents who can seamlessly blend into the population when the APCs roll in under the A-10′s, they’re less useful.

Beyond tactics, the use of NCW concepts is severely damaging to U.S. interests in the entire region. The desperate need for overflight rights over Pakistan from aircraft carriers are partially responsible for our passive attitude toward Pervez Musharraf. The need for additional air fields beyond Bagram have led to American acceptance of repressive regimes across Central Asia (the minor dust-up over Andijon, which resulted in Islam Karimov’s denial of American access to K2, is an anomaly both in the limpness of the American protests and the severity of Karimov’s response). This was driven home by an article in The American Prospect on the politics of basing rights in Kyrgyzstan, which have resulted in the deep alienation of Edil Baisalov (more worrying is his turning toward China, which would signal the loss of an otherwise respectable ally in the region).

All that being said, we remain far less worse off than the Soviets after five years of fighting (though, weirdly, in both wars, it took five years for it to reach an apex). The war, however, is very loseable, as none of the leadership has shown any indication of adapting tactics or strategy to match. So far, the closest they’ve come is simply giving the PRTs a slightly larger protection force; it doesn’t address the fundamental governance issues behind Karzai, the lack of “hold” operations to match the “sweeps,” the bumbling and counterproductive opium eradication policy, and so on.

In many ways, the U.S. really is repeating the past, by perfecting the Soviet method of warfare. Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Tajik leader of the Northern Alliance as famous for his victories in extremely lopsided battles against vastly superior foreign armies as he was ignored for his long string of losses to the Taliban, studied Mao’s theories of guerilla warfare obsessively. He wasn’t not alone, and every major leader of the mujahideen groups (including the Taliban) learned tactics from the ISI training camps.

In other words, the Taliban generally know that westerners are, at the end of the day, squeamish. And that the people on the ground are afraid. They press both to their advantage. Instead of working to deny them access, which must include a more serious effort at using local tribal cultures to our advantage (which can be done), as well as a vastly expanded effort at creating Taliban free zones, the U.S. begs NATO for a few recon planes, or a few more thousand troops to replace the few thousand being rotated home.

Without a major strategic change on the horizon—major enough to virtually guarantee it will never overcome the bureaucratic inertia at the Pentagon—the coalition in Afghanistan will be slowly ground to the next election, when a fatigued population will throw its hands in the air and declare victory while ordering retreat.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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