I don’t want to make fun of Defense Tech’s blogger Christian, but why is he acting like this is a surprise?
The situation in Afghanistan has gotten me pretty pissed off these days. I got off the phone a little while ago with the commander of a battalion of Marines — 2nd battalion, 7th Marine Regiment — who’s trying to hold back the waters of “Taliban” violence manning the ramparts of a 28,000 square kilometer area of operations … a swath the size of Vermont, he said.
Because of this lack of forces, Lt. Col. Richard Hall, the battalion CO, has lost by my count 13 Marines in the short time he’s been in Afghanistan. That’s getting close to the total number of Marines killed in Iraq this year. Hall’s been extended once already — and he’s praying for relief by November if Gates will free up some Marines from Anbar (Iraq) as the commandant reiterated his desire to do today at the Pentagon.
My fundamental question is how could we have let it get this bad?
Dude, while everyone else—including, unfortunately, your publication—has been laser-focused on Iraq, those of us following Afghanistan have been waving and screaming about just this problem. For years now, Afghanistan has been as relatively dangerous as Iraq, and now it is suffering a far higher attrition rate that even the worst of the fighting back west. The Marines don’t have enough troops to “hold” the areas they clear—something we’ve been talking about here since they deployed.
So right on, Christian. It is a good thing you’re drawing attention to this, because maybe now someone will wake the hell up and listen to the fundamental structural problems facing the Afghan campaign. Just… don’t take your eye off the ball next time, okay? The entire country did, and it is seriously biting us in the ass now.
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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{ 5 comments }
But what’s the logic of “holding back the waters” when the source of the flow of water is across the border and we do nothing about stopping it up or draining the source? Are we hoping that the future new Pakistani administration will be more open to letting us conduct joint operations to root out bases there, or at least bomb and we just hold on until then? Or do we just hope that the Taliban eventually just give up and quit coming into Afghanistan? The whole situation boggles the mind.
Justin, it’s misleading to pretend the only problem Afghanistan is facing is Pakistan. The haven issue is a problem, but it is one of the lesser ones. A method of Taliban recruitment that has been reported but barely discussed because it is embarrassing to us is that the primary pool of new Taliban fighters is not in NWFP or FATA but in local communities in Afghanistan. Our own unwillingness to remove bad leadership — governors and sub-governors who play off local disputes to entrench their own power base — has given the Taliban groups an enormous advantage by allowing them to come in and serve as both local power brokers but also local agents of justice. It has been remarkably effective.
Plus, if there are a few militants causing trouble locally, and there aren’t enough troops (coalition or ANA/ANP) nearby to create any kind fo security pocket, it would be daft to join up and put one’s entire family and lives at risk, especially when those troops nearby will just move on the moment something else bad happens.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are symbiotic — You have to address both, but you can’t just address Pakistan. As for the new civilian government in Islamabad, let them work out their leadership first. This it the struggle they should have been going through in 2002, if we weren’t so stupid as to allow Musharraf to repeatedly cancel elections and ban secular parties. Pakistan doesn’t want terrorism on their soil any more than we do, and while about 30% or so supports opposing the U.S., they really don’t want an unstable narco-state next door. So once they work out their own issues, they’ll have a great deal of interest in helping out Afghanistan. But first things first.
I agree with the idea that Pakistan and Afghanistan have to be addressed simultaneously, but I think JTapp is right–in that Pakistan is not being dealt with at all, and the general consensus seems to be to let the civilian leadership sort themselves out first. Problem: left to their own devices, the Pakistani leadership will choose squabbling endlessly over confronting real problems every time, if history is any guide.
I also have to point out that it’s not a given that troops will solve the problem. The current standard counterinsurgency calculation for troop strength is 20 troops to 1000 civilian population. Securing the entire country would cost about 640k troops, and just the Pashtun areas (assuming 40% of the country) would cost 255k. The point here is that we aren’t going to have nearly that kind of commitment, so some creative shortcuts are going to have to be found in the meantime, as was the case in Iraq. A “mini-surge” of troops is just going to be a bandaid in Afghanistan though, because we don’t have other forms of leverage that we do in Iraq (basically buying off Sunni enemies).
One glaringly obvious part of the solution is to pump up our development aid by a factor of 8, so it comes more into line with what we did in Kosovo and Bosnia. That was what Afghans were expecting in the first place in 2001, and not getting that caused the disappointment and ambivalence about the American presence.
There’s more than one way to create pockets of security, is my point.
Ian — I agree, absolutely. You’ll get no argument from me about the absolute necessity of aid, though in Afghanistan’s case it would have to be meticulously applied, which so far it hasn’t been.
About Pakistan, their dictator just resigned. I’m okay with letting them sort things out a bit first. I actually have more faith in the civilians solving that problem than I did in Musharraf. Bombing and incursions are non-starters — they haven’t worked since 2002, and they’ll work even less now. The tribal militants need to be undermined politically, and the best way to do that is by an inclusive civilian government.
We could also, you know, try to crack down on the Saudi and Emirati sources of funding. But not with this administration.
By the way, we seem to be only counting American/Western troops. The ANA is 80,000 strong and growing. Part of a successful COIN strategy is building up sufficient local forces to do the job too, and reaching 255k is much more feasible if you look at improving/expanding the ANA and ANP.
Joshua, I understand what you’re saying, but I see no easy way to replace leadership & warlords–even back in 2001. Putting the ethnic differences aside, there are tribal factions that further complicate the matter. One person’s ruthless warlord might be another guy’s family patriarch. We’re not talking about an educated people that have great access to information; there isn’t even hardly 19th century infrastructure in Afghanistan.
From all I’m reading it appears that the natives are growing restless against the U.S. presence. So, I feel like I did before the “surge” in Iraq– is greatly increasing troop levels really a good idea?
I’m afraid that the Iraq surge has become a precedent, a “cure-all” to our problems. People don’t look at other in-country factors that contributed to the surge’s success in Iraq that aren’t present at all in Afghanistan.