Why the Obama Administration Is All Over the Map on Afghanistan
Hey Rajiv Chandrasekaran, what the heck happened back in March when Obama decided to send 17,000 more troops into Afghanistan and started telling everyone we needed a more expansive approach there?
Everyone, save Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, agreed that the United States needed to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency mission to defeat the Taliban…
[...]
To senior military commanders, the [implications were] unambiguous: U.S. and NATO forces would have to change the way they operated in Afghanistan. Instead of focusing on hunting and killing insurgents, the troops would have to concentrate on protecting the good Afghans from the bad ones.
And to carry out such a counterinsurgency effort the way its doctrine prescribes, the military would almost certainly need more boots on the ground.
To some civilians who participated in the strategic review, that conclusion was much less clear. Some took it as inevitable that more troops would be needed, but others thought the thrust of the new approach was to send over scores more diplomats and reconstruction experts. They figured a counterinsurgency mission could be accomplished with the forces already in the country, plus the 17,000 new troops Obama had authorized in February.
“It was easy to say, ‘Hey, I support COIN,’ because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes,” said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency. (emphasis mine)
This sort of thing is almost enough to make you feel for the COIN clique. Barack Obama fancies himself a foreign-policy thinker, and his national-security staff no doubt think highly of their strategic vision and would like to advance the idea that Democratic administrations make better foreign-policy decisions than Republican administrations. But when Obama and his administration come out in March and say “yes, we’d like a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan,” and then send McChrystal over to do an assessment of what a COIN mission would need in terms of resources, it’s just absurd for them flutter six months later that “well, we didn’t know what we were getting into! They didn’t tell us it was going to be long and hard and costly!”
We’ve been having a discussion on counterinsurgency — indeed we’ve been doing counterinsurgency — for the last few years. There are lots of us who think that COIN in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand. My view is that COIN more generally is an intellectually insular doctrine purveyed by a cadre of scholar-practitioners who’ve either situated the doctrine in an absurd strategic context [.pdf] or else failed even to attempt to situate the approach inside any larger strategy.
But to be fair to them, they’ve been pretty candid about how hard counterinsurgency is. It’s just ridiculous for the administration to protest that they didn’t know it was going to be so expensive. The policy outcome the Obama administration produced was simply to throw more resources at the problem without bothering to think carefully about the connections between strategy, doctrine, and resources. Not encouraging.
David Frum Analyzes Why ‘The Crazies’ Are Running the GOP
In a discussion on Bloggingheads, David Frum offers his thoughts on the sad state of the GOP these days:
He blames the predicament, in part, on the “conservative entertainment-industrial complex,” a term coined by Andrew Sullivan. In Frum’s telling, this complex has “distorted conservative dialogue to suit the wishes of the Fox audience.” He says that drawing on such a group, “you can get seriously rich out of that, but you can’t govern a country with that kind of voter base, it’s a tiny minority-within-a-minority.”
This is an interesting thesis. Frum was the coauthor of a seemingly successful, widely discussed foreign-policy book titled An End to Evil, which posited that terrorism posed a “threat to the survival of our nation,” and in foreign policy, “there is no middle way for Americans. It is victory or Holocaust.” Are these the sorts of carefully considered judgments on which the GOP is going to ride back into office?
It’s probably true that pushing the American nationalist button over and over from 2002 forward contributed to getting Bush reelected in 2004, but the results after then have been rather less encouraging. John Boehner colorfully remarked recently that the GOP “took it in the shorts with Bush-Cheney, the Iraq War, and by sacrificing fiscal responsibility to hold power.” I’m not sure that my preferred foreign policy is the key to political success, but I’m pretty sure that the zany world view that Frum has traded on isn’t the way forward either.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Bringing the States Back In
It’s an annoying, hackneyed trope of foreign policy types to say “if you want to understand X, you have to understand Y.” That said, let me engage in a little bit of it.
What’s going on in Afghanistan, we’re supposed to believe, is about terrorism, failed states, economic development, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, human rights, and some other stuff. And to an extent, it is about each of those things. But to my mind, if you want to get a handle on what’s driving events over there, and on its historical status as a plaything of regional and extraregional powers, you ought to read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
The themes that permeate the article are familiar: States as the primary actors in international politics, their uncertainty about other states’ intentions, the fundamental zero-sumness of security competition…somebody should cook up a theory or two on this stuff.
Eventually–although in fairness, God only knows when–we’re going to leave Afghanistan. When that happens, India and Pakistan are still going to live in the neighborhood. They’d each prefer to have lots of influence in Afghanistan, and to preclude the other from having too much. Accordingly, they’re both trying to set up structures and relationships that would, in the ideal scenario, let them control Afghanistan. In a less-than-ideal scenario, they’d like enough influence to undermine the other’s control of the country. Until you grasp that nettle, you’re really just fumbling around in the dark.
Find a solution for that in your COIN manual.
McChrystal and Direct Action
Fred Kaplan and the New York Times say that the decision to replace General David McKiernan with Lt. General Stan McChrystal as the principle US commander in Afghanistan is another step in the COINification of the Pentagon under Robert Gates. They say we’ve replaced a conventional warfare guy with an unconventional warfare guy.
That’s too simple. McChrystal is known for his mastery of the sharp or kinetic end of the counterinsurgency mission. The command he headed from 2003 to 2008 – Joint Special Operations Command — is essentially the operational component of Special Operations Command, which has really become a fifth service. JSOC organizes special operations missions in war zones. According to many officers, JSOC has also become enraptured with direct action. That means using intelligence from various sources to plan raids, often kicking down doors in the dead of night, interrogating people to generate more intelligence, doing it again immediately, and eventually capturing or killing insurgent leaders with the intelligence gleaned.
Bob Woodward’s latest book argues that JSOC’s role in employing these tactics in Iraq was crucial to the supposed success of the surge. But some informed observers beg to differ, arguing that standard counterinsurgency tactics and the contributions of Iraqis themselves mattered far more. Some complain that JSOC’s aggressive tactics and limited coordination with those in the regular chain of command undermined pacification efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the (recently released!) book on the post Cold War evolution of the US military that I co-edited, Colin Jackson and Austin Long have a chapter discussing the politics of special operations command. They argue that the direct action theory of victory in counterinsurgency is a close relative to the air force’s theory of decapitation, which says you can defeat a nation by attacking its leaders from the air. They explain that direct action has long been the favored tactic of secret or “black” SOF organizations like Delta Force, but that the wars made it the dominant mission in SOCOM as a whole, crowding traditional “white” counterinsurgency missions like population protection, force training, and civil affairs. To them, that is a problem, because the direct action theory of victory is badly flawed. You can’t kill your way to victory in these sorts of wars, they argue. That’s particularly true in Afghanistan, I’d add, where distance and poor roads make the exploitation of intelligence far more time-consuming.
I don’t know to what extent McChrystal shares the black SOF worldview. He would probably say that direct action is just part of the toolkit. It is possible, however, that his appointment reflects a decision to downplay nation-building in Afghanistan and focus more on killing raids and training Afghan soldiers.
It is also interesting to speculate about what Michael Vickers (the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities) had to say about this. Vickers — a key advisor to Gates and a carry-over from the Bush administration — is said to be skeptical about troop surges in counterinsurgency, preferring to train local forces.
According to Greg Grant of DoD Buzz:
In a speech before a defense industry gathering last month, Vickers said he foresees a shift over time from the manpower intensive counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to more “distributed operations across the world,” relying on close to 100 small teams of special operations forces to hunt down terrorist networks, part of a “global radical Islamist insurgency.”
I don’t like the across the world part, but if this appointment means more limited objectives in Afghanistan, it’s good news.
A final note on McChrystal: he reportedly runs many miles a day, sleeps only a few hours, and avoids eating until evening to avoid sluggishness. Apparently the iron-man thing goes over well with Rangers, but I think commanders, whose job is mostly thinking, should get a good night’s sleep and three square.
An Intellectual Counterinsurgency
My friend (and noble peacemaker) Spencer Ackerman points us to Tom Ricks’ take on the Army’s new stability operations manual:
I wonder if the very title of the manual is incorrect. After all, we didn’t invade Iraq to provide stability, but to force change. Likewise in Afghanistan. And once we were there, we didn’t aim for stability, but to encourage democracy, which (the thought is not original with me) in a region like the Middle East generally undermines stability. I mean, if all we wanted was stability, why not find a strongman and leave?
What we really are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think, is instability operations… Personally, I think the mission of changing the culture of Iraq was nuts — but that was the mission the president assigned the military.
I think a more intellectually honest title for the manual would be “Revolutionary Operations.” Don’t hold your breath.
Ricks is right, but he misses a larger problem. The argument of the folks who want to develop COIN capabilities has become completely circular.
Take, for example, the worry of Lt. Gen William Caldwell, in unveiling the original release of FM 3-7, that we live in an “era of uncertainty and persistent conflict.” Accordingly, says Caldwell, we need capabilities to produce stability. Hence, the stability operations field manual.
This elides the fact that if we had to take an impartial look at where the instability is coming from, a hell of a lot of it is emanating from Washington, DC. Our Rube Goldberg political science theories, based in large part on liberal international relations theory, have led us to knock over governments and pursue radical transformation everywhere from Latin America to Eastern Europe to the mountains of Central Asia, the jungles of Vietnam, and the sands of Iraq.
Then, when confronted with the wreckage of our policy, we convince ourselves that we are gravely threatened by the instability we have created, and must enhance our capabilities to rectify this instability. Less kindly, it’s like the Tennessee Valley Authority with guns, Humvees and translators.
Look at the new “whole-of-government” counterinsurgency guide, for example. The issuance of the volume was predicated on the logically-true-but-practically-misleading claim that “in today’s world, state failure can quickly become not merely a misfortune for local communities, but a threat to global security.” (emphasis mine) The COIN manual then quickly proceeds to tell us that any decision to do COIN “should not be taken lightly; historically COIN campaigns have almost always been more costly, more protracted and more difficult than first anticipated.” Then it quickly becomes a cookbook on how to use the Agriculture, Treasury, and Transportation Departments to transform the way foreigners run their countries.
My colleague Ben Friedman recently remarked that “Both Creighton’s Abrams’ reforms ensuring that the president had to activate the reserves to start a war and the Weinberger-Powell doctrine were sneaky usurpations of authority. They were also realistic efforts to avoid bad wars and on balance good things.” He’s right. It would be good if we were devoting a tenth the resources toward stopping the next policy disaster as we are devoting to figuring out how to execute self-destructive policies more effectively.
In short, if, as the leading COIN advocate of the moment tells us, the best way to fight the “war on terrorism” is by engaging in a “global counterinsurgency,” we’re in deep, deep trouble. As long as the only people who can stop us are ourselves, I’m afraid we won’t be stopped.
Power, as Karl Deutsch once wrote, is “the ability to talk instead of listen. In this sense, it is the ability to afford not to learn.” And we’ve got loads of power.
Strategy and Counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency expert Andrew Exum, of Abu Muqawama war blog, takes on Justin Logan’s post below. At the risk of restating Justin’s points, I feel compelled to jump into the fray.
Exum says basically this: Our policies have tended to result in small wars, however foolish. We want an Army of our policies. There is, in other words, a difference between operations and strategy. Counterinsurgency experts are just preaching good practice in the former. They just work here. Grand strategy is someone else’s gig.
There is merit in this view. But it has two problems.
First, the COIN gurus do not confine themselves to the operational side of things. Exum works for the Center for New American Security, which has collected counterinsurgency experts who argue that 1) Americans can become proficient counterinsurgents and 2) counter-terrorism requires that transformation. I believe neither. Apparently Exum only buys 1. I hope he can convince his colleagues to stop saying 2.
Second, the stark divide between strategy and operations is an ideal. The theory that the military services are only professional technicians serving the ends of politicians is too simple. The Army has political interests, which change with its structure and leadership. Those interests affect our defense and foreign policy. The causal arrow between national security policy and the structure and doctrine of the organizations that execute it points both ways. Pretending it is not so is a dodge, even if it gets you an A in your undergraduate civil-military relations class. Both Creighton’s Abrams’ reforms ensuring that the president had to activate the reserves to start a war and the Weinberger-Powell doctrine were sneaky usurpations of authority. They were also realistic efforts to avoid bad wars and on balance good things.
Defense writers tend to depict the generals who resist permanently transforming the US ground forces into a counterinsurgency force as benighted fools and the lieutenant colonels who buck them as forces of truth and light. The reality is more complicated. The Big Army that wants to fight only Big Wars reflects a realistic sense of what military force can and can’t do and the insight that reengineering foreign countries goes in the can’t bucket. They make these wars less likely. The little army aligned against them is a result of the fact that these wars occur anyway, and being prepared is sensible. I am not sure who I’m rooting for.
More clear to me is that the realist view of small wars wars could use support. Realists say that what we’ve discovered fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are just COIN best practices, which guarantee nothing because this is ultimately someone else’s politics. They say that the best solution is don’t do it and next best is to severely curtail your objectives and stop confusing counterinsurgency with counterterrorism. If the new counterinsurgency class believes even part of that, they should say so more forcefully.
Will the ‘Rise of the Counterinsurgents’ Lead to Fewer Counterinsurgency Wars?
Matt Yglesias picks up on the Bacevich review I referenced below and points to a post from counterinsurgency (COIN) scholar Andrew Exum in which Exum argues that learning to do counterinsurgency better will lead to our doing less of it:
No one who really understands COIN wants to do it. Liberal interventionalists and neo-conservatives are likely to be much more enthusiastic than the practitioners themselves. Counter-insurgents, often knowing something of what they speak through practical and hard-won experience, realize all too well just how difficult and costly big schemes drawn up in Washington become when they have to be operationalized. Counter-insurgency is hard. Best to avoid it, actually.
This doesn’t make much sense. Exum has previously excoriated COIN skeptic Gian Gentile for pursuing an “anti-COIN crusade.” But by Exum’s reasoning above, it is Exum who should be on an anti-COIN crusade. Instead, Exum thinks that DOD needs to allocate more resources to doing COIN.
Academically, Exum is interested in insurgencies. And indeed — they’re interesting. But for the COIN clique to think that their realistic appreciation of the difficulties of COIN and their private reticence to do it is going to outweigh their technocratic advice and willingness to obey orders in the minds of policymakers, I think they’re gravely mistaken. The work of the COIN crowd is going to create the impression in the minds of policymakers that the military knows how to win counterinsurgencies and therefore we don’t need an “Iraq syndrome.” But we do need an Iraq syndrome.
Take, for one example of my argument, the thinking of Bush NSC official Peter Feaver.* He thinks, as I do, that making COIN doctrine central to American foreign policy thought is going to create a future in which US foreign policy will continue to look like that of President Bush. Except for Feaver, that’s a feature, not a bug:
The problem with Chris’s post on COIN is that it takes the existing debate at face value, as if it really were a debate about the best way to do COIN or its place in American national security. I don’t think it is.
Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda. Setting them aside, the larger debate seems driven by one of three deeper considerations. First, anti-COIN is a convenient way to argue against American military involvement in any fashion because the most urgent near-term threats requiring military operations involve COIN. So if your ideology tells you that the dominant problem in the world is American militarism; if you look at recent history and can only find cases where we did use military force and shouldn’t have and can find no cases where we did not use military force and should have; if you think that getting defeated in Iraq (or Afghanistan) would have a salutary chastening effect on American adventurism; if any or all of that applies, then it makes sense to argue against Gates’ emphasis on COIN now. If the U.S. military cannot or will not do COIN, then the U.S. military cannot and will not be operational.
Does Exum think this policymaker’s view is wrong? Aberrant? I think its descriptive content is exactly accurate and characteristic. Orienting planning and resources more toward COIN is likely to lead to more counterinsurgency wars. I’m pretty confident in this prediction. If somebody disagrees, I’d like to hear a better fleshed out argument behind the idea that telling policymakers “we now know how to do COIN pretty well” will lead to those policymakers to decide we ought to do it less.
UPDATE: Professor Feaver writes in to say that by “Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the COIN critics Chris cites are sincere patriots who honestly believe what they have written and have no deeper agenda” he meant to make the positive statement that these people are patriots with noble intentions and didn’t mean to intimate they could be insincere patriots of questionable honesty with deeper agendas. He also disputes the factual accuracy of the Times article linked above and points to this Commentary piece as the definitive account of his work at the Bush NSC.
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