For Bing, Before I Was Against Bing Posted by Patrick Barry

Looking over all the interesting things I didn't read this weekend, I caught this blurb about Bing West's latest contribution to the debate over what to do in Afghanistan, in which he argues that against the popular wisdom that A) Iraq's lessons arent applicable in the Afghan context, and B) that the U.S. should adopt a nation-building lite plan to stabilize the Afghan state.

As DA readers may know, West has become a bit of a controversial figure within the COIN and journalist communities after he criticized Nir Rosen for embedding with the Taliban. Though I found West's attack on Rosen nauseating, I was happy to separate it from what he had to say about Afghanistan, especially since the LA Times blog made him seem like such a bold contrarian.  After reading West's piece however, I found it wanting in a lot of areas. 

West is probably at his best when he's pointing out the flawed assumptions implicit in a few of the arguments against a "surge" in Afghanistan.  Taking aim at those who say that an awakening-style strategy wouldn't work there because of the differences from Iraq, West points out that the Iraq Awakening was really a hodge-podge of locally-suited plans that evolved differently in different parts of the country.  War planners didn't work with local proxies in Iraq uniformly, so why would they do so in Afghanistan? This seems correct to me.  Counter-insurgencecy is by intent a local thing, so local differences don't necessarily undermine its applicablity.

It's an interesting piece of criticism, but it doesn't change the fact that there are still very big differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, including the terrain, which West mentions, and a history of warlordism, which he doesn't. West is absolutey right to say that those differences shouldn't result in a wholesale abandoning of Iraq wisdom, but we do have to strive to tailor that wisdom to account for Afghanistan's realities - an effor that West doesn't entirely make.  He does wing up putting forward a strategy - to embed U.S. advisors in Afghan units with the goal of expanding the ASF to 140,000 - but it neither addresses the obstacles to creating an effective Afghan force of that size (like the fact that it would cost 2x Afghanistan's GDP), nor offers a compelling alternative to the plan if it proves infeasible.

West also pulls back from weighing in constructively when it comes to the debate over whether to nation-build in Afghanistan.  He's justified in observing that the way people talk about Afghanistan suggests a long-term committment to building the Afghan state, without necessarily bothering to look at whether that's a realistic possibility.  Fine. But then what is the right balance of short-term fixes to the immediate threat of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and long-term strategies that address the reasons for their safe-haven existing in the first place?  That's where the debate should be, and West doesn't quite get us there. 

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