Is Optimism On Afghanistan Warranted? Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at the excellent Majils blog, Greg Carlstrom is pessimistic:

Operation Moshtarak could ultimately be a significant development -- if it leads to a secure Helmand province with decent local governance. Baradar's capture, too, could have broader implications. The early signs are not all encouraging, though, and it's simply too early to declare that the U.S. has regained the initiative in Afghanistan.

Now I take a back seat to no man or woman in my pessimism about Afghanistan, but I have a slightly different take on this. The US is putting renewed military pressure on the Taliban in Helmand; deals with tribes like the Shinwari (which I'm skeptical of) have the potential to increase the political and military pressure on the Taliban; and clearly the lack of clarity in Pakistan about its support for the Afghan Taliban has to be creating some concern in Quetta and elsewhere.

So from this perspective it's really hard for me to see how the United States ISN'T in some small way regaining the initiative in Afghanistan. What has happened in the past week or so has the potential to turn the tide of the war and it should on the surface create some opportunity for optimism. The problem is there seems to be good reason to suspect otherwise. For example, CJ Chivers piece in the NYT from a few days ago seems to puncture the bubble of ISAF optimism about the Afghan Army:

Scenes from this corner of the battlefield, observed over eight days by two New York Times journalists, suggest that the day when the Afghan Army will be well led and able to perform complex operations independently, rather than merely assist American missions, remains far off.

The effort to train the Afghan Army has long been troubled, with soldiers and officers repeatedly falling short. And yet after nearly a decade of American and European mentorship and many billions of dollars of American taxpayer investment, American and Afghan officials have portrayed the Afghan Army as the force out front in this important offensive against the Taliban.

Statements from Kabul have said the Afghan military is planning the missions and leading both the fight and the effort to engage with Afghan civilians caught between the Taliban and the newly arrived troops.

But that assertion conflicts with what is visible in the field. In every engagement between the Taliban and one front-line American Marine unit, the operation has been led in almost every significant sense by American officers and troops. They organized the forces for battle, transported them in American vehicles and helicopters from Western-run bases into Taliban-held ground, and have been the primary fighting force each day.

You got to love how Chivers says that military statements "conflict" with what's happening in the field. How about those statements are blatantly untrue - that also works. But look, this is really concerning . . . and not the slightest bit surprising. We knew months ago that the ANSF wasn't up to the job of holding and building in Helmand. 

Rajiv Chandrasekeran's stellar reporting doesn't spark much confidence either:

On the satellite photographs of Marja that Marines scrutinized before launching a massive assault against the Taliban a week ago, what they assumed was the municipal government center appeared to be a large, rectangular building, cater-cornered from the main police station.

Seizing that intersection became a key objective, one deemed essential to imposing authority and beginning reconstruction in this part of Helmand province once U.S. and Afghan troops flush out the insurgents.

But when Marine officers reached the area, they discovered that two-dimensional images can be deceiving. What they had thought was the flat roof of the municipal building turned out to be a concrete foundation, and the police station was a bombed-out schoolhouse.

The problem here is not that the government center turned out to be a concrete foundation, it's that we continue to believe that government authority in places like Marjeh will be established via a gleaming municipal center or through various reconstruction projects. This has always been an underlying weakness of FM 3-24 and American COIN in general: namely viewing the provision of goods and services as fundamentally more important - and even decisive - in assuring loyalty to the state, rather than ethnic, tribal, religious or even village allegiances. The very idea that you can bring in to Marjah "government in box" likes it's pre-fabricated housing - and that it will immediately create loyalty among the people to a government in Kabul that they currently view as distant as corrupt - just strikes me as an incredibly simplistic way of thinking about how state legitimacy is derived.

Speaking of that corrupt government in Kabul, comes this piece of "good news"

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has unilaterally taken control of the country's top electoral watchdog, provoking outrage from western diplomats, the Guardian has learnt.

The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), which forced Karzai into a runoff election after it disqualified nearly 1m fraudulent votes in last year's presidential election, previously included three foreign experts named by the UN.

However, according to a new presidential decree published today, Karzai will have the exclusive power to appoint all five panel members. His decision to "Afghanise" the ECC came while parliament was in recess.

I'm generally of the "Let Hamid be Hamid" school of thought, but if you're going to make extending state legitimacy a key feature of your counter-insurgency effort these types of things are not going to help.

But there are other reasons for concern. Last week I attended the International Studies Association Conference and I was very struck by the fact that over three days - and a lot of discussion on Af/Pak and COIN - one point kept getting made over and over again: US deployment schedules make it very hard to do effective counter-insurgency. This is true on both the military and civilian side - and a few days ago Robert Wehrle, who has been mentoring the Afghan police, made precisely the same point:

Length of tour for those mentoring ministry-level efforts is simply too short. Six to eight months is barely enough time to gain an understanding of system dynamics, let alone effect meaningful change. The attitude this engenders in the Afghans is "wait and see." They are reluctant to embrace recommendations from the current mentor because he will change in six months - so they push back out of wariness and fatigue.

A closely related dynamic is related to end-of-tour performance reporting. A combat-zone performance report carries significant weight at the next promotion board. Not surprisingly, the focus on doing "something meaningful" creates turmoil as people rotate in and out, declare the previous efforts ineffective, and start their own programs. This unsatisfactory situation creates its own perpetual dust storm of short-term-focused efforts to achieve immediate goals.

What is so troubling is that everyone seems to recognize this is a problem, but what's clear is that it doesn't seem like much is being done to change it . . . or even can be done.

In the end, I really have no idea what's going to happen in Pakistan with the arrest of Mullah Baradar; whether this is a shift in Pakistani attitudes toward the Taliban is still up in the air. And even though the US has at least in the interim re-claimed the initiative what's far less clear is whether we can hold it - or even fully understand how to.            

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Great post Michael. I was going to write something similar as a follow-up to my last piece about Marjah (http://demagoguesanddictators.blogspot.com/2010/02/missing-something-in-marjah.html), but instead I'm just linking to yours. I think the military still doesn't quite understand governance as opposed to government and how difficult it really is to provide.

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So from this perspective it's really hard for me to see how the United States ISN'T in some small way regaining the initiative in Afghanistan. What has happened in the past week or so has the potential to turn the tide of the war and it should on the surface create some opportunity for optimism.

Michael, as you well know, turning the tide of the war, absent any political progress, is meaningless in this kind of nation-building effort. The facts remain that the government and military in Afghanistan are beyond useless and show no signs of changing. When one considers the history of the country, its terrain and illiteracy, its history plus the lack of success in any comparable US endeavor (indeed Vietnam being a notable failure in this department) then turning the tide of war in the conflict's ninth year means nothing.

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