The Redhunter

1. UNDERSTAND WHY WE'RE THERE
Afghanistan is not now a sanctuary for al-Qaeda, but it would likely become one again if we abandoned it. Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban government we removed in 2001, is alive and well in Pakistan.... Allowing Afghanistan to fail would mean allowing these determined enemies of the United States to regain the freedom they had before 9/11.

Pakistan itself is another reason Afghanistan is vitally important to America....As long as Afghanistan is unstable, Pakistan will be unable to bring order to its own tribal areas, where many terrorist sanctuaries persist. It will also be distracted from addressing the more fundamental problems of Islamic radicalism that threaten its very survival as a state. Further, Afghan instability makes the U.S. dependent on Pakistan logistically.

Stated more simply; do not allow terrorists to have an entire nation or even region to themselves. They must not be allowed to have a sanctuary of any size. Without one they can still be dangerous, with one they can wreck untold havoc. Not only is sanctuary useful from a logistical perspective, they can use the fact of its existence as a propaganda ploy, in this case the seat of their new caliphate.

2. KNOW WHAT WE HAVE TO ACHIEVE
Success in Afghanistan does not require creating a paradise in one of the poorest countries on earth, but we cannot define victory down. Preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists again, helping Pakistan fight its own terrorist problems, and liberating ourselves from dependence on Pakistan will require building an Afghan state with a representative government.

This almost seems a repudiation of some of what we've been hearing recently about how we have to "redefine expectations" in Afghanistan.

Kagan goes on to say that despite problems, "the country is neither ungovernable nor artificial." Again, unless I am misreading things this is a bit different than what we usually hear.

3. UNDERSTAND OUR ENEMIES AND FRIENDS
There is no such thing as "the Taliban" today. Many different groups with different leaders and aims call themselves "Taliban," and many more are called "Taliban" by their enemies....

In general terms, any group that calls itself "Taliban" is identifying itself as against the government in Kabul, the U.S., and U.S. allies. Our job is to understand which groups are truly dangerous, which are irreconcilable with our goals for Afghanistan--and which can be fractured or persuaded to rejoin the Afghan polity. We can't fight them all, and we can't negotiate with them all. Dropping the term "Taliban" and referring to specific groups instead would be a good way to start understanding who is really causing problems.

I had not known this but it makes sense. Unlike, for example, Vietnam, we have been fortunate not to face a unified insurgency in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The advantage from our perspective is that while we can't fight them all, we don't have to. Part of counterinsurgency as outlined in Field Manual 3-24 is determining which parts of the insurgency we can co-opt and turn to our side, or at least neutralize.

Not surprisingly, establishing the legitimacy of the government is important to Kagan. Again, this is stressed in Petraeus' 3-24. Right now the provincial governors and local leaders were appointed by President Karzia, which may have worked as a short-term solution but cannot stand in the long run. Leaders at all levels must be selected by the people or they will not be perceived as legitimate.

4. COMMIT TO THE EFFORT
The consistent unwillingness of the U.S. government to commit to the success of its endeavors in Afghanistan (and Iraq) over the long term is a serious obstacle to progress. The Pakistani leadership appears convinced that America will abandon its efforts in South Asia sooner rather than later, and this conviction fuels Pakistan's determination to retain support for (and therefore control of) Afghan Taliban groups based in its territory....

When U.S. forces moved into insurgent strongholds in Iraq in 2007, the first thing they were asked was: "Are you going to stay this time?" When the answer was yes (and we proved it by really staying and living among them), the floodgates of local opposition to the insurgents opened. The people of Afghanistan need the same reassurance.

Our history is very much against us in this effort. Islamists point to our retreat following the Marine-barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983, the "Blackhawk Down" incident in 1993, our abandonment of Afghanistan following the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, and our abandonment of Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis to Saddam Hussein's retribution in 1991 and 1992. At the end of 2006, our enemies in Iraq were already declaring victory, convinced that the pattern would repeat itself. The question they are now asking is: Was the surge an aberration in U.S. policy or a new pattern?

When Walid Phares outlined the history of the modern jihad Future Jihad, he stressed that Osama bin Laden and his cohorts watched these and more incidents carefully. Concluding that the United States would run when it's forces sustained losses, in 1998 he released a fatwa that was for all practical purposes a declaration of war on the United States. Seeing no response, he took it as a sign from Allah that we were ripe for the picking, and started planning the operation that became the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001.

"Are you going to stay this time?" This goes to the very heart of counterinsurgency strategy. What we have to do is win their "hearts and minds." Unfortunately, this is perhaps the most misunderstood phrase in all of warfare. As properly explained in 3-24,

"Hearts" means persuading people that their best interests are served by COIN success. "Minds" means convincing them that the force can protect them and that resisting it is pointless. Note that neither concerns whether people like Soldiers and Marines. Calculated self-interest, not emotion, is what counts. Over time, successful trusted networks grow like roots into the populace. They displace enemy networks, which forces enemies into the open, letting military forces seize the initiative and destroy the insurgents.

In short

Hearts: The population must be convinced that our success is in their long-term interests.

Minds: The population must be convinced that we actually are going to win, and we (or a transition force) will permanently protect their interests.

It's all about staying power. In the formulation of Osama bin Laden, it's about who the people perceive as being the "strong horse."

5. LEARN AND ADAPT THE RIGHT LESSONS
We cannot dismiss our extensive and painful experiences in Iraq, but we must recognize the differences between that country and Afghanistan.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Iraq that is transportable to Afghanistan is this: It is impossible to conduct effective counterterrorism operations (i.e., targeting terrorist networks with precise attacks on key leadership nodes) in a fragile state without conducting effective counterinsurgency operations (i.e., protecting the population and using economic and political programs to build support for the government and resistance to insurgents and terrorists).

All this gets terribly complicated, but think about it this way; counterterror focuses on chasing terrorists around the country, counterinsurgency is focuses on protect the population.

The lesson of Iraq is that you cannot "kill your way out of an insurgency." In Iraq we eliminated scores of terrorists from AQI and other organizations, includiing Abu Musab al Zarqawi himself in June 2006, yet the insurgency only kept getting worse.

Killing the leadership is all very fine, but the reason it doesn't work by itself is that we're not dealing with a criminal gang like the mafia. Insurgencies are more horizontally organized than vertically, so are not dependent on a few leaders.

Another thing to remember is that like politics, all insurgencies are local. Their nature varies from village to village. What works in one may not work in another. We did not win in Iraq using the same strategy in all parts of the country, because the problem was not the same in all parts. As the environmentalists say, we must think globally but act locally.

6. CONSIDER THE HUMAN TERRAIN
Pashtuns are not Arabs. They have different traditions, different tribal structures, different ways of resolving differences. One of the most important (and least remarked-upon) differences is that Iraqis fight in their cities and villages while Pashtuns, on the whole, do not.

Coalition forces fought their way through Iraqi cities and villages, sometimes doing fearful damage to the cities and local populations. We devastated Fallujah and Ramadi, for example. But local grievances did not focus on the collateral damage. Considering the scale of the destruction, Iraqi complaints about it were very mild....

Pashtuns don't work that way...The major urban centers are not insurgent sanctuaries, and most insurgent attacks occur not only beyond the city limits but outside of the villages as well.

In other words, the war in Iraq was fought in the urban areas, in Afghanistan it is in the countryside. We must adapt our strategy and tactics accordingly.

In fact, to solve the problems in Afghanistan we must have a deep understanding of local dynamics in many different areas. In the current security environment, only American and allied military forces can understand those dynamics, and they can do so only by living among the people in a way that is mutually acceptable to our forces and the Afghans.

This "living among the people" was key to our success in Iraq, a strategy that is stressed in 3-24. You cannot fight an insurgency from large bases, however safe you may think your troops are there.

See Iraq Briefing - 04 Feb 2008 - "We do not drive or commute to work" and
Iraq Briefing - 22 Feb 2008 - "We are Living with the Population"

7. UNDERSTAND WHAT WE MUST DO, CAN DO, AND CAN'T DO
The Afghan National Army consists of perhaps 70,000 troops (on paper). This number will rise gradually to 134,000--itself an arbitrary sum, based on assumptions about what the fifth-poorest country in the world can afford to pay for an army that is certainly too small to establish and maintain security. The Afghan National Police are ineffective when not actively part of the problem. Afghanistan is significantly larger than Iraq, its terrain is far more daunting, and its population is greater. The Iraqi Security Forces that defeated the insurgency (with our help) in 2007 and 2008 numbered over 500,000 by the end. There is simply no way that Afghan Security Forces can defeat the insurgents on their own, with or without large numbers of coalition advisers.

There's not much more to say other than that the Afghanis won't be able to stand on their own for quite some time.

8. HAVE A GOOD PLAN
Adding more troops to a failing strategy rarely works. Current military and political leaders recognize this, which is why reviews are underway in CENTCOM, the Joint Staff, and the White House to develop a new strategy for Afghanistan.

Kagan goes on to outline a number of recommendations for theater commander Gen. David McKiernan, some of which involve giving him more staff and bolstering the diplomatic corps that I won't detail here. The lesson though is twofold: One, critics of the Iraqi surge would have been right if in fact all we had done is send more troops to do the same thing. Second, Petraeus did not do it alone, but was ably assisted by a large staff, the most important of whom was then Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno. Odierno planned the individual operations and led the day-to-day conduct of the war during 2007-08.

9. PRIORITIZE EFFORTS
While the situation in Afghanistan is indeed deteriorating, it would be wrong to rush forces out of Iraq this year in response. Most important, as detailed above, we have not yet established the conditions in Afghanistan that would allow a surge to be decisive. Also, the theater cannot absorb too many reinforcements too quickly. The surge in Iraq brought U.S. troop levels up to something over 160,000 soldiers--about the same number we had had there at the end of 2005. By contrast, coalition force levels in Afghanistan are already at their highest levels. The logistical base that supports them is very sparse. In Iraq there was enough reserve logistical and infrastructure capacity to integrate five additional brigades and two battalions in the space of six months. Because similar resources are lacking, it would be much harder to accomplish such a feat in Afghanistan at this point.

It would be foolish to risk all that we have gained in Iraq for Afghanistan.

Also, it must be remembered that the logistical situation in Afghanistan is infinitely more difficult than in Iraq. In the latter we have direct access to the country by sea, with the former we are dependent on Pakistan and the northern "'stans" for access. It is easy to move units around on a map, quite another to keep them properly supplied, something that does not happen by magic.

In the end, Kagan stresses that this is not an outline for a plan for Afghanistan, but rather "a set of guidelines for thinking about how to develop one." They're good ones, and I do hope they're listening.