The Redhunter

To inform the national discussion, therefore, we have produced a report that argues for an addition of 40,000-45,000 US troops in 2010 to the 68,000 American forces that will be there by the end of this year. The report illustrates where US, NATO, and Afghan forces are now and where additional forces are needed to accomplish the mission. It links the US force requirements to the growth of the Afghan National Security Forces on an accelerated timeline. It explains the methodology for assessing the adequacy of a proposed force-level. This product, and our recommendations and assessments, are entirely our own--they do not necessarily reflect the views of General McChrystal or anyone else." - Fred and Kim Kagan

Now for the report:

Objectives

• Create conditions in Afghanistan to prevent the re‐establishment of safe havens for al
Qaeda and other trans‐national terrorist groups
• Establish sufficient stability to ensure that these conditions can be sustained over time with foreign financial assistance but with very limited foreign military presence

COIN (counterinsurgency) Strategic Framework

• Security
- Defeat the insurgency together with the ANSF
- Expand and improve the ANSF as rapidly as possible
- Make the lines cross
• Governance
- Remediate damage that corruption and abuse of power have done to the legitimacy of the Afghan Government
- Help and cajole GIRoA to emplace systems and procedures to improve legitimacy over the next few years
- Improve the capacity of GIRoA at all levels to provide essential services to the Afghan people, especially security, justice, dispute resolution, and basic agricultural and transportation infrastructure
• Development
- Focus development efforts on building Afghan capacity to develop their own country rather than on developing it for them
- Ensure that development empowers the government, not the enemy
- Address corruption and the perception of corruption within the international development effort
• Security and governance have priority over development

Me - that last line is vital; securing the population must come before economic development, and indeed even before political progress. For years we had it backward in Iraq, and with the surge in 2007 we finally got it right. As such, we succeeded.

Afghan Government Legitimacy

• Establishing the legitimacy of the Afghan government is a requirement for successful counter‐insurgency
• Elections are one way of establishing legitimacy, but they are neither sufficient nor necessarily determinative
• US must redouble its efforts to help Afghanistan establish the legitimacy of the institutions of its government
• A key part of these efforts must be dramatically increasing transparency in Afghan budgetary procedures (building on models already in place in some ministries)
• The US must also work to encourage the Afghan government to establish procedures for electing provincial and district governors and sub‐governors who are currently appointed by the president
• The US and the international community together control virtually all of Afghanistan's budget; they have enormous leverage if they choose to use it (much more than the leverage the US had on oil‐rich Iraq)
• The presence of large numbers of American and international forces and the irreplaceable role they currently play in providing security for the Afghan government and its officials also offer enormous leverage

Sources of Legitimacy

• Elections are one source of legitimacy, but only one
• Legitimacy is also defined by the performance of the government, both in its ability to provide desired services and in its adherence to social norms
• Karzai would likely have won fair elections, although possibly not in the first round, and he would almost certainly have carried the Pashtun areas heavily--so the problem is not the imposition of an unacceptable leader but rather the manipulations that led to this particular outcome
• The fraud is unquestionably damaging to Karzai's legitimacy and therefore harmful to the ISAF effort
• But in the mid‐ and long‐term, legitimacy will be defined much more by the actions Karzai and the international community take now than by the fraudulence of these elections
• We should not condone the fraud; on the contrary, we should deplore it
• But we should accept the outcome of the Afghan legal processes now underway to review the result and then develop and use all possible leverage with Karzai to shape the new government in ways the will repair the damage to its legitimacy and begin to improve the situation

Me - so we see that while elections are necessary, we should not focus too much on them. The reality is that most Afghans didn't even know there was an election, and many who voted didn't really understand what they were doing. What they want is a government that they believe is looking out for their interests, is reasonably free of corruption, and can provide basic services.

Legitimacy After the Election

• The US can also work to help the Afghan government reform itself using tools similar to those we employed in helping the Iraqi government rid itself of malign actors supporting sectarian cleansing and death‐squads in 2007:
- US forces can collect evidence of malfeasance by Afghan officials at all levels
- That evidence can be presented to those officials, to their superiors, to Karzai, to Afghan courts, to the public, or, in some cases, to international courts
- In some cases, criminal action should result; in some cases, the officials should be removed; in some cases, the aim is simply to pressure those officials to stop certain specific behaviors that threaten the success of the mission
- This is not a crusade against corruption--officials are only targeted when their actions seriously jeopardize our efforts
- This does not require the removal of Karzai or some of his key allies (including family members) from positions of power--as in Iraq, it should be possible to rechannel their behavior away from the activities that are most damaging
• The US has demonstrated that it can generate such precise and surgical
pressure on critical points in a political system in Iraq
• This approach requires significant numbers of American forces actively patrolling among the population--only in that way can our leaders develop the intelligence they need to determine which malign actors must be addressed and to gather the information needed to address them

Me - the good news is that unlike Iraq, we have a lot of leverage with the Afghan government.

Legitimacy and the ANSF

• What is the ANSF fighting for if the US makes it clear that it regards the Afghan Government as illegitimate?
• The ANSF leadership is well aware that it cannot manage the violence in Afghanistan on its own
• Announcing that no US reinforcements are on the way is likely to damage ANSF morale seriously, particularly coupled with US interactions with the Afghan government that suggest the US does not accept its legitimacy
• The ANSF does not exist or fight in a vacuum--its quality and performance depends heavily on its belief that the international community supports it and will continue to support it adequately, and on its belief that its cause is just Legitimacy and Force Levels
• The flaws of the August 20 election increase the requirement for additional forces rather than decreasing it
• If the US declares that it will not send additional forces because of those flaws, it is de facto declaring that it regards the election as illegitimate, the Karzai government as illegitimate, and the Afghan enterprise as unworthy of additional effort, all of which will seriously exacerbate damage to the legitimacy of the government within Afghanistan as well as to the will of the international community to continue the struggle
• Failing to send additional forces, moreover, deprives the US of the ability to take advantage of the opportunities offered by this flawed election, particularly the opportunities to leverage Karzai's insecurity and growing recognition that he must take real steps to re‐establish the legitimacy of his government
• This is not a symbolic question--undertaking any of the steps outlined in this document to address systemic problems that undermine the legitimacy of the Afghan government require additional American military forces operating in a COIN mission on the ground

Me - let 's not cut off our nose to spite our face by not sending troops because of a fraudulent election. This is Afghanistan, folks, not Idaho. Let's concentrate on basic government services, which is all the people there really care about, anyway. What we don't want to do is create a situation that undermines the Afghan security forces, because if they lose confidence in us it will be very difficult if not impossible to regain their trust.

Next: The current size and state of the Allied and Afghan security forces