Enemy-centred ideas for Afghanistan
Two recent articles, one by Bernard Finel and one by Austin Long, argue for a more ‘enemy-centred’ approach to the campaign in Afghanistan, one that would satisfy U.S. counter-terrorist objectives without embroiling its forces in overly ambitious state-building. It is interesting to read the two articles together, as both argue for a scaling-down of ambitions, yet in fairly distinct ways.
In Foreign Affairs, Bernard Finel argues that the targeting of insurgency strongholds (such as Marja and Kandahar) is the best way of conducting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and that the focus on populations is a red herring. He makes some important charges against the conduct of ‘population-centred’ counterinsurgency: it reduces the motivation for violence to that of bad governance, ignoring other factors; and it focuses on the population’s supposed needs rather than the enemy’s activity; yet is unlikely to address any of these ‘underlying factors’ given limitations in time, leverage and capability. Finel argues that rather than address these ‘underlying factors’, U.S. strategy should focus on ‘systematically attacking insurgents’ strongholds’, as this would allow coalition forces to ‘erode insurgent combat power, overturn the narrative that the insurgency is winning, and ultimately compel the insurgents to compromise’.
Plainly, clearing insurgency strongholds would be central to any counterinsurgency campaign — in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Yet where Finel differs is concerning the aftermath of such operations. Conventional counterinsurgency theory would subject ‘cleared’ areas to reconstruction and development, conducted through local communities and with the aim of supporting capacity and winning allies. Security is maintained through the continuous presence of forces, whether local, host-nation, or foreign, so that the insurgency group is denied access and the counterinsurgency effort gains legitimacy. In broad strokes, that’s more or less it.
Finel proposes an alternative: the logic of his enemy-centric approach is ‘not to hold territory but to demonstrate that the insurgents cannot hold territory either’. The point would be to use the military pressure against insurgency strongholds to inform eventual negotiations, which may not produce ‘victory’ as initially conceived but a ‘substitute for victory’ that would at least guarantee U.S. counterterrorism objectives. This may be unsatisfying, yet as Finel stresses, most conflicts end through an admixture of negotiations and armed force, and victory, therefore, becomes a matter of compromising less than your adversaries. As he puts it:
When victory for either side is impossible — or simply too costly to achieve — the key impediment to peace is precisely the refusal of either or both sides to accept that the only possible peace is a compromised one.
In general this is an under-appreciated point, yet I wish this theoretical notion had been tied more closely to the approach to counterinsurgency argued for in the article. What happens after the strikes on insurgency strongholds? Is it back to the FOB? And if so wouldn’t this risk a gradual slide back to status quo ante? Are isolated shows of force sufficient to ‘overturn the narrative’, and whose narrative are we in fact after: that of our domestic audience, that of ‘the insurgents’, or that of the Afghan people caught between insurgent control and NATO raids? Also, would staggered shows of force be sufficient to gain leverage in whatever negotiations that follow and who would these negotiations involve?
Finel’s piece makes for interesting reading but, given the length of this ‘snapshot’, there is perhaps an inevitable lack of detail, resulting in a proposal that seems tempting in its simplicity yet fares less well upon further scrutiny.Without greater elaboration, there seems to be a step missing here.
In contrast, Austin Long’s proposal for an enemy-centred strategy in Afghanistan is rather comprehensive. In his article ‘Small is Beautiful‘ for Orbis, he lays out a detailed vision for how to deploy U.S. forces for a counter-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan. Small, of course, is a relative term: as Long explains, his proposal is not on the scale of El Salvador (officially 55 advisers), but involves almost 10,000 troops, mostly SOF and aviation squadrons, with a BCT acting as a quick-reaction force. Still, Long makes the convincing argument that such a force would be capable of disrupting al-Qaeda-affiliated elements in Afghanistan without committing the U.S. to an expensive, perilous state-building endeavour that, even if moderately successful in the short-term, is undercut by the insurgents’ continued haven in Pakistan and the short timeline of our operation (as set by the Obama administration, but also by political realities in many European capitals). If U.S. strategic aims in Afghanistan are to disrupt and dismantle AQ, a smaller intervention may be a good starting point, while anything more may in fact be counter-productive, given the military, temporal, logistical, financial and many, many political obstacles in the way of a comprehensive state-building effort. As Long is keen to remind us, ‘the key to strategy is aligning resources with goals’.
There is much to go on here: a hard-nosed proposal to deploy troops in line with given timelines, current resources and stated strategic aims. Of course, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and there are aspects of Long’s proposal that I would like to see fleshed out. How, specifically, would the smaller force obtain actionable (and reliable) intelligence? And how would the presence of one ODA (each 12 man strong) in 30–40 districts cover a sufficient number of Afghanistan’s nearly 1,000 400 districts (even if many of these are today strategically irrelevant)?
Still, it would be foolish to dismiss the proposal as ‘unrealistic’, particularly given the far greater lack of realism in some of our current mission statements for Afghansitan. Proponents of more grandiose strategies often seek to convey an impression of restrained ambitions: what is aimed for is not a ‘Jeffersonian democracy’, not a ‘Switzerland in Central Asia’ — take your pick. Yet that just begs the question of what is indeed aimed for and how it is to be achieved prior to the imminent reduction in forces, by the U.S. as well as other NATO allies. If these withdrawals happen as currently planned, there is a very urgent need to consider alternative means of exerting influence and achieving strategic aims. These two articles may just be the starting points we need.
Originally published at kingsofwar.org.uk on April 8, 2010.
