…Doomed to Repeat It

Missing the Point in the Land That Time Forgot

Diverting from the usual five paragraph format can sometimes lead literature into unclear digressions, but it can also allow one to write quickly in order to maintain original intent.

I often ask myself had the coalition adopted a purely advisory mission immediately after the Taliban’s fall in 2002, how would things have been different? My personal belief is that we would still not have “won” the war, but maybe Afghanistan would be in a less precarious position. From my position, only in 2011-2012 did we realize the true poor state of the Afghan security forces. There were always jokes about how ineffective the police were and how unable the army was during the surge and earlier campaigns, but not until recently did we realize…holy shit, these guys have to take over for us.

Any educated response to the question needs to involve a close look at what the Soviets tried to accomplish during their foray.

“Military advisors were, for the most part, senior Soviet officers posted as high as the Afghan General Staff and Ministry of Defence down to the battalion level. The latter served in particularly daunting conditions. They faced difference of language and tradition as well as mujahadeen infiltration in the ranks of supposedly loyal Afghan troops. They were responsible for coordinating joint battle operations, convincing often reluctant Afghan officers to do their part in plans conceived by more senior Soviet advisors, and then drawing the brunt of their superiors’ ire when the Afghan units did not perform to the Soviets’ satisfaction, which was almost always.”

Sound familiar to all you ETT SFAT folks out there?

I find both confliction and difficulty in deciphering the overall Soviet intent in regards to Afghanistan. Many sources state the purpose was closer to defensive event, maybe even an altruistic in nature. In any event, it appears the majority of the Soviet advisory effort was concentrated towards political party unification under the umbrella of communism, rather than strategically propping up the Afghan military. The remainder of the advisor contingent towards the security force and intelligence nodes, with intel winning out resources in this regard.

One similarity between US and Soviet advisors in Afghanistan was that we both had a serious lack of training in regards to language and culture, but to be honest this fact is ancillary to being a naturally good advisor. There were good and bad choices for advisor selections, but our system was not set up to support this fact. National Guard units were chosen as advisors and their varied civilian professional experiences brought a unique perspective to advising. Marines were also tasked with ETT (Embedded Training Team) duty, specifically in RC-East. Their aggressiveness and tactical knowledge provided a jack-of-all-trades approach to instructing Afghans. The issue lay within the fact that they were an extremely subordinate to the almighty BSO, the Battle-Space Owner. Typically an Infantry Brigade / Battalion, the BSO helped the ETT’s only when available which is not so much a stone thrown at the BSO due to the fact that many units were too busy fighting for their lives, literally. In all fairness, one cannot pin much of the blame at all on the BSO’s. They were given a mission and until only recently, which can be argued as too late, it was not to push their Afghan partners into the fray.

The 162nd Infantry Brigade, a Fort Polk-based unit responsible for training advisors, is hanging on by a thread and its termination is currently in the crosshairs for the end of this year. This leaves the security force assistance mission solely on the narrow shoulders of US Army Special Forces (narrow in a metaphorical way, guys. I know you lift a lot of weights). At any rate, the 162nd was never set up to train every advisor sent into theater, so units did their own informal training after clumsily grouping individuals into teams.

So what mistakes were made? The Soviets did not so much as advise as attempt to will into existence their ideas and project them upon their Afghan partners. Us Americans…well we have bumbled our way for almost an entire decade before concentrating an advisory effort (hypocrisy alert, I was a contributing catalyst in this regard).

So what’s the point? This discussion forces us to ask ourselves; would advising have worked had we adopted it as our chief campaign strategy immediately after the fall of the Taliban? By focusing on the Afghan security forces’ tactical weaknesses, supporting their strongpoints of cultural identification and intelligence, we could have slowly but sustainably built up their infrastructure to the point of bridging the large gaps that separate our forces. I fully realize reading something about the history of battle in Afghanistan seems out of place during these globally turbulent times, but it is quite apt due to the re-shaping of the most powerful military the earth has ever seen. What we really need to do is forecast what our next war could possibly look like. All this qualitative analysis on advising is useless without knowing for sure that it will benefit our ability to effectively shorten or prevent the next armed conflict.

It seems that our government is taking the easy, simple way out of this conundrum of budgeting…give the service chiefs a number, tell them to get there, and shape the next conflict via the forces we have when the dust settles. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of living in a world that conforms to our defense posture. Perfecting our advisory tactics could well be the answer to this specific problem of power vacuums and global terrorism, but we don’t know that because we never put any effort towards resolving the War on Terror this way. My Army, the service facing the most severe cuts, has a number of potentially 420,000, however we will never know if that amount allows us to fight another asymmetric war because we never did it right in the first place.