Max Boot: How We Can Win in Afghanistan
[Max Boot is the author of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.]
The terms counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have become common currency this decade in the wake of September 11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. To a layman’s ear, they can sound like synonyms, especially because of our habit of labeling all insurgents as terrorists. But to military professionals, they are two very different concepts. Counterterrorism refers to operations employing small numbers of Special Operations “door kickers” and high-tech weapons systems such as Predator drones and cruise missiles. Such operations are designed to capture or kill a small number of “high-value targets.” Counterinsurgency, known as COIN in military argot, is much more ambitious. According to official Army doctrine, COIN refers to “those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” The combined approach typically requires a substantial commitment of ground troops for an extended period of time.
When General Stanley McChrystal was selected on May 11 of this year as the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, it was by no means certain which approach he would employ. His background is almost entirely in counterterrorism. He had been head of the Joint Special Operations Command (comprising elite units such as the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEALs) when it was carrying out daring raids to capture Saddam Hussein and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. If he had decided to follow the same approach in Afghanistan, he would have had the support of Vice President Joe Biden and numerous congressional Democrats who favor a narrow counterterrorism strategy to fight al-Qaeda and who want to cut the number of American troops to a bare minimum.
But that is not what McChrystal has chosen to do. He has decided, as he put it in an “interim assessment” dated August 30 that was later leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, that “success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.” A close reading of that document, which was directed at the Pentagon and White House, as well as the “Counterinsurgency Guidance” drafted at his behest around the same time and directed at his own troops, provides a window into his thinking. It shows why a COIN campaign is needed, how it would be carried out, and why the kind of narrow counterterrorism effort favored by so many amateur military strategists is unlikely to succeed.
_____________
The case against a counterterrorism approach in Afghanistan is laid out most clearly in the Counterinsurgency Guidance. McChrystal’s focus is on explaining why conventional military operations cannot defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan, but the same arguments apply to counterterrorism generally, which is a smaller-scale version of the same conceit—that the U.S. military can defeat an insurgency simply by killing insurgents. McChrystal writes that the math doesn’t add up:
From a conventional standpoint, the killing of two insurgents in a group of ten leaves eight remaining: 10 — 2 = 8. From the insurgent standpoint, those two killed were likely related to many others who will want vengeance. If civilian casualties occurred, that number will be much higher. Therefore, the death of two creates more willing recruits: 10 minus 2 equals 20 (or more) rather than 8.
He goes on to note that the “attrition” approach has been employed in Afghanistan over the past eight years by a relatively small number of American forces and their NATO allies. Yet, he writes, “eight years of individually successful kinetic operations have resulted in more violence.” He continues: “This is not to say that we should avoid a fight, but to win we need to do much more than simply kill or capture militants.”
What else, then, must coalition forces do? McChrystal’s answer:
An effective “offensive” operation in counterinsurgency is one that takes from the insurgent what he cannot afford to lose—control of the population. We must think of offensive operations not simply as those that target militants, but ones that earn the trust and support of the people while denying influence and access to the insurgents.
The Counterinsurgency Guidance points out that firing guns and missiles can often make it more difficult to win “trust and support.” An anecdote makes the point:
An ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] patrol was traveling through a city at a high rate of speed, driving down the center to force traffic off the road. Several pedestrians and other vehicles were pushed out of the way. A vehicle approached from the side into the traffic circle. The gunner fired a pen flare at it, which entered the vehicle and caught the interior on fire. As the ISAF patrol sped away, Afghans crowded around the car. How many insurgents did the patrol make that day?
As an example of how “self-defeating” the use of force can be, McChrystal could just as easily have chosen an example involving a Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile or an F-16 dropping a 500-pound bomb—the kind of strike that often causes considerable “collateral damage” and that, if the more limited counterterrorism approach were to be adopted, would become the centerpiece of our strategy.
McChrystal counsels his troops to take a different path, to “embrace the people,” to “partner with the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] at all echelons,” and to “build governance capacity and accountability.” He urges coalition troops to be “a positive force in the community; shield the people from harm; foster stability. Use local economic initiatives to increase employment and give young men alternatives to insurgency.”
This would mean putting less emphasis not only on using force but also on “force protection” measures (such as body armor and heavily armored vehicles), which distance the security forces from the population. As an example of what he expects, McChrystal cites an anecdote involving an “ISAF unit and their partnered Afghan company” that were “participating in a large shura [tribal council] in a previously hostile village.” During the shura, which was attended by “nearly the entire village,” he writes, “two insurgents began firing shots at one of the unit’s observation posts.” The sergeant in charge of the post could have returned fire but he chose not “to over-react and ruin the meeting.” -“Later,” this example concludes, “the village elders found the two militants and punished them accordingly.”
While counterintuitive to a conventional military mind, such thinking is hardly novel for anyone familiar with the history of counterinsurgency. McChrystal’s advice to embrace the population and be sparing in the use of firepower has been employed by successful counterinsurgents from the American Army in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century; to the British in Malaya in the 1950s and Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s; to, more recently, the Americans in Iraq. By contrast, counterinsurgency strategies that rely on firepower have usually failed, whether tried by the French in Algeria, by the U.S. in Vietnam, or by the Russians in Afghanistan.
The risk of the counterinsurgency approach—which helps to explain why it has not been adopted in Afghanistan until now or in Iraq until 2007—is that, in the short term, it will result in more casualties for coalition forces. Placing troops among the people and limiting their expenditure of firepower makes them more vulnerable at first than if they were sequestered on heavily fortified bases and ventured out only in heavily armored convoys. But in the long term, as the experience of Iraq shows, getting troops off their massive bases is the surest way to pacify the country and bring down casualties, both for civilians and security forces...
Read entire article at Commentary
The terms counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have become common currency this decade in the wake of September 11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. To a layman’s ear, they can sound like synonyms, especially because of our habit of labeling all insurgents as terrorists. But to military professionals, they are two very different concepts. Counterterrorism refers to operations employing small numbers of Special Operations “door kickers” and high-tech weapons systems such as Predator drones and cruise missiles. Such operations are designed to capture or kill a small number of “high-value targets.” Counterinsurgency, known as COIN in military argot, is much more ambitious. According to official Army doctrine, COIN refers to “those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” The combined approach typically requires a substantial commitment of ground troops for an extended period of time.
When General Stanley McChrystal was selected on May 11 of this year as the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, it was by no means certain which approach he would employ. His background is almost entirely in counterterrorism. He had been head of the Joint Special Operations Command (comprising elite units such as the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEALs) when it was carrying out daring raids to capture Saddam Hussein and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. If he had decided to follow the same approach in Afghanistan, he would have had the support of Vice President Joe Biden and numerous congressional Democrats who favor a narrow counterterrorism strategy to fight al-Qaeda and who want to cut the number of American troops to a bare minimum.
But that is not what McChrystal has chosen to do. He has decided, as he put it in an “interim assessment” dated August 30 that was later leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, that “success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.” A close reading of that document, which was directed at the Pentagon and White House, as well as the “Counterinsurgency Guidance” drafted at his behest around the same time and directed at his own troops, provides a window into his thinking. It shows why a COIN campaign is needed, how it would be carried out, and why the kind of narrow counterterrorism effort favored by so many amateur military strategists is unlikely to succeed.
_____________
The case against a counterterrorism approach in Afghanistan is laid out most clearly in the Counterinsurgency Guidance. McChrystal’s focus is on explaining why conventional military operations cannot defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan, but the same arguments apply to counterterrorism generally, which is a smaller-scale version of the same conceit—that the U.S. military can defeat an insurgency simply by killing insurgents. McChrystal writes that the math doesn’t add up:
From a conventional standpoint, the killing of two insurgents in a group of ten leaves eight remaining: 10 — 2 = 8. From the insurgent standpoint, those two killed were likely related to many others who will want vengeance. If civilian casualties occurred, that number will be much higher. Therefore, the death of two creates more willing recruits: 10 minus 2 equals 20 (or more) rather than 8.
He goes on to note that the “attrition” approach has been employed in Afghanistan over the past eight years by a relatively small number of American forces and their NATO allies. Yet, he writes, “eight years of individually successful kinetic operations have resulted in more violence.” He continues: “This is not to say that we should avoid a fight, but to win we need to do much more than simply kill or capture militants.”
What else, then, must coalition forces do? McChrystal’s answer:
An effective “offensive” operation in counterinsurgency is one that takes from the insurgent what he cannot afford to lose—control of the population. We must think of offensive operations not simply as those that target militants, but ones that earn the trust and support of the people while denying influence and access to the insurgents.
The Counterinsurgency Guidance points out that firing guns and missiles can often make it more difficult to win “trust and support.” An anecdote makes the point:
An ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] patrol was traveling through a city at a high rate of speed, driving down the center to force traffic off the road. Several pedestrians and other vehicles were pushed out of the way. A vehicle approached from the side into the traffic circle. The gunner fired a pen flare at it, which entered the vehicle and caught the interior on fire. As the ISAF patrol sped away, Afghans crowded around the car. How many insurgents did the patrol make that day?
As an example of how “self-defeating” the use of force can be, McChrystal could just as easily have chosen an example involving a Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile or an F-16 dropping a 500-pound bomb—the kind of strike that often causes considerable “collateral damage” and that, if the more limited counterterrorism approach were to be adopted, would become the centerpiece of our strategy.
McChrystal counsels his troops to take a different path, to “embrace the people,” to “partner with the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] at all echelons,” and to “build governance capacity and accountability.” He urges coalition troops to be “a positive force in the community; shield the people from harm; foster stability. Use local economic initiatives to increase employment and give young men alternatives to insurgency.”
This would mean putting less emphasis not only on using force but also on “force protection” measures (such as body armor and heavily armored vehicles), which distance the security forces from the population. As an example of what he expects, McChrystal cites an anecdote involving an “ISAF unit and their partnered Afghan company” that were “participating in a large shura [tribal council] in a previously hostile village.” During the shura, which was attended by “nearly the entire village,” he writes, “two insurgents began firing shots at one of the unit’s observation posts.” The sergeant in charge of the post could have returned fire but he chose not “to over-react and ruin the meeting.” -“Later,” this example concludes, “the village elders found the two militants and punished them accordingly.”
While counterintuitive to a conventional military mind, such thinking is hardly novel for anyone familiar with the history of counterinsurgency. McChrystal’s advice to embrace the population and be sparing in the use of firepower has been employed by successful counterinsurgents from the American Army in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century; to the British in Malaya in the 1950s and Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s; to, more recently, the Americans in Iraq. By contrast, counterinsurgency strategies that rely on firepower have usually failed, whether tried by the French in Algeria, by the U.S. in Vietnam, or by the Russians in Afghanistan.
The risk of the counterinsurgency approach—which helps to explain why it has not been adopted in Afghanistan until now or in Iraq until 2007—is that, in the short term, it will result in more casualties for coalition forces. Placing troops among the people and limiting their expenditure of firepower makes them more vulnerable at first than if they were sequestered on heavily fortified bases and ventured out only in heavily armored convoys. But in the long term, as the experience of Iraq shows, getting troops off their massive bases is the surest way to pacify the country and bring down casualties, both for civilians and security forces...