May 26, 2011:
Two Views on Our Progress in Afghanistan
Colleagues: Two contrasting opinions by experts on the prognosis for our strategy in Afghanistan. The first is by former Marine and Ass’t Secretary of Defense, Bing West, who has been a consistent critic of the “population-centric” COIN strategy in Afstan, which he thinks—based on much time spent in the war zone at the tactical level—is going nowhere.
I have also included a very recent assessment by Brookings expert Mike O’Hanlon, just returned from Afstan on a visit with Marine General Amos. I had asked two respected associates to provide a more positive assessment in order to balance what some (including them) might perceive as my “negativity” toward the potential for a successful outcome there.
I asked them for a recommendation—hence the O’Hanlon piece, and for their thoughts on Bing’s viewpoint. They wrote:
(From a long time regional expert formerly with the CJCS) Ty, in answer to your request for a piece that is serious and more upbeat than Bing West’s pretty negative assessment, I would recommend Michael O’Hanlon’s analysis to contrast West’s incessant, and in my opinion, ill-conceived strategic-level criticism based upon tactical-level observations.
This is from Mike O’Hanlon in NYT from Saturday, May 21st. Mike just back from travels with USMC Commandant James Amos in the same locales that West traveled over a year ago. Far better news and much more balance than presented by West.
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(From an Afghan expert and professor), “Ty, on Bing West, I loved his battle stories … accept some of his recommendations … but he never connects the dots. We are so kinetic and he pretends the soldiers are all drinking tea and that we are wasting huge amounts on nation building. He is right that this is the Afghans to win. Most reviews of his have been good. Joe
One critic of extending our presence in Afghanistan reminds us of the true costs of doing so: “More than $7 billion a month, perhaps another thousand lives lost, and thousands of limbs gone forever.”
OK—You again be the judge. Below are West’s fairly negative and long assessment followed by O’Hanlon’s more upbeat viewpoint. Ty
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NATIONAL REVIEW MAY 20, 2011
A Thousand Years Away
American valor, Afghan vacillation
BY BING WEST
Sangin District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan
In late March, I rejoined the platoon whose maneuvers I had described (With the Warriors) in the National Review. To reach the platoon, I first checked in at the operations center of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. While there, I watched the deaths of two insurgents. A real-time video feed from an overhead aircraft showed a motorcyclist and his passenger, carrying a pickaxe and bulging sack, driving past a crowded market in Sangin District. They stopped on an open strip of road, where one man hacked out a shallow hole. The other then placed an improvised explosive device (IED) in the hole. Minutes later, a Hellfire missile killed them both.
While the air strike was routine, the location was disturbing. In Sangin, the United States and its coalition partners had spent millions of dollars to provide electric power, schools, clinics, and roads. Yet the bombers on the motorcycle had driven brazenly through the market, unafraid of betrayal by those the coalition had aided for years.
The next day, when I reached the 3rd Platoon of Kilo Company, the troops were still living in cave-like rooms inside an abandoned compound. The big news since my last visit was the blimp tethered above Kilo Company’s outpost down the road. Its cameras streamed video night and day into the company’s two-desk command post. The Taliban, wary of the all-seeing eye in the sky too high to shoot down, had pulled back a few miles, to the annoyance of the 3rd Platoon. After half a year of steady combat, the men were wearing down, most having lost 10 to 15 pounds. They joked that the Taliban were inconsiderate.
“We have to walk farther to get into a fight,” Lt. Vic Garcia told me.
Before we left on patrol, the platoon gathered for a group photo. Since October, the 3rd Platoon had evacuated an average of one casualty per week — and they had one more week to go before deploying back to the States. 3rd platoon was a tight-knit band of warriors who, knowing they faced more casualties, were stolidly purposeful. For them, there was no backing off.
As we left the wire, Cpl. Colbey Yazzie unslung his Vallon metal detector and moved ahead to take point. An unassuming Navajo with a warm smile, Yaz was the platoon’s talisman, having discovered and detonated over 40 IEDs buried in the fields.
“How do you do it day after day, Yaz?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he grinned. “Just habit, I guess.”
“That’s not it, dude,” Sgt. Philip McCulloch said. “You’re awesome, man, the best in the battalion.”
As Yaz began to sweep back and forth, a dozen Marines fell into a single file behind him. Across Helmand Province, hundreds of similar patrols were on the move. Home to about 1.3 million Pashtuns, Helmand is a vast, flat desert interrupted by a few rivers fed by snowfields to the north. Most of the population lives in the Green Zone, a system of canals that sustains fertile farm fields along the banks of the rivers.
Near the patrol base, shepherds were tending cows and sheep, a sign they expected no attack by Taliban gangs. Several men rushed up to us, demanding payment for vague claims of battle damage. Every American battalion has millions of dollars to spend on local projects, and most farmers wanted a cut. We have created an Afghan culture of entitlement rather than self-reliance.
We walked past a farm compound that had been shattered by a bomb strike. Three waifs stood solemnly in the rubble. In a small field next to the compound, their father was scattering seed among poppy plants. He refused to look at the Marines.
Next to a fording point across a stream, Yaz found and cut a thick white electric wire. Buried somewhere close by was a plastic jug of explosives. One end of the wire led toward a compound where several women and children huddled nervously. After marking the spot for later examination by ordnance experts, Lieutenant Garcia gestured to Yaz to push on. The triggerman was long gone and there wasn’t any sense upsetting the women.
In its seven-month deployment, the 3rd Platoon had encountered over a hundred IEDs. The farming community knew the identity of the men who planted the mines. Out of fear, conviction, or both, the farmers remained silent.
Farther on, small groups of men glared at us. The white flag of the Taliban defiantly fluttered over an abandoned farmhouse. Out in the fields, farmers, women, and children hastened to shelter, a signal that the enemy lurked nearby. Staying in file, the Marines knelt and prepared to return fire. The sniper assigned to cover Yaz’s back scanned the empty fields to the front with binoculars. Garcia radioed the mortar crew back at base to stand by. When a helicopter gunship flew over for a look, McCulloch testily told the pilot to leave the area lest the Taliban be afraid to open fire.
The patrol wanted to fight. They measured themselves by how many enemy they killed. After waiting a half hour and getting no action, they returned to base.
***
After accompanying the 3rd Platoon on a few more patrols, I moved on. Three days after I left, Sgt. Dominic Esquibel, the 1st Squad leader, stepped on a mine. In the Iraqi battle for Fallujah, Esquibel had won the Navy Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for valor, but he refused to wear it because he wanted no personal recognition. He had stayed on active duty for one last tour in order to watch over his squad in Afghanistan. When I talked to him in the hospital, he was fighting to keep his right foot.
“I thank God it was me,” he said, “rather than one of my men.”
The next day, Yaz lost his right leg, and Corpsman Redmond Ramos sustained severe injuries trying to aid him.
“The IED maker had been watching me,” Yaz told me from his hospital room. “He set three mines. When I knelt to disarm one, another blew up under me. He was real smart.”
And he was real protected by the Pashtun code of silence. Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, commander of the 22,000 Marines in Helmand during March, said the Taliban “have lost the support of the people within the province.” Perhaps. But the villagers remained silent about who among them were sowing the fiendish mines. Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, has referred to the population as “professional chameleons,” providing support first to one side, then to another. This is understandable. A survey in Helmand and Kandahar last summer found that 71 percent believed the Taliban would return once the American forces left.
Kilo and the other companies of Battalion 3-5 had killed several hundred Taliban, and captured 80. The slipshod Afghan criminal system sentenced 15 of them to prison for at least a year; the other 65 were released or received token sentences. Every month in Afghanistan, there are about 1,400 IED attacks, requiring the collusion of many thousands of farmers. Yet fewer than 3,000 Taliban are being held in Afghan or coalition prisons, compared with 24,000 insurgents imprisoned in Iraq at the peak of the surge there in 2007. Most Taliban who are detained quickly walk free. On a per capita basis, Sweden has a higher prison population than does Afghanistan.
The 3rd Platoon went to Sangin with 53 troops and concluded their seven-month tour with 25 killed, missing limbs, or otherwise wounded and evacuated to the States. It took raw grit to patrol day after day, knowing that a large number of them would not return in one piece — or, in some cases, at all.
“The only way of approaching a war like this,” Garcia said, “is to block out the hurt. I tell my squad leaders they have to be the best. The skipper [Capt. Nick Johnson, the company commander] tells us we have to be the best company. Same attitude across the battalion. You compete to be the toughest. Never let the Taliban feel they have the upper hand.”
The platoon’s parent unit — the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment — had suffered the heaviest losses (30 killed) of any battalion in the ten-year war. What was gained? They had broken the long-held control of the Taliban over Sangin District. What comes next? In March, Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Sangin to congratulate the Marines there for having “killed, captured, or driven away most of the Taliban.” He told reporters that a strategy was in place “to actually put us on the path to success.”
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The strategy Gates mentioned consisted of four tasks. The first two are summarized as “clear and hold.” Across Afghanistan, each day nearly a thousand American platoons like Garcia’s sally forth through mine-laced fields and roads, waiting for enemies not in uniform to shoot first, so the platoon can fire back. This is a defensive, grind-it-out tactic based on attrition, and, as stated above, it has greatly degraded the Taliban’s capabilities, effectively clearing their fighters out of many districts.
That doesn’t necessarily deny the Taliban control of the population — the “hold” part. One obstacle is the rules of engagement: Out of respect for the culture, American troops do not enter farm compounds. They also do not patrol at night, when they cannot detect IEDs. And because the Taliban do not wear uniforms, they can live near an American base — as long as their neighbors do not betray them.
The current plan is to continue this approach for four more years while gradually withdrawing our forces. The approach can work, given enough time, money, and troops. In 2010, 499 Americans were killed; in 2011, the intensity of fighting portends a similar loss. The financial bill will be above $100 billion for the year.
“Clear and hold” cannot succeed by itself, both because the American troops are foreigners and because the math doesn’t add up. There are fewer than a thousand American outposts to secure 7,000 Pashtun villages. The Taliban wander in and out of the villages as frequently as American units do. At some point, the Afghan soldiers (most of whom are not Pashtuns) will have to fight their war without us. So, according to Gates, the third part of the strategy is to expand “the Afghan national security forces to the point where they can handle a degraded Taliban threat.”
Attrition can degrade and demoralize an enemy force, but today the Taliban still enjoy a sanctuary in Pakistan that is 1,500 miles in length. After Osama bin Laden was killed, Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader responsible for thousands of coalition deaths, remained snug and secure inside Pakistan. Although Taliban losses in districts like Sangin have been severe, the madrassas, or Islamist schools, in Pakistan provide a stream of zealous Taliban recruits. It is unclear when the attrition by American forces inside Afghanistan will exceed the replacement rate from Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the Afghan police remain unreliable, while Afghan-army battalions sustain extremely high turnover rates. We have scant leverage to insist upon promotions based on merit instead of bribes and tribal contacts. In Sangin, most of the Afghan soldiers tagged along in the formation, while Marines like Yazzie cleared the way. Put plainly, we won’t know whether the Afghan forces can stand up to the Taliban until our forces have withdrawn. But it is not until the end of 2014 — four more years — that Afghan security forces are expected to take over the combat mission.
Apart from clearing out the Taliban by attrition tactics, denying them control of the population, and building up the Afghan forces, there is a fourth task for our battalions, called the “hold and build” phase. Our counterinsurgency doctrine states that “soldiers and marines are expected to be nation-builders as well as warriors.” That expectation has proved far too ambitious, if not downright arrogant. The 12 million Pashtun tribesmen whom our soldiers “secure and serve” — to use General Petraeus’s term — have remained steadfastly neutral, while accepting every dollar we give them.
Soldiers, not villagers, win battles. Our core mission must be to instill in the Afghan soldiers the belief that they can crush the Taliban. That’s not an impossible task. Today, the Marines have largely cleared Helmand, where for four years the Taliban had been viewed as invincible. The next step is to gradually move the Afghan soldiers into the front. Every American battalion commander, however, knows the serious defects in the Afghan army and does not want to risk failure by pulling back too quickly.
There is a path to accelerating the handover: Bulk up our adviser teams while reducing our conventional forces. Shift from protecting a neutral population to cultivating a fighting spirit in the Afghan army. Every day, Afghan soldiers accompany American soldiers on patrol; they are useful at spotting the Taliban, after which the Americans conduct the battle. The Afghans can be put in the lead if we replace 700-man U.S. battalions with 200-man adviser units that have adequate combat power and experienced leaders.
The surge of American troops has shattered the momentum of the Taliban. It’s unlikely they can regain that momentum. On May 15, Defense Secretary Gates said: “We’ve turned a corner, because of the Taliban being driven out and kept out. . . . Military pressure could create the circumstances for reconciliation.” One precedent is our Vietnam-era negotiations with the North Vietnamese, although they did not work out so well.
The central question remains: Why are we fighting, if the Taliban — unlike al-Qaeda — are not a terrorist threat to U.S.?
No strategy is risk-free. But since the secretary of defense has chosen to emphasize “reconciliation,” it is time to begin a quiet, steady withdrawal of our combat units. Karzai may cut an opaque deal with the Taliban, whom he refuses to call an enemy. If he does, it will signal that a decade of fighting by brave Americans like Yaz was due to a simple misunderstanding among Afghan brothers. As happened after Vietnam, a generation of American soldiers and Marines will then question the wisdom of their seniors who insisted upon the Sisyphean strategy of nation building in a tribal country 7,000 miles and a thousand years away.
(Mr. West, a former assistant secretary of defense, served with the Marines in Vietnam. He is the author, most recently, of The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan.)
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Finally, a Fighting Force
By MICHAEL E. O’HANLON
IN the last two weeks, an Afghan police officer killed two American Marines in Helmand Province, and another killed a British soldier after a dispute over a soccer match. Last month, an Afghan military pilot killed nine American military trainers after an argument at a meeting in Kabul.
None of the killers seem to have been Taliban infiltrators, but that alone is not terribly reassuring. The United States’ exit strategy for the war in Afghanistan depends largely on the performance, competence and trustworthiness of the Afghan security forces, and critics of the mission view such episodes as evidence that the Afghan forces are generally unreliable — ineffectual in combat and too often unmotivated, erratic or corrupt. The issue looms over President Obama’s decision about troop reductions in Afghanistan, which he is expected to announce by July.
But there is reason to be hopeful. I was in Helmand Province last week, traveling with Gen. James F. Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps, and despite the recent setbacks and other problems, my impression of today’s Afghan security forces was encouraging.
Helmand Province, for years a Taliban stronghold, has in the past year or so seen remarkable progress. Almost all of the populated parts of the province are now under the control of the Afghan government and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
The region is not completely safe, to be sure. But most major roads are serviceable, and government officials now generally use them instead of NATO helicopters to get around. Markets are open; schools have increased almost 50 percent in number since late 2009; twice as many Afghan officials work in local governments as did a year ago; and poppy production is down.
The even better news is that Afghan forces deserve an increasingly large share of the credit. The message from the Marines and British soldiers I spoke to in the province was one of growing appreciation for the skills and fighting spirit of Afghan soldiers and police officers.
Last year in southern Afghanistan, Afghans made up about half of all the combined forces used to clear the region of most Taliban weapons caches and strongholds. According to the International Security Assistance Force, roughly two-thirds of all Afghan Army battalions nationwide now score at least a 3 on a military-readiness scale from 1 to 5, meaning that while they still require outside help, they are quite effective when conducting missions with NATO troops.
Police and army pay is now adequate by national standards, and local recruiting goals for the Afghan Army and police in Helmand Province have been largely met this spring for the first time since the war began. Desertion rates are still too high, and Afghan troops too often overstay their military leaves, but the trends point in the right direction.
During my travels, several Marine officers who also had experience in Iraq told me that Afghan police officers and soldiers were better fighters than their Iraqi counterparts. Routinely, in towns like Musa Qala that are still tense, Afghans provide half the personnel on most foot patrols — and I was told that they do not shrink from fighting when they run into trouble.
I heard many anecdotes that spoke to the growing effectiveness of the Afghan forces. Recently, for instance, in the town of Marja, intelligence indicated the presence of Taliban forces in the vicinity. An Afghan unit responsible for that sector leaped into action. A few hours later it returned with Taliban captives.
The unit’s American partners told me that they would have preferred more of a plan — the Afghan forces were somewhat reckless in their response. But the important point was that the Afghans did not avoid combat or expect NATO soldiers to do their fighting for them.
Does this mean the United States should prepare for an immediate drawdown of troops?
No. What I saw and heard in Helmand Province supports the exit strategy — but not for this summer or fall.
An American commander told me that in his estimation, after an area is first cleared of the Taliban, NATO can substantially draw down its forces there 24 to 30 months later. That gives NATO enough time to recruit and train Afghan Army and police units, allows Afghan citizens to gain confidence that the Taliban is not coming back and gives the civilian government a chance to get off the ground. The time frame implies significantly reduced NATO forces in southern Afghanistan by next year.
In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, many Americans have argued that the country should cut its losses in Afghanistan and bring our troops home. But while the United States does need a better political and diplomatic strategy for the mission (in particular, for dealing with Kabul and Islamabad), this is not the time to jettison a military strategy that has finally hit its stride.
Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.