"Vietghanistan" from Michael Moore's website

Quite a lot of print and airtime have been expended recently on “managing expectations” regarding our excellent adventure in Afghanistan.  If any of you have experienced qualms about any item, or combination of items, on the following list, I’m fairly certain that the latest news cycle has done nothing at all to allay your fears or clear up your doubts.  Here’s my personal list of still-unanswered questions regarding the US’ nine year military presence in Afghanistan; answers to some, preferably all of these questions would, I believe, greatly enhance my understanding, as a voter and taxpayer, of what the hell our leaders think they have accomplished/hope to accomplish by continuing along their merry, globally destabilizing way:

• Why have our military leaders changed strategy after nine years in Afghanistan?
• Why is our new counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan better than other strategies? What does COIN success look like? Did our previous strategy/-ies fail?
• How much have our total military expenditures in Afghanistan contributed to our overall objectives there? 
• How well-trained in counterinsurgency strategy and tactics are our troops? How well outfitted are they for the same?
• How many successful counterinsurgency campaigns have been executed by the US military? By any world military power?  How many of those successful campaigns were executed in eighteen months?
• Do Afghans want us to help them fight against the Taliban?  How many Afghan civilians have we killed/maimed by “accident?”

* * *

That list of questions is by no means comprehensive but, rather, represents my current reality-based heavyweight questions specific to the US role in Afghanistan.  The remainder of the list is somewhat more “existential:”

• What would happen to the US economy (ergo global economy) if there were a worldwide moratorium on “military and/or quasi-military incursions/interventions?”
• Once Afghanistan is “stabilized,” what then?
• Are we safer? Or are we in more danger than ever before?
• Are we about to become bankrupt? Financially? Morally? Both???

So.  Those are my questions . . .  and I’m willing to wait  . . .  but, if the Sunday Hot Air Fest is any indication, answers are not forthcoming any time soon.

Part of the breakdown in communications about our latest strategy in Afghanistan, I believe, stems from the very nature of Counterinsurgency (or COIN, as our acronym-loving DoD prefers to streamline it) which is that COIN is simply a glorified PR campaign, with bombs and bullets rather than 3-color brochures.  To be successful at COIN is to successfully manage perceptions and expectations.  Due to the circumstances of some of my past employment, this is very familiar ground for me – I could bore you silly (but won’t) with a comparison of the finer “nits and gnats” that inform the practices of public relations operatives and the agents of COIN.

In fact, COIN is so thoroughly imbued with the mystery and magic of Big Business that I was not at all surprised to find a vintage 2005 document entitled “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency” that had been whipped up by one Kalev I. Sepp, Ph.D., for counterinsurgency mavens at Military Review. 

For whatever arcane reason (perhaps a mischievous sense of irony?), Dr. Sepp chose an epigraph for his Best Practices . . .  paper taken from the wit and wisdom of Gen. Earle Wheeler.  For those of us who lived through/paid attention to the Vietnam War Era, Wheeler’s name bangs a gong, to say the least.  Wheeler was Lyndon B. Johnson’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff throughout most of the juicy parts of the Vietnam War, and a right old warlord he was.  I’m still scratching my head over this quotation heading up an article on counterinsurgency but here it is, maybe you can make sense of it:

“It is fashionable in some quarters to say that the problems in Southeast Asia are primarily political and economic rather than military. I do not agree. The essence of the problem in Vietnam is military.”—General Earle Wheeler, 1962

Dr. Sepp dances deftly around the fact that very few, if any, of the “counterinsurgency” efforts of the past century can be truthfully designated unqualified successes (especially among those that are dreamed up by outside forces (Us) for an indigenous population (Them) to sign up for).  Lucky for us, as the good doctor points out, more can be learned from mistakes and failures than from success because few will argue, I’m sure, with my opinion that Counterinsurgencies resulting from outside intervention are historically abysmal failures both in the military and social senses (see US in Vietnam — and in any number of other third world locales; USSR in Afghanistan; Britain in US – 1776, etc., etc.).

Although delineating Best Practices in Counterinsurgency is, by its very nature, a dubious project, I have to trust to Dr. Sepp’s empirical purity in all of this and, since the subject matter is topical and close to hand, I thought it might be an interesting exercise to see how our erstwhile Agents of COIN stack up against Dr. Sepp’s “best practices” model.

* * *

Of primary importance, per Sepp, is that the people of the insurgency-challenged nation, in our example Afghanistan, are the “center of gravity” of the counterinsurgency:

“Winning their hearts and minds must be the objective of the government’s efforts.   Because this is a policy objective, it must be directed by the country’s political leaders.”

Uh, oh.  Houston we have a problem . . .  Dr. Sepp appears to be working off an assumption that counterinsurgencies are always “by, for and of the people” directly affected by insurgents in their midst, rather than by foreign instigators who come armed with their own agenda.  Let’s assume, for a moment, that the Afghan people had actually been desperate to overthrow their government; that would have made them “insurgents,”  against their own active government.  If the US were to lend them a hand in achieving that end, while we happened to be in the neighborhood, some might call that “regime change” (an apt description, IMO).

Instead, what actually happened, as we know, is that the US decided to take its War on Terror on the road and by virtue of militarily deposing the acting Afghan (Taliban) government, the US fomented an Afghan insurgency where there previously was none.  Who knew that the Taliban would try to regain control after being deposed by Righteous Americans?  Everyone knows that deposed leaders are supposed to accept their “just deserts,” dealt out by the Forces for Good, and go off to become novelists or darkside celebrities elsewhere.

When the “newly liberated” but war-weary Afghan people showed little gratitude or organized interest in keeping the Taliban out of power permanently, the US found itself with a virtual “pig in a poke.”    The Pentagon took “fifteen minutes” to depose the Taliban and nine years to try to persuade the Afghans to own the counterinsurgency and to keep the Taliban, Al Qaeda and anyone else on our shit list off of their turf. 

From the get-go, this is already no classic “insurgency/counterinsurgency”scenario, nonetheless, we can play along and perhaps discover that all of the makings of a happy ending are in place, despite the eccentric origins of the US’ “counterinsurgency of convenience” in Afghanistan. 

Ergo, here are the operational practices necessary for COIN success in Dr. Sepp’s estimable opinion:

Human Rights  The security of the people must be assured as a basic need, along with food, water, shelter, health care, and a means of living. These are human rights, along with freedom of worship, access to education, and equal rights for women.  The failure of counterinsurgencies and the root cause of the insurgencies themselves can often be traced to government disregard of these basic rights.

So.  It would appear that, in order for counterinsurgency to succeed in Afghanistan, roughly 400 years worth of human rights reforms (that often run counter to indigenous religious and cultural tastes) must be enacted in the next eighteen months . . . i.e., “government-in-a-box?

Law enforcement  Intelligence operations that help detect terrorist insurgents for arrest and prosecution are the single most important practice to protect a population from threats to its security. Honest, trained, robust police forces responsible for security can gather intelligence at the community level.  In turn, an incorrupt, functioning judiciary must support the police.

I have to trust that there is a reason that the Afghan population fears the Karzai government’s police force more than the Taliban (which has a habit of beheading its offenders).  Also, a simple, fiscal fact is that Afghanistan cannot even begin to afford to train, equip, and maintain an “honest, trained, robust police force” not to mention an “incorrupt, functioning judiciary.” 

Population control  Insurgents rely on members of the population for concealment, sustenance, and recruits, so they must be isolated from the people by all means possible. Among the most effective means are such population-control measures as vehicle and personnel checkpoints and national identity cards.

Dr. Sepp doesn’t specifically mention it, but I suspect that he would agree that said “checkpoints” should not become an occasion of death or dismemberment to the “protected population,” if they are to reasonably contribute to the overall success of the counterinsurgency.

Political process Informational campaigns explain to the population what they can do to help their government make them secure from terrorist insurgents; encourage participation in the political process by voting in local and national elections; and convince insurgents they can best meet their personal interests and avoid the risk of imprisonment or death by reintegrating themselves into the population through amnesty, rehabilitation, or by simply not fighting.

We might actually be able to give this item a C- (for effort), so far.  Afghans did, indeed, recently go to the polls (for what it’s worth).  On the other hand, Afghans still seem inclined to engage US troops to settle old neighborhood scores by branding their enemies with a “T” while running bomb parts for the Taliban.

Counterinsurgent warfare Allied military forces and advisory teams, organized to support police forces and fight insurgents, can bolster security until indigenous security forces are competent to perform these tasks without allied assistance.

In the U.S. Armed Forces, only the Special Forces (SF) are expressly organized and trained for counterinsurgent warfare and advising indigenous forces. (My emphasis)

Ahhhh, well, that answers one of my earlier questions but gives rise to others, I’m afraid:

So what is the role of the other 120,000 (non-Special Forces) deployed?  And why do we always need more of them if they are not trained for the COIN strategy being used, in the first place?

And, if the success of counterinsurgency is so important then why are we allowing private contractors, who hire retired college campus security guards, to train the Afghan security forces when we have Special Forces, far better trained to carry out that supposedly “mission-critical” activity.  Perhaps training illiterate police recruits isn’t “special” enough . . . ??

Securing borders Border crossings must be restricted to deny terrorist insurgents a sanctuary and to enhance national sovereignty.

Hmmmmmmm . . . . this one isn’t happening in eighteen years, let alone eighteen months.  But, if the Afghans figure it out, maybe they’ll share their findings with Texas and Arizona . . .

Executive authority Emergency conditions dictate that a government needs a single, fully empowered executive to direct and coordinate counterinsurgency efforts. Power-sharing among political bodies, while appropriate and necessary in peacetime, presents wartime vulnerabilities and gaps in coordination that insurgents can exploit.

Tell that to the Warlords attending the Peace Jirga . . . or to the “Mayor of Kabul,” for that matter.  Also notice, once again, that according to Best Practices, Karzai should actually be in charge, here; strictly by the book, it’s his job to counter an Afghan insurgency.  Lately, he’s showing signs of “getting” that part, at least . . .

So that’s it, in a nutshell – Best Practices in Counterinsurgency.  To round things out, Dr. Sepp also threw in a few “Counterinsurgency Don’ts.”  Here are a few of the historic counterinsurgency mistakes that Sepp cites as tried-and-true prescriptions for COIN failure taken from real-life examples:

• Indigenous regular armies, although fighting in their own country and more numerous than foreign forces, were subordinate to them.  Conventional forces trained indigenous units in their image—with historically poor results. (My emphasis)
• Special operations forces committed most of their units to raids and reconnaissance missions, with successful but narrow results. The Americans further marginalized their Special Forces by economy-of-force assignments to sparsely populated hinterlands.
• In the Republic of Vietnam, the Saigon Government’s leadership was unsettled. Leadership was unequally divided in the allied ranks between the U.S. Ambassador, the CIA Chief of Station, and the senior U.S. military commander.
• Impatience, masked as aggressiveness and “offensive-mindedness,” drove the Americans to apply counterinsurgency methods learned from conflicts in Greece and Malaya, but without taking into account the differences in the lands and people.
• The Americans ignored the French experience in Indochina, particularly the general ineffectiveness of large-unit operations.

Sound familiar?  It doesn’t take a military genius to recognize a really awful strategy — heck, even some members of Congress are starting to gag on this one, which means it’s probably way past time to show them some love for their efforts to get us (and Afghanistan) out of this mess.

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