The Changing Nature of War?

This from Dexter Filkins writing in the New Yorker about the revocation of the U.S. military's ban on women in combat irked me:

Notions of equality aside, the real factor that rendered the “non-combat” distinction meaningless was the changing nature of the wars. In an old-style conflict like, say, the Second World War, big, uniformed armies squared off against other big, uniformed armies. In a war like that, driving a truck in a supply convoy, or briefing reporters on the days’ events, could be deemed relatively safe. As long as you were behind the lines, your chances of getting killed were small. But in Iraq and Afghanistan there are no front lines. Or, as the troops on the ground say, the front line is where you are.

Filkins is write that insurgencies are messy and are largely fought without front lines in the way we often imagine European-style warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  But insurgencies are not new and that the United States has faced two in the last twelve years is hardly reflective of the changing nature of war.  

Don't misunderstand me: Filkins' point that the distinction between combat and non-combat jobs--and the supposed protection this distinction afforded female servicemembers--was fairly meaningless in Iraq and Afghanistan is not lost on me.  But Filkins wrongly locates the cause of the distinction's meaninglessness in a non-existent paradigm shift in the nature of warfare itself.  It is not warfare that has changed but the composition of the U.S. armed forces.  Even in Filkins' imagined World War II, women driving supply convoys  would be frequent targets of attack.  Airborne interdiction played a prominent role in World War II.  In North Africa and the Italian campaign, for example, the U.S. Army Air Corps attacked supply depots, ports, and even the ferries traveling over the Messina Straits.  Had women soldiers been used by Axis forces to pilot those ferries or load or unload materiel at ports, then female soldiers would have been killed there.   

Tribes versus Government

Among a myriad of articles in today’s New York Times addressing Afghanistan, David Sanger pens one that purports to deconstruct the “what ifs” of Afghanistan: What if the Bush administration had put enough troops into the country to stabilize it after the Taliban’s ouster? What if the Bush administration had followed through on its promise of an Afghan Marshall Plan? What if the Bush administration had not been distracted by its war of choice in Iraq? Would then Afghanistan not have become a hash?

Though his tone is negative, Sanger is ultimately inconclusive. He does question, however, whether “30,000, or even 60,000, [troops] could have brought stability to a vast country, where tribes, not governments, are the ruling powers?” He notes, “The Taliban—a native movement—would almost certainly have waited it out, figuring Washington could not sustain so large a force for very long.”

It strikes me that Sanger’s analysis rolls up a bit of Orientalism with two curious assumptions. The Orientalism is obvious in Sanger’s contrast between government and tribes. The dichotomy is, of course, false. Tribal power and governmental power are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, tribes can be an incredibly effective mode of governance and an excellent building block on which to develop communal reconciliation and broader governance. Both the US experience in Anbar province in Iraq and the history of Somaliland since 1991 provide excellent examples of tribes behaving in just this way. The dichotomy, though, is not Sanger’s alone—the Western penchant for contrasting civic government, epitomized in Western states, with any mode of governance that is alien is well trod territory.

The curious assumptions in Sanger’s analysis are that he apparently believes the Taliban to both be static and monolithic, and popular. Sanger’s belief that the Taliban could have waited out a US/NATO deployment of 30,000-60,000 troops suggests that he believes the Taliban circa 2001 and the Taliban today to be the same, unchanging, and monolithic. Sanger’s implicit contrast of the Taliban, “a native movement,” with Karzai’s government and its supporters suggests that he believes the Taliban to have an Afghanistan-wide base of support.

Comparing the budding truth of Sanger’s second assumption to the origin of the Taliban—and its level of popular support in 2001—demonstrates that his first assumption is false. The Taliban began as a Pashtun movement and in large measure it remains so today. It is true that the insurgency is spreading from Pashtun heartlands—both in the south, Helmand, and in the north, Kunduz—to reach non-Pashtun majority provinces. The Taliban’s emerging national strength has only come through nearly a decade of Western malfeasance in Afghanistan—without failing to deliver on promises of reconstruction and improved livelihood, without scuttling the goodwill of the Afghan people by killing so many civilians, without supporting an obviously corrupt regime while pretending otherwise, it is unlikely that the Taliban would have garnered popular support beyond the ranks of the Pashtun. It is little wonder that the Taliban were able to inflict so little damage on the ISAF for so many years—it took time for ISAF to do sufficient damage to itself vis-à-vis the civilian populace for the Taliban to reap benefits in the form of increased popular support, greater numbers of fighters, and greater freedom of movement. Thus, a greater security presence at the outset—provided that security force employed COIN principles properly—would likely have made all the difference in the world.

On McChrystal

The now infamous profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone makes for compelling reading. McChrystal comes across as a deeply dedicated and committed commander. For all the hyperventilation over the disparaging remarks McChrystal has for Vice President Biden and others in the Obama administration, what is most interesting is how clearly McChrystal understands counterinsurgency—and how clearly the author of the piece, Michael Hastings, does not.

Passages like this one are particularly telling:

During the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight – like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. "We aren't putting fear into the Taliban," one soldier says.
"Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing," McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn't work."
"I'm not saying go out and kill everybody, sir," the soldier persists. "You say we've stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don't believe that's true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it's getting."
"I agree with you," McChrystal says. "In this area, we've not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I'm telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?"
A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn't have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. "That's the way this game is," McChrystal says. "It's complex. I can't just decide: It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts."

That McChrystal gets it, understands what must be done to achieve any sort of success in Afghanistan, makes it that much worse that he must now, in my view, be relieved of command. In what is truly epic irony, the man the article describes repeatedly as knowing just how far to push against a system and survive, in allowing this profile to be done, he has pushed too far.

Lessons Learned from the Anbar Awakening

A friend and I are reading Al-Anbar Awakening: U.S. Marines and Counterinsurgency in Iraq 2004-2009 together, intending to talk over the lessons learned by the Marines in their part of the United States struggle to learn “to eat soup with a knife.” I just opened the book this evening and began reading the forward, which is written by Gen. John F. Kelly—who I had the opportunity to speak with almost a year ago. Immediately I was struck by what he had to say. Here are a few passages I found note worthy:

In Iraq to a very large degree, we—the U.S. military and civilians—were the source of the insurgency. Honest men and women can argue the whys, what-ifs, and what might-have-beens, but ultimately, it was mostly about unfulfilled promises and the heavy-handed military approach taken by some over the summer of 2003 that caused events to spiral out of control.

And, as far as why the Anbaris turned against the insurgency:

To [the Anbaris], their alliance with [al-Qaeda] was a marriage of convenience to fight the U.S. occupation. Al-Qaeda brought dedication, organization, funding, and a willingness to die. Over time, however, it overplayed its hand and wore out its welcome by forcing an extreme Islamic agenda on a generally secular and very tribal culture. Al-Qaeda’s campaign evolved from assistance, to persuasion, to intimidation, to murder in the most horrific ways, all designed to intimidate Anbari society—tribes and sheikhs alike—to adopt the most extreme form of Islam . . . . It was increasingly directed at the sheikhs themselves, and just as importantly, it began to have an impact on the business of tribal leaders.

More to come. Obviously, the value of lessons learned is the portability (or not) of the lesson to other contexts. From Iraq to Afghanistan, say.

Just What It Needs

The New York Times leads with a story today detailing the discovery of vast amounts of mineral wealth in Afghanistan. According to the article, the United States "has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral resources in Afghanistan." The deposits include iron, copper, gold, lithium, and cobalt—minerals necessary for everything from heavy industry to high technology. A Pentagon source reportedly describes Afghanistan as the "Saudi Arabia of lithium."

The Times article highlights the possibility the mineral wealth has to transform the Afghan economy. That is certainly so. Unfortunately they also have the possibility of transforming the Afghan conflict—a political one—into a rent-seeking conflict and exacerbating the already outrageous amounts of graft and corruption retarding that country's development.

Even without the mineral wealth, Afghanistan suffers from epidemic corruption. Already, the heroin trade adds a degree of complexity to counterinsurgency that has proven extraordinarily difficult to surmount. Warlords, Taliban, civilian farmers, and members of the Afghan government all profit or draw their livelihoods from the cultivation of poppies for heroin delivery. Interdicting the trade has the possibility of alienating or impoverishing the local populace, undermining COIN's overall efforts. The common profiting from the trade gives elements of the Afghan government or warlords who nominally support ISAF reason to cooperate in a limited way with the Taliban.

The difficulty of extracting minerals from the ground—as compared to harvesting poppies—may make mineral wealth an unlikely complicating factor to the Afghan war. However, the experience of blood diamonds in Africa should teach us that complicated extractive resources can be tapped by seemingly unsophisticated armed bands and used to fuel already entrenched conflicts.

Vast mineral wealth also raises the strategic importance of Afghanistan. Afghanistan already held substantial strategic import due both to its location geographically and untapped petroleum and natural gas reserves. Copper, gold, and lithium—ores necessary for high tech devices—will have only increasing value and importance. The scale of the deposits hinted at by the New York Times articles suggest that Afghanistan will be of increasing interest to Iran, Pakistan, Russia, the United States, and China. This has the potential of increasing the number of spoilers involved in any conflict-resolution or accommodation process. It also may open doors to the Karzai government otherwise foreclosed to it; giving it alternatives to dealing with the United States—an already fraught relationship.

COIN Deficiencies

This year is to be year of the COIN for NATO and the US military in Afghanistan. The much ballyhooed Marja operation was intended to be a prototype of this model, before COIN tactics were employed in a larger, more difficult, Kandahar operation.

Unfortunately, the recent news out of Marja is not heartening: 3 months after the US drove the Taliban out of Marja, families are fleeing in the face of Taliban terrorization. Population protection is integral to successful COIN tactics. A force unable to protect the civilian population cannot win the trust of the civilian population—without trust and cooperation, counter-insurgency operations are bound to fail.

The United States and NATO forces are in a particularly difficult spot in Afghanistan—the United States effectively ignored Afghanistan from late 2002 until 2008, giving the population there good reason to distrust Western statements of long-term commitment.