US Policy in Afghanistan and Iraq: Lessons and Legacies 9781626370203

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US Policy in Afghanistan and Iraq

Tower Center Political Studies James F. Hollifield, series editor

US Policy in Afghanistan and Iraq Lessons and Legacies Edited by

Seyom Brown Robert H. Scales

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq : lessons and legacies / edited by Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales. p. cm. — (Tower Center political studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-809-9 (alk. paper) 1. Iraq War, 2003—Influence. 2. Afghan War, 2001—Influence. 3. United States—Foreign relations—21st century. 4. Military planning—United States. I. Brown, Seyom. II. Scales, Robert H., 1944– III. Title: United States policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. DS79.76.U72 2012 956.7044'31—dc23 2011049559 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Foreword, James F. Hollifield Acknowledgments

vii ix

Introduction, Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

1

Part 1 Post–September 11 Foreign Policy The Emergent Debate: Introduction to Part 1, Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

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1 US Strategy Toward “Rogue States,” Robert Litwak

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2 Learning from Our Mistakes, Marvin Weinbaum

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Part 2 Military Strategy and Planning Reassessing Priorities: Introduction to Part 2, Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

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3 Military Strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dan Caldwell

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4 Lessons Learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, Stephen Biddle

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5 Winning the Wars We’re In, John Nagl

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v

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Contents

Part 3 Counterinsurgency and Statebuilding Unanticipated Challenges: Introduction to Part 3, Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

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6 Strategic Counterinsurgency, Linda Robinson

113

7 Assessing Counterinsurgency Operations, Michael O’Hanlon

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8 The Predicament in Afghanistan, Vanda Felbab-Brown

139

Part 4 Conclusion 9 Where Do We Go from Here? Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales List of Acronyms Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

185 191 193 205 209 219

Foreword

The US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the counterinsurgency wars they spawned have sown dissent and division in Washington and across the land. The contradictory lessons that scholars, policymakers, and concerned citizens continue to draw from these conflicts are perhaps their greatest legacy, for they make it difficult to develop a coherent and sustainable foreign policy. The authors of this book reflect on the lessons and legacies of these conflicts. They came together under the editorship of Professor Seyom Brown and MajorGeneral Robert H. Scales (ret.) to consider a fundamental question: Where do we go from here? The book is a project of the Tower Center’s Program on National Security and Defense, which is directed by Professor Brown. The Program on National Security and Defense is designed to stimulate scholarly, student, and public awareness of current and future challenges to national security and to generate fresh thinking about how to safeguard the security interests of the United States. The Tower Center’s seminars, conferences, and publications offer opportunities to engage in dialogue on these and other vital public policy issues with leaders from government, academia, and industry. The vigorous but thoughtfully reasoned arguments and prescriptions in the present volume, while often in contention with one another, are testimony to the value of this mission. —James F. Hollifield Director, John G. Tower Center for Political Studies Southern Methodist University vii

Acknowledgments

On behalf of all of the authors, we want to give special thanks to the group of distinguished authorities on US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan who shared their insights with us during a Tower Center symposium: Colonel Thomas E. Ayers, General Gregory A. Biscone, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Admiral William R. Burke, Wendy Chamberlain, Lee Cullum, Colonel James A. Dixon, Bernard Finel, Mant Hawkins, Dennis Ippolito, General Francis G. Mahon, Iftikhar Malik, Barry Posen, and Jack H. Pryor. Others with whom we consulted and who helped to structure the inquiry include Barry Blechman, Edmund Giambastiani, Bobby Inman, Robert Jordan, Lawrence Korb, Robert Litwak, James McCarthy, James Walker, and Lauren Young. More than anyone, the person who inspired this effort and who generated the support to sustain this project was General John (“Jack”) Costello (ret.), vice president of business development and strategic planning for Raytheon Strategic Systems. It was Jack’s vision of dialogues on grand strategy “beyond the Washington, D.C., Beltway” that led to the creation and success of the Tower Center’s Program on National Security and Defense—a locus for synergistic exchanges among scholars, public officials, and industry executives on major issues of national security. Our only sadness in issuing the present publication is that Jack did not live to see this result. We also want to thank the logistics team in Dallas—Lynne Novack (associate director of the Program on National Security and Defense), Carole Wilson (executive director of the Tower Center), ix

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Acknowledgments

Noelle McAlpine (associate director of the Tower Center), and Spencer Diebel (administrative assistant)—whose superb work in managing meetings and communications was key to the completion of this project. Research assistance was provided by Tigist Gebru, Sanjeev Kumar, Ryan Swick, and April Zinober. Their resourcefulness, informed understanding of the issues, and patient dedication to the project is deeply appreciated. And it is by no means pro forma that we acknowledge the crucial role of Lynne Rienner and her highly talented editorial staff at Lynne Rienner Publishers. The interventions of Shena Redmond (senior project editor) and Jason Cook brought coherence in form and style to this collection of essays. Shena and Jason were also adept at providing needed corrective therapy for Washington insider–type obscure allusions to official acts and actors and for the affliction of acronymphomania, which characteristically infects communication among policy wonks. The book would never have materialized, however, without the initial courageous decision of Lynne Rienner herself to take on this otherwise somewhat maverick venture and her keen-eyed involvement and guidance along the way to ensure that the book is pertinent to scholarly work as well as to crucial policy debates. —Seyom Brown Robert H. Scales

Introduction Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

The first two large-scale military interventions by the United States since the end of the Vietnam War—Operation Enduring Freedom, in Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom—strained US capacities and raised doubts about the country’s will to play as significant and valued a world role in the twenty-first century as it did in the twentieth. Our purpose in this book is to help generate an informed national conversation on how the country can and should adapt to the still-unfolding legacies of these interventions and to other situations that have called or might call for the use of US military force—such as the rebellions against dictatorships in the Maghreb and the Middle East, the growing influence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, and the persistent development of nuclear arsenals by North Korea and Iran. We asked the contributors to the book to assess, from the perspective of their experience and scholarly investigations, the current and emerging effects of the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions on conditions in and around the two countries. We also invited them to join with us, the editors, in reflecting on the implications of their assessments for overall US foreign policy, national security policy, and military strategy and planning.

The Regime-Change Question The controversial assessments in these pages of the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions point to the need for a deeply probing national con1

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Introduction

versation about the circumstances—foreign and domestic—that warrant the United States becoming involved in efforts to coercively change the governing regime of another country. The lack of anything approaching a national consensus on this fundamental issue was evident in the intense debates even within the Obama administration over how to react to the so-called Arab Spring upheavals spreading through the Middle East, starting in the winter of 2010–2011. Neither we nor any of our fellow authors seriously challenge the premise that the United States has justification for trying to take down regimes that, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, harbor terrorists determined to injure the United States and its citizens. Yet given the difficulties encountered in both Afghanistan and Iraq, there is little support in the chapters here for a national security policy and overall military force structure designed mainly for conducting such missions of regime change or regime support (against insurgencies). Even under the assumption of a reduced defense budget, “full spectrum” and “hybrid” capabilities are widely endorsed. But what the balance should be in the US military between forces designed for use in “hearts and minds” and stability operations and those designed for larger kinetic operations is still very much at issue. What emphasis is given to the different missions will be highly dependent not only on emerging international challenges, but also on the political climate in the United States, which will be profoundly affected by the stillunfolding outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pervading our dialogue is the recognition that, whereas a military intervention may be legally and morally justified, it may nevertheless be unwise. This agnosticism reflects, and is part of, the national debate over whether the difficulties encountered and enormous costs borne by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan are inherent in such interventions (as argued by Robert Litwak and Dan Caldwell in this volume) or are the consequence of poorly designed implementing strategies and bad execution (as argued by Stephen Biddle and Vanda Felbab-Brown). How this question is answered has immense implications for US foreign and national security policy and military planning.

Counterinsurgency, Stabilization, and Statebuilding Strategies Despite the lack of consensus on the basic issue of the future US capacity and will to undertake regime-change operations, the analysis

Introduction

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in all of the chapters proceeds on the premise that the still-conflictual and negative socioeconomic effects of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute a legacy from which the United States cannot simply walk away. Indeed, most of the authors agree, either explicitly or implicitly, with John Nagl’s insistence in this volume that the priority task today of analysts and policymakers is to devise strategies and programs for “winning the wars [and statebuilding efforts] we’re in.” But to grant that this is the priority task is not to hold that the preoccupation with ensuring a satisfactory outcome in the present conflicts should push aside critical first-order questioning of the wisdom of our initial involvement and strategies—embarrassing or not. The discussion about how to win the wars we’re in features assessments in Parts 2 and 3 of the “hearts and minds” philosophy and counterinsurgency doctrine of the US Army and Marine Corps and its basic application in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan as directed by Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. This discussion encompasses the growing international and domestic attention (including debates within the US military) accorded to the rules of engagement for US and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops in Afghanistan. This is connected with the issue (raised by Biddle) of the best allocation of effort, whether counterterrorism by special operations and drone strikes into western Pakistan on the one hand, or strengthened counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan on the other. This issue in turn raises the question of the role and scope of US and ISAF operations—whether the US/ISAF counterinsurgency missions should be concentrated in a few selected cities, or spread wide across the rural and urban areas of the country and into Pakistan. As such, the book deals centrally with the controversies over strategies and programs for “statebuilding,” particularly in Afghanistan (which, following the insistence of Marvin Weinbaum, is the concept we use here instead of the more common term “nationbuilding”): Weinbaum, Nagl, Robinson, and Felbab-Brown all regard statebuilding as not only the objective of, but also the condition for, successful counterinsurgency. But for Afghanistan this leads to the unresolved issue of the extent to which local warlords and tribal militias should be strengthened, and can be reliably depended upon to assume a large role in counterinsurgency and postcounterinsurgency governance. Nagl supports such decentralization, but Weinbaum and Felbab-Brown are skeptical that the warlords can overcome their internecine struggles to provide durable leadership, and worry that the tribal militias will plunge many parts of the country into anarchic violent conflict.

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Introduction

The controversies over statebuilding in Afghanistan encompass stability operations, reconstruction of infrastructure, socioeconomic efforts to wean farmers away from opium poppy crops, the pacing of transfer of peacekeeping operations to the Afghans themselves, police and judicial institution reforms, distribution of power and authority between the center and local communities and tribes, anticorruption efforts, and—crucially—the extent to which the Taliban should be reintegrated into the institutions and processes of governance.

Implications for Military Planning In the concluding chapter we trace the implications for military planning given the uncertainties about geopolitical developments and the lack of consensus concerning when and how the United States should attempt to coercively affect the struggle for power within other countries. There is the risk of once again preparing to fight the last war— which would be the case if “irregular” warfare (“the wars we’re in now”) were to become the centerpiece of military planning, skewing procurement, recruitment, and strategy away from a prudent balance between short-term and longer-term preparedness.

Part 1 Post–September 11 Foreign Policy

The Emergent Debate: Introduction to Part 1 Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

The most consequential legacy of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the erosion of post–September 11 support for regime-change interventions abroad to rout out terrorists and remove governments who harbor them, especially if such interventions require US “boots on the ground” (Washington jargon for land-warfare troops). The post-9/11 interventionism, energized by many of the ideas of neoconservatism plus a good deal of Wilsonian liberalism (making the world safe for democracy but also making the world safe through democratization), had taken the form of full-blown military invasions of two countries that had not directly attacked the United States. The first, Operation Enduring Freedom, launched in 2001, was designed to destroy al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, kill or capture the terrorist movement’s leaders (Osama bin Laden and his deputies), and knock out the Taliban regime that had been providing al-Qaeda safe haven. The second, Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched in 2003, and initially justified by the need to coercively dismantle Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, quickly morphed into a democracyimplantation effort when no active WMD programs were found, justified by the presumed need to prevent Iraq from becoming a breeding ground for terrorists, and also to make post-Saddam Iraq the model for a democratically transformed Middle East. Pressing against the interventionist policy is a new skepticism— born of growing frustration with the “blood and treasure” costs and embarrassments of the Iraq and Afghanistan operations—about the 7

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capacity of the United States, at acceptable costs, to coercively depose and construct legitimate political regimes around the world. This skepticism has been reflected in the debates within the Obama administration and the president’s apparent ambivalence over the role the United States should play in response to the Arab Spring upheavals in the Maghreb and the Middle East against tyrannical regimes. On one side are devotees of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, holding that regimes that are unable or unwilling to provide for the basic needs and respect the fundamental human rights of the people within their jurisdictions cannot on grounds of national sovereignty be immune from international intervention, and that, indeed, the international community has not only the right, but also an obligation, to do whatever is necessary to rectify the suffering of the afflicted people. On the other side are the more traditional “realists” who argue that how governments treat the people within their jurisdictions is not the business of outsiders, except in cases of horrendous violations such as genocide, or terrible conditions such as mass starvation that the government in question is not dealing with adequately. From all indications, President Barack Obama himself, although a believer in the international responsibility to protect, is also a prudential realist when it comes to committing the United States to additional regime-change military operations, given the drain on resources by the Iraq and Afghanistan operations, the popular souring on persisting US involvement in these conflictridden societies, and the growing doubts in the policy community that the United States has the right answers to the governance and development challenges around the world. Ironically, the anti-intervention backlash comes just following the ascendance of military doctrines, generals, and admirals that have embraced stability operations, peacekeeping, and nationbuilding counterinsurgency missions as prime roles for the armed forces. Indeed, the new COIN (acronym for “counterinsurgency”) approach, central to the curriculum of the military academies and war colleges, with its “hearts and minds” emphasis on socioeconomic issues, anthropology, language training, policing, and conflict resolution, appears designed to produce an officer corps prepared to manage a global imperium, just when the foreign policy establishment is beginning to sour on anything that smacks of Pax Americana superpowerism. The book as a whole reflects this duality. On the one hand there is discussion of what the apparently successful regime-change and COIN operations in Iraq indicate about how to more effectively manage the remaining COIN campaign in Afghanistan as well as future COIN

The Emergent Debate

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operations; there is also a discussion of lessons that can be drawn from the experience in the Afghanistan/Pakistan theater for other counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and nationbuilding operations—say, in Somalia or Yemen. On the other hand, the discourse raises first-order issues of foreign policy and grand strategy, even about the wisdom of the United States becoming involved in such conflicts in the first place. The book starts with the first-order grand strategy questions, and then moves on to deal with the more operational legacies and lessons, recognizing, however, that some of the debates over currently contending COIN and counterterrorism strategies may eventually be rendered largely moot by changes in basic US foreign policy or grand strategy. Most of the contributors recognize—explicitly or implicitly—that the post-9/11 regime-change strategies have been for the most part anomalous in US foreign policy since the end of World War II. During the Cold War the United States was usually more concerned with the international alignment of foreign governments—whether or not they were allies or camp-followers of the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China—than with the internal characteristics of regimes, be they democratic or autocratic, respectful of human rights or not. To be sure, if the ideology of a regime or political movement would put it in the camp of the Soviets and Chinese Communists and thus affect the global balance of power, US policy might well be animated to subvert it or smash it if possible—witness the Eisenhower administration’s interventions in Iran and Guatemala, the Kennedy administration’s unsuccessful Bay of Pigs operation against Castro, the failed effort to prevent Ho Chi Minh from taking over all of Vietnam, US overt and covert assistance to anti-Marxist contenders for power in postcolonial Africa, and the Reagan administration’s arming of the Nicaraguan “contras” in an effort to depose the radical leftist regime in Managua. The rhetoric of regime change (“rollback,” “liberation”), however, exceeded its physical reality: interventions involving US military action within the Soviet sphere of control—say, in support of the Hungarian resistance in 1956 or the Prague Spring in 1968—that were sure to encounter direct Soviet resistance and could explode into all-out war were put aside as too reckless. Indeed, “containment” evolved into a modus vivendi with the Communist states (once the Vietnam War was brought to an end). President Richard Nixon, implementing Henry Kissinger’s counsel, even purged US foreign policy of anticommunist rhetoric, bringing the public definition of US interests into congruence with their strate-

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gies of détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China, and mutual pledges not to interfere in the other side’s internal affairs. President Jimmy Carter’s reaction to the Nixon-Kissinger realpolitik, through his emphasis on human rights, and President Ronald Reagan’s, through his “full-court press” against the “evil empire” and the so-called Reagan Doctrine of active worldwide support for political and economic freedom, again took place mostly at the level of rhetoric. To put US money and might at the service of its verbal commitments, both Carter and Reagan authorized economic sanctions against certain tyrants (Carter more against rightists, Reagan more against leftists), as well as military and covert assistance to deserving governments or opposition movements (such as the mujahidin in Afghanistan and the contras in Nicaragua). Carter authorized, then aborted, the Desert One operation to free the hostages in the US embassy in Tehran, and Reagan ordered the rescue of US medical students in Grenada. When US forces that were part of the multilateral peacekeeping operation in Lebanon fell victim to a brutal terrorist attack on their compound at the Beirut airport, Reagan pulled them out. But under neither of these freedomchampioning US presidents was there direct US military action to effect a change in regime in a hostile country. Nor was there any regime-change action as such under the two subsequent presidents. George H. W. Bush’s Desert Storm, undertaken to reverse Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, was a classic case of geopolitical realism, as was his rejection of advice to march on to Baghdad to liberate Iraq from Saddam’s dictatorship (part of the reasoning was the usefulness of retaining a reasonably intact Iraq as a counterweight to Iran). Also, prudence prevailed in the White House when it came to determining how strongly to react to the Chinese regime’s brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The deployment of 20,000 US troops to Somalia was regarded by the elder Bush as a limited humanitarian intervention in support of international relief efforts that were being blocked by internecine battles among the country’s warlords. Then, under Bill Clinton, when the Somalian mission began to involve US troops in bloody skirmishes (“Black Hawk down” and the corpse of a US soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu) and in taking sides in what was turning into a civil war, the president called the troops back home. The closest to full-blown regime change that the United States engaged in between the end of the Cold War and the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan was its support in the 1990s of the independence struggles in the Balkans by former members of the Yugoslavian federation

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against Serbia and its campaigns of “ethnic cleansing.” Especially during the war in Kosovo, the commitment of US airpower against Belgrade’s military assets, and hints from Washington that it might also involve US combat troops, were designed to coerce the Serbian leaders to accept the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia into a number of sovereign nation-states. In 1998 the US Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, declaring “it should be the policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government”—again much talk, little action. Clinton did order the Desert Fox operation, a four-day bombing campaign against Iraqi targets as punishment for Saddam’s obstruction of the United Nations inspection team’s effort to determine if Iraq had a nuclear weapons program in violation of its obligations under the Gulf War cease-fire accord. But there was no serious contemplation at the time of anything like a ground-force invasion to take the dictator down.

Operation Iraqi Freedom: Model for Where Not to Go? The record of how the United States chose to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it is progressively revealed in the memoirs of the participants, investigative journalists, and archival research by scholars, shows a pattern wherein the gut-determination to “get Saddam” had as much, if not more, to do with going to war than did a precise assessment of how the dictator’s intentions and capabilities could affect vital US security interests. The result was a diversion of resources to the takeover in Iraq that would have been better applied to secure the more justifiable regime-change operation in Afghanistan. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were seen by some in the George W. Bush administration as providing the United States with a sufficient rationale for invading Iraq—namely, that some of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, if transferred to the terrorists, could inflict catastrophic damage to the United States. The president reportedly found this argument compelling, but wanted evidence of a direct connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda before authorizing the attack on Iraq. Meanwhile, military action to oust the al-Qaeda–harboring Taliban from Kabul was given temporary priority. As it turned out, the intelligence community, working on the project during the year following the US invasion of Afghanistan, was unable to

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give legs to the flimsy allegations of a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam. Accordingly, the case for forcing a change of regime in Baghdad came to depend almost entirely on Saddam’s violation of the post–Gulf War cease-fire accord and UN resolutions requiring him to dismantle his WMD and strategic missile programs. But when the Operation Iraqi Freedom command, just a few weeks into the military occupation of the country, found Saddam’s WMD threat to be a myth (partly of the dictator’s own construction), regime change suddenly lost its prime justification. So the world was now told that the real reason for invading Iraq was to transform the brutal dictatorship into a democracy—the first true democracy in the Arab world (other than perhaps unstable Lebanon)—which would be an exemplar to the other countries in the Middle East as to how prosperity and domestic peace are achieved and sustained through economic and political freedom. This presumably would prove to be a contagious idea in the region; and as others followed the Iraqi example, peace among the states in the Middle East would be much more likely than it ever had been, for the simple reason (now supported by a good deal of social science research) that democracies rarely fight each other. Later in this volume we will discuss the legacies and lessons of the military aspects of Operation Iraqi Freedom (including the failure to anticipate the substantial insurgency that broke out), and the reconstruction and nationbuilding phases (including the wholesale deBaathification campaign). Suffice it to say here that the erratic changes in the rationale for the 2003 invasion—from precluding Saddam’s support for anti-US terrorists, to preventing his development and use of weapons of mass destruction, to converting Iraq into an exemplar for the rest of the Middle East of the “peace through democracy” paradigm—will likely go down in history as a model of how not to formulate and conduct US foreign policy and national security policy.

Afghanistan: What Will Be the Afterthoughts? Operation Enduring Freedom, the first regime-change military operation in reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, was launched on October 7, 2001, barely a month after the attacks, with hardly any controversy in Washington or the country at large over whether it was a just war. There was broad bipartisan support for the Bush administration’s position that the United States had a vital interest in ousting the Taliban from power in Kabul to prevent

The Emergent Debate

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Afghanistan being a safe haven for al-Qaeda and other anti-US terrorists. And the Obama administration, upon taking office, reaffirmed the analysis and basic judgment that this now decade-long effort to keep Afghanistan free of Taliban control was a “war of necessity”— in contrast to the “war of choice” in Iraq. There were debates within the new administration over strategies and tactics for securing victory and reconstructing the country— issues that remain unresolved to this day (and will be analyzed subsequently in the volume). And given increasing worries in the United States about the economic downturn and failure to address programs at home, there were growing doubts within the policy community and the public at large as to the validity of continuing what had become the longest war in US history, and one of the most expensive. The case for “staying the course,” with whatever it takes to keep the Taliban from reestablishing themselves as the dominant power in Afghanistan, rests on the hypothesized consequences of a failure to do so: al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies, whose goal is to inflict as much suffering on Americans as possible, will regain a safe haven from which to manage their terrorist attacks. Also, despite the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen and other high-level al-Qaeda leaders, the failure to smash the Taliban would give al-Qaeda and its allies and supporters around the world a great boost of confidence that their violent brand of radical jihadist Islam is destined to win in the global struggle against the infidels and apostates; and their claim to be on the side of history and God would enhance their ability to raise funds and recruit new followers. The fillip this would give the radical Islamists in nuclear-armed Pakistan was one of the nightmares. Moreover, the United States and its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) allies would suffer a humiliating collapse in international influence and reputation for not being able to mobilize the capability and will to fight for world law and order and basic human rights. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) itself, having made the out-of-region COIN campaign in Afghanistan a litmus test of its continuing importance in the post–Cold War world, would, in all likelihood, not survive such a humiliation. In anticipation of not being able to secure most of Afghanistan against the resurgent Taliban, some advocates of persisting in the counterinsurgency war—not redefining it as simply a counterterrorism war—have been talking of altering the objective to the establishment of a differentiated, decentralized, and more pluralistic country, rather than a unitary state—perhaps a confederal system in which some provinces

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may be left under the control of the Taliban. The Taliban, on the basis of negotiations, would agree to call off its insurgency in response to being accorded legitimate governing authority in selected regions (constrained by an obligation not to again provide safe haven for al-Qaeda) and representation at the confederal center in Kabul. The virtue of this accommodation to “reality” is also its vice: accommodation to the existing territorial distribution of control, which in many places may still be ground that is under contest by rival warlords and ethnic communities, and therefore subject to renewed fighting for control before the ink is dry on the cease-fire accords. The likelihood of a substantial US/ISAF military reengagement under circumstances of a breakdown in the cease-fire would be no greater than was the likelihood of a US reengagement in Vietnam when the Communists violated the 1973 cease-fire accords that committed the National Liberation Front and the government in Saigon to respect their respective areas of control in South Vietnam. But what if regional countries—India, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia—were initially brought in as guarantor powers? Could some of them be relied on to intervene to compel a restoration of the cease-fire conditions? More probable would be competitive interventions by the neighboring powers to secure advantageous positions for themselves in the disintegrating country.

Cumulative Impact on US Foreign Policy Ironically, whereas the new preoccupation with terrorism after 9/11 provided the basis for sustaining a globally assertive US foreign policy in the post–Cold War era, the resulting interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and their complications and costs have been generating both domestic and international reactions that are likely to severely limit the US international peace and security role in the future. Indeed, they have already—as evidenced in the ambivalent and ultimately constrained responses by the Obama administration to the upheavals in the Maghreb and the Middle East associated with the Arab Spring. The hubris and illusions of omnipotence and omniscience that appeared to be driving the country’s post–Cold War foreign policy have been supplanted by deepening doubts in the policy community and the public at large about the capacity—and moral right—of the United States and its allies to depose and impose regimes in other countries, or to fundamentally restructure them. The recrudescence of ethno-religious political violence in places where the United States and its allies have had a

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heavy footprint since the Cold War—the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan— are cases in point. According to this view, which its advocates claim has been revalidated by the chaos now engulfing the Arab Spring region, the most that outsiders should aspire to accomplish is to change a regime’s behavior, not to change the regime itself. Does this reaction to US reformist interventions abroad portend a return to a Kissinger-style realism of cultivating and maintaining predictable and stable relationships with governments (what the Obama administration calls “engagement”), and also being indifferent as to how governments treat their own people or deal with corruption, as long as they can maintain basic domestic stability? Or does the souring on reformist interventions go further and portend a more dramatic swing against engagement itself, mutual security pacts (“entangling alliances” and the like), especially of the multilateral kind—namely, neo-isolationism? Our prediction is that the country’s reaction to continuing bad news—from Iraq (such as a flare-up of interethnic violence since the US forces left), from Afghanistan (such as corruption-laden and ineffective governance from Kabul, and continuing Taliban gains in some areas), and from Pakistan (such as the country looking more and more like a failed state, while the military, poised to take over, is increasingly staffed by radical jihadists)—is unpredictable. Yet this unpredictability itself is a basic prediction that the parameters of plausible US foreign policies have widened to encompass alternatives with very different resource and military planning implications. The alternative foreign and national security policies, which we will analyze further in the concluding chapter, range from an allcontinents global involvement for advancing US interests and values around the world, to a minimalist policy to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Without yet having resolved the basic foreign policy debate, the nation’s leadership is having great difficulty in designing a national security policy and grand strategy and establishing priority roles and missions for its military; for at one extreme there would be a requirement for an enormously expensive multipurpose military capable of fighting simultaneously on many fronts, and at the other extreme anything that wasn’t needed for homeland defense would be rejected in favor of the allocation of resources to domestic needs.

1 US Strategy Toward “Rogue States” Robert Litwak

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had a profound impact on US national security perspectives and policies. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States and its international “coalition of the willing” waged two wars of “regime change”—first in Afghanistan, to topple the Taliban regime that had provided safe haven to alQaeda; and next in Iraq, to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime. Driving the action in Iraq was a redefined definition of threat that highlighted the dangerous new “nexus” of proliferation and terrorism, specifically the nightmare scenario that this “rogue state” might transfer a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) to a terrorist group. The third front in the “war on terror” after 9/11 was Pakistan, to whose rugged northwest frontier provinces the Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants retreated in the aftermath of the US-led military coalition against them in 2001–2002. Pakistan, designated by the United States as a major non–North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, is viewed as both the solution to and the source of the insurgency problem in Afghanistan. The Obama administration, continuing the policy of its predecessor, has pursued a mixed strategy of engagement (through economic and military assistance) and pressure to motivate Pakistan’s government to confront the Taliban and al-Qaeda on its own territory. Pakistan is also a country of nonproliferation concern, because of its national nuclear weapons program, the black-market nuclear commerce conducted by the notorious A. Q. Khan network, and increasing concern about 17

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Pakistani weapons falling into the hands of terrorist groups. In practice, with Pakistan, US counterterrorism interests—that is, the interests of the United States in maintaining a relationship with Islamabad that is supportive of the US war effort in Afghanistan—have trumped nonproliferation concerns stemming from the Pakistani nuclear weapons program. The nuclear crisis that has commanded Washington’s attention during this period has been Iran, where the United States has found that the Iraq model of coercive nonproliferation through a change of regime cannot be replicated, and that the alternative strategy of containment in tandem with pragmatic diplomatic engagement may prove inadequate in preventing eventual nuclear weapons acquisition by Iran. This “nexus” of proliferation and terrorism has been a major driver of US national security policy since 9/11. The precedents set in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan each hold different lessons for the management of the security threat embodied in that nexus.

The Impact of 9/11 on US Strategy In the decade between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, US grand strategy was reflected in the Clinton administration’s “engagement and enlargement” slogan. The approach was premised on the Wilsonian assumption that the key to creating a pacific international system was the proliferation of democracies worldwide. The Clinton administration laid out a four-tier typology of states in the post–Cold War era. In the first category were the advanced industrial democracies of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Second were the emerging democracies, with market economies, of Latin America, East Asia, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere that aspired to join the top tier. The third category comprised failing and failed states, such as Somalia, where central governments no longer exerted effective control over their territories and had ceased providing the most basic political goods (starting with security). Fourth, and finally, were the “rogue states”—relatively marginal international actors such as North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya, that constituted the main residual challenge to international order after the Cold War through their use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy and their pursuit of WMD capabilities. For the Clinton administration, the defining feature of contemporary international relations was the absence of great power competition together with the serious risk of such competition leading to major war. Instead, the primary focus of security concern

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after the Cold War was on the category of rogue states. This trend was evident at the end of the George H. W. Bush administration, when the end of the Cold War coincided with a hot war in the Persian Gulf to expel Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—the archetype rogue state— from Kuwait. The generic US strategy toward the rogue states was containment and political isolation. Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attack on the US homeland on 9/11 abruptly ended the so-called post–Cold War era. That misleadingly tranquil decade after the demise of the Soviet Union had fueled expectations of a long-term benign international environment, and a belief that US global primacy and “hyperpower” status would translate into security. “In retrospect the Millennium marked only a moment in time,” then–British prime minister Tony Blair declared. “It was the events of 11 September that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future.”1 Although 9/11 did not change the international system, it did precipitate a definition of threat. President George W. Bush asserted that the threat posed by rogue regimes derives from “their true nature.” After 9/11, the administration explicitly declared that the United States could no longer rely on the traditional strategic concepts of deterrence and containment to meet the “new deadly challenges” because of the character of its adversaries—undeterrable terrorist groups and unpredictable “rogue states.” The Bush administration argued that the proliferation of WMD capabilities to rogue states, in tandem with the sponsorship of terrorism by their unstable ruling regimes, created a deadly new nexus. In this nightmare scenario that drove US national security policy after 9/11, rogue regimes could transfer nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons to their terrorist clients, who would have no moral or political compunction about using them against the United States. In its comprehensive national security strategy of September 2002, the Bush administration maintained that a strategy of deterrence based on punishment was “less likely to work against leaders of rogue states,” who were “more willing to take risks” and more prone than an orthodox great power rival (such as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or contemporary China) to use weapons of mass destruction. This redefinition of the threat led to a redefinition of strategy. The United States shifted from a pre-9/11 strategy of containment (emphasizing deterrence and the political isolation of adversaries) to a post-9/11 strategy that emphasized regime change. The initial case was, of course, Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime relied on Osama

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bin Laden’s largesse and, in turn, had permitted al-Qaeda to use that country as a safe haven from which it could plot and mount the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the phrase of British military expert Lawrence Freedman, Afghanistan was not a state sponsor of terrorism, but rather a “terrorist-sponsored state.” President Bush, in his address to Congress in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, issued a public ultimatum to the Taliban regime to deliver the terrorists to the United States “or . . . share in their fate.”2 It is an interesting counterfactual to consider what would have happened had the Taliban leadership turned over Osama bin Laden and the top al-Qaeda leadership to the United States under this threat of regime change. The Taliban’s refusal to do so, whether through miscalculation (not believing that the United States could mount a military operation on the other side of the globe to topple it) or out of its ideological affinity with bin Laden’s worldview, provided the basis for the war of regime change that the United States and its allies launched in Afghanistan one month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As with Afghanistan, for the three “rogue states” identified in 2002 by President George W. Bush as members of the “axis of evil”— Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—US strategy shifted from containment and deterrence to regime change. The Bush administration’s argument, in short, was that their ostensibly threatening behavior was seen to be inextricably linked to the very nature of the regimes: to stop the threatening behavior, one had to change the rogue regimes. This argumentation was central to the Bush administration’s decision to launch a preventive war against a nonimminent threat to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that the administration’s military decision was based neither on new intelligence nor on a perception of imminent threat, but instead on old evidence viewed “in a dramatic new light—through the prism of our experience on 9/11.” The focus on regime change placed the United States at odds with much of the international community because of the cardinal principle of state sovereignty. Bush’s effort to reconcile the contradiction between the US determination to remove Saddam Hussein and the UN Security Council resolutions that made no mention of regime change produced the tortured formulation: “The policy of our government . . . is regime change—because we don’t believe [Saddam] is going to change. However, if he were to meet all the conditions of the United Nations . . . that in itself will signal the regime has changed.”3 One could argue that the threat of regime change might have provided

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effective coercive leverage with Saddam, but that would also have required a credible commitment to lift that threat if the Iraqi leader came into compliance with the UN Security Council resolutions. In the case of Saddam, it was emphatically clear that the Bush administration was not prepared to take yes for an answer. The Iraq Survey Group’s final report observes that Saddam never resolved the “contradiction” between the UN Security Council’s disarmament mandate and his intention to rebuild his WMD arsenal. His perceptions of a hostile external environment (strikingly fixated more on Iran than on the United States) prompted him “to bluff” about the status of Iraq’s WMD programs. For Saddam, who frequently told his inner circle that the “better part of war was deceiving,” this ambiguity was instrumental. Uncertainty about whether or not Iraq retained WMD capabilities, he believed, could have an important deterrent effect on adversaries, both without (the United States) and within (the Shiites). This security preoccupation, as well as his ego, led him to resist making the fact of Iraqi WMD disarmament unequivocally clear.4 In an interview after the regime’s overthrow, General Raad Majid al-Hamdani, an Iraqi Republican Guard commander, termed Saddam’s strategy of cultivating ambiguity about his unconventional weapons programs “deterrence by doubt.”5 Ironically, the ambiguity about Iraq’s WMD capabilities that Saddam cultivated to retain “a strategic deterrent” became the basis for the US military action that toppled his regime. Whether the invasion of Iraq was a “war of necessity” or a “war of choice” remains a contentious issue. All parties—the former Bush administration and its critics—agree that the war was preventive rather than preemptive, in that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was not imminent, which is the prerequisite for preemption in international law. Indeed, various presidential pronouncements after 9/11 had explicitly elevated “prevention” as a rationale to address emerging threats “before” they become imminent. The administration’s case for urgent action in Iraq rested on the Saddam Hussein regime’s purported links to al-Qaeda, fueling the fear that the dictator might transfer WMD capabilities to terrorists, and on the intelligence community’s assessment that Iraq was actively reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. But the White House’s depiction of Iraq’s urgent threat was based on an unproven cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda and a highly speculative assertion of Iraqi interest in transferring WMD capabilities to al-Qaeda (not merely in response to a US military action to topple the regime). On the nuclear question, the administration’s new alarm arose

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from suspect sources (such as the Iraqi informant fittingly codenamed “Curveball”) and flawed analysis (for example, of the alleged end-use of the aluminum tubes Iraq had acquired). According to an April 2005 Gallup Poll, fully half of Americans believed that the Bush administration had not only erred in its prewar intelligence assessments, but also “deliberately misled” the public on Iraq’s WMD programs.6 Without those two critical elements—Iraq’s nuclear capability and the al-Qaeda link—the administration’s pressing case for jettisoning the pre-9/11 strategy of containment in favor of preventive regime change would have been undermined. Yet even if the poorly founded—and much debated—claims had not been raised, legitimate ambiguity would have remained about the status of Iraq’s WMD programs (specifically, the unresolved questions about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs detailed in the January 1999 final report of the United Nations Special Commission [UNSCOM]). Historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote: “The rush to war in Iraq in the absence of a ‘first shot’ or ‘smoking gun’ left . . . a growing sense throughout the world there could be nothing worse than American hegemony if it was to be used in this way.”7 In withholding its legitimizing imprimatur for the 2003 war, the United Nations was saying, in essence, that the international community considered the precedent of a USimposed regime change in Baghdad worse than leaving the Iraqi dictator in power. Underlying the dispute were contending perspectives on the core issue of violating Iraqi sovereignty. President George H. W. Bush had faced a far easier task in assembling an international coalition for a showdown with Iraq than did his son twelve years later. In the 1991 Gulf War, UN Security Council authorization and the forging of a broad multinational coalition to liberate Kuwait were diplomatically possible because Saddam Hussein had violated a universally supported international norm: the protection of state sovereignty from external aggression. (As one observer colorfully put it, one state should not be permitted to murder another.) By contrast, in the bitter 2003 UN debate, the attainment of Security Council approval for military action was inherently bound to rouse strong opposition for the very same reason: compelling Iraqi WMD disarmament through an externally imposed regime change, even if undertaken to enforce a Security Council resolution, would be a precedent-setting negation of state sovereignty. The perception of the United States as a rogue superpower that had arrogated an unfettered right of military preemption, prompted a de facto effort by France, Germany, and Russia to block this unilateral application of US power. The effort was most clearly manifested in the French diplo-

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matic campaign in early March 2003 to mobilize opposition to the Anglo-American proposal for a final UN Security Council resolution with an ultimatum to trigger the use of force.

Iraq and Libya: Contrasting Nonproliferation Precedents In the aftermath of the war to oust Saddam Hussein, the George W. Bush administration characterized Iraq as a demonstration conflict exemplifying the 2002 national security strategy. That sentiment was captured in one official’s assertion that “Iraq is not just about Iraq. . . . It is of a type.” Some early indicators pointed toward the possible continuation of the muscular approach, as in the bravado of one hard-line official who stated that the message of the Iraq War for Iran’s theocratic regime was: “Take a number.” Administration pragmatists, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, expressed concern that the preventivewar precedent, if characterized as the new paradigm and not as an extraordinary remedy for a unique case, would create an incentive in Pyongyang and Tehran to accelerate, rather than roll back, their nuclear weapons program in order to deter a US attack. To assuage concerns about the Iraq precedent vis-à-vis North Korea and Iran, officials reiterated that the administration did not have a “cookie-cutter” strategy. But critics questioned whether it had a cookie-cutter mind-set that would preclude meaningful negotiation. In December 2003, eight months after Saddam’s fall, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s surprise decision to terminate his country’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs pointed to an alternative to the Iraq model—nonproliferation through a change in a regime rather than a change of regime. The bombshell revelation of the Libyan deal by the Bush and Blair governments immediately prompted a vigorous debate over contending explanations for Qaddafi’s strategic turnabout. Neoconservative proponents of the Iraq War and the muscular approach to nonproliferation underlying it pointed to the demonstration effect of the regime-changing “shock and awe” military campaign of the United States, which had “redefined war,” in President Bush’s words. Yet the available evidence supports an alternative conclusion: the crux of the December 2003 agreement was an implicit, but clear, assurance of regime survival to Qaddafi by the Bush administration. The accord could plausibly have unfolded in the absence of the demonstration effect of the Iraq War, given that domestic factors had

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strongly motivated Qaddafi to seek an exit for Libya from the sanctions regime in place since the early 1990s. But one cannot logically argue that the breakthrough in December 2003 would have occurred in the absence of a US security guarantee to the Libyan regime. The United States was willing to eschew the objective of regime change in return for this profound change in the regime’s behavior. External pressure, such as sanctions and the US interdiction of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons–related technology, raised the costs of Libyan noncompliance with nonproliferation and antiterrorism norms. Those concerted actions created a necessary but not a sufficient condition for change. Indeed, if the Bush administration had rejected the provision of a security assurance to Qaddafi, his incentive would have cut precisely in the opposite direction—that is, toward the retention, and perhaps even acceleration, of his nuclear program to deter a US attack. In short, what sealed the deal for the United States was Libya’s change in behavior with respect to terrorism and proliferation; what sealed the deal for Libya was a US assurance of nonintervention. Alternative routes to political change, then, were taken in the precedent-setting cases of 2003 involving two “rogue states”: in Iraq, a change of regime imposed through an occupying foreign army; in Libya, an indigenous process of change in a regime in response to internal and external pressures. These contrasting precedents set in Iraq and Libya have important implications for the ongoing nuclear crises with North Korea and Iran. In Washington, North Korea is viewed as a defensive, marginal state whose regime’s calculus of decision is driven solely by the imperative of political survival. Despite its less advanced nuclear weapons program, Iran is considered the more dynamic threat because of its extensive financial resources from oil production, its erratic president and his extremist rhetoric, and Tehran’s destabilizing foreign policy (as evidenced by its sponsorship of terrorism and its concerted effort to derail the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations). With Iran, the Bush administration was caught between the Iraq and Libya precedents. It could not replicate the Iraq model of coercive nonproliferation through regime change, and the administration was unwilling to offer assurances of regime security that were critical to Qaddafi’s decision to terminate his nuclear program. As a consequence, the Bush administration missed an opportunity to test Iranian intentions before the radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, and before centrifuges were spinning at the Natanz site. The Bush administration’s mantra was “all options are on the

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table.” But to what end? Administration officials sent out a mixed message, never clarifying whether the US objective was to change these “rogue” regimes or to change their behavior. The theory of coercive diplomacy incorporates the threatened or actual use of force, but that demonstrative exercise of military power must be clearly linked to a limited political objective. Creating some degree of bargaining leverage with Tehran under unfavorable conditions must start with a fundamental recognition: the successful application of coercive diplomacy (i.e., employing a combination of punitive instruments and inducements to alter the target state’s foreign policy behavior) is not possible when the goal is the maximalist one of regime change.

The Obama Administration’s Policy Shift President Barack Obama inherited a hard case with no good options. Obama administration officials have called the negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities a critical test of the Tehran regime’s intentions. The dilemma is that through its mastery of uranium enrichment, Iran has achieved a breakout option: centrifuges ostensibly intended to produce low-enriched uranium for civil use can be kept spinning to yield high-enriched uranium for bomb-making. Negotiations can narrow, but not eliminate, this inherent ambiguity, since any country that crosses this key technological threshold is a “virtual” nuclear weapons state, according to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed El Baradei. The much discussed military option—air strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure—would set back the nuclear program for some years, but not end it. More fundamentally, in Tehran, military action would be viewed as the initiation of a regime-toppling war. The envisioned scope of US military action would reinforce this Iranian perception: an air campaign would likely be of the magnitude of Operation Desert Fox in Iraq, which spanned four days in late December 1998, rather than of the scale of the lightning Israeli air strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. Because the prospect of a US air strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure has been a matter of open speculation, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, has warned that a US military strike would trigger major Iranian retaliation against US interests worldwide, starting in Iraq. Domestically, the hard-line regime, on the defensive since the fraudulent June 2009 elections that

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kept Ahmadinejad in power, would politically benefit from the “rally round the flag” effect of foreign military intervention. The alternative to the military option is a strategy of containment and deterrence. Perceptions that the US objective is regime change create an incentive for nuclear hedging and the strategic use of WMD ambiguity.8 To narrow that range of ambiguity, Iran should be presented with a structured choice between the tangible benefits of behavior change and the penalties for noncompliance. The key to this strategy of coercive diplomacy is to combine tangible pressure on core regime interests with credible US assurances of regime security, as in the case of Libya, and a clear pathway to a transformed strategic relationship. The Obama administration’s resolution of the ambiguity in US policy—clarifying that the US objective is behavior change—is the prerequisite for reducing Iran’s nuclear ambiguity. Washington’s willingness to “take yes for an answer” and to diplomatically engage Iran is a prerequisite for strong collective action if Tehran says no to a fair proposal. Though vulnerable to economic coercion, international support for meaningful, targeted sanctions on Iran will be impossible to marshal if others believe the US goal is regime change rather than behavior change. Creating meaningful multilateral pressure on Iran to comply will require Russia to decide whether its occasionally rancorous differences with the United States trump its interest in blocking the rise of another nuclear weapons state on its periphery. A primary objective of the Obama administration’s “reset” of relations with Russia is to win Moscow’s diplomatic support for the US strategy of pressure and engagement. Optimists among US specialists believe that agreements are attainable, and that the challenge is to identify acceptable terms. Skeptics discount the possibility of negotiated settlements because they believe that the Tehran regime is determined to acquire nuclear weapons. The failure of the Obama administration’s engagement strategy drew US domestic political criticism. The Bush administration’s mixed message about the US objective toward Iran—regime change or behavior change—prompted criticism that it never made clear whether it would “take yes for an answer.” With the Obama administration, Iran’s diplomatic rebuff and its continued flouting of UN Security Council resolutions led conservative critics to ask whether it would “take no for an answer.” Further complicating prospects was the US-assisted regime change in Libya, conducted as a humanitarian intervention, which undercut the ability of the United States to incorporate a security assurance as part of a negotiated settlement to limit

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Iran’s nuclear program. Indeed, Iranian leaders have asserted that the NATO intervention in Libya proves that Qaddafi never should have given up his nuclear capabilities, which might have deterred the regime-changing attack. The prognosis, though, is that Iran will continue to cultivate ambiguity about its nuclear programs. The focus of negotiations and UN Security Council pressure will remain on circumscribing that country’s “civil” uranium enrichment program, which provides Iran a latent capability for a nuclear breakout. As Iran expert Shahram Chubin has noted, the Iranian program is determined and incremental, but it is not a crash program in the face of an existential threat. Iran is not under urgent pressure to weaponize. Indeed, given the possible regional reaction to an overt nuclear Iran (e.g., stimulating possible nuclear acquisition by Saudi Arabia and Egypt), a hedge strategy suits Iran’s interests. The major issue raised by nuclear ambiguity is whether the United States can live with it in a post-9/11 world. The Bush administration’s focus on the “nexus” of proliferation and terrorism was driven by the nightmare scenario of a rogue state handing off WMD capabilities to a terrorist group. Yet in the Iraq case, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 warned that the administration’s intended course—a march on Baghdad to overthrow the regime—was the only circumstance likely to cause a “desperate” Saddam to “exact [such] vengeance.” In the current nuclear crisis with Iran, the view that the Islamic Republic is undeterrable because of the character of its religious, apocalyptic regime has led some to advocate military strikes— essentially preventive war—before Iran achieves “a point of no return” in its nuclear program. But a major element of the 2007 NIE on Iran was the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran’s leadership is guided by a “cost-benefit approach.” The NIE’s characterization of Iran as a rational actor supports an important policy conclusion: unlike terrorist groups, states whose regimes’ paramount goal is survival can be deterred. Though living with ambiguity about the nuclear capabilities of Iran (as well as North Korea) for the foreseeable future, US officials must unambiguously lay down a deterrent “red line”—the threat of a regimechanging US counter-response if a state transfers nuclear materials or capabilities to a nonstate terrorist group, such as al-Qaeda. For the target states, a US declaratory policy combining deterrence by punishment (linked to a clear “red line”) and reassurance of nonhostile US intentions would create a new calculus of decision for their ruling regimes. However, NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 (although

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undertaken on humanitarian rather than nonproliferation grounds) has undercut US ability to credibly offer a security assurance to the Iranian and North Korean regimes to restrain their nuclear intentions. Much more likely than the direct transfer of unconventional weapons from a rogue state to a terrorist group—the driving scenario behind the post-9/11 focus on the nexus of proliferation and terrorism—is the inadvertent “leakage” of nuclear and other WMD-related materials to terrorist groups from states, notably Russia and Pakistan, which exert inadequate control over dangerous technologies. With a low-capacity state like Pakistan, a key element of strategy is a variant of deterrence policy—deterrence by denial. Through the development of governmental capacity, the strategy aims to frustrate the ability of nonstate terrorist groups to operate or acquire WMD capabilities. That increased capacity could promote more effective regime control over WMD-related technologies and materials. At the outset of the Cold War, George Kennan wrote that the Soviet system “bears within it the seeds of its own decay” and argued for a strategy of “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment.” The ongoing nuclear crisis with Iran is playing out against the backdrop of political turmoil in that country. But with regime change not an immediate prospect, the United States cannot wait for a potentially long-term political process to play out there. As Henry Kissinger argued, “Focusing on regime change as the road to denuclearization confuses the issue. . . . The diplomacy appropriate to denuclearization is comparable to the containment policy that helped win the Cold War: no preemptive challenge to the external security of the adversary, but firm resistance to attempts to project its power abroad and reliance on domestic forces to bring about internal change.”9 A containment strategy would decouple the nuclear issue from the question of regime change and rely on internal forces as the agent of societal change.

Notes 1. CNN, “Blair: Surrender Terrorists of Surrender Power,” October 2, 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/10/02/ret.blair.address. 2. US White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” September 20, 2001, www .whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010920-8.html. 3. US White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “President Discusses Foreign Policy Matters with NATO Secretary,” October 21, 2002, www .whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021021-8.html.

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4. Central Intelligence Agency, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD, vol. 1 (Langley, September 30, 2004), pp. 34–35. 5. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006), p. 65; Michael R. Gordon and Bernard W. Trainor, “Hussein Saw Iraqi Unrest as Top Threat,” New York Times, March 12, 2006, p. A1. 6. Gallup Poll, April 2005, www.usatoday.com/news/polls/tables/live/ 2005-04-03-poll.htm. 7. John Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 101. 8. For an outstanding discussion of nuclear hedging, see Ariel Levite, “Never Say Never Again: Nuclear Reversal Revisited,” International Security 27, no. 3, Winter 2002–2003. 9. Henry A. Kissinger, “A Nuclear Test for Diplomacy,” Washington Post, May 16, 2006, p. A17.

2 Learning from Our Mistakes Marvin Weinbaum

After more than a decade of deep US military and political engagement with Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is serious soulsearching over what has gone wrong and what we might have done differently. Despite gains in 2010 and 2011, doubts exist that the counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan can be sustained or that a strategic partnership with Pakistan is any longer possible. A drawdown of forces has begun in Afghanistan and domestic backing for US involvement with both countries has seriously eroded. Considerable attention is being given to the transfer of responsibility to Afghan security forces and the possibly dire financial impact of disengagement on the Afghan economy. Alternative strategies that protect US national security interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan are being proposed, most of them prescribing a narrowing of objectives and a lower profile. After a series of divisive events during 2011, US ties with Pakistan are under reassessment in hopes of finding common interests on which to build a more realistic relationship. Much of the discussion in Washington has focused on whether a tougher stance on Pakistan is warranted, and what the United States can do differently in assistance programs. At stake in both reappraisals are their potential impacts on the US capacity to thwart global terrorism and contribute to regional stability. Lessons can no doubt be taken from the failure of the United States to preclude Afghan Taliban resurgence or help bring about better governance and a sustainable economy. We should also be able to

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learn from a decade of US policies toward Pakistan how to better manage a relationship with a partner whose divergent strategic goals often outweigh our overlapping interests. More broadly, the lessons we take away from Afghanistan and Pakistan may help us arrive at better-informed decisions on whether to intervene elsewhere militarily and attempt statebuilding. And when we do, these lessons might also improve our chances for success.

The Top-Down Fallacy Perhaps one of the clearest lessons to be drawn from the US experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the danger of basing policy on a relationship with a single individual. In Afghanistan, the international community envisioned that a future Afghan state would be a constitutionally democratic government, more centralized than the country had previously known. As a presidential system, it required a strong and capable chief executive in order to succeed. Hamid Karzai was the US choice for the office, and other countries and the United Nations acceded. With Afghans expecting Karzai to be their ticket to generous US and international assistance, opposition to his selection melted away. But the drawbacks of having Karzai seen as a US client became increasingly clear over time. Karzai’s failings as president, notably his tolerance of incompetence and corrupt administration, and his indecision as a national leader, soon became evident. During the George W. Bush administration, Karzai’s close personal relationship with the US president encouraged his feelings of indispensability. But the US-Afghan presidential relationship has become strained under the Barack Obama administration, even while the current counterinsurgency strategy of the United States banks heavily on having a credible partner at the helm of the Afghan government. At its core, the strategy rests on the United States being able to convince Afghans to place their confidence in the Kabul government. The United States finds itself having to work closely with Karzai even while pressing him to adopt changes in government personnel and policies. Yet, as much as the United States is anxious that its strategic goals in Afghanistan not be held hostage to Karzai’s personal qualities and managerial skills, this seems increasingly the case. Close identification with a national leader who becomes more a liability than an asset has similarly confounded US policy in Pakistan. As head of state and army chief, President Pervez Musharraf was believed

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instrumental to gaining Pakistan’s cooperation in US military operations in Afghanistan. His public advocacy of a progressive Islamic democracy was welcomed in Washington, as were his several conciliatory moves with India. While Pakistan’s often-duplicitous policies in dealing with its domestic extremists and militants were less appreciated, the United States showed forbearance, despite Musharraf’s manipulation of the country’s constitution and repressive measures against his political opposition. Washington continued to back him even in the face of growing popular anger in 2007 over his heavy-handed treatment of the judiciary and the imposition of emergency rule. Musharraf’s close personal ties to the George W. Bush administration contributed to its long denial of a political transition occurring in Pakistan. Only with Musharraf out of the picture did the United States appear to recognize that the best way to counter extremism is through support of Pakistan’s democratic institutions and the rule of law in the country. US officials insist on their preference for the military’s subordination to civilian authority. Washington has been perceived as having a special relationship with Asif Ali Zardari, who assumed the presidency in 2008. Zardari has been a frequent advocate of policies favored by the United States, most notably in his willingness to address Islamic extremism, try to rein in the military, and improve relations with India. But most of his initiatives have lacked proper preparation and drew the military’s disapproval. With Zardari handicapped by his past reputation for personal corruption, his continued cronyism, and his preoccupation with ongoing legal challenges, the United States has had little to show for its relationship. Not surprisingly, then, it is with army chief Pervaiz Kayani and Inter-Services Intelligence director Ahmad Shuja Pasha whom the United States continues to communicate on issues of security, especially involving Afghanistan. Close identification by the United States with unpopular leaders has led Afghans and Pakistanis to criticize Washington for meddling in their countries’ domestic affairs. It has also shown that while the United States must work with elites, it must better take into account the constraints that popular pressures can impose on policymakers, especially in an era of easy access to multiple sources of media and electronic communication. Improving the chances for democratic government, creating stability, and laying the conditions for political reform and economic and social progress depend on the ability of the United States and others to help Afghanistan build and to help Pakistan reinvigorate those elective and civil institutions that can narrow the trust deficit that their governments have with their own peoples.

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Afghanistan has always had a concentration of formal authority at the center, but the scope of powers of its governments extended only weakly and narrowly to the periphery. As already noted, foreign governments and donors, together with the UN, promoted a post-Taliban constitutional, democratic order calling for strong national leadership and centralized administrative structures that could partner responsibly in reconstructing an Afghan state and economy. This has left a heavy burden on fledging national institutions that are largely unable to deliver services or formulate coherent policies. Frustration with the weak, ineffectual, and often corrupt governance in Kabul has led to a growing realization that programs cannot be successfully implemented without the greater participation and initiatives of those in the provinces and districts. This might entail greater reliance on strengthened traditional institutions assuming local responsibilities for representation and decisionmaking. Whether in development or military strategies, there is now increasing belief in the need to promote bottom-up strategies while also assisting capacity building in the central government. International actors have been active to various degrees in the promotion of democracy in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Great weight has been given to the holding of elections as a means of creating government legitimacy. In Afghanistan in particular, however, recent elections have been politically destabilizing, ethnically divisive showcases for the country’s rampant corrupt behavior. Nothing has hurt the reputation of democracy more than the performance of those who have used the powers conferred through elections to govern ineffectually and unfairly. The United States and other countries have also come to realize that Afghanistan has been burdened with too many elections that it will never be able to afford financially to conduct on its own. The willingness of Afghans to participate in elections probably has had less to do with the principle of democratic choice than with the promise of delivering basic justice and economic improvement. Disappointment with the performance of democratic institutions has led many to question whether they are premature or culturally inappropriate. Some insist that necessary socioeconomic preconditions are absent in Afghanistan, including a larger middle class and civil society. Others allege democracy’s incompatibility with Muslim society and Islamic doctrines. In any case, expectations for democratic institutions need to be more realistic. Internationally provided physical and legal structures of a modern legislature give no assurance that legislators will understand their role and act responsibly in providing intended checks

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and balances in the political system. Afghanistan’s high illiteracy and somewhat perverse national electoral laws have increased an appreciation for the contribution that can be made by traditional bodies in providing popular expression and interest representation. Similarly, heavy investment in creating a formal justice system overlooks many of the time-honored means of conflict resolution. Customarily, law often has provisions that clash with our concepts of individual rights, especially women’s rights. But with all its shortcomings, customary means to settle disputes must fill the vacuum in the absence of a state capacity to impose its own writ over the legal process. In Pakistan, with its colonial legacy of a well-institutionalized legislative and judicial system, elections can serve as a necessary antidote to unaccountable civilian government and autocratic military rule. Yet the United States has gained a reputation in Pakistan of preferring cooperative military leadership to its democratic alternatives. Efforts to salvage an increasingly unpopular Musharraf presidency in 2007 and 2008 cost the United States dearly in terms of public support in Pakistan, and the nonconfidence verdict against the governing party in the country’s 2008 parliamentary elections was in part a vote against its close relationship with US policy. In trying to avoid offense to the Musharraf leadership, the United States erred in minimizing the regime’s abuse of Pakistan’s constitution and civil liberties. Many normally pro-US Pakistanis interpreted this as the United States giving its blessing to the abuses, in contradiction to its purported democratic ideals. In general, US officials have been slow to appreciate the difference between what they think they are accomplishing and what Pakistanis and Afghans perceive. High-level visits and public statements intended to encourage particular policies have frequently been ill-timed and their impact on public attitudes has been poorly gauged. Demands made on the two governments, when publicly aired, often leave the impression that Washington is trying to micromanage their domestic politics. The United States is handicapped by security concerns from communicating directly to citizens in both countries, but has also not been particularly adept at shaping its message for mass audiences. Consequently, the information on which the publics in Pakistan and Afghanistan form their opinions is usually shallow and one-sided, and easily manipulated by opportunistic political figures and highly competitive media outlets prone to sensationalism. Politically insecure leaders in both countries hesitate to take the political risks involved in countering unfair criticism of the United States.

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The United States has been repeatedly confronted with the limits of its influence to affect policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is often undecided whether this results from lack of governmental will or lack of governmental capacity in these countries. Washington has frequently misread the motives, capabilities, and intentions of Afghan and Pakistani policymakers. What is clear is that elites in Afghanistan and Pakistan will not easily accede to what they view as contrary to their own political survival or their countries’ core security interests. More realistic US relations with these countries require replacing illusions about partnerships with better recognition of where national goals and priorities diverge. This will help avoid the inevitable disappointments and recriminations. It may then lead to greater focus on those areas of agreement that are likely to be the most productive and mutually beneficial.

Insufficient Attention to Basic Structural Factors Among both Afghans and Pakistanis the most important source of insecurity is not insurgency but economic deprivation and the absence of law and order. This means that aid programs must focus heavily on providing for economic growth and helping to improve the rule of law. Reducing crime and even petty corruption can also be profound in its effect on the economy and the confidence that people have in their political leaders. Yet it took too long for the United States and others to fully grasp the way security, development, and enhanced governance intersect, and that progress on any one of these areas is unlikely without gains in the others. Afghans waited in vain for a post-Taliban dividend that would provide employment opportunities and incomes. Uneven development nationally has also fostered deep resentments. And without better governance, development can be neither equitably nor competently implemented. Mounting grievances associated with administrative and judicial corruption have turned large numbers of Afghans against the Kabul government. The role of economic development and improved governance in helping to sustain gains in security is central to any counterinsurgency strategy. Afghan development over the past decade has lacked the sense of urgency it warrants and the resources it requires. Assistance policies also failed to establish clear priorities. The United States is paying the price for years of uncoordinated, often ad hoc aid policies that assumed that there was ample time to address serious issues of development. In

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failing to take advantage of what had been for some years after 2001 a more secure environment, many opportunities were missed. The United States thought it had time on its side for addressing issues and as a result undermined the kind of changes that could have created a bulwark against insurgency. While the need for the development of physical and human capital has not diminished, addressing the deficits has become so much more difficult. The international community’s initial approach to Afghanistan has often been described as the “light footprint.” It involved respectable pledges from donor countries of financial resources for the country’s relief and development. The United States believed that much of the job of reconstruction could be an international responsibility. The UN would oversee the creation of a political framework for the country that focused on providing for a national leadership, a written constitution, and an orderly democratic process. Supposedly, a greater US presence would lead the Afghans to resent the Americans as occupiers, this despite evidence that people across the county were clamoring for the presence of foreign troops to stave off the return of rapacious local militias. Actually, there was a more impelling reason for limiting the US commitment: the Bush administration had no intention of getting bogged down in Afghanistan because of plans to invade Iraq. Counterterrorism operations aimed at finding and destroying al-Qaeda preoccupied the administration. Yet even this mission was sorely underresourced. Only grudgingly did the United States drop its almost doctrinal aversion to anything resembling what was called “nationbuilding.” A more comprehensive and fuller commitment to rebuilding an Afghan state and economy was inescapable if the country was to make any meaningful recovery nationally and manage to achieve political stability. Only after several years did the United States come to appreciate how greatly it had underestimated the costs, the complexity, and the urgency of development programs, as well as the importance of addressing Afghanistan’s governance deficit. US policymakers were also late in accepting that in Pakistan our assistance had too exclusively favored the military. Roughly 80 percent of US assistance since 2002 has gone to security or securityrelated programs. Over $1 billion yearly, much of it unaccounted for, was meant to cover Pakistan’s operations against militants in the border areas. The relatively low funding for nonmilitary development programs through most of the past decade has contributed to the view that US aid is essentially a partnership with the Pakistani army, meant

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to serve US strategic interests and with scant concern for the people of Pakistan. The humanitarian work of the US military following the earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir in 2005 was the lone occasion when US aid gained popular recognition and approval. At least for a brief period, the Pakistani public’s negative views of the United States were replaced by images of the United States using its military forces to genuinely help ordinary people. The United States similarly attempted to capitalize politically from a humanitarian crisis following the Pakistani army’s campaign against militants in Swat Valley in 2009. As the single largest contributor to refugee relief efforts, the United States sought a visible presence in the camps but was barred by skittish Pakistani authorities. Another opportunity to demonstrate a concern for the Pakistani people came with the country’s devastating monsoon floods in 2010, to which the United States responded generously with relief assistance. But the United States received little credit from a Pakistani public largely unaware of the preeminent US contribution to the relief efforts and prone to finding ulterior motives in any US activities in the country. In 2009, in an effort to reset US relations with Pakistan, Congress authorized $7.5 billion in nonmilitary aid over the course of five years. This aid was expected to fund several major infrastructure projects and create new programs in the education and health sectors. But public skepticism, fueled by media commentary and objections by the Pakistani military, focused not on what the funds could do for the country’s development budget but on the language in the legislation that was seen as interfering in Pakistan’s domestic affairs. The United States had misjudged how the modest conditionality placed on the aid would be received and distorted. In 2010 Zardari’s political enemies tried unsuccessfully to scuttle the aid package. It is widely conceded that better planning is required to avoid aid programs that are unfocused, poorly conceived, and lacking in sufficient oversight. Failures of coordination in development and economic assistance are also frequently cited. Foreign and domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international agencies often duplicate efforts and operate at cross-purposes. In setting national development goals, rural development involving water and electricity and help for the agricultural sector is said to warrant higher priority. Many argue for giving greater attention to the aggregate impact of development projects over the management of small individual projects. But others worry that too much attention goes to aid planning and not enough to ensuring its delivery to the intended recipients.

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The international aid community increasingly understands the value of a development approach that allows local publics to identify their needs and become direct participants in programs that benefit them. There is now recognition that greater efforts are needed to contract locally and avoid having foreign firms siphon off a large proportion of the allocated project funds. There is increased focus on the World Bank–funded Afghan National Stability Program and particularly its community development councils, which have the potential to transform local governance and connect peripheral subnational government to the central government. The objective is to give locals a sense of ownership in development projects while also strengthening the state’s authority in opposing extremism and insurgency. In Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATAs), the US Office of Transitional Initiatives has had modest success with low-profile funding of locally contracted, small development projects intended to build people’s trust and confidence in their local and provincial governments. In Afghanistan, the Kabul government insists that more outside resources need to be channeled through its ministries, and objects to being bypassed in favor of subnational levels of government. Officials complain that the central government’s capacity has been damaged by the ability of NGOs and international organizations to drain the pool of qualified Afghan employees by offering considerably higher salaries. Against the argument that national authorities lack the managerial abilities and trustworthiness needed to successfully implement programs, government officials contend that without being given greater responsibility the necessary skills can never be acquired. As the conference in Kabul in July 2010 confirmed, there is little disagreement with the principle that programs in Afghanistan must be designed ultimately to transfer responsibility and be self-sustaining. While reliance on the United States and international community for development and military assistance will continue for some time, both Afghanistan and Pakistan must also be weaned off dependency. Reports of widespread corruption and misuse of funds understandably lead to demands for greater transparency and accountability in US aid programs. Washington’s frustrations with policies pursued by Kabul and Islamabad also bring calls for US assistance to be used as leverage against Afghan and Pakistani leaders. The United States may have a reason to expect something in return for its aid. But to put relations with Afghanistan or Pakistan on a transactional basis can be counterproductive to US objectives. The appearance of buying compliance reflects poorly on the United States in both coun-

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tries, where there are heightened sensitivities over national sovereignty. It is one thing to ask that aid be spent and managed efficiently and require benchmarks, and quite another to insist that aid to overcome social and economic problems be contingent on cooperation strategically. Most pointedly, basic human needs should not be conditioned on the performance of government officials or dictated by US military aims. Nonmilitary aid to Pakistan with no obvious link to serving US interests need not be viewed as simple altruism, especially when it can help build a climate of goodwill that can contribute to the success of US policies.

Overly Narrow Concept of Security The conflict in Afghanistan also shows the pitfalls of designing and resourcing a counterinsurgency campaign with its objectives defined mostly in military terms. For most of the years of military involvement in the region, US policy was almost exclusively focused on a counterterrorism campaign whose target was al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After 2001, the United States made the serious mistake of assuming that the Afghan Taliban was a mostly spent force. As a result, the Taliban was able to regroup and reequip with virtual impunity in Pakistan and gradually mount an insurgency in Afghanistan. Only after some five years did the United States wake up to the severity of the challenge presented by the Taliban and its allies, and the necessity of a counterinsurgency strategy that required a great deal more than a military plan. Even then, the decision to resource a broader approach in order to take the initiative away from the Taliban militarily and politically was not made until late 2009. For several years after 2001, Afghans were eager to see the countrywide deployment of large numbers of international troops, whom they saw as providing security and ensuring the delivery of services. The public was especially anxious to have these forces prevent local commanders from establishing their fiefdoms at the expense of traditional leaders and state authority. But as the insurgency gained momentum, US forces were preoccupied with counterterrorism operations on the border with Pakistan, and NATO-led international troops were preoccupied with peacekeeping mainly in Afghanistan’s north. Meanwhile, many districts in the country felt neither the writ of the state nor the presence of international troops.

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The size and mission of the international forces permitted only a spotty application of an approach that emphasized protecting and winning over larger numbers of Afghans. As the Taliban increased its presence countrywide, it became increasingly evident that if its gains were to be reversed, there was need for a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy requiring a military force capable of clearing and holding areas against the enemy while also bringing tangible improvements in people’s lives. Based on the counterinsurgency doctrine, the troop level needed to suppress an insurgency should number around 600,000, including Afghan security forces, although half that number could probably suffice for securing only Afghanistan’s larger population centers. With the United States and its coalition partners now agreeing on concluding their military presence by the end of 2014, any gains will be impossible to sustain without an Afghan national army and police who are prepared to assume responsibility for carrying on the counterinsurgency. The United States did not initially prioritize army recruitment and took even longer to recognize the importance of increasing the size and improving the quality of the country’s police. Not only do the police have a role in combating crime and helping to create a credible system of local justice, but they are also expected to serve as a paramilitary force in counterinsurgency. But the mostly poorly trained and illiterate national police are the weakest link in the Afghan security system. This has led to a government program to supplement the national police with community-based forces, raising questions about the loyalties of recruits and the wisdom of distributing weapons to them. Still more controversial is the practice of enlisting local commanders and their militias as allies in fighting insurgents, often to protect supply lines and local installations. The establishment in late 2003 of several US-fielded provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) was the first step, albeit a cautious one, toward adopting a more comprehensive and countrywide approach to addressing the insurgency. Nine years later, these joint military and civilian teams, many no larger than a hundred members, are located in twenty-five of the thirty-four provincial capitals, with nearly half provided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other coalition partners. As part of the civilian surge intended to complement the US military surge after 2009, increased numbers of qualified civilian experts were assigned to PRTs. The impact of PRTs across the country has been problematic, however, as to their contribution to both

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local security and small-scale development. PRTs have varied considerably in how they define their mission and many are criticized as being mostly preoccupied with protecting themselves. PRTs have also been accused of blurring the difference between military-funded development projects and the work of NGOs and international relief organizations, which diminishes their perceived neutrality and endangers aid personnel. In order for PRTs to both serve the counterinsurgency and also be a vehicle for development activities, civil-military efforts must be better integrated and the distinction between military and nonmilitary assistance programs must be reconciled. Controversy over the presence of PRTs, including objections from the Karzai regime, has led to the decision that they will be phased out well before the end of 2014. Sanctions imposed after 1990 and augmented in 1999 left the United States without regular contact with the Pakistani military for more than a decade. These policies reinforced deeply held doubts about the reliability of the United States. Opportunities were lost that might have given Washington leverage to discourage Pakistan’s mentoring of Afghan Taliban forces during the 1990s, slow the growth of radical Islamic sympathies in the Pakistani army, and provide better intelligence regarding Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation activities. Had the United States been able to use its earlier influence in the Pakistani army to facilitate Indo-Pakistani negotiations over Kashmir, it might have made the present-day task of getting Pakistan to take the threats to national security from its western rather than eastern border more seriously. In some contrast to Afghanistan, the United States has had fewer military options in Pakistan. US efforts to convince the country’s leadership to act more aggressively against domestic extremists and deny safe haven to the Afghan Taliban have mostly taken the form of personal diplomacy and persuasion. The greatest leverage with the Pakistani military has come from the furnishing of major weapons systems. Until mid-2011, it was thought that any denial of equipment and training would run counter to Washington’s interest in improving the capability of the Pakistani forces against their militant extremists and their willingness, albeit limited, to block insurgent infiltration into Afghanistan. What has often been criticized as open-ended largesse to Pakistan’s military was believed necessary to ensure the continued transit from the port of Karachi of the lion’s share of supplies needed by US and allied forces engaged in Afghanistan. There was reluctance to put in jeopardy the Pakistani military’s quiet cooperation with the United States in providing intelligence and the use of

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launching sites for drone attacks against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Pakistan. What had been taken for granted as a working relationship was, however, put in doubt by events during 2011. The United States let it be known in July that it had suspended $800 million in military aid to Pakistan, one-third of its annual military assistance. The policy change grew out of frustrations with the Pakistani army’s unwillingness to undertake operations against Afghan insurgent strongholds inside its borders, particular the Haqqani militants in northern Waziristan. Several other factors went into the reversal, not the least being US displeasure with the retaliatory measures by a senior Pakistani military official embarrassed by the unilateral US raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011 and Islamabad’s actions curtailing US antiterrorist intelligence activities. But rather than push the Pakistan leadership toward greater cooperation militarily, the partial aid cutoff has only reinforced long-standing views about US unreliability. It further constricted the latitude of a military and civilian leadership facing strong anti-US popular sentiment. By the year’s end, US relations with Pakistan had reached a new low. In response to the deaths in late November of two dozen Pakistani soldiers in a misdirected US air attack at a border post, Pakistan closed down the two major border transit points for supplies reaching Afghanistan. US personnel were also evicted from a Pakistani airbase from which unmanned aerial vehicles were launched against targets in the border areas. This use of armed drones in the Pakistani and Afghan theaters has been a continuing source of controversy. Reported civilian casualties have inflamed public feelings in both countries and brought bitter criticism from government circles. Improved coordination between Pakistani and US intelligence that had helped to identify legitimate targets and reduce the collateral damage has been put in jeopardy. To win over hearts and minds in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the United States has needed to better calibrate its military operations to cultural sensitivities and economic realities. Special operations units in Afghanistan operating outside the usual chain of command have been most often identified with heavy-handed tactics. Similarly, indiscriminate drug eradication programs that provide no alternative crops or livelihoods for farmers can alienate rural populations ambivalent in their political loyalties. In addition, the psychological and perceptual aspects in fighting insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan require greater attention. Breaking the perception of defeat is critical to the US military strategy

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in Afghanistan. The appearance of winning or losing, staying or leaving, has a profound influence on the support that US military operations receive from the civilian populations in both countries. Even in their acceptance of civilian casualties, the public in both countries seem willing to show greater tolerance if they perceive that the momentum is in a favored direction. Additionally, showing progress in addressing people’s sense of security against criminal behavior on the roads and in their homes can build confidence in counterinsurgency policies. The United States is faced with dispelling the widespread belief in Afghanistan that it seeks to occupy the country and seize its natural resources, and in Pakistan that it aims to weaken the country and seize its nuclear weapons—all as part of a greater war against Islam. In general, it is a storyline about US perfidy and betrayal that can be punctured only with well-designed and consistent counternarratives. In retrospect, some argue that a more inclusive political approach that had invited the Afghan Taliban in 2001 to participate in the political process might have marginalized its hard core and denied it the ability to ignite an insurgency. However, the strong feeling against the senior Taliban leadership by those who had so recently fought against the Taliban naturally militated against an accommodation. In all probability, moreover, Mullah Omar and his close followers were unlikely to have been attracted to a Western-style political formula for Afghanistan. Now, after more than a decade of war, Washington and other capitals are inclined to believe that the conflict can only end with a political solution. This conclusion led to a concerted diplomatic effort by the United States during 2011 to initiate peace talks with willing Taliban leaders. It was assumed that in a negotiated power-sharing arrangement the insurgency could be enticed to accept the basic tenets of the Afghan constitution and not threaten the human rights gains in recent years. But getting the Taliban to compromise on their determination to implement an exclusively Sharia state seems unrealistic as long as they believe that time and God are on their side. Not only is the insurgency convinced that it is winning but that it has only to wait for the planned exit of international troops and the collapse of Afghan security forces.

Policy Overview The United States continues to justify military intervention in Afghanistan and operations across the border in Pakistan in terms of protecting

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the US homeland from an ever-plotting al-Qaeda leadership. Yet the decision reached in Washington in 2009 to embark on a classic counterinsurgency strategy rejected the primacy of counterterrorism. This seeming contradiction can be resolved only by arguing that without a broad effort to secure Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and like groups will acquire with a Taliban victory the ungoverned space in which they can thrive. But continuing to pin the need for international military intervention principally on the dangers posed by al-Qaeda has made a longterm strategy that aims at stabilizing the country hard to defend against the criticism that there are less costly and intrusive ways to deal with the insurgency and export of terrorism. The Obama administration also finds this a difficult argument to make given al-Qaeda’s acknowledged presence mainly in Pakistan and its having become a globally franchised enterprise. A skeptical American public requires a fuller explanation of the probable consequences of a Taliban victory, one that includes but goes well beyond the threat presented by al-Qaeda. It entails addressing the likely fallout of a military defeat in Afghanistan for the entire region, nowhere more so than in Pakistan. The impact on countries that have partnered strategically with the United States in Afghanistan, and particularly with the NATO alliance, must be weighed. The probable international repercussions for terrorist recruitment if militant Islamists are able to boast that they have dealt a mighty blow to the United States and the West also demand consideration. Only then can current arguments favoring a minimalist counterterrorism strategy or an early withdrawal from Afghanistan and the region be judged. The promised US military drawdown that began in late 2011 is meant to assure the American public that the United States is not committed to an indefinite military presence or to nationbuilding in Afghanistan. Even while acknowledging the long-term security and economic dependence of Afghanistan on the international community, the United States continues to resist the proposition that it is engaged in nationbuilding. In reality, this is a misnomer. In Afghanistan the requirement is not for “nationbuilding” but for elemental “statebuilding.” Afghanistan is already a nation in the sense that its people, whatever their ethnic and ideological differences, view themselves as Afghans. No legacy of a separatist movement exists. Pakistan, in some contrast, has stronger state institutions but is a weaker nation with a history of nationalist and separatist movements based on region, language, and ethnicity. Because nationhood is built on a common identity, it evolves slowly, and foreign powers can do little to affect it. But outsiders can

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have a significant impact in strengthening the state. In Pakistan’s case it was left with a colonial legacy of political institutions that continue to serve the country despite their frequent abuse of power. In Afghanistan, foreign involvement that helps to achieve the political and economic stability may be necessary for institutions to root and grow. Regional powers and other involved countries, including India and Saudi Arabia, are needed to complement US policies of statebuilding and counterinsurgency. Washington has hoped that these countries might contribute to Afghanistan’s security and economic stability after 2014. A conference of regional countries in Istanbul in November 2011 was thought to be the venue at which they would build a consensus on noninterference in Afghanistan and agree to cooperate in helping the country to integrate into a regional economy, sometimes referred to as creating a New Silk Road. There was broad agreement in Istanbul, as there was at an international conference the following month in Bonn, on the principles of cooperation to stabilize and secure Afghanistan and commit to assist the country. At neither meeting, however, were mechanisms created to implement agreed goals. Among the regional countries, most remain suspicious of the others’ future intentions and seem mainly concerned with positioning themselves so that they will not be disadvantaged should Afghanistan begin to fragment after 2014. All the same, none of the regional players are keen on seeing ideologically driven Taliban leaders restored to power. Nor would any of them be served by a return that sets off a civil war and an ensuing humanitarian crisis producing millions of refugees. A civil war also threatens to draw Russia, Iran, and Pakistan through their proxies into a regional conflict. Iran and others may fear a long-term US presence through a strategic partnership with Afghanistan, but none in fact wish to see a precipitous departure of US and NATO forces that turns the country over to militant Islamic extremists. While installing a friendly Pashtun Taliban force in an abandoned Afghanistan may figure in Pakistan’s plans, Pakistanis cannot ignore the danger posed should their own Taliban insurgents find strategic depth through their Afghan cohorts and then turn their attention to bringing down the Islamabad government. It is thus not surprising that Pakistan seeks a negotiated coalition government in Afghanistan as a way to check its Taliban allies and also avoid a post–US occupation civil war among clients of the regional powers. Even if forced to lower expectations about what it can achieve in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the lessons learned during the past decade

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offer some hope that the United States can leave Afghanistan a reasonably secure country with at least a minimally effective government and a society whose well-being is substantially improved. These lessons can also help the United States overcome its often distrustful, mercurial relationship with Pakistan, and assist Pakistan in realizing the kind of economic, social, and political reforms that are the best guarantees against domestic instability. The United States can use its good offices to mitigate the possibility of conflict between Pakistan and its Indian and Afghan neighbors. But we are already late in applying the lessons learned. Many of the objectives that were within our reach just a few years ago now come at heavier costs, and we may not succeed even with the best of military and development strategies. But for all the risks in trying to succeed, the costs of walking away are probably far greater. Looking ahead, the lessons from a decade of experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be instructive in helping the United States to decide on future military missions aimed at regime change and statebuilding. Most observers would agree that a high bar ought to be set for military intervention, above all that it be limited to the pursuit of vital national interests. Applying the so-called Powell Doctrine, the case is strengthened where there are a clear set of goals, a supportive public, a willingness to use overwhelming force, and a well-defined exit strategy. Broad international endorsement and, as in the Afghan case, the promise of cooperation by regional powers make the decision easier. Several of these conditions were met in the resolve to use military force in Afghanistan and enlist Pakistan as a strategic partner. It is difficult to disagree with the choice of armed intervention in the wake of 9/11 and following several years of unfruitful diplomacy and sanctions designed to force the Taliban to yield up Osama bin Laden. Washington had signaled even after 9/11 its willingness to forgo regime change in Afghanistan in exchange for the al-Qaeda leader and his close associates. But once the decision was made to intervene militarily, the stated goal became the removal of the threat of international terrorism by ridding Afghanistan of al-Qaeda and its allies, and hunting down its leaders. Moreover, the mission had the approval of the UN and the commitment of a multinational peacekeeping force. A key player, Pakistan, had signed on to facilitate the military operation. Indeed, all the interested regional powers were willing, as was demonstrated in the December 2001 Bonn Agreement, to cooperate in stabilizing Afghanistan with a post-Taliban government that would be broad-based and democratic.

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Yet there was plainly absent in Afghanistan the use of overwhelming force or an exit strategy. A low troop profile was consistent with Washington’s mistaken belief in Afghan xenophobia and conviction that only a mop-up operation of Taliban and al-Qaeda remained. Only a small contingent of CIA and special forces were in the field to prevent the escape of militants. Over the next year, the combined strength of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan grew to no more than 10,000, with only Americans deployed in combat roles. International forces were expected to remain until some vague date when the country would be sufficiently stabilized. It is generally acknowledged that the lack of “boots on the ground” in the critical border areas allowed the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaderships to escape to Pakistan. The military’s light footprint is also held responsible for a failure countrywide to provide basic security, allowing for a political vacuum that was quickly filled by predatory warlords. A deficit of forces also contributed to ineffective statebuilding, including the slow progress in training an Afghan army and the inability to secure development activities in several critical provinces. Absent an exit strategy, no benchmarks were available on which to assess success of an increasingly challenged military mission that for much of the decade numbered about 60,000 international troops. Only when the US troop surge, beginning in 2009, transformed the mission from counterterrorism to potentially open-ended counterinsurgency with 140,000 coalition troops, did US and European decisionmakers begin to feel pressure to set a date for a military exit from Afghanistan. With the disappointments of the Afghan mission, admonitions about not undertaking an intervention without large forces committed to getting in and a strategy for getting out obviously have new credibility. But those policy choices subsequently made in confronting the challenges of insurgency and statebuilding bear greater responsibility. Looming large among these was the often poor choice of allies, resulting in disunity of political and military commands, overdependencies, and misdirection of resources. Of course, it may be that even with well-crafted policies, the existence of insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan together with a dysfunctional Kabul government left nearly insurmountable obstacles to success. It is also debatable whether what was initially a war of necessity might have become a war of choice. If nothing else, the lessons of the past decade should offer guidance for any future military interventions.

Part 2 Military Strategy and Planning

Reassessing Priorities: Introduction to Part 2 Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

The troubles encountered and generated by the grand strategy of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq have become a source of division within the policy community. The debates are over the wisdom of having deployed the US military for the regime-change missions and whether, despite the “success” in Libya, any such missions should be undertaken in the future. The disagreements are also over the priority to be accorded in the ongoing conflicts to either counterterrorism operations or counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, and they extend to controversies over the military strategies and tactics being employed, including rules of engagement. In large part the difficulties stem from the fact that neither the Afghanistan nor the Iraq campaign was initially designed as a counterinsurgency operation. They were both designed to knock an entrenched regime from power. And that much they did, in the centers of their power in Kabul and Baghdad. But they did not adequately anticipate— or establish priorities for dealing with—what would happen next. In Iraq the remnants of Saddam’s military and palace guards who fled, or did not engage the US “shock and awe” onslaught, regrouped, shod their uniforms, and launched a full-blown, albeit highly decentralized and disorganized, insurgency against the transitional authorities installed and defended by the US forces. And in Afghanistan the apparent rapid collapse of the Taliban regime’s capability to defend Kabul and other key cities, and the retreat of its cadres across the border into neighboring Pakistan, belied the fact that the Taliban and its al-Qaeda 51

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allies were simply transforming their struggle into another historical effort to rid the country of foreign occupiers—the British in the nineteenth century, the Russians in the twentieth, and now the Americans and their allies in the twenty-first. Again, through a patient strategy of asymmetric warfare (low-tech disruptive operations against the occupiers’ high-tech deployments), plus population extortion and seduction (allowing and protecting opium poppy production, for example), the Taliban hoped to erode the commitments of the United States and its partners in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to stay the course, and to undermine popular confidence in the newly installed US-backed regime in Kabul. In both Operation Enduring Freedom, in Afghanistan, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, US strategic priorities had to be rapidly adapted to the unanticipated reality of a full-blown insurgency: having smashed the target regime’s military capabilities in the capital city and its immediate environs, the establishment of viable governance now required the destruction of the deposed regime’s residual forces across the country. Sufficient US and coalition military forces would have to be maintained in the liberated areas long enough to allow for, and manage if necessary, economic and political reconstruction following the hostilities, while gradually transferring the security functions to the new regime’s police and military: a nationwide “clear, hold, build, and transfer” strategy. But in Iraq as well as Afghanistan the US military and its allies had been severely underresourced for a nationwide “clear,” let alone “hold,” implementation of the strategy, and unprepared for the political and cultural resistance they encountered in the “build” phase. The military-force deficiencies for the first three phases, as well the difficulties in building up adequate Iraqi and Afghan police and military forces, should have—logically—resulted not only in belated increases in US military deployments (ordered by George W. Bush in 2007 for Iraq and Barack Obama in 2009 for Afghanistan), but also in slowing down the scheduling of eventual troop withdrawals. But the resource implications—human, material, and financial—of a full-blown counterinsurgency and statebuilding effort proved to be inconsistent with the war-weariness that began to show in the United States and other ISAF countries. Accordingly, political logic overcame the strategic logic, and was reflected in the determination to terminate at least the combat operations of US and coalition forces by publicly specified dates (the end of 2011 for Iraq, 2014 for Afghanistan), timelines that henceforth strongly influenced the COIN and counterterrorism strategies.

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These various issues were reflected in, and also exacerbated by, differences in the US military over how exactly to conduct the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism combat operations. Should these operations and their rules of engagement be constrained by “the book”—the new Army-Marine field manual on counterinsurgency authored by General David Petraeus and John Nagl (one of the contributors to our own volume)—or should they give priority to securing rapidly as much of the country as possible through attrition-based surges with overwhelming force? And in the Afghanistan campaign, where attrition of the enemy was inhibited by their seeking sanctuary across the border in Pakistan, what emphasis should be given to crossborder raids by US special forces and drones even in the face of opposition by the Pakistanis that these violated their sovereignty? Debates continue as of this writing in the US administration, Congress, and the public at large over two core issues: the importance that preventing a Taliban resurgence has for the goal of fundamentally weakening the capacity of al-Qaeda and other jihadist extremists to attack the United States, and the capability and willingness of the United States, at a time of domestic economic crisis, to devote an unlimited amount of resources for an indefinite period to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq and to the COIN campaign in Afghanistan. The debates, within the Obama administration no less than in Congress, think tanks, and editorial columns—cutting across political party alignments—revolve around the priority to be given to the counterterrorism missions as distinct from the counterinsurgency missions. Some contend that if the objective is to destroy al-Qaeda’s leadership and terrorist network, intelligence and offensive operations could and should be more concentrated on knocking out the remaining al-Qaeda enclaves still located in the border areas of eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. The strategies and capabilities needed for this effort are quite different, it is argued, and involve much smaller numbers of troops than would be required to defeat the Taliban across the length and breadth of Afghanistan. Others, however, dispute the dichotomous view, pointing out that there is still considerable linkage between alQaeda and the Taliban, the latter helping to maintain terrorist training camps across the border in Pakistan, and sure to continue to provide such hospitality whenever and wherever feasible—including again in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the more problematic a sustained prosecution of the counterinsurgency has become in Afghanistan, the more US political and military leaders have emphasized devolving responsibility onto the

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Afghans for conducting it. In contrast to Operation Iraqi Freedom, where the success of the surge permitted an accelerated drawdown of US combat troops, in Afghanistan such a devolution would be eerily similar to what happened in the Vietnam War, where “Vietnamization” was a cover for US disengagement. At least in South Vietnam, the government the United States had been trying to strengthen was run by a military establishment of considerable rectitude. But in Afghanistan, the government and military to whom authority to manage the counterinsurgency is to be transferred are riddled with corruption from top to bottom. It was the government’s pervasive corruptibility, exemplified by President Hamid Karzai’s fraudulent reelection in the fall of 2009, that soured Americans on further expending “blood and treasure” to fend off the Taliban insurgency and prompted US considerations of a complete and rapid “Afghanization” of the counterinsurgency. What then, however? Despite public opinion polls supporting a termination of the US involvement, at the time of this writing neither the Obama administration nor the principal foreign policy leadership of the Republican opposition (with a few exceptions) have been ready to liquidate what has been, by broad bipartisan consensus, regarded as a “war of necessity.” The dominant view is yet: even if we can’t win, it is intolerable that the Taliban should come back into power as the ruling regime. The parade of horribles inferred from such an outcome includes a new Pakistan-Taliban alliance to keep India out, which would have the opposite effect of drawing Indians in and provoking a new India-Pakistan war (at a time of great instability in Pakistan with scary implications for the command and control and use of its nuclear arsenal); China taking advantage of the turmoil to enlarge its sphere of economic and political influence on the subcontinent; the energizing, worldwide, of al-Qaeda and other jihadists; a total reversal of whatever human rights progress, especially for women, has been achieved in Afghanistan during the decade of US involvement; and a plummeting of respect, globally, for US power, hard as well as soft. Intolerable, yes; but as the US and ISAF forces are thinned out in Afghanistan, what if the Afghan military and police are not up to the task of providing the basic security needed around the country to allow sufficient governance to prevent the Taliban from reestablishing its control? How much, if any, reliance should be devolved to tribal militias or warlords in various locales as bulwarks against a Taliban takeover?—a question raised by Stephen Biddle here in Part 2, and addressed in detail by Vanda Felbab-Brown in Part 3.

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Alternatively, what about the various efforts to induce Taliban fighters to defect—promising amnesty and offering them better-paying and less dangerous alternative employment? Or what if President Karzai were to hold out an olive branch and offer participation in the country’s governance to elements of the Taliban regarded as “moderate”? Could ostensible defectors play games of deception to infiltrate and subvert the ongoing reconstruction of governance? Would negotiating with the moderate Taliban elements confer political legitimacy on their movement and undermine the efforts on the part of the United States and its allies, including Pakistan, to continue to risk lives fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda extremists? These highly politicized and still-unresolved military issues, addressed here by Dan Caldwell, Stephen Biddle, and John Nagl, are part of the legacy of the US regime-change operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a legacy that leaves the policy community as well as the general American public with little heart or stomach, even after knocking Gaddafi from power, for any additional regime-change interventions—as evidenced in the nation’s ambivalence with regard to other political upheavals in the Maghreb and the Middle East that are impinging on important US interests.

3 Military Strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq Dan Caldwell

We don’t learn new lessons. We relearn old lessons that we haven’t paid attention to. —General John Vessey, US Army1

When the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, its leaders were immediately confronted with how to respond. The 9/11 attacks were unique in that they had been planned and carried out by a nonstate actor, al-Qaeda, that had sought and been granted state sanctuary, by the Taliban government of Afghanistan. When the United States demanded and Taliban leader Mullah Omar refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, a policy of regime change was adopted and carried out. Some US officials were also concerned about the threat posed by the government of Iraq and feared that it possessed weapons of mass destruction, which, if used by terrorists, would make the 9/11 attacks pale by comparison. This chapter discusses the various military strategies for dealing with al-Qaeda and the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that US policymakers considered and implemented, and assesses their effectiveness. It draws on both primary and secondary sources—the substantial writings of former government officials, military officers, journalists, and academic analysts.2

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9/11 and Afghanistan The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can only be understood in relation to the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, just as the Korean and Vietnam Wars can only be understood in their relation to the Cold War. At the time of the attacks, President George W. Bush was visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, reading to the children. After Chief of Staff Andrew Card told him about the second attack, Bush looked stunned, as if he did not believe what he had heard or that he did not know how to react. The president’s reaction was understandable; after all, the homeland of the United States had not experienced a major attack by a foreign power since the War of 1812, almost two centuries earlier. September 11 ushered in a new era of international relations.3 Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 2001, international relations had been characterized as the “post–Cold War” era. When terrorists forcibly took over and used four commercial airliners as manned missiles, this period ended, and the “age of terror” began. George W. Bush was deeply affected by the attacks; in his memoirs he wrote, “My first reaction was outrage. Someone had dared attack America. They were going to pay. . . . In my notes, I had written, ‘Terrorism against America will not succeed.’”4 Concerning his response to 9/11, Bush told an associate, “This is what I was put on earth for.”5 Political scientist Robert Jervis of Columbia University has observed, “There is reason to believe that just as his coming to Christ gave meaning to his previously aimless and dissolute personal life, so the war on terrorism has become, not only the defining character of his foreign policy, but also his sacred mission.”6 Integral to that mission was identifying and bringing to justice those who had perpetrated the attacks against the United States. To his credit, the president ordered that the available evidence be examined thoroughly and carefully, and this required time and great effort. In addition, the president was anxious to make sure that Americans would not consider the conflict to be one between the West and Islam. While Bush urged toleration toward Muslims, however, there should be no mistake about his intent. As Bush said in his first speech to the American people and the Congress following the attacks: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”7

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President Bush also realized that, contrary to the unilateralist orientation of his administration during his first year in office, the war against terrorism required the support of other countries. As CIA director George Tenet noted, “you cannot fight terrorism alone. There were clear limitations to what we could do without the help of likeminded governments.”8 The traditional “like-minded” allies of the United States were quick to offer their condolences and assistance. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invoked Article V of its treaty for the first time in its history and committed seven airborne-warning aircraft to patrol the skies over the United States with European pilots and crews. In this new age of terrorism, “like-minded” was redefined, and that became clear with the first call from a foreign leader to express his condolences for America’s losses and offer his country’s help; the call came from Russian president Vladimir Putin, a former Soviet KGB officer. The help that Russia gave to the United States was both tangible and significant. No country had more knowledge of Afghanistan than Russia, which had waged a costly nine-anda-half-year campaign there. Russia provided the United States with valuable intelligence concerning the geography, culture, and social structure of Afghanistan. This provided a dramatic example how things had changed since the Cold War and even since the transitional, post–Cold War period. “Like-minded,” as it turned out, was not restricted to Western allies or even recent competitors of the United States. In this new “war on terror,” the US government accepted help from whatever sources were judged to be valuable. One of the most dramatic of the new collaborators was Syria, one of the seven countries that the US government had officially identified as a state sponsor of terrorism. After several weeks of collecting and analyzing the evidence concerning the 9/11 attacks, the US government identified al-Qaeda, a terrorist group founded and headed by Osama bin Laden, as responsible and demanded that the Taliban government in Afghanistan close alQaeda’s terrorist training camps and hand over bin Laden to the United States. As President Bush recalled in his memoirs, “They [the Taliban] will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”9 The Taliban leader of Afghanistan, Mullah Omar, refused to accede to Bush’s ultimatum. On September 30, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote to President Bush: “The U.S. strategic theme should be aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism.”10 Consistent with Rumsfeld’s

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advice, the United States adopted a strategy of regime change, and on October 7, twenty-six days after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, 426 special forces soldiers and CIA operatives, in coordination with members of the Afghan Northern Alliance, attacked and destroyed the al-Qaeda training camps and overthrew the Taliban government within a matter of days.11 That was the successful part of the operation; the failure to capture or kill bin Laden and Mullah Omar was the disappointing aspect. However, the overthrow of the Taliban government indicated that the “revolution in military affairs” that incorporated the application of advanced technology was very real and not just a hypothetical idea in the mind of a visionary general, government official, or strategist. To Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the US success vindicated his ideas about the efficacy of the transformation of military affairs, namely making US forces “lighter, more agile, and more rapidly deployable.”12 The US success in Afghanistan also demonstrated that in this new war on terror, the best defense was a good offense; as the president told his closest advisers, “We need to fight it [terrorism] overseas by bringing the war to the bad guys.”13 Reflecting Bush’s view, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld believed that “the way to deal with terrorists is not only to try and defend against them, but also to take the battle to them.”14 Using a sports metaphor favored by the president, the United States needed to play “away games” and not just “home games.”

Possible Ways of Dealing with Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein The George W. Bush administration considered a number of different strategies for dealing with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.15 Broadly speaking, dating back to the Gulf War of 1991, six different strategies were considered: containment and deterrence; assassination or a coup d’état; attacks by limited, highly mobile special forces; a counterinsurgency strategy; a conventional strategy employing overwhelming military force; and a small armored force exploiting the advantages offered by the revolution in military affairs. Containment and Deterrence In January 1991 the United States and thirty-three other countries attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait to force their withdrawal, an action supported by thirteen UN resolutions. But these resolutions did not

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support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein or the taking of Baghdad. There were understandable reasons that the United States did not favor eliminating Saddam, for doing so could have enabled the Shiites to come to power and ally with Iran. Or, if the Iraqi government were eliminated, then a power vacuum would have been created in a vital region that contained a majority of the world’s proven oil reserves. As a result, the George H. W. Bush administration was unwilling to go beyond the mandate provided by the United Nations. In their coauthored book published in 1998, Bush and Brent Scowcroft recalled: While we hoped that a popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the United States nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. . . . Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still [in 1998] be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.16

According to then–secretary of defense Dick Cheney: We could have gone on [to Baghdad, but] I don’t know how we would have let go of that tar baby once we had grabbed hold of it. . . . How many additional American casualties would we have had to suffer? How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer I would give is not very damn many.17

General Norman Schwarzkopf, the overall commander of US and coalition forces during the Gulf War, indicated the reasons why the objectives were limited: Had the United States and the United Kingdom gone on alone to capture Baghdad . . . we would have been considered occupying powers and therefore would have been responsible for all the costs of maintaining or restoring government, education, and other services for the people of Iraq. From the brief time we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit—we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation. This is a burden I am sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take on.18

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According to Richard Haass, a close adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell, “The truth is there was no interest in going to Baghdad. I do not recall any dissent on this point. . . . We would have become an occupying power in a hostile land with no exit strategy.”19 However, even though there were some in the administration, most notably Paul Wolfowitz, who favored removing Saddam from power, the administration’s policy was to contain and deter Iraq from expanding its territory or influence. Once in office, the Bill Clinton administration essentially continued the contain and deter policy of the George H. W. Bush administration, although Clinton applied it to Iran as well as Iraq in a policy the administration referred to as “dual containment.”20 Assassination or Coup d’État Following the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, US government officials considered assassination attempts on bin Laden.21 In their memoirs, President Clinton wrote that his goal was “to wipe out much of the al Qaeda leadership,”22 and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recalled that Clinton explicitly authorized the use of force to capture or kill bin Laden and his subordinates.23 In addition, there were reports that the CIA had hired private security contractors to locate and assassinate top leaders of al-Qaeda.24 Soon after the 9/11 attacks, 60 percent of Americans supported the assassination of foreign leaders, presumably including bin Laden and Saddam, to achieve victory. By contrast, a 1981 Gallup Poll found that 82 percent of Americans opposed political assassinations under all circumstances.25 During and at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, leading members of the coalition openly expressed their hope for regime change in Iraq. In January 1991 former British prime minister John Major told the House of Commons: “I very strongly suspect that he [Saddam] may yet become a target of his own people. . . . It is perfectly clear that this man is amoral. He takes hostages. He attacks population centres. He threatens prisoners. He is a man without pity and, whatever his fate may be, I for one, will not weep for him.”26 President George H. W. Bush commented that it would “be a heck of a lot easier if he and that leadership were not in power in Iraq.”27 At the end of the Gulf War, George H. W. Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam, and in response the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south demonstrated against Saddam and the Baathist-controlled government. Saddam reacted quickly and brutally to suppress the fledgling revolts.

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One possible way to change the Iraqi regime was to assassinate Saddam Hussein; in fact, during the 1980s there had been at least four different assassination attempts. In July 1982 Saddam’s motorcade was attacked; in 1985 in Tikrit, Saddam’s native city, a car packed with explosives was parked along Saddam’s motorcade route but detonated before Saddam passed it. There were two further assassination attempts, in 1984 and 1987.28 These were all attempts, presumably, by Iraqis, since domestic law formally prohibited the United States from sponsoring such action. In response to revelations that the CIA had planned several assassination plots against Fidel Castro, in 1976 President Gerald R. Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations, a prohibition that was reinforced by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.29 In the mid1990s there were reports that a CIA agent, Robert Baer, had initiated an assassination plot against Saddam, which had been blocked by Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake.30 By 1995, three plans for overthrowing Saddam were being planned.31 In November 1994, an Iraqi major-general who had served as an adviser to Saddam defected to the Kurdish area of Iraq and began to plan for the overthrow of Saddam. His plan called for three experienced combat units—the Seventy-sixth Brigade, the Fifteenth Infantry Division, and the Fifth Mechanized Division—to attack Saddam’s forces and to foment dissension. Jalal Talabani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), had a second plan for getting rid of Saddam: focusing on an attack on Iraq’s V Corps, which was the main Iraqi military force confronting Kurdish forces. According to Talabani, “Entire companies, even divisions, will surrender at the first shot.”32 The only problem was that Talabani’s forces consisted of only 2,000 lightly armed Kurdish militia members (pechmerga). Several Iraqi exiles were also working on plans; they wanted to reenter Iraq and form a force to overthrow Saddam. Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite Iraqi whose family left Iraq when he was thirteen years old, was elected president of the Iraqi National Congress in 1992 and was well connected in Washington, particularly within the Pentagon and the White House. Robert Blackwill, who was the National Security Council’s (NSC) director for Iraq and who had previously served as ambassador to India, referred to Chalabi as the “Michael Jordan of Iraq.”33 Following the Kurdish and Shiite revolts of early 1991, Chalabi had written a paper titled “End Game,” calling for Kurdish forces under Talabani and Masud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), to attack from the north and for Shiite forces to attack

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from the south. The problem was that Talabani and Barzani had not agreed to the plan, and Chalabi had little support within Iraq. Chalabi believed, according to his biographer, Aram Roston, that “the Iraqi army would not fight but would simply shift its allegiance, unit by unit. Iraq, he said, was like a junkyard full of gasoline cans, and all one needed to do was throw in a match to get the fire started.”34 Ayad Allawi, a Baathist and a rival of Chalabi, also was working on a plan: to stage a coup d’état. Allawi convinced the CIA to support his plan, codenamed Panther. The attempted coup took place in 1996 and was “an unmitigated disaster.”35 Within two months Saddam had arrested 120 conspirators, an action that ended the hopes for a successful coup. These failures, however, did not diminish Wolfowitz’s support for overthrowing Saddam; in December 1998 he wrote, “Toppling Saddam is the only outcome that can satisfy the vital U.S. interest in a stable and secure Gulf region.”36 General Anthony Zinni, former head of US Central Command (CENTCOM), referred to plans calling for the support of Iraqi exiles as the “Bay of Goats,” comparing them to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and a group of three respected foreign policy experts publicly criticized Wolfowitz’s plan in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs.37 Attacks by Special Forces Buoyed by the impressive success of the United States in overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, some favored the use of a similar military strategy in Iraq. Indeed, in his memoirs, President George W. Bush noted that as he and his advisers considered US options in Iraq, “the experience in Afghanistan was at the forefront of our minds. Thanks to new technology and innovative planning, we had destroyed the Taliban and closed the al Qaeda camps using far fewer troops.”38 In Afghanistan, just over 400 special forces and CIA operators had worked closely with Northern Alliance forces and US airpower. The United States called in air strikes and the Northern Alliance provided the ground forces, a combination that proved to be successful in changing the Afghan regime and destroying al-Qaeda training camps. The problem in applying the Afghan strategy to Iraq was that there was no organized, cohesive force similar to the Northern Alliance. Saddam had acted forcefully and brutally following the Gulf War to eliminate any potential opponents. In addition, the most likely and most capable opposition came from the Kurds in the north, but they

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were rent with dissension between the two leading groups, the KDP and the PUK. As a result, there was little to no realistic possibility of applying the regime-change strategy used in Afghanistan to Iraq. Counterinsurgency Strategy The US Army and Marine Corps field manual defines an insurgency as “an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.”39 The strategic objectives of conventional or counterinsurgency military operations are radically different. In the conventional or counterterrorist approach, the aim is to destroy enemy forces, and the metrics of success consist of the number of enemy killed, the amount of equipment destroyed, the area of territory captured, and so on. In counterinsurgency, in contrast, according to David Kilcullen, “the population is the prize, and protecting and controlling it is the key activity.”40 Prior to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the largest-scale US counterinsurgency campaign was waged in Vietnam; however, the counterinsurgency approach was at odds with and in competition with the conventional military approach. During the early years of US involvement in Vietnam the United States adopted a counterinsurgency approach, but in later years it adopted a conventional military approach, and one of the main metrics used to evaluate the military’s success was the “body count” of enemy killed. Vietnam was both “America’s longest war” (until supplanted by the war in Afghanistan) and the first war that the United States lost, a fact that had a deep and profound effect on the members of the US military, many of whom blamed either politicians for not supporting the US effort sufficiently or the US strategy of counterinsurgency. Conventional Strategy Employing Overwhelming Military Force Planning for a possible war in Iraq began soon after the Gulf War ended in 1991. A standard practice of the military is to plan for various contingencies, and given the bellicose actions of Saddam Hussein even after his country had been decisively defeated in 1991, there was ample cause for the US military to plan for eventual war against Iraq. While he was commander of CENTCOM, General Anthony

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Zinni developed a contingency war plan that called for up to 500,000 troops and a possible postwar occupation of Iraq for up to ten years.41 When Lieutenant-General Greg Newbold briefed Secretary Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard Myers, and other top military leaders, it was clear that Rumsfeld was unhappy with the plan; in his memoirs he noted “it was very much like one for the Gulf War a decade ago. . . . In fact, I knew of no military officials who believed that the ‘Desert Storm on Steroids’ war plan would be appropriate for the current circumstances.” 42 In short, Rumsfeld believed that the old operational plan required too many troops and supplies and would take too long to implement. Instead, Rumsfeld wanted to get in, defeat Saddam’s forces quickly, and get out of Iraq as rapidly as possible. But was that feasible? Rumsfeld was not the only one who was unhappy with Zinni’s operational plan. CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks characterized it as “stale, conventional, predictable. Worst of all, it is premised on continuing the policy of containment.”43 It was, according to the general, “basically Desert Storm II,” simply a warmed-over version of the 1991 war plan. Rumsfeld believed that a transformation in defense had occurred, but many of the uniformed senior officers were not as enthusiastic about the efficacy of the revolution in military affairs as were Rumsfeld and his military and civilian aides. For example, Army Corps of Engineers brigadier-general Steve Hawkins in February 2003 estimated that no fewer than 350,000 coalition troops would be needed to provide stability in the aftermath of a war to overthrow Saddam.44 General Hawkins forwarded his estimate to Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 25, 2003. Senator Carl Levin, the senior-ranking Democrat on the committee, asked General Shinseki if he could give “some idea as to the magnitude of the Army’s force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war.” Shinseki replied, “In specific numbers, I would have to rely on the combatant commander’s exact requirements,” to which Levin interjected, “How about a range?” The general continued: “I would say that what’s been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers, are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. . . . [Iraq is a large country with competing ethnic groups] so it takes significant ground forces to maintain a safe and secure environment to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.”45 Shinseki’s estimate of

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the number of troops required for an effective occupation was supported by a number of generals, including Major-General William Nash, General Barry McCaffrey, and others who had previously served in the postconflict environments of Bosnia and Kosovo.46 In spite of the fact that those who had experience in postconflict occupations commonly held Shinseki’s views, his comments created a firestorm within the Pentagon. Two days after the general’s testimony, Paul Wolfowitz characterized Shinseki’s estimate as “wildly off the mark” and added, “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam’s security force and his army.”47 Shinseki’s estimates ultimately proved to be accurate and yet, despite or rather because of his honesty, he was criticized and undercut by his Department of Defense civilian superiors.48

A Small Armored Force and the Revolution of Military Affairs During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush called for a significant transformation of the US military from “industrial age operations” toward “information age battles” of the new century.49 Once elected and soon after his inauguration, Bush signed Presidential Directive no. 3, which stipulated: “The secretary of defense is hereby given a broad mandate to challenge the status quo and establish new and innovative practices and processes for acquiring U.S. defense capabilities for decades to come.”50 Rumsfeld believed that the major problem in reaping the benefits of the advantages offered by the revolution in military affairs was bureaucratic resistance. On September 10, 2001, the day before the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States, Rumsfeld told Pentagon employees: The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal inconsistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. . . . You may think I am describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.51

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Following the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld pressed his plan for transforming the US military. In his annual report to the president of 2002, Rumsfeld wrote: “some believe that, with the U.S. in the midst of a difficult and dangerous war on terrorism, now is not the time to transform our Armed Forces. The opposite is true. Now is precisely the time to make changes.”52 Ever-sensitive to the need to gain public acceptance of his ideas, Rumsfeld wrote an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs describing his vision of transforming the military.53 What “transformation” actually meant in operational terms was never very clear. Early in his tenure, Rumsfeld convened the Pentagon’s senior civilian and military staffs to clarify the concept. This group developed a definition of transformation: “a process that shapes the changing nature of military competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people, processes, and organizations that exploit our nation’s advantages and protect against our asymmetric vulnerabilities to sustain our strategic position, contributing to peace and stability in the world.”54 The problem with this definition was that it could include almost anything, and it did. Following the Afghanistan campaign, Rumsfeld was fond of claiming that special forces soldiers riding horses with the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan was an example of military transformation.55 If anything, this represented adaptation to the circumstances faced in battle, at the expense of speed, firepower, mobility, and technology. After a consideration of these approaches for dealing with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the United States went to war, but curiously, even high-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration either were not consulted or did not know of a firm decision for war.56 Bob Woodward reported, “Both Powell and Rice knew that Powell had never made an overall recommendation on war to the president since he had never been asked.”57 CIA director George Tenet recalled, “In none of the meetings [concerning Iraq] can anyone remember a discussion of the central questions. Was it wise to go to war? Was it the right thing to do? The agenda focused solely on what actions would need to be taken if a decision to attack were later made.”58 One of Colin Powell’s principal advisers, Richard Haass, said that Powell “would go to his grave not knowing why the U.S. went to war.” Haass added, “The fundamental decision to go to war against Saddam’s Iraq had effectively been made by a president and an administration with virtually no systematic, rigorous, in-house debate.”59

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US Military Operations in Iraq: A “Catastrophic Success” The US Joint Chiefs of Staff divides planning for war into the following four phases:60 • Phase I: Preparations for a possible invasion. • Phase II: Shaping the battle space, beginning with the start of air operations. • Phase III: Decisive offensive operations and major combat operations, including complete regime removal. • Phase IV: Posthostilities stabilization and reconstruction. Once the United States had attacked Afghanistan and overthrown the Taliban regime and destroyed al-Qaeda’s training bases, the question then was, what should be done next? There were two schools of thought within the US government. 61 The Department of State favored a peacekeeping force designed to stabilize urban areas, while the Department of Defense adamantly opposed anything resembling the Bush administration’s bête noir, nationbuilding. As a result of the opposition of the vice president’s office and the Pentagon, the United States adopted a “light footprint” in Afghanistan, and this did not provide enough forces to stabilize the country. As Rand Corporation analyst Seth Jones concluded, “In practice, the light footprint translated into one of the lowest levels of troops, police, and financial assistance in any stabilization operation since the end of World War II.”62 On March 20, 2003, US forces embarked on Phase III of the war plan and attacked Iraq; major combat operations lasted twenty-three days, and by April 9, US forces had reached Baghdad and toppled the iconic statue of Saddam at Firdos Square. On May 1, President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln to showcase a large banner that Bush’s staff had placed on the bridge of the ship proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.”63 But was it? The fall of Baghdad marked the end of Phase III, the acute military combat part of the war, but Phase IV—reconstruction—remained. And complicating the situation and problems in Afghanistan was the fact that a number of resources, particularly special forces, had been withdrawn from Afghanistan to send to Iraq. This action alone hampered the effort to find, capture, or kill leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, including, most prominently, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

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Members of the Bush administration were ecstatic about the results of the war and the way that it was fought. On the day that Baghdad fell, Vice President Cheney said that the US success was “proof positive of the success of our efforts to transform the military.”64 Rumsfeld triumphantly noted that the coalition’s success was not a result of “overwhelming force,” as the United States had used in the Gulf War, but rather resulted from the use of speed, firepower, mobility, and technology. One of Rumsfeld’s principal deputies, Steven Cambone, remarked, “What you see in Iraq in its embryonic form is the kind of warfare that is animating our desire to transform the force.”65 Ultimately, the United States invaded Iraq and defeated the country’s military with a force of 145,000, which was significantly fewer than half the minimum number of forces called for in General Zinni’s plan. As it turned out, even though the United States deployed between 140,000 to 175,000 military personnel to Iraq at various times during the first six years of the war, General Shinseki’s estimate proved to be accurate for the occupation of Iraq. Unwilling to admit its disastrous underdeployment of troops to Iraq, the Bush administration made up for the shortfall by hiring civilian contractors to do many of the jobs that in previous conflicts would have been performed by members of the military. By mid-2007, the number of civilian contractors in Iraq equaled 130,000.66 Added to the 150,000 soldiers and marines, this totaled 280,000, which was close to the 300,000 troops called for in General Zinni’s plan and as General Shinseki had predicted. CIA director George Tenet summarized the acute combat phase of the Iraq War and the “peace” that followed: “On a scale of one to ten, the plan to capture the country scored at least an eight. Unfortunately, the plan for ‘the day after’ charitably was a two. The war, in short, went great, but peace was hell.”67 Tenet was not alone in his judgment. Counterinsurgency expert Ahmed Hashim concluded, “The reconstruction of Iraq has been a tragic failure.” 68 Journalist Nir Rosen commented, “the Americans lost the war when they won it.” 69 Tragically, this result had not been unforeseen; in the run-up to the war, General Franks recalled, “Washington needed to get ready for the occupation and reconstruction—because combat operations might be over sooner than anyone could imagine. At NSC briefings, Rumsfeld and I referred to that possibility as a ‘catastrophic success.’”70 An Army War College study had presciently warned: “The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace in Iraq is real and serious.”71

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The faulty assumptions and mistakes of the postwar Phase IV operations of the Coalition Provisional Authority have been well documented by both observers and participants.72 Suffice it to note that the United States came close to losing the war in 2006. In his memoirs, President Bush recalled, “The summer of 2006 was the worst period of my presidency. . . . For the first time, I worried we night not succeed.”73 In 2006, according to Ambassador Ryan Crocker, US policy in Iraq “came pretty close to just unraveling.”74 In addition, things were not going well in Afghanistan where there were not enough US and NATO troops to provide adequate security for reconstruction and development. The question by that time was what needed to be done in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Counter-Revolution At different times in its history, the United States has fought small wars as both insurgency and counterinsurgency campaigns. During the Revolutionary War, some Americans fighting for independence waged an insurgency campaign against a conventional European army, the British “redcoats.” Francis Marion, known as the “swamp fox,” staged hit-and-run raids against the British in South Carolina. Having gained its independence and expanding its territory to the west, the United States fought a series of battles against Native American tribes and nations. Once the frontier closed, Americans turned their attention to foreign regions. In 1805, the United States engaged the Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa. The Civil War marked the first large-scale war in which the United States fought, and in many ways it was one of the first truly modern wars in which advanced technologies such as machine guns, railroads, and even balloons were used. In part due to modern technologies and in part due to the ideological character of the Civil War, the losses were horrific—620,000 were killed. Even in the Civil War, however, some forces, particularly on the Confederate side, engaged in hit-and-run attacks characteristic of an insurgency. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the United States fought insurgent forces in a number of small wars around the world, including in Panama, Samoa, the Philippines, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico. In confronting these insurgencies, the United States developed tactics and strategies for doing so.75

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In the twentieth century the United States moved from fighting small wars to fighting big wars employing advanced technologies and large numbers of its citizens. Reflecting a traditional isolationist approach to international involvement, the United States entered World War I only after the war had been raging for more than three years. As in the Civil War, in World War I modern technologies, including the first use of poison gas, resulted in high casualties for the combatants. In World War I nearly 117,000 Americans were killed. World War II resulted in substantially more losses—more than 405,000 killed. Although it would be an exaggeration and an affront to the enormous losses of the Allies to claim that US forces “won the war,” they certainly were essential to the Allied victory in World War II. US military leaders learned a number of lessons from the war, including the value of firepower, mobility, and technological superiority, and these were seen as the quintessential elements of a modern, successful military. The development, employment, and success of blitzkrieg (lightning war) military tactics by Nazi Germany removed any doubt that modern technologies provided distinct advantages in strengthening military capabilities and increasing the probability of success in war. The US generals who fought the Korean War had been trained in World War II and, fortunately for the United States, the North Korean and Chinese opposition chose to fight a conventional war. In the 1960s, however, a new kind of conflict arose—wars of “national liberation” fought by indigenous insurgents. Many thought that the Dwight Eisenhower administration’s policy of “massive retaliation” with the threat of possible nuclear response to local aggression was simply not credible. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson, retired US Army chief of staff General Maxwell Taylor, strategist Bernard Brodie, professor Henry Kissinger, and then-senator John F. Kennedy all criticized Eisenhower’s strategy. Once elected, John Kennedy took note of the new environment faced by the United States. According to Roger Hilsman, a close aide of Kennedy and a veteran of the insurgency that fought in Burma in World War II, Kennedy’s first question after his inauguration was: “What are we doing about guerilla warfare?”76 Significantly, Kennedy and his closest advisers had served as junior officers rather than flag officers (generals and admirals) during World War II, and they recognized that a shift in fighting wars had occurred. In his address to the West Point class of 1961, Kennedy noted that the United States faced “another type of war,” one “new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerillas,

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subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by evading and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him.”77 To meet these new challenges, President Kennedy strongly supported the US military’s special forces, despite the strong resistance of the Army. As Colonel David Hackworth, one of the most highly decorated Army officers in US history, noted in his memoir: “Counterinsurgency was the thing in the early sixties. It was endorsed enthusiastically by Kennedy and his brain trust.”78 When Kennedy became president, he was confronted with what to do in Vietnam. His preference was to send US military personnel to advise Vietnamese units in counterinsurgency tactics and strategy, but the top US military leaders at the time neither were trained in counterinsurgency nor did they have much respect for the military’s special forces. Characterizing this view was General Harold Johnson, Army chief of staff from 1964 to 1968: Well, the Special Forces that were available at the time President Kennedy latched on to them as a new gimmick, were what I would describe as consisting primarily of fugitives from responsibility. These were people that somehow or other tended to be nonconformist, couldn’t quite get along in a straight military system, and found a haven where their actions were not scrutinized too carefully, and where they came under only sporadic or intermittent observation from the regular chain of command. . . . Perhaps there is a desirability for this highly specialized effort, but I continue to really question it as such.79

General Johnson’s critical view of the special forces persisted. As Donald Rumsfeld noted in his memoirs, “Many conventional Army officers considered the Special Forces to be undisciplined cowboys. It was not uncommon in military circles to hear them described as ‘hotdogs’ who took too many risks, got into trouble, and needed to be rescued.”80 Related to the criticisms of the special forces, there was neither an adequate understanding nor an appreciation of what counterinsurgency was. As a consequence, when the US military in Vietnam embarked on what it considered a counterinsurgency approach, it did not reflect the thinking or prescriptions of the foremost theorists, such as T. E. Lawrence, David Galula, or Sir Robert Thompson. The US military remained focused on destroying the enemy rather than protecting the indigenous population, as called for in classical counterin-

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surgency doctrine. According to Colonel Hackworth, “The outspoken Green Berets . . . warned that the counterinsurgency training we were receiving wasn’t counterinsurgency at all, but conventional tactics with increased mobility by helicopters.”81 A junior officer recalled, “I can personally vouch that much Army counterinsurgency training was not counterinsurgency training at all. I was amazed after my basic course in July 1970 to see what the Army had recorded as counterinsurgency subjects. I remember all our UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] instruction was considered to be a counterinsurgency subject. Whole lotta lip service there!”82 Robert Thompson, probably the most respected counterinsurgency expert in the world in the early 1960s, noted, “the helicopter . . . exaggerated two great weaknesses of the American character—impatience and aggressiveness. . . . It is probable that without the helicopter, ‘search and destroy’ would not have been possible, and, in this sense, the helicopter was one of the major contributions to the failure in strategy.”83 According to Army officer and scholar H. R. McMaster, “Vietnam was a test case for defeating communist insurgencies.”84 General William Westmoreland, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, sought to fight the war in Vietnam along conventional lines, but the problem, of course, was that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, much like Americans in the Revolutionary War and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, chose not to fight in this fashion. They chose instead to fight an asymmetrical war. By the time that a new US commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, sought to revise the way that the United States was fighting the war, it was too late. As former Army officer John Nagl has concluded, “The army that General Westmoreland commanded was a firepower army, one broadly inappropriate to the demands of counterinsurgency warfare in South Vietnam. . . . By failing to learn the lessons of Vietnam, the U.S. Army continued to prepare itself to fight the wrong war.”85 When George W. Bush and his advisers were discussing various military strategies for dealing with Afghanistan and Iraq, no highranking adviser advocated a counterinsurgency strategy. There was, to be sure, significant disagreement about the strategy to be employed, but the two principal strategies most seriously considered were the Rumsfeld-Franks transformational strategy, emphasizing speed, mobility, and precision weapons. In contrast, many of the top military officers— Generals Shinseki, Zinni, and Hugh Shelton—favored a large number of forces to overwhelm the enemy. Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired Army general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

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had expanded and elaborated on his “doctrine” (a set of guidelines, really) for the United States to follow before using force in international relations, including stipulating a war’s objectives, securing adequate public support, and formulating an exit strategy. At the end of the day, the Rumsfeld-Franks “transformers” won the debate on the military strategy for the Iraq War, but significantly, prior to and at the beginning of the war, there was no influential organizational or individual advocate of a counterinsurgency strategy. By 2005, US strategy focused on training Iraqi security forces so that they could take over from US forces; according to President Bush, “as the Iraqi forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down.”86 This was the strategy that was presented in a special White House document, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.87 However, several events called the viability of this strategy into serious question. Just several weeks after the publication of the White House strategy paper, John Murtha, a former Marine and respected Democratic congressman from Penn-sylvania with a reputation for being strong on defense issues, declared that “our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty” and that it was time to bring the troops home as soon as possible, within six months at most.88 In February 2006, al-Qaeda terrorists blew up the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, Iraq, which catalyzed bloody sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. There were several instances in which Iraqi forces simply failed to show up for the fight. At this point, it appeared that rather than a “strategy for victory,” US policy was a strategy for defeat, and as Peter Feaver, one of the authors of the strategy, noted, “Over the course of 2006, the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq collapsed.”89 Only when Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to be on the verge of collapse did President Bush and his advisers begin to consider seriously an alternative military strategy to the conventional enemy-focused approach. Several individuals and groups who were both inside and outside government suggested a new approach for dealing with Afghanistan and Iraq. One of those who suggested a new approach to President Bush was a retired general, Jack Keane, who had been impressed with the thinking and career of a young general, David Petraeus, who had served as the commander of the famed 101st Airborne Division in Operation Iraqi Freedom. 90 Retired general Barry McCaffrey had described Petraeus as the brightest of his cohort of generals.91 After his first tour of duty in northern Iraq and a second tour in charge of Iraqi military training, Petraeus served as commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he recruited a bright staff

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including Lieutenant-Colonels John Nagl and Conrad Crane to rewrite the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. Serving as General Petraeus’s Marine counterpart was Lieutenant-General James Mattis. Building on classic works of counterinsurgency, the drafters emphasized the following “paradoxes of counterinsurgency”: • The more you protect your force, the less secure you are. • Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is. • The more successful the counterinsurgency is, the less force can be used and the more risk must be accepted. • Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction. • Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot. • The host nation doing something tolerably is normally better than us doing it well. • If a tactic works this week, it might not work next week; if it works in this province, it might not work in the next. • Tactical success guarantees nothing. • Many important decisions are not made by generals.92 “Principles” or “paradoxes” such as these were well and good for war college journal articles or doctoral dissertations, but how and under what circumstances could they be applied to real-world situations? By the end of 2006 the situation in Iraq was dire, and the American people recognized it as such. In the congressional elections of 2006 the Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, for the first time since 1994. The day following the elections, President Bush accepted Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, a clear signal that the president was moving away from Rumsfeld’s policies. On December 19, Bush said for the first time, “We’re not winning, we’re not losing in Iraq,” his most candid admission to that date that the situation in Iraq was not going well. At this point in the war, the president faced three broad options, as he recalled in his memoirs: “The first called for us to accelerate the existing strategy of training Iraqi forces while withdrawing our own. . . . The second option was to pull our troops back from Baghdad until the sectarian violence burned out. . . . The third option was to double down. We would deploy tens of thousands more troops—a surge—to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign in Baghdad.”93 On January 5, 2007, the president appointed General Petraeus as the commander of all US forces in Iraq, and five days later the president announced that he would send an additional 30,000 US troops to Iraq to

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support the new strategy, widely known as “the surge.” Gradually, in the months that followed, it appeared that the surge was having positive effects in Iraq. At the end of August 2007, militant Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr ordered a cease-fire for the forces under his control, and then extended his cease-fire order for another six months in February 2008. Despite these positive signs, Ambassador Ryan Crocker noted in January 2008, “There is a chance of this [increased stability in Iraq] breaking down at a whole range of points.”94 In April, Petraeus and Crocker testified before the US Congress, and Crocker referred to the possible “Lebanonization” of Iraq—the possibility that conflicting ethnic and religious groups could destabilize the country as had occurred in Lebanon years before. Things were also tense in Afghanistan. In April 2008 there was an assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai, and in July the Indian embassy in Kabul was bombed, killing fifty people. By mid-2008 there were positive indicators that the surge in Iraq was having its intended effects. For example, Admiral William Fallon, former CENTCOM commander, noted in July that “the number of incidents of violence nationwide in Iraq is less than a tenth of what we were experiencing in the spring of 2007.”95 After a visit to Kuwait and Afghanistan in October–November of 2008, General Barry McCaffrey noted specific indicators of progress: daily attacks had decreased from more than 180 per day in July 2007 to just over 20 per day in November 2008; civilian deaths had decreased from 3,700 per month in December 2006 to just over 400 per month in October 2008; US military deaths had decreased from 110 in May 2007 to 10 in October 2008; and Iraqi security forces killed in action had decreased from 310 in June 2007 to 50 in October 2008.96 The surge of troops in Iraq represented much more than simply sending more troops to Iraq; rather it represented the implementation of a true counterinsurgency strategy. What was happening, according to David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency expert and adviser to General Petraeus, was “a counterrevolution in military affairs.”97 Or as Thomas Ricks put it, “With the advent of the surge, the Army effectively turned the war over to its internal dissidents.”98 Whether or not this counterrevolution will be successful over the long run is still not clear; the ultimate outcome of the war in Iraq is still uncertain, but as Vali Nasr observed, the surge enabled Iraq to go from being a failed state to a fragile state.99 In his news briefing at the Pentagon, General Petraeus noted the “operational environment in Iraq is the most complex and challenging I have ever seen—much more complex that it was when I

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left last in September 2005, and vastly more complex than what I recall in Central America, Haiti and the Balkans in previous tours in these locations.”100 Despite the uncertainties, one thing was clear: the surge had been far more successful than Rumsfeld’s transformational “light footprint” strategy. At the same time that the US government was dealing with the simultaneous challenges in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, the American people were confronted with the need to select a new president in 2008. The Republicans nominated longtime senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war, and the Democrats nominated firstterm senator Barack Obama. McCain favored sending more troops to the wars, and Obama favored troop reductions. In a hard-fought election, Obama won and was inaugurated as the first African American president in US history on January 20, 2009. Once inaugurated, Obama faced more domestic and foreign challenges than any incoming president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among the most significant of those challenges was the daunting task of deciding what to do about Afghanistan, where things were not going well: the Taliban was resurging and gaining power, and terrorists continued to enjoy a safe haven in the tribal areas on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.101 The Obama administration put substantial pressure on the Pakistani government to move against the terrorists in the border areas, and toward the end of 2009 the Pakistani military moved against these forces. In Afghanistan, elections were held in November 2009, and there were charges that the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, and his followers had rigged the elections. The charges were substantial enough that the election results were not validated for weeks. President Obama took six weeks to consider what strategy to pursue regarding Afghanistan, and according to journalist Bob Woodward, the review was contentious among Obama’s advisers, with the military pushing for an increase of 40,000 troops and Obama’s advisers advocating a lesser number.102 At the end of his deliberations, the president announced an increase of 33,000 in the number of troops to be sent to Afghanistan, the appointment of General Stanley McChrystal as the commander of US forces there, and the implementation of a counterinsurgency strategy. McChrystal had substantial experience in dealing with Afghanistan and Iraq, for he had been the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008. Under his command, JSOC captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003 and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in June 2006. Like General Petraeus, McChrystal believed in the goals of the

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counterinsurgency approach, namely to protect the population and not simply kill enemy insurgents. To do this, McChrystal claimed, “personnel must be seen as guests of the Afghan people and their government, not an occupying army . . . [and they] must spend as much time as possible with the people and as little time as possible in armored vehicles or behind walls of forward operating bases.”103 In his initial assessment of conditions in Afghanistan that General McChrystal prepared for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, he soberly concluded: “The situation in Afghanistan is serious; neither success nor failure can be taken for granted. . . . This is a different kind of fight. We must conduct classic counterinsurgency operations in an environment that is uniquely complex.”104 Under McChrystal, JSOC implemented an effective counterinsurgency campaign; however, his tenure as commander and career as an officer ended surprisingly and abruptly in June 2010 when McChrystal and members of his staff made a number of comments to a freelance journalist from Rolling Stone magazine criticizing President Obama and members of his administration.105 McChrystal told the reporter that Obama appeared to be “uncomfortable and intimidated” in his first meeting with the general. Members of McChrystal’s staff said that National Security Adviser General James Jones was “a clown” and also criticized Vice President Joseph Biden. These disrespectful comments created a firestorm, and General McChrystal tendered his resignation, which President Obama accepted. The controversy illustrated the concept of “friction” that the great military strategist Carl von Clausewitz had described: “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war. . . . Countless minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of perfomance, so that one always falls far short of the intended goal.”106 General Petraeus stepped down as CENTCOM commander and replaced General McChrystal, providing continuity and stability to a potentially destabilizing situation. General James Mattis replaced Petraeus at Central Command, and the two military commanders continued to emphasize the counterinsurgency approach. By August 31, 2010, US combat troops had withdrawn from Iraq. In Afghanistan, the United States was challenged to differentiate between Muslim groups and leaders who were irreconcilably opposed to the United States and its allies and those who could be co-opted to support the United States. In essence, the United States was attempting to imple-

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ment a policy in Afghanistan similar to the one it had previously implemented in Iraq, and the closest analog to the Sons of Iraq Sunni tribesmen in Afghanistan were the Taliban. As correspondent Dexter Filkins wrote, “The Afghan reconstruction plan is intended to duplicate the Awakening movement in Iraq, where Sunni tribal leaders, many of them insurgents, agreed to stop fighting and in many cases were paid to do so.”107 The problem with exporting the Sunni Awakening approach to Afghanistan is that there was no analogous group excepting the Taliban, which demanded that all foreign troops leave Afghanistan before reconciliation talks could begin. The United States insisted that the Afghan Taliban renounce its ties to al-Qaeda and that it support the Afghan constitution, which among other things called for equal rights for men and women.108 Thus the two sides seemed to be at loggerheads.

Conclusion In responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States changed the regimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Just as a counterinsurgency strategy was implemented in Iraq, General Stanley McChrystal sought to implement a similar counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Some recent observers have concluded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld placed higher priority on his “revolution of military affairs” than on US operations in Iraq; according to Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, “It’s my belief that he [Rumsfeld] had an expectation of what his job would be as secretary of defense, and it probably centered around transformation. . . . And then a war got in the way. Transformation had been a labor of love for him. The war became a labor of responsibility. It was the beautiful siren of transformation that had attracted him to the job, but the shoals ended up being the shoals of war.”109 But Rumsfeld should not be held primarily responsible for the failure of the strategy he supported in Iraq; that responsibility is shared by George W. Bush, who, after all, as commander in chief, was Rumsfeld’s boss. In addition, it is clear from published memoirs and analyses that Vice President Dick Cheney and his office played a central role in the strategy and tactics of the war in Iraq. One of the biggest problems of the war was that US objectives were unclear, unrealistic, or both. The eminent British military strategist Basil Liddell Hart defined strategy as “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfil

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ends of policy.”110 Another respected international relations expert, Hedley Bull, defined strategy as “exploiting military force so as to attain given objects of policy.”111 The problem with the Bush administration’s strategy for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was that the “ends of policy” either were not specified or were unattainable (for example, the establishment of a democratic Afghanistan, Iraq, and Middle East). T. E. Lawrence, one of the most quoted and respected experts on counterinsurgency, defined tactics as “the means toward the strategic goal, the steps of the staircase.”112 The Bush administration’s strategic goals were unclear, so it is hardly surprising that the means for achieving those goals—tactics—were also confused. It is too soon to tell what effects the Obama administration’s policies will have. General Wesley Clark has pointed out “The US military is as sharp as a diamond-pointed drill bit but as brittle as glass.”113 The US military’s sustained operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have increased that brittleness and, ironically, the effect of these campaigns on the US military may be similar to the impact of Vietnam. In his memoirs, General Tommy Franks noted, “It’s a military axiom that no plan survives initial contact with the enemy.”114 The Bush administration’s war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq survived the initial contact with the enemy, but not postwar challenges, and the failure to realistically plan for the rebuilding of Afghanistan and occupation and reconstruction of Iraq were costly mistakes that will affect the global role of the United States for many years to come. Given the human and economic costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the difficulties in toppling Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and the effects of these wars on the US military, it is unlikely that the United States will adopt a regime-change strategy in the foreseeable future.

Notes This chapter draws from the a more comprehensive study of mine: Dan Caldwell, Vortex of Conflict: U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 1. Quoted in David Howell Petraeus, “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era,” PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1987, p. 239. 2. For an extensive bibliography of these sources, see Caldwell, Vortex of Conflict. For the most comprehensive bibliography on Afghanistan, see Christian Bleuer, Afghan Analyst Bibliography 2011, 6th ed., http://afghanistan -analyst.org/bibliography.aspx.

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3. Dan Caldwell and Robert E. Williams, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012). 4. George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), pp. 127–128. 5. Quoted in James Harding, “Conflicting Views from Two Bush Camps,” Financial Times, March 20, 2003. 6. Robert Jervis, “Understanding the Bush Doctrine,” in Demetrios Caraley, ed., American Hegemony: Preventive War, Iraq, and Imposing Democracy (New York: Academy of Political Science, 2004), p. 17. 7. Bush, Decision Points, p. 138. 8. George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 129. 9. Bush, Decision Points, pp. 192–193. 10. “Strategic Thoughts,” memorandum from Donald Rumsfeld to George W. Bush, September 30, 2001, quoted in Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), p. 373. 11. For accounts by the CIA agents who first went to Afghanistan, see Gary C. Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Random House, 2005); and Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pessullo, Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and AlQaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander (New York: Three Rivers, 2005). 12. Bush, Decision Points, p. 84. 13. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 281. 14. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, p. 32. 15. There are several histories of the military aspects of Iraq war-planning and invasion, including Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006); John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Knopf, 2004); Anthony H. Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2003); and Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 16. George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 199), p. 489. 17. “Interview with Dick Cheney,” Frontline: The Gulf War, PBS, cited in Karen DeYoung, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 211. 18. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf with Peter Petre, The Autobiography: It Doesn’t Take a Hero (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 498. 19. Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), p. 131.

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20. For a description of this policy, see the article by Clinton’s assistant for national security affairs: Anthony Lake, “Confronting Backlash States,” Foreign Affairs, March–April 1994. 21. 9/11 Commission Final Report (New York: Norton, 2003), pp. 116–117, 131–133. 22. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 799. 23. Madeleine Albright with Bill Woodward, Madame Secretary (New York: Miramax, 2003), p. 374. 24. Mark Mazzetti, “Outsiders Hired as C.I.A. Planned to Kill Jihadists,” New York Times, August 20, 2009, p. A1; Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “National Security Inc.,” Washington Post, July 20, 2010. 25. “How Far Americans Would Go to Fight Terror,” Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 2001. 26. Official Record, UK House of Commons, January 15–22, 1991, quoted in Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 411. 27. The Guardian, February 26, 1991; quoted in Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, p. 412. 28. Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam and the Crisis in the Gulf (New York: Times, 1990), p. 117. 29. Executive Order 12333. 30. These are described in Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (New York: Three Rivers, 2002). 31. Ibid., pp. 198–199; Ronald Kessler, The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003). 32. Quoted in Kessler, The CIA at War, p. 197. 33. Quoted in Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, p. 489. 34. Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi (New York: Nation, 2008), p. 106. 35. Ibid., p. 118. 36. New Republic, December 7, 1998. 37. Daniel Byman, Kenneth Pollack, and Gideon Rose, “The Rollback Fantasy,” Foreign Affairs, January–February 1999. 38. Bush, Decision Points, p. 234. 39. US Army and Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 2. 40. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 73. 41. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 4. 42. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, pp. 427–428. 43. Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 331.

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44. Cited in Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 101–102. 45. US Senate, Armed Services Committee, “Testimony of General Eric Shinseki,” The Fiscal Year 2004 Defense Budget,” Washington, D.C., February 25, 2003; the Levin-Shinseki exchange is reprinted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 97; and in Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, p. 454. 46. Author interviews with generals who led previous occupations in Bosnia and Kosovo. 47. Quoted in David Rieff, “Who Botched the Occupation?” New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003, p. 44. 48. For Rumsfeld’s perspective on General Shinseki, see Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, pp. 452–456. 49. George W. Bush, speech at The Citadel, South Carolina, September 23, 1999. 50. Quoted in Bradley Graham, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), p. 208. 51. Quoted in ibid., p. 277. 52. Donald Rumsfeld, Annual Report to the President and the Congress, 2002 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2002); cited in Graham, By His Own Rules, p. 326. 53. Donald Rumsfeld, “Transforming the Military,” Foreign Affairs, May–June 2002. 54. Quoted in Graham, By His Own Rules, p. 325. 55. Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009). 56. For an excellent analysis, see Joseph J. Collins, “Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath,” Institute for National Strategic Studies Occasional Paper no. 5 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, April 2008). 57. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 437. 58. Tenet with Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, p. 308. 59. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, p. 6. 60. US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Operations, Joint Publication 3-0 (Washington, D.C., September 17, 2006), p. xxi. 61. Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 110. 62. Ibid., p. 118. 63. In his memoirs, Bush comments concerning the “Mission Accomplished” banner: “Our stagecraft had gone awry. It was a big mistake.” Bush, Decision Points, p. 257. 64. Quoted in Dale R. Herspring, Rumsfeld’s Wars: The Arrogance of Power (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), p. 58.

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65. Quoted in Frederick Kagan, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (New York: Encounter, 2006), p. 346. 66. John M. Broder, “Filling Gaps in Iraq, Then Finding a Void at Home,” New York Times, July 17, 2007, p. A1. 67. Tenet with Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, p. 399. 68. Ahmed S. Rashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 292. 69. Quoted in Charles H. Ferguson, No End in Sight: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), p. 136. 70. Franks with McConnell, American Soldier, p. 442; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, p. 476. 71. Quoted in Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), pp. 196–197. 72. See, for example, L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 2006); Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Knopf, 2006); Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Holt, 2005); George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005); David L. Phillips, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Boulder: Westview, 2005); and Ricardo Sanchez and Donald T. Phillips, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story (New York: Harper, 2008). 73. Bush, Decision Points, p. 367. 74. Quoted in Ricks, The Gamble, p. 32. 75. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic, 2003). 76. Quoted in Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), p. 413. 77. William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), p. 38. 78. David H. Hackworth and Julie Sherman, About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 431, emphasis in the original. 79. General Harold K. Johnson, US Army Military History Institute, Senior Officer Oral History Project, vol. 3, sec. 12, April 23, 1973, pp. 8–9, quoted in John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 128. 80. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, p. 653. 81. Hackworth with Sherman, About Face, p. 431. 82. Author interview with an Army officer who was a second lieutenant in 1970.

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83. Robert S. Thompson, No Exit from Vietnam (London: Chatto and Sindus, 1969), p. 136, quoted in Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, p. 209. 84. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), p. 146. 85. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, pp. 175, 208. 86. Quoted in Ricks, The Gamble, p. 14. 87. US White House, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (Washington, D.C., November 5, 2005). 88. Quoted in Peter D. Feaver, “Anatomy of the Surge,” Commentary, April 2008. 89. Ibid. See also Peter D. Feaver, “The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge,” International Security 35, no. 4, Spring 2011, pp. 87–125. 90. Ricks, The Gamble. 91. Cited in Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of War (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008). 92. US Army and Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency Field Manual, pp. 48–50. 93. Bush, Decision Points, p. 372. 94. Quoted in Ricks, The Gamble, p. 271. 95. William J. Fallon, “Surge Protector,” New York Times, July 20, 2008, p. 13. 96. “Visit to Iraq and Kuwait, 31 October–6 November 2008,” memorandum from General Barry R. McCaffrey to Colonel Michael Meese, p. 5. 97. Quoted in Ricks, The Gamble, p. 163. 98. Thomas Ricks, “Understanding the Surge in Iraq and What’s Ahead” (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 29, 2009). 99. Quoted in Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, August 3, 2008, p. 55. 100. “DOD News Briefing with Gen. Petraeus from the Pentagon,” April 26, 2007, News Transcript, US Department of Defense, p. 1; http://www .defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3951/. 101. For an excellent overview, see Joseph J. Collins, Understanding War in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2011). 102. Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 103. “COMISAF’s Initial Assessment, August 30, 2006,” memorandum from General Stanley A. McChrystal to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, p. 2-12. 104. Ibid., p. 1-1. 105. Michael Hastings, “The Runaway General,” Rolling Stone, June 22, 2010.

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106. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), bk. 1, chap. 7, p. 119. 107. Dexter Filkins, “Afghans Offer Jobs to Taliban If They Defect,” New York Times, November 11, 2009, p. A1. 108. Steve Coll, “War by Other Means: Is It Possible to Negotiate with the Taliban?” New Yorker, May 24, 2010. 109. Quoted in Graham, By His Own Rules, pp. 671–672. 110. Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 335. 111. Hedley Bull, “Strategic Studies and Its Critics,” World Politics 20, no. 4, July 1968, p. 593. 112. Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, p. 253. 113. General Wesley Clark, remarks at the University of California, Los Angeles. 114. Franks with McDowell, American Soldier, p. 239.

4 Lessons Learned in Afghanistan and Iraq Stephen Biddle

Two lessons have been widely drawn from the Iraq experience for Afghanistan: that “population-centric” counterinsurgency (COIN) methods can suffocate an insurgency if applied with enough troops, and that local security militias such as the “Sons of Iraq” (SOI) program can enable civilians to protect themselves and exclude insurgents. Hence a properly resourced application of Iraq-style COIN and local militias to Afghanistan can be expected to succeed now as they did in Iraq in 2007, it is often supposed. This prescription for Afghanistan is partly right and partly wrong, but the analysis that distills the prescription from an analogy to Iraq is wholly wrong. This is because neither population-centric COIN nor the SOI program actually worked in Iraq in the way the standard account supposes. Both were indeed critical contributors to reduced violence, but not because 2007 COIN methods somehow suffocated the insurgency, or because the SOI program enabled civilians to defend themselves from insurgents. They played important but very different roles than these. And the actual roles they played in 2007 in Iraq were so strongly dependent upon idiosyncratic local conditions as to make a simple extension to Afghanistan a very risky prediction. There may well be sound generalizations on internal warfare that could cover both Iraq and Afghanistan as special cases—but if so, this will require sound explanations of cause and effect in Iraq first, and the commonplace lessons now being drawn from Iraq fail this test.

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The Surge, the SOI Movement, and Violence Reduction in Iraq It is important to reconsider the role played by the surge and the SOI movement in reducing violence in Iraq. For most of the course of the Iraq War, Iraq’s Sunni insurgents believed they were stronger militarily than the Shiites; if only Sunnis could drive the Americans out, then a weak Shiite regime would collapse without its US protectors and Sunnis could seize control. Hence Sunni strategy for most of the war centered on inflicting US casualties and imposing enough chaos and general violence to persuade the Americans to withdraw. Events in 2006 and early 2007, however, changed this analysis fundamentally. The key to this was the Sunnis’ military defeat in the sectarian Battle of Baghdad that followed the Askariya Mosque bombing of February 2006. Until that time, Shiite militias had fought mostly defensively and often stood on the sidelines in Sunni-US combat. But when Sunni militants affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) destroyed the shrine, the Shiite militias entered the war in force and on the offensive. The result was a yearlong wave of sectarian violence in Baghdad pitting Sunni insurgent factions and their AQI allies against, especially, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM). At the time, this wave of bloodshed was seen as a disaster—and in humanitarian terms it clearly was. The United States tried to stop it. But in retrospect, it proved to have been the critical enabler of a later wave of cease-fires by transforming the Sunnis’ strategic calculus. Sunnis were always outnumbered in Iraq. But until the mosque bombing, most of the Shiites’ military potential had stood aside as the United States bore the brunt of the fighting, and this enabled Sunnis to believe that they were actually the stronger internal combatant and would win an eventual all-out war after a US withdrawal. The Battle of Baghdad, however, produced a direct, large-scale, pitched battle between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias without decisive intervention from either the Americans or the Iraqi government forces, neither of which were strong enough to control the city. The 2006 fighting thus provided the Sunnis with their first real, objective, concrete evidence of what an all-out war with the Shiites would mean. The result was a shock. To the Sunnis’ surprise and dismay, they were decisively defeated: what had once been a mixed-sect city became a predominantly Shiite one as the JAM progressively drove the Sunnis out and shrank their remaining strongholds in the capital. With the Americans playing no decisive role, Shiites overwhelmed

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Sunni combatants in neighborhood after neighborhood. Sunnis who had harbored fond hopes of ruling the country by defeating the Shiites in open warfare were now unable to call on relatives in traditional Sunni strongholds in Baghdad because the JAM had driven them from their homes and replaced them with Shiite squatters. Neighborhoods that had been Sunni homeland for generations were now off limits, populated with and defended by their rivals. In a head-to-head fight, the Sunnis had been beaten by Shiite militias they had assumed they could dominate. In the meantime, AQI had substantially alienated their more secular Sunni allies. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has always been exceptionally violent, and not only against Shiites and Americans. Fellow Sunnis whom AQI’s leadership felt were not sufficiently devout or committed were also targeted with extraordinary brutality. The smuggling networks that many Sunni shaikhs in Anbar province had relied upon for generations to fund tribal patronage networks were appropriated by AQI for its own use. Tribal shaikhs who had ruled large communities of kin and allies were marginalized by usurpers whose only apparent qualifications for leadership status were their violence and their connection to al-Qaeda. Before the Battle of Baghdad, AQI was thus broadly unpopular among secular Sunnis, but tolerated on the assumption that its combat value against Shiites and Americans outweighed its disadvantages. As defeat in Baghdad became clearer, however, it also became clear that AQI could not deliver real protection. By late 2006 it was thus apparent to the non-AQI Sunni leadership that continued alignment with AQI in a losing war against both the Shiites and the Americans meant not just loss of income and status to an upstart terrorist group, but also likely defeat in a potentially genocidal war if a US withdrawal left them to the tender mercies of the Shiites. Secular Sunnis desperately needed new allies. And the only possible choice was the United States. The Battle of Baghdad thus gave Sunnis a major strategic incentive for realignment with the United States and away from AQI. But this incentive alone was insufficient. In fact, Sunni tribal leaders had attempted realignment away from AQI in “proto-Awakenings” on multiple previous occasions. AQI, however, was not an easy ally to abandon. Its trademark brutality had been used repeatedly in the past to retaliate against Sunni tribal shaikhs who had tried to realign; in the past, these counterattacks had succeeded in driving secular Sunni factions back into the fold, and the incipient rebellions had been quashed. The difference between 2007 and these earlier experiences was “the surge.”

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What the surge did was to provide the means for Sunnis to survive realignment by protecting them from AQI counterattacks that had previously been decisive but now were not. In this role, the surge was only partly a troop increase—at least as important, it was also a systematic change in the way US forces operated, moving them away from reliance on large, defended bases and episodic mounted patrols and into the distributed, dismounted, persistent operations among the population called for by “population-centric” COIN doctrine. This was not literally unique to 2007—individual brigades had periodically experimented with such methods on a local, idiosyncratic basis starting at least as early as Colonel H. R. McMaster’s operations in Tal Afar with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in 2005. Among these experiments were Colonel Sean McFarland’s operations in Anbar in late 2006. The 2006 Anbar experiment coincided with the 2006 iteration of Sunni tribal disaffection with AQI, and together they created something new: a US military force that could provide persistent, distributed, dismounted ground combat strength capable of using Sunni tribal knowledge of AQI cell membership and infrastructure to cripple AQI and protect realigning Sunnis from AQI counterattacks. The result was that Sunnis who wanted to realign could now do so and survive, and their knowledge and cooperation in turn increased the effectiveness of their newfound US allies. In 2007, theater commander General David Petraeus insisted that McMaster and McFarland–style COIN tactics be employed on a systematic, consistent basis across Iraq, rather than being the accidental outcome of local decisions by unusual leaders. And the surge provided a roughly one-third increase in combat brigades, enabling these methods to be extended across the most threatened sections of central Iraq (especially Baghdad and the Baghdad “belts”). This in turn caused the “Anbar model” pioneered by McFarland to spread rapidly outside its Anbar origins over the course of 2007. The vehicle for this spread was the growth of what were originally called “Concerned Local Citizens” (CLC) groups, and what soon were renamed the “Sons of Iraq” or SOI movement. The SOI program was built around a series of local, bilateral, contractual agreements in which particular groups of local Iraqis agreed not to fight the United States or the government of Iraq, and to turn their arms instead on common enemies—and especially AQI. These local groups further agreed to wear distinguishing uniforms, to patrol their home districts, to limit their activities to those home districts, and to provide coalition forces and the Iraqi government with biometric data (e.g., fingerprints

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and retinal scans), names, and home addresses for all members. In exchange they received recognition as legitimate security providers in their districts, a pledge that they would not be fired upon by US or Iraqi government forces as long as they observed their end of the agreement, and a US-provided salary of $300 per member per month. (They did not, however, receive arms or ammunition from the United States; SOI participants used their own weapons and ammunition, of which they had plenty without US help.) These SOI groups thus constituted local security militias operating under contractual terms that established cease-fires with the Iraqi government and the United States. The SOI movement spread like wildfire through central Iraq by mid-2007. From a baseline of essentially zero in January of that year, by November membership had grown to more than 95,000 Iraqis under more than 200 such contracts across much of western and central Iraq. By way of comparison, the entire active strength of the British army worldwide is about 100,000—the growth in SOI membership in just a few months was truly extraordinary. And the heart of the SOI membership was the secular Sunni insurgency itself: although some SOI members were Shiite and some were former civilian bystanders in the sectarian violence, the core of the movement was made up of former insurgents who in many cases signed up for SOI duty in the same formations, and with the same leaders and weapons they had used to fight the war just a few months before. In effect, the SOI movement became the vehicle by which a strategically motivated Sunni realignment was realized: the Sunni insurgency went from enemy to ally via the Sons of Iraq program. The result was a powerful synergy: the prospect of US security emboldened already-motivated Sunnis to realign with the United States; Sunni realignment as SOIs enhanced US lethality against AQI; US defeat of local AQI cells protected realigned Sunni SOIs; and local SOI cease-fires with the Americans reduced US casualties and freed US forces to venture outward from Baghdad to keep AQI off-balance and on the run. Cease-fires with Sunnis in turn facilitated cease-fires with key Shiite militias. These militias began largely as self-defense mechanisms to protect Shiite civilians from Sunni attack. But as Sunni insurgents ceased offensive operations and as AQI weakened, the need for such defenders waned and the JAM in particular found its support base among Shiite civilians weakening. This loss of support was exacerbated by the growing criminality of many militia members, who had exploited their supporters’ dependency by preying

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upon them with gangland control of key commodities such as cooking fuel and gasoline for economic extortion. Rising criminality in turn created fissiparous tendencies within the militias, as factions with their own income sources grew increasingly independent of the leadership and of militant Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr in particular. Meanwhile the US military presence was strengthening with the arrival of surge brigades in al-Sadr’s home base of Baghdad, and those Americans were increasingly freed of the need to fight Sunnis by the growth of local cease-fires, posing an increasing threat to JAM military control in the capital. Taken together, this created multiple perils for Moqtada al-Sadr. In previous firefights with the Americans, he had sustained heavy losses but easily recovered with new recruits given his popularity. But the Shiites’ growing disaffection with his increasingly wayward militia, coupled with declining fear of Sunni attack, threatened his ability to make up for losses with new recruitment. At the same time, tensions with other Shiite militias, especially the Badr Brigade in southern Iraq, where JAM was weaker but where much of Iraq’s oil wealth was concentrated, posed a threat from a different direction, and al-Sadr’s weakening control over rogue elements created a danger of the organization gradually slipping out of his hands. When Shiites were unified by a mortal threat from Sunni attack and the Americans were tied down with insurgents and AQI, these internal problems could be managed and al-Sadr could afford to keep the JAM in the field and killing Sunnis and Americans. But as the Sunni threat waned, Shiite support weakened, the JAM splintered, and the Americans strengthened, al-Sadr’s ability to tolerate a new battle with the US Army was thus progressively diminished. Of course, alSadr is notoriously hard to read, and it is impossible to know exactly why he does what he does. But at least one plausible hypothesis is that the effect of Sunni cease-fires added to other mounting internal pressures to persuade al-Sadr that he had to stand down himself rather than take another beating from the Americans. Hence the new circumstances drove the JAM, too, to observe a cease-fire. These cease-fires were critical in reducing violence in Iraq. In effect, most of the combatant factions that had been fighting the Americans and the government voluntarily agreed to stop. Moreover, the remaining hardcore AQI and rogue militia holdouts had been seriously disadvantaged by the defection of their erstwhile allies: without the safe houses, financial support, intelligence, and concealment provided by their coreligionists, AQI and militia rogues were exposed to

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US firepower in ways they had not been previously. Guerrillas survive by stealth—their key defense from destruction by better-armed government forces is the government’s inability to distinguish fighters from innocent civilians. When their former allies agreed to finger holdout guerrillas for US engagement, AQI’s military position in western and central Iraq thus became largely untenable and they were forced to withdraw into the limited areas of Diyala, Salah ad Din, and Ninawa provinces, where SOI deals had not yet been reached. The net result was a dramatic reduction in opposition, a dramatic reduction in the number of enemy-initiated attacks, and a corresponding reduction in US casualties, Iraqi civilian deaths, and Iraqi Security Force (ISF) losses. The violence reduction was not, by contrast, caused by US forces destroying the insurgents militarily. Most Sunni insurgents and JAM militiamen survived the fighting and retain to this day much of their former potential combatant strength. The JAM is in hibernation but retains its arms and much of its leadership; much of the Sunni insurgency became the SOI movement. AQI’s casualties were heavy in 2007, but AQI was never the bulk of the Sunni combatant strength, and violence in 2006 was increasingly attributable to Shiite militia activity. Neither of the latter has suffered nearly enough casualties to explain a radical reduction in violence. Nor did the surge suffocate the insurgents’ ability to operate by blanketing Iraq with a prohibitive density of security forces. Even at the height of the surge, US troop strength was nowhere near the standard rule of thumb for security force strength needed to pacify a threatened country. In US doctrine, one trained security provider per fifty civilians to be protected is considered the preferred ratio; for a country the size of Iraq, this would have required around 600,000 soldiers and police. The maximum US troop strength in Iraq was only about 160,000, or perhaps one-fourth of the doctrinal norm. ISF improvements helped, but these were more an effect of success than its cause. The ISF certainly grew over the course of 2007, and better training surely increased its proficiency. Even today, however, its leadership, training, equipment, and logistics remain very uneven, and all were far worse during the surge. More important, the key shortcoming of the ISF prior to 2008 was never its technical proficiency, but its politics. Predominantly Shiite or Kurdish ISF units were often distrusted by Sunnis and had great difficulty functioning effectively in Sunni neighborhoods. Even Shiite ISF formations had difficulty functioning in Shiite neighborhoods controlled by rival Shiite factions, as

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their inability to advance against JAM militiamen in Basra without heavy US support as recently as the spring of 2008 demonstrated. When ISF soldiers or police were faced with a raging sectarian civil war, their effectiveness was hamstrung by their families’ exposure to militia retaliation and their own divided loyalties. Only when the sectarian violence waned, and when the grip of sectarian militia terrorism against military and police family members loosened, could the ISF begin to function as a meaningful population security force. Today the ISF is an important (if imperfect) contributor to stability; in 2007 it was as much a part of the problem as its solution. Nor is the violence reduction attributable to sectarian cleansing. Many have argued that violence fell because there was no one left to kill: Baghdad’s once-mixed neighborhoods are now purely Shiite, they claim, removing the casus belli that once drove the violence. Yet significant Sunni populations remain in Baghdad—many fewer than in 2005, but significant all the same. More important, the relative incidence of mixed and pure, or Sunni and Shiite, neighborhoods in Baghdad correlates very poorly with the scale of sectarian violence. The killing has always been concentrated at the frontiers between Shiite and Sunni districts, where, typically, Shiite militias fought to expand their control and Sunni insurgents fought to hold them off. As this unfolded, Sunnis were often forced out and city blocks would fall under Shiite control, but this simply moved the frontier to the next block, where the battle continued unabated. Cleansing thus moved the violence, but did not reduce it. This can be seen in the casualty statistics for 2006, which hardly fell as Baghdad’s Sunni population shrank: all estimates show increasing civilian fatalities over the course of 2006, not the opposite. The only way this cleansing process could explain a radical drop in violence is if the frontiers disappeared as a result of Sunni extinction in Baghdad—but this has not occurred. And it is far from clear that even a total Sunni eviction from Baghdad would end the violence: the frontier would simply move on to the “Baghdad belts,” the ring of heavily Sunni towns and suburbs that surround the city. In fact this had already started in 2006–2007: both Sunni and Shiite combatants maneuvered extensively to improve their positions for continued warfare beyond the city by contesting control of key outlying towns. The violence did not simply run its course and ebb for lack of interest; regrettably, there remains an enormous potential for continued sectarian bloodletting in Iraq. The net result, then, was that a shift in the underlying strategic balance between Sunnis and Shiites as a result of Sunni defeat in the

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Battle of Baghdad and strategic errors by AQI drove Sunnis to realign away from their erstwhile AQI allies and toward the United States, and this in turn drove the key Shiite militias into cease-fires. These realignments were critical for the ensuing decline in violence. And the violence came down largely because the former Sunni insurgents became SOI local security militias in negotiated cease-fires. The SOIs were needed to help fight AQI, but they did not need to wage pitched battles against a broad-based insurgency—because they were the insurgents themselves, in new uniforms under a fundamentally different conception of their strategic self-interest. And either way, they were hardly alone in defending their communities from AQI holdouts and rogue Shiite militias: SOIs typically operated in close coordination with large US infantry formations employing population-centric COIN, whose persistent presence was instrumental in enabling even battle-hardened SOI members to defeat AQI counterattacks at tolerable cost. Iraqi security militias were thus not simple civilians prior to their standup as SOI militias—the key SOI groups were among the most experienced fighters in Iraq until they became the Sons of Iraq. And even so, the SOIs did not normally extend security into areas without a substantial US military presence in those same districts. None of this is to suggest that the surge was unimportant—on the contrary, it was absolutely necessary to the eventual reduction of violence in Iraq. But while it was necessary, it was not sufficient: without the critical preconditions laid by the Sunni-Shiite Battle of Baghdad the previous year, the surge alone could not have had the effect it did in 2007. And the way it functioned was not simply to suffocate a large-scale Sunni insurgency with a prohibitive density of security forces—it was never large enough to accomplish this. Its role was essential, but very different from that often assumed in today’s debate over Afghanistan. And this suggests very different implications for Afghanistan than those now commonly drawn from Iraq.

Implications for Afghanistan This analysis of Iraq’s military dynamics in 2006–2007 suggests great caution in drawing lessons from the Iraq experience for Afghan strategy. These are very different theaters, as many have already pointed out: their geography, ethnic makeup, tribal systems, economic prospects, and political histories, for example, are all very dissimilar. But the most important reason for caution is that the course of the

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Iraq War in 2006–2007 turned on conditioning events for which there is no evident parallel in Afghanistan today. The most important of these is the crucial role played by the SOI movement in Iraq. Many have hoped that local village security forces in Afghanistan can stand in for the SOIs in Iraq, but the SOI program enjoyed at least two crucial advantages that will be very difficult to duplicate. First, many SOI members were already trained, organized fighters—as former insurgents who had been waging war for years, often under the same commanders who led them as SOI chiefs, the militiamen of the SOI movement were often not groups of novice civilians pressed into duty without preparation or military experience. (Indeed, the SOI members whom I encountered in Iraq in November 2007 were among the most impressive Iraqi soldiers I had seen in the country to that time, including the Iraqi government army.) And second, the SOIs faced a greatly denatured threat in Iraq—their primary enemy was an AQI subinsurgency that was brutally violent, but whose numbers were but a fraction of those of the preexisting insurgency, much of whom had become SOI members by mid-2007. By contrast, the militias under consideration for Afghanistan would consist of true civilians with limited prior military experience and negligible training, who would be fighting a full-strength insurgency of increasing size. If the Taliban suffer military reverses on the scale of those the Sunnis faced in 2006, perhaps Taliban units, too, can be induced to change sides en masse; the “reintegration” program now under way in Afghanistan is designed to encourage such defection. But absent the critical prior defeat of the enemy units to be reintegrated, it is unlikely that anything like the SOI experience can be duplicated in Afghanistan. None of this is to suggest that success is impossible in Afghanistan, or that population-centric COIN, in particular, is not the right strategy there. What this analysis does show, however, is that the Iraq War does not provide a simple template for waging war in Afghanistan. A sound understanding of the conduct of the Iraq campaign in 2006–2007 reveals dynamics that are unlikely to be repeated soon in the Afghan context. Population-centric COIN and local militia formation may or may not be sound strategies for Afghanistan, but the case for them or against them must rest on something more pertinent than lessons drawn from a conflict that is too different to bear the weight.

5 Winning the Wars We’re In John Nagl

Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. —General Douglas MacArthur

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred long-overdue changes in the way the US military prepares for and prioritizes irregular warfare. These changes are hard-won: they have been achieved only after years of wartime trials and tribulations that have cost the United States dearly in money, matériel, and the lives of its courageous service members. These changes have the potential to affect the chances of success in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The United States is engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan that is not yet won. At great cost, it just managed to turn around another such campaign in Iraq that was on the verge of catastrophic collapse in 2007 when General David Petraeus took command there. A continued US commitment to both countries will likely be necessary for some years to come. Enemies of the United States in the “Long War”—the al-Qaeda terrorist organization and its associated movements infesting other states around the world—remain determined to strike. A host of trends from globalization to population growth to weapons proliferation suggest that the “era of persistent

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conflict” against lethal nonstate irregular foes will not end anytime soon.1 For all these reasons, the security of the United States and its interests demand that the nation continue to learn and adapt to counterinsurgency and irregular warfare and that it institutionalize these adaptations so that they are not forgotten again.

Forgetting Yesterday’s Lessons—On Purpose Today’s wars can only be explained in the light of the US experience in Vietnam. In the wake of that war, the Army opted to focus on large-scale conventional combat and “forget” counterinsurgency. Studies criticizing the Army’s approach to the Vietnam War were largely ignored. The solution was to rebuild an Army focused exclusively on achieving decisive operational victories on the battlefield. The dark side of this rebirth was the rejection of irregular warfare as a significant component of future conflict. Rather than rethinking and improving its counterinsurgency doctrine after Vietnam, the Army sought to bury it, largely banishing it from its key field manuals and the curriculum of its schoolhouses. Doctrine for “low-intensity” operations did make a comeback in the 1980s, but the Army regarded such missions as the exclusive province of special operations forces. Worse, these revamped doctrinal publications prescribed the same enemy-centric conventional operations and tactics that had been developed in the early 1960s, again giving short shrift to the importance of securing the population and countering political subversion.2 It was as if the Vietnam War had never happened. The US military’s superlative performance in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 further entrenched the mind-set that conventional state-on-state warfare was the future, while counterinsurgency and irregular warfare were but lesser included contingencies. The nation did not adjust to the fact that its peer competitor had collapsed, spending the decade after the end of the Cold War continuing to prepare for war against a Soviet Union that no longer existed. Deployments to Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans in the 1990s brought the US military face to face with different types of missions that did not adhere to the Desert Storm model. And despite the relatively high demand for its forces in unconventional environments, the military continued to emphasize “rapid, decisive battlefield operations by large combat forces” in its doctrine and professional education. The

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overriding emphasis on conventional operations left the military unable to deal effectively with the wars it ultimately had to fight.

A Failure of Adaptation After the wakeup call of September 11, the US lack of preparedness for unconventional warfare was exacerbated by its failure to adapt fully and rapidly to the demands of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. By early 2002 the Taliban appeared defeated and Afghanistan firmly under the control of the Afghan allies of the United States. The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 after a three-week campaign initially appeared as another confirmation of the superiority of US military capabilities. In both instances, the enemy had other plans. Inadequate contingency planning by both civilian leaders and military commanders to secure the peace contributed to the chaotic conditions that enabled insurgent groups to establish themselves. With some notable lower-level exceptions, the US military did not adapt to these conditions until it was perilously close to losing these wars. US forces faced with insurgencies had no doctrinal or training background in irregular warfare and reacted in an ad hoc fashion to challenges. Many early approaches to counterinsurgency failed to protect the indigenous population from insurgent attacks and alienated the people through the excessive use of force—my own tank unit was not exempt from many of these mistakes in Iraq’s Anbar province in 2004.3 Although some units did develop and employ effective populationcentric counterinsurgency techniques independently, such improvements were not emulated in a coordinated fashion throughout the force.4 It was not until 2007 that the United States finally adopted a unified approach that effectively secured the population and co-opted reconcilable insurgent fighters in Iraq; a similar approach finally took hold in Afghanistan, with the resources to implement it, in 2009.

Toward a “Better War” in Afghanistan Preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a sanctuary for terrorists with global reach or serving as the catalyst for a broader regional security meltdown are the key objectives of the campaign there. Securing these objectives requires helping the Afghans to build a sustainable

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system of governance that can adequately ensure security for the Afghan people—the keystone upon which a successful exit strategy depends. The United States should aim for a sustainable system of governance that can effectively combat the insurgency, and in doing so prevent a reemergence of transnational terrorist safe havens. Achieving these goals will require the continued presence of military forces, but also a much greater commitment to good governance and to providing for the needs of the Afghan people where they live. The coalition will need to use its considerable leverage to counter Afghan government corruption at every level. While an expanded international commitment of security and development forces can assist in the achievement of these goals in the short term, ultimately Afghans must ensure stability and security in their own country. The US exit strategy from Afghanistan requires the building of a state that is able to provide a modicum of security and governance to its people. In Iraq, the successful implementation of a betterresourced effort to build indigenous security forces, after years of floundering, has now enabled the withdrawal of US forces as their Iraqi counterparts increasingly take responsibility for their own security; success in Afghanistan requires a similar situation. The classic “clear, hold, and build” counterinsurgency model was relearned over several painful years in Iraq, but at present there are insufficient Afghan soldiers and police to implement that approach by holding areas that have been cleared of insurgents. As a result, US troops have had to clear the same areas repeatedly—paying a price for each operation both in US lives and in support from the Afghan public, who suffer from Taliban reprisals whenever US military forces “clear and leave.” US and allied forces must ensure that their tactics are not counterproductive to the operational necessity of population security and gaining local support against the insurgency. As in the early years of the Iraq War, in Afghanistan US troops initially tended toward heavy-handed tactics and reliance on air strikes, an approach that alienated the Afghan population. Recent US commanders in Afghanistan have taken steps to rein in such counterproductive tactics, but these incidents have left a legacy of Afghan mistrust that has proven difficult to overcome. While much attention now focuses on the direct counterinsurgency role of US forces, over time more attention and resources must be devoted to developing Afghan security forces. Significant numbers of US soldiers are required to implement the initial phases of a “clear, hold, and build” counterinsurgency strategy, but over time responsibility must transition to the Afghans to secure their own country.

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The first requirement for success in a counterinsurgency campaign is the ability to secure the population; counterinsurgency requires boots on the ground and plenty of them. The long-term answer is a properly sized, well-trained, and well-equipped Afghan army and police force. The Afghan army is probably the most effective institution in the country, but it will continue to need US help for some years to come to provide the security needed to prevent Taliban insurgents from infiltrating the population. Training and assisting Afghan security forces will be a long-term effort that will require US and international assistance and advisers for many years, but there is no viable alternative. The United States must continue to improve the way it engages Afghan communities at the local level. Insurgencies can be won or lost in villages and districts, because securing the support of the population requires understanding the specific issues that cause it to sympathize with one side or another. Insurgencies are rarely monolithic: they comprise numerous local factions and individuals fighting for personal gain, revenge against real or perceived slights, tribal loyalties, or other reasons that may have little to do with the insurgency’s professed cause. The Taliban is an amalgam of local fighters and mercenary and criminal elements centered around a hard core of committed jihadists; US commanders are interested in trying to “flip” less ideological factions and promote the development of local self-defense militias to encourage the Afghan tribes to defend against Taliban infiltration.5 Exploiting divisions within an insurgency paid dividends in Iraq, where the emergence of the “Awakening” and “Sons of Iraq” movements played a major role in crippling al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and dramatically reducing violence. However, local communities are unlikely to turn in favor of international security forces and the Afghan government until these entities demonstrate that they are fully willing and able to drive out the Taliban and provide some level of lasting security and competent governance. The Afghan people won’t resist the Taliban or help the security forces as long as the insurgency appears to hold the upper hand while the government remains weak at best and abusive at worst. Seizing the initiative from the Taliban and reestablishing the political order’s legitimacy requires securing the population and developing a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of local communities, particularly the conflicts within them that insurgents can exploit to their own ends. Building host-nation security forces and “flipping” elements of the Taliban are not sufficient factors for success on their own, but they are important components of a counterinsurgency strategy that

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can succeed in Afghanistan if properly resourced. Counterinsurgency requires an integrated approach along multiple mutually reinforcing lines of operation; attempting to do counterinsurgency on the cheap prolongs war and diminishes the chance of success.

Learning from Our Mistakes Saint Augustine taught that “the purpose of war is to build a better peace,” but the United States has not built the capacity to create that better peace in its national security establishment. The historical record reveals that the United States engages in ambiguous counterinsurgency and nationbuilding missions far more often than it faces fullscale war. Similar demands will only increase in a globalized world where local problems increasingly do not stay local and where “the most likely catastrophic threats to our homeland . . . are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.”6 Trends such as the youth bulge and urbanization in underdeveloped states, as well as the proliferation of more lethal weaponry, point to a future dominated by chaotic local insecurity and conflict rather than confrontations between the armies and navies of nation-states.7 This future of persistent low-intensity conflict around the globe suggests that US interests are at risk not from rising peer competitors but from what Jim Thomas has called a “global security capacity deficit.”8 As a result, the US military is more likely to be called upon to counter insurgencies, intervene in civil strife and humanitarian crises, rebuild nations, and wage unconventional types of warfare than it is to fight mirror-image armed forces. The country will not have the luxury of opting out of these missions because they do not conform to preferred notions of the US way of war.9 Both state and nonstate enemies will seek more asymmetric ways to challenge the United States and its allies. The conventional military superiority of the United States, which remains substantial, will drive many of these enemies to the same conclusion: when they fight the United States conventionally, they lose horribly in days or weeks, but when they fight unconventionally by employing guerrilla tactics, terrorism, and information operations, they have a better chance of success. It is unclear why even a powerful enemy would want to risk a costly head-to-head battlefield confrontation with the United States. As former secretary of defense Robert Gates has said, “Put simply, our enemies and potential adversaries—including nation states—

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have gone to school on us. They saw what America’s technology and firepower did to Saddam’s army in 1991 and again in 2003, and they’ve seen what [improvised explosive devices] are doing to the American military today.”10 The developing strategic environment will see state and nonstate adversaries devising innovative strategies to counter US military power by exploiting widely available technology and weapons and integrating tactics from across the spectrum of conflict. The resulting conflicts will be protracted and hinge on the affected populations’ perceptions of truth and legitimacy rather than the outcome of tactical engagements on the battlefield. This is the kind of war the United States is struggling to understand in Afghanistan; it is the kind of war the country is most likely to face in the future. The learning curve is not going to get any easier.

Notes This chapter is a revision and expansion of John A. Nagl, “Let’s Win the Wars We’re In,” Joint Force Quarterly 52, First Quarter 2009. 1. Pete Geren and George W. Casey, Jr., 2008 Army Posture Statement, 2008, available at www.army.mil/aps/08/strategic_context/strategic_context .html. 2. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 271–273. 3. See John A. Nagl, “Spilling Soup on Myself,” preface to Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Nigel Alwyn-Foster, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations,” Military Review, November–December 2005; Daniel Marston, “Lessons in 21st-Century Counterinsurgency: Afghanistan 2001–2007,” in Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian, eds., Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Oxford: Osprey, 2008); and Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006). 4. George Packer, “The Lesson of Tal Afar,” New Yorker, April 10, 2006, www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/10/060410fa_fact2. 5. See Fontini Christia and Michael Semple, “Flipping the Taliban,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2009. 6. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates speech at National Defense University, September 29, 2008, available at http://www.defense.gov/speeches /speech.aspx?speechid=1279 7. For more on this point, see John A. Nagl and Paul L. Yingling, “New Rules for New Enemies,” Armed Forces Journal, October 2006, www .armedforcesjournal.com/2006/10/2088425.

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8. Jim Thomas, Sustainable Security: Developing a Security Strategy for the Long Haul (Washington, D.C.: Center for a New American Security, April 2008), p. 9, www.cnas.org/attachments/contentmanagers/1924/Thomas _SustainableSecurity_April08.pdf. 9. Gates speech, September 29, 2008. 10. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates speech at the Association of the United States Army, October 10, 2007, available at http://www.defense .gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1181.

Part 3 Counterinsurgency and Statebuilding

Unanticipated Challenges: Introduction to Part 3 Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

Perhaps it was because the Gulf War of 1991 was waged and won as an almost purely military conflict that subsequently the political aspects of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom were so embarrassingly unanticipated. Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait in August 1990 had been a standard invasion with tanks, artillery, and troops supported by fighter aircraft; in response, the USled Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait was a series of conventional military encounters on the open battlefield in which the superior firepower (range and accuracy) and generalship of the United States and its allies swiftly and decisively won the war. Had the United States gone further in the spring of 1991 and invaded Iraq in an attempt to topple Saddam and his regime, the Gulf War would have been transformed into a multidimensional political-military conflict—the kind of war the United States had been avoiding since Vietnam. Although President George H. W. Bush touted the full-throttled Gulf War as getting rid of the “Vietnam syndrome” once and for all, ironically the fear of becoming involved in “another Vietnam quagmire” was one of the principal determinants of Bush’s decision to stop the US advance at the Kuwait-Iraq border and negotiate a cease-fire with Saddam Hussein. So in 2001 and 2003 when the two unprecedented regime-change ventures were ordered by George W. Bush, they were undertaken by a US military that had for the most part relegated to the dustbin the kind of operational doctrines, tactical rules of engagement, troop training, and equipment that were required for effectively conducting 109

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another sustained counterinsurgency, and by a civilian national security team that was also unprepared to manage the community- and statebuilding phases of counterinsurgency. The military commanders of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, to their credit, came to understand by middecade that what were supposed to be “shock and awe” rapid-knockout campaigns would have been better called “shock and flaw” in that the plans for these military operations had not anticipated the full-blown insurgencies they provoked. The “Mission Accomplished” banner under which President Bush spoke on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, had to be redefined, given that the mission had only accomplished the removal of the evil regime in the capital from power. And the previously dismissed policy of “nationbuilding” was suddenly resurrected—now under the rubric of “reconstruction”— as the core purpose of the both the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. The new mantra in Washington and from the commanders in the field became that effective counterinsurgency (COIN) was more political than military. Thus, as Michael O’Hanlon shows in his chapter, the standard metrics of targets destroyed and body counts for assessing progress in past COIN campaigns were largely useless. Moreover, the failure to understand and anticipate the excruciatingly complex challenges of governance in these now-liberated—but broken—societies led to some of the early serious mistakes in statebuilding recounted by Linda Robinson and Vanda Felbab-Brown in their chapters. In Iraq, the misconceived purging of Sunnis from the military and Baath Party members from the administrative agencies not only hollowed out the Iraqi government’s capacities for providing needed public services, but also alienated the Sunnis from the Shiite majority now claiming their “democratic” right to run the country, setting in motion the sectarian violent conflicts that verged on fullscale civil war. In Afghanistan, US-directed efforts to eradicate the country’s largest cash crop, the opium poppy, had the unintended consequence of allowing the Taliban to be the protector-champion of the farming communities across the country, whose elementary economic well-being depended on cultivating and selling the poppies. In both countries, as Robinson and Felbab-Brown show, even the “new” COIN strategy—actually a revived version of the classic British strategy of population protection and winning hearts and minds— encountered myriad unanticipated challenges when it came to implementing these concepts. In Iraq deep religious cleavages (Sunni versus Shiite and fundamentalist versus moderate in each community) and in

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Afghanistan historical ethnic rivalries (Pashtun versus Tajik, and tribal and warlord–mobilized factions within the larger groupings) provided no singular insurgent enemy against whom the population had to be protected or who was contaminating their hearts and minds. Yes, the Taliban and al-Qaeda (in both countries) were unscrupulously, through bribery and intimidation, exploiting these cleavages to subvert the authority of the state, but so was the state in its counteractions; stirring up communal and tribal loyalties and feuds was the very essence of the crass and brutal political game. At times, as in the so-called Sunni Awakening in Iraq, the United States was able to exploit local animosities against al-Qaeda, but the divide-and-conquer stratagem, or arming of particular tribes, at times backfired, with the United States itself being regarded as a participant in the postwar internecine struggles. The Americans apparently had to learn for themselves—what the British, French, and Dutch discovered during the centuries of their colonial dominance—that the outsider is ultimately at a disadvantage in trying to anticipate the kaleidoscopic shifts in alignments and antagonisms among the locals, which even the locals themselves cannot reliably predict. Another systemic problem is the phenomenon of corruption, particularly in Afghanistan, where, as Felbab-Brown shows, the situation has presented frustratingly strong challenges to both COIN and statebuilding efforts. For the former, the pervasiveness of corruption in the Afghan police and even the military raises doubts about their ability to effectively take over by 2014 the combat and public safety functions that for over a decade have been performed mostly by the United States and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). With respect to statebuilding, the deeply ingrained culture of corruption, and its resilience against efforts to purge it from the country’s central and local governments, has raised questions about the wisdom of the high-priority reform that efforts have been given in recent years. The public reprimands of Kabul from Washington may be further undermining the weak authority of the Afghan government and its fledgling security apparatus, without making a significant dent in the corruption. Yet as Felbab-Brown demonstrates, prioritizing security without at the same time substantially routing out the corruption that pervades the security apparatus is a futile statebuilding strategy.

6 Strategic Counterinsurgency Linda Robinson

The United States is going through its most sustained and intensive experience of war since it departed Vietnam three and a half decades ago. Americans will process and debate the relevant lessons of this current experience for years to come, just as they did after that earlier momentous chapter in the nation’s history. But there are four broad lessons that may be drawn about the policy and resource decisions of the United States at the national strategy level. In addition, the course of the conflict in Iraq must be accurately understood in order to derive the most important lessons about the conduct of the Iraq War at the policystrategic, operational, and tactical levels. Finally, the lessons learned at great cost and effort in Iraq must be carefully applied to the particular conditions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

National Strategy and Policy The broadest policy lesson is that there are limits to US resources and political will. The years of war since 2001 have produced a new sobriety about the enormous political, economic, and social costs of war. The experience has tested whether the United States is in fact prepared to conduct two wars simultaneously, as official defense strategy long held that it must be able to do. Even though policymakers pursued a form of triage by opting for a narrowly focused effort in Afghanistan

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while devoting most US troops, matériel, and attention to Iraq from 2003 to 2008, US resources and political will were nonetheless strained to the breaking point by the combined endeavor. And while the United States drew down troops in Iraq and subsequently ratcheted up its effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan to blunt resurgent violence and produce a change in momentum in that conflict, the strains persisted. As political will for large-scale efforts waned, Washington’s commitment to Iraq and then Afghanistan diminished. The second lesson is that the United States cannot ignore the question of “what comes after.” It paid dearly for embracing mistaken conceptions of war such as the idea that it can engage in quick, antiseptic “regime change” with no messy aftermath. Similar wishful thinking that limited counterterrorist strikes or police actions can produce lasting results or a fundamental change in the dynamics of a conflict has been belied by recent experience. The decapitation of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in the form of the capture and death of its leader, Abu Musab alZarqawi, was followed by the most violent year in the entire Iraq War. Dislodging the Taliban without addressing the conditions that allowed it to come to power did not produce a lasting solution. While the United States cannot remedy every ill, when it decides to go to war it must have a coherent and plausible plan for the endgame that entails more than plotting an exit strategy for US troops. If stability is not achieved, the exercise will have been in vain. The third lesson is that the United States must be prepared for longterm endeavors when it does decide to intervene. Explaining this requires unusually honest and persuasive leadership. Americans resist foreign involvement unless convinced that vital US interests are clearly, directly, and fundamentally threatened, and even then a limited intervention will always be more palatable. Making the case is further complicated by the fact that intelligence is often ambiguous and must be interpreted; it is one of the occupational hazards of leadership. The bar is thus set high, but this is not to say that the United States will never intervene again. The United States will continue to be called upon to assume a leadership role and will act to protect its interests. It must be prepared to use force when necessary, and to come to the aid of friends and allies or to stabilize regions where it has significant interests at stake. There is a strong case to be made for the value of early interventions of the nonwar (i.e., noncombat) variety to help other countries solve their own problems and thereby avoid the type of full-scale interventions the United States has engaged in recently. These types of interventions run the gamut from security, humanitarian, and development

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assistance to multinational stabilization, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and peacebuilding operations. These three lessons suggest that the United States can be most successful when it pursues a sustainable, long-term approach to resolving threats or conflicts. That in turn suggests a fourth broad lesson, that the civilian national security cadre must be better prepared to weigh and make these critical foreign policy and national strategy decisions. The United States lacks a civilian national security cadre with sufficient training, tools, experience, and planning abilities. The line between policy, strategy, and campaign planning is a blurry rather than a sharp one, and it is only the senior military leadership who receive a systematic strategic education. A country governed by civilians should not have to default to its uniformed officer corps for such critical skills. The egregious and continuing underinvestment in civilian national security capabilities and capacity is evident across the board, from the strategic planning level to the tactical expeditionary level. The disinvestment since the Cold War ended has not been reversed. The decision to go to war is taken by civilians, and the endgames that terminate most wars are also largely political (World War II was the last war in which the adversary capitulated on the battlefield). It is therefore imperative that those charged with advising the president on the fundamental decisions of war and peace be sufficiently schooled in national security and strategy to exercise their authority competently. Loyalty cannot substitute for competence, and minimum standards should be imposed on civilian professionals as is done for the military.

Understanding the Iraq War Much effort has been expended in examining the decision to go to war, but the most important lessons relate to what the United States did once it was at war. Wars will start for one reason or another, and the outcome will be determined largely by the ability to understand and shape the conflict. In the case of Iraq, the main features of the conflict eluded many of the key US leaders, including the impact of their own decisions, for much of the war. While the fog of war will always cloud the battlefield, it is imperative that both decisionmakers and commanders arrive at a correct understanding of the dynamics of a conflict in order to chart an appropriate course. Five errors shaped the worsening war from 2003 to 2007. The initial decision to disband the Iraqi security forces and the Baath

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Party (which had provided the administrative backbone of the secular socialist state system) ensured that chaos would ensue. It created a massive constituency to conduct and support an insurgency against the US-led coalition and the new Iraqi order. An insurgency may have occurred in any case, but the series of decisions taken after the end of major combat operations virtually guaranteed that the United States would be confronted by a second, more virulent conflict that constituted what most will remember as the Iraq War. The initial three-week campaign to crush the Iraqi regime’s leadership, destroy its physical infrastructure, and disarticulate its command and control structure was a Pyrrhic victory whose primary lesson is that technologically superior might alone cannot win wars. The second critical error was to proceed with the January 2005 elections even when it was clear that the majority of the Sunni population and political groups were going to boycott the vote. The sole purpose of the elections was to set the stage for a political transition and institutionalize the new order. If the Sunnis did not participate in that exercise, the resulting political order would lack legitimacy in their eyes. They would have no incentive to participate in a system that they did not help construct. The third error was the writing of a constitution that imposed a Shia Islamist vision for Iraq, which further galvanized the insurgency and reinforced its alliance with the foreign jihadists, who stoked the violence with spectacular and ghoulish attacks. A promise to consider revisions to the constitution was never honored. These three political decisions fundamentally affected the war’s course, yet neither policymakers nor commanders fully understood or reckoned with their impact. The fourth error was a persistent tendency by both policymakers and commanders to overlook and underestimate the growing violence by Islamist Shiite extremists. The enemy was defined as the Sunni insurgency, while various Shiite militias (Jaish al-Mahdi [JAM] as well as the older Badr Corps and others) and their compatriots in the police, Facilities Protection Services, the ministries, and the army gained strength. The degree to which sectarian violence was being conducted not only by Sunni insurgents but also by agents of the Iraqi state, including its senior leadership, was ignored by all but a few lone voices who had been reporting on the Shiite threat since 2003. The violence swelled dramatically during the Ibrahim Jaafari government in 2005, well before the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006. The consequence was a failure to recognize the brewing civil

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war, the active Iranian involvement, and the Iraqi government’s role as an active participant on the Shiite side. No steps were taken to address these factors. The fifth error was the indiscriminate targeting and tactical blunders by the US military, such as the repeated clearing operations that in essence treated the Sunni population as the enemy. Sunnis and members of the former regime interpreted these five decisions and behaviors as meaning that they had no place in the new order of Iraq. From their vantage point, the United States was actively working to bring about an Iraq exclusively ruled by Shia Islamist parties. Their neighborhoods were repeatedly raided, Sunni insurgents were conflated with all Sunnis, and the sweeping de-Baathification process demonized anyone with a role in the previous regime. The turning point in the Iraq War came in 2007 as a result of numerous factors. The first and most essential step was the diagnosis of the conflict, including recognition of these errors and what they had produced, through a three-month independent study by a multinational, multidisciplinary group of experts convened by General David Petraeus immediately after he became the commander of MultiNational Forces in Iraq (MNF-Iraq). This joint strategic assessment team, co-led by an officer and a diplomat, concluded that the primary dynamic of the conflict had become a “communal struggle” (i.e., sectarian or civil war) and that the primary prescription for its resolution was to achieve a political accommodation. The resulting joint campaign plan redirected the coalition to work from the bottom up, to identify and separate reconcilable from irreconcilable insurgents, through a population security strategy, and from the top down in a coordinated effort with the US country team and Iraqi leaders to hammer out the political, economic, and security reforms and resource decisions that would advance a viable power-sharing model for the new Iraq. For the first time, an active effort was made to connect the political-diplomatic strategy to the military counterinsurgency strategy. These measures eroded the base of support for the insurgency, and a multipronged “Anaconda” strategy was used to target the “irreconcilable” elements of the insurgency. A simplistic debate has erupted over whether the dramatic decline in violence in 2007 resulted from US actions alone or from the spontaneous decisions of Iraqis. Neither is true. The stage for the turnaround was set by two key factors: the Sunni adversary overreached (by use of extreme violence and ghoulish attacks on women, children, and

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large civilian concentrations, televised beheadings, forced marriages, draconian punishments for common social habits such as smoking, and so forth), and the Shiite militia’s violence pushed most Sunni insurgents to abandon their revanchist goals in favor of a quest for survival. This set the stage for the US reconciliation initiative, which was pursued despite the Shiite government’s objections, to which the Sunni insurgency and its base responded en masse. The Sunni insurgency would not have flipped had they not had someone to come in from the cold to. The US forces played a pivotal and unprecedented role as neighborhood peacemakers and then allies and protectors of that newly turned force. In the end, more than 100,000 Iraqis signed up for the neighborhood watch force known as the Sons of Iraq (or “concerned local citizens”). That number exceeded any estimates of the insurgency’s size and constituted the great majority of the nationalist Sunni insurgency and its base. These “reconcilable” insurgents opted to test whether the US alliance could provide them with security and a place in the political, economic, and military order of Iraq. Many of them loathed the Iranian-oriented, religious Shia element in the Iraqi government, but they banked on the United States to work out some arrangement that would provide them with jobs, security, and a redefinition of the balance of power. It was this expectation of an existential remedy, rather than a $10 daily salary, that accounted for the magnitude of this phenomenon. The reconciliation initiative was the key to achieving a dramatic reduction in the violence in Iraq, but the tactic was not employed in isolation, nor would it have succeeded in isolation. The overture was critically enabled by numerous tactical measures employed simultaneously across greater Baghdad, which was the epicenter of the conflict, and then extended to other parts of the country. These measures included, most importantly, the dispersion of US troops in platoonsized elements to live in neighborhoods in sixty-seven joint security stations and combat outposts. Even though such outposts had existed before 2007, they did not exist in sufficient density, combined with the other measures, nor were they empowered with a sufficient reconciliation mandate to permit the troops to achieve the desired effect of providing security to the population and in turn yield the all-important human intelligence. When the Sunni insurgents and base flipped, they led US troops to insurgent hideouts and arms caches. Thanks to the provision of handheld biometric devices to the troops, computerized,

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shareable databases of suspected insurgents were created for the first time. Concrete walls were constructed, curfews imposed, and checkpoints erected to isolate neighborhoods that were the principal bomb factories and safe havens as well as to protect the commercial areas that were the insurgents’ principal targets. Scanners were installed at bridge crossings to detect bombs. Fusion centers pooled intelligence assets and placed analysts next to operators to create the most agile method of enemy targeting yet developed. A much less widely publicized parallel process of pressure and reconciliation overtures was employed toward Shiite militia factions, including extensive dialogue with detained Shiite extremist leaders as well as Iraqi government leaders to encourage a similar separation of reconcilable from irreconcilable Shia Islamist elements. Over time, wedges were driven between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Moqtada al-Sadr, and then between Sadrists and the most violent and brutal militia cells. After al-Maliki decided to confront Sadr’s militia in Karbala and later in Basra, Iran decided its own interests were best served by prioritizing relations with the Baghdad government rather than al-Sadr’s militia. It lent its weight to encouraging and maintaining the al-Sadr militia’s cease-fire. The lull in violence permitted a resumption of economic life, which the US forces encouraged with an infusion of small-scale economic and infrastructure projects. The embassy country team also provided training and advice to improve the flow of Iraqi government funds and the functioning of ministries and local governments. Finally, the US military leadership and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, as well as farsighted Iraqis, realized that none of these measures would have lasting effects if Iraq did not make headway in constructing a model that gave Iraq’s constituent groups a stake in the political, economic, and security life of the country. Moreover, a very large plurality of Iraqis do not self-identify as members of an ethnic or religious group and therefore hope to see a nonsectarian government model rather than a multisectarian one. Making progress on these basic but complex issues is the essential requirement for an accommodation that would constitute a successful endgame. Facile declarations that the war was “over” and the Shiites had “won” overlooked the very real remaining fissures and potential for resumption of violence if formal compromises were not reached and instituted. In 2007–2008, several important compromises were struck that can serve as models. For example, a provincial powers law bal-

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anced provincial authority with the power of the central government to remove a provincial governor through a deliberate process under certain conditions. The initial “Anbar Awakening” (the tribal reconciliation movement in that province) was solidified by subsequent agreements that gave tribal shaikhs nonvoting seats on the provincial council in advance of elections, allowed Anbari military recruits to serve their initial tours in that province, and provided a generous infusion of centralgovernment funding to calm concerns that resource-rich provinces would deny benefits to this overwhelmingly Sunni province. The endgame in Iraq is still unfolding, and an eventual resolution of this conflict depends on whether and how several bedrock issues are resolved. The stakes go beyond Iraq: its internal stability is not only important for a lasting peace there but for stability in the region as well. In fact, Iraq’s importance is such that regional stability is probably unattainable without internal stability in Iraq. If Iraq can successfully accommodate its constituent groups, the incentives for other states in the region to interfere or undermine Iraq’s stability will greatly diminish. Iraq may not necessarily play in the future the same role it historically played of geopolitical counterweight to Iran, but a foreign policy that reflects its distinct Arab identity and national interests would allay concerns of neighboring Sunni regimes about a “Shia axis.” The United States and other countries, including European nations and Iraq’s regional neighbors, can foster and support this search for internal and regional stability. Lasting stability in Iraq will depend on whether the parliament and government formed out of the 2010 elections are able to bridge the divide of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd to address the critical pending issues. These include constitutional reforms that reflect a national consensus about the balance of central and regional power and the role of religion; resolution of the status of Kirkuk and, more broadly, the boundaries of the Kurdish region and the limits of its security forces’ authority; and finally, agreement on how Iraq’s major national resource, oil, will be developed and managed. The continued development of professional, nonpartisan, and nonsectarian security forces will also be a key factor in Iraq’s future stability. That should include the willingness to incorporate former members of the insurgency who have sworn loyalty to the new order. To the degree that the United States continues to play an active diplomatic and security role in fostering resolution of these issues, the chances for an outcome amenable to US interests and regional stability will be enhanced. This marriage of strategy and counterinsurgency could be termed strategic counterinsurgency.

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The Principles of Strategic Counterinsurgency The US military has learned and adapted a great deal since 2001, which is a testament to the ability of the institution’s members to transform in the middle of conflict. It has learned that military operations alone do not result in victory, particularly in an insurgency. But it has not yet linked its insights regarding the operational and tactical practice of counterinsurgency to the overarching imperative to frame the political solutions that constitute the endgames of these conflicts. One may argue, correctly, that it is the business of strategy to develop the political analysis and the attendant political solution. In any event, strategy and counterinsurgency must be married to undertake and conclude a successful counterinsurgency campaign. That is what is meant by strategic counterinsurgency. Three important lessons have been learned in the realm of operational art. The first and most important lesson is that the problem must be understood in depth. The nature of the conflict and its primary driver or drivers must be identified in order to fashion the correct strategy for addressing it. The winning side requires legitimacy in the eyes of those who are ruled, which requires a culturally appropriate model for fighting the war and for the wielding of power (the provision of security, governance, and economic livelihood). Second, the solution to the problem is likely to involve more than combat. Perhaps the pithiest rendition of this key operational lesson learned is the saying coined by Major-General Kenneth Tovo, who led special forces units on four tours in Iraq: “You can’t kill your way to victory.” Combat is only one of the lines of operations and not necessarily the determinative one. Population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) holds that it is more important to secure the population than to kill the enemy. In reality, a blend of population- and enemy-centric counterinsurgency is likely to be required, but US forces have rediscovered what General Stanley McChrystal has labeled “COIN math” in his commander’s guidance for troops in Afghanistan: namely that killing an insurgent does not result in a net reduction of enemy ranks if the entire family or clan then joins the insurgency. The balance of lethal and nonlethal measures employed tends to favor the latter, and McChrystal’s guidance goes so far as to suggest that the proper ratio should be something like 95 percent population-centric and 5 percent enemy-centric. The preferred approach to solve the problem is frequently referred to as a “comprehensive approach,” which recognizes that coordinated

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action by a variety of military, civilian, and local entities must proceed along multiple lines of operations. A comprehensive approach does not imply a uniform formula but one derived from the particular diagnosis of the conflict’s causes. It requires addressing the causes of conflict and the reasons why people are fighting. Such nonmilitary actions are best carried out not by US combat troops but by the locals who understand their culture best and civilians with the requisite expertise in such areas as governance, development, essential services, communications, policing, and so forth. But if others cannot perform these roles, the uniformed forces will have to find ways to do them. All these various lines of operation must be coordinated to produce the necessary effect, even if there is no single chain of command. This is referred to as either unity of effort or unity of purpose. The comprehensive approach also requires continuity to sustain the gains and maintain control of areas recovered from the enemy until the host nation can provide security and governance by itself. Communication is another essential part of this approach. The US military has come a long way in understanding the degree to which waging war requires a communications strategy that is both forthright and timely. Ultimately the local government will have to win or lose this struggle and establish itself as the legitimate voice of the people, as a central part of a successful endgame, so words and actions by the US force should not undermine that outcome but rather, to the degree possible, directly foster it. The third lesson is that a constant learning process is required to assess the situation and the results achieved in order to adapt the approach or campaign plan. This method allows that the initial understanding of the problem is not likely to be perfect, and that complex or “wicked” problems cannot be entirely known before action must be taken. It also takes into account that the United States is an actor in these problems and that its actions will have an impact on the problem itself. For example, the United States was not overtly partial to the Shia Islamist agenda, but its antagonism toward Sunni Wahabbism and actions motivated by that sentiment led Iraqi Sunnis to perceive the United States as anti-Sunni. This recognition of the “observer effect” and the iterative approach to campaign design are powerful insights that are already being adopted as doctrine by some of the uniformed services. The various insights contained in this comprehensive approach have been codified in “commander’s guidance” statements and tactical directives.

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It is equally important not to enshrine the wrong lessons. There is no fixed set of measures to be applied in counterinsurgency; the chief injunction is to understand the essential drivers of the conflict, to fashion a tailored approach, and then to assess results and adapt course as needed until the conflict is resolved. It would be a mistake, for example, to assume that there is a mathematical formula for applying a prescribed amount of effort, say 20 percent of the force or resources each to the combat, security, development, essential services, and governance lines of operation. A conflict’s causes tend to be far more specific and may not require the same measures as another conflict. Similarly, the popular phrase “clear, hold, and build” has been interpreted by some to connote a sequential, physical process of clearing an area of insurgents and then erecting a security and governance structure. If only the process were so straightforward. The reality is that the weaker adversary will hide or melt away and then at his convenience conduct standoff attacks on the vulnerable population or his enemy’s flanks. The holding and building phases generally require addressing the reasons why the conflict occurred in the first place. An even more dangerous assumption is that application of this approach requires some set ratio of US troops to population or enemy forces. The preferred ratio of one counterinsurgent to fifty inhabitants of a given area is nothing more than a historical calculation, unadjusted for critical variables such as the differences between rural and urban insurgencies or other attributes of the physical or cultural terrain. Moreover, the ideal counterinsurgent is always an indigenous actor. It is far better, to paraphrase T. E. Lawrence, for the locals to do the best they can than for outsiders to do it for them. Those locals may be duly constituted forces, traditional groups, or even civilians who band together (as did Peru’s rondas campesinas to fight the Shining Path). This is the traditional counterinsurgency model, which is often described as working “by, with, and through” indigenous forces, populations, and authorities. The lexicon needs to be reoriented back to this original understanding that a counterinsurgency is waged by the government under attack, possibly with support from an outside ally such as the United States. The term third-party counterinsurgency to connote a counterinsurgency largely conducted by the outside party only confuses this central point: the locus of responsibility for conducting a counterinsurgency must be the government under attack. This model has been successfully applied in El Salvador, Colombia, and the Philippines. A

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key ingredient in those successes was the country’s commitment to a broad program of reforms to address the underlying conditions of the conflict. Thus the counterinsurgency plan was married to a political strategy. In the case of El Salvador, the reforms were literally part of the UN mediated accord that ended the war.

Applying the Right Lessons in Afghanistan and Pakistan Unfortunately, these lessons have been unevenly applied in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan thus far. At the national policy level, two reviews were undertaken to establish the objectives, which were narrowly defined as eradication of al-Qaeda safe havens and prevention of their reestablishment. Both military commanders in Afghanistan and at US Central Command conducted their own assessments and concluded, in agreement with Senior Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, that achieving those narrow goals in a lasting fashion required stabilizing both countries. However, significant elements of the US government favored pursuing a short-term triage policy of targeting terrorists with raids and drones rather than addressing the underlying drivers of conflict. The result was an ongoing internal debate that was never fully resolved. A long-term, small-footprint strategy with sustainable levels of assistance is a more appropriate approach given that neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan can be stabilized overnight. The commanders’ assessments correctly noted that Afghanistan’s government does not deliver basic security and justice to its citizens. Corruption is an active stimulant to the insurgency. But these conditions can only be addressed over time. The same problems plague Pakistan. But neither US policy nor the commanders’ campaign plans addressed the particular local and ethnic drivers of the Pashtun insurgency of eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, which provides the hospitable home for alQaeda and associated movements. A more tailored policy is needed aimed at those specific subregions and the national cleavages between Pashtuns and the other dominant groups. Finally, regional diplomacy has not diminished the hostility beween Afghanistan and Pakistan, born of Pakistan’s fear of Indian encroachment and dominance, and exacerbated by the fact that their common border is not demarcated. This hostility is one of the most significant drivers of the conflict, lead-

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ing Pakistan to provide support to the Taliban insurgency fighting the government of Afghanistan. As of early 2012, US policy was at a crossroads. Steadily declining US public support for large expenditures and troop deployments to Afghanistan led the Obama administration to ratchet down its effort there. US-Pakistan relations had steadily deteriorated throughout 2011, markedly after the special operations raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May. A diplomatic initiative to pursue a dialogue with the Taliban had begun somewhat fitfully and did not appear to offer early prospects for resolution of the conflict. The diplomatic and military strategies, moreover, appeared to be highly disconnected. The two options appeared to be reduction of US forces to a very small counterterrorism force or the crafting of a small-footprint effort to support continued counterinsurgency carried out primarily by Afghanistan and Pakistan. A modest but sustained effort is desirable to stabilize Afghanistan and prevent a worsening situation in Pakistan, a country where the United States has clear and vital interests. The primary means for the United States of influencing and supporting these measures will be through civilian and military diplomacy, intelligence assistance, and security force assistance. The latter may also include fielded combat advisers in Afghanistan to bolster that country’s forces, and perhaps as well in Pakistan, provided that relations rebound.1 In Afghanistan, a long-term assistance effort should focus on the following elements: • Make reconciliation and reintegration the centerpiece. Afghans need to take charge of this process, which has been overly micromanaged by the United States. Only an estimated 10 percent of the insurgents are hardcore Taliban, and there is a long history of side-switching in Afghanistan’s many years of war. Many of these deals will occur at the local level, and the United States should do whatever it can to facilitate them. Its most important contribution is likely to avoid targeting mid-level insurgent leaders who wish to give up fighting. • Empower legitimate local governance by decentralizing aid. Given that the reach of the central Afghan government to the 76 percent of the population who are rural has been limited, provision of governance, justice, and security, at least in the short term, will likely come from the bottom up. This appears to be the most culturally appropriate model for the rural areas of Afghanistan. Legitimate local leaders should be identified and empowered by channeling funds to

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them for implementation of government services, basic justice, jobs programs, and local security forces. • Convert local defense forces into the duly constituted local police. Locally recruited and deployed Afghan forces accountable to legitimate local authorities should be responsible for district and subdistrict security at least in the Pashtun areas of the south and east. Locally recruited forces are likely to be more effective than the current national army and police, which are drawn largely from other parts of the country. • Continue to build right-sized national security institutions. Afghanistan cannot afford a massive national security apparatus, which had been planned to reach 357,000 troops and police, with an annual maintenance cost of $6 billion. The United States should continue to fund and train a much smaller force. • Increase legitimacy at the national level. Much effort has been expended on targeting corruption with minimal results. This is a longterm issue that requires sustained focus. More important is to reach some agreement on a truth and reconciliation process (a “transitional justice” formula that does not thrust the country into civil war). A second focus should be reforms to permit election rather than appointment of provisional and district governors. In parallel, the United States should also maintain a modestly funded but long-term effort to dampen insurgency in Pakistan and stabilize the country, primarily through these diplomacy and security assistance measures: • Prioritize diplomatic initiatives to resolve Pakistani security concerns. Pakistan’s strategic calculus is based on security concerns that must be addressed if Pakistan is to alter its behavior, including its practice of supporting armed proxies as a hedge to keep its adversaries at bay. Pakistan views Afghanistan through its lens of preoccupation with India, and India must be persuaded to do its part to bring stability to a neighborhood where it is the rising regional power. Increased transparency of Indian activities in Afghanistan, and Afghanistan’s agreement to demarcate the border with Pakistan, are steps that can be taken as part of a series of quid pro quos with Pakistan. In return, Pakistan should agree to eject or capture insurgent leaders and cease support to armed proxies. • Support a national commitment to political and economic reform. The Punjabi elite will need to come to grips with the fact that

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preservation of their country requires fundamental reform to quell the growing violence by a mixture of armed groups that is spreading to key population centers. This volatile stew includes Pashtun insurgents, Baluchi separatists, Kashmiri splinter groups, sectarian militants, and al-Qaeda. Some of these groups are rooted in Deobandi interpretations of Islam; others, such as the Baluchi groups, are based on historical denial of resources and influence. The extreme marginalization of the Pashtun tribal areas and the lack of writ of law are the issues most urgently in need of remedy. They require the Islamabad government to make a profound commitment to improving Pashtun self-governance, administration, education, and development as a first step to improving the lot of all its citizenry. The government’s reform of the Frontier Crimes Regulation was a first step. • Renew COIN training and assistance to Pakistani security forces. Such training, exchanges, and other forms of engagement with Pakistani forces are the most effective means of influencing the country’s approach to its metastasizing insurgency in both the short and the long term. First, the US military must rebuild influence and trust among a Pakistani military that views it with suspicion and mistrust. While the Pakistani military has begun to take on the Pakistani Taliban, there is not yet a consensus that other insurgent groups must be confronted. US training and influence can encourage a more holistic view of counterinsurgency that includes governance and development operations, as well as more discriminate use of force in counterguerrilla operations. Both sets of recommendations, for Afghanistan as well as Pakistan, apply principles of strategic counterinsurgency to the unique characteristics of each country’s problems. They recognize the inability of the United States to sustain massive military and economic assistance programs and instead propose long-term sustainable programs to bolster efforts carried out primarily by those countries. They also recognize the virtue of the host nation and indigenous population taking the lead, in terms of the capacity-building and legitimacy effects. Finally, they recognize the intractable and systemic nature of the conflicts’ roots, which in the case of the South Asia conflict are multiple and complex. Finally, the primary focus of these recommendations is on the political drivers of conflict and the political solutions that are required. The military role in counterinsurgency and stabilization operations is at bottom a supporting role. The military provides a critical umbrella of security for

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the necessary political actions, and in some cases it may itself be a provider or facilitator of political solutions.

Note 1. The United States is presently using combat force in Pakistan in a standoff mode, in the form of covert strikes on insurgent leaders with armed drones. The extensive use of unmanned aerial drones undermines the Pakistani government’s legitimacy, and the counterproductive political effects will eventually outweigh the benefits of the program. In my opinion, there is an endless supply of Pashtun tribesmen ready to take the reins of the insurgency, so the tactic is of limited value in any case, and not a substitute for a comprehensive strategy.

7 Assessing Counterinsurgency Operations Michael O’Hanlon

How can we tell if a counterinsurgency campaign is being won? In the course of 2010 and 2011, in Afghanistan, it was very important to know how to answer this question. In 2012, it still is, even after more than a decade of war there. Even if the current strategy, led by the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is largely correct, it is important to recognize that the effort could still fail. The situation could simply be hopeless at this late hour, after so many years of floundering that have cost NATO and President Hamid Karzai so much credibility and allowed the Taliban to regroup. Even if the situation still offers a glimmer of hope, and even if NATO does its part, the Karzai government may fail to play its own role. The international community may also continue to reinforce certain unhealthy tendencies of the Karzai government itself—providing too many contracts to corrupt individuals, allowing subcontracting procedures that have the result of creating multiple opportunities for bribes and commissions to be paid, and so on. The template of counterinsurgency that was effective in Iraq may not be transplantable to Afghanistan. At a basic conceptual level, it could prove to be the wrong strategy for Afghanistan. Or, perhaps more likely, even if the same basic principles are largely applicable in both places, we may simply fail at a practical level to find the necessary national, provincial, and local leaders with whom to cooperate. Despite all the improvements made by President Barack Obama and others in recent months, the United States could still suffer defeat. We need a way to know if we are succeeding in this core goal. 129

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To be clear, I believe the effort in Afghanistan is at present a mixed bag, unlikely to fail entirely yet also unlikely to stabilize the country by the time NATO withdraws most of its combat forces by 2014. Certainly the roles of Pakistan, and of Afghanistan’s political system, will be crucial in determining the outcome—and 2014 is also the year when the Afghan constitution requires that President Karzai be replaced by another duly elected leader. But my own assessment is not meant to replace the need to establish a methodology for measuring our progress, so that others may reach their own conclusions and so that our debates over who is right can proceed from as much of a common base of understanding as possible. Assessing progress in counterinsurgency missions is always hard. Sizing the force correctly for a stabilization mission is a key ingredient— and it has been the subject of much discussion in the modern US debate. But in fact, there is no exact formula for sizing forces. Even if there were, getting the numbers right would hardly ensure success. Troops might not perform optimally if they are poorly prepared for the mission; the security environment might pose too many daunting challenges for even properly sized and trained forces to contend with; the politics of the country in question might not evolve in a favorable direction because of the actions of internal or external spoilers. Only by tracking progress on the ground can we know whether a strategy is working. And only by examining a range of indicators can we determine how to adjust a strategy that may require improvement. The process of defeating an insurgency while building up a host government is too complex to lend itself to simple quantification; assessing trends in such a mission is equal parts art and science, so there is no short list of metrics to provide a definitive bottom line on how things are going. Indeed, those who try to use a short list often cherry-pick data to serve an agenda. As the late Fred Ikle, former undersecretary of defense from the Reagan years, once put it, “both sides in the internal debate often pick some isolated statistics out of the welter of information, instead of trying to justify their position on the basis on an overall evaluation.”1 We must beware this temptation. A number of axioms have been developed over the decades to guide policymakers as they attempt counterinsurgency, stabilization, and nationbuilding missions. Several concepts have become so frequently voiced that they have developed almost iconic status: • Counterinsurgency requires attention to three main areas of effort: security, economics, and politics.

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• Successful counterinsurgency depends most critically on how the local population views its well-being and the role of the government and international forces in supporting that well-being. Battlefield victories are important in their own right, but they also sustain support among the population. • Successful counterinsurgency requires empowerment of legitimate, indigenous actors and cannot be achieved principally through the efforts of outsiders. • Patience is required in counterinsurgency, because successful efforts typically take a decade or longer. • Care and precision are required in the use of force in counterinsurgency; policing functions are ultimately more appropriate than combat operations by soldiers. The problem with such a list of truisms is not so much that they are incorrect—in fact, they are probably all generally sound. Rather, the challenge comes in translating these principles into actionable policy in a given case and in determining if efforts to do so are succeeding. It is here where metrics potentially have their greatest role. Metrics are easy to misuse. In Vietnam, for example, the United States was convinced that there would be a “crossover point” in attrition of the Vietcong. If US military forces could manage to kill enough of them, say 50,000 a year, the Vietcong’s recruiting efforts would not be able to keep pace, and combined US and South Vietnamese forces would ultimately prevail. This focus on body count contributed to General William Westmoreland’s unfortunate emphasis on search-anddestroy operations, which caused huge numbers of civilian casualties and in that way increased the enemy’s capacity to recruit. The United States and South Vietnam also fixated on the ratio of counterinsurgents to insurgents, working from the assumption that successful counterinsurgency requires ten government soldiers for every insurgent. This simplifying assumption is partly validated by history, but only in an approximate sense. By applying it too rigidly, the rule of thumb misled US and South Vietnamese policymakers, giving them too much confidence that they would be successful if they could just generate a certain number of combat forces (without paying sufficient attention to the forces’ quality or proficiency in counterinsurgency operations).2 This unhappy Vietnam experience with metrics is one reason why US commanders have been reluctant to offer estimates of the size of the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan. The noted Australian soldier and scholar David Kilcullen has estimated that the Taliban in 2008 numbered from

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32,000 to 40,000 fighters inside Afghanistan at any moment, with about 8,000 to 10,000 of them making up the hardcore full-time movement. Major-General Mart de Kruif, former commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in southern Afghanistan, estimated that in this region of the country, notably Kandahar and Helmand provinces as well as Zabul and Uruzgan, the resistance numbered perhaps 10,000 to 18,000 fighters in the summer of 2009, “including the $10-a-day fighters.” Of course, such estimates are rough.3 By contrast, the mujahidin who fought the Soviets in the 1980s may have numbered up to 250,000, and they were supplied with advanced arms by Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia.4 That said, if the Afghan resistance remains lethal and resilient, it is difficult to take much solace in the fact that it is not huge. So trying to track its size is worthwhile, as long as numbers are recognized to be highly imprecise and of limited diagnostic value. Iraq provides context too. Many lessons learned from Vietnam were put into practice there, but mistakes still occurred in the use of metrics. For example, the United States thought that Iraqi security forces were improving fast in the 2004–2006 period as we recruited, trained, equipped, and helped field them. But in fact those forces were usually badly led, often by sectarian actors with ties to extremist militias, and in retrospect (as scholar Steven Biddle had earlier warned— see Chapter 4) our training and equipping efforts clearly had the partial effect of arming antagonists in a civil war. Most metrics failed to capture such trends—until we learned to factor demonstrated battlefield performance into official assessments of the quality of Iraqi army and police units. That Iraq experience provides one valuable lesson for Afghanistan. Others come from earlier successful counterinsurgency and stabilization missions in places such as the Philippines and Malaya. Many of the metrics used there placed a premium on tracking trends in the daily life of typical citizens. How secure were they, and who did they credit for that security? How hopeful did they find their economic situation, regardless of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) or even their own personal wealth at a moment in time? Did they think their country’s politics were giving them a voice?5

Metrics in Afghanistan So, understanding the pitfalls and limitations of metrics—but also realizing there is little choice but to try to assess progress in this type of war through some sort of structured analysis, rather than just the

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impressions of leaders—how can we tell if the Afghanistan war is headed in the right direction? Which metrics are most important, when should they reveal progress if indeed the current strategy winds up working—and, by contrast, how can we know if the strategy is not working and the mission failing? In Afghanistan, beyond the crucial matters of political decisionmaking of relevance to the war effort in both Kabul and Islamabad, the key is to understand how the war is affecting the daily lives of citizens— their sense of security, of opportunity, of hopefulness, of support for NATO and for their own government. To understand this, we need to understand the size, scale, and geographic concentrations of enemy forces on a detailed basis. We also need to track the performance of Afghan security forces—as well as the broader Afghan justice system, including the courts, because creating a sense of stability and of reasonable government rule is crucial. The following additional indicators of progress would also appear very important, at not only the national but also the provincial and district levels: • The level of violence, nationally as well as regionally and locally, and if possible the degree to which the enemy initiates violent encounters (if the enemy causes most of them, this suggests that it retains most of the initiative in the conflict).6 • Trends on accidental casualties to civilians caused by Afghan or foreign troops in contact with the enemy (for the same reason as for the preceding indicator). • The specific levels of targeted violence against key individuals— that is, assassinations and kidnappings of key political, governmental, and business leaders and other prominent persons as well as of security force personnel. • The views among the Afghan population about the government and its performance (and its corruption levels), about NATO forces, about law and order in their neighborhoods and villages, about their quality of life as well as economic opportunities— and about various resistance movements, to see if the people are still generally opposed to the insurgency. Measuring these things involves public opinion polls; it also involves watching for signs of citizen involvement on matters such as reporting the locations of improvised explosive devices before they detonate.7 • Perhaps most of all at this point, since the war shows no signs of being decisively resolved by 2014, how well Afghan forces are able to handle primary security responsibility in those parts of the country where they first assume it.

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One key point should be made about Afghanistan: although the preceding list of indicators starts with trends on violence, these are probably not quite as crucial or determinative in Afghanistan as they were in Iraq.8 In Iraq in 2005–2006, the violence was literally tearing the country apart, with most estimates averaging about 3,000 civilian fatalities a month. That was bad enough, but another 100,000 persons a month were being driven from their homes. In Afghanistan, even today after the worsening of violence over recent years, estimated civilian fatality levels are only about 10 percent of what they were in Iraq at the peak of that nation’s violence. While the first order of business for the surge in Iraq was to reduce the rates of killing and ethnic displacement, in Afghanistan the lower level of violence means that the higher priority is probably statebuilding. To put it differently, while tragic, the overall level of violence is not so horrible as to be decisive on its own. If we can cap the violence, and the spread of the Taliban, while building up the Afghan state and thereby making possible an eventual NATO exit strategy, we will likely achieve our core goals—even if that leaves the Afghans to continue to fight the insurgency another decade after most of NATO’s troops go home. Institution building, starting with the security forces and other instruments of law and order, is probably even more important than killing insurgents in this war.9 In addition, it is not necessarily bad news if the insurgents in Afghanistan respond to the recent buildup, or expected drawdown, of US and Afghan forces by dispersing or relocating rather than fighting. We do not need to kill or capture enemy personnel so much as to build up state institutions so that in the future the Afghans can take on the insurgents themselves. Anything that buys us time to strengthen the Afghan government and improve the Afghan economy works to our advantage. Such dynamics could make time an ally of the Afghan government and NATO; in recent years, time has been our enemy, because the general perception of a worsening situation for Afghans eroded support for the government and the international coalition.

How Long Will It Take? It appears that the Afghan campaign has had mixed results. The Obama force levels have been in place long enough that trends resulting from their presence, and their operations, are now apparent—and alas they point in opposing directions. There has been much progress, to be sure. But we cannot be confident that the overall trajectory is

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trending favorably or unfavorably. Nor can we tell yet if any progress is likely to outlast the large NATO presence on the ground now. It is simply too close to call. We can be reasonably confident that NATO’s forces have made substantial progress in the country’s south, where violent incidents are typically down 50 percent and positive indicators like children in school are typically up by around 50 percent since 2009. But the progress has been far slower in the east, and there may not be time to complete the job there in light of Obama’s plans to pull one-third of all US forces out of the country by the end of the summer of 2012. It is still taking considerable time to improve the Afghan security forces as well, and their growth is occurring at an impressive but still modest overall pace when measured against national needs. In light of this, the current strategy for making the full transition to Afghan leadership on the ground and in the field by 2014 or perhaps somewhat sooner makes sense. The Afghan army and police should be at full size by about 2013, with a final year of mentoring for late-forming units thereafter. It also makes sense to have a substantial NATO/ISAF presence through what will be a crucial political transition year in 2014 as Afghans go to the polls to replace President Hamid Karzai, who must step down according to the nation’s constitution. And the country’s east, presently as violent as ever, will certainly require at least another two to three years of combined effort by Afghan and foreign forces to stabilize. An even bigger key here could be the role of Pakistan in reining in the insurgent groups on its territory. A gradual downsizing process for US and other foreign forces, beginning now and continuing until 2014, probably makes the most sense, though reductions in late 2012 and early to middle 2013 should be modest to compensate for the fact that the drawdown of early to middle 2012 has been somewhat rushed. My focus in watching trends over this period of 2012–2014 will center on three things: 1. Overall levels of violence, as well as specific trends in the east (and the implied role of Pakistan in that violence)—less out of worry about absolute numbers of incidents and more due to an interest in trend lines as a measure of whether the insurgency is weakening or not. 2. Continued growth, improvement, and field performance of the Afghan security forces in the field—the key to NATO’s exit strategy in many ways.

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3. The functioning of the Afghan political process, including the development of political checks and balances (through institutions like parliament) and new political actors (preferably through stronger political parties), including those at the provincial and district levels. Pakistan’s political process and its role in the Afghanistan war are also crucial. This is not exactly a short list of metrics, but it is about as parsimonious as one can reasonably be in this business. And it will probably not produce a clear verdict on the success of the mission in the coming years—but perhaps, given Afghanistan’s role in US security, avoiding a defeat is sufficient. That is hardly an inspirational message, and it is not as much as I had hoped for in 2009. But it may be all we can really achieve. And it may be good enough.

Notes 1. Fred Charles Ikle, Every War Must End (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 96. 2. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 177–214; Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 169–177, 210–212, 220–223, 233–247, 262–263, 282–293. 3. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 48–49; US Department of Defense, news briefing with Major-General Mart de Kruif, Pentagon Briefing Room via teleconference, June 25, 2009, www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4439. 4. Peter Bergen, “Winning the Good War: Why Afghanistan Is Not Obama’s Vietnam,” Washington Monthly, July–August 2009, p. 50. 5. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 2005), pp. 70–86. 6. Jonathan J. Schroden, “Measures for Security in a Counterinsurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 5, October 2009, pp. 715–744. 7. Andrew M. Exum, Nathaniel C. Fick, Ahmed A. Humayun, and David J. Kilcullen, “Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan” (Washington, D.C: Center for a New American Security, June 2009), p. 25, www.cnas.org; Anthony H. Cordesman, “The Afghanistan Campaign: Can We Win?” (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 22, 2009), p. 23, www.csis.org/burke/reports.

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8. Jason Campbell, Michael O’Hanlon, and Jeremy Shapiro, “Assessing Counterinsurgency and Stabilization Missions,” Foreign Policy Paper no. 14 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, May 2009). 9. For a similar view, see David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, p. 113.

8 The Predicament in Afghanistan Vanda Felbab-Brown

Starting in 2001 as a presumably swift regime-change operation to drive the al-Qaeda–harboring Taliban from power, the US military intervention in Afghanistan morphed by the mid-2000s into a full-blown counterinsurgency against the Taliban’s drive to retake control of the country. In 2009 the Barack Obama administration inherited the US and international mission there in a condition of deep crisis. The George W. Bush administration’s economy-of-force, minimal-input approach for Afghanistan and its prioritization of Iraq had left a structural environment in Afghanistan that motivated national and local powerbrokers to return to their ways of narrowly pursuing immediate power and profit maximization at the expense of building effective and accountable governance. Although the Obama administration tried to reverse this negative syndrome, its imposition of a time limit on the deployment of US forces only reinforced the short-term, “what’s in it for me” calculus of the Afghan powerbrokers. The result has been a continuing uphill struggle to devise mechanisms to improve governance and sustain security gains. Henceforth, and still prevailing at the time of this writing, the United States and its allies have been struggling with a fundamental predicament: the Taliban insurgency feeds on the condition of inept and corrupt governance, yet the United States and its international partners have been unable and often unmotivated to induce better governance from the Afghan government and unofficial powerbrokers.

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Consequently, although the narrow counterterrorism objectives of the United States of deposing the Taliban and disrupting al-Qaeda might seem to be accomplished, the success of the larger project— establishing a stable and legitimate government in Afghanistan that can deliver security and other essential public goods, and anchoring it in a solid regional arrangement—remains a huge question mark. The Afghan National Army (ANA) is improving as a force capable of providing security to the Afghan population and ensuring Kabul’s writ. But whether these improvements will be sufficient before the majority of US troops depart in 2014 is as yet highly uncertain. Meanwhile, political trends and the quality of governance in Afghanistan continue to deteriorate and are increasingly generating pressures that could yet explode in civil war. Thus even observable increases in physical security may not indicate durable stability if Afghans’ confidence in the future does not increase.

The Failure of Governance in Post-2001 Afghanistan What allowed the Taliban—an amalgam of the remnants of the traditional Taliban of the 1990s, of alienated Afghan tribes and powerbrokers, of the Haqqani faction in eastern Afghanistan sponsored by Pakistan, and of foreign jihadists—to regain traction with the population in Afghanistan, after being driven from power in 2001, was the failure of the new Afghan government under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai to deliver good governance. The new state failed not only to meet the expectations of the population concerning economic development, but even to maintain elemental security. The absence of the Afghan national and international forces from large swaths of the country, including much of the strategic provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, allowed the Taliban to come back and reestablish themselves in their former base by the rule of their Kalashnikovs.1 Street crime, such as the thefts, robberies, and the rise of unofficial road tolls that had made Afghans’ lives miserable during the early 1990s, once again rapidly spread throughout the country—frequently perpetrated by members of the Afghan National Police (ANP), an institution seen by Afghans as one of the most corrupt in the country. Moreover, the antiTaliban warlords who became members of the post-Taliban government were the source of much of the political infighting and physical insecurity during the early post-Taliban years.2 As a result, the state has been critically challenged in its most fundamental and inescapable

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function: delivering public safety, for which it remains dependent on outsiders and private entities. The lack of a multifaceted state presence, including effective law enforcement and a respected judiciary, has resulted in the absence of the rule of law. Conflicts over land and water and tribal feuds have continued to characterize local politics, at times intensifying ethnic and regional disputes as many Pashtuns come to believe that the Tajiks of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance have enjoyed unfair access to political and economic power in the post-Taliban political dispensations. Officials at all levels of the Afghan government have often usurped power for personal enrichment and power accumulation. They have approached their positions as governors, police chiefs, and members of provincial development councils (the key governing bodies at the provincial level) as personal fiefs.3 Corruption has become pervasive— exacerbated by the bourgeoning illegal cultivation of poppy, the selective enforcement of the prohibition against its cultivation, and the drug trade—the effluence of structural deficiencies of state institutions and predatory behavior of official and unofficial powerbrokers. Thus the overall governance situation in the post-Taliban era has been one of weakly functioning state institutions being subverted by influential powerbrokers for power and profit accumulation. The state has been unable and sometimes unwilling to uniformly enforce laws and policies, while many regulations have not necessarily been seen as legitimate by the population. Not surprisingly, Afghans systematically distrust state institutions (as well as unofficial powerbrokers) to equitably enforce laws and allocate resources. And after three decades of conflict, Afghans have come to operate on short-term horizons and discount the future in favor of the present. The great uncertainties about the stability of Afghanistan post-2014 reinforce a historically conditioned sense among Afghans that one has to benefit from today’s opportunities now and a reluctance to undertake long-term institutional investments and submit to the rule of law. Beyond the Taliban’s Kalashnikov rule in places where the presence of the Afghan state and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is weak, the insurgent movement has employed four key mobilization strategies and messages. First, it has stepped into the lacuna of good governance, by disbursing its—however harsh and arbitrary—“justice” and order, arbitrating disputes, such as over land and water, and acting against crime. Second, with respect to recruiting fighters, the Taliban has attempted to mobilize the Pashtun population, especially Ghilzai Pashtuns, by

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emphasizing their marginalization in the post-2001 period. The first Karzai government was dominated by non-Pashtun northerners, a balance that was changed later in favor of the Pashtuns, if not necessarily Ghilzai Pashtuns. Certainly at the local level, the Ghilzai have been frequently discriminated against in the post-Taliban period, like during much of Afghanistan’s history, by non-Ghilzai Pashtun government administrators or unofficial powerbrokers with strong ties to government officials. The third key source of Taliban support among the population has been its ability to protect the poppy fields from eradication efforts by the Afghan national government and, until 2009, by the government’s international sponsors. Amounting to between a third and half of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) since 2001, the poppy economy represents the economic lifeline of much of Afghanistan’s rural population and underlies much of the economic activity in urban centers as well.4 Consequently, eradication drives and bans on poppy cultivation are deeply unpopular and economically devastating for local populations and alienate them from the national government and its international sponsors. Until extensive eradication efforts were suspended by the Obama administration in 2009, they were a key source of Taliban mobilization.5 Local bans, such as in Nangarhar, continue to be a source of such alienation.6 Fourth, as the international presence in Afghanistan became associated with rising civilian casualties as a result of a too-thin NATO troop presence and a subsequent overreliance on air power, the Taliban began to stress nationalism and violent jihad against “Western infidels” occupying Afghanistan.

The Illusions of Outsourcing Basic Governance to Tribes and Warlords In contrast to my argument that it is the paucity of good governance that has alienated Afghans from their government and severely complicated the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency campaign, some analysts insist that the alienation has been the result of too much presence of the state. They maintain that Pashtuns are uninterested in improved governance, want to be left alone with minimal interaction with the outside world, and resent the interference of the central state in their lives and foreign presence on their territory.7 Such arguments emphasize anthropological notions of “Pashtunwali” and the intensely tribal and anti-

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modern identity of the Pashtuns. The principal, and frequently only, source of political legitimacy and affinity according such arguments, is the tribe. Hence it is not the absence of good governance and failure of the central state to provide it, but rather the presence of the central state and foreign troops, that stimulates popular support for militancy. Thus, any attempt to deliver improved governance is at best futile or directly counterproductive.8 Instead, it is argued, a scaled-down US and international presence in Afghanistan will encourage local solutions, improvements in governance, and stability.9 Such a viewpoint in fact was one of the principal drivers of the Bush administration’s decision to adopt a “light footprint” approach in Afghanistan. But such arguments are fallacious. Neither the Pashtuns nor the Afghans in general are inherently anti-foreign or anti-Western. While it is true that the vast majority of the Afghan Taliban insurgents are Pashtuns, not all Pashtuns support the Taliban. Indeed, what was striking about the early post-Taliban period was the warm welcome that the United States and the international community received from Afghans, including Pashtuns. During the pre-Soviet era, Afghans were also accustomed to and welcomed foreign presence in Afghanistan—both in the form of development aid and technical assistance and in the form of Western tourists. Indeed, during that period, the government in Kabul was rather competent in playing the United States and Soviet Union against each other and reaping benefits from letting both court Afghanistan for allegiance. However, to the extent that outsiders’ presence is associated only with continuing or increasing violence and not improvements in security and governance, people naturally sour on the outsiders’ presence. Nor are Afghans a bunch of tribes without national identity. While it is true that ethnic and tribal identities are important and the writ of the central state has frequently been minimal and fragile, most Afghans do have a sense of a national identity and define themselves as Afghans. Indeed, a common offense that foreigners commit is to ask an Afghan what tribe he is from, with the overwhelming reply being that “I am Afghan.” Afghanistan’s various civil wars have been over who controls the central state and how much the central state can dictate to local entities, but they have never been about secession (unlike in parts of Pakistan, for example). Nor are Pashtuns bound to shun interaction with the outside world. Moreover, the presence of foreign jihadists is as “alien” and disturbing to local ways as the presence of Western foreigners and the central state. Indeed, much of the conflict in eastern Afghanistan has been between

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foreign jihadists (Arab, Chechen, and Uzbek) and local tribes, with the latter seeking to prevent the foreign jihadists from realizing their ambition to dominate local decisionmaking structures and violently impose alien ways. (Much of the conflict in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas [FATAs] of Pakistan during the 2000s also stemmed from a similar violent contestation between foreign jihadists and local tribes.) The consequence of Western withdrawal is thus not a return to the nineteenth century with isolated Pashtun tribes left to their own devices without any encroachment from the outside world, but a dense presence of foreign jihadists co-mingling with the locals and seeking to influence local Afghans. Those who adopt a nineteenth-century view of the Pashtuns and argue for leaving the locals alone are thus depriving the West and the national governments on both sides of the Durand Line, which separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, of the ability to shape the identities and affinities of the local populations and persuade them that the future is better if they side with the legitimate government. On neither side of the border are the Pashtuns inherently anti-state. In Afghanistan, Kandahari Durrani Pashtuns have dominated the central state for several centuries. The fallacy of the “leave it to the tribes” argument is further compounded by its assumption that the tribal structures today exercise the same level of control and influence as they did before the 1970s. In fact, on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the tribal structures have been severely weakened by multiple factors. In Afghanistan, communist rule, the Soviet counterinsurgency policy, the anti-Soviet jihad, the civil war of the 1990s, and the Taliban policy since the mid-1990s of assassinating maliks (tribal chiefs) have all severely undermined many of the traditional tribal structures. While they still exist, provide political identification, and deliver some levels of common political action, the tribal structures often lack the capacity to resist a violent challenge from criminals or insurgents or to deliver economic improvements and rule of law to their members. Thus they cannot be relied upon to deliver effective governance in the absence of state presence. Indeed, the rise of the Taliban groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been a manifestation of the weakness of traditional governing mechanisms. Proposals that Afghan “warlords” should handle security and provide governance are equally deficient. Although many Afghans are stuck living in the de facto fiefs of the powerbrokers, they often do not consider the influence of the warlords and crimelords legitimate, even if they find it inescapable. Many of today’s powerbrokers emerged out of the anti-Soviet jihad as outsiders to the traditional tribal structures

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and challengers to the maliks, presenting themselves as the new khans and distributors of security and patronage to their clients. The US and coalition forces of Operation Enduring Freedom (the name for the military intervention against the Taliban in 2001) crucially relied on them for intelligence, logistics, and military operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. As the international community at first, and later also President Hamid Karzai, have been largely unwilling to confront the warlords and wean themselves off their dependence on them and crimelords for their services, they do exercise considerable power. But rather than battle them, President Karzai has chosen to co-opt the warlords by offering them various positions in the national and subnational governments. Instead of confronting them, Karzai continues to reach often unstable accommodation with them. Accordingly, the national government has also come to behave in an equally corrupt and unresponsive manner as the powerbrokers themselves. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the CIA, and other international actors have failed to develop mechanisms to function without the powerbrokers and to progressively marginalize them within Afghanistan’s political system. Instead, warlords cum government officials, such as Atta Mohammad Noor in Balkh, General Abdul Razziq in Kandahar (before his assassination in the summer of 2011), and also Ahmed Wali Karzai in Kandahar and Matullah Khan in Uruzgan, have entrenched themselves in Afghanistan’s political arrangements and continue to present themselves as indispensable to an international community that itself oscillates between working through them and trying to work around them.10 Often, such individuals are involved in electoral fraud, abuse and usurpation of international aid contracts, tribal discrimination, and illegal activities such as drug smuggling. Even so, they do get things done for the international community—be it intelligence provision, protection of ISAF logistics, or clearing operations in Kandahar’s Mahlajat and Arghandab areas. The continuing lack of actionable intelligence and of broader understanding of the increasing power of such powerbrokers and the complexity of their networks has made it extremely difficult for the international community to marginalize them and work around them. Yet the internationals’ and Kabul’s unwillingness to take on the warlords and economic powerbrokers has also undermined what it takes to further good governance and statebuilding. It has been conducive to massive corruption and has permitted the warlords cum government officials to perpetuate discriminatory and rapacious behavior, thus further eroding the already-weak credibility and legitimacy of the state.

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What Governance Deficiencies Matter Most to Local Populations Recent discussions and criticisms in the United States of governance deficiencies in Afghanistan have almost universally condemned poor governance, corruption, and the drug trade in one breath. Yet not all governance deficiencies are equally important to local populations, nor are they all necessarily seen as pernicious by the Afghans in the same way that Westerners frequently do. The pervasiveness of poppy cultivation, for example, is frequently not seen as a governance deficiency: indeed, while it may be illegal, many Afghans nonetheless see the poppy economy as legitimate.11 Physical Insecurity The governance problems that matter most to local populations are the ones that most directly affect their human security. Uppermost among them is the lack of physical safety from either politically motivated violence or violent crime. To be sure, the Taliban groups on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border are highly violent and carry out targeted killings against local political leaders and development workers, often resulting in indiscriminate civilian casualties. But as long as counterinsurgent forces are not capable of holding territories cleared of insurgents and these territories are re-penetrated by militant groups, greater security cannot be experienced by the locals. In such circumstances, the manifestation of the state and counterinsurgent forces continues to be a lack of security; and indeed, the presence of the state and counterinsurgent forces can be associated with even greater insecurity. The surge of US forces in southern Afghanistan—in the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar—did significantly improve the security situation there. Although the fighting was intense and often greatly affected the civilian population, ISAF forces were able to clear the Taliban from key districts previously controlled by the regime, such as Marja in Helmand and Arghandab in Kandahar. Although the “government out-of-a-box” famously announced by General Stanley McChrystal failed to materialize, the presence of district governors and line ministry officials in the liberated districts gradually increased. Soon, however, the Taliban started trickling back in and deploying an intimidation campaign of assassinating and threatening district officials or those seen as cooperating with the government. Most dangerous, the

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announcement by President Barack Obama that the surge forces would withdraw from Afghanistan by the fall of 2012 and the majority of US combat forces by 2014 risked undermining what progress had been achieved in the south. Even while some Afghans welcomed the announcement, it intensified fears among many others that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) would ultimately not be able to hold the cleared areas and that the population would be subject to Taliban retaliation. It thus further encouraged hedging strategies among the population, such as sending one son to sign up with the Taliban and another one to join the ANA. The announcement also generated an intense dilemma for ISAF centering on how many forces should be pulled out from the fragile south and deployed to eastern Afghanistan, where the Haqqani insurgency has been far more virulent and deadly than even the Kandahari Taliban with its Quetta shura leadership.12 The Haqqanis have been behind many of the spectacular attacks in Kabul, such as bombings of the Indian embassy and attacks on the Intercontinental Hotel and the US embassy. ISAF strategists fear that the ANA continues to be unable to take on the Haqqanis without major ISAF assistance. But major drawdowns in the south create a great risk that the Taliban will be able to reassert control over the cleared areas and the population will sour altogether on the Afghan government and international forces in Afghanistan. The failure to establish public safety and prevent violent street crime also pulls in the insurgents in multiple ways. On the one hand, insurgents often make tactical alliances with criminal groups, such as smuggling mafia or drug-trafficking organizations, to share in their profits and logistical networks. Conversely, many criminal groups— both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan—seek the legitimacy and glory that comes with calling themselves “the Taliban,” rather than referring to themselves as common criminals. At the same time, intense crime provides key opportunities for militant groups to penetrate communities and outperform the government by disbursing their forms of “justice” and order. Crime can be as much a threat to one’s safety and economic survival as outright military conflict. Afghans often comment that while they did not like the Taliban’s brutality, they appreciated the fact that under Taliban rule, one could travel from Kandahar to Kabul with a million rupees (the currency in Afghanistan at that time) and no one would steal any of the money nor would the travelers have to pay fees at illegal checkpoints.13 The ANP, while arguably becoming better at handling potential suicide-bomber threats at least in major cities—no doubt an impor-

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tant accomplishment as a result of greater training and mentoring by ISAF forces—is systemically unable to address and prevent street crime.14 Anticrime efforts remain largely confined to a few high-level anti–organized crime efforts, such as the Major Crime Task Force and the Law Enforcement Professionals mentoring program, but they have not achieved the intensity or focus needed to improve physical security from crime on the streets. Insecurity Regarding Basic Economic Livelihood Certainty of economic survival, food security, and economic development is the second key aspect of human security and a second key objective against which Afghans judge the quality of governance. And yet Western definitions of good governance in terms of opium poppy suppression are frequently at odds with these Afghan basic needs and conceptions of good governance. For much of the population, cultivation of poppy is the basic source of economic survival and food security and frequently the sole source of livelihood. Consequently, when in the absence of alternative livelihoods the international community defines good governance as reducing the area of poppy cultivation— whether through eradication or bans—it defines good governance in a way that, at least in the short term, is directly detrimental to the fundamental interests of the population. Nangarhar provides a telling example. For decades this province has been one of the dominant producers of opium poppy. But since 2007, as a result of the suppression efforts of the province’s governor, Gul Agha Shirzai—including bans on cultivation, forced eradication, imprisonment of violators, and claims that NATO would bomb the houses of those who cultivate poppy or keep opium—cultivation decreased to almost zero. This has been hailed as a major success to be emulated throughout Afghanistan. In fact, the ban greatly impoverished the Nangarhar population, causing household incomes to fall 90 percent for many and driving them into debt. As promised legal economic alternatives failed to materialize, many coped by resorting to crime, such as kidnappings and robberies, others by seeking employment in the poppy fields of Helmand, yet others by migrating to Pakistan, where they frequently ended up being recruited by the Taliban. The population became deeply alienated from the government, resorting to strikes and attacks on government forces, and districts that were severely hit economically, such as Khogiani, Achin, and Shinwar, became no-go zones for the Afghan government

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and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although those tribal areas historically have been opposed to the Taliban, its mobilization efforts there have accelerated to an unprecedented degree. The locals began allowing the Taliban to cross over from Pakistan, and intelligence provision to Afghan forces and NATO almost dried up. Tribal elders who supported the ban became discredited, and the collapse of their legitimacy provided an opportunity for the Taliban to insert itself into the decisionmaking structures of those areas. Such previous bans in Nangarhar province, including in 2005, turned out to be unsustainable in the absence of legal economic alternatives, and poppy cultivation inevitably swung back—although the current ban has held for four years.15 The performance of the government, while pleasing the international community and hailed as an example of good governance, deeply discredited the central state in the eyes of the local population. Areas where alternative livelihoods efforts have been insufficient, such as in parts of Nangarhar or elsewhere in Balkh, have become politically restive and have experienced an intensification of conflict over land and water and access to resource handouts from the international community, with militias also going rogue and combating neighboring tribes and attempting to seize their land. These areas have experienced rebellions of young men against the local maliks who support poppy eradication, physical attacks on eradication teams, intense Taliban mobilization, and increased flows of militants into and through Nangarhar province from Pakistan.16

Outside Intervention Policies and Governance-Building Efforts Apart from defining governance in various functional realms in ways that contradict Afghan perceptions of legitimacy, the international community’s statebuilding and governance-improvement efforts have been plagued by other challenges and contradictions. Isolation from Local Populations and Limited Understanding Counterinsurgency and good governance efforts in Afghanistan have been plagued by insufficient understanding on the part of outsiders of the complex and fluid Afghan environment. The difficult questions of

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how much force protection is appropriate for the military and the civilians and how much interaction (and of what kind) is permissible between the international community and the Afghan population have tended to be resolved in the direction of greater protection requirements and a thin amount of direct exchanges between the internationals and the locals. Locked up at the military bases and headquarters of the provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), which constitute the development arm of the military effort, the internationals have been excessively dependent on selected Afghan interlocutors, such as government officials or powerbrokers, for much of their understanding of the local dynamics. The reliability of these Afghan interlocutors of the international community, however, has often been problematic. Frequently not able to comprehend, or unwilling to deal with, the deeper socioeconomic and political problems in the areas of their responsibility, they are prone to providing skewed intelligence, sometimes deliberately designed to maximize their power and profit. To the extent that international forces have ventured out among the population, they often have focused on very narrow intelligence gathering, such as tactical information on the Taliban, without generating a broad socioeconomic, political, and ethnic understanding of the conditions in each locality. Lack of Clarity Regarding Definition of the Mission Both the US government and other members of the coalition have struggled with how to define the mission in Afghanistan. For the international allies, the question has been whether to define the mission as a peacekeeping operation (which many choose to do despite the level of insecurity in the country) or a counterinsurgency and counterterrorism mission. For the United States, the question has been whether to define the objective as statebuilding that results in a stable central Afghan governing entity or as limited counterterrorism. At times, the George W. Bush administration included democracy and women’s rights in its objectives, issues that have been significantly less emphasized by the Barack Obama administration. Moreover, even when counterterrorism was determined to be the primary objective, the question remained whether an off-shore, air-based counterterrorism approach could be effective without a statebuilding component. The counterterrorism aspect of the strategy also has been complicated by the inability to decide whether the focus of counterterrorism efforts should be al-Qaeda solely or if the Taliban should be treated as an equally hostile entity.

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These two competing definitions of objectives dictate very different strategies, force postures, and civilian components of the strategy, such as development. They are premised on very different behavior on the part of the Afghans and create different expectations in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan. They also generate different expectations in the domestic constituencies of governments that are contributing forces to the international coalition. Thus the vacillation among these two competing definitions of US objectives in Afghanistan has greatly complicated the campaign there as well as limited the amount of resources that the United States and its ISAF allies have been willing to dedicate to the effort. The Obama administration inherited the war at a time when the military situation on the battlefield was going poorly and the quality of Afghan governance was progressively deteriorating. Afghanistan was experiencing the greatest insecurity and corruption since 2001. From the moment it took over, the Obama administration struggled to resolve the question of counterterrorism from the air versus statebuilding, and with the major domestic political ramifications at home regarding whether to intensify US involvement, including, crucially, an increase of the US military component, or to dramatically scale down the mission. The administration ultimately attempted to define the mission as essentially one of counterterrorism in order to satisfy the American public, especially the administration’s Democratic base, which was becoming increasingly opposed to the war. But that message failed to resonate with the Afghan population. To pressure the Afghan government to step up to the challenge and “Afghanize” the war (so as to avoid bogging down the United States in “another Vietnam”), the Obama administration also imposed a timeline on how long the US military surge would last. But the imposition of the timeline has not induced Afghan government officials to reduce corruption and improve governance. Instead, it has jeopardized the military gains of the surge and contributed to a sense among the Afghans that the United States may not succeed in the effort and may abandon them, thus perpetuating and intensifying the kind of Afghan behavior that privileges short-term horizons and efforts to maximize power and profit as quickly as possible. These two competing concepts, counterterrorism versus statebuilding, also have led to acute uncertainty as to whether a negotiated solution with the Taliban is possible and appropriate.17 The uncertainty extends to whether the Taliban can be trusted to uphold any agreement and break with al-Qaeda, what the red lines for the US govern-

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ment are, whether or not and how Pakistan should be brought into the negotiations, and whether negotiations and reconciliation should involve only luring individual fighters away with economic incentives, peeling off tribes, or actual strategic negotiations with the Taliban.18 Nor has it been fully resolved whether the “reconciled” peeled-off groups would be given jobs and sent back to their villages, or rearmed under the various militia programs taking place in Afghanistan and sent back to fight the Taliban. The question of whether to engage in strategic negotiations with the Taliban was all the more sensitive for the United States since it had previously vigorously opposed Pakistan’s series of negotiations with Pakistani-Taliban groups and their affiliates. Unlike Britain, which as early as 2005 embraced negotiations as an important part of the overall strategy and progressively came to focus on a negotiated solution, the United States was reluctant to embrace negotiations until 2010. With US blessing, Afghan-led negotiations ultimately got under way in the spring of 2010. Since then the United States has taken a more active role in negotiations, at times making the governments in Kabul and Islamabad feel that they are being bypassed. Thus both Afghanistan and Pakistan have attempted to reassert greater control over negotiations, such as by arresting Taliban interlocutors, like Mullah Baradar, under the guise of counterterrorism, or leaking the identity of other interlocutors, like Tayyab Agha.19 Furthermore, international actors, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany, have tried to play a prominent role in the negotiations. The result has been the simultaneous undertaking of many different processes and initiatives, making an already opaque negotiating situation even murkier. The negotiations with the Taliban are also controversial within Afghanistan, with many groups fearing that their status would be severely jeopardized by any deal. Foremost among the wary are the northerners, especially Panshiri Tajiks, who have strong memories of Taliban oppression and who achieved unprecedented political, economic, and military power in Afghanistan in the post-2001 settlement. Many civil society groups, such as women’s organizations, also fear a settlement. But so do the Kandahari Durrani elites. So far, the Afghan-led and US independent negotiations have amounted mostly to talking about talking. Moreover, all the strategic questions—even when resolved at the policy level—become immeasurably more complex at the operational and implementation level.20

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Shortcuts on the Battlefield: Militias by Any Other Name The time limit on US combat troop deployments and the corollary constraints, born in part out of the global financial crisis and its effects on the United States, on the transfer and funding of resources, have also complicated the effort to “Afghanize” the war. Afghanization has been supposed to proceed by speeding up the building of Afghan institutions, such as the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. Although the police are highly underperforming, rapacious, and corrupt and require extensive training and mentoring, the training has nonetheless been cut from eight weeks to six weeks under the socalled Focused District Development program. The police have been also defined as essentially a light version of the military, to be used for counterinsurgency purposes and public safety, instead of an entity designed for fighting crime, a key grievance of the Afghan population. Although intensified US training has improved the quality of the police, even their elite unit, Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), has at times fallen short of the hoped-for results. The Afghan National Army, which has received the most intense training focus from ISAF, has made the greatest strides. Not only has it grown in size, but also its quality has improved. The remaining period until 2014 will show the capacity of the ANA to tackle the Taliban and other forms of insecurity. But even the ANA hardly represents a clearcut success. Worrisomely, it appears that it is deeply riven by ethnic factions, not to mention the fact that most of its high-level commanders continue to be northerners and that southern Pashtuns exhibit little interest in signing up for even rank-and-file positions. Thus there is a real danger that the ANA may fracture along ethnic lines and around particular commanders when the foreigners leave. The difficulties in standing up Afghan security institutions rapidly and in securing even the key eighty high-priority districts have led to yet another shortcut, repeated throughout the effort since 2001: standing up militias under various names.21 Often, however, the militias have proved unable to prevail against the Taliban, undermining the effort to build up a viable and accountable Afghan state. Inspired by the “Anbar Awakening” in Iraq, whose Sunni militias, along with the US military surge, were a crucial part of bringing down al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and decreasing the intensity of the civil war, the Afghan “militias” are supposed to increase security in areas where the presence of the ANP, ANA, and ISAF has been limited to

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nonexistent, and to supply higher-quality intelligence given their superior knowledge of the local environment. With ISAF denying that the program amounts to a militia effort (calling the units everything else but militias and insisting that the program is based on Afghan traditions, such as arbakai), the latest version is called the Afghan Local Police (ALP). It is slated to generate at least 30,000, and perhaps as many as 60,000, recruits. The effort is nothing new: the Soviets in the 1980s resorted to raising tribal militias when they realized that they were not winning in Afghanistan and used the militias as part of an exit strategy. Indeed, Afghans overwhelmingly associate the militia program with the Soviets’ defeat and see it as yet another signal of the United States preparing to leave without a stable order in place.22 Since 2002, various versions of the militia option have existed, such as the Afghan Auxiliary Police, the Afghan Public Protection Program, the Village Stabilization Program, and the Community Defense Initiative, also known as the Local Defense Initiative in some areas. In some of these efforts, the selfdefense forces are not supposed to be paid; but many of them insist on some sort of payment, so the nonpayment rule is often adjusted.23 A great deal of skepticism is warranted about such efforts.24 Great variations in the quality of the ALP effort and its long-term consequences are to be expected. Further, it is doubtful that the militias can reliably accomplish the tactical objective of effectively fighting the Taliban, given that they are often weak and lack resupply and support if they come under overwhelming Taliban attack. For example, when the Afghan Public Protection forces ran out of ammunition in Wardak as a result of lack of support from the Ministry of Interior and shed their uniforms to avoid being targeted by the Taliban, all the US military supervisor of the program could offer was the encouragement “to put on a brave face and look like they have ammo.”25 Tribal structures in much of Afghanistan have been deeply damaged, and local communities often are unable to resist the Taliban physically. Thus the Afghans frequently hedge their bets by paying part of their income—including from ISAF—to the Taliban as “protection” from its attacks. Indeed, such hedging is typical of Afghan history, with local warlords, khans, and tribes siding and making peace with those they sense will prevail in a conflict, and then unhesitatingly breaking deals if the situation on the battlefield changes. Sometimes, the accommodation between the militias and the Taliban even results in temporary improvements in security in a given locale, such as along isolated roads, and the community welcomes it. Logar, where such an initiative

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is currently under way, presents a good example.26 But the reduction in violence is often fleeting, lasting only until a deal collapses or the Taliban chooses to renege. At the same time, the presence of the militias greatly complicates statebuilding and governance-improvement efforts in Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly unpopular with Afghans of all ethnic groups, except the powerbrokers, who try to sell their mercenaries to ISAF for hefty payoffs, the militias have a long history of turning on local populations and engaging in predatory behavior toward local communities, including the theft of land and goods, extortion, and murder. In Kunduz, for example, after the militias defeated the Taliban in their villages, they started extorting the communities and demanding taxes for themselves.27 Not infrequently, they also turn on and fight each other, instead of the Taliban. One notorious case of such infighting took place in Uruzgan in 2010.28 Although the Afghan Local Police are supervised by the Ministry of Interior, the latter has often proved unable to control the self-defense forces. Under the leadership of Bismullah Mohammadi, the Ministry of Interior, long one of Afghanistan’s most corrupt and ethnically rift institutions, has also sought to legitimize and formalize other militias that, like the ALP, have not been vetted, raising worries about intensification of predatory behavior.29 Often, none of the vetting checks found necessary for the ANA and ANP, such as issuance of government identification cards, medical screening (including a drug test), and biometric screening, are in place for the ALP and other militias. Further, authority over ALP units resides with district police chiefs, a post that has often been associated with some of the greatest and most consistent corruption in Afghanistan. In the ALP’s case, three village elders are also supposed to vouch for each militiaman.30 Yet frequently a powerbroker controls the village elders, dictating his preferences in a way that escapes international scrutiny and results in extortion of rival villages. The internationals often lack sufficient understanding of these local conditions and mechanisms that are necessary for effectively controlling the militias. The militia program can also easily inflame ethnic tensions. An official of the National Directorate of Security in Baghlan, for example, told me that the militias were a good idea as long as they were Tajiks. He was not sure about arming the Pashtuns, however.31 Proposals to extend the role of the community development councils (CDCs) to oversee the local ALP units are also full of pitfalls. Potentially, such CDC involvement could be a useful mechanism for

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reducing the chance of the ALP abusing the local community. The CDCs have been one of the most effective and accountable mechanisms of community decisionmaking and involvement in local development. Widely representative of and enjoying credibility with the local community, the CDCs thus would seem to constitute an appealing oversight mechanism as well as a check on the district police chiefs. Yet encouraging the CDCs to monitor the ALP can backfire and subject the CDCs to untenable political pressures. One of the reasons why the CDCs have escaped the broader political manipulation and corruption that characterizes governance in Afghanistan is that they have been handling very small amounts of money—in the single thousands of dollars for a particular project. In a place flooded with millions of dollars in foreign aid and contracts, those amounts were too small to generate undesirable interest on the part of local powerbrokers in such projects. Even the Taliban has mostly not bothered to skim them. So the CDCs have largely been left free from political interference. However, if the CDCs are tasked with monitoring the ALP, both the Taliban and local powerbrokers may start taking far greater notice of them and attempt to manipulate or coerce them. If the community’s will as expressed through the CDCs prevails, a great achievement for governance and reduction in influence of the powerbrokers will be scored. If not, the ALP oversight role might easily spell the end of the CDCs’ effectiveness. Moreover, with effective CDC involvement, the oversight function would still extend only within a community— that is, within a village. Only the district police chief is tasked with making sure that the ALP not only stays true to the wishes of the community, but also does not extort rival communities. Even when these militias-by-any-other-name occasionally seem to deliver results,32 without close monitoring and the ability to disarm them and control them, they often go bad quickly. The 2010 experience with militias in Nangarhar illustrates this dynamic. The tribes in the Achin and Shinwar regions of Nangarhar province spontaneously raised anti-Taliban militias.33 Enthusiastically embraced by the US military command in Afghanistan and promised financial sponsorship, the tribes were incorporated into the Community Defense Initiative, another version of the local militia approach. But quickly, the militias turned on a rival tribe. Using US-provided weapons and claiming to have US backing, they “reclaimed” land disputed between the two tribes and triggered violence in large portions of the province. Thus even when the program is performing its function of bringing down

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the Taliban in a particular locale, it still leaves behind armed men who can and often do challenge the already-weak central government and prey on local communities. In complex ways, the militias are also linked to Afghanistan’s plentiful private security companies, many of which are involved in a variety of abuses, such as extortion, collusion with the Taliban, and ethnic and tribal discrimination. And many are linked to high-ranking government officials and their relatives, such as President Hamid Karzai’s cousins, Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak’s son, and Speaker of the Senate Sibghatullah Mujadeddi’s son. Although widely disliked by many Afghans and often accused of various kinds of misbehavior, the private security companies have also been indispensable in providing security for logistical supplies for ISAF, and protection for development NGOs and embassies.34 President Karzai’s decision in 2010 to dismantle all the private security companies, starting with the unregistered ones, thus came as a shock, and by March 2012 had not yet been implemented.35 Instead, under pressure from the US Congress, ISAF has sought to increase oversight of the private security companies and limit the amount of ISAF contract money they have been passing on to the Taliban to prevent its attacks on the supply convoys.36 Continuing Confusion over Whether to Tackle Corruption and How The lack of resolution of the debate over whether effective counterterrorism in Afghanistan requires statebuilding also has involved continuing policy oscillation over whether to combat corruption and how. Reliance on corrupt and abusive warlords for intelligence, logistics, and direct counterterrorism operations often comes at the price of ignoring governance issues. Some of the most notorious powerbrokers, such as Ahmed Wali Karzai, Matullah Khan, and Gul Agha Shirzai, know how to get things done to facilitate the operations of the international community in Afghanistan. The internationals are often too isolated behind the Hesco gravel bags at their compounds to be aware of how rapacious and discriminatory some of their key Afghan interlocutors have been, or just choose to ignore their problematic aspects. Especially early on, the Obama administration accorded greater importance to fighting corruption in Afghanistan, building up various civilian structures, such as the Major Crime Task Force, and ultimately

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similar equivalent units within ISAF, such as its anticorruption task force, Shafafyat. But it often demanded reform with an intensity that ignored Afghan realities and political complexities—a system in which the highest government officials as well as the lowest, and extending to line ministries, banking centers, and most international contracts, are pervaded by corruption.37 The Obama anticorruption campaign thus secured dramatic promises from President Karzai to tackle corruption, with little actual follow-up. Moreover, the lack of prioritization as to what corruption needs to be addressed first and definitively, often ignores the political debts President Karzai owes and his internal entanglements and dependencies. Karzai thus often seeks (and many times succeeds) to reverse the anticorruption efforts, such as indictments of powerful corrupt officials or the development of anticorruption and anticrime institutions that the internationals are trying to stand up.38 But as the Obama administration decided to scale down its military presence in Afghanistan, US officials started vacillating once again in their determination to take on corruption. Many in the US government have begun to argue that tackling corruption is a luxury the United States can no longer afford; instead it needs to prioritize stability. This school of thought holds that limiting the military mission in Afghanistan mostly to remotely delivered airborne counterterrorist strikes could permit working through the local warlords and powerbrokers, instead of being obsessed with the means they used to acquire their power and their criminal entanglements and discriminatory practices.39 Meanwhile, absent a coherent policy on corruption, the Obama administration and ISAF have failed to develop mechanisms and structures to work around and marginalize the problematic powerbrokers and often continue to be dependent on their services. As a high-ranking ISAF official in Kandahar told me in the fall of 2010, “In the current struggle for Kandahar, our nightmare is having to take on the Taliban and Wali [the then-alive Ahmed Wali Karzai] at the same time. But we understand that he has alienated some people in Kandahar.” He then went on to enthusiastically describe how thencolonel Abdul Razziq—a notorious powerbroker and smuggler from Spin Boldak—recently successfully cleared Mahlajat, a troubled subdistrict of Kandahar City, of the Taliban, “something even the Soviets couldn’t do.” 40 ISAF has since brought Razziq to Arghandab and other areas of Kandahar to conduct military operations there and he has been named police chief in Kandahar. A former high official of the US provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar explained the difficulties the international community has faced when trying to impose

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red lines on powerbrokers such as Razziq: no undermining of provincial and district officials and no interference with the Peace Jirga (a body established by President Karzai to set up the broad framework for reconciliation with the Taliban) and parliamentary elections. “But very quickly they violated all of the red lines we gave them. But they are effective in getting things done. We can’t go after them at the same time as we are fighting the Taliban. When the Taliban is defeated, the Afghans will take care of the powerbrokers themselves.” In short, the commitment of the United States and international community to good governance and the tackling of corruption has been deeply conflicted. All too often, the internationals’ commitment to good governance has appeared troublingly inconsistent and halfhearted to Afghans. The massive infusion of tens of billions of foreign aid into Afghanistan has also generated its own corruption.41 Large amounts of the aid money appear to have been siphoned off by clever powerbrokers.42 At other times, these financial flows have strengthened existing powerbrokers who can get their hands on the money and who have developed vested interests in preventing others and the population at large from accessing these financial flows.43 Some of the contract wars in places like Kandahar have been actual wars, with rival businessmen linked to prominent tribes and powerbrokers, such as the Popolzais and Ahmed Wali Karzai on the one hand and the Barakzais and Gul Agha Shirzai on the other, physically shooting each other to get access to the contract money and setting up coercive monopolies under the guise of business associations to control the rents.44 At other times, the aid flows have given rise to new “khans,” further undermining both the traditional institutions as well as the official government that the international community has struggled to stand up. Many have financially profited from the insecurity that generates demands for private security companies and militias and that prevents effective monitoring.45 The international community’s strategy has thus oscillated between tolerating corruption for the sake of other goals—with the justification that Afghans are accustomed to corruption anyway—or confronting it head on, but with little effectiveness. A constant challenge and dilemma has been whether to provide money through the Afghan government “on budget,” or directly from the international community to “the people.”46 Channeling outside financial aid through the national government is highly desirable, since it can increase fiscal capacity of the state and link the population more closely to the state, which builds accountability.47 Yet the Afghan government at its various levels has turned out to be too corrupt and too lacking in capacity to process the

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money (at least what has been left after the international community’s “overhead” deductions). Bypassing the national government and channeling money directly or through NGOs has resulted at times in the money reaching the ground faster (though not necessarily in a less corrupt manner). But it also has undermined the government’s authority and capacity and often has strengthened local powerbrokers. At the July 2010 donor conference in Kabul, President Karzai won a pledge from the international community that at least 50 percent of all economic assistance would be channeled through his government within two years, while the United States announced it now believed it had developed a certification process to determine which Afghan ministries were qualified to receive US assistance directly.48 Ignoring corruption is often justified as prioritizing stability, but since corruption and the lack of rule of law are key mobilizing mechanisms for the Taliban and sources of Afghans’ anger with their government, it is doubtful that stability can be achieved without addressing at least the most egregious corruption. Yet the system is so pervasively corrupt and so deeply and intricately linked to key structures of power and networks of influence that some prioritization of anticorruption focus is required. Although the internationals currently do not have the capacity to do without the powerbrokers, they can mitigate at least their most detrimental behavior, such as systematic discrimination against particular tribes. Anticorruption efforts should focus on limiting tribal or ethnic discrimination in access to jobs, especially in the ANA and ANP, and on expanding access to markets and contracts. A corollary of limiting ethnic discrimination within the security services is making sure that particular ethnic groups or people from particular regions who do not have access to influential powerbrokers in the higher-level commands are not selectively posted to very violent areas for too long without being rotated out; and also that command levels are not dominated by a particular ethnic group, such as the Tajiks, and that salaries and leaves are equally distributed by superiors.49 Additionally, it is critical to focus on corruption that undermines the emergence of the already-fragile markets in Afghanistan. Such severely detrimental corruption includes ever-proliferating unofficial checkpoints and ever-escalating bribes to be paid at the checkpoints, corruption in the banking sector, such as the theft at the Kabul Bank that threatened to unravel Afghanistan’s entire banking sector, and corruption in line ministries wherein a bribe is paid and yet the service is still not delivered and the bribe has to be paid several times over.50

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Finally, efforts to undermine effective local officials should not be tolerated. The international community should use the problematic powerbrokers as little as possible and only as last resort. The damage the powerbrokers can inflict on the international community’s efforts may well necessitate “having them in the tent rather than trying to pull the stakes off the tent on the outside,” as an ISAF official put it. But if the powerbrokers bring down the tent from the inside by their rapacious behavior, the statebuilding effort will be equally ineffective. There is a real cost to prioritizing the anticorruption campaign as opposed to combating corruption of any sort in a blanket way. The prioritized approach requires an intelligence picture that the international community does not have. And it can again expose the international community to the risk of being seen as inconsistent and embracing double-standards. But with the continuing dependence on problematic interlocutors, such prioritized focus is perhaps the best the internationals can currently hope to accomplish. Emphasizing all corruption equally will likely run up against the political dependencies of the current Afghan government and motivate it to do nothing on corruption to avoid rocking the boat.51 However, whatever red lines the internationals set for the powerbrokers, the internationals need to be prepared to uphold these lines and take punitive actions if the powerbrokers violate them. The internationals thus should only set as red lines for President Karzai and for the powerbrokers those that they actually have the will and capacity to enforce. A consistent failure to act against behavior designated as intolerable only undermines the reputation and effectiveness of the international community. Direct Efforts to Improve Governance Even to the extent that combating corruption in Afghanistan has at times been determined to be a key objective of the US government and the international community, the international community has struggled to devise effective mechanisms to accomplish this objective. Believing that the George W. Bush administration let President Karzai off the hook for corruption and government malfeasance, the Barack Obama administration arrived at the White House with a determination to pressure Karzai into changing his behavior or marginalize him so that he would not be reelected in the 2010 presidential elections. But the pressure did not pay off: President Karzai still won the elec-

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tion through fraud and by co-opting various powerbrokers and promising them government appointments or behind-the-scenes influence. Nor did he change his behavior and propensity to tolerate corruption, despite overt promises to the contrary. Subsequent public criticism from the United States also failed to increase Karzai’s motivation to tackle corruption and improve governance. Nor did it succeed in getting Karzai to remove the most problematic powerbrokers and government officials from positions of influence. Having been conditioned both by his early experiences of observing tribal politics in Kandahar and by the internationals’ early reluctance to take on the warlords, President Karzai has chosen instead to shuffle the problematic powerbrokers around Afghanistan’s various ministries and provinces. Instead of improving governance and satisfying Washington’s demand, the Afghan president has become deeply antagonistic toward and distrustful of the United States while feeling all the more beholden to various Afghan powerbrokers. Rather than encouraging Karzai to become a more reliable partner of the international community, the overt pressure from Washington has increased his paranoia, his reliance on a progressively smaller and smaller clique of advisers, mainly his immediate family,52 and his fundamental distrust of his international partners.53 A subsequent softer approach to Karzai, adopted by Washington in the spring of 2010, did not succeed in assuaging his distrust of the internationals, and also created the impression that the international community was caving into Karzai’s antics.54 Indeed, a fundamental discrepancy in mutual understanding of what fostering good governance means continues to exist between the international community and President Karzai. Washington and the internationals define good governance as building effective and corruption-free institutions and bureaucracies. President Karzai, however, focuses on the weakness, not the lack of accountability, of the central state and defines improving governance as expanding and deepening the Kandahari Durrani power structures and his personal network while infusing those two endeavors with a national image.55 Thus, instead of caving to Western pressure, the Arg Palace (the presidential seat in Kabul) has responded with various counterstrategies, such as blaming others for Afghanistan’s problems, including international observers and participants for perpetrating fraud in the presidential elections; attacking the international community and repeating various antiforeigner conspiracy theories believed by Afghans; threatening actions directly contradictory to the war effort,

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such as Karzai suggesting that he would join the Taliban if the foreigners continued to put pressure on him, or shutting down private security companies on which the international community is dependent for logistics and security; and seeking to divide the international community into adversaries and allies, while courting new friends, such as Russia and Iran.56 Frustration with Karzai and a lack of progress in pressuring Kabul to improve governance resulted in the internationals’ embrace of a “going local” approach to governance. Instead of seeking to work through the central government, the international community came to focus on local officials and traditional local governance mechanisms, such as shuras (local councils of tribal elders). Given Afghanistan’s traditionally weak center and highly decentralized power arrangements, such a policy made sense.57 Among the mechanisms created under this new approach were the Independent Directorate for Local Governance,58 which soon became co-opted by Kabul and run by a Karzai loyalist, Jelani Popal; and the Afghan Social Outreach Program (ASOP), which has sought to generate village- and district-level governance, including in highly insecure areas, by paying local tribal elders to form shuras. For the latter, the hope was that the outreach structures could also be used more directly in the counterinsurgency effort.59 A corollary to going local has been an effort to rapidly dispatch district officials and local representatives of line ministries to areas cleared from insurgents through the military surge. Nonetheless, the same deficiencies that plagued local administration prior to the surge continue to plague it after the surge: local officials are still completely dependent on Kabul for their budgets in the highly centralized system that Afghanistan adopted in 2004 (even though President Karzai is often disparaged as a weak mayor of Kabul).60 Local officials—be they ex-patriots parachuted to Afghanistan from abroad or local Afghans—also often have little knowledge of local conditions, limited willingness to spend time in the violent districts, and limited acceptability to local communities or powerbrokers.61 The experience of Kandahar’s Tooryalai Wesa, as governor of the province, is just one of many examples. Wesa was brought back to Kandahar from Canada, but Kandahar’s powerbrokers, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, continued to maintain authority and ran circles around the governor. Other local officials, even while liked and embraced by the international community, such as Abdul Jabar, who was Arghandab’s district governor in 2010 before he was killed, subsequently turned out to be deeply corrupt, involved in criminal activi-

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ties, such as skimming large sums of money from foreign aid, and even in cahoots with the Taliban.62 Many of the shuras embraced by the international community have not accurately and equitably represented local communities either. They too have often lacked the capacity to address governance problems and have been dominated behind the scenes by problematic powerbrokers.63 Rather, just like district government officials, the shuras need to be constantly supervised by the internationals to ensure that they fully reflect the various factions and voices of the community. But the influence of powerbrokers as well as Taliban assassinations of tribal elders often discourage such broad representation. Some of the shuras created under ASOP failed to perform altogether and only served as a way for local strongmen to extract money from the international community. Even local leaders who have performed well have faced great challenges. The international community has attempted to reward such well-performing local leaders by channeling money and influence through them. But as the tensions between President Karzai and the international community escalated during the Obama administration, such direct international endorsement has at times become a kiss of death for the local officials, causing Karzai to see them as a threat and to attempt to marginalize them or remove them from office.64 Perhaps the most successful model of local governance has been the so-called community development councils, established under the auspices of the National Solidarity Program (NSP). Inspired by a similar program in Indonesia, the CDCs were instituted in Afghanistan in the early 2000s by then–minister of finance Ashraf Ghani. Designed to distribute small grants to village-level communities, the program has required participation of the entire community in decisions regarding development projects and their execution as well as that the local community contributes some of its resources to the project. Yet the CDCs too have faced challenges and limitations. One of the reasons they escaped the corruption and rent extraction problems that have plagued larger aid programs and contracts has been that the sums transferred have been relatively small. Consequently, many powerbrokers have not bothered to muscle onto the projects. Yet if such administration and policy designs were to be scaled up, they might well lose some of the representation, oversight, and joint community responsibility and could attract detrimental attention from rapacious powerbrokers. Already, insecurity has jeopardized some of the CDCs, with the Taliban demanding a cut from CDC funds to sup-

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port projects in areas with a strong Taliban presence, such as Ghazni province. But these “taxes” to the Taliban shrank some of the resources to the point that the CDC programs could not be implemented. When approached for supplemental funds, the central government has mostly insisted that the local community either expel the Taliban, provide intelligence on it, or dip into its own pockets to take care of the financial shortfall. The CDC representatives have refused to undertake the anti-Taliban measures and have maintained that since it is the responsibility of the government to defeat the Taliban and provide security, Kabul should pay for the Taliban tax. Moreover, many of the governance and economic development problems, such as regional water management and electrification, require decisionmaking and coordination at cross-provincial levels and simply cannot be addressed locally.65 Thus, although the focus on local governance is appropriate because it is organic to Afghanistan’s traditional political arrangements and is the way most Afghans experience the government, it can only supplement national governance, not cover its deficiencies. The Love That Money Can’t Buy: Economic Stabilization Programs Linked to the ever-shifting debate about whether the international mission in Afghanistan is one of counterterrorism or statebuilding, economic development efforts by the international community have been plagued by a similar vacillation between two competing understandings of their purpose. Is the purpose of the economic projects to buy off the population and wean it off from the insurgents, or to produce long-term sustainable development? The buyoff concept has included so-called quick-impact projects carried out by the US military with money from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) or through the provincial reconstruction teams 66 as well as so-called economic stabilization projects, also known as the District Delivery Program or District Stabilization Framework, carried out by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The latter were designed as shortterm cash-for-work programs, lasting weeks or at best months. Their goals have been to keep Afghan males employed so that economic necessities do not drive them to join the Taliban, and to secure the allegiance of the population, who, ideally, will provide intelligence on the insurgents. Under this concept, US economic development efforts

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have prioritized the most violent areas. Accordingly, the vast majority of the $250 million USAID Afghanistan budget for 2010 went to only two provinces: Kandahar and Helmand.67 In Helmand’s Nawa district, for example, USAID spent upward of $30 million within nine months, in what some dubbed the “carpet bombing of Nawa with cash.”68 With Nawa’s 75,000 people, such aid amounts to $400 per person, while Afghanistan’s per capita income is only $300 per year. Although US government officials emphasize that these stabilization programs have generated tens of thousands of jobs in Afghanistan’s south, many of the efforts have been unsustainable short-lived programs, such as canal cleaning and grain storage and road building, or small grants, such as for seeds and fertilizers.69 Characteristically, they collapse as soon as the money runs out, often in the span of several weeks. Nor has adequate consideration been given to the development of assured markets; consequently, much of the produce cultivated under the USAID-contracted programs would possibly not find buyers and rot. There is also little evidence that these programs have secured the allegiance of the population to either the Afghan government or ISAF forces or resulted in increases in intelligence from the population on the Taliban.70 But as many of these programs were budgeted to run only through October 2010 or December 2010 (then to be replaced by long-term sustainable development, which the persisting insecurity often still prevents), their closure sometimes antagonized the population by disappointing raised expectations. Another $500 million of US aid was allocated for southern Afghanistan in 2011. Because of the complexity and opacity of Afghanistan’s political, economic, and contracting scene, many of these international programs have continued to flow to problematic, discriminatory, and corrupt powerbrokers, generating further resentment among the population and intensifying Afghanistan’s rampant corruption and lack of accountability. At other times, they have spurred new tribal rivalries and community tensions.71 Nor have these programs yet addressed the structural deficiencies of the rural economy in Afghanistan, including the drivers of poppy cultivation. A microcredit system, for example, continues to be lacking throughout much of Afghanistan. In fact, many of the stabilization efforts, such as wheat distribution and grant programs, directly undermine some of the long-term imperatives for addressing the structural market deficiencies, such as the development of microcredit and the establishment of local Afghan seed banks and seed markets and rural

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enterprise and value-added chains. Shortcuts such as the so-called food zone in Helmand and similar wheat distribution schemes elsewhere in Afghanistan are symptomatic of the mode of minimal short-term economic and security payoffs (but substantial medium-term costs) with which the internationals have operated in Afghanistan. The result: persisting deep market deficiencies and compromised rule of law.72 There is a delicate three-way balance among long-term development, the need to generate support among the population and alleviate economic deprivation in the short term, and statebuilding. A counternarcotics “alternative livelihoods” program in Afghanistan provides a telling example. Aware of the deeply destabilizing effects of poppy suppression in the absence of alternative livelihoods and yet under pressure to reduce poppy cultivation, Helmand governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal, widely acclaimed as competent and committed, launched a wheat-seed distribution project during the 2008–2009 growing season. In order to encourage them not to grow poppy, farmers were given free wheat seeds. This program proved popular with the segments of the Helmand population who received the free wheat and the program was emulated throughout Afghanistan and continued in 2010. Poppy cultivation did decrease in Helmand in 2009, and many enthusiastically attributed the results to the wheat distribution program, rather than low opium prices. And yet there are good reasons to doubt the effectiveness of the program, at least with respect to development and even governance. Because of land density issues in Afghanistan, the lack of sustainability of the favorable wheat-to-opium price ratios under which the program took effect, and the limited ability of wheat cultivation to generate employment, wheat turned out to be a singularly inappropriate replacement crop.73 Indeed, much of the wheat seed ended up being sold in markets rather than sown. Due to the insecurity prevailing in Helmand at the time, the program was undertaken without any field assessment of what drives poppy cultivation in particular areas of Helmand and in Afghanistan more broadly74—a deficient policymaking process in which policy was developed without understanding of the causes of the problem it was trying to address. Yet because most people welcome free handouts, the program was popular. But it also became politically manipulated by local administrators and tribal elders who sought to strengthen their power. Although the program was deficient from a development perspective, it brought immediate political benefits to those who sponsored it, including the political machinery of President Hamid Karzai, who at that time was seeking reelection. Good governance was thus

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equated with the immediate handouts and their political payoff without regard for long-term economic development, best practices, and optimal decisionmaking processes. At the same time, the wheat program and other economic stabilization programs often set up expectations on the part of the population of free handouts from the central government and international community without being economically viable and sustainable in the long term and without requiring commitments from the local community. Thus, many of the CERP and stabilization programs have encouraged Afghans to expect payoffs for any activity consistent with the interests of the international community, even if the activity is not also in their own interest. The CDCs, on the contrary, have required strong community participation and commitments to the development projects. Modeled similarly, the approach of the Dutch PRT in Uruzgan (at least until the Netherlands withdrew its forces in 2010) was particularly effective in limiting both the locals’ expectations of free handouts and communal and intertribal tensions over the distribution of external assistance. The Dutch insisted that any economic project be sanctioned by the entire community and that the PRT would only contribute the resources or technical knowledge that the community lacked. Thus the community had to identify and carry out all that it could execute in the project on its own, and the Dutch PRT and partner NGOs would only supply the rest.75 Despite such examples, political pressures from the bottom up continue to reinforce ISAF’s predilection for the short-term quickimpact projects. Sustainable development requires a lot of time, but the Afghan population has been highly impatient to see some minimal improvements and often has demanded handout programs without regard for long-term sustainability and desirability.76 At least some Afghan government officials, however, have become dissatisfied with the short-term cash-for-work programs and are demanding that foreign aid be instead structured as capacity-building efforts and longterm development projects. Yet the persisting, if substantially reduced, insecurity even in highprofile focus areas, such as Marja and Arghandab, can threaten the limited short-term “stabilization” programs. The Taliban has strongly intensified its campaign to assassinate Afghan government officials, international contractors and NGOs, and their Afghan counterparts who are cooperating with ISAF or the Kabul government; and both the implementers and Afghan beneficiaries of these programs have been killed. This intimidation campaign has scared off some Afghans from

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participating in the programs and may again result in local Afghan officials and internationals once more locking themselves up in their compounds as they did before the surge.77 US and ISAF officials emphasize that in cleared areas in the south shops have reopened on the streets and bazaars seem livelier. Yet Afghan shopkeepers often say that they are trying to make as much money as possible in a short window of opportunity, because they expect security to deteriorate again and they may then lose all business opportunities.78 Thus, even for these stabilization programs, security is a critical prerequisite. A major withdrawal of US forces from the south to insert them into the troubled east may jeopardize all the fragile and costly improvements in the south.

Conclusion Poor governance from the center and within the periphery has enabled the Taliban insurgency to once again gain traction with the Afghan population since the early 2000s. The key governance deficiencies that matter most to the population are lack of physical security from politically motivated violence and crime, lack of food security and social advancement possibilities in the context of poverty and widespread corruption, and lack of justice and dispute resolution mechanisms. Thus, governance in post-Taliban Afghanistan has been characterized by weakly functioning state institutions that are unable and unwilling to uniformly enforce laws and policies. Official and unofficial powerbrokers have positioned themselves to be able to issue exceptions from law enforcement to their networks of clients, who can thus capture high rents. The Taliban has stepped into this lacuna of state power and accountability and offered itself to marginalized communities and those unable to capture rents from the post-2001 windfalls, acting as a patron capable of redressing these deficiencies. At the same time, more often than not it has simply imposed its rule on the population through the barrels of its Kalashnikovs. The Obama administration came into office with the determination to make the war in Afghanistan and its spillovers into Pakistan a key focus of its foreign policy. But although it significantly increased the military, economic, and civilian resources available for the war compared to the Bush administration, it has found itself facing some of the same dilemmas and challenges as the Bush administration. First, insufficient security has prevented ISAF and other international civilians from interacting fully with the Afghans. Their isolation

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at the bases has resulted in reliance on problematic interlocutors for information and intelligence, which they often distort to serve their own interests. Second, both the United States and the international community have struggled to resolve whether the mission in Afghanistan is one of narrowly defined counterterrorism or should also include broader statebuilding and hence considerably more resources. Oscillation between the two definitions of the US-ISAF mission has both raised and disappointed the expectations of the Afghan population. Third, the limited willingness of the United States and its allies to devote the necessary resources for the larger statebuilding mission, including the military aspects of counterinsurgency, has led to various problematic shortcuts on the battlefield, such as reliance on manipulative powerbrokers and unreliable and abusive militias, both of whom undermine governance in Afghanistan. Washington is also continually conflicted over whether and how to tackle corruption. Fourth, efforts to work through the national government in Kabul or through local officials have so far failed to redress the governance deficiencies. And fifth, far from uniformly encouraging needed economic development, the large levels of economic aid flowing into Afghanistan without effective monitoring have generated their own problems. Often designed as short-term programs to buy love rather than catalyze sustainable development, the aid flows have encouraged some of the predatory and rapacious behavior that underlies bad governance in Afghanistan. Yet, in the context of the collapsing legitimacy of the national government, heightened ethnic tensions, and increasing influence of problematic powerbrokers, many Afghans also understand that it is the presence of the international forces that is keeping the country from exploding into a full-blown civil war.79 The consequences of such an outcome and more broadly of a failure to leave a stable government behind in Afghanistan would be dire for the United States. Although alQaeda’s capabilities in Afghanistan have been diminished, should parts of Afghanistan fall back to the Taliban—an inevitable outcome during a civil war under the current circumstances—violent jihadist groups would likely be able to reestablish significant presence in Afghanistan and once again plot dangerous terrorist attacks. Equally significant, an unstable Afghanistan with a strong jihadist terrorist presence would also further weaken the already-fragile Pakistan. Pakistan-oriented salafi groups could use Afghanistan as a safe haven for actions in Pakistan. Pakistan’s military and intelligences services, preoccupied with minimizing India’s influence in Afghanistan and with Pakistan’s

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perceived encirclement, would likely be even more reluctant to confront Pakistan’s own militant groups forcefully, jeopardizing the country’s internal security. As the 2014 withdrawal of the majority of US combat troops from Afghanistan looms ever closer, the question for the United States and the international community is whether they can establish the security and economic superstructures necessary to improve governance in Afghanistan. Underlying that question is a core uncertainty as to whether the internationals still can induce the Afghans to move away from immediate short-term power and profit maximization and resurrect their confidence in a better and stable future. Lessons for Broader Statebuilding The immediate and early postintervention period is the critical and optimal time to shape the political environment in the country. At

that time, local powerbrokers have the least certainty about the future and show the greatest restraint in directly or covertly challenging the intervener. Their networks of power have often been weakened by the collapse of the previous order and they have not had time to reconsolidate and reconstitute their new power networks. In the early postintervention period, the local population is also most willing to work with the intervener in setting up the new order. Under the best of circumstances, locals have disliked the previous political regime and are now hopeful about the future. At minimum, they will be uncertain about the power and capabilities of the intervener and fearful of actively resisting it. The longer the intervener waits to set up capable state structures, the harder the statebuilding effort becomes. Military opposition emerges, local powerbrokers’ networks are (re)established, and the population loses faith in the future. Undoing such negative trends becomes harder and harder as more time elapses. Remobilizing the support of the population becomes especially difficult. The window of opportunity closes rapidly, and at some point reversing the bad trends may become impossible. At the same time, the intervener’s domestic popular support for the mission will also have begun to dissipate. Immediately establishing law and order and physical security is essential in the post–military operations phase. In the absence of

physical security, standing up effective and accountable governing structures is very difficult. Both the powerbrokers’ and the population’s

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tendency will be to hedge on as many sides as possible, and their willingness to make the necessary long-term investments in setting up good governance and economic structures will be compromised. Establishing physical security involves deploying indigenous units capable of policing alongside the military-intervention forces, and standing up capable, vetted local police units as soon as possible. A critical component of establishing the physical security and public safety necessary so the population can engage in productive economic activity and have a stake in the new order is to suppress crime, including street crime. Building capable anticrime police forces is as important as building counterinsurgency or other military forces. An economy-of-force approach will complicate greatly the need to establish law and order. Both politically at home and militarily in the intervention environment, it is far easier for the intervener to come in with strong force levels and scale down the effort than to ramp it up later after security begins to deteriorate. However, the intervener should not be lulled into a false sense of optimism that the military victory took place rapidly and reductions in the deployed force can come quickly: the enemy will often hide among the population rather than fight, but later may initiate a guerrilla intimidation and assassination campaign that can paralyze the statebuilding effort. Thus the “holding” phase of the security effort is often far longer than initially assumed. Shortcuts to establishing physical security often fail to produce the desired immediate tactical benefits. Such shortcuts include

reliance on powerbrokers or the use of militias. They often generate major long-term problems for governance. Inevitably, the local powerbrokers and population will have a far better understanding of the political and economic power arrangements than the intervener. This is especially the case when

the intervener becomes locked up at military bases because of an inadequate security situation, further limiting the completeness of its intelligence picture. Accordingly, the intervener’s understanding of the situation needs to go beyond tactical intelligence regarding the insurgents or powerbrokers. It also needs to include sociopolitical issues, such as land and water distribution in rural societies and control over major industry assets in industrialized societies. Without such broad understanding, building effective and accountable political structures and promoting job-generating growth will be very hard.

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Thus it is especially important that civilian advisers, not simply military or military-civilian teams, get out among the population. Using short-term economic programs to buy love for the intervener and the new order rarely works. While establishing the secu-

rity, rule-of-law, and market structures necessary for long-term economic growth will give the population a stake in preserving the new order, showering a country with economic projects and grants without regard for the community’s participation and the projects’ sustainability only encourages corruption, undermines good governance, and motivates powerbrokers to treat the intervener as a source of rents. In fact, such an approach can generate its own violent conflict dynamic among rival powerbrokers over the international aid money. Managing expectations of the population is especially important.

It is vital to dispel expectations that massive political and economic progress will come quickly on the heels of the military effort. Insisting from early on that the population and its leaders need to bring about the new order and that the internationals can merely assist is important. The host population needs to be discouraged from the idea that the internationals have the capacity to dispense great economic and political progress without major contribution from the locals. Imposing a timeline on the length of the intervention and statebuilding effort involves acute dilemmas. A timeline is often necessary

for maintaining domestic public support in the intervening countries. But it only sometimes motivates the local population, government, and powerbrokers in the host country to dispense with free-riding on the intervener and make the necessary investments in providing for their own security and governance. Instead it can motivate the local actors to intensify detrimental profit and power maximization behavior before the intervener’s order and the associated rents collapse. Leaders of the intervener’s forces need to be acutely aware of the dual audiences they face with any statements they make. The

host-country population may be rural and isolated, but in today’s world it nonetheless has unprecedented access to information from around the globe. Defining a mission narrowly as counterterrorism, for example, may sit well with the domestic constituency of the intervener, but it may be deeply counterproductive for motivating the host

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population to participate in the statebuilding effort. Thus, while maintaining domestic public support in the intervening countries is critical, it is equally critical to always define the mission in a way that gives the host population a stake in supporting the effort. Isolation and marginalization of external spoilers needs to be a key part of the focus. Often this is even harder than marginalizing

internal spoilers. (See Chapter 2 on Pakistan.) The intervening countries need to be deeply aware of the limitations of their power. Externally driven statebuilding efforts can suc-

ceed and have succeeded. But the time and resource requirements for the interveners are often very large. It is comparatively easy for the interveners to destroy a regime. It is far harder for them to build a new political and economic order. In fact, unless the interveners have very large coercive power at their disposal and the capacity to maintain such power for a long time, they cannot build a new political order for another country or nation. They can only assist in the statebuilding effort. The ownership of and commitment to the effort must come principally from the local population.

Notes 1. See, for example, Seth G. Jones, “The Rise of the Afghanistan Insurgency: State Failure and Jihad,” International Security 32, no. 4, Spring 2008, pp. 7–40. 2. See, for example, Kathy Gannon, “Afghanistan Unbound,” Foreign Affairs, May–June 2004, pp. 35–46. 3. For the number of government administrative positions, such as key law enforcement positions, that have been sold for profit (as well as political favoritism), see, for example, Barnett Rubin, “Saving Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, January–February 2007, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62270/ barnett-r-rubin/saving-afghanistan. 4. For the macroeconomic effects of the narcotics economy, see Edouard Martin and Steven Symansky, “Macroeconomic Impact of the Drug Economy and Counter-Narcotics Efforts,” in Doris Buddenberg and William A. Byrd, eds., Afghanistan’s Drug Industry: Structure, Functioning, Dynamics, and Implications of Counter-Narcotics Policy (New York: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and World Bank, 2006), pp. 25–46, www.unodc.org/pdf/ afg/publications/afghanistan_drug_industry.pdf.

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5. For details on how the sponsorship of the poppy economy allows the Taliban to obtain this key political capital, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2009), chap. 5. 6. For the evolution of counternarcotics politics in Afghanistan, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The Obama Administration’s New Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan: Its Promises and Potential Pitfalls” (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, September 2009), www.brookings.edu/~/media /Files/rc/papers/2009/09_afghanistan_felbabbrown/09_afghanistan_ felbabbrown.pdf. 7. See, for example, David J. Kilcullen, “Terrain, Tribes, and Terrorists: Pakistan, 2006–08,” Counterinsurgency and Pakistan Paper Series no. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2009); Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, “No Sign Until the Burst of Fire,” International Security 32, no. 4, Spring 2008; and David Ignatius, “Britain’s Afghan Wisdom,” Washington Post, September 24, 2009. 8. A third strand of this argument and sometimes an altogether separate argument is that the international community (like the state in Afghanistan and Pakistan) does not have the capacity and cannot develop the capacity to overcome the structural and implementation obstacles to improving governance. 9. Afghanistan Study Group, A New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan, September 2010, www.afghanistanstudygroup.org /read-the-report. 10. See, for example, Dexter Filkins, “Despite Doubt, Karzai Brother Retains Power,” New York Times, March 30, 2010; Joshua Partlow, “Ahmed Wali Karzai, an Ally and Obstacle to the U.S. Military in Afghanistan,” Washington Post, June 13, 2010; Carlotta Gall, “In Afghanistan’s North, a Former Warlord Offers Security,” New York Times, May 17, 2010; and Joshua Partlow and Karin Brulliard, “U.S. Operations in Kandahar Push Out Taliban,” Washington Post, October 25, 2010. 11. See, for example, Jan Koehler and Christoph Zürcher, Conflict Processing and the Opium Poppy Economy in Afghanistan, PAL Internal Document no. 5, May 2005, www.gtz.de/de/dokumente/en-DrugsandConflict AfghanistanPAL.pdf; and David Mansfield and Adam Pain, “Counternarcotics in Afghanistan: The Failure of Success?” briefing paper (Kabul: AREU, December 2008). 12. For details on the Haqqani network and its history, see Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane, and Alissa Rubin, “Brutal Haqqani Network Bedevils U.S. Officials in Afghanistan,” New York Times, September 24, 2011. 13. Author interviews with Afghans in spring 2009 and fall 2010. 14. For some of the continuing problems with the ANP, see Ernesto Londono, “Afghan Forces’ Apathy Starts to Wear on U.S. Platoon in Kandahar,” Washington Post, June 20, 2010.

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15. For details, see Felbab-Brown, “The Obama Administration’s New Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan: Its Promises and Potential Pitfalls.” See also David Mansfield, “Responding to Risk and Uncertainty: Understanding the Nature of Change in the Rural Livelihoods of Opium Poppy Growing Households in the 2007/08 Growing Season,” report for the Afghan Drugs Inter-Departmental Unit, United Kingdom, July 2008. 16. David Mansfield, The Ban on Opium Production Across Nangarhar: A Risk Too Far, unpublished manuscript, September 2010. 17. For an overview of some of the key questions, challenges, and dilemmas, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Negotiations and Reconciliation with the Taliban: Key Policy Issues and Dilemmas” (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, January 2010), www.brookings.edu/articles/2010/0128_taliban _felbabbrown.aspx. 18. For a comprehensive analysis of previous reconciliation efforts as well as the current strategy to lure individual insurgents away with economic incentives, see Matt Waldman, “Golden Surrender: The Risks, Challenges, and Implications of Reintegration in Afghanistan” (Afghanistan Analyst Network, March 2010), http://aan-afghanistan.com/uploads/2010_AAN_ Golden_Surrender.pdf; Michael Semple and Fotini Christia, “Flipping the Taliban,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2009; Thomas Ruttig, “The Other Side: Causes, Actors, and Approaches to Talks” (Afghanistan Analyst Network, January 2009), http://aan-afghanistan.com/uploads/200907% 20AAN%20Report%20Ruttig%20-%20The%20Other%20Side.pdf; Antonio Guistozzi, ed., Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field (London: Hurst, 2009); and Elisabeth Bumiller, “U.S. Tries to Reintegrate Taliban Soldiers,” New York Times, May 23, 2010. 19. For details, see Kathy Gannon and Anne Gearan, “Hamid Karzai’s Office Scuttled Secret U.S.-Taliban Talks,” Associated Press, August 29, 2011. 20. For an excellent and fascinating account of the difficulties of translating formulated policy into programs and outcomes on the ground, see Ronald Neumann, The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan (Dulles: Potomac, 2009). 21. The “militia” program described here is separate from and in addition to the CIA’s Afghan paramilitary program to hunt down al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, the latter of which consists of “counterterrorism pursuit teams” comprising at least 3,000 fighters. For details on their effectiveness, see Craig Whitlock and Greg Miller, “U.S. Covert Paramilitary Presence in Afghanistan Much Larger Than Thought,” Washington Post, September 22, 2010. 22. Author interviews with Afghans from all walks of life about the militia program in Kandahar, Kabul, and Baghlan, September 2010. 23. See, for example, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “U.S. Training Afghan Villagers to Fight the Taliban,” Washington Post, April 27, 2010. 24. For a strong endorsement of the program, see, for example, Major Jim Gant, “One Tribe at a Time,” Small Wars Journal Blog, October 2009,

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www.stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/one-tribe-at-a-time-4-the-full-document -at-last. For various critiques, see, for example, Christian Bleuer, “Petraeus and McChrystal Drink Major Gant’s Snake Oil,” Ghosts of Alexander, January 18, 2010, www.easterncampaign.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/petraeus -and-mcchrystal-drink-major-gants-snake-oil. 25. David Axe, “Fourth Time the Charm for NATO’s Afghan Militia Plan?” World Politics Review, July 21, 2010. On the positive side, the Wardak Afghan Public Protection militias showed considerable restraint by staying out of local tribal disputes, such as between the Hazaras and the Kuchis over grazing lands. 26. Author interviews with maliks from Logar, September 2010. 27. See, for example, Dexter Filkins, “Afghan Militias Battle Taliban with Aid of U.S.,” New York Times, November 21, 2009. 28. Author interviews in Afghanistan, September 2010. 29. For contradictions with the effort to disarm illegal armed groups (DIAG), see Robin Edward-Poulton, DIAG Evaluation: Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups in Afghanistan (New York: United Nations Development Programme and Afghanistan’s New Beginnings Programme [ANBP], April 2009); and Simonetta Rossi and Antonio Guistozzi, “Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration of Ex-Combatants (DDR) in Afghanistan,” working paper (London: Crisis States Research Centre, June 2006). 30. Kim Sengupta, “Allies Target Lapsed Taliban as They Set Up Own Militia,” The Independent, October 25, 2010. 31. Author interview with a National Directorate of Security official, Baghlan, Afghanistan, September 2010. 32. For some of the at least temporary accomplishments of the militias, see, for example, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “U.S. Eager to Replicate Afghan Villagers’ Successful Revolt Against Taliban,” Washington Post, June 21, 2010. 33. Dexter Filkins, “Unofficial Afghan Militias Fighting the Taliban, with U.S. Help,” New York Times, November 22, 2009. 34. Dexter Filkins, “Convoy Guards in Afghanistan Face an Inquiry,” New York Times, June 6, 2010. 35. For details on the decision and subsequent negotiations between the international community and President Karzai to revoke the decision, see, for example, Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin, “Afghan Leader Admits His Office Gets Cash from Iran,” New York Times, October 25, 2010. 36. On the “one step forward, two steps back” US effort to monitor its contracting in Afghanistan, including of trucking contracts, see Karen DeYoung, “Corrupt Afghan Trucking for U.S. Military Probed by Congress,” Washington Post, September 15, 2011. 37. On the banking-sector corruption and Western anti–money-laundering efforts, see, for example, Matthew Rosenberg, “Corruption Suspected in Airlift of Billions of Cash from Kabul,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2010; and Greg Miller and Ernesto Londono, “U.S. Officials Say Karzai Aides Are Derailing Corruption Cases Involving Elite,” Washington Post, June 28, 2010.

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38. See, for example, Miller and Londono, “U.S. Officials Say Karzai Aides Are Derailing Corruption Cases Involving Elite.” 39. See, for example, interview with unnamed US officials in Greg Jaffe, “U.S. to Temper Stance on Afghan Corruption,” Washington Post, September 4, 2010; Greg Miller and Joshua Partlow, “CIA Making Secret Payments to Members of Karzai Administration,” Washington Post, August 27, 2010; and Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti, “Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.,” New York Times, August 25, 2010. 40. Author interview with an ISAF official, Kandahar, September 2010. See also Partlow and Brulliard, “U.S. Operations in Kandahar Push Out Taliban,” October 25, 2010. 41. As of January 2010 the United States alone had allocated more than $51 billion to Afghanistan, with more than half of this amount going to the Afghan National Security Forces. See Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), “Quarterly Report to Congress,” July 2010, p. 43, www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/Jul2010/SIGAR_July2010.pdf; and Kenneth Katzman, Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy (Washington: Congressional Research Service, 2010), pp. 77–78, www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL30588.pdf. In 2011 the plan was to increase the US contribution to $71 billion. See, for example, Brett Blackledge, Richard Lardner, and Deb Reichmann, “After Years of Rebuilding, Most Afghans Lack Power,” Washington Post, July 19, 2010. The majority of the aid goes to building Afghan security forces. 42. See, for example, Matthew Rosenberg, “Corruption Suspected in Airlift of Billions in Cash from Kabul,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2010. 43. See, for example, Dexter Filkins, “With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds Afghan Empire,” New York Times, June 5, 2010. 44. Following congressional inquiries into the corruption associated with the international contracts, the Shafafyat anticorruption task force is also supposed to tackle this type of corruption. See Carlotta Gall, “Kandahar: A Battlefield Even Before U.S. Offensive,” New York Times, March 26, 2010. 45. On the intensity of such “insecurity-pays” dynamics in central Afghanistan, see International Crisis Group, “The Insurgency in Afghanistan’s Heartland,” Asia Report no. 207 (Washington, D.C., June 27, 2011), www .crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-asia/afghanistan/207-the-insurgency -in-afghanistans-heartland.asp. 46. For the 2009–2010 financial year, 62 percent of foreign aid was directed to Afghanistan through the donor-managed external budget, while 38 percent was channeled to the Afghan government budget. See SIGAR, “Quarterly Report to Congress,” p. 52. 47. For such an argument, see, for example, Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 48. Karen DeYoung and Joshua Partlow, “Karzai Pledges Reforms in Exchange for International Backing at Afghan Conference,” Washington Post, July 20, 2010.

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49. All of these problems have troubled both the ANA and the ANP. Author interviews with ISAF officers and ANA and ANP rank-and-file recruits as well as officers, Afghanistan, spring 2009 and fall 2010. For regional balance problems in the ANA, see, for example, Elisabeth Bumiller, “Report Criticizes U.S. System for Evaluating Afghan Forces,” New York Times, June 28, 2010. For ethnic rifts in the ANA, especially at the command level, see International Crisis Group, “A Force in Fragments: Reconstituting the Afghan National Army,” Asia Report no. 190 (Washington, D.C., May 12, 2010), http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-asia/afghanistan /190%20A%20Force%20in%20Fragments%20-%20Reconstituting%20the %20Afghan%20National%20Army.pdf. For other performance problems, such as drug abuse, inability and unwillingness to operate independently with ISAF support, corruption, illiteracy, and attrition, desertion, and retention issues, see Elisabeth Bumiller, “Report Criticizes U.S. System for Evaluating Afghan Forces,” New York Times, June 28, 2010. 50. For details on the systematic and government-linked corruption at the Kabul Bank, see Dexter Filkins, “The Afghan Bank Heist,” New Yorker, February 14, 2011. 51. This is indeed the phrase that President Karzai supposedly used in a meeting with about sixty prominent maliks and businessmen in August 2010 to counter their demands that he undertake anticorruption measures in the line ministries in order to facilitate business. Author interview with one of the maliks who was part of the meeting at the Arg Palace, Afghanistan, September 2010. 52. For the deep linkages of President Karzai’s family to key economic activities in Afghanistan and his buildup of his family network as a preservation mechanism should the current political order collapse, see, for example, James Risen, “Karzai’s Kin Use Ties to Gain Power in Afghanistan,” New York Times, October 5, 2010. 53. Alissa Rubin, “Karzai’s Isolation Worries Afghans and the West,” New York Times, June 7, 2010. 54. On the evolution of the Obama administration’s policy toward President Karzai, see Helene Cooper and Mark Landler, “U.S. Now Trying Softer Approach Toward Karzai,” New York Times, April 9, 2010. 55. Author interviews with former high-ranking Afghan government officials, Washington, D.C., and Afghanistan, September 2010. 56. For some of such statements by President Karzai, see, for example, Joshua Partlow, Scott Wilson, and William Branigin, “White House Calls Karzai Accusations ‘Genuinely Troubling,’” Washington Post, April 2, 2010. 57. For an endorsement of such an approach, see, for example, Stephen Biddle, Fotini Christia, and Alexander Thier, “Defining Success in Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2010. 58. For an excellent and comprehensive overview of Afghanistan’s national and local government structures and international institutions in Afghanistan, see Colin Cookman and Caroline Wadhams, Governance in

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Afghanistan: Looking Ahead to What We Leave Behind, May 2010, www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/05/afghan_governance.html. 59. Ann Scott Tyson, “New Joint Effort Aims to Empower Afghan Tribes to Guard Themselves,” Washington Post, March 31, 2008. See also Carlotta Gall, “U.S. Hopes Afghan Councils Will Weaken Taliban,” New York Times, June 19, 2010. 60. Sarah Lister, “Understanding State-Building and Local Government in Afghanistan,” Working Paper no. 14 (London: Crisis States Research Centre, 2007), p. 4; Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, “The A to Z Guide to Afghanistan Assistance,” 2010, p. 74, www.areu.org.af/index.php ?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=17. See also Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung, “Afghanistan’s Karzai to Urge Caution as U.S. Pushes to Empower Local Leaders,” Washington Post, May 12, 2010. 61. See, for example, Karin Brulliard, “In Targeting Taliban Stronghold, U.S. Depends on Afghans’ Reluctant Support,” Washington Post, July 16, 2010. 62. Author interviews with Kandahar’s influentials and Afghan journalists, Kandahar, September 2010. On the problems with Marja’s district governor, Haji Zahir, see Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “‘Still a Long Way to Go’ for U.S. Operation in Marja, Afghanistan,” Washington Post, June 10, 2010. 63. For an excellent discussion, see, for example, Shahmahmood Miakhel and Noah Coburn, Many Shuras Do Not a Government Make: International Community Engagement with Local Councils in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: US Institute of Peace Press, September 7, 2010). See also Dexter Filkins, “Inside Corrupt-istan, a Loss of Faith in Leaders,” New York Times, September 4, 2010. 64. See, for example, Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin, “Graft-Fighting Prosecutor Fired in Afghanistan,” New York Times, August 28, 2010. 65. Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Stop Buying Off the Afghans” (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, May 11, 2010), www.brookings.edu/opinions /2010/0511_karzai_felbabbrown.aspx. 66. PRT leaders have the authority to disburse up to $25,000 for individual projects and up to $100,000 per month. 67. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “In Afghan Region, U.S. Spreads the Cash to Fight the Taliban,” Washington Post, May 31, 2010; Karen DeYoung, “Results of Kandahar Offensive May Affect Future U.S. Moves,” Washington Post, May 23, 2010. 68. Chandrasekaran, “In Afghan Region, U.S. Spreads the Cash.” 69. Author interviews with USAID, implementing-contractor, and NGO representatives, and Afghan government officials, maliks, and businessmen, in Kandahar and Kabul, September 2010. 70. See, for example, Andrew Wilder, “A ‘Weapons System’ Based on Wishful Thinking,” Boston Globe, September 16, 2009. 71. Chandrasekaran, “In Afghan Region, U.S. Spreads the Cash.” USAID also envisions spending about $140 million to help settle property disputes.

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That would be an immense and highly strategic accomplishment, yet it is a very difficult undertaking as it involves building a land cadastre in Afghanistan. 72. On details of the problematic and inadequate nature of the wheat distribution and similar programs, see, for example, David Mansfield, “Sustaining the Decline: Understanding the Nature of Change in Rural Livelihoods of Opium Growing Households in the 2008/09 Growing Season,” report for the Afghan Drugs Inter-Departmental Unit, United Kingdom, May 2009; Felbab-Brown, “The Obama Administration’s New Counternarcotics Strategy in Afghanistan”; and Joel Hafvenstein, “The Helmand Food Zone Fiasco,” August 26, 2010, www.registan.net/index.php/ 2010/08/26/helmand-food-zone-fiasco. 73. For details, see Felbab-Brown, “The Obama Administration’s New Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan”; Mansfield, “Responding to Risk and Uncertainty”; and Christopher Ward and William Byrd, “Afghanistan’s Opium Drug Economy,” Report no. SASPR-5 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, December 2004). 74. Author interviews with counternarcotics officials in southern Afghanistan and Washington, D.C., spring 2009. 75. Author interviews with the Dutch PRT members and Uruzgan government officials and NGOs, Uruzgan, spring 2009. 76. There are difficult choices to make in deciding between “quickimpact” but unsustainable projects on the one hand, or long-term development on the other, as seen, for example, in the complex decisionmaking regarding whether to bring power generators to Kandahar not only to satisfy the population but also to complicate the Taliban’s movements in the city and reduce crime, even though the generators will be dependent on an outside fuel supply or continue to await sufficient electricity while the Kajaki Dam and power lines are being completed. The latter approach is sustainable, but insecurity prevents the completion of the project. For details, see Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “U.S. Military, Diplomats at Odds over How to Resolve Kandahar’s Electricity Vows,” Washington Post, April 23, 2010; and Blackledge, Lardner, and Reichmann, “After Years of Rebuilding, Most Afghans Lack Power.” 77. Author interviews with USAID contractors, NGOs, and their Afghan counterparts in Kandahar and Kabul, September 2010. See also Chandrasekaran, “‘Still a Long Way to Go’ for U.S. Operation.” 78. Author interviews with Afghan shopkeepers, September 2010. 79. Based on author interviews with Afghans from all walks of life and various ethnic groups, Kandahar, Kabul, and Baghlan, September 2010.

Part 4 Conclusion

9 Where Do We Go from Here? Seyom Brown and Robert H. Scales

Attempts to distill lessons and legacies from the US regimechange interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq will be preoccupying historians, political scientists, and military strategists for decades to come. Accordingly, the present effort, published while the United States is still deeply embroiled in the conflict in Afghanistan and in the process of redefining its postmilitary involvement in Iraq, may seem premature. But those of us contributing to this volume, being policy analysts (also concerned citizens) engaged in the ongoing national discourse and debates, are not content to hold back our views until “all the evidence is in,” so to speak. Rather, we are committed to turning the debates as much as possible into thoughtful discourse, and to deepening that discourse so as to reduce the likelihood that future national security decisions will be made on the kind of shallow premises that were responsible for the various flawed undertakings exposed in the chapters of this volume. Flawed or efficacious, many of the US policies pursued in Afghanistan and Iraq are traceable to the trauma of September 11—a “black swan moment” in that it precipitated a new era that cancelled crucial assumptions in existing national security strategy while failing to replace them with new and credible ones. September 11 made it politically imperative for the nation’s leaders to respond angrily and with alacrity (consistent with our “Don’t just stand there; do something!” culture), but often without sufficient assessment of the required resources and long-term implications. 185

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Disagreement over the Lessons Although seeking lessons with policy implications, we prefer, as editors, not to pick and choose among the sometimes contradictory prescriptions our authors offer. We can, however, arrange their recommendations (and related prescriptions being discussed in the policy arena today) into contending schools of thought on “where do we go from here?” in US national security policy. Indeed, the lack of anything like an emergent national consensus on what should be the post–Afghanistan and Iraq national security policy is itself one of the principal legacies of the two interventions. Prepare for protracted irregular war. Centered primarily in the upper echelons of the Army and Marine Corps, and championed by those strategists who produced the new counterinsurgency manual, this school adheres to the belief that today’s conflicts in failed and failing states, and the venues they provide for anti-US radical movements and terrorism, will persist for generations. Thus Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom were not one-off affairs but harbingers of a long era of expeditionary deployments with troops trained and equipped for irregular warfare, dangerous peacekeeping, and stability and reconstruction missions. An essential part of the training program for such troops will have to be sociological—indeed anthropological—understanding of the culture, religions, and languages of the nations and ethnic communities around the world. Protect the homeland and bring back the troops. Strongly advo-

cated within the reserve components of the military, politically liberal groups on the left, and libertarians on the right, this school tends to regard US military deployments around the world as more often than not the problem (provoking hatred of the United States) rather than the solution to anti-US radicalism and terrorism. Moreover, it is argued, the United States, with more than enough problems at home to tend to, should dispense with the self-appointed mission of bringing peace, democracy, and prosperity to societies that cannot take care of themselves. Command of the global commons and “offshore balancing.”

Gaining prominence among Navy and Air Force strategists and academic “realists” opposed to neoconservative and neo-Wilsonian interventions on behalf of free markets and democracy, this view

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holds that US military superiority in the oceans, air, outer space, and cyberspace is the best way to protect both the homeland and the country’s commercial and geostrategic interests around the world. If some of the interests that are threatened lie within other countries, the military operations that may be required for their protection should be waged by US allies in these countries, with the United States providing air- and sea-delivered military support to the in-country operations—a strategy called “offshore balancing.” Most else, except perhaps quick-in and quick-out injections of special antiterrorist forces, is regarded as superfluous and too expensive. Get ready for futuristic war. Focusing on robotics, cyberwar, and space satellites (given the importance of the space environment for electronic communications), growing numbers of military technologists envision a fundamental melding of civilian and military assets, targets, personnel, and vulnerabilities in current and future conflicts. Not yet central to the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the emergent capabilities have nonetheless been increasingly employed in the form of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or “drones” for targeting and attacking terrorist enclaves. The implications for national security policy and military strategy, devotees of this school argue, are enormous, for they blur not only the distinction between combatants and noncombatants but also the distinction between war and nonmilitary means of coercion. Moreover, they tend to moot even the concept of asymmetric warfare, in that a state or political movement otherwise greatly inferior in the instruments of warfare, if it has among its members just a few brilliant information-technology geeks, can substantially “equalize” the balance of destructive and disruptive capabilities between the superpower and the minor power. An unprecedented top-to-bottom revision of grand strategy is overdue, this school contends. Marginalize military power; emphasize conflict resolution and global governance. Arguing that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq prove

that war has become a counterproductive and anachronistic method of protecting and advancing US interests and values, a growing consortium of public intellectuals, academics, and think tank analysts have been urging the adoption of a revised and “holistic” concept of national security. The new approach would privilege conflict resolution diplomacy and greater reliance on multilateral processes and institutions for dealing with the needs of failed and failing states and to pressure autocratic countries to democratize and respect basic human rights.

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Contain, deter, and be prepared to fight potential aggressor states. This school holds that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the

associated primacy accorded to counterinsurgency strategies and capabilities, have been, and should be treated as, anomalous diversions from the central concern of US national security policy: preventing aggression and power-plays by those powerful enough, and determined enough, to harm the security and well-being of the United States and its major allies. A nuclear-armed North Korea and a nuclear-arming Iran fit that category of threat. And China certainly has the wherewithal to pose an existential threat to Taiwan, to its rivals for resources in the East China and South China Seas, and even to the United States itself should Washington attempt to counter Beijing’s moves against its neighbors in the future. Nor can future clashes with a newly expansionist Russia be completely discounted. Accordingly, while not losing sight of the futuristic warfare threats and terrorist attacks that can come from diverse sources, US national security strategy and military planning, it is argued, must still give high priority to capabilities for containing, deterring, and (if deterrence fails) beating back “traditional” forms of aggression from such mainline adversaries.

A Constraining Legacy The wide disagreements in the United States about the lessons that should be drawn from the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions for future national security policy have the effect of limiting the choices that can in fact be made. For should in the world of practical policy implies can, and can, in our democracy, requires a broad consensus on the shoulds. The dissensus on the lessons—in other words, the inability of policymakers and the concerned public to converge on a set of foreign policy and national security policy prescriptions—is in itself one of the principal legacies, and probably the most important one, for it severely narrows the actual range of choice of future policy alternatives to those that don’t require broad public support, which means, in turn, no actions abroad that will incur large commitments of human and material resources. Especially at a time of financial stringency, and efforts to bring deficit spending under control, this translates into a lean defense budget—with cuts well over $500 billion in Pentagon spending over the coming decade—which further restricts the range of grand strategies that can be given serious consideration.

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This constraining legacy was reflected in the statement of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to his audience at the Military Academy at West Point as he approached the end of his tenure in office that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Already impacting US foreign policy and national security strategies, the “no more Iraqs and Afghanistans” syndrome has been evident in the Obama administration’s responses to the so-called Arab Spring upheavals in the Maghreb and Middle East since December 2010. Although the responses have varied—given the different situations in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria—they have been the same in one fundamental respect: there would be no US “boots on the ground.” If the situation did call for US military involvement to stanch or affect the outcome of violent conflicts in such countries, the instruments of choice for surveillance and the delivery of lethal strikes would be remotely commanded and piloted drones and standoff air-delivered or sea-based cruise missiles. The portent is for a divided US foreign policy elite, with the dominant faction, chastened by Iraq and Afghanistan, convinced that we’re not very good at nationbuilding, confronting an increasingly populist, “America-first” electorate—together in effect vetoing any national security policy and military posture that would reflect the ideas of the school of protracted irregular war. This would be a starkly ironic legacy of these conflicts that, having produced an adoption by the US military of a “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency strategy, dethroned those commanders who wanted to fight the last conventional war (à la the Gulf War)—ironic, in that with the revised doctrines, training routines, and equipment procurement criteria for the new counterinsurgency strategy now institutionalized and shaping the twenty-first-century military, such a military may be just the instrument the country does not want to employ. The more likely contenders for adoption as the country’s basic national security policy are, on the one hand, some combination of the muscular schools of futuristic warfare, command of the commons, and deterrence of aggressors, with occasional employment of commando-type special operations forces for quick-in, quick-out antiterrorist operations; and, on the other hand, a “strange bedfellows” combination of the school of neoisolationism (homeland security only) with the school of demilitarization of foreign policy. At the

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time of this writing—with the financial crisis being translated into major reductions in the federal budget—a minimally expensive military posture is in the offing and will likely constrain the choice of foreign policies. Of course, unpredictable events—characteristically the actions of others—will likely have as much, if not more, to do with which of these tendencies prevails. Absent such highly determinate events, however, the prospect in the years ahead is for profound national ambivalence with regard to the role of force in US foreign policy and the missions and structure of the country’s military.

Acronyms

ALP ANA ANCOP ANP ANSF AQI ASOP CDC CENTCOM CERP CLC COIN DIAG FATA GDP IAEA ISAF ISF JAM JSOC KDP MNF-Iraq NATO

Afghan Local Police Afghan National Army Afghan National Civil Order Police Afghan National Police Afghan National Security Forces al-Qaeda in Iraq Afghan Social Outreach Program community development council (Afghanistan) Central Command Commander’s Emergency Response Program Concerned Local Citizens (Iraq) counterinsurgency disarm illegal armed groups Federally Administered Tribal Area (Pakistan) gross domestic product International Atomic Energy Agency International Security Assistance Force (Afghanistan) Iraqi Security Force Jaish al-Mahdi (Iraq) Joint Special Operations Command Kurdish Democratic Party Multi-National Forces in Iraq North Atlantic Treaty Organization 191

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NGO NIE NSC NSP PRT PUK SOI UCMJ UNSCOM WMD

Acronyms

nongovernmental organization National Intelligence Estimate National Security Council National Solidarity Program (Afghanistan) provincial reconstruction team (Afghanistan) Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Sons of Iraq Uniform Code of Military Justice United Nations Special Commission weapons of mass destruction

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The Contributors

Stephen Biddle is senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. A member of the Defense Policy Board, he has served on strategic and military assessment teams for the US Commands in Iraq and Afghanistan. Biddle has held teaching and research posts at various universities, including Harvard and North Carolina, and was the Elihu Root Chair in Military Studies at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. His book Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle has won several major prizes. Seyom Brown is John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security at Southern Methodist University and senior adviser to the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brown has held senior research and analysis positions at the Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Belfer Center for Science and Technology at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The most recent of his twelve books on US foreign policy and international relations are Higher Realism: A New Foreign Policy for the United States and The Illusion of Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century. Dan Caldwell is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University. He has served on the faculties of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Brown University, the University 205

206

The Contributors

of California at Los Angeles, and Harvard University. Caldwell is the author and editor of numerous books on international relations and US foreign policy, including Vortex of Conflict: U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq; Seeking Security in an Insecure World; and Henry Kissinger: His Personality and Policies. Vanda Felbab-Brown is Fellow in Foreign Policy and the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on the interactions among illicit economies, criminal organizations, and armed conflict. Felbab-Brown is the author of Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs and numerous policy monographs. Robert Litwak is vice president for programs at the Woodrow Wilson

Center in Washington, D.C. He served on the National Security Council Staff as director of nonproliferation in the Clinton administration. Litwak is the author of numerous books on US foreign policy and national security policy, including Regime Change: U.S. Strategy Through the Prism of 9/11; and Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment After the Cold War. John Nagl, former president of the Center for a New American Security, is a research fellow at the US Naval Academy. A veteran of both Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Nagl, along with General David H. Petraeus, was a principal on the writing team that produced the 2006 US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Michael O’Hanlon is director of research and senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. A frequent media and op-ed commentator on national security issues, O’Hanlon’s numerous books include Defense Strategy for the Post-Saddam Era and (with Kurt Campbell) Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security. He is a developer and contributor to the Brookings indices on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Linda Robinson is a scholarly journalist and consultant on political conflict, insurgency, and counterinsurgency, and has reported extensively from the field in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to her numerous articles, she is the author of two bestselling books: Tell Me How This

The Contributors

207

Ends: General Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq and Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Robinson is frequently invited to speak at civilian and military educational institutions and policy institutes. Robert H. Scales (Major-General, ret.) is president of Colgen, Inc.,

a consulting firm specializing in military affairs and strategy. Scales is a former commandant of the US Army War College and held command and staff positions in the United States, Germany, Korea, and Vietnam, where he was awarded the Silver Star. He is the author of numerous books on contemporary and future warfare, including Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military, as well as on military history, including Certain Victory and Firepower in Limited War. Marvin Weinbaum is a scholar in residence at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. An expert on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, and Turkey, Weinbaum was an analyst in the US Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He was also director of the program in South Asian and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Index

Abrams, Creighton, 74 Acheson, Dean, 72 Afghan Local Police (ALP), 154, 155, 156 Afghan National Army (ANA), 140, 147, 153, 179(n49) Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), 153 Afghan National Police (ANP), 140, 147–148, 153, 179(n49) Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), 147, 178(n41) Afghan National Stability Program, 39, 45–46 Afghan Northern Alliance, 60 Afghan Public Protection Program, 154 Afghan Social Outreach Program (ASOP), 163, 164 Afghanistan, goals of intervention in, 7; Pakistan’s connection to insurgency in, 17–18; USPakistani relations and, 33; international support for democratization of, 34–35; structural inadequacy and insecurity in, 36–37, 39; dependence on development and

military assistance, 39; counterinsurgency v. counterterrorism strategies in, 40– 44, 53; provincial reconstruction teams in, 41–42, 150, 168; Taliban threat influencing Pakistani policy toward, 46–47; lack of exit strategy, 48; initial campaign design, 51–52; US debate over devolution of responsibility in, 53–54; corruption in, 54, 157– 161; and 9/11, 58–60; potential for failure in, 77; electoral fraud in, 78; Obama strategy for, 78–80; continuing US commitment in, 99–100; prioritizing security and development in, 101–104; poppy economy in, 110, 141, 142, 148, 166–168; national strategy and policy lessons deriving from Iraq war, 114; strategic counterinsurgency approach in, 124–128; counterinsurgency assessment for, 129–134; Taliban numbers in, 132; Iraq’s military dynamics influencing Afghan strategy, 97–98; timeline for progress in, 134–135; post-2001

Subentries appear in the order in which they are discussed within the text.

209

210

failure of governance, 140–142, 169–170; ensuring basic economic livelihood in, 148–149; outside actors’ limited understanding of, 149–150; defining the mission in, 150–152; militias in, 153–157; economic stabilization programs, 165–169; US allocation of resources for, 178(n41). See also Governance (Afghanistan); Nationbuilding Agha, Tayyab, 152 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 24–25, 26 Air strikes: Afghanistan, 102 al-Awlaki, Anwar, 13 Albright, Madeleine, 62 al-Hamdani, Raad Majid, 21 Allawi, Ayad, 64 al-Maliki, Nouri, 119 al-Qaeda, 7, 11–12, 13; Bush’s justification for Iraq intervention, 21–22; evidence connecting 9/11 to, 59–60; Bush’s military transformation strategy and, 67–68; Golden Dome mosque destruction, 75; exploiting ethnic and religious cleavages in, 110–111; al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), 90, 91, 93, 94–95, 97, 98, 103, 153–154 al-Sadr, Moqtada, 77, 94, 119 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 78, 114 Anbar Awakening, 103, 120, 153–154 Anbar model, 92–93 Arab Spring: Obama administration response to, 2, 8, 189. See also specific countries Army forces: Afghan National Army, 41, 103, 140, 147, 153, 179(n49) Askariya Mosque, bombing of, 90 Assassination strategy, 62–64 Asymmetrical warfare, 74 Attrition strategy in Vietnam, 131 Axis of evil, 20 Baath Party (Iraq), 115–116 Baer, Robert, 63

Index

Baghdad, Battle of, 90–91, 97, 101 Balkan intervention, 10–11 Baradar, Abdul Ghani (Mullah), 152 Barbary pirates, 71 Barzani, Masud, 63–64 Bay of Goats, 64 Biden, Joseph, 79 Bin Laden, Osama, 13, 59–60, 62–63; 69, 125 Blackwill, Robert, 63 Blair, Tony, 19 Blitzkrieg, 72 Bonn Agreement (2001), 47 Brodie, Bernard, 72 Budget constraints, 189–190 Bull, Hedley, 81 Bush, George W.: special forces attack strategy in Iraq, 64–65; military transformation strategy, 67, 74–75, 80; toppling Saddam’s regime, 69; on failure in Iraq, 71; potential defeat in Iraq, 76; and redefinition of military “success” in Iraq, 110 Bush (I) administration, 10; rogue states strategy, 19; and UN support for Kuwait liberation, 22, 60–61 Bush (II) administration: national security strategy toward rogue states, 19–20, 27; rationale for Iraq intervention, 21–22; Iraq intervention as precedent for Iran and Libya interventions, 23–25; early “light footprint” in Afghanistan, 37; “clear, hold, build, and transfer” strategy, 52; response to 9/11, 58–60; strategy options for bin Laden and Saddam, 60–69; defining the mission in Afghanistan, 150 Cambone, Steven, 70 Card, Andrew, 58, 80 Carter, Jimmy, 10 Castro, Fidel, 63 Casualties: and armed drones, 43; Civil War, 71; COIN math, 121; World War I and World War II, 72

Index

Causes of conflict, comprehensive approach to, 121–122, 123 Ceasefires, 93–95, 97 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 60, 63 Chalabi, Ahmed, 63–64 Cheney, Dick, 61, 70 China, 10, 188 Civilian nuclear programs: Iran, 27 Civil society groups, Afghanistan, 152 Civil war in Afghanistan, 46, 170 Civil War, American, 71 Civilian casualties in Afghanistan, 134 Civilian contractors in Iraq, 70 Clark, Wesley, 81 Clausewitz, Carl von, 79 “Clear, hold, and build” strategy, 53, 102, 123 Clinton administration, 11; Somali mission, 10; engagement and enlargement strategy, 18–19; continuing Bush’s containment and deterrence strategy, 62; assassination and coup d’état strategies against bin Laden and Saddam, 62–63 Coalition Provisional Authority, 71 COIN. See Counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy COIN math, 121 Cold War, 9–11, 28, 58 Collateral damage, 43 Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), 165 Communication, strategy of, 122 Communist insurgencies, 74 Community Defense Initiative (Afghanistan), 156–157 Community development councils (CDCs; Afghanistan), 155–156, 164–165, 168 Concerned Local Citizens (CLC) groups, 92–93 Conflict resolution, 187–188 Constraining effects of legacy, 188–199

211

Containment and deterrence strategies, 18–20, 26, 27–28, 66, 188Bush modification of, 60–62, Conventional warfare, 100–101 Corruption: and development and military assistance, 39–40; and debate over drawdown, 54; challenging COIN and statebuilding efforts, 111; and establishing legitimacy, 126; by Afghan National Police, 140, 153; jeopardizing governance-building through, 151–152; in Afghan Ministry of Interior, 155; policy debate over, 157–161; in local governance, 163–164 Counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy, 3, 121–124; military versus political stance, 8–9; drawdown of in Afghanistan, 31; original design of Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, 51; in Vietnam, 65, 100; history of in US small wars, 71–74; Kennedy’s support for, 73; paradoxes of, 76; and the “surge,” 77–78; McChrystal’s support of, 78–79; population-centric methods, 89, 92, 97, 98; COIN training of Pakistani security forces, 127; assessing success of, 129; elements for success, 130–131; metrics in Afghanistan, 132–134; Crane, Conrad, 76 Criminal behavior: by local Iraqi militias, 94; and security in Afghanistan, 147–148; by local Afghan militias, 155 Crocker, Ryan, 71, 77, 119 de Kruif, Mart, 132 Defense, Department of, 69 Demilitarization of foreign policy, 189–190 Democracy and democratization: Clinton’s engagement and enlargement strategy in democratized states, 18–19; US military protection of, 186–187

212

Desert Fox, Operation (1998), 11, 25 Desert One Operation, 10 Desert Storm, Operation, 10, 100 Deterrence strategy. See Containment and deterrence strategies Development, economic: Pakistan and Afghanistan’s structural inadequacy hindering, 36–40; early intervention precluding combat intervention, 114–115; policies to empower legitimate local governance, 125–126; Afghanistan’s economic stabilization programs, 165–169; aid problems in Afghanistan, 170 Diplomatic efforts, 44, 114–115, 126 District Delivery Program, 165 Domestic politics and Obama’s strategies, 26–27, 53–54, 78 Drones, 43, 128(n1), 187 Drug trade, 141. See also Poppy economy Dual containment, 62 Economic crisis, US, 53–54, 153 Economic reform in Pakistan, 126–127 Economic stabilization programs, 165–169 Economics and statebuilding in Afghanistan, 46; and successful counterinsurgency, 130–131; corruption’s effects on, in Afghanistan, 160; and political power in Afghanistan, 172–173; and role of US military, 186–187. See also Poppy economy Eisenhower, Dwight, 72 Eisenhower administration, 9 El Baradei, Mohamed, 25 El Salvador, 123–124 Elections, 35; Karzai’s fraudulent reelection, 54, 78, 161–162; in Iraq 2005, 116 Enduring Freedom, Operation, 1; goals of, 7, 13–14; initial political support for, 12–14; “shock and flaw” campaign, 109–110;

Index

warlords’ coalition and, 145. See also Afghanistan Engagement and enlargement strategy, 18–19 Ethnic cleansing, 11 Ethnic tensions, 155–156 Exit strategy, 48, 102, 134, 154 Failing and failed states: Clinton’s engagement and enlargement strategy for, 18–19 Fallon, William, 77 Feaver, Peter, 75 Federally administered tribal areas (FATAs), 39 Floods, in Pakistan, 38 Focused District Development program, 153 Food zone (Afghanistan), 167 Ford, Gerald R., 63 Foreign Affairs journal, 64, 68 Foreign aid: corruption and, 159–160; for economic stabilization, 165–169 France: opposition to US intervention in Iraq, 22–23 Franks, Tommy, 66, 70, 74–75, 81 Futuristic warfare, 187, 189 Gates, Robert, 104–105, 189 Ghani, Ashraf, 164 Ghilzai Pashtuns, 141–142 Global commons, 186–187 Global governance, 187–188 Governance: structural requisites for, 36–40; complexity of in liberated societies, 110; and defeating insurgency, 130, 187. See also Nationbuilding; Statebuilding Governance (Afghanistan): sustainability of, 101–102, 161–165, 168–171; local, 125–126; international community’s role, 139–140, 175(n8); post-2001 failures of, 140–142, 169–170; role of tribes, warlords, and militias, 142–145, 155; insecurity and, 146–148; and

Index

basic economic livelihood, 148–149; Grand strategy, 9, 18–19, 51–52. See also Strategy Green Berets, 74 Gulf War, 60–62, 66, 109 Haass, Richard, 68 Haqqani insurgents, 147 Hashim, Ahmed, 70 Hawkins, Steve, 66 “Hearts and minds” campaign, 3, 110–111, 189 Helicopters, 74 Holbrooke, Richard, 124 Holistic approach to national security, 187 Homeland, protection of, 186. See also National security policy Humanitarian assistance: aid in Pakistan, 38; and military intervention, 114–115 Human security, 146–148, 171–172 Hussein, Saddam, 11, 20–21, 60–61, 63–64, 78 Ikle, Fred, 130 Independent Directorate for Local Governance (Afghanistan), 163 India: statebuilding in Afghanistan, 46; threatened by Pakistan-Taliban alliance, 54 Infrastructure projects, 38 Insurgency: impact on US military strategy, 43–44; US strategic adaptation to, 52; and US small wars, 71–74; of Sunnis in Iraq, 90–97; engaging local communities against, 103; unplanned for in Iraq, 115–117 Intelligence, 114; role of in Iraq intervention, 21–22; and Iranian nuclear weapons, 27; and Bush’s response to 9/11, 58–59 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), 132, 145; staying the course in Afghanistan, 13; standing up Afghan militias, 154;

213

and private security companies, 157; anticorruption task force, 158; isolation from Afghan population, 169–170 Iran: as part of axis of evil, 20; nonproliferation strategy toward, 24–28; Clinton’s dual containment strategy toward, 62; relations with Iraq government, 119; as security threat, 188 Iran-Contra affair, 9–10 Iraq: George H.W. Bush’s prudence in, 10; bombed in Operation Desert Fox, 11; preemptive versus preventive strikes war against 21; initial campaign design for, 51; US debate over counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategies in, 52–53; Bush’s call for revolt against Saddam, 62; special forces attack strategy in, 64–65; overwhelming military force strategy toward, 65–67; as “catastrophic success,” 69–71; Bush’s choice of Rumsfeld-Franks transformation strategy in, 74–75; Bush’s view of defeat in, 76; surge in, 77–78, 90, 91–92; sectarian conflict in, 90–91, 94–97; Sons of Iraq movement, 92–93; military dynamics influencing Afghan strategy in, 97–98; continuing US commitment to, 99–100; religious cleavages in, 110–111; national strategy and policy lessons derived from, 113–120; Sunni extremism in, 118–119; counterinsurgency strategies in, 121–124, 129–130; erroneous metrics for, 132 Iraq Liberation Act (1998), 11 Iraq Survey Group report, 21 Iraqi Freedom, Operation, 1; goals of, 7, 11–12; “shock and flaw” campaign, 109–110. See also Iraq Iraqi National Congress, 63 Iraqi Security Force (ISF), 95–96 Irregular warfare, 4, 99–100, 104–105, 186

214

Islamism, 13; US-Pakistani cooperation on, 33; development aid and, 39; growing violence of Iraqi Shiite extremists, 116–117; observed effect of US actions against, 122 Isolationism, 189 Jabar, Abdul, 163–164 Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM), 90–91, 93–96, 116 Johnson, Harold, 73 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 66, 69 Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 78–79 Jones, James, 79 Jones, Seth, 69 Judiciary, 34–35, 133, 141 Kalashnikov rule, Taliban’s, 140–141 Karzai, Ahmed Wali, 145, 157, 158 Karzai, Hamid, 32, 129, 157, 179(n51); electoral fraud by, 78; replacement of, 135; Pashtun domination of government, 142; warlords’ power, 145; anticorruption activities by, 158; US efforts to improve regime of, 161–163; local governance initiatives by, 164 Kayani, Pervaiz, 33 Keane, Jack, 75 Kennedy, John F., 72–73 Kennedy administration, 9 Khameini, Ali, 25–26 Khan, A. Q., 17–18 Khan, Matiullah, 145, 157 Kilcullen, David, 77 Kissinger, Henry, 28, 72 Korean War, 72 Kosovo, 11 Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), 63–64 Kurdish forces, 63, 64–65 Kuwait: UN stance on Saddam, 60–61 Lake, Anthony, 63 Law Enforcement Professionals, 148

Index

Lawrence, T. E., 81, 123 Lebanon: terrorist attack on the US military, 10 Lebanonization of Iraq, 77 Legislative systems: in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 34–35 Legitimacy: of Afghan transitional justice, 126; Afghan tribal identity and, 142–143 Levin, Carl, 66 Libya, 23–24, 26–27, 28 Liddell Hart, Basil, 81 “Light footprint” in Afghanistan, 37, 48, 69, 124–125, 143 Local defense against insurgencies, 103–104 Local defense forces, 126. See also Afghan Local Police Local governance initiatives: Afghanistan, 163 MacArthur, Douglas, 99(quote) Major, John, 62 Major Crime Task Force, 148 Marion, Francis, 71 Massive retaliation policy, 72 Mattis, James, 76, 79 McCaffrey, Barry, 67, 75, 77 McChrystal, Stanley, 78–79, 80, 121, 146 McFarland, Sean, 92 McMaster, H. R., 92 Military assistance: US suspension of to Pakistan, 43 Military intervention: wisdom of, 2; priority tasks for, 3; US nonintervention assurance in Libya, 24; to combat terrorism, 40–44; al-Qaeda presence as justification for, 44–46; as stimulus to anti-US radicalism and terrorism, 186 Military leadership: and USPakistani ties, 35 Military planning, 4 Military power, marginalization of, 187–188 Military transformation, 67–68, 70, 74–75

Index

Militias, 3, 89–98, 103, 153–157, 176(n21) Mohammadi, Bismullah, 155 Murtha, John, 75 Musharraf, Pervez, 32–33, 35 Myers, Richard, 66 Nagl, John, 53, 74, 76 Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, 148 Nash, William, 67 Nasr, Vali, 77 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), 27 National liberation, wars of, 72 National security policy: impact of 9/11 on, 17; toward weapons of mass destruction, 19–20; Obama’s shift on Iran, 25–28; ability to influence Pakistani and Afghan policy, 35–36; adaptation to counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, 100; and peace, 104; for stabilizing Afghanistan, 126; holistic approach to, 187; on use of drones, 187; for containing and deterring potential aggressor states, 188; and Obama’s response to Arab Spring, 189 National Strategy for Victory in Iraq document, 75 Nationbuilding: “clear, hold, build, and transfer” strategy, 52; Bush’s opposition to, 69; shifting role in Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, 110; and need to understand local situation, 149–150; as definition of mission, 150–152; and training national security forces, 153–154; local militias as complicating factor in, 155; and economic stabilization programs, 165, 167; and shaping the political and legal environment, 171–174. See also Governance; Statebuilding Negotiations with Taliban, 152 Neoconservatives, 7, 23, 186–187 Neoisolationism, 189 Newbold, Greg, 66

215

9/11: as rationale for invading Iraq, 11–12; impact on US national security policy, 17; Afghanistan war and, 59–60; adaptation to unconventional warfare following, 101; US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan derived from, 185 Noncombatants, tactics and strategies regarding, 187–188 Nonproliferation, 22–28. See also Iran; North Korea; Nuclear capability; Weapons of mass destruction Noor, Atta Mohammad, 145 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 129; staying the course in Afghanistan, 13; response to 9/11, 59; timeline for progress in Afghanistan, 135; weakness in Afghanistan, 141. See also International Security Assistance Force North Korea, 20, 24, 28, 188 Nuclear capability, 1; Pakistan’s, 17–18; as Bush’s justification for Iraq intervention, 21–22; Iran’s ambiguity over, 25–28 Obama, Barack, administration: debates in over Arab Spring, 2; attitude toward regime change, 8; definition of mission in Afghanistan, 13, 150–151; mixed strategy of engagement with Pakistan, 17–18; policy shift on rogue states’ nonproliferation, 25–28; relations with President Karzai, 32; and al-Qaeda threat, 45; and resource commitment in Iraq and Afghanistan, 53–54; and inherited challenges, 78, 139; Afghanistan strategy, 78–80; and General McChrystal’s recommendations, 79; troop drawdown in Afghanistan, 125, 147; policies on corruption in Afghanistan, 157–158; and statebuilding in Afghanistan, 161–162, 169–170

216

Office of Transitional Initiatives, US, 39 Offshore balancing, 187 Omar, Mohammed (Mullah), 59, 60, 69 Operational art, 121 Pakistan, 13; role in Afghanistan, 17–18, 40–44, 46–47, 54, 78, 124–128, 135, 144, 152, 170–171; reassessing US ties to, 31–32; US presidential ties to national leadership of, 32–33; international support for democratization in, 34–35; humanitarian and development assistance to, 37–39; structural inadequacy and insecurity in, 37–40; suspension of aid to, 43; need for common national identity, 45–46 Pasha, Ahmad Shuja, 33 Pashtun insurgency, 124–125, 127, 128(n1), 141, 142–144 Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), 63 Peru, 123 Petraeus, David, 53, 75–79, 92–93, 117 Police systems and forces, 41, 103, 126 Policymaking legacies of Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, 188–199. See also National security policy Popal, Jelani, 163 Poppy economy, 110, 141, 142, 148, 166–168 Population-centric COIN methods, 89, 92, 97, 98, 121 Post–Cold War period, 58–59 Powell, Colin, 68, 74–75 Powell Doctrine, 47, 75 Powerbrokers in Afghanistan, 140–141, 155–157; siphoning off aid money, 159–160; co-opting local governance initiatives, 163–164 Presidential Directive no. 3, 67

Index

Private security in Afghanistan, 157 Proliferation. See Nuclear capability Provincial powers law (Iraq), 119–120 Provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), 41–42, 150, 168 Putin, Vladimir, 59 Qaddafi, Muammar, 23–24 Razziq, Abdul, 145, 158–159 Reagan, Ronald: ban on assassinations, 63 Reagan administration, 9, 10 Reassurance strategy, 27 Reconciliation initiative in Afghanistan, 125 Reconciliation initiative in Iraq 117–118 Reconstruction in Iraq, 69, 70 Refugees: Afghans’ flight to Pakistan, 53 Regime change: controversy over US role in, 1–2, 7–11 15, 20–21, 26–28, 51, 59–61, 64–65, 69–71, 80, 114 Regional powers: and statebuilding in Afghanistan, 46; and stability in Iraq, 120 Revolutionary War, 71 Rice, Condoleezza, 68 Ricks, Thomas, 77 Rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction, 18–20, 22–28 Rolling Stone magazine, 79 Rosen, Nir, 70 Rumsfeld, Donald, 59–60, 66–68, 70, 73–76, 80 Russia: and Obama’s Iran policy, 26; response to 9/11, 59; as security threat, 188 Salafi groups, 170–171 Sanctions: during Cold War, 10; against Qaddafi, 24; against Iran, 26; and US-Pakistan relations, 42–43

Index

Saudi Arabia: role in Afghanistan, 46 Schwarzkopf, Norman, 61–62 Scowcroft, Brent, 61 Sectarian conflict, 75, 90, 95–97 Security assistance: for Afghanistan and Pakistan, 125–128; role in counterinsurgency, 130–131 Security forces: Afghani, 102–104, 133, 135–136, 153–159; Pakistani, 127 Senate Armed Services Committee, 66–67 September 11, 2001. See 9/11 Shafafyat, 158 Shelton, Hugh, 74–75 Shiite militias, 90–91, 94, 95–96, 116–117, 119, 122 Shinseki, Eric, 66–67, 70, 74–75 Shirzai, Gul Agha, 148, 157 Shuras (local councils), 147, 163, 164 Somalia, 10 Sons of Iraq (SOI) movement, 89, 90, 92–93, 95, 98, 103, 118–119 Sovereignty issues, 20–23 Soviet Union, 9–10, 19, 28, 58–59, 100, 132, 144, 154 Special forces/special operations, 3, 43, 64–65, 73, 100, 125, 189 Stabilization operations: in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 69, 124; in Iraq, corruption and, 120, 158, 160 Statebuilding: controversies over strategies and programs, 3–4; military doctrine embracing, 8; Afghanistan’s limited capabilities for, 37; and national identity, 45–46; Taliban threats to, 46–48. See also Nationbuilding Street crime: Afghanistan, 147 Sunni insurgents (Iraq), 90–97, 93, 94; US military targeting of, 117; US reconciliation with, 118–119, 122 Surge (Iraq), 77–78, 91–92, 97 Sustainable development, 168–169

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Swat Valley, Pakistan, 38 Syria: response to 9/11, 59 Talabani, Jalal, 63 Taliban, 7, 11–12, 13; counterinsurgency strategy against, 41, 51–54; participation in the political process by, 44; connections to al-Qaeda, 45; regional antipathy to, 46; US strategic adaptation, 51–53; importance of preventing resurgence of, 53, 54; threat of alliance with Pakistan and evidence connecting 9/11 to, 59–60; local militia defense against, 103; and poppy eradication efforts, 110; exploitation of ethnic and religious cleavages, 110–111; numbers of 131–132; re-emergence as insurgent force, 139–142, 169; threats to human security, 146–147, 164–165; negotiations with, 152; local militias’ and, 154–157; 164–165; and civil war, 170–171 Taylor, Maxwell, 72 Technology: in Civil War, 71; and futuristic war, 187; and strategic innovation, 105; in World War I, 72 Tenet, George, 59, 68, 70 Terrorism: as justification of US role in regime change, 2; and support for US interventionism, 7–8; against US forces in Lebanon, 10; and concerns over Pakistan’s nuclear program, 18; and Clinton’s engagement and enlargement strategy, 18–19; focus of US foreign policy 40–44; Bush’s response to 9/11, 58–60; focus of the mission in Afghanistan, 150–152; US intervention contributing to, 186 Third-party counterinsurgency, 123–124

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Thompson, Robert, 74 Tovo, Kenneth, 121 Transformation, military, 67–68 Tribal affiliations in Afghanistan, 142–145, 153–155 Tribal conflict (Iraq), 91 Tribal militias (Afghanistan). See Militias Troop deployments: in Iraq, 70; in Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, 78–79; and Afghan security forces, 95–96; “clear, hold, and build” requirements for, 123; related to counterinsurgency progress, 130 Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), 74 United Nations: support sought for Iraq intervention, 22, 60–61; Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 43, 128(n1), 187 US Agency for International Development (USAID), 165 US Department of State, 69

Index

Vessey, John, 57(quote) Vietnam intervention, 9, 14, 54, 65, 73–74, 100, 109, 131 Warlords (Afghanistan), 3, 140–145, 158 Weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 7, 12; Bush strategy toward rogue states, 19; justification for Iraq intervention, 21–22; Saddam’s response to UN mandate, 21 Wesa, Tooryalai, 163–164 Westmoreland, William, 74, 131 Wheat program (Afghanistan), 167–168 Wolfowitz, Paul, 62, 64, 67 Woodward, Bob, 78 World War I, 72 World War II, 72 Yemen, 13 Yugoslavia, 10–11 Zardari, Asif Ali, 33, 38 Zinni, Anthony, 64, 65–66, 70, 74–75

About the Book

How have the costs, both human and material, of US involvement in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq affected the country’s will for conducting regime-change operations? What are the implications for issues of strategy? The authors of US Policy in Afghanistan and Iraq assess the impact of the two conflicts on US foreign policy, military planning, and capacities for counterinsurgency and statebuilding. They also offer keenly insightful guidance for avoiding the pitfalls and increasing the prospects for success when the United States does intervene. Seyom Brown is John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair in International Politics and National Security in the Department of Political Science at Southern Methodist University. The most recent of his many publications include Higher Realism: A New Foreign Policy for the United States, The Illusion of Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century, and The Faces of Power: Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Clinton. Robert H. Scales (Major-General, ret.) is former commandant of the US Army War College. He is the author of Firepower in Limited War and Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military; and coauthor (with Williamson Murray) of The Iraq War: A Military History.

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