Fly-Over Country

As a follow up on the drone attacks . . .

JCS Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen says our air attacks in Afghanistan aren't working out so well either:

The United States cannot succeed in Afghanistan if the American military keeps killing Afghan civilians, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Monday.

In remarks to scholars, national security experts and the media at the Brookings Institution, Admiral Mullen said that the American air strikes that killed an undetermined number of civilians in Afghanistan’s Farah Province two weeks ago had put the U.S. strategy in the country in jeopardy.
“We cannot succeed in Afghanistan or anywhere else, but let’s talk specifically about Afghanistan, by killing Afghan civilians,” Admiral Mullen said, adding that “we can’t keep going through incidents like this and expect the strategy to work.”

In counterinsurgency warfare, the people are the prize.  You can't win them by bombing them.  I'm glad Mullen is worrying about this.

About those Predator attacks . . .

Barack Obama has continued (perhaps expanded) George Bush's use of Predator drones to attack suspected terrorist or Taliban targets in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.  It certainly seems like a good idea to kill the bad guys when we practicably can, but stories like this suggest that we may be causing more trouble than we're preventing:

United States officials acknowledged Thursday for the first time that at least some of what might be 100 civilian deaths in western Afghanistan had been caused by American bombs. In Afghanistan, residents angrily protested the deaths and demanded that American forces leave the country.

. . . The deaths drew hundreds of Afghans into the streets to protest outside police stations and the governor’s office in Farah Province, where two villages were bombed after Afghan forces were ambushed by Taliban insurgents on Monday night.

Outside the governor’s office, police officers fired on demonstrators who threw stones, wounding three of them.

The United States defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, questioned by journalists as he visited the capital, Kabul, apologized for any loss of innocent life. But he said that “exploiting civilian casualties and often causing civilian casualties are a fundamental part” of the insurgents’ strategy.

I'm sure the insurgents do play up civilian casualties, but they do that because people understandably get very pissed off about civilian casualties.  That's why we shouldn't carry out attacks that entail civilian casualties unless it's absolutely necessary.

I recently heard an excellent interview with Daid Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency expert and former adviser to Gen. Daid Petraeus who recently authored The Accidental Guerilla.  Kilcullen explained that we're fighting two separate groups of people in Afghanistan.  The first group is al Qaeda, which is actively engaged in an international campaign against us in the hope of triggering a war of civilizations that would topple the corrupt authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes it despises.  The second group is comprised of local people who have no interest in al Qaeda's broader goals, but have taken up arms against us because we've come to their country and blown up their friends and neighbors.  This group would have no further interest in us if we merely stopped blowing things up in their country.

According to Kilcullen, the first group -- al Qaeda -- comprises only 2 to 5 percent of the people we're fighting.  The remaining 95 to 98 percent is comprised of the "accidental guerillas" -- who weren't fighting us until we came to their country and would stop fighting us when we left.

This is among the reasons why counterinsurgency warfare is so difficult.  Unlike traditional warfare, the goal in counterinsurgency is to protect and thereby win the people.  You don't do that by killing them.  I'm very skeptical that killing al Qaeda's number three man for the eleventieth time is really worth the human cost of these Predator strikes

Is Afghanistan worth it?

John Mueller argues that the threat from al Qaeda and the Taliban doesn't justify the war in Afghanistan.  Observing that "the operational base for 9/11 was in Hamburg, Germany", Mueller argues that al Qaeda doesn't really need a protected base camp, and to the extent it does need a sanctuary it already has one in Pakistan.  Of perhaps greater interest is his contention that we've massively overstated the threat we face from "al Qaeda Central":

At present, al Qaeda consists of a few hundred people running around in Pakistan, seeking to avoid detection and helping the Taliban when possible. It also has a disjointed network of fellow travelers around the globe who communicate over the Internet. Over the last decade, the group has almost completely discredited itself in the Muslim world due to the fallout from the 9/11 attacks and subsequent counterproductive terrorism, much of it directed against Muslims. No convincing evidence has been offered publicly to show that al Qaeda Central has put together a single full operation anywhere in the world since 9/11. And, outside of war zones, the violence perpetrated by al Qaeda affiliates, wannabes, and lookalikes combined has resulted in the deaths of some 200 to 300 people per year, and may be declining. That is 200 to 300 too many, of course, but it scarcely suggests that "the safety of people around the world is at stake," as Obama dramatically puts it.

In addition, al Qaeda has yet to establish a significant presence in the United States. In 2002, U.S. intelligence reports asserted that the number of trained al Qaeda operatives in the United States was between 2,000 and 5,000, and FBI Director Robert Mueller assured a Senate committee that al Qaeda had "developed a support infrastructure" in the country and achieved both "the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning." However, after years of well funded sleuthing, the FBI and other investigative agencies have been unable to uncover a single true al Qaeda sleeper cell or operative within the country. Mueller's rallying cry has now been reduced to a comparatively bland formulation: "We believe al Qaeda is still seeking to infiltrate operatives into the U.S. from overseas."

Even that may not be true. Since 9/11, some two million foreigners have been admitted to the United States legally and many others, of course, have entered illegally. Even if border security has been so effective that 90 percent of al Qaeda’s operatives have been turned away or deterred from entering the United States, some should have made it in -- and some of those, it seems reasonable to suggest, would have been picked up by law enforcement by now. The lack of attacks inside the United States combined with the inability of the FBI to find any potential attackers suggests that the terrorists are either not trying very hard or are far less clever and capable than usually depicted.

Barack Obama has appropriately adopted much more modest goals for Afghanistan, but they may be too ambitious still.  It's not at all clear that we possess the power, the wisdom, or the determination to produce a stable, centrally-governed Afghanistan, which in any event would not be possible unless the Taliban's sanctuaries in Pakistan are eliminated.  If we don't have to do this to safeguard ourselves against another 9/11, then we ought to reconsider why we are doing it.

Bacevich reviews Kilcullen

With the Obama administration about to announce a new way forward in Afghanistan, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen has written a new book on the role of counterinsurgency in what has been called the War on Terror: The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One.  For Kilcullen's purposes, the war in Afghanistan is a small war in the midst of the broader War on Terror (an unfortunate formulation that the Obama administration appears to have abandoned).

I haven't yet read Kilcullen's book, but I have read a review by conservative realist Andrew Bacevich, whose recent book The Limits of Power is itself a must read.  (For more from Bacevich, see this excellent interview with Bill Moyers.)  Bacevich applauds Kilcullen's counterinsurgency practices, but argues that Kilcullen the practitioner misses the strategic lessons highlighted by Kilcullen the academic.  For my purposes, though, Bacevich emphasizes key strategic realities that were virtually ignored in the Iraq debate and should not be ignored again in the reassessment of our mission in Afghanistan. 

Here's the basic reason why it's folly to militarize our approach to al Qaeda:

Mucking around by outsiders converts small problems into big ones. An appreciation of this phenomenon lies at the heart of al-Qaeda’s strategy, which Kilcullen describes as “fundamentally one of bleeding the United States to exhaustion, while simultaneously using U.S. reaction to incite a mass uprising within the Islamic world.” With that end in mind, al-Qaeda conspires to lure the West into launching ill-advised military actions, confident that one result will be to antagonize the local population, which will then respond to al-Qaeda’s calls to expel the intruders. In essence, Western intervention serves as al-Qaeda’s best recruiting tool. This is Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla Syndrome.

Kilcullen emphasizes that accidental guerrillas fight not to reinstitute the caliphate or to convert nonbelievers, but “principally to be left alone.” What they want above all is to preserve their way of life. The vast majority of those who take up arms against the United States and its allies do so “not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow, but because we have invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element.”

When we respond to al Qaeda by invading and occupying other countries, we're playing from al Qaeda's playbook. Nevertheless, Kilcullen supports a massive expansion of our mission in Afghanistan:

In 2008, Kilcullen left Baghdad and turned his attention to Afghanistan, surveying the situation there at the behest of then-Secretary Rice. More than seven years after U.S. forces first arrived, the news coming out of Kabul is almost uniformly bad. Kilcullen knows this but insists that the war “remains winnable.” In this case, winning will require the United States and its allies to commit themselves to an intensive effort, lasting “five to ten years at least,” aimed at “building a resilient Afghan state and civil society” capable of fending off the Taliban. The key to success, in his view, is to extend “an effective, legitimate government presence into Afghanistan’s 40,020 villages.” Such a presence, he concedes, is something that has never existed.

Stripped to its essentials, this is a call for Western-engineered nation building on a stupendous scale—in Kilcullen’s own words, “building an effective state structure, for the first time in modern Afghan history.” Yet even that will not suffice. Given the porous Afghan-Pakistani border, unless the United States and its partners also fix Pakistan, “a military victory in Afghanistan will simply shift the problem a few miles to the east.” With this is mind, Kilcullen calls for a “full-spectrum strategy” designed to “improve governance, security, and economic conditions” throughout the region. Although he illustrates this approach anecdotally, he offers no estimates of costs or who will pay them. Nor does Kilcullen explain why the results to be achieved in Afghanistan-Pakistan, even in the very best case, would produce an outcome any more definitive than the one he foresees in Iraq.

9/11 was a terrible blow, but it makes no sense to respond by invading and remaking countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and in any event we can't afford the massive burdens of empire that this entails.  It may make sense to add troops in the short run, but they need to be employed in pursuit of much more modest goals consistent with a clear-eyed reassessment of our national interest.  Any assessment of our national interest that requires us to spend another decade or more conjuring up a new Afghan society that has never before existed has clearly gone off the rails.