The war in Afghanistan began with clear ambitions: U.S. forces,
subsequently aided by Western allies, sought to kill or capture
al Qaeda militants who had used the country as a sanctuary. To
accomplish this the United States would drive the radical Islamic
Taliban government from their control of Afghanistan. In the
eight-year interim Washington apparently has lost track of the
original objective.
The Taliban as a movement still exists and controls certain
portions of Afghanistan, mainly — though not solely — in the
south and southeast. For several years NATO forces have been
attempting to train Afghan Army units to carry on the battle
against the Taliban. The number successfully trained is far below
that which is needed to accomplish this goal.
Here we return to the original point of our objective in
Afghanistan. Our aim was to force the Taliban to relinquish their
hold on the government. This has succeeded, but now we are
committed to keeping today’s and tomorrow’s Taliban from
returning to power. To do this General Stanley McChrystal has
requested 30,000-40,000 U.S. troops (ten thousand below an
earlier request) in addition to the approximately 68,000
personnel already planned to be in-country by the end of this
year.
It is well understood from the experience of the last
several years that the creation of a cohesive national Afghan
military force has little chance of coming to fruition in any
reasonable time frame. It is not revealing classified information
to state that the initial efforts to establish an Afghan Army
have been hindered by the traditional rivalries among the various
Afghan tribal and clan groups. This all-encompassing
socio-cultural clash is augmented by the overwhelming illiteracy
of the eligible manpower.
What is driving American policy in Afghanistan is the
inability to conceive of a way to avoid appearing to quit the
field with the war still at hand. The plan of creating an Afghan
Army to take over from the U.S. and NATO is simply a device to
allow the West to get out of a place it long ago had decided was
a losing proposition strategically even if it was relatively
successful tactically. As the situation stands, it would take
many more years to weld together such a unified Afghan fighting
force — and even that appears problematical.
A national Afghan army can be created, but only by a strong
and dynamic Afghan leader — not by foreigners, no matter how
well intentioned. There are some in Washington who have
encouraged the idea of finding willing “good” Taliban to make up
a cadre of converted fighters. Again, such fighters — even if
they can be recruited — have to be accepted by kindred tribesmen
to become effective in strategic terms. Aside from possible use
on a special operations scale, broader utility of ex-Taliban is
severely limited.
By seeking to turn the Afghan situation into “the war that
Bush forgot,” Obama’s administration has introduced a Vietnam
aspect into a conflict that the previous administration had come
to realize had become a strategic trap that, if not abandoned,
had to be reduced to a special operations killing or converting
program. The alternative discarded was to resort to a major
build-up of U.S./NATO force levels to initiate a traditional
campaign to overwhelm all indigenous counter-action.
Not only was special operations irregular warfare seemingly
too base for the Obama White House to espouse, it was the form of
war fighting that was contrary to the peculiar sensibilities of a
professed liberal Washington leadership. In reality the
Administration is more worried about domestic and foreign
political fallout from an avowed “killing” campaign than it is
over the fact of fighting the enemy in the field.
The result is that once again the military is forced to
fight with rules of engagement that not only limit but are
contrary to sound war fighting principles. President Obama has
established tactical goals for the theater that can be
accomplished only by larger troop concentrations, then says he
wants minimal force and “humane” methods utilized. For some
reason President Obama has been encouraged to think an expanded,
yet still constrained, conventional force performing in a
pacification mode is operationally more effective than an
uninhibited special operations dynamic backed up, if necessary,
by a reserve of local and NATO conventional strike forces.
Shouldn’t the war effort now be to keep the Taliban from
returning to power and al Qaeda from reconstituting itself rather
than perpetuating an increasingly wide land war? Afghanistan is
clearly a spec ops and covert activity job; that is the reason
these capabilities have been theater specialized and deployed.
The troops in the field can handle the work, but, in spite of lip
service, the politicians in Washington appear to find it too
rough.
