The NY Times published an article on the progress of the Afghan War today that I found was interesting in the context of last winter’s debate between COIN and CT advocates.
Despite deepening pessimism back home and disarray in the top American military ranks, officials insist that the buildup of soldiers in Afghanistan is beginning to show results: Commando raids over the last four months have taken scores of insurgent leaders out of action, in a secretive operation aimed partly at pressuring the Taliban to reconcile with the Afghan government.
About 130 important insurgent figures have been captured or killed in Afghanistan over the past 120 days, about the time that commanders turned their attention from the fight around Marja to a much more complex campaign around Kandahar, according to NATO military statistics.
Some senior NATO officers say that military intelligence has picked up initial indications that the increased Special Operations missions aimed at provincial insurgent commanders inside the country have provoked some Taliban leaders to begin internal discussions of whether to accept offers of reconciliation with the government.
The Special Operations raids have caused an unspecified number of innocent deaths that have outraged the local population, frustrated the Afghan government’s efforts to attract more supporters across the nation — and prompted a tightening of allied rules on the use of lethal force.
Military officers acknowledge that these capture-or-kill missions are not an end in themselves, but are meant to establish an elusive strategic advantage at the start of a broad campaign to neutralize the Taliban.
Killing and capturing insurgent leaders is hardly the main focus of population-centric COIN, from my understanding. In fact, these Special Operations raids are exactly what the proponents of a light-footprint CT approach believed would be more effective in neutralizing the insurgency and inducing them to reconcile with the government. At a time when the pop-COIN approach has thus far engendered mixed or ambiguous results, it is fascinating to see how quickly “results” have come full-circle to mean body counts and not the various COIN metrics that were developed to track progress in the Obama Administration’s new strategy. In fact, reconciliation and negotiations with the top leadership were never really emphasized when the strategy was unveiled.
Still, as I have previously argued, I don’t believe that it must be an either or scenario between CT and COIN. Despite the fact that these Special Ops raids can sometimes inadvertently harm civilians, the operations can be used in conjunction with efforts to secure strategic areas, hold these areas, and build. The problem is that the potency of COIN approach is predicated more so on the effectiveness of the government to do its job and not the military’s ability clear and hold. And the host government has largely struck out in this regard. This is precisely the reason that some experts were skeptical that COIN could work at all, let alone be cost-effective.
It may be premature to really assess any of these trends and results, I am not sure. All I know is that I was skeptical a CT focused strategy would be successful in neutralizing the Taliban and bringing them to the negotiating table. And although I thought the July 2011 deadline was strategically counterproductive — mostly due to its impact on Pakistani thinking — and that 30K additional troops was still not enough, I thought that pop-COIN had a better chance of turning the tide. Once Obama announced the time-line and that he was only sending 30K, I was much more skeptical the strategy would bear fruit — but I was still willing to give it a shot.
If and when it becomes clear that the CT approach is what really brought the insurgency to a stand-still, I will be the first to admit I was wrong and absorb the lessons learned thereafter. Until then, I’ll have to be patient like everyone else and wait to see how this pans out.
But I will conclude with an excerpt from an article in the Washington Post from September 21, 2009:
McChrystal makes clear that his call for more forces is predicated on the adoption of a strategy in which troops emphasize protecting Afghans rather than killing insurgents or controlling territory. Most starkly, he says: “[I]nadequate resources will likely result in failure. However, without a new strategy, the mission should not be resourced.”
UPDATE: Dr. Finel wrote a post that dovetails nicely with this. When I first read the NY Times piece, my initial thought was, “Damn, Finel may have been right.” Gotta give credit where credit is due.
