The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

The top
American commander of troops in Afghanistan showed signs of impatience about
the growing number of insider attacks, called green-on-blue, that have taken a
toll on U.S. troops this year. During
an interview on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, Gen. John Allen said:

“I’m mad as hell
about them [green-on-blue attacks], to be honest with you…We’re going to get
after this. It reverberates everywhere, across the United States. You know,
we’re willing to sacrifice a lot for this campaign. But we’re not willing to be
murdered for it.”

President Barack
Obama’s plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan calls for the US to train Afghan
security forces to defend their own country as most of the remaining 68,000
U.S. troops will return home in 2014.

Allen, who
said that the “vast majority” of Afghans and Afghan soldiers stood
with the US, warned that Americans should be prepared to see the deadly attacks
continue:

“The enemy
recognizes this is a vulnerability…You know, in Iraq, the signature weapon
system that we hadn’t seen before was the IED. We had to adjust to that. Here,
I think the signature attack that we’re beginning to see is going to be the
insider attack.”

The Wrongologist reported on
green-on-blue attacks in March, 2012 here, quoting Dr. Jeffery Bordin, a PhD working for the military.
Bordin reported on the reasons for green-on-blue attacks in “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural
Incompatibility”. He characterized the shootings of Americans by Afghan
troops as “a severe and rapidly metastasizing malignancy.”

Surprise! Here we are 6 months later,
questioning the plan.

So,
What’s Wrong?

It’s our
strategy that’s wrong.

Our original mission was to kill bin
Laden, to destroy al Qaeda and to remove the Taliban government that had
sheltered them. Our original strategy
was to use Special Forces to achieve those ends and we accomplished two out of three with special operations forces within
weeks, and again using Special Forces, bin Laden in 2011.

Advantage: USA.

Then, we
changed our strategy. We decided to hold territory. Our Generals said:
If we can’t hold territory, we can’t win the war in Afghanistan. That strategy had
failed by 2009. Advantage: Taliban.

Third, our strategy morphed to: We
need to suppress the Taliban and buy time so that they negotiate with us (and Karzai). We settled on combining a surge with implementing Gen.
Petraeus’ counter-insurgency strategy, (COIN). COIN means we root out
the Taliban while winning the hearts and minds of the Afghans. The COIN
doctrine invokes the imagery of an “ink blot”: Operations begin in a
small area then spread out to adjacent villages and districts, winning people
over and detaching them from the insurgents.

There was never much reason to
believe that COIN would succeed. See the Wrongologist’s prior posts, here, here, and here. But the military situation in Afghanistan
looked sufficiently dire in 2009 that a bipartisan consensus of Washington
policymakers believed that a surge was necessary. So, Gens. Petraeus and McChrystal said we should add
troops (surge), because it worked in Iraq. After intramurals about how many
troops to employ in the surge, Obama settled on 30,000, below the 40,000
McChrystal said he needed.

We have now withdrawn the surge troops. But the suppressive force provided by the surge did not even
tamp down insurgent activity to levels seen in 2009, much less defuse the
situation, or enable COIN. Here are some statistics:

• In
  August 2009, at the height of the Obama administration’s debate over a troop
  surge, insurgents attacked US troops using small-arms fire, homemade bombs, and
  mortars, approximately 2,700 times.
  In August 2012, they attacked just shy of 3,000
  times.

•  In
  August 2009, insurgents used just
  under 600 IED’s on NATO forces. They used just over 600 IED’s NATO forces in August 2012.

And there’s another number to consider: Its 988; the
number of US troops killed in action in Afghanistan or who died since the troop
surge. The Taliban is
not battered, they didn’t agree to negotiate and now, the New York Times reports that the negotiating effort is over.

At best, the Surge strategy was a
draw with the Taliban.

Our final strategy is to train the Afghans
to do it for us.
That allows us to declare victory and head for the exits. Preparing the
Afghan Army and police to fight without us is
the foundation of the Obama Administration’s 2010 strategy to withdraw most
American forces by the end of 2014.

What
happens if we can’t train the Afghans? We’re
about to find out, since two weeks ago, we decided to suspend joint
combat patrols because of the growing green-on-blue attacks. So far this year, more than fifty American and NATO
soldiers have been killed by Afghan soldiers or recruits: actually, its 56 (16+%) of the 340 who have died this
year.

Advantage Taliban.

As Dexter Filkins
wrote in The Atlantic:

“When I was in
Afghanistan in April and May [2012], it was clear that the entire thrust of the
American-led mission was to train Afghan forces as quickly as possible, so that
we could stay on our departure schedule. The principal means to that end, I was
told repeatedly by senior commanders, was carrying out operations together. (I
heard the phrase “shoulder to shoulder” so often I started repeating it in my
sleep.) The reason for this was simple: Afghan soldiers typically perform much
better when American soldiers are with them. The Afghans fight better, feel
better, and abuse each other, and Afghan civilians, less.”

The Washington Post is now reporting
that joint operations
with the Afghans have now resumed, although
not at the same level as before. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan over the
weekend to meet with Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. and NATO commander, and
other officials. Dempsey said he wanted to:

“get a sense for whether our campaign
objectives were still valid, whether our campaign plan was still on track…The
Taliban is clearly trying to split us apart, but it won’t work…They’re working
to weaken the coalition, and that won’t work either.”

It is difficult to
overstate just how easily the Taliban have blunted our latest strategy.
Afghans (civilian and
insurgent alike) may be uneducated by our standards, but clearly, they’re not
stupid.

Our strategy? We decided
to hold territory, we started nation-building, we COIN’ed, we surged. The
Taliban strategy? Keep up their hit and run operations.

Here
is Obama’s (and our) dilemma: We have been in Afghanistan for eleven
years. We can’t remain much longer because we’ve overstayed our welcome, even
among our friends. But, if we leave, it means a Taliban takeover.

And
now, we can’t train the local troops to take over for us.

Time for a new strategy: We should leave,
but our leaders are afraid of the “They lost Afghanistan” narrative: We need
some sort of Graceful War Zone Exit
to make OUR LEADERS (not us) feel leaving is acceptable.

Here is the Wrongologist’s take: Our military has achieved
all of the tangible goals that can be expected of them in Afghanistan. The
thing no one in government can articulate for us is the real benefit to the US
of a peaceful Afghanistan: The argument
that Afghanistan is a base for terrorist activities is ridiculous,
since the terrorists exist in Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, or, even Pakistan,
where bin Laden lived for so many years.

Our
strategy is now self-defeating. We are locked into a situation where we are
committed to supporting the Karzai government, when our only true strategic interest is that we not be attacked
from there. Our national interest has absolutely nothing to do with
whatever regime rules Afghanistan and were it to be convulsed with civil war
and internecine bloodshed, it will not materially affect us.

We should withdraw from Afghanistan
and let Mr. Karzai see if he can govern without us. We should make it clear
that, while we cannot impose a government, our drones and cruise missiles can
make darned sure no Taliban regime will ever govern effectively.

This
is a strategy we can execute.

Don’t agree? Read what a 20-year old Afghan
soldier told The New York Times last
Wednesday:

“We
would have killed many of [the U.S. troops] already, but our commanders are
cowards and don’t let us.”

Game over! Time to go
home!