Afghanistan: what is needed now is a political surge

The surge is over in Afghanistan. The quest-ion now is what to do next? In November 2009, after weeks of deliberation, Barack Obama and his administration decided to commit 30,000 additional troops for an 18 month period to the end of the 2011 in order to try and replicate the success of Bush’s bold decision to surge in Iraq in 2007 when the campaign there looked doomed. The advocates of the Afghan surge, Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, were key figures in Iraq and were major proponents of the need for a surge in 2007 if the US were to stand any chance of success in that theatre. The gamble, as Thomas Ricks called it, famously paid off.

Unfortunately, the success of the surge in Iraq does not seem to have been replicated in Afghanistan for two critical reasons.

Firstly, the surge worked in Iraq primarily because it coincided with a political transformation: the Anbar Uprising. The Sunni minority recognised that it could not win the sectarian civil war which began soon after the invasion and attained an intensity of quite bewildering brutality in 2005. At the same time, the Sunnis rejected al Qaeda when it was clear that these foreign terrorists offered no future for Iraq — only fundamentalist nihilism and death.  

Secondly, the surge was based on a counter-insurgency concept which involved connecting the people to the central government through the extension of security to once vulnerable and hostile population groups.

Neither of these conditions have pertained in Afghanistan. No equivalent of the Anbar Uprising has occurred. There has been no political epiphany by either elites or populace that they should support the political process and confess their allegiance to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Moreover, and intimately connected to this, because of the extreme social fragmentation of the Afghan polity, the presence of western troops — even if they operate according to counter-insurgency principles focusing on population security and using minimal force — tends to generate resistance and violence from a population that is often at best skeptical about central government.

It was always unlikely that the surge would work in Afghanistan, though US military commanders have been dismayed that Obama seems to have given up on it so quickly, drawing down troops precipitately before their influence can be realised.

The current post-surge strategy seems to involve two parallel processes. On the one hand, NATO’s ISAF have announced a continuance of their stabilisation plan out to 2015 (with significantly less troops) at which point they will ‘transition’ to Afghan security leadership. NATO has committed itself to a mentoring, training and support role thereafter but conventional forces will not be used in a combat role.

At the same time, Barack Obama seems to be retrenching back to Operation Enduring Freedom; the purely counter-terrorist mission based in the south and east initiated after the 9/11 attacks. This mission involves a particular emphasis on the east because of its proximity to training bases in Pakistan.

The disastrous helicopter attack which killed 26 Pakistani soldiers on the border at the end of November 2011 might be taken as evidence of this renewed focus — and its potential consequences.

Catastrophic strategic defeat, with the Taliban taking over Kabul while the West and especially the US are in Afghanistan in any force, seems unlikely. However, it is not clear that the current retrenchment can be successful in ending the war and bringing genuine peace. If 130,000 Nato troops were unable to stabilise Afghanistan between July 2010 and 2011, it seems implausible that an ever declining number of troops could be successful working under the same operational concept out to 2015.

At the same time, it is difficult to see how a counter-terrorist/guerilla mission in the east could continue to be effective if violence and instability escalated dramatically in other parts of Afghanistan.

A post-surge strategy seems necessary, therefore, and it might involve three chief elements. Firstly, a political surge seems of paramount importance. Even in central Helmand where the British, enjoying significant troop densities, have been successful in stabilising the micro-environment around Lashkar Gar, it has been suggested by those who have worked there that the progress will collapse on British withdrawal. The British and some NATO troops elsewhere have created a bubble of security, but without building a regime organically tied to the existing political order their great efforts are likely to be temporary.

NATO needs to identify a coherent and potentially self-sustaining regime and support its key leaders. This political task is more urgent now than ever since the Taliban seem to have identified governance as the critical vulnerability of NATO and the Karzai regime and have conducted a very successful campaign of political assassination since the spring, killing former President Rabbani, Ahmed Wali Karzai, Jan Mohammed Khan and the major of Kandahar, Ghulam Haidar Hameedi. The political agent, not the soldier, is likely to be more important now.

Of course, one of the critical processes of political engagement will be with Islamabad, complicated to the point of impossibility by the assassination of Bin Laden, the accidental killing of Pakistani troops on the border, the continual public accusations of duplicity and bad faith and the failure to recognise Pakistan’s legitimate concerns about Afghanistan.

Secondly, in place of ISAF’s currently planned reduction of conventional force numbers over the next three years, a more purposeful and accelerated draw-down of conventional forces may, somewhat counter-intuitively, generate dividends. The surge strategy was based on an enduring counter-insurgency principle about the importance of force densities, which is in almost every case valid — except in Afghanistan.

Due to its extreme political and social fragmentation, western troops in sufficient numbers have sometimes been able to generate local security. However, more often, they have generated fighting and instability as they disturb local power balances and threaten political and economic autonomy.

Conventional troops, dependent upon a long supply chain through Pakistan (which the Taliban not only periodically target but from which they seem to benefit in the form of levies on trucks), are simply not that useful in building political order in Afghanistan.

Finally, a Special Operations Forces surge seems necessary. Since Iraq, Special Operations Forces have often been diverted from one of their prime missions: mentoring and training. Instead, Special Forces, especially tier 1 units like the SAS and Delta Force, have been for the most part engaged in kill or capture raids.

Some of these may have had a temporary tactical effect especially on IED networks but their strategic impact seems to have fallen a long way short of the prodigious investment of intelligence, surveillance and lift assets in them.

Since there is unanimity that strategic success relies on the generation of Afghan security forces, assigning the West’ best trained and equipped forces to this task would seem to be an appropriate assignment of resources. Special Forces will be able to work more discretely in small numbers with reduced political repercussions at local, national, regional and international levels than conventional forces.

Critically, this mentoring should link up with the political surge so that Afghan security forces are not simply taught skills but Afghan security units are attached directly to local political orders and leaders.

In Helmand, experiments with training local police raised from villages to police their own villages have been successful precisely because these policemen are seen as legitimate, enjoying dense ties with local leaders, unlike the national police force.

Of course, it is unlikely that any of this will happen — except for a preordained draw-down of conventional western troops (potentially mirroring the Soviet retreat 20 years ago). As the dominant partners, the US seem set on the counter-terrorist route, while NATO can think of nothing else but sticking to a timetable of exit.  It is here that the UK may have a role. The UK has played a very important part at every level in Afghanistan. Perhaps it might use its considerable influence and especially credibility with the Americans to persuade them of a politicised post-surge strategy — not least because Britain has learnt all these lessons in Afghanistan before: in the nineteenth century.

In Afghanistan, highly knowledgeable and skilled political agents, often armed only with money and political incentives rather than troops seem to have been consistently more successful than thousands of soldiers.

Anthony King, University of Exeter, worked in PRISM Cell, Regional Command South, Afghanistan, 2009-10.