As the chopper swung around to land, the Taliban opened up, sending journalists scrambling for cover and Marines into full combat mode. According to Matthew Green of the Financial Times, \u201cThe crackle of gunfire lasted about 20 minutes and continued in the background as a state department official gave a presentation to Mr. Holbrooke about U.S. and U.K [United Kingdom] efforts to boost local government and promote agriculture in the town.\u201dThe U.S. officials were then bundled into armored cars and whisked back to the helicopter. As the chopper took off an enormous explosion shook the town\u2019s bazaar.<\/p>\n
When it was launched in March, the Marjah operation was billed as a \u201cturning point\u201d in the Afghan War, an acid test for the doctrine of counterinsurgency, or \u201cCOIN,\u201d a carefully designed strategy to wrest a strategic area from the Taliban and win the \u201chearts and minds\u201d of the local people. And in a sense Marjah has indeed defined COIN, just not quite in the way its advocates had hoped for.<\/p>\n
In his bible for counterinsurgency, Field Manuel 3-24, General David Petraeus argues, \u201cThe cornerstone of any COIN effort is establishing security for the civilian population.\u201d As one village elder who attended the Holbrooke meeting\u2014incognito for fear of being recognized by the Taliban\u2014told Green, \u201cThere is no security in Marjah.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nor in much of the rest of the country. The latest U.S. assessment found five out of 116 areas \u201csecure,\u201d and in 89 of the areas the government was \u201cnon-existent, dysfunctional or unproductive.\u201d<\/p>\n
That the war in Afghanistan is a failure will hardly come as news to most people. Our NATO allies are preparing to abandon the endeavor\u2014the Dutch, Canadians and Poles have announced they are bailing\u2014and the British, who have the second largest contingent in Afghanistan, are clamoring for peace talks. Opposition to the war in Britain is at 72 percent.<\/p>\n
But there is a tendency to blame the growing debacle on conditions peculiar to Afghanistan. There are certainly things about that country that have stymied foreign invaders: it is landlocked, filled with daunting terrain, and populated by people who don\u2019t cotton to outsiders. But it would be a serious error to attribute the current crisis to Afghanistan\u2019s well-earned reputation as the \u201cgraveyard of empires.\u201d<\/p>\n
The problem is not Afghanistan, but the entire concept of COIN, and the debate around it is hardly academic. Counterinsurgency has seized the high ground in the Pentagon and the halls of Washington, and there are other places in the world where it is being deployed, from the jungles of Columbia to the dry lands that border the Sahara. If the COIN doctrine is not challenged, Americans may well find themselves debating its merits in places like Somalia, Yemen, or Mauritania.<\/p>\n
\u201cCounterinsurgency aims at reshaping a nation and its society over the long haul,\u201d says military historian Frank Chadwick, emphasizing \u201cinfrastructure improvements, ground-level security, and building a bond between the local population and the security forces.\u201d<\/p>\n
In theory COIN sounds reasonable. In practice it almost always fails. Where it has succeeded\u2014the Philippines, Malaya, Bolivia, Sri Lanka, and the Boer War\u2014the conditions were very special: island nations cut off from outside support (the Philippines and Sri Lanka), insurgencies that failed to develop a following (Bolivia), or were based in a minority ethnic community (Malaya, the Boer War).<\/p>\n
COIN is always presented as politically neutral, a series of tactics aimed at winning hearts and minds. But in fact, COIN has always been part of a strategy of domination by a nation(s) and\/or socio\/economic class.<\/p>\n
The threat of \u201cCommunism\u201d and its companion, the \u201cdomino theory,\u201d sent soldiers to countries from Grenada to Lebanon, and turned the Vietnamese civil war into a Cold War battleground. If we didn\u2019t stop the communists in Vietnam, went the argument, eventually the Reds would storm the beaches at San Diego.<\/p>\n
Replace communism with \u201cterrorism\u201d and today\u2019s rationales sound much the same. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates describes Afghanistan as \u201cthe fountainhead of terrorism\u201d and, when asked to explain why Germany was sending troops to Afghanistan, then German Defense Minister Peter Strock argued that Berlin\u2019s security would be \u201c defended in the Hindu Kush.\u201d British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown routinely said that confronting \u201cterrorism\u201d in Afghanistan would protect the home front.<\/p>\n
But as counterterrorism expert Richard Barrett points out, the Afghan Taliban have never been a threat to the West, and the idea that fighting the Taliban would reduce the threat of terrorism is \u201ccomplete rubbish.\u201d In any case, the al-Qaeda operatives who pulled off the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon got their training in Hamburg and south Florida, not Tora Bora.<\/p>\n
The U.S. has strategic interests in Central Asia and the Middle East, and \u201cterrorism\u201d is a handy excuse to inject military power into these two energy-rich regions of the world. Whoever holds the energy high ground in the coming decades will exert enormous influence on world politics.<\/p>\n
No, it is not all about oil and gas, but a lot of it is.<\/p>\n
Winning \u201chearts and minds\u201d is just a tactic aimed at insuring our paramount interests, and\/or the interests of the \u201cfriendly\u201d governments that we fight for. Be nice to the locals unless the locals decide that they don\u2019t much like long-term occupation, don\u2019t trust their government, and might have some ideas about how they should run their own affairs.<\/p>\n
Then \u201chearts and minds\u201d turns nasty. U.S. Special Operations Forces carry out as many as five \u201ckill and capture\u201d raids a day in Afghanistan and have assassinated or jailed more than 500 Afghans in the past few months Thousands of others languish in prisons.<\/p>\n
The core of COIN is coercion, whether it is carried out with a gun or truckloads of money. If the majority of people accept coercion\u2014and the COIN supported government doesn\u2019t highjack the trucks\u2014then it may work<\/p>\n
And then maybe not. Tufts University recently researched the impact of COIN aid and found little evidence that such projects win locals over. According to Tufts professor, Andrew Wilder, \u201cMany of the Afghans interviewed for our study identified their corrupt and predatory government as the most important cause of insecurity, and perceived international aid security contracts as enriching a kleptocratic elite.\u201d<\/p>\n
This should hardly come as a surprise. Most regimes the U.S. ends up supporting against insurgents are composed of narrow elites who rule through military power and political monopoly. Our backing of the El Salvador and Guatemalan governments during the 1980s come to mind. Both were essentially death squads with national anthems.<\/p>\n
The U.S. doesn\u2019t care if a government is corrupt or democratic\u2014if it did, would countries like Egypt and Honduras be recipients of U.S. aid, and would we be cuddling up with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? The only thing the U.S. cares about is whether the local elites will serve Washington\u2019s interests by giving it bases, resources, or commercial access.<\/p>\n
Afghanistan is no different. The government of Hamid Karzi is a kleptocracy with little support or presence outside Kabul.<\/p>\n
In many ways COIN is the most destructive and self-defeating strategy a country can employ, and its toxicity is long-term. Take what didn\u2019t get reported in the recent firing of former Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal.<\/p>\n
McChrystal cut his COIN teeth running Special Operations death squads in Iraq, similar to the Vietnam War\u2019s \u201cOperation Phoenix\u201d that killed upwards of 60,000 \u201cViet Cong cadre\u201d and eventually led to the Mai Lai massacre. The success of Phoenix is best summed up by photos of desperate South Vietnamese soldiers clinging to U.S. helicopter skids as the Americans scrambled to get out before Saigon fell.<\/p>\n
But COIN advocates read history selectively and the loss in Vietnam was soon blamed on backstabbing journalists and pot-smoking hippies. The lessons were re-written, the memories expunged, and the disasters re-interpreted.<\/p>\n
So COIN is back. And it is working no better than it did in the 1960s. Take the counterterrorism portion of the doctrine.<\/p>\n
Over the past several years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been carrying out a sort of long-distance Phoenix program, using armed drones to assassinate insurgent leaders in Pakistan. The program has purportedly snuffed out about 150 such \u201cleaders.\u201d But it has also killed more than 1,000 civilians and inflamed not only the relatives of those killed or wounded in the attacks, but Pakistanis in general. According to an International Republican Institute poll, 80 percent of Pakistanis are now anti-American, and the killer drones are a major reason.<\/p>\n
\u201cHearts and minds\u201d soldiers like Petraeus don\u2019t much like the drone attacks because they alienate Pakistan and dry up intelligence sources in that country.<\/p>\n
But McChrystal\u2019s Phoenix program of killing Taliban \u201cleaders\u201d in Afghanistan is no better. As author and reporter Anne Jones notes, \u201cAssassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers\u2014those we call the \u2018bad Taliban\u2019\u2014actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns who are more interested in living off the population we\u2019re supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201chearts and minds\u201d crew have their own problems. McChrystal and Petraeus have long stressed the counterproductive effect of using airpower and artillery against insurgents, because it inevitably produces civilian casualties. But this means that the war is now between two groups of infantry, one of which knows the terrain, speaks the local language, and can turn from a fighter to a farmer in a few minutes.<\/p>\n
As the recent Rolling Stone article found, McChrystal was unpopular because his troops felt he put them in harm\u2019s way. Firefights that used to be ended quickly by air strikes go on for hours, and the Taliban are demonstrating that, given a level playing field, they are skilled fighters.<\/p>\n
In his recent testimony before Congress, Petraeus said he would \u201cemploy all assets\u201d to insure the safety of the troops and \u201cre-examine\u201d his ban on air power. But if he does, civilian casualties will rise, increasing local anger and recruits for the Taliban.<\/p>\n
The war in Afghanistan is first about U.S. interests in Central Asia. It is also about honing a military for future irregular wars and projecting NATO as a worldwide alliance. And once the U.S. endorsed Karzai\u2019s recent fraudulent election, the Afghans know it isn\u2019t about democracy.<\/p>\n
One of the key ingredients in COIN is a reliable local army, but U.S. soldiers no longer trust the ANA because they correctly suspect it is a conduit to the Taliban. \u201cAmerican soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don\u2019t tell their ANA colleagues when and where they are going on patrol,\u201d says Jones. Somebody told those insurgents that Holbrook and Eikenberry were coming to Marjah.<\/p>\n
Afghanistan is ethnically divided, desperately poor, and finishing its fourth decade of war. Morale among U.S. troops is plummeting. A U.S. officer told the Washington Times, \u201cWe are a battle-hardened force but eight years in Afghanistan has worn us down.\u201d As one Sergeant told Rolling Stone, \u201cWe\u2019re losing this f—ing thing!\u201d<\/p>\n
The sergeant is right, though the Afghans are the big losers. But as bad as Afghanistan is, things will be considerably worse if the U.S. draws the conclusion that \u201cspecial circumstances\u201d in Afghanistan are to blame for failure, not the nature of COIN itself.<\/p>\n
There was a time when the old imperial powers and the U.S. could wage war without having to bank their home fires. No longer. The U.S. has spent over $300 billion on the Afghan War, and is currently shelling out about $7 billion a month. In the meantime, 32 states are sliding toward insolvency, and 15 million people have lost their jobs. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Huffington Post, \u201cIt just can\u2019t be that we have a domestic agenda that is half the size of the defense budget.\u201d<\/p>\n
Empires can choose to step back with a certain grace, as the Dutch did in Southeast Asia. Or they can stubbornly hang on, casting about for the right military formula that will keep them on top. That fall is considerably harder.<\/p>\n
The choice is ours.<\/p>\n
Conn Hallinan<\/strong> can be reached at: ringoanne@sbcglobal.net<\/p>\n Source <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the chopper swung around to land, the Taliban opened up, sending journalists scrambling for cover and Marines into full combat mode. According to Matthew Green of the Financial Times, \u201cThe crackle of gunfire lasted about 20 minutes and continued in the background as a state department official gave a presentation to Mr. Holbrooke about U.S. and U.K [United Kingdom] efforts to boost local government and promote agriculture in the town.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. officials were then bundled into armored cars and whisked back to the helicopter. As the chopper took off an enormous explosion shook the town\u2019s bazaar.<\/p>\n When it was launched in March, the Marjah operation was billed as a \u201cturning point\u201d in the Afghan War, an acid test for the doctrine of counterinsurgency, or \u201cCOIN,\u201d a carefully designed strategy to wrest a strategic area from the Taliban and win the \u201chearts and minds\u201d of the local people. And in a sense Marjah has indeed defined COIN, just not quite in the way its advocates had hoped for. Continue reading