On a highway north of Kabul last month, an American soldier aimed a machine gun at my car from the turret of his armored Humvee. In the split second for which our eyes locked, I had a revelation: To a man with a weapon, everything looks like a threat.
. . . It's not something I'll forget. It's not the sort of thing ordinary Afghans forget, either, and it reminded me that heavy-handed military tactics can alienate the people we're trying to help while playing into the hands of the people we're trying to defeat.
Welcome to the paradoxical world of counterinsurgency warfare -- the kind of war you win by not shooting.
The objective in fighting insurgents isn't to kill every enemy fighter -- you simply can't -- but to persuade the population to abandon the insurgents' cause. The laws of these campaigns seem topsy-turvy by conventional military standards: Money is more decisive than bullets; protecting our own forces undermines the U.S. mission; heavy firepower is counterproductive; and winning battles guarantees nothing.
The New York Times has
a long article on how the “Good War” in Afghanistan has went bad. The really short version can be found in the emphasized text above from Nathaniel Fick’s article in the Washington Post. Rather, the short version is that we haven’t been following those rules, and as a result, the situation is deteriorating.
One of the things I sensed from reading Fick’s article, is that when he first talks to other American soldiers, their total focus is on finding and killing the bad guys. In much the same way, most of the war’s supporters will talk about how we’re there to fight, kill, take out, or destroy the Taliban and/or al Qaeda.
The truth is more subtle. We’re there to defeat them, and to do so in a counterinsurgency campaign means finding out what we can do
for the people, not what we can do
to the enemy, because all too often in this kind of warfare, the two categories can shift and merge dependant upon your actions.
Reconstruction funds can shape the battlefield as surely as bombs. But such methods are still not used widely enough in Afghanistan. After spending more than $14 billion in aid to the country since 2001, the United States' latest disbursement, of more than $10 billion, will start this month. Some 80 percent of it is earmarked for security spending, leaving only about 20 percent for reconstruction projects and initiatives to foster good governance.
Very much like in Iraq, money allocated to build or rebuild infrastructure for the civilian population gets spent mostly on security, and the actual projects themselves are too few and too poorly funded to make much difference, which leads to episodes
like this one with our troops.
Canadian soldiers found no weapons or Taliban during a recent foray into a region considered an insurgent stronghold, but they did get an earful from villagers who accused them of failing to keep their promises.
"Canadians have come here three times before and promised (to give us a well) but they've done nothing,"
Reconstruction never gets the kind of press combat does, and digging a well isn't going to win you any medals. But if we’re going to have any chance in winning over the population, its the well-digging and school-building that will do it, not driving by on patrol or going through people’s houses hunting for weapons.
The counter-argument usually goes that without security, reconstruction can’t proceed, which segues nicely into point two:
The second pillar of the academy's curriculum relates to the first: The more you protect your forces, the less safe you may be. To be effective, troops, diplomats and civilian aid workers need to get out among the people. But nearly every American I saw in Kabul was hidden behind high walls or racing through the streets in armored convoys.
. . .
Of course, mingling with the population means exposing ourselves to attacks, and commanders have an obligation to safeguard their troops. But they have an even greater responsibility to accomplish their mission. When we retreat behind body armor and concrete barriers, it becomes impossible to understand the society we claim to defend. If we emphasize "force protection" above all else, we will never develop the cultural understanding, relationships and intelligence we need to win. Accepting the greater tactical risk of reaching out to Afghans reduces the strategic risk that the Taliban will return to power.
“Force protection” is the byword for much of our operations. This is, to some extent, brought upon by the Canadian public, or at least our politicians' perception of the public. Every time a soldier dies, the question is raised whether or not we think the mission is worthwhile. Harper tried to ban the media from the repatriation ceremonies to keep the deaths out of the public eye as much as possible.
The thought being that if Canadians see too many flag-draped coffins being unloaded, they’ll demand a withdrawal from Afghanistan. It may be true, but the result is that the leadership worries more about what will cause casualties rather than what will make the mission more successful.
One of the major resources in counterinsurgencies is intelligence from the local population. How are you going to get that intelligence if the only time Afghans see your troops is over the business end of a machine gun? When you speed through town in an armoured convoy and shoot any vehicle that gets too close?
Protecting the force means isolating them, and isolation means defeat. To win, you must expose yourself to greater casualties, which is probably the hardest thing to ask our soldiers to do, particularly given there is no guarentee it will actually work.
This also ties well into the third point, where heavy-handed military operations, and particularly air strikes, do more harm than good to our mission.
This issue seems to get the most press, and the US attracts the most criticism,
even from allies, and this year particularly
has not been a good one for foreign forces in this regard. More civilians have died because of coalition actions than by those of the Taliban.
Sending in the infantry to dig enemy fighters out of villages is risky and would cause higher casualties, something the leadership wants to avoid, and there is the simple fact that the coalition has far too few troops on the ground to be able to engage in that type of attritional fighting anyway. If your emphasis is on protecting your own troops, then calling in an air strike simply makes the most tactical sense. When civilians are killed in those strikes, the oft-heard excuse for this is that the enemy “hides behind civilians” or some other such reasoning that puts the blame for civilian deaths on the targets rather than the bombers. But it doesn’t really matter who we blame for these deaths, it's who the
Afghan people blame that counts, and they’re blaming the people dropping the bombs, not whoever the intended targets were.
And when the emphasis on force protection means that the isolated foreign troops don’t have good local intelligence and the target turns out to have been a mistake, . . . Saying it wasn't intentional doesn’t really make much difference to the people that are killed. What makes sense tactically sets us back on the strategic level, which is why Fick and others call counterinsurgency paradoxical. To win, you need to do what doesn't make conventional sense.
The reason these firepower over manpower tactics work against us is somewhat simple. They send a message to the Afghan people that their lives are worth far less than ours. When we suspect that enemy fighters are in a village or residential neighbourhood, we’re more willing to cause some “collateral damage” and kill civilians by dropping large amounts of high explosives on mud-brick houses, than risk our soldiers by sending them in to dig the enemy out.
Basically, “We’re here to protect you. But, you know, we’re willing to kill you rather than risk getting hurt doing it.” Not the truth, and not how the decision gets made, but its still the kind of message that those whose houses are on the receiving end of those air strikes hear.
High explosives are an indiscriminate weapon, and in counterinsurgency, indiscriminate weapons are just another recruiting tool for the insurgents.
“The Americans are killing and destroying a village just in pursuit of one person,” said Mahmadullah, 24, referring to Osama bin Laden. “So now we have understood that the Americans are a curse on us, and they are here just to destroy Afghanistan. They can tell the difference between men and women, children and animals, but they are just killing everyone.”
A trained mullah from the village of Kutaizi, half an hour from Sangin, Mahmadullah reacted with sarcasm to the idea that reconstruction and assistance could change the minds of the people.
“First they kill me, and then they rebuild my house?” he said. “What is the point when I am dead and my son is dead? This is not of any worth to us.”
So we call in air strikes to win battles without losing too many soldiers, but lose the support of the (surviving) population. Point four:
Just as it did in Vietnam, the U.S. military could win every battle and still lose the war.
And losing the war is where we are headed in Afghanistan if the tactics don't change.
Cross-posted to
BlogsCanada: E-Group
