A winning strategy in Afghanistan isn't as black-and-white as advocates of counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism would have us believe. The solution is a hybrid - and the Army is already putting it in place. All the Army is waiting for is for the president to hurry up and make a decision.
David Ignatius of the Washington Post shows how solidly he understands the issue in his recent column from Afghanistan. The column is titled,"The Real Afghan Strategy: Will Obama Give It a Chance?"
Ignatius looks at the quizzical look on the face of an Afghan farmer who is speaking with US troops who understand his culture. Perhaps the farmer is wondering, Ignatius writes, "Can these pleasant, tea-drinking American soldiers really be the same people who are assaulting Taliban fighters in this region of eastern Afghanistan?"
"The answer is yes. Even as US forces show a gentler side with their new stress on people-friendly counterinsurgency, they continue to conduct devastating attacks on the enemy. It's this mix of hard and soft that's the essence of the US battle plan here, but this reality is not well understood back in America.
"The Washington debate about the Afghanistan war - pitting advocates of a broad counterinsurgency strategy against those who favor a narrower counterterrorism approach - has sometimes been misleading, at least in terms of what actually goes on here. The fact is that U.S. forces are doing both missions every day and night - and indeed are becoming increasingly effective at each one."
There's a danger, though, as Ignatius observes. "A strategy that combines stroking your friends and pounding your enemies runs the risk of sending mixed messages. The public, here and around the world, may conclude that for all their new talk about drinking tea, the Americans are ruthless killers. Meanwhile, the enemy may conclude that whatever its firepower, the United States is impatient and will eventually go away. The wires may get crossed, in other words, with people getting the opposite message from the one intended."
Very true. Ignatius is in Afghanistan to discover what he calls "both sides of this complicated and ambitious strategy."
The first is the soft, "population-centric" approach, which Ignatius demonstrates in a pilot project to improve local governance. The US hopes to show that the locals won't see the central Afghan government as "a distant and corrupt force in Kabul" but as a better-than-Taliban local presence. The problem, Ignatius correctly notes, is that the illusion defies reality: "the Kabul government is distant and corrupt."
Representatives of the first wave of a US "civilian surge" that President Obama promised are already on the scene (though this stability operations initiative predates the Obama administration by several years). The US Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, State Department and other agencies have been at work on this for quite a while, with valiant - and often very successful - efforts that remain almost unknown here at home.
The "hard" side of the US strategy consists of widespread use of special operations forces: the lethal "black" side that kills or neutralizes enemy forces, and the soft "unconventional" side consisting of "A-Teams" to work among the towns and villages with Afghan soldiers, police, and tribal leaders.
"These are creative operations, employing some of America's best soldiers," Ignatius notes. "They reflect a growing understanding of what counterinsurgency experts call the 'human terrain map.'" And mastery of the human terrain, as this blog constantly notes, is key to winning the war.
"It's like all the instruments in an orchestra," a US military commander tells Ignatius of the battle plan's varied parts. "You have to know how to play them together." (This is the very approach of the Institute of World Politics, the graduate school where I teach.)
So the choice between counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, Ignatius notes, "is a false argument. What the United States actually has in Afghanistan is a mixture. Obama must now decide whether to provide the resources - and take the risks - to test whether this combined strategy can succeed."
Photo: Human Terrain Team at work. An Afghan interpreter, left, and Jared Davidson, with Human Terrain Team, both attached to Regimental Combat Team 3 (RCT-3) and the Afghan National Army (ANA), talk with a villager during a mounted patrol in Nawa district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Sept. 23, 2009. The ANA and RCT-3 Marines are talking with village residents to try to gain public assistance in ridding the area of enemy forces. The Marines are deployed to conduct partnered counterinsurgency operations with Afghan National Security Forces in southern Afghanistan. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Gunnery Sgt. James A. Burks/Released)
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