The Stakes in Afghanistan
Spencer Ackerman has a long-form piece on the evolution of the Obama administration’s thinking on Afghanistan. It includes this telling insight: “To a great degree, Afghanistan is a proving ground for what the United States will ultimately consider the true lessons of Iraq.”
To a great degree, this is what I find to be the most troubling thing about the counterinsurgency approach to Afghanistan. It strikes me as something that’s driven at least as much by a desire to win an argument in Washington, DC about the workability of counterinsurgency as by a thoughtful analysis about the costs and benefits of adopting such an approach. Precisely because of COIN’s ascendant-but-still-uncertain status in the American military toolkit, it’s very difficult for a COIN advocate to say “eh? this would be costly at best and it’s not clear it’s worthwhile.” Ultimately, I’d say I’m more sympathetic to the COIN crowd’s view of the world than to enthusiasts about air power or the need to prepare for naval battles with China. But these kind of intra-military disputes inevitably wind up creating a somewhat warped view of what’s going on in the world.
18 Responses to “The Stakes in Afghanistan”
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November 5th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Thank goodness this is not some bizarre alternate universe where these are the only two choices in thinking of how to approach foreign policy.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:27 am
I think it’s about how to disengage from a senseless military policy without losing elections.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:45 am
This is the problem with “listening to your generals”–you’ve got an inherent selection bias. It’s like asking Scott Boras if you need a free agent.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Every strategy is designed to win an argument in Washington.
The actual War in Afghanistan can’t be won, so what else is there to argue about?
November 5th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Cheney promised us that the GWOT would last two decades or more, through several administrations, and Obama seems likely to obey.
The nice thing about the Iraq-Afghanistan War is that it means that some other country is not being bombed yet. Korea, Iran, Colombia, and then there are some sleepers. Somalia really has nothing to bomb, but neither did Afghanistan. Sudan is a bad guy, but it seems to be our bad guy in some sense. I’ve always thought that Burma should be moved up the queue, but then, maybe we’d accidentally Dick Cheney if we did.
Bombing a European nation would be more of a challenge and would probably strain our alliances, but on the other hand, those countries are target-rich.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Yes, we really shouldn’t bother to play out what would happen if we engaged in a naval war with China. That would just be insane.
Instead, the entire planning apparatus of the United States must be put to good use planning a war against a bunch of hicks in the mountains of Afrghanistan. Clearly that’s a far more rational approach to defending the United States.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Every strategy is designed to win an argument in Washington.
And to be demagogued on the teevee.
November 5th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Bombing a European nation would be more of a challenge and would probably strain our alliances, but on the other hand, those countries are target-rich.
These guys seem pretty happy with our last go around with that.
November 5th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Spackerman’s article is very illuminating indeed. RTWT!
November 5th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Iraq was the stupidest, most mendacious thing we’ve ever done, at least lately. Please tell me we’re not in Afghanistan to learn anything about Iraq.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Far and away the best thing our military could do to safeguard the Homeland and create a viable opportunity for World Peace would be to pulverize Israel from the air and on the ground. I believe Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Brazil would all be on board. It’s too good an idea to just idly dismiss. To limit the number of civilian casualties, we could help re-locate the populace until the mission was accomplished. Then, afterward, they could go back to Israel and re-vitalize it as a constructive World citizen.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
COIN is a helluva lot better than the crap strategies the military has been conjuring up since the ass whupping it took in Vietnam.
Think about it, we fought a guerrilla army in the jungles of a third world Asian country for the better part of 10 years. Our strategy consisted of killing the enemy and, OOPS, hundreds of thousands of civilians too, using overwhelming combined arms firepower. Get a platoon, or a company, or, better yet, a battalion, surrounded, and the call in air strikes. Huey gunships, Phantoms and napalm, arclight, B-52’s, heavy ordnance. Pile up the dead bodies on both sides. Count em. Hey! There is more of them. Victory.
So we end up losing in most ignominious fashion in Vietnam and what do military planners and geniuses at the highest levels spend the next decade and a half developing? A new strategic theory on how to conduct and win a war, and they call it: AirLand Battle.
Sounds fucking cool, doesn’t it? AirLand Battle. But in reality AirLand Battle is a direct rip-off of DeepBattle strategies developed by Soviet military planners in the 20’s and 30’s, essentially, blitzkreig warfare, only instead of using horses and wagons, Nazi style, to penetrate deep behind enemy lines you use, you know, vehicles, and insert in our case, of course, Warthogs for the Stuka/Shturmovik for low level air to ground support.
Dumb. It gets even dumber. Even after we had invaded Afghanistan Rummy Rumsfeld and the DoD were signing off on a shiny new strategy for our armed forces to use in the 21st Century, and they called it: Network-Centric Warfare.
Network-Centric Warfare shares the same concepts as AirLand Battle except: everybody using this grand new strategy, down to the lowest enlisted man, gets a headset -and night vision goggles.
30 years after Vietnam, we once again invade a country in Asia without any strategy at all other than to kill people, mostly from the air. We can’t use AirLand Battle, or Network-Centric Warfare, because there is no army to destroy and there aren’t any roads for fast mobile action. Instead, we bombed the shit out of Afghanistan with our ancient killing machine, the B-52, and shifted our gaze to happier hunting grounds, one country over to the west. We know what happened next.
The beauty of COIN is it can go anywhere -theoretically, I mean. It is a trunk that can sprout a thousand possible branches. And the core of that trunk is not about killing. And the branches off that trunk are conceptually related ideas. This new approach is entirely antithetical to the standard operative principles which have guided the armed forces throughout my lifetime.
And for me, someone my age, the idea that our vast killing machine is finally thinking, finally using its fucking noodle, to seek ways to apply solutions that don’t involve wholesale chaos and death -is a most welcome thing.
And yet nobody seems to like it. Nobody wants do deal with it. They want the old ways back. “Why can’t we just slaughter them from air, like we always do?”
November 5th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
The British in Africa didn’t call their efforts in West Africa counter-insurgency in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Lord Lugard had pretty sophisticated theories about co-opting the locals and using local proxies.
November 5th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
“And for me, someone my age, the idea that our vast killing machine is finally thinking, finally using its fucking noodle, to seek ways to apply solutions that don’t involve wholesale chaos and death -is a most welcome thing.”
But that COIN “thinking” is thinking inside a very tiny little
box labelled “how to occupy an undeveloped country”. The
radical thought of just *not* occupying other countries
doesn’t occur to 99.99% of the military. Kudos is due to
General Wesley Clark, who had the insight to *not* fight
the Kosovo intervention as a COIN ground war, but rather to
use air power to make it painful enough to get all parties
to negotiate a solution. I was skeptical about that at the
time, but it turned out to be a really smart plan.
Everything since 2000 looks clumsy, stupid, expensive, and
ineffective compared to that success.
And I’m not at all sure that the COIN stuff gets you less
chaos and death – it just spreads it out over 10 or 20
years of futile occupation, a wedding party here, a few
bystanders caught in the crossfire there, a carbomb every
now and then, until the voters get tired of the stupid game
and force a withdrawal.
November 5th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
“Yes, we really shouldn’t bother to play out what would happen if we engaged in a naval war with China. That would just be insane.”
The US has 12 carrier battle groups. China has … zero.
None. Nul. Bupkis.
So this is pretty easy to play out. The US sends a couple of carrier battle groups. The US planes sink China’s surface
ships (no battleships or cruisers, 26 destroyers, 51 frigates)
and their submarines (40+ conventional subs, probably highly
vulnerable due to short range and need to surface, a few
nuclear subs which are surely nowhere near as good as the
Russian ones we’re trained and equipped to deal with).
Now maybe, possibly, perhaps, about 20 or 25 years from now, China might have got round to building a few aircraft
carriers and learning the very difficult and complex
business of carrier operations, and then there might be
something to talk about. But for now, it’s a complete
red herring.
November 5th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
It’s a fine piece, but I’m thinking Spencer meant “hopeless” here, not “helpless”: “…provided that no one admits a situation is indeed helpless.”
November 5th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
“So this is pretty easy to play out”
It sure is a good thing anti-ship missiles haven’t been invented, and that China doesn’t know how to make them. Thousands and thousands of them.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
“It sure is a good thing anti-ship missiles haven’t been invented, and that China doesn’t know how to make them. Thousands and thousands of them.”
… which is why carrier-based aircraft are so darn important.
Because they allow you to destroy enemy ships and aircraft
before they get within range to fire off missiles.
Of course we also have short-range defenses such as anti-missile
missiles and Phalanx automated guns. But the basic principle
of carrier warfare, now just as in the 1940s, is that your
aircraft find and destroy the enemy before they get close
enough to do damage.
Now if your plan is to use the US Navy close to the Chinese
mainland to support an invasion, then you’ll have trouble
with land-based missiles. But you’ll also have trouble with
a whole lot of other stuff, because invading China and trying
to subdue 1.2B Chinese would be utterly batshit crazy under
any circumstances whatsoever.