"So Long:" Michael Hirsh's and James Tarabay's National Journal Article on Afghanistan

8/6/2019 "So Long:" Michael Hirsh's and James Tarabay's National Journal Article on Afghanistan

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John Nagl is the kind of guy who brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wicked linein The Great Gatsby about people who succeed at such an early age that “ev-erything afterward savors of anticlimax.” A star at West Point and a Rhodesscholar, the native Nebraskan was only 37 when he landed on the cover of TheNew York Times Magazine in January 2004. In that article, Nagl oered an in-side-the-Sunni-Triangle tutorial on what he came to call “graduate-level war.”Nagl’s mantra: “We have to outthink the enemy, not just outght him.” In an

era when small but wily bands of non-

uniformed insurgents could stymie America’s mighty military machine with stealthy guerrilla attacks androadside bombs planted in the night,the U.S. had to gure out how to huntdown the bad guys and cut o theirsupport from the local population.Nagl, after studying the British andFrench colonial experience, as wellas America’s handling of the Viet-nam War, helped to develop what hassince become famous as U.S. “coun-terinsurgency doctrine,” or COIN. Ashis celebrity grew, Nagl proselytized

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So Long It isn’t just people who aredying in Afghanistan. So isan entire concept of war.By Michael Hirsh andJamie Tarabay

Scholar-warrior: John Nagl

june 25, 2011



about it everywhere, even on The Daily ShowWith Jon Stewart.

By the late 2000s, the precocious Armymajor had become part of a brain trust around

America’s uber-general, David Petraeuthe commander who implemented the Iraqtroop surge. Commissioned by Petraeus, Naghelped to author the ocial counterinsurgen

cy manual that has since reoriented Americanmilitary doctrine, shifting the center of gravity from rough-and-ready conventional warghters to cerebral specialists in irregular

warfare and targeted response. After retiringfrom the Army as a lieutenant colonel in early2008—even though he seemed to be on thefast track to four-star fame—Nagl took over alittle-known think tank, the Center for a New

American Security, and turned it into wha journalist Tara McKelvey called “counterinsurgency central in Washington.”

Brilliant and brash as ever at the advancedage of 45, Nagl delivers a sober endorsement

of the military’s current COIN strategy in Afghanistan, which, because it was adaptedfrom Iraq, is partly his brainchild. It is a strategy that many experts believe is not working—and the skeptics may now include Presi-dent Obama himself. “I think any sane person

would be disillusioned,” Nagl says over a lunchof mussels and mozzarella salad at Finemondo, a lushly decorated restaurant around thecorner from his oce. Even some of thosearound Petraeus (who is retiring from the military to run the CIA) are losing heart. But Nagsays that the Janus-faced core of COIN strategy—winning over the Afghan population with

kindness, aid, and a multibillion-dollar policyto “clear, hold, and build” towns and villages while ruthlessly killing o insurgents—is juststarting to succeed. He laments that the de

bate in Washington is dominated by critic who complain that the war is almost 10 yearslong and already more hopeless than Vietnam

What they don’t fully appreciate, according to Nagl, is that Washington, distracted byIraq, had mostly neglected Afghanistan until two years ago. “We took a little eight-yeargoddamn vacation.” Grabbing a piece of pa-per, Nagl quickly sketches a map that showshow solvable the problem in Afghanistan isas long as COIN is applied. The mostly non-Pashtun (and therefore mostly non-Taliban)north largely takes care of itself; the strategyis working in the south under the Marinesand so the only task left is to secure the eastMeanwhile, Petraeus’s “Anaconda strategy”of attacking the Taliban and choking o itsresources is sowing doubt among the insurgent leadership. “I think we’re on the verge o

breaking the insurgency,” Nagl says. “It’s exactly the wrong time to change horses.”

Yet a surprising number of military experts seem sure that COIN is failing; that itis not even a real strategy; and that guys like

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Nation-building:Western

governments are

helping to build

infrastructure in

Afghanistan.



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and the population.… When you begin to seeparents pushing their children to school, thenthat tells you that threat is diminishing.”

Petraeus’s successor, Marine Lt. Gen. John Allen, will follow a similar course. He perfect-ly ts the Nagl/Petraeus mold of the scholar-soldier. Adaptable and erudite (he has “oneof the best libraries” in the military, accord-

ing to retired Marine Col. Dan Kelly, an oldfriend), Allen also has considerable hands-onexperience in counterinsurgency. He directedgovernance and stability operations in Iraq’s

Anbar province during the 2006-08 surge,

John Nagl, who are perhaps a little too smartfor their own good, have been snowing usall along. The newly vocal doubters includesome of those who helped develop counterin-surgency in the rst place. They run the spec-trum from those who think COIN is pretty much a crock to those who still believe in theidea but doubt Washington’s ability to imple-

ment it. Among the latter is Lt. Gen. JohnCampbell, who just handed o command of

Afghanistan Regional Command East, themost recalcitrant part of the country but theone Nagl has hopes for. Campbell notes thatCOIN typically takes a decade or more to

work. “I think it’s the way to go, but I don’tthink we have time,” he told National Journal in a June 14 interview. “If we don’t show prog-ress, we’re not going to have the money.”

Already, Washington is losing patience.On Wednesday, Obama announced a faster-than-expected drawdown, saying he would

bring home the entire 33,000-troop surge by

the fall of 2012 and end the war by 2014. “Itis time to focus on nation-building at home,”Obama said. As the 2012 presidential cam-paign gets under way and the political debatecenters on the debt ceiling and the decit, themounting cost of the war has eclipsed the ca-sualty rate as Topic A. A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Pressshows that nearly 60 percent of Americans be-lieve that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Af-ghanistan has contributed “a great deal” to thenation’s debt—more than, say, increased do-mestic spending or the tax cuts enacted overthe past decade. The public is clearly growing

disenchanted with COIN’s expense and incre-mental progress. Even traditionally hawkishRepublicans, particularly in the House, have

begun to balk. “The budget math has caughtup to the theory,” says retired Gen. David Bar-no, who once commanded U.S. forces in Af-ghanistan but now works for Nagl. Counterin-surgency, the theory goes, can work only withthe right balance of war-ghting to take downthe bad guys and nation-building to win overthe people. It seems suddenly clear that Amer-ica doesn’t have the patience and cash for both.

THE TROUBLEOcial optimism, of course, still reigns. Ma-rine Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, who until re-cently commanded the 1st Expeditionary Force in the Southwest—mainly Helmandand Nimruz provinces, considered partialsuccess stories—says he believes that COINcan work even with limited troops and time.“Success can become a tidal wave, buildingmomentum of its own,” Mills told National Journal. “As people become more condentin their Afghan security forces, I think you’regoing to see a shift even in the troublesomeareas.… It’s beginning to show success.”

As one piece of evidence of how the U.S.

military “learns” (a key Nagl idea), Mills sayshe was not as interested in “body counts” asin other measures: the diminishing resourcesof the Taliban as they “search for old muni-tions and save expended cartridges”; the ea-gerness with which parents in his area senttheir children to school; and the lower de-sertion rates among Afghan soldiers. At last

count, the U.S. military said that the attritionrate had dropped from 70 to 30 percent. Millssays he saw, in just a year, dramatic improve-ment in “probably the most important met-ric: the separation between the insurgency

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helping to transform it from a hotbed of insur-gency into a critical building block of stability.

But Allen may now have an impossiblecircle to square: He will preside over a draw-down at exactly the moment when COIN’sarchitects say it has just begun to receive theminimum resources necessary. Under COINtheory, there should ideally be about 20 secu-

rity ocers for every 1,000 civilians, which would mean that NATO and the U.S. need600,000 troops in Afghanistan rather thanthe 140,000 or so there now—a number setto decline next month.

Not surprisingly, according to military ocials, right now COIN is not working toprotect—and thereby win over—most of the

Afghan population. Earlier this month, theUnited Nations announced that May was thedeadliest month for civilians there since it be-gan keeping count in 2007. The Taliban andother insurgents caused most of the deaths,

but at least 12 percent were ascribed to mis-takes by NATO troops and Afghan forces.Because Afghan civilians are dying at higherrates, Campbell says, Western forces are notseeing the population come over to their side

in large numbers—something that’s cruciafor the strategy to succeed. The people, heconcedes, believe that the coalition doesn’tdo enough to protect them, and neither the

Afghan army nor some 20,000 police are yeup to that task. “We’re not going to kill our

way out,” Campbell says. Another problem for counterinsurgency i

its mind-boggling cost—and its meager returnon investment. Even with the United Statesspending $80 billion per year, Campbell saysthat “the full spectrum of COIN” is being applied only in a relatively small section of thecountry’s south and southwest, centered onKandahar, with a population of about 2.1 million. The 14 provinces of the battle-strickeneast have a population nine times that size, constituting more than half of Afghanistan’s totapopulation of 30 million. Nagl may be right insaying that Regional Command East is “all wehave to do,” but it’s bigger by far than anythingthe U.S. has yet tried. Campbell says it “will

be the last place we leave.” Meanwhile, it appears that Obama has decided not to press fora larger COIN approach in the east, which Petraeus wanted, so that he can withdraw from

Afghanistan more quickly, according to a senior administration ocial. Petraeus “wanted to move some of the [south] folks into [theeast] to repeat the counterinsurgency campaign there. The president doesn’t think that’snecessary,” the ocial said.

Two further problems are the absence ofa legitimate and trusted government that theU.S. and NATO can hand o to—this is absolutely critical and perhaps the most Viet

namesque aspect of Afghanistan—and theTaliban’s safe haven across the border inPakistan, which has possibly grown even safer as relations between the U.S. and Pakistancontinue to deteriorate.

Before Obama settled on his current strategy and ordered the surge, Vice President JoeBiden argued vehemently in 2009 for a pared

back approach that discarded COIN, admitted that Afghan President Hamid Karza

wouldn’t be much help, and focused mainlyon attacking terrorists. Today, the problemsof counterinsurgency are rapidly reducing

American strategy to something that lookmore and more like this. “Essentially what’shappening now is the Biden plan on steroids,”says retired Army Lt. Col. Douglas OllivantCampbell’s former military aide and an ex

White House staer focused on AfghanistanOllivant calls this “a realist version o

COIN”: Practice counterinsurgency in places where it might work and leave the other plac-es (for example, the unruly Pech Valley, from

which Campbell simply withdrew) alone. Ithese regions become nests for Taliban, “then

you do the Biden plan there” and launch missions, he says. “What Campbell tried to focuson was a more limited approach that tries to

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get the low-hanging fruit,” Ollivant says. “Itconnects the cities that want to be part of thesolution.” COIN-istas like to compare their

approach to the spread of ink spots on a papertowel; the secured (ink-spotted) area bleedsout to connect with other ink spots until im-portant corridors of stability appear through-out the country. But the new skeptics, suchas Ollivant, say that so many areas are irre-mediable that a few stray ink spots may neverspread far enough—which is partly why a sim-ilar strategy failed in Vietnam.

THE SKEPTICSCan such a partial solution, amounting to akind of land-based island-hopping, ever work?Retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes

says it can’t, and he is in a position to know.Hammes, now a fellow at the National DefenseUniversity’s Center for Strategic Research, isa onetime COIN supporter who helped devisethe current strategy. Outside pockets of suc-cess like Helmand province, “what Petraeusis doing is killing Taliban,” Hammes says, andthat’s about it. Because of Karzai’s failures andPakistan’s open door, a huge “strategic discon-nect” exists between the COIN concept andthe reality on the ground, he contends. “Thecounterinsurgency discussion led by JohnNagl and his team” doesn’t acknowledge that.

Afghanistan is far more primitive thanIraq, where most of the COIN proponents cuttheir teeth. “Social and economic conditionsare not the same as in Iraq, or Malaya in 1950,”Hammes says. Counterinsurgency requires atleast “an 18th-century concept of representa-tive government and a 19th-century conceptof government providing services.” In Afghan-istan, he says, “we think we’re going to leapfrom somewhere in the 7th-to-14th century into the 19th century—and do it in four years.”

And although insurgents crossed from Syriaand Saudi Arabia into Iraq, there was nothinglike Afghanistan’s porous border and the sanc-tuary next door. Afghanistan “is a helluva lot

larger,” Hammes says. “Pakistan can’t controlthe border as Syria or Saudi [Arabia] could.”

And it doesn’t even want to. Campbell uses

the word “biblical” to describe Afghanistan:“Iraq had water, infrastructure, oil, educatedpeople. Afghanistan has none of that.” Beyondthat, Campbell says, there is almost no one

who can replace Karzai, meaning there may beno credible government to hand things o to.“The bench is not deep at all,” he says. “This is

where it’s completely dierent from Iraq.” All of these doubts about COIN add up to

what retired Army Gen. Robert Scales calls“the slow gravitation of Afghanistan from acounterinsurgency-centered strategy to onetied more to direct action”—killing enoughTaliban quickly enough to drive the leaders to

the peace table, then getting out just as quickly.Ollivant, for one, says that because Allen willlose most of the 30,000 surge troops by 2012,“he needs a new strategy.” A White Housespokesman, Tommy Vietor, told National Jour-nal that none is planned. “We are not funda-mentally re-litigating where we ended up,” hesaid. Nonetheless, administration ocials in-creasingly talk of COIN as a one-o success inIraq, and they emphasize that Obama alwaysintended it for only parts of Afghanistan.

COIN strategy is complex and ambitious.On paper, it is impressive. It calls for a kindof nation-building: fostering reconstructionand economic progress; building up localgovernance, police, and security—all in aneort to engender popular faith in the gov-ernment and to “reintegrate” former insur-gents and their supporters into society.

But more and more, former counterinsur-gency stars are realizing that their moment of favor may be brief—perhaps almost as brief as the ash of self-celebration that the neo-cons enjoyed nearly a decade ago between themoment Baghdad fell and Iraq went sour. Andthe argument is bigger than Afghanistan. “It’snot so much a doctrinal debate as a struggleover the soul of the Army,” says retired Army

Col. Peter Mansoor, Petraeus’s former execu-tive ocer in Iraq and a key member of his

brain trust. “It’s about whether the Army is

primarily a force that ghts and wins conven-tional wars or whether counterinsurgency ispart and parcel of what the Army has to do.…

As we pull out of Afghanistan, there will be ashift back to training for conventional wars,”he says. “Counterinsurgency is going to slow-ly die out, just as it died out, after Vietnam.”

Even if the war in Afghanistan ends moresuccessfully than the Vietnam War did, Man-soor says, “there’s not going to be any stom-ach in the United States for this kind of thinggoing forward…. We’re going to shy away from regime change or these really large-scale counterinsurgency conicts. That’s

why you see, in Libya, the reluctance of theObama administration to do more than whatthey’re doing.”

Barno says that COIN can’t be permittedto atrophy again as a way of thinking. Evenmost skeptics concede that counterinsurgen-cy thinking helped, at least in turning backthe Iraq insurgency. “We snatched victory [inIraq] from the jaws of defeat through a classiccounterinsurgency campaign,” Barno says.“You’re never to see a conventional war everagain that doesn’t not have a very robust ir-regular component to it.”

FOOL’S GOLDStill, some critics are using this period of doc-trinal doubt to attack the very idea of counter-insurgency as a profound self-deception—mil-itary fool’s gold, in eect. Increasingly, thesecritics include NATO allies. Tom Johnson, aformer adviser to the Canadian NATO com-mand in Kabul, says he has come to believethat COIN “is a lot of smoke and mirrors.” Intruth, he says, “the United States and NATOonly control the land they’re standing on atany particular time.” Even that advantage of-ten disappears at night, when the Taliban re-turn, and it will almost entirely disappear by

june 25, 2011

The debate: Gen. John Campbell (left) wants counterinsurgency;

Vice President Joe Biden wants to focus on counterterrorism.



june 25, 2011 31

2014, Johnson believes. Worse, by supporting acorrupt government and pretending to protectthe population, the U.S. may be creating moreenemies than it would if it simply withdrew.

Douglas Porch, a military scholar at the Na- val Postgraduate School, believes that Nagl andhis band are guilty of mythologizing counter-insurgency as a kind of cleaned-up, civilized

war, when in actuality it relies mainly on savagetactics—covert killing on a large scale by aerialdrones and special-ops teams. They have alsofalsied history, he says: “COIN is not a sep-arate category of warfare, as people like Johnand others try to make it out. It’s really just asubset of minor tactics. It becomes a sort of competition of people who do big wars againstpeople who do little wars. The little-wars guysthink they’re being looked down on, so they evolve a theology. That’s counterinsurgency.”

And, most of all, the truth about pastcounterinsurgency campaigns is often theopposite of what proponents say. The colo-

nial British quashed an insurgency in Malaya,for example, not by winning over the popula-tion but by killing many of them, Porch says:“The tactics they employed were total brutal-ity. What they did was lock these people inconcentration camps and pitted one minority group against the other.”

Nagl retorts: “While there were cases of British brutality against the local popula-tion, these decreased over time as the Britisharmy, empowered by its regimental system,learned and adapted.” Nagl also says that theBritish successfully raised a home guard of some 250,000 soldiers in Malaya to protect

the “New Villages” that the Brits had builtto separate the population from the insur-gents. Still, Nagl is the rst to admit that theexact reasons for counterinsurgency successare never clear, just as it’s not precisely clear

whether parts of Iraq stabilized mainly be-cause of COIN tactics or because the sectar-ian bloodletting was so terrible that the Sun-

nis nally rejected violence.Porch also complains that the U.S. military

is growing weaker as a ghting force, losingits war-waging abilities as it avoids anythingmore than the most surgical strikes and drainsitself in fruitless eorts to succor the popula-tion. “It’s much easier for the conventionalmilitary to adapt to COIN than the other way around,” he says. “The French army COIN-ized in Algeria and Mexico in the 19th cen-tury, then confronted the Prussians in 1870and got their butts kicked,” he says. “Thenthe same thing happened to the British army through colonial warfare. In two world wars,

they didn’t do well. So in the end, you get badarmies that can’t really adapt to big warfare.”

Diehard COIN advocates respond simply: What’s the alternative? Unless you give up Afghanistan—per the Biden plan—you don’thave much choice but to try to pacify the pop-ulation and set up a friendly government if the United States wants to get out with any sense of honor. “There have been times whenI’ve been very frustrated, very frustrated, butI did see progress too,” says Campbell, whostill thinks that the current approach is the

best one. Like Nagl, Mansoor stresses that Americans will support the eort if they un-

derstand that COIN is still largely untriedin Afghanistan. “We really have not foughta counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan for 10 years,” he says. “We’ve fought ifor maybe a year-plus at this point. Maybe noteven that much.”

Others argue that we’ve been at this for years already. John Hillen, who was assistan

secretary of State for political and militaryaairs under President George W. Bush, acknowledges that COIN was slow in gettingstarted but that generals such as Barno weredoing a lot of the same things (albeit with fewer troops) back in the mid-2000s. Barno himself argues that the U.S. has “already won the

Afghan war twice—once in December 200and a second time by the end of 2004,” beforethe Taliban began coming back. But journalist

Ahmed Rashid, who has written authoritative books on the Taliban, says that the insurgents were ltering into Afghanistan as early a2002 and were just waiting for their moment.

The question now is whether the Taliban will simply lie in wait until 2014 and com back one more time. It’s no surprise that—accelerated by the bin Laden takedown and asense that al-Qaida is waning, or at least hiding, in Pakistan—the U.S. strategy is shiftingheavily toward the pared-down Biden focus.

Nagl and others sketch out a possible future in which Afghan forces are just capable okeeping the country together, with U.S. spe-cial-ops forces and the CIA providing guid-ance, technical support, and intelligence. “Ultimately, the war doesn’t end in 2014 when we

withdraw,” Mansoor says. “The situation only

needs to be stable enough so that Afghan forces exist and can func-tion with some counterterrorismsupport from the U.S.” And thegovernment must be more legitimate than, say, South Vietnam’regime was. “If you look at thepolls, as much as Karzai stuedthe ballot boxes, he still is one othe more popular politicians in

Afghanistan, more than the seriesof military dictators who ruled

Vietnam. He can’t run for ocagain, so there will be anotherpresident of Afghanistan. I thinkfrankly, that transition of government is going to be really crucial.”

By then, U.S. forces will belargely gone, and private-security contractors will ll the gapsalong with covert operations. Thereconstruction, development, andreconciliation part of counterinsurgency will shrink every month

And so the population may be evenfurther out of reach. All of whichdoesn’t sound like a promisinggrade for graduate-level warfare. n

Watered down: Critics say COIN isn’t as tough as the prototype

strategy that Britain used to stie a postwar revolt in Malaya.

"So Long:" Michael Hirsh's and James Tarabay's National Journal Article on Afghanistan

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