Welcome to Derreck Crowe, who will be blogging for us on Afghanistan--Chris
When the history of the Afghanistan war is written, the week of August 16-22 may be remembered as the week the counterinsurgency trap closed on the United States.
For most of the following, I'll discuss counterinsurgency on its own terms to show how U.S. decision-makers have walked themselves into a trap that should cause us to reconsider our involvement in Afghanistan even if we grant their bad strategic assumption that COIN was the proper paradigm from which to plan an end to al-Qaida.
Counterinsurgency, as defined by the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, is a fancy word for jumping into a foreign civil conflict on the side of a purported legitimate government in a fight against other factions. The prize is the consent of the governed/occupied.
At its core, COIN is a struggle for the population's support. The protection, welfare, and support of the people are vital to success...Both insurgents and counterinsurgents are fighting for the support of the populace...Popular support allows counterinsurgents to develop the intelligence necessary to identify and defeat insurgents.
Demonstrations of the legitimacy of the government backed by counterinsurgents are essential to this strategy. The COIN manual goes so far as to call a legitimate host nation government the "north star." The corollary of this requirement is that the counterinsurgent must work as hard as possible to create the perception of legitimacy for their allies. Elections become enormously important for this purpose. A healthy, widespread voter turnout in an election relatively free of fraud can purchase legitimacy for the government. Massive fraud and spotty turnout, especially among populations from which insurgents draw recruits, can rob the government of a significant portion of the legitimacy it has. If a foreigncounterinsurgent planned to stay in-country for a wider purpose than simply keeping a government intact-- to fight al Qaida, for instance--the counterinsurgent can be strongly tempted to try to spin questionable election results as legitimate to validate their presence in the country.
Worse, if a foreign power undertakes counterinsurgency in an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" manner, they risk not only failure of the strategy but culpability in the actions of an illegitimate government--which increases the chances of terrorism.
The United States has made both of these mistakes in Afghanistan.
First, we've failed miserably in our self-appointed role as the tutor of the young Afghan democracy by trying to spin massively fraudulent elections as successes to validate our continued military presence in the country. Procedural allowances made for the oppression of women in Afghan society included the practice of allowing men to request voting cards for women in their households without the women being present. In 2004, Afghan partisans widely exploited this provision, which caused "female" registration rates to total an obviously fraudulent 70 percent of the registration rolls in some areas, eventually totaling 41 percent of the vote. As Ann Jones points out in her post at The Nation, Westerners laid the groundwork for the current fraud by failing to denounce the 2004 fraud--thus missing an opportunity to model a form of democracy in which vote fraud would not be tolerated.
[At the polling station in Pul-e-Charki] ...5,530 votes had already been cast for the Presidential Elections [by 7:55 a.m.], according to the records being kept by the election staff beside each ballot box. In each box there were an oddly uniform 500 to 510 votes. More impressive still, some 3,025 of the ballots were women’s votes.
Assuming that the last voter disappeared at least two minutes before the Times arrived at 7.55am, the staff working on the 12 separate ballot boxes at the site must have been processing at least 100 voters per minute since polling began.
The Times reporters waited for an hour and found no voters until a lorry arrived with 30 voters on it. Under the Times' observation, the election workers at the station that had apparently processed 100 votes per minute, every minute for the first 55 minutes of the day were suddenly unable to process more than four voters every three minutes.
A fraud scheme was expected, but the Times story hints that the level of fraud was astounding. Allegations were swirling that as many as 70,000 fraudulent votes had been stuffed just into "polling centres around the Haji Janat Gul polling centre, east of Kabul." Seventy thousand stuffed votes just in one small region. The fraud was compounded by both leading candidates making public statements that they had clearly won, despite having no credible way to have vote totals from rural areas transporting ballots by donkey [h/t Steve Hynd]. As The New York Times indicates, a runoff between Dr. Abdullah Abdullah and President Hamid Karzai could very possibly lead to severely exacerbated ethnic tensions between the Uzbek and Tajik north and the Pashtun south, in the most extreme scenario leading to a new north/south civil war.
American officials were quick to declare the poll a success — worth the expanding commitment of troops and money to an increasingly unpopular and corruption-plagued government.
These farcical stamps of approval on the trash 2004 and 2009 elections compound the fundamental error that the United States made by treating as legitimate the outcome of the 2002 loya jirga which solidified the basic elements of the new Afghan state. From a Human Rights Watch report, Killing You is a Very Easy Thing for Us:
The June 2002 loya jirga (“grand council”), convened in Kabul under the terms of the Bonn Agreement to pick a transitional government to rule until the 2004 elections, was meant, in part, to make the government more representative. No one expected a fully democratic process, but most Afghans andinternational observers hoped that the meeting would provide an opportunity to increase civilian influence in government, or at least to lessen the dominance of military forces.
That is not what happened. Instead, in many ways Afghanistan’s military factions and warlords increased and further legitimized their power during theloya jirga. As Human Rights Watch documented before, during, and after the loya jirga, army and police officials threatened, imprisoned, and even killed candidates to stop them from running for the loya jirga, or to intimidate them from acting independently. At the loya jirga itself, many legitimate delegates were sidelined. Hamid Karzai was reelected, with allies in several key ministries, but a few powerful men, behind closed doors, made most of the final decisions about the shape of the government. Political power struggles were mostly between different warlords wrestling for control, not between the warlords and more legitimate civilian rulers. President Karzai managed to increase the power of some of his allies, but the military factions lost none of their influence.
At the end of the loya jirga, Hamid Karzai remained in power and some qualified ministers were appointed, but his cabinet’s overall power dynamic underwent little change...At thelocal level, the main positions of power—the governorships and local military commands—were hardly affected.
The abuses committed by warlord and military factions during the loya jirga, besides corrupting the process, served to alienate and disillusion many candidates and politically active persons. Many local political organizers have told Human Rights Watch that their current fears about local leaders stem from their experiences during the loya jirga. In this sense, the loya jirga process solidified the dominance of military leaders both at the local level and in Kabul. Many local political opponents returned to their hometowns after the loya jirga feeling weak and unsupported.
These feelings were buttressed by the impression that international actors were more interested in working with military factions than with more legitimate Afghan civilian representatives. Images of U.S. and European diplomats, military commanders, and aid officials meeting with Afghan warlords like Ismail Khan andGul Agha Sherzai served to further disenchant civil society leaders and political organizers.
Validating this process was the initial mistake on the part of the U.S. that led to the pursuit of a COIN strategy without the fundamentals in place required by the doctrine for success (aside from, you know, the 600,000 troops the U.S. would need if we were actually going to do anything remotely approaching by-the-book COIN). The government that gestated at the 2002 loya jirga was a bad seed that blossomed into the corrupt warlord-riddled narco-state centered in Kabul. The U.S. missed this vital opportunity to support the members of a pro-democracy movement, instead opting to support local strongmen and war criminals, like some bad flashback to the Cold War.
Continual U.S. support (in blood and treasure) of this Kabul regime contributed to an election result that indicates the massive failure of the COIN effort to win over thelocal population supporting the insurgency. By and large, the Pashtun heartland stayed home. The New York Timesreports:
In a broad southern region — provinces like Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan and Zabul — turnout was as low as 5 percent to 10 percent, the official said, effectively disenfranchising the region viewed as the most crucial in the American-led military campaign.
In terms of COIN strategy, this is a disaster. Counterinsurgency aims to separate insurgents from the general local population by winning their allegiance to the legitimate host nation government. That switch is the holy grail of the COIN strategy and is absolutely required for success in this strategic paradigm. If the Afghan regions ofPashtunistan rejected the vote, essentially it means that they have rejected participation in the processes of the Kabul-centered government and that the COIN strategy thus far is a massive failure.
It matters little whether the Pashuns stayed home primarily out of disgust for the Kabul government or out of fear of Taliban reprisal. Either motivation indicates that despite the additional investment of tens of thousands of U.S. troops to secure the country prior to the election, the Pashtuns have little confidence in the process or the counterinsurgents' ability to secure them during the process. Again, these are indications of failure among the population mostessential to ending the insurgency according to COIN doctrine.
So here we are, eight years into what is soon to become a war more costly than the Iraq war, with nothing to show for it but a corrupt narco -state run by warlords, two "elections" whose results are absolutely not credible, rising U.S. casualties and rising civilian casualties (with the number of civilians killed by us and our allies growing each year), and Osama bin Laden running free. The Pashtuns, the main target of our consent campaign, have rejected the processes of the Afghan state. Our COIN strategy has collapsed.
The truth is that counterinsurgency was always a trap, based on the untrue assumption that launching a war was the appropriate response to 9/11 that would make our country safer (see the embedded video below). COIN-pushers ignored the fact that our very presence in a foreign land would be a prime driver, if not the prime driver, for an insurgency. They ignored the fact that the supporting strongmen to provide stability (which the COIN manual calls favoring "peace over justice," versus the very messy business of bringing war criminals to justice) would allow the grievances of past conflict to fester and generate new violence. These internal flaws of COIN doctrine, along with the massive troop requirements needed to even begin a credible effort at implementing it, lead to an ever-deepening conflict that mires the U.S. in a moral and strategic morass, with an ever-increasing troop and cash commitment and a forced marriage with pigs that won't hold still while we apply the lipstick.
Last week, the trap may have snapped shut.
(Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow at Brave New Foundation/The Seminal. Learn more about the risks to our security by U.S. policies in Afghanistan at Rethink Afghanistan.)
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