Afghanistan: What We Should Do.

 I thought I was alone in this opinion, but in Bloomberg's editorial today:

Even at this late date, the U.S. should stand with what remains of the national government and the heroic holdouts in the Afghan armed forces. Targeted U.S. air strikes and a rushed deployment of 5,000 American troops may yet stave off a collapse of the capital and buy precious time for evacuations. But no one should doubt the end game: In all likelihood, the Taliban will soon be in complete command.

And:

As a start, the administration must offer more help to the Afghan people. It should continue funding the government and military as long as they remain viable, while also offering aid to civil society. It should accelerate efforts to evacuate the roughly 17,000 Afghans who worked for the U.S. — as cooks, translators, drivers, security guards and engineers — and have now become targets, along with their families. It should make every possible effort to enable imperiled Afghans in the broader population to flee, including establishing air corridors. And it should work with its allies to establish a viable resettlement plan for refugees, while pressuring Pakistan and Iran to accept their share.

Not exactly my view.

I subscribe more to the "you broke it, you bought it" model of things.  And this is our responsibility.

We should stand with stand with the remaining Afghan forces still fighting, and by standing with them, go back in, in force while we still have a toehold.

Let's be honest, the Taliban isn't the Herman Goering Division, or a seasoned NVA unit in 1975.  It's never been that adept of a fighting force.  It is, basically, a religiously motivated force of very light infantry.  If we go back in, it'll collapse rapidly.

We should.

But we won't. We will instead sit by cowardly and wring our hands about how awful this is, and in a few weeks be blaming the Afghans for their loss.

Not that this isn't without some merit. The country never put together a government anyone could love.  People who might wonder why the Saur Revolution happened in 1978 have an idea now. The country is a mess.

None of which proves the opposite.  A brave nation would go back in.  We're not going to do that.

Losing in Afghanistan.

 

United States Navy photograph by Lt. Chad Dulac.

A recent article I saw somewhere stated that a lot of Vietnam veterans are having an unwelcome recollection of the end of that war.  One Vietnam vet I know personally told me that.

And the reason why is that they're seeing an abandonment of a cause we fought for in Afghanistan, just like we did in Vietnam.

It's an open question how long a democratic country can maintain a fight against an enemy that doesn't threaten to overrun it.  The US fought for four years in the Civil War over what the nation would be, and twice that long to bring the nation into existence in the 1770s and 1780s.  World War Two was fought, by the US, for four years as well.  All those wars, and others, were fought to a conclusion, so obviously the US will do that.  We more or less did that with Iraq, actually completing what we had started with the second Gulf War.

We didn't do that with Vietnam.  We entered, in a minor way, in 1958 and left officially in 1973, but in reality we didn't really get rolling until 1964 and had pretty much gotten out by 1972.  Still, Vietnam was a pretty long war by American standards, and we'd grown tired of the whole thing by 1968.  Nixon was elected on a promise to get us out, which he did. 

By the time we left Vietnam the American Army had basically been destroyed.  Not a battlefield destruction by any means, the NVA and the VC were not capable of doing that. But its moral had completely been destroyed.  Of the four services, probably the Marines and the Air Force were in the best shape. The Navy actually experienced a late war mutiny on an aircraft carrier, showing how bad things were for it.  That's important to know, but it doesn't change the fact that we entered Vietnam in strength in 1965, converted the war to an American style war, were complicit by omission in the assassination of its civilian head of state, and then left.  The US could have prevented the North Vietnamese victory in 1975 by the application of air power, but we chose not to.  

That may beg the question of what would have occurred in the war had the US simply not become involved.  Frankly, the Republic of Vietnam stood a good chance of falling on its own.  But we did become involved and even had a bit of a role in seeing a non-democratic civilian government become a series of military ones.  Only the first one arguably understood the country itself.

Intervening in a nation militarily imposes obligations on a country, wish for them or not.  Wars don't end when the party initiating them concludes they're over.  They end when both parties do.  When we left Vietnam we did so under a fiction that we were turning the war over (back?) to the South Vietnamese.  But we'd converted the war's nature into something else by that time, and taught the ARVN to fight like the US Army, with US equipment, and US airpower.  It's no wonder the rank and file of the ARVN collapsed in 1975. They no longer had all of that like they had before.

And that's what is going to happen in Afghanistan.

Somebody whose feed I get on Facebook, at least for the time being, claims that we entered Afghanistan on a limited "punitive expedition" and should have gotten right back out. There's some merit to that claim, but that isn't what we did at all.  Indeed, we botched the war there right from the onset, and that set the path for the next twenty years.

Donald Rumsfeld, who just died recently, was Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense and therefore was familiar with punitive expeditions. The US reaction to the Mayaguez's taking by Cambodia was sort of that.  But by the time he was George Bush II's Secretary of Defense, he'd become a member of the technology v. troops trap that has so often ensnared Americans.

Moreover, while U.S. troops first touched ground in October 2001, the US put the war on a back burner preferring instead to take on Iraq in a war that was completely unconnected with the 9/11 attacks and which didn't need to be fought, or if it did, it didn't need to be fought at that time.

Indeed, often missed in the story of "America's longest war" is the fact that the US never committed to it in the way that was either required or really military necessary.  At a high point, in 2011, there were 98,000 US troops in Afghanistan, which is a lot, but pales in comparison to the 500,000 men commitment that was made to Vietnam and Korea.  Of course, those were large wars in comparison as well.  By and large, however, the US kept its commitment to Afghanistan low and slow, which meant that the Taliban was able to adjuster, and for that matter so was Al Queada.  That kept the war running.  In December 2002, well after the US commitment had commenced, there were still just under 10,000 US troops in the country. 

Fighting guerilla wars isn't easy to start with, but to really have caught and addressed the Taliban, the initial commitment should have been heavy and exclusive.  We never did that.

It's also easy to now forget that Osama bin Laden wasn't killed until May 2011.  It took us a full decade to achieve that goal, which had been part of the initial goal in the first instance.  Having engaged the war in Afghanistan in 2001, and having not achieved that goal until a decade later, those who argue that the effort was to be a punitive raid have more or less missed that point.

As we were in the country for that length of time, it was necessary to attempt to restore a functioning Afghani civil government.  But that sort of thing takes a very long time, which we should have been well aware of.  As we're addressing in another post on a completely unrelated topic, democracy isn't instinctive and building a democratic culture takes a very long time.  Germany and Japan, which had functioning parliamentary systems that were not completely democratic, but which did function, flunked it in the mid 20th Century and didn't achieve democracy until they were occupied after World War Two.  China, which started off attempting in 1911, has never pulled it off.  The US, our own example, started off with the reputation of being radically democratic, but only 6% of the population could vote in the country's first democratic election.

Given this, we can't really expect the Afghani government to be stable for a long time.  It's had twenty years, some might note, but many nations have taken longer than that.

And its military is collapsing in the face of a Taliban onslaught.  The best we can now hope for is that some regions of the country will become self-governing under their own local warlords.  Not a cheery thought, but the best one.  A 30,000 man strong body of Afghani commandos continues to fight well, but they are about it. The best they can hope for is that the Afghan central government becomes one more contesting force, sort of in the model of Lebanon of the 1970s.

None of this had to be.  We could have avoided this by fighting the war intelligently and according to well established military principals in 2001 and 2002.  But we botched that.

Having failed that, that committed us to the long haul. That would mean keeping some troops, and more particularly air assets, in the country for a long time, perhaps another twenty years.  If that seems outrageous, we've now had troops in Europe since they landed in Italy in 1943, and some forces on Japanese soil that have been there since 1945.  Our troops in the Philippines were there, under somewhat analogous conditions, from 1898 until the country was really made free in 1945, and continued on for various reasons decades after that.  We've been in South Korean since 1950 in a technical state of halted hostilities.

When we left Vietnam in 1972 it took three years for the country to fall, giving the US the hoped for illusion of "peace with honor" that Nixon had hoped for, even as he knew the country would fall.  The country has followed the Communist path since then, with all that entails, including a slow move towards a market economy directed from above.  Lenin's New Economic Policy may never have taken root in the USSR, but it seems to have elsewhere in the Communist world, save for the Stalinist theme park of North Korea.  No such hope can be realistically conveyed for an Afghanistan with the Taliban back in power.  It never had any interest in anything other than a strict Islamic rule. And that's what is most likely to return in that country.  We'll be complicit in that.

Addendum

Prior to the US announcing its intent to withdraw during the late portion of the Trump Presidency, total non Afghani forces supporting the government amount to 7,500 troops, of which 2,500 were Americans. The Afghan National Army was doing 98% of the fighting.

The third option in Afghanistan

Over the past few days the United States came surprisingly close to obtaining a "sustainable solution" in Afghanistan.

"Sustainable solution" is the phrase used repeatedly by a former government official who was interviewed on NPR on Sunday, when the news broke that the U.S. had called off a meeting with the Taliban that was scheduled to occur at Camp David and which would likely have resulted in that "Sustainable solution".

"Sustainable solution" means a surrender.  More specifically it means that special type of American surrender which allows the public to wholly ignore that the country surrendered and allows an administration in charge to pretend we didn't surrender.  It is, therefore a duplicitous surrender.

Throughout the weekend shows and on to the week the news was fully of analysis about how there were only two options in Afghanistan.  One is surrendering, which isn't what anyone calls it, and the other is keeping on with our low grade commitment. The US has only 5,000 soldiers in Afghanistan at the moment which frankly isn't much, and it isn't enough.  The Trump Administration, in calling off the talks, noted that the U.S. did so as an American soldier had been killed in the days leading up to the Camp David meeting, which was regarded as inappropriate for a negotiating party, while also noting that during the past few days the NATO commitment to the war had killed 1,000 Taliban combatants, which if true would be the equivalent to 1/5th of our own commitment to the war and would also equal about 1/3d of the total number of casualties we've had in the entire 20 year war.

Which brings us to the third option.

We could, and should, actually go ahead and win the war.

First let's state two obvious facts.  One is that if we pull out now, no matter how we term it, Afghanistan will fall back into a brutal Islamic theocracy run by the Taliban.  The second fact is that we've fought the war very badly.

Okay, the first.

We went into Afghanistan in the first place as the country had fallen into the hands of the Taliban and they hosted Al Qaeda.  The attacks on our country that took place on this day in 2001 were planned and stages from Afghanistan.  Afghanistan hosted the Al Qaeda as the Taliban shared the same Islamist view of the world which holds that all opposed to Islam in any fashion are infidels to be conquered by the sword.  It isn't the only view of the world that Muslims hold but it is well grounded in Islamic tradition and theology.  Many Muslims would dispute the last point, but Islam is a religion that is badly fractured into various groups, not all of which hold the same views on certain tenants, including whether there needs to be a Caliph and whether armed expansion of the religion is a central tenant.  The further a person goes, geographically, from the origin of the faith the less likely is it that its adherents hold those views.  But those views are not far removed from those which developed during Mohammed's lifetime or shortly thereafter and while there hasn't been a unified Islam since Muhammad's death, the feature of a violent expansive Islam isn't new to this era, nor has there ever been an era without it since his death.

But there has also often been a different view in which Muslims on a local level didn't pay much attention to those matters and rather focused on others.  Even early on this was the case.  That drama is playing out in Afghanistan now and has been since the Soviet invasion of the country wrecked it.

We easily shoved aside, but that's all we did, the Taliban when we came in with a badly planned and badly lead intervention following the September 11 attacks.  That allowed the tribal elements that opposed the Taliban to fill the vacuum. But we never wiped out the Taliban, even though we largely did Al Qaeda, and its fought on. And fighting on in a country that's in a state of reversed development that's so extensive that it's development has regressed hundreds of years has not been hard for it.  It now controls huge area of the country, although not as much as some American news outlets have reported.

The Taliban controls 14.5% of the country. The Afghan government controls 56.3% of the country. Both sides in the contest now control more of the country than they did in 2018, when the Afghan government controlled about 30% of the country and the Taliban 7% of the country.

So the rest of the country remains in contest, with the Afghan government actually silently pulling ahead, while the Taliban oddly also gains ground.  Right now, if trends continue, the Afghan government can be foreseen to control at least 60% of the country in the foreseeable future and 70% is unimaginable.  On the other had, seeing the Taliban control 20% or 25% isn't either.

Obvious in this is that the war is in fact developing and the Afghan government is winning.  It isn't winning in a George S. Patton advance to the Rhine fashion, but it's winning.

Guerrilla wars, which is sort of what this is, take a long time to win.  The Communist Vietnamese struggled for 30 years to win completely in Vietnam.  The British fought for 12 years in Malaya before declaring the war won, but the actual low grade struggle that followed went on for another 20 years.  The Philippine Insurrection supposedly went on for three years, but only because the U.S. pretended that the war ended then.  So the current war lasting 20 years isn't exactly surprising and shouldn't be.

But the U.S. has no staying power in guerrilla wars and indeed it doesn't in protracted wars at all.  We never have.  That's why we abandoned the Republic of Vietnam to its fate and allowed it to be defeated in 1975.  And that's why we're ready to do the same with Afghanistan.

This has come about in part because we've believed every since World War Two that we can fight a war in which Clausewitz has no part, but of course, we can't, which is the second factor noted above.  And we very much did that in Afghanistan.  Under the inept oversight of Donald Rumsfeld, we committed an economy of troops to the effort in the belief that our opponents were all rude primitives and we were super technical and could win a primitive war with special means. That was stupid.

Part of the reason, indeed much of the reason, we did that is that we were also taking on the Baathist regime in Iraq and had no need whatsoever to do that. That war was our kind of war, an armored advance on an armored enemy.  But it took up most of our effort.  The war in Afghanistan languished with lessor participation and it, over time, has reduced to one in which we really have only a smallish numerical role.  The U.S. may have 5,000 troops in Afghanistan, but the U.S. Army alone has 20,000 in Germany, where the risk of those troops being engaged in combat is quite low.

Not that 5,000 men, in terms of our current force, is small in some ways.  It isn't comparatively.  We have, for example, half that number in Japan and about three times that number in South Korea, where the risk of their becoming involved in combat isn't unsubstantial.  But it isn't a gigantic commitment in terms of men and its not enough to really do anything other than stiffen the Afghan government's will to fight on, which it has been doing.  If we add in non US NATO troops, which Americans routinely forget, those numbers climb to 17,000.

That allows the Afghani government to struggle on to try to control all of its territory.  It isn't enough to really end the war in a decisive way.  That latter fact allows the Taliban to struggle on as well.

So our only alternative is to hang on for eons or get out, right?

No.

The 14% of the country occupied by the Taliban is readily identifiable.  Commitment of an actual combat division, or better yet two, which would be 15,000 to 30,000 men, in combination with Afghani government forces, in a single hard strike would put that 14% to 0% and would cause a massive blood loss to the Taliban.  If it wasn't enough to convince a group of people who are largely willing to die on the basis that they'll go right to Heaven anyway to quit, it'll convince some, and it'll end the existence of many more in a way that would allow the Afghan government to be a presence back on its own territory.

At that point, the maintenance of the peace could logically become a UN, rather than a NATO effort, something that NATO has a lot of experience with. The blue helmets of UN peace keepers could then be a presence.  The United Nations already deploys over 100,000 troops committed by its members around the globe in just such missions, and not all of them are in kind and gentle lands by any means.  And quite a few of those troops are Muslims from Muslim nations that don't have the conquer for a Caliph mindset.  Having those troops, which include female Muslim soldiers from such places as Bangladesh, serve in the region is likely to be less offensive, and indeed perhaps more shocking, than Americans, long term.

That would give Afghanistan a chance to have a future in which the Islamic nation wasn't a base for extremism. Where women were treated as human beings, could vote, and go to school.  And were the type of Islam that most people claim is the real Islam, and which does reflect the view of most Muslims most places, could be restored to its prior place.

The opposite result is grim.  Most of all for women, but for everyone in general.  A victorious Taliban isn't going to be hosting a Summer of Love any time soon, and the kind of forces that will find refuge there aren't the kind that any nation just like it or sharing its views will be able to live comfortably with.

Surrendering in Afghanistan. Maybe the Senate has learned history even if the President has not.

Make no mistake about it, the "peace" that's being considered in Afghanistan isn't a peace.  It's a withdrawal which will be followed by the collapse of the Afghan government and a return to power of the Taliban. 

Saigon, 1975.

It's the helicopter from the Saigon Embassy roof all over again, after a fictional peace with Hanoi, except in this instance, it's worse.  Much worse.

Which is why its refreshing to see the Republican controlled Senate find its backbone, as noted here in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Senate, in a bipartisan rebuke to President Trump’s foreign policy, voted overwhelmingly to advance legislation drafted by the majority leader to express strong opposition to the president’s withdrawal of United States military forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

The 68-to-23 vote to cut off debate ensures that the amendment, written by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and backed by virtually every Senate Republican, will be added to a broader bipartisan Middle East policy bill expected to easily pass the Senate next week.

I hope the Senate's view prevails.

It's frequently noted that the war in Afghanistan is the longest running war in American history, which it is if you don't count the Indian Wars as a single war.  If you do that, no other American war even compares as those wars started sometime in the 1600s and concluded, depending upon how you look at it, in 1890 or 1916.  They're a bit longer.

But the war in Afghanistan is pretty darned long, to be sure. 

Donald Rumsfeld, who reprising the role of Robert Strange McNamara chose to ignore the lessons of history and presume that the United States was not subject to them.

A lot of that can be laid at the feet of the second President George Bush, or perhaps more accurately at the feet of his controversial Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.  Rumsfeld took the view that all prior laws of war were no longer applicable to the United States, and therefore even though we knew that Al Queda was headquartered in Afghanistan and sheltered by the Taliban, we could commit an absolute minimum of force to the war there, fight the war with a few specialists and air power, rely on dubious native allies, while taking on a second war with Iraq for what turned out to be dubious reasons, and still win the war in Afghanistan.

Carl von Causewitz looking on with disdain at Donald Rumsfeld from history.

Carl von Clausewitz would have whacked Rumsfeld with his riding crop for thinking such a stupid thing.  

Classic military Clausewitzian thought would have held that having determined that war in Afghanistan was necessary, which it was, it was then incumbent upon the U.S. to use overwhelming force to crush the enemy immediately and leave Afghanistan basically compliant in the wake of a crushing defeat of the radical Islamists.  Instead, we chose to engage basically with special forces and air power while we built up a force to attack Iraq and left much of the ground fighting to Islamic militias of dubious dependability.  That in turn meant that we didn't get around to really committing until well after the war in Iraq, which we didn't have to engage in, in the first place, had become a second guerrilla war which in turn meant that no how badly the Taliban did in combat they'd learned that they could keep on, keeping on.

U.S. Special Forces troops with Northern Alliance troops. The Northern Alliance was a genuinely anti Taliban force, and truly useful in the field, but it wasn't the sort of force that was any more likely to result in a stable government long term than the Montagnards were in Southeast Asia.  Using them was wise and necessary.  Leaving the war nearly entirely to them was not.

Since that time we've fought a war of decreasing commitment sort of hoping against hope that the Afghan government we supported and created after the Taliban were driven out of Kabul would be able to take over, much like we hoped that successive South Vietnamese governments would be able to take over the Vietnam War after 1968.

That didn't work then and its obviously not working now.

Which has lead to the conclusion that we need to do is dress up a defeat, like we did in Vietnam, and get out.  

Of course getting out meant the ultimate fall of our ally, the Republic of Vietnam, and the installation of a brutal communist regime that still remains in power.  The analogy there probably ends, as Vietnam isn't Afghanistan and it never posed any direct threat to the United States.*  Afghanistan has been used as the headquarters for a global radical Islamic war on the world with the goal to establish a new Caliphate and subject the world to Islam.  Hanoi just wanted to subject Vietnam to communism, which it did, but which it is now loosing due to the pervasive nature of American pop and consumer culture.**

If and when we leave Afghanistan, if we haven't succeeded there, it will return to the control of the Taliban in short, probably very short, order.  Compelling the Afghan government to include the Taliban in the government will be no more successful than Hanoi's promise not to resume the war with Saigon, or the fusion of the Royal and Pathet Lao armies was.  The result is inevitable.

Of course, a person might also ask if the same results as the Vietnam War might also be inevitable.  If we haven't won after an eighteen year commitment, why would we win now?

Well, the numbers are part of the reason.

The United States has less than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.  At the absolute height of our commitment, in 2011, when we "surged", we had 110,000 men there, which we built up to rapidly after we crossed the 20,000 number in mid 05 and which then fell off rapidly, falling below 20,000 again in 2014.

10th Mountain Division troops in Afghanistan in 2005.

Now, before we go on, something about this should be obvious.  A country which proposed to unseat its de facto, if not de jure, government of the size of Afghanistan but which didn't even get up over the division level commitment for the first three plus years of that was either acting stupidly or wasn't serious.  And a nation that would commit over 100,000 men for a very brief interval and then presume, when it was known that the war wasn't won, that everything would be fine, also wasn't acdting particularly rationally.  The U.S. should have committed that 100,000 men in the first three months of the war in which case we probably could have totally withdrawn by 2011.

Donald Rumsfeld, here's your sign.

United States Drug Enforcement personnel burning  hashish as part of an American policing operation in an ancillary quasi military operation guaranteed to make enemies of the rural populace.

The thought was, of course, or rather the naive hope was, that the Afghan army we built would take over.  Just like the ARVN. That in fact was not an irrational hope in the late 1960s, but in the case of the Afghan army, given the way we went about it, it certainly was.

Soldier of the U.S. Army (Michigan National Guard) on patrol with Afghans and, in German desert camouflage, Latvian soldier

Afghanistan has had an army since 1709, and a fairly good one in the 1950s, but that all came apart following the Communist coup that took over the country in the 1970s. The army fell apart and the country fell into civil war, from which its never emerged.  Reconstituting a real army after a twenty five year gap has proven extremely difficult and like most armies that exist in a scenario in which a foreign power is putting them together, it's been infiltrated by the enemy.  It's going to take quite a while before that army can stand on its own.  By comparison again, the French put together what would become the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the early 1950s and it wasn't until the late 1960s that it was capable of somewhat standing on its own, although it never really achieved that status.  And like the ARVN its not only has very loyal soldiers, but it's subject to being accused of being a colonial puppet by its clearly nativist opponent.  So while it has 174,000 men, it can't field that number as an effective fighting force.

Afghan commandos waiting for airlift from Russian made helicopters.  With their western airborne transportation and American arms and equipment they bear a worrisome resemblance to crack ARVN units of the late Vietnam War.

Indeed, it's lost over half the country.

So we've lost, right?

Well, we might have, but before we give up, we better at least try to win.  And we can do that.

Indeed, there's no doubt that a second surge, like the first one, would reoccupy the country and drive the Taliban out, probably into Pakistan, in the case of the survivors.  We can debate what to do about that, but serving notice on Pakistan that its border will be regarded as fictional would be one thing to do.  Pakistan isn't going to fight the Untied States under any circumstances, and indeed India would dearly love it to even suggest that it would.  An effort of that type would reoccupy the country and, if a remaining commitment of at least 50,000 men stayed for at time, as in a decade, the country would have a chance.

A chancier, but also probably likely to work means, would be to commit a large, but lesser, force of 50,000 to 60,000 and do the same thing.  Of course, that's not a small commitment either.

The odds are better, however, that we'll simply abandon it, and our effort there, and live to regret the consequences.

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*See, however, Was The Domino Theory Right? and Looking at the Vietnam War differently.  Not as a war but a campaign in the Cold War.

**Whatever the results of the war have been, the inevitable trend of Vietnam is exhibited by the presence of a Victoria's Secret in Hanoi and V-pop in the country at large.  The South Vietnamese never ended up embracing Communism and the North Vietnamese are abandoning it.