I really, really, did not want to blog about Afghanistan again, after doing so in my last post. There are, after all, other places and issues to discuss. But it is not every day that one has a leaked assessment by the top U.S. general in Afghanistan discussing in unsparing terms past U.S. progress, or lack thereof, and what is necessary in the future, at least in his view, to achieve mission success.

Given that the time for the Obama administration to put off making a decision on what to do in Afghanistan is diminishing the assessment is as unvarnished and stark of the status quo and choices available to it, as to what to do in the future, as we are likely to have for some time.

So, now that the Pentagon released a declassified version of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s assessment which includes minor deletions of material that officials said could compromise future operations, as opposed to the one marked “confidential” that the Washington Post had originally obtained, let us simply ponder the significance of some of the passages. I comment below each excerpt. Be advised, I unavoidably go long on this post.

The situation in Afghanistan is serious; neither success nor failure can be taken for granted. Although considerable effort and sacrifice have resulted in some progress, many indicators suggest the overall situation is deteriorating. We face not only a resilient and growing insurgency; there is also a crisis of confidence among Afghans — in both their government and the international community – that undermines our credibility and emboldens the insurgents. Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents.

Give credit to Gen. McChrystal for being bluntly honest. To address just one aspect of the above, which the report never really addresses, how is the Afghan’s people crisis of confidence in their government going to improve, when their own government can’t hold an honest election? Or as he says on the next page, “However, progress is hindered by the dual threat of a resilient insurgency and a crisis of confidence in the government and the international coalition. To win their support, we must protect the people from both of these threats.”

The stakes in Afghanistan are high. NATO’s Comprehensive Strategic Political Military Plan and President Obama’s strategy to disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat at Qaeda and prevent their return to Afghanistan have laid out a dear path of what we must do. Stability in Afghanistan is an imperative; if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or has insufficient capability to counter transnational terrorists – Afghanistan could again become a base for terrorism, with obvious implications for regional stability.

Let’s be clear on this point. Even if we could wave a magic wand and prevent Afghanistan from ever again being a safe haven for Al Qaeda it would not mean the end of Al Qaeda. Since the Sep. 11 attacks Al-Qaeda has both devolved and regrouped. It is now as much an ideology as an organized network. As such it no longer needs Afghanistan to survive or to be able to carry off future attacks.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (lSAF) requires a new strategy that is credible to, and sustainable by, the Afghans. This new strategy must also be properly resourced and executed through an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign that earns the support of the Afghan people and provides them with a secure environment.

More on this point later but just how many years has ISAF been operating with an ineffective strategy? Has it not been obvious, long before Obama won election, for some time it was not working?

This is a different kind of fight. We must conduct classic counterinsurgency operations in an environment that is uniquely complex. Three regional insurgencies have intersected with a dynamic blend of local power struggles in a country damaged by 30 years of conflict. This makes for a situation that defies simple solutions or quick fixes. Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.

Isn’t part of the problem that many U.S. military commanders thought they were doing exactly that, i.e. conducting classic counterinsurgency operations? Of course, they never were. Because, as this post by William Lind at Defense and the National Interest notes, classic counterinsurgency doctrine says we need hundreds of thousands more troops in Afghanistan.

And, by definition, COIN presumes the functioning of an effective state. Lind writes, “Is there a state in Afghanistan? At times, the report appears to assume a state; elsewhere, it speaks of the Afghan state’s weaknesses. It never addresses the main fact, namely that at present there is no state, and under the current Afghan government there is no prospect of creating one.”

And if there is no effective COIN how long will it take for the U.S. to be proficient at developing a relevant one for Afghanistan and implementing it? The lessons learned in Iraq cannot just be moved over to Afghanistan. It takes time to train officers and troops to learn and implement a new doctrine. Just distributing a new field manual that Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command,  helped co-author is unlikely to be sufficient.

Interestingly, as a Foreign Policy blog notes:

Sending Petraeus to rally British support makes sense, but it makes me wonder why the Obama administration hasn’t used Petraeus — certainly the most well-known military officer in the country and a bona fide pop-culture icon — to pitch the Afghanistan strategy to the U.S. public.

The media-savvy general seemed to be everywhere during the later Bush years defending the Iraq surge. But Petraeus has been out of the spotlight lately and the job of “selling” Afghanistan seems to have been left to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and the previously unknown Stan McChrystal. With the Pentagon worried about declining public support for the war, it seems odd that they haven’t pulled out the big guns, so to speak.

Again, to quote from the assessment:

Second, and more importantly, we face both a short and long-term fight. The long-term fight will require patience and commitment, but I believe the short-term fight will be decisive. Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.

Let’s say for the sake of illustration that President Obama makes a decision to send more troops in the next month, although it is unlikely to happen that quickly. In fact the Washington Post reported Sunday that President Obama has not set a deadline for determining a new strategy or for committing more troops to the war in Afghanistan. Furthermore, his closest advisors seem deeply divided over what to do. The Washington Post reported Sunday that beyond Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has advocated an alternative strategy to the troop buildup, other presidential advisers sound dubious about more troops, including Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, according to people who have spoken with them. At the same time, Mr. Obama is also hearing from more hawkish figures, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By the time troops have gone through notification, training, deployment to theater and to their eventual stationing in various Afghan locales they will have, what, maybe half a year. Isn’t at that point too late?

As formidable as the threat may be, we make the problem harder. ISAF is a conventional force that is poorly configured for COIN, inexperienced in local languages and culture, and struggling with challenges inherent to coalition warfare. These intrinsic disadvantages are exacerbated by our current operational culture and how we operate.

Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us — physically and psychologically — from the people we seek to protect. In addition, we run the risk of strategic defeat by pursuing tactical wins that cause civilian casualties or unnecessary collateral damage. The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves.

And apparently, despite all the blood and treasure spent thus far, we and our allies have been doing a very good job of it

Our campaign in Afghanistan has been historically under-resourced and remains so today. Almost every aspect of our collective effort and associated resourcing has lagged a growing insurgency – historically a recipe for failure in COIN. Success will require a discrete “jump” to gain the initiative, demonstrate progress in the short term, and secure long-term support.

Yet, even if we provide “proper resources” success is far from certain. McChrystal writes later on, “A ‘properly-resourced’ strategy provides the means deemed necessary to accomplish the mission with appropriate and acceptable risk. In the case of Afghanistan, this level of resourcing is less than the amount that is required to secure the whole country. By comparison, a ‘fully-resourced’ strategy could achieve low risk, but this would be excessive in the final analysis. Some areas are more consequential for the survival of GIRoA than others.”

So, even if we proper, not full, resources (which is code for both more military and civilian bodies– General McChrystal is expected to ask for as many as 40,000 additional troops — it will mean leaving parts of Afghanistan on their own. Or as William Lind wrote:

In a curious passage, the report says, on page 2-20,

The greater resources (ISAF requires) will not be sufficient to achieve success, but will enable implementation of the new strategy. Conversely, inadequate resources will likely result in failure. However, without a new strategy, the mission should not be resourced.

Here we encounter the report’s most dangerous failing. It confuses the strategic and the operational levels of war. In fact, the report does not offer a new strategy, but a new operational-level plan. How the war is fought, i.e. by following classic counter-insurgency doctrine, is operational, not strategic.

America must find a new strategy, since the current strategy depends on an Afghan state that does not exist. But the report offers no new strategy. The passage on page 2-20 thus ends up saying, “If you don’t give us more troops, we will fail. But you shouldn’t give us more troops unless we adopt a new strategy, which we don’t have. And even if you do give us the troops we want for the new strategy we haven’t got, they will not be enough to achieve success.” This reveals utter intellectual confusion.

In fact, Gen. McChrystal’s assessment may mark the beginning of the end of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. The Small Wars Journal blog has this to say:

McChrystal also calls for gaining military initiative over the Taliban over the next 12 months. Since the Taliban can easily go to ground without penalty during that time, the United States is unlikely to be able to visibly achieve this condition either. In theory, a sustained counterinsurgency campaign could gradually improve these problem areas. But it is very likely too late in the Washington political game to sustain the effort required. Obama and his team are thus likely to conclude that the counterinsurgency campaign McChrystal calls for in his report is impractical and should be abandoned as an option.

Every war is different of course but sometimes parallels are instructive. While it is easy to dismiss comparisons to Vietnam as the obsession of the 60s generation there are points worth considering. As Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times:

Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al Qaeda’s ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Last month’s blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any pretense that Hamid Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a legitimate partner for America in a counterinsurgency project of enormous risk and cost. Indeed, Karzai, whose brother is a reputed narcotics trafficker, is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned criminal enterprise in the early 1960s. And unlike Kennedy, whose C.I.A. helped take out the Diem brothers, Obama doesn’t have a coup in his toolbox.

…

Obama’s decision, whichever it is, will demand all the wisdom and political courage he can muster. If he adds combat troops, he’ll be extending a deteriorating eight-year-long war without a majority of his country or his own party behind him. He’ll have to explain why more American lives should be yoked to the Karzai “government.” He’ll have to be honest in estimating the cost. (The Iraq war, which the Bush administration priced at $50 to $60 billion, is at roughly $1 trillion and counting.) He will have to finally ask recession-battered Americans what his predecessor never did: How much — and what — are you willing to sacrifice in blood and treasure for the mission?

This is going to be a pivotal, perhaps seminal decision, for President Obama. None of his choices are great. In the end it may come down to a least worst decision. Given the stakes he is correct in refusing to be rushed. Nevertheless the clock is ticking.

Related posts:

1. Gen. McChrystal is no Gen. MacArthur
2. Rules of Engagement
3. Afghanistan questions I hope will be answered tonight
4. Afghanistan: I don’t believe in miracles
5. Afghanistan Debate Tonight