Victory Institute

While watching a recent PBS interview with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the communications disconnect between the government and the American people regarding war in Afghanistan was quite apparent. When the host asked McChrystal if the recent operation in Marjah was successful (McChrystal has since called Marjah a “bleeding ulcer”), the general’s response was, “I think that people need to understand counterinsurgency to judge success or failure.”

But how can people understand the complexities of counterinsurgency (COIN) when virtually no one in the Obama administration is making an effort to engage the American people? Although counterinsurgency operations figured prominently in turning the tide in the Iraq war, many Americans have less than a basic understanding of COIN - most have no understanding at all.

In an attempt to find answers, we asked Victory Institute Senior Advisor Gary H. Johnson, Jr. to weigh in on the topic.

Chris Carter: Was President Obama’s December 2009 decision to simultaneously announce a surge of 30,000 troops and an 18-month “timeframe for transition” in Afghanistan naïve? And is July 2011 in fact an arbitrary timeline for withdrawal?

GARY H. JOHNSON, JR.: President Obama’s move to identify a “time frame for transition” was not naïve or arbitrary. In terms of statecraft, the decision was a unique application of leverage upon the administrations of both President Karzai in Afghanistan and President Zardari in Pakistan to work towards common cause. Nearing the end of the U.S. war council sessions last year – when pressed by Obama – Defense Secretary Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen, CENTCOM Commander Gen. David Petraeus, and the top U.S. and NATO Commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal all agreed that the pursuit of a well-resourced counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan would prove successful within two years of the initial troop surge of July 2009. Therefore, the July 2011 date held a strategic value. To the US military command, it represented a “proof of concept” – a point in time at which a “conditions-based” transition out of Afghanistan could feasibly begin for American forces. More importantly, it stood as a point in the not too distant future at which the Afghan Security apparatus could begin to operate on its own.

In these respects, the July 2011 transition (1) holds the US military strategists accountable for the success of the COIN operations, (2) provides a sense of urgency for the Karzai administration to end corruption and institute programs for success in the establishment of basic services to the people of Afghanistan, and (3) generates incentives for the Zardari administration to help stabilize Afghanistan, so it does not devolve into a safe haven from which terrorists can launch attacks on Pakistan.

Carter: Does the July 2011 transition allow for what General McChrystal refers to in his recent PBS interview as a “long-term commitment” in Afghanistan?

JOHNSON: The “long-term commitment” to Afghanistan’s sovereignty McChrystal is referring to, in my estimation, exists independently alongside the July 2011 transition. In other words, creating a “strategic partnership” with Afghanistan for the long run and the transfer of security command in the near term, while mutually reinforcing, are independent concepts to the General.

For instance, the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill amounts to a $7.5 billion “long-term commitment” (of five years) to Pakistan’s stability and sovereignty yet exists independently of the Coalition Support Fund and other US programs designed to facilitate aid for Pakistan’s fight against our common enemy. Similar development and diplomatic initiatives will naturally be in play for Afghanistan following the July 2011 inflection point. Moreover, the international coalition will likely take on the role of equipping, funding and maintaining the Afghan security forces for at least a decade as the economy of the country stabilizes.

Also, the timeframe makes “political” assumptions that are not apparent to the average man on the street. The troop surge will not be complete until late summer, which seemingly limits American engagement to an impossibly small window of activity. However, what most witnesses do not understand is that a population-centric COIN model is not based on the classic “clear, hold, build” formula.

In population-centric COIN, a “shape, clear, hold, build, transition” model is being applied by the coalition forces. The “clear” phase of operations does not begin until the military commanders have properly worked with the ministerial, national, provincial, district and local political players of the legitimate government in Kabul to “shape” the dynamics of the kinetic activity and guarantee the least amount of civilian collateral damage. So, while rightfully disgusted Americans are watching news clips of Marja militants dropping weapons in the middle of a firefight and walking away with impunity, what is missed in the heated conversation about the restrictive Rules of Engagement is the discussion of whether the battlefield dynamics that were created in the “shape” phase of Operation Moshtarak removed the primary propaganda weapon from the Taliban insurgency – human shields. The real question, then, is whether the political shaping effort will generate tangible results by July 2011.

But, on the whole, the surge of 30,000 US troops is a substantial re-commitment to the security of Afghanistan, which will cost a minimum of $30 billion for one year of operations and will provide a sorely needed shot in the arm to NATO’s Afghan security training mission. But, with rampant absenteeism, drug addiction and endemic illiteracy plaguing the ranks of the Afghan recruits, there is no guarantee that the Afghan security apparatus will be operational by mid 2011 much less 2014.

Carter: What is the best way to characterize President Obama’s decision to announce an Afghan surge and an Afghan transition at the same time? Are there any major weaknesses that you see in the administration’s approach in Afghanistan?

JOHNSON: Well, the President’s announcement of the July 2011 transition represented a critical communications challenge to the administration.

So, from my perspective, the primary weakness or failing of the Obama administration’s overall efforts to stabilize Afghanistan lay in its inability to properly communicate the rationale of a population-centric COIN model to the American people.

No sustained effort has been made to bring the American people up to speed. Rather than explain the difficulties in the transition, key US spokesmen and leaders identify the status of operations in Afghanistan as “complicated” and the aims of the COIN strategy as “complex”.

The consequences of this communication evasion are legion.

As a result of this evasion, the American people do not understand the political context shaping the dynamics of the battlefield. Since their leadership has not apprised them of the multiple shadowy villains our soldiers are fighting much less delivered a running progress report on the dismantling of the al Qaeda network, the American people can place no value or expectation on the intelligence challenge of defeating the Taliban command and control. The American people do not have a clear picture of the human toll of 31 years of warfare or the ethnic and tribal dimensions of the conflict, nor have they been sold on either the basic value of stabilizing Afghanistan or the feasibility of “flipping” the Taliban in a national reconciliation process. The American people cannot even begin to comprehend a society in which 87% of women are victimized by sexual violence, much less navigate the geopolitical realities of statecraft at play or the questions of sovereignty raised over the CIA’s use of drone strikes in Pakistani territory. The American people have, to this point, been unable to grasp the narco-terror nexus of crime syndicates and smuggling networks that supply and sustain our enemies, and they are completely in the dark over the nature of the intimidation tactics utilized by the Taliban on a day-to-day basis. The American people have no direct dialogue with Afghanistan’s university professors and do not yet hold the intellectual capacity to help these intellectuals wage a war of reason on the radicalization inherent in the curriculum of the Arab-influenced Wahhab and Deobandi madrassas that dot the AfPak countryside by the thousands. All the American people see is a quick surge and withdrawal and the guarantee of more American lives being lost and more billions being spent for a cause they don’t understand. In the arena of perceptions, then, the Obama administration has failed to bridge the AfPak disconnect for the American people.

Why are we in Afghanistan? Why are the Rules of Engagement so restrictive? These are the questions Americans are asking. And the answer they are receiving is a cold shoulder as the Obama administration bypasses its responsibility to reach out to the American people in its rush to engage and accommodate the Muslim world. In this respect, questions like “What is COIN?” don’t even register in the main, leaving any discussion of the evolution of COIN from a classic to a population-centric to a partner-centric model to the experts high in their ivory towers.

Carter: McChrystal said that the Taliban is “not popular with Afghans.” But when 40 of the districts surveyed in the April 2010 Afghanistan Pentagon Report are sympathetic to the insurgency and another eight districts are fully supportive of the insurgency, is that an accurate statement?

JOHNSON: There are 364 districts in Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.  The Report on Progress Toward Stability and Security in Afghanistan released by the Pentagon in April focused its studies on 80 districts listed as “Key Terrain” and 41 other “Areas of Interest”.  The districts surveyed were the population centers of the country which use the highway system as their economic lifeblood and those areas which hold a strategic or tactical value in terms of access to rivers, borders or canal networks which naturally offer conditions for poppy cultivation.  Roughly 70% of the Afghan population resides in this ring that makes up just under a third of the districts in the country, and for purposes of a population-centric COIN model, the survey data is useful in trend analysis and force focus.

The fact that 48 districts either support or sympathize with the insurgency, while troubling, only represents around 13% of Afghanistan’s districts.  Also, as McChrystal points out, a number of polls do indicate that support for the Taliban is low and a growing number of Afghans feel that the country is now moving in the right direction.  Most polling data available shows that around 7% of the Afghan people sympathize with the Taliban while around 3% fully support the insurgent cause.  So, whether the poll is district based or population based, only around 10% of the population supports the Taliban movement in some shape or fashion.  And while this number seems small, it must be reckoned that the population of Afghanistan is in the neighborhood of 30 million.  If 10% of Afghanis support the insurgency, then three million people in Afghanistan are willing to accept the legitimate authority of the Taliban or, in the least, identify with the Taliban narrative for a variety of reasons.

If similar figures exist in Pakistan, which has a population of 180 million, then over 20 million sympathizers and supporters are lobbying for the success of the Taliban push in the AfPak region.  The Pentagon report did not show results of polls conducted in a similar manner on Pak territories.  Considering that the aim of the coalition effort to stabilize Afghanistan is based on eliminating the safe havens from which the al Qaeda network can launch attacks on America and Afghanistan, identifying the network’s belt of sympathizers and supporters on the Pakistan side of the equation remains an unexamined key in the successful completion of the Afghan COIN operations.

A comparison of December 2009 and March 2010 survey and poll numbers do indicate a nominal level of progress has been made by the Karzai administration, but these numbers are never broken down by gender, tribe, ethnicity, poverty or literacy levels. In March, only 29 of the surveyed key terrain districts sympathized with the Karzai claim to legitimate authority and no key terrain districts fully supported the government in Kabul.  On the face of it, this seems to lean towards a picture of a popular insurgency; but, the real number at play in these districts is the large presence of neutral players and fence sitters.  The political element of the McChrystal population-centric model is designed to gain support and sympathies of the 44 neutral “swing” districts by delivering development, governance and security ties that positively impact the provincial, district, and local horizons.  The primary obstacle in this quest is the percentage of Afghans who see corruption as the ultimate cause of unrest – a full 75% of the Afghan people polled consistently consider corruption within the Karzai government as a delegitimizing reality.  Yet, while systemic corruption plagues the Karzai administration and a trust deficit does exist, the Taliban insurgency has not crossed the threshold of a “popular” insurgency.

The April Pentagon assessment states unequivocally that “popular support is a prerequisite for success in a COIN campaign; the alternative is popular support for the insurgency, which renders the ISAF mission unachievable.”  In this frame, McChrystal’s statement that the Afghan insurgency is “serious” but not “popular” is not a declarative opinion, it is an imperative distinction.  Moreover, the report notes that the insurgency’s primary sources of financial support are derived by internal coercion through the opiate trade, and an external donor network of hawaladars that originate in outlying Islamic states.  In this, it is likely that McChrystal believes the Taliban insurgency is over-reliant on its status as a cause célèbre of wealthy Arabs rather than a self-sufficient and internally re-generating phenomenon.

Carter: What would you characterize as the weaknesses and strengths of the Taliban threat in Afghanistan?  And beyond the Pentagon Report, what signs of Coalition progress are evident?

Intimidation is generally not a source of popular support.  The dramatic escalation of a literal political assassination campaign by the Taliban in Kandahar generates fear rather than support.  But, the campaign of assassination does demonstrate that the Taliban understands the population-centric COIN methodology and, at the same time, weakens the Karzai regime’s claims on improved security.  Support for the Taliban is also diminished when IED attacks kill innocent civilians – IED attacks have risen over 2000% in five years.  Also, Taliban support wanes when “night letters” threaten public executions for those working with the Karzai regime and his international partners.

If you step back and look at the situation in Afghanistan, the brutal campaign of the Taliban actually mirrors the “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” model of the Obama administration.  So, while USAID and the Provincial Reconstruction Teams are completing uplift projects at a rapid rate, generating revenue streams, creating commerce, delivering services and improving the lives of those involved at the local level while working to improve security – the Taliban are disrupting the logistics, dismantling the political advances, and attempting to defeat the coalition by maintaining its strategic advantage and dominance in the arena of information.  Luckily for NATO forces, as the Pentagon Report points out, leadership overlaps and spats within the multiple Taliban command and controls weaken this mirroring effort of the insurgency.

The primary strength of the Taliban insurgency, according to the Pentagon’s report is its rapid information operations and media campaigns, which should tell the West that the insurgency is essentially a propagandist terror network.  In this, the language divide places the Taliban squarely in the driver’s seat at the local level, where impoverished tribal cultures – cut off from the outside world and largely illiterate – are bombarded with loudspeaker and radio reports of respected local Taliban in concert with community mosque messages on the nature of jihad.  In this respect, the “district level” surveys of COIN trend analysis do not hold the capacity to properly analyze the influence of the Taliban at the local level.

In response to this district level limitation, a local level political “shaping” surge evident in a civ-mil nexus of the coalition forces has developed, through USAID, a Tactical Conflict Assessment and Planning Framework.  In a February 2010 TCAPF report, the design of a “Tactical Stability Matrix” shows promise in determining the cause and nature of local grievances and instability, by identifying villager problems as either perception-based or the result of a systemic breakdown in governance.

Breaking the cycle of Talibanization is difficult and requires “popular” support for the ISAF mission.  By establishing a persistent presence at the local levels, the civ-mil operations featuring USAID are at the heart of McChrystal’s population-centric strategy to win the trust of the Afghan people. In this, developing a methodology to separate Taliban jihadists and common bandits or tribal troublemakers at the local level, will perhaps translate into real progress in the establishment of security by the Karzai government; however, at the current rate of assessment and planning, the July 2011 transition will come and go by the time traction in the nationwide effort is measurable.

Carter: McChrystal has stated that the American people need to understand COIN in order to judge success or failure in Afghanistan.  Is there an effort by COIN advocates to silence critics?

JOHNSON: I wouldn’t say that COIN advocates are attempting to silence criticism or debate; but, what is apparent is that the proponents of COIN are in a position of profound influence over policy discussions at the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and USAID.  The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is the ultimate influence broker in Washington DC in the arenas of national security and defense policy.

To my knowledge, at least 14 CNAS staffers have already been pulled into the ranks of the Obama administration.  CNAS emerged in 2007.  In three years, the infant organization has virtually cornered the national security and counterinsurgency discussion in America.

The combined networking power of the CNAS staff, former staffers, board of directors and executives are unmatched in influence peddling capacity on COIN policy matters; however, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute, WINEP, CSIS, USIP, the Clintonista Center for American Progress, and a clutch of other high-profile, “non-partisan” think tanks also claim a fair number of influence brokers in the Obama Administration’s war room.

Carter: What is the best way, then, to follow COIN developments and discussions?

JOHNSON: The first step in following the discussion on COIN is to recognize who is driving the discussions.  RAND and Brookings programs often tilt at the topic.  Some military institutes, postgraduate programs, and a number of independent fellows and well-rounded authors at the New America Foundation are providing rays of COIN insight on a regular basis.  However, the driver of the discussion and evolution of COIN is the Center for a New American Security.  On the surface, a number of players are visible at CNAS.

Michele Flournoy, the former President and co-founder of CNAS was appointed in February 2009 as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy of the United States.  The Friday before President Obama’s March 27 launch of his AfPak strategy, Flournoy helped launch the Stability Operations Field Manual (FM3-07), which framed the new civilian-military formulas for properly responding to conflict zones, bringing USAID-styled civilian experts into the forward actions of military counterinsurgency operations – the focus on increased Civ-Mil operations in the State Department is, in itself, a US foreign policy sea change.  Michele Flournoy has been a fixture in the creation of the Obama Administration’s foreign conflict policy, paving the way for other CNAS fellows to take leadership roles.  The relatively unknown Andrew Exum was slotted to join General McChrystal’s initial assessment team for Afghanistan late last spring.  Andrew Exum was then joined by the author of The Accidental Guerilla, David Kilcullen, a non-resident fellow at CNAS, to create a June 2009 Afghan policy paper entitled Triage.  Former CNAS CEO and co-founder Kurt Campbell is now the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia.  John Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaysia and Vietnam is now the acting President of CNAS.  The current CEO of CNAS is Nathaniel Fick, author of the best-selling book One Bullet Away and former civilian instructor at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy in Kabul.  Military analyst Tom Ricks, author of two books about Iraq, FIASCO and The Gamble, is a Senior Fellow at CNAS.  And, to round out the CNAS line-up, a brace of New York Times writers, namely Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, stand as their resident writers.    Learning the names and following the work of these CNAS thinkers is the second step in staying current on the trends in COIN and its influence.

Added to this insider club driving the discussion and framing the public debates on COIN is the new status of USAID as a Development pillar, rising alongside Defense and Diplomacy in a “whole of government” approach to global crises.  Hundreds of businesses, NGO think tanks, and strategy firms waited throughout 2009 to put together a proposal for the new administrator of USAID.  Rajiv Shah was not sworn in to the post until January of 2010.  Reading the CNAS writing on the wall, hundreds of well-organized think tanks set about hiring lobbyists and focusing their study groups and policy papers into the intellectual mold of a “New American Security” to ensure the funding of projects and earn a profitable seat at the “Development” table, whose working chairs were established on October 14, 2009 by the US Global Leadership Coalition under the State Department banner “Putting Smart Power to Work”.

Looking back to McChrystal’s opinion on making educated judgments on COIN ops, then, while it is true that the American people need to understand COIN in order to properly assess the successes and failures of military activity in Afghanistan, it is also true that any and all criticism of COIN from the American people goes virtually unheard atop the ivory towers of Washington DC’s think tank fellows of pull.

In combination, these influential “pull-peddlers” rise as an Ivory Wall that effectively separates the voices of American dissent from the locked markets of a favor society press.