Until the McChrystal team was put in place, both ISAF and US command reporting constantly understated the expansion of Taliban and insurgent influence, focused on tactical operations and related forms of violence, and issue updates that always tried to present the situation in favorable terms.
At the same time, no effort was made to provide an honest net assessment of how popular reactions to the war were affecting the course of combat and the success of Taliban and other insurgent groups. There was no meaningful net assessment of the role and impact of Afghan governance and justice system, of the effectiveness of the Afghan national security forces ANSF , or of the impact of either civil or security aid. The problems in the Karzai government—and the impacts of the complex mix of Afghan corruption, power brokering, narco-trafficking, and links to the Taliban—were largely ignored or excused.
No one was willing to address the national constraints and limits on the use of given ISAF forces, or the lack of coordination, honesty, and effectiveness in national economic aid efforts. The end result was politically correct, to provide aid and comfort to the enemy, allow it to create a major insurgency, and vastly increase the number of Afghan, US, and allied casualties. It is important to note that these were far more intelligence and policy failures in Washington than in Afghanistan.
All of these issues and problems were raised from onwards by intelligence officers in the field, various commanders, and various ambassadors. It was Washington that did not respond, bogged down in bureaucratic stovepipes and infighting, and which did not seem to want to hear or communicate bad news at the highest levels of government.
The US country team is now making it clear that we came close to decisively losing the war by early It is addressing the need to focus on the population and not kinetics, and the need to transform integrated civil-military efforts from hollow rhetoric to actual practice in key population centers and districts.
The second area of progress is a series of efforts that are underway to develop broad models to provide an integrated civil-military set of metrics, or matrix, to provide a clear picture of what is happening in the Afghan and Iraq Wars. It is a deep reflection on the fundamental failures and incompetence of the leadership within the NSC, State Department, Department of Defense and the intelligence community that this effort is only now becoming serious—eight years into the Afghan conflict.
US counterinsurgency operations suffer from a lack of coordination and clear policy mandates, as well as close ties to the operational and intelligence efforts in each country. Nevertheless, the State Department is at least beginning to address the fact it has not been involved in post conflict reconstruction in Iraq and faces years before it can report that Iraq no longer needs aid and stability operations. These efforts may lead to more transparent and realistic measurements of progress in the war.
All metric systems, however, can be undermined if the civilian or military personnel using them are not ruthlessly honest in their reporting.
Whether these efforts finally lead to real integrated civil-military reporting and plans for either war—versus the largely empty conceptual efforts that have taken place to date—is still an open question. A few steps in the right direction, however, are a major improvement over nothing—or at least over years of failure and neglect. It is all too clear is that there will be no quick victory of any kind in either Afghanistan or Iraq that will somehow reduce the need for a level of credibility and transparency that two Administrations have totally failed to provide for two long wars.
Forging a strategic partnership in Iraq will take at least another five years of civil and military aid and assistance. The President was at best ingenuous in taking about beginning US withdrawals in , and denying we are involved in nation building. Short of a virtual implosion in the Taliban and other insurgents, it is far more likely to be before the US can safely cap its involvement and make major reductions in US forces. We probably face at least two more years of hard fighting and casualties.
The bulk of the aid effort in governance and economics will also continue to fall on the US, particularly the forward effort in the 80 most critical districts where the Taliban and other insurgents have major influence or pose a critical threat. If America is to sustain long wars filled with uncertainty, this situation must change. It is far easier to talk about a population centric strategy, and use buzz words like shape, clear, build, hold, and transfer , than it is to show how this can be accomplished and that it is credible.
The military challenges involved are all too real—particularly in helping Pakistan develop the capabilities its forces need to fully secure the country. If ISAF and the US are to change this situation—and create an Afghan and Pakistani capability to operate largely without US forces in the future—they need to show that they can build much larger and more effective Afghan forces, build up all of the necessary civilian elements to hold and build , and do so on a national basis within a reasonable amount of time, at a practical cost.
This requires more than concepts and limited successes. It requires effort that can be cost-effective on a national scale. So far, the US has not addressed any aspect of how the new strategy can be scaled up to do this.
Marja, if anything, is an example of an impossible approach. Throwing some 8,, US, British, and Afghan security forces into an area only square kilometers, with only 80, Afghans, and estimates of less than 1, easily dispersible Taliban insurgents is not a model that can be recreated in Kandahar or any other major population center.
This density of resources is impossible to scale up, even in phased operations. Moreover, to the extent that Marja has been a test bed, it has revealed more problems than successes.
Far too many elements of the ANSF did not perform well or with effective independence, and some of the weaker elements — like the ANP — began their stay in Marja by looting one of the local markets. It should be stressed that this does not mean that the new strategy cannot work. It will, however, require enough time to create a mix of Afghan forces with both the size and effectiveness to do the job and supplement US and ISAF forces.
It will require much stronger Afghan government support, as well as a build-up of Afghan government capacity in the field. It also will require experienced US and allied civil-military teams at a much larger scale than a limited surge of several hundred trained, but largely inexperienced, US civilians can accomplish. Decisively winning in on anything like the scale required does not.
The Obama Administration needs to address this, and do so honestly. There has been far too much spin and rhetoric in the past, and far too little substance. The end result is broad skepticism and distrust. There are no valid historical examples of what kind of US resources are required, and the troop ratios often quoted for counterinsurgency operations have little historical validity even for the cases quoted and do not take account of changes in military technology, the use of allied forces, and the impact of outside nations and sanctuaries.
It is clear, however, that currently planned US troop levels may well be marginal at best, that Afghan forces will take time to expand and train, that number of allied forces will drop, and that removing national restrictions and caveats will be difficult to impossible to accomplish. Moreover, the State Department has never credibly explained who they will send, what their level of experience must be, or where they will actually go in the field.
More importantly, it has never made the slightest effort to define the number of civilian personnel that is actually needed. It is far easier to talk about asking other countries for more than to recruit civilian personnel from within the State Department—much less qualified ones that will stay for reasonable amounts of time and go into the higher risk areas where they are needed. The Administration needs to show that it is providing the mix of military forces and civilians necessary to do the job.
Moreover, it needs to start laying out at a rolling five year plan for US spending on both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such a plan will have to change regularly, but it is time to stop pretending that a long war does not have consistently high costs. The United States must define these costs, explain why each cost is necessary, and prepare the Congress and American people for the realities of what is to come. The US and ISAF effort to train adequate Afghan security forces has been completely reorganized, and the Administration now seems committed to providing the proper level of funds, trainers, and mentors.
The Department of Defense has already said that it will provide an updated report on April 28th, and the new team should not be judged before that report is available. Moreover, the Report on Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan that has just been issued finally makes it clear that the readiness categorization system the US has used for both Iraqi forces and Afghan forces has never reflected actual military or police effectiveness in the field — a breakthrough in the integrity of reporting that is long overdue.
The best team in the world, however, cannot function if it is rushed to produce force quantity to meet a deadline in ways that sacrifice force quality. Military history is often the history of the fact that a focus on numbers per se is a proven way to lose a war.
Moreover, creating effective forces requires experienced trainers, mentors, and partners—not simply warm and sometimes unwilling bodies. DoD still has not made being a trainer or mentor part of an attractive career track, thus sending our best and brightest officers to jobs far less relevant to the war.
It requires transparent attention to corruption and incompetence. Virtually everyone who worked on the new strategy agreed that the corruption and lack of capacity in the Afghan government at every level was as much of a threat to success as the Taliban and other insurgents. Nothing that President Karzai has done as of yet has indicated that this situation has changed at the top.
Assessments of the situation in Kandahar have spotlighted how serious a threat it is at the provincial and local levels, and Marja is a warning that far too little has changed in the field. CNN President Joe Biden has said repeatedly over the past four months -- as recently as last week -- that he refuses to hand off the war in Afghanistan to a fifth US president.
More Videos A timeline of US presidents' involvement in Afghanistan Implicit in that statement is the belief the war shouldn't have been passed to him , nearly 20 years after it began.
Each president since has confronted an evolving mission in Afghanistan, one that resulted in tens of thousands American and Afghan casualties, frustratingly futile attempts to improve the country's political leadership and a Taliban that stubbornly refused defeat. Biden has explained his decision to withdraw all US troops as a necessary choice for a war whose purpose had become blurred, adding that it was set in motion by a deal with the Taliban made by President Donald Trump.
The chaos that ensued in evacuating Americans and Afghans who assisted the war effort was a predictable and mostly unavoidable outcome, he said last week. Still, the scenes of rushed departures from Kabul and the Taliban's takeover of the country have proved deeply humbling for a global superpower that spent billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives in its efforts. Read More. How America spent 20 years in Afghanistan, only to have the Taliban resume control again as its troops withdrew, will be a topic for historians to ponder for decades.
And who ultimately bears responsibility is a complicated debate. Here is how each president has approached what became America's longest war:. George W. After the September 11, , terror attacks , which were plotted by al Qaeda from bases in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush vowed to stamp out global terrorism.
He called on the Taliban -- which controlled most of Afghanistan -- to deliver al Qaeda leaders hiding out in the country, including Osama bin Laden. When the Taliban rejected that call, he adopted a war footing. Bush, in remarks to a joint session of Congress two days later, acknowledged the coming conflict would amount to "a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.
Still, even Bush couldn't have predicted just how lengthy the war would become. The war's earliest phase mostly involved airstrikes on al Qaeda and Taliban targets.
But by November, 1, American troops were in the country. Then-President George W. Bush poses for photographers in the White House in Washington, DC, October 7 , after announcing that the US launched attacks against Afghanistan as a new front in its war on terrorism.
That number steadily increased over the coming months as US and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban government and went after bin Laden, who was hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex southeast of Kabul. Bin Laden eventually slipped across the border into Pakistan. The coming months and years would see Bush send thousands more US troops to Afghanistan to go after Taliban insurgents.
By May , the Pentagon said major combat in Afghanistan was over. Focus for the US and its international partners turned toward reconstructing the country and installing a western-style democratic political system. Many of the strictures of the Taliban did fall away, and thousands of girls and women were allowed to attend school and take jobs. But Afghanistan's government, still rife with corruption, frustrated American officials.
And the Taliban began a resurgence. At the same time, focus was shifting in Washington toward another war, this time in Iraq, which sapped military resources and attention away from Afghanistan. By the time Bush was reelected in , troop levels in Afghanistan had reached around 20,, even as oversight and attention were directed more squarely on what was transpiring in Iraq. The following years would see steady increases in American forces deployed to Afghanistan as the Taliban regained ground in rural areas of the south.
When Bush left office in , there were more than 30, US troops stationed there -- and the Taliban was staging a full-blown insurgency.
Barack Obama. Top generals recommended a "surge" in troop levels to weaken the Taliban, which was staging attacks at a heightened clip. After a grueling internal debate, during which then-Vice President Biden made his opposition to the surge known, Obama ultimately began deploying tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. At the same time, he committed to a withdrawal timetable that would begin pulling troops back out by and insisted on standards in measuring progress in fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda.
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