Afghanistan: Eikenberry --- The Limits of Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Afghanistan --- Since 9/11, two consecutive U.S. administrations have labored mightily to help Afghanistan create a state inhospitable to terrorist organizations with transnational aspirations and capabilities. The goal has been clear enough, but its attainment has proved vexing. Officials have struggled to define the necessary attributes of a stable post-Taliban Afghan state and to agree on the best means for achieving them. This is not surprising. The U.S. intervention required improvisation in a distant, mountainous land with de jure, but not de facto, sovereignty; a traumatized and divided population; and staggering political, economic, and social problems. Achieving even minimal strategic objectives in such a context was never going to be quick, easy, or cheap. --- U.S. military commanders diagnosed Afghanistan’s problem as an indigenous insurgency, albeit one made worse by the insurgents’ access to sanctuaries in Pakistan. By contrast, Karzai and many of his compatriots diagnosed the problem as militant extremism, exported from Pakistan but cleverly masquerading itself in local garb. So while U.S. military commanders argued that a long, costly counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan was necessary to decisively defeat al Qaeda in the Central and South Asian region, Karzai consistently held that the so-called insurgency was mostly a “Made in Pakistan” product that Islamabad was forcefully exporting across the border. He had a point. --- In late 2001, the world watched in awe as small numbers of U.S. ground forces, operating together with mostly Northern Alliance militias and enabled by twenty-first-century intelligence, communications, and precision strike ordnance, quickly routed the Taliban forces that had dominated Afghan battlefields for some five years. The Taliban regime was dismantled, but it was not destroyed. Aided by Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, the Taliban’s leadership began to reconstitute across the Durand Line, beyond the reach of the American military. In short order, the Taliban soon reestablished influence inside Afghanistan. --- The Afghans observed these developments at first with puzzlement, then with frustration, and ultimately with anger. They were initially puzzled as to why the U.S. government and military generally refused to publicly admit for several years that the Afghan Taliban’s center of gravity had shifted from Kabul to Islamabad. They then became frustrated when they realized that the United States would not attack the Afghan Taliban inside Pakistan because of Washington’s worry that violations of Islamabad’s sovereignty would risk more important strategic objectives (such as defeating al Qaeda and preserving stability in a problematic, nuclear-armed power). And finally, they became angry when the costs of counterinsurgency seemed to far exceed the benefits delivered. --- As the United States launched the surge, Karzai ever more frequently and publicly made such statements as “Al Qaeda was driven out of Afghanistan in 2001. They have no base in Afghanistan. The war against terrorism is not in Afghan villages and is not in the Afghan countryside.” Still, the southern Afghan countryside was designated ground zero of the counterinsurgency campaign by the U.S. military. Karzai came to regularly protest aerial bombardments of Afghan villages, coalition night raids that violated Afghan homes, detentions of Afghan citizens by international military forces, abuses by armed contractors and local militias paid by and loyal to foreign forces, and the rising tide of inadvertent but inevitable civilian casualties. --- For his part, Karzai could not have cared less about complex COIN metrics invented by foreign military staffs and think tanks (such as trend lines on the number of attacks with improvised explosive devices being thwarted by tip-offs from Afghan civilians or the number of Afghan army battalions operating at the level called “capability milestone 1”). What mattered to him was achieving the interdependent aims of regaining Afghanistan’s de facto sovereignty, strengthening political legitimacy and control, and bringing peace and stability to his country. In his mind, the American military’s way of war did not appear to bring him closer to any of these goals. --- Waging war is serious business, and military commanders must ensure that their critical planning assumptions are based on empirical evidence and probabilities, not simply on hope. This was not done when the Afghan surge was designed in 2009. --- “So what?” some might say. Even if the campaign plan was based on faulty assumptions, might not the final result still be an Afghanistan better off than before? That is possible. But while making Afghanistan a better place to live is certainly a noble goal, it is not necessarily a vital U.S. national interest, and the history is still worth revisiting so proper lessons can be learned.