The death of Osama bin Laden and the upcoming tenth anniversary of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan have triggered several important policy issues. This testimony poses several questions. What should the U.S. objectives be in Afghanistan? Based on these objectives, what are America's military options (and what would the implications be for transition)? Finally, what are the political options, including the possibility of a peace settlement?
I argue that U.S. objectives in Afghanistan should be tied to narrow U.S. national security interests, and the U.S. military strategy should transition to an Afghan-led counterinsurgency strategy. This strategy would involve decreasing the U.S. military footprint and relying on an increasingly prominent role of U.S. Special Operations Forces to help Afghans conduct counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. It would require assisting Afghan national and local forces degrade the insurgency and target terrorist leaders. Implementing this strategy would require decreasing the U.S. military footprint to perhaps 30,000 or fewer forces by 2014 and surging Afghan National Security Forces and Afghan Local Police. It would also include leveraging U.S. Special Operations Forces, CIA, and some conventional forces to conduct several tasks: train, equip, and advise Afghan National Security Forces; assist local communities improve security and governance from the bottom up (especially the Afghan Local Police and Village Stability Operations programs); conduct direct action operations against high value targets; provide a range of "enablers," such as intelligence, civil affairs, and military information support operations.
There are several ways for the United States to achieve its limited objectives in Afghanistan. The first is if al Qa'ida is destroyed in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and no longer poses a serious threat to the U.S. homeland. The second is if the Taliban breaks ties with al Qa'ida. The third is if Afghan National Security Forces and local allies (such as Afghan Local Police) can sufficiently degrade the insurgency and prevent the return of the Taliban with minimal outside assistance. At the moment, the United States should pursue all three means simultaneously -- targeting al Qa'ida and its allies, political negotiations, and Afghan-led counterinsurgency -- until one of them, alone or in combination with the others, adequately achieves core U.S. objectives.
Transitioning to Afghan-Led Counterinsurgency - Prepared statement by Dr. Seth Jones.