Topics include:

1) Was it a mistake to send a Stryker brigade to Afghanistan?

2) U.S. troop morale may be slipping in Afghanistan.

Was it a mistake to send a Stryker brigade to Afghanistan?

On July 5, the U.S. Army's 5th Stryker Brigade arrived in Kandahar province for a year-long tour of duty. The brigade was equipped with 350 Stryker combat vehicles, an eight-wheeled armored infantry carrier that has proven successful in Iraq and is popular with soldiers. It was the first time the Army had deployed Strykers to Afghanistan, but the country has proven unforgiving to the brigade. Thus far they have lost 21 of their Strykers to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), at a cost of two dozen killed and over 70 wounded. On Oct. 27, seven soldiers died during the bombing of a single Stryker vehicle.

Why are Strykers seemingly more vulnerable to improvised explosive attack in Afghanistan than they were in Iraq? Iraq has a much more developed road network than Afghanistan. A denser road network provided U.S. mission planners with more routes to choose from, complicating the enemy's roadside bombing effort. In Afghanistan by contrast, U.S. forces may be lucky to have one useable road to get from an assembly area to an objective. The standard counter-IED strategy is to constantly observe such roads for insurgent bomb-planting activity. Fewer roads would mean less for the Americans to observe, in theory making it easier to find the insurgent bomb-planters. But the level of surveillance assets in the 5th Brigade's area might not be at the same density that U.S. units have enjoyed lately in Iraq. In fact, Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV, the brigade commander, has called for more surveillance help.

The best solution to the problem of IEDs is to infiltrate, attack, and destroy the insurgent organizations that plant them. While that effort progresses, coalition forces can reduce the IED threat by 1) staying off the roads and 2) dispersing by putting fewer troops in a greater number of vehicles. Obvious solutions, but often impractical to implement.

Given Afghanistan's vast distances and low population density, movement by vehicles is essential. Helicopters bypass the roads but are expensive, few in number, and have their own risks. Off-road movement by heavy vehicles laden with troops and supplies is impractical. A new all-terrain mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle (M-ATV) may be promising for Afghanistan. M-ATV carries 5 soldiers compared to the Stryker's 13 and may have better off-road capability. Compared to the Stryker, M-ATV would disperse soldiers in more vehicles and avoid some of the risks of being on Afghanistan's roads.

Watching for bomb-planters, avoiding unwatched roads, using helicopters, dispersing into more vehicles, and taking alternate routes across country will all help with the IED problem. But the real solution lies with offensive action against the IED networks. This will require aggressive patrolling, raiding, and the interrogation of captured suspects, actions that hopefully are not yet out of fashion.

U.S. troop morale may be slipping in Afghanistan

Is the morale of U.S. combat units in Afghanistan beginning to slip? Are U.S. troops in the field, restrained by risk-averse bosses in Kabul and Washington, increasingly just going through the motions, hoping to finish up their tours in one piece? A new report from Bing West hints at this disturbing conclusion.

West was a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer in Vietnam, an assistant secretary of defense, and has written three books on the current war in Iraq. His latest report for Small Wars Journal is based on three trips he made to Afghanistan this year.

West describes U.S. conventional combat units as risk averse, passive, and not respected by the Taliban:

Our SOF [special operating forces] has high morale due to a focused kinetic mission and the warrior's satisfaction in kinetics well applied. A war in which SOF, aviation and Taliban-initiated actions result in most of the enemy losses is of concern. Although his leaders are routinely eliminated by SOF, the enemy does not perceive that he confronts a superior, implacable adversary when he encounters our conventional units. We should change that.

Our SOF is enemy-focused, while our conventional forces are population-focused. Many coalition battalions have red areas [Taliban-controlled zones] where they rarely venture. ... In sum, a balance must be maintained between population-centric COIN and blows aimed against Taliban cohesiveness. This is beginning to slip in our conventional units ... Well-founded doubt about Afghan national cohesiveness and self-reliance pervades all ranks in our military. Gone is the post-9/11 zeal. There is no widely-shared view of victory or definition of what winning means. To the troops, framework ops [routine patrols and meetings with locals] are a job to be done, while getting home in one piece.

The result, West explains, is that Afghan civilians are cooperating with the Taliban rather than the coalition:

It is not self-evident how winning the hearts of village elders or linking villages to Kabul wins the war. Our Soldiers believe that Afghans accept what we give them without reciprocating by turning against the Taliban. The elders don't raise militias or recruits for the army, or drive out the Taliban. ... The theory of counterinsurgency is that villagers, once given security and services, will inform on the insurgents. In reality, the Pashtun Taliban aren't oppressing the villagers, and the coalition doesn't have the troops to provide security in many areas. So villagers hedge their bets-accepting projects from the coalition while keeping their mouths shut as the Taliban move about in small gangs.

West concludes, "An acceptably governed Afghan state can emerge, provided we continue the fight for years." But he also observes that U.S. troops in the field respond to the cues they get from their top-level leaders. If these leaders don't commit to a decisive result, don't trust the judgment of their subordinates, and cut off the troops' access to air and artillery support, the troops will respond with passivity and cynicism. These are attitudes the military cannot afford in Afghanistan.

Three well-known military thinkers re-evaluate what we've assumed to know—that just wasn't so—about a country where we've been fighting for eight years.

The 19th-century humorist Josh Billings once wrote that "It ain't the things you don't know what gets you in deep trouble; it's the things you knows for sure what ain't so." The fictional Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, who captained the ill-fated minesweeper USS Caine in Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, claimed, "You can't assume nothin' in this man's Navy." He was wrong, of course, because military planners frequently must substitute assumptions for absent facts. Those who did so in preparation for Operation Iraqi Freedom erred so outrageously that key suppositions began to clash with reality before the war was one week old, because what they knew for sure wasn't so. (For elaboration, see John M. Collins, "You Can't Assume Nothin'," Proceedings, May 2003, p. 50.)

The Defense Department's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms clearly states that assumptions concerning current and future events must precede sound estimates of the situation and decisions regarding sensible courses of action. Connections between assumptions and strategy for Afghanistan accordingly are inseparable, but the architects of U.S. military involvement cling tenaciously to presumptions that simply aren't so. Armed combat consequently continues to escalate eight years after early victory seemed assured.

President Barack Obama and his advisers will find it difficult (perhaps impossible) to craft sound policies, plans, force postures, and operations without first determining which underlying assumptions to retain, which to discard, and which blank spots to fill, then revise their list accordingly. Senator John Kerry (D-MA), in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, recently announced that "we in Congress have our own assignment: to test all of the underlying assumptions in Afghanistan and make sure they are the right ones before embarking on a new strategy." No official compendium is publicly accessible (if indeed one exists), but several perceived assumptions based on observable behavior seem worthy of reconsideration...

Much more at Proceedings.

By Judah Grunstein

Cross-posted at World Politics Review

A paper by Maj. Jim Gant, titled, "One Tribe at a Time" (.pdf), has been getting all sorts of attention since it ran on Steven Pressman's site a few weeks back. I finally got down to reading it last night after Andrew Exum flagged it as an alternative to COIN in Afghanistan.

Where to begin? The paper is a collection of nativist mythologies that have run as a theme throughout the West's imperial age. Last of the Mohicans? Lawrence of Arabia? Dances with Wolves? They're in there. So is an element of Stockholm Syndrome, for that matter. The problem arises not with Lawrence, of course, but with his evil twin, Kurtz, who has already served as a symbol of colonial-era (Heart of Darkness) and modern American (Apocalypse Now) hubris.

And if that seems like hyperbole, consider that Gant's narrative begins with his apparently arbitrary and unilateral decision to take the side of one tribal chieftain over a rival group from within the same tribe, based solely on his gut feeling. Happily for Gant, it turned out that the subsequent alliance -- which included him arming his "host tribe" -- resulted in benefits for him and his squad. But how do you operationalize gut feeling?

Gant calls for small, autonomous units to essentially "go native" in order to win over allegiance at the tribal level. But how can the fragmented alliances that result be coordinated into a broader strategy? And what happens if one autonomous unit's alliance conflicts with another's? Or if it conflicts with the chain of command's broader objectives? In other words, how do we establish unity of effort and command over such a network of alliances, when the Afghans themselves have not been able to?

As for Gant's subsequent contention that his plan represents a "light footprint COIN" approach, he himself points out that he and his team were safer in the village than in their outpost, and that he was unable to prevent the attacks the village suffered as a result of its cooperation. In other words, there's a real confusion about who was protecting whom.

Anyone who has worked in a helping role -- whether in social work, aid and development, and apparently population-centric counterinsurgency -- has witnessed (or lived) the phenomenon of a line worker identifying with the target population, especially when the line worker is subject to extended immersion within the social structure of the targeted population. Inevitably, it leads to a confusion of loyalties and friction with the broader institutional goals. There's a very delicate balance between listening to and empathizing with the people you're trying to help, and maintaining defined boundaries -- to identify their needs, without identifying with them. But it's an essential balance to strike, because the helping relationship is by its very nature vulnerable to manipulation and abuse, on both sides.

What's also overlooked -- by Gant, but also by more conventional COIN theory -- is the fact that intervening in a social system creates both winners and losers. COIN bases its methodology in large part on the assumption that losers will shift loyalties in order to compete for the benefits on offer. Again, the lessons from the helping professions show that this is far from a foregone conclusion. The resulting power imbalances within the indigenous structure can instead lead to increased -- and rigidified -- resentment and hostility toward the helping professional.

Gant's story is a remarkable and courageous one that resonates with us for many of the same reasons that this kind of narrative historically has. But the fact that people are clinging to the operational solutions he offers is a testament to the fact that there are simply no good options in Afghanistan.

In Washington, the debate over Afghanistan seems to center around two broad ideas: counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism. Should the United States add troops for a more population-centric strategy, as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal advocates? Or should it use a less ground-heavy approach, disrupting Al Qaeda with Special Operation Forces and unmanned drones, as Vice President Joseph Biden argues? There is, of course, no shortage of other ideas, many of them afloat in the blogosphere. Among the more provocative ones has been posted on Steven Pressfield's blog, It's the Tribes, Stupid, and it comes from an Army Special Forces major who has spent much time in both Afghanistan and Iraq training indigenous fighters.

The 45-page paper, "One Tribe at a Time" by Maj. Jim Gant, argues that one way to undermine the insurgency is to return, in part, to the strategy that ousted the Taliban to begin with: Embed small, highly skilled and almost completely autonomous units with tribes across Afghanistan. Much like the Green Berets who worked with the Northern Alliance to drive out the Taliban in 2001 and 2002, the units, which Major Gant calls Tribal Engagement Teams, would wear Afghan garb and live in Afghan villages for extended periods, training, equipping and fighting alongside tribal militias.

The goal would be to encourage what Major Gant sees as a natural antipathy between many tribes toward some of the more ideological, anti-American segments of the insurgency. Just as the Sunni tribesmen dubbed the Sons of Iraq turned against foreign al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, Major Gant argues that Tribal Engagement Teams can counter al-Qaeda networks in Afghanistan by creating or strengthening indigenous fighting forces built upon local militias. That kind of strategy has been discussed in Afghanistan, where critics argue that it would undermine the central government in Kabul and encourage warlordism...

More at The New York Times.

As President Obama and his top advisers make their final decisions on whether to send 40,000 or more troops to Afghanistan, it comes on the heels of the bloodiest month for US forces in the history of the eight-year conflict. In October, 55 troops were killed in action in Afghanistan. If there is a surge, US Army Capt. Micah Chapman says there will likely be more months like this ahead. "The more troops you have on the ground, the more chances there are for casualties," says the Fort Drum, N.Y., resident. "But I think you'll see a marked decrease in violence across the board once you get past the initial flood stage." But for many of the soldiers at Combat Outpost Penich, top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal's stark warning - to send more troops or risk failure - sounds too dire. At least in the eastern Kunar River Valley, where their company-sized force (about 100 soldiers) is posted, they say the challenges aren't quite so insurmountable. Yes, they say, major results may take time, and soldiers here face difficult living and working conditions, but they say they can get the job done...

In this vast country with much of the population spread across remote villages, US forces must be strategic about where they project strength, trying to block central arteries of enemy movement and disrupt strongholds. McCrystal recently ordered the closure of many remote outposts in an effort to focus on protecting key population centers -- such as the cities of Kabul and Kandahar - and winning over residents. In this company, US soldiers say they don't need a surge. But they agree that with more boots on the ground, they would have the resources to extend their presence farther from the base into areas where the Taliban remain popular. Like combat units elsewhere, this one is stretched thin by the requirements of simply protecting their base. A surge "would make it easier because there would be more people to pull guard [duty] and the infantry can go out and do its job," says Pfc. Daniel Robbins of Iowa City, Iowa. The company's missions include hunting the Taliban with Afghan security forces as well as building roads with local Afghan leaders. Robbins says that when his unit is busy with operations it places stress on soldiers who alternate between guard duty and missions, leaving little time for rest. If there was a surge, says Spc. Nick Armstrong of Chesapeake, Va., "then we could work more in terms of pushing out [into the countryside]." He adds that he can imagine the push happening either with more platoon-sized bases (about 40 to 60 soldiers) or increasing personnel levels on larger bases to allow for more patrols...

More at The Christian Science Monitor.

This video shows why coalition and Afghan battalions inflict few Taliban casualties. Causes include terrain, Taliban maneuver, heavy coalition armor and risk aversion to minimize casualties, while doing a professional job and returning in one piece.

Confronting the Hydra: Big Problems with Small Wars - Lieutenant Colonel Mark O'Neill, Lowy Institute.

Australia's current role in Afghanistan is the latest experience in a long history of involvement in counterinsurgency conflicts or 'small wars'. Such commitments may begin as wars of choice, but history suggests they can turn into wars of necessity, and their costs and political impact can be large. In this Lowy Institute Paper, Mark O'Neill charts the enduring nature of Australia's problems with such wars. He concludes that, as a democratic middle power that chooses to wage counterinsurgency conflicts, Australia needs improved strategic policy approaches and capabilities to overcome a complex and many-headed threat.

Full monograph at the Lowy Institute.

The Stimson post discusses:

Section 1206 (Global Train and Equip)

Section 1207 (Security and Stabilization)

Section 1208 (Support to Foreign Forces)

CERP

Pakistan COIN Fund

Iraq and Afghanistan Security Forces Fund

Coalition Support Funds

Combatant Commander Initiative Fund

Cooperative Threat Reduction

Some counter-drug programs

And more

Click the Stimson Center link above to see the details.

... And herein lies the lesson for the Obama administration: decide already. No matter how many more opinions you seek, they will be contrasting and conflicting. There is no hidden oracle within the Beltway or beyond that will provide the answer. No doubt, this is a difficult decision, and its effects are far-reaching. The ultimate strategy for Afghanistan has ramifications beyond our diplomatic and military strategy for the region. The decision whether or not to go forward with Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendations will cement whether or not counterinsurgency will be the prevailing military doctrine for years to come. How much the US focuses on institutional reform, governance and infrastructure as part of any new strategy will answer once and for all whether the United States has the stomach or the capability to engage in modern-day nation building.

The outcome in Afghanistan will also affect Washington's standing vis a vis its international rival, Iran, just as it presents some unsettling implications for nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India. And once the United States commits itself to a cause and backs away from that commitment, as some have suggested we do in Afghanistan by scaling back our presence and constricting our goals, it is jeopardizing its ability to intervene in future conflicts should the need arise. Just take a look at Somalia...

More at The Washington Post.

Hamid Karzai was declared winner of the presidential vote in Afghanistan on Monday after his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew from the runoff. But questions concerning the Karzai government's legitimacy and corruption remain as unresolved as before.

The case of Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Karzai's brother, shows how difficult it is to deal with the government now in place. The Times reported last week that Ahmed Karzai is paid by the CIA to help recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the agency's direction. He has been linked to Afghanistan's narcotics trade and is the most powerful figure in the swath of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban's insurgency is strongest.

What should be done, if anything, about Ahmed Wali Karzai? Does his suspected connection to the opium trade make it impossible to achieve American goals in Afghanistan, particularly in Kandahar, where he is based? What does his political prominence say about the prospects for reforming the government?

Robert D. Kaplan, Center for a New American Security

Frederick W. Kagan, American Enterprise Institute

Vanda Felbab-Brown, Brookings Institution

Stephen Biddle, Council on Foreign Relations

More at The New York Times.