How to End the Insurgency and Win the War in Afghanistan
by Anna Mulrine

Ongoing war in Afghanistan
(c) M. Ryder

With his new book, In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan , Seth Jones examines the root of the insurgency in that country and how disgruntled rural villagers could mean the difference between American victory and defeat.

A longtime Afghanistan expert with the Rand Corp. and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, Jones talks about how the United States should handle Afghanistan. Excerpts:

By the end of the summer, the 21,000 new U.S. troops that President Obama ordered to Afghanistan will be largely in place there, doubling U.S. force levels on the ground. Is this a good idea?

I don't think it was a bad decision.

It does without a doubt make it Obama's war.

The broader issue is that the larger numbers of U.S. forces may be quite helpful if they can operate with minimal civilian casualties and hold territory, but I don't think it's the answer. The bigger question is, What is the U.S. strategy for leveraging local Afghans? There aren't enough Afghan national security forces, but there are tribes who are willing to patrol their areas.

There is some resistance to enlisting tribal forces for security, however. What are the objections?

In southern Afghanistan [where British forces operate], there has been a British concern that they don't want to contribute to the growth of militia forces. Large militias controlled by warlords in the 1980s contributed to war in the 1990s. What you do see in a range of other cases is that when very local forces are created in a defensive nature at the village level, they tend to be quite legitimate.

The U.S. marines are back in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. A Marine battalion of 1,000 troops spent six months there, near the town of Garmsir, between May and October 2008. What happened?

When the marines left last October, they were replaced by a relatively small British force and not even an entire Afghan National Army kandak [equivalent to a battalion of approximately 600 soldiers]. The long-term strategy for holding the area was problematic because the hold force wasn't really well thought out. By the time the marines left, shops had opened up in the bazaar. The Brits and the [Afghan National Army] managed to keep a lot of the shops open, but the Brits weren't interested in getting deep into a lot of areas of Garmsir.

The key question for the marines now is, What is their presence going to look like a year from now and two years from now? How long are they going to be able to stay?

This is something I don't think anyone has their finger on.

Characterize the tension between the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency over CIA Predator drone strikes in Pakistan.

There are some areas [in Pakistan] where the Predators are having a positive impact on a tactical level. They have certainly killed some mid- and senior-level al Qaeda officials, and they have caused a lot of changes in movement of senior al Qaeda officials and disrupted their security. The concern has been civilian casualties, but rather surprisingly, a couple of human-rights groups in Pakistan said the strikes are not killing a lot of civilians. One of the metrics they use is [internally displaced person] flows, and they are not seeing that. But at a strategic level, where they're having a negative impact in Pakistan is the issue of sovereignty. The mainstream, pro-Western Pakistani press sees it as a breach of sovereignty. The Pakistani state intelligence apparatus, the ISI, and the Pakistani military have been broadly supportive of the strikes. But they have asked for a greater say over Predator strikes and intelligence. But this won't happen if the Indian lobby [gets involved]. If the Pakistani military gets the ability to use some of the most sophisticated Predator assets out there, I suspect that would be of deep concern to Indians.

Is it possible to exploit the deep divisions between the Taliban and al Qaeda?

The increasing use of suicide attacks has caused some consternation among members of the Taliban's inner shura [tribal council] that has really tried to put some pressure on al Qaeda to decrease suicide attacks. When you get down to a grass-roots level, there are tribes that are aggrieved at the government but do hate the Taliban. There are a lot of potential fissures.

You say that the idea that the insurgency is ideologically motivated is fundamentally flawed. How so?

The primary focus of what people are pissed off about is that they just believe that there is no useful governance. Locals have just gotten really tired of it. The Afghan central government has not only not provided services and security; it has also become deeply corrupt. Opinion polls show that Afghans believe that corruption is a major problem that is getting worse. According to an Asia Foundation poll, 60 percent believed that corruption had increased over the past year at the national level. Many Afghans report that they have been directly affected by bribery. Thirty-six percent said they had been involved in bribery with a police officer, 35 percent with a court official, and 34 percent with officials when applying for work.

What sort of chance does the former Afghan finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, have against Hamid Karzai in the presidential election?

I haven't seen any good public opinion polls. Ghani obviously understands Afghanistan. What he doesn't appear to have is a big political support base. The issue with him is that he hasn't spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. His focus has largely been in working in places like Washington, D.C.

The civilian side of Obama's surge amounts to roughly 300 people. Is it enough?

The problem is not so much the lack of American civilians in Afghanistan. The bigger problem is the lack of civilians in the areas that matter most, including in the south and the east. It's not clear that those numbers are going to increase significantly anytime soon. Getting civilians deep into rural areas of the country has been extremely difficult. But you can order military forces in. It appears that it will continue to be a U.S. military war in the areas that matter most.

 

 

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How to End the Insurgency and Win the War in Afghanistan

 

(c) 2009 U.S. News & World Report