Obama will announce his Afghanistan strategy next week. Reports indicate that troop levels will most likely be close to the 40,000 requested by General McChrystal. According to the New York Times, the three possibilities being seriously considered were:
1) Send 40,000 troops.
This plan involves sending about 10,000 troops to Kandahar (where now there are about 3,200 U.S. troops and 1,600 Canadian soldiers); 5,000 to Helmand (where now there are around 4,000 marines); 5,000 to P2K (the provinces of Paktika, Paktia and Khost in the east); and 10,000 trainers working with Afghan soldiers.
2) Send 20,000 to 35,000 troops.
Gates, Mullen, and Clinton support a plan in this area of troop levels, though they apparently clashed on how the troops should be used. This plan would involve 5,000 troops for training as opposed to 10,000. If the surge is more toward 20,000, not many troops, if any at all, would be sent to Helmand and P2K.
3) Send 10,000 to 15,000 troops.
This plan focuses on training Afghan troops and going after Al Qaeda in Pakistan via drone attacks.
William R. Polk, writing a guest editorial for Informed Comment, notes that none of these proposals meet the troop-population ratio recommended by the U.S. counterinsurgency field manual. With the Afghan population around 33 million, that would mean at least 660,000 troops.
Also, a successful counterinsurgency strategy depends on clear-hold-build, which has thus far been a failure in Afghanistan. The U.S. has cleared Helmand three times but failed to hold it, to which General McChrystal responded, “And once you clear something and don’t hold it, you probably didn’t really clear it. It has no staying power. In fact, I would argue that it’s worse, because you create an expectation and then you dash it. So I think that you’re almost better to have not gone there at all.”
Furthermore, as Polk notes, the Soviets tried clear-hold-build in the 1980’s and failed. He writes:
…[I]n a report on November 13, 1986, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev commented that the Russians attempted the same strategy but admitted that it failed. “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan,” he said, “that has not been occupied by one of or soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless, much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize . . . Without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time.”
Thus, Polk advocates a fourth option: leave. He foresees that the power vacuum created by a U.S. troop withdrawal would be filled by the resumption of village meetings called jirgas. He writes:
Little known or appreciated outside of Afghanistan, neither by the Russians in their time nor by us today, the jirga is the quintessential Afghan means of political action. We need to understand it because, whether we like it or not, it will play a major role in the way the war is brought to a close. I must dilate briefly on it.
The jirga is a very old and common Asian way of settling disputes and legitimating ruling authorities. Among the Mongols and Turks, it was known as a quriltai and similar assemblies were held by the Iranians. Probably few Americans realize that a native American people, the Iroquois, had a similar way of dealing with military and diplomatic affairs…
Since many of the problems of each village depend on actions beyond its locale, the village elders will press for and participate in tribal meetings. In turn these participants will be drawn into regional meetings. At the end of the process will be a grand national assembly which is known as a loya jirga.
Polk argues that the Soviet failure in Afghanistan stemmed from Soviet opposition to the loya jirga notion. Polk writes:
The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and managed to by-pass or suppress it. They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation. The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga and was not regarded by the people as legitimate. So the Russians left with their tail between their legs.
And Polk hits on the U.S.’s biggest problem in Afghanistan: “outside of the major cities, few Afghanis think of the government as legitimate. Most regard it as a foreign tyranny.”
In a similar vein, Fred Kaplan of Slate advocates the “One Tribe At a Time” approach proposed by Major Jim Grant. Kaplan writes:
The premise of [Grant’s] paper is that Afghanistan “has never had a strong central government and never will.” Rather, its society and power structure are, and always will be, built around tribes—and any U.S. or NATO effort to defeat the Taliban must be built around tribes, as well.
The United States’ approach of the last seven years—focusing on Kabul and the buildup of Afghanistan’s national army and police force—is wrongheaded and doomed. The tribal approach also has many risks. But the case for it, Gant argues, is this: “Nothing else will work.”
Does Obama realize the importance of working for legitimization through Afghanistan’s tribal system? Perhaps we’ll find out next week.
