Countering Andrew Bacevich: Which Doctrine in Afghanistan?

The following is a post from Milton Wilkins.

In an interview Friday morning with NPR, Andrew Bacevich made a claim that many commentators have been suggesting for some time: that our strategy and objectives in Afghanistan are fundamentally misguided. While Bacevich has made valid points, his increasingly-popular alternative to the current doctrine similarly provides no guarantee of success.

Our current strategy - “population-centric” counterinsurgency, or COIN - entails flooding population centers with troops as a means of convincing locals that they can be protected from brutal insurgents if they cooperate with coalition forces, while providing NATO with intelligence and refusing the Taliban refuge. Beyond this, COIN entails directly hiring local proxies and gaining the people’s respect and trust through nation-building efforts.

Afghanistan presents enormous problems for this model. The country is 1.5 times larger than Iraq, its populace massive and extremely dispersed, with few “population centers” to be found, not to mention a largely non-existent infrastructure. There is growing consensus that the current 100,000 troop force is far too small for this mission. Finally, accountable, centralized government remains elusive while its own forces remain underprepared, depriving the doctrine of a prerequisite for ultimate success. That is assuming, of course, that we even know what progress would look like.

Bacevich’s alternative to the COIN doctrine, and one that has generally become increasingly popular, is a “pure counterterrorism” approach. Its supporters would have us abandon our fight against most of the Taliban, pull most of our forces out of the country, escalate the use of drones, and focus on the “real enemy:” Al Qaeda, now rooted in Pakistan. Insofar as Afghan tribal militants are concerned, the goal is to pay for their cooperation and punish those harboring Al Qaeda through air campaigns. To Bacevich, Afghanistan’s fate is irrelevant as long as we continue to disrupt Al Qaeda’s infrastructure with tribalism and targeted killing.

The central flaw of this approach – which we have actually been using for most of the last seven years – concerns intelligence. The goal of population-centrism is gaining intelligence, and without men on the ground vetting and protecting an army of informants, it will prove incredibly difficult to ascertain who is actually cooperating with us against Al Qaeda. Without this method of providing reliable HUMINT, disloyal proxies could trick us into striking local rivals or communities with no hostile presence; similar patterns have emerged in Iraq and plagued our efforts in Vietnam.

Such misfires would incur blowback by creating more terrorists while making Afghans doubt our ability to effectively locate the militants, critically undermining the value of our threat to only punish harborers and thereby discouraging tribes from cooperating with us in the first place. Even our more accurate drone strikes have alienated Afghans with the collateral damage they’ve caused, and relying on them more with worse intelligence could quickly see the costs outweigh the benefits.

The point is taken that our current doctrine is costly, complicated and troubled, as members of Gen. McChrystal’s review team have openly admitted; however, Bacevich and the “counterterrorists” offer us lower costs with no surefire benefit.

Milton Wilkins is a former PPI intern. The views expressed here are his own.