100,000 American Troops + $8 Bill/Year Needed in Afghanistan

[Pat]

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Editorial Notes:

(1) In the first OpEd Article below, Bing West says Gen. Patraeus really needs 100,000 American troops (plus 300,000 Afghan troops) PLUS $8 BILLION ANNUALLY FOR AT LEAST 10 YEARS to be successful in Afghanistan – with frequent references to “cups of tea” being insufficient no matter how many.

(2) Bing West is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense and a combat marine, who reports regularly from Iraq and Afghanistan.

(3) Bing West’s third book on the Iraq war, "The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq," was published last year by Random House.

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OpEd Article – 29 July 2009

How We’ll Win in Afghanistan
Gen. Petraeus knows how to defeat an insurgency. But he will need congressional support.

By Bing West
Task Force Chosin, Afghanistan

More coalition soldiers have died in July than in any previous month in the nine-year war in Afghanistan. Last week, the soldier who slept on the cot next to me was killed. A rocket-propelled grenade fired from a snow-capped mountain in remote Nuristan Province killed Staff Sgt. Eric Lindstrom, a father of twin baby girls and the best squad leader in the platoon.

Strangely, our military leaders rarely talk about the battles here. They urge shooting less and drinking more cups of tea with village elders. This is the new face of war—counterinsurgency defined as nation-building, an idealistic blend of development aid and John Locke philosophy. Our generals say that the war is “80% non-kinetic.”

Although they welcome the largess provided by coalition forces, the village elders with whom our soldiers drink tea are intimidated by an enemy that prowls at night when our forces return to their bases. The Taliban is a highly mobile, amorphous force, with little popular support. But it is very willing to fight. Firefights are infrequent during the harvest seasons for poppy, corn and wheat, indicating that most local guerrillas are poor kids raised in a culture of tribal feuds, brigandage and AK rifles. The enemy leaders, more sinister and gangster-like, slip back and forth across the 1,500-mile border with Pakistan.

While our Special Operations Forces launch raids that disrupt the Taliban, our conventional soldiers carry out the less-adventurous “framework” operations—mainly presence patrols. With 80 pounds on their back, day after day they slog through the heat, dust and mud, waiting for the enemy to initiate contact.

Overall, too few of the enemy are being killed or captured to sap their morale. It’s like fighting Apaches in the 19th century. The hidden guerillas shoot from tree lines or mountainsides, making accurate return fire impossible. And we rarely bomb a compound, despite press headlines to the contrary. A week ago, a Marine, a British adviser and I watched a man scurrying back and forth at one end of a long building while we were under fire from the other end. The man was carrying something, but the Marine couldn’t decide whether the rules permitted shooting him. No army has ever fought with the restraint of the U.S. and its NATO allies.

In 2002, American social engineers contrived a democratic model that placed the power of the purse inside the ministries in Kabul, believing that central control would stifle regional warlords. When the resulting corruption and favoritism deprived the villages and districts of funds, the U.S. military established Provincial Reconstruction Teams armed with millions of quick-spending dollars. The hugely popular PRTs have provided the funding lubricant that enables local government to operate.

On both fronts—development and fighting—the U.S. military has surged forward this summer, just as promised. Given the vast, harsh terrain and the immense open border, instead of 60,000 American soldiers we actually need 100,000—and many more helicopters. Infantrymen wear down after hundreds of grueling patrols. Instead of a 12-month tour, the U.S. Army should rotate its units on a seven-month basis and keep their brigades intact, as do the Marines.

Regardless of these shortcomings, there will be progress over the next year. Gen. David Petraeus, the theater commander, knows how to defeat an insurgency. In the north, we don’t have to occupy every remote valley. Tribal rebels who just plain like to fight can be isolated in the harsh mountains to enjoy their privations. In the south, the Marines and the British are cleansing Helmand Province of the toxic mixture of drug smuggling and insurgent dominance.

War is not complicated. You have to separate the guerrilla forces from the population and kill them until they no longer want to continue. Al Qaeda, dominated by Arabs, is finished inside Afghanistan. The Taliban are Afghans, to be dealt with by Afghans. As he did in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus wants to recruit local forces to protect their own villages. That will expand the Afghan forces to 300,000 and stabilize the situation. On patrols, Afghan soldiers spot the enemy 10 times more frequently than do coalition solders. Afghan soldiers are brave, hardy, ill-disciplined, individualistic, temperamental and trustworthy.

A year from now, coalition forces should be able to gradually withdraw, replaced by robust support and adviser units embedded in Afghan security forces. We shouldn’t make this a NATO war, allowing the Afghans to stand back. We’re outsiders, no matter how many schools we build or cups of tea we drink.

Staff Sgt. Eric Lindstrom was quiet the night before he died. His squad was going into the bottom of a “punch bowl” with mountains all around, not a good place to fight.

For things to turn out right for us—to keep faith with Eric—we have to gradually let the Afghans do their own fighting, while supporting them generously. Afghan forces will need $4 billion a year for another decade, with a like sum for development. The crunch in terms of American support for the war will come a year from now. The danger is that Congress, so generous in supporting our own forces today, may not support the aid needed for progress in Afghanistan tomorrow.

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OpEd Article – 8 May 2009

Give the Afghan Army a Governance Role
The military is the country's most trusted institution.

By BING WEST
Korengal Valley, Afghanistan

The only way to reach Viper Company of the 26th Regiment, First Infantry Division, is by helicopter. When I fly in, Capt. Jimmy Howell greets me. "I'm holding a shura [meeting of village elders]," he says. "We won't be shot at until they leave." The steep-sided Korengal Valley, 70 miles northeast of Kabul, is the scene of the war's fiercest fighting, claiming 57 American lives over the past three years.

Sure enough, an hour after the elders leave the shura, 30-millimeter shells strike the outpost. Cpl. Marc Madding, an Afghan army adviser, begins firing .50 caliber rounds at the enemy position, laughing as an Afghan soldier scurries from the latrine with shells bursting behind him. Capt. Howell adjusts mortar and artillery shells on the hillside, followed by an A-10 aircraft dropping 250-pound bombs. It's another afternoon in the Korengal, the hot spot in a district that's recorded some 1,990 similar engagements since mid-2005.

Overwhelming American firepower forced the wily fundamentalist insurgents to maintain a respectful distance. A few days earlier, an enemy unit had let down its guard and lost 15 combatants to a well-staged American ambush. Most of the fundamentalists killed were from villages that frequently receive food and medical aid from the U.S. Army outpost. The following day, an American soldier was killed outside a nearby village.

In what Rudyard Kipling called "the arithmetic of the frontier," fundamentalism and tribal hostility fuel persistent attacks, year after year, here in the Korengal. It's not well known stateside, but the Taliban are just one of many fundamentalist gangs waging war against our forces here. Like the U.S. Cavalry fighting the Apaches in the 19th century, it is problematical whether the Americans should push deeper into this treacherous valley or simply bottle up the local fighters.

Whatever the strategy in the Korengal, the broader war across eastern Afghanistan is showing signs of progress. Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, commanding Joint Task Force 101, has deployed his forces in a 300-mile swath that runs from south of Kabul northeast to the Pakistan border. Partnered with Afghan units in over 100 patrol bases along the populated river valleys, JTF 101 has driven the fundamentalist fighters back into the hills and blocked the infiltration routes from Pakistan. The price for an AK-47 rifle smuggled in from Pakistan has doubled in the past four months. For Maj. Gen. Schloesser, the art of command hinges on applying sufficient power to prevent sanctuaries inside the remote valleys without diverting too much power from the populated areas. The restrained military goal is to control the majority of the population around Kabul and to the east, not to pacify the entire region.

The next challenge is to gain control over the southern portion of the country. In the next few months, 10,000 American soldiers and marines will join NATO forces down south. The steady gains by JTF 101 showed that enemy fighters are not fanatics determined to die. Similarly, by the fall the Taliban will be driven back from the populated areas in the south, as they have been in the east.

But as long as Pakistan is a sanctuary, U.S. forces here will be on the strategic defensive, no matter how skillful their military tactics. We can't stay forever. The basic question is: How to consolidate the battlefield gains? That depends upon how the mission is defined. President Barack Obama has avoided promising to build a vibrant democratic nation. "The achievable goal," he said recently, "is to make sure it [Afghanistan] is not a safe haven for terrorists." Such a minimalist policy can be achieved in one of two ways.

The first is to apply the classic counterinsurgency model: After the military push the enemy from a populated area, the police take over, while government appointees provide honest governance and basic services. This approach pursues the expensive nation-building that Mr. Obama has not endorsed. It requires thousands of additional police trainers and hundreds of civilian advisers in the districts. These advisers also serve as watchdogs against corruption, acting as a shadow government to restrain officials prone to skimming and payoffs. It's a sound approach that is slow and expensive.

The second option is to expand the role of the Afghan army to act as the facilitators and watchdogs of governance. Today, American commanders like Capt. Howell routinely participate in shuras or councils. They can gradually hand off such governance-related tasks to Afghan officers.

To do so requires funding a military pension plan conditioned upon retiring a generation of superannuated senior Afghan officers and promoting the younger generation. Afghan battalions would remain in set locales for years instead of rotating every few months as many now do. By homesteading, the Afghan army would develop sources to make arrests or deals beyond our ken. Unlike the police, they could ward off retaliatory attacks. In a de facto way, the military -- the most respected institution in Afghanistan -- would become the real backbone connecting the locals to the central government.

The new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan is retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded the NATO force there a few years ago. While lacking presidential envoy Richard Holbrooke's flamboyance and adulatory press, Gen. Eikenberry doesn't ruffle feathers and understands the political-military dynamic. In 2004, for instance, he deftly removed control over the fledgling Iraqi army from the incompetent Coalition Provisional Authority. As our ambassador in Kabul, he can facilitate an expanded managerial role for the military in government activities while fostering the civilian political process.

If that sounds like double-talk, it is. An activist Afghan military is reminiscent of earlier eras of shadow military influence in Turkey (or in Pakistan, Jordan, Mexico, Argentina, etc.). During internal strife, however, many governments have expanded the powers of their military. It should not be the job of America to build a European-style democracy in Afghanistan. The Afghan military is more trustworthy than either the police or the civilian bureaucracy.

Capt. Howell of Viper Company has been called out of the Korengal for a few days to receive the U.S. Army's highest award for leadership. Then it's back into the fray. There's a price we must pay to ensure the Taliban don't reclaim Afghanistan. But let's not add to the cost by expanding our national objectives. We can't manage the skein of tribal loyalties and jealousies. The fastest way to reduce the size of our involvement is to build up the Afghan Army and quietly encourage it to play an active, expansionist role in governance.