Fact Checking Slaughter and Bergen
Edward Kenney Afghanistan Study Group
At the Senate Hearings last Tuesday, Anne-Marie Slaughter echoed a point that has been made in the past by Peter Bergen and others. The argument goes something like this:
“We have already tried the light footprint counter-terror approach. We tried it from 2001 to 2008. It failed.”
There are actually two assertions here.
1. We adopted a counter-terror (CT) approach prior to 2009
2. This approach proved unsuccessful.
Both of these assertions are highly dubious.
First did we adopt a light footprint counter-terror approach between 2001 and 2009? Well the first obvious difference between our strategy early in the war, and the proposed “CT” strategy today is troop numbers. In the early periods of the war, the U.S. and International forces were increasing significantly. Between January 2006 and December 2008 approximately 45,000 additional international troops were sent to Afghanistan. In the U.S. we frequently forget the significant surge in European troops which predated the 2009 surge by three years. In this period the U.S. was not focused on counter-terror, either. In fact, intelligence and military resources to fight terrorism were shifted out of Afghanistan and into Iraq. So of the two key components of a light footprint CT-centric approach—a reduced level of troops and a increased focus on counter-terror—neither were present between 2001 and 2009. The Bush policy, best described as benign neglect is not the same as counter-terrorism at all.
Furthermore the conditions on the ground are very different now than they were prior to 2009. The Afghan National Army has grown significantly, and its capabilities are greatly enhanced according to the Pentagon. I remain skeptical that Afghan security forces are capable of wiping out the Taliban especially given the difficulties retaining Southern Pashtuns, but they are probably capable of defending Kabul and other relatively secure areas of the country from a potential Taliban offensive, especially with continued U.S. support. This was not the case three years ago.
So Bergen and Slaughter’s first assertion is clearly false. But was the Bush “benign neglect” approach successful? This depends on what metrics are used. The main goal of a counter-terrorism policy is to disrupt and dismantle international terrorist groups (duh!). By this criterion, Bush’s Afghanistan policy was relatively successful. Al Qaeda did not re-emerge in Afghanistan[1] after 2001; this is true despite the undisputed gains made by the Taliban between 2006 and 2009.
Slaughter and Bergen are also incorrectly assessing the Bush strategy in vacuum, not comparing it to possible alternative policies. Compared to the current COIN strategy, Bush’s policy of “benign neglect” does not look half bad. Since Obama has taken office and adopted a more aggressive military strategy, virtually every security metric has worsened, so if the “benign neglect” approach failed, it has still failed less than the current COIN approach.
This analysis does not prove that a small footprint counter-terror policy will work, but it does suggest that the alarmist rhetoric coming from the Coinistas needs better supporting evidence.
[1] Al Qaeda did re-emerge in Iraq, but that is another story.
