ASG Blog
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Honorary Afghanistan Study Group Member: British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee
Published: March 3rd, 2011
Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group
The British Parliament’s bipartisan Foreign Affairs Committee has released the results of a year-long inquiry into the war in Afghanistan which concludes that “…the current full-scale and highly intensive counter-insurgency campaign is not succeeding.”
In a statement accompanying the report, Conservative MP and Chair of the Committee Richard Ottaway warned:
“There is a danger that without appropriate political leadership, the current military campaign is in danger of inadvertently derailing efforts to secure a political solution to what is essentially a political problem. The US should not delay its significant involvement in talks with the Taliban leadership because, without US support in this respect, there can be no longer-term peace in Afghanistan.”
Other highlights of the committee’s conclusions and recommendations that could have been copy-pasted from the Afghanistan Study Group’s report A New Way Forward:
- the main justification for fighting the war, eliminating Afghanistan as a base for Al Qaeda, “may have been achieved some time ago”
- the logic behind the argument that a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban is necessary to prevent Al Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan is flawed
- “…the pre-requisites for a successful military campaign are currently lacking…” (see safe-havens for the Taliban in Pakistan and the steady erosion of the Afghan government’s legitimacy in the eyes of its citizenry)
- the current focus on weakening the insurgency through military means may reduce the chances of achieving the essential political settlement by increasing mistrust and further radicalizing the insurgency
- and given all the above: “An Afghan-led, but U.S. driven, process of political reconciliation is the best remaining hope that the UK and others have of achieving an honourable exit from Afghanistan.”
The committee’s report calls on the British government to use its influence as the second largest contributor of troops and funding for the war effort to encourage the U.S. to step up its efforts to find a political solution and negotiate directly with the Taliban.
For its part, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s administration responded to the report by implying that its conclusions were outdated. Foreign Secretary William Hague told reporters that, “The situation in Afghanistan is constantly changing and in some cases has moved on from the evidence given to the [committee].”
The foreign secretary conveniently failed to provide any detail regarding the cases he was referring to, nor did he offer any evidence that the situation had changed in any significant respect from a year ago. The British public, however, has definitely “moved on” from supporting their country’s continued military engagement in Afghanistan. Polls show that over 70% of Britons believe the war is unwinnable and they are turning their attention to the $8 billion a year their government spends on Afghanistan as they face the deepest budget cuts in 60 years at home.
Meanwhile, assertions of progress on the ground in Afghanistan continue to crumble under the weight of their lofty claims while the counterproductive military campaign grinds on…
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Progress in the Pech Valley – Taking Two Steps Forward by Taking a Step Back
Published: March 2nd, 2011
Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group
Reports that US forces are finally withdrawing from the Pech River Valley may offer a glimpse of what progress looks like in Afghanistan. The Pech Valley is a remote, isolated, and according to the US military itself, strategically unimportant patch of territory in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. Strategically unimportant, and yet, since 2003 American forces have suffered 103 combat deaths with hundreds more wounded and have shelled out millions of dollars in order to maintain a tenuous presence there. The result: the Pech is the same as it ever was except with a few more paved roads (and more instability).
As Lt. Col. Joseph Ryan, the commander of the 800-soldier battalion deployed in the Pech, told the Washington Post in December of last year: “There is nothing strategically important about this terrain. We fight here because the enemy is here. The enemy fights here because we are here…The best thing we can do is pull back and let the Afghans figure this place out.”
American officials prefer to describe the withdrawal, which began on Feb. 15 and will take several months to complete, as a “realignment” that will provide better security for the Afghan people. Their logic is as follows: the valley consumed resources disproportionate with its importance; the resources deployed there could be better used in other areas; and there are not enough troops to decisively defeat the insurgency there anyways.
This leads one to wonder, what conclusions might policymakers reach if they applied this logic consistently to the whole of American involvement in Afghanistan?
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“Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia”: Gates’ West Point Speech and a Tipping Point in Afghanistan
Published: March 1st, 2011
We couldn’t have said it any better ourselves…
In a remarkably blunt speech to the cadets at West Point last Friday, Defense Secretary Gates gave aspiring SecDef’s of tomorrow sitting in the crowd a sure-fire way to determine whether they need to seek psychological counseling:
“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
Sage advice, and had he been so inclined, Gates might have offered his audience another tried-and-true test of (in)sanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
And yet, if these mental health tests were applied to the policy of military escalation in Afghanistan endorsed by Secretary Gates and the Obama administration the whole lot would have to be committed.In December of 2009, after eight years of a war in Afghanistan that had cost 947 US servicemen and women their lives and American taxpayers over $230 billion dollars, the Obama administration doubled-down on an already failed strategy in the hopes that it would produce a different outcome.
It hasn’t.
The “surge” of 30,000 additional troops (a “big American land army” unto itself) and $105 billion taxpayer dollars in 2010 failed to stop increases in civilian casualties, troop deaths, and perceptions of government corruption among Afghans. The security situation in Afghanistan has continued its downward spiral and is now at its lowest point in ten years.
As Afghanistan Study Group member Steve Clemons put it yesterday on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown, “I don’t know how you keep a straight face looking at what we’re doing today in Afghanistan when you’ve had one of the biggest indictments of that policy and that style of warfare by your Secretary of Defense.”
Joe Scarborough echoed Clemons’ sentiment from the conservative end of the political spectrum saying that Gates’ statement at West Point was further evidence that “…keeping our troops in Afghanistan makes no sense.” Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb asks, “So, if it doesn’t make sense to fight in Afghanistan tomorrow, why do it now?”
Yet despite the growing chorus against the war and his own statement at West Point, Secretary Gates’ has managed to maintain his poker face. Just last week he told the Weekly Standard that the Obama administration’s gamble on escalating the current Big American Land War in Asia was beginning to pay off, that things looked better the closer one is to the front, and that erratically shifting the deadlines for troop withdrawal was going to trick the Taliban without confusing our Afghan partners or the American public.
All these dissonant voices are enough to make one’s head spin. Then again, maybe spin is the point. However, as ASG member Stephen Walt put it in a Foreign Policy blog post yesterday, no amount of spin by the administration can change the fact that the U.S. will eventually leave Afghanistan to its fate once it has “…finally figured out the stakes aren’t worth the effort, especially given the low odds of meaningful success.”
Secretary Gates’ speech at West Point suggests that he may have finally come to this realization himself. If that is the case, his continued support for the militaristic status quo in Afghanistan really is crazy and he and the Obama adminstration should seek help in trying to make sense of our strategy. In doing so, they would benefit greatly from listening to the increasingly unified voice of the American public calling for a plan that prioritizes the responsible withdrawal of troops.
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Reconciliation in Afghanistan: This time it’s for real?
Published: March 1st, 2011
Edward Kenney
Afghanistan Study Group BloggerSteve Coll reports in the New Yorker that the Obama administration is engaged in secret high level talks with the Taliban. If true, this marks an important development towards ending the conflict; Afghanistan Study Group put political reconciliation and power sharing first in its list of recommendations for a new direction in Afghan policy. It is nice to see the Obama administration following our advice.
Still, Coll’s revelations should be taken with a grain of salt. We all remember the reports last fall that the U.S. was facilitating peace talks; unfortunately one of the Talib leaders with whom the U.S. was talking turned out to be a fraud, and the negotiations fizzled. A heavy dose of skepticism is therefore warranted when it comes to anonymous sources claiming the existence of secret ongoing peace negotiations. Nevertheless, this leak does suggest that the Obama administration is more willing to engage the Taliban than previously thought.
One line particularly stuck out in Coll’s article:
General David Petraeus said recently that counterinsurgency efforts in the Taliban strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces had pushed the guerrillas back. It was these perceived military gains that influenced the Administration’s decision to enter into direct talks.
Just last week, John Nagl and Nathaniel Fick of the neo-conservative Center for New American Security argued in the New York Times that the insurgency would have to be marginalized before negotiating; a view that always seemed at odds with reality. Now the truth comes out: If Coll’s report is to be believed, it was actually the Americans who refused to negotiate from a position of weakness. If the supposed military gains of the past month open up the door to a peace process, this will indeed be a positive development.
End Note
On the subject of reconciliation, Afghan analyst Minna Jaavenpaa has an excellent new report on the challenges of making peace in Afghanistan published by the United States Institute for Peace. Her paper nicely compliments some of my own work on this subject. It is well worth a read.
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Steve Clemons on The Daily Rundown
Published: February 28th, 2011
Afghanistan Study Group’s Steve Clemons appeared this morning on The Daily Rundown and spoke with NBC’s Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie. Discussing Michael Hastings’ latest piece on the Psy-ops featured in The Rolling Stone, Robert Gates speech at West Point last week, and al-Qaeda. “Afghanistan is not a way in which American power is being leveraged to achieve better ends—it’s become a trap on American power.”
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The Afghanistan Weekly Reader – February 25, 2011
Published: February 25th, 2011
We are seeing increasing signs that the surge in Afghanistan is not working—U.S. troops are pulling back from what was once billed as a key strategic location and the nighttime raids that neo-conservatives claim have been so effective are actually killing many civilians, souring the Afghanistan public on the American presence. The story of the week, of course, came from Rolling Stone magazine, and asserted that the U.S. military has been conducting psy-ops on members of Congress and even Joint Chiefs Chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen. To top it off, despite loud calls for shrinking the deficit, the Republican defense budget is slated to be even LARGER in the next year.
On the good side of the ledger, the U.S. is reported to be talking to the Taliban in hopes of breaking its alliance with al Qaeda – a top recommendation of last fall’s Afghanistan Study Group report. And Governor Mike Huckabee, who may run for president in 2012, spoke very critically of Afghanistan, wondering what the end game is. We’re hopeful it will spark a real debate within the Republican primary and among the public at large.
Here are some of the most important pieces we’ve written or read this week.
U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley it Called Vital to War
The New York Times by C.J. Chivers, Alissa J. Rubin and Wesley Morgan
KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators
The Rolling Stone by Michael Hastings
The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in ’psychological operations’ to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.NATO’s Afghan Night Raids Come with High Civilian Cost
Reuters by Emmo Graham-Harrison
A few minutes and a few bullets were enough to turn Abdullah from an 11th grade student with dreams of becoming a translator to the despairing head of a family of more than a dozen. His father and oldest brother were shot dead last August at the start of a midnight assault by NATO-led troops on their house in Afghanistan’s east. Abdullah himself was hooded, handcuffed and flown to prison, where he was detained for questioning and then released.Huckabee Sees No Endgame in Afghanistan
The Washington Post by Dan Balz
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, setting himself apart from most other Republicans, said Wednesday he sees no obvious endgame to the war in Afghanistan and expressed grave doubts about how the United States extricates itself from a conflict that is now nearly a decade old.Afghan Security the Worst in a Decade: UN
ABC News – AFP
The security situation in Afghanistan has worsened to its lowest point since the toppling of the Taliban a decade ago and attacks on aid workers are at unprecedented levels, a United Nations envoy said. Robert Watkins, the outgoing UN deputy special representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, says from a humanitarian perspective, security “is on everyone’s minds”.U.S. Entering Direct Talks with Taliban: Report
Reuters
The United States has entered into direct talks with leaders of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but contacts are exploratory and not yet a peace negotiation, according to an article on Saturday in The New Yorker magazine.Secretary Gates’ View from the Afghanistan Front
Afghanistan Study Group by Will Keola Thomas
In a candid interview with the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, Defense Secretary Gates offers an upbeat view of the war in Afghanistan that suggests he is still wearing Pentagon-issue rose-colored glasses. Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer any hard evidence that would allow the American public to double-check his prescription. However, Secretary Gates does put forward an argument on presumed progress in Afghanistan that should leave Americans rubbing their eyes.Psy-ops and Afghanistan: Stop Spinning the American Public
Afghanistan Study Group by Will Keola Thomas
The goal of the U.S. Militarys psychological operations in Afghanistan is to use propaganda to influence the emotions and behaviors of hostile foreign groups. But according to a shocking story by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone, it is visiting members of Congress and the American public that are being targeted. -
Mike Huckabee: the Foreign Policy Candidate
Published: February 25th, 2011
Ed Kenney
Afghanistan Study Group BloggerWith all the hullabaloo around yesterday’s bombshell Rolling Stone piece about the U.S. Military using psy-ops on sitting members of Congress and their own Chair of the Joint Chiefs, one key story has gone relatively unnoticed. I’ll start by saying that Mike Huckabee has taken some pretty far-out positions on foreign policy. In 2009, he famously said that there is no room in the middle of the Jewish homeland for a Palestinian state. Early this year, he elaborated on this point by suggesting that the Palestinians repatriate to Muslim lands.
But give the Huck some credit. He is the second potential GOP presidential candidate after Ron Paul to express doubt about the war in Afghanistan. At a session with journalists sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Huckabee reportedly asked whether there was a viable exit strategy.
From the Washington Post:
“What’s the endgame we’re playing here?” [Huckabee] told reporters at a session hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “I can’t see a conclusion.”
This is an important question. If our goal is a “Valhalla in Afghanistan”, the U.S. will never complete this mission. If the goal is to protect the U.S.’s vital national interests, a change strategy can achieve this objective at considerably less cost in both blood and treasure. Hopefully, Huckabee’s openness to ask these hard questions will encourage a real debate in the Republican presidential primary about the wisdom of our strategy in Afghanistan. It’s perhaps the best opportunity yet to educate the American people about what’s actually going right and wrong, and to debate what the best course for American national security is going forward.
Kudos to Huckabee.
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Psy-ops and Afghanistan: Stop Spinning the American Public
Published: February 24th, 2011
Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group
The goal of the U.S. Militarys psychological operations in Afghanistan is to use propaganda to influence the emotions and behaviors of “hostile foreign groups”. But according to a shocking story by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone, it is visiting members of Congress and the American public that are being targeted.
Hastings describes how a “psy-ops” unit based at Camp Eggers in Kabul was directed by Lt. Gen. William Caldwell to compile dossiers on visiting U.S. lawmakers. According to Lt. Col Michael Holmes, the leader of the psy-ops unit, these dossiers were intended to give the general and his staff an understanding of the “pressure points” that could be used to lobby congressional delegations for more funds and to manipulate their perceptions of the war.
The use of information operations resources for the purpose of propagandizing American citizens and political representatives is strictly illegal under the terms of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. In the case described by Hastings, those targeted in Lt. Gen. Caldwells psy-ops campaign included senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin as well as Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee and a number of think tank analysts who play an enormous role in influencing public perception of the war.
Public acquiescence and congressional support for military escalation in Afghanistan has long been facilitated by the Pentagons manipulation of information flowing back to the United States from the battlefield. From facilitating high-level access for sympathetic pundits to paying retired military officers to act as mouthpieces for the Defense Department while presenting themselves as impartial “experts“, the Pentagons attempts to secure support for the war has blurred the line between “public diplomacy” and propaganda to the point where it is indistinguishable. But the use of a psychological operations unit to manipulate elected representatives into escalating military involvement in Afghanistan is completely beyond the pale. The Pentagon must stop spinning the American public.
General Petraeus has ordered an investigation of the reports. For his part, Lt. Gen. Caldwell sent a response to Rolling Stone that “categorically denies the assertion that the command used an Information Operations Cell to influence Distinguished visitors.”
Do we know whether this psy-ops campaign had an impact on the visiting delegations? Hastings article says” …there is no way to tell what, if any, influence it had on American policy.” But Afghanistan Study Group co-founder Steve Clemons has several interesting posts up at the Washington Note describing the before and after of Senator Levins visit to Gen. Caldwells command in Kabul.
Clemons also asks the important question of just how far Gen. Caldwells psy-ops net was cast – was President Obama or any of the presidents team targeted? These questions deserve a thorough investigation. The Pentagon should certainly carry out an inquiry given the allegations directed towards one of its top generals, but given the Pentagons long history of spinning the American public on the war in Afghanistan, it is essential to also have an independent and transparent investigation carried out by Congress.
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Secretary Gates’ View from the Afghanistan Front
Published: February 24th, 2011
Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group
In a candid interview with the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, Defense Secretary Gates offers an upbeat view of the war in Afghanistan that suggests he is still wearing Pentagon-issue rose-colored glasses. Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer any hard evidence that would allow the American public to double-check his prescription.
However, Secretary Gates does put forward an argument on presumed progress in Afghanistan that should leave Americans rubbing their eyes.
First, Gates believes there may be a “payoff” when the July 2011 deadline passes without any substantial drawdown of US troops. The idea, apparently, is that the Taliban will have the rug pulled out from under them when our troops aren’t gone by August. As Secretary Gates puts it:
“The Taliban were messaging that we were leaving in July of ‘11. It seemed to me that if we were willing to be patient we could do some judo on them. Because if the Taliban were all persuaded we were going to be gone by the end of July ‘11, they were going to be in for a really big surprise in August, September, October, November and so on, because we are still going to have a huge number of forces there.”
It seems, however, that if anyone was thrown by that judo-move it was Vice President Biden, our sometimes-strategic partner Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and the American public (though not necessarily in that order). The Taliban, for their part, appear well-aware of the Lisbon plan to keep NATO combat troops in Afghanistan until 2014, have increased their ranks to historic levels despite last year’s “surge” of US troops, and are preparing for a major offensive this Spring.
Secretary Gates goes on to use a particularly confusing metric to show improvement in our strategy and application of resources in Afghanistan: US combat deaths.
“I would argue that we have only begun to get both the strategy and the resources in place to really fight this war in the last 18 months or so. When I took this job on December 18th, 2006, between 2001 and that date, we lost 194 kids. We’ve now lost 1,145. So in terms of a real war, this war has been going on not ten years.”
Well, Gates is correct in one respect: the war has gotten more “real”. Coalition casualties, civilian deaths, cost to US taxpayers, and Afghan government corruption have all increased over the past year. UN representatives in Afghanistan are now going on the record saying that the security situation has deteriorated to its lowest point since 2001.
Secretary Gates also told Mr. Hayes that the significant progress being made isn’t necessarily obvious to those following developments from the US, saying, “I believe the closer you are to the front, the better it looks.”
But Americans have a clearer view of these developments than Gates assumes. A USA Today/Gallup poll taken in January found that 72% of Americans favor Congressional action this year to speed up the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. These folks don’t need to be on the ground in Helmand or Kandahar to see that a strategy dependent on military escalation is a prescription for failure. They have a close-up view of the other frontlines: the fiscal frontlines.
A majority of Americans from across the political spectrum see these frontlines running straight and unbroken from the billions spent on the battlefields of Afghanistan to the unemployment lines in their hometowns, to the picket lines in front of their statehouses. When will Secretary Gates and the Obama administration get the picture?
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Yet Another Unsupported Assertion of Progress in Afghanistan
Published: February 23rd, 2011
Normally, when a column opens with the phrase “there is increasing evidence that…”, a reader has the right to expect that some evidence will be presented in the body of the column. John Nagl and Nathanial Fick’s op-ed (The Long War May be Getting Shorter, February 21st) seemingly breaks this contract. Their op-ed provides no data—not even one number—to suggest that security has improved. The only bright spot from the column seems to be the size of the as yet untested Afghanistan National Army, which is costing taxpayers $12.8 billion to train in a country whose entire GDP is only $16.6 billion.
There is a very clear reason why pro-surge coinistas do not cite actual data and numbers. If they did, they would have a difficult time selling their policies. Fick and Nagl work for CNAS, an organization which has long been a proponent of billion dollar counter-insurgency strategies with an emphasis on military solutions. Not surprisingly, they tend to view events in Afghanistan through rose-tinted glasses. In just the last three days, stories from major newspapers tell a very different story. On Monday, a suicide bomber in Kunduz province killed 31 Afghan civilians at a government census office. Kunduz province lies in Northern Afghanistan, a region once viewed as one of the more stable.
Also on Monday, the Washington Post reported that drone attacks are becoming less effective at killing high level targets.
“CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists: two”
The increased use of drones was actually cited by Nagl and Fick as more “evidence” that the Pakistani sanctuary problem has been solved.
And finally, on Sunday, the Afghanistan government charged the U.S. of killing 65 civilians, including more than 60 children in Eastern Afghanistan. There is no way of knowing whether these allegations, which come from the Governor of Konar are correct, but the U.S. has dramatically increased its bombing campaign there, and the by our own admission it is virtually impossible to distinguish between civilians and insurgents.
To be fair, Nagl and Fick do tout three other developments in Afghanistan: the year-long troop escalation that has produced a worsening security environment, the renewed commitment to stay in Afghanistan forever (or at least to 2014 and beyond) despite widespread opposition in the United States, and yet another task force to combat corruption which apparently will pressure Karzai to act despite all evidence to the contrary. If this is the best “evidence” the military can produce, we’re in deep trouble.
Update:
Nagl and Fick also tout the increased usage of nighttime raids as important development, but a report from Reuters on Thursday suggests that General Petraeus’s looser rules of engagement regarding these raids have led to an increase in accidental fatalities which fuel the insurgency.
