One of the hardest parts of counter-insurgency warfare is judging whether you're winning. It's hard because there are so many misleading indicators and it's awfully tempting to grab ahold of them and trumpet victory.
We declared our victory in Panjwai when we drove the Taliban fighters out of the district but was that actually a win or just one more page in a long book? You see, we can claim victory and yet we're fighting battles we simply cannot lose. We can't be defeated by guys with 50's era assault rifles and rocket grenades. We've got better rifles, better rocket launchers and we also have a bunch of stuff the guerrillas don't have such as artillery, armoured vehicles, aerial drones, attack helicopters and strike fighter jets. How could we possibly be defeated in battle?
The other side isn't stupid, they understand all of this. They understand it better than we do because it's a type of warfare they've waged and won for two centuries against the British and then the Soviets.
We need to keep a close eye on our military leaders to see if they 'get it' and, so far at least, they don't appear to be getting it. Canada's Brigadier-General David Fraser has been saying a lot of silly things lately. During Operation Medusa he repeatedly claimed that we had the Taliban surrounded and trapped. Turns out they were actually pretty free to come and go as they pleased right through General Fraser's cordon.
Yesterday General Fraser gave us another insight into what's in his mind when he came out with this bizarre logic: "The Taliban are a bunch of cowards. They're not strong. If they were strong, let's come out in the open field. Let's do this one-on-one. Why don't you want to come out here? ...They're desperate. If they want to fight, I'm willing to have a fight any time they want. But this is not an honourable fight at all."
To me at least it sounds like General Fraser is the one who's desperate. The Taliban may be evil, they may be barbaric but they're hardly cowards. To stand up to our combined arms firepower for days on end isn't typical of cowardice. As for coming "out in the open field", the idea is absurd. Fraser seems to expect these people to come out, stand up and get mowed down - if they're at all honourable.
Sorry, David, but you need to wake up to how these people fight and stop throwing tantrums because they don't fight the way you want them to. They fight on their terms, not yours, and in the main they'll fight where and when and how they choose. You can howl at the moon in frustration but you have to adapt to the realities on the ground.
Of course it's hard to fault David Fraser too much after hearing his boss, Lt.-Gen. David Richards who commands the entire International Security Assistance Force. Richards told a British broadcaster that he was determined the campaign would be successful and that the Taliban would "start dancing to my tune." Oh dear, this guy may actually believe what he's saying.
Unfortunately, NATO's primary and dominant response to the isurgency is resort to superior, military force. Of course we're talking about NATO which is, at its core, a military alliance. But Afghanistan confronts NATO with a type of war for which it isn't trained or equipped to fight so its leaders go back to the warfare they do know and rage when the other guys don't want to play by their rules.
Earlier this month, Jeffrey Record issued a report entitled "The American Way of War, Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency," and it's a real eye opener. Record teaches strategy at America's Air War College. Summarizing existing theories he wrote:
"Some people argue that the key to insurgent success is asymmetry of stakes. Insurgents have a greater interest in the outcome of the war and therefore bring to it a superior political will, a greater determination to fight and die; the insurgents wage total war, whereas the government or foreign occupying power fights what, for it, is necessarily a limited war.
"Others contend that superior strategy best explains insurgent victories - that is protracted guerrilla warfare against a politically impatient and tactically inflexible conventional enemy. Still others believe that the stronger side's type of governance is the place to look; they argue that democracies, as opposed to dictatorships, lack the political and moral stomach to prevail in long and bloody wars against irregular adversaries.
"Varying combinations ofweaker political will, inferior strategy, democratic governance, and failure to isolate insurgent access to external assistance go a long way in explaining insurgent wins over great powers."
General Fraser gets riled up by the Taliban's refusal to come out and fight in the open. Does he not understand that insurgents always avoid their enemy's strengths and exploit their weaknesses?
We need to understand that the Taliban's war is political, not military. The Taliban may choose to stand and fight but only to show the Afghan people that they can take it and survive, that the Western armies with all their technology can't defeat them. They want to spread fear among the people because people blame their government for failing to provide them with security. They also seek to provoke their military opponents into over-reacting, using excessive firepower and inflicting collateral damage on the populace to turn them against their government. As Mr. Record puts it:
"Military victory is a beginning, not an end. Approaching war as an apolitical enterprise encourages fatal inattention to the challenges of converting military wins into political successes. It thwarts recognition that insurgencies are first and foremost political struggles that cannot be defeated by military means alone - indeed, that effective counterinsurgency requires the greatest discretion in the use of force."
We need to remember that the essence of the war we're fighting in Afghanistan is 'regime change.' Karzai has assumed his country's presidency but has never been able to consolidate his political control over the country and, hence, his very legitimacy is still unresolved. The Taliban took to the hills but they were never truly defeated and they never surrendered. The West has been fighting this war for five years already since the U.S. joined the Northern Alliance to oust the Taliban in the wake of September 11, 2001. You must bear in mind that our side has been after these guys for five years and yet they've come back perhaps stronger than ever.
Are we winning in Afghanistan? No, we're not. We didn't go there to win because that would have taken a force many, many times greater than the force NATO has hobbled together. This war is already splitting our alliance and, especially in Europe, popular support for NATO is falling quickly. NATO allies, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, are refusing to get involved. In some quarters NATO is coming to be seen as George Bush's Foreign Legion.
We're trying to use conventional warfare against an insurgency. We're not securing the countryside to bolster popular support for the government. We've acted so slowly that the 'regime change' government of Hamid Karzai has already become corrupt and compromised and is losing the support of the Afghan people. We're still relying on Pakistan to sever the Taliban's external support because we don't have remotely enough troops to tackle that job ourselves.
We're told it'll take three to five years to defeat the Taliban. Maybe the general making that claim can explain why we've failed so miserably in the five years we've already been at them?
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