A common feature of failed counterinsurgency warfare is the eventual drift into "mission creep."
Mission creep is the temptation when the original mission isn't working to either expand the initial commitment or move on to an even bigger mission. It happens - all too often - and it almost always winds up the same way, in failure.
Vietnam is the classic example of mission creep. America originally sent in military advisors to work with the South Vietnamese forces. Then that progressed into combat formations with a massive supporting effort from the US Air Force and US Navy. Carrier battle groups lined up off the North Vietnamese coast. Bombers flying in from Thailand and Guam. Air war over North Vietnam. Carpet bombing in Laos. Invasion of Cambodia. Eventually just under 600,000 US soldiers in South Vietnam. And it all ended with helicopters flying off the rooftop of a hastily abandoned American embassy. What began with Eisenhower ended with Nixon/Ford, claiming the lives of 50,000 Americans on the battlefield and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, the countrysides still littered with mines and unexploded ordinance and the generational scourge of Agent Orange. All for a little country that, at the end of the day, really didn't matter very much at all.
Now Stephane Dion has concluded that NATO's efforts in Afghanistan are probably doomed to failure without taking the fight to the insurgent and terrorist strongholds inside Pakistan's tribal lands. He's probably right.
Unfortunately Mr. Dion has the same blinkered vision that Richard Nixon had when he authorized the secret invasion of Cambodia. Neither of them realized that they were addressing but one of several fatal flaws. Nixon thought he would destroy North Vietnam's sanctuary infrastructure in Cambodia and eliminate the threat to the south coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail. It didn't work for Nixon and the same thinking won't work for Dion and NATO either.
At best - at the very best - you can staunch the flow of the insurgency temporarily but only temporarily. Much as I hate this hackneyed phrase, "we have all the watches, but they have all the time." Time is not on our side. It is on theirs. They're the home team, not us. It's Year Six of this fumbled effort and that means that Year One options are long foreclosed. If there was ever a time for a military operation to sweep the tribal lands it was at the outset before the Taliban and al-Qaeda were able to get their infrastructure established there and cement their alliances with the locals. They haven't survived this long by being fools. They have almost certainly prepared a long time ago for the possibility of the arrival of westerners in the tribal lands.
Speaking of the locals, the Pashtun and Baloch tribesmen of the border regions, what sort of reaction do we expect from them? Do we think they haven't been watching where this war has gone these past six years? Do we think they're going to be any more welcoming to us than they have been to the Pakstani army in recent years or to the British armies of the past? If an infidel force shows up, even with the support of the Pakistani army, what might that do to the simmering Baloch secessionist movement, how might that spread and, in turn, destabilize Islamabad?
Six years, six lost years and what have we learned? We ought to have learned that counterinsurgency warfare cannot be fought "on the cheap." We ought to have learned that but we haven't. We don't even have but a fraction of the force needed to secure Kandahar province so we have to send our soldiers out on patrols, trolling for IEDs. NATO cannot maintain the existing force structure. If it could, it would be able to relieve us with another nation's soldiers but it can't and it won't.
There's no appetite among the NATO membership for the existing war so where are we going to conjure up support for a new and wider war, one that could have repercussions throughout the region that we can't even begin to contemplate much less hope to control?
Yesterday US Defence Secretary Robert Gates stirred up a hornets' nest by slagging NATO forces as not up to the job of counterinsurgency warfare. Guess what? He's right. He's right except that he's disingenuous if he doesn't include his own forces in that description. That's why his own forces haven't laid their hands on bin Laden in six years. That's why the Taliban has come back, resurgent. That's why al-Qaeda has morphed into a much harder target spread throughout the Islamic world, Europe and even North America. That's why the bulk of his own army languishes, worn out, in Iraq.
Mister Dion may be right, the key to the future of Afghanistan may depend on what happens across the border in Pakistan but that is just one issue that will ultimately dictate what fate befalls Afghanistan, just one key.
10 comments:
Outstanding detail/post, MoS.
Someone should suggest Dion reads it.
Pakistan is presumably trying to fight the insurgents in their own country, unlike Vietnam where they expanded the war into the enemy's country. Dion was suggesting help - not necessarily military help - for Pakistan in their fight with the insurgents.
Pakistan is fighting an insurgency, more than one in fact, while it simultaneously supports others. India is known to support both the Baloch nationalists and Afghanistan's northern warlords. Pakistan supports muslim insurgents in Kashmir and has always backed Pashtun extremists in Afghanistan. We (NATO) have an unrealistically narrow focus on the greater game that is being played. A settlement of Jumma/Kashmir dispute and an end to Indian interference with the Balochs and northern Afghan tribes (Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara) would make our challenges much easier.
MOS,
Hey, Dion was quoted out of context. This is what some Libloggers are saying.
On second thought, is NATO strictly a military alliance and there are no diplomatic and peacekeeping aspects available? Can it interfere in negotiating a settlement in Darfur, for example?
The quotes I initially read (which are hard to find now) were pretty straight forward. Obviously the Pakistan High Commissioner seems to have understood what was said. I'm willing to give Mr. Dion the benefit of the doubt - to a degree. That said I think he's demonstrated a serious fluency problem. It prevents his apparent meaning from coming across and, by his account, leaves the voting public confused at best. At times his English reminds me of Diefenbaker's French. That's not good enough for the leader of a national party in Canada today.
I'm no longer sure what NATO is and I expect that's a question that's going to be explored by the membership before very long. A military alliance where members consider participation optional isn't much of an alliance. NATO does have very limited diplomatic offices but its ability to project any prestige has clearly taken a huge hit from the Afghanistan problems.
Before the US went into Iraq, Rumsfeld made loud noises about the "New Europe" whose members supported the invasion in contrast to "Old Europe" states that didn't. Curious how, today, you're hard pressed to find any sign of "New Europe" carrying any weight in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yet it was America that pushed hardest for their admission to NATO. I don't think NATO is strengthened by the presence of Eastern European freeloaders.
It seems that Dion made the remark in French at Quebec City with Denis Coderre beside him. Don't have the tape of the news conference. Could be lost in translation
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080117.DION17/TPStory/National
Using a collective security alliance for special operations into Pakistan. This is SAS mode military operations that Hillier and Paul Martin dream of. Even Harper, MacKay, and Day have second thoughts.
Excellent analysis. Agree with you. If only Bush had concentrated on Afghanistan and not gone into Iraq. He was too obsessed to gain access to the oil reserves in Iraq. It had nothing to do with homeland security.
Mr. Dion is doing disserve to his leadership by suggesting such expansion of war. It is a Bush mission botched up by Bush. May be Democratic administration in the Whitehouse will figure out better solution.
I don't think a Democratic administration will do an awful lot more for Afghanistan even if most US forces are withdrawn from Iraq. I think Washington's focus on the Bush war on terror is going to blur a bit as the country's economic vulnerability moves to the forefront.
Look at it this way. Six, going on seven years in Afghanistan and we're all sitting around waiting for a winning strategy to be devised. There's a message in that.
As for the suggestions of SAS-style raids in Waziristan, why bother? What would 15 or 20-commandos do in the tribal lands? Catch a bus to Quettta so they can count black turbans? One thing they might well accomplish is to drive the tribesmen resolutely on side with the insurgents but I'm not sure that's what we're actually hoping to achieve. Maybe we could call our handiwork "Greater Talibanistan"
You're probably right that Dems have no solution either. You're quite knowledgeable on the geopolitical situation in that area. What do you think is the solution to this quagmire and what should be the exit strategy for Canada?
I don't think we're remotely near the point of defining solutions. There is so much myopia on the real issues and so many inconsistent national agendas in play. The Brits say they're in for a generation or two. Other partner nations won't agree to commit to a year or two. Some won't commit at all. How does an alliance such as NATO overcome that sort of divisiveness to begin addressing solutions?
I guess NATO has to be sorted out first. There needs to be clarification of its purpose, now that applies in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the future, and an effective mechanism for engaging the entire membership in its efforts. Right now NATO is staggering around like a Friday night drunk at closing time. It's caught in the grip of dysfunction.
If NATO can't be restored to an effective, meaningful alliance in short order, the nations contributing to the Afghanistan effort are going to have to sort out these problems among themselves without the intervention or direction of Brussels.
If the Brits are content to remain in Afghanistan for twenty or thirty years and we think that our forces could be put to better use elsewhere, we have to work that out with them.
If we're going to give up the Kandahar combat role we owe it to our real partners - the Brits, Dutch and Aussies to co-ordinate our actions to minimize any adverse impacts on them.
I think the ideal approach would be to assess the real situation, in Afghanistan and the region generally, and try to find agreement with our partners on just what is truly achievable and at what cost. Then there has to be a lot of horsetrading.
Afghanistan is not a great candidate for transformation into a Western-style democracy. That sort of babble only works in Kabul. The rest of the country has a feudal bent with the reins of power still in the hands of warlords and drug barons.
We have to shed our fanciful illusions about a secular, democratic society in Afghanistan. A nation with such a large criminal economy can never be far from the edge of anarchy or civil war. That's a key reason why Karzai's government has failed to consolidate its power beyond Kabul. He's been able to move on neither warlord nor drug baron all the while he's been reliant on NATO and the US force to swat away at the Taliban.
How do we leave? We begin by trying to reach some agreement with our partners on the practical aspects of withdrawal with a genuine willingness to make compromises to achieve our bottom line. If there is no common ground, we take the only option remaining to us.
That's my take on this problem. It's all well and good to toss about ideas of what else Canada could be doing in Afghanistan but if we can't find an acceptable way to step out of Kandahar, I think we may just have to pull up stakes and leave.
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