“The ‘clear, hold, build’ thing that we’re supposed to be doing … we’re not doing that,” Hughes said. “If any commander in this brigade goes to sleep at night thinking after we’ve walked through that orchard over there that it’s clear, he’s a f—— idiot.”

As the article explains, the split culminated in the early replacement of Capt. Joel Kassulke and a later change of mission for the entire company. Those events are described as terrible blows to the unit’s morale.

More broadly, this is another article describing U.S. military difficulties in conducting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which again makes me wonder what happened to the COIN savvy on the part of the U.S. military that we saw during the so-called ’surge’ in Iraq. Are more positive accounts of operations in Afghanistan simply not being written about, have I not seen them, or did the operational learning in Iraq somehow dissipate as the focus shifted to Afghanistan? It should be mentioned that the battalion in the article (1/17) trained for Iraq before then being deployed to Afghanistan and it is clearly not as if the operational environment in the two theatres are the same. Nonetheless it seems to me that some of the fundamentals have been lost: whereas reports abounded of commanders at all levels in Iraq who understood counterinsurgency, I am getting almost the polar opposite impression when reading about Afghanistan.

It complements an article I came across earlier in the week: “The Unravelling of Pakistan“, by John R. Schmidt, published in Survival earlier this year. Schmidt lays out the typical reasons why Pakistan’s cooperation is essential to the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan, and to regional stability more broadly, but reminds us, through a compelling review of Pakistani political culture and the performance of the Pakistani political class since the founding of the state, that there are no real grounds for optimism on this front.

What I liked about the article is that it posits the behaviour of the Pakistani government within its national, historical and social context. For someone like myself – no expert on Pakistan – it also provided a useful illustration of the competing forces and interests that influence eventual Pakistani policy. Those of you with access to Survival can read the article here.

In his recently released book, Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal comments on the frequently affirmed importance of understanding your environment:

To many this will appear obvious and as hardly meriting separate treatment. Yet it is striking just how absent, beyond the superficial and glib acknowledgement that ‘history matters’, the significance of complex historical legacies has been from the deliberations of Western governments contemplating interventions in societies which, while fractured and traumatised by war, retain a profound sense of their own history and cultural worth, and whose basis of social order often differs sharply from those of the intervening powers.

I agree wholeheartedly: there is a difference between saying that ‘history matters’ or that ‘culture matters’ and doing the difficult work to understand, to really understand, the areas in which interventions are to take place or are currently ongoing.

Another Norwegian academic, Reidar Visser, takes this argument further, in a challenging but also very interesting post on the Obama administration’s experience with counterinsurgency in Iraq and its plans for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Most of the blog entry focuses on internal political wranglings in Iraq and will be fascinating for anyone, such as myself, keen to follow these developments. The part that really stuck with me though, because of its wider implications, is where Visser takes the American leadership to task for failing to acknowledge their own poor understanding of politics both in Iraq and Afghanistan and the limiting effects their lack of understanding will have on their ability to ‘conduct state-building’ in either country. He says: “these people cannot know what is right for Afghanistan because they lack a profound cultural understanding of those countries”.

Vissar then raises a bunch of thorny yet for the most unanswered questions about the Afghans’ preferred form of government, and adds that:

No attempt will be made to answer these complicated questions here. Rather, that is something that should be left for true Afghanistan experts who know the languages, the religions and the history of the country. The question today is whether such experts were ever consulted before President Barack Obama made his decision on strategy.

There is a sense of frustration, if not of anger, here, but it may not be wholly unjustified. While we cannot expect Obama and Biden to develop a ‘profound cultural understanding’ of Afghanistan, we may ask for area specialists and regional experts to be consulted — but are they? Planning for the Somalia intervention in 1992 infamously ignored the advice of area experts and ethnographers; the Iraq invasion was made without consulting, or at least listening to, those well versed with the country’s politics and society; and the same could fairly be said for the Afghanistan invasion of 2001. I would be interested in seeing whether, after so many years of experience with counterinsurgency and with so many injunctions to ‘understand the human terrain’, it is now really déjà vu all over again?

I encourage you to check out Mats Berdal’s book here and to read Vissar’s blog post here.

I am of course aware that what has been described as U.S. ‘counterinsurgency’ operations in Afghanistan have not always, or even often, subscribed to the principles of FM 3-24, or of COIN theory more generally. I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with Marine Colonel Dale Alford at a recent conference at the Naval War College, where he presented a very persuasive and memorable paper on this very point. A different version of this paper can be found here (pp. 12-15), on the site of a Marine Corps University conference on counterinsurgency, which I regrettably did not attend. Col Alford’s point, as stolen from that conference transcript, was that:

We need to re-position a significant portion of our FOBs and COPs among the population because right now they’re not. The problem is they were built for CT missions in ’02 and ’03 and in ’04 in wrong locations for a population-centric COIN effort.
And the second thing is we talk about it a lot, we write about it a lot but we are not focused on the Afghan army and the Afghan police and the Afghan border police. We don’t live with them as partnered units. We consider partnering to link up and do operations. If you’re not sleeping with them, eating with them, and crapping in the same bucket, you’re not partnered and we’re not partnered in Afghanistan.

So there is some resonance between Col Alford’s account and that of Lt-Col Goya. Nonetheless Goya’s account of U.S. force posture in Afghanistan still strikes me as something of a predictable caricature, or at least as somewhat anachronistic; it reminds me of the way Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo was crititised for isolating troops from their operating environment, or of some of the criticism of the unreal life in the ‘Green Zone’ in Iraq. Is it really the case that nothing has changed, that these bad habits of counterinsurgency still prevail? Has there been no operational learning of counterinsurgency? And what then of the many soldiers who conducted counterinsurgency so well in Iraq as part of the surge?

These are the questions I am currently trying to find some answers to. At this point, it seems to me that Goya is a little bit harsh on the conduct of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and that perhaps this criticism would have sounded more appropriate a few years ago. At the same time, Goya may also be a little too nice to his own compatriots: he contrasts the U.S. military effort with that of France, specifying that (loosely translated) “the Afghans have a good image of the French, whose community-oriented approach makes them less confrontational, more patient and more successful”. Is this simply another case of French anti-Americanism?