Aftermath

with the Afghan Regional Security Integration Command, and he enjoyed his job. In his view the Afghan army should have been pushing the enemy away from the population while the police should have been protecting and controlling the population.

Control is essential to a successful COIN campaign. According to Stathis Kalyvas, a Yale political scientist and expert on civil war whose book The Logic of Violence in Civil War was very influential among counterinsurgency theorists, “The higher the level of control exercised by the actor, the higher the rate of collaboration with this actor—and, inversely, the lower the rate of defection.” Control leads to collaboration and allows the counterinsurgents to separate the insurgents from the community. But the Americans would never have enough troops in Afghanistan to achieve control. Unlike in Iraq, where the surge focused on Baghdad, a densely urban environment where a census could be conducted, neighborhoods closed off with Americans at the access points, in Afghanistan the war was rural. The Americans got lucky in Iraq, benefiting from sectarianism that changed the dynamics of the conflict from an anti-occupation struggle to a civil war. Millions were displaced, hundreds of thousands were killed. The Americans looked good in comparison, and they decided to focus on protecting the people. Then the Shiites defeated the Sunnis, and Sunni militias chose to ally themselves with the Americans. But a caricature of the surge dominated popular culture. Both Washington and the military came to believe that COIN just might be the magic formula in Afghanistan. While ignoring the right lessons from Iraq, such as the use of community outposts, there was much talk of bribing Afghan tribes, which misunderstood why Sunnis stopped resisting in Iraq and gave way too much importance to tribalism in Afghan society. The Americans were unable to grasp that material benefits were not the only thing that could motivate people. McChrystal called for a new focus on the urban population centers of the country and less on the rural areas. This was also the failed approach favored by the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Like the mujahideen, the Taliban are strong in the rural areas, in mountains and valleys.

McChrystal insisted that securing the people of Afghanistan was his goal. But why, then, were the Americans operating out of large bases and not in the communities? The community outposts that existed in Afghanistan were actually away from the population. In Iraq the Americans’ best success came with their use of community outposts. If they set up similar outposts in Afghanistan, they would not have to “commute to work” on roads vulnerable to IEDs in mammoth vehicles that keep them removed from the people, staring at them like aliens in spaceships unable to breathe in their atmosphere. It was a paradox of population-centric COIN in Afghanistan that the areas where the population was most concentrated were not the insurgent strongholds; instead the insurgents were based in the rural areas, away from population centers. The surge in Iraq was urban-based, and much easier. In Baghdad the Americans figured out who lived where, what they did, and what they wanted. That lesson didn’t make it over to Afghanistan.

THE AMERICANS’ OBSESSION with Afghanistan’s elections also resembled their Iraq approach, which erroneously focused on landmark events. Just as in Iraq, when elections helped enshrine sectarianism and pave the way to civil war, so too in Afghanistan the elections empowered warlords; enshrined a corrupt order; and, in the case of the August 2009 elections, completely discredited the government and its foreign backers. Strategy in Afghanistan was put on hold so that the elections could be held. Turnout in the south was less than 10 percent, and zero in some places. There was overwhelming evidence of systematic election fraud and ballot stuffing. The Taliban managed to reduce the turnout compared with previous years. There were seven thousand polling stations throughout the country, so the Taliban could not actually disrupt voting too much. It would have also been bad PR for them to kill too many civilians. Their lack of operations might have shown that even they knew the elections didn’t matter and that nothing could better serve their ends than letting the elections take place and ending up with a deeply flawed result. Meanwhile, the Americans and their allies immediately hailed the elections as a success, merely because violence was low, thus further associating themselves with a corrupt government. How could Afghans take Americans seriously when they backed a corrupt government and were deeply implicated in corruption? The failed elections were a message to Afghans that there was no hope of improvement or change.

In September 2009 McChrystal’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan was leaked to the media. He had been advised by a team of experts, many of them celebrity pundits from Washington think tanks. Only one of his advisers was an expert on Afghanistan. When Petraeus conducted his Iraq review, he called on people who really knew Iraq to join his “brain trust.” McChrystal called in advisers from both sides of the political divide in Washington who already believed that population-centric COIN was the solution to everything. It was a savvy move, sure to help him gain support in Congress. There was a cult of celebrity in the D.C. policy set. Many of the same pseudo experts who were once convinced that the war in Iraq was the most important thing in the world, even at the expense of Afghanistan, were now convinced that Afghanistan was the most important thing in the world, and were organizing panels with other pseudo experts in Washington think tanks. They offered trendy solutions, like an industry giving managed and preplanned narratives about what was going on. COIN advocates from DC think tanks were connected to political appointees who came from DC think tanks. There was an explosion of commentary on Afghanistan coming from positions of ignorance, quoting generalities. McChrystal himself had been chosen because he could drum up bipartisan support. He was another hero general like Petraeus, with an aura of infallibility—he was there to save the day. Fawning articles praised his low percentage of body fat, his ascetic habit of eating one meal a day, his repetition of simple COIN aphorisms that had already become cliches in Iraq by 2007. He was another warrior scholar the media could write panegyrics about.

Just as Petraeus replaced a discredited General Casey in Iraq, and Abrams replaced a discredited General Westmorland in Vietnam, so too had McChrystal replaced a discredited McKiernan, and the media eagerly consumed the hype about the new general. The generals were manipulating public opinion, inviting celebrity pundits to take part in reviews and then write opinion pieces in newspapers in support of the conclusion that the pundits and generals proposed. The military was setting the agenda for the war, and in the end it came down to more troops. McChrystal and the military were playing Obama. They wanted billions of dollars and a war without end so they could experiment with COIN, the solution for all problems. McChrystal bluntly stated that if his strategy wasn’t followed, then the mission in Afghanistan would fail. Neither he nor his backers explained what the qualitative difference would be. They were not doing COIN properly with the troops they had already, so why bring in more?

Even though McChrystal’s assessment identified the biggest challenges the Americans faced as political, social, and economic, his solution was military. The generals were trying to make all of Afghanistan’s problems look like a nail, and they kept wanting to apply the hammer. They were saying they could fight a war by not focusing on the enemy, but they were not actually taking the steps to protect people, either. Instead of relying on civilian experts, the government ended up using the military even to solve problems that weren’t military. McChrystal advocated a war that was population-centric and not enemy-centric, and yet all the talk was over how many troops they would need, instead of what a successful COIN strategy would require. Despite all the talk of a civilian surge, the civilians—diplomats, advisers, trainers—to staff even the much lower requirements of the last seven years were not found. Nor were the civilians found to meet the requirements for the American mission in Iraq. Instead, McChrystal increased the number of special operators to kill Taliban instead of trainers for the police and army.

More than a specific code of action, COIN was a mentality. But it hadn’t really trickled down. Once you got down to the rifle squad, COIN didn’t make any sense. It was hard for the troops to keep the greater strategic picture in their minds. They were being asked to be Wyatt Earp and Mother Teresa at the same time. Most soldiers didn’t care about the mission; they just wanted to live through the deployment. Lip service is paid to COIN, but the military isn’t implementing its own plan very well. Officers speak of going into villages and “doing that COIN shit.” COIN required the Americans in their bases to learn about and live with the people in the villages. They couldn’t just go in for a few hours, call a shura with some elders, and then rush back to base before the chow hall closed. COIN was dangerous, and the military was risk-averse. In Iraq the American casualties peaked when the military got serious about protecting the people. The faces in charge of the war in Afghanistan had changed, but the strategy had not.

The American military and policy establishments were institutionally incapable of doing COIN. They lacked the curiosity to understand other cultures and the empathy to understand what motivated other people. In the military in particular, Afghans were still viewed as “hajjis.” Alternative viewpoints were not considered. Many journalists failed to understand that when you’re with the military you’re changing your selection bias. By showing