Military

Both BettyC and John did very good posts on President Biden’s decision on Tuesday to adhere to the agreement that the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban and withdraw US forces from Afghanistan. I wanted to write a little bit about this in terms of the strategic implications and what I think the strategic calculus was.

For full disclosure: I was informally told to begin preparing in 2009 to be deployed to Afghanistan sometime in 2010, that at some point I’d be put back in training and assigned a new team. This did not happen. I was handed off to the Army’s second culture program and assigned to be the Cultural Advisor/Senior Civilian Advisor to the Commandant of the US Army War College, where I was dual hatted internally as the Professor of Culture, Strategy, and Policy, as well as dual hatted within the program as the senior subject matter expert and, ultimately, as the staffer Acting as the Deputy Director. It was an honor and privilege to serve the 48th, 49th, and 50th Commandants, so no complaints there. And from 2009 through 2014 I spent a lot of time providing support – from pre-deployment preparation to reach back analytical support – to elements at and above brigade deployed to Afghanistan. So while I don’t have boots on the ground time in Afghanistan like I do in Iraq – where I’ve also either volunteered to deploy or been asked to and agreed to deploy a number of times since 2014, which didn’t happen for a variety of reasons (cough, sequester, cough) – I have spent a lot of time working on Afghan and Afghan related issues for different Army elements.

I think there are three strategic considerations that went into the Biden national-security team’s analysis of how to proceed in Afghanistan. They are:

1. What happens if we break the agreement the previous administration locked us into?
2. What happens if we adhere to the agreement the previous administration locked us into?
3. Have we done what was necessary, or, perhaps, is it even possible to do what is necessary through our operations in Afghanistan to set the conditions to secure the peace once we withdraw?

These questions/considerations are undergirded and framed within one of the key strategist’s questions: how much risk am I willing to assume? I think from the reporting we can pretty much conclude that Biden and his team ran the traps on the first two questions and concluded that honoring the agreement assumes less risk for the US, our allies and partners, and the region than breaking it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t any risk. I don’t for a moment think that the Taliban are going to be positive actors once we and our NATO allies withdraw, let alone between now and the withdrawal. And I doubt anyone on the Biden nat-sec team is so naive as to think that either.

The third question is the harder one to answer. Because it is, I think, abundantly clear that we have not done what was required, either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table or in advising and assisting or in doing political development and building infrastructure, to set the conditions to secure the peace once we withdraw. I also think it is abundantly clear that no matter who is doing the policy and strategy development, the planning, the analysis, etc regarding Afghanistan that we have in 2021 any real, let alone better idea of how to do or achieve any of this in Afghanistan. And that’s where the strategic rubber meets the operational reality road. The point of waging war is to establish conditions through the use of force to inflict so much pain on one’s opponent or opponents as to make them unable and/or unwilling to continue fighting that it allows one to secure the peace once fighting has concluded. I don’t know of anyone, including the Afghan subject matter experts I used to work with on this stuff, who have any good and/or realistic ideas how to do this vis a vis the Taliban. And if you cannot do this and you are not going to simply stay some place as a third party counterinsurgent and peacemaking force for ever, then you don’t have an achievable strategic objective.

And the largest, overarching, and overwhelming problem with the US’s Afghanistan policy and theater strategy for the better part of the past twenty years, is that it hasn’t been achievable. Getting bin Laden – either capture or kill – was achievable and has been achieved. Dismantling al Qaeda’s ability to use Afghanistan as a base of operation and originating node of influence in a transnational terrorist network was achievable and a lot of it has been achieved. But turning Afghanistan into a functioning state and society, that has an Afghan contextualized and acceptable form of small “l” and small “d” liberal democracy was always somewhere between an exceedingly heavy lift and impossible. A lot of that has to do with Afghanistan and its human and political geography; its socio-cultural, socio-political, socio-religious, and socio-economic reality as it is, not as we wish it was or might be. A lot of it has to do with the fact that it is almost impossible to successfully conduct a third party counterinsurgency to successful conclusion. There are only four or five of these that have ever been successful and what made them successful in terms of the actual military operations is no longer acceptable. The classic example of success is the Malaya campaign, which the US and our allies cannot and will not emulate anywhere.

Right now the good faith push back, as opposed to the “you can’t withdraw as it is disrespectful to everyone killed or wounded in action in Afghanistan”, which is a stupid reason to continue a war, is centered on the effect this will have on groups that the Taliban targets. Specifically women and girls, LGBTQ Afghans, less religious Afghans, Afghans that live in urban areas, non-Pashtun Afghans, and several other groups that the Taliban has historically brutalized, oppressed, and mistreated both when they were running Afghanistan and in the areas of Afghanistan they currently control. This is a compelling moral argument. It is an important argument. However, this argument basically requires American’s political leadership – from President Biden to both Democratic and Republican members of the House and the Senate – to hold a very public discussion with each other and the American people as to what this would entail, why it would be worth it for US security and that of our allies given the risks to both human and economic resources involved, and for the US military to actually produce a feasible, acceptable, and suitable theater strategy with clearly understood and achievable measures of effectiveness to undertake this mission. While I have no doubt the Biden administration officials are capable of doing this, in fact Secretary of State Blinken went to Afghanistan today to speak to the troops there about the decision, I don’t see members of Congress having this debate. Both because it would quickly devolve into jingoism, but also because the most jingoistic of our members of the House and the Senate seem to have the least professional integrity. No one in Congress wants this debate because no one in Congress wants it coming up in their next reelection campaign, no matter how much of the flag they wrap themselves in.

The protection our and our allies presence have provided for these groups in parts of, but not all of Afghanistan has been a by-product of what was our actual national and theater level objectives in Afghanistan. The calls to remain in Afghanistan to provide this protection as the end-state to be achieved would change the mission. It would not be counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism. It would become peace making and peace keeping. They are very, very, very different. Frankly, I’m not really sure the US military is properly educated and trained for this type of mission. We have spent a lot of time and money – I mean A LOT – over the past twenty years trying to get US conventional forces to be able to do tactical and operational missions that are either adjacent to what our various Special Operations elements do or are lite versions of those Special Operations missions. And, frankly, the strategic success in conducting these missions has been mixed even as every year the tactical and operational competency gets better among our conventional forces. But peace making and peace keeping missions are not something the US specializes in. It is such a limited priority that the only US military program devoted to it, the Peace Keeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI), has been partially defunded and was barely rescued from being completely defunded and shut down during the Trump administration.

And it is here that we reach the strategist’s dilemma: a moral quandary. In chapter five of the Tao Te Ching, it’s author – Lao Tzu – states that:

Heaven and Earth are impartial; they treat all of creation as straw dogs.
The Master doesn’t take sides; he treats everyone like a straw dog.

This concept of dispassionately treating everyone as if they are the same is reflected in The Art of War, the classic Taoist treatise on strategy and the ethics of war and conflict. And it is the strategist’s dilemma, especially American strategists given our national ideals. We spend a lot of time in professional military education, especially at the higher, graduate, and professional education levels/equivalents (the Service academies, each Service’s strategists schools, and the Senior Leader Colleges/each Services War College) of trying to get the students, whether cadets and midshipmen or lieutenant colonels and colonels, to think about how America’s ideals influence or should influence our policy and strategy. Or whether they should even do so at all. We try to get them to think through whether it is better to try to formulate a policy and develop a strategy to achieve it that is dispassionate or that tries to incorporate and achieve some of our national ideals. Or whether it is even possible.

FDR faced this dilemma. He knew, because the allies knew, what Hitler was doing with the Final Solution. FDR knew that if he ordered the bombing of the NAZI rail lines, it would slow down the industrial extermination of the Jews of Europe. But he also knew that if he did so, it would tip the allies’ hand to the NAZI leadership. And while Hitler might not understand all the nuance, the military and intelligence leadership would. FDR’s decision was to prosecute the war as the best way of stopping the Final Solution even though it meant more Jews would die in the Holocaust than if he took direct action to stop the NAZI extermination program. It was the hardest of hard decisions and to this day it still generates enough controversy that scholars and analysts are debating it and polemicists use it to claim that FDR was a virulent anti-Semite, which he was not.

This is the strategic dilemma that the Biden national-security team and President Biden are facing. The only really compelling reason to stay in Afghanistan now is to put US and our coalition forces in between the Taliban and the Afghans that the Taliban would tyrannize, abuse, and mistreat. The US military is not really prepared to do this type of operation. The only one of our allies who really specialize in it, and who are the best at it, is New Zealand and they just don’t have the force capacity to do it by themselves. However, there are a number of compelling reasons to bring the Afghan campaign to a conclusion. The most prominent of them is that the Trump administration, when they were the US government, obligated the United States to do so.

There are no good strategic solutions to Afghanistan. We are a third party actor in Afghanistan. Even after twenty years of operations there, of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines going back multiple times during the course of their careers, and hiring civilian subject matter experts with deep expertise into Afghan politics, culture, history, and religion, we still cannot formulate and/or articulate a way forward that both makes sense within an Afghan context and is achievable. Staying in Afghanistan assumes risk. Leaving assumes risk. The questions, after all the words are typed, is the same: how much risk and what types of risk are we willing to assume. And the answers will only come, as they always do, in time.

Changing what type of and how much risk we are willing to assume does not, however, dishonor the service and the sacrifice of anyone who served in Afghanistan over the past twenty years.

Open thread.

The Strategic Implications of President Biden’s Decision To Adhere To the Agreement To Withdraw US Forces From AfghanistanPost + Comments (88)