Nir Rosen - Aftermath

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 clichés 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 up with the white guys with guns, you are eliminating all the people who don’t want to talk to the military, or talking to those who have an interest in engaging the foreign occupier. Regular people won’t relate to you in a natural or honest way. For the U.S. military, seeing something from a reporter’s or Afghan’s perspective is an exception. Even the media were perceived as the enemy. Military officers had been talking for a long time about being good at complex operations, providing aid while engaging in military operations, but they still made it up as they went and hoped that the previous unit had learned something. Units were terrible at handing over the knowledge they had gained, and relationships formed with Afghans were lost. Even when officers got it right, the system wouldn’t, because the military Weltanschauung could not account for complex social environments. The military’s way of thinking was still very conventional. All the officers could do was to try to take COIN and graft it onto conventional doctrine, putting a COIN face on the same old army. The Pentagon cultivated engineers, but Afghanistan could not be approached from a systems engineering perspective. COIN was hard to translate into PowerPoint, the military’s favorite language. The greatest advantage the Taliban had may have been not relying on PowerPoint.

COIN inevitably required military action against a major segment of the Afghan population, and in doing so it undermined the project of state building and national consensus that the international community was simultaneously involved in. The new American mantra called not for targeting the insurgents but protecting the population. But the population was attacked by the Taliban only to the extent that it collaborated with the Americans and their puppet government. Does protecting the population mean protecting them from the Taliban or the police or the Americans? The Americans in Afghanistan were like firemen attracting pyromaniacs.

McChrystal did have an academic “red cell” formed under the auspices of Harvard, but they were never sent the strategy to review, so these bona fide experts were never really consulted. Instead McChrystal’s team listened to urban Afghan expats, fluent in English, who “drank the Kool-Aid of the Kabulis,” as one academic participant described it to me. The center of gravity in Afghanistan are the rural areas, where the Taliban has its greatest strength and where the war will be won or lost. But these expats prioritized the urban, had never been out in the hinterland, a strategy, ironically, out of the old Soviet playbook. They were giving McChrystal the advice Kabulis wanted to hear.