Don’t count your chickens until they are hatched…
Wednesday, 2, July, 2008A couple of articles caught my eye in today’s Times. The first by Magnus Linklater is a short account of a recent visit to southern Afghanistan ‘It was a battlefield last time I was here. The progress is remarkable’
Linklater gives credit for the progress in no small part to the USMC who fairly recently arrived in the area by force, although they are due to pull out in September:
A few weeks ago, Garmsir was a no-go area for all but the hunkered down British troops in their heavily guarded forward operating bases, and for the US Marines, beginning to arrive in force. Known as the “snake’s head” because of the distinctive shape of the area – a broad expanse of fertile country in the north, tapering to a long tail of farmland, supporting a rural population, mostly cultivating opium poppies – Garmsir was, until recently, held by the Taleban.
“The last time I was here, I wasn’t able to come into the town at all. It was a full-scale battlefield,” Sir Jock said. “Now we’ve just come twice through the main street. I wouldn’t say for one moment that we’ve restored Garmsir to total peace and security, but the progress we’ve made over the last few months is remarkable.”
This is excellent news and accords with reports from colleagues and students in Afghanistan that progress is being made there, that the campaign is being fought more intelligently than it was, and that the Taliban is hemorrhaging support through indiscriminate attacks which make it look as though it is they and not ISAF which is violating the ancient codes of fighting in this area.
Seizing it back was due in part to the surge of the US Marines, with their massively resourced Marine Expeditionary Unit. But it was also achieved through a classic piece of soldiering by A Company of the Argyll and Suther-land Highlanders – the kind of infantry operation that hasn’t changed much in character since the Second World War. In the cramped forward operating base of Delhi (these FOBs, a key part of the Helmand strategy, mostly bear classic names from Britain’s military past, like Inkerman, Balaklava and Nijmegen) Major Neil Den-McKay took me up to his tiny observation post, protected by sand-bags, with a thin slit looking out over a 120-degree arc of the countryside. He pointed to an open field, falling away to a ditch, barely 300 yards away.
“The Taleban were there,” he said.
“We knew they were there because they kept attacking us. So we had to clear it.” He did so by taking a company of jocks in point formation, with bayonets fixed, straight down the ditch until they encountered the Taleban head on. “I don’t think they were expecting us,” said Major Den-McKay drily. “They certainly seemed surprised.” The Argylls drove the Taleban out, inflicting heavy casualties, and without losing a man. It may not have been more than a skirmish, but it sent out a powerful message about the determination of the British forces to make the territory their own.
Earlier, I had sat with Sir Jock and the commanding officer of the Helmand task force, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, listening to the commander of the US Marine Expeditionary Unit, Colonel Lewis Henderson, who spoke of how a combination of military might and civil resources had taken and held the snake’s head itself. He talked of the use of powerful armoury to defeat the Taleban, including blowing up more than 200 bunkers, seizing caches of weaponry and destroying the infrastructure, together with tactics designed to win over the local population once victory had been achieved.
But here’s the rub, you see. Now that you’ve driven the Taliban out how are you going to keep them from coming back? You’re all familiar with the raging debate over force structure, training and organization. Should we have a ‘COIN-oriented’ force or a ‘warfighting’ force? I don’t want to rehash it here except to say that the dichotomy is crude and unhelpful because it’s not an either/or situation . You need to do both because dealing with the immense and perpetual problems of imposing (or reimposing) political control throughout and beyond combat operations is the core and essence of making war an effective instrument of state policy. Fact is that right now ‘nation-building’ and ‘war-winning’ are cognate terms. This may not be to your liking but you can’t always pick your wars.
Back to Linklater, though, who illustrates how the flow of ‘COIN-best practice’ which once flowed from the UK to the USA (justifiably, or not) now goes the other way. I do not think Brigadier Aylwin-Foster could have written his seminal essay in the Military Review Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations today. However right it was at the time (and I think it was pretty accurate), it is clear that the US military has come a long way since then. Is the British Army keeping up?
“To sustain and secure,” was the way he described it. It was the sustaining part that provided a fascinating insight into how far American counter-insurgency tactics have developed since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Aware of the danger of suicide bombers, one of the first things they did was to carry out random finger-printing of suspicious-looking civilians in the outlying areas of the snake’s head. It suggested that the Marines had good local knowledge, whereas in fact they had encountered what Colonel Henderson described as “black holes of intelligence”.
He admitted that they knew very little about local power bases and the complexities of tribal allegiances. So instead the marines went out into the villages with grapes. Why grapes? “They give off a nice smell, and they’re not threatening,” he said. They also sent out leaflets – not warning the local people about the Taleban, but explaining what the Americans were trying to do. Reckoning that many residents of Garmsir were underinformed about the war, they distributed 400 clock radios. And they began compiling data – about the number of shops, the distribution of farms, the availability of schools. They discovered things they didn’t know before, like the fact that although this was a very poor rural population, it was surprisingly well-educated, with some of the villagers speaking two or more languages.
The British listeners were clearly impressed by Colonel Henderson’s presentation, but some of the flies in the Garmsir ointment emerged almost immediately. In the first place, the US Marines are due to pull out of the area in September, leaving this experiment in winning the peace open-ended. Could the British maintain the momentum without the kind of resources that the Americans had deployed? “The commander of the Helmand task force will deploy his units as he sees fit to ensure that we can hold on to and sustain the progress that’s been made here and bring it forward,” said Sir Jock, in the clipped manner of one who is not certain of the answer.
My sense is that the British Army is trying (and don’t get me wrong, I remain strongly of the view that the British Army is the best there is). But the tradition here is to try to do twice as much as the Americans in half the time with half the resources–a situation which, quite predictably, results in failure at least half the time. The US I think leaves less to chance because it is more prepared to match resources with the scale of the real mission requirements. I am reminded of Edward Luttwak’s sharp reminder that ‘the West has become comfortably habituated with defeat.’ He was talking mainly about the US, I reckon, but it applies equally here where, says Brian Bond in The Pursuit of Victory, ‘The British will forgive defeat, but never victory.’
But why am I banging on about defeat when Linklater is saying things are looking up in Afghanistan and others, like Gerard Baker recently tell us to Cheer up. Were Winning this War on Terror? Because I think it’s really premature. Afghanistan is a multi-decade commitment and I’m not sure we’ve enough gas in the tank to sustain it–nor do I see the government really putting enough money into changing that (in fact, this government seems to have been drained of all will entirely beyond that of its own immediate political survival). Moreover, in the broader context while it is great that Al Qaeda no longer has a territorial base in Afghanistan, as Michael Evans also writes in today’s Times, they have other places to go Al Qaeda finds three safe havens for terror training:
Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organisation, driven out of Afghanistan and defeated in Iraq, is re-emerging in strength in three alternative safe havens for training, operational planning and recruiting – Pakistan, Somalia and Algeria – according to Western intelligence and defence sources.
The core al-Qaeda headquarters in the tribal areas of Pakistan pose the gravest threat to the United Kingdom. But in Somalia and in Algeria, where the so-called al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was set up in 2004 as a powerful bin Laden offshoot, the organisation is recruiting energetically and its leaders are believed to have aspirations to hit Western targets.
The basic problem is that we need to face up to a world in which adversaries capable of causing great harm require a very limited territorial base and flourish in the disaffected elements of our domestic population. We’re a long way from figuring out how to deal with that; so it’s way too soon to start declaring victory. Related thoughts at Abu Muqawama The Order of AQ.