A Petraeus-Style Plan Emerges in Afghanistan

It's being called "Inteqal," which is both Pashtu and Dari for "Transition." It's the NATO / Kabul plan (masterminded by General Petraeus) for a phased transition of military control, by province, to the Afghan military and police force.

The fact that there's a plan doesn't necessarily mean that it will work. Even if it's a good plan, it needs excellent execution to achieve "victory" (where "victory" is a very difficult and vague definition, anyway). But, holy smokes, it's a plan, which is something the Afghan War has seriously lacked for the last 8 years.

The concept very closely maps the Iraqi transition plan (my blog posts in 2008 focused largely on tracking the progress of this transition plan). Similar to Iraq, Afghanistan's map will now be colored red, orange, yellow, light green, dark green (indicating, respectfully: Not Ready for Transition, Partially Ready for Transition, Ready for Transition, Transitioning Within Six Months, and Transition Complete). The idea is that NATO develops capability internally in the "easier" provinces, transitions them, and consolidates its forces to progressively more "difficult" provinces.

This kind of plan has two advantages: first, it gives the Afghan Army and Police (as well as civil administrative) forces "practice" in these early-transition provinces, such that the kinks can be worked out in a lower-risk environment. Second, it gives NATO forces an opportunity to progressively consolidate, which allows them to maintain security forces in more hotly contested provinces, even as the troop draw-down begins. the plan has some merit.

Unfortunately for the sake of my curiosity, Petraeus is not keen on publishing the transition plan right now, lest it arm the Taliban with a document around which to develop a detailed strategy. But we can know a few of the provinces coming soon (like Herat), as well as some of those definitely not being transitioned for a while (like Helmand and Khandahar).

Small outposts and bases have already been transitioned--in part as a trial for the strategy, and in part due to the need to show progress.

The plan is good--though progress may need to be measured with some skepticism. The fact that a province is "transitioned" does not necessarily mean it's secure. With a pullout schedule looming over US forces, Petraeus will be under the gun to move quickly with the transition. The risk, of course, is that the "early" provinces are transitioned quickly in order to maximize security presence in Khandahar, Helmand, and Zabol.

Furthermore, NATO has to define the end-game. The Taliban are not going to disappear before NATO leaves. There is much talk of negotiations, but it's not clear whether those are actually happening.

In the end, this plan needs to be able to pose the following threat: "The Taliban cannot reach a sweeping victory after NATO leaves. A continued civil war will be a bloody stalemate." If such a threat is credible, negotiations can begin in earnest. Therefore, while Petraeus cannot divulge the details of the transition plan, results and progress will need to be publicized impressively, to put the Taliban in a position where it makes sense to seriously consider collaboration.

An Afghan Exit Strategy

A conference in Kabul was held today about the international exit strategy from Afghanistan. A few things came out of it:

1) There's a goal date for Afghan Army leadership of every province in the country for 2014. Karzai and international forces are agreed on it (though it's non-binding).
2) The US will still keep drawing down forces in 2011. It will probably start slow--it's not the optimal time to draw down, but Obama has domestic promises he'll need to keep.

That said, let's think about the strategy itself.

First, what's the minimum goal of ISAF? To prevent an al-Qaeda (or other anti-Western international terror force) from taking hold. Certainly, if the Taliban takes over Afghanistan (or controls a large portion of it in a stable way), the risks of this will be very high--the war will be a failure.

The more control that the Kabul government has over Afghanistan, and the weaker the Taliban is, the higher the chances a pro-Western stable equilibrium will arise. Thus all the focus on state-building.

But at the end of the day, Afghanistan does not even have to be as strong and stable as Iraq to be a "success." That said, they're very different situations--Iraq was mostly a sectarian civil war, and Afghanistan is mostly an ideological insurgency (a la Vietnam, as much as that's a scary thought).

The strategy suddenly sounds a lot like the Petraeus strategy in Iraq. It includes:
1) Get the troops out onto the ground. Have them standing side-by-side with Afghani soldiers as patrollers in the streets. This not only trains the Afghani soldiers, but helps keep NATO soldiers looking like the good guys.
2) Focus on handing over one province at a time. Kabul will need to slowly and gradually develop its statecraft. Readers from 2006/2007 may remember Foggofwar's close tracking of the progress of province handover. I continue to believe this will be an important performance indicator. The strategy will allow NATO to continually consolidate troops into more and more troublesome provinces, as "easier" provinces are taken by Afghani troops. The "easier" provinces will provide areas to build experience for the Afghani Army, so that veterans can be cycled to "tougher" provinces that fall under Afghani control after stints in these "easier" provinces.
3) A focus on aggressive raids. The trick here will be to continually deny safe haven to the Taliban. Special forces should be employed at night to make it as scary for the Taliban to sleep as it is for pro-Western collaborators. Constant raids in Iraq against al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups went a long way in eliminating the actual insurgent part of the war.

Some new parts of the strategy:
1) A high reliance on Pakistan. The US needs to continue to be very diplomatic with the Pakistani people. Luckily for the US, it has managed to make drone bombings in northwest Pakistan enough of a status quo that it doesn't seem to be making the Pakistani people angrier. The US will almost certainly be sending special ops to assist Pakistan in offensives in Northern Waziristan and other hot spots to deny the Taliban cross-border support and organization. We'll continue to stress here at Foggofwar the importance of making sure there aren't "safe zones" for the Taliban to fall back, regroup, heal, resupply, organize, command, communicate, etc. It must be made into a fractured and confused force if it can be broken.
Pakistan also has a fair amount of success in breaking the Pakistani Taliban, though the Pakistani Taliban is generally considered to be "softer" and less experienced than its Afghani counterparts (who have been fighting a tough guerrilla war for most of the last 25 years). That said, lessons can be learned by the thoroughness of the Pakistani offensives.
2) Dealing with supply problems. Iraq really had few supply problems for the US. Basrah, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia all provided easy entry points for supplies. As news of attacks on NATO supply convoys in Pakistan/Afghanistan suggests, NATO must sometimes operate with fewer supplies than it would like. This can easily hamper offensive efforts.

That said, conditions in Afghanistan are currently terrible. Roadside bombings in Q1 2010 are double those in Q1 2009. June was the deadliest month in the 9-year war for ISAF forces. A previous post of mine suggests that this may be a better sign thatn one would immediately think, but it does indeed still risk running ISAF (or parts of it) out of Afghanistan. For every country that breaks and peels away, the Taliban strikes a victory.

They also have control of most of the southwest of the country--it's a big territory with a fair number of people. Getting potential sympathisers to work with the Afghan government will require such a massive and sustained disruption of Taliban operations there that they cannot hunt and kill the sympathisers at night--one of their most effective terror tactics.

Going forward, NATO will have to keep drone missiles, special ops, and the occasional small offensive in the Pashtun region (along with brilliant cooperation with Pakistan into the north) as it consolidates northern provinces under Afghani government control, in order to prevent the Taliban from mobilizing into a full offensive itself. As the Afghani Army grows, NATO will need to prepare a full invasion force--prepped by special operations, spearheaded by the Marines & Army, and then garrison by massive numbers of Afghani police and army, to take control of the Pashtun region. It will need to be huge, swift, and incredibly costly.

The exit strategy is a tough one. This is a much more difficult war than Iraq ever was. Ultimately, it will depend on being able to win over parts of the Taliban, and breaking the top-level leadership to prevent sufficient collaboration by the various Taliban factions for a full takeover.

Perils in Placing Too Much Hope in Afghan Elections

A low-order analysis of the coming Afghan election (which is about the best you'll be getting out of me today) suggests that no likely result is going to have particularly positive outcomes for the anti-Taliban coalition, despite the increasingly bulky bunch of eggs being stuffed into the election basket by the ISAF.

Recent polls put Karzai in a decisive lead with 44%, though failing to get 50% would lead to a runoff. In second is former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah with 26%; in third, Ramazan Bashardost with 10%; and in fourth, Ashraf Ghani with 6%.

So let us first assume that the vote goes relatively smoothly, despite Taliban attempts to disrupt it. If Karzai wins, Afghanistan has a status quo problem. He is not a terrible president, but he is often arbitrary, his government is corrupt and dysfunctional, and he has apparently alienated much of his former Pashtun support in the south (he is the only all-Pashtun major candidate). Worse, he is being seen as selling out women's rights: he is executing the implementation of a law that allows Shiite men to deny food to their wives, should their wives not be satisfying them sexually (among other things). The implementation of the law is likely to boost his support among some of the 20% Shiite population of Afghanistan. Once the golden boy of the anti-Taliban movement and its Western allies, Karzai has fallen to the point of receiving but an exhausted shrug from those former allies with whom he is not currently cutting deals. Communication difficulties throughout Afghanistan and other barriers to entry for other candidates are probably large contributors to Karzai's current poll popularity.

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah is half-Pashtun, but spent the Taliban regime fighting with the Northern Alliance, and is therefore unlikely to win over many fence-sitting Taliban supporters simply by being elected. His current campaign mimics that of President Obama in rhetoric, and he has clearly set himself up as a sortof "change" candidate, with governmental corruption being his highest campaign issue ("security" is not listed as an official issue, but this may in large part be due to the fact that Abdullah knows better than to think it is a simple lack of will to fight that is keeping the Afghani security forces from winning). He is certainly likely to take Mr. Karzai to a runoff, but whether he'll win is unclear even to pollsters. And whether he can pull Afghanistan together is equally unclear. He does not have the loyalties of many tribes and warlords that Karzai does--and if they cannot be kept in line as the Afghan state develops, they will become as dangerous as the Taliban. And while a change in face might bring some temporary honeymoon to negotiations with the Taliban, they are unlikely to balk on their demand that negotiations occur only after foreign troops have left the country.

The other two candidates are very unlikely to make it to the runoff, which is a shame, because they're quite incredible men. They're both very well-educated technocrats that have detailed plans on how to create structures and incentives to eliminate corruption. Bashardost and Ghani have both won my heart: Bashardost's campaign office is a small tent outside of Kabul's parliament, and he's got a reputation as a charismatic, hot-headed crusader for transparency and political rights. Ghani is talkative and is apparently at times overbearing, but this is largely because he has so many intelligent things to say that he must say them quickly, lest he run out of time. As the former planning and finance ministers, respectively, their attention to detail grossly outstrips their more strongman-style rivals. But, again, they are very unlikely to win.

And, again, this assumes that the Taliban's relative quiet over the past few weeks has not been in preparation for a devastating and coordinated attack on the elections. Should the elections be significantly disrupted, the winner will face incredible legitimacy problems, despite the best of possible intentions. Thursday shall be a tense day. But the Taliban have largely let election commission workers set up and prepare without harassment, which means they may well not try to disrupt the elections themselves. The Taliban are more interested in gaining popularity for themselves than instilling temporary chaos. 90% of polled Afghans declared their intention to vote, which means a significant disruption would likely stir anger amongst otherwise-friendly Afghan people. The Pakistani Taliban's PR disaster has probably taught the Afghani Taliban that discretion is often a key aspect of a winning strategy.

We'll keep you updated on how things go on Thursday when we know.