"Unrealistic Planning" In Afghanistan

By Steve Hynd

There's a lot to unpack in an official report today from the UK's House of Commons foreign affairs select committee which says that British operations in Afghanistan have been hampered by �unrealistic planning ... poor co-ordination and a failure to provide the military with clear direction�.

The report concludes that, while the military campaign in Helmand may be gaining traction, Afghan support for the troops has been damaged by civilian casualties and "cultural insensitivity", while there is no evidence the war on drugs has reduced poppy cultivation. A weak, corrupt police force is driving Afghans back to the Taliban to seek justice, it argues, while cultural assumptions about women are barely changed.

For a start, it gives those who might wish to do so a clear invite to say that much of the mess is from following American direction too closely and seeking to do nation building when that was never a realistic objective. The Tories were quick off that particular mark.

William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, seized on the committee's call for the UK mission to focus more narrowly on security. "This confirms what we have been saying for months. Britain's objectives in Afghanistan should be realistic, tightly defined and subject to regular formal assessment." He said there was an "urgent need to take stock" to establish what progress was really being made.

If you think that's a slam at the Bush/Obama/Petraeus/McChrystal notion of a full-on counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan, you'd be right. And British conservative misgivings are only going to get more vocal if today's London Times report is correct and Britain is asked to contribute 2,000 more troops to accompany the extra American soldiers everyone believes McChrystal is going to ask for. There's a strong element of "and a pony too" in what's coming from McChrystal's COINdinista advisory team.

John Nagl, president of the Centre for a New American Security, which was involved in McChrystal�s review, said 20 troops are needed for every 1,000 of the population, which would imply a force of 600,000 in Afghanistan. �We�re currently well below half that, so it should be no surprise that the fight isn�t going well. When we start approaching 500,000 the fight will go appreciably better and that should be our top priority,� Nagl said.

How long is this going to take? The senior Canadian general on the ground says it won't be anytime soon.

Afghan security forces barely have a strength of 150,000 right now, and they're of highly dubious quality and motivation. We're now told that it's only when those forces see an almost 300% increase that things will start to get better. Is that even possible? It's also an increase which would have to be paid for by the West for at least a decade, as paying for all those troops and police is going to cost something like five times Afghanistan's annual GDP. Then there's the cost of the 12,000 Western trainers required, again for a decade or more - most of which will have to come from the U.S.

Yet there's no clear guarantee that even then a COIN approach will work and that things will get better even if all that works out. Some have worried that such a strong military invites a coup, others have pointed out that common Afghans are adamant that they'd rather have the Taliban in charge of their security than Afghanistan's incredibly corrupt (and boy-raping) police force.

And it all may be in the wrong place anyway. As the Guardian notes:

MPs conclude that there is now a "strong argument to be made" that the Afghan insurgency is no longer an immediate threat to Britain, adding: "That threat in the form of al-Qaida and international terrorism can be said more properly to emanate from Pakistan."

There's been a strong tendency among cheerleaders for the Afghan occupation recently to say that "failure" there would set off a domino cascade of militant Islamic victory, starting with Pakistan. Yet the notion that the Taliban could somehow take over Pakistan - which has a 650,000 strong, well-equipped, army - has always been ludicrous. That isn't the same, however, as the argument that the cenetr of gravity of Al Qaeda operations has shifted across the border. It has - even Petraeus admits there are no Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. That means, effectively, that the war is over - there's no longer any rationale for the UN mandate for the allied occupation. And no-one is talking about invading Pakistan, under any circumstances. There's no reason to keep massive numbers of troops in Afghanistan excpet to impose Western notions of government and culture at gunpoint - the old colonialist White Man's Burden.