The Gorbachev-McChrystal Plan

By Steve Hynd

Steve Coll points out that Gen. McChrystal's new strategy of withdrawing to Afghan cities bears an uncommon similiarity to the Soviet exit strategy from the 80's.

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, he inherited a deteriorating war in Afghanistan. He wanted out but he was boxed in by hardliners in his Politburo and military. Gradually, however, he constructed an exit strategy from Afghanistan. It had several components, all of which are present, in amended forms, in the current Obama policy debate.

In Afghanistan, after an initial and failed attempt to use special forces more aggressively to hit Islamist guerrillas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the Soviets began to pull back into Afghanistan�s major cities and to �Afghan-ize� their military operations. As they prepared to withdraw, Soviet troops moved away from direct combat, particularly in the countryside, and instead concentrated on training and equipping the Afghan forces. They also provided supplies and expertise the Afghans lacked�air power, for example, and SCUD missiles. As I described in a previous post, this military strategy worked pretty well, and the Soviet city-fortresses withstood heavy assaults from the U.S.-financed mujaheddin even after Soviet troops left the country; they left only a thousand or two military and intelligence advisers behind.

Gorbachev�s Afghan client, President Najibullah, seized the space created by the Soviet transition. He negotiated with tribes, won defections, and preached relentlessly about national unity and Islam... In essence, he practiced and partially succeeded at a prospective Obama approach that is short-handed as �reconciliation� or �national reintegration� in reference to the Taliban. Najibullah never brought his main enemies into the fold, but he bought time and held his ground in what amounted to a prolonged stalemate.

Gorbie's exit strategy didn't work out well for Afghanistan partly because the U.S. wouldn't back his calls for UN-led stabilization of the country and region. Partly because Najibullah was murdered, possibly on the orders of elements within Pakistan's government or military who supported and still support the Taliban.

Still, Gorbachev got the Soviet Union a ceasefire and a way out of its Afghanistan quagmire in fairly short order. Coll appears to be indirectly suggesting that McChrystal is following the same game plan. If so, I've no real problem with that. International assistance for Afghanistan would be more forthcoming this time around although we might still have the problem of another great power inciting Pakistan to destabilize matters there.

(Pakistan's a whole other ball of wax - COIN advocates keep dancing around the fact that the U.S. military is in the wrong country and the U.S. answer to that is to pursue a military surge in Afghanistan but an aid surge to Pakistan. Huh? Aid for the former but containment for the latter would be a more appropriate response.)

But if that's McChrystal's exit plan, could someone in the COIN community at least be honest that it involves abandoning all of rural Afghanistan - the bulk of the population and all the places "safe havens" could be established - to the Taliban? After all, that even a partial withdrawal or transition to a counter-terrorism strategy now would "abandon Afghans to the Taliban" has been a major criticism levelled by COINdinistas and their neocon allies at drawdown advocates. Yet at the same time they've been universal in their acclaim for McChrystal. It's beginning to look like six of one and half a dozen of the other as far as outcomes for Afghans go. As one columnist in the Daily Star of Lebanon puts it:

As in Iraq, an American withdrawal would potentially unleash forces of Balkanization. That may sound disturbing, but it is probably an unstoppable consequence of the initial US invasion.

The primary difference is the number of U.S. dead and billions of U.S. treasure spent getting there.