The Trouble With Ink Spots

By Steve Hynd

Steve Coll writes that McChrystal's plan is essentially the one the Soviets tried, only presumably without quite so much careless death and destruction. And he points to the shortfalls the Soviets already discovered in that plan.

Even if an ink-spot campaign is successful, the Taliban will still own sizable chunks of the Afghan countryside for years. Their forces will be able to move fairly freely at night and in the mountains, as they do now; they will be able to carry out ambushes on the roads; they will attempt to penetrate city defenses to undertake spectacular car bombings and raids; and they will continue to move back and forth across the border with Pakistan, resourced by leadership and financing networks located there. Perhaps, in time, if the proposed McChyrstal strategy succeeded, and a archipelago of relative peace and normalcy were established, and the factionalism within the current Kabul government subsided, and Afghan forces grew and improved, and at least some local Taliban opponents were converted into quiescent local powers, the Afghan state would then be able to push out gradually into the countryside, widening its ink spots.

Those are a lot of ifs. The uncertainties point, like so many other factors in this conflict, to the central importance of politics in Kabul and Islamabad. The Soviets failed in Afghanistan for many reasons, beginning with the brutality of their military campaigns and the implausibility of their political strategy. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1980s, they had constructed a durable ink spot strategy, albeit one based on a more defensive and internally ruthless political-military strategy from the one McChrystal is proposing. The Soviets were unable, however, to convert that partial territorial achievement into a broader and more durable strategic success. Partly they just ran out of time, as often happens in expeditionary wars. Their other problems included their inability to control the insurgents� sanctuary in Pakistan; their inability to stop infiltration across the Pakistan-Afghan border; their inability to build Afghan political unity, even at the local level; their inability to develop a successful reconciliation strategy to divide the Islamist insurgents they faced; and their inability to create successful international diplomacy to reinforce a stable Afghanistan and region. Does that list of headaches sound familiar?

That we're the "good" guys isn't a defense for ignoring the lessons of the Soviet occupation. It's senseless to gamble at least $1 trillion and upwards of 100,000 U.S. lives on reliving the Soviet experience.