Replicating the Awakening

By Dave Anderson:

The local IraqiSunni Arab insurgencies flipped in 2006/2007 in the Anbar Awakening because the local elites thought that one group of meddlesome foreigners with declining and increasingly minimalist goals would be more useful to them in accomplishing local political/economic objectives than the other group of meddlesome and heavily armed foreigners who maintained maximalist goals.

The 1920 Brigade, the neo-Baathists and other local Sunni Arab Anbaris were seeking to maintain security rents and local dominance over their own communities.  During the first three years of the Iraqi insurgency, the foreign jihadis were useful cannon-fodder and suicide bombers, but their goal set was not in complete accord with the goal set of the local fighters.  Once the foreigners and takfiri fighters began to displace local elites by muscling prohibitions and moral restrictions as well as attempting to collect taxes on local and long-standing smuggling routes and routines, their usefulness was greatly decreased.

At that point, the local fighters who constituted the bulk of the Iraqi Sunni Arab insurgency went out to protect their local interests and began to cut deals with the US where the US received assurances that the locals would not shoot at US patrols, and the locals received security and political rents and firepower assistance to beat up on the other group of annoying foreigners who were seeking to impose maximalist goals on the local population. 

And it worked, as long as "working"  is defined as dramatically decreasing violence directed against US troops and the recognition that these deals weaken any Westphalian claim of statehood for a weak central government as the local elites maintained their militias and the local legitimacy of violence.  The maximalist, non-local fighters lost the sea in which they needed to swim in. 

Last week, the Boston Globe reported that US military believes the vast majority of the Afghans who are shooting at US forces are doing so for purely local reasons.  They are in the words of COIN advocate Col. Kilcullen 'accidental guerrillas' who will not want to engage in inter-continental urban guerrilla or terrorist strikes because that does not serve their local needs.

Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan
are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new
generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral
wealth, and smuggling routes...�Ninety percent is a tribal, localized
insurgency,�� said one US intelligence official in Washington who
helped draft the assessments. �Ten percent are hardcore ideologues
fighting for the Taliban...."

the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family
and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting,
and they see themselves as opposing the United States be cause it is an
occupying power, the officials and analysts said.

The London Times reports that the US is thinking about cutting a number of deals with local fighters, commanders and elites who are fighting for purely local reasons.  This would be a replication of the Anbar Awakening strategy where the US recognizes that there is no vital or even sort-of kind-of important national interest in and of itself as to whom controls a particular timber smuggling route.  Instead the locals who possess a vast sorting advantage of whom belongs and whom does not, can take care of their own security against other maximalist goal seeking groups. 

Afghans are known for changing sides back and forth during their long years of
war � there is an old saying that �you can rent an Afghan but never buy one�
� and battles have often been decided by defections rather than combat.

Paying Taliban foot-soldiers to switch sides could spare US lives and save
money, say its advocates. A recent report by the Senate foreign relations
committee estimated the Taliban fighting strength at 15,000, of whom only 5%
are committed idealogues while 70% fight for money � the so-called $10-a-day
Taliban. Doubling this to win them over would cost just $300,000 a day,
compared with the $165m a day the United States is spending fighting the
war.

Loyalty leasing and minimizing the goal set to regional pockets of stability whose elite understand that the US maintains a very credible deterrant of pounding the snot out of fixed and high value targets in the case of long-distance "far enemy" terror strikes originating from certain sections of Afghanistan would be a viable glidepath to a reduction of violence as well as decreasing US commitments to maximal goal sets.