Horses Fled, Please Bolt Doors On Barn

By Steve Hynd

The AP's headline says it all: US says too few Afghans to take control in Marjah.

Not nearly enough trained Afghans are available to take control of key Taliban strongholds like Marjah after the military has pushed out the enemy, U.S. officials told a Senate panel on Thursday.

The lack of competent local officials in southern Afghanistan could frustrate Washington's aims in the region, and keep the U.S. on the hook - financially and militarily - for several years to come. President Barack Obama has pledged that American forces will begin their exit next year.

There's not nearly enough trained Afghan soldiers or cops to hold what's supposedly been cleared either, although the "cleared" part is a bit muddy too:

A U.S. Senate hearing on Thursday offered a grim assessment of the state of Marjah, almost three months after the major NATO offensive Operation Moshtarak began in the southern region.

Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Marjah does not appear to be a turning point in the overall mission in Afghanistan.

A recent survey conducted by the International Council on Security and Development showed that a vast majority of villagers felt negatively about foreign troops and that more young Afghans had joined the Taliban over the last year," he said at the hearing. "Worse still were the reasons they had signed up with the Taliban: they said they joined because they had no jobs, because they had no money to get married or buy land, because they had no other future. In short, the coalition and their own government have not provided promising alternatives."

This while the Taliban are infiltrating back into the area. It's not going to get any better anytime soon either. NATO allies didn't cough up enough trainers, despite promises, last time they were asked and they won't do so again now, no matter how upbeat NATO spokespeople try to sound. Europe's leaders want out, not further in, and would have already stampeded for the exits were it not for US pressure and fears about the future of the NATO alliance.

You have to wonder what former CNAS honcho, now Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy has been smoking when she says that:

"for the first time, we finally have the right mission, the right strategy, the right leadership team in place."

Meanwhile, over at the CNAS halls themselves, Andrew Exum has a paper.

This report notes that America's counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan has focused more on waging war at the operational and tactical levels at the expense of the strategic and political levels.

�In the end, by having so vocally and materially committed to the Karzai regime, the United States and its allies are tied to its successes and failures. The goal, then, should be to maximize the former and minimize the latter through focused application of U.S. leverage,� writes CNAS Fellow and author Andrew Exum.  �Designing a political campaign minimizes the role luck plays in whether the United States and its allies are successful.�

By drawing on research conducted through hundreds of interviews with U.S. and NATO military officers and diplomats, policymakers and NGOs in Afghanistan, Exum offers recommendations to design an effective political campaign:

1. Convene another strategic review to assess the civilian strategy, not the U.S. and allied military strategy, in Afghanistan. President Obama should ask the tough questions to his secretaries and envoys that he asked his military commander � General Stanley McChrystal � to answer in his fall 2009 review.

2. Build a functioning relationship with Hamid Karzai and demonstrate to the Afghan president that he has an enduring partner in the United States and its allies.

3. Use U.S. and allied leverage to press the government of Afghanistan to either hold elections for district governors or appoint competent governors from Kabul. Effective local governance is a prerequisite for U.S. and allied forces to institute aid and development projects that are essential to addressing the factors driving conflict and violence at the local level.

Jacob Stokes is spot on: shouldn't the US's COIN masterminds thought of all this before they got kinetic? And Joshua Foust snarks "I'm curious how we 'use U.S. leverage' more than we already have. What else is left?" Exum's paper is like calling for locking the doors on a barn after the horses have all fled.

So we've got a military strategy that's bogged down in whack-a-mole and a political strategy that's so lagging it's invisible. But Flournoy thinks everything is going swimmingly. Sheesh.

Isn't it time we tried the strategy from Iraq, where the blindingly obvious realization was that Iraqis would take ownership of their own nation the instant they knew for a fact they wouldn't have the U.S. to prop them up forever? Thus, the declaration of a definite withdrawal date and a timetable to get everyone there. Let's give that a try.