A Return To Counter-Terrorism?

By Steve Hynd

Today the NYT sems to be signalling that Joe Biden's preference for "counter-terrorism" has won out over the Pentagon's love of the cult of COIN. In a piece by Helen Cooper and Mark Landler which is also very useful for insights into how Pakistan is involved in the process of negotiating with the Taliban, we hear that:

When President Obama announced his new war plan for Afghanistan last year, the centerpiece of the strategy � and a big part of the rationale for sending 30,000 additional troops � was to safeguard the Afghan people, provide them with a competent government and win their allegiance.

Eight months later, that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country.

Instead, what has turned out to work well is an approach American officials have talked much less about: counterterrorism, military-speak for the targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Faced with that reality, and the pressure of a self-imposed deadline to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011, the Obama administration is starting to count more heavily on the strategy of hunting down insurgents. The shift could change the nature of the war and potentially, in the view of some officials, hasten a political settlement with the Taliban.

According to the NYT pair, US special forces have "taken more than 130 significant insurgents out of action" in just the last five months and that, now:

American intelligence reporting has recently revealed growing examples of Taliban fighters who are fearful of moving into higher-level command positions because of these lethal operations, according to a senior American military officer who follows Afghanistan closely.

Judging that they have gained some leverage over the Taliban, American officials are now debating when to try to bring them to the negotiating table to end the fighting. Rattling the Taliban, officials said, may open the door to reconciling with them more quickly, even if the officials caution that the outreach is still deeply uncertain.

American military officials and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan have begun a robust discussion about �to what degree these people are going to be allowed to have a seat at the table,� one military official said.

Of course, all this could have been accomplished without a surge of 30,000 troops, without throwing billions at the corrupt Karzai government or at the Pakistanis, without hundreds of deaths. The military changed the original mission in Afghanistan even before McChrystal steamrollered the White House into accepting that surge but the NYT piece suggests that Biden's suggested far more minimal presence would have worked all along.

Of course, the notion that insurgents can be "hot-housed" to a more amenable stance by targeted killings isn't a new one - it worked well for the British in Northern Ireland - and the pitfalls are well known. If the Obama administration are to rely on such a strategy more as part of an exit ramp in Afghanistan, they'll need to be far more wary of killing civilians and make sure the targets are as specific as possible. That said, it's likely that counter-terrorism, by its very scale, is more civilian-friendly than "population centric" COIN involving 100,000+ troops that always seems to end up being "force-protection-centric" COIN.

And I doubt the Pentagon will give up on its preference for nation-building COIN in any case. It gives opportunities for "Can we invade it? Yes we can!" gung-ho that keeps careers going, brings in vast budget appropriations in a time of falling "big-ticket" needs and keeps all the practical "on the ground" power of US diplomacy over at the Pentagon instead of at State. A core counter-terrorism strategy does none of these things.