Coalition fragmentation

By Dave Anderson:

Italy is again questioning why they are in Afghanistan.  The cnnservative government wants  begin pulling out the reinforced brigade that is part of ISAF.  Reuters has details:

Italy wants to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan "as soon as possible" but will not take the decision unilaterally, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Thursday.

"We are all anxious and hopeful to bring our boys home as soon as possible," Berlusconi told reporters in Brussels after six Italian troops were killed by a suicide car bomber in Kabul.

"We are all convinced that it's better for everyone to leave Afghanistan soon," he said.

ISAF is a coalition whose dominant member wants to massively escalate its committment to Afghanistan without a clear strategy while most of its other members with significant military capacity are looking to reduce their exposure and costs in Afghanistan.  As I noted a week ago, this is one of the great vulnerabilities that the anti-Karzai government forces, including the Taliban, can and most likely will target next year:

The center of gravity then is the international forces that buttress of the Karzai government and provide some thin tentacles into the Pashtun heartland....

 2010 will be a good year if the Taliban is able to force the withdrawal of at least three national contingents by the start of 2011...

If there is any fungible or mobile resources in the Pashtun heartland, I would move those resources off of anti-American attacks (as the Americans will be around for at least another couple of years) and dedicate those resources to anti-British and anti-German attacks.  As Steve has pointed out, the British political establishment in all parties are looking for an out.  Abu M. notes that the German political establishment has minimal stakes in Afghanistan, especially as the original mission has drifted into a quasi-imperial COIN effort.  

Shifting additional money, weapons, fighters, trainers and other supplies to these two national sectors with the intent of causing disproportionately heavy casualties and costs over the next year would be a viable means of breaking the already thin commitments these two nations have for the Afghanistan fight.  The withdrawal of 10,000 to 15,000 UK and German troops would not be fatal, but it would be a steady drip of increased costs and increased isolation of the United States and the Karzai government.

The long term implied strategy is to have the United States should more and more of the actual costs of propping up the Karzai government untikl the US political system decides that tertiary goals are not worth trillions of dollars.  To get there, the coalition of cost splitters needs to be fragmented so all costs are borne by the US. 

COIN and the Continental Disconnect

By Dave Anderson:

The Christian Science Monitor is covering German political reaction to the recent bombing of the two gasoline tankers that most likely killed scores of civilians. The airstrike was carried out by a US aircraft, but under German ground command. [h/t to MyDD]

Germany and other European nations are unlikely to abruptly change their Afghan missions in the short term, despite high levels of public dissatisfaction. But German, French, and British leaders this week began to signal that their commitment is not indefinite.

 

Neither Mrs. Merkel�s Christian Democrats nor her main opponents, the Social Democrats led by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, have engaged a deeply pacifist electorate on the subject.

 

Horst Bacia, defense columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, offered a typical reaction: The bombing �is having a sobering effect on the home front, where people have long viewed the [Afghan] mission through rose-tinted spectacles. Why is it so hard for politicians to give convincing reasons for it?�

 

In recent polls, 66 percent of the British and 64 percent of the French electorate said they wanted the Afghan mission ended. Some 22 percent of Italians want an immediate withdrawal, and 34 percent favor gradual withdrawal.  

�But there�s a questioning on both sides of the Atlantic � what should we do next? Karzai is looking like a South Vietnamese dictator � vote fraud, corruption. It�s getting tricky.�

This isthe problem with COIN when implemented by democracies on tertiary objectives; the public does not buy into the mission or the benefits that are dwarfed by the probable bundle of costs:

the political costs of the COIN strategy were very high; promises of ten to twenty year wars, consumption of the society's productive surplus, the consistent threat of de-pacification, severe social and domestic political instability and legitimacy threats.  These costs could be borne if the theatre of war was critical to the existence and maitenance of a desired social order as these costs were borne in World War Two.  However in both examples, especially in Vietnam, the objective loss function was fairly small as Vietnam was a tertiary interest for the United States.

 

COIN today promises the same type of inputs --- ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis --- with the same type of outcomes --- weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest.

And shockingly the public of democracies don't like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security that operational and tactical successes may or may not generate.

So as the public turns against the Afghanistan war as there has been at best a muddled and poorly reasoned argument for expansion of the war to prop up �our guy� in Karzai, the elites and governing institutions can either continue at the cost of significant mistrust and legitimacy losses or they can ramp down their engagement of unpopular policies.  Some European nations will respond to democratic incentives and pressures first because their institutions are not half-way through the crazy window, but sooner or later the United States will either have an insulated, Beltway-centric elite pursuing vastly unpopular policies or vaguely competent opportunistic politicians who are not scared of being called �weak on defense� and �terrorist lovers� will smell an opportunity and run with it.