The Afghan Draft?

By Dave Anderson:

To fight a traditional counter-insurgency campaign, the counter-insurgent forces needs lots of troops with lots of discipline and discretion.  The estimate is the counter-insurgent force needs to be able to field 2% to 3% of the population in arms and those men in arms need to possess high levels of cultural awareness and intelligence as well as excellent fire discipline combined with a willingness to take casualties from hidden insurgents instead of dishing casualties out without regard to civilian deaths.

That is a very tough nut to crack in any army.  It is an even tougher nut to crack in a multi-generational civil war.  It is even more difficult to field such an army when a good chunk of that army does not want to be there. The Telegraph reports that the Afghanistani government is thinking of instituting a draft to raise force levels:

It [the Afghan National Army] should then reach 240,000 as soon as possible, which commanders
admit would need the recruitment and training of 5,000 men each month.

Afghanistan's
ministry of defence said it was now drawing up plans for compulsory
military service under a constitutional clause stating all Afghans have
a duty to defend their country.

Zaher Azimi, spokesman for the
ministry, told Afghan television: "We consider preparing a plan to
revive the obligatory military service one way or another.

"We
plan to have our volunteer army soldiers take part in the combat
activities while the soldiers serving under obligatory military service
work in the logistical and administrative areas.

If an individual soldier is just serving his time for a very corrupt government that may or may not pay him on time, I have a hard time seeing what incentives he has to fight hard, to fight smart or not to sell stuff (weapons, supplies and information) on the black market.  Conflicting primary loyalties to a tribe or group will supersede any weak loyalties to a government that is amazingly corrupt and illegitimate.  This may not be a good idea after all.......

More troops, less support

By Dave Anderson:

With the planned leak of the request by Gen. McChystal for seveal more combat brigades to socially re-engineer several hundred years of Afghan political arrangments in one or at the most two deployment cycles, there is  massive problem with this strategy, if it can be called that.  COIN is an operational doctrine, and it does not examine the political goals that are being sought, nor the political constraints.  One of those political constraints is that the American public is indierennt at best towards supporting the current level of activites in Afghanistan, much less escalating thos activites. 

From CNN:

But support for the Afghan war hit an all-time low in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released last week. That survey found 39 percent still favor the war, compared with 58 percent who oppose it -- making it almost as unpopular as the Iraq war has become in recent years. And calls for more troops could be a tough sell in Congress.

Expanded and expensive committments for an already unpopular war in a shitty economy with no hope for employment or wage increases for a while where the only supporters for the increase are political adversaries of the President and the majority is not a formula for success or sustainability. 

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.