Get Your Surge On
December 9th, 2008 by Nick SaintThe frequency with which the word ’surge’ crops up in discussions about Afghanistan is a testament to just how few terms and ideas people are willing to worry about at once. It is the stated position of our incoming president that we need more troops in our fight against the Taliban and other militant groups in the region. Indeed, this has been conventional wisdom for some time now, and was a point of agreement between Obama and McCain during the election. Obama did not, however, use the word ’surge’ to describe what was needed in Afghanistan, at least initially. (He may never have done so, but the word has infected the discourse so thoroughly that I doubt he’s avoided it altogether.)
Of course, it shouldn’t matter what we call our military initiatives. A surge by any other name would work as effectively. But more and more, the use of this word seems to be feeding the mistaken notion that the desire to send more troops to Afghanistan is a reaction to the success of the surge in Iraq, or at least that the latter should serve as a starting point for our thinking about the former. Here’s Kevin Drum, who is actually at the sensible end of this sort of talk:
The theory behind the surge in Iraq was that a relatively small number of additional troops could make a difference if they were concentrated primarily in Baghdad, where three or four brigades would represent a near doubling of forces. Baghdad was considered so central to Iraqi security that if it could be pacified, it would make an enormous difference in the rest of the country too.
That’s not true of Afghanistan. Obviously Kabul has to be safe, but it doesn’t play the same outsize role that Baghdad does in Iraq. Nor are any of the other factors that helped the surge succeed present in Afghanistan. It’s just a mess. Denying al-Qaeda a safe sanctuary is an important goal, but if even Kabul isn’t safe anymore, it means we’ve got a very, very long road ahead of us before we can make that happen. I don’t envy Barack Obama the choices he has ahead of him.
As far as these things go, this is pretty sensible. Certainly we should draw what lessons we can from our experience in Iraq. But there is a suggestion here, explicit in much MSM reporting, that the wisdom of increasing troop levels in Afghanistan depends on the presence or absence of “the factors that helped the surge succeed”, and there is nothing sensible about that. The one truly relevant similarity is that in Afghanistan today, as was the case in Iraq before the surge, we don’t have enough troops to maintain order. But this has been true since before the surge even began, indeed since around the time the Iraq War itself began. Consider The Economist, writing in October of 2003:
Moreover, the ravaged Taliban and al-Qaeda forces appear to be regrouping, especially near or across the border with Pakistan. On Tuesday, Zalmay Khalilzad, America’s special envoy to Afghanistan, warned of possible “spectacular attacks” against the reconstruction efforts.
…
Stabilising remote parts of Afghanistan was never going to be easy. But it has not helped that the international peacekeeping force has essentially ceded the territory to local warlords. The 5,500-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) patrols only Kabul. America has thousands more troops throughout Afghanistan. They have tried to stabilise the south, but spend much of their time hunting down al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants and neglecting locals’ day-to-day security needs. Afghanistan, the United Nations and Japan recently signed an agreement to demobilise 100,000 of the warlords’ fighters in the provinces—a classic case of wishful thinking.
…
This week the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which leads ISAF, approved in principle the extension of its peacekeeping forces outside the capital. Germany, which is eager to mend its fractured relations with America, has eagerly backed the proposal (which Mr Karzai has long begged for). It wants to send 450 German peacekeepers to Kunduz, a region in the north, to help with reconstruction efforts. Expanding NATO’s reach outside Kabul would require the UN Security Council’s approval; Germany has already drafted a resolution, which may be passed this month.
All well and good. However, a few hundred peacekeepers in a single province will have little effect. NATO leaders say Germany’s move may pave the way for other small military units (New Zealand, America and Britain already have similar forces operating, though not under NATO). But lots more troops are needed.
The political will seems to be there. At a NATO meeting in Colorado this week, America’s defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said: “We’ve always favoured an expansion outside of Kabul.” His words were echoed by NATO’s secretary-general, George Robertson. The trouble is a lack of manpower and money. America has around 140,000 overstretched troops in Iraq and cannot spare many more for Afghanistan. This week it eagerly snapped up an offer from Serbia and Montenegro to contribute up to 1,000 troops to “Operation Enduring Freedom”, a Taliban-hunting operation that is separate from ISAF. Rounding up more troops from other NATO countries is made harder by their commitments in the Balkans and Africa.
Rereading this is pretty depressing for a number of reasons. For one thing, though Obama talked a lot on the campaign trail about how Iraq had caused us to “take our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget just how long we’ve been making a mess of things there. For another, it’s a reminder of the international support we squandered; after September 11th, taking out the Taliban was a pretty easy sell. By starting a war which most of our allies hate and, as a result, not being able to contribute our share of the needed troops to the area, we allowed that enthusiasm to expire.
That said, the situation we are in now, though somewhat worse, is not all that different from what The Economist described over five years ago. And, as then, what we need to succeed there is not a surge in troop levels, but simply a good old fashioned increase in troop levels, the difference being that we shouldn’t even pretend to expect that those levels could come back down in just a few months.
As Drum reports, the one bright spot in Afghanistan up until now - a relatively safe and stable Kabul - seems to be in jeopardy. On top of this, Iraq has left our international good will in shambles and our own population war weary. We’ve spent years making ourselves look bad to the Afghans themselves. We are, in short, in much worse shape to fight this war than we were seven years ago.
Personally, I think this war is too important to give up on, but I don’t think there is much point in staying there if we aren’t willing to commit more resources for an extended period of time. That would be a very serious commitment; it serves everyone’s interests to know if Americans are really willing to make it before we send more troops to Afghanistan. The more people call this move a ’surge’, the less seriously people are going to think it through.
