AFPAK Review and the Long War

Wired's always-informative Danger Room blog has a good brief summary of the Obama administration's latest Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy review.

That article links to another, earlier article on the UAV strikes against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in their safe havens in the northwest Pakistan that has a key quote from Gen. Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA:

"... you have to understand that what we just talked about was a counterterrorism success... Unless you’re prepared to do this forever, you have to change the facts on the ground. That requires successful counterinsurgency."

It's been a long time since I was in Afghanistan, so take this as just some musings from an armchair strategist, but I would claim that we are, or at least should be, in a counter-terrorism campaign and not in a counter-insurgency campaign and that is something that we should be prepared to do "forever" (or at least for many years). As Lawrence Wright wrote in his excellent book The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, the insurgency that we're fighting is resistance to the modern, secular, cosmopolitan civilization of the late 20th and 21st centuries.

It took Europe hundreds of years to emerge from the Dark Ages. We cannot force the countries of the "Gap," as Thomas P.M. Barnett refers to the nations that cannot or will not fully embrace the modern world in The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, to make this transition in only a few years. To do so at gunpoint would require a far more heavy-handed and expensive military, economic, and cultural imperialism than we are willing to embark upon and we would certainly lose patience before a long counter-insurgency campaign to win hearts and minds could take hold. The emergence of countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and others from the Gap will only happen over the course of generations.

So, what do we do? Some strategists have dismissed the UAV strikes and similar actions as playing "whack-a-mole," but I think a long-term counter-terrorism campaign is actually the best option available to the US and the other nations of the cosmopolitan "Core" (to use another term from Barnett). I call it "the Israeli strategy." Israel has been playing "whack-a-mole" against the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations since its inception in the late 1940's. The whacks range run the gamut from assassinations and isolated missile strikes to major cross-border incursions (as in southern Lebanon and Gaza). Some are more successful than others, but they have collectively kept the terrorist attacks at a level that has allowed Israel to survive and even thrive despite being under constant threat from both terrorism and hostile neighbors.

That's the kinetic side of the campaign, with the goal of "managing" terrorist attacks against the US and the "Core" to an "acceptable" level through preemptive and retaliatory small- to medium-scale operations, ranging from persistent ISR, covert raids, aerial strikes, and SOF actions to occasional short- to medium-term incursions by conventional forces into safe haven areas.

On the non-kinetic side, we need to do everything possible to constructively engage the "Gap" and bring them into the "Core" economically, politically, socially, diplomatically and, perhaps most important, intellectually. By engaging them in our modern world, exposing them to knowledge and ideas, their mindsets will change. Over the course of years and generations, bit-by-bit, the "Gap" will emerge from its present Dark Ages and become part of the "Core" and the motivations for terrorism will wither away.

By: Guardian