David Kilcullen: For answers to the Afghan-Pakistan conflict, ask ... what would Curzon do?
[Dr David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla (Hurst/Oxford 2009), served in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2006 and 2008 as Special Adviser for Counterinsurgency to the US Secretary of State.]
Britain’s eyes this week are on southern Afghanistan. US Marines have doubled Coalition troop numbers in Helmand and are moving to clear Taleban base areas as part of Operation Khanjar. A major British offensive is also underway: Operation Panchai Palang, an effort to extend Coalition control along the Helmand River valley, one month ahead of the Afghan presidential elections currently scheduled for 20 August. Though the Taleban seem so far to be mostly melting away before the Marines, they are making a determined stand against the British. They are digging in among the tactically important canal and river crossings of the central valley, where UK troops are fighting hard to dislodge them from the Nad Ali district northwest of Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.
During their own Afghan war, the Soviets called this area the Green Belt. They suffered heavy casualties among its complex, densely vegetated mosaic of farms, fields, villages, orchards and irrigation channels — an extremely demanding environment akin, in some places, to the Normandy Bocage of 1944. For its part, Britain has now lost 184 soldiers in Afghanistan, higher than the 179 killed in Iraq, and a number that will unfortunately rise as operations continue. Taleban deaths are much higher.
For Nato, Afghanistan will remain the military main effort in South Asia. It is an important fight which, despite its grinding difficulty, may be slowly starting to improve due to the combination of American reinforcements and the energetic leadership of the new commander, General Stanley A. McChrystal, a Special Forces officer who genuinely ‘gets’ counter-insurgency. The shift to a strategy of protecting the population, reducing civilian casualties, increasing the size and capacity of Afghan police and military forces, and the planned ‘civilian surge’ of governance and development assistance are all positive, provided the effort can be resourced and sustained. Indeed, some analysts are quietly starting to express a hope that the sharply negative trends of past years — increased violence, higher civilian casualties, a spreading and intensifying insurgency, an intractable narcotics problem and corrupt and ineffective local government — may begin to bottom out at some point in the next fighting season (conflict in Afghanistan, like its agriculture, having a very definite seasonal character). War is a complex human activity, insurgency is its most complex variant. So it is much too early to predict how the campaign will develop. But we can certainly expect continued major fighting over the summer and autumn and into the ninth winter of a very long war.
Meanwhile, across the frontier in Pakistan, another offensive is underway. And while Afghanistan is Nato’s main concern, what is happening in Pakistan is of even greater strategic importance.
Afghanistan has roughly 30 million inhabitants; Pakistan’s population and territory are more than five times larger. Two thirds of the Pashtun ethnic group, the world’s largest tribal society — one of the biggest nations without its own state and the main recruiting base for the Taleban — are in Pakistan not Afghanistan. The senior leadership of al-Qa’eda, the Afghan Taleban, and the other major insurgent factions are in safe havens in Pakistan. The Pakistani version of the Taleban has defeated the army in every major campaign since 2001, resulting in a series of face-saving ‘peace’ deals that have ceded huge swaths of territory and population to extremist control. There have been dozens of terrorist attacks within Pakistan over the past several years, and there has been a Pakistani connection in many of the most serious international terrorist attacks over the same period. The Pakistani diaspora stretches worldwide, so that events in Pakistan affect substantial immigrant populations in many parts of the world. Militancy or insecurity in Pakistan can create insecurity elsewhere.
Pakistan has more than 100 nuclear weapons, an army larger than that of the United States, an economy that was nearing collapse before the IMF bailout of late 2008 and is still in bad shape, and a weak government whose civilian leaders have proven unable to control their own national security establishment. Military institutions like the intelligence service, ISI, and some other security organisations, have complex and continuing ties to militant organisations, many of which they themselves created as proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war or as unconventional counterweights to Indian regional hegemony. Militant groups include the Afghan Taleban, religious extremist organisations, and groups like the Haqqani network centred on Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — a thorny hedge of mountain peaks and unsubdued tribes that has never been governed by outsiders, even since before British India extended its imperial grasp to what is now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the 1840s.
One of Britain’s foremost colonial administrators, George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India 1899-1905, took office in the wake of the largest frontier tribal uprising in British Indian history. The Great Frontier War of 1897 pitted British and Indian troops against tribal lashkars and religious fanatics in exactly the same places — Bajaur, Malakand, Swat, Dir — where the Pakistani army is fighting the Taleban today. Lord Curzon is well known for his observation that ‘No patchwork scheme and all our present and recent schemes: blockade, allowances, etc, are mere patchwork — will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine.’
The question is whether Pakistan’s current operation (President Asif Zardari launched a new offensive against the Taleban in April) is the military steamroller finally going into action, or whether this is another patchwork scheme. Oddly, it may turn out to be both — a patchwork steamroller...
Read entire article at Spectator (UK)
Britain’s eyes this week are on southern Afghanistan. US Marines have doubled Coalition troop numbers in Helmand and are moving to clear Taleban base areas as part of Operation Khanjar. A major British offensive is also underway: Operation Panchai Palang, an effort to extend Coalition control along the Helmand River valley, one month ahead of the Afghan presidential elections currently scheduled for 20 August. Though the Taleban seem so far to be mostly melting away before the Marines, they are making a determined stand against the British. They are digging in among the tactically important canal and river crossings of the central valley, where UK troops are fighting hard to dislodge them from the Nad Ali district northwest of Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.
During their own Afghan war, the Soviets called this area the Green Belt. They suffered heavy casualties among its complex, densely vegetated mosaic of farms, fields, villages, orchards and irrigation channels — an extremely demanding environment akin, in some places, to the Normandy Bocage of 1944. For its part, Britain has now lost 184 soldiers in Afghanistan, higher than the 179 killed in Iraq, and a number that will unfortunately rise as operations continue. Taleban deaths are much higher.
For Nato, Afghanistan will remain the military main effort in South Asia. It is an important fight which, despite its grinding difficulty, may be slowly starting to improve due to the combination of American reinforcements and the energetic leadership of the new commander, General Stanley A. McChrystal, a Special Forces officer who genuinely ‘gets’ counter-insurgency. The shift to a strategy of protecting the population, reducing civilian casualties, increasing the size and capacity of Afghan police and military forces, and the planned ‘civilian surge’ of governance and development assistance are all positive, provided the effort can be resourced and sustained. Indeed, some analysts are quietly starting to express a hope that the sharply negative trends of past years — increased violence, higher civilian casualties, a spreading and intensifying insurgency, an intractable narcotics problem and corrupt and ineffective local government — may begin to bottom out at some point in the next fighting season (conflict in Afghanistan, like its agriculture, having a very definite seasonal character). War is a complex human activity, insurgency is its most complex variant. So it is much too early to predict how the campaign will develop. But we can certainly expect continued major fighting over the summer and autumn and into the ninth winter of a very long war.
Meanwhile, across the frontier in Pakistan, another offensive is underway. And while Afghanistan is Nato’s main concern, what is happening in Pakistan is of even greater strategic importance.
Afghanistan has roughly 30 million inhabitants; Pakistan’s population and territory are more than five times larger. Two thirds of the Pashtun ethnic group, the world’s largest tribal society — one of the biggest nations without its own state and the main recruiting base for the Taleban — are in Pakistan not Afghanistan. The senior leadership of al-Qa’eda, the Afghan Taleban, and the other major insurgent factions are in safe havens in Pakistan. The Pakistani version of the Taleban has defeated the army in every major campaign since 2001, resulting in a series of face-saving ‘peace’ deals that have ceded huge swaths of territory and population to extremist control. There have been dozens of terrorist attacks within Pakistan over the past several years, and there has been a Pakistani connection in many of the most serious international terrorist attacks over the same period. The Pakistani diaspora stretches worldwide, so that events in Pakistan affect substantial immigrant populations in many parts of the world. Militancy or insecurity in Pakistan can create insecurity elsewhere.
Pakistan has more than 100 nuclear weapons, an army larger than that of the United States, an economy that was nearing collapse before the IMF bailout of late 2008 and is still in bad shape, and a weak government whose civilian leaders have proven unable to control their own national security establishment. Military institutions like the intelligence service, ISI, and some other security organisations, have complex and continuing ties to militant organisations, many of which they themselves created as proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war or as unconventional counterweights to Indian regional hegemony. Militant groups include the Afghan Taleban, religious extremist organisations, and groups like the Haqqani network centred on Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — a thorny hedge of mountain peaks and unsubdued tribes that has never been governed by outsiders, even since before British India extended its imperial grasp to what is now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the 1840s.
One of Britain’s foremost colonial administrators, George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India 1899-1905, took office in the wake of the largest frontier tribal uprising in British Indian history. The Great Frontier War of 1897 pitted British and Indian troops against tribal lashkars and religious fanatics in exactly the same places — Bajaur, Malakand, Swat, Dir — where the Pakistani army is fighting the Taleban today. Lord Curzon is well known for his observation that ‘No patchwork scheme and all our present and recent schemes: blockade, allowances, etc, are mere patchwork — will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine.’
The question is whether Pakistan’s current operation (President Asif Zardari launched a new offensive against the Taleban in April) is the military steamroller finally going into action, or whether this is another patchwork scheme. Oddly, it may turn out to be both — a patchwork steamroller...