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The deteriorating situation in Helmand, by Jonathan Mueller

Larry Kummer, Editor

Here is a guest post about the situation in Afghanistan by Jonathan Mueller, a sharp and insightful operational analysis.  Note the brief description of his background appearing after the essay.  My thanks to him for sharing this with us.

One caveat:  I disagree with the strategic context of his analysis.  That is, counter-insurgency successes are almost always by local forces.  CI by predominately foreign forces almost always lose.  This is the key distinction, almost always ignored by pro-war western analysts.

“The deteriorating situation in Helmand”, by Jonathan Mueller

It is fairly easy to see why the British Army is taking so many casualties in Helmand: they have abandoned their clear-hold-build strategy and returned to a search-and-destroy campaign against the Taliban. In clear-hold-build one principle is to never occupy territory you cannot hold, but the British have returned to patrolling and raiding across territory they do not have the troops to hold.

Why they have done this is less clear. British commanders have every reason to know that while clear-hold-build has some hope of success, search and destroy draws on a long record of failure for this kind of operation.

The British Army has led the world in developing classical counter-insurgency doctrine and its officers understand it as well as anybody.

About Counterinsurgency

Classical counter-insurgency doctrine developed in the 1950s. It is based on earlier methods of imperial policing but adapted to combat the more robust threat from Marxist-nationalist national liberation movements emerging at the time. The Americans in the Philippines and the British in Malaya found similar solutions, but while the Americans have forgotten and re-learned those lessons several times over the British have institutionalised and continuously developed them.

Classical counter-insurgency doctrine takes Mao’s maxim that ‘the guerrilla swims among the people as a fish in the sea’ and turns it around: separate the guerrilla from the people and he will die, like a fish out of water. Classical doctrine aims to use police, military, and intelligence services to protect the people from the insurgents and create a screen behind which political, economic, and other measures can be taken to resolve the problem. Clear-hold-build is a re-statement of the classical principles.

We can see:

  • Classical doctrine is a combined-action programme combining military and non-military measures;
  • Even the security portion is a combined action of police, military, and intelligence, which often looks more like policing than regular warfare;
  • The people themselves are the battlefield;
  • The military cannot solve the problem themselves; only create conditions for other means to solve the problem.

Success with classical doctrine requires:

  1. A political framework;
  2. Effective coordination among all the civilian and security agencies that are part of the solution. Today this includes international organisations and NGOs who may not see themselves as parties to the conflict;
  3. Adequate troops in both quantity and quality. Effective counter-insurgency operations require great discipline and restraint. Officers must be diplomats and anthropologists as well as soldiers;

(a) Minimum firepower must be used to avoid civilian casualties, which only make the problem worse – this is why numbers and discipline of infantry are so important.

(b) There is no point taking ground and not holding it. Move in, establish security, take a census, and start building infrastructure that shows you intend to stay.

The two ways to win

There are two ways for an intervening power to provide troops for counter-insurgency:

  1. Send in its own troops in adequate numbers to do the job;
  2. Use a small number of trainers and advisers to organise local forces.

The latter has obvious advantages if it can be made to work. If it cannot, that is a significant warning about the strength, effectiveness, and legitimacy of the regime being supported, and addressing those weaknesses must be part of the programme.

Malaya was an example of the former {FM:  see my note at the end}, the Philippines of the latter.

Blended approaches that use local troops of inadequate quality to make up for inadequate numbers of outside troops seldom work. Neither do forced hand-overs of responsibility from outside to local forces based on a timetable fixed by the outsiders’ desire to withdraw. It is always desirable to stand up local troops and hand over to them as quickly as possible, but they must take responsibility as they are ready to, not be given it when it is politically convenient to do so. As soon as the outsiders say they are going, they lose influence. All the people whose collaboration they need start positioning themselves for life without foreign patrons. To build a durable solution you must convince people that you will stay until the durable solution is in place.

It is important to distinguish between regular troops and auxiliary para-military forces. Whether they are called militia (a dirty word in Afghanistan), home guard, or whatever, and irregardless of whether the regular troops are local or foreign, these can be important force-multipliers, but there still must be an adequate force, in quantity and quality, of regular troops. Zero times anything is still zero.

Regular troops inexperienced in counter-insurgency inevitably believe they have to seize the initiative with offensive operations intended to seek out the insurgents, and see the challenge as one of locating the insurgents so that they can crush them with their superior firepower. What they do not realise is that, by blundering around a countryside that the insurgents know better than they do, they are surrendering the initiative. The insurgents control the time, place, and duration of engagements. The insurgents control how many casualties they suffer, so they cannot be defeated by attrition.

When the security forces instead concentrate on protecting the population, they are applying Moltke the Elder’s maxim to seize a position the enemy must attack. Cut off their access to the people, and the insurgents must attack, or become irrelevant. Who has the initiative now?

If you do not protect the people, they cannot help you even if they want to (and they probably do not), because the insurgents would kill them if they did. Start protecting them, serving them, treating them with respect, and they may just believe you are good for them, and come forward with information you are desperate for, like the location of IEDs.

The Labour government deserves all the lumps it is getting for its failure to provide adequate resources for the Army in Afghanistan, but the debate is going down a blind alley. Search and destroy tactics may make it look like the Army needs more helicopters and mine-proof vehicles, but that is an illusion based on tactics that will fail even with more resources.

What the Army needs in Afghanistan

What the Army needs in Afghanistan and in general is more infantry. In clear-hold-build your defence against IEDs and other attacks is your ability to persuade the local population that you are there to stay and your presence is good for them. Show them that their bread is buttered on your side and they will show you the IEDs. Holding ground, in particular, is a labour-intensive task which cannot be done without more infantry.

In remarks to the press General Sir Richard Dannatt (Chief of the General Staff) has been tactful about DfID (Department for International Development), but I will be less so. In Afghanistan DfID has always been part of the problem. They have never been on the same page as the Army, always reluctant to work together with the Army in combined action against the Taliban.

When Labour created DfID out of the ODA (Overseas Development Agency) they expressly gave it the mission of alleviating poverty. This was a rejection of white-elephant capital projects, an approach to foreign aid that was largely abandoned in the 1970s. A noble thought, focusing on poverty, but one that has substantially limited DfID as an instrument of British policy.

Under clear-hold-build it should be obvious that the building is to be done by DfID. This means moving in behind the Army to implement quick-implementing local programmes for rural development. Instead DfID is concentrating on capacity-building with the central government. If you want to build a house, do you start with the roof?

The British have the example of the Westminster Process, the stately but time-tested process by which they divested themselves of an empire, which built from locality to province to nation. The time is now for DfID to get with the programme and join with the Army in putting all possible resources into combined action against the Taliban. That this has not already been done speaks poorly of DfID’s grasp of British objectives in Afghanistan, as well as of the government’s effectiveness in directing the efforts of its agencies. The failure to align DfID more closely with the reasons Britain is fighting in Afghanistan is the responsibility of DfID’s own leadership, the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister, and the entire Cabinet.

Conclusions

Classical counter-insurgency doctrine is a hard slog and by no means fool-proof, but it provides the best hope of success in Afghanistan. The Army needs to return to the doctrine it developed, and the government needs to provide leadership, discipline, and the necessary resources for the necessary combined action programme.

There is a danger right now that the high casualties the Army is taking in Afghanistan discrediting the whole operation with the British public. This would be unfortunate. We have the mess we have in Afghanistan because we abandoned the Afghans when the Soviets left. We forgot their contribution to the fall of the USSR and failed to help them re-build the country we had helped them to destroy. We left Afghanistan to become a ticking bomb, which exploded on 9/11, and if we leave now it will still be a ticking bomb, right next door to another ticking bomb, Pakistan.

Today, on a national level, Afghanistan lacks the political framework to solve the problem of the Taliban, but British and American forces have found that when they apply classical counter-insurgency in cooperation with communities they have been able to build the political framework on a local level. The requirement today is to get all the players pulling in the direction set by those principles, not to give up.

About the author

In 1981 Dick Cheney, then a young and moderate congressman who professed admiration for the way Melvin Laird had maneuvered Nixon out of Vietnam, brought Mueller into his office to help propagate the ideas of John Boyd and Chuck Spinney. 

He went on to a career in the Foreign Service, during which (1988-90) he managed anti-narcotics assistance to the Colombian, Bolivian, and other South American police forces — a form of low-intensity conflict that he believes would probably be more successful if we took more lessons from classical counter-insurgency doctrine. His last job in the Foreign Service (1998-2000) was managing assistance for Afghan refugees. For the last year he has been involved with the Afghan programmes of two small London NGOs, the European-Atlantic Group and the Next Century Foundation.

About the Malayan Emergency

This is often cited as a victory of the British, an example of successful counter-insurgency by foreigners.  As does Mueller in this essay, and John Nagl in his book.  That is probably not accurate, as seen by the numbers of troops contributed and their losses (from Wikipedia).

Fighting the insurgents:

Killed:

Afterword

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For more information from the FM site

To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar.  Of esp interest these days:

Posts about the War in Afghanistan:

  1. Scorecard #2: How well are we doing in Iraq? Afghanistan?, 31 October 2003
  2. Quote of the day: this is America’s geopolitical strategy in action, 26 February 2008 — George Friedman of Statfor on the Afghanistan War.
  3. Another perspective on Afghanistan, a reply to George Friedman, 27 February 2008
  4. Why are we are fighting in Afghanistan?, 9 April 2008 — A debate with Joshua Foust.
  5. We are withdrawing from Afghanistan, too (eventually), 21 April 2008
  6. Brilliant, insightful articles about the Afghanistan War, 8 June 2008
  7. The good news about COIN in Afghanistan is really bad news, 20 August 2008
  8. Pakistan warns America about their borders, and their sovereignty, 14 September 2008
  9. “Strategic Divergence: The War Against the Taliban and the War Against Al Qaeda” by George Friedman, 31 January 2009
  10. A joust between two schools of American military theory, 19 May 2009
  11. Troops without proper equipment in 2004, troops without proper equipment in 2009 – where’s the outrage?, 20 May 2009
  12. New bases in Afghanistan – more outposts of America’s Empire, 21 May 2009
  13. The simple, fool-proof plan for victory in Afghanistan , 1 June 2009
  14. Advice about our long war – “It’s the tribes, stupid”, 9 June 2009
  15. An expert explains why we must fight in Afghanistan, 11 June 2009
  16. Real experts review a presentation about the War (look here, if you’re looking for well-written analysis!), 21 June 2009
  17. The Big Lie at work in Afghanistan – an open discussion, 23 June 2009
  18. The trinity of modern warfare at work in Afghanistan, 13 July 2009
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