George Packer has conducted an interesting interview over at The New Yorker with David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert whom Packer has previous written about. Whatever you think about our presence in Afghanistan — I think it is a mistake, and counterproductive to our national security interests, among other sorts of interest — it’s well worth reading the interview carefully.
A key quote:
PACKER: So, on the military side, three additional brigades isn’t the answer? Or isn’t the only answer?
KILCULLEN: That’s right. The first thing we have to do is to “triage” the environment: figure out the smallest number of Afghan population centers that accounts for the greatest percentage of the population. Once we understand that lay-down (e.g., in the South, it’s two towns that account for eighty per cent of the population, but the east is more rural, so it’s a different calculation there), then we tailor a security plan for each major cluster of population, and for the key communications—roads, essentially—that link them together. Then we will have an idea of the extra troops we need, if any. But we can start right away with the troops we have.
Also, there are assets beyond (or, at a pinch, instead of) combat troops that would make a huge difference, without “breaking the bank” for combat troops elsewhere. These include construction engineers, aid and development personnel, aid project money, intelligence analysts, helicopters, trainers and advisers, mentors for local mayors and district officials, surveillance assets and so on—so it’s not necessarily a straight zero-sum between having combat troops pull out of Iraq so we can send them to Afghanistan. (In any case, if you accept the argument that a key part of our grand-strategic problem is that we are over-committed in Iraq—and I do accept that argument—then it makes no sense to pull troops out of Iraq just so we can go and re-commit them somewhere else. We need to be reducing overall force commitment everywhere, not just moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. That would be tantamount to un-bogging ourselves from Iraq just so we can re-bog ourselves in Afghanistan).
What we have here is a leading counterinsurgency expert saying that not only is our presence in Iraq counterproductive, but that adding brigades is not — necessarily — the answer to improving the lives of Afghani citizens and routing out the Taliban.
Read the whole interview. It’s quite interesting.