Afpak vs. Pacification

Between the idea
And the reality
Falls the Shadow
--The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

The soldier, arm'd with sword and gun
Palsied strikes the summer's sun
The poor man's farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric's shore
--Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

I had a brother at Khe Sahn
fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone
--Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen
________________

Global Post's second installment on the Vietnam - Afghanistan analogy merits comment (The Pitfalls of Pacification).

We throw words around in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) and do not stop to consider their Orwellian implications. Take for example, pacification, from pace (L): peace.

Relocating unwilling villagers to guarded villages as in the Strategic Hamlet program in Vietnam was anything but peaceful, but we called it "pacification". This forced relocation is actually a provocation; it gets people's asses up on their shoulders, and is the portal for more violence.

In Counterinsurgency and pacification, the question should always be: Why is the policy being instituted, and what benefit will accrue from it?

To call enforced relocation pacification inverts the meaning of words. Said relocation puts the guerrilla talent pool in little concentration camps, making it easier for government forces to control their actions. This includes ambushing all avenues of approach and killing anything that moves through the night around the village.

Since ARVN forces were averse to doing night ambushes, this action usually devolved to U.S. combat forces. And once enough of the village was killed, they could then be viewed as pacified. The same yardstick is being applied in Afghanistan.

Steinglass says Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke faces "many of the same problems" in Afghanistan that he faced at the beginning of his career in Vietnam. The problems include the people not liking the American invaders. Even though they may not like the Talibs (Vietcong), they like the U.S. occupation even less, a problem that will never be solved through use of arms.

The more combat pressure the U.S. applies, the stronger the counter-pressure from the local inhabitants. In Vietnam, not all VC were Communists, and today, not Afghan insurgents are Taliban or al-Qaeda.

The "problems" should be countenanced as assumptions in the planning stage before the U.S. enters a country. This is traditionally achieved through a U.S. Special Forces collaboration with the State Department, called an Area Study. Where are the Area Studies for Iraq and Afghanistan? Invading a country sans an Area Study = going cross country without a road map (forget GPS).

One of those relocated, Cai Van Minh, 56, "recalls the terror of random shelling by South Vietnamese artillery every night, which was an ineffectual attempt to harass Viet Cong troops. The shelling only added to the population’s antagonism. Although the strategic hamlets were supposed to protect the peasants from the Viet Cong, they were actually driving even more of them to support the communists."

Interesting the writer calls the VC "troops". The VC were generally indigenous fighters leading dual lives. They were not troops in the traditional sense but were clearly insurgents/guerrillas operating as the tactical situation demanded, as auxiliary in the fight versus the U.S.-backed ARVN forces.

But this does not raise them to the level of troops, an idea which also applies to the Taliban insurgents of Afghanistan. So, why are they willing to die in such a ready manner? Because it is their country and their way of life which they are defending. This should resonate with any self-respecting American.

"The fact that the strategic hamlets program failed does not mean it was poor counterinsurgency theory." But theory and reality are different things. COIN doesn't work because the everyday lives of VN/Afghan indigenous do not roll into a neat theory to be achieved via military action.

For example, the theory is that the U.S. fights insurgencies to help the people to be free, but the reality is far from that. Achieving elections does not = democracy, and neither the VN nor the Afghan government are democratic institutions.

Forcing democracies down people's gullets is not liberalism in action; it is tyranny. This basic fact -- the bedrock of COIN -- insures a violent counter-reaction from the populace. This is Ground-Zero!

"According to military historian Nguyen Huu Nguyen, a colonel in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) who fought in the South from 1965 to 1975, the strategic hamlets program was a good idea. In fact, the goal it sought to achieve was crucial: “population control,” as it is called in the new 2007 U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual, co-authored by Gen. David Petraeus. It is the same goal that Petraeus pursued in Baghdad by walling off ethnically homogenous neighborhoods and instituting curfews and checkpoints."

The two situations are dissimilar save for the U.S. is generally arrayed and hostile against Sunni movements. Population control is the only essential part of the strategy. In the 60's, this was called PRC (Population and resource Control), a component of IDAD (Internal Defense and Development). This has morphed into nation building.

Controlling the population is surely a COIN priority as it denies recruitment, intelligence and billeting to the insurgents. Most importantly, it denies them access to the population's food. Since the people are farmers, this is the major source of rations for insurgents. The formula is simple: deny the insurgents access to the people and you concomitantly deny them access to their food.

Now this is theory, since there are several types of insurgent movements. This formula applies only to internal insurgent movements, which RVN and Afghanistan do not classically fit. Neither are 1950's Malaya and U.S. forces can neither isolate the people nor the battlefield.

This concept also ignores black markets which always spring up around U.S. bases and thrive on buying and selling any manner of items including rations, weapons, munitions, clothing and medical supplies. Another commodity is the sex trade that provides intel and money for indigenous movements.

"But in Vietnam, it didn’t work. Corrupt government administrators stole funds meant for construction and social programs. To generate positive statistics, the government expanded the program too fast — when Holbrooke arrived in the Mekong Delta, he found many of the hamlets in his province existed only on paper. The government lacked troops to defend them."

The government was defending the strategic hamlets, but as soon as government troops disappeared, so did the hamlet's involuntary residents. They slipped back to their ancestral homes, and the VC understood and exploited this peasant behavior; the U.S. never seemed to grasp it.

"Many analysts have criticized the U.S. for misapplying old solutions, fighting in Vietnam as if it were Korea, Malaya or the Philippines rather than adapting to local realities. The new counterinsurgency manual tries to avoid such mistakes. Planners in Afghanistan will not simply replicate techniques from Vietnam or Iraq. They will recognize that the goals, actors, resources and constraints in Afghanistan are different. And they will employ an iterative process, testing out new techniques, discarding failures and adopting successes."

The U.S. does not adopt successful tactics, but instead, what passes as success. Long-term COIN strategy is often derailed by tactical folly such as "force relocation", defoliation or poppy eradication.

Poppy eradication will not hurt al-Qaeda or the Talibs since they have sources of revenue independent of drug money. Eradication only adds to the hatred directed the the U.S.-led coalition imposing external standards upon insular societies. In fact, such programs confuse the issue: Are U.S. forces there to fight drugs, the Taliban or al-Qaeda? They can't do it all.

When considering any success, one must ask, "To what end?" How does a phony matrix of COIN success equate to anything of value for the U.S. taxpayer funding the enterprise? What are we getting in the quid pro quo of the marketplace?

Provincial Reconstruction Teams in CORD/RVN were synergistic and fully coordinated with the State Department and host nation requirements. Is the same true of the PRT's in Afghanistan, which appear to be fully U.S. military in nature? What is the makeup and experience level of these PRT's? What do they accomplish in Afghanistan?

"The CIA, meanwhile, understood that a sophisticated social and political view of the conflict required an attempt to dismantle the Viet Cong’s shadow government, and set up the “Phoenix” program to gather intelligence and promote defections, arrests and assassinations of Viet Cong officials. Experts at USAID, RAND, the State Department and elsewhere saw the need for land reform to draw impoverished poor peasants away from the communists, and finally convinced the Vietnamese government to adopt a law that redistributed land from wealthy landowners to poor farmers. And this is just a partial list of efforts to combat the war's social underpinnings."

The corruption of COIN can be most easily seen in programs like Phoenix, in which assassination became the major tool of U.S. policy. The words assassination and democracy do not fit, and together spell out one word: FAILURE. When the U.S resorts to state-sanctioned assassination and torture, the war is lost. We lose the moral high ground, and are no longer on the right side of the fence.

Sending 300 more State Department civilians to Afghanistan is irrelevant. After seven years of war, what will these personnel achieve? What skill sets will they apply to the operation? Moreover, who determines the priorities?

The U.S. new New Afpak policy focuses on integrating the sociopolitical and military elements of counterinsurgency. But when introducing the Afghanistan strategy to NATO officials, "Holbrooke said that simply spending a lot of money on aid does not guarantee results."

This is the key issue -- what are the results required from our effort in Afghanistan? The focus appears to be COIN, when in fact we are supposed to be there fighting terror aimed at the heart of America. So how is that threat being addressed by continuing the Afghan occupation?

Why does U.S. policy care if there is an insurgency in Afghanistan? The only concern should be terrorism currently aimed at America reemerging or developing as a collateral issue.

U.S. efforts should focus on this primary mission. The rest is diversionary and wasted effort that we can ill-afford.