Kilcullen And A Pony

By Cernig

There's very interesting interview today with counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen in the New Yorker.

My take - he says there's less than a year before Afghanistan is irretreivable, that Pakistan is the true central front and that he can see how to rescue both nations. I think he's being overly optimistic about the timeframe to rescue the Afghanistan misadventure. It has already slipped past, for reasons Kilcullen actually explains in his interview - the recalcitrance and corruption of US-backed governments in Pakistan and Afghanistan, too many years of ignoring the very real Pakistan problem, training the Afghan police to be an army-lite instead of policemen and then allowing the Taliban to become the party of law-and-order, insensitive Coalition military operations etc. We can see how things need to be fixed but we can't get there from here.

When you look closer Kilcullen is entirely vague both on what needs to be done in Pakistan (compared with far more specific plans in Afghanistan) and on how to get the political leadership of both nations to go along with any Western plans.

Pakistan (rather than either Afghanistan or Iraq) is the central front of world terrorism. The problem is time frame: it takes six to nine months to plan an attack of the scale of 9/11, so we need a “counter-sanctuary” strategy that delivers over that time frame, to prevent al Qaeda from using its Pakistan safe haven to mount another attack on the West. This means that building an effective nation-state in Pakistan, though an important and noble objective, cannot be our sole solution—nation-building in Pakistan is a twenty to thirty year project, minimum, if indeed it proves possible at all—i.e. nation-building doesn’t deliver in the time frame we need. So we need a short-term counter-sanctuary program, a long-term nation-building program to ultimately resolve the problem, and a medium-term “bridging” strategy (five to ten years)—counterinsurgency, in essence—that gets us from here to there. That middle part is the weakest link right now. All of that boils down to a policy of:

(a) encouraging and supporting Pakistan to step up and effectively govern its entire territory including the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas], and to resolve the current Baluch and Pashtun insurgency, while
(b) assisting wherever possible in the long-term process of state-building and governance, but
(c) reserving the right to strike, as a last resort, at al Qaeda-linked terrorist targets that threaten the international community, if (and only if) they are operating in areas that lie outside effective Pakistani sovereignty.

There's a massive element of Pony Plan in his prescriptions, and it involves everything that the Coalition military cannot do on its own. How does the West get the Pakistani leadership to do a) and b), especially when that would first involve winnowing out the "fecklessness or complicity of some elements in Pakistan" which is the biggest stumbling block to finding a solution to both those massive problems and to ending the safe haven that Al Qaeda and the Taliban's leadership has enjoyed inside Pakistan?

That "and a pony too!" element in even this COIN guru's thoughts about the regions non-military problems reminds me hugely of the shortcomings in the military-led COIN strategy in Iraq, of course. And he's got this telling line on that: "we don’t want to un-bog ourselves from Iraq only to get bogged in Afghanistan while Iraq turns bad again." I thought the narrative was that we were past the chances of the latter happening...

Comments

[Dave Schuler]

I think he's being overly optimistic about the timeframe to rescue the Afghanistan misadventure.

I agree and said as much in my post on the interview at OTB. I see you also picked up Dr. Kilcullen's failure to come up with specific, practical prescriptions for Pakistan in the absence of which IMO the entire enterprise is helpless.

I also note that there's little reason to believe that even had the failures in NATO activity (poor coalition management, strategic scarcity of resources, and sporadic attention) not been the case that the strategic objectives of the mission could have been achieved in a time and cost acceptable to the American people.