The Kilcullen prescription for Afghanistan

The Aussie strategist who helped develop the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq tells what is needed in Afghanistan.

The Belmont Club comments on the Kilcullen interview:

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One of Kilcullen’s most interesting observations is which he believes to be the central front on terrorism. Is it Iraq or Afghanistan? It is neither.

Pakistan is extremely important; indeed, 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. …

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The bottom line here is that the War on Terror is far from over. Whether we are, as Churchill once said, not at the beginning of the end, but at least at the end of the beginning ultimately depends on whether there is a consensus in the West that can sustain the long campaign that Kilcullen describes. The limp response from NATO and the desire for quick fixes suggests that while the road to ultimate victory may be known, we may not want to go there. Where we will go on the road of quick fixes is another story.

The point is that the long war requires the political will to fight that long. In Iraq there were many in the US, including Obama who did not possess that will. They claim to have it in Afghanistan. Do they have it in Pakistan? They better. This Observer/Guardian story gives a good picture of the terrain that is being fought over in Pakistan.

Iraq weakened and distracted al Qaeda much more than the critics of the war will ever comprehend, much less acknowledge. We are now in a position to take advantage of that by fighting a weakened enemy in an environment that is much more favorable to his type of warfare than Iraq.

Hat tip to Small Wars Journal.