Counterinsurgency in Kandahar

Washington Post:

The Obama administration's campaign to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan's second-largest city is a go-for-broke move that even its authors are unsure will succeed.

The bet is that the Kandahar operation, backed by thousands of U.S. troops and billions of dollars, will break the mystique and morale of the insurgents, turn the tide of the war and validate the administration's Afghanistan strategy.

There is no Plan B.

The deadline for results is short: Administration officials anticipate that the operation will form the centerpiece of a major strategy assessment due in December and will justify the first withdrawals of U.S. troops from elsewhere in Afghanistan in July 2011. Although operations initiated last winter in southwestern Helmand province will continue, and new troop deployments are scheduled this year for northern and eastern Afghanistan, little else will matter if the news from Kandahar is not good.

The urgency and the difficulty of the task were illustrated Saturday when the Taliban launched an unprecedented rocket and ground attack against the Kandahar air field, NATO's largest installation in southern Afghanistan and the headquarters of the upcoming offensive. Several coalition troops and civilian employees were wounded when rockets sailed over perimeter fortifications, but gunmen who tried to fire their way inside through a gate were unsuccessful, the U.S. military said.

Officials have described the offensive's blend of civilian and military operations as the first true test of the counterinsurgency doctrine adopted five years ago on the eve of the 2007 surge in Iraq, but since only imperfectly applied. As troops battle insurgent forces entrenched among the population on the outskirts of the city, the birthplace of the Taliban movement, U.S.-mentored Afghan police will establish a presence in the relatively secure center.

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The counterinsurgency doctrine was successful in Iraq, however imperfectly applied. War is not like a manufacturing process where strategy can easily make goods and services available. In that process, there is not an enemy fighting back and trying to thwart your strategy.

The attack on the Kandahar air base may have been a PR success in the way it was described by the Post, but militarily it was a failure that never had a chance of success outside the PR realm. The enemy can always launch failed attacks. It is one of the few things in warfare that it is easy. The attack on the base, may have been an attempt to find out how our defensives are set up. but even if that was the case the Taliban does not have teh capacity to mass its troops for an assault on the base that could come anywhere close to overrunning it. Such a mass attack would be immediately destroyed by our superior fire power and would be a gift to our forces seeking to destroy the Taliban.

It is not clear to me why the media does not comprehend this reality. But, obviously they do not, or there would not be an attempt to describe a failed attack by the enemy as significant or ominous. The bottom line is most Taliban initiated attacks are PR events. They do not have the capacity to launch meaningful attacks, especially in places like Kandahar.

The problem with the administration strategy in Kandahar, is their short time fuse. They are likely to explode their own strategy by pulling out too quickly. Counterinsurgency is a long term operation. It can take years to be successful, but given the time it is successful about 90 percent of the time. If not given time, it is likely to fail. We got lucky in Iraq that we were able to succeed so quickly. We may not be that lucky in Kandahar.