A Moment of Clarity in Afghanistan

Two news items from Afghanistan made quite an impact yesterday, offering a moment of clarity in what had become a largely theoretical debate over both tactics and strategy. The first is the increasing certainty that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s election victory will not withstand the taint of widespread voting fraud. The second is a riveting account from Jonathan Landay of an extended firefight between Afghan Army troops supported by embedded U.S. Marine trainers and Taliban insurgents.

With regards to the election, while fraud is almost inevitable in such a context, the problem arises both from what turnout revealed about popular confidence in the central government — not much — and from the taint of illegitimacy that has resulted from the perceptions of how widespread the fraud actually was. It’s not impossible that some sort of power-sharing agreement will be worked out that could salvage political stability in Kabul. But this very significantly damages one leg of the COIN stool — namely, to wage the counterinsurgency in support of a popularly recognized, legitimate host government.

Andrew Exum neither backs away from how tough he has always said the misison would be, nor from his conviction that we must see it through. But this is telling:

But what does COIN look like, theoretically, without the Afghan government? That’s a pretty tough question to answer.

Given Landay’s account, though, it might be the least of the COIN crowd’s worries. As John McCleary notes, Landay’s reporting highlights a vastly improved Taliban operational capability (a 9-hour sustained firefight), their advantage in the intelligence terrain (the mission was compromised by Afghan villagers), and their ability to conjugate the two:

What’s worse is that the firefight ground on as long as it did, resulting in the death of four Marines, because air support was unavailable and artillery denied to the pinned down units to avoid causing civilian casualties.

COIN — done by the book, that is, without aggressive air support — in support of a legitimate Afghan government was already going to be a very tough sell. (For all the comparisons to COIN in Iraq, the Surge was accompanied by a massive increase in very kinetic air support.) Indeed, the Obama administration has spent an enormous amount of political capital over the past six months trying to convince skeptics that it had found a new strategy (going after al-Qaida) based on a new tactic (the use of COIN), and that the combination of the two would turn things around in Afghanistan, largely in order to prepare public opinion for accounts such as Landay’s. Given yesterday’s developments, that will be an increasingly difficult argument to defend.

Michael Cohen argues for a drawdown, while ruling out a precipitous withdrawal: