If you ever needed a reminder about the difficulties of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Joe Klein’s piece in Time is it. Klein tells the story of Capt. Jeremiah Ellis, a 29-year-old Army officer leading 120 soldiers in Dog Company, the only American presence in the remote village of Senjaray. Though anecdotal, the piece is a highly detailed, pitch-perfect account of why stabilizing Afghanistan is so difficult.
Here are some of the highlights.
On the Taliban:
Unlike many of his fellow officers in Zhari district, and many of the troops under his command, Ellis really believed in counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine.
He still does, but he’s more skeptical now. The past four months in Senjaray have taught him how difficult it is to do COIN in an area that is, in effect, controlled by the enemy — and with a command structure that is tangled in bureaucracy and paralyzed by the incompetence and corruption of the local Afghan leadership. Indeed, as the struggle to open the school — or get anything of value at all done in Senjaray — progressed, the metaphor was transformed into a much bigger question: If the U.S. Army couldn’t open a small school in a crucial town, how could it expect to succeed in Afghanistan?
… [A]lmost any development project the Americans tried in Senjaray would end up benefitting the Taliban — except one: reopening the Pir Mohammed School.
On rules of engagement:
General McChrystal has issued a series of tactical directives and rules of engagement banning most forms of air support. There are also new rules governing when and how troops on the ground can use their weapons. “Look at these,” Ellis told me, tossing a fat sheaf of directives onto his desk. “Some of these are written by freaking lawyers, and I’m supposed to read them aloud to my troops. It’s laughable. We can’t fire warning shots. We can’t even fire pen flares to stop an oncoming vehicle. If a guy shoots at you, then puts down his weapon and runs away, you can’t fire back at him because you might harm a civilian.”
The troops hate the new rules. Indeed, a soldier from another of the 1/12’s companies sent an angry e-mail to McChrystal, saying the new rules were endangering the troops. The General immediately flew down to Zhari and walked a patrol with that soldier’s platoon. “It was a good experience,” McChrystal told me later. “I explained to them why we needed the rules. And I’ve been making it my practice to go out on patrol with other units ever since.”
Ellis understands the rationale for the rules — “It’s what distinguishes us from the Taliban” — but that doesn’t make them easier to enforce.
On internal military bureaucracy:
Lieutenant Reed Peeples, a former Peace Corps volunteer whose 2nd platoon patrolled the area around the school, put it more simply: “For months, we’ve been trying to win over the people of this town — and we haven’t produced anything tangible. They are sitting on the fence, waiting to see which side is stronger. We haven’t had much luck with development projects. We haven’t proved that we can take care of them. Reopening the school would be our first real win.”
It was unimaginable that the higher-ups — those in “echelons above reality,” as Ellis liked to say — would actually stop the Pir Mohammed project. He figured it would be delayed a day or two and decided to move ahead with his plan.
Read the whole article, it’s worth your time, and is a clear depiction of the challenges the U.S. military, including those they bring on themselves.
Now that we’re on the subject, I just want to remind readers of the arguments I made for counterinsurgency last year. In recent days I’ve been essentially accused of being a shill for the administration who would have blindly saluted and supported whatever the administration decided.
Wrong. While I certainly applaud the administration’s process in arriving at its policy, I’m on record as calling for a counterinsurgency strategy before the administration announced its plan. In an October column, Will Marshall and I made the case that administration should hew closely to the counterinsurgency strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, during a period when our Afghanistan strategy was very much up in the air.
When the counterinsurgency strategy was announced, I offered my praise for what I thought was the right call, calling it our “best choice to offer definitive and lasting security,” even as I warned that it was “hardly a guaranteed success.” If the administration had taken a different route, I probably would have offered my criticism, even as I praised the careful and thoughtful process behind it. I’d just like to think that good process tends to lead to good policy – and I think that’s what happened here.
Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/ / CC BY 2.0
