WASHINGTON – A day after Gen. David Petraeus assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that a July 2011 timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan sends a crucial “message of urgency,” another a fellow counterinsurgency expert said the perception of a set end date works against U.S. forces there.
“It’s reinforcing all the negative stereotypes about American commitment,” said Conrad Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute of the Army War College and lead author on the Army and Marine Corps field manual that contains the current counterinsurgency doctrine. “Everything coming back on this is negative,” Crane said. “It’s hurting our ability to accomplish the mission at the tactical and operational level.”
Crane spoke at a luncheon discussion at the Hudson Institute on the topic “Can Counterinsurgency Work in Afghanistan?” along with Ann Marlowe, a writer who has been embedded six times with troops in Afghanistan and a visiting fellow at Hudson.
Crane identified ways war in Afghanistan is different from other U.S. military campaigns and how that difference will affect how counterinsurgency doctrine is applied. Among them:
Mosaic
“It’s a mosaic war,” Crane said. “It differs from valley to valley and hill to hill.” This piecemeal arrangement of societal and fighting conditions lends itself to the iterative process of planning counterinsurgency campaigns: “You’ve got to continually redesign and re-plan it,” Crane said.
A colonel’s war
Crane called the Afghan war, Operation Enduring Freedom, “a colonel’s war, not a general’s war.”
“The colonels control the key battle space and the key resources in their zone much better than the generals do in the planning office,” Crane said.
Victory will be defined by a key tenet of counterinsurgency, Crane said: in order to have security, the people must accept the government as legitimate.
“What will victory look like? That’s a question to ask the Afghans,” Crane said. But, Crane later added: “Five years from now what do things look like in Afghanistan? I think that answer is going to be determined a lot more by what goes on in Washington than what goes on in Kabul.”