On December 3, President Obama made a surprise, three-hour visit to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. It was later billed as planned trip to thank the troops for their service, but it turns out Obama was supposed to helicopter from Bagram to Kabul — a 30 minute trip — to meet with President Karzai but had the trip cancelled because of weather. The math indicates Obama wasn’t going to be spending much time with the troops.
In the event, Obama did thank some assembled troops. “You are achieving your objectives,” he declared. “We said we were going to break the Taliban’s momentum, and that’s what you are doing, going on the offensive, tired of playing defense.’’
It seems correct to conclude that the Taliban’s momentum has been broken, mainly by placing 20,000 Marines in southern Helmand Province, the heart of Taliban territory. But the remark about no longer playing defense illustrates the quicksilver nature of our purported strategy. His charge to the generals was to check the Taliban momentum, but, he cautioned, “It can’t be an open-ended nation building. … It’s not a full-blown counterinsurgency strategy.” Obama is waiting to see how events unfold, before he decides whether to fold.
Have the generals now sent our troops onto the offense, after years of playing defense? The Marines in the south have only one way of fighting — attack — but they are only 20 percent of the force. Another 7 percent are the Special Operations Forces, SOF, that spend all their time tracking down Taliban cadre.
The other 73 percent of the force conduct counterinsurgency under a doctrine that has overemphasized “non-kinetics” (not shooting). The objective is to win hearts and minds by drinking cups of tea with the elders and giving out $4 billion a year in projects.
Yet in the past few months, our generals have emphasized the kinetics employed by a minority of the force. The apparent reason was to persuade the Taliban to negotiate while they still had a chance. Now we have learned from the press that the lead Taliban negotiator was an imposter.
So is the essence of our strategy a kinetic offensive against the Taliban, or defensive counterinsurgency to protect the Pashtun population and hope they reciprocate by providing recruits for the Afghan forces and information about the Taliban agents in their midst? I think it is still the latter, and I have grave reservations whether the Pashtuns are reciprocating, and whether Karzai and his government are reliable.
Sometime in the next three weeks, the White House is due to release the assessment from Afghanistan, and we may — but only may – then have a better sense of our strategy. I’m not counting on it, though, because there are no consistent measures that we the public has been shown, year after year. Each general can withhold or reveal data as he decides. It remains to be seen whether the December report will contain hard data to support whether our troops have shifted from the defense onto the offense.
— Bing West is author of The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy and the Way Out of Afghanistan.