Groundhog War | Foreign Affairs

Groundhog War | Foreign Affairs:

Bing West assesses the Afghanistan problem to the heart of the matter:

The platoons in Restrepo and Armadillo act as their own tribes, confident in their warrior skills and psychologically distant from their senior leaderships. Since 2001, not one person among the past nine successive U.S. commanding generals in Afghanistan and past two U.S. secretaries of defense has changed the war's five key premises: total domestic control for Afghan officials, billions of dollars for projects to woo the local tribes, a war of attrition to drive back the Taliban, toleration of Pakistan as a sanctuary for the enemy, and a slow buildup of Afghan forces to fight their own war. In essence, politicians and policymakers in Washington have handed the war over to those generals who have embraced nation building as a military mission.

U.S. President Barack Obama has pledged to steadily withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end the U.S. combat mission by 2014. Regardless of how the war turns out, the military lessons learned will be negative; the conflict has dragged on far too long to be considered a strategic success. Unlike in the years after World War II, the generals of this day will not gain in historical stature. The popularity of the idea of counterinsurgency as nation building reached its zenith when Iraq was stabilized in 2008. At the time, the U.S. military's counterinsurgency warriorintellectuals were in vogue. As happened to their predecessors after the Vietnam War, however, their concepts of war fighting will come to be rejected by the younger generation of company-grade officers who had to execute a flawed doctrine. No matter their skills and good intentions, foreign troops cannot persuade the people of another nation to reject insurgents in their midst. The people must convince themselves -- and be willing to sacrifice for that conviction.

After the United States and the United Nations handed full sovereignty to Karzai and his top officials in 2002, the U.S. military could only coax them to pursue, rather than directly institute itself, competent military and civilian leadership in Afghan institutions. Meanwhile, a strategy that rested on persuading the people to turn against the insurgents failed to win the commitment of the tribes. U.S. and NATO soldiers went on patrols until they were shot at and then returned fire discriminately. With Pakistan as their sanctuary, the Taliban controlled the tempo of the war.

Read the whole thing.