<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/05/are_we_winning_in_afghanis
tan> Are We Winning in Afghanistan?
An exclusive interview with Gen. John Allen, commander of America's
forgotten war.
INTERVIEW BY GORDON LUBOLD | SEPTEMBER 6, 2012
The lack of a clearly defined narrative about Afghanistan, combined with
election noise and economic worries in the United States, has pushed the war
out of the American consciousness. In recent weeks, the spate of insider
attacks put it back on the media's map, temporarily. But the next several
months will in many ways shape the U.S. exit between now and December 2014.
Soon, we will learn how many troops will remain in the country. We'll learn
what impact attacks on militants may have on the battlefield. We'll see if
the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) can truly stand on their own. And
we'll learn just how fast U.S. forces will be sent to the exits.
FP's Gordon Lubold sat down with Gen. John Allen, commander of the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), in his office in Kabul on
Aug. 29 -- as he scrambled to stop the insider attacks against U.S. forces
and just over two months before he submits his recommendation to President
Barack Obama on the size of the force he thinks he'll need through next
year. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
In addition to troop levels and the state of the ANSF, Allen talked about a
new phenomenon in the war: a series of local uprisings that remain
disconnected from each other and the Afghan government but that could
possibly come together to pose a serious threat to the Taliban. Talking at
greater length about the uprisings than he has before, and drawing a link to
the Anbar Awakening in Iraq, Allen said, "This is a really important moment
for this campaign because the brutality of the Taliban and the desire for
local communities to have security has become so, so prominent -- as it was
in Anbar -- that they're willing to take the situation into their own hands
to do this."
Meanwhile, Allen provided some insight into how he will frame his report to
the president: "The battle space has really changed. I used to say how much
combat power I'm going to need. It's not any longer a pure measure of combat
power, because much of what is generating success for us is less about
conventional maneuver units than it is about the combination of conventional
maneuver units with the success that is being achieved with the security
force assistance." The Afghans, he says, are really stepping up to the task.
Washington will certainly be watching to see whether he is right.
Foreign Policy: Thanks again for sitting down with us. I am particularly
interested in these uprisings in the east and how you view them. They are in
their nascency, but I am told they may be a significant trend down the line.
Are we talking "Andar Awakening"?
Gen. John Allen: They're actually calling it the Andar Awakening ... to
plagiarize our Anbar Awakening. [But] let me just make a couple of general
remarks. It's been a pretty busy summer. We're about 20 days from finishing
up the recovery of the surge. We are inserting our Security Force Assistance
Teams. We're reposturing the battle space to account for that. The ANSF is
really taking over much more of the fighting than it has done in the past.
The Security Force Assistance Teams are really accelerating that.
Unprompted by me, as I circulate in the battle space, the brigade commanders
are uniformly, in different regional commands, using the term "game-changer"
with the Security Force Assistance Teams in really accelerating where we
want the ANSF to go. So the recovery of the surge, the reposturing of the
battle space, the insertion of the Security Force Assistance Teams, the ANSF
moving more into the lead, fighting the insurgency, the beginning of the
base closure....
All of that has been going on this summer.... On the whole, the campaign is
on track.
What I have been asked in the past is, "When are you shifting the main
effort from the south to the east?" And I respond with, "That's not the
question." I'm weighting the fight in the east because they need the
resources, 'cause that, that insurgent fight is different than the insurgent
fight everywhere else in the battle space. But I'm shifting the main effort
right now, and the main effort is shifting in that we, ISAF, will become the
supporting effort. The ANSF will become the main effort....
FP: Is that where you wanted to be in terms of the schedule, the ANSF taking
over?
Allen: It's actually ahead of time.... What you see I have in the battle
space now is a combination of advisors and main-force units. The advisors
are inside the Afghan units. The main-force units are partnered with them or
are conducting independent ops, and there are really very few independent
ISAF operations anymore. It is very, very substantially partnered, and in
many cases they are actually ANSF-led.
Now I just came back from [Regional Command-East], where I spent a good bit
of time earlier this week with both of the ANSF corps commanders. We're
seeing the ANSF routinely conduct operations now from squad level to corps
level. I mean, they're running the entire spectrum of operations. Do they
need help? The answer is yes. They need a lot of help still, because we
still haven't recruited the whole force. Which I think is important for
people to understand. We've probably got another 15,000 to 20,000 to go [to
get to a total force of 352,000]. But we don't finish the whole build of the
force until December of next year. So I'm actually pretty pleased with where
the ANSF is right now, given where they were just two years ago. But much
work remains to be done. We've got enablers that have to come online. We've
got to build their capabilities to employ, for example, artillery. We've got
to work very hard on their sustainment and resupply capabilities.
FP: Which means airlift, for example --
Allen: Airlift, and we can talk about the air piece of it. That is one that
has got a lot of my attention, and it's going to be a long time to fix that
actually. But the sustainment piece of this, as I actually was saying just
this morning to my leaders, a young army might do quite well in close
combat, but young armies fail typically to sustain themselves. And so we're
putting a tremendous amount of effort, actually, into engendering habits of
sustainment. And it's everything from being able to properly convoy the
equipment and the fuels and that sort of thing to the various places for
distribution to getting the spare parts to the mechanics so they can turn
the wrenches in the motor pools to keep the vehicles up.
FP: You just returned from the east. Tell me about these uprisings against
the Taliban and how you see them.
Allen: They're really an important moment, actually. And I had the
conversation with [President Hamid Karzai] this morning. Each, each one is
an organic movement. And they're popping up in a lot of different places.
We're going to start to plot them on a map -- we've actually done it already
-- but we're going to do some analysis as to, is it tribal? Is it ethnic?
What was the particular cause? What is the potential solution?
[Andar district in Ghazni province] is the most conspicuous right now, but
there's another really substantial one that's growing in Kamdesh in southern
Nuristan. There's one growing in Wardak. There's one growing in Ghor. We've
heard of one in Faryab.
And so what we have to do is, as I said to [Karzai] this morning, it's not
just about supporting Andar in Ghazni. This is a really important moment for
this campaign because the brutality of the Taliban and the desire for local
communities to have security has become so, so prominent -- as it was in
Anbar -- that they're willing to take the situation into their own hands to
do this.
FP: What is the proper role for ISAF to play here?
Allen: We're not playing a role. If we do at all, it will be always through
GIRoA [government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan] ... because we
don't want an uprising to appear to be responsive to us. We want it to be
responsive to the local conditions, and we ultimately would like to see
GIRoA be the solution for them. And that's the right thing to do.
So I think that as we analyze each one of these, each one started for a
different reason, and so we've got to be sensitive to the kinds of
assistance. When I say "we," I always mean GIRoA, the Afghan government. It
has to be sensitive to why it started and how conceivably it can help the
people. They ought to want to help the people. And how they might help the
people is going to be different in each place. It could be about local
employment. It could be about a school. It could be about a clinic. It could
be about fresh water. Just a little bit of help gives the people in that
village, or cluster of villages, a choice for the first time. Because right
now their only choice is fighting the Taliban or being repressed by the
Taliban.
FP: Could the kind of assistance these villages might be provided include
arms?
Allen: The answer is yes, but that's a decision made by the Afghans.
FP: You seem fairly bullish on this trend.
Allen: I think it is.... In fact, when I first visited Ghazni in August of
last year, Andar was considered almost terra incognita. We had to fight into
Andar and fight out of Andar. Now Andar is a place that's completely
different. And this will be, for Afghans who are watching the world unfold
for them, what they're seeing is that the ANSF has created a security bubble
in a lot of places around the country. Now there's still a lot of fighting
that's going on, but there are people that now -- again, the conversation
with the president today -- there are places in this country where the
people can have a post-conflict conversation.
We saw this in Anbar. It is very much like what we experienced in Anbar. Now
is the time to surge capabilities for governance and economic opportunity
into the "white space" that has been created by and largely by the Afghan
forces. So that's one condition that's being seen in the battle space. But
another condition that's being seen in the battle space is what we just
talked about, which is people who are tired of the constant oppression and
the nature of the quality of their life inflicted on them by the Taliban.
They want something different, but they don't really have any choices. And
so this gives them a choice as well.
FP: I understand the need to put an Afghan face on this. But to whatever
extent the Afghan government plays a role, they'll still need coalition
assistance, say, in the form of a coalition helicopter. Suddenly the help
looks very Western, right?
Allen: I'm telling you right now, we're resupplying in Kamdesh using Afghan
Army helicopters. They're getting up there. They're doing it. They've
inserted commandos up there. They're resupplying local elements up there.
They're maintaining the ANP [Afghan National Police] in some key checkpoints
and strong points. They're maintaining them. Every now and again, they'll
run out of helicopters, and we'll help 'em. But part of this is a genuine
effort, a genuine desire on behalf of the Afghans to truly make this an
Afghan spontaneous uprising, but an Afghan-supported effort, too. Which I
think is great.
FP: Let's just say you're leaving ISAF by next spring. Do you have so much
hope in this that things could look quite a bit different by then.
Allen: Well, I think there are some places it could. I think there's some
places; it's really too early to tell.
FP: Right. Peace won't break out across the entire land.
Allen: No, that's right, but there will be some.... Remember, it didn't all
break out in Iraq at the same time. It started in Anbar. If properly
nurtured, if properly nurtured, these could become important local
influences in blunting the Taliban's attempt to get into the population.
FP: The surge troops will soon redeploy, and you will have roughly 68,000
American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. You have said publicly that
you would like to maintain as much of that force as possible through next
year.
Allen: Well, let me just give you a broad idea of how we're disposed at
[68,000], and we'll be at [68,000] on 1 October. A great deal of the
conventional combat power is going to be in the east to continue to partner
closely with [Afghan units]. So we're going to have conventional combat
power in here to partner with them on operations, to do corps-level
operations, where they're hitting the enemy simultaneously across the
network. We've also, though, inserted a lot of advisors in there, too. So
we're both advising and we're partnering.... [One Afghan corps] commander
said to my division commander, "On the 1st of July, I got it." And he does;
he does got it. His name is Hamid. He's very good, and he's out there
kicking ass. I'm telling you.
But we have loaded it up with Afghans now, so there is a full corps of
Afghans, a battalion of [Afghan National Civil Order Police]. We've gotten
permission to increase the Afghan Local Police in there. We're using
commando battalions to do focused operations. So even though our numbers
have come down, we've still got a substantial British contingent, a
substantial Marine contingent with Army enablers, and a large Afghan
presence there.
FP: So you're not worried about the south?
Allen: Well, I'm going to watch it very closely. I'm going to watch it very
closely because this in the end, of course, is the spiritual homeland of the
Pashtun rebellion. So for us it is less about a full-up conventional battle
here than it is about consolidating our holds on the population, which is
the key terrain and the center of gravity in a counterinsurgency operation.
FP: I want to ask you about Pakistani influence.
Allen: It's substantial. The Haqqanis are still very active. The Haqqanis as
a group, it's important to keep an eye on them.... Now again, good Irishman
here, I'm tapping wood every time I say this, but the fact that there have
not been large-scale attacks inside [Kabul] -- which is one of the most
threatened cities on the planet, given the threat streams emanating out of
North Waziristan and out of terrorist concentrations along the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas and inside Afghanistan -- is a direct reflection
to, I think, the success of our posturing of conventional forces and the use
of special operations forces in very close integration.
FP: When will you make your recommendation to President Obama regarding
troop strength?
Allen: My goal now is to have something out of here by the middle of
November.
FP: What will it include?
Allen: It's going to have several parts to it. I'm going to assess the state
of the insurgency, as we saw it this year. I'm going to assess the state of
the ANSF, as it has evolved this year. And, you know, I really think that's
good news. In fact, both of those are good-news stories. I'm going to assess
the operational conditions in '13 and then make a recommendation on what I
think to be the kind of forces that I'll need in '13 and '14.
And I used to use a different term because the battle space has really
changed. I used to say how much combat power I'm going to need. It's not any
longer a pure measure of combat power, because much of what is generating
success for us is less about conventional maneuver units than it is about
the combination of conventional maneuver units with the success that is
being achieved with the security force assistance. So it is a combination of
forces and capabilities which I'll clearly depict as being in synergy that
I'll seek to make in the recommendation. So it's about numbers, but within
those numbers, it's about being able to depict the kinds of forces necessary
to continue to generate success.
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Received on Thu Sep 06 2012 - 18:03:30 EDT
