The Doctrine of Failure in Afghanistan: Rethinking nation building and the punitive expedition

Declaring Victory in Afghanistan, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

However well-intentioned it may be, nation building in a state with a tribal culture may be a failed doctrine from the outset. In cases where intervention is essential and where indigenous cultural resistance to adoption of Western-style democratic values is high and entrenched, the punitive expedition may be the best or "least bad" response.

The changing nature of war

War and conflict have changed. The old interstate-industrial paradigm of conflict in which nation states project force to acquire territory for economic gain are gone, replaced by what British General Sir Rupert Smith famously coined as "war amongst the people," a conflict paradigm in which force is used to establish conditions in which the political objectives may be achieved through diplomacy and the people among whom we fight are simultaneously the targets of violence, the power objectives for both sides, and may be both sympathetic and hostile towards the intervening foreign force.[1]Terms applicable to the old paradigm included "win," "lose," "attack," "destroy," and "hold." They no longer apply within the new conflict model, being replaced by terms such as "stabilise," "exit strategy," "intervention," and "facilitate." Even the term for our opposing force has changed from "enemy," to "state or non-state actor," in order to avoid alienating the population from or among which the non-state actor emerges and operates.

Within certain regions of the world conflict has assumed a persistent condition and there is a reason for that. These conflicts overwhelmingly involve what military historian Ralph Peters refers to as "wars of blood and faith," confrontations and conflicts of tribe, ethnicity, or religion that are irreconcilable and against which traditional geostrategic approaches based upon political ideology are utterly useless.[2] The ideology and social perspectives demonstrated by these state-sponsored or non-state actors are often so entrenched and extreme in character that no negotiation is rationally possible or substantively productive. These persistent conflicts typically involve underdeveloped nation states with tribal cultures and involve a scope of conflict that vacillates between terrorism, insurgency, and irregular warfare.

There is often no endgame to these timeless conflicts.

A very recent and classic demonstration of this trend is the Pakistani Taliban’s "offer of reconciliation" in exchange for the reduction or elimination of highly effective U.S. drone strikes against Taliban and Haqqani leadership.[3] Key Taliban preconditions of this offer include the unilateral rejection of the ratified Afghan constitution in its entirety, a document based upon the Western values of democracy, individual equality, and intellectual openness.[4][5] The most superficial examination of this "offer" reveals the essence of the Taliban itself, a fascistic Islamist movement dedicated to the establishment of yet another totalitarian Islamist state – precisely the condition that led to the U.S. invasion following September 11, 2001.

Nation building vs. Regime change

There is a big difference between the doctrine of nation building and simple regime change. The idea that simply replacing the regime of a hostile or dysfunctional nation state with that of a regime friendly to U.S. interests will by default result in comprehensive cultural change toward a Western style democracy is tenuous at best. In the case of a nation state dominated by ancient tribal cultures it is nothing short of fanciful. Regime change within such a country must increasingly be viewed within the context of its potential to drive substantive cultural change as a metric of its potential for its success. This is the prime lesson of Afghanistan for doctrinal development: the nation state may come and go but the tribe and culture will survive.

We should not be distracted by Islam, either. As Alexander the Great could tell us today, his culture was pre-Christian and his Bactrian (now Afghan) tribal enemies were pre-Islamic by almost 900 years. Islam is a top-down belief system and coincides perfectly with a tribal (top-down) culture. It is the one unifying element within the disparate Afghan tribal and ethnic landscape and it is the carefully considered propagation mechanism behind the creation and purpose of the Taliban. Islam is often cited by some strategic analysts in the news media as the chief obstacle to progress in Afghanistan but it is not – it is tribes and a tribal culture that conflict so completely with Western concepts of democracy and individuality.

Award-winning author Steven Pressfield once wrote perhaps the best short essay on tribalism that I’ve ever read and encapsulated the concept brilliantly, "In other words, the clash of East and West is at bottom not about religion. It’s about two different ways of [existing] in the world. Those ways haven’t changed in 2300 years. They are polar antagonists, incompatible and irreconcilable."[6] Unfortunately, there some people at the State Department and a few at the Pentagon who still don’t understand that.

To attempt to rapidly nation build in these ancient cultures using modern Western social concepts of equality, individuality, openness, and jurisprudence flies in the face of cultural teachings that go back to pre-history and will be a non-starter. There’s a long, consistent history here and particularly in Afghanistan. Alexander tried to nation build in Afghanistan 2300 years ago and failed at huge cost to the Macedonian empire. So did Genghis Khan in the 12th century BCE, Tamerlane in the 13th, Babur in the 16th, the British in the 19th (three very bloody times), and the Soviets in the 20th.

After all of attempts at nation building in Afghanistan using imposed external cultural models had failed so dismally throughout recorded history, what doctrine did the U.S. settle upon as its choice for strategic change in the tribal land of Afghanistan?

Nation building, of course!

When we do attempt to improperly apply the doctrine of nation building in tribal cultures we run the very real risk of things going wildly askew or achieving highly ambiguous outcomes. The contemporary example of this first case is the result of the 2006 free elections in the Palestine Territories in which the extremist Hamas party was elected to power over a ferociously corrupt Palestinian Authority. The lesson of that debacle is that the application of Western-style democracy to a culture absent of pre-existing Western-style social values may result in self-determination to a condition even more oppositional to Western interests than the original condition we wanted to change!

In the second case, I’ll use Operation Enduring Freedom and its highly ambiguous outcome. The U.S. has been in Afghanistan now for more than ten years and the overwhelming consensus among rank and file military and civilian stability personnel I interviewed there is that the situation will rapidly devolve to a pre-intervention condition once the U.S. and ISAF depart. The practical analogy is similar to removing your hand from a bucket full of water – your ability to influence the contents ends immediately when you withdraw your hand. Nature and politics both abhor a vacuum. It will be filled and in a primitive land it will be filled by the strongest and most ambitious element, just as it has for millennia. Right now, that strongest indigenous element is the Pakistan-subsidised Taliban.

Finally, nation building and regime change in nation states with tribal cultures may require strategies and tactics that are highly unpalatable to modern Western minds. In a complete turnaround in strategy since the first year of the war, the adoption and unilateral implementation of highly restrictive rules of engagement by U.S. and ISAF in Afghanistan has led to the innovative and adaptive development of entire engagement strategies by Taliban and Haqqani insurgents. These self-imposed, highly restrictive rules of engagement essentially neutralise the overwhelming qualitative advantage enjoyed by modern Western militaries and serve to level the combat playing field with a disadvantaged insurgency; a horrible consequence of well-intentioned efforts to avoid unintended civilian casualties. Our poorly considered policies have created a condition of strategic stalemate with a vastly inferior Islamist insurgency after ten years of fighting. In unconventional warfare with Islamist non-state actors a strategic stalemate equates to victory by the Islamists.

The Punitive Expedition

When the territorial sovereign is too weak or is unwilling to enforce respect for international law, a state which is wronged may find it necessary to invade the territory and to chastise the individuals who violate its rights and threaten its security. Stowell – Intervention in International Law[7]

Despite the best wishes of many at the State Department, it is clear that nation building as a doctrinal approach is not always the best approach. In cases such as Afghanistan, we may want to revive an equally ancient approach: the punitive expedition. Not the dozen-cruise-missiles-against-empty-camps in the middle of the night response. Not a remote campaign by drones, but an actual boots on the ground, combined-arms expedition carefully conceived and crafted to radically and rapidly mitigate or change a threat dynamic within a country like Afghanistan. The U.S. has a history of punitive expeditions; some successful, some not, and others achieving ambiguous results through ambiguous definitions of purpose and success, such as the 1916 punitive expedition into Mexico to capture or kill the bandit Francisco "Pancho" Villa and his followers.[8] The original mission to capture or kill Osama bin Laden was a punitive expedition, as was the 1986 strike against Libya and its terrorism-directing dictator, Muamar Qaddafi.[9]

In the case of Afghanistan that means going one step further than we originally did in the first year of the war and not merely driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan (itself a punitive campaign), but creating such a huge disincentive for Pakistan to reinforce, subsidise, and propagate its Frankenstein monster that it would never consider the Taliban again as a mechanism to check the expansion of Indian influence into Afghanistan. That means not merely cutting off comprehensive aid to Pakistan, but very deliberately and publicly diverting that aid to its most feared rival, India. That means targeted strikes against Taliban sustainment interests in Pakistan, including the ISI-funded training facilities and the trucking companies, chemical plants, and fuel concessions operated by the transnational criminal cartels that are aligned with the Taliban and operate with the tacit complicity of the Pakistani government. In the global war on terror, there is no such thing as a "frenemy," only an enemy, and particularly when that government sponsors terror against the U.S. and its strategic interests.

In the case of Afghanistan that means the enforced destruction of every opium field in the country, instantly destroying 90% of the world’s opium supply[10] and depriving both Pakistan and Iran of a river of clandestine hard currency that fuels transnational terror, insurgency, organised crime, and in the case of Iran offsets international sanctions intended to prevent the development of a nuclear weapons programme. Opposition is met and crushed by overwhelming military force, but limited in scope to highly focused targets. In the case of a punitive counter-narcoterrorist expedition, we are unconcerned about the impact to the Afghan farmer who makes a profit from opium and the heroin it produces just as we are unconcerned about the economic welfare of the operator of a clandestine methamphetamine lab in the desert of New Mexico who makes a profit from his poisonous product.

The punitive expedition lasts only as long as is necessary to accomplish very specific politico-military objectives and then it is withdrawn to be replaced by economic sanctions that are tied to very specific, objective markers for improvement in nation state behaviour. If international opposition prevents generalised sanctions, then unilateral sanctions should be imposed. When those markers are met, the sanctions are lifted and the lesson is hopefully learned: direct and indirect hostile action against the U.S. and its interests will result in immediate effects that far exceed any benefit of hostile action. In the tribal culture, definitive force is respected and itself regarded as a marker for future relations. That is the way of the tribes and, in this new conflict paradigm, it is urgently necessary to see through our enemies’ eyes.

Most educated people are familiar with the definition of insanity that is attributed to the Nobel laureate and great physicist Albert Einstein: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." It is time to consider critically the folly of attempting to nation build in any tribal culture that opposes Western value systems inherent to democratic nation building. Simply changing the regime will not work and attempting bottom-up reforms will last only as long as we maintain a significant presence; as soon as we depart the culture will revert to its familiar cultural practices.

It won’t help the U.S. this time, but it will when we return again to Afghanistan.

And we will.

(Originally Posted on Defense IQ)

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