Beyond Bin Laden (5 page)

Similarly, military commanders, determined to overcome all obstacles, loathe failure and rarely criticize each other, lest unit morale suffer. Although George Washington's forces were driven from Long Island and New York City in mid-1776, his report to Congress greatly understated the disaster. Frustrated by Germany's resistance to changing its tactics prior to World War II, Heinz Guderian, who went on to achieve fame as a brilliant commander, complained that "tacticians tell lies too, but the lies only become evident after the next war has been lost."

In addition to organizational culture, the second problem bedeviling risk assessment is irrelevant or flawed measurements. Because the mission in Afghanistan was nation-building, slogans such as "the military is only twenty percent of the problem" emerged, and plotting progress became as fuzzy as the mission itself. Assessments included an idiosyncratic range of subjects that encompassed governance, politics, polling, economic development, electricity production, unemployment rates, civilian casualties, IED explosions, fuel production, elections, and the rule of law. It was hard to distinguish between the trivial and the important.

Risk assessment and measures of effectiveness were addressed interchangeably, when in fact the two categories were quite different. Measures of effectiveness answer the question: What's going on in this country? Data included the amount of free electric power distributed, schools opened, civilian deaths, enemy attacks, fuel delivered, political parties registered, elections held, etc. Most were lagging indicators that told you what had happened, not why it had happened or what was likely to happen.

Risk assessment, on the other hand, looks at the future. It focuses on the odds of succeeding, given a constrained number of American forces and resources. For instance, Iraq was falling apart in 2006.

But when the trends were most dire in Baghdad, the war was already turning around in western Anbar Province, because the Sunni tribes had changed sides. Although a "tipping point" critical to the war's outcome had been reached on the ground, it was not placed within a strategic framework that would inform all interested parties, including the White House, Congress, the press, and military staffs outside Iraq.

While risk assessment can be expected to identify and highlight such tipping points, it cannot predict when they are about to occur. That's as impossible as predicting a high or low point in the stock market.

War yields defining events, leaders, and movements that assessments cannot predict. There is a dearth of historical models showing how to nation-build successfully.

 

Through May 2011, our strategy has been to employ 100,000 U.S. troops and $110 billion, together with aid and 32,000 troops from our NATO allies, to build a modern Afghan nation in a vast, backward country with a subsistence economy, an uneducated work force, a flourishing drug trade, and loyalty to subtribes rather than to a functioning central government. The operational approach has been to drive out the local Taliban in selected provinces, most along the Pakistan border, by deploying small American units (averaging about a hundred soldiers) in a thousand outposts among the population and by doling out about $4 billion in local funding to gain popular support, while raising local militia and training Afghan police and soldiers to take over the protection task.

President Obama has promised to terminate the American combat role in 2014. After that, we don't know whether the Pashtun farmers want to be protected by an Afghan army that is predominantly non-Pashtun, or whether that army will stand up against the Taliban in the mountains and in the poppy fields.

We can, however, assess the greater risk. Our objective in invading Afghanistan was to prevent terrorist attacks against the West, particularly against American civilians in the United States. The risk as we withdraw is that the Taliban would seize control of the country or provoke a civil war between the Pashtuns and the other major tribes, especially the Tajiks, that would result in a victory for the fundamentalists determined to launch transnational attacks. But the likelihood of that occurrence is low because the momentum of the Taliban has been stopped.

The role of the U.S. military is to develop an Afghan force that can contain the Taliban, allowing us to largely withdraw. Nation-building should be put aside and rejected as a military mission. Inside Afghanistan, the military effort should be gradually scaled back to advising the Afghan army so that they fight their own war. The means to do this is to deploy an adviser task force of about fifty Americans with each of the one hundred fifty Afghan battalions, while withdrawing American battalions. The adviser task forces would provide fire support and leadership example.

Pakistan must not remain a sanctuary. This does not mean recklessly widening the war. It does mean making it clear that Taliban leaders operating from Pakistan with the knowledge of Pakistani officials will be hunted down. President Obama dispatched a raiding party to eliminate Osama bin Laden because he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. Similarly, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and his top counselors are responsible for thousands of American deaths in Afghanistan. Like Bin Laden, Omar and the leadership of the Taliban live in comfortable compounds. Like Bin Laden, the Taliban leadership is a target that should be struck.

No organization, be it Al Qaeda or the Taliban, can operate efficiently once its top leadership is subjected to constant attack. No more sanctuary.

 

Bing West
is a former assistant secretary of defense and combat marine. His most recent book is
The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan.

 

When the United States finally found Osama bin Laden, he was not hiding under a rock in a remote mountain cave or among the anonymous, teeming crowds of one of Pakistan's overgrown cities like Karachi. The world's most notorious terrorist was instead ensconced far more comfortably in a large walled compound neighboring a military academy in the hill town of Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The specific circumstances of Bin Laden's death say a great deal about Pakistan and the relationship between Washington and Islamabad. Global attention is now harshly fixed on Pakistan's military and intelligence services, who find themselves in the impossible situation of appearing either terribly incompetent—for not knowing of Bin Laden's presence under their noses—or profoundly compromised—for knowing and failing to act. Moreover, the circumstances demonstrate that the degree of mistrust between Washington and Islamabad is so high that the Obama administration chose to send U.S. helicopters into Pakistani airspace without alerting any local authorities, even at the risk of tripping Pakistan's air defenses and provoking an armed confrontation.

The Bin Laden operation took place at a time when U.S.-Pakistan relations were already in a state of crisis. If Pakistan were more like Somalia or Yemen, the prospect of a rupture between Washington and Islamabad would not be nearly so worrisome. The United States could pursue a counterterror agenda by remote, launching drone strikes and commando raids with little concern for their political implications. But Pakistan is not Somalia or Yemen, and the stakes for American interests could hardly be higher. Pakistan is nuclear-armed, with an arsenal that is growing faster than any other in the world. It is a nation of roughly 180 million, projected to be the world's fourth largest country—after India, China, and the United States—by midcentury. If present trends hold, that population will remain young, poorly educated, ill-prepared to compete in the global economy, and infested with terrorist networks and extreme ideologies. A destabilized Pakistan, or one that actively opposes the United States, poses a problem of unprecedented scale and complexity. Left to fester, it will only grow more difficult over time.

For all of these reasons, if Washington defeats Al Qaeda but "loses" Pakistan, the long-term strategic consequences will be dire.

 

The Meaning of Abbottabad

 

I visited Abbottabad in late 2007. The purpose of my trip was to meet with a group of local politicians who, I was told ahead of time, were worried about a new influx of fanatical militants in their region. Over a long family style dinner, they described how the Pakistani "Taliban" were sweeping into Abbottabad and neighboring towns, intimidating traditional community leaders and cowing the public. They said nothing about Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda, and I did not ask. But their depiction of a community that was falling under the sway of militants, of a population that could not stand up to the threat, and of a Pakistani state that showed absolutely no intention of reversing the trend, was more revealing than I understood at the time.

Indirectly at least, Bin Laden's long stay in Abbottabad was enabled by the fact that Pakistan's military and intelligence services nurtured a range of jihadi outfits. For years, the area has served as a home both to Pakistan's premier military academy and to the camps that trained so-called holy warriors for the insurgencies of Kashmir and Afghanistan. This was an open secret, but certainly not one that you would be likely to read in Pakistan's newspapers or hear on its wide range of boisterous cable news programs. Too many Pakistani journalists have learned from tragic experience the dangers of speaking out against Pakistan's extremists. Residents in a place like Abbottabad learn not to ask too many questions. Under such conditions, we might imagine that even the construction of Bin Laden's massive home, with eighteen-foot walls topped by razor wire, might have blended into Abbottabad's deceptively bucolic landscape.

To be clear, we should not assume that Pakistan's military leadership knew the whereabouts of Bin Laden or that it engaged in any direct attempt to hide him from prying American eyes. But it is unquestionably true that Pakistan's army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officials have created, over the course of decades, an environment that permits an enormous range of nefarious activities—including militancy and terrorism—fosters fear and violence, and discourages questions or dissent. Today, the prospect that Pakistan cannot control the terrorists in its midst is almost more troubling than the notion that it has masterfully pulled the wool over America's eyes. But either way, there is a deep, deep problem.

 

A History of Militancy

 

Pakistan's militant landscape did not take shape overnight. Its origins can be traced all the way to the foundation of independent Pakistan in 1947, when Pashtun militias fought for control over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan's wars with India, particularly in 1971 when the eastern half of the country declared itself independent Bangladesh, left deep scars on the national psyche. A pervasive sense of insecurity—justified or not—explains much of Pakistan's regional posture to this day. As India's smaller sibling, facing undeniably larger and more capable conventional military forces, Pakistan has pursued an asymmetrical strategy of relying upon irregular militant units and, after 1998, a rapid expansion of its nuclear and missile programs. For sixty years, Pakistan has also assiduously cultivated an alliance with China, believing it offers an external balance of last resort against New Delhi.

Pakistan's activities in neighboring Afghanistan also have their roots in a sense of insecurity. From its founding, Pakistan has feared the potential that the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan might unite with their ethnic compatriots in Pakistan, ripping a chunk of contested territory away from Islamabad's grasp in the process. These fears have been compounded by the sense that India might encircle Pakistan by achieving a dominant influence in Kabul. Pakistan's support to the Afghan mujahideen, to successive warring factions in the civil war that followed, and eventually to the Taliban, were all justified as efforts to expand Islamabad's influence inside Afghanistan, undermine Pashtun nationalism, and gain "strategic depth" against the Indian adversary in the east.

Whatever the origins of Pakistan's regional approach, the military's cultivation of jihadi groups has created substantial problems in Pakistan that seem to have no end in sight. Since 2001, over thirty thousand Pakistani civilians have been killed in terrorist and insurgent attacks. Pakistan is insecure today because it rides the tiger of militancy, not because it faces Pashtun irredentism or Indian aggression. The state has less control than it once did over the groups it created and nurtured, like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). New groups, such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), have emerged that openly champion war against fellow Pakistanis and their leaders. Pakistan's intelligence services still claim—and may even believe—that they can draw distinctions between factions. But there is stronger evidence to suggest that these terrorist organizations are increasingly entangled with each other and with international outfits like Al Qaeda.

Pakistan's sense of insecurity has also stunted its political and economic development. By so often selecting guns over butter throughout its history, the nation has left education, healthcare, and public infrastructure chronically underfunded. Under such conditions, it is unsurprising that Pakistan's military has emerged as the country's most capable institution. Also not surprisingly, the army has translated its capacity into political power, ruling directly for decades and retaining a dominant role in defense and foreign policy even when nominally under civilian command, as it is today. Pakistan's civilian politicians remain far less experienced in security matters.

Only the consolidation of Pakistan's transition to civilian rule will produce a stable, healthy civil-military relationship. Yet that scenario remains a long way off. In the interim, we must understand that the outcome of the struggle for Pakistan's future will be determined by the relative power of its military and civilian institutions. There will be winners and losers inside Pakistan if Islamabad chooses—or is forced—to change the way it operates. So it is not simply a matter of convincing top leaders to see the light; they would also need the power to challenge entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo.