Osama Bin Laden Was Not Enough

7/31/2019 Osama Bin Laden Was Not Enough

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WHY WE MUST WIN IN AFGHANISTAN


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Arent we losing?

No. Over the last few years, we have retaken numerous

key insurgent safe havens, command bases, and logisticshubs in Afghanistan, especially in Helmand and Kandahar

provinces, where most of the surge forces went. The Tali-

ban has failed to retake almost any of that terrain despite

repeated attempts, and the population in many of those

areas is now standing up against the Taliban by volunteer-

ing for Afghan Local Police units. Enemy-initiated attacks

were lower in 2012 than in the previous year for the first

time since 2008. Taliban senior leadership is fragmenting

and bickering over whether or not to negotiate with us

and the Afghan government. Taliban leaders are increas-

ingly out of touch with their own fighters in southern

Afghanistan and with the population in general.In fact, while the meme in Washington is that we

have lost, the meme in villages in Afghanistan is that

Afghans should stand up against the Taliban. We saw a

new phenomenon this year in an area previously

actively supportive of the Taliban (Andar District in

Ghazni Province, southwest of Kabul), where the local

population formed an anti-Taliban uprising. News of

that uprising spread through Afghanistan, and many

villages across the country are talking about doing the

same thing. This wont be the equivalent of the Anbar

Awakening and wont suddenly end the war, but it is

a major indication that Afghans are feeling that the

Taliban, not the United States, will lose.

Honestly, isnt it true that we

cant win?

No, and neither is it true that we dont know what

winning is. Winning is helping the Afghans create an

environment in which al Qaeda and affiliated movements

cannot re-establish safe havens from which to plan

attacks against the US and our allies. Al Qaedas presence

in Afghanistan is currently minimal, but the group hasshown a strong desire to re-establish itself in Afghanistan

if it can. Its key allies in that effort are the Taliban and the

Haqqani Network. We have deprived the Taliban of

almost all of its important safe havens and bases in south-

ern Afghanistan (Helmand and Kandahar Provinces), and

Afghans in those areas are now standing up to resist

attempts of the Taliban to re-establish control. We have

faced more challenges in eastern Afghanistan, particularly

against the Haqqani Network, because the president

chose to withdraw the surge forces prematurely, before

we could conduct the necessary clearing operations. Nev-

ertheless, even in areas in the east that had formerly sup-ported the Taliban and the Haqqanis, Afghans are starting

to resist them and ask for our assistance in doing so. We

have blunted determined efforts by the Haqqanis to light

up Kabul with spectacular attacks and recently killed the

operational commander of that network (and a son of its

founder), Badruddin Haqqani.

The Afghan National Security Forces now number

around 330,000 and are aggressively taking the fight to

the enemy in many areas with limited coalition support.

They cannot yet carry the fight themselves, and impor-

tant high-end operations that only US forces can under-

take still remain. But their ability and willingness to fight

has improved dramatically, as evidenced in part by the

fact that they take four to five times as many casualties

as we do every week. We drove al Qaeda from its safe

havens in Afghanistan in 2002. We have prevented it

from returning. We are setting conditions whereby

Afghans will be able to keep it from returning with

diminishing US assistance over time. Yes, we can still win.

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Osama bin Laden was not enoughWhy we must win in Afghanistan

President Obama has vowed to remove US troops from Afghanistan by 2014. But the war with al Qaeda

and its allies cannot be endedit can only be won or lost. Despite the negative stories about Taliban

raids and insider attacks, the US-led effort is actually on a path to success. Afghanistan is the jewel in

al Qaedas crown, and the extremists who want to bring their fight back to US soil are desperate to

recapture it. Do we have the resolve to defeat them? Here are answers to common questions about

the war in Afghanistan:

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After 11 years without an attack

on US soil, arent we overstating

the threat?

There have been two attacks on US soil since 2009 and

two more attempts disrupted after they were wellunderway. In December 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmu-

tallab successfully got an explosive device (in his under-

wear) onto an aircraft and attempted to detonate it

over US soil. The attempt failed only because the device

was faultynot because we disrupted the attack. In

May 2010, Faisal Shahzad got a vehicle loaded with

explosives into Times Square in New York City. Again,

the attack failed only because he had built the bomb

badly and it was discovered before it exploded. If he

had designed the bomb properly (which is not all that

hard to do), the attack would have succeeded. In Fall

2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (in Yemen) hidbombs in printer cartridges and got them into the par-

cel delivery system headed to targets in the US. The

bombs were discovered en route. In April 2012, a Saudi

informant tipped Riyadh off about another underwear-

bomb plot, which was disrupted while underway by

Saudi and US officials.

Al Qaeda franchises have grown dramatically in

strength and capability since 2009. Al Qaeda in Yemen

retains a much larger safe haven in that country than it

had in 2009, despite recent successes by US direct-action

operations and Yemeni counterinsurgency operations. It

has used that safe haven, as we have seen, to attemptattacks on the US even as it fought against Yemeni forces.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, almost destroyed and operationally

insignificant when Obama took office, has re-established

itself following the withdrawal of all American forces

from Iraq at the end of 2011. It is now conducting regular

spectacular attacks in Iraq (including against the limited

number of US facilities that remain there). But it has also

spread its operations into neighboring Syria, where it is

radicalizing the originally moderate groups opposing

Bashar al Assads regime and developing new safe havens

from which to expand operations in the future. Al Qaeda

in the Islamic Maghreb, born in Algeria, was an almost-

irrelevant group limited to kidnap-for-ransom operations

a year ago. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently

revealed, it has now expanded across North Africa and

was responsible for the attack on our consulate in Beng-

hazi, Libya, that killed our ambassador. It has also spread

into Equatorial Africa, using unrest in Mali to establish a

foothold there.

These groups are all directly linked to and affiliated

with the core al Qaeda group now led by Osama bin

Ladens deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, from Pakistan. We

have killed leaders of that core group for 11 years, but it

can recover very quickly if it regains freedom of action

in Afghanistan, especially since it can now harness the

strength and expansion of franchises that did not existin 2001.

Why should we do all the fighting

when none of our allies or anyone in

the Middle East is willing to?

Our enemies are trying to kill us every day. We need to

defeat them regardless of what our friends do. We are

not fighting for anyone but ourselves, and we are the

ones who will suffer if we fail or turn away from the bat-

tle. Neither is it true that our allies have done nothing.African Union countries have sent thousands of soldiers

into Somalia to fight against the al Qaeda affiliate there

(al Shabaab) and have, at great cost, driven it out of

Somalias capital, Mogadishu, and key port, Kismayo.

The Saudis conducted a concerted campaign against al

Qaeda operatives within their country that has driven

all of the al Qaeda leadership out of Saudi Arabia. Many

of those leaders fled to Yemen, where the Yemeni gov-

ernment has been actively fighting (sending numerous

brigades) against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

the franchise there that threatens Yemen and the US

directly. After al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb attackedour consulate in Benghazi, thousands of Libyans turned

out to protest that attack, and the Libyan government

started arresting and rooting out the organizations

operatives and affiliates. The Muslim world is joined in

battle, and many more Muslim soldiers are fighting

against al Qaeda affiliates than are Americans.

Even if we want to stay, arent our

allies all pulling out?

No. Tens of thousands of British, German, Polish, Italian,Spanish, Romanian, Georgian, and even Jordanian sol-

diers are still in Afghanistan today. They are generally

reducing the size of their contingents as American

forces withdraw, but there has been no rush to the exits

by our allies, despite the White Houses poor leadership.

As of October 8, 2012, the US contributed 68,000 of

almost 105,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, meaning

that our allies still have around 37,000 soldiers there.

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Will any victory be worth it as

long as Pakistan is a terror hub?

Failure in Afghanistan will look like failure in Iraq looks

today, only worse. There will be no US bases conducting

counterterrorism operations if we give up our efforts

now because Afghanistan will collapse into civil war. No

Afghan government is likely to permit, let alone sup-

port, US counterterror bases in Afghanistan if we have

left the Afghans to die. Limited US counterterrorism

forces could not defend themselves from resurging

enemies in a chaotic and collapsing Afghan state. Since

Afghanistan is landlocked (unlike Yemen and Somalia),

and since we no longer can use bases in Pakistan, we

would be unable to conduct counterterror operations

in Afghanistan from a technical, logistical perspective

its just too far to fly from the Indian Ocean. The end of

counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan will permital Qaeda and its affiliates to re-establish sanctuaries

there that we will not be able to disrupt, let alone

destroy. The terror hub in Pakistan, now under some

degree of pressure by Pakistani forces and a great

degree of control by the Inter-Services Intelligence

Directorate, which does not want to see a 9/11-style

attack conducted from Pakistani territory, will become a

terror-exporting base in a lawless Afghanistan. The con-

straints imposed by the Pakistanis on their terror-

minded guests will disappear when those guests move

into Afghanistan. In short, if you worry about the Pak-

istani terror hub now, youll fear it greatly when itssupersized by a premature US withdrawal in

Afghanistan.

Dont the attacks on us by Afghans

prove we cant rely on them once we

leave?

Attacks by members of the Afghan National Security

Forces on American and international troops, although

tragic and headline-grabbing, remain extremely low

both in total numbers and as a percentage of Afghansfighting. There have been a total of 63 incidents since

2009, including 34 this year, out of an Afghan force of

more than 330,000, meaning that something like .01

percent of the Afghan security forces were involved.

The attacks do not indicate in any way that the Afghans

have turned against us or that the Taliban has heavily

infiltrated the Afghan security forces. On the contrary,

literally hundreds of thousands of Afghans are fighting

the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and our

other common foes every day. They are taking four to

five times as many casualties as we are, yet they keep

signing up for the fightand we should remember that

the Afghan army, like ours, is an all-volunteer force. The

perpetrators of the green-on-blue attacks are distress-

ing anomalies, not harbingers of the future.

Dont massive corruption, Hamid

Karzais craziness, and our commit-

ment to leave by 2014 add up to a

reason to call it a day right now?

Corruption, Karzai, Obamas deadlines, premature troop

withdrawals, and many other obstacles and missteps are

all challenges that must be met and overcome. The

United States has overcome far more daunting chal-

lenges than these in previous struggles. Afghanistan

needs only to be sufficiently governed to prevent civil

war, Taliban resurgence, or vital power vacuums. This lim-

ited goal is achievable, even in a frustrating environment.

Were in Afghanistan because enemies who want to

kill as many Americans as possible covet it as a sanctu-

ary from which to do so. Those enemies will seek to

regain that sanctuary if we leave and will proceed to

develop plans and operations to kill Americans. Aban-

doning the fight now does not make that threat go

away. Those who advocate throwing in the towel out of

frustration with Karzai, corruption, deadlines, or any-

thing else must answer to the absolute moral impera-

tive of describing an alternate approach for dealing

with the threats that will remain and, in fact, grow. No

one has yet offered a compelling alternate approach. It

is an American conceit that the world exists only when

we pay attention to it. Reality proves otherwise. The

problems in Afghanistan will threaten US security even

if we go away. That is what we learned on September

11, 2001, and it remains true to this day.

The bottom line is that there either is or is not an

imperative national security interest for the US in

Afghanistan. We are confident that there is, and so wemust and will overcome these problems to the extent

necessary to succeed.

Cant the Afghans just do more

for their own security?

When the Taliban fell in 2001 there was no Afghan army

at all, nor any police or other security forces in this

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war-ravaged country of some 30 million people. As

recently as 2009, the international community was plan-

ning to build an Afghan army and police force of well

under 150,000 combined, on the grounds that Afghani-

stan could not afford anything larger. That argument was

(and is) nonsensicalthe cost of supporting one Afghan

soldier is a tiny fraction of the cost of deploying an Ameri-can soldier to Afghanistan. The current Obama adminis-

tration plan to cut the Afghan security forces by more

than 100,000 in the couple of years following 2014 is

therefore also nonsensicalor worse, since it means put-

ting 100,000 unemployed, military-trained males back on

the streets while pulling out almost all (or, if one listens to

the vice president announcing policy on national televi-

sion, all) of our forces.

In other words, we have been building the current

Afghan National Security Forces in earnest for about

four years. Considering that timeline, they are doing

pretty well. They are overwhelmingly light infantry who

were trained and moved into the field as rapidly as pos-

sible to support and then free up American and interna-

tional forces. Our commandersquite rightlydid not

take the time to build up logistics units, artillery, and

other critical enablers when we needed to get Afghans

fighting as quickly as possible. But those enablers are

now the key constraint on the Afghans doing more for

their own security. Our trainers and even combat forces

partnered at all levels with Afghan troops are now

working hard to help them develop the skills and units

they need to do more, but this task cannot be per-formed overnight. The Afghans are, in fact, doing all

that they can right now.

Afghan National Security Forces, furthermore, take

about four to five times more casualties than Coalition

forces. The Afghans are investing their human treasure

in this fight.

Did we really accomplish any-

thing with the surge in Afghanistan

last year?

The surge began in 2009. Since then, we and our inter-

national and Afghan partners have deprived our ene-

mies of critical safe havens, command-and-control

centers, bases of recruitment and support, and logisti-

cal hubs in the following areas: Marjah, Nad Ali, and

Garmsir Districts, Helmand Province; Arghandab,

Zharay, Panjwayi, Dand, and Malajat Districts and areas

of Kandahar Province; Khost and Sabari Districts of

Khost Province; Chamkani and Dand Patan Districts of

Paktia Province; and Sar Howza, Sharana, Yusuf Khel,

and Yahya Khel in Paktika Province.

We have disrupted Taliban command-and-controland operational networks across southern Afghanistan

and into the east. We have supported the establishment

of the Afghan Local Police program, in which Afghan

village elders partner with local chiefs of police to field

their own villagers to fight against the Taliban; the size

of the force has grown from a few hundred in mid-2010

to more than 16,000 today. We have helped field well

over 100,000 new members of the Afghan National

Police and Afghan National Army. Provinces now have

their own Afghan quick-reaction forces that can

respond to crises. We have developed Afghan Special

Forces capabilities to conduct night raids and other

forms of direct-action operations with little or no sup-

port from the US. The surge accomplished quite a bit.

Doesnt the countrys tribal

politics mean there will always be

an opening for al Qaeda?

Afghanistans tribal politics are unquestionably com-

plex. There will always be winners and losers, and al

Qaeda and its associates will continue to reach out to

the losers and offer their help. Many Afghan villagersare illiteratebut theyre not stupid. On the contrary,

they are remarkably clever in their ability to find ways

to survive despite incredible poverty and more than

three decades of continuous war. They know that har-

boring al Qaeda means inviting unwanted attention

from the Afghan government and from the US military.

As long as we support the Afghan security forces and

maintain a sufficient presence in the country to be able

to respond rapidly and decisively to indications that al

Qaeda is re-establishing itself, Afghans will remain

extremely loath to welcome such dangerous guests.

Should the US withdraw completely and allow the situ-

ation to collapse into uncontrolled chaos and civil war,

however, the calculus of survival for Afghan villagers

will shift and al Qaeda may come once again to seem

the lesser of many very dangerous evils.

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Cant we manage the terrorist

threat in Afghanistan with counter-

terrorism operations?

Counterterror (CT) operations is a shorthand for the

targeted killing of individual terrorist leaders. Theseoperations can be conducted either with special mis-

sion units or from aerial platforms. In either case, they

require an enormous amount of intelligence accurate

enough to place a bomb or a team at a given location

just at the moment that the terrorist leader is there. The

limitations on Americas ability to generate that kind of

intelligenceand on the number of special mission

units and other platforms that could take action in

response to itare highly classified, but very real.

Counterterrorism operations are among the most com-

plex and demanding of any military operations. They

cannot simply be dialed up at will.They also require facilities in reasonable proximity to

the targets. Most people who talk about a CT option in

Afghanistan describe a very small US footprint there that

would make such facilities available. The US must be

present, because without those facilities, there can be

no CT campaign. But those facilities do not exist in a vac-

uum. The soldiers or platforms operating from them

may be small in number, but they must be housed, fed,

maintained, equipped, supplied, and, above all, pro-

tected. The footprint for each facility, therefore, is not

small. Then there is the problem of getting supplies,

equipment, and people to and from those facilities. Arethe roads secure enough to travel on? If Afghanistan has

returned to chaos and civil war, then the answer to that

question will assuredly be no. In that case, we would

have to fly everything in and out of these bases from

some central location. Its hard to fly a lot of supplies in

helicopters, so wed want fixed-wing airstrips. Runways

are long, making the perimeters even longer. The

perimeters need to be defended against direct attack.

The aircraft, soldiers, and crews need to be protected

against long-range rocket and mortar attack. Quick reac-

tion forces must be on hand in case someone tries to

overrun one of the facilities. Medical facilities must be

available to care for the wounded immediately. By the

time youre done adding up all the real-world require-

ments for a light footprint, youre looking at involving

many thousands of American service members.

Since we decided at the outset of this hypothetical

CT campaign just to let Afghanistan go back to the

state of nature, those thousands of Americans can

expect to be constantly under attack. It is quite likely, in

fact, that they will end up devoting most of their CT

expertise to attacking enemy groups that are directly

threatening them rather than going after largernational priorities. After all, CT forces that are on the

verge of being overrun cant go chasing after al Qaeda

leaders in the hills. Even if one imagines that a targeted

campaign of killing leaders is an effective way to defeat

a terrorist organizationand no historical precedent

exists to support that hypothesisthe challenges of

trying to implement such an effort in a collapsing

Afghanistan are insurmountable.

If you balance the massive cost,

the 11 years, and the lives lost, issecuring Afghanistan really worth it?

The cost of the war must be balanced against both the

benefits of success and the likely costs of failure. The

benefits of success, in this case, are largely preventive

that is, they would prevent the extremely damaging

consequences of failure. One could argue, in truth, that

our problems with Pakistan could be materially eased if

a stable and solid Afghanistan stripped Islamabad of the

ability to export its violent Islamist proxies across the

Durand Line rather than dealing with them itself. Secur-

ing Afghanistan would also help solidify our relationshipwith India, our key strategic partner on the Asian conti-

nent and a vital counterbalance to China. But those pos-

itive outcomes are less important than the need to

prevent al Qaeda and its affiliates from regaining what

had been their capital and crown jewel in the context

of their global resurgence. The likely costs of failure in

Afghanistan are the re-establishment of al Qaeda opera-

tional bases from which more attacks on the US and

our allies will be planned and conducted, the further

strengthening of the global jihadist narrative that

terrorism in the service of violent Islamism is an

inevitably successful means to defeat superpowers, and

the destruction of what little remains of American credi-

bility in the world. Those costs are very highmuch

higher, in fact, than the likely costs of remaining to finish

the job at the force levels likely necessary to do so.

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If we need to be in Afghanistan

because its a terrorist haven, doesnt

that mean we need to be in Yemen?

Somalia? Mali? And maybe even back

in Iraq?Afghanistan is special to our enemies. Osama bin Laden

and most other senior al Qaeda leaders cut their teeth

fighting the Soviets therebeing a mujahid from

Afghanistan continues to be one of the most important

credentials in the global jihadist movement. Bin Laden

formed his first major alliance with Jalaluddin Haqqani

and established his first bases in Haqqanis lands in

Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. When Mullah Omars

Taliban took control of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s,

offering bin Laden hospitality, bin Laden swore alle-

giance to Mullah Omar as commander of the faithful.

Al Qaeda recognized the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,

Omars theocracy, as the only righteous Islamist state

actually to govern a country. Afghanistan has deep sig-

nificance for al Qaeda. Restoring it to them on top of

their gains in Yemen, Mali, Somalia, and elsewhere

would be giving back the crown jewel of jihad to a

resurgent global terrorist network.

Werent the American people

promised that if we finished the job

in Iraq, al Qaeda wouldnt be back?But they are.

Yes. But we did not finish the job. President Obama

decided to withdraw all American forces from Iraq at

the end of 2011 rather than attempt to complete the

arduous process of getting to an agreement with the

Iraqis about extending their presence. He did not even

succeed in gettingor, as far as we can tell, even try to

getan agreement to permit limited numbers of coun-

terterrorism forces to remain in Iraq. As of January 2012,

therefore, a grand total of 150 American uniformed per-

sonnel were in Iraq, all under embassy authority andalmost all engaged in working through contracts. Had

Obama persevered in the negotiations with the serious-

ness and urgency they deserved and retained even a

limited American military presence in Iraq, we might

well have been able to blunt the re-emergence of al

Qaeda in Iraq. The groups regrowth is the direct result

of Obamas retreat.

Give me one simple reason why

we need to be there 11 years after

9/11. Isnt this just a recipe for

endless war?

It takes two to dance, but one to make war. Our enemies

are at war with us and will continue to be even if we

leave Afghanistan. Their ability to wage war will, in fact,

increase materially. Retreating from Afghanistan now is

a recipe for endless war. Worse still, it is a recipe for end-

less war fought on American soil, American embassies,

the hotels in which American tourists stay abroad, Amer-

ican airplanesin short, a war taken directly to our way

of life. Winning in Afghanistan will not end that war by

itself, but it is absolutely a vital prerequisite.

If we havent won yet, when and

how do we end it, get out, and close

the book on Afghanistan?

We began a new strategy in Afghanistan in 2009, recog-

nizing for the first time in this war that we actually facedan insurgency and that we had to pursue a counter-

insurgency strategy to defeat it. President Obama

announced that strategy in December 2009. The last

surge forces arrived in late 2010. Weve had two years

to make a great deal of progress. We need another two

to expand and solidify that progress. This strategy is not

a repetition of anything weve done earlier in Afghani-

stan, and it has an inherent and logical timeline. We end

the war by completing the current strategy on that

timeline, not by following an arbitrary timeline set by

politicians or, more horribly, by the editorial board of

the New York Times.

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For more of AEIs work on Afghanistan, visit

www.aei.org/topic/al-qaeda-and-afghanistan-winning-the-ght

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Osama Bin Laden Was Not Enough