by SWJ Editors
April 24, 2014
by Whitney Kassel, Foreign Policy
If Iraq was, very arguably, counterinsurgency's success story, Afghanistan looks increasingly like the place COIN went to die. Half of the soldiers NATO tried to train can't read. They spent billions on roads leading nowhere, schools with no teachers, and efforts to halt a heroin trade that has hit all-time highs. And in exchange for these labors and over 3,400 fatalities, we've seen President Karzai's February prisoner release and bilateral security agreement negotiations -- which look more like NATO is being shown the door than being asked to help stave off an all but inevitable civil war. Even leaders who implemented the strategy, most notably former U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, have been singing COIN's funeral dirge.
This all begs the question of how the United States and NATO came to pursue a COIN strategy in Afghanistan. If eliminating al Qaeda was the top objective, why didn't they stick with counterterrorism, namely, targeted strikes against members of the Taliban deemed to be "irreconcilable," or U.S. Vice President Biden's infamous "CT-plus," a slightly beefed-up version that still fell short of the robust assistance to the Afghan government that characterized COIN? Why did they pursue a strategy that many believed was deeply flawed, or at least very risky? Looking at how the strategy evolved, particularly after 2008, the answer that emerges is that COIN looked like the least bad option and the best chance to create some semblance of stability under which to defeat the Taliban and, in turn, al Qaeda…
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