NATO Does Not Assume Enough Risk in the War in Afghanistan
By Matt Rowe, Executive Director, WinTheGWOT.org
According to the AP, official investigations after recent fighting in Afghanistan between US forces and the Taliban have led to 62 enemy deaths and some 45 collateral civilian deaths. The death toll appears to have resulted from airstrikes that hit civilian homes in a village in which the Taliban had moved after an ambush of NATO forces. Unfortunately, in a counterinsurgency where main focus is to win over popular support from the insurgent enemy, the math of 62 enemy troops killed minus 45 civilians killed does not equal a net reduction in enemy supporters of 17. In this case, the 45 civilians that were killed conservatively translates into some 200 surviving family members and friends who will now either actively or passively support our enemies—a net gain of more than 130 motivated enemy supporters (not counting the family and friends of the actual enemy troops killed).
Making matters worse, in an effort to win over the populace, “the war of perceptions” is tremendously important and local Afghan officials claim that the civilian death toll is much higher. Whether they are right or wrong does not matter—what the local populace believes is what matters and they are certainly going to discount the results of any official investigation by NATO. The Afghan national government has made complaints in recent months about the number of collateral civilian deaths, injuries, and property damage resulting from NATO actions, so the popular mood is already arrayed against us. If NATO continues to fight the war in Afghanistan in the conventional manner that it has we will ultimately lose the struggle for the hearts and minds of the populace.
Even the new Army and Marine Corps Field Manual on Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24) states that in a counterinsurgency more risk must be accepted by the counterinsurgent. This means that it is no longer appropriate to call for relatively indiscriminate airpower in a populated area when a patrol or convoy comes under attack. A much more restricted response is called for in which NATO forces respond in a highly selective manner, and which puts our troops at much greater personal risk for the sake of protecting non-combatants. Nonetheless, this is the price of winning in a counterinsurgency, but whether NATO nations are willing to accept a higher casualty rate among their troops is not clear.
In fact, it remains to be seen whether NATO can even conduct a proper counterinsurgency. Colonel Hy Rothstein, a 30-year veteran of US Army Special Forces now teaching in the Naval Post Graduate School and author of the book, Afghanistan & the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare, has studied NATO operations in that country in significant detail. Professor Rothstein reports that “…the focus on attrition, the lack of security, and the overriding force protection concerns have severed the link between coalition forces and the indigenous population, eliminating the most valuable source of operational intelligence—the population—and inhibiting the ability of the coalition to locate and destroy the insurgents.”
So killing civilians not only increases the number of enemies that we face, but also makes it more difficult to pin them down and eliminate them. To change this paradigm, NATO must commit itself to assuming much more operational risk on the battlefields of Afghanistan. This is certainly no indictment of the amazing courage that our troops show on a daily basis. They will—and always have stepped up to the required level of personal risk to get their difficult jobs done. What is required is that NATO political and military leaders accept the increased risk and develop the appropriate tactical actions to mitigate it as much as possible. Otherwise, all of the risk and loss to date will amount to a strategic failure in Afghanistan.
According to the AP, official investigations after recent fighting in Afghanistan between US forces and the Taliban have led to 62 enemy deaths and some 45 collateral civilian deaths. The death toll appears to have resulted from airstrikes that hit civilian homes in a village in which the Taliban had moved after an ambush of NATO forces. Unfortunately, in a counterinsurgency where main focus is to win over popular support from the insurgent enemy, the math of 62 enemy troops killed minus 45 civilians killed does not equal a net reduction in enemy supporters of 17. In this case, the 45 civilians that were killed conservatively translates into some 200 surviving family members and friends who will now either actively or passively support our enemies—a net gain of more than 130 motivated enemy supporters (not counting the family and friends of the actual enemy troops killed).
Making matters worse, in an effort to win over the populace, “the war of perceptions” is tremendously important and local Afghan officials claim that the civilian death toll is much higher. Whether they are right or wrong does not matter—what the local populace believes is what matters and they are certainly going to discount the results of any official investigation by NATO. The Afghan national government has made complaints in recent months about the number of collateral civilian deaths, injuries, and property damage resulting from NATO actions, so the popular mood is already arrayed against us. If NATO continues to fight the war in Afghanistan in the conventional manner that it has we will ultimately lose the struggle for the hearts and minds of the populace.
Even the new Army and Marine Corps Field Manual on Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24) states that in a counterinsurgency more risk must be accepted by the counterinsurgent. This means that it is no longer appropriate to call for relatively indiscriminate airpower in a populated area when a patrol or convoy comes under attack. A much more restricted response is called for in which NATO forces respond in a highly selective manner, and which puts our troops at much greater personal risk for the sake of protecting non-combatants. Nonetheless, this is the price of winning in a counterinsurgency, but whether NATO nations are willing to accept a higher casualty rate among their troops is not clear.
In fact, it remains to be seen whether NATO can even conduct a proper counterinsurgency. Colonel Hy Rothstein, a 30-year veteran of US Army Special Forces now teaching in the Naval Post Graduate School and author of the book, Afghanistan & the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare, has studied NATO operations in that country in significant detail. Professor Rothstein reports that “…the focus on attrition, the lack of security, and the overriding force protection concerns have severed the link between coalition forces and the indigenous population, eliminating the most valuable source of operational intelligence—the population—and inhibiting the ability of the coalition to locate and destroy the insurgents.”
So killing civilians not only increases the number of enemies that we face, but also makes it more difficult to pin them down and eliminate them. To change this paradigm, NATO must commit itself to assuming much more operational risk on the battlefields of Afghanistan. This is certainly no indictment of the amazing courage that our troops show on a daily basis. They will—and always have stepped up to the required level of personal risk to get their difficult jobs done. What is required is that NATO political and military leaders accept the increased risk and develop the appropriate tactical actions to mitigate it as much as possible. Otherwise, all of the risk and loss to date will amount to a strategic failure in Afghanistan.
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