Fortifying and defending a handful of Afghan cities while ceding control of the vast countryside to the Taliban seems less a strategy for victory than a delaying tactic to stave off defeat.
The “defend the cities” option, gaining favour this week in Washington as President Barack Obama nears a decision on whether to send tens of thousands more American soldiers to Afghanistan, echoes a reality already under way.
Even before he called for reinforcements, General Stanley McChrystal, the NATO and U.S. commander in Afghanistan, had ordered a temporary pullback of troops from remote and vulnerable outposts.
But pulling back for the winter as a prelude to a massive force increase to wage classic counterinsurgency by deploying foreign forces throughout the country to “protect the people” is far different than a war strategy based on conceding the countryside to the Taliban.
That strategy was tried for a decade by the Soviets and, to a lesser extent, in the years immediately after the toppling of the Taliban in 2001. It failed for the Soviets in the 1980s, driven ignominiously from the Afghanistan quagmire by Islamists and local warlords armed by the United States.
“Defend the cities” is seen as a variation or a compromise on the even more sweeping option favoured by Vice-President Joe Biden that would essentially abandon counterinsurgency in favour of counterterrorism. That option calls for relying on drone aircraft and teams of Special Forces to hunt down al-Qaeda operatives while allowing the Taliban – not regarded by some as posing a direct U.S. national security threat – to roam.
“The Biden approach would effectively abandon large swaths of territory to the Taliban, sending a signal to the Afghan government and people that the United States isn't serious about reconstruction,” said Mark Sedra, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo and senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation. “Just defending the cities would be not quite as extreme” but it would still abandon Afghanistan's mostly rural population, Prof. Sedra said in an interview.
It's hard to project any war's outcome, but a decades-old U.S. State Department review of the Soviet effort to subjugate Afghanistan makes sobering reading.
“The Soviets and their Kabul allies are able to exercise effective control over only a small fraction of Afghanistan. Except for sweep operations, they rarely venture away from their own bases, parts of the cities, and the major highways. At night, even these are not safe for them.
“Most of the country's rural areas remain beyond Soviet and regime control,” it concluded in 1985, still four years before Moscow called it quits.
Although many NATO contingents already retreat to fortified based in major cities at nightfall, Gen. McChrystal's plan – built on the risky but seemingly successful surge in Iraq – envisions a huge commitment of foreign troops to protect Afghans where they live.
Tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops would “surge” into Afghanistan, perhaps for years, while a huge effort is launched to train and equip Kabul's army and police forces until they are sufficient large, loyal and corruption-free to allow foreign troops an exit strategy.
Prof. Sedra believes rapidly increasingly Afghan's forces has a better chance of long-term success. “An additional commitment of 40,000-50,000 U.S. troops … likely won't be enough to tip the balance in NATO's favour.
“In the end, only the Afghans can win the insurgency against the Taliban and maintain stability,” he wrote in a paper published yesterday. “They need to be endowed with the capacity to do so.”