Fighting "the other war" counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, 2003- 2005

Military Review, Sept-Oct, 2007 by David W. Barno

With "respect for Afghans" as our watchword, we decided that convincing the Afghan people to commit to their future by supporting elections for a new government would be the near-term centerpiece of coalition efforts. Thus, our military "main effort" in 2004 would be explicitly to "set the conditions for a successful Afghan presidential election"--certainly an unconventional military focus.

One of the changes in our military approach evinced by this focus on the population was a near-ironclad prohibition against using airpower to strike targets not directly engaged in close combat with coalition troops. Air strikes based solely on technical intelligence were almost entirely eliminated owing both to their conspicuous lack of success and the unintended casualties they characteristically caused among Afghan civilians. In my estimation, this new judicious reserve in the application of coalition firepower helped sustain the people's fragile tolerance of an extended international military presence. In essence, we traded some tactical effect for much more important strategic consequences.

Overarching Principle 2: Unity of Purpose

A second principle of our strategy was interagency and international unity of purpose. Militarily, this was paralleled by a deliberate and measured reorganization to achieve unity of command in coalition operations. As noted above, our military organizational structures had evolved unevenly as forces echeloned into Afghanistan in disparate increments following the Taliban's fall in late 2001. During the execution of that early operational phase, most U.S. troops were based outside of Afghanistan, and those in-country had only begun to establish what would become long-term operating bases. During 2002, Bagram and Kandahar became the primary base locations for large units, logistical infrastructure, and coalition airpower. As more units were added to the mix, and as the coalition presence continued long beyond initial expectations, a patchwork line of command authorities had evolved--an unsurprising situation given the need to cover a huge country with a small sliver of forces.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Our moves over the next months focused on establishing two ground brigade-level headquarters, one assigned the hazardous south and the other the volatile east (figure 2). (16) (The northern half of the country remained largely free from any enemy threat, and thus became an economy-of-force area.) The brigades' headquarters in the south and cast became centers for regional command and control of forces in the vast southern half of the country. Each brigade was assigned an area of operations spanning its entire region. All organizations operating in this battlespace worked directly for or in support of the brigade commander. This was a striking and powerful organizational change.

Establishing unity of purpose in the non-military sphere was much more difficult. Arguably, the greatest flaw in our 21 st-century approach to COIN is our inability to marshal and fuse efforts from all the elements of national power into a unified whole. This failure has resulted in an approach akin to punching an adversary with five outstretched fingers rather than one powerful closed fist.