Friday, October 09, 2009 The Wall Street Journal: No Substitute for Boots on the Ground

The Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574459552088369672.html

In 2008 I commanded a team of U.S. Army combat advisers in northern Afghanistan's remote Chahar Darreh district. We patrolled with about 50 Afghan police troopers, conducting ambushes, reconnaissance, law-enforcement tasks and reconstruction.

These missions had one purpose: to build trust between the police and the people and thereby isolate the insurgents moving among them. Some Afghan troopers were thieves and Taliban infiltrators. Most served with honor and courage.

A growing chorus of Americans rejects operations of this kind. Opposition has hardened in response to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's call to launch a fully resourced counterinsurgency effort.

Naturally, the peaceniks want us to leave Afghanistan altogether. Other opponents of the McChrystal plan urge President Barack Obama to select a safer, cheaper cleaner method of defeating al Qaeda. Some conservative isolationists, joined by Vice President Joe Biden, argue that we should rely on commando raids and missile strikes to zap terrorist targets from afar, thereby sparing infantrymen like us the risks that go with living among the Afghans. Tellingly, the Biden camp has yet to offer any details about the sources of real-time intelligence needed to execute precision strikes, or the locations of the bases from which they would be launched.

In the years prior to 9/11, our leaders gambled with the nation's safety by employing "surgical" cruise missiles attacks (that blew up only abandoned tents) and organizing specialized counterterrorism forces (that never deployed due to a poverty of intelligence). Nowadays, any talk of returning to this over-the-horizon concept is shockingly naïve.

There is also a claim that the McChrystal counterinsurgency plan amounts to a "nation building" program, doomed to fail in the Afghan badlands. But like other U.S. counterinsurgency forces that have operated in Afghanistan, our team did not dabble in grand-scale social experimentation. We simply helped Afghans establish security at the local level and set conditions for governance and reconstruction.

As our nine-month deployment unfolded, we witnessed progress precisely along these lines. In February we embedded with the Afghan troopers and encouraged them to operate proactively against the enemy. By the end of March, citizens were reporting roadside bomb locations and impending attacks to the district manager, who passed the information to the police chief. Our team and the police disrupted the attacks through some quiet foot patrols and a few visits to suspected insurgent ringleaders, during which they learned that if bad things happened they would be held responsible. These operations did not produce a Taliban body count, but the district center remained safe.

The Taliban delivered written threats directing the people to stop working with the police and the Americans. The locals provided these "night letters" to us, and we integrated them into our intelligence work. Taliban fighters machine-gunned and rocketed the police station. The cops repelled the assaults and remained on duty. People were coming down on the side of the police, and the enemy was losing the initiative.

Over the summer, we provided funds to resurface the district's main road, linking the muddy flood plain to the national highway system and the cement factories, flour mills, slaughterhouses, colleges and hospitals in Konduz City. We expanded the district's central school. People of every ethnicity enrolled their children (girls, as well as boys). A corrupt building inspector attempted to subvert the school project with a demand for bribes. The province police commander, a barrel-chested former communist, warned him to back off.

Did any of this protect America from al Qaeda? A fair question, and the answer is that trusted networks of Afghan citizens that we and the Afghan police developed-by bringing security, governance and reconstruction to the district-produced a stream of actionable intelligence that we supplied to other coalition units responsible for counterterrorism. The details remain classified.

Then, after seven months, progress stopped. As required, I reported to headquarters that the district's cops had achieved basic capacities in operations, administration and logistics. With that, my team was ordered to another district, leaving 56 still-green but technically "certified" Afghan troopers to face a ruthless enemy moving in a sea of 100,000 people.

Why was our team ordered to depart? First, as confirmed by a recent report from Department of Defense's inspector general, there were and remain insufficient numbers of U.S. combat advisers to provide continuous coverage in key districts. Second, combat advisers are directed to assess security forces according to a training model that fails to focus on the most fundamental metric of all-whether local forces have actually established enduring security.

The result in the district we patrolled is that security has collapsed. Schools have been vandalized. Taliban fighters and robbers prowl the roads. NATO-sponsored reconstruction projects now draw extortionists like blood draws sharks. The intelligence flow has dried up.

Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) has correctly identified the development of Afghan security forces as the key to securing Afghanistan. But his approach-favoring a surge of U.S. trainers rather than combatants-misses the mark.

Calling combat advisers trainers does not take them out of harm's way. In 2008, more than 35 combat advisers were killed in action across Afghanistan. If Mr. Levin's idea is to restrict trainers to the safety of U.S. military bases, then the effort will do little to develop Afghan forces and even less to establish security.

Cops and soldiers (Afghan or American) are not made in classrooms or on shooting ranges. It is in alleyways and markets and on open highways and farmlands where young troopers build trust in one another, receive on-the-job mentoring, and earn the confidence of the citizenry. That confidence is the decisive point of any counterinsurgency effort.

That is why it is in the field where Afghan soldiers and police need our forces most. As military historians Fred and Kimberly Kagan have observed-and as I saw in both Iraq and Afghanistan-the swiftest path to development and independence for local security forces is through joint operations based on habitual relationships between units.

Last month, in his recommendation to the president, Gen. McChrystal called for "rapidly expanded coalition force partnering at every level." This will permit operations that are fully resourced, planned and integrated, with embedded combat advisers serving as coaches, patrolling partners, honest brokers against corruption, and liaisons between the Afghans and affiliated NATO units. That is how a surge in combat forces will directly contribute to building Afghanistan's own security forces.

I saw little evidence that the sheer size of an American presence will cause Afghans to resent us as an occupying force. Failure to provide security is much more dangerous. One of our interpreters explained to us that the Afghan people like the coalition. "What people hate is that you won't stop the violence. They say, 'Why don't the Americans do something?'" I can only imagine the rage now harbored by the people of the flood plain, who were left to fend for themselves once their police were "certified."

If the president feels the need to accommodate his liberal base, then we must hope that he resists the temptation to do so mathematically by splitting the difference between the highest and lowest troop numbers that Gen. McChrystal might propose. That would be the equivalent of FDR ordering Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to assault Omaha Beach but not Utah.

Technology and elite special forces provide certain advantages in modern warfare. But to defeat an insurgency, there can be no substitute for boots on the ground. This fact forms the cornerstone of Gen. McChrystal's call for more troops. Hopefully the president is listening.

Mr. Heintz, a major in the New York Army National Guard reserve, served in 2001 at Ground Zero, in 2004 in Iraq, and in 2008 in Afghanistan. He is a member of Vets for Freedom.