The Taliban: Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent

For Westerners, Afghanistan has always been distant, exotic, and periodically threatening. In the Occident, the Afghan warrior tradition enjoys well-earned respect. Many countries have invaded Afghanistan, but few have controlled it for long. In the 19th century, the British conquered, then were defeated, then conquered again, and then left Afghanistan. The Soviets had an equally checkered relationship with Afghanistan and, like the British before them, were defeated.  

Afghans, too, suffered the wages of war. In the late 20th century, the Soviets carpet bombed villages and valleys, killing over 1 million Afghans and dispersing many millions more into squalid, disease-ridden refugee shanties. After the Soviet invasion, the always-fragile traditional economy collapsed, plunging Afghans into destitution, fatalism, and despair.

For more than 12 years, the United States has been at war in Afghanistan. Events surrounding that country provoke controversy. An American soldier captured by the Taliban under questionable circumstances was recently traded for elite Afghan insurgents. Will this prolong the insurgency, will it shorten it, or will it have no consequence? This is uncertain. But what is certain is that Afghanistan serves as a grand laboratory of military and economic developmental polices. Lessons drawn from counterinsurgency successes and failures guide American policies in some of the most desperately poor nations of the world. This is a battle of wills.The Taliban’s goal of reestablishing Islamic law, or Sharia, is common to many Islamic organizations, both militant as well as those who proclaim themselves peaceful. The use of insurgency is one tactic to achieve the world domination of Islam. Militant Islam is expressed through different means and media. For this reason, it is a battle of ideas, as well as bullets. It is being waged through the Internet, in mosques, and in religious schools, or madrassas, as well as on the fields of battle in Afghanistan.

The Taliban offer an unrelenting dedication to conquer Afghanistan, an unconstrained use of terror, and solidarity with important fragments of global Islam. The Taliban leverage deeply ingrained Afghan skepticism of Western promises for a better future. Foreign men have come and gone from Afghanistan, and, despite promises, only the poverty remains. Taliban leaders boast that Afghans are armed with the religious fervor, honor, and resolve. “Such weapons are neither available in the arsenal of America nor in the warehouse of her allies.”[1] In January 2013, the Taliban crowed, “No sooner will the foreigners quit than the Afghans will start living under the cover of an Islamic government and in the environment of Islamic brotherhood.” 

The American-led Coalition is determined to prevent the Taliban’s triumph. Today’s soldiers on both sides of the struggle have lived only in wartime. The sons of Taliban fighters, who were 10 when the group was scattered into Pakistan, are now in their early 20s. Many are hardened fighters and will, undoubtedly, face the sons of the Northern Alliance. The Taliban are tough, but so are many other Afghans.

As the book The Taliban: Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgents comes to publication, U.S. forces are scheduled to leave, and the Taliban will certainly try to fill the security vacuum. Thirteen years of building a civil service, army, police, and health and educational system will be put to the test. The extent to which Afghanistan’s fortunes are intertwined with or independent of American military will be decided. Will the Taliban’s power-sharing negotiations become a viper’s embrace of the still-struggling Karzai regime? Can the Karzai regime stand on its own to meet the Taliban challenge? The stakes are survival for the new Afghan state.

  

Mark Silinsky is a 30-year veteran of the defense intelligence community. He has served as a senior counterinsurgency advisor and counterintelligence analyst in the United States and in Afghanistan. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Southern California; earned a master's degree from Oxford University; and is a graduate of the Naval War College, the National Defense University, and the National Intelligence University.

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[1] Statement of the Islamic Emirate on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11, Afghan Forums, Accessed July 1, 2014, http://www.afghanforums.com/showthread.php?23426-Statement-of-the-Islamic-Emirate-on-the-Tenth-Anniversary-of-9-11-you-must-read-it-)

Author Guest Post: Matthew Flynn on Counterinsurgency

History and Better Policy
by Matthew J. Flynn

The historian may well be tempted to reflect on the American experience in Afghanistan and say out loud, ‘I told you so.’ As the American build-up there accelerated under the Obama administration, a public debate over how to avoid the ill fate of previous self-declared liberators of that area was largely muted if it occurred at all. Yet, historical analysis would have offered such a warning. Conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union struggled to control this region. Such a historical pattern does not ensure a repetition of the past in the present, but some assessment of how those situations do or do not relate to the present may have favorably informed the American policy objective in Afghanistan. One should attempt to reach beyond merely assigning blame for this policy failure. The historical perspective suggested here would not have predicted the adverse results currently in Afghanistan. Instead, policy makers could have used this history to anticipate possible difficulties and weigh the value of continued intervention in Afghanistan. Should the necessity of intervention be justified, then the hardships now encountered would be worth the struggle.

This kind of historical reflection had been done by the US military in at least one respect. Once a greater commitment of US troops to Afghanistan came under consideration, senior commanders carefully analyzed the counterinsurgency (COIN) approach to be waged by this increased force. As a result, at least one historical misstep was avoided, and that was a reliance on conventional forces seeking a battlefield victory to end the insurgency. Rather, the US military prepared for a struggle with the security of the Afghan population foremost in mind, a focus it had applied in Iraq after much trial and error. A better COIN doctrine may now be exposed as inadequate in Afghanistan, but it was consciously attempted, allowing the US military to boast of having learned quickly from any missteps in Iraq.

This success separated the United States from other states that had enjoyed a marked military superiority over the enemy and relied almost exclusively on conventional military force to try and end an insurgency. This counterinsurgency approach inevitably failed, a failure all the more remarkable given that these states often had successfully conducted counterinsurgency operations in the past because they broke free of a reliance on conventional military force. This reality is the topic of my book, Contesting History: the Bush Counterinsurgency Legacy in Iraq (Praeger, 6/2010), a study that also makes it clear how the United States avoided this historical pitfall in Iraq. 

Unfortunately, the region is still a spring board for terrorism exposing the policy designed to mitigate this threat as a failure no matter any tactical successes derived from a COIN doctrine centered on protecting the population. One reason why is that the US experience in Afghanistan has raised the question whether population centric operations at times require conventional military operation as well in order to protect that population. In turn, the issue becomes, can COIN succeed given this tension? The importance of this inquiry again highlights the value of historical perspective for the question immediately rises, is this tension unique to Afghanistan or has it been present in past conflicts? Any response to this point calls attention to the need for historical analysis to play a key role in shaping COIN doctrine.

--Matthew J. Flynn

Matthew J. Flynn, Ph.D., is a specialist in comparative warfare of the United States and the world. Flynn taught history courses at Ohio University and San Diego State University before accepting a position at Arizona State University in 2005. He currently teaches in the international division of the History Department at the United States Military Academy, West Point. He has written extensively on international military history, including a study of preemptive warfare titled, First Strike: Preemptive War in Modern History (May 2008). His first book, China Contested (2006), looks at the permeability of the political borders that Western powers established in China from 1500 to the present.  Flynn is also co-authoring a volume that asks its American reader to weigh side-by-side the venerable George Washington and the unscrupulous Napoleon Bonaparte. The book, Washington and Napoleon, will be published by Potomac Books in mid-2010.