The war in Afghanistan is winnable for three reasons: because for the first time the coalition fighting there has the right strategy and the resources to begin to implement it, because the Taliban are losing their sanctuaries in Pakistan and because the Afghan government and the security forces are growing in capability and numbers. None of these trends is irreversible, and they are not in themselves determinants of victory. But they demonstrate that the war can be won if we display the kind of determination that defeating an insurgency requires.

It’s a decidedly big-picture op-ed. Nagl has much less to say on NATO’s prospects for reversing the insurgency’s gains in southern Afghanistan ahead of the July 2011 date for beginning a gradual transfer of security responsibilities to Afghan control — and correlative U.S. troop withdrawals. And he has less to say about the costs of the war, writing instead that success is a “vital national interest” and that counterinsurgency is hard and takes time.  Will that persuade doubters?

As of mid-2009, the United States employed over 22,000 hired guns in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that number keeps going up. Our reliance on private, for-profit companies for the business of waging war is extremely dangerous. It’s time we move to eliminate the use of these unaccountable and controversial mercenaries, and I ask you to join me as a citizen co-sponsor of legislation that I have just re-introduced, the Stop Outsourcing Our Security Act.

The Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which will be introduced in the Senate by Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, recognizes that the U.S. needs to end its reliance on private security contractors, and it would prohibit the use of private contractors for military, security, law enforcement, intelligence, and armed rescue functions. It would also increase transparency over any remaining contracts by increasing reporting requirements and Congressional oversight.

In the interest of providing the other side of the issue, John Nagl and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security recently wrote that the first-order priority for any reorganization of the U.S. reliance on security contractors has to be for a determination of which security, intelligence and law-enforcement functions are inherently governmental ones. Also, full disclosure: FDL hosts my personal blog.

I just finished an important meeting with Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, and we discussed about how we’re going to work to support the newly reelected president. But we’re going to be expecting more and we’re going to be providing the kind of assistance and guidance that fall within a demand for greater accountability, a serious effort against corruption, more transparency.
We’re going to try to build up the capacity of the government and make sure that we have a partner not just in the president, but in the government in Kabul and the government in the local areas of Afghanistan, as well as the civil society in Afghanistan. Because the struggle that they are engaged in and the threat that they face must be met by everyone doing more and being more accountable to deliver results.

My emphasis. This is the first on-record administration acknowledgment that its gaze is turning, Nagl/Fontaine-like, to local governance in response to Karzai’s fraud and intransigence on adopting anti-corruption measures.

Now, it’s not necessarily true that the outcome in the Afghan elections represents, by McChrystal’s approach, that the end is nigh. But it’s a big, big problem.

Into that breach came two Center for a New American Security analysts, Richard Fontaine and counterinsurgency-heavyweight John Nagl. They urged Obama to operationalize McChrystal’s assessment — shared by many in the administration — by ignoring Kabul and focusing governance and development efforts at the provincial and local level. And let’s be real: if you’re not going to pull out, that’s pretty much the only choice you have, short of giving Karzai a blank check again. Gibbs’ statement indicates that Fontaine and Nagl pretty much won.

“We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether he’s doing anything differently — whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides said. He insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality surrounding the Obama administration’s own debate on a new strategy, and the request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan, for upward of 44,000 more troops.

Really? We’ll know in less than a Friedman Unit? That actually seems like a rather short period of time. And the quote seems dubious. If Obama orders an escalation of troops, as he’s likely to do, then the United States will effectively be reducing its leverage on Karzai. So the Friedmans will roll onward. Will Obama work around Karzai, focusing on sub-national governance? Will Karzai let that happen?

Obama’s interest in provincial allies also reflects the administration’s growing disenchantment with President Hamid Karzai and his inability to extend his government’s authority beyond Kabul during his nearly eight years in office. Provincial governments and tribal structures have long exerted more power than the central government, which many Afghans view as remote, corrupt and ineffective. Another U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy said, “Most of Afghanistan that’s stable is under local control.”

The joke going around the Washington Afghanistan-watcher circuit is that federalized Iraq has the constitution Afghanistan needs and strong-central-government-in-theory-but-weak-in-practice Afghanistan has the constitution Iraq needs. I don’t really know how well Fontaine and Nagl’s proposal addresses what are likely to be persistent legitimacy concerns after next week’s runoff vote. But I hope they’ve got answers, because it looks like their argument has persuaded the president.

Update: Matthew Yglesias observes that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if we determined which regions of the U.S. are targets for stewardship by the international community.

“On the one hand, it is expected to achieve high impact counterinsurgency and broad-based economic development objectives as quickly as possible, especially in those areas more susceptible to radical Taliban recruitment,” Callison’s memo says. “On the other hand, it is asked to do this by working through national and local government channels and host country contractors and NGOs, and not through U.S. contractors and NGOs, to avoid the overhead charges of the latter and to improve the institutional capacity and legitimacy of government agencies and local institutions.”

“These are all worthy goals,” Callison continues, ”and USAID can achieve them all. However, they are contradictory objectives without a reasonable period for the latter.”

Relatedly, two influential security wonks at the Center for a New American Security say we don’t have to worry so much about Hamid Karzai’s stolen election because we can still work with … local Afghan officials.

Update: Didn’t mean to slight USA Today’s Ken Dilanian, who apparently had the memo first.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) (WDCpix)

Most congressional hearings bring administration officials up for a grilling. Others present interest group-backed pseudo-experts to give canned analysis. Rarely do congressional hearings present eclectic analysts who address a given policy option from a first-principle perspective to an engaged group of lawmakers. Yet that’s exactly what happened Wednesday afternoon when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began what chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) described as a series of hearings about the war in Afghanistan.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Kerry assembled three experts to scrutinize the core issues at the heart of the war and the alternatives proposed to wage it: John Nagl, the president of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that has provided significant personnel and intellectual heft to the Obama administration; Steve Biddle, an influential security expert with the Council on Foreign Relations who advised Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recent review of Afghanistan strategy; and Rory Stewart, head of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, who wrote a widely read travelogue of his journeys through Afghanistan. Intellectual cleavages over both strategy and basic views of the war were apparent on the panel, with Nagl and Biddle supporting a more robustly resourced war with broader aims than Stewart endorsed. But both Nagl and Biddle grappled with the harder implications of such positions, with Nagl emphasizing the primacy of competent Afghan, not U.S., security forces, and Biddle equivocating on the overall importance of Afghanistan to U.S. interests.

This week, President Obama is expected to approve McChrystal’s strategy review, and McChrystal is expected to finalize a palette of options for resourcing the war, including the prospect of U.S. troop increases. Amid rapidly eroding public support for the war, one of the larger concerns roiling lawmakers is whether the counterinsurgency strategy fulsomely embraced by the administration is sufficiently tied to the administration’s stated objectives of eradicating al-Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan and preventing al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan. Kerry asked if this week’s successful commando raid in Somalia against an important al-Qaeda-linked figure — launched from offshore bases and requiring no on-land troop presence — might be a model for an alternative strategy.

“Sir, it tells us you can conduct counterterrorism with a light footprint, not counterinsurgency,” Nagl replied. Kerry was unsatisfied with the answer: “That’s exactly my point,” he said. Nagl parried that the presence of neighboring Pakistan was the crucial difference, as the absence of U.S. forces would contribute to the destabilization of Afghanistan’s neighbor, while their presence inspired Pakistani resolve. “I am convinced that American counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in Afghanistan have contributed to the more effective Pakistani counterinsurgency campaign” of the spring, when Pakistani troops finally evicted Taliban insurgents from the Swat valley.

Stewart disagreed, contending that the United States tended to underestimate Afghan and Pakistani will to make decisions in their own interests and overestimated the impact of Afghanistan to Pakistani stability. “It’s very dangerous to mount an argument about Afghanistan based on Pakistan,” he said, comparing weak, poor Afghanistan to a cat and nuclear-armed Pakistan to a tiger. “We’re beating the cat,” Stewart continued, “and when you say, ‘Why are you beating the cat?’ you say, ‘It’s a cat-tiger strategy.’ But you’re beating the cat because you don’t know what to do about the tiger.”

A better strategy, Stewart argued, would be to use special forces to “identify a narrow group of people called al-Qaeda and then eliminate them.”

Later in the hearing, Biddle addressed some of the problems with the so-called “offshore” option, whereby U.S. forces launch the occasional raid, mostly from the skies or with special forces, on selected al-Qaeda targets, dissenting from Stewart’s prescriptions. “Safe havens do not [offer al-Qaeda] real estate for construction of tent farms for training seminars,” he said, but instead they protect al-Qaeda from “human-intelligence penetration on the ground,” upon which such targeted counterterrorism strikes depend. With regard to the drone strikes in Pakistan against al-Qaeda — which the CIA claims has seriously eroded al-Qaeda’s freedom of movement in the tribal areas and which some counterinsurgents fear will ultimately alienate Pakistanis — “control of the government underneath the drones” was an additional prerequisite for success, Biddle said. Take away human intelligence and host-government complicity through an offshoring strategy, and counterterrorism would be a non-starter.

Nagl, an Iraq war veteran and longtime advocate of prosecuting counterinsurgency largely through the cultivation of partner military forces, was agnostic in his remarks about whether to send additional U.S. combat forces to Afghanistan. Instead he advocated, as Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has proposed, an accelerated deployment of Afghan security forces, and proposed increasing the dedicated U.S. force for training Afghan forces from 4000 to 10,000. Since the U.S. method of training counterinsurgent forces involves mentoring in combat, not academic settings, “No one should think because we’re sending over trainers that we’re not putting them in harm’s way,” Nagl cautioned.

All three panelists agreed on the need to distinguish among what McChrystal has called the “Taliban-led syndicate” of insurgent groups, particularly the small core that fights for ideological conviction and those who fight for more transactional reasons, like money or status. Most insurgents in Afghanistan “are not particularly interested in international terrorism,” Stewart said, and the “small proportion who are don’t have the resources to carry out whatever ambition [is] in their fantasies.”

But Biddle and Nagl responded that such distinctions could not drive splits within the Taliban absent more aggressive fighting and sustained U.S. and Afghan governmental commitment. So-called reconciliation efforts could be successful only “if the military tide begins to turn and perceptions of long-term trajectory” are on the side of the Afghan government, Biddle said. And if the U.S. couldn’t protect defectors from the Taliban coalition from reprisal, “It’s very difficult to convince a ten-dollar Taliban to side with us.”

It was difficult to read the impact the testimony had on the assembled senators. Most, including Kerry, posed skeptical questions to all panelists, indicating a more open debate than the congressional debate over the Iraq war, which often devolved into questioning designed to elicit politically-useful responses. Kerry, for instance, has described the struggle against al-Qaeda as a “global counterinsurgency,” yet he aimed most of his more pointed questions at Nagl, who mostly agrees with that analysis.

Kerry said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had agreed to testify before the panel next month, after President Obama made a decision on whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan. Another hearing, on how to avoid failure in Afghanistan, is scheduled for Thursday morning, when the panel will hear from ret. Gen. Bantz Craddock, the former NATO commander; development expert Clare Lockhart; novelist Khaled Hosseini; and Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Pakistan.

John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security: “An Afghan state able to secure itself against internal threat with minimal external help”; one that “does not serve as a … base for attacks on its neighbors”; and which is “opposed to the interests of al-Qaeda worldwide.”

Steve Biddle, military analyst with the Brookings Institution: “We need only a country sufficiently in control of its territory that large contiguous blocs of Afghanistan cannot be used as a base for attacking others.”

Rory Stewart, head of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard: An “Afghanistan [that] does not in any way pose a majorly increased threat to the U.S.”

“We’re beating the cat,” Stewart said, “and when you say, ‘Why are you beating the cat?’ you say, ‘It’s a cat-tiger strategy.’ But you’re beating the cat because you don’t know what to do about the tiger.”

Stewart fears that surging troops is unsustainable. “A light footprint is a more sustainable footprint,” he said. He wants troops to focus on “a very narrow counterterrorism objective … and a humanitarian objective, contributing in a way we do in many other countries,” to a “stable, prosperous humane” Afghanistan.

Update: Steve Biddle works for the Council on Foreign Relations. This post originally reported he works for Brookings. We regret the error.

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