osama bin laden was not enough
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WHY WE MUST WIN IN AFGHANISTAN
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Arent we losing?
No. Over the last few years, we have retaken numerous
key insurgent safe havens, command bases, and logisticshubs in Afghanistan, especially in Helmand and Kandahar
provinces, where most of the surge forces went. The Tali-
ban has failed to retake almost any of that terrain despite
repeated attempts, and the population in many of those
areas is now standing up against the Taliban by volunteer-
ing for Afghan Local Police units. Enemy-initiated attacks
were lower in 2012 than in the previous year for the first
time since 2008. Taliban senior leadership is fragmenting
and bickering over whether or not to negotiate with us
and the Afghan government. Taliban leaders are increas-
ingly out of touch with their own fighters in southern
Afghanistan and with the population in general.In fact, while the meme in Washington is that we
have lost, the meme in villages in Afghanistan is that
Afghans should stand up against the Taliban. We saw a
new phenomenon this year in an area previously
actively supportive of the Taliban (Andar District in
Ghazni Province, southwest of Kabul), where the local
population formed an anti-Taliban uprising. News of
that uprising spread through Afghanistan, and many
villages across the country are talking about doing the
same thing. This wont be the equivalent of the Anbar
Awakening and wont suddenly end the war, but it is
a major indication that Afghans are feeling that the
Taliban, not the United States, will lose.
Honestly, isnt it true that we
cant win?
No, and neither is it true that we dont know what
winning is. Winning is helping the Afghans create an
environment in which al Qaeda and affiliated movements
cannot re-establish safe havens from which to plan
attacks against the US and our allies. Al Qaedas presence
in Afghanistan is currently minimal, but the group hasshown a strong desire to re-establish itself in Afghanistan
if it can. Its key allies in that effort are the Taliban and the
Haqqani Network. We have deprived the Taliban of
almost all of its important safe havens and bases in south-
ern Afghanistan (Helmand and Kandahar Provinces), and
Afghans in those areas are now standing up to resist
attempts of the Taliban to re-establish control. We have
faced more challenges in eastern Afghanistan, particularly
against the Haqqani Network, because the president
chose to withdraw the surge forces prematurely, before
we could conduct the necessary clearing operations. Nev-
ertheless, even in areas in the east that had formerly sup-ported the Taliban and the Haqqanis, Afghans are starting
to resist them and ask for our assistance in doing so. We
have blunted determined efforts by the Haqqanis to light
up Kabul with spectacular attacks and recently killed the
operational commander of that network (and a son of its
founder), Badruddin Haqqani.
The Afghan National Security Forces now number
around 330,000 and are aggressively taking the fight to
the enemy in many areas with limited coalition support.
They cannot yet carry the fight themselves, and impor-
tant high-end operations that only US forces can under-
take still remain. But their ability and willingness to fight
has improved dramatically, as evidenced in part by the
fact that they take four to five times as many casualties
as we do every week. We drove al Qaeda from its safe
havens in Afghanistan in 2002. We have prevented it
from returning. We are setting conditions whereby
Afghans will be able to keep it from returning with
diminishing US assistance over time. Yes, we can still win.
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Osama bin Laden was not enoughWhy we must win in Afghanistan
President Obama has vowed to remove US troops from Afghanistan by 2014. But the war with al Qaeda
and its allies cannot be endedit can only be won or lost. Despite the negative stories about Taliban
raids and insider attacks, the US-led effort is actually on a path to success. Afghanistan is the jewel in
al Qaedas crown, and the extremists who want to bring their fight back to US soil are desperate to
recapture it. Do we have the resolve to defeat them? Here are answers to common questions about
the war in Afghanistan:
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After 11 years without an attack
on US soil, arent we overstating
the threat?
There have been two attacks on US soil since 2009 and
two more attempts disrupted after they were wellunderway. In December 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmu-
tallab successfully got an explosive device (in his under-
wear) onto an aircraft and attempted to detonate it
over US soil. The attempt failed only because the device
was faultynot because we disrupted the attack. In
May 2010, Faisal Shahzad got a vehicle loaded with
explosives into Times Square in New York City. Again,
the attack failed only because he had built the bomb
badly and it was discovered before it exploded. If he
had designed the bomb properly (which is not all that
hard to do), the attack would have succeeded. In Fall
2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (in Yemen) hidbombs in printer cartridges and got them into the par-
cel delivery system headed to targets in the US. The
bombs were discovered en route. In April 2012, a Saudi
informant tipped Riyadh off about another underwear-
bomb plot, which was disrupted while underway by
Saudi and US officials.
Al Qaeda franchises have grown dramatically in
strength and capability since 2009. Al Qaeda in Yemen
retains a much larger safe haven in that country than it
had in 2009, despite recent successes by US direct-action
operations and Yemeni counterinsurgency operations. It
has used that safe haven, as we have seen, to attemptattacks on the US even as it fought against Yemeni forces.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, almost destroyed and operationally
insignificant when Obama took office, has re-established
itself following the withdrawal of all American forces
from Iraq at the end of 2011. It is now conducting regular
spectacular attacks in Iraq (including against the limited
number of US facilities that remain there). But it has also
spread its operations into neighboring Syria, where it is
radicalizing the originally moderate groups opposing
Bashar al Assads regime and developing new safe havens
from which to expand operations in the future. Al Qaeda
in the Islamic Maghreb, born in Algeria, was an almost-
irrelevant group limited to kidnap-for-ransom operations
a year ago. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently
revealed, it has now expanded across North Africa and
was responsible for the attack on our consulate in Beng-
hazi, Libya, that killed our ambassador. It has also spread
into Equatorial Africa, using unrest in Mali to establish a
foothold there.
These groups are all directly linked to and affiliated
with the core al Qaeda group now led by Osama bin
Ladens deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, from Pakistan. We
have killed leaders of that core group for 11 years, but it
can recover very quickly if it regains freedom of action
in Afghanistan, especially since it can now harness the
strength and expansion of franchises that did not existin 2001.
Why should we do all the fighting
when none of our allies or anyone in
the Middle East is willing to?
Our enemies are trying to kill us every day. We need to
defeat them regardless of what our friends do. We are
not fighting for anyone but ourselves, and we are the
ones who will suffer if we fail or turn away from the bat-
tle. Neither is it true that our allies have done nothing.African Union countries have sent thousands of soldiers
into Somalia to fight against the al Qaeda affiliate there
(al Shabaab) and have, at great cost, driven it out of
Somalias capital, Mogadishu, and key port, Kismayo.
The Saudis conducted a concerted campaign against al
Qaeda operatives within their country that has driven
all of the al Qaeda leadership out of Saudi Arabia. Many
of those leaders fled to Yemen, where the Yemeni gov-
ernment has been actively fighting (sending numerous
brigades) against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
the franchise there that threatens Yemen and the US
directly. After al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb attackedour consulate in Benghazi, thousands of Libyans turned
out to protest that attack, and the Libyan government
started arresting and rooting out the organizations
operatives and affiliates. The Muslim world is joined in
battle, and many more Muslim soldiers are fighting
against al Qaeda affiliates than are Americans.
Even if we want to stay, arent our
allies all pulling out?
No. Tens of thousands of British, German, Polish, Italian,Spanish, Romanian, Georgian, and even Jordanian sol-
diers are still in Afghanistan today. They are generally
reducing the size of their contingents as American
forces withdraw, but there has been no rush to the exits
by our allies, despite the White Houses poor leadership.
As of October 8, 2012, the US contributed 68,000 of
almost 105,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, meaning
that our allies still have around 37,000 soldiers there.
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Will any victory be worth it as
long as Pakistan is a terror hub?
Failure in Afghanistan will look like failure in Iraq looks
today, only worse. There will be no US bases conducting
counterterrorism operations if we give up our efforts
now because Afghanistan will collapse into civil war. No
Afghan government is likely to permit, let alone sup-
port, US counterterror bases in Afghanistan if we have
left the Afghans to die. Limited US counterterrorism
forces could not defend themselves from resurging
enemies in a chaotic and collapsing Afghan state. Since
Afghanistan is landlocked (unlike Yemen and Somalia),
and since we no longer can use bases in Pakistan, we
would be unable to conduct counterterror operations
in Afghanistan from a technical, logistical perspective
its just too far to fly from the Indian Ocean. The end of
counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan will permital Qaeda and its affiliates to re-establish sanctuaries
there that we will not be able to disrupt, let alone
destroy. The terror hub in Pakistan, now under some
degree of pressure by Pakistani forces and a great
degree of control by the Inter-Services Intelligence
Directorate, which does not want to see a 9/11-style
attack conducted from Pakistani territory, will become a
terror-exporting base in a lawless Afghanistan. The con-
straints imposed by the Pakistanis on their terror-
minded guests will disappear when those guests move
into Afghanistan. In short, if you worry about the Pak-
istani terror hub now, youll fear it greatly when itssupersized by a premature US withdrawal in
Afghanistan.
Dont the attacks on us by Afghans
prove we cant rely on them once we
leave?
Attacks by members of the Afghan National Security
Forces on American and international troops, although
tragic and headline-grabbing, remain extremely low
both in total numbers and as a percentage of Afghansfighting. There have been a total of 63 incidents since
2009, including 34 this year, out of an Afghan force of
more than 330,000, meaning that something like .01
percent of the Afghan security forces were involved.
The attacks do not indicate in any way that the Afghans
have turned against us or that the Taliban has heavily
infiltrated the Afghan security forces. On the contrary,
literally hundreds of thousands of Afghans are fighting
the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and our
other common foes every day. They are taking four to
five times as many casualties as we are, yet they keep
signing up for the fightand we should remember that
the Afghan army, like ours, is an all-volunteer force. The
perpetrators of the green-on-blue attacks are distress-
ing anomalies, not harbingers of the future.
Dont massive corruption, Hamid
Karzais craziness, and our commit-
ment to leave by 2014 add up to a
reason to call it a day right now?
Corruption, Karzai, Obamas deadlines, premature troop
withdrawals, and many other obstacles and missteps are
all challenges that must be met and overcome. The
United States has overcome far more daunting chal-
lenges than these in previous struggles. Afghanistan
needs only to be sufficiently governed to prevent civil
war, Taliban resurgence, or vital power vacuums. This lim-
ited goal is achievable, even in a frustrating environment.
Were in Afghanistan because enemies who want to
kill as many Americans as possible covet it as a sanctu-
ary from which to do so. Those enemies will seek to
regain that sanctuary if we leave and will proceed to
develop plans and operations to kill Americans. Aban-
doning the fight now does not make that threat go
away. Those who advocate throwing in the towel out of
frustration with Karzai, corruption, deadlines, or any-
thing else must answer to the absolute moral impera-
tive of describing an alternate approach for dealing
with the threats that will remain and, in fact, grow. No
one has yet offered a compelling alternate approach. It
is an American conceit that the world exists only when
we pay attention to it. Reality proves otherwise. The
problems in Afghanistan will threaten US security even
if we go away. That is what we learned on September
11, 2001, and it remains true to this day.
The bottom line is that there either is or is not an
imperative national security interest for the US in
Afghanistan. We are confident that there is, and so wemust and will overcome these problems to the extent
necessary to succeed.
Cant the Afghans just do more
for their own security?
When the Taliban fell in 2001 there was no Afghan army
at all, nor any police or other security forces in this
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war-ravaged country of some 30 million people. As
recently as 2009, the international community was plan-
ning to build an Afghan army and police force of well
under 150,000 combined, on the grounds that Afghani-
stan could not afford anything larger. That argument was
(and is) nonsensicalthe cost of supporting one Afghan
soldier is a tiny fraction of the cost of deploying an Ameri-can soldier to Afghanistan. The current Obama adminis-
tration plan to cut the Afghan security forces by more
than 100,000 in the couple of years following 2014 is
therefore also nonsensicalor worse, since it means put-
ting 100,000 unemployed, military-trained males back on
the streets while pulling out almost all (or, if one listens to
the vice president announcing policy on national televi-
sion, all) of our forces.
In other words, we have been building the current
Afghan National Security Forces in earnest for about
four years. Considering that timeline, they are doing
pretty well. They are overwhelmingly light infantry who
were trained and moved into the field as rapidly as pos-
sible to support and then free up American and interna-
tional forces. Our commandersquite rightlydid not
take the time to build up logistics units, artillery, and
other critical enablers when we needed to get Afghans
fighting as quickly as possible. But those enablers are
now the key constraint on the Afghans doing more for
their own security. Our trainers and even combat forces
partnered at all levels with Afghan troops are now
working hard to help them develop the skills and units
they need to do more, but this task cannot be per-formed overnight. The Afghans are, in fact, doing all
that they can right now.
Afghan National Security Forces, furthermore, take
about four to five times more casualties than Coalition
forces. The Afghans are investing their human treasure
in this fight.
Did we really accomplish any-
thing with the surge in Afghanistan
last year?
The surge began in 2009. Since then, we and our inter-
national and Afghan partners have deprived our ene-
mies of critical safe havens, command-and-control
centers, bases of recruitment and support, and logisti-
cal hubs in the following areas: Marjah, Nad Ali, and
Garmsir Districts, Helmand Province; Arghandab,
Zharay, Panjwayi, Dand, and Malajat Districts and areas
of Kandahar Province; Khost and Sabari Districts of
Khost Province; Chamkani and Dand Patan Districts of
Paktia Province; and Sar Howza, Sharana, Yusuf Khel,
and Yahya Khel in Paktika Province.
We have disrupted Taliban command-and-controland operational networks across southern Afghanistan
and into the east. We have supported the establishment
of the Afghan Local Police program, in which Afghan
village elders partner with local chiefs of police to field
their own villagers to fight against the Taliban; the size
of the force has grown from a few hundred in mid-2010
to more than 16,000 today. We have helped field well
over 100,000 new members of the Afghan National
Police and Afghan National Army. Provinces now have
their own Afghan quick-reaction forces that can
respond to crises. We have developed Afghan Special
Forces capabilities to conduct night raids and other
forms of direct-action operations with little or no sup-
port from the US. The surge accomplished quite a bit.
Doesnt the countrys tribal
politics mean there will always be
an opening for al Qaeda?
Afghanistans tribal politics are unquestionably com-
plex. There will always be winners and losers, and al
Qaeda and its associates will continue to reach out to
the losers and offer their help. Many Afghan villagersare illiteratebut theyre not stupid. On the contrary,
they are remarkably clever in their ability to find ways
to survive despite incredible poverty and more than
three decades of continuous war. They know that har-
boring al Qaeda means inviting unwanted attention
from the Afghan government and from the US military.
As long as we support the Afghan security forces and
maintain a sufficient presence in the country to be able
to respond rapidly and decisively to indications that al
Qaeda is re-establishing itself, Afghans will remain
extremely loath to welcome such dangerous guests.
Should the US withdraw completely and allow the situ-
ation to collapse into uncontrolled chaos and civil war,
however, the calculus of survival for Afghan villagers
will shift and al Qaeda may come once again to seem
the lesser of many very dangerous evils.
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Cant we manage the terrorist
threat in Afghanistan with counter-
terrorism operations?
Counterterror (CT) operations is a shorthand for the
targeted killing of individual terrorist leaders. Theseoperations can be conducted either with special mis-
sion units or from aerial platforms. In either case, they
require an enormous amount of intelligence accurate
enough to place a bomb or a team at a given location
just at the moment that the terrorist leader is there. The
limitations on Americas ability to generate that kind of
intelligenceand on the number of special mission
units and other platforms that could take action in
response to itare highly classified, but very real.
Counterterrorism operations are among the most com-
plex and demanding of any military operations. They
cannot simply be dialed up at will.They also require facilities in reasonable proximity to
the targets. Most people who talk about a CT option in
Afghanistan describe a very small US footprint there that
would make such facilities available. The US must be
present, because without those facilities, there can be
no CT campaign. But those facilities do not exist in a vac-
uum. The soldiers or platforms operating from them
may be small in number, but they must be housed, fed,
maintained, equipped, supplied, and, above all, pro-
tected. The footprint for each facility, therefore, is not
small. Then there is the problem of getting supplies,
equipment, and people to and from those facilities. Arethe roads secure enough to travel on? If Afghanistan has
returned to chaos and civil war, then the answer to that
question will assuredly be no. In that case, we would
have to fly everything in and out of these bases from
some central location. Its hard to fly a lot of supplies in
helicopters, so wed want fixed-wing airstrips. Runways
are long, making the perimeters even longer. The
perimeters need to be defended against direct attack.
The aircraft, soldiers, and crews need to be protected
against long-range rocket and mortar attack. Quick reac-
tion forces must be on hand in case someone tries to
overrun one of the facilities. Medical facilities must be
available to care for the wounded immediately. By the
time youre done adding up all the real-world require-
ments for a light footprint, youre looking at involving
many thousands of American service members.
Since we decided at the outset of this hypothetical
CT campaign just to let Afghanistan go back to the
state of nature, those thousands of Americans can
expect to be constantly under attack. It is quite likely, in
fact, that they will end up devoting most of their CT
expertise to attacking enemy groups that are directly
threatening them rather than going after largernational priorities. After all, CT forces that are on the
verge of being overrun cant go chasing after al Qaeda
leaders in the hills. Even if one imagines that a targeted
campaign of killing leaders is an effective way to defeat
a terrorist organizationand no historical precedent
exists to support that hypothesisthe challenges of
trying to implement such an effort in a collapsing
Afghanistan are insurmountable.
If you balance the massive cost,
the 11 years, and the lives lost, issecuring Afghanistan really worth it?
The cost of the war must be balanced against both the
benefits of success and the likely costs of failure. The
benefits of success, in this case, are largely preventive
that is, they would prevent the extremely damaging
consequences of failure. One could argue, in truth, that
our problems with Pakistan could be materially eased if
a stable and solid Afghanistan stripped Islamabad of the
ability to export its violent Islamist proxies across the
Durand Line rather than dealing with them itself. Secur-
ing Afghanistan would also help solidify our relationshipwith India, our key strategic partner on the Asian conti-
nent and a vital counterbalance to China. But those pos-
itive outcomes are less important than the need to
prevent al Qaeda and its affiliates from regaining what
had been their capital and crown jewel in the context
of their global resurgence. The likely costs of failure in
Afghanistan are the re-establishment of al Qaeda opera-
tional bases from which more attacks on the US and
our allies will be planned and conducted, the further
strengthening of the global jihadist narrative that
terrorism in the service of violent Islamism is an
inevitably successful means to defeat superpowers, and
the destruction of what little remains of American credi-
bility in the world. Those costs are very highmuch
higher, in fact, than the likely costs of remaining to finish
the job at the force levels likely necessary to do so.
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If we need to be in Afghanistan
because its a terrorist haven, doesnt
that mean we need to be in Yemen?
Somalia? Mali? And maybe even back
in Iraq?Afghanistan is special to our enemies. Osama bin Laden
and most other senior al Qaeda leaders cut their teeth
fighting the Soviets therebeing a mujahid from
Afghanistan continues to be one of the most important
credentials in the global jihadist movement. Bin Laden
formed his first major alliance with Jalaluddin Haqqani
and established his first bases in Haqqanis lands in
Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. When Mullah Omars
Taliban took control of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s,
offering bin Laden hospitality, bin Laden swore alle-
giance to Mullah Omar as commander of the faithful.
Al Qaeda recognized the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,
Omars theocracy, as the only righteous Islamist state
actually to govern a country. Afghanistan has deep sig-
nificance for al Qaeda. Restoring it to them on top of
their gains in Yemen, Mali, Somalia, and elsewhere
would be giving back the crown jewel of jihad to a
resurgent global terrorist network.
Werent the American people
promised that if we finished the job
in Iraq, al Qaeda wouldnt be back?But they are.
Yes. But we did not finish the job. President Obama
decided to withdraw all American forces from Iraq at
the end of 2011 rather than attempt to complete the
arduous process of getting to an agreement with the
Iraqis about extending their presence. He did not even
succeed in gettingor, as far as we can tell, even try to
getan agreement to permit limited numbers of coun-
terterrorism forces to remain in Iraq. As of January 2012,
therefore, a grand total of 150 American uniformed per-
sonnel were in Iraq, all under embassy authority andalmost all engaged in working through contracts. Had
Obama persevered in the negotiations with the serious-
ness and urgency they deserved and retained even a
limited American military presence in Iraq, we might
well have been able to blunt the re-emergence of al
Qaeda in Iraq. The groups regrowth is the direct result
of Obamas retreat.
Give me one simple reason why
we need to be there 11 years after
9/11. Isnt this just a recipe for
endless war?
It takes two to dance, but one to make war. Our enemies
are at war with us and will continue to be even if we
leave Afghanistan. Their ability to wage war will, in fact,
increase materially. Retreating from Afghanistan now is
a recipe for endless war. Worse still, it is a recipe for end-
less war fought on American soil, American embassies,
the hotels in which American tourists stay abroad, Amer-
ican airplanesin short, a war taken directly to our way
of life. Winning in Afghanistan will not end that war by
itself, but it is absolutely a vital prerequisite.
If we havent won yet, when and
how do we end it, get out, and close
the book on Afghanistan?
We began a new strategy in Afghanistan in 2009, recog-
nizing for the first time in this war that we actually facedan insurgency and that we had to pursue a counter-
insurgency strategy to defeat it. President Obama
announced that strategy in December 2009. The last
surge forces arrived in late 2010. Weve had two years
to make a great deal of progress. We need another two
to expand and solidify that progress. This strategy is not
a repetition of anything weve done earlier in Afghani-
stan, and it has an inherent and logical timeline. We end
the war by completing the current strategy on that
timeline, not by following an arbitrary timeline set by
politicians or, more horribly, by the editorial board of
the New York Times.
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For more of AEIs work on Afghanistan, visit
www.aei.org/topic/al-qaeda-and-afghanistan-winning-the-ght