Here Comes the Flop: American Misreads and The Taliban's Endgame

Like a weak two-pair in Texas hold’em poker, the United States’ hand in Afghanistan is unlikely to improve with time as government opposition strengthens its grasp.  As Afghanistan’s allies gathered in London recently to assess the capacity of the troubled nation’s newly formed government, the news of recent Taliban gains in southern and northern Afghanistan must surely have been on the minds of conference participants. Three announcements in the past six weeks – the US decision to extend Afghan combat operations for a full year; Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s resumption of night combat operations; and the U.S.-NATO Joint Command decision to classify assessments of the Afghan Government security forces for operational reasons – can all be taken as indications that Afghanistan may be closer to a collapse than many would publicly acknowledge.

The Taliban are still launching attacks in January and the significance of the Taliban’s non-seasonal fighting capability cannot be overstated. The typical ‘Spring-Fight & Winter-Rest’ combat dynamics of Afghanistan was as much a byproduct of harsh climate-imposed realities as it was a factor of the poppy harvest and opium manufacturing logistics. The planting and harvesting of the poppy crop – the aerobic respiration of the organism that is the Quetta Shura Taliban – had previously defined the insurgents’ ability to fund weaponry purchases, tap manpower and launch attacks. The broadening of attacks outside of these typical combat periods suggests that the insurgency is no longer significantly constrained by its financial position and that the central government of Afghanistan may soon face a year-long fighting season. In other words, there soon may be no fighting season at all, there will just be … fighting.

Please do not interpret emotive praise of Afghan Army regulars within the past Department of Defense assessments as predictive evidence that government forces will be able to hold territory over the next two years.  Afghan soldiers and particularly the nation’s police are paying in blood in an admirable defense of sovereign territory, but it will not be enough. If the status quo security dynamics continue, it is my opinion that the Taliban will achieve a kind of victory particular to Afghanistan’s political history. With the exception of Kabul and a few isolated non-Pashtun ethnic enclaves, the Taliban will effectively govern the majority of Afghanistan. Such a reality will force the central government in Kabul into involuntary reconciliation talks (it would be semantically incorrect to call these ‘peace’ talks). Those talks with the Taliban – prompted by regional interlocutors with dubious intent – will validate the Taliban as the greater lawful governing authority, with Kabul holding only titular power in a weak confederacy. If NATO personnel exist in any capacity in Afghanistan in 2016 or beyond, the Taliban would likely use its newfound political influence in Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga to expel these remaining forces by suspending the recently signed Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) through the agreement’s existing legal channels.

Aside from the reference to the Taliban’s all-season combat capability, I find strong evidence for the sustained battlefield superiority of the numerically inferior, but qualitatively superior, Taliban in relation to the Afghan National Army (ANA). I will not reiterate what both Larry Goodson and Thomas Johnson writing in the US Army War College Journal have observed or repeat Brookings’ January 2014 assessment written by Vanda Felbab-Brown regarding the insufficiency of Afghanistan security forces to defend territory without the support of International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF). I will state that from personal experience supporting ANA capacity development that I agree with those assessments. I believe that ISAF forces have imbued Afghan security forces with all of the coalition’s inherent weaknesses –  vulnerability to asymmetric attack, long logistical footprints and a reliance on air and artillery fire support in combat operations. However, these same Afghan forces possess none of the technological prowess that permitted ISAF forces to support advanced targeting operations to remove the Taliban’s most effective combat leaders. This is not a criticism of US or NATO capabilities but a criticism of ascertaining what is and is not possible in a few years’ time. We have repeated King Saul’s mistake and have given our David cumbersome, over-sized armor before the duel, neglecting the more appropriate sling and stone.

Misreads and Meta-Data

Even if policy makers and readers are inclined to assess the strategic situation as more favorable for Kabul than this author assesses, it would behoove those in positions of authority to dispel any sense of comfort they may derive from measuring Taliban activity over the past year, in which ‘enemy-initiated activity’ decreased by 27 percent. More than a one-quarter decline in violence sounds like unambiguous security progress. Reproduced from the October 2014 report, year-over-year, enemy-initiated activity appears as such in Table 1. Note that this activity is likely a composite of Taliban, Haqqani Network, the Pakistani Taliban in its current incarnation and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin attacks:

[Table 1]

2014 Afghanistan Security Metrics

Enemy Initiated Attacks

High-Profile Attacks

Direct Fire

IED/Mine Explosions

Complex Coordinated Attacks

Indirect Fire Attacks

Percentage Year-on-Year Change

-27%

16%

-23%

-34%

-31%

-37%

I have changed the font color to emphasize a particular narrative and in full knowledge of how the optics of such statistics are typically briefed ‘up’ the chain of command. Reliance on the above statistics at the strategic level could lead a US or NATO policy-maker to conclude that with the exception of high-profile attacks such as car bombs in the capital, that nation-wide violence is declining, and by inference, that human security is improving. How can these statistics be reconciled with a wash of reporting that suggests the Taliban are increasingly taking and holding territory? In recent months, the insurgency’s combat characteristics have demonstrated atypical seasonality and size; committing fighters in larger numbers and during colder periods of the year, periods typically reserved for recuperation and rearmament. Reports that the Taliban have captured territory in Northern Afghanistan far from the region where the Durrani-Pashtun (from which the Taliban draws the majority of its personnel) traditionally have had influence suggests these gains are not just a fleeting part of a pre-Ramadan offensive initiated in June 2014. Rather they are likely a part of something more enduring. 

The main metric for assessing internal stability in a conflict can be patently misleading.  Proving this requires only a quick examination of how attacks are graphically depicted. A simple schematic that tracks the number of insurgent attacks on one axis and the scope of friendly force influence on the other axis tends to generate the shape of an arc (Chart 1). An arc is created because the pattern of insurgent attacks is symmetrical in nature.  When counterinsurgency forces exercise little control over a region, there are few attacks reported both due to sample bias (you can’t record what you don’t see) and because insurgents have no need to take action where they already exercise authority or operate untrammelled. As friendly and enemy forces come into direct contact with one another during the course of counterinsurgency (or insurgency) operations, hostile activity reporting must increase. If counterinsurgency forces win influence and secure cooperation with the majority of the population, violence subsides. And here is why year-on-year, enemy-initiated attacks can be so misleading: The enemy-initiated attack report functions much like a pulse monitor that flat lines when the medical patient is dead, but also flat lines when the patient is in robust health.  As a logical consequence of this approach, if the Taliban et al gain influence over more of the nation’s 400 or so districts, the scope for reporting violent acts must decrease. As the central government governs less, through the cumulative loss of traffic checkpoints, district police centers and offensive patrols, less data is remitted back to the center. Alone, the reported 27 percent annual decrease in enemy-initiated attacks leads an observer completely unable to determine which ‘end’ of the arc the measurement is being taken from. Is it the end that favors Kabul, or the end that favors the Taliban? The use of enemy-initiated attack measurements would be akin to a store owner trying to track the volume of ‘shoplifting events’ each month; the number can reach zero because the store’s security is impeccable, but the number can also reach zero because there is nothing left to steal.

The Right Call

Now surely a shopkeeper knows the difference between a well-stocked store and a looted franchise, but do defense officials know the difference between a stabilizing Afghanistan and one moving toward collapse?  American policy-makers and high-ranking officers have been hooked on bad data before; notably from 1965 to1968 when the rate of infiltration from North Vietnamese Army (NVA) forces was coupled with the infamous body count totals to establish enemy attrition goals. U.S. intelligence analysts and operational planners analyzed these figures in order to offer a clear measure of security progress in the Republic of South Vietnam. As documented by James Wirtz of the Naval Postgraduate School in The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War, General Westmoreland’s preoccupation with achieving an attrition equilibrium contributed to an organizational bias within Westmoreland’s staff that discounted the possibility of a major enemy offensive initiated during the Vietnamese holiday of Tet in 1968. A reliance on certain metrics similar to the body count equilibrium example may be hampering policy-makers’ ability to understand a genuine strategic shift of power in Afghanistan. If you are still not convinced that bad metrics persist in part because of their simplicity and ability to play towards the interests of optimistically-inclined listeners, I would encourage you to review an activity that American’s are seriously interested in, such as football. In sport, time of possession is both a popular metric cited by sports broadcasters, and is also one that is completely useless in predicting competitive outcomes. For skeptics of the war-as-gridiron cliché, the fallacy of using time of possession statistics holds true as well in Major League Soccer.

At an operational and tactical level the, U.S. Army does acknowledge the potential fallacy of conflating decreasing insurgent attacks as a positive security development. In the most recent revision of the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24), now relabeled as Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies, some attention is given to misleading metrics. However, the specific observation about enemy-initiated attacks is not included as one of the eight logical fallacies listed in the field manual.  Enemy-initiated attacks, which are generally included in reports of significant activity (SIGACTS), can be a valuable reporting metric when disaggregated at a tactical level. Lower-echelon units should be aware of this statistic and should report figures upward. Noticing changes in enemy activity can help counterinsurgency forces adopt tactic-specific force protection measures to better protect themselves and the human population with whom they operate. However, above the tactical level this metric is essentially useless. There are no simple metrics that will supplement the complex human-terrain assessments required to understand the scope of insurgent influence amongst Afghanistan’s disparate clans and ethnicities. As Afghan-sourced reporting increases as a proportion of total reported data, the temptation for US policy makers to latch on to a simple group of metrics will grow. That temptation will be especially strong in the mind of combat-fatigued leaders when green-hued numbers seem to deliver positive news and any glad tidings exculpates those same leaders from having to recognize a crisis.

The past seven decades seem full of geopolitical shocks and rapid non-linear change as viewed from an American leader’s perspective; President Truman and the collapse of the Chiang Kai-Shek’s Republic of China in 1949; President Ford and the fall of the Republic of South Vietnam in 1975; and President Carter and the collapse of the Shah’s government in Iran in 1979 to name a few instances. President Obama and the Republic of Iraq might have been added to that list in 2014 if not for drastic action and the reintroduction of multinational forces to the region. Those events, still ongoing in Iraq, may have inoculated Western leaders from wishful thinking regarding Afghanistan, but the tone of official publications regarding the overall security situation in Afghanistan seems unjustifiably upbeat. More so than an accurate assessment of enemy force capabilities, a clear-eyed appraisal of Kabul’s true capacity to exercise sovereignty over its 32 million people is critical if 14 years of NATO-led counterinsurgency operations are to confer renewable security dividends to the people of Afghanistan. Let’s do the insurgency one less favor and dispense with enemy-initiated attacks as a macro-level reporting tool. It will only mislead us.

Sale Lilly is a former naval threat analyst and naval officer who served alongside NATO units in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Afghanistan. He is currently an operations consultant at Ward Circle Strategies.