Wanna Fight? Pushing Partners Aside in Afghanistan
Kyle Atwell and Paul Bailey
October 11, 2021
Commentary
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“Remember when we kept saying that we were on ‘Afghan-led’ missions? We were lying every time.” This July 2021 tweet by Robert O’Neill, the Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden, kicked up a Twitter frenzy. It was posted in the same week that the United States announced it had officially left Bagram Air Base, one of the final and most symbolic steps in ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The tweet captures a key disconnect between strategic intent in Afghanistan and tactical implementation, ultimately suggesting that large-footprint troop surges in expeditionary counterinsurgencies are doomed to fail.
Despite senior leaders’ guidance to advise and assist, tactical units across Afghanistan showed a clear preference for unilateral combat operations, often cutting Afghan partners out of mission planning and only grabbing enough Afghans on the way out of the wire to put an Afghan face on thinly veiled U.S. operations. Our respective Marine and Army experiences in-theater and our academic research suggest a prevalent preference to fight throughout Afghanistan, as well as in other theaters. We argue that this preference occurs under conditions in which tactical units possess the capabilities to conduct unilateral operations and working with partner forces is relatively difficult, dangerous, disappointing, and downright contradictory to the warrior ethos in the U.S. military. In other words, when U.S. units can fight alone, they will choose to do so.
To incentivize advising over fighting in future expeditionary counter-insurgency operations, large footprints of ground troops should be avoided. Instead, small and tailored units of advisors with substantive enabling packages should support partner forces without crowding them out from ownership of security operations. Counter-insurgency in Afghanistan resulted in, at best, short-term and highly localized security, and ultimately resulted in a partner force ill-prepared to fill the security vacuum once U.S. forces withdrew. While the failure manifested at the tactical level, the policy implications are strategic in nature and hold important lessons for how to conduct counter-insurgency and partner warfare in the future.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/10/we-wanted-to-fight-incentivizing-advising-over-fighting-in-afghanistan-and-beyond/
