Category Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

Afghan Security Forces Deaths Top 45,000 Since 2014

The President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, speaking with CNN’s Farid Zakiria, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, 25 January 2019. [Office of the President, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan]

Last Friday, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani admitted that his country’s security forces had suffered over 45,000 fatalities since he took office in September 2014. This total far exceeds the total of 28,000 killed since 2015 that Ghani had previously announced in November 2018. Ghani’s cryptic comment in Davos did not indicate how the newly revealed total relates to previously released figures, whether it was based on new accounting, a sharp increase in recent casualties, or more forthrightness.

This revised figure casts significant doubt on the validity of analysis based on the previous reporting. Correcting it will be difficult. At the request of the Afghan government in May 2017, the U.S. military has treated security forces attrition and loss data as classified and has withheld it from public release.

If Ghani’s figure is, in fact, accurate, then it reinforces the observation that the course of the conflict is tilting increasingly against the Afghan government.

 

An Administrative Weakness

Another post is response the comments to this blog post:

The Afghan Insurgents

The comment was “…the insurgents are one side of the coin and the other is the credibility of the government we are trying to create in Afghanistan…If the central government is seen as corrupt and self serving then this also inspires the insurgents and may in fact be the decisive factor….”

This immediately brought to mind David Galula’s construct, which was based upon four major points (see pages 210-211 of America’s Modern Wars):

  1. Insurgents need a cause
  2. A police and administrative weakness
  3. A non-hostile geographic environment
  4. Outside support in the middle to late states.

He specifically state that: “the first two are musts. The last is a help that may become a necessity.”

Now, the problem is that we never took the time to measure an “administrative weakness” or even define what it was. Nor did David Galula. Furthermore, there is also probably an “administrative weakness” or two on the guerilla side. If the culture of Iraq/Afghanistan/Vietnam make it difficult to create government structures and armed forces that are highly motivated, unified and not corrupted, well I suspect some of those same problems exist among the guerillas drawn from that same culture. Therefore, to measure this requires some way of defining what these “administrative weaknesses” are, but also quantifying them, and then determining how they affected both (or more) sides. Needless to say, this was not going to be done in the initial phase of our analysis. We were never funded to conduct follow-up analysis.

This is the problem with David Galula’s construct. There is no easy way to measure it or analyze it. Galula offers no definition of what an “administrative weakness” is. If he does not define it, then how do I define it for his “theory?”

One does note that Galula in his description of the Viet Cong in 1963 states that:

The insurgent has really no cause at all: he is exploiting the counterinsurgent’s weaknesses and mistakes….The insurgent’s program is simply: “Throw the rascals out.: If the “rascals” (whoever is in power in Saigon) amend their ways, the insurgents would lose his cause.

As I note on page 48 of my book:

This was a war that eventually resulted in over 2 million deaths and insurgent force in excess of 300,000. As it is, one could infer from Galula’s statement that he felt that the insurgency could be easily defeated since it was based upon “no real cause.”  We believe that this view has been proven incorrect by historical events.

Clearly identifying insurgent cause and administrative weakness was also a challenge for David Galula.

Bernard Fall Quote

We have gotten several interesting comments to this blog post:

The Afghan Insurgents

One comment stated in part that “….I am thinking the road building, school building, and all that has zero impact on winning the people…..”

This reminds me of a Bernard Fall quote related to the Vietnam War. I used it as the introduction to Chapter 14 (page 147) of my book America’s Modern Wars:

Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of anti-malaria sprays. One can’t fight an ideology; one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies. Yet this is done constantly. One side says, “Land reform,” and the other side says, “Better culverts.” One side says, “We are going to kill all of those nasty village chiefs and landlords.” The other side says, “Yes, but look, we want to give you prize pigs to improve your strain.” These arguments just do not match.  Simple but adequate appeals will have to be found sooner or later.

 Bernard Fall, 1967

 

U.S. Army Releases New Iraq War History

On Thursday, the U.S. Army released a long-awaited history of its operational combat experience in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. The study, titled The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 1: Invasion – Insurgency – Civil War, 2003-2006 and The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 2: Surge and Withdrawal, 2007-2011, was published under the auspices of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.

This reflects its unconventional origins. Under normal circumstances, such work would be undertaken by either the U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute (CSI), which is charged with writing quick-turnaround “instant histories,” or the U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH), which writes more deeply researched “official history,” years or decades after the fact.[1] Instead, these volumes were directly commissioned by then-Chief of the Staff of the Army, General Raymond Odierno, who created an Iraq Study Group in 2013 to research and write them. According to Odierno, his intent was “to capture key lessons, insights, and innovations from our more than 8 years of conflict in that country.[I]t was time to conduct an initial examination of the Army’s experiences in the post-9/11 wars, to determine their implications for our future operations, strategy, doctrine, force structure, and institutions.”

CSI had already started writing contemporary histories of the conflict, publishing On Point: The United States Army in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (2004) and On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign (2008), which covered the period from 2003 to January 2005. A projected third volume was advertised, but never published.

Although the Iraq Study Group completed its work in June 2016 and the first volume of the history was scheduled for publication that October, its release was delayed due to concerns within the Army historical community regarding the its perspective and controversial conclusions. After external reviewers deemed the study fair and recommended its publication, claims were lodged after its existence was made public last autumn that the Army was suppressing it to avoid embarrassment. Making clear that the study was not an official history publication, current Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley added his own forward to Odierno’s, and publicly released the two volumes yesterday.

NOTES

[1] For a discussion of the roles and mission of CSI and CMH with regard to history, see W. Shane Story, “Transformation or Troop Strength? Early Accounts of the Invasion of Iraq” Army History, Winter 2006; Richard W. Stewart, “‘Instant’ History and History: A Hierarchy of Needs” Army History, Winter 2006; Jeffrey J. Clarke, “The Care and Feeding of Contemporary History,” Army History, Winter 2006; and Gregory Fontenot, “The U.S. Army and Contemporary Military History,” Army History, Spring 2008.

 

The Afghan Insurgents

Suicide bomber in Baghlan Jadid, April 2009. Photo by William A. Lawrence II

The charts looking at force ratios created by our regression analysis of 83 cases were very much based on insurgent cause, a subject that a lot of counterinsurgency analysts gloss over. The question is whether the insurgency is based upon a central political idea (like nationalism), an overarching idea (an ideology like communism) and a limited developed political thought (a regional or factional insurgency). This very much changes the difficulty of suppressing the insurgency. It also changes the odds of winning. The force levels and sometimes duration of insurgencies were significantly different for these cases. In my book America’s Modern Wars I end up spending three chapters on this subject: Chapter 4: Force Ratios Really Do Matter, Chapter 5: Cause Really is Important and Chapter 6: The Two Together Seem Really Important.

Now, this came up when we were doing our estimate in 2004 of U.S. casualties and the  duration of an insurgency in Iraq (which is in Chapter 1 of my book). In this case we have a country that was maybe 60% Shiite Muslim and an insurgency that was centered around the population of around 20% Sunni Muslim. Was this a regional or factional insurgency? Probably. We built that estimate on only 28 cases (because, you know, research takes time). In those cases that were based upon a central political idea, the insurgents won 75% of the time. In those cases that were based upon a limited political idea, the insurgents did not win in any of those cases. This is a big, and very noticeable difference. It was the one bright spot in my briefings (as people weren’t too excited about my conclusions that we would loose 5,000+ and it would take 10+ years…as that was not what was being promised by our political leaders in 2004).

The challenge is sorting out which applies to Afghanistan. There is no question that when they were fighting the Soviet Union, it was based upon a central political idea (nationalism). The question is, what is this insurgency based upon?

Part of the problem in sorting out what is happening in Afghanistan is that the country’s demographics are very complex. For example 42% of the population is Pashtun, 33% is Tajik, 9% is Hazara (who are usually Shiite Muslims), 9% are Uzbek, 4% Aimek, 3% Trukmen, 2% Baloch and 4% others (source World Factbook, 2013 estimate, courtesy of Wikipedia).

Language is a little better with 80% speaking Dari, which is Persian or Farsi. 47% speak Pashto, the native tongue of Pashtuns. 5% speak English.

The country is usually considered 85-90% Sunni Muslim and 7-15% Shiite Muslim.

A 2018 population estimate for Afghanistan is 31,575,018 (pretty precise for an estimate).

The insurgents tend to also be separated in a bewildering array of groups (as was also the case when they were fighting the Soviet Union). Some of the insurgent groups are:

Taliban: These are the previous rulers of Afghanistan. Was close to Al-Qaeda.

Haqqani Network: Offshoot of the Taliban. Al-Qaeda affiliate.

Fidal Mahaz: Splinter group from the Taliban

IEHCA: Splinter group from the Taliban

HIG: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group, who has been doing this since 1980s. He signed a peace agreement with the Afghan government in 2016.

IMU: Originally an Uzbek movement.

Islamic Jihad Union (IJU): Militant Islamist organization. Split off from IMU. Al-Qaeda affiliate

ETIM: Uyghurs from China.

LeJ: anti-Shiite group

Pakistani Taliban or TTP: Primarily focused on Pakistan

Lel: Primarily focused on Pakistan

ISIL-KP: Islamic state affilliate.

 

This is a quickly cobbled together list. Some with more expertise are welcome to add or modify this list.

Wikipedia does give strengths for some of these groups. Have no idea how accurate they are:

Taliban: 60,000

Haqqani Network: 4,000-15,000

Fidai Mahaz: 8,000

IEHCA: 3,00-3,500

HIG: 1,500-2,200+

al-Qaeda: 50-100

 

So….when I was coding the over 100 cases that we now have in our database, it was relatively easy to determine if an insurgency was based upon a central idea, or an overarching idea or was regional or factional. There was very little debate in most cases.

On the other…..it is a little harder to tell what it should be in this particular case.

Interesting enough, I stumbled across an article last week discussing the same issue: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/taliban-and-changing-nature-pashtun-nationalism-41182

New York Military Affairs Symposium

There is an 37-year old organization called the New York Military Affair Symposium that regular hosts speakers. Their website and speaker schedule is here: http://www.nymas.org/

This Friday (Jan 18), Max Boot will be presenting about his book The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.

I will be presenting on 26 April based upon my book War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat.

The presentations are at the Soldier Sailors Club, 283 Lexington Avenue, New York City at 7 PM.

A Force Ratio Model Applied to Afghanistan

As many people are aware, the one logit regression that we had confidence in from the 83 insurgency cases we tested was a force ratio versus outcome model. This is discussed in the following blog post and in Chapter 6 of my book America’s Modern Wars.

We probably need to keep talking about Afghanistan

The key was that we ended up with two very different curves: one if the insurgency was based upon a central idea (like nationalism) and a lesser curve if the insurgency was based upon limited political concept (a regional or factional insurgency). Now, we never really determined which applied to Afghanistan, because we actually never had a contract to do any work or analysis on Afghanistan. I am hesitant to reach conclusions without some research.

But let us look at the force ratios there now. I estimate that the insurgency has at least 60,000 full-time and part-time insurgents. There may have more than that. But, working backwards from the incident count of 20,000+ a year, and comparing those incident counts with insurgent strengths in past insurgencies, leads me to conclude that it is at least 60,000 insurgents. This process is discussed in depth in Chapter 11 of my book. Let’s work with that figure for a moment.

The counterinsurgent forces consist of supposedly almost 400,000 people. Except…in our model we only counted army and air force, and only counted police only if it was clear that counterinsurgent operations was their primary duty. Therefore our model did not count most police.

Parsing out the data in Wikipedia shows that the Afghan Army and Air Force total around 195,000 active in 2014. The Wikipedia source was this article: https://www.pajhwok.com/en/2015/03/10/mohammadi-asks-troops-stand-united. I have no idea how correct this number is. It might be a little optimistic (see my comments about auditing the police force rolls).

The Afghan National Police (ANP) have 157,000 members in September 2013 (again Wikipedia). I note that the UNAMA report in December 2018 on the audit reduced the ANP payroll from 147,875 to 106,189. But, this is a national police force. It includes uniformed police, border police, a criminal investigation division of 4,148 investigators, etc. Let’s say for convenience that half of them are doing traditional police work and half are doing counterinsurgent work. I have no idea if this is a good or reasonable split. So let’s say 53,000 ANP police involved in the counterinsurgency effort. The Afghan Local Police (ALP) are 19,600 as of February 2013. As they are clearly part of the counterinsurgency effort, I will count them.

The 18,000 ISAF are mostly training, so I am not sure how they should be counted, but we will count them. No sure if we should count the 20,000 contractors, as quite simply, there were not a lot of contractors in our previous 83 cases. The use of private contractors to fight insurgencies is a relatively new approach. For now I will not count them.

So, let’s count counterinsurgent strength at 195,000 + 53,000 ANP + 19,600 ALP + 18,000 ISAF. This gives a counterinsurgent strength of 285,600 compared to an insurgent strength of 60,000. This is a 4.76-to-1 force ratio. This is a very precise number created from some very fuzzy data.

Now, if I look at the curve for an insurgency based upon an limited political concept, and I see that an 4.76-to-1 force ratio means that the counterinsurgent won roughly 86% of the time (see page 65 of my book). This is favorable. But right now, it doesn’t really look like we have been winning in Afghanistan over the last eight years.

On the other hand, if I code this as an insurgency based upon a central idea I see that a 4.76-to-1 force ratio results in the counterinsurgent winning 19% of the time. This is much worse.

So…I have yet to make a determination as to which curve should apply in this case. Perhaps neither do, as Afghanistan is a unique and complex case. Properly analyzing this would require a level-of-effort beyond what I am willing to invest. Keep in mind that our Iraq estimate was funded in 2004 (see Chapter 1 of my book). It was also ignored.

Force Draw Downs

I do discuss force draw downs in my book America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. It is in Chapter 19 called “Withdrawal and War Termination” (pages 237-242). To quote from parts of that chapter:

The missing piece of analysis in both our work and in that of many of the various counterinsurgent theorists is how does one terminate or end these wars, and what is the best way to do so? This is not an insignificant point. We did propose doing exactly such a study in several of our reports, briefings and conversations, but no one expressed a strong interest in examining war termination…..

In our initial look at 28 cases, we found only three cases where the counterinsurgents were able to reduce or choose to significantly reduce force strength during the course of an insurgency. These are Malaya, Northern Ireland and Vietnam. With our expanded database of 83 cases, these are still the only three cases of such.

Let us look at each in turn. The case of Malaya is illustrated below:

The most intense phase of the insurgency was from 1958 to 1952. Peak counterinsurgent deaths were 488 in 1951, with 272 in 1952 and only 95 in 1953. Over the course of 1959 and 1960, there were only three deaths.

When one looks at counterinsurgent force strength over that period, one notes a large decline in strength, but in fact, it is a decline in militia strength. Commonwealth troop strength peaked at 29,656 in 1956, consisting of UK troops, Gurkhas and Australians. It declined to 16,939 in 1960. Basically, even with no combat occurring for two years, the troop strength of the intervening forces (“UK Combat Troops” on the first graph) was reduced by one half and only during last couple of years. The decline is Malayan strength is primarily due to police force declining after 1953 and the “Special Constabulary” declining after 1952 and eventually being reduced to zero. There was also a Malayan Home Guard that was briefly up to 300,000 people, but most of them were never armed and were eventually disbanded.

This is the best case we have of a force draw down, and it was only done to any significance late in the war, where the insurgency was pretty much reduced to 400 or so fighters sitting across the narrow border with Thailand and scattered remnants being policed inside of Malaya.

Northern Ireland is another case in which the degree of activity was very intense early on. For example:

On the other hand, force strength does not draw down much.

In this case the peak counterinsurgent strength was 48,341 in 1972, and the counterinsurgent strength is still 22,691 in 2002. These two cases show the limitation of a draw down.

In the case of Vietnam, there was a four-year-long massive build up, and then four years of equally hasty withdrawal. This is clearly not the way to conduct a war and is discussed in more depth in Chapter Twenty-Two. Vietnam is clearly is not a good example of a successful force drawn down.

Besides these three cases, we do not have any other good examples of a force draw down except that which occurs in the last year of the war, and agreements are reached and the war ended. In general, this strongly indicates that draw downs are not very practical until you have resolved the war.

A basic examination needs to be done concerning how insurgencies end, how withdrawals are conducted, and what the impact of various approaches towards war termination is. This also needs to address long-term outcome, that is, what happened following war termination.

We have nothing particularly unique and insightful to offer in this regard. Therefore, we will avoid the tendency to pontificate generally and leave this discussion for later. Still, we are currently observing with Afghanistan and Iraq two wars where the intervening power is withdrawing or has withdrawn. These are both interesting cases of war termination strategies, although it we do not yet know the outcome in either case.

The bolding was added for this post.

Peacekeeping Institute?

It appears that the Army is looking at shuttering the rather small Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute: https://www.yahoo.com/news/army-push-end-peacekeeping-institute-sparks-wider-debate-100019830.html

Now, I have never had any intersection with this organization, so I have no idea of how effective, productive or useful it is. I gather they are looking at renaming it (because peacekeeping is a bad word?) and cutting it more than 2/3rds. This is minimal savings.

Now, my experience is that DOD, being command driven and mission oriented, tends to forget about missions that are not currently getting “command attention.” I discussed this problem in some depth in my book America’s Modern Wars. We have seen parts of DOD go from ignoring the study of insurgencies before 2001 to recently not being able to properly model conventional combat for training exercises. As outrageous as this last sentence sounds, I can back it up with real world examples, except I really don’t want to embarrass anyone. But let us say, that we have seen multiple examples over the years of DOD being overly focused on the mission de jure at the expense of its other missions. DOD missions range from conventional wars, to counterinsurgencies, to irregular operations, to peacekeeping, nation building, and even border protection. These missions come and go, but they always show back up. It has been the case for over 200 years. The DOD always needs to be ready to conduct all missions. The failures in Iraq, which cost American lives, drives home that point in blood.

U.S. Military Deaths from 2006

Interesting chart from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Source: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/IF10899.pdf

OCO Deaths = Overseas Contingency Operations — meaning mostly Iraq and Afghanistan.

Non-OCO Deaths = means mostly accident, self-inflicted wounds, and illness. There are the almost 1,000 deaths a year that are going to occur in the U.S. military even when at peace. They listed accidents as 4,599 cases, self-inflicted deaths as 3,258 cases and illness/injury as 2,650 cases. Note that OCO operations also include accidents (471), self-inflicted wounded (282) and illness and injury (119). There are also 458 homicides in non-OCO and 41 homicides among the OCO deaths (along with 2,698 killed in action and 874 died of wounds).

It would have been more interesting if they started those charts in 2000 or 2001.

A few other interesting charts from that link:

The chart below is Iraq war deaths from 2006. Total Iraq war deaths since 2003 were over 4,500.

And these are Afghanistan war deaths from 2006. Total Afghanistan war deaths since 2001 add up to over 2,300.

These are, of course, only U.S. DOD deaths. There are also U.S. contractors, NATO allies, other U.S. allies, Iraq and Afghanstani forces, militia, civilians, insurgents, etc. It starts adding up.