Winning Without Weapons

The only hope for establishing peace in Afghanistan lies in a kinder, gentler form of counter in surgency.

ON A HIGHWAY NORTH OF KABUL LAST SUMMER AN AMERICAN SOLDIER aimed a machine gun at my car from the turret of his armored Humvee. In the split second for which our eyes locked I had a revelation: To a man with a weapon, everything looks like a threat

I served as an infantry officer in Afghanistan in 2001-02 and in Iraq in 2003, but this was my first time on the other end of an American machine gun. It's not something I'll forget. It's not the sort of thing ordinary Afghans forget, either—heavyhanded military tactics can alienate the people we're trying to help while playing into the hands of the people we're trying to defeat.

Welcome to the paradoxical world of counter in surgency warfare, where money is more decisive than bullets, protecting our own forces undermines the U.S. mission, heavy firepower is counterproductive and winning battles guarantees nothing.

I was invited to Afghanistan by the U.S. Army to help teach these principles at the Afghanistan Counter in surgency Academy, a tiny collection of huts and tents on Kabul's dusty southern outskirts. Since May motley classes of several dozen Afghan army officers, Afghan policemen, NATO officers, American officers and civilians have been learning and living side by side there for a week at a time, united in trying to bring good governance, prosperity and security to Afghanistan. The curriculum is based on the Army and Marine Corps' new counter in surgency doctrine, released last December Classes revolve around four paradoxes of counter in surgency.

The first is that the best weapons don't shoot. Counter in surgents must excel at finding creative, nonmilitary solutions to military problems. Take roads as an example. When U.N. teams begin building new stretches of road in volatile Afghan provinces such as Zabul and Kandahar, insurgents inevitably attack the workers. As the projects progress and villagers begin to see the benefits of having paved access to markets and health care, the Taliban attacks become less frequent. New highways then extend the reach of the Karzai administration into previously inaccessible areas, making a continuous Afghan police presence possible and helping lower the overall level of violence.

Reconstruction funds can shape the battlefield as surely as bombs, but such methods are still not used widely enough in Afghanistan. After spending more than $14 billion in aid to the country since 2001, the United States began spending another $10 billion in August. Some 80 percent of it is earmarked for security spending, leaving only about 20 percent for reconstruction projects and initiatives to foster good governance.

The second pillar of the academy's curriculum is that the more you protect your forces, the less safe you may be. To be effective, troops, diplomats and civilian aid workers need to get out among the people. Nearly every American I saw in Kabul was behind high walls or racing through the streets in armored convoys.

Afghanistan isn't Iraq. Tourists travel through much of the country in relative safety, glass office towers are sprouting up in Kabul, and Coca-Cola recently opened a bottling plant there. I drove through the capital in a dirty green Toyota, wearing civilian clothes and stopping to shop in bazaars, eat in restaurants and visit businesses. In two weeks I saw more of Kabul than many military officers and diplomats do in a year.

After a State Department official gave a presentation at the academy he and I climbed a nearby hill to explore the ruins of an old palace. He was only nine days from the end of his 12-month tour, and our walk was the first time he'd ever been allowed to get out and explore the city.

Of course, mingling with the population means exposing ourselves to attacks, and commanders have an obligation to safeguard their troops. They have an even greater responsibility to accomplish their mission. When we retreat behind body armor and concrete barriers, it becomes impossible to understand the society we claim to defend and we don't develop the cultural understanding, relationships and intelligence we need to win. Accepting the greater tactical risk of reaching out to Afghans reduces the strategic risk that the Taliban will return to power.

The third paradox hammered home at the academy is that the more force you use, the less effective you may be. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are difficult to tally, but 300 to 500 noncombatants have probably been killed already this year, mostly in U.S. and coalition air strikes. Killing civilians, even in error, is not only a serious moral transgression but also a lethal strategic misstep. Wayward U.S. strikes have seriously undermined the very legitimacy of the Karzai government and made too many Afghans resent coalition forces. If Afghans lose patience with the coalition presence those forces will be run out of the country, as were the British and the Soviets before them.

One of my many gratifying moments at the academy came at the start of a class on targeting. I asked the students to list the top three targets they would aim for if they were leading forces in Zabul province, a Taliban stronghold. A U.S. officer rattled off the names of three senior Taliban leaders to be captured or killed. An Afghan officer responded, "First we must target the local councils to see how we can best help them. Then we must target the local mullahs to find out their needs and let them know we respect their authority." Exactly. In counter in surgency warfare targeting is more about whom you bring in than whom you take out.

The academy's final lesson is that tactical success in a vacuum guarantees nothing Just as it did in Vietnam, the U.S. military could win every battle and still lose the war—largely because our primary enemies in Afghanistan still have a sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan. Rather than make a suicidal stand against the allied forces invading Afghanistan after September 11,2001, many Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters melted away to create a parallel "Talibanistan" in the lawless tribal areas of western Pakistan, a fact to which NATO supreme commander Gen. James Jones testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and that Karzai reiterated during his August visit to Camp David.

Chasing terrorists and the Taliban around Afghanistan leads to little lasting progress as long as they can slip across the border to rest and regroup. Since 2001 the United States has tolerated this quiet reconstitution of the Taliban in Pakistan as long as Islamabad granted us basing and overflight rights, tepidly pursued al-Qaeda's leadership and cracked down on A.Q. Khan's nuclear-proliferation network. The Durand Line, which separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, is a mapmaker's fantasy. Without political reform, economic development and military operations on both sides of the border, we can do little more than put a finger in the dike that's keeping radicalism and instability in Pakistan from spilling back into Afghanistan.

On the last afternoon of the course I asked my students to define victory in Afghanistan. Wed talked about this earlier in the week, and most of their answers had focused on militarily defeating the Taliban or killing Osama bin Laden. Now the Afghan officers took the lead in a spirited discussion with their U.S. and NATO classmates. Finally the group agreed on this: "Victory is achieved when the people of Afghanistan consent to the legitimacy of their government and stop actively and passively supporting the insurgency."

Winning that consent will require deescalating military force, boosting the capacities of the Karzai government, accelerating reconstruction and getting real with Pakistan. It won't be easy or comfortable, but the alternative, which I glimpsed while staring down the barrel of that machine gun, is our nation going zero for two in its first wars of the new century.

Reconstruction funds can shape the battlefield as surely as bombs.

NATHANIEL FICK is the author of One Bullet Away. The Making of a Marine Officer. He will graduate in May from theHarvard Business School and the KennedySchool of Government. This piece is adaptedfrom a Washington Post article.