Strategic Contradictions of COIN and Counterterrorism in Central Asia

This week I will pick up Woodward’s new book about the strategic deliberations of the Obama administration regarding Afghanistan. I’m very interested in reading the terms sheet written by Obama that dictated American strategy, goals, and objectives. The tension between doing counterinsurgency operations but explictly rejecting a full-scale nation building strategy will be what to look for.

However, I realized last night that Robert Kaplan is indeed right and that geography does matter. Particularly when performing counterinsurgency operations in a landlocked country. This makes logistical capabilities dependent on a neighboring country, and pissing them off would probably be a bad idea.

This is precisely the situation we have in Afghanistan. And for all of the emphasis we have on changing Pakistani behavior to eliminate Taliban safe havens and support, counterterrorism air strikes across the border in Pakistan in pursuit of those same adversaries has severely jeopardized our relationship with them. Suddenly, the Pakistanis want to show how dependent we are on them to logistically supply manpower-intensive counterinsurgency operations. It is really any coincidence that tankers stuck at the border by the Pakistani state were hit by the Taliban?

Ruthlessly pursuing counterterrorism in one country to support counterinsurgency in a neighboring one means we should be willing to tolerate political blowback when our CT ops kill the wrong people. The more dependent we are on the former to supply operations in the latter, the greater the strategic contradiction in pursuing both politics.

Global War Continues…

I remember I said something awhile ago about drone and helicopter strikes in Pakistan as an undeclared war. Here’s their reaction:

Wednesday’s helicopter incursion appeared to have crossed a line for the Pakistanis that “could lead to some very serious consequences,” a senior Pakistani military officer said. The Americans, he said, “underestimate the reaction” to something that “amounts to no more and no less than attacking the Pakistani army.”

This has always been the strategic limitation of airpower counterterrorism, Exum and Kilcullen always warned against it.

The Pakistanis said that after U.S. helicopters “engaged through cannon fire” with the post, the soldiers fired warning shots with their rifles. The helicopters responded with two missiles that destroyed the post, killing three soldiers and wounding the rest.
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Within hours, Pakistan had ordered the nearby border crossing at Torkham closed and NATO supply trucks were idling there, according to transporters stuck at the pass and officials in the region. The pass, which lies north of Peshawar, is the main entry point for U.S. and NATO fuel and supplies transported from the Pakistani port of Karachi over land into Afghanistan.

Our problem is our inability to identify the enemy and thus confuse it with ‘allied’ troops. When insurgents are supported by government forces, we shouldn’t be surprised when we accidently kill the latter while pursuing the former.

*changed the original title because I forgot about Yemen.