Afghanistan Archive

In a recent World Politics Review article, U.S. Army Col. Gian Gentile declared that COIN is “dead” as the motivating intellectual concept for the U.S. Army. Although combat continues in Afghanistan, to some extent guided by the precepts set forth in the Army’s “Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency,” Gentile argues that the inability of COIN doctrine to produce a definitive outcome in Afghanistan, along with the end of fighting in Iraq, serves to render the school of thought obsolete. Indeed, Gentile argues that the Army should abandon the “search for lessons of strategic value from the past 10 years of counterinsurgency […]

On Sept. 26, deep inside Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, Afghan counternarcotics agents backed by their Australian counterparts seized and destroyed $350 million worth of illegal narcotics. The operation set a record for drug seizures in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Two weeks earlier, the same authorities busted the largest heroin-producing facility found in Afghanistan since 2006, capturing drugs worth $150 million if sold in the U.S. Both operations took millions of dollars from the pockets of insurgents who might otherwise use the money to buy weapons and ultimately mount narco-terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan. But a […]

In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington last Friday, Viktor Ivanov, the director of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN), laid out an ambitious agenda for increased Russia-U.S. cooperation in several counternarcotics areas, characterized by “new thinking” on a variety of issues. Ivanov, who stopped in Washington after attending the fifth meeting of the Counternarcotics Working Group of the U.S.-Russia Presidential Commission in Chicago, proposed creating an integrated command for counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan that would include representatives from the FSKN, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force […]

There is perhaps no better measure of the failure of American strategy over the past decade than the fact that in both Iraq and Afghanistan, tactical objectives have been used to define victory. In particular, both wars have been characterized by an all-encompassing obsession with the methods and tactics of counterinsurgency. To be sure, the tactics of counterinsurgency require political and cultural acumen to build host-nation governments and economies. But understanding the political aspects of counterinsurgency tactics is fundamentally different from understanding core American political objectives and then defining a cost-effective strategy to achieve them. If it is to avoid […]

At a meeting of more than 2,000 tribal elders in Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called for a security pact with the U.S. that respects full Afghan sovereignty. Karzai told delagates at the meeting that the Afghan-U.S. relationship should be one of two independent states.

For the past eight months, Western nations at the United Nations Security Council have unsuccessfully sought to impose sanctions on the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for its violent repression of a pro-reform revolt across the country. The effort follows their success last February in getting the council to impose muscular penalties on the now-defunct government of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Meanwhile, U.N. sanctions are currently in place against North Korea and Iran as a response to these countries’ violations of international nonproliferation obligations. Despite the diverging motivations behind each of these efforts to penalize the targeted countries, […]

The past month has seen an unusual flurry of diplomacy between the U.S. and Pakistan, with relations going from troubled to tense to partially reconciled. The row began when outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Haqqani Network was a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the ISI. The Pakistani government and military responded by denying any such links and strongly cautioned against U.S. unilateral action inside Pakistan. The U.S. then took steps to lower the temperature, dispatching U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman, followed by a high-profile […]

One purpose of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recently completed trip to Afghanistan and several of its neighbors was to secure the growing flow of Western military supplies entering Afghanistan through the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), which involves Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Russia and other former Soviet republics. Another objective was to promote Afghanistan’s economic integration with the rest of Central Asia. Both tasks are difficult and essential, but we must not allow our urgent pursuit of the first to distract us from the long-term necessity of the second. The Central Asian countries have been logical partners to support the U.S.-led […]

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drove an evolution in U.S. military doctrine that saw the emergence and rapid rise to prominence of counterinsurgency and stability operations. With the U.S. preparing to leave Iraq and draw down its mission in Afghanistan, this WPR report examines U.S. military doctrine in — and after — the Long War. Below are links to each article in this special report, which subscribers can read in full. Not a subscriber? Purchase this document for Kindle or as a PDF from Scribd. Or subscribe now. COIN in Iraq Institutionalizing Adaptation: U.S. Counterinsurgency Capabilities Must ImproveBy John […]