Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Steve Metz of the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania about the psychology of counter-insurgency and its applications in Afghanistan.
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LISA MULLINS: You just heard that report by Ian Pannell, the final point of the piece being that if the war in Afghanistan is about power then the United States would have won already. In your own experience and in your talks with military officials there and soldiers there, do you believe the same thing?
STEVE METZ: Absolutely, yeah. What insurgency is always about is the psychological battle. It's not really about strength in the terms of conventional war. As the officer pointed out there, Afghanistan is no contest in conventional terms. But in the psychological battlefield and the armed theater, the two sides are unfortunately closer to being equal.
MULLINS: Well, if that's the case, then why is the Obama Administration sending 21,000 more American troops to Afghanistan?
METZ: Well, I think the reporter really hit on it at the end there because what the history of insurgency tells us is that counterinsurgents succeed when they're able to separate insurgence from the population. Insurgents rely on the local population for intelligence, for camouflage, for psychological actions and so forth. So what success takes is not simply defeating the insurgents on the battlefield but finding a way to keep them away from the local population, and that takes a lot of what soldier's refer to as "boots on the ground." Insurgency and counterinsurgency is not so much military strength that matters, as much as military, and security, and presence. You need to have a 24-hour presence in places to keep the insurgents away.
MULLINS: And what about the co-optability of insurgents because we know that played a large role in Iraq in actually paying off some of the insurgents to join the other side, in this case being the Americans, and in some cases those insurgents would do it instantly and then fight against their former colleagues the next day. Can that work in Afghanistan? Has that worked?
METZ: That's really an open question. I mean, if you look at the history of counterinsurgency, very often one of the keys to success was to be able to divide and conquer the insurgents, to convince one part of them to turn against the other. That happened in Iraq because the Anbar Tribes, the local Iraqi insurgents in many cases, had grown tired of the Al-Qaeda presence. What remains to be seen is whether in Afghanistan the Taliban has really grown tired of the Al-Qaeda presence, the outside presence or not. And I really don't know the answer to that, but if they haven't, it'll be very difficult to replicate the Iraq success there.
MULLINS: Steve, as one final question for the you, the New York Times writer, Dexter Filkins has written that war in Pakistan and Afghanistan is unlike war anywhere else in the world. I wonder if you agree with that and if so, why?
METZ: Well, yeah, I thought that Filkins' book, “Forever War,†was probably the best book I've read for several years. I think it's true in Afghanistan and Pakistan because of the tribal culture and social systems there. It's certainly different because of the intense intermixing of the politics of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda with the religious dimension of it and because of the number of actors that are involved. So, it certainly is unique but then almost all internal conflicts are unique in one way or the other.
MULLINS: Just one more question about that then. Those differences, what do they mandate of the U.S. Military and the U.S. Government in terms of diplomacy?
METZ: Well, you know, I think that one of the most important things there is convincing the Pakistani government to focus its, if not full effort, at least the majority of its effort on this particular conflict. I mean, as we all know, part of the problem for the past five years has been that the Pakistani government saw the Taliban and extremism within its borders as less of a threat than the external one from India. I mean, there certainly are signs just within the past few weeks that the government in Islamabad is kind of getting serious about it. But I've long believed that until the Pakistani government exerts control over all of its territory then the insurgency in Afghanistan is never going to end.
MULLINS: All right, thank you for speaking with us. Steve Metz of the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. Thanks.
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