School of War - Ep 73: Carter Malkasian on Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency (New Makers of Modern Strategy #3)

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Carter Malkasian, chair of the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and contributor to New Makers of Modern Strategy, joins the show to talk about counterterrorism and counterinsurgency since 9/11. ▪️ Times      •    01:39 Introduction      •    02:01 From academia to Garmsir      •    03:48 Center for Naval Analysis      •    05:45 Two faces of the same coin     •    08:51 Counterterrorism vs counterinsurgency      •    13:00 McChrystal and Petraeus     •    16:29 Types of insurgency      •    20:34 The Sunni Awakening and the Surge     •    24:32 Two different wars     •    30:51 Gilding the lily      •    37:46 The Obama Administration     •    41:42 ISIS     •    44:45 Withdrawal deadline Follow along on Instagram

In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, the U.S. military adopted two related but different strategies for attacking our enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world. The first, counterterrorism, was a playbook of methods and associated special units that we were already using before the attacks, but which took on new significance and harnessed vastly expanded resources. The other, counter-insurgency, was a playbook dating from the old days of fighting small wars against communists' insurgents. It needed dusting off, took on new dimensions, and became extremely controversial. Today, as part of our new makers of modern strategy series, we'll talk about the connections and discontinuities between these two approaches to the war

on terror. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today by Carter Malkasian, who's the author of the American War in Afghanistan, a history. He's the chair of the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, and he is a contributor of the chapter on counterinsurgency and counterterror strategies after 9-11 to the new edition of New Makers of Modern Strategy. Carter, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you, Aaron. Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate it. And so we, you know, we talk to a lot of scholars and historians and writers on this show, and you, of course, are one of those

things. But you are also a practitioner. You served abroad. You've participated in some of the things that you've now written about in this new volume. So maybe we should start. Could you just tell us a bit about yourself in your career and how you found yourself in a place like Garmshire, Afghanistan, and actually working on counterinsurgency strategy as a practitioner? So I first, I think my original intention was to become a historian in academia. And I went and got my doctorate in that.

And from doing that, I went and started working at a think tank called the Center for naval analysis. And that was right when the wars had begun. And having studied this kind of stuff, I felt like I should become a little bit involved in seeing what was happening and learning about it. And so that led me first to Iraq and later on led me to Afghanistan and eventually to Garmseer in Southern and Southern Helmand, where I spent two years. And I, like my education, I had unexpected benefits from it because I didn't

study counterinsurgency in depth when I was getting my PhD. And I wasn't trying to study it. But my doctoral supervisor, Professor Robert O'Neill, he had been the intelligence officer of the 5th Royal Australian Regiment, 5th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, in Vietnam. And he had spent a year in Vietnam. And so he had this intense understanding of counterinsurgents. And when I started to do my doctoral research, he insisted that I and the rest of the students understand about guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency and have some background in it. And that became this endless source of information for me in background, whether I was in Iraq or Afghanistan or other places later on.

And what were you actually doing when you were in Iraq and in Afghanistan? You know, what were the sort of jobs you had in your day to day? So in Iraq, I was working with the first Marine Expeditionary Force. I was a field analyst there from a think tank called the Center for Naval Analysis, CNA. And there, the generals there would have me looking at kind of the operational problems, usually related to guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, that they were experiencing. So I was able to analyze part, I was around and able to analyze parts of the First Battle of Fallujah. I was able to see how the Iraqi army was being stood up and go and look at that.

They'd sometimes send me to various places throughout the province to go get information, understand what was happening, and try to explain to them things that were working or what working or what I thought was working and not working. I mean, you know from being a Marine that really things differ from place to place. And one thing that works one place may not work somewhere else. Yeah. So I got a lot of good background there. And then after that, I kind of enjoyed that work so much that I didn't want to analyze anymore.

I wanted to be a part of it and, you know, trying to make decisions and make a difference. And that's what eventually got me to Garmseer, where I was working as the State Department's political officer in the department, in the district, and eventually becoming the head of the district support team there in Garmes here. Right. Well, one thing I want to drive towards over the course of our conversation, you say some things work in some places, not in others. And that can be, as we both know, you know, at the district level or maybe even the

sub-district level. It could also be at the, you know, the geopolitical level. And I do want to drive towards, you know, the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, which has been a theme of this show, actually, with different conversations we've had and why some things that seem to work in Iraq faced much stiffer headwinds in Afghanistan. But we'll come to that. Just taking your chapter as a starting point, it's about coin, but it's also about counterterror. Why address both in the same piece of writing?

They both have as, so thinking about it in terms of makers of modern strategy, this kind of textbook for understanding strategy, both counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency are trying to address a similar problem of how you deal with adversaries you don't want to fight you face to face, who may be intermixed between the people, who are going to try to address. various non-conventional means of attacking you. These are both kind of two different ways to handle the problem. And counterinsurgency has a little bit of a longer history and legacy, going back to colonial wars, then to wars of decolonization in the early Cold War, then through Malaya, through Vietnam. Counterterrorism is somewhat newer. Its origins come from some of those techniques and those kinds.

conflicts. Like you think about the Phoenix program in Vietnam or some of the things with the French were doing in Algeria and the kind of network analysis they were doing, there's some counterterrorism roots there. Counterterrorism also starts to rise up in kind of the work that was done in the 70s and 80s on hostage rescue. But overall counterinsurgency is a little bit, counterterrorism is a little bit newer. And how you use counterterrorism to, the different techniques to use counterterrorism effectively hadn't really been proven before 2001. It's through the conflict that we see these techniques develop and become more refined.

And in this, you also see counterinsurgency and counterterrorism really starting to weave together, such that by the end of it, the two or one, although I would say with the techniques of counterterrorism, having a slight dominance over the techniques of counterinsurgency. Can I, I want to make a kind of blunt observation that lacks all nuance and then you can add back in the nuance and tell me where I'm going wrong with it. But this is a thought that occurred to me reading your essay, which is very thought provoking and incredibly efficient summary of a vast body of events and, you know, successes and failures of the last 20 years. But, you know, there's there's a way to understand counterinsurgency and counterterrorism together where counterinsurgency with its focus on protecting the population. is almost more defensive in character, and counterterror is more offensive in character, assuming, of course, that the insurgents and the terrorists are roughly the same people. To what extent is that fair? To what extent is that going to fall apart?

It's another way of asking the question, like, how do these two things go together? I think that's an excellent point. Counterinsurgency tries to make the effort to protect the population. to place forces in an area or in an area that will prevent those villagers from being attacked. And we can go in a little bit later, if you like, in terms of what it really means to protect the population. But there's this idea that you should be stopping the insurgents from harming the mass of the population. Counterterrorism on its own doesn't really have that aspect of it. counterterrorism is more focused on striking the insurgent leadership or even lower level

fighters who may be trying to lay IEDs or something like that. But it's more focused on gaining the ISR to find the adversary, using the ISR to fix them, sending in the air strike or the strike team to take it, take them out, gathering intelligence and information after that, and then repeating the process over again. And there's some different ways to refine that process if you want to be doing it rapidly, or if you wanted to do it slowly in a very, very targeted and careful sense, kind of the way they went after Osama bin Laden. But you're right that it's more offensive. The two become blurred over time because a lot of the counterterrorist activities that we'd be going that we'd be using and say after 2012, counterinsurgency, the United States ceases to

use that word. And the United States basically says we're not going to follow that. But nevertheless, the activities that were going on, which were very, very counterterrorism focused, would still have aspects of counter-inservancy. So you'd still have the local forces protecting the population, and we might have some people advising them. And like, theoretically, we could say, okay, was that just counter-insurgency? Was that a combination of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency? But all that gets well too theoretical.

I think what I think the more important point is you can have counterterrorism happening with some blurring of what is also protecting the population. Now, similarly, as you know, counterinsurgency could have a lot of blurring too, because in Iraq and Afghanistan, we never had purely counterinsurgency happening or purely counterterrorism. At the height of the counterinsurgency campaign, there was a whole lot of counterterrorism targeting going on. And as you know, there was no battalion out there that didn't have its list of targets that it was trying to go after and trying to plan its own raids and activities. So you can't really say that one is a entirely offensive or not necessarily defensive because it blurs. But I think you are right and you

can kind of draw this general theme for each of them. A brief anecdote and then we can get back to business. But I, you know, the Marine Corps famously can make anything not fun, you know, so I think you sleep out slide and shoot guns for a living sounds awesome. It turns out Quantico or, you know, Paris Island or wherever it's actually not as much fun as you think it's going to be. But there, there we were. There I was in Southern Marja in 2010. We got a call that there is a high value target about 1,500 meters away from my position. And that night, there's going to be a special operations raid on this site. And it is my job to go out and secure the perimeter.

And I think this is awesome. This is so cool. I'm going to go see some, you know, dev group, CAG. I'm going to see some high-end stuff tonight. This could be Osama bin Laden for all I know. I don't know. So as the evening goes on, it becomes progressively clearer and clearer and clearer that the reality is actually a lot less interesting than the scenario I just laid out.

And in fact, the Ranger platoon from Camp Dwyer is about to fly in and pick up some guy who no one could describe to me why this guy is that important in this house. And I furiously call up my battalion and insist that at a fraction of the cost to the taxpayers, my Marines can walk across these fields right now and arrest anyone in that house you want arrested. We can do it. And this suggestion was denied. The raid also kept getting pushed back further and further.

It's like four in the morning. And these guys fly in from, you know, 20 kilometers away and pick up some guy and break some stuff in the house and off they go. But in any event, I hear you. So can we talk, let's let's talk about you identify these two Americans as pivotal figures in the development of counterterror and counterinsurgency over the last 20 years, Stan McChrystal and I thought we might talk about them for a minute and maybe start with McChrystal. What was his role in the development of the American way of counterterror operations? So he comes into Iraq and he sees that operations are going on and there's efforts to go and target al-Qaeda in Iraq in particular, Zarkawi. But he sees that the effort isn't as effective or as efficient as it should be. So he notes that we have a lot of stovepipes, that we have different organizations all doing their own thing, different organizations all trying to do targeting, not being coordinated.

Plus, you have different supporting organizations, different intelligence organizations, on different organizations that might be focused on things like threat financing, that all have some information, some part of the puzzle, but everyone is doing their own thing. So he pulls that together to try to work with all those groups so that you could pool information and pool effort to better focus on what you're doing. Now, with the actual units that are going out and conducting strikes, that's not as hard. as bringing together all the intelligence organizations, getting any liaisons on his staff,

so that he can create his own network. And he was very fond of saying it takes a network to defeat a network because the terrorists are networks. So he's creating his own network that's going to counter that. He also had a different philosophy about how you, the tempo of the targeting, then instead of carefully studying every piece of intelligence and every lead and then waiting to strike,

his philosophy was, no, go and go into the target. strike a lot. Strike as soon as you can because once you strike, you get more information. And as you get more information, then you can then go after the next target. And you should do it quickly because you don't want the next target to flee. And so he then sets up that kind of operational tempo there. This hadn't been formally established. And it was so effective in going after Zarkawi and then also taking apart some of the Shia-Iranian-backed networks in like Baghdad, that then that method had a great deal of credibility and was effectively repeat it was it was repeated in fdana send whether we say it's effective or not is a different question but was

repeatedly later on so that's why he becomes this this pivotal figure there on david petraeus is also a pivotal figure now counter assuracy like i said had a much longer lineage and had lessons that had existed previously. But Trace knew some of those because of his education. And he was informed by a broad number of officers and academics who also, like, added to the knowledge base there, you'll be familiar with names like David and Kilcullin or John Noggle. And so he looked at the operations that were going on. He said, these operations don't fit with how counterinsertion, what the lessons of counterinsurgency have been. And he starts to create the new doctrine. The other thing that's important about him here is his energy and his determination to create the new doctrine, to push through bureaucratic obstacles, to create the field manual, to argue against those who are saying you can't do that, should all be focused purely on killing, and then to go to Iraq and start to spread word of it, to implement it, to make sure units on the ground were actually doing it.

And that, of course, leads to the – that is part of the Iraq surge and the success that occurred in the Iraq surge. Now, the fact that Iraq was successful helps this part of Iraq was successful, helps legitimize both McChrystal's concept of counterterrorism and Petraeus' concept of counterinsurgency. So again, we'll come back to this Iraq-Afghanistan distinction in a second because I think it's sort of at the center of understanding the period. But just to step back for a second on counterinsurgency in particular, you know, as you point out, there's this rich literature, which in turn stems from this rich experience of, you know, essentially Western military. is fighting in a, you know, colonial, post-colonial environment and often fighting Marxist-inspired movements, right? And I think that's where the literature really sort of the original, the foundational literature frames itself. Is there, is there a way in which fighting insurgencies in an Islamic extremist context is different from fighting insurgencies that stem from

sort of Marxist thought? Or is there more, so much continuity? that the differences are essentially not that important. So some people have drawn, some people have been able to draw some similarities between the two. But I, I, so similarities like the Marxist insurgencies tended to have fairly strong command and control and cohesion across the movement. And some people will say, well, the Taliban,

I mean, I would say the Taliban similarly have strong cohesion. Some people will say some of these Islamic incurgencies also have this kind of cohesion. that could be an explanation for their effectiveness. I guess I'm uncomfortable making too many comparisons between the two, as a historian, but I would say that there are certain things that are worth thinking about when it comes to an Islamic insurgency. And I'm not certain how much these are 100% different from a Marxist insurgency. But the kinds of things I think about when I look at a Islamic insurgency is, well, first of all,

Are they as cohesive as other insurgencies? And on the one hand, I might say, oh, they are. Look at how cohesive the Taliban were. On the other hand, I might say, I'm not sure about that. In some places, tribal divisions end up fragmenting the Islamic insurgency. Another way to put it is that the notions and codes of Islam were not legitimated enough or enforced enough in certain insurgencies to overcome the tribal divisions, is a more kind of academic way, I might say it.

But so you might slick it, well, the Taliban were cohesive, but the Iraqi insurgency was less cohesive. You might say the AQI was cohesive, but all those other resistance groups that were more tribally oriented were not so cohesive. You might look at the TTP in Pakistan or the Pakistani Taliban. And note, they have a, they're very fragment. So you see some differences there. The other thing that I would point to that struck me, of course, in Afghanistan is

the degree of motivation and inspiration, the Taliban were able to garner by the fact they were fighting an occupier. And by the fact they were fighting an occupier in an occupier who was not Islamic in an Islamic country. And they were able to motivate their forces, I believe, to do a lot because of that. Now, is that different from a Marxist insurgency? Well, some I would say yes but I mean were the north Vietnamese and the Vietam motivated absolutely they were were they motivated partly because of U.S. occupation there's going to be a lot of debate on this point but were they motivated from U.S. occupation yes they were motivated partly by that so you might see you can see some similarities that might exist there too but I don't know hopefully

that explores the question right yeah no I appreciate it so let's talk about the Sunni awakening and the surge in Iraq which you you outline in the chapter essentially is a you know a successful enterprise or related couple of enterprises. And I think I didn't serve there, but I think I agree with that based on everything I've read and everyone I've spoken to. You know, what happened later in Iraq sort of downstream of political and strategic decisions at the very highest level, but that the effort to quell the insurgency, you know, 2007 into 2008 was, was broadly successful. What are the ingredients of that success? What was the awakening? Just talk us through it. So the tribal awakening that started at Anbar was initially a small group of tribes who decided to fight Al-Qaeda.

There's lots of debate as to exactly why they decided to fight Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda, some people say it was because of the brutality of Al-Qaeda, and that caused them to rise up. There's something to that, but it was also because al-Qaeda was sitting on their smuggling routes. Al-Qaeda was crowding out the ways that they traditionally made money, which some of them were mafia-esque or illegitimate. You also have the fact that Iran was exhibiting more influence via Shia militias in Baghdad, and the whole civil war was breaking out inside of Baghdad. So tribes were aware of that, and that caused tribes to think a little bit more about which side do I take in this.

am I going to be best off with al-Qaeda? I'm going to be best off with the government. I'm going to be best off with the Americans who might be able to help me a little bit. So that had some influence over how this started. And it starts with a small group of tribes, but it expands as those tribes have success. Now, their success depends inherently on our support. It depends on Marines and U.S. soldiers being in Ramadi, the city where a lot of this started. it depends on the funds that the U.S. was able to encourage the Iraqi government or the U.S. was able to give itself to the movement. Without these factors, it wouldn't have succeeded. And in the end, that's one reason it later falls apart. Because once the United States leaves, these groups can't continue to hold down al-Qaeda. And the government comes after them in various ways, and the government intercedes in a way that makes the tribes'

more upset and actually turned some of them back to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is at this point the Islamic State. But it was our troops on the ground and our money was a necessary condition to the kind of success that the awakening had. Once we were there, a lot of these longer-term natural dynamics started to come back into play and the tribes couldn't succeed on their own. Now, that part of the story, that doesn't occur until 2011, 2013, 2014. So as we go into Afghanistan, we don't, it looks like an unvarnished, it looks like an unvarnished victory. But later on, it's there's the cracks and the problems become apparent. But that's only after we've committed to the same kind of strategy in Afghanistan.

Yeah. Well, so let's talk about that then. And this was a period in which you and I were both in Afghanistan. And, you know, I was a relatively new lieutenant. And I remember sort of coming through Quantico. and to my battalion and company, all of my teachers and then my chain of command were all Iraq veterans and all believed, again, I think with some justice, that they had been successful, just recently successful in Iraq, broadly against the insurgency, and then also tactically,

you know, just fighting in places like Fallujah and Ramadi. They had figured out how to do it. And so we basically prepared to do that fight and that war. and then ended up, my battalion was actually rerouted. We were going to go to Iraq in 2009 and ended up going, we were the first battalion to go as part of the Afghan, the December 2009, Afghanistan surge to Helmand. How did it play out when the same strategy,

the same counterinsurgency framework is employed in a place like Afghanistan, which might, for folks without much experience at that part of the world, there might seem to be more in common between Afghanistan and Iraq than not in common, but in your better position to say than me seems to me to be not the case. They're quite different places. Yeah, so I think what I'd start with saying is there was good and bad in having that Iraq model to draw off of. So when I was in Iraq in 2004 with the first Marine battalions that were in Anbar and getting to see them operate and start in GE's counterinsurgency, and of course, Marines already have some background in this.

Sure. But still, it was raw. Different techniques were being tested, different ways to patrol were being tested, if you should patrol or not was being tested out, how you interact with a population. And the idea of like building up a local force was extremely nascent then. Everyone was trying very hard and everyone was kind of aware of principles, but all those tactics and techniques hadn't been refined. How to deal with IEDs hadn't been refined.

When you come to Afghanistan, it was a tremendous benefit to have that library of tactics and techniques and procedures for all the Marines. And the ones that were in Iraq, they already knew how to conduct operations. They already knew different ways to patrol. Yes, they had to adapt it to a different situation in Iraq. But they knew about countering various ways to counter IEDs. They understood the dangers of IEDs. They understood working with the population, the dangers of accidentally killing population.

They understood the interactions that you have to make to build trust. They knew that the Marines alone wouldn't be enough to quell violence in an area. So they knew they needed to build up the army and they needed to recruit police and they needed to think about the role of the tribes. They came in at an advanced graduate level of understanding. And overall, that was of benefit. were mistakes made absolutely, where sometimes the wrong approach applied, absolutely.

And I mean, I'm sure I made mistakes in that regard. At the same time, I know I benefited from understanding some of the dangers of recruiting tribal militias in Iraq and understanding how it was going to be important to put limits on what we were doing in Garmzer. At the same time, understanding that without local support, this isn't going to go anywhere.

So I'd better figure out a way to mobilize the locals. Now, that's the good of it. The bad of it is I don't think we had good enough understanding of the cost, of how, look at the cost of having this many troops in an area and not understanding enough that what we were going to establish would fall apart if we left, or even the more important understanding. Because in the world, right, people said, okay, we're here. If we leave, it's going to fall apart.

That means we need to stay for a long time. But the more important understanding is knowing America's not going to do that, politicians aren't going to leave Americans there for long periods of time. Now, a longer view of Iraq would have given us more of that understanding, and we would have been less optimistic when it came to Iraq at that point. But that's not how it played. Now, a lot of this I don't really at all see is that perhaps a little bit selfishly. I don't see a lot of this is really the fault of Marines on the ground

or that many people at all who are on the ground. I see this is more about what strategic decision makers need to be staying and realizing and the people who are advising them to a larger extent need to need to be new. We haven't really talked much about President Bush or President Obama, but obviously decisions that they and their key advisors took were relevant here. One more sort of on the ground question before we get to them, though. One thing that struck me, because I was there December of 9 to July of 10, and I left I left in a pretty pessimistic mood about the future of Marja, which was my experience.

And as you know, these things, when you're kind of working at the tactical, low-end operational level, your experiences are extremely local. And my local experience was non-positive. I mean, we were taking more casualties per week in May, June, July than we had during the battle, the battle of Marja in February. So I left thinking, man, you know, this is not going to work out. And I was wrong at a tactical and operational level. I was absolutely wrong, the battalions that succeeded us.

And not to criticize my own Marines, I mean, they continued things that we had started, but were not yet bearing fruit and started things of their own. And by, you know, 2012 or so, you know, the Helbin River Valley and, you know, folks like you Carter deserve a lot of credit for this as well, was on some level pacified. Now, it was a tenuous pacification. And I'm curious to know your view about whether it was more or, less tenuous than what had been achieved in a place like Ambar. But nevertheless, I mean, a lot less violence, you know, in 2012, 2013 than before. But here's the on the ground question for you.

And, you know, I'm a little less inclined to let the military chain of command off the hook and I want to know your view. I remember reading in the paper at the time as this success story kind of played out that what had been achieved, and it was military officer saying that's not politicians, what had been achieved was that we had established the legitimacy of the Afghan government. That was false. I assume you agree. I'm curious to know your view, but I mean, I saw with my own two eyes how false that was. What we had done was we had successfully, we can euphemize about it and say we successfully created these structures of local authority. You could also, I think, accurately say we had figured out who to pay off, you know, and you got a third way to put

it was we engaged in subsidies, right, which would be the British imperial way of talking about it. tried and true tactics of establishing local order. But this is not what the world was told. It's not clear to me that it's what American politicians were told by the military. There was this narrative that the counterinsurgency strategy, and maybe this is what starts to change from 12 to 13, as you talk about we stop using the word, was successful in the most simple and direct sense that if the goal is to establish the legitimacy of the government, well, we had done that in Helmand. So I'm curious to know, you were there and you were also the historian, the historian of this. So what am I saying here that's off base? What's your take on the military's role here? So I did not mean to

let the whole military off the hook. I meant to leave the folks who are on the ground having to do the fighting largely off the hook. Now, what goes up further up the chain and what's being told to Washington, that does require a greater deal of sobriety on the part of commanders. Now, some of what gets said is said at the moment. It's said by general officers in the sense of I'm speaking to multiple audiences. I'm speaking to troops on the ground and they don't need to hear that things aren't going as well as we hope they would. At the same time that they're speaking to the larger DC audience about what's happening. And then you also have to take into account sometimes people just make the wrong assessment.

They think things are going well. They think it's all going to develop well. But they can't actually predict the future right or see the future right. And they're taking small examples of success, the establishment of a district center or a district office in the middle of Marja, as an example of something. larger or an indication that something larger is going to happen when it's really not it's just it's just temporarily in that area on so I mean that's kind of how I that's kind of how I look at that that situation there there are generals in the in the course of this that obfuscated what the truth was but I'd say that the the the times when that was worse was

probably actually in the creation of the surge in the first place, rather than in the advertisement of how it was doing later on. Can you say more? What do you mean by that? Well, when the decisions were made to surge, it was portrayed that Afghanistan was going to fall if we did not. And it was also portrayed that we would be able to make a difference in a short amount of time when it seems like Petratus and McChrystal knew that actually wasn't true.

So I think there was some purposeful overselling of the threat and overselling of this solution. And so that's a, that's a point at which that I worry more than some of what was happening in Helmand in terms of how well, how well things were going. Now, in general, in Helmand overall, I would call it a tactical success, and now we can debate what does it mean for the government to be legitimate or not. But we know that after forces drew down significantly in 2014, when there's basically no forces anymore in Helmut. And even before that, as we started pull out from places, the government was able to continue ruling. The government was able to continue doing things. they were able to drive freely from place to place.

And a good number of people, I mean, the polls say the majority of the people support the government, whether that's true or not we can debate. But I tend to think that the polling is fairly correct, or at least is getting the general viewpoint of things. The problem is that how do you stop a very motivated group of insurgents from continuing to fight? A motivated group of insurgents who do not see the government as legitimate, who believe that they are potentially not Islamic. and believe they are fighting a puppet government. And they have a safe haven in Pakistan.

So Helmand really falls apart as the Taliban launch more attacks, and that becomes the critical part there. No, that's really interesting. You know, again, I need to emphasize that my experience, my experience is not even Marja, really. It's southern Marja. Like it's like a few square kilometers in the southern third of that district. And I just, I...

Your experience is like what you, like, every battalion would go in. Every group of Marines at first goes in experiences a huge amount of fighting. And there was too much belief at the time that it could go quickly and that we would turn it quickly. Yeah. I mean, that was another drastic misjudgment. This was going to take time to make this work. And then other battalions had to follow on. One of the great things that the Marines tended to do in my experience was one battalion

would build upon what the others did. And it was in that process that something happened in Marja where there was some kind of stability after that. But here's the part that's really like, but that took so many Marine battalions to do it. And how could that cost ever be worthwhile? And the cost in lives, the cost and money to make that happen. How is the United States going to be able to maintain that

for many years or throughout the throughout, the throughout the country. And that was the strategic mistake that was made. I think that strategic mistake could have been avoided, but that would have been before Marines ever got on the ground in Marja. Yeah. To his great credit, I remember my battalion commander at the time, Coworth, who is now a general officer,

I remember just happening to be chatting with him at Camp Dwyer before we went to Marja. And we're sort of standing there looking at, you know, great fleets of MRAPs and, you know, Cobras parked over by their side and, you know, sort of typically a very cinematic hub of marine activity at scale and him making reference to some comment of Osama bin Laden's that, you know, part of the strategy will be here to kind of tie the United States down and, you know, diminish their energy. And he sort of set it with with the implication that we were,

we were watching it occur. So give him credit for thinking strategically in that moment as a, as an operational commander. Well, so to your point, so starting around 2012, 2013, we do start to, I mean, there is a general skepticism that sets in. The president seemed, President Obama seems to have always been skeptical on some level of these large scale operations. So he did, he did run on sort of Iraq being the bad war and Afghanistan being the good war, which sort of ties his, ties his hands a bit politically. But that skepticism gets more and more widespread. I remember these fierce debates at the time, sort of internal to the officer corps and and folks who wrote about military practice about whether or not counterinsurgency was on some level,

you know, evil, you know, fundamentally immoral, let alone, you know, misguided. And, you know, by the time we were dealing with ISIS, we take a very different approach. So characterize where we get by this period, sort of the middle teens. I mean, so with President Obama, I'd say it's not just merely like skepticism. What happens in Afghanistan strongly contributes to him saying we are not going, we are going to withdraw troops. we're going to get all the way out of out of Afghanistan. And I think it's often that Petraeus wanted to turn back the clock to show enough success that President Obama would give them more time. I think Petraeus sped up the clock.

The sending of large numbers of troops sped up the clock. Now, so after that, the focus in Afghanistan, and then that gets, well, the focus in Afghanistan becomes like training and advising and counterterrorism. When the Islamic State attacks in Iraq, there's no. intention on the part of the U.S. government to put in large numbers of troops. Sometimes military officers and such will say we need to put more in, we're going to have to go back here and fight, we need to send in additional ground troops, we need to get more directly involved in combat. But the Obama administration was against that. And higher leadership, too, was not, higher military leadership never coalesced around that kind of strategy. The strategy was

we will provide, we will do targeting. We will conduct, we will conduct, Air strikes, again, and even this took a little bit of time. We'll get to air strikes against the Islamic State. We will eventually move to doing advising, which got for some of our troops to be, you know, close to the front line. And except for certain like special operators, you weren't supposed to be involved in combat. But, you know, when you're close to the front line, you know, some things may happen here and there. But you're supposed to be advising, providing support for targeting, which was largely kind of counterterrorism kind of techniques to go after after the enemy. and then behind the scenes building up the Iraqi army

or their counterterrorism force to CTS. So it's a much more, it's a much lighter approach. It's much more in the background. It's much more dependent on our partners. So it depended on having things like the CTS to work with, to doing the fighting through Mosul. In Syria, it depended on the SDF, Syrian Democratic forces, to go and drive south and do very heavy fighting

like in the city of Raqa. but supported and advised by our forces and with lots of airstrikes to support what they were doing. So this is like the, you can see a con, people wouldn't want to call this counterinsurgency, but you can see it's a combination of the two approaches. The counterterrorism focus on ISR, targeting air strikes,

but that counterinsurgency focus of advising and the local forces being strongly involved and having to hold terrain and do all the things that we used to do. The difference is that older focus on we need to have a large number of troops on the ground and a heavy footprint. That's gone. I remember at the time, just as an observer, being frustrated with the administration's strategy because it was so slow. Because I take everything you just said.

I think I agree with it all. But all of that can be true. And it is also the case that things went on the battlefield went much more slowly than they would. have had there been a more direct, robust American edge, right, to the operations, is, I guess my question could take the form of, you know, make the case if you would or if you believe it that that's okay. Because, you know, again, as a Marine, you know, one is, one is conditioned to seek decision. So if we know where we're going, we know that ISIS is a bad thing and we don't want it to continue to assemble state-like qualities, we should just get rid of it. And again, at the

time, I just thought this is taking an awfully long time and that's going to lead to bad consequences. As it turned out, there were no grand ISIS attacks at scale on the homeland or anything like that. But how did it work out that that was okay? So there was concern. And I remember being in the Pentagon in 2015, just over a year after Mosul had fallen. And there was a lot of concern. Like, the strategy isn't going to get it done. This is, it's taking too long to pressure them.

We're still losing ground in Syria. We haven't been able to retake any Vambar, Mosul, or anything like that. And there were at that point conversations that some people thought, well, let's go ahead and we should be ready to put more troops in and we should propose that. But most of the debate, and certainly what the senior leaders thought was, no, let's look at what more support we need to give to the Iraqis. Think about, do we need to give our advisors better access? do we need to have an ability to call in more airstrikes? How should authorities change? It was those kind of questions that were dominant.

So it was worth the weight in the end. It was worth being patient because we got the results that we wanted out of it. And it costs us less than putting troops on the ground in both lives and money. And then if you think about it, what we're, really makes a light footprint important here is that Iraq and Afghanistan have showed us that these places after you get done fighting and stabilizing them, they're likely to fall apart again. You have a strong risk it's going to fall apart again. So we want to be careful about how much we invest to fix something. So you're probably not really fixing it. You're stabilizing

it for a little bit of time, and you're probably going to have to leave, and it could become, it could become worse again. So it makes sense to be careful about your investment. I want to ask you about Obama's sort of declaration of a deadline in Afghanistan, because I have, that has always rub me the wrong way. I have a feeling that you may take a, again, a more nuanced view than me of it. But there was a time when I would have held that up as a kind of error, sort of at the scale of President Bush making democracy, sort of the focus of so many of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I say that as somebody who was once a card-carrying member of the, you know, or adhere it to the freedom agenda. Christopher Hitchens read the warrant at my

commissioning in Quantico, just to let you know how deep in my participation in that line of thought was. And I received a very rude education, I think, and it's shortcomings in Helmut. But just is that sort of scrambled everything and made it hard, I think, to see what was practically valuable here and there and what we were doing. So I encountered individually, like day to day, people throwing that deadline for withdrawal in my face, you know, as a troop leader. And, you know, are there ways in which it harmed us, you know, or I could see, like, it's part of the logic of everything else you've been saying that it was an inevitable concession kind of to reality. But like, how do you, how do you you think of that assertion? How do you, how do you analyze it? Well, so I, I mean, as a negotiating

tactic, I don't think it was tactically a good move. So I do think it, you're removing leverage from the table. You want to be able to give that at some point to the Taliban if they're going to be cooperative. And I remember tribal leaders going like to Pakistan, because they'd go back and forth, and they'd go talk to some Taliban leaders. And one of them, well, they went and talked to Molinaim Barich, who was the Taliban provincial governor for the time for Helman province. It wasn't living in Helmand because it was too dangerous farm he was in. He was in Pakistan. But he told one set of tribal leaders, so the Americans are leaving. We're going to come back. So you need to come work with us right now. And I remember other tribal leaders, you know,

mentioning other things to me, like we like to be able to walk freely in our, in our villages. And if our women want to walk from this building to that building, we don't want the Taliban to get mad at us. I remember lots of things like that. But strategically, I don't think it was a major factor. Strategically, look how hard the Taliban fought. Do we really think that if they thought that we weren't leaving, that they were going to fight less hard? I mean, they got a lot of motivation by the fact that we were there. And the other thing during this point is he also had a lot of Taliban propagandists saying Obama's lying. They're going to stay. you need to go fight.

So I don't tend to think that if I play a counterfactual where Obama says something differently, that the Taliban who fought us for 20 years in very harsh conditions were willing to lay IEDs in the middle of cities that were under our control, willing to send suicide bombers into those cities. I don't really think that if Obama had said something different regarding the timeline, that we would have been at a very large different result here today. Carter Malkasian, author of the American War in Afghanistan, a contributor to new makers of modern strategy. Thank you so much for joining the show.

It's been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate you making the time. Thank you, Art. It's good seeing you today. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.