Afghanistan is an even worse quagmire.

The top KGB official in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation says US and NATO officials "listen, but they do not hear" when he describes his experience there, according to this long interview by John Burns in The New York Times today. The Soviets had 140,000 troops in Afghanistan and extensive education, welfare, and public works programs but could not pacify the place. Here's how that compares to Iraq and Afghanistan today.

According to the CIA factbook, Afghanistan is 48% larger than Iraq and has 16% more people. Afghanistan is "mostly rugged mountains" with only 12% arable land. The labor force is 80% in agriculture, and the population is not highly concentrated in cities. It seems to me this would be a much more difficult place to control with conventional military forces than Iraq. As Rumsfeld famously said, after a few air raids there was nothing left to bomb. And rugged mountains are not the preferred terrain for armored vehicles.

In comparison to the 140,000 troops the Soviets deployed, there are now about 65,000 US and coalition forces in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration and both Presidential candidates support sending more US troops to Afghanistan, starting with 8,000 "early next year." In the counterinsurgency field manual authored by Gen. David Petraeus, it is estimated at 1-67 that an occupying force needs a minimum of 2% as many troops as the population to be controlled. That would mean at least 650,000 troops to defeat an insurgency among all of the nearly 33 million Afghanis.

It appears our "mission" is to stay in Afghanistan, our main goal is to kill or capture Osama bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan, and that determination is our only strategy. To the extent our forces go after bin Laden in Pakistan, how might we actually accomplish that, and don't the risks include civil war, rampant terrorism, coup d'états, and/or a failed state in the only Islamic nation with nuclear weapons?

There is nothing about this situation that makes a favorable outcome seem plausible, and the commander of British forces in Afghanistan agrees. We need to rethink this from bottom to top, and then we probably need to disengage militarily and plan to pursue realistic regional goals diplomatically and economically.

Update on Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 09:40AM by Skeptic

A retired Russian Lt. General who served 5 years in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation says the US is repeating the mistakes the Soviets made, in this interview by Megan Stack of the Los Angeles Times. 

Update on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 at 06:17AM by Skeptic

Half the population of Afghanistan lives in villages of fewer than 300 persons, and the insurgency is based in these rural areas, not the cities, according to this report by Michael Gordon in NYT. If counterinsurgency troops were disseminated in proportion to the population, half of them would be in outposts of fewer than 6 soldiers.  That would seem to make them extraordinarily vulnerable.  Yet, if they are not that close, how can they protect the population from the insurgents?  "Afghanistan may be the 'good war,' but it is also the harder war," according to David Kilcullen, former advisor to Secretary of State Rice, quoted in the linked article. The article also describes other ways in which Afghanistan is a different and more difficult challenge compared to Iraq.

Update on Saturday, December 6, 2008 at 05:31PM by Skeptic

Andrew Bacevich agrees.

Comments

[christine]

For Pete's sake Roger, no one, no one has ever held Afghanistan...history is decisive on the prospect of "winning" in Afghanistan. I can only hope that Obama was just blowing air when he said Afghanistan was more important than Iraq...if he takes it seriously, it will destroy him, just like Vietnam destroyed LBJ.