Withdraw and Win: "Go" for Victory in Afghanistan
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Calhoun, Institutional Archive of the Naval Postgraduate School Calhoun: The NPS Institutional Archive Faculty and Researcher Publications Faculty and Researcher Publications Collection 2013-02-25 Withdraw and win: "go" for victory in Afghanistan Thiel, Joshua Small Wars Journal Small Wars Article: Journal Article, February 25, 2013 -2:30am http://hdl.handle.net/10945/47516 Withdraw and Win: ?Go? for Victory in Afghanistan By Joshua Thiel and Douglas A. Borer Journal Article | Feb 25 2013 - 2:30am Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the US Army, US Navy, DOD, or Government of the United States. This article was submitted for internal review in October 2012. It has been approved for release by USASOC, USASFC, 1st SFG(A), SOJTF-A, and CJSOTF-A. All information is from unclassified resources or from the authors’ experience. All maps are from open source websites. Research for this article was made possible by the Combating Terrorism Archive Project (CTAP) at the Naval Postgraduate School. The war in Afghanistan can still be won. There, we have said it. Let us begin by answering the skeptics’ question: what does “victory” mean? Victory is defined by Afghanistan becoming a territorial entity from which terrorists cannot gain sufficient safe haven to organize, train, equip, and launch attacks against the USA and its allies. This means the Taliban must be denied the opportunity to return to unchecked power in Afghanistan. If the Taliban return to unilateral power, sooner or later Afghan soil will again be used by al Qaeda or similar violent radicals to strike the both the West and neighboring South Asian states. The pre-9.11.01 status quo will have been recreated and the last ten years will be wasted. This must not happen. Although we are sympathetic to those who define “victory” as meaning democracy, human rights, and other western liberal notions of individual and economic freedom, our definition of strategic victory does not require these things. Now we are going to explain how to win by presenting an operational level plan called “Go” that will help the Afghan government maintain enduring control over key nodes in the geo-political space. Doing so will set the conditions for the eventual evolution of a viable Afghan state. Again, the goal of this plan is to deny terrorists the ability to launch 9.11-like attacks from Afghanistan after most US troops leave the country in 2014. We are not offering a new grand strategy; however, we are offering focus and synchronization to create optimal synergy for the approach that is now working, Village Stability Operations. The benefits include: a reduction of US resources, the elimination of terrorist basing, and mitigating the loss of US prestige if the war is judged as lost. Our approach does not require a new "surge" of forces or a delay in the present draw down. However, as occurred in the wake of the last time the United States witnessed a surprise attack in1941, our plan may require that some US personnel remain deployed to the theater for a long time. After 10 years in Afghanistan, America stands at a critical historic juncture. We believe re-energizing the allied Village Stability approach is important because it is the best approach on which to build a clear plan for victory. Some people may think that the primary American interest is simply to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as politically possible, and hope that things turn out. We agree that hope is a good thing, but it is a poor strategy. If indeed the intent is only to withdraw, without also trying to win, then we believe most combat operations should stop, and all personnel should work to reduce risk by focusing almost unilaterally on force protection. Of course doing this would mean leaving our Afghan allies to fend for themselves. Doing so would enhance instability in South Asia and foment further unrest by violent radicals in a nuclear-armed Pakistan. Additionally, an immediate pullout out would mean abandoning the initiative that the Village Stability approach has invigorated. We call a complete and rapid withdrawal a "hope without a prayer" strategy, and categorically reject it as being unnecessarily defeatist. Afghanistan, America, and the international coalition can still win. Although we envision policy makers reading this article and embracing our ideas, our audience is primarily those military officers who have deployed or will deploy to Afghanistan in 2013-2014 and in who's decisions and actions in the battle space: in VSPs in the villages, in the VSSAs in the district centers, AOBs in the provincial capitals, and SOTF's on the FOB's, where the outcome of the war will be determined. Under our plan your job is not to deploy in order to achieve career advancement goals or to rotate with minimal casualties to your units. Your job, your only job, is to win the war. As such we are speaking directly to Green Beret ODA commanders and their 12 man teams. We are speaking to AOB commanders and their company staffs. We are speaking to Special Forces battalion commanders, and their equivalents in the Seals, Marines, and all international coalition forces in ISAF. We are talking to officers of the Civil Affairs, MISO, Intel, Logistics, and other branches who are key enablers of SOF combat forces. To higher echelon authorities in theater we say this: understand and support the efforts of the front-line ground pounders to execute these operational and tactical innovations and you will have helped to win America's longest war. To all US and allied forces high and low we say: if withdraw without winning is your call to arms, then you as individuals and we (the allied countries of the coalition) have already lost. Time to “Go”: Operationalizing VSO by Optimizing VSP’s The good news is that much of the heavy lifting has been done to set the stage for victory over the Taliban. Over the last three years the United States and its allies have been quietly conducting a population-centric approach against the Taliban in the remote rural areas of Afghanistan called VSO, or village stability operations, which seeks to earn the trust of the population at the grass roots level. Unlike Iraq, where most of the population lives in towns and cities, the Afghan population is mostly rural, and the insurgency thrives outside of the relatively few towns and cities. The center of gravity in all counter- insurgencies is the population. In Iraq, that meant cities and towns. In Afghanistan that means the tiny villages and extended village networks of commerce and mobility that dominate each valley. The major flaw of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan two decades ago was that it focused on the cities, thus ceding the unchecked mobility of the country-side to the Mujahedeen. Overall, the US strategy ever since the arrival of large numbers of general-purpose forces in 2004 has been all too much like the Soviet’s “inside- out” approach: focusing too much on demographic concentrations in the cities along the ring road. VSO, correctly, is an “outside in” approach using mostly SOF personnel dispersed to the rural areas. However, the true story of VSO must be told by focusing on VSPs: Village Stability Platforms. VSP’s are the safe houses; the small, fortified compounds; and tiny outposts that ODA team members base from. This is mostly a story about VSPs. Map 1: Map of Afghanistan highlighting Uruzgan and Day Kundi Provinces, the AOB’s operational area. The American public has heard very little about VSO or VSPs, but the truth is the program works and it has driven the Taliban out of many parts of the country. Doing so has robbed the Taliban of manpower, legitimacy, money, and key staging areas. However, we know that VSO has yet to achieve a so-called “tipping point” which would make the Taliban’s return to unchecked dominance impossible. By explaining how to optimize VSPs, through the application of a new operational concept called “Go,” we are confident that tipping point can be reached by 2014. We base this claim on factual evidence. Our operational plan has already worked in one area of central Afghanistan that had been dominated by the Taliban. If higher echelon leaders are willing to closely examine what happened in Uruzgan and Day Kundi Province from April 2011 to January 2012, we believe the operational plan that achieved success there can also be applied successfully to the entire country In early 2011, Major Thiel received orders to return to 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), assume command of Special Forces Company, and deploy to Afghanistan. Major Thiel’s Special Forces Company, labeled an AOB during operations, was tasked to conduct Village Stability Operations in Uruzgan and Day Kundi Provinces from April 2011 to January 2012. Before departing the Naval Post Graduate School for the deployment, Thiel began war-gaming in a classroom with the Village Stability Platform (VSP) sites plotted on a map. Dr. Gordon McCormick (who in 1993 co-founded NPS’s famed SOLIC curriculum with then Navy Commander William McRaven) observed that the problem set Thiel was struggling with required nothing more than a Wei Chi strategy. In the Wei Chi board game, two players alternately place white and black stones on vacant intersections to surround a larger total area and capture the opponent stones. McCormick recommended Thiel read “The Protracted Game: A Wei Chi Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy,” by Scott A.