Reading Galula in Afghanistan
Why the failure of the Afghan Surge doesn’t make counterinsurgency theory wrong.
This spring marks five years since the troop surge in Afghanistan began. President Obama authorized a plan to send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan in December 2009 and in early March 2010 the first elements of the surge began arriving in-country. This decision was based on the view, advocated by military leaders, that the counterinsurgency approach that had reduced violence in Iraq could do the same in Afghanistan.
Five years after the Afghan Surge began the situation looks quite different. The surge is long over. U.S. troop levels are now down from a peak of nearly 100,000 in 2011 to just 10,000 today, and are scheduled to drop to 5,000 by next year (although Defense Secretary Ash Carter has said this schedule may shift). Two things have not changed since the spring of 2010: the Taliban have not been defeated; and they continue to threaten Afghanistan’s stability. The failure of the Afghan Surge has led some to suggest that counterinsurgency theory never had any merit and should be abandoned as a part of American military doctrine. After all, if COIN did not lead to victory over Afghanistan’s insurgents then it must not be a valid doctrine.
The father of modern counterinsurgency theory, David Galula, would have a different view. Galula was a French Army officer who served in Indochina and Algeria. He fought insurgents for nearly two decades. Galula took the lessons he learned in these conflicts and turned them into a book called Counterinsurgency: Theory and Practice, which has become a standard text on the subject of counterinsurgency. Galula would not have been surprised by the difficulty in turning counterinsurgency theory into practice in Afghanistan. He would understand that, in fact, the U.S. experience there validated the ideas in his famous book.
Galula would probably have thought the Afghan Surge faced long odds from the start, not least because he understood that political conditions are critical and weighed against success in Afghanistan. The challenges posed by the Kabul’s legitimacy, or lack thereof, have been well documented. Less attention has been paid to geography, which Galula also believed was important to the success of a counterinsurgency. The paucity of attention is unfortunate because geography was a crucial factor in the failure of the surge to stem the Taliban’s momentum.
In his book, Galula names several geographic factors that he believed were critical to the success of a counterinsurgency. He would say the American experience in Afghanistan confirms his thinking about counterinsurgency because the geography there is hugely favorable to an insurgent, as opposed to Iraq where the geography is favorable to a counterinsurgent. This difference goes a long way in explaining why the Iraq Surge was able to bring violence down dramatically and why the Afghan Surge did not, and suggests that Galula’s approach to small wars remains valid.
Borders, Location, and Configuration
The first geographic condition Galula names as being important are borders. “The border areas are a permanent source of weakness for the counterinsurgent,” writes Galula. Although the Taliban regime was toppled in 2001, many of its leaders were able to find sanctuary across the border in Pakistan. For the last 13 years the Taliban, and other Afghan centric militants fighting alongside it, remained able to take advantage of safe haven in Pakistan and thus largely out of reach of U.S. military power. The Pakistani Army made a few halting efforts to bring the tribal areas under control (largely due to pressure from the United States), but largely avoided targeting Taliban sanctuaries there. The Pakistan army also allowed the Taliban to operate in other parts of the country, including Balochistan and Karachi. In short, after reluctantly supporting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan reverted to its pre-9/11 policy of supporting the Taliban. The United States has launched drone strikes against al Qaeda and other militants in certain tribal agencies – particularly North Waziristan – but Taliban strongholds in Pakistan have been immune from the pressure United States ground forces could apply.
On the Afghan side of the border, American counterinsurgents could clear out hives of Taliban activity. Not so for Taliban forces hiding in Pakistan. Galula understood this condition as a major challenge. Taliban forces can build strength in Pakistan and strike across the border then withdraw back to Pakistan to build strength again. As Galula wrote, “By moving from one side of the border to the other, the insurgent is often able to escape pressure or, at least, to complicate operations of his opponent.”
Galula also discusses location and configuration as being important. In a country that can be compartmentalized and where the insurgency can be pressed into small areas from which it cannot escape the counterinsurgent has an advantage. The best conditions for a counterinsurgent would be to fight on an island in the shape of a star. Insurgents on an island cannot escape to neighboring countries. A country that has territory that juts out like points of a star creates places insurgents can be funneled down into, isolated, and destroyed.
In contrast, the ideal configuration of a battlefield from the perspective of the insurgent is a landlocked country with rounded borders surrounded by countries favorable to the insurgency. A country with rounded borders is not easily compartmentalized, and a country surrounded by neighbors favorable to the insurgency allows for the insurgency to find safe havens. It is not hard to see where Afghanistan fits on this spectrum. As a landlocked country with a rounded border and a neighbor who provides a safe haven to insurgents, Afghanistan represents ideal conditions from the perspective of an insurgent.
Compare this situation to that in Iraq. Iranian munitions flowed to Shi’ite militias and foreign fighters were able to cross over from neighboring Syria but neither country was willing to allow insurgents to openly operate from their territory. Iraq’s insurgents had no choice but to make their strongholds inside Iraq itself. When the surge came they had nowhere to go to avoid the pressure of U.S. troops. In Afghanistan, by contrast, the insurgent could always find sanctuary.
Terrain
The next factor discussed by Galula is terrain. Galula makes clear that the insurgent wants either rugged mountains or dense jungle. Hills and vegetation provide sanctuary for the insurgent and are difficult for the counterinsurgent to penetrate. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most mountainous countries. The roads are of poor quality and rail lines are nonexistent, especially in the center. Given the harsh terrain and poor transportation infrastructure, the interior of Afghanistan is very hard for a counterinsurgent to access, much less control.
Going back to the times of Alexander the Great, insurgents have used Afghanistan’s forbidding mountains as a defense. Insurgents strike out of inaccessible mountain redoubts and use the winter months to recover from losses incurred during the summer fighting season. Counterinsurgents have had difficulty penetrating deep into small mountain villages because of difficult terrain and poor infrastructure. The difficulty is made more acute in winter when the roads are snowed in and the mountains are even more inaccessible.
The Soviets learned the hard way that controlling Afghanistan’s cities is not enough to control the country. The Soviets and their Afghan communist allies held the major cities as well as the major roads linking them but this did not lead to a Soviet victory. The Soviets never controlled the rural areas in the center of the country or in the countryside surrounding the major cities and so could not subdue the insurgency.
The terrain advantages the insurgent has in Afghanistan are the opposite of what the insurgency had in Iraq. In Iraq, the land was flat, open desert. Galula notes that this is the ideal situation from the perspective of the counterinsurgent. In Algeria, he wrote, “the FLN was never able to operate for any sustained period in the vast expanses of the Sahara, with the French forces securing the oases and vital wells and air surveillance detecting every move [of the insurgent]”. In Iraq, the insurgency thrived in cities but wilted in open desert. In Anbar Province, for example, the insurgency was strong in Fallujah and Ramadi but weak in the rural areas and the empty desert of the far west. The United States could defeat the insurgents by securing the major cities. Not so in Afghanistan, where insurgents could thrive across a huge swath of mountainous countryside.
Population
Galula makes clear that distribution of population is key to the success of an insurgency. Galula states plainly that, “The more scattered the population, the better for the insurgent”. Galula understood that counterinsurgency is about securing the population and denying the insurgent access to the population. The number of troops required to secure the population in a counterinsurgency is a function of the size of the population and the geographic area over which it is spread. A rural population spread across a wide area requires more troops to secure than the same number of people concentrated in cities.
Afghanistan has a population of 31 million people spread over an area of 250,000 square miles. Just 24% of its population lives in cities. It is one of the most rural countries in the world and its population is distributed fairly evenly throughout the country. There is almost nowhere in Afghanistan where Afghans do not live.
Iraq, on the other hand, is an urban country with 66% of its people living in cities. Iraq had only 25 million people spread across just 170,000 square miles. Even that exaggerates the size of the part of Iraq that the surge had to control because most of Iraq’s vast western desert is essentially uninhabited.
The distribution of the Iraqi population is ideal for counterinsurgency. Iraq has a smaller population living in a smaller territory than Afghanistan and its population is concentrated in cities that are themselves concentrated in an even more compact piece of Iraq’s territory. The Iraq Surge was, for this reason, primarily an urban affair with special concentration in Baghdad.
To illustrate the point, consider that the Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiya was home to 400,000 people but could be controlled by a single brigade because the neighborhood was only a few square miles. To police the same number of people in the highly rural Helmand Province would require enough U.S. forces to control about 8,000 square miles of territory. It is simply inconceivable that a single brigade could secure a piece of territory that large against a determined insurgency.
In a city, counterinsurgents can respond quickly to emergencies because counterinsurgent forces are never far away. Responding to violence in rural areas is more difficult because counterinsurgent forces have to travel long distances to respond to insurgent activity. By the time counterinsurgent forces arrive the insurgents have long since left the scene of the violence. Counterinsurgent forces cannot offer security to the population because they can’t maintain a presence in every small village in Afghanistan’s rural mountains the way they could always be near to any neighborhood in a major Iraqi city. Galula understood this problem well and would not have been surprised at the difficulty it created in Afghanistan.
Conclusion
Critics of counterinsurgency theory have pointed to Afghanistan as an example of the theory’s deficiencies. In fact, the difficulties the Afghan Surge ran into are a confirmation of much of the foundational thought in counterinsurgency theory. Counterinsurgency theory is not a magic formula for victory. It is a set of ideas that help military leaders understand the challenges they face in small wars and design campaign plans to meet those challenges. Commentators who wish to discard counterinsurgency theory based on the result in Afghanistan should take a closer look at the geographic impediments to success and adopt a more nuanced view of what the war in Afghanistan says about counterinsurgency theory.
Just as with a conventional campaign, a counterinsurgency’s chances of success are highly dependent on the starting conditions of the campaign. The fact that counterinsurgency was not very successful in Afghanistan is not proof that counterinsurgency doesn’t work. It is only proof that, as Galula warned, not every counterinsurgency campaign will be waged in favorable conditions.
John Ford is a reserve Captain in the United States Army’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps and a graduate of Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law. He has written for The Diplomat Magazine and The National Interest. You can follow him on twitter @johndouglasford
Photo credit: ResoluteSupportMedia
Tom 
Tom Oakley 
Koolaid 
Lee 
John 
dF 
Rob Thornton 
Chuck 
J Harlan 
The author alludes to something significant: one of General McChrystal’s greatest failings as a campaign designer was his decision to withdraw troops from the rural areas in order to secure Afghan cities. This mirrored (and was, I suspect, informed by) Galula’s “tâches d’huile”/”spots of ink” concept, which advocated for securing one city, then using it as a base to secure an adjacent city in a sort of cascade pattern reminiscent of World War II’s War Plan Orange. However, in the case of Afghanistan, vice Algeria (as the author notes), the Taliban’s “center of gravity” and/or areas of greatest strength were the rural areas in the southern regions of the country, particularly in those provinces bordering Pakistan. General McChrystal could have had a successful campaign on his hands had he started by unequivocally securing one district – the Marines’ 2010 Marjah offensive, for example, or maybe Lashkar Gah – and then slowly expanding that zone of control, district by district. By withdrawing from hard-won positions like OP Restrepo, COP Keating, and such, McChrystal secured cities while ceding the Taliban’s heartland. I have never believed that Afghanistan (or Iraq, for that matter) were inevitable losses for ISAF (or MNF-I). However, it has been profoundly frustrating to see cogent, historically successful COIN doctrine – Galula’s writings, based though they may have been on unsuccessful campaigns, being one such example – being churned into the FM 3-24 “sausage” by TRADOC, and then ignored by commanders in the field because it ran contrary to (mostly U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force) institutional culture.
I think the author misses the point entirely. COIN was a tactic and was designed to support a strong central government in Kabul that would govern through federated provinces. That governance is elusive. Corruption (as outlined in Sarah Chayes new book and the many SIGAR reports) detail a country that does not have a coherent governance structure. So all the COIN, building up Marjah with a government in a box was futile. This article seems to leave out that none of this would build a foundation that would ever leave to an exit strategy around a “stable” environment.
That you would quote or mention Sarah Chayes re: COIN renders your comment that much more meaningless.
IMO, it appeared that Sarah’s sole hateful ambition in Afghanistan was to destroy the life of a single Afghan, Ahmad Wali Karzai.
COIN isn’t a tactic, Tom, it’s a strategic purpose that can use any number of methods: scorched earth, population-centric nation building, information, economic strangulation, and so on.
You’re both incorrect. COIN is not a tactic, and it certainly is not a strategy. Counterinsurgency is a type of conflict. Much in the same way that a civil war, revolution, or coup d’etat are all types of conflicts. Hence, sayin that COIN is a strategy or tactic is akin to saying that civil war is a strategy, which sounds ridiculuous.
Nation-building is not the job of the military, and should never again in the future be the job of any military, since it is essentially a civilian-led effort.
The primary reason the U.S. did not fully and meaningfully succeed in Afghanistan and Iraq – insurgency remains very active in both countries – is that COIN wasn’t civilian-led nor were the conditions ready for it. PRTs with civilian advisors who are beholden to the military for protection in the course of their work is not nation-building. It is posing as nation building, e.g. Kajaki Dam! And if the civilians need that much protection to do their job then the time is not right to go out and nation-build! Nation-building does require many conditions in place no matter how hard you hold your breath and tap your shoes and say it’s so, it’s so. The first condition for nation-building is peace. You need a country with capable civil service, like Germany and Japan under the Marshall Plan. You need a country with supportive neighboring countries. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan met these conditions. Regardless, the military thought it could use cash to buy people. Wrong. Can’t use money as a weapons system – stupid! But it didn’t work out to well, did it? Further, you got a bunch of American colonels telling experienced counterparts what they need in their own country. Preposterous form of nation building for the sake of the exercise only. Proving the concept takes more than wishful thinking.
“Nation-building is not the job of the military, and should never again in the future be the job of any military, since it is essentially a civilian-led effort.”
“What is important is what needs to be done, not who is doing it”-Galula.
It would be great if there were as many FSO, governance, and development, experts as there were soldiers in the government, but it will probably never be that way. I’m not sure how your PRT argument makes sense since security is the fundamental prerequisite for anything else to happen, and if there isn’t a need to have soldiers guarding a PRT then there probably isn’t even a need for a PRT in the first place, if you’re prioritizing the same areas the insurgency is. Your comment assumes there is a clear cut difference between clear-hold-build, when there isn’t, obviously, when you’re involved in unconventional warfare. COIN has been proven plenty of times in Iraq and Afghanistan but in smaller contexts of villages and valleys, rather than a whole country. COIN is an incredibly difficult thing to execute, to try to do so in a country like Iraq and Afghanistan makes it a daunting challenge, but doesn’t necessarily prove that it is a bad idea. And even saying “COIN doesn’t work” makes no sense, because COIN is whatever you want it to be. COIN looked different in some respects in Iraq than it did in Afghanistan. COIN can look different in Ramadi than it does in Fallujah. COIN can look different in the Pech river valley from 2005 than in 2007.
Please name those southeastern Afghan villages where COIN remains successful, particularly in those areas where insurgents WERE and ARE active. Marja? No. Sangin? No. Darawud? Ex. Kajaki Dam is monolithic failure of the military. $400 million spent and really nothing to show for it. The insurgents take credit for any electricity in the area. And please don’t say the diesel generated electricity was a success. Afghans can’t afford to maintain and operate diesel generators spewing toxic waste in rural villages where the air quality was great until burn pits….the list goes on…nothing except that COIN is supposed to neutralize insurgency. Insurgents are more alive and active than in 2005.
The conceptual underpinnings of the doctrine are in theory logical. It is their application that is suspect. If applied in political conditions that include a capable and committed partner, that is believed to be legitimate and the best alternative to the opposition, then the chances of success increase. If those conditions are absent and we are really the only people that want it to succeed (let alone believe in its merits), then it probably will not work. Even if those conditions are fulfilled it is still a long shot to assume that our policy objectives will remain attractive and sustainable. That said, I think wholesale commitment to a theory so dependent on the will and means of others to achieve enduring policy goals is unduly risky and should only be entered into as a last resort. It should not be the first idea out of the box – in most cases it may be best to leave the box sealed and just observe – it may be better (and more sustainable) in the long run.
Sir, soaking a matter in intellectual jargon doesn’t make the matter that much more purposeful. It’s actually very simple to nation-build if you mean it. USAID tried, but the military outspent that poor tired agency. The problem is the military sticking its nose in places it doesn’t belong, like international development nation-building, state-building, capacity-building. I know top brass who didn’t get it, and couldn’t understand. But they kept insisting to do it their way regardless of their lack of understanding.
Then there’s this article, in which the author predicted the outcome of the “surge” with 100 percent accuracy before it even started, and nailed the current situation precisely five years ago:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/12/10/obamas-indecent-interval/
As a counterinsurgent in Afghanistan for close to 10 years, I knew that Afghans historically and traditionally are unaccustomed to a central government telling them what to do. COIN’s bottom up governance strategy competed with the donors’ top down governance policies. Repatriating intellectual Afghans were forced to comply with the multitude of ill planned donor ambitions for the country. Many capable Afghans were sidelined and marginalized by the ambitions of development experts from around the world. Then all their talk focused on forcing Afghanistan into the 21st Century.
COIN was effectively forced on the Afghans. They had no choice but to accept the tactic. That’s why COIN didn’t take too well with the Afghans.
The problem was an American problem to begin with, especially as the world’s police in the late 10th century. Perhaps the U.S. shouldn’t have abandoned Afghanistan to foreign fighters and bin Laden post-Soviet withdrawal. Perhaps 9-11 then would’ve been a highly remote possibility instead of becoming a real opportunity for the foreign fighters.
Perhaps the U.S. shouldn’t have provided that much funds to Pakistan ($10 billion a year) who undoubtedly used parts of that funding to establish and fund violent extremist organizations.
Perhaps the U.S. shouldn’t have abandoned Iraq to a Shia government who despised recalcitrant and historically violent Sunnis.
Perhaps the U.S. should’ve helped Syrian freedom fighters if the U.S. doesn’t like Assad. Strangely, the U.S. didn’t do anything to support freedom fighters against Assad. Stupid!
IOW, the U.S. either has some horrible foreign policy makers or the U.S. is blindly beholden to interest groups whose aims compete with America’s globalization interests.
One of the big differences between Afghanistan and Iraq is the people. Afghans are not Iraqis, with all the differences noted.
Of course the human terrain is relevant to COIN efforts.
Aside from the inherent problems of “What would Galula say about Afghanistan”, the main problem with this article is the author’s underlying assumption that what Galula wrote is gospel. While Galula presents some interesting ideas and neat stories that make him sound like a reincarnated Lawrence of Arabia, there’s no proof that any of his stories are accurate. I have yet to come across any accounts of Algeria that ever reference Galula other than his own memoir.
However, even if everything Galula wrote was accurate, and he did create an island of happiness amidst the maelstrom of conflict in Algeria, Mr. Ford still misses the larger point Galula was trying to make about the conflict.
Yes, Galula expresses frustration that many of his peers and superiors refused to buy into his methods. But the larger issue for Galula, and the primary cause Galula attributes to French failure in the conflict is a lack of coherent strategy and unity of effort between the French government (both in Paris and Algiers), and the senior leadership of the French military. French policy on how to approach the Algerian conflict osscilated wildly throughout the conflict, and commanders at the tactical level (like Galula) were simply unable to make sustained progress in the confusion.
One can assume that Galula did not have tangible solutions to this problem, since he limited his advice on how to conduct a counterinsurgency at the tactical level.
If you’re going to compare Algeria to Afghanistan, the root of all the difficulties for the counterinsurgent forces in both conflicts is the lack of clear, coherent strategy.
Developing a clear, coherent strategy for any type of war is the true, “graduate level of war”. Unfortunately, many in the military and those who write about military affairs are still enamored with referring to COIN as a strategy, when it is simply a type of conflict. Until we accept this, we’ll continue to treat the symptoms instead of the disease itself.
*Drop Mike, Walk Off Stage*
What’s conveniently forgotten is when Galula had a chance to put his theory into practice in Algeria it failed.
There are two types of counter-insurgency in the modern era. In one the gov’t usually wins. A local regime fights the insurgents. It may get help from outside but the troops on the ground are locals and the decision makers are locals. Ideas about development and good governance have a place here. Remove the cause of the rebellion and it will wither. An alternative is brutality which can also work.
The second kind- which usually loses- is when an occupier is running the COIN campaign. The foreigners lose because they have better places to be, have little knowledge of the place and nationalism is a great rebel recruiter.
This article makes one wonder if the author actually believes France could have kept Algeria as a colony if it had only done more of what Galula recommended?