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Last fall, I returned from a six-month deployment to Iraq with the Navy, in which I worked as a tribal and leadership engagement officer in the Fallujah area. By the end of my deployment, Fallujah had changed from an area rife with al-Qaida’s presence and upward of 750 security incidents a month to one where al-Qaida was on the run and security incidents were down to about 80 a month. I saw what was needed to convincingly defeat an insurgency as we worked with local tribes and Iraqi security forces to clear and hold each of Fallujah’s 10 neighborhoods and numerous surrounding villages.

As security became the norm in the city, the educated middle-class re-asserted its leadership, and the men with guns who had so long dominated politics in the post-Saddam era transitioned to a civilian-controlled police force. By the end of my tour, engineers, architects, teachers and doctors were dominating the city council’s meetings, asking for more power and authority from U.S. forces to administer their affairs as we began initial planning to draw down our forces.

As much as it heartened me to witness the positive changes taking place in Fallujah, it also saddened me because it demonstrated just how inadequate our efforts are in Afghanistan and how far away we are from victory. It also prompted me to reflect upon my time in Afghanistan, where I worked as a political officer with the State Department for a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in 2005 and 2006 and on the strategies that are now being talked about to stabilize Afghanistan.

There has been a great deal of discussion about having a surge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan with the hope that this will have the same extremely positive effects it did in Iraq. While there must be an increase in U.S. forces, it must have an enduring presence and not one that goes away after a relatively brief period of time. Local security forces in Afghanistan, who would be charged with maintaining any post-surge security effect, lack not only the capabilities of Iraqi security forces but, in many cases, a modern outlook with respect to professionalism and personal behavior, and a functioning police system that can ensure adequate equipment, pay and support.

For example, the reality in most villages in southern Afghanistan is that local police are simply militias led by illiterate leaders who often prey upon the local population as much as they protect it. Transitioning these men to a police force that can actively and successfully deal with the Taliban, while maintaining the support of the community, will take years of determined effort. Additionally, our efforts should include the professional development of policing skills as well as focus on literacy and education and the inculcation of modern practices. In many respects, this requires a professional service dedicated to this effort, not one that is largely resourced through frequent rotations. Until efforts are made to comprehensively address the shortcomings of local security forces, the gains from any surge in Afghanistan would be difficult to maintain and consolidate.

Necessary foreigners

There are some who have stated that Afghanistan doesn’t need more troops because they will be resented by the Afghan population, which has a tradition of hostility to outsiders. Based upon my experience in Afghanistan, the Afghans certainly don’t want more foreigners influencing their internal affairs, especially if they come from neighboring countries, but they do crave security and the honest administration of government.

As long as the troops are deployed to each district center in the south and east, where the insurgency is raging, and then dispersed to major population areas in a population protection posture, the increase will be well-received. How our forces are organized affects how they will be welcomed; as one tribal elder recently told a Marine in Helmand province, as reported by The Associated Press, “When you protect us, we will be able to protect you.” If too much of our presence is through airstrikes or direct-action missions, then the people will resent us because of the inevitable collateral damage that comes from hitting an enemy that hides among the people and the chance that intelligence isn’t always correct. If we are living among the people, our presence is as much a deterrent to the Taliban as it is an enabler of the positive administration of government.

In many respects, we are the only means for villages and districts to stay connected to their central government and for local officials to confidently lead their people. Similarly, our mentoring and coaching of local leaders is sorely needed, and much like local security forces, they need help with respect to literacy training and competent administration along with exposure to a professional outlook. None of these efforts are easy, nor will they be accomplished quickly. A dedicated political service that can work on these issues is required. It doesn’t have to be large, but it must be effective and well-resourced and break the mold of frequent rotations.

Tribal power

Another lesson learned in Iraq is that tribal affiliation often has a greater pull on the hearts and minds of men than does Islamist ideology. Additionally, tribes can be used very effectively to fight al-Qaida and serve as a bulwark to the appeals of insurgent recruiters. Tribal affiliation is very strong in Iraq and Afghanistan, but their respective tribal systems and the contexts within which they operate are very different. Based on my experience in Anbar province, many tribal leaders are educated or at least have a modern outlook, and though Saddam’s relationship with them fluctuated from repression to co-optation to inclusion, they have a great deal of experience working with a viable central government. They have expectations of what the government can and should be doing, which affects their own behavior, and they insist on their rights and on the government meeting its responsibilities. In the case of Iraq, the government has most of the capacity to generally follow through on these expectations.

Many villages and districts in Afghanistan also have high hopes of what the government should be doing, but they know it will take years for this to occur. Because many tribal leaders know this and because their experience with the central government is of a weak, nonexistent or certainly not a reliable partner, empowering them can actually become a challenge to building the government. Although in some respects they may be a partner for the government if approached intelligently, this fine balancing act of building a modern state while incorporating traditional authority structures will be difficult. Even though these were also concerns in Anbar, the actions of the tribes were nested in the organization of a burgeoning state that had previously existed.

Like many tribes in Iraq, Afghanistan’s tribes view their relationships as almost exclusively zero-sum, but this already well-developed characteristic has been reinforced by the history of continuous fighting between factions, rival warlords, and even between towns and villages. This significantly complicates a tribal engagement strategy that seeks to work against insurgents by, with and through tribes. For these tribes, access to and control of land, water and roads is paramount because life is so precarious. Conflicts between tribes are matters of life and death rather than contests for power. There are no oil profits, or enough U.S. troops, to mitigate conflicts and, because Afghanistan is so undeveloped, few jobs other than those that support an agrarian economy. Because tribal relationships are so fragile in many parts of the country, any tribal engagement policy has to tread very carefully so that rival factions don’t appeal to the Taliban or other insurgent groups to balance a perceived tribal preference.

Additionally, unlike in Iraq, where tribal structures have remained largely intact since the Iraqi state was founded, although Saddam did try to change them, Afghanistan’s tribes have been systematically undermined by the Taliban and Pakistani intelligence, perverted by the free flow of arms, and weakened because of mass migrations of people. Those who are in power may not be the traditional tribal leaders and any attempt to reestablish traditional tribal authority will be actively resisted.

Funding PRTs

One of the keys to success in the Iraq surge was the minisurge of nonkinetic assets and capabilities. A constellation of PRTs dispersed with the troops during the surge as they mostly fanned out in and around Baghdad in a population protection posture in 2007. The number of PRTs also increased beyond the capital to solidify security gains in other parts of the country, such as Anbar province. The PRTs provided necessary interagency support for reconstruction, development and good governance efforts, and each team had a staff member from State and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The staff was supplemented by military personnel who were brought in for their specialized skill sets to assist with development efforts.

Even though PRTs first started in Afghanistan in 2003, they are significantly less well-resourced than their Iraqi counterparts. Any surge in Afghanistan will require the significant expansion and deepening of these assets. Unfortunately, State Department, USAID and the military have been stretched thin by Iraq, and the development and reconstruction challenges of Afghanistan are much greater than Iraq. What struck me most about Iraq was that even though the amount of reconstruction needs measured in dollars was indeed much greater than Afghanistan, they at least had the physical infrastructure of modernity, the money to fix it and the educated personnel to do it. None of these things exist in Afghanistan to the degree that its people and the project sizes require.

Much like the security services, the capabilities of the Afghan government at the district and village level are minimal or nonexistent. In many parts of the country, a robust PRT may have to take on the responsibilities of governance, albeit to a limited degree, while the capabilities of the Afghan state develop. At present, most Afghan PRTs have far too few interagency partners to help them extend the reach of the Afghan government to each and every district and village. Until this happens, there will always be a reason for villagers to support the insurgency because their government doesn’t do anything for them.

insurgent havens

A key goal of the surge in Iraq was to eliminate insurgent havens, which is a key aspect of counterinsurgency, either through the direct application of U.S. military power or indirectly by empowering indigenous security forces. Unless and until the insurgent havens in Pakistan are dealt with by applying an enlightened counterinsurgency strategy, success in Afghanistan is not assured. Even though external havens were never fully eliminated in Iraq, the surge allowed local Iraqi forces to eliminate jihadists and the havens they needed once they arrived.

The number of insurgents coming into Iraq is significantly lower than the number of insurgents who enter Afghanistan each day from Pakistan. Even if the strategy in Afghanistan is well-resourced and implemented, as long as Pakistan is not addressed, no amount of our efforts will really resolve the conflict in our favor for a long time. Even though this is already widely known by those who have served and worked in Afghanistan, it bears mentioning again in order to realistically look at the prospects for victory of any Afghanistan troop surge.

As Iraq continues to stabilize and attention returns back to Afghanistan, many of the hard-fought counterinsurgency and stability operations lessons learned in Iraq are being given a fresh look for use in Afghanistan. Although most of the population in Afghanistan supports the government of Afghanistan and coalition forces, the challenges of successfully resourcing and implementing a counterinsurgency campaign there are daunting. What we must be mindful of is that each insurgency is different and must be taken as it is and not as we would like it to be. We should be cautious about taking strategies that work in one theater and using them in another. Some elements of counterinsurgency, such as population protection, robust nonkinetic assistance, and well-resourced mentoring efforts, are common among different conflicts, but even then, their nature and how they are implemented often change. Even though Afghanistan’s challenges are unique, they are not impossible, and the right mix of resources, leadership and mind-set are vital for victory — informed by our experience in Iraq, but not dominated by it.