Winning in Afghanistan

America's war in Afghanistan, soon to enter its eighth year, is arguably at its lowest point since troops drove the Taliban from power in 2001. Throughout the country, Taliban forces are making inroads. Allied casualties are at their highest since the war began. And Al Qaeda operates from a safe haven on the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, just out of America's reach.

Thomas Johnson, a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and an expert on Afghanistan, believes the U.S.-led war now resembles the failed Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, which lasted almost 10 years and cost the mighty Soviet military about 15,000 lives. Johnson recently returned from Afghanistan, where he spent seven weeks talking to military officers, Afghan politicians and tribal leaders and, with the help of an Afghan go-between, Taliban commanders. Johnson shared his findings with NEWSWEEK's Dan Ephron. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What is flawed about our approach in Afghanistan?
Thomas Johnson: It's the same problem the Soviets had in their engagement from 1979 to 1989 … The United States, just as the Soviet Union, controls all the urban areas and especially provincial capitals and Kabul. But this is a rural counterinsurgency, just as the mujahedin's conflict against the Soviets was also a rural insurgency. And you don't win a rural insurgency from Kabul or Jalalabad or Kandahar. You win a rural insurgency by maintaining a presence and insulating the villages in the rural areas. And that's what we don't do—unlike what the mujahedin did in their battle with the Soviets and unlike what the Taliban are presently doing in Afghanistan today, where they operate on the village level on a 7/24 basis, either intimidating or winning the allegiance of the Afghan people. That's what it takes to win an insurgency and that's what it also takes to win a counterinsurgency.

So let's unpack that. You're saying we're mainly on the big bases, we're not scattered throughout the rural areas. Are there enough troops in Afghanistan to have a presence everywhere?
Yes. I believe the problem in Afghanistan isn't necessarily a quantitative manpower problem but rather a manpower distribution problem. We have between 60,000 and 70,000 international troops in Afghanistan presently and the vast majority of these spend their time in the FOBs [forward operating bases]. We have at least 10,000 soldiers, airmen, Marines and the like in Bagram for example, which is at least 150 miles away from the insurgency. And Bagram has a Pizza Hut, a Burger King and even a massage parlor. But it's not the way to win a counterinsurgency. You have to be out in the villages … When I was in Solerno last year, which is a FOB near the Pakistani-Afghan border near Khost, I estimated—and nobody really argued with me—that while there were thousands of people at this base, probably less than 5 percent ever left the wire. And you just can't prosecute a counterinsurgency with those kinds of numbers.

If you have smaller numbers of troops in compounds throughout the country, how do you protect them? How do you make sure their bases don't get overrun by the Taliban?
The Taliban up to this point have not, with one exception, shown that they have the capability of overrunning an international force of the size I'm suggesting at the district level. What I talk about is about 75 ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] personnel complemented by 50 Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police and that's complemented by an additional 25 to 45 civilian development specialists—everything from hydrologists to agro-economists and the like … In most of the districts where the Taliban are operating, they're not roaming around in groups of 500 or even groups of 50. We're talking about tens.

And what would be the main mission of the troops at this local level? Is it to provide security for the Afghans who aren't getting it from the central government?
South of the Helmand River, where the Pashtun homeland really is, there's been very little reconstruction. So first of all, these district teams will be able to pursue reconstruction and development programs but not at the whims of Kabul … You would be basically building and enhancing the types of things the people themselves are suggesting are needed. This would help to solidify the traditional Pashtun social structure that's had a very sophisticated conflict-mechanism strategy over the years, that's been basically destroyed since 1979 when the Soviets invaded. I argue that what we really want to do is to rebuild this social structure that's been very good at resolving and moderating conflicts and the like. The next thing is that, you know, there's a symbiotic relationship between security and reconstruction. You can't have one without the other, especially in this campaign. We being at the village level would also offer village elders security. We're insulating them against the insurgents, the Taliban. And I think it would eventually drive the Taliban out of these areas, much the way it's been done in some of the urban areas in Iraq through the inkblot strategy.