Who's winning, who's losing, and why.

A New Plan for Afghanistan

Less counterinsurgency, more killing and capturing.

By Fred KaplanUpdated Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010, at 6:39 PM ET

Gen. David PetraeusOfficials say a shift in U.S. war strategy has begun to take place in Afghanistan, away from classic counterinsurgency (protecting the population, providing basic services, promoting good government) and toward the traditional business of killing and capturing bad guys.

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Counterinsurgency (or COIN, as it's often called) is hardly dead. Many U.S. troops are still very much engaged in COIN operations. A surge of civilian officials and advisers, from several NATO countries, is well under way in Kabul's ministries in and several provincial districts. And COIN is seen as vital to Afghanistan's long-term stability.

However, U.S. and NATO officers, intelligence analysts, and other officials and advisers now believe that our objectives in the Afghanistan war can no longer be accomplished in sufficiently short time through COIN alone or even through a COIN-dominant strategy.

Hence the huge increase, just in the last three months, of military attacks—by drones, aircraft-launched smart bombs, and special-operations forces on the ground—against Taliban soldiers and, in many cases, specific midlevel Taliban leaders.

The intended effect is the same: to apply pressure on the Taliban insurgents, disrupt their command-control networks, create fissures between the insurgents fighting in the field and their leaders across the border in Pakistan—to the point where many of them surrender or negotiate a reconciliation with the Afghan government.

Under classic COIN strategy, this process would take place slowly but steadily, as the presence of security forces and the supply of basic services boost popular allegiance to the Afghan government, which in turn dries up the base of support for the insurgents.

However, it is now calculated, even by many COIN advocates, that this process would take too long—and be too corrupted by Afghan politics—to work in any practical sense.

As for the timing, President Barack Obama has repeatedly said that his much-publicized deadline of July 2011 will mark only the beginning of a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and that the scope and pace of the pullout will be determined by conditions on the ground. Still, it's clear that domestic support for this war is winding down. Some senior White House advisers (though just some) are seeking any excuse for an exit. In any case, the time needed for success through a COIN campaign alone—another six to 10 years, or more, the strategy's most avid supporters estimate—is seen as politically unsustainable.

As for Afghan politics, COIN can succeed only by, with, and through the host government; U.S. troops in a COIN operation are—and advertise themselves to be—fighting on behalf of the host government. And yet, by all official accounts, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government is so distrusted by its own people—and so incompetent at (or uninterested in) providing services—that it cannot really serve as a reliable partner in a COIN campaign.

So, U.S. and NATO forces are concentrating more on a different, possibly faster, explicitly more forceful means of pressuring the Taliban to the negotiating tables.

Airstrikes and commando killings have always been part of the operation. By the same token, COIN is still a part of this ramped-up killing campaign. Without the security provided by lots of U.S. troops on the ground—and without the human intelligence that these troops cultivate among the local population—the special-ops forces wouldn't be able to function, and the air and drone pilots wouldn't know where their targets were. The two strategies—counterinsurgency and counterterrorism—are, in this sense, connected. What's recently changed is the emphasis on each, not just in degree and intensity but also in terms of which approach is seen as the spearhead to achieving the war's objectives.

This shift in emphasis is not a subtle matter; it is altering the character of this war. The Army's field manual on counterinsurgency—which was co-written by Gen. David Petraeus, who is now U.S. commander in Afghanistan—notes that COIN wars are "protracted by nature" and that they require "firm political will and extreme patience," as well as "considerable expenditure of time and resources." It orders all soldiers and officers to focus on protecting the population and to put much less priority on "killing and capturing the enemy." At one point, the manual advises its readers: "Only attack insurgents when they get in the way."

Since taking command of the Afghanistan war, Petraeus has said that Taliban fighters and their commanders wouldn't seek a deal unless they thought they were losing. But in recent weeks, he has substantially stepped up this side of the campaign—the business of "killing and capturing the enemy," which his field manual discouraged—to make the insurgents perceive that they're losing much more quickly.

"Petraeus is unleashing the special-ops guys," one U.S. official told me, in every area of Afghanistan where the Taliban are in force: north, east, and south.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, is now out in paperback. He can be reached at .

Photograph of Gen. David Petraeus by Chris Hondros/Getty Images.