The roots of Obama's Afghanistan strategy

This month, 4000 United States Marines launched Operation Khanjar (strike of the sword) into Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The images splashed across the media, of soldiers and helicopters in rugged desert, illustrate the bare facts of yet another US led operation. There have been so many since September 11, 2001, that it can be difficult to distinguish the latest.

But whether it succeeds or otherwise, Operation Khanjar is worth noting for the strategic change it represents.

On 4 July The Australian ran the headline 'Offensives reveal Obama's strategy'. Really, Operation Khanjar is not Obama's strategy at all. Behind this operation lies a strategic consensus on counter-insurgency that has been gaining ground since the 2007 'surge' in Iraq.

David Kilcullen, former Australian Army officer and senior counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus, has been an emerging voice articulating new ways to combat insurgency. His book, The Accidental Guerrilla is a mind-boggling read and not just because it is a work of analytical depth.

Kilcullen's book rams home the almost overwhelming complexity of the Pashtun Taliban insurgency and the challenge of building an Afghan state, a project in which Australian troops are engaged.

His argument is that most of those Pashtun tribesmen fighting for the Taliban are 'accidental guerrillas' who are not ideological radicals, but tribesmen who have been provoked, bullied or bribed into attacking foreign troops.

To combat this 'accidental guerrilla syndrome' Kilcullen lays out what he calls a 'population centric approach,' which emphasises denying Taliban insurgents access to rural population centres rather than endlessly hunting them down in the countryside.

This approach to counter-insurgency, Kilcullen argues, proved its worth in the 2007 'surge', pulling Baghdad back from the brink of sectarian chaos. Kilcullen draws from his experience as one of the architects of that operation and applies it to Afghanistan, where, he argues, protecting the population from intimidation and coercion by the Taliban is a vital part of stifling the insurgency.

For the insurgents, he says, the populace is oxygen: deny them access and the Taliban will eventually wilt.

Operation Khanjar has Kilcullen's thesis written all over it. The central tenets have been echoed by US commanders. In particular, Kilcullen's argument that 'reforms targeting local and provincial government effectiveness are indispensable' seems to have been taken to heart.

As Marine Brigadier General Larry Nicholson said to his officers before the operation began: 'our focus is not on the Taliban' but 'on getting this government back up on its feet'. According to Nicholson, that means drinking tea and eating goat with the local people, over and above firing bullets.

The US commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, has also emphasised that Operation Khanjar is aimed at 'developing government that can protect people' even at the local level.

The fact that the first major military operation launched under the Obama administration rests upon intellectual foundations laid by figures such as David Kilcullen and David Petraeus does suggest a shift in American thinking. But contrary to headlines in the mainstream media, this was not President Obama's brainchild. Interestingly, it took a lot of convincing for Obama to come to terms with the strategies now being employed.

At the Crocker US Senate Hearing into Iraq in September 2007, then Senators Obama and Biden were sceptical about the merits of the population centric surge operation. Obama argued that the impact had been 'relatively modest' and asked General Petraeus for an answer to the question, 'at what point do we say "enough"?'

Likewise, Biden pressed the General for a progress update on a scale of one to ten. In this he echoed the mainstream media which often represents the counter-insurgency effort in statistics. Given Kilcullen's description of the multi-faceted nature of counter-insurgency, this reduction of the issues must have tried the General.

But Obama's reservations have since been laid aside, and the counter-insurgency strategy developed by General Petraeus alongside advisors like Kilcullen has been restored. Operation Khanjar, taking place in the very environment discussed by Kilcullen in The Accidental Guerrilla, is a test case for this 'population centric' strategy.

Kilcullen points out that the results will not be immediate. Building local communities is a long term project. Indeed, as of 7 July, Brigadier General Nicholson has highlighted the immediate challenges facing the marines, lamenting the lack of available local Afghan troops. From Pashtun tribal sensitivities to tensions between local and government authorities, the difficulties of southern Afghanistan are relentless.

Afghan parliamentarian Malalai Joya has argued that 'no nation can donate liberation to another', and that Afghan people must be left to work things out for themselves. But General McChrystal represents Operation Khanjar, coming shortly before the Afghan presidential elections and focusing on the people, as less about 'liberation' than about providing the space in which Afghans might choose their own future.