Category Estimating Insurgent Force Size

Continuing the discussion on Afghanistan drawn from fragments of text from pages 260-262 of America’s Modern Wars:

The 2013 figure of 20,093 incidents a year does argue for a significant insurgency force. If we use a conservative figure of 333 incidents per thousand insurgents, then we are looking at more than 60,000 full-time and part-time insurgents. The number of security incidences has declined slightly since 2011. This would indicate that either we are slowly bringing the insurgency under control or that they are simply waiting until the U.S. leaves before they get more serious. Still, the level of violence is higher than it was in 2009, before the surge started, and the level of violence in 2013 is not significantly less than it was in 2011…. It certainly appears we are a long way from getting the situation under control, and leaves open the question as to what will happen once the United States completes its withdrawal.

We still do not know for sure if Afghanistan is a regional or factional insurgency or whether it is broadly based. But if it is a regional or factional insurgency, then according to our regression model, we should be winning. Yet we only appear to be winning during the surge…

…[skipped several paragraphs]

With the insurgency able to threaten and kill more civilians, the government riddled with corruption and bribery, opium poppy cultivation expanding in the areas currently being fought over, and large numbers of people displaced and continuing to be displaced, this all paints a picture of an insurgency that is not only not under control, but is actually expanding its influence.

If this is a broadly based insurgency then at the current force levels our chances of winning still appear to be low. To push the ratios up to a level where we have a good chance of winning it would require another 100,000 or more troops (almost certainly from the U.S.)  plus the commitment of time and losses for several more years while it is turned around. In effect, we would have to go back to the force levels we have in 2010.

…[skipped several paragraphs]

If our model is correct and the insurgency is indeed broadly based, then it is going to take more than time to defeat it. It is going to take more force than we currently have. Theoretically this can come from the Afghan Army, but they do need to be raised, trained, motivated, and made effective. 

…

If this insurgency is broadly based, then the surge we did up to 100,000 U.S. troops in 2010 and the building up of the Afghan army was probably good enough to turn the tide. The fact that incidents appear to have declined in 2012 indicates that this may have been working, but incidents are back up for 2013. The problem is if the insurgency is broadly based, then those surge forces needed to stay in place for the next ten years, with the expected continued losses and expenses. [bolding added for this post]

….

(to be continued) 

 

Continuing the discussion on Afghanistan drawn from fragments of text from pages 258-260 of America’s Modern Wars:

We received no substantive response to our briefing and meanwhile the war in Afghanistan continued. Finally in early 2009, we wrote an unpublished op-ed piece that said in part:

Right now, in Afghanistan we have very roughly 30,000 U.S. troops, 30,000 other international troops, 60,000 operational Afghani Army troops and maybe 60,000 active Afghani Police. The effectiveness of the Afghani army and police are open to debate, but the police have been losing almost 1,000 people a year…

This argues, regardless of everything else currently going on, that U.S. needs to to add between 30,000 and 60,000 troops Afghanistan. Anything less is too little to give us the best chance of a favorable outcome. At 60,000 more, this pushes the force ratio back to a more comfortable 3.75-to-1 ratio even if there is 32,000 insurgents and one does not count the Afghani army or police.

This is assuming that we fully understand the nature of the Afghan insurgency. If this insurgency is much more broadly based (i.e. based upon nationalism), then we are looking at even higher force levels required….

Therefore, we recommend pushing U.S. force levels up another 60,000 more for this next year while continuing to aggressively search for a political solution and while continuing to develop the Afghani National Army and the Afghani Police. If this increase and a potential political solution noticeably changes the conditions on the ground, then this has worked. If not, then in the long run we will want to back out of any major ground commitment in Afghanistan sooner rather than later.

….

In the interim, the Obama administration came up with its own response to the developing Afghan crisis, which was its own surge. Under this plan, announced in December 2009, another 30,000 or so troops were added as part of a surge, having reached the peak of the surge in the later half of 2010. They then set a withdrawal date of the middle of 2011, which they were unable to achieve.

So, more than five years after we wrote the February 2009 unpublished op-ed piece, does it still stand up? In the Report of Secretary-General of the United Nations for March 2014, they record that as of mid-January 2014 there were 145,199 Afghan National Police and 193,427 Afghan National Army soldiers. The “surge targets” were 152,000 and 195,000 respectively. So, this is between 193,427 to 338,626 counterinsurgent (depending on how you count police). This is certainly enough strength to counteract a force of 20,000 insurgents.

The U.S. force is drawing down and is disengaged from any active combat role as of 2015. The force peaked from about 100,000 in 2010 [meaning we added 70,000 U.S. troops] down to 66,000 as of start of 2013. Over the course of 2013, 34,000 of thee troops were to be withdrawn, with the U.S. involvement to end sometime in 2015. The coalition forces have already mostly left. As such, this Afghan force of over 300,000 troops and police is the primary counterinsurgent force for the future. It is certainly a much more impressive force than the 114,066 that we tried to prosecute the war with back in 2006.

On the other hand, the level of violence continued to rise during the buildup of the Afghan Army. This can be show with the reporting of the U.N. Department of Safety and Security (UNDAS) of security incidences in Afghanistan:

                                      Security               Incidences

Period                           Incidences          Per Month

2008                                8,893                     741

2009                              11,524                     960

2010                              19,403                  1,617

2011                              22,903                  1,909

Jan-July 2012              10,109                  1,431

16 Aug – 15 Nov 2012    4,639                  1,546

16 Nov – 15 Feb 2013    3,783                  1,261

2013                             20,093                  1,674

 

(to be continued) 

Picking the discussion up from fragments of text from pages 256 – 258 of America’s Modern Wars:

…if we use the figure of 250 incidents [per thousand], then we are looking at an estimated insurgent strength as high as 26,384 [in December 2008]. This is still based upon a performance that may have been better than what the insurgents were doing in Iraq! We are probably looking at an insurgent force strength that is greater than 20,000 and had been that way for the three years of 2006 to 2008.  

…Looking once again at our logit regression model, if the insurgency is regional or factional, then the counterinsurgency has a 93.1 to 96.8 percent chance of winning. If the insurgency is broadly based (national) then the counterinsurgency has a 28.9 to 48.1 percent chance of winning.

…So again we are back to the same two questions that we face[d] in Iraq, what is the size of the insurgency and is it a regional or factional insurgency.

In a December 2008 briefing [at NIC] I posed that question after presenting this data. I then asked the room full of analysts whether the insurgency in Afghanistan [was] regional or factional, or was it broadly based. I was concerned that it might be broadly based because:

1. The insurgents came from the majority tribe in Afghanistan, the Pashtun…
2. It appears that the open source estimate of insurgent strength was again low.
3. It appears that things were getting worse.

At the time of that briefing, we had 110,790 troops there. The Dupuy Institute estimated insurgent strength between 15,000 and 25,000, with us leaning towards the higher figure. So if the insurgency was a regional or factional insurgency, then even at a force ratio of 4.43 to 1 (assuming 25,000 insurgents), we had an 84 percent chance of winning. Yet, it did not appear that we were winning. [bolding added for this post]

So, the question went around the table, and two or three people there strongly opined that it was clearly a regional or factional insurgency. There was certitude in the voices. I was not sure, but was not ready to argue it at the time.

The danger is that if the insurgency is broadly based, and there were indeed something like 25,000 insurgents, then at a 4.43 to 1 force ratio, then according to our logit regression model, the chance of the blue side winning was only 14 percent. To push the odds up to a more reasonable level of 80 percent would mean that we needed a force ratio of more like 15.5 to 1, meaning an additional 276,710 troops, and most likely the majority of them would have to come from America! Needless to say, as the U.S. was hesitant to build up to 160,000 troops in Iraq, then such a number for Afghanistan was going to be difficult to sell.

We received no substantive response to our briefing and meanwhile the war in Afghanistan continued…

(to be continued) 

So the opening paragraph of my chapter (see page 253 of America’s Modern Wars) on Afghanistan says (after the infamous George W. Bush quote):

Afghanistan is an unusual case, as the central government (controlled by the Taliban) was overthrown in 2001 by the U.S. and their Afghan allies, with the U.S. allied with and helping the anti-Taliban insurgents! This U.S. then installed a new government and a new insurgency developed against this U.S. supported government. Still, the insurgency appeared to lie fallow until 2005, when the incidents and violence began cycling upwards and finally exploding into a full scale insurgency in 2009 that now appears to be difficult to control.

I then describe the process in some depth, concluding on page 255:

This left the U.S. and allies in 2006 with 114,066 counterinsurgents facing allegedly only 2,000 to 5,000 insurgents and suffering 65 U.S. killed in action (as opposed to killed from all causes, 65 coalition killed in action, 63 Afghan Army and a rather significant 412 [Afghan] police. Were the counterinsurgents loosing control of the war at that point, only securing those spots they most cared about, and handing over control of the rest ot the country to the insurgents? That appears to be the case.

From there, the war tipped rapidly out of control, with 2007 seeing 83 U.S. killed in action, 99 coalition troops killed in action, 385 Afghan Army and a stunning figure of 925 police killed. The following year was no better, with 133 U.S. killed in action, 125 coalition killed in action, 226 Afghan Army and 880 police killed. The years of 2009 and 2010 have only been worse.

So, what happened and how did the U.S. loose control of the situation? Unfortunately, The Dupuy Institute was not doing any work on the subject at the time. But, we do note to start with that the estimates of insurgent strength again appear low, as was the case with Iraq. In 2006 it was estimated that the insurgents had between 2,000 and 5,000 troops. The U.S. and coalition forces also claimed to have killed 600 insurgents and captured 1,200 more. This is pretty significant casualties if the insurgency only had 2,000 fighters. One wonders how so few guerillas managed to keep the insurgency going with such losses.

By 1 January 2008 the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had upped its estimate to between 7,000 and 20,000 guerillas, which is much better, but when one considers that the guerillas had been doing over 6,000 incidents a year since 2006, it appears that the public estimates were still catching up with the reality on the ground.

In December 2008 we flagged this concern about guerilla force size in a briefing we gave. We noted that the incidents in Afghanistan were on the rise.  

(to be continued)