Course Correction

Camp Julien is surrounded by reminders of Afghanistan’s past. The coalition military base--which sits in the hills south of Kabul, just high enough to rise above the thick cloud of smog that perpetually blankets the city--is flanked by two European-style palaces built in the 1920s by the modernizing King Amanullah. Home to Soviet troops and mujahedin during the past decades of war, the now-crumbling palaces are littered with bullet holes and decorated with graffiti in multiple languages. Uphill from Julien is the old Russian officers’ club, dating from the Soviet invasion and featuring a recently refilled swimming pool that overlooks the southern half of the city. The pool is said to have been the site of executions in the 1990s; the condemned were apparently shot off the diving board.

The project underway at Camp Julien aims to help the United States and its allies succeed where King Amanullah, the Russians, and even the mujahedin failed. Julien is home to the Counterinsurgency Training Center–Afghanistan, where U.S. and coalition forces are trying to teach themselves and Afghans how to fight a different kind of war. For one week each month, 130 students descend on Julien to learn about counterinsurgency. Attendees come from every possible background: U.S. and coalition troops of all ranks, ages, and nationalities; State Department and USAID personnel; Afghan soldiers and police; members of NGOs; contractors; Army anthropologists. (I was there in July as part of my research on law in situations of counterinsurgency.)

Overseeing the center is an American colonel named John Agoglia. The Brooklyn native is both impossibly considerate and, at six feet and 215 pounds, incredibly imposing--a fact compounded by his loud, decisive manner. "No one here is a subject-matter expert in counterinsurgency," he announces to his students on the first day of their course. "If you think you’re an expert, it indicates to me you’ve stopped learning, don’t have an open mind, and you should leave. We’re all students here."

His strength, he told me, lies not in creating ideas but in synthesizing them. The result is that Agoglia presides over something akin to the Aspen Ideas Festival of Afghanistan. Sitting around a campfire or in the center’s small, plywood-walled conference room, groups one would never expect to see together talk late into the night about counterinsurgency theory or metrics for measuring the efficacy of development aid. Agoglia’s staff contributes to this vibrancy. His 15 instructors include French and Australian officers, as well as U.S. troops with varied experiences. Their offices are filled with books on counterinsurgency operations and Afghan history--from the conqueror Babur’s memoirs to histories of the British-Afghan wars of the nineteenth century. Julien may not fit the image of an ordinary military installation, but counterinsurgency has long been considered atypical--the province of warrior-scholars like General David Petraeus (who has a Ph.D. from Princeton) or John Nagl (a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford). Indeed, the Army and Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual opens with what has become a popular epigram: "Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man’s warfare--it is the graduate level of war."

This more sophisticated style of warfare is now central to Afghanistan’s future. General Stanley McChrystal, who oversees the coalition effort in the country, issued a tactical directive in early July to his forces. It was a striking document that effectively reversed the central theory of the great wars of the twentieth century--destroy the military and the will of the people. Instead, McChrystal told the troops that "we will not win based on the number of Taliban we kill," and he cautioned against using air attacks because they might cause civilian casualties. An alienated population, he argued, would threaten the mission’s success. More recently, McChrystal has identified another tenet of counterinsurgency as a crucial objective in the fight for Afghanistan: improving governance at all levels. As counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen has noted, "a government that is losing to an insurgency is not being outfought, it is being outgoverned."

Now, President Obama must decide whether to give McChrystal the additional troops he is requesting to carry out this strategy. Before he does, he will have to determine whether he thinks counterinsurgency can truly succeed in Afghanistan. And the answer to that question hinges partly on whether our military can learn this type of warfare, and learn it quickly. "I expect our force to internalize and operate in accordance with my intent," McChrystal wrote in his July directive. "Following this intent requires a cultural shift within our forces--and complete understanding at every level--down to the most junior soldiers." An entirely new mindset is a tall order for a massive bureaucracy. If you want a sense of whether it can be done, there is no better place to visit than Camp Julien--Afghanistan’s graduate school of war.