https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/how-the-taliban-did-it-inside-the-operational-art-of-its-military-victory/
How the Taliban did it: Inside the ‘operational art’ of its military victory
By
Benjamin Jensen
The Taliban are in Kabul and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has left the country.
How exactly did the militant group do it? Understanding how the
Taliban accomplished its lightning-fast encirclement of the capital, as
well as the next phase of the conflict, requires understanding the
group’s strategy in terms of “operational art.” The Taliban of 2021 is
not the same as the Taliban of the 1990s. This Taliban is now adept at
integrating military and non-military instruments of power in pursuit of
its political objectives.
The Afghan government didn’t lose the fight because most US military
forces withdrew from the country. Instead, the government’s troops were
outmaneuvered by a more adaptive military organization. The Taliban
delineated specific objectives and lines of effort to hollow out the
Afghan security forces and conduct a strategic encirclement of Kabul
designed to force the government to capitulate.
The concept of operational art forms the blueprint for military
campaigns, translating political objectives and strategy into tactical
actions on the battlefield. A group need not study Clausewitz and
Western military history, or attend a modern military staff college, to
develop such an art. As the Taliban has demonstrated, it need only rely
on an overarching theory of victory to guide its actions.
Over time, the Taliban has evolved into a military group capable of
advancing along multiple lines of effort. The shadowy insurgent network
deft at executing rural ambushes and planting improvised explosive
devices (IEDs) has been replaced by a complex organization managing as
many as 80,000 fighters who are even more skilled at using social media
than AK-47s. Their operational art combines information operations,
including appeals from tribal elders alongside text messages and
Twitter, with decentralized orders that allow local commanders who know
the terrain and politics in their areas to identify opportunities for
taking the initiative. When Taliban forces achieve military success,
they reinforce those advances with mobile reserve exploitation forces—hordes of commandos on motorcycles—allowing the group to maintain tempo on the battlefield.
The Taliban’s overarching objective has not changed for years: seize
control of Afghanistan and re-establish an Islamic Emirate. During the
current military campaign, the group was pragmatic about this objective.
Success could come in the form of pure military victory or a more
complex negotiated settlement that left the group in the seat of power
and the administration in Kabul expats or prisoners. This pragmatism
reflects the Taliban’s understanding that the group cannot govern
Afghanistan the same way it did in the 1990s. The Taliban will be harsh
and roll back human rights, but it will seek to keep the country
connected to the world and the aid dollars flowing. The group likely
wants to avoid repeating the governance failures of the 1990s by calling
for many government officials to remain in technical positions and
ensure that basic services and the economy continue functioning. Taliban
fighters have seized key economic terrain such as border-crossing
points, granting themselves enough funds to govern a country of almost
forty million people.
To achieve their objective, the Taliban’s military campaign relied on four lines of effort:
1. Isolating the Afghan military
The collapse of the Afghan security forces was a result of
operational-level isolation. In US Army doctrine, isolation involves
sealing off an enemy both physically and psychologically from its base
of support—denying them freedom of movement and preventing
reinforcement. The Taliban took a deliberate approach to isolating its
foe at the operational level for more than eighteen months by taking
advantage of fundamental weaknesses in the posture of Afghan security
forces.
Initially, the Afghan government focused on holding terrain through
checkpoints and small outposts scattered across the country. From a
political standpoint, this posture allowed Ghani, who struggled to win
broad-based political support, to appeal to different political groups
and say he was denying the Taliban terrain.
But the military reality was the opposite: The approach dispersed
units across the country and rendered them unable to mutually reinforce
one another. The Taliban exploited this vulnerability, disrupting ground
lines of communication in an effort to further isolate the checkpoints
and set the conditions for the defeat of Afghan forces. As the
checkpoints became dependent on getting new supplies by air, resupply
missions strained an already overstretched Afghan Air Force. As a
result, maintenance issues grounded more aircraft than anti-aircraft
fire did.
The net result was a series of outposts where Afghan forces were often without food, water, or ammunition, breeding discontent, disillusionment, and a broken air force to boot.
2. Targeting cohesion through threats and texts
With Afghan security forces—which likely outnumbered the Taliban by
three to one—isolated, the Taliban increased activities along a second
line of effort: the use of tailored propaganda and information
operations to undermine morale and cohesion. Morale and the will to
fight are critical intangibles in war—as practitioners ranging from Sun
Tzu to Napoleon have observed. The Taliban further sealed off physically
isolated Afghan security forces through a sophisticated
psychological-warfare campaign.
The insurgents flooded social media with images that offered
surrounded Afghan security forces a Hobson’s choice: Surrender and
live—or die and wonder if the Taliban will kill your family next. More
than 70 percent of the Afghan population has access to cell phones, and
the Taliban has adapted accordingly—using modern, Russian-style
information warfare that deploys fake accounts and bots to spread its
messages and undermine the Afghan government.
The group combined the new with the old as well, using appeals from
tribal elders alongside text messages to compel Afghan security forces
to surrender. As outposts crumbled, the Taliban sustained its momentum
on the battlefield using captured military equipment not only to
resupply its forces but also to exploit images of the surrender for
additional propaganda.
Put yourself in the shoes of an Afghan soldier: You are in a combat
outpost, running out of food and ammunition, fighting for an unpopular
government, and forced to pay bribes due to endemic corruption. As you
look at your cell phone, all you see are images of fellow soldiers
surrendering. Even if you opt to fight, your morale and will to fight
have been undermined.
3. Practicing a new form of terror: kill and compel
The Taliban used terror to further undermine confidence in the
government and degrade Kabul’s ability to fight. Whereas the insurgents
once relied on high-value attacks using vehicle-borne IEDs to terrorize
the population and strike at the government, in the lead-up to this
latest campaign they shifted their tactics to a war in the shadows that
proved more effective in undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan
government.
Over the last two years, the Taliban has employed a covert
assassination campaign to target civil-society leaders and key military
personnel such as pilots. The intermediate military objective was
twofold. First, it amplified the Taliban’s strategic messaging that
Ghani’s regime could not secure Afghanistan. Everyone knew the Taliban
was behind most of the assassinations, but the fact that it didn’t take
credit for them made the killings seem more insidious. Second, the best
way to destroy an air force is on the ground. Lacking sophisticated
air-defense weapons, the Taliban opted to undermine the Afghan Air Force
by killing pilots in their homes—a crude but effective variant of the
practice of high-value individual targeting. These attacks were designed
to compel other Afghan pilots to abandon their posts.
4. Negotiating to buy time and constrain military power
The Taliban integrated diplomacy with its military campaign in a way
that both Afghan security forces and the United States struggled to
replicate. War is a continuation of politics. Any battlefield activity
in which the operational logic isn’t connected to clearly defined
political objectives will prove self-defeating.
The Taliban took advantage of the peace deal negotiated largely
bilaterally between its representatives and the United States under
former President Donald Trump. In excluding the Afghan government, the
agreement undermined the Ghani administration politically and made it
difficult to maintain unity of effort between partners in the
counterinsurgency campaign. The Taliban used the cover of the peace deal
to move into position across the country, surrounding key districts and
provincial centers, while also using the negotiation process to limit
US military power. Each round of diplomatic talks constrained America’s
ability to attack Taliban targets.
If there was a critical turning point in the conflict, it was the
peace deal signed under Trump: Without it, the Taliban would have
struggled to isolate the Afghan military and set the conditions for its
rapid advance on Kabul. Likewise, the deal signaled to regional actors
that they needed to hedge their bets and start making provisions for the
end of the Ghani regime in Afghanistan.
The next phase
All wars must end. But how they end matters and can determine the
character of future conflicts and their ability to spread beyond
borders.
The complete collapse of the Afghan security forces increases the
likelihood that regional actors will engage the Taliban, shifting from
proxy support to open political relations with the group. These
interactions will be transactional exchanges, as states like Iran and
Pakistan secure their borders and security interests while countries
such as Russia, China, and Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbors advance
their economic interests and try to limit refugee flows and what could
prove to be a complex humanitarian emergency.
In the transition period, regional states and great powers will
determine whether or not to fund rival centers of power in Afghanistan
to balance the Taliban—an unlikely prospect in the short-term given the
success of the Taliban campaign. More immediately, regional actors will
increasingly view Afghanistan through a counterterrorism lens and shift
their attention to groups such as ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), a mutual enemy
of states in the region and the Taliban.
In this environment, US policy will need to focus on averting a
humanitarian catastrophe and developing viable options for pursuing
American counterterrorism goals. The war in Afghanistan is displacing
hundreds of thousands of people in the middle of a pandemic and a severe
drought affecting the region. Humanitarian concerns and terrorism are
not mutually exclusive. Groups such as ISIS-K will prey on the
post-conflict security crisis to radicalize a new generation of
followers who feel abandoned by Western institutions. Other actors, such
as Russia and Belarus, will take advantage of refugee flows to further
polarize politics in Europe. The United States and its partners will
need to shift from supporting a fallen regime to preventing the
Taliban’s military victory from fueling unrest in new forms.
Benjamin Jensen is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft
Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. He holds a
dual appointment as a professor at the Marine Corps University School of
Advanced Warfare, where he runs its Future War research program, and as
a scholar in residence at American University’s School of International
Service. Outside of academia, he is a reserve officer in the US Army
who recently returned from supporting the Resolute Support mission in
Afghanistan. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not
reflect official government policy.
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