

John Allen better be a mathematical genius. The three-star Marine general tapped to helm the Afghanistan war has one hell of a battlefield geometry problem on his hands. Not only does Allen have to hold U.S. gains in southern Afghanistan, he's got to tamp down the volatile east, all while losing 33,000 troops by next September. "I can't figure out how to do the math," says John Nagl, president of the influential Center for a New American Security.

Allen may have to have a preliminary answer by Tuesday morning. That's when he goes before the Senate Armed Services Committee for a bout of questions on the end of the surge. While senators are sure to use Allen as a political football over the impending drawdown, the real question surrounding his impending command is what he can do to stop eastern Afghanistan's downward spiral.

Since 2009, President Obama's troop surges focused on the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, leaving the east, on the border with Pakistan, with 7,000 fewer troops. The military thought that was just Phase One. Rep. Buck McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, tells Danger Room he thought Phase Two was going to be a surge eastward, to take territory away from the Taliban and the Haqqani Network along the Pakistan border.

"If you only have limited forces, and we've really got the south under control, then it seems logical to release some forces to go into the north and east and do the same thing there," McKeon says.

But as Danger Room first reported, the Obama team nixed that idea, for fear of expanding a war it wants to wind down. "We don't anticipate replicating what we did in the south in the east," a senior administration official said last week. Instead, 10,000 troops will depart Afghanistan this year, before another 23,000 leave by September 2012.

That's a big problem. As Yochi Dreazen writes for National Journal, Afghanistan's "real story is not in the south; it's in the east." That's where Taliban and Haqqani Network fighters stream in from Pakistan, carrying money, weapons and supplies to combat U.S. troops and plans to besiege Kabul. All that makes the area's strategic importance "infinitely greater" than Helmand and Kandahar, writes Carnegie Endowment scholar Gilles Dorronsoro (.pdf). Whatever the merits of trying to take the Taliban's spiritual heartland away from it, insurgent attacks in the east rose 21 percent by March.

Insurgents are bolder in the east, too. Pressure from U.S. troops forced the Taliban in the south to rely on assassinations. In the east, according to Jeffrey Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War, Haqqani Network fighters use multiple suicide attacks, car bombs and "mass infantry tactics," swarming against U.S. bases and convoys. They get mowed down and "don't seem bothered," Dressler says, since they can replenish their numbers across the Pakistan border.

Allen's job will be to suppress those fighters without any big push into the east. He'll have armed drones at his disposal, lethal forces from the Joint Special Operations Command, and Afghan troops to make up the difference. Petraeus tried hard not to criticize the troop drawdown during a Senate hearing on Thursday. Longtime allies aren't as shy.

Retired Col. Peter Mansoor, a former executive officer to Petraeus, considers the "shortsighted" decision to mean the end of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

Nagl, another old confidante of Petraeus, has a subtler take. "We'll retain a counterinsurgency strategy in the south and southwest, but it'll be a counterterrorism strategy in the east," Nagl says. Whatever the bifurcations, declining to seize and hold territory from the insurgents on the Pakistan border means "we're accepting additional risk," unless Allen "is able to do some things with his forces that I can't see."

Just because Allen may not have many counterinsurgency options available to him doesn't mean there's nothing he can do. Testifying next to him tomorrow will be the former leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, Adm. William McRaven, who's tapped to be the next leader of all special operations forces. McRaven planned the successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden, which may look more and more like the template for confronting the insurgency in the east.

But that would still suggest that the final stage of the Afghanistan war will leave Kabul and Kandahar as islands of relative calm – with several volatile provinces in between. "If we don't do Logar, Wardak and Ghazni [Provinces], then what have we bought?" wonders Doug Ollivant, another Petraeus braintruster and former counterinsurgency adviser in eastern Afghanistan. "The two big things we've done aren't connected." Allen may as well start shuffling his Rubik's Cube for ideas on connecting them.

Photo: Flickr/ISAF

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