Tate/Gannon/Fisher/Lee Afghanistan COIN Aff

Northwestern Debate Institute 20101

Tate/Gannon/Fisher/LeeAfghanistan COIN Aff

afghanistan aff – wave 1

1ac

1ac – afghan instability

1AC – afghan instability......

1ac – afghan instability

1ac - afghan instability

1ac – afghan instability

1ac - afghan instability

1ac – afghan instability

1ac - terrorism

1AC - terrorism

1ac terrorism

1AC - terrorism

1AC – HEGEMONY

1ac – hegemony

1AC - HEGEMONY

1ac – hegemony

1AC – HEGEMONY

1ac – hegemony

1AC - HEGEMONY

1ac – PAKISTAN STABILITY

1ac – pakistan stability

2ac – nato add-on

2ac nato add-on

inherency – no coin drawdown now

inherency – status quo will increase forces

inherency – petraeus will continue counterinsurgency focus

we are losing

coin fails – laundry list

coin fails – victory impossible

coin fails – increases insurgency

COIN FAILS - LOCALS

coin fails – locals

COIN FAILS – LOCALS

coin fails – locals

coin fails – karzai blocks effectiveness

coin fails – no military support

coin fails – not enough troops

coin fails – empirically

coin fails – poor communication

coin fails – incomplete

coin fails – indicts of advocates

coin fails – at: iraq proves coin good

afghan instability adv – plan key to negotations

afghan instability adv – plan withdraws support for karzai

afghan instability adv – nation building fails

afghan instability adv – paritioning good

afghan instability adv – warlords good

AFGHAN INSTABILITY ADV – LOCALS KEY

Afghan instability adv– KEY TO REGIONAL STABILITY

afghan instability adv – key to regional stability

afghan instability adv – key to pakistani stability

afghan instability adv – pakistan instability impacts

afghan instability adv – regional instability = nuclear war

afghan instability adv – taliban could get nukes

afghan instability adv – nuclear war = extinction

HEGEMONY ADVANTAGE – CREDIBILITY LOW NOW

hegemony advantage – status quo = overstretch

hegemony advantage – withdrawal restores us heg

HEGEMONY ADVANTAGE – PRESENCE HURTS SOFT POWER

hegemony advantage – presence hurts soft power

hegemony advantage – counter-insurgency destroys

HEGEMONY ADVANTAGE – PLAN = SHIFT AWAY from COUNTER-INSURGENCY DOCTRINE

hegemony advantage - continued reliance on coin spills over

hegemony advantage – presence = direct trade-off

hegemony advantage – costs destroys us heg

hegemony advantage – overstretch hurts us hegemony

hegemony advantage – afghanistan key

hegemony advantage – hard power key

hegemony advantage – decline = nuclear war

hegemony advantage – heg good - terrorism

hegemony advantage – heg good – prolif

hegemony advantage – heg good – china

hegemony advantage – heg good - iranian aggression

HEGEMONY ADVANTAGE – AT: WITHDRAWAL KILLS CRED

TERRORISM ADVANTAGE – ATTACK COMING

terrorism advantage – al qaeda seeking nukes now

terrorism advantage – plan key to reducing al qaeda threat

terror advantage – counter-terrorism strategy alone can solve

terrorism advantage – counter-terrorism strategy alone solves

terrorism advantage – nation-building won’t solve terror

terrorism advantage – winning hearts and minds key

terrorism advantage – coin fails – misfocus

TERROR ADVantage – COIN FAILS – MISFOCUS

terrorism advantage – coin fails – misfocus

terrorism advantage – coin fails – fuels recruitment

TERRORISM ADVantage – COIN FAILS – ENDLESS WAR

terrorism advantage – coin fails to capture terrorists

TERRORISM ADVANTAGE –TALIBAN POWER IRRELEVANT

terrorism ADVANTAGE – TALIBAN POWER IRRELEVANT

terrorism advantage – they can get nukes

terrorism advantage – nuclear helpers – theft

terrorism advantage – impact helpers – causes nuclear war

terrorism advantage – impact helpers – probability

terrorism advantage - impact helpers – probability

terrorism advantage – impact helpers – timeframe

terror advantage – impact helpers – timeframe

terrorism advantage – extinction impacts

terrorism advantage – at: intelligence gathering

terrorism advantage – at: al qaeda weak

pakistan stability advantage – plan solves taliban expansion

pakistan stability advantage – coin mobilizes taliban

pakistan stability advantage – military presence destabilizes

pakistan stability advantage – ct alone enough

pakistan stability advantage – loose nukes

pakistan stability advantage – collapse = nuclear war

pakistan stability advantage – india will attack

PAKISTAN stability ADVantage – INDO/PAK war IMPACTS

pakistan stability advantage – indo/pak war impacts

iranian hostility advantage

2ac – at: withdrawal Disadvantages

2ac – at: withdrawal disadvantages

2ac – at: terrorism turn

2ac – at: Petraeus solves

topicality helpers – “substantially reduce”

topicality helpers – counterinsurgency = military/POLICE presence

topicality helpers – “military presence” includes combat forces

topicality helpers – counterinsurgency = political goals

TOPICALITY HELPERS – COUNTERINSURGENCY = COMPREHENSIVE ACTIONS

POLITICS– CONGRESS SUPPORTS THE PLAN

politics – congress supports the plan

POLITICS – DEMOCRATS SUPPORT PLAN

POLITICS LINKS – DEMOCRATS SUPPORT PLAN

POLITICS – PUBLIC SUPPORTS THE PLAN

POLITICS LINKS – PUBLIC SUPPORTS THE PLAN

POLITICS – PUBLIC SUPPORTS THE PLAN

POLITICS LINKS – PUBLIC SUPPORTS THE PLAN

politics link turn – collins supports plan

resolve da answers

karzai credibility da ans – cred low now

KARZAI CREDIBILITY DA ANS – CRED LOW NOW

karzai credibility da ans – plan key to karzai’s credibility

karzai credibility da ans – plan key to reconciliation

2ac taliban reconciliation/negotations cp ans – increases instability

2ac taliban reconciliation/negotations cp ans – will fail

2ac taliban reconciliation/negotiations cp ans – will fail

2ac taliban reconciliation/negotiations cp ans – happening now

2ac consult nato cp ans – nato will say no

2ac consult the jcs cp answers

2ac fund the pmcS CP ANS

2ac western imperialism k helpers

1ac

PLAN: The United States federal government should reduce nearly all of its military presence dedicated to the counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan.

1ac – afghan instability

ADVANTAGE ____: AFGHANISTAN INSTABILITY

DESPITE EIGHT YEARS OF FAILURE, THE STATUS QUO HAS DOUBLE-DOWNED WITH A COUNTERINSURGENCY FOCUS TO STABILIZE AFGHANISTAN WITH THE PETRAEUS ANNOUNCEMENT

GUSTERSON, professor of anthropology and sociology @ George Mason University, 07-20-2010[Hugh, “Against counter-insurgency in Afghanistan”, The Bulletin, 20In%20Afghanistan%20By%20Jugh%20Gusterson.htm] ttate

It says something about American politics that Gen. StanleyMcChrystal was not fired becauseU.S. casualtiesin Afghanistan are running at record levels, because the much vaunted Marja initiative has failed, or because the Kandahar offensive is already in trouble during its preliminary rollout. No, he was fired because he and his team embarrassed the White House with carelessly frank talk to a journalist."This is a change in personnel, but not a change in policy," said President Barack Obama in announcing General McChrystal's dismissal. Or, in the words of Rep. James McGovern, we have the "same menu, different waiter."

But you could put Mother Teresa in charge of Afghanistan and, with flows of resources of that magnitude, she would be unable to prevent the kind of corruption we see in Afghanistan today.

However,the real story should notbethe change in personnel butthe continuation of a failed policy, and there is abundant evidence that the policy is failing--both in the Rolling Stone article that got General McChrystal fired and in other recent media reports. Coalition casualties are steadily rising, andthis month is the deadliest yet with over 46 U.S. and 95 coalition troops killed already. Over the past year,IED attacks have doubled. The Marja campaign, intended to model the power of the new counterinsurgency strategy, is failing: The Taliban are more popularin Marja than the corrupt official government with which the U.S. is allied and, having melted away during the front-page U.S. military offensive, Taliban fighters are now back in force. General McChrystal himself referred to Marja as "a bleeding ulcer" (a much more significant quote than what his aides might have called Vice President Joe Biden).The Kandahar campaign, for which Marja was supposed to be a glorious dress rehearsal, is months behind schedule in the face of opposition from local eldersand second thoughts from an ill-prepared Afghan government. So tenuous is U.S. control of the countryside that coalition forces cannot move essential suppliesalong major transport routes without paying warlords hundreds of dollars per truck in protection money, some of which gets passed on to the Taliban fighters sworn to kill U.S. soldiers. Most devastating of all (and the least reported in secondary media accounts), the Rolling Stone article quotesAmerican grunts on the frontlines saying they have lost faith in the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. And the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, has become like Robert McNamara in Vietnam, telling his government in private that counterinsurgency is not working, only to fall in line behind the policy in public. Finally, the U.S. is losing the war on the home front too, with the Christian Science Monitor reporting thatonly 41 percent of Americans now believe that the war in Afghanistan can be won, while 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Obama is managing it.

Yet the U.S. national security state has doubled down on counterinsurgency, not just in Afghanistan but more generally. The U.S. Army has heavily promoted its new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and advocates of counterinsurgency(such as Gen. David Petraeus, one of the authors of the Manual)have been promoted to key positions in the military. Military training of new Army recruits and Marines now emphasizes counterinsurgency techniques. Africom, the U.S. military's new Africa command, has largely organized itself around counterinsurgency doctrine. Meanwhile, think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Center for a New American Security, both well networked to the current White House, litter their websites and the nation's op-ed pages with homilies in favor of counterinsurgency doctrine. The U.S. military is, in other words,reorienting itself around counterinsurgency.

And yet, historically, counterinsurgency campaigns have almost always failed.This is especially so when the counterinsurgents are foreign troops fighting on the insurgents' territory. The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam failed. The Soviet counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan failed (as did the British one about a century earlier). The British counterinsurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland and Kenya failed. The white Rhodesians' counterinsurgency campaign against black guerillas failed. And the French counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria failed--although that has not stopped the U.S. military from building their current doctrine around the theories of David Galula, one of the leaders of that failed campaign. A rare example of success is the recent Sri Lankan campaign against the Tamil Tigers, but success was achieved by a government on its own territory following a military strategy of exterminist ferocity. Surely the U.S. does not want to go down that path, does it?

Rolling Stone quotes Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville,General McChrystal's chief of operations, as saying of the endgame in Afghanistan, "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win." In the inevitable postmortem in future years that will follow the defeat or stalemating of the U.S. in Afghanistan, the loudest voices will belong to the apostles of counterinsurgency who, rather than admit that counterinsurgency is an inherently flawed project, will start to point the finger of blame elsewhere. Notwithstanding the dismal track record of counterinsurgency campaigns in general, they will tell us the war in Afghanistan could have been won if Obama had agreed to more troops. Or if he had put General Petraeus in charge earlier. Or if he had not declared the July 2011 date for beginning withdrawal. Or if the U.S. had found a more popular ally than President Hamid Karzai.

This will matter greatly becauseAfghanistan is at the beginning, not the end, of the counterinsurgency road on the U.S. military horizon. In what was until recently called the "Global War on Terror," counterinsurgency plays the sort of framing and orienting role that containment and deterrence played in the Cold War. The U.S. military is already thinking about future counterinsurgency campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines.

Given the Pentagon's fantasies of future counterinsurgencies, it is vital to make the argument that counterinsurgency has failed in Afghanistan not because of flaws in its execution but because, as I have argued before, counterinsurgency campaigns almost inevitably contain within themselves the seeds of their own failure.Counterinsurgency forces stand little chance of defeating the insurgents without large numbers of troops, but the presence of foreign troops inevitably excites nationalist hostility from the local population; the more foreign troops there are, the more hostility there will be.Also,the more troops there are, the more military casualties there will be, and this undermines support for counterinsurgency at home--as we are now seeing in the UK and the U.S. Counterinsurgency campaigns also benefit from being allied to a strong and popular local government. We hear a lot these days about Karzai's inadequacy in this regard, but it may not be all his fault: Almost by definition, a leader who relies on external occupying troops for his power will be seen as a foreign puppet and will be compromised in the eyes of his people.

Finally, there is the issue of development, about which the U.S. media and military leaders have shown an extraordinary inability to think clearly in Afghanistan. U.S. military leaders are surely right to think that they are more likely to win the hearts and minds of local populations if they bring them not just roadblocks, nighttime raids, and detentions, but also power plants, irrigation projects, schools, and so on. But the problem is that, when you pour huge amounts of money into a poor country, you inevitably produce corruption and all sorts of other social distortions. Leaving aside the military contracting money pouring into Afghanistan, the U.S. is allocating almost $4 billion a year for development projects in Afghanistan, the fifth poorest country in the world (with a GDP estimated at $13-23 billion and a per capita GDP of $1,000). And it is complaining that Karzai's inability to control corruption in Afghanistan is alienating the population. But you could put Mother Teresa in charge of Afghanistan and, with flows of resources of that magnitude, she would be unable to prevent the kind of corruption we see in Afghanistan today.It is not Karzai, but the U.S. strategy of counterinsurgency itself, that is ultimately responsible for the corruption.

It seemed that the U.S. learned these lessons after the failure of counterinsurgency in Vietnam. For 20 years after Vietnam, the U.S. eschewed the occupation of other countries and learned to intervene either with short, sharp land invasions that led to the installation of a new client regime and rapid removal of U.S. forces (Grenada, Panama), or by deploying U.S. airpower in support of other people's ground forces (Bosnia, Kosovo). But, after the end of the Cold War, boasting that it was the world's sole remaining superpower, the U.S. became drunk on fantasies of its own powerand, after 9/11, enraged enough to lash out. It believed that it would succeed where others had failed, simply because it was the United States of America.

1AC – afghan instability

AND, WE WILL CONTROL UNIQUENESS - INCREASING INSURGENCY AND INSTABILITY IN AFGHANISTAN NOW

Rod Nordland 6-19-10, AFGHAN EMPLOYEES OF THE NEW YORK TIMES CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM KHOST, 6/19/10, “Violence up Sharply in Afghanistan”, NY Times, [ imanol

KABUL, Afghanistan — With an average of an assassination a day and a suicide bombing every second or third day,insurgents have greatly increased the level of violence in Afghanistan, and have become by far the biggest killers of civilianshere, theUnited Nations said in areportreleased publicly on Saturday.

U.S. Hopes Afghan Councils Will Weaken Taliban(June 20, 2010)

The report also confirms statistics from theNATOcoalition, which claimed a continuing decrease in civilian deaths caused by the United States military and its allies. At the same timeit blames stepped-up military operations for an overall increase in the violence.

Especially alarming were increases in suicide bombings and assassinations of government officialsin a three-month period ending June 16, and a near-doubling of roadside bombings for the first four months of 2010 compared with the same period in 2009.

“The number of security incidents increased significantly, compared to previous years and contrary to seasonal trends,” the report said, adding that most of this was a consequence of military operations in the southern part of the country, particularly Helmand and Kandahar Provinces, where increased NATO military operations have been under way since February.

Most victims of the increased violence continue to be civilians, and the proportion of those killed by insurgents, rather than the government or its NATO allies, rose to 70 percent from mid-March through mid-June. In the previous three months, the United Nations blamed insurgents for 67 percent of civilian deaths.

The most striking change has been in suicide bombings, whose numbers have tripled this year compared with 2009. Such attacks now take place an average of three times a week compared with once a week before. In addition, two of three of those suicide attacks are considered “complex,” in which attackers use a suicide bomb as well as other weapons. Half the suicide attacks, the United Nations said, occur in southern Afghanistan.

“Theshift to more complex suicide attacks demonstrates a growing capability of the local terrorist networks linked toAl Qaeda,”the report said.

It depicted a concerted effort by insurgents to deliberately single out civilians.“Insurgents followed up their threats against the civilian population with, on average, seven assassinationsevery week, the majority of which were conducted in the south and southeast regions,” it said.