The Ongoing Shift from Global War to Global Self-Defense Against Terrorism: Afghanistan Edition

Have you been pondering the meaning of the ban on "enduring offensive" ground combat operations included in the administration's draft ISIS AUMF? Wondering what it means in practice for the US military to have a ground presence contemplating some SOF activity targeting high-value enemies and front-line support to host-state forces, while not crossing the "enduring offensive" line? No need to speculate; current practice in Afghanistan provides a reasonably clear illustration of what this would look like. Matthew Rosenberg and Eric Schmitt have a piece in the New York Times this morning (Mark Mazzetti also contributed to the reporting) describing an uptick in night raids conducted by hybrid teams consisting of elite agents of the Afghan National Directorate of Security working with US SOF and CIA personnel. The story is important as a marker of the direction in which the US mission in Afghanistan is heading, and as a preview of what the US ground role could become (or may perhaps already be) in Iraq in 2015. The "combat operations" phase in Afghanistan is over, on paper, leaving in place a mission for US forces that emphasizes training and support for Afghan forces but that also includes lingering SOF (and CIA) capacity to use force to some extent in self-defense and for counterterrorism purposes. The Rosenberg/Schmitt story helpfully underscores just what these latter capacities can entail. This model--cooperative with the host state's tier-one security units (trained, armed, transported, advised, and informed by ours), integrated with JSOC and CIA--is very appealing under the right conditions, at least if the goal is to keep a lid on insurgency and keep disruptive pressure on terrorists. Afghanistan may well be the best forum to test it. Yemen had potential as well, but in light of recent events Yemen is trending more in the Somalia direction in terms of having to operate from further out, with less ability to remain in place, and with less in the way of a government partner. Iraq, one suspects, will end up closer to the Afghanistan model. This is the new GWOT: a multi-state campaign to disrupt the extremist jihadi network, while staying in the shadows as much as possible and working by, with, and through host state and allied forces. Note that it does not really depend at all on AUMFs, given the scope of the underlying self-defense rationales and the absence of a role for long-term military detention administered by the US...