Counter-Terrorism or Occupation?

Robert Pape notes the correlation between troop increases and insurgent activity in Afghanistan in The New York Times (h/t Andrew Sullivan).

As Western occupation grew, the use of the two most worrisome forms of terrorism in Afghanistan — suicide attacks and homemade bombs — escalated in parallel. There were no recorded suicide attacks in Afghanistan before 2001. According to data I have collected, in the immediate aftermath of America’s conquest, the nation experienced only a small number: none in 2002, two in 2003, five in 2004 and nine in 2005.

But in 2006, suicide attacks began to increase by an order of magnitude — with 97 in 2006, 142 in 2007, 148 in 2008 and more than 60 in the first half of 2009. Moreover, the overwhelming percentage of the suicide attacks (80 percent) has been against United States and allied troops or their bases rather than Afghan civilians, and nearly all (95 percent) carried out by Afghans...The picture is clear: the more Western troops we have sent to Afghanistan, the more the local residents have viewed themselves as under foreign occupation, leading to a rise in suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. (We see this pattern pretty much any time an “outside” armed force has tried to pacify a region, from the West Bank to Kashmir to Sri Lanka.)

As my graduate school professors pounded into us, "correlation does not imply causation." There are certainly other factors contributing to the increase in insurgent activity including a predictable rebound by the Taliban and resentment toward the corrupt Karzai government seen as propped up by American occupation. Still, it is worth considering that adding troops may actually contribute to things getting worse in Afghanistan.

--Ballard Burgher