http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121668659664272147.html
Afghanistan needs many things, but two more brigades of U.S. troops are not among them.
Barack Obama said: “We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there.” Mr. Obama should have supported the surge in Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that advocating one in Afghanistan makes sense.
Afghanistan’s problems are not the same as Iraq’s. Its people aren’t recovering from a brutal, all-controlling tyranny, but from decades of chaos and centuries of bad government. Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is largely illiterate and has a relatively undeveloped civil society. Afghan society still centers around the family and, for men, the mosque. Its society and traditions are still largely intact, in contrast to Iraq’s fractured, urbanized and half-modernized population.
The Afghan insurgency has no broad popular base and doesn’t mirror an obvious religious or ethnic fault line. It is also far more linked with Pakistani support than the Iraqi insurgency or militias were with Iran. Afghanistan needs a better president, judiciary and police force — and a Pakistani government that is not playing footsie with the Taliban.
In Afghanistan, the situation can differ radically in provinces just a half-hour helicopter ride away. There has been much recent hysteria about an incident on July 13 when nine American soldiers were killed in an insurgent assault on a combat outpost in Want, in Nuristan (mistakenly reported as taking place in Wanat in neighboring Kunar Province). This was the deadliest attack on American soldiers since 16 troops were killed in Kunar in 2005. It was a tragic event, but does not demonstrate that the American effort in Afghanistan is on the brink of disaster, as some commentators have risibly argued.
“RC-East has pushed up to new areas and the bad guys are pushing back there,” a serving U.S. government official who requested anonymity told me. Regional Command East has been applying a standard formula in 14 Afghan provinces, usually with great success. Even privates can tell you that it’s about living among the people, building projects for them, and, in the Pashtun belt, getting the tribes on your side. This won’t do the trick unless the governor and sub-governors are decent and respected by the tribal leaders, and the tribes themselves are cohesive.
“But there is no such thing as tribe in Nuristan,” the official continued. “There is no unit above the corporate community.” The last governor was fired, but it’s not clear how much even a brilliant, honest governor could do in a place so unaccustomed to authority above the village level.
Nuristanis — who were converted from paganism to Islam only about 100 years ago — live in isolated villages in terrain that is rugged even by Afghan standards. There are no paved roads in the province, and helicopters can be shot down from above in the narrow valleys, as two U.S. military helicopters were in the last year.
So how do we bring security to Nuristan? Is bringing in thousands of American troops the answer?
“No!” the official said. “It’s using Special Forces to get the bad guys who are infiltrating from Pakistan. Our enemy only attacks when they expect to win. If we have to go after them, we need the capacity to hunt them with stealth over trackless mountainsides for which our infantry, cavalry and airborne soldiers are not trained or equipped to operate.” Defeating the enemy is best accomplished by highly trained fighters who travel light.
Counterinsurgency is not one-size-fits-all. While there are best practices, they must be applied in a nuanced way. In poorly governed countries where insurgencies are likely to arise, the solution may vary from valley to valley.
It shouldn’t be hard to see that adding men, helicopters or projects is not always the solution. But then, a would-be commander in chief who announces his prescription for Afghanistan before setting foot there has a lot to learn about America’s top job.
so i will just cut and past quotes and explain how wrong this idiot is…
1.Afghanistan needs many things, but two more brigades of U.S. troops are not among them
- the area i, yes a LT, was responsible for was the size a brigade would have owned in Iraq or division in WWII…have they ever seen Afghanistan?
2.The Afghan insurgency has no broad popular base and doesn’t mirror an obvious religious or ethnic fault line
- insurgence: all pashton and suni and i have been shot at from so many villages where “there has never been Taliban here ever, and go away!”
3.Afghanistan needs a better president, judiciary and police force
- apparently this happens by not training and supporting them -> presently in one Provence (more that 1000 police) there are 13 police trainers and mentors… but 13 is a good round number so that should be good enough…right…
4. –> the whole paragraph about US Soldiers getting over run… by the way, i stood at attention on a cold morning as every single one of those caskets passed by me on their last trip home.
- wow, that was a useless paragraph. we are not trying to occupy this place, we are trying to affect change…which is hard to do when you have 16 Soldiers on a firebase. counterinsurgencies are not won by occupying firebases, but by patrolling hourly the towns around the base. with 16 guys this is impossible. 8-10 for security of the base and 5 to patrol with 1 leader… they tried that, and they all died. nice. thanks one line of logic says keep troop numbers low and there will be less casualties, and the Soldier who is alone in a foxhole (yes we sometimes still use those) facing 8 Taliban is wishing he had a buddy to fight and die with.
5. next paragraph, im not sure why she put this in here? pashtons, there is a subject to write an article about, and why the RC East “source” line. we know journalists quote super secret sources like college students quote the Internet (a super secret source of the highest type and of course of the best reliability told me that i should invest in GOLD, so i dumped all my commodes and tech stocks and bough gold!) this secret and unverifiable level of credibility would never fly in any other realm of our lives, so why should it here?
- the pashton belt has another name…it is the place where us forces are, or the alternate name, the only place where us forces are. tribes are relativity not important as they do not accurately reflect the locations of people who claim them after thousands of years of movement and war. of course it is worth fighting over if there is nothing to fight over, but i have never personnel had am issue from this point, ever. good governors… ya and we need good governors in the states, so what. what does the government being messed up have to do with good governance – which is one of the 3 area this rifle toting death soldier (her words not mine) focuses on, the other 2 being security and development, yes we build things to, we do not just knock them over. believe it or not, we do not like being shot at and after awhile will try something crazy, like helping people, to make it stop.
6. the paragraph about no central government…
- well lets go back a few years and tell the French that there may be some blood shed and it is going to be hard and its never been done before, so just stop. democracy is not worth creating and a monarch is just fine, so just sit there and be oppressed. a lack of precedent is not a big deal when there is a mandate from the people, like freedom of any number of oppressed peoples which this lady probably studied and believes in very much… now that it done and easy and she did not have to sacrifice anything to be apart of the good feeling created by it.
7. SF to chase down and kill terrorists coming across the border.
- where to start, well we tried that in the drug war on our border, and it worked out great. i mean you can even get a drop of illegal drugs in most American cities now… and its all because of the raiding and ambushing mentality that the border defense agencies has been implementing for so many success filled years. back in reality, it take a real afghan force to establish and maintain a border defense agency to police the border. they know who the smugglers are, who the Taliban are, who the nomadic people who drift back and forth are. kicking in doors and drooping bombs in the border region -although it looks great on TV- is not a solution. it is but 1 facet of a solution that involves thousands of US Soldiers sitting with Afghans on the border teaching them to do the job. oh, i did that as well.
8. who announces (her) prescription for Afghanistan before setting foot there has a lot to learn about America’s top job (which is the media because for some stupid reason people listen to them).
- she has never been the the Afghanistan i have been to. the place where i can give you a time and 1/4 mile stretch of road and you will be shot and blown up guaranteed, no shit guarantee.
bottom line is of security, development and good governance, security is the deal breaker. where i used to live, the UN would not come to meetings anymore because of “security”. these meetings were about security and development. the UN chief of the area -the equivalent to an ambassador would call me and ask if i would bring up several points at the meeting because they were not allowed to come. the second two need to happen in order for the problem to be solved, but there needs to be a guy with a gun to stop the other guy with a gun from shooting the third guy (the UN) who is digging a well.
i know this offends their liberal (anti gun) mindset to accept that some level of violence or at least a counter to violence (with violent tools like Soldiers and helicopters), but good intentions and a lack of machine guns gets you to telecommute to the security and development meeting, and that accomplishes nothing. i have seen this time and time again, in the only Provence (Kabul and Wardak Provence) that she has ever been to, if she has ever been here at all.
her article was an expression of a FEELING she had. it went something like… i do not like the idea of war or soldiers… they are sending more soldiers to Afghanistan (something every commander here wants – well aside from super secret super high up sources). i should put my FEELINGS on paper and back them up with some facts and sources…lets find/select some facts and sources.
Your articles: just read some of your articles. Very interesting and informative. Good ‘stuff’.
Reflecting upon the surge back during the Viet Nam era and now, during President Johnson’s term, I wonder if this may have similarities. Difficult for me to say. Nothing is exactly the same as before. If something works, keep doing it. If something doesn’t, change the way your doing it. The question that comes to mind is why do we need a surge? It is not the same as Iraq. But are things different in Afghanistan now (Nov. 2008) than before? And even if they are different, does not mean that we need a “surge”, either. I am very interested in this area, since I have a daughter and son in law going there soon. jt