Aloha from Afghanistan
Posted 03-23-2010 at 06:53 AM by KurtBevacqua
I've been away for some time, and there is a logical explanation. I've been in Afghanistan. Well, I dropped off the board before then, but it makes for a good excuse to strike up a conversation.
In three months I've finally gotten a decent feel for what is going on here, and it's nothing like you could imagine. It's not war as my 18 years of experience, training, and six previous deployments know it. It's really not like any war the United States has ever experienced. I suspect the closest parallel I could draw would be the conflict in Northern Ireland, and even that leaves some areas to be desired.
I'd like to get one clear point across, our "army", the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), is incapable of "winning" this war. And victory is not something that can be measured by the destruction of the Taliban. Besides most people don't really understand what the Taliban is in the first place.
OK, let's start with the basics. Just what is "victory" in Afghanistan? There are several entities with a lot at stake here. ISAF is perhaps the key driver, but as I said ISAF can't win. So who can "win"? Well obviously there is the Taliban, but there is also the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GiRoA). In my humble estimation this war is really a conflict between GiRoA and the always changing configuration of tribes and groups who make up the Taliban.
The way to win is to gain, and then maintain the trust of the populace. How each side appears to be doing it is by trying to win the hearts and minds of the public while simultaneously trying to kill and/or capture key members of the other side. Frequently members of the general population at-large each side is trying to woo are confused for members of the opposition. So it becomes a cat and mouse game of seeing who can provoke the other side into getting caught doing really nasty things to citizens in the middle. As you can well imagine this runs pretty counter-intuitive to the way professional soldiers are trained to do their business. And I'm sure you can also well imagine it means pretty bad things frequently happen to the folks caught in the middle.
Last fall President Obama said we can have 30,000 more troops, and we have until the middle of 2011 to show some serious progress that this bizarro conflict is going the right way. So what the President has done is to set into motion our own bizarro game of seeing how fast we can hand things off to GiRoA. We tried this in Vietnam, and Nixon gave us three years (as opposed to 18 months) to do it and it failed.
I'm not saying we're doomed to fail like Vietnman. In fact I really have no idea how this is going to play out. I do know our Afghan allies aren't nearly as averse to a good fight as our ARVN friends in Vietnam were. In fact the Afghans are very willing, exceptional fighters. The hard part is bringing them all together. The National Army and National Police hate each other, sometimes it seems more than they hate the Taliban.
And then there is President Karzai. (pregnant pause here)
There are so many nuances and complications that I better stop right here. To summarize, the fight isn't ISAF against Taliban, it's ISAF helping GiRoA stand on it's own two feet to become a legitimate government the citizens trust. We do that and we'll come about as close to "victory" as you can get.
In three months I've finally gotten a decent feel for what is going on here, and it's nothing like you could imagine. It's not war as my 18 years of experience, training, and six previous deployments know it. It's really not like any war the United States has ever experienced. I suspect the closest parallel I could draw would be the conflict in Northern Ireland, and even that leaves some areas to be desired.
I'd like to get one clear point across, our "army", the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), is incapable of "winning" this war. And victory is not something that can be measured by the destruction of the Taliban. Besides most people don't really understand what the Taliban is in the first place.
OK, let's start with the basics. Just what is "victory" in Afghanistan? There are several entities with a lot at stake here. ISAF is perhaps the key driver, but as I said ISAF can't win. So who can "win"? Well obviously there is the Taliban, but there is also the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GiRoA). In my humble estimation this war is really a conflict between GiRoA and the always changing configuration of tribes and groups who make up the Taliban.
The way to win is to gain, and then maintain the trust of the populace. How each side appears to be doing it is by trying to win the hearts and minds of the public while simultaneously trying to kill and/or capture key members of the other side. Frequently members of the general population at-large each side is trying to woo are confused for members of the opposition. So it becomes a cat and mouse game of seeing who can provoke the other side into getting caught doing really nasty things to citizens in the middle. As you can well imagine this runs pretty counter-intuitive to the way professional soldiers are trained to do their business. And I'm sure you can also well imagine it means pretty bad things frequently happen to the folks caught in the middle.
Last fall President Obama said we can have 30,000 more troops, and we have until the middle of 2011 to show some serious progress that this bizarro conflict is going the right way. So what the President has done is to set into motion our own bizarro game of seeing how fast we can hand things off to GiRoA. We tried this in Vietnam, and Nixon gave us three years (as opposed to 18 months) to do it and it failed.
I'm not saying we're doomed to fail like Vietnman. In fact I really have no idea how this is going to play out. I do know our Afghan allies aren't nearly as averse to a good fight as our ARVN friends in Vietnam were. In fact the Afghans are very willing, exceptional fighters. The hard part is bringing them all together. The National Army and National Police hate each other, sometimes it seems more than they hate the Taliban.
And then there is President Karzai. (pregnant pause here)
There are so many nuances and complications that I better stop right here. To summarize, the fight isn't ISAF against Taliban, it's ISAF helping GiRoA stand on it's own two feet to become a legitimate government the citizens trust. We do that and we'll come about as close to "victory" as you can get.
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