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StaticAge wrote:

Steyr AUG wrote:

Pariah wrote:

Funny you should say that while the reports from commanders have indicated we have lost ground in recent years, primarily due to inadequate resources allocated which allowed AQ and the Taliban to regroup and reorganize.

There are many types of ground in Afghanistan. Losing ground in the tactical situation is quite a bit different than losing ground in the strategic situation. Much progress has been made in the strategic arena through the building of sustainable infrastructure. Obviously the tactical and other parts of the strategic situation need attention too, which is the subject of the report.

So, nothing the sociopolitical situation is stagnant or backsliding, but the bodies keep piling up.

The situation is obviously dynamic but many types of infrastructure have been trending upward for quite some time. Needless to say, the analysis that nothing has been accomplished is completely inaccurate.

Steyr, do you understand that you just contradicted McCrystal? Infrastructure has very little affect if the political situation deteriorates and the population becomes disaffected.

Perhaps you had best reread the history of the Vietnam War, and while you are at it, review the actions and progress in Iraq for specific political stabilization that has occurred.

Right now your last two posts were full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Stop your generalizations. And take off your rose-colored glasses.

sturner wrote:

Infrastructure has very little affect if the political situation deteriorates and the population becomes disaffected.

Developing the ring road and other infrastructure, the work of the human terrain teams, humanitarian assistance programs by the .mil, constructing important facilities such as schools and hospitals, water projects, power projects, training the ANA, ANP, et al, are exactly the kind of programs that directly target the population so they dont become disaffected. It is a necessary component of a strong Afghan government and thus helps in that department.

Mentoring the .gov of Afghanistan is obviously more difficult and as embedded trainers are more experienced with the cultural aspects of Afghanistan, progress continues to get better.

Perhaps you had best reread the history of the Vietnam War

Despite the constant uninformed rhetoric,  afghanistan is not Vietnam. It is far more important to study *Afghanistan* and its culture than it is to look at a completely different culture with different values.

Last edited by Steyr AUG (2009-10-05 6:47 am)

Another sign of '.mil' success?

Deadly blast strikes U.N. building in Islamabad
At least 2 people reportedly killed at Pakistan World Food Program office

[Breaking News] ISLAMABAD (AP) - A bomb inside the offices of the World Food Program in the Pakistani capital killed at least two people and wounded several others Monday, police and witnesses said.

The blast left victims lying on the ground in pools of blood and shattered windows in the heavily guarded and fortified building in Islamabad, witness said.

Al-Qaida and Taliban militants have carried out scores of attacks in Pakistan over the last 2 1/2 years, a number of them targeting foreigners and their interests. Under U.S. pressure, Pakistani security forces are targeting the extremists in their strongholds in the northwest.

Dr. Altaf Hussain said two people were killed and four others wounded. Another hospital official said one of the dead was a foreigner.

UN spokeswoman Ishrat Rizvi says it is not yet clear whether the device "was thrown or already planted."

"I was on the upper floor when there was the sound of a huge explosion downstairs. I found many of my colleagues lying on the floor full of blood," said a WFP employee who declined to be named. "We immediately put the most critically wounded in a vehicle and rushed them to hospital."

The WFP is distributing food to poor Pakistanis, including those in the northwest.

The British defense and home ministers were visiting Islamabad at the time of the attack, but were unaffected.   

Editor's note: This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Right in the capital- no wonder McChrystal wants more troops. But I suppose these are the last gasps of an enemy on the run.

Looks to me, tho, that AQ and/or the Taliban have not left A'stan, as someone recently opined.

sturner wrote:

Vietnam also had lots of infrastructure built during the 7 years of U.S. involvement.

Vietnam was a war that involved a free standing army heavily supported by external sources. Afghanistan has a different culture, different terrain, and a different dynamic. Learn about these differences and you will see that a constant reliance on an academic view of vietnam falls far short of developing effective Afghan policy.

And while you are at it, why don't you study up on the Huk rebellion in the Philippines?

In Afghanistan there is no external army threat, there is only the internal threat from the Taliban. The only viable army are the NATO forces. I'm not stupid. There are parallels in the Vietnam War that should not be repeated in Afghanistan.

More to the point is that in order to win, you need more than a mere military response. The strategy is two pronged. First, how important to U.S. interests is a stable Afghanistan? Second, how do we defeat the threat? There is only one threat and that is the Taliban. Al Queda is a subordinate threat that wouldn't exist in Afghanistan without the Taliban, therefore, the Taliban is the threat that must be defeated.

Insurgencies are not defeated by military means. The root cause of the insurrgency is political. Clausewitz's dictum may be inferred.  Military operations are used to provide security for the population, specifically in the the southern provinces. To defeat the Taliban, there must be an accommodation with the low level Taliban, which are the local tribal leaders who give their support to the larger organization. Getting them to come to the government's side would remove support for the national level Taliban. All successful resolutions to insurgencies have followed this route.

sturner wrote:

And while you are at it, why don't you study up on the Huk rebellion in the Philippines?

In Afghanistan there is no external army threat, there is only the internal threat from the Taliban. The only viable army are the NATO forces. I'm not stupid. There are parallels in the Vietnam War that should not be repeated in Afghanistan.

More to the point is that in order to win, you need more than a mere military response. The strategy is two pronged. First, how important to U.S. interests is a stable Afghanistan? Second, how do we defeat the threat? There is only one threat and that is the Taliban. Al Queda is a subordinate threat that wouldn't exist in Afghanistan without the Taliban, therefore, the Taliban is the threat that must be defeated.

Insurgencies are not defeated by military means. The root cause of the insurrgency is political. Clausewitz's dictum may be inferred.  Military operations are used to provide security for the population, specifically in the the southern provinces. To defeat the Taliban, there must be an accommodation with the low level Taliban, which are the local tribal leaders who give their support to the larger organization. Getting them to come to the government's side would remove support for the national level Taliban. All successful resolutions to insurgencies have followed this route.

To follow up on those...

Afghan troop decision bedevils Obama
Amid rising deaths and souring public mood, president's advisers are split

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama will confer Tuesday with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders on the Afghanistan war as he faces increasing pressure to make a decision on whether to send more U.S. troops there.

Obama's top defense and diplomacy advisers said the United States retains the Afghanistan war goal that Obama outlined just two months into his presidency — to sideline al-Qaida — but changing circumstances require a reassessment of how to get there.

In the face of rising casualties and souring public opinion, his administration is split over whether to boost U.S. forces or take an alternative path.

At issue is whether U.S. forces should continue to focus on fighting the Taliban and securing the Afghan population or shift to more narrowly targeting, with unmanned spy drones and covert operations, al-Qaida terrorists believed to be hiding in Pakistan.

The narrower approach would require fewer troops.

Republican Sen. John McCain, Obama's opponent in last year's presidential election and one of the lawmakers expected at Tuesday's meeting, said he thinks it's critical that the administration avoid thinking of the insurgent Taliban and al-Qaida terrorist network as separate enemies.

"If the Taliban returns, they will work with al-Qaida," he told NBC's TODAY on Tuesday. "It's just a historical fact. You can't separate the two. ... I strongly disagree with those who allege those are separate problems. They have worked together in the past and they will work together in the future."

However, senior officials told NBC News that al-Qaida and the Taliban shouldn't be seen as one entity. While al-Qaida is viewed as a global terror threat, the Taliban is viewed by the administration as an "indigenous extremist organization" focused on destabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As one administration official put it: The goal is to defeat the Taliban but the goal is to destroy al-Qaida.

Steyr AUG wrote:

Vietnam was a war that involved a free standing army heavily supported by external sources. Afghanistan has a different culture, different terrain, and a different dynamic. Learn about these differences and you will see that a constant reliance on an academic view of vietnam falls far short of developing effective Afghan policy.

You know, I think more learning may be in order on your part, e.g. history. Here's someone you might have heard of during training...

..

The most unambiguous form of exit strategy is victory, though as we have seen in Korea, where American troops have remained since 1953, even that may not permit troop withdrawals. A seemingly unavoidable paradox emerges. The domestic debate generates the pressure for diplomatic compromise. Yet the fanaticism that motivates guerrillas—not to speak of suicide bombers—does not allow for compromise unless they face defeat or exhaustion. That, in turn, implies a surge testing the patience of the American public. Is that paradox soluble?

The prevailing strategy in Afghanistan is based on the classic anti-insurrection doctrine: to build a central government, commit it to the improvement of the lives of its people, and then protect the population until that government's own forces are able, with our training, to take over. The request for more forces by General McChrystal states explicitly that his existing forces are inadequate for this mission, implying three options: to continue the present deployment and abandon the McChrystal strategy; to decrease the present deployment with a new strategy; or to increase the existing deployment with a strategy focused on the security of the population. A decision not to increase current force levels involves, at a minimum, abandoning the strategy proposed by General McChrystal and endorsed by Gen. David Petraeus; it would be widely interpreted as the first step toward withdrawal. The second option—offered as an alternative—would shrink the current mission by focusing on counter-terrorism rather than counter-insurgency. The argument would be that the overriding American strategic objective in Afghanistan is to prevent the country from turning once again into a base for international terrorism. Hence the defeat of Al Qaeda and radical Islamic jihad should be the dominant priority. Since the Taliban, according to this view, is a local, not a global, threat, it can be relegated to being a secondary target. A negotiation with the group might isolate Al Qaeda and lead to its defeat, in return for not challenging the Taliban in the governance of Afghanistan. After all, it was the Taliban which provided bases for Al Qaeda in the first place.

This theory seems to me to be too clever by half. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are unlikely to be able to be separated so neatly geographically. It would also imply the partition of Afghanistan along functional lines, for it is highly improbable that the civic actions on which our policies are based could be carried out in areas controlled by the Taliban. Even so-called realists—like me—would gag at a tacit U.S. cooperation with the Taliban in the governance of Afghanistan.

This is not to exclude the possibility of defections from the Taliban as occurred from Al Qaeda in Iraq's Anbar province. But those occurred after the surge, not as a way to avoid it. To adopt such a course is a disguised way of retreating from Afghanistan altogether.

Those in the chain of command in Afghanistan, each with outstanding qualifications, have all been recently appointed by the Obama administration. Rejecting their recommendations would be a triumph of domestic politics over strategic judgment. It would draw us into a numbers game without definable criteria.

President Obama, as a candidate, proclaimed Afghanistan a necessary war. As president, he has shown considerable courage in implementing his promise to increase our forces in Afghanistan and to pursue the war more energetically. A sudden reversal of American policy would fundamentally affect domestic stability in Pakistan by freeing the Qaeda forces along the Afghan border for even deeper incursions into Pakistan, threatening domestic chaos. It would raise the most serious questions about American steadiness in India, the probable target should a collapse in Afghanistan give jihad an even greater impetus. In short, the reversal of a process introduced with sweeping visions by two administrations may lead to chaos, ultimately deeper American involvement, and loss of confidence in American reliability. The prospects of world order will be greatly affected by whether our strategy comes to be perceived as a retreat from the region, or a more effective way to sustain it.

The military strategy proposed by Generals McChrystal and Petraeus needs, however, to be given a broader context with particular emphasis on the political environment. Every guerrilla war raises the challenge of how to define military objectives. Military strategy is traditionally defined by control of the maximum amount of territory. But the strategy of the guerrilla—described by Mao—is to draw the adversary into a morass of popular resistance in which, after a while, extrication becomes his principal objective. In Vietnam, the guerrillas often ceded control of the territory during the day and returned at night to prevent political stabilization. Therefore, in guerrilla war, control of 75 percent of the territory 100 percent of the time is more important than controlling 100 percent of the territory 75 percent of the time. A key strategic issue, therefore, will be which part of Afghan territory can be effectively controlled in terms of these criteria.

This is of particular relevance to Afghanistan. No outside force has, since the Mongol invasion, ever pacified the entire country. Even Alexander the Great only passed through. Afghanistan has been governed, if at all, by a coalition of local feudal or semifeudal rulers. In the past, any attempt to endow the central government with overriding authority has been resisted by some established local rulers. That is likely to be the fate of any central government in Kabul, regardless of its ideological coloration and perhaps even its efficiency. It would be ironic if, by following the received counterinsurgency playbook too literally, we produced another motive for civil war. Can a civil society be built on a national basis in a country which is neither a nation nor a state?
..

My bold. Kissinger on A'stan (10/3/09)

daemon wrote:

I thought I said that already.

You of all people shouldn't carp about a long quote-post.

Are you saying you are full of pith?

JIC, here's your helmet.

Window was smashed. From the top and from before the beginning, imho.

sturner wrote:

And while you are at it, why don't you study up on the Huk rebellion in the Philippines?

Thanks, but that was already well covered by Army COIN curriculum et al.

To defeat the Taliban, there must be an accommodation with the low level Taliban, which are the local tribal leaders who give their support to the larger organization. Getting them to come to the government's side would remove support for the national level Taliban. All successful resolutions to insurgencies have followed this route.

This is already happening, and has been for some time. However it is much more difficult to actually accomplish than it is to theorize about it.

How do roads and firefights reduce corruption ?  Where warlords are given powerful federal roles, and the criminal justice system is suborned to gangs and factions ?