Remember that Iraq only stabilized quite recently. Also remember that Iraq as a nation is used to having a stable society relatively united under one gov ernment, however poor a government it was.

Afghanistan has been nearly two generations without peace, but it has functioned as a stable state back in the 60s and 70s. They were, in fact, beginning significant liberal reforms in the 70s., It was pushing these too fast that led to the first modern insurgency there, which in turn drew in Soviet military presence in order to prop up what was, for the Soviets, a very friendly government.

The people want a peaceful stable state. Most of them could care less about a central government in Kabul, but they certainly don't want the Taliban in most cases.

It's going to be very critical to eventually pull of a fairly clean, relatively fair election, where the presidency changes and the results are abided by. They need to see that a transition of power can be accomplished without violent overthrow.

There is also a huge need to improve the educational system and other social infrastructure. They need economic opportunity other than agriculture and herding. A generation of kids needs to be raised to be optimistic about their country, and to know enough to want better than what the Taliban offer them.

An alternative needs to be found to opium cultivation, and this is starting to happen with wheat crops. Wheat can bring in as much cash for the farmers, without resulting in the massive drug profits that have typically benefited the Neo-Taliban and other insurgents.

The border with Pakistan needs to be secured. Right now insurgents pass across at will. The border itself is very artifical; known as the Duran Line it was artificially imposed through the middle of Pashtun tribal territory by the British, so as to create a buffer state between what was then the Russian empire and the British empire in India. Afghanistan could well be a more viable state if the Pashtun regions were separated from the rest of Afghansitan and given autonomy. To be blunt, the Pashtuns are the problem. If we could carve off southern Afghanistan and northern PAkistan, wall them in and cut them off from the rest of the world, checking back every century or so, we'd be better off than we are now., The place is just so goddamned backwards it's mind numbing.

In the long term they must be weaned off of the tribal system. It is very, very real and very powerful. Take two neighbouring villages; one may love us and support us, the other may be a deathtrap for coalition forces moving through their territory.

We must swallow hard and accept the continuing human cost. What we're doing IS worth it, but it WILL be very hard to accept the sacrifices necessary. The people there want a better life, and we can give it to them if we stay the course. If we give up and pull out it will be a tremendous betrayal of all the Afghans who've sought for the past eight years to make their country better.

Rednekk hit on a good point vis a vis the overcentralization of power. Afghanistan would work better as a somewhat loose republic (your mom, LOL) then as a tight federal state. There's also a problem with Pashto hegemony in government- yet the Pashtuns in the south will never tolerate a president who's a Hazara, or a Tajik, or an Uzbek, or really any other ethnicity that isn't Pashto. Unfortunately the Pashtuns tend to treat anyone else like crap.

We're not hurting because we can't shoot armed people. We're hindered because they retain enough support amongst some segments of the local population to be able to carry out IED attacks. Not with impunity, but successfully enough to kill our guys.

The issue is identifying who is *actually* an enemy- and at times who is *actually* a friend. Shifting tribal allegiances don't make this any easier.

We are not facing so much difficulty due to a lack of military might or from failures in our ROEs. It's instead hard because the central government has little perceived legitimacy, and little ability to project power. It's taken us too long to accomplish much, and consequently the optimism that had pushed many locals into our arms from the start is eroding.

 

I personally would like to see us leave that area of the world. If we see terrorists having training camps bomb them with drones from the air, and get our guys off the dirt.

 

We don't want to take over the country, so why are we there?

 

War means one side wins, and the other side loses... Unless you are trying to do something politically.

 

And when you combine politics and war, the winner ends up losing.

 

How much did we spend on Iraq? and for what? Did we take enough oil to pay for the cost of the war. Nope, we spent billions more to rebuild what we destroyed...

 

Stupid imo.

 

Leave that sand pit to the vipers. Put our soldiers on our boarders and protect them. Put in missle defence to protect our airspace, and let the rest of the world police itself. We can't afford to be the world policeman. We have lost way too many of our soldiers lives already and for what?...

 

politics and war don't combine. Its like oil and water.

 

 

B.S.

Bush got you guys into Afghanistan, and then diverted the needed troops away, and to Iraq instead, leaving us and other NATO allies hung out to dry, and fighting hard just to maintain our own small AOs without chance of expanding them.

A hundred and thirty one dead Canadians later, Obama has committed a massive increase in troops to the South, and the difference is being seen. Areas that were previously held by a single battalion now have nearly a division present. We can expand our existing areas and project power into new ones. We can pursue insurgent forces where we believe they are, not just waiting for them to come to where we are. HAd we been able to do this in 2004 and 2005, we wouldn't have had the neo-Taliban resurgence of 2006. The enemy saw that the fight wasn't really there from our end, that we didn't have the troops necessary, and they were heartened by it.

Now that America's once again focusing on Afghansitan, I expect the situation to improve. But don't even try to pin this on Obama, or to say it's his lack of fortitude that's leading to our difficulties there.  He's articulated the realities and the goals for Afghanistan far better than Bush ever did, AND he's following through on government plans to commit more resources where needed.

Linus, you're also right out to lunch. The goals in Afghanistan are not militayr, they are civil. Our end state is not the complete destruction of the insurgency- it is the exiestence of an Afghan military and police force that are capable of dealing with it themselves, overseen by a stable Afghan central government.

Going into mosques, and unleashing massive firepower in built up areas just pisses people off. The Soviets tried all that already.

The rules of engagement we have now WORK- and I challenge any member of this forum to show where they have more credibility and subject matter knowledge on this specific subject than I do. We can do what we need to do. At no point did I ever feel trepidation that I would not be able to defend myself if need be, and when our guys need to conduct offensive operations, as long as the intel is there to justify it, they will get the ROE authorizations we need.

Killing people isn't just some abstract thing, it's not just a body count. It's real, and those real people have real families, and real tribes, who will come back on us with a vengeance if we don't do it right and for the right reasons.

We still need more troops, but the ones we have are employed pretty well, and are able to do their job.

We CAN tell everyone to 'get out of the area- anyone here after _____ date will be condiered an insurgent'. We did it in Kandahar in 2006, but it didn't work particularly well. we still get blown up regularly in the areas we supposedly 'secured' during Operation Medusa in the Panjwai district.

The enemy is in and of the local population. We cannot sufficiently restrict their freedom of movement and still allow a local pattern of life at the same time. The ability just isn't there. We cannot in every case dictate the terms of the war; sometimes we *must* fight them their own way because that way is minimally invasive to the local population, and because any other means of fighting will just piss the locals off too much and drive more of them from our side.

You're mistaken in thinking we must eliminate an enemy from an area, and then improve that area subsequently. It's more likely to be concurrent, if not, in fact, the other way round. The enemy exist in given areas because of local sympathies to the insurgency, and we cannot eliminate those sympathies except by concrete actions to help the locals. Promises mean nothing- we must go in, build things, create growth, do medical and veterinary outreach, replace the destroyed Opium crops with viable alternative.s Only when such things are done will the locals cease actively supporting the insurgents. Even at that they may play neutral and accept the presence of both forces; the Taliban are fond of 'night letters'; essentially propaganda often in the form of threats delivered to local leaders. We need to demonstrate that through our presence suich threats are not credible, but to do that we must make a concrete impact on the enemy's ability to act and to project influence into areas neighbouring their own.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the 'inkblot' school of counterinsurgency theory, but essentially it likens our presence to spots of ink spilled on a map, which is actually rather accurate. We need to increase our geographic presence and establish lines of communication and cooperation between ourselves, the government, the NGOs, and the local people. It's a hundred little thigns that all have to happen at once. It's not like you can definitively say one day "OK, they're gone" and the next go in and start building. You have to send in the civil-military cooperation guys, determine the needs of the locals, and then send in the engineers to accomplish quick-impact projects that will have a concrete positive impact on the lives of the locals. *Then* maybe someone will come to you with info about an IED factory.

At the end it's all about perceived credibility. They must see us as having more strength, more power, more willingness to fight than the insurgents. The Afghans traditionally side with whoever is stronger in an area. That's the best way to stay alive.

Sorry Linus, I'm not trying to be a dick here, but from the arguments you're positing it's clear that you're completely out of your depth here.

 

And brihard all i can really say to that is...

There are two schools on hearts and minds- one is that the traditional concept is vital for winning a war. The other holds that 'two in the heart, one in the mind' is a nice way to drop a target. I buy into both. In most cases, sympathies can be swayed by civil action and aid efforts, but in some cases, some enemies are so implacable as to only be dealt with effectively through PRECISE, DISCRIMINATE force. Aircraft certainly have a role, particularly for close air support, but they've been far too willingly employd to take out point targets based on sketchy information, often resulting in mistargeting of assets at best, or civilian deaths accompanying a legit strike at best.

You're constraining yourself improperly by thinking of this as a military win. I'll put this out there.

You keep talking right past what I'm saying, and it's starting to piss me off. Yes, we need to take military action in many cases, but right now our presence is disproportionately military in nature, and what civil groups are there mostly seem to sit around and write reports. There's no concerted civil-military effort, and a lot of the NGOs are afraid to have ny real association with us. PAradoxically, this denies them the protection needed to get much done.

There will always be a few who need to be fought, but the point I've made repeatedly is that that is NOT rightfully the role of the U.S., or NATO, but of the Afghan government through the Afghan NAtional Army and the various police services. The numebr of true radicals is very small. Most fighters are occasional fighters in between harvests, and are motivated by tribal allegiances or by easily avoided grievances such as the inadvertant bombing of civilian targets.

We had it won in 2002 and 2003, then Bush effed up and sent the U.S. military to Iraq. Had we used those numebrs, committed them to Afghanistan, held ground and exploited our success we could have done it. The enemy were essentially destroyed, and waht remained were in effect 'stunned'- unsure what to do, without the resources to do much of anything, and without andy command and control structure. We mistakenly mistook this for instant victory, and U.S. troops were diverted to Iraq.

Our military efforts are about what they should be. We need VASTLY more commitment to rebuilding and development.

If you have an opinion, state it for comment. If you have a question, ask it. Don't sit there trying to draw a specific answer from me.

The mountainous regions barely matter because they are in no way a center of gravity in the conflict. They aren't population centers. Yes, we need to go there ventually, but we stand to gain more by engaging with the locals and alienating the insurgents from the residents. If the locals grow to oppose the insurgency of their own right, we won't nee dto worry about the Jihadis in  the mountains, because their efforts will be hindered by the Afghans themselves. Now that said, Paktiya and Paktika provinces are not my areas of expertise, however the troops are best employed engaging with the local population. If we DO develop reliable information about insurgent presence in the mountains, that's what we have special forces and helicopters for.

We can't secure the Borders without Pakistan's cooperation. They're pushing hard against the neo-Taliban in their ownt erritory, which is both good and bad. Good, because it kills some of them, and demonstrates Pakistani resolve. It also draws the insurgents against them on that side of the border. On the downside, it pushes more of them back into Afghanistan in retreat, and may force them to try harder to consolidate their positions in the more traditional Taliban areas in Kandahar and Helmand.

The eastern region is an ingress and egress route, but the south is where the population is more dense, and also is the heartland of the Taliban. They originated in the Maywand district of Kandahar near the Helmand border in 1994. They still don't like us there (that';s where I was IEDed). The east is bad; the south is worse. The south now has eight to ten times the military presence it had a year and a half ago, so I'm cautiously optimistic. Very cautiously. If we can improve the civil effort to match the military one, we *might* start separating the population away from the insurgency again.

I am NOT a trained expert in counterinsurgency by any means and do not claim to be, but I have enough of an academic grounding in sociology, political science, history, criminology (yes it's relevant) to have an idea of what I'm talking about.

Your buddies are making the mistake of thinking that the only way to fight the enemy is by putting two rounds in his face. That deals with the immediate threat, but it doesn't cut him off at the source. Think of it from an epidemiological perspective- if you fight the source of an illness, less treatment or cure is ultimately required to fight the symptoms.

We're very capable of dealing with the enemy who are dumb enough to shoot at us or get spotted planting IEDs, but we need the locals onside to go after their logistical infrastructure and their command and control. That is the only way to dismantle them as organizations.

Your buddies are not wrong, but they're not looking at enough of the picture. Sending more troops will help stave off defeat, but it will not win it for us. We need to do that through other means.