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Afghanistan
Problems with counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan
2009-10-23
The current US strategy of attempting to protect the Afghan population and marginalizing the Taliban is surprisingly ignorant of both the realities of Afghan society and the limitations of America's tolerance for casualties. History is not encouraging. In two centuries, the Pashtuns have never once tolerated a permanent presence of armed foreigners.
Although foreign Taliban are acceptable
They tolerated the Sikhs though... those who didn't lost their heads. The Sikh king Ranjit Singh took half their lands, and kept it. When the British defeated the Sikhs, those Pashtun lands and people ended up under the Raj and today Pakistan
Defending families and villages is a cultural duty of local men, and the presence of outsiders is generally perceived as a threat, especially when they are non-Muslim. Historical memories are long in this part of the world. Some Afghans still say prayers for mujahedin who fought against the British -- in the 19th century.

Because the Afghan culture highly values politeness, Westerners rarely understand how unpopular they are in the region. The presence of coalition troops means IEDs, ambushes and airstrikes, and consequently a higher probability of being killed, maimed or robbed of a livelihood. Any incident quickly reinforces the divide between locals and outsiders, and the Afghan media provide extensive and graphic coverage of botched airstrikes and injured civilians.

Aid always has the potential to create trouble. Contrary to what is often supposed, an Afghan village is rarely a "community," in the sense that its residents are accustomed to working together toward common goals. Afghans are much more individualistic than that. Frankly, we don't have the human resources to do work of this kind. Very few Westerners speak a local language,
Eight years and counting of minimal US effort in this regard
and it is too much to expect soldiers to have sustained contact with the population in hostile villages.

If the White House heeds McChrystal's advice and sends more troops to the south and east of Afghanistan in hopes of retaking Pashtun population centers, American casualties will likely rise above 800 a year, about what they were in the worst years in Iraq.

Gilles Dorronsoro is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Jerry Pournelle commented on this article so:

We are not going to build a liberal democracy in Afghanistan; it will take longer and cost more than this nation is willing to invest. We are not going to have stable Western armed enclaves in Afghanistan. That can be done, but won't be very useful, and will be costly over long periods of time -- again something that this nation is nearly incapable of. That inability, by the way, has been true for a very long time.

Containing Afghanistan is simple. Leave, with warning that we are going, taking with us those doomed allies to whom we have sworn protection (it's probably too late to build them an enclave, and they don't want that anyway). Afghanistan for the Afghans, meaning tribes and warlords with Pushtan domination around Kabul. We can try to shore up an anti-Taliban faction in Kabul. That might even work. But do it from afar. The strategy of counter-insurgency would work if we could actually commit to two generations of doing it, feeding a squad a month into the meatgrinder and disrupting a lot of American families for two generations here; but we aren't going to do that, and blood and treasure poured into Afghanistan is likely poured into, well, not sand, but the Ford of Kabul River.
Posted by:Anguper Hupomosing9418

#3  --- I thinks we can see where these folks are coming from....
--- Leaving will give us a Taliban government pretty quickly... a well armed and organized minority group ... keeping the others supressed.
I'm looking for better ideas. I do agree with Pournelle that the US electorate will not put up with the 20+ years of counterinsurgency efforts that seem to be necessary to prevent Afghanistan from serving as the base for jihad. But a policy of containment is almost as difficult to sustain.
Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418    2009-10-23 12:19  

#2  Leaving will give us a Taliban government pretty quickly.

If you look at what kept pre-invasion iraq stable is was that a well armed and organized minority group kept the rest of the population in line.

We should emulate this, effectively creating our own afganistan saddam. One group keeping the others supressed.
Posted by: flash91   2009-10-23 12:06  

#1  They talk of the cost of being in Afghanistan but have nothing to say about the cost of leaving. FTA: "Dorronsoro was a professor of political science at the Sorbonne, Paris and the Institute of Political Studies of Rennes. He also served as the scientific coordinator at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul, Turkey"

And Pournelle has never been if favor of Iraq or Afghanistan.

I thinks we can see where these folks are coming from....
Posted by: tipover   2009-10-23 11:46  

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