The Washington Times reports that a "dead" al-Qaeda terrorist, thought to have been killed by a Sept. 7 Predator drone strike, has surfaced on the radio. So much for VP Joe Biden's stand-off strikes war model. The UK Times Online reports that Italian troops sandbagged their French successors in one Afghan region. Seems the Italians made a deal with the Taliban, paying them off so as to prevent attacks on Italian positions; but they neglected to disclose this to the French successors, who found themselves ambushed when payments ceased. The French went into a "safe" area lightly armed and were set upon by Taliban. Casualties were growing when US special forces came to the rescue with air strikes. Read the full article for a case study in Italian fecklessness.
In Commentary, Max Boot explains why counterinsurgency works better as a strategy than stand-off counterterrorism targeting. He starts by defining the terms:
The terms counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have become common currency this decade in the wake of September 11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. To a layman’s ear, they can sound like synonyms, especially because of our habit of labeling all insurgents as terrorists. But to military professionals, they are two very different concepts. Counterterrorism refers to operations employing small numbers of Special Operations “door kickers” and high-tech weapons systems such as Predator drones and cruise missiles. Such operations are designed to capture or kill a small number of “high-value targets.” Counterinsurgency, known as COIN in military argot, is much more ambitious. According to official Army doctrine, COIN refers to “those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” The combined approach typically requires a substantial commitment of ground troops for an extended period of time.
Boot continues with General McChrystal's explanation:
The case against a counterterrorism approach in Afghanistan is laid out most clearly in the Counterinsurgency Guidance. McChrystal’s focus is on explaining why conventional military operations cannot defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan, but the same arguments apply to counterterrorism generally, which is a smaller-scale version of the same conceit—that the U.S. military can defeat an insurgency simply by killing insurgents. McChrystal writes that the math doesn’t add up:
From a conventional standpoint, the killing of two insurgents in a group of ten leaves eight remaining: 10 - 2 = 8. From the insurgent standpoint, those two killed were likely related to many others who will want vengeance. If civilian casualties occurred, that number will be much higher. Therefore, the death of two creates more willing recruits: 10 minus 2 equals 20 (or more) rather than 8.
He goes on to note that the “attrition” approach has been employed
in Afghanistan over the past eight years by a relatively small number
of American forces and their NATO allies. Yet, he writes, “eight years
of individually successful kinetic operations have resulted in more
violence.” He continues: “This is not to say that we should avoid a
fight, but to win we need to do much more than simply kill or capture
militants.”
What else, then, must coalition forces do? McChrystal’s answer:
An effective “offensive” operation in counterinsurgency is one that takes from the insurgent what he cannot afford to lose—control of the population. We must think of offensive operations not simply as those that target militants, but ones that earn the trust and support of the people while denying influence and access to the insurgents.
Boot then notes that the payoff comes after taking higher casualties up front:
While counterintuitive to a conventional military mind, such thinking is hardly novel for anyone familiar with the history of counterinsurgency. McChrystal’s advice to embrace the population and be sparing in the use of firepower has been employed by successful counterinsurgents from the American Army in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century; to the British in Malaya in the 1950s and Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s; to, more recently, the Americans in Iraq. By contrast, counterinsurgency strategies that rely on firepower have usually failed, whether tried by the French in Algeria, by the U.S. in Vietnam, or by the Russians in Afghanistan.
The risk of the counterinsurgency approach—which helps to explain why it has not been adopted in Afghanistan until now or in Iraq until 2007—is that, in the short term, it will result in more casualties for coalition forces. Placing troops among the people and limiting their expenditure of firepower makes them more vulnerable at first than if they were sequestered on heavily fortified bases and ventured out only in heavily armored convoys. But in the long term, as the experience of Iraq shows, getting troops off their massive bases is the surest way to pacify the country and bring down casualties, both for civilians and security forces.
Boot adds several pages of analysis to the above, in an 8-pager well worth reading in full.
Bottom Line. To have a chance to prevail in Afghanistan, we will need to accept more casualties now, and also build a stable Afghan government that does not alienate the locals.
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