A Bridge Too Far?

TW: Info Dissemination has excerpts from a recent COIN seminar. They are pretty interesting. The challenge that strikes me amongst many is the folks discussing COIN are Lt. Colonel and Colonel level. Folks with 20 or so years of experience (with multiple war tours) and usually multiple degrees, they are as qualified and competent as we can produce. Yet they struggle with the strategies and how to execute them. Ultimately the execution will not be done by upper level officers, it will be done by junior officers and enlisted personnel.

Can we legitimately expect COIN with its unbelievable needs for patience, local knowledge and extraordinary risks to percolate downward to 18 and 20 year olds. Are we debating a viable strategy?

From Info Dissemination:
"...what I see in Afghanistan, and I had the opportunity to travel around the entire country, visit many, many units including our NATO partners, that we’re completely an enemy-centric force.

We need to re-position a significant portion of our FOBs and COPs among the population because right now they’re not. The problem is they were built for CT missions in ’02 and ’03 and in ’04 in wrong locations for a population-centric COIN effort.

And the second thing is we talk about it a lot, we write about it a lot but we are not focused on the Afghan army and the Afghan police and the Afghan border police. We don’t live with them as partnered units. We consider partnering to link up and do operations. If you’re not sleeping with them, eating with them, and crapping in the same bucket, you’re not partnered and we’re not partnered in Afghanistan.Real quick.

COIN population centric is not about being nice to them like – (inaudible) – said. “Hearts and minds” gets confused sometimes. It’s about separating the population from the insurgents, protecting them, influencing them, and controlling the population, especially in the initial stages. And we talked about already about the enemy. It’s fluid; it hides in plain sight.

The enemy does it.And what do we mean by hearts and minds? I think, Dr. Mansoor, you brought up “trust and confidence.” I totally agree. The heart or the trust is that we’re in their best self-interests. We’re in their best self-interest. The people have to be believe that and in their mind or their confidence in us they have to believe that we are going to win, and when I say we, it’s the Afghan army and police with our support and their government. They have to believe that we’re going to win and we’re going to protect them. In their heart they have to believe we’re in their best self-interest and in their mind they believe that we are going to win. We’re failing to do that...

They’ve learned to survive 30 years of war by hedging their bets. They’ve learned to play both sides. And they are still doing it. Why? Because they’re getting slapped on one cheek by their government and the other cheek by the Taliban. They don’t have a good choice and we’re not providing them a good choice because we’re not population centric, we’re not amongst the people, and we’re not with their army and police force...

The next thing is these people can read you better than any people I’ve ever been around including my uncles that live in north Georgia which are very similar to. (Laughter.) They live off the land. They’ve learned over their lifetime in order to survive how to read people. You’ve got to understand that when you deal with then on a daily basis. If you’re not sincere, they will see through you in a heartbeat and you will not be successful with them..."
http://www.informationdissemination.net/2009/10/art-of-battalion-command-in.html