TW: More excerpts from the Wood piece from this morning. But he frames two crucial issues. One is that over and over especially in the Muslim world (and this was also a huge issue in Vietnam) the insurgent, nationalists have massive advantages over the occupying or legacy government in providing basic security. The Taliban are radicals and misogynistic but they have provided certain types of internal stability that the previous and current Afghan governments have not. Corruption in Afghanistan and surrounding areas is rife not least amongst our local external and internal allies. For the average Afghan male who could give a crap about our problems the Taliban are a viable and in certain ways superior option to the Western allies and their domestic Afghan partners.
Hamas and Hizbollah employ some of the same approaches to win over indigenous voters within Gaza and Lebanon. Weak, ineffectual and most of all corrupt local governments create a void into which their radical Islamist based security becomes an attractive alternative.
Secondly, COIN is hard. Any foreign force starts out with massive disadvantages as the relatively ignorant outsiders. Regardless the time, money and blood necessary to effectively implement COIN is tremendous. Should the U.S. and its allies decide to double down with our commitments, folks should understand we are talking about years, hundreds of billions of $ and thousands of casualties. I say implement not win COIN. Few can define what "winning" a counter-insurgency when the variables are so broad even means.
From David Wood at Politics Daily:
"...The "deliberative'' strategy review, which the White House said would take "several weeks,'' has been complicated by the hard-to-miss corruption in last month's Afghan elections, widely viewed as stolen by President Hamid Karzai. It's not that the voting "irregularities" were a surprise, said a U.S. official involved in the issue, but that they highlighted what McChrystal believes are two principal enemies in Afghanistan: the spreading insurgency and the fast-eroding confidence of the Afghan public it its government and, by association, in the United States and its allies. This "crisis," McChrystal wrote, springs from non-performing national government ministries and district offices, "the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power-brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement, and a longstanding lack of economic opportunity.''
By contrast, Taliban insurgents have a reputation of intolerance of corruption and for swift, brutal justice. Many local Taliban shadow governments include panels to weigh citizen complaints against Taliban officials. The United States must do at least as well to protect the Afghan people from the scourge of their own government, as well as protecting them from insurgent attacks and intimidation.
Clearly, most of these problems cannot be solved with military force. "Our conventional warfare culture is part of the problem,'' McChrystal acknowledged to the White House. Despite years of experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military hasn't mastered counterinsurgency, and the "surge'' of American civilian experts to help train police, farmers and government officials hasn't fully materialized.
That leaves field commanders scrambling to fill the gaps. At Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan, Col. Howard made sure I noticed that in his top-secret daily briefings, two civilians sit with him as joint commanders of the fight: a State Department diplomat and an official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "They don't just sit there – they are in charge of things and make decisions,'' Howard told me last month.But his frustration was clear. "Protecting the population – it's easy to throw that term around but it's hard to turn it into an operation,'' Howard told me. "Does it mean putting all the people in a corral and putting soldiers around them? No. It means doing a lot of things we've been doing already: going after people planting IEDs, disrupting infiltration routes across the border from Pakistan, partnering with police so they can secure the streets, working with the governors so they make good decisions ... all that's protecting the population. It's almost a mentality versus a single operation...''
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