Archive for the 'Counterinsurgency' Category

BCE weighs in (via WRSA).

As it is right now, as RA said further in the email: “Why would anybody go with the goons from Just-Us going forward? I mean why would you cooperate with Just-Us in any way knowing you will be tortured and abused?<snip>  “The current government has shown they will take you, they will torture you, and withhold medical treatment.

He goes further and asserts with some authority that it was the three letter agencies who were doing the rendition.  I’m certain it was too.

Furthermore, I’m certain that they got no actionable intel from it all.  If they had wanted actionable intel rather than making enemies, they would have fed them well, treated them with courtesy, and made friends with them.

BCE further discusses the fact that January 6 wasn’t an insurrection.  Good grief no.

January 6 was a made-for-TV circus act orchestrated by agent provocateurs.  But I sort of disagree that the protestors are in prison because the FedGov fears them.  I think they’re in prison for the FedGov to make an example of them.

No one chooses to stop what’s happening – not powerless senators, not the courts, not law enforcement, not the DoJ, not anyone.

They don’t choose to stop it because the three letter agencies run the country.  And while I’ve said before that we went into Iraq in order to test weapon systems and learn COIN (counterinsurgency), I think that’s wrong.

The U.S. has always known how to do this.  We went into Iraq for other reasons, you can fill in the blank (the military industrial complex, to hone our skills, etc.).

Don’t be surprised or astonished at what you’re seeing now in the D.C. prison, exclaiming that it violates this and that and the other, the right to a speedy trial, the right to counsel, the right to face your accuser, cruel and inhumane conditions, and so on and so forth.

They don’t care.  When you look at everything around you symbolic of the system – local law enforcement, state law enforcement, the federal protection police, the DHS, the CIA, the FBI, the fusion centers, the NSA, think of it this way.

This is all COIN and stability operations.  We did it in Iraq because we learned to do it in America.  American law enforcement isn’t practicing the concept of the local constable or peace officer.  They haven’t for a long, long time.

This is classic COIN and stability operations, all for the purpose of keeping those in power who are currently in power.

That’s why the protestors are in the D.C. prison.

I have enough posts on Afghanistan to write a book.  But I thought it may be a good thing to give some closing thoughts on a failed campaign.

From the beginning of the George W. Bush era, the notion had been that people love liberty and will always side with it.  This is a demonstrably stupid assumption, disproven merely by looking at the medical yoke of tyranny Americans seem to love at the moment.

The important facet of human belief systems Bush failed to take into account was religion.  Islam isn’t built for liberty, and liberty isn’t compatible with Islam.  When David Kilcullen wrote his doctoral thesis on counterinsurgency, he learned all the wrong lessons.  He mistakenly believed that hearts can be won, and that the measure of doing that is a function of the degree to which they all share in the wealth, prosperity, political theater, and health of a nation or people.  It’s the sociologist’s dream – couple human terrain with force from guns, and any culture can be transitioned into something that it is not.

David Petraeus learned all the wrong lessons from Kilcullen.  Stanley McChrystal attempted to cut off the head of the snake with direct action operations using SpecOps, falsely believing that without the head, the snake would perish.  Islam isn’t a snake, but rather, a world and life view (a false one) that regenerates.  The HVT campaign was bound to fail.

On top of that, following the mantra to win hearts and minds, a set of ROE was put into place that made it impossible for the U.S. warrior to win.  He had to fight the battles of lawfare as much as enemy combatants.  Finally, the campaign in Afghanistan was marked by micromanagement and extraordinary ignorance and stupidity.

Gen. David Rodriguez made it difficult for Marines in Helmand and during the initial parts of the larger campaign for Helmand he issued an order that every use of artillery receive his approval.  The ignorance of U.S. brass taking Viagra to the tribal chieftains so that could continue their abuse of little boys is so repugnant that it’s amazing the enlisted men didn’t turn their weapons on their own command.

Tim Lynch (who has spent longer time in Afghanistan that any English speaking man alive today, nearly ten years) told me personally that the DoD had thousands of hours of video footage of Afghan boys engaged in sexual activity with animals.  Against this backdrop, Islamist militants only became more incensed and enraged.

From the beginning I favored sending the Rangers and Marines to the border with Pakistan so that AQ could be killed in the caves of Tora Bora rather than escaping to live and fight again.  Chase the Taliban, kill them, and then there would be no Quetta Shura.  And then leave.  But we had to play armed social worker, and now here we are.

The final exit is a debacle of mammoth proportions, Americans will be left in Afghanistan to be beheaded, and Bagram Air Base (the best and brightest hope for a smooth withdrawal) was shut down.  And they are proud of it.  Meanwhile, twelve Marines perished today.  It is a dark day.

I asked my friend John Bernard (former Marine Corps First Sergeant) – who lost his own son in Afghanistan – for his thoughts today.  He sent me this, but as I see, he also posted it to his blog.  Give it a visit.  Here are his thoughts.

***********************************

So after several years of listening to the faint of heart and the lowly in character sob over the use of wrong pronouns, the meritless claims of institutional racism, continual cries of inequity, inequality, privilege and oh yeah, mean tweets, we arrive at today’s latest fruit of globalist clap-trap; 12 dead American Service members and another 15 wounded by some as yet unnamed cabal of Satan worshipping cretins in Kabul.

This follows a week of watching one of the most disgraceful egress operations in the annals of Military History. And it as an easily foretold ending to an historically ill-advised military doctrine which supplanted the hunt-kill strategy in place in Afghanistan until June of 2009. I “predicted” this that same fateful month and reiterated over the following decade.

I will remind those who forgot and the rest who have been too self-absorbed to know, that in June of 2009 Stanley McChrystal brought to light the fruit of a year of positing, posturing, submitting and frankly, undermining the probability of any kind of favorable outcome in what has been called, the Graveyard of Empires. Make no mistake, the genesis of this horrific turn in Afghanistan rests with the then newly Minted/Corronated/Sainted, Barrack Hussein Obama 6 months earlier. Obama had been very clear in his narcissistic “memoir”, Audacity of Hope, pg 261 …” I will stand with them [Muslims] should the political winds shift in an ugly direction…”

He backed those words with his Commander’s Intent statement regarding Afghanistan by voicing concern for the safety of the average Afghan; supplanting his sworn duty and associated responsibility for the Constitution, National Security and his War Fighters. His voiced concern instructed his bevy of Leftist Politruk and the machinery of Leftist Bureaucrats at the Pentagon who felt legitimized in dragging down the sullied book, from the dusty shelf in the Library of Horrible Ideas and one more time decided to apply the doctrine of the Counter Insurgency with its impossible ROE, to Afghanistan.

Given COIN’s 76 year history of 100% abysmal failure, it was nothing short of malfeasance and even justifying a charge of Negligent Homicide for those who recommended COIN with the same charge placed against the one man who chose to secure security for a foreign people over the security of the Nation and its War Fighters he was Oathbound to Defend.

Given the catastrophic endings for the Brits in Malay, the French in Indochina, the US in Vietnam, Somalia and the questionable conditions in Iraq; the predictable consequences in the entire Middle East from 2010-2012 including the attack on the CIA safe house in Benghazi where four Americans were killed and no rescue mission was launched, it was not only predictable that ANY egress from Afghanistan would be catastrophic, but in fact, a given!

With this history as backdrop, we can now discuss Biden’s Saigon or potential Dien Bien Phu through the lens of historical accuracy understanding that COIN in Afghanistan was doomed to fail even before McChrystal opened his mouth publicly in June of 2009.

What makes what we are witnessing in real time all the more frustrating is knowing his not too bright advisors had at least, warned him of the probability of failure a full 6 months before they pulled the metaphorical trigger on the egress.

It is also appalling and frustrating to have to listen to Biden and his underlings parade out rhetorical effort after lie after garbled statement in an effort to put a smiley face – even to take credit for some kind of tactical mastery in this entirely preventable episode.

Again, predictably, the White House Press Corps seems incapable or unwilling to ask the most obvious questions;

“Why didn’t you keep Bagram open until every single American Citizen and Afghan Collaborator were safe”…

“Why didn’t you secure the several billion dollars in US War Materiel and Weaponry before pulling out the last of the troops and contractors?”

“Why didn’t you immediately launch a massive extraction effort to safeguard and remove American citizens when it became undeniably apparent on August 14th?”

“Why in the name of all that is right and just did you give any sway to the Terrorists “Teachers” known as the Taliban?

Instead we have been treated to that age old political witchcraft, enjoined by both politician, bureaucrat politruk and media entertainer alike; the effort to polish a turd. Somewhere along the line it became knee-jerk to spin a story, create a tale, redirect the public gaze and basically, lie, rather than own up to the mistake.

Unfortunately, a full 50% of this population is more than happy to play along and even gleeful at the prospect of actively participating as long as it props up their questionable selection for the Presidency.

Obama may have started us down this path

Obama’s Politruk may have sullied themselves in the name of relevancy.

But it is Biden and his corral of miscreants who own this astoundingly shameful excuse for an egress.

And now he can add the names of at least 27 American War Fighters; dead and wounded who were tasked with nothing short of a cleanup operation in a vain attempt to help a feckless “president” save face.

Democrats and their legion of facilitators would do well to learn at least one lesson;

Sometimes, a Turd is simply a Turd.

I pray for the families of those 12 War Fighters whose lives were sacrificed for the sake of politics. It is doubly infuriating for our family being as this debacle began to take shape on the Anniversary of our Son’s death in Afghanistan 08/14/2009.

I pray for the families of the thousands whose lives were sacrificed for the misplaced interest of a president who sullied his oath, 12 years ago.

I hope although very likely in vain, that those who selected the current figurehead will see the fruit of that ill-conceived choice even if it required the unnecessary deaths of yet more American Service members, this day, 26 August 2021.

 Semper Fidelis

 John Bernard

UPDATE from HPS: I cannot help but append this post with another observation.

They were never serious.  I knew they weren’t serious when I watched and analyzed the logistics operations taking place a decade ago.

General David Rodriguez boldly and baldly stated over TV that the Taliban were on their heels.  They were reeling from the pounding the U.S. troops had given them.  For that reason, there would be no spring offensive.

I said that there would be, and I explained in many posts exactly what the strategy would be.  The Taliban would attacks the lines of logistics at two points:  (1) The port city of Lahore to Chaman (the Southern route), and (2) The port city of Lahore to The Khyber Pass through the Torkham Crossing (the Northern route).  There are two main [guarded] border crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan.  This isn’t difficult.  This Khyber Pass route is particularly treacherous, with one blown up truck blocking the single roadway for hours or even days.  I’ve still got the pictures of what they did to the trucks.  The Southern route relied on “Jingle Trucks” of the locals.  It was a pittance compared to the Northern route.

The Taliban did exactly what I said they would do.  There was a spring offensive, and it attacked both points of ingress of supply into Afghanistan.

After this, flights kicked up at Donaldson AFB in Greenville, S.C., 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.  It was all air after that.

And David Rodriguez is an idiot and the DoD should hire me as their logistics analyst.  They don’t care enough to do that.

Via reader David Dietz, news from Baltimore:

Five days ago, Det. Sean Suiter, a married father of five and an 18-year veteran with the Baltimore Police, was patrolling the streets of West Baltimore around 5pm last Wednesday when he saw suspicious activity. Suiter approached a man and was shot point blank in the head, in a summary execution. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition where he later died of his injuries.

Rest In Peace Detective Sean Suiter https://t.co/NiKIdmzbAD pic.twitter.com/l7vkrOKjMv

— Baltimore Police (@BaltimorePolice) November 16, 2017

In response, Baltimore Police reacted with ‘fire and fury’ turning the neighborhood where Suiter was shot into an “open-air prison”, shutting down city streets and enabling checkpoints for citizens while officers in tactical gear went door to door, according to Baltimore Brew. Residents were prohibited from entering their own neighborhood unless they showed proper identification, these extreme measures have been in place for 4-5 days.

“They’ve been to my house three times asking, ‘Did you hear anything? Do you know anything,’” said Edward Stanley, a local resident, who had to show a yellow slip before entering the neighborhood.

Baltimore Brew said, the neighborhood was tuned into “open-air prison”, as the complete lockdown was in attempt to collect evidence and search for the shooter.

Police initially said they needed to cordon off the area to try to capture the shooter. Police have said Suiter was in the 900 block of Bennett Place, investigating a previous homicide, when he was shot on Wednesday. So far, no arrests have been announced in the case. This morning, homicide detective Mike Newton told The Brew that the lockdown was necessary to collect evidence.

One community group took pictures of a checkpoint in West Baltimore.

#FreeWestBaltimore pic.twitter.com/P61qoDLHnq

— Baltimore BLOC (@BmoreBloc) November 19, 2017

15 @BaltimorePolice vehicles on Schroeder alone and dozens more on surrounding blocks. All the officers are just sitting in their cars. pic.twitter.com/M9zCCltdzK

— Baltimore BLOC (@BmoreBloc) November 19, 2017

Another twitter account describes how ‘the police declared marital law’, as one police officer with an assault rifle guards a corner.

And apparently police been standing on corners like this the last two days pic.twitter.com/y9Qrd2TSRe

— Pulla (@KINGDACEO) November 17, 2017

This is what the U.S. Marine Corps did in Fallujah in 2007.  I’ve rehearsed this too many times already, but once more for my newer readers won’t hurt anything.  I watched prior to Daniel’s deployment as 80-100 fighters per month crossed the Syrian and Jordanian borders into Iraq, right up to his deployment.  We know that from the Sinjar papers.  They came through little towns like Al Qaim.

Ramadi was a hot spot for them, and not only were there U.S. forces, but competing groups made it a very dangerous place to be.  In response, the foreign fighters migrated to Fallujah right about the time for his deployment early in 2007.  Then 2/6 deployed, and Fallujah was so in lock step with the foreign fighters that the children would walk around groups of U.S. Marines (as instructed by the fighters) carrying black balloons so that the foreign fighters would have targets for mortar fire.

In response, the Marines locked down Fallujah.  When I say locked down, I mean they locked it down in every way.  Vehicle traffic was forbidden.  Concrete barriers were put up, and there were two ways into and out of the city.   Military age males (MAMs) were given full biometric screening (fingerprints, iris scans, name, age, place of residence, etc.), and the shooting started.  The Marines hunted the foreign fighters down room to room, house to house, and literally visited every domicile in the city.

As the fighters would try to infiltrate across the Euphrates River, the Marines would shoot them.  My son was aboard a helicopter shooting an M2 at times, when he wasn’t carrying a SAW or M4 room-to-room.  It was important to know everything about everyone, all of the time, with cameras everywhere, biometric data available at the click of a mouse, and with full control over means of ingress and egress.

They didn’t drive the foreign fighters out of Fallujah.  They found and killed them all.  This kind of tactical approach is highly effective, and the Marines were masters of it.  The Baltimore police want control over the city.  By control, I mean complete control, with knowledge of everyone, information on their comings and goings and their whereabouts at all times, updates on their intentions and predilections, and full freedom to maneuver or respond as necessary to meet the perceived threat.

They learned this from the U.S. military.  Expect to see additional elements of this COIN / stability operations in Baltimore, like UAVs or drones to help them “see” the terrain.  Expect JTTF and robust Fusion center activity, and expect to see the U.S. justice system to go right along with everything that happens.

It’s where we are.  It’s the state to which we’ve been driven.  America has created third world countries in large cities like Baltimore, Chicago, L.A., Atlanta, Houston, and St. Louis, by means of handouts and fatherless families.  Opening the borders hasn’t helped.  The result is third world hell holes that scare even the police, but given that the police are the largest gang in America, they will respond in kind.

Mondoweiss:

After more than a year of stonewalling and what some might call obstructing justice, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued an apology for the horrific execution of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason van Dyke. Laquan McDonald was the black 17-year-old who was shot 16 times by the police officer on Oct. 20, 2014. The video showing the shooting was only released by Chicago officials when they were ordered to do so by a judge in late November 2015.

But apology or not, the underlying substantive issue is that the summary execution of McDonald was the sort of atrocity that one would expect to see in what the U.S. once called “police states.” In fact, one can imagine a death squad execution in El Salvador in the 1980s looking very similar on video to McDonald’s slaying.

“Police state” is a term which has fallen into disuse since 9/11 with the adoption of so many similar practices by the so-called “democracies” in their domestic policies. The term generally was applied to Fascist or Communist governments and described a country where the police and the military exercised martial law over citizens or military occupation powers that uses military force to control a civilian population.

Sometimes these arbitrary powers were enforced by summary executions, depending on how much the authorities could get away with in their “extreme measures.” This was the practice in countries such as Nazi Germany; Pinochet’s Chile; El Salvador and Guatemala during the Cold War; to a lesser degree, apartheid South Africa; and military occupied territories such as Tibet, Israeli-occupied Palestine, and Eastern Europe under the Soviet Union.

But Chicago isn’t under martial law or military occupation, is it? Nor is it an apartheid state, with apartheid enforced by domestic martial law and military force, is it? To a normal civilian-oriented mind, one would think it is not under military occupation or martial law.

Yet, under Mayor Emanuel, a former civilian volunteer on an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) base, and Garry McCarthy, the now former Chicago Police Superintendent (Emanuel fired him Dec. 1), it seems that parts of Chicago were treated as if they were occupied territory under police or paramilitary rule.

That is, under arbitrary martial law, just like the repressive martial law regime of the Israeli Defense Forces in the occupied territory of Palestine. Martial law or occupation law is arbitrary as it is not law, but is the manifestation of the occupying military commander’s “will.”

How could this be in the civilian government of Chicago? In part, because Police Superintendent McCarthy and the City of Chicago sought out and received training by Israeli occupation forces in “counter-terrorism” policing, that is, “pacifying” a population through aggressive intelligence gathering and the application of military force. Counter-insurgency is the term used for when this doctrine is applied by military forces.

This collaboration between Israel and U.S. police agencies, including Chicago, emerged after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Since then, by one count, at least 300 high-ranking sheriffs and police from cities both large and small have received counter-terrorism training in Israel. For instance, in January 2003, 33 senior U.S. law enforcement officials from Chicago and other major American cities flew to Israel for sessions on “Law Enforcement in the Era of Global Terror.”

In 2009, Israel’s Midwest Consulate General co-sponsored “an intensive seminar” in Israel for senior Chicago police officials “on intelligence-led policing techniques.”

[ … ]

… over more than a decade, senior Chicago police officials have been studying Israel’s militarized police practices for how best to maintain a repressive military control over an occupied population living under permanent, strict martial, or occupation, law.

Why this matters is that Israel doesn’t have a domestic civilian policing model but instead applies a counter-insurgency policing model intended for a population under military occupation, or otherwise considered as hostile under martial law.

This policing model is being sold by Israel’s government to gullible or authoritarian-leaning U.S. police officials as a legitimate domestic policing model when, in fact, it is a military model of the sort used by militaristic, authoritarian regimes, customarily referred to as “fascist.”

You can read the rest for yourself.  First a bit of nuanced correction to the article.  What the author refers to as counterinsurgency (COIN) is not counterinsurgency, not in its classical sense, and certainly not in the modern sense.  Just to take one example for purposes of illustration, the U.S. Marine Corps was very successful in the Anbar Province with COIN.  Terrorists had been driven out, young men had jobs, weapons caches had been found, insurgents had been rooted out and killed, and much blood had been spilled, most of it not American.

The tactics, techniques and procedures were extremely aggressive, and if they are ever implemented in the U.S., it will be considered full blown war.  What you see in Chicago today, and in Israel as well, is more correctly termed stability operations.  The difference is important, not pedantic.  The author has no idea of the kind of TTPs were used in Iraq (I do because my son was there in the thick of it), and if he did he wouldn’t use the term COIN.

But what the Marine Corps couldn’t accomplish is fixing millennia-old hatred over rights to succession between Sunni and Shia.  What they couldn’t do is fix the seed of hatred and violence inherent in Islam.  Thus, the root problem remains today.  And this is the point of analogy between COIN in Iraq, stability operations in Israel and stability operations in Chicago.

While we aren’t dealing with millennia-old problems, we are in fact dealing with at least fourth or fifth generation entitlement, with fatherless families, SNAP payments, welfare, “free” medical care, and so on.  Just enough government largesse to keep the inner city blacks on a leash, not enough (yet) to create revolution against it.  And therefore the elites get their voting bloc, which is the intended outcome all along.

But the monster this created is ugly and difficult to control.  I’ve read comments about the rioters in Ferguson, to the extent that any protest against “the man” (or the state) is a good thing and they must be our ally (I’m not sure who “our” is).  Such a view is a sign of lack of attention to detail, immaturity and weakness of mind.  Most of the rioters in Ferguson would sooner gut you groin to throat with a knife and then rape your wife and daughter as to look at you.  Anyone who feels an alliance with the rioters in Ferguson is a fool.

This is a monster the government and effete urbanite elitists created.  The hive is coming apart at the seems, and the only way to keep it together is harsher and harsher stability operations.  Make no mistake about it.  The Chicago Mayor knows all about the tactics in use in Chicago and approves of them.  The firing of the chief of police was a sacrifice to the masses.

The lesson for us is that police departments are more and more using stability operations as a model or paradigm for their work, with the approval of those in charge.  As these tactics want to work their way into the fabric of American society like a cancer, one goal will be to kill the cancer before it takes over the host.  This battle will be gradual, fought initially on the fields of town hall meetings, boards, blogs, and so on.  If the battles are lost there, it will expand, and if lost entirely, dystopia (and maybe insurgency) will come to the American countryside.

The wars for the inner city cannot be won.  America is going broke and the largesse cannot continue forever.  Sooner or later, the riots will expand.  The more important thing will be what happens to the medium and smaller towns of America?  Stability operations can lead to COIN if not successful (and couple this with Islamic terrorism and the influx from South of the border, and the potential for success seems bleak), and neither COIN nor stability operations is an acceptable model for this country.

The Small Wars Journal has a tradition of publishing white papers and opinion pieces on the relationship of counterinsurgency tactics to community policing, even advocating the use of regular U.S. military forces to couple with police in the States, and the latest is entitled Counterinsurgency and Community Policing: More Alike than Meets the Eye.

I won’t duplicate what ends up being a very long article here, since you can study it yourself.  But I will make several observations.  The first has to do with his MOS.  By training and trade the author is a LEO who apparently deployed as a Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer.  He wasn’t the pointy end of the spear as was my son and many others.

What you don’t get is the perspective of someone who had to engage in room clearing operations against people shouting Allahu Akbar, chopped boats and people to pieces with an M2 aboard a helicopter, who were boating across the Euphrates River after you had locked down Fallujah, or who constructed your FOB on your back handing sandbags over your head to the next Marine while you were being shot at.

I’m not recounting this brief history for fun – it wasn’t for my son.  I am mentioning it in order to explain what you do mainly get with this paper: happy face COIN, or the mythical story told to the masses in order to get them to support state-building across the pond.

The author sets up the article with this:

The term counterinsurgency has long been associated with military operations and soldiers.  It conjures visions of violent urban combat action, population relocation, social engineering, and a tool for dealing with foreign political emergencies.  These visions are not inaccurate as they represent some of the methods and strategies used in COIN operations throughout history.  But these methods and strategies do not encapsulate all aspects of COIN.  As COIN operations shift from combat to peace keeping and community-building they begin to resemble traditional community policing activities in which the public servant controls through education and raising ethical stature in communities.  It is in the transitional phase – when the soldier transitions into the policeman and community facilitator – that COIN and Community policing share the same strategies and tactics.

Part of the happy face is in his presentation of typical policing:

COIN is typically employed by uniformed soldiers, armed with assault rifles and supported by light and heavy armored vehicles and tactical air assets.  Community Policing is conducted by uniformed police officers, representatives of the community they serve, with a badge, a holstered pistol, and a number of less-lethal tools.  In COIN, soldiers control population movement and space through use of roadblocks, cordoning off, house to house search and clearing operations, and patrolling villages and neighborhoods in HUMVEE’s and Armored Personnel Carriers.  In Community Policing, police patrol neighborhoods in police cars, bicycles, foot beats, and horses, people are free to move about and there is no outward show of force.

He is intentionally ignoring the militarization of police in America, or perhaps better yet, he is attempting to show both the militarized presence and the so-called population-centric community building he believes police do.

He says “COIN and Community Policing are intrinsically linked,” and then makes this pregnant statement:

In addition to the non-kinetic imperatives mentioned above, similarities can also be found in traditional policing activities such as crime prevention, traffic control, crime investigation, and overall public safety.  In COIN operations powers of arrest are generally left to the police organizations of the host nation.  However, soldiers stand side by side with their host nation counterpart and provide assistance in the form of identifying and, when necessary, arresting insurgents.

As a successful COIN operation, he uses the British experience in Northern Ireland where British troops coupled with local police.  But it is important to get the thrust of his article in the alignment, or nexus, of tactics to achieve the overall strategy.  He ends with this:

Ultimately, the desired end state is a strategy that is seen as legitimate, employing social, political, economic, and security measures that meet the population’s needs, including adequate mechanisms to address the grievances that may have fueled support of the insurgency.

In his world, police become social planners, and employ various tools to meet the population’s needs and address grievances, while at the same time coupling with a more militarized presence to tamp down violence and insurgency.

This thinking isn’t foreign to American police.  They have been playing social planner and policy-maker for decades now, making better sense of the recent blame the Chicago chief of police laid with the availability of guns for violence in Chicago.

But heretofore, this thinking i.e., alignment of military with local police, was indeed foreign to military strategists.  With papers like this it is becoming more commonplace and when something becomes commonplace and worthy of consideration, it becomes easier to engage.

Take note of these things.  Not only are the police becoming more militarized, the armed forces is studying policy-making, trying to learn to employ the tools of social engineering and building human terrain systems, and talking about addressing grievances and meeting community needs.

It all continues a rich tradition of flirtation with treasonous theories at the SWJ.  After all, it worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan, why not try it in the United States?

Mark Steyn observes:

The pitiful self-inflicted tragedy of the west’s “strategy” in Afghanistan is summed up in this opening sentence:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A newly recruited Afghan village policeman opened fire on his American allies on Friday, killing two US service members minutes after they handed him his official weapon in an inauguration ceremony.

There’s nothing clever or sophisticated about this attack. You don’t have to plot, or disguise yourself, or break into a secure facility. They come to you, to your village. They even give you money. And then they give you the gun. And then you shoot them.

Do they cover that in Pentagon-approved must-read Three Cups Of Tea? Afghanistan is just another in the long roll-call of America’s un-won wars these past six decades – except that it’s taken longer to lose than the others, and in their barbarity the locals demonstrate an almost gleeful contempt for a lavishly endowed enemy with everything except the one thing it needs: strategic purpose. This ought to be a national scandal …

To some degree we’ve covered this in Green On Blue Bloodbath In Afghanistan.  At least now they have changed their disposition towards the ANA and ANP.

The uptick in attacks by Afghan security forces against coalition troops has hit home, with all troops at NATO headquarters and all bases across Afghanistan now ordered to carry loaded weapons around the clock, CNN learned Friday.

Gen. John Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, ordered the move, according to a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the orders. The order, made in recent days, was divulged amid two more so-called green-on-blue or insider attacks Friday.

It’s ridiculous that we weren’t already behaving this way.  This is part of the impetus behind me asking why all Soldiers and Marines don’t already carry a sidearm. In Iraq when the Marines, 2/6 Golf Company, was in Fallujah (2007), they wouldn’t even sleep around ISF unless they had concertina wire and armed, on duty Marines between them and ISF soldiers.

As for the tragedy of the Afghanistan strategy, it isn’t that there wasn’t one.  It’s that the flag and staff officers from the Pentagon to Afghanistan came under the spell of the doctrines of population-centric counterinsurgency and nation-building.  For it, as Steyn observes, “We came, we saw, we left no trace. America’s longest war will leave nothing behind.”  Not even killing enough of the enemy.  We will be back again, hopefully as grown ups next time.

From The Washington Times:

Afghanistan’s harsh and isolated Korengal Valley two years ago this month served as the setting for an unlikely U.S. military maneuver — a retreat.

The Army evacuated a network of hilltop platoon outposts, left them to the Taliban and started a war strategy devised by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan in 2010.

[ … ]

Today, the failed Korengal experiment is a factor in a new way of conducting missions in the east, which includes Kunar and 13 other provinces, and a 450-mile-long border with terrorist-infested Pakistan. The military calls it a “refocus” on finding and hitting the enemy, with less reliance on static valley outposts.

[ … ]

Nearly nine years into the war, the military had to acknowledge a big mistake.

“So what the commanders did, they took a very hard look at the east, with the help of the Kagans, who analyzed the terrain and the enemy to a level of detail that maybe had not been done in the past,” Gen. Keane said.

The Kagans are Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife analytical team who played a major role in developing and selling the Iraq surge.

In 2010, the U.S. command invited them to Afghanistan as an outside “red team” to tell the generals how operations could be improved.

Mr. Kagan, a military historian who taught at West Point, is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mrs. Kagan, who also taught at West Point, is president of the Institute for the Study of War.

The Kagans spent months in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. They traveled throughout the battle space to study the enemy and the tactics to kill them.

As the Kagans gave their advice, U.S. troops adapted.

“They refocused on the populated areas, which has meant coming out of some of the valleys,” Mrs. Kagan told The Times. “Troops rearranged so that they were massed in the key terrain in population areas in order to interact with the population, protect that population and really help abrogate the enemy by seeing to it they could not engage in the same intimidation campaigns that they were engaged in populated areas.”

Three main intelligence/strike targets emerged: “mobility corridors” through which the Taliban and allied Haqqani Network fighters moved; “support zones,” or safe havens, where the enemy planned and rested; and the areas around possible enemy targets.

“The Kagans did a better job in analyzing which were the ones the enemy was using and which ones were more important,” Gen. Keane said.

And what about the valleys such as Korengal?

“They are using strike forces and basically planned operations on occasion to go back into the valleys and remove pockets of the enemies when they grow sufficient to warrant military attention,” Mrs. Kagan said. “That is really what has changed in operating in the northern Kabul area.”

Mrs. Kagan said the operations of Army Col. Andrew Poppas, who led Task Force Bastogne last year, stand as a good example. He used “creative ways to mass forces” to go after the Taliban, she said.

Nine months into his mission, Col. Poppas talked to the Pentagon press corps from a base in Jalalabad. He gave three examples of combined strikes on identified safe havens that took territory away from the Taliban.

In Operation Bulldog Bite in Kunar’s Pech River Valley, “we successfully reduced the amount of insurgent attacks on the local populace and proved wrong the entire mystique that there were safe havens [for] the enemy,” he said. “We worked through each of the separate valleys, identifying, targeting the enemy network, predominately Taliban.”

Analysis & Commentary

Sounds nice, no?  “Mobility corridors,” and “creative ways to mass forces”?  The only problem is that despite what General Keane is saying, it hasn’t worked, and won’t work.  Let’s begin with Highway 1, the most significant transportation and logistics corridor in Afghanistan, running between Kabul and Kandahar, and then on to other cities as the so-called “ring road.”  Greg Jaffe recently authored a good piece at The Washington Post on this very road.  The entire report is well worth the study time, but after a recent IED attack on Highway 1, U.S. forces wanted to know why a local farmer didn’t report the IED.  The farmer’s reply is telling: “The Taliban were everywhere, including the Afghan army, the farmer replied. “There is no one I can trust,” he insisted.

On to RC South, which is supposed to be so much better off than RC East.  The Marines are frustrated with the constant release of insurgents from prison, the changing strategies, and so much more.  This report is disheartening.

I have seen courageous American soldiers get increasingly frustrated and cynical about the war. Last summer a Marine colonel in southern Afghanistan told me there was low morale among the troops. He said, “On an operational level, the soldiers are saying, ‘I’m going to go over there and try to not get my legs blown off. My nation will shut this bullshit down.’ That’s the feeling of my fellow soldiers.” The marine officer said, “The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”

As for Keane’s claims for the success of the Kagan’s plans in RC East, there is near panic among Afghans in the Nuristan Province.

Local Afghan officials have called for a military intervention in the country’s northeast after scores of suspected Pakistani Taliban fighters overran several districts in Nuristan, a remote province bordering Pakistan.

Ghulamullah Nuristani, the security chief in Nuristan, says the militants captured the Kamdesh and Bargmatal districts of Nuristan two weeks ago and have torched dozens of homes and threatened to kill local villagers who work for the Afghan government.

Nuristani has called on NATO and the Afghan government to intervene, insisting that the small contingent of local police is powerless to stop the militants in Nuristan, from where U.S. forces withdrew in 2009.

“If anybody opposes them, the insurgents burn their homes and threaten to kill them. I have witnessed several houses being burned and seen many of the inhabitants beaten,” Nuristani says. “Until the government intervenes, we don’t have the resources [to fight back]. We can’t do it alone.”

It’s not clear where the militants are from. Nuristani says they are members of the Pakistani Taliban, who control the Pakistani side of the border alongside Al-Qaeda operatives and fighters from the Hizb-e Islami group headed by notorious former warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Aziz Rahman, a village elder in Kamdesh, describes the militants as armed and wearing black clothing. He says the militants have set up a shadow government, opening local offices and collecting taxes from local residents.

“Kamdesh is under the control of the Taliban. The men in black clothing are here. They have opened a Department of the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” Rahman says. “They are teaching religious material and are telling people to do the right things. If people violate the rules, then they get punished.”

[ … ]

Mawlawi Ahmadullah Moahad, a member of parliament from Nuristan, issued a warning to the government on the deteriorating situation in Nuristan when he addressed parliament on March 24.

Moahad told parliament that the militants had crossed the border from Pakistan and had evicted hundreds of villagers from their homes and replaced them with families from the Pakistani town of Chitral, which is across the border in the Bajaur tribal agency.

It’s just as I had forecast for the Pech River Valley and Hindu Kush once U.S. troops left.  A better chance to kill the trouble-makers in their own safe haven, we will never have.  But we chose to implement population-centric counterinsurgency and withdraw to the cities, and then to top it all off, we decreased troop levels.  It’s a sad, sad story that regular readers have seen well documented on the pages of The Captain’s Journal.

But what we see above is the fruit of our strategy.  The chickens are coming home to roost.  The people of Nuristan are in a panic, the Marines are fed up with the strategy, the farmers in the Kandahar Province are afraid of the Taliban, and just to make sure that you understand how parents and loved ones feel about the engagement, read the comments about the report from Nuristan when the author got the date for the battle at Kamdesh wrong.

by: Vanessa Adelson from: USA

March 29, 2012 23:59

Please get your facts straight. COP Keating was attacked in October 2009, not 2008. I should know. My son was killed during that attack. 300 Taliban attacked our small COP of about 50 soldiers. NOT ONE person from the village of Kamdesh let our COP know about the imminent attack. Some ANA were killed that day. Others turned their guns and attacked our soldiers. Others ran and hid. Let them ROT! Oh yeah, America….Pakistan is not a nation that should be considered our friend. Where do you think the Taliban came from that attacked my son and his buddies. Let’s just get the hell out of that country.

by: Dave from: Ft drum

March 30, 2012 16:52

Justice served. Keating was attacked repeatedly during 2008 as well and the first indicator of an attack was always the locals not showing up for work. No warnings. Screw em. My CO, Capt Yellescas died there in october 2008, a week after telling the local shura that America would abandon them to the Taliban if they didn’t start helping.

by: Cynthia Woodard from: Pa

March 30, 2012 00:23

The Battle of Kemdash was Oct 03, 09, not 08. My son was one of the 8 that were killed that day. Those people didn’t warn the soldiers that they were going to be attacked by 300+ insurgens. NOW they cry for our help. I say NO NO NO.

by: Knighthawk from: USA

March 30, 2012 00:44

All due respect – tough doo-doo. Too little too late we’re out of there soon and these people are screwed by their own failures to act when they had a chance, and their not the only area with the same story. The time for such calls were years ago but most of these villagers didn’t want to risk being involved then, or in many cases they did far worse by aiding the enemy (the very same people they are now complaining about) when US\NATO et all actually did try to secure their areas but this same population wouldn’t lift much of a finger to help themselves.

The fact they are crying foul now is pretty rich, but typical of the general afghan mentality.

Not a lot of love going around.  And when you have lost morale among the Marines due to failed strategy and the parents and loved ones of men who have suffered are angry and resentful, you know that support for the campaign has evaporated.

It didn’t have to be this way, but we pretended that minimal troops and nation-building would work in Afghanistan.  It’s been a costly pretension.

Courtesy of reader Šťoural.  The COIN dance.

Maj. Gen. John Toolan turned over the reins of Regional Command Southwest yesterday to Maj. Gen. Charles Gurganus, who will lead Marine forces in Helmand and Nimroz provinces this summer.

Toolan has repeatedly praised Mohammad Gulab Mangal, Helmand’s provincial governor for his leadership. The general cited Mangal jumping to action as one reason why Helmand didn’t have the same kind of violent protests other parts of the country did after U.S. soldiers burned Qurans at Bagram Air Base last month.

To thank Mangal and other top Afghan officials for their year-long partnership, Toolan held a farewell dinner last week at the Afghan Cultural Center at Camp Leatherneck. And as you can see in the photograph above released by the Corps, the general threw himself into the mix completely, dressing in traditional Afghan garb and joining others on the dance floor.

Observe where population-centric counterinsurgency hath brought us … and left us.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the U.S. could not figure out how to negotiate an extension of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq, leading to the “premature evacuation” of our forces in two months time, the Turks have decided to make it clear to the world (and, more importantly, the regional powers that matter) the decidedly unmanly U.S. foreign policy.

Turkey has apparently decided that it is really just too inconvenient to keep dodging back and forth across the northern Iraqi border in pursuit of Kurdish militants.  Instead, according to this news item from August (which seems to have slipped under the collective radar), the Turks are fortifying bases in northern Iraq and settling in for a seemingly long stay.

ANKARA, Turkey, Aug. 19 (UPI) — Turkey targeted Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq for a second day, broadening the reach of its fight against the rebels, officials said.

The attacks Thursday came as Turkey said it’s turning intelligence outposts into operations garrisons to fight the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as PKK, to northern Iraq, where Turkey has 2,500 troops.

Turkey, which has had intelligence outposts in the region since 1995, will transform a Bamerni garrison into a logistics center for supporting major operations against PKK, Today’s Zaman reported.

The publication, citing sources, said fortification of outposts would enable Turkish troops in Iraq to stay there longer to search for members of the outlawed PKK. Bombings are to continue and units from Sirnak province will be deployed in the region, officials said.

Today’s Zaman did not give casualty figures in the latest attacks.

The 25 cross-border operations Turkey has conducted so far have been short because of pressure from allies and regional governments, but sources told Today’s Zaman Turkey would now continue operations as long as necessary to end the threat of terrorism in northern Iraq.

After a regular meeting Thursday, led by President Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s National Security Council said it’s embarking on “more effective and decisive strategy in the fight against terrorism.”

About 20 million of Turkey’s 74 million residents are Kurds, living mainly in the southeast near the country’s borders with Iraq and Iran, and the PKK’s fight for Kurdish independence has claimed 40,000 lives in the past three decades.

There are so many knife wounds in such a short story.  The actions of Turkey here could not present a stronger contrast with U.S. actions if Hollywood wanted to script it.

First off, the Turks do not seem to have learned that Iraq is a sovereign state and that any bases in Iraq used to pursue Turkey’s enemies must be subject to arduous and infinite negotiations, full of lavish offers of foreign aid and support.    How long did Turkey negotiate with Nouri al-Maliki in order to get these basing rights in a supposedly sovereign Iraq?  The article is silent but it is a safe bet that there were no negotiations.   Turkey essentially told the Iraqis, “We’re doing this.  Get used to it.”

Next, what about immunity for Turkish soldiers from prosecution under Iraqi laws?   Obama has told us that those Iraqis are absolute sticklers about this sort of thing.  Why the Iraqi people would never allow foreign soldiers on their soil who can violate Iraqi law with impunity.   The U.S. just couldn’t get that point resolved, so time to pack up in a hurry and get out of Dodge.    Somehow, though, it doesn’t look like the Turks are at all worried about Iraqi prosecutors putting Turkish soldiers in jail.

And how about that nasty Turkish attitude about a few, measly PKK fighters taking shelter in Iraq?  Kurds make up over 25% of Turkey’s population and have historic claims to parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran.   Arguably, the Kurds were robbed of their own state when the victors of World War I split up the Ottoman Empire.   Unlike the U.S. in Pakistan, Turkey seems to have no problem treating the Iraqi border as purely optional and, now, it seems that part of Iraq itself will become effectively Turkish until the PKK is sorted out.   If that ever happens.

And what to make of Turkey’s methods for defeating the PKK?  It sure does not sound like Turkey is establishing these bases in Iraq in order to win the hearts and minds of PKK guerillas.   I sure hope that Turkish forces are going to be culturally sensitive and not commit any grievous offenses like flatulence in the presence of Iraqi Kurds, but we cannot expect that Turkish leaders will be nearly as enlightened as American leadership in this regard.  Instead, it appears that the Turks are intent on finding and killing as many of the PKK militants as possible, hence the talk by President Gul about “effective and decisive strategy in the fight against terrorism.”   Sounds way too warlike.   Not at all a COIN-centric policy.

Nonetheless, these actions by Turkey should not diminish the crowning achievement announced by President Obama that U.S. forces will be completely withdrawn from Iraq by January 1, 2012 and the war officially “over.”

Funny.  Wasn’t there a time in U.S. history when a war was not “over,” it was “won” ?

UPDATE: Michael Rubin has just posted this damning bit of information that relates how the once openly-pro American Kurds of Iraq have now (correctly) read the complete collapse of American foreign policy in the Middle East and are embracing the Iranian Regime:

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Over the past year, US and NATO forces say they have made considerable progress against the Afghan insurgency through the use of night raids. But a new study suggests that the long-controversial nighttime operations are doing more harm than good.

Despite a sharp rise in the number of night raids, there have been no benefits in the form of decreased insurgent attacks, and anger over the operations has continued to mount among Afghan civilians, found the report by the Open Society Foundations and The Liaison Office, a research and analysis group in Kabul.

“The dramatic increase in the number of night raids, and evidence that night raids or other operations may be more broadly targeting civilians to gather information and intelligence, appear to have overwhelmed Afghan tolerance of the practice,” wrote the authors of the report. “Afghan attitudes toward night raids are as hostile as ever, if not more so.”

International forces rely heavily on night raids to capture or kill high-level insurgents. Night raids are a critical component of NATO’s strategy here, but a growing number of Afghans, including President Hamid Karzai, have condemned the raids as disrespectful to Afghan culture, and say they undermine the authority of the government and security forces …

Even in the face of heated political debate about the night raids, there was fivefold increase between February 2009 and December 2010. Though newer statistics are unavailable, military officials indicated to Open Society Foundations that international forces still conduct a large number of night raids, possibly at higher rates than those previously documented. By one estimate, up to 40 night raids occur daily throughout Afghanistan.

“The night raids are perceived by the people, by the government, by Afghans as an insult. It’s a very big insult because they are insulting our privacy … so people hate them from the depths of their hearts,” says Rahim Khurram, deputy director of The Liaison Office …

The US and international forces have made a number of changes to their night-raid policy that have, by many measures, improved their accuracy and addressed Afghan concerns. Among other changes, Afghan officials are now incorporated in the planning process, and 25 percent of night operations are led by Afghan forces.

Presently, International Security Assistance Force officials say that they get their target 80 percent of the time during night raids. The report does not state what portion of the remaining 20 percent escaped or if they mistakenly arrested the wrong person. ISAF officials also point out that the night raids account for less than 1 percent of civilian casualties and that 85 percent are conducted without any shots fired.

“Night operations are an effective method of maintaining the pressure on the enemy while minimizing risk to innocent civilians,” says US Army Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, an ISAF spokesman.

Many of the improvements have been overlooked or gone unnoticed by Afghans, however, due to the sheer quantity.

Despite pervasive disapproval of night raids among many Afghans, if conducted properly, they are a valuable tool against the insurgency, says Mirwais Yasini, a member of parliament from Nangarhar Province, where night raids have been a serious point of contention.

“We cannot do without them, because if we do away with the night raids it means we are cutting [ISAF’s] operational capacity to the day, and if we do that it means we’re cutting their operational capacity to less than 50 percent,” says Mr. Yasini.

He suggests that instead of raiding houses during the night, international forces should try surrounding a village at night and make arrests during the day time.

Analysis & Commentary

Of course many of the Afghan people don’t like it.  But the edifice upon which this whole objection is built is population-centric counterinsurgency, with its adage that “if you kill one insurgent you create ten more.”  There isn’t a single shred of evidence that killing an insurgent creates ten more – that’s just a doctrinal mantra, and if repeated enough times it begins to be taken as science.  However, while the objection lodged by the Afghans to high value target raids may not be salient, there is a much more important reason that these raids are not as successful as they are purported to be.  Prisons.  Many or most of the HVTs are not killed, but captured and sent to prisons.  These prisons have become not only a laughingstock of the Afghan culture, they have become dangerous.

Cell Block 3 was in flames as prison riots continued in the next block over. The Taliban had grown too powerful, and the confinements of Afghanistan’s Pol-e-charki prison became little more than protective walls rendering them untouchable from the war raging outside.

The December 2008 riots at Pol-e-charki prison on the outskirts of Kabul served as a wake-up call to the severity of the corruption that had crept in through padded pockets and turning blind eyes. Captured Taliban commanders and radicalized prisoners had formed an operating center within Cell Block 3—armed with weapons, and with their own Shura Council to hold trials, vote, and eliminate those who refused to cooperate.

“The guards were not even allowed to go down into the cell block because they would be killed or kidnapped—I mean, its the Wild West out there,” said Drew Berquist, a former U.S. intelligence agent and author of “The Maverick Experiment,” in a phone interview.

Attention fell on the prison after the riots, and rebuilding efforts became focused on increasing security. This included eliminating cells for large groups, and replacing them with cells for smaller groups of between two and eight.

“You had a prison that was run by the Afghan government, but really, entire facilities within that prison were being used as training and education grounds for insurgent elements,” said Drew Quinn, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs director at the U.S. Embassy Kabul, on the NATO Channel in Nov. 2009.

Resolving such issues is no simple matter, and the battle behind prison walls continues to this day.

A rare news conference in Kabul, held by Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security intelligence service in February, highlighted the breadth of the problem—noting that despite efforts to root out operations at Pul-e-Charkhi, it is still going strong.

Taliban commander Talib Jan, a prisoner at Pul-e-Charkhi, is one of the more extreme cases. He organizes suicide bombings across Kabul from within his cell—including the Jan. 28 suicide bombing of a supermarket that killed 14 people.

“Most of the terrorist and suicide attacks in Kabul were planned from inside this prison by this man,” said National Directorate of Security spokesman, Lutfullah Mashal, at the conference, New York Times reported.

The problem, according to Berquist, runs deep.

“The prison systems are corrupt,” Berquist said. “The safest place for the Taliban is the prisons because they can’t get caught again.”

But if killing an insurgent doesn’t in fact create ten more, imprisonment of one may in fact do just that.  To coin a phrase, “imprisonment one insurgent creates ten more.”  Remember that phrase.  Since HVT raids focus so much on imprisonment of insurgents, they are counterproductive.  Killing the enemy isn’t counterproductive, but because we place so much value in not doing that in the campaign, it has affected the entirety of the effort.

And this clouds the whole strategy.  Thus, Presidential candidate Rick Perry is not clear yet in his proposed strategy for Afghansitan.

Rick Perry is still laboring to articulate a clear position on Afghanistan. At Monday night’s Republican debate, Perry–who has no real foreign policy experience beyond flying Air Force cargo planes abroad–seemed to endorse Jon Huntsman’s call for a major drawdown from Afghanistan. Yesterday, an unnamed Perry adviser revised and extended the gentleman’s remarks for Foreign Policy:

“If increasingly the Afghans can do this kind of work, then of course we want to bring our people home. It’s good for us, it’s good for them. But Gov. Perry is not confident in the Obama policy, which seems to be driven largely by politics, and he’s not confident in the 100,000 troops number. He’d like to know if it’s possible at 40,000,” the advisor said, explaining that the rationale for the specific number of U.S. troops on the ground has never been clearly explained by the administration.”He would lean toward wanting to bring our troops home, but he understands that we have vital strategic interests in Afghanistan and that a precipitous withdrawal is not what he’s recommending.”

This position is incredibly tortured. A presence of 100,000 troops seems too high to Perry, but he opposes Obama’s plan for a modest withdrawal of about 30,000 troops because it’s apparently driven by “politics.” He’s against a precipitous withdrawal, yet he’s interested in a 60 percent reduction in forces–to a level that would make David Petraeus bang his forehead on his desk.

Perry isn’t the only Republican to send mixed signals on Afghanistan. That’s because the GOP candidates are torn between two powerful forces. One is the general public’s loss of patience with the Afghanistan war. Especially now that Osama bin Laden is shark food, a clear majority of Americans want us out–regardless of whether Afghan troops can execute jumping jacks. But Republican voters are still on board: As of June, 53% of them still favored fighting on until Afghanistan has been stabilized (whatever that means).

Even Andrew McCarthy, writing for NRO, observes that Perry’s answer was muddled (although McCarthy parrots the usual stuff about killing and capturing a lot of people which makes his case rather odd).  Since we have tried population-centric counterinsurgency and nation-building in the most backwards place on earth, the last ten years has seen a groundhog day rinse and repeat of the same thing, over and over again.  Of course our strategy is confused.  The people who implemented it were confused.

Mr. Obama has been content to go along with a confused strategy and cut his losses as soon as possible.  In challenging him, the GOP needs to see their way clear to a revised strategy and a justification for said approach.  This needs to fit within the framework of the larger war against the transnational insurgency, in which AQ, the Taliban, the TTP, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., are just manifestations of the militant side of Islamism, with the Muslim Brotherhood being the manifestation of the more political side of (what will ultimately become the forcible implementation of) sharia law.

Whatever is decided, let’s be clear.  A small footprint, HVT raid-based approach by 10,000 – 15,000 troopers, mostly SOF, won’t work.  When there are no troops to provide security for the people who supply intelligence for the raids, the raids will dry up.  When logistics cannot get supplies to the troopers, it will take SOF missions to rescue the SOF troopers remaining in Afghanistan.  A small footprint is a silly, juvenile cop out, and a poor excuse for actually thinking through the difficult issues of the war.

The troops exist for the proper execution of the campaign.  The CJCS could tell the Commandant of the Marines to stop playing Iwo Jima, give up the ridiculous EFV, settle for a mission that includes air-based forcible entry capabilities, and send Marines all over the world in distributed operations (similar to SOF).  There are missions for the Marines to do, surely.

And as for what to do with the insurgents, they must be killed or released.  Prisons are not only not helpful in counterinsurgency, they are counterproductive.  As I have said before, prisons … do … not … work … in … counterinsurgency.

UPDATE: From The Washington Post:

Even as U.S.-led forces draw down in Afghanistan, U.S. officials expect the number of detainees at their main prison to increase — and by a significant margin.

Officials had already announced that they would retain control of the Parwan Detention Center north of Kabul well beyond the planned 2012 transfer date because of concerns that the Afghan legal system is still too weak. But U.S. officials recently said they intend to solicit contractors to help expand the facility’s capacity from about 3,500 beds to 5,500 beds.

Parwan, which has been expanded previously, holds about 2,500 detainees. Those detainees include high-profile insurgents as well as Afghans who are suspected of playing more of a peripheral role in the conflict.

The construction project “is part of our established and ongoing transition efforts” with the Afghan government, Capt. Kevin Aandahl, a spokesman for the U.S. task force that oversees detention operations in Afghanistan, said in an e-mail. Aandahl said the expansion was necessary to “accommodate an increase in the number of suspected insurgents being detained as a result of intelligence-based counter- terrorism operations, which we conduct with our Afghan partners.

There is a massive amount of hope in this plan.  It is being planned in order to “accommodate an increase in the number of suspected insurgents being detained as a result of intelligence-based counter- terrorism operations …”  All of which means that the U.S. wants to turn this even more into a SOF High Value Target campaign.  In other words, take that which hasn’t succeeded thus far, and intensify it without the troopers on the ground to supply logistics and security for those who supply intelligence.  This exemplifies the bankruptcy of our military thinking on Afghanistan.

Prior:

The Long Term Effects of Prisons in Counterinsurgency

The Great Escape – in Afghanistan!

Because Prisons Work So Well In Counterinsurgency

Afghan Prison An Insurgent Breeding Ground

Prisons Do Not Work In Counterinsurgency

Hamid Karzai: Defeater of the High Value Target Program

The Ineffectiveness of Prisons in Counterinsurgency

Jirgas and Release of Taliban Prisoners

Prisons in Afghanistan

Prisons in Counterinsurgency