How our troops should approach waging the war in Afghanistan by building trust with locals
After several years of lenses pointed solely on Iraq, and two years of adoration over a Chicago politician who would end up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the realities of a land that most Americans didn’t even know existed before 9/11 have grown too important to ignore.
President Obama showed signs of honoring his campaign promises of a new direction in Afghanistan and installed a new commander, General Stanley McChrystal and reopening dialogue on the once distant conflict. Yet the President now finds himself in a precarious situation, as his base on the pacifist left have turned on him, seeing Afghanistan as a “good war” no more.
In the face of such opposition, Obama has found himself between a rock and a hard place, dedicating himself to countless policy meetings in search of an answer. But while some in the administration are ardent in their call for a withdrawal of forces, the President would be wise to lend his ears to an official from a past president and the strategy that he once oversaw.
That man is Secretary of Defense Robert Gates; the strategy is COIN.
COIN (short for COunter-INsurgency) is a definitive solution to the age-old headache of what to do once enemies remove their uniforms and turn to the playbook of unorthodoxy. Because when dealing with warfare in the Middle East against radical, Jihadi Islam, “by the book” is furthest from a terrorist’s mind.
Even the greatest army in the world can find itself bleeding from all sides not from armies, tanks and planes, but rather jerry-rigged explosives, snipers, and any man desperate and crazy enough to strap himself to enough bombs to light himself up like a Christmas tree.
In essence, the current Afghan insurgency is a principle example of warfare beyond modern conventions in a very dangerous way. So forget about what you thought you knew, because this isn’t your daddy’s war.
But as it so turns out, COIN is wise to insurgencies, seeing the terrorists bet and raising them a trump card of its own. Key to COIN is the notion of taking warfare, usually fought on the level of armies, to the level of squads and even individuals. Rather than only focusing on the macro level, COIN uses every asset of the military to leave no stone unturned.
Operations turn smart as strategies adapt to the situations and threats at hand rather than an overly rigid and unmoving central command too distant from combat to do any good. Soldiers become specialized as small, maneuverable forces and neutralize specific targets rather than sending entire divisions into situations that would certainly result in collateral damage and more enemies than friends.
Some have argued that our presence overseas creates more terrorists than we can get rid of. The point if COIN is to specifically address that concern. Relations between American troops and Afghanis get better, and our military cooperates with local civilians in a quid pro quo that brings local people humanitarian services and security in exchange for cooperation and perhaps the whereabouts of local insurgents. In short, COIN succeeds where conventional tactics end, not so much by killing terrorists, but rather the environment which breeds and aids them. and enemies.
This is only the tip of the iceberg: the strategy is complex enough to fill books, let alone articles. But for a look at success one needs only take a gander at Iraq, where, after a destructive surge in violence in 2006 showed the mistakes of old-fashioned warfare, a surge of our own was implemented under General David Petraeus that turned the near defeat into the stability that has allowed a once war torn country to flourish.
Afghanistan can see a similar success; Gates knows it and McChrystal knows it, as both have called upon the White House for such a strategy at this crucial crossroads.