A veteran infantryman with much time in the Middle East, and other wars, writes in with the following suggestions.
Life is getting rough. He begins
with how to target Karzai's relatives:
Putting and adequate number of troops into
Afghanistan is only a start. Listed below are some proposed adjustments ...
STRATEGIC ADJUSTMENTS
A Day
of the Long Knives. We have a tremendous
amount of leverage left in Afghanistan; there is no doubt in anyone's mind that
the Karzai family will be to back running a chain of kabob joints in suburban Maryland
without the support of the US government. What disappoints the Afghan people is
that we have not used this leverage to insist on better governance. We can, and
must, do better by them if we hope for a successful outcome against the Taliban
and their criminal enablers.
We, not the Karzai government,
should pick out the fifty most corrupt members of the Afghan government and
insist on their replacement. The people who replace them should have a U.S. or
NATO nation advisor assigned to spend the first three months with the new
appointee cleaning up the mess. At least ten of the fifty should be members of
the extended Karzai family in order to show that no-one is beyond the reach of
the government clean up. The message
behind this should be clear to the rest of the government; "you could be next!"
Where would we get the fifty
advisors given the slow ability of the civilian arms of the U.S. government to
provide the "civilian surge" long called for in Afghanistan? There are several
options. We could use American civil affairs officers; there are plenty of them
in Iraq and Afghanistan manning increasingly bloated staffs. Another source of
manpower could come from cleaning out the attaché offices at the Embassy and
sending them out to field until the civilian surge catches up in recruiting
qualified civilians. A third source might be Iraq where there are Provincial
Reconstruction Teams that are wrapping up their missions. The State Department
could transfer them on a voluntary basis if it puts its mind to it. The bottom
line is to send the message that we are prepared make heads roll in the Kabul
government, and to do this on a three month rotating basis until we see
results.
Until the kleptocrats in Kabul and
the provinces have the fear of Allah put in them, there will be no reason for
the Afghan people to assume that a reformed Taliban is not a viable
alternative. That brings us to the provinces.
Reform in the Provinces. As a start, the top levels of the
governments of the five worst governed provinces in Iraq should be replaced.
Again, this should be our call, not Karzai's. For at least a month, the
replacement officials on the provincial governance team should be paired with
their advisors from the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) at an offsite
location and receive solid governance training. It is hard to train people
under fire. The loss of what passes for current governance in the target
provinces for a month or so can be more than offset by the enhancements of
bringing a trained and functional governance team on line after offsite
training. This approach should be repeated province by province as new PRTs
become available. Again, the American and NATO training cadre should have
absolute power to replace those trainees who fail to grasp the concept. This
calls for the extreme in tough love.
(Read on)
Alternative Political Parties. One of the fantasies that have sprung out of the war in
Afghanistan is that factions can be turned at the drop of a hat. It is true
that changing sides is a time honored tradition in Afghanistan, but the thought
that they will flip without a good reason is not valid. Afghan tribal leaders
and warlords switch sides when they think they see a winner. We are not winning
at this point.
If we want to get members of the
insurgency to change sides, we need to turn the tide and show signs of
progress; there will be no cheap victories in this war. However, there is hope
in providing an alternative to armed resistance for those who truly seek
national reform. The creation of a legitimate reformist political coalition
that armed insurgents could join, with some pledge of not returning to armed
struggle, is not out of the question. This approach worked in El Salvador, but
the creation of such a mechanism in Afghanistan will need strong American and
NATO top cover. There will be no incentive to come out of the cold if the
insurgency is continuing to gain strength or if the insurgent defectors fear
assassination after seeking legitimacy.
OPERATIONAL ADJUSTMENTS
No Province Left Behind; an Economy of Force Campaign. The one area where this author takes
strong exception to the McChrystal approach is in any attempt to cede ground to
the various Afghan insurgent groups loosely known as the Taliban. The Taliban
should be made to bleed for every gain as an economy of force measure. Here, we
can take a page from the Iraqi play book. In Iraq, we created militias to
resist foreign jihadists through a combination of tribal pressure and
funding. Afghanistan is not Iraq; it is much more complicated, but if we begin
to understand the culture and politics of each locality, we achieve similar
results. The fact that Afghanistan is more complicated that Iraq is often seen
as a challenge. It is also an opportunity. There are more factions in
Afghanistan, and that means more opportunities to create fissures in the
opposition.
Most Taliban "offensives" have been
uncontested affairs where they walk into undefended villages and say to the
locals, "there will be a battle here; you can stay or go as you please." With
no place else to go, the villagers often choose to stay. They then fall into
the hostile camp and become collateral damage in International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) attempts to retake the ground. The increasingly
sophisticated Taliban information operations network then takes advantage of
the casualties.
We need to turn these villages into
anti-insurgent strong points. This has worked in some areas in Afghanistan, but
we need to integrate it into our overall strategic-operational approach. We
should approach the villagers and ask what they most need. It could be a well,
an irrigation project, an access road or something else. The bottom line is
that the project(s) should be a local call, not something that we assume that
they need. The deal in providing the project should be that the village
population will form a popular force unit to protect itself and the project(s).
We can arm them and pay for the militiamen's time, but they need to do the
defending themselves. If we use mobile air assault forces to back up these
popular forces, we can deny the Taliban the quick, relatively bloodless
victories that they have achieved so often in the past. Non-lethal terrain
denial has worked in Iraq, and it can work in Afghanistan as well.
Micro Sensors and Weapons on Stun; Putting Technology to Work. General McChrystal has stressed the
need to reduce collateral casualties among Afghan civilians as part of his
strategy for securing the population. However, that guidance, poses the danger
of unduly putting our own forces at risk. This is already becoming an issue in
the media and in American and allied public opinion.
We can make better and more
innovative use of technology in Afghanistan than we have done to date.
Technology cannot solve all of our problems, but it could address the specific
problems that we are discussing here.
Non-Lethal Technology. A more
advanced version of the Directed Energy Active Denial System that exists today
could incapacitate civilians and combatants taking shelter in the same building
eliminating the need to use lethal means to retake areas when they have been
lost to the Taliban. This would decrease
the danger to our troops posed by current the current directives against
putting civilians in undue danger while giving them a tool to accomplish that
mission without putting themselves in undue danger.
Small Eyes on Target. We now have
the technology to put many more eyes on the ground through the use of
micro-cameras on very small sensors and robots that can cover areas where NATO
and Afghan soldiers do not have enough "boots on the ground" to be strong
everywhere that we would like to be. These sensors are very difficult to detect
and have a very long field loitering time. Some micro sensors can actually
recharge themselves with sunlight giving them virtually unlimited loiter time.
We could do a much better job of securing Afghanistan's borders and filling in
the white space between the strategic villages advocated earlier in this
article through the use of such sensors. This is an idea very similar to the
"McNamara Line" concept designed to isolate South Vietnam from North Vietnamese
infiltration along the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail. We did not have the
technology to realize McNamara's vision then, but we do today. Sensors are not
a substitute for manpower, but they can be a force multiplier.
The problem is that both of the
technologies advocated in this piece are under-resourced. We need a Manhattan
Project-like approach to quickly give our soldiers and Marines the tools that
they need and deserve to accomplish the missions that they are being given.
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