Newly installed Afghan theater commander Gen. David Petraeus has issued new “Counterinsurgency Guidance” to troops under his command. The 24 points are largely plucked from Field Manual 3–24 Counterinsurgency and David Kilcullen’s 28 COIN principles albeit with an Afghan flavor; for example, it includes the familiar “human terrain” is the “decisive terrain” and “people are the center of gravity.”
Petraeus has brought lessons from his Iraq command experience to Afghanistan, urging troops to get out and live among the people by positioning “combat outposts” as close to the people as feasible, similar to changes he implemented in Baghdad in 2007. Troops are told to get out of their vehicles and walk, another less from Iraq. While patrolling on foot troops should ditch the high-speed shades: “Situational awareness can only be gained by interacting face-to-face, not separated by ballistic glass or Oakleys.”
The new commander’s guidance includes many of the rules laid down by the previous commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, behave politely while in foreign lands and don’t do stupid things that piss off the locals. “Alienating Afghan civilians sows the seeds of our defeat.”
On the always hot-button rules of engagement issue, Petraeus’ new guidance doesn’t say a whole lot; it’s quite likely that a separate “guidance” will address ROE in more detail. It does say that troops must fight with discipline, using only the “firepower needed to win a fight.” As is repeated in every COIN tome, the document says killing civilians or damaging their property serves as an excellent recruiting tool for the insurgents.
To this Afghanistan specific distillation of COIN best practices, Petraeus has added “confront the culture of impunity,” identifying Afghan corruption and abuses as an enemy of the people and giving U.S. troops the mission of reforming a failing government in addition to defeating a virulent insurgency. Corrupt “networks” of Afghan government officials are to be added to targeting lists. Once identified the COIN guidance extols troops to “confront, isolate, pressure and defund malign actors.”
Petraeus’ COIN guidance continues the careful recalibration of expectations I’ve been noticing in recent official statements and briefs regarding Afghanistan. “Avoid premature declarations of success… Strive to under-promise and over-deliver.”
– Greg Grant
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm, what exactly does "targeting" corrupt officials mean? That could get messy, both literally and strategically.
I’m sure that by “targeting,” he means isolating, marginalizing, or ousting corrupt officials and players from positions of power.
I’m not sure how this differs from McChrystal’s guidelines, but I like where the General is aiming with this one. A lot of the success in Iraq came from having Battalion commanders and lower with the power and authority to perform civic rehabilitation projects, or the purse to fund them. Another huge factor was that the military was a more aggressive arbiter of disputes, and leaned heavily on corrupt or weak officials to do the right thing at the platoon and battalion level. They performed a bottom up type of nation building, making the individual villages and towns as close to whole again as possible, while remaining a a strong and fair third party to bring grievances. As Yon put it, they were the strongest tribe.
Whether that will work in Afghanistan is anyone’s guess, but it is as good a place to start as any. A loose confederation of tribes and villages is probably the best we can expect as far as outcomes go, and this is a good step toward achieving that.
Now if we could just get another Ryan Crocker to start leaning hard on and working with the government in Kabul, we might start getting somewhere.
If they want to get rid of corrupt officials, they'd need to start with Karzai.
Isn't the "firepower needed to win a fight" generally everything you have available?
Didn’t we try dispersed combat outposts on the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Wanat and Keating are what happens if we disperse to protect the people and everything goes south due to lack of troops.
We also tried killing everything that moves (i.e. Vietnam) and that didn't go too well for us.
im wondering if wat motivated Vietnam, $$$$ motivated the powers that be. We really ginned up the intel on WMD, and after 9/11 fear was used to sway the public. I hope Cheney and Bush family rot in bloody hell for wat is kinda "known"…no WMD, $$$ to contractors-OIL..wow, wat a snow job…
If it makes the mission that little bit easier to achieve without further endangering our troops it has to be good, or at least as good as you can get in a bad situation. It will be interesting to see what General Petraeus does with the new ROE guidelines if and when those are issued.
YES, Karzai then his bro. They been running game for too long, and the rteality is, a-stan is just too tribal, with ethnic groups who been killing each other for ages. I think the best we can do is try and stand up an army. 2011 could stretch a long way. [Advisors, air power etc] now about "targeting" officials? We talking about legally, OR REAL JUSTICE!!!??????????
The problem is that U.S. troops aren't trained or equipped well to be a nation building force in Afghanistan. Imagine Saudi Arabian tourists with phrasebooks and guns trying to overhaul the government in West Virginia or Mississippi and you see the magnitude of the problem. Good doctrine is of limited value when you don't have the tools (cultural as much as physical) to carry it out.
We don't have large numbers of people who speak their language, understand their customs, have a sense of what makes the local political system tick, or have the resources to conduct the kind of mass, grassroots ideology building campaign before trying to change people's ways that the Taliban did. We also have very few people with any clue how a third world economy works or can be developed. Soldiers aren't hired for their cultural sensitivity, experience managing corrupt political systems, Pashtun language expertise, or economic development credentials. In fact, if someone with that skill set showed up at our door, we'd probably refuse to grant the top secret security clearance necessary to do the relevant jobs or sit on it indefinitely. This is a job that requires as many people with a Peace Corps or third world lawyer/businessman skill set as it does with a military skill set.
At first, when we were successful, with a small number of special ops and CIA agents with more of a sense for what they were dealing with, we had no choice but to outsource jobs. Now we are doing them ourselves, even though we aren't well suited to it (and neither are the Canadians or the British).
If we want to get a good result we need to stop trying to do the parts of the job we aren't well suited to do as a military force, and hire a lot of people who we can half way trust, en masse, to do it for us. To the extent that the skills aren't available in the Afghan population, we need to go recruiting in Muslim countries with similar issues but more success, give them crash courses in the local language, and hand over the job. Places like Turkey, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia would be some natural places to start hiring. We also ought to be beating the bushes to find people in areas like immigrant communities in places like Detroit and London and Bonn. The bureaucracy that would supervise them all probably needs to be outside the DOD and NIA, with a very different culture. This bureaucracy would need to coordinate with the military, but the military should be supporting a nation building agency rather than trying to do it itself.