Excellent Afghan ETT Blog
Link.
Somehow I missed this excellent blog before today. Excerpt from the most recent post:
Quote:
Here's a illustration of what the Afghans and ETTs face everday. We roll up to a town where we've heard there's a small clinic possibly giving aid to the enemy. The town is in the foothills at the end of a wadi, the wadi starts in Pakistan and ends here, like a sewer pipe. I say sewer pipe because this is where the sewage empties into Afghanistan. Sewage in the form of chechyens, arabs and various other foregin fighters. We know they're foreign; not by any high tech signal intelligence intercept. That looks cool in the Bourne Identity or some other Hollywood flick. No, we know this because we go through the trash that they leave behind and can tell from the type and quantities. This is low tech warfare at its finest; we look less like James Bond and more like Paparazzi going through Paris Hilton's garbage in the morning for a story. A strong stomach is more useful than a Predator UAV. The sewage spills out here.
and
Quote:
He's right, the doctor has done more than 80% of the people would do, he told us they were here and left. We can't protect his guy at night and they will cut his head off. He won't even get the dubious honor of having it done on the internet, it'll just be done in the dark of night and we'll get a report about it after several days.
That's the central issue here, how do you protect them? Those who defend everything, defend nothing. We aren't here at night and the ACM are. When we roll in they roll out. It's whack a mole on steroids! We try to build the ANA and ANP, the last two ANP chiefs were shot in the face in broad daylight by ACM
The doctor is indicative of a great number of the population. It's not that they hate us they just don't know if we're going to win. We will, we just have to show them in tangibles. Promises are empty. Deeds not words. If the ANA says that they'll protect them then they have to 100%.
It's a battle of inches, slow, plodding, and deliberate. It's low tech. We dig through the trash to find them. It's happening here. Predator, Reaper and all of the other cool billion dollar weapons systems help very little. As T.F Farenbach wrote, "It is a battle of wills in the dirt".
