NYT: U.S. to Protect Populous Afghan Areas, Officials Say
From the NYT webpage
Quote:
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability.
Mr. Obama has yet to make a decision and has other options available to him, but as officials described it, the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed. The question of how much of the country should fall under the direct protection of American and NATO forces will be central to deciding how many troops will be sent.
At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.
So it sounds like we may be leaning toward a policy that only reinforces one of the central concerns mentioned in Matthew Hoh's resignation letter. Namely, that this war has...
Quote:
..."violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency."
Our students at SAMS, who have been looking at the problem closely over the last 10 months, in coordination with planners on the ground, have seen the same problem and came to essentially the same conclusions that the McChrystal report came to. Were their own ideas to be implemented, the strategy would focus on winning in the villages by focusing development and building good governance at the local level in order to rebalance the role of local / tribal leadership with that of the central government.
One can argue whether we should continue there at all, but if we are to continue, we need to ensure that understanding of the situation on the ground as it exists on the ground drives the strategy.
Afghanistan cities and anything else?
CitadelSix,
Welcome aboard and another current thread discusses the rural -v- urban population in Afghanistan: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=8797
I am wary of a strategy that reduces even further the Allied role in rural areas and seems to be a return to the Soviet option. Cities and main roads, with frequent expeditions and raids into the rural 'Chaos Country'.
What did your studies conclude about Allied and Afghan government in the non-Pashtun areas? A cities first strategy needs to be balanced with retaining those areas, just look at recent events around Kunduz (with a Pathan minority).
What about those areas where we have tried to intervene, from a UK perspective Helmand Province, can we pullback to campaign in more important areas? The eastern mountain valleys e.g. Korengal now appear to be a "valley too far".
All from a faraway "armchair".
davidbfpo
Some questions to CitadelSix
Based on this:
Quote:
from CitSix
Were their [Our students at SAMS] own ideas to be implemented, the strategy would focus on winning in the villages by focusing development and building good governance at the local level in order to rebalance the role of local / tribal leadership with that of the central government.
1. What does their model of local governance look like ?
2. What does their model of the local justice system look like (judges, prosecutors and police in the criminal sector; judges and "juries" - shuras & jirgas - in the civil sector) ?
3. How does that model interface with the national government (at district, province and national levels) ?
4. How does that model interface with local and regional "power people" (warlords in UnkindSpeak) ?
5. Is this an "all or nothing" model (all being Astan's some 40,000 villages), or would a more modest approach be taken ? If the latter, what portions of Astan would be the better choices for implementation ? See this post in another thread for links to some possibly relevant maps.
6. Who would implement the local governance model (e.g., military, civilian; e.g., US, Astanis - in what mix in this laudable political effort) ?
Regards
Mike