What will our expedition to Afghanistan teach us?
Post up your top five lessons that you hope are gleaned from our long stay in AFG. Whether we have the capacity to grasp the lesson is important, but not critical.
In no particular order, mine are:
1) The national policy goals should be clear and concise, and the integrated plan to achieve them must be properly resourced. Make sure everyone understands the goals and the plan.
2) We can't expect a tribal society to drink the democratic Kool-Aid just because we say so. The manner in which Karzai controlled the levers to choose provincial governors, and they in turn the district governors and the police chiefs, should have been a warning that our wants did not nest with reality. Those who benefit from his patronage won't be there to protect him when Karzai is strung up in a Kabul square.
3) The FOB concept was another massive failure, considering the need to secure the population and obvious approaches that work.
4) When the security forces you are training start turning on you, it is a clue. Pay attention and don't blame the victims.
5) Our disregard for the nexus of drugs, narco-warlords, and the Taliban connection, prolonged the war. Good men died because possession of ten kilos of heroin didn't warrant action by the toothless courts, among other rule of law shortcomings.
The bonus lesson is that we should have lived intermingled with the population. No commuting to work...no return to the COP at night for hot chow and a cot. If we really want to deal with rural insurgency, we've got to own it, every minute of every hour of every day. The insurgents do, and that's why they will prevail.
Maybe Take A Second Look At Nuclear Weapons
William S. Lind in his article "4GW First Blow A Quick Look"(available in Marine Corps Gazette Archive" thought that a Nuclear Retaliation was a viable option in the first few days after the 911 attacks to show the little terrorist how a true Super Power would respond.
I don't know if we should do this but it is worth a second look. We cannot keep spending what may amount to 3 Trillion dollars(A'stan and Iraq and GWOT) for Small Wars that we don't even win.
Nation building is viewed as sovereignty building in the region
You cannot divorce these lessons from the larger regional competitions. We turned away from nation building because violence increased and it increased for a complicated reasons.
We mistook the idea that our original victory was in any way durable. And a 25 year time span is nonsensical. I'm sorry I'm so adamant on this point but this is the source of so many troubles in Afghanistan and the larger neighborhood; the idea that others won't react to our long term plans because they conflict with local and regional plans.
If this is the lesson learned, that we turned away from nation building and that is the source of our troubles, then I am very afraid the lessons will not help.
Again, sorry to be so troublesome on the matter but it really requires a broader lens.
What did the PRTs teach us?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
jcustis
I never noticed a shift because I was prepping for my Afghan deploy in 2009 and into 2010 (having finished an Iraq deploy in April '09), and FM 3-24 remained a bible we were leaning on. The notion of the PRT somehow holding the key to the lock box of answers was rampant to the point of a farce by the time I saw the PRT's shoddy work.
Jon,
I am still working on my reflections from a faraway armchair, but this passage caught my attention.
My own reading on the PRT theme was in the earlier years and a couple of encounters with those who had been involved later on. Alongside more reading on the role of the Political Officer along the Durand Line, in the British Imperial era.
Was Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) a far more acceptable label and concept for the Afghans and those who were in the audience back home? At the start of our intervention, which was overwhelmingly coercive, Afghanistan had some limited governance at provincial level and almost none at the national level. The PRT's role was really to act as political officers, with a tiny non-military component, a small protective detail, some good comms and a bag full of cash.
It was clear by 2005 and certainly by 2006 that the level of violence within Afghanistan meant neither the political or reconstruction role was working. I recall one PRT rarely left its own base and relied on non-Afghans for security.
The British PRT which moved from the north (Mazar-i-Sharif IIRC) to Helmand, growing in size with larger civil staff (DFID, FCO, SOCA etc), then was reported to embark on projects that stretched credulity - a children's playground, with a ferris wheel comes to mind - and distributing ammonium nitrate fertiliser, in the chemical composition to make IEDs! Shoddy became dangerous.
NPR piece on PRTs in Afghanistan.
There was an NPR piece on PRTs in Afghanistan last month [LINK].
From the transcript:
Quote:
Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin talks to Kael Weston about the closing of the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. PRTs are humanitarian missions run by military troops and civilians that built roads and schools. Weston spent seven years as a diplomat for the State Department, and says the teams have a mixed legacy.
The Enemy Is Still A System.....Not A Country!
Here is a link to "Top Secret America" a PBS report that covers everything not just A'stan. But it is worth watching the first 15 or 20 minutes to see how clearly the CIA understood we were fighting a Terrorist System not a Country and what to do about it. In large part the American military did not get it and still doesn't! Which is why we could have a carbon copy of the USA in A'stan and it would still not stop Terrorist attacks as we found out recently in Boston. I think that is the real lesson that needs to be learned and we can either learn it and adapt or not learn it and keep on getting attacked all the while wasting unbelievable amounts of money!
Here is the link:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...secretamerica/
Girl Green Berets As A Lesson To Be Learned
I don't know if this is a lesson to be learned or not but here is a link to how valuable female soldiers are in A'stan and they are clearly designated as special forces both by the commentator and their shoulder patches.
http://videos.komando.com/watch/3231...-screen-shot-b
Potentially useful reading.
Heard the authors on the John Batchelor show sometime back. Have not read the book but it may be of interest:
Quote:
These experts in the field challenge commonly held views about the success of the global war on terrorism and its campaign in Afghanistan. Their book questions some fundamentals of the population-centric COIN doctrine currently in vogue and harshly criticizes key decisions about the prosecution of the Afghan war. It is the only book to compare the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan from a national strategic perspective. It questions several key operational factors in Afghanistan, including the decision to give NATO the lead, the performance of both civilian and military leaders, and the prosecution of an Iraq War-style surge. It also contrasts the counterinsurgency campaign styles and the leadership of senior American officials in both Iraq and Afghanistan. A final chapter outlines key lessons of the two campaigns.
http://www.amazon.com/From-Kabul-Bag.../dp/1612510221
Any suggestions on what to read regarding coalitions and counterinsurgency or is our NATO experiment kind of a first?
If you go back to the 2002-3 period and are given the military task again, given that NATO and the US wanted to stay in some peace keeping capacity, is there a different way to do things? I suppose the complaint back then is that requests for troops were turned down. How to stabilize in a more modest way if you are given that civilian task, whether it be wise strategically or not?
Coalitions and counterinsurgency
Madhu just asked:
Quote:
Any suggestions on what to read regarding coalitions and counterinsurgency or is our NATO experiment kind of a first?
In modern times the USA has fought several wars, some of them with an insurgent component, with a coalition. Sometimes the extent of US fighting has been very small, e.g. French Indo-China as the logistic supplier and maybe money too.
The UK considers some of its small wars have been coalition efforts too. Not only in the colonial era, such as Malaysia and Kenya; then Oman comes to mind. To be fair even when sovereign states were involved the UK was in the lead.
What is not clear from Afghanistan is what the balance was between NATO the alliance and individual members on policy-making. An alliance that had worked together preparing for war - in Europe - appeared when campaigning in Afghanistan to - be diplomatic - lose focus.