Why are we still leading missions, instead of supporting Afghans conduct them?

[Fuchs]

It's not necessary to have a more educated or more trained force than your enemy, though - especially when you have obvious numerical superiority.

You need to motivate them.

[JMA]

It's not necessary to have a more educated or more trained force than your enemy, though - especially when you have obvious numerical superiority.

You need to motivate them.

This is the key.

It appears that the whole Afghan situation is built around guns for hire out of which it seems the Taliban have the edge in some at least being prepared to fight and die while none (except a few foreign zealots) are prepared to fight for nothing. If the motivation to join the ANA is the pay and not the cause (who would want to fight and die for a corrupt regime) the prognosis is not good.

[jmm99]

From David's post, Spring up north (in another thread), we find in the linked FP article, The Lost Villages - Saying goodbye to a once-friendly land, now taken without a fight by the Taliban:

Mazar-e-Sharif itself has the feel of a city besieged. Since a suicide bomber last Saturday killed the venerated police commander of nine northern provinces, Gen. Daoud Daoud, an eerie hush has descended upon the city's low sprawl.

With the demise of Gen. Daoud Daoud, the Talibs can cross one off of their HVT list.

Regards

[Ray]

I recently met a person from Afghanistan.

He also echoes what JMA has stated -

It appears that the whole Afghan situation is built around guns for hire

and add easy money - poppy and foreign Aid.

[Fuchs]

Few things fit together when it comes to characterising the Taliban or the conflict in Afghanistan.

# Reports about captured/arrested Taliban claim that up to a third of them were Taliban "leaders" - the definition of leader seems to be stretched below fire team leader in AFG

# Taliban in AFG are decentralised groups of platoon to company strength in terms of active fighters, but still able to focus "offensives" on certain regions?

# Drug business is supposedly a major if not THE income source of TB, but maps show that TB activity/influence, AFG population as a whole and poppy harvesting areas don't really match - not even two at once.

# Lots of "Taliban in army clothes" opened fire on or bombed foreign forces. Turned out that these "Taliban in army clothes" were apparently usually army soldiers indeed, not just disguised as implied in ISAF reports.

# How can it be explained that on the one hand the TB are elusive, part of the people - but then they are supposedly flushed out of regions by army sweeps?

# How exactly can TB monitor foreign forces movement using shadowing unarmed motorcycle drivers with mobile phones or radios when said foreign forces should easily be able to jam any such communication and should be able to let loose accompanying ANP to simply catch and arrest those scouts?

# Why is it that even reports about major and supposedly elaborate ambushes report a marginal lethality of the same and about positioning of ambush forces below the level of basic infantry manual quality ambush tactics?

# How comes that the TB supposedly pay more $$$ per month to their mercenaries than the ANA and ANP pay to soldiers, and what does this tell about the motivation and nature of the insurgency? Doesn't this all sound much more like a mafia than like a political-religious-cultural civil war?

# Why exactly are - after 10 years- still almost no indigenous state forces fully combat ready without foreign assistance, while their opponents seem to build up their forces in a few weeks or months every spring?

# Why exactly are TB supposedly conquering undefended terrain if the area is supposed to be composed of warlike tribal communities?

# Why does the old domino principle (TB arrive in force, pressure local representatives, community joins them and agrees to observer their laws, respect their courts, pay taxes and donate volunteer troops) that pushed the TB to power in the late 90's still work? Wasn't it supposed to help only those who are obviously winning and superior (which worked against the TB and for the Northern Alliance in late 2001)?

# Why are foreigners focusing so much on the indigenous state forces ANA and ANP. Isn't a loyal and competent bureaucracy the real arm of a government, with armed services being merely the brass knuckles?
What are army and police worth without an effective bureaucracy?

[jcustis]

# Drug business is supposedly a major if not THE income source of TB, but maps show that TB activity/influence, AFG population as a whole and poppy harvesting areas don't really match - not even two at once.

If we were in the business of eradicating the crops wholesale, their presence would certainly spike, although perhaps not so much directly in attacks aimed at the forces conducting the eradication. It would spike along lines of communication, soft targets (why attack strength), and fixed locations.

# How exactly can TB monitor foreign forces movement using shadowing unarmed motorcycle drivers with mobile phones or radios when said foreign forces should easily be able to jam any such communication and should be able to let loose accompanying ANP to simply catch and arrest those scouts?

It's absolutely easy, but then again doing so would be like employing the proverbial hammer to kill a fly. The remainder of the reasons "why" fall into the realm of OPSEC, however, and there are any of them.

# Why are foreigners focusing so much on the indigenous state forces ANA and ANP. Isn't a loyal and competent bureaucracy the real arm of a government, with armed services being merely the brass knuckles?
What are army and police worth without an effective bureaucracy?

You are absolutely spot on. The answers are wrapped up in the perils and evils of a bureaucracy, however.

# How can it be explained that on the one hand the TB are elusive, part of the people - but then they are supposedly flushed out of regions by army sweeps?

Uh...ever hear of public relations and marketing?

# Why exactly are - after 10 years- still almost no indigenous state forces fully combat ready without foreign assistance, while their opponents seem to build up their forces in a few weeks or months every spring?

"Build up" is an erroneous expression. They tend to go dormant, like a bear in hibernation, to some extent. The proverbial school of fish that they swim amongst starts to swim slower in the winter as well, so everyone is idling a little. They lie a little low during portions of the summer as well.

# Why exactly are TB supposedly conquering undefended terrain if the area is supposed to be composed of warlike tribal communities?

An Army lieutenant told an interesting story once at a COIN academy class, where residents of a particular neighbor in Kabul were getting the blues because development of the neighborhood was progressing at a crawl. What would you know, but instability all of a sudden set in with reports of Taliban afoot, stirring up trouble and intimidating the neighbors. What do you think the coalition response to the threat of Taliban encroachment was? Is your first guess a development project? Ding...ding.

Undefended terrain always fosters reports that inflate the true situation at hand.

# Why does the old domino principle (TB arrive in force, pressure local representatives, community joins them and agrees to observer their laws, respect their courts, pay taxes and donate volunteer troops) that pushed the TB to power in the late 90's still work? Wasn't it supposed to help only those who are obviously winning and superior (which worked against the TB and for the Northern Alliance in late 2001)?

That's a matter of context, degrees, and location, relative to the central government. The shadow governor in the district I was deployed to wasn't forced to go underground until early 2009.

"The pessimism is strong in this one."

[Fuchs]

"Build up" is an erroneous expression. They tend to go dormant, like a bear in hibernation, to some extent. The proverbial school of fish that they swim amongst starts to swim slower in the winter as well, so everyone is idling a little. They lie a little low during portions of the summer as well.

They come back every year at greater force 8at least greater quantity of incidents and casualties) after sustaining casualties in the previous year.
This increase does likely not happen in the "dormant" phase, so I conclude that they increase (build up) their strength mostly in spring.

[Bob's World]

# Why are foreigners focusing so much on the indigenous state forces ANA and ANP. Isn't a loyal and competent bureaucracy the real arm of a government, with armed services being merely the brass knuckles?
What are army and police worth without an effective bureaucracy?

When we define insurgency as "war" we punt the problem to the military.

When the military is given a "war" they set out to "win" it.

To win a war one must "defeat" the threat.

To defeat an insurgency threat is "complex" so we determine that we need a range of tools, from development to CT, to defeat it, and a host nation security force is a critical tool.

US military do not see politics as their business, so while they may well recognize the political component of a comprehensive COIN campaign, they leave that to "the politicians." Our politicians have already left the whole thing to "the military." So the only politicians worrying about the political aspects that are at the heart of the insurgency are the leadership of the Karzai/Northern Alliance GiROA and multi-headed Taliban leadership in Pakistan. For some reason, those two groups can't seem to agree on their own.

The Northern Alliance, protected and ignored by ISAF, is hard-set that they will not compromise and surrender any of their exclusive monopoly on political and economic power. The Taliban is equally hard-set that they will not tolerate being legally excluded from economic and political opportunity in their own homeland. So they wage a revolution against GiROA.

Back to the US military: As the "Threat" from this revolutionary insurgency based in Pakistan grows and becomes more violent, clearly more effort is needed to defeat it and win. So we slowly at first, and then more rapidly with a surge, bring in more and more and more foreign presence and push to make the GiROA security forces (made up also of the Northern Alliance) larger and larger to go out and suppress the resistance insurgency that grows in response to our own growth to suppress them.

It is a vicious circle. This is why Galula pointed out that COIN should be led by civilians. Insurgency is an illegal, often violent, political problem. The critical aspects of the solution lie in government. No US general is going to make fixing the government of Afghanistan his main effort, even if he privately recognizes that it is the main problem. So we do what militaries do in these situations and we apply a mix of hugs and punches to the populace in an effort to make them stop complaining about the political situation that we refuse to address. In Vietnam we said "We had to destroy the village to save the village" as Diem and his equally illegitimate successors sat protected by us in Saigon. In Afghanistan we say "We have to Clear the District in order to Build the District." Same-same. This never works for long, if at all.

Withdrawing foreign troops will increase stability as it will decrease the reason why the resistance resists. GiROA will still likely fall though, as the Revolution, having been unaddressed will sweep in and take them down. Now, if GiROA would get serious about reconciliation and then sit down to craft a new constitution that can build trust and teamwork between ALL Afghans, they could survive in relative stability for years.

This is not hard, but we make it very "complex" and difficult.