Quote Originally Posted by jcustis View Post
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.
I need more time to reflect on this, but I thought the Army's white paper on the lessons learned over the past decade was way off the mark and mostly a self-serving paper to justify the Army's current vision. I have some initial thoughts on your comments.

1. National goals must be practical, thus feasible. It is much better to under promise and over deliver, then over promise and under deliver. We achieved a lot in Afghanistan in short order, but my staying to achieve the unachievable it now appears to be loss.

2. Most unconventional warfare adventures and military occupations result in failure because we pick and buy the easiest proxies to work with, not the best proxies, which generally over time backfires. The he's a bastard, but he's our bastard whether Karzai, the Shah of Iran, or the Contras may sound like realpolitik, but when you look at the long data it tells a different story.

3. While U.S. forces may not be welcomed in the local villages, the FOB concept is flawed. I suspect we would see a different situation today if we picked another horse other than Karzai to ride AND we employed better tactics such as implementing something along the VSO program early in the war, and using general purpose forces to aggressively and persistently patrol the areas between the villages. Taking and holding (controlling) ground is as important as it always was. The enemy needs a degree of freedom of movement to operate, if you control the ground (and you don't from a FOB) you greatly reduce his effectiveness, especially if the VSO program is flushing out the shadow governments. While we evolved our UAV and man hunting tactics to a razor's edge, they ultimately failed to facilitate anything resembling a decisive tactical operation.