@JCustis:

A couple issues with what you wrote:

Some would argue Arghandab, which was very low-violence and pro-government compared to the rest of the South until this summer, didn't require a "Clear" phase this year, so much as a reinforcing of the "Hold" already in place by ANSF supported by ISAF. Obviously the commander of 1/17 disagreed, and probably for excellent reasons; I'm merely pointing out your and his assumption that a Clear was necessary, which some of Naylor's sources appear to see as the primary point of contention here.

I'm also not sure that when the enemy "presents himself" entirely in the form of IED attacks on you whenever you're in restrictive terrain, that there's really anything to "Find-Fix-Finish" in the traditional sense without a heavy application of Pop-centric COIN at the same time. Obviously the Finding in that case will rely heavily on gaining local support, which, again, some of Naylor's sources seem to see as the problem.

Two of the big issues the 1/17 CO was probably dealing with that Naylor doesn't mention were the tangle of competing land claims in Arghandab, which makes it even more difficult to procure property for basing than usual in Afghanistan, combined with an unwillingness to take over public property like schools and district centres for that purpose and undermine an area where development and local governance was at least until recently working, after a fashion. They also would have had very few ANSF to work with. Given those limitations, which would have effectively prevented the rapid creation of the kind of dismounted patrol bases and security stations this kind of dense agricultural area needs (it really is mostly non-permissive to LAV-sized vehicles) and the distance of the main base (Frontenac) from the populated area, the battalion commander may not have seen any realistic alternative to sweep-and-pull-back ops in the early months. Sometimes grass-mowing may seem like all you've got.

That said, the fact that the enemy will occasionally "mass into platoons" (largely in my experience to overrun isolated ANP stations at night) but never uses direct fire against ISAF (and even then only when they're dismounted), only that steady rain of IEDs, which is their TTP throughout the Zhari-Arghandab area, doesn't necessarily equate to them having sufficient "freedom of maneuver to mass and conduct larger-scale operations" for COIN to be set aside entirely, either.

The coalition's fear in Arghandab, with a working economy, a successful development effort, and a neutral or positively inclined population, was that it would turn into Zhari next door, where repeated sweeps and kinetic activities against suspected IED layers rapidly shut down the basis of that economy through depopulation and property damage and undermining of local governance, making it even more fertile as an insurgent hiding and recruiting location, as well as negatively impacting Kandahar City itself with a new influx of unemployed and angry young men. Any overly aggressive series of ISAF "counter-guerilla" clear ops in theory could come with those kinds of unintended side effects in this terrain.