Night Raids. That is a totally different animal and is primarily Rangers, not SF.

Rangers are firemen, SF are cops. SF walk the beat day and night among the people in bad neighborhoods. Rangers sit at the station waiting for the bell to ring, then mount up and run into the flames to do their business, mount back up and return to the station. You gotta have both, but the term "SOF" blurs important distinctions. Rangers are 90% techint driven; SF is 90% humint driven. Rangers are 99% DA, SF are 90% FID.

The night raids are a touchy topic for a variety of reasons. One reason is because they are effective at finding and getting the guys they look for (how effective that in turn is to the overall success of the operation is a matter of a large, and very different debate). Another is because everybody has an idiot cousin or son-in-law or two in their family. Karzai and his appointed governors and their network of friends are not exempt from this. When one of these guys is running dope or guns or affiliated more directly with Taliban operations and gets rolled up in the night, phones start ringing. Mr. local big shot may well have Karzai on speed dial, or at least the governor, and in this culture such calls are common, answered, and responded to. Our senior leaders spend a great deal of their face time with senior GIRoA officials discussing these matters rather than important issues such as governance, security, economic development, etc. Another is that Rangers tend to break things. Their goal is to get in, get their guy and get out and stay alive in the process. Things like doors get broken. Lastly is that in any culture a man's home is his castle. In this culture multiply how you might feel by 10. Pashtunwali places a duty on the head of household to secure those within his compound. Worst case, the head of household rushes forward to do his duty, dusty AK or old Russian single shot shotgun, or even older British rifle in hand, and is shot for his troubles. Even best case, when no one is inadvertently killed or taken by mistake for questioning, this same head of household is left emasculated and powerless in his own eyes and those of his friends and family. I don't think we can fully appreciate the emotional effect of that or ever be able to assess how many Taliban are produced for every Taliban removed in such operations.

The Rangers are very good at what they do. As to the overall Cost/Benefit? No one will ever know. Personally, my assessment is that it is counterproductive, but reasonable minds can differ. It provides a very objective measure of performance in a conflict where few things are objective, so those numbers get used a lot to show "progress" for that reason alone. This is a problem in the military in general. Things that can be counted and put on PowerPoint slides take on an inflated importance over other things that cannot.

Ken. I hear you. Today's conflicts (I refuse to call them wars) are remarkably bloodless for our forces. Your own experience shows that. For those that forget, a bad month in Vietnam was about equal to a bad year in Afghanistan. These numbers are just for KIAs:
1964 - 206
1965 - 1,863
1966 - 6,144
1967 - 11,153
1968 - 16,589
1969 - 11,614
1970 - 6,083
1971 - 2,357
1972 - 640

Its hard for us to imagine Infantry units turning over 100-200% casualties in just a few months, yet that was pretty standard in WWII. But that was indeed war, where there was an enemy that had to be closed with and defeated. National survival was at stake.
This is an insurgency, and it is not even our insurgency, and the insurgency is not even our mission. Our mission is to prevent AQ from operating effectively from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Our Ends, Ways and Means have drifted into their separate corners in ways that happened slowly over time, but as one looks at the current state of things it really just can't be rationally justified.

When I say that our COIN doctrine is actually a Colonial Intervention Doctrine, that is not getting "ideological" (as you accused me yesterday, btw), it is getting real. That is the historical fact. That is not a judgment of history, it just is what it is. I don't think anyone would argue that the US has colonial designs or interests in Afghanistan. Similarly, we should not then be applying colonial TTPs. Back in the Philippine Insurrection days we did not yet have the benefit of Colonial Intervention Doctrine to apply, so we used what we had, which was the lessons learned from our own Indian Wars. This is why the Army herded hundreds of men, women and children into an extinct volcanic bowl on Jolo and proceeded to gun them down in mass. Leaders go with what they know and all doctrine is obsolete before it is ever written down.

FM 3-24 was also obsolete 100 years before it was written. We don't need to create and sustain some government at all costs in Afghanistan to support our interests there. The very effort to do so puts our true interests in the region at risk. It also puts the people of Afghanistan caught in the middle of the contest at risk and our own soldiers as well. Calling it a "war" perpetuates that, IMO.

A bit of a late night ramble.