The Political Officer as a Counter-Insurgent (merged thread)

[max161]

With all due respect but I wonder if this type of long term continuity is not an issue for us in Afghanistan. Has the advice provided over the tenures of seven commanders been sound? Again with all due respect but we tend to gravitate to those who can speak English and the local language well and know our culture and the local one(s) as well (which makes us comfortable) and this sometimes puts blinders on us. I have no idea if that is the case in this situation and I am sure I will be chastised by those who know him as a patriot but I think we should remain objective about the advice we receive and objective about those who provide advice.

[Bill Moore]

Political advisors, indigenous or not, look at the world through their own lens and generally attempt to convince others to see the same thing. I can't think of too many countries I have been in where I could simply accept the advice of local advisors without considering the context. I recall getting a lot of advise from Kurds, Sunni's, and Shia in Iraq that looked after their specific interests. The same was true in many other countries. If a foreign military ever occupies the U.S. I wonder if they would pick Karl Rove or James Carville?

While locals "must" be listened to, I actually think it makes sense to have a non-local political advisor who is familiar with the culture, language, and views of the multiple political/ethnic factions to help the commander put things in context. I think we have defaulted to blindly listening to local political advisors from Karzai to Ahmed Chalabi, and that has definitely led us astray at the strategic level, and we tend to the do the same thing at the tactical level. When we embrace "it is the tribe stupid" then we stupidly default to working with any tribal leader willing to work with us which is expedient, but often undermines our longer term objectives.

Seems that based on my readings we did much better at this sort of thing during in WWII. Somehow without human terrain teams, complexity, and COIN doctrine it was understood that socio-economic-political aspects were important and they were integrated into the planning. We picked sides based on our ends, and in some cases they backfired, but it was still done more deliberately than it has been done in Iraq and Afghanistan.