The answer to this question reminds me of an anecdote from my tour.

The ANA Platoon Commander I shared my AO and base with was a young Pashtun man named U. A Sergeant, he took command when the officer was killed in an insurgent ambush. U spoke Pashtun, Dari and fairly good English and was the son of a mid-to-high level bureaucrat in the Defence Ministry in Kabul. He may not have been a full elite, but the fact that he was smart, fluent and literate in the key languages and knew and worked within the Pashtun socio-political system meant locals respected and listed to him.

U quickly impressed me with his abilities. Despite being conditioned to believe the ANA were like children that you had tagging along to legitimize your mission, the partnership between him and I was 50/50. We planned all our patrols together, I got the resources he needed for him and his men and he quickly developed a rapport with the locals to get us the intelligence needed to understand the environment we were operating in (and the enemy who was trying to kill us). We made much progress in a month. I called him the “godfather” because of the way he worked his cellphone and I called myself his consigliere.

Unfortunately, U dissapeared for reasons I will not go into here. As a replacement, I received Sgt H. Sgt H was a Hazara. Also a veteran of many years of combat in the ANA, he despised the locals and said that all Kanadaharis were insurgents. He refused to make contact with the locals and would go on patrols only when prompted by myself. Although I got him into a busy and aggressive patrolling rhythm, he wouldn't provide any input at all – he only went along because his company commander (who was really good) ordered him to support the Canadians. At one point, Sgt H sent his subordinates to deal with a neighbouring farmer who he was having issues with; the soldiers started to beat the man with their rifles until one of my sentries intervened by firing a flare into the air. This is simply not something that would have happened with Sgt U.

The good news was that at the end of my tour, U ended up back with us and I saw him one last time before I left the country. When I left him, he was leading his platoon on patrols in a dusty corner of Panjwayi district as he had for the previous few years. A true veteran, my "tour" was his "life".

This experience convinced me that the line between success and failure is more U's and less H's. When I read Mark Moyar's A Question of Command I felt drawn to his incomplete, but (I believe), correct theory on COIN. We are still leading operations because we don't have enough Sgt U's.