Quote Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon View Post
Two points. First (and again), you can't have it both ways: You can't say the population doesn't care and just want to be left alone AND that they are upset with the occupation and therefore are fighting us. If they wanted to fight us they would join the insurgency. I am not a believer in the idea that the Taliban has been working to place moles in the Afghan security forces just to kill one or two people while in fits of rage. You project your beliefs onto another culture in order to satisfy your own narrative.

Second, it is irrelevant to the question asked as I will explain below.



Even if ten percent of the murders were caused by our misunderstanding of a cultural difference then they are worth studying for that reason alone. It is also arrogant to believe that this is just an Afghan problem. If, in fact, it is the result of our ignorance to understand a tribal culture then it is likely to be reproduced in any other similar culture under similar circumstances.
And you seem to believe that "the taliban" is some formal organization that one joins...odd. Insurgency is an informal business, and we label people by their actions, but I'd advise against thinking that our labels then convert into some actual formal organization.

"The Taliban" are in simplest terms those Afghans who resist against our presence or who revolt against the government of Afghanistan. Why would you assume that those Afghans who opt to join the security forces of Afghanistan at one point in their life might not some months later come to realize they made the wrong decision for them and decide to act in a manner that supports the insurgency??

I do not project Western beliefs or values on anyone, I simply look past what we wish the facts of some situation were to attempt to understand them for what they actually are.

So many of our programs intended to achieve COIN success produce reasonably positive tactical effects that we can measure, so we assume those programs to be moving us toward our strategic goals. Like adding tactical successes can ultimately get to strategic success. But what we ignore or don't understand is that many of those same actions that produce positive tactical effects also produce negative strategic effects due to how they are implemented. In those cases every action moves us closer to strategic failure at the same time that we delude ourselves that we are closing in on tactical success. Night Raids, Clear-Hold-Build operations, training ANSF, etc all fit in this category much of the time.

So, a man joins the ANSF in a belief that he is best served by supporting the current government. Then over time some mix of how he is treated by his foreign trainers, the types of operations he goes out on, etc combine to make him realize that in now believes he is better served by supporting change. This does not mean he was a "mole" planted by Taliban leadership, he could be, but he could have just been "radicalized" by his exposure to his trainers or the ANSF experience in general.