The Kill Company

[IntelTrooper]

Absolutely correct for openers, agree with you wholeheartedly until the last clause -- you are not ever going to win anyone's heart or mind. What you can do is convince most people that you do consider their interests and that you can clobber the bad guys anytime you can locate them and that you are trying to do this without being counter productive by killing the wrong people.

To misquote Hawking misquoting Johst, "When I hear 'hearts and minds' I reach for my gun."

Seriously, though, this phrase needs to be eliminated from US military vocabulary. Yes, it is good to be polite, culturally sensitive, yadda yadda yadda. Yes, it is good to provide HA and projects and all that stuff. But it is not going to make everyone your friend, turn on the insurgents and win the day. Not on a mass scale, anyway. Not even on a village level. Probably not even on the family level.

Ken, as usual, is precisely correct. The ultimate purpose is for the government/counter-insurgent force to be able to effectively project a reasonable level power anywhere within its borders, or at least enough so that its residents have a belief that the government can protect them (presumably from insurgents and criminals). It should also be perceived as representing the interests of the residents, but that isn't necessarily absolute.

I see a lot of inexperienced, starry-eyed Americans get dumbfounded when they show up in a village, make a big show of meeting with the local malik and pass out a few bags of rice and blankets and then don't get the local Taliban just handed over to them. Anyone with an elementary grasp of human motivation and psychology (especially Maslow's hierarchy) should immediately sense what is going on -- Americans/Afghan government have no credibility, they show up, give out some cheap gifts, and leave. Then they expect the locals to put their lives in danger by cooperating with the government, a government that is absent 99% of the time and has no ability to provide even basic services or security.

No matter how good of "friends" you are, no matter if in their hearts and minds are tattooed Afghan and American flags, no one -- very few, anyway -- is dumb enough to switch sides based on some common courtesy and cheap HA. They will switch sides when they believe it is in their best interests to, and in the rural villages where people have a very long institutional memory, the Coalition and Afghan government is going to have to provide extraordinary proof that they are going to be around for the long haul.

/rant