New Guidance on Counter-Insurgency

[William F. Owen]

No Wilf, you have it all wrong on this statement.

If you spend all your time trying to kill the enemy, you stand to lose sight of many things concerning the population, like whether or not the enemy is slipping into his villages and towns at night to deliver mischief and mayhem

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How does any intelligent application of force against the enemy, allow them to freely move in and out of villages? That is precisely what focussing on the enemy would aim to prevent. 1st Core Function is FIND.

We should do our best to avoid killing civilians...and that's about the gist of it. You talk a lot about concepts and ideas standing up to rigor. Please show the council where anyone advocating a effort that focuses on the population (or even just looks to pay attention to the population), actually said that killing the enemy mens kills the population.

I have long said that the application of force should be intelligently applied. - EG - not killing civilians. The New ROE for A'STAN explicitly talk about restricting the use of force to prevent civilian casualties, as part of POP CENTRIC COIN do they not.

My reasoning is same, if not tighter ROE, should be applied as part of going after the enemy.

Now COMISAF COIN Guidance states claims 8 years of successful kinetic actions have made the problem worse. Essentially in that killing the enemy alienates the population. So does that mean the population all support the Taliban and don't like seeing them get killed or does it mean that negligent use of fire power risks killing the population?

In fact the document explicitly states that large operations risk killing civilians.

To logically extrapolate from the COMISAF, it basically says that you can't kill the Taliban because it will make them want to kill you. This logic does not seem to extend to what happens when you have to kill them, when they try and attack the civilians you are trying to protect.