The Clausewitz Collection (merged thread)

[Firn]

There are no easy answers, and certainly implementing any of those is harder still.

One of my beef's with COIN is that it tends to enable the policy types to sit back and wring their hands over how much it costs, how long it will take, how many causualites will be incurred, etc for the military to SOLVE the problem so that they can get back to policy work again. IMHO this is completely, negligently, backwards thinking. All the military can do when it goes out to conduct FID to assist the COIN forces of a foreign ally are to help shape conditions that allow the polciy types to identify, address and repair the failures of local/national governance in the COIN force that created the condtions that are the ripe soil that insurgency grows in (and we all know what fertalizes those seeds, the blood of all swept up in the second order effects of those govenrmental failures), moving the bubble down the curve on my chart from ph 1/2 down toward ph 0, to shape conditions so that the policy guys can actually solve the insurgency.

So for the (Afghan) government fighting the insurgency is the continuation of politik (polity, politics, policy) with the addition/intermixture of other means? A continuation of polity, poltitics and policy which ougth to detract the (fertile) soil on which the insurgency grows and the led out the water in which it lives, coupled with the (direct) fight against it? Efforts supported by Western nations to fulfill their political goals. Goals which have been questioned at home and worldwide for some time now. The (strategic, economical, ..) costs and risks of which should match the importance of the goals relative to the purpose of the same states.

Firn


I will address the specifics of the other raised (and interesting) points later.