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April 11, 2010
In his profile on General David Petraeus, the most influential military officer in America, Vanity Fair Mark Bowden links the current war in Afghanistan to the conventional US view of the Vietnam War.
Bowden says:
Here’s how the thinking went: No matter how important a conflict, public and political support for it erodes as casualties and expenses rise. In Vietnam, the U.S. government gave up on a difficult but doable military mission, sacrificing what could have been a hard-won victory to the god of public opinion
The army’s conventional view of that war tended to place the blame for failure on civilian leaders and the press not its own strategies.
Bowden points out that:
As they had in Vietnam, American forces in Iraq were losing the trust and support of the people, who were suffering terrible levels of violence. Yet the generals in command persisted on their course, targeting insurgents and working to secure the safety of their own troops first.
You can see why the Iraqi's want the American out of their country from this viral video of a U.S. Apache helicopter attacking a group of people in a Baghdad suburb inJuly 2007 on WikiLeaks. It's not difficult to see why the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies of the national security state, anxious to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing, want to destroy WikiLeaks.
The new view advocated by Petraeus in Iraq was to put counter-insurgency into practice based on the old principle of securing the population and doing it by living with the people; a fully resourced, comprehensive counter-insurgency including the surge. It assumes that the war in Afghanistan is not chasing the Taliban out of the city or underground but winning the population, a process which can begin only after the city has been retaken.
Petraeus's new version of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual made the central theme political rather than military: counterinsurgency theory holds that military action can only be a precondition for political success. A counterinsurgency can succeed only if it makes the government legitimate in the eyes of its citizens. This requires economic aid, governance reform, improvement in basic services and the like. And it requires an act of understanding, even empathy.
In Afghanistan the US had focused too much on the enemy and not enough on providing security for the Afghan people. In Counterinsurgency Field Manual: Afghanistan Edition in Foreign Policy Nathaniel C Fick and John A Nagl state:
If it is true that a new plan is needed in Afghanistan, it is doubly true that Afghanistan is not Iraq. Conflating the two conflicts would be a dangerous oversimplification. The Iraq war has been mostly urban, largely sectarian, and contained within Iraq's borders. The Afghan war has been intrinsically rural, mostly confined to the Pashtun belt across the country's south and east, and inextricably linked to Pakistan. Because the natures of the conflicts are different, the strategies to fight them must be equally so. The very fact that Pakistan serves as a sanctuary for the Taliban and al Qaeda makes regional diplomacy far more necessary than it was in Iraq. Additional troops are certainly needed in Afghanistan, but a surge itself will not equal success.
Winning over the population for the Americans in Afghanistan amounts to buying the loyalty of the local population.
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Bribe them with a candy bar.
The good conservative never forgets and never learns.