Just another post-imperial guerilla war [View All]

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The military strategy on Afghanistan in just 16 characters

By GWYNNE DYER

. . . The current generation of Western officers are in denial, as if the past half-century didn't happen. They parrot some of the slogans of the era of guerilla wars, like the need to win the "hearts and minds" of the population, but it's just empty words. The phrase dates from the Vietnam War, but the tactic didn't work there and it isn't working in Afghanistan.

The plan, in this offensive in Helmand province, is to capture the towns (clear and hold), and then saturate the area with Afghan troops and police and win the locals' hearts and minds by providing better security and public services. It might work if all the people involved on both sides were bland, interchangeable characters from The Sims, but they are not.

The people of Helmand province are Pashtuns, and the Taliban are almost exclusively a Pashtun organization. The people who the Western armies are fighting are local men: Few Taliban fighters die more than a day's walk from home. Whereas almost none of the Afghan troops and police who are supposed to win local minds and hearts are Pashtuns.

They are mostly Tajiks from the north who speak Dari, not Pashto. (Very few Pashtuns join the Kabul regime's army and police.) Even if these particular Afghan police are better trained and less prone to steal money, do drugs and rape young men at checkpoints than their colleagues elsewhere, they are unwelcome outsiders in Helmand.

This is just another post-imperial guerilla war, and it will almost certainly end in the same way as all the others. Thirty years ago, any Western military officer could have told you that, but large organizations often forget their own history.


full article: http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20100302/Opinion/3020367/-1/googleNews