Wanat: new footage and coverage

[tyrspawn]

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b11_1258311346

[Wildman]

Guess the baddies didn't want to show the near constant overhead coverage and bomb dropping on their foreheads in that clip. Nice how ABC highlighted our 9 dead and did not mention the body count on the Al Queda (Taliban) side.

The entire focus of the piece was how powerful they've become....oh well, one hopes they concentrate more it will make finding and killing them easier.

[tyrspawn]

Guess the baddies didn't want to show the near constant overhead coverage and bomb dropping on their foreheads in that clip. Nice how ABC highlighted our 9 dead and did not mention the body count on the Al Queda (Taliban) side.

The entire focus of the piece was how powerful they've become....oh well, one hopes they concentrate more it will make finding and killing them easier.

It's following a similar evolution as the VC resistance in South Vietnam. They once fired random mortar rounds and tried to snipe US forces (as the Taliban did up until recently), as they over ten years slowly built up enough force to do massive direct attacks like the one at Wanat. We are making identical mistakes as we did in Vietnam, we are using a modified version of Westmoreland's inept counterinsurgency strategy, go a random hill, defend it for a few days, get attacked, kill or retreat, give up the ground, go to another random hill. It doesn't accomplish anything. What's next, fortified hamlets so we can give away fire bases to the Taliban?

The Taliban is always going to be on the bad side of the engagements, absorbing horrific casualties (just as the VC did) - but in the end it won't matter. They are clearly become bolder in their attacks, and the rate of attrition will soon be unbearable.

[Squatdog]

Yup.

The whole incident was almost a cliche of American failings.

[Bigduke6]

It's following a similar evolution as the VC resistance in South Vietnam. They once fired random mortar rounds and tried to snipe US forces (as the Taliban did up until recently), as they over ten years slowly built up enough force to do massive direct attacks like the one at Wanat. We are making identical mistakes as we did in Vietnam, we are using a modified version of Westmoreland's inept counterinsurgency strategy, go a random hill, defend it for a few days, get attacked, kill or retreat, give up the ground, go to another random hill. It doesn't accomplish anything. What's next, fortified hamlets so we can give away fire bases to the Taliban?

The fortified hamlet concept is already in operation Afghanistan. Of course, the nomenclature is different; now it's "Local Afghan police forces" who have been "trained and mentored" by "US and NATO experts"; with an ultimate goal of "turning over security responsibilties to the Afghan government."

The approach is quite similar to the Vietnam strategic hamlet concept. The Americans allow people in villages designated "friendly" to have "weapons for self-defence", backed by "trained security forces"; the idea being that if you arm the locals they will reject the insurgency, as the insurgency only makes progress because it has the guns and the villagers don't.

In Vietnam this approach failed because (1) The local governments were quite corrupt, and for the right money quite willing to cooperate with the insurgency (2) No matter how nasty the insurgents, at least they weren't foreign (3) the insurgents believed they were fighting to free their country from foreign military occupation and (4) living in a fairly insular, non-global village kind of place, the average Vietnamese villager was pretty xenophobic.

In Afghanistan, we are being told, this approach will work because Afghanistan is nothing like Vietnam.

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Yeah. The strategy is simply bound to work this time......... isn't it?

Regards

KR

[Sergei]

Afghanistan is currently just a sideshow. The battle with Taliban is won or lost in Pakistan, and it will take a long time to pacify the Pashtu areas there. But at least they're doing something.

Personally I'm in favour of complete Vietnamization of Afghanistan.

[costard]

Well, Afghanistan could sure do with some trees to soak up all the carbon they're going to generate once they become a first world nation. Then the countryside will look a bit like Vietnam. A job for the greenies perhaps?

[Dietrich]

In Vietnam this approach failed because (1) The local governments were quite corrupt, and for the right money quite willing to cooperate with the insurgency (2) No matter how nasty the insurgents, at least they weren't foreign (3) the insurgents believed they were fighting to free their country from foreign military occupation and (4) living in a fairly insular, non-global village kind of place, the average Vietnamese villager was pretty xenophobic.

So, the long and the short of it is that Afghanistan is not a place in which Coalition forces -- not matter how astute the counterinsurgency strategy and judicious the troops carrying it out -- can "win" in any sense of the word.

As far as I can tell, it's effectively impossible for the locals' agreement with and support of Coalition forces to ever be as significant (let alone more significant) than their support (if only passive support) for "the insurgents", who -- after all -- are of the same region and religion, if not the same tribe as well.

[Squatdog]

The fortified hamlet concept is already in operation Afghanistan. Of course, the nomenclature is different; now it's "Local Afghan police forces" who have been "trained and mentored" by "US and NATO experts"; with an ultimate goal of "turning over security responsibilties to the Afghan government."

The approach is quite similar to the Vietnam strategic hamlet concept. The Americans allow people in villages designated "friendly" to have "weapons for self-defence", backed by "trained security forces"; the idea being that if you arm the locals they will reject the insurgency, as the insurgency only makes progress because it has the guns and the villagers don't.

In Vietnam this approach failed because (1) The local governments were quite corrupt, and for the right money quite willing to cooperate with the insurgency (2) No matter how nasty the insurgents, at least they weren't foreign (3) the insurgents believed they were fighting to free their country from foreign military occupation and (4) living in a fairly insular, non-global village kind of place, the average Vietnamese villager was pretty xenophobic.

In Afghanistan, we are being told, this approach will work because Afghanistan is nothing like Vietnam.

It's the same strategy that the British used with great success in Malay and Oman.

Strategic Hamlets failed in Vietnam because they were very poorly implemented and overseen at the strategic level by morons who genuinely believed that 'firepower' was the solution to the local insurgency.

[Michael Emrys]

It's the same strategy that the British used with great success in Malay and Oman.

A significant portion of the success in Malaya was due to it being a long narrow peninsula. Thus it was relatively easy to block north>south infiltration. This was not possible in Viet Nam due to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Strategic Hamlets failed in Vietnam because they were very poorly implemented and overseen at the strategic level by morons who genuinely believed that 'firepower' was the solution to the local insurgency.

That was an important factor. I'm not convinced that there was any way to "win" that war at any acceptable cost though. There were just too many things going against it.

Michael

[Bigduke6]

Squatdog,

Well, I can't really speak to Oman, I'm not very familiar with that particular insurgency. But from a quick read, it appears the insurgents were revolutionary Marxists looking to overthrow the traditional Islamic regime; that's an uphill battle at the get go. Also the interior is desert, meaning the insurgents didn't exactly have a population to hide in and feed off of, and on the other side of the border is not exactly a safe haven, just more sand and scorpions.

In Malaysia, again you had Communist revolutionaries wanting to get rid of the current regime, which again more or less is Islamic. What's more, in Malaysia the insurgents by and large were ethnically different from the population; non-Islamic Chinese were insurgents, the majority population was Moslem Malays, who were quite happy to have the SAS come in and help rub out ethnic Chinese hinding in the jungles, as if the Chinese won Malaysia was going to become a state run by the Chinese minority ruling class, with the Malays the ruled proletariat.

Certainly, the British rounded up the Chinese villagers, forcing many of the insurgents into the swamps and deep jungle, and no question the British succeeded in hunting down some of the insurgents.

As Emrys points out, the insurgents in Malaya had neither sancturary nor foreign allies. The Taliban have both in...wait for it...that beacon of democracy and rule of law, Pakistan.

As I understand it the way the Malayan Emergency ended, was that Malaysia became an independent country, the new government offered amnesty to the insurgents and most insurgents took them up on it, the British went home, and some die-hard insurgents were still in the jungle but they had become marginalised politically.

All of which might be a template for ending the war in Afghanistan - cutting a deal with the Taliban and getting the Hell out so we can watch them from a safe distance as they string up Karzai and his buddies (you know they will) - but it is not exactly a paradigm of conditions ripe for a successful strategic hamlet program in Afghanistan.

I think it is interesting to note that in terms of historical timing, Vietnam came right on the heels of the Malay Emergency. No doubt part of the reason the US took so long to realize repressing the insurgency in Vietnam wasn't going to work, was because the US decision makers had the Malay Emergency as an example of success to go by, and that example was quite fresh, and the last big war the US was in, WW2, was a thumping US success. And of course there was the - at the time - unassailable US logic: If the British can do it, how can we possibly not be able to do it better?

At the time Vietnam probably seemed quite winnable. How could it have not? The US was the US, the bad guys were supposedly Communists, and the US populace believed the experts. Sure, the history of Vietnamese xenophobia, militarism, and resistance to foreign rule was there for any one willing to take the time to read it. But no one had the time.

The Americans are carrying somewhat different intellectual different baggage into Afghanistan, but if you look closely, there are some interesting parallels with the 1960s. They have superpower hubris, and much of the US military and its supporters are convinced its every act is, by definition, and at times no matter how simple minded, a selfless act benefiting US security, and criticising either the act or its motivations is unpatriotic, if not traitorous. Many of th US decision-makers are under the impression that the template that worked in Iraq, will work in Afghanistan, after all in both cases the insurgents are Islamic Terrorists, right?

This is not an general attitude lending itself to nuanced evaluations of what is actually possible, who the enemy is, what are the limits of military power, and so on.

It is however a general attitude, strikingly similar to the US mindset shortly after the Malaysian Emergency came to a close, but before US forces arrived in Vietnam.

[Sgt Joch]

Vietnam is not a good parallel. Military and political leaders in Vietnam based their decisions, not on the Malay insurgency (what do the brits know? ), but on the Korean War where they had defeated an invasion from North Korea and kept South Korea "free".

The top brass analysed the war in purely conventional terms, as an invasion from the north and based their strategy purely in terms of defeating NVA/vietcong forces(i.e. "Kill ratio"). Lip service was paid to winning over the population ("hearts and mind"), but no one in power really believed in it.

The situation now is different since the NATO forces on the ground are well versed in counter-insurgency theory and know that is the only way they can possibly win. The problem is not lack of knowledge, but lack of resources to have a significant impact.

[Sgt Joch]

The fortified hamlet concept is already in operation Afghanistan. Of course, the nomenclature is different; now it's "Local Afghan police forces" who have been "trained and mentored" by "US and NATO experts"; with an ultimate goal of "turning over security responsibilties to the Afghan government."

The approach is quite similar to the Vietnam strategic hamlet concept. The Americans allow people in villages designated "friendly" to have "weapons for self-defence", backed by "trained security forces"; the idea being that if you arm the locals they will reject the insurgency, as the insurgency only makes progress because it has the guns and the villagers don't.

Again, not to unduly pick on BD, but the parallel is not quite accurate, providing security from the insurgents is a key part of a successful counter-insurgency strategy and was the impetus behind the "surge" strategy in Iraq in 2007. Of course, that works to the extent that villagers are kept in their own homes and can continue carrying on their normal life.

In Vietnam, the "strategic hamlet" concept was carried out in a totally ham-fisted way. Villagers were forced to relocate to these new villages, usually in poorer, smaller housing, often losing their ancestral homes, lands and posessions which were torched to deny them to the VC. Their movements in and out of the villages were strictly controlled, to prevent infiltration by the VC. The "strategic hamlets" were viewed by the local population as prison camps, which is in fact what they were, and fostered resentment more than anything else.

oh, and the Vietnam war was not unwinnable, by the summer of 68, even with their ham-fisted methods, US forces had managed to gut the local vietcong forces and they could only be sustained by a massive influx of cadres from the north. Even then, the "insurgency" was too weakened to topple the Saigon regime, the final blow was struck by conventional NVA forces, including tanks, which carried out a conventional invasion from the north. The first invasion in 72 was defeated by US air power, but the one in 74-75 succeeded, since US forces did not intervene.

The US "lost" Vietnam, not because the war was unwinnable, but because by the summer of 68, the US government had lost the support of US public opinion which was no longer willing to pay the price required to win the war. That is the parallel with Afghanistan, the war is not unwinnable per se, but the Taliban is betting that western governments are not willing to pay the price in casualties and money to have a real shot at winning.

[Bigduke6]

Sgt Joch,

No worries. You're right the Afghan villagers aren't being relocated, so that part of the strategic hamlet concept certainly isn't being implemented in Afghanistan.

Still. The foreigers are creating police and military units, arming those police and military units, and - for now anyway - attempting to assert control over Afghanistan one village at a time. McChyrstal said it: The center of balance is the Afghan population, how many insurgents are killed is not the main thing. That's hearts and minds, and that concept is straight from Vietnam.

I will challenge your arguement strategic hamlets were implemented in Vietnam in an incompetent and ham-handed way. At the time, the very best brains in the country recommended it, computers - pretty much for the first time in warfare - provided data to track it, and the very idea a US military effort was dependant on the support of a foreign civilian population, in a war, was a huge leap of Pentagon thinking. These are the guys that won WW2 and put together a recovery in Korea; given that background their willingness even to consider the opinions of the Vietnamese population is far from incompetent, but arguably quite original thinking.

The problem I have with "we could have won in Vietnam", is that implicit in that statement assumes hindsight competence of the highest order, of fallible men and women in a war. Sure, maybe the US could have won, if the public will was there and the military effort was efficient, smart, and produced results. But what was produced was a quagmire, with little progress, and increasing evidence US efforts were absolutely unappreciated by the Vietnames.

As I have written before, supressing the Pathans might be possible if the US public had the will to mobilize for a major war including a draft and commitment of about 20 per cent of the GNP. But they don't, the Pathans know it, and all this "well, we can still win in Afghanistan" is to my mind willful ignorance of those two critical facts. The Pathans are betting on a sure thing. The western governments sooner or later will bow to the will of their populations, and split, and that goes for the Americans too. All the "shoulda woulda coulda" in the world won't change that.

[Squatdog]

A significant portion of the success in Malaya was due to it being a long narrow peninsula. Thus it was relatively easy to block north>south infiltration. This was not possible in Viet Nam due to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Malay is a short, fat peninsular with over a hundred kilometres of dense secondary jungle seperating the east and west coasts. This made interdiction very difficult, especially considering the relatively small number of British troops available and the fact that helicopters were in their infancy.:

So no, it wasn't 'relatively easy' to block north/south infiltration and this wasn't a a significant portion of success.

Well, I can't really speak to Oman, I'm not very familiar with that particular insurgency. But from a quick read, it appears the insurgents were revolutionary Marxists looking to overthrow the traditional Islamic regime; that's an uphill battle at the get go. Also the interior is desert, meaning the insurgents didn't exactly have a population to hide in and feed off of, and on the other side of the border is not exactly a safe haven, just more sand and scorpions.

Apart from the coastal plain, Oman is very rugged and mountainous, with a large plateau (the Jebel) which was the main Adoo stronghold. Very similar to Afghanistan in fact.

The rebels may have been Marxist (and this counted against them in the later stages of the campaign), but they were also exporting Nassar's pan-Arab ideals to a population hostile to the despotic rule of the Sultan. The first thing the SAS did was depose him in favour of his Sandhurst-educated son.

I think it is interesting to note that in terms of historical timing, Vietnam came right on the heels of the Malay Emergency. No doubt part of the reason the US took so long to realize repressing the insurgency in Vietnam wasn't going to work, was because the US decision makers had the Malay Emergency as an example of success to go by, and that example was quite fresh, and the last big war the US was in, WW2, was a thumping US success. And of course there was the - at the time - unassailable US logic: If the British can do it, how can we possibly not be able to do it better?

The American commanders pretty much ignored most of the advice given by the British Advisory Msission, to the point where Thompson wondered what he was even doing in Vietnam. He eventually shutting up shop altogether after being systematically ignored for 3 years. When they did implement some of the COIN strategies, they were usually butchered, with the Strategic Hamlets being case in point.

Instead of consolidating fortified towns defended by militia, they pressed on without securing the surrounding areas and attempted to convert the militia into ARVN auxilleries, a role which they were ill-suited and negated the advantage of using local 'home guard'.

As I understand it the way the Malayan Emergency ended, was that Malaysia became an independent country, the new government offered amnesty to the insurgents and most insurgents took them up on it, the British went home, and some die-hard insurgents were still in the jungle but they had become marginalised politically.

Most of the insurgents were killed or captured and the British dictated peace at their own terms.

I will challenge your arguement strategic hamlets were implemented in Vietnam in an incompetent and ham-handed way. At the time, the very best brains in the country recommended it, computers - pretty much for the first time in warfare - provided data to track it, and the very idea a US military effort was dependant on the support of a foreign civilian population, in a war, was a huge leap of Pentagon thinking. These are the guys that won WW2 and put together a recovery in Korea; given that background their willingness even to consider the opinions of the Vietnamese population is far from incompetent, but arguably quite original thinking.

Oh please...

They may have been visionary conventional strategists, but they were also HUGELY reactionary and refused to listen to any advice that deviated from what they knew.

[Sgt Joch]

Still. The foreigers are creating police and military units, arming those police and military units, and - for now anyway - attempting to assert control over Afghanistan one village at a time. McChyrstal said it: The center of balance is the Afghan population, how many insurgents are killed is not the main thing. That's hearts and minds, and that concept is straight from Vietnam.

I will challenge your arguement strategic hamlets were implemented in Vietnam in an incompetent and ham-handed way. At the time, the very best brains in the country recommended it, computers - pretty much for the first time in warfare - provided data to track it, and the very idea a US military effort was dependant on the support of a foreign civilian population, in a war, was a huge leap of Pentagon thinking. These are the guys that won WW2 and put together a recovery in Korea; given that background their willingness even to consider the opinions of the Vietnamese population is far from incompetent, but arguably quite original thinking.

There is a subtle difference in approach. The current approach is based on winning the active support of the population, to shrivel up the supply of recruits and supply to the insurgency, which is straight out of the COIN playbook.

The approach in Vietnam was completely the opposite. The whole aim of the strategic hamlet program was to regroup the civilian population to make it easier to identify and kill insurgents. One of the problems in Vietnam was that it was basically impossible for Americans to tell who was a civilian and who was a VC. Under the program, in an area where you might have, say 20 villages in a given area, all of the population was moved to one central village where the population was monitered and basically locked up at night. The thinking was that anyone outside the village at night was a VC which would allow the US to turn the entire area into a free fire zone. Gaining the support of the population was not the aim of the program and the program in fact alienated large segment of the peasant population subjected to it.

The problem I have with "we could have won in Vietnam", is that implicit in that statement assumes hindsight competence of the highest order, of fallible men and women in a war. Sure, maybe the US could have won, if the public will was there and the military effort was efficient, smart, and produced results. But what was produced was a quagmire, with little progress, and increasing evidence US efforts were absolutely unappreciated by the Vietnames.

As I have written before, supressing the Pathans might be possible if the US public had the will to mobilize for a major war including a draft and commitment of about 20 per cent of the GNP. But they don't, the Pathans know it, and all this "well, we can still win in Afghanistan" is to my mind willful ignorance of those two critical facts. The Pathans are betting on a sure thing. The western governments sooner or later will bow to the will of their populations, and split, and that goes for the Americans too. All the "shoulda woulda coulda" in the world won't change that.

My comment is just that we have to be careful not to fall into historical determinism, i.e. "the US lost in Vietnam, therefore it was unwinnable", or "the USSR lost Afghanistan, therefore it is unwinnable by NATO". History is not carved in stone and it is not preordained that NATO will lose in Afghanistan. I will agree though that the current strategy is not working and unless there is a serious commitment by NATO (which probably will not happen), the war is probably unwinnable.

[tyrspawn]

Some general thoughts:

Let's not forget that a major reason why the hamlet program failed: local collaboration and coercion by the VC, which I think is also happening in Afghanistan. We are naiive enough to assume the Afghani people want us there, and accordingly, they are supplying, alerting and defecting to the Taliban. While the Taliban might be religious extremists, at least they are racially and culturally familiar, they present an amenable substitute for the NATO forces, especially in the countryside. In Vietnam we spent a substantial amount of resources on the hamlets and either through collaboration or appeasement of VC infiltrators, virtually all of the resources went directly to the VC.

Another thing, you guys were talking about successful counterinsurgencies... the one which is always overlooked and is in my opinion the most successful and substantial was the one on Sri Lanka against the Tamil tigers. The tigers were similar to the Vietnamese in that they had a VC-esque terrorist/irregular branch and a powerful conventional army, including a air force, navy and tanks, analogous to the PAVN. What was the Sri Lanken solution to the Tamil Tigers? MASSIVE FORCE, coercion, repression of the ethnic Tamils and a refusal to win "hearts and minds." An old school strategy: don't love, but kill the enemy. They waged a brutal counter insurgency that... WORKED. The Tamil Tigers are utterly defeated, and while the campaign was bloody, arguably considered war crimes at parts, it was successful. The real question is: do the ends justify the means?

I think the only way for Afghanistan to be successful would be to cease the "search and destroy" Westmoreland doctrine and to institute "search and hold," with a massive influx of soldiers. In other words: position interlocking firebases and platoons/companies all throughout the countryside, set up checkpoints everywhere. A realistic influx of soldiers needed to do such an operation will not be raised and the American people, myself included, would not willingly answer a draft for that endeavor.

[Squatdog]

Some general thoughts:

Another thing, you guys were talking about successful counterinsurgencies... the one which is always overlooked and is in my opinion the most successful and substantial was the one on Sri Lanka against the Tamil tigers. The tigers were similar to the Vietnamese in that they had a VC-esque terrorist/irregular branch and a powerful conventional army, including a air force, navy and tanks, analogous to the PAVN. What was the Sri Lanken solution to the Tamil Tigers? MASSIVE FORCE, coercion, repression of the ethnic Tamils and a refusal to win "hearts and minds." An old school strategy: don't love, but kill the enemy. They waged a brutal counter insurgency that... WORKED. The Tamil Tigers are utterly defeated, and while the campaign was bloody, arguably considered war crimes at parts, it was successful. The real question is: do the ends justify the means?

I think the only way for Afghanistan to be successful would be to cease the "search and destroy" Westmoreland doctrine and to institute "search and hold," with a massive influx of soldiers. In other words: position interlocking firebases and platoons/companies all throughout the countryside, set up checkpoints everywhere. A realistic influx of soldiers needed to do such an operation will not be raised and the American people, myself included, would not willingly answer a draft for that endeavor.

Oh God...

It took the Sri Lankans DECADES to defeat the Tamils, losing tens of thousands of men and commiting inumerable atrocities in the process. This really isn't a feasible example for a first-world democracy to follow.

Also, the Russians went this route in Afghanistan and it didn't exactly work well for them...

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Oh God...

It took the Sri Lankans DECADES to defeat the Tamils, losing tens of thousands of men and commiting inumerable atrocities in the process. This really isn't a feasible example for a first-world democracy to follow.

Also, the Russians went this route in Afghanistan and it didn't exactly work well for them...

Well, Pakistan might just do the ugly work for us. ISAF/UN just needs to prop up what poor excuse for an Afghan government is available to us long enough for the Taliban be destroyed elsewhere. Ofcourse, if our will crumbles before the Pakistanis are done in their neck of the the woods, they'll not get anywhere either.

But I think our chance of succes has never been greater, even with the mission in Afghanistan faltering. Losing support from the Pakistanis, in particular ISI, has weakened the Taliban like they've never been weakened before.

[tyrspawn]

Oh God...

It took the Sri Lankans DECADES to defeat the Tamils, losing tens of thousands of men and commiting inumerable atrocities in the process. This really isn't a feasible example for a first-world democracy to follow.

Also, the Russians went this route in Afghanistan and it didn't exactly work well for them...

Lack of historical context here... the strategy which Sri Lanka used to finish off the Tamil Tigers only took a few years to implement and execute. The earlier years they didn't use the strategy I am referring to in my previous post.

My point is, that's how counter insurgency is done. Winning "hearts and minds" (i hate that phrase so much) doesn't work. ANd how that translates into actual practice is us paying terrorists and Taliban fighters not to attack us. Look to the Roman emperors who tried to pay off the barbarians not to attack, things didn't go well.

[Squatdog]

Lack of historical context here... the strategy which Sri Lanka used to finish off the Tamil Tigers only took a few years to implement and execute. The earlier years they didn't use the strategy I am referring to in my previous post.

Uhhhhh...they had been engaged in total war against the Tamils for a long time. A LONG time.

My point is, that's how counter insurgency is done. Winning "hearts and minds" (i hate that phrase so much) doesn't work. ANd how that translates into actual practice is us paying terrorists and Taliban fighters not to attack us. Look to the Roman emperors who tried to pay off the barbarians not to attack, things didn't go well.

I really hope you aren't in any way associated with the military or in a position to influence foreign policy.

'Hearts and minds' has been shown to work in numerous campaigns, all across the world. Aside from the obvious of Malay, Oman, Kenya, Sierra Leone etc. it was the way the British Empire managed to control a quarter of the world's land surface and population without slaughtering people left and right

Even the Romans would rather co-opt barbarians as vassals rather than going to the expense of sending a legion to give them a good kicking.

[Bigduke6]

Sqautdog,

My main point is that the US planners were not Homer Simpson-type dolts, they were literally the "Best and the brightest", brought in by MacNamara and given close to carte blanche to get the results the nation needed. The strategic hamlets program was, when you stop an think about it, a fairly imaginative attempt to solve several problems at once -

- Build up support for a crappy local government

- Get the locals to deal with the insurgents themselves, and not depend on US forces

- Deny the insurgents popular support

- Keep the insurgents from infiltrating the villages, and so from contacting the villagers, be the contact gifts, extortion, assassinations, etc.

- Make it easier to kill insurgents, as the odds increase that some one outside a strategic hamlet is a bad guy, not a good guy.

How different are those goals, from what the US is attempting in Afghanistan? We all know the policy: "Clear and hold" - in other words the ink blot strategy. You go in, you make a village friendly, and you don't leave it until it is so friendly it is an asset to further expansion of friendly territory.

As I see it, the only real difference between "strategic hamlets" and "clear and hold" is that in Vietnam the US military moved the villagers, while in Afghanistan the villagers' location, dictates where the the US military must move. Everything else is pretty much the same.

As are the insurgency's counters: they infiltrate the villages with their spies, they propagandize how villages friendly with the US are collaberationist traitors selling out the nation to foreigner. Moreover, these villages the US is trying to make friendly, are often great for insurgent recruiting: Where there is money there is corruption, and where there is corruption without recourse some men get mad enough to fight. And of course a village armed by the Americans to defend itself against the insurgents, can sometimes become an armory for the insurgents - to return to the original thread that's apparently precisely what happened at Wanat.

We are now being told, by the current generation of extremely smart decision makers - at least, they say they're smart and therefore we should trust them - that the present approach of "clear and hold" will work because it is different from what failed in Vietnam, just as Vietnam is very different from Afghanistan, and after all the soldiers implementing that strategy are partiots and heroes, how can we doubt them?

My point is, every one of them, the generals, the black ops guys, the diplomats, the grunts, the civilian affairs dudes, the contractors; very last one of them in Afghanistan is a fallible human, and I see no evidence they are smarter than the people who tried to impose US will on Vietnam. If they reject obviously similar history as irrelevant, then any thinking person needs to wonder whether those fallible people aren't just deceiving themselves.

Sgt Joch,

It's not determinism, it's just a rational evaluation of reality.

The task is make the Pathans peaceful, the tools are whatever means US public will is capable of employing.

US public will from the get-go has not been anywhere close to what is needed for the US to bring to bear the means that would have a reasonable chance of making the Pathans peaceful. My personal thumbnail estimate is a national draft, maybe 20 per cent of the US GDP for about five to ten years, and public support over that period to the killing thousands of Afghans including innocent ones, and thousands of US service personnel too. That would, my guess, get the job done. You have to put the warlords out of business, long term, and replace them with a better standard of living for most Afghans.

But of course public will isn't anything like that, a dozen casualties is huge news, a hundred dead in a month is unsustainable, and the cost of maintaining the rough equivalent of a single Corps in Afghanistan, is considered by just about every one except the military drawing the paychecks, an absolutely unacceptable and outrageous waste of taxpayer money. The US effort right now is barely enough to keep the insurgency from really getting rolling, and there is as nearly as I can tell no way in this life or the next a chance of increased US public will for more sacrifice. And like I said, the Taliban leaders know it too.

This is leaving aside the ticklish question of Pakistan. Just how would the US, even if there was public will for a major war in Southwest Asia, deal with the Pathans in Pakistan? At least in Vietnam it was Cambodians and Laotians supposedly running the safe havens; here it's just Pathans on either side of the international line. So what, the US is supposed to declare war on Pakistan? Invade and occupy the Northwest Provinces? Never mind how that might radicalise Islam against the US, how do we deal with Pakistan's military, they have nukes and if we invade their country we make ourselves a nuclear target.

Maybe, like Elmar hopes, the Pakistan government decides to take fire and sword to the NW Territories, then maybe the US doesn't have to do that dirty work.

Of course, Pakistan is one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, they have a national interest in a weak, unstable Afghanistan, and their national spy agency, which is even more committed to fighting and violence in Afghanistan, doesn't really answer to Islamabad.

So a Taliban strategist looking at things has to wonder, which is more likely, the US gets really serious about Afghanistan AND at the very same time the corrupt bureaucrats in Islamabad decide to stick it to the NW Territories, OR the US will just eventually get fed up and leave?

I would say the odds are so heavily in favor of the second option, that the result is practically pre-determined. But you're right, the impossible can happen, maybe if the Taliban nerve gassed several thousand US school children or something you'd get the public will.

But barring that, and if you'll pardon the metaphors, what's coming next isn't chiseled in stone, it's more like it's an actual monolithic feature of a mountain that have been standing unchanged, since the beginning of time.

There is a subtle difference in approach. The current approach is based on winning the active support of the population, to shrivel up the supply of recruits and supply to the insurgency, which is straight out of the COIN playbook.

The approach in Vietnam was completely the opposite. The whole aim of the strategic hamlet program was to regroup the civilian population to make it easier to identify and kill insurgents. One of the problems in Vietnam was that it was basically impossible for Americans to tell who was a civilian and who was a VC. Under the program, in an area where you might have, say 20 villages in a given area, all of the population was moved to one central village where the population was monitered and basically locked up at night. The thinking was that anyone outside the village at night was a VC which would allow the US to turn the entire area into a free fire zone. Gaining the support of the population was not the aim of the program and the program in fact alienated large segment of the peasant population subjected to it.

My comment is just that we have to be careful not to fall into historical determinism, i.e. "the US lost in Vietnam, therefore it was unwinnable", or "the USSR lost Afghanistan, therefore it is unwinnable by NATO". History is not carved in stone and it is not preordained that NATO will lose in Afghanistan. I will agree though that the current strategy is not working and unless there is a serious commitment by NATO (which probably will not happen), the war is probably unwinnable.

[daisy]

The British strategy in Kenya was similar to the one the followed in South Africa some 50 years earlier - the large scale use of concentration camps to deny the enemy supplies and reinforcement. In both instances the Brits won, and in both there were large civilian casualties. But of course thats how Empires maintain their colonies without slaughtering people left and right.

Imo Kenya is not a good example of hearts and minds tactics at work.

Oman, no idea what happened there will have a look sometime.

Malaya - yes, hearts and minds did work because the insurgents were not very popular in the 1st place.

I'm an 'outsider' to the Afghanistan conflict as my country is not allied to either the USA/NATO or the Taliban.So i dont have the level of knowledge about the conflict that many of the posters in this thread have.

Imo the current USA/NATO tactics will not win the war, at best a bloody stalemate with an 'honourable' withdrawl leaving the whole mess to fester.

Which will create further problems for the next generation and probably the generation thereafter. Ad infinitum.

The Allies strategy in WW2 was not to win the hearts and minds of the German people - No, it was to bomb their cities, kill their soldiers, destroy the means and willingness to wage aggresive war. Total war and total commitment from the allies.

And while total war is not the solution for Afghanistan, total commitment from the USA/NATO alliance is. And that is lacking and untill that mindset changes i have my doubts if the USA/NATO can pull it off.

[Squatdog]

My main point is that the US planners were not Homer Simpson-type dolts, they were literally the "Best and the brightest", brought in by MacNamara and given close to carte blanche to get the results the nation needed. The strategic hamlets program was, when you stop an think about it, a fairly imaginative attempt to solve several problems at once -

No it wasn't.

It was a carbon copy of the British Malay strategy, as recomended by the British Advisory Mission in Vietnam. The big difference is that the American commanders totally butchered the concept through their misguided belief that conventional warfare would trump an insurgency.

The commander of US forces in Vietnam at the time (Harkins) was an incompetent moron. That doesn't really bode well for the rest of the officer corps.

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The British strategy in Kenya was similar to the one the followed in South Africa some 50 years earlier - the large scale use of concentration camps to deny the enemy supplies and reinforcement. In both instances the Brits won, and in both there were large civilian casualties. But of course thats how Empires maintain their colonies without slaughtering people left and right.

'Large' is relative in this case. You're talking about maybe 20,000 civilian casualties over the course of 8 years, many of them slaughtered by the rebels.

The main source of British success was 'turning' former Mau Mau to infiltrate the rebels as part of 'pseudo-gangs'. This was in addition to forming a Home Guard of friendly Kikuya and encouraging the Masai to hunt the rebels in remote areas.