Wanat: new footage and coverage

[Squatdog]

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.

Totally different scenario.

[Gpig]

With regards to Sri Lanka, it was a dramatic change in, and implementation of new strategy that won the government the day.

You are correct, Squatdog, that the insurgency had gone on for years and years. But suddenly, the government was unstoppable. The rebels losing on every front. It was like the government had "figured it out."

It's interesting to me, because as I followed along through the world news, there was nothing obvious about the change. Does anybody know what was different?

[Squatdog]

I believe there was a tsunami at one point, but other than that, I don't know.

[costard]

With regards to Sri Lanka, it was a dramatic change in, and implementation of new strategy that won the government the day.

You are correct, Squatdog, that the insurgency had gone on for years and years. But suddenly, the government was unstoppable. The rebels losing on every front. It was like the government had "figured it out."

It's interesting to me, because as I followed along through the world news, there was nothing obvious about the change. Does anybody know what was different?

A successful truce was negotiated and the Tamils took their eye off the ball over two years of peace. Then the Sri Lankan military staged a couple of bombings (having spent those two years building their capacity and intelligence) and immediately launched an all out offensive. I'm waiting to see the military take over completely - and I suspect that is why the Sri Lankan market has done so poorly in the last couple of months, because everyone else is waiting for the same thing.

[tyrspawn]

With regards to Sri Lanka, it was a dramatic change in, and implementation of new strategy that won the government the day.

You are correct, Squatdog, that the insurgency had gone on for years and years. But suddenly, the government was unstoppable. The rebels losing on every front. It was like the government had "figured it out."

It's interesting to me, because as I followed along through the world news, there was nothing obvious about the change. Does anybody know what was different?

Yeah, they stopped trying to reconcile with, pay off and "police" the Tamil Tigers and instead declared them a national enemy, mobilizing for total war (as if their country was being invaded) and directly occupying and saturating the ethnic Tamil areas with hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

If we were to implement that effective strategy in Afghanistan we would stop paying Taliban and AQ fighters to stop attacking our forces and instead kill them all on sight. We would also saturate the countryside with checkpoints, thousands of interlocking firebases and garrison every village with troops. The problem is, we don't have the the million troops necessary to do so, nor will a draft ever be accepted by the American public for a war which is unnecessary and already almost a decade old.

But the Sri Lankans have it right, they went from being in a troublesome stalemate with the Tamils to utterly defeating them in two years, and the Tigers were, at least in my opinion, a much greater threat than the Taliban, as they had an able conventional army in ADDITION to an irregular guerrilla force.

Right now in Afghanistan we have an eerily similar situation as to the Westmoreland years of Vietnam - the enemy has infiltrated everywhere and has rural support, and in order to combat them we patrol to "search and destroy." The problem with S&D is that no progress is ever made: land security does not exist. You send out patrols to interdict enemy movement, you kill them, or they kill you (Wanat), and then you leave. The area which you interdicted immediately goes back to enemy control. The original idea was that these patrols would deal so much damage to the enemy that they would defeat the insurgency - in other words, the losses could not be absorbed. Realistically, this does not happen, and all S&D results in is countless BLUFOR lives lost and low morale.

Watch this:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d14_1256567169

[Squatdog]

Yeah, they stopped trying to reconcile with, pay off and "police" the Tamil Tigers and instead declared them a national enemy, mobilizing for total war (as if their country was being invaded) and directly occupying and saturating the ethnic Tamil areas with hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

Their country effectively WAS being invaded, because the Tamils occupied the northwest region of Sri Lanka and had been engaged in attacks on the general population for decades!

It's like if Florida seceeded from America and engaged in an armed insurgency to gain self-rule

Right now in Afghanistan we have an eerily similar situation as to the Westmoreland years of Vietnam - the enemy has infiltrated everywhere and has rural support, and in order to combat them we patrol to "search and destroy." The problem with S&D is that no progress is ever made: land security does not exist. You send out patrols to interdict enemy movement, you kill them, or they kill you (Wanat), and then you leave. The area which you interdicted immediately goes back to enemy control. The original idea was that these patrols would deal so much damage to the enemy that they would defeat the insurgency - in other words, the losses could not be absorbed. Realistically, this does not happen, and all S&D results in is countless BLUFOR lives lost and low morale.

The basic strategy in Afghanistan is sound, but their simply aren't enough boots on the ground to maintain control over the vast rural areas and the porous border with the Pakistani tribal areas provides a constant source of fighters for the Taleban.

[Bigduke6]

How can you call the strategy sound, if getting enough boots on the ground is impossible?

[daisy]

Well if Prez Obama orders more US troops in it might help. And that seems likely to happen.

But will the extra troops be used to defeat the Taliban completely or is it a strategy to stabilise the situation enought that a honorable withdrawl is possibe?

[Battlefront.com]

Daisy,

Well if Prez Obama orders more US troops in it might help. And that seems likely to happen.

The problem is "help" doesn't mean "success". There was a similar problem with the US economic stimulus plan. If you put in too few resources then you don't get the debt without the positive outcome. When President Bush did a stimulus back in 2008 that was the case. People got tax refunds and it made no impact on the larger economic downward spiral. If you put too many resources in then you get other problems. Therefore you have to put in enough or come up with a different plan.

The problem right now is that the strategic distraction of Iraq has allowed Afghanistan to slide into a state where the amount of "boots" necessary to stabilize the situation *might* be greater than can be mustered. Certainly some experts are saying that is absolutely the case. If that is true, then adding McCrystal's requested 40,000 would just be pissing in the wind. And of course anything less than that would be even worse.

So the question is... what is the number of boots needed? If that number can not be realistically deployed, then the strategy must change. If that number can be realistically deployed, then nothing less should be considered for the current strategy.

This is why the deliberations are going on now. There's a strong argument to make that the current strategy can not be supported even if there was political will amongst the Coalition nations (which is sorely lacking).

Steve

[Squatdog]

The thing that hamstrung the Afghanistan strategy (aside from the Iraq debacle) was that the lack of manpower meant the coalition forces couldn't consolidate their gains or effectively provide protection for the villages they 'turned'.

What would happen is that they'd kick the Taleban out, win over the village, put in a civil action team for a week, then bug out. The Taleban would then move back in, execute villagers for collaborating, leaving the counter-insurgency effort worse off than before.

This is why the coalition effectively lost the initiative. They weren't seen as a credible source of protection.

[Dietrich]

There's a strong argument to make that the current strategy can not be supported even if there was political will amongst the Coalition nations (which is sorely lacking).

To relate this back to CM:SF and its backstory -- the fictitious invasion of Syria by significant forces from the US and the UK as well as Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands is the fallout from at-least-as-bad-as-9/11 terrorist attacks on all of those countries (and perhaps more).

Had countries other than the US suffered 9/11-scale terrorist attacks, it's not unreasonable to figure that they would have provided more than token military support in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. The UK -- which suffered the "7/7" bombings in London that killed several dozen people (rather than several thousand, as in NYC) -- has been the second-largest contributor of troops to the coalition. Spain likewise suffered a bombing attack (on March 11, 2004) which killed 191 people and wounded 1,800.

And speaking of political will, the suggested option of buying off the Taliban would (as I understand it) be as good as political suicide for anyone who proposed it, since such would be seen as doing a deal with the devil and not doggedly combating drug production and distribution.

[Cpl Steiner]

I am really looking forward to the CM Afghanistan game - partly because I feel the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s might now, in retrospect, actually look like the good guys.

According to this Wikipedia article, the Soviet's were hoodwinked into invading Afghanistan as part of an American secret plot to give the Soviets "their Vietnam".

Read the bit about Brzezinski's role in the plan in the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan