John Hemming, Reuters’ chief correspondent in Afghanistan, went on a Humvee patrol with the U.S. around Kandahar. It was a bit disquieting:
“Why are they throwing potatoes? That’s food,” the major ponders.
“Maybe they think we’re hungry, sir,” comes back the driver.
“A–holes,” interjects the TC.
“When they give you the finger, you should smile and wave back at them,” advises the major, perhaps suddenly remembering the reporter sitting silently in the back.
“Fight fire with fire, that’s what I say,” says the TC, obviously not on message.
“Hearts and minds, remember, hearts and minds,” replies the major jovially. Now I’m even more sure this is for my benefit and wonder how many hearts and minds we have won today.
“I’ve had three fingers, I don’t know how many thumbs down, two rocks and a potato today,” says the TC as we arrive back at base as if to sum up our score-card…
The success of Western governments’ policies in Afghanistan ultimately rests on the shoulders of some very young men. They are very brave, and mostly very professional, but expected to be killers one minute and diplomats the next. That is a lot to ask.
It isn’t difficult to imagine why people react with hostility: after all, how much would you enjoy foreign troops rolling through your city, shooting at anyone who wanders too close, wounding innocent bystanders in the process? It is approaching the time when NATO starts learning one of the legitimate lessons of Iraq: in a distributed insurgency, “force protection” is a guaranteed losing game. You can never protect your troops well enough to safeguard them from harm, and in the process you slowly chip away at public support for the mission through misunderstandings and general pig-headedness.
This is why a comprehensive plan to mitigate unintended civilian casualties, which stems from both a top-down strategic overhaul of the mission in Afghanistan, as well as the addition of more troops to better interface with the population, is absolutely critical. Unfortunately, all that seems to come out of NATO capitals is, “more more more!”
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
For information on reproducing this article, see our Terms of Use
{ 6 comments }
Agreed. Unfortunately, the strong emphasis on force protection is something the voters at home deeply desire.
I remember a chart being shown some time ago. While not very impressive per se, it showed how responsibility in military operations moved down from high ranking officers to squad or platoon leaders. This may lead to more locally aware decisions but, as mentioned in the report, those having to make decisions now are are far too often young and unexperienced.
PS: Having read the article, they’re US Army, not Candians
The world’s most perfect plan for protecting everyone… every soldier gets a soldier to protect them, and each of those soldiers gets a soldier to protect them, and each of those… well, you get the idea.
Soldiers are very professional? I served in the US Marines. We all knew how to follow orders, shine boots, press uniforms, snip those tiny loose threads from clothes (called “irish pennants”), close-order drill, marching, sitting cross-legged on concrete, standing in formation for a long time… but if we learned _anything_ about treating people decently, well, I was absent that day from Boot Camp.
In fact, learning to hate enemies enough to kill them is a constant theme, it might even have been a conscious process of indoctrination. I was trained in the mid-late 1990s and we were doing cadence to kill Commies. There was some more pointed comments about how the North Koreans were trained harder than we were.
TCHe, you’re right. I blame it on posting this at 2 am. Bah.
And JoshSN you’re highlighting just why the military is not the right lead agency for reconstruction. I think it’s unfair to tar soldiers as unthinking death zombies — they are mostly doing the best they can — but when you get down to it, Krulak’s concept of the “Three Block War” is completely undoable for a generalist military we expect to be equally good at counterinsurgency and large scale conventional combat.
There’s a troop rotation going on in Kandahar right now, with a corresponding uptick in civilian shootings. As a friend of mine recently put it, “The old guys just want to make it through the next week, and the new guys are nervous and jumpy.”
Joel, that’s good to know. Typically, insurgent attacks spike during RIPTOA, because they want to kill as many new guys as they can before the new unit learns better.