Herschel Smith is talking a lot of sense here:
Even many of the Army SOF are base-bound except for their forays into the wild via helicopter rides to the next raid. Some Army are doing it right (e.g., the Korangal Valley), as are the Marines in Helmand. But the gargantuan bases are an obstacle to success in Afghanistan. Empty them. Send the Army on dismounted patrols, open vehicle patrol bases, smaller FOBs, and combat outposts. Get amongst the people. Only then will they sense that you are committed and give you intelligence – leading ultimately to killing Taliban, which will then further contribute to their security, and so on the process goes.
Yes. This, again, is why I firmly believe the ETT/PMT/OMLT model (e.g., “Foreign Internal Defense,” or FID) is ultimately the key to a win in Afghanistan. It is ultimately from that foundation—the development of a strong and effective security force—that all the pretty things of the civilian surge can flow. Assuming it’s even possible, something I am not sold on.
Smith gets his inspiration from this Philip Smucker piece in the Asia Times. I really don’t mean to pick on Smucker, but what the hell is this?
First, the “bad guys”, along with Osama bin Laden’s trusted corps of advisors, are swarming in the valleys, hills and mountains of Pashtunistan this summer. A risk-averse, air-power-friendly US military has effectively surrendered the countryside over the past three years along the porous border. Calling this a “stalemate” is to smear lipstick on a pig.
If you doubt that, and you are a Caucasian, you might try taking a stroll outside the three-meter, sand-filled walls of any American base in eastern or southern Afghanistan. You’ll be abducted by armed men and whisked off to Pakistan in no time. An American-run radio station director in Paktika province told me that the Taliban are winning the war of ideas hands down against America and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Taliban have “financial and economic means”, he said. “They can easily scare the people by killing or beheading them.”
Yes, true, but there are a LOT of Caucasians spending a lot of time outside any HESCO barriers—even in places like Khost, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Kandahar. There is risk, to be sure, but that is just a ridiculous exaggeration. Smucker mis-serves his readers by being so Sebastian Junger about it.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 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
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“…swarming in the valleys, hills and mountains”? Hardly. They’re there, and blend in with the population. But this isn’t the Mongol Horde.
Some of us leave the FOB all the time, although are smart enough to take precautions. Like any place in the world, one must figure out what to do and what not to do, where to go and where not to. But to sensationally describe it such that any white person who dares set foot off the FOB gets snatched is to show how much you’ve eaten up all the Stupid you’re spoonfed by paranoid security types.
And if our troops never leave the FOB, what the fuck are they doing in Afghanistan in the first place?
(My comment was obviously a reaction to the quote from Philip Smucker. I should have written it to say as such — but I guess this illustrates danger of commenting on only a few hours of sleep.)
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 06/05/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
These days FID is being called “Security Force Assistance” (or at least falls under that rubric), for what it’s worth.