Bottom line: as a foreign occupier you have one way to win a guerilla war against a local adversary. The Romans figured it out 2,000 years ago: “Solitudenem facient et pacem appelant”. You make a wasteland and call it peace. It’s an indescribably vile, inhuman business and it works. You “pacify” the occupied land for a generation, or more.

Short of that, show me the Western occupation that EVER worked in the long run. Malaya is cheating, because you are depending on an enemy that consists of an ethnic minority making moron-level stupid decisions. The reality since 1945 is that the foreigner comes, the foreigner fights, the foreigner leaves. If the local government or what passes for a government can beat down, or buy out, or compromise with the insurgents the war ends. Otherwise, not.

Jesus wept. This isn’t rocket science, and yet the Exums and Kagans and Wests – not to mention the legion of uniformed policy and strategy wonks – keep circling this drain without ever starting from the simple bedrock hardscape I’ve just laid down.

So I get the whole whiny and petulant thing. If we haven’t figured out that there’s no there there yet, we never will.

It’s worth noting that Spain had the same problem with the Netherlands some three centuries ago. Didn’t work out well for them.

Recent efforts to portray the country as an Islamic “domino” where the fall of the Karzai government would result in a wave of regional destabilization and jihadi ascendance are a farcical re-hash of Vietnam-era propaganda.

As this unravels the public supporters of COIN will start to hedge so that they have skeptical comments on record so as to not go down with the ship.

In regard to “measuring” fear and intimidation, Nathan and Bruce point out two of the factors that we tracked in Iraq: night letters and assassinations (as opposed to indiscriminate killing). Also, kidnappings, and VCDs of assassinations and torture distributed to the populace. Specific threats are another, though measuring these can be difficult. If the threats are effective enough, the intimidated parties will never tell you about the threat because they’re too scared. However, we found the fear and intimidation metrics in Iraq (in 2007) to be a good leading indicator. When the fear and intimidation dropped, the other “metrics” such as IEDs found/exploded, direct fire attacks, and indirect fire attacks soon dropped as well.

Unfortunately, fear and intimidation metrics cannot be measured very well without very good human intelligence collection, a solid understanding of the populace, and some historical data to put it in context. D’oh!