Comments on: Withdrawal is not (Necessarily) Surrender

By: anan

anan — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:10:45 +0000

Don’t agree with you on China.

I have supported the Shanghai Accords since the 1990s. On September 12, 2001, at a meeting the Shanghai Accords countries met (with India and Iran and Russia); they issued a statement that they would support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. {China also joined the statement.} More on this later.

Will explain the super embedded concept later.

By: DE Teodoru

DE Teodoru — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:52:12 +0000

There is this neocon notion that it’s never too late because you can always nuke the area if you have to. Kilcullen or Reidel, I can’t right now recall which book, shows a picture of a fortified Taliban position where, I think, three guys were hiding and some 8 JDAMS were dumped from the air to dislodge them and they were still firing, only to sneak out on their own. Well, imagine what that operation cost; can we as a BROKE nation afford all this warfare a la Brooks/McChrystal or would we do better investing in cash for clonkers? Recently Brooks on PBS spoke of competition between the two wars and domestic affairs. As a survivor of 9/11 I certainly would not want a repeat event. But are we spending capital in the best place by listening to Brooks– remember that he wants full metal jaket in Iraq still? Totally aside from the fate of Afghans– we had no qualms even cutting ARVN off in logisitics after US left per Kennedy Amendment– is America like Rome in the Germanic forests losing what it has precious little of? I can tell you that the Kagan case on the surge is now up against Tom Rick’s new account of the unravelling, a case well made by many other authors while his “surge” book seemed not to, McMasters included. Do we or do we not– WITH AN EYE TO *OUR* NATIONAL fututre– set a limit on the blood and treasure we’ll invest in Afghnaistan? Lastly, if we pull out, wouldn’t Shanghai Accord nations (most are so called “observers” but really full particiants) HAVE to step in to prevent Taliban victory? China has been quietly leaking nuclear technology all over the “Third World” so as to defuse our retaliatory aim, sort of a high-tech Maoist: “one, two three….many revolutions” with nukes instead of guerrillas. It would be nice to see it stuck cutting off Taliban rather than making deals with it as it had since 1970s.

By: DE Teodoru

DE Teodoru — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:26:18 +0000

Anan, how much of a logistic hardship would your proposed super-embbeding cause? Can ISAF afford such an investment there in light on the new McChrystal notions of prioritizing? How would ANP and ANA coordinate to layer the police and military ops? Would they operate under a foreign command or their local Afghan leaders? Would US/German units work together or separate from ANP/ANA units? How good is the linguistic communication, given what Faust wrote in NY Times about translators as thin reeds of communications?

By: DE Teodoru

DE Teodoru — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:20:06 +0000

No police forces can be of any value if not well trained in technical skills of police work– therefore techincally literate– and VERY well paid. We saw that with South Vietnam’s “white mice.” When replaced by Phoenix Teams and RD cadres of people with many months of training, the VCI fell vulnerable– and it was an all GVN show by 1969. I thought that for both Iraqi and Afghan police, we should have taken entire familes to the US or Europe for training and literacy, maybe for 3 or more years, and then, keeping their familes safe abroad, sending police OFFICERS back into action to work under close advisory role of well integrated SOF leaders so they could impose rule of law. In Vietnam the VCI was a core structure that dominated a coalition of NLF factions (most were fictious entities) that provided regular units from North Vietnam the infrastructural and logistic support they needed via Fortified Liberation Villages to operate their missions. In Iraq/Afghan cases there is not foreign controlled central core as in South Vietnam; there often is no coordination between local factions. And yet, our “kinetics” failed to separate local interests from Taliban and/or alQaeda interests. I would be most interested in any explanation of characteristics of the way we operate that would explain the current situation where no matter how much more “kinetics” we throw in, the bigger becomes the response, often more as local gang guerrillas lightly armed than an organized insurgency. It would be intersting to know how much curent insurgents benifit from Soviet experience. As I recall, they managed, by attrition, to create very effective combat teams to isloate and eliminate Soviet units, much as VC/NVA did to US/ARVN units. What can be said about how well the American commanders learned from the Vietnam and Soviet experiences?

By: Joshua Foust

Joshua Foust — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:00:51 +0000

Yeah, gotta throw the BS flag on this one. Unless there is a Nuristan, Ohio, I’m pretty sure you’re not there right now. But please, if they suddenly started routing all Afghanistan NIPR traffic through DODNIC, I’ll be happily corrected.

Secondly, the geography of Nuristan makes widespread agriculture impossible. It’s not an area of broad valleys — it’s almost all steep ravines with extremely small areas capable of supporting any cultivation whatsoever, and even then only after extensive irrigation work and manuring and crop rotation. Even when things were relatively great there in the 1970s, Schuyler Jones wrote that most communities were barely self sufficient because they had so little arable land, and they certainly had few if any economic connections to the outside (their primary exports were felt and ghee).

I don’t doubt the Nuristan PRT has been devoted to building roads in the province—I said as much in the post. But claiming Nuristan is the breadbasket of Afghanistan is a ridiculous claim at odds with literally all the research and surveys available of the place. Without any evidence, I don’t believe for a second that a) the “northeast” generates 80% of Afghanistan’s food, and especially that Nuristan “makes up the bulk” of that food.

And even if Nuristan was somehow Afghanistan’s breadbasket… that still wouldn’t make it strategic.

By: Danny

Danny — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 01:41:14 +0000

Being there right now, I can say Nuristan is of great strategic value. 80% of the food (ag) produced in Afghanistan is produced in the northeast – Nuristan making up the bulk of that harvest. That production has been the result of the vast amount of water that flows through and fertile fields along the way. These areas were decimated during the decades of war which are painted on the faces of the hard working agrarians hiking aimlessly through their fields. Our presence is turning that back around. Nearly every one of our projects through the Provincial Reconstrcution Team has been to create growth in the fields (wheather from creating a tree farm or increasing water efficiencies) to the commerce of those products (building roads and bridges). Food production is vital to convincing the next generation there’s hope around the corner. Strategic – well, go take a walk to the villages like I do and you’ll see smiles where there were once frowns. Beleive me, it’s working.

By: M SHANNON

M SHANNON — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:03:25 +0000

This isn’t original but is it possible that bin Laden wants the US to escalate? That a major escalation (surge is the wrong term…it presumes a planned draw down) is what he wants… to economically bleed the US or is there a grander plan?

McChrystal isn’t actually asking for a reinforcement of 40,000 he’s asking for 90,000 because there will be 1.2 civilians for every US soldier. All of whom must be fed, armed, watered, amused and powered. And since the major source of enemy funding appears to be from extortion of NATO contractors and looting NATO supplies what is to stop them from cutting the LOCs instead of just taxing them? Could this be a trap? Could the ATGW and MANPADS that have been curiously missing from the enemy arsenal appear after the reinforcements have arrived?

By: David M

David M — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:44:56 +0000

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 09/28/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.

By: Joshua Foust

Joshua Foust — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:39:19 +0000

Your whiny complaining made me realize that we have to make some choices, no matter how sub-optimal. Nuristan makes sense as the first place.

I, too, am a growing skeptic of more troops. If they’re not being used properly, more troops really can’t be relied upon to improve things much, can they?

By: Joshua Foust

Joshua Foust — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:37:05 +0000

I agree. Rajiv Chandrasekaran just wrote another dispatch in which the guys in Kandahar think they need to secure Kandahar with more troops to win. I wonder why they'd say that, and if people elsewhere would disagree...