Does this sound familiar?
Captain Huysman said the Afghan forces were critically important in establishing trust and communication with citizens. “We can’t read these people; we’re different,” he said. “They’re not going to tell us the truth. We’ll never get to build and transition” — the last phase of the operation — “unless we have the Afghans.”
Well, I hope Commander-in-Chief Obama gets briefed as succinctly as this NY Times reporter on the ground with the troops.
What have our armed forces learned at unbearable expense in Iraq?
One paramount thing our armed forces must have learned is if you do not understand the population of a country you are rescuing/invading/occupying/rebuilding - and they do not understand you - then you will have very limited progress.
Remember "As they stand up, we will stand down" as the watchword pre/during/post-Surge?
“The net increase in Afghan security forces is zero” since the brigade arrived a few months ago, he [Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province] said. The lack of Afghan forces “is absolutely our Achilles’ heel,” added Capt. Brian Huysman, commander of Company C of the First Battalion, Fifth Marines in Nawa.
I don't have the answers. I don't have a solution. I have a gnawing pain, that as our new President leads his Administration and our military and diplomatic corps into a new set of relationships with regional powers across Asia and the Middle East, he and we are going to continue to pay for those lessons from Iraq. But we'll be paying for them in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere - and the people who live there will be paying an order of magnitude more.
I think we need to get out of Afghanistan militarily. The sooner, the better.
Perhaps I'm in a minority, but I'm one who does not think the Surge in Iraq was a magic potion. I think things "quieted down" in Iraq because the Shiites ethnically cleansed Baghdad while we bought off enough of the Sunni insurgents.
4,000 Marines can't be expected to take and hold and rebuild Helmand province in Afghanistan without the active support of tens of thousands of Afghan men at arms. If that country, which is in its fourth decade of invasion/civil war/warlord/narco-state hell, is going to pull together and build a new society, then there has to be a vastly upgraded role played by such outside resources as the United Nations - and there must certainly be an accelerated upswing in political dealmaking in Kabul, enough that the faltering government there can prove itself by projecting confidence and stability out across Helmand and other provinces.
The deck is stacked against our troops. Awash in opium, Afghanistan must of necessity be flooded with corruption. The Taliban is just one manifestation of the disorder.
Either we get a solid corps of Afghan allies to bolster our troops there - or we should get out.
What's the timetable?