One of the driving factors in the Anbar Awakening was the realization by the sheiks that the al Qaeda infiltrators they had either been partnering with or ignoring were killing far more innocent Iraqis than they were the occupyimg Americans. The sheiks realized the foreign jihadists cared not at all about the locals and killed them, raped them and used them as cannon fodder. The sheiks saw just the opposite from the Americans and decided that their honor demanded that they stand to protect their own people. We need a similar dynamic in Afghanistan and the brutality of the Taliban is providing the impetus. From a Kabul-based PAO. Less than 12 hours after a suicide bomber struck near ISAF headquarters in Kabul, the staff is back to business, and for most of us things are pretty much as they were. Not so for the Afghans killed and wounded in this attack. Here is the frustration, and maybe the hope, of the mission here. Insurgents execute a well planned attack, and their presumptive Western targets are largely unscathed while more Afghans suffer. The gamble of our counterinsurgency strategy is that the Afghan people--repulsed by insurgent violence--will support their government before they reject it for whatever peace they think they can achieve under the insurgents' sway. It's going to be damn difficult to succeed. But after working together to recover from today's blow, international forces and more than a few Afghans are only more committed to try. We have completely re-focused our efforts in Afghanistan on population-centric COIN and as sucj have greatly restricted the use of tactics that lead to civilian casualties. This has increased the danger our troops face and made it more difficult for us to kill bad guys. But.....It also makes it easier fir us to differentiate ourselves from the Talibs. They are scholars of death and oppression and we need to make that disctinction in every way. We need to build rapport with the locals through shared sacrifice and let them see that we offer prosperity and and security and the Talibs offer death and destruction. That is how to reach a tipping point, and it must be done village by village and valley by valley. But if we demonstrate this by acts, we can help the locals oppose the extremists and defend themselves. That is an exit strategy.
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/PhNjxmrGjRY/taliban-successful-at-killing-afghans.html
Posted
Aug 18 2009, 01:21 AM
by
BLACKFIVE