The saying goes "You can rent an Afghan, but you can't buy him". It looks like the British Army is going to accept that conventional wisdom and see about leasing some Talibs to keep them out of the fray. Now while it is easy to crack jokes about Brits wandering the battlefield with satchels of gold, there is some logic to this strategy and it does mirror the US Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP) funds and if used well can provide alternatives to serving with the Taliban to young men with no business propositions. Addressing the issue of paying off the locals, the new manual states that army commanders should give away enough money to dissuade them from joining the enemy. The Taleban is known to pay about $10 (£5.95) a day to recruit local fighters. Major-General Paul Newton said: “The best weapons to counter insurgents don’t shoot. In other words, use bags of gold in the short term to change the security dynamics. But you don’t just chuck gold at them, this has to be done wisely.”.... The manual says that money can be the answer, if it is prudently distributed. “Properly spent within a context of longer-term planning, money offers a cost-effective means for pulling community support away from the insurgents and provides the military with a much-needed economy of force measure,” it says. “Unemployed and under-employed military-aged males typically provide the richest vein from which insurgents recruit ‘foot soldiers’. Short-term, labour-intensive projects are therefore the best way to disrupt such recruiting.” “The counter-insurgent should be careful not to be over-generous since this will distort local economic and social activity and may lead to unproductive dependency.” So in the end you can rent them to deny them to the Taliban as foot soldiers, but you have to have some kind of longer term plan or they will just go back to them when the lease is up. Again this is not an unheard of policy and the tribes have a long history of alliances of convenience based on payoffs. But in the end there must be a follow on program that incents them to stay out of the insurgent business, or you will just have kicked the can down the trail a bit.
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/_PAfc0V8VQI/brits-to-start-renting-taliban.html
Posted
Nov 16 2009, 11:35 PM
by
BLACKFIVE