Comments
Of course all of those described SOF efforts are also just going after the resistance insurgency. One must address the Revolution to produce any kind of enduring effect.
Yes, the rangers are VERY good at taking down local resistance squad leaders in the middle of the night. What effect that on the resistance? Better question, what effect when its the wrong house, or even if the right house and innocent people get dragged off for a few days of questioning? You can imagine how you'd feel if arrested in your home without warrant (for search or arrest), dragged off in front of your family and neighbors, and released without apology by your own police. Imagine if it were some foreign military force. Injustice under the rule of law is a major driver of insurgency, and this is a poster child for injustice.
VSO and ALP are also great programs, but who will be most vulnerable to Taliban retaliation when we pack up and go home without addressing the Revolutionary aspect of the insurgency first?
Sure, all of this is better than the "destroy the village to save the village" Clear-Hold-Build operations we have our conventional forces do, but it is still renedered moot by a flawed operational design that lacks a sophisticated understanding of insurgency in general and this insurgency in particular.
We can do better. We owe it to our troops, and we owe it to the Afghan people. It is time to either get serious about reconciliation and resolve the revolution by ending the Northern Alliance monopoly on governance, or go home.
Bob
What the three esteemed gentlemen above said.
Horses for courses; Right tool for the job and all that...
Though I'd add that while properly applied DA has considerable benefit, SF is being grossly misused in the conduct of it and there is a certain loss if the conventional force, perfectly capable of most but not all such attacks, is seen only as a provider of benefits and occasional fighter only when attacked.
I'm aware that this is the assumption... it's hard not to be aware of that. Like you, though, I just don't see it working. The army may be able to build infrastructure and train soldiers, but it certainly hasn't the capacity to build governance or an economy in a foreign nation. I don't see how we can ask the army to develop that capacity without compromising its ability to fight wars. Development work and war fighting are radically different professions, and it's not rational to expect a single institution to do both.
I've never thought "nation-building" made much sense from the start, because nations aren't built, they grow. We may be able to help cultivate a nation, but we can't build one. There are parts of that cultivation process where military forces may be useful: providing security in the initial stages, and training armed forces. Asking the army the build governance, develop an economy, and take on a development role is, as you say, a fool's errand.
Dayuhan:
But this was the basic logic of American Coin: state building. FM 3-24 acknowledges as much.
Lines of Effort (or whatever they are called now) are essentially about building the institutions of state.
The basic idea is that if an army provides security, and at the same time builds infrastructure, governance, the economy, local security forces, then it will win the allegiance of the local population over to our side and that of the government we are supporting.
For a foreign occupying Army like the US in Afghanistan it has always been a fool's errand.
Yet there has emerged a whole class of civilian and military experts who have convinced themselves that it can work.
It cannot.
gian
What's remarkable to me is that anyone ever expected military forces to be able to build a credible Afghan national government. That's not meant to be an insult to the military forces involved, at all: they've been assigned a task that is completely inconsistent with what they are trained and equipped to do. If the US intends to go about installing governments, we might be better advised to develop a specific capacity trained and equipped for that purpose, and if we're not prepared to develop that capacity, we might be better advised to refrain from trying to install governments.
Asking an army to build a credible government in Afghanistan is like asking an engineer to do surgery. Of course the army will do better at training defense forces and conducting direct military operations. It's what they do. Building governments isn't... and shouldn't be.
The Yin and Yang of Special Operations shown here:
"The report, which covers the final quarter of 2010, says the special operations night raids, combined with village-by-village security operations, have shown more lasting progress in degrading the Taliban and its influence than attempts by conventional military forces to drive out militants, the officials say."
...
"Petraeus, together with his predecessor, now-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, championed the surge in special operations forces to roughly 10,000 -- including about 4,000 elite "direct action" forces who hunt militants and 6,000 others, such as Green Berets and Marine special operators, who train local village security forces."