‘Counterproductive Counterinsurgency’
From Kandahar, View of a ‘Counterproductive Counterinsurgency’ – Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent.
Later this morning, Presidents Obama and Hamid Karzai will meet at the White House. Karzai will present to Obama his proposal for a peace offer to the Taliban leadership. Obama will extend U.S. support for the people and government of Afghanistan over the long term.
All this happens as thousands of U.S., NATO and Afghan forces are moving into the city and surrounding environs of Kandahar. Senior officials in charge of shaping the operation have cautioned against viewing Kandahar as an iconic invasion campaign. Unlike the February operation in Marja, where 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops invaded and a governance structure of unproven capability was essentially airlifted into an area under Taliban control, the approach to Kandahar involves bolstering governance and economic efforts in parts of Kandahar currently under government control and expanding them outwards into Taliban-held territory. That will require intense and persistent coordination between NATO militaries, NATO civilians, their governments back home, Afghan security forces, local Afghan government officials and national Afghan government officials. A source in Kandahar considers it all a pipe dream.
That source passed on the following assessment of how counterinsurgency efforts across Afghanistan are shaping up, over a year after Obama embraced them at the strategic level and nearly a year after Obama tapped Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Amb. Karl Eikenberry to implement them. The source’s reluctant viewpoint, which is making its way through official channels in Afghanistan, is that the coordination necessary for successful counterinsurgency between civilian and military forces is not in evidence. Neither is the coordination between NATO and Afghan forces. Lumbering bureaucracy inhibits the rapid application of services and economic aid after military forces clear an area…
More at The Washington Independent.
