Marine Corps Manual Offers Blunt, Revealing Portrait of Afghan War
01.12.2012 at 10:04am
Marine Corps Manual Offers Blunt, Revealing Portrait of Afghan War at the Washington Post and Afghanistan, Operational Culture for Deploying Personnel at Public Intelligence.
Once the United State committed to long termn, armed naton building (around the early 2004 timeframe) and then supercharged with the faux-lessons of success from the Coin Surge in Iraq, the Taliban have become an operational enemy of the US military in Afghanistan. They are an operational enemy because the US has adopted armed nation building as its operational framework which requires a large military occupation, and the Taliban resist this. Yet once we got past 2002 the Taliban have not been our strategic enemy which all along has been AQ. As Bing West has argued we are fighting the wrong war, and in my view the wrong enemy however tactically proficient we have become at it.
But in war it is first and foremost strategy that counts and must be in charge of tactics. Unfortunately the American military has been guided by the imperatives and principles of armed nation building which have eclipsed better strategic thinking which should have gotten us out of the armed nation building business long ago simply because it is not worth the amount of American blood and treasure to carry it out. There were other ways yet because of the arrogance of success produced by the belief that the Iraq Surge worked and optimism that it produced we were blind to see other options.
Gian—you are right again about the surge—just why is there no open and direct debate on the surge—would argue that the massive discussion on COIN after 3-24 was designed to “cloud” our view on just about anything around the term insurgency.
IE—was the core Sunni insurgency (excluding the groups around AQI) built on actually just three core groups—1920 which was nationalistic and former Baathists/military/intelligence, Ansar al Sunnah (Arab/Kurdish who had been in Iraq before we arrived) and the Islamic Army in Iraq a secular leaning Salafi/nationalist gorup.
All the tens of other named groups were really sub groups of the core using multiple names for opsec reasons and for giving us a perception of facing hundreds of fighters.
Would argue that now IAI and the JRTN (formerly 1920) have actually merged as a single representative of the Sunni’s although maintaining spearate IO web sites outwardly thus the Sunni are prepared for the coming civil war that in their eyes will occur.
So maybe we just blew the whole Iraq campaign as we focused on say AQI and it did not fully understand that one had to operate against the whole of the ecosystem as a single group. In AFGN we seem to focus on the Taliban for awhile then Haqqani then HiG–we seem to be able to not have learned from Iraq that the focus should be on the whole system. We also failed to fully understand just how the Shia groups played into the overall ecosystem as well.
A question that comes to mind for Iraq that has never been addressed was just how deep and just how active were the Iraqi Salafi groups in Iraq before we arrived in 2003? It is the elephant in the room that no one wants to address.
Just my thoughts.