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And he provides some field notes to Small Wars Journal. It’s interesting stuff. I am alarmed by his use of the term “control” to describe the military’s interaction with the population, but maybe that’s just my effete liberal sensibilities and West is merely writing without euphemism, which is to be admired.
Something that my piece for The National gets at is the applicability of Iraq-style COIN for Afghanistan, and so I read West’s notes in that frame of mind. This, for instance, jumped out at me:
General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker changed the course of the Iraq war by exploiting the change in Sunni attitudes. The Pashtun tribes, however, are deeply divided and lack the overall cohesiveness and leadership of the Iraqi Sunni tribal structure. Plus, it’s not their fight as long as the government exploits rather than offers them incentives.
Now, I often say that we should just view Afghanistan, and our approaches to Afghanistan, on their own terms. And I stand by that. But maybe I’m naive or maybe the framework is inescapable. If so, West provides some basis for believing that it’s just not appropriate. I don’t honestly know if this tells us much — “Afghanistan is not Iraq” is a heuristic of dubious utility — but if people are just stuck thinking that “what worked there can work here, with some tinkering,” then maybe it actually does.
Meanwhile, this really cries out for a follow-up:
The theory of counterinsurgency is that villagers, once given security and services, will inform on the insurgents. In reality, the Pashtun Taliban aren’t oppressing the villagers, and the coalition doesn’t have the troops to provide security in many areas.
I’d love to know more about what West means by this, as it conflicts with the standard reported view of the Taliban’s shadow government operating through night letters and other coercive means.
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This is something I’ve wondered about for some time, and honestly I don’t think there’s any way for me to get to a real answer, or even ask the question without sounding like a paranoid crank. Over the last several decades, it has become increasingly obvious that my government practices propaganda dissemination and disinformation for it’s own ends and purposes. There can be no doubt that the concerned parties work hard to frame the discussion in a manner favorable to their aims and agenda, and it would be unrealistically naive to accept any description of the Taliban or the larger Afghan and Pakistani insurgencies at face value. I remember how any real deep consideration of the motivations of the 9/11 hijackers was, to put it delicately, aggressively discouraged in favor of the more simplistic explanation “they are evil”.
The information we receive here in the US about the Taliban is so uniformly awful as to be caricature, more comic-book minions of great evil than other real human beings with goals and grievances. If you want to experience this, just make some kind of vanilla statement about the Taliban not being the personification of evil on earth and see how quickly someone shows up to tell you that you need to do a little more research on the murdering, raping, oppressing evil scum that has the temerity to shoot at good pure american men and women for NO REASON at all. Hell, I’ve had it happen to me in these very comment pages.
There can be no doubt that the reality of the situation is far more complex and nuanced than we are being led to believe, and there are not only people providing dishonest or at least incomplete information in order to demonize the enemy in wartime, but people who actively discourage any exploration or discussion of these questions. It is neither unpatriotic nor treasonous to try to develop a more complete understanding of your enemy, and if you try to do so you will find that he is more and more like you and me. That is the nature of the beast.
mikey
Why are they conflicting? They’re not cartoon supervillains.
If you as an Afghan just go about your business, they pretty much leave you alone. The more you do things seen as pro-West or pro-government, the more they lean on you, starting with night letters and moving up. They put out a few checkpoints to get some local revenue, or confiscate food or lodgings when they need them, but so do the police. Other than that, from your regular Afghan in the south the insurgent presence can be pretty much entirely benign, so long as you overtly play by their rules.