August 11th, 2009 § 0
President Obama doesn’t need to send any more American soldiers to Afghanistan. There’s no doubt country needs to be stabilized – and fast. But it would be more effective to send thousands of police officers: beat cops who would know how to walk the streets and round up the criminals who are terrorizing and destabilizing that country.
And I’m not just talking the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
June 29th, 2009 § 1
The U.S. government has announced that it will be reshaping counter narcotics strategy in Afghanistan to increase efforts to interdict smugglers and traffickers and take the focus off crop eradication, which has hurt poor farmers.
This is a welcome change. As the Obama administration’s special envoy to the region Richard Holbrooke put it, the policies of the Bush administration — which pushed grandiose development plans and wide-scale crop eradication — largely failed:
“They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban.”
To support this shift in focus, the U.S. military (not to mention troops from other NATO nations operating in Afghanistan) will have to reshape its efforts from the ground up to accommodate this shift in focus. There are two main areas where they will have to change their behavior, one is how they interact with locals, and speak about the Taliban and al Qaeda (in other words, a public relations campaign) and the other is how they collect intelligence. Every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan plays a critical role, right down to the grunt on patrol.
First, public relations. American forces in Afghanistan should stop using words like jihadi, mujahidin and Taliban to refer to the enemy, because these are actually complementary terms for them. I like the suggestion made by counter insurgency expert David Kilcullen in his brilliant book The Accidental Guerilla that they use the term ‘taqfiri,’ or heretic. As I say in my presenations on the book, the Taliban use two bogus arguments among the local populace to rationalize trafficking drugs. One bogus argument is that, even though Islam’s holy book, the Koran, bans the use, cultivation and traffic in all narcotics, it gives you a pass in times of war (it does not). The other bogus argument they use is that the Koran allows you to traffic in drugs as long as you sell them only to non-Muslims (it doesn’t, and they don’t). Almost none of Afghanistan’s drug crop ends up in the United States, while Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran — all Muslim nations — have skyrocketing addiction rates. If coalition forces talk about the Taliban as heretics and criminals, they will have a better chance of winning public support.
Second, collecting intelligence. U.S. soldiers patrolling the mountains, villages and poppy fields of Afghanistan are no different than the cops who walk the beat on U.S. streets. They have a valuable role in collecting ground level information about how the enemy funds himself. If a military patrol intercepts a guy with a drug shipment, find out who he got it from, and more importantly, who he is taking it to. Don’t ask him if he knows where Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar is. Would a New York City beat cop busting a cocaine pusher ask him where to find Pablo Escobar? No, but that low-level smuggler is part of a chain. He will have information about the guy above him on the chain, and that guy will have information about the guy above him. Follow the chain. Follow the money.
