In Counterinsurgency Class, Soldiers Think Like Taliban:
Students took the roles of insurgents in an academy session late last month. Capt. Khawja Mohammed, a 38-year-old training officer for the Afghan riot police, suggested they stage a public hanging of someone suspected of collaborating with the coalition. “We can intimidate people,” he offered.Lt. Col. Sayed Najeeb of the Afghan intelligence service proposed a series of attacks on coalition or government checkpoints. “That will tell the people that the government can’t take care of itself,” Col. Najeeb, a 38-year-old with a thick black beard, black shirt and black pinstriped suit. He spoke in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s main languages, through an interpreter. As insurgents, he said, “We can tell the people that the infidels have come to destroy their religion, but if we don’t demonstrate enough force, people won’t join us.”
Sgt. First Class James Litchford, 43, from Hattiesburg, Miss., said he would plan a frontal assault on a major U.S. base. The attackers should grab the Americans “by the belt,” he said — that is, get so close to the base so fast that the defenders wouldn’t dare use air strikes or artillery for fear of hitting their own men. Then the insurgents would swarm through the base defenses, he said.
“All you’ve got to do is overrun it,” he said. “You don’t have to hold it.” The news media would do the rest, he said, boosting the insurgents’ standing in Afghanistan and damaging morale back in the U.S. “We’ve got to bleed them out and make the coalition lose its will to fight,” said Sgt. Stockdill, a beefy 33-year-old from Rural Valley, Pa., warming to the challenge.
I don’t envy these guys:
But as the academy students discovered, putting the theory into practice can feel like building a sand castle as the tide is coming in. There’s only so much aid money to go around. There are only so many soldiers to clear and hold. There are local blood feuds to resolve. There are local power structures to decipher. There are civilians to charm. And there are insurgents trying to disrupt the whole venture.One common complaint in Afghanistan is that the coalition makes big promises, but fails to deliver. “Afghans don’t understand how, if the world’s only superpower is involved in a fight, it can’t get them a goddamn road after promising to do so in 2002,” says Capt. Helmer.
Smaller missteps can undo months of counterinsurgency efforts. Lt. Isaac and a fellow instructor arrived at the academy last month in a U.S. military convoy. The drivers, worried about suicide bombers and ambushes, sped through Kabul, honking and bullying civilian vehicles away. “We just made a thousand new enemies,” Lt. Isaac told his colleague.
Another example: As a goodwill gesture in September, coalition soldiers in Khost Province handed out soccer balls decorated with the flags of the world. One of them, the Saudi flag, bears a verse from the Koran. Rumors spread widely that the coalition was, in essence, encouraging Afghan children to put their holy book on the ground and kick it.
More damaging are any deaths of Afghan civilians at the hands of coalition forces. Sgt. Litchford told his classmates one day: “The military can’t win this war, but it sure as hell can lose it.” Capt. Ray Gilmore, a 30-year-old from North Conway, N.H., told his students about a fight earlier this year in the Zerkoh Valley, in which locals and Western media reported that U.S. air strikes killed dozens of civilians. The U.S. military says Special Forces troops came under Taliban attack and killed 136 fighters, but that further investigation found no evidence of civilian deaths. Still, the Afghan government permanently banned coalition troops from entering the area, Capt. Gilmore says.
Capt. Helmer says counterinsurgents face a paradox: “The more you protect the force, the less safe you are.” When coalition troops hole up in big bases, surrounded by barbed wire and sand barriers, they risk turning the locals toward the insurgents. Small, vulnerable outposts set among the villages, such as ones the Army has erected along the Pech River Valley near Pakistan, bring troops and people closer together. When the insurgents attack the troops, they are attacking the people, too. But such exposed positions also increase the near-term risk of allied casualties.