In guerrilla wars, victory always requires dreadful means. The guerrillas clutch the people as shields. That is a good reason to avoid fighting against guerrillas. There is usually an alternative. The Reaganite alternative was that instead of us fighting against Soviet sponsored guerrillas, we would sponsor lots and lots of guerrillas and let the Soviets fight them. The Soviets did not hesitate to employ dreadful means, but they swiftly ran short of treasure to pay for dreadful means.
Every victory against guerrillas has involved horrifying brutality. The British in Malaya imprisoned the entire ethnic group that the guerrillas hid among, all of them. Saddam re-engineered his country’s rivers so that he could deny water to vast areas of Iraq, not only burning the crops and killing the cattle that the people would have nothing to eat, but also, nothing to drink. Americans conquered the Philippines by threatening genocide, and making a pretty good start on it, a model that the Ceylonese government has been imitating. The Ceylonese government systematically massacred women and children to deter the guerrillas from hiding among them, which deterrence succeeded, forcing the Tamil Tigers into conventional war.
Thus in Afghanistan, there are three choices: Defeat the Taliban using the methods of Malaya and the Philippines, choose a different war after the manner of Reagan, or leave.
We are not doing any of those. What the @#$% are we doing?
“our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population.”
Not killing the enemy means losing the war while they kill Americans.
“Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us – physically and psychologically – from the people we seek to protect.”
So we should not be protecting our own forces, but instead the people who willingly or unwillingly are protecting our enemies. At least this General is consistent. Evil and insane, but consistently so.
So if we are not slaying our enemies, and protecting our troops, what the @#$% are we doing in Afghanistan?
“There must be development and use of indigenous narratives to tap into the wider cultural pulse of Afghanistan.”
This is the standard multiculturalist pap we get inflicted in America’s public schools as an effort to smash Christianity. Islam is supposedly the religion of peace, and we just have to remind all those gentle nice Muslims that it is, and they will happily join the multicultural rainbow singing Kumbayah.
It is not working against Christianity in America even though the Cathedral has total control. It sure is not going to work in a Muslim country where the Muslims are shooting back, answering words that seek to destroy their culture with bullets that seek to destroy their enemies. If you want to change the Afghan belief system to something less violent, the only plausible candidates are Sufi Islam or evangelical protestantism. Multicultural religion of peace pablum is not going to stand a chance. And if you want to change the Afghan belief system, first you have to kill everyone who will kill to prevent you from changing it. You cannot win the war by changing their religious beliefs. After you win the war, you can use victory for lots of purposes, such as imposing a more peaceable brand of Islam, or eradicating Islam, or raping all the women, or turning the place into a superhighway and parking lot, or whatever. But you cannot impose a more peaceable variety of Islam while the less peaceable variety answers words with bullets.
Other blogs commenting on this moronic plan for winning the war by means of rainbows and pink unicorns, care bear style, either complain that there are insufficient rainbows and pink unicorns, or else are mightily impressed because it is such a muscular militaristic proposal. The only sane commentary that I found was “Our troops are not in Afghanistan for a social experiment”. The Obama objection to this plan appears to be that it involves too much deadly violence, and not enough rainbows and pink unicorns.