More Troops, Fewer Caveats. Let's Get Serious - Anthony Cordesman, The Times opinion.
In Afghanistan Nato/ISAF faces challenges that go far beyond the normal limits of counter-insurgency and military strategy. It must carry out the equivalent of armed nation building, and simultaneously defeat the Taleban and al-Qaeda. It must change its strategy and tactics after years in which member countries, particularly the United States, failed to react to the seriousness of the emerging insurgency. The nations of the alliance lacked a unity of purpose, failed to provide enough troops and placed serious national caveats and limits on their use. They let the enemy take the initiative for more than half a decade.
The result is that the Taleban have been winning the war for control of Afghanistan's territory and population while Nato/ISAF has focused on the tactical and combat aspects. The insurgents may have lost virtually every military clash, but they have expanded their areas of influence from 30 of Afghanistan's 364 districts in 2003 to some 160 districts by the end of 2008, while insurgent attacks increased by 60 per cent between October 2008 and April 2009 alone...
First, it must change its strategy to continue to defeat the insurgency in tactical terms, but also eliminate Taleban, Hekmatyar and Haqqani control and influence...
Second, to be effective, it must eliminate as many national caveats and restrictions on troops as possible, and add a substantial number of additional US combat brigades...
More at The Times.
Comments
I worry with the title for this piece that people are going to assume "less caveats" means less restrictions on what soldiers can do downrange. In many cases, the only way to force the Army (by which I mean military) to fight an effective counter-insurgency is to force it to work with other units. That caveat is very useful.