by Colonel Gary Anderson, Small Wars Journal
The Taliban Can Be Stopped (Full PDF Article)
The Taliban are not ten feet tall, and there is no horde of Taliban supermen overrunning either Afghanistan or Pakistan. That is not how they operate. We and the Pakistanis tend to try to put their offensives" in our frame of reference, and then are continually surprised when massive applications of force fail to stop them, and only result in increased negative publicity and civilian casualties.
The reality of Taliban offensives is that they largely consist of their fighters walking into an undefended village, and announcing to the population that, there is going to be a war here, if you don't want to be part of it, leave." Those who don't want to be part of the war do depart and become internally displaced persons or refugees (in the case of those who flee across borders). Those who stay can either assist the Taliban or dig in and hope that they do not get caught in the crossfire.
The Taliban do bring a rough sense of law and order and swift justice that contrasts with the cumbersome and corrupt governance that all too often characterizes governance in the hinterlands of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lack of security and poor governance, not the Taliban are the real enemies in both nations.
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Comments
Sir,
Excellent article. I believe that the only way to project an ethical (as opposed to corrupt) and effective government presence into the Afghan hinterlands (especially the border areas) is by embedding CAP-type units with local (Popular?) forces at the village level and some serious oversight at the district level. Too much of the lower level of Afghan government (district-level) has gotten away without any consistent supervision, and because of the types of people generally appointed to those positions corruption is at absurd levels.
I'm not sure that a rotation to training programs in the U.S. will be effective, though. Regardless of how well-trained the security forces and other government officials are, we are going to have to work to overcome an even stronger force in the form of tribal and familial ties before they should be considered competent to operate on their own.