Posted on 10/03/2009 8:04:09 AM PDT by flowerplough
Subhead: Deadly 4-hour firefight becomes template for how not to win the war.
The paratroopers of Chosen Company had plenty to worry about as they began digging in at their new outpost on the fringe of a hostile frontier village in eastern Afghanistan.
Intelligence reports were warning of militants massing in the area. As the paratroopers looked around, the only villagers they could see were men of fighting age idling in the bazaar. There were no women and children, and some houses looked abandoned. Through their night scopes they could see furtive figures on the surrounding mountainsides.
A few days later, they were almost overrun by 200 insurgents.
That firefight, a debacle that cost nine American lives in July 2008, has become the new template for how not to win in Afghanistan. The calamity and its roots have been described in bitter, painstaking detail in an unreleased Army history, a devastating narrative that has begun to circulate in an initial form even as the military opened a formal review this week of decisions made up and down the chain of command.
The 248-page draft history, obtained by The New York Times, helps explain why the new commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is pressing so hard for a full-fledged commitment to a style of counterinsurgency that rests on winning over the people of Afghanistan even more than killing militants. The military has already incorporated lessons from the battle in the new doctrine for war in Afghanistan
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
“absence of cultural awareness and understanding of the specific tribal and governance situation”
oops - article is from New York Times, hosted on msNBC
Insufficient troop presence to protect the natives from militant murder and intimidation tactics, goofy ROE rules, imposed by NATO and the 0 regime, which put troops in the field at risk and cost lives while preventing the troops from effectively engaging. Costly ineffective sweep and destroy missions that do not seal the border thus allowing free access to and from terrorist safe haven areas.
In the final analysis, let me explain the difference between mutual respect and “cultural awareness”.
In World War II, there was little or no effort to become “friends” with the Germans. They would have not done so, because we were their enemy. However, the US Air force went to great lengths that when bombing their towns and cities, to *not* bomb historical churches and other things of great cultural and historical value.
The German people remembered this courtesy for decades after the war, even though most had lost loved ones in the war. In the long run, it mattered more that we tried to avoid destroying what was built long before us, and what should survive long after we are all gone.
Conversely, Americans are still hated in the city of Dresden, that our air force flattened.
Compare this to “cultural awareness”, which in the case of Afghanistan is a horrible, evil, rotten culture that should be discarded. Their culture is defective and crippled. It needs to be deleted and replaced with a culture that works, that sustains, that has a beneficial purpose.
Our efforts to preserve their culture, out of “cultural awareness”, is like trying to preserve a malignant cancer.
Instead, we should have learned our lesson in Iraq, that every system we tried to preserve didn’t work, yet every replacement system we gave them functioned as good as expected. We should have preserved *nothing* of the old Iraq government and social culture, because that was what got them into this mess in the first place.
And this is doubly true of Afghanistan. Obama the socialist should use his socialism on them first, not us. A socialism that destroys the culture and homogenizes the people. Even socialism would be a better system than what they have now, which is little more than tribal barbarity under the rule of warlords.
This says a lot. Socialism is awful as a governmental system. For it to positively shine in Afghanistan shows how utterly grotesque their culture truly is.
The only thing that saved this unit was many of the soldiers had combat experience in Iraq. In other words nobody was a recent commissioned officer or weekend warrior and just saw combat for the first time. Not panicking and making the right snap decisions is what helped them maintain their composure and defeat the Taliban attackers. Despite the battle, the US military is alot quicker in making changes since then because the people in charge are at a wartime tempo, unlike the politicians and bureacrats in state side. I say get the assets from Iraq to Afghanistan ASAP.
The Army and National Security staff in the WH makes strategic decisions on a war based on a single small unit action?
There is one iron fact that often needs to be mentioned in Afghanistan.
There are 30,000,000 people in Afghanistan, and 111,000,000 people in Pakistan; and there are only about 100,000 total NATO forces, and 100,000 poorly trained Afghan army forces.
And while the enemy does not control the countryside, neither does the government. There is no nationalist sentiment, the country is ethnically divided, and half its porous border is shared with Pakistan.
Thus the only practical military goal is not to set up a stable regime, but to convince all the major factions to neither host the Taliban and al-Qaeda, nor to permit the export of terrorism in other ways.
Add to this that the majority of Afghanistan’s problems are external, for which we are to a great extent reliant on the will of the Pakistani government and military. And criminal, with the very high profit margin from the sale of heroin.
Militarily, this is a mess without any clean resolution.
Our efforts to preserve their culture, out of “cultural awareness”, is like trying to preserve a malignant cancer.
For it to positively shine in Afghanistan shows how utterly grotesque their culture truly is.
I'm finishing my year long tour in Afghanistan with the Army. What you posted is spot on with regard to Afghanistan. This place is a nation of hillbillies and illiterate losers primarily to their ass-backwards culture.
I liked his post very much too.
What I got from the article is that much of the village was complicit with the Taliban. In that case it needed to be made an example of. No “culture” and nothing there to preserve as in the case of Dresden, it would have been understood by the most backward of people, especially by the most backward of people.
There is no resistence where there are no survivors.
You may or may not have heard of it, but the brilliant historical novel ‘Flashman’ (the first in the series), by George MacDonald Fraser, recounted the disastrous British withdrawl from Afghanistan, under perhaps the most incompetent general who ever lived, Major-General William George Keith Elphinstone, CB.
The anti-hero of the novel, Harry Flashman, is a coward, cheat, scoundrel, womanizer, and general all-around swine, and the novels were alleged to be parts of his autobiography, which took him to the greatest conflicts and battles of the 19th Century. Fraser did such a historically accurate job, that initially he fooled several literary critics into thinking it was a real autobiography.
In any event, it is a very enjoyable read, and having been to Afghanistan, you will have a good “terrain walk” picture of how things were for the British in 1842, carrying Brown Bess muskets (effective range from 50-100 yards.)
The Russians tried that, and it didn’t work. Reprisals are war crimes, and should stay that way.
Afghans are not likely to ever LIKE us. They respect strength, and they are not cowards, but neither are they rational people.
If an American doctor sees a man’s teen daughter and saves her life, the Afghan man feels compelled to KILL his daughter. How do you win the hearts and minds of a people who will kill their own daughters and wives?
Meanwhile, Pakistan provides a safe haven for the Taliban.
So how do we win? By making a 100 year commitment (or at least a 50 year one) to provide security and bring them into at least the 15th century...
Don’t want to do that? Then you might as well pull out.
Afghanistan is the reason the neutron bomb was invented. Too bad we don’t have a bunch to use.
“This place is a nation of hillbillies...”
I was there Jan - Jun 2007. Met some of the 173rd folks. You have seriously insulted every hillbilly in the history of the world. Hillbillies are damn fine, reasonable people compared to Afghans.
Not exactly what I was talking about. Massacring people and wiping out their culture are two very different things. For example, in Iraq, the US military did such a good job of showing a better way of doing things, that even tribal leaders with a vested interest in their jobs thought it was a better system of leadership.
From the start, Afghanistan needed a MacArthur(PBUH) constitution imposed on them. Everyone and anyone who wanted to be in the government would have to do it the hard way, with performance of the new system. Caste, connection, wealth, are all meaningless to the promotion of new government employees.
It is downright Pavlovian. They have to be retrained so that they no longer believe that positions of authority are first, for personal enrichment, second, to reward their friends, and third, to punish their enemies. This is not easy. So at first their jobs are assembly line rubber stamping. Repetition, don’t make waves, don’t change anything. Do it exactly the same way every time for a long time and you get promoted. Get creative, you fail and you stay where you are.
Next, because the minimum wage in Afghanistan is tiny, we could have literally employed most of the men in every troublesome district. Work for free food, and your family gets your pay. And any man walking around not employed is a suspect. Great, huge public works programs to help rebuild national infrastructure, on a budget.
Then set up a system of militarily protected enormous boarding schools for children, and actually pay a stipend to parents to surrender their kids for five years of intense schooling by western standards. Feed the kids up and teach them as much as you can as fast as you can.
The idea is to train them so that they will be the next generation of political and business leaders.
Finally, organize the women, so that they are gainfully occupied while their men and children are away. Bluntly this is reeducation, but it is also teaching them that they have spines and are human beings. Personally, I would require every woman to carry a knife on her person at all times, and all other women to enforce the rule, so that they would no more dream of going out in public without their knife than without their clothes.
Yes, it would be a major cultural purge, and yes, the US military would be doing the very same thing as it is right now. But eventually at least we would start to see some cultural dividends in what are right now people trapped in a hell of their own making.
I agree with you entirely for step two.
But MacArthur’s(PBUH) constitution was made possible by Iwo Jima, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the resultant complete collapse of any idea of continuing support for an insurgency.
I have often compared Iraq to the forgotten lessons of Philippine-American war (1899-1916) in length, scale and number of US casualties (4800 KIA.) Black Jack Pershing(PBUH) took the final fight out of the resistence the old-fashioned way (200,000 casualties) and then we built the country.
I absolutely agree with you, whether the "enemy" shares your noble goals or defies them at every opportunity AND you or your children are there fighting under those rules.
If my children or I are fighting that enemy, I have clearly opposite ideas...
And yet it was a simple act of Pershing that ended the Insurrection.
He took a group of Moros scheduled to be executed to a large pit, then ordered half of them executed and thrown into the pit while the other half witnessed. Then a number of pig carcasses were thrown on top of them, and the pit was buried.
Then he ordered the other prisoners released with instructions that they be allowed to travel home without interference. In just a week or two, word had spread to all the Moro territories, and the Insurrection immediately ended.
I have no illusions about the US pacifying Afghanistan. That must be accomplished by the Afghans. However, we could have trained a central core of educated and capable Afghans that might, after many years, slowly build a country from the chaos.
But as things stand, they have no competent leadership, no national prerogative, a tribal mentality, and an inert and corrupt government.
While the US military worked wonders with the ARVN, and did an amazing job with the Iraqi army, they had a lot of raw materials to work with. With Afghanistan, you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.
There.
Fixed it.
Well, I did a tour in Afghanistan (staff weenie - I turned 49 there), and my two oldest kids did tours in Iraq, and my son-in-law did 2 tours in Fallujah in the infantry...none of us believe in killing civilians in reprisals.
That didn’t happen.
Here is an example of what DID happen:
“In late 1911 about 800 Moros fled to the old battleground of Bud Dajo to make a stand. Pershing’s response to this development provides an illuminating contrast with that of Wood in the earlier episode on the mountain. The matter could be ended without bloodshed, Pershing maintained, if Americans were patient. He wrote, “It is not my purpose to make any grandstand play here and get a lot of soldiers killed and massacre a lot of Moros, including women and children.”
Pershing succeeded in dispersing the Moros on Bud Dajo with few casualties. Acting swiftly before the Moros could gather provisions or construct cottas, his soldiers surrounded the mountain to cut the Moros off from their sources of supply. Cooperative Moro leaders convinced most of the people to leave the mountain and surrender their weapons. Only 12 Moros were killed—far fewer than the 600 lost 5 years previously.”
He didn’t always have the option of working like that,
“Pershing’s handling of another case of strong resistance resulted in much more bloodshed, however. In 1913 thousands of Moros moved to the fortified crater of Bud Bagsak in eastern Jolo to defy the disarmament policy. Pershing worked diligently to negotiate the Moros’ departure, and many eventually left the mountain. However, a group of around 500 remained in their stronghold and refused to surrender their weapons. Unwilling to accept such open defiance and under pressure to end the insurgency, Pershing ordered an attack on Bud Bagsak that resulted in the deaths of almost all the Moros who were there, including as many as 50 women and children. The battle of Bud Bagsak was the last major case of Moro resistance to U.S. control.”
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/milreview/byler.pdf
Yeah, the pig thing is a myth/legend/propaganda.
100,000 Moros alone were killed over ten years, mostly civilians.
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