Hybrid Strategy Risky in Afghanistan

DoD Buzz ^ | 11/2/2009 | Greg Grant

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

The ongoing debate over the way forward in Afghanistan has settled into the “light footprint,” counterterrorism approach, versus the “heavy footprint,” population-centric counterinsurgency approach. Reportedly, what is about to emerge from the Obama administration is a hybrid of the two, with the vast majority of troops providing security in Afghanistan’s major population centers and pulling troops out of less populated rural zones. Drone strikes and periodic raids would be employed to check the Taliban in remote areas.

The danger in such an approach is that once rural villages are ceded to insurgent control, they may never be recaptured as the Taliban expands its shadow government.

Consider what could be called the “lone guerrilla paradox,” a concept that has vexed counterinsurgents from Algeria to Vietnam to now Afghanistan. In a remote rural village, a single insurgent fighter represents a “monopoly of force,” controlling that village even if challenged by an entire battalion of government troops doing continuous battalion sweeps. The only time the lone guerrilla doesn’t control the village is the few hours when the counterinsurgents sweep through, once they leave, the guerrilla’s monopoly is re-established.

I came across this balance of forces puzzle in Jeffrey Race’s excellent book, War Comes to Long An. Race, an Army officer who served in Vietnam, wrote about the war from the viewpoint of a single province adjacent to Saigon. In the Vietnam book club reportedly going on in high policy circles it’s regrettable that Race’s book is never mentioned as it is probably the best account of local level war in Vietnam.

[Vanders9]

Hybrid is bad. All military strategy based on compromise and half-measures is bad. Pull the troops out now!

[Ben Ficklin]

bump