In the initial seizure of Afghanistan about 300 Green Berets and paramilitary branch guys from another government agency swept the Taliban from power. They all had loaded guns and didn’t trust any one they met. They trained, equipped and led Afghan irregular forces. The Army response was to send a three star headquarters bring a military sense of order to the war. They stopped paying the irregular forces and lost influence over them.
The US Army has something no other army in the world does. Army Special Forces Command is a division sized force specifically designed to train and employ indigenous forces in combat. Led by a two star Green Beret, they are the perfect tool for counter insurgency. In El Salvador in the 80’s, they won a war without a single infantry unit, 55 guys at a time.
Afghanistan is a primitive and complicated place. It is a fractured and isolated area which lacks any national identity. Ninety percent of the population can’t read or do simple math. The current NATO theory is that we can make Afghanistan a modern nation-state with functional national security institutions in one generation.
The experts would tell you that the only thing that works in Afghanistan is the ethnic clan organization. The national government is not recognized in much of the country and recruits to the army and police have a higher loyalty to their clan. These clan leaders control the fate of the national government.
The Department of Defense would never send a sailor to run a ground campaign. They would never send a pilot to run a naval blockade. For over a decade, they sent a series of infantry generals to run a counter insurgency. As in Vietnam, the results speak for them selves. What we need is a strategy of training locals to fight their own battles.
Corporate Army has two core competencies. When they don’t know what else to do, they built bases and increase conventional force structure. The need for bases and supplies created vast movements of building supplies, equipment, food and water. All this stuff comes to a sea port in Pakistan and is trucked across Afghanistan. The Taliban “taxes” the movement of these goods and that is now the largest source of their income. Bigger than Opium.
If you ask an Army general how to solve a problem, the answer is always a number of infantry brigades. This is the product of their training and culture. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When things weren’t working in Afghanistan, they didn’t re-evaluate strategy, they sent more troops. If your house is on fire, and there are two police cars there, it won’t help to send more police cars. Send the specialists.
I support the President’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. I wish it was moving at a more rapid pace. Almost immediately after initial victory, there was a deliberate decision to stop Green Berets from working with indigenous forces in Afghanistan and replace them with conventional soldiers. The results are readily visible in the casualty figures.
Conventional troops don’t have the training, language skills or mindset to work in this environment. There have been a series of seemingly minor cultural incidents which have been brilliantly exploited by our enemies. Combine this with leadership which doesn’t trust soldiers with loaded guns and you have big problems.
At the beginning of the war, most of our generals had no combat experience. Some had been to the former Yugoslavia where they learned to patrol in light vehicles and wear body armor with unloaded weapons. In worked there, but not in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We need to put the right guys in the right jobs and pull conventional troops out of Afghanistan. They can do little good, but they make great targets.
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