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Blackfive: Beyond COIN v. CT or COIN + CT: An Emerging Third Position |
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Wednesday, 28 October 2009 |
How many troops do we need in Afghanistan? Yesterday's publishing of State Department officer's letter of resignation brought us a practical expression of a theory: essentially, that the unified insurgency would collapse if we weren't there for it to fight. The theory holds that tribal ethic of "me against my brother, the two of us against our cousins, the four of us against our neighbors, all of us against the tribe across the ridge, all those tribes together against strangers..." is allowing the Pashtun-based Taliban to hold up a coalition that they couldn't manage without us present. If we pulled back, or pulled out, these natural tensions would reassert themselves and the insurgency would be ripped apart from the inside. There are several names associated with this theory that give it credibility. The first is Dr. David Kilcullen, who needs no introduction to readers of BLACKFIVE. His book The Accidental Guerrilla holds that there are two factions to the insurgencies we fight: the hard-core ideologues who came to fight us, and the "accidental guerrillas" who got swept up into a fight that happened in their backyard. Dr. Kilcullen gives advice not so much aimed at abandoning the fight, but on swaying those who have 'accidentally' fallen in with the enemy toward our side. Another, who should be as well known but is not, is MAJ Jim Gant, a Special Forces officer who has a new paper out on the subject of tribal engagement. The paper is only 45 pages long, yet offers some fairly specific suggestions on how to reform current practices to support the strategy he proposes. In Iraq, tribal engagement is how the Awakening happened: the tribal frictions began to pull some of the 'accidental' guerrillas away from AQI, and the Coalition was ready to do what it took to support their swing to our side of the conflict. How would that theory work in the absence of Coalition forces, which is what is being proposed in Afghanistan? Presumably, one would wait for the tribal tensions to create open fissures between the hard core and the local tribals, and then make contact with those tribes and offer them support at a much-lower footprint: perhaps with MAJ Gant's proposed SF advisors, or perhaps only with money and weapons. In return for their support against terrorists, and tacit support for the government, they would be allowed to field forces and control their own territory (as the Sons of Iraq were so permitted). This approach creates a whole new class of "warlords" in read
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