McChrystal does 60 day review

NY Times:

The new American commander in Afghanistan has ordered a 60-day review of the entire military mission to identify better ways to separate the population from insurgents, an assessment that is expected to lead to new economic and military steps to carve fighters off from the Taliban.

Over the next week, the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is scheduled to crisscross Afghanistan to meet provincial leaders, villagers and American and allied officials, while counterinsurgency experts from inside and outside the government assist in the top-to-bottom review.

Although the review is in its preliminary stages, General McChrystal is already pledging to expand the fight beyond the purely military campaign to defeat the insurgents.

“The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed,” General McChrystal told a Senate committee at his confirmation hearing on June 2. “It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence.”

The comment was viewed as particularly significant coming from General McChrystal, who was trained in “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency theory as a young Green Beret but more recently spent five years commanding the most secret capture-or-kill teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.

General McChrystal took command this week, as the American military starts to double its number of personnel members in Afghanistan, to about 68,000 by late summer.

More than a dozen senior military officers and Pentagon civilians involved in the review described the effort to refocus military planning, tactics and operations, but spoke on the condition of anonymity because the assessment was just getting under way.

Military planners predict that the increased troop presence will allow the military to raise the stakes on insurgent “day fighters” who pick up arms less for ideology than for money to survive. Until now, they could join the insurgency ad hoc and at relatively little risk of being captured, wounded or killed.

“We are going to bring the hurt to the insurgency and offer them an existential choice,” said another senior military officer.

“Those who are ideologically committed — we don’t expect them to change. They will fight, and they will die,” the officer said. “But for the many for whom ideology is not the motivation, we are going to offer them a serious motivation to stop, to make another choice.”

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One key will be increasing the size and professionalism of Afghanistan’s security forces. Another will be assuring that farmers who agree to cultivate legitimate crops will be protected from intimidation by narcotics bosses, whose proceeds form a main base of financial support to the insurgency.

The military says it will also seek to form a social contract with farmers and small business leaders: If they choose legitimate crops and pay taxes, they will be guaranteed secure transportation routes to markets without the pressure of bribes at illegal checkpoints.

The impact of the economy on the insurgency is significant, officials said. Even a primitive economy that is self-sustaining will reduce the number of unemployed men who join the insurgency for day wages.

...

One of our problems in Afghanistan is an inadequate force to space ratio. We did not have enough troops to protect the people and we were constantly playing whack a mole with the Taliban. To get the right ratio we need to add not only US troops, but more importantly Afghan troops. We have to do it in a way that we gain the confidence of the people in order to increase the intelligence on the location of the enemy. With enough troops we can create check points that will make it difficult to impossible for the enemy to move to contact without detection.

McChrystal's review will allow him to get an handle on the political aspects of the war within Afghanistan.

I just finished reading Gary Schroen's First In, An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan. Schroen's crew was met by a surprisingly competent group from the Northern Alliance. The NA did have certain weaknesses, but US air power, once it was finally brought to bear led to their breakout. I remember thinking at the time how ineffective our early bombing in Afghanistan was, and the CIA and the NA were as frustrated by it as I was. I also recall being impressed by Dr. Abdullah, the NA spokesman and Foreign Minister.

We have come a long way in Afghanistan, since those early days. The Taliban are nowhere near as big a threat to the Afghans as they were in 2001. They have been bolstered since al Qaeda's defeat in Iraq by foreign fighters who fled that war. They are trying the same losing strategy they used in Iraq. The terrain in Afghanistan is more favorable to insurgents, but so far there has only been a smattering of effective use of that advantage. Al Qaeda and the Taliban know they cannot stand up to our troops, so they will continue to try to avoid contact as use booby traps when they think they can get away with it.