How To Win In Afghanistan Part 2

THE PRESENT
The foreign concepts and ethnocentrically driven ideology, I speak of, are all of the social and political programs enacted in Afghanistan, in an effort to “modernize” that nation. Instead of respecting and cooperating with the existing informal institutions and working within the already present power structures, the decision was made to re-invent the wheel through a little ‘nation-building’. ‘Nation-building’ is not only costly (in blood and treasure) but it is insanely stupid.
In the midst of a war with a much smaller mobile force that doesn’t stay fixed in place for very long (when challenged), it is unwise, as a leader, to get bogged down in self-inflicted quagmires (i.e., excursions into nation-building) brought on by the static unimaginative minds of the supposed military experts who slither about your feet.
While you are busy ‘nation-building’ (creating democratic institutions, voting infrastructure, conducting elections, and stabilizing security forces, etc.) your smaller, highly mobile, and more mentally agile (terrorist) foe will simply evade you and leave the area altogether (because a smarter smaller force will only limit themselves to fighting when it is easy and in their favor to do so- they will not make any desperate last stands unless backed into a corner.) What’s more, having incorrectly labeled one or more of the indigenous groups of that nation as being tantamount to Terrorists themselves (as we have done in Afghanistan), you then create for yourself a wonderful little thing called an insurgency (which we now have in Afghanistan.)
Similarly, (when faced with a much smaller highly mobile force that doesn’t stay fixed in place for very long when challenged) parking (or surging) a large body of troops somewhere for a long period of time, in the midst of a war with that smaller force, is foolish and unnecessary; being that the much smaller force is not going to line up all ‘revolutionary war like’ and fight some pitched-battle with you. Wisely the terrorists (the smaller more mobile fighting force) will run away, in the face of superior force.
Likewise, In the case of the insurgents (the people indigenous to the nation who are fighting against our forces and most likely their corrupt government), it becomes a game of waiting; waiting for us to lose support back at home, waiting for us to run out of resources and time is on their side. They are at home in their own country able to cease fighting and blend back in with the populace at will.
While we waste the lives of our troops and watch our mounting national debt soar to even further astronomical heights, the insurgents we fight grow stronger by doing nothing at all. The insurgents have a superior economy of force at work and therefore, once again, time is on their side.
All of the failure, along with the inefficiency and loss, inherent in our current efforts in Afghanistan is due to our strategy; the horrible terra-forming project which sought to radically alter the country’s social and political landscape. If you incorporate bad thinking and narrow-mindedness into your planned actions, you get a bad result. If you adopt a flawed worldview and fixed paradigms into your foreign policy decisions, you get disastrous consequences. In the case of Afghanistan, this could not be more true.
The time has come for a new strategy; a strategy that breaks free from all previous paradigms and that is based on things as they are at any given moment and not how they were or how we said they would be during some inane press conference. We need to get away from any and all attachments that keep us from accomplishing our real goal; the far more logical and utility goal of efficiently capturing or killing Al Qaeda while denying them safe haven anywhere in the world. And we cannot do this with viscous inertia-laden thinking that only helps to prolong and produce the type of quagmires we find ourselves in today.