Afghanistan Taliban Body Count
Shades of the Vietnam War. The body count as a sign of measuring progress in a war is back.
This time it’s the Nato as well as the American commanders who are being stupid. According to a coalition statement Nato-led forces, including American and Afghan troops, have killed scores of Taliban fighters in the western province of Herat. The latest report is that more than one hundred Taliban fighters have been killed.
Oh really? And how do we know they were all Taliban? Don’t those people dress pretty much all the same? And there is another unpleasant problem. People who have been hit by 500 pound bombs are rather hard to identify even if you find a few scattered body parts.
Well, there are conflicting reports. According to an Afghani protester “the people they have killed are not Taliban, they are civilians”. Probably the truth is that some were Taliban and some were civilians who were hiding in their homes at the time a precision bombing raid precisely dropped a bomb on top of their heads.
Interestingly enough while the Nato forces press release says that Afghan police and military units took part in the combat operations the Afghans deny that they were involved.
And why is this?
The answer is simple. The Afghans understand their culture while the Nato and American commanders do not. They are not stupid like the foreigners who like to brag about their body counts and consider a high body count as a sign of progress in winning the war.
The Afghans do not want the certain retribution for the Taliban and civilian deaths to fall upon their heads. No thank you. They wisely insist that they had nothing to do with this operation.
Afghanistan is one of the most tribal societies in the world. Family, tribe, and old testament style eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, Islamic religion mean everything to these people. If a family member is harmed the surviving fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, good friends, and even sisters and mothers, are honor bound to seek revenge.
Kill one Taliban and for sure two or three or four will spring up in his place. Kill a hundred or more today and you will have an additional battalion of Taliban to fight tomorrow. Bragging about how many you have killed in a combat operation is going to send more brave young British, American, and Nato troops back home in aluminum flag draped coffins. Be sure that intensified Taliban revenge attacks, probably in the form of suicide bombers and IED’s will follow.
A high Taliban causally rate in Afghanistan is actually bad news. It is a sign that the coalition forces are losing the war. The war can not be won militarily anymore than the war in Iraq can be won militarily. Without a political solution coalition forces can fight for ten more years. In the end they will lose.
To win in an insurgency conflict you have to develop trust among the population. You have to demonstrate that their lives will be more secure, more prosperous, more fulfilling, more promising, under your governance than if they support your opponent in the conflict. You do not build trust by bombing civilian villages, creating unavoidable collateral damage, and by destroying blood and tribal relatives who may or may not be Taliban.
All of this should be well known to military commanders by now. These are the principal reasons that insurgencies are so hard to win. You have a foreign army up against the local guys yet you are trying to win over the “hearts and minds” of the local population who are related by tribe, blood, and religion to those who you are killing and trying to kill.
It’s kind of difficult to win over the local folks by bragging about your body counts. Those bodies invariably include a number of the local population’s relatives.
I saw first hand in Vietnam how this type of stupidity plays out. Body counts were all the rage in Vietnam. Photo opps were staged next to ten foot high piles of dead VC and NVA soldiers. Yet look how that wasteful war worked out for US forces.
Winning an insurgency takes careful planning, a lot of rebuilding, providing security to at first limited areas, providing medical facilities to the population and providing jobs and education. You can only hope to gradually extend your sphere of influence as you clear, secure, and rebuild a few areas at a time.
You have to be constantly on your guard to combat corruption among your own people and the local population as large sums of money are being spend in an environment where accounting controls may be difficult to implement. Wide spread corruption can easily destroy your best efforts at rebuilding.
It is a very long term resource demanding operation. You must have an excellent understanding and appreciation of the local culture and traditions to stand any chance at all of eventually being successful. In Afghanistan and Iraq the “culture gap” is an issue that collation forces are having a great deal of difficulty coping with.
You must build enough trust so that the population believes you will be permanently behind the government you support. You have to absolutely convince the population that you can and will provide them with more security and a better life than that offered by your adversary. If the population sees you as being only a short term influence that will soon be on your way leaving them to fend for themselves you lose.
Occupying armies of any nation are not known for their sensitivity in dealing with large populations of largely hostile folks. A lot of patience is involved. As Americans are not known for their patience it is doubtful that America will want to stay on an expensive uncertain course for ten or more years.
The big question is “What are we fighting for? Unless the fight is truly a matter of grave national interest perhaps the expenditure in blood, money, and other resources necessary to fight and win against an insurgency in a far away land just isn’t justified by any result that can possibly be achieved.
Stacking up bodies to the moon will not win an insurgency. Surely by now there are at least a hand full of Nato, British, and America generals and politicians who know this.
When will they speak out?
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