24.Dec.2009 at 24 | David Ucko
U.S. COIN ops in the Arghandab river valley
Sean Naylor has a lengthy piece in the Army Times on the conduct of counterinsurgency operations in the Arghandab River Valley, Afghanistan. The piece is extremely interesting because it hints at the lack of agreement across rank as to what counterinsurgency entails or should look like. In this case, you have a very negative bottom-up reaction from the company level to the approach taken by the brigade commander, who apparently foreswears FM 3-24.2 in favour of the much more coercive or ‘enemy-centered’ 1980s’ counter-guerrilla doctrine. The O-6 in this instance sees a heavy-handed approach focusing on the enemy as a necessary precursor to reaching out to the population; the O-3 and his unit think basic COIN principles are being ignored and that the brigade-level clearing operations are achieving little other than more U.S. casualties:
“The ‘clear, hold, build’ thing that we’re supposed to be doing … we’re not doing that,” Hughes said. “If any commander in this brigade goes to sleep at night thinking after we’ve walked through that orchard over there that it’s clear, he’s a f—— idiot.”
As the article explains, the split culminated in the early replacement of Capt. Joel Kassulke and a later change of mission for the entire company. Those events are described as terrible blows to the unit’s morale.
More broadly, this is another article describing U.S. military difficulties in conducting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which again makes me wonder what happened to the COIN savvy on the part of the U.S. military that we saw during the so-called ’surge’ in Iraq. Are more positive accounts of operations in Afghanistan simply not being written about, have I not seen them, or did the operational learning in Iraq somehow dissipate as the focus shifted to Afghanistan? It should be mentioned that the battalion in the article (1/17) trained for Iraq before then being deployed to Afghanistan and it is clearly not as if the operational environment in the two theatres are the same. Nonetheless it seems to me that some of the fundamentals have been lost: whereas reports abounded of commanders at all levels in Iraq who understood counterinsurgency, I am getting almost the polar opposite impression when reading about Afghanistan.
