U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Cody Collins and Spc. Daniel Camino walk across a stream during a village assessment in Jalrez Valley, Wardak province, Afgahnistan, March 12, 2009. The soldiers, assigned to Company A, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, focus on assessing the villages, talking with local leaders and identifying needed projects. DoD photo by Fred W. Baker IIIFrom DoD Buzz:
The military is taking new ways of fighting, learned on Iraq’s battlefields, to Afghanistan. The new approach combines troops operating in distributed teams on the ground supported by vast numbers of aerial drones, satellites, precision weapons and spies working informants, according to Gen. David Petraeus.
“This is the answer,” the Central Command chief said before an overflow crowd yesterday at the annual CNAS conference in Washington, “This is how we fight, when we can, with all of the assets that we have.” While acknowledging that the rural and mountainous Afghan landscape is very different from Iraq’s concentrated urban battle zones, to counter the “Pashtun insurgency,” the military is trying to replicate the same operational approach that proved highly effective in battling a shadowy enemy in Iraq.
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My Comment: This sounds very good in theory, but in Iraq there were enough boots on the ground (after the surge) and a sizable part of the population supporting your cause. In Afghanistan, I do not see enough boots on the ground, and the Pashtun population ambivalent about NATO and the Afghan government at best. Afghanistan also has the world's worse narcotics problem, minimal infrastructure, and a culture of corruption that is unequal in the world (which is at times hard to believe).
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