Saturday, July 11, 2009
How to Win in Afghanistan
Quadrant Online:
[Video of Justin Kelly speaking at a Quadrant Dinner on “Winning in Afghanistan”]
Military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated.
—Clausewitz
General Sir Gerald Templar’s admonition during the Malayan Emergency that “the answer [to the insurgency] lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and the minds of the people” has echoed through the ensuing half-century and has become the basic precept on which counter-insurgency campaigns are—or apparently should be—designed. Nowadays, hardly a day passes in which some journalist or general is not reminding us that there is no military solution to the war in Afghanistan.[1] Echoing this proposition, in January 2009, the Secretary General of NATO argued that good governance “would suck the oxygen out of the insurgency”.[2] Similar statements were made about the war in Iraq; to argue against Bush’s 2007 “surge” of troops and to emphasise that here lay a “quagmire”—dreaded by all in the US Congress and the New York Times—from which immediate withdrawal was the only solution.
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My Comment: I am not as optimistic as Justin Kelly .... but his comments are definitely worth the time to read and analyze.
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1 comment:
I do agree that a new approach has to be taken on the war in Afghanistan, because the old one is clearly not working. However, I feel that if there is "no military solution" to the war in Afghanistan, why are we using soldiers to try and win the "hearts and minds" of the people in an counter-insurgency effort. I came across this video while searching about this topic that shows the positives and negatives of such an approach.
http://www.newsy.com/videos/afghanistan_same_war_different_strategy
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