General McChrystal says more troops are needed in Afghanistan. But the lesson of Iraq is that you have to win over the local population.
It’s not often that a serving general talks publicly about the prospect of defeat, but that’s exactly what General Stanley McChrystal, the US force commander in Afghanistan, has done.
His report, leaked to the Washington Post, makes bleak reading for those who would say that if only they had a few more troops all would be well.
“Focussing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely,” he writes. “The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.”
What it boils down to is more hearts and minds, less trying to kill the Taliban.
And he points up a very interesting issue: force protection. This is something we noticed when the American troops first arrived in Baghdad. Simply put, they killed Iraqi civilians rather than risk their own lives.
As a result scores of Iraqis were killed when they approached checkpoints simply because – at first – they didn’t know to get out of their cars and put their hands in the air.
I remember how our driver and fixer did indeed, as Dick Cheney predicted, see the Americans as liberators on Day One. But on Day Two we watched marines shoot at two carloads of Iraqis rather than theoretically risk exposing themselves by moving into the middle of the road with a notice in Arabic (not that they had a notice in Arabic) saying: No Entry.
The result: three dead and three wounded, including a five-year-old girl. Unsurprisingly, our Iraqi colleagues immediately changed their view of the Americans.
General McChrystal says US troops (and presumably other Nato forces as well) need to change their “operational culture”. I don’t know how easy that will be, especially in the one year time frame he’s given for reversing the “insurgent momentum”.
After eight years, it’s very hard for soldiers to see the local population as anything other than potential enemies, especially when every patrol runs the risk of improvised explosive devices. When soldiers are dying every day, of course they look with suspicion at those who around them who may be sheltering – willingly or unwillingly – those who are trying to kill them.
General McChrystal’s analysis is spot on. He seems to understand why so many Afghans are hostile to American soldiers. Yet I suspect he underestimates most Afghans’ over-arching suspicion of foreigners (especially those are occupying their country), and the wariness of his own troops.
He knows what’s gone wrong. But whether it’s really possible for a new strategy to put it right, well, that’s much more difficult.