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AFGHANISTAN

As Goes Afghanistan ...
THOMAS HENRIKSEN

The outcome of the Afghanistan strategy debate within Barack Obama's administration will carry deep consequences for the fight against terrorist-based insurgencies around the world. The current U.S. counterinsurgency effort in the Central Asian country is similar to anti-insurgent campaigns elsewhere. What impacts one, therefore, is likely to affect others. If President Obama abandons counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, it will be difficult for it to be applied elsewhere despite many successes.

Army General Stanley McChrystal, the overall U.S. and NATO commander, requested 40,000 additional American troops to conduct a population-centric counterinsurgency campaign. Although the McChrystai counterinsurgency strategy is rooted in specific cases in U.S. military history. its most recent success came late in the Iraq War....

Lifting a page from the Iraq counterinsurgency campaign, Gen. McChrystal is implementing what has come to be regarded as a classical counterinsurgency. His plans entail protecting the local Afghans from Taliban terrorism, expanding Afghanistan's army and police, and providing modest economic development and jobs
to villagers so they will provide intelligence and recruits for the security forces, and take up a better life without the Taliban ....

If Washington ditches its counterinsurgency course here, it will deliver a blow to similar U.S. and Western counterinsurgency doctrines worldwide. Counterinsurgency tactics have been successful in keeping the lid on budding low-intensity conflicts around the world. Compared to conventional wars they are low-budget and
low- or no-U.S. casualty affairs. The U.S. supplies training, equipment, arms, guidance and financial support. But indigenous forces take the lead in combating terrorists and insurgents and in creating better societies with less neglect of marginalized groups who often provide recruits for terrorism. Allowing the domestic security forces to take the credit, U.S. special operations forces help in refurbishing mosques, building schools, digging wells and staffing medical and veterinary clinics.

Currently, the United States has about 600 Special Operations Forces in the Mindanao, a southern island in the Philippine archipelago. These troops and others assist the Armed Forces of the Philippines in combatting Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist movement founded, in part, by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a violent separatist group .... Without ... American military and financial help, the radical movements would have carved out sanctuaries, breeding terrorists to threaten the United States.

On the other side of the globe in the Horn of Africa, the Pentagon stood up a command structure just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Operating out of a former French military post in Djibouti, some 1,800 U.S. troops conduct lethal attacks on such wanted terrorists as Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was killed by helicopterborne
missiles in Somalia last month .... American forces also perform much non-lethal work in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Djibouti to pre-empt insurgencies from developing.

Across the Gulf of Aden, U.S. special forces are training Yemen's troops in counterinsurgency tactics to arrest a spreading insurgency in the country's northern belt ,along the border with Saudi Arabia. In Pakistan, American forces are engaged in training missions to help the Pakistani military confront a series of Taliban
insurgent movements in the nation's northern zones. In these countries, as well as others, the Pentagon has deployed small U.S. units to train local armies in counterinsurgency techniques similar to those being instituted in Afghanistan.

The units' success is due to skill and the low-visibility of their presence. They also demonstrate that the McChrystal strategy will work, once enough troops are in place to reduce the rural violence allowing the non-lethal efforts to take roo!. Pulling the rug out from the U.S. counterinsurgency in Afghanistan would, in time,
lead to the jettisoning of similar anti-insurgent programs .... By backing a winning counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the United States will go a long way in defeating militant insurgents around the world.

(Thomas Henriksen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the U.S. Joint Special Operations University. National Post, November 03, 2009)

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