Bombing Our Chances of Success in Afghanistan
The Times reports that US Special Forces operations in Afghanistan, where small groups of soldiers with heavy air support engage Taliban fighters, are incurring the wrath of the local population, because the air strikes often incur collateral damage which makes locals unwilling to cooperate with US and British forces there:
Altogether, he said, 20 people were killed in the airstrikes after Taliban fighters came through the village. He figured that the planes had bombed them mistakenly, because the Taliban were fighting United States forces well below the village at the time.
He said that he opposed to the Taliban, but that after the bombing raid the villagers were so angered that most of the men who survived went off to join the insurgents. Whether people would support the foreign troops “depends on the behavior of ISAF,” Mohammadullah said, referring to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. “If they treat the civilians well, they will win.”
It is in fact the possibility of the population turning against them, or the unpopularity of the campaign back home, that most concerns the military, one NATO military official said. “We know we can beat the Taliban on the ground,” the official said. “The issue is the population.”
This is just bad, bad policy that even our own counterinsurgency manual warns against. This anecdote illustrates why air strikes really should be a counterinsurgency tool of last resort. The Taliban essentially wins a double victory whenever one of our errant bombs strikes an Afghan village. There is the large propaganda victory – the Taliban can say that the US doesn’t care about the lives of Afghan children, thus making locals less likely to support NATO forces fighting against them. As this article outlines, there is also the immediate victory in force numbers – if it is indeed common for villagers, after being bombed, to actually join the Taliban, then the Taliban will do all it can to invite the bombings. It can win the propaganda war while actually replenishing troops lost in the battles that incur the air strikes.
This brings up the larger question: why is the American offensive military presence in these parts of Afghanistan just a small contingent of special forces that calls in airstrikes whenever they engage the Taliban? I’m just shooting the breeze here, but perhaps we could afford to have higher troop concentrations, so when engaging insurgents they wouldn’t need to rely on airstrikes, in these parts of Afghanistan if they weren’t tied up elsewhere, like say, Iraq maybe?
