Matt Zeitlin

The Economist limns General Stanley McChrystal’s “counterinsurgency guidance for Afghanistan.” The  annoymous blogger finds that McChrystal has very high expectations for what the military should and can do in Afghanistan:

One interesting angle that the guidance suggests is that the Army may be thinking that it cannot rely on the promised surge of civilian aid professionals; it has to do the job itself. This may be true. Afghanistan is in the middle of a war. Development workers go into their field to help the world’s poor. They don’t go into it to risk getting killed. Soldiers, on the other hand, do go into their field knowing that they risk getting killed. A familiar insurgent tactic is to assassinate development workers and wait for a clumsy military response, which they can evade. That is insurgents’ territory of strength. Insurgents are much more reluctant to attack military forces head-on; that is their territory of weakness. The COIN guidance proposes that the military forces become the development workers. If insurgents want to attack the development workers, they then have to attack military forces head-on. It might work. It depends on instilling a new ethic amongst American soldiers. Their job is no longer mainly to risk their lives trying to kill the enemy. Their job is mainly to risk their lives trying to fix the local irrigation system. It’s a concept. A little hippie-ish. But a concept.

This strikes me as a huge problem. In the development and diplomatic communities, where we’d expect there to be the most people trained and ready to this type of development and diplomatic work, there aren’t really enough people who have the technical, linguistic and cultural skills to do so. Are we expect that combat troops — who, after all, are primarily trained in combat — to do any better? This is not to say that these type of counter-insurgent skills, and the overall mindset that population protection is an important military tactic, are not spreading throughout the military, but still, it seems to be putting a whole lot out of soldiers to also expect them to be diplomats and development workers.

This is hardly an original observation, but perhaps the high expectations McChrystal has for soldiers shows that counterinsurgency is actually incredibly difficult, especially if you don’t want to do it by traditional means — which essentially means making civilians pay the price for having insurgents in their midst — and that the US should, in general, avoid getting itself involved in such situations.