Still crazy?
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - 0 Comments
As we approach the four-year anniversary of Jack Layton saying that really crazy thing, General David Petraeus speaks with Fox News about the way forward in Afghanistan.
Karzai has offered a list of conditions Taliban fighters must meet to be a part of Afghanistan’s future — accept the constitution, lay down weapons, cut ties to Al Qaeda and become productive or participating members of society. If those “redlines” are met, Petraeus said he doesn’t see “why you would not support reconciliation.”
“We sat down across the table in Iraq from individuals who had our blood on their hands. That’s what was done in northern Ireland. It’s what’s done in just about any insurgency as you get to the end stages of it,” he said. “If there’s a willingness of those at the high-levels to do that, and they do indeed agree to the safeguards. … then certainly you would want to reconcile,” he said.
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Barack’s war
By John Parisella - Friday, October 9, 2009 at 12:09 PM - 12 Comments
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama insisted on a crucial distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan, he said, is a war of necessity, while Iraq is a war of choice. In doing so, Obama, who had wrestled the anti-war Democrats away from his candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, was being consistent with his positions following 9/11. He opposed the war in Iraq, but supported the decision to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. Since taking office, his administration has acted on both two fronts. On Iraq, it has adopted a policy which will essentially remove American troops from a combat role over the next two years, gaining the support of Republicans in the process. In the case of Afghanistan, Obama opted to move 16,000 troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan to combat al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors. That too obtained bipartisan support. Since then, conditions on the ground in Afghanistan have deteriorated significantly, to the point the administration is now divided on whether to send a major new influx of troops (in the vicinity of 40,000) to pursue the effort to keep the Taliban from recapturing power.
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How to beat an insurgency by killing fewer people (II)
By Michael Petrou - Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 11:57 PM - 5 Comments
My colleague Andrew Potter blogged a few weeks ago about Thomas Ricks’ new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. The book tells the story behind America’s strategic shift in Iraq – from one where the primary goal is defeating the enemy, to the current strategy which holds that the primary objective is winning over the population.
The man most responsible for this shift is David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq and later led its occupation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Here he sought to engage and protect the local population, rather than seeking out and destroying every last insurgent. The city was a rare success during the early days of America’s occupation of Iraq, but was swallowed up by the insurgency when Petraeus and the 101st left. Petraeus now heads U.S. Central Command and directs U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, where the United States is shifting its focus, and where Canadian soldiers have been fighting the Taliban for the last seven years.
Last June, Petraeus sent his commanders in Iraq a memo in which he outlines the tactics and philosophies he expects them to employ in a hearts-and-minds counter-insurgency campaign. This memo is included in the appendix of The Gamble, and I’ve recorded much of it below.
General Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s chief of the defence staff, shares Petraeus’s belief that beating an insurgency requires winning over the local population. He said as much in a recent speech. Still, I’d like to know how many of the tactics and strategies discussed by Petraeus are employed by Canadians in Afghanistan. Does the Canadian military have patrol bases and outposts in Kandahar city? How much time (especially overnight) do Canadian troops spend there versus back at the main base? Are Canadian soldiers living among the Afghans, or as, Petraeus would describe it, are they commuting to work? How many patrols are conducted on foot, versus from inside vehicles? How much, if any, of Kandahar city and province do the Canadian soldiers or their Afghan allies decisively control? Are they holding territory, or does their authority vanish when their patrol rolls away? Is the Canadian military working to peel away “reconcilable” insurgents from “irreconcilables”? In other words, are Canadian soldiers talking to the Taliban? How smooth are transitions from an outgoing group of soldiers to those who are just arriving? Are relationships that are built between locals and one deployment of Canadian troops carried over to the new arrivals?
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How to beat an insurgency by killing fewer people
By Michael Petrou - Monday, March 2, 2009 at 2:18 PM - 0 Comments
I wrote this article about tackling the Afghan insurgency for our website.
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More from Munich: Gen. Petraeus' no-spin zone
By Paul Wells - Monday, February 9, 2009 at 8:18 PM - 9 Comments
I believe David Petraeus’ speech at the weekend Munich Conference was by far the most important of the prepared remarks I heard. (There was a lot of fascinating stuff during the Q&A sessions afterward, which is not logged on the conference website, but Petraeus — in some ways more than Joe Biden — walked in with the most interesting, and certainly the most detailed, opening remarks.) What follows is actually less important than, for instance, the fairly detailed itemized list of additional battlefield resources the Obama administration will be seeking from its allies. But it kind of struck me as I listened back to the general’s speech. From the audio file:
We must also strive to be first with the truth. We need to beat the insurgents and extremists to the headlines and to pre-empt rumours. We can only do that by getting accurate information to the chain of command, to our Afghan partners, and to the press as soon as is possible. Integrity is critical to this fight. Thus, when situations are bad we should freely acknowledge that fact and avoid temptations to spin. Rather we should describe the setbacks and failures we suffer and then state what we’ve learned from them and how we’ll adjust to reduce the chances of similar events in the future.
