Search and Avoid

They call it stormy Monday,
but Tuesday's just as bad
Wednesday's worse,
and Thursday's also sad
--Stormy Monday, T-Bone Walker

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Global Post's Matt Steinglass wrote a two-part article last month on the "Lessons of Vietnam," and how Afghanistan fails to apply those lessons.

"In Vietnam, American officers trained to fight conventional armies could not adjust to a war where villages welcomed government troops by day and Viet Cong guerrillas by night, where the ARVN troops they fought alongside were not necessarily loyal to their own government, and where the real battlefield lay in the hearts and minds of the people they were supposedly there to defend."

The Big Lie of Counterinsurgency doctrine [COIN] is that the U.S. engages in nasty little wars to win the hearts and minds of people we do not even like. U.S. troops in Vietnam neither liked nor cared about the Vietnamese or their hearts and minds. The name of the game is killing and surviving.

Lesson #1 from Vietnam should be: Think before you act! Ask -- What is the purpose and what is the cost of success, and also, of failure.

"With a surge of 17,000 additional U.S. troops underway in Afghanistan, the Pentagon is making hard choices about how to go about building an Afghan government that has popular legitimacy and can defend itself against Taliban guerrillas."

Using this yardstick, we will never reach a clear and decisive conclusion the the Afghan war. The Pentagon is not expert in building countries; quite the opposite. U.S. Department of Defense assets destroy countries.

Retired NVA Col. Nguyen Huu Nguyen warns, “If the U.S. builds up its forces in Afghanistan it will probably sink deeper into a quagmire,” a statement with which Central Command Chief Gen. David H. Petraeus disagrees. And of course he does, because his next promotion depends upon the hat trick that Afghanistan be pawned off as a success.

Petraeus is described as "one of a cadre of warrior scholars who pushed the U.S. Army to relearn how to fight [COIN]. The new counterinsurgency thinkers included promising younger officers such as Col. H.R. McMaster and Col. John Nagl (now retired)." If LTC Nagl was such a promising young officer, why did the system allow him to fade away? Perhaps because he could not countenance his scholarship being co-opted into a lie?

It was only in 1967, and increasingly after the Tet Offensive in 1968, that the U.S. turned to a strategy of pacification and counterinsurgency, known as “clear and hold.” When it did, it was successful, according to these counterinsurgency reformers. By 1971, the Viet Cong had almost entirely lost its hold on South Vietnam’s countryside. But the U.S. then retreated from Vietnam, and the ARVN was finally outmatched in a main-force struggle against the invading NVA in 1975.

The Republic of Vietnam's Army was never outmatched. It was outfought and out-generaled. The ARVN was fully equipped and trained to defend against NVA operations, but the officers failed to synergistically employ their assets.

Another failure was that former tactics employing vast firepower were no longer available due to U.S. cutbacks in funding and logistics.

The RVN had one of the largest Air Force's in the world, but they failed to employ these assets for anything much besides personal escape vehicles to fly to freedom. the U.S. can clear and hold all day long but in the end, if the indigenous do not fight, then it is all a joke. The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is yet another example.

Creating military-type police forces and western-style armies will not ever lead to a successful COIN methodology. The problems of Afghanistan, Iraq and RVN can never be solved by adding more violence to an already violent environment.

Special Forces said in VN, "If you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." the same is true if you put them in the ground, but this leaves the original question unanswered: Why are we there, anyway?

If combating terrorism is the goal, why do we care about winning their hearts and minds? Just eliminate the threat and drive on. All lessons type articles on COIN focus on the "how" rather than the "why".

However, if the "why" is not legit, then the "how" is an academic exercise in futility.