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The commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, US Army General Stanley McChrystal, says the American military now understands counterinsurgency better than it ever has, and has made it a centerpiece of the new Afghanistan strategy. Reporter Ben Gilbert has been embedded with American forces in Afghanistan. On today’s show he is taking a look at how the counterinsurgency doctrine is being implemented on the ground in Afghanistan. (Photo: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images)
- Background brief:Taliban insurgency
- President Obama’s Afghanistan plan
- BBC coverage of the Afghanistan conflict
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. President Obama unveiled his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan this month as the insurgency was getting stronger and public support for the war was getting weaker. Still the President promised to send 30,000 more troops. The administration says the success of their mission will be measured less by how many militants are killed than by how many civilians are protected. But the US troops in Afghanistan were trained to be warriors, not peacekeepers. Ben Gilbert is embedded with the US led International Military Mission’s Task Force Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
BEN GILBERT: Soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment expected some serious combat when they heard they were going to the violent Taliban stronghold of Zari district, west of Kandahar. It’s what they’d been trained for, but it’s not what they got, according to Lt. Reed Peeples, a platoon leader in the 1-12’s Dog Company.
REED PEEPLES: The enemy’s there but they don’t shoot at you, they won’t engage you, and it’s frustrating for the guys because they had just kind of a lot of people had it in their heads they had this idea of this mythic like Afghan fighters who are, you know the guys fought the Soviets and you know everybody else and we’re going to come out here and duke it out every day and then the reality of it is, that it’s a lot more building, maintaining relationships, than fighting.
GILBERT: Lt. Peeples was building and maintaining relationships on a recent patrol through the village of Sanjaray. He and his platoon were walking down streets barely wide enough for a pickup truck. Ten-foot high mud walls flanked them on both sides. Lt. Peeples was leading a presence patrol to show villagers that the Taliban aren’t the only game in town any more. Then Peeples walked up to five turbaned men at a street corner and introduced himself through an interpreter.
PEEPLES: We’re foreigners. We don’t know who the good guys are. We don’t know who the bad guys are. And so for us to provide help, provide security to you guys, we need your help and we need help with the people in order to let us know what your concerns are so that we can work with the police and the army to fix them.
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GILBERT: The men nodded. They said security is good, but they weren’t especially engaging, but they weren’t rude either. What Peeples was doing was part of the new counterinsurgency doctrine that’s being implemented in Afghanistan. The idea is to protect the local population. Peeples has a good sense for it. He volunteered for two years in the Peace Corps in nearby Kurdistan. So he knows how to talk with local Afghans. But few of Peeple’s men have much training in counterinsurgency. Private 1st Class Aurelio Reese says he and his fellow soldiers are learning it as they go.
AURELIO REESE: I believe, my opinion that most of us are pretty much winging it half the time, try to compensate for the differences of how we usually operate.
GILBERT: What are the differences?
REESE: The differences? Well they have to do a lot more to us than we usually would like, take Iraq for instance. Just little things would escalate to violence. And here we have to, we have to take a little bit more from the people.
GILBERT: Reese’s friend, Private 1st Class Andrew Jay is on his first deployment. He says this isn’t what he and the members of his platoon prepared for.
ANDREW JAY: It seems as, you know from basic training and this you know one shot one kill mindset, and coming here, it’s more of like we’re peacekeepers almost, international police officers. You know we can’t do a whole lot.
DANIEL ESCAMILLA: Counterinsurgency, get rid of the bad guys.
GILBERT: Staff Sergeant Daniel Escamilla has been in the Army for 13 years. He says he’s not used to being a policeman and he’d rather play a little rougher.
ESCAMILLA: Get rid of anybody that’s working with the insurgents. And I’m not saying kill them all, what I’m saying is get them out of here. Throw them in jail. Do what needs to be done with criminals. Being a cop, that’s not me. What we do need to do is get aggressive with them, flush them out, and let these guys know that we’re going to go after the Taliban and we’re going to be proactive instead of reactive. Because we’re doing a lot of reactive stuff right now.
GILBERT: Sergeant Escamilla deals with not being able to be more aggressive, by hitting the gym more these days. Dog Company’s commander, Captain Thomas Lamb admits his troops get frustrated.
THOMAS LAMB: It’s hard. I mean you know our soldiers, once they see a difference, that’s the big thing is just I mean, fruits of your labor, you know. If you’re doing a puzzle like one piece of it and another guy’s doing another piece, you don’t see the fruits until all of those pieces come back together and you see what you just made.
GILBERT: Captain Lamb says his soldiers joined the Army for action. And most of what they do in counter insurgency is zero action. Lamb says that’s boring but that’s okay.
LAMB: In my mind the more boring the better.
GILBERT: On the other hand Lt. Peeples warns about complacency. Troops who go months without a firefight could drop their guard; that could prove disastrous if they were attacked. So he says his troops; mission in Afghanistan requires striking a balance between protecting the population and maintaining the ability to protect themselves. For The World I’m Ben Gilbert in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.
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