Afghan forces. Green-on-blue attacks. The solution. Split up the Afghan green force into two distinct forces - a national Afghan army which Afghans pay for and is commanded by the Afghan president and whichever general he/she wants to appoint. (“dark green”) a NATO-ISAF auxiliary force of Afghans and others, funded by the US and other NATO countries and international donors. This would be commanded by our generals. (“light green”) The Afghan National Army, the "green" force is rotten, if not to its core then to much of the periphery. Some of the green is more like gangrene (gan-green, get it! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ) The problem I see is in the disconnect between the political control (Karzai) and the funding (mostly from the USA but anyway internationally funded). Karzai as the "duly" (ahem) elected president of Afghanistan is perfectly entitled to run an Afghan national army but Afghans should pay for that themselves. Afghanistan is a poor nation and could not afford that much of an army but if they paid for it themselves, at least the Afghan national army would likely be honest, accountable to Afghans and take on limited tasks - secure the presidential palace, military headquarters and might be up to defending the capital Kabul and surrounding land, maybe. Now the issue is this - to secure all of Afghanistan, even to secure our supply routes, we need lots of troops and it makes sense to have some kind of Afghan force to help us - but we need a bigger and better green force than the Afghans can afford to pay for. (Also why would a national Afghan force want to prioritise defending our supply routes? They wouldn't want to.) So the West, NATO needs to pay for some green Afghan forces - that's a good idea, if, if, if, if and only if, those green forces we are paying for are auxiliary to NATO-ISAF - run by NATO-ISAF - under the control of a NATO general, maybe an American general if you could find a good one to do it. That way we would only recruit capable Afghans into the green force we pay for and interact with daily. We'd be sure our green troops were loyal - wouldn't shoot our blue troops. No way would we have any incentive to spend our own money on disloyal incapable Afghans in green uniform so we would not do it, if we had political and military control over our green forces, which we would have if they were called "The NATO-ISAF Afghan auxiliary force" - with no pretence of them being an Afghan national force under Karzai. However, some idiot has come up with the idea of paying Afghans to have an army funded by us but controlled by Karzai so there is no accountability. The people in charge, deciding who to recruit, can recruit bad soldiers because they get paid more by the US for soldiers, whether they be bad soldiers or not. Why wouldn't Karzai and this guy Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Lt. Gen. Sher Mohammad Karim, Commander of the Afghan National Army recruit junkies, thieves, murderers and agents for the Taliban into the Afghan National Army? Why wouldn't they recruit anybody they can find into the Afghan national army if, for every soldier they can name, they get paid more US dollars? Where's the incentive for Karzai and Karim to recruit only good soldiers? There isn't any incentive at all. Again the US ends up funding corruption. If a green soldier kills a blue then who gets held responsible in the chain of command? Nobody gets held responsible. Who should get held responsible? The US and NATO should. We should blame ourselves for paying anything for an army which we do not have any political control over. What on earth does Panetta (and what did Gates before him) think he is (was) doing trusting this guy Karzai and his general Karim with billions of US tax-payer dollars to pay for a green army? Why are NATO defence ministers happy with the poor leadership from NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis? Shouldn't the NATO leaders have spotted this fatal flaw in green troop organisation and tried to re-organise green forces as I suggest here, if they know what they are doing (which they don't)? The competent answer to green on blue attacks is to split up the Afghan army into two distinct forces - a national Afghan army which Afghans pay for and is commanded by the Afghan president and whichever general he/she wants to appoint. (dark green) a NATO-ISAF auxiliary force of Afghans, funded by the US and other NATO counties and international donors. This would be commanded by our generals. (light green) So there should be two green armies - each of a different shade of green. Karzai's dark green he would use to defend himself and his capital. Our light green we would use to defend our supply routes and to support our operations in Afghanistan generally. Only when the Afghan economy had grown to the point that they could afford to pay for a big enough army to defend the whole country would we transfer our light green army over to Afghan national control and then we could leave Afghanistan in the hands of Afghans. So long as we are paying for an Afghan force we must retain political control over it otherwise it fuels corruption and does little or nothing to help to fight the enemy we are trying to defeat and the green-on-blue attacks simply undermine political support for the whole Afghanistan / Pakistan mission.
You've got to be kidding. We are about to leave, not scale up the mission to that degree. It's as if your solution to gang violence would be to put 10 cops on every street in the city. Yes, it would probably reduce crime, but it's impractical.
No I'm not but you've got to misunderstand something if you think I am kidding. End of combat mission in 2014 and drawing down, sure. I'd be surprised if all NATO troops are leaving though. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a NATO military base or two left in Afghanistan after 2014 even under present plans. I mean it is not as if the Taliban are defeated yet. It is not as if the Pakistani ISI have stopped funding and hosting the Taliban and other terrorists. There's still a threat from that area that we haven't crushed yet. It's not over, even though yes the bulk of our troops are drawing down, as per the president's orders. That's a given. The issue is how do we make the mission a success given the president's order to end the combat mission by 2014? It's not easy but my plan is our best hope. It not a "scale up" it's a different plan, of the same scale, for what we do while we are there, is all. It not more troops, it's not more money, it's just doing different things with the same money and mostly the same troops but troops hired by us using our money not troops hired by Karzai using our money. Not "every street". My plan calls for 40 men per mile, so that's enough for 4 one-mile long streets 10 cops on each. But cities have lots of streets so I think you are exaggerating. I think comparing my plan with streets is a bit confusing. It's fairer to compare the number of police in a big city with the number of troops my plan needs. Take a big city like New York - that has 35,000 NYPD cops. Using the same number (35,000) of infantry my plan could secure 875 miles of Afghanistan's roads which is a very useful length of secure route and would take you from one side of the country to the other and some to spare no problem. Two big cities worth of cops - 70,000 would be more than is needed to man the routes shown in this map. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And look these are troops that are being paid for anyway. Karzai is getting international aid money for his 200,000 to 300,000 or so Afghan National Army troops of questionable quality. My plan is just spending that money that is already been spent differently and more effectively for our purposes. If it is practical for our governments to give lots of money to Karzai for the ANA it is equally practical to spend the same money more wisely, right? Not forgetting the $2 billion per year the US could save by stopping giving aid money to Pakistan while it is a state sponsor of terrorism. That $2 bn/yr could be used more usefully to win the war on terror, such as to fund fortifications to defend Afghanistan's main roads. What's "impractical" about that?
I don't see how you could do that with the same number of troops. You are either spreading the existing ones out, or adding more of them, neither of which is practical. I see thousands of miles of roads on that map. Even one thousand miles is 40,000 troops.
Well first let's get you a bigger version of that map so you can see the legend or scale. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! So I was talking about the length of routes illustrated by the thick coloured lines I have hand drawn on top of the map. Most of the coloured lines are about 400 mile routes. Red - 400, Blue - 400, Purple - 400, Green - 400, Yellow - 100. So that's maybe about a total of about 1700 miles which at 40 men per mile is 68,000 men for the infantry requirements. Of course you have got support troops on top of that but take the money that's paying for Karzai's 200,000 to 300,000 troops and there should be enough I would think to protect that sort of length of route no problem. I haven't worked out the lengths with any precision because these are imaginary routes just dreamed up by me in 20 minutes as I was pondering what a railway network for Afghanistan might run to length-wise approximately. So something like that could be the basic network then supposing the Afghan government or a business partner wanted to add on a length of secure route for a project in Afghanistan and wanted the same security as the main supply route then the supply route protection force could quote them for how much for say another 100 miles tacked on. Or supposing money was short and NATO only really wanted to build the purple and red routes then it's only 800 miles so you only need 32,000 infantry. I'm not sure where you get "thousands of miles" from?
I don't think it's "unspeakable cruelty". Simply different cultures different values different values. Adults who should speak of international matters should have minds wide enough for international matters. The lady who speaks in the video simply represents the minority in that country. The majority agrees with that lady being killed. Which is why she's in her office and they're out in the streets.
You need to be smart and efficient to exterminate. If you walk into a room that has cockroaches, once you turn on the light and enter the room, the roaches scatter and hide. They will remain hidden until you leave, with a few stragglers remaining. The Taliban will not come out from hiding in numbers, until we leave. They will scatter and hide as long as we are in the room. The trick is extermination 1.01. You need to bait and time it, so when the roaches come out to feast, you exterminate. I would set the stage to leave in a time of apparent instability, with a forming power vacuum. This is the perfect staged lure to get the roaches to come out in numbers to fill in the easy void. They want this power and will not be able to resist. When they appear in force, you fumigate. I would not do this to soldiers who follow the rules of warring sportsmanship. Once soldiers target innocent civilians (beyond unintentional friendly fire) and break the code of warriors, they gain cockroach status. Fumigation is on the table. One cool way would be a Trojan Horse. Where the horse (hidden personnel) is there waiting after we say all are gone. You can sort of predict where the roaches will eat first and out flank them. This will not occur because war is big business and extending it against a smaller opponent needs you to help the roaches by feeding them. Peace means loss of revenue.
...or in more formal terms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_convention This is why we are having such a tough time fighting the enemy, we live by the Geneva Convention, and others do not. In other words, we TRY to play as fair as possible, but others exploit that weakness.
The problem is that country is there has been no real country, its just tribes. No basis for a culture that we know in west, so its hard for america to target them and change them, when they have nout to lose. I can see why they say that country was a death for great powers, as its basic ways really eat into what those countries coming in try to do. To start a country from scratch like what they are doing there is very hard. Obviously america will never leave, but its going to take along time. People do not know for the most part what makes society in west, but it took us centuries. So changing that country who knows, even though america has lots of mind control techs, you see there basic ways hinder all this. America thrives on changing countries into sex mad societies. I seriously doubt that ploy will work there lol
They already have society and culture, they just don't have state organization, a somewhat recent invention that may not prove to be durable.
Again we must not forget that the Taliban are proxy agents for the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. Now Pakistan is a state. It has nuclear weapons. We are not fighting only primitive tribespeople when we fight the Taliban. We are fighting a state, state which gets paid $2 billion a year from the US. The Taliban are paid by the ISI. The Taliban take their orders from the ISI. The Taliban kill for the ISI, they fight wars against our troops for the ISI. The ISI is a state military intelligence agency. This war we are fighting is 100% a war against a state - the Pakistani state - a state which we are funding at the same time we are fighting its secret agents. Watch this to understand. Really you must not be as misdirected as a 3 or 4 year old watching a Punch and Judy puppet show and thinking the puppets have a life of their own and it is not just the puppeteer. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! http://www.puppetonline.co.uk/pics/punch-and-judy.jpg The puppets are not alive, OK? It's the puppeteer inside the booth that is really alive. Likewise the Taliban are just puppets for the ISI, the Pakistani state. Without the Pakistani state and other state-sponsors keeping their organisation running, the Taliban would be as limp and feeble a fighting-force as a puppet without the puppeteer. Understand?
Just how powerful will the organization get when we are fighting an outright conventional war in Pakistan? Jihadists will come from everywhere to take part. I think you have zero experience in counter terrorism.
Excellent videos, Peter. It's unfortunate that we must deal with Pakistan, and I will be happy when we end our involvement in Afghanistan.
I do not propose a full-scale invasion of Pakistan with NATO ground forces but rather the use of air-power with the occasional special forces raid like the one to get Bin Laden. So it would not be like our Afghanistan nor Iraq invasions; much more like Libya - where our war against Gaddafi was an air-power war for the most part. The main threat to air-power operations over Pakistan comes from the Pakistani military air defences. No doubt the Pakistani state could give ground-to-air missiles to the Taliban and they could afford to as well if the US foolishly keeps funding Pakistan aid money to the tune of $2 billion per year. Saudi Arabia or Iran could also provide ground-to-air missiles to the Taliban. However it is a big decision for Pakistan to use its official air-defences against NATO because NATO would then have to take out those Pakistani air defences. The better strategy for the Pakistani military is not to confront NATO officially; to keep out of our war against the Taliban and the Pakistani ISI, military intelligence agency who have been supporting the Taliban. So great care must be taken if we are to distinguish between different elements in the Pakistani state, seek to split them into friend and foe. It may not work but my plan is the best chance to keep this war at the lowest level of intensity possible (yet still win). To answer "just how powerful will the organisation" facing us in Pakistan get? The Pakistani state has nuclear weapons. Potentially, it is a powerful enemy, but NATO is more powerful and Pakistan would lose a nuclear war with the West, so best not start one. Therefore you should be able to understand that more jihadists on the ground in Pakistan are simply more targets to hit. They do not pose a significant threat to our air power, acknowledging that ground-to-air missiles are a threat in anybody's hands to low flying aircraft, sure. But these missiles are expensive so once again it depends on which states are buying missiles for the jihadists - Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran - and what military action or anti-satellite TV action, will we take to prosecute regime-change against any state which supplies expensive, sophisticated ground-to-air missiles to the Taliban. It all comes back to dealing with the fact that the true enemy behind the jihadists are the state sponsors and we need to face that fact. It's simply no good muttering and burying your head in a counter-insurgency manual when the enemy is states with nuclear weapons and vast oil wealth. Don't bury your head in the sand like an ostrich. Man up. Straighten up that back-bone. This is war. This is not policing, heavy.
There's always another "Teliban" waiting to emerge once this one is removed, if it ever is. It seems that no matter how many times you put out the fires of terrorism others seem to emerge into existence almost overnight. There's always someone wanting to take control over countries other than those who were elected because they have no power or control over those that have the power so they choose to fight against whoever is in power at the time. I have always thought that many terrorists are actually being paid under the table by those in charge just to have someone they can say they need to fight to keep those in power, in power.
The US does not have to give Pakistan $2 billion a year in aid. It does not. No, it doesn't! We are only ever obligated to give aid to real friends, our genuine allies and never obligated to pay those who claim they are our friends to our face but who are secretly betraying us behind our backs. When you pay money to an enemy out of fear what worse he might do, it is called "a protection racket". It is absurd for the US and allies to pay a protection racket to a foe which is much weaker than us. It is a like a city police force paying protection money to a gangster when the gangster could easily be arrested instead. It's absurd. It's perverse. It's idiotic. It's bad politics. So quit paying Pakistan. Period. Full stop. If after this war, our friends in Pakistan win out and Pakistan becomes fully under the control of a responsible democratic government which eliminates our terror-sponsoring enemies within the Pakistani state then we can revisit the aid issue. Not before.
Peter, We are buying access to Afghanistan through Pakistan airspace and Pakistan supply routes. As long as we wage war in Afghanistan, we are tied to Pakistan. Once we leave that frickin' hole of a country, we can also discard Pakistan. It a sad situation.
Well the Taliban hasn't been removed yet. The Taliban didn't just "emerge", it was set up by the Pakistani state military intelligence agency, the ISI. Of course, if you had bothered to watch these videos, you'd know that.
