Afghanistan decision time:
The President is at the point of making a critical decision concering the direction of the war in Afghanistan. There have been hundreds of opinions flooding the media recently. This is my insgiht, which I gained from my conversations with a Special Forces soldier who spent a year on the ground, and from my living in a similar Muslim country.
Point one: Conventional warfare has alway been a failure in Afghanistan. It would be unrealistic to think we could do better than the Russians or the Brits or any of the others that have tried to control the country over the past 500 years. With that in mind, I think we should fight this war differently than any war we have ever fought. The key is to beat the Taliban at their own game. We can do this by emphaizing the use of Special Forces. We should immediately began to replace the conventional NATO troops with Special Operation troops and any new troops should be strictly Special Force. In addtion, these 12 man Special Forces’s teams should be given broad authority to conduct their opperations and not be subject to any red tape that would hinder them. The second part of the solution is to fill the skys with drones, pull back our convertional forces into the major cities, and let the Afghan troops take charge of their country. As the Special Forces teams increase there should be a withdrawal of convential forces.
If the Afghan troops can’t control the countryside, then, with the combination of drones and NATO Special Operation troops, we can prevent al-Qaida from ever establishing control over the country.
If we follow this plan, in five years we could stablize the country and withdraw 90% of our conventional forces.
We can win in Afghanistan.
