Despite battlefield gains against insurgents in southern Afghanistan, the United States is failing to win over Afghans in the heartland of the Taliban, a new study shows.
Almost 90 percent of men polled in contested districts in southern Afghanistan believe foreign military operations are bad for them, according to research by the International Council on Security and Development, or ICOS.
But Steve Biddle, writing on the Web site of the [U.S.] Council on Foreign Relations, reads this research differently:
The purpose is not to win by making the locals like you, as the bumper sticker seems to imply. The purpose is to replace insurgent control of the population with government control of the population. This normally requires combat to clear insurgents from the area and defeat their efforts to return. Combat in populated areas is always unpopular with resident civilians. Whatever else they want from life, civilians want to survive. And combat in populated areas always kills innocent civilians as a byproduct of the effort to kill insurgents. Before the government offensive, there is usually little violence–when insurgents control the area they don’t need to kill people. Then the government launches an offensive to clear the insurgent presence, and there is a lot of violence, with inevitable damage to civilian property and deaths of innocent people. When asked, as ICOS did, civilians normally prefer insurgent control and calm over a war amongst their homes and families that might get them killed. Once the government establishes real, persistent control, the preference returns to calm and safety over combat and danger, but this now favors the government over the insurgency.
(This is not unique to COIN, by the way. The population of Normandy was not happy when the Allies invaded in 1944. Most preferred calm and German occupation over destruction of their homes and livelihoods, chaos, and the risk of death for themselves and their families, even in exchange for freedom from the unwelcome Germans. Survival tends to outweigh other considerations in wartime among directly threatened civilians.)
Meanwhile, the Taliban have taken its propaganda war — aimed at winning hearts and minds — to a new theatre: Twitter and Facebook. The Taliban tweeted this earlier today:
Not sure — in fact, pretty sure — this is not true. Spin Boldak is well south of Kandahar, where most Canadian Forces personnel and assets are, right on the border with Pakistan. We have no reports in Ottawa that Canadian armour was operating near there today and I can find no independent reports of NATO activities there today.
There's a bit of public source evidence that at least some of the reports link up to actual events, but only the CF (or other militaries tracking the statements) would know for sure – and I doubt they'd tell. Some other possibilities:
1) incident may have happened, but with no dead (therefore not likely to be reported by Canadian authorities); or
2) incident may have happened to a non-Canadian vehicle, but is attributed to Canadians.
Also, the Taliban's been on Twitter for since before this past Christmas (and its web pages – Pashto, Arabic and English – have for years had buttons to click to tweet various claims). It's only been a few weeks that it's been tweeting in English.
Finally, since late 2008, the Taliban has claimed ~14 or so Canadians killed for every one that actually has been – a bit more on that here: http://scr.bi/mPAFMw