You want to keep friends loyal (by rewarding and protecting them--from the enemy or your own firepower), push neutrals into friendly status with carrots and sticks, and move enemies into neutral status with bribes and threats of inevitable death as you pursue them and kill them. If you can push someone from enemy to friendly in one flip, so much the better. But the point is that there is a continuum of local attitudes that you have to work on and push in your favor. Keep doing this, and eventually you run out of enemies--you win the war. Then you have to win the peace, of course, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
So this report is heartening even though so much of the conventional wisdom wrongly assumes we are losing in Afghanistan:
Success in Afghanistan is beginning to come in the first muddy trickles after a long drought.
Small groups of Taliban fighters -- sometimes a dozen with a leader -- are approaching local Afghan government officials, asking what kind of deal they might get. "First, they want to be taken off any list, so they are not targeted," explains a NATO official in Afghanistan. "Second, they want protection from the insurgency. Third, some kind of economic opportunity."
In counterinsurgency doctrine, this is known as "reintegration." The official admits it is "spotty" in Afghanistan but spreading in all regions. "It is happening in small numbers -- drip, drip, drip. It has not yet changed the battle space. . . . It is not a tipping point, at this point." The goal is to push these numbers much higher, with more insurgents driven to negotiation and exhaustion, so they "put down their weapons and go home."
Many Americans ask: What would victory look like in Afghanistan? It would look like this -- except more of it.
Just choose to win rather than lose. That's step one, anyway. Then make sure everyone in Afghanistan knows we will stay long enough to win. And then win, of course.
