Instpundit reports on an email from Michael Yon about Afghanistan:
US Marines are waging death and destruction on the Taliban in a way the Taliban are not used to. Average patrol finds 1 IED and kills 1 Taliban and they are going night and day.
From my distant view, I can never be sure if we are using the right level of violence (and to be honest, I don't even know what that level should be at any given time). Too little and we can't protect or control the people because the enemy is too strong. Let me quote a passage from A Better War about Vietnam that I used in this post:
George Jacobson, an "old hand" who altogether served eighteen years in Vietnam and was a mainstay of the pacification program in these later years, often observed that "there's no question that pacification is either 90 percent or 10 percent security, depending on which expert you talk to. But there isn't any expert that will doubt that it's the first 10 percent or the first 90 percent. You just can't conduct pacification in the face of an NVA division."
Too much security effort, on the other hand, and we can seem worse than the enemy and provoke the people to support the enemy and not our side.
I worry because Afghans seem far more sensitive to our use of firepower than the Iraqis ever were during the height of the fight there. In the end, I trust General Petraeus can handle this delicate balance and that this waging of death and destruction is just the first percent of our effort that sets the stage for the non-kinetics that are the true main effort of any counter-insurgency campaign.
But I'll remain worried.
