Military intelligence officers were scrambling a year ago to collect and analyze the social, economic and tribal ins and outs of each valley and hamlet in Afghanistan.
This information wasn't the kind of secret or covert material many military intelligence specialists were used to. But it was seen as crucial to helping commanders tell the good guys from the bad, learn what Afghans really needed from their government and undermine the Taliban-led insurgency by winning hearts and minds over time.
Since last fall, top intelligence leaders in Afghanistan shifted their focus back to targeting the enemy in the more traditional way, by mapping their networks and analyzing what made the Taliban tick.
They didn't stop collecting the other information. But their goal now was helping tell commanders what they needed to know to kill insurgents and drive the enemy to the negotiating table.
One, the former is surely needed for classic counter-insurgency to win the population over--but if we were trying to win the people over to Kabul's "central" government, that was never going to happen. My goals for a surge were far less ambitious:
Backed by a stick of constant military operations that continue to hunt jihadis through the winters over the next couple years and lack of support from outside Afghanistan, Pro-Taliban and anti-government tribes will hopefully tire of the fight. Many are in it for the money and not the ideology. We'll negotiate terms of surrender for the less committed tribes so they'll abandon support for drug gangs and Taliban warlords. We won't call it surrender any more than we called the Sunni "Awakening" movement in Iraq a surrender--although it was. ...
The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.
Second, there is more of a link between counter-insurgency (protecting the people and separating them from insurgents) and counter-terrorism (seeking body counts of the enemy). Without the former, there isn't enough intelligence to effectively carry out the latter; and without the latter, we can't protect the people from the insurgents.
Third, when dealing with a hostile population, counter-insurgency has to focus less on hearts and minds and more on separating the insurgents from support from the people even if the people prefer the insurgents. Southern Afghanistan is the enemy heartland, and many of the hearts and minds simply hate us and love the Taliban. There are limits to what we can do to persuade these people to work with us.
If this shift in intelligence focus is simply a reflection that we recognize we can't build a unified Afghanistan government in a land of tribes, then that's a good sign we aren't aiming for a bridge too far.
