It seems that our uptick in UAV strikes inside Pakistan over the last month is indeed a new strategy to preempt Taliban forces and disrupt them so they can't come across the border in force:
"In order to stop unifying Taliban groups from launching massive attacks against NATO and in particular newly arriving U.S. troops in Afghanistan, such attacks have become indispensable on Americans' part," he said.
Keeping Pakistani territory from being a sanctuary and jumping off point to attack US forces is more important than ever with our forces moving into small outposts near the border:
President Barack Obama is hoping to boost the flagging war effort in Afghanistan by sending 17,000 reinforcements. Most of them will be deployed to small, remote bases such as Seray, a walled compound of trenches and fortified buildings near the Pakistan border. Many of these new outposts will be in eastern and southern Afghanistan, the most violent parts of the country.
But will the troops in these tiny redoubts be able to carry out the often conflicting missions of fighting insurgents and building relationships with local villagers, or will these soldiers and Marines merely be easy targets?
You'll recall the Wanat battle that could have been a tragedy had we lost. The Taliban are no doubt eager to gain a propaganda victory by over-running an outpost and killing every American there. The vast majority of the time these outposts will be killing ground for the enemy. Just like Vietnam firebases, these outposts will be hard targets that will draw in the enemy where they will lose heavily. But the enemy just needs to be lucky (or we just need to be sloppy) once, and they have a massacre that will be played up by the media.
With the news that we are heading to the frontier, it seems that my broad guess on our future approach is correct.
And although the article mentions one renowned analyst's opinion that we need to focus more on the cities as we did in Iraq, I disagree. The Afghan insurgency is far more reliant on weapons and manpower coming in from Pakistan's tribal areas. In Iraq, controlling the borders wasn't initially as important since money and arms were readily available inside Iraq. And trying to keep out the 2 or 3 jihadis who came in per day to serve as suicide bombers was way too tough. We'd have wasted resources and scarce American manpower on the border of Iraq while the main battle raged in the cities.
The cities are certainly important and we must fight there, too. We (including NATO and allied forces) should support Afghan forces in the cities to root out Taliban shadow governments, but American troops can do the most good isolating the battlefield as much as possible out near the border with Pakistan. I suspect that Afghan sensitivity to civilian casualties attributed to our forces means we should be a supporting force in urban areas where Afghan forces are the primary on-the-ground muscle. I'd rather not have a surge of forces into Afghanistan where we can't easily supply them, but that is a done deal.
But I don't think that drone strikes alone can keep the Taliban broken up and off balance enough to protect our border region outposts. We need Pakistan to control or at least contest the region.
And if Pakistan can't exercise some level of control or influence, we may need an unconventional campaign to extend our eyes and ears--and firepower--into the Pakistan tribal regions in a post-Westphalian campaign.
If we don't prevent the Pakistan border areas from being a safe staging area for the Taliban, we will lose a company-size outpost at some point. We never suffered such a loss in Iraq, but the enemy there did not have the sanctuary that the Taliban and al Qaeda enjoy inside Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the enemy is not nearly as atomized as the Iraqi terrorists and insurgents were.
And after we lose a hundred or so men in one battle, the anti-war Left will turn on the good war in earnest. Get ready to hear, "Hey, ho, B-H-O, American troops have got to go!" The chants just write themselves.
