“I think we’re talking months for this to play out, and it’ll play out at a little different speed everywhere,” he said. “Until we hit the point where the insurgent fighters decide they cannot force us out or cannot discourage us, I think they’re likely to stay significantly.”
This sounds an awful lot like we expect to outlast their will to win. I know this is but one comment and I shouldn't extrapolate too much from it. And I know that the general is talking about Helmand Province here and not all of Afghanistan, but it is still wrong to think this way about even a slice of Afghanistan. Even a slice that provides such a large amount of the enemy's funding. Yes, it is important to hold this territory even if the enemy abandons it. But this isn't a silver bullet to win the war. They'll get other funding and adapt to lesser amounts to support their jihad.
We can't outlast the enemy there. We have gone a long way around the globe to fight the jihadis. The jihadis live right there. We can't outlast them.
We have to be talking in terms of defeating the enemy. We have to think of winning the war and not being the last man standing.
Just because this is a counter-insurgency doesn't mean that defeating the enemy is less important than in a conventional fight.
Yes, it means that kinetics must be an important but secondary focus, with winning hearts and minds the first job. But it doesn't mean we don't have to destroy the enemy in the field.
Defeating the enemy armed groups is primarily an effort designed to destroy the enemy's assets of recruits, weapons, money, and terrain (to rest, train, and stage from). The non-kinetic elements of COIN can cripple these things and recruit the locals to our side who also have no place to go if they don't win, but the kinetic elements must kill off the existing hard core fighters and scare the less committed into deserting.
So yes, this is not a fight where firepower is dominant. But it is still a fight and we still must defeat the enemy.
Outlasting a domestically based insurgency is a sucker's game. I hope we know better than to play that game.
