As I advocated during the Iraq campaign, in Afghanistan we need to be able to sift the population to remove the enemy from the friendlies and neutrals. I'm shocked that this apparently isn't being done (tip to Instapundit):
The problem set on the ground is that a certain subset of people in Afghanistan want to run the country again--the Taliban. There aren't that many true Taliban, but they pay well and the work is appealing to unemployed young men.
The solution is get rid of the Taliban and their hired help or dissuade the hired help. Simple. But the US Military/ISAF/NATO do know who we need to get rid of. ...
The Talibs and their day-laborers can hide in plain sight because US and ISAF forces do not know who everyone is. (This concept shocks some Afghans who think the American surely have some gizmo that tell them who everyone is in a town.) The local Afghans know who everyone is and use that as leverage on the Americans. Relying on local intel is necessary, but you should not rely on the locals to be your phone book. ...
Soldiers and Marines need hit the streets constantly knocking on every door getting the names of everyone who lives in a house. The GPS grid of the house is noted and used as a street address. A picture of the house is taken with a digital camera. Pictures of the adult males are taken with a digital camera. The file number of the picture is tagged along with the names of the residents and the GPS grid. All of this is added into an Access database. The pictures are on corresponding power-point slides.
Bingo. You now have a clue as to who is supposed to live at that house. When you go on patrol again, you can check and see who is supposed to be in the house and confirm the data. It will take an entire deployment to get a significant database, but once a unit gets enough names, the enemy will have a hard time hiding and move on.
If we can't pluck the enemy from amidst the people we've technically liberated by marching into town, our efforts to protect them will go nowhere.
As long as I'm at it, protecting the population centers still has to include going out of the population centers and looking for the enemy to kill them. This doesn't mean we declare free fire zones and abandon careful rules of engagement. That is still important to avoid driving more people than we kill to the enemy's side.
Protecting the people doesn't mean just patroling population centers and sleeping in a building next to them. You can't commute to this type of war, it is true. But it is still war, which means enemies must die.
But it helps to know who the enemy is so the right people die. Count the people.
