Helped by billions of dollars in U.S. aid during the last decade, Colombia's armed forces have used better intelligence and mobility to batter guerrilla armies, pushing their fighters into ever more remote hideouts.
The largest group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, has adjusted its tactics, however, by returning to its guerrilla roots and using smaller units - in contrast to the 1990s when it seized swathes of territory.
So while the army has killed top FARC commanders such as Raul Reyes in 2008, Mono Jojoy in 2010 and Alfonso Cano in 2011, the war goes on.
Military and civilian sources familiar with the new strategy say the main change is to increase the focus on the FARC's logistics and financial operations, as well as its main fighting units. ...
"Mono Jojoy died and nothing happened, the FARC continued. Cano died and nothing happened either. There was demoralization and a weakening, but the rebels aren't finished." ...
The revamped strategy is to dismantle the fronts [NOTE: "fronts" are what FARC calls their units in the field, analagous to battalions, it seems, in organization if not size, I'd guess] involved in cocaine smuggling, arms trafficking, the manufacture of bombs and illegal mineral mining, as well as specialist combat units such as the feared Teofilo Forero mobile front, the sources said.
I haven't followed Colombia's war on insurgents and narco-terrorists. It has gone on my entire adult life with the insurgents and/or drug dealers sometimes controlling large parts of the country.
I'd recall that Colombia was a functioning (if truncated) state despite the ongoing violence (including right-wing militias that played as dirty as the insurgents) as the debate over Iraq sometimes ridiculously raged over whether Iraq could completely suppress the terrorists and insurgents Iraq's government faced--as if that was the only measure of victory.
Colombia has had success in going into the insurgent strongholds and breaking up their control. The enemy was atomized and resorted more to terror than population and land control to fight the government. The enemy also became more of a criminal enterprise with a political fig leaf rather than a communist insurgency with drug gang allies who provided money.
After atomizing the enemy, the government had success in killing leaders of the down-but-not-out insurgents. But the enemy still does not quit. Perhaps thinking that they could duplicate the success Peru had in really crippling the Shining Path in Peru by killing its charismatic leader, Colombia tried the "counter-terrorism" strategy of going after leadership.
But it isn't working. Oh, going after the leadership is necessary since it gets rid of more experienced leaders and disrupts the enemy while they bring up new leaders. But it isn't enough.
So the Colombians have to do something different. No that the Colombians are losing--they're just facing different circumstances. The fact that the Colombians have briefed CIA director Petraeus, who orchestrated the "counter-insurgency" approaches in Iraq and Afghanistan to focus on protecting the people from insurgents (or more broadly, separating the people from the insurgents, which then includes the situation where the local population supports the insurgents rather than simply needing protection from the insurgents), makes it seem like our old debate about counter-terrorism (relying on special forces and drones to hammer leadership) versus counter-insurgency (separating the insurgents from the people) is taking place.
But in fact, that isn't the debate. Colombia has secured the population. FARC no longer terrorizes the cities nominally under government control and FARC no longer controls the remote productive countryside that was a de facto FARC state. This is more of a Vietnam debate, really.
In Vietnam, we always had two wars: the classic counter-insurgency against the Viet Cong (including--and increasingly after Tet--North Vietnamese infiltrators) to secure the population centers and root out insurgent networks; and the big war fights out in the bush where we fought large and organized conventional enemy forces. Vietnam comparisons regarding Iraq always frustrated me because so many people only remembered the former war without remembering the latter. In Iraq, we never had the latter. For the most part, we never faced enemies massed in larger than platoon strength. We never had to worry about our spread out forces being overwhelmed by a larger force. Even in Afghanistan where the enemy can come across the border with Pakistan in larger numbers, we've rarely faced this situation. And in every one we have, our forces held their outposts in the face of the attacks.
But this isn't even about the small unit/big unit Vietnam wars since FARC doesn't have big units in the field. They were defeated in the last decade by a greatly expanded Colombian military trained and equipped by the United States. For decades, FARC thrived because the army wasn't big enough to secure the population centers let alone to go after FARC in their home territory. But that finally changed and Colombia did go into the enemy home territory and broke their control. No, this is more about going into the last sanctuaries of the FARC in the remote wilderness to scatter them so they cannot reconstitute if left alone and come back down to threaten the populated areas.
As I noted, the small unit war in Vietnam required us to spread our forces out to control the population. But the enemy big units in the field could sweep up those scattered small units. So we needed some forces concentrated to keep the enemy big units at bay. Our "incursion" into Cambodia was simply part of keeping the enemy big units at bay--in that case to allow our withdrawal unhindered.
So Colombia is figuratively going into Cambodia. They need to hammer the remaining enemy units (whether combat or logistics) that have retreated into their wilderness sanctuary to hide and hope that time will allow them to reverse their defeats. Our experience in Afghanistan in 2001 of raising the near-dead Northern Alliance up (after it was defeated but not scattered in the 1990s by the Taliban) to spearhead our offensive against the Taliban regime is a lesson on this issue.
But then again, maybe this is an Afghanistan debate. Despite cries from the anti-war side (and some isolationists on the right) that the inability to completely wipe out the Taliban in Afghanistan means our enemy is winning, we have smashed up the Taliban quite a bit. Indeed, the Taliban in Pakistan want a ceasefire with Pakistan to rescue their Afghan brethren:
The head of the Haqqani Network (based in North Waziristan) confirmed that there was a ceasefire deal with Pakistani security forces. ... The Haqqani leaders are complaining about how difficult it is to get the many Islamic terror groups to abide by the ceasefire deal. Haqqani also confirmed that the main purpose of the ceasefire was to provide aid for the beleaguered Afghan Taliban forces.
We haven't smashed the enemy. Which is why we need another fighting season to smash up the enemy in Regional Command East where the Taliban draw support from inside Pakistan. But I don't know if our newly revealed plans to quit our combat missions by summer 2013 includes a full effort this year in the east to go with another year of building up the Afghan security forces to handle the atomized threat.
And even if we do have a fighting season in Regional Command East, another problem looms as much as it does for Colombia, assuming they successfully pursue the FARC into the wilderness and break them up. The enemy still lives on in Pakistan. For Colombia, the enemy has new rear areas in Venezuela and Ecuador (which Colombia raided not too long ago) and probably in Peru.
Unfortunately, we'll have to live with a long war in Afghanistan just as Colombia has endured a long war with FARC. FARC had their own remote areas as a sanctuary while Afghanistan has to endure the Taliban with a sanctuary in Pakistan. And as the Haqqani ceasefire with Pakistan shows, we can't count on Pakistan to control their side of the border. Indeed, the same Strategypage link shows that the Obama administration has made it more difficult for Pakistan to control their side of the border:
A long-banned anti-American group; "The Defense of Pakistan Council" has been revived. The group has been holding large anti-American demonstrations. This is apparently in response to U.S. threats to halt the billions of dollars in economic and military aid for Pakistan. Many Pakistanis are angered by this threat, and are responding with hostility. But the big change in Pakistan is the enormous shift in attitude against the army and intelligence services (ISI). This has been growing for years, but last year's American raid into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden changed everything. The revelations that bin Laden had been living in a military town for years, despite constant army insistence that they did not know where bin Laden was. Years of growing hostility against military lies and corruption now had convincing confirmation.
Not that I think we shouldn't have killed Osama bin Laden. We had to. But it was neigher nuanced nor smart diplomacy. Heck, I never thought our drone strikes begun during the last year of the Bush administration was anything more than keeping the Taliban off balance during the presidential transition. I thought that the Pakistani public reaction against violating their sovereignty would outweigh the benefits of killing jihadi leaders in the long run. But the strikes didn't lead to such a reaction and they have continued. I assume there was no public reaction because Pakistan's military agreed to who we targeted, and so they didn't stoke public resentment. But by getting bin Laden, we did target someone that Pakistan's military (and intelligence services) didn't want us to target. So Pakistan's military didn't like that. And the inability of Pakistan's military to stop us angered the Pakistani public without any stoking--but the anger includes the Pakistani military as well. So stoking anger against America is their only recourse (well, other than completely siding with us to defeat the jihadis, apparently). So we can't count on Pakistan to help us crush the last Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.
So as we head for the exits in Afghanistan, remember that this war will go on for decades since beating the enemy inside Afghanistan is only part of the battle. We will need to remain on guard against the enemy reconsituting in Pakistan and returning to Afghanistan. If all goes well and we remain attentive and involved, we won't be suffering casualties any more than we have been in Colombia's long war. But we can't just walk away too soon unless we want to risk Afghanistan again becoming a sanctuary for jihadis who want to kill us at home.
UPDATE: Strategypage notes the new approach and emphasizes the financial and logistics angle. That fits with the Cambodia comparison, but the comparison only extends so far. For Colombia, it is trying to go for the kill to keep the enemy from regenerating rather than buying time like a spoiling attack the way the Cambodia Incursion really was.
