And as you've heard me say before, perhaps, in any counterinsurgency, the foreign forces really need to do a variety of things, but the two really big things that it will typically do is to shape the insurgency itself, because you're involved primarily, because you're involved primarily, because the country that asked you to come is in trouble. I mean, their military may -- depending on where you are, what country you're in, the military may well be either flat on its back or nonexistent.
So the foreign forces typically do two things. One is to shape the insurgency, and the other is to build the national forces, which theoretically ought to move to the lead. And so where we are now in this counterinsurgency campaign is to move the national forces, the ANSF, into the lead as quickly as we can. We've got about 30 months left on the campaign, 31 months or so. The ANSF has yet to be fully recruited. It'll be done soon, but the deadline on it was 1 October.
We will train and equip and field that force over the next year so that it's fully combat-ready and in the field by the end of '13. But there are lots of formations already fighting. I mean, there is -- there is significant ANSF involvement in the day-to-day operations as we go along. And so we're putting greater emphasis on that now, and we'll put even greater emphasis in the future on moving the ANSF into the lead and ISAF forces moving into support over this period of the next year or so.
From the beginning of the insurgencies in Iraq, I argued that we didn't need to beat the enemy--we needed to help Iraqis beat the enemies. I often spoke of our role as "atomizing" the enemy to make them weak enough for a strengthened local security structure to defeat. As Allen said, we're there only because the locals can't handle the job at the moment.
Of course, atomizing the enemy--hitting them hard enough that they can't operate in larger formations that can overwhelm small friendly outposts and patrols--is only one part of knocking down the enemy. Allen calls it "shaping" the insurgency. I assume that includes things beyond atomization like decapitation (killing or capturing experienced leadership), clearing vital areas or pushing the enemy into marginal areas, interdicting enemy supply sources, and interfering with local support for the insurgents.
The key, I suppose, is whether we will have succeeded in knocking down the enemy and building up the friendly forces enough to win without our direct ground role. I think we're on the path to doing that, but I really can't know for sure. Heck, even if I knew for sure we were on that path, we could still screw it up.
Remember that we successfully prepared South Vietnam to defend themselves with limited US support but then we denied Saigon that limited air and logistics support after we left. Not that Afghanistan faces the threat of conquest, but they could very well face the problem of being abandoned by America which is tired of war. Too often we seem to believe war ends if we walk away.
