Not every security force has to be of the caliber of a SEAL or our Delta Force to defeat an insurgency.
At the core, you want special forces for the hard missions .
You want much larger numbers of well-trained troops for defending key pieces of territory and for searching for and killing the enemy. These guys may call on the special forces for help.
You want trained police or territorial defense forces who can move around and handle the usual small numbers of insurgents and terrorists and who keep their finger on the pulse of the locals day-to-day. These guys may call on the regulars for help when they face something they can't handle.
And you need the ill-trained and more vulnerable to infiltration local defense forces to live in the local villages and towns 24/7 and really watch and feel the local conditions. They can handle the locals who try to intimidate locals and even small numbers of insurgents that try to launch attacks. They may need to call the police or territorial defense forces for threats too large to handle.
And they need foreign air power, logistics, and intelligence plus foreign advisers embedded in units and trainers to keep the whole thing going until they can handle it.
The idea that local defense forces are more of a danger than an absolutely crucial part of a successful counterinsurgency fight is ridiculous. It is even more ridiculous in poor Afghanistan which cannot afford to have full time soldiers in sufficient numbers to secure the entire country. Local defense forces must be made to work.
RAND has a report out on past use of local defense forces. One can screw up local defense force programs, but that doesn't mean that they aren't crucial for winning:
Local defense forces have often played a key role in counterinsurgencies throughout the 20th century. Today, local defense forces in the form of the Afghan Local Police constitute a major arm of the U.S. strategy to secure Afghanistan. This book seeks to draw lessons from previous efforts to build local defense forces. Specifically, it analyzes the use and management of local defense forces in eight major counterinsurgencies, from Indochina to Operation Iraqi Freedom. The goal is to inform U.S. and allied operations in Afghanistan as well as other current or future conflicts. The book concludes that local defense forces can be highly effective in helping to defeat an insurgency but that the management of these forces presents enormous challenges. The final chapter summarizes key lessons learned and best practices for the management of local defense forces.
I have no way to know if we are doing it right from this distance in Afghanistan. But we did do it right enough to win in Iraq, so I have hope we have experience that can be transferred to the different circumstances of Afghanistan. Knowing about the other cases beyond our first-hand experience should help, too.
