McKiernan's Fall and NATO in Afghanistan

This is a thoughtful article about the firing of General David McKiernan as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The author, "Spook 86," alludes to one of McKiernan's problems as the management of NATO forces in Afghanistan. He might have spent more time on that issue, because it is quite evident that reconciling the various countries's preferences has been close to impossible.

Tom Ricks, in his new book in Iraq, The Gamble, points out that one of the problems with the counterinsurgency doctrine promoted by General David Petraeus is that it virtually guarantees increased military casualties when first implemented. The mission of "protecting the population" is accomplished by placing troops between the population and the insurgents, thus virtually asking the insurgents to focus their attacks on the military. This may be the right way to fight this kind of war, but it may not be popular. Some Americans are remarkably blase about the deaths of Iraqi or Afghan civilians, but highly intolerant of the deaths of American soldiers.

The feeling now, unlike during the Clinton and early Bush administrations, is that the American people will tolerate a certain level of casualties, if the military effort appears to be succeeding. In other words, the public has an instinctual grasp of the military principle that one should never reinforce defeat. In the Afghan environment, successful counterinsurgency efforts will mean placing a lot of soldiers on foot patrol in Afghan villages, when many of them will be shot at, and some will be killed. This may be, I say again, the right way to proceed, but I don't see our German or Italian allies joining us in such an endeavor. High Noon is not in their cultural DNA.