The punchline is in the last para…….its what we give lip service to, but actually try .005% of the time………

Best Practices in the Comprehensive Approach to War Among the People
The Europeans don’t like the term counterinsurgency. For the French, it is associated with torture in Algeria. For others, it is a question of definition. Any effort against an insurgency is inherently a counter-insurgency, so does the term denote any effort against an insurgency (as it would seem on its face) or is it a set of principles and a way of doing business as US doctrine seems to suggest.

They therefore utilize the term “Comprehensive Approach” to denote the set of practices across the political, military, economic, social, and information spheres required to defeat an entrenched insurgent enemy.

Recently, some Pakistani forces in Mohmand tribal district have began to implement such a comprehensive approach, probably developing a set of best practices that are worth serious study.

A intra-tribal dispute among the Safi tribe (who cross into Kunar near where the large attack on American forces took place earlier this week) had led to under-development and violence in the region as elements of the Masaud and Gurbaz sub-tribes were fighting over the ability to export valuable Pakistani marble from the district into Pakistan. The government couldn’t reach into the area, and lawlessness was rampant.

These Pakistani forces implemented a dispute settlement mechanism, opened up the marble trade, taxed the income from the mines, and drafted men to serve in the forces and enforce the settlement (which involved awarding different mountains to different sub-tribes and parceling up those mountains by family and village).

It has been a brilliant operation that may provide a template for dealing with these types of disputes in Afghanistan, for instance in Kunar and Nuristan where disputes over the lumber trade, gemstones, and water result in violence and insurgency.

It is unfortunate then that the Pakistani forces who have led this brilliant operation marshal under the white banner and black turbans of the Pakistani Taliban.

(To read more, see the NY Times article here. Thanks to the anonymous officer who provided this interpretation of the article for me to work with.)

Afghanistan is, in the opinion of Serious People, “lost”. Too late. too many ignored promises, waaaaay too many dead bystanders, and the memory of the US’s support for the Warlords, as for US support of Saddam, while down the memory hole here, very much in peoples minds there.
The only question at this point is how many peasants will we butcher before we leave…..
Or, how huge the conflagration be if we start piling up bodies in Pakistan……

while the bin Ladenists- a tiny nexus- are due for some sort of retribution, the criminal/terrorist element that poses an actual, REAL threat to the worlds most powerful nation are to be found here, in official & high corporate/ideologue circles.
Everything else is a fleabite.

It seems like almost a year ago I was pretty excited about Barack Obama’s tough stance on Afghanistan. He even made the chimp flinch and say he loved the idea of commando raids on Taliban hotspots. Well that was just the bugle call of more war games. I soon cooled off. If we really were intending to tamp down the entire nation of Afghanistan in sort of a WWII-style general occupation, the time would have been in 2003. We didn’t. I swear Bush promised the family that he would let OBL escape. There is no other logical explanation. We didn’t even send men into the rugged north. We merely formed alliances with tribal chiefs. Obviously we didn’t intend to devote our resources there. It’s a little too late now. Have we learned nothing from Iraq. There is no amount of troops that will stabilize Afghanistan today. And don’t believe for two seconds that any troop surge has stabilized Iraq. If anyone does, they are still buying in to the whole GWOT bullshit dream. It’s time to start rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq and make friends with our enemies. You know we could make an awful lot of good, old-fashioned codeine and morphine with all that opium.

And this from someone who, but a very short time ago, was suggesting that there was some “hope” being offered, reminiscent of “half the way with LBJ”.

Obama Wants to Shrink One War, But Expand Two Others

By Tom Hayden
AlterNet
July 16, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/91645/