Petraeus and the Afghanistan Rules of Engagement

There has been a lot of talk about the Rules of Engagement (ROE) in Afghanistan and whether they are too restrictive of our troops ability to defend themselves. Many are speculating that Gen. Petraeus will loosen them now that he is in charge. If you are curious about my qualifications to discuss this, there is some bio information on me below the fold.

The main complaint is that we have limited our forces from calling for supporting fires when they are in a firefight. The first thing to note is that the actual ROE are classified, so most of what is being discussed the Tactical Directive that Gen. McChrystal released before he was stone rolled. Now I will agree that there is a lot of sweetness and light, milk of human kindness talk in that directive about yielding to Afghans on the road and showing them respect. Doesn’t really sound like the warrior ethos, I know. But we can’t kill our way out of this. If we don’t gain the trust of the Afghan people and get them involved in providing their own security, governance and prosperity we cannot succeed. There is a case to be made for “Rubble doesn’t make trouble”, but does anyone really believe we are going flatten most of the border provinces where the Taliban hold sway?

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We are following a counterinsurgency strategy that Gen. Petraeus helped develop and it requires that we do everything possible to avoid killing civilians. Afghanistan is a tribal culture and when we kill a civilian, we often lose an entire tribe as possible allies and may even push them past neutral to supporting the insurgents. So it is likely Petraeus will maintain most of the current ROE and instead will reinforce to subordinate commanders that they have always had the ability to call for fire if our troops are in jeopardy and other measures will not be effective. Most of the anecdotal evidence that the ROE are getting our troops killed have been instances where the actual rules were implemented far more strictly than written or intended. While it may be more satisfying to crush our enemies and see them driven before us, it’s when that lamentation of the women comes from civilian casualties that it becomes counter-productive.

So we will continue to show restraint and we will not destroy the village in order to save it. As I said it is a different kind of warfare, but if we ever want to leave there, we must create a situation where the Afghans have skin in the game and see a path to a better future. Here is a video discussing our current situation.

Hello All and welcome to the latest piece of the Breitbart Big empire. I’m Jim Hanson and I have been bestriding the internets as Uncle Jimbo at the military website BLACKFIVE for five years now. I served in 1st Special Forces Group and operated all over the Pacific Rim and prior to that I spent three glorious years in Germany. With Peter Schweizer as Editor in Chief and Frank Gaffney editing the policy, think tank and one over the world views, Andrew figured he had the Big Brains beat well covered. He asked if I would edit the boots on the ground, practitioners part of the game.

Big Peace will cover all aspects of national security and I’ll help bring the voices of the knuckle-dragging, pipe hitters as well as the Teva sandals wearing NGO workers in the conflict zones. There are a lot of moving parts to our security efforts and we’ll present original reporting on as many as possible including the full spectrum of military operations from kinetic to humanitarian, the intelligence world (although we won’t be exposing classified programs; the NY Times has that well covered), and the State Department’s public diplomacy and reconstruction teams in the field.

This topic is too important to be left to our current media organs, so we will be counter-progamming to their narrative of a post-American world. America is still the greatest force for freedom, liberty and yes peace on this planet and we will make sure that you get to hear about that.