New Rules of Engagement: Saving American Lives in Afghanistan

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It has always been somewhat counter-intuitive that a less aggressive strategy and tactics will succeed in Afghanistan. There has been considerable complaining about the tighter rules of engagement (ROE) put in place by Gen. McChrystal and mostly kept in place by Gen. Petraeus. It goes against our warrior spirit to have all these sweetness and light, milk of human kindness restrictions on our troops. But the point all along was to avoid killing civilians so they would not help the enemy and we could eventually get them helping us and their own government. Well it is working.

The 69-page NBER study analyzed 4,000 civilian casualties and 25,000 clashes between U.S.-led forces and insurgents over the 15 months ending April 1. The pattern it detected was that civilian casualties caused by U.S. and NATO actions “are associated with a substantively and statistically large increase in attacks” by the Taliban and other Afghan militants. The average civilian-casualty event caused by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) killed or wounded two Afghans. According to the analysis, districts in which such an incident occurred averaged six more violent clashes over the following six weeks than did otherwise similar areas that were spared civilian casualties. “The data are consistent with the claim that civilian casualties are affecting future violence through increased recruitment into insurgent groups after a civilian casualty incident,” the Air Force-funded report says. “Local exposure to violence from ISAF appears to be the primary driver of this effect.”

So when we kill civilians, we get an additional attack per week in that area. That is pretty cut and dried, and we haven’t even been doing this for all that long. The effect is contagious and can eventually lead to a tipping point where enough of the local populace sees the Taliban as the enemy and us as their salvation. That is exactly what population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) is designed to do. It is not a case of hamstringing our troops and not allowing them to take the fight to the enemy. It is making sure that when we do engage with the enemy the collateral damage doesn’t trump the damage we do to the Taliban. That means that sometimes we may not kill every bad guy we could, but as we have seen we also won’t generate additional attacks against us. And as I said that effect becomes cumulative. The Afghans know that we can bring tremendous firepower to bear on any spot in the country. When we refrain, we gain the opportunity to reach out to that tribe and explain that we held our fire to ensure we didn’t kill them. That is COIN judo which flips a Taliban recruitment opportunity into one for us.

This doesn’t mean we lose our focus on making dead tangos, it just means we do it differently. For example we have a Marine patrol that gets hit from a village and in the course of the firefight can identify what house the insurgents are in. It is simple to call for fire and have that house flattened, game over. But it is a common Taliban practice to force the family to stay in the house as they attack us. That way if we do turn it to rubble, we have also killed women and children of that tribe. So they lose a couple mindless trigger pullers, and we lose an entire tribe as allies. They will take those odds any time we offer them.

But now flip that on its head, and instead of a 2,000 lb bomb, the Marines call for smoke to mask their withdrawal. Then we go to the local leaders and tell them “OK Fellas, we held our fire. Now tell us who the Taliban are and we will come scarf them up in the middle of the night.” We get names and locations and the black helicopters full of pipe hitters swoop in to scarf up the bad guys. No civilians killed and good will established.The local leaders gain power for keeping their people safe and we can follow on with aid and reconstruction projects to seal the deal. Now that we have Karzai’s OK to arm and train local militias, we can then turn all the potential Taliban recruits into proud Sons of Afghanistan keeping their own families safe. We have captured or killed hundreds of Taliban leaders in the past months and you can be certain that much of the intel allowing it, came as a result of our change of tactics.

It’s much easier to look at the situation in Afghanistan and say we need to take the fight to the enemy. It’s much more effective to look at how we do that as part of a larger strategy to deny our enemy the assistance of the local populace. It’s even more effective when we can point out the care we take to avoid killing civilians to local leaders as we try to gain their help and to Muslims worldwide as we work a grand strategy of de-legitimizing the extremists. Much as I love making dead tangos, I prefer to win the war of ideas and marginalize the fanatics. They are much easier to whack that way, and we can corrupt the rest with our decadent Western ways.