Outside View: In Afghanistan, it does take a village

HELSINKI, Finland, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- In testimony before the U.S. Senate, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal said: "To pursue our core goal of defeating al-Qaida and preventing their return to Afghanistan, we must disrupt and degrade the Taliban's capacity, deny their access to the Afghan population, and strengthen the Afghan security forces."

To succeed, McChrystal and his warriors must fully understand the character, motivations, ambitions and, in particular, the methods of the enemy. Approaches that may have worked earlier in Afghanistan or even recently in Iraq may fail to turn around the present situation.

Saeen Dilawar, from Pakistan's central Punjab province, became a jihadi in 1992, joining the militant wing of a mainstream religious party Jamaat-e-Islami, which was sponsored and trained by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency to conduct a proxy war against India in the disputed province of Kashmir. Dilawar was forced to return to his farming village when the ISI stopped funding the insurgent activities of his militant group.

According to a report by Issam Ahmed of The Christian Science Monitor, the story does not end there. Dilawar and other Punjabi jihadis have linked up with the Taliban. This development not only increases the threat along the already volatile Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but it has spawned an insurgent threat in Pakistan's governmental, military and culture heartland.

Dilawar is quick to stress "a true jihadi never retires," recalling his recent experience in Afghanistan "There is no feeling quite like killing infidels."

As Ahmed writes, Dilawar's friend Akbar Ali Alvi, a former Jamaat-e-Islami official, adds, "The war may be in Waziristan and Afghanistan now, but, God willing, we will bring it to the streets of New York and Washington."

It would be a serious error in judgment to assume that the Islamic extremist threat begins and ends with al-Qaida. It has now undergone metastasis. The disease has spread far beyond the narrow border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al-Qaida now represents an important, albeit small, element of a Taliban viral insurgency from southern and eastern Afghanistan, across the border areas and deep into Pakistan's vital Punjab province. They are flush with cash from drug trafficking and funding from international foundations supporting extremist Islamic beliefs.

The Taliban are winning their own version of the "ink spot" strategy, and their ambitions reach far beyond simple control of Afghanistan, one-third of which they now effectively rule.

Fully understanding and countering how the Taliban operate specifically at the Afghan village level will be critical to the success of McChrystal's plan to "disrupt and degrade the Taliban's capacity, deny their access to the Afghan population and strengthen the Afghan security forces."

The manner in which Taliban forces take over strategic villages and create networks covering large areas with relatively few forces is brilliantly outlined by Special Forces NCO Mark Sexton and William Lind in "On War No. 325: How the Taliban take a Village."

Within Afghan villages there are three nodes if influence: village elders, the religious leader and the village security force. Through either indoctrination or coercion, the Taliban replaces the traditional village beliefs or leaders with those that support the Taliban philosophy. Creating a network of these subverted villages, the Taliban can control and operate from large geographical areas, establish sophisticated communication capabilities, attack opportunistically and then melt back into these networked sanctuaries.

As the authors state, to counter the Taliban, U.S. and Afghan forces must be able to infiltrate and shape the village nodes of influence. They write: "The U.S. and Afghan forces and government will need to identify individuals to use lethal and non-lethal targeting. This requires in-depth knowledge of tribal structure, alliances and feuds. Viable alternatives or choices need to be available to village leaders and villagers. Just placing U.S. and Afghan soldiers at an outpost and conducting token presence patrols and occasionally bantering with locals and organizing a shura once a month are not going to work."

Through a decentralized and bottom-up approach starting at the village level, supplementing it with conventional infantry and air support as appropriate, the result will likely be a more effective means of executing all the elements of a successful counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan.

How the surge troops are used is more important than how many are sent.

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(Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D., is a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and a veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army or U.S. government.)

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(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)