Some Fresh Thinking on Afghanistan

Rick "Ozzie" Nelson, a former Naval Officer and now a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has put this piece out in order to question some of the prevailing wisdom in DC these days about counterinsurgency operations (COIN) and the applicability of COIN to what is going on in Afghanistan and our goals there.

I'm no COIN expert, and I am way out of my depth when it comes to Afghanistan. But I do have a lot of time in DC, and any time you start to hear the chattering classes begin to parrot Army Field Manuals, it is time to start questioning whether an idea has gone way past ripe. I think Nelson raises that sense here (as a critic, not a member of the chattering class). Every talking head on cable seems to be a COIN expert these days--and I'm not even sure Afghanistan is an insurgency (seems more like a civil war to me).

We went to war in Afghanistan to kill terrorists; if the Taliban had given up Bin Laden, they'd still be in power. Along the way, we vastly up-scoped our war aims, and now we're trying to figure out what to do next. My support for mounting a huge counterinsurgency effort is waning. There is no government, there is no middle class, there is not any history of science, learning and technology. This is not Iraq, and the time is coming for us to figure out how to get out of there.

Hat Tip: Tim Long