A natural-born insurgent, Sgt. First Class Jacob Stockdill was brimming with malicious suggestions when a group of American soldiers and Afghan security men sat down last month to plot their own defeat. “I can put a guy out on a ridge with an AK-47 and have him take a couple of shots,” Sgt. Stockdill proposed to fellow students at the Army’s new Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy. “The Americans will shoot back with their big guns and disrupt the whole valley…. Being an insurgent would be so easy.” Capt. Chris Rowe finished his thought: “All you have to do is not screw up, and, even if you do, you just blame it on the Americans.” Six years into the Afghan war, the Army has decided its troops on the ground still don’t understand well enough how to battle the Taliban insurgency. So since the spring, groups of 60 people have been attending intensive, five-day sessions in plywood classrooms in the corner of a U.S. base here, where they learn to think like a Taliban and counterpunch like a politician. The academy’s principal message: The war that began to oust a regime has evolved into a popularity contest where insurgents and counterinsurgents vie for public support and the right to rule. The implicit critique: Many U.S. and allied soldiers still arrive in the country well-trained to kill, but not to persuade.
That soldiers are training to win a “popularity contest” demonstrates the depth of the institutional shift in Army thinking, as the subtle intricacies inherent in both the Afghani and Iraqi insurgencies force the Pentagon to reevaluate even its most elementary of doctrines. Phillips elaborates on the complexity of this new fight:
Col. Najeeb, the Afghan intelligence officer, complained to American classmates that coalition troops sometimes are so nervous about being hit that they mistrust all Afghans, including the security forces. He told of being sent to scout out a village before a coalition sweep. As he left the village on a motorcycle, NATO troops opened fire on him, even though he waved ID proving he is a government agent. He never got close enough to warn the coalition soldiers of the ambush that awaited them in the village, he said. His classmate Capt. Nick Talbot, a 27-year-old from Washington, D.C., countered with a story about a car bomb in September in Nangarhar Province near Pakistan. U.S. troops arrived to find a man in a police uniform unconscious on the ground. When they did a routine body search for any unseen injuries, they discovered he was wearing a vest filled with explosives. The man woke up, but was unable to detonate the bomb before the soldiers killed him. “It can make you very hesitant to work very closely” with Afghan security forces, Capt. Talbot confessed to Col. Najeeb.
To be sure, Afghanistan is a geopolitical Rubik’s Cube. Solving it is going to take time. The same goes for Iraq. But, despite common difficulties, one can’t help but to admire the Army’s remarkable comfort in adapting itself to the challenges faced in both theaters. Though they have a ways to go, their journey from a clunky, immobile Cold War bureaucracy to an agile, flexible fighting force has been nothing short of amazing.
