We're all going to hear about "COIN principles" and "COIN strategies", so I went looking around.

[NYC_SKP]

I'm still looking for a post worthy image of a graphic shown on MSNBC earlier this evening, re Afghanistan Strategy.

It included the term "COIN Dynamics" in the title. Some images are on this blog: http://www.praajek.com/2009/12/war-strateegery.html

So I found this description for COIN (counterinsurgency) Strategies:

The USMC – Joint Forces Command co-sponsored Joint Urban Warrior 05 War Game included a special cell tasked to examine future Counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. This special cell was comprised of personnel from all U.S. services, coalition / multinational partners, interagency organizations and senior “grey beards” (retired military and diplomatic personnel). The range of operational experience included Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, Horn of Africa, Timor, Colombia, El Salvador, Northern Ireland, Vietnam and other ops / deployments...

The cell members; most experienced, well-read and studied in COIN; had current doctrine and historical studies at their disposal. The first order of business in the cell included an agreement on a definition of insurgency and a set of COIN guiding principles to enable a base for follow-on discussion and debate. The definition and principles follow:

Insurgency Defined…

Insurgency is competition involving at least one non-state movement using means that include violence against an established authority to achieve political change.

COIN Principles…

1. Effect political primacy in pursuit of a strategic aim.
2. Understand the complex dynamics of the insurgency, including the wider environment.
3. Apply power discriminately to influence human will.
4. Promote unity of purpose to coordinate the actions of participating agencies.
5. Isolate the insurgents from their physical and moral support base.
6. Sustain commitment to expend political capital and resources over a long period.

http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=50

It's a start.

My impression that a comprehensive effort is underway that includes far more non-military tasks than it does gun-toting shoot-at-people ops.

I'm hopeful that many of our 30,000 troops will be engaged in a number of activities that will help to leave Afghanistan a better place.

Also, this is why comparisons to Viet Nam are useless, as is the application of the term "Graveyard of Empires", as this refers to past attempts at conquest, which is not what our being there is about.

I hope someone with better information will chime in or post a new OP about all this.

Thanks.

NYC_SKP

[AllentownJake]

1. Soldiers are trained for combat

If they are sending in nation builders and diplomats they are not in the form of troops, they are in the form of people from the CIA and the State department and they are going in additional to the soldiers.

[NYC_SKP]

2. The only close friend my age in the army was an equipment operator. Built roads,

irrigation ditches, stuff like that.

[AllentownJake]

5. 30,000 combat troops

I may be mistaken but support troops went a month ago

[ipaint]

3. Massive failure.

But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

...With "multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups," he wrote, the insurgency "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603394.html

We are the problem. Our presence as an occupying force creates enemy insurgents out of local civilians with a history we not only won't acknowledge but plan to completely re-write. Do will kill them all? Flatten the country? build massive prisons?

This can only end badly.

[peacetalksforall]

4. "The range of operational experience included Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, Horn of Africa,

Timor, Colombia, El Salvador, Northern Ireland, Vietnam and other ops / deployments..."

That is all I needed to hear.

War boys with war toys.

Experience at death and the worst kind of imperialism ever considered.

The poor people of Afganistan. Like Iraq. It is there misfortune to be in the way of war boys working for war barons.

We're supposed to be impressed.

How loathsome.

[Fumesucker]

6. Here is a link to Army/Marine Corps FM 3-24, the COIN field manual

Recently updated by General Betrayus himself.

http://www.usgcoin.org/library/doctrine/COIN-FM3-24.pdf

[StarfarerBill]

7. The hearts-and-minds strategy hasn't worked anywhere it's been applied,

but there's a first time for everything, right?