Reply #3: Those hearings could be quite interesting

[TayTay]

I wrote this in another thread:

Those hearings this week are starting to look really interesting. Sen. Kerry has scheduled a hearing for Wed afternoon for a battle of the experts to define the strategies. They basically are:

pursue a counter-insurgency strategy. This is the troop-intensive strategy that seeks to, well, nation-build our way out of trouble in Afghanistan. The Long War, defined. (decades, maybe?)

pursue a counter-terrorism strategy. Maintain a small but very supple force of specialized forces to pursue and eliminate the enemy. Leave the nation-building to NGO's. Our troops are not trained in nation-building. (Three cups of tea is not doable by an armed forces.)

recognize the limits of our power, delineate our place in the greater area and maintain as small a footprint as possible. We have no way to "win" in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda is not confined to that area any more that it is confined to any other place on earth. (Bacevich position of classical conservatism that seeks to keep the US out of these struggles in the first place.)

This is a setup hearing that defines the terms that are being debated. What exactly are all the talking heads talking about when they refer to a strategy in Afghanistan. Well, these are 3 strategies and Sen. Kerry means to lay them all out. (And I could construct an argument from existing Kerry speeches to adopt/dismiss all 3 strategies, btw.)


The next hearing on Thursday morning takes this information and talks about how to avoid failure in Afghanistan. This should be fascinating because we don't know yet what the Chairman considers "failure" to be.

I can cite references on where the people testifying are coming from, but I think it would be quite insightful to think about that roundtable from back in February. What are we doing in Afghanistan? What are we becoming in Pakistan? (Yes, I mean becoming. I can't help but feel that the push to more mechanized, remote warfare plays a part in this. War cannot be pursued as if it were a video game. Mechanized, remote war and the use of drones and so forth in Pakistan is something that should weigh on the soul. A soul that has thought of these things before in other wars might just be inclined to revisit them. ) I don't know, part of me wants to "read up" for these hearings by perusing Shakespeare. Odd thought, that one.

The more important hearing is Thursday, but the Wed afternoon hearing is classic prosecutor: lay out the terms for the jury to see, clearly and in full.

Terms we might hear a lot: Asymmetric Warfare: Warfare in which belligerents are mismatched in their military capabilities or their accustomed methods of engagement. In such a situation, the militarily disadvantaged power must press its special advantages or effectively exploit its enemy's particular weaknesses if the disadvantaged power is to have any hope of prevailing. Using an adversary's strength against him, while exploiting his weaknesses.