Goldfarb notes that Vice President Biden is trying to split the Afghan baby, proposing a big bump in kinetic operations (read: airstrikes) instead of complying with General McChrystal's request for more troops. Have we learned nothing in the past eight years? Neither Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, nor General McMaster and Aussie Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, nor any of the other brilliant counterinsurgency brains born of the Iraqi Surge believe that an increase in airstrikes is a viable way to win the war. McChrystal feels so strongly on this point that one of his first orders of business after assuming command was to restrict the use of airstrikes to defensive scenarios only.
Overly aggressive use of airpower is the quickest way to lose a low-intensity conflict. The Taliban masks its presence per Mao's highly successful warfighting stratagem, moving seamlessly through the Afghan population, operating out of villages instead of military bases, planning attacks from the safety of mosques and schools. Denying the enemy those safe havens requires boots, not bombs. That's straight out of our own COIN doctrine, which advises that instead of fighting the enemy, we fight the enemy's strategy.
Here's where a bump in airstrikes and a decrease of troops would lead us: American forces relinquish large swaths of Afghanistan to Taliban control, reassuming the failed garrison mentality that cost us so dearly in Iraq. The Afghan people completely lose faith in our ability to protect and defend them, submitting to Taliban rule. Our human intelligence wells dry up. We lose the ability to track targets in and out of Pakistan's northwest frontier. Our kill/capture rate for high value targets plummets. Logistics become nightmarish, as the enemy controls all the vital roadways, restricting resupply efforts to the air alone (quick note: the Senate thankfully voted to continue C-17 production this morning. The Obama Administration was furiously trying to kill the indispensable cargo jet). Afghanistan reverts to its pre-2001 stone age, with U.S. forces relegated to annoying the Taliban with pinprick airstrikes and isolated patrols. That's exactly how the Soviets lost in Afghanistan, that's how the Rhodesians lost their Bush War, that's how the French lost in Indochina and how we lost in Vietnam. It's almost how we lost in Iraq. End state is a certitude: they win, we lose.
Should Vice President Biden find himself interested in floating real solutions to winning this war, I'd highly recommend a reading of Lt. Col. Kilcullen's bible for COIN ops: Twenty Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company Level Counterinsurgency. It's a quick and easy read, and it doesn't mention airstrikes anywhere.
