There's many a slip between cup and lip

By Steve Hynd

Or between paper and reality.

HuffPo's interview with NBC broadcaster Brian Williams in Kabul illustrates how the "force protection" paradigm wins out over well-meaning manuals and papers about "population-centric" COIN better than I ever could.

HP: There's all this talk of making the cities more secure. Is there any sense that the people in the cities want the foreign troops there?
BW: Whereas some of the locals in Iraq (depending on the circumstances) will often be comforted to see U.S. dismounted infantry patrols, (in ways they were not until fairly recently) and will ask them for help and to stay with them, the situation here in Afghanistan is different. The two societies are vastly different. It is not helped by the fact that U.S. forces often take a very aggressive posture -- arriving in small towns in massive armored vehicles with machine gun turrets, each infantryman with his hands on his M-4 rifle in front of him...and often on the trigger with the safety off. Of course there's a reason for this: they get shot at and killed, and they are soldiers in an unforgiving place -- surrounded by an enemy they often can't see. So its a Catch-22 of sorts. It made big news here when Gen. McCrystal started the practice of removing his body armor while on walkabouts, or when meeting with local leaders. By his reasoning, the locals aren't wearing such armor. It should also be pointed out that he gets around in a massive, armored SUV with security vehicles in tow, dismounted infantry flanking him and able to unleash fearsome amounts of suppressing fire, and air support overhead whenever he is out and about. Even when U.S. troops are handing out something "good" -- food supplies, medicine, school supplies for the Afghan children, its not as if local villagers tending to their goats on a Thursday afternoon sit around thinking, "If only a dismounted platoon of heavily-armed American soldiers would come visit us today, preferably accompanied by an armored mechanized column...".

"Humvees in a china shop", as Anna Husarska of International Rescue put it back in July.

The main destination of this "surge" will be the U.S.-led provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), whose performance in Afghanistan has been criticized by humanitarian groups on the ground: One aid worker from a European nongovernmental organization said they behave like "Humvees in a china shop."

While working in the eastern city of Jalalabad last year, I heard many tales that amounted to such porcelain-breaking. The main victims were the communities the PRTs were seeking to help. An Afghan working for an Asian NGO recounted how 15 Humvees entered their compound unannounced and the uniformed "farenjee" (Afghan for "foreigners") began conducting quick medical examinations -- 45 seconds per patient -- while photographing the process to document their outreach. (After complaints from the NGO, the Americans said they spent 105 seconds per patient, not 45.) There was the time that armed, uniformed Americans arrived at an orphanage, I was told, to distribute pencils and notebooks. In the process, the Americans terrified the female employees of the orphanage and the young children. An Afghan doctor from an American NGO told me his concerns about the welfare of communities where the PRTs distribute medicines from their Humvees: The labels are in English or Urdu, he noted, not Pashto, the language spoken in the region.

I visited Jalalabad again in May. The aid agency I work for, the International Rescue Committee, continues to implement programs there, but even now the ever-deteriorating security environment means we mostly have to rely on our trusted staff of Afghans. I did get to visit the American PRT in Jalalabad, where I was received by a senior civil affairs officer. He told me and an Afghan colleague of mine that Americans were no longer going out to villages uninvited. I suggested that the danger still existed for locals contacted by the PRTs -- these Afghans could be branded collaborators. But the officer saw no problem. "Our presence forces them to make a choice: Either they support the government or they support the Taliban," he said. And he added, "It takes a little bit of courage if you want to be free; freedom does not come free."

Yes, there are many places in which reconstruction and aid teams are doing good work, as are teams working with small groups of reconcileable insurgents, and the U.S. is on some kind of learning curve there. But William's observations, taken together with many other COIN epic fails, suggest that there's an upper limit on how far that curve can be pushed. Nor have I seen anyone justify why these small teams - working of necessity out pretty much on their own - need to be backed up by a 100,000 strong army of occupation to do their jobs. Wouldn't their jobs be easier and even safer without the plethora of heavily armed and armored china shop wreckers?