WOOOHOOO! Governor Nuristani was sacked!
I wouldn’t say it while he was still the governor of Nuristan, but that guy wasn’t really on our side. The quotes below prove that. He was the governor who was ranting about our planes killing 27 people in a wedding party that was apparently crammed into two cars. The mortars fired at the fledgling combat outpost were obviously party favors gone awry.
His cheerleading for the ACM are pretty apparent below:
“The coordinated assault at Wanat sent a strong signal to other insurgent groups that “America cannot resist them anymore,” said Tamim Nuristani, who was fired as provincial governor last week by President Hamid Karzai’s administration for criticizing a U.S. airstrike that Afghan officials say killed civilians July 4 in the same area as Sunday’s attack.
Nuristani said the attackers at Wanat were a mix of Afghan- and Pakistan-based militants, some with al-Qaida links – a sign, he said, that cooperation is growing between what had been often fractious factions fighting the Western military presence in Afghanistan.
“The (attackers) were not only from Nuristan but from other districts,” Nuristani said. “They are not only Taliban. They were (Pakistan-based) Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Hezb-i-Islami, Taliban and those people who are dissatisfied with the (Karzai) government after these recent incidents. They all came together for this one.”
Okay… a bad on my part, apparently: First report I saw was a patrol ambushed. Then KIA in the attack, now killed during the penetration.
Oh, BTW ex-gov Nuristani, taking over the COP is winning. Getting there and getting thrown out is horshoes… close, but no banana. Nice cheerleading, though. Give that man some pom-poms.
The other part that is true is that we are really hit-or-miss when it comes to separating the insurgents from the population. We need to listen carefully to their messages and usurp or refute them.
Part of their message is that the government can’t protect them. Refute that by pushing local security. (Afghanistan is short thousands of mentors to help the police learn to function, now short ANA mentors to help the ANA to continue to develop.)
The other guy is right, too… it DOES show that we are “getting in their face.”
It also does show a resurgent insurgent. It’s nice to have a place to go, hang out, visit the ATM (Arab Teller Machine,) smoke some hashish and plan your next op; a place where you can actually see where you are going, the planes in the sky… but they can’t touch you. Lovely Pakistan. (cue music)
Figuring out the above and developing a functional counterinsurgency plan is the closest thing to rocket science that you can think of… and it not optional.
Tough work has to be done on the diplomacy side to open Pakistan to getting some help for that nasty infection that they have, but that needs to be done, too. The back door has got to be shut.
BTW, the cordon thing comes naturally when you build roads, which is happening all over the place there. The ink spot thing is working, too… but we are waaaaay short of mentors to help the Afghans develop viable governmental organizations, like the police.
When you fix the police in a district, it’s amazing what they can do for local security. Some areas, like those infiltration routes, are always going to require Army assets to keep it stoppered.
The tactics used in the surge are based on counterinsurgency doctrine, not Iraq-specific. Surge tactics are based on Galula’s tenet: The more safe you try to keep yourself, the less secure you will be.
The thing is that when you follow that, you expose yourself to the potential for this type of attack.
