Scourge of hillbillies, peasants, and farmers everywhere, except that it ALWAYS loses "wars" to them.

Isn't that about the ratio of support troops to front line troops in the US army?

What is going here with this article?. I mean if the ratio 12:1 in favor of the US, is not on par with having enough American troops to fight Taliban on one to one basis, is there really anyone out there with money to burn, to pay this security expert to write what she writes?.
khairi janbek.paris/france

I think what she's alluding to is the paradox that troops face.

They can request air support during operations, but if the chances of civilian casualties are high then the administration has curtailed the availability of such air raids.

What she's trying to do is pin Obama with the accusation that he cares more about Afghan sub-human civilians than our gallant boys over there.

Ofcourse he doesn't, he just see's huge fallujah-style civilian death-toll numbers as tangible ways to piss off more locals and swell the ranks of Insurgents - something that will even FURTHER endanger our boys.

It's a low-blow Op-Ed.

Professor Walt,
you wrote a while back on the importance of knowing
who is funding the think tanks that seem to be so effective at
opinion-leading and policy-shaping.

One thing that surprises me is the growth of "think tanks" that seem to be encroaching on the shaping and formulation of national security policy,
and building public support for same.
For example,
the Institute for the Study of War,
and several private organizations which have taken it upon themselves
to monitor, translate, and publicize messages coming from al Qaeda, et al.,
a function which I would have thought
should be performed somewhere in the USG.
Various DoD bigwigs seem to take these quite seriously.

As a political scientist, and student of policy-making in the national security arena,
what are your thoughts on the propriety of said organizations?
How should the public think about such organizations?

I couldn’t agree more about how this Op-Ed is very misinformed. Granted, you read plenty of stupid Op-Ed's, but usually they are written by idiots who at the very least held some sort of important position in government or academia at one point in their lives. She’s just a graduate student!

She obviously has no understanding of the basic tenants of counterinsurgency, and may have been absence for most of her history classes. She states that “the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim.” Have you ever heard of Vietnam Ms. Dadkhah? Not to mention the fact that successful air campaigns generally work against traditional armies with traditional targets.

Her argument also ignores the fact that we live in a completely different media age than we did during previous conflicts. Technological advances in media production and distribution make it much easier and quicker for an insurgency to produce video that could easily undermine the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan. Especially if civilian casualties are high. The evolution that has taken place in Arab media (internet & satellite news) means that if the U.S. and NATO forces are lax in preventing civilian deaths, than they will clearly not succeed because they will lose any support within the Middle East or South Asia. We all know that there already isn’t too much support. Large amounts of civilian deaths would also only reinforce negative stereotypes of the U.S. and the West in the Muslim world. A place we very much need to improve our image.

Besides these strategic arguments, there is just a very basic humanitarian argument that one should at all costs avoid the death of innocent civilians.

Feel free to join my “Lara M. Dadkhah is a complete idiot” Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=344284916070

Dadkhah's advice would work . . . if the US was planning on sitting on Afghanistan for a long time (think decades into the foreseeable future), and cared first and foremost about pacifying the area barring other objectives. Other revolts have been put down with brutal force - the Brits put down a massive Iraqi revolt in the 1920s that way.

Obviously, the above two requirements don't apply. The US is not planning on sitting on Afghanistan for a long time; rather, it wants to legitimize an Afghan government favorable to the US. Nor does it care first and foremost about pacifying the area - read the second clause in the second sentence again.

Her argument also ignores the fact that we live in a completely different media age than we did during previous conflicts. Technological advances in media production and distribution make it much easier and quicker for an insurgency to produce video that could easily undermine the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan. Especially if civilian casualties are high. The evolution that has taken place in Arab media (internet & satellite news) means that if the U.S. and NATO forces are lax in preventing civilian deaths, than they will clearly not succeed because they will lose any support within the Middle East or South Asia.

This is a big one - the nature of how conflicts are viewed has changed drastically. Nowadays, if the US were to bomb some site in Iraq, in 24 hours there's video footage of it all over the internet, along with the grieving family, the jihadist reaction, and so forth.

so what is your solution for all this? we're in there, let's make it happen.
20 percent violence, 80 percent civilian shit. (lets build up their things etc...)
if its not going to work in the long run, then its only because we've got the wrong mix of people. i mean how hard is it to really seduce third world nationals with money and other benefits? i for one was born in such conditions, no running water, no phone, no tv etc....but i would agree to make allegiances with those who would agree to build things that would help the populace, like dams. sincerely: just build it.
but then i come from nepal, never been occupied by the west, you know wha i am saying? i dont understand the hatred, i just see the $$$$$$

I should add, I do agree with this last point of her op-ed -

Wars are always ugly, and always monstrous, and best avoided. Once begun, however, the goal of even a "long war" should be victory in as short a time as possible, using every advantage you have.

There are a number of rules, many of them somewhat arbitrary, designed ostensibly to protect civilian lives. While this is a good idea, in theory,

A)it doesn't prevent the development of the weapons designed specifically to target civilians. A major biological warfare treaty didn't stop the Soviets from developing the world's biggest and most dangerous biological warfare program.

B)it produces a bad delusion, the idea that we can somehow "sanitize" conflict and take the unpleasantness out of it. The idea that there is some type of "ideal" conflict where civilians never get accidentally killed by weapons in a combat zone, and any deviation from that is not an accident but a deliberate crime. This is a dangerous delusion, and it actually encourages warfare.

C)It drags out conflicts. A short, brutal, devastating conflict is a major shock to a society, that kills many and causes major devastation - but if it is followed by peace, then it is a shock many societies can recover from afterward. By contrast, a long, protracted, "low"-intensity conflict is the kind that warps societies, creating generations who have known nothing but conflict, perverse conflict-dependent social and economic networks, and weakens development and recovery.