A U.S. Marine who is an embedded trainer with the Afghan National Army discusses the negative effects that an open debate on troop levels and strategy in Afghanistan can have on the effort there. The personal views expressed here do not reflect the views of the U.S. military.
Read more about his experience overseas in his blog, Embedded in Afghanistan.
The wait continues for the president’s decision on General McChrystal’s recommendation. The unfortunate aspect of all of this business is that the debate is taking place in the public eye. While having a public 
debate on the efficacy of sending more troops certainly satisfies the exigencies of American politics, it’s most certainly not beneficial to the war effort as a whole. I say this because if the decision is made to not send more troops, or even not send as many as asked for the by the general, we will be perceived by the Afghan government, people, and security forces as abandoning them and losing our will to fight the insurgents. I can confirm that the ANA leaders I habitually talked with were always worried about our ability to stick things out and did not want to see us go anywhere until the country had progressed significantly.
Perception is an incredibly important part of any counter-insurgency, as winning the support of the people should ultimately lead to victory. I can confirm that many of the people of Afghanistan don’t really care who wins this war, just so long as someone wins it, and they can live a semblance of a normal life…i.e. the people will support the side that appears to be on the path to victory.
For these reasons, any action leading to the perception of weakness or lack of commitment on our part needs to be scrupulously avoided. It would have been better to avoid all of this public debate on the issue…unless the request is granted of course, in which case we may take some small benefit from all of this publicizing of our intentions on the matter.
The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.
11/19/2009 :: 11:43:40 PM
fred Says:
I understand the marines point of view, i just disagree with him. We are a free society, as Americans what we do and what makes us who we are is our open disagreement and debate amonst ourselves. Not to have open debate and transparency on the issues of our time isn’t freedom, it’s oppressive government control. Our ideals have value becausewe as a people are able to discuss, disagree, come to a concenses or solution together, with all points of view heard and not muzzled and forced to accept any point of view, just because it is the govenments position. Had voices of dissent raised voices of concern and oppisition to what snowballed into the trainwreak we experienced in Iraq, we would be a hell of a lot better off than we are today in the entire region. In america we discuss and reason things out in the open. Questioning the intelligence of expanding an eight year war in a contry never run democratically and is painfully curropt is exactly what we americans need to be discussing.