I've been here almost three months with one more to go and have spent time in Helmund, Kabul, Parwan and Khowst provinces. My next stop will be in the Argendahb river valley near Khandahar.

Every province and region is different, which is why I'm doing a four month trip and visiting multiple parts of the country traveling on my own and embedded with US Forces.

The Afghanistan troop surge has not had near the success of the Iraq troop surge of 2007. There are many reasons why it has not succeeded, the primary three to me are not enough combat troops on the ground, which means commanders cannot fully execute population centric counter insurgency and even if they did have enough troops, I'm not sure the commanders would do COIN properly. The third reason is demographic, there are not enough adult Afghan men in the farming villages to join village protection forces on the scale of the Sons of Iraq and Awakening movements in Iraq.

I started my region by region embed tour in Helmund which has its own hydra of a problem because there is so much money to be made in the opium poppy business. As I wrote in early May, the ultimate resolution may have to be a business deal that legitimizes and regulates the opium trade.

The Marines are getting the closest to true counter insurgency operations with a vast network of platoon sized outposts and intensive patrolling, but have not instituted the vast census/ID card and population movement control measures outlined in 5-71 of the COIN field manual. In Iraq some Marine battalions had developed massive databases listing who lived in each house by name, phone number, car, occupation, tribe, clan, set. I have encountered nothing similar in Afghanistan.

In the Marines's defense, a large percentage of the population in Helmund is migratory farmers making a census/ID card program less effective, but even nailing down the details of a permanent population goes a long way to making harder for the enemy to move and hide in plain sight.

Here in Khowst province, at the height of the so-called fighting season, there is not nearly as much combat as there has been in the past. Real fire-fights are rare. More likely is a teenager or two firing poorly aimed pop-shots at a platoon as they leave a village. There are IEDs but a lot of the young men who put them in the ground wind up getting a bomb or missile dropped on them. The insurgents still fire mortars, rockets and other types of indirect fire at US bases and outposts but not nearly in the volume they had in the past.

The enemy almost always works in small, two to four man teams. To put this in perspective, in the 1980s the Soviets and Mujahideen threw thousands of menat each other fighting over the Khowst/Gardez highway which US Forces routinely drive up and down.

The US Forces here are not really doing population centric counter insurgency. The briefing slides the officers may say they are doping population centric COIN, but they are not. They are not doing census/ID card programs or other measures prescribed in the Counter Insurgency Field Manual to control movement of the population and separate the insurgents from the population.

Here in Khowst it is mostly enemy centric counter insurgency. Platoons patrol the area around their outposts for a few days, then go on big operations to distant villages to stir up trouble and develop enough signals intel for Special Forces teams to zero in on targets for raids.

The problem with that approach is the ease in which the enemy can fill those slots of bad guys. Keeping violent pressure on the insurgents is a necessity, but not the answer.

The units doing this cannot be blamed for the approach. They lack the personnel to lock down broad swaths of the country side. Putting pressure on the insurgent leaders by holding the 500-pound-bomb of Damocles over their heads in hopes they come to the negotiating table may be the best course of action available.

In Iraq the answer became the SOI and Awakening Movements. Some were spontaneous and started fighting Al Qaida on their own. Others had to be bribed and cajoled. Eventually unemployed and/or under employed men were put on the payroll to defend their villages.

In Iraq there would be 4 young men to each middle aged man in the SOI. The SOI were often supervised by former military men and the tribal leaders.

The demographics of Khowst province would produce a ratio of 40 young men to each middle aged man. The tribal structure of Khowst is weak and the villages easily intimidated by the insurgents because the majority of adult men are working in the Gulf states, Dubai, Saudia Arabia or in the big cities.

http://outsidethewire.com/blog/afghanistan/da-afghanistan-gum-shawi-kasan.html

Without credible village defense forces or Home Guard units as discussed in 6-39 of the COIN manual, it is very difficult to truly choke out an insurgency. Until the missing men of Afghanistan come back to the villages, the tribes and clans of the rural areas will be weak and succumb to the pressure of the insurgents.

ISAF is not losing by any stretch of the imagination. The troop surge has produced some gains, just not the dramatic gains seen in the Iraq surge of 2007. My analysis is that the surge was not large enough to do true population centric counter insurgency and even if it was, there is no guarantee commanders on the ground would have done it. True COIN is very boring, dull, grinding work that looks very bland on a power point slide and evaluation report. Many officers have never heard of census/ID card and population movement control measures which leads me to think they have never read the COIN manual.

But even if there were enough combat troops and they were doing the time tested successful COIN techniques, the lack of adult men in the rural areas to join Home Guard and village protection forces would hamstring the effort. The missing men of Afghanistan also explain the low quality of Afghan soldiers and police. Men with education, intellect and ambition go abroad or the cities leaving the mostly illiterate and indolent to populate the Afghan security services.

The ultimate question comes down to whether the original intent of Operation Enduring Freedom has been achieved: Eliminate and Prevent Afghanistan as a safe haven for international Islamic terrorists.

It is no longer a safe haven. But what happens after total US withdrawal is the question. Afghanistan could revert to its traditional pre-communist status as benign third world country. It could just as easily descend into a chaotic warlordistan the malignancy of which could spread and lead to safe havens for international terrorists.

It all comes down to the American public's appetite for risk or willingness to keep throwing money down the rat hole. The worst case risk is the resurgence of Al Qaida and Islamic terror in the newly liberated Afghanistan. The other extreme is the massive cost of keeping troop levels the same for two more years and a large presence for another five or more years.

Half measures can be made, but they only get half results.