The exhuast from the four engines of a C-130 cargo plane is hot enough to cook flesh.

As you exit the cargo ramp, the exhaust has cooled down to a 150 degree 70 mile per hour wind.

As I walked out the exhaust blast I discovered the rest of FOB Fenty in Jalalabad felt just as hot.  

Jalalabad is one of the hottest places in Afghanistan in the summer but has a mild winter climate.

It is a sprawling city of concrete, mudbrick and dust at the confluence of the Kunar and Kabul rivers, is the dominant city in Nangarhar province. 

Jalalabad and Kabul river

Alexander the Great's army massed near Jalalabad before his invasion of the Indus valley in modern day Pakistan.

Sounds like the set for a joke, but I was met at the airport by two Afghans who work with a friend of mine in the logistics business.

Kabul International is a busy airport.  Several regional airlines run daily flights around Afghanistan and between international destinations like Dubai and New Delhi.

JD outside the old terminal at Kabul International

The baggage claim system in the new terminal works well and as an airport, it could compare with smaller, regional airports in places like Topeka, KS.

I was met by two local Afghans who took me on a driving tour of Kabul and then on to Bagram.

JD is short for Jawad, he is a Hazar, an ethnic group in the north/central part of Iraq.   

And Haji is Haji because he has made the Haj.  Haji also fought with the Taliban for a few years before going into the logistics business with a few western expats

JD (left) and Haji (right)

We took the scenic route, winding through Kabul from the airport to the Intercontinental Hotel, where we had lunch with a friend of mine from Iraq who is working with NDI running a team of election monitors.

After this piece by Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic , I got a few emails saying, "see, the take gloves off approach does work."

Yes, it works in the specific case of Sri Lanka if you are willing to do what the government did to subdue the Tigers.

But Iraq and Afghanistan are not Sri Lanka and lets face it, a plurality of voters in the US will not go along with the tactics used by the government of Sri Lanka.

Lets start with the geographic differences first.  Sri Lanka is a self contained island nation.  Afghanistan is land locked with pourous borders and Iraq is nearly land locked with those same pourous borders.

Those pourous borders allow new fighters to enter the fray.

Compounding the borders problem is that at various times the Islamic components of Iraq and Afghanistan had a huge recruiting base--the Tamil Tigers never had such a large base.

An attrition war, attempting to kill every would be Islamic Freedom Fighter is impossible.  In my years running around Iraq I have seen entire HVT lists killed or incarcerated without causing a hiccup in insurgent operations.

Killing and incarcerating the enemy is required and killing them is always a good thing, but it is not the be all end all solution.

But the major difference between Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq is that, despite its brutality, the government of Sri Lanka was still the "home team."  The harsh tactics of the government were approved by a plurality of the voters year in and year out in their dysfunctional democracy.

The US and the coalition are the "visitors", the outsiders, the invaders and the occupiers.  In the case of Iraq it was a three way with two home teams.

Anything done by the visitors to the local nationals causes them to unify against the visitors.

The goal of the visiting team is to gain the passive support of the local population.  There is no precedent in which killing on the level of Sri Lanka worked for the visitors--just ask the Soviets.

The successful counter insurgencies by a visiting force focus on doing things the insurgents cannot--commerce, medical care, security, stability.  They rely on census and ID card programs, controlling the movement of the population, building an intelligence net and denying the insugents the ability to hide in plain sight.

The classic example is the Briggs Plan the British used Malaya as detailed in Richard Clutterbuck's classic, "The Long, Long War."

In societies with a strong revenge culture like Iraq and Afghanistan, for every innocent civilian you kill, you create another batch of insugents.  They are not in it for the cause, but because the blood debt demands it.

The passive support of the population then flows to the insurgents who can hide in plain sight and attack at time, place and manner of their choosing as the intel dries up.

Much of Iraq was tamed using the basics that have worked for visiting armies time and again.  As noted by former Army Cav. Squadron Commander LTC Jim Crider what worked was census data collection, building an intel and jump starting commerce.

(I was with Crider's soldiers when they first started to use the proven techniques in 2007.)

They became more successful in the Doura area of Baghdad when they "put the gloves back on."  (And the gloves on/off analogy is always wrong, you can hit a person harder with boxing [or even hockey] gloves on causing much more trauma to the skull without breaking your own hand.  Which is why MMA is actually safer, the lighter gloves prevent repeated punching with full power.)

The "gloves on" approach to counter insurgency allows the visitors to land harder hits to the insurgents ability to operate.

Afghanistan and Iraq are not Sri Lanka.  The US is the visiting team and should use the tactics that have proven successful in the past for visiting armies.

Over the years I have written that the strategy and tactics of Al Qaida and the Taliban were geared toward affecting media coverage of the wars.

The best chance of the US and Coalition withdrawing from Iraq or Afghanistan was not through military force employed by the Taliban or Al Qaida, but through an erosion of political will on the part of the American public and members of Congress.  The will of the public is affected by what it sees in the media, therefore, the media has always been the target of action.

This is 4th Generation Warfare.

A line in a report about the kidnapping and detention of New York Times reporter David Rhode caught my eye and is excerpted by Powerline .

The key line in the excerpt:

"The kidnappers initially said as much."

The Taliban, normally not ones to shy away from publicity wanted the kidnapping to fly below the radar.

If the ransom to be negotiated was money, the Times, even in its current straights, could cough up enough to purchase release.

But going back to the Taliban and Al Qaida's primary strategy of attacking American public opinion, what if the ransom was not cash but news coverage?

This is not to say that the Times yielded and shaped their coverage to the demands of the captors--I sincerely doubt they did.  The Times may be many things, but from my contacts with its reporters, it is not the type to negotiate coverage with terrorists.  Even they are smart enough to realize if you do it just once--you are gonna have to do it forever.  Which is why you do not negotiate with terrorists.

But, I can definately see the Taliban wanting to put that option on the table.  And if that option was on the table, broad public knowledge of a reporter for the Times being held hostage would make it more difficult to get the editorial ransom from the Times.  A shift in tone of coverage coinciding with kidnapping would deminish the effectiveness of the Taliban's editorial demands.

In modern 4th Generation Warfare, the media is the target of many actions.  If I was the Taliban, I would kidnap reporters and demand editorial ransom.  Many things can be purchased with cash from opium or other criminal enterprises ran by terrorist organizations, but editorial coverage is too tempting not to ask for.

In the modern media battlespace we have already seen media outlets capitulate to threats of violence--the cartoons & Fitna come to mind.  CNN traded access for self censoring editorial in Iraq under Saddam's regime.  And of course there is Walter Duranty.

As the threat enviorment and 4GW grows, editors and publishers will have to steel themselves to the new environment.  The public will have to be aware of how modern terrorists and insurgents target them through the media.

LTC Jim Crider has published a report on his experience as a battalion commander in 2007-08 in Baghdad.

I was with Crider's 1/4 Cav. in early May 2007.

When I was with them they were just begining to understand counter insurgency and from what I saw in the fall of 2009, Crider and the follow-on unit got it right.

Download the full report here .  I'll be reading it on the plane tomorrow.

For a little visual flavor of what Crider is talking about, watch this.

For a more detailed look, my documentary Baghdad Surge shows the tactics, techniques and procedures in vivid color and sound following a Company Commander who operated a few blocks from Crider's 1/4 Cav.

Crider was thrown in a tough environment, adapted and succeeded.  He took me for a tour down 60th street as my own personal PSD when it was just dogs and snipers.  Crider was never afraid to get down on the street and do the work.