Targeted Killing Is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan

[unhappycamper]

Marines patrolled with Afghans near Marja in May. The administration’s shift in thinking has been gradual but perceptible.


Targeted Killing Is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
Published: July 31, 2010

WASHINGTON — When President Obama announced his new war plan for Afghanistan last year, the centerpiece of the strategy — and a big part of the rationale for sending 30,000 additional troops — was to safeguard the Afghan people, provide them with a competent government and win their allegiance.

Eight months later, that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country.

Instead, what has turned out to work well is an approach American officials have talked much less about: counterterrorism, military-speak for the targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Faced with that reality, and the pressure of a self-imposed deadline to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011, the Obama administration is starting to count more heavily on the strategy of hunting down insurgents. The shift could change the nature of the war and potentially, in the view of some officials, hasten a political settlement with the Taliban.

Based on the American military experience in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, it is not clear that killing enemy fighters is sufficient by itself to cripple an insurgency. Still, commando raids over the last five months have taken more than 130 significant insurgents out of action, while interrogations of captured fighters have led to a fuller picture of the enemy, according to administration officials and diplomats.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. the plan was to get the bad guys

we don't need 30,000 troops to do that

[saigon68]

2. Killing a few children and Granmothers along the way

Helps too </sarcasm>

[KharmaTrain]

3. "Hasten A Political Settlement"...

I hope that's the real situation here. There have been reports for several months of back-channel talks going on between the State Department and Taliban leaders at some kind of truce, but I'm not sure this includes continuing as Karzai's defender.

The military has bogged itself down in a civil war with no real endgame. "Targeting" (per se...cause aren't all those who are killed in war targeted??) is a eupanism of "being careful" as opposed to the indiscriminate destruction of villages and lives...the old S & D scenario. The military appears to be sensitive to the criticisms that their actions have turned the locals against this occupation and this has some seeds of hope to try to soften that image.

In the end, the US will have to come to grips with a Taliban presence in Afghanistan...