The Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: Part Four - Culture and Terrain

The Marine Corps University Counterinsurgency Leadership In Afghanistan, Iraq and Beyond: The Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency transcript (PDF) is so good, I have decided to post the entire thing in four installments. I believe there are important insights in these discussions not only for Afghanistan, but in the context of US Navy discussions as well. The participants were:

Bing West, Correspondent, The Atlantic
Col. Dale Alford, Institute for Defense Analyses, USMC
Col. William M. Jurney, US Joint Forces Command, USMC
Col. David Furness, Marine Corps Liaison Office, US House of Representatives

Held on Wednesday, September 23, 2024 at 10:30 at the National Press Club, Washington DC, part four is the presentation by Col. Dale Alford.

I’d like to start by saying us three on the stage here, first of all, we’ve known each other as brothers literally for 20 years. Our families, our friends, we’ve spent many, many hours over the last 20 years drinking beer together and on occasion sipping a glass of whiskey talking about this stuff. And what I just heard over the last 30 minutes, I could say again over and over and expanse on each of those points because we literally know what each other think. And that’s a unique thing about the Marine Corps that you need to understand.

What I will talk about - I was asked by Mark to talk about the lessons from Al-Qa’im and how they transfer to Afghanistan. I had an opportunity to command a battalion in Afghanistan ’04, came home for seven months, went back to Iraq with the same battalion, literally the same battalion, same five company commanders for the most part, the three - the XOs all just - that was an unique piece the 36 were able to do. And then this past year I spent nine months in Afghanistan working for a great soldier named Gen. McKiernan.

What I will say is what Bill said. It is population centric versus enemy centric? Yes. Again, it’s both. And you call look at al-Qaim and you can say we did Iron Fist, a battalion size operation - got to do everything that everyone believed that you would want to do as a battalion commander: shot rockets, dropped bombs, threw hand grenades, the whole bit - and then a regimental size operation, Steel Curtain, in order to take back the area of Al-Qa’im.

That was a means to an ends though. As we moved and did that, we literally dropped off platoons that built position and at the end of a 10-week period, we have 14 positions. And we immediately moved the Iraqi army in with us. I learned many of those things at the first tour in Afghanistan - mistakes made - and was able to use that the next year in Iraq.

And how does that transition to Afghanistan? Right now, what I see in Afghanistan, and I had the opportunity to travel around the entire country, visit many, many units including our NATO partners, that we’re completely an enemy-centric force.

We need to re-position a significant portion of our FOBs and COPs among the population because right now they’re not. The problem is they were built for CT missions in ’02 and ’03 and in ’04 in wrong locations for a population-centric COIN effort.

And the second thing is we talk about it a lot, we write about it a lot but we are not focused on the Afghan army and the Afghan police and the Afghan border police. We don’t live with them as partnered units. We consider partnering to link up and do operations. If you’re not sleeping with them, eating with them, and crapping in the same bucket, you’re not partnered and we’re not partnered in Afghanistan.

Real quick. COIN population centric is not about being nice to them like - (inaudible) - said. “Hearts and minds” gets confused sometimes. It’s about separating the population from the insurgents, protecting them, influencing them, and controlling the population, especially in the initial stages. And we talked about already about the enemy. It’s fluid; it hides in plain sight. The enemy does it.

And what do we mean by hearts and minds? I think, Dr. Mansoor, you brought up “trust and confidence.” I totally agree. The heart or the trust is that we’re in their best self-interests. We’re in their best self-interest. The people have to be believe that and in their mind or their confidence in us they have to believe that we are going to win, and when I say we, it’s the Afghan army and police with our support and their government. They have to believe that we’re going to win and we’re going to protect them. In their heart they have to believe we’re in their best self-interest and in their mind they believe that we are going to win. We’re failing to do that.

I’ll talk a little bit about if you’re going to do population-centric COIN and you’re going to live with the Afghan army and police, how do you do that? And the very first step is you really need to understand who you’re dealing with. I’m going to talk a little bit about understanding the Afghan people from my 17, 18 months experience in the country.

First off, this is a quote I found and I totally agree with it. They’ve learned to survive 30 years of war by hedging their bets. They’ve learned to play both sides. And they are still doing it. Why? Because they’re getting slapped on one cheek by their government and the other cheek by the Taliban. They don’t have a good choice and we’re not providing them a good choice because we’re not population centric, we’re not amongst the people, and we’re not with their army and police force. That’s the first step. I was pleased to see Gen. McChrystal’s paper that came out Monday that he’s writing about it. Now we’ve got to execute it.

The next thing is these people can read you better than any people I’ve ever been around including my uncles that live in north Georgia which are very similar to. (Laughter.) They live off the land. They’ve learned over their lifetime in order to survive how to read people. You’ve got to understand that when you deal with then on a daily basis. If you’re not sincere, they will see through you in a heartbeat and you will not be successful with them.

And the next point is about their problems. Their problem is they don’t have honor. They don’t have justice in their government. They believe that their government is corrupt. Whether it is or not, they believe it. And they don’t believe that they have physical security and a significant portion of the population doesn’t have food security four or five months out of the year; those three things, we - if we’re among the people and with their army - we can focus on those.

This is an important list. First bullet: The Afghans have based all their thoughts and decisions on history. When an Afghan looks at life, he looks backwards. He thinks about his history, he makes decisions off of his oral history that he knows of his society.

When we, the Western world, look at life, we look forward. We think about how we’re going to have a bigger house, we’re going to have a better retirement, I’m going to get a better car, I’m going to send my kid to college and get a better education, which in my case, it’s not very difficult to do.

When you deal with an Afghan, he makes decisions. You’ve got to know that. He looks at life 360 degrees from the way you look at life. It’s difficult for us to wrap our minds around and understand that. We must try better.

It’s an agricultural-based society which is extremely important and it was - and much of their agriculture was destroyed in past history and we must focus our effort and our development to bring that back. First thing is we’ve got to be there amongst them.

And then the rural versus the city - 80 percent of the population is a rural force, rural people. They don’t want electricity in many of the homes. We think they do. Why did Iraqis want electricity as soon as we - because they had electricity. The Afghan - many of the Afghans never had electricity. They want electricity to move water in their clinics and to schools but in their basic homes, they’re not begging for it, but we’re trying to give it to them in many cases. We need to understand them better before we try to help them.

And the last one, how do you get them to pick our side? This whole thing is about getting them to pick our side. Right now, they’re playing defense. They’re on defense because they’re not picking our side because they don’t believe in their heart that we’re in their best self-interest, and in their mind they don’t know if we’re going to win.

The Afghan culture, it’s like the Iraqi culture on steroids. It really is. It’s a weird mix between Pashtunwali and Islam, which in many cases are opposed to each other. And the parts where the insurgency really is, the East and the South - because this is a Pashtun insurgence, make no error about it - Pashtunwali is extremely strong even though something similar to Pashtunwali is throughout the rest of the country. And it is a great code. It is a very similar code that my uncles in north Georgia live by.

Understanding the people and their culture, and you need to do that because that’s all they have. That village elder that you deal with on a daily basis, if you’re doing this business right, his honor and his culture and his history is all he has in life and he will kill you for it.

We’ll go through the Afghan army real quick. One thing I’ll say about it is you’ve got to leverage a culture. The leadership we’ve talked about already, the logistic of their force is weak and we had to work on that. You’ve got to accept chaos when you deal with the Afghan Army because it’s going to be there. And you’ve got to show that you’re committed and risk your life right beside them. If you don’t do that, they will not fight with you.

The army - I’ll talk about all three of them - the army is an extremely credible force especially at the company and below. The battalion and above, they’re struggling. Battalion and above is struggling because they’re trying to build the airplane while they fly it. And if we’re them all the time, which we’re not now, as a partnered force, we can make that a lot better. Advisors and mentors are not enough. We have to evolve for that. We had to start with a partnered force and evolve to mentors and advisors and then work our way out of a job. We got it backwards, I believe.

The Afghan police - there’s got to be a local-based police, as Col. Jurney talked about. It must be from the local area and the people have to know who they are. That’s where the intelligence comes from and I believe that we, as a general purpose force, have to live with the police force.
I can do some math for you really quick. How do you do that because there’s a lot of places. Let’s just say there are 360 districts. There’s 388 but we’ll say 360. I think an infantry battalion can do about 12 positions, 12 districts, and we’ve got some examples of this down south with the Marines in Delaram. You divide that and it comes out to be 30 battalions. Thirty battalions is 10 brigades. We’ve got to do some real math and tell some real truth about what it’s going to take if we’re going to do population-centric COIN because the police are the most important thing we’re doing and right now we’re not focused on it.

Those clusters in those districts, you’d be amazing at what happens when the Marines live with them or the soldiers. The governor, the district governor moves and he puts his house right by the police station. The district police chief moves right by the police station and stays there 24/7. The judge moves there. He can move the DSTs, the district support team out of PRTs into those areas. It becomes a cluster in those districts and that’s where it matters in Afghanistan, down at the district level. We’re failing to do that.

And last, the last piece is the Afghan border police, the forgotten soldiers. They are a paramilitary fighting force. If you want to get into a firefight in Afghanistan you go partner up with the Afghan border police. You’ll get all the fighting you want. We’re not doing it. And we must change the way we’re doing it and we must do some real math on what it’s going to take if we want to make a viable, stable Afghan country that no longer harbors terrorists. If that’s so, then there are some hard lessons, some hard decisions that have to be made about what’s going to take.

Thank you. (Applause.)