U.S. Army Pfc. Shawn Williams gives the thumbs-up to members of his unit as he is evacuated after being injured by a roadside bomb in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, June 17, 2011. Williams is assigned to the 25th Infantry Division's 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team. U.S. Navy photo by Lt. j.g. Haraz N. Ghanbari Washington Losing Patience with Counterinsurgency In Afghanistan -- Michael Hirsh and Jamie Tarabay, National Journal
It isn’t just people who are dying in Afghanistan. So is an entire concept of war.
John Nagl is the kind of guy who brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wicked line in The Great Gatsby about people who succeed at such an early age that “everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” A star at West Point and a Rhodes scholar, the native Nebraskan was only 37 when he landed on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in January 2004. In that article, Nagl offered an inside-the-Sunni-Triangle tutorial on what he came to call “graduate-level war.” Nagl’s mantra: “We have to outthink the enemy, not just outfight him.” In an era when small but wily bands of nonuniformed insurgents could stymie America’s mighty military machine with stealthy guerrilla attacks and roadside bombs planted in the night, the U.S. had to figure out how to hunt down the bad guys and cut off their support from the local population. Nagl, after studying the British and French colonial experience, as well as America’s handling of the Vietnam War, helped to develop what has since become famous as U.S. “counterinsurgency doctrine,” or COIN. As his celebrity grew, Nagl proselytized about it everywhere, even on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
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My Comment: Washington is not losing patience with Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan .... they lost it a long time ago.
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