Conventional Wisdom Won't Work in Afghanistan

The cliché that you must "protect the population" in order to win a counterinsurgency has now become entrenched in conventional wisdom. This is especially so of the war in Afghanistan, where civilian casualties have become a deeply polarizing issue. It has become so important that, during a recent trip to Helmand Province, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan, declared that Coalition forces must make a "cultural shift" in Afghanistan, away from their normal combat orientation and toward protecting civilians.

But protecting the population requires knowing where it lives. Here, the Army's conventional wisdom fails.

In Iraq, the population was heavily urbanized, so spreading out into the cities made sense. The Surge, for example, was almost entirely focused on Baghdad. Now the consensus seems to be that the Army should focus on securing Afghanistan's major cities as well.

Pretending that Afghanistan is an urban culture clashes with reality. According to the Central Statistics Office, around 10 percent of Afghanistan's population is still nomadic. Afghanistan's 10 largest cities hold less than 20 percent of its people, and the rest of Afghanistan lives in small rural communities.

There is irony at play, too: Afghan cities are actually pretty safe in comparison to the countryside. Attacks on major cities are the exception, not the rule, because the U.S. is good at protecting cities. So focusing even more on them is redundant. What the U.S. is very bad at, on the other hand, is protecting the countryside. (There is a worrying similarity, too, to the Soviets' belief that if they controlled the cities, they would control the country, a belief that proved disastrously wrong.)