How to Win in Afghanistan

Quadrant Online:

[Video of Justin Kelly speaking at a Quadrant Dinner on “Winning in Afghanistan”]

Military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated.
—Clausewitz

General Sir Gerald Templar’s admonition during the Malayan Emergency that “the answer [to the insurgency] lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and the minds of the people” has echoed through the ensuing half-century and has become the basic precept on which counter-insurgency campaigns are—or apparently should be—designed. Nowadays, hardly a day passes in which some journalist or general is not reminding us that there is no military solution to the war in Afghanistan.[1] Echoing this proposition, in January 2009, the Secretary General of NATO argued that good governance “would suck the oxygen out of the insurgency”.[2] Similar statements were made about the war in Iraq; to argue against Bush’s 2007 “surge” of troops and to emphasise that here lay a “quagmire”—dreaded by all in the US Congress and the New York Times—from which immediate withdrawal was the only solution.

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My Comment: I am not as optimistic as Justin Kelly .... but his comments are definitely worth the time to read and analyze.