The Redhunter

GEN. CARTER: Thank you very much. And good morning to you all in the Pentagon....

And what we've tried -- been trying to do here is to get the Afghan government to assert its authority over a number of places in Helmand which have been ungoverned for some months now. So that was the key objective, about the Afghan government asserting its control and authority over central Helmand and the ungoverned spaces that existed within it....

Now, the second part of setting the political context was about making sure that the Afghan government in Kabul was fully behind this operation. And Governor Mangal about three-and-a-half weeks ago led a delegation consisting of my two security partners -- General Wardak, who runs the regional police that corresponds to RC South; and General Zazai, who commands the 205th Corps of the Afghan National Army.

He led this delegation up to Kabul, where they briefed President Karzai and his national-security committee on how the operation would work.

What they showed to him was that the operation had been planned from the finish back to the start, with, importantly, governance at the tip of the spear. So what Governor Mangal was able to reassure the president about was that they had thought through very carefully the sorts of services that people wanted to have on the ground and how that would represent betterment for the population....

Now, up front, as the commander on the ground, there were two things that I wanted to ensure were put in place before the operation was mounted, the first one of which was to ensure that the political context was properly set, and the second one was to ensure that we had adequate resources to conduct the operation. And I'll talk to the setting of the political context first of all....

Now, a second part of the operational prerequisite that I had for this operation was to ensure that we had adequate resources. And what I'm talking about here is predominantly Afghan national security force resources. And for the operation, six ANA [Afghan National Army] kandaks, or battalion, were -- battalions, were made available, as were two of the special commando kandaks, around a thousand of the ANCOP, or the Afghan gendarmerie -- that's their special police force that's nationally recruited. And we are in the process of training around a thousand new Afghan national policemen, who will be fed into Nad Ali and Marja once the hold phase of the operation starts to bite effectively.

And, of course, what's made all of this possible is the fact that the first two U.S. Marine Corps battalions that President Obama announced as part of his uplift before Christmas became available to us during the course of December and January. And they, in partnership with these Afghan national security forces and an uplift that Gordon Brown announced for British forces, has made it possible for us to put on the ground around 8,000 combined troops, who have provided the sort of force densities that are needed generally to bring the sort of security that's required on the ground.

Now, inserting all of this in a way that guarantees surprise, given that we were quite open about the fact this operation was happening, was a challenge. Now, I know that the scale of aviation assault that happened at the beginning of the Iraq war was a sight to behold. But in terms of detail coordination, I think the aviation insertion that took place last Saturday morning was most impressive, for it brought together not just one nation, but five nations' worth of helicopter pilots and a whole load of Afghans de-busing from the back of these helicopters as well....

And the upshot of this was that complete tactical surprise was achieved. And the insurgence was entirely dislocated in the first 24 hours of the operation....

Although there was much of interest in the briefing, we'll just concentrate on one exchange in the Q & A, because it goes to the heart of counterinsurgency warfare

Q Sir, Bryan Bender with the Boston Globe. To try and follow up on that, obviously your focus -- a lot of your focus now is this operation, but can you give us a broader assessment of your headquarters and the larger region of the south? What does the enemy look like? What does the population look like in terms of their view of the government? Kind of give us a sense of what your challenge is going forward in the next six months to stabilize not just this region but what you just said has been one of the most unstable.

GEN. CARTER: Yes. I mean, I think one of the things -- the key things that changed with General McChrystal's population-centric approach is that a mission statement that was very much focused on defeating an insurgency switched firmly to protecting a population.

Now in the south, that means that given even the additional resources we've got, that we have to be very focused on where the population is living.

Central Helmand is therefore important to us because, taking Lashkar Gah as the center, from Lashkar Gah north by about 50 kilometers, and from Lashkar Gah south down to Garmsir, another distance of about a hundred kilometers, within that part of the Helmand Valley around 750,000 people live.

Equally, over in Kandahar, in the urban area lives around 500,000 people, and around it, in its rural environs, all of which are very closely irrigated and therefore significantly populated, another 500,000 people live.

So taking the overall population in the south -- there's around 3 million -- you can see if you focused your attention in population- centric terms on those two population areas, you're picking up around two-thirds of the population.

So from my perspective as an RC South commander, my principal effort goes towards central Helmand and to the population living in and around Kandahar and the urban area.

I'm also very conscious of freedom of movement between those two population centers, because if you can get Afghans to be able to move freely on those roads, you'll begin to get the economy to move and governance to be delivered more broadly across the region.

Now as the population sees it at the moment, it does not feel able to move freely on those roads, and indeed it is regularly fleeced at illegal checkpoints if it tries to move goods and services that it has grown in these agricultural areas, as it were, to market or indeed further afield. And what we have to do is to improve that paradigm and to make that population feel protected.

The challenge, though, is that we need adequate ANSF (Afghanistan National Security Forces) to be able to do that. And the big difficulty for us at the moment is that we need more policemen to do this, and we're therefore working extremely hard to build on the police force, in conjunction with the army, to give ourself [sic] that partnership to be able genuinely to pop -- to protect that population.

I've gone over this a kazillion times on this blog while discussing Iraq and Afghanistan, but once more can't hurt; the key to beating insurgents is to win over the population. This does not mean they have to like the counterinsurgents, rather that they must 1) believe the counterinsurgents must win and that 2) it is their best interests that they win. The first step is protecting the population. If the counterinsurgents cannot protect the people, all the building projects in the world are worthless.

We were able to protect the population in Iraq after the surge of 2007, and after we won them over this led to a process whereby the insurgents had no place to hide.

Now I realize this is a quite simplified version of events, that there were several regional insurgencies in Iraq, each of which was quite different. And there was the Anbar Awakening. But it is a good description of the overall picture and the definition of how to win.

It's so far so good with Operation Moshtarak, and we'll just have to wait and see whether our gains are permanent.

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Operation Moshtarak: Kinetic Operations in Afghanistan Begin Anew