Local legitimacy and this week's elections

By Dave Anderson:

Big sweeps are impressive. Plenty of helicopters, maybe some artillery firing star shells and Willie Pete, dozens of Humvees and MRAPs loaded to the gills with a couple of companies of heavily loaded infantrymen all look great on television. They'll hit some initial scattered resistance as guerrilla and tribal fire teams and squads shoot and scoot to cover their escape over the goat paths, ratlines and and trails that they have known since they were five years old. The heavily loaded infantry's big concern is IEDs and left-over Soviet era mines as they take every step slowly, and then the occassionally harrassing mortar or rocket round. Within a day or two, the infantry sits in the bazaar, speaking with the elders and proclaim victory as well as registering voters for an election next week.

There are a couple of problems with this large sweep strategy in Afghanistan. The first is that it is not credible that the heavy, foreign forces are able to stay for long and actually create the umbrella of security that ink-spot and population-centric COIN need. Everyone knows that the Afghan Army does not have the capacity to "hold" cleared villages and towns due to a combination of a lack of numbers and a lack of motivation. Everyone knows that the Marines and the British Army don't have the numbers to hold too many villages at once, they can just chomp and stomp large concentrations and inflict mild attritional losses. Everyone knows that the Taliban fighters who were the target of the sweep are still in the bazaar watching and learning who is collaborating with the foreigners who may or may not be in that bazaar for long. Everyone knows those basic facts.

The Taliban is watching element is a long term concern for anyone who may be inclined to collaborate with the foreign forces. This is even more pronounced in the fact that the recent round of sweeps are designed to clear villages and towns in the Pashtun heartland for the election. It is ridiculous to assume that a Taliban controlled village that has been overrun and temporarily retaken by forces backing the Karzai government will be able to vote with any legitimacy in an election that is due to take place in a week or two after the change in local control.

There is no security, there is no credible promise by the counter-insurgent force that they can provide 24 hour blanket protection to the village elders down to the little old lady who wants to vote that they will not be whacked by their neighbors who also are in the Taliban. There is minimal information that is relevant to the political debate, and there is no infrastructure to actually hold a theoretically fair election. The elections in these newly seized areas will be a crock of shit no matter what the results are.