I discovered a cool blog yesterday that I wanted to share with you. It’s called Bill and Bob’s Afghan Excellent Adventure, and it’s written by an NCO stationed in Afghanistan. Longtime Flametoad readers know that I’ve been a big fan of independent journalists Michael Totten and Michael Yon, who each spent several months a year for the last few years embedded with troops in Iraq. I quickly came to believe that the reports I got from the Michaels were much more reliable than the canned news I was getting from the major news outlets. The reports, like good magazine feature articles, were also very engaging on a human level.
Tuesday I read ten posts from Bill and Bob’s Excellent Afghan Adventure, which is about as close to the source as you can get. His analysis of the Army’s effectiveness at deploying COIN and the resistance from some quarters is pretty fascinating reading. It reminds me of several conversations I had with Cerebral Misfire about using “strategic cultural imperialism” versus “kinetic warfare”. He firmly believed that the only way to recover from the debacle in Iraq was by thoroughly militarily crushing all resistence. I saw our need as more of a two-pronged approach, in which military force was needed against the truly bad guys while we worked on the hearts and minds of the everyday Iraqi to stop new insurgents from being recruited. Counter Insurgency (COIN) is neither cultural imperialism as I imagined it, nor is it the “kinetic warfare” that he or many soldiers equate with warfare.
Regardless, my input amounts to little more than armchair quarterbacking. If you want the scoop on America’s fight in Afghanistan and its implications for how we prepare for battle in the future, I highly recommend Bill and Bob’s Excellent Afghan Adventure.
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