A Quote by Vali Nasr
President Barack Obama started by accepting the military's counterinsurgency, but came out of Afghanistan having decided that counterinsurgency actually doesn't work.
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The Germans have done wonderful work. Not long ago, a German battle group battalion conducted a very impressive counterinsurgency operation in a portion of Baghlan province. I think these are the first counterinsurgency operations conducted by any German element after World War II. And they did a very impressive job.
Just in time for the renewal of the war debate in Congress, the University of Chicago Press has released The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. . . . It's a nifty volume, not only because it gives you a sense of what our most highly regarded military theorists are thinking but because sometimes what they're thinking is the last thing you'd expect. Especially interesting is a section called 'Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations,' which tells us: 'Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction' and 'Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.'
You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation.
One is the goals of 9/11 itself, of that attack was to draw the United States into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency as the Soviets had done before them.
I think the central mission in Afghanistan right now is to protect the people, certainly, and that would be inclusive of everybody, and that in a, in an insurgency and a counterinsurgency, that's really the center of gravity.
Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work." A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work." If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that George W.Bush lied about mass destruction weapons, the thumbnail version of Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.
America's military is the best in the world, but this president [Barack Obama] is hollowing out our military. We need a commander in chief that believes in American exceptionalism again.
At least, it is encouraging to me that President [Barack] Obama has put Afghanistan front and center in this broader so-called War on terror, and that he is taking a different approach to Afghanistan.
[Barack Obama] is sending more troops [to Afghanistan], but they have also realized that we are not going to win that war through guns and tanks. We have to engage the neighbors, and it is good that there is a non-military strategy in addition to a military strategy. It is, at least, encouraging. Whether it will work or not, the jury is still put.
Military leaders, many of whom were students of counterinsurgency, recognized the dangers of an incremental escalation and the historical lesson that 'trailing' an insurgency typically condemned counterinsurgents to failure.
This president [Barack Obama] is undermining our military. This president is more interested in funding Planned Parenthood than in funding the military.
I think indeed our response on counterinsurgency needs to be finely tuned to the needs of Afghanistan. This is not Iraq. We don't have a Sons of Iraq here. We don't have the same divisions here that we had between Sunni and Shia.
I do not believe that a counterterrorism strategy all by itself, without a sufficient level of counterinsurgency, will work.
It turned out that Democrats did not come out in the numbers they came out for, for Barack Obama. Five million fewer voters than went for Barack Obama back in 2012. So, what went wrong?
The president [Barack Obama] decided to leave more troops than he had originally planned in Afghanistan. We have a very cooperative government there, with Ashraf Ghani and his top - his top partner, Abdullah. And they are doing their very best. And the Afghan army is actually fighting. The Afghan army is taking heavy losses defending Afghan territory.
I never talk about military moves. I always criticized President [Barack] Obama with having an announcement that they're going into Mosul. They give the name, the date the time. I don't believe in that.
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