Afstan: "In Defense of Air Power"

William Arkin of the Washington Post makes a good defence, one I suspect the CF would agree with:

Winter came none too soon to Afghanistan this year. The snows and rough weather tend to impede the Taliban and give technological advantage to U.S. and coalition forces. And this year, the most violent since the fall of the Taliban, a momentary respite is especially needed.

One of the main storylines coming out of Afghanistan this year involved civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO airstrikes. It's a storyline the military should be able to counter, but hasn't - which means a win for the Taliban in the information war.

The typical media report reads like this from The Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section:

"Last year was the worst year for civilian casualties since the fall of the country's cruel Taliban regime, and 2007 is shaping up to be even worse. The most alarming point: As of July, more civilians had died as a result of NATO, U.S. and Afghan government firepower than had died due to the Taliban. According to U.N. figures, 314 civilians were killed by international and Afghan government forces in the first six months of this year, while 279 civilians were killed by the insurgents [emphasis added--in a country of 25-30 million!].

"So why on Earth are the NATO and U.S. forces and their Afghan allies killing more civilians than the Taliban? One explanation can be found in the relatively low number of Western boots on the ground. Afghanistan, which is 1 1/2 times the size of Iraq and has a somewhat larger population, has only about 50,000 U.S. and NATO soldiers stationed on its soil. By contrast, more than 170,000 U.S. troops are now in Iraq. So the West has to rely far more heavily on airstrikes in Afghanistan, which inevitably exact a higher toll in civilian casualties. Indeed, the Associated Press found that U.S. and NATO forces launched more than 1,000 airstrikes in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2007 alone -- four times as many airstrikes as U.S. forces carried out in Iraq during that period."

It's true that there aren't many boots on the ground in Afghanistan. The buzzword among military types there is "under-resourced." At the same time, given the circumstances, the use of air power has been highly effective. It allows NATO a presence in every nook and cranny of the country, denies sanctuary to insurgents and ensures a sustained offensive. Moreover, there's no empirical evidence that air power is more deadly than equivalent ground engagements and no reason to think the civilian protections would be better if there were 400,000 troops on the ground, which is what Army counter-insurgency doctrine calls for.

But few people seem to understand or appreciate what air power affords -- not even, apparently, U.S. commanders.

Here's an exchange from earlier this week between the NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill, and PBS NewsHour's Gwen Ifill.

Ifill: "But some Europeans, who are your allies in this, have said that the air strikes, for instance, are turning Afghans against the NATO forces and causing collateral damage, and that that's not the best strategy."

McNeill: "Well, and, indeed, there is some truth to that. There have been noncombatant deaths, but I would want to point out to all of our listeners the stringent methods that we take to make sure we minimize risk to the Afghan people, as well as their property. And often the insurgent puts out statements about what has occurred that simply is not true. We've been able to refute a number of those. He's a little better at information operations, so to speak, than we are, one, because he feels no compelling need to be accurate. That's not my view. We have to be very accurate with what we say."

Lamenting that the bad guys are just really good at information warfare is evasive and ineffective [emphasis added], but lost in the answer is no understanding by the top commander of air power. The question -- the equivalent of when did you stop beating your wife -- and the answer, admitting a high level of civilian damage and suggesting that indeed air power is responsible (say, for instance, rather than the enemy being responsible or questioning whether it's true in the first place) turns an effective strategy into merely an object of the information war. The Taliban might be controlling the narrative, but it is McNeill's answer that is the enabler.

McNeill should have said: "Gwen, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing, given how under-resourced we are, if it weren't for air power. It's our asymmetric advantage. And its effectiveness is so frustrating to the enemy that the Taliban's only recourse is to portray it as particularly damaging to civilians. I'm afraid you - and other critics -- are too accepting of the enemy's claims. U.S. and NATO forces are attacking combatants in Afghanistan, and doing the best we can to safeguard civilians in that process."
Of course, for McNeill - an Army man -- to say it, he'd have to understand it. The Air Force needs to get better at telling its story, too.