The Torch: Afstan: A way to make a success of President Obama's strategy

"Vietnamization" that works (see below). The ANSF must be enabled increasingly to take charge themselves--and be given much improved ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) support. Excerpts from a post by BruceR. at Flit:

... Gen. McChrystal's review ...[said] that the forces [international and ANSF] must actually start to work closely together now, not just continue the lip service: enabling Afghan operations, not just dragging them along on ours. This change in attitude towards ANSF development is the most important part of his new strategy, separate from any change in troop levels. As McChrystal himself said, in the absence of the attitudinal change, any troop increase is irrelevant.
The end state here, at least within the parts of the country the government is trying to hold, is akin to what was supposed to happen in the early 1970s with Vietnamization... Afghan ground forces, supported and backed up by Western enablers... ISR drones, helicopters, fast air, casevac, highly accurate artillery, delivered to them through control relationships or imbedded mentors. Everyone agrees that gradually the part of the country patrolled on foot and in vehicles by Western soldiers needs to decrease... this is the way to get there. First, drop the bureaucratic and operational barriers to full cooperation. Then start handing back the country, district by district and province by province, with only Western mentors or their military equivalents (albeit with radios that can call down whatever's needed) remaining. The areas where a Western battalion has the lead will correspondingly shrink progressively, removing them as a presence from populated areas.
That means there will still be lots of Americans and ISAF troops post July '11. But they'll be less visible... and in a real sense working for and with the Afghans, not around them...

One of those enablers we're going to continue to provide for a long time is ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). Now, there's one complication with that plan, and for that I need to show a picture.

This is the 1/205 ANA Brigade's intelligence desk on deployed operations. Seriously, this is all of it. There is no more. 1/205 was responsible for fighting the insurgency in Kandahar Province, which has roughly a million people. What you are seeing is all the tools, all of them, the Afghan army had at the time to find their enemy and evaluate the effect they were having on them in that province...

By the way, the president in his Dec. 1 speech said that "Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency." Post-Tet the US and South Vietnam did not in fact face such an insurgency--and just in case one scoffs, reflexively, unthinkingly, and ignorantly at "Vietnamization":

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Unquestionably, this was being aided by the fact that during the 1968 TET Offensive the Viet Cong organization implanted within the population surfaced and was largely destroyed. North Vietnam's subsequent attempts to replace these mostly South Vietnamese cadres with Northerners failed. The Abrams/Colby "one war strategy" was certainly aided by the Viet Cong's demise, but the population could never have been secured without the strategy. By 1972 about 90% of the South Vietnamese population had been returned to our control...

Indeed by later 1972 that would have meant South Vietnamese military control as US ground forces were being rapidly withdrawn ("The last US ground combat troops left Vietnam on 23 August, 1972."). The South Vietnamese government was not defeated by an insurgency of any sort; rather it was defeated in 1975 by a major North Vietnamese Army conventional offensive, complete with tanks and artillery (US air support had also ended):

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During March

Another NVA offensive sends 100,000 soldiers against the major cities of Quang Tri, Hue and Da Nang. Backed by powerful armored forces and eight full regiments of artillery, they quickly succeed in capturing Quang Tri province.

North Vietnamese armored forces
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