The "Hearts and Minds" Guys

Today, there are nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers hiking around the dusty villages of Afghanistan, battling a tenacious insurgency. Winning "hearts and minds" is once again the order of the day for the U.S. military. The war may have moved to the other end of Asia, but in thinking of the Afghanistan war, I find myself returning to the lessons I learned as a young man in Vietnam.

I was not a soldier during the Vietnam War, but one of four State Department civilians working for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in our province, Binh Long, 60 miles north of Saigon. We were the counterinsurgency workers, the "hearts and minds" guys, a mixture of young do-gooders fresh out of college, midcareer Foreign Service officers, and a great many random misfits: men escaping nagging wives and boring jobs, adventurers, boozers, soldiers of fortune, profiteers, ex-military personnel hooked on war.

If one were to conduct a survey of the civilians plying their trade in Afghanistan today, I do not doubt that it would consist of a similar mix of people. We worked in the villages so that the Vietnamese people would side with us, not the enemy. We thought we could win the war by being nice.

What we learned was that "nice" has a variety of meanings in wartime. The day after the battle of Loc Ninh, in October 1967, we visited a village that had been hit by friendly fire. The village, 40 or 50 thatch and stone homes set close together and connected by dirt paths, spread down a gentle slope below us in the bright morning sun. It was impossible to imagine anything bad happening in this pastoral landscape. I took the door gunner's helmet, spoke to the pilot, and pointed to a clear area at the top of the rise. The pilot nodded and eased the chopper down as gently as setting a teacup and saucer on a side table.

The villagers told us no one had been killed or injured by the errant gunfire; three houses, however, were destroyed. We promised to bring aluminum roofing sheets, bulgur wheat, rice, old clothes from Catholic Relief Services, CARE packages -- the usual stuff. We got back on the chopper and flew over to Loc Ninh, where the main battle had taken place.

That evening back in An Loc, the provincial capital, one of the many spies working in our province sidled up and said "Got a report."

"Yeah?"

"That village today?"

"What?"

"Squad of VC there. Said, 'We want to kill these Americans.' People said, 'No, don't; they're just here to help us.'" The spy jerked his head up, grunted a half-laugh, and turned for the Special Forces club. The villagers had saved our lives.

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DEBANJAN

11:20 PM ET

August 13, 2010

Great article Roger

Normally we know that the Westerners do not consider their enemies as equal human beings. Dehumanization of enemy is the first of the Western war principles.

It is a refreshing article from your part to speak the opposite.

I remember another article that I read in 2007 in one of the American news papers about one American pilot who hated Muslims since 9/11 , went to Afghanistan to bomb the hell out of them. His fighter jet was shot down over one Afghan village in probably 2006 and all his other mates were dead. Then afghan villagers from one poor Afghan village saved him from the retribution of Taliban , nursed him back to health and he was all right after some time.

Since then I have not heard much about this man. Can you kindly help us Roger telling us what this guy is doing now ?

TOOLBAG

11:19 AM ET

August 14, 2010

Wait a minute

What about the helpful Afghans that brutally killed those Sailors recently. What about the helpful Iraqis that beheaded a soldier, or the Helpful Iraqis that beat to death and then burned two soldiers. Don't give me this bullshit that there aren't monsters on the other side to. In war each side has its own heroes and villains. I also like your completely racist comment that dehumanizing the enemy is the way of Western War. Do you have a reading comprehension problem? Soldiers are being allowed to die because the strategy in Afghanistan is designed to all but eliminate civilian casualties and to be sensitive to the Afghan culture. How about this how about we all stop being so sensitive. What would happen if the forces in Afghanistan decided to stop using restraint? Debanjan you have taken a very narrow and uninformed stance on this issue. It is cliché and very provincial.

THAT SAM I AM

3:45 PM ET

August 15, 2010

Rescued SEAL update

Marcus Luttrell was the Navy SEAL who was rescued by Afghan villagers after the rest of his patrol was killed by Taliban in June 2005. A quick Google search says he's currently making the speaking rounds with Sarah Palin.

Here's a link to his book

http://www.amazon.com/Lone-Survivor-Eyewitness-Account-Operation/dp/0316044695/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281904544&sr=1-1

And here's a link to a talk he gave at an NRA meeting in May 2008. He doesn't seem to have much patience with rules of engagement and hearts and minds.

http://copthetruth.typepad.com/cop_the_truth/2008/05/marcus-luttrell.html

DISIGNY

Hearts and Minds

What we need to explain to the Afghans is why we are doing the same things to them that the British and Soviets have been doing for the last 200 years. Perhaps we really believe that the Afghans , and other Moslems are terminally stupid, but there is really no evidence of this.

THEJADEDCYNIC

7:07 PM ET

Neither the Soviets, the British, the Mongols, or Alexander went to Afghanistan with the justification America had. Every one of those former antagonists in Afghanistan was there for selfish ends; to build an empire or secure the flanks of an established one. The US invaded for one reason; the Taliban harbored people responsible for murdering several thousand of our citizens. We happen not to take very kindly to that sort of thing here DISIGNY. (You probably wouldn't cotton to that either I suspect.)
Unlike the Sov's the Brit's, the Mongols, or any of the other "conquerors"; we've been spending more blood and treasure there than we do for our own people. We were even kind enough to identify a trillion or so worth of minerals on their real estate; if they can get their acts together and exploit these reserves, they stand a chance of becoming a moderately wealthy country. In short, I resent the implication that we are "doing" anything to these people, unless it's to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century!
(Oh and we're also making it damned inconvenient to go around cutting girl's noses off, and stuff like that. Not bad for a bunch of "evil occupiers", huh?)

6:44 PM ET

I find it frustrating that people seem to have soured on the war in Afghanistan, as if the situation has somehow become untenable. What makes Afghanistan the shaky situation it is, is the fecklessness of it's governing elites, especially one Hamid Karzai. The Americans and NATO forces in the country have delivered vital services, built roads and schools, and prevented some of the most brutal and benighted zealots ever spawned from further pillaging innocent people in the name of their ideology. ( I refuse to denigrate Islam with a connection to these people. Fascism is fascism; disguise it with religion if you will.)
I find equally exasperating the ease with which people are willing to attribute normal collateral damage in wartime to "war crimes" needing to be exposed and corrected. I agree that American forces operating under the Rumsfeld/Cheney "harsh interrogation regime" were guilty of numerous violations of the rules of war. I dispute completely the notion that this somehow equates to the "American way of war"; or that our forces are currently operating under those kinds of rules of engagement. If anything; the counter-insurgency strategy adopted by McChrystal and continued with slight modification by Petraeus, seems to me too restrictive and errs on the side of caution rather than boldness.
I found the article refreshing simply because it acknowledges the grey areas that exist between societies in conflict, and the peoples caught in that collision. The choice the villagers exercised that day is repeated daily in Afghanistan, I would guess; let the Americans live to render aid, or kill if you choose, as long as you leave our village in peace.

AVNER STEIN

5:38 AM ET

Lol que?

Israel killed 2 million civilians in Vietnam, fire-bombed Japan and Germany, raped thousands of Koreans, killed thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis?

Uh?

You really want to compare Israel's righteous military history to our's?

LOL.

I agree, "wining the hearts and minds" argument is bogus. Either US military makes a decision to eliminate the Taliban, which would mean putting pressure on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or we leave.

Our presence there is becoming more and more pointless.

8:22 PM ET

Wikipedia much?

So what? How did the 1st intifada start?

Oh yeah - staged by Hamas. A few Arabs die in a car accident and the Palestinians say it was a master-conspiracy to kill Palestinians.

How would the US to react to terrorism on the home-front? Look how every nation has confronted civil conflicts - syria wiped out 40,000 in the hama massacre, Jordan killed 3,500 Palestinians over a weekend, Egypt hanged thousands of muslim brotherhood operatives, hell Kuwait recently kicked out 30 citizens for Islamists demonstrations...and they're an Islamic state!

Israel is not perfect and of course it has made mistakes, but to point to one problem and say Israel is a horrible country is bogus.

Israel didn't murder millions of people like the USA.

ARTFUL AID WORKER

7:24 AM ET

Great article

It was a man's honest reflections about Viet Nam. Mr Cranse exhibits a remarkable self-reflexive quality; thinking about what happened then, imagining what could have happened, and drawing inferences about the risks and humanity of people living on the brink. The comparison with Afghanistan is apt.

Then a bunch of you tossbags start ripping into Israel and pulp-theories about COIN, etc.

Boring sods.

Great article Mr. Cranse - very provocative (for me at least).

DDSNAIK

1:33 PM ET

I 2nd Artful's comments

... and reject every possible commentary being hijacked into the Isreali/conspiracy/random meandering argument stream of thought.

MAY

9:20 PM ET

Dismembering Afghanistan is being discussed instead

http://www.fpif.org/articles/dismembering_afghanistan

YARINSIZ

4:44 AM ET

September 10, 2010

Neither the Soviets, the

Foreign Policy Magazine

Inside National Security

The United States never did understand the Vietnamese 40 years ago -- and should do everything possible to avoid making the same mistake in Afghanistan today.

BY ROGER CRANSE | AUGUST 13, 2010

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