pmcimagazine.com
WHAT WENT WRONG IN
AFGHANISTAN?
Since 20 December 2001, the date which marked the
authorization of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) to assist the Afghan Government , hundreds of
thousands of coalition soldiers from around 50 different states
have physically been and served in Afghanistan.
security analyst. Gurcan obtained his PhD in May 2016, with
a dissertation on changes in the Turkish military over the last
decade. He has been published extensively in Turkish and foreign
academic journals
Roughly 20 rotation periods have been experienced; billions of
US dollars have been spent; and almost 3,500 coalition soldiers
and 7,400 Afghani security personnel have fallen for Afghanistan.
In this badly-managed success story, the true determiner of
both tactical outcomes on the ground and strategic results
was always the tribal and rural parts of Muslim-populated
Afghanistan. Although there has emerged a vast literature on
counterinsurgency theories and tactics, we still lack reliable
information about the motivations and aspirations of the
residents of Tribalized Rural Muslim Environments (TRMEs) that
make up most of Afghanistan.
The aim of this book is to describe some on-the-ground problems
of counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in TRMEs, specifically in rural
Afghanistan, and then to propose how these efforts might be
improved. Along the way, it will be necessary to challenge many
current assumptions about the conduct of counterinsurgency
in Afghanistan. Most generally, the book will show how
counterinsurgency succeeds or fails at the local level (at the
level of tactical decisions by small-unit leaders) and that these
decisions cannot be successful without understanding the culture
and perspective of those who live in TRMEs.
Engaging issues of culture, the author is a Muslim who spent his
childhood in a TRME, a remote village in Turkey, and he offers his
observations on the basis of 15 years’ worth of field experience
as a Turkish Special Forces officer serving in rural Iraq, Turkey,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. Cultures in these areas
are not the same, but there are sufficient similarities to suggest
some overall characteristics of TRMEs and some general problems
of COIN efforts in these environments. In summary, this book
not only challenges some of the fundamentals of traditional
counterinsurgency wisdom and emphasizes the importance of
the tactical level, a rarely-studied field from the COIN perspective,
but also blends the first hand field experiences of the author with
deep analyses. In this sense, it is not solely an autobiography,
but something much more.
Metin Gurcan is a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse. Now
resigned from the military, he is an Istanbul-based independent
Author: Metin Gurcan
Publisher: Helion and Company
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1911096001
ISBN-13: 978-1911096009
Paperback: 132 pages
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