Lt. Gen. Mike DeLong was on Don Imus’s program this morning touting his book Inside CentCom. Gen. DeLong was Tommy Franks’s right hand man in conceiving and executing the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He expressed the opinion—which I have been saying for some time now—that such successes we have had in Afghanistan were because of the strategy we undertook there, not despite it. The objectives for Afghanistan were:
- Remove the Taliban and al Qaeda from power there.
- Re-establish civil society there on more democratic lines.
- Arrest or kill Osama bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda leaders.
The strategy that was used in achieving these goals was:
- Obtain the support of local leaders and forces.
- Minimize harm to Afghan people.
- Provide support to local forces in achieving the objectives.
I just don’t understand people who advocate a more cowboy, unilateralist approach than the one we took. A larger footprint, more aggressive force would have been likely to mobilize Afghans against us as it did against the Russians and British.
