Going Local - VSO/ Afghan Local Police: A Square Peg in a Round Hole

From Scott Mann’s forthcoming “Game Changers”:

The U.S. and its allies have fought valiantly in Afghanistan, but fighting courageously in the unfortunate country of Afghanistan does us no more good than it did for Alexander the Great. The Afghan Campaign (2002 – 2014) following the initial SOF-led Unconventional Warfare Campaign of late 2001, evolved into an obscenely large and disconnected military endeavor for the type of threat and instability faced in this violent place. This top-down military campaign involved large-scale and unwieldy unilateral counter-insurgency forces projecting a war of attrition against shadow extremists who were embedded among a grievance-riddled clan society we did not care to understand.

This top-down approach continued for almost a decade until SOF tried something different – not new – getting back to the roots of Special Forces. By stepping back, and defining relative stability as largely bottom-up informal civil society handling its own affairs, SOF began to live and work within rural Pashtun villages to help locals stand up against extremists. This program is known today as Village Stability Operations (VSO). This SOF-initiative underpinned the Afghan-led program of Afghan Local Police (ALP) and put power in the hands of rural folks, the way it always was. It also sought to connect rural villages to their government in minimalist ways - ways that the locals accepted.

VSO was not a silver bullet and it was never designed to win the Afghan campaign. It was designed to address the critically important element of informal civil society, especially in Pashtun tribal areas, that the Coalition and the Afghan Government were not suited to address. In places like North Afghanistan, where civil society was less fractured and loyalties to the government run deeper, VSO was not as effective. VSO had many problems of its own, however, its strength was that it was based on local realities.

What VSO did was teach us things about clan society that we didn't understand with traditional COIN. Because it was synchronized with local realities, VSO grew quickly and had significant impact on senior al Qa'ida and Taliban Leaders. Unfortunately, the program started too late and was short lived. Starting in 2013, the Afghan Transition marked the end of VSO and as Afghan Local Police continued, VSO ended as Green Berets, SEALS, and Marines were pulled out of villages and consolidated in the regional urban centers. As these SOF teams departed the rural areas, many key communities fell to the extremists.

Now, we are withdrawing under unfavorable circumstances. This withdrawal, which will lead to zero force presence, puts our country at unnecessary risk by giving a moral victory to Qa'ida. It places the full load of stability on the shaky shoulders of the fledgling Afghan state and its battered informal civil societal skeleton.

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The storm gathers as we sleep. Despite vast amounts of blood and treasure expended since 9-11-2001, America and her allies are losing the war against Islamist violent extremists. For the first time since the War on Terror began, Green Beret Scott Mann, an original architect and implementer of this strategic program, reveals an immediately useful strategic framework to defeat ISIS, al Qa'ida, and even criminal elements here at home. This isn’t theory, this program started by Green Berets in the central highlands of Vietnam and mastered in the dusty villages of Afghanistan, holds the key to defeating Islamist violent extremists.