Reply #11: NPR did a good report relating to this this morning

[MissMillie]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100942657

Within a few weeks, the administration of President Barack Obama will unveil a series of reviews on Afghanistan and Pakistan.....

The reviews offer a chance for fresh thinking on how to handle the deteriorating security situations in these countries. Dozens of experts and analysts have been tapped for their input.

One of those is David Kilcullen, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Kilcullen approaches the dual challenge of Afghanistan and Pakistan from a different starting point than many others grappling with the problem.

For starters, Kilcullen is Australian — a former army officer and a counterinsurgency expert. The 41-year-old has a doctorate in the anthropology of guerrilla warfare. He also was a senior adviser to Gen. David Petraeus during the early days of the military surge in Iraq in 2007.

"We have a longer-term problem about how we've been conducting the operation to date," he says. "Afghanistan is really on the point of significant downturn this year."

Local Connections, Isolating The Enemy

Kilcullen says routing Taliban extremists from their sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan is critical to success in Afghanistan. But he says the U.S. also will have to assess — and change — the way a new influx of U.S. troops is fighting the war in Afghanistan.

Kilcullen says the current U.S. approach is "enemy-centric."

"We are chasing the bad guys around Afghanistan, and that leaves the population feeling unprotected and insecure," he says.

Kilcullen says the militants are elusive, and don't have to hold and defend territory. He says that instead of hunting the extremists, the U.S. would do better to focus its efforts on providing the local population with better security as a way to gain their cooperation and trust.

(more at the link)