Can U.S. Troops Run McChrystal’s ‘Soft Power’ Playbook?
America has fought in its fair share of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies — from our own revolution to Iraq. But in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is trying something different. In a rather unorthodox approach, commanders there are radically de-emphasizing the “kinetic,” bombs and bullets fight, and instead putting a premium on persuading the people to side against the Taliban. That may sound similar to the strategy General David Petraeus executed in Iraq, and helped postulate in the military’s counterinsurgency field manual. But General Stanley McChrystal has taken the approach several steps further in Afghanistan — discouraging cordon-and-search raids, all-but-banning air strikes, directing troops to consider retreat rather than attacking a town. “It’s not the number of people you kill, it’s the number of people you convince. It’s the number of people that don’t get killed. It’s the number of houses are not destroyed,” McChrystal told his troops recently. It’s an attractive goal,
