The residents of Afghanistan's Tarok Kolache are really quite fond of the American forces who demolished their village. The Taliban had turned the place into a minefield, after all, and now U.S. troops are helping rebuild the place. That's the story, at least, according to Gen. David Petraeus' biographer and former adviser, who's embedded with the 1-320th Field Artillery Regiment nearby.
Paula Broadwell finds residents of the town to be all smiles now that reconstruction is beginning. In October, the 1-320th pounded Tarok Kolache with 49,200 lbs of bombs and rockets after the Taliban kicked out its residents and turned it into a hotbed of homemade bombs, making it too dangerous for U.S. troops to clear. Now, its children are playing happily on Tarok Kolache's roads. One village representative tells Broadwell that he wants the unit "to move into our new village with us. We don't want you to leave."
All in all, Broadwell concludes, it's a "small victory" for the war effort, and any skepticism about the operation is "skewed" by not being on the ground to talk to the locals.
We'd never dispute the value of on-the-ground-experience, of course. That's why we took so seriously earlier reports from Tarok Kolache and nearby areas detailing local frustration with heavy-handed U.S. tactics. The Washington Post recently recounted a Kandahar farmer asking a NATO general, "Why do you have to blow up so many of our fields and homes?" In Tarok Kolache itself, Stars & Stripes reported in December that villagers compared the U.S. to the 80s-era Soviet occupiers and were "extremely angry," as one U.S. captain put it, at least until the U.S. began pledging to rebuild the area. Even Broadwell's first piece on Tarok Kolache earlier this month picked up on the villagers' unease with the leveling of their homes.
Perhaps rebuilding a village can offset its residents' anger at its destruction. But it's worth remembering that Insurgency 101 is about provoking violent overreactions from counterinsurgents. Petraeus' spokesman, Col. Erik Gunhus, told Danger Room last week that U.S. troops waging a difficult fight in southern Afghanistan were encountering compounds and even whole villages "saturated" with homemade explosives, ready to kill American forces.
That suggests the Taliban may be trying to force the U.S. into knocking down the buildings, spreading the message that the U.S. don't actually care about Afghan lives or property. "Given that the strategy -- that EVERYONE here knows -- is to win the hearts and minds of villagers, razing villages is not high on the priority list," Broadwell emails Afghanistan analyst Josh Foust, who's been sharply critical of the Tarok Kolache operation. "It is not common."
Perhaps. But in November, the *New York Times *reported that during a two-month period in Kandahar, NATO tallied 174 "deliberate demolitions... including homes and other structures."
To say the least, U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan don't have a good track record. Hopefully Broadwell's right and Tarok Kolache will prove to be an exception. But the more the U.S. relies on demolitions like that, the smaller its margin of error for keeping the Afghan people on its side will become.
In July, a military official wrote that the Taliban "want" U.S. troops to "kill civilians or damage their property in the course of our operations," thereby creating "more enemies than our operations eliminate." His name is Gen. David Petraeus. Years ago, he learned some hard lessons about how heavy-handed tactics can inadvertently set back an entire U.S. war effort.
*Update, 1:20 p.m.: *Over at Tom Ricks' blog, the commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320, Lt. Col. David Flynn, writes a long, detailed post explaining his reasoning for flattening and now rebuilding Tarok Kolache. Here's how he describes the measures he took to avoid civilian casualties, which match what Petraeus' spokesman told Danger Room last week:
Flynn continues, "If we didn't care about the local population, I would have thrown money at them and bid them farewell. We are committed to their future, and as far as I can tell they are walking side by side with us."
*Photos: DoD, ISAF
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