Via Noah Shachtman at Danger Room, Anna Mulrine reports for U.S. News that the Afghan Social Outreach Program I mentioned yesterday includes such Sons-of-Iraq-like behavior as arming ex-insurgents:

As in Iraq, the Afghan forces would be on the U.S. payroll, which officials hope will also entice some former insurgents to work with NATO forces. “We bring money so we can hire young men to be the first line of defense” in small towns throughout Afghanistan, says a senior U.S. military official in Kabul. “We wouldn’t be surprised if some of them used to be insurgents. We figure this is a way to crack the nut.”

Mulrine quotes McKiernan on this, so she can hardly be said not to represent his views. Interestingly, McKiernan tells her that U.S. troops are going to indirectly pick the Afghan recruits themselves for this initiative, convening shura councils of tribal elders who will nominate ASOP candidates. “We need to make sure we’re employing the right people to provide security for the population,” she quotes an anonymous official as saying.

Noah wonders:

But the Sons of Iraq also worked as a program because tribal leaders in Anbar were fed up with Al Qaeda in Mespotamia — and had already started to take matters in their own hands. Is their a similar seed of opposition in Afghanistan?

Good question. Here are two more: McKiernan worried aloud in October about creating another militia in a country with too many of them as it is. How is this not a militia? He also said that “tribal engagement, it has to be led by the Afghan government.” Is this led by the Afghan government? What’s the argument for doing this instead of expanding Afghan police/army recruitment?

Not a word of this is true:

It’s basically self-refuting to see the McCain campaign clip off Obama’s full Afghanistan comments from August — “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there” — which is an obvious call to bolster troop levels.

The concern about civilian casualties were echoed by America-haters like as Hamid Karzai and George W. Bush, as this AP factcheck points out.

To their ranks, let’s add Gen. McClellan McKiernan, from his press conference at the Newseum last week, when he discussed the counterproductivity of civilian casualties to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

This is a transcript from my voice recorder:

[Shows a slide of himself at a meeting of Afghan villagers] The picture in the bottom center, if I could dwell on that for just a second, yes, that’s myself with my back turned to you, at a province that doesn’t need to be named, and it has to do with civilian casualties. It’s an episode — and I’d like to dwell on civilian casualties with you for a minute.

We take great measures to try to avoid civilian casualties. But when a mistake is made and inadvertently there is a loss of civilian life unintentionally, we try to make sure that we get out with the truth as quickly as we can. We have a hard time beating the insurgent to the story because he’s not concerned with the truth.

But in this particular case I went to this location and talked with a group of tribal elders in an area where we think we inadvertently caused some civilian casualties. And to tell you what an incredible sort of population lives in Afghanistan, that fellow sitting in the middle of the picture there, he lost seven members of his family.

Yet he came and talked to me that day, allowed me to apologize to him, allowed us to have a shura, allowed us to talk and, at the end of the day, he professed that he did not want the Taliban back in power — that he supported the presence of international forces.

I don’t think that would happen in our country, in the United States of America. I don’t think someone that lost seven members of their family would come sit down with somebody in the military and even have a discussion.

But it tells you about the resiliency of that population. But I hope you ask me something else about civilian casualties, because that’s something we try to go to great lengths to avoid in that country. …

[Reporter asks question about civilian casualties]… First of all, it’s important that ISAF, that the military, try to come out with the truth as quickly as possible. But we inherently play catch-up to anybody that reports a number or an event. We do try at least to get a truthful accounting in the media.

It’s very difficult to come up with numbers in Afghanistan after there’s been a military operation. A lot of that’s cultural, because people generally are taken away and buried quite quickly in that culture, so it’s not like you can exploit a site for a period of time and come up with an accurate number, so a lot of it’s based on estimates.

And then, finally, I won’t go into specifics on rules of engagement, but I’ll say that principles such as positive identification of targets to the best of our ability, the concept of proportionality, precise planning considerations on type of weapons and use of weapons — all of that is factored in, all of that is attempted to be disciplined in units before they even come to the theater.

But when you fight a counterinsurgency, by the nature of an insurgency, where the enemy mixes in with the population, it is virtually impossible to completely avoid civilian casualties in that kind of environment.

McCain’s new slogan maybe ought to be Dishonor Before Death.

These two things cannot coexist: the McCain-Palin insistence on deferring to ground commanders in war and the McCain-Palin insistence that the “surge strategy,” as Palin put it, is necessary in Afghanistan.

As I reported after Gen. David McKiernan’s Wednesday press conference, McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, unambiguously rejects the idea of an Afghanistan surge and of a “Pashtun Awakening.”

If they’re for a surge in Afghanistan, they’re arguing against the explicit recommendations of the commanding general. Which they’re free to do! They just can’t say any longer that it’s the ground commanders who best understand the strategy.

Or, as he put it, “Sen. Obama calls for more troops, but what he doesn’t understand, it’s got to be a new strategy, the same strategy that he condemned in Iraq. It’s going to have to be employed in Afghanistan.”

Alas, Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, disagrees.

Sorry to quote the last post at length, but this seems like valuable context.

McKiernan said today:

But there are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, it’s such a poor country, by any set of metrics you can imagine. A country that has very harsh geography. It’s very difficult to move around, getting back to our reliance on helicopters. It’s a country with very few natural resources, as opposed to the oil revenues that [Iraq] has. There’s very little money to be generated in terms of generated in Afghanistan. The literacy rate — you have a literate society in Iraq, you have a society that has a history of producing civil administrators, technocrats, middle class that are able to run the country in Iraq. You do not have that in Afghanistan. So there’s educational challenges, challenges of human capitol that I mentioned earlier.

So there are a lot of challenges. What I don’t think is needed — the word that I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word “surge.” There needs to be a sustained commitment of a variety of military and non-military resources, I believe. That’s my advice to winning in Afghanistan. It won’t be a short-term solution.

Here’s McKiernan’s entire answer:

I like to remind people that Afghanistan, when the United States intervened after 9/11, was in a civil war. It wouldn’t take much to go back to a civil war. There’s a degree of complexity with tribal networks that I find if I stayed there 20 years I would not understand completely.

I do think there’s a role for traditional tribal authorities and tribal structure in Afghanistan, in the rural areas especially, to play in a community-based sense of security, of connection with the government, and of environmental considerations. But I think that has to be led, that tribal engagement, it has to be led by the Afghan government. I specifically tell my chain of command in ISAF [International Security Assistance Force, the name for NATO's mission in Afghanistan] that I don’t want the military to be engaging the tribes to do that. It has to be through the Afghan government to do that. But of course, there’s danger in that. There’s always, “Is this particular tribe, is it being reached out to for all the right reasons?” That has to be watched very closely.

Later, the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung followed up, and McKiernan elaborated — and, in the process, threw cold water on the broader idea that what seemed to work in Iraq will work in Afghanistan:

First of all, please don’t think that I’m saying there’s no room for tribal engagement in Afghanistan, because I think it’s very necessary. But I think it’s much more complex environment of tribal linkages, and intertribal complexity than there is in Iraq. It’s not as simple as taking the Sunni Awakening and doing the Pashtun Awakening in Afghanistan. It’s much more complex than that.

But there are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, it’s such a poor country, by any set of metrics you can imagine. A country that has very harsh geography. It’s very difficult to move around, getting back to our reliance on helicopters. It’s a country with very few natural resources, as opposed to the oil revenues that [Iraq] has. There’s very little money to be generated in terms of generated in Afghanistan. The literacy rate — you have a literate society in Iraq, you have a society that has a history of producing civil administrators, technocrats, middle class that are able to run the country in Iraq. You do not have that in Afghanistan. So there’s educational challenges, challenges of human capitol that I mentioned earlier.

So there are a lot of challenges. What I don’t think is needed — the word that I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word “surge.” There needs to be a sustained commitment of a variety of military and non-military resources, I believe. That’s my advice to winning in Afghanistan. It won’t be a short-term solution.