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Top Security Expert Points To History To Show How Trump Can Successfully End The War In Afghanistan

   DailyWire.com
President Donald J. Trump visits troops at Bagram Airfield on Thursday, November 28, 2019, in Afghanistan, during a surprise visit to spend Thanksgiving with troops.
White House Photo by Shealah Craighead

Erik Prince, Chairman of the Frontier Resource Group, pointed to history in an interview with The Daily Wire this week in explaining how President Donald Trump can end the war in Afghanistan and thus secure a win as he seeks re-election.

Prince said that bureaucracy, politicians, and the military industrial complex was working overtime to stop the war from ending, and that the cost was high from a financial standpoint as well as from the standpoint of life and limbs that are lost in combat.

“Congress is right to be concerned about terrorism, but there’s already 130 terrorist sanctuaries in Afghanistan and that’s a figure from the former head of the NDS, the Afghan intel service,” Prince said. “And with 130 terrorist sanctuaries, meaning no-go areas that no friendly troops ever go in, that to me is a breeding ground, so with 4,500 [troops] you’re at best playing whack-a-mole occasionally, and it does not provide the structural support that the Afghan forces need.”

Prince explained that the current way that the U.S. is rotating troops into Afghanistan is not the most effective way to provide the three critical components that are needed to achieve success: mentors, air power, and combat logistics. Prince said that instead of thinking about deploying veteran volunteers contracted to the Afghan government as a “privatization,” officials should think about it as “rationalization” — meaning the entire goal is to make the operation more efficient.

Prince pointed to the Flying Tigers — a group of volunteer American aviators that fought against Japan during the early days of the United States’ involvement in World War II – as an example of how contractors can be critical in securing victory on the battlefield.

Prince also pointed to another example from history, Trump’s own personal history, as a vignette of how the president’s instincts have served him well in the past and have helped build his legacy.

“When young Donald Trump was a developer in New York, Ed Koch was the mayor, and the city was screwing up how they were trying to rehab this ice rink in central park, and after seeing this thing flail for years, and millions of dollars over budget, Trump said, give me the chance and let me fix this my way and I get to put my name on it,” Prince said. “And he did, and within six months the ice rink was reopened and all is good.”

The Washington Post reported:

Trump has run the rinks since the 1980s, under a concession from the city of New York. The rinks actually played a major role in the creation of Trump as a national celebrity: In the 1980s, he took over a languishing city-run renovation project and famously finished the rink himself, on time and under budget.

President Trump has the same opportunity here, according to Prince, who noted that he believes the president knows that the more efficient option is to deploy veteran volunteers contracted to the Afghan government.

Prince said that those who opposed his plan belonged to the so-called “deep state,” and included James Mattis, former Secretary of Defense, Joseph Dunford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Allen, former commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, and H.R. McMaster, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general.

U.S. officials can still be in the loop in the entire process, including in providing oversight to prevent fraud, if it chooses to deploy veteran volunteers that are contracted to the Afghan government, Prince said.

“I mean sadly, we would have U.S. troops out 2-years-ago if they’d gone with that plan and saved a couple hundred billion dollars, but, alas, the president listened to them and, you know, the deep state won that round,” Prince said.

Prince broke down the plan that he thinks would be most effective for obtaining success in Afghanistan by highlighting the three critical components that he says are needed.

1. Inserting U.S. veterans in with the Afghan forces in the mentoring phase:

One, mentoring: you take veterans, U.S. veterans, guys that are in their 30s and 40s or 50s that have been multiple tours there, and you assign them to an Afghan battalion, where they live with, train with, and fight alongside a team that goes with that Afghan unit every time they go on the field, down to platoon size. You do that to provide leadership, intelligence, communications, medical, and logistics expertise. The have enablers that every unit has to get right, because if one of them is missing it [the whole thing does not work].

The mentors are assigned, and so I’ll put a guy in there for 90 days and then take him home for 30 days, back in for 90 days, home for 30 days. They’re assigned to the same battalion, in the same valley, and they really start to know the terrain. They know the good mullah from the bad mullah, they know the orphan on the corner, etc… and that’s how you actually build hearts and minds and continuity and the trust of the local people, and most importantly, the Afghan forces know that you’re there and you’re coming back and you will fight with them and if necessary, bleed along side of them. And we did that model when we built Afghan border police and we never had any fracturing, green on blue incidents, as have plagued U.S. forces because there’s no continuity, the U.S. literally commutes to their mentoring mission. U.S. forces live on a base, a very nice, very secure, very expensive base, and they drive their armored vehicles in a predictable route to the Afghan base, spend a few hours there and then leave.

Our model is to attach the Afghans and be there for the long-term, for a year, two years, three years, however long that mentoring model goes.

2. Providing air power:

The U.S. has spent north of a trillion dollars trying to build the Afghan security forces and, again, you’re taking a 90% illiterate population and trying to say, “We’re going to make an air force out of you.” That’s a mighty tough bridge because even if they get qualified mechanics trained, those mechanics get poached to the local, to an airline in the area, because they pay more and you’re not getting killed doing it. And so, the air power that the U.S. has provided is largely ineffective and so again, our model is to provide the right kind of aircraft, and again, this is not theoretical for me. I had 56 of my own airplanes that I owned in Afghanistan, working for the Department of Defense, supporting them exactly the way that I’m talking about. With lift and surveillance, medievac, area resupply, we didn’t do CAS [close air support], but I have plenty of folks that have done that.

So, again, that model of reliable aircraft that show up when an Afghan unit is surrounded and needs resupply, when they need medievac, and when they need CAS, close air support, it shows up with no excuses. The U.S. Air Force doesn’t like to come below 2o or 25,000 feet and there’s been no aircraft lost over Afghanistan to enemy missiles. If you wonder about U.S. doctrine and U.S. policy and why it’s so expensive and so ineffective, just look at the non-adaptability even to the air force, but that’s a longer conversation.

3. Providing combat logistics:

We would put mentors, basically controllers, guys with clip boards, digital clip boards, in at the warehouse facilities where the food, the fuel, the ammunition, the parts, and the payroll all comes through, to eliminate those soldiers to make sure the supplies come complete, correct, and on-time, and to cut out the massive amount of corruption and fraud that exists there now. This is a really basic model. This is not rocket science, and it’s proven, and if you look at any truly indigenous capacity building programs that have been successful and you compare it to what the U.S. has done, the difference is pretty stark.

That’s what I’ve laid out. It’s legal. There’s precedent for it. If you know anything about the Flying Tigers in World War II, that was before the U.S. was involved in the Pacific theater, where you had the Japanese bombing the hell out of the Chinese nationalist cities, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and in that case the free Chinese asked America for help and they weren’t sending U.S. forces, so they sent contractors, veterans … [they sent] a team of 100 aircraft and the crews, the mechanics, supply them, and they flew combat missions against the Japanese air force — 1940, 1941 — and they did very, very well. Some of the first victories were air war victories over Japan[ese forces].

So, that model works and it can work again, in this case working for the Afghan government, contracting and hiring the capacity they need, but of course, in the city of Washington where everything is hyper partisan and the military industrial is a very real thing, that any alternate idea that reduces the massive spend in gravy train is a mortal threat to that gravy train, so I understand the push back from Washington. The president has other options if he wants to be clever and innovative and make good on his campaign promise to pull U.S. troops out without the inevitable collapse that will come because if you pull any and all U.S. presence out, the Afghan forces will collapse in a matter of weeks, not even months, and then you will have the helicopters off the roof top moment of the U.S. embassy like you did in Saigon in 1975. I was six-years-old when that happened, I remember that, and that would not be a good look for America.

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