A recent article in the New York Times highlights some of the problems
the Allies face in dealing with the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/world/asia/06afghan.html
The Dutch regular army troops take a very different approach to
pacification than the Americans, British, Canadians, and other allies.
The Dutch focus more on making personal contact with the locals,
cultivating relationships, and, most unusual of all for combat troops,
they avoid combat with the enemy.
Many of history’s best counter-insurgency campaigns focused a great
deal of energy, time, and resources, on denying the enemy forces the
use, cover, and allegiances of the local population. Some, campaigns,
such as the British concentration camps for the Boer civilian
population and the Spanish attempt to squelch the Cuban Revolution in
the 1890s, used barbaric methods to achieve their aims. (The British
won, the Spanish managed to tick off the Americans so much that the
U.S. intervened). The Dutch method goes to the other end of the
spectrum to an extreme. Be friendly, polite, build schools and roads,
and don’t kill anyone. Even if they shoot at you.
Back in the 1990s, the Dutch participated in an Allied attempt to
protect Bosnian Serbs (http://www.historyguy.com/balkan_war_third.htm)
at a place called Srebernica. The Dutch soldiers avoided combat, and
allowed the Serbs to slaughter 8,000 Bosnian men and boys. If I were
an Afghan civilian making nice with the Allies in this war, and I have
to depend on the Dutch Boys from the Gandhi School of Pacification to
save my life from the Taliban or al-Qaida, I’d better have my funeral
plot picked out in advance.
In all the talk of the "Surge" of American troops into Baghdad, one
facet of that increase of soldiers is that they are now supposed to be
actively patrolling neighborhoods and making face-to-face contact with
local civilians. In this sense the American strategy in Iraq is
similar to the Dutch ploy in Afghanistan. The comparison ends here
though, since we all know that the U.S. troops are going to defend
themselves and shoot back.