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 Muslims (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.