How does that deal with the dismaying tendency of Afghan soldiers to shoot our soldier?
Good question. I suspect that tactic does not date back to the East India Company.
It allows our troops to pursue the enemy and destroy him.
Currently, our troops are so loaded down with armor and equipment that we can’t catch the enemy when they run away.
Personally, I support a more genocidal approach. Wipe the villages, towns and NGOs supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Cut them off from food and shelter and wait for winter...
“How does that deal with the dismaying tendency of Afghan soldiers to shoot our soldier?”
One reason for Afghan soldiers to shoot their American counterparts, is taking personal offense to something.
The Iranians have suffered far more of this, with the Afghans they have hired to fight in Syria - several senior Iranian officers have been killed by their Afghan mercenaries. Iranian senior officers come from a ruling elite that is used to lording their dominance over subordinates - they feel entitled to slap or strike subordinates. Afghans tend to not be particularly fearful people, and often won’t tolerate taking crap from someone.
Some of the killings of Americans by Afghan soldiers are definitely by infiltrators with islamist or Taliban sympathies, but some are just disgruntled or unhinged individuals - sometimes upset over things that the guys getting shot had nothing to do with.
The bottom line though, is that the phenomena is just a footnote in the big picture struggle in the country.
Erik Prince makes some very important points, which should help quite a bit.
It gets us out of the charade of being in a “coalition” between regular US Troops and the Afghan army fighting for “democracy”
Who sees any path to a western “victory”: in Afghamistan?
In fact- what do we even define as “victory” and what do the Afghan people define as “victory”
Prince is saying go in with special operators and mercenaries and clean out the worst of the bad guys
as for the rest of it let tribal alliances and the “army” settle their own beefs as long as it’s internal.
We focus on taking out any leader of any group who poses a threat of harboring international terrorists and stop sending our guys to die from ieds on roads we build and patrol trying to build hospitals, schools and bridges for people who stone their women to death
and since we are clearly in the protectionist racket for the opium trade which thrives despite our 15 year occupation- then work with Russia Pakistan and China to back the powers that are most willing to curb it. Stop pretending we are Boy Scouts