Lecciones danesas en Afganistán.

Excelente documento del Danish Institute for International Studies: "NATO in Afghanistan - What lessons are we learning and are we willing to adjust?" de Peter Dahl.

Muchas lecciones de lo aprendido por nuestros aliados son muy útiles , sobre todo a nivel operacional y táctico, las más difíciles de adquirir: ROEs, Información Pública, objetivos tácticos vs fines operacionales, INFOOPS, OPCON de los PRTs... muchas lecciones muy valiosas que conviene anotar con cautela porque muchas van apuntadas directamente contra nuestra contribución a ISAF -no sólo-.

Yo anoto para mí:

Political/strategic level:

-The international community must moderate its ambitions for a stable Afghanistan to match the resources it is prepared to make available, thereby creating a holistic strategy for the mission. Meaning, that a strategic overall political military campaign plan needs to be formulated and agreed upon by the Afghan government and the international community.

-The counter opium strategy must be closely coordinated in a holistic effort with other development tasks, such as education, infrastructure, health care and especially security – the primary task of ISAF.

Operational level:

-Without any unity of command, effective military operations are hard to carry out. The ISAF task is to implement the mission mandate, but ISAF in itself is restricted in its conduct of operations as caveats are drawn up nationally, mainly because of domestic politics. These caveats need to be lifted so that ISAF can conduct operations more effectively. Taking the political reality into consideration as a minimum, all the caveats should be clearly written on paper, and not just developed on ‘ad hoc’ basis.

-The international community must provide ISAF with the resources it originally requested to carry out its task.

-Is important that the international and national communities have full knowledge and understanding of the aims of the mission and the tasks it has been given.

-Therefore, troop-contributing countries must actually allocate the command of the PRT to the ISAF commander in the area of operation – and thereby the overall PRT strategy – if success is to be achieved, and not just deploy the PRT as an instrument of national politics.

Tactical level:

-The ISAF public information strategy must calculate whether or not the international and especially the national population deem actions a success when insurgents have been killed.

-The rules of engagement have to reflect the complexity of the mission it is the soldiers’ mandate is to implement.