The new plan for Afghanistan: Less counterinsurgency, more killing

U.S. and NATO officers, intelligence analysts, and other officials and advisers now believe that our objectives in the Afghanistan war can no longer be accomplished in sufficiently short time through COIN alone or even through a COIN-dominant strategy.

Hence the huge increase, just in the last three months, of military attacks—by drones, aircraft-launched smart bombs, and special-operations forces on the ground—against Taliban soldiers and, in many cases, specific midlevel Taliban leaders.

The intended effect is the same: to apply pressure on the Taliban insurgents, disrupt their command-control networks, create fissures between the insurgents fighting in the field and their leaders across the border in Pakistan—to the point where many of them surrender or negotiate a reconciliation with the Afghan government…

This new twist in the strategy seems to be having some effect. One senior officer said (and other officials confirmed) that 300 midlevel Taliban have been killed or captured in the last three months, including a number of shadow provincial governors, district commanders, and trainers or facilitators in the use of roadside bombs. In addition, more than 800 rank-and-file insurgents have been killed, and more than 2,000 have been captured.