Retired Col. Peter R. Mansoor said, "We cannot rely on high-tech weaponry to check" al-Qaida and Taliban forces concentrated on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. He said, "We're deluding ourselves" to believe that "we can use Predator strikes and airstrikes in Pakistan as a long-term solution to the terrorist presence there."
"We found this out in Iraq that you can kill terrorists by the scores ... and not impact the organization because backups are already appointed and, in fact, you inflame public opinion in the villages that are struck," Mansoor said.
Yesterday, a suicide bomber struck a restaurant in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 11 people, including pro-government fighters opposed to the country's top Taliban commander, intelligence officials said.
Mansoor, now the General Raymond Mason chair of military history at Ohio State, testified before a Senate Armed Services subcommittee the same day that the Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration is considering intensifying its use of the CIA Predator, a drone that fires precision-guided missiles.
In his testimony and an interview with The Dispatch, Mansoor painted a grim picture of the U.S. effort to defeat al-Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He said the number of U.S., NATO and Afghan armed forces is "woefully short."
"It's not an insoluble problem," Mansoor said. "The counterinsurgency fundamentals used in Iraq during the surge still apply, the people are still the important piece of the equation, and we need to readjust our strategy in Afghanistan to focus on population security as the No. 1 aspect."
As a senior adviser to Petraeus, who commanded U.S forces in Iraq, Mansoor helped design the counterinsurgency strategy in 2007 and 2008 that dealt a punishing blow to the Iraqi insurgents and dramatically reduced violence in that country.
Mansoor joined two other military experts to warn the Senate panel that the U.S. Army does not have enough troops trained to fight the counterinsurgency wars that the nation is likely to face in the future.
"History has underlined again and again that counterinsurgency warfare can only be won on the ground," Mansoor told the senators. "These struggles are troop-intensive, for the counterinsurgents must secure and control the population, deliver essential services and provide a basic quality of life."
Mansoor said the long-term solution depends on persuading the Pakistani government and military to take a more aggressive role in fighting al-Qaida and the Taliban.
In the long run, "the existence of the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida on Pakistani soil will be a threat to the sovereignty of Pakistan itself," Mansoor said. "This may be something we have to work out not over a matter of weeks or months, but maybe a matter of months and years. But that is the only way forward."
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