Topicality

A. Interpretation: Reduce means a total elimination

And, Presence is the totality of military activities in each country.

Blechman 97
Dr. Barry M. Blechman is the co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center and a Stimson Distinguished Fellow focused on nuclear disarmament. He was
also the founder and president of DFI International Inc., a research and consulting company in Washington, DC, from 1984 until its sale in 2007. Dr.
Blechman has more than forty years of distinguished service in the national security field. An expert on political/military policies, military strategy, and
defense budgets and industries, he has worked in the Departments of State and Defense and at the Office of Management and Budget, and is a frequent
consultant to the US Government on a wide range of subjects. Among other boards and commissions, Dr. Blechman served on the Commission to Assess
the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States (1998-99), the Defense Policy Board (2002-06), the Mayor’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response
Program Advisory Committee in the District of Columbia (2004-06), and the Department of State Advisory Committee on Transformational Diplomacy
(2005-08). A Georgetown PhD in international relations, Dr. Blechman has written extensively on national security issues and has taught at several
universities. Barry M. Blechman et al, President of DFI International, Spring, 1997, Strategic Review, p.14

Given its multifaceted nature, neither practitioners nor scholars have yet settled on a single definition of presence. Technically, the term refers
to
both a military posture and a military objective. This study uses the term “presence” to refer to a continuum of military activities, from a
variety of interactions during peacetime to crisis response involving both forces on the scene and those based in the United States. Our definition
follows that articulated by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Presence is the totality of U.S. instruments of power
deployed overseas (both permanently and temporarily) along with the requisite infrastructure and sustainment
capabilities."

B. Violation
C. Standards

1st brightline – absolute brightlines to check sketchy we meet

arguments – vote neg on the risk they don’t meet their vague
counter-interpretation that’s an independent voter

2nd big affs key to ground– large withdrawal means the neg can make
diverse presence good arguments – that’s key to directing debates
on-case which boost education – politics, spending DAs, consult
Russia don’t compare

3rd big affs keeps affs on their toes researching new developments which is key to
education

4th is moving target – a limited caselist means 2acs can’t spike out of on-case
arguments by clarifying their plan text – key to structural fairness
D. Voters

Topicality is a voter for fairness and education - evaluate it under a

competing interpretations framework
 Plan Flaw
1. Violation – they withdraw all members disclosed or undisclosed of Task Force 373 but there’s
no such thing as Task Force 373 – the unit has been renamed meaning they withdraw
literally no one
DER SPIEGEL 10
“Germany Gave Names to Secret Taliban Hit List”, by Spiegel Staff, Der Spiegel is one of the three newspapers that received access to the Task Force 373
Wikileaks logs, ULRIKE DEMMER, MATTHIAS GEBAUER, CHRISTOPH HICKMANN, MARCEL ROSENBACH, CHRISTOPH SCHWENNICKE
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,709625,00.html

And now it's acquiring yet another new dimension. It has becomes clear that, even though German elite units such as Task Force 47 were not deployed to
deliberately target people, their counterpart, the American special forces unit Task Force 373, which has since been renamed Task
Force 3-10, takes on the dirty work and processes the hit lists -- in the territory controlled by the Bundeswehr and on the basis of German
information, no less. For most Germans, this is new information, and anyone with any common sense would argue that it is indeed their business.

2. It’s a voter
A) Any clarification of their plan text is abusive – if affs could rewrite their plan texts after
the 1NC to spike out of solvency attacks neg would always lose
B) they get no solvency which is a stock issue
C) no wiggle room – the government wants special forces to stay which means when the
legislation is signed into law the pentagon will deliberately misinterpret it
D) Their fault, not ours – they literally had three newspapers to read and they
didn’t catch this – incentivize better research by voting neg
4:58

Next off is the borders kritik:

A) The aff’s invocation of borders reifies geographic boundary drawing as a violent practice of
mastery that leads to war and displacement while marginalizing those without the power
over mapping

O TUATHAIL 96’
(Gearoid, Associate Professor of Geography at VT and Professor of Government and International Affairs, Critical Geopolitics p.1-2)

Geography is about power. Although often assumed to be innocent the geography of the world is not a product of
nature but a product of histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to
organize, occupy, and administer space. Imperial systems throughout history, from classical Greece
and Rome to China and the Arab world, exercised
their power through their ability to impose order and
meaning upon space. In 16th century Europe, the centralizing states of the “new monarchs” began
organizing space around an intensified principle of royal absolutism. In regions both within and beyond the nominal domain of the
Crown, the power of royal authority over space was extended and deepened by newly powerful court
bureaucracies and armies. The results in many instances were often violent, as the jurisdictional ambitions of
total authority met the determined resistance of certain local and regional lords. Within the context of this struggle,
the cartographic and other descriptive forms of knowledge that took the name “geography” in the early modern period and
that were written in the name of the sovereign could hardly be anything else but political. To the opponents of the expansionist
court, “geography was a foreign imposition, a form of knowledge conceived in imperial capitals and
dedicated to the territorialization of space along the lines established by royal authority. Geography was
not something already possessed by the earth but an active writing of the earth by an expanding,
centralizing imperial state. It was not a noun but a verb, a geo-graphing, an earth-writing by ambitious
endocolonizing and exocolonizing states who sought to seize space and organize it to fit their own cultural
visions and material interests. More than five hundred years later, this struggle between centralizing states and
authoritative centers, on the on hand, and rebellious margins and dissident cultures, on the other hand, is still with us. While almost
all of the land of the earth has now been territorialized by states, the process by which this disciplining of space by modern
states occurs remain highly contested. From Chechnya to Chiapas and from Rondonia to Kurdistann and East Timor, the
jurisdictions of centralized nation-states strive to eliminate the contradictions of
marginalized peoples and nations. Idealized maps from the center clash with the lived geographies
of the margin, with the controlling cartographic visions of the former frequently inducing cultural conflict, war,
and displacement. Indeed, the rise in absolute number of displaced peoples in the past twenty-five years is testimony to the
persistence of struggles over space and place. In 1993 The United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees estimated that roughly 1 in every
130 people on earth has been forced into flight because of war and state persecution. In 1970 there were 2.5 million refugees in the world; today
that figure is well over 18.2 million. In addition an estimated 24 million people are internally displaced within their own
states because of conflict. More recently, genocide in Rwanda left over 500,000 murdered and produced an unprecedented exodus of
refuges from that state into surrounding states. Refugees continue to be generated by “ethnic cleansing” campaigns in the Balkans; economic
collapse in Cuba; ethnic wars in the Caucus; state repression in Guatemala, Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq, and Sudan; and xenophobic terror in many
other states. Strugglesover the ownership, administration, and mastery of space are an inescapable part
of the dynamic of contemporary global politics.
B) The aff cannot respond to the global plurality of risks that have proliferated in the second
millennium. This means that their predictions and risk calculations are suspect, we
cannot manage the complexity of the globalized world with liberal institutions.

Ó TUATHAIL IN 1999
(Gearóid, Professor, Government and International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Understanding Critical Geopolitics:
Geopolitics and Risk Society, Journal of Strategic Studies, 22: 2, 107 — 124)

The first argument is that the problematic of 'national security' in the contemporary era is now global. While regional
and state-centered threats are still significant security concerns, the
most pressing security challenges, from
terrorism to international organized crime and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, are now
'deterritorialized' and global. Most within the Western security community now recognize this and have a strong appreciation of
the value of coordinated international diplomatic efforts through diplomacy, international assistance, arms control, and nonproliferation initiatives
to shape the international geopolitical environment. However, two tendencies tend to undermine such efforts, the first a unilateralist and
neo-isolationist reflex in states (like the US) which disparages international cooperative initiatives, the
second an unwillingness on the part of Western states, alliances and economies to reflexively
examine how they themselves may be contributing to global insecurity with their own narrow
techno-scientific rationality, neoliberal nostrums, informational networks, profligate consumption, and
export of deadly weapons and toxins. This relates to the second argument made by
critical geopolitics: that the institutions of Western modernity are experiencing a 'victory crisis'. Beck suggests
that 'more and more often we find ourselves in situations which the prevailing institutions and concepts of
politics can neither grasp nor adequately respond to'.29 He describes an ironic legitimation crisis for the political institutions of
the West at the end of the Cold War, as one world of risks passes and the new has not yet been fully grasped.30 The institutions experiencing a
'victory crisis' include the free market, the welfare state, multiparty democracy, national sovereignty, and 'national security' bureaucracies. This
'victory crisis' is one of capability and rationality. Industrial society institutions cannot handle, manage and respond to the problems of risk
society;our regulatory institutions cannot keep up with the global plurality of risks proliferating
as we enter the second millennium. Furthermore their calculus of risk is suspect. Potentially catastrophic
hazards have become normalized. Acceptable risks have become accepted risks. 'The inherent
pluralization of risks ... calls the rationality of risk calculation into question'.31
C) All war and violence are caused by the national identity and territoriality that is produced by
the geopolitics of the state

NEOCLEOUS ‘03
[Mark, Professor of Government at Brunel University, Europen Journal of Social Theory, “Off The Map: Violence and Cartography”, 2003,
http://est.sagepub.com/content/6/4/409.abstract, 13. July. 2010//WFI-SW]

The edict of Pope Alexander VI in 1492 which gave impetus to the idea of a spatially divided earth by drawing lines
delineating certain parts of the globe and specifying which part ‘belonged’ to which European power was
extended and formalized in the 17th century with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), strengthened in the 18th century with the emphasis on
territorial (‘national’) unity in the French and American revolutions, and consolidated in the 20th century with an international state
system – a system which became so entrenched that the territorial state became the political form to be
adopted by all nations. The ‘modernization’ of politics was thus as much a process of territorialization as it was a process of
secularization and rationalization. The form of sovereign power that developed in Europe from the 16th century onward conceived space as
bounded. ‘Sovereignty’, like ‘state’, implies ‘space’, and control of a territory becomes the foundation of sovereignty (Lefebvre, 1974: 280;
Foucault, 1980: 68–9; 1991: 87). This division of territorial sovereignty between states is most explicit at the point where the fields of power
interface: there must be no overlap and no uncertainty about the borders of the territory. As Michael Hardt and Toni
Negri (2000: 167) put it, ‘modern sovereignty resides precisely on the limit’. This requires a new kind of political geography in which neither
overlapping margin nor multiple sovereignty is permitted. (It is precisely because of this exclusive territoriality that Embassies exist. Having
created mutually exclusive territories, states found that there was little space left for the conduct of diplomacy. The outcome was little islands of
alien sovereignty within the state’s territory: the Embassy [see Mattingly, 1955].) At the same time, it requires the permanent policing of territorial
boundaries. States become and remain ‘sovereign’ not just in the sense that they are all powerful
within their territories, but also because they police the borders of a particular space and
claim to ‘represent’ the citizens within those borders. The consequence of this mutually constitutive relation
between territory and state power is that the earth’s surface has been inscribed in a particular way – according to the territorial ambitions of the
modern state – and space has come to assume absolute priority in the statist political imaginary. Without this essential conjunction of space and
politics, sovereignty would lose its meaning. As such, we might say that the modern political imaginary is a territorial imaginary. That this is so is
illustrated by the policy of ‘containment’ in which a political counter to the Soviet Union was thought to be necessary for territorial reasons, and
the broader 20th-century terminological distinction between East and West as friend and foe, with Cuba somehow belonging to the East and
Japan co-opted for the West (Buck-Morss, 2000: 22–5). But there is more to territory than just space. The notion of ‘territory’ is
derived from a complex of terms: from terra (of earth, and thus a domain) and territ -orium, referring to a
place from which people are warned off, but is also has links with terr -ere, meaning to frighten. And the
notion of region derives from the Latin regere (to rule) with its connotations of military power. Territory is
land occupied and maintained through terror; a region is space ruled through force. The
secret of territoriality is thus violence: the force necessary for the production of space
and the terror crucial to the creation of boundaries. It is not just that sovereignty implies
space, then, but that ‘it implies a space against which violence, whether latent or overt, is
directed – a space established and constituted by violence’ (Lefebvre, 1974: 280). As macrosociologists
have pointed out time and again, it is the use of physical force in controlling a territory that is the key to the state, for without it any claim to the
territory would mean nothing. Put more simply: ‘borders are drawn with blood’

D) The modern state utilizes a “kill to save” mentality to justify intervention and warfare, which
turns the aff
SHAPIRO ‘97
[Michael J, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, “Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War”, 1997//WFI-SW]

Whatever else such a divided body and its correspondingly divided practices might imply, warfare for the Hurons could not be totalizing, for the
whole identity was not involved. And, perhaps more important for purposes of comparison with modern state warfare, there was a relative
absence of collective stakes. In contrast, modern states have decidedly collective stakes with a peculiarly modern
character. What makes the contemporary state-oriented war animus peculiar when it is placed in historical
perspective is the structure of its rationale. The stakes of war are bound up with the survival of a kind of
collective body that did not exist in the seventeenth century, the "population." Speaking of modern warfare, Foucault isolates the
relationship of this new body to violence: Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
defended; they are waged in behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are
mobilized for purposes of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity.... The
principle underlying the tactics of battle— that one has to be capable of killing to go on living
— has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. 64 "Strategy" here does not mean
the instrumental rationale through which violence is a policy to achieve various ends. It is meant ontologically, for it refers to
the modern concern with the boundaries of individual and collective bodies that provide the
predicates through which the globe is mapped and dangers are discerned.
E) Our alternative is to embrace a critical geopolitics by rejecting the aff - only by being
skeptical of the state and military bureaucracies embedded in the affirmative can we
expose the view from nowhere that governs status quo geopolitics
Ó TUATHAIL IN 1999
(Gearóid, Professor, Government and International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Understanding Critical Geopolitics:
Geopolitics and Risk Society, Journal of Strategic Studies, 22: 2, 107 — 124)

Critical geopolitics, by contrast, is a problematizing theoretical enterprise that places the existing
structures of power and knowledge in question. Also a convenient label for a disparate set of literatures and
tendencies that congealed in the 1980s into a developed critique of 'orthodox geopolitics' and the dangerous nostrums associated with it,
critical geopolitics seek to recover the complexities of global political life and expose the power
relationships that characterize knowledge about geopolitics concealed by orthodox
geopolitics.1 Eschewing explicit interest in providing 'advice to the prince', critical geopolitics critiques the superficial and self-interested
ways in which orthodox geopolitics 'reads the world political map' by projecting its own cultural and political assumptions upon it while concealing
these very assumptions. Geopolitics, critical geopoliticians argue, operates with a 'view from nowhere', a seeing that
refuses to see itself and the power relationships that make it possible. As an unreflexively eurocentric and
narrowly rational cultural practice of 'experts' in powerful Western institutions (from universities to military
bureaucracies to strategic 'think-tanks'), geopolitics is not about power politics: it is power politics!
Critical geopolitics strives to expose this power politics to scrutiny and public debate in
the name of deepening democratic politics. For critical geopolitics, the notion of 'is' is always an essentially contested
perspectival notion. Knowledge is always situated knowledge, articulating the perspective of
certain cultures and subjects while marginalizing that of others. Its 'we' is a transnational
community of citizens skeptical of the power concentrated in state and military
bureaucracies, and committed to an open democratic debate about the meaning and
politics of 'security'.
2:18
 Counterplan

Observation 1 is the counterplan text: The United States Department of Defense should order
Task Force 373 to halt the use of any “kill or capture” or “Joint Prioritized Effects Lists.”
The Department of Defense should order Task Force 373 and Task Force 373 to halt
independent manhunt operations including night raids and transition to the full-time
training of Afghan security forces, only engaging in non-night raids missions jointly with
Afghan security forces, including the Afghan National Police, Afghan National Army, and
Afghan Special Forces.

Observation 2 is solvency

The counterplan solves one hundred percent of the case – the hit lists
are how TF 373 perform extrajudicial killings and upset the
population – and TF 373 answers directly to the pentagon
GEBAUER ET AL 2010
Matthias Gebauer, John Goetz, Hans Hoyng, Susanne Koelbl, Marcel Rosenbach and Gregor Peter Schmitz are staff-writers covering the Wiki-leaks
releases for Der Speigel, the German newspaper that received the documents, “US Elite Unit Could Create Political Fallout for Berlin,”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,708407,00.html

One element of the war logs that is likely to spark considerable debate is the information they provide about the
United States' Task Force 373,
whose work the Pentagon has sought to keep under tight wraps throughout the war in Afghanistan. The unit of elite soldiers,
which includes members of the Navy Seals and the Delta Force, get their orders directly from the Pentagon in Washington and
operate outside of the chain of command of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The existence of this special force is by no means a
secret, but top military officials have refused to discuss its controversial mission: the deactivation of top Taliban and terrorists by either killing or
capturing them. The TF 373 unit works according to classified lists of enemies compiled by the coalition troops that are
called "Joint Prioritized Effects Lists" (JPEL) in military jargon. In the close to 92,000 logs leaked, 84 pertain to JPEL-related actions, and together they
provide a bounty of information about a force whose work has at times resulted in civilian deaths.

Observation 3 is the net benefit

The counterplan wins a stronger link to their winning the war advantage – prefer the team that
has the strongest chance of solving nuclear war
1:33

1. Uniqueness: Special operations forces strained now but meeting

recruiting goals
BROOK 12-26
Tom Vanden Brook is Pentagon Reporter for USA Today, “U.S. special ops forces vital in Afghan war,” http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-
12-27-specialoperations27_ST_N.htm

Strong recruiting is vital for the military's 61,000-member special operations forces, which have taken a central and growing role in combat in
Afghanistan and training local security forces. The services report that they're meeting recruiting goals even as the forces
continue to grow. Increasing the size of the elite force is essential because the nation is sending its special operations troops into battle at an
unprecedented pace. Brig. Gen. Bennet Sacolick, who leads the Army special operations training center at Fort Bragg and commanded special operation
troops in Iraq, says repeat combat tours — typically six-month deployments — for his soldiers have become "too steep." "Guys are away
from home more than they are at home," Sacolick says. "That's not good. Even if our guys are fine with it, their families aren't. At some point, Mom is
going to say, 'Enough is enough.' There isn't a guy who doesn't have that challenge. They can't wait to get home" and then they feel guilty that they're not
at work, he says. Sen. Jack Reed, the Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, says special operations troops have little
time to recover as their stretches at home are marked by intense training. He is concerned about the cumulative effect
on mental health of endless training and fighting on troops and their families. The length of the tours are generally shorter than the
year-long deployments of regular units, but they deploy to combat zones more frequently. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the
Pentagon has steadily added to its special operations ranks — its most highly trained and lethal force. These troops
include Navy SEALs and the Army's Green Berets and Rangers, as well as forces in the Air Force and Marines. The demand shows no signs of slackening.
The Army will need more special operations soldiers to accommodate operations in Afghanistan and future
conflicts, Sacolick says. Their expertise in a region's language and culture and their ability to train local security forces suit them well for
counterinsurgency duty in countries with weak governments.
2. Link: Eliminating Task Force 373 means crippling special operations in
Afghanistan – bases, personnel, and capabilities are all lost
NAYLOR DECEMBER 20TH
Sean D. Naylor is a senior writer at the Army Times Publishing Company and the author of "Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation
Anaconda.", JSOC task force battles Haqqani militants, http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/09/army-haqqani-092010w/

Sometimes referred to as “the National Mission Force,” the JSOC task force has been a constant presence in Afghanistan since
late 2001. It has used several code names, including Task Force 11 and Task Force 373. A senior coalition officer requested its current
numerical name not be published. The task force is led by JSOC commander Vice Adm. Bill McRaven, and the chain of command goes straight from him
to U.S. Central Command head Marine Gen. Jim Mattis rather than through Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top coalition officer in Afghanistan, the
senior NATO military official in Kabul said. This arrangement isn’t causing any problems, the senior NATO official said, adding that “there’s no light
between any of the command and control structures that we have.” Underneath McRaven in the task force’s command structure is the 75th Ranger
Regiment commander, Col. Michael Kurilla, who usually runs operations on a day-to-day basis with a staff built around his regimental headquarters,
said the senior special operations officer with recent Afghanistan experience. The Navy’s DEVGRU continues to rotate most of its
forces, along with its various squadron headquarters through Afghanistan as well, he said. McRaven and Kurilla are normally
located at the task force’s headquarters at Bagram Airfield. The force has another modern, hardstand facility at
Kandahar and smaller facilities at other bases around Afghanistan, some of which are left unmanned until the task force requires their use for a
mission, the senior special ops officer said. As a result of JSOC’s shift in emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, the task force has increased by 50 to 60
percent during the past year, and now has about 5,000 personnel, said the senior special ops officer. That surge has driven a 40 to
50 percent increase in missions conducted, he said. Most of the additional troops have gone to southern and
northern Afghanistan, the JSOC elements in the east having benefited from an increase about 18 months ago, he said. In the 90 days
preceding Aug. 30, the task force conducted “a little over 500” missions, said a coalition official.

3. Special operations shifting from combat operations to training role

now – special ops presence is key to training Afghan Police and
Army which is key to securing Kandahar
NAYLOR 2010
Sean D. Naylor is a senior writer at the Army Times Publishing Company and the author of "Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation
Anaconda.", Special Forces training Afghan police units, 6/12,
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/06/army_special_forces_afghan_police_061110w/

In an effort to reduce attrition rates in Afghan National Civil Order Police units — and improve those units’ performance ahead
of the upcoming Kandahar offensive — senior military officials here have ordered U.S. special operations forces to provide
additional training to 40 percent of the elite police force and to establish long-term partnerships with half the
battalions they train. To reduce the attrition that can run as high as 140 percent in a year, the special operations forces will
convert the ANCOP battalions, or kandaks, to the same operational cycle that has worked to keep attrition rates low in the
Afghan National Army’s Commando units, which are trained by and partnered with Special Forces. Meanwhile, the
ANCOP units trained by the special operations units are being sent to southern Afghanistan, to support the Marine operation to
secure the town of Marjah in Helmand province and the upcoming set of missions — named Hamkari Baraye Kandahar, or Cooperation for Kandahar
— in and around Kandahar city.

4. Kandahar is key to war effort

NISSENBAUM AND LANDAY 10
Dion Nissenbaum is the Jerusalem bureau chief for McClatchy newspapers, Jonathan S. Landay is the senior national security and intelligence
correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, has written about foreign affairs and U.S. defense, intelligence and foreign policies for nearly 25 year, “Critical
U.S. battle begins in Afghanistan amid many doubts”, July 30th, The McClatchy Company is the third-largest newspaper company in the United States,
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/30/98430/us-led-coalition-finds-success.html
As the U.S.-led coalition launches its most critical military operation of the nine-year war in Afghanistan, doubts are growing
about whether the United States and its allies can contain the surging Taliban-led insurgency and prevent the country from reverting to an al Qaida
sanctuary or erupting in civil war. The operation aims to secure Kandahar, the financial, trade and political hub of
southern Afghanistan and the seat of Taliban rule of Afghanistan until the 2001 U.S. invasion. Kandahar is the cultural
and spiritual center of the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the Taliban are drawn almost exclusively.
U.S. and Afghan troops already have made the first moves to flush the Taliban from their strongholds in the lush
Arghandab Valley and other districts around the second-largest Afghan city, but a host of problems plague the long-delayed initiative and the larger U.S.-
led war effort. U.S. troops are fanning out across the city of Kandahar to train Afghan police as part of a counter-
insurgency plan refined by Army Gen. David Petraeus, the newly named commander of all allied forces, that
will focus more on creating a respected government instead of routing insurgents inside the city. U.S. casualties are
averaging two deaths per day, the highest since the beginning of the war, and U.S. troops suffered their highest monthly death toll of the war in July, with
63 Americans killed. A Gallup poll published earlier this month found that 60 percent of Americans think things are going badly. That was before the
massive leak of secret U.S. military reports on WikiLeaks, which drove home what an uphill struggle Afghanistan has been. Opposition to the war is
growing, especially within President Barack Obama's Democratic Party, amid a slow economic recovery and surging federal deficit. On July 27, 102
Democrats in the House of Representatives, all facing re-election in November, voted unsuccessfully to kill $33 billion in emergency war funding. With
mixed signals from Congress and Obama about how long U.S. troops will remain, Afghan leaders say they're uncertain of U.S. intentions. On the ground,
in the face of a determined Taliban assassination campaign, the Afghan government's performance is unlikely to improve. Despite concerted diplomacy
and the promise of an enormous new U.S. aid package, the Obama administration can't convince Pakistan to close down the Afghan insurgent
sanctuaries that border Afghanistan. Failure in Kandahar could doom the U.S.-led counterinsurgency operation. "It is from
Kandahar that the Taliban attempt to control the hearts and minds of the Afghan people," said Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman
of the Joint Chief of Staff, in June. "It is my belief that should they go unchallenged there and in the surrounding areas, they
will feel equally unchallenged elsewhere. "As goes Kandahar, so goes Afghanistan," he said.

5. American Special Operations are key to training Afghan special

operations which are key to winning hearts and minds and long-
term security – they’re best at language/cultural training
Strategy Page, 10
Strategy Page, online journal for military affairs, Afghanistan Grows Its Own Special Forces, 11.12.10,
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htsf/20101112.aspx

November 12, 2010: The Afghan Army has formed and deployed its first Special Forces teams, and they are a huge success. Many Afghans are familiar
with American Special Forces, but while these foreign
troops spoke the language and knew the culture, they weren't
Afghan. Despite that, the American Special Forces often established rapport with the Afghan villagers, and were
often very successful. But the Afghan Special Forces take that rapport to a new level. Afghan villagers admired the
skills of the American Special Forces, both as warriors and experts in many other areas. But now they see Afghans doing the same things.
This
makes a big impression, and the Afghan Special Forces get even more cooperation and trust. The Afghan Special Forces
aren't the only elite military unit the Afghans have formed. Six years ago, the Afghan Army formed its first commando battalion. The unit was trained by
U.S. Marines. Since then, 2,400 carefully selected Afghan infantrymen have been sent to Jordan for commando and special operations training. The
sergeants among this group, served as trainers during the formation of additional commando battalions. Three years ago, U.S. Army Special
Forces were involved in the forming of five commando battalions, so that each of the five army corps has one of
these special operations units. Currently, there are 7,000 troops in the Afghan Commando Brigade. All this was done in
a nation where over 60 percent of the population is illiterate, and the military traditions are more tribal warrior than professional soldier. The tribal
culture makes it difficult for soldiers from different tribes to work together. But there are always those who have the desire to do something different, and
these are the men who made the cut in the special operations forces. The U.S. Special Forces assisted the Afghans in creating
Special Forces units similar to the American ones, where each unit specializes in working with specific ethnic
groups, or tribal coalitions. The goal is a force of four Afghan Special Forces battalions, each with 18 A-Teams.
Given the success of American Special Forces, that are trained to understand Afghan culture and speak the
language, it was believed that Afghans doing the same thing, would perform even better, and more than double
the number of Special Forces troops, specialized in dealing with Afghanistan, available. Moreover, this means that
Afghanistan will still have a Special Forces capability once U.S. forces depart. Afghanistan is the kind of country (four
major ethnic groups, hundreds of tribes and clans) that needs Special Forces long term. The problem with this approach is that it means picking apart current
Afghan special operations units. Especially damaging will be the use of the best Afghan commando officers and NCOs for building the Special Forces units. But this is not a large, or a long term, problem.
Initially, all the Special Forces candidates came from the Commando Brigade, and only required ten weeks of training. After that, Special Forces recruiting will be conducted throughout the
army, and initial Special Forces training will be 15 weeks. The initial selection involved taking the 145 commandos who volunteered, putting them
through a one week qualification process (similar to the one used in the United States), and finding, as in the U.S., that only about half (69) passed.
These men formed the first four A-Teams (of 15 men each). Some of those who passed the training are being used to help American Special Forces troops
train the next class. The members of the new A-Teams underwent 26 weeks of on-the-job training, before being considered mission capable. There were
some unique problems in training the Afghan Special Forces candidates. Unlike the United States, there is a much wider social gulf between officers and
NCOs in Afghanistan. But for Special Forces to work, there has to be very close cooperation between officers and NCOs. The Special Forces training
appears to have solved this, even if it was done by convincing the Afghan officers that this kind of closeness was a special technique unique to Special
Forces operations, and essential for A-Teams to succeed. But ten officer candidates dropped out because this kind of relationship with NCOs was too
much for them to handle. There were ethnic problems as well. Most of the Afghan Special Forces will be needed in the south, where
the Taliban come from and where Pushtuns (40 percent of the population and historically the dominant group) are the majority. Many of the
minorities in Afghanistan (Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and Turkmen) have long been united in their opposition to Pushtun domination. The Tajik are 25
percent of the population and the Hazara (Mongols, a reminder of the medieval Mongolian invasions) 19 percent. The remainder are mostly various
Turkic groups (Uzbeks and Turkmen). All of these groups are wary of the Pushtuns, but will work with them if they do not feel threatened. Because of the
war with the Taliban, fewer Pushtuns join the army, and many more Hazara (who have long been persecuted by the other groups) do. Thus there were twice as many Hazara as Pushtuns in the
the Hazara are much better educated than the Pushtuns, and make better soldiers. It's expected
first Afghan A-Teams. But

they will make superior Special Forces operators (as Special Forces troops are called) as well, and be able to
work well with Pushtuns. So far they do, but not as well as Pushtun operators. The original Afghan commandos are more similar to U.S. Army Rangers, although they also serve as a
special response unit for emergencies. The Afghan commandos are used for operations where additional skill and reliability are required. The Afghan commandos also carry out raids, and some have been
given additional training, so they can operate closely with foreign commando units. The Afghans take well to commando training, and respect commandos in
general. The Russian Spetsnaz commandos were feared and respected by Afghans during the 1980s war, and U.S. Special Forces, and various contingents of foreign commandos, have also impressed the
Afghans. While a warrior culture, the Afghans never developed the systematic training that makes soldiers much more effective. Most Afghans realize that it's this training that creates the formidable
foreign commando warriors. So, when given an opportunity to get this kind of training, there are plenty of enthusiastic volunteers. Now that Afghan Special Forces have
proved that they can do the job, recruiting is easier. Talented young men can aspire to something besides becoming a warlord or leader of a drug gang. There is
one potential problem, however; corruption. Tribal loyalty is so strong that it encourages corruption when it is at the expense of some other tribe and enriches your own. While few American Special Forces
operators have been involved in corruption, the number of Afghans may, based on the local culture, be higher. There is also the experience in other poor countries, where special operations troops are lured
U.S. Army Special Forces are a unique
away, by higher pay, to criminal enterprises. So far, none of this is a problem. But based on past experience, it's only a matter of time.

organization in military, and intelligence, history. No other nation has anything like the Special Forces, and never had. The idea of training
thousands of troops to
very high standards, then having them study foreign languages and cultures, and specialize in working with people of a

specific culture, is unique to the Special Forces.