Segregation of troops and people in Afghanistan

Informative article in Reuters by Joshua Koust, a defense analyst who was embedded with troops in Afghanistan for the past ten weeks.

His main point is that in Afghanistan US troops are totally segregated from the population, which mostly lives in rural areas, and it is hard to imagine that changing, and COIN only works when US troops are in the population among the people. This is the main reason why Afghanistan will be so much more challenging than Iraq. (In Iraq higher concentrations of the people live in Baghdad and other major cities.)

The end result is stark: in a war that is desperately short of the troops needed to provide security to increasingly less remote communities, 93% of the soldiers stationed at the Coalition’s primary base never walk outside the gates. Instead of a focus on separating the insurgents from the population - another clichéd pillar of counterinsurgency - the focus seems instead to be simply killing as many of the enemy as can be identified.

Really interesting point about the Catch 22 - military advances enable the army to conduct operations further from the population, but this is exactly the opposite of where they need to be:

It is a brutal catch-22. The United States operates an incomprehensibly sophisticated Army - its ability to see things from afar, monitor and decode transmissions, and snoop on anything electronic is unmatched, and quite daunting.