BYU grad says surge should work in Afghanistan

PROVO — A troop surge worked in Iraq and should be part of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, said a Brigham Young University graduate who is a consultant for the American military command.

The surge ordered by President Barack Obama on Tuesday must be part of a broader campaign to better understand, communicate with and help the many different ethnic communities in Afghanistan, Adam Fife said Wednesday during a lecture at BYU's David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies.

Unconventional tools can help the United States defeat the al-Qaida and Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan, said Fife, who earned a bachelor's degree in international studies at BYU. He is now the director of unconventional solutions at SOS International, a private consulting company that last month was awarded a contract worth nearly $1 billion to support the U.S. Strategic Command.

SOS trains military leaders to work with leaders of the many Afghan tribes to build relationships of trust. Fife said they then can begin to use an analytic tool called atmospherics to assess each community's situation and how it might react to events.

The program requires regular visits to communities, where military leaders or contractors ask questions about the cost of goods, the availability of water and electricity and other details.

With that information, analysts can monitor 50 data points a week and provide productive analysis to military leaders in each neighborhood and in the command structure, Fife said.

He said his own greatest interest is in information warfare.

"The Taliban is extremely effective at producing propaganda," Fife said. "They could give doctoral-level courses on how you target a community and manipulate the way they think so they start coming around to the way you think."

The U.S.-led coalition hasn't effectively countered the misinformation, he said.

Fife said he believes the Iraq surge worked because Iraqis gained the confidence to turn in insurgents when U.S. soldiers entered their neighborhoods and stayed. Afghanis need similar relationships with American forces, he said.

Even if atmospherics and improved communication aid the troop surge, and the U.S. military manages to cut off drug trafficking and secure the border with Pakistan, rooting out the insurgents will remain difficult, Fife said.

"My guess is we'll be there another dozen years to prop this up," he said.

Success, Fife concluded, will require a delicate balance between a central government and the tribes.

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