Community | March 11, 2010 | 7 comments

Adding Women to the Afghanistan War Strategy

source: http://www.ypnation.net/afghanistan-war-strategy-women

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NankinYP
YPNation contributor Taylor Wiles takes a look at the female engagement teams in Afghanistan:

"Still, these teams will likely face significant obstacles. The Small Wars Journal has published an essay (pdf), in which Captain Matt Pottinger, who co-founded the first FET, and two cultural advisers—one, a Pashtun-American who’s been at the job for two decades—lay out challenges for the future of FET deployments. Here, they say, are the most important limiting factors to their success:

* Die-hard presumptions by battlefield commanders that engaging local women will pay no dividends.
* Hackneyed hypotheses that female engagement will offend most Pashtun men.
* A failure to involve FETs in the planning stage of operations, leading to poorly conceived missions.
* An unwillingness to establish full-time FETs made up of volunteers who are given the resources and time to train as professionals should.

It’s old news that our military culture has sufficient faith in technological superiority—$780 billion of faith, to be exact—and not much in low-tech problem-solving. A little ironic when we consider the impact of the IEDs, which are made from scraps, that have killed nearly 1,000 coalition troops so far. This FET movement comes as a welcome challenge to misconceptions that have kept coalition troops from making sustained progress against the Taliban."

Read more: http://www.ypnation.net/afghanistan-war-strategy-women

What do you think about the female engagement teams? We want to hear from you!
  1. groups:
    Community,   Afghanistan News
  2. tags:
    Afghanistan,  War in Afghanistan,  Women in the Military,  afghanistan war strategy,  1 more
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7 comments // Adding Women to the Afghanistan War Strategy

  • crobichaud
    • 0
      crobichaud  

    • I am certainly interested in reading curtisreed's opinion on why this article is "stupid". Quite interesting choice of word without additional comment.

    • 1 year ago
  • memcmahon
    • 0
      memcmahon  

    • I think it a valid article, the middle east as we know is often a predominately male controlled society and this issue really hasn't been addressed in main stream media. I for one found this to be completely valid piece and voted it up because i felt it to contain a valid insight into a war we've been fighting for over 6 years now. If you don't find it to be important well i for one don't really care. Thank you though for your wonderful insight into this article. You make valid points.... for a preschooler.

    • 1 year ago
  • PaulKemp
    • 0
      PaulKemp  

    • I find it interesting that you are so concerned about the status of this post. I'd argue that it would be a more productive use of your time to either comment on the post's substance or to move on. You might even consider checking out the full article. But hey, they're just looking to engage people, to get them talking, to encourage them to exercise their voices and to act. But why would anyone want to do that when they can just complain incessantly?

    • 1 year ago
  • curtisreed
  • curtisreed
  • curtisreed
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