COIN, Colombia, and Afghanistan

PCR Project Co-Director Rick Barton recently returned from a conference in Bogota that explored the Colombian experience with counterinsurgency. There are a lot of lessons to be learned here that could translate to improvements in Afghanistan. As this NATO report points out, "it is the difficulty in accessing large parts of territory - and the use that terrorist and drug trafficking groups have made of them - where the similarities between the two countries begin." Scott Wilson picks up the same meme, writing about the Colombian government's ability to marginalize a Marxist insurgency and why the comparison of Colombia is more helpful than that of Iraq, when discussing Afghanistan.