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An uncomfortable awakening has occurred among coalition forces in Afghanistan – after so much time and dollars and lives lost, they realize they have been fighting this war all wrong.

As a result, the coalition countries, including Canada, have indicated a willingness to follow U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, the head of the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Afghanistan, as he changes the strategy from a classic “stability operation” to one of counterinsurgency.

That means looking at the engagement not as a military mission to eradicate the Taliban, but as an effort to gain the support and assistance of the local population in suppressing the insurgency. It means providing a spectrum of security, good governance and development – and giving the Afghans a reason to prefer what is offered by the government in Kabul to what is being held out by the Taliban.

“The force structure we had in here might have been good enough post-2002 if we had an organized, comprehensive approach,” U.S. Colonel John Aglogia, the director of the Counterinsurgency Training Centre for NATO forces, said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail.

“The fact that we did not [do that] allowed for corruption to get embedded in different areas of the government. It allowed for the Taliban to provide governance where the government could not. That resulted in increased insecurity because the population now sees the government as the problem, not as the solution – and the Taliban as the solution, not the problem,” he said.

NATO defence ministers met in Bratislava, Slovakia, recently and endorsed a broad counterinsurgency approach for Afghanistan that will require a massive troop buildup of the sort currently being considered by U.S. President Barack Obama.

“There is the support of this counterinsurgency strategy, which means that ministers agree that it does not solve the problems in Afghanistan just to hunt down and kill individual terrorists,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters. “What we need is a much broader strategy which stabilizes the whole Afghan society.”

In effect, the coalition has said that the game of whack-a-mole that has been played by all NATO armies, including the Canadians in Kandahar, must end. In its place, the coalition will adopt the kind of approach Canadian soldiers are using in the model villages they have established south of Kandahar city and hope to spread to the broader, and more dangerous, Panjwai region in the coming months.

It's not that the military planners who ran the operation against the insurgency for the past seven years did not understand counterinsurgency techniques, Col. Aglogia said, they simply didn't have the resources.

A counterinsurgency demands huge numbers of troops to secure an area and stay until the population can fend for itself.

In addition, “we had different allies saying ‘we don't do COIN [counterinsurgency], we do stability operations,'“ Col. Aglogia said.

A new NATO command structure was put in place in recent months that aims to co-ordinate the effort from the top down. There has been a huge influx of U.S. troops and tens of thousands more are being considered. And all participating armies are about to get a lesson in counterinsurgency techniques that are being taught to 130 people at a time at the centre run by Col. Aglogia in what used to be Camp Julien, a Canadian base on the east side of Kabul.

For seven years, ISAF were doing what they call “mowing the grass,” he said. They would go into an area, establish a relationship with the local people, clear the region of Taliban and leave two weeks later. “And the folks who decided that they were going to work with us and believed that we were going to be there to provide a long-term presence and provide protection and development, are now getting killed.”

The ordinary Afghan came to understand the coalition forces as the soldiers who would point guns at them from the turrets of armoured vehicles as convoys raced through their towns.

In the meantime, the war was being lost.

So, last November, military planners started talking seriously about initiating a population-centric approach in Afghanistan. Soldiers have to realize that the way to win the war may not be with guns, Col. Aglogia said. “It may be by education, it may be by holding government officials accountable and forcing them to be transparent, it may be by doing some development projects, it may be by helping to settle a dispute over water or grazing rights.”

And they have to convince the Afghan population that they are going to win, he said. “Because I may like what you have to offer, I may like it a hell of a lot better than what someone else has to offer. But if I don't think you are going to win, then I am not going to risk my ass supporting you.”

In Deh-e-Bagh and Balanday, the model villages in Kandahar being patrolled by the Canadians, the strategy seems to be working – for now.

Canadian defence analysts who toured Balanday last week returned to say counterinsurgency tactics are reversing the Taliban's momentum.

But villagers from Deh-e-Bagh have told The Globe and Mail that the experiment will remain successful only as long as the foreign troops pay them to take part in work programs. When the Canadians leave in 2011 and the money dries up, they said, they will go back to working for the Taliban.

Col. Aglogia is optimistic that in two years the governance and security pieces can be put in place and programs can be developed to provide long-term economic stability so that people can work and provide for their families.

“Politically, you have made the statement that you are leaving – and I fully understand that,” the colonel said. “But, between now and then, with additional resources, I think you should see some significant changes in that environment.”