War Is Boring

In January 2008, Captain Christian Dwarshuis was in charge of the Dutch Operational Mentor and Liaison team at the Forward Operating Base (FOB) Kyber. His job was to help the attached Afghan National Army (ANA) unit conduct security operations in the area.

For six years free-lance war correspondent David Axe has been traveling from battlefield to battlefield — from Iraq to Afghanistan, from East Timor to Darfur,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports. Actually, I’ve never been to Darfur — only Chad, near Darfur. Anyway …

The only remaining V-2 rocket in The Netherlands can still be seen in The Hague at the Historical Museum of The Hague. The exhibition “War and Liberation in 3-D” stays till September 26th and will show color images taken by local resistance photographer Wim Berssenbrugge (1918-2007). Berssenbrugge was the only photographer to take a picture of a V-2 rocket taking off from Dutch territory. This photo and a series of other never before-seen stereographic images provide new insight into the Second World War in The Hague: in color and in stereo.

In the summer of 2007, I spent a week in Uruzgan, southern Afghanistan, reporting on the Dutch occupation of that desert province. It was my first trip to Afghanistan as a freelance war correspondent, and I was stoked for some action. It was either fate’s cruel sense of humor or spitefulness on NATO’s part that I wound up in Uruzgan. The Dutch had been there a year with hardly any fighting—and that was exactly how they liked it. “You can’t win hearts and minds by shooting at people,” one Dutch commander said.

Today Uruzgan province is mostly safe around the main population centers, a far cry from when the Dutch first came here four years ago. The Dutch troops have worked hard to establish good relations with the local population and, when they must, they and their Australian counterparts have fought, died and been maimed and injured along with their Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police comrades.

After five years, $2 billion in direct costs and the loss of 24 soldiers, the Dutch military is finally leaving Afghanistan. The Netherlands’ 2,000-strong task force officially departs the southern province of Uruzgan on August 1. U.S. troops will fill in.

The Dutch have set a benchmark in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, with the way they have conducted counter-insurgency operations in pursuit of the “ink-spot” strategy. This strategy concentrates military and construction efforts around population centers in a bid to “make the Taliban irrelevant.” This summer the Dutch will be leaving the province as a combat force. The Americans will take over. Until then, however, the battle continues beyond the ink spot’s borders. This is where the Dutch Special Forces come in. I paid a visit to an SF facility in The Netherlands to observe their training.

“The Dutch political system has all but officially canceled [its] participation in the F-35 JSF program,” Eric Palmer reports. The three major parties have each offered a proposed way forward, ranging from canceling all participation in the $300-billion, dozen-nation stealth fighter program to simply commissioning a fresh study of fighter needs.

On August 20 2007, Adjudent Rob Martens, Royal Dutch Air Force, Explosive Clearance Service, was taking part in an armored patrol in the Chora Valley’s Kala Kala region of Uruzgan province.