Free Range International

Last night I was coming back from the Lebanese Restaurant located in the Wazar Akbar Khan section of Kabul.   Back in the day it had a full bar and open patio with large crowds of expat customers, but not these days.   Now you have to walk through a long blast proof hallway through a series of locked doors and that’s after being searched for weapons curbside.   They still serve great food and have a good double apple shesha mix, but now when the waiter takes your order he’ll wink and say would you like the red chai?   That’s code for red wine and it arrives in a teapot with tea mugs.   The days of having an open bar are behind us in most Kabul restaurants. As my good buddy, occasional driver, sometimes terp and all around elite Afghan analyst Cartman and I turned the corner at Finest supermarket we saw a company of ANSF cutting the road to the interior ministry and Serena Hotel.  The cops didn’t have riot gear but they did have their batons.    The only way Afghan drivers will pay attention to the police is if they believe failure to comply will result in a wood shampoo.   Last night it was clear the cops were ready to administer wood shampoos to anyone ignoring their road block.

Cartman’s phone rings and I hear a feminine voice of an international reporter who I don’t know that well.

“Boss, she wants to know if Obama is coming to talk to Karzai” said Cartman.

“Tell her it is a gross breach of etiquette for her to talk to an Afghan male who is not a member of her immediate family.”

“She said your blog sucks and to shut up because she’s not asking you”.

The question sure put what I was seeing in context.  The local cops don’t come out at night and cut roads unless something big is up.

It turns out the Commander in Chief was on the ground for a secret visit that obviously wasn’t too secret and one has to wonder if we might want to think of rebranding the Secret Service because they can’t keep a damn thing secret anymore.

The president was on the ground in Bagram Air Base pumping up the troops but (according to NPR) not spiking the ball again on the one-year anniversary of his gutsy call to send a crew of hardened sailors into Pakistan to whack OBL.   Recently the gutsy call of last year had been in the news…something about Mitt wouldn’t have made it and I guess there is a professional video of the VP making an ass out of himself describing how the difficult decision was made.   Mitt batted the sleazy allegations leveled at him out of the park and then the real story behind the decision to whack OBL came out and it looks to me like our POTUS came as close to voting present as is possible with a presidential finding.

Next thing you know we have a not so secret, secret visit where the Prez pumps up the troops and then last night sneaks into Kabul to ink a really, really, great deal with President Karzai.   But none of this had anything to do with the anniversary of killing OBL because the president said so himself .

The Taliban decided that, they too were not going to observe the one year anniversary of OBL’s demise by conducting another well planned, poorly executed, attack inside the Kabul Ring of Steel (my guys call it the Ring of Steal).   The tactics were standard; a VBIED at the gate, followed by a ground assault by gunmen disguised in burkas.  The target a bit ambitious, it’s called Green Village and is a privately owned FOB designed to provide ISAF level security.   The results were predictable, the attackers rapidly isolated, this time rapidly dispatched, their intended targets unscathed, a bunch of innocent civilians, mostly children, killed or injured.

Most international guesthouses in Afghanistan meet the UN Minimum Occupational Safety Standards (UN MOSS) but Green Village far exceeds MOSS because its intended clientele is the US Government, not stingy, tight wad NGO’s.   Opened in 2008 the place has never stopped growing, always at 100% occupancy it has great food, a decent gym, racquetball courts, a bar, pool, and all sorts of kiosks selling local goods and other stuff.   I don’t care for the place myself because its pre-fabricated, high-end feel combines everything that is wrong about our efforts and confines it in a small, artificially nice place.   We have called it menopause manor for years because of the unending stream of reporting, generated by the residents, saying the Taliban are targeting them.

This morning the Taliban were not able to talk their way past the gate guards so they blew their VBIED on the road at exactly the time when one would expect 200 to 300 school children to be walking by.

This is a picture from 2005 of kids waiting for their school bus on the corner of Jalalabad Road and the Green Village road. There are hundreds more children walking to schools along that road every morning now. At least one of those killed and many of the wounded today were school children.

The VBIED was followed up by three-man assault force who approached their objective wearing burkas, and started battling with the Serbs and Nepalese guards from the Green Village guard force.  At some point I guess they took the burkas off;  it would be weird for Taliban dudes to attack in burkas. The optics would be all wrong.

Anyway, one of the three attackers blew himself up, another was gunned down and the third made it into the laundry building which is still well outside the blast walls of the main camp.     The Kabul PD Critical Response Unit took the last one out soon after arriving on the scene. This was a typical Taliban attack good planning, excellent operational security, poor execution coupled to a complete disregard for collateral damage.

The planning was pretty impressive because Green Village is the only privately run FOB in the country that houses ISAF contractors and troops. It would be, by far, the easiest ISAF FOB in the country to attack; if you could sneak a battalion of infantry into Kabul.  One VBIED and three suicide bombers is not really an attack; it’s a statement. Like the last attack in Kabul it was successful only because it happened. The tactical failure of the assault force is, as it always is here, irrelevant.

Here are, in my humble opinion, are the take-aways’ from this latest attack.

The President’s schedule was compromised to the mainstream media.  The planning for his visit was excellent; in around 2000 out by 0400; that scheduled allowed the downtown to be cleared and the President to meet with Karzai with minimal disruption to local residents.  But I knew he was coming before he arrived because the MSM phone call put what I was witnessing downtown into context.  It appears I wasn’t the only one in on the secret.

This dispatch came in from Taliban central on twitter today:

Al Farouq spring offensive will be launched on May 3 all over Afghanistan.   The Taliban said the code name came from Islam’s second caliph, Omar al Farouq known for his military advances in Asia and the Arab world during the seventh century.

The announcement comes hours after Taliban insurgents armed with guns, suicide vests and a bomb-laden car attacked a heavily fortified compound used by Westerners in Kabul, killing seven people and wounding more than a dozen.

The militants claimed the attack in defiance of US President Barack Obama’s call that the war was ending during a visit to Afghanistan on the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death on Wednesday.”

Did the Taliban launched one of their pre-planned attacks a day early because they discovered that Obama was in Kabul?  The attack happened two hours after the POTUS left and that means two hours after all the elite police units in the capitol went off duty after being up all night because he was here. That’s a pretty impressive reaction time by the Taliban and it demonstrates the danger of allowing administration operatives to leak details of Presidential trips to preferred members of the MSM.

The reaction to todays attack by the people inside Green Village was also impressive when compared to the attack on ISAF HQ last fall.  None of the residents, many of whom are EUPOL police officers or ISAF troops and therefore have weapons, ran out to the walls to start shooting wildly in the general direction of attack.  They let the guard force do its work which, I understand, is a drilled SOP at Green Village. This reinforces the point that there is nothing, not one damn thing, big government can do more efficiently and effectively than the private market and that includes repelling ineffective insurgent attacks on FOB’s hosting government troops.

The Afghans are hosed; the agreement Obama came into Kabul to sign last night is long on promises but short on specifics.   The level of funding for ANSF he is promising has to be approved every year by congress and what are the chances that they decide to cut it at some point in the future?

Our involvement in Afghanistan is not going to end well.  I predict we will pull all of our military out in 2014 just like we did Iraq in 2011.  There will be no “force enablers” and, unlike Iraq, there will be no massive international Private Security Company presence to enable continued reconstruction.  We will pull all our forces out and with them will go all the reconstruction and when that happens the world bank will no longer support the Afghani.  The Afghani will then free fall just like the Zimbabwean dollar while the country erupts in civil war.

I have made many grim predictions on this blog over the years, my take on the so called Arab spring comes immediately to mind, and I always use the caveat that I hope I’m wrong.  So, I hope I’m wrong about Afghanistan’s future, but I doubt it.

The other day The Bot and I were talking about Greg Mortenson (author of Three Cups of Tea).  Mortenson has been court ordered to fork over a million bucks for managing  donor money like a GSA mandarin.  He is also guilty of  fabricating tales of derring-do in his mission to build schools using the transformative method of  drinking tea with village elders.    I never believed a word of it so I never read the book but am surprised to learn that Mortenson was paid to lecture senior military officers who should have been able to recognize this fraud a mile away.  If the military wants to talk to experts on getting schools built, staffed, and funded they should be talking to the La Jolla Rotary Club.  Those folks have been building schools in Nangarhar Province for years under the San Diego Sister City program.  Years of success in a difficult, front line province with not much press, very little fanfare and no taxpayer money; that’s an effort to be proud of and now they’re battling polio.

Early on in the Afghan adventure living outside the wire was the norm even for the military.  Westerners could drive anywhere knowing their arrival in remote districts would be welcomed if not eagerly anticipated by local villagers.  In Jalalabad City there were two different compounds for SF teams, another compound full of psyops or civil affairs or some other outfit like that, the ANP mentors lived out in the town as did the local EOD mentor.  The other expats living in Jbad at the time (including the Rotary Club folks) regularly socialized with them at the Taj tiki bar and at the weekly dinner parties hosted by NGO’s or the UN. That changed when the American military issued a  massive life support contract called LOGCAP that ended up driving life support costs to a million dollars per soldier per year.  The units who had been embedded in Jbad city (and lots of other places around the country) were forced to move into the Big Box FOB’s for force protection and financial reasons.  Those units were gathering tons of useful information; they would have picked up a lot from their pattern of life alone; most of them were  in the information gathering business anyway and I know they were successful.  But performance wasn’t the issue, getting all hands behind the wire was and that was a mistake.

The Bot and I were talking about the old days and how damn cool everything was when I mentioned Mortenson and he looks over and said “mate, you know what it took to build the TK runway?  Five Machineguns.  His story is interesting mostly because there is no way any international could do what he did today in Afghanistan.  There is no faster way to end up in jail (or paying a hefty bribe to avoid it) then to drive around illegally armed.  In many of the areas where we once roamed free the Taliban now control the turf.  The local folks are no longer happy to see foreigners in their midsts, the Afghan security forces are, in some places, openly hostile and will extort those who don’t know the language or aren’t smart enough to hire a good fixer.

The Afghan people are stressed to the max and who can blame them?  The latest attack in Kabul scared them – not the attack itself, it was mostly viewed as a nuisance, what scared them was how people in Washington, London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome etc… would react.  Afghanistan cannot function without billions in donor support.  That support will not come through unless the World Bank and the IMF are able to remain in country and, at some point in the very near future, gain confidence that the central government can manage Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund.  If the security situation deterorates to the point where the World Bank can’t stay or the central government proves incapable of managing the ARTF the internationals will go, the money will stop, the international support under the Afghani will drop, and overnight you will see Zimbabwe type inflation.

The local folks understand this and know that in less then two years they could lose everything. Again. And that is some seriously depressing shit which is why The Bot and I were boring ourselves with stories from days gone by.  Here is a quick trip down memory lane to illustrate how things have changed in Afghanistan.

The Bot jumped in an SUV and, by himself mind you, drove about 150 kilometers to the outskirts of Kabul where he purchased 5 Machineguns and as many rounds as he could find from a village elder. We didn't know each other back then but at the same time he was heading up to Kabul my mobile security team and I were heading from Kabul to Kandahar to deploy K9 teams. By late 2007 this was no longer possible - insurgent attacks were too frequent. We had to stop outside the hamlet of Shah Joy to get a flat fixed and we're not to happy to be static in this area which was controlled by the Taliban even back then. A few days after I took this picture The Bot was ambushed near here but able to hole up and keep his attackers at bay until an American patrol came by.

These two kids had a compressor and a stack of tires next to the road - that's the local way of advertising tire repair. They were as fast and serious as a NASCAR pit crew.

They didn't have the tools of a NASCAR pit crew just the sense of urgency and that probably was due to the fact that we were well inside Indian country and needed to get going before the local insurgents decided to get us going.

The Bot made it to Kabul and back without incident and scored five PKM's along with enough ammo to run them awhile. Back in the day we had not figured out the low profile approach to outside the wire work. We would learn through bitter experience to never ride around looking like this again. Any international caught with 5 belt fed machineguns today would be in the Poli Charki prison for a long long time. It is so against the law now, but back in 06 it wasn't too big a deal.

Having scored the guns the next step was to plan out the defense with the local ANP chief and his tribal auxiliaries

And there it is - pile up some dirt to elevate the guns who then provide overwatch and the rest of the men get busy trying to chip through the rock. When the machinegunners dueled, it was at a very slow sustained rate because even back then ammo was outrageously expensive.

Under a million dollars to complete - one international supervisor to handle all the problems that come up on projects like this and in record time you have an improved (sealed mind you mate) dirt runway that handled C-130's and the old Sov transports found all over Central Asia with no problems. When LOGCAP rolled into TK they fenced this all in, tore up the runway, paved it and put lights in and spent a fortune improving the base, but did that lavish infrastructure translate into improved mission performance? I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

I remember back in 06 and 07 when the human terrain started to shift a little.  What I didn’t know then was the tide of unease flowing through the population was (in part) triggered by the arrival of the British army in Helmand.  Apparently the SAS and their American counterparts had conducted a comprehensive study of the Helmand in 2005 and had come up with a really good deployment plan.  They recommended to the army that it fortify the two largest towns, engage in reconstruction in those towns,  leave the current governor in place even though he was a Narco Khan, and most importantly, stay out of the rest of the province. Her Majesties government instead insisted that Karzai remove the governor, focused on poppy eradication and, based on intel that there were only 420 Taliban in the province, decided  they could ruck up to densely populated areas and kill them while ignoring all the other pricks milling around as if they were gliding through the fucking matrix.  (hat tip to Charles Booker for the matrix quote).

I knew the British Army had stumbled badly in the Helmand but I didn’t know how or why nor did I appreciate the adverse impact the Helmand fighting had on the other provinces.  I found the gory details of the Helmand fiasco in the new book Losing Small Wars by Frank Ledwidge.  The hyperlink is to a not too friendly review of the book in The Telegraph.  The only point the reviewer can find to quibble over is the authors contention that most of the British forces sent to Helmand never left the safety of their Big Box FOBs.   The review is a little emotional and I suspect the reporter lost friends in this conflict but that kind of reaction clouds rational discorse about sensitive topics.  To wit:

One senior officer in General Richards HQ had done the sums.  He told the general that ‘on a good day and with a following wind after a good deal of planning, once the HQ and communications staff have been taken into account, and if the guard roster was doubled’ (meaning the assigned manpower cut in half) ‘we can find 168 combat troops to conduct operations from the entire brigade’.

How do you justify that ? Prior to the establishment of big box FOB’s there were detachments of troops spread out around the countryside and for every 20 men assigned to a safe house you had 20 men ready for combat.  Then come the FOB’s and with them the rotating battle staffs and before you know it the reality on the ground is so bad that the military creates its own alternative reality based on I am still not sure what.  Big Box FOBs are a problem created from the unlimited funding of discretionary spending by both the Pentagon and congress to make our soldiers safer and more comfortable.  Who could be against that?  But does this lavish support translate into improved tactical performance or significantly contribute to mission accomplishment?  Most importantly is it better for our troops on a big box FOB or deployed on shoe string budgets like they were in the early days?  What came first the Big Box FOB or Taliban human wave attacks? In my memory they seemed to have arrived back to back.

Here is an interesting article written by the recent American commander back in TK answering my question of how well lavish base support facilities contribute to his ability to accomplish his assigned mission.

When I took command of a NATO task force in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan in July 2010, one of my first patrols in the province included a stop at the construction site for an unfinished U.S.-funded police headquarters. Inside, we found loose 82mm mortar rounds and cell phone components: clearly the tools of an IED-maker.

Finishing this well-intentioned project that had become a shelter for terrorists became one of my top priorities. The project had stalled due to a cumbersome bureaucracy, poor contracting procedures, high leadership turn-over, and a lack of proper supervision,

When I relinquished command and left Afghanistan about a year later, the project was back on track but still incomplete, despite three years of frustrating effort.

I know he doesn’t say a word about facilities in the article but you can’t tell me that if he was living out in the villle in his own compound with his own motley  crew and a bunch of Afghan auxiliaries that it would have taken him three damn years to almost build a crappy little ANP post. Besides  our ability to perform isn’t the issue; there are many successful reconstruction models to emulate in Afghanistan.  The La Jolla Rotary Club would probably be more than happy to explain the reconstruction game to anyone who wants to hear it. What we should be focusing on is the balance between base support for deployed troops and their ability to accomplish the mission. It seems to me the troops were much happier and more effective when allowed to live off the economy and operate independently.  It also cost billions less to deploy them in that manner while reducing the ISAF footprint by at least half if not more.  That would save a considerable amount of blood and treasure, but who cares?  The past is the past and now we face the brave new future.  The awkward close of our Afghan adventure is upon us and nobody is in the position to make an educated guess on how this is all going to end. That sad fact is why being here now is like stepping into a pressure cooker.

At 0630 this morning, Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) in the form of the Kabul Critical Response Unit (CRU) finished off a crew of villains who had been fighting for the past 16 hours.  These guys, most likely HIG militants, had barricaded themselves in a building under construction next to the Azizi Bank located [...]

America is currently experiencing some monster tornados deep in the heartland.  As dawn breaks across the land, the scenes of devastation are dramatic, but the casualties so far, remarkably low.  Modern early warning systems have a lot to do with that.  When a sudden serious storm breaks in Kabul, it is a [...]

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Editors Note:  B is taking some time off from destroying Libtards on Thomas Ricks blog to vent on a topic few men will dare touch.  At the Foriegn Policy blog he’s been coming up with stuff like this:
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Editors Note:  This post is the first (of what I hope to be many) posts from my father Major General J.D. Lynch Jr. USMC (Ret.)
The Current Situation
Forty years ago, the American military was held in great contempt by the public it served. The feeling was returned in roughly equal measure. We have since gone [...]