As the elections approach there has been much in the news on Afghanistan and most of it is not terribly accurate. Yesterday’s VBIED in Kabul is a good example. Most news outlets are connecting this attack to a countrywide effort by Taliban groups to interfere with the Presidential election scheduled for Thursday. I’m not buying that and I don’t think the Taliban view this upcoming election as a significant event. Some groups have publicly stated they will not interfere, other groups say they will disrupt the process, but we are not seeing any real attempts to do that.
This Washington Post story is typical of the MSM reporting on the Kabul blast with the title of “Pre Vote Blast in Kabul Signal Taliban Intent.” That is bullshit – what the blast signals is that somebody was able to bribe their way past the ANP check-posts and get right up to the U.S. Embassy checkpoint without being detected. This is the first successful Taliban attack in Kabul since last winter and although the execution was better than average the Taliban once again managed to kill or wound innocent Afghan civilians most of whom were undoubtedly children. I was interviewed for my take on the bombing by the Christian Science Monitor and remarked that it seemed this attack was executed better than the average Taliban lash up but after seeing the picture above I take it back. Poor bomb making with typically poor execution – there would be nothing left of the vehicle or that poor bike rider had this been a Baghdad VBIED.
This blast in Kabul needs to be investigated with both forensics and interviews with every guard at every post around ISAF being grilled by counter intelligence specialists in an effort to determine how that little as vehicle with all the explosives on board made it to the front of ISAF Headquarters. But that is not going to happen. Take a moment to read this article from CSM and to see why. The ANP general in charge of conducting criminal investigations is denied access to the scene and run off by ISAF HQ troops who would not know an Afghan general from the Easter Bunny. What kind of an investigation do you think we will have now? The Afghans have done a good job at securing Kabul and this was a serious breach but we (ISAF we) will never know how it happened because we do not embed with the police – we have meetings and PowerPoint briefs and drink a little tea with them and call that “mentoring.”
Gen. Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayed Zada is not going to be inclined to help us when he is treated so poorly during a routine bombing investigation and who can blame him? But it gets worse. In Jalalabad the city is emptying of civilian internationals who are being forced to spend the week in Kabul or out of the country as election day nears. The Army Brigade in Jalalabad has nightly meetings to go over and over and over the plans for placing Afghan security forces in concentric rings to screen all the traffic coming into the city. An officer I chatted with today was very proud telling me how they have the Afghans in on the planning and everything is going just perfectly. But there is one problem; there are no security checkpoints going up around Jalalabad. The officer was stunned when I told him that I have seen only one extra checkpoint and that was up for 3 hours several night ago. No I was told “they are up all night and have been for weeks.” I swear you cannot make this stuff up…they are no extra check posts up and I drive frequently from the Taj to the Shem Bot’s house at night and know exactly which check posts are working, how many men are manning them and who the men are. This is what happens when you live on a FOB and your daily reality is defined by PowerPoint briefs and classified(read closed loop) reporting. Just because a bunch of guys sitting in a conference room say something is happening doesn’t mean it is happening – whatever happened to the old troop leading steps?
Military officers are not the only ones with a warped perception about how things are going in Afghanistan big time foreign policy wonks are capable of making fools of themselves too. This article in Foreign Policy by Anna Husarska is full of the kind of lunacy which can only come from classified reports and briefing with senior officers. In the article Anna states that ANSO – the Afghanistan NGO security office has stated NGO’s “were generally attacked for being perceived as intrinsic to the military and political objectives.” ANSO has said no such thing. NGO’s are targeted by criminals because they are easy targets and the Taliban because they are foreigners or work for foreigners. Ms Husaraska goes on to bitch about ISAF using white SUV’s saying that NGO’s use white SUV’s and the military shouldn’t so that the bad guys don’t get confused about which SUV’s to attack. Pick your own cuss word for a response – the NGO’s in Afghanistan do not all have white SUV’s (very few do) and the military is not about to change the color of the white trucks they have finally gotten around to procuring …why should they? The final interesting tidbit in this article is the description of her ride from the Jalalabad Airport to downtown Jbad. That is a drive I do almost daily and I promise tell you she is not describing Jalalabad in her article. Maybe the military flew her into Ghor Province and told her she was in Jalalabad…who knows?
There was also this article from USA Today concerning the counter IED program in Nangarhar Province. It covers a call made to the local Army FOB concerning an IED and the soldiers response with a 4 MRAP flying squad. The mission unquestionably went down as described but there is a problem with the whole story line and that is 95% of the ordinance recovered and 99% of the calls for EOD support go to a single American contractor who lives outside the wire and has a team of Afghan EOD techs in training. The reason he gets all the calls and most of the recoveries is that he responds within 5 minutes of notification 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The FOB bound Army cannot run to their vehicles and respond – they take at least 3 hours to get organized, make a patrol plan, file and brief the plan before even drawing their weapons. A retired Navy Chief who travels in unarmored low profile vehicles – exactly as most of us do can often be on scene, disarm and secure the device, and be back home in bed before the ISAF team can even clear the base. That is the price of fighting a counterinsurgency off of big box FOB’s. The lone American also has the time and ability to rent a backhoe and dig out reported missile hits from farmers fields – just like the one above which impacted right outside the Army base in Jalalabad. It is important to know why missiles fail to function which is the whole point in having highly trained EOD techs in country. The Army guys locked down on their FOB in Jbad can do this work too but they have to be given the freedom of movement to allow them to work like their lone out side the wire contractor does.
It would be safer for an EOD flying squad to be in armored SUV’s like the cats in Kabul pictured earlier in the post. The belief that MRAP’s will protect you from the bad guys is just not true. They have saved many lives so far in Afghanistan but that will not last. It is always, in all times and in all places, easier and cheaper to defeat a new technology than it is to field it.
Babatim,
Your and Michael Yon’s blogs should be recommended reading for the entire US of A.
Thanks,
Eddie
Tim,
You have my vote to shutdown every FOB throughout the country. I will take the risk and live among the local populace while standing guard alongside ANA and ANP counterparts. I can’t imagine the goodwill we would create if we moved into urban and rural areas and lived among the very people we claim to protect and secure. I understand we would face greater risk but in return we would earn the trust and respect of the locals who would in turn serve alongside us in countering the Taliban and other violent elements. Of course, this would mean limited internet access, phone service, and other sundries. Also, we wouldn’t have a whole lot of air conditioning which would really put a hurt on the Chigo HVAC company (which is Chinese by the way). The next time you’re in a FOB count the number of Chigo units hooked up to the various buildings and C-Huts?!?! I don’t want to know how much we spend on those things!!
Anyway, great to hear an accurate and truly outside the wire report on the happenings within Afghanistan. Our so-called “situational awareness” inside the FOB’s is restricted to full motion video from drones, source reporting and other intelligence (mostly from the national agencies), and patrols who dare venture during daylight hours to conduct MEDCAP’s and other limited aid to the locals. We really can’t win the hearts and minds living inside our fortresses and only venturing outside with an infantry platoon in tow and don’t forget the approved CONOP from higher.
Stay safe out there…
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 08/17/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
Tim,
As always, thank you for your insight and assessments. This is the type of reporting and analysis that should be on the front page of every western language newspaper.
Spot on with your comments about our Senior officers lacking situational awareness because of a lack of boots on the ground developing the situation.
We can’t have a shared reality if we aren’t willing to be audacious and accept risk.
As always, very informative post. I have been wondering what your take is on the upcoming elections. I’m going to assume, outside of that one VIEB in Kabul, the rest of Kabul was relatively peaceful/uneventful that day. You don’t think there will be any violence in regards to the elections? Do you think there will be a turn out? Is the election of local representatives more important to the people or are they as ho-hum about is as most Americans?
The standard of Anglo-Saxon journalism generally is sub-standard. For example, during the recent crisis in Iran, the BBC, CNN, Fox and ITN made huge noise about “foreign reporters” being restricted to their offices, not allowed to report the protests, etc.
Well, Robert Fisk (a veteran and respected British reporter who spent most of the last 7 years reporting outside the green zone about how the Coalition almost f*cked up Iraq) noted in his dispatch “er…what restrictions? I’m registered with the Iranian authorities and nobody has told me anything!” So he kept on reporting and left when his visa ran out several weeks later.
The problem comes with speculation and I call this the “Concorde effect” which I’ll explain with the Concorde air crash in Paris, 2000.
Concorde beforehand had never had a crash and bar one or two incidents was one of the most reliable airliners in the air. Then you have a pretty horrific crash. The media (BBC, CNN, etc) jump on it due to the graphic nature of the footage of a flame ridden aircraft taking off and immediately ask “whats went wrong?” which, because they don’t get a satisfactory answer because air accident investigations take time, leads to their next speculative question “what went wrong with Concode” which then leads to “why did Concorde fail”, “can Concorde’s faults be fixed?”, “will British Airways and Air France fix Concorde?” and then, finally, “can Concorde survive?”
In truth, it wasn’t the Paris air diaster that killed Concorde, it was roughly 18 months of straight speculative bullsh*t from the American and British media that killed it off.
And so, you have the same here. A carbomb goes off in Kabul. The first question is “where in Kabul?” When the answer is ISAF headquarters the speculation starts in earnest. “Is this a direct challenge to ISAF’s mission?” “Will this affect the elections?” “is election violence inevitable?” “Does ISAF have the ability to prevent election violence when it eventually happens?” and so on, and so on and so on…
If moving into populated areas means keeping hundreds of meters of distance from civilians while driving the Humvees in the city, then I don’t think you are leaving a good impression nor it is going work.
The soft hat tactic works only if you really interact with real people, listen to them, Pay ANA and ANP proper salaries so they don’t accept bribes from potential VBIEDs and don’t just kill for the hell of it.
Afghans are stupidly proud people, but they are the friendliest of them all only if shown some gratitude. Had the US handle this war properly from the beginning, it wouldn’t have been this bad now. 2003 and 4 looks like a distant history, we bars, clubs and we could drive around in the city without the fear of being shot by the police or kidnapped by ex-warlord from the north.
We need to look at our policies as a whole not just talk about mixing with people.
Great article anyway
Tim,
To comment on your caption in the last photo, “It is always easier and cheaper to defeat new battlefield technologies than it is to design and field them.” Now you’re really asking for the paradigm to shift!! As you know all too well there is money ($$ and lots of it) to be made in selling the military all this gear. Rarely (I give the Marines more credit then my beloved Army) do the pinheads in the Pentagon even ask the men and women in the field using this equipment if it is the right thing for the right problem. All too often is rammed down your throat and you are forced to live with it…
I won’t engage in a debate about the importance of protecting lives, but are IED’s an equipment problem or a policy problem? If I only leave the comforts of my FOB during specified times and only along specific routes how long will it take Tommy Taliban to figure out my routine? Plus let’s not forget my signature of MRAP’s, Armored HMMWVs, and so on. I wear enough gear to look like I am invading Mars or something on Starship Troopers!! Our boys and girls standout from everything else so only a blind mujahid would missing seeing them traveling down the road. Plus, when I do roll in it’s 360 degree security and crew-served weapons manned and ready!!
Now if I lived among the very people who are being influenced by this bullsh!t the Taliban espouse won’t I most likely increase the odds of swaying their opinion?? Especially if I give them (locals) money to work for me and not the Taliban…secondary effects will include stripping the bad guys of their economic influence as well as ideological but again that will take getting out of the FOB and STAYING OUT of the FOB.
Of course, this would mean billions in lost defense contract dollars for the companies who profit on these FOB’s from building them to wiring them for electricity to feeding the troops. Long gone are the days of General Purpose tents, diesel generators, and lots of concertina wire and sandbags, plus pulling your own security. Heck now we hire TCNs (third county nationals) to pull our security and do everything else for us!! When I go eat in the mess hall it’s anything from a Filipino to a Russian serving up my food, and the locals what jobs do we give them? They get to scrub the pots and pans. Not too mention cleaning the showers and pumping the waste out of the latrine sumps!! What a winning the hearts and minds strategy that is!! There are some exceptions inside the Special Forces camps where they seem to realize the importance of engaging the locals even inside the FOB! They hire local tribesmen, pay them above average wages (not the KBR type salary), and give show them some diginity. In return you get a local Afghan less likely to believe what the Taliban is telling them that Americans and westerners hate them and want to enslave them…
Anyway, this is COIN and FOBs are here to stay!! Heck, go into USFOR-A headquarters and count the bodies in there working. Unbelievable waste of manpower since I would venture to say 99% of what they do does little to impact anyone outside their headquarters. For example, when it is all said and done there will be something like 150+ intelligence personnel working in USFOR-A HQ. Guess how much of their work directly impacts the MEB or BCTs? How much analysis and production are they putting forth for the MEB and the BCTs? Little to none since the MEB and BCTs themselves struggle to collect intel throughout their own AO’s. So why are they all there? Because just like MNF-I, MNC-I, and the various MND’s in Iraq, and the CFC-A and ISAF HQ that came before it the more stars in the HQ the more support bodies you need to sustain it! Lots of PowerPoint updates, VTCs, and meetings to win the war…
Anyway, this diatribe is over for now. Stay safe out there…
“The FOB bound Army cannot run to their vehicles and respond they take at least 3 hours to get organized, make a patrol plan, file and brief the plan before even drawing their weapons”
Okay, so this is the “fleet of foot” McChrystal was talking about? This is more like waiting for the diva and her entourage to arrive. The smart locals gave up long ago, and others find their admiration constantly tested and waning.
It seems this fortress approach isn’t exactly “winning the hearts and minds,” and also is shortchanging both the Afghans and the Armed Forces to a great degree.
It seems there’s a perception that it’s safer for our troops to run it as a 9 – 5 war and keep them behind the FOB walls, than to get out there, take risks, and move quietly and freely amid the general population. Maybe in the short short term, but certainly this approach only prolongs things, makes little or no inroads, creates suspicion, and we can’t keep doing this forever. I’m not saying we act like the Peace Corps, but we do make our best scores when we’re doing things, helping, working with, communicating with directly.
Perhaps we need to put a spin on Shakespeare: “First, we kill all the Power Point presentations.”
Stay safe. Go visit The Hubs when you’ve got a spare moment.
“This is what happens when you live on a FOB and your daily reality is defined by PowerPoint briefs and classified(read closed loop) reporting. Just because a bunch of guys sitting in a conference room say something is happening doesn’t mean it is happening whatever happened to the old troop leading steps?”
Sounds ominously like the events in a bunker in Berlin in 1945. Hopefully GEN McCrystal is goint of fire one or more of these big box FOB commanders soon and get the troops out amoung the people to provide COIN.
Thanks for putting this in perspective. I’ve linked to it.
All,
For those of you who want to see our soldiers ‘outside the wire’ you can go to militaryphotos.net and look at the pics submitted from the troops in Afghanistan. You will notice even those “outside the wire” of the larger FOB’s aren’t living among the people. They remain situated usually on high ground overlooking a road and some smaller villages. They have HESCO barriers (lots of them = $$$) between them and the outside world. These are the proverbial Combat Outposts of those troops who are ‘outside the wire’. They make great targets for the mujahid to practice launching their 107mm Chinese rockets and conduct small arms attacks.
These arguments of “Fortressing” ourselves aren’t new to anyone in the service. We were laughed at by the Brits and French in Bosnia throughout the late 90’s because of our over the top force protection posture. How many troops did the Brits and Frogs lose in Bosnia? A handful at the most but they were among the population in soft caps and pistols in flap holsters all day, everyday. They had a better understanding of the REAL security situation on the ground and better situational awareness. Plus, if the mujahid wanted to attack them they would kill innocent civilians in the process which is scorned and looked down upon by even Mullah Omar. It’s hard for Al Qaeda and the Taliban to discredit our efforts when our troops are living among the people and working to make their lives better FULLTIME. Not a few hours a day coming out of FOB fortress with an infantry platoon in tow but living among them every minute of everyday and working with them to provide security and a better way of life.
If interested you can go to Google and type in “Eagle Base and Tuzla” you will get to see American taxpayer dollars STILL at work today keeping this large FOB up and running in Bosnia. Guess how often those garrisoned soldiers get out and mingle with the local public? Never because there are Al Qaeda associated groups somewhere in Bosnia so we can’t risk the lives of our soldiers. So let’s keep them buttoned up inside of Eagle Base. Also, get on the internet and you can see how much defense dollars we still spend to keep Camp Falcon in Kosovo alive and running. That’s right, Kosovo and Bosnia which were started under President Clinton!!
Another interesting internet search, go to DynCorp, Northrup Grumman, L3, General Dynamics, and so on to search overseas employment opportunities in Afghanistan. There are an abundant amount of employment opportunities for these contract companies. They are looking for supply personnel, electricians, plumbers, communications technicians (internet and morale phone services), and maintenance personnel to stand-up and expand these FOBs. Also there is an abundance of staff jobs for higher HQ like ops, intel, logistics, and so on…
What does all this equate to? It means bigger staffs for higher HQs, ever expanding FOBs, and an increase in quality of life for our soldiers and marines. What does this mean for the average Afghan? I think the vote is still out on this one so I will withold judgment, but if Iraq is any indication then we can expect the same core problems to remain even after we leave…bottom line, our intervention in Afghanistan will not CHANGE anything LONG TERM (i.e. 10-20 years)…
Anyway, I am way too pessimistic to believe our military culture will shift under this current ‘surge’ and a change in leadership at USFOR-A. The amount of $$ money these FOBs generate is too large and this isn’t a new phenomenon. These FOBs have stifled military policy and strategy for at least a decade and a half…
Stay safe.