What To Do? Part One

15 Replies to “What To Do? Part One”

1. Great post.

   There is one lesson from Northern Ireland that we should learn then that is that we need to watch the local authorities (police, civil administration even home grown spooks) like hawks.

   Only then can you prevent abuses, corruption and even report and stop collusion between local authorities and the more unsavory, corrupt or dangerously idealistic elements of your own force.

   Theres a reason why the British Army patrolled with RUC/PSNI Officers and manned Police stations in Northern Ireland and while it was partly to protect the Coppers, it wasn’t because the British were in cahoots with the then majority Protestant organisation. They were there specifically to keep an eye on them, make sure they didn’t get up to any funny business or collude with Loyalist Paramilitaries.

   There were bad apples, of course they were, the FRU was one but if the main force of Operation Banner (the 38 year lond mission in Northern Ireland) were allowed to keep closer tabs on the RUC and so on the illeigal operation would have been stopped earlier and fewer innocent people killed.

   Its the same here as you quite rightly point out. The best way to win the trust of the Afghan people is to get out there and mentor the ANP, Afghan Army and Afghan Security Services to death. Cut out the powerpoint crap and stick to the buggers like glue, follow them everywhere, jointly man their police stations and barracks, etc.

   None of this is being done or is being done with a bare minimum of resources and it stinks. We don’t need 4 man advisor teams or whatever the hell are there you need to get everyone involved on a rotating basis.

2. Me thinks Obama is starting to sound like Rumsfeld did during those infamous press conferences. He’s choosing not to make a decision, while couching it in the unfortunate din of metaphor. Next he’ll be rewriting Rimbaud.
   “We need a surge of Tony Soprano’s to work with the Afghans because mafia guys have more experience solving Afghan style problems.”
   Amen.

   I really like and appreciate your forthright manner. I look forward to reading part 2.

3. Tim,

   Two points —

   1) McChrystal says FOBs are not working. Amen, but guess what’s going up faster in Afghanistan? Nothing, these things are popping up everywhere and they simply do two things — separate the friendlies from the people we are supposedly here protecting. More importantly, they make big profits for large and small military defense companies. If nothing drives politics and military decision making it is money $$… No more explanation needed.

   2) You’re absolutely spot on that we suck at counter-insurgency. We called Iraq a success but if you read the papers (not the MSM) you will see sectarian violence is once again rearing its ugly head and before to long we will see Shia’s, Sunni’s, and Kurd’s going at it full tilt. As you know military and political careers are made over long periods of conflict not to mention Point #1 above…$$$$$ so along goes the train affectionally called the Afghanistan Civ-Mil Campaign Plan…

   At the end of the day there are a lot people deployed to Afghanistan but very few are outside doing anything. I would venture to say the scale of people actually doing “COIN” every single day compared to those who sit on FOBs throughout the country is probably somewhere around 100 to 1 or greater.

   In closing there is no chance of ‘getting rid’ of the Taliban and even identifying the irreconcilables will be a joke. At the end of the day we are mired in a country of corruption and I see no real long term success coming from our military involvement here. The Taliban will remain here long after we leave and the Karazai family will do nothing but successfully pad their Dubai bank accounts, continue to allow the country to mire in its corruption, and once Kandahar and Kabul fall again they will quickly jet out of the country to Europe living off the fortunes they will have amassed in the time since.

   Expending resources on building and maintaining FOBs is ridiculous but I have mentioned before that this form of warfare is not new. We’ve lived with it for the past decade starting in the Balkans, and so here we go again as more plywood and HESCO barrier mini-cities are built away from the very population we claim to serve and protect…

   Looking forward to Part 2…

4. Great site. Great post. Can’t wait for Part 2.

   A few disagreements:

   1. Killing Bin Laden at Tora Bora would not have won the war. Our failure to deny AQ and Mullah Omar sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the critical failure. As soon as it was clear that the enemy was seeking refuge in Pakistan, the U.S. should have given the same ultimatum to the Pak government that we did immediately after 9/11: you will either help us eradicate AQ and its allies or you will be targeted as well. This, however, touches on your excellent point that the U.S. is reluctant to fight wars that may entail significant casualties.

   2. It is an exaggeration to say that the U.S. military is not good at fighting counterinsurgencies, at least in 2007 and 2008. Iraq is a perfect example of COIN done superbly. The Marines were doing this well by 2006 and Petraeus had Mosul completely pacified using COIN in 2003 until he was moved back to the U.S. and another commander (and Brennan) brought in who screwed up all the good work that Petraeus had done there. Your example of present-day Iraq is misplaced. There is no denying that the strategy employed by Petraeus and Odierno in 2007-2008 won that war and beat the insurgency, humiliating Al Qaeda. What is happening there today, however, is a cautionary tale in negotiating a terrible Status of Forces Agreement which resulted in U.S. forces being relegated to the FOB’s just as they were from 2003 through 2006. Essentially, we beat the enemy in Iraq using COIN and then promptly traded away the victory by giving the Iraqis way too much control over our forces and too much responsibility for security before the time was right.

5. The last photo takes my breath away.

6. One point. You say “President Obama is on record as saying that Afghanistan is critical in order to prevent the return of the Taliban who will provide haven, support and bases to Al Qadea. I believe he said “in order to prevent the return of Al Qaeda…”, not taliban.

   I believe there is no winnable strategy nor any reason to stay there. It is lose-lose and departure will result in a lot of “timber” battles as various groups try to consolidate power. Not our battle.

   Again, excellent and insightful article.

7. Bilbo,

   Bang on about sectarian conflict returning to Iraq. I read about the Iraqi government wanting to remove the peace walls (i.e. blast barriers) seperting Shia and Sunni neighborhoods with increasing alarm and dismay.

   Another Ulster fact, the peace walls in Belfast and Derry are still there after 35 years and a highly successful peace process and functioning coalition government. They are still there because nobody, not the police, the British government, or the Northern Ireland Executive can definitively say that sectarian violence won’t break out again if they removed the walls.

   Nobody in Iraq has even made that assessment in Iraq, let alone figure out an answer and blood will flow as a result. Mark my words.

8. TS Alfabet…you are right, the vote and return of power to the soveriegn should be the last thing we do as we roll the guidons and leave Iraq. However, the single (most important) flaw (from a political standpoint) is that we rushed (both IZ and AF) the ‘popular vote’ as if this was some barometer of democracy at work. All we successfully did in IZ was give the down-trodden Shia’s the keys to the palace and since they are the majority who spent the last several decades under an oppressive Sunni Baathist the payback was extreme. Everybody always goes back to AQ but they were simply one violent actor in a series of groups doing the killing in IZ during the Patraues ‘success’ in Mosul and later IZ writ large. The Shia militias, Kurdish Peshmerge, and the Sunni-affiliates of AQ were (and to some extent still are) violent groups within IZ facilitating the agenda of those they represent. The single flaw in our metric of success for COIN in IZ was the temporary easing of hostilities, however, nothing was ‘fixed’ as it relates to centuries old ethnic hatred. This would require an occupation of decades by US and coalition forces and that will NEVER happen in modern day America under our current political system. Anyway, I stand by my assessment that the Taliban ideology (hence it is an idea not a finite group of actors) will remain for a very long time. Our military presence in AFG will do little to change that dynamic. I would go a step further and say our current policy of living in FOBs and allowing the Talibam freedom of maneuver among the very population we claim to serve is counter-productive. The Taliban provide security where there is none or worse a corrupt Afghan security apparatus who exploit their own. Mullah Omar’s rise to power came from his strict adherence to Islam and his stand against those warlords who were exploiting the very people they claimed to represent. The strategy is written well but I think the execution will fall short. It will take a major event to change the paradigm of the US military — force protection is paramount over anything else, plus the topics already discussed on this blog (lack of unity of command among the coalition, US military C2 that makes swift and effective action impossible, concern for the US casualty rate, and ROE that limits are forces from hammering the bad guys where necessary)…

   In America, Iraq is politically over…no matter how much the violence will increase there isn’t a politician in the running who will suggest a return to that place. I think we should stick to what we do best — high intensity, full contact combat (i.e. early stages of OEF and OIF) we have failed in the past quarter century at the long dwell occupation operations stuff. Bosnia is no closer to being fixed as is Kosovo or Haiti. I am about reinforcing success and sticking to what we do best. This COIN ideology phase will pass in the coming years as we drawdown forces in IZ and eventually AFG. The military industrial machine will continue to press for missile defense, strategic global force projection, and high-tech fighters, subs, and collection systems. We could save billions if we simply reached out to Mullah Omar and signed a deal that he not allow AQ to ever reside on Afghan soil, and should they (AQ) ever execute an attack against us from AFG we will once again bomb them back to the stone age. We are very good at that and I remain convinced we can do that effectively and efficiently…containment by superior technology and overwhelming firepower. The same with Pakistan, the next time a bomb goes off in western Europe or in the US and its traced back to the FATA. We are game on and let there be no doubt in the Pakistani government that they had better keep their ‘guests’ in check or we will rain down a firestorm on their ass. We can continue to do all the business ventures we want with Afghanistan once the Taliban stabilize the country and agree to play nicely. Same with Pakistan but again we reserve the right to defend ourselves and our allies at any time. I estimate we would save billions, if not trillions in taxpayer dollars.

9. The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 09/23/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.

10. U.S. ARMY FAILS TO CONNECT WITH THE AFGHAN PEOPLE FOR LONG-TERM STABILITY SAYS NATO CIVIL-MILITARY AFFAIRS ADVISOR

    6.) Despite all of the media attention to the contrary, the facts are quite clear that the Department of Defense lacks the institutionalized solutions to support civilian led operations and meet future civil-military teaming requirements at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. We truly have not created a real, lasting, or stable, Peace in Iraq, or Afghanistan, because we are not conducting the in-depth joint training necessary to accomplish that desired end state.

    (7.) As a result we can’t truly stabilize Iraq, Afghanistan, nor can we train their soldiers or police to do it either. This lack of training is due to a War Fighter Insurgency within the U.S. Army, which still espouses, although in seemingly subtle ways, kinetic operations as their preferred method of operation; ways that, combined with the fact that truly no one in DOD is paying any attention to a very transparent problem, have re-enforced a U.S. Army kinetics first, last, and always, approach to operations.

    (8.) As we are all aware U.S. Army doctrine visualizes three major areas that comprise Full Spectrum (Stability) Operations, each of equal importance: Offense, Defense, and Stability. The requirement for the Army to conduct full-spectrum operations is derived from: The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), National Security Program Directive (NSPD) #44, DoD Directive 3000.05 (Stability Operations), and Army Campaign Plan.

    (9.) The War Fighter Insurgency, originally created in 2003, and allowed to continue to function through the administrations of two Secretaries of Defense, is an insurgency against the expressed mandate of the three DOD Directives listed in paragraph (7.) above, as well as the U.S. Army’s own Campaign Plan, and other documents, designed to enhance the Army’s ability to conduct stability operations.

    (10.) This insurgency is conducted with malice a forethought, in secret where possible, and with the intent to maintain the U.S. Army’s kinetic mission as paramount. Why? The U.S. Army General Staff understands kinetics. It does not understand non-kinetics, and lack of understanding breeds fear, and fear breeds avoidance. In short the U.S. Army was painfully unprepared in 2001, and this War Fighter Insurgency was born the day that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made his famous statement that U.S. Troops would no longer do nation building. That continues to be the U.S. Army’s Raison d’être today for their resistance to seriously training for, or conducting, viable stability operations.

    (11.) It is literally impossible for the U.S. Army, the main provider of manpower and expertise to support U.S. national interests, to successfully transition to Phase 4 & 5 Operations [post combat stability operations], because the U.S. Army is not properly trained, and therefore the operations can not be properly planned, or executed, to make that vital transition. Quite simply, we may see what needs to be done, but we can’t do what needs to be done, because there is now a six year training void in how to effectively use our non-kinetic enablers; mainly Civil-Affairs. The War Fighter Insurgency is continuing to prevent that from happening.

    H/T: Grim

11. Pingback: The Captain’s Journal » What to do about Afghanistan?

12. Boy, there is a lot of stuff floating around about Afghanistan. From Biden’s secret Ninja plan, to training thousands of afghans for police and military to McChrystal possibly resigning.. Jeeze, what else? lol Anyhoo, I was wondering what your take was on this article Tim. Because whatever plan Obama and company come up with, all roads lead to training. Is it as dismal as the author points out, or is this a BS article? Cheers.
    ——-
    Meet the Afghan Army
    Is It a Figment of Washington’s Imagination?
    By Ann Jones
    The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans — Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn’t bet on Them.
    Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them — the Afghans — I want to talk about.
    Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.
    In the heat of this summer, I went out to the training fields near Kabul where Afghan army recruits are put through their paces, and it was quickly evident just what’s getting lost in translation. Our trainers, soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, were masterful. Professional and highly skilled, they were dedicated to carrying out their mission — and doing the job well. They were also big, strong, camouflaged, combat-booted, supersized American men, their bodies swollen by flak jackets and lashed with knives, handguns, and god only knows what else. Any American could be proud of their commitment to tough duty.
    The Afghans were puny by comparison: Hundreds of little Davids to the overstuffed American Goliaths training them. Keep in mind: Afghan recruits come from a world of desperate poverty. They are almost uniformly malnourished and underweight. Many are no bigger than I am (5’4″ and thin) — and some probably not much stronger. Like me, many sag under the weight of a standard-issue flack jacket.
    Their American trainers spoke of “upper body strength deficiency” and prescribed pushups because their trainees buckle under the backpacks filled with 50 pounds of equipment and ammo they are expected to carry. All this material must seem absurd to men whose fathers and brothers, wearing only the old cotton shirts and baggy pants of everyday life and carrying battered Russian Kalashnikov rifles, defeated the Red Army two decades ago. American trainers marvel that, freed from heavy equipment and uniforms, Afghan soldiers can run through the mountains all day — as the Taliban guerrillas in fact do with great effect — but the U.S. military is determined to train them for another style of war.
    Still, the new recruits turn out for training in the blistering heat in this stony desert landscape wearing, beneath their heavy uniforms, the smart red, green, and black warm-up outfits intended to encourage them to engage in off-duty exercise. American trainers recognize that recruits regularly wear all their gear at once for fear somebody will steal anything left behind in the barracks, but they take this overdressing as a sign of how much Afghans love the military. My own reading, based on my observations of Afghan life during the years I’ve spent in that country, is this: It’s a sign of how little they trust one another, or the Americans who gave them the snazzy suits. I think it also indicates the obvious: that these impoverished men in a country without work have joined the Afghan National Army for what they can get out of it (and keep or sell) — and that doesn’t include democracy or glory.
    In the current policy debate about the Afghan War in Washington, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin wants the Afghans to defend their country. Senator John McCain, the top Republican on the committee, agrees but says they need even more help from even more Americans. The common ground — the sacred territory President Obama gropes for — is that, whatever else happens, the U.S. must speed up the training of “the Afghan security forces.”
    American military planners and policymakers already proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model, wind-up American Marines. That is not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen — and ever faster.
    “Basic Warrior Training”
    So who are these security forces? They include the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP). International forces and private contractors have been training Afghan recruits for both of them since 2001. In fact, the determination of Western military planners to create a national army and police force has been so great that some seem to have suppressed for years the reports of Canadian soldiers who witnessed members of the Afghan security forces engaging in a fairly common pastime, sodomizing young boys.
    Current training and mentoring is provided by the U.S., Great Britain, France, Canada, Romania, Poland, Mongolia, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as by the private for-profit contractors MPRI, KBR (formerly a division of Halliburton), Pulau, Paravant, and RONCO.
    Almost eight years and counting since the “mentoring” process began, officers at the Kabul Military Training Center report that the army now numbers between 88,000 and 92,000 soldiers, depending on who you talk to; and the basic training course financed and led by Americans, called “Basic Warrior Training,” is turning out 28,800 new soldiers every year, according to a Kabul Military Training Center “fact sheet.” The current projected “end strength” for the ANA, to be reached in December 2011, is 134,000 men; but Afghan officers told me they’re planning for a force of 200,000, while the Western press often cites 240,000 as the final figure.
    The number 400,000 is often mentioned as the supposed end-strength quota for the combined security forces — an army of 240,000 soldiers and a police force with 160,000 men. Yet Afghan National Police officials also speak of a far more inflated figure, 250,000, and they claim that 149,000 men have already been trained. Police training has always proven problematic, however, in part because, from the start, the European allies fundamentally disagreed with the Bush administration about what the role of the Afghan police should be. Germany initiated the training of what it saw as an unarmed force that would direct traffic, deter crime, and keep civic order for the benefit of the civilian population. The U.S. took over in 2003, handed the task off to a private for-profit military contractor, DynCorp, and proceeded to produce a heavily armed, undisciplined, and thoroughly venal paramilitary force despised by Kabulis and feared by Afghan civilians in the countryside.
    Contradicting that widespread public view, an Afghan commanding officer of the ANP assured me that today the police are trained as police, not as a paramilitary auxiliary of the ANA. “But policing is different in Afghanistan,” he said, because the police operate in active war zones.

    Washington sends mixed messages on this subject. It farms out responsibility for the ANP to a private contractor that hires as mentors retired American law enforcement officers — a Kentucky state trooper, a Texas county lawman, a North Carolina cop, and so on. Yet Washington policymakers continue to couple the police with the army as “the Afghan security forces” — the most basic police rank is “soldier” — in a merger that must influence what DynCorp puts in its training syllabus. At the Afghan National Police training camp outside Kabul, I watched a squad of trainees learn (reluctantly) how to respond to a full-scale ambush. Though they were armed only with red rubber Kalashnikovs, the exercise looked to me much like the military maneuvers I’d witnessed at the army training camp.
    Like army training, police training, too, was accelerated months ago to insure “security” during the run-up to the presidential election. With that goal in mind, DynCorp mentors shrunk the basic police training course from eight weeks to three, after which the police were dispatched to villages all across the country, including areas controlled by the Taliban. After the election, the surviving short-course police “soldiers” were to be brought back to Kabul for the rest of the basic training program. There’s no word yet on how many returned.
    You have to wonder about the wisdom of rushing out this half-baked product. How would you feel if the police in your community were turned loose, heavily armed, after three weeks of training? And how would you feel if you were given a three-week training course with a rubber gun and then dispatched, with a real one, to defend your country?
    Training security forces is not cheap. So far, the estimated cost of training and mentoring the police since 2001 is at least $10 billion. Any reliable figure on the cost of training and mentoring the Afghan army since 2001 is as invisible as the army itself. But the U.S. currently spends some $4 billion a month on military operations in Afghanistan.
    The Invisible Men
    What is there to show for all this remarkably expensive training? Although in Washington they may talk about the 90,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army, no one has reported actually seeing such an army anywhere in Afghanistan. When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police. Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own? No explanation has been offered. American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?
    My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of “Basic Warrior Training” 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.
    In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it’s a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid. Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujahidin — the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets — and many are undoubtedly Taliban.
    American trainers have taken careful note of the fact that, when ANA soldiers were given leave after basic training to return home with their pay, they generally didn’t come back. To foil paycheck scams and decrease soaring rates of desertion, they recently devised a money-transfer system that allows the soldiers to send pay home without ever leaving their base. That sounds like a good idea, but like many expensive American solutions to Afghan problems, it misses the point. It’s not just the money the soldier wants to transfer home, it’s himself as well.
    Earlier this year, the U.S. training program became slightly more compelling with the introduction of a U.S.-made weapon, the M-16 rifle, which was phased in over four months as a replacement for the venerable Kalashnikov. Even U.S. trainers admit that, in Afghanistan, the Kalashnikov is actually the superior weapon. Light and accurate, it requires no cleaning even in the dust of the high desert, and every man and boy already knows it well. The strange and sensitive M-16, on the other hand, may be more accurate at slightly greater distances, but only if a soldier can keep it clean, while managing to adjust and readjust its notoriously sensitive sights. The struggling soldiers of the ANA may not ace that test, but now that the U.S. military has generously passed on its old M-16s to Afghans, it can buy new ones at taxpayer expense, a prospect certain to gladden the heart of any arms manufacturer. (Incidentally, thanks must go to the Illinois National Guard for risking their lives to make possible such handsome corporate profits.)
    As for the police, U.S.-funded training offers a similar revolving door. In Afghanistan, however, it is far more dangerous to be a policeman than a soldier. While soldiers on patrol can slip away, policemen stuck at their posts are killed almost every day. Assigned in small numbers to staff small-town police stations or highway checkpoints, they are sitting ducks for Taliban fighters. As representatives of the now thoroughly discredited government of President Hamid Karzai, the hapless police make handy symbolic targets. British commanders in Helmand province estimated that 60% of Afghan police are on drugs — and little wonder why.
    In the Pashtun provinces of southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is strong, recruiting men for the Afghan National Police is a “problem,” as an ANP commander told me. Consequently, non-Pashtun police trainees of Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek, or other ethnic backgrounds are dispatched to maintain order in Pashtun territory. They might as well paint targets on their foreheads. The police who accompanied the U.S. Marines into Helmand Province reportedly refused to leave their heavily armed mentors to take up suicidal posts in provincial villages. Some police and army soldiers, when asked by reporters, claimed to be “visiting” Helmand province only for “vacation.”
    Training Day
    In many districts, the police recently supplemented their low pay and demonstrated allegiance to local warlords by stuffing ballot boxes for President Karzai in the presidential election. Consider that but one more indication — like the defection of those great Islamist fundamentalist mujahidin allies the U.S. sponsored in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s who are now fighting with the Taliban — that no amount of American training, mentoring, or cash will determine who or what Afghans will fight for, if indeed they fight at all.
    Afghans are world famous fighters, in part because they have a knack for gravitating to the winning side, and they’re ready to change sides with alacrity until they get it right. Recognizing that Afghans back a winner, U.S. military strategists are now banking on a counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to “clear, hold, and build” — that is, to stick around long enough to win the Afghans over. But it’s way too late for that to work. These days, U.S. troops sticking around look ever more like a foreign occupying army and, to the Taliban, like targets.
    Recently Karen DeYoung noted in the Washington Post that the Taliban now regularly use very sophisticated military techniques — “as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.” Of course, some of them have attended training sessions which teach them to fight in “austere environments,” probably time and time again. If you were a Talib, wouldn’t you scout the training being offered to Afghans on the other side? And wouldn’t you do it more than once if you could get well paid every time?
    Such training is bound to come in handy — as it may have for the Talib policeman who, just last week, bumped off eight other comrades at his police post in Kunduz Province in northern Afghanistan and turned it over to the Taliban. On the other hand, such training can be deadly to American trainers. Take the case of the American trainer who was shot and wounded that same week by one of his trainees. Reportedly, a dispute arose because the trainer was drinking water “in front of locals,” while the trainees were fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramazan.
    There is, by the way, plenty of evidence that Taliban fighters get along just fine, fighting fiercely and well without the training lavished on the ANA and the ANP. Why is it that Afghan Taliban fighters seem so bold and effective, while the Afghan National Police are so dismally corrupt and the Afghan National Army a washout?
    When I visited bases and training grounds in July, I heard some American trainers describe their Afghan trainees in the same racist terms once applied to African slaves in the U.S.: lazy, irresponsible, stupid, childish, and so on. That’s how Afghan resistance, avoidance, and sabotage look to American eyes. The Taliban fight for something they believe — that their country should be freed from foreign occupation. “Our” Afghans try to get by.
    Yet one amazing thing happens to ANA trainees who stick it out for the whole 10 weeks of basic training. Their slight bodies begin to fill out a little. They gain more energy and better spirits — all because for the first time in their lives they have enough nutritious food to eat.
    Better nutrition notwithstanding — Senator Levin, Senator McCain — “our” Afghans are never going to fight for an American cause, with or without American troops, the way we imagine they should. They’re never going to fight with the energy of the Taliban for a national government that we installed against Afghan wishes, then more recently set up to steal another election, and now seem about to ratify in office, despite incontrovertible evidence of flagrant fraud. Why should they? Even if the U.S. could win their minds, their hearts are not in it.
    One small warning: Don’t take the insecurity of the Afghan security forces as an argument for sending yet more American troops to Afghanistan. Aggressive Americans (now numbering 68,000) are likely to be even less successful than reluctant Afghan forces. Afghans want peace, but the kharaji (foreign) troops (100,000, if you include U.S. allies in NATO) bring death and destruction wherever they go. Think instead about what you might have won — and could still win — had you spent all those military billions on food. Or maybe agriculture. Or health care. Or a civilian job corps. Is it too late for that now?
    Ann Jones is the author of Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan, 2006) and writes often about Afghanistan for TomDispatch and the Nation. War Is Not Over When It’s Over, her new book about the impact of war on women, will be published next year.
    http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175116/ann_jones_us_or_them_in_afghanistan_

13. I think you wrote this post with allot of rush, hence ignored all the fact about the people of Afghanistan.
    Your mention the war in Sri Lanka and how the government won it by killing scores of civilian people. My good friend, when Russian invaded Afghanistan, in Herat, they killed 24000 people in just a couple of days.
    I suggest you have a look at the events that took place after that. The war intensified and people got angrier, they all went to seek revenge, not scared.
    If people kill each other for Timber, imagine what they would do to anyone, when they kill their loved ones. This generation of Afghans born and grew up in war, you want war believe you me they will give you one.
    In the beginning Americans targeted any gathering took place in the south, bombed in killing everyone and blamed Taliban presence, South was once a peaceful place, you and I could go there and mangle with locals, but try and go there now …
    Afghanistan doesn’t need more troops, McCristal has some right policies, investment in the Afghan government and forces is a must do thing to win this war, Killing one civilian will create tens of them.
    The mistake NATO/Americans made in Afghanistan was NOT trying to understand these people, and that is exactly what you are suggesting to repeat.

14. The actual saying is “you can never cross the same river twice”. Ponder that and you’ll find the truth in it.

    The President’s version still has meaning but most of that is lost.

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