There are no easy answers for Afghanistan. Take the recent elections; are there palatable options to fixing that mess? You can accept the results which are unpalatable, you can hold a run off which would probably be an even bigger farce; you could hold an emergency Loya Jirga and start over (could you imagine that?) There are a few more options available I suppose but none of them very attractive. President Obama appears to be “voting present” for the time being but there is General McChrystal’s leaked confidential report in Washington to get the chattering classes focused on everything except what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan. 
The military is asking for more troops but to do what? Unless they move off the FOB’s and out into the local population they do little more than create and targets go opportunity for the various armed opposition groups (AOG’s) who plague the countryside. The only way to secure the people is to live with the people It’s just that simple.
Unless the present FOB bound kinetic ops orientation is completely eliminated we will leave here in worse shape than we are now and right now which is not great. We are spending billions of dollars we do not have and gaining not one damn thing for it. When we started this fight President Bush said “we will not falter, we will not tire, we will not fail.” In Afghanistan the military is tired; worn out by back to back to back deployments. We are clearly failing by any unit of measurement and it now appears we are faltering too.
To validate my claim I have to rely on my personal experience. My colleagues and I are finishing up a six month cash for work program focused on Kandahar, Jalalabad, Gardez and Lahska Gar. Not easy places to work (except Jalalabad which is a great place to work) and Tim the Canadian had over 5,000 people working in Kandahar, Ranger Will over 2,000 in Lashka Gar – I had 4,002 working in Jalalabad and over 2,000 in Gardez. Compare those numbers to the performance of the massive PRT’s located in those towns – it is not even close. I think the Canadians in Kandahar reported a total of 136 cash for work recipients for 2009. We get results because we live and work in the community and operate in close coordination with the municipal authorities who we see almost daily. Plus we control the cash.
Look at the diagram above and contemplate the fact that there are several large multi-million dollar contracts out to bring internet connectivity to Afghanistan, but the contractors have yet to figure out how to engineer the job. While they spend a fortune planning the Fab Folks surged here last month from both Cambridge England, and Cambridge Massachusetts, (and Iceland) to move the FabLab to a better location downtown and install more internet links to local schools and NGO’s. They are able to so much because they are outside the artificial security bubble that disrupts aid efforts in Afghanistan. J.D. Johannes did an excellent job of describing the Afghan security bubble in this post.
The Fab Folk believe the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the children. Lots of people think the center of gravity for any society are the children. But the Fab Folks put their skin in the game to teach the Afghans not just how to use a computer but how to build a network. They feel the more exposure children have to other children via the FabLab video conference software the better.
Contractors have a bad name in this current campaign for several reasons not the least of which is some of them have earned a bad name. But I’ll tell you this – find me a contract where the men are out of control and I’ll show you a contract where the contracting officer has completely abdicated his contractual and legal obligations. Jake Allen has an excellent podcast on contracting over at the Private Military Herald which can be found here. He hits the nail on the head in an interview with Danielle Brian from POGO concerning the American Embassy Guard Contract. As I observed in my post on the topic it would be impossible to execute the contract as tendered and still make a profit. But the private security industry is not full of competent cutthroats it’s full of stupid greedy cutthroats.
The PMC market is run by retired military officers have no experience with profit and loss statements – we deal exclusively in loss statements during our professional lives. That is the nature of government service. The nature of private security contracting is to cut bids back to the slimmest of margins in order to win the contracts which always go to the lowest bidder. My estimate is that over 50% of the security contracts currently active in Afghanistan are losing money. Few of the Afghan PMC’s have the expertise to determine the exact profit point on a dynamic contract with unfunded hard requirements.
Just throwing out more contracts to attract contractors will not work for Afghanistan. It is clear the contracting system is completely dysfunctional and repeatedly produces the worst possible outcomes (look at how are vitally important interpreter corps is being treated.) The only way for this to work is to have battle space commanders not only write the release the contract but insist that the program management and most of the people on that contract are people he knows. Officers or NCO’s he has served with and trusts. I would further argue that the teams going out to districts to replicate what we did in the most contested cites of the country be CivMil – both civilian contractor and military personnel who live where they work. The military part of the team could focus on the most important mission we have and that is to mentor Afghan Security Forces and in some cases help them fight.
Here is why the contracting piece could work if done correctly. Again I use my personal experience to illustrate. I know every infantry Regimental Commander in the Marine Corps. Some are good friends the rest good acquaintances. If I am in charge of a contract let by them where I report to them what are my motivations to do a superior job? It is not money it is my allegiance to peers whom I have known all my adult life and whom I greatly admire and respect. My reputation for getting the mission done is at stake – this is the level of trust and respect needed to get civ/mil teams into the districts. Cost plus contract with clearly stated profit margins which can be easily understood by all – in a dynamic environment simple is smart. When a commander can look at his contractor and say “Timmy I want you to do to this DAC, set up a good safe house, and complete the following tasks….” When the commanders knows that is all the guidance he need provide to get important tasks to operate with speed and vision.
For those of you who do not think my idea is crazy enough I take it one step further. The military should start a program for junior officers and enlisted to participate in these projects as civilians on the contractor side. They would get a three year $1,000 a day contracts and owe three years of service when they complete the contract. Many of the problems which accompany long duration deployments disappear when you get to the $1,000 a day pay scale. And paying these contractors $1000 a day is pennies on the dollar to what we spend to keep an individual service member deployed in country. Most importantly the worth of an officer (or NCO) who has spent three years living in the same province in Afghanistan has to be about 40 times that of an officer (or NCO) who has completed a master degree program.
There are no easy answers but if we want to get the work done which is required to reach an acceptable end state our options are severely constrained. You just have to get off the FOB’s, off our collective fat asses and do it. But it will take a completely different approach to writing and awarding contracts to accomplish the mission.
Hey Tim, I read this paragraph that you wrote and I thought ‘boy scouts’. And if you think about it, the Boy Scouts specializes in serving the community and being leaders. And especially for the orphans. You could apply the same concept to the girls with the girl scouts.
If the cycle of war in Afghanistan is to be broken, then it will take leaders with values ingrained into their very being to get them there. Are there such leaders in the midst of Afghanistan now, or will they have to be grown from the ground up? Just an idea….
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The Fab Folk have discovered something which the military may know and the State Department hasn’t a clue about and that is the center of gravity in Afghanistan. It is the children they are the only real hope to future peace and as they gain more education they become more aware of just how deplorable are the conditions of their country. Ask a religious student what muslims do for Ramadan if they live above 60 degrees north latitude and he will want to know why. When you explain that there is no sunset up there this time of year he’ll ask why? Which means you have to explain elementary concepts like the earth rotates on its axis but at a slight tilt which causes (among other things) periods of perpetual daylight in the northern extremes. University educated men don’t know this here and when they find out elementary aged children are expected to understand this most basic concept they get angry about the pap they have been taught and hungry to learn more. Poor people, regardless of location or religious background, tend to be serious about learning. Abject poverty is great human motivator.
I should have Googled before the post. Sorry. According to wikipedia, Scouting is nothing new in Afghanistan. It just needs to be revitalized.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan_Scout_Association#History
Tim,
Excellent post and you are once again right on target. I share your angst at the current course of our military. As I end my career of over 23 years, I lack the inspiration I had all those years ago as an idealistic PFC where it was simply good against evil. As I have matured in both age and rank you sit in meetings where it becomes painfully clear that we lack a top-down vision for what we are doing out here. More troops piled into more FOBs with only a handful of platoons walking side-by-side with ANA and ANP is not the cure. If we took every single support activity (Bde and Bn staff) and placed them in the local district centers where we paid the locals rent and we hired the locals to do everything from cutting hair to laundry, and we opened up schools and clinics within the ‘safe areas’ we establish inside these cities (much like the British in N. Ireland) we would win these so-called hearts and minds in short order. Instead we pop-up these mini-city FOBs in the middle of isolated valleys or on airfields away from the very people we wish to influence. We restrict our own freedom of maneuver because we are tethered to these FOBs. I hear the counter-argument of using COPs or combat outposts but I disagree this is even close to the same thing.
Anyway, great post and you are absolutely right – they are tired and non-stop deployments have taken the motivation out of most of those who have spent the past five years in and out of IZ and AF.
Good luck out there and stay safe.
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 09/25/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
“For those of you who do not think my idea is crazy enough I take it one step further. The military should start a program for junior officers and enlisted to participate in these projects as civilians on the contractor side. They would get a three year $1,000 a day contracts and owe three years of service when they complete the contract.”
This is really an outstanding idea Tim! Another excellent post bro, and thanks for highlighting the good works of the fabfolks – Those kids literally deserve medals.
Tim,
I started reading your posts this past spring when I determined I was likely to again take a job in Afghanistan. I worked in Iraq in ’04-’05 as a contractor and saw the big FOB mentality there. Then I saw what it begat us. Traveling across Iraq from Tikrit to Balad, thru Baqubah and to the Iranian border I was amazed that the only US military presence I saw were other, heavily armed convoys moving in the opposite direction. There was no presence in the communities. I speculated to those I worked with that we wouldn’t be effective at mentoring Iraqi’s NOR at interdicting arms coming into the country from Iran, if we didn’t get our butts outside the wire. It was with no small wonder when I left in ’05 that I saw Diyalah Province violence spike.
I was fortunate to take a job in Afghanistan in 2006. I was additionally fortunate that I was able to travel throughout the country and interface more closely with the people. I am in total agreement with you that the Afghan people are an amazing population and I would love to bring my 19yr old son over, just so he could meet these historic people. I saw with my own eyes what effect a small unit can have when they interface with the locals. Myself and 3 US Army soldiers visited a school in the Khost area. We delivered school supplies donated by loved ones back in the states. We had arranged with the teacher of the school for this visit and had the fortune of meeting with one of the village elders who assisted us in passing out the supplies to the children. The US Army Major who headed this effort did so without higher headquarters knowledge. I also witnessed a hollywood actor, who was in country working with the orphanages totally without a security net. He had traveled in that area in the late 60’s early 70’s and developed the same feeling for the people as I have. His Dari and Pashto were excellent. He dressed as a local and knew how to blend in. I certainly hope that the sacrifices made by our military men and women are NOT for naught. I pray that the command structure will take some of your suggestions to heart and do the right thing for our forces and the people of Afghanistan. I just don’t understand why they can’t figure out that all the armor and barriers in the world won’t keep our military safe if the people are against us. Stay safe.
You ROCKED it.
So, here’s the deal. I’m putting a shout out for people to send water blasters, dolls, and frisbees your way.
Another shout out to the FAB LAB group, whose work has gone largely ignored and unreported by the mainstream media.
People without body armor and MRAPs outside of a HESCO wall? OMG, they must be suicidal! Don’t you know Jalalabad is basically the same as Helmand and Kunar?? Ask anyone from the 3/1 ID…
I think people in general are at their best when they’re doing something constructive that brings clear results. From what I’ve read, all this Fobbitizing hasn’t been good for either the morale or safety of the troops, nor has it done much for those who live outside the wire.
Really, it just doesn’t make any sense. Say you have a medical team. And this team is super good not only at providing service but also teaching. Why not –let’s just hypothesize, send them into the local hospital, have them work with the staff to reorganize, rebuild, retrain –wouldn’t this (over time) go further to making inroads with the locals?
It just seems to me that we are stuck in a very insular approach. How did this happen?
I love the stuff about FAB LAB. I think there’s much to be said about all these graduate students coming over on their own, running around Jalalabad with teens setting up WiFi (FabFi).
But I do worry about the public rumblings here –the Pelosi set that screams out “there’s no support” without understanding the repercussions of quickly pulling out. I worry about Obama sitting on a fence refusing to make any decision, but trying to buy us off with fancy metaphor and simile. If there’s a leadership in trouble over there, it’s because there is no leadership over here.
I read your posts Tim and I get overwelmed with optimism and wish I could come back to Afghanistan immediately to help in some small way. This is how we all should be thinking in the Military, but we don’t, our risk averse culture has corrupted even our brightest and most optimistic thinkers. Too many Majors worried about getting BN command, too many Colonels worried about becoming Generals. Everyone else just wanting to get back to America as soon as possible.
We need REAL leadership in Afghanistan. If we could clone a dozen McChrystals and send them to every major command in Afghanistan it would be a good start.