Security incident rates around Afghanistan are skyrocketing and this year it appears that Jalalabad is, for the first time, going to get its fair share of attention. This unfortunate fact is forcing outside the wire implementers to spend an inordinate amount of time tea drinking and jaw jacking with various local officials and ISAF people in order to get a handle on just how safe we are. My assessment? We’re in for a bad summer, but not as bad a summer as the few internationals working outside the FOB’s in the south. There are two reasons for this; the first is most of us working outside the wire in the east have been here a long time and have developed networks to local people who provide both warning and protection. The second thing going in our favor is that the attacks are amateurish and stupid; even if we were being targeted, the chances of being caught in an effective attack are minimal. This is clearly not the case in the southern region of Afghanistan where al Qaeda operatives are lending technical expertise and the Quetta Shura is able to funnel in ample amounts of money and munitions.
The suicide VBIED attack outside Darlaman Palace in Kabul earlier in the month demonstrated how bad it can get when the Taliban score a semi professionally constructed vehicle borne IED and get it into the city of Kabul. Four Americans and one Canadian soldier were killed in that attack (along with scores of Afghan civilians which nobody seems to be too upset about), but the Taliban do not have the ability to build car bombs of that nature (reportedly 1600 pounds of military grade explosives) in large numbers.
Here is the story board of incidents from the last 10 days in Jalalabad – previously an island of calm and safety in Eastern Afghanistan:
18 MAY: A magnetic mine detonates on the rear of a fuel tanker. The driver disconnected his truck from the fuel tanker and pulled away allowing the Jalalabad Fire Department to extinguish the blaze in less than 15 minutes - note the brand spanking new fire rig in the background. The Jalalabad FD is getting good at this which is most fortunate as they are going to get much more practice very soonThis is what locally fabricated magnetic IED's look like. They are big, obvious, not too powerful and it is hard to imagine that they were attached to the fuel truck for very long without being spotted. My guess was these things are being attached to the rear truck of fuel convoys at the customs station about 4 miles to the east. But it may be they are all being placed on trucks by motorcycle borne villains. The last picture tells that story and it is pretty gruesome - so close this post if you are eating a meal or reading this around the kids because you have to get past the last picture for more insightful commentary.The local people spontaneously cheer when they see new fire trucks like this one roll through the streets. This proof that given unlimited time and unlimited amounts of OPM (other peoples money) that the State Department can, in a little less than a decade, actually do something worthy of mention despite confining themselves to FOBs or the super plush embassy compound.20 MAY The morning statrted with a bang - a small IED detonated at around 0700 beside the main road running through downtown Jalalabad. This was yet another in a string of nusiance attacks which cause little damage or injury.20 MAY - Minutes after the IED went off downtown another low order explosion occured just outside the ISAF base at the Jalalabad Airfield. The exposives were in a van heading east from the Pakistan border - several more low order explosions went off as the van burned. The driver bailed out and escaped. Crates full of bananas spilled out of the burning van as the driver abruptly pulled off the road and bailed out - look at what was underneath the bananas - old crappy nasty Soviet ordnance. The Sov's used TNT based explosives for their military - we use C4 and other much more stable explosives for ours. Old soviet rounds tend to have rust all over them and to leach out a clear chemical smelling fluid called Nitroglycerin which is unstable and prone to ignite at the most inopportune times.23 MAY - A small explosion occured during the evening at the Nangarhar Customs lot which is a mile or so to the east of the Jalalabad Airfield - this appears to be another magnetic mine.24 MAY - a low order detonation occurs as a clearly marked NGO vehicle is driving on this main road just outside of Jalalabad. The blast ruptured the vehicles radiator and it coasted to a stop down the roadIt turns out the explosion was a small amount of HME (home made explosives) placed under a Mk7 anti tank mine which did not have a fuse. It was also a remotely controlled bomb - this is the transmitter. Had the Mk7 functioned properly the NGO truck would have done about 7 Cheetah flips in the air before crashing back to earth.25 MAY - Another limpet mine attack on a fuel truck traveling the Jalalabad truck by-pass. This time the truck didn't catch on fire.
28 MAY - Two men on a motorcycle attach a limpit mine to this truck at around 1000 in the morning - the mine functions shortly after it is attached to the fuel trailer.28 May - The armed two man hit team attach a limpet mine to the back of this truck about 5 minutes later but.......The mine functions upon placement turning the villians into crispy critters
D'OH!!!!
Allow me to provide some expert analysis; here it is…..ready? I have no idea what the hell this is all about. Normally tanker attacks are conducted to cover up fuel thefts but all these tankers were full. Normally IED’s are directed at some sort of target but for the last three months the IED’s going off in Jalalabad (with two exceptions covered in previous posts) have been small scale nuisance attacks designed to limit damage and casualties. So I have no idea what to make of it. All the local officials we talk to are adamant that the internationals working reconstruction projects are as safe now as they have always been. They contend the failed anti tank mine attack on locals driving a clearly marked NGO vehicle (and it is stupid to be in a vehicle which is marked with international NGO logos and stickers of an AK47 with a read circle and line drawn through it showing the occupants are unarmed and proud of it) was a simple mistake.
Just last night I saw a report from Jalalabad (I am in Dubai on R&R) that two vehicles had a collision right outside the main gate to the Jalalabad Airfield; both drivers were brought in for questioning and one of the drivers went back outside the gate to get his paperwork and took off running into the night. Upon inspection his vehicle was full of military grade explosives.
There are two things in play which probably account for the disturbing spike in incidents around Jalalabad. The first is Kandahar. The Governor of Nanagarhar Province is the honorable Agha Gul Sherzzai who is the head of a powerful Kandahar family and who fought with the US back in 2001 to rid Kandahar of Taliban. He was moved to Nangarhar Province in 2005 by President Karzai who then moved his brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai (AWK) up to be the head of the provincial council in Kandahar. Those of you who have been paying any attention at all to Afghanistan can instantly read between the lines. For the rest of you read this in order to break the code.
The second factor in play is ISAF – despite all the talk of ‘focusing on the population” and “population centric warfare” ISAF in general and the American army specifically are doing nothing of the sort. The Americans have a unit on the border crossing at Torkham but those guys just sit on the road all day doing nothing and they go back to the FOB every evening. They inspect nothing, they mentor nobody, they serve little purpose outside of providing an armed American presence at that crossing. The Americans have “rule of law specialists” who are fobbits – they do sortie out to the Nangarhar ANP HQ about two to three times a month so they can drink tea and play grab ass with their ANP counterparts but what is the point? What the hell can you accomplish in a three hour visit?
Until our actions on the ground include teaming up with the ANP; embedding into their units and patrolling with them we will continue to see tons and tons of explosives rolling across the border daily and guess what happens next? This happens – Afghan insurgents learn to destroy key U.S. armored vehicle. I have written at least a dozen times on the folly of trying to answer tactical problems with technology. Now even the McClatchey news service has figured that out. Maybe given more time and unlimited amounts of OPM the brass will figure this out too. They need to relearn the timeless military lesson that you lose more troops trying to protect them with a passive operational posture and “advanced” technology then you do using aggressive offensive action. If we’re here to fight, lets fight – if not lets go home – its that simple.
A few days ago I was invited back to The Alyona Show to talk about tribal militias. You can see Alyona now during these interviews, but I still ended up looking all over the place like Stevie Wonder. No idea why I do that… Alyona and I ended up talking about two different aspects of the militia issue. She was more concerned about the abuse angle – that we may be creating armed groups who abuse the population and ignore the rule of law. I remain more concerned about the economy of force angle – using tribal militias to control key areas, thus sparing our limited manpower for heavily populated areas currently infested with Taliban.
It is hard to get into sync when doing such a short interview but I was able to address a common misconception and that is the use of tribal militia forces to spearhead Special Forces raids. I am no fan of some of the Special Forces work in Afghanistan because there is no need to hit local compounds with the full SF direct action package which includes the varsity Afghan Commandos (who are very very good) a half dozen or so helicopters, dedicated UAV platforms, dedicated attack jets and AC 130 gunships, etc… to pick up a few suspected Taliban. That is a ton of time and money to spend on trying to get villains who may or may not be in the targeted compound. It is easier and cheaper to drive up in the middle of the day with some ANA troops, knock on the door and ask your target if he wants to come now or does he want to fight? These guys are inside compounds with 9 foot high walls, it’s not like they can run away – there are four options when faced with deadly force confrontation; fight, flight, posture or submission. When trapped inside a compound those options are reduced to fight or submission. If the target wants to fight you can invite him to be a true Pashtun man of honor and let the women and kids out of the compound before you come in to get him. You can also move the neighbors out of their compounds, and then try to talk them out or bomb them or go in after them… whatever option you want. It is much easier and safer for everyone (except the targets because this is only going to end one way for them) if you would just think things through and take your time.
Watch the interview clip and then read on as I attempt to explain why this “arm the tribal militia” story is even more confusing and complex then you can imagine.
Last night I received a call from my good friend Chief Ajmal Khan Azizi who had just escaped a serious Taliban ambush. As I reported in this post last February Chief Azizi had returned to his tribal homelands to coordinate with The Boss on reconstruction projects and to renew his pleading with the American army stationed in his area for support in battling the Taliban. Ajmal is the chief of a large tribal federation as well as a Canadian citizen. He has gone hat in hand to London, Kabul and Washington DC to raise support for his beleaguered tribal area, and although he finds a sympathetic audience wherever he goes, what he never gets is a firm commitment to help. I am not the only one taking up his cause, The Boss has been working with the US Embassy in Kabul and Steven Pressfield published a multi part interview with Ajmal this year too.
Last night as Ajmal was moving through the town of Ali Khel near the Pakistan border, he was ambushed by a platoon of Pakistani Taliban (their accents give them away). The ambush was initiated with an IED explosion followed by small arms fire (SAF) and RPG’s. I talked with the chief of the Zazi Valley police, Amir Mohammad who said the Paki’s shot volley after volley from at least 6 RPG’s and they threw over 14 grenades during the fight. Ajmal called on the near by Afghan Border Police for help and they declined to intervene, so the ambush was not broken until Zazi Valley tribal police (or tribal militia- depends on who’s naming them) reinforcements showed up and drove the attackers back towards Pakistan. Ajmal lost a truck and had three men wounded. One of them was seriously wounded and was being transported to Kabul (a five hour drive) in order to get him proper medical care.
Chief Ajmal Khan Azizi, with Shah Mohammad and his Tribal Police chief Amir Mohammad moments after he landed in Gardez last February.
Forty five minutes of sustained RPK fire from multiple machineguns takes tens of thousands of rounds. Firing multiple rockets from up to six RPG launchers is also an extravagant use of ammo given the current rates of consumption by the Taliban. Somebody really wants to see a tribal leader, who is on our side in this fight, and who controls the critical border lands of the Parrot’s Beak; dead.
Ajmal has a problem as the chief of an eleven tribe federation; he’s not on good terms with the Karzai government in Kabul. The reason he is on the outs is his insistence that officials appointed by the Kabul government not abuse their powers or positions at the expense of the the local people living in the Zazi valley. He insists they not steal land, not steal aid money, not encourage the narcotics trade, and to not sell weapons and ammunition across the border to Pakistani Taliban. Not all the Kabul appointees were able to abide by these simple rules so they were run out of the valley. The Kabul officials went to the US army to complain and, as is typical in most of their country, they were not only believed by the Americans, but supported. The reason for this is the current ISAF mission statement is based on “supporting GIRoA” (Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.)
How many of you have read over and over and over that the biggest obstacle to progress is the thoroughly corrupt and abusive central government? Here is a recent story on the topic – just one of dozens that will be published this week just as they werre last week and will be the week after next. GIRoA is the problem – we know they are corrupt and operating on personal agendas that start with getting wealthy and end with getting wealthy. So when they come to the Americans saying they were run out of a valley by the tribal chiefs because those chiefs are bad, or Taliban or drug merchants (pick your story but those three are standard complaints from the Karazi regime) – when that happens why do we automatically side with Kabul. I was going to write ‘why would we believe them’ but I don’t think the senior people in the military and State are so stupid or lazy as to be fooled by this bullshit. I may be giving them too much credit.
Ajmal stopped in for a late dinner after driving to Jalalabad from Zazi valley last winter – a dangerous 14 hour trip – he may not look it but he was exhausted
When Alyona asked me about Tribal Militias my first thoughts were about men I know like Ajmal who are walking the fine line between a central government who abuses their positions of trust (I am referring to Kabul not Washington D.C. but it is true for DC too) and the American led ISAF. You would think that ISAF would be bending over backwards to help a tribal federation chief from Canada who is obviously all in with us in battling the Taliban. Ajmal and his association of border tribes are the perfect economy of force option. They want to drive the Taliban and assorted Pakistani enablers out of their valley. They have no desire to operate outside of their hereditary lands and inside those lands their is no police abuse because the police answer to the tribal elders. This isn’t a unique situation many areas (but not all) in Afghanistan have strong tribal federations. This is a viable solution only among the tribes bordering Pakistan in parts of the east and southeast and in remote interior sections of the country.
Attempts by ISAF to use the tribes as militia in other portions of the country have resulted in debacles. This article from Time is a good example and no doubt the kind of tribal militia related problems which has caught the attention of The Alyona Show and every other person paying attention to this conflict. This is a complex place requiring solutions tailored to the area, people and situation on the ground at the district level. Designing a campaign to do that requires decentralized decision making on the ground with small units of infantry who are empowered to provide support as they see fit in their area of operations. The advantage of operating this way is the ability of these infantry units to build good governance from the bottom up because they are in the position to know what is transpiring, 24/7, in the district administrative centers, which would serve as the area security forces TOC (tactical operations center) too.
Afghanistan is going to hell in a hand basket. As I am sitting here these messages from multiple watch officers just popped up on the Afghanistan security chat room which was established some months back:
22 MAY 10 2012L: COMPLEX ATTACK: KAF: KANDAHAR PROVINCE; KAF subjected to 9 rounds of indirect fire accompanied by SAF. Will update as information becomes available.
2020L Our guys in KAF are reporting 3 rounds…1 near the hotel, 2 near the boardwalk…..no info on the reported other 6 rkts or the SA.
2027L Reports from RED HORSE that KAF north side is under ground attack, further report that one container (possibly but not confirmed) ECOLOG was hit by a rocket. All this is too preliminary to confirm at this time.
2034L I have unarmed guards on north side of KAF 100 meters from inside fence line reporting no small arms fire heard in their vicinity, but siren GROUND ATTACK is broad-casted. Number of rockets is between 4-8. Situation still developing.
SAF is the acronym for small arms fire which would indicate a ground attack. Maneuvering a Taliban assault team into small arms range of the gigantic ISAF Kandahar Air Field (KAF) is a tactical feat I do not believe the Taliban could plan and execute. As the watch officers above noted it cannot be confirmed that a ground assault is taking place. The ground attack earlier this week targeting the Bagram Airbase outside of Kabul was a joke – typical amateur hour execution of a poor plan which had zero chance of success. This is a serious attack. Normally the Taliban can’t hit anything with rockets but they are winging them inside the fence line now.
We announced to all who would listen that we were going to sort out Kandahar with a major military operation this summer. Now we have called it off and the locals in the city are questioning our resolve. The Taliban are testing our resolve as I write this post. This is not good, especially given the dog and pony show of President Karzai’s recent trip to Washington. It is going to be a very long summer – I hope we get our bearings soon or more and more of our citizens are going to start to ask why the hell we are here.
The Powerline Blog has a post this morning on a surprising honest review in the Washington Post of the new book Necessary Secrets. From the Powerline post:
“The review is by Leonard Downie, Jr., who was the Post’s executive editor until 2008. Downie is obviously uneasy with Schoenfeld’s view that editors and reporters at the New York Times should be prosecuted and imprisoned for revealing two of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism programs – the warrantless intercept program for monitoring calls to the U.S. by foreign terrorists and the program though which the international financial transactions of terrorists were secretly tracked.”
The exposure of these programs by the fearless reporters and editors at the Times unquestionably contributed to the prolonged detention of David Rohde because we lost the tools for finding to a kidnap victim in the tribal areas of Pakistan. For that very reason the Times was forced to find “outside the box” options to try and gain Rohdes’ freedom and apparently one of those options involved hiring civilian contractors who had contacts and access into the denied areas of the North West Frontier. Here is a quote from the first story the Times published on the subject:
From December 2008 to mid-June 2009, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Clarridge were hired to assist The New York Times in the case of David Rohde, the Times reporter who was kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan and held for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The reporter ultimately escaped on his own.
I doubt he escaped on his own. The Haqqanis do not seem the kind of villains who would let David walk freely around the compound to find enough rope laying right there to scale the compound walls. Nor do I think Americans can wander about the town of Miranshah for more than five minutes without being detected but miraculously there was a patrol of Khyber Rifles to take him into custody and see him safely to Peshawar. Sounds like somebody pulled off a wicked smart operation to me.
Parody from Freerepublic.com
Many of you may not recall the kidnapping of the Times Pultzer Prize winning journalist because the Times used their considerable clout to put a complete media black out on the event. It is too bad that the Times is unable to muster a little empathy for the Americans fighting in Afghanistan or they would not have published a piece in the Sunday edition which, by their own admission, endangers them. “U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts” is the headline but in the article the doubts are from the CIA and International man of action Robert Young Pelton about a program which is performing so well the Pentagon doesn’t want to shut it down. The CIA is supposed to run human intelligence and can’t, Mr. Pelton had a contract to do something similar and failed so what is the point of the story? Look at this quote:
“While the Pentagon declined to discuss the program, it appears that commanders in the field are in no rush to shut it down because some of the information has been highly valuable, particularly in protecting troops against enemy attacks.”
Is that not all you need to know about this program to understand that maybe there are better things to focus on in Afghanistan? This article, just like the first one, said that the military is investigating to make sure no policies or procedures were violated. So what is the point? Is the New York Times now the hall monitor of record? “Teacher, teacher those boys are still producing vital intelligence and we told them to stop!” “Teacher, teacher Mike Furlong just came out of the boys room and it smells like cigarette smoke!” Are you kidding me? Do these people think we are so stupid we cannot clearly see this hypocritical agenda driven attack journalism for what it is?
Blackfive came out today with yet another report on the detention of Mullah Omar by the Pakistan ISI. Uncle Jimbo is no amateur and has many more sources for this kind of news than I do. If this story is true it is an outrage. The President of the United States has the mandate to uphold the constitution. He has no right to spin and scheme and play games where matters of national security are in play. There is nothing for him to think about – the procedures for high value fugitives like Mullah Omar have been planned out in great detail by top legal talent like John Woo who crafted a constitutionally acceptable set of procedures so tight that even Jon Stewart could not find fault in them. Obama has been in office for over 18 months; if he has not written his own set of procedures he has to live with the old ones.
This Mullah Omar story is the most important story of the day. Our government is lying to us, they are taking liberties with the positions of power the people have granted them that are not constitutional nor remotely covered by executive privilege. I want to know if this is true but our “newspaper of record” is busy carrying water for a loser CIA station chief and a failed Canadian “adventure personality.” I’ll keep my eyes glued to the Times of London who will break this story light years ahead of our liberal, agenda driven, state run media.
OPM stands for “Other Peoples Money” and our politicians are getting so good at spending it they are currently spending OPM which OP have not even earned yet. Conventional wisdom is that having access to unlimited funds would be a good thing for a military engaged in extended combat operations, but the exact opposite is true. The abundance of money (in theory, mind you, America really doesn’t have any more to be spending now) is a curse to the military leader and our current military effort. It allows us to get away with things like procuring a million dollar ATV MRAP for every fireteam of every squad of every platoon deployed here, which for a Marine infantry battalion would equal somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 MRAPs for the entire battalion. If you think it is a good thing for a Marine infantry battalion to have 120 million in MRAP rolling stock, you’re wrong.
Before I get to that I need to send a hat tip out to Nathan Hodge and Noah Schactman at Wired’s Danger Room for putting up a post featuring a prominent photo of your humble correspondent. The Danger Room post got me invited to the Alyona Show – they emailed me a clip of Joshua Faust from Registan being interviewed by Alyona and I figured if Joshua is on board, so am I. I agreed to be taped late at night local time and, having read Joshua’s post on his segment tried to take off the tape of my glasses and glue them together. It didn’t work so I ditched the glasses and moved the laptop far enough away so I could see something and was all set to talk with Alyona. Only you don’t get to talk to Alyona; all you see is a skype screen with your video going and nothing else. I had no idea where to look because looking at me looking at me is weird, so in the video I look more like Stevie Wonder looking around all over the place than somebody having a conversation. It is not too bad to watch – clearly the “contractor” thing was what she wanted to talk about and like all Americans, when she thinks contractor she thinks Blackwater. When I think contractor I think of big large numbers of big guys (not fit guys) who are assigned to the FOBs and never leave. The number of contractors operating outside the wire is a minuscule percentage of the contractors working this campaign and most of them are implementers not security types.
To illustrate the curse of OPM on military operations I’ll use The Bot as an example. As I have mentioned, The Bot has been detailed to the south and is based out of Kandahar City now. He had to move around a lot and has dyed his hair and beard black making him look like some kind of pirate when he is wearing a turban. Being a vain man (and because he’s smart) he won’t let me post any pictures of him, but he has an interesting observation on what it’s like to be outside the wire and mixed in with the population of Kandahar.
Yesterday, The Bot almost ran afoul of Taliban checkpoints, twice in the middle of the day, and both checkpoints were within four miles of the massive Kandahar Airfield where something like 22,000 NATO military troops are stationed “protecting the Afghan people.” The MO for both illegal checkpoints was the same – the villains were wearing yellow reflective vests commonly used by Afghan cash for work crews and had placed their weapons in wheelbarrows hiding them with shovels and brooms. They rucked up to their selected positions which happened to be on the main ring road (Rte 4) about three miles to the Spin Boldak side (at around 0900 in the morning) and another group was on the main road into Kandahar City at about 1100 in the morning. They stopped cars, checked for anyone with a cell phone number of papers which would connect them to the government or the international military and executed at least one local man who failed to pass muster.
The ring road outside of Kandahar. We used to run this route routinely just three years ago but now it is bad guy land.
The Bot had no problems identifying these Taliban checkpoints for what they were and avoiding them. Even with his language skills and dyed hair he is not going to fool any Afghan into thinking he is a local if given more than a casual glance. Because The Bot and the rest of us do not have unlimited amounts of OPM we have to come up with ways to move around and work, making do with what we can afford on the local market. When faced with tactical problems, the outside the wire contractor has to develop a tactical solution, or move their operations onto military bases from which they can accomplish very little aside from billing hours to their contracts and collecting massive paychecks. There are lots of tactical options, the most common being the use of outriders on motorcycles who communicate with hand and arm signals because hand held radios are illegal here. Unless you are a licensed security company in which case they are legal but still subject to confiscation by the ANP (especially in Kabul.)
The American military was once famous for its ability to organize complex endeavors with limited resources. Now it is famous for organizing unnecessarily complex schemes using unlimited resources. The price you pay when given unlimited resources is the current inability to solve the most fundamental tactical problems using the initiative and creativity of your troops at the pointy end of the spear. We encase our troops in heavy body armor which limits their mobility, quickly saps their endurance, and renders them almost immobile, making them much easier to hit. That so many survive being shot is great but I’m solidly in the “I’d rather not be shot, or go down with heat stroke, or sustain serious chronic injury to my ankles, knees or hips” camp. We then provide multi million dollar “mine resistant” vehicles which protect against most improvised explosives, but cannot protect our troops from standard military anti tank mines, a munition found in abundance throughout Afghanistan.
This is what field grade officers confined to the FOB and bored out of their minds do to get even with the general officers who sent them here. It takes balls the size of small cantaloupes to stand up and brief this kind of crap to general officers with a straight face. Taking a complex problem and making it even more complex takes a special kind of skill which need not be resident in the best military the world has ever known.
We, the United States are the ones who said Kandahar was the key and our next big push. Just like we did in the Helmand Province we broadcast our plans in the media – we told the Taliban we were coming after them. We unleashed the varsity SF and focused the JPEL on Kandahar, we talked and talked and talked until just hours before D-day and then we put the whole thing on hold because “the Afghans aren’t ready.” Were the Afghans ready when the Marine Brigade started their operations in the Helmand Province last summer? No, they weren’t. And they are not ready now to take over for the Marines, which is a huge problem currently not being addressed with anything resembling a workable solution because the Department of State and USAID are involved and they have collectively learned not one damn thing from their nine year record of mission failure in Afghanistan.
The villains do not have unlimited OPM and have to use tactical solutions based on found objects. The most common is to make large roadsie anti-personnel mines using a large cooking pot. They drill a hole in the bottom and knot some det cord inside with a non electric blasting cap (electric caps are hard to find here because road building companies will pay more than IED syndicates for them) with some wires stuck in them to make them function like an electric cap (this does not always work which is why more than half of all planted IED's fail to function) and fill the pot with a liquid mixture of ammonium nitrate (which has been outlawed and is less common now) or potassium chlorate (which works but not as well as the other stuff) and throw in a bunch of common nuts and bolts. These pots are sealed with some sort of smelly wax for water proofing and hooked up to a circuit board located some feet away with an antenna using fine copper wire salvaged from alternators to complete the circuit. They are crudely aimed at about the height of a pickup truck and used against the unarmored ANA trucks which have troops in the back. They make a big boom and leave a big hole. They are also simple to spot with outriders.
So we broadcast our next “big push” into Kandahar, the villains respond with their own shaping operation attacking international aid workers (which I predicted they would based on the irresponsible crap published by the NYT,) killing security officials and tribal elders in broad daylight and they are now setting up road blocks and executing Afghans who they think are linked to the government or international forces in the middle of the day within line of sight of the massive ISAF air base. This is not good. It should not be tolerated nor does it have to be if we unleash the creative ingenuity of American infantry who love to develop techniques and tactics tailored to specific situations which allow them to get the drop on scumbags and kill them. If we were not burdened with the unlimited resources and forced to make do with what we can find on hand, do you think American infantry guys could not figure out a way to combat the Taliban in Kandahar?
Here is the real crime; if you deployed your infantry with simple open ended mission type orders, it would take much less of them than we currently use in offensive operations. An infantry company can call upon and control more fire power, with pin point accuracy, than was available to an infantry division in World War II. You could take a Marine rifle company, tell the young captain to spread his platoons into four strong points around Kandahar City, augment them with a platoon of ANA, and tell them to figure out a way to stop the damn Taliban check points. If they were allowed to war game up a solution and implement it, you would end up with all sorts of local vehicles which are carrying uniformed troops working with outriders on motorcycles to try and detect these checkpoints, roll up on them, and then jump them the Marine Corps way, using point blank automatic weapons fire. How many counter-checkpoint hits do you think it would take before the checkpoints disappeared? Plus it pumps up the troops to be on the offensive whacking cretins who need to be whacked.
Here is the point; protecting the population means being out with the population. Every evening the sound of rifle fire erupts all around the Taj. We are a mere 5 miles away from districts which are dominated by the Taliban. Soon Jalalabad, one of the safest cities in the country will become like Kandahar. What if we decided to get off the massive Jalalabad FOB and actually embed with the people of Jalalabad? How would that be different from what we are doing now?
If we gave Jalalabad a rifle company and told them to embed with the local security forces, become visible to the people while ensuring the security forces do their job, we would see ANP and ANA trucks with Americans in them, we would see the incidence of police shaking down local businessmen evaporate overnight. The businessmen would be used to seeing the same Americans and confident that if they told them about getting the shakedown something would be done about it. Take this one step further – the rifle company commander starts to know the city as well as I do and, at no additional cost of OPM does things which make life in the city better for all residents. Here is just two; kill all the stray, feral dogs which run amok in the city inflicting on average seven to eight serious bites on the children nightly, and take the “vector control truck” off the FOB and into the refugee camps to spray these camps and eradicate the vermin (and most importantly the scorpions) which plague those poor people. Better yet take two of the vector control trucks and start working on mosquito eradication because in Jalalabad malaria is endemic. Before long the rifle company commander would know Jalalabad as I know it and the people would know him like they do the many international reconstruction types who have been here for years. When he has proved that you can operate outside the wire in the same vehicles used by Afghan security forces, that you can bring out vector control trucks and other support vehicles to help the people through a long hot summer (and Ramadan will occur during the summer too which is going to really suck) then you could get even more aggressive. What do you think the impact of operating in such an open manner would be on the average Afghan from the region? I think it would be a game changer.
There has been much in the press concerning our intelligence agencies and their inability to produce meaningful products. ISAF is starting to listen to guys like me and recently I had the distinct pleasure taking a very senior American and three of his guys from Gen Flynn’s J2 office on the road with me between Jalalabad and Kabul. They understood immediately the value of moving around like a regular citizen when it comes to basic situational awareness – everybody already understands that it is obvious. They sent me an unclassified assessment of Jalalabad City and Beshud district which surrounds most of the city. Sixty three pages of stuff and guess what? It was excellent; a commander could pick that up, read it in an afternoon, and have a very good understanding of the city and the prominent players. What is missing is personal familiarity with the key power players and intimate knowledge of the terrain and the situation for the average Afghan businessman. Information which a smart guy could pick up inside of two weeks on the street.
There is nothing hard about getting out and aggressively operating in most of the contested regions. It seems pretty straightforward to me. Which brings me to my final topic and it is not something Americans should be happy about. I have been hearing for weeks rumors about the detention of this guy:
Mullah Omar
I have heard about this from both prominent Afghans and from a source from the USG who has impeccable credentials and has never been wrong in the past. The media story is here and that story is that the Pakistan ISI has Mullah Omar under house arrest, that our government knows this but for some reason wants to keep it a secret. I need to stress that not everyone I have contacted about this story has heard these rumors and a few important, well informed milbloggers flat out do not believe them. Regardless this story has legs and if it is true there is a huge huge problem. That problem is very simple – there should be no doubt about what happens when an allied intelligence service gets their hands on Mullah Omar. There is nothing to discuss, nothing to think through, nothing to spin, there only this; give him to us. Immediately. End of negotiation. There should be no question on the part of the USG about what to do with this dirtbag either. He is an unlawful enemy combatant and needs to be detained and held for trial by military tribunal. There is no other conceivable option. If this story proves true, and I think it is, what the hell is going on back in DC? This isn’t a game, dammit, it’s war and needs to be treated as such.
The fighting season is rapidly ramping up to make this the bloodiest yet, which makes it the perfect time for President Karzai to go to Washington for a little face time with the Commander in Chief. What is to be accomplished during this meeting is easy to predict: Not one damn thing. This article in the Washington Post explains why – here is a quote from it: “‘We don’t have a plan yet,’ worries the senior military official.” With the operation to clear Kandahar on hold, that’s a huge problem.
The Taliban have declared a major offensive targeting ISAF, the Afghan government, ANSF, and all internationals. The offensive is named al Faath (victory) and it is scheduled to start tomorrow. Threats of this nature have come often in the past but this one is being taken seriously by Afghan security forces and internationals working outside the wire. But taking things seriously has not, as far as we can tell, resulted in changes to the daily routine of the Afghan Security Forces.
This is a pity because a more proactive approach is obviously required and I’ll explain how that could work using the recent attack on the governor and provincial council in the previously peaceful city of Zaranj, which is the Capital of Nimroz Province.
On the 5th of May at approximately 0930 a squad of nine Taliban fighters in two Toyota Corollas attacked the Nimroz Provincial Council office and the Governors compound. They attacked sequentially in what appeared to be a well planned raid. All nine attackers were dressed in ANA uniforms, armed with AK47 assault rifles, and carried at least one hand grenade. All nine were wearing suicide vests.
The attack started north of the governors compound and rolled south where it was stopped before the governors compound was breached
Mullah John Binns called from his compound in Zaranj that day announcing “the villains made a determined assault on the governors compound but were thwarted by reconnaissance failure and stout walls”. That was an exceptionally long statement from John so I perked up asking for details. He said he’s send a report and hung up. Our company, Central Asia Development Group, (CADG) was the only USAID contractor working in Nimroz province. The closest ISAF base was in the Helmand province but we knew Zaranj was one of the safest cities in Afghanistan and had no problems operating in such a remote location.
The raid force, who may or may not have been Taliban, armed opposition groups being prolific in the country, had failed to confirm their target reconnaissance. They were forced to stop and dismount well short of their objective because most of the roads into the objective had been cut (by us) so we could installation drainage pipes as part of a civic works project. Our road work created a counter-mobility barrier blocking their ingress from the south which was the direction of the villains, mounted in two Toyota Carolas approached.
The first group of attackers dismounted here due to road construction and assaulted through the gate.
Five attackers from the first vehicle moved past this gate and stopped outside the entrance gate of the Provincial Council office where they engaged ANP (Afghan National Police) who were responding from the Governors compound to the south. There were also ANP units arriving to the north of the attackers on the street pictured above.
Breach point into the Provincial Council compound
One of the villains detonated his suicide vest to clear the security stationed at the gate of the Provincial Council’s office complex. The remaining villains rushed inside the compound firing into the council offices from the outer windows.
This is the window outside the main Provincial Council meeting room through which the three attackers poured in AK47 fire which mortally wounded a female council memberLooking into the council office from the attackers perspective at the window – it looks like they did not fire too many rounds into this room, but look at all the bullet strikes outside the window frame in the picture above – as I have said before these guys really suck at gun fighting. Could you imagine standing right where this picture was taken and putting more rounds into the wall you are standing behind than into the room?
At least one ANP guard was inside the building returning fire and many of the council members also started to return fire with their sidearms. One of the attackers was killed during this portion of the attack. The attackers then threw in a hand grenade (which detonated under a stairwell sending the frag back at the attackers) and turned their attention to the Governors compound.
Throwing a grenade into a doorway where it lodges under a stairwell which forces the blast and frag back at you is just a step above shooting yourself in the stupidity chain. These guys were Darwin Award candidates for sure.
Now things start to get really crazy. If you look at the google map above, you can see where the second corolla pulled up and emptied out four more fighters. The second vehicle was stopped well short of the Governors compound by a recently installed road block that I believe the Marines had recommended and paid for as part of a security assessment they made when Nimroz fell under their area of operations in 2009. By the time both assault teams linked up there was organized effective fire coming at them from the Governors compound to the south and ANP troops arriving from the north.
Looking south towards the Governors compound from the attackers perspective. At this point they could not move down the street due to heavy fire from Afghan security forces.
Their second vehicle – which was probably rigged as a vehicle born IED was unable to make it into the fight and retreated, so the raiding party was stuck and had to come up with a way to close the final 300 meters. They did what all suicide vest wearing raiding parties do – they started breaching the walls of compounds adjacent to the Governors place by throwing themselves against the wall and detonating.
The raid goes super kinetic – the four new attackers linked up with the two surviving attackers from the first crew and started towards the governors office. One of the bombers breached the wall by detonating his vest – the damage is being repaired by the owner less than 24 hours later
As the raid force breached each wall they moved into the compounds looking for a way to the Governors office. They did not fire at the compound owners or their families. Once in the first compound and out of the line of fire of the ANP, another attacker blew himself up at the doorway of an adjacent compound.
The second breach point – the attackers moved through this door to get into the compound next door to the governors place. Repairs are underway – this photo was taken the day after the attack.
At this point the assault squad is down to four men and they had a mighty big wall to get through. Obviously these guys were not disposed to alternative courses of action – I guess when you strap on a suicide vest everything around you looks like a target. So hey diddle diddle straight up the middle they went.
Number one man go! The first attempt to breach the Governors compound – not too effectiveNumber two man go! The second attempt to get through this rather stout wall failed tooNumber 3 man….oh wait he’s dead…so I guess I’ll just sit down here and…. BOOM!
The attackers never made it into the governors compound and the fighting ended with the suicide of the last surviving attacker. This attack was typical for the various armed insurgent groups in Afghanistan. The planning seemed to be good the execution was amateurish with poor gun handling, poor grenade handling, poor marksmanship, and no branch or squeal planning being the defining characteristics. As soon as the attackers found themselves cornered or stymied by an unanticipated obstacle they blew themselves up.
One of the attackers who was killed before he could activate his vest. The vest was removed by NDS.
The attackers were reported to be younger males, not Afghan in appearance, with red faces and Pakistani-style shoes. Some witnesses believed them to be Pakistani, others Iranian. They were wearing ANA uniforms and all nine had Suicide -IED vests, AK47s and at least one had a grenade.
There are several theories amongst the more credible local nationals (LNs) who are familiar with all the facts of the attack. One theory is that this was an attack staged by Quetta Shura Taliban. The Nimroz Governor had recently been in the media pointing out that Zaranj had not had one Taliban incident in the past year.
Another theory held by many if the attack was perpetrated by Iranian elements trying to further destabilize Afghanistan. There is has also been a recent war of words between Iran and Afghanistan regarding water rights and a hydro-electric project. Several locals reported that Iranian closed the Milak/Zaranj border crossing the day of the attack and the day before.
One thing is certain and that is it is easy – really easy to preempt these kinds of attacks with the proper deployment of ISAF troops. Everyone of these attacks occurs during the morning hours. Everyone of them involve bad guys wearing ANA or ANP uniforms and suicide vests being delivered to the objective by small private cars. All it would take to stop these kinds of attacks would be deploying joint military/ANP patrols in the neighborhoods but here is the catch – MRAPS won’t work. They are too big, the people inside cannot see, smell, hear, or feel anything outside of the massive iron MRAP. Plus the damn things would tear out the electrical wires in 97% of the suburban streets in Afghanistan.
Preempting Taliban attacks in the cities and larger towns means Americans and Afghans riding around in the LTV’s (light tactical vehicle to the military; pick up truck to the rest of us) where they can see, hear and observe the local environment while applying the rule of opposites. This they can do in theory but not in practice because of “force protection” rules laid out from on high.
So tomorrow is al Faath day which may or may not bring some more of these attacks. I’m in Jalalabad and too worried about it but you know what would really make an impression? Seeing the Afghan and US Army out in force tomorrow morning manning checkpoints and driving around the neighborhoods looking for things which are exactly opposite to what they expect to see. If we are supposedly focused on the population then the population should actually see us being focused on them and being proactive during times when the villains are up to mischief. Flooding Jalalabad with a few hundred of the 7 to 8 thousand troops in residence outside the city would do wonders for the morale of the population we are supposed to be protecting. But the chances of that happening are zero. The concepts of “COIN” and “population centric” operations all you want but it means nothing to the population. Actions always speak louder than words.
It has been a long time since we have seen a crazy contractor story from Afghanistan. This story, about reckless security contractors, popped up in the news yesterday, saying “...Private Afghan security guards protecting NATO supply convoys in southern Kandahar province regularly fire wildly into villages they pass, hindering coalition efforts to build local support ahead of this summer’s planned offensive in the area, U.S. and Afghan officials say.”
Well now, I have gone on record as saying security contractors don’t do those sorts of things only to find that maybe they do. Look at this quote from the linked article, “Especially as they go through the populated areas, they tend to squeeze the trigger first and ask questions later,” said Capt. Matt Quiggle, a member of the U.S. Army‘s 5th Stryker brigade tasked with patrolling Highway One, which connects Afghanistan’s major cities.” The 5th Stryker Brigade has had some problems with “escalation of force” issues recently so I thought this was an attempt at a little deflection. I gave The Bot a bell to see what he had heard; The Bot is spending this fighting season in the south and is pretty clued in. It turns out he has heard the same thing; this story turns out to be true.
The military personnel quoted in the linked article correctly point out that the shooting of innocent civilians makes their job harder. That cuts both ways; most of us working outside the wire have learned to deal with blowback when ISAF inflicts collateral damage during kinetic operations or in escalation of force shootings. I am with the military guys on the consequences of allowing people to shoot indiscriminately at unarmed civilians. The key word in that last sentence is “allowing.” These contractors are protecting NATO supply convoys. NATO is the customer who wrote the contract and hired the guards. They fund these people and can instantly de-fund them, eliminating the whole problem. The customer is responsible for what these guards are doing and they are obligated to put a stop to this behavior.
The Bot told me the company responsible for this conduct is an old one which I thought had long ago gone out of business. The founders are awaiting trial in the United States and their offices in Kabul were once raided by the FBI who carted off their records and computers. It appears this company is now an Afghan owned and operated business. How can a company like that get a NATO supply escort contract? I’m not too sure, but will say that the pressure on contracting officers to accept the lowest bidder, while favoring Afghan companies ahead of international companies when at all possible, is a big part of the problem. The bigger problem is the contracting process. The contracting officers supporting the military come from their own command and have no relationship with their “customers” (the supported military units) other than that established after they arrive in country. They have no ability to monitor performance, are overworked, under-staffed and afraid for their very lives least they do something wrong, or be accused of improper conduct. There are many stories of contracting officers committing suicide after it was discovered they took a bribe. Infantry officers can deploy here and become legends doing feats of combat daring-do. The best thing that can happen to a contracting officer is that he leaves here with everything he had before he came. Being a contracting officer is a crap job and crap jobs in the military are supposed to be assigned to competent junior officers as a collateral duty to teach them humility and grace under pressure. The way the American military does contracting is perfect for building large bases and expensive airplanes in the United States but it is not working here…. not even close.
Post-World War II discussions with German officers revealed that, so far as their WWII predecessors were concerned, one of the major strengths of the American military was the ability to adapt to complex, dynamic combat situations by making bold and necessary changes. We are trying to make some bold course corrections here but the fundamental weakness of clear, hold and build strategy lies in the fact that the military commander responsible for the clearing and holding phases of the combat operation in a given district lacks the assets essential to accomplishment of the fundamental operational objective, the build phase.
I don’t believe the military wants this responsibility and I don’t blame them. The problem is the military and the governmental agencies tasked with post-conflict development in Afghanistan stand on the brink of failure. Something has got to change and the only agency who has demonstrated the ability to handle post-conflict development is the Department of Defense. Every other US government (USG) agency assigned to help in this task is failing. The military needs to do here what it did in Iraq, which is take over the damn thing and get us back on track. However it is clear that the Pentagon has not realized this, and is not adopting to this fact.
The recently concluded 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), is the legislatively mandated review by the Department of Defense of the country’s longer-term defense requirements. The QDR is supposed to couple strategy to military capabilities for not only current conflicts but to also develop force structure tailored to future threats. The problem is that to the Pentagon, future threats always look like the threats of the past because the QDR’s always recommend that the force structure be cut evenly across the board. The Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps end up with about the same percentage of the defense dollar that they had when QDR’s started some 20 odd years ago. So we end up with a force structure designed to fight a peer level threat. Thus, the force designed to fight the Cold War has become the template for American military force structure, regardless of the fact that a peer level threat is the least likely problem we will face over the next several decades.
General McChrystal has shut all the fast food joints down at the Kandahar Airfield in preparation for the coming offensive, because he needs the room to bring in more forces. There are currently over 20,000 military and contractor personnel there supporting units in the field, which number around maybe 2000 troops on a busy day. I guess that number is to increase significantly, but bringing in more fobbits at this stage of the game is pointless. Somebody needs to stop worrying about how much beer the Germans drink, how many fast food concessions are on the super big box FOB’s, who is walking around the FOB’s without wearing eye protection and which soldiers are out on operations without wearing all their Land Warrior experimental bullshit, and start focusing on the Taliban, the Afghan people, and how to separate one from the other. The future of war for the rest of our lifetimes will feature very little peer to peer wars, pitting one state against another, and a lot of what we see in Afghanistan, which is battle in the daily context of everything else. The United States needs to develop the force structure to function in this kind of an environment and the proven solution would be to grow the Marine Corps (who has the mission of expeditionary warfare) and couple to them a contractor-based organization which would be just like the old East India Company, but different. Different in the sense that it works directly for the Marine Corps as armed reconstruction implementers and project managers. The natural choice for the management side would be guys like me, retired Marines who are well known to the commanders and have to answer to those commanders for everything they do and fail to do, just like they did on active duty. Project management of that nature coupled with implementers who work just like Team Canada is working now would make lines of authority and accountability clean, simple and efficient.
There is a group of rogue contractors working the border from Spin Boldak to Kandahar who are apparently shooting small arms indiscriminately. They are an all Afghan crew, off duty ANP soldiers are working with them, and they are on an ISAF contract. It is up to ISAF to put a stop to this and to do so immediately. But they can’t because nobody seems to know who these clowns work for and how to apply the pain of liquidated damages or a CURE notice while finding one of the 33 registered security companies that have the ability to deploy armed internationals who can run the job correctly. It is not that hard to find a model which can allow us to start gaining ground in Afghanistan, but it will require enormous amounts of intra-agency warfare to come up with a radical template tailored to address what to do when you have war occurring in the midst of everyday life inside an alien culture and far away from home. This is a very complex problem with many variables which we do not know or understand. Simplicity is the weapon to use in the face of uncertainty, which is why we have simple military principals, which should never be ignored or violated. Unity of command is one of those principals and once we understand this and use it to our advantage, we will make faster progress. The commander who is responsible for the Hold and Clear has to have the authority and ability to do the Build too – there is no other way.
Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of the Mujahedin expulsion of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and was marked by a military parade in Kabul.
Vice president, Marshal Fahim in his inaugural speech emphasized on the fight against government corruption and reinforcement of the Afghan Army.
He also suggested from the anti-government groups to return to mainstream and peaceful life.
“The negotiation doors are open for those who are interested in peace and participation of normal life processes,” said Fahim.
The Afghan Defense Minister in his speech criticized the international community and said they haven’t helped Afghanistan in a way they should have.
“The threats in our region and country have been evaluated slight by our international partners, as a result, their aids haven’t been able to meet our needs,” said Afghan Defense Minister.
Well there you go. I live here, so I’m with the Marshal and I understand that Marshal Fahim is a good man. Without question, Afghanistan would benefit from many more like him.
However, Kabul is, for the moment, irrelevant. The center of gravity for the Taliban and their various affiliates is Kandahar. If ISAF and the Afghan Army can clear and hold Kandahar and the surrounding communities,it will be a game changer. Here is a great quote from Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress:
“When I think of the battle of Kandahar, I think of it as a cross between The Wire and The Sopranos. They’re trying to deal with drugs and government and the Taleban. Nobody knows who the good cops are and who the crooks are.”
As I pointed out before, that is exactly the problem – we don’t know who the power brokers are in Kandahar. We have shaped the entire Afghan campaign at the strategic level to be the center of gravity, but on the tactical level we go in blind (in certain important areas) and that is no damn good. We lack the depth of intelligence to determine where to apply pressure with the local power structure. It is not like we don’t have hundreds of really smart people working the issue. The problem is we have wasted time using surrogates when our operatives should have been out and about finding things out first hand. There are not too many internationals out and about in Kandahar City now. Here is a report from Team Canada:
Things are really tense here right now, spending half the day and night at stand-to or on over-watch shift. Bunch of IEDs and direct-fire attacks this AM. One of our CFW workers got killed and three injured by an IED targeting ANP today, wrong place wrong time. Not sure how long we are going to be able to keep operating, but we will be the last to leave if at all, I guarantee that. XXX, XXXXXXX, and XXX are all gone or holed up on KAF – battle ineffective. We are the only show in town right now.
The reason Team Canada (comprised of both former Canadian and American military guys) is still operating is because they were raised in a culture of mission accomplishment. Gen McChrystal went on record earlier in the month saying that he has too many contractors in theater, which is probably true. But there are all sorts of different contractors out here and the ones operating outside the wire effectively should be receiving all sorts of encouragement. Again, I digress; the topic is Kandahar so let me get back on track. Indirectly.
Two nights ago Jalalabad was hit (again) with a small ineffective IED downtown and 2 rockets impacting near the Governor’s compound. As I said before, the city has received more IED’s and rockets in the last four weeks than we have had in the last four years. What’s going on? I’ll give you an educated guess. The Governor of Nangarhar Province is Gul Agha Sherzai, who is from Kandahar City and was one of the warlords who fought on our side in 2001 to rid the place of Taliban. I suspect that if we had the ability to do so, we would move Karzai’s brother out of Kandahar and bring Governor Sherzai back in as the Provincial Governor. How much do you want to bet that the sudden dramatic increase in IED and rocket attacks affecting Jalalabad City has more to do with Kandahar Province than Nangarhar?
The battle for Kandahar has already started. The varsity SF guys are working down the JPEL, taking out senior bad guys, which seems to have become a full time mission. The SF raid phase is what the military calls “shaping the battle space.” The villains are doing some shaping too. This week they assassinated two Agrhandab district shura members – both elders of the Alikozai tribe ,as well as the deputy mayor of Kandahar. The Alikozai tribe is pretty damn big and knocking off deputy mayors while they pray at the local mosque is supposed to be bad form. The villains could be alienating the very people they need in order to survive the coming onslaught like Al Qadea did with the tribes in Al Anbar, Iraq. Then again maybe they aren’t, who knows? Clearly we don’t.
I hope the targeted strikes in Kandhahar are going better than they are in Jalalabad. Last night we heard what was clearly a varsity SF raid very close to the Taj. AC 130’s, fast movers, lots of transport rotary wing. Apparently, the boys hit a compound belonging to a female member of parliament searching for a “Taliban Facilitator.” During the raid a neighbor responded to the raid with his AK 47 and was shot and killed. This morning we were treated to a pretty impressive (by local standards) demonstration a few hundred meters west of the Taj where local villagers had brought the body of the dead man and were chanting “Death to America.”
The ANP form a line in front of the Taj - minutes before opening fire as the local mob surged towards them throwing rocks. Photo by Michael Yon
The ANP did a good job of controlling this protest. They rerouted all the trucks and traffic through the gas station, which is just to the right out of frame in the picture above. About an hour into the protest the crowd surged forward and pelted the police with rocks. The ANP retreated and fired a few volleys of AK47 rounds into the air. They ran forward and threw a few CS grenades, but the wind was wrong and the CS blew back on them (and us at the Taj) so they retreated a bit again. An hour after that, the crowd had dispersed, traffic was moving again, and we could relax a bit.
These varsity SF raids are really cool, but last night’s efforts came up dry. There are many better ways to go about getting a “Taliban Facilitator” who is located inside the compound of an Afghan MP, astride the main Jalalabad to Kabul road. A few truck loads of ANP with a fireteam of American Military Police is more than adequate. Afghan compounds are, from a tactical perspective, easy to isolate and one can always start a raid by knocking on the door and asking the suspect to come along for a chat. What is he going to do? Start a siege in a Member of Parliament’s compound?
Regardless, last night’s raid was a dry hole which, given the status of the compound owner, is a huge screw up. How did that compound end up on a JPEL target list? What were the motivations of the people who nominated it? Who was that shot across the bow directed at? I bet we don’t know, but if I had to guess, I would say that all of this – the attacks in Jalalabad, last night’s disaster of a raid, all of it, is connected to Kandahar. And I do not see how they can methodically clear and hold the Kandahar City and the surrounding districts without pulling the Marines into the fight from their current area of operations. If they plan to mimic the tactics used in Iraq it is going to take a lot of infantry. More on this in the next post. For now my forecast is that it is going to be a very interesting fighting season and the battle for Kandahar remains the most important battle since Tora Bora.
ISAF continues to reposition forces closer to the civilian population centers as part of their “population centric” strategy. They’ve set off a flurry of activity putting up blast walls, T barriers, concertina wire and Hesco counter mobility obstacles. Only none of this frantic building of security barriers is happening anywhere near Afghan population centers – it is all happening on the Big Box Fob’s. General McChrystal is leading by example – at the ISAF HQ in Kabul last week I noted that the finishing touches are going into a custom built, specially designed, multi-million dollar blast wall which is located inside the new giant T barrier wall, which was built inside the outer T barrier wall after the last VBIED attack on ISAF HQ. The original multi-million dollar T barrier wall was built inside the Hesco wall which itself is backed by a locally made rock and concrete wall shortly after a rocket landed near the ISAF HQ in 2006. It is hard to square the frantic pace of installing three to four layers of blast walls on Big Box FOB’s with all the talk of securing the population centers.
An ANA battalion OPs center from the 201st ANA Division. Not many blast walls going up here and as you can see nine years into this exercise and we haven't even repaired an ANA buildings on their main bases. The damage you see here occurred around 1991 when the Muj tried to bum rush Jalalababd shortly after the Soviets withdrew. They got as far as this battalion HQ before being pushed back by the Soviet trained and equipped Afghan National Army
As I am writing this post I am concurrently trying to reroute a client around the almost daily fire fight on the vital Kabul to Jalalabad road. Last night we had a mortar round impact in Jalalabad City which has seen more IED’s and indirect fire attacks in the past 5 weeks then in the previous five years. In Kabul rumors are flying around the city about the relative safety of internationals, both on the road and in their compounds. The Taliban and other bad actors are not the concern – it is the Afghan Security Forces which are currently making life most uncomfortable for the international community. Last week, the Afghan Vice and Virtue police raided almost every western restaurant in Kabul. They also raided a gigantic private secured living compound called Green Village because it (like every other secure compound in Kabul) had a bar. That these places were all licensed, legal and have been operating for years is a given, and apparently irrelevant. The eastern European waitresses from one of the nicer restaurants were arrested and taken for medical examination “to ascertain whom they might have been sleeping with, police officials said.” Yeah right, CSI Kabul – I bet they have the ability to “ascertain whom they might have been sleeping with.” Adding insult to injury, the French owner of L’Atmosphère, who has been in business since 2004 and once paid more in Afghan taxes than any other entity in the country, is reported to be in jail after protesting too much during the raid on his fine establishment.
It is the Kabul ANP who stand accused of murdering the American security operative, Louis Maxwell, after he saved 17 of his UN colleagues during an attack on their guesthouse on 28 October 2009. He had a Heckler and Koch G36K assault rifle, which is worth a fortune here. He was shot repeatedly (he was already badly wounded defending his charges) at point blank range by an ANP soldier who wanted the gun. Apparently, CSI Kabul lacks the requisite skills to determine if an American contractor, armed and sanctioned by the UN and acting in accordance to his contractual duties, was killed at point blank range by one of their officers.
Louis Maxwell with his H&K G36K. A true American hero.
Paladinsix, at the Knights of Afghanistan blog, has an excellent post from inside Kabul on the effects of endemic corruption. What he is describing (and I can attest that everything he is saying is 100% on target) is a concerted effort by the Kabul authorities to drive westerners out. Which is exactly what the Taliban is attempting to do with multiple attacks on USAID implementation partners in Kandahar and Lashkar Gah. To date, the only Americans to be killed in both these efforts is Louis Maxwell – the Taliban only killed Afghan security guards and local bystanders. Does that give you some perspective on the current threat level for internationals living in Kabul?
Our fundamental problem in Afghanistan is that we are fighting on behalf of a central government which is not considered legitimate by a vast majority of the population. When we squeeze this government it tends to squeeze back, which is exactly why all of a sudden the vice and virtue police considered western restaurants to be “centers of immorality.” Just as a side, the consumption of adult beverages is a very popular pastime with the adult males in Afghanistan. The liberal canard that the use of alcohol is offensive to Islamic societies, like all liberal canards, is based on willful ignorance by our elites and their lap dog main stream media. Alcohol is not illegal for westerners and has always been part of the male Afghan social scene since before Alexander the Great invaded. Yet unlike Alexander, we have a lot of carrots to dole out to the Afghan government in support of our objectives, but do not have one stick – not one we can use to encourage good behavior. As a result men and women I have known for years and who have operated here effectively are for the first time ever planning to go home and stay. There is only so much risk a person can stomach, and the risk for the thousands of outside the wire contractors working in Afghanistan is not only increasing exponentially, it is coming from Afghans on both sides of the conflict.
The civilian reconstruction sector is not the only portion of the international effort being adversely affected by the failure to develop a functional Afghan government – the rot is spreading from the top down with the dangerous contagion of plummeting morale. Herschel Smith at the Captain’s Journal linked to a depressing report from Afghanistan by journalist Ben Shaw, which showed up in the comments section of his latest post. The first paragraph:
As a journalist (and combat veteran) currently embedded with US forces in Afghanistan, I have found that roughly 95% of the troops on the ground in no way believe in their mission, have no confidence that their efforts will bring about lasting change to Afghan security, stability, governance, or a decreased influence of radicalism. In truth, they fight simply to stay alive and want nothing more than to go home.
Napoleon said that in war “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” This is the consequence of fronting a government which abuses the population and international guests alike. If the ISAF soldiers were methodically clearing areas of Taliban and then assisting in the establishment of law and order, governance and services which serve the people, and that the people appreciate, we would be achieving moral ascendancy. But that is impossible because the vast majority of troops are based on FOB’s and never leave them, and there is no legitimate government with which to entrust areas we have cleared. So now that we are unable to do what is important, the unimportant has become important and the mark of military virtue is the enforcement of petty policies like the mandatory wearing of eye protection at all times while outdoors.
We came to the Korengal Valley in peace; we are leaving in peace and at the cost of around 50 American lives. We are also leaving a half finished black top road. How do you put lipstick on this pig? And who do you think see this as a victory Taliban troops or our troops? The sun glasses are considered to be extremely rude by Afghans when talking to them like this but regulations mandate soldiers must wear eye pro at all times. It is safer for junior officers to follow regulations than to use their hard earned local knowledge and common sense in today's Army.
We have pulled out of the Korengal Valley of Kunar Province as part of the new strategy to focus on population centers. Yet all the new building and all the new surge forces are being shoehorned onto Big Box FOB’s, where they are forming fusion cells to fuse the information generated by the 3 or 4 existing fusion cells in each brigade TOC in an attempt to make sense out of the avalanche of “story boards” and “white papers” being generated by thousands of officers and former officer contractors who are locked into FOB’s, but still feel compelled to work 14 hours a day. The surge in building activity is confined exclusively to ISAF bases and there are no indications, not one, that the military is going to shift into a “population centric” posture by putting troops out within the population 24/7 to provide security. This is deja vu all over again, it is exactly the same dilemma we faced in Iraq before the surge there. As usual, there is one segment of the population which is not fooled by story boards and white papers authored by their seniors – the troops. And so morale is apparently now a problem. While the Taliban make videos as they swarm over our latest abandoned base our troops are facing this;
As a recent example, I filmed approximately 75 minutes of combat footage, knowingly exposed myself to concentrated enemy fire, and learned two days ago that if I post this footage, the Soldiers on film will be charged and/or relieved for uniform violations, improper wear of personal protective equipment (ballistic glasses, fire-retardant gloves, etc), and that low-level commanders have already begun this process. In an attempt to preserve the careers of the Soldiers I am trying to advocate, I am unable to tell (or show) the US public what they’re experiencing and what they think of it. The military only wants good news to flow from embedded journalists not facts.
There are huge costs hidden behind this kind of pass the buck, risk averse, stupidity. Risk aversion is expensive, not for the bureaucrat, but for the taxpayer and it leads to fiscal insanity. For example, was it cost effective or even necessary to shut down Europe to all air travel because of the recent volcano eruption in Iceland? Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club posted this yesterday:
As volcanoes go Eyjafjallajökull was accounted by Icelandic volcanologists as a weary old man. It’s recent eruption was unremarkable.
Ash from the volcano’s plume has reached an altitude of only about 10 kilometers (six miles), not high enough to reach the stratosphere images taken by the Eumetsat satellite concluded that Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull has spewed 2,000 tons of sulphur dioxide into the air. Pinatubo spouted 10,000 times that amount.
So the economy loses about 4 Billion to the over reaction of bureaucrats in England who honestly believe they must drive down risk to near zero no matter what the cost. Do you remember all the airliners that were damaged by flying Pacific routes after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo? Yeah me neither – there were none and there would have been none if we had ignored the British “experts.” British “experts” are not confining their depredations to the global economy, this observation by Max Hastings is fair warning about where our military is heading:
We are in danger of emasculating the armed forces we claim to love so much, by extending Health and Safety protection to the battlefield. I have no doubt that the coroners who preside at inquests on soldiers killed in Afghanistan are compassionate men. But senior officers regard them as a menace to the Services’ real interests.
I get the distinct impression that we are seeing the FOB’s harden because the military is riding this one out until somebody pulls the plug. I have no facts to back those feelings up … it is just my gut reaction to what I am seeing as the fighting season starts. I hope I am wrong, but will tell you this: what is needed here is leadership from the Commander in Chief. If we are going, then let’s go – if we are staying, then somebody needs to explain how we will win without a functioning Afghan central government to partner with. It is the Commander in Chief who has to set the conditions for success. He is responsible for sorting out Karzai and hammering out an agreement stating exactly what is expected of our ally if we continue to support him. Only he can impart a sense of urgency on senior officers in the military hierarchy. Only he can direct them to focus on the Afghans outside the wire and not the soldiers trapped inside the Big Box FOB’s. It is clear, based on the reporting I am seeing from the embedded journalists, that this fight is beyond the capabilities of Gen. McChrystal and his staff. Instead of focusing on NATO soldiers drinking beer he should be focusing on nitwit officers using press photos as evidence with which to burn their own soldiers for failing to follow some minor uniform regulation.
If our Commander in Chief wants to remain committed to Afghanistan he needs to sell his plan to the American people. Come over here to sort out the Karzai administration and bring in a military commander who can motivate the troops and focus the effort on a common enemy with clearly defined goals and objectives. If we see Barak Obama come to Afghanistan, followed shortly by the appointment of General Mattis to lead our efforts here, we will win. If not we are on our way out and it may get real ugly before we are gone.
The ever alert FRI regular commentators picked up on this tragedy in near real time. Last Tuesday morning an Army patrol opened fire on a bus on the main road between Kandahar and the large ISAF base just outside the city. They killed four Afghans which sparked protests inside Kandahar City. The NATO statement is pasted below:
NATO said the bus approached a slow-moving military patrol from the rear at a high speed. Troops opened fire after the driver ignored flares and other warnings including flashlights and hand signals to slow down, NATO said in a statement. It confirmed four people were killed, adding the alliance “deeply regrets the tragic loss of life.”
I have a problem with the “flares and other warnings including flashlights and hand signals.” If a fast moving bus is approaching a slow moving convoy, how much time does the turret gunner have to make a shoot/no shoot decision? Subtract the time it takes to bring the machine gun to bear on target and fire, which is 3 to 5 seconds, and I have a hard time seeing how he armed and fired a flare, then used his flashlight, then used hand signals (which would not have been visible in the pre-dawn gloom) in the 20 or so seconds it took for the bus to close with the convoy. When you read the news accounts, the statements by witnesses from the bus sound much more credible. They said they were just driving along when the Americans opened fire without warning.
I have been shot at three times, once by the Brits (American Embassy project vehicle put out of commission – downtown Kabul, spring of 2005), once by the American army (warning shots into the hillside while in a Japanese Embassy vehicle with diplomatic plates and a very senior passenger – downtown Kabul winter 2006), and once by the ANA (last Monday when they shot at a car right next to me that had nicked their fender in a gigantic traffic jam). The common denominator of those shootings was the lack of warning. The turret gunners suddenly got behind their weapons and I thought, “Holy shit, they are going to shoot,” and they did.
One of those shootings produced the best quote I have to date from my years here. My Japanese client, the Chief of Party for JICA, shook his head and said, “Tim san, I do no understand how your army beat us in World War II.” I launched into a spirited defense of the Fleet Marine Force, but he cut me off to make a phone call. I was very fond of Mr. N and he knew better than to try and ride out a Tim san rant.
Last week the Taliban culminated a series of ineffective IED and rocket attacks on the population of Jalalabad with a bicycle bomb detonated in a swarm of children – a weapon supposedly directed against the Americans, one which could never even dent an MRAP, but could slice through unprotected children. This week our guys pulled a bonehead move – one of which I have blogged about many times before – the shooting of civilians by convoy turret gunners. With the dynamics on the ground, our stupid moves are costing more then the Taliban’s stupid moves. The good people of Jalalabad were pissed off about the bike bomb, but not enough to stage a protest and shout “death to the Taliban.”
That is the critical dynamic with which to judge how the people feel about us and the assorted groupings of bad guys who cause them much more grief and hardship, in their reaction to loss of life through stupidity. When people react with spontaneous outrage to Taliban killings, then we will know the tipping point is well behind us. Until then the best thing we could do is to limit the number of military vehicles we put on the road by stopping the “commute to work” mentality found on Big Army FOB’s and by removing turret gunners. As I have pointed out about 100 times or so, the tactic of shooting at VBIED’s to stop them before they hit a convoy has never worked. ISAF gunners have killed hundreds of civilians and never stopped a single suicide bomber.
There is a large roomy truck by-pass which the Army can use to move around Jalalabad City. Moving through this densely packed urban area places everyone at risk unless the gunners are familiar with the local traffic congestion and having swarms of local people moving around them. In this close urban terrain the ability to pick out a VBIED and successfully engage it is zero. Experienced troops will stay low in their gunners turrets in a relaxed, alert posture and stay off of the big machine guns.
This summer the big push for ISAF will be Kandahar City. The urban terrain there looks just like the picture above of downtown Jalalabad. Although you would not know it from this week’s tragic shooting, the American military has considerable experience in urban counterinsurgency fighting. That was what the Iraq surge was all about – taking back the cities to halt ethnic cleansing while simultaneously peeling Al Qaeda away from the Sunni population. The big message from General Petraeus at that time was to stop commuting to the fight and establish fortified positions from which to control neighborhoods.
Last night there was another series of attacks in Kandahar City, two car bombs, both of which were targeting the international community. A VBIED apparently penetrated into a compound shared by the Louis Berger Group and Chemonics – a large USAID implementing partner. Reportedly, three internationals and three Afghans were killed in the blast which was huge – this was a well designed, powerful VBIED which are rare in Afghanistan. Another small IED detonated last night in Jalalabad very close to the site of last week’s bicycle bomb; it caused no damage or casualties because it was an act of intimidation. I should say another failed attempt of intimidation because the local people really could give a damn about these nuisance attacks which, for all we know, could be (as E2 observed in the comment section) directed at Governor Sherzai.
What is happening in Jalalabad and Kandahar are two completely different events. Jalalabad is experiencing a rash of small scale incidents designed to minimize casualties (with the notable exception of last week’s bike bomb), which are having zero impact on the attitudes of the local population. In Kandahar there is clearly a well organized campaign designed to preempt the impending ISAF operation focused on Kandahar.
Here is a rare event, a convoy using the Jalalabad bypass road, something all convoys should do.
Last night’s attack in Kandahar was the third attack on an aid organization operating in the south in the last month. Two of these attacks targeted large compounds with multiple layers of security, the attempted attack on IRD in Lashkar Gah last month failed. The attack last night on Louis Berger did not. By successfully targeting international aid workers, the bad guys are able to slow down and in some cases stop the “build” part of the “clear, hold, and build” tactic which is now the focus of ISAF. By driving up the level of violence in Kandahar they can force ISAF and ANSF units to deploy into the city center without doing the methodical job of clearing street by street, erecting mobility obstacles to funnel all traffic into joint check points, conducting a census to establish who belongs where and who’s controlling the city. Thrusting units deep inside a hostile unstable city will dramatically increase the probability of another shooting event which ISAF can clearly not afford.
In the east things are not looking great either. The districts of Sherzad and Khogyani, less than 20 miles away from the Taj, are under complete Taliban control. Our local nationals who are from villages in these district can no longer travel to their homes. Yesterday there was another small arms attack on the Jalalabad to Kabul road. The attackers struck along the boundary which separates areas of responsibility between the French Army (Kabul Province) and American Army (Laghman Province), which resulted in only Afghan police responding to the attack while units of the Afghan Army were on holiday routine not 2 miles further down the road. Make of that what you will, but enemy units that know how to work unit boundaries are demonstrating tactical competence. As bad as things look in the south, all of it could change if we clear and hold Kandahar City and the major village complexes around the city while continuing to hold what the Marines have cleared in the Helmand Province. Driving out the forces sponsored by the Quetta Shura from their home provinces and keeping them out would be a devastating psychological blow to all the other bad actors in the east and south east as well as a huge victory for Afghan people.
But here is the thing…..politics. The linked article covers it pretty well. What ISAF hopes to do is use international forces operating in conjunction with the Afghan Army to chase the Taliban out of the second largest city in the country. Simultaneously they want to replace the current racketeering-infected government with one which is recognized by Afghans as being more inclusive and less corrupt. The first step in accomplishing that mission would seem to be removing Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK), from the scene which, apparently, is not going to happen. Instead, the military is going to attempt to work around and “contain” him. This is not because of his rumored association with the CIA, but because the military realizes it has no real knowledge of Kandahar’s mafia-influenced political scene and thus no ability to predict the ramifications of removing the guy perched at the very top.
ISAF wants to clear the city in a slow, deliberate, methodical fashion, spending lots of time in hopes of avoiding casualties. The Taliban appear to be trying to draw them into the city ahead of schedule and then bleed them. If they are successful at inflicting casualties (and not even heavy casualties, just a few a day, a number which would have been irrelevant in past wars) then they will completely derail ISAF. If that happens, RC South will want to throw the Marines into the fray and we’ll lose everything they have gained over the past 18 months in a bid to win Kandahar. So we shall see. The way things look to me at the moment, the entire Afghanistan operation now depends on being successful at both eliminating the Taliban and the corrupt government from Kandahar. That is a difficult mission the military cannot accomplish alone.
Yesterday morning started with an event so senseless and evil that it is hard to describe. An American army patrol was moving through downtown Jalalabad when the villains detonated a bicycle mounted IED. This IED had no chance of even denting the paint job on an MRAP, but it did throw out a bunch of shrapnel, which killed one of the best diesel engine mechanics in town and wounded another 15 civilians – mostly children.
Mastafyat Square in Jalalabad City; the abandoned bicycle explode in the area marked (upper left quadrant) - there is a large school directly behind this area. At 0845 there are hundreds of elementary aged school children funneling down that road to school.
I drove up behind the convoy a few minutes after the attack. They had stopped, dismounted and were treating the injured. I walked up to the rear vehicle turret gunner and asked if I could cut through the convoy and head into the downtown area. He pointed over to the scene and said they were treating a bunch of school kids and I could not get through the circle yet. I had thought that the IED had gone off much further down the street, where there’s a stretch of road with very little pedestrian activity. Once I saw where the bomb had gone off I was stunned – the traffic circle is full of children at that time of the day. I asked if they were OK and he said yes, but there were a lot of injured school kids; he was visibly upset about the children. I could see soldiers working on the kids about 50 yards further down the street and can only imagine how upset they were.
The point of origin about 6 hours after the attack throughout the day local people came to see what had happened.
It is hard to determine exactly what an attack of this nature was supposed to accomplish. There was zero chance that the bomb would damage an American convoy. We are told again and again that careless use of firepower by ISAF is generating more fighters determined to get revenge for the deaths of family members. If that is true one would suspect the Taliban would also not conduct meaningless attacks which kill and injure innocents; there are conflicting reports, one says the Taliban claimed credit for the attack, another says they specifically denied any involvement.
It does not take a very large blast to knock down local brick walls - bike bombs most often contain explosives externally disguised to look like some sort of cargo.
Bicycle borne IED’s are anti-personal weapons which are not very powerful and not effective against vehicles – especially armored vehicles. They can cause a lot of casualties among unprotected civilians, which is exactly what happened yesterday. So what was the point? That is impossible to say, but here are some things to mull over. In the last three weeks or so there have been a series of very minor rocket strikes and IED attacks. This started around Nowruz, which is the Persian New Year (it is 1389 now by that calender) and was celebrated on the 19th of March. There were reportedly warnings by the Taliban to local people not to celebrate Nowruz, which were dismissed out of hand. Pashtunistan square in the downtown area was crammed with people (male people anyway) during the evening of Nowruz. During the early morning hours a single 107mm rocket landed in the eastern end of the city and two small IED’s went off near Pashtunistan square. Even on New Year’s the streets are empty by 0100 so these three attacks caused no casualties and little damage. They caused no reaction from the local people other than annoyance. There have been several single 107 rocket shots which have landed in local housing areas since Nowruz which have caused little damage and only one casualty. The bike attack yesterday seems to be a tipping point; it has the locals attention – they are upset and angry.
The day after the bike IED attack local school children exam the scene.
One of the factors in play with our efforts in Afghanistan is the absolute disgust local Afghans harbor for the various factions who conduct attacks of this nature or try to intimidate them into not celebrating traditional Persian holidays because the Wahhabi school of Islam does not recognize them. They are fed up with this kind of incredibly reckless use of weapons which are targeting them. Hezb-e-Islami Gullbuddin (HIG), the Taliban sort of affiliate party run by Gullbuddin Heckmatyar, has announced a suspension of operations while they talk with the Karzai Government and has even been fighting with Taliban formations in both the northern part of the country and in Kunar Province. HIG is responsible for much of the mayhem in the region and it could be that withdrawing their fighters created a power vacuum which has been filled by amateurs of the religious extremist type. They will not be able to hide inside the local population for long if they are so stupid that they shoot rockets at the biggest public park in Jalalabad during Nowruz and cook off anti personnel IED’s around crowds of school children. When the local security apparatus gets wound up and on the trail of cells operating in urban areas like Jalalabad they can be very effective. Somebody is going to answer for the bike attack, but even if they roll up the entire cell it will not have a meaningful or lasting impact in the overall provincial security situation. The only meaningful measurement of progress is economic. When the unemployment is reasonable and opportunity for a living wage widely available to all Afghans, then the little bands of psychos who set off bombs around school children will never be able to survive inside the population. We have a long way to go before we reach such an aggressive milestone and until we do, we are going to see more senseless attacks of this nature.
