Author: babatim

My morning email contained a heads up from Mullah John who is home on R&R. 60 Minutes had broadcast a show on the American Special Forces last night and the segment was “disheartening” to quote the good Mullah. After watching it I was left speechless – it was worse then “disheartening,” it was awful. It is hard to know what to say when you see stuff like this but not knowing what to say has never stopped me before so here it goes….

The segment was called “The Quiet Professionals” which of course is a great name for an organization that invites 60 Minutes for a two month embed. Hit the link above to see the piece, because I doubt anyone reading this blog caught it when it aired last night on CBS. It appears to be a 13 minutes of Lara flirting with SF dudes or as a commenter on the CBS website noted about Lara’s narration “It’s like listening to a child explain black holes.”

Of course the segment has all the annoying crap one associates with Special Forces – only use first names, wearing sunglasses to “protect their identity” and digitized faces for all the Americans not wearing sunglasses. Does anyone believe that the Taliban is going come to America and hunt these guys down some day? Of course not but the Taliban routinely hunt down ANA Commandos in their home villages but none of them have their faces digitized or identities hidden. Why?

The 60 Minutes crew caught three shootings on film which are all in the segment. The first victim was one of the SF team leaders who was shot during a raid by one of the Afghan soldiers they are training. The second shooting was an Afghan Commando who shot himself in the foot during another raid. The final shooting was committed by a member of the SF team who shot two children who were sitting in the back of a vehicle that was approaching a village where the rest of the team was “catching an important Taliban commander.” He was shooting at an approaching vehicle with a suppressed weapon to warn it to stop… great thinking, but we’ll get to that and a recent shooting of an imam in Kabul last week later.

Everything the “Quiet Professionals” did in this story was (to me) suspect, from shooting at targets down range while Afghans are standing right next to the targets, to screaming obscenities at them, calling them “fucktards” and inflicting group punishment because they couldn’t master the “load, unload” drill, which I know from experience your average 11 year old can master in little under an hour of professional instruction.

Want to know something our ‘elite’ SF guys don’t seem to know? Afghans don’t cuss. To call an Afghan a motherfucker (a word used frequently in every conversation in the American military) is a grave insult that would, in the local context, need to be atoned by blood. I cannot stress this point enough and if, during my frequent forays into the tribal bad lands, I used that word even in jest I would have been killed long ago. One of the secrets that I and my fellow outside the wire expats use in the contested areas is respect for local culture coupled with big confident smiles;  that’s why we are able to do what every USG expert contends cannot be done.

I could go through this piece point by point, harping on quotes like wearing beards is “a mark of respect among the locals”  which nonsense but why bother? The piece speaks for itself so let’s get back to this shooting business.

Let me set this up; one of the SF team along with an ANA soldier is pulling security on the road leading into a village where the rest of the team is looking for a ‘high value target’ (HVT in mil speak). When an old truck rumbles down the road towards him the SF guy fires ‘warning shots’ from his rifle which has a suppressor on it. When he runs up to the truck he discovers there were two young boys in the back and he had shot them both.

What should the guy have done when a truck load of males is approaching at “high speed” on the rutted bumpy dirt road leading into the village? He should have done what we do – walk out to the road with a big friendly smile, hold up your hand, have them stop and then tell them to sit tight until the Americans are done. It is that simple – the biggest weapon us Americans have in Afghanistan is a warm smile and the ability to at least say “Tsenga Ye?” (“How are you?” in Pashto). I have been in this exact situation about 100 times over the years and so viewed this incident with no small amount of disgust.

What if the truck is full of Taliban? That’s what binoculars are for. A truck full of bad guys is a target easily defeated by two riflemen who are weapons free and waiting for them within hand grenade range. They are in a truck and can’t use their weapons effectively until they are out of the truck. In other words they would be sitting ducks. That is not true if they stop at some distance away and deploy from the truck which is the Taliban MO. But the truck in this instance didn’t do that – it just drove down the dirt road as fast as the dirt road allowed until the kids in the back started screaming and a crazy American popped out of a treeline and started running towards them. The driver is not going to hear shots fired from a suppressed weapon so until he sees something to make him stop the firing suppressed warning shots tactic is pointless.

There is one more aspect to this story which I find deeply disturbing as a military professional. The SF guy whacks a 14 year old kid dead center in the chest with his main battle rifle from less than 50 yards away and when he runs up to the vehicle the kid pops up and starts giving him shit about it? What the hell kind of main battle rifle are we using these days? Don’t get me wrong; I was pleased to see the child survived, as was the guy who shot him, and everyone else involved. But when you shoot someone in the chest with a military grade rifle then that someone is supposed to go down and stay down. Whatever cartridge, barrel length, and suppressor combination that team is using is obviously less than adequate. They should be carrying 7.62×51 mm rifles. If they can all press twice their body weight then they can handle a few extra pounds of proper battle rifle and ammo. They also can probably handle the strain of carrying binoculars too – killing children is bad on morale especially when you could avoid shooting them using standard infantry techniques like making friend or foe determinations with binoculars.

Better yet they may want to consider slowing down enough to issue a proper raid order with brief backs and inspections. You have to be a 10th degree ninja master to pull a two man covering element job by standing in the middle of the road day dreaming about Lara Logan which is how this unfortunate incident started.

Which brings us to the latest bad news from Kabul; the shooting of an important imam who was in his car with a bunch of his children when a convoy driving down Jalalabad road shot him dead. He reportedly failed to slow down when approaching the convoy which is the standard story you hear from ISAF every time they shoot up a car load of civilians. I think the body count is well over 600 at this point and not one of these unfortunates did anything unusual by Afghan driving standards. You can read about that here.

Here is the thing – I can’t think of any incidence in which a suicide bomber blew himself up in Afghanistan with passengers in the vehicle. I also can’t think of a single incident in Afghanistan in which a military gunner successfully stopped a suicide bomber from driving into his convoy. This escalation of force was senseless. I can recall examples when gunners have been killed leaning out of their cupolas exposed while trying to engage suicide VBIED drivers while the rest of their crew survived the explosion. They would not have been killed had they ducked down inside their armored vehicle.

I am as fond of brave fighting men as the next guy and admire the courage those kids showed trying to protect their fellow soldiers. But the escalation of force tactics currently being used are stupid and should be changed immediately. What happened in Kabul is murder – you can not justify shooting a driver who has a car load of children under any circumstance. We have too much history here and should know what a VBIED looks like – this shooting is just as stupid as the shootings involving Italians in Herat last summer, or the Blackwater guys in Kabul last spring.

When you live behind walls everything on the other side of those walls is a threat. When you isolate your forces from the population you are supposed to “protect,” then your forces have no ability to distinguish friend from foe; threat from normal routine or the good from the bad. Gen McChrystal can gob on all he wants about the importance of “COIN” and, “getting to know the people” blah blah blah…. it doesn’t matter because he sets the operational rules here and under his rules no conventional American troops can leave a FOB unless they have at least four MRAPS and 16 riflemen. How are you supposed to, “protect the people” if you can only roll around in large road-bound convoys? How can you, “protect the people” if every night all your people have to be back on the big box FOB’s eating ice cream and pecan pie?

These SF guys are supposed to be the ones who know how to operate outside the big bases with the local population but did you notice where they are living? On a big box FOB; isolated and removed from their Afghan charges – which was obvious because none of them spoke a word of Dari or Pashto. My children can get through formal greetings in both Pashto and Dari and they were here for just a few months – it’s just not that hard to learn these things when you live in the local environment. Those SF teams should be out here free ranging with guys like The Bot, Mullah John, Panjiwai Tim and myself. They are good troops being poorly served by commanders who keep them isolated and removed from the people they are supposed to be protecting. They will never be able to gain the situational awareness required to do real COIN if they remain confined to the Big Box FOBs. That is the real story, and as usual CBS missed it.

The string of failures starting with the Jihadi attack on Fort Hood by an American Army Major, followed by the fiasco of incompetence demonstrated by multiple agencies in the Christmas Day undie bomber attempt, followed by the CIA FOB Chapman attack were huge strikes.   Three strikes, but nobody is out because that is the nature of bureaucracies.   The only time large bureaucracies hold individuals accountable for major failures is when they can pin the blame squarely on a junior member – that is the way it is.

Major General Michael T. Flynn, USA has followed up his blunt criticism of the intelligence portion of our Afghan operations with a solid paper, co authored by Captain Matt Pottinger, USMC, and Paul Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), on making   intelligence relevant in Afghanistan.   These men are at the forefront of the counterbureaucracy battle fighting against the tide of mediocrity that has defined our military efforts to date.   I am compelled to point out that the picture on the cover of an Army general officer who is engaging some key elders while wearing body armor, helmet, SUNGLASSES, and with a rifle strapped to his chest is illustrative of exactly how not to conduct COIN.   I don’t know if that was done  on purpose or not, but the last thing a general officer should be doing is showing up in his Ivanhoe armor and a rifle strapped to his chest to talk with local leaders.   No body armor, no helmet, no  rifle, and certainly no sunglasses is how a senior leader demonstrates calm, trust in his men, and physical courage in this environment.   My kids who have spent months at a time here could tell you that.

The Flynn paper defines the problems plaguing our efforts with insight and clarity.   The authors describe the efforts of several battalions who have gotten it right.   They focus on the 1st Battalion 5th Marines, who after clearing   Nawa of Taliban focused on identifying local centers of gravity which they could influence to improve the security situation on the ground for the local Afghans.   This is an important distinction – they focused on making the environment safe for the people, not for them, which in the context of Afghanistan military operations is not the norm.   ISAF forces focus their effort on “red” incidents not “white” information.   Red incidents mean IED strikes, which is to say the entire effort of most units is to find and kill IED syndicates, so they can drive around in their MRAPS without losing people.   White information is all about the human terrain on the ground, i.e. who is in charge of what, what are the major concerns of the people, what factors are degrading security for the average Afghan etc…     White information can only be gained by sustained contact with the local population which is exactly what 1/5 did when they settled into Nawa after clearing out the Taliban.

Faced with rifle companies spread thinly on the ground and without access to buildings, computers, internet, or even reliable electricity, the Marines adapted by spreading their intelligence thinly and tasking the rifle companies to provide the atmospherics needed to gain an understanding of exactly what was impacting the local population so they could deliver security customized to the needs of the Afghan villagers.   In a summer which saw a dramatic increase in casualties from IED’s countrywide, the Marines of 1/5 drove down the IED incident rate to zero.   The local people actually chased off Taliban IED teams themselves.   That is nothing less than astounding.   There were similar successes posted by American Army battalions which are highlighted in the paper too.   But I have to add that kind of success cannot last forever in an active insurgency – there were loses in Nawa this week to IED’s.

This white paper is full of good things but all good things must come to an end and at the end of this paper there are no good things which I can detect.   As the new Obama surge comes into the theater it  will bring with it massive new headquarters – a MEF forward for the Marines and an airborne divisional headquarters for the Army.   Of the 30,000 additional troops thrown into this fight, at least 5,000 of them will be found in these two headquarters units alone.   Adding layers of additional bureaucracy to the already bloated, essentially useless staffs here now will render the immanently reasonable suggestions contained in Gen Flynn’s paper moot.   Which brings us back to the consistent pattern of failure which defines the Central Intelligence Agency, The Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Council.   Eric Raymond at the Armed and Dangerous blog defines the problem succinctly:

“When I look at the pattern of failures, I am reminded of something I learned from software engineering: planning fails when the complexity of the problem exceeds the capacity of the planners to reason about it. And the complexity of real-world planning problems almost never rises linearly; it tends to go up at least quadratically in the number of independent variables or problem elements.

I think the complexifying financial and political environment of the last few decades has simply outstripped the capacity of our educated classes, our cognitive elite, to cope with it. The wizards in our financial system couldn’t reason effectively about derivatives risk and oversimplified their way into meltdown; regulators failed to foresee the consequences of requiring a quota of mortgage loans to insolvent minority customers; and politico-military strategists weaned on the relative simplicity of confronting nation-state adversaries thrashed pitifully when required to game against fuzzy coalitions of state and non-state actors.”

There are few things in the world more complex than the  web of Islamic extremist organizations currently at war with the governments and peoples of the west.   One of those things  that is more complex is the situation we now face in Afghanistan.   We are supporting Afghan government officials who may or may not be more of a problem then the Taliban, we are trying to engage the population based on tribal affiliations which are not always clear or relevant, and we are identifying, targeting and killing “commanders” who have proven to be easily replaced.   William McCallister, in an interview by Stephen Pressfield does the best job of defining the complexities of the Afghan human terrain:

“Tribal identities exist in Afghanistan, but local communities and interest groups may not necessarily organize themselves based on these identities. Individuals tend to define themselves in terms of a group identity. A qawm, or solidarity group, is a collection of people that act as a single unit, which  is organized on the basis of some shared identity, system of values, beliefs and or interests. It can describe a family group or reflect a geographical area. It can specify a group of people united by a common political or military goal under one jang salar or martial leader. Members of a village; the inhabitants of a valley; a warlord and his retainers; a strongman and his followers; a bandit and his forty thieves, or the local chapter of the Taliban are all aqwam (plural).”

Afghanistan is a complex place where the situation on the ground can range from actively hostile to completely benign depending on the district, valley, town our isolated village.   An intelligence system designed to collect against a peer level threat with its associated defense, intelligence and political structures is not the optimal organization to employ in the counterinsurgency environment.   Add to that system layers and layers of additional bureaucracy and the results are a system designed to fail.   This comment from FRI regular E2 paints a bleak picture for the intelligence specialists assigned to the FOB’s.

“I read MG Flynn’s paper as well, and while he makes some excellent points, he failed to mention that part of the reason our intelligence sucks is that all our collectors are mostly stuck on the FOB.   That’s why we’ve become so hooked on technical intelligence. The kind of relevant intelligence that Flynn yearns for comes from meaningful interaction with the populace, period.   In my experience with Afghans, especially Pashtuns, if you suddenly roll up into their village with your MRAPs, Star Ship Trooper suits, and “foreign” interpreters (even if your terp is from Afghanistan, if he’s not from the neighborhood, he’s “foreign”), they will tell you two things: jack and sh*t.   We are reminded constantly that Afghanistan is a country broken by decades of war; no one trusts one another.   But trust is only obtained by building meaningful relationships with people, and our current force protection policies make the process of building rapport impossible.   As I sit here at my desk, on an unnamed FOB in Regional Command East, I would dearly love to grab a few of my soldiers and head out to the local market to see what’s going on in town today.   Perhaps I could report back to my leadership that local farmers are concerned about a drought next year because of the light snowfall this winter, or that the mullah down the street is preaching anti-coalition/government propaganda.   I’d get this information from shop keepers and kids that I’ve built a relationship with over the past few months.   But I cannot just walk off the FOB because that would be the end of my career. Instead, I’m going to check out BBC.com, call a couple guys I know like Tim, and continue to be disgruntled that I have NO idea what’s going on outside my FOB.”

Now here is the thing – as poor an effort as we seem to be making there are more then a few places where district level governance is developing into an effective effort.   I am almost certain that back in late 1986 the Soviets had won the Afghan War.   They were already committed to pulling out by then and nobody was really assessing the situation on the ground with an eye towards staying.   But as often happens in a counterinsurgency war, they had won, but did not know it.   I mention that only because it is impossible to say with certainty just how good or how bad we are doing in Helmand or Kunar or Paktia.   The only meaningful measurements are found at the district level which means sustained engagement.   If we can get off the FOB’s and do that….who knows?   I bet that when the tipping point comes we will not see it.   If ISAF can adapt by decentralizing their forces off the FOB’s and hardening in every district center it will change the trajectory of this war.