Category: East

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Stop Making Sense

It is proving impossible to get a read on “the Afghan street” since our Commander in Chief articulated the new set of tactics for Afghanistan at his speech at West Point.   It is clear the dynamics on the ground have changed and that this change is being driven by the fact that our great communicator placed an arbitrary date on when we will be done and start going home.   Of course nobody in Afghanistan or any place else on planet earth believes we will start to pull out in 18 months but that is not the point.   Afghans currently populating positions of power have paid hefty sums to be appointed to those positions and are insisting on getting a good return on their investments before the gravy train leaves the station.   My military friends have seen the same thing as they fight endless battles on the Niper net to get the food allowances and other petty cash paid to their Afghan Army soldiers without getting the Afghan senior officers they mentor fired for bringing the problem up in the first place.   It is most depressing and leaves little for me to write about as I cannot blog on specifics which were told to me in confidence.

It is good to see the Army out and about in places like Kunar Province but this is not COIN because COIN takes living with and protecting the local population. Driving around glad handing the locals is a good thing but accomplishes nothing except adding stats to the unit ops board
It is good to see the Army out and about in places like Kunar Province but this is not COIN because COIN takes living with and protecting the local population. Driving around glad handing the locals is OK but accomplishes nothing except adding stats to the unit ops board.

I am at the moment inside both the loop and the wire.   There is a huge problem which we are trying to help fix and that is the “hold and build” portion of the “clear, hold and build” tactic which is our current strategy (even though it is not a strategy but I have been over that and will leave it for now.)     Here is the interesting thing – as we talk with the Marines (the only outfit on the ground who has successfully done the clear part of the mission and have an institutional legacy of innovation and thinking outside the box) – I am recognizing a concept which is at the heart of the Tea Party movement as well as the current alarm in American at our elected representatives shoving massive government take overs of our economy down our throats.   And here it is:   our government is not capable of developing or executing innovative, cost effective solutions to unique problems.   They are only capable of knee jerk reactions to events which have already happened all the while treating us citizens as if we are stupid, incapable of recognizing hypocrisy and too lazy to do anything about it.   The American ruling class may be proved correct in their assessment of a lethargic, uneducated, disconnected population and if so then my fellow Americans deserve what they will get which is a nanny state from hell coupled with generations of debt.

Downtown Jalalabad, busy, noisy, crowded, and relativly safe
Downtown Jalalabad, busy, noisy, crowded, and relatively safe.   Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar Province is in the east which despite the degree of insurgent activity remains clam enough to allow everyone (except the US Government agencies and the US military who remain locked down behind the wire in their various FOB’s) to get projects and commerce flowing.

Case in point – the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA agents/contractors in Khost.   There appears to be much confusion as to how this happened.   At first we were told the bomber was a known asset who could freely come and go as he pleased.       Now it is being reported that this cat had never been to FOB Chapman before but had provided “actionable intelligence”   in the past and had some really hot scoop which drew down the senior guys from Kabul.   Which is it?   I don’t know or care because it doesn’t matter.   The bad guys have smart bombs too and one of them found its way onto FOB Chapman. As I have repeatedly pointed out in past posts it is always easier and much cheaper to defeat a technology than it is to field it. How much does it cost us to keep the drones flying so that we can hit “high value target?”   We don’t know because those budgets are classified but it took less than 100 dollars worth of explosives for the bad guys smart bomb to score a big hit against us on multiple high value targets.

Here is the question – how many years have they (the CIA) been doing the exact same procedure in the exact same place? Does not field craft 101 state that you cannot run a static agent operation from the same base for almost a decade? Especially when that operation is designed to target bad guys for termination – would you not think that maybe running off the same base with the same security procedures for year after year is a bit unreasonable?

Downtown Lashka Gar - the capitol of Helmand province which is in the south. Not too crowded not
Downtown Lashkar Gah – the capitol of Helmand province which is in the south. Not crowded, not noisy, not too busy,   not that safe. The Taliban are costing the people of this region their shot at getting back to where they were in the early 1970’s.   Do you think they do not realize this?

Our vaunted CIA never leaves the wire under any circumstances even in tame places like Jalalabad so all their intel comes from people who walk into the FOB’s.   How good is the product they are producing using these risk averse intelligence gathering techniques and procedures?   It is worthless – or as the general in charge of military intelligence put it “marginally relevant.”   Maj Gen Michael Flynn is one of those general officers I would really like to know – a man who clearly is fighting the Counterbureaucracy battle with skill, insight and passion like a true patriot. The wires are currently humming with this report on the state of our intelligence efforts.   It seems that after all the time, money, and blood we spent in Afghanistan we are unable to provide the war-fighter or decision-maker with any useful intelligence products.

This picture was taken today outside on of our secure bases in the Helmand - that is a local Afghan guard doing the searching. I asked the ISAF guys at the gate who that guard was and how long he had been working for them. They had no idea.
This picture was taken today outside one of our secure bases in Helmand Province – that is a local Afghan guard doing the searching. I asked the ISAF guys at the gate who that guard was and how long he had been working for them. They had no idea. We have all the money in the world for MRAP’s,   bat wing stealth fighter jets and aircraft carriers but no money for a simple bomb dog contract which would substantially increase the personal safety of the 1000 or so servicemen on this base.   That is your Big Government at work – lots of smart people acting stupidly as a matter of routine.   If you are a British citizen don’t laugh – this is one of your bases.

It appears the only “actionable intelligence” being generated on the ground is being generated by infantrymen on the ground which is to say generated by the Marines in the south (the only armed force consistently outside the wire and “on the ground” in theater.)   My father, a retired Marine Corps general officer often told me the only intel he ever received in 35 years of active service worth more than a warm cup of spit was intel he generated himself with his Marines.   My Dad hated the CIA, hated Special Forces – pretty much had no use for any “special” organization to include the Marines’ own Force Recon.   All they had ever done for him was to get his Marines killed in stupid rescue missions which he was forced to launch in response to urgent requests from some “snake eaters” who had discovered that they could not, in fact, just melt away into the jungle when the NVA were in the area and on their ass.

Let me try a little application of common sense starting with the   attempt on Christmas day to blow up an American airliner which was handled so amateurishly by the current administration.   Mark Levin and the rest of the freedom media has that aspect of the story covered so I’ll take another angle.   The underpant bomber (I know I should say suspect) who I shall now call Mr. Bacon-strip was in the tropical paradise of Yemen for demolition training.   He was issued a pair of underwear with det cord sewn into it and a chemical ignition system and told to fly into Chicago and blow up the plane just before it lands.   His detonator failed which allowed a journalist from Europe (of all places) to jump the little turd, give him some chin music (good thing he is not a SEAL or he’d be in legal trouble) and stop him from trying to ignite the explosives which apparently had caught fire and burned off a good portion of his Johnson.   In response the “experts” at Homeland security issued a dictate that no passenger can have anything in his/her/their/its lap or watch the entertainment system or read a book for the final hour of international flights.

Two questions; was this a good operation from the oppositions point of view? (The attack in Khost sure was and I hear they even filmed it.) And what the hell is the purpose behind taking away everything from passengers on the final leg of an international flight? Conventional wisdom seems to be of the opinion that the operation was well planned and executed minus the faulty detonator and the response by American Homeland Security is stupid and pointless.   Conventional wisdom is wrong.

I have taken more than my share of demolition classes over the years – the longest being a ten day assault breacher course (back in the 90’s that course was classified available only to us “special” folk – assault breaching is now a common infantry technique.)   After that training I was very proficient with demolitions and would have had no problem figuring out a how to set off det cord with or without a proper detonator.   My initial demolition training with the Marine Corps at The Basic School was just four hours after which my classmates and I blew up an old tractor – there was nothing left of it but a smoking hole in the ground.   When you are working with educated, bright, motivated people like Mr Bacon-strip mastering demolitions takes little time or practice.   So how long was he in training?   Weeks? Days? Hours?   Get the point?

Why is this Kuchi family camped out at the base of the Spin Ghar mountains with all those donkey's? Let me guess "engaging in appropriate international trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan?" You think? Of course not and the shame here is all you need to do is go talk to these people slip them a modest amount of money and some antibiotics and they' ll be on their way without any dramas. If you are really smart you would slip some transponders on the damn donkey's but that is spy shit best left to the CIA if and when they ever get off their FOB's.
Why is this Kuchi family camped out at the base of the Spin Ghar mountains with all those donkey’s at this time of the year? Let me guess; “engaging in appropriate, legal, and necessary   international trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan?” You think?   Of course not and the shame here is all you need to do is go talk to these people, slip them a modest amount of money and some antibiotics for the animals, and they’ ll be on their way without any dramas and without hauling tons of ammunition over the border for the bad guys who have taken the time to talk with them and slip them a little money.

Then the jerk goes to Europe, buys a one-way ticket to America with cash, doesn’t check in any luggage…..is that state of the art field craft for al Qaeda?   Of course not; that little shit (…sorry I mean man caused disaster suspect)   did everything he could to get caught by behaving in a manner which shouted to anyone paying attention “I am a terrorist.”   This attempt was amateur hour and you know why I think it was?   Because the guys pulling this little jerks strings had no intention of blowing up a plane.   They wanted what they got – a failed attempt which embarrasses the U.S. (as if the current administration needs help in that area,) costs us tons of money to re-mediate and leads to what they really want which is the harassment and stigmatization of Islamic people flying into western nations.   Remember the various organizations flying the al Qaeda flag are at war with us and they need to keep their base motivated just like we do.   What better way then to finally force the United States to treat all Muslims as suspects with our heavy handed TSA?   It will piss them off …. just ask Michael Yon who was recently detained at the SeaTac airport for exercising his constitutional right to call bullshit on a petty agent of the state who demanded to know his level of income.

What about the Homeland Security response to Bacon-strip?   Why force people to remain in their seats for the final hour of a flight?   I have heard pundits saying that the terrorist would just blow the plane up two hours before hitting the United States so the rule is pointless.   I agree the rule is pointless as is much of crap we must put up with to fly around the United States but there is a certain logic to it.   Terrorists are not going to blow up a plane two hours out because the plane then falls out of the sky into the ocean and nobody knows what happened nor do they really care.   Remember the Air France plane which plunged into the Atlantic en route from Brazil last year?   Not many people do and nobody knows why that plane went down.   It could have been the first Mr. Bacon-strip for all we know but we don’t know and never will because the ocean is a big, deep, cold, dark place which knows how to keep a secret.   Janet Nepolitano isn’t really a brain dead bureaucrat incapable of saying anything other than focus group pablum.   She knows we can’t really protect our selves from terrorist aboard international airlines and has therefore put in rules that will hopefully get them to act outside the United States.   If a plane full of mostly Americans gets blown up outside the US that is not her problem and if she is really lucky it will go down in the ocean and be nobody’s problem.

Turning our attention back to Afghanistan we see nothing but doom and gloom.   This article, featuring expert analysis by retired Army General Barry McCaffrey says we should expect 500 casualties per month this summer.   If you did not have a reason to ignore talking head generals before you have one now because McCaffrey’s opinion, shaped by unlimited access inside the US military security bubble, is about as stupid as anything else emanating from the Temple of Doom (a.k.a. White House.)     Barry McCaffrey is one of those generals I have no desire to ever meet.

Armed AID workers? This is the model the boss and I have pushed for the past year and one we proved can work in the most heavily contested regions of the country. We are at it still but find it hard to generate more than passing interest from the various US government agencies in Kabul who are busy gurading their rice bowls as the coutry continues to slide into anarchy. Amy Sun is responsible for bringing real hope and change - in the form of a Fab Lab and high speed internet to the kids of Nangarhar Province and it has cost the American taxpayer not one red cent. Do you think that US AID of the Department of State want to reinfoce her success by funding more Fab Labs? Nope. What they care about is their rice bowls and nobody is going to upset their apple carts by bringing in technology and program which actually work.
Armed AID workers? This is the model the boss and I have pushed for the past year and one we proved can work in the most heavily contested regions of the country. We are at it still but find it hard to generate more than passing interest from the various US government agencies in Kabul who are busy gurading their rice bowls as the coutry continues to slide into anarchy. Amy Sun is responsible for bringing real hope and change – in the form of a Fab Lab and high speed internet to the kids of Nangarhar Province and it has cost the American taxpayer not one red cent. Do you think that US AID of the Department of State want to reinforce her success by funding more Fab Labs? Nope. What they care about is their rice bowls and nobody is going to upset their apple carts by bringing in technology and programs which actually work.

McCaffrey sites the Army debacles at Wanat and FOB Keating as examples of very clever fighters with ferocious combat capabilities who I guess are going to pick up their game this summer and put the whoop ass on us.   The Taliban affiliates and their foreigner mercenaries can be cleaver and have demonstrated the will (occasionally) to advance under fire.   But Ferocious combat capabilities?   Like what?   They throw everything they have after planning for weeks at isolated American troops and accomplish what?   They can’t even inflict double digit casualties.   When they mass like they did at both Wanat and Keating the American military (after the attack never before) lifts all its restrictions on artillery and air delivered ordinance, puts its SF teams and their Afghan Commando counterparts into the field, and proceeds to run down any group larger than two people who seem to be heading towards the Pakistan border.   The SF guys I talked with who responded to the attack on FOB Keating are certain that they bagged every dirt bag involved in that attack.   Even the Iraqis who, also suck at fighting, could do better than that.   There are brave Taliban fighters and even a few who can hit what they are shooting at but small groups of brave fighters are no match for the American, British, French or even the German military because we know the two C’s; combined arms and cohesion.

We have been at this going on nine years.   The security situation has steadily deteriorated in that time.   We are fighting (for the most part) Pashtoon peoples who have some sort of Taliban affiliation.   We are not fighting the Tajiks, Uzbecks, Hazara, or Turkimen peoples who populate the northern portions of the country.   In this respect our current operations are not anywhere near as difficult or comprehensive as those mounted by the old Soviet Union.   We spend billions to be here and most of that money is ending up in the pockets of Afghan elites and war lords or the corporate coffers of various European and American companies.   It seems to me that if we had small teams of guys going about the countryside telling all who care to listen that we’ll pay 1 million dollars to anyone who produces a live Taliban and 2 million to anyone who produces a live al Qaeda foreigner that we would not only save billions but we would have finished this adventure a long time ago.   That is just one hair brained idea – I have hundreds more.   How about dropping plastic bags containing   porno magazines, a loaded syringe full of heroin, 3 little bottles of good scotch and a cell phone which only dials 900 numbers into areas along the border which are known routes of infiltration.   I know ….what am I thinking…plastic bags?   Bad for the environment and they’ll produce greenhouse gases when burned so the program would need to purchase carbon credits from AlGore……

Yes that is a seriously stupid plan which would never really work….well it would work but the fallout would be intense and rightfully so.     But I tell you one thing – at least it is a plan which is more than most the military outfits operating in this theater have.

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Counter-Bureaucracy

I’m back after a month off to find things have changed very little on the Afghan street. Everyone I talk to thinks the international military effort is entering its final stage. I have been on the road for over a week and have talked with all sorts of folks from the military, USAID, and local Afghans. The lack of optimism regarding our effort was the common denominator in every conversation. We are not being beaten by the Taliban; we are beating ourselves.

There are military missions underway to be more proactive in making contact with and helping isolated tribal people. One such program is apparently classified but open sources point to series of “fly-away” teams, mostly military, who go into the deep hinterlands and stay in a village complex for weeks if not months at a time. Clearly that type of sustained contact is exactly what our COIN doctrine mandates and can do nothing but good. On the security front I saw a news report on TV about a flying column of Afghan and American Special Forces types who drop in on Blackhawks to stop and search traffic moving across the desert from Pakistan. Done correctly this type of security operation will be popular with the law abiding Afghan. But the ability to sustain any meaningful contact with the Afghan people still appears to be missing.

Traffic on the Jalalabad - Kabul road. Traffic has always flowed freely on this vital route despite periodic low level attacks aimed mainly at fuel tankers.
Traffic on the Jalalabad – Kabul road Christmas 2009. Traffic has always flowed freely on this vital route despite periodic low level attacks aimed mainly at fuel tankers.

What is important to note about the efforts described above is that both involve Special Forces. Those missions could easily be accomplished with line infantry (augmented with the same specialists the SF teams are using). But the SF guys have an advantage and that is they are experts in the next revolutionary doctrine in military affairs: counterbureaucracy.   A recent Belmont Club post tells the story best. Here is the money quote:

In other words, they wanted to give the troops a chance against the bureaucracy. In that fight, the troop’s main weapon was the habitual relationship, a word which apparently signifies the informal networks that soldiers actually use to get around the bureaucracy. If done by the book most everything might actually be impossible. Only by performing continuous expedients is anything accomplished at all.

As you read through the article you’ll note that even the SF teams operating off of main FOB’s cannot always navigate the bureaucracy fast enough to move on important Taliban leaders when they surface and are vulnerable. It appears somebody in the SF chain of command figured out how to launch open-ended continuous operations as one mission allowing some of the teams in the south to make meaningful contributions to the overall security picture.

ANA checkpoint just west of Surobi. The Afghan security forces are clearly more active and operating in a consistently professional manner in and around Kabul.
ANA checkpoint just west of Surobi, Christmas Day, 2009, Afghan security forces are getting more active  in and around Kabul.

As both of these programs are based in the South one has to conclude that SF teams in the east and north are still struggling to get off base. The SF team in Jalalabad with their Afghan Commando counterparts were dispatched in force into the Kunar Province mountains after the ambush at Gangigal last summer. They should still be out there living in different villages and protecting the frontier with aggressive patrolling. If they were allowed to operate in that manner that is exactly where they would be.   The troops I talk with at the pointed end of the spear know what needs to be done and want the freedom of action to go get on it but the bureaucracy above them will not accept the associated risks.

COIN is not that hard to do despite this recent article about a battalion commander operating in Logar Province who is being lauded for thinking “outside the box.” I am going to paste in comments from Mullah John who is smarter than most on things like this:

“COIN is the graduate level of war: complete nonsense. COIN is police work, a touch of CT with decent municipal services. To say that handing out welfare in Logar requires even the same level of military expertise as conducting Overlord or the Six Day War is utter rubbish.

It’s hubris designed to make Petreaus et al seem to be considerably more clever than they actually are and also serves to justify the continued existence of the US Army at its current size and holds out the hope however unlikely, that Zen Masters like the object of the article have the magical answer to Pashtoon objections to foreign armies being in their country: Poetry! Of course why didn’t we all see it and VON KRIEGE in the original German ! and Sun Tzu and captains being allowed to spend money EUREKA!

BTW thinking outside the box normally describes thought at odds with received wisdom and certainly with the entire chain of command.”

Neither Mullah John nor I are taking anything away from LtCol Thomas Gukeisen who is the subject of the article. He sounds like a sound tactician and we could unquestionably use more like him. Unit leaders like LtCOl Gukeisen operate in the COIN environment using what is known as “recognition primed” decision making which requires a solid understanding of current military capabilities, the history of warfare, and a bias for action. Operations such as Overlord (the World War II Allied invasion of Europe) require “concurrent option analysis” decision making by gigantic staffs which have to be fused together and synchronized by three or four star generals. Saying that the ability of a battalion commander to do basic COIN techniques is graduate level work is like saying the ability of a family doctor to diagnose a case of step throat by smell alone requires more skill than a surgeon performing intracranial neurosurgery…it is not only wrong it is weird.

A sign of commitment; bringing your kids over for a few months to enjoy the sights, sounds and people which make Afghanistan such a cool place to work in. My son Logan and daughter Kalie outside Little Barabad, Nangarhar Province, October 2009
A sign of commitment; bringing your kids over for a few months to enjoy the sights, sounds and people that make Afghanistan such a cool country to work in. My son Logan and daughter Kalie outside Little Barabad, Nangarhar Province, October 2009.   

The Army has started changing up their operations by embedding the Afghan Army inside there combat brigades. They take care of the logistics. commodities and personal administration but the price is that all patrols are joint and done under US force protection rules. The effective administration of things like pay and leave may help reduce ANA attrition. But if you mandate that every squad which goes out has with it a four MRAP, 16 man American equivalent and that the patrol only go where the MRAP’s can go and that the patrol be cleared with multiple correctly formatted PowerPoint briefs then your tempo of operations plummets. It has to when you work inside the bureaucracy – that is the nature of bureaucracy.

The thing about talking “COIN” is that you are talking tactics not strategy. Tactics devoid of strategy are ultimately meaningless because they accomplish nothing of value. We have been very successful at killing Taliban commanders for eight years and have caused (relatively) little collateral damage. Yet killing guys doesn’t matter because there are dozens more ready and wiling to replace them. But you also can’t not kill them – you can’t let guys who attack your forces walk. The Taliban have tried several times to over-run and American position but have failed to inflict double digit KIA’s in any attempt while being shot to pieces as they try to withdraw behind the Pakistan border.

We seem to be going down the same road as the Soviets did by restricting ourselves to the main roads and cities while clearing out the “Green Zone” of southern Afghanistan. We are rapidly building up troop strength and focusing almost all of our effort on the “Pashtun Belt” along the Afghan/Pakistan border. Our efforts are predicated on the getting the Afghan government capable of functioning independently. But that is not going to happen and everyone knows it. We do things under the  “COIN” brand like building modern roads into the Kunar valley which, believe it or not, have produced a positive effect on the local population. There are now extensive rice paddies in the Kuz Kunar district of Nangarhar province which, thanks to the hard work of a four-man JICA team, produce enough rice per hectare to provide a better return in investment than poppy. The only reason the water is flowing and the rice growing is the modern paved road which the US Army paid to have built going into and through Kunar Province. The Kuz Kunar district can now be classified as self sustaining and therefore passified. Well, if we had a strategy with associated metrics it could be called passified….what it is called now remains unknown to those of us outside the military.

Kuz Kunar Province on the Jalalabad - Assadabad raod
Kuz Kunar district of Nangarhar Province   on the Jalalabad – Assadabad road

Building roads as “the mission” isn’t “COIN” despite our efforts positive impact on some formally unstable districts is not enough if your goal is to leave Afghanistan a secure, functional country. That would be a strategic goal but like the Russians before us we do not have a strategy, just tactics.   Afghanistan will not be functional country anytime soon because the source of legitimacy for Afghan rulers has never been through an elected government. GoIRA as the military calls the Kabul government is and will always be perceived as illegitimate by a majority of the population. In that respect we face a similar situation to both the Russians and our checkered past in Vietnam. Check out this quote comparing Afghanistan and Vietnam from a recent article in Military Review:

Both insurgencies were and are rurally based.   In both cases, 80 percent of the population was and is rural, with national literacy hovering around 10 percent.   Both insurgencies were and are ethnically cohesive and exclusive.   In both cases, insurgents enjoyed safe sanctuary behind a long, rugged and uncloseable border, which conventional U.S. forces could not and cannot cross, where the enemy had and has uncontested political power.

The article can be found embedded in this post at the American Thinker blog. The Vietnam analogy is one I have resisted in the past but I am rapidly becoming convinced that it is becoming a valid comparison. Look at this recent article about the Army Stryker Brigade operating down south in Kandahar Province. The Army Brigade Commander sounds exactly like one of his Vietnam era counterparts – check out this quote from him:

…He outlined how he intended his approach to work. [W]hen it comes to the enemy, you have leadership, supply chains and formations. And you’ve really got to tackle all three of those, Tunnell said. I was wounded as a battalion commander and they had a perfectly capable battalion commander in to replace me very quickly; our supply lines were interdicted with ambushes and they never stopped us from getting any resources, but when you degrade a formation substantially, that will stop operations. And then if you degrade formations, supply chains and leadership near simultaneously, you’ll cause the enemy in the area to collapse, and that is what we’re trying to do here.

Hate to point out the obvious but that quote is bullshit. General McChrystal can talk about counterinsurgency all he wants but it seems that commanders at the Brigade level pretty much do what they want based on what they know and what they know is how to kill people.   COIN is a tactic – we need a strategy but have none because the National Command Authority continues to vote present. Without a strategy it is impossible to tell how well we are doing or predict when we will be done.

We are asking men and women from over 40 countries to fight so Afghanistan can join the core group of functional nations. Somebody needs to be leading this effort by creating a strategy with which we can define an endstate allowing us to estimate how we are doing and when we can leave. That would be the job of our current Commander in Chief – inshallah someday soon he will figure that out.

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The Tribes

More interesting news is coming out of Kabul as the drive-by media continues its impressive efforts trying to explain our Commander in Chief’s continuing dithering on what to do about Afghanistan. His obvious attempt at moving President Karzai out of the way has ended in abject failure straining relations with the Kabul government to the point of breaking and driving Karzai right into the hands of the very people we have been trying to get off the Afghan stage. An excellent explanation on how the administration completely screwed themselves, the Afghans and the rest of us can be found in this Power Line post.

But the stupidity of our current administrations efforts are not what got the blood up this morning….what do you expect from a President with no prior executive experience and Hillary Clinton?  This article from the New York Times about tribes resisting the Taliban is why I’m pounding away on the laptop in a Dubai hotel lobby. Authored by Dexter Filkins the article announces a new strategy to called the Community Defense Initiative which is designed to engage and arm the tribes in the east and south. The article talks about our bearded Special Forces helicoptering into Nangarhar Provinces Achin district with flour and some other nonsense to support the tribal chiefs who have run out the Taliban. It talks about other SF soldiers “fanning our across the country” to engage the tribes and support them in defending their lands and way of life from depredations by the Taliban. Dexter Filkins writes a great article and it is worth reading but unfortunately as in most things published by the New York Times it is complete bullshit.

Chief Ajmal Khan Zaizi who has been featured in a series of blog posts by Steven Pressfield  and is a friend of The Boss. The Boss gave Ajmal a very competent Ghost Team member to start some major cash for work programs in his tribal area on the Pakistan border. We had worked out the logistics of going into the Jaji valley which is surrounded by areas under Taliban control and sent out a query to the local US Army COP about using their LZ to fly our guy out when he was finished. Here is the response we received:

Sir,

Thank you for your message. Any development project in Jaji would be great, but I would like to ensure that it ties into the district development list/tribal development list, in order to ensure that the district leadership is not undermined.

Unfortunately, Ahjmal Khan Jaji is not a tribal leader at all. I do not want you to come into this environment thinking that to be a fact.

Additionally, the security force of Amir Muhammad is an illegal force that is not endorsed by MOI.

The facts are that Azad Khan, the Jaji Sub Governor, has a great relationship with the tribes a focus for his district. The ANSF in this area (ANP and ABP) are a professional/legitimate force that does a tremendous job in keeping the best security for the people.

Yes indeed the Jaji Sub Governor has everything under control, the security situation is fine, and the tribes apparently content. That seems to be at odds with everything anybody knows about the portion of Paktia Province which borders Pakistan but there it is. How can the local American Army commander be so stupid you are no doubt asking yourself and the answer is he probably isn’t stupid – he is doing what he has been told to do.

You see the American military is an effective military leviathan which, unlike most other components of American society is focused on one thing – its assigned missions.   Mission accomplishment trumps everything else for the military and they are expected and will forfeit their lives and the lives of their men to accomplish their assigned missions.   The main mission for our military in Afghanistan is to nurture and support GoIRA – the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.  In most places we know and work in the government is more of a problem for the local people than the Taliban. This is a well documented fact which has zero impact on the American military.

Tribal Chiefs like Ajmal Zaizi are focused on their people and must protect them from outsiders who try to take their lands, rape their children, and disrupt the delicate balance of tribal social mores which allow all to live in peace. I have not heard of one reported rape of a child by Taliban but you can find dozens of articles about Afghan Security Forces being accused of that heinous crime with a simple goggle search. So when a tribal chief drives all the unsavory characters preying on his people off his lands who is it that he is driving out?  In Ajmal’s case it was both the Taliban and the GIRoA officials appointed by the Karzai government in Kabul.

Thus a western educated, populist style leader who has been on the run from the Taliban, who lost his father to the Taliban, who has driven out the Taliban, established good order and discipline in his strategic valley and even reached across the border into Pakistan to strike up alliances with the hard pressed Shia tribes located in the Parrots Beak area (didn’t know there were Shia there did you?  Me either but I know how important that is and also how much those people need friends like us) is now considered by the U.S. Army to be an AOG leader.   AOG means “Armed Opposition Group” which means Ajmal is now lumped in with the Taliban and drug barons.

If a tribe is strong enough to stand up to the Taliban it is also strong enough to stand up to crooked politicians appointed by Kabul and their pedophile policemen. In areas with a strong governor and decent infrastructure like Nangarhar Province the tribes do not have problems with Afghan Security Forces because they will tolerate no misbehavior and the governor would be prone to quickly, decisively and one hopes brutally deal with miscreants who rape and pillage the population they are supposed to be protecting. In isolated portions of the country with little infrastructure and a weak provincial government this is not the case and thus men like Ajmal do what they have to do to secure their people and that means driving predatory government and security forces off their lands.

The FOB bound local American military units have little ability to observe or understand what is happening. They rarely leave their bases and when they do they have such large areas to cover that they can do little more than a “drive by” to show the flag or hand out some food stuffs or meaningless trinkets. The Americans have a mission to support GIRoA. Tribes with the cohesion and combat power to drive parasitic representatives of GIRoA off their lands are by default bad guys even if those same tribes are also keeping the Taliban wolf away from their door.

I know that I make this point over and over but feel compelled to point out yet again that one cannot “do” counterinsurgency by commuting daily from a large FOB. The concept of “bearded Special Forces” fanning out all over the country to help the tribal chiefs is a joke. What needs to happen is to put American troops into these tribal areas to live with, train with, and become allies with those tribes. There is no other way and you don’t need “Special Forces” for that mission – regular infantry can do the job with no additional training. The SF guys should shave off those beards anyway – 8 years of incompetently planned and executed “HVT” missions have given them a bad reputation while accomplishing nothing of strategic significance. What the hell is this helicoptering into Achin district by the “bearded soldiers” to pass out flour all about anyway? They could drive into the damn district in less than an hour, rent a nice safe house, move in and hang out for a year or two thus demonstrating a little commitment to the local tribes while simultaneously actually learning something about the place and its people. If they were really smart they would leave the beards, shed the uniform, rent local vehicles and ditch the stupid MRAP’s – that way the bad guys would not be able to target them with IED’s so easily – but that kind of thinking appears to be a bridge too far for the army these days.

The American military is a world leading institution when it comes to developing and using emerging technology.   Unfortunately that technology now allows our bloated, top heavy staffs to micromanage units in the field to an unprecedented degree. The results were predictable back in the 80’s when my Marine peers and I were first dealing with the impact of satellite position reporting systems, radios which actually worked most of the time and commanders who had video screens in their operations centers. What we predicted back then and are seeing today is the stifling of initiative on the ground combined with the removal of the tactical decision making by the commander on the ground. Our OODA loop has now been slowed down so much by the ability of multiple staffs far removed from the battle to insert themselves into the process that we risk becoming as slow and cumbersome as the old Soviet Army. If we do not step away from the computers, comfortable quarters, lavish DFAC’s and get our collective asses out into the field to really protect the population we are going to end up with another mark is the “lost” column. There is no excuse for that.

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Turkey Shoot

I was enjoying a morning cup of coffee on the Baba Deck with a group of friends just in from the States when we saw the signature of a tanker attack just up the road.  That has never happened this close to Jalalabad before so we conducted a brief staff meeting which consisted of saying “let’s go” and headed up the road to see what was what.

Moments after the tankers were hit - photo taken from the Taj Jalalabad Baba Deck
Moments after the tankers were hit – photo taken from the Taj Jalalabad Baba Deck

The ANP had closed the Duranta Dam tunnel but recognizing us they waved us through and we continued through the tunnel at speed only to have the ANP on the other side of the tunnel wave us right on down the road and into the kill zone.

Approaching the ambush site - note the armed civilian - who knows who he is - running towards the firing. What is also important to note is the lack of any vegitation or cover in the hills where the bad guys are and the Amry OH 58 Kiowa circiling overhead.
Approaching the ambush site – note the armed civilian – who knows who he is – running towards the firing. What is also important to note is the lack of vegetation or cover in the hills where the bad guys are and the U.S. Army OH58D Kiowa circling overhead. The men on the ridge line are Blue Compass convoy escort who are on the flank of the Taliban ambush squad

We saw a string of tracers stitch the road to our front and immediately pulled a hard left into dead space well short of the burning trucks to continue forward on foot. The firing was sporadic, just a few incoming rounds cracking well over our heads and we were not sure if it was aimed at us or spill over from the firefight we could hear to our right. The villains had a belt fed machinegun (probably a PKM) which fired a few bursts in our direction during the 5 or so minutes it took us to work towards the their flank. Just shy of the ridge they were on they decided we were more than a nuisance and started cranking rounds our way in earnest. We withdrew which was a disappointment  because I had a new camera and wanted to put it to use.

There was a section (two) of Army OH58D  helicopters circling overhead very low as they worked out who was who on the ground so I tried taking pictures of them but they came out crappy because it was a new camera and I’m not that damn bright when it comes to cameras

There are no villages up in the hills above the Duranta Dam, no vegetation and no cover. Once the Kiowa’s obtained good situational awareness they engaged the ambush team the bad guys were toast.T hey couldn’t go to ground, they couldn’t hide, they were in the open and forced to be on the move by pressure from a convoy escort team from  Blue Compass and a few ANP troops who had followed them into the hills.

The first two tankers have been hit with multiple rounds and are leakng JP 8 all over the road
The first two tankers have been hit with multiple rounds and are leaking JP 8 all over the road

This was a more effective ambush then we normally see further west on the Jbad /Kabul highway. The terrain forced the shooters to be much closer to the road than they are when they ambush from the heights of the Tangi Valley further down the road. There were three tankers hit and dumping JP 8 all over the road but not burning. Three more were hit and on fire in the northern portion of the kill zone.

These trucks took a beating - there were no driver casualties reported just two escort guards who were reported injured
These trucks took a beating – there were no driver casualties   just two escort guards who were reported injured

Shortly after the photograph above was taken the OH58’s got a firing solution and let rip with rockets and gun pods. Kiowa pilots seem to like getting close and personal and these guys were not staying above some hard artificial “ceiling” dictated to them from on high but were on the deck, spitting venom like a good gunship should. I doubt the villains had much of a chance – reportedly four were killed.

When you see this much fuel pouring out of a tanker you know it is just a matter of time before something bad happens
When you see this much fuel pouring out of a tanker you know it is just a matter of time before something bad happens
Tghe truck drivers start some damage control efforts by sticking small tree branches into the bullet holes. There are coverd in fuel but doing a good job at protecting the shipment they are responsible for.
The truck drivers start some damage control efforts by sticking small tree branches into the bullet holes. They are covered in fuel but doing a good job at protecting the shipment they are responsible for.

The Kiowa’s ended this fight and the efforts on the ground turned to separating the leaking fuel tankers from the burning ones. This is an effort best watched from at least two ridge lines away and we had work to do so we headed back to Taj noting there were at least 50 fuel tankers lining the road just outside the kill zone. In the big scheme of things these attacks are meaningless; the loss of fuel is sucked up by the contractor who only gets paid for what he delivers. The numbers of trucks being lost are like-wise a problem for Pakistani truck companies and not Uncle Sam. The American taxpayer can’t buy a break like that in most places.

Napoleon reportedly said; “moral power is to the physical as three parts out of four”.  Attacks like the one we witnessed this morning are always victories on the moral level for the Taliban.  That is the problem for our efforts in Afghanistan in a nut shell.  The Taliban do not have to be tactically good or win on the physical level, they don’t have to be smart or survive half ass ambush attempts.  They just need to attack and if they lose every battle in the end it won’t matter; they’ll still win.

Convoy escort from Blue Compass telling us the "Taliban are nishta" after the Kiowa's fired them up
Convoy escort from Blue Compass telling us the “Taliban are nishta” after the Kiowa’s fired them up

The ambush squad who sortied out this morning to burn fuel trucks were clueless. They shoot up 6 trucks out of a convoy of around 80 and then found themselves flanked by armed guards, forced to move in open terrain where they were hunted down like rabid dogs by Kiowa helicopters. This also was a good demonstration of using PSC’s to perform tasks which are not cost effective for the military.  It was our good luck and the villains bad luck that two helicopters were hanging around the area with full ammo stores when this went down. The pressure applied by aggressive maneuver from the convoy escort security element helped the Kiowa’s PID (positive ID) the bad guys and obtain permission to smoke them. It is rare to see that work out so smoothly. Too bad its not always this easy with the Taliban.

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The Tribes – A Bottom Up Approach

The last post generated quite a few interesting comments about the Steven Pressfield Blog, Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai, and the prospect of using specialized troops to embed with the tribes.  With the election now decided this is an excellent time to talk about the tribes and more importantly a bottom up approach. The government in Kabul is not going to change – in fact they already fired a shot across the bow of the international community with a message that is easy to decipher. Check out this email which came from a senior security manager in Kabul last night:

Dear All,

Last night the Lounge Restaurant in Wazir Akbar Khan was raided by police and all their liquor confiscated. They were also on their way to Gandamak but it was already closed. I made a phone call to the Regional Police Commander for Kabul who confirmed that the police is indeed conducting raids on restaurants 2 reasons:

  • Restaurants selling liquor are illegal
  • Restaurants are being closed because of an outbreak of swine flu.

You are thus instructed not to visit any restaurants until further notice.

Regards,

XXXXXXX

The restaurants servicing internationals in Kabul have been operating for over six years now and are licensed, legal establishments who pay a ton in taxes and other   charges to the local government officials. All of them openly sell liquor and always have because it is legal for non Muslims to drink alcohol in Afghanistan and, with the exception of the Taliban rule, always has been.  And Swine Flu?  Are you kidding me?  The Kabul government is doing what the Taliban cannot do (yet) and that is driving  out foreign aid workers so they can insert their own Afghan cronies to steal an even higher percentage of foreign aid dollars then they are currently stealing. Greed is a terrible thing which is why it is mentioned so often in the bible.  And the Koran too for that matter but who cares about minor technicalities like that these days?  Apparently nobody in the senior ranks of international community.

The local Bad Guys smoked a tanker two days ago between Jbad and Kabul. There were no less thanb 200 tankers lined up behind this one which got through fine. The consistent trend we see is attacking lone trucks every now and then and running away. It is not a serious effort at disrupting the logistical efforts on this lone route west to Kabul.
The local Bad Guys smoked a tanker two days ago between Jbad and Kabul. There were no less than 200 tankers lined up behind this one which got through fine. The consistent trend we see is attacking lone trucks every now and then and running away. It is not a serious effort at disrupting the logistical efforts on this lone route west to Kabul.

The central government is a much bigger hindrance to the efforts of the international community than the Taliban is which makes the option of bottom up change very appealing.   Author Steven Pressfield, one of my all time favorite writers, started a blog in which has has posted a number of interviews with Chief Ajmal Khan Azazi who has formed a 11 tribe alliance in the Zazai valley of Paktia Province. An area that is astride the Pakistan border and thought to be under Taliban control.   The interviews are remarkable for several reasons like the fact that Ajmal’s tribal fighters have driven both the Kabul government officials (who they consider to be corrupt and ineffective) as well as various Taliban bands out of their tribal lands.

I know Ajmal and have had two meetings with him in Dubai.  He is good friends with The Boss and we are trying to get some cash for work projects going in his area.  As you read through the various interviews with Chief Zazai you will notice instantly that he makes perfect sense to those who understand Afghan history.   Afghanistan has never been effectively ruled by a central government in Kabul and the one that is there now is no exception.   If we want to try a bottom up approach it is going to have to be done by partnering with tribal leaders like Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai.

Hate to see this - an IED going off right across the street from the Taj
Hate to see this – an IED going off right across the street from the Taj

There is a plan which outlines a solid concept of operations for tribal engagement on the Pressfield blog.   Major Jim Gant, an army SF Officer has written a paper called “One Tribe At A Time” and the link to download it is on the Pressfield homepage.   It is a great paper especially where he relates his experience in the Kunar Province back in 2003.   Major Gant succinctly covers why our current approach will not work and then goes on to recommend a strategy based of Tribal Engagement Teams. I like the part where he describes patrolling with his tribal hosts without body armor or helmets.   If we are going to fight with the tribes we have to fight like they do and that means no body armor if they have none.   Wearing body armor in the high mountains is stupid anyway but not all the tribes live in high mountain valleys – there are plenty of flat lander tribes too.

Ir is hard to know what to make of this - military grade explosives in a pile of marble chips next to the main road which goes off in the middle of the afternoon and hits nothing. There are no indications that this device was targeting anything let alone the internationals at the Taj Guesthouse
Point of origin for the IED that detonated across the street from the Taj.   It is hard to know what to make of this – military grade explosives in a pile of marble chips next to the main road which goes off in the middle of the afternoon and hits nothing. There are no indications that this device was targeting anything let alone the internationals at the Taj Guesthouse.   Is this a business dispute?   A poorly made IED to target traffic on the main road to Kabul?     Like most things in Afghanistan it is hard to imagine what this IED was all about.

The French used a similar concept during the Indochina War when they deployed the Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aerportes (Composite Airborne Commando Group) known by the French initials of G.C.M.A.   They would send teams of volunteers (normally a junior officer and four sergeants or corporals)  deep into the North Vietnam mountains to link up with tribes who rejected the communist government.   Fifty years ago the French lacked the ability to resupply or even in some cases maintain contact with their inserted G.C.M.A. teams. The only way out for the G.C.M.A. team members was to be wounded, very sick, or mentally broken in which case an airplane would be sent to a remote strip for a medevac, if it were possible and it often was not.   Some teams went out and were never heard from again, others ended up raising and commanding entire battalions of tribal fighters.  None of the men involved received proper recognition for the unbelievably heroic efforts they put into the program because in the end they were tactically irrelevant in the large scheme of things. The Vietminh’s effective (and dreaded) 421st Intelligence Battalion targeted successful G.C.M.A. teams as soon as they surfaced and they knew what they were doing.

I'm practicing with the camera more - girls from Little Barabad village - a dirt poor Kuchi village across the river from Jalalabad
I’m practicing with the camera more – girls from Little Barabad village – a dirt poor Kuchi village across the river from Jalalabad

The Tribal Engagement Teams proposed by Major Gant would not have to endure the isolation, lack of logistical support, absence of command and control nor the multi-year long missions which made the G.C.M.A. such a bad deal.   But 2003 was a long time ago and special forces troops have not been engaging tribes as Major Gant was able to do back then. Their reputation is not exactly great now that they are known more for universally unpopular night raids than for living out among the tribes doing the time/labor intensive work of counterinsurgency.

I think these TET’s do not need to be special forces troops anyway – a rifle platoon would be a better organization in most locations given that tribal villages are often clustered about farming or grazing land giving the platoon the ability to deploy its three squads into different villages which are part of the tribal cluster.   Regardless of who does the mission one thing is certain and that is a tribal engagement strategy can’t be the central component of our Afghan strategy.   It  is an economy of force mission that would free up large numbers of conventional troops deployed along the Pakistani border. The conventional forces should be focused on developing the Afghan Security Forces (ANSF) so they can operate on their own if we ever to get our ground forces out of here.

These boys ran three miles with a Pashto - English translation book to see if they were saying "my friend can swim like a fish" correctly. We need to focus on these young guys because there are so many of them who want to learn.
These boys ran three miles with a Pashto – English translation book to see if they were saying “my friend can swim like a fish” correctly. We need to focus on these young guys because there are so many of them who want to learn. They want and need a future and if we don’t help create that for them…..

Despite the inherent coolness of an outfit like the French G.C.M.A. the best they could have done was nip around the margins of the Vietminh Army and they didn’t do that.  But Afghanistan is different and the Taliban doesn’t have an army. Tribal Engagement strategies have another huge advantage which our military and civilian leaders do not want to talk about and that is they cut out the central government in Kabul.  The biggest threat to our interests in Afghanistan is he blatant, in your face corruption that defines the Karzai government. If we don’t acknowledge this and find a way to work around it every penny we spent and droop of blood we lost will be in vain.  When we eventually leave, the Taliban will return and Afghans who were foolish enough to believe in us and cooperate with us will be hunted down and slaughtered. In that respect the end game here will be identical to the end game in Vietnam.

 

Nothing about Afghanistan is easy or straight forward but the TET concept is worth a shot.

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The State of Play

The best way to view the current state of play in Afghanistan is to start at the top of food chain and work down to what is important.   The presidential election remains undecided and now Abdullah Abdullah has pulled out of the run-off election. Our Secretary of State says that means nothing. I agree but for different reasons; in the end it does not matter who is leading the country – the Afghan government will not be a proper COIN partner and will continue to be part of the problem regardless of how these elections turn out. Conducting a runoff will only give the bad guys more opportunity for mischief while accomplishing nothing.

Another big story from up the food chain concerned former Marine Captain Matthew Hoh who resigned from the State Department because he no longer knew why we are fighting in Afghanistan. As a fellow Devil Dog he will be spared my harsh opinion because that is the way us Marines roll – you want to hear us taking the piss out of fellow Marines you need to be wearing the Eagle Globe and Anchor. The only thing relevant about young Mathew is the level of play he is getting in the drive-by media.

This story is a brush back pitch to President Obama from his friends in the press announcing that the honeymoon is over.   When the story broke Michael Yon and I chatted about it on the net and the first thing I asked him was how many Afghan villages had he visited that  would not be thrilled to see a platoon of American (or ISAF but to the Afghans they are all Americans) infantry move in to stay for a long time? Like me his answer was very few. Michael has been over much of this country often riding along with the Bot or I. I have been in a lot more places than Michael and can name only a few that would not immediately welcome the semi-permanent deployment of American troops. On his most important point Hoh is wrong as wrong can be.

Army troops from the 4th Brigade chatting up the folks along the new road they built in Kunar Province. It is good to see American infantry dismoounted and interacting with the local peoples in a calm professional manner. But this is not COIN - these troops will mount up and move on in an hour. They are not providing security to the local people they are just showing the flag which expensive, inefficient, dangerous for the troops and at this stage of the conflict just plain silly
Army troops from the 4th Brigade chatting up the folks along the new road they built in Kunar Province. It is good to see American infantry dismounted and interacting with the local peoples in a calm professional manner. But this is not COIN – these troops will mount up and move on in an hour. They are not providing security to the local people they are just showing the flag which expensive, inefficient, dangerous for the troops because there is only one way out and one way back to their base.   Better to go out and stay out then to be predictable every time you leave the wire

Mister Hoh stuck to his guns when offered a seat at the big table by the ambassador which showed commendable conviction and character. But the reason the military fights here is because it has been told to fight here. Once that decision is made the men at the pointed end of the spear fight for each other. That is the nature of professional warriors.   If the host nation government isn’t a reliable partner – that is supposed to be a problem for the State Department. But hear me when I tell you the Afghan government is not going to change and it is a bigger obstacle to peace than the Taliban.

The overall security situation is what it is too; which not good in many places. The disturbing attack on a Kabul Guesthouse – which was UN MOSS (minimum operational safety standard) compliant and had some UN workers in residence again shows the bad guys can penetrate the tight security in capitol.

If it was the bad guys who attacked this particular target which just happened to be the UN team shipped in to monitor the presidential elections. Lot’s of people were unhappy about having those do-gooders running around and in this country when people are unhappy about you being here they let you know in unequivocal terms.

Weapons are not allowed in the official UN billets outside Kabul but they are temporary Guesthouses which there were not more internationals killed in this attack.

If the Taliban did this (which I doubt) the attack too is not enough to change the overall security picture. If the Taliban follow up with multiple attacks directed at internationals it would force all of us to operate like we did in Iraq back in 2005 and 2006. That would virtually halt all reconstruction activities until a massive security effort could be designed and staffed. That is not going to happen; all the sides in this conflict and all the surrounding countries are making too much money on the massive effort being expended in support of the Afghan reconstruction endeavor. The Taliban are Afghans and they know how the foreigner gravy train works.

This is not what you want to see driving down the road; sunburned, lean men with hard eyes and high top sneakers. These are Taliban fighters and we saw hundreds of them hanging out along the roadside in the Province. Kunar statisically the most dangerous province in the country - that will change as the Americans pull out of their forward bases becasue the raw incident numbers will pulmmet but it will always be a bad place for us internationals. Most of the people in Kunar want to be left alone; we should accomidate them and let the Afghans deal with this chronically unstable area
This is not what you want to see driving down the road; Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. The dress gives them away; note the squared tunic bottoms on some of these cats – that’s a Pakistani thing – Afghans prefer rounded corners on their tunics and you can see both in this picture. I suspect there are new Taliban fighters hanging out on the road side so they can watch our convoys and the troops who have dismounted and are playing grab ass with the local kids. This is a standard tactic of de-mystifying the large scary looking MRAP’s. 

If the Taliban had to strength and ability to really go after internationals they probably would but they don’t. But they can penetrate the Afghan security blanket which covers the capitol and cause all sorts of problems. The only way to prevent that and really the only way to have any real impact at all is to focus our efforts on the Afghan security forces. Our current mentoring efforts are not effective. We do not “embed” with the Afghans really. They are no Afghan liaison officers in any of the tactical operations centers resident in every battalion and brigade headquarters. An Afghan brigade HQ is a map table and a few radios – ours have dozens of people all with computer work stations and large video screens streaming in multiple feeds. We have hundreds of EuPol police officers here doing God knows what. They are not out with the Afghan police and seem to hang out in large purpose built buildings sending each other emails or surfing the internet. Kabul will be safe on the day you see EuPol officers or ISAF military out manning the checkpoints with the Afghans and not one day before that. Until then we will continue to see effective car bombing and armed raids. Check that – I doubt we will see more armed raids because in most of the Guesthouses I know in Kabul there are so many armed internationals that the bad guys would be shredded by the time they made it past the gates.

If we want to rapidly build the Afghan Security Forces the only way to do it is to live and work with them 24/7. We need to adopt them, feed them, pay them, and watch after them. What can a US officer really do when the Colonel he is mentoring cannot feed his own troops because the money to buy that chow is siphoned off by officers above him? If they make a stink about it the Afghan Colonel is sure to be relieved and thrown out on the streets. The current mentors have guys fighting daily while dealing with problems they would never encounter in the American system. They do the best they can to support the unit they are assigned to mentor, but they are not really embedded. They live of separate compounds inside the Afghan compounds completely separate from their charges. Mentoring means leading by example while living and fighting with your host country troops. It does not mean setting up a parallel TOC, camp, cook house, offices, and coffee shop where the Afghans are not welcomed or allowed.

Look at the size of these stupid MRAP's. When the troops are inside them they have no ability to hear what is happening outside the vehicle and most of the occupant cannot see a damn thing from inside them. These vehicles isolate the people inside them completley from the outside world which makes them more, not less vulnerable to attack. Still it was good to see the Americans hanging out with the locals in a relaxed calm manner.....a little late for this mind you but still a positive sign
This is what the bad guys in the photo above were looking at. Army troops hanging out with the local kids. The MRAPS are big and look impressive but they don’t shoot TOW’s like the Hummers did so in Kunar they are essentially worthless and we are losing too many because they can’t shoot high enough in the mountains.

The military is bitching about the fact that the Afghan government is not a reliable partner and a big part of the insecurity problem. This is true but the military can’t change that. They can make the Afghan military part of the solution but not by treating them the way they treat them now. We need to get the troops off the FOB’s and out with their counterparts in the villages. We also need to pull out of areas where the local people do not want our help – which is not that many areas in the country as a whole.

Kunar farmer threshing wheat the old fashioned way
Kunar farmer threshing wheat the old fashioned way

Every officer in all the NATO forces is taught the Principles of Warfare which are pasted in below:

  • Objective: Direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective. “The ultimate military purpose of war is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and will to fight.”
  • Offensive: Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative. Even in defense, a military organization is expected to maintain a level of aggressiveness by patrolling and launching limited counter-offensives.
  • Mass: Mass the effects of overwhelming combat power at the decisive place and time.
  • Economy of Force: Employ all combat power available in the most effective way possible; allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts.
  • Maneuver: Place the enemy in a position of disadvantage through the flexible application of combat power.
  • Unity of Command: For every objective, seek unity of command and unity of effort.
  • Security: Never permit the enemy to acquire unexpected advantage.
  • Surprise: Strike the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared.
  • Simplicity: Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and concise orders to ensure thorough understanding.

Not one of these rules are being followed in Afghanistan. Not one. The most important principal above is unity of command but we don’t come close. Gen McChrystal cannot tell his NATO subordinates to do a damn thing they don’t want to do- they will just call home to their respective capitols and tell the politicians to tell them not to do what they were just told to do but do not want to do. We have no mass and therefore cannot really do economy of force operations. Simplicity is a concept all but forgotten by the modern military and nobody can tell you in clear concise terms what the objective or our current efforts are.

The Kabul government will never be a reliable partner but the Afghan Army could develop into an effective force which, inshallah, could help drive Afghanistan into the functioning core of nation states (that should be our objective by the way.) General McChrystal should focus on that goal and continue with his efforts to send the REMF’s home, get off the FOB’s and get more troops into areas where they can protect the population.

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Permissive Environment

Gunfire rippled across the morning calm of Jalalabad today. From what we have learned there were up to four gunmen who attacked the Nangarhar Hotel. Two were detected when they walking into the Hotel armed with AK 47’s and pistols.  There was a Provincial Directors workshop in progress which was probably the intended target. As they walked up to the hotel they were identified and challenged by one of the 20 or so ANP soldiers who mill about the area and the lead gunmen opened fire. He hit the closest policemen who in turn shot the first bad guy dead and the second bad guy retreated up to the second floor and barricaded himself in his room. The Provincial Directors bailed out of the second story windows with at least one being directed to exit the building by the surviving gunman.  So maybe they weren’t the target???   The police start to hammer away at the room and wounded the guy has holed up in and after 20 minutes he surrendered and is now in custody.   Reportedly there may have been two more accomplices who got away.

Initial reports in the press reported this to be an assassination attempt on the Governor of Nangarhar Province, Gul Agha Shirzai, but he was not anywhere near the action. It is not clear to what this mornings dust up was all about. To show you how things work in Afghanistan the local ANSO guy reported that it was unclear what this attack was about or who the target was. In Kabul that report morphed into an attempt on the Governor, who was supposedly driving to the hotel, by two suicide bombers on the Afghan evening news. Now all sorts of Kabul based PSC’s are reporting similar nonsense in their country threat intel reports. The sole exception is Tundra Security because the Bot went to the scene to get the story first hand.  One thing is clear – the gunmen were (as if often the case) as amateur as a guys with a guns can be.   There were no suicide vest or explosives on either them.

Second deck of the Nangarhar Hotel where the cover man retreated to after he was engaged by the ANP
Battle damage to the second deck of the Nangarhar Hotel where the cover man retreated to after he was engaged by the ANP.   Photo by Shem Bot

Incidents like this gun fight cause those of us who work outside the wire to reassess our security environment – is Jalalabad a permissive, semi- permissive, or non permissive environment?  These terms were once used by the United States Marines when we planned operations ashore. When my old unit 1st Battalion 8th Marines sent a rifle company to assist with the Kobe earthquake in 1995 they went without weapons or body armor – it was a permissive environment plus the Japanese made it clear that armed Americans were not needed nor welcomed. When that same battalion went into Albania in 1997 it was a semi permissive environment so they took the weapons and body armor but did not fire a shot at all the drunken locals who were milling about armed with looted AK-47’s. You don’t shoot people because they are armed, inebriated and unruly. The rules of engagement in semi permissive environments are very rigid.

The international aid community treats Jalalabad as a permissive environment – the US Military conducts all outside the wire missions in Jalalabad as if they are in a hostile environment. At the Nangarhar Provincial Police HQ in Jalalabad when members of the military (or their contractors) cross the street from the DynCorp side they have Nepalese guards stop all traffic – stand at the ready in the street with rifles while the soldiers hustle across the street in full armor. The soldiers I know who work there occasionally are embarrassed by this procedure understanding well what kind of message they are sending to their Afghan hosts.   How long does it take to turn a permissive environment into a non permissive environment by treating it from the start as non permissive? Will we not create a self fulfilling prophecy if we do not at some point change he way we interact with the Afghan people?

The bad news of the day is about the American losses in the west due to an aviation accident involving three different helicopters which have killed 14 American servicemen. Aviation accidents routinely produce huge casualties and they are always bad news to all involved.  One of the things to remember as the debate about Afghanistan continues is that the Taliban cannot, on their best day and when they throw all they have, inflict the level of casualties on our forces associated with aviation accidents (which most often occur in training.) They have tried twice to inflict heavy casualties by attacking undermanned joint U.S. Army/Afghan outposts in Nuristan over the past 15 months. First a well armed and equipped force tried to turn Wanat into the Alamo and most recently the same thing happened at FOB Keating. Each time the bad guys have suffered heavy casualties while inflicting single digit losses on the American defenders.

All losses be they from enemy action our aviation accident are painful. It is the price of war but what is important as we continue our efforts in Afghanistan is to remember just how ineffective our enemies are. They are getting better with the explosives which is concerning – especially the more advanced IED firing switches we are now seeing originating in Iran. But by and large they remain inept and ineffective. The Taliban cannot beat our military but our military can beat itself by remaining FOB bound while and focused on kinetic operations.

This is pro firing circut work - 10 firing circuts were recovered in Herat Province last summer and reportedly were of Iranian origin
This is pro circuit work – 10 firing switches were recovered in Herat Province last summer and reportedly were of Iranian origin.   Amateurs are not going to invest in screw terminals and the boards are from a mass production run. This is  a high end commercial firing circuit which has been modified by somebody who knows what he’s doing.

The reason it is important to focus on the Taliban’s complete lack of ability to conduct meaningful military operations is that eventually they are going to get better and when they do what is our response? If we were serious about our efforts here the clear way forward would be to embed troops into Afghan formations and truly mentor them. Anything short of that is a fools errand planed and implemented not to win here but to kick the can down the road until America elects some adults to take charge of the levers of power.

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Pay to Play

As the cool weather finally moves into Afghanistan I have to tell you that from my perspective not much is happening. I am not talking about security incidents – they almost doubled last week from a near all time high the week before. There is lots of villianary going on – the weather is perfect for it – but nothing seems to be really changing. One gets the impression that the players from all sides want to maintain the current status quo because all the sides are benefiting.

The bad guys continue to pick off lone fuel tankers a few time each month on the main road between Jalalabad and Kabul. The level of activity seems seems artificaly low. If a small armed group really wanted to cause problems on this vital road they could do so without too much difficulty
The bad guys continue to pick off lone fuel tankers  on the main road between Jalalabad and Kabul. The level of activity seems seems artificially low. If a small armed group really wanted to cause problems on this vital road they could do so without too much difficulty

Last week yet another story about one of the ISAF countries paying the Taliban to keep things on the down low came out. This story implied the French losses in last August action around the Uzbin Valley were directly tied to them failing to maintain the financial arrangements of their predecessors from Italy. There are hundreds of stories about how the Taliban and their various allies are benefiting from the current war as are various government officials and a rouges gallery of warlords. NATO has issued a strong denial that any of its members are paying off potential trouble makers.

fight pos
This is the closest ANA post to the truck attack pictured above. The six men manning this position have no transport and seem to stay on post for weeks at a time. They really do not have the ability nor inclination to interdict bad guys attacking the road below them.

I don’t believe the NATO spokesman nor do I believe there is a direct correlation between payments to local centers of influence by the Italians and the attack on the French patrol in the Uzbin. If the French had known about such an arrangement and refused to honor it one suspects they would have been better prepared when they ran into their first ambush. However there is no question that “centers of influence” on every side of this conflict are making a lot of money by allowing or protecting or stealing from the unbelievable amount of supplies moving into Afghanistan. This is a fact which is not in dispute – many people including myself believe the various Taliban units make much more cash in the protection racket than they make in the poppy trade.

Most of the money being paid for protection is coming from the reconstruction effort and as with most things in life is not as straight forward as paying cash to the head bad guy to be left alone. The cash comes from establishing local monopolies such as vehicle and heavy equipment rentals. If people had any idea how much money there is in waste removal trucks servicing the many different FOB’s and COP’s which dot the countryside we would have a Gold Rush of poop removal prospectors combing Central Asia for honey dipper trucks. Having a monopoly on poop trucks, or fuel tankers, or rock crushers, could make a man millions quickly in Afghanistan. The other way money is extracted from the effort is by providing security or a construction services. Much has been written about the efforts in Kabul to regulate the security industry but once outside the capitol every local power broker has both his own security and construction company and failing to utilize these services invites attack.

107mm Rocket dug out of a vegetable field near the Jalalabad Airport last week. These weapons are only effective when fired in large numbers which is why the one or two a week being shot at the Jbad airport is not getting the local folks or the soldiers too excitied.
107mm Rocket dug out of a vegetable field near the Jalalabad Airport last week. These weapons are only effective when fired in large numbers which is why the one or two a week being shot at the Jbad airport is not getting the local folks or the soldiers too excited.

There are persistent rumors that the local Army FOB at the Jalalabad Airport is being targeted with rockets by local “land owners” because they are not paying enough rent. My Army friends have heard this too and have not a clue about what it is all about because they don’t pay rent. It is possible that some locals are not happy with the current unit. The CO banned the weekly bazaar in which dozens of local vendors would participate. This was an economic loss to local businessmen but given the amount of aircraft, drones and munitions on the base a reasonable precaution. It is hard to believe that somehow somebody important is no longer getting their cut and is letting lose with 107mm rockets as a result. But they are shooting one or two every week or so. The skipper hired well diggers to go out into the fields next to the base to dig up the dud rockers (they function about 50% of the time) but the army remains convinced they aren’t being shot at.

I’ll tell you this … when us outside the wire contractors fall behind of paying local subcontractors our personal security goes right out of the window. Many a firm has had important local national staff kidnapped and in some cases international staff attacked over money issues. As I have observed in the past experienced mafia leaders would feel very at home operating businesses in Afghanistan.

ISAF and the US Department of State have closed all roads leading away from the International Airport with the exception of this one which runs through Wazar Akbra Khan. Every year Afghan politicians try to pass legislation forcing the military and others who feel they have to live behind blast walls out of the city. Every year ISAF and DS just ignore the problem - which to them isn't really a probelm at all because they don't move much from behind their blast walls and when they do they can use the three other roads they have cut to civilian traffic
ISAF and the US Department of State have closed all roads leading away from the International Airport with the exception of this one which runs through Wazar Akbar Khan. Every year Afghan politicians try to pass legislation forcing the military and others who feel they have to live behind blast walls out of the city. Every year ISAF and DS just ignore the problem – which to them isn’t really a problem at all because they don’t move much from behind their blast walls and when they do they can use the three other roads they have cut to civilian traffic.   Unless they are taking the senior folks out for a 3 martini lunch in which case they clog up the road moving the VIP’s to Boccacio

One of these days the local shooter is going to get lucky with his 107 rockets and hit the fuel pit or ammo dump which will get every-one’s attention for about four or five days.   I doubt he is aiming at those sites or even wants to hit them which is why it seems that everything is just moving along the same way it always does.   We lose a fuel tanker here, a few men in a MRAP there, the drones continue to kill with scary precision, the military talks COIN but when you observe them operating in and around Kabul you see a attrition warfare oriented army of occupation completely removed and divorced from the locals they are supposed to be protecting.

The Nangarhar PRT got right on the Sachria Bridge and have already awarded the work - this is a great sign of progress and one of the only examples I know of where the local PRT reacted with speed to a serious problem. Most PRT's are just not that useful and the people trapped inside them should be let free and sent home because we cannot afford to keep hundreds of fobbits confined on PRT bases where they earn yet another college degree - we need people who are off the FOB's doing work...not on the FOB's talking about doing work
The Nangarhar PRT got right on the Saracha Bridge and have already awarded the work – this is a great sign of progress.   Most PRT’s are just not that useful and the people trapped inside them should be free ranging about the countryside doing similar major projects like repairs the 30 or so bridges which are still down in most of the eastern provinces.

My prediction for the future is that nothing will change.   The President has made it clear he intends to continue vote present.   Now he is waiting for the election results in order to determine the best way forward to pursue our goals (whatever the hell they may be) in Afghanistan.   John Kerry, who was a CAB Chaser before there were CAB’s, has weighed into the debate helping out President Obama by declaring that targeted strikes combined with Special Forces missions will not be enough to “win” in Afghanistan.   It always helps to have a senior senator like Kerry coming out in direct opposition to your Vice President’s new strategary when you are running the clock.

John Kerry was for CAB Chasing before he was against it
John Kerry was for CAB Chasing before he was against it.   This badge was designed to reward non infantry soldiers who have fought in combat but like all silly devices and patches and most medals it is now meaningless.   There are hundreds of Junior John Kerry’s out here who will go outside the FOB until they earn a CAB and then it takes a block of C4 under the butts to ever get them off again.   Upon embarking on a career as a Marine infantry officer my Dad gave this one bit of advice; “watch what the Army does son and do the exact opposite.”   He could not have been more correct and the Army’s extravagant use of badges, tabs, and other shiny reflective objects placed about the uniform has rendered all of them meaningless because everyone has them.   Looks goofy too but that is just my opinion.

Several trial balloons being floated out of the White House.   The Pakistan First idea which is favored by VP Biden and maybe three other people; the we are “prepared to accept some Taliban involvement in Afghanistan’s political future” idea – the quote is from a White House press briefing.   The third option (which I believe will be the one Obama goes with) is to declare status quo as victory and start to wind things down real slow like.   The only problem with that last option is that the bad guys get a vote on your plan too and once they see the money train is leaving the station it is hard to predict just how poorly they will react.   It is safe to say that regardless of the direction our current administration takes Afghanistan is going to continue to get more unstable and more violent.   The Afghans I know don’t want this but they also understand just how little they can influence current events.   Life is hard; harder when you are stupid and there seems to be an inordinate amount of stupid people on all sides trying to “manage” the fight in Afghanistan.

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Reading Tea Leaves

I have been in Dubai on a business trip for the past week. The boss is spoiling his talented group of Canadians and I in preparation for expanding out efforts into the most contested districts in the country. He didn’t have to spend the money as my colleagues and I are motivated by the challenge – although staying at the Raffles Hotel in Dubai was pretty damn cool.

Saturday evening my inbox started filling with news of a serious fight in Nuristan.   I checked the wires and found nothing.   I checked again Sunday morning and nishta – I even emailed my Buddy Michael Yon and he too was hearing something was up but but did not know what was happening.   The wires started humming about the attack on two isolated outposts in Nuristan Province about 24 hours after I had first heard about it.   The New York Slimes has an OK roundup of what happened here.   If my information is correct this story contains a “untruth” told by a Colonel – and that is the kind of thing which really gets me worried.   I get worried because I know what happened to our military post Vietnam and would be crushed to see them held in such low esteem and outright contempt by the American public again in my lifetime.   Let me insert an excellent point from a more than excellent post by one of the all time most excellent bloggers “…lying, while advantageous in the short run, is like a drug, temporary in its effects; requiring higher and higher doses to maintain the same effect and is finally self-destructive.” That is from this mornings post on the Belmont Club by Richard Fernandez; a blogger I admire greatly….and I’m stopping with all the “excellents.”

Saturdays attack on two outposts started in similar fashion to the attack last year in Wanat.   The fighters; described as “local militia” by ISAF boiled up out of a mosque and laid siege to the American soldiers and their Afghan counterparts located inside a small forward operating base called ‘FOB Keating” and a nearby smaller Afghan police post.   The fighting was so intense that none of the wounded could be evacuated for the first 16 hours which explains the number of alarming emails I was getting last Saturday evening.   As is always the case when dealing with American infantry be they Marine or Army the wounded who could still fight did fight and refused to be evacuated.   This report from ABC news covered that angle with the amazement one always sees in graduates from elitist American journalism schools when they encounter the selflessness of first rate infantrymen in contact.

Pedros are the direct descendants of the Jolly Green Giants from Vietnam. These cats get to combine the rush of paramedic work with the even bigger rush of getting in short sharp gunfights.
Pedros are the direct descendants of the Jolly Green Giants from Vietnam. These cats get to combine the rush of paramedic work with the even bigger rush of getting in short sharp gunfights.

At the end of this engagement Pedros flew in and extracted all the Americans and Afghans from Keating which had been completely destroyed in the fighting.   But an Army Colonel quoted in the NYT article said “American forces still controlled the compound, which they share with Afghan security forces.”   This is a perfect example of the attrition warfare mindset which is ingrained in most of our military officers.   Owning the field of battle post fight is a measurement of success in conventional military operations. It is irrelevant in the context of a counterinsurgency.   The only relative measurement of success is how much of the population is on your side.   In the battle for FOB Keating the population was never on our side – they were apparently the ones who attacked us – so why were we even there in the first place? I don’t know the answer but will bet a months pay that we are soon out of Nuristan Province.   As I have said many times before the instability in Nuristan is financed by gem smuggling syndicates which is an Afghan problem.   We have no solutions to offer the Nuristani people except to leave them alone which is all they want anyway.

No idea what the helmet is for but this looks really cool and looking good is half the battle - another Pedro shot from Michael Yon
No idea what the helmet is for but this looks really cool and looking good is half the battle - another Pedro shot from Michael Yon

But there is something else which needs to be said about my view on how to win the Afghan fight using small civ/mil teams embedded into Afghan districts and here it is.   If this war was fought the way I recommend you would have more incidents similar to the attack on Keating.   There is no way to be as aggressive as I recommend (and operate) without getting a team attacked at some point.   When that happens you are going to lose some …dying is part of living and even though every loss is a tragedy to the family bearing that loss on high you have expect and accept the fact that in war you are going to lose people.   Lots of missions = lots of risks; no missions = no risk and for a vast majority of the military units deployed here the later seems to be the rule.   Those who do not want to get off the FOB’s and fight should redeploy back to home station.

This is the typical use of small NATO forces from the Baltic countries. These guys sit on the runway at Kandahar all day, every day to keep an eye on traffic coming out of the commercial side of the Kandahar Airport. It was around 125 degrees when this picture was taken last summer. This is all this unit will do for the duration of their time in Afghanistan although I think this country has resposnibility for some of the entry control points too. We need people off the FOB's...do you know how expensive it is to keep military units deployed here to do this kind of make work? Under what circumstances can you imagine that the men and or woman in this vehcile would actually start shooting with that machinegun? They are facing an internatioanl air terminal for chrst sakes...what a waste of money, time and manpower.
This is the typical use of small NATO forces from the Baltic countries. These guys sit on the runway at Kandahar all day, every day to keep an eye on traffic coming out of the commercial side of the Kandahar Airport. It was around 125 degrees when this picture was taken last summer. This is all this unit will do for the duration of their time in Afghanistan although I think this country has resposnibility for some of the entry control points too. We need people off the FOB's...do you know how expensive it is to keep military units deployed here to do this kind of make work? Under what circumstances can you imagine that the men and or woman in this vehcile would actually start shooting with that machinegun? They are facing an internatioanl air terminal for chrst sakes...what a waste of money, time and manpower.

Which brings us the reading tea leaves.   It appears that our Commander in Chief has made up his mind what to do in Afghanistan.   He is voting present.   We will not be sending more troops nor will we be pulling any out.   His new commanding general is on record as saying this is not acceptable and for his troubles the good general got to fly to England to get his ass chewed by the President who was coming or going from his failed attempt to win an Olympics bid for the crime plagued, politically corrupt, scandal ridden shit hole known to us Americans as “Chicago.” General McChrystal apparently does not understand the genius of voting “present” (being a man of action and all) and said “waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome.   This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support.”

For speaking a little truth to power the General got his ass chewed and this review from a Bruce Ackerman a purported expert on constitutional law at Yale University, who said in the Washington Post: “As commanding general, McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements.”

Hey Bruce – nobody cares what our academic “betters” thinks about what a general should and should not do…they know more about political infighting than your entire faculty lounge ….. how do you think you get to be a four star general anyway you dumbass.

Sorry I’m ranting again – but although we are not gettig more troops … we are getting a civilian surge known in State Department speak as “the uplift” which will flood our FOB’s with more civilian experts.   I know some of the men coming out in the uplift and can say without reservation they are smarter than I am about the Stan, more capable than I am at running reconstruction projects and if let lose could make a huge difference. But they won’t be let off the FOB.   Lots of missions = big risks and nobody is into taking risks to achieve a mission which has yet to be clearly defined, properly resourced, or supported by the one man who’s support is crtical – The President of the United States.

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The Internal Focus of ISAF

Earlier in the week I had one of those trips from hell which make being in Afghanistan such a drag.   The drive between Jalalabad and Kabul takes less than 2 hours on a good day.   Last Sunday the drive took over 12 hours – 9 of them spent sitting in a traffic jam just outside the the Poli Charki pass.   The reason I was stuck with thousands and thousands of Afghans is that the French army had closed the road between Kabul and Jalalabad.   They had (again second time in a week about the 50th time this year) rolled one of their armored vehicles and insisting that no traffic pass the accident scene until it had been recovered.   The vehicle went over the side of the road into a ravine so the recovery required an industrial size crane which did not even arrive on scene until around five hours after the accident.   That is five hours worth of traffic which should have been flowing freely but ISAF does not think that way.   Whatever impact their actions have on the Afghans seems to be irrelevant to ISAF commanders – a mindset which is 180 degrees out from our recently upgraded, improved counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine.

The French were having a very bad day.   They lost a legionnaire in this single vehicle traffic accident, had lost another 12 hours earlier to a lightening strike and two more who were drowned in a flash flood.   A violent storm had scoured the eastern region at around 0530 Sunday morning causing a series of dangerous flash floods.   The French were reportedly out and about at that hour in   “an operation designed to strike at a network of bomb-setters.”

Typical French convoy moving from the FOB in Kabul. A year ago the French took a bit of an ass whopping outside of Surobi and to their credit they have not backed down. Not backing down is good - but it has nothing to do with counterinsurgency and being able to drive around Kabul Province in old crappy armored personnel carriers does nothing to win the COIN fight and a lot to alienate the population
Typical French convoy moving from the FOB in Kabul. A year ago the French took a bit of an ass whopping outside of Surobi and to their credit they have not backed down. Not backing down is good - but it has nothing to do with counterinsurgency and being able to drive around Kabul Province in old crappy armored personnel carriers does nothing to win the COIN fight and a lot to alienate the population

Striking a “network of bomb-setters” normally requires extensive human intelligence,   reconnaissance to verify the intelligence followed by a visit by the direct action door kickers.   Unless the “bomb – setters” are operating off an ISAF FOB or are stupid enough to give up their location and intention over cell phones there is no way the French or anyone else will be able to accurately target them because the recon guys, the human intelligence collectors and the door kickers are all confined to FOB’s and when they venture out they do so in gigantic armored personnel carriers (which tend to roll over on the narrow, mountainous roads of Afghanistan) and are completely isolated from the Afghan people they are supposedly here to protect.   But the French were out and about; off the FOB in the bush doing some sort of operation which is more than can be said for the majority of military units operating in Afghanistan.

I am a proud former member of the Bethesda Chevy Chase Rescue Squad and have some experience at dealing with motor vehicle accidents involving fatalities
I am a proud former member of the Bethesda Chevy Chase Rescue Squad and have some experience at dealing with motor vehicle accidents involving fatalities

The problem is that the focus of the French (and every other unit here except the US Marines) is completely internal.   Closing the most important route in Afghanistan for an entire day is too stupid for words.   When that happens all the traffic jams up every bit of lane and shoulder on either side of the accident scene.   The Afghans trapped in this scrum cannot get food or water or turn around and leave.   The woman cannot get out of their vehicles and enjoy a bit of fresh air – they are stuck packed (and I mean packed) into small cars or vans where they must sit and bake in the sun unless a male relative happens to be there and agrees to walk them off to a side ditch somewhere to go to the bathroom.

Life is hard on woman in Afghanistan due to cultural mores. This is not an easy point to grasp when your time here is spent on a FOB. When you are able to develoo the situational awarness required for successful COIN operations then you can lose the inward focus of a attrition warfare army and figure out things such as closing the only main east-west road in the entire country for 12 hours is mind numbingly stupid
Life is hard on woman in Afghanistan due to cultural mores. This is not an easy point to grasp when your time here is spent on a FOB. When you are able to develoo the situational awarness required for successful COIN operations then you can lose the inward focus of a attrition warfare army and figure out things such as closing the only main east-west road in the entire country for 12 hours is mind numbingly stupid

The reason it seems reasonable to the French Army to close the most important road in Afghanistan is the same reason the US Army continues to roll through downtown Jalalabad instead of using the brand new high speed truck by pass which is faster and safer for them.   Their focus in exclusively internal.   They plan all operations, movements, and interactions with the Afghans (when they manage to get off a FOB) based on what is easiest and safest for them with no consideration of the Afghan people.   This is an “effects based” opinion based on what I see daily.

The only military unit I have been able to personally observe while planning future operations was the US Marine Corps 2nd MEB.   The Marines were asking the Boss and I about cutting military roads so they could avoid adversely impacting the local people in the Helmand Green Zone.   Their focus was exclusively external on what was convenient for the Afghans not what was easiest for them.   This may explain why they have taken such a large chunk of the Helmand River Valley and dominated it with little to no post assault fighting while the British army is unable to walk 100 meters off their combat outposts in the same river valley without getting blown up or in a fire fight.

The truck by-pass around Jalalabad City. This terminates right outside the large Army FOB at the Jalalabad airport but the US Army never uses it. I asked a convoy leader once why and he did not know it was there and then added it was not in the SOP and therefore an unauthorized route. The Army fob is less than a mile away from this point of the by-pass route
The truck by-pass around Jalalabad City. This terminates right outside the large Army FOB at the Jalalabad airport but the US Army never uses it. I asked a convoy leader once why and he did not know it was there and then added it was not in the SOP and therefore an unauthorized route. The Army fob is less than a mile away from this point of the by-pass route

As the security situation in Afghanistan continues to degrade it is most frustrating to see that our military is completely unable to break away from its risk adverse, zero defects, careerist mentality.   I never thought it would be easy for our attrition warfare oriented military to learn the decentralized and risky business of fighting a proper counterinsurgency but I did think we would figure it out given enough time and money.   But we are not even close.   General McChrystal knows what needs to be done – our very own counterinsurgency doctrine also spells out how to fight in the COIN environment but our military is hobbled by Colonels and Sergeants Major who are motivated exclusively by what is good for their careers and reputations.   Careerist sycophants will never think outside the box or try something new least they fail.   Failure is not possible when you do exactly what the man before you did regardless of what is happening outside the wire with the Afghan people.   No way to measure that so it cannot count against you on your combat command officer fitness evaluation right?   The US Marines seem to be breaking this mold but they are not here in enough strength to make much of an impact and thus are irrelevant in the big picture.

Motor vehicle accidents are frequent and bad in Afghanistan. This one was worse than most - a van full of woman and children was t-boned by a white corolla which tried to enter the by-pass without giving way. Many of the woman and children were still alive and being manhandled out of the wreakage by local people. This accident occured about 600 meters away from a major US FOB. A Brigade commander who was oriented on the people of Afghanistan could have the few high speed roads in the area coverd with little flying colums of mixed gendered troops. We stopped to lend a hand but were by the police (correctly) that it would be a bad idea for a male foriegner to tend to the criticaly injured woman - the children were already in cabs and heading to the Nanagarhar Teaching Hospital some 3 miles away.
Motor vehicle accidents are frequent and bad in Afghanistan. This one was worse than most - a van full of woman and children was t-boned by a white corolla which tried to enter the by-pass without giving way. Many of the woman and children were still alive and being manhandled out of the wreakage by local people. This accident occured about 600 meters away from a major US FOB. A Brigade commander who was oriented on the people of Afghanistan could have the few high speed roads in the area coverd with little flying colums of mixed gendered troops. We stopped to lend a hand but were by the police (correctly) that it would be a bad idea for a male foriegner to tend to the criticaly injured woman - the children were already in cabs and heading to the Nanagarhar Teaching Hospital some 3 miles away.

ISAF is here to bring security to the people of Afghanistan so they can re-build their economy and infrastructure.   But ISAF can’t protect the people of Afghanistan – they cannot even protect themselves.   The reality is that we have this backwards – it is the people of Afghanistan who are able to provide the protection and security us foreigners need to operate outside the wire.   All we need do is demonstrate commitment to the people thus providing a reason for them to believe in us and support our mission.

That is why my son and I can travel around as freely as we do – the people protect us – they warn us if danger is about – they look after us when we walk around the bazaars. The reason the people protect us is because everyone in Jalalabad knows who we are and what we are doing and they appreciate it. In Gardez the Taliban came to several of our projects and asked what was going on.   The local people told them in no uncertain terms that the rehabilitation of their karez’s and canals was the first good thing which has happened to them since the Americans came and that if the Taliban interfered the people would fight them.   The Taliban did not interfere and I suspect many of them were working on our projects – 6 bucks a day is good pay for unskilled laborers in Afghanistan.

Our FOB’s are full of men and woman who would love to have the freedom to operate like we do so they too could make a difference.   I recieve emails from them daily.   But our military system will not let them off the FOB’s, out of the body armor, or out of the large stupid, dangerous MRAP’s.   Instead we continue to bring “security” to the local people at the point of a gun.   How stupid is that?

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