The sun is setting over the Hindu Kush and tonight we finally end Ramadan and start the four day “Big” Eid holidays. The kids behind the Taj didn’t have any fire crackers so they dug up their Dad’s AK and shot off a magazine. By the time the guards and I got there in response their father was tanning the boys hides with vigor. Ammo is expensive here and the boys had just cranked off about 20 bucks worth; scaring the hell out of me and pissing their old man off to no end. It is dark now and the local people are throwing firecrackers or cranking off automatic weapons at a sustained pace. Eid sucks for us because if there was a good time to attack a safe house full of internationals now would be that time. But at least Ramadan is over and the boys will step up their day game while stopping all the pissing and moaning about how thirsty they are or how they have no energy blah blah blah. It was refraining from smoking cigarettes that was really kicking their asses but they sucked it up well.
Afghanistan is getting considerable attention in the press lately. Should we stay or go? Is this another Vietnam? Do we need more troops? I found this quote today here from the President which clears things up (I guess.)
Each historical moment is different, Mr Obama said in an interview published yesterday. You never step into the same river twice, and so Afghanistan is not Vietnam.
I grew up on the Severn River in Maryland and went to the exact same spot on the river almost daily because my buddy Chris McConnel had a dock and a ski boat there. Who knew you were not supposed to go into the same river twice back then? Better yet what the hell is the President talking about?
September 9th was Masood Day and here is a shot of one of parades in downtown Kabul
President Obama is on record as saying that Afghanistan is critical in order to prevent the return of the Taliban who will provide haven, support and bases to al Qaeda. The problem is that al Qaeda has all the support and bases it needs in Pakistan. I am on record as saying that Afghanistan would never allow al Qaeda back inside its borders no matter who was ruling and the truth is al Qaeda has spent eight years reconstituting in the Northwest Frontier and doesn’t need Afghanistan – they are fine where they are. In fact the ties with their hosts are stronger and their overall security much better than it was when they operated out of Eastern Afghanistan.
When the President throws down a marker that big it makes it very hard to set conditions under which we can leave. The Taliban are not going anywhere – they live here. Al Qaeda isn’t going anywhere either – they could not be more firmly entrenched in any other place on the globe.
ANP checkpoint in Jalalabad which is similar to those found all over Afghanistan. This was on election day and the police were being attentive. During Ramadan they seldon stop anyone and they never fool with traffic at night. Think some real mentorship could make these guys more effective? You have to get off the FOB and live with these cats to do that and we are not anywhere close to doing that.
We had a chance to finish Bin Laden and blew it at Tora Bora. In hindsight it would seem we should have thrown everything we had into the fight to finish him off but we didn’t. The first hand account provided by Dalton Fury indicates that Colonels back in Bagram Airbase put the breaks on the American Special Forces troops who could have flooded the mountain in an all out effort to Kill Bin Laden. According to this account the Colonel in charge was a Mogadishu vet and did not want to see his men chewed up because they lacked proper fire support. I would like to think that were I in that Colonels place I would have fragged as many birds as I could, rounded up as many troops as I could and flew into Tora Bora to make an all out assault on Bin Laden. Nothing was more important than killing that shitbird and if it cost a lot of American lives so be it. As long as I was there sharing the risk and hardships that is – you can’t be frantically flinging troops into a meat grinder while in remaining in the rear – that is a huge Bushido Code violation.
But I wasn’t there and have the clarity of 8 years hindsight so perhaps my criticism of this lapse are unfounded but that action meant the mission failed and it was the most important mission of my generation. I know two things; good losers lose and the day Bin Laden got away was the day we lost the war in Afghanistan.
Western Armies are not good at counterinsurgency warfare. They do not have the people or formations who can embed in the local community. Western Armies can no longer deploy formations overseas for years at a time. They are not willing to use the tactics required to win which involve not only high risk but lots of killing. Sri Lanka just won an unbelievably long and bitter counterinsurgency. Do you think if the Taliban leadership surrounded themselves with tens of thousands of non combatants we would kill all of of them to get that leadership? That is what Sri Lanka did . There are some who believe the military is under performing on purpose. Stephen Henthorne who is a Senior Adviser on the Joint Interagency – Multinational Stability Operations ISAF staff recently sent a memo to the National Security Adviser General Jones where he all but accused the Army of insubordination; check this out:
“Please trust me when I tell you that General McChrystal’s two man Civil-Military Campaign Planning team in the Pentagon, if they are in fact working for General McChrystal, will never be able to give the President an effective Civil-Military Campaign Plan for Afghanistan. There is a growing belief, that a Civil-Military Plan for Afghanistan is being designed to fail. This seems to be so much the case that the War Fighter Insurgency, that has been written about since 2004, might well be more accurately termed today a War Fighter Mutiny.
See the link for more on the “War Fighter Mutiny” but I do not think it is a mutiny at all. The military has pulled its weight the best it can but that is clearly not good enough.
The price for failing to mentor – secure zones in key cities like Kabul can only be secure if we make them secure. The Afghan Security Forces are clearly not up to the task. This is a Reuters phot from yesterdays attack on an Italian convoy travelinig down the main road to the Kabul International Airport
The military is not conducting a “warfighters mutiny” it is performing as best it can but our military was designed in the past with the technology of the past to face problems from the past. It is good at fighting peer level threats. It is not good at fighting counterinsurgencies. While our senior military leaders were spending years in school on topics such a ethics in combat and the law of land warfare the Afghans who we are now mentoring were killing people, lots of them. Look at this report from last week:
Large numbers of members of the Mangal and Moqdil tribes have clashed over timber rights. Reports of 25-60 fatalities have been received. The Governor of Khost has gone to the area to try to stop the fighting and disarm the tribes.
This is how scores are settled here – toe to toe with automatic weapons. This is why when ISAF tried to apologize for whacking all the civilians who were demanding their cut of fuel from the Taliban up in Kunduz the local people asked them to start killing more so that the Taliban would head back south. We need a surge of Tony Soprano’s to work with the Afghans because mafia guys have more experience solving Afghan style problems.
There are those who dismiss the effectiveness of solving problems by killing people but it is one method that has proven effective over the years…just ask the Carthaginians or the Aztecs or the poor Beothuk Indians who once occupied Newfoundland. People of the west no longer consider such tactics appropriate and I concur as I know there are other ways to get what needs to be done done. My point is that our diplomats and officer corps are in no way prepared to deal with people who resort to indiscriminate killing as easily and naturally as a fish learns to swim.
EID is here and all the Afghan boys get a new set of clothes and a plastic weapon. These boy are just outside the main ISAF enterance and are a new crew – the old kids one always saw out there either perished or are recovering from the VBIED which detonated in this street last month.
Our collective military systems place a premium on education, obtaining advanced degrees, being polished, poised and articulate in all situations, being fit, wise and just but most important is being a consensus building team player with zero….and I mean zero defects in character and military reputation. In America this system produces senior officers and enlisted men and woman who are most impressive. Our professional military education system produces great results if you are solving hugely complex symmetrical problems. It does not produce competent warfighters. Martin van Creveld wrote a book on this topic back in 1990 called The Training Of Officers; From Military Professionalism to Irrelevance where he was emphatic that we were warehousing officers in our schools letting them do nothing productive in the military context.
I actually met van Creveld when he came and hung out in Quantico back in 92. After seeing him pop up at several of our field problems with his son in tow I asked him if he now thought better of his thesis now that he had spent time with the warrior monks of IOC. He looked at me squinting saying “I have never more certain of anything else in my life Captain Lynch.”
If the military is housing its officers in do nothing schools than they won’t know how to do something when they have to leave the US and perform modern problem solving on modern problems. It appears Gen McChrystal has recognized this to be a problem and is attacking it head on. Check out this quote from a piece which just came across the wire:
The key weakness of ISAF, he says, is that it is not aggressively defending the Afghan population. “Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us — physically and psychologically — from the people we seek to protect. . . . The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves.”
General McChrystal’s report covers the widespread corruption which characterizes the Afghan government. He takes head on the problem of the Quetta Shura, revitalized Al Qaeda, and the pointlessness of staying on FOB’s. Man that is good stuff but how did it end up in the Washington Post before the Commander in Chief saw it? Most of the long term observers in Afghanistan would agree with the report. None of us expect the report to change how ISAF operates or change the trajectory of the Afghan Campaign. We lost the day Bin Laden walked away and we have been inflicting the death of a thousand cuts upon ourselves since 2001. Part two of this post will address a way forward. But here is the thing – you cannot think “outside the box” when your first priority is to put all your troops inside boxes for their own protection. There are no school book solutions for Afghanistan there can only be short term stabilization and long term (modest) outside the box innovative solutions. Most of the problems currently plaguing Afghanistan can only be solved by Afghans.
There was a time when the boys of Kabul would wave, smile and ask for sanjook (chewing gum) but not now. These kids are the future and we should be paying much more attention to managing their perceptions then trying to get the adults to play by our rules.
You have to admit that the current guard force at the U.S. Embassy Kabul know how to get attention. The rash of stories which broke last Wednesday were amusing to say the least. The story broke with a news release from a group called “Project on Government Oversight” (POGO) who had received pictures and written complaints from a group of contractors at the embassy and given the nature of the pictures it went viral.
A few selected news story headlines from around the world
I was the project manager for the first group of civilian contractors who relieved the Marines (weapons company 2/6) at that embassy in 2005. At the time the contract called for 146 expatriates, 245 third country nationals and around 75 local Afghans. There are things I know which I can not discuss in an open form but let me tell you this; there are serious, serious problems with that contract which have little to do with the behavior highlighted in the tsunami of international coverage.
Managing contracts of this size in Iraq or Afghanistan is an impossible job and there is a very small pool of talent who have the ability and energy to do it well. I came to Kabul from the American Embassy in Baghdad where I first joined the circuit with a British firm. I received a call around Midnight on a Sunday from the company recruiter who I could barely understand and he said in a very loud voice “mate do you have your kit?” I replied in the affirmative and he says “I need a fill in Baghdad mate can you leave in two days?” I again said yes and he yelled “great mate see you in 24 hours.” The next morning I had a ticket to London and I left the following day. It was a weird thing to do but I hated being retired and was a really crappy civilian. I was lucky, the project manager in Baghdad, who would come back to fill me in Kabul two years later was one of the best I have ever seen. He was from Zimbabwe, had extensive combat experience, and was of the quiet confident type who paid keen attention to what his expats did both on and off duty.
Camp Happy housed over 300 Expats and TCN's and it sucked. The upside to being in a real shit sandwich like this was that everyone had to respect the need for off shift personnel to sleep so everyone was excessivly considerate
The main reason why managing these contracts is so difficult is that it is impossible to stay ahead of the stupidity curve your men will generate. There is no way to anticipate it because some of these guys do the most unbelievably stupid things sober; add alcohol and the potential for Darwin Award level stupidity goes up exponentially. In the military I knew my Marines well because we spent so much time together – often in prolonged field exercises. Your average young enlisted Marine has the ability to do stupid things too but they fall into an easily anticipated set of behaviors which savvy leadership can recognize and at times circumvent. Not true with contractors – some of stories I have heard are amazing.
I hated working at the American Embassy in Kabul for a number of reasons. My personal antipathy unquestionably clouds my judgment on the ability, competence, and usefulness of the arrogant snobbish bureaucrats who work there. I showed up on the 7th of March, most of the expats arrived on a charter flight the next day and that ride in was so bad that one of them immediately resigned. We were housed in a hastily built camp which had not been completed – the roof was not even on the barracks. Our Nepalese arrived in April but we had to assume the contract on 17 March. We had been set up to fail because the department in charge of our contract, the Regional Security Officer’s (RSO’s) clearly did not want the Marines to go – I knew some of the Marines and they were feeding me the inside scoop.
The Bridge contract had a bar which prevents excessive drinking or rowdeness due to peer level monitoring. Our big nights were pub quiz night with MC Steve (behind the bar) and our designated hosts Lord Nelson and Sponge Bob. Due to the cut throat nature of pub quiz they were not allowed to drink until after the match was decided. We did have to explain to the 3rd Para vets that anything involving nakedness and other mens rear ends was considered homsexual behavior by definition and therefore prohibited.
Most of the expats who arrived for the contract had worked for the same company during the first Afghan election and they were predominantly from the UK. They were also an older crowed with the talents one expects to find in retired military men, so organizing and starting the contract was much easier than the industry norm. Our cookhouse was a nightmare but we had a PA from Scotland who got it sorted out, but not before we lost men to the hospital, to all manner of food borne parasites. The RSO’s would not give us the weapons called for in the contract so we had them send out raiding parties of guys who had worked the election and had weapons stashed or knew where to find them. It was a nightmare and I never got along with the RSO shop but I don’t want to start telling old sea stories or start in on State Department RSO’s. They have plenty of talent in that program and one of them, Tim Sullivan, for whom the current guard camp is named, was one of the best all around operators I have ever met.
The problem with the current guard force is that they are on a shit contract. Ignore the money value published in the papers – that number is for five years executed at full value which is impossible to do . Armor Group North America is losing big money on that job and they are about to lose a lot more. I was asked by a few companies to consult on their bids for it back in 2006 and my answer was always the same – don’t bid because if you win you’ll lose money. There were requirements in the contract that could not be filled. The number of security clearance holding Americans was excessive and unnecessary (they have been modified.) The skill set required in the contract was out of all proportion to the tasks actually executed by the guards (these too have since been modified) and the training requirements were completely unrealistic given the amount of time the State Department would allow for the guard force to train prior to assuming the contract.
Camp Sully just before it opened. It looks like a big roomy place which it was compared to Camp Happy but looks are deceiving. The expat rooms had attached bathrooms which is good but the bathroom were almost as large as the sleeping area and wasted valuable space. The TCN barracks towards the rear of the picture did not have attached bathrooms and were therefore a little biggerthan the expat rooms. The project leadership lives in the closet building and those rooms - which had shared bathrooms - were pretty nice...but there are only 8 of them.
The several hundred page request for proposal (RFP) was full of legalize contract language which was there for the same reason congressional bills are several thousands pages of incomprehensible gibberish – to hide things. In the case of the embassy contract it was penalties for failing to meet certain stipulations. The only companies who could have actually met the requirements at the time were Blackwater and Triple Canopy but they could never submit a bid low enough to win because they have to run the training infrastructure back in the States required by the contract and thus were forced to bid realistic numbers. They were never in the running. All of the contracts being let for security and everything else go to the lowest bidder.
When we started the bridge contract back in 2005 I told the men there that although our billets suck and we look like clowns, (we had no uniforms and looked like a motorcycle gang on post with civvie clothing and old AK 47’s with chest rigs, I thought it looked kind of cool, but it wasn’t good for morale) recent history tells us that we will be on the job for years, not the six months of the contract and that the pay is good, risk is low, and thus by definition life is good. I was proved correct – the bridge contract lasted two years before a company successfully took over. The first company to win the contract was MVM and their genius plan was to bring in South African passport holding Vamba tribal fighters from Namibia to work as the senior guards and “english speaking ” junior guards from Peru. The South African plan met the terms of the contract but turned out to be a disaster. When the Peruvians arrived not one of them could speak a word of English. I was there for that too and am thus unable to go into the details.
When Armor Group won they were heading down the same path as MVM but at the last minute the CEO came in, immediately fired his management team and entered into negotiations with the existing project manager for him and his crew to come aboard. I am hesitant to go into detail due to an acute congenital fear of lawyers. Runs in my family according to my Father. The pay for new joins was low and the scheme did not favor Americans due to our tax laws. The original guard force lasted a little less than a year before the PM left which caused the immediate exodus of all the old guards.The new guards got much lower rates of pay. You get what you pay for in this industry and Armor Group was not paying much.
Anyone who has visited the US Embassy recently may be startled to see this picture but this was how we started the contract - an armed guard and one unarmed terp out front on Masooud Road with a knee high concreate barrier. This entire street is now closed off and full of T Walls. We did have a drop arm and armed men directly behing the intiaial screening crew but this was nerve racking duty and the boys did not like it much.
The pay thing is a problem which can be worked through with good on the ground leadership and incentives for people who are on their second, third or fourth year of the contract; the real problem is with the living conditions and job requirements of the guard force. The average living space per man in Camp Sullivan is less than the square footage required for inmates in federal penitentiaries. I put that in writing in a memo to the RSO when the camp was being built which may help explain the stained relationship I had with him. The recreation facilities are inadequate and the gym full of third rate Turkish equipment. There is no space on the camp for the men to do anything outside of their crammed barracks and they have little ability to get off camp. When you are designing camps to house hundreds of guards for years at a time you have to pay attention to their morale recreation and welfare needs which is something the military excels at. If you do not think through what they are going to do off duty as thoroughly as their on duty tasks than you are set up to fail.
I feel compelled to point out that these are "consenting adults" which I thought made this kind of behavior exempt from the condemnation of normal people who find it offensive - wasn't that what the Sec of State said about her husband? Times change and these morons are now toast on the circuit
Now that the furor of last week has died down it appears that our Secretary of State has the situation in hand. Surprisingly enough she found the behavior completely inappropriate and a threat to good order and discipline. I don’t understand that – what business is it of hers what consenting adults do? Is that not the lesson of the Lewinsky affair? Maybe it was because the guards were having these stupid parties on a facility rented by the State Department which drew her condemnation – but the oval office is even more important a government place than Camp Sullivan isn’t it? Or maybe she was upset because management was encouraging this nonsense which means there is a disparity in power between the individuals involved which makes even their consent suspect….you know like the disparity of power between the President of the United States and an intern? No wait that can’t be it…anyway the boss has taken a stand against serial sexual predators (first time for everything) and fired the whole crew.
But that contract will still have a ton of problems and the men working there will continue to be even more miserable than the FOB bound military who at least have good gyms, pizza hut, lots of girls on their bases, green beans coffee houses etc.
There is only one way to fix the Embassy contract and that is to cut the number of guards in half, make them all Americans and pull them into the embassy where they can work and live alongside the other Americans. The security guards are not now and never have been able to use the gyms or bars or tennis courts or swimming pool which are all reserved for embassy staff. That should change. The security guard contract should also be combined with the Ambassadors PSD contract (currently Blackwater and before them DynCorp) so that guards joining the contract can work their way up onto the Ambassador’s detail – that way when a new guy joins that team he has a clue about Afghanistan. Knowing how to “evasive drive” or shoot is useless here – knowing the people, how they drive and what is normal behavior is critical and you can’t learn that in security “operator” school. What are the chances that the State Department is aware enough to recognize the problems they created on this contract and then really fix them? Absolutely zero. Like I said I hated working that contract because the people you are serving are just plain rude, arrogant and worse yet, completely clueless about what is happening outside the walls of their plush digs.
It is hot, humid and sunny this morning in Jalalabad with a pleasant light wind blowing out of the Northeast. The traffic is light, people calm and as we sit here on the Baba deck monitoring the election we are receiving a report about every 10 minutes of mischief and mayhem. I bet less than 50% of them are true. For example, there is a report out of Kunar that the Taliban is shooting “an RPG” off near a polling station “every hour.” We are getting a steady stream of SMS messages out of Kabul where most of the international community is currently located due to potential instability and they say there are several gunfights and a few bombs in the capitol. As most of the security companies are on complete lock-down it is impossible to verify the reporting. Good security companies and good operatives report as fact only those things they have verified themselves – everything else is suspect. So when we hear there is a “gun fight between political parties in Zone 9 of Kabul” we don’t necessarily believe it.
I still believe the Taliban do not view the election as a significant event although it is clear some actors do. Around the city of Kunduz there were 24 election stations burned down on Tuesday night which indicates Hekmatyar’s group HiG is sending a message about the election. HiG reportedly conducted their own version of a RIP (relief in place) by replacing all the commanders in Kunduz last winter and ordering them to fight. They have been battling with the Germans all summer up in the previously very quiet and safe north and it will be interesting to see if the German’s step up their game and rediscover the art of small unit infantry warfare like the French have done outside of Kabul.
The French now move in small fast formations or “serials” in milspeak allowing them to move their company sized convoys quickly and with the ability to mutually support. Classic infantry tactics and a new look for the French who have gotten better and better at the COIN fight since their embarrassing defeat a year ago in the Uzbin valley outside of Surobi.
We will be out and about later in the day to get some food and ice – the staff is off today and we are forced to fend for ourselves. The extra tight ring of steel securitynever showed in Jalalabad and folded in Gardez the troops folded up their checkpoints at around 2000 local which does not bode well. There is also a ban on reporting of security incidents put on the media from on high according to this article from McClatchy. At the Taj we are tracking the incident levels in real time with software, programming and super tech geek support from Ken and Mullah Todd. The press has picked up on our low budget highly efficient efforts – here is the BBC’s report. Here is the link to Alive Afghanistan and Mullah Todd’s tracking map….it is smoking right now with live reporting from Afghan’s across the country via SMS text messaging.
The end of a quiet day in Jalalabad as viewed from the Baba Deck of the Taj. The mound in the foreground is a Buddhist Burial Mound dating back to 300 BC
Although quiet in the city the election day produced some 80+ security incidents in the Eastern Region. Most of them appear to be minor – only two civilian deaths were reported – in Paktia Province and they were civilians caught in a cross fire between the ANP and villains of unknown affiliation. It is clear that in many places in both the south, southeast and east the vote did not go well. The entire Province of Nimroz did not participate according to reporting on the Afghan Alive election tracker. In most of the north the vote went as planned.
This is downtown Jalalabad at 1300 this afternoon. The town was deserted and there were a few more ANP troops on the streets than normal. We did not see many kids out and about today either.
It is hard to predict how today’s vote will turn out. We received a report around 1500 today that females and children were moving in mass from the Panjshir section of Kabul but that is unconfirmed. If true it would be a troubling signal but a dumb move by the Northern Alliance party. They are still well positioned to get a seat at the table and I would doubt they are serious about clearing the decks for action in Kabul.
There was not much evidence of increased security in Jalalabad on election day although the regular ANP checkpoints were checking all traffic which they rarely do
In Gardez the ANP detected a suicide bomber on a motorcycle and opened fire on him. He withdrew about 500 meters away from the checkpoint and detonated his vest. It would appear that at the price of 2 civilians and open hapless suicide bomber the collective entities operating under the Taliban flag did a sufficient job of disrupting things today. Accomplishing this without a high body count is pretty impressive and probably proves me wrong on my prediction above that the various Taliban Shura’s did not view the election as a significant event. I’m not adding the three idiot bank robbers in Kabul yesterday to the Taliban ledger – seizing a bank which is empty of money is too stupid even for them. The countrywide death toll for today is in at 26 which is pretty low yesterday we saw 101 dead and 563 wounded in a Baghdad bombing and it seems to me that Iraq is more important to us strategically than Afghanistan.
A group of supporters for Karzai heading out of Jalalabad at full throttle. This was just about the only traffic we saw downtown today.
My buddy Gaz sends the following from Kandahar; “at 1915 we have counted 37 explosions in the city.” That is a lot of rocket fire and one has to wonder how that happens given the counter battery radar, aircraft and other sensors ringing the city. Here are some pics from some of the closer strikes:
Kandahar City as viewed from Gaz’s roofMore from GazIt is impossible to have a proper barbi when shrap like this is flying around the poop deck
I’m glad I live in Jalalabad – this level of excitement is bad on the digestion.
It appears that Taliban fighters are moving out of the “Southern Triangle” of Nangarhar Province and attempting to interdict the road to Kabul. The latest attack (August 6th) occurred closer to Jalalabad then attacks targeting fuel tankers last summer. The talented RPG gunner we nicknamed “The Mechanic” was working the Tangi valley closer to Surobi last summer shooting up scores of fuel tankers but we are not seeing evidence of the Mechanic this year and have been told French Special Forces whacked him last winter.
The most recent attack happened in broad daylight around 0800 and the ambush team stayed on scene to fight with the ANP/ANA for around an hour; pulling out only after American soldiers arrived on scene. This is a new (not cool) milestone for the Taliban.
This was the targeted tanker – it took multiple hits to the cab and tanker from small arms fire and an RPG hit to the external fuel tank behing the cab
I was in Kabul when this ambush went down so Shem Bot and Mullah John went out to have a look and reported the following:
20 or so bad guys moved into a refugee settlement from the ridge line of the Tor Ghar mountains (Black Mountains). They dug hasty fighting positions and whacked a fuel tanker then stayed around to fight with the ANP. The villains kept up a sustained rate of fire for 45 minutes and broke contact when the Americans got SA (situational awareness) and got their 81’s (81mm mortars) in action.
When the Taliban attack a major road it brings traffic to a halt which blocks the road and isolates the fight. Afghans always fill all lanes and road shoulders to push up as close as humanly possible to a road blockage knowing full well that by doing so they will extend the length and time of the blockage. I have seen Afghans jumping a 100 person line at the Dubai airport look mystified when they are forced to go to the back of the line to wait their turn. They just do not like to que up so when the road clears it takes hours to unblock the east/west travel lanes and get moving. An ambush like this will normally make the movement of reinforcements into the fight impossible but the Americans made it through in 45 minutes winning an official Mention in Dispatches from the staff of FRI.
RPG strike – not the work of the Mechanic who would never waste a rocket like this – he consistently hit the cabs killing the drivers last summer…we have no idea what he had against fule truck drivers but I bet Steven King could come up with a good story line about it
Our question remains how did a squad of Taliban move over the Tor Ghar mountains, dig in and ambush a fuel tanker to draw all the local ANP units into a sustained firefight. Break contact after the Americans show up yet make it back over the mountains without being hit by 300 to 400 rounds of 30mm cannon fire by an Apache, or a Kiowa or maybe even a fast mover (jet)? I think I found the answer to that question when I was down south with the Marines last week. The Marines are shooting rockets – a lot of them and I was chatting up the Operations Officer who told me he has been coordinating with some Geo Space type agency in DC.
It turns out the new generation of the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) goes so high that they have to de-conflict the missile track with satellites and other stuff hanging out in space. When I asked why they shot so many he said the new ROE makes getting clearance to use Tac Air difficult to do in a timely manner. He added that they’ll fix that in due time when they’ve been in theater a bit longer but for now have to tolerate ISAF micromanagement.
It seems that the Taliban understand the ROE has changed enough that they now operate near local villages knowing we will not shoot when they go to ground around civilians. A year ago there would have been so many attack birds stacked over those deadbeats they would have needed an airborne controller to keep them from hitting each other. There is no vegetation or cover in this area of the country so men moving across the countryside are easy prey for attack pilots. But not anymore apparently – drop the rifles and you’re no longer a PID (positive ID) candidate.
Michael Yon is down south with the Marines and sent this very cool picture of a CH-47 landing in brownout conditions. It takes a ton of both skill and guts to land a bird in these kinds of conditions
Changing the Rules of Engagement (ROE) based on pressure over civilian casualties would be one thing if the civilian casualty statistics were solid but they’re not. For example; a convoy of fuel trucks is attacked by the villains and in that attack 20 PSC guards and 15 tanker drivers are killed. Under current polices (which are not standardized among the UN, military, ANSO or the Afghan Security Forces) they are civilians. Another example; A local land owner hosts a war party of Villains in his Qalat providing them food, shelter, safe haven and weapons storage. Those fighters later attack an Afghan police checkpoint and a predator follows them back to the Qalat allowing it’s controllers to call in fast movers and light the place up. The compound owner, his wife and kids are killed in the ensuing air strike….are they civilians or fighters?
I have been a consistent and harsh critic of the way we have used air strikes which have resulted in the killing of innocent civilians and only innocent civilians because the target was nominated by intel that in-evidently involves a walk-in HumInt asset. The over reliance on technology and “trusted” government officials resulted in dropping ordinance on people we don’t know to be Taliban. Their crime was getting on the wrong side of “trusted government assets” and are then whacked based on intel provided by these them to the spooks. That’s bad tactics and bad tactics rarely provide good opportunists for lasting results. The Captains Journal, using excerpts from Vampire Six and the FRI blog has the best write up on the topic I have seen right here.
Expended brass in one of the fighting positions used on the 6 August tanker ambush. 20 armed men should not be allowed to walk anywhere in Afghanistan without feeling the heat of an airborne targeting laser on their neck just before the lights go out for good. Photo by The Shem Bot
In war people die; that’s why it is in everyone’s best interest to get this shit over quickly and to beat the enemy decisively. It’s not important how wars start but how they end is critical. When the enemy is beaten and knows he’s beaten wars end. Until we reach that point we will spend blood, our blood, their blood and the blood of innocents. The longer this is allowed to continue the more we are going to bleed which is why we need to finish it. And the only way to finish it is to kill the Big T Taliban when and where we find them even when there might be innocents around them.
Last February I wrote this post about the Afghan Security Market.I was in Kabul for a month as a favor to a friend when I wrote the post filling in for a guy I had not met before named Christian Major.Christian and I spent two days conducting a turn over before he went home.I instantly became a big fan of his when I saw him interacting with the local beggar kids on our first morning together.He had exceptional language skills, he was a very big and very fit guy, had an infectious smile, great sense of humor and like all the good guys in my line of work a tender heart.As many of us do he sponsored children from the slums paying them to go to school.Unlike many of us he followed up on his investment ensuring unscrupulous family members did not take the money from his charges and force them to beg in other parts of the city.Christian Major was a good man; I am proud to call him my friend; Christian died sometime during the night last Thursday and was found in his room by his mates on Friday morning.
Christian in DC last February while on leave
We do not know why he died and there is no reason to suspect foul play.Christian was a friend to everyone he met good natured and relaxed in all situations as only big, fit, highly trained men can be.I am on the way home for a much needed break and am therefore not in close contact with my buddies back in Kabul so I do not know what the family is planning or where to send my condolences. When I find out I will post that information on this page.
Christian sucking it up at BUDs in Coronado back in the day
I do not know why we lost Christian but do know we lost someone special.He was an “outside the wire” guy who knew the languages, culture and people of Afghanistan. Please remember him and his family in your prayers.
Anyone who knew Christian will recognize the smirk - damn ballsy move to pull in the middle of hell week at BUDs - look at how miserable everyone else looks
I have been victimized this week by a crashed internet system and one false start on this post. In addition when I do get a little net time I am engaged in several email conversations with FRI readers some of these are so good I may post them as standalone articles. Chris Chivers of the New York Times has been one of the readers I have been chatting with and it is his piece here which is the start point for this week’s post. This post will be unreasonably massive at times confusing but stick with it and I’ll tie all it all together in the end, inshallah. Bonus feature alert: this post includes a photo story board covering last Monday’s assassination attempt on President Karzai’s brother. I was on the road that day too with my faithful finance officer Misael, who hails from the island of Mindanao but claims to be a Catholic and not a Abu Sayef member. When we turned a corner in the Tangi Valley and saw all the expended brass in the road, he ignored his collateral duty as photographers mate and wedged himself firmly under the dash board. Misael has spent the last year in Kandahar and has developed an exaggerated sense of danger but I’ll get him snapped in soon enough. So there are only a few marginal pictures from a point and shoot camera due to the insistence of the ANP that we keep moving … probably a good idea.
Double bad news - being stuck behind an American convoy will triple the commute time to Kabul. Of greatrer concern is the lack of traffic heading east from Kabul. The Americans, oblivious to the fighting a few miles ahead, turned off shortly after we got stuck behind them
I commented last week that this story shows the way forward but I was talking in nuanced terms as our democratic leaders would say which is stateist speak for not telling the whole story. The article covers a rifle company from the 1st Battalion 26th Infantry as they conduct a 40 hour sweep in the Korangel Valley of Kunar Province. That the rifle company was conducting a sweep is the good part of the story everything else about it is, to the professional observer, bad. Let us start with the duration of this patrol … 40 hours. That amount of time outside the wire means the troops reached the limit of their endurance given the heavy loads they must carry. In the last war we fought that rifle companies patrolled on their own (Vietnam), patrolling outside the wire for only 40 hours would have been labeled light weight. The company patrol Chivers wrote about was anything but light weight – here is the story.
There was one General Officer who left Vietnam with his reputation not only intact but enhanced was Major General Razor Ray Davis of the 3rd Marine Division. He deployed his under strength, poorly equipped, infantry battalions out into the bush of Northern I Corps (near the DMZ between south and north Vietnam) to find fix and destroy the NVA maneuver regiments who infested the area. Forty hours? Try 21 days or more of patrolling and if they were not making contact he flew out, talked with the CO, called in a squadron of CH-46’s (the same Marine helicopters still in use today) and flew the battalion to an area that showed more promise. My father, an operations officer with one of those battalions, said they smelled so bad at the end of one of these sweeps that when flown out to a Navy LPH, the ship’s captain insisted they strip in the hanger bay throw all their uniforms (what was left of them) overboard and get hosed down with fire hoses before going anywhere else on his ship. That didn’t work out to well for the Captain in case you were wondering.
More bad news - fuel tankers running in a big group with armed security - and still no traffic heading east from Kabul. That means there is a large French or Amercan Convoy ahead or fighting on the road. The danger for us is when the traffic is allowed to flow east - they will come three abreast and as fast as their beater cars will take them. Vehicle accidents are the number one threat to outside the wire contractors followed by ISAF convoy gunners - the Taliban is a close third in our threat matrix.
What has changed? Several things, starting with the amount of armor our troops must wear and ending with the risk aversion and force protection mind set which has infused the United States Military . Between those two data points lies a chain of command which is designed to reflect responsibility away from senior officers a development that I, a retired professional, find reprehensible. Let me cover that last statement first and we can start right here to see the results of a military decision making by committee. The story is about the first female Air Force Academy graduate to die in Afghanistan. She was killed by a anti tank mine on the road between Bagram and Kabul. The road was built by the Soviets to bypass the Shomali Plains where they were constantly ambushed back in the day. I took Megan Ortagus, who was embedding with the Army, down that road a month ago and pointed out all the massive pot holes that local children from a recently established refugee camp fill with sand in hopes that passing vehicles will throw them some cash or water. I wish I had a picture but imagine this – the only road connecting our main airbase in Bagram with our bases in Kabul is full of potholes so big that kids are constantly filling them with sand so vehicles can drive at a reasonable pace. These holes are just the right size to hold a TC 6 or MK 7 anti tank mine – the most common mines here – and I pointed out to Megan that if we had a military focused on counterinsurgency the first thing they would have done (like 7 years ago) would have been to fix and seal the road between their main airhead and main bases. We are talking at most twenty miles or so of road and every night Terry Taliban could have been effortlessly seeding this route with antitank mines by the hundreds BECAUSE THE HOLES WERE ALREADY THERE AS WAS THE SAND TO COVER THE MINES. I also told Megan that when they do mine that road it will be an indicator of bloody times directly ahead. The only question now is who is going to do the bleeding us or our enemies? I don’t know, so lets get back to the story line.
Mk 7 mines - normally found on dirt roads or unsealed paved roadsTC 6 mine - normally found on dirt roads or unsealed paved roads
As I mentioned earlier, the forty hour patrol tested the limits of endurance of this rifle company for one simple reason – they carry too much weight. If you are going to go after insurgents who occupy the higher passes of the Hindu Kush Mountain Range (hint, hint) why in the name of God would you be wearing body armor and helmets? We had this kind of warfare figured out about 50 years ago when the Marine Corps established the Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California. A mountain warfare training rotation was most popular with the troops because they didn’t have to wear helmet and flak jackets during the training. All this talk about fielding lighter body armor is ridiculous – we should be talking about no body armor, no ballistic helmets, and patrols that go out and stay out when working places like the Korengal Valley. These days the Pentagon would recoil in horror at the mere thought of troops stepping one foot off a FOB without full ballistic protection these are the same officers and officials who reacted to the Mogadishu battle in 1993 by trying to buy more F- 32 ground superiority, center of excellence, air dominating, stealth, bat winged, frog footed, super quiet, swift, silent and deadly anti – guerilla fighter jet. I may have the nomenclature on that wrong. OK, OK, I’m making the plane up but what about armored protection for the vehicles used by ground troops? Did not the battle in the streets of Mogadishu illustrate the need for that? Apparently careful study by our military experts determined that armored vehicles and ballistic plates were not a legitimate requirement for ground combat. Not until Secretary Rumsfeld started taking heat after we had invaded Iraq did anyone find the money to armor up our vehicles and troops. But now the mere thought of operating without all the armor that the Pentagon was forced to buy about a decade after your average 7 year old could have figured out we should armor up some of our infantry vehicles and buy ballistic armor for all the troops now it is just inconceivable that they operate without it even when they are climbing around 12,000 foot mountain passes. Is it me or does this not strike you as stupid?
Typical result of blocking traffic for convoys - when the cars are able to travel at speed again they end up doing stuff like this. This picture was taken last Monday after a Frnch convoy moved through the Mahipar Pass
What happens when our men get shot you ask? I ask what happens when they don’t. Coach Vince Lombardi had the last word on this topic when he said “fatigue makes cowards of us all.” The argument against body armor is that too much weight causes physical exhaustion (lots of orthopedic injuries too) and physically exhausted troops are easier to hit. That they survive being hit is something which is good but I am firmly in the “I want to hit the enemy and not be hit myself” camp. I’ve been shot before and it hurts like hell so I’ll do most anything to avoid getting shot again. I’m all for ballistic armor in most times and places but we are talking serious mountains and you cannot conduct mountain warfare in armor – I don’t care how fit the force is. Hitting the enemy is what it is all about – and hitting the enemy is easier when you are not dehydrated and exhausted. Read some of the articles recently published by Mr. Chivers. He points out the enemy is physically weak, they appear malnourished, they can’t shoot a rifle with any accuracy, they cannot shoot mortars or machineguns in a remotly professional manner, nor can they coordinate among themselves. These guys suck at fighting so why are we not dominating them like the chumps they are? Why? Because we do not have a clearly defined mission and thus have no understanding of why we are here which results in extreme risk aversion because the only measurement of success is keeping your casualties low as humanly possible. That’s why.
One of the few pics I was able to get because Misael was being such a sissy - you can see the expended brass at these ANP troops feet. The fighting was long over by this time but the police were still insisting that traffic move along smartly
What is our mission in Afghanistan? I have been here four years and I don’t have a clue. If it is to prevent the return of the Taliban and al Qaeda, that mission was accomplished years ago. They will never be back in any kind of force regardless of when and how we leave. Is it to stand up a central government to allow the people of Afghanistan to join the rest of the functioning core of nation states? That is a noble mission and one I often used to explain why we are here years ago when I first started talking to local leaders in Shrua’s. But our actions on the ground do not remotely correspond to that mission (if that is why we are here.) How can you mentor Afghans if all your diplomats stay completely isolated from them inside a posh embassy throwing endless rounds of parties for each other? Look at the Afghan government. It is judged by all international observers to be in the top three nation sates for official corruption and you can see where all the billions we have spent has gone. Just like the TARP money it has disappeared into thin air and we have nothing to show for it.
The bad guys fired on Karzai's convoy from the high ground to the right. There are ANA soldiers stationed on in the hills to the left. The shooter bpicked out the largest, newest SUV in a 12 vehcile convoy and hit it repeatedly from way up the hillside. That normally takes a machinegun on a tripod with a T&E mechinsim and some stubby pencil math. You have top dope the gun for the elevation drop - lining up the sights will not work becasue the fall of shot is not a straight line. This was either some exceptionally good machinegunning or a very lucky shooter. Remember the ANA is on the adjacent hill not 300 meteres away when the shooter opened up. Karzai's brother - demonstrating better judgement than most Afghan VIP's was not sitting in the brand new SUV.
This is how big the disconnect is between the inside the wire military and the rest of us currently residing on planet earth – I lifted it from Michael Yon’s website earlier in the week: From: IDR-TCMC-Office Manager
TO:[Distribution list including contractors.]
Sent: Saturday, 16 May, 2009 4:52 PM
Greetings all;
The security state at KAF has been raised. Please ensure that all contractors at KAF, including visitors and transit personnel comply with the following instruction. The security dress state has changed to wearing Combat Body Armour and carrying Helmet when outside a hardened structure. Inside they are to be readily available. There is also now an additional alarm sounding which is a warbling alarm, and is the warning of a Ground Attack and all personnel should move inside a building and await further instructions. Instructions for Op ***** which will cover this procedure will be disseminated in the near future. All contractor personnel are to ensure that they carry their ID on them at all times. Further information is available from the TCMC if required.
Game On.
Game On? How about Game over? This is the law of unintended consequences in action and let me explain why. Our Department of State has insisted on letting the Afghan government do what it wants and one of things they have done is to make the possession of body armor, helmets, weapons, two way radios, and armored cars against the law unless you are a licensed security company. Every contractor on that base who owns and issues body armor and helmets to his or her employees has violated the law of the land. This, according to our military, is grounds for contract termination (failure to comply with all local laws). Check out my post here which was a cover feature in last March’s Soldier of Fortune magazine. This is what happens to contractors working outside the wire who have body armor – note also I had proper licenses. The NDS took the body armor from two MIT PhD candidates knowing full well they were clients and that we were operating in accordance with the law. But let us ignore the law like the State Department and our military do with their contractors and look at ramifications. Say I have 1000 men working construction aboard the Kandahar Airfield (KAF) and receive the memo above. It is now what military guys call a “specified task” meaning it must be addressed and I must comply or face mission failure. 1000 guys x $1800 or so for average body armor equal $1,800,000 which I would invoice immediately along with a contact modification. There are over 10,000 contractors working aboard KAF. Get the picture?
I never thought I'd see a Soviet BMP and American M 113 working side by side. the BMP looks cool but is pretty mnuch useless becasue it cannot elevate the cannon enough to fight in the mountains.
The military is not congress. They cannot impose unfunded mandates on their contractors. Why do all the construction guys, accountants, cooks, bakers, Timmy Horton’s coffee shop girls etc need body armor and helmets? So they can put them on after a missile hits? The Army used to pull that silly drill in Kabul back in 2005. A rocket would land somewhere in Kabul and all the bases and the embassy would sound alarms sending all hands into bunkers with helmets and body armor. But even the slowest force protection officer began to realize that taking measures to mitigate an event which has already occurred was stupid. But Tim, you ask, what if more missiles came? Well we have these things called counter- battery radars which have been around for about 30 years and they so good that the launch point of any indirect fire system is determined before the projectile lands. Even the illiterate peasants commonly conned into launching missiles have figured out that remaining at a launch site is certain death for them. There has not been an indirect fire attack involving volley after volley of rockets in this country since 2001. Not one. Unsurprisingly, this fact never stopped the force protection officers from insisting that all hands wear body armor and helmets after a rockets had landed in Kabul back in ’05. The troops, diplomats and others inside these compounds would only comply for, at most, four hours before they started taking the crap off because it was uncomfortable (and stupid.) When you do not have the time, talent or money to do what is important the unimportant becomes important and that is what the memo above is all about.
Contracting officers like the one who wrote the memo above have a very hard job. They can earn no glory, they do not receive praise, the best thing that can happen to them on a tour in Afghanistan is to return home with their rank and reputation. To avoid the temptation or appearance of fraud or favoritism they write requests for proposals which make little to no sense and award contracts based exclusively on the lowest bid submitted. What is the price for disconnecting contracting from performance? You get security guards hired to protect bases who actually murder American soldiers. I know of three such incidents and there are more. I had a friend show up at the Taj who was asked to stand up a guard force as soon as he could to replace an outfit named Golden State. There is no company by that name on the Afghan list of 37 authorized security companies. It was a rogue outfit run by some Afghans who spent time in America and their bid for these guard jobs was less than half what the reputable firms bid. They won, they sucked, they were fired and shot at their Army employers on the way out the door but, being typical Afghans, they did not hit anyone. I asked my buddy if the Army had finally figured out their guard forces needed international supervision and of course the answer was no. Too expensive don’t you see. Our Army will spend 2 million dollars each on ground penetrating radars to mount on the front of the hundreds of multimillion dollar MRAPs despite the fact that they HAVE NEVER DETECTED A MINE IN AFGHANISTAN. But spending money on proper guard forces to watch over our troops on a base oh no, that is just too expensive. Buying uniforms and proper boots for the American contractor mentored Afghan EOD teams who work outside the wire finding and disarming mines daily not enough money for them either. Unlike the massive American contracts to high tech companies that produce worthless gizmos or large just about worthless MRAPs every contract in this country goes to the lowest bidder – a game the Afghans figured out long ago.
Let me provide the yellow for anyone reading this who works in contracting and is interested in how to do it right. I got this tip from a good friend who used this technique in 2003 when he was here serving in the American army. You put out a bid for Afghan companies (I’m not talking armed guards which should always be done by reputable international companies) and you’ll get three bids. Take the lowest number and tell the Afghans this is the ceiling and they should bid lower and tender the bid again. Then take the lowest two bidders and tell them to bid against each other and that lowest bid will win. You will end up awarding projects for less than half of the original lowest bid. That is how you save money if saving money is what you want to do. Any other method is just plain head in the sand stupidity which ignores the experience of the Army and Marine units who used to range around the country like true professionals back in the day. That changed when the Big Army came into the country and started getting things organized (read everyone goes on big box FOB’s to be micro managed.)
I mentioned that reputable international security firms should be the only ones providing armed guards for military bases. What about the four Blackwater guys who shot and killed two Afghans after a traffic accident on Jalalabad Road in downtown Kabul? I have said in prior posts that Blackwater has a country manager who has been here longer than I have and is one of the most knowledgeable Americans I know on the state of play in Afghanistan. I have also written that the BW crews I see outside the wire working with the Afghan Border Police are first rate and I am always happy to know they are out and about when I am working the districts of Nangarhar Province. They hardly ever get out and about now by the way, but that is a topic for another day. I stand by that and can surmise that the four individuals involved in this incident shot that Afghans for exactly the same reason that ISAF soldiers have killed about 500 civilians in their vehicles and that is because the car “was threatening.” I don’t know what that means because I live and operate outside the wire and know that Afghan drivers do all sorts of crazy things, none of which seem too threatening to me. Inside the wire types do not think like the thousands of guys (and gals) who are with me outside the wire. They have no front specific knowledge, even after being in country for months and months, because they live on FOB’s. Fobbits have no meaningful interaction with Afghans. That is the nature of the fobbit. They get front specific knowledge from Hollywood movies or dime store novels written by former SAS men or from the many “gun store commando” schools which have popped up in America, Britain and elsewhere. Apparently the Blackwater guys are now on their way home and will probably avoid prosecution just like all the troops who have killed civilians here in the past. They should be in jail awaiting prosecution to fullest extent of law. Being a gun store commando is no excuse for murder and that is exactly what those four committed.
This brings us to the story which will not go away the civilians killed in an ISAF air strike in Farah Province. I pointed out in my last post that the United States military doesn’t even have white phosphorous rounds (called Willie Pete or WP) in the inventory a fact which was contradicted by C.J. Chivers himself in the story linked above. I saw this post by some anti war blogger which sited Chivers piece as proof that ISAF was lying about the entire incident. I was forced to go to Google and yes, it turns out there are now Willie Pete rounds in the inventory for our field artillery. I am still right about the Farah incident that was Tac Air, not field artillery and Tac Air does not have WP munitions. Willie Pete is used by Americans to mark targets for tactical aircraft to bomb. The last thing anyone on the ground wants to see is a jet jockey who is traveling around 400 mph at 25,000 feet above the battle believing he has the situational awareness to drop bombs where he thinks they are needed. Only in the fevered imaginations of Hollywood producers and Air Force Academy cadets would that make sense. In the real world you shoot a marking round, ask the pilot does he see the mark and if he does you tell him how far away from the mark, using meters a simple compass bearings, the target is and then you give him the direction of attack. The key to using Tac Air is to not allow the pilot to do any thinking at all he does exactly what you tell him and any deviation should result in an immediate abort call followed by a healthy round of cussing at him (or her these days) and then sending the offender home with all his stores so everyone back at the base knows he is a liability who cannot follow directions. Failure to follow these simple rules results in the alarming sight of pilots yelling tally ho and coming straight at you. If you let pilots think they can figure out what is happening on the ground without terminal guidance you they end up bombing Canadian field training exercises, or Marine Corps LAV’s.
That is what WP is for and the only reason why you would not use it against enemy troops in the open is that artillery batteries only load out with so much WP but lots of HE (high explosives.) Were I an infantry commander who saw dozens of enemy troops in the open and had enough Willie Pete (better yet the felt wedge red phosphorus rounds) I’d volley a battalion six on top of them in a heartbeat. It would cause all kinds of gruesome third degree burns and after stripping the survivors of their weapons and radios I’d pay the locals to haul the wounded back to Pakistan where they could die a lingering painful death from infection. There is no law of land warfare against hitting troops with WP or RP rounds not treating them would be a clear violation of international law and if I really did something like that as an active duty Marine I would face a well deserved courts martial. Still it is a good tactic pumps up the troops, demoralizes our enemies, lets the tribal leaders in Pakistan know we are serious about making them calm down and they even might stop cutting the heads off of every stranger wondering about the FATA. But RP rounds cost a lot more than HE rounds and that too would get you in hot water with a Marine chain of command. The only time in the history of the Marine Corps a unit fired hundreds of expensive smoke rounds occurred during the battle of Khe San. On Saint Patrick’s Day 1968 the 10th Marines fired hundreds green smoke rounds into all known and suspected NVA positions in the hills around that embattled outpost. That not only motivated the troops but got rid of the rounds the Marines couldn’t take with them when they abandoned the base.
Back to the incident in Farah Province: The locals claim we killed over 150 innocents which I can promise you is a gross exaggeration that is unverifiable due to our insistence on respecting local religious traditions. Of course if there were 150 bodies buried outside that village in Farah and we insisted on paying compensation for say 24 bodies the locals would be digging up the others with great haste to get the additional money but again, I digress. There are several things about this incident that are critical to understanding why we are failing in Afghanistan. The first is President Karzai’s insistence that we stop using tactical aircraft under all circumstances. You cannot fight a counterinsurgency without the complete and total cooperation of the government you are trying to support. It cannot be done. The continued alienation of the President of Afghanistan (and he is going to win again in August of that I am certain), cannot continue if we hope to ever make progress on our fight to bring security to the people of this country. The continued use of the MSM preferred narrative degrades our counterinsurgency fight and the information warriors of the American military do nothing about this from their desks on the big box FOB’s. They cannot even see .af, .com; or .edu websites on military computers all they see is .mil websites. I know, you can’t make this kind of strangeness up. The detail in this story one for which I was taken to task at Registan.net is the ability of the Taliban to come into a village and force the people to act as human shields at the point of a gun.
I have said before that driving around Kabul like a bat out of hell is stupid and results in dead civilians and injured troops. This is one of the reasons that the government of Iraq has now banned all "tactical" driving and I am sure the Afghans are not far behind.
It seems that a healthy percentage of our no knock HVT Special Forces raids result in the killing of local men who, as expected, grab their guns and race out of their compounds to help defend their neighbors. Yet every report we see of the Taliban using villagers as human shields implies that no local men put up armed resistance. Does that make sense to you? The local men are more than willing to fight our tier one Special Forces operators, yet cower in fear and act like a flock of sheep when groups of Taliban show up in the village? The truth is somewhere in the middle no group of Taliban is going to heard a bunch of Shinwari (dominate Nangarhar Pashtun tribe) into a hut and shower them with Willie Pete grenades and get away with it. But they could do that to the Kuchi villagers of Little Barabad because that village is surrounded by Shinwari tribal peoples who could give a rat’s patootie about the Kuchi’s and would not lift a finger to help them. Clearly there are villages that are vulnerable to Taliban intimidation but they are a minority. There are four kinds of tribes in Afghanistan; ones that want to be left alone (Nuristan and Kunar Provinces have many of them); ones that are interested in making money and cooperate with both sides to do just that (the Shinwari are the classic example); tribes clearly affiliated with the Taliban mostly in the south; and tribes that want our help to bring security and reconstruction to their lands that would be all the tribes of the north, most of the west, some in the east and none in the south. Our answer to this complex human mosaic is to treat all tribes exactly the same. Again does that make sense to you?
Our current military Afghan Campaign can best be illustrated by the old Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike parable. We cannot take our finger out of the dike or it will implode, we cannot try something new to solve the problem of a small breach in the dike because we are afraid it will make the problem worse. Every year the commander rotates and a new guy puts his finger in the dike hoping against hope that the dike will not fail on his watch. At the end of that year he goes home to never again worry himself about Afghanistan, its peoples or its problems. We can do better but that takes a leader with the understanding and ability to change our approach radically. That could have happened if the plan floated by General Conway to let the Marines handle Afghanistan was accepted Generals Mattis, or Kelley, or Allen any of them have the character and ability to change a failing strategy and they have junior General Officers like Hummer, Osterman, and Nicholson (to name a few) to back them up along with a lions’ brood of experienced combat infantry colonels (the army probably has a bunch with equal ability and talent, I just don’t know them and they do not appear to be operating in Afghanistan.) But that is not going to happen so we wait for the next rotation of Big Army and our NATO allies to come put their fingers in the dike while spending billions and billions of dollars we do not have pursuing a strategy that is guaranteed to fail.
It is time to turn the ole gimlet eye onto the news starting with this article about the killing of a little girl by the Italian army ISAF contingent in Herat. which I want to compare to the current civilian casualty flap in Farah Province where over 100 people are reported to have been killed in ISAF air strikes. In my opinion one these incidents should result in a murder charge and the other is the way things have to be but we are not managing that message well at all.
The facts as reported about the Italian shooting seem very clear. They overtook a civilian vehicle but reported it to be driving at high speed they claim to have fired warning shots but TV footage of the car shows it was hit repeatedly in the left rear quarter panel area indicating the shooter was behind the vehicle. The shooting resulted in the death of a 12 year old girl and the Italians drove right past after shooting this car load of people without even stopping. That is murder. There is no way to justify it as anything else based on the facts presented in the news article. Most civilian traffic will attempt to stay in front of convoys because once overtaken you’ll join 100’s of other vehicles in a miles long 20 mph rat line. Which of course is point #1 how can the Italians overtake a racing car in their armored troop carriers? They can’t.
It is a common technique for suicide bombers to slow down and wait for a convoy to draw close and then detonate their IED. It is also common for the slow moving traffic to pull over allowing military convoys to overtake them. These convoys pass vehicles all the time but they will light up vehicles they suspect to be VBIED’s. It’s a poor tactic due to the compressed time/distance ratio.
Colonel John Boyd, USAF (Ret) developed the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) Loop theory after an analysis of air to air engagements during the Korea conflict. The Soviet MiG-15 was faster than the American F-86 Sabre and were operating from Chinese airfields close to the front. The F-86 squadrons were flying from the south and would arrive with maybe 15 minutes of fuel to burn before they were forced to head home. The MiG could out-climb the Sabre at all altitudes, and it had a greater operational ceiling.
But the MiG had design flaws resulting in poor control at high speeds, a low rate of roll and directional instability at high altitudes. Boyd recognized that the way of taking advantage of these flaws was to enter a series of intricate turns designed to make the MiG react to the Sabre. Once the MiG was committed it just a matter of time before the Sabre was able convert his high speed maneuver advantage to get a gun solution using the K14 radar gun-sight, which was designed to use derivative movement information for the firing solution.
For earthbound gunfighters the OODA loop also has great utility. The best example would be the famous (in my circles anyway) Tueller drill. Named after Salt Lake City Police Sergeant Dennis Tueller it is a simple demonstration of perceived vs actual risk. The drill assumes an assailant armed with an edged weapon is being uncooperative and is designed to show how close is too close in that situation. The assailant stands back to back with a shooter who has a holstered pistol and is facing a target 7 yards away. On cue the assailant starts to run and stops when he hears the pistol report. The shooter presents his weapon to the target and delivers a controlled pair center mass. A well trained shooter using a good rig and pistol can deliver a controlled pair from the holster in 1.1 to 1.3 seconds – about the time it takes a young adult male to cover the 21 feet.
This MRAP was hit by a three wheel cab on the Jalalabad/Kunar bridge. There were no serious injuries to the soldiers in this attack.
Twenty one feet is about three car parking spaces or the length of a slightly bigger than average room. Most people feel safe with that much room between them and a stranger. If an assailant starts at you full speed from that distance only the best trained top tier shooters in the world have a chance of presenting a pistol and firing two effective shots. And that is only if they have already decided to shoot; the step in the OODA loop model which takes the longest to work through. The Tueller drill is a perfect example of training designed to improve OODA loop decision making. By illustrating how close is too close and reinforcing the concept with dynamic training the students learn how to make the critical shoot don’t shoot decision faster based off legitimate state of the art training.
This is how the army would like to travel. This is the Jbad truck by-pass and is normally not too crowded.
Which brings us to ISAF convoys and machinegunners; ISAF convoys over take civilian traffic and pass on coming civilian traffic as a matter of routine. Convoy gunners are responsible for recognizing potential threats, warning them to keep their distance, and firing on them when that warning is ignored. Although ISAF convoys are slow they will still close with on coming traffic at a rate of 60 feet per second which is 3.5 car lengths. On a flat road with perfect visibility a convoy gunner has about 60 seconds – the time it takes a vehicle to reach him from just outside the max effective range of his machine gun – to determine if a vehicle is a threat. There are very few places in Afghanistan with that much flat terrain – my guess would be that the average civilian car to ISAF convoy encounter is around 10 to 15 seconds long. What do you think it would take to get your attention, have you orient your weapon, then make the critical friend or foe decision before firing into an oncoming car?
Convoy’s could never keep vehicles from crowding in around them in urban areas. This is downtown Jalalabad and the soldiers in this convoy have been in country for months are relaxed.
To distinguish potential threats in the normal chaotic local traffic clutter requires gunners with enough knowledge to apply the rule of opposites. Suicide vehicle drivers tend to have a signature, they tend to behave erratically, and in order to detect one in time to warn and engage him you would have to detect him a long way off. If you think through this process – especially while driving so you can do a little real time war gaming – you will come to the same conclusion I have. And that is our counter VBIED measures will never work because it is not possible for a soldier to complete the OODA loop and reach an informed firing solution given the small amount of time, short distances, and number of innocent people who drive like lunatics in Afghanistan. You cannot recognize a VBIED that fast – not possible – so why the hell are we still shooting 12 year old girls in this country?
When a large bureaucracy like the Pentagon is faced with making a major decision regarding an issue as complex as Afghanistan experienced observers know they will see one of two approaches. The first (and by far rarest) option is a radical departure from current operational methods representing a new way forward. The way soldiers from the SBS and Delta handled the fight in Tora Bora during the opening month of the war on terror sorry I guess it is now “overseas contingency operations” is a good example. Faced with a complex battlefield containing armed factions of dubious loyalty and motivation they improvised using small units to maneuver firepower in place of the manpower they did not have.
Their solutions or “lessons learned” according to the unit commander, Dalton Fury, were not recorded in the Army after action system and they have been forgotten probably because taking a truly decentralized approach when deploying American fighting forces is completely alien to senior Colonels and General Officers. The second and by far most common approach from the Pentagon is to do “more of the same but do it faster and better.” That is what the generals tried to sell President Bush back when he sold the surge idea to them. And it appears that is what the generals or most probably the national security team have sold President Obama. It will fail. Dismally.
There has been only one document I have seen in the last three months which shows a clear coherent understanding of the situation in Afghanistan. It was written by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and can be found here. Congressman Rohrabacher is “speaking truth to power” when he writes;
“America then put its emphasis on establishing a central government based in Kabul as the dominant authority in Afghanistan, something no one – foreign or Afghan – has been able to do for centuries.
…A genuine commitment to decentralizing power and authority in Afghanistan is only part of the solution, but a critical one. This is difficult for military leaders, schooled in chains of command and top-down structure, to comprehend.”
The performance of our General Officer Corps in both Iraq and Afghanistan seems to back the good Congressman. They were not comfortable with and had to be forced into the decentralized operations which worked so well during the Iraq surge. They have been unwilling to operate in a decentralized manner in Afghanistan with the notable exception of the U. S. Marine Corps Special Purpose Task Force Afghanistan. That unit has repeatedly fought two to three hundred man Taliban formations with reinforced rifle platoons and beat them like a drum. They are now enjoying unrestricted freedom of movement and bringing security to the remote areas of Farah and Helmand Provinces. But there are only so many Marines the US Army, which continues to favor large isolated bases from which they can commute to the war, is clearly not inclined to operate in a similar fashion and our other allies do not have the ability (even those who have the will) to conduct full spectrum combined arms counterinsurgency warfare.
Defensive tactics which do not conform to counterinsurgency doctrine, are stupid, unsafe, and cause needles casualties. Here are three car loads of American soldiers in uniform driving like lunatics down the Jalalabad road in Kabul. They would be much safer if they spread out, mixed with civilian traffic and drove in a reasonable manner like us normal people do. But it is too much fun for these young men to speed around blocking traffic, forcing slow moving cars off the road, and being a general pain in the ass to the public at large. Not smart, not safe, not reasonable.
Large military formations are not only a hindrance to progress they are completely unnecessary. They seem to be part of a new strategy, hinted at but not so far reviled, of controlling the population centers and the main roads while attempting to bring redevelopment aid to the rural population. That my friends was the Soviet plan a plan that worked good enough for them to bring in about 80 times the redevelopment aid in their first eight years when compared to our bloated, inefficient, risk adverse efforts. I hear this from Afghans all the time by the way and I mean all the time – “why can’t the most powerful country on earth do a little better than the godless Soviets?” What can one say? I don’t know but I do know that there are hundreds thousands of unemployed young men in this country and each of them has only one goal in life and that is to get together enough money to get married. This is a powerful motivator in societies which strictly ban contact between men and woman unless they are direct family or married. These guys will go where the money is and right now the various Armed Opposition Groups (AOG) around the country are paying much better wages to those who will plant an IED or take a few shots at the infidels.
Now here is something interesting reportedly Joe Biden and “Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg, who argued in closed-door meetings for a minimal strategy of stabilizing Afghanistan that one source described as a “lowest common denominator” approach.” According to the linked article (from Bill Gertz who is a complete and total stud in my book for the excellent books he has authored) “The Holbrooke-Petraeus-Clinton faction, according to the sources, prevailed. The result is expected to be a major, long-term military and civilian program to reinvent Afghanistan from one of the most backward, least developed nations to a relatively prosperous democratic state.”
I hate to say this but I am on Joe Biden’s side of the debate. The way forward is using small teams comprised of civilians and military living in fortified compounds an working with Afghan officials at the district, province and shura level. Using the classic inkblot approach we could set up multiple teams in districts where the shura’s have invited them to come and help. Pashtunwali cuts both ways and we could use that code to our advantage by getting the invite in and holding leaders accountable when bad things happen in their respective villages. Bad things will happen by the way and it is important that we demonstrate resolve and commitment when they do. The ability to operate, even in hostile areas, with small groups is something I have blogged about in the past here, here and here. We did it before in 2001 and need to do it again because it is effective and very cheap. Last time I checked the United States was pretty much broke so the cost thing should be important. But more importantly there is am imperative documented in our doctrine yet ignored by our senior military leaders and that is YOU CANNOT COMMUTE TO A COUNTERINSURGENCY.
That tactic exposes your forces to the IED threat costing you in men and material while you gain nothing, win nothing, bring nothing to the people we are supposed to be helping, in short you spend American blood for not tangible good reason at all and that my friends is a crime. Passive risk adverse tactics cost more blood than going aggressive just look at the Marines down south for validation but we are building more FOB’s and sending more “presence patrols” out to be ambushed and shot up by enemies they cannot see or understand because they are isolated from the people and don’t know a damn thing about anything outside their respective FOB’s.
The kind of approach I advocate could produce an acceptable endstate by its very design. Go into the districts, finish the irrigation, road and school work which has already been identified in Provincial plans, and go home. Continue with the effort to train the Afghan military and use the embedded trainers and their units as your localized react force and you have a plan which conforms to current counterinsurgency doctrine. Low footprint, effective, pennies on the dollar to what we currently spend to support all the people we have deployed here the vast majority of whom never leave the bases to which they are assigned.
But we are not doing that. We are bringing in more forces and placing them on FOB’s. There is an expected “surge” of civilian experts but civilians operating under Department of State or US Military security rules are isolated from the population and of little use they tend to hit the DFAC early and horde the pecan pie too which is completely unsat. I was shut out seven days in a row in Kabul on the pecan pie front and am bitter I don’t get to eat at DFAC’s much which is why I get a little carried away on this whole pie thing. It seems from reporting that we are bringing in experts to help the central government build its capacity to administer this fractious land. That’s a great goal but it is also more of the same. Supporting a central government which is clearly every bit as much of a problem for the average citizen of Afghanistan as the warlords/Taliban are is not going to work well for anyone except the companies who win the lucrative contracts to bring civilian “experts” over here. This “Civilian Surge” is supposed to include a ton of lawyers and judges. What the hell do American lawyers and judges know about Afghan legal practices? From the perspective of an American patriot I can state unequivocally that:
– The lawyers and judges will have zero impact on the Afghan legal system.
– There will never be enough Taliban car bombs, IED’s or direct fire attacks around Kabul to weed out these damn lawyers while they are in a combat zone and vulnerable. (I know lawyer jokes are easy but they are also hard to resist sometimes.)
So if they will make exactly the same contribution their peers have made in the last 8 years (that would no contribution at all) and there is no chance of enough of the lawyers getting killed over here to reduce their numbers and parasitic impact on the American people why send them at all?
Here is a Turkish Army convoy heading into a FOB behind a convoy of French paratroopers. The Turks never drive fast, mix in with the local traffic and do not man turret guns in the capitol. The Afghan civilians like the Turks a lot and go out of their way to point out the difference between how the Turks operate when compared to American, British, and French forces. A head of this group were two truck loads of Norwegian Special Forces who travel like I do in unarmored local vehicles. If I had gotten a picture of them and posted it I suspect I’d be inundated by requests from young women to come intern with Free Range International. The guys looked like young Vikings and they should be out with us doing good deeds daily with us rather than forced to sortie out of a large FOB
Here is an original idea. Not that original actually I got the idea from Old Blue. We have many other nations joining us here under the flag of the International Security Forces Afghanistan (ISAF) flag. These allies include military formations from Muslim countries such as Turkey and the UAE. Why not break them down into Provincial level so that our Muslim allies can provide legal and governance guidance? Forget using American lawyers, or judges, or correctional officers who do not know a thing about this country or its people. Let some of our Muslim allies step up the plate and do some heavy lifting. But the Department of State already has programs to provide police, legal, and correctional training with mentorship to foreign nations. They do not required any original thinking or customization and can be implemented with little effort and supervision by our overworked State Department bureaucrats. That these programs have not produced one iota of positive change since they started several years ago is irrelevant (apparently) to our government.
Another important point these civ mil teams should have females attached. The reason for this is that women in Afghanistan wield significant power inside the family compound walls. They may not be able to go to the bazaar without a male relative but inside their home it is a different story. They will rat out the men folk in a heartbeat if they think they (the men) are doing stupid things. Now imagine this you’re a man sitting in your home and you tell your wife “Mohammad and I are going to go out tonight and set in some IED’s for cash.” How many of you men out there could say that and just screw off with your mates for the night? Think things are different here? Think again guys wives are wives and your average Afghan will pull this kind of stuff at his own peril. Because the wives will exact their revenge not directly mind you but indirectly. Last summer when Amy Sun and her MIT crew were here was the first time I realized how powerful women are in Afghan society. Now the San Diego Sister Cites program had brought over another young woman who has never been in a post conflict zone and you can find her blog here. I do not know her well and have no idea what she will do and experience during her visit but I know Afghanistan and she is in for a treat follow her blog she writes well and see for yourself. And remember she is demonstrating how freedom of action and the ability to interact with the local population in an unrestricted manner can bring rapid improvement and understanding with that population. We have doctrine which stresses this point but do not have commanders willing or able to execute that doctrine.
The newest Milblogger in Jalalabad
Here is an extract from this recent report about our new strategy in Afghanistan:
Most of the American reinforcements are being deployed to the south of the country, a Taliban stronghold that is one of the largest opium-producing regions in the world. U.S. and NATO officials believe that the drug trade provides the Taliban with billions of dollars each year.
The Obama administration hopes to undercut the Taliban by launching a new counter-narcotics offensive in the Helmand River Valley and other parts of southern Afghanistan. The mission will be the primary focus of the U.S. reinforcements.
Under one facet of the plan, U.S. or Afghan troops will first offer Afghan farmers free wheat seed to replace their crops that produce opium. If the farmers refuse, U.S. or Afghan personnel will burn their fields, and then again offer them free replacement seeds. A senior U.S. military official described the approach as a “carrot, stick, carrot” effort.
I assume this bit a strategic wisdom has been blessed by the new ambassador our first active duty general to become an ambassador who was here as the guy in charge years ago. Back when General Eikenberry assumed command in Afghanistan we could drive down to Kandahar with no problem. By the time he left that was a guaranteed fire fight unless you were embedded in a military convoy and many of them were getting attacked too. It is impossible to generate “change you can believe in” using the same people who have yet to demonstrate any original thinking on this complex problem. Carrot, stick, carrot my ass. That is stick, stick and more stick at the end of which the poor farmer sells his 9 y/o daughter for 500 bucks to give the rest of your family a chance to make it through the winter. Wheat seed who thinks up this kind of madness?
Here is another tip for the military that is going to have to implement this new “mo better” plan. An Afghan farmer with a poppy crop in the ground has gone into considerable debt to get that crop started. Destroying his fields will leave him with nothing. He will be forced to sell his children to get out from under his debt to the drug lords. The fields belonging to the rich and powerful have never been touched to date by the poppy eradication teams and they won’t under this new strategy because the Afghan government will not allow them to be touched. I know that the media says drugs are fueling the insurgency and they are certainly contributing but the real winners in the drug trade are the landowners who rent the lots, seed and fertilizer to share croppers. Those land owners can be found in Kabul and Dubai as well as Quetta and Peshawar. Our government knows this heck even the main stream media is getting around to figuring this out too. The large majority of Taliban make their money on the transport and security portions of the pipeline which is chump change compared to the big bucks being made by the land owners.
So as the new surge rolls out the mandarins of Kabul are most pleased they will make millions providing (or leaning on the providers) secure isolated giant FOB’s. They will be able to skim millions from the completely ridiculous and ineffective police and legal “mentoring programs” which has already deployed thousands of European and American police officers to Kabul where they toil daily in a secure purpose built facility churning out paperwork and having absolutely no impact at all on the ability of the Afghan police to do their jobs. They will make tons of money knowing full well the programs they are skimming millions from will not produce anything for the average Afghan which will allow them to retain power. Change you can believe in? Right.
I had a great interview with Jake Allen from the Combat Operator Ezine. He is just as talented on the radio as he is with the pen and it turns out we had met each other several years ago when his former rifle company commander Dave Furness and I dropped by his home in Salt Lake City. In the small world department I should be seeing the good Colonel tomorrow night when he swings through Kabul. Colonel Furness is irritating over two decades of infantry service, multiple combat tours, and he remains in perfect shape and looks like he’s about 37 years old. Smart as a whip, writes way better than I do, no bad back or trick knee or even good scars but a great friend and I could not be prouder seeing him doing so well. There was that kidney stone incident which (unfortunately for Dave) was witnessed by then Captain now Colonel Eric Mellinger acknowledged as one of the best comedic talent amongst our generation of infantry officers. That is a great story involving surprise, suspense, danger (Dave was driving when the stone hit) lots of bad language and a surprise ending. But you won’t get it from me if there is a Marine lurking out there looking for Mess Night material the FRI blog respects the USMC bashido code so you’ll have to look elsewhere. But it is a damn funny story and one which the good Colonel is most reluctant to tell.
Jake and I had wide ranging interview which touched on contractors and reconstruction a topic which is leading current news cycles. You can listen to the interview here. For those who are interested in the private security market you should bookmark Jake’s ezine he is an excellent writer and has a very astute read on the industry. Private security contracting is a growth industry and Jake covers the industry better than any other writer I know.
Afghanistan could use some civilian fire/rescue mentors with modern trucks and equipment. Especially if they could call in medevac birds and use the excellent military trauma centers for serious auto accident victims. That is the kind of operation which would generate nothing but goodwill from your average Afghan
The “civilian surge” has been a topic getting much press as of late. There is little question that Afghanistan could benefit from a surge of civilian reconstruction types with the money and the ability to fund and supervise redevelopment projects. The question is will this “civilian surge” contain people who can do that. Judging from the feeding frenzy I am seeing in the private security market my guess is the answer is no. There are several large US AID prime contractors operating here and they all share similar traits. They have large corporate headquarters in Washington DC. They protect their field teams with expatriate security operatives and live in heavily fortified compounds which is consistent with the contracts they have been awarded. They have lots of corporate overhead to pay for. When they deploy teams into the Provinces it takes a ton of money. Because these are large corporations who are performing a very large contracts the management of money is very strict which I appreciate as a taxpayer but it slows everything down, especially on large complex projects.
I want to be clear about the fact that these companies are running good programs and are executing their assigned projects professionally. There is no question the people on the ground working for these companies are doing great work no question. The point is a ton of money for these projects goes into the front end and most of it is siphoned off before any comes out the receiving end. That fact which is a common complaint aired by Afghan politicians in the local press and thus a point not lost on the Afghan population is compounded with the lack of urgency and commitment with which aid is being delivered.
Work for cash programs can briefly employ massive amounts of manpower. But it takes internationals in the districts to allow these programs to make a significant impact
As I have said many times before you can still travel throughout the majority of Afghanistan without elaborate security measures. Internationals can set up very secure living compounds using the United Nations Minimum Operational Security Standards (UN MOSS) for about half the cost of building a compound to meet the standards on US AID contracts. We need a surge of civilians but it should be a surge of armed contractors who are able to live in the communities with local security. I blogged about exactly that kind of program here and it is this type of cost effective reconstruction that will be effective because it allows capacity building in Afghan firms while keeping the majority of the reconstruction dollars in the Afghan economy.
I would take that concept one step further by saying we should also consider attaching teams of armed contractors directly to maneuver military units. They could represent one of several current US AID programs which are designed to fund and mentor small to medium Afghan businesses. That would instantly magnify the already considerable positive economic impact of the current Commanders Emergency Funds Program (CERP) by allowing a commander to turn to his civvie contractor team and say “I want to get the machinery in here to open this green marble quarry find a program that can fund it.” That would take one phone call right to the ops guy in Kabul for ASMED or one of the many other US AID programs set up to create Afghan enterprises and you’re funded. Working with US AID money is a pain due to the required accounting and reporting procedures but with a small staff embedded into the military you can manage the paperwork delivering aid and starting capitol with precision. And it is dirt cheap compared to how we are doing it now and better yet it would directly support the efforts of maneuver commanders who are on the ground and know much more about what is needed than their US AID or State counterparts in Kabul.
The French are getting better at moving through the constricted Mahipar Pass. They are much more relaxed too as they have gotten very used to running this road which leads to Surobi
Also mentioned in the podcast was a current shortage of weapons in the Kabul area. I was trying to find a good pistol for a friend and discovered that all the old sources are not selling any weapons at the moment. There are a hundred theories floating about concerning why this is the case I have my suspicions but don’t really know. What I can say with authority that it is not a positive sign. And then this pops up today in the media. Ten policemen and a district chief ambushed way up north in Jawzjan Province. There were some dusts ups in that province last summer between the police and armed fighters representing who knows but they didn’t amount to much with the ANP easily driving off their antagonists. The provincial chief of police says the Taliban were responsible and that he has also arrested four of the attackers. That is hard to believe so I put a call into the Bot but he’s in Mazar-e-Sharif which is completely locked down due to today’s New Years visit by the foreign ministers from Iran and Tajikistan. He’s not too sure Taliban would be poking around up there but is alarmed with the proficiency of the bad guys who did this one. Ten killed, four more wounded – that was an ambush conducted with a good degree of skillful planning and execution. We would hate to see that kind of stuff happening with any degree of regularity.
As I said the Bot is on lockdown but I’m not sure what that means. Here is more or less the end of our conversation.
Bot “On lock down mate going to go on the piss with the boys”
Me “how are you going to go on the piss if you’re locked down?”
Bot “I’m not that locked down mate for God sakes man”
Me “Oh then what does lockdown mean?”
Bot “It means I’m going on the piss mate what’s the problem”
Me “You know what I mean where is my Blog post?”
Bot “Now you done it mate XXXXXX and further more mate here is another fact XXXXXXXXXX etc”
I can’t print the rest because then this post won’t get through my Dad’s net nanny which would precipitate a harsh email from him with foul language which somehow escapes his net nanny via the outlook program. Who knows how that works? For the hundreds who have asked the Shem Bot is fine and will post again once he has recovered from being “locked down.”
The Fab Folk continue to work like demons to maximize their time on the ground. Yesterday they had successful test shots with their fabricated internet antennas to both a local NGO and the Nangarhar Public Hospital. They work every evening setting up the XO laptops they have sent in and early each morning they meet for a couple of hours to learn Pashto. Their teacher comes from the local school and is a life-long resident of the local village. He tells me that, despite the very mild winter we have had to date, that poverty is driving people to desperate measures. Frequently voices call out to him from the shadows at night “we are Taliban give us your wallet, watch and cell phone.” They are not Taliban but men he has known for years. I asked why this was happening because our understanding of Pashtun culture would prohibit such gross criminality inside one’s own community. “Yes this is true but we are now so poor that the elders do not ask young men where they got this or where they got that they praise them instead for bringing anything of value which will ease their poverty.” This is just a hint at the amount of tension under the surface of a population located in one of the more affluent portions of Afghanistan. Across the river at Little Barabad (official name) or Tutikas (the villagers do not like the official name) the villagers cut down their large shade tree which served as the communal meeting place and picnic site. The wood is not for them – it was sold to a “rich man” to generate cash to buy medicine for several of the children.
We have been running the road to Kabul a lot as of late taking people to and from the Airport in Kabul. A couple of days ago we took Dr. Dave and Dr. Art Mendoza back to Kabul for their flight home and saw the aftermath of a big fight the night before. We were warned prior to leaving by another security firm (we share all intel at all times in the field) that there had been much fighting outside Gamberi and sure enough when we got to the point in the road where the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) had set up on the shoulders we saw this:
Looking east from the ANP position
Apparently a group of Armed Opposition Group (AOG) fighters sneaked up the draw between the ANA and ANP positions and shot up the truck above with small arms and RPG’s. They then fired at both the ANP positions to their west and the ANA positions to their east before withdrawing across the Kabul River. The ANA and ANP spent the next hour or so firing at each other. By the time we rolled past the ANA had taken their casualties and withdrawn leaving the poor police to sit in their shallow little holes to suck up all the rain we have been getting of late.
We are convinced that somebody in Laghaman Province is running an RPG gunners school because we see reports of RPG-only attacks on police posts along this portion of the road every 4 to 5 weeks. Normally they volley 10 rounds in rapid succession and withdraw causing little to no damage. But we know there is at least one RPG mechanic out there (most likely in Laghman) who can really put some English on his rockets and make very difficult shots consistently. I bet he has a group of students he is working with and what better way to train them then to take on the softest of soft targets like the silly deployment of ANA and ANP forces five feet off the main road? You could tell just by looking at them they had no fire plans, no fire control measures, and probably no plan at all. What they need is not more PowerPoint lectures from DynCorp contractors they need mentors with them in the field and there are not enough here.
Yesterday I was returning from dropping off James the Marine and because I had no choice had to make the return drive alone. As I rounded the Mahipar Pass I saw a wall of trucks pulled off to the side which indicated some sort of blockage in the tunnel. I drove far enough to get a look before turning around and saw it was a U.S. Army convoy stopped right in the middle of the pass. Once the traffic stops flowing in Afghanistan it is very difficult to start it going again because all the east bound traffic will move into every nook and cranny available to their front and block the road. It takes a good hour to get them out of your way so that a convoy can move again. But I was ready checking my wallet to find 100 Euros there I turned around and headed back to the German PX at the ISAF camp outside Kabul to score some premium German beer (at only 12 euro a case) figuring if I had to drive back in the dark I might as well do so with a truck load of beer.
The American convoy is stopped and the vehicles are stacking up behind it. The same is true to their fron so when they start moving they will have to thread their way through the local traffice which sort of defeats the whole purpose of keeping the traffic away from them at all times. It also makes it easier for the bad guys to target them.
Sure enough when I made it back to the Mahipar Pass it was clear and I was smoothly driving for the next 45 minutes until I got outside Surobi. Rounding a corner I saw all the trucks parked in the right lane and taking the left lane I moved far enough down to see the same convoy parked in the middle of the road. They sat there for 30 minutes and then took another 30 minutes to get moving before stopping again maybe five miles down the road. I had worked my way up to the front of the line by then and 45 minutes into this stop I approached the convoy tail gunner to ask if they would let me through. He got on the radio and in a few minutes said “no because the road to the front is blocked (by the west bound traffic) and I couldn’t make it through anyway.” I asked him what the problem was and he replied “don’t know” which is exactly the correct answer because he has no business telling me a damn thing just because I’m a lone American with a CAC card. He brushed me off without a moment’s hesitation like a real pro I like seeing that kind of heads up thinking by our troops.
But the longer we sat the more upset the locals behind me became. Soon the sound of a thousand car horns filled the air. Over a hundred men were now standing around my vehicle trying to get the ANA troops to let them pass. As is usually the case there were several fluent English speakers amongst them and they came over to chat me up about what was happening. I was as pissed as they were and being a poltroon by nature freely admitted this. Then out of the crowd came a man with a very sick looking child and I was pressed into service to intervene on his behalf. I walked over to the tail gunner and asked if a vehicle with a medical emergency could get through. He asked how many more vehicles contain people with medical emergencies and I glanced back saw about a thousand vehicles stacked up behind me and said “probably about a thousand” which made the kid laugh. Again correct response from the tail gunner who seems like a great trooper because if you let one vehicle through the rest will follow TIA this is Afghanistan. To make a long story short it took me five hours to get back to the Taj. Several more times the American convoy stopped and each time the fluent English speaker from Leeds England came up to stand near my car. That is a very Pashtun thing to do he was watching out for me to ensure none of the drivers behind took out their frustrations on the lone American in their midst. Not that I thought this would occur but it was a nice gesture.
The struggle of the average Afghan to find enough to eat; the continued lack of performance by the Afghan security forces and the inability of the ISAF military to operate amongst the Afghans without treating every civilian they come in contact with as a crazed jihadist killer are linked. The United States and her allies have spent billions in Afghanistan and have very little to show for it. Afghanistan is currently in a death spiral not because of a lack of aid funds but rather how those funds have been spent and allocated. Every indication we see on the ground is that more money will be thrown into the same failed programs currently being implemented; another demonstration that we have not learned any meaningful lessons.
The reason these programs won’t work is that they are off the shelf solutions designed to make the lives of bureaucrats and contracting officers easy rather than bringing assistance to the Afghans. The Department of State has spent 2.5 BILLION bringing in police trainers, jail guard trainers, and lawyers to train the judges. Now what the hell does anyone at DynCorp or PAE know about Afghan police or Afghan jurisprudence? Nothing of course but that is not why they win these large lucrative contracts it is because they already have large lucrative contracts and therefore know how to work with DS contracting officers to make their lives easier. What is the return on our investment? After the large scale jail break in Kandahar last summer investigators discovered there were over 100 illegal cell phones in the hands of inmates. When we capture important Taliban leaders and send them to the main Afghan jail at Pul-i-Charki they are often back home before the soldiers who delivered them. The Afghan police are unreliable and prone to preying on the population. The current Afghan government is more of a problem than a solution. It is being out-governed by the Taliban in the many districts under Taliban control. Who “built capacity” with these Taliban? How many billions of dollars were spent teaching the Taliban to administer justice and civil control so effectively?
What the State department did was to use off the shelf solutions which had nothing to do with the situation in Afghanistan and everything to do with what was easy for the Department of State. After all when you spend all your time in Afghanistan locked inside a gigantic posh embassy compound how in the world would you know what the Afghans need? You are forced to work through the Afghan government and have any of you ever read one news story about the Afghan government that was not about the appalling amount of corruption found at every level in every ministry? I would say you have not but as an insider I will tell you there is one ministry the ministry of aviation is every bit as honest and effective as its international counterparts. In fact the Afghans working in that ministry are more honest than any politician to be found within 153 miles of Chicagobut I digress.
The State Department is and has been the lead agency in Afghanistan and their performance here is every bit the fiasco as their performance in Iraq. Remember that Paul Brenner was a compromise President Bush made between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon he gave the boys at state a year to get Iraq back on its feet but Brenner used his 12 months to destroy the country and hamstring our military. He unilaterally made decisions for which we paid in American blood. The price tag for his incompetence paid by the Iraqis is probably beyond measure. Colin Powell, who foisted Brenner upon Iraq had more to do with the fiasco portion of that war than Rumsfeld but you’d have to do some serious archival research to know it because the nitwits in the MSM would not in a million years burden the people of America with good honest reporting which strayed from their preferred narrative.
That is not to say that the US Military has demonstrated the capacity, tactical flexibility, or ability to assess the situation on the ground, learn from past mistakes, and formulate a strategic framework under which all operations in Afghanistan can be conducted. They have not and we are risking another Vietnam and I am not talking about getting beaten by the rag tag assortment of Taliban and neo Taliban on the field of battle. I am talking about having the American peoples will to fight crippled by a media who are able to reveal that the Generals are spinning tales that are as stupid and uninformed as the old “five O’ Clock follies” in Saigon were back in Vietnam. Let me make this point clear I am not critical of the American (or any other ISAF) soldier who is over here doing his duty. Every one of them volunteered to join a military at war and their grit, determination to do what is right and courage are commendable. I am critical of the generals who seem unable to implement the very doctrine they tout as the answer to the counterinsurgency battle. I am not the only one who sees things this way please take the time to read this excellent piece by a retired Army Colonel who is much better writer than I am. He is calling for a massive forced retirement amongst American General Officers which would be a smart move given their lackluster performance and one with serious historical precedent.
The only reason we are not at the point where the American people start to treat their military in the manner it was treated in the early seventies is that our media is even more incompetent than the Department of State or the Pentagon. If we had the same type of reporters as the ones who worked Vietnam year in and year out they would be able to throw the BS flag at every single briefing they are given because the things I hear the big Army saying about the situation here are flat out nonsense. This situation will not last much longer. The drive by media is starting to get a clue as I saw when talking with Martha Raddatz the Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent from ABC news. The only thing stopping her from getting a really comprehensive first hand view of how silly the DS and military approach is to this conflict is her own silly corporate “force protection” rules. But she got an earful from me and spent a few hours roaming about the countryside like the thousands of other internationals who live and work here. Not that you can do that in every district or province in Afghanistan there are many where it would now be suicidal for a westerner to walk around knowing where you are safe and where you are not is the most basic function of military intelligence. Why we cannot figure that out and act accordingly is beyond me.
Here is the connection to my rambling observations. If our billions of dollars went to implement the infrastructure improvements which the Afghans at the district level have been pleading for during the last six to seven years you could instantly start employing massive amounts of idle unemployed men. But you cannot do this with the Department of Sate contracting vehicles nor through large, bloated, international companies like Louis Berger or DynCorp or PAE or KBR or any of the other current “implementers” who are receiving most of the reconstruction monies. You need a company like Louis Berger to build big things like hydro electric dams, posh embassy compounds, or international airports. You do not need Louis Berger to build roads and schools. The Afghans can do that themselves. You also don’t need the nitwits of Foggy Bottom deciding how to implement a reconstruction plan because what you get is what the average Afghan sees now. Lots of police posts, government office building and training bases being built for the very people and organizations who abuse them, steal from them and fail to protect them from other (non uniformed) criminals or the Taliban. The only way forward are civil military teams who are embedded into the community, who stay in the community and who are able to green light and supervise Afghan designed and built irrigation, road, and micro hydro projects. An excellent prototype of exactly this kind of team was working in Afghanistan back in the early days before Big Army came and put all the SF teams back inside the large FOB’s. It will be the topic of my next post.
Let me stress something my friends and that is time is running out for us in Afghanistan. Soon the MSM is going to discover they are missing a great opportunity to play in their favorite game of pin the tail on the Pentagon spokesman. They are still sore at the military for making them collectively look like a bunch of know-nothing amateurs back in 2003 during the massive military embed for the storming of Iraq.
I asked the local headmaster what he was going to do about the highway men who lurk in the shadows around Bagrami but he said it is no longer a problem and would say no more. That means the Taliban have stepped in and are now active right behind my guesthouse. In time we will have to reach some sort of accommodation with them. We are not going to be attacked because the local people would not allow it and the Talibs, if they are here, are local people too. Plus we have excellent fields of fire, Pashin (not Pashtun) tribal fighters for guards and lots of guns and ammo. Local Talibs do not attack hard targets like us for good reason they are trying to feed their families too and will be of little use to them if they get “seriously kilt” by the Free Rangers at FOB Taj.
