Authors - Free Range International

Fridays are always laid-back, as it’s the one day off we get each week. We had our usual complement of French and German aid workers visit for drinks and a dip in the pool.

If you can’t tell, my French friend Pierre is in flagrant violation of the’no Speedo’ rule at the Taj. Every time we try to explain the rule to him, he pretends not to understand English. However, he and his crew are great folks who pay in Euros, which makes them especially popular with me, so we let him slide on the speedo issue.

The interesting tidbit of the day comes from the lady on the right. She is German and works for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). She requested our assessment of the attack last night on the Dih Bala district center, which is 300 meters away from one of her offices. Like many international NGO workers, she has a high tolerance for risk. She has been here a long time, knows Dih Bala and the surrounding area well, and is completely freaked out because there have been no problems with the Taliban before.

Dih Bala is about 10 miles to the east of us and the home of many large clans of Brigands. They never molest the NGO’s or IGOs as reconstruction makes it easier for them to smuggle stuff across the frontier, which is how they have earned their living for the past 2 to 3 thousand years. The Governor of Nangarhar Province has successfully eliminated the cultivation of opium poppy in the area. However, there are still tons of the stuff here because of the smuggling expertise of people like those in the Dih Bala district. So the fact that the Taliban is attacking the district center means something.

It could be the elders posing with weapons to get the governor’s attention. The Governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, is from Khandahar Province, and the local tribal chiefs have a tenuous working relationship with him. One way to get the attention and a little love from the big man is to have your district center attacked and then say you drove the bad guys out when the Afghan Army arrives to investigate. Or it could be the Taliban has moved into the district, and that is always bad news for the elders. The Taliban typically dismantle the local power structure to establish dominance in an area. The elders can pledge allegiance to the Taliban or be targeted for assassination. If the Taliban are not strong enough or if they miscalculate when dealing with certain elders, the villagers will grab their rifles and fight. Intimidation of an armed population is a dangerous game – the Taliban screw it up sometimes.

Our assessment of Dih Bala district is that the Taliban are back and strong enough to challenge the central government for the district center. Our German friend agreed, which is a bitter thing for her to do, because with the Taliban back, her work here is at an end.

As the security situation continues to deteriorate, we have been making a point to look at every tanker and police check post attacked by the Taliban.

This truck was attacked by the Taliban note the local kid who has walked about 3 miles from Surobi to drain some of the remaining diesel.

The tanker pictured above was attacked from across the river and took a good 60 to 70 rounds into the cab and front proper aspect. It also took an RPG round into the cab. The RPG shot was either beginner’s luck or we have one hell of a pro RPG gunner working the area. The closest probable ambush site is 400 meters away and 200 meters above the truck.

This truck was not attacked by the Taliban; it was torched to cover up fuel theft. I’m with my buddy Special K, who visits from time to time, and I wanted to take a picture for the blog.

The tanker pictured above had 10 bullets and one RPG hit; all the rounds came in from the left rear or the roadside of the river. There are ANP checkposts 500 meters behind us and 500 meters ahead – an ambushing party can’t cross the river or set up on the side of the road without being detected. All the Taliban attacks come from across the river and include enough firepower to fix the checkposts while they go after fuel tankers. That didn’t happen this time, and there is also little fuel left in the tanker. We guess that it was emptied in Laghman Province and then shot up in the same spot as the previous two Taliban attacks. The criminals were probably mounted in local vehicles, and they and the driver escaped after paying off the cops. It’s just a guess, but it’s the simplest explanation.

It has been seven years since the events of 9/11. The war on terror, or the Long War, which is a better term, is the reason I am here. I’m in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where I’ve been living for the past year. I spent a few years living in Kabul and free-ranging the country, having found a reason to visit every province in Afghanistan. I’m a security contractor; outside the wire type and the crew I run with use low-profile, local vehicles and are very good at talking their way past checkpoints.

The security contracting business in Afghanistan is a challenging endeavor. The American firms Blackwater and DynCorp have secured the majority of the lucrative DoD and DoS contracts, and the rest of the market consists of British PSCs and a growing number of Afghan companies that employ Expatriates. Tight competition for lucrative reconstruction work drove the compensation rates into the basement.

Our State Department and USAID have established burdensome security standards that far exceed the UN MOSS (minimum operational security standard.) These stringent standards slow projects and drain millions from building infrastructure to paying for fleets of armored vehicles and large secure compounds. Other donor countries abide by the UN standards, and their operating costs are a fraction of what the US spends on security and life support for their Aid implementers.

Our cook Khan has been pissing and moaning about cooking during Ramadan and came up with a dozen very crappy meat pies and then took off for his home village to prepare for Eid. We were getting ready to buy some chickens to cook, but instead, we tried dusting the meat pies with Old Bay spice we found. It’s Thursday night, which is the night the Tiki Bar hosts all the NGO folks, and who wants to fuss with dressing out a skinny chicken during happy hour?

It’s Poppy Eradication Bob’s birthday is tonight. He’s former Army SF and loves to sing all the old crappy high rotation FM hair band songs from his misspent youth. His singing is horrible, but he’s a “good bloke” in contractor speak, so we tolerate the noise with grace and humor.

The price we are paying for not having enough troops outside the wire is increased instability and more and more Taliban attacks. It is not yet a problem in Jalalabad city, but the Jalalabad to Kabul road, which is essential to ISAF and US supply efforts, as well as for our weekly booze runs, has been hit with many ambushes this summer. We go out to examine most of them to get a handle on just how severe the attacks are becoming and the tactics they are using.

Below is a photo of the whole team from this summer, when we were fortunate enough to have Amy Sun, a PhD graduate student from MIT, who is a bona fide rocket scientist. She was quite astute in determining what had happened from the forensics and the amount of fuel remaining in the tankers. She wasn’t bad at reading bullet and RPG strikes, too; in fact, she was smarter about all this than we are, which was annoying but handy.

It’s been 7 years since 9/11, and I’ve been out here for four of them. We work with the Japan International Cooperation Agency. Unlike USAID, JICA personnel work in the countryside or Kabul alongside their Afghan counterparts. Every yen the Japanese people send here to help the Afghans gets spent exactly as it is supposed to because the Japanese JICA staff is in the offices with the Afghans, ensuring they know where every yen goes. We’d be in much better shape if USAID did the same.

This will be a long war that my children will fight, if they choose to serve, and their children will too. There is no way to understand this place or fight effectively here unless you are familiar with the people and their culture. Eventually, we must figure out how to keep more people like me in the country for a long duration so that they, too, learn how to operate in the tribal districts. I have lots of ideas on how to do that, which I will share in future posts.

Category: Authors

The Taliban take Dih Bala

Seven Years Since 9/11, the View from Afghanistan