I was enjoying a morning cup of coffee on the Baba Deck with a group of friends just in from the States when we saw the signature of a tanker attack just up the road. That has never happened this close to Jalalabad before so we conducted a brief staff meeting which consisted of saying “let’s go” and headed up the road to see what was what.
Moments after the tankers were hit – photo taken from the Taj Jalalabad Baba Deck
The ANP had closed the Duranta Dam tunnel but recognizing us they waved us through and we continued through the tunnel at speed only to have the ANP on the other side of the tunnel wave us right on down the road and into the kill zone.
Approaching the ambush site – note the armed civilian – who knows who he is – running towards the firing. What is also important to note is the lack of vegetation or cover in the hills where the bad guys are and the U.S. Army OH58D Kiowa circling overhead. The men on the ridge line are Blue Compass convoy escort who are on the flank of the Taliban ambush squad
We saw a string of tracers stitch the road to our front and immediately pulled a hard left into dead space well short of the burning trucks to continue forward on foot. The firing was sporadic, just a few incoming rounds cracking well over our heads and we were not sure if it was aimed at us or spill over from the firefight we could hear to our right. The villains had a belt fed machinegun (probably a PKM) which fired a few bursts in our direction during the 5 or so minutes it took us to work towards the their flank. Just shy of the ridge they were on they decided we were more than a nuisance and started cranking rounds our way in earnest. We withdrew which was a disappointment because I had a new camera and wanted to put it to use.
There was a section (two) of Army OH58D helicopters circling overhead very low as they worked out who was who on the ground so I tried taking pictures of them but they came out crappy because it was a new camera and I’m not that damn bright when it comes to cameras
There are no villages up in the hills above the Duranta Dam, no vegetation and no cover. Once the Kiowa’s obtained good situational awareness they engaged the ambush team the bad guys were toast.T hey couldn’t go to ground, they couldn’t hide, they were in the open and forced to be on the move by pressure from a convoy escort team from Blue Compass and a few ANP troops who had followed them into the hills.
The first two tankers have been hit with multiple rounds and are leaking JP 8 all over the road
This was a more effective ambush then we normally see further west on the Jbad /Kabul highway. The terrain forced the shooters to be much closer to the road than they are when they ambush from the heights of the Tangi Valley further down the road. There were three tankers hit and dumping JP 8 all over the road but not burning. Three more were hit and on fire in the northern portion of the kill zone.
These trucks took a beating – there were no driver casualties just two escort guards who were reported injured
Shortly after the photograph above was taken the OH58’s got a firing solution and let rip with rockets and gun pods. Kiowa pilots seem to like getting close and personal and these guys were not staying above some hard artificial “ceiling” dictated to them from on high but were on the deck, spitting venom like a good gunship should. I doubt the villains had much of a chance – reportedly four were killed.
When you see this much fuel pouring out of a tanker you know it is just a matter of time before something bad happensThe truck drivers start some damage control efforts by sticking small tree branches into the bullet holes. They are covered in fuel but doing a good job at protecting the shipment they are responsible for.
The Kiowa’s ended this fight and the efforts on the ground turned to separating the leaking fuel tankers from the burning ones. This is an effort best watched from at least two ridge lines away and we had work to do so we headed back to Taj noting there were at least 50 fuel tankers lining the road just outside the kill zone. In the big scheme of things these attacks are meaningless; the loss of fuel is sucked up by the contractor who only gets paid for what he delivers. The numbers of trucks being lost are like-wise a problem for Pakistani truck companies and not Uncle Sam. The American taxpayer can’t buy a break like that in most places.
Napoleon reportedly said; “moral power is to the physical as three parts out of four”. Attacks like the one we witnessed this morning are always victories on the moral level for the Taliban. That is the problem for our efforts in Afghanistan in a nut shell. The Taliban do not have to be tactically good or win on the physical level, they don’t have to be smart or survive half ass ambush attempts. They just need to attack and if they lose every battle in the end it won’t matter; they’ll still win.
Convoy escort from Blue Compass telling us the “Taliban are nishta” after the Kiowa’s fired them up
The ambush squad who sortied out this morning to burn fuel trucks were clueless. They shoot up 6 trucks out of a convoy of around 80 and then found themselves flanked by armed guards, forced to move in open terrain where they were hunted down like rabid dogs by Kiowa helicopters. This also was a good demonstration of using PSC’s to perform tasks which are not cost effective for the military. It was our good luck and the villains bad luck that two helicopters were hanging around the area with full ammo stores when this went down. The pressure applied by aggressive maneuver from the convoy escort security element helped the Kiowa’s PID (positive ID) the bad guys and obtain permission to smoke them. It is rare to see that work out so smoothly. Too bad its not always this easy with the Taliban.
The last post generated quite a few interesting comments about the Steven Pressfield Blog, Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai, and the prospect of using specialized troops to embed with the tribes. With the election now decided this is an excellent time to talk about the tribes and more importantly a bottom up approach. The government in Kabul is not going to change – in fact they already fired a shot across the bow of the international community with a message that is easy to decipher. Checkout this email which came from a senior security manager in Kabul last night:
Dear All,
Last night the Lounge Restaurant in Wazir Akbar Khan was raided by police and all their liquor confiscated. They were also on their way to Gandamak but it was already closed. I made a phone call to the Regional Police Commander for Kabul who confirmed that the police is indeed conducting raids on restaurants 2 reasons:
Restaurants selling liquor are illegal
Restaurants are being closed because of an outbreak of swine flu.
You are thus instructed not to visit any restaurants until further notice.
Regards,
XXXXXXX
The restaurants servicing internationals in Kabul have been operating for over six years now and are licensed, legal establishments who pay a ton in taxes and other charges to the local government officials. All of them openly sell liquor and always have because it is legal for non Muslims to drink alcohol in Afghanistan and, with the exception of the Taliban rule, always has been. And Swine Flu? Are you kidding me? The Kabul government is doing what the Taliban cannot do (yet) and that is driving out foreign aid workers so they can insert their own Afghan cronies to steal an even higher percentage of foreign aid dollars then they are currently stealing. Greed is a terrible thing which is why it is mentioned so often in the bible. And the Koran too for that matter but who cares about minor technicalities like that these days? Apparently nobody in the senior ranks of international community.
The local Bad Guys smoked a tanker two days ago between Jbad and Kabul. There were no less than 200 tankers lined up behind this one which got through fine. The consistent trend we see is attacking lone trucks every now and then and running away. It is not a serious effort at disrupting the logistical efforts on this lone route west to Kabul.
The central government is a much bigger hindrance to the efforts of the international community than the Taliban is which makes the option of bottom up change very appealing. Author Steven Pressfield, one of my all time favorite writers, started a blog in which has has posted a number of interviews with Chief Ajmal Khan Azazi who has formed a 11 tribe alliance in the Zazai valley of Paktia Province. An area that is astride the Pakistan border and thought to be under Taliban control. The interviews are remarkable for several reasons like the fact that Ajmal’s tribal fighters have driven both the Kabul government officials (who they consider to be corrupt and ineffective) as well as various Taliban bands out of their tribal lands.
I know Ajmal and have had two meetings with him in Dubai. He is good friends with The Boss and we are trying to get some cash for work projects going in his area. As you read through the various interviews with Chief Zazai you will notice instantly that he makes perfect sense to those who understand Afghan history. Afghanistan has never been effectively ruled by a central government in Kabul and the one that is there now is no exception. If we want to try a bottom up approach it is going to have to be done by partnering with tribal leaders like Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai.
Hate to see this – an IED going off right across the street from the Taj
There is a plan which outlines a solid concept of operations for tribal engagement on the Pressfield blog. Major Jim Gant, an army SF Officer has written a paper called “One Tribe At A Time” and the link to download it is on the Pressfield homepage. It is a great paper especially where he relates his experience in the Kunar Province back in 2003. Major Gant succinctly covers why our current approach will not work and then goes on to recommend a strategy based of Tribal Engagement Teams. I like the part where he describes patrolling with his tribal hosts without body armor or helmets. If we are going to fight with the tribes we have to fight like they do and that means no body armor if they have none. Wearing body armor in the high mountains is stupid anyway but not all the tribes live in high mountain valleys – there are plenty of flat lander tribes too.
Point of origin for the IED that detonated across the street from the Taj. It is hard to know what to make of this – military grade explosives in a pile of marble chips next to the main road which goes off in the middle of the afternoon and hits nothing. There are no indications that this device was targeting anything let alone the internationals at the Taj Guesthouse. Is this a business dispute? A poorly made IED to target traffic on the main road to Kabul? Like most things in Afghanistan it is hard to imagine what this IED was all about.
The French used a similar concept during the Indochina War when they deployed the Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aerportes (Composite Airborne Commando Group) known by the French initials of G.C.M.A. They would send teams of volunteers (normally a junior officer and four sergeants or corporals) deep into the North Vietnam mountains to link up with tribes who rejected the communist government. Fifty years ago the French lacked the ability to resupply or even in some cases maintain contact with their inserted G.C.M.A. teams. The only way out for the G.C.M.A. team members was to be wounded, very sick, or mentally broken in which case an airplane would be sent to a remote strip for a medevac, if it were possible and it often was not. Some teams went out and were never heard from again, others ended up raising and commanding entire battalions of tribal fighters. None of the men involved received proper recognition for the unbelievably heroic efforts they put into the program because in the end they were tactically irrelevant in the large scheme of things. The Vietminh’s effective (and dreaded) 421st Intelligence Battalion targeted successful G.C.M.A. teams as soon as they surfaced and they knew what they were doing.
I’m practicing with the camera more – girls from Little Barabad village – a dirt poor Kuchi village across the river from Jalalabad
The Tribal Engagement Teams proposed by Major Gant would not have to endure the isolation, lack of logistical support, absence of command and control nor the multi-year long missions which made the G.C.M.A. such a bad deal. But 2003 was a long time ago and special forces troops have not been engaging tribes as Major Gant was able to do back then. Their reputation is not exactly great now that they are known more for universally unpopular night raids than for living out among the tribes doing the time/labor intensive work of counterinsurgency.
I think these TET’s do not need to be special forces troops anyway – a rifle platoon would be a better organization in most locations given that tribal villages are often clustered about farming or grazing land giving the platoon the ability to deploy its three squads into different villages which are part of the tribal cluster. Regardless of who does the mission one thing is certain and that is a tribal engagement strategy can’t be the central component of our Afghan strategy. It is an economy of force mission that would free up large numbers of conventional troops deployed along the Pakistani border. The conventional forces should be focused on developing the Afghan Security Forces (ANSF) so they can operate on their own if we ever to get our ground forces out of here.
These boys ran three miles with a Pashto – English translation book to see if they were saying “my friend can swim like a fish” correctly. We need to focus on these young guys because there are so many of them who want to learn. They want and need a future and if we don’t help create that for them…..
Despite the inherent coolness of an outfit like the French G.C.M.A. the best they could have done was nip around the margins of the Vietminh Army and they didn’t do that. But Afghanistan is different and the Taliban doesn’t have an army. Tribal Engagement strategies have another huge advantage which our military and civilian leaders do not want to talk about and that is they cut out the central government in Kabul. The biggest threat to our interests in Afghanistan is he blatant, in your face corruption that defines the Karzai government. If we don’t acknowledge this and find a way to work around it every penny we spent and droop of blood we lost will be in vain. When we eventually leave, the Taliban will return and Afghans who were foolish enough to believe in us and cooperate with us will be hunted down and slaughtered. In that respect the end game here will be identical to the end game in Vietnam.
Nothing about Afghanistan is easy or straight forward but the TET concept is worth a shot.
The best way to view the current state of play in Afghanistan is to start at the top of food chain and work down to what is important. The presidential election remains undecided and now Abdullah Abdullah has pulled out of the run-off election. Our Secretary of State says that means nothing. I agree but for different reasons; in the end it does not matter who is leading the country – the Afghan government will not be a proper COIN partner and will continue to be part of the problem regardless of how these elections turn out. Conducting a runoff will only give the bad guys more opportunity for mischief while accomplishing nothing.
Another big story from up the food chain concerned former Marine Captain Matthew Hoh who resigned from the State Department because he no longer knew why we are fighting in Afghanistan. As a fellow Devil Dog he will be spared my harsh opinion because that is the way us Marines roll – you want to hear us taking the piss out of fellow Marines you need to be wearing the Eagle Globe and Anchor. The only thing relevant about young Mathew is the level of play he is getting in the drive-by media.
This story is a brush back pitch to President Obama from his friends in the press announcing that the honeymoon is over. When the story broke Michael Yon and I chatted about it on the net and the first thing I asked him was how many Afghan villages had he visited that would not be thrilled to see a platoon of American (or ISAF but to the Afghans they are all Americans) infantry move in to stay for a long time? Like me his answer was very few. Michael has been over much of this country often riding along with the Bot or I. I have been in a lot more places than Michael and can name only a few that would not immediately welcome the semi-permanent deployment of American troops. On his most important point Hoh is wrong as wrong can be.
Army troops from the 4th Brigade chatting up the folks along the new road they built in Kunar Province. It is good to see American infantry dismounted and interacting with the local peoples in a calm professional manner. But this is not COIN – these troops will mount up and move on in an hour. They are not providing security to the local people they are just showing the flag which expensive, inefficient, dangerous for the troops because there is only one way out and one way back to their base. Better to go out and stay out then to be predictable every time you leave the wire
Mister Hoh stuck to his guns when offered a seat at the big table by the ambassador which showed commendable conviction and character. But the reason the military fights here is because it has been told to fight here. Once that decision is made the men at the pointed end of the spear fight for each other. That is the nature of professional warriors. If the host nation government isn’t a reliable partner – that is supposed to be a problem for the State Department. But hear me when I tell you the Afghan government is not going to change and it is a bigger obstacle to peace than the Taliban.
The overall security situation is what it is too; which not good in many places. The disturbing attack on a Kabul Guesthouse – which was UN MOSS (minimum operational safety standard) compliant and had some UN workers in residence again shows the bad guys can penetrate the tight security in capitol.
If it was the bad guys who attacked this particular target which just happened to be the UN team shipped in to monitor the presidential elections. Lot’s of people were unhappy about having those do-gooders running around and in this country when people are unhappy about you being here they let you know in unequivocal terms.
Weapons are not allowed in the official UN billets outside Kabul but they are temporary Guesthouses which there were not more internationals killed in this attack.
If the Taliban did this (which I doubt) the attack too is not enough to change the overall security picture. If the Taliban follow up with multiple attacks directed at internationals it would force all of us to operate like we did in Iraq back in 2005 and 2006. That would virtually halt all reconstruction activities until a massive security effort could be designed and staffed. That is not going to happen; all the sides in this conflict and all the surrounding countries are making too much money on the massive effort being expended in support of the Afghan reconstruction endeavor. The Taliban are Afghans and they know how the foreigner gravy train works.
This is not what you want to see driving down the road; Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. The dress gives them away; note the squared tunic bottoms on some of these cats – that’s a Pakistani thing – Afghans prefer rounded corners on their tunics and you can see both in this picture. I suspect there are new Taliban fighters hanging out on the road side so they can watch our convoys and the troops who have dismounted and are playing grab ass with the local kids. This is a standard tactic of de-mystifying the large scary looking MRAP’s.
If the Taliban had to strength and ability to really go after internationals they probably would but they don’t. But they can penetrate the Afghan security blanket which covers the capitol and cause all sorts of problems. The only way to prevent that and really the only way to have any real impact at all is to focus our efforts on the Afghan security forces. Our current mentoring efforts are not effective. We do not “embed” with the Afghans really. They are no Afghan liaison officers in any of the tactical operations centers resident in every battalion and brigade headquarters. An Afghan brigade HQ is a map table and a few radios – ours have dozens of people all with computer work stations and large video screens streaming in multiple feeds. We have hundreds of EuPol police officers here doing God knows what. They are not out with the Afghan police and seem to hang out in large purpose built buildings sending each other emails or surfing the internet. Kabul will be safe on the day you see EuPol officers or ISAF military out manning the checkpoints with the Afghans and not one day before that. Until then we will continue to see effective car bombing and armed raids. Check that – I doubt we will see more armed raids because in most of the Guesthouses I know in Kabul there are so many armed internationals that the bad guys would be shredded by the time they made it past the gates.
If we want to rapidly build the Afghan Security Forces the only way to do it is to live and work with them 24/7. We need to adopt them, feed them, pay them, and watch after them. What can a US officer really do when the Colonel he is mentoring cannot feed his own troops because the money to buy that chow is siphoned off by officers above him? If they make a stink about it the Afghan Colonel is sure to be relieved and thrown out on the streets. The current mentors have guys fighting daily while dealing with problems they would never encounter in the American system. They do the best they can to support the unit they are assigned to mentor, but they are not really embedded. They live of separate compounds inside the Afghan compounds completely separate from their charges. Mentoring means leading by example while living and fighting with your host country troops. It does not mean setting up a parallel TOC, camp, cook house, offices, and coffee shop where the Afghans are not welcomed or allowed.
This is what the bad guys in the photo above were looking at. Army troops hanging out with the local kids. The MRAPS are big and look impressive but they don’t shoot TOW’s like the Hummers did so in Kunar they are essentially worthless and we are losing too many because they can’t shoot high enough in the mountains.
The military is bitching about the fact that the Afghan government is not a reliable partner and a big part of the insecurity problem. This is true but the military can’t change that. They can make the Afghan military part of the solution but not by treating them the way they treat them now. We need to get the troops off the FOB’s and out with their counterparts in the villages. We also need to pull out of areas where the local people do not want our help – which is not that many areas in the country as a whole.
Kunar farmer threshing wheat the old fashioned way
Every officer in all the NATO forces is taught the Principles of Warfare which are pasted in below:
Objective: Direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective. “The ultimate military purpose of war is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and will to fight.”
Offensive: Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative. Even in defense, a military organization is expected to maintain a level of aggressiveness by patrolling and launching limited counter-offensives.
Mass: Mass the effects of overwhelming combat power at the decisive place and time.
Economy of Force: Employ all combat power available in the most effective way possible; allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts.
Maneuver: Place the enemy in a position of disadvantage through the flexible application of combat power.
Unity of Command: For every objective, seek unity of command and unity of effort.
Security: Never permit the enemy to acquire unexpected advantage.
Surprise: Strike the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared.
Simplicity: Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and concise orders to ensure thorough understanding.
Not one of these rules are being followed in Afghanistan. Not one. The most important principal above is unity of command but we don’t come close. Gen McChrystal cannot tell his NATO subordinates to do a damn thing they don’t want to do- they will just call home to their respective capitols and tell the politicians to tell them not to do what they were just told to do but do not want to do. We have no mass and therefore cannot really do economy of force operations. Simplicity is a concept all but forgotten by the modern military and nobody can tell you in clear concise terms what the objective or our current efforts are.
The Kabul government will never be a reliable partner but the Afghan Army could develop into an effective force which, inshallah, could help drive Afghanistan into the functioning core of nation states (that should be our objective by the way.) General McChrystal should focus on that goal and continue with his efforts to send the REMF’s home, get off the FOB’s and get more troops into areas where they can protect the population.
Michael Yon was kind enough to give the blog a plug in his latest post on the National Reviews blog the corner. The problems currently being experienced by the expat community renewing visa’s our obtaining work permits are irksome and expensive but in the big scheme of things minor. The government in Kabul is not working which is not news. My confidence in the ability of all the Afghans, ISAF and the UN to get a runoff election planned and executed in two weeks remains low; but it could happen.
It is hard to see what difference the result of this election will make on the continued problems afflicting central government control exercised from on high in Kabul. Michael posted another interesting piece the other day about adopting the Afghan Army. In that piece was a link to this Dexter Filkins article on General Stanley McChrystal which made for good reading. The biggest problem with General Stanley McChrystal is that he’s an American. There is no Afghan equivalent of which I am aware and a warrior leader in the McChrystal mold is exactly the kind of man who stands a chance of exercising effective control from Kabul. Unfortunately there is not anyone of that stature or competence in the Afghan Security Forces. It is difficult to see what difference a runoff election will make in the big scheme of things but that is no reason for excessive pessimism.
For most Afghan families hauling fresh drinking water takes up a considerable amount of their daily routine.
Towards the end of the Filkins article General McChrystal hears something interesting when he asks the local governor what he could be doing better.
Abdullah Jan said “You need to live in buildings not tents.”
Sounds like a comment one would find on the FRI blog which I find personally gratifying. There is no question that the American military has a handle on the more immediate problems confronting them in Afghanistan and an idea how to fix it. The question is do they have moral courage to do what needs to be done? Physical courage is easy to find in humans but moral courage in a trait much more rare in the species. It will take a lot of moral courage from on high to get the American military off the FOB’s, out of those stupid MRAP’s, out of the body armor and helmets which make them easier to hit when they are working in the 110 degree heat or climbing steep mountain passes. It was interesting to read that the first thing Gen McChrystal did when he arrived in Garmser was to take off the body armor and helmet.
The leading edge of an Afghan population boom is rapidly coming of age. Their current prospects for meaningful employment are grim. The consequences of a large pool of unemployed young men hanging about are easily predictable
Thomas Ricks has an interesting post in the Foreign Policy blog which illustrates the need for radical change in military performance. The post contains extracts from a blunt report Canadian intelligence officer along with his commentary such as the gems below:
In one remote village, strong Afghan commanders worked hard to deny the area to the Taliban, and also gained a remarkable amount of intelligence. But then the outpost “was closed just after the end of our tour due to its sustainment difficulties, in all likelihood dooming many of the locals who had collaborated with us there.” This is the opposite of protecting the population — it is endangering them.
He also takes a small whack at the Americans, saying that the safest police stations in southern Afghanistan were those where Canadian mentors lived and slept. “The American PMT approach, which involved teams driving out in the morning to visit, regrettably was far less effective in this regard.”
After years of training and advising, “we were still very much at year zero. And that’s a big problem because the whole definition of victory in a counter-insurgency, as defined in FM 3-24 and elsewhere, is getting the battle to the point where indigenous forces can take over, and you can leave. … All [the enemy] has to do is deny you that indigenous force development, by making things so kinetic that you can’t focus on mentoring.”
Under the way we currently operate, he says, most allied units think that dealing with Afghans is someone else’s job. “Mentors in effect become the excuse for Western soldiers to avoid contact with Afghan soldiers.”
That last issue, the failure of mentoring, leads to his strong endorsement of Gen. McChrystal’s recommendations for a radical new approach to the war. The most significant aspect of the general’s plan, he says, is to have Americans and other foreign troops co-located with Afghan forces, living, eating and sleeping alongside them. He advocates giving up mentoring and going instead to this flat-out partnering.
Children from a refugee camp outside of Jalalabad heading out to scavenge for animal forage
Getting off the FOB’s and stopping the “commute to the job” mentality is something I have been railing about since day one. It is good to see us heading in this direction but I have to tell you it is not that easy as it sounds. It is physically easy to set up safe houses in Afghan towns and embed with the locals (where invited to do so) but it requires a complete change in the perceptions of risk by the military bureaucracy. I drive around Jalalabad by myself in an unarmored vehicle with nothing more than a concealed pistol for protection as a matter of routine as do many other internationals. When working in contested areas we wear local clothes, often have rifles and extra local guys with us but we still stay out of the armored vehicles because they draw too much attention allowing for easier targeting by the bad guys. Many of the American military mentors I know would love to do the same thing because it would allow them more freedom of movement and make them more effective. But getting buy-in to deploy your military forces in such a manner from on high? Not a chance. If you have not lived like we do or had the experiences that our military mentor teams have had living with the people then chances are you think the risks we take daily are insane. They are not but it is not easy to convince people who have had multiple FOB tours here of that fact.
As we muddle through a new approach to the Afghan Campaign there is one fact of ground truth which remains very positive. In most places of this country what the local people want is for us to move in and stay. America and her allies are viewed very positively by a majority of the population. As I have written in the past the most potent weapon the foreigners arsenal is a big smile and the ability to say a local greeting. Afghans are a very friendly and polite people – they love it when they meet friendly, polite foreigners. Inshallah soon we will see civ/mil teams moving into the local districts and living on the economy like we do. That is the only way you can rapidly spread not only security but projects like this. That is how you start to reach the key demographic in Afghanistan which is the young people who are rapidly coming of age. The link above about a computer lab in Gardez is more good news – but you could do more faster with Fab Labs and it would costs pennies on the dollar when compared to the way we currently field similar projects.
I have been in Dubai on a business trip for the past week. The boss is spoiling his talented group of Canadians and I in preparation for expanding out efforts into the most contested districts in the country. He didn’t have to spend the money as my colleagues and I are motivated by the challenge – although staying at the Raffles Hotel in Dubai was pretty damn cool.
Saturday evening my inbox started filling with news of a serious fight in Nuristan. I checked the wires and found nothing. I checked again Sunday morning and nishta – I even emailed my Buddy Michael Yon and he too was hearing something was up but but did not know what was happening. The wires started humming about the attack on two isolated outposts in Nuristan Province about 24 hours after I had first heard about it. The New York Slimes has an OK roundup of what happened here. If my information is correct this story contains a “untruth” told by a Colonel – and that is the kind of thing which really gets me worried. I get worried because I know what happened to our military post Vietnam and would be crushed to see them held in such low esteem and outright contempt by the American public again in my lifetime. Let me insert an excellent point from a more than excellent post by one of the all time most excellent bloggers “…lying, while advantageous in the short run, is like a drug, temporary in its effects; requiring higher and higher doses to maintain the same effect and is finally self-destructive.” That is from this mornings post on the Belmont Club by Richard Fernandez; a blogger I admire greatly….and I’m stopping with all the “excellents.”
Saturdays attack on two outposts started in similar fashion to the attack last year in Wanat. The fighters; described as “local militia” by ISAF boiled up out of a mosque and laid siege to the American soldiers and their Afghan counterparts located inside a small forward operating base called ‘FOB Keating” and a nearby smaller Afghan police post. The fighting was so intense that none of the wounded could be evacuated for the first 16 hours which explains the number of alarming emails I was getting last Saturday evening. As is always the case when dealing with American infantry be they Marine or Army the wounded who could still fight did fight and refused to be evacuated. This report from ABC news covered that angle with the amazement one always sees in graduates from elitist American journalism schools when they encounter the selflessness of first rate infantrymen in contact.
Pedros are the direct descendants of the Jolly Green Giants from Vietnam. These cats get to combine the rush of paramedic work with the even bigger rush of getting in short sharp gunfights.
At the end of this engagement Pedros flew in and extracted all the Americans and Afghans from Keating which had been completely destroyed in the fighting. But an Army Colonel quoted in the NYT article said “American forces still controlled the compound, which they share with Afghan security forces.” This is a perfect example of the attrition warfare mindset which is ingrained in most of our military officers. Owning the field of battle post fight is a measurement of success in conventional military operations. It is irrelevant in the context of a counterinsurgency. The only relative measurement of success is how much of the population is on your side. In the battle for FOB Keating the population was never on our side – they were apparently the ones who attacked us – so why were we even there in the first place? I don’t know the answer but will bet a months pay that we are soon out of Nuristan Province. As I have said many times before the instability in Nuristan is financed by gem smuggling syndicates which is an Afghan problem. We have no solutions to offer the Nuristani people except to leave them alone which is all they want anyway.
No idea what the helmet is for but this looks really cool and looking good is half the battle - another Pedro shot from Michael Yon
But there is something else which needs to be said about my view on how to win the Afghan fight using small civ/mil teams embedded into Afghan districts and here it is. If this war was fought the way I recommend you would have more incidents similar to the attack on Keating. There is no way to be as aggressive as I recommend (and operate) without getting a team attacked at some point. When that happens you are going to lose some …dying is part of living and even though every loss is a tragedy to the family bearing that loss on high you have expect and accept the fact that in war you are going to lose people. Lots of missions = lots of risks; no missions = no risk and for a vast majority of the military units deployed here the later seems to be the rule. Those who do not want to get off the FOB’s and fight should redeploy back to home station.
This is the typical use of small NATO forces from the Baltic countries. These guys sit on the runway at Kandahar all day, every day to keep an eye on traffic coming out of the commercial side of the Kandahar Airport. It was around 125 degrees when this picture was taken last summer. This is all this unit will do for the duration of their time in Afghanistan although I think this country has resposnibility for some of the entry control points too. We need people off the FOB's...do you know how expensive it is to keep military units deployed here to do this kind of make work? Under what circumstances can you imagine that the men and or woman in this vehcile would actually start shooting with that machinegun? They are facing an internatioanl air terminal for chrst sakes...what a waste of money, time and manpower.
Which brings us the reading tea leaves. It appears that our Commander in Chief has made up his mind what to do in Afghanistan. He is voting present. We will not be sending more troops nor will we be pulling any out. His new commanding general is on record as saying this is not acceptable and for his troubles the good general got to fly to England to get his ass chewed by the President who was coming or going from his failed attempt to win an Olympics bid for the crime plagued, politically corrupt, scandal ridden shit hole known to us Americans as “Chicago.” General McChrystal apparently does not understand the genius of voting “present” (being a man of action and all) and said “waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support.”
For speaking a little truth to power the General got his ass chewed and this review from a Bruce Ackerman a purported expert on constitutional law at Yale University, who said in the Washington Post: “As commanding general, McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements.”
Hey Bruce – nobody cares what our academic “betters” thinks about what a general should and should not do…they know more about political infighting than your entire faculty lounge ….. how do you think you get to be a four star general anyway you dumbass.
Sorry I’m ranting again – but although we are not gettig more troops … we are getting a civilian surge known in State Department speak as “the uplift” which will flood our FOB’s with more civilian experts. I know some of the men coming out in the uplift and can say without reservation they are smarter than I am about the Stan, more capable than I am at running reconstruction projects and if let lose could make a huge difference. But they won’t be let off the FOB. Lots of missions = big risks and nobody is into taking risks to achieve a mission which has yet to be clearly defined, properly resourced, or supported by the one man who’s support is crtical – The President of the United States.
Earlier in the week I had one of those trips from hell which make being in Afghanistan such a drag. The drive between Jalalabad and Kabul takes less than 2 hours on a good day. Last Sunday the drive took over 12 hours – 9 of them spent sitting in a traffic jam just outside the the Poli Charki pass. The reason I was stuck with thousands and thousands of Afghans is that the French army had closed the road between Kabul and Jalalabad. They had (again second time in a week about the 50th time this year) rolled one of their armored vehicles and insisting that no traffic pass the accident scene until it had been recovered. The vehicle went over the side of the road into a ravine so the recovery required an industrial size crane which did not even arrive on scene until around five hours after the accident. That is five hours worth of traffic which should have been flowing freely but ISAF does not think that way. Whatever impact their actions have on the Afghans seems to be irrelevant to ISAF commanders – a mindset which is 180 degrees out from our recently upgraded, improved counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine.
The French were having a very bad day. They lost a legionnaire in this single vehicle traffic accident, had lost another 12 hours earlier to a lightening strike and two more who were drowned in a flash flood. A violent storm had scoured the eastern region at around 0530 Sunday morning causing a series of dangerous flash floods. The French were reportedly out and about at that hour in “an operation designed to strike at a network of bomb-setters.”
Typical French convoy moving from the FOB in Kabul. A year ago the French took a bit of an ass whopping outside of Surobi and to their credit they have not backed down. Not backing down is good - but it has nothing to do with counterinsurgency and being able to drive around Kabul Province in old crappy armored personnel carriers does nothing to win the COIN fight and a lot to alienate the population
Striking a “network of bomb-setters” normally requires extensive human intelligence, reconnaissance to verify the intelligence followed by a visit by the direct action door kickers. Unless the “bomb – setters” are operating off an ISAF FOB or are stupid enough to give up their location and intention over cell phones there is no way the French or anyone else will be able to accurately target them because the recon guys, the human intelligence collectors and the door kickers are all confined to FOB’s and when they venture out they do so in gigantic armored personnel carriers (which tend to roll over on the narrow, mountainous roads of Afghanistan) and are completely isolated from the Afghan people they are supposedly here to protect. But the French were out and about; off the FOB in the bush doing some sort of operation which is more than can be said for the majority of military units operating in Afghanistan.
I am a proud former member of the Bethesda Chevy Chase Rescue Squad and have some experience at dealing with motor vehicle accidents involving fatalities
The problem is that the focus of the French (and every other unit here except the US Marines) is completely internal. Closing the most important route in Afghanistan for an entire day is too stupid for words. When that happens all the traffic jams up every bit of lane and shoulder on either side of the accident scene. The Afghans trapped in this scrum cannot get food or water or turn around and leave. The woman cannot get out of their vehicles and enjoy a bit of fresh air – they are stuck packed (and I mean packed) into small cars or vans where they must sit and bake in the sun unless a male relative happens to be there and agrees to walk them off to a side ditch somewhere to go to the bathroom.
Life is hard on woman in Afghanistan due to cultural mores. This is not an easy point to grasp when your time here is spent on a FOB. When you are able to develoo the situational awarness required for successful COIN operations then you can lose the inward focus of a attrition warfare army and figure out things such as closing the only main east-west road in the entire country for 12 hours is mind numbingly stupid
The reason it seems reasonable to the French Army to close the most important road in Afghanistan is the same reason the US Army continues to roll through downtown Jalalabad instead of using the brand new high speed truck by pass which is faster and safer for them. Their focus in exclusively internal. They plan all operations, movements, and interactions with the Afghans (when they manage to get off a FOB) based on what is easiest and safest for them with no consideration of the Afghan people. This is an “effects based” opinion based on what I see daily.
The only military unit I have been able to personally observe while planning future operations was the US Marine Corps 2nd MEB. The Marines were asking the Boss and I about cutting military roads so they could avoid adversely impacting the local people in the Helmand Green Zone. Their focus was exclusively external on what was convenient for the Afghans not what was easiest for them. This may explain why they have taken such a large chunk of the Helmand River Valley and dominated it with little to no post assault fighting while the British army is unable to walk 100 meters off their combat outposts in the same river valley without getting blown up or in a fire fight.
The truck by-pass around Jalalabad City. This terminates right outside the large Army FOB at the Jalalabad airport but the US Army never uses it. I asked a convoy leader once why and he did not know it was there and then added it was not in the SOP and therefore an unauthorized route. The Army fob is less than a mile away from this point of the by-pass route
As the security situation in Afghanistan continues to degrade it is most frustrating to see that our military is completely unable to break away from its risk adverse, zero defects, careerist mentality. I never thought it would be easy for our attrition warfare oriented military to learn the decentralized and risky business of fighting a proper counterinsurgency but I did think we would figure it out given enough time and money. But we are not even close. General McChrystal knows what needs to be done – our very own counterinsurgency doctrine also spells out how to fight in the COIN environment but our military is hobbled by Colonels and Sergeants Major who are motivated exclusively by what is good for their careers and reputations. Careerist sycophants will never think outside the box or try something new least they fail. Failure is not possible when you do exactly what the man before you did regardless of what is happening outside the wire with the Afghan people. No way to measure that so it cannot count against you on your combat command officer fitness evaluation right? The US Marines seem to be breaking this mold but they are not here in enough strength to make much of an impact and thus are irrelevant in the big picture.
Motor vehicle accidents are frequent and bad in Afghanistan. This one was worse than most - a van full of woman and children was t-boned by a white corolla which tried to enter the by-pass without giving way. Many of the woman and children were still alive and being manhandled out of the wreakage by local people. This accident occured about 600 meters away from a major US FOB. A Brigade commander who was oriented on the people of Afghanistan could have the few high speed roads in the area coverd with little flying colums of mixed gendered troops. We stopped to lend a hand but were by the police (correctly) that it would be a bad idea for a male foriegner to tend to the criticaly injured woman - the children were already in cabs and heading to the Nanagarhar Teaching Hospital some 3 miles away.
ISAF is here to bring security to the people of Afghanistan so they can re-build their economy and infrastructure. But ISAF can’t protect the people of Afghanistan – they cannot even protect themselves. The reality is that we have this backwards – it is the people of Afghanistan who are able to provide the protection and security us foreigners need to operate outside the wire. All we need do is demonstrate commitment to the people thus providing a reason for them to believe in us and support our mission.
That is why my son and I can travel around as freely as we do – the people protect us – they warn us if danger is about – they look after us when we walk around the bazaars. The reason the people protect us is because everyone in Jalalabad knows who we are and what we are doing and they appreciate it. In Gardez the Taliban came to several of our projects and asked what was going on. The local people told them in no uncertain terms that the rehabilitation of their karez’s and canals was the first good thing which has happened to them since the Americans came and that if the Taliban interfered the people would fight them. The Taliban did not interfere and I suspect many of them were working on our projects – 6 bucks a day is good pay for unskilled laborers in Afghanistan.
Our FOB’s are full of men and woman who would love to have the freedom to operate like we do so they too could make a difference. I recieve emails from them daily. But our military system will not let them off the FOB’s, out of the body armor, or out of the large stupid, dangerous MRAP’s. Instead we continue to bring “security” to the local people at the point of a gun. How stupid is that?
There are no easy answers for Afghanistan. Take the recent elections; are there palatable options to fixing that mess? You can accept the results which are unpalatable, you can hold a run off which would probably be an even bigger farce; you could hold an emergency Loya Jirga and start over (could you imagine that?) There are a few more options available I suppose but none of them very attractive. President Obama appears to be “voting present” for the time being but there is General McChrystal’s leaked confidential report in Washington to get the chattering classes focused on everything except what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan.
The military is asking for more troops but to do what? Unless they move off the FOB’s and out into the local population they do little more than create and targets go opportunity for the various armed opposition groups (AOG’s) who plague the countryside. The only way to secure the people is to live with the people It’s just that simple.
A joint Afghan/American Army visit to a village on the Jalalabad/Kabul road on the second day of EID. This is a step in the right direction but in and of itself too little too late. The local American training team should be stopping in villages and chatting up folks every day all day. In the 26 months I have been living in Jalalabad this is the first time I have seen American soldiers off their vehicles and talking to local people. This is EID – these guys should bring boxes of dolls and water guns, a sheep, and some soda; take off the helmets and body armor and spend a few hours having water fights with the kids while the adults cook up the sheep. That is how you gain traction in a local area – there are no shortcuts, no gee whiz technology which allows the grunt work to be accomplished back at the fob by desk bond fobbits.
Unless the present FOB bound kinetic ops orientation is completely eliminated we will leave here in worse shape than we are now and right now which is not great. We are spending billions of dollars we do not have and gaining not one damn thing for it. When we started this fight President Bush said “we will not falter, we will not tire, we will not fail.” In Afghanistan the military is tired; worn out by back to back to back deployments. We are clearly failing by any unit of measurement and it now appears we are faltering too.
Building roads in downtown Jalalabad the old fashion way
To validate my claim I have to rely on my personal experience. My colleagues and I are finishing up a six month cash for work program focused on Kandahar, Jalalabad, Gardez and Lahska Gar. Not easy places to work (except Jalalabad which is a great place to work) and Tim the Canadian had over 5,000 people working in Kandahar, Ranger Will over 2,000 in Lashka Gar – I had 4,002 working in Jalalabad and over 2,000 in Gardez. Compare those numbers to the performance of the massive PRT’s located in those towns – it is not even close. I think the Canadians in Kandahar reported a total of 136 cash for work recipients for 2009. We get results because we live and work in the community and operate in close coordination with the municipal authorities who we see almost daily. Plus we control the cash.
This is the Fab Fi internet installed mostly by local kids who fabricate their links at the Fab Lab. The August Fab Folk surge tuned the system up and added more large links at a frantic pace during their shot time here. Total cost to the Americanb taxpayer? Zero. The Grad students who do this work pay their own way. Look at the diagram above and contemplate that there are servel large multi million
Look at the diagram above and contemplate the fact that there are several large multi-million dollar contracts out to bring internet connectivity to Afghanistan, but the contractors have yet to figure out how to engineer the job. While they spend a fortune planning the Fab Folks surged here last month from both Cambridge England, and Cambridge Massachusetts, (and Iceland) to move the FabLab to a better location downtown and install more internet links to local schools and NGO’s. They are able to so much because they are outside the artificial security bubble that disrupts aid efforts in Afghanistan. J.D. Johannes did an excellent job of describing the Afghan security bubble in this post.
Keith Berkoben from MIT installing Fab Fi links on the largest water tower in Jalalabad
The Fab Folk believe the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the children. Lots of people think the center of gravity for any society are the children. But the Fab Folks put their skin in the game to teach the Afghans not just how to use a computer but how to build a network. They feel the more exposure children have to other children via the FabLab video conference software the better.
This equipment has been up since January 2009 and still works despite the beating it is getting from the elements. Why is it the that only successful effort to get computers and internet to school children is unfunded and driving the internationals who make it happen into poverty? Why can’t the military of State Department figure out how to do the same given their unlimited resources?
Contractors have a bad name in this current campaign for several reasons not the least of which is some of them have earned a bad name. But I’ll tell you this – find me a contract where the men are out of control and I’ll show you a contract where the contracting officer has completely abdicated his contractual and legal obligations. Jake Allen has an excellent podcast on contracting over at the Private Military Herald which can be found here. He hits the nail on the head in an interview with Danielle Brian from POGO concerning the American Embassy Guard Contract. As I observed in my post on the topic it would be impossible to execute the contract as tendered and still make a profit. But the private security industry is not full of competent cutthroats it’s full of stupid greedy cutthroats.
The PMC market is run by retired military officers have no experience with profit and loss statements – we deal exclusively in loss statements during our professional lives. That is the nature of government service. The nature of private security contracting is to cut bids back to the slimmest of margins in order to win the contracts which always go to the lowest bidder. My estimate is that over 50% of the security contracts currently active in Afghanistan are losing money. Few of the Afghan PMC’s have the expertise to determine the exact profit point on a dynamic contract with unfunded hard requirements.
Just throwing out more contracts to attract contractors will not work for Afghanistan. It is clear the contracting system is completely dysfunctional and repeatedly produces the worst possible outcomes (look at how are vitally important interpreter corps is being treated.) The only way for this to work is to have battle space commanders not only write the release the contract but insist that the program management and most of the people on that contract are people he knows. Officers or NCO’s he has served with and trusts. I would further argue that the teams going out to districts to replicate what we did in the most contested cites of the country be CivMil – both civilian contractor and military personnel who live where they work. The military part of the team could focus on the most important mission we have and that is to mentor Afghan Security Forces and in some cases help them fight.
The main park in Jalalabad on the first day of EID. The adults woudl be thrilled to see the local Brigade Commander and staff walking around (without body armor, helmets, weapons etc..) and the local kids would be exstatic to see a platoon of paratroopers with boxes of super soaker water guns to have sqirt gun fights – that kind of gesture would generate stories which would go far and wide and remain in circulation for a generation. That is counterinsurgency warfare
Here is why the contracting piece could work if done correctly. Again I use my personal experience to illustrate. I know every infantry Regimental Commander in the Marine Corps. Some are good friends the rest good acquaintances. If I am in charge of a contract let by them where I report to them what are my motivations to do a superior job? It is not money it is my allegiance to peers whom I have known all my adult life and whom I greatly admire and respect. My reputation for getting the mission done is at stake – this is the level of trust and respect needed to get civ/mil teams into the districts. Cost plus contract with clearly stated profit margins which can be easily understood by all – in a dynamic environment simple is smart. When a commander can look at his contractor and say “Timmy I want you to do to this DAC, set up a good safe house, and complete the following tasks….” When the commanders knows that is all the guidance he need provide to get important tasks to operate with speed and vision.
Logan the Nuristani humping a large Fab Fi up the water tower. Logan is 18 years old, had been here two months and has picked up a considerable amount of Pashto and Dari
For those of you who do not think my idea is crazy enough I take it one step further. The military should start a program for junior officers and enlisted to participate in these projects as civilians on the contractor side. They would get a three year $1,000 a day contracts and owe three years of service when they complete the contract. Many of the problems which accompany long duration deployments disappear when you get to the $1,000 a day pay scale. And paying these contractors $1000 a day is pennies on the dollar to what we spend to keep an individual service member deployed in country. Most importantly the worth of an officer (or NCO) who has spent three years living in the same province in Afghanistan has to be about 40 times that of an officer (or NCO) who has completed a master degree program.
Want to see Afghan men get emotional? Introduce them to your son who you have brought over becuase you think the country and its people are so impressive you wanted him to experience it too. My son Logan has been here for two months and loves it. One of his goals is to have the first Afgahn ultimate frisbee game in Central Asia
There are no easy answers but if we want to get the work done which is required to reach an acceptable end state our options are severely constrained. You just have to get off the FOB’s, off our collective fat asses and do it. But it will take a completely different approach to writing and awarding contracts to accomplish the mission.
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.
The bad guys hit a home run today by whacking the number the deputy commander of the Nangarhar NDS. The NDS is the National Directorate of Security and they are the best of what is currently available in the Afghan Security Forces. The number 2, Dr. Abdullah is an old Jihadi Commander from Laghman Province who fought the Soviets as Masooud’s chief of security before continuing the fight against the Taliban. He was reportedly at the central Mosque for Mitharlam City (the capitol of Lagham Province) to fork over a ton of family dough to finance a major addition to that mosque. Seems damn un-Islamic to me to whack a guy who is donating that much cash to a Mosque in that Mosque.
Note the date time stamp – this is seconds after the BBIED went off and killed Dr. Abdullah. It was taken by The Skipper who was in the city to remove and destroy old ordinance
Killed along with Dr. Abdullah was a Mr. Imadudin, Head of the Laghman Provincial Council along with 22 other people (54 more were wounded.) The press is reporting that this was caused by a vehicle borne IED but that is not correct. The bomber was wearing a suicide vest and forced his way through the crowd to detonate his rig after Dr Abdullah had entered his vehicle but before the guards closed the door. That is a damn near perfect strike which is not the norm for suicide bombers in Afghanistan. My sources tell me that there was a lot of small arms fire after the incident and at this point we suspect it was the Afghan security forces firing in the air as a method of crowd control.
Here is the best information we have on how this attack went down: Dr. Abdullah had stopped outside his SUV to disperse cash to some disabled people who had approached him asking for help. After handing out some cash he entered his vehicle and the bomber, wearing a burka, approached with a letter for him. He was in the car with the door open when the bomber handed him the letter and detonated himself. This is a plausible explanation but anyone close enough to see this happen is probably dead so it could be bazaar rumor or the police coming up with a story that puts their security in a better light. There is little doubt that the BBIED (body borne IED) wore a disguise to help get him close to Abdullah and either a burka or a NDS uniform would be about the only ones I can think of which would work.
Dr. Abdullah was a very high value target so he had a large number of armed troops acting as a personal security detail (PSD) and they were the majority of the fatal casualties.
Here is what happens when a BBIED gets to you before the door on your armored SUV is shut – Dr. Abdullah may have had a chance if the armored truck was locked up.
Dr. Abdullah and Mr. Imadudin join the Jani Khel district of Paktya Chief of Police and a senior CT (counter terrorism) commander in Khost as well as many more minor security officials in being “martyred” within the last six days. In the counterinsurgency (COIN) fight the insurgents look to strip away the government security apparatus when they feel confident in their ability to take the initiative and hold ground formally controlled by the officials they are knocking off. These kind of operations also allow the Taliban to portray themselves as brave warriors who strike with precision and minimize collateral damage. Ouch! Good thing they are as bad at IO as they are at shooting rifles or we’d have a world of problems sustaining our efforts here.
Here is the latest IO campaign from the eastern region Taliban – a professionally printed night letter which is so stupid school children giggle when they read it.
This Night Letter was posted around Jalalabad last week
Here is the English translation:
We are kindly requesting and begging all the Muslims to immediately stop sending female members of their families to Shirzai Stadium on Wednesday days any more, Because we are all Muslims and such activities are prohibited in Islam whatever is happening inside the stadium. We are requesting you that you have already forgotten the Pashtunwali and courage but don’t forget Islam.
You don’t know what is going on inside but we are monitoring the activities closely, we are Muslims that’s why we are writing you this letter that we are ready be martyred because we don’t want disorder in the country. We are doing this just for Islam because we are Muslims and prior warning is important.
After this announcement you have few days if any one obey this will be good for him and if not he will be responsible for his own death, we swear to Allah that those who will not obey this will face severe consequences,
Note:
Each Muslim will swear to Allah that he will distribute this message to others as well.
We think this is referring to a Ministry of Woman’s Affairs training class which is teaching local teenage girls how to use computers. Jalalabad is the capitol of Nangarhar Province and the people here pride themselves on being educated. Nobody wants to live under the yoke of a bunch of illiterate, viscous, stupid puritans but there is a growing segment of the Pashtun population which will tolerate the Taliban because the central government has completely and totally failed them. Add to this all the problems with the election – remembering that I wrote 3 months ago that Afghanistan is no more capable of holding honest, open elections than the state of Illinois – and what we have now is the makings of another perfect storm.
The force behind the gathering storm clouds is the most fickle force in the world….American public opinion. It is getting harder and harder to explain what exactly it is we are hoping to accomplish by staying here just as it is getting harder and harder for the military to explain exactly how putting tens of thousands of troops behind the wire on large FOB’s is a plan which will accomplish anything productive. Here is what I think –von Clausewitz had it wrong about war – it should be politics by other means but it is not because there is too much emotional, cultural, historical, and psychological baggage tied up in it. George Will published an article today advocating an immediate withdraw from Afghanistan. He was immediately censored in the press but he is making an argument which is hard to refute.
There are no easy answers in Afghanistan. Gen McChrystal is coming out with an assessment that says he doesn’t need a lot of troops but he does need troops who can live off the FOB’s, eat kabob’s and rice and live with the Afghans. Modern western armies are not trained or organized to provide that kind of support. We once could and did in places as diverse as Haiti, El Salvador and China but that was when we deployed by ship and it took months to get on station and we were not capable of flying people all over the world. If McChrystal really wants on the ground embedded mentoring he needs to hire guys like us.
