Category: Long War

The efforts of the international community to bring aid to Afghanistan, help develop the infrastructure with the goal of allowing Afghanistan a chance at self sufficiency are failing dismally.  That should not be a surprise to anyone familiar with the international aid racket.  The international community has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the years in Africa without one iota of success. They are enriching vile, oppressive dictators while sentencing the average African to a life of misery, poverty and squalor. Most people in most places at most times have lived under the yoke of tyranny which seems, with the exception of the western world, to be the natural order of things. One need not be a historical scholar to understand what is self evident – just look at Zimbabwe, Haiti, Mexico or Illinois to see the heavy hand of tyranny stealing from the people to enrich powerful elites.

Is the average citizen of the African continent better off now that colonialism is dead? I doubt it and in fact have personally talked to hundreds of Africans who will tell you without much prodding that life in their country was much better during the days of European colonialism. Aid programs do not work unless the people delivering the aid are in the same boat as the recipients. If the countries who provide aid are not willing to send their aid workers into the recipient country and leave them there then it is much more humane for all involved to do nothing, to spend not one penny, to leave people to their own devices to fend for themselves and figure out how to join modernity on their own terms.  Throwing billions into countries ruled by tyrants does nothing but increase human misery and mayhem; conditions which I’m firmly against as a matter of principle.

The Aid business is now a deadly business according to the New York Times in a long detailed story about NGO’s  located right down the street from us. The Times, like all media except the Toronto Star, ignores our operational success and implementation savvy because it runs counter to their narrative. You would think our success at accomplishing all projects on time and on budget in the most kinetic provinces would garner some attention in the US media but it hasn’t. The only reporter to recognize what we were accomplishing and write about it was the Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter who wrote about my buddy Panjwaii Tim and his Kandahar operation.

From the linked New York Times article:

Among the contracted aid groups working for coalition government programs, which nearly always employ armed guards and work in fortified compounds or from military bases, the body count has been particularly severe. Eighty aid contractors employed by the United States Agency for International Development were killed and 220 wounded from January through early November of this year. (In the same period, 410 American soldiers and  Marines died.)

The aid contractors were attacked on average 55 times a month  a seven-fold increase over 2009, Mr. Gast said. By contrast, 20 people employed by charitable and humanitarian groups, which refuse to use armed guards or work with the military, were killed during the first nine months of this year.

The article goes on to point out that Doctors Without Borders has a compound in Lashkar Gah which has never been attacked unlike the heavily fortified IRD compound which is right down the street.  That’s a good point, sort of, as I too think the heavily fortified compounds are a waste of money and invite attack from armed actors of various stripes. I live right behind the Doctors Without Borders compound and our compound is more modest and inconspicuous. Unlike our Doctor neighbors every expat bedroom is a mini armory/ammunition supply point. We don’t have wire lacing the top of our walls but we have plenty on our side of the wall out of view of the public. I pity the fool who jumps into our compound because he’s landing on top of triple strand concertina which will slow him long enough for the dogs to get into action.

Here is what really irritates me about the New York Times piece:

Mr. Watson agrees that the lines are often blurred. It makes it difficult for us in the humanitarian community to demonstrate to those on the other side of the conflict that we strive to be neutral intermediaries, he said.

The only “neutral intermediaries” Afghanistan has seen in modern times was the medical team headed by Dan Terry and Tom Little who accounted for 10 of the 20 humanitarian group members that were killed this year.  Unlike Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders and all the armed knuckleheads like me running around the country, Tom and Dan lived here, were fluent in local languages, were never armed, and were seen by all sides as being neutral. Yet they were gunned down in cold blood by Islamic insurgents affiliated with the Taliban. The Taliban once believed in in neutral intermediaries which is why Tom Little and Dan Terry lived and worked in Afghanistan during the Taliban reign. Now the Taliban clearly do not respect neutral intermediaries which was proven beyond a doubt to myself and the other expats Free Ranging beyond the wire by the murder of Tom Little and Dan Terry.

The Governor of Nimroz Province Abdul Karim Brahui, my super Provincial Manager Bashir and I opening up the Kang district canal which will bring irrigation to the district for the first time in 40 years. Will projects like this help?  I think they might but don’t really know.  What I care about is that we do what we say we are going to do without wasting millions of donor dollars to do it. The international NGO community seems to specialize in administering  ineffective aid at the margins. They want to be perceived by all sides as “neutral intermediaries” which makes motivates their international staff while giving them a false sense of security. But they do not have the staying power or religious based motivation that sustained Dan Terry and his wife for 30 years and thus the results they produce are as transitory as they are.

If the true neutral intermediaries are no longer safe in Afghanistan then the only way “aid” is going to be accomplished is by aid workers who can protect themselves. Which is what we do but what nobody else (in the aid game) wants to do (because hiring former military guys to deliver aid is like giving fish bicycles or something) despite the fact it is the only way to get things done.

The ineptitude of our Taliban advisories is one reason why the military portion of the surge is working so well.  Another reason is that we have (under the radar) eased up the restrictions on the use of firepower. As I mentioned in past posts the Marines down south have no problems with the ROE and they shoot HIMARS and run tac air daily.  Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room has blogged on the HIMAR  but unlike his observations it seemed to me that shooting  HIMARS was easier for the Marines then working in Tac Air.  Regardless it is clear that the military has turned a corner and is prevailing on the southern field of battle.  For a retired infantry guy like me it is great to see but it is also irrelevant.

The reason our current military success is meaningless is because our other governmental agencies insist on working through the government in Kabul despite a decade of experience proving the central government is not going to function like a western government. The other problem that every senior decision maker involved with this endeavor also knows is that the people of Afghanistan will not accept a government installed and maintained by infidels as legitimate. It’s one of those inconvenient truths that is not talked about in polite company.

It occurs to me that a rational approach towards Afghanistan would mandate we spend more time and effort bolstering leaders like Governor Abdul Karim Brahui  while simultaneously ignoring and marginalizing the central government in Kabul.  That is the only way (as I see it) that we can compliment the military success we are seeing in the South.  But the big boys in the aid racket don’t want effective solutions; they want giant multi-million dollar contracts and despite a 10-year history of failure they will get them. Those fools will continue pissing away a kings fortune daily while accomplishing little. That is not right, it is not fair, it pisses me off but I’ll you this; it is the truth.

There are a couple of recent articles in the flood of coverage about Afghanistan which caught my eye last week.  The first is factually wrong but I understand what the author was saying and he is, in a sense correct.  The second is factually correct, I understand what that reporter was saying too and think he is, in a sense wrong.  By analyzing both one can get a read on where we are in our battle to bring security to the population in the context of nation building.

The first article is Afghanistan’s Forgotten Province by Karlos Zurutuza which is about Nimroz Province.  From the article:

‘You’re right, no troops based there,’ he says. And I’m realizing now that there’s not a PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) in the area, either.’ I ask him why none are stationed there, but he doesn’t have an answer. Neither do the experts.

Nimroz is a major smuggling hub in Afghanistan: heroin goes out and weapons get in across the Afghan-Iranian border,’ says best-selling writer and renowned Afghanistan commentator Ahmed Rashid. He says he has no explanation for the military abandonment’ of this remote, but potentially key, southern province.

Nimroz Province has two major municipal centers; the capitol of Zaranj which is on the border with Iran and Delaram which is astride Rte 1 bordering Helmand Province.  There are no ISAF forces in Zaranj but there is the 2nd Marine Regimental Combat Team in Delaram.  There are over 10,000 ISAF troops in the Province and if you google “Nimroz Province” you’ll see several articles about the Marines fighting there.  So the article is wrong but the point the author is trying to make which is Nimroz has not received anything like the redevelopment love being dumped into other key provinces is correct.  Was correct is more accurate because Nimroz is about to feel the love.

This War was published by self described “person of liberal temperament”  James Traub who takes the reader on a lengthly yet concise review of American force projection overseas to explain why he thinks Afghanistan “…feels like, increasingly, is Vietnam, especially to people who formed their views of American military power, and indeed of America itself, in opposition to the Vietnam War.”  He is unable to make his case because we just do not know what the end game will look like.  Along the way he reports from the front of the Khandahar battle a few things I find very interesting.

By the time I arrived, Arghandab had become safe enough for the district governor, Hajji Abdul Jabbar, to report to work every day at the district center inside the base. Abdul Jabbar was just about the whole of government in the district, since the few officials sent from ministries in Kabul tended either not to show up or not to work when they did. Every morning, Abdul Jabbar held an audience for petitioners, listening to their grievances and stamping their tattered papers. Once a week, he met with the district  shura, a group of village elders and farmers. The meeting I attended featured a lot of shouting and accusation, much of it by Abdul Jabbar. It seemed pretty formless, but Kevin Melton, a very tall and very young official from USAID, leaned over to me and said, They’re talking about security. Normally it’s ISAF doing the talking. They’re pointing fingers at each other; that’s progress.

I felt like I was watching a political-science experiment: forging a social contract in a state of nature. Melton believed that what mattered was not so much building roads or schools as overcoming the legacy of distrust, the habit of seeking violent solutions to all problems. He saw his job as helping give local citizens a voice in decisions, so that ultimately they could take responsibility for themselves rather than simply accepting assistance. And he felt that his efforts were working. Thanks to small-team units living out in the district and to constant patrolling among the villages a crucial element of COIN strategy the Taliban presence had dropped significantly. If things continue as they have for the last four months, Melton quoted Hajji Mohammad, the  shura leader, as saying, this next year could reverse the last seven.

The presence of a USAID Field Service Officer (FSO) is due to the civilian component of the surge and they are showing up in just every key district in the South.  The second bit of information in the quote is that the American army has dispersed it’s maneuver battalions in the same manner the Marines have done in the Helmand.  They are off the FOB’s and in the ville with the people which means Gen Petraeus may in fact be the most effective General Officer of his generation.  The General sits on top of a massive military bureaucracy fighting a nasty insurgency with a coalition combat force and a dysfunctional host government. Despite this he has been able to turn his intent of getting off the FOB’s into action which is something his predecessors were unable or unwilling to do.

As I said above Nimroz Province is about to feel the love as the Marines and their USG surge counterparts start to focus on a Province which has been quiet yet remains  important due to the border crossing with Iran. The Province has a new Governor, Abdul Karim Barahawi who is an elder in the Barahawi  Baloch tribe and a respected, reportedly effective, commander who fought both the Soviets and the Taliban. He is a serious, competent man who wants to do right by the people of his province. Nimroz is a place which has plenty of Taliban but pretty good security. The roads are not safe at night for expats or Afghans who work for the government but commerce seems to flow without too much shrinkage. The Taliban in Nimroz seem to be mostly locals and focused on protecting and running the logistical pipeline from Iran into the Helmand Province.

The Americans face a tough choice in Nimroz. It is calm enough and the threat diffuse enough that there is no geographic or human terrain at which one can aim a kinetic operation. There is little to clear but it is not safe enough to hold. The Marines understand the best way to accomplish the “Hold” part of the mission is not with combat troops.  They want to weaponize money and use that to conduct the build but due to self imposed force protection measures they cannot get out and about in Nimroz or any other quiet, permissive area of the country.

We are spending billions of dollars to accomplish a mission we can’t do because of artificial constraints that do not reflect reality on the ground. Yet lightly armed experienced international stability operators can work all anywhere in the province when they work with local shura’s, village elders and district government officials.  I know this from personal experience.

Let me provide a hypothetical example to illustrate the point of how artificially high the overhead is for your typical US Government (USG) employee trying to do reconstruction. In this example the USG employee concerned with good governance and assigned to a PRT to mentor  provincial authorities.

To make this a best case scenario allow me to further stipulate that USG employees are allowed to move off post for official meetings with just two vehicles and four armed protection specialists and that he is able to get off base once a week or about 40 times in a 12 month deployment.  Here’s the stubby pencil math:

Cost of vehicles (including import fee’s and ECM equipment) 450k each

Cost of security operatives (including R&R rotations, mobilization training, insurance, admin fees etc…) 550k each

Cost of housing both operatives and USG official on a FOB 1 million each

Total cost divided by 40 trips =  $203,750.00 per trip most of which are less than 3 miles total.  I cost less than half that per year and don’t need or want the security specialists.

I have often argued contractors are the only efficient tool we have but let’s face it – that doesn’t look like it is going to happen.  Creating yet another USG agency with a mandate to operate closer to the contractor model won’t work.  Once a US Government Agency comes is created it is impossible to un-create and will grow exponentially regardless of performance.

This is where having unlimited amounts of other peoples money (OPM) really hurts.  I know most of the USAID FSO’s in the Helmand and I deal with the American military on a daily basis. The FSO’s at the district level are smart, competent and just as dedicated to the mission as the Marines they are living with.  They are also frustrated because they know all to well the cost of being hamstrung by force protection mandates. The Marines are looking for a few good men to operate the way we are currently operating in Nimroz Province and they too are frustrated.  I have been advocating for years that armed contractors (not security contractors but project implementors) are the perfect solution. But let’s be honest that is not going to happen.

Being efficient, accomplishing the mission in a cost effective manner with minimal loss of life; all the things I was taught were important as a junior officer in the Marines turns out to be completely irrelevant to the ever expanding big government agencies. Americans have a long history of successfully fighting small wars far from home as do many of our allies. These small wars were fought on shoe string budgets by small units of Marines and sailors (and at times the American army too) who had arrived on ships are weren’t going home until the conflict was over. It is now inconceivable that the United States would send combat units into a theater of action for years on end. That is the only way a western military will ever be able to operate effectively while limiting their casualties and civilian casualties from collateral damage. I bet you could raise a battalion or two of volunteers to try a deployment like this but it is hard to imagine the USA pulling it off.

So what to do about Afghanistan’s forgotten province?  I ask one of my brother Marines what he would do were he given this problem to solve under the historical constraints normally faced by Marine commanders fighting a small war.  He replied immediately ; Q-cars, fire force and pseudo operators. Which is exactly what I would say as would all of my friends who are in the business. But there is no way the American military could even contemplate let alone run such decentralized high risk operations.

There are legitimate reasons to give Nimroz Province some attention but we don’t have to spend billions to do it.  We are going to put our money on the line to prove that. Soon Ghost Team will be heading into Nimroz Province with the intent of getting the irrigation canals up and the capitol city refurbished.  Nimroz will soon no longer be the forgotten Province.

I have written in the past about night raids and aggressive ISAF convoy tactics causing unnecessary civilian casualties.  I have also written on the importance of not allowing enemy fighters who attack ISAF units to live and fight another day.  Counterinsurgency requires adaptation and my annoyance at night raids or shooting car loads of locals who come too close to convoys is that there are better ways to handle both situations. Nine years and counting and I have seen little adaptation to the local environment by the American military and our NATO allies until now.

I have just witnessed adaptation by the military after spending some time with the Marines of Regimental Combat Team 1.  They are operating in the southern Helmand province where the terrain is flat and the enemy not able or willing to operate in large numbers. Prior to this trip all my observations regarding military efforts have been “effects based”.  I had been on the outside looking in.  I have never before traveled with a military patrol nor have I had the opportunity to observe and talk with troops in the field.

I have posted in the past on the rules of engagement often linking to Herschel Smith at  The Captains Journal with whom I am in complete agreement.  We feel the rules of engagement are too restrictive and endanger the lives of ISAF and Afghan soldiers in the field. I posted recently about my first visit to RCT 1 where Col Furness and his staff do not feel the rules of engagement are too restrictive or inappropriate. On this trip I had a chance to talk to grunts in the field, platoon sergeants, company commanders as well as all three battalion commanders. The consensus is that the Marines do not consider the rules of engagement too restrictive. The only bitching I heard from the junior enlisted men concerned the strict PID – positive identification of a target before they can engage.

The examples I heard about the problems with PID were instructive. One of the Sergeants told me about an incident where the lead MATV had hit a large pressure plate IED which destroyed the mine roller attached to the front of it and most of the engine compartment. As the Marines worked to recover the vehicle small teams of Taliban would open up from the outside of some compounds a few hundred of meters to the East. Then they would displace and do the same thing from the West. The battalion commander had strict rules about firing into the populated portions of blocks (this was in Marjah) and being a passenger in the targeted  vehicle he was standing right there taking the whole situation in. The sergeant was frustrated because they never got a fix on the shooters so they could not return fire. I asked LtCol Ellison about this and he was blunt; “I’m not lighting up an area where families we know and support are living in order to suppress a couple of idiots who were shooting a few long range, ineffective rounds.”

I’m growing fond of LtCol Ellison – that’s warrior talk there brother.

Another interesting story unfolded as we were touring the Choor Bazaar. The ANA troops had spotted a man carrying an AK47 and they exchanged gunfire with him. The man ran into a local compound just as a patrol of Marines rounded the corner on a dead run. The Marines threw in a frag grenade which killed the gunmen and went into the compound to recover him and his weapon. The man’s brother came to the bazaar to speak to LtCol Ellison telling him his brother was “not right in the head” and should not have been out with a rifle. He understood that his brother should not have been shooting at the ANA and that Marines responded as expected to an active gunman. After saying that he asked for his brother body and the AK 47 he had been using. LtCol Ellison was polite but firm telling the man the Marines will not tolerate shooting at the Afghan security forces in Marjah because they leave him little choice in response. Having established this point he apologized and asked the man to come in and make a claim for their loss (financial compensation for accidental death) at the district governors office. He promised they would have no further issues with the burial and to ensure that told him a squad of Marines would be there to protect them.  All of this was heard by the mans neighbors who crowded in to listen to the interpreter as the discussion progressed. The man then asked if he could have his AK back.  LtCol Ellison just looked at him and his terp said “no”.  And that was that – the villagers headed back home and we continued on our way.

Ltcol Ellison is an exceptionally gifted commander with a very clear understanding of what he is doing and where his efforts are going.  His rules of engagement are different from his sister battalions to the north and south of him.  He has packed away his 81 mortars and sent that large platoon out west in the desert across the Helmand river to interdict Taliban fighter infiltration. He only lets his company commanders shoot illumination rounds from their 60 mortars unless there are exceptional circumstances requiring HE (high explosive) rounds.  He told me the battalion that proceeded him, the 1st Battalion 6th Marines had cleared central Marjah and that he was solidly in the hold phase of the operation.  He has spread out into over 80 positions ranging from lone static MRAP’s  (manned by rotating fireteams) watching areas of high IED activity to squad, platoon and company combat outposts.  LtCol Ellison told me “we shoot a lot of Hellfire’s and sometimes other air delivered ordnance but for the most part our aggressive patrolling keeps the Taliban out.  We’re driving the incident numbers into the basement.”

In the northern outskirts of Marjah and beyond the 2nd Battalion 9th Marines (2/9) has been tasked with pushing the Taliban out of the populated areas and keeping them out.  They have sections of 81mm mortars in each company patrol base and use them frequently.

The portion of 2/9’s A.O. that I saw looked exactly like the rest of Marjah.  The same large grid pattern with clusters of houses surrounded by fields but there were a lot less people visible in the streets and fields.  The Marines patrol aggressively but get much more contact and they are much quicker with the supporting arms and heavy machineguns.  Fire missions have to be cleared at the battalion level but that is how the Marines do things regardless of front specific ROE and the reason for this is de-confliction.  They have a lot of Marines out patrolling at any given time and have to know where all of them are before they cut lose the firepower.

Rifle company CP’s are pretty high tech these days. The watch chief has a chat window open with the battalion and updates them constantly with locations of friendly patrols as well as a narrative of what they are up to. Accounting for them when clearing fire missions is virtually instantaneous.  When a patrol makes contact or calls in a casualty the chat box pops up on every operations screen in the region. This makes clearing fires or launching a medical evacuation  just  a matter of minutes after the green light is received.

Marjah is the first place I have seen ANCOP’s who are the Afghanistan National Civil Order Police. The Marines make good use of them and they also give them specialized training at Camp Leatherneck prior to sending them out.  The ANCOPs I saw in Marjah were clearly Tajiks from the North of the country.  They spend a lot of time talking with the local people and they are clearly a valuable asset in gaining the kind of local atmospherics which can greatly aid the Marines as they work through the “Hold” portion of their mission.  I have seen articles like this one in the press about patrols from 2/6 looking for the houses of certain tribal members.  I am guessing that was earlier in the  deployment. They seem to know all the tribal members now and would be sending the ANCOP’s out to locate the compound for a specific guy if they did not already know where he lived.

Marjah is a small area of Helmand province with a unique set of circumstances.  It was fascinating to me that Marine battalions had adapted with different operational templates between units just a few miles away from each other.  But that is what it takes to do counterinsurgency.  The ability to adapt and make tactical determinations based on micro level ground truth is essential to the mission.

The Marines have a distinct advantage in counterinsurgency due to the size of their maneuver units.  Marine rifle companies, battalion and regiments are much larger than their army counterparts. This is a legacy of World War II where the Marine battalion table of organization was designed to allow the battalion to function in the face of heavy casualties. Size matters in most things and especially when it comes to boots on the ground but the Marines also have another advantage;their well documented bias for action.

Not all my readers thought Mac’s observation in this post; (that this is smart guys war) – was that smart.  I did at the time and now that I have seen the line units in the field I agree with Mac even more. I’m all for stopping most night raids and using those teams for village stability operations. I am also for adopting convoy techniques that fit the local environment so that the shooting of civilian vehicles (which I have to admit has dropped off considerably over the past year) stops.  But it seems to me that the current ROE is proving to be more than adequate for those who can fight the smart guy war.

After only 90 days of fighting to root out the Taliban from a place they have owned for over a decade Gen McChrystal called Marjah a bleeding ulcer. That was a harsh assessment given the tenacity of the enemy, the tight rules of engagement, and the limited amount of time the Marines have invested in the fight.  Marjah is still being called “the most dangerous place in Afghanistan” by embedded media which is, in my professional opinion, not true.  I’ve just returned from a three day trip into Marjah after being lucky enough to catch a ride with the CO of Regimental Combat Team 1, Col Dave Furness. There is too much information from that trip to post in one sitting so the first dispatch from the trip will cover Marjah.  The other things I saw, like Senators McCain, Lieberman, Graham and Gillibrand in the Nawa District Center will have to wait.

Counterinsurgency requires boots on the ground when you need them and time. The Marines have been at this task (clearing Helmand Province) for nine months and they are winning.  But it is not easy and it is not cheap in the terms of treasure or blood.  Despite this, the one complaint I heard from virtually every commander I talked with concerned their ability to rapidly employ the most potent tool in their arsenal – money.  They feel the clearing is about done so its time to start the “holding’ piece. But holding takes money to build stuff and provide services and money comes from the contracting establishment and that establishment is not designed for or capable of rapidly dispensing money.

We entered Marjah on the afternoon of 11 November heading directly to one of the dozens of platoon combat outposts (COP’s) which dot the Marjah area.  We were heading for an important ceremony but not one we would wish on anyone else. A painful yet important ritual designed to honor the dead while assisting the living in dealing with the loss of comrades they knew intimately and loved deeply. That is the dynamic of infantry – you know your fellow Marine better than anyone else in the world knows him. You may not always like every member of your platoon but you love all of them. And there is not doubt in the mind of an infantry Marine that the men he is with will instantly and willingly take suicidal risks to help him if he is in trouble. Memorials are tough and this one was especially tough for the very tight 3rd Platoon, Echo Company, 2nd Battalion 6th Marines because they were saying goodbye to their leader.

This was my first visit to a Marine COP and I wished it had been for another purpose.  Marjah is rapidly healing but that doesn’t mean the Talbian has given up and gone to ground.

The 2nd Battalion 6th Marines is currently responsible for the southern, central and some of the northern portions of Marjah which is actually a series of villages organized around a gigantic grid of canals which were built by US AID back in the 60’s.  They are expanding their control block by block by spreading their Marines out into platoon and squad size outposts from which Marines foot patrol constantly. The villains still offer battle but only on their terms which means when they fire at a patrol they have already set up IED’s between their positions and the Marines. The Taliban have learned through bitter experience that Marine infantry maneuvers aggressively while employing precision supporting fires and will close with and destroy those who stand and fight them. The Taliban started to use small arms in an attempt to lure aggressive Marines into mine fields full of improvised explosive devices.  Now the Marines maneuver to fix the teams engaging with small arms and then swarm them with other units coming in from a different directions or with precision fire from drones.  That’s the purpose for establishing multiple small potions from which to patrol 24/7.

Marjah is no longer the most dangerous place in Afghanistan. That distinction belongs to Sangin where Col Paul Kennedy is leading the 2nd Regimental Combat Team is a very stiff fight to secure the area.  The Marines way of conducting the counterinsurgency fight has caused some friction with our allies who think they are too aggressive. They are, without question, the most aggressive fighters in Afghanistan but they are also proving to be the most adept at holding the ground they have cleared. The battalion which proceeded 2/6 in downtown Marjah, the 1st Battalion of the 6th Marines had a 90/10 IED find rate.  Only 10% of the IED’s targeting them detonated and the others were either detected by the Marines or (in a vast majority of the time) were pointed out to the Marines by the local population.

Colonel Furness told me there was a Corporal in 3/1 (deployed in the South around Khanishin) who had an uncanny ability to spot IED’s. His squad wanted him on point every day. 49 times there were IED’s placed to target them and 49 times this Corporal found them first. Know what you get when you find mines targeting your squad 49 times in a row? Probably a lot of love and respect from your fellow Marines but you don’t get a combat action ribbon because when you find the mines every time the villains don’t shoot.  Mine blasts are used as the signal to attack with small arms and the Taliban are not known for their ability to contingency plan so when the mine doesn’t blow they slink off. Imagine that; seven months of constant patrols in a kinetic environment but because you are so good at spotting mines you don’t get to wear the coveted combat action ribbon. Col Furness isn’t a big fan of that order but it is an order so as 3/1 was leaving he showed up at a company formation and meritoriously promoted the kid to Sergeant. “It was the least I could do – the kid deserved a hell of lot more… I wish I had 100 more just like him.”

Here is another story you don’t hear every day. Today one of the squad patrols from 2/6 was stopped by a local man who wanted to turn in his son for being Taliban. He had told the kid over and over he did not want him fighting for the Taliban who he believes to be un-Islamic.  The father and one of his other sons went to the district center to have their statements video tapped and after doing so his son was arrested.

Counterinsurgency takes time and it is hard on the men and women doing the fighting.  The question is not can we prevail but will we be allowed to prevail and that question can only be answered by our Commander in Chief. The President can only “vote present” on Afghanistan for so long.  He needs to tell the American people and our allies what we are trying to accomplish in order to define an endstate.  The “July 2011 draw down” of forces is not a plan or an endstate or even a good idea. It is an abdication of leadership for a meaningless date which is predicated on nothing more than political calculation. Our president is rumored to be a very smart man. It is time for him to prove it.

Inchon is the call sign for the 1st Marine Regiment – currently deployed in southern region of the Helmand Province as Regimental Combat Team 1 (RCT 1).  They are  operating out of a large FOB in the middle of the Dasht-e Margo (Deseret of Death) about 50 kilometers from the Provincial capitol of Lashkar Gah, named Camp Dwyer.  Unlike other FOB’s I’ve visited this massive base has lots of room but very few people. The Marines don’t like FOB’s much and having (by design) a lean tooth to tail ratio (trigger pullers to support personnel) this is what one would expect to see.

RCT 1 is commanded by another close friend of mine Colonel Dave Furness, USMC, of Columbus, Ohio. Like my friends featured in previous posts, Colonel Paul Kennedy, USMC and Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Kenny, USMC, Dave was on the staff of the Marine Corps Infantry Officer course with me back in the early 90’s. The four of us also commanded recruiting stations in the late 90’s (the Marines take recruiting seriously) and as is often the case in the Corps we would bump into each other in places like Okinawa, Korea or Thailand when assigned to Fleet Marine Force infantry units.

When I arrived at the RCT 1 headquarters building I was shown into a large office where Dave was waiting with a warm smile, big bear hug and man was he a sight for sore eyes. We sat down and Dave started reading me in on his view of the operational situation he’s dealing with in the Southern Helmand. I started taking  notes:

“Timmy planting guys in the ground is easy, I don’t even worry about that, leaving it to the Battalion Commanders. You know what I worry about? The time horizon. That’s my problem because it impacts my grunts and I’m the only guy in this lash-up who can effect it. The main problem we face here is that the poppy has a value added chain. A farmer is given the seed, he is given the fertilizer – poppy doesn’t take much water or care while growing – and at harvest time he is given guys who score the flowers and collect the dope. At the end of the season he is given a portion of the harvest to sell or barter. The dope is then moved, processed and smuggled out of the country. Poppy has a well established added value chain which provides employment for lots of people while making life easy for the farmer. It costs him little to grow and doesn’t take much work. We want to sell him seed and fertilizer for a crop which is difficult to grow and much more susceptible to failure due to bad weather, floods and insects. We want him to harvest it and want him to take it to market and sell it. There are no value added processes to employ other people. There is no cold storage, no food processing plants, no grain elevators, no good roads, and no teamsters to truck produce using economies of scale.  What would you do if you were a farmer in southern Helmand?”

Readers who have been following the Afghan campaign over the years must be depressed at hearing this. What Dave identified as the problem is exactly what military and development experts identified as the problem nine years ago.

We talked about why, after so long, we’re still talking about the problem instead of fixing it but I don’t want to get my buddies in hot water for bitching about how difficult it is to do what should be easy so I’ll move on to something I also found interesting – the time horizon. Like every other commander in theater Dave is frustrated to the point of insubordination with how slow we are at funding and executing projects. More from Colonel Furness:

“I’m not doing much clearing; the 7th Marines (who rotated home a few weeks ago) did all the clearing. Paul (who commands RCT 2 in Delaram) is fighting like a lion up north right now but we’re pretty much policing up small cells of die-hards which isn’t that hard. Marjah is still active but as we expand out of the district center we’re getting that under control. I’m still losing guys, I still take KIA’s and I have had several Marines lose limbs. I hate that, hate seeing my guys get hit but we’re dishing out more than the bad guys can take so the kinetics will die down. What I want for my Marines is a reasonable time horizon for reconstruction projects so they can see the fruits of their sacrifice. I can do the paperwork for 40 or 50 projects which I know will create the value chain needed to beat the poppy and there is no chance that me or my Marines will see any of it done, or even started, even if they get approved and “fast tracked.” My guys are patrolling three times a day, eating Mr. E’s or local chow, they sleep on the deck in the dirt and I want them to see why they are doing this. We like the Afghans; every one of them we talk to asks for two things: all weather roads and schools for their kids. They know they are doomed to a lifetime of hard labor with no chance at upward mobility because they are illiterate, so they want a better life for their children. My Marines who are out there living in the dirt and heat and filth with them want the same thing. But I can’t build schools with my CERP funds, nor can I hire teachers with my CERP funds and working through the regional contracting command to program money for those things is like pulling a diamond out of a goat’s ass. It is just doesn’t happen.”

I wanted to talk war but the warrior wanted to talk value added chains and time horizons. “We’ll talk about that later in detail with the staff, I have a treat for you, lets go see Mac.”

Mike McNamara is one those characters with a story so improbable that you would think he was a creation of Hollywood. In the golden days of Hollywood Mike McNamara, a.k.a Mac would have made a worthy character in any war flick. I had not seen Mac since 1994 and had no idea he was deployed here with Dave.

Major Mike McNamara, USMCR, left active duty in the late 90’s, moving his family to North Dakota where he has a regular job, coaches the high school baseball team (his Dad managed the Boston Red Socks) serves on the city council and has his own radio show. Mactalk has got to be among the most entertaining radio shows in the nation. Mac is one of the smartest, funniest people I have ever met. That’s saying something too – Jeff Kenny is so funny that The Bot couldn’t eat chow around him. Jeff would come up with totally bizarre observations that were so funny Shem would have soda coming out of his nose or start choking on his food he was laughing so hard.  Mike doesn’t drill with the reserves and only puts on the uniform on when his friends ask him to come run their Combat Operations Center (COC) when they go to war. This is the third time he has been called and it is also the third time a general officer has had to tell the manpower weenies at HQMC to shut up, activate McNamara and send him overseas without delay. Mike will never be promoted past the rank of Major and couldn’t care less – when his buddies call he drops what he’s doing and comes overseas for a year at a time.  Every time.

Mike was set up in the COC like a grand pasha with several computer screens and a few log books arrayed in a semi circle in front of him. He was in the process of planting some guys into the ground who had been foolish enough to start sniping at a Marine patrol. We watched the feed from a Reaper which was loitering about 2o,ooo feet above the doomed Taliban – it was invisible, inaudible, and alert.  The Reaper was hanging Hellfires on its weapon pylons and as we watched it sent one screaming towards four villains when they huddled together next to a wall out of sight of the Marines they had just attacked.

The Hellfire is a supersonic missile but when it makes its final course correction just prior to hitting target it slows to subsonic speed. The sonic boom gets ahead of it so that the targets hear it about 1.5 seconds before it strikes.  Sure enough three of the four look up startled while the fourth immediately started running like he’s in the Olympic finals of the 100 meter sprint.  The three Lookie Lous’ disappear – the sprinter starts to stagger clearly wounded. Within the hour he would be joining us at Camp Dwyer where he received  state of the art medical care and will be kept in the base hospital until well enough to be turned over to the Afghan Army.

The Hellfire is pinpoint accurate with a limited ECR (effective casualty radius).  Designed to kill enemy armor the military has discovered it is the perfect weapon to shoot at human targets because they can take out guys leaning against a wall without any damage to the wall or people standing just a few feet away.

The morning news feed contained this story: yet another front line dispatch about restrictive rules of engagement. Which was most timely because I asked Mac about that yesterday and I give him the last word.

“This is “smart guy” war dummies get people killed here just like they did in al Anbar Province (Iraq).  The current ROE emphasizes the preservation of civilian life except in extreme cases which is fundamental to winning the civilian population and also fundamental to “winning the peace.” Anybody who doesn’t understand this is either stupid or inexperienced in this business. When our Marines are in contact near structures or civilians and ask us for supporting fires we ask  “are you unable to maneuver?” Answer: “…wait one… then you get “…we’re good, we can still maneuver…”

Even though it’s harder you restrain your firepower allowing the ground force to work the problem while we get attack helicopters, or jets or drones into a position to use precision weapons. The goal is how to keep the pressure on miscreants until you can whack them. This is smart guy war from squad to RCT (Regimental Combat Team) level.

We also use our air assets to do “show of force” runs in order to suppress accurate small arms fire and that works too. There are creative non-kinetic things you can do before you have to drop the hammer. Our Marines are great at exercising restraint; it’s amazing to me to see them do it every day.

My take on those who bitch is that they haven’t studied the ROE close enough to learn the “in’s and out’s”. We run rotatory and fixed wing CAS (close air support) multiple times every day. We understand killing civilians sets the effort back in a huge way… especially when we are beginning to see so many positive signs in the AO. BUT, we know we can protect our Marines and we do. Smart guy war is harder, it demands more from both the Marines in contact and my guys who are just itching to unload ordnance on the bad guys.

I’ll tell you what’s tough and that’s the days after we have had our own killed or badly wounded. Those days are the most challenging in terms of restraint. When we’re evaluating targets on those days you can feel the vibe in the room is different. That’s when the adults have to show up and keep things solid. It’s not easy and it’s not fun but that’s what we’re paid to do; be the adults.”

The ongoing saga about banning security contractors in Afghanistan continues while the need for them grows to the point that  CNN has gotten a clue. Many big reconstruction projects are grinding to a halt and let me tell you something – the local people are sick and tired of this. We have been at the reconstruction business going on ten years now yet our impact on the lives of the average Afghan has been minimal. In Kabul there is a rising epidemic of Cutaneous leishmanisis which has stuck some 65,000 people, mostly woman and children. Do you know how simple it is to stop the an epidemic of leishmanisis? Start a cash for work program to build concrete floors in every dwelling in the city including all the squatter huts in the hills – it is that simple. We could stop this problem cold for what is essentially chump change in reconstruction dollars.

Yet simple solutions to complex problems elude us; we focus instead on “good governance” or the “Afghanistan water table project” or a dozen other programs which suck up hundreds of millions of dollars while doing not one damn thing for the Afghan people. The Afghan government continues to fail at providing basic services while excelling at hounding outside the wire contractors. Visa’s for internationals working in-country remain impossible to obtain so more and more of us who work outside the FOB’s are heading home. Yet ISAF continues to support the elimination of private security contractors as noted below. I extracted the quote from some article I forgot to bookmark and am too irritated to look for at the moment.

Karzai has said repeatedly in recent months that the companies undermine government security forces, creating a parallel security structure. His desire to ban the private security groups seems to reflect the thinking of the former top American commander in Afghanistan.

Before he was replaced earlier this year for making disparaging comments about the Obama administration, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said “the coalition in Afghanistan has become too dependent on private contractors.”

There is no doubt that the military is too dependent on private contractors – the FOB’s are full of them 98% of whom are not in the security industry. Those of us who are outside the wire  doing the heavy lifting in the reconstruction piece need to be able to protect ourselves. The Afghan security forces are not remotely capable of doing the job and the sad fact is that the only international military force we can count on to come to our aid when attacked are the Americans.

For those of you who think I am exaggerating read this article closely.  If you are a German citizen you may want to skip it because it’s about the response to the Taliban attack on the USAID Implementation partner DAI in Kunduz earlier this year by the German military. As a retired military officer I have studied the innovation and professionalism of the German military during the First and Second World Wars all my adult life. It gives me no pleasure to highlight this story of indifference from a military which was once the best the world had ever seen.

Given the train wreck that is Afghanistan at the moment, Nic Lee, who heads the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) has recommended that NGO’s deal with the Taliban to facilitate their projects. That is not as ridiculous as it probably sounds to FRI readers because he is talking about NGO’s not implementation firms.

Nic sees the NGOs (unarmed, non-profits) as neutral and believes that if the Taliban also see them as non-participants in the war they’ll leave them alone. This has been generally true in the east for years. In the South not so much and in the North and West the problem for NGO’s and other internationals has been criminal groups not Taliban.  It’s to the Taliban’s advantage to allow medical clinics and farm projects to run without interference so they can show the locals that good stuff happens when they’re in charge. There’s no upside to harming NGOs and the Taliban senior leaders know it. Criminals and junior Taliban who didn’t get the memo and are another matter.

The problem for NGOs ( Lee does not consider DAI, Chemonics and the other USAID implementing partners including us as to be true NGO’s) is in areas where control is contested and their locals are at risk from kidnappings and IEDs strikes because they are working for infidel invaders. Infidel neutral non-participants bearing gifts are still infidels and there are many areas in this country where they (and their Afghan employees who bear the risk) should not (and mostly do not) go. NGO’s operating deep in contested districts are probably dealing with the Taliban anyway. For many tribes the Taliban flag is a flag of convenience and NGO’s embedded inside Afghan districts know that better than we do. I’m not sure why Nic published advice that is already understood by the target audience but sure to raise eyebrows with the international press. I don’t know him that well but don’t think he’s a publicity seeker so I’m not sure what this is all about.

The bigger problem for NGO’s and the rest of us is Nic’s advice is flat out wrong. The security situation for foreigners living outside the wire changed radically for the worst on August 6th, 2010 with the murder of a eight person medical team who had just conducted eye clinics in the remote Nuristan Province. Dan Terry and Tom Little spent over 30 years living in Afghanistan while bringing modern medical treatment to thousands of Afghans. Despite their decades of experience and close relationships with the tribes of the area  they were gunned down  in what has been describes as the “the worst crime targeting the humanitarian community that has ever taken place in Afghanistan.”

The security situation has degraded too far too fast for NGO’s to operate safely in most of Afghanistan. Ghost Team is now the only viable option for outside the wire reconstruction but that won’t happen because we’re not popular with the USAID preferred contractors or USAID. We carry guns and send in pictures from projects in places nobody else has or would ever go. We never miss a deadline…..want to be popular with bureaucrats? Do not succeed where all others have failed.

Contractors have gotten a bad rap in the press and with the FOB bound portion of our military establishment. Troops at the pointed end of the spear where we do our projects love us and go out of their way to protect and take care of us. But on the big box FOB’s we are not allowed weapons, cameras, laptops, or cell phones.  On every FOB there is an Afghan bazaar plus several military exchanges that sell knives, swords, antique guns, cell phones, computers, cameras, etc… proving again that stupidity never takes a holiday. By contract with the United States Government we are required to have cell phones, cameras and laptops in order to submit detailed reports to USAID program managers living on military bases. But look at what we are not allowed on those bases.

The few contractors who remain outside the wire need protection from the Taliban, from criminals, from the Afghan government and the rear echelon military establishment.  It’s getting damn lonely for us these days and there is no excuse for harassing the few good men who are out in harms way getting projects done on time and on budget.