Afghan Journal

The contours of an Afghan settlement

For all the talk of  seeking a political settlement of the Afghan war  with the involvement of the Taliban, it has not been clear even broadly what a final deal will look like.   Will the Taliban, who control or exercise influence over large parts of the country, take charge in Kabul ? Will the United States simply and fully withdraw all its forces from the country?  What happens to President Hamid Karzai who has been actively seeking reconciliation with the hardline Islamists ? What about the regional powers, not just Pakistan which obviously will play a central role because of its ties to the Taliban, but also Iran and India, both with rising stakes there along with the Russians and the Chinese to a lesser extent  ?

Selig Harrison, director of the Asia programme at the Center for International Policy, explores some of these questions in a must-read piece in Foreign Policy headlined “How to leave Afghanistan without Losing.”

As the title suggests, America’s exit strategy should be based on the premise that  while the Talban will have to be accommodated in any settlement, they must be contained.  Disengagement  from Afghanistan does not mean surrender to the Taliban, Harrison argues, even though the austere Islamist group has virtually fought a coalition led by the world’s most powerful military to a stalemate.  And the key to the containment strategy rests with Afghanistan’s neighbours.

Six of the seven regional powers with a stake in Afghanistan share the U.S. goal of preventing the return of a Taliban dictatorship in Kabul.  These  include such unlikely countries as Iran, Russia, China, and India besides the central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan all worried that the extreme version of Islam espoused by the Taliban can only have negative consequences for their own countries, the  author argues.

The one country that supports a Taliban return to power, is Pakistan, which helped install and sustain the  regime that ruled from 1996 to 2001. Although given the manner in which militants groups inspired or tied to the Afghan Taliban have turned on the Pakistani state in recent years, you would have to think that security planners in Islamabad may have their own concerns of a fully resurrected Taliban just over the border.

Harrison suggests the following steps

Afghanistan’s $2 bln gravy train

The United States cannot win a fight for hearts and minds if it outsources critical missions to unaccountable contractors, U.S. President Barack Obama said during a speech he made as a senator back in 2007.  It hasn’t changed much in Afghanistan since then as a U.S. Congressional investigation into a $2.16 billion supply chain that provides  soldiers everything from muffins to mine-resistant vehicles shows.

Security for the supply chain running through remote and hostile terrain has been outsourced to contractors, “an arrangement that has fuelled a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of  warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others,” according to John F.Tierney, chairman of the subcommittee on National Security And Foreign Affairs.

Here’s a PDFof the report.  It makes for sobering reading.  The scale of the operation is indeed immense, and you can get a glimpse of it if you drove from Kabul to the military base in Bagram.   Container  depots stretch into the arid fields while a long line of brightly decorated trucks jam the entrance to the sprawling military base.

The principal contract supporting the U.S. supply chain in Afghanistan is called Host Nation Trucking, a $2.16 billion contract split among eight Afghan, American, and Middle Eastern companies. Although there are other supply chain contracts, the HNT contract provides trucking for over 70 percent of the total goods and material distributed to U.S. troops in the field, roughly 6,000 to 8,000 truck missions per month. Most of the prime contractors and their trucking subcontractors hire local Afghan security providers for armed protection of the trucking convoys. A typical convoy of 300 supply trucks going from Kabul to Kandahar, for example, will travel with 400 to 500 guards in dozens of trucks armed with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).

The logic behind outsourcing the security of the supply chain is to leave troops free to focus on counter-insurgency. During the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989), by contrast, its army devoted a substantial portion of its total force structure to defending its supply chain.  But this reliance on outsiders has spawned an extraordinary cast of characters and may well be undermining U.S. goals, the report says.

Take for example Commander Ruhullah, the prototype of a new class of warlord in Afghanistan.  Before September 11, 2001, he was relatively unknown in the country.Today, he is the single largest security provider for the U.S. supply chain in Afghanistan, operating along Highway 1, the main transportation artery between Kabul and Kandahar, the congressional report said. Because most U.S. supplies are shipped through Pakistan to Bagram, north of Kabul, while most U.S. troops are surging into Kandahar, in the south, Highway 1 is the critical route for the supply chain within Afghanistan.

Ruhullah commands a small army of over 600 armed guards, the congressional report said.  His men engage in regular combat with insurgent forces. He claims extraordinary casualty figures on both sides (450 of his own men killed in the last year and many more Taliban dead). He readily admits to bribing governors, police chiefs, and army generals. Over a cup of tea in Dubai, he complained to the Subcommittee staff about the high cost of ammunition in Afghanistan -– he says he spends $1.5 million per month on rounds for an arsenal that includes AK-47s, heavy machine guns, and RPGs.51 Villagers along the road refer to him as “the Butcher.”

Obama’s secret trip to Afghanistan

For a leader who has come to own the Afghan war, U.S. President Barack Obama’s first trip to Kabul and the military headquarters in  Bagram since he took office 15 months ago was remarkable for its secrecy and surprise.

He flew in late on Sunday night, the blinds lowered on Air Force One all the way from Washington, and left while it was still dark.

It tells you more about the state of the eight-year war than anything else in recent weeks. Imagine visiting a country in the dead of the night, calling on its president sometime soon after and then flying out before the sun rises.

Here’s a Reuters story on how the six-hour trip was orchestrated.

One encouraging sign though: a Washington Post poll released just as Obama made the trip to the war-shattered nation showed that Afghanistan is still the one issue where Americans are behind  him.

Overall, 53 percent of those polled approved of the way he was dealing with the situation in Afghanistan with 35 percent expressing disapproval.

A Guantanamo Bay in Afghanistan?

(A protester outside the White House in Washington dressed as a Guantanamo Bay detainee. Photo by Kevin Lamarque)

The United States is considering a proposal to hold foreign terrorism suspects at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan,  the Los Angeles Times reported this week, a  new Guantanamo Bay just as it is trying to close down the original facility in Cuba.

Given the amount of trouble that Washington has run into for running  a detention centre where  prisoners have no access to the U.S. court system, it sounds like a bad idea to be setting it up in Afghanistan, say experts.

A “very bad idea”, actually, says human rights lawyer Sahr Muhammedally, to be doing this at a time when the U.S. military is trying to win the support of the Afghan people as the centrepiece of its strategy to reverse the tide of the eight-year war.

Guantanamo Bay is an ugly name in Afghanistan, with scores of Afghans held for anything from two to five years without any opportunity to defend themselves. To be now trying to create a  mini-Gitmo in the country must come as an affront to many of them, says Muhammedally in this article for Foreign Policy’s AFPAK Channel.

Anger over night raids and arbitrary detentions by international military forces ranks second to that of civilian casualties, the London-based lawyer says.  Expanding the Bagram detention centre, which already stands along with Guantanamo Bay and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib as a symbol of harsh treatment of detainees, must come as a further provocation.

Anatomy of a plane disaster in Afghanistan

In July this year,  a U.S. Air Force F-15E supersonic fighter crashed into a dark mountainside in eastern Afghanistan killing both crew members.  While there have been several helicopter accidents, crashes by supersonic jets are a rare occurrence especially in a country where the enemy doesn’t have the weapons to threaten them.

So what went wrong ? Time magazine published the results of an Air Force investigation last week and it suggests that the “stresses of combat , accumulating slowly and insidiously, can overcome the world’s best pilots even when everything aboard a a $50 million fighter jet works perfectly.”

The deadly sequence of events began late at night when a pair of  the F-15E or Strike Eagles were on their way back to Bagram air base after a four-hour mision near the Pakistan border, supporting ground troops. Just then, the pilots decided to practice high-angle strafing runs against dirt mounds in the middle of a dry river bed.

It is arguably one of the Air Force’s most dangerous misions — diving toward the ground amid mountains on a dark night. Yes, the pilots were wearing night vision goggles, but because they work by amplifying the existing light, they can only do so much. 

A simple miscalculation of the lakebed’ s elevation led to the crash, the investigation showed.  The altitude was calculated at 4,800 feet,  when the figure should have been 10,200 ft . So the pilots calibrated their strafing run based on the wrong figure and then began streaking through the darkness at supersonic speed.  Time says the plane’s collision avoidance system warned four times as it hurtled down, but presumably there was too little time left. The pilots didn’t even try to avoid the mountain they slammed into, or eject.

Tragic as the crash was, it reminds you that while  ground soldiers talk of rampant confusion in the battlefield amid blood and mud, the picture can often get fuzzy miles above in the skies. And that men and machine are constantly being pushed to the limits.

Choppers, the Achilles’ heel in the Afghan war

Back in 2002 during a reporting assignment in Afghanistan, a U.S. helicopter pilot told me that it was important to send a message early on that “we own the skies, night or day”.  So at any given point of time if you were at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul, you could see aircraft, mostly choppers taking off, landing or simply idling  in the skies above in what became the region’s busiest airfield.

Seven years on, the U.S. military is holding on to the skies ever more tightly as the ground below slips away to a Taliban insurgency at its fiercest level. And because they fly more and because the terrain and weather are difficult, the chances of things going wrong increase, as happened earlier this week when 14 Americans, including 11 soldiers, were killed in two separate chopper crashes.

U.S. soldiers were twice as likely to die in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan than in Iraq, Time magazine reported. It quoted Michael O’ Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who is keeping a rolling count of U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, as saying that it wasn’t hostile fire that was bringing down the choppers. “The main issues have to do with terrain, weather and of course frequency of use,” he says.

While 5% of U.S. deaths in Iraq have been caused by helicopter crashes — 216 out of 4,348 — the total is 12% in Afghanistan — 101 of 866 — even before Monday’s losses, Hanlon says.

Afghanistan, roughly the size of Texas, has few major roads, and they are being increasingly monitored and mined, forcing the U.S. to rely more on aircraft to move troops and supplies. Indeed many of the U.S. outposts in the country can only be reached by helicopters.

Noah Schachtman writes in Danger Room, a blog on national security, that helicopters are the “irreplaceable connective tissue of the Afghanistan war effort — and its potential Achilles’ heel.”  When the U.S. military wants to haul gear, supply outposts, reposition forces, or evacuate wounded troops, the first, best and only option is to do so by helicopter.