Afghan Journal

Is the tide turning in southern Afghanistan ?

The American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War  has a new report out that says rather unequivocally that the United States is starting to turn the war around in southern Afghanistan following the surge. Since the deployment of U.S. Marines to Helmand in 2009 and the launch of an offensive there followed by operations in Kandahar, the Taliban has effectively lost all its main safe havens in the region, authors Frederick  W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan argue.  

The Taliban assassination squad in Kandahar has ben dismantled, the insurgents’ ability to acquire, transport and use IED materials and other weapons has been disrupted, and narcotics facilitators and financiers who link the drug market to the insurgency have been aggressively targeted.  Above all,  NATO and Afghan forces continue to  hold all the areas they have cleared in the two provinces, arguably the heart of the insurgency, which is a significant departure from the past.

The war is far from over, large parts of the country remain under insurgent control, and there is limited, if not negligent political  progress in the areas re-taken from the Taliban. But the momentum of the insurgency in the south has unquestionably been arrested and probably reversed, the authors say. 

Is the ground really shifting, and if so, what’s behind this breakthrough ? Part of the reason is the arrival of 30,000 U.S. troops under the surge  which military commanders said was necessary to make a dent in an insurgency at its deadliest since 2001.  Another 1,400  Marines  have just been ordered , all part of efforts to crush the Taliban so America can make an honourable ext from its longest war yet. But it is not just more troops that General David Petraeus has thrown at  the resilient Taliban.

 By all accounts, the war has turned ultra-violent as Danger Room blog called it a few months ago, with Petraeus bringing in the full weight of the U.S.. military to bear on the insurgents.  U.S.  Special Forces stepped up raids, taking out hundreds of militants, surface-to surface missiles were fired to clear the Taliban in Kandahar, and tanks deployed in Helmand to crush them.

Air strikes, the weapon of last choice under previous General Stanley McChrystal’s winning the hearts and minds strategy, rose to their highest level since the invasion in 2011, with 1,000 attacks in one month alone.  U.S. generals are again talking of ”shock and awe” to destroy the Taliban, a far cry from the population -centric-strategy pursued earlier with its stress on avoiding civilian casualties. The level of civil casualties in the past few months, though, doesn’t seem to have risen in proportion to the intensity of the war effort, which means operations are much more accurate probably because of better intelligence,  more involvement of the ANA, and perhaps foreign forces have just gotten better  over a period of time.

The Afghan media surge — highlighting unpaid salaries

US and NATO forces in Afghanistan recently sent out a news release apparently highlighting that teachers in a school supported by international troops were going unpaid for weeks, or even months.That wasn’t the headline of course — we were told “Uruzgan teachers to begin receiving salaries” but just three paragraphs in was the news that the school reopened on September 23.And the six teachers shouldn’t expect their modest 5,000 Afghanis (just over $100) salary for at least another few weeks it added — mentioning only that pay would arrive “in the coming weeks”.

The military are sending out far more news releases than just a few months ago, with even relatively small operations highlighted, more frequent updates on major operations, and more reports on aid projects and ventures like a children’s day in Bamiyan province. Recent headlines include: “Coalition and Afghan Border Police living on the edge” ,  “Female engagement team builds bridges into Afghan society” , “Afghan National Army honoured at concert” and “Afghan masons ‘build’ sustainability through concrete training”.

We no longer leap to attention quite so fast when we see one of their news releases pop into our inboxes.

They also seem to have taken on a lot of new staff; some of whom are still getting used to the job. Ringing up with a question about another routine news release recently, I was asked to spell out my name and that of the company I work for, and then asked what Reuters does.

Of course we are not universally known, but we do have correspondents in nearly every country in the world, most major news outlets are our subscribers, and our reports, directly and indirectly, reach hundreds of millions of people each day. So if you are in the business of disseminating news, its quite unusual not to have heard of Reuters.

Lost in translation : the Afghan War

U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan will have to demonstrate basic proficiency in Dari, the lingua franca of the country, Mother Jones  reports. It’s the latest of the orders issued by commander of U.S. and NATO forces, General David Petraeus, in a late bid to bridge the gulf with citizens. “Even a few phrases really breaks the ice and just shows good intentions,” Petraeus says in an  interview on the U.S. army- run Defense Video and Imagery Distribution System. Here’s the video.

Is it too little, too late ? Some military experts point out that just about half of Afghanistan speaks Dari.  Over a third speak Pashto, followed by Turkic languages including Uzbek and Turkmen and then 30 minor languages according to the CIA’ Factbook.  Are the soldiers going to learn a smattering of these languages too, especially Pashto, the language of the original Afghan Taliban and other Pashtuns who straddle both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border ?

Or is there another, deeper purpose to it ?  Mother Jones points out there are reports that the U.S. military is laying the ground for withdrawal by shoring up the defences of major population centers such as Kabul and Kandahar. And so if troops were to be in these big cities, it makes sense to learn a few basics of Dari, the language still most used for political communication, Pashto by contrast is spoken by relatively more people  in the areas outside the big centres including Kandahar. Dari is not going to take a soldier far in some of these areas controlled by the Taliban, but if the idea is to pull out eventually from the countryside, why  bother learning the language – Pashto in this case.  

Hard to tell if that argument holds.   It’s all part of the “advance to the rear” strategy, some would argue in classic military spin. Tactical withdrawal perhaps. Whatever the gameplan, language is a barrier in multi-lingual Afghanistan and, as we wrote sometime ago, made worse by a shortage of interpreters. In fact you have to ask who is going to teach the soldiers ?

Can America win in Afghanistan?

Only 41 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that the country can win the war in Afghanistan, a new poll shows, down from 51 percent in December when President Barack Obama announced a new war strategy. The Rasmussen telephone poll conducted last week found that 36 percent of those surveyed didn’t think the United States could win in Afghanistan. Another 23 percent were unsure.

Doubts about the handling of the Afghan war have continuously been growing, except for that spike in hopes soon after Obama announced a surge as part of  his strategy to stabilise Afghanistan and bring the troops home. Indeed, 48 percent of those polled said ending the war now was a more important goal than winning it, reflecting falling confidence in the war effort.

The poll was conducted just as U.S. casualties from the nine-year war crossed the 1,000 mark, pushed by a suicide attack on a NATO convoy in Kabul. That attack, the deadliest against foreign troops since September, was  followed by assaults on heavily-fortified military bases in Bagram, north of Kabul, and in Kandahar.

In the American narrative of the war, comparisons with Vietnam keep coming back, despite strong assertions that the two wars aren’t the same.  Michael Cohen, writing in Democracy Arsenal, joins a growing  army of sceptics questioning the upcoming operation in Kandahar and whether the United States was underestimating the enemy in much the same way as it did the North Vietnamese back in 1965.

Cohen, picking up on a piece in The Washington Post, says the U.S. military plan for Kandahar seems to be predicated on the notion that the U.S. will bloody the Taliban, seize some level of control in the southern province and push the Taliban closer to negotiations.. But what if doesn’t happen?

“What if the Taliban undertake a guerrilla campaign against NATO forces and/or a wave of terror attacks those who collaborate with the U.S. government. What if they decide to bide their time and wait out U.S. military operations? What if local Afghans blame NATO and the U.S. for the violence that will be sure to accompany our military operations there? What if the strengthening of corrupt, government officials like Walid Karzai turns more of the population against the government? And above all, what if escalation in Kandahar makes the Taliban not more inclined to negotiate with the U.S., but less? What if military operations actually slow the move toward political reconciliation?”

“Broken Afghanistan” hits back at Britain

New British Defence Secretary Liam Fox’s remarks describing Afghanistan as a broken 13th-century country have predictably touched off a firestorm of criticism both at home and in Afghanistan.  For a moment, though, if you drove around  Kabul’s dusty hillsides dotted with dirt-poor, crumbling dwellings and saw the war-ravaged capital’s ruins, you could  forgive Fox for thinking he was in a medieval-era country.

Indeed the criticism against him in Afghanistan is not so much about it being a broken country, but that who exactly is responsible.  Mandegar, a local  newspaper, kicked off its reaction with the headline : “Our 13th century society is the result of your colonialism.”  It reminds readers about the British wars in Afghanistan and how each time Afghans succeeded in driving them out of the country.  “We don’t need Britain in Afghanistan,”  the Arman e-Melli daily said.

Referring to Fox’s remarks that troops were not in Afghanistan to promote education, but rather to defend British streets, the newspaper said Afghans were very aware that the British involvement in south Asia throughout history was aimed at protecting its interests, often at great cost to the countries in the region.  It was a pity that Afghans were fighting each other, otherwise they would have lifted the country out of the “13th century”, the newspaper said.

Fox’s characterisation of Afghanistan was raised at a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the weekend, the Times said. It quoted an Afghan source as saying that the remarks showed Britain to be a “colonialist, orientalist and  racist country.”  In his defence,  Fox’s office has pointed to similar remarks made by Karzai in the past about the Taliban leaving behind a 13th or 14th century country.

Some people are saying it’s Britain that’s broken and is looking for a reason to leave Afghanistan.  British  soldiers are horribly over-extended, taking an ever higher number of casualties and the country can hardly afford the financial costs of keeping them there indefinitely, the Independent wrote.   On Monday, the British Defence Ministry announced that the army’s top bomb disposal officer had resigned , a move which the Sun newspaper said was prompted by concerns that a shortage of  trained bomb disposal experts was putting troops in Afghanistan under strain.

Killing more efficiently: America’s violin-sized missiles

The CIA is using smaller, advanced missiles – some of them no longer than a violin-case – to target militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt, according to the Washington Post.

The idea is to limit civilian casualties, the newspaper said quoting defence officials, after months of deadly missile strikes by unmanned Predator aircraft that has so burned Pakistan both in terms of the actual collateral damage and its sense of loss of sovereignty.

With the new missiles you are talking of precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare, U.S.  officials say. Last month, a small CIA missile, weighing about 35 pounds, tore through the second floor of a house in Miram Shah, a town in South Waziristan.

The projectile exploded, killing a top al-Qaeda official and about nine other suspected terrorists, the newspaper said. The mud-brick house collapsed and the roof of a neighbouring house was damaged, but no one else in the town of 5,000 was hurt, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed after-action reports.

Besides the obvious gains from such “clean killings”, you are also getting more bang for your buck. The drones were earlier mounted with Hellfire missiles with a 100-pound warhead designed to destroy a main battle tank. To fire such a missile at a car or a compound in the Pakistani northwest is surely overkill, as the military-focused Danger Room blog notes.

A whole range of small missiles are being developed to be launched from the Predator, such as Lockheed Martin’s Scorpion weiging 35 pounds and with a diameter of a coffee cup. It causes far less destruction than a Hellfire, and it can be fitted with four different guidance systems that allow it to home in on targets as small as a single person, in complete darkness.

Very clinical, very precise. There is almost  a seductive element to it and it goes back to the whole debate about trying to make war as cost-free as possible. A painless war ?  But what about the people on  the ground where this great advance in warfare is being played out.

The Taliban, an enigma wrapped in a riddle ?

Anne  Stenersen  of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment has published by far one of the most detailed studies of the Taliban, their structure, leadership and just how they view the world.  Its interesting  because even after all these years  they remain a bit of an enigma beginning with the reclusive founder and supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

As Stenersen notes,  a lot of the attention within NATO has been on defeating the insurgency or how best to manage it. Less attention has been given to trying to understand who the insurgents are, and what they are fighting for. Even the way we describe them is not very defined. The insurgents are often lumped together as “al Qaeda and the Talban” , even though in many fundamental ways they could be vastly dissimilar,  or described as OMF (Other military Forces) as NATO tends to do in militaryspeak, perhaps in the belief that denying them a  proper name  diminishes them.

On the ground, soldiers often describe the enemy as “anyone shooting at us”  making it even more vague. Obviously the nature of the insurgency has something to do with this : the great diversity in Afghanistan’s demography and geography means the insurgency can vary from region to region, or even from one village to the other. You could be fighting a Taliban commander in one, and a warlord linked to them in the other.

But the insurgency in Afghanistan is certainly not a collection of small, locally based militas with no overall leadership or structure. And neither do the insurgents themselves  see it that way and its important to hear their view of themselves, both in the event of trying to seek reconciliation or to crush them militarily.

Today Mullah Omar’s Taliban movement describes itself as a resistance movement with a leadership, organisation structure, a defined goal and strategy and even an official “code of conduct” for its members. And it has made clear repeatedly it  likes to be referred to as The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the official name of the regime which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

A link to Stenersen’s 85-page report is available on jihadica.com but here are some of the other  big  take-aways :

(more…)

Bombing your own people: the use of air power in South Asia

Pakistani army chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani offered a rare apology at the weekend for a deadly air strike in the Khyber region in the northwest  in which residents and local officials say at least 63 civilians were killed.

Tragically for the Pakistani military, most of the victims were members of a tribe that had stood up against the Taliban. Some of them were members of the army. Indeed as Dawn reported the first bomb was dropped on the house of a serving army officer, followed by another more devastating strike just when people rushed to the scene. Such actions defy description and an explanation is in order from those who ordered the assault, the newspaper said in an angry editorial.

But the question really is wasn’t it coming? The counter-insurgency strategy that Pakistan has pursued to wrest control of its turbulent northwest along the border with Afghanistan has consisted of heavy use of air strikes and long range artillery barrages in the initial stages before putting boots on the ground.

It’s the steam-roller approach that Lord Curzon, the turn-of-the century British Viceroy of India, spoke about when confronted with a similar challenge in Waziristan – except that it relies on stand-off weapons like releasing bombs from the safety of a jet aircraft to keep military casualties down, taking a leaf from the U.S. playbook in Afghanistan.

Indeed it would appear that while the U.S. is trying to change tack after years of  deadly strikes in Afghanistan, and focus on avoiding casualties at all costs, the Pakistanis are relying on the classic counter-insurgency strategy of overwhelming force as Tim Foxley writes on the Afghanistan blog or the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

He calls it a mismatch in the way the war against militants is being fought on the two sides of the Durand Line separating Afghanistan and Pakistan, but if you looked elsewhere in the region, a heavy hand is increasingly the preferred course for security forces.

Sri Lanka conducted nearly daily air strikes and artillery barrages to crush the Tamil Tigers last summer at great cost to civilian lives. Some people in India are calling for a similar approach to tackling a strengthening Maoist insurgency operating deep in the jungles of central and eastern India. It’s the sort of option that New Delhi has balked at in half a century of fighting rebellions in its northeast and Kashmir in the last 20 years although it has thrown men and armour at the militants outnumbering them by a significant ratio.

Strangers at the door: Afghanistan’s deadly night raids

NATO has admitted that its forces were responsible for the deaths of five Afghan civilians including three women during a botched night-time raid in eastern Afghanistan in February. Two of the women were pregnant, one a mother of 10, the other had six children.

The alliance initially said troops had found the women already killed, bound and gagged, when they entered the compound in Gardez in Paktia province, but later acknowledged that was untrue. NATO is now looking at allegations by Afghan investigators that U.S. Special Forces involved in the raid tampered with evidence at the scene to cover the blunder.

It was another of Afghanistan’s deadly night raids gone wrong, which have so alienated Afghans, and where the risk of killing civilians is perhaps greater than with air strikes.  The New York-based  Open Society Institute in a report released in February said while casualties linked to air strikes had fallen as part of the new counter-insurgency strategy to protect the population, there has been no noticeable decrease in the dreaded practice of night raids. Indeed night raids are taking place in previously unaffected areas such as Kunduz in the north where a resurgent Taliban have mounted a strong challenge to German forces based there.

Night raids are when military forces, usually a mixed group of internationals and Afghans, force entry into an Afghan home in the middle of the night, search the premises and usually detain one or more men of the family. Reports of abuse — punching, slapping, or other mistreatment — during these raids are frequent, says Erica Gaston, a human rights lawyer and one of the report’s authors.

In some cases, people said they witnessed detainees being gun butted or kicked, sometimes while handcuffed. Former detainees and other witnesses to night raids reported international forces breaking dishes, destroying furniture, and setting vehicles on fire. Because many compounds house dozens of people, this property destruction was widely viewed as unnecessary and drew complaints from non-targeted residents in the house and their communities, the Open Society report says.

According to the UN, at least 98 civilians were killed in these incidents in 2009. In terms of creating enemies, you couldn’t do it better than attacking people in their homes at night, Gaston says. “It’s hard to do worse than breaking into some one’s house at night, taking actions that are viewed as violating the women of the household, and hauling family members to unknown detention sites for weeks to months.”

An effective Afghan police force: still wishful thinking

U.S. President Barack Obama reiterated on Monday his belief that the Afghan police and army had to grow in order to pave the way for a United States and NATO military drawdown in Afghanistan.

Strengthening Afghanistan’s indigenous security forces has always been one of the main planks of the NATO-led ISAF military strategy. But the Afghan police have a lot of problems. The are often accused of endemic corruption, colluding with Taliban insurgents, being poorly trained and badly organised. In some areas, we have reported before, their criminal behaviour has actually turned the communities they are meant to serve toward the Taliban, unwittingly empowering the insurgency.

The United States and its allies have spent billions of dollars on the Afghan police, but as this July report, funded by the European Commission states, “sustainable returns on investment seem very limited”. The report is still one of the most forthright and frank accounts of the problems facing the Afghan police.

The report points to five major problems facing police: 1) forced to take on military responsibilities sometimes such as engaging militants in gunfights, 2) lack of trust by Afghans 3) lack of training and equipment 4) a very high level of illiteracy and 5) allegations of endemic corruption.

In the field they do sometimes look like a bit of a motley crew. It is not unusual to see police on patrol wearing casual shoes or sandals with no socks. They like to customise their uniforms with unusual jewellery and quite a few like to decorate their Kalashnikov rifles with stickers, flowers and colourful tassles.

These few anecdotes do not of course accurately reflect the entire 80,000 and more individuals who make up the force. But with a target to recruit another 80,000 Afghans, the Interior Ministry really have their work cut out, considering the rather limited human resources Afghanistan has to offer.

There is no shortage of unemployed young people in Afghanistan and as one of the world’s poorest countries it is not difficult to recruit people en masse here. Government recruitment can also be a means of deterring the poor from joining the insurgency. But finding healthy and educated young men and women who want to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the world for little more than $100 a month, is another matter entirely.