Afghan Journal

America in Afghanistan until 2024 ?

The Daily Telegraph  reports that the status of forces agreement that the United States and Afghanistan are negotiating may allow a U.S. military presence in the country until 2024 .  That’s a full 10 years beyond the deadline for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops and handing over security responsibilities to Afghan forces.

The negotiations are being conducted under a veil of security, and we have no way of knowing, at this point at least, if the two sides are really talking about U.S. troops in the country for that long. ( The very fact that a decade after U.S. troops entered the country there is no formal agreement spelling out the terms of their deployment is in itself remarkable)

But it does seem more likely than not that there there will be a U.S. military presence, however small, in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and that is going to force the players involved in the conflict and those watching from the sidelines with more than a spectator’s interest to rethink their calculations.

Indeed, the talk of an extended force deployment may be an attempt to reverse the perception that America was in full retreat following President Barack Obama’s announcement  of a drawdown that many in the military believe has only hardened the resolve of the Taliban insurgents and their backers in Pakistan to wait out the departure.

Now with troops, including a sizeable element of Special Forces, backed by the United States’ aggressive and unparalleled air power, to be based in the turbulent south and east of the country beyond 2014, the  players have to shuffle their cards again. For those elements in the Taliban who may have explored the idea of reconciliation, the plan for a long-term U.S.military involvement in the country has just made their task even more  difficult.

For Pakistan, the country most affected by what happens in Afghanistan, the idea that the United States is not going to walk away, sharpens its dilemma and once again goes to the heart of its role as a conflicted partner in the war against Islamist militancy.  On the face of it, a U.S. military presence next door means continued pressure on Pakistan to act against the militant groups that operate from its soil. It means the drones will continue to fly in its skies and fire missiles at will.

Coping with death on the Afghan battlefield

Reuters correspondent Golnar Motevalli was emebedded with U.S. Marines as they launched one of the biggest offensives of the eight-year-war in Afghanistan last month.  Here’s her moving account of how soldiers and civilians are both scarred by deaths around them in the southern district of Marjah where the operation was carried out.

Corporal Jacob Turbett gave out a single groan of pain before the Taliban bullet, which had pierced his heart, ended his life.

Medics had carried Turbett from the bank of dirt he was standing on, where the bullet ricocheted and entered his chest, laid him out on the dusty ground of a small Afghan home, and frantically tried to resuscitate him. Above them T-shirts and woolen sweaters on washing lines flapped in the breeze.

It was February 13, late morning. Hours earlier, I had landed by helicopter in a muddy field in Marjah in pitch darkness as last month’s massive U.S.-led military assault in southern Afghanistan got underway. As day broke, the crack of bullets erupted from a few hundred meters away and the troops of Bravo Company, First battalion, Sixth Marines were locked in an intense gunbattle.

Over the first days of the American bid to retake the initiative in the eight-year war against the Taliban, I would witness how U.S. Marines and Afghan civilians alike coped with death.

Shortly after landing in Marjah a platoon of Marines had taken over the house where Turbett now lay dying. Little chicks scurried about the grounds of the mud brick abode, pecking at the floor while above their heads bullets zipped through the air. As Turbett struggled for breath, the Afghan family that owned the house sat in silence, holed-up inside one of their small rooms, unaware that a man was dying a few feet away. The Marines, through an interpreter, had told the family they needed to use their home as a temporary command post.

The gunfire subsided slightly as the Marines focused on saving their colleague. Then the sound of a toddler crying broke from the room where the family were. Eventually a tiny girl in a pink dress stepped out from behind a rickety wooden door which was draped in a dirty black curtain, her wizened, bearded father clutching her hand and ushering her to the toilet.

Women hold up half the sky even in Afghanistan ?

Back in 2002, onlookers would often gather outside the U.S. military headquarters in Bagram in Afghanistan, watching women soldiers in full battle gear sitting on top of vehicles on guard duty at the entrance to the base.

For a deeply conservative society such as Afghanistan, it was a novel sight to watch women in such a role, more so coming soon after the harsh regime of the Taliban. From time to time, the women would get annoyed and holler to the men hanging around and staring at them:  “Back off. Haven’t you seen a woman ever?”

Getting into the base off and on, I often wondered what was the idea of posting women soldiers right at the entrance, since it only underlined the vast cultural gulf between the two societies.

Anyway, fast forward to 2010,  women members of the U.S. Marine Corps are going to be at the front end of the renewed push to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans. They will be launched into Afghan homes to try and win over the rural women, according to a report in The New York Times. You can’t gain the trust of  the population if  you talk to only half of it, is the argument for this outreach to Afghan women.

Beginning next month small units of the female marines will accompany the men on their patrol in Helmand, one of Afghanistan’s most violent provinces. The teams will meet Afghan women in their homes, assess their need for help, and gather intelligence. Hopefully, winning the  women’s goodwill  could make Afghans, both men and women, less suspicious of American troops. For, women hold half the sky even in Afghanistan.

Once inside an Afghan compound, the Marines have been instructed to remove the ‘battle rattle” of body armour and helmets, and in a nod to local custom, swap the helmet for a scarf.

The other do’s and don’ts: Don’t start by firing off questions, break the ice by playing with the children and don’t let the interpreter hijack the conversation.

Afghan Taliban snipers the bigger enemy in Marjah

                                                          By Golnar Motevalli

When thousands of U.S. Marines swept into the centre of the southern Afghan town of Marjah this month, they had prepared for a huge improvised explosive device (IED) threat and sporadic Taliban gun attacks.

Instead, they found Taliban snipers with fatally accurate shots and some of the worst examples of home-made explosives they had ever come across.

Corporal Thomas Gibbons-neff, a 22-year old sniper from Darien, Connecticut spends most days in a single position in the village of Koru Chareh in the town of Marjah, looking down a scope on his rifle watching for Taliban gunmen.

“We have never experienced this level of threat, this trained foe. In 2008 it was a completely different time of fight,” said Gibbons-neff, who was deployed to Helmand in 2008.

The Marines are reluctant to use the term “sniper” to refer to Taliban gunmen, preferring to call them “trained marksmen” because, while their skills have markedly improved since last year, they are bad at covering their tracks.

Empty bullet shells have been found littered outside a mosque the Marines believe one sniper used as a position in the village of Koru Chareh.

Afghan offensive : When the Marjah “pork chop” turns into a “lamb chop”

                                                              By Golnar Motevalli

All militaries are notorious for their use of jargon, acronyms and code names to describe people, places and operations. The village of Koru Chareh in the centre of Marjah and a key area in the U.S. Marines’  objective to seize the town in Operation Moshtarak was also given a moniker.

 Koru Chareh is a cluster of unevenly planned low-rise mudbrick dwellings surrounded by small canals. From an aerial map it is shaped like an oblong which tapers at the end. So the Marines called it the “pork chop”.

Officers would radio in suspicious sightings in the “pork chop”,  such as  a bomb-like device  or a suspected   Taliban sniper. About a week later it occurred to them that the reference to a cut of meat from an animal seen as “haraam” or forbidden in one of the world’s most conservative Muslim countries may be inappropriate. So one evening, as some Marines were turning into their sleeping bags while others kept watch on outposts, it was decided that the “lamb chop” should replace the pork chop.

“Well, no one in the States eats lamb” one officer said, to explain why the moniker was chosen in the first place. It is also highly doubtful if any Afghans in Marjah, most of whom had fled the town before the offensive, had any idea that their U.S. allies were using the name at all.

America attempting a more “humane war” in Afghanistan

One of the reasons the big U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan’s Marjah area has slowed down is because the Marines are trying to avoid civilian casualties at all costs, according to military commanders. So use of air power, the key to U.S. battle strategy, has been cut back because of the risk of collateral damage from strikes.

Lara M. Dadkhah, an intelligence analyst, in a New York Times op-ed says troops under heavy attack in Marjah have had to wait for an hour or more for air support so that insurgents were properly identified. “We didn’t come to Marjah to destroy it, or to hurt civilians,” Dadkhah quotes a Marine officer as saying after he waited 90 minutes before the Cobra helicopters he had requested showed up with their Hellfire missiles.

The new approach flows from U.S. and NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy that the war in Afghanistan can only be won by winning the full support of the Afghan people, not just by killing or capturing militants. As  he says in this counter-insurgency guidance issued last year,  ”security may not come from overwhelming firepower, and force protection may mean more personal interaction with the Afghan people, not less.”  Thus the use of air power and long range artillery, which can lead to civilian casualties, can only be authorised under very limited and prescribed conditions.

The new strategy has already unfolded on the ground, and Marjah is no exception. Dadkhah says analysis of U.S. military data shows that while the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has more than doubled since 2008, the number of close air support sorties which are usually in aid of troops under fire grew by only 27 percent. It can only mean 1) troops are calling for air support less often than before McChrystal’s directives  2) that even when they do, their requests are denied.

While killing innocents or destroying towns cannot be an objective of the operation to take Marjah, Dadkhah says the emphasis on civilian protection is putting U.S. soldiers on the defensive in what is intended to be the war’s biggest offensive. No army, not even the United States, can expect to win if it gives up its advantages, and air power is certainly one of them. Over a longer term, the whole idea that war can be conducted in  a just manner and without causing any civilian casualties is dangerous.

“General McChrystal’s directive was well intentioned, but the lofty ideal at its heart is a lie, and an immoral one at that, because it pretends that war can be fair or humane, ” says Dadkhah. “Wars are always ugly, and always monstrous, and best avoided. Once begun, however, the goal of even a ‘long war’ should be victory in as short a time as possible, using every advantage you have.”

But there are others who say that criticism of General McChrystal’s approach is itself short-sighted. While there can be a tactical logic for continuing the use of air power and heavy artillery to win the immediate battle, this is a high-risk strategy over the longer term. It’s a game of perceptions and McChrystal is right in trying to win it that way, argues Julia Mahlejd writing in Registan, a blog focused on Afghanistan and Central Asia. “The use of air power causes the least number of civilian casualty incidents and kills or wounds the least number of Afghans per year. But when such incidents do occur they are invariably spectacular. No wonder they cause the most outrage. And that outrage diminishes Afghan support for the mission,” she writes.