Afghan Journal

While Karzai and the West dueled, Afghans lost

While Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his American backers were having a very public row, 170 people were killed in political violence in Afghanistan last week, foreign affairs expert Juan Cole points out on his blog Informed Comment.

There were 117 incidents according to the Afghan interior ministry, four times the number for the previous week. Most of the violence was in the south casting a shadow over supposed U.S. gains in the region, Cole says. Indeed residents in Marjah, the site of a major military offensive against the Taliban, are complaining of lack of security, he quotes a report by the local Pajwhok news agency as saying.

Residents say there is poor security, that civilians are caught in the cross-fire between U.S./Afghanistan National Army troops and the Taliban, and that it is dangerous to work their fields (Marjah is a set of agricultural villages and scattered farm houses).

They say that the Afghanistan police have not provided even the level of security that the Taliban once had, the report says. Security for villagers remains precarious in Marjah, Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson who led the Marine assault told the Los Angeles Times in an interview this week. The Taliban were still planting explosives and intimidating people.

And all this while Karzai and U.S. officials were having a go at each other with the Afghan leader even threatening to join the Taliban if the West didn’t back off. (It’s another question that the Taliban may not admit him to their ranks straightaway, might put him on trial instead).

Karzai is getting support from an unlikely quarter though. Liz Cheney has attacked President Barack Obama for his cooling relationship with Karzai.

Afghan attacks dip after crackdown on Quetta Shura?

It could be early days yet, and the sampling may be small, but there are signs of a drop in Taliban attacks following the Pakistani crackdown on the Quetta Shura, an intelligence website says. If the assessment put out by NightWatch intelligence turns out to be true over the next few weeks, it will  reinforce U.S. military officials’ long-standing position you cannot win the war in Afghanistan unless you take out the Taliban leadership in Pakistan

NightWatch says it began compiling and analysing open source reporting in Afghanistan in early February to determine whether the arrest of Taliban  no.2 Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi and other commanders subsequently had a measurable impact on the fighting. Looking at the figures for January and February and factoring in weather conditions, the answer is that the Pakistani crackdown appears to have contributed to a “clear but delayed drop in clashes,”  it says.

While combat in early January was lacklustre, typical of mid-winter with 5 to 6 significant clashes involving loss of life or property each day, the pace picked-up that month and into early February. In the week following Baradar’s arrest on Feb. 8 the daily number of clashes dipped, picked up a little the following week, but then fell back reaching the low levels recorded in early January.

The February is dip is even more striking, because it happened just when the United States launched the biggest operation in years in southern Helmand province’s Marjah. Usually each time there is a big NATO operation, Taliban fighters try and step up action elsewhere to distract the security forces.

We may well be grasping at straws here.  It’s not even clear how much of the Taliban military strategy was being directed by Baradar; some people have suggested he was actually in contact with the Afghan government as part of its reconciliation drive. If that were true, he may not have been the top military strategist for the Taliban for  sometime, and in that sense, his capture shouldn’t be making a huge difference to their operations.  Perhaps the dip in Taliban attacks is just a temporary phenomenon.

Either way, the pressure on Pakistan remains. If indeed its crackdown on elements of the Afghan Taliban, for whatever reason, has made a difference to the war, it will only bolster the U.S. case for more action.

“I think there is going to be a lot of  talk  about what more Pakistan can do about the militants,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and now with The Brookings Institution, told Reuters last month.

Reuters photographer and Marine meet again in Helmand

Almost two years ago, Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic captured a dramatic shot of U.S. Marine Sergeant William Bee, from Wooster, Ohio, the moment a Taliban bullet hit a wall inches from this head.

In the photo Bee is just about holding on to his rifle as he is hit by a spray of rocks and dirt when the bullet hits a compound wall in front of him.

When the photo was published by Reuters, in May 2008, it was picked up by several newspapers, widely distributed over the internet and has become one of the defining images of the war in Afghanistan.

Last month, en route to Marjah to cover the U.S. Marine-led operation in the town, Goran bumped into Bee for the first time since he took that photo. Bee was on Camp Dwyer, a large base home to mainly Marines in southern Helmand province. Bee was also on his way to Marjah with Alpha Company of the First Battalion, Sixth Marines.

“I was doing change over, getting dressed, getting washed, stuff like that. We heard one gun shot by one of the posts, I went over there to check and make sure it was alright. I’ve seen this guy, I drew down on him and the world went black. Then I came to, I was on a stretcher, everybody thought I got shot. But I was fine. Had a couple of Tylenol. Goran came up to me with a big smile on his face and said ‘dude, you got to see what I got’. That was pretty much it,” Bee said. “I was hoping Goran was out here, I like him a lot. He’s probably the best embed I’ve ever worked with, plus he gave us a shit load of cigarettes when we didn’t have any.”

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.

from Photographers Blog:

Inside the Afghan surge

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.