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.

A piece of America in the heart of Taliban country

Reuters correspondent Michael Georgy is on an embed in Kandahar airfield where U.S.-led NATO troops are preparing an operation against the Taliban in their southern Afghan stronghold. Here’s a glimpse of life on the base.

By Michael Georgy

I walked by TGI Friday’s and a Canadian brand coffee shop as men and women playing volleyball looked like they were enjoying the beach in California. People were drinking milkshakes along a lovely boardwalk. There was a French-style patisserie for those seeking a bit of European culture.

It felt like I was back home in the United States, not thousands of miles away in the heart of Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, a centuries-old country that has fended off one foreign power after another. Is there something terribly wrong with this picture? Is this huge, growing air field a glaring example of what critics say is Western insensitivity to other cultures, even though it is securely contained in a place most Afghans will never see?

Just outside the airfield are some of the people that America has vowed to save from Taliban “terrorists” by pounding the militants and helping to build solid government institutions.

There were children beside heaps of garbage. They could not dream of getting their hands on the types of toys sold in sprawling department stores in America, where the nightly news usually offers short clips on developments in Afghanistan, President Obama’s top foreign policy priority.

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?”

Is the surge failing in Afghanistan?

Six months into the surge in Afghanistan, Americans and Afghans alike are asking the question whether it has worked and the ugly reality is that it has failed to make a difference, writes Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post.

To be sure, as U.S. President Barack Obama said last week only half the reinforcements he ordered in December have arrived and there is still more than a year to go before the troop withdrawals begin.

But comparisons with Iraq – America’s other war – are hard to push away and they don’t look good at all. Diehl says five months into the Iraq surge in 2007, sectarian violence was dropping, Sunni tribes were turning against al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government was delivering on its promises.

Afghanistan, in contrast, is a failure on all these counts. Violence has gone up and it cannot just be because more troops have been deployed in new areas and there is more fighting. As we wrote earlier, there were 400 attacks in one week in April, a majority of them roadside bombs.

On Tuesday, the Taliban struck in heavily-guarded Kabul, killing 18 people including six foreign troops  in a suicide attack on a NATO convoy. It was the biggest loss for NATO since September and the deadliest attack in the capital since a February raid.

On the same day, across the border in Pakistan a bicycle bomb ripped through the northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan killing 12 people, and you begin to wonder if Obama’s entire regional war strategy policy is at risk of unravelling.

For a panel discussion on Afghanistan organised by the Thomson Reuters Foundation click here

Half a billion dollars for Afghan interpreters

Thousands of U.S. troops are streaming into Afghanistan each month as part of the surge, and among the things critical to their mission are the services of interpreters.

The U.S. army this month extended the contract of an Ohio-based company to provide translators for Afghanistan for another year at a cost of $679 million. U.S. and NATO commander Lt. General Stanley McChyrstal’s strategy for Afghanistan rests on winning the trust of the people and that can’t work if you don’t have enough people speaking any of their languages such as Pashto, Dari, Tajik, Uzbek.

The “terps”, as the soldiers call them in military slang, don’t just do literal translations, they provide insights into local culture and customs that are key to any attempt to win the people over. And above all, their ability to read the situation on the ground can often save lives.

So the military has turned to Mission Essential Personnel to recruit, screen and bring more than 5,000 interpreters into the battlefield. A handful of the translators are American citizens of Afghan descent, writes Noah Shactman on Danger Room blog. If they have the right language skills and can pass a security clearance, they can make up to $235,000 a year plus health benefits and their work is mostly “analysing communications” and “document exploitation” on one of of the big, comfortable U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

But the vast majority of the recruits are local Afghans, earning about $900 a month and their job is to accompany frontline troops into action, Shacktman says. These interpreters are given a week’s month’s worth of training before they’re shipped out to combat. Once there, they’re required to spend a year working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and be on-call during the remaining time.

It can be a gruelling schedule, and obviously dangerous. The danger is not just when they are out in the field with the troops. They are also targeted in their homes by the Taliban for working for foreign forces, and often their families are threatened.

 This weekend the Taliban said they had kidnapped and killed four Afghan interpreters, including one on his wedding day, because they worked for Western troops in Khost province.

U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan set to overtake Iraq

At some point this month or early June, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan will outnumber those in Iraq, writes Michael E. O ‘Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. It’s an artificial milestone but it is worth noting because it tells you a good deal about the two wars and where the United States stands in each.

The cross-over is also a measure of how big and rapid has the shift been in America’s military power toward Afghanistan since President Barack Obama took office last year promising to bring the troops home.

There are currently around 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and just under 100,000 in Iraq. The United States is adding roughly 2,000 more troops each month in Afghanistan as part of a build-up to beat back a resurgent Taliban while drawing down more than 5,000 from Iraq.

By the end of the summer, the troop strength in Afghanistan will hit 100,000 while the number in Iraq would have fallen to half of that. It’s a dramatic shift since Obama was inaugurated as U.S. president in January last year when there were just 35,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The casualty count from the two wars also tells you about which is the hotter theatre, perhaps in part also because more troops mean more fighting.  U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are greater than Iraq by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1, and that imbalance will likely increase over the course of the year, says O’Hanlon.

So is the growing U.S. troop presence making a difference? A progress report issued by the Pentagon this week on the security situation in Afghanistan paints a mixed picture.

Despite the addition of more than 50,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the past year, there still aren’t enough forces to conduct operations in the majority of key areas, it said.