Afghan Journal

US military surge: the view from Kandahar

The U.S. military has stopped the Taliban momentum in southern Afghanistan, and is probably starting to reverse it following the surge, according to a study we wrote about this week here. The view from the ground, though, is much less rosy.

Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy has published a paper under its Afghan Voices series looking at how ordinary Afghans view the current round of military operations centred around Kandahar.

Author Zabih Ullah spoke to people in Kandahar and its surrounding districts and they don’t seem particularly impressed with the surge. Most believe the offensive will end up like so many other operations in the past and that the only people to suffer will be ordinary Afghans. It’s the ordinary people with no links to the Taliban who end up losing lives, getting wounded or arrested in these operations, they believe.

That said, though, the people of Kandahar don’t want the coalition to leave. They see a role for foreign forces in the province, but one that is focused more on stabilisation and peace building rather than hunt down-the-Taliban operations that U.S. military generals have repeatedly mounted in the troubled region.

 Zabih Ullah lists five reasons why the U.S. cannot succeed in Kandahar. One, so long as the Taliban have a sanctuary in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province just over the border, they will be hard to defeat. Taliban commanders live securely in urban areas and there is even a separate hospital for injured fighters in the middle of the Baluch capital, Quetta, the author said.

 In addition, there are thousands of madrassas in Baluchistan where Afghan refugees are being indoctrinated to carry out attacks on Afghan forces seen as slaves of foreign forces. Pakistan, though, has consistently denied the existence of a Quetta shura, the name given to the Taliban leadership council supposedly based there.

from Tales from the Trail:

McCain sees India, U.S. teaming up against “troubling” China

As President Barack Obama begins his visit to India, his erstwhile rival John McCain is voicing hope that Washington and New Delhi will tighten up their military cooperation in the face of China's "troubling" assertiveness.

McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate and the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a think-tank audience in Washington on Friday that the two huge democracies were natural allies in the quest to temper China's ambitions.

"While India and the United States each continue to encourage a peaceful rise for China, we must recognize that one of the greatest factors for shaping this outcome and making it more likely is a robust U.S.-India strategic partnership," McCain said.

McCain suggested that India and the United States could increase the level of representation at each other's central military commands and work to make their armed forces more "interoperable" through joint military exercises and sharing of intelligence.

"There's no reason why we can't work to facilitate India's deployment of advanced defense capabilities such as nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, missile defense architecture as well as India's inclusion in the development of the joint strike fighter," the next generation fighter aircraft being developed by the United States, the United Kingdom and others, McCain said.

The United States should also firmly back India's desire for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, he said.

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.”

The changing face of war in Afghanistan

I was embedded with Western troops a few days ago. Beforehand I was warned of austere living conditions at the combat outpost. I thought about the agony — since I suffer from technophobia — of filing stories through a satellite phone in the scorching heat.

As I rolled out my sleeping bag I noticed all the soldiers had mosquito nets over theirs. Actually, they were there to keep camel spiders and scorpions away. It was remote as can be. Grape fields, mountains and villages with mud brick huts with, probably, no electricity.

What about troop morale? A sergeant said one of the problems he faces is trying to help his men cope with their girlfriends breaking up with them and family problems. I thought of that old movie image of the soldier getting his letter from the mail pouch and reading the Dear John notice.

 Not here. To my surprise, the combat post had wireless Internet. I walked by soldiers at night and there was that familiar Facebook screen. Love — and no more love — messages carried electronically.

I celebrated. I was able to file without the dreaded satphone. Has Internet changed the face of war? Is there such a thing as idle time anymore?

“Incoming,” the alert sounded, ” get off your computers and take up your positions.” I bet the soldiers can’t wait to get back to instant messaging, or the latest pictures of their girfriends on Facebook, after the Taliban stop firing their AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.

Western army fights on its stomach;what about the Taliban ?

Walking into a mess hall at Kandahar Air  Field in Afghanistan can be confusing.

Soldiers from NATO countries, walking in  all directions, have plenty to choose from. Asian workers load heaps of food on plates as long rows of soldiers wait patiently. There is the salad bar. The fruit bar. The bread toasting area. In the centre of  mess  halls are short order cooks who make stir fry meals, for instance. The drinks section offers everything from apple to multi-vitamin juices to chilled milk.

 If  soldiers are still thirsty and need a  quick sugar boost they can always turn to refrigerators packed with soft drinks. For the greedy – a sign says only two cans per person.

After a dizzying look at all that is on offer, I remembered, for some reason, someone telling me long ago how the  Vietnamese lived on tiny amounts of rice fighting the Americans.  Did that make them even harder fighters?  Probably.

What do  the Taliban eat? Are they loading up on  staggering amounts of Afghan food,  including the local equivalent of ice cream  and cake?  Are they comforted by air conditioning and entertained by sports  channels at canteens on huge, heavily-guarded bases where sirens blare when a rocket is fired at them?

Unlikely. Their  leader, Mullah Omar, who lost an eye  fighting Soviet occupiers, is known as a  simple man, from a simple background devoid of what his fighters would surely see as  shocking luxuries enjoyed by his Western  enemies.

 Smaller helpings may be good for the warrior’s psyche.

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?”

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.

Burying the Powell doctrine in Afghanistan

Early this month Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered what military experts are saying was the final nail in the coffin of  the Powell doctrine, a set of principles that General Colin Powell during his tenure as chairman laid out for the use of military force. A key element was that the military plan should employ decisive and overwhelming force in order to achieve a rapid result. A clear exit strategy must be thought through right from the beginning and the use of force must only be a last resort, Powell said, the experience of Vietnam clearly weighing on him.

U.S. military involvement overseas has deviated far from those principles since then but Mullen finally finished it off, according to Robert Haddick in this piece for Foreign Policy. The United States is faced with low-level warfare and the public must accept it as a way of life. The question no longer is whether to use military force; America’s enemies whether in Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen have settled that issue, ensuring it remains engaged in conflict. The question is how should it use its vast power.

The nature of the threat from irregular warfare is such that it would often make more sense for the United States to turn to use of military force as a first option, according to the new Mullen doctrine. And you don’t need to assemble an armada before going in, as Powell did for Operation Desert Storm. You need to be precise and principled.

Last week another one of Powell’s principles came under withering attack and this goes directly to the heart of the issue of nation-building that the United States has been faced with in Afghanistan and Iraq after invading these countries.  Powell said America had a  moral obligation to countries it got militarily involved in, a sort of a “Pottery Barn rule” which meant  “you break it, you own it.”

Bernard Finel, a senior fellow at the America Security Project, rejects the Pottery Barn rule saying that while the U.S. must launch quick decisive operations in third countries,  it must not get subsequently involved in an open-ended military occupation.  In short, the U.S. military  must play to its strengths and not fight the asymmetric war that its adversaries want it to, as it has discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The U.S. military is a dominant fighting force, capable of rapid global power projection and able to defeat state adversaries quickly and at relatively low cost in American lives and treasure. Unfortunately, American leaders are increasingly trying to transform this force into one optimized for counterinsurgency missions and long-term military occupations,”  Finel writes in the Armed Forces Journal.

So if there is a rogue regime that needs to be removed in the interests of regional stability or for protection of basic human rights for example, the United States would be better off launching quick, decisive military attacks even repeatedly than staying on trying to repair the ”broken dishes.” In the cases of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States achieved its core objectives early on in the campaign, Finel argues. But in both wars it has stayed on, even though the benefits flowing from it are limited.

It’s a counter-insurgency, stupid

On a recent embed with U.S. Marines in a remote spot of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, the Taliban, or Taliban-linked insurgents, seemed so elusive and invisible that it was easy to doubt whether they actually existed.   Only the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) planted crudely under dirt tracks indicated insurgents were lurking somewhere in Helmand’s vast cornfields and desert plains.  Every home or compound that was visited and searched by the Marines I accompanied on foot patrol appeared to be safe or occupied by harmless residents who just wanted to get along with their lives.   The Marines, who had been ambushed by a group of insurgents and successfully cleared a path laced with bombs a day or so before, were by and large convinced that someone, somewhere in these villages, knew where the insurgents were or when they were likely to turn up next.   Patrolling villages in “Taliban country”, is an essential plank of the U.S. military’s counter-insurgency, the strategy championed by General David Petreus in Iraq and largely credited for quelling the insurgency there.   Most U.S. military officers in Afghanistan swear by Field Manual 3-24 (FM 3-24) — the military’s counter-insurgency (COIN) bible. They admit to having “drank the Cool Aid” and most are confident it is the best hope Washington has of gaining the upper hand on the Taliban, securing the support of the population, while trying to keep civilian casualties as low as possible.   But with reports that as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops have been requested for Afghanistan by the commander of foreign forces there, Army General Stanley McChrystal, many are beginning to question whether COIN is too costly, whether it’s misguided and if more troops actually feeds the insurgency.   In his recent assessment of the war in Afghanistan McChrystal said that protecting the population was of paramount importance in efforts to defeat the insurgency. This is one of the core mantras from a French scholar and military officer, David Galula, whose work heavily informs the FM 3-24.   Galula, however, was writing in the 1960s, with reference to France’s struggle against Algeria’s National Liberation Front. As such some scholars such as Thomas Rid at the Woodrow Wilson Institute have said that because counter-insurgency as a military doctrine is the product of a colonial age, rooted in 19th centruy scholarship, it may essentially be outdated or inappropriate for a 21st century war in Afghanistan.   In a recent interview with news channel Al Jazeera, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said that COIN principles were outdated and would not work in Afghanistan. Even the idea of conducting a western-style democratic election was laughable to him and had echoes of how the Soviet Union tried to impose communism on Afghans in the 1980s.   More soldiers will inevitably foster more discontent within the population, Brzezinski said. A few years down the line, the insurgency would have grown leading to another call for more troops, perpetuating a troops-violence-troops cycle.   The supporters of COIN maintain that it’s the only way to ensure that a viable state can be built and supported. This blog post on the AfPak Channel says that what appears to be going on in Washington, particularly after President Barack Obama’s strategy review of Afghanistan back in April, is an attempt to combine COIN with counter-terrorism, something which “threatens to leave the U.S. with no clarity of strategy, doctrine, tactics and objectives.”   Another crucial part of Afghanistan’s future stability is the power of its own security forces. Right now the Afghan army, which is seen as broadly successful and relatively effective, is far too small. Only 650 Afghan troops pushed into Helmand with 4,000 U.S. Marines this summer.   Marine commanders on the ground say the Afghan army needs to significantly expand together with Afghan police. The police are paid between $70 and $100 a month to work one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, as they are often the first target of insurgents. They are also by and large poorly-educated or illiterate and because they are locally deployed, they tend to have loyalties to certain tribes and are known for turning a blind eye on insurgent activities in some areas.   Afghan army officers themselves are sometimes at odds with the U.S. approach. Foreign troops respond to insurgent gunfire using sophisticated weaponry and stronger force. It is a tactic some Afghan officers say is unnecessary and provokes local anger, even before foreign troops can advance into villages. “I think language is the strongest weapon of all, not guns, I think we should do a lot more talking” one Afghan sergeant in Helmand recently told me.   None of the villagers I interviewed in Helmand last week seemed happy to see Marines turning up at their front door, at best some were indifferent. In one shura I observed, the tone of the Marines, who are often decades younger than the wizened, bearded elders they try to communicate with, seemed frustrated and they appeared convinced the local elders were hiding information from them.   The elders are never asked whether they are happy to see their new neighbours, it is taken as a given that they should be grateful for their presence. The line often used to try and turn them into informants is: “you give us information on the Taliban and we will build you a school”.    

(Photos: on a foot patrol with U.S. Marines in Darwishan, Helmand; a U.S. Marine takes a break while on patrol in Mian Poshtay, Helmand; Afghan soldiers search a compound in Mian Poshtay, Helmand. Reuters/Asmaa Waguih)