Archive for the 'Force Projection' Category

In the Afghanistan town of Darvishan, Garmsir District, an incident occurred between the townsfolk and the Marines.

Anti-American violence eased Wednesday in the southern Afghanistan town of Darvishan, where the Taliban fanned demonstrations following rumors of desecration of the Koran in a U.S.-led operation.

U.S. military officials said there was no truth to rumors that the Islamic holy book had been mistreated, but protests had turned deadly before U.S. and Afghan officials met with community and tribal elders to diffuse tensions and security forces discouraged potential demonstrators from entering the town.

Six Afghan civilians were killed about 20 miles south of Darvishan when a large group of villagers heading for the Garmsir District center failed to heed repeated warnings to turn back and tried to force their way through a military checkpoint, U.S. Marine officers said.

One person was shot by a Marine and five others were shot by Afghan soldiers, officials said.

An Afghan policeman was critically wounded Wednesday when suspected Taliban gunmen ambushed him on the outskirts of Darvishan as he drove to work.

“It was generally calm here today,” Lt. Col. John McDonough, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines, said at a staff briefing at Combat Outpost Delhi, on the edge of Darvishan. “Let’s work to keep it that way.”

U.S. Marines were pelted with rocks and sprayed with gunfire Tuesday in Darvishan as Taliban-led rioting roiled the town, which is located in southern Helmand province. One Afghan gunman was killed by a Marine sniper. No Marines were killed or seriously injured.

Pelted with rocks and sprayed with gunfire.  A followup Reuters report was a little more specific concerning the circumstances surrounding this event.

The incident, which took place on Wednesday but was not reported until Friday, was the second demonstration to turn violent in two days in Helmand’s Garmsir district, suggesting mounting civil unrest in a part of the country where U.S. Marines under NATO command made major advances last year.

“ANA and ISAF forces warned a crowd of between 200 and 400 assembled civilians to keep its distance from the outpost,” a NATO statement said, referring to the Afghan National Army and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

ISAF is manned in the area by U.S. Marines.

“A number of civilians in the crowd disregarded instructions, resulting in forces firing warning shots. Deliberative escalation of force procedures were followed, but one individual continued to ignore instructions, striking members of the combined force with a stick,” the statement said.

Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale said both Afghan troops and the U.S. Marines subsequently fired at the crowd. An investigation was under way to determine which force’s bullets had struck each the five people who were wounded.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO troops are one of the most emotive issues in Afghanistan’s eight-year-old conflict.

The incident came a day after another violent demonstration in Garmsir. During that earlier demonstration, U.S. Marines say they fired only at a sniper, who had shot into their base. Afghan officials say Afghan troops killed eight protesters and wounded 13 who were trying to storm a government building.

Afghan and U.S. officials say the initial unrest was prompted by rumors that U.S. troops had defaced a holy book during a raid. U.S. and Afghan officials met with locals in the area to restore calm and deny the rumors in strong terms.

“A lot of this came from a massive Taliban-initiated hoax,” Breasseale said. “People started behaving dangerously and unfortunately things like this happen.”

Dawood Ahmadi, spokesman for Helmand governor Gulab Mangal, said Wednesday’s demonstration had taken place outside a base where U.S. and Afghan officials were discussing the unrest from the day before.

He said Taliban infiltrators in Wednesday’s crowd fired at the U.S. and Afghan troops, prompting the Afghans to return fire. The NATO statement made no mention of shots fired from the crowd.

Or more correctly, it appears that there were at least two different incidents similar in nature.  Either way, several things jump out of the reports and I would offer the following observations concerning the events and the Marines’ reaction.  First, there is nothing new about insurgent-instigated chaos.  This kind of thing occurred in Iraq too, and in the Anbar Province, it was dealt a quick blow whenever and wherever it happened.

Second, the Taliban feel utterly protected by being amidst the population.  While it may be backed with all of the nice intentions mankind can muster, the unintended consequences of less robust rules of engagement are that more noncombatants die.  Many, if not most, of these townsfolk would never have been there if they had believed that they were in mortal danger, and the Taliban wouldn’t have been there to instigate the event(s) if we were giving chase to them and they were running for their lives.

When townsfolk can pelt the Marines with rocks and Taliban fighters can run amok in the crowds, U.S. forces are not respected.  It’s an ominous sign – that the most feared fighting force on earth, the 911 forces of America, the most deadly, rapid and mobile strike forces of any nation anywhere, can be pelted with rocks and hit with sticks without any fear whatsoever.  This isn’t likely to ensure belief by the population that they will be “protected” by our forces.  So much for effective counterinsurgency viz. Field Manual FM 3-24.  Oh, and as for attempting to find out who actually shot who in this “investigation,” we have yet another instance of flag and staff level officers trying to micromanage the campaign.  Let me state in the clearest possible terms – IT DOESN’T MATTER.

As for more robust rules of engagement, hearken back to Recon by Fire and the informative video I posted more than two years ago.

From The New York Times:

Trucks gayly painted with hearts and doves jam up at crowded wayside bazaars. Billboards advertise cell phones and advise drivers to keep their donkeys off the road.

It’s not readily evident that this is probably the world’s most dangerous highway, a prime target for Taliban insurgents attempting to sever a vital, 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) artery with ambushes, executions and roadside bombs.

Widely seen as symbolic of Afghanistan’s progress and security, or lack of it, Highway 1 suffered a dramatic increase in bomb attacks in 2009, but also a marked improvement along a critical 90-kilometer (55-mile) stretch after U.S. forces arrived in strength.

”Last year the insurgents were very successful in interdicting convoys. They can’t stage that type of attack anymore,” says Lt. Col. Kimo Gallahue, who commands a U.S. battalion guarding the highway just south of Kabul. ”Since August we’ve been ripping through the enemy. Mass matters.”

The situation is starkly different as the highway veers farther south into the Taliban heartland. Overall, roadside bomb attacks have risen by more than 50 percent — from 308 in 2008 to 469 last year. But 394 were discovered before they detonated, up from 254 the previous year, according to a command spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician.

Since the U.S. invasion of 2001, this vital land link between the country’s two largest cities has been hotly and violently contested. About 35 percent of Afghanistan’s population lives within 50 kilometers (30 miles) of the Kandahar-to-Kabul stretch, giving weight to the notion that ”as the highway goes, so goes the country.”

Battered by war and weather, the road got a $250 million makeover five years ago, halving the 12-hour, 483-kilometer (301-mile) drive between Kabul to Kandahar which have the two largest NATO bases. The U.S., Japan and Saudi Arabia then followed with an overhaul of the stretch from Kandahar to the western city of Herat.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar has good reason to target the road, says Col. David B. Haight, commander of U.S. forces in Wardak and Logar provinces which adjoin Kabul.

”If you were Omar, wouldn’t you want to attack the country’s most strategic highway, an icon of commerce economic progress? He sees traffic on the road and he doesn’t like it. He has tried to disrupt it but he can’t stop it,” Haight said.

”There’s never a day off. That road is very critical,” he says, noting that the U.S. military has intercepts from Omar to subordinates stressing the importance of the two provinces because of their locations along or near the highway.

In 2008, the Taliban did unleash intense strikes against the highway’s southern approach to Kabul where Gallahue’s troops now operate. In a series of spectacular attacks, three U.S. soldiers died in an ambush, one of them dragged off and mutilated beyond recognition, and in a separate action an entire 50-vehicle convoy ferrying supplies for U.S. forces was set ablaze and seven of its drivers beheaded.

That year, the U.S. military deployed a skeleton force of some 600 troops to stem a resurgent Taliban at the gates of Kabul in Wardak and Logar. This was boosted to more than 4,000 in early 2009, with seemingly significant effect.

This report is noteworthy for the roads and logistics issues which we have discussed, but more to the point, mass matters in contemporary counterinsurgencies.  In the two most significant counterinsurgency campaigns in our lifetime, increased force projection was needed as I have advocated for three and a half years.  So much for the notion that the large footprint model turns the population against the U.S. and creates more insurgents than we kill.  There may be some turnaround point where this occurs, but we have yet to test that theory in real life situations.

From Stars and Stripes:

Coalition troops will have to accept more risk as commanders push for a major turnaround in the Afghan war over the next 18 months, according to the commander of day-to-day operations across Afghanistan.

In an interview with Stars and Stripes, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez said a renewed emphasis on developing a rapport with the Afghan people will mean an increase in the kind of “chai ops” — casual interactions with local leaders and residents, often over tea — that have been common in Iraq for the past year and a half.

This includes an emphasis on taking a less aggressive posture, removing helmets and body armor when appropriate, and living alongside Afghan security forces, Rodriguez said.

With insurgent infiltration still rife within the Afghan security forces, that’s a prospect that has some soldiers uneasy, but one Rodriguez said is necessary.

“It is certainly a risk, but the benefits are worth the risk,” he said.

That risk was underscored Tuesday, when an Afghan soldier killed a U.S. servicemember and wounded two Italian soldiers in Badghis province.

Rodriguez said that local commanders will decide what kind of posture to take and allowed that some situations still call for a stronger show of force, but he made clear that the ideal is to get as close to the people as possible.

“When you roll up into a village with one machine gunner on top of an MRAP, it’s not … too easy to interact with the people,” he said.

Analysis & Commentary

The transcript of the conversation with General Rodriguez doesn’t reveal use of the phrase “chai ops.”  That’s a function of the reporting.  But in a manner the actual transcript reveals even more troubling information about what Rodriguez thinks about counterinsurgency.

To be sure, the importance of the “awakening” in Anbar must be one of the elements of understanding that campaign, but the popular myth has grown up around Western Iraq that makes it all about drinking chai, siding with the tribes, going softer in our approach, and finally listening to them as they communicated to us.  And the leader of this revolution in counterinsurgency warfare was none other than General Petraeus.  We were losing until he appeared on the scene, and when he did things turned around.

We Americans love our generals, but this explanation has taken on mythical proportions, and is itself full of myths, gross exaggerations and outright falsehoods.  While Captain Travis Patriquin was courting Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, elements of the U.S. forces were targeting his smuggling lines and killing his tribal members to shut down his sources of income.  The tribal awakening had a context, and that was the use of force.  As the pundits talk about the tribes, the Marines talk about kinetics.

Furthermore, the tribal awakening was specific to Ramadi.  The beginnings of cooperation between U.S. forces and local elements came in al Qaim between Marines and a strong man police chief named Abu Ahmed.  In Haditha it necessitated sand berms around the city to isolate it from insurgents coming across the border from Syria, along with a strong man police chief named Colonel Faruq.

In Fallujah in 2007 it required heavy kinetics, followed on by census taking, gated communities, biometrics and heavy policing.  Even late in 2007 Ramadi was described by Marine Lieutenant Colonel Mike Silverman as like Stalingrad.  Examples abound, and as late as 2008, artillery elements fired as many as 11,000 155 mm (M105) rounds in Baquba, Iraq in response to insurgent mortar activity.

Whatever else General Petraeus did for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. Marine campaign for Anbar was underway, prosecuted before the advent of Petraeus, and continued the same way it was begun.  The Marines lost more than 1000 men in combat, and this heavy toll was a necessary investment regardless of drinking chai with the locals.

What is so troubling about Rodriguez’s remarks is that historical revisionism has make its way into strategic planning for Afghanistan.

You’ve always got, no-matter where you are and everything, you’ve got somebody to check you.  That’s what we have higher-headquarters for, no matter where you are; but a, there asked to make judgments, and again, there are supervisors and chain of command always checks everything, but this is part of the thing where you have to trust people to do the right thing sometimes because you can’t be there everywhere and there asked to make thousands of decisions but unfortunately one might not work out right but for the most part it’s gone pretty good and those leaders and supervisors are making good decisions and we think that’s the way to do it in the long run.

It’s kind of like making friends.  Whether in Afghanistan, tea is important, whether it is the 3 cups of tea, like Mortenson says or anybody else but it’s just building those relationships …

Again, when you are with them, you make sure they are not doing anything wrong; serving themselves before they are serving the people.

Try to make it easy, it’s like a war crime, you don’t stand by and allow that to happen, so we don’t stand by and allow their governance to take advantage of the people; a lot of that is relationships, it’s about leadership, and just making sure they’re doing the right thing to serve their people …

Earlier on he mentions removal of body armor.  The fact that he believes that the campaign for Afghanistan is anywhere close even to considering not wearing proper personal protective equipment is worse than preposterous – it is scary, because the lives of so many men depend upon decisions like this one.

In the transcript he does discuss pressing decision-making downward in the chain of command and allowing decisions like this to be made at the local level, but he doesn’t believe it.  He reverts to the notion of every decision being checked by someone, and even seems to lament the fact that he (or others high in the chain of command) cannot be everywhere all of the time – as if his decisions would be the right ones even if his spirit he could be ubiquitous.

As we have discussion before, this micromanagement of the campaign is modeled on Western corporate conglomerate business practices, and relies on the mistaken notion that the higher up one goes in the chain of command, the better he is able to know, see, discern, ascertain, and divine all decisions made by all people concerning every event or decision under his charge.  It assumes that promotion makes supermen, and this idea will become even more deadly on the fields of Afghanistan.

So the command situation is worse than simply mythologizing the importance of tea.  We are now admitting to micromanaging the campaign from the highest levels of command (and lamenting that we cannot do it even more), and stupidly equating the failure to hold sovereign leaders accountable to our standards with war crimes.  With leadership like this, the job of the Taliban is made even easier.

Prior concerning micromanagement of the military:

Micromanaging the Campaign in Afghanistan II

Micromanaging the Campaign in Afghanistan

Prior concerning intelligence and analysis failures of General Rodriguez’s staff:

Systemic Defense Intelligence Failures

U.S. Intelligence Failures: Dual Taliban Campaigns

Lt. Col. Christian Cabannis fully adheres to and advocates the doctrines of population-centric counterinsurgency.

Christian Cabannis met a social worker before deploying to Afghanistan. Not for his own wellbeing, but to better understand the task at hand. It was his mother’s idea.

Her son is a lieutenant colonel in the US marines and the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion 8th Marine Regiment.

He is in charge of perhaps the most dangerous part of Afghanistan and also one of the poorest. So his mother wanted him to better understand what it is that motivates the poor and how to win their support.

He describes this mission as “armed social work”; providing hope for the needy and defence against the Taliban …

It is pure, modern counter-insurgency strategy (Coin) and what American and British generals believe is the key to winning this war. Lt Col Cabannis says that until recently the mission lacked the right focus.

Three years ago, Garmsir market was shot up and abandoned; the scene of pitched battles between British forces and the Taliban. But today UK and US troops have driven them away from the town and Garmsir is held up as a success story.

In the past three months, US marines have built on British efforts to establish meaningful local government …

He believes that many insurgents can be persuaded to put down their weapons and re-join society and there are discussions under way as to how to achieve this.

The marines’ success is in part due to sheer size; having the force strength to push into new areas, to stay there and to engage in what they call “consent-winning activities” on a much larger scale than Britain has been able to.

There is much left out of this account of the battle for Garmsir, Afghanistan.  The facts left out of the account actually causes this account to skew the interpretation and may change the context the reader places around the events, thus affecting the import of the story.

The British were unable to take and hold Garmsir, and so in 2008 the U.S. Marines 24th MEU initiated large scale operations to take it from the Taliban.  The operations relied on heavy kinetics, but was welcomed by the people of Garmsir.  The drive against the Taliban continued in such heavy military operations that the fire fights were at times described as full bore reloading by the Marines.  As if speaking to population-centric counterinsurgency experts who believe that they must win the population by nonkinetic means, town elder Abdul Nabi told the Marines “We are grateful for the security.  We don’t need your help, just security.”  The 24th MEU killed some 400 Taliban during their deployment.

In 2008 the Marines were doing the right things – they certainly didn’t lack focus.  But the 24th MEU had to leave, and they turned over to the British, who once again couldn’t hold the terrain, either physical or human.  Thus more U.S. Marine Corps operations had to be initiated in the Helmand Province in 2009.

Accompanying the fantasy-narrative that the lack of focus in the past has given way to a brilliant new strategy to win Afghanistan is a robust defense of the rules of engagement by Lt. Col. Cabannis.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

This is a big change since the spring. All U.S. forces in Afghanistan are now being told to protect civilians even if the enemy gets away. Over the last eight years, Afghans have been outraged by civilian deaths and it’s a big reason the U.S. is not winning.

“Killing a 1000 Taliban is great but if I kill two civilians in the process, it’s a loss,” Lt. Col. Cabaniss said.

Asked how many enemies have been killed so far, Cabaniss said, “I have no idea and it’s really irrelevant.”

“Body counts not something that you track?” Pelley asked.

“It doesn’t tell me that I’m being successful. It doesn’t tell me that at all. The number of tips that I receive from the local population about IED’s in the area, Taliban in the area, that is a measure of effectiveness,” Cabaniss explained.

This is an important exchange, and we should spend some time dissecting and analyzing it.  The reason the U.S. is not winning is force projection, or lack thereof.  There aren’t enough troops, as we saw with the 2008 campaign for Garmsir in the Helmand Province.  The ANP and ANA cannot possibly hold the terrain once it has been taken and won’t be ready for quite some time.  In fact, there is some indication that the locals themselves are a bit disgusted by the ROE.

But even for population-centric counterinsurgency advocates, this exchange is full of nonsense.  To be sure, the population may be one means of marginalizing the insurgents, getting intelligence on them, and then conducting intelligence-driven raids, killing or capturing them.  This was done en masse in Iraq, especially in 2007.  But in the interview Cabannis makes a leap from an enabling feature of counterinsurgency to the end or purpose of it.

If a Province has 1000 Taliban and the U.S. Marines kill them all, and along with them the Marines inadvertently kill two noncombatants, it’s preposterous to suggest that this is a loss.  This suggestion is tantamount to saying that for every noncombatant we kill greater than five hundred pop up in his place.

Further, why did Cabannis use the values of 1000 and 2?  Would it have been acceptable to have killed a single noncombatant if we had killed 1000 Taliban?  If so, is he suggesting that the ratio of generation to kill rate of insurgents is greater than 500: 1 but less than 1000:1?  Or perhaps if these suggestions sound a bit pedantic, it’s more likely that he is simply using theatrics and hyperbole to make a point.  But if one has to use theatrics, the point itself suffers from lack of credibility.

Finally, why is killing Taliban great?  If it’s great because it assures the population that they are protected, then we should endeavor to do more of it.  Killing noncombatants is never a good thing, but giving the insurgents safe haven amongst the domiciles of villages sends the opposite message than we intend.  It gives them operating space, and it tells the villagers that we won’t pursue the insurgents on their own terrain, and thus there is no protection from them once they come into your homes and villages.  The very time you need the protection is precisely the time we will abandon you to the enemy.

A very good report from Matt Sanchez.

It’s the middle of the night at the east corner guard post of Fiddler’s Green, a Marine fire base in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, along the border with Pakistan.

Corporal Ryan Joseph Bernal is on perimeter security duty.

Armed with an M-4, night vision binoculars and an array of high-powered automatic weaponry, the 22-year-old U.S. Marine and several others keep watch for activity just outside the concertina wire, which conveys the powerful message “DO NOT ENTER” in a universal language Marines, civilians and the Taliban all understand …

A tiny red flare warns potential intruders not to approach — but it’s the figures you can’t see who pose the greatest threat to Fiddler’s Green, located at what commanders call a “chokepoint to Taliban activity.”

Throughout the day, redundant checks are designed to account for Marines. “Accountability. Eyes on every Marine, pre-combat checks, pre-combat inspections,” said battalion commander Lt. Chris Lewis. “Physical and visual accountability, nothing less.”

Based upon what I know from Operation Alljah, I have always rejected the dichotomy between force protection and force projection, or between U.S. troop security and population security, no matter what the in vogue “population-centric COIN” doctrine says.  The Marines are in touch with the population during constant patrols – patrols so intense and long that many are suffering dehydration because they can’t carry enough water.  There is no need to make themselves insecure during sleep in order to win the cooperation of the population, no matter what a counterinsurgency field manual says.  It didn’t work that way in the Anbar Province of Iraq.

One other report to drive home the point from the Washington Post.

Two Marines on a road-clearing crew were killed Monday in Helmand’s Garmsir District, after they traced the wire of a suspected bomb into a house that was rigged to explode, according to an officer with their unit. Since the U.S. launched its Helmand operation, Western troops in Afghanistan have been dying at a rate of three a day, far higher than the normal rate.

The bomb attacks have slowed or obstructed the Marines’ use of the network of narrow, unpaved dirt roads that link farming villages in the river valley. The bombs have already disabled several vehicles which are further hampered by their bulk in navigating the primitive roads. The Marines’ mine-resistant armored protection vehicles “are just too big for those roads,” said Col. Eric Mellinger, operations officer for the Marine
brigade.

Commanders have made some roads off limits, instead requiring slow-going travel through adjacent deserts, or foot marches through fields and canals. Many of the supplies for the troops are being flown in by helicopter.

If, at the present time, the force presence isn’t enough to fully secure the physical terrain and thus IEDs remain a serious threat on the roads, then adapt.  It’s what Marines do.  Stick to the deserts, trenches and untraveled areas.  Slower, sure.  But do you think the Marines will be exposed to the population and meet some Afghanis during these treks?  And do you think the Taliban have the manpower or ordnance to mine the entire countryside with IEDs because of this adaptation, or will they get frustrated?

Postscript: Is “Fiddler’s Green” a cool name for a fire base, or what?  I want to go there.