Archive for the 'Kandahar' Category

Our friend Michael Yon has penned a must read at the Small Wars Journal entitled Arghandab and the Battle for Kandahar.  Myra MacDonald of Reuters picks up on Michael’s assessment and makes a salient point.

… let’s assume for the purposes of argument that Pakistan does not drop its resistance to tackling Afghan militants in its border regions. (Pakistan argues it cannot tackle everyone at once and has its hands full fighting the Pakistani Taliban; its critics say it is hedging its bets ahead of any eventual U.S. withdrawal, when it might want to use groups like the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan.)

At that point, a major U.S. military success in Afghanistan could be the only way to break the stalemate. An in that light, Yon’s focus on the Arghandab River Valley becomes essential reading.

We’ll return to Myra’s point momentarily.  Michael performs far-reaching analysis, from use of the Russian experience in Afghanistan (The Bear Went Over the Mountain) to the revised tactical directive issued by General McChrystal (ROE).  Michael doesn’t weigh in himself on the ROE.  He does honestly point out that the ROE will cause additional casualties.  Petraeus also confesses that Afghanistan will get bloodier than it is now.  It will so for more reasons than simply adding more troops (or better said, it could be less bloody than it is going to be).

The question is not whether there is ROE.  Michael points out that the Russian ROE turned the population completely against them because they essentially had no ROE.  We do, we did, and we will in the future.  The question is more nuanced than that.  I am aware from a number of sources the nature of combat and other operations in Fallujah in 2007 (and at other points in the campaign for Anbar), and the ROE were more robust than currently in place in Afghanistan; or in other words, McChrystal’s tactical directive is more restrictive than the ROE in effect while the Anbar Province was being won by the U.S. Marine Corps.  In order to believe that the revised tactical directive is beneficial to the campaign one must believe that the ensuing casualties for which it is at least a contributing cause will be less in the long run than if a more robust ROE were in place with its accompanying increased force protection.  We’ll see.  Troop morale and public opinion mean everything to the campaign.

Michael continues by pointing out that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is fictitious.  Taliban cross with impunity through this imaginary border, and the coming battle will be for Afghanistan’s South.

In Helmand, the fight is serious, and friendly troops are spread far too thinly. Some experts believe that focusing on Helmand before securing Kandahar was a strategic error. Most districts in Kandahar are said to be under Taliban control or heavy influence. Some areas of the south are under complete, uncontested Taliban control …

The Taliban want Kandahar and are in a good position to get it. The year 2010 likely will mark a true Battle for Kandahar, though it probably will not be punctuated by the sort of pitched battles we saw in places like Mosul and Baghdad. This remains unknown.

Armies from at least three countries have ventured into the Arghandab River Valley: British, followed by Soviets, and more recently Canadians; all were unsuccessful.

Michael compares and contrasts the Russian campaign with the coming U.S. and ISAF operations, and then rehearses a bit of recent history for us.

The enemy is not defeated, but our people were now operating among them. U.S. casualties continued during the next three months but there are indications that the enemy is today in disarray. The enemy became afraid to sleep indoors where they might be killed by an airstrike—or by U.S. soldiers, who have a tendency to burst in during periods of maximum REM sleep. The Taliban were terrorized and began sleeping in the orchards at night, rigging homes with explosives, which they arm at night. (I’ve heard similar reports from Pakistan. Pakistanis have said that drone strikes are demoralizing and terrorizing the Taliban, and though drone strikes are controversial, some Pakistanis want to see the strikes increased.)

And so we have a dilemma even in Michael’s account.  These episodes of bursting in by U.S. Soldiers came to an end with McChrystal’s tactical directive, and the drone strikes into Pakistan which have so disheartened the Taliban don’t have an analogy with the ROE in use by Soldiers and Marines in Helmand and elsewhere in Afghanistan.

But Michael points out that fresh troops are indeed on the way, and that’s good.  More force projection is needed.  But I have titled this the battle for Kandahar and Helmand because the fight cannot be disentangled from Helmand any more than it can be from Pakistan.  Population centric COIN doctrine has driven us to Kandahar, but leaving Helmand alone is not an acceptable solution given that the Taliban train there, raise their support there, and take refuge in its scattered towns.

The Marines left the operations in Now Zad improperly resourced and thus the Taliban fighters garrisoned there escaped.  Marja is next, and the Marines’ claim is that “We won’t leave anywhere else uncovered. We won’t go anywhere we can’t clear, we won’t clear anywhere we can’t stay and we won’t stay anywhere we can’t build.”  Helmand and Kandahar may be seen as coupled, with operations in one place affecting operations in the other.

True enough, Pakistani Army operations on the imaginary side of the border mean something.  Back to Ms. MacDonald’s point, I have previously said that:

The conversation on Pakistan versus Afghanistan presupposes that the Durand Line means anything, and that the Taliban and al Qaeda respect an imaginary boundary cut through the middle of the Hindu Kush.  It doesn’t and they don’t.  If our engagement of Pakistan is to mean anything, we must understand that they are taking their cue from us, and that our campaign is pressing the radicals from the Afghanistan side while their campaign is pressing them from the Pakistani side.

Advocating disengagement from Afghanistan is tantamount to suggesting that one front against the enemy would be better than two, and that one nation involved in the struggle would be better than two (assuming that Pakistan would keep up the fight in our total absence, an assumption for which I see no basis).  It’s tantamount to suggesting that it’s better to give the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan as Pakistan presses them from their side, or that it’s better to give them safe haven in Pakistan while we press them from our side.  Both suggestions are preposterous.

That there is an indigenous insurgency (the so-called ten dollar Taliban) that bootstraps to the real religiously motivated fighters is irrelevant.  We had to fight our way through this group in Iraq too, and it is the nature of these insurgencies.  Complaining about it is acceptable – but using it as an excuse to abandon the campaign is not.  That every contact isn’t with Arabic or Chechen or Uzbek jihadists is irrelevant.  That doesn’t mean that Afghanistan is not a central front in the transnational insurgency called Islamic Jihad.  The Taliban are important inasmuch as they gave and would continue to give safe haven to globalists.

For this reason the campaign in Afghanistan must be successful.  Pakistan will take their cue from us and follow our lead.

In recently released article Why are we in the Helmand Province? I a argued for the legitimacy of the Marines’ presence in the Helmand Province, contra the pronouncements of the population-centric counterinsurgency proponents who wish to deploy U.S. troops to population centers such as Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Jalalabad.  We must go where the insurgents recruit, train, raise their largesse and take safe haven.

Greyhawk at the Mudville Gazette later discussed the fact that we mustn’t let Kandahar become like the cities in Anbar, Iraq, controlled by the insurgents, before we take action (to which I responded on one issue raised by Greyhawk in Insufficient Numbers of Marines).  But the fall of Kandahar is proceeding apace, and my arguments for deploying U.S. Marines in the Helmand Province are not to be construed as arguments against deploying them in Kandahar, as sufficient numbers of Marines are available to accomplish both.

Tyler Hicks is reporting from Kandahar, and the streets are anything but secure and bustling with trade.

Tyler Hicks has three rules when photographing in a dangerous, unstable city like Kandahar, Afghanistan. Keep moving, watch the crowd and always listen to your translator and driver.

“It doesn’t matter where you are in the city — there’s always a possibility that you’re moments away from being killed,” said Mr. Hicks, 40, who has been working in Afghanistan for The New York Times since 2001. “So you shave off risk anywhere you can. It’s that bad.”

Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, was the Taliban’s headquarters from the mid-1990s until its overthrow in 2001. Today, Islamic militants are once again operating inside the city, planting roadside bombs, almost daily, and carrying out a number of suicide attacks.

Mr. Hicks prefers working early in the morning when there are fewer people on the street, dressed in traditional clothing and traveling in a car. He often photographs from the window or limits his time on the street to just minutes, but is still able to create images with a startling intimate feel.

“Working is very difficult because no matter how much you try to fit in, once you get out of the car with your cameras, you’re identified and faced with a lot of unfriendly stares,” Mr. Hicks said.

Kandahar doesn’t see or interact with many foreign troops.  In fact, Michael Yon also reports from Kandahar on just what happens with the troops based around Kandahar.

Slowly, surely, the city is being strangled.  Signaling the depth of our commitment, security forces are thinner in Kandahar than the Himalayan air.  During the days and evenings, there were the sounds of occasional bombs—some caused by suicide attackers, and others by firefights.  The windows in my room had been blown out recently and now were replaced.  We came here to kill our enemies, but today we want to make a country from scratch …

An American convoy of MRAPs approached from the front and a soldier in the lead vehicle shot a pen-flare, causing everyone to pull off the road.  The convoys are more menacing from the outside and in fact I kept the camera down and this is exactly why Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is concerned about adding too many troops.  Can’t argue with his reasoning; convoys and troops truly are menacing despite that U.S. and British soldiers are very disciplined.  It must look far worse to Afghans.  Most Afghans never talk with foreign soldiers and those who do normally only see us in passing.  In fact, most soldiers never leave base.  Our forces at KAF (Kandahar Airfield) have a base so large that this commercial jet is about to land there after flying dangerously over this unsecured road.

It isn’t the number of troops that’s the problem, it’s what they are doing.  More correctly, the number of troops is the problem in that there aren’t enough of them to secure Afghanistan, but the ones who are there are doing the wrong things.  So there are two large  problems, and both need to be fixed in order to be successful.

Kandahar is badly in need of two or three U.S. Marine Regimental Combat Teams with Air Task Force support.  There is a need for Army mechanized troops – perhaps in other parts of Afghanistan, but the debate between mechanized and foot-borne (or dismounted) soldiering is more than merely academic.  Kandahar badly needs to see troops.  Afghans in Kandahar need aggressive policing.  They need to speak with troops, observe them patrol every day, and feel the protection afforded by Marines with rifles who will fire them at the Taliban.  They need to see the Afghan National Police teamed up with the Marines and interacting with the people rather than tearing out through the city aboard trucks like Yon observed.

Kandahar needs to be a dismounted campaign.  Living on large mega-bases and patrolling in vehicles just won’t do.  No protection from the Taliban is afforded by Soldiers in MRAPs, and no policing and population control can be conducted from the seat of a vehicle, any more than intelligence can be gleaned from mounted patrols.  Kandahar is slowly falling to the Taliban, and the only alternative to ceding this human and physical terrain to the enemy is aggressive, large scale troop presence conducting dismounted patrols.  But for the patrols to be effective, General McChrystal’s tactical directive limiting fires in certain situations must be rescinded.  The Marines and smart and adaptable, and don’t need McChrystal’s advice, as they have been doing and winning counterinsurgencies longer than has McChrystal.  The good general is trying to teach his granny to suck eggs.

CSM on the insurgency in Southern Afghanistan.

US and Afghan security officials say that in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces, border police training has been going on for much longer.

“We’ve only been focusing on the border police in the south for nine months,” says Hix. Until now, the focus in Afghanistan’s violent south has been on building the region’s district police forces, and “there just weren’t enough resources to train the border police,” he explains.

It took longer to begin training programs for border patrol officers in the south, because the fight here is viewed by US military commanders as less of a commuter’s war. Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban movement, and, unlike the northern and eastern regions of Afghanistan, homegrown insurgents are plentiful.

“In the east, they have a much bigger Pakistan problem than we do,” says Hix, referring to Pakistan’s tribal areas across the border. where militants enjoy safe haven and can enter Afghanistan freely. “Down here, a lot of the enemy is local. In the south, the enemy is enabled by forces in Pakistan, not dependent on Pakistan.”

As for corruption, he says that “there will always be smuggling. Always has been, always will be, as there is in every country in the world. But coalition monitors tell me that pilferage here is less than the percentage of pilferage that has been documented at some Western ports of entry.”

Afghan security officials understand all too well the problems facing the ABP.

“I believe in the border police’s efforts, and I believe they’re capable,” says Brig. Gen. Shermohammed Zazi, who commands the Afghan National Army’s 205 Corps in Kandahar. “But they don’t have enough personnel to cover a 1,000-plus kilometer border, and they don’t have proper equipment.”

And of course, the border has two sides. Some ABP officials complain that their Pakistani counterparts, though better funded, are less effective than the Afghans are.

Still, resources for the border police on the Afghan side are what most concern coalition forces here.

In southern Afghanistan, district-level police number between 6,000 and 7,000, about twice the size of the border patrol. Money for the ABP comes out of the larger police budget, making it difficult to gauge the exact cost of the program. Hix has promised to provide Hakim with up-armored Humvees and other equipment once it becomes available.

The six-week training currently offered by the coalition is less about police work and more about how to survive contact with insurgents. Unlike district police, the border guards operate in small units on far-flung outposts, with little backup.

It’s a dangerous job, and the training includes an emergency medical care component to help stem casualties.

While Afghan and US security officials are optimistic about the program, the ABP has a long way to go.

“Here,” says Hix, “hope is in degrees.”

In the Northern and Eastern reaches of Afghanistan we are fighting the Tehrik-i-Taliban and the Haqqani network of fighters, both of whom find safe haven in Pakistan.  But it’s important to remember that the Afgan Taliban have their leaders and headquarters just across the Pakistan border in Quetta.  200 Afghan Border Police cannot possibly hope to accomplish this mission.  But there is hope on the way.

Some 7,000 new U.S. troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Barack Obama are fanning out across the country’s dangerous south on a mission to defeat an increasingly violent Taliban insurgency.

Marine spokesman 1st Lt. Abe Sipe says 7,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade are now in the country. The brigade is based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

The Marines represent the first wave of 21,000 troops ordered to Afghanistan this summer. Most of the buildup will take place in Helmand and Kandahar.

The two southern provinces lie at the heart of the insurgency and are close to the border with Pakistan, where the Taliban’s top leadership is believed to be based.

The lot appears to be cast for the U.S. Marines.  While Army, Army SOF and the CIA are taking on the border regions with Northern Pakistan, the Marines have been assigned to the indigenous insurgency in the South.

Colonel Tom McGrath recently met with bloggers to discuss the recent events surrounding the prison break in Kandahar and subsequent combat that occurred in the villages around Kandahar.  A number of interesting exchanges took place.

Q Sure, I mean, you know, the question that I’d really hope to ask, after the obligatory thank-you for taking the time with us, was basically the media impressions of this were that it was a fairly large, well-organized raid on the part of the Taliban.  And the impression I’m getting from listening to you is pretty substantially different. Am I correct in that?

COL. MCGRATH: Yeah, I mean, listen, I’ll give them credit. They pulled it off. It was successful. So you know, it’s all about the results.  And they got what they wanted. But I don’t think it was that big of a success, because we pursued them up into the district and we were able to kill them and capture them and push them out of the district very quickly within a matter of days — (inaudible) — weeks or months, which has happened before.  So I don’t –

Q Not so much asking about sort of the outcomes as sort of the scale on which they could operate, I mean, to the extent that they had 40 or 50 people as opposed to the extent they had 5 people.

COL. MCGRATH: Yeah, I don’t think it was, no. The numbers: I’m not really sure. We’ll never know. It could have been that large or that small.  But you know, they’re walking around the city like you and I. It doesn’t take much to burst into a compound and, you know, push the doors open and let some folks out.  You know, someone had written that it was as good as, you know, a ranger-style raid or a commando-style raid. I don’t buy that. If it was so good, they would have been able to get away, reconsolidate and attack us and
hurt us. But it was the other way around.

Regardless of the way the main stream media put it, The Captain’s Journal compared it more to a Mad Max movie than some special operation by well-honed troops.

You simply cannot make this stuff up.  In a scene reminiscent of Mad Max or The Road Warrior, 30 motorcyclists managed to take out a prison and release 1150 criminals, 400 Taliban among them.  Where was the force protection?  Where were the vehicle barriers (you know, those mechanically operated devices that flatten your tires if you go over them the wrong way)?  Where were the concrete truck barricades?  Where was the training?  Where was the supervision?  Forget expensive UAVs and road construction for a minute.  What about spending a little money on teaching the Afghan police about combat and force protection.  Failure to do so has cost us the freedom of 400 Taliban – and potentially U.S. lives to capture or kill them again.

The point was not the brilliance of the Taliban, but the abject failure of the prison system and police.  What did Col. McGrath have to say about that issue?

… like I said, their prisons aren’t like our prisons or jails. They’re pretty much just edifices with doors and things like that, so if a big explosion comes though, there’s a lot of mayhem, they’re able to push their way out or — many are unlocked, what might be a lock or not — there might even not be locks in there as far as I know, and just make their way — made a run for it.

Our point exactly.  There is good news too.  The Afghan Army readied themselves quickly, went after the Taliban, and within a couple of days have driven them from the Kandahar area (read the full interview of Col. McGrath).  They are getting better.  But there is a caveat.  Our friend Richard S. Lowry asked some hard questions since TCJ couldn’t be in on the discussion.

Q Great. We’ve heard reports back here after the prison break that there were roughly 1,100 prisoners that got away and 400 of them were Taliban.  Assuming those numbers are right, and what you’ve told us just in the last few minutes, it looks like there’s 900 to a thousand of them that are still at large. Is there any ongoing operation that you can tell us about to hunt these people down?

COL. MCGRATH: There was about 900, we think, that got out. There was reports, you know, there were 400 Taliban, 200 Taliban. I’d say it was more probably 200 to 300 that were in there, Taliban. We conducted the operations in the Arghandab, and I told you we killed about 80, took another 25 prisoner, killed another 20 or 30 southwest of the city. But there’s ongoing operations – - I can’t get into detail — to continue to fight the Taliban and pursue the Taliban.

Q So you’re pretty confident that you got a vast majority of the Taliban in the first 24 to 48 hours that escaped?

COL. MCGRATH: No, I can’t speculate. They don’t keep very good records at the prison. We haven’t been through the training with the prison yet. That’s something — probably be down the road. It’s not on my — I don’t do the prisons over here. So I just don’t know, to be honest with you.

Col. McGrath wisely refused to speak authoritatively concerning numbers.  But based on previous reports, it appears that there are several hundred Taliban still at large from this prison break.  They melted away into the villages to fight again another day rather than take anyone on in direct kinetic engagements.  Or, they melted away into the nearby mountains.

A view of the Arghandabd district in the southern city of Kandahar, June 19, 2008 (Reuters)

The Taliban have history in the mountains around Kandahar, where Mullah Omar had a wealthy dwelling in spite of the poverty of the people in the region.  We have seen it before.  In December of 2001 upon the fall of Kandahar, Muhammad Omar and the Taliban fled to the mountains in the area.  Three months ago in Taking the High Ground in Afghanistan we commented that Afghan and IASF forces must be prepared to engage in the chase in the high ground.

Winning or losing the campaign will not come down to being able to rapidly deploy and temporarily drive the Taliban from their domiciles.  The lessons learned in Iraq – constant contact with both the enemy and population, intelligence-driven raids, security, relentless pressure on the enemy, relationships with the people – must be applied in Afghanistan.  Whack-a-mole counterinsurgency will not work.