Archive for the 'Afghanistan' Category

Glenn Reynolds recently posted a link to a interesting report from an embed by Joe Pappalardo with Popular Mechanics.  The reader should take the several minutes required to read the report, and assuming that this obtains, I won’t rehearse the report here, except for one part that jumped off of the page at me because I have followed it.

More information comes in and planning is done on the fly around the horseshoe table: 10th Mountain division troops are en route. They will find and secure a landing zone for the Chinooks. To get a jump on the process, the choppers with the Special Operations troops will predeploy at another Forward Operating Base closer to the target mountain. It’s a good plan, but it needs to be backed with maps and permission from a brigadier general in Bagram Air Base, where the brass keeps an eye on operations and seeks stamps of approval for them from Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s personal staff.

Okay, I want to know exactly what this paragraph means?  Hamid Karzai had previously wanted a Status of Forces Agreement with the U.S. similar to the Iraq SOFA, a plan I called a Blunder of Colossal Proportions if it happened.  Karzai has requested operational, strategic and tactical control over U.S. troops, an eventuality that would essentially mean that it’s best simply to stand down and deploy back to the states.  Campaign over.

Remember that Karzai is the one who said to Mullah Omar that “A few days ago I pleaded with the leader of the Taliban, telling him ‘My brother, my dear, come back to your homeland. Come back and work for peace, for the good of the Afghan people. Stop this business of brothers killing brothers’.”

Are we seeking approval for specific military operations from Hamid Karzai or his staff?  If so, under what legal framework?  Why are we doing this?  Has this caused any lethargy to enter the campaign because [a] this permission was delayed, or [b] this permission was not forthcoming?  Who has sought this approval – NATO forces, U.S. forces under the control of NATO, or U.S. forces only under the command of CENTCOM?  Who, very specifically, has ordered that the U.S. seek permission for military operations from Karzai’s office?

We need answers to these and more questions concerning this troubling revelation.

U.S. and Afghan soldiers on patrol in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, April 2009.

The administration is taking a troubling stand on metrics for the campaign in Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to keep things secret that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton found it expedient to politicize.

The Obama administration wants to keep its metrics of progress for the war in Afghanistan under wraps. Secretary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told the Senate Appropriations Committee last week that the executive branch, not Congress, should craft the Afghan benchmarks, many of which will be classified. Times certainly have changed – two years ago, then-Sen. Clinton demanded benchmarks be included in the May 2007 Iraq war supplemental appropriation.

Mr. Obama promised a benchmarked war effort in March when he announced his Afghanistan strategy. He rejected “blindly staying the course,” a tart reference to one of Mr. Bush’s pet phrases, and promised instead that there would be “clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable.” Perhaps the president could explain how accountability can function if Congress and the public do not know what the clear metrics are.

Mrs. Clinton stated that the government is “going to be measuring from every perspective,” but more metrics are not necessarily better. Once this multitude of measures is set in place, they can calcify thinking and destroy the spirit of innovation that is critical in waging unconventional war. Benchmarks are not a substitute for strategy, but pursuit of them can wind up driving the war effort when they should be a trailing indicator. We saw that in Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara’s metric-mad approach to fighting the war in Vietnam. A clever enemy will use publicly published metrics to focus its efforts on the things the U.S. government deems to be important, seeking to shape perceptions of failure and defeat by the bureaucracy’s own definition. It is unwise to hand the enemy the ability to create meaningful strategic effects by our own criteria.

Public metrics also can create political problems, as Mrs. Clinton well knows. In September 2007, the Government Accountability Office reported that Baghdad had “met 3, partially met 4, and did not meet 11” of the 18 benchmarks Congress had established the previous May. Opponents of the surge strategy, such as Mrs. Clinton and then-Sen. Obama, seized on the report to declare the surge a failure. But the war was, in fact, being won. Had the United States been guided by congressional politics rather than sound military thinking, we would have withdrawn from Iraq last year and marked it as a defeat (editorial comment, italics mine).

Some learning has occurred over the past two years. The Obama administration does not want to face the kinds of political problems that some of its leading members created for their predecessors. We applaud the administration’s newfound respect for secrecy in warfare and only wish it had dawned on these officials sooner.

Take note of the sophisticated nuance in the editorial above, for while it maintains the appearance of patriotism and support for the campaign, it falls into the trap laid by the administration.  Mr. Obama promised clear metrics to hold ourselves accountable.  Ms. Clinton later promises that the government is going to be “measuring from every perspective.”  But be aware that handing the enemy knowledge of what you think is important tells them where to focus their energies, so many of the metrics used by the government will remain classified, or so we’re told by Ms. Clinton.

This argument is a pig in a poke.  The administration is counting on the unthinking population buying into the notion of the campaign in Afghanistan being similar to, say, the war in the South Pacific with Japan, or D-Day, or the Battle of Inchon, where troop movements, timing of operations and so forth, are operational security, and divulging them to the enemy causes loss of lives and irreparable harm to our own battle plans.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  General deployment plans such as the 10th Mountain Division to the area around Kabul in order to stabilize the ring of security around the central government are well known and laid out for us by not only open source information but official military sources as well.

Counterinsurgency has its moments (such as troop movements and intelligence-driven raids) that fall into the OPSEC category, but comprehensive battle space metrics is not one of them.  In fact, note the very specific data given to us in the most recent report on Iraq by the DoD.

Note that the title of this report is Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq: March 2009 Report to Congress.  Very specific metrics indeed, collected and collated by the executive branch and presented to the legislative branch, and for very good reason.  The legislative branch controls the money.

We have made it an obvious priority to train and stand up the Afghan forces, a strategy that the Bush administration pursued in Iraq.  It didn’t work in Iraq until force projection by the U.S. forces provided security for the population, and so concerns like drug use by the Afghan police and army are serious issues that must be tracked and communicated to planners and legislators; that rate of casualties, trust in government, and fidelity of internal governmental systems are important metrics to be studied and communicated to the voters.  The voters get the final say.

A communist system controls the flow, rate, quality, quantity and target of information.  In the free market of ideas, the U.S. stands alone as the nation most willing to let the people themselves judge the rightness or wrongness of things.

What the administration doesn’t like is not the potential operational security concerns associated with metrics in the Afghanistan campaign.  That’s a pitifully crafted argument that can be dismissed rather quickly by most thinking men and women.  They fear that there are forces out there who might use the metrics in the same dark and ill-intentioned manner that those in this current administration used them to undercut and under-resource the campaign in Iraq.

For the record, The Captain’s Journal isn’t among those detractors who would undercut the campaign because we weren’t meeting targets.  We would propose funding and resourcing the forces better so that we could meet those targets, while also analyzing the reasons for failure.  It would appear that this administration doesn’t hold to similar thinking.

In July 2007 the Washington Times reported that the Taliban first used missiles against U.S. air assets.

Taliban militants used a heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile to attack a Western aircraft over Afghanistan for the first time last week, coalition military sources say.

The attack with a weapon thought to have been smuggled across the border with Iran represents a worrisome increase in the capability of the militants that Western commanders had long feared.

The sources said the Taliban attempted to bring down an American C-130 Hercules airplane flying over the southwestern province of Nimroz on July 22. The crew reported that a missile system locked on to their aircraft and that a missile was fired.

It closed in on the large C-130, pursuing it as the pilots made a series of violent evasive maneuvers and jettisoned flares to confuse the heat sensors in the nose of the surface-to-air missile, or SAM.

In April 2008 the Telegraph reported that the Afghan Taliban had used Iranian-made missiles on UK troops.

British troops in Afghanistan are being targeted by surface-to-air missiles supplied by Iran, a senior Army source said yesterday.

Officers in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are supplying hundreds of weapons, including the missiles, to Taliban insurgents, it is believed.

Most worrying is the news that SA7 Strella anti-aircraft missiles have been supplied to the Taliban. The weapons are a serious threat to helicopters supplying more than 6,000 troops.

It is not thought the Taliban are well trained in how to use the weapons most effectively. In southern Helmand yesterday they fired an anti-aircraft weapon at an American F18 fighter without hitting it.

Other weapons being smuggled in include plastic explosives, anti-tank mines, AK47s, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.

These two attacks were apparently done with SA-7 missiles, one type of MANPAD system.  As of March 2009, U.S. intelligence believes that the successor to the SA-7, the SA-14 Gremlin, has been procured by the Taliban.

IRAN is supplying the Taliban in Afghanistan with surface-to-air missiles capable of destroying a helicopter, according to American intelligence sources.

They believe the Taliban wants to use the SA-14 Gremlins missiles to launch a “spectacular” attack against coalition forces in Helmand, where insurgents claim to be gaining the upper hand.

Although British and American helicopters operating in southern Afghanistan are equipped with defensive systems to deflect an attempted strike, the SA-14 can evade such counter-measures …

Special forces have previously intercepted arms shipments from Iran that would have helped the Taliban intensify a roadside bombing campaign that has killed 40 British troops over the past 18 months, including three last week.

However, coalition forces only became aware of the presence of SA14s two weeks ago when parts from two of them were discovered during an American operation in western Afghanistan.

In April 2009, U.S. forces destroyed even heavier anti-aircraft weapons.

The US-led coalition troops in a … air strike knocked down two anti-aircraft missile launchers in Nad Ali district, where Taliban militants have a significant influence.

The press release said locals informed security forces about the heavy guns installed on a truck to hunt down choppers of the international forces.

This appears to be something heavier than MANPADS, and the Taliban certainly are not capable of fielding this kind of weaponry themselves.  Iranian hands are all over the supply of the SA-7 and SA-14 to the Taliban, and while it is unknown where these specific heavier weapons came from, one thing is clear.  If the Taliban are armed with anti-aircraft ordnance and the know-how to use it, the campaign in Afghanistan has gotten a lot more dangerous and problematic.

So much for Obama’s attempt to pursue constructive ties with Iran.

Well known and well-traveled independent journalist Philip Smucker has written an article in the Asia Times Online that warrants our utmost attention.  But first, here is Philip’s take on the road situation in Afghanistan and its significance to successful counterinsurgency.  This is required listening for anyone who really wants to understand the current counterinsurgency situation in Afghanistan.

Now to the Asia Times article.

In an instant … the mountainside above the rocky town of Doab erupted in muzzle flashes. For the next several hours, American soldiers in a convoy of 18 vehicles scrambled for cover as rockets and mortars rained down from the mountainsides and US helicopters swept in to evacuate the injured. Along with several of his best soldiers out of Fort Hood, Texas, Lieutenant Dashielle Ballarta, 24, displayed composure in the face of fire as his mortar team fell to Taliban bullets. Indeed, over the next five hours, three insurgent commanders with an estimated four dozen fighters would ambush the American soldiers at three different locations along a road with sheer drop-offs of 300 meters.

Only the fast reactions of US soldiers and medics would avert what commanders said could well have been a “slaughter” of American and Afghan forces. In the end, the Americans would boast that “we kicked some ass up there”, but the insurgents would also claim victory; dancing on the splintered remains of an abandoned US Humvee and vowing to keep the Americans from establishing a foothold north of their base in Kalagush, Nuristan.

This province, with its jagged peaks that rise two kilometers high into the blue skies above Pakistan, is known as Afghanistan’s “forgotten province”. But the intensity of the March 30 attack on a US military humanitarian aid convoy suggests that al-Qaeda and the Taliban have designated northern Nuristan as a key infiltration route and supply line for a growing insurgency.

Though Washington officials have castigated Pakistan for allowing al-Qaeda and Taliban “safe havens” to thrive along its own western borders, which abut Nuristan, this province’s vast terrain provides a similarly strong enemy sanctuary.

“The Taliban and al-Qaeda are moving through Nuristan at will,” said Lieutenant Colonel Larry Pickett, 46, a resident of McComb, Illinois, who dove for cover and took aim at the Taliban attackers in Doab, who had signaled their intentions a night earlier. “The north of the province is wide open and there is nothing to stop them.”

Some Western intelligence officers and Pakistani officials believe that the insurgents in Nuristan are part and parcel of a global guerrilla movement and may be protecting important al-Qaeda figures, possibly Osama bin Laden himself. “We can’t prove that Osama bin Laden is not there,” said Robin Whitley, 33, a US military intelligence officer in Kalagush. “A lot of people are on the lookout for a six-foot-four Arab, but when you don’t have anybody up there, you just don’t know.”

The convoy of 16 US Humvees and four Afghan trucks filled with security guards, left Kalagush on March 29 for a road convoy into the Doab district of Nuristan province. Leading the American contingent was naval commander Caleb Kerr, 37, who heads up Nuristan’s Provincial Reconstruction Team, Lieutenant Colonel Sal Petrovia, 37, and Lieutenant Colonel Pickett. Also along for the ride were Pentagon intelligence agents, including an unarmed member of the Human Terrain Team. The overnight mission intended to meet with local Nuristani officials, look at larger development projects and assess the possibility for more assistance …

The American strategy in Nuristan reverses the old US Marine Corps version of counter-insurgency; “clear, hold and build”. It stresses building first, with the hope that Nuristanis will eventually “see the light” and side with the Afghan government.

“There is a ton of bad guys in Nuristan, but we don’t have the resources to go after them all right now,” said Kerr. “We will not win by killing more people.”

The overnight development survey to Doab appeared to be going well until midnight when translators, who were listening to three distinct languages on radio intercepts, picked up chatter that indicated “the enemy” was planning to ambush US forces.

In the morning, meetings with senior officials continued and American engineers surveyed a new hospital and several schools.

Despite the presence of US-funded police in the town, dozens of insurgents managed to converge on the Americans from neighboring valleys, without being detected even by aerial drones specifically tasked with monitoring such movements. After seven years of careful observation, Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents have learned to attack US forces when they are in remote terrain, far from their home base and short on air power.

At 11:15 am, just when the US air cover pulled off the scene to refuel, insurgents, holed up in hidden bunkers, began to fire rockets, mortars and small arms at the largest American patrol position; a circle of jeeps with guns pointing out. Sergeant Mathews, 24, from Chicago, quickly unpacked his mortar system, but enemy fire blasted his legs out from under him.

Platoon leader Lieutenant Dashielle Ballarta sprinted over. As medics assisted two wounded soldiers, the young lieutenant grabbed the mortar and pointed it towards muzzle flashes on the mountain. “It was pretty much ‘grab-and-point’ as the insurgents were so close he couldn’t calibrate their distance,” said Lieutenant Colonel Sal Petrovia, who had raced down to join the patrol team. “Our medics were treating the wounded, Specialist Shane McMath and Sergeant Mike Mathews, for 15 minutes behind a Humvee when the opposite mountainside opened up with muzzle flashes. They had snipers and I think they had been waiting for us to move to one side of the Humvees.”

After stabilizing the injured, the convoy moved down the road towards a pre-designated helicopter landing zone. A huge boulder blocked their exit. The Americans had to settle for a make-shift landing zone on a terraced wheat field, where a chopper could only send down a rope and harness.

“As we were preparing the wounded to be lifted out, we started taking fire again, this time on the retaining wall above the heads of the wounded soldiers,” said Lieutenant Colonel Petrovia. “The medics, Kurt Willen, 25 and David Myers, 23, covered the bodies of the two wounded soldiers and the rescue chopper had to back away as we called in two Apaches to suppress the enemy fire.”

Fighting continued as the US convoy snaked away, jeeps limping along with blown-out tires and dragging another disabled vehicle.

As the convoy negotiated switch-backs above cliff faces some four kilometers forward, insurgents launched yet another assault, rocketing the disabled vehicle, which still had four soldiers in it. Three-inch thick glass windows shattered and rockets bounced off the metal armor. “I looked around the bend and I could see Captain Tino Gonzales trying to keep his rear covered, ducking and dodging behind a tiny boulder as bullets pinged off the rock,” said Petrovia, who finally decided to abandon the disabled vehicle. An Apache was ordered to destroy it to prevent the Taliban or al-Qaeda from gaining access to sensitive military information.

At 8 pm, well after sunset, the US convoy puttered back into its base at Kalagush. Commanders said they had been taken aback by both the weaponry and the number of insurgents that had attacked them in Doab.

This is important and compelling journalism.  Take particular note of the comment that the plan reverses the clear-hold-build strategy “with the hope that Nuristanis will eventually “see the light” and side with the Afghan government.”

Sadly, I believe that it won’t work.  The force projection must first be implemented to ensure that the road-builders have safety, the aid workers have security, the infrastructure doesn’t go to financing the Taliban, and the soft counterinsurgency doesn’t in effect work directly against the kinetic operations at which the U.S. Army is working so hard.

Philip also reviewed David Kilcullen’s book Accidental Guerrilla.  At the end of his review, he asks:

It may be that the imminent American surge in forces (at least 20,000 more troops on the way) could provide some of the answer, but if the US military goes in hard, particularly into the indomitable terrain of Nuristan, will it just end up creating more “accidental guerrillas?” One wonders what the Australian expert would advise on this point, just as US intelligence on al-Qaeda movements in Nuristan is increasing. As Kilcullen notes, “Our too-willing and heavy-handed interventions in the so-called ‘war on terror’ to date have largely played into the hands of this al-Qaeda exhaustion strategy.”

I think that this issue is largely a nonstarter.  This issue may in fact be salient for some international engagements, but we were far from it in Iraq, and are extremely far from in in Afghanistan.  On the contrary.  We may have found the hornets nest, and the hornets must be eradicated.  Reader and commenter TSAlfabet recently asked the following question.

Assuming that more than the 21,000 additional troops will not be forthcoming and, further assuming that the U.S. will apply some kind of cordon & secure strategy as discussed, where would you focus those efforts, at least initially? Kandahar? Helmand? In other words, since it is highly unlikely that the Administration is going to invest the necessary forces to secure all of the desired areas, what, in your view … are the most critical areas of A-stan that must be pacified and held in order to have a shot at prevailing long-term?

Great question.  The Marines are obviously needed for the major combat operations in Now Zad.  But more Marines are on the way, and they should be deployed to the Nuristan and Kunar Provinces (where the Korangal Valley is).

Firebase Phoenix overlooking the Korengal Valley

These are adjacent provinces, in the East area of responsibility, very near the Pakistan border and subject not only to indigenous Taliban fighters, but an influx of Taliban from Pakistan.  We’ve struck the motherload.

Prior:

Counterinsurgency Successes in Afghanistan

More on Combat in Korangal Valley Afghanistan

Following up Counterinsurgency Successes in Afghanistan, C. J. Chivers and Tyler Hicks bring us another compelling acccount of combat in the Korangal Valley, Afghanistan.

Specialist Robert Soto ran for cover last week as his platoon was ambushed in Afghanistan. Across the river, two comrades crouched behind a rock.

The Taliban opened fire. The ambush was on.

Lieutenant Smith asked Sergeant Tanner for a report. The blast had blown the sergeant off his feet, spinning him around and throwing him down. He was disoriented. He said he thought he had all of his men.

As the firing neared its peak, Lieutenant Smith ordered the men around him to disperse so they could not all be struck by a single burst of fire. Then he provided covering fire so the artillery observer and a machine gun team could run back across the first bridge, gain elevation in Aliabad and cover the squad in the field.

A soldier caught in an ambush — looking for safety while returning fire, with ears ringing and skin pouring sweat — can feel utterly alone, trapped in a box of crisscrossing lead and terrifying sound, with death an instant away.

He is actually part of something more complicated. Bullets flew down into the riverbed from three sides. But as the lieutenants worked their radios, soldiers outside the kill zone were trying to erode the Taliban’s opening advantage.

Within the platoon, the squad in the rear of the column set up its machine guns and was firing on several of the Taliban shooting positions. A group of Afghan National Army soldiers, directed by a Marine corporal, was also firing.

In American firebases on ridges along the valley, soldiers with heavier machine guns and automatic grenade launchers focused on Afghan buildings in three villages — Donga, Laneyal and Darbart — from where the trapped platoon was taking fire.

Farther back, at Company B’s outpost, a pair of Air Force noncommissioned officers was directing aircraft into position, while two 120-millimeter mortars were firing high-explosive and white phosphorus rounds at targets the platoon had identified.

Alternately crouched and standing on the open rock spur, the lieutenants rushed to influence the fight and plan an escape from the trap. Once the American response began to build and the Taliban firing subsided, Lieutenant Rodriguez told Lieutenant Smith, they would throw smoke grenades along the river bank and pull back.

This is extremely compelling reporting.  Read the entire article at the New York Times.  There are many observations to be made, but perhaps at a later time.

C. J. Chivers and Tyler Hicks bring us a great account of a remarkable counterinsurgency success in Afghanistan.

Only the lead insurgents were disciplined as they walked along the ridge. They moved carefully, with weapons ready and at least five yards between each man, the soldiers who surprised them said.

Behind them, a knot of Taliban fighters walked in a denser group, some with rifles slung on their shoulders — “pretty much exactly the way we tell soldiers not to do it,” said Specialist Robert Soto, the radio operator for the American patrol.

If these insurgents came close enough, the soldiers knew, the patrol could kill them in a batch.

Fight by fight, the infantryman’s war in Afghanistan is often waged on the Taliban’s terms. Insurgents ambush convoys and patrols from high ridges or long ranges and slip away as the Americans, weighed down by equipment, return fire and call for air and artillery support. Last week a patrol from the First Infantry Division reversed the routine.

An American platoon surprised an armed Taliban column on a forested ridgeline at night, and killed at least 13 insurgents, and perhaps many more, with rifles, machine guns, Claymore mines, hand grenades and a knife.

The one-sided fight, fought on the slopes of the same mountain where a Navy Seal patrol was surrounded in 2005 and a helicopter with reinforcements was shot down, does not change the war. It was one of hundreds of firefights that have occurred in the Korangal Valley, an isolated region where local insurgents and the Americans have been locked in a bitter stalemate for more than three years.

But as accounts of the fight have spread, the ambush, on Good Friday, has become an emotional rallying point for soldiers in Kunar Province, who have seen it as a both a validation of their equipment and training and a welcome bit of score-settling in an area that in recent years has claimed more American lives than any other.

The patrol, 30 soldiers from the First Battalion, 26th Infantry, had left this outpost before noon on April 10, and spent much of the day climbing a ridge on the opposite side of the Korangal River, according to interviews with more than half the participants.

Once the soldiers reached the ridge’s crest, almost 6,000 feet above sea level on the side of a peak called Sautalu Sar, they found fresh footprints on the trails, and parapets of rock from where Taliban fighters often fire rifles and rocket-propelled grenades down onto this outpost.

The platoon leader, Second Lt. Justin Smith, selected a spot where trails intersected, and the platoon dug shallow fighting holes before dark. Claymore antipersonnel mines were set among the trees nearby.

At sunset, Lieutenant Smith called for a period of absolute silence, which lasted into darkness. Then he ordered three scouts to sit in a listening post about 100 yards away, 10 feet off the trail.

The scouts set in. Less than a half-minute later, a column of Taliban fighters appeared, walking briskly their way.

Sgt. Zachary R. Reese, a sniper, whispered into his radio. “We have eight enemy personnel coming down on our position really fast,” he said. He could say no more; the Taliban fighters were a few feet away.

More appeared. Then more still. The sergeant counted 26 gunmen pass by.

The patrol, Second Platoon of Company B, was in a place where no Americans had spent a night for years, and it seemed that the Afghans did not expect danger.

The soldiers waited. The rules of the ambush were long ago drilled into them: no one can move, and no one can fire until the patrol leader gives the order. Then everyone must fire at once.

The third Taliban fighter in the column switched on a flashlight, the soldiers said, and quickly switched it off. About 50 yards separated the two sides, but Lieutenant Smith did not want to start shooting too soon, he said, “because if too many lived then we’d be up there fighting them all night.”

He let the Taliban column continue on. The soldiers trained their weapons’ infrared lasers, which are visible only with night-vision equipment, on the fighters as they drew closer. The lasers mark the path a bullet will fly.

The lead fighter had almost reached the platoon when Pvt. First Class Troy Pacini-Harvey, 19, his laser trained on the lead man’s forehead, moved his rifle’s selector lever from safe to semi-automatic. It made a barely audible click. The Taliban fighter froze. He was six feet away.

Lieutenant Smith was new to the platoon. This was his fourth patrol. He was in a situation that every infantry lieutenant trains for, but almost no infantry lieutenant ever sees. “Fire,” he said, softly into the radio. “Fire. Fire. Fire.”

The platoon’s frontage exploded with noise and flashes of light as soldiers fired. Bullets struck all of the lead Taliban fighters, the soldiers said. The first Afghans fell where they were hit, not managing to fire a single shot.

Five Taliban fighters bolted to the soldiers’ left, unwittingly running squarely into the path of machine-gun bullets and the Claymore mines. For a moment, the soldiers heard rustling in the brush. They detonated their Claymores and threw hand grenades. The rustling stopped.

Two other Taliban fighters had dashed to the right, toward an almost sheer drop. One ran so wildly in the blackness that his momentum carried him off the cliff, several soldiers said.

Another stopped at the edge. Pvt. First Class Brad Larson, 19, had followed the man with his laser. “I took him out,” he said.

The scout at the listening post shot three of the fleeing fighters, and dropped two more with hand grenades. “We stopped what we could see,” Sergeant Reese said.

The shooting had lasted a few minutes. The hillside briefly fell quiet. The surviving Taliban fighters, some of whom had run back up the trail, began shouting in the darkness. “We could hear them calling out to one another,” Specialist Soto said.

Lieutenant Smith called the listening post back in. After two Apache attack helicopters showed up, an F-15 dropped a bomb on the Taliban’s escape route, about 600 yards up the trail. Then the lieutenant ordered teams to search the bodies they could find on the crest.

Sergeant Reese gave his rifle to another sniper to cover him while he tried to cut away a Taliban fighter’s ammunition pouches with a four-inch blade. The fighter had only been pretending to be dead, the soldiers said. He lunged for Sergeant Reese, who stabbed him in the left eye.

In all, the soldiers found eight bodies on the crest. They photographed them to try to identify them later, and collected their weapons, ammunition, radios and papers. Then the patrol swept down a gully where a pilot said he saw more insurgents hiding.

Four scouts, using night-vision gear, spotted five fighters crouching behind rocks, and killed them with rifle and machine-gun fire, the scouts said. The bodies were searched and photographed, too. The platoon began to hike back to the outpost, carrying the captured equipment.

Second Platoon, Company B has endured one of the most arduous assignments in Afghanistan. Eight of the platoon’s soldiers have been wounded in nine months of fighting in the valley, part of a bitter contest for control of a small and sparsely populated area.

Three others have been killed.

In a matter of minutes, the ambush changed the experience of the surviving soldiers’ tours. The degree of turnabout surprised even some the soldiers who participated.

“It’s the first time most of us have even seen the guys who were shooting at us,” said Sgt. Thomas Horvath, 21.

The next day, elders from the valley would ask permission to collect the villages’ dead. Company B’s commander, Capt. James C. Howell, would grant it.

But already, as the soldiers slid and climbed down the mountain, word of the insurgents’ defeat was traveling through Taliban networks.

Analysis & Commentary

Thanks to Chivers and Hicks for a great article on the campaign in Afghanistan.  Abu Muqawama gives the unit props, but asks the following question: “But what are we doing in the Korengal (sic) Valley? Does anyone know? Are we just trying to control the terrain or what?”  Good question.  There has been a robust debate concerning where the additional troops should go in Afghanistan – the urban population centers where the people are, or the rural areas where the Taliban control and recruit?  A good question, this, because it goes to the heart of the population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine promulgated over the last several years.

And in a hard situation in Afghanistan where we have both large rural areas and urban areas containing much of the population, how does this doctrine hold up?  Well, it at least leads to very puzzled questions from COIN experts.  It also shows that counterinsurgency cannot possibly be codified in a manual, no matter how hard we may try.

In Strategy in Afghanistan: Population or Enemy-Centric, we tried to strike a healthy balance.

The Captain’s Journal supports a different view.  U.S. forces are present in Afghanistan because there are enemies of the U.S. located there, and also those who harbor enemies of the U.S.  Without them, the likelihood of our presence is vanishingly small.  The enemy is our target.

If the enemy announced his presence and fought without the benefit of mixing with the population, the rate of the fight would be more productive.  This has occurred even recently in Afghanistan, when the Taliban evacuated Garmser of its population, dug in and unsuccessfully faced down the Marines of the 24th MEU.  During their deployment in Helmand, they killed some 400 hard core Taliban fighters in what was described at times as “full bore reloading.”  Yet the tribal elders also said that “When you protect us, we will be able to protect you,” showing little interest in reconstruction, programs and assistance.

But it will not always be this clear.  The enemy is who we are after, but to get to them at times requires focusing on the population.  Every situation is unique, and thus rather than finding a center of gravity, it is best to see the campaign as employing lines of effort.  In spite of the lack of adequate troops, the campaign will not be an either-or decision, focusing on the enemy or the population.  It will be both-and.

At times this will be extremely difficult, with the insurgency embedding with the population, shielding themselves with women and children, and hiding from U.S. forces.  Counterinsurgency thus proves to be a difficult mix of direct action military engagements, streetside conversations, visits to homes, learning the population and culture, and rebuilding the infrastructure.  There will be enough of this to go around for everyone in the campaign.

But just occasionally, the insurgents will separate themselves from the population, attempt to mass on a location, and go into conventional military formation.  When this happens and when U.S. forces can find it, it pays to kill them on the spot whether they are a direct threat or not.

Why are U.S. forces present in the Korangal valley?  The obvious answer is to kill the enemy.  It’s the perfect circumstances, crafted by the insurgents themselves.  No women, no children, no surrounding infrastructure to be destroyed, only the enemy and U.S. troops.  We dread the difficulty of population-centric counterinsurgency and pray for such engagements.

Such engagements are not to be found in the urban population centers.  Interdiction of enemy fighters and enemy-centric warfare can best be conducted when we are hunting and killing the enemy with enough troops to accomplish success.

There are other aspects of this engagement that warms our hearts.  Notice that despite the rules of engagement which do not discuss or countenance offensive operations at all, U.S. forces killed enemy fighters without first waiting for them to threaten or fire on them.  Notice also that the U.S. combatants are regular infantry.  Just so.  The campaign will be won or lost with regular infantry, not direct action by Special Operations Forces on so-called high value targets, a strategy that has not succeeded in the campaign for as long as it has been pursued.

At the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente has a preening commentary on the situation for women in Afghanistan.

Why are we in Afghanistan? To do good, of course. To beat back the Taliban so Afghans can build a secure and peaceful state where little girls can go to school and their mothers have the right to go to the market without having acid thrown in their faces.

But that’s not the goal of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. His aim is to get re-elected. So he signed a law that gives the powerful Shia minority the right to treat women the traditional way. According to United Nations organizations, the law legalizes marital rape, gives custody rights to fathers and forbids women from leaving their home without their husbands’ protection.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Karzai’s Western allies – especially Canada – are horrified. Our Foreign Affairs Minister spoke sternly to some Afghan cabinet ministers, and International Trade Minister Stockwell Day demanded a “definitive answer” on the situation. Alas, Canadian scolding isn’t likely to do much good. Mr. Karzai is the democratically elected leader of an independent country, one that Canadian soldiers are dying to protect. The government has the right to pass any laws it wants.

The Westerners who helped Mr. Karzai get elected now despise him. So do most Afghans. But the West can hardly overthrow him now, because that would not be democratic.

The original reason for the war was to stop al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan to mount terrorist attacks on the West. But Western leaders have sold the war on all the good we’re doing there. People are (grudgingly) willing to go along with it, so long as we’re helping little girls go to school …

Personally, I doubt anyone can fix Afghanistan – not even Barack Obama. But both conservatives and liberals have become quite attached to this war. Conservatives think the war will improve security in the West. Liberals think the war will improve the Afghans’ lot. And because the UN approves of it, they think it is an exercise in benign humanitarian intervention rather than hubristic imperial overreach.

Hmmm … hubristic imperial overreach.  Well, let’s recall exactly why we went into Afghanistan.  Remember the attacks of 9/11?  The Hamburg cell trained there after meeting UBL who convinced them to attack the U.S. rather than their original target of Germany.

Since then it has become obvious that an evolution – or devolution – was occurring in which the Taliban and Tehrik-i-Taliban of Pakistan were morphing into something more like al Qaeda with globalist intentions.  Several seasons of counterinsurgency have been wasted in the campaign for Afghanistan with too few forces to do any good.

So the question now isn’t how many al Qaeda are located in Afghanistan or the tribal regions of Pakistan.  The question isn’t how many of the indigenous poor we can strip away from the hard core Taliban.  The question isn’t even how many of the Tehrik-i-Taliban are now globalists.  Most of them, if I have the right sense of things.  They must all be killed.  The real question is without U.S. presence, how many of the Afghans would willingly give safe haven to globalists.  Without force projection and some larger presence in the counterinsurgency campaign, this may be an impossible question to answer.

We aren’t in Afghanistan to change their culture or value system.  Girls going to school is indeed a good thing, but we must not attempt to enforce such an idea with guns.  This is the surest way to defeat.  In short, nation-building must only occur to the extent necessary to give some reasonable probability to the ejection of globalists from the country.  We are there for the safety and security of the West, not to remake them in our own image.

U.S. Marines keep watch as fellow Marines search for Taliban arms caches on March 31, 2009 in the abandoned town of Now Zad in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Marines from Lima Company of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, have been fighting Taliban insurgents, whose frontline position is just over a mile away from their base (John Moore/Getty Images).

Our buddy Andrew Exum has a piece out today with The New Republic entitled No Place to Hide.  In it, he defends the Obama administration’s “renunciation of traditional counter-terror strategies.”  More specifically:

When the Obama administration announced the results of its review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policies on Friday, reporters quizzing the review’s authors seemed confused. They wondered whether the recommendations announced by the president amounted to an abandonment or endorsement of the kind of population-centric counter-insurgency strategy employed in Iraq in 2007. Were we embracing a more limited counter-terror mission? Or were we committing ourselves more fully to nation-building?

The aims of the strategy are quite modest: to deny transnational terror groups the ability to use physical space to plan and prepare for attacks on the United States in the way that al-Qaeda used Afghanistan in the years before the 9/11 attacks. And the central problem of the post-Cold War era is that these staging grounds are often in ungoverned spaces like the Pashtun belt straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The solution to this problem in those countries is improved governance from Kabul and Islamabad, respectively, which leads us to pursuing lines of operation quite unlike those most normally associated with the art of war–such as improving centralized governance, coordinating economic development, and providing essential services to the peoples of southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. The new Obama strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan is thus better described as a “counter-haven” strategy then a counter-terrorism strategy. (I must credit a conversation I had with counter-insurgency theorist-practitioner David Kilcullen on Friday for that particular turn of phrase.)

So the plan announced by the Obama administration is actually a renunciation of traditional counter-terror strategies–which have employed special operations raids, drone strikes, and bombing campaigns to deter or reduce the capacity of transnational terror groups. In the administration’s strategy is the admission that solely “kinetic” means–blowing things up and killing people–cannot be relied upon to end the threat from terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I won’t repeat all of his prose here, but Exum launches into an interesting missive on the issue of Cartesian space versus virtual space.

The White House strategy, though, betrays an obsession with physical space at the expense of virtual space. This fixation very much reflects a generational divide among the scholars and policy-makers who focus on terrorism. Younger scholars such as Will McCants (now at the Department of Defense) and Thomas Hegghammer–in addition to being much more likely to actually be able to speak and read the relevant languages (Arabic and Urdu)–are “digital natives” rather than “digital immigrants” (to use the labels preferred by the counter-insurgency scholar Thomas Rid): They do not need to have the explosive potential of the internet explained to them, and McCants and Hegghammer especially have individually spent hundreds of hours on the more popular jihadi chatrooms to gather data about the debates and spread of information that is taking place in the virtual world

Well, Exum seems to be saying that we must be prepared to take on the enemy anywhere for this to work, and I tend to agree (and for that reason believe that the global counterinsurgency in which we are engaged is underfunded and under-resourced).  I also believe that we should be prepared to confront the conventional enemies, which is why rather than throwing several trillion dollars down the toilet, we should be funding the U.S. military.

But anywhere is still somewhere that is located in Cartesian space.  I’m not impressed with the alleged global power of the Internet jihadists, and most of them are still jihadist wannabes in cyberspace.  Let them pick up a rifle and do duty, but until they do, we are worrying about the wrong thing.  Have your IT experts, but what we really need are boots on the ground.

Our very good friend Professor Gian Gentile gives Exum nice props, and is perhaps being too gracious.  I’m not that gracious, something quite endemic to my nature, I’m sure.  Exum is playing make believe about the Obama administration renunciation of the counter-terror strategy and HVT campaign.  Only recently was it announced that the UAV strikes would expand to Quetta.

Now, I’m not against the strikes for the typical reasons: they kill innocents, they add to the rolls of the insurgency, etc.  In fact, I’m not against them at all.  But simply put, this strategy won’t work.  Neither will this strategy work when applied with SOF troopers who swoop into an area, kill a HVT, and then withdraw.

Stupid in the superlative, and we have discussed it before.  Have your airmen that can use a Milstar uplink to guide a JDAM to target by painting it with a laser; have your SEALs who can attach underwater demolitions.  Very well.  The ground is controlled by infantry, and if we win the campaign in Afghanistan it will be because the load is borne on the backs of the infantry and Cavalry.  They can converse with the population, they can gain intelligence, they can deliver logistics, they can fight the enemy, and they can fast-rope into an area and kill or capture the HVTs if that becomes necessary.

I have had very unsatisfactory e-mail exchanges with Exum on this issue, and while Exum continues to defend the Obama adminstration and its alleged repudiation of the HVT strategy, he then turns around and defends the use of SOF to kill or capture HVT.

We must fish or cut bait in Afghanistan.  We must not go in half way.  We must decide if we support the campaign or not.  If we support it, then we need to resource and finance it.  Send in the Cavalry and infantry.  Prepare for proper logistics.  If not, then let’s withdraw and live to fight another day, while protecting and training the sons of America.  They aren’t toys or pawn pieces with which to enact an administration’s damn foreign policy.  They are men, made in God’s image, your neighbors and loved ones.