Archive for the 'Afghanistan' Category

Marines of 3rd platoon 1st squad, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion 7th Marines, conduct a local security patrol in the city of Now Zad, Afghanistan to ensure the safety of the forward operating base on June 08, 2008.

Friend of The Captain’s Journal Major Cliff Gilmore (USMC) is in Afghanistan and sends an anecdotal update on Marines in Now Zad that makes him proud to be a Marine.

I did make a short trip “up north” to a fun little place called Now Zad where a company of Marines have been slogging it out. I don’t like to bring politics into these e-mails, but in general I can comfortably say that those who beat the “support our troops, bring them home now” drum clearly haven’t talked to the warriors I mixed with out there. Several have died. More have lost limbs to improvised explosive devices (IED). All of their corpsmen (medics) have received one or more Purple Heart Medals for injuries sustained in combat and not a one of them talked about wanting to go home. When I arrived at Now Zad I came in with approximately 30 combat replacements. New Marines in to take the place of those already killed or injured. They were all volunteers and left their various units to re-enforce the Marines at Now Zad because, according to one Marine, “…we heard this was where the bad guys are.”

I talked with numerous Marines and hovered in the pre-dawn shadows of the moonscape listening to their chatter for hours and heard only about what they had learned, how they were getting better at this kind of fighting, and how they couldn’t wait to get back outside the wire and “…hunt the scrappy little @&%!ers down.” Point here being, I’m not at all confident the boys in the middle of the fight are thinking in terms of how the folks back Stateside might be able to support them by bringing them home. Mostly they just want more bullets.

I ran into one young Marine who has already been shot twice and blown up by an IED once and came away essentially unscathed both times. The IED resulted in a sprained ankle which he taped up and strapped back into his boot. The two shots came while he was on the radio calling for medevac for a fellow Marine. As the story goes — told the same way by numerous Marines out at Now Zad — he was kneeling beside the wounded Marine, radio in one hand, assisting the corpsmen in treating the wounded Marine with the other. Calm as could be his conversation on the radio went something like “…sir, we have a Marine down and need a medevac immediately. We are located at grid 123456. He looks stable but his injuries are serious. We need you to come and get him now. Oh, and I just got shot too so you’ll have to come get me as well.”

He took two 7.62 AK-47 rounds to the left side under his arm. His armor stopped the bullets, but he didn’t realize that at first. As he described it, the force of the rounds hitting him felt “…pretty much real enough at the time…” As others described it, he didn’t even flinch when the shots came, did not skip a beat on his evac call, and once he had a chance to inspect his bruised ribs simply asked the doc to tape him up and then went back into the fight.

He didn’t ask to go home.

Proud indeed. Thanks to Major Gilmore for this update, and watch your six, friend.

It was Maj. Gen. Jeffery J. Schloesser who initially pointed out that the Taliban would be active this winter despite the common perceptions of a stand down in operations due to the weather.

American troops in Afghanistan will step up offensive operations this winter because insurgents are increasingly staying in the country to prepare for spring attacks, a U.S. commander told The Associated Press.

Maj. Gen. Jeffery J. Schloesser said a 40 percent surge in violence in April and May was fueled in part by militants preparing stores of weapons during the winter, which generally is a slow period for fighting, particularly in snowy Afghan mountainous areas.

“If we don’t do anything over the winter the enemy will more and more try to seek safe haven in Afghanistan rather than going back to Pakistan,” Schloesser said …

He said the U.S. military realized more militants spent last winter in Afghanistan after speaking with elders and villagers who had been pushed out of their homes. The spike in violence in the spring occurred because insurgents were already in position to unleash attacks, though U.S. officials didn’t know it at the time, he said.

“They didn’t have to come over the passes, they were already here,” Schloesser said during an interview while flying in a Black Hawk helicopter Monday to a small U.S. outpost in Nuristan, a province that borders Pakistan.

Now he is reiterating this position, but adding a new twist concerning the capabilities of U.S. forces and the intent to interdict Taliban operations.

A top U.S. general said he expects militant violence in Afghanistan to rise some 30 percent this winter compared with last year, but that he does not think insurgents have the ability to mount a massive campaign during the country’s harsh weather.

Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser said the U.S. will attack militant cells in areas of Afghanistan where U.S. forces in some cases haven’t operated before but where officials now realize “the enemy is seeking to remain as a rest and facilitation area in the winter.”

Winter has traditionally been seen as a down time for fighting in Afghanistan, but Schloesser said offensive operations by U.S. troops this year could dispel that notion.

U.S. troops will “take advantage of our mobility and capacity to operate in the snow and to be able to find the enemy,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday.

Militants will have the option to be “captured, killed, to reconcile or flee,” the general said. “And I think fleeing will be very hard in the winter, especially if they’re in flip flops or sandals.”

In January 2007, U.S. airstrikes killed some 120 militants crossing the border on foot from Pakistan into Afghanistan, and a video of the attack taken by a drone showed that many of the insurgents — who were walking in a single-file line through mountainous terrain — were barefoot.

Schloesser said he thinks militants are now better equipped with boots and sleeping bags but don’t have the ability to conduct complex operations in deep snow or freezing weather.

Schloesser clearly intends to use the weather as a force multiplier. But many of the insurgents are at home in Kandahar or other smaller villages in Southern Afghanistan, with families, history, homes and experience in the bitter winters. For these fighters there is no need to traipse through the countryside looking for a place to throw a sleeping bag for the night.

Time will tell if the these good intentions come to pass, but expect it to be a tough winter for U.S. troops – frostbite, frost-jamming of the tight tolerances of the action in the M16A2 and SAWs, and the inability to detect IED emplacements due to muddy and snow-covered terrain. On this last example, the Taliban have shown an adaptability that can prove menacing. “Western field commanders readily acknowledge that the Taliban and their allies learn from failures as well as successes. When Taliban fighters noticed that western forces were jamming the signals they used to detonate roadside bombs, they switched back to pressure plates that would be set off by a passing convoy.”

But scores of Taliban have been killed too. If the U.S. command has their way, it’ll be a tougher winter for the Taliban.

Regular readers of The Captain’s Journal know that we’ve been critical of NATO. As far back as five months ago we were discussing and advocating a reorganization of NATO to report to U.S. CENTCOM, or at a minimum, removing U.S. troops from NATO command in Afghanistan. We also pointed out the red tape and utter confusion in NATO in everything from strategy to radio frequencies. As characterized by one Marine officer prior to operations in the Helmand Province, they had to “wait for the Elephants to stop dancing.”

Four months ago The Captain’s Journal continued to advocate realignment of forces, saying that “promotion of General Petraeus to Commander of CENTCOM without a realignment of U.S. troops to his direct command (they currently report to NATO command) removes the possibility for any strategic changes needed to make the campaign successful.”

One week ago we discussed the potential realignment in the works for the campaign, but continued to advocate more U.S. troops since many NATO troops are bound by overly restrictive rules of engagement. Now we learn that the realignment we have recommended is underway.

The BBC has learnt that a new-look command structure will drive the continuing fight against the Taleban in Afghanistan. will (sic) now be led by a change in the existing command structure.

US General David McKiernan will now command both the US and Nato forces who are currently based in Afghanistan.

General McKiernan told the BBC’s John Simpson that the move would create “a greater unity” among the forces. But the British Army has criticised the move, arguing that any big decisions will now be taken primarily by the US.

As we recently said, “Petraeus must have access to resources that will operate with regard to unity of command, unity of strategy and unity of mission. Time is short in the campaign, Pakistan’s intentions cannot be trusted, and the security situation is degrading.”

We’re thrilled that what we have advocated has come to pass.  Does CENTCOM read this blog?  As for the overall command structure change, regular readers of The Captain’s Journal heard it advocated here first, heard it announced here first, and studied the reasons for our advocacy.

The Herald Sun has an article from an Australian perspective on the campaign in Afghanistan. Recall as you read this that based on discussions in The Cult of Special Forces, the Australians do not allow their infantry to engage in combat operations, and in fact require that they sign formal agreements stating that they haven’t provoked kinetic engagements. They allow only their special forces to engage in kinetic operations.

The ambush and serious wounding of nine elite Australian soldiers in Afghanistan this month showed just how tenuous the coalition’s hold is over most of the troubled country.

Despite the advanced weapons and remote technology waged against them by the world’s top military powers, including unmanned spy planes that escort most patrols, Taliban fighters backed by their comrades in Pakistan and Iran just keep on coming.

The situation is so confused that highly trained Australian special forces troops have been implicated in the death of a district governor during a firefight between the Diggers and Afghan police.

For one British attack helicopter crew the reality of this bitter war reflected the fantasy of a Terminator movie during a recent operation in the restive Helmand province.

After firing a Hellfire missile from their Apache chopper to level a building housing key Taliban leaders, they were astonished to see several men escaping from the smouldering pile of rubble in a sports utility vehicle.

The pilots tuned their high-tech optical equipment, which can focus on an individual face from several kilometres away, onto the speeding utility and positively identified a prime target inside.

Another Hellfire reduced the Toyota to scrap metal, but, amazingly, one of the insurgents had survived and what was left of him began crawling away, Terminator -like, from the carnage.

The coup de grace was delivered by a short burst from the chopper’s lethal 30mm chain gun.

The Taliban might be unable to drive foreign forces out with a decisive military offensive, but they are determined to win this war of attrition.

From the heavily fortified United Nations, American, NATO and Afghan government citadels in the capital Kabul to the bloody frontline “green zones” in Helmand and Oruzgan provinces, this is a war that could last for decades and may never be won.

As the coalition death toll mounts and the Western political landscape changes, the question being asked across Afghanistan is not how the military campaign is going but rather what are the alternatives.

The 70,000 foreign troops in the country, including 1100 Australians, represent the blunt instrument of international policy.

But the force is nowhere near big enough to actually defeat the enemy, train the Afghan army and secure desperately needed infrastructure development.

Indeed, the war may never be won, and the last paragraph explains exactly why. Not enough troops. Interestingly, the author calls the 70,000 troops in Afghanistan a “blunt instrument.”

With many of these troops unable to perform offensive or kinetic operations due to rules of engagement, and with strategic incoherence keeping them on FOBs rather than contacting the population, the remaining troops that can engage in combat do so with heavy use of air power with its collateral damage and raids against high value targets.

This is a blunt instrument indeed. While counterintuitive, one lesson learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom is that while some old school counterinsurgency thinkers advocated the small footprint, it is precisely this that causes convulsive contact with the population. The more productive, precise and surgical operations require time and infantry. Infantry contacts both the population and the enemy constantly, with enough force projection to provide security and gain intelligence.  The Captain’s Journal has repeatedly stated a maxim: the necessity to apply force is inversely proportional to the force projection.

So while the pedestrian version of kinetic operations has special forces raids as surgical and infantry operations as blunt, in counterinsurgency exactly the opposite is true. Australia’s political leadership would do well to learn this, and also surmise that in the end, the small footprint model will be more costly. Australia’s military leadership already knows this.

In the spirit of our own Games of Duplicity, prominent Pakistani Irfan Husain upbraids Pakistan and her leadership, and concludes with the following:

Another factor that has thwarted a more effective response to the Taliban threat is Pakistan’s preoccupation with India. Generations of army officers have been taught that Pakistan’s giant neighbor is the real enemy, and this doctrine is reflected in the disposition and concentration of the country’s half-million-strong army. Troops have been trained to fight a conventional war on the plains of Punjab and Sindh. After 9/11, around 80,000 troops were deployed along the Afghan border, but even this number was insufficient to seal it. Currently, a military alliance between Afghanistan and India is Pakistani military planners’ worst nightmare. To thwart such a possibility, the Pakistani Army wants to retain the Taliban as proxies and is therefore reluctant to crush them.

Finally, Pakistan has not yet worked out a political consensus about who the real enemy is. Until the day he left office in early August, Musharraf was regularly castigated in the media as Bush’s poodle doing America’s dirty work by killing his own people. Pakistani TV networks are forever churning out talk shows in which so-called experts criticize the government for fighting fellow Muslims. They conveniently overlook the fact that these same Muslims are responsible for killing hundreds of innocent Pakistanis and Afghans.

In post-Musharraf Pakistan, the newly-elected government is struggling to find its feet. The coalition of the two largest parties has already split up. Nawaz Sharif, leader of his faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, has made clear his intention to talk to the Taliban rather than fight them. But Asif Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto and now president of Pakistan, has declared his intention to take the fight to the terrorists who threaten to seize control. In a recent article in The Washington Post, Zardari called this the “battle for Pakistan’s soul.” Clearly, this is a battle Pakistan cannot afford to lose.

In fact, a U.S. Marine Lt. Col. has recently gone on record saying that Pakistani troops were have at times actively resupplied the Taliban during combat operations.

Pakistani military forces flew repeated helicopter missions into Afghanistan to resupply the Taliban during a fierce battle in June 2007, according to a U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel, who says his information is based on multiple U.S. and Afghan intelligence reports.

The revelation by Lt. Col. Chris Nash, who commanded an embedded training team in eastern Afghanistan from June 2007 to March 2008, adds a new twist to the controversy over a U.S. special operations raid into Pakistan Sept. 3.

Pakistani officials strongly protested that raid, with a statement issued by the foreign ministry calling it a “gross violation of Pakistan’s territory.”

But fewer than 15 months earlier, Pakistani forces were flying cross-border missions in the other direction to resupply a “base camp” in Nangarhar Province occupied by fighters from the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Hezb-i-Islami faction led by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Nash told Army Times in a Sept. 17 telephone interview.

He had previously alluded to the episode in a PowerPoint briefing he had prepared to help coalition forces headed to Afghanistan. The briefing, titled “Observations and Opinions IRT Operations in Afghanistan by a Former ETT OIC” and dated August 2008, has circulated widely in military circles. Military Times obtained a copy.

Nash said his embedded training team, ETT 2-5, and their allies from the Afghan Border Police’s 1st Brigade fought “a significant fight” in late June 2007 in the Agam Tengay and Wazir Tengay valleys in the Tora Bora mountains of southern Nangarhar – the same region in which al-Qaida forces fought a retreat into Pakistan from prepared defenses in the winter of 2001-2002.

“I had six [Marine] guys on a hill,” Nash said. “They weren’t surrounded, but in the traditional sense they might have been.”

At a critical point in the battle, the Pakistanis flew several resupply missions to a Taliban base about 15 to 20 kilometers inside Afghanistan, Nash said. None of the Marines witnessed the helicopter flights during the four days they were there, he said in a Sept. 19 email. Rather, the supply flights had been reported to them by Afghan soldiers and local civilians in the village of Tangay Kholl.

Versus this picture of active assistance to the Taliban, Pakistan has recently conducted heavy operations in Bajaur, and these operations are having a tangible effect inside Afghanistan.

[The] operation, which began in early August, has won praise from U.S. officials worried about rising violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan but has triggered retaliatory suicide bombings elsewhere in Pakistan. Some officials believe that the weekend bombing of the Marriott Hotel may have been a response to the Bajaur operations, which the army says have left more than 700 suspected militants dead.

Washington says the operation in Bajaur, rumored to be the hiding place of Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, appears to have reduced violence across the border in Afghanistan.

A Pakistani Army spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, has said that Bajaur has been turned into a “mega-sanctuary” for militants and that the military is determined to flush them out.

But a rash of U.S. cross-border operations in neighboring tribal regions, including suspected missile strikes and a ground assault, underscore Washington’s concerns that Pakistan is either unwilling or incapable of rooting out extremists on its own.

There is still reason to be concerned. The intransigence of the world view and bureaucracy in the Pakistan military will be difficult to repair. Also, The Captain’s Journal still advocates the idea that the first place for NATO confrontation of the Taliban is Afghanistan. Security must be provided for the population in a counterinsurgency. However, if Pakistan can turns its attention away from India and towards the real threat – the Taliban – the effectiveness of the campaign will increase by an order of magnitude.

Major General Charles Dunlap, Jr., defends the heavy use of air power in Operation Enduring Freedom.

“Tanks and armor are not a big deal — the planes are the killers. I can handle everything but the jet fighters.” This recent conversation between Taliban commanders, intercepted by U.S. intelligence officers, does much to explain the frenzied efforts of their propaganda machine to ban the use of the weapon they fear most: airpower …

What is frustrating them? Modern U.S. and coalition airpower. Relentless aerial surveillance and highly precise bombing turn Taliban efforts to overrun the detachments into crushing defeats. And the Taliban have virtually no weapons to stop our planes.

Instead, they are trying to use sophisticated propaganda techniques to create a political crisis that will shoot down the use of airpower as effectively as any anti-aircraft gun.

Indeed, it may have been the very heavy use of air power thus far which has prevented total loss of the campaign given the underresourced effort (with respect to infantry), but while air power can participate heavily and even prevent the loss of the campaign in this case, it cannot win. Troops on the ground must accomplish that task, even if they utilize air power to assist them.

The Captain’s Journal has called for more troops in the campaign, stating that the recent addition of a few thousand troops will not be nearly enough (and General McKiernan agrees with this assessment). But contrary to our position, Fred Kaplan weighs in on why he believes that a surge will not work in Afghanistan.

… the situation in Iraq bears little resemblance to that of Afghanistan. Barnett Rubin, a professor at New York University and author of several books about the country, spells out some of the differences:

Iraq’s insurgency is based in Iraq; Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents are based mainly across the border in Pakistan. Iraq is urban, educated, and has great wealth, at least potentially, in its oil supplies; Afghanistan is rural, largely illiterate, and ranks as one of the world’s five poorest countries. Iraq has some history as a cohesive nation (albeit as the result of a minority ruling sect oppressing the majority); Afghanistan never has and, given its geography, perhaps never will.

Moreover, the Taliban’s insurgency is ideological, not ethno-sectarian (except incidentally). Therefore, while some warlords and tribes have allied themselves with the Taliban for opportunistic or nationalistic reasons, and therefore might be peeled away and co-opted, the conditions are not ripe for some sort of Taliban or Pashtun “Awakening.” Nor is there any place where walls might isolate the insurgents.

Kaplan then tells us what he believes is possible for the campaign.

The ultimate military goal—one lesson from Petraeus’ strategy in Iraq that is worth learning and might be applicable—is to protect the Afghan population, and that requires putting a lot of troops in the neighborhoods of towns and villages, to provide security and build trust. It might be possible to do this in Afghanistan, just as it was done in many Iraqi neighborhoods with one important difference—it has to be done by the Afghan National Army, not by us.

There are a few reasons for this. First, we simply can’t do it. Stephen Biddle—a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, who was an adviser on some aspects of Iraq strategy—estimates that securing the Afghan population would require about 500,000 troops. That’s 10 times the combined number of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan now. We don’t have anywhere near this level of manpower to spare (the three extra U.S. brigades under consideration would amount to about 12,000 troops), and even if we did, and even if we wanted to send them, we’d have no way to maintain them. (In Iraq, Saddam Hussein left behind a robust logistical network, including paved highways and lots of air bases with long runways; Afghanistan has nothing of the sort.)

Second, unlike in Iraq—where sectarian clashes required U.S. troops to step in (Sunnis wouldn’t trust Shiite troops, and Shiites wouldn’t trust Sunni troops)—the Afghan army is seen as, and actually is, a national institution. Given the right resources, it could do the job … And that leads to something that we and other countries could do—pour lots and lots of money into Afghanistan, so the government can equip, train, and pay a much larger national army.

These are some pregnant paragraphs by Kaplan, and bear some unpacking to acertain both the wisdom and folly in them. Kaplan is right concerning the absence of an awakening of the sort that occurred in the Anbar Province. This is the subject of a debate we’ve had at the Small Wars Council, and we maintain our position that while a few insignificant Taliban may be able to be peeled away from the force, in the end it will have little if any effect on the effort. The ideological connection between the Taliban and al Qaeda that led to safe haven in Afghanistan prior to 9/11 remains, and rather than be introduced to the foreign notion of radical Islamic Sharia as did the Anbaris, the Taliban have no need of such an introduction.

So if the U.S. isn’t (and shouldn’t be) interested in forming another fledgling democracy in an otherwise strictly Islamic region, why should we care if they rule their people via Sharia? The answer comes not in Sharia, but in the symbiotic connection between the Taliban and al Qaeda we mentioned above, i.e., friendship with and support of globalists.

The Taliban of Afghanistan prior to 9/11 were not so much focused on global jihad as was al Qaeda, but the seeds for the ideology were present enough for the Taliban to grant safe haven to al Qaeda. With the advent of the Tehrik-i-Taliban of Pakistan (TTP), a new order has come about and the Taliban have clearly said that their focus is global. Terrorists are flooding in from around the world to be trained for global jihad in Baitullah Mehsud’s camps. The Tehrik-i-Taliban are hard core radicals, and shout to passersby in Khyber “We are Taliban! We are mujahedin! “We are al-Qaida!” There is no distinction.

In spite of the demand by the principles of counterinsurgency to build roads, schools, power grids and infrastructure, the population has clearly said that they demand security from the Taliban threat instead. The Anbar awakening occurred with indigenous, non-al Qaeda fighters who had no love for extremism. It didn’t occur with al Qaeda. To believe that an “awakening” can occur within the Taliban is analogous to faith that al Qaeda will turn against itself. They – al Qaeda and the Taliban – are one and the same.

Kaplan’s proposal that it will require half a million U.S. troops to provide security for the population of Afghanistan isn’t far off the mark set by Australian Major General Jim Molan.

International forces in Afghanistan are repeating mistakes made in Iraq by failing to commit sufficient troops, a recently retired Australian army general said Tuesday.

Maj. Gen. Jim Molan said he could see parallels between the worsening situation in Afghanistan and the months after the defeat of the Iraqi military when he commanded 300,000 troops in Iraq as Chief of Operations for the U.S.-led multinational force in 2004 and 2005.

“The biggest error that we made in the second year of the war in Iraq, 2004, was that we didn’t have unity of effort or command, and we didn’t have a comprehensive plan and we didn’t have sufficient troops,” Molan, who retired from the army this year, said in a lecture to a conservative think-tank.

“We are making exactly the same mistake now, and although none of us has done much, the Americans have moved in and solved the unity of effort by putting one of their people in command of everything,” he said of U.S. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who took over the NATO command in Afghanistan in June.

“There’s a chance now they’ll get a comprehensive plan up — it’s going to be difficult working with NATO … and I think we are years away from getting anything that approaches sufficient troops into Afghanistan,” he added.

Molan estimated about 500,000 troops were needed in Afghanistan, where there are currently 65,000 foreign troops and 62,000 Afghanistan National Army soldiers.

“The aim of the Taliban is to get into the cities and fight us like they’re fighting us in Iraq,” Mola said.

“Iraq is what Afghanistan will be if the Taliban get back into the cities and nothing will change,” he added.

Australia is the largest contributor to Afghanistan outside NATO. There are 1,000 Australian troops in the central Asian country.

Molan dismissed the Australian government’s argument that it did not have sufficient troops to send more.

“I believe we can afford to put more troops in and I believe we can afford to sustain them, but it would require governments to back that idea up,” Molan said.

But he said the onus was on NATO to commit the thousands of additional troops required to win the conflict.

Quite obviously the U.S. doesn’t have half a million troops to provide security for Afghanistan. Australia must change as well as the balance of NATO (regarding rules of engagement). Currently, Australia allows only its special forces to engage kinetic operations, and other Australian forces are limited to force protection—rigidly imposed to the point whereby participants have been required to sign formal documents declaring that they have not provoked combat operations.

But if NATO should do more, so should the U.S. whose generals have claimed that Operation Enduring Freedom is an underresourced campaign for several years. The Captain’s Journal has gone on record stating that the U.S. is losing the campaign because of degrading security. Following this article, Andrew Lubin wrote to tell us that:

The downside of “getting the word out” is that lots of people don’t like to read it. You wrote a good piece (and have always done so); and I hope you will continue. Did you see yesterday’s lead editorial in the NY Times “Afghanistan on Fire”…you need to read it. I spent June over there; it’s worse than you can imagine; it’s like Iraq in 2004-2005.

Now Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies has written a comprehensive report entitled Losing the Afghan-Pakistan War?: The Rising Threat. In this analysis Cordesman concludes that the Taliban have turned much of Afghanistan into “no-go zones.”

The map above shows insurgent activities in 2007, and the rate of attacks in 2008 has been higher than in 2007. The darker red indicates the areas with permanent Taliban presence. The “border” between Afghanistan and Pakistan effectively doesn’t exist.

The erstwhile capital city of the Taliban, Kandahar, is in obvious need of protection against the thugery and oppression by the Taliban.

The neat rows of new homes in the gated community sit behind freshly painted three-metre-high cement walls and rows of manicured shrubs.

Pavements lined with imported eucalyptus trees border smoothly paved streets that fill at twilight with cyclists and walkers. Further back, another cluster of houses is being built, including an eight-bedroom villa with a pool, wraparound deck and balcony supported by doric columns.

Residents at the Aino Mina housing development also have access to a mosque, two private schools, football fields, playgrounds and private armed guards on duty 24 hours a day. A hospital, supermarket, pizza parlour and golf course are also planned.

But, despite luxuries rivalling those found in exclusive suburban communities in the United States, many owners are trying to sell or rent out their homes. Others have temporarily abandoned properties. The reason is as simple as the long-standing estate agent’s maxim: location, location, location.

This upmarket residential neighbourhood is situated on the outskirts of the provincial capital of Kandahar – one of the most volatile and lawless provinces of Afghanistan. Others call the area the heartbeat of the Taliban, the place where the group formed in the early 1990s and where it is, by all accounts, re-establishing itself today.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Sayed Hakim Kallmi, a 40-year-old hotel manager, said as he stood on the pavement outside his dream home in Aino Mina. He was watching his son and three of his six daughters play with neighbours. “There’s no security here” …

Taliban operatives have made no secret of their campaign to intimidate residents of Aino Mina. Ahmadi, who described himself as a spokesman for the group, said: “We seriously warn people not to buy here. Those who stay there and who buy there will be held responsible for the actions we take against them later.”

Residents and workers in the development say the Taliban have targeted the area and maintain an unmistakable presence. During a sweltering July afternoon, a thickly bearded man in a shalwar kameez with a turban wrapped around his head rode a motorcycle along the nearly empty streets of Aino Mina with an AK-47 strapped across his back. The motorbike and the AK-47 both are long-favoured hallmarks of the Taliban.

Despite the rider, a handful of construction workers at the project hauled wheelbarrows full of dirt, lugged slabs of concrete and scaled bamboo ladders. Naik Mohammed, 28, pointed to a two-story townhouse and said Taliban militants had recently looted the elegant dwelling and demanded protection money from its occupants.

“They told the owners to pay $200,000 and they would allow them to live there peacefully and they won’t kill them,” Mohammed said. “The family left the next day.”

Admiral Mullen himself – Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – has said that time is running out on Afghanistan. The push to treat the campaign against the Taliban as a counterterrorism operation against so-called high value targets with limited force presence and small footprint has enabled Taliban control of the human terrain. The fact that neither the U.S. nor NATO has 500,000 troops to dedicate to Operation Enduring Freedom is not an excuse for continued failure to ramp up troop presence to capture and kill Taliban and train Afghan troops to do the same.

The objection that the U.S. cannot contribute 500,000 troops must be placed in context. There are currently just over 32,000 troops in Afghanistan, somewhere around one fifth of the forces in Iraq. Before the defeatists howl that the campaign cannot be won, it is prudent to take the campaign seriously and listen to the Generals when they declare it to be an underresourced campaign.

The battle of wanat where nine U.S. soldiers were killed and fifteen wounded is indicative of more than just that the Taliban can conduct larger scale operations when they desire. No Afghan troops died in the engagement, since the U.S. forces took the brunt of the punishment. It will be protracted period of time before Afghan troops can be relied upon perform kinetic operations sufficiently enough to push back Taliban presence in Afghanistan without significant U.S. force projection.

Further, religiously motivated fighters (jihadists and globalists) and thugs and criminals who extort thousands of dollars from the population must be captured or killed. We can no more reconcile with these elements than we did with al Qaeda in Anbar. While al Qaeda attacked and brutalized the Anbaris, the indigenous insurgents for the most part did not. Their attacks were reserved for U.S. forces until being killed or captured to the point that their ranks were decimated by U.S. Marines, the rest being co-opted by U.S. dollars and protection. Al Qaeda was never offered dollars for reconciliation.  They were simply killed.  Concerning reconciliation with an insurgency, it is important to get this distinction correct.

Other Resources:

A Wild Frontier (The Economist): Yet a devious Pakistani strategy of failing to crack down on cross-border violence is not the only reason it persists, nor the main one. A better explanation, given the fraught, radicalised and ungoverned state of north-western Pakistan, and the many dead soldiers there, is that the army could not make a much better fist of controlling the border, even if it did its damnedest. And moreover, it may be afraid to pursue its campaign more vigorously, for two reasons. Pakistani officials suggest that, despite battling the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas, the army is reluctant to attack the Afghan Taliban, allegedly led from Peshawar and from Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province, for fear of worsening security problems in those places. Secondly, the campaign is unpopular, in the army and elsewhere, precisely because Pakistanis think it is being waged for America.

A Modernized Taliban Thrives in Afghanistan (Washington Post) : Just one year ago, the Taliban insurgency was a furtive, loosely organized guerrilla force that carried out hit-and-run ambushes, burned empty schools, left warning letters at night and concentrated attacks in the southern rural regions of its ethnic and religious heartland. Today it is a larger, better armed and more confident militia, capable of mounting sustained military assaults. Its forces operate in virtually every province and control many districts in areas ringing the capital. Its fighters have bombed embassies and prisons, nearly assassinated the president, executed foreign aid workers and hanged or beheaded dozens of Afghans. The new Taliban movement has created a parallel government structure that includes defense and finance councils and appoints judges and officials in some areas. It offers cash to recruits and presents letters of introduction to local leaders. It operates Web sites and a 24-hour propaganda apparatus that spins every military incident faster than Afghan and Western officials can manage

U.S. Seeks Sweeping Changes in Command Structure for Afghanistan (The Captain’s Journal): Without drastic changes in the nature of the mission of NATO troops, it is doubtful that even placing them under the command of General Petraeus will change much. This is partly why we have recommended more U.S. troops. Petraeus must have access to resources that will operate with regard to unity of command, unity of strategy and unity of mission. Time is short in the campaign, Pakistan’s intentions cannot be trusted, and the security situation is degrading.

Fighting a Technologically Advanced Insurgency (The Captain’s Journal): Both the U.S. DoD and the British MoD should invest as necessary to stay ahead in technology. But we must not miss the point concerning technology. Playing the game of one-step-ahead is a deadly and costly way to run a campaign. The solution to the problem of Taliban technology is to conduct intelligence driven raids against the Taliban who perpetrate the use of such technology. Rather than the so-called high value targets with recognizable names, the real high value targets are the Taliban perpetrators, the fighters, technicians and practitioners.

The Cult of Special Forces (The Captain’s Journal): But the advent of each new story about SOF that kills some high profile name, while riveting for the non-military reader, continues the same lesson that Rumsfeld took into Afghanistan with his vision of airmen with satellite uplinks guiding JDAMS to target, CIA operatives, and alliances with rogues in the country who could knock out the Taliban. Afghanistan is a failing campaign precisely because of this view. Counterinsurgency requires infantry and force projection, those things necessary to ensure security for the population.

Interview with Taliban Spokesman Maulvi Omar (The Captain’s Journal):

Q: What is the difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban? Have they any relation?

A: There is no difference. The formation of the Taliban and al Qaeda was based on an ideology. Today, Taliban and al Qaeda have become an ideology. Whoever works in these organizations, they fight against kafir (infidel) cruelty. Both are fighting for the supremacy of Allah and his Kalma. However, those fighting in foreign countries are called al Qaeda, while those fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan are called Taliban. In fact, both are the name of one ideology. The aim and objectives of both the organizations are the same.

About five months ago The Captain’s Journal published Command Structure Changes for Afghanistan, which Glenn Reynolds linked at Instapundit. We were prescient and properly predicted that in order to give General Petraeus the power and authority to implement a coherent counterinsurgency strategy with unity of effort throughout the organization, U.S. forces would need to be completely under his command at CENTCOM. Glenn had a nose for news too in taking interest in this subject, and it appears that the U.S. is pushing for just what we recommended (and even a little beyond).

The Bush administration is pushing for sweeping changes to the military command structure in Afghanistan, so that the head of international forces would report directly to US Central Command instead of Nato.

The changes would have huge repercussions for Nato, whose officials have stated that Afghanistan is a “defining moment” for the organisation’s ability to conduct large-scale operations abroad.

The Independent has learnt that the proposal to streamline the complex chain of command, enabling US General David McKiernan to be answerable to superiors at Centcom in Tampa, Florida, rather than Nato, is before Robert Gates, the American Defence Secretary.

Mr Gates is due in the UK today after a visit to Afghanistan where he spoke about the deteriorating security situation with senior Western officers and Afghan ministers. At the same time, in a mark of the seriousness with which the Americans view the situation, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, flew to Pakistan from where Taliban fighters are mounting cross-border raids.

Any move to make the Afghan war an American-run operation would be controversial in some Nato countries. There is already public disquiet in countries such as Italy, Germany and Canada over the conflict.

Nevertheless, altering the command structure is an option in a wide-ranging plan by Washington to acquire greater control of the mission in Afghanistan. A violent Taliban resurgence has made the past three months the most lethal for Western forces. President George Bush has recently announced that several thousand troops will be moved from Iraq to Afghanistan, and General David Petraeus, who led the “surge” in Iraq, credited with reducing the violence there, is returning to the US in overall charge of both missions.

But it is the proposed change to the command structure in Afghanistan which is seen by the Americans as crucial to whether or not the Afghan mission succeeds. Officials point out that in Iraq, General Petraeus was in sole command, which allowed him to carry out his counter-insurgency plan. In Afghanistan, however, different Nato countries are in charge of different regions, often with different rules. Forty nations ranging from Albania and Iceland to the US and Britain are involved in Afghan operations. The force in southern Afghanistan, the main theatre of combat, includes troops from Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Australia, Romania and nine other nations.

US forces sent to Afghanistan recently from Iraq claimed that operations were being stymied because of the multi-layered command structure. Colonel Anthony Anderson, commander of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines complained publicly: “We are trying to keep our frustration in check … but we have to wait for the elephants to stop dancing”, a reference to the alleged clumsiness of the international command.

Lt Col Brian Mennes, commander of Task Force Fury, a parachute battalion serving in Kandahar, said at the end of his tour: “We don’t understand where we are going here, we desperately want to see a strategy in front of us.”

The British and Canadians are contributing mightily to the campaign in Afghanistan. But as examples of strategic incoherence, the German rules of engagement only allows firing in self defense, and Australian infantry troops are required to sign formal documents declaring that they have not provoked combat operations (their special forces are the only troops allowed to engage in kinetic operations).

Without drastic changes in the nature of the mission of NATO troops, it is doubtful that even placing them under the command of General Petraeus will change much. This is partly why we have recommended more U.S. troops. Petraeus must have access to resources that will operate with regard to unity of command, unity of strategy and unity of mission. Time is short in the campaign, Pakistan’s intentions cannot be trusted, and the security situation is degrading.

The Captain’s Journal has been an advocate Operation Enduring Freedom for more than eight months, along with the commanders on the ground in Afghanistan. The top brass has heard, but apparently we haven’t been loud enough. General McKiernan is doing his part (as did his predecessor General McNeill who said Afghanistan was an under-resourced war).

The senior U.S. general in Afghanistan said Tuesday he is fighting the war with too few ground troops, and that even the reinforcements President Bush announced last week are insufficient. He said the shortage compels him to use more air power, at the cost of higher civilian casualties.

Speaking just hours after a new U.S. commander took charge in Iraq, Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, told reporters that he realized the only way he would receive the additional ground forces he needs is for Washington to decide to divert them from Iraq.

McKiernan spoke in an interview with reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who arrived here Tuesday evening after presiding at a ceremony in Baghdad where Gen. Ray Odierno took over for Gen. David Petraeus as the top commander of the 146,000 American troops fighting that war.

McKiernan said his Washington bosses had “validated” his request for three more ground combat brigades, in addition to the Army brigade that Bush announced will deploy to Afghanistan in January instead of going to Iraq.

He said the brigade coming in January will merely fill an immediate need for more help in eastern Afghanistan and cited a need for at least 10,000 additional ground troops, beyond the 3,700 due early next year.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are headed in opposite directions: violence is down substantially in Iraq and U.S. troop levels are declining, whereas the fighting is heating up in Afghanistan and more U.S. troops are needed. It will fall to the next U.S. president to decide how to balance resources on both fronts.

McKiernan said he believed it was a question of when, not whether, he would get the troops he has requested.

“It’s a question of political decisions to be made to divert capabilities from Iraq to Afghanistan,” he said.

He disputed the notion that the U.S. and NATO war strategy has failed and needs to be overhauled.

“Our strategy of approaching counterinsurgency operations is a valid strategy here,” McKeirnan said. “Our problem is we don’t have enough resources to do it with.”

Several thousand more troops for Afghanistan have been announced, but it clearly isn’t enough. Without the needed boots on the ground, the over-reliance on heavy-handed air power is risking alienation of the population with unnecessary collateral damage and civilians casualties.  In counterinsurgency, loss of the population means loss of the campaign.

That constant contact with the enemy and security for the population is necessary should be obvious based on our Marines in Helmand coverage and commentary, and it was a counterinsurgency lesson re-learned by the commanders in the ISAF upon the initial engagement with the Taliban (h/t Small Wars Journal Blog).

Lt. Col. Kent Hayes knows all about the blood, sweat, and excruciating effort needed to lay the initial security piece of the counterinsurgency puzzle. The rangy executive officer for the 24th MEU explains that the Marines’ original plan to act as a roaming strike force in Helmand had to be torn up after the first battle with the Taliban. The enemy unexpectedly stayed and fought fiercely for more than a week rather than relinquish Garmsir. An estimated 400 insurgents died. Marine commanders immediately realized that the town was a critical resupply and logistics hub for insurgent operations throughout the province.

“Our original mission was to act as a quick-reaction force for the ISAF commander in Kabul so he could throw us at any escalating crisis in this area,” Hayes says. But Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, understood the strategic importance of Garmsir and instead ordered the marines to stay in the town and implement a classic counterinsurgency operation of “clear, hold, and build.” Hayes says that his troops are “not normally in the business of owning ground, but I guess you could say we’ve rented Garmsir for a while” …

Hayes is unequivocal in naming the key to the 24th MEU’s success in Helmand province: “It’s a real simple concept–we learned during this mission that the best way to combat this type of enemy is to mass forces and stay. We actually replaced a small British force that was spread thin trying to cover too much ground with too few troops. Instead, we flooded a town that was strategically important to the enemy with overwhelming forces. That’s the way you can win this kind of fight–with boots on the ground.”

The message could not be clearer. We need boots on the ground.  The Marines have proven that counterinsurgency can be successful in Afghanistan with the appropriate force size and strategy.

There are many differences between insurgencies in the twenty first century and those of 100, 50, 30 or even 10 years ago.  In addition to the transnational nature of the fighters, the easy and quick access to technologically advanced and standoff weapons introduces elements that makes previous centuries of counterinsurgency experience almost meaningless.  Examples of such elements are cell phones, IEDs and in particular, EFPs.  Our quarter century old enemy Iran is busy in Afghanistan as they were (and still are) in Iraq.

The comments by the commander, who would not be named but operates in the south east of the country where there has been a surge in Taliban attacks, were a rare admission of co-operation between elements within the Iranian regime and forces fighting British and American troops in Afghanistan.

“There’s a kind of landmine called a Dragon. Iran’s sending it,” he said. “It’s directional and it causes heavy casualties.

“We’re ambushing the Americans and planting roadside bombs. We never let them relax.”

The commander, a veteran of 30 years who started fighting when the Soviet Union was occupying Afghanistan, said the Dragon had revolutionised the Taliban’s ability to target Nato soldiers deployed in his area.

“If you lay an ordinary mine, it will only cause minor damage to Humvees or one of their big tanks. But if you lay a Dragon, it will destroy it completely,” he said.

A “Dragon” is the local nickname for a type of weapon known internationally as an Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) or “shaped charge” and has been used with devastating effect in Iraq by Iranian-backed groups. It is shaped so that all the explosive force is concentrated in one direction – the target – rather than blasting in all directions and weakening its impact.

A former mujahideen fighter who knows the Afghan arms market well and who asked to be known as Shahir said the Dragon mines came directly from Iran.

Iran has denied these allegations, but Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador in Kabul, said the British Army, which is deployed in south-western Afghanistan, had intercepted consignments of weapons which they believe were “donated by a group within the Iranian state”.

The only other possible source, the arms expert said, would be Pakistan’s Tribal Areas where a relatively sophisticated arms industry has grown up. “Until now,” he said, “no-one in the Tribal Areas has been able to copy these mines. Both the metal and the explosives are different, very high quality and very effective, obviously not Chinese or Pakistani.”

He said there were two routes for Iranian weaponry getting to the Taliban. “There are people inside the state in Iran who donate weapons. There are also Iranian businessmen who sell them.”

The Taliban are also employing technologically advanced communications in order to avoid electronic interdiction and eavesdropping.

Taliban fighters targeting British troops in Afghanistan are using Skype voice-over-IP phones to evade detection.

Security sources have told the Evening Standard that unlike traditional mobile calls, which can be monitored by RAF Nimrod spy planes, Skype calls are heavily encrypted.

Taliban leaders had previously been known to use satellite phones, which could be tracked and located by western forces.

The British and American governments are said to be investing resources to crack voice-over-IP (VoIP) codes.

“The trouble with this technology is that it is easily available but devilishly hard to crack,” a security source told the Standard. “The technology can now be accessed on mobile internet devices and the country’s mobile phone network is expanding rapidly.”

Skype is owned by eBay and has around 300m user accounts worldwide.

Sir David Pepper, head of government listening centre GCHQ, has previously complained that internet calls are “seriously undermining” his organisation’s ability to intercept communications.

There are suggestions as to what might be effective means to stop this use of Skype.

Simple – move to compressed data on their system.

Compressed Skype calls make life a lot easier for pattern recognition software to detect key words in the digital data stream, simply because the $trings of data are shorter.

There’s been a few reports on the subject over the last few years, but Skype has avoided making any comment for fear of upsetting its users.

Now that the issue is coming into the open, however, I strongly suspect Skype won’t have much choice.

Unless, of course, it wants to see ISPs in dodgy areas of the world like Afghanistan block the use of Skype on their Internet connections, so depriving the Net telephony company of valuable call revenue…

Maybe it’s this simple – and maybe not.  Both the U.S. DoD and the British MoD should invest as necessary to stay ahead in technology.  But we must not miss the the point concerning technology.  Playing the game of one-step-ahead is a deadly and costly way to run a campaign.

The solution to the problem of Taliban technology is to conduct intelligence driven raids against the Taliban who perpetrate the use of such technology.  Rather than the so-called high value targets with recognizable names, the real high value targets are the Taliban perpetrators, the fighters, technicians and practitioners.

 But in order to conduct intelligence driven raids against such people, we first have to have intelligence.  In order to gain the proper intelligence, the population must have security.  Maj. Gen. Jeffery J. Schloesser has said that there are as many as 11,000 insurgents operating in the Eastern part of Afghanistan.  This size insurgency requires a larger projection of power by infantry to ensure the progress of the counterinsurgency campaign.  Killing and capturing Taliban will end the threat posed by EFPs and Skype.

The Asia Times has an interesting account from one Taliban concerning Kandahar, the Taliban and the Tehrik-i-Taliban.

The Taliban took over Kabul in 1996 and opened the country to al-Qaeda’s training camps, while Osama bin Laden settled in Kandahar. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan a few months later, the Taliban agreed to lose their government but, in the tradition of the Afghan code of honor of Pashtunwali, they refused to hand over their most wanted guests to the Americans.

Seven years after 9/11, the resurgent Taliban movement is exclusively led by Kandahari clans, which still boast of their sacrifices for the Islamic brotherhood in the name of Pashtunwali, but they maintain that the Taliban have never harbored – and never will – an aggressive agenda towards the world community …

“Our code of conduct is documented in the Asasi Qanoon [Basic Law of Afghanistan]. Under article 103, it is mentioned that we don’t want any disruptions in any country of the world. The Taliban are only a national resistance movement against foreign occupation forces in Afghanistan,” said Jalil …

Along with the Taliban’s foreign minister in 2001, Mullah Abdul Wakeel Muttawakil, Jalil was not comfortable with al-Qaeda being in the country, but when questioned on the matter he initially evaded answering with a smile, saying only that “it is unnecessary to open up controversies”.

However, he did then elaborate, “Arabs are different from the Taliban. If today they boost attacks on Western targets, they do so independently. We have nothing to do with their claims. We have always limited our battle to that against NATO and although we could work in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Russia, China or Iran, we never had any role in these areas.

Jalil’s comments did not ring true. Several Taliban commanders, including the slain Mullah Dadullah and Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, besides scores of al-Qaeda members, have maintained that the only way to win the Afghan war against NATO is to attack Western targets in Europe and America. I cited some of their statements to Jalil and asked, “Are they lying, or are you?”

“Nobody is lying. There are issues here to understand. First, there were people like Mullah Dadullah [a senior military commander killed by NATO in 2007] . He was emotional and often engaged in rhetoric – many times – different from Taliban policies, so much so that on several occasions he was warned by the Taliban leadership about his statements to the media.

“Second, it is necessary to understand that there is a sea of difference between the people who call themselves the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Taliban [led by Mehsud] and the Taliban. We have nothing to do with them. In fact, we oppose the policies they adhere to against the Pakistani security forces.

The journalist, Syed Saleem Shahzad, is probably pushing as hard as he can in this interview, but he probably knows that there is more to the story. Mullah Omar opposed the Tehrik-i-Taliban too (TTP – Tehrik-i-Taliban of Pakistan) – for a while – but Baitullah Mehsud is too powerful, and now al Qaeda is aligned with the TTP and Omar settled for saying that he doesn’t command Mehsud.

The TTP commands the youngest, most violent fighters in the region compared to the old line Taliban, and the TTP has a global focus just as al Qaeda. Broadly defined, the Taliban are people who either would offer refuge to globalists like al Qaeda just as they did before 9/11, or they are themselves globalists. Either way, they pose a threat to the West.

Continuing with the real revelation in this article:

“But don’t you think that in this long process of a guerrilla war, especially as the Taliban don’t have the latest weaponry, it would make the Afghan population sick and tired of the Taliban-led resistance?” I asked.

Jalil responded quickly, “Not at all. The Taliban emerged from Kandahar, which has a special dynamic in Afghanistan, and they have never accepted foreign occupation. The Taliban still draws its military leaders from Kandahar, and look at the history of Kandahar … when I say Kandahar I don’t mean the present divisions, it means the entire regions of Helmand, Urzgan and Zabul … it has always produced the best military leaders.

“The Taliban are not a stand-alone entity. Ninety percent of the present resistance in Kandahar survives because of the masses. They provide shelter to us in their homes, feed us and provide money for us to go back and fight against the foreign forces, and they never mind if in the course of this they suffer casualties because of aerial bombardments,” Jalil said. (At least 540 civilians have been killed in the conflict so far this year, a sharp increase over last year’s total of 321.)

And our Taliban has now described the Ramadi of Afghanistan. Just as with Ramadi in 2005 – 2007, unless the U.S. forces are numerous and logistically supported well enough to project force into Kandahar – the capital of the Taliban – we won’t be successful. Just as in Ramadi, Kandahar will require combat outposts, combined combat outposts / police precincts, dismounted patrols, intelligence gathering, contact with the population, intelligence-driven raids, and (as in Fallujah during Operation Alljah) biometrics and possibly even gated communities.  Without diminishing the brave contributions of so many U.S. warriors thus far in Operation Enduring Freedom, it may be observed that the real campaign for Afghanistan is yet to begin.