Archive for the 'Afghanistan' Category

The Captain’s Journal doesn’t like to be negative, but it is necessary to engage in truth-telling.  For more than half a year The Captain’s Journal has been in a state of near despair over the failure of NATO to deploy forces to Afghanistan, employ a realistic set of rules of engagement, and implement a coherent, consistent counterinsurgency strategy.  There are seasons in counterinsurgency, and the campaign will soon suffer under the weight of U.S. and NATO being viewed as occupiers rather than liberators.  Timeliness is everything in COIN.

The Pentagon is months behind us, but it appears that the sentiment is now mutual.

American officials are in a state of near despair about the failure of Britain’s European allies to do more to beef up Nato combat power in Afghanistan.

A Pentagon adviser told The Telegraph that US commanders wish they had never agreed to Nato taking charge of major combat operations against the Taliban in the lawless south of the country.

They believe that different military rules of engagement and different approaches to reconstruction have made it impossible to devise a unified strategy for fighting and nation building, leaving the way open for the resurgence of the Taliban.

So what do rules of engagement have to do with the campaign in Afghanistan?  The Germans know full well what a restrictive set of ROE can do to efforts to militarily defeat the enemy.  Not long ago they had to allow a Taliban commander to escape because he wasn’t brandishing a weapon while escaping.  Troops can act in self defense, but many cannot conduct offensive operations.  Continuing with the Telegraph report:

The Pentagon consultant pointed to the different national rules which mean that troops from several Nato allies like Germany are banned from conducting offensive military operations, or conducting patrols at night.

The adviser said: “There’s frustration, there’s irritation. The mood veers between acceptance and despair that nothing is changing. We ask for more troops and they’re not forthcoming in the numbers we need.

“The mistake was handing it over to Nato in the first place. For many countries being in Afghanistan seems to be about keeping up appearances, rather than actually fighting a war that needs to be won.

“Was that necessary diplomatically? Probably. Is it desirable militarily? I don’t think so and nor do most others who are involved with Afghanistan,” he said.

The consultant, who advises the Pentagon on security coordination with the Afghan military, said American ire is not directed at the British, who are “doing what they can”.

Ali Jalali, the Afghan interior minister between 2003 and 2005 endorsed that view that the Taliban can only be defeated and marginalised from Afghan life if there is a new strategy and a unified military command.

In an interview with The Telegraph he said: “In the absence of an overall counterinsurgency strategy, what the international community and the Afghan government are doing is not designed to win the war, rather not to lose.

“That is a major problem. There’s no campaign plan. We need a unified command of all forces that can do three things: fighting, stabilising and peacekeeping. Unless you speak with one voice it is not going to work. We need more troops to stabilise the country.”

There has been a serious strategic malaise in Afghanistan since the inception of NATO presence.  So in addition to advocating more troops, we have advocated a division of command, with the U.S. taking over at least the Southern region (or permanent command of the campaign).  But the same countries who know that there is strategic malaise continue to encourage it by refusing to adopt any other strategy or ROE, or even consider a reorganization of forces.

It gets worse.  Even among the staunchest of allies there is a reluctance to face the real causes of failure.

“The problem,” says one officer, “is that we are focusing on protective mobility. We are definitely going down the road the Russians went in the Eighties, with over-reliance on massive armoured vehicles.”

The debate is starting on the ground because soldiers are frustrated that they can march their hearts out all day to track the enemy, only to be blown up by a mine. They query how a lumbering convoy of 100 armoured vehicles can ever surprise an enemy who knows every rock and cave in his own back yard. The time has come, suggest some, to fight the way the enemy fights – but smarter.

In the Rhodesian insurgency, tiny units called fire forces, working in groups of four or eight, would drop into enemy territory by parachute or helicopter, unheard and unseen.

With the aid of local trackers, they remained concealed for days, watching the enemy’s movements and waiting patiently for the optimum time to strike. Again and again the guerrillas were horrified as their safety cordon unravelled, with colleagues falling dead around them.

By contrast, our strategy is static, based on bases in fixed locations. Troops leave them to go on patrol in full view of the enemy – which had fatal consequences this month. “It’s bloody hard to deceive the enemy with a column of ground movement that can be picked up 500 metres beyond the base,” says one veteran. “The effect of four helicopters disgorging 100 soldiers from an unexpected direction would have a huge impact, and would lead to a reduction in the opportunities to blow us up with mines.”

So the British are advocating distributed operations now.  Then, they point the finger of blame at the lack of air transport.

The reason why the US Marines were so successful in southern Helmand this spring was because they were able to land 600 troops in one lift in one night. In the two weeks I was with them, the Paras could only muster one air assault of two helicopters that had to go in three lifts, hugely increasing the risk of the enemy assembling an anti-aircraft team to attack them.

Landing so many Marines had nothing whatsoever to do with their success in Helmand.  The Marines stayed around to conduct continued counterinsurgency operations, as we discussed in U.S. Marine Style Counterinsurgency.  If the Marines had all marched on foot to Garmser – not, by the way, a ridiculous notion – it wouldn’t have mattered.  They could have sent word to the Taliban by courier that they were coming.  The Taliban were dug in and waiting for the fight.  Helicopters simply made it easier on the infantry.

The British are pointing to distributed operations, air power, discrete mobility, and all manner of tricks and toys that they believe will enhance the campaign.  To be sure, we also believe that materiel availability should be increased, and we have been a proponent of distributed operations in the past, along with the robust projection of air power.

But it should be remembered that upon the initial engagement of the Marines in Garmser, the British complained about the hard tactics by the Corps.  More helicopters can be supplied to the theater, but without force projection and an increase in troops, the materiel won’t matter.  Ali Jalali is right.  NATO is in the theater to keep from losing.  This very strategy will ensure loss.

In Concerning the U.S.-Iraq Security Arrangement we discussed the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and Iraq over exactly what the U.S. force presence should look like in the future.  We concluded with the position that an empowered Iran would result from a rapid stand-down of U.S. forces in Iraq, and that a once-in-a generation opportunity existed to impede Iranian intentions of hegemony by our continued existence in Iraq.

David Ignatius recently had an article where he discussed the “right Iraqi footprint,” citing David Kilcullen.

I’ve been helped in thinking about the future of Iraq by conversations over the past week with Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer and an expert in counterinsurgency. He was a key member of the team that drafted Gen. David Petraeus’s Iraq campaign plan. He was speaking in a private capacity at an academic conference sponsored by the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies — and he stressed that he was offering ideas about the future, rather than a critique of past or present strategy.

Kilcullen’s key point is that we need to use the breathing space the surge has created to transition to a presence in Iraq that is less costly and more sustainable. By congressional estimates, we’re spending about $400 million a day on the war; at that rate, we are walking into the trap Osama bin Laden described in 2004, when he said he wanted to draw us so deep into conflict that we would eventually leave the region exhausted and bankrupt, the way the Soviets departed Afghanistan.

Kilcullen argues, as Abizaid did, that our heavy military occupation of Iraq has created enemies unnecessarily. It’s human nature: People don’t like to see another country’s army patrolling their streets. It’s the “antibody response,” he says. “Our large-scale presence, although essential for current stability, also creates an angry reaction — and therefore can’t be a permanent solution. We need to focus on what General Petraeus has called ‘sustainable security.’ ”

The alternative to our big, uniformed force in Iraq is a lighter, smaller, more nimble residual force. This force could concentrate on the tasks that most Iraqis and Americans seem to think are sensible — fighting al-Qaeda terrorists and training the Iraqi military and other proxy forces. “Over the long run, we need to go cheap, quiet, low-footprint,” argues Kilcullen.

Is The Captain’s Journal out of accord with Kilcullen?  Not by a long shot.  In fact, we heartily concur with Kilcullen’s position, as any regular reader knows (see Observations on Timeliness from the Small Wars Manual, where we feared that the protracted operations were leading to the perception of the U.S. as occupier rather than liberator).

There are seasons in counterinsurgency, and a finite period of time in which to accomplish certain important milestones and results.  We were advocating the “surge” and “security plan” from the inception of The Captain’s Journal.  We have also been among the first to raise warning flags about Operation Enduring Freedom, advocating vigorously for more troops, a change in rules of engagement for NATO troops, and a comprehensive strategic approach.

This buildup of troops, we have known for some time, could only come from a decrease in troop presence in Iraq.  But we also know that after pacification of parts of Iraq and standing up the internal Iraqi system, further troops presence would only cause a diminution of the view of the U.S. mission among Iraqis.  The Marines in Anbar should be standing down very soon, if they haven’t already.  The season of combat is over, the season of transition teams and proper governance is in full swing, and even that will be standing down soon.

We advocated more rapid confrontation of the problematic Shi’a South for the same reasons that we advocated a rapid buildup in Afghanistan.  Seasons run their own course, and cannot be repeated or slowed.  Kilcullen is right on the money concerning footprint.  It should have started large in Iraq, and had to wait on the surge.  It will end small, but the very concerns we are addressing here speak volumes about the campaign in Afghanistan which is older than Operation Iraqi Freedom.

It is necessary to end with the right force size and mission in Iraq, and this doesn’t mean complete withdrawal any more than it means continued heavy force projection.  The campaign in Afghanistan has yet to see the right size force.

The Captain’s Journal has been tracking the Khyber Pass and the Torkham crossing to determine how active they are with respect to enemy interdiction of U.S. supplies and materiel.  Things have appeared to be relatively quiet, but this is deceiving.  Action has occurred without making its way to the news – at least not until recently.  But there are two separate versions of the story.  The first comes to us from Reuters.

Four U.S. helicopter engines worth more than $13 million have been stolen while they were being trucked from Afghanistan to a port in Pakistan to be shipped home, the U.S. military said.

Most supplies for the U.S. military in landlocked Afghanistan, including fuel, are transported through Pakistan, and militants in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have been stepping up attacks on shipments.

A U.S. military spokesman said the engines were being transported by a Pakistani trucking company when they went missing some time in the month before April 10.

It was not known if the shipment went missing on the Afghan side of the border or in Pakistan, Sergeant Mark Swart said on Thursday.

“We don’t have the information on exactly where it disappeared. We just know that it did not get to the port,” he said.

The next comes from Rediff.

Taliban militants in Pakistan’s restive tribal belt captured three US military choppers while they were being shipped in a dismantled state from Peshawar to Jalalabad in Afghanistan and sold one of the helicopters for several hundred thousand dollars, a media report said todays.

Pakistani officials confirmed the development while the US embassy spokesperson refused to comment, saying the information ‘appears to be only hearsay’, The News daily reported.

Some diplomats in Islamabad were aware of the Taliban operation but were not ready to speak on record. One of the hijacked helicopters had already been sold to an unidentified customer in Afghanistan, the report said.

The components of the helicopters arrived in containers at the Karachi Port and were taken by road to Peshawar. The containers then entered the tribal areas for the journey to Afghanistan.

When the containers entered the restive Khyber Agency, Taliban stopped the convoys and took away the helicopter components. Pakistani paramilitary forces tried to confront the Taliban but ‘suffered heavy losses due to darkness’.

The incident happened in the same area where Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan Tariq Azizuddin was kidnapped in February this year.

Or are these two separate events?  One account has four helicopter engines making their way from Afghanistan to Karachi to be shipped to the U.S., the interdiction occurring prior to April 10.  The next account has three dismantled helicopters making their way from Karachi to Afghanistan, the interdiction occurring some time in February.

Either way, helicopters or helicopter parts were interdicted, either to or from Karachi.  Or, these are two separate accounts.  But the strategic plan to make the Khyber pass a problematic transit route is still active by the Taliban.

Prior:

Taliban and al Qaeda Strategy in Pakistan and Afghanistan

The Khyber Pass

The Torkham Crossing

We have covered the hard core, robust kinetic engagement of the U.S. Marines in the Helmand Province in and around the city of Garmser, Afghanistan.  The British drove them to the fight, everyone else watched and the Taliban died.  But is this all there is to U.S. Marine style counterinsurgency?  Not even nearly.  Michael M. Phillips of the Wall Street Journal has given us a thinking man’s discussion of counterinsurgency in After Battle in Afghanistan Villages, Marines Open Complaint Shop.

During a month of house-to-house combat, First Lt. Steven Bechtel’s men fired about 500 mortar rounds at Taliban insurgents.

Now, he’s paying the price.

Just two days after the main Taliban force was routed, Lt. Bechtel put aside his weapons and opened what amounts to a wartime complaints desk in a mud-brick hut. The lieutenant and his men spend their time cataloging the destruction and issuing vouchers to compensate villagers for their losses, whether caused by U.S. missiles or Taliban grenades.

“We’re very sorry for the damage to your doors, but we had to make sure the Taliban didn’t leave any bombs or weapons inside,” Lt. Bechtel last week told Abdul Majid, a 70-year-old with a weathered face, a dense white beard and a cane made from a tree limb.

“It’s no problem,” Mr. Majid responded. “You’re paying for it.”

The First Battalion of the Sixth Marine Regiment was recently deployed to Afghanistan as part of a force, 3,000-strong, helping to turn the tide against a resurgent Taliban. What resulted was a conventional battle that raged through the villages and poppy fields of Garmsir District, a major waypoint for insurgents leaving safe havens in Pakistan, a sign of how far Western gains have slipped recently.

The fighting sent civilians fleeing into the surrounding desert. After the violence ebbed, the villagers returned, in many cases to homes cracked open by artillery, bombs, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. Soon they were lined up at Lt. Bechtel’s door, testing the Marines’ ability to shift gears on the fly, from combat to the struggle for popular allegiance. Winning over the locals has always been a goal; now, it’s happening in double-quick time.

“It just switched suddenly one day,” says Lt. Bechtel, a soft-spoken 24-year-old from Naples, Fla., who decided in the eighth grade that he wanted to be a Marine. “All of the sudden there were civilians in the area.”

More than 200 villagers have applied for compensation already, and a vendor has set up shop outside the coiled razor-wire barrier selling cigarettes and soda to the petitioners. At the first coils, the villagers, all men or boys, must lift their shirts or robes to show that they aren’t wearing suicide vests. At the guard post, a Marine sentry pats them down before they’re allowed to approach the office.

The walls inside are adorned with posters of sumptuous feasts and the holy city of Medina. They’re property of the compound’s owner. The Marines commandeered the man’s residence during the fighting, and now scores of men from the battalion’s Alpha Company camp in his buildings and sandy yard, for which they pay the equivalent of $60 a month in rent. The troops promise to leave as soon as they have built a base of their own. But the owner comes by almost daily to demand his house back, or at least more rent.

The first time a villager comes to the complaint office, the lieutenant or his No. 2, Sgt. James Blake, a 25-year-old from Merrimack, N.H., jots down the claim on a piece of yellow legal paper. The petitioner takes the note to a Marine patrol in his neighborhood. The Marines verify the damage and send the man back to Lt. Bechtel.

At the second meeting, the Marines tally up the cost, using data on an Excel spreadsheet that the lieutenant, who majored in mechanical-engineering at Virginia Military Institute, compiled using prices gathered from the local market.

The Marines have a penchant for personal responsibility and equipment and ordnance accountability.  Every round is intended to kill the enemy, and yet every round is tracked for its affect.  Tear down a door?  We pay.  Kill a goat?  We pay.  Break a window?  We replace it.  And … we track it all in EXCEL.  The same thing was done in Fallujah during Operation Alljah.

The tired and badly simplistic phrase “winning hearts and minds” should be forever forgotten in favor of what they Marines have done in Anbar, Iraq and Helmand, Afghanistan.  It is about kinetics, security for the population, cultural understanding, family honor, property ownership, boundaries of behavior, and holding the terrain to ensure long term stability and governance.

Today’s warriors not only have to be qualified at warcraft, they must be warrior scholars, capable of cultural assimilation, at least pseudo-qualified in anthropology and psychology, and prepared for stability operations.  And the Marines are not only up to the task, they are the best in the world.

Lastly, the WSJ article leaves this account with a caveat.

On a single day last week , the Marines pledged $12,100 in reparations. “I’d rather be shooting mortars,” says Sgt. Blake. “But I understand why we’re doing this, paying for the damage we caused. And I like helping people out as much as we can.”

Mr. Majid, the elderly petitioner, patted Lt. Bechtel on the shoulder and removed his own blue turban — gestures of gratitude — when offered 36,000 afghanis, or about $720, to repair his house and restore his fields. Afterward, he requested medicine for his headaches and help feeding his family. By the time he left, Mr. Majid had a new radio, a few packaged military meals, Tylenol for his head and antidiarrhea medicine for his grandson.

There’s one flaw in the Marines’ campaign. While they freely issue compensation vouchers, they don’t have any actual money to give out yet. The cash, the Marines tell the villagers, will be here on July 1. The date has already slipped once, from mid-June, and some people doubt they’ll ever see the money. “If we don’t pay them on the first,” Sgt. Blake said, “it’s going to be bad.”

You better believe it.  The money had better be there because it affects the reputation of the U.S. Marines and the COIN effort underway in Afghanistan.  Time for the DoD to “belly up to the bar.”

Prior:

The Warrior Scholar

Marines in Helmand

We recently covered the break of approximately 400 low- and mid-level Taliban fighters from prison by motorcyclists and suicide bombers.  The families of these fighters were said to be slaughtering sheep in anticipation of their return.  Now for the consequences of the laxity in prison and judicial operations.  The freed Taliban fighters are massing in villages around Kandahar and digging in anticipating a fight with the Afghan Army or ISAF.

The Taliban dug into defensive positions in a cluster of villages near Kandahar yesterday in apparent preparation for a battle on the doorstep of Afghanistan’s second city.

The brazen gambit came days after the Taliban smashed into Kandahar’s main prison, freeing 400 militants, and deepening the sense of crisis in the country.

Local elders said fighters had flooded into Arghandab, a rural sprawl of farmhouses and vineyards that stretches north-west of Kandahar city. “They have blown up several bridges and are planting mines everywhere,” Muhammad Usman, a taxi driver who had evacuated a family, told reporters in Kandahar.

The Afghan army flew 700 soldiers into Kandahar and Nato redeployed Canadian soldiers in response to the Taliban actions. But the US-led coalition – which operates under a separate chain of command – disputed the seriousness of the threat, saying it had deployed a patrol to Arghandab and found “no evidence that militants control the area”.

A Nato spokesman, Mark Laity, said the alliance had a “very mixed picture” about the size of the buildup. “We assume insurgents are there but we have little evidence of hundreds. You have some displaced people who are panicky, some bad guys who are exaggerating and so it’s hard to know what is happening,” he said.

Laity said Nato aircraft had dropped leaflets on the area urging residents to stay indoors. “We’re emphasising potential threats,” he said.

The Taliban have long prized Arghandab, whose pomegranate orchards and vineyards make for ideal guerrilla fighting ground. Soviet troops never managed to capture the area during the 10-year occupation that ended in 1989. But it has been vulnerable since the death last year of two leaders of the local Alokozai tribe, Mullah Naqibullah and Abdul Hakim Jan – one from a heart attack, the other in a suicide bombing …

One commander, Mullah Ahmedullah, said escaped prisoners from Friday night’s jailbreak were among their ranks.

“We’ve occupied most of the area and it’s a good place for fighting. Now we are waiting for the Nato and Afghan forces,” he told the Associated Press.

So the ISAF has “deployed a patrol” to the area and found no evidence that the Taliban control anything.  This sounds similar to the claim that there wasn’t going to be a spring offensive.  The Captain’s Journal will make a prediction.  First, when fighting starts, it will then be ascertained that the Taliban didn’t give away their force size to this patrol (as if they are supposed to walk up and surrender intelligence to the ISAF).  Second, the Taliban will make this as much of an asymmetric fight as they capable.

They have learned their lesson well from other kinetic engagements, and they will use roadside bombs, mines, fire and melt away, and snipers, and they will hide amongst the population.  And the lesson for ISAF and the Afghan Army?  It would be nice, this idea that they would meet on the field of battle and conduct squad rushes against a uniformed army.  But it won’t happen, and coalition forces need to be as adaptable as the Taliban have proven to be.

Sending a patrol into the area is not the ticket.  Countersnipers, robust ROE, distributed operations, night time operations, route interdiction, UAV surveillance, checkpoints, starting and fainting away and later conducting the operation on our own time table to keep the enemy guessing … these ideas are winners, along with force projection.  When command thinks they have enough troops, they need to double the force size.

If the Taliban choose to confront the ISAF in kinetic operations, then the battle plan may be easier than we thought.  But according to the reports from the field to The Captain’s Journal, it won’t happen this way.  If the Taliban fire and melt away and the fighting ends in the immediate area, it is too soon for the ISAF to claim victory.  Counterinsurgency takes time and commitment.  Keep the faith.

Six months agoThe Captain’s Journal was issuing warnings about Operation Enduring Freedom being headed in the wrong direction, while General Rodriguez (and U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan) were denying that there would be any such thing as a spring Taliban offensive.  The only offensive, they claimed, would be the U.S. offensive to route the Taliban.  True, the Marines have had tremendous success in and around Garmser, but this is only localized success at the hands of a few companies of Marines.  If there is any current doubt about the need for force projection – a recurring theme as our readers know – May’s combat deaths in Afghanistan outnumbered Iraq.

It’s a grim gauge of U.S. wars going in opposite directions: American and allied combat deaths in Afghanistan in May passed the monthly toll in Iraq for the first time.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates used the statistical comparison to dramatize his point to NATO defense ministers that they need to do more to get Afghanistan moving in a better direction. He wants more allied combat troops, more trainers and more public commitment.

More positively, the May death totals point to security improvements in Iraq that few thought likely a year ago.

But the deterioration in Afghanistan suggests a troubling additional possibility: a widening of the war to Pakistan, where the Taliban and al-Qaida have found haven.

By the Pentagon’s count, 15 U.S. and two allied troops were killed in action in Iraq last month, a total of 17. In Afghanistan it was 19, including 14 Americans and five coalition troops. One month does not make a trend, but in this case the statistics are so out of whack with perceptions of the two wars that Gates could use them to drive home his point about Afghanistan.

Even when non-combat deaths are included, the overall May toll was greater in Afghanistan than in Iraq: a total of 22 in Afghanistan, including 17 Americans, compared with 21 in Iraq, including 19 Americans, according to an Associated Press count.

The comparison is even more remarkable if you consider that there are about three times more U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan. Since the Iraq war began in March 2003, there have been just under 4,100 U.S. deaths — including more than 3,300 killed in action — according to the Pentagon’s count. In the Afghan campaign, which began in October 2001, the U.S. death total is just over 500, including 313 killed in action.

We also covered the recent Afghan prison break in Kandaharreleasing 450 Taliban back into the population.  So as to remediate any doubt remaining about a resurgent Taliban, their public relations has given us a glimpse into the operation.

Yesterday, Sarposa’s entire population of 1,100 inmates – including murderers, bandits and about 450 hardened Islamic militants – was enjoying freedom after an audacious Taliban attack engineered one of the biggest mass jail breaks in history.

In a spectacular raid which confounded hopes that the Taliban was now on the back foot, a group of about 30 heavily armed insurgents launched an assault on the prison on Friday evening, using two suicide bombers to blow open the gates and then massacring at least 15 dazed guards as they tried to put up a fight.

The inmates fled into the night through the lush pomegranate groves that surround the building before coalition troops could arrive from their base on the far side of the city. Convoys of Taliban-driven getaway minibuses were waiting nearby with engines running.

Yesterday, as coalition and Afghan officials launched an urgent review of security in every jail in the country and declared a state of emergency in Kandahar, Taliban supporters around the region began slaughtering sheep in anticipation of being reunited with their jailed relations.

There is another problem regarding prisons.  The recent SCOTUS decision will make it difficult to bring arrested enemy combatants to the U.S. for formal prosecution, but building prisons in Afghanistan just got harder.

“There has been no agreement with the ministry of justice. We cannot speak about this.” Members of the Afghan parliament also pleaded ignorance of the plans.

“This issue has not been referred to parliament,” said Shukria Barakzai, a member of the lower house. She insisted that parliamentary action would be required before construction can start.

“According to the laws of Afghanistan, the land cannot be given away,” she said. “No country has a right to make a prison here. And not a single criminal should be handed over to foreigners. This prison at Bagram not only violates the constitution, it calls into question the legitimacy of the present government.”

President Hamid Karzai refused to comment on the issue.

But others say plans for the new prison have become an issue between Washington and Kabul.

“The government will not say this formally, but this issue has been raised between high-ranking authorities of Afghanistan and the United States,” said Fazel Rahman Oria, editor of Erada Daily newspaper.

“It shows the climate of distrust between the two countries.” Oria also speculated that building a massive detention facility could deepen growing resentment of the foreign military presence in the country.

The rules of engagement orient U.S. servicemen to arrest combatants, while the SCOTUS gives them constitutional rights and foreign countries prohibit the construction of prisons to hold them.  And in another sign of shifting tactics away from direct kinetic confrontation and towards standoff weapons and covert action, four U.S. Marines out of Twentynine Palms died from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in what was the “worst single attack on U.S. or coalition forces in Afghanistan this year.”  The campaign badly needs force projection to kill the enemy.

General McNeill has said that the insurgency in increasing in Afghanistan, but along with the factual analysis he gives us the same warning concerning the Pakistan border region we have heard for months now.

The outgoing top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan said Friday that attacks increased 50 percent in April in the country’s eastern region, where U.S. troops primarily operate, as a spreading Taliban insurgency across the border in Pakistan fueled a surge in violence.

In a sober assessment, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, who departed June 3 after 16 months commanding NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, said that although record levels of foreign and Afghan troops have constrained repeated Taliban offensives, stabilizing Afghanistan will be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgent havens in Pakistan.

The Taliban is “resurgent in the region,” particularly in sanctuaries in Pakistan, and as a result “it’s going to be difficult to take on this insurgent group . . . in the broader sort of way,” McNeill said at a Pentagon news conference.

Clashes in the east pushed U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan in May to 15, and total foreign troop deaths there to 23, the highest monthly figure since last August.

Indeed, comprehensive data released by the NATO-led command show a steady escalation in violence since NATO took charge of the Afghanistan mission in 2006, spurred in part by more aggressive operations by the alliance and most recently by U.S. Marine battalions in the heavily contested southern province of Helmand. ISAF troops in Afghanistan increased from 36,000 in early 2007 to 52,000 now, while the Afghan army grew from 20,000 to 58,000 soldiers.

Overall violence has increased and attacks have grown more complex, according to the data and U.S. military officials. The number of roadside bombs increased from 1,931 in 2006 to 2,615 last year. Attacks peaked during the months of the warm weather fighting season, with more than 400 in the peak month of 2005, more than 800 in 2006, and about 1,000 in 2007.

As violence has risen, it has remained concentrated geographically in a relatively small number of districts, the data show, in predominantly Pashtun areas. Afghanistan has 364 districts, and last year about 70 percent of all attacks took place in 40, or about 10 percent, of those districts, McNeill said. For the first half of this year, he said, about 76 percent of attacks took place in virtually the same 40 districts, with some shifts in Farah and Nimruz provinces.

The district data has helped drive the deployment of NATO forces, with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit focusing on a district in southern Helmand that shows extensive enemy activity. “We knew it was a dark hole and we had to get to it; we simply didn’t have the force,” said McNeill, noting that ISAF remains short of combat troops, helicopters, and intelligence and surveillance equipment.

Troop numbers are low compared with the size of the insurgency, which includes many part-time fighters. There are an estimated 5,000 to 20,000 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, plus an estimated 1,000 each for the insurgent groups led by Siraj Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, according to ISAF intelligence.

More worrisome than the Taliban expansion in Pakistan is the threat of more cooperation between homegrown insurgents and outside extremist groups, McNeill said. “The greatest risk is the possibility of collusion between the insurgents who are indigenous to that region and the more intractable, the more extreme terrorists who are taking up residence there in the North-West Frontier” Province of Pakistan, he said.

McNeill criticized Pakistani efforts to crack down on that threat, and — offering his unofficial view — described the political situation in Islamabad as “dysfunctional.”

He also criticized efforts by the Pakistan government to negotiate peace deals with insurgents on the frontier, saying past agreements have led to increased attacks across the border in Afghanistan. McNeill said the 50 percent increase in attacks in eastern Afghanistan in April compared with the same month last year is “directly attributable to the lack of pressure on the other side of the border.”

But is McNeill’s assessment true?  Well, yes and no.  It is true that “stabilizing Afghanistan will be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgent havens in Pakistan,” as long as NATO has only 52,000 troops in theater, and as long as restrictive ROE prevents the Germans from taking offensive actions against the Taliban, and as long as NATO lacks a coherent overarching strategy, and as long as half of the force is employed in force protection rather than counterinsurgency.  What McNeill doesn’t really know is whether the campaign could be successful – regardless of disposition of the issue of the Pakistan Taliban – with the force size present in Iraq.

We should be careful and deliberate here.  After all, The Captain’s Journal has been quick to point out that Syria and Iran must be confronted if the campaign in Iraq is to be successful.  But also to be fair (and we still take this position), Pakistan doesn’t have the goals of regional hegemony that Iran does.  In Conversation with a Jihadi, we learned from his perspective that “If NATO remains strong in Afghanistan, it will put pressure on Pakistan. If NATO remains weaker in Afghanistan, it will dare [encourage] Pakistan to support the Taliban.”

If we are engaged in fighting against a transnational insurgency, then we cannot realistically complain that the insurgency is transnational and recognizes no borders.  We can continue to pressure Pakistan, but the one available avenue of kinetic operations against the Taliban – Afghanistan – must be the focus of our efforts.  Until we have ramped up force projection within this theater, we do not know whether our actions in Afghanistan can be dispositive concerning the Taliban, and thus we have no real leverage with Pakistan.  After all, if we haven’t committed to the campaign, then why should they?  Or so they are left to think.

Let’s take first things first.

From Scotsman.com:

Taleban militants stormed a prison in Afghanistan last night, blowing open its main gates with a car bomb and freeing more than 1,000 inmates.

Several suicide bombers, dozens of fighters on motorbikes and a number of rockets were also used in the carefully orchestrated operation at the jail in Kandahar.

Under cover of darkness, most of the 1,150 prisoners, including some 400 Taleban, are believed to have fled.

Some prisoners are believed to have been killed in the crossfire of a gun battle between police and the insurgents who managed to get inside the jail.

An unknown number of prison guards were also killed.

A state of emergency has now been declared in Kandahar city. Police and troops were on the streets and all residents were ordered to remain in their homes.

Officials said the attack, which lasted 30 minutes, began when a tanker full of explosives was detonated at the prison’s main gate.

Minutes later, a suicide bomber on foot blasted a hole in the back of the prison and around 50 fighters stormed inside. One shopkeeper selling vegetables near the prison said he saw prisoners escape after the attack and run toward pomegranate and grape groves lying behind the complex.

Abdul Quadir, the prison director, said: “They (the Taleban] used a truck to blow the gate open and all of the guards at the gate have been killed and are under rubble.”

Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai and the president of Kandahar’s provincial council, confirmed: “All the prisoners escaped. There is no one left.”

Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Taleban, said 30 insurgents on motorbikes and two suicide bombers attacked the prison. He claimed that the attack had been planned for the last two month, “to release our Taleban friends”.

“Today we succeeded,” he said, adding that the escaped prisoners “are safe in town and they are going to their homes”.

The prison holds common criminals but also Taleban militants fighting Nato troops and the Afghan government.

Officials with Nato’s International Security Assistance Force said they were aware of the attack but had no details.

Last month, some 350 Taleban suspects held at the Kandahar prison ended a week-long hunger strike after a parliamentary delegation promised their cases would be reviewed.

Some of the hunger strikers are believed to have been held without trial for more than two years. Others received lengthy sentences after short trials.

Kandahar – the Taleban’s former stronghold and Afghanistan’s second-largest city – has been the scene of fierce battles between Nato forces and insurgent fighters over the last two years.

The US military has handed over an unspecified number of suspected Taleban fighters to Afghan custody under a programme agreed last year to transfer all Afghan prisoners from American detention.

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

If this is the state of the Afghan police, then Hamid Karzai was prescient when he said that Afghanistan would need U.S. troops for ten or more years.  The Afghan police appear to be completely inept.  But what we do over these next ten years is important.  Take careful note of the handover of Taliban to Afghanistan, resulting perhaps in part due to the delays in processing prisoners through Gitmo and anticipation of the recent SCOTUS decision.

Many lives were put in jeopardy to capture these Taliban, and it is far better to kill the enemy on the field of battle than it is to capture them, feed them and try them, or see them broken free by 30 motorcyclists.

We have previously discussed how Hamid Karzai wants the U.S. to stop arresting members of the Taliban because it was a disincentive to peace with them.  Pakistan’s version of this sentiment is remarkably similar.

Pakistan’s peace agreements with Taliban militants have drawn concern from NATO forces, Afghan officials and the U.S. government who worry they will be short-lived truces that only undermine the war against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.

But a day before leaving on his first trip to Kabul, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi pushed back against critics during a forceful speech before parliament.

“When we talk of peace, we also have to tell our friends, who at times are cynical about the peace negotiations that Pakistan has undertaken,” said Qureshi. “Look at the spirit behind that negotiation. The spirit is not capitulation, the spirit is not compromise, the spirit is peaceful coexistence.”

As for the Afghanistan Taliban, one commander recently said “You know, the Taliban and the Americans are as different as fire and water. Maybe the water will kill the fire or the fire will kill the water, but one of these things has to happen.”  “If the foreigners did not have their planes, then within five days I guarantee we would be in the streets of Kabul.”

As for the Pakistani Taliban, they are about to take control of Peshawar.

The provincial capital might slip into the hands of groups of militants within a few months if the government did not take adequate measures to arrest the growing trend of militancy.

The district is surrounded by tribal Khyber Agency in the west, Darra Adamkhel, Frontier Region Peshawar in the south and Mohmand Agency and Shabqadar town of Charsadda district in the north. Militant groups have been gaining strength for the past several months in all these towns.

Militants have now spread to innumerable villages of the Peshawar district. Radicals have thickly populated Matani, Mashokhel, Mashogagar and Badhber villages close to Darra Adamkhel.

The militants associated with two groups of Khyber Agency led by Mangal Bagh and Haji Namdar have been gathering vigour in Sheikhan, Sarband, Regi and Nasir Bagh while two militant groups of Mohmand Agency have established their writ in Mathra, Michni, Daudzai and Khazana villages.

It would appear that the “peaceful coexistence” doctrine has proven itself to be problematic.

Background & Report

In Competing Strategies in Afghanistan we documented the push by Hamid Karzai, Secretary Miliband and Secretary Des Browne to negotiate with the Taliban.  The Canadian liberal Senators have now put their weight behind the same plan, with the Tory Senators waffling over the idea.

The wide-ranging report also calls for the military to extend tour lengths to between nine and 12 months from the current six-month rotation, something that is being actively considered by Canada’s war planners.

“We’re aware this is a very contentious issue related to families,” Kenny said. “But it will have significant advantages in terms of creating a better relationship in Afghanistan.”

The Senators said it would also cut down on the number of soldiers who have to deploy several times to the country, and presumably ease the emotional burden on their families.

But the most contentious recommendation of the report, and the one least likely to be accepted by the Tories, is that Canadian soldiers and government officials try to make contact with the Taliban insurgency. The government has repeatedly rejected this course of action even though other NATO countries have made it a common practice.

“We’ve been very careful about it,” Kenny said, noting that Tory Senators objected to the recommendation. “We believe that these communications should take place only in circumstances where we think that some specific progress can be made.”

TheStar.com even showed a nice picture of what reconciliation looks like with a picture of Taliban surrendering their weapons.

But a different picture has been painted of the Taliban intentions.

“In the daytime we are farmers; at night we are Taliban,” he said, smiling.

Recent news reports published across the world would suggest the insurgency in Afghanistan is close to being defeated. In particular, they have focused on the southern province of Helmand, where a surge in US troops has allowed Nato-led forces to take new ground.

But when The National interviewed two Taliban commanders this month, it heard, and saw, a radically different story.

In the spring of 2007, Ghafar and his colleague, Zahir Jan, travelled to Kandahar from their homes in Helmand, where they claimed innocent women and children had been buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed by air strikes. At the time, both said they were fighting to defend their religion, their country and their families.

Since then, the violence has continued unabated. The Taliban and foreign soldiers – most notably the British – have suffered heavy casualties. Thousands upon thousands of Afghan civilians have been forced to flee the fighting.

Given the intensity of the combat, two men who live through it on a daily basis could be forgiven for feeling at least a little weary. Yet, if anything, Ghafar and Zahir Jan appeared more relaxed and determined than they were a year ago.

Speaking on the condition that the location of the interview would not be revealed, they came across as happy and eager to fight. For them, each death – no matter whose side it is on – means they are a step closer to bringing the conflict to an end.

“You know, the Taliban and the Americans are as different as fire and water. Maybe the water will kill the fire or the fire will kill the water, but one of these things has to happen,” Zahir Jan said …

Offhandedly, they said the United States deserves to be attacked on its own soil and suggested the Taliban could eventually send suicide bombers to the United States. They said they were “thousands times more confident” of victory in Afghanistan than they had been before, thanks largely to growing support from the population and improved weaponry.

“We have very advanced rockets. You can split them into three parts and carry them on donkeys. Then you just walk along and when you see a convoy of troops you can fix them together and fire them very quickly,” Zahir Jan said.

“If the foreigners did not have their planes, then within five days I guarantee we would be in the streets of Kabul.”

Analysis & Commentary

It has been said that the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan now includes a mixture of drug runners, criminals, warlords, and Taliban.  True, as we have noted in The Disaggregation of the Taliban.  But as we have also noted, wheat is replacing poppy throughout Afghanistan as the money crop, and nothing stops the Taliban from extortion of farmers over the safe transport of wheat.  In fact, nothing has stopped the Taliban from extortion of wireless phone companies in Afghanistan.  The problem is not wheat, wireless phone companies or poppy.  The problem is the Taliban.

Although widely known for corruption and helping only a little in the campaign against the Taliban, the Karzai government is not why NATO and U.S. forces are in Afghanistan.  There are many corrupt governments in the world, but only a few of them have Taliban.  Criminality, drugs, corruption, lack of infrastructure, and a host of other things have managed to divert attention off of the real problem in Afghanistan.

When reconciliation with the Sunni insurgency began in Anbar, Shiekh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha and his tribe had already begun to fight al Qaeda.  Over the course of the next two years the Sunni insurgency would lay down arms, put on police uniforms, and maintain security for the population while working alongside Americans.  In Fallujah in 2007, the Iraqi Police worked hard to emulate and impress the Marines, whom they almost worshiped.  The most recent reconciliation involves more than 500 such fighters in Sunni enclaves within mostly Shi’a Balad, Iraq, these fighters also agreeing to be tried in court for any crimes.

What’s the difference?  The Sunni fighters in Iraq didn’t fight for religious reasons.  The compelling reasons were political and financial.  Any reconciliation with rogue elements in Afghanistan must target warlords, criminals and other non-religiously motivated people.  Rather than these elements, NATO is choosing the only group which will not ever reconcile due to their belief system – the Taliban.

Just like Baitullah Mehsud of the Tehrik-i-Taliban who has recently said that he wants to “fight against Americans,” the Afghan Taliban commanders see that the West and their world view are unable to be reconciled, and they want attacks on American soil again.

Unlike the Pakistani Taliban who are overt with their views, the Afghan Taliban are playing NATO for fools.  “In the daytime we are farmers; at night we are Taliban.”  Even if violence had essentially disappeared from the scene in Afghanistan, leading to the redeployment of NATO forces home, the problem will not have gone away.  The radical ideology remains, and not just in the countryside.  Secret Taliban cells are spreading lessons of jihad in Kabul University.

There exists a once in a generation opportunity to defeat one of the most dangerous, violent and insidious forces on the planet, but for the sake of temporary peace it seems that some are willing to stand down from the fight, pretending that the intentions of the Taliban are sincere.  While this game is futile and pointless, the real problem is that it is affecting strategy and wasting valuable and irreplaceable time in the campaign.  Thus, we play the game at our own peril.