We recently discussed one officer lamenting the tactic of wearing body armor and carrying grenades on patrol.  Presumably, he wants to jettison those tactical advantages when confronted by Taliban insurgents, though not even the mayor of Kandahar feels safe from insurgent violence.  Now comes the latest in fine thinking concerning the campaign.

MARAWARA DISTRICT, Afghanistan —  After nine years of reconstruction efforts that have cost billions of dollars, U.S. military and civilian experts are trying a different strategy in this remote corner of eastern Afghanistan: doing more by doing less.

“We’ve been like Santa Claus, going through money, whatever you need,” said Navy Cmdr. William B. Goss, who commands the 100-person reconstruction team at Forward Operating Base Wright, near the Kunar provincial capital of Asadabad.

The funding for U.S. projects wasn’t always steady, nor was the oversight, and the planning was often criticized. Now there’s a change of focus.

Goss and his contingent, who arrived here in late October, still oversee the construction of desperately needed infrastructure and promote the role of women in this deeply conservative region, but the focus is on tutoring local officials.

Development projects now are running on Afghan, rather than American, schedules, even if it takes longer to build a road or school. Fewer projects are started, and only those with the prospect of continuing after foreign troops leave.

This is a real makeover: U.S. troops here have even stopped handing out candy and pens to the young boys who gather whenever they leave the base.

Kunar is a test ground for Vice President Joe Biden’s declaration last month that it’s time for the United States “to start to take the training wheels off” in Afghanistan.

Whether the strategy succeeds in Kunar and elsewhere in Afghanistan will determine – along with combat operations – whether the United States leaves behind even a minimally stable country.

Biden’s philosophy was on display in November when Goss and his team visited the U.S.-funded Lahore Dag Middle School to inspect the moss green and white structure, which opened in late October to 206 students.

Headmaster Faiz Mohammed was happy with his clean, new 14-room school. The electricity and plumbing worked as promised. His students no longer would have to study in tents or outdoors under trees. But Mohammed was hoping for a little more American largesse.

“If it’s possible … to receive any stationery?” he asked. The answer was a polite “no.”

Whether jettisoning our body armor or withholding pens and stationary, there you have it.  The Captain’s Journal.  Keeping you apprised of the best that American strategic minds has to offer.  We’re in the very best of hands.

From MSNBC (lengthy excerpt with important ending):

Over the last six months, U.S. troops have wrested the school away from insurgents. They’ve hired Afghan contractors to rebuild it, and lost blood defending it.

But the tiny school has yet to open, and nobody’s quite sure when it will.

American commanders have called the Pir Mohammed primary school “the premier development project” in Zhari district, a Taliban heartland in Kandahar province at the center of President Barack Obama’s 30,000-man surge.

The small brick and stone complex represents much of what American forces are trying to achieve in Afghanistan: winning over a war-weary population, tying a people to their estranged government, bolstering Afghan forces so American troops can go home. But the struggle to open Pir Mohammed three years after the Taliban closed it shows the obstacles U.S. forces face in a complex counterinsurgency fight — one whose success depends not on firepower, but on the support of a terrified people.

Similar battles are taking place across the country. In Marjah, for example, a former Taliban stronghold in neighboring Helmand province, several schools have opened since American-led troops overran the district in February. But many parents are still too afraid of violence and Taliban threats to let their children attend.

In Senjeray, too, “there are teachers … and we’ve found them and talked to them,” said Capt. Nick Stout, a company commander from the 101st Airborne Division’s 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment. “We say, ‘When the school’s built, do you want to come teach?’ And they say, ‘No, no, I don’t, not at all.'”

Perched amid majestic mountain crags at the base of a fertile river valley, the village of Senjeray resembles a walled fort, 10,000 people living in a labyrinth of steep, hardened mud walls.

Pir Mohammed sits at the southeastern edge of the village, a pair of modest, single-story buildings that once served hundreds, maybe thousands of children. A small plaque at the entrance engraved with black words on light gray marble indicates U.S. troops refurbished the school “in friendship with the People of Afghanistan” in November 2002 — one year after the American invasion.

Canadians finished the school and opened it in 2005. But in 2007, Taliban fighters attacked it, breaking windows and busting doors off hinges. They took away a dozen students, cut the fingers off some and killed the parents of others, said Bismallah Qari, a 30-year-old black-bearded mullah from Senjeray.

The Taliban opposes Western-style education, and apparently saw the school as a symbol of government authority. Qari said the Taliban also believed children would be forced to study Christianity there.

Since then, Senjeray’s children have had only one place to go: a handful of Islamic madrassas run by conservative mullahs like Qari that some American commanders say are radicalizing a new generation of Afghan youth, turning them away from President Hamid Karzai’s government and the NATO coalition.

Speaking through an interpreter as American troops searched a recently filled hole in his madrassa they suspected held a weapons cache, Qari said he wanted his kids to attend Pir Mohammed, too, but “we can’t do it.”

“The Taliban won’t allow us to go there,” he said. “They’ll kill us, they’ll kill our children.”

Pir Mohammed occupies ground highly valued by the insurgency — part of a corridor the Taliban use to traffic arms and guerrillas through villages along the Arghandab River and into Kandahar city.

In April, American troops seized the school in a military operation backed by Afghan troops. They found it in ruins, its rooms reduced to toilets littered with needles, apparently for drug use.

When Stout’s unit arrived in May, he deployed two platoons to protect the school round the clock. On their second day, a U.S. soldier was shot in the lung, but survived.

For weeks, firefights erupted almost daily.

U.S. engineers knocked down walls and trees nearby where insurgents hide. Afghan security forces set up checkpoints on surrounding roads. And armored American trucks stood guard to defend the school’s crumbling outer walls.

The school itself was turned into a de facto military base: Stout’s men stacked sandbags in the windows and installed machine gun nests on the rooftops. They filled rooms with metal boxes of ammunition and anti-tank rockets, and slept on cots inside it.

The American occupation drew the ire of village elders. In mid-July, more than 300 turbaned men from Senjeray urged the provincial governor to pressure the Americans to leave Pir Mohammed. Stout said that in meetings afterward, elders told him the Taliban had pressured them to do so. Nevertheless, they reiterated the plea — and made a crucial promise in return.

“They were saying, ‘Look, if you get out of the school, we’ll protect the school,'” Stout recalled. “They said, ‘We got it. We’ll keep attacks from happening. And people will go there.'”

Withdrawing, in fact, was exactly what Stout wanted. It fit with the wider strategy of letting Afghan forces take on security, and freed Stout’s troops to secure more ground elsewhere.

So the American platoons pulled out in mid-August, leaving their Afghan counterparts in charge.

Instead of the peace the elders promised, attacks actually increased, Stout said. Within days, the school suffered two grenade assaults and a pair of shoulder-fired rocket strikes, one of which killed a seven-year-old boy playing outside.

At meetings that week with mullahs and elders, Stout’s team displayed a poster-sized photo of the wounded boy just after the explosion, his face bloodied with shrapnel.

“We said, ‘Look, how does this sit in your stomach? Does this bother you?'” Stout recalled. “We told them: ‘These people clearly don’t care about you, your family, or your livelihood.'”

The elders agreed, and Stout made a proposition: “Come bleed with us and defeat the bigger problem, help drive the insurgents out.”

At that, the elders drew back.

Some said they didn’t know who had carried out the attack. Others said there were no insurgents in Senjeray. Most said they were mere farmers, and if they cooperated with the Americans, the Taliban would cut their heads off.

Stout rebutted with a grim warning: “As long as you guys tolerate this, as long as you turn your backs, your children are going to continue to suffer.”

The elders nodded. They promised to escort American troops through Senjeray, where attackers hidden on rooftops tossed grenades at U.S. patrols nearly every time they passed by.

But in the weeks that followed, nobody ever turned up.

Qari, the local mullah, said Senjeray’s residents were caught in the middle and could not control the insurgency.

“We told the Taliban we don’t want your support, and we don’t want the support of the U.S. Army,” he said. “We told them: ‘We can ensure our own security, just leave us alone.'”

Part of the difficulty of winning over people in Afghanistan is that NATO-led forces are trying to do it in full body armor.

American troops live in fortified bubbles surrounded by blast walls and dirt-filled barriers. Their window onto the country is often an alien landscape that’s hard to see through inches-thick bulletproof glass covered in dust.

On the ground, American strategy often rests on fragile agreements between two groups worlds apart: young muscle-bound troops with crew cuts and tattoos and conservative white-bearded elders in turbans.

There may be no place tougher to win hearts and minds than Zhari. Here is where the Taliban movement was founded 16 years ago. A few miles to the west is Singesar, where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar once ran an Islamic school.

“Obviously there’s a lot of Taliban sympathy out there,” Stout said. “These people don’t give a damn about us … and quite frankly, why would they? We’re strangers, we’ve been here for a few months, we walk around the town with guns, 40 pounds of body army and (a lot of) grenades.”

Afghan troops, too, acknowledge the cold reception in Senjeray, where they are seen as foreigners trying to finish off an old war. Much of the Afghan army’s rank and file here is drawn from the north — Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara — who fought the overwhelmingly Pashtun Taliban in the 1990s.

“The people in this town hate us,” said Lt. Said Abdul Ghafar, an ethnic Tajik soldier based at Pir Mohammed. “The Taliban tell them we’re not real Muslims, that we’re infidels. So the children throw rocks at us and won’t even say hello.”

Analysis & Commentary

This report is remarkably depressing.  The irony is that there is not a single problem discussed above with the U.S. campaign in Kandahar that couldn’t have also been said of the U.S. campaign in Fallujah or Baghdad in 2007.  We weren’t loved in the least.

But note what the focus of the discussion is not.  It isn’t about wasting time, resources and blood defending an inanimate object that can neither hurt you nor love you (i.e., the school).  It isn’t about the need to chase the insurgents and kill them.  It isn’t about force projection of U.S. troops.

Note now what the discussion is about.  The problem, says Stout, is that our boys are wearing 40 pounds of body armor and carry grenades.  The problem is that they don’t “give a damn about us.”  Stout’s focus is not on the legitimacy of U.S. troop actions, but of the ANA.

Is this the depth of strategic thinking among our officer corps?  We are failing in Kandahar because we are wearing 40 pounds of body armor and carrying grenades?

In Fallujah in 2007, the IPs are the ones who didn’t give a damn about what the population thought of them.  The fact that they knew they had the backing of the U.S. Marines made all the difference, and force brought legitimacy for the IPs.  The notion that body armor separates the Soldiers from the people is patently absurd.  What are we supposed to think about this?  That the solution to winning their hearts and minds is to jettison the body armor and grenades?  How many unnecessary deaths would that cause and how laughable would the U.S. Army appear to the population?  How does it say “we’re here to win” if we get rid of our weapons and allow ourselves to be shot?

In Fallujah and Baghdad in 2007, there was no focus on holding terrain or even attempting to stand up a legitimate government until the insurgency had been dealt a significant blow.  Recalling what we did in Iraq (from an Army officer):

One thing that I think many people forget about Iraq (or maybe it wasn’t reported?) is that in 2007 and 2008 we were killing and capturing lots of people on a nightly basis. Protecting the populace was A priority. When speaking to the folks back home, in order to sell the war, perhaps we said that it was the priority. But on the ground, I do not recall a single Commander’s Update Brief spending any time at all discussing what we had done to protect anyone. We were focused on punching al-Qaeda in the nuts at every opportunity and dismantling their networks. The reconcilables got the message loud and clear that they could take money and jobs in return for cooperation, or they would die a swift death when we came knocking down their doors in the middle of the night. The rest of the populace made it clear to them that they should take the offer. The only protection that the population got from us was good fire discipline so that we did not kill non-combatants. We made it clear that the government intended to win this thing and we did not send that message by delivering governance or digging wells. We shot motherf******s in the face.  Pop-COIN blasphemers, your scripture is false teaching.

This wasn’t just SOF.  This was everyone.  This posture is what I don’t currently see in our campaign for Afghanistan.

So you say that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has become a joke?

With United Nations climate negotiators facing an uphill battle to advance their goal of reducing emissions linked to global warming, it’s no surprise that the woman steering the talks appealed to a Mayan goddess Monday.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

She called for “a balanced outcome” which would marry financial and emissions commitments from industrialized countries aimed at combating climate change with “the understanding of fairness that will guide long-term mitigation efforts.”

“Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skilful interlacing of many threads,” said Figueres, who hails from Costa Rica and started her greetings in Spanish before switching to English. “I am convinced that 20 years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel.”

One would think that the revelations about the shysters at the University of East Anglia would have at least held the hoax in abatement or slowed it a little.  Not if the CIA has anything to do with it.

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.

Seeking negotiating chips, the US state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations.

Rather than seeking out ways to effect regime change in Iran, the CIA is spending time on AGW.  Is it even possible at this point to rebuild the edifice of national intelligence that has been dismantled over the last three administrations?  Is it too far gone at this point?  Have we lost entirely the capability to do covert information gathering and warfare in our focus on things like AGW and … ahem … [wink] … domestic extremists?

From Marine Corps Times:

Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C. and Camp Pendleton, Calif., now have the option of pursuing intermediate and advanced language study before deploying to Afghanistan.

The bases recently added two new courses in Pashto and Dari which are Afghanistan’s main languages. The new courses were added in answer to demand from operational forces, most now working to tame Helmand province in the country’s south.

The basic language course is unchanged. Marines will still complete about 40 hours of live instruction and 100 hours of computer-based self-study which will help them master about 50 words and phrases.

But motivated Marines who have a knack for languages can now boost their communication skills with intermediate and advanced options.

The intermediate course will emphasize two-way communication teaching Marines how to ask questions and interpret basic answers. This will help them gather intelligence by understanding descriptions of colors, clothing and vehicles; and how to discuss locations and directions. Through intermediate study, Marines will learn about 200 words and phrases. The whole evolution takes about 80 hours of live instruction and 72 hours of self-study.

The advanced course will help Marines expand their vocabulary to 600 words and phrases through 160 hours of live instruction and 72 hours of self study. By the courses end, they should be able to communicate mission-specific information.

The classes aren’t designed to make marines fluent, but they will provide them with the ability to interact with village elders, farmers or children with a better understanding of their culture and more words and phrases to work with, said George Dallas, director of the Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.

The courses, detailed in Marine administrative message 652/10, will be available through 2014. Participation is at a unit commander’s discretion.

If I was commanding officer it would certainly be my “discretion” to have as many Marines trained as deeply as possible in the indigenous language before deployment.

While I have derided the many civil affairs projects implemented with no security, thus wasting time and money, and while I have certainly been a proponent of force projection in all phases of a counterinsurgency campaign, this is one area where I have focused my advocacy.  I can’t think of a greater skill to take to Afghanistan than an understanding of the language.  Language training is right up there in importance beside skill in weapon use, fire and maneuver tactics and having good logistics.  After all, we are trying to find and kill an enemy who hides among the indigenous population.

This is a good development.  More is needed.

Loyal reader and blogger Rick Keyes has made a contribution for our education this weekend.  Rick has cataloged and analyzed the recent drone strikes in the tribal region of Pakistan.  Make sure to study his report Drone_Front.

Next, the Army has finally published an official historical analysis of the engagement at Wanat.  The study is from The Staff of the U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  It is entitled Wanat: Combat Action in Afghanistan, 2008.

On page 255 three of my articles are listed.  I am proud to have contributed in some small degree to this important work.  I had wanted for a long time to publish Douglas Cubbison’s preliminary work in full, but it was forwarded to me in confidence and I have held that confidence until today.  Now the study is complete, although not exactly in its original form or with all of its original content.

More from Wikileaks (courtesy of WSJ):

Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables provide new details on the U.S. assessment of how Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has promoted Tehran’s influence in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The demise of archenemy Saddam Hussein, with whom Tehran fought an eight-year war in the 1980s, presented the Iranians with an unprecedented opportunity, and they appear to have exploited it from Day One.

The leadership of the Qods Force—the Guards’ paramilitary and espionage arm—”took advantage of the vacuum” in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein’s regime to begin sending operatives into Iraq when “little attention was focused on Iran,” according to an April 2009 dispatch from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The cable was part of a trove of classified U.S. diplomatic communications made public this week by WikiLeaks.

Early priorities for the Iranian operatives included assassinating former Iraqi fighter pilots who flew sorties against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, according to a December 2009 dispatch from Baghdad. As of the end of last year 180 pilots had been killed, according to the report.

But Iran’s broader goals have been the establishment of “an economically dependent and politically subservient Iraq” and the undermining of rivals, in part through paramilitary means, the cables suggest.

Iran’s ambassador to Iraq Hassan Danaie-Far denied in a recent interview that Iran was meddling in Iraq’s affairs or supporting militias.

Since 2003, Qods Force commander Brig. Gen. Qasim Soleimani has been “the point man directing the formulation and implementation” of the Iranian government’s Iraq policy “with authority second only” to the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to another dispatch from Baghdad dated November 2009.

Through his officers and “Iraqi proxies,” Gen. Soleimani “employs the full range of diplomatic, security, intelligence, and economic tools to influence allies and detractors in order to shape a more pro-Iran regime in Baghdad and the provinces,” according to the same dispatch.

Some Qods Force operatives have entered Iraq under the guise of charities or the Iranian Red Crescent—the Islamic version of the Red Cross—according to an October 2008 dispatch from America’s Iran Regional Presence Office based in the Gulf Arab emirate of Dubai.

The cable, which cites an “Iranian with detailed knowledge of the country’s Red Crescent” as a source, says the organization contracted companies affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards to build clinics in Baghdad and the predominantly Shiite cities of Basra, Hilla, Karbala and Najaf to the south. The clinics were used “for treatment but also as warehouses for military equipment or military bases if needed.”

Other Iranian operatives came in as diplomats, including some allegedly as senior as Tehran’s former ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, who is described as “an associate” of the Qods Force in the November 2009 dispatch. His successor, Mr. Danaie-Far, was a naval commander in the Revolutionary Guards.

In addition to training, funding and arming Shiite militias in Iraq involved in attacking U.S. interests, Gen. Soleimani has overseen economic development assistance to Iraq and the promotion of bilateral trade that reached an annual level of almost $4 billion by the end of 2009. He also oversaw the furthering of Iranian “soft power” through activities such as the renovation of Iraq’s revered Shiite shrines by Revolutionary Guards-owned companies, according to several dispatches.

The Iranian commander also “enjoys longstanding close ties” with several top Iraqi officials such as President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to a dispatch from Baghdad.

The November 2009 cable says Iran hands out cash payments to “Iraqi surrogates,” which include some of the political parties currently in power. It says while exact figures are unknown, Tehran’s financial assistance is estimated in the cables at $100 million to $200 million a year, with an estimated $70 million going to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) party, which was based in Iran before Mr. Hussein’s fall.

In one cable, U.S. diplomats in Baghdad say sensitivity by Iraqi leaders toward being seen as “Iranian lackeys” will ultimately constrain Iran’s influence in Iraq.

Even though both countries are majority Shiite Muslim, they embrace opposing clerical traditions. Iraq’s revered Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is Iranian-born but rejects Iran’s clerical rule.

One dispatch that followed a visit by U.S. diplomats to Mr. Sistani’s base in Najaf last year said the reclusive cleric personally prohibited the enrollment of Iranian students at seminaries in the city in order to prevent infiltration by the Revolutionary Guards.

Right.  Like Iranian meddling inside of Iraq is some sort of newly-discovered fact.  It was known years ago.  Take careful note.  I have been watching this man General Qassem Suleimani, and have specifically called for his assassination.  It would have been better for Iraq had this man been dead long ago.  Note also that I have more recently called for more assassinations of Iranians in key places within the Quds forces.

This follows a rich tradition here at The Captain’s Journal, where I called for the assassination of Moqtada al Sadr.  It’s simple.  Reverse executive order 12,333 prohibiting assassinations.  It’s way past time to wield this simple but effective tool.

Concerning the assassination of Iranian nuclear physicists which I applauded just recently, the New York Post has taken what I perceive to be a very significant step.  They have endorsed the same thing.

Who is killing the great nuclear scientists of Iran?

Who cares?

That is, as long as enough of them are offed to stymie development of a deliverable Iranian nuke.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he knows who’s behind the recent drive-by bombings of the scientists. He sees “the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments” — by which he means Israel and the United States.

Maybe. (The answer will no doubt be in the next WikiLeaks dump.)

According to news reports, unidentified assailants riding motorcycles carried out two bombings in Tehran on Monday, attaching explosives to the scientists’ cars and detonating them remotely.

One attack killed Majid Shahriari, manager of a “major project” for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization and an expert in neutron transport — a key stage in the chain reactions behind nuclear weapons.

The other bomb seriously injured Fereydoon Abbasi, a senior Ministry of Defense scientist who’s said to work closely with the notorious Revolutionary Guard and reportedly is believed by Western intelligence to be a key figure in Iran’s drive to build nukes.

As one unnamed US official told the Times: “They’re [both] bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb.”

Israel, of course, has been warning about an Iranian nuclear arsenal for some time now — and is believed to have been behind last summer’s Stuxnet computer-worm attack, which reportedly sent Iran’s nuclear centrifuges out of control.

If the US government has finally come to realize that a more hands-on approach is needed — and, as the latest WikiLeaks disclosures show, Washington is being pressed hard by a clearly terrified Arab world — that’s all to the good.

Not so significant for a Military Blogger.  Monumentally significant for a main stream news organization, even one which leans more conservative.  To the New York Post: welcome.  My position actually cost me readers (I know because of demands to remove e-mails from my auto-distribution).  I suspect that it will for you as well.  But I’m not in this to max out my readers.  I have a stake in what we do in this transnational insurgency in which we unfortunately find ourselves.  I suspect you feel that you do as well.

Regular readers know that I am no proponent of the high value target program.  The middle of the night raids by SOF operators, the temporary stays in prison, the quick release, the lack of embedded of SOF with infantry and thus the lack of participation in the holistic counterinsurgency effort, etc.

While I am not opposed to making life hard for insurgents, I believe that the program is just generally ineffective.  Now comes Hamid Karzai to ensure its complete failure (edited for brevity).

Afghan security forces are freeing captured senior Taliban for payment or political motives, with President Hamid Karzai and his powerful brother among those authorizing and requesting releases.

The practice is so systemic that the Taliban have a committee focused on getting their fighters out of jail. It undermines the deterrent effect of arrest and the potential of the prisoner population as a card to play in peace talks, analysts say.

The releases, which were confirmed to Reuters by several sources familiar with a range of cases, also raise questions about the capacity and political will of Afghan security forces meant to be taking over from foreign troops starting next year.

But cases uncovered by Reuters including that of Ghulam Haidar, a top insurgent in the southern Taliban heartland of Kandahar, suggest that a web of complex loyalties and widespread corruption are undermining the fight against the insurgency.

Ghulam Haidar, meaning “servant of God”, is a common name in Afghanistan so when Canadian forces turned one of the most dangerous men in Kandahar city over to their Afghan counterparts in March, they may not have realized who he was.

Days later he was walking free again, according to three sources who have investigated prisoner releases or have seen documents about Haidar’s capture. They asked not to be named because they are not authorized to release information.

“They took this guy into custody in mid-March, but he was out again in a few days. This is a classic example of what has been happening,” one former Western official told Reuters.

A Kabul-based source with links to Western intelligence services confirmed Haidar was a Taliban leader known to have a major role in the insurgency around the city.

Yet his freedom was requested by Karzai’s younger brother Ahmad Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar provincial council.

Dubbed “AWK” by Westerners working in Kandahar, he has an iron grip on the city but his loyalties are considered less solid. A U.S. government cable dated 2009, released by WikiLeaks, described him as a corrupt drug trafficker.

“When Ghulam Haidar was in (Afghan) custody AWK asked for his release,” said a second source, who rejected the idea that Haidar could have been set free because he was a double agent.

“If the Afghan government had good agents within the Taliban things should have gotten better — but that is obviously not the case,” the source added.

Ahmad Wali Karzai said he had never asked for the release of a Taliban prisoner and had not heard of Ghulam Haidar.

“I am the person most wanted by the Taliban, with nine suicide attacks against me,” he told Reuters by telephone.

“I would be the last person to release the Taliban — my position is for more tough measures against them.”

The Defence Ministry and National Directorate of Security, President Karzai’s office and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force all declined to respond to questions on Ghulam Haidar’s case or the wider issue of Taliban releases.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, which controls the police, said it had not been involved in release of any Taliban.

“We have no evidence and no examples that detained Taliban were released by government officials,” Zemarai Bashary said.

Haidar was one of the most high-profile insurgents in recent years to slip through prisoner release mechanisms that are designed to prevent innocent men from languishing in prison but are regularly exploited by the Taliban to free key commanders.

“The Taliban operate a commission for prisoners affairs and effecting releases is among its responsibilities,” said Michael Semple, a Harvard University fellow with over 20 years experience in Afghanistan and extensive contacts with the Taliban.

“It’s systemic. It is well beyond the level of having the occasional success,” he added.

Another source also confirmed the committee’s existence, although in practical terms most release operations were conceived and directed at the local level.

In cases like Ghulam Haidar, political connections are key.

One of the most high-profile examples in recent years was the 2007 release of Dastagir, a Taliban leader from northwestern Badghis province. President Karzai himself ordered the commander freed after village elders promised he would renounce violence.

His return to battle united feuding Taliban factions and he was personally responsible for the deaths of at least 32 Afghan policemen in attacks he organized before he was killed in 2009, said a government source from western Afghanistan.

Sometimes cash is more effective.

One source told Reuters Ahmad Wali Karzai had paid tens of thousands of dollars to secure the release of another Taliban commander, Anwar Shah Agha, who operates in the area to the west of Kandahar city and was captured in May 2009.

He was released by Afghan security forces in Kabul in March 2010, and has since returned to the battlefield.

Some Taliban are freed legally but with a worrying lack of transparency, said Kate Clark, senior analyst at Afghanistan Analysts Network who has studied Taliban releases. She cited the case of Akbar Agha freed late last year by Karzai.

“He was pardoned secretly and is now living under semi-house arrest. He was quite senior, and put away for kidnapping UN staff including a British woman,” Clark said.

“Pardoning criminals is a constitutional right of the president’s, but the lack of transparency, the fact that he does not necessarily announce the pardons, is concerning for anyone looking at it from a rule-of-law perspective.”

“What are we really fighting for? We risk our lives to catch them and bring them in and then they just release them,” said a Kabul-based source who followed the Ghulam Haidar case.

The releases attracted the notice, and anger, of Karzai’s Western backers, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks.

“Both (Karzai and the attorney general) authorize the release of detainees pre-trial and allow dangerous individuals to go free or re-enter the battlefield without ever facing an Afghan court,” the August 2009 cable from the embassy in Kabul said.

It goes on to list 150 pre-trial releases from one Afghan detention facility since 2007, including 27 prisoners who had been held at Guantanamo Bay by the United States.

The complex lines of the Afghan conflict also mean today’s enemy can be tomorrow’s friend. Ghulam Haidar, for example, is from the Popalzai tribe like the Karzais. Tribal loyalties run deep in Afghanistan.

I predicted that prisons would be problematic in Afghanistan, and they are.  As for the bastard Wali Karzai, it’s no surprise that his name comes up.  We have discussed this man before.

It isn’t just that the high value target campaign is generally ineffective and a misuse of highly skilled SOF troopers, and it is both.  No, it’s more than that.  The Afghanis are conspiring to ensure that what little to moderate effectiveness it could have has been neutered.

Prisons are generally problematic for counterinsurgency.  As I have argued before, there is no replacement for killing the enemy on the field of battle.

In case you weren’t watching, there has been a covert cyberwar going on against Iran’s nuclear program.

The mission: Infiltrate the highly advanced, securely guarded enemy headquarters where scientists in the clutches of an evil master are secretly building a weapon that can destroy the world. Then render that weapon harmless and escape undetected.

But in the 21st century, Bond doesn’t get the call. Instead, the job is handled by a suave and very sophisticated secret computer worm, a jumble of code called Stuxnet, which in the last year has not only crippled Iran’s nuclear program but has caused a major rethinking of computer security around the globe.

Intelligence agencies, computer security companies and the nuclear industry have been trying to analyze the worm since it was discovered in June by a Belarus-based company that was doing business in Iran. And what they’ve all found, says Sean McGurk, the Homeland Security Department’s acting director of national cyber security and communications integration, is a “game changer.”

The construction of the worm was so advanced, it was “like the arrival of an F-35 into a World War I battlefield,” says Ralph Langner, the computer expert who was the first to sound the alarm about Stuxnet. Others have called it the first “weaponized” computer virus.

Simply put, Stuxnet is an incredibly advanced, undetectable computer worm that took years to construct and was designed to jump from computer to computer until it found the specific, protected control system that it aimed to destroy: Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

The target was seemingly impenetrable; for security reasons, it lay several stories underground and was not connected to the World Wide Web. And that meant Stuxnet had to act as sort of a computer cruise missile: As it made its passage through a set of unconnected computers, it had to grow and adapt to security measures and other changes until it reached one that could bring it into the nuclear facility.

When it ultimately found its target, it would have to secretly manipulate it until it was so compromised it ceased normal functions.

And finally, after the job was done, the worm would have to destroy itself without leaving a trace.

That is what we are learning happened at Iran’s nuclear facilities — both at Natanz, which houses the centrifuge arrays used for processing uranium into nuclear fuel, and, to a lesser extent, at Bushehr, Iran’s nuclear power plant.

At Natanz, for almost 17 months, Stuxnet quietly worked its way into the system and targeted a specific component — the frequency converters made by the German equipment manufacturer Siemens that regulated the speed of the spinning centrifuges used to create nuclear fuel. The worm then took control of the speed at which the centrifuges spun, making them turn so fast in a quick burst that they would be damaged but not destroyed. And at the same time, the worm masked that change in speed from being discovered at the centrifuges’ control panel.

Read the entire report for a very interesting analysis of what apparently is the first real instance of effective cyberwar.  It occurred probably due to cooperation between intelligence agencies, lead more than likely by the Mossad.  This set the program back months or even years.

There is more.  Iranian nuclear physicists and engineers are dying at an alarming rate.

Earlier today, Majid Shahriari, a professor in nuclear physics at Martyr Beheshti University, was assassinated in Tehran. Fereydoun Abbasi Davani, professor in nuclear physics at Iran’s National Defense University, was severely wounded in a separate attack. Motorcyclists either stuck explosives to the physicists’ cars as they headed to work, or threw explosives into the cars. These were just the latest attacks — on January 10, 2010, Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, another Iranian physicist, was killed by a remote-controlled bomb as he left his home.

Iran has accused the CIA and Mossad of masterminding the attacks.  Ryan, from Dallas, TX, dispatches that concern. “I’m not worried about the CIA being to blame, the US government is not competent enough to pull an operation this clean off. A US attempt would have resulted in a lunch worth of mashed potatoes being placed on the wrong cars windshield and the subsequent explosion of a bicyclist.”

Unfortunately, Ryan is probably right.  Again, it is likely the Mossad that is responsible.  But these small efforts must end at some point (or be greatly expanded), since all they do will is temporarily cause the Iranian program to cease and desist.  These efforts won’t end the program.

Switching subjects just for a moment, I had originally judged the most recent Wikileaks data dump to be irrelevant.  The original two were, and told us things that we (I) already knew.  Most Milbloggers knew 95% of at least the broad strokes of the information contained in the data dump on Iraq and Afghanistan.  But this most recent data dump is essentially different.  It pertains to documents that embarrass the administration’s diplomatic efforts and show them to be fundamentally unsound and ineffective.

I predicted this two years ago.

… the State Department will begin the administration will high hopes, excitement and grand ambitions for the role of diplomacy, negotiations and multi-lateral talks. By the end of the administration, a general malaise and confusion will have descended upon the entire State Department, and yet there will still be sparse and shallow understanding of why negotiations have so miserably failed to prevent or ameliorate the various calamities for which they were targeted.

And concerning the failure of diplomatic efforts, we see now that Saudi Arabia has been begging the U.S. for military action against Iran.  It looks as it the folks who would be in a better position that us to understand the Persian mind don’t place much reliance on our “negotiating” and diplomatic efforts to dissuade Iran from their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Total war with Iran?  No.  That’s what I have wanted to avoid.  Too messy, and unnecessary when it can be done differently.  Covert war with Iran?  Yes, and I have been begging for this for some four years now.  What the Mossad is doing is good, but we need more, and we need the active participation of the CIA.  We need an insurgency within Iran, support for the protesting students, assassination of military commanders within the Quds force, disruption of their infrastructure, cyber attacks, more killing of Iranians inside of Iraq, obvious threats against the Iranian regime by the U.S., and an end to support for Iranian-backed politicians within Iraq.  This is only a start.

In short, we need comprehensive covert war.  I will not rest until I have my war.

Rosie DiManno is one of my favorite reporters and columnists.  In her latest she heaps great scorn and opprobrium on the Canadian withdrawal from Kandahar (quoting at length).

There are two occupying armies in Kabul: NGOs and ISAF.

The non-governmental agencies are in their element, many underscrutinized in their aid and development budgets, as literally billions of donation dollars flow through the capital.

Little of that largesse has substantially improved civilian life. But the humanitarian hyenas drive around in chauffeured SUVs, usually reside in highly secured compounds with extensive domestic staff, and enjoy a lively social whirl in restricted clubs where Afghans are rarely found — beyond serving alcoholic drinks they’re not permitted to imbibe.

Planet ISAF is equally insulated behind high UN and NATO walls, though officials in tandem with Afghan ministry representatives conduct weekly media briefings where not much of significance is ever discussed. The Kabul bureau for journalists is a surprisingly soft gig as most reporters rely ever more on stringers to bring back the goods, take all the risks.

Though International Security Assistance Force convoys venture out daily, the city’s security responsibility has for the past year been Afghan-led. Unlike their ISAF counterparts, barely visible from within their heavily armoured vehicles, Afghan security forces — national army and police — are dangerously exposed in mini pickup trucks.

If the Afghan National Police, in particular, is loathed by the citizenry as hooligans and extortionists, a considerable number in cahoots with insurgency elements, one can almost understand their treason and criminality: Pay is negligible, dangers omnipresent, command-and-control corrupt. For many Afghans who enter the police training program, the true objective is a year or two of shakedown opportunity, after which they can return to their villages with a useful nest egg.

I am not a cynic about Afghanistan’s potential to rise from the ashes of civil war, chronic misrule and international neglect. Its rich mining resources alone should provide economic buoyancy if ever properly administered rather than exploited by covetous multinationals. Even the corruption that exasperated donor nations endlessly drone on about — while their own NGOs and development contractors take their cut — is, in fact, a time-honoured alternative system of governance, arguably the only quasi-capitalism that works here.

The country has always been a suzerain for warlords; the original Taliban, for all their piety, were nothing less than another criminal gang, built on vast Pashtun tribal loyalties, armed and schooled in proxy sacking by Pakistan.

For Canadian combat troops and their support divisions in Kandahar, these past six years, Kabul was that mile-high mirage in the distant rear, redoubt of bureaucrats, la-la DMZ for pretend soldiers. Not one I ever met pined to be posted there. Even those sickened of life outside-the-wire, the perilous patrols and wearying village shuras, had no stomach for a politically massaged Kabul assignment.

In the pecking order of combat virility, even deployment as force protection for Canada’s Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar city was viewed dimly: that place with the pool, surf and turf dinners and circle-the-wagon ramparts.

Ottawa has spent these past half-dozen years decrying the no-fight no-front caveats imposed by NATO troop contributors, and rightly so. The heavy lifting through the worst of the insurgency fell to Canada, Britain and Holland — latterly, Americans — while the likes of Germany, Sweden and Italy carved out relatively safe havens.

Now, we’re no different from the shirkers.

Make no mistake. Dress it up as both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff might like: If this new stay-in plan is put to effect as advertised, Canadian troops, highly valued for their combat skills, will be little more than decorative tassels on the Afghanistan uniform, their primary value to pick up the mentoring slack left behind by other bolting allies so that Americans can carry on their terrorist-tracking pursuits.

President Barack Obama is interested in Afghanistan only so far as preventing it from becoming once again a refuge for Al Qaeda and its assorted adjuncts, the ganglia of insurrectionists entrenched along the lawless border with Pakistan. While there is growing concern over Iran’s influence in Afghanistan, the U.S. objective is quite narrow and geopolitical; an exit segue it can live with.

It was NATO that always had the much grander vision for Afghanistan, if not the resolve or political commitment, not the troop contribution or — for far too long — the vigorous rules of engagement, to even begin imposing order on so large and complicated a battlefield.

With its shrinking ambitions for Afghanistan, NATO has confirmed its irrelevancy and inefficacy in the 21st century — the true reason for taking up this cause in the first place, and never mind building schools, emancipating women or laying down a democratic footprint. If Afghanistan has any future, it will be on the blood of Americans or via an ignominious rapprochement with the Taliban.

(Here’s adding insult to injury: The New York Times has reported that those promising secret talks between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war were actually being conducted with a Taliban imposter.)

So Canada is on board to shunt some 950 troops to Kabul next summer to run training programs until 2014. Having visited such instruction camps in Afghanistan, I’ve got news for you: The ANA, an institution respected by the citizenry, doesn’t need us for inside-the-wire training purposes; only for outside-the-wire command-and-control tutoring, which Harper insists we won’t provide. And the ANP, as constituted, is incapable of even A-B-C coaching. Better off opening up the cantonments and returning to Afghan men (and women) all those weapons collected in disarmament drives. At least then they’d have a chance of defending themselves against the next wave of marauders and power-hungry zealots.

As for Canadian soldiers turned into military metrosexuals: They make a nice latte in Kabul, guys.

Rosie is tough on the Canadian boys, or more precisely, the Canadian political establishment which is spearheading the “strategic redeployment” to Kabul.  A few observations are in order concerning Rosie’s commentary.

First, if Canadians believe that they will somehow be spared the onslaught of militant Islam because of proximity to the U.S., they can think again.  The U.S. cannot single-handedly defeat the transnational insurgency of radical Islam, and the regional AfPak insurgency is a significant and important element in the global campaign.

Second, Rosie hits an important nail on the head when she discusses the fact that it was always NATO which had the grand visions of nation-building in Afghanistan.  The U.S. had heretofore been primarily hunting and killing the enemy (although to be clear, that changed lately due to the influence of population-centric counterinsurgency dogma with McChrystal and Petraeus).  That NATO has now abandoned their lofty dreams of creating Shangi-La on the Asian continent is a pitiful testimony to what never could have happened anyway.  Not that woman’s rights or education for children isn’t a laudable goal, but there  is only so much the U.S. can do, and there is poverty and malfeasance of leadership on every continent.  All of those problems are not correctable.  Defeating the insurgency is possible, but a focus that has been lost in all the talk of creating legitimate governance.

Third, note how Rosie described the disconnectedness of the NGOs and ISAF to the population or countryside of Afghanistan.  Nothing could ensure loss any more than this.  For all the talk of knowing the population, we seem to know more about the huge bases we’re on than the people we are supposed to be winning.

Finally, of course it’s true that basic training in Kabul is a small part of the whole.  But this contribution by Canadian forces is pro forma.  The ANA needs to see good NCOs in action.  Instead, they will see good NCOs garrisoned at huge bases.  And as a certain Marine I know has remarked before, there is a difference between a garrison Marine and a grunt.  The ANA needs to be embedded with grunts.  Instead they get the garrison boys.  So much for Canada’s contribution to the campaign.

It’s membership renewal time, and I cannot forget that Wayne LaPierre endorsed Harry Reid, saying “He is a true champion of the Second Amendment back in Washington, DC.”  There was ultimately no NRA endorsement, with Chris Cox saying “Reid’s push to confirm Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan” prevented the NRA from endorsing Reid.

Actually, it was the strong reaction by NRA membership that prevented it from happening.  Reid secured a significant amount of money for a shooting range in Clark County, Nevada (61 million dollars of tax money, to be precise), and there has been significant politicking on this issue within the NRA, with a gag order being issued to members of the NRA board on the Kagan nomination.

And here I thought that the NRA was above buy offs, influence peddling, and general corruption.  Even now it isn’t clear to me why Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox cannot simply be kicked to the curb and new leadership installed?  Thuggish behavior should not be tolerated, and the NRA deserves better leadership that these two men.  It is enough that they should beclown themselves and instigate internecine warfare on the board; we shouldn’t allow it to happen to the NRA too.

Yet I am just a member, and I know that there are other organizations that promise to be above the influence peddling.  So do I dump the NRA or give them one more chance?

Note: For Harry Reid’s record on the 2nd Amendment, see here.