Category: Afghanistan (vintage)

I’ve begun reading the accounts from Wikileaks’s Afghanistan War Logs (AWL) that are being provided by the NYT, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel.
The revelations that have interested me most have been those about the extra-judicial killings (assassinations) that have been carried out by the U.S. military against suspected (or merely accused) Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Conducting extra-judicial killings is, of course, a tactic the US military has picked up from Israel, which has used them for many years now.
An “extra-judicial” killing is, of course, just that. It is a killing in which any “evidence” there is against the target is compiled and judged only in secret, by secret accusers.
In the U.S. military, the tendency is to say that the orders that result from this process are to “capture or kill” those designated as targets. But as this Guardian review of the AWL material reveals,

In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

The Guardian piece, which was written by Nick Davies, says that,

The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed “black” unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a “kill or capture” list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list.

Both the Guardian account and the Der Spiegel account note that U.S. military commanders have gone to great lengths to conceal he existence of TF-373, which it describes as,

The unit of elite soldiers, which includes members of the Navy Seals and the Delta Force, get their orders directly from the Pentagon in Washington and operate outside of the chain of command of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

I note parenthetically that ABC News had a story today about the Taliban in Afghanistan having claimed that they had killed one U.S. Navy member and captured another one.
What on earth were two U.S. “sailors” doing in seriously landlocked Afghanistan, I wondered?
The Spiegel story notes that,

[T]he new information about the secret commando missions could… prove embarrassing for the German government. Roughly 300 men with TF 373 have been stationed on the grounds of Camp Marmal, the German field base in Mazar-e-Sharif, since the summer of 2009. The special unit has chosen a strategically advantageous and shielded location at the airfield, where it operates from the Regional Command North, which is under the command of Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
The stationing of the unit was a sensitive issue from the very beginning, and officials in Berlin persistently sought to prevent much discussion of the issue.

The Spiegel story also gives the distinct impression that the activities of the JPEL-related teams have been stepped up in recent months.
So much for Pres. Obama having brought a new respect for the rule of law into the conduct of U.S. government activities overseas.
The Guardian account gives many details of instances in which there have been significant killings of bystanders in conjunction with the activities of TF 373. The killing of bystanders (a.k.a. “collateral damage”) is indeed horrendous, and tragic. But even if no bystanders were killed at all, the idea of designating individuals for execution based on secret accusations against them is itself inherently anti-democratic and repellent.
I really don’t see why Pres. Obama and his advisers don’t understand this.
(Perhaps he listens too much to the advice he gets from his many Israeli friends? Of course, Israel’s longstanding and persistent use of this grisly tactic hasn’t “solved” its many remaining problems with its neighbors, has it? Indeed, by most accounts, it has merely exacerbated those problems. Obama might usefully ponder on that… )

Whenever I read the news about the U.S.-led military project in Afghanistan these days, I feel a knot of dread in my stomach. The project is so palpably rushing toward a denouement that will be disastrous for many of its participants in the project itself– and also, most likely, for unforeseeable numbers of Afghans.
I already felt pretty pessimistic about the chances of Obama’s “surge” there back in December, when I wrote this short essay for Boston Review. I have felt even worse about it in recent weeks.
Within just the past five days, anti-ISAF forces have undertaken bold attacks against an ISAF convoy in Kabul (where three high-ranking U.S. officers and one Canadian ditto were reportedly among the casualties); against Bagram air base near Kabul; and then, last night, against the big ISAF air-base in Kandahar.
It was always an exercise in imperial hubris to imagine that bringing the number of NATO/ISAF troops up to 90,000, as Obama’s surge is now in the midst of doing, could somehow turn the strategic tide in Afghanistan in ISAF’s favor. In the 1980s the Soviet Union, which bordered directly onto Afghanistan (thus ensuring that its supply lines were considerably shorter than American supply lines today) and was the repository of considerable historical, ethnographic, and directly-gained political knowledge about Afghanistan, was unable to impose its will on Afghanistan’s people even though it had more than 100,000 troops there.
Why should Americans politicians imagine that ISAF’s much more vulnerable and more poorly informed 90,000 could succeed?
So, the destructive power the ISAF can (and sometimes does) employ in Afghanistan, is considerably heftier, more mobile, and more lethal than that used by the Russians?
That doesn’t count for anything strategically meaningful on today’s battlefield. It “matters” only to the communities that get ripped apart by those very destructive air and artillery attacks… communities where lives and livelihoods alike can be blown out of existence by a single piece of hyper-destructive ordnance.
But the political– that is, the truly strategic– result of such attacks has frequently been merely to harden opinion against those who have launched them. The ability (and willingness) to use hyper-lethal force thus very frequently turns out to be counter-productive… As, to their credit, Gen. Petraeus and the other authors of the U.S. military’s 2006 “Counterinsurgency Manual” recognized when they were writing it.
Enter the “softer, gentler” way of American warfare in Afghanistan… As was described in this May 20 report on NPR by Jackie Northam, and in this report in today’s WaPo by Karen De Young.
Northam:

Until a few weeks ago, U.S. and NATO military officials were describing the upcoming operation in Kandahar as a major offensive — the cornerstone of the new strategy meant to break the momentum of the Taliban insurgency — and said it was due to get under way this spring or in early summer, to be wrapped up by August.
But then last month, American military spokesmen in Kabul began telling reporters it was incorrect to use terms such as “offensive” or “operation” in describing plans for Kandahar. Last week, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said the “efforts” in Kandahar are a process, not an event.
… “We’re not using the term ‘operation’ or ‘major operations,’ because that often brings to mind in people’s psyche the idea of a D-Day and an H-hour and an attack,” he said.
Not only has the terminology changed, but so too has the timeline. Officials with the departments of State and Defense say an outright offensive won’t be launched until this autumn at the earliest.

DeYoung today:

“It’s not a military operation in the normal sense of the word,” an administration official said.
… The name of the offensive — Hamkari Baraye Kandahar, or Cooperation for Kandahar — was carefully chosen to avoid the word “operation,” which suggests violence. The administration official described it benignly as a “military presence” and [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai has defined it as a “process.”

But the U.S.’s softer, gentler way of warfare is not going well. The mantra for this COIN-inspired approach is that the counterinsurgency forces need to “clear, hold, and build” in the successive chunks of the land that they operate in.
In Kandahar, which is widely considered the key to “breaking” the Afghan Taliban, the prospects for “clear and hold” already look pretty bleak. Yesterday’s Wapo had this (notably “Kim”-like) story about pro-Talib operatives who in recent weeks have already been quietly assassinating and poisoning pro-U.S. community leaders throughout the city.
Significantly, the writer there, Joshua Partlow, reports that in most cases the assassins have delivered “night letters” to their targets a few nights before the killings. You could describe that as a scare tactic. Or, more generously, you could say that it gives the recipients “one last chance” to cease their cooperation with the U.S…. but on pain of death.
For his story, Partlow got to interview the surviving relatives of some of those who ended up killed, and of course, many of their stories were heart-rending. Who he did not, I imagine, get to interview were the families where a member had received such a threatening letter and then moved swiftly to cut all ties with the Americans (including with military-accompanied U.S. reporters like Partlow.) Who knows what the proportion between the members of those two groups would be?
… And then, regarding the third, “build” phase of the COIN program, DeYoung’s piece gives us an indication of how very challenging (or perhaps, actually, doomed from the get-go) that phase promises to be. She cites a recent, military-produced analysis as reporting that,

Of 784 uniformed police in Kandahar city and the surrounding area, only 25 percent to 30 percent have been trained, although new forces are scheduled to arrive for the offensive. Of 87 slots for local judges, nine are filled. Saraposa prison, the main detention facility in Kandahar, is overpopulated and is considered less than secure, and the offensive is expected to produce “far more” prisoners than it can handle…

As Northam noted, the U.S. military and many other actors have been looking at the fate of the U.S. military’s “clear, hold, and build” in the much smaller town/district of Marjah last February as giving an indication of what might lie ahead in Kandahar.
What they’ve been seeing must have been very dishearterning for the military.
On May 18, the London Sunday Times’s Marie Colvin, who had just been in Marjah, had this to report:

I personally was out on patrol with the American Marines. We were on a night patrol and we were spotted by what was the Taliban. They started following us with the light from a roof and there were others in the tree line. It was very clear that they had some kind of network in Marjah. I would say about 50 percent are local Marjah residents. Everyone knows who they were, they put their Kalishnikovs down, they picked up a shovel, and now they’ve come back, given that the poppy harvest is in.
The Taliban make their money from taxing local poppy farmers… Certainly other Taliban, other supporters have come back into Marjah. But a lot of the insurgents and the intimidation you’re seeing is actually coming from local Marjah Taliban sympathizers or members.

NPR host Robert Siegel, who was interviewing Colvin there, framed the report with this assessment:

In February, the U.S. Marines moved into Marjah in force, having publically declared the district of 75,000 a key objective. They were there to push the Taliban out of their last remaining stronghold in the province. This was part of the Afghan surge, more U.S. and Afghan troops that would hold the city and protect the population.
Well, after initial reports of resistance and then success, here’s what’s disconcerting: the Taliban have resumed their insurgency and Afghan civilians are fleeing the area…

The big, quasi-state visit that Karzai and 15 members of his government made to Washington just 10-12 days ago now already seems a distant memory. He got the expected rapping over the knuckles from some of his hosts about the need for him to “crack down on corruption”, etc.
Like most other aspects of his visit, that one was really an act of kabuki theater (and I really don’t know how participants in such gatherings can keep themselves from giggling at key moments.) Because of course, one of the major “weapons” the U.S. military is planning to use during its “surge” in Kandahar– as it did in Iraq’s Anbar province in 2007– is great bags-full of dollar bills, with which it hopes to buy off as many of the insurgents as possible.
Anyway, one thing Karzai was able to win from his American hosts during his visit was their “permission” that he could go ahead and organize a “peace jirga” later this month, to try to engage key figures close to the Taliban in a peace negotiation.
On May 20, AP had a report that he and his people have already been sending out some pretty serious peace feelers to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami, including with a meeting then underway in the Maldives and an earlier meeting in Kabul.
The Hizb is thought to be a lot smaller than the Taliban; and Karzai was said to have been upset that the initiative in convening the Maldives meeting had been taken by Hekmatyar’s son-in-law, not himself. For more on the Maldives meeting, see Tim Coghlan’s May 21 piece in the London Times.
Anyway, between the promised peace jirga and the Maldives meeting, it seems that Karzai is still a lot more eager to explore a negotiated resolution of the conflict with the Taliban than the Americans are.
Pres. Obama needs to be a lot more open than he currently is to the idea of making a speedy and substantial shift away from military confrontation in Afghanistan, and toward real negotiations with all the substantial political currents in the country, with a U.N. framework being the one best designed to support such talks.
Hey, he could always say this is part of the “new internationalism” he was so eager to talk about during the commencement address he gave at the West Point Military Academy yesterday.
Absent such a shift, many more of Afghanistan’s chronically war-battered people are going to continue to find their lives blighted– or snuffed out completely– by the continuing conflict; many more U.S. service-members are going to find themselves at risk in a very distant, very hostile land; and the extraordinary costs of this military campaign in Afghanistan will continue sucking life out of our country’s present economy and our future economic prospects.
Call off this military confrontation, Obama! Find a way to the peace table while you can.

Oh, the U.S. has such a pesky “Host Nation” problem in Afghanistan these days, doesn’t it?
On Saturday, the U.S.-installed president, Hamid Karzai said he would join the Taliban if the western nations don’t stop meddling in his country.
H’mmm.
“Host Nation” is a key concept in the US Army and Marine Corps’s 2006 manual on counter-insurgency. U.S. counter-insurgency theory, you see– or ‘COIN’ as the cognoscenti call it– is all based on the idea that the U.S. military will be fighting these vicious, basically anti-guerrilla wars inside somebody else’s country. Thus there is from the get-go a deep problem of the legitimacy of the U.S. presence; and the U.S. military can attempt to solve this only by upholding the myth that they are always there “at the invitation” of the local government of what is called the “Host Nation”.
Never mind that it may well have been– as in the case of Karzai government in Afghanistan or the Nuri al-Maliki government in Iraq– only the power of the U.S. military that brought these men to power in the first place. That fact needs to be airbrushed out of this account of the roots of the U.S. military’s legitimacy.
But then, those U.S.-installed “leaders” tend to go majorly off the reservation and start acting on their own account. Both these men, for example, have fairly warm relations with the Iranian government. (But only Karzai could pull off the complicated political trick of being on good terms with both the Iranian mullahs and the fiercely anti-Shiite Taliban!)
Actually, U.S.-installed leaders are going off the reservation in other countries, too. How about that Saad Hariri, all lovey-dovey with Syria these days?
… I just went back and read the lengthy critique I did here in January 2007 of the U.S. military’s whole COIN doctrine, and the problem it has with the legitimacy issue and with Host Nation relations. It is really not too bad. Scroll on down to the table there.
Within Afghanistan, Karzai’s present truculence toward the Americans poses huge problems for the American military’s plan to mount a big anti-Taliban operation in Kandahar over the summer. This operation has, I think, been intended to be the capstone of the big “look-tough” policy Obama and his advisers planned as a prelude to the major drawdown of U.S. forces that he has all along planned. (As I wrote in my Boston Review piece last December.)
But for the U.S. military to get tough in Kandahar, they’ll need to be confronting the provincial governor, who is Karzai’s reportedly very corrupt brother Ahmed Wali Karzai. I suspect that’s what much of the current U.S.-Karzai tension is really about?
At abroader level, though, the endgame for the U.S. military’s 8.5-year presence in Afghanistan now looks as though it might well be rather ignominious. As I’ve argued in numerous places before, it would be much better for Washington to take the “Afghanistan question” back to the U.N Security Council and win the real support of all the other big powers there for a resolution that will allow an orderly shrinkage of U.S. military power in the region, real buy-in from Afghanistan’s neighbors and all the other big Asian powers to some broad regional settlement, and a re-balancing of the west-rest balance both in that region and everywhere else in the world.
Maintaining the fiction that Americans of any description– whether grunts earnestly trying to follow Gen. Petraeus’s COIN manual, or the former Marine Corps general who’s Obama’s national security adviser, or the former junior senator from New York who’s now the country’s top diplomat– have any clue at all as to how to resolve Afghanistan’s many very thorny problems of internal balance, governance, and relations with its neighbors is a mistake that it’s very costly to continue making for very much longer.

Richard A. Oppel had a fascinating, closely reported piece from Marja, Afghanistan, in the NYT today, telling how that small part of Helmand province, which was supposed to be the showcase for how Obama’s very own surge in Afghanistan could “turn the tide” against the Taliban, has in fact done nothing of the sort.
Oppel’s lede:

Since their offensive here in February, the Marines have flooded Marja with hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. The tactic aims to win over wary residents by paying them compensation for property damage or putting to work men who would otherwise look to the Taliban for support.
The approach helped turn the tide of insurgency in Iraq. But in Marja, where the Taliban seem to know everything — and most of the time it is impossible to even tell who they are — they have already found ways to thwart the strategy in many places, including killing or beating some who take the Marines’ money, or pocketing it themselves.
Just a few weeks since the start of the operation here, the Taliban have “reseized control and the momentum in a lot of ways” in northern Marja, Maj. James Coffman, civil affairs leader for the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, said in an interview in late March. “We have to change tactics to get the locals back on our side.”
Col. Ghulam Sakhi, an Afghan National Police commander here, says his informants have told him that at least 30 Taliban have come to one Marine outpost here to take money from the Marines as compensation for property damage or family members killed during the operation in February.
“You shake hands with them, but you don’t know they are Taliban,” Colonel Sakhi said. “They have the same clothes, and the same style. And they are using the money against the Marines. They are buying I.E.D.’s and buying ammunition, everything.”

Oppel says directly that the Marines trying to do the “hold and build” phases of the “war” in Marja are “somewhat flummoxed”:

In Marja, the Taliban are hardly a distinct militant group, and the Marines have collided with a Taliban identity so dominant that the movement appears more akin to the only political organization in a one-party town, with an influence that touches everyone. Even the Marines admit to being somewhat flummoxed.
“We’ve got to re-evaluate our definition of the word ‘enemy,’ ” said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province. “Most people here identify themselves as Taliban.”
“We have to readjust our thinking so we’re not trying to chase the Taliban out of Marja, we’re trying to chase the enemy out,” he said. “We have to deal with these people.”

The story also strongly suggests to me that the Afghan National Police commander quoted, Col. Ghulam Sakhi, is either on bad terms with the man whom the Americans have parachuted in as been district governor, “Hajji” Abdul Zahir, or Ghulam Sakhi feels he’s not getting enough of a payoff from the huge amounts of money Abdul Zahir has been given control of by the Americans (or both.)
These kinds of problems within Afghan politics probably pose an even greater threat to Gen. McChrystal’s “COIN” plan for Afghanistan than do the Talibs and the other insurgents. The next big campaign for the “surge” will pose an even greater political challenge. That will be Kandahar, where PM Hamid Karzai’s brother is governor and is viewed by the Americans as a huge political problem.
Well, relations between the Americans and the PM are in pretty poor shape right now, too… In fact, the political problems the U.S. forces are facing in Afghanistan these days probably make the ones they faced in Iraq in 2006-07 look simple by comparison. Ditto the logistical challenges. (For the latter, see e.g. here and here. Scroll down for the story in that second one.)
Over at Registan, Joshua Foust has pointed out that in the excellent op-ed he had in the NYT a month ago, he predicted exactly these kinds of problems in Marja.
Having read the Oppel piece this morning, it was strange to get to the WaPo this evening and see the usually sensible David Ignatius writing an incredibly upbeat piece from Marja today. He was indicating that the process of convening tribal shuras and spreading money around was working very well:

This is how conflicts end in Afghanistan: The Afghans talk out their grievances and eventually reach a deal. Money is exchanged and honor restored. Fighting often continues in the background, but most people go home until the next conflict begins.
“By all appearances, the people of Marja just want to get on with their lives,” says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was an enthusiastic observer of the shura here. He assured an audience of Afghan journalists later in Kabul: “All of us want to see this [war] end as soon as possible.”

Ignatius, however, gives no evidence that he’s spent anything like the amount of time in Marja itself that Oppel and his photographer, Moises Saman, did. So though i usually have a lot of respect for Ignatius’s work, on this one I’m incline to trust Oppel more. (By the way, the print version of the story is much longer and more detailed than the web version. Worth getting hold of.)
Back in December, I argued in this Boston Review article that most of the thinking behind Obama’s decision to “surge” in Afghanistan was actually U.S. domestic politics. I still think that’s the case. But for Obama’s original plan to work, he has to find a way to subsequently get out of Afghanistan that’s not a rout. Not easy.