Afghanistan’s Most Wanted

What do the words “Afghanistan” and “insurgency” bring to mind? I expect most would say “Taliban.” Nice guess but – no cigar.

It’s not your fault. Our political and military leaders have spent the past seven years grooming your mind to go in default, ‘Taliban-mode’ whenever Afghanistan comes into the conversation.

Would you be surprised to learn that the Afghan insurgency is actually comprised of some fourteen armed camps, organized along ethnic and feudal lines, most of them operating independently of the others? That’s fourteen as in one more than thirteen or thirteen more than the Taliban.

In fairness, it wasn’t always that way – it just is that way now. And, no, this isn’t including al-Qaeda. They’re not insurgents which are, by definition, Afghan nationalists. al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization whose interests sometimes, but not always, overlap with the insurgency’s.

The CIA has told the Los Angeles Times that the latest “surge” in violence against the Infidel forces is the handiwork of three warlords, all of them from Karzai’s Pashtun tribe: Mullah Omar (the old hand), Jalaluddin Haqqani (a former Taliban leader recently returned to fill the bomb-emptied boots of Mullah Dadullah) and, as no anti-Western uprising would be complete without him, the nastiest dog in the Pashtun pack, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a former Taliban rival who’s now thrown in with the insurgency to be able to claim his share in the civil war that’s bound to resume when we leave).

As though they haven’t made stupid blunders before, the Times quotes CIA officials as saying they’re making a bid to win over – gulp – Hekmatyar:

“Hekmatyar, who is based north of Peshawar in Pakistan, is the most mercurial of the three. As an engineering student at Kabul University in the 1970s, he was accused of throwing acid in the faces of women who did not wear a veil. He became one of the most effective mujahedin leaders in the war against the Soviets during the 1980s, leading a group that received millions in CIA funding.

The CIA and U.S. special operations teams, hoping to turn him again, have approached Hekmatyar in recent years through intermediaries, according to U.S. sources. Last year, he was also contacted by representatives of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The talks went nowhere, according to Afghan news reports.”

Now, to put this in some perspective, Hekmatyar (the pleasant looking chap pictured above) was the obvious Pashtun pick to become Afghan president after the mujahadeen drove out the Soviets and their communist government. He was considered by Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency much too rabid for the job so they shoehorned in the far more moderate Taliban instead. And now the CIA is trying to recruit this guy?

Tell me again that we’re going to win this thing.

 

Afghanistan Coming Unglued

More news about Afghanistan and, as expected, little good in it.

The Aussies have leaked a secret NATO study showing we’re not winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. To the contrary, a majority of those polled now see ISAF unfavourably. Maybe it has something to do with shelling and bombing the hell out of their villages, maybe not.

The Australian report was from last Saturday’s Syndney Morning Herald:

“AUSTRALIAN troops in southern Afghanistan face worsening security and their battlefield successes against the Taliban are not winning the support of local people, a confidential report and secret polling show.

The Sun-Herald has obtained a confidential security report that warns the capital, Kabul, will become virtually cut off from the rest of the country and is likely to be the target of a “spectacular” terrorist attack.

It says security in Oruzgan province, where about 1000 Australian troops are based and where Signaller Sean McCarthy was killed last week, will deteriorate, with the likelihood of more casualties among foreign troops.

The report, by international security consultants, says tactical successes against the Taliban are not being translated into long-term improvements in the lives of Afghan people.

The report’s warnings are underlined by a secret poll undertaken for NATO that reveals Oruzgan residents are increasingly negative towards foreign troops and regard their level of security as poor and getting worse.”

In Oruzgan province alone, where the Australians serve alongside the Dutch, 60% of the population has been found to be anti-NATO.

The Globe & Mail reported that the Canadian military has been reviewing the Soviet failure in Afghanistan in hopes of avoiding the same mistakes.

Researchers said the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is a major hindrance. The mujahedeen used the porous frontier to smuggle arms and resources into Afghanistan in the 1980s and are offering Taliban supporters the same supply route for insurgents and weapons today.

…In a separate memo that year, the same authors warn that NATO forces will never be able to stabilize Afghanistan until the country’s economy is sufficiently stable and growing to allow the fledging Afghan government to cover a substantial amount of its own security and welfare bills.

“The main reasons behind the fall of the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul were not defeat on the battlefield nor military superiority of the resistance but the regime’s failure to achieve economic sustainability and its overreliance on foreign aid,” says a document called Economic Development in Afghanistan during the Soviet Period 1979-1989: Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan.

…The authors say Afghanistan should redevelop its petroleum wealth as part of the solution. “Revenues from the sale of natural gas were a substantial part of Afghan state income until 1986. The development of oil and natural gas industries has great potential to benefit the Afghan economy.”

…Douglas Bland, chair of Defence Management Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, said a key lesson from the 1980s is not to leave in a hurried manner as the Soviets did.

“One of the big lessons for us is, don’t beat a hasty uncontrolled retreat because the place then really goes nuts,” Prof. Bland said. “The exit strategy has to be some very carefully considered process and based on a strong local security situation.”

“Canadians should be prepared for the fact that Canadian soldiers and policemen and others will be employed in security duties in Afghanistan for a very long time.”

Unfortunately Mr. (Dr.) Bland overlooks a fundamental point – time is not on our side. We’re infidels to the Afghan people. We’re ethnically, culturally, economically, politically, linguistically and religiously alien to them. We’re just the latest gang in centuries of Euros to set up shop in that country, stay a few years and then leave. General David Petraeus knows that counter-insurgency operations such as the Afghan effort have a markedly short shelf life before the foreign soldiers transition, in the eyes of the locals, from liberators to occupiers. The NATO report leaked by the Australians shows we’re already losing these people in droves.

Did someone mention “oil”? Why, of course, by all means build up Afghanistan’s oil and natural gas infrastructure. Pipelines. That’s the ticket, eh? One problem. We don’t control the countryside. We’re a tiny, garrison force. We don’t have but a fraction of the troops we need just to defend against the Taliban. Who in hell is going to defend vast stretches of pipelines that can be so easily destroyed with just a small amount of explosives? If the Taliban can virtually surround Kabul and cut it off from the rest of the country, pipelines will be destroyed as fast as they’re built – just another way of so many to undermine the Afghan people’s confidence in their government.

Then there’s the pipeline route. It’s planned to run through Farah, Kandahar and Helmand provinces, all Taliban hotbeds. From there it’s straight into Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, itself embroiled in an insurgency (with some American support). If the bad guys have a reserve of people willing to blow themselves up at the first sight of a NATO patrol, how hard will it be to persuade folks to place explosives on vulnerable pipelines?

The Globe’s Paul Koring went to Moscow to see what he could learn about the Russian experience in Afghanistan and got an earful from retired four star general Ruslan Aushev who spent five years with the Soviet army during the occupation:

“You are just repeating our mistakes,” Mr. Aushev said in an elegant, memento-filled office close to the Russian Duma.

“Most Afghans still live in a feudal society, in villages far from the cities,” he said. “For them, there is no difference between being bombed by the Soviets and now being bombed by the Americans … and it won’t succeed.”

“The Taliban may not be able to win militarily but they can’t be defeated and sooner or later the Western alliance will be forced with pullout,” he warned.

Support for the insurgents will grow the longer the foreign armies remain in Afghanistan, he said. Although the Soviets deployed more than 100,000 soldiers across Afghanistan – roughly double the number of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops currently deployed – and trained an Afghan army three times the size of Kabul’s current security forces, it was never enough, Mr. Aushev said.

“If we wanted stability we would have needed 800,000 soldiers,” he said, echoing the estimates of some unheeded American generals who called for much larger occupation forces in Iraq.”

The leaked NATO report is interesting. It clearly contains nothing that our adversaries – the insurgents, the drug barons and the corrupt politicians and government officials who collaborate with them – don’t already know. The risk to NATO is that the information might reach the voters in its member nations and further erode support for the hapless adventure in Afghanistan. After all the core element of guerrilla warfare is the struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the public and that’s a struggle NATO has to win both in Afghanistan and at home. If it loses either, it loses both.

We ought to be wary about the latest oil and gas proposals. Look at the facts. Our forces, alien as they are to the Afghan peoples, have been in-country since 2001, seven years already. We’re now propping up a decidedly unpopular central government and a power structure predatory to its citizens. We’re wearing out our welcome. Petraeus himself warned of the very limited shelf-life of counterinsurgency warfare in which the “liberator” comes to be seen as the “occupier.” We’re now in the “occupier” stage and we can only reinforce that perception, and play into the Taliban’s propaganda machine, if we get involved in developing, managing and militarily defending the country’s gas and oil resources.

With the Afghan mission already faltering, adding an oil dimension to it can only undermine its credibility with the Afghan peoples. We need an influx of American troops to help hold off the Taliban, not to defend long tracts of steel pipe. If the American army doesn’t secure the pipelines, the job will fall to someone else. Can you say Blackwater?

 

Robot Wars

A British expert on robotic weaponry warns that they could soon become an affordable weapon of choice for terrorists and insurgents. From Reuters:

Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield said he believed falling costs would soon make robots a realistic option for extremist groups.
Several countries and companies are developing the technology for robot weapons, with the U.S. Department of Defense leading the way. More than 4,000 robots are deployed in Iraq.

“The trouble is that we can’t really put the genie back in the bottle. Once the new weapons are out there, they will be fairly easy to copy,” Sharkey will tell a one-day conference organised by the Royal United Services Institute on Wednesday.

“How long is it going to be before the terrorists get in on the act? With the current prices of robot construction falling dramatically and the availability of ready-made components for the amateur market, it wouldn’t require a lot of skill to make autonomous robot weapons.”

Sharkey says a GPS guided drone could be produced for about $500.

 

The Will to Leave – And Live

The Canadian Armed Forces have taken on a Herculean chore in Afghanistan. Maybe that’s because we – and the handful of participating NATO nations – are stuck in peacekeeping mode.

I have nothing against peacekeeping. I believe that’s what Canadian forces do best, where they make the greatest contribution. That said, Afghanistan isn’t about peacekeeping. It’s counterinsurgency warfare. Yet we’re still approaching it as though it was something else and that’s why, six years down the road, we still sit around with our thumbs up our backsides sending our soldiers out trolling for IEDs.

We’re told the biggest task is to train an Afghan army of somewhere between 40,000 to 70,000 soldiers to ensure the security of the country and the central government in Kabul. What have we accomplished? 15, maybe 20,000 tops and a lot of them either deserting or about to every day. Six years for this?

In six years we ought to have been able to recruit, equip and train an army of 100,000 from Quaker colonies alone! But the Afghan people aren’t pacifists, they’re steeped in martial history although it’s generally been on a tribal level but still. So what gives? Damn little, and that’s the problem.

The answer lies in Canada’s mission to Kandahar but you can find the same message in the Dutch, the German and the French contingents also. We’re over there on peacekeeping mode.

In warfighting mode, the relative positions of civilian and military leaders shift somewhat. The civilian leadership remains in overall command and tells the military what it wants. The military then tells the civilian leadership what it needs to do the job. The civilian leadership then comes up with what the military needs or at least it does its best to fit the bill. Then the military goes out and achieves what it’s been told to accomplish or dies trying.

The military measures its needs according to the job it’s been given. If it has to fight an army of 20,000, it needs enough force to do that job. If it has to fight an army of 100,000, it needs considerably more. What the military needs is defined by the challenge. If the government wants to run convoys it needs to churn out corvettes and frigates. If it wants to fight an air war it needs bombers and fighters.

We’re at war in Afghanistan but we’re not acting like it. At the risk of droning on about this again, when we picked up the Kandahar mission, General Rick Hillier prescribed a force of about 2,500 soldiers for the job. That would give him 1,500 inside the wire to do all the support jobs necessary to let him maintain a combat force of 1,000 soldiers outside the wire. Why only 1,000? Well, at the outset, Hillier told the fawning flock of reporters that we were only facing a “few dozen …scumbags.” Even though Kandahar at 52,000 sq. kms. is a good amount of territory, 1,000 soldiers ought to have been enough to handle a few dozen bad guys.

But that few dozen quickly turned into a few hundred and now into the thousands with several thousand more waiting their turn just across the line in Pakistan and what are we deploying to meet that threat? Why a force of 2,500; 1,500 inside the wire and 1,000 troops outside, just like we had at the outset.

We were supposed to have the bad guys handily outnumbered but we don’t anymore. Their numbers have grown, by an order of magnitude, while ours remain static or, perhaps, stagnant. We remain, even at this late date, with a force measured to conventional warfighting, not counterinsurgency.

Guerrilla war isn’t fought with tanks and artillery and air strikes. Heavy firepower ought to play a relatively minor role. Counterinsurgency is a war of soldiers, lots of soldiers. It requires the government side to occupy ground, denying that territory and the civilians and villages within it to the enemy. You keep them out by being there yourself.

The Romans mastered counterinsurgency warfare and just about every power since then has had a go at it. Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, Afghanistan are all examples where the guerrillas won. There are others. Let’s see – where did they lose? I’ll have to get back to you on that. Sure there was Malaya but there the Brits weren’t dealing with a nationalist force but an insurgency spawned by an ethnic minority (Chinese) that the Malays wouldn’t support.

Notice I said “nationalist”? That’s because guerrilla movements are nationalist. They come from within and seek to implant their vision on their country. It’s their country. It’s where they and their families and their tribes live. They don’t want to destroy the country, they want to reshape it. That’s why their war is a political war. Only by achieving their political goals – foremost among them the collapse of popular support for the central government – do they win.

You don’t get very far trying to force a guerrilla opponent to fight a military war. By the simple fact that they don’t have tanks or artillery or helicopter gunships or mobility or high tech communications, there’s no way they can win a military war. But they don’t have to win a military war, they don’t have to fight a military war. Our senior officers just make themselves look idiotic when they mock the Taliban for not coming out to “fight like men.” That’s the mentality of leadership that’s committed to fighting the wrong war, the military war.

The low manpower/high firepower military war plays into the hands of the insurgents. We’ve become addicted to massively superior firepower as a “force multiplier” a way to avoid having to actually multiply the force itself. It’s just super, as long as you can get your enemy to mass into a convenient formation in a suitable battlefield. That’s military war. Those same, massive firepower weapons lose political wars. Because you rely on weaponry you don’t have soldiers on the ground in the villages to keep the insurgents out. Then, when the guerrillas provoke you into firing on them, your powerful weaponry almost inevitably wipes out civilians in the mix.

Now, you may kill ten guerrillas and only two civilians but in the village down the road the locals are going to get told you killed twelve civilians and they’re going to believe it. There, you just took another loss in the political war. They’re going to believe it because they know these insurgents freely come into their villages also and that means they could be the next in line for your “death from above.” They lay the blame for the dead civilians at your feet because they know that when their turn comes it’ll be a Western bomb that kills their family. And all that heavy firepower they associate with that guy Karzai in Kabul. Eventually they may see the guerrillas as their only hope of getting to live in peace again.

So, what’s the answer? Surely it must begin in taking the decision to either leave or wage a counterinsurgency war. We either fight the insurgents in their political war or we leave. How do we fight a counterinsurgency war? You do what it takes and that means your political leaders decide to provide their military leaders with what they need for this type of warfare – massive numbers of soldiers.

Those leaders, Harper included, need to take a couple of hours to read America’s new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, FM 3-24. If you want to read it and know more about the problem than your own prime minister and his defence minister and, perhaps, even our top general, follow this link:

www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf

The lead author of fm3-24 was America’s guerrilla warfare wunderkind, David Petraeus. It came about because the American military realized after 9/11 that it knew almost nothing about counterinsurgency warfare. They also realized there was a treasure trove of invaluable information at their fingertips from all those guerrilla wars over the last two millenia and they began by absorbing and digesting that wisdom.

So, what’s the miracle truism of fm3-24? Rule Numero Uno is that counterinsurgency warfare is the most labour-intensive warfare we can undertake. You need people on the ground occupying territory. You need them living in and securing the villages and the fields and the installations. You need them scouring the territory ambushing and hunting down the insurgents. You need scads of soldiers so that you maintain the initiative, not the guerrillas. You win by keeping them on the defensive, unable to access their essential civilian support system. If you don’t, you lose. Which leads to Rule Numeros Dos – Go Big or Go Home.

Harper, loudmouthed braggart that he is, proclaims the government is going to do “what’s right” in Afghanistan, not what it learns from polls. Fair enough. Want to know “what’s right?” Go to fm 3-24 and other recent strategic studies. What’s right is a combat force that falls between one rifle for every twenty five to fifty civilians in the territory to be protected. What’s right means a force of 15-25,000 soldiers in Kandahar, combat soldiers. That’s “what’s right”, and that’s what Harper has absolutely no intention of doing.

What’s right is not leaving our understrength force over there to run through territory it doesn’t control, trolling for IEDs. What’s right is having the courage, the decency to honour the sacrifice of these soldiers by admitting we’re not going to bear the burden of fielding the force they need to win. What’s right is to muster up the integrity to admit it’s time to leave.

 

Sunni Insurgency on R&R in Iraq

The White House eagerly portrays the 30,000 soldier “surge” of the past few months as a great success and there have indeed been positive signs, especially a decline in sectarian butchery in Baghdad and a sharp reduction in attacks on American troops. But not everyone has been certain just what the surge actually accomplished. There has been a lot of speculation that the warring parties, the Shia militias and the Sunni insurgency, just decided to lay low and wait it out, relying on reports that the surge would only be temporary. Now, a senior member of the Sunni insurgency has told The Guardian that was indeed the case.

Iraq’s main Sunni-led resistance groups have scaled back their attacks on US forces in Baghdad and parts of Anbar province in a deliberate strategy aimed at regrouping, retraining, and waiting out George Bush’s “surge”, a key insurgent leader has told the Guardian.
US officials recently reported a 55% drop in attacks across Iraq. One explanation they give is the presence of 30,000 extra US troops deployed this summer. The other is the decision by dozens of Sunni tribal leaders to accept money and weapons from the Americans in return for confronting al-Qaida militants who attack civilians. They call their movement al-Sahwa (the Awakening).

The resistance groups are another factor in the complex equation in Iraq’s Sunni areas. “We oppose al-Qaida as well as al-Sahwa,” the director of the political department of the 1920 Revolution Brigades told the Guardian in Damascus in a rare interview with a western reporter.

Using the nom de guerre Dr Abdallah Suleiman Omary, he went on: “Al-Sahwa has made a deal with the US to take charge of their local areas and not hit US troops, while the resistance’s purpose is to drive the occupiers out of Iraq. We are waiting in al-Sahwa areas. We disagree with them but do not fight them. We have shifted our operations to other areas”.

Omary predicts the deal negotiated last week between Bush and the Shia prime minister al Maliki for a permanent American military presence in Iraq will fracture the American’s cease-fire with al-Shawa.

If Omary is right, the surge may have accomplished very little perhaps save for giving everyone involved a much needed respite.

 

The Kiss of Death

The US commander in Iraq, counter-insurgency wunderkind General David Petraeus has told BBC that fighting the Iraqi insurgency is a long-term challenge that could take decades.

If anyone should know, it’s Petraeus whose extensive study of insurgency and guerrilla warfare was incorporated in the US Army’s new counter-insurgency field manual, FM 3-24.

The general’s comments, while probably accurate, raise some tough questions. For example, just what is going to be left of Iraq after an insurgency/civil war of decades? What does this forecast mean to the American people and the 2008 elections?

It’s going to be tough, if not impossible, to sell the idea of a decades-long war in Iraq to Americans in 2007 after they’ve put up with four years of setbacks. They have simply lost their appetite for this wholly unnecessary adventure and I’m sure Petraeus knows that as well as anyone.

 

Oh, This is Precious

“Going to war without France

is like going duck hunting

without your accordion”

Remember when “Dysfunctional Don” Rumsfeld uttered that insult to France when it refused to join Bush’s insane invasion of Iraq? America and Americans turned on France, calling them “surrender monkeys” and renaming french fries “freedom fries.” What a pack of sphincters!

The Christian Science Monitor reports that George w. Bush and his followers are now scrambling to learn everything they can about fighting insurgencies the French style. They’re lapping up the lessons of what the French did right in Algeria:

“The Pentagon held a screening in 2003 of “The Battle of Algiers,” a movie about French troops winning control of the Algerian capital. President Bush says that he recently read Alistair Horne’s authoritative history on the war, “A Savage War of Peace.” And last fall, Christopher Harmon, who teaches a course on the Algerian war at the Marine Corps University (MCU) in Washington, lectured marines in Iraq about the Algerian model.”

“Many steps taken in Algeria offer valuable lessons for Iraq …but not all are applicable. The Algerian and Iraqi insurgencies are different as are the French and American military forces and their strategic goals. The French went in with an overwhelming force determined to permanently control Algeria. Some 500,000 French soldiers occupied a country of 9 million Algerians and were aided by skilled Algerian soldiers called harkis. In Iraq there are roughly 150,000 troops in a country of about 26 million where efforts to train strong, nationalist-minded Iraqi security forces have had spotty results.

“Sealing off the borders is a lesson “the US has totally been unable to use … this is one of the problems of going in with the small force [former US Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld chose. This is something the French didn’t make a mistake on,” says Christopher Harmon, who teaches a course on the Algerian war at the Marine Corps University (MCU) in Washington .

Now, just to recap. What did the French do right in Algeria? They went in with 500,000 soldiers for a country of 9-million. Wait a minute, what about Canada in Kandahar? What have we got? Oh yeah, a combat group of 1,000 foot soldiers. Maybe Harper and Hillier could borrow that book when George finishes with it. No forget it, we’ll be out of there by 2009.