Afghanistan Flashback!

I had really thought I had gotten all of my war stories out of my system when, after reading this post from [My] State Failure Blog a memory came to mind.

The portion of the post which sparked my recollection was:

- Complaints about the fact the US military continued to hire and employ local militiamen to guard some of its bases even at the time when the DDR process was on.

Que the way back machine to 2003/2004…

I certainly wasn’t particularly high on the food chain in Afghanistan but you didn’t need to be on the NSC to know that the goal of our efforts was the creation of a central government that could exercise control of the nation. One of the ways of doing that would be giving the government a monopoly (or at least a preponderance) on the use of force by disarming the numerous ‘warlords’ and militias and creating, in their place a proper army.

I was therefore surprised to hear from my command staff a plan to hire several local commanders to provide ’security’ to Bagram Airfield. I put security in quotes because we had security well in hand and the program was actually a jobs program. Quite frankly, several of us were quite baffled by the decision for several reasons:

If we wanted to encourage militia members to find another line of work, why pay them to remain militia men?
Some of the commanders were were supposed to work with were not the most trustworthy types. There was concern about having their armed men in a position to conduct surveillance or worse.
Fear that the militias would use this job as yet another way to extort money from local inhabitants. We had several instances where commanders pointed to their relationship with us to intimidate and exploit local populations. Strengthening that impression seemed a bad idea.

The whole thing was all the more confusing because just a day or two after hearing about this grand scheme, I sat in on a briefing by a British officer about the DDR program and its ambitious plans. Afterwards I asked him about his impressions of the militia jobs program we were implementing and he seemed dumbfounded.

Apparently, he didn’t know.

That very much seemed a theme of my tour there. There was very little coordination of activity (at least around Bagram) and units frequently did their own thing. Sometimes that worked out well. You could take the initiative and get things done that otherwise would require an inordinate amount of time getting permission or checking boxes. Other times, and on the whole, it was a net negative since various units or elements within units would work at cross purposes and not know what each other was doing.

Part of that seemed to be the result of an attitude among some, of just trying to muddle through until their tour was over. The assumption was that higher headquarters was keeping control of the ‘master plan’ and worrying about the effects of individual soldiers or units on overall strategy was ‘beyond our pay grade’. This allowed some commanders to make decisions that were directly contradictory with our strategic interests.

Hmmm…it seems my experience wasn’t an isolated one.