A bad day in Afghanistan

Bad news today that 9 soldiers were killed and more injured in an attack on a base near the Afghan-Pakistan border.  ‘I told you so’ is really getting less and less satisfying after 5 years but this is really another indication that the U.S. hasn’t lost the initiative in its “War on Terror” but that it has never really tried to win it.  We got roped into Iraq based upon our own hubris, wacked out ideology and theology, then let Al-Qaeda decide that would be the focus of all our attention.  We then spent the next four years with the famous ‘whack-a-mole’ strategy only to switch to the glorious, answer to all our problems SURGE. 

So, what happens next?  Exactly what you’d expect of an enemy who decides the rules.  They just moved to an area where we don’t have a preponderance of force.  We’re just seeing the same old ‘whack a mole’ strategy except now it’s on a regional scale instead of a national one.  What’s the administration’s answer?  Let’s go chase the enemy and declare Afghanistan the ‘central front’.  Great, we’ll take troops out of Iraq ship them off to Afghanistan and then we can ship them back to Iraq in a couple of years when that place falls apart without the huge influx of money, men and arms that we’re putting into it.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m a big fan of sending extra support to Afghanistan and have been since we invaded.  The problem is the reason for the recent interest in such a plan.  It’s got everything to do with reacting to what the enemy is doing and is not part of any coordinated grand strategy on our part. 

We should be deciding where (if anywhere) the main focus of our anti-Islamist efforts should be, not the Islamists we’re fighting.

Afghanistan update

Bad news continues to flow out of Central Asia.  Part of me wants to think (hope?) that the latest string of reporting is really just the news media looking for another interesting story since the Iraq war has fallen into a bit of a lull (at least in terms of Americans dying - Iraqi deaths never seem to generate any interest) but I can’t help feeling that six years of neglect in Afghanistan is getting ready to take a huge bite out of our rear end.

Yesterday’s Washington Post has a story about Pakistan’s military moving in to Peshwar because of concerns about imminent attacks by Islamic extremists.   Pakistan’s media takes an even more alarmist view quoting  in saying:

“Officials in the home department, who evaluate the situation on an almost daily basis, believe declaring a state of red alert is now only a matter of time…Peshawar is in a state of siege and if Peshawar falls, the rest of the districts in the NWFP would fall like ninepins,”

Now Peshwar isn’t some puny collection of mud huts in the middle of nowhere.  It’s a city of 3 million people and if the Pakistani government can’t maintain control of something that big, what can it be expected to do?  An initial report implies that the forces of the government of Pakistan aren’t exactly filled with motivation to act decisively against the militants.

There’s always been suspicions that elements within the Pakistani military/intelligenceservices weren’t necessarily ‘on board’ with this whole ‘War on Terror’ thing and regard the Taliban as good friends.  The recent RAND report (no, I haven’t read it yet and don’t even think about recommending it to me to read while I’m on vacation) asserts that Pakistani forces have provided the Taliban with intelligence and other support.

So what do we do if large portions of Pakistan become’officially’ ungovernable and we can’t even have the current charade in which everyone pretends the central government is in control?

Beats me, but it doesn’t look good.

The best heroin our taxes can buy

J, over at the Armchair Generalist, has a post about a Philadelphia Inquirer story (geez, this better be good, I’m blogging about a blog about a news article…talk about an echo chamber) that described how a marine unit (an element of the 24th MEU) has set up shop in a poppy growing region and allowed local farmers to continue harvesting their crop.  I can only assume the marines will allow the harvest to begin that long, winding journey to the streets of Europe, Asia and the U.S.

J is a big proponent of eradication efforts to destroy the poppy harvest in Afghanistan but I remain skeptical.  Quite frankly, I don’t think there’s any realistic way to destroy the whole (or even a significant amount) of the crop and our puny efforts to do so will only result in the following outcomes:

1. Hostility among the local population towards the U.S./coalition
2. Increased prices (and profits) for the Taliban/drug runners due to reductions in supply (perceived or real)
3. Increased poverty among Afghan farmers

I would argue (and have) that the solution is for the West to buy the poppy crops and destroy them after purchase.  In this way you could deprive insurgents/drug traffickers of both a major source of income and supply of their product and prevent the further impoverishment of Afghan farmers.  While this wouldn’t be a good long term solution, it would go a long way in taking the initiative away from the insurgents and force them to either find alternate sources of revenue or fight to hold poppy producing territory.  This would also contribute to winning that ‘hearts and minds’ campaign we keep hearing about among the local population.

Once you’ve got the poppy farmers on the payroll, the goal then should be to build the infrastructure up as quickly as possible so those farmers can transition to legitimate crops which can be sold on the open market.  One of the problems facing farmers is that crops which could be profitable can’t get to market now without significant spoilage because of the lousy transportation system.  Poppies stand up pretty well to the hardships of long transportation routes.

So the marines protecting the farmers and their opium crop may be denying the Taliban some revenue in their work but that’s not clear at all.  The Taliban may just demand their cut from somewhere higher in the distribution chain.  EIther way, it doesn’t deprive narcotics processors or traffickers from their revenue (and may even benefit them now that their fields are secured free of charge courtesy of the U.S. government) which means they will be staying in business. 

So how well would the Taliban function with $100 million less in revenue every year?  I don’t know, but I’d sure like to find out.

A failure to communicate…

A recent posting from the [My] State Failure Blog turned me on to the work of John McHugh, a photojournalist who’s been spending a lot of time in Afghanistan.  I haven’t gone through his Guardian work yet but this video really brought me back to my time there.

One of the most fundimental challanges in being a solider in a foreign land (not to mention trying to run a successful counterinsurgency campaign) is communicating with the local population.  Even though there were way too few troops in country when I was there, there was a constant shortage of translators.  The majority of translators are locals who happened to know some english (just how much varied greatly) and were not suppossed to be privy to sensitive information.  There were also U.S. citizens, frequently immigrants from Afghanistan, who returned either to help out their new country, their old country, cash in on the $15,000 per month paycheck they were earning or some combination of all three.  Many of these people were given security clearances and therefore were able to be present during sensitive discussions, planning or negotiations.

The demand for translators with clearances (all the ones I knew of hired via private contracting companies) was huge.  So huge, in fact, that many of us had suspicions that corners were cut in the hiring and vetting of many of these interpreters (not to mention the fact that many of them had questionable language skills).

Translators present two significant problems:  errors in translation and abuse of position.

Errors in translation are similar to what you see in the video.  I can’t tell you how many times I asked a local a question, heard him give a lengthy response and then have the interpreter tell me “He says ‘Hi’.”  You then have to decide if you want to get into it with your interpreter and make him tell you everything that was said.  Even then, you can’t be sure if you’re getting the correct translation.

Abuse of position can occur with any interpreter but the most serious repercussions occur with the contracted U.S. citizens.  There were so few around, and the pay was so good that interpreters frequently spent much more time in country than soldiers.  When I got there in 2003, there were several interpreters that had been there almost continuously since the war began, and all their work was in one geographical area.  This positioned the interpreters to be a sort of court Vizier.  Many commanders relied on their interpreters to tell them who they should meet, who was friendly and who to trust.  Rumors were rife that some interpreters sold access (’Oh, you want to have a meeting with the commander?  Then you must pay me.’) and influence.

Now, that is way, WAY outside the bounds of what interpreters are suppossed to do.  They, like their name implies, are suppossed to translate.  That’s it.  Just relay what was just said in one language into another language.  Without commentary, opinion, additions or subtractions.  I have to admit, that it took me a while to learn that lesson myself but many (including many much senior to myself) never learned it.  There was a policy in place to rotate interpreters every so often just so that they couldn’t build up a network of clients and abuse their power.  I never saw such a policy enforced although I did see an attempt.  Some young officer (a captain, I believe) responsible for tracking the interpreters sent out a memo saying that all of our interpreters with security clearances would be rotated on a certain day.  Very shortly thereafter, that order was recinded because of an outcry by senior personnel about how much damage would be caused if they lost ‘their’ interpreter.  Now, if all they’re suppossed to do is translate, why do you need a specific person?  You don’t.  But if you’re using that interpreter as a crutch to tell you how to do your job you fight like hell to keep him.

My theory is that the requirements of a counterinsurgency campaign didn’t really sink in during 2003/2004 and many just didn’t know what they were supposed to do.  Who was taught how to deal with local populations?  Who even knew what our broad strategy was?  So it became easy for some to rely on a person who had been there longer and spoke the language.

I only trusted one translator when I was there and he was a local without any sort of clearance.  By the end of our tour we’d try (usually unsuccessfully) to get two interpreters to go out with us so we could have a bit of check and balance.  Competition was intense among interpreters (frequently he who was attached to the highest ranking soldier rose to prominence in their own internal pecking order) and so you could usually rely on them to stab each other in the back and tell you about screw ups.  That was usually all the incentive interpreters needed to do their job properly.

Afghanistan Roundup

Whew…the news from Afghanistan has not been good recently.

Now, the good news is that casualties in Iraq in May were really, really low (for Iraq anyway…19 American deaths, we have no idea how many Iraqi deaths and, quite frankly, no one in the administration particularly cares).  The bad news is that casualties in Afghanistan are up (17 Americans in May and 6 coalition deaths).

Oh, and that prison escape from earlier in the week?  Apparently 870 of approximately 1,000 prisoners escaped during that attack.  About 400 of those were members of the Taliban.

And now Karzai is threatening to send troops into Pakistan to attack the taliban safe areas.  I’m not sure how realistic such a threat is but it certainly shows that Afghan-Pakistan tensions remain uneasy.

Taliban resurgent

Today the Taliban launched a significant attack against a prison in Khandahar which resulted in hundreds of prisoners escaping. This sort of attack would have been unthinkable in 2003/2004 and seems to be reminiscent of the well planned, large scale attacks of the Iraq insurgency circa 2004-2007. I don’t know if this reflects any sort of transfer of talent from Iraq to Afghanistan but it certainly hasn’t helped that Afghanistan hasn’t received the attention (military or economic) it’s needed since 2002.

Either way, it’s not a good sign

Afghan Rambos

The Washington Post yesterday described the creation and deployment of Afghan commandos to fight the Taleban.  The article makes the 4,000 soldiers sounds very impressive and it sounds like the U.S. is putting some significant time and resources in training and equipping these forces.  I found this quote very interesting:

In marksmanship, for example, commandos fire more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition in their initial training alone, while the average Afghan soldier fires 60 rounds in training each year.

This got me thinking about the training we recently did at Ft. Dix and my comments about how the Army plays it cheap with weapons training when it comes to many of its soldiers.  That 60 rounds of ammunition per soldier per year is about the same amount that I’ve received ever since I’ve been in the army with the exception of when I was mobilizing (and it that case I doubt I fired more than 200 rounds).  I’ve always questioned just how proficient a marksman you can be when you only shoot one day a year, under unrealistic conditions with a minimal amount of ammunition but what do I know?  As I’ve said before, training has gotten better over the years but there’s still this approach that neglects training (at least among the reserve component) to do minimal training until the word comes down to mobilize and then there’s a mad dash to cram as much training as possible in a short period of time.  I think that’s the wrong way to approach it since (as anyone who’s crammed for a test can tell you), there’s just no way you can expect soldiers to absorb and retain the flood of new information and procedures as well as if they were involved in training over the long term where they could be exposed to these procedures and tactics repeatedly.

But that’s not why I wanted to blog about this news item.

I haven’t done any research on this but I wonder if there are any examples of fragile (or failed) nation states developing elite military units which didn’t end up abusing their power?  It’s not a huge leap from counterinsurgency force and death squad if there’s no effective control of the military.  The Karzai government doesn’t have a great deal of control in many parts of the country and I doubt there’s deep loyalty to the new Afghan state system.  So, we’re in a precarious place here.  The development of the force and their apparent competence is definitely a good sign.  In many ways though, that was the easy part.  What needs to happen now (just like in Iraq) is a strengthening of the legitimacy (both perceived and actual) of the central government.

Clear some space on that bookshelf

A little while ago, I wrote that I had been experimenting with the self publishing site Blurb.com.  I wanted a way to capture some of my better photos and old school picture albums just weren’t cutting it.  They just didn’t seem particularly satisfying or complementary to my pictures and in many cases, they don’t leave you any opportunity to put the photos into context with text.  I guess I could hand write notes around the pictures but given my handwriting style, I think that would just give readers the impression that I was some sort of escaped mental patient.  At a minimum, I’m sure it could be used against me at any sort of commitment hearing.

That leads to the second problem with photo albums.  They’re difficult to reproduce.  I’m not going to kid myself into thinking I’ll make the NY Times bestseller list (although with nonsense like this topping the non-fiction lists perhaps I do have a decent chance of making the list) it is nice to be able to have a way to make copies if friends, family or others would like them.

So, dear readers, because I’ve come to think of you as one big happy family (the kind that keeps meaning to visit but can’t seem to find the time because they have to lance that nasty looking boil on the cat), I’m posting my works so far on the right hand side of the screen (See?  Those nifty little thumbnail images over there?).

The “War is Heck” book contains many of the stories you’ve seen here (with serious editing to correct the grammatical/spelling mistakes and to punch up the stories) as well as a few I haven’t posted.  In addition, there are 100+ photos of my time there, most quite good, if I say so myself.  I’ve had to blot out the faces of U.S. soldiers so they aren’t recognizable just to stay on the safe side of any potential legal issues.

The books are really of quite good quality in terms of binding, paper quality, etc.  I’ve only ordered the hardcovers thus far and was very pleased.

So, help out a starving artist, and pick up one of these fine books today (Christmas ain’t that far away, after all).

The Bhutto assassination

I’m not sure I have much to add than what’s moving throughout the information superhighway.  Just a couple of comments though…

I found CNN’s fixation on whether she was killed by gunshot or shrapnel along with the ridiculous amount of airtime wasted on that irrelevant question to be indicative of the problem with TV news’ today.  A reluctance to handle potentially complex issues and events and instead give issues of no consequence much more attention than they deserve simply because it will be possible to provide a ‘correct answer’.

“Yes…We can now confirm that Bhutto was killed by gunshots.  And now that we’ve got that settled we can take you to footage of a water skiing squirrel.”

Yo!  Pinheads!  How about a discussion of the various factions vying for power in Pakistan and what this might mean for our efforts in Afghanistan?

The first thing that came to mind when I heard about the assassination was the killing of Masood on the 9th of September, 2001.  If, in fact, Al-Qaeda/Taliban forces were behind this, was it a one-off to keep Pakistan in a state of heightened tension or perhaps is part of a larger effort to destabilize the country/region/etc.?  Of course it’s all speculation but Al-Qaeda does seem to try to think at least two moves ahead and so the question of how they intend to exploit this attack should be on our minds.

Afghanistan? There’s a war there?

It’s been six years since we invaded Afghanistan and the Bush administration finally decides it may be time to take that conflict seriously.

According to the NY times:

Deeply concerned about the prospect of failure in Afghanistan, the Bush administration and NATO have begun three top-to-bottom reviews of the entire mission, from security and counterterrorism to political consolidation and economic development, according to American and alliance officials.

And the Washington Post:

Administration officials say the White House has become more concerned in recent months about the situation in Afghanistan, where grinding poverty, rampant corruption, poor infrastructure and the growing challenge from the Taliban are hindering U.S. stabilization efforts.

What makes this thing so maddening is that there have been tons of people who have been sounding the alarm about this for years.  Bush however was focused on Iraq and so virtually ignored Afghanistan.  Of course, given his track record, that might be seen as a blessing by the Afghan people.

Now, Bush is apparently going to start videoconferencing Karzai in order to “aimed at more closely monitoring and influencing the situation there, officials said. Bush has long held such videoconferences with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.”   Can you imagine those conversations?  Does anyone believe that the situation will benefit from Bush’s attention and influence?

Yikes…