As the Obama Administration tripled the number of combat troops in Afghanistan, their mission has been repeatedly redefined. The latest version calls for a major offensive to be launched in Kandahar Province, which is supposed to be the last major US push of this protracted conflict, with a gradual withdrawal to begin next year, so long as the withdrawal is supported by a progress report due in December.
The first of the 2010 operations, the taking and holding of the Marjah regional center in Helmand Province, is now being described by its top commander as a "bleeding ulcer.". The American garrison has had to abandon the countryside and pull back on the town center, which it nonetheless controls only by day, while the residents flee the chaos in increasing numbers.
On the heels of this failed operation comes the centerpiece of Obama’s surge, the clearing of Kandahar. Allow me to provide a preview to this much anticipated event.
Last fall, as the Obama Administration commenced its second Afghan surge of roughly 60,000 troops (30,000 Pentagon and roughly the same number of private contractor gunmen, per current standard operating procedure), the Administration set out an aspirational timetable to reassure the public that this was not a war without end. Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified before the Senate, "Our current plan is that we will begin the transition [to hand over control to the Afghans themselves]. . . in July of 2011. We will evaluate in December 2010 whether we believe we will be able to meet that objective." Obviously this is a very fluid and flexible timetable, but, along with the large number of troops committed, it did seem to create some pressure on the planned operations to show some progress this year.
Responding to the pressure, top allied commander for Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal decided to snatch victory from the jaws of quagmire by fully implementing the principles of the Petreaus counterinsurgency strategy ("COIN"). These principles were first applied during the 2007 Bush Iraq surge, which has been declared a success by the American leadership, and on which Obama’s Afghan surge is largely modeled. The COIN doctrine focuses on defeating insurgencies by winning the loyalty of the subject population, causing them to turn on the insurgents and "choose life," if you will. This is to be accomplished by protecting them from insurgent driven violence, thereby theoretically creating a climate of normalcy and trust, and allowing the local puppet regime to gain some legitimacy, moving the society to a place in which they learn to settle their disputes and vent their frustrations through the political process, making the country safe for democracy and denying the Forces of Terror a base from which to strike the Homeland.
Under the COIN doctrine, military operations are secondary and important only insofar as they impact the psychological battle space by convincing the people both within the occupied areas and in the mteropolie that the insurgents are losing and the occupation is wining, and further that the occupation’s goals are not to harm or subjugate the occupied population but to save it from the insurgents whose goal is not to save the population but to harm and subjugate it. It is a complex psychological approach that attempts to shape people’s opinions around the world through a steady stream of successful operations and positive new stories. As General McChrystal is fond of saying, "This is all in the minds of the participants."
This doctrine is currently very much in the ascendant in the Pentagon, with Secretary Gates trying to get the entire military to fall into line with these principles. However, there is a lively debate about how many resources of the larger COIN strategy should be devoted to protecting the population center for insurgent violence, as well as civilian oriented reconstruction and good governance projects, as opposed to targeting insurgents where they hide through combat patrols and intelligence driven "clearing" operations by "hunter-killer teams." The U.S. Special Operations Command chief Adm. Eric Olson, whose forces make up the bulk of the hunter killers and who is a proponent of the old school kinetic style of war, has recently criticized McChrystal's "population centric" interpretation, viewing it as not focused enough on actually engaging insurgent forces. The debate within military intellectual circles is quite heated (PDF), in a tedious and occasionally terrifying sort of way, like cops arguing over whether they need to focus their kicks on the suspect’s head or groin.
Essentially, "non-kinetic" operations in which few insurgents are killed, are considered too touchy feely and ineffective in defeating the enemy, while offensive operations focusing on the killing or capture of low and mid level insurgent fighters and their "accomplices" among the population, such as the so called "night raids" can get quite messy and are feared to turn the population against the counterinsurgency forces who are ostensibly there to protect them (possibly breeding more terrorists then they eliminate). Given the reality that the kinetic operations entail a group of heavily armed men bursting into a residential compound looking for certain targets and firing at anyone they consider hostile, a few terribly botched raids are as inevitable as a deepwater oil well blowout, and, just as with the oil spills, a few is all it takes to irrevocably poison the environment.
In addition to not being kick ass enough, the more holistic, "dirty hippy") "population centric approach," has the serious problem that it depends for its success on a psychological shift in the occupied population, a population whose mentality is little understood by the thinkers who are attempting to mold it so quickly and crudely. In addition to the occupied population having to reevaluate their opinion of the US led coalition forces, they must also begin to trust the corrupt puppet government foisted on them by the occupiers. And for added complexity, the domestic audience must be simultaneously convinced that the expensive pacification efforts are working, and that the heroic individuals who choose to become paid gunmen for the state are not being cannon foddered in vain, so that the wars continue to serve their greater purpose of raising the leadership’s approval ratings and the public’s patriotic fervor, rather than lowering them. To this end, a major concern of the "population centric" COIN adherents has been that their approach, while still quite deadly to the subject population, does not produce the images that the militaristic imperial public is used to, of massive explosions and massed assaults, and General McChrystal has been at pains to dampen such expectations and to prepare the public for a less than spectacular summer offensive season, which might hopefully be offset by a bloodier than ever summer blockbuster slate at the megaplex.
Despite of its deplorable lack of photogenic kick assedness, one should also not make the mistake of thinking that the "population centric" approach is significantly less violent or deadly to the subject population it is designed to protect that its "kinetic" counterpart. While it relies less on night raids and other assaults against residential compounds, its main methods of creating security are installing a system of thousands of checkpoints and walling urban centers into small grid units, which are then sequentially flooded with occupation forces to achieve the golden counterinsurgency ration of 1 occupier to 30 occupied which allows complete monitoring of all anti occupation activity and sentiment. Within these walled off reservations, the residents are individually checked, their housing is repeatedly searched, and those who pass muster are issued biometric identification which allows them to move slowly through the few entry and exit points allowed to them to move around. Great pressure is exerted on the members of this isolated community to inform on each other, with rewards for any reporting regarding the suspicious activities of one’s neighbors. Those who refuse to cooperate or who have reports made against them risk death or indefinite detention, until the community is slowly purged of everybody except active collaborators and demonstrable innocents.
This is for example how Petreaus pacified Baghdad to great fanfare back home, though it was far less popular among Iraqis. In addition to the complete restriction of freedom within the walls of the grid, the casualties inflicted at checkpoints due to miscommunications and the jittery nerves of all involved take as much of a human toll as a conventional campaign of raids and missile strikes. While no accurate statistics exist, according to the Pentagon’s minimal estimate, 429 Iraqi civilians were executed at American checkpoints in 2006, when US troops levels in Iraq were comparable to what they are in Afghanistan today. The implementation of this approach in Kandahar city is set to occur this summer and to form the centerpiece of the new Democrat style of war.
As the theoretical arguments continue, and before the walls begin going up in Kandahar, the actual operations employing the bulk of the forced surged by Obama have already begun. The first major operation of 2010 was devoted to clearing the Taliban out of the Helmand River valley, a major agricultural area in Afghanistan's south, which previously lay in the British zone of control. The British contingent left in charge of the area had been unable to exercise effective control over the area, and it gradually became a hub of opium production and a Taliban stronghold. Several provincial centers were stormed and attempts were made to provide them with strong garrisons of American troops and Afghan police to prevent the return of the Taliban.
One such operation, for the capture and holding of the town of Marjah and its surroundings, became the largest military operation of the war, with tens of thousands of American troops assaulting entrenched Taliban fighters during February of 2010. Nearly four months later, the effect of this operation is still unclear. The commanders cite statistics such as 8 of 15 schools in Marjah now being open, the Marjah bazaars functioning and the ability for the 600,000 people in central Helmand Province to move freely between villages and towns (by day and assuming they do not run afoul of coalition checkpoints). The U.S.-backed Marjah governor, Marine officials said, has five top ministers. Eight of 81 certified teachers are on the job, and 350 of an estimated 10,000 students are going to school.
However, the Pentagon review of the operation’s aftermath is glum, and even General McChrystal has been forced to acknowledge that the progress has been slower than anticipated, and now characterizes the situation as a "bleeding ulcer." The Taliban have reentered the town in large numbers, intimidating the citizenry from working with the coalition and increasing violence. In response, the US Marine garrison has had to pull back from the countryside into the city, ceding the rural area back to the Taliban, in order to provide more security in the provincial center where the government apparatus is clustered. A steadily increasing flow of Afghans are fleeing the violence that is coming at them from all sides.
According to the Red Cross office in Helmand, most of the displaced are poor families who left their homes for Lashkar Gah due to security concerns.
The head of the Afghan Red Crescent Society's Helmand office, Ahmadullah Ahmadi, said 117 families left in early May alone and he warned that the situation was deteriorating.
"People are living in very bad conditions; there are no jobs, the fighting is starting again, and this situation has compelled the residents to leave Marjah, he said. "We don't have enough resources to help them."
Though the Marjah operation has been less successful than hoped, it was nonetheless only the opening salvo in the planned Obama surge, and the focus must now shift to the major operation intended to restore security in Kandahar Province and the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest urban center and the major Pashtun metropolis. This offensive was supposed to be the centerpiece in restoring the confidence of the Afghan people in their government and the coalition, and to that end, the plan called for close cooperation with the local tribal elders and a thorough reform of the notoriously corrupt government of President Karzai's brother, Wali. Wali has however provided quite resilient, and since he is the chief source for intelligence driving the stepped up campaign of night raids now engulfing Kandahar, the coalition has quickly backtrcked from any intentions to replace him.
Likewise, although the official intent of the coalition still remains to "shura their way to success" as a nameless Pentagon spokesman
put it on March 29th, the steady opposition of the tribal elders to any such operation has caused the coalition to backtrack from any commitment it made to seek consent from the representatives of the population which its operations are ostensibly designed to protect. On April 4th, President Karzai told a Kandahar shura that the operation would not be carried out until the elders themselves were ready to support it. The elders immediately took the opportunity to make clear that they would not consent to any such an operation. Perhaps somebody told them about the walls that now divide Baghdad, or maybe they don’t have the "yes we can" spirit that is now being required from all global citizens by the Obama Pentagon, but faced with this strong opposition, the coalition has reduced its aspirations from obtaining consent to holding out a vague hope that "local tribal elders in Kandahar could "shape the conditions" under which the influx of foreign troops operate." This is probably a more honest characterization of the power being left to the residents within the intended battle space, since the victim always retains the power to "shape the conditions" of its violation. Even if one is gagged, hooded and shackled, one can, after all, still "shape the conditions" by, for example, soiling oneself, thereby making one’s capture and transport to the torture block under Bagram Air Field that much more unpleasant to the rubber gloved men with the cattle prods who are America’s greatest heroes in the War on Terror.
A major problem which has already led to the cancellation of some preparatory raids which were supposed to "shape the Kandahar operational battle space" is that, in order to garner local support for the operation, the NATO leadership decided that it was supposed to be "Afghan led." So far, several raids have had to be cancelled because no Afghan units of even battalion strength could be found capable of taking part. It is unclear where the much grater numbers of Afghan soldiers required for the main push can be found, but of course, since this is a purely psychologically driven parameter, it can always simply be altered by the commanders on the ground. One can, after all argue that the Afghans are just as likely to be repelled as won over by the presence of the opium addicted child rapists of the Afghan government forces (it’s hard to find a good collaborator these days). The inherent uncertainty of trying to estimate how one’s invasion will play out in the minds of the witnesses can sometimes be an advantage rather than a handicap.
The operations in Kandahar were initially supposed to deemphasize combat and instead to focus on good governance, to be accompanied by major reforms within the thoroughly corrupt regional administration of Wali Karzai, the President's brother and a notorious drug lord. Last October, as reports of Wali Karzai's role in the opium trade were circulating, McChrystal's intelligence chief General Michael T Flynn said, "If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves... The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of [Al] Capone." However, in the absence of any reliable local allies, a united opposition from the tribal elders and the lack of capable Afghan units, the coalition has determined that it cannot afford to jettison the only ally it has in the region, however corrupt and unpopular he may be. Wali's control of the Kandahar security services, such as they are, gives him access to intelligence the coalition badly needs to plan their operations, and he has now been transformed from an obstacle to the operation to one of its greatest assets. Once again we see that the fact that all of the advantages or disadvantages exist only in the minds of the Pentagon planners as they attempt to anticipate the reactions in the minds of the Afghan and American public, allows such quick transitions and provides much needed operational flexibility to this complex endeavor.
Despite all these problems, or, as they have now been re-imagined, because of these advantages, the major operations will get underway shortly, since the thousand of new troops are already in place and some sort of progress needs to be shown in time for the December review. Anticipating the assault, the Taliban has already commenced their own counter operations, which include a series of assassinations of collaborating figures in Kandahar, as well as brazen assaults on even the most fortified coalition positions. This is creating a climate of fear among Kandahar's residents which might give rise to a refugee wave much greater than that from Marjah.
The Taliban cannot to be allowed to carrying out their operations without a spectacular and media friendly response, because even though their military impact is negligible, these insurgent operations are widely reported and may (or may not) shift the psychological momentum of the war. The loss of psychological momentum has been McChrystal’s chief concern from the beginning, as it is the concern of many sports coaches across the world. Last year, in McChrystal’s estimation, the insurgents thought they had the momentum, which was very bad for the good guys. However, McChrystal did not lose hope at his own grim conclusions, and in December of last year, predicted that by December of this year, by the time of the fateful review, "new security gains will be illuminated by specific indicators and will be clear to us that the insurgency has lost the momentum. And by the summer of 2011, it will be clear to the Afghan people that the insurgency will not win, giving them the chance to side with their government." And as of May 26 of this year, in McChrystal’s mind, the Taliban had indeed lost that vital momentum, giving the Afghans the chance to side with their government and possibly also to be redeemed by the Lord Jesus Christ. So with states this high, one can understand that the Taliban cannot be allowed to continue getting their operations written up in the New York Times without an overwhelming media counter-saturation.
Accordingly, the latest word from the Pentagon is that the operation in Kandahar City will begin in June and aim to rid the city of Taliban fighters by the holy month of Ramadan which falls in August this year. About 10,000 American troops will be involved. Within the city itself, the military surge s likely to be limited to more U.S. military police and military intelligence troops, and to Afghan army, intelligence and plainclothes police deployments. The operation will unfold on the Baghdad model discussed above, with the city divided into grids and the grids then flooded with soldiers, police, intelligence officers, interrogators and tortures until every resident either turns somebody in, confesses or goes mad. More conventional kinetic military operations can be expected in the rural districts surrounding Kandahar city, such as Zhari and Arghandab, where large areas are under full Taliban control. Marjah-like clearing operations and the ever popular night raids are expected there this summer, along with intermittent periods of intense missile strikes.
To sum up, the great blood batch continues despite every indicator pointing to its futility, because the Pentagon has learned the amazing mind trick of turning everything into a completely theoretical exercise in winning hears and minds minds, which hypothetical minds can be made to think whatever the Pentagon planners want them to. The momentum has shifted and will continue to shift, while the enemy continues to be demoralized and the Afghan people continue their love affair with Western democracy. The Democratic President continues to pour in ever more troops and money into this 9 year old conflict, which has evolved from a counterterrorism to a nation building to now a counterinsurgency operation. The operations have morphed over the years from the pursuit of al Qaeda to, in the latest version, attempts to secure the Afghan population from an insurgency aimed largely at the foreign occupation.
Efforts to create a legitimate Afghan government which would win the loyalties of the population and provide a reliable local partner have failed miserably and were largely abandoned following President Karzai's brazenly stolen election last year. However, the generals press on, reshaping the message to win support for their warmed over Vietnam vintage operations back home. Despite the ostensible focus on protecting the Afghans, the civilian casualties have soared dramatically since Obama's surges began last year. Such facts pose no significant obstacle however to the rebranding of the war as a kindler gentler one, a smarter, better war fought by freedom loving heroes under the direction of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
The reality, if such a thing still survived the relentless Pentagon assault upon it, is that even within this narrowly and torturously redefined mission, none of the conditions which the planners deem necessary for success are present. The local population has not consented to being protected by the occupiers, the local government has no local support and exists solely with foreign backing. The insurgency continues to expand its reach and capability despite the many optimistically promoted offensives and hundreds of assassination strikes against the leadership. Lost in the fanfare of the Surge is the fact that dozens of NATO bases had to be abandoned to the enemy just this year because they were simply indefensible in light of the Taliban’s growing power. Into the teeth of these glaring deficiencies, another grim offensive is set to bleed Afghanistan's second largest city throughout the summer. Expecting this undertaking to produce any progress is contrary to any logic, if such a thing still survived the relentless Pentagon assault upon it.
And after the campaign season is ended by the harsh winter conditions, we can expect a progress report in December which will use this year's failure to justify even more troops for next year's campaign season. We shall then see whether Obama's vague intention to begin a drawdown next year will survive the failure of his current surge, or whether he will once again try to avoid defeat through escalation, as he has already done twice since assuming office. Given that Obama’s review to the two previous reports which documented the ongoing fiasco was to double and then double again the number of troops in the theater in order not to appear "weak on defense," which is any Democratic politician’s greatest fear along with being seen as "soft on crime," it does not take a prophet to predict what the reaction will be to the third report, or what the reaction of the obedient Democrats will be to their President ordering yet another expansion of the war effort.