Afghanistan: The 'Good War' Gets Complicated
By David Wood
Afghanistan Journal (PoliticsDaily.com)
September 4, 2009
COMBAT OUTPOST ZORMAT, Afghanistan -- When a warning crackled over the radio of a suspected ambush ahead, Lt. Col. Rob Campbell swore softly and ordered his three armored trucks to a halt. What happened next illustrates why the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is failing, why commanders here are asking for more manpower- and why they are pleading for more time.
Leaping out with his M-4 carbine, Campbell, a tall cavalry officer with sandy hair and freckles, strode through the empty, sun-baked fields flanking the road while his men fanned out, checking the ground for IEDs, sweeping the fields for snipers. The Afghan police assigned to patrol this stretch of road? Nowhere in sight.
"I can't be doing this all day," Campbell grumbled as he paused to examine a distant building through his rifle scope. Campbell is a senior officer. He commands a U.S. Army cavalry squadron of roughly 1,000 soldiers. Handling a suspected ambush is a job for a junior soldier with two or three years experience.
Carefully, they approached a tumbledown building beneath a dusty grove of wilted trees. Three disheveled young Afghans emerged, blinking in the sunlight: Afghan National Police. There was little sign of the U.S. training and equipment they'd received.
The ambush report was a false alarm, but for Campbell, it was a teachable moment.
"Who's in charge here? Where are your boots and helmets and uniforms?"Campbell demanded. "You have to look professional, then people will respect you and the Taliban will not attack!"
The young police managed to look both sheepish and skeptical. Through a translator, they complained that an overnight rain had left a foot of water in their sleeping quarters. When the Taliban mortars them at night, they have no mortar to shoot back.
"You have to go out and patrol," Campbell lectured them as they stood sullenly. "The Taliban will run away. That's how you stop them from attacking. You don't need a mortar." He climbed back in his multi-ton, air-conditioned armored truck. The police did not wave goodbye.
The plain fact in Afghanistan today is there are too few U.S. troops, and too few reliable Afghan security forces, to protect the population from the Taliban and other insurgents. But, in this complex war, simply pouring more American combat power into Afghanistan isn't enough, commanders here say.
"We need the support of the population; the insurgents only need to control the population -and they do that by making them scared to act." Col. Michael Howard told me. Hunting down and killing enemy insurgents is necessary, he and others argue, but it's not enough. Winning means enabling Afghans to resist the Taliban on their own- militarily, politically, socially and economically.
Howard is an intense, sinewy war-fighter who commands the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division, which is spread across three provinces (Paktika, Paktiya and Khowst) of eastern Afghanistan. This is his fourth deployment in Afghanistan, and he's seen enough to know that firepower alone is insufficient to win. This time, he wields an impressive array of combat troops, plus military and civilian experts working on economic and agricultural development, mentoring local government officials, and training and advising Afghan army and police. In his secret daily battle-update briefing, officials from the State Department, Agriculture Department, USAID and other civilian agencies sit at his side. "And they're in charge of things and make decisions and produce results" Howard stressed.
But for U.S. soldiers and Marines trained to seize and hold a hilltop or other objective, this is a complicated, ambiguous and seemingly endless campaign. Their biggest fear is than an impatient American public or Congress will reach the same conclusion, and not understanding the complexity and long-term nature of this war, will pull the plug on what looks like a losing quagmire.
"We are winning here, but the requirement to win faster is real because at some point, people will lose faith," said Howard, referring both to Afghans and the American public. "The war is really over-simplified to the American public, and that's a function of how it's reported," Howard scolded me.
But another officer, an artillery officer, struggling here with small-town tribal and political dynamics, confessed: "Even my family doesn't understand what we're trying to do here."
Small wonder, for the requirements of this war turn conventional military thinking on its head. The very presence of American troops in body armor, helmets and ballistic sunglasses can be intimidating, Afghans say. And American combat power and tactics, no matter how judiciously applied, often alienate local people. An insurgent killed by U.S. forces is likely to have a local family committed to revenge, no matter how they view the war. Kill an insurgent, create four new ones, as the saying here goes.
"I could do nothing but kill the enemy all day long, while public support goes down to nothing," said Campbell. His men are excruciatingly careful about wielding their power. In seven months, they haven't kicked down a door- formerly a common practice by troops conducting house searches.
But Campbell also told me of an operation one night when overhead surveillance showed what looked like a team of insurgents planting IEDs beside a road. He and his staff watched until they were certain, and then called in a strike -on local farmers engaged in midnight planting.
"It was horrible, something I'll have to live with," Campbell said with anguish on his angular face. He took a goat and compensation payment to the family of the dead farmer, and apologized. "They forgave us, so we didn't create any new insurgents," he assured me.
Still, deadly errors like that have set back the war effort during the seven years that American forces have been operating here in east-central Afghanistan, a region of broad plains and towering mountains. In March 2002, two battalions of infantry, from the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne Divisions, mounted an assault into the mountains above what is now Combat Outpost Zormat. The plan was to surround and kill fleeing remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Instead, the insurgents escaped into the jagged peaks and narrow defiles of the Shah-i-Khot Valley.
Having covered that operation first-hand, I was curious to see how seven years of U.S. military operations here, and costly training and equipping of the Afghan army and police -- $5.6 billion in Afghanistan this year alone -- had improved security.
Sadly, things have gotten worse.
In Gardez, the nearest city, a young Afghan told me the insurgents still hold the Shah-i-Khot, and U.S. commanders said they avoid that area, content for the moment to leave insurgents to themselves up in that relatively unpopulated area."We're focused on the population centers, which is not ideal," said Capt. Brian Johnson, the 27-year-old who commands the modest Zormat combat outpost. Insurgents travel through the area in groups of 10 or 20, he said, but a neighboring combat outpost that could intercept them is not manned "because of a lack of [U.S.] troops."
In the more populated valleys below, Johnson's men run joint patrols and targeted attacks with the Afghan army unit based next door. "There's more good news than bad news here,'' he insisted. A year ago, a trip up the road to another combat outpost required the brigade commander's permission and attack helicopters hovering overhead. "This morning, we went back and forth twice with no permission or escort needed," he said.
Still, U.S. and Afghan forces have been unable to effectively protect the civilian population across the region. Insurgents have set a record number of IEDs, about 45 percent more than a year ago. About half of those are detected or avoided before they detonate -- but Afghan civilian casualties have still risen sharply. Here in Paktiya Province, the number of civilians killed, mostly by insurgent IEDs, is up 29 percent from last year, while across the broader region of eastern Afghanistan the number of civilians killed and wounded rose about 45 percent.
Col. Howard, the brigade commander, told me the rising violence is a deep concern that has led him to raise the issue of getting additional U.S. troops, although he wouldn't say how many he needs.
"The violence has to come down to a level where it doesn't affect the daily lives of the people, to a point where people aren't afraid to take an active part in their government -- and right now we're not at that level,'' he said. In particular, he is struggling with IEDs and official corruption, the two scourges that Afghans complain about the most. Corruption, Howard said, "is a cancer without a cure in Afghanistan. If we don't come up with a cure, it will cause us to fail."
The IED problem is manageable, with more resources, he suggested. Jalaluddin Haqqani and his sons, who run a violently dangerous Taliban network in this region, have poured tens of thousands of dollars into attacking the civilian population. "Those IEDs cost a ton of money, those suicide vests, the suicide truck bombs, cost thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of explosives."
"If your enemy ups his resourcing by 10 percent and you don't -- and you're not already winning by 10 percent in the first place, you're gonna have a setback," Howard said, explaining his current situation. The result is an increasingly intimidated population unwilling to vote, for example, or even risk routine travel.
Doctors at the Afghan civilian hospital in Khowst used to regularly make the short drive to visit the U.S. military hospital at Forward Operating Base Salerno, Howard's sprawling headquarters. No longer.
"It's very dangerous to be known to be working with the Americans," said Lt. Col. Patricia Ten Haaf, the hospital commander. "Two years ago there was a lot of back-and-forth, but now I wouldn't send my only eye surgeon there, and their doctors won't come here for internships. And I regret that."
A middle-aged Afghan doctor also lamented the deterioration of security. "In 2002 to 2006, the security situation was better. It was easy for an American doctor to come to Khowst hospital. Walking around the city was no problem. Now..." he crinkled his eyes in an apologetic smile. "Not possible." He asked not to be identified by name.
U.S. agricultural experts hired four Afghans from Khowst to be agricultural advisers. Their families received threatening "night letters" from the Taliban, and two of the four advisers quit. With the safety of the Afghan people eroding, Howard acknowledged that "we have to have an increase in resources -- certainly an increase in ground troops."
U.S., Allied and Afghan forces are winning every fight with insurgents. "But are we winning fast enough, are we bringing the violence down fast enough? I don't think we are," he acknowledged.
That concern is widespread among American military officers here. "You can't be here and not want to help the Afghan people, and I do think Afghanistan could again become a breeding ground for international terrorism,'' said Col. Cindra Chastain, deputy commander of the Indiana National Guard's agricultural development team in Khowst Province.
"Is the public willing to have us stay long enough to do what we need to do? I don't think so,'' she told me. "But if not, everything we're doing here will be wasted."
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