Afghanistan - Why apologize when the strategy is wrong?

KABUL – Two American soldiers were killed Thursday in a shooting by an Afghan soldier and a literacy teacher at a joint base in southern Afghanistan, officials said, the latest in a series of deaths as anti-Americanism rises following the burning of Korans by U.S. soldiers.

Both were killed on the same day that the top NATO commander allowed a small number of foreign advisers to return to work at Afghan ministries after more than a week of being locked down in secure locations because of the killing of two other Americans.



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A New Strategy for Afghanistan: Kill the Enemy.

It only took eight years and one trillion US dollars for the cream of West Point to decide that perhaps it was a good idea to target and kill the bastards that murdered three thousand of our people, attacked our financial center, their Pentagon, slit the throats of woman flight attendants and destroyed a good part of the normality of our lives.

The genius of our elected leaders, our political and professional experts, the "shock and awe" generation are finally getting it. If someone kills and destroys a piece of you, kill them back and do so in a way that they will never forget.

Well its, too late for that. Shock and Awe?

Here is Shock and Awe: We could have and should have put two tactical nuclear weapons on every camp and done so with 24 hours of identifying who and where. When we found out they were mostly Saudis we should have called in their ambassador, grabbed him by the fan belt around his sorry ass head, forced his face into carpet in the Oval Office and tell the son of a bitch they owe us $500 billion in reparations with a weekly vig of $10 billion.

Instead we baked Ramadan cookies and fired the Iraqi army. After eight years and $50 billion dollars worth of powerpoint charts, we are down to the wisdom, political genius and military acumen of Joe Fuckin Biden.

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Targeted Killing Is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan

By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
Published: July 31, 2010
NY Times

WASHINGTON — When President Obama announced his new war plan for Afghanistan last year, the centerpiece of the strategy — and a big part of the rationale for sending 30,000 additional troops — was to safeguard the Afghan people, provide them with a competent government and win their allegiance.

Eight months later, that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country.

Instead, what has turned out to work well is an approach American officials have talked much less about: counterterrorism, military-speak for the targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Faced with that reality, and the pressure of a self-imposed deadline to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011, the Obama administration is starting to count more heavily on the strategy of hunting down insurgents. The shift could change the nature of the war and potentially, in the view of some officials, hasten a political settlement with the Taliban.

Based on the American military experience in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, it is not clear that killing enemy fighters is sufficient by itself to cripple an insurgency. Still, commando raids over the last five months have taken more than 130 significant insurgents out of action, while interrogations of captured fighters have led to a fuller picture of the enemy, according to administration officials and diplomats.

American intelligence reporting has recently revealed growing examples of Taliban fighters who are fearful of moving into higher-level command positions because of these lethal operations, according to a senior American military officer who follows Afghanistan closely.

Judging that they have gained some leverage over the Taliban, American officials are now debating when to try to bring them to the negotiating table to end the fighting. Rattling the Taliban, officials said, may open the door to reconciling with them more quickly, even if the officials caution that the outreach is still deeply uncertain.

American military officials and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan have begun a robust discussion about “to what degree these people are going to be allowed to have a seat at the table,” one military official said. “The only real solution to Afghanistan has got to be political.”

The evolving thinking comes at a time when the lack of apparent progress in the nearly nine-year war is making it harder for Mr. Obama to hold his own party together on the issue. And it raises questions about whether the administration is seeking a rationale for reducing troop levels as scheduled starting next summer even if the counterinsurgency strategy does not show significant progress by then.

A senior White House official said the administration hoped that its targeted killings, along with high-level contacts between Mr. Karzai and Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief and a former head of its intelligence service — which is believed to have close links to the Taliban — would combine to pressure Taliban leaders to come to the negotiating table.

A long-awaited campaign to convert lower-level and midlevel Taliban fighters has finally begun in earnest, with Mr. Karzai signing a decree authorizing the reintegration program. With $200 million from Japan and other allies, and an additional $100 million in Pentagon money, American military officers will soon be handing out money to lure people away from the insurgency.

“We’re not ready to make the qualitative judgment that the cumulative effects of what we are doing are enough to change their calculus yet,” the White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. But, reflecting the administration’s hope that the killings are making a difference, he added, “If I were the Taliban, I’d be worried.”

Mr. Obama’s timetable calls for an assessment in December of how his strategy is faring. The administration has not yet begun a formal review of the policy. But while several officials said Mr. Obama remained committed to the strategy he set out at the end of last year, they conceded that the counterinsurgency part of it had lagged while the counterterrorism part had been more successful.

That divergence could lead to a replay of last year’s policy debate, in which Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. pushed for a focus on capturing and killing terrorist leaders, while the Pentagon, including the current commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, pushed for a broader strategy that also included a strong focus on securing Afghan population centers with more troops.

Still, in an interview Thursday with “Today” on NBC, Mr. Biden appeared to reiterate his earlier stance.

We are in Afghanistan for one express purpose: Al Qaeda,” he said. “Al Qaeda exists in those mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are not there to nation-build. We’re not out there deciding we’re going to turn this into a Jeffersonian democracy and build that country.”

The administration’s shift in thinking is gradual but has been perceptible in the public remarks of various officials. The incoming commander of the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, was asked last week by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, whether the administration’s July 2011 date for starting to withdraw American troops implied a shift in emphasis from counterinsurgency to a strategy concentrating on killing terrorists.

“I think that is the approach, Senator,” he replied.

The emerging American model can best be described as “counterterrorism, with some counterinsurgency strategy that forces the hands of insurgent leaders,” said a diplomat with knowledge of the planning. It melds elements of both strategies in a policy that continues to evolve, as conditions change.

Some of the feelers to the Taliban are being put out by the Karzai government and some by the Pakistanis. Some, eventually, will be handled by General Petraeus and other military officials. Contacts are being kept under wraps, several officials said, because any evidence that insurgent leaders are talking to American or Afghan officials could be used against them by rival insurgents.

Another factor that has spurred talk of reconciliation is a classified military report, called “State of the Taliban,” prepared by Task Force 373, a Special Operations team composed of the army’s Delta Force and Navy Seals, which has captured insurgents and taken them to Bagram Air Base for interrogation.

While the report does not offer a silver bullet for how to deal with the Taliban, one official said that for the first time, it gives Americans and their allies “a rich vein of understanding of why the Taliban was fighting and what it would take them to stop.” The report depicts the Taliban as spearheading a fractured insurgency, but one in which conservative Pashtun nationalism and respect for Afghan culture are both at play, this official said.

Despite deep American concerns about Pakistan’s trustworthiness as an ally, Pakistan has also emerged in recent months as a potential agent for reconciliation. Mr. Karzai has held at least two meetings with General Kayani of Pakistan. American officials say they believe that their talks have not yet delved into the details of negotiations with insurgent leaders, but Pakistan is eager to play a role in talks with the Haqqani network, a major insurgent group based in the country that has close ties to its intelligence service.

The links between Mr. Karzai and General Kayani, officials said, helped seal a recent trade deal between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which required concessions on the part of the Pakistani military.

“The best hope for resolving Afghanistan lies in Pakistan, and we have made some progress there,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent visitor to the region.

"Listen up general, if you don't know how to use your big gun, at least give me a light."

Nation Building in Afghanistan

Do you think much has changed in one year?

Lessons Learned in U.S. Nation-Building Efforts

• Many factors -- such as prior democratic experience, level of economic development, and social homogeneity -- can influence the ease or difficulty of nation-building, but the single most important controllable determinant seems to be the level of effort, as measured in troops, money, and time.

• Multilateral nation-building is more complex and time-consuming than a unilateral approach. But the multilateral approach is considerably less expensive for individual participants.

• Multilateral nation-building can produce more thorough transformations and greater regional reconciliation than can unilateral efforts.

• Unity of command is as essential in peace operations as it is in war. This unity of command can be achieved even in operations with broad multilateral participation when the major participants share a common vision and tailor the response of international institutions accordingly.

• There appears to be an inverse correlation between the size of the military stabilization force and the level of casualties. The higher the proportion of troops relative to the resident population, the lower the number of casualties suffered and inflicted. Indeed, most of the post-conflict operations that were generously manned suffered no casualties at all.

• Neighboring states can exert significant influence, for good or bad. It is nearly impossible to put together a fragmented nation if its neighbors try to tear it apart. Every effort should be made to secure their support.

• Accountability for past injustices can be a powerful component of democratization. Such accountability can be among the most difficult and controversial aspects of any nation-building endeavor, however, and therefore should be attempted only if there is a deep and long-term commitment to the overall operation.

• There is no quick fix for nation-building. None of our cases was successfully completed in less than seven years.

Source: America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, by James Dobbins, et al., RAND, 2003.

Further reading
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Reliability of Afghan army called into question by Pentagon

By Ben Farmer in Kabul and James Kirkup Published: 7:00AM BST 14 Jul 2010 Telegraph

Raising the competence of the force is central to the entire Nato strategy for Afghanistan. Western nations have said they will withdraw their forces only when the Afghans can secure the country themselves.

With the Afghan National Police widely regarded as corrupt and unreliable, even greater importance rests on the Afghan National Army (ANA).

Nato leaders have repeatedly claimed that the ANA is making excellent progress, but those claims have been questioned by a US government audit.

Arnold Fields, the US Defense Department’s inspector general for Afghanistan, concluded that the capabilities of many “top-rated” ANA units have been “overstated” by Nato commanders.

Several ANA units officially passed as able to operate without international support or guidance have not proved they are capable of independent operations, the auditor found in a report last month.

Nato admits that Afghan forces remain totally reliant on Nato for air support and artillery, for medical evacuation from the battlefield and often for supplies.

The audit’s findings are echoed by Nato commanders in the field.

Many Nato troops have hair-raising stories of careless young Afghan soldiers accidentally firing their weapons, including rocket launchers.

Commanders in the field have also occasionally questioned the Afghans’ commitment.

On a recent visit to the Babaji area of Helmand, where yesterday’s shooting took place, The Daily Telegraph saw Afghan troops refuse to carry their own food or water on patrol and demand that Gurkhas supply them instead.
Some Afghan soldiers also refuse to patrol at night or in the heat of midday. One British officer said: “The Afghan soldiers and police like to have fresh food. They are fixed to their meal times. Sometimes they have been out on patrol and said 'It’s lunchtime, it’s over’ .”

There are currently about 119,000 members of the ANA. To allow the transfer of security duties, Nato has set a target of 171,000, due to be reached by 2014. That means an accelerated process that sees new recruits given two months’ basic training before being assigned to units, often formed from scratch.

Prof Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute said a few units are of good quality but, because of the short training period for rank-and-file soldiers, “the quality is always going to be patchy”.

There are questions about the commitment of the ANA and Prof Clarke estimated that one in ten newly trained ANA soldiers go absent without leave.

British officers training the ANA say that there is a particular shortage of non-commissioned officers, the sergeants and sergeants-major who are the backbone of any modern army.

Paul Flynn, a Labour backbencher and critic of the Afghan war, described the ANA as “a group of drug-addicted mercenaries” that could not be trusted.

He said: “Its members have little or no loyalty to their election-rigging president, their own government or international governments. Why on earth do we expect to build a stable Afghanistan on that crumbling foundation?

The Poppy Palaces of Afghanistan

'Poppy palaces' are latest symbol of Afghan corruption


By Karin Brulliard
Saturday, June 5, 2010; 2:55 PM
Washington Post

KABUL -- For rent on Street 6 in the neighborhood of Sherpur: a four-story, 11-bedroom dwelling of pink granite and lime marble, complete with massage showers, a rooftop fountain and, in the basement, an Asian-themed nightclub. Price: $12,000 a month.

It's a relative bargain in this district favored by former warlords and bureaucrats -- Kabul's version of Beverly Hills. There may be a war on, but carnival-colored mansions are mushrooming alongside cratered streets and sewage streams here. Vast outdoor chandeliers, heated indoor pools and acres of mirrored, skyscraper glass windows abound.

The grandiose houses -- derided here as narco-tecture -- have become the most obvious symbols of Afghanistan's corruption, which ranks among the world's worst and is fueled both by an enormous influx of American dollars and by the opium trade. They have paralleled a building boom sweeping this and other Afghan cities, fed by the donor money that has helped distort an economy of haves and have-nots.

But unlike the roads and schools being built, the so-called "poppy palaces" are so garishly incongruous that some observers view them as more cultural erosion in an oft-invaded nation. Traditional Afghan residences are low-slung mud brick with internal courtyards and little external embellishment. Poppy houses, critics grumble, are imported Pakistani designs, with Arab, or simply alien, influences.

"I mix designs from the U.S. and U.K. -- I create my own!" said Haji Akram Mughal, a Pakistani architect who works out of a second-story Sherpur office, where on a recent day he displayed blueprints for two mansions he designed for Afghan Air Force generals, one of which resembled a plantation from the American South.

In most of Afghanistan, where the United Nations says more than one-third of the population lives in "absolute poverty," mud walls and no running water remain the norm. That also prevailed in Sherpur until seven years ago, when local authorities bulldozed rudimentary houses there and gave the land to senior government workers. In their place now stand houses that mimic Roman ruins, the White House and a cruise ship.

Then there are the rooftop birds: Atop two domiciles sit giant statues of eagles, their wings spread.

"When I saw that eagle on my roof, I liked it more than a real one," said Fazil Mohammed, a construction executive who owns the larger of the eagles and its 16-bedroom perch, which he said is leased to a nephew of President Hamid Karzai. Never, Mohammed said, would he have "such a fancy thing" in the typical Afghan neighborhood where he now resides.

"The eagles? I can't place them at all," said Thalia Kennedy, an architectural historian at the Kabul-based Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which preserves historic urban areas. Poppy houses, she said, "seem to represent a massive leap from tradition."

But not entirely: Afghanistan has always been a crossroads, Kennedy said, and some of the poppy houses hint at past eras. The Mughals, whose 16th- and 17th-century South Asian empire included parts of Afghanistan, favored glass decoration, a bit like the sparkly mosaics of some Sherpur verandas, she said. An "obsession" with adorning every inch of a building's interior is common across the Muslim world, she said, something Afghanistan's nouveau riche have taken outside.

Zamani Nawid, a property dealer in Sherpur, said most homeowners acquire blueprints from Pakistan and hire local engineers to do the building, which is often fairly shoddy. Then they rent them to foreigners and go live in Dubai, he said. They are "very powerful people," Nawid said -- the sorts with posses of bodyguards -- and so he asks no questions about their sources of funding.

Among Nawid's listings is a 47-bedroom monstrosity that rents for $47,000 a month. He said he has also sold a property with a poolside feature that sounds like an urban legend: A mechanical contraption that looks like a black crow, and which wraps its wings around swimmers then blows air to dry them off.

"It's bigger than a man," Nawid, 21, said approvingly. "In Afghanistan, there is a lot of competition. So everyone wants a house that is better than the other person."

Among this set, the popular features these days would make a fundamentalist Taliban commander keel over. And for that reason, they are often concealed in the basement, said Mughal, the architect.

"Barbecue -- it's a must. Swimming pool -- it's a must. And -- I feel shame -- drinking," he said about his clients' typical demands. "Yes, a bar. Everybody likes this."

A few blocks away, 80-year-old Mohammed Gul sold brooms and cucumbers outside the earth house he built with his hands three decades ago. It now stands in the shadow of Sherpur palaces, which he said he views with awe and fear.

They are lovely, he said, even if they are "owned by drug dealers." But the city has warned that his patch of land might soon be handed to developers. Then, said Mohammed, "the next day they will come to us with their bulldozers."

The problems faced by Soviet forces in Afghanistan carry echoes for Nato

Not that you need it, but here is some bad news and then some even worse news.

First the bad.

The Senate will soon increase the national debt limit to above $13 trillion. That is paltry compared to what follows. The next ten years show a hyperbolic curve to financial ruin, brought to you by politicians that can't help themselves.

Democrats are nervous, twitchy, and are considering attaching a debt increase provision to the Defense Department spending bill. They will claim they are doing that for patriotic reasons. They are spending us into the abyss for God and country.

Meanwhile the twin sources of economic calamity and declining American security, Iraq and Afghanistan, grind on and on. Democracy is expensive you know, especially for the tribes of Islam, tribes who hate each other intensely and trust each other even less.

Now the worse news.

How do we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, when we decide it is time to get out? Forget the reasons that will be fabricated for leaving, how do we do it?

The BBC examines how the Soviets did it. First let's examine the Soviet time-line in Afghanistan which spanned ten years. (We are in our eighth year.)

• 1979 - Brezhnev sends in troops
• 1988 - USSR pledges to withdraw
• 1989 - final Soviet withdrawal
• Soviet deaths - estimated at 15,000
• Afghan deaths - estimated at one million
• The Soviets spent a paltry $12 billion. (To date the US has spent $1,300 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

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Soviet lessons from Afghanistan

Andrew North
BBC News

All the most senior ministers were at the Afghan strategy meeting.

They knew things were not going well, but from their leader there was a whiff of panic.

"We just need to be sure that the final result does not look like a humiliating defeat: to have lost so many men and now abandoned it all... in short, we have to get out of there."

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - the speaker of those words - was understandably alarmed.
It was June 1986, almost a year since he had taken the decision to start withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and hand over more responsibility to the government there.

But Soviet losses, already above 10,000, kept mounting.

With conflicting signals this week about the direction of Western policy in Afghanistan, there is a hint of the same kind of panic and indecision.

Soviet exit strategy

US President Barack Obama is still deciding whether to send in thousands of US reinforcements.

Yet the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown - facing ever-greater opposition to the Afghan war - has been highlighting possibilities for UK troops to pull back in some areas next year.

It is less than two weeks since he was saying: "We cannot, must not and will not walk away."

But as Mr Gorbachev found, getting out is at least as difficult as staying in.

It took almost four years to pull out entirely - because of a combination of dithering over strategy and last-ditch efforts by Moscow to prop up its client government in Kabul in the hope of maintaining some pride and influence.

The former Soviet leader's difficulties are detailed in previously secret transcripts of Politburo meetings and diary entries recently released by the Washington-based National Security Archive.

They make sobering reading for British and American leaders, as they decide whether to double-up or cut their losses in Afghanistan.

There are certainly differences - not least America's determination to make the Soviet withdrawal as costly as possible in blood and treasure.

Lost battle

But there are echoes too of the difficulties the US and its allies face now.


By the late 1980s, Moscow's exit strategy was basically the same as Nato's today - to build up an allied government in Kabul with sufficient trained army and police forces to defend itself, thereby allowing foreign troops to leave.

But even with the backing of a 100,000-strong Soviet army and billions of rubles in aid, the Afghan government struggled to establish its legitimacy and authority much beyond the capital - much like President Hamid Karzai's Western-backed administration today.

This bleak assessment of the situation in late 1986 by the Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, sounds eerily familiar.

"Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old," Mr Akhromeev told Mr Gorbachev at a November 1986 Politburo session.

"There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels.

"The whole problem is that military results are not followed up by political actions. At the centre there is authority; in the provinces there is not.

"We control Kabul and the provincial centres, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority. We have lost the battle for the Afghan people".

Familiar problems

By that point, Soviet trainers had created an Afghan army 160,000-strong - double the size of the force Nato has trained so far - together with thousands of much-feared secret policemen.

Yet once Soviet forces had left, they could do little more than defend Kabul and a few other cities.
Only massive military aid, coupled with incompetence and in-fighting among the US-backed mujahideen opposition, allowed the Afghan government Moscow left behind to cling on in Kabul for a few more years before finally collapsing.

There were familiar problems too with the financial assistance Moscow gave.

It hoped the funds would bolster the capacity of the Afghan government and pay for projects that would benefit people, winning hearts and minds.

However corruption rendered much of its useless.

As the Politburo discussed a new aid request from Kabul in January 1987, Marshal Sergei Sokolov said: "In 1981, we gave them 100m roubles of free assistance. And all of that went to the elite. And there was nothing in the hamlets - no kerosene, no matches."

Afghans confuse democracy with fornication.

Afghans confuse democracy with fornication
By Sharif Khoram (AFP) – 2 hours ago

KABUL — Fornication, bare flesh and a descent into Western decadence -- these are Afghan definitions of democracy that expose how little the foreign concept has permeated the national psyche as elections near.

Afghanistan will vote August 20 in its second "democratic" presidential election but centuries of tribalism, decades of war and the draconian legacy of the Taliban ensure that confusion still reigns over what voting will bring.

"Western democracy is freedom and fornication. This is democracy for Western, American and European people and it is developing the same way here," said Wasim, a 28-year-old waiter in a Kabul kebab restaurant.

Mansoor Aslami, 21, a cosmetics shop owner, defines democracy as a boy and girl walking together on the street without being questioned, and is less than keen on some of the trends he sees among his patrons.

"I see signs of democracy among customers with bare arms and necks, but so long as democracy is according to Islam, it is good," he told AFP.

Eight years after the overthrow of the Taliban, much of conservative Afghan society has little understanding of democracy and sees it synonymous with a moral decline from traditional Islamic values, analysts say.

Afghanistan flirted with democracy in the 1960s and 1970s by holding limited parliamentary elections but the experiment was squashed with the 1979 Soviet invasion that set off decades of civil war and foreign intervention.
The 1996-2001 Taliban government banned music and dancing, ordered men not to shave, decreed that women wear the all-encompassing burka and banned girls from attending school. Punishments for violations were brutal.

After the Taliban were toppled by the 2001 US-led invasion -- sparked by Kabul's refusal to hand over the presumed Al-Qaeda masterminds of the September 11 attacks -- woman flung off their veils and celebrations erupted on the streets.

But the abrupt change jarred much of the deeply conservative, rural country. A Taliban insurgency trying to regain power and antipathy for Western troops has cowed many people into reverting to strict Islamic dress.

The country of 26-30 million adopted democratic principles in its post-Taliban constitution but with 70 percent of the population illiterate, the majority know nothing about representative governance.

For many "democracy" ushered in by the 2004 ballot, which swept Hamid Karzai to power, and preparations for presidential and provincial council elections this month have not been accompanied by awareness campaigns.

Access to the Internet and other media is scant. About 20 television channels and 90 radio stations established since 2001 mostly blare out music, offering little political debate or social programming.

But Mohammad Haleem, 25, is a convert. He says he will stand in line to vote for president and council members in his home province of Paktya.

"It allows us to select our fate," he said. "I will give my vote to the person who can serve Islam and the country."
Western films widely available after the fall of the Taliban gave Afghans an impression of democratic nations being morally loose.

"I don't know the meaning of democracy," said Noor Ali, an 81-year-old man with a long white beard sitting in front of a Kabul stall that sells petrol.

"I am old. I only know when I ask women 'why are you out almost naked in the street?' I am told 'uncle, this is democracy'," he said.

"Is this democracy? Dancing, having bare skin, dishonour? If it is, it shouldn't be," said Ali.
Critics warn that widespread corruption, insecurity and so many illegal private armies also threaten efforts to establish democracy.

Karzai's appointment of officials with dubious reputations and government failures to prosecute human rights' abusers and criminals have disillusioned many about the new system.

"I have bad memories of the past seven years," said Allah Mohammad, 60, working in Kabul dress shop and planning not to vote on August 20.

Many feel ideals that took centuries to evolve in modern Western societies were thrust upon the nation. They may eschew the polls or cast their ballot without understanding the issues, said Afghan analyst Wahid Mujda.

"When we ask people what democracy is, they will say democracy means lack of modesty and no religion, and that because of this issue there is a day-by-day increase in insecurity.

"Democracy is something that people have to get used to gradually," he said.