Chasing Ghosts in Afghanistan

Chasing Ghosts in Afghanistan

Katrina vanden Heuvel & Greg Kaufmann
April 27, 2009 - The Nation

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There were two important hearings regarding Afghanistan on the Hill last week -- in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and at the Congressional Progressive Caucus' (CPC) third forum examining the war. Both raised critical questions about the current strategy of escalation -- questions Congress should take to heart as it considers the $83 billion war supplemental in coming weeks.

Senator John Kerry -- who as a young Vietnam veteran famously asked the Foreign Relations Committee, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" -- now chaired that same committee's hearing titled "Voice of Veterans of the Afghan War." He said in his opening statement that he "would not compare all of our conflicts to the Vietnam War.... [That] does not mean, however, that there are no parallels between the two wars." The hearing bore out some of those parallels.

There was a diversity of opinion among the four veterans and retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich as to whether sending more troops is the right thing to do. But there was also something they held in common: their connection to this war -- its stakes, costs, and consequences -- is very personal (in the case of Bacevich his personal connection comes not only from having served in Vietnam but also losing his son in Iraq.)

Retired Corporal Rick Reyes was the most vocal of the Afghanistan War veterans in opposing escalation. He spoke of his determination -- and that of his fellow Marines -- to "fight the enemy" following 9/11. But Reyes said that instead they were "sent to fight an enemy we could never see. The entire time we were there, we were chasing ghosts."

Reyes' mission was to "locate and capture suspected members of the Taliban" during nighttime raids. But it was impossible to distinguish between suspected terrorists and the civilian population and "we began creating enemies out of innocent civilians." He told a story of beating a suspected terrorist "to submission" only to discover he was a civilian trying to deliver milk to his kids.

"There were hundreds of incidents like this one," he said. "... Almost 100 percent of the time we would find that suspected terrorists turned out to be innocent civilians."

Reyes called the presence of so many troops "a sign of poor intelligence. With strong intelligence there's no need to occupy the country with [this] massive amount of troops. So we need to strengthen our intelligence, and then plan, and then execute."

He's convinced, in fact, that the escalation will only make the situation worse. "I can almost guarantee you that sending more troops will mean more civilian and US troop casualties, more homes being broken into, more children without food, more women without husbands.... Sending more troops will not make the US safer, it will only build more opposition against us." He concluded with an appeal "on behalf of truth and patriotism to consider carefully and rethink Afghanistan. More troops, more war is not the answer."

Bacevich -- a graduate of West Point and current Boston University faculty member -- also offered compelling testimony on finding an alternative to military force. He drew a parallel to the Vietnam War and President Lyndon Johnson's "tragic failure of imagination, persuading himself that there existed no alternative to a massive US troop commitment."

Bacevich said that if the objective is indeed to ensure that Afghanistan is not a "safe haven" for Al Qaeda, then one example of an alternative to escalation is to "recognize the tribal nature of Afghan politics... and to provide incentives to the tribal chiefs to govern their patch of Earth in ways consistent with our interests. In other words, just don't let Al Qaeda in. And where those incentives don't work then it might be necessary for us to engage in some kind of a punitive action... to eliminate any elements of Al Qaeda." He also spoke of building more "robust defenses" at home, denying terrorist networks financial resources through less dependence on foreign oil, and emphasizing smart police work and intelligence sharing which is more effective and cheaper.

Senator Russ Feingold -- one of the earliest of a growing number of Democrats to question President Obama's policy -- pointed out that increasing the number of troops "may have no lasting positive impact so long as there are safe havens militants in Pakistan.... [it] may further destabilize the situation in Pakistan to the detriment of US national security."

Bacevich agreed. "Even if we could magically wave our wand, and tomorrow have the Afghanistan problem be solved," he said, "...what exactly would we have achieved in a strategic sense...? In many respects the larger problem is in neighboring Pakistan. To invest enormous resources in Afghanistan I think is allowing technical considerations to take precedence over strategic thinking." (A point which seems all the more compelling in light ofrecent events in Pakistan.)

"What about the possibility that an escalation in Afghanistan can actually be more destabilizing to Pakistan?" Sen. Feingold asked. "In other words, in terms of militants spilling back over into that border. Is that a fair concern or not?

"I think it's a very real concern," Bacevich said. "...To some measurable degree, in places like Afghanistan, increasing the US presence actually increases the dimensions of the problem."

Even supporters of President Obama's policy expressed doubt about the prospects for success. Captain Westley Moore said -- even with the escalation -- the number of troops for the mission at hand is still "paltry." (He's right, if one follows General Petraeus' counterinsurgency principles it's been suggested we would need upward of 400,000 troops.) At the CPC forum, Hekmat Karzai, Director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul, said: "Counterinsurgency is supposed to be about 80 percent political and 20 percent military... but in Afghanistan we have had over 90 percent of our resources allocated towards military, about 8 percent towards development."

Retired Major General Paul Eaton -- who was charged with rebuilding the Iraqi Armed Forces from 2003-04 and later became an outspoken critic of the Bush Administration -- was also at the CPC forum. He quoted his son's commander in Afghanistan who said, "I don't need any more combat power. I need agriculture experts, I need water engineers, I need doctors, nurses, dentists...."

CPC Policy Advisor Bill Goold posed a critical question as to whether US and NATO forces are widely "viewed as foreign occupiers", and if so, "what military strategy could possibly succeed?"

Clare Lockhart, who served as a UN advisor in Afghanistan during the 2001 Bonn process -- a meeting of Afghans under UN auspices to help the transition to a permanent government and constitution -- said there is indeed "a risk" of the perception of the military as a foreign occupation.

Karzai pointed out that in 2004-05 Afghan support for the international forces was over 80 percent, and that support has now fallen to "the high 40s."

In a dramatic moment, Rep. John Conyers arrived during the forum to make a statement against escalation: "As one who supported the 44th President before nearly everybody else, I want you to understand that my reasons for thinking this is a mistake is not based on the fact that I think I'm smarter than Barack Obama. I think he's the smartest political person in the United States. But I think he's getting some terrible advice. And so I'm here to help straighten that out, because I want him to stay on track.... My first suggestion is that we're making precisely the same mistake that we've been making for six years in Iraq.... [There] is a very suspicious, uneasy feeling among a number of people that this is the beginning of an open-ended situation, that no matter how well tailored it is, no matter how carefully though out it is... we're getting into another hole...."

Conyers is absolutely right. The best thing anyone can do right now to support President Obama is to advise against digging us deeper into what could become a quagmire. Senator Kerry promised more hearings, a thorough vetting of all alternatives, and that the committee will exercise its oversight authority. Let's hope he follows through. Now is also a good time to let your legislators know you are against escalation and that you want to see more hearings that explore alternatives.

As Corporal Reyes suggested, it's time to stop chasing ghosts in Afghanistan.

US Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

US Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Gareth Porter
April 21, 2009 - Inter Press Service

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President Barack Obama and other top officials in his administration have made it clear that there can be no military solution in Afghanistan, and that the non-military efforts to win over the Afghan population will be central to its chances of success.

The reality, however, is that U.S. military and civilian agencies lack the skills and training as well as the institutional framework necessary to carry out culturally and politically sensitive socio-economic programmes at the local level in Afghanistan, or even to avoid further alienation of the population.

In fact, the U.S. government does not even have a minimum corps of people capable of speaking Pashto, the language of the 14 million ethnic Pashtuns who represent about 42 percent of the population of Afghanistan. It is in the Pashtun southern and eastern regions of the country that the complex insurgency that has come to be called the Taliban has been able to organise and often effectively govern at the village level in recent years.

"If all you are going to do is kill the bad guys, then you don't need a lot of Pashto speakers," said Larry Goodson of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the National War College, who was a member of the team assembled by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to formulate a proposal for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But an effort to win over Pashto-speaking Afghans cannot succeed without officials who can communicate effectively in Pashto.

According to Chris Mason, who was a member of the Interagency Group on Afghanistan from early 2002 until September 2005, the Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan are "proto-insurgents", meaning that they are "naturally averse to the imposition of external order".

The United States needs "thousands" of Pashto speakers to have any chance of success in winning them over, said Mason, recalling that 5,000 U.S. officials had learned Vietnamese by the end of the Vietnam War. "The Foreign Service Institute should be turning out 200 to 300 Pashto speakers a year," he said.

But according to an official at the State Department's Bureau of Human Resources, the United States has turned out a total of only 18 Foreign Service officers who can speak Pashto, and only two of them are now serving in Afghanistan - both apparently in Kabul.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California trains roughly 30 to 40 military personnel in Pashto each year, according to media relations officer Brian Lamar, most of whom are enlisted men in military intelligence.

That indicates that there are very few U.S. nationals capable of working with local Pashtuns on development and political problems. The National War College's Goodson said the almost complete absence of Pashto-speaking U.S. officials in Afghanistan "belies the U.S. commitment to a nation-building and counter-insurgency approach."

It is also emblematic of a broader human resource deficit in regard to a U.S. political approach to counter-insurgency as distinct from the past military approach in Afghanistan, according to Goodson. Winning over the Pashtun population "requires a level of human capital that, even prior to the global economic crisis was hard to come by," Goodson said, but in his view, "None of that staff is really in place."

The Washington Post reported that Obama announced in late March that the number of U.S. civilian officials to be involved in the new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy would be increased by at least 50 percent to more than 900. But even a doubling of the civilian presence would not address the yawning human resource gap in regard to a non-military approach to the insurgency, according to Goodson.

That's because the additional civilians would be based on a model of "highly paid contractors" who live far from the people they are supposed to be helping to win over, Goodson explained. That creates friction with their poorly paid Afghan counterparts and does nothing to establish relations with local people, said Goodson.

"You really do wonder if we are set up to do what we need to do in Afghanistan," said Goodson.
Mason warns that increased U.S. troops strength in Afghanistan is more likely to further alienate the population than help win them over unless the troops are trained for completely different operations from those they have done in the past. "Simply putting in more imperial storm troopers who do not speak the language and who are going to kick in more doors is just going to piss off more people," he said.

Mason believes many Army officers do understand the need to avoid traditional operations aimed at finding and killing or capturing insurgents, but are hamstrung by the Army itself. "The Army needs to move away from its default position, which has been war of annihilation, destroying the enemy, and focus on civil affairs," Mason said.

Col. David Lamm, who was chief of staff of the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, Lt. Gen. David Barno, is doubtful about the willingness of the Army leadership to shift to a counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan. "The institutional army doesn't want to do this," he told IPS in an interview last September. "There isn't a lot of money in counter-insurgency. It isn't a high-tech war - it's a low-tech humint [human intelligence] operation."

Lamm recalled that the army's role in Afghanistan before Barno took command in 2003 had been "counter-terrorism" rather than counter-insurgency. The army "wanted to roll in, round up terrorists, drive them out of the country, kill them," he said. Barno shifted the mission to one aimed at winning over the Afghan population, but he did so on his own, without any guidance from Washington, according to Lamm.

With the transition to NATO responsibility for Afghanistan that began in late 2005, the emphasis in U.S. military strategy was on "force protection" and keeping casualties low, Lamm said. After the shift to NATO responsibility, most U.S. troops in Afghanistan were still committed to an explicitly "counter-terrorism" role of destroying al Qaeda and Taliban "holdouts".

One of the hallmarks of that role, which has continued since 2006, is heavy reliance on airpower as a means of trying to weaken the insurgency. Barno, now director of the Near East South Asia Centre for Strategic Studies at the National Defence University, told IPS in an interview last September," There is a predilection to use airpower in lieu of close up encounters [with insurgents] to avoid U.S. casualties."

Barno recalled that he dramatically reduced reliance on airpower, because he regarded the Afghan tolerance for the U.S. military presence as a "bag of capital" that was used up "every time we used airpower or knocked down doors or detained someone in front of their family".

Barno's policy of curbing airpower was abandoned by his successor, Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, from 2005 to 2007, and the number of airstrikes has continued to grow exponentially since 2005. Eikenberry was nominated by Obama to be ambassador to Afghanistan - an indication that the broad outlines of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will continue to emphasise air attacks on suspected Taliban targets.

Growing Afghan anger at the hundreds of civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes, often based on bad intelligence, has been exploited by insurgents across the country.

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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.