Aug
30
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Tuesday, 30 August 2011 |
The great mystery of the war in Afghanistan is not why the US led coalition has failed to permanently crush a group of illiterate, inbred, salafist rednecks--although that is a burning question. The real mystery is why a plurality of the Afghan people accept and even defend their totally dysfunctional system. They may verbally complain, but their actions and behaviours are the better measurment.
In Iraq during the Anbar Awakening the late Sheik Abu Risa Sittar, an opportunistic tribal leader as ever existed, supposedly said losing a war to the US is a good thing. As the stories go he would pose a rhetorical question, "would you rather be Germany and Japan, or Vietnam and North Korea?"
A plurality of sensible Iraqis opted for the former and joined with the US coalition to defeat the insurgency in hopes the security would lead to a result more like Japan than North Korea. At they did least for a period of time.
Only narrow slices of the Afghan population will even contemplate a hypothetical like Sittar's.
Many US officers cite apathy as barrier to progress and gaining the support of the population. They often link it to war fatigue, explained with some variation of a phrase starting with, "after 30 years of war..."
The war fatigue and resulting apathy are real, but a precise explanation of why Afghans accept and defend their dysfunctional country is offered by the social psychology concept of System Justification.
With roots in Social Identity Theory, Social Justice research, Social Dominance Theory and Marxist-Feminist Theories of Ideology, System Justification (SJ) can feel like a grand unification theory of social science dreamed up by vegan leftists after smoking an ounce of Humbolt County Chronic.
As a grand unification theory, System Justification's eighteen indivdual hypotheses make it impossible to disprove, thus failing Karl Popper's test of scientific validation. If you can't disprove a theory, reams of corroboration are meaningless. As a scientfic theory, SJ leaves a lot to be desired, but as framework for investigating certain attitudes and behaviours, SJ is an excellent tool.
One of the most well publicized SJ studies in the US used the theory to explain why political conservatives are happier than political liberals.
In a study published in the journal Psychological Science titled "Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?" Jaime Napier and John Jost concluded, "conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer against the negative hedonic effects of economic inequality." In other words, conservatives around the world, not just in the US, are able to use their ideology to justify and rationalize income inequality.
Jost, in another paper, writes, "system justifying ideologies serve a palliative function in that they reduce anxiety, guilt, dissonance, discomfort and uncertainty for those who are advanaged and disadvantaged."
Another study by Jost asked Yale students to explain why Yale alumni were more successful or less successful than Stanford alumni. One group of Yale students was presented data showing Yale grads fared better than their west coast counterparts. Another group of read data showing Cardinals earned more.
This experiment was to test SJ's sixth hypothesis, "members of low-status groups will exhibit outgroup favoritism" and sort-of corroborated the hypothesis.
Yale students when asked to give open-ended answers to why they were more successful than Stanford students responded with statements like, "Yale admits students with better records who are innately more driven." The group with the opposite data on alumni success gave answers like "Stanford is a more selective school so it will have smarter people."
It is not important whether the experiment proves or disproves SJ. The results showing that Yale students will create and adapt explanations depending on the data presented them is what really counts.
Humans need explanations for why things are the way they are. Humans need a narrative sequence to explain things in a way that makes sense. The facts do not matter. Truth, being to many a malleable concept, does not matter. What counts is that the narrative make sense.
The Yale students were writing explanations that could have fit into a larger narrative if they were prompted to write a full essay off the cuff. The large narratives are stories and in every story there is a hero and a villain. In most there is some type of victim. Since few people willingly cast themselves as the villain, most people opt for hero or victim, but being a victim is not exactly fun. Conservatives are, as Jost and Napier point out, happier than liberals.
This effect on the narrative is where SJ is remarkably adept and one study offers a framework to understand Afghanistan and its narratives.
"When you're stuck with something, one tendency is to make peace with it and try to see it in as much of a positive light as you can," said University of Waterloo professor Kristin Laurin about the results of her study on restricted emigration policies.
The study found that when people were presented written materials pointing out inequalities in their country and that leaving their country, in this case Canada, would become more difficult in they future they were more likely to defend the system.
"Restricted freedom of movement can lead to increased system justification i.e., increased support of the status quo...we found that participants who read that their country was difficult to leave became stronger defenders of their system’s legitimacy," the study published in August 2010 reported.
Laurin took the findings and extrapolated them on to other reasons it could be difficult to leave a country or break out of system. "The very people who are put in the worst position by a particular system, might be the ones that are the most motivated to defend that system."
Most Afghans are trapped in the current system. Many farmers are actually share croppers trapped in a cycle of debt. Laborers are often little more than indentured servants and even shop keepers in rural areas are in locked into financing arragements they will never be able to overcome.
There are some that get out. In the rural areas, tens of thousands of Afghans work abroad in the Emirates or Saudi Arabia as laborers. Others pay thousands of dollars to smugglers and leave the country locked in a shipping container bound for Europe.
The laborers are trapped in an overseas extension of the system. The illegal immigrants are usually trapped in and underground limbo. Few who make the container journey actually succeed in obtaining asylum and a normalized immigration status.
If just the suggestion of restricted emigration, as in Larin's study, can make people justify a system, how much more can actually being trapped in the world's most dysfunctional and dangerous country make an Afghan justify and defend the status quo?
Afghans waxing nolstagic over their country is legendary. The British Diplomat Mounstuart Elphinstone wrote in 1815 about this attachment:
"A native of the wild valley of Speiga, north-east of Ghuznee, who was obliged to flee his country for some offense, was once giving me an account of his travels, he concluded by enumerating the countries he had visited, and by comparing them with his own; 'I have seen all Persia and India, Georgia, Tartary and Bolochestan, but I have seen no such place as Speiga in all my travels."
That attachment continues for some Afghan expats to this day. At a group lunch in Kabul a US aid worker of Afghan descent complained about all the American and British Afghans who write about Afghanistan on their Facebook pages. "I can tell they have never been here. I always comment back how much this place sucks but they don't want to know." The Western Afghans who find their way back to Kabul uniformly agree about how backward, corrupt and screwed up the country is. Most of the Afghans who are trapped will, like the traveller from Speiga, profess great love of country and engage in the most confounding form of blame shifting when confronted with the nation's ills.
A recurring theme in Afghan politics is to bemoan how much western aid money seems to vanish. Just driving around the country it is hard to detect evidence of the billions of dollars in aid money that has sloshed through the place. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other politicians have repeatedly called for more western aid to flow through the Afghan government because direct efforts supposedly undermine his government.
"Afghanistan belongs to Afghans. Afghans don't want government from abroad. Afghans don't want a European government. Afghans don't want an American government. Afghans don't want a Pakistan government. Afghans don't want an Iranian government." Karzai, was quoted as saying during a press conference in February of 2011.
It is effective political rhetoric.
Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies states that half of the aid money has been wasted and grossly distorted the Afghan economy. Where did all the money go? A significant sum is stolen by Afghans. A narrow bore example is common office supplies. Aid groups will send an Afghan employee out to buy printer cartridges. The shop keeper asks the employee how much he should write on the receipt. Usually it is 20% higher than the actual price and the employee pockets the difference between the actual price and receipt.
In reality, most things in Afghanistan are the same price or cheaper than in the west, but the rip-off is near universal. If the employee is actually honest, the shop keeper will look at him like he's an idiot.
As Elphinstone wrote, "the love of gain seems to be their ruling passion...the influence of money on the whole nation, is spoken of by those who know them best, as boundless, and it is not denied by themselves."
Afghans love money so much they named their unit of currency after themseleves--the Afghani.
The bribery is endemic. Just to complete what would be a very mundane filming assignment in the US I had to bribe two Afghan Army Majors, a General and the equivalent of an assistant secretary of defense. I, like some westerners, pulled the liquor arbitrage by smuggling in bottles of cheap vodka. The $9 dollar bottles were equal to $100 in bribes. Turnabout is fair play I guess.
The corruption is nothing new. Two hundred years ago British ethnographers wrote how Afghan officials were "maintained by bribes and perquisites." Appointments to official positions were sold then just as they are now and Elphintone found "the Haukim generally farms the revenue from his province." The sale of offices and farming of revenue was common in feudal Europe.
If a person is not on the take, he is considered stupid, not honest.
Sentient Afghans know the scams, but in pure System Justification do not blame their countrymen. They blame the westerners--for everything.
US Military officers and western diplomats look at the poverty, the violence, the corruption and dysfunction, they see all the things the west is willing to do if only the Afghans would cooperate. The officers and diplomats can grasp why high ranking Afghan officials on the take do not play ball--the status quo is very profitable. Why the hypothetical posed in Iraq by Sheik Sittar "would you rather be Germany and Japan, or Vietnam and North Korea?"
never seems to occur to lower tiers is maddening to the officers and diplomats. The first and eighteenth hypotheses of SJ provide, if not an explanation, at least a way to frame the behaviour of the average trapped Afghan.
"People will rationalise the status quo by judging likely events to be more desirable than unlikely events...whether those events are initially defined as attractive or unattractive..." reads the first hypothesis of SJ.
The bookend, hypothesis 18 states "system justification levels will be higher in societies in which social and economic inequality is more extreme rather than less extreme."
Hypotheses two through seventeen are every logical permutation in between.
During the 2009 Afghan elections I was hired to gather atmospherics of the electorate. Due to insurance policy restrictions, most of the groups working on the elections were cloistered in hotels and moved around in armored SUVs. As a consultant on contract I was not restricted and could free range conducting field interviews recorded on a Flip camera asking everyone from day laborers, and subsistance level shop keepers to bankers a series of questions.
The responses were nearly universal.
"Do you think your vote will be counted?" Yes
"Do you think your vote will matter?" No.
"Who will win the election?" Karzai.
These man on the street interviews are statistically invalid, but I never once heard anyone say they thought Abdullah Abdullah would win. Polling in July by the International Republican Institute asked "Regardless of who you support for president, who do you think will actually win the presidential election?". Forty-five percent indicated Karzai. In the same poll 44% said they planned on voting for Karzai with Abdullah 26%.
When the interviews devolved into a scrum a recurring theme was that their vote would not matter because nothing would really change. No matter who won, nothing would change.
As election day approached and it became more apparant that the election would be corrupted, many staffers were bracing for unrest. The former British paratroopers providing security made contingency plans. Some groups stockpiled supplies in their hotels.
When the rampant fraud was easily uncovered there were not riots in the street. There were no major protests. There were some grumbles of discontent from the opposition's campaign, but even Abdullah Abdullah quickly threw in the towel.
The parliamentary elections in 2010 produced identical results; rampant fraud followed by nary a shrug. A post election poll commisisoned by ABC News, the BBC and Washington Post found 58% were satisfied with the outcome.
How can people a majority be satisfied with fraud and the 41% disatisfied just accept it? System Justification provides an insight.
In the US a pre-election poll of voters guaged the desirability of Bush vs. Gore in relation to the likehood either candidate would win. When Democrats were given data showing Gore likely to win, the desirability of Gore scored high. The more likely Gore was to win, the higher Democrats ranked Gore. Data showing a likely Bush win caused the same reaction among Republicans.
Where things get interesting is flip side reaction. When Democrats were told Bush was likely to win, his desirability crept up. When Republicans were told Gore was likely to win, his desireability rating improved by more than 300%. Republicans are often political conservatives and as noted above, conservatives are thought to exhibit more System Justification than liberals. (It could be that liberals just exhibit an inability to accept reality. Most social scientists tilt liberal and therefore may see liberal behaviour as the norm, thus giving a label to conservative behaviour.)
If American voters will shift their views based on the likely outcome, how much more so are Afghans trapped in their system? Is it any wonder the only thing that can get Afghans worked up is when a vehicle driven by a westerner runs over an Afghan or night raids by US and Afghan special forces. Atrocities by the Taliban are all but accepted as the norm.
When there is unrest in the streets, the target is almost always ISAF or even Western Aid groups. Former Chicago Tribune reporter Kim Barker described the May/June 2006 anti-Western riots in Kabul as a watershed moment. Afghans were grumbling about the immense wealth accumulated by Afghan government officials, warlords who were also government officials and government officials who became drug lords. When an ISAF military vehicle crashed, killing three Afghans it provided the spark. Afghan men went door to door through Kabul neighborhoods like Wazir Akbar Khan looking for Westerners to kill.
When viewed through a macro-level prism of SJ, this all makes sense. The "palliative function" of SJ shifts a person from helpless victim to Afghan patriot by refusing to kow-tow to the foreigners. The legendary independence of the Afghans, which history shows to be more situational and malleable than the legend, can be reframed as psychological defense mechanism. The internal dialouge may go something like this 'I'm not a backward, illiterate hillbilly. I'm a proud defender of Afghanistan/Islam/Pashtunism.'
(The cognitive biases of the endowment effect and loss aversion and how they affect resistance to change is also in play, but that is the subject for another paper.)
Painting with a very broad brush here, the Afghan people live in a society where the extreme gaps in social and economic inequality are highly visible and viewed as extremely unlikely to change. It is a place where SJ can become rampant.
For the Western military officer and diplomat, the likely hood of change is the key factor. For the past five years the military effort against the Taliban has been a stalemate. Despite billions of dollars in aid, the country is in shambles. Aid projects that have been completed, like roads, are already falling apart. For the lower class Afghans life is not remarkably different than it was under the Taliban except for the guady displays of wealth by those who have siphoned off millions of dollars in aid money, government largess and are on the take in every other fashion.
To break out of a cycle of SJ requires the default result, the likely result to stop happening or at least not be so easily predicted. Most westerners rotate in and out of the country, the Afghans see the same actions taken by ISAF and the NGOs time and again with the same meaningless results. The first step would be to stop doing what has been done time and again because obviously what ISAF and the international community have been doing for the past years has not been working. The Afghan people see that it has not worked.
Case in point, since 2007 infantry units from platoon sized to reinforced companies have been stationed at COP Sabari in northern Khost province. For most of that time US units have been doing the exact same missions.
In 2010 Haji Doulat, a former district subgovernor in Sabari, told the Hudson Insitute's Ann Marlow US Forces 'spent too much time chasing insurgents in the mountains and too little securing the population.' Doulat was referring to the ramp up in operations by units of the 101st Airborne.
During my three weeks embedded with Bravo Company 1-26 Infantry at COP Sabari, half the time was spent on missions more than 20 kilometers from the main population center around the District Center. One them, an air assualt into the mountains. During my two months embedded with Task Force Duke in Khost, I spent as much time on what Army Field Manual FM-3-24.2 'Counter Insurgency Tactics' calls Seek and Attack missions than population centric patrols.
After three years of 'chasing insurgents in the mountains' there are still insurgents in the mountains and the security situation for the average resident of Khost province has not changed. If the colloquial definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result, Afghans have judged senior leadership of ISAF's Regional Command East as insane. An ISAF tracking poll running from September of 2009 through March of 2011 show only 5% of Afghans credit ISAF with bringing security to their area. Just 25% of Afghans think the ANA will be able to defeat the insurgents in the next few years.
There is still majority support among Afghans for a US presence, but confidence in the US' ability to provide security has dropped from 67% to 36% in the last two years.
(Why the US military at times seems locked into the doing the same types of missions over and over again is a whole other field of study.)
If US forces were to do a complete 180 from their current operations to localized population centric operations like census and ID card programs, the residents of Sabari would not be able to prejudge the likely outcome creating a gap in the SJ feedback loop and possibly altering their behaviour.
A template for radically different missions is Task Force Spartan west of Kandahar in the fertile farmland along the Argendahb river. Instead of walking through minefields every day to patrol the villages, they live in the villages. When they pushed south to establish outposts in distant villages, they cut brand new roads with bulldozers. The next step is to build a wall 15 mile-long wall along the river bank. Soon the only way in and out of the area will be through checkpoints manned by US and Afghan security forces.
The effect has been enough to shock a few local residents into creating the Weapons Shura--a militia of local men working with US soldiers.
Changing the tactics of the military is just one step. A recognition that business as usual across the whole spectrum of aid and development organizations has not worked is also required. Given the results of all the money that has been spent, it would probably have been better to dump bundles of cash out the back of helicopters.
At least some of those bundles would have landed in the hands of shop keepers who would finally pay off their debts and be able to move beyond subsistence level retail.
System Justification intensifies when there is gross economic inequality. In Afghanistan the spread between the haves and have nots is probably greater than in any other country. Programs that target the extreme poor with traditional aid have a horrible track record globally.
The economic and social inequality that intensifies SJ has been exacerbated by the inflationary effects of aid spending. In ISAF polls Afghans report high prices as being a bigger issue than security. The single biggest issue of concern to Afghans is unemployment. When the aid spigot slows down there will be a major recession.
The only lasting economic hope is private business investment, but that is a mirage given the current global economy. Even putting aside the global recession, the barriers of security and corruption remain. The corruption is fed by the lack of security so until there is security, everything else is meaningless.
When the aid money stops and ISAF forces pull out, Afghans will not look in the mirror and blame themselves for their role in squandering 12 years. They will blame the west. They will blame America. The opportunistic Mullahs, politicians and strong men who frame a System Justifying narrative will gain the passive support of the population.
The traditional way to gain control of the Afghan people has always been to unite them against an external enemy.
"An ordinary monarch might endeavour to reduce the tribes to obedience by force," Elphinstone wrote. "But one Afghan King [Ahmed Shah] has already had the penetration to discover that it would require less exertion to conquer all the neighbouring kingdoms, than to subdue his own countrymen."
Elphinstone, writing about the policies of Ahmed Shah, concluded, "for the consolidation of his power at home, he relied, in a great measure, on the effects of his foreign wars."
Karzai in railing against America, Europe, Pakistan and Iran is following established patterns of success.
As a palliative explanation and justification for failure, the combination of Islam and blaming the west is the narrative that has served opportunistic leaders in the region for decades and it seems almost custom tailored for Afghanistan. This narrative will shape what comes next in Afghanistan.
Before President Obama announced the end of the Afghan troop surge, Cordesman wrote, "No government has made a public effort to either estimate the future cost of the war in money and casualties, or to justify its strategic value relative to other uses of these resources. This is a critical failing, given the intense pressures on national security spending, shrinking forces in most countries, the risks in other regions of the world, and the severe limits to even US power projection capabilities."
Cordesman was a bit premature. The calculation has been made by the electorate and the war has not been judged to be worth it. This judgement is based on current expenditures and recent results. It has not been judged against potential worst case scenario outcomes--the Quetta Shura Taliban back in control of the country, combining forces with the Pakistan Taliban and pointing thousands of unemployed young men toward an external enemy.
This leaves the US led coalition with two years to break the SJ cycle and mitigate the worst case scenario.
Attempting to alleviate income inequality via the usual projects is not going to work. Even massive infusions of cash have not brought down unemployment in the US. The only way to reduce unemployment in Afghanistan will be outside investment and not even the Chinese are going to invest much until there is enough security to make mining profitable.
A radical idea would be to take as much aid funding as possible and redirect it toward the military effort. All the military provisional reconstruction teams, agricultural development teams and the manpower of every other program of the sort gets swapped for infantry. Instead of deploying more Brigade Combat Teams and Battalions, give the battalions more infantry companies. The goal is combat power on the street and nearly every Battalion Commander I have met could easily integrate four more maneuver companies into his formation.
Boots on the ground are not enough. The military tactics must be radically altered. As illustrated above, the Afghans have seen the same types of missions over and over. They can assess the likely outcome of an air assualt or 'Seek and Attack' mission and in true SJ fashion, see the US failure as a good thing.
The departure from the types of missions previously conducted in the area must be extreme enough that the residents cannot prejudge the outcome. The intent of the missions has to be to jolt the residents out of the SJ feedback loop opening up the window of opportunity to gain their passive support.
The US has announced a time frame for ending its involvement, but how it ends has not been decided. The current glide-path of transition reinforces SJ. Afghans only have to look back twenty years to see how the last departure of a major power turned out, judge that as the likely outcome, embrace it and justify it.
The best hope for a soft-landing for Afghanistan may not be an orderly transition and withdrawal but an all out final push.
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Aug
11
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Thursday, 11 August 2011 |
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"Hi, my name is Brad," he said shaking my hand.
His smile and eyes were warm and friendly, more president of a small city Rotary Club than the highly trained, extremely experienced and very lethal man I knew he was. He was a Navy SEAL team leader.
Unlike the guy who wrote the New Yorker piece a week ago, I actually went on a mission in Afghanistan with the gentlemen I'm writing about.
I bumped into Brad and his two companions the night before in the tactical operations center. They had just arrived and were wearing some seriously high end combat apparel.
"We're all way over dressed," the company commander said before he noticed me. "PTs are just fine for the walk through."
After inquiring about the time of the mission brief and walk through, I quickly exited the TOC. The next morning as I met up with the platoon I was going to embed with for the mission, the company commander said the SEALs wanted to introduce themselves and make sure I understood the OpSec.
It was not the first time I had bumped into SEALs, they were pretty common in Al Anbar province, Iraq. The rules are simple: keep the camera off them, don't be a tool.
Brad introduced me to two other SEALs, Andy and Peter. They were all in their mid or late thirties, probably team leaders with a rank of Sr. Chief or Master Chief. In their civilian gym shorts and t-shirts the trio looked more like they had showed up for the workout of the day at CrossFit gym than the briefing for major combat operation.
"You have been around so you know the rules right?" Brad asked, with the same friendly demeanor.
"Yeah, just keep the lens off you guys. I shoot on tape so if I get you by accident we can go back, look at it and record some black over it."
Brad looked at the other two as if to say, 'that was easy.'
"Great to meet you, JD, we'll see you out there. It will be a good time."
I headed back to my platoon and made sure to keep my camera pointed in the opposite direction of them.
The next day when the grunts staged up to head out on the mission the SEALs were the source of a lot speculation. What were three SEALs doing going along with a bunch of grunts? What kind of weapon is that? Where can you buy those pants? The weapon was an H&K 416. They told us the website where to buy the pants, but I'm keeping that secret. 5.11 Tactical pants used to be cool, then they became a part of the work uniform for the Defense Contract Management Agency. When the auditors start wearing something, you know the coolness factor is gone. No one ever did figure out what they were doing going on this mission with a bunch of grunts.
I strapped on my body armor and jumped up and down a few times, making sure everything fit well, was strapped on tight and didn't jangle.
"Nice kit, but that D ring will be target for the Chechen sniper," Peter said.
"I've been hearing about that guy for years," I said dryly, "he has a great marketing campaign."
Peter gave me a sly grin. THE Chechen sniper, emphasis on THE is something of a running gag among jaded multi-deployment vets. "No, no, no, that was some other sniper, not THE Chechen sniper." I took the D ring off when Peter wasn't looking.
For most of the mission I was with my platoon doing our thing. My first interaction with them was during a low-key tactical situation.
"Hey, me and the guys are gonna be up here," Brad said, leaning over my shoulder. "Try to keep the camera off us."
"No problem. But if you and Andy get positioned in the enemy's blind spot and start dropping dudes, I'm gonna get right behind you and film the whole thing."
Brad hit me with the smile again, "just as long as we can get copies of it."
Brad's first move after that was not to take overt control of the situation. He complimented the platoon sergeant on the smart decisions he made so far, then by way of asking a few questions, guided the sergeant into making some even better decisions.
In all the writing about the SEALs recently, that is something I think many people miss. Yes, SEALs are incredibly athletic and physically fit. They are some of the best gunfighters and tacticians in the business, but they are also very intelligent, articulate and polished. Their interpersonal communications skills could be highlighted by the Harvard Business Review.
On the surface they projected an image of deadly efficiency. They wore full beards and weapons ranging from brass knuckles to a hatchet. Yes, a hatchet. Chad and Andy were muscular enough to make me feel like a pipsqueak. Andy, in particular became the subject of a series of Chuck Norris two liners. "Andy was a SEAL...back when he first joined the Navy. Andy told me about his leave time...he thought Ranger school was kinda gay." But during the lag time Andy would pull out his Kindle and would flash a megawatt smile with own dry one liners. "Way to supress that rock."
Peter for his part had SEAL depricating quips like how he didn't let his guys handle power tools. They have a lot of practice and trigger time with their weapons, not so much with the trigger on a skil saw.
At one point I shot the breeze with Brad and explained how a mid-life crisis led me to become a combat cameraman.
"What does a guy like you do for a mid-life crisis?" I asked him.
"Get married, start a family, work at a bank."
That low key life is not far off from how they roll around on FOBs. Whenever I have spotted a real Budweiser Badge SEAL on base he blends in to the background wearing jeans and t-shirt, looking like he could be a guy who manages bottled water and MRE distribution at the supply yard. Albeit one who looks like he spends a lot of his off time in the gym.
They know they are that pinnacle of the warrior food chain, don't gloat about it and have a fondness for old fashioned grunts who do the grinding work of war. When we were in a secured area they would drift from one group of soldiers to another talking shop and patiently answering questions. They knew how to work a temporary patrol base like a politician works a room full of donors. Like I said, polished, but not a just a surface gleam, a type of shine that only comes from pure mettle.
The SEALs I met were not the one dimensional caricatures so often potrayed. One of them described to me how he wept when he learned Osama bin Laden had been killed. Another gave the shoulder hugging comfort of wise fellow warrior to a soldier describing the carnage of a previous tour. They are human beings. Men who have families, wives, children, mortages. They laugh, cry and bleed the same color as the private on his first deployment.
Deep down, I believe they are driven by love. Anger, aggression, hatred and revenge cannot sustain men who do what they do.
If he had wanted to, Brad could have had me moved to another unit where I would have sat on a mountain top observation post. But he took my measure and for some reason, trusted me.
After that mission I would see them off and on. Brad would give me big wave, Andy's hard set jaw would change to movie star smile and Peter would make the work seem mundane.
I don't think they were on the helicopter that went down, but my stomache sank when I read the first news flash. I don't know their real names, or where they are from just their faces and a glimpse their character. Thankfully I haven't seen their faces yet.
Brad, if you are reading this, I have a copy of that video clip you wanted.
(Note: I have always assumed the names I know them by to be pseudonyms, but changed them again just to be sure. I intenionally left out a ton of information and if you doubt I was actually there, I have officers and NCOs to back me up.)
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Aug
04
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Thursday, 04 August 2011 |
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This humerous item from AOL Defense got me thinking...
I get double points on #3 for not looking like an obese war tourist but probably lose points on #7 for spending too much time in Afghanistan.
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Aug
02
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Tuesday, 02 August 2011 |
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"We determined we were not going back, we were just gonna live in the village." That decision made late in the night inside a mud-walled house compound by CPT Dennis Call and LTC Kenneth Mintz changed the battle against the Taliban in the Argendahb river valley west Khandahar city.
The Zahray District of Khandahar province and specifically the town of Sangasar north of the Argendahb river near where CPT Call's Soldiers operate is the spiritual homeland of the Taliban. Mullah Omar had his first Mosque here and in 1994, after Omar and a few local madrassa students hanged a local strongman who raped two girls from the barrel of an old Soviet tank, formed the Taliban in his Sangasar mosque. After the hanging other residents of the district and Khandahar city began requesting Omar and his band to dispense rough Islamic justice.
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1-32 Infantry's area of operations is near the village of Nalgham where the area between the river and Highway 1
is the widest. Open source map from the University of Texas.
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In less than two years the Taliban grew from a few conservative mullahs and students to a military force backed by Pakistani intelligence and funded by the major opium drug lords and the trucking mafia. The turning point for the Taliban came by a simple business deal. After the Soviets left, the communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan regime fell and the Mujahedeen Commanders took over. In many places local tribal based warlords and strongmen took over their areas pushing out what remained of the traditional Khan and Malik tribal leadership. The warlords along Highway 1 which runs from Chamen on the Pakistan border all the way through Herat and then north into the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan charged extortionate tolls on cargo trucks or just plain hijacked the trucks. This made sanctions busting into Iran, opium trafficking and all other forms of smuggling less profitable and terribly unpredictable. The Taliban offered an alternative--security and a flat rate toll on Highway 1. The Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Agency bought into the idea as did the drug lords and the trucking mafia.
It was the Taliban's first step down a slippery slope from a group of religious leaders dispensing harsh Islamic justice to a criminal enterprise with a thin Islamic veneer. Maintaining that veneer is part of the reason the Taliban is fighting the US and Afghan government forces so hard in Zahray.
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Jul
27
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Wednesday, 27 July 2011 |
I just left the Kandahar area and did a clean battle hand off with
Michael Yon who plans to use Task Force Spartan as his base of
operations for the next few months. Michael has been running around the
wars for six years and we've corresponded but never met in person until
two weeks ago. As far as embeds goes, he's tops in time with the
military which make his books all but required reading.
Michael has a new dispatch up about how the Taliban's brutality is growing .
The brutality of the Taliban is a direct result of the pressure being
put on them by the Soldiers of 4-4 Cav and Task Force Spartan. The same
thing happened in Iraq. When the brutality became monstrously
sadistic, the people revolted with the Awakening movements.
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Jul
20
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Wednesday, 20 July 2011 |
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Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Mintz made a series crucial decisions in late April and early May that flipped the Taliban's tactics upside down and is establishing the infrastructure needed to deliver what could be a devastating series of knock-down punches in what used to be Mullah Omar's backyard.
For the last four months I have been traveling Afghanistan looking for a place where the surge here may equal the effects of the 2007 Iraq Surge. If there is anywhere in Afghanistan where a movement similar to the Anbar Awakening that sprang up in Iraq's Al Anbar province along the the Euphrates river in 2007 can be built, it is the Argendahb river valley west of Khandahar.
The physical terrain is remarkably similar to that of the Euphrates river valley. There is a key highway, irrigated farmland, clusters of villages and a river. Granted the Argendahb is a mere stream compared to the Euphrates which is key difference because it does not create a physical barrier, but it is a terrain feature that can be used tactically. Most interesting is how much the insurgent's view of the Argendahb matches Al Qaida's view of Al Anbar. For the Capital T hard core Taliban the river valley west of Khandahar is an almost spiritual homeland. For Al Qaida in Iraq, the pure Sunni Islam of Al Anbar was their base of support.
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| This open source map comes from the University of Texas. TF Spartan,
3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain operates west of Khandahar mostly in the area
between Highway 1 on the north and the river to the south. |
The way LTC Mintz, commander of 1-32 Infantry, has arrayed his forces is also remarkably similar to the way Marines and Soldiers were stacked up on the Euphrates river valley in 2007 as the Anbar Awakening spread down stream from Ramadi to Baghdad .
Instead of living on Company sized combat outposts of about 125 men and patrolling through the farm land that is strewn with mines to the villages then returning to the outpost, Mintz's men live in platoon and squad sized patrol bases and strong points in the villages with their Afghan Army brothers. An average patrol base has about 25 men in it. The water is warm, the food is MREs and the living is dirty--a lot of Soldiers love it.
Throughout Afghanistan Army units go on patrol through the fields only to be shot at from behind the walls of the villages. The game plan of the Taliban is to shoot at Soldiers from two sides in hopes of baiting the Soldiers into crossing a mine field. By buying or renting a house in the village, building a few shooting postions on the roof and staying in the village 24/7 the tables are turned. The Taliban now has to cross their own mine fields and try to attack the US Soldiers who are in covered positions behind the walls. The US Soldiers patrol in the villages, the fields and roads between the villages and in a bubble of the fields around the villages.
Mintz, who is to combat tactics what Chuck Knoll, the legendary coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, is to football fundamentals, has executed a plan that is truly full spectrum Counter Insurgency.
Counter Insurgency is a competition for the people, not farm fields. The goal is to separate the Taliban from the people. By living in the villages, the soldiers have not just weekly or daily contact with the population, but hourly contact. The Taliban, to have influence over the people, have to fight their way through a platoon of US Soldiers and Afghan soldiers. If the Talibs don't die in the process, they usually give up under the precision fire of US soldiers.
Mintz' soldiers are killing Taliban, having constant contact with the people, and protecting the people from the Taliban who shoot into the village. A complete 180 from the usual scenario in Afghanistan, but the exact scenario that I saw first hand in Iraq's Euphrates river valley as local villagers stood up and joined with the Marines in taking on Al Qaida.
Completing the local villager's piece of the puzzle is the Weapons Shura--occasionally referred to as 'Nalgham Force'--a small band of eccentric leaders with mixed motives who at personal risk have joined with Mintz' soldiers to provide security for the villages.
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| Members of the Weapons Shura and Afghan Police meet with LTC Mintz
(blocked by his interpreter) and CPT Dennis Call, commander of Charlie
Company. They hold their meetings under a canopy of grape vines. |
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| The Argendahb is grape country. |
To be sure, a couple small outposts in the villages and few dudes with AKs do not an awakening make, but I saw beginnings of the Anbar Awakening and the situation is similar. The physical infrastructure of small patrol bases and strong points in the villages is the first step. The next is to drill down deep into the political structure of the village, find the key leaders, gain their confidence and convince them to join with the US and thier Afghan Army brothers to fight the Taliban. CPT Call plans on developing an ID Card program for the villagers, which is text book counter insurgency and creates a semi-gated community. No ID card, no access to the area and no more hiding in plain sight. The step beyond that is to find the power-players with the Zoor who are on the Taliban's side but can be tilted to the side of the Afghan/US coalition.
There is a lot more for me to drill down into, so more will be coming in a couple days. This thing could fall flat on its face, but LTC Mintz and his boss, COL Patrick Frank the commander of Task Force Spartan, are veterans of the 2007 Iraq surge and know what success looks like in counter insurgency. Their success this time may be an Arghendahb Awakening right in the area where Mullah Omar used to have his Mosque.
Please help! Hit
the tip jar or buy a dvd.
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Standing in front of the building the Taliban used to use as thier
tactical operations center in Nalgham. From left to right: Maj Shaki
Jan, CPT Dennis Call, JD Johannes, LTC Kenneth Mintz.
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A fighting position in one of the Afghan Army's strong points.
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| War Buddies. MAJ Brian Ducote and JD Johannes. I met Ducote when he
was a Captain commanding Battle Company in Baghdad in 2007 during the
Iraq surge. I embedded with Battle Company for a few weeks and made a
documentary about them. Ducote is now the Operations Officer of 1-32
Infantry.
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Jul
03
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Sunday, 03 July 2011 |
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As I walked along the two-foot wide trail on a 75-foot-high cliff I had one question for US Army Captain Aaron Tapalman. "Exactly how is it that the embedded reporter wound up walking point?"
Operation Nike, an air assault mission to the mountains of Sabari District in northern Khowst province, Afghanistan kicked off 2 A.M. when the soldiers of Bravo Company, a.k.a. Team Viper, loaded up on dual rotar CH-47 helicopters for a twenty minute flight to where no US Soldiers had ever gone before.
Nike, a battalion level operation of the 1-26 Infantry Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team/1ID--The Big Red One--was designed "to cause disruption [of] the insurgent support zone" in the western part of the Battalion's area. The driver of the operation was one month old video from a drone that appeared to show a group of six men suspected of being insurgents from Pakistan driving up a nearly dry mountain river bed to a village that has no name and unloaded what could have been two machine guns before dispersing into the rocky, tree covered mountains.
Team Viper's mission was to work with their Afghan Army partner platoon to clear the village, search for any illegal weapons and engage the village elders to gather information and intelligence. On the mission Vipers 2nd Platoon would be the main effort, moving through the villages with their ANA counterparts and other attached teams of soldiers like Explosive Ordinance Disposal, military intelligence and Psychological Operations. First Platoon would provide over-watch security from the ridge lines. Further down the river canyon, a platoon from Hannibal Company was positioned in armored MATV vehichles controlling access to the road. At the peak of the mountain was the battalion TAC--a small tactical operations center set up in the field.
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| Area of Operation Nike and Maday Ghar mountain. Yellow dot is LZ
where Team Viper landed at night. Red dot is Koshal Kalay, aka the
village with no name. Blue dot is Mundikehla. Pink dot is the final LZ
where we flew out of. |
In keeping with military procedure, the villages to be cleared were termed objectives and given code names, in this case Beetle, Bear, Badger, Bison and Bobcat in addition to their local name. Objective Beetle, the first objective and also the place where the men with machine guns were spotted by the drone, only had a code name because no US or coalition forces had ever been there to ask anyone what the small cluster of houses clinging to the side of the mountain was called.
To get to Beetle, the Soldiers of Team Viper had to descend 2,000 feet of treacherous terrain ranging from loose shale that collapsed under foot causing rock and soldiers to careen down the side of the mountain to climbing down the boulders of mountain water falls. By the time they reached Objective Beetle, Operation Nike had 5 soldiers in need of Medical Evacuation.
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Jun
22
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Wednesday, 22 June 2011 |
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I've been here almost three months with one more to go and have spent time in Helmund, Kabul, Parwan and Khowst provinces. My next stop will be in the Argendahb river valley near Khandahar.
Every province and region is different, which is why I'm doing a four month trip and visiting multiple parts of the country traveling on my own and embedded with US Forces.
The Afghanistan troop surge has not had near the success of the Iraq troop surge of 2007. There are many reasons why it has not succeeded, the primary three to me are not enough combat troops on the ground, which means commanders cannot fully execute population centric counter insurgency and even if they did have enough troops, I'm not sure the commanders would do COIN properly. The third reason is demographic, there are not enough adult Afghan men in the farming villages to join village protection forces on the scale of the Sons of Iraq and Awakening movements in Iraq.
I started my region by region embed tour in Helmund which has its own hydra of a problem because there is so much money to be made in the opium poppy business. As I wrote in early May, the ultimate resolution may have to be a business deal that legitimizes and regulates the opium trade.
The Marines are getting the closest to true counter insurgency operations with a vast network of platoon sized outposts and intensive patrolling, but have not instituted the vast census/ID card and population movement control measures outlined in 5-71 of the COIN field manual. In Iraq some Marine battalions had developed massive databases listing who lived in each house by name, phone number, car, occupation, tribe, clan, set. I have encountered nothing similar in Afghanistan.
In the Marines's defense, a large percentage of the population in Helmund is migratory farmers making a census/ID card program less effective, but even nailing down the details of a permanent population goes a long way to making harder for the enemy to move and hide in plain sight.
Here in Khowst province, at the height of the so-called fighting season, there is not nearly as much combat as there has been in the past. Real fire-fights are rare. More likely is a teenager or two firing poorly aimed pop-shots at a platoon as they leave a village. There are IEDs but a lot of the young men who put them in the ground wind up getting a bomb or missile dropped on them. The insurgents still fire mortars, rockets and other types of indirect fire at US bases and outposts but not nearly in the volume they had in the past.
The enemy almost always works in small, two to four man teams. To put this in perspective, in the 1980s the Soviets and Mujahideen threw thousands of menat each other fighting over the Khowst/Gardez highway which US Forces routinely drive up and down.
The US Forces here are not really doing population centric counter insurgency. The briefing slides the officers may say they are doping population centric COIN, but they are not. They are not doing census/ID card programs or other measures prescribed in the Counter Insurgency Field Manual to control movement of the population and separate the insurgents from the population.
Here in Khowst it is mostly enemy centric counter insurgency. Platoons patrol the area around their outposts for a few days, then go on big operations to distant villages to stir up trouble and develop enough signals intel for Special Forces teams to zero in on targets for raids.
The problem with that approach is the ease in which the enemy can fill those slots of bad guys. Keeping violent pressure on the insurgents is a necessity, but not the answer.
The units doing this cannot be blamed for the approach. They lack the personnel to lock down broad swaths of the country side. Putting pressure on the insurgent leaders by holding the 500-pound-bomb of Damocles over their heads in hopes they come to the negotiating table may be the best course of action available.
In Iraq the answer became the SOI and Awakening Movements. Some were spontaneous and started fighting Al Qaida on their own. Others had to be bribed and cajoled. Eventually unemployed and/or under employed men were put on the payroll to defend their villages.
In Iraq there would be 4 young men to each middle aged man in the SOI. The SOI were often supervised by former military men and the tribal leaders.
The demographics of Khowst province would produce a ratio of 40 young men to each middle aged man. The tribal structure of Khowst is weak and the villages easily intimidated by the insurgents because the majority of adult men are working in the Gulf states, Dubai, Saudia Arabia or in the big cities.
http://outsidethewire.com/blog/afghanistan/da-afghanistan-gum-shawi-kasan.html
Without credible village defense forces or Home Guard units as discussed in 6-39 of the COIN manual, it is very difficult to truly choke out an insurgency. Until the missing men of Afghanistan come back to the villages, the tribes and clans of the rural areas will be weak and succumb to the pressure of the insurgents.
ISAF is not losing by any stretch of the imagination. The troop surge has produced some gains, just not the dramatic gains seen in the Iraq surge of 2007. My analysis is that the surge was not large enough to do true population centric counter insurgency and even if it was, there is no guarantee commanders on the ground would have done it. True COIN is very boring, dull, grinding work that looks very bland on a power point slide and evaluation report. Many officers have never heard of census/ID card and population movement control measures which leads me to think they have never read the COIN manual.
But even if there were enough combat troops and they were doing the time tested successful COIN techniques, the lack of adult men in the rural areas to join Home Guard and village protection forces would hamstring the effort. The missing men of Afghanistan also explain the low quality of Afghan soldiers and police. Men with education, intellect and ambition go abroad or the cities leaving the mostly illiterate and indolent to populate the Afghan security services.
The ultimate question comes down to whether the original intent of Operation Enduring Freedom has been achieved: Eliminate and Prevent Afghanistan as a safe haven for international Islamic terrorists.
It is no longer a safe haven. But what happens after total US withdrawal is the question. Afghanistan could revert to its traditional pre-communist status as benign third world country. It could just as easily descend into a chaotic warlordistan the malignancy of which could spread and lead to safe havens for international terrorists.
It all comes down to the American public's appetite for risk or willingness to keep throwing money down the rat hole. The worst case risk is the resurgence of Al Qaida and Islamic terror in the newly liberated Afghanistan. The other extreme is the massive cost of keeping troop levels the same for two more years and a large presence for another five or more years.
Half measures can be made, but they only get half results.
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Jun
21
2011
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Written by JD Johannes
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Wednesday, 22 June 2011 |
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"Pashtunwali is dead!" Hajji Baraun announced in to the assembled Shura in the village of Zambar. Pashtunwali being the ancient tribal code of honor and conduct of the Afghan people. When I heard the english translation from the interpreter, my brain finally caught up with my what eyes had been seeing or, more accurately, not seeing.
For the past three weeks I walked through the villages, mountains and fields of Sabari district in Khowst province with Team Viper, the Bravo Company of the 1-26 Infantry based in the Sabari District of Khowst Province. I spent most of time with 2nd Platoon which seems to walk everywhere on missions ranging from the routine 6-8 kilometer security patrols to a two-day hike through the mountains to a village no US forces had ever been to. I had seen a lot of Sabari up close and on foot, but it took the mission to Zambar listening to Hajji Baraun speak to handful of Afghan government officials for me to understand the Sabari and why the Afghan surge has not been as effective as the Iraq troop surge of 2007.
The Mission to Zambar was a part of Operation Maiwan IV, a multi-stage operation by Task Force Duke, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division--The Big Red One--to push units out beyond their normal patrol zones to disrupt enemy activity. Second platoon drove in armored MATVs to Zambar and then would do an 11 kilometer patrol in the heat of the day. The drive was the worst part.
"Hey, JD, they're gonna do a controlled det in five," Sergeant Josh Haigood said, looking back at me. It was about 11 in the morning and we had been crammed up in MATVs and other armored vehicles since 3 A.M.
The route clearance platoon, Aces, which specializes in finding and detonating IEDs had already found a 25 pound bomb buried in the road. This one was estimated to be 35 pounds. The greater Zambar Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau sure knows how to make coalition forces feel welcome.
I took the opportunity to film the controlled det as chance to unfold myself from the cramped back seat and stretch my legs. After a couple hours in an MATV and most armored vehicles the pain of sitting in the most uncomfortable seat ever devised by military industrial complex subsides into a throbbing numbness. Occasionally soldiers legs are so numb they fall four feet to the ground while trying to climb out the vehicles. The Soldiers and Sergeants of 2nd Platoon would rather walk.
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