Apr
07
2009
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Tuesday, 07 April 2009 |
"When thousands of Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, our nation went to war. Had the Japanese claimed we could not pursue them, say, across the International Date Line, we would have laughed. Yet after bin Laden killed thousands in 2001, our generals, politicians, and president stopped at the arbitrary Durand Line (the official border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, drawn by a British colonial official in 1893) and thus granted a sanctuary to al-Qaeda when it was at its weakest. When attacked at home, we responded as a kinder, gentler nation--and were less feared for our response."
Bing is a true subject matter expert. Here is his latest article .
|
|
Dec
05
2008
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Friday, 05 December 2008 |
This item from Powerline caught my eye. Specifically the name of the captured terrorist: Ansari.
Ready for a lesson in obscure and possibly irrelevant Muslim/Arab/Afghan/Indian history?
The 'Ansari' were people from Medina, in the Arabian peninsula, who follow the prophet Mohammed during his flight from Mecca. Families who use the name 'Ansari' do so because they claim to be descended from the families who orginally joined Mohammed.
Whether or not any true Ansari made it to Afghanistan during the Muslim invasions we do not know for sure, but there was a group of purported Ansari popped up around 1550 AD in the mountains near Peshawar.
These Ansari formed a schizmatic sect that orthodox Muslims consider heresy called the Roshanis. (There is dispute on whether these back woods men were truly Ansari. They may have adopted the name to lend credibility to their cause.)
For two generations they were a constant thorn in the side of the Mughal Empire in the areas of the Kyber and what is now Waziristan.
These Ansari/Roshanis were eventually subdued and presented themselves in surrender before the Emperor Shah Jahan in Dehli. The Emperor allowed them and their followers to migrate to the Deccan provinces where they served the empire--often under arms carrying the banner of the empire. Whether they carried on their heresy is not fully addressed, but the British chronicler of things Afghan, Sir Olaf Caroe, points to the notion they came back to Orthodox Muslim beliefs and practices.
The Deccan Provinces are in the southern peninsula, below the Narmada river.
If the Afghan/Peshawar Ansari were relocated to the Deccan provinces, that would explain a terrorist with the Ansari name popping up in Mumbai.
Or, he could be taking the Ansari title as a Nom de guerre--a signal to those who know their Islamic history that he sees himself as one who is a true follower of the prophet Mohammed. In the world of the Islamic extremist, following the ways of the unique Quranic generation, which the true Ansari were members of, is the highest of goals.
Now, is any of this relevant to anything? I will not make that leap. But it does show that there is more to events of today than what happened yesterday.
|
|
Dec
02
2008
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 |
|
In close quarters with friends I will occasionally quip that the solution to the current unpleasantness in Afghanistan to create the country that always should have been--Pashtunistan.
Pashtunistan would run from the plains of Afghanistan, over the Duarnd line to the plains west of the Indus. This would be the tribal areas of Pakistan the mountain regions of Afghanistan populated by the Pathan tribes.
In my not so serious statement, I suggest Afghanistan, Pakistan and the NATO countries multi-laterally declare the new state and promptly declare war on it. Preferrably at the same press conference.
Quite the joke, eh?
Except at least one smart person has a serious variant on it.
In today's Washington Post, Robert Kagan poses the variant on my Pashtunistan scenario writing, "Have the international community declare that parts of Pakistan have become ungovernable and a menace to international security. Establish an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas."
The idea of Pashtunistan is nothing new. Since the partition of India into Pakistan there has been an effort to formalize Pashtunistan. The effort has waxed and waned over the decades, but maybe its time has come.
Afghanistan is not a country, it is an amalgamation whose borders were drawn by Russia, Iran (Persia) and Britain. Historically to be an Afghan meant to be a Pathan, a Pashtun to the extent that in the 1964 constitutional Loya Jirgah, it had to be clarified that being an Afghan meant being a person native to the borders of Afghanistan. Throughout the history of Afghanistan, no leader ever really, and definately no foreign force, subdued and controlled the Pathan tribes of the mountains and hill country on either side of Durand line.
Most invaders by-passed the region on their way to or from India.
The Pathan areas have always been a law unto themselves following the Pashtunwali, the code of the Pathans and their own clan and tribal governance.
The difficult part of the recent battles in Afghanistan are what they have been for every foreign invader or Afghan Shah--the Pathans of the hills and mountains. Western Afghanistan is rarely a problem.
My solution, often spoken in jest, is actually based on what has happened in the region for mellenia. Mujahideen fighting the Soviets used the tribal areas of Pakistan as a rear base much as the Taliban do now. The British, while at times able to hold the plains in the 19th century, never controlled the hills, let alone the mountains. None of the great classical empires Persian or Greek controlled the mountains.
You can fight your way through the mountains, you can hold a mountain pass for logistical purposes or even buy off a tribe that has lived in the cliffs above a pass for centuries--but no one has controlled the whole of Pashtunistan. The partition only exacerbates the problem as there are rear areas on either side of the Durand line. If Pakistan gets serious, go west, if NATO and Afghanistan gets serious, go east.
But even this over simplifies the problem because the Pathan hillmen are not the problem per se. It is their guests who use the mountains as a staging area and safe harbour for a war against civilization who are the problem.
The true solution lies in the answer to this question--how do we convince the Pathans to turn over their guests?
They key to the solution--if there is one--lies in the mellenia old Pashtunwali, the code of the Pathans. Crack the code, and you will be able to crack the Pathans.
|
|
Nov
17
2008
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Monday, 17 November 2008 |
In Brigadier Richard L. Clutterbuck's book "The Long Long War: The Emergency in Malaya 1948-1960" the end game of the British fight against the communist guerillas is very instructive.
Clutterbuck puts the begining of the end game around 1955. But the end was not until 1960.
I first encountered Clutterbuck and the Malayan civil war as model for counter insurgency in Fallujah in 2005.
After reading the book, I realized it was a blue-print for how to build a counter-insurgency.
The British, like the coalition in Iraq, spent a lot of time on mostly useless hammer and anvil type operations until they embarked on the "Briggs Plan."
If you put the Briggs Plan next to General Petraeus' counter insurgency manual, they are nearly identical. The accounts of the Briggs plan in action mirror the strategies and tactics employed by General Raymond Odierno when he was the Corps Commander in 2007.
The coalition is in a similar position to the British in 1956-1957.
The government of Iraq is becoming more capable. The Iraqi Police and military are more effective. The insurgency is waning and on the run. Many former insurgents, both Sunni and Shia, are being assimilated into mainstream.
But there is still a cadre of dedicated insurgents out there.
The British solution was to keep the emergency regulations in place, but with less strict enforcement on a case by case basis and to work closely with the new Malayan government. The British still kept their full complement of infantry battalions in the jungles, slowly hunting down the remnants and stepped up construction and commercial projects.
The British did not pull back into large bases. They dispersed out even deeper into the jungles of Malaya.
In Iraq, this move would be to reduce our logistical footprint in massive bases and to deploy infantry into even smaller outposts in the population centers where the Soldiers and Marines would live off the local economy as much as possible.
The arc of the war in Iraq has mirrored the British experience in Malaya to an uncanny degree. U.S. Policy makers should study the history of Malayan civil war.
If they do, they will see that we need another three years or more of deliberate and precision hunting down of the insurgent cadres to finish the job permanently, lest the core be able to reconstitute itself.
The surge has worked--to a stunning degree. But the war is not won yet.
|
|
Oct
09
2008
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Thursday, 09 October 2008 |
The Taliban, the 'Talibs,' products of Peshawar and Quetta madrassas overflowing with orphans and children of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan are, in the end, Pathans--also known as Pashtuns.
A survey of history of the Pathans shows one never-ending pattern: Fusion in the face of a common enemy and the frission that shortly follows.
The warrior Poet Khushal Khan Khattack, attempted and occasionally succeeded in unifying the Pathans against the Moghuls, but the pattern of fusion and frission always frustrated his efforts, leading Khushal to write of his fellow Pathans:
Of the Pathans that are famed in the land of Roh,
Now-a-days are the Mohmands, the Bangash, and the Warrakzais, and the Afridis.
The dogs of the Mohmands are better than the Bangash,
Though the Mohmands themselves are a thousand times worse than the dogs.
The Warrakzais are the scavengers of the Afridis,
Though the Afridis, one and all, are but scavengers themselves.
This is the truth of the best of the dwellers in the land of Pathans,
Of those worse than these who would say that they were men?
No good qualities are there in the Pathans than are now living:
All that were of any worth are imprisoned in the grave.
This indeed is apparent to all who know them.
He of whom the Moghuls say, "He is loyal to us",
God forbid the shame of such should be concealed!
Let the Pathans drive all thought of honour from their hearts:
For these are ensnared by the baits the Moghuls have put for them. (Dupree, Afghanistan, 88)
"Ultimately, the Taliban are tribal Pashtoons [Pathans]," writes Robert Kaplan in this book Soldiers of God. "An anarchic mountain people who have ground up one foreign invader after another." (Kaplan 239)
The Pathans unify barely enough and barely long enough to bloody their enemy before descending into tribal warfare again. Even Kushal, while fighting the Moghuls, "carried out his tribal blood fued with another major Pashtun tribe, the Yusufzai." (Dupree, 321)
The blood fued, the blood debt, is something the United States has faced recently. The violence in Iraq in 2006 and early 2007 was not, as some believe, a civil war. It was the the Arab tradition of the blood debt spiraling out of control.
As Gibbon wrote of the Arabs in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "Everyman, at least every family, was the judge and avenger of his own cause...the interest and principle of the bloody debt are accumulated; the individuals of either family lead a life of malice and suspicion, and fifty years may sometime elapse before account of the vengeance be finally settled." (Modern Classics Library, 894)
(In my documentary Baghdad Surge , you can witness the cycle of the blood debt in action and how one infantry battalion set the stage to short-circuit the cycle.)
In the West Rashid district of Baghdad, the cycle of violence was brought to a halt when Sunni assassins like Malik and Shia assassins like the "The Wolf" were captured or killed by U.S. Soldiers. Because many reporters and analysts did not understand what they were seeing, because they did not study Arab culture, they thought they were watching a civil war--but random and targetted assassinations do not a civil war make.
I fear many are making the same err in Afghanistan--a failure to understand the culture. The lumping of Pathans, who throughout time have bloodied any invader (which the U.S. is), with the Taliban would be a mistake.
If the Pathans can be peeled off from the actual Taliban the way generic Sunni tribal insurgents were peeled off from the Takfiris in Iraq's Al Anbar province, the direction of the war will change.
In these discussions and negotiations the lessons of the British in 1842 should loom large.
In 1842 the revolts of the Afghans had the British in dire straights and Sir William Macnaghten, British Envoy to Afghanistan, set about a plan to sow dissent among the various tribal chiefs and bribe them to betray the rebel leader Akbar Khan.
But Akbar Khan set a trap for Macnaghten.
"[Macnaghten] seized on proposals from Akbar Khan which would permit the British to remain in Kabul until spring, and then withdraw voluntarily. Understandably desperate and strained by the awesome responsibility on him, Macnaghten accepted and signed a Persian document which agreed to Akbar's terms. Akbar showed the document to the other Afghan chiefs to expose Macnaghten's two-faced policy. Several of the 'rebel' leaders admitted to receiving proposals from Macnaghten to betray Akbar. Now, all united in a plan to sieze Macnaghten and hold him hostage." (Dupree 387)
(Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game has a more in-depth account.)
Macnaghten was not taken hostage though....Akbar murdered Macnaghten.
The British retreated from Kabul to Jalabad and only one Englishman survived the winter cold and the constant gunfire rained down by the tribesmen from the hills and crags to reach Jalabad.
But the fusion gave way to frission once again:
"Almost immediately after the defeat of the final remnants of the Kabul garrison at Gandamak, the illusion of unity loosened and finally broke down. Akbar Khan could not hold together the exultant Ghilzai and other Pashtun elements, and, singing improvised songs of the improvised victory, many tribesmen returned home." (Dupree 394)
The goal of any discussions with the Taliban, or more precisely, the Pathan (Pashtun) elements of the Taliban is to bring about the inevitable cycle of frission. In this case, frission between the Taliban and the Pathans.
To do this, the wise company and battalion commander will have to master the ancient way of the Pathans.
In a few weeks I will be in Afghanistan to witness what is happening first hand, until then, I will continue to study the history and anthropology of Afghanistan, the Pashtun language and the ways of the Pathans.
|
|
Sep
23
2008
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Tuesday, 23 September 2008 |
|
The tide turned in Iraq when coalition forces got off the FOB, got outside the wire, lived in small outposts and started walking through villages and neighborhoods instead of driving around in humvees.
That lesson has yet to make its way to Afghanistan :
"Yes. I believe the problem in Afghanistan isn't necessarily a quantitative manpower problem but rather a manpower distribution problem. We have between 60,000 and 70,000 international troops in Afghanistan presently and the vast majority of these spend their time in the FOBs [forward operating bases]. We have at least 10,000 soldiers, airmen, Marines and the like in Bagram for example, which is at least 150 miles away from the insurgency. And Bagram has a Pizza Hut, a Burger King and even a massage parlor. But it's not the way to win a counterinsurgency. You have to be out in the villages … When I was in Solerno last year, which is a FOB near the Pakistani-Afghan border near Khost, I estimated—and nobody really argued with me—that while there were thousands of people at this base, probably less than 5 percent ever left the wire. And you just can't prosecute a counterinsurgency with those kinds of numbers."
The scenario above sounds exactly like Iraq 2005. And we all know how well that strategy worked.
Counter insurgency is not all that complex. Get outside the wire, build a small outpost in a village, conduct a census, patrol 24/7.
I've even got an instructional DVD on it.
And as for the reporters question about, "If you have smaller numbers of troops in compounds throughout the
country, how do you protect them? How do you make sure their bases don't get
overrun by the Taliban?"
I've got a DVD about that as well.
|
| | |
May
30
2008
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Friday, 30 May 2008 |
|
When negotiating with your enemy, know his demands and what he will agree to even before sending an envoy.
Inha mu kif jihad, hatta il-sharia hal--il-waahid Quanoon a-ardah.
This is the stated position of our most ardent enemies: We will not stop jihad, until the sharia is the one source of law on earth.
The sending of envoys and offers has a long tradition in the Muslim way of war.
In 633 AD (12 Hijri) the Muslim General Khalid bin Al-Wahid sent envoys making the following offer to the Persians
"Submit to Islam and be safe. Or agree to the payment of the Jizya, and you and your people will be under our protection, else you will have only yourself to blame for the consequences, for I bring a people who desire death as ardently as you desire life." (History of al-Tabari, Volume XI)
Osama Bin Laden used similar language in his 1996 Fatwa :
"I say to you William (Defence Secretary) that: These youths love death as you loves life."
The United States was barely a Nation when in 1785, Tripoli's ambassador to England, Abdrahaman informed John Adams that Tripoli and the U.S. were at war.
Abdrahaman further informed Adams that a treaty could be purchased and warned that, according to David McCullough, "A war between Christian and Christian was mild, prisoners were trated with humanity; but warned his Excellency, a war between Muslim and Christian would be horrible."
Abdrahman's justification for a state of war? The Koran. As Jefferson wrote :
"It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave."
For 13 centuries, the demands of Mohammedan Jihadists have been plain. They key to negotiation with the Mohammedan Jihadist is understanding that there is no negotiation for the Mohammedan Jihadist only demands to be accepted or rejected.
|
|
May
19
2008
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Monday, 19 May 2008 |
Suug Sooda. The arabic term for Black Market.
The Black Market is how many insurgent operations are funded. In Iraq, the criminal and the insurgent are often integrated.
A black market exists only when there is profit by avoiding government regulation, rationing or taxation.
To eliminate the black market that funds insurgent operations, do not create more regulations or increase enforcement--eliminate the regulation, rationing and taxation that leads to a black market.
|
|
May
08
2008
|
Written by JD Johannes
|
|
Friday, 09 May 2008 |
Entire High Value Target lists will be captured, incarcerated, interrogated, executed...or shot on sight.
But it will make little difference over the course of time. I have seen this with my own eyes.
The cemetaries of the world are filled with indespensible men and an insurgency is filled with despinsible men.
Pressure must be placed on insurgent networks and personnel. The insurgents must be hunted and disrupted. But the capture or killing of one or a few or many is not the goal.
The goal is to eliminate the insurgency's ability to operate.
Much in the way that the killing of Pablo Escobar did not eliminate or slow down the cocaine trade, the capture of the latest insurgent leader will not stop the terror and mayhem.
In the cocaine business, the potential for profit is to high for the vacuume not to be filled.
For the insurgent, it is the same, but the currency is the success of the movement.
The better allocation of resources is in those tactics that deny the insurgency the ability to succeed, rather than targetting successful insurgents.
|
|
|
Blog 
