Archive for the 'Counterinsurgency' Category

In U.S. Intelligence Failures: Dual Taliban Campaigns, we provided the analysis showing that there has been a split in the Taliban organization with Baitullah Mehsud (or By’atullah Mahsoud) the leader of the Pakistan wing and Mullah Mohammed Omar the leader of the Afghanistan wing.  Taliban insurgency is planned for Afghanistan, and an insurrection is planned for Pakistan.  This analysis, proven correct, was directly contrary to the analysis given by Army Major General David Rodriguez who claimed that the front in Pakistan would prevent the Taliban from conducting a “spring offensive” in Afghanistan in 2008.  But Mullah Mohammed Omar has recently said through a spokesman that the Taliban doesn’t align themselves with the fight in Pakistan.  Their’s is an Afghani struggle.

Mehsud’s reach extends far throughout Pakistan.  Only yesterday, the port city of Karachi saw combat that had its roots in Mehsud’s plans for Pakistan.  “At least three members of Jundullah (Army of God) were killed in the clash with police and paramilitary forces. Two policemen also died. One of the dead militants was the suspected leader of the cell, Qasim Toori, who was wanted in connection with previous deadly attacks in Pakistan.  Jundullah was founded in the South Waziristan tribal area in 2004 and is now led by Pakistani Taliban Baitullah Mehsud and Tahir Yuldashev, head of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. In recent weeks, Jundullah has become estranged from the main Taliban movement led by Mullah Omar, who insists that militant activities should be confined to Afghanistan, and not directed against Pakistan.  A senior police officer told Asia Times Online soon after the militants’ hideout in a residential area had been seized, “I was stunned watching so much weaponry [being used], ranging from RPGs [rocket propelled grenades] to light machine guns. It appeared they were preparing for a war.”

Preparing for war indeed.  Mehsud recently laid out his plans for Musharraf and Pakistan.  “We will teach him a lesson that will be recorded in the pages of history in letters of gold. The crimes of these murderers, who were acting at Bush’s command, are unforgivable. Soon, we will take vengeance upon them for destroying the mosques. The pure land of Pakistan does not tolerate traitors. They must flee to America and live there. Here, Musharraf will live to regret his injustice towards the students of the Red Mosque. Allah willing, Musharraf will suffer great pain, along with all his aides. The Muslims will never forgive Musharraf for the sin he committed.”  Just to make the global aspirations of the Taliban clear, he continues: “We want to eradicate Britain and America, and to shatter the arrogance and tyranny of the infidels. We pray that Allah will enable us to destroy the White House, New York, and London.”

In addition to cross-border operations, the connection between the Afghanistan and Pakistan goes deeper.  There is a symbiotic connection of the Pakistani ports to the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan in that Afghanistan is land-locked and dependent on supply routes through Pakistan.  Mehsud’s forces have begun to effectively target these supply routes.

Their latest target was a supply convoy outside the town of Dera Ismail Khan on the Indus Highway, one of Pakistan’s main arteries.

“They managed to single out the most important lorries, removed the drivers and then vanished the consignment lock stock and barrel,” said the official.

“Among the booty they discovered trucks carrying cargos of pristine 4×4 military vehicles, fitted with the most modern communications and listening technology,” he added.

The official added that Mehsud’s gunmen lacked the expertise to operate the equipment. So they enlisted the help of Uzbek and other foreign militants who are based in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas lining the north-west frontier.

In Afghanistan U.S. forces are both battling a Taliban insurgency and attempting to rebuild infrastructure and provide jobs.  But it is difficult in insurgent-held territory.  “This has been a Taliban area for years,” said Lt. Col. Dave Woods, who commands U.S. Forces in Paktia, one of the eastern provinces in Afghanistan which shares a small slice of border with Pakistan.  Roadside bombs in this area have killed two American soldiers, wounded more than 60, and destroyed as many as 30 military vehicles. They are often pressure plate devices made of anti-tank mines, sometimes stacked two or three high to create more force. They are planted on the very dirt roads the U.S. military hopes to rebuild, to improve the lives of the villagers here and turn them against the Taliban.

Already, 400 local men have been put to work. They line one main road, armed with shovels. U.S. commanders admit the work is labor intensive for a reason.  “We’re giving these men an opportunity to work this winter versus going to Pakistan or put in IEDs,” said Woods, seen at left talking to CBS News correspondent Cami McCormick. He believes his most powerful weapon is the ability to provide jobs. “It’s something the Taliban can’t do.” The workers are paid five dollars a day. The Taliban tried to stop the project, issuing threats over its radio station and through “night letters”, which appeared on residents’ doorsteps, warning that them and their families would be killed if they participated. But the men showed up for work anyway. In the months ahead, the road will be paved. It is an important trade route.

Contrary to the notion that the Taliban have stood down due to the winter weather, the tactics of intimidation and IEDs are being implemented by the Taliban in a winter so cold that as many as 300 Afghanis have recently died from exposure.  Taliban violence continues throughout Afghanistan.  Targets of the violence continue to be the Afghanis who work to construct infrastructure.

Taliban insurgents beheaded four Afghan road-workers in the northeast of the country after their families failed to pay a ransom for their release, the Interior Ministry said on Wednesday.

Afghanistan has seen a sharp rise in violence over the past two years as Taliban insurgents have stepped up their fight to overthrow the pro-Western Afghan government and eject foreign troops. Taliban insurgents have often targeted workers on government and foreign-backed infrastructure projects …

More than 6,000 people were killed last year in Afghanistan, many of them civilians, the worst year of violence since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001 for failing to give up al Qaeda leaders in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The violence against NATO supplies is not limited to the Taliban in Pakistan; these routes are in danger in Afghanistan.

Roadside bombings and a suicide attack have killed three people and wounded nine others in southern Afghanistan.

Police say a suicide bomber in a vehicle tried to attack a NATO convoy in Kandahar province’s Zhari district Wednesday. But the bomber hit a private car instead, wounding four civilians inside. There were no casualties among NATO troops.

Separately, a newly planted mine exploded under another civilian vehicle in the same district Tuesday, killing two civilians and wounding four others.

Also Tuesday, a vehicle carrying an Afghan road-working crew hit a mine in Kandahar’s Panjwaii district, killing one labourer and wounding another.

Kandahar’s police chief, Sayed Agha Saqib, blamed Taliban insurgents for the attacks, which occurred on roads often used by Afghan and western military forces.

The Taliban are engaged on two fronts.  They have continued unabated, and will increase in intensity throughout 2008.  Jobs for workers and other assistance programs are a good plan and anthropologically sound ideas, especially since Afghanistan has the highest number of widows per capita of any country in the world.  But it will take more than jobs to counter the Taliban offensives.  The exercise of military power and force projection are the necessary pre-conditions for successful reconstruction.  3200 U.S. Marines are soon headed for Afghanistan.  More will be needed.

Prior:

U.S. Intelligence Failures: Dual Taliban Campaigns

Baitullah Mehsud: The Most Powerful Man in Waziristan

Taliban Campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Musharraf Chides U.S. for Lack of Force

Three days ago in my article Taliban Campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I cited an Asia Times article in which it was reported that Baitullah Mehsud was sacked by Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

With the Taliban’s spring offensive just months away, the Afghan front has been quiet as Taliban and al-Qaeda militants have been heavily engaged in fighting security forces in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

But now Taliban leader Mullah Omar has put his foot down and reset the goals for the Taliban: their primary task is the struggle in Afghanistan, not against the Pakistan state.

Mullah Omar has sacked his own appointed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, the main architect of the fight against Pakistani security forces, and urged all Taliban commanders to turn their venom against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, highly placed contacts in the Taliban told Asia Times Online. Mullah Omar then appointed Moulvi Faqir Mohammed (a commander from Bajaur Agency) but he refused the job. In the past few days, the Pakistani Taliban have held several meetings but have not yet appointed a replacement to Mehsud.

Only now is the Hindustan Times and the Tehran Times catching up and reporting on this important development.  However, I also discussed Mehsud’s power in Pakistan and suggested that he would retain control of some of his troops, with Mullah Omar retaining control of his fighters and re-entering the campaign in Afghanistan with heavy insurgency.  The Taliban will become factious, but it will not disintegrate.

Baitullah Mehsud, the chosen leader of a militant coalition known as the “Taliban Movement of Pakistan,” a collection of 26 groups that have come together to battle the Pakistani army, sits down with al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Islamabad from an undisclosed location in northwest Pakistan.  (Al Jazeera)

Some analysts believe that Baitullah Mehsud is more powerful than Osama bin Laden; he is said to be the single most important man in Pakistan’s future.  For the time being, he has certainly become the most powerful man in Waziristan.

He has kept his face hidden from journalists, meaning that few outsiders even know what he looks like, although locals report that he receives treatment for diabetes. “Despite the fact that he is a diabetic, he is a very active man,” says Hussein Barki, a local tribal chief. “He changes his hide-outs so frequently, leaving the intelligence agencies clueless about him.”

Mehsud began his rise a decade ago, when he headed off to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. He comes from the Mehsud tribe, the largest in South Waziristan, but he, like most of his jihadist counterparts, did not have any stature in traditional tribal leadership. “They came up outside the tribal structure through the meritocracy of jihad,” says Fair. “They raised money harboring al Qaeda and other elements” in Pakistan’s tribal regions …

Mehsud has become deeply entrenched in Waziristan. The immediate source of his power is a corps of several hundred foreign fighters, mostly Uzbeks and other Central Asians, whom he commands. Along with his tribal followers, Mehsud is estimated to command several thousand armed militiamen, although he has claimed higher numbers.

Either way, Mehsud has established himself as someone locals respect, as well as fear. “He is no doubt the most influential and powerful person of South and North Waziristan,” says Barki, the tribal chief. “He has restored law and order in the area. But people also believe that there are many bad people in his militia.”

Pakistani forces have tried to strike back at Mehsud and his followers, but the most visible results have been significant casualties on the government side. With the powerful traditions of tribal loyalty, Mehsud also appears to have benefited from the local reaction to the government’s assault on him. “Those who are not supporters of Osama [bin Laden] or Baitullah, even they have been forced by the indiscriminate military operations to harbor sympathies for them,” says Momin Khan, the owner of a small trucking company in South Waziristan.

Still, Mehsud is a “ferocious enforcer” of his harsh interpretation of Islamic law, according to one U.S. intelligence official, and his zealotry has begun to alienate many locals. “He has enforced his own rules in the area binding men not to shave their beards,” says Naseeb Khan, who runs a small public telephone office in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan. “Playing music and watching videos are against the law here.”

Still, Khan adds that if he needs to settle any kind of legal issue, he will go to Mehsud and not the local courts. Says Khan, “He is the law here.”

Our analysis: This power and ‘moral authority’ will prevent Mullah Omar’s attempt to sack him and regain control of the Pakistan Taliban from succeeding.  This data still points to multiple Taliban fronts in 2008: one in Afghanistan, and the other in Pakistan.  As we have pointed out before (and as pointed out by Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute), the fates of Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably linked.  An increase in force size for Afghanistan of only 3200 Marines is a small commitment given the stakes.

For all those readers who care about counterinsurgency – how to wage it, what we have done wrong in Iraq, what we have done (and are doing) right in Iraq, and what the campaign in Iraq does for our doctrine – there is a discussion thread at the Small Wars Journal that in our opinion is the most important one that has been started.  Without hesitation and in no holds barred fashion, it became a fascinating and most useful strategic slug-fest of competing ideas and narrative accounts of the campaign in Iraq.  If the main stream media reports have become boring and repetitious and the blogs have become outlets for talking points, this kind of discussion is at the same time professional, honest, forthright and intellectually complex, and should be engaged by all professional military who want to learn about both making war and peace.  This dialogue should be studied in war college classrooms across the nation.  We are linking it here (and also providing comments concerning this thread) because we have a number of readers who do not routinely traffic the Small Wars Journal.  While we will give some background, for the comments here to be in their proper context, the discussion thread must be studied.

The discussion began when the Small Wars Journal editor linked a commentary by Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, who is currently on staff at the United States Military Academy, and who also commanded a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006.  Gentile’s commentary was entitled Our Troops Did Not Fail in 2006, as was the Small Wars Council dicussion thread.  Gentile says:

During the year I commanded a combat battalion in West Baghdad in 2006, some of the soldiers in our outfit were wounded and some were killed, but we did not fail. In my opinion we succeeded.

We cleaned up garbage, started to establish neighborhood security forces, rebuilt schools and killed or captured hostile insurgents, both Shiite and Sunni. Our fundamental mission was to protect the people. Other combat outfits we served alongside did the same.

In this sense there is little difference between what American combat soldiers did in 2006 and what they are now doing as part of the “surge.” The only significant change is that, as part of the surge strategy, nearly 100,000 Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, were induced to stop attacking Americans and were put on the U.S. government payroll as allies against Al Qaeda.

This cash-for-cooperation tactic with our former enemies in no way diminishes the contribution of the soldiers and marines who are on the ground now. On the contrary, soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants and captains are struggling harder than ever to bring stability and peace to a complex society scarred by years of brutal violence.

Much talk has come from expert analysts, army officers and U.S. presidential candidates touting the success of the effort implemented by General David Patraeus. Many of these individuals compare the success of the surge in 2007 with what they see as the failure of American forces in Iraq in 2006.

One proponent of the surge, the neoconservative writer Clifford May, has written that by 2006, American forces had pretty much quit the country and were “cooped up in well-guarded Forward Operating Bases” – FOBS in military jargon – while “foreign terrorists slaughtered innocents” and the Iraq civil war raged around them. A senior officer who this past summer was a staff member for a very senior American leader in Iraq matter-of-factly characterized the nature of American forces in Iraq in 2006 as “Fob Rats.” Senator John McCain, now running for president, wrote in a recent opinion article that, prior to the surge, American strategy at the highest levels in Iraq was “mismanaged.”

But the combat battalion that I commanded in the 4th Infantry Division was a part of that so-called mismanagement, or what other, perhaps more direct critics, have referred to as failure.

On one level, my response to such statements is admittedly raw and visceral: If I was hunkered down on Fobs and if I and my men had pretty much quit the country in 2006, then how did soldiers under my command “just get dead?” What now am I to tell their families?

I remember a medic in our battalion, his combat patrol hit by multiple roadside bombs, moving under potential enemy fire to save the life of a local Iraqi man who had been seriously wounded in the attack. This medic was decorated for valor. He understood our primary purpose in Iraq was to protect the people.

I know from experience that the accuracy of reports that tout differences between counterinsurgency methods in 2006 and in 2007 are mostly off the mark …

The main difference was a decision by senior American leaders in 2007 to pay large amounts of money to Sunni insurgents to stop attacking Americans and join the fight against Al Qaeda. Coupled with this was the decision by the Shiite militia leader, Moktada al-Sadr, to refrain from attacking coalition forces.  The dramatic drop in violence, especially toward Americans, that occurred in Baghdad from June to July 2007 can mainly be explained by these new conditions …

But we should call a spade a spade and acknowledge why violence has dropped. Politicians and political analysts may make false comparisons.

The political motivations for such assertions are obvious. Yet American soldiers who fought bravely and bled in Iraq in in the years before the surge have become victims of American politics. We deserve fairer treatment.

LTC Gian Gentile, squadron commander, 8th Squadron, 10th Cavalry, inspects Iraqi checkpoint operations in Southwest Baghdad. The Iraqi Security Forces working the checkpoint outside the Al Amarriya Mulhalla, or neighborhood, are dealing with Anti-Iraqi Forces attempting to disrupt security in their area by using snipers and planting Improvised Explosive Devices in the local communities. U.S. and Iraqi Forces are working together in South and Central Baghdad, conducting combined patrols in efforts to maintain security for the communities and defeat AIF activity in Baghdad. Pic: SSG Brent Williams

The responses in the discussion thread have a broad range, beginning with the short and (we think) correct observation by Professor Steve Metz that “the position that U.S. troops are now doing something different than before is a minority one. What I hear is that most people who know anything about Iraq recognize that by 2005 at the latest, our units were doing the right things. There just wasn’t enough of them.”  This is an important comment, and one to which we will return later.

The very next comment in this thread is also smart, saying in part that “I think that beyond the simple increase of troop numbers, the surge represented a political statement of will to continue the fight in Iraq at a time when we were signalling transition and withdrawal.  Contrary to many accounts, the Sunni awakening and the emergence of CLCs (“concerned Local Citizens”) was not merely a case of us buying off Iraqi tribes. If it were just a matter of money, we could simply keep paying for a long time. The cost-benefit case could be easily made between paying them and maintaining troops here. There were multiple reasons for this phenomenon, among them: extremists overplaying their hands, the relentless pressure of Coalition and Iraqi military operations (current efforts build off of previous efforts), and the signal from the surge that we were not leaving anytime soon (commitment to stay in Iraq).”

From here the discussion takes on a more spirited nature, with points and counterpoints being made by both commenters and Lt. Col. Gian Gentile.  One significant point is made that perhaps Lt. Col. Gentile’s unit wasn’t affected by the previous strategy, but his own unit was, that affect being FOB consolidation rather than in being near to or with the population.  Gentile later responds again with a lengthy rejoinder, including this gem: “Getting at the primary mechansim for the lowering of violence in Summer 2007 is absolutely critical here. Most assume that it was American military power using new doctrine and more troops that did it.”

At the Captain’s Journal we also hold the truth in high regard, and because there has been such disagreement on the Anbar campaign, we started the category Anbar Narrative.  In order to address some of Gentile’s points, we will use an operation with which we are intimately familiar: Operation Alljah, begun in April and essentially ending in October of 2007 with the return of 2/6 (although officially ending prior to that).

The middle and subsequent phases of the operation used many modern techniques to inhibit the insurgency, such as gated communities, biometrics (retinal scans, fingerprints), and census taking.  However, it is clear that the early stages of the operation and going into the middle stages involved heavy kinetic operations and force projection.  To be absolutely clear, military power set the pretext for the campaign and allowed the balance of the methods to be successful.  The force projection included combat operations, intelligence-driven raids, constant dismounted patrols, heavy contact with, questioning and deposing of the population, and high visibility within Fallujah proper and the Euphrates river basin towards Baghdad.

Prior to Operation Alljah there had been moderate to significant success in counterinsurgency efforts in the balance of Anbar, depending upon the location.  Foreign fighters (Arabs, Africans, Chechens and Far Eastern fighters) and some indigenous insurgents had been driven to Fallujah as the last relatively safe place for them in Anbar.  They owned the streets of Fallujah in the first quarter of 2007 and were protecting a very large weapons cache in the industrial area (which included small arms, heavier weapons and chlorine).  They were also using Fallujah as a base of operations from which to launch operations into Baghdad.  The unit 2/6 replaced had flatly stated that Fallujah could not be won.

Into this came the Marines of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Regiment.  As Bill Ardolino cites from the Marines he interviewed, the Marines with 2/6 came in hard (“the whole persona of the 2/6 [Marines], the way they’re running operations, is to provide for the citizens. The IPs [Iraqi Police] are like that too, they’re out there engaging the people. They [used to get] attacked so much that they were a military force, doing military-type operations. When they showed up, they showed up hard. Now it’s more ‘Hey what’s going on? How are you doing? What can we do for you?’ It’s yielded huge gains.”).  They found transition to food bags and civil affairs missions hard and boring, but made the change and eventually turned over a relatively stable and safe city to their replacements.  The indigenous insurgents went home (many to Lt. Col. Bohm’s AO in Western Anbar), and the foreign fighters – the ones who weren’t killed by the Marines – made their way North to Mosul, Kirkuk and other areas of the Diyala Province.  The deployment of 2/6 to Fallujah was planned prior to the so-called surge, and yet contrary to the well worn notion of tribal leaders, Operation Alljah didn’t make use of or have any reference to tribes.  The Marines made significant use of the muktars, or city leaders and block captains.

The populist understanding of the campaign in Anbar involves tribes “flipping” to support the U.S.  A Google search on the words “sheikhs turn against al Qaeda” yields more than 300,000 sources, and the year 2007 is rich with main stream media reports of the Anbar awakening.  To be sure, the tribal revolt against al Qaeda was important, and without it, Anbar may not be as safe as it is today.  Another (still incomplete) narrative of the Anbar campaign involves what Gentile discusses – the U.S. implemented a strategy to pay off the indigenous insurgents.  This narrative is only slightly more sophisticated than the populist version, and sees the strategy to pay the indigenous fighters as without pretext and disconnected from the previous two or three years of combat operations.

Even in areas in which tribal leaders were important, e.g., Ramadi, there was force projection and combat operations as the pretext for the awakening.  As we have stated before at the SWJ Blog:

It has become in vogue to characterize the Anbar narrative as the “awakening,” and nothing more than this, as if it was all about getting a tribe to “flip.” To be sure, we needed Captain Travis Patriquin’s observations sooner than we got them, and I have argued almost nonstop for greater language training before deployment and payment to so-called “concerned citizens” and other erstwhile insurgents. You can qualify expert on the rifle range, but if you can’t speak the language, you’re going in ‘blind’ (to play on words).

But just to make it clear, to see the Anbar narrative as all about tribes “flipping” is an impoverished view of the campaign. It’s a Johnny-come-lately view. Hard and costly kinetic operations laid the groundwork for the tribal realignments. Sheikh Sattar had to have his smuggling lines cut and dismembered by specially assigned units conducting kinetic operations in order to ‘see the light’ and align with U.S. forces. Then, a tank had to be parked outside his residence to provide protection against the insurgents in order to keep him alive and aligned with the U.S.

The pundits talk about the tribes, but the Marines talk about kinetic operations inside Ramadi to provide the window of opportunity for the tribes to realign their allegiance.

Costa … dedicated a portion of his time to cracking the insurgents’ methods of communication.

“Generally there was a guy putting up gang signs, which could either send a rocket-propelled grenade through your window or some other attack your way,” said Costa, who began to realize the significance of unarmed people on Ramadi’s streets providing information via visual cues.

“You’re watching something on the street like that happening, and you’re like, ‘What the hell is that guy doing?’” he recalled. “And then the next thing you know, insurgents start coming out of the woodwork.”

“Signalers” — the eyes and ears of insurgent leaders — informed the insurgent strategists who commanded armed fighters by using hand and arm gestures. “You could see the signaler commanding troops,” Costa recalled. “He just doesn’t have a weapon.”

To curb insurgents’ ability to communicate, Costa decided on a revolutionary move: He and his unit would dismantle the enemy’s communication lines by neutralizing the threat from signalers. Sparing no time, he set a tone in Ramadi that signalers would be dealt with no differently from their weapon-wielding insurgent comrades.

“We called it in that we heard guys were signaling, and the battalion would advise from there,” he said, recalling the first day of the new strategy. “We locked that road down pretty well that day.”

In ensuing weeks, coalition forces coordinated efforts to dismember the insurgent signal patterns entrenched in Ramadi. This helped tamp down violence and create political breathing room, which in turn allowed the forging of key alliances between local tribal sheiks and coalition operators. The subsequent progress was later dubbed the “Anbar Awakening,” a societal purging of extremism by Anbaris that ushered in a level of stability unprecedented since U.S. operations in Iraq began.

“In the end, it turned out that Ramadi did a complete 180,” Costa said. “I got pictures in September from the unit that had relieved us, and I just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think I was looking at the same city.”

Ironically, in Ramadi — the city formerly paralyzed by insurgents, where Costa was unable to set foot in public during daylight hours upon arrival — citizens participated in a 5K “Fun Run” in September.

Regarding the payment to concerned citizens, a tactic we have strongly advocated here, it wasn’t as if U.S. strategists awoke one day and realized that payment might help to pacify their area of operations.  Rather, as observed by one commenter to this discussion thread, “relentless pressure” by coalition troops and the psychological affect of the surge (to convince them that the U.S. had no intention of leaving) were pre-conditions to successful implementation of this strategy.  While payment to sheikhs is larger, the payment to individual citizen’s watch members is no more than a pittance.

Whether tribal leaders, muktars, payment to concerned citizens, or operations from a combat outpost or FOB, there are many narratives coming from OIF.  Even when the 2/6 Marines pushed al Qaeda from Fallujah, there was still some degree of “whack-a-mole” counterinsurgency as they deployed to Diyala.  And hence, we are back to the comment left by Steve Metz at the beginning.  We never had enough troops to successfully implement counterinsurgency across Iraq.  In many ways the Marines in Anbar didn’t either, and took the losses associated with this lack of forces.

Intelligence-driven raids, close contact with the population, and constant dismounted patrols can be implemented from FOBs or combat outposts.  The location where Marines or Soldiers live takes on secondary or even tertiary importance to intelligence-driven operations, intensive contact with the population and enemy, and force projection.  Gentile is correct if his objection to the populist narrative is that it should not be seen as an exclusive narrative.  The campaign is much more complex than that.  However, before long in the discussion thread, Gentile digresses into a common meme over which we have engaged (that Iraq is in a civil war).  We have the utmost respect for Gentile, but if there can be no comprehensive and all-inclusive narrative for the campaign for him and his reports, then the comprehensive narrative of civil war cannot apply either.

There is no doubt that there was a low grade civil war in Gentile’s AO, and perhaps there still is in parts of Iraq.  Perhaps upon the eventual drawdown of U.S. troops there will be a return to factious warfare.  Then again, perhaps not.  But as for Anbar, there never was and is not now a civil war.  Of the many Marines we have debriefed following Operation Alljah, the consistent report is that “We killed Chechens, Africans, and men with slanted eyes – we don’t know where they were from.  But we didn’t kill a single Iraqi.”  Lt. Col. Gentile’s battalion was engaged in combat operations and protection of the population, no matter the populist narrative of troops sitting at FOBs eating ice cream.  Payment to concerned citizens and tribal participation in their own defense required a pretext and are good and wholesome and anthropologically sound tactics, no matter that the populist narrative chides the U.S. for “buying off” insurgents.  Civil war can describe parts of Iraq, but certainly not all of it.  The AOs are too diverse, and after all, the campaign for Iraq remains a complex affair that has proven unfriendly to populist narratives.

Prior:

The Strong Horse in Counterinsurgency

The Anbar Narrative (category)

Can the Anbar Strategy Work in Pakistan?

The Role of Force Projection in Counterinsurgency

Major General Benjamin Mixon Reports on Counterinsurgency

Our Deal with Mullah Abdul Salaam

Background

With over 3000 Marines headed for Afghanistan in the coming months to help with spring counterinsurgency operations, The Asia Times gives us a glimpse inside the Taliban leadership.

With the Taliban’s spring offensive just months away, the Afghan front has been quiet as Taliban and al-Qaeda militants have been heavily engaged in fighting security forces in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

But now Taliban leader Mullah Omar has put his foot down and reset the goals for the Taliban: their primary task is the struggle in Afghanistan, not against the Pakistan state.

Mullah Omar has sacked his own appointed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, the main architect of the fight against Pakistani security forces, and urged all Taliban commanders to turn their venom against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, highly placed contacts in the Taliban told Asia Times Online. Mullah Omar then appointed Moulvi Faqir Mohammed (a commander from Bajaur Agency) but he refused the job. In the past few days, the Pakistani Taliban have held several meetings but have not yet appointed a replacement to Mehsud.

This major development occurred at a time when Pakistan was reaching out with an olive branch to the Pakistani Taliban. Main commanders, including Hafiz Gul Bahadur and the main Afghan Taliban based in Pakistan, Sirajuddin Haqqani, signed peace agreements. But al-Qaeda elements, including Tahir Yuldashev, chief of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, undermined this initiative.

“We refused any peace agreement with the Pakistani security forces and urged the mujahideen fight for complete victory,” Yuldashev said in a jihadi video message seen by Asia Times Online. Yuldashev’s closest aide and disciple, Mehsud, last week carried out an attack on a Pakistani security post and then seized two forts in the South Waziristan tribal area.

As a result, Pakistan bombed South Waziristan and sent in heavy artillery and tanks for a major operation against Mehsud. Other important commanders are now in North Waziristan and they support the peace agreements with the Pakistani security forces.

Pakistan’s strategic quarters maintain the planned operation in South Waziristan is aimed particularly at eliminating Mehsud.

“While talking to government representatives in the jirga [peace council] we could clearly discern a grudge against Baitullah Mehsud and the Mehsud tribes by the security forces. And there are signs that the government is obsessed with a military operation to make Baitullah Mehsud a martyr,” a leading member of the peace jirga in South Waziristan, Maulana Hisamuddin, commented to Voice of America.

Mehsud came into the spotlight after Taliban commander Nek Mohammed was killed in a missile attack in South Waziristan in mid-2004. Nek was from the Wazir tribe, which is considered a rival tribe of the Mehsud. Haji Omar, another Wazir, replaced Nek, but support from Yuldashev and Uzbek militants strengthened Mehsud’s position. He rose through the ranks of the Taliban after becoming acquainted with Mullah Dadullah (killed by US-led forces in May 2007) and Mehsud supplied Dadullah with many suicide bombers.

Dadullah’s patronage attracted many Pakistani jihadis into Mehsud’s fold and by 2007 he was reckoned as the biggest Taliban commander in Pakistan – according to one estimate he alone had over 20,000 fighters.

The link to Dadullah also brought the approval of Mullah Omar, and when the Taliban leader last year revived the “Islamic Emirates” in the tribal areas, Mehsud was appointed as his representative, that is, the chief of the Pakistani Taliban.

Mehsud was expected to provide valuable support to the Taliban in Afghanistan, but instead he directed all his fighters against Pakistani security forces.

With Mehsud now replaced, Mullah Omar will use all Taliban assets in the tribal areas for the struggle in Afghanistan. This leaves Mehsud and his loyalists completely isolated to fight against Pakistani forces.

According to Taliban quarters in Afghanistan that Asia Times Online spoke to recently, the Taliban have well-established pockets around Logar, Wardak and Ghazni, which are all gateways to the capital Kabul.

Many important districts in the southwestern provinces, including Zabul, Helmand, Urzgan and Kandahar, are also under the control of the Taliban. Similarly, districts in the northwestern, including Nimroz, Farah and Ghor, have fallen to the Taliban.

Certainly, the Taliban will be keen to advance from these positions, but they will also concentrate on destroying NATO’s supply lines from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The Taliban launched their first attack in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province on Monday, destroying a convoy of oil tankers destined for NATO’s Kandahar air field.

“If NATO’s supply lines are shut down from Pakistan, NATO will sweat in Afghanistan,” a member of a leading humanitarian organization in Kabul told Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity. “The only substitute would be air operations, but then NATO costs would sky-rocket.”

Discussion and Commentary

This description points to fractures within the Taliban organization.  But rather than simply sacking Mehsud and replacing him with someone loyal to Mullah Omar, it is more likely that the Taliban will continue in two different factions, with Mullah Omar leading the faction associated primarily with Afghanistan, while Mehsud continues to lead his fighters in an insurgency within Pakistan proper.  Mehsud is a powerful man and has been blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.  He is careful and evasive; “he travels in a convoy of pickups protected by two dozen heavily armed guards, he rarely sleeps in the same bed twice in a row, and his face has never been photographed.”   Assassination of Bhutto is part of a larger plan.

Baitullah and his allies have even grander plans, the Afghan source says. Her assassination is only part of Zawahiri’s long-nurtured plan to destabilize Pakistan and Musharraf’s regime, wage war in Afghanistan, and then destroy democracy in other Islamic countries such as Turkey and Indonesia.

Baitullah’s alleged emergence as the triggerman in this grand scheme illustrates the mutability of the jihadist enemy since 9/11. As recently as June 2004, Iraq was said to be Al Qaeda’s main battleground, and Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was the terror chieftain whom US authorities worried about most. Baitullah was then a largely unknown subcommander in South Waziristan. But that same month, a US Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone killed Nek Mohammad, the young, dashing and publicity-hungry tribal leader in Waziristan.

Al Qaeda and tribal militants promoted the young Baitullah to a command position … Since then, Zarqawi has been killed by US forces, Iraq has receded as a haven for Al Qaeda, and Baitullah has come into his own as a terrorist leader in newly unstable Pakistan. Last month a council of militant leaders from the tribal agencies and neighboring areas named Baitullah the head of the newly formed Taliban Movement in Pakistan, a loose alliance of jihadist organizations in the tribal agencies.

Taliban sources who would speak only on condition of anonymity describe Baitullah as a key middleman in the jihadist network: his tribesmen provide security for Al Qaeda’s rough-hewn training compounds in the tribal area as well as foot soldiers for Qaeda-designed attacks. With a long tradition as smugglers, the tribals (most of whom, like Baitullah, take Mehsud as their surname) run an extensive nationwide trucking and transport network that reaches from the borderlands into teeming cities like Karachi, allowing Baitullah to easily move men and weapons throughout Pakistan.

Baitullah has clearly outsmarted the unpopular Musharraf, whom President George W. Bush praised again last week as an “ally” who “understands clearly the risks of dealing with extremists and terrorists.” In February 2005, with his military getting bloodied in the tribal areas, the Pakistani president decided to strike a peace deal with Baitullah and other militant leaders and their frontmen.

Under the terms of the deal the militants agreed not to provide assistance or shelter to foreign fighters, not to attack government forces, and not to support the Taliban or launch cross-border operations into Afghanistan. As part of the deal, Baitullah coaxed the government into giving him and the other leaders $540,000 that they supposedly owed to Al Qaeda.

The large cash infusion bolstered the jihadist forces, and under cover of the ceasefire Baitullah’s territory became an even more secure safe haven. He and other militant leaders have assassinated some 200 tribal elders who dared to oppose them. The Pakistani government struck a similar peace agreement with militants in North Waziristan in September 2006, transforming much of that tribal area into a militant camp as well …

In his few statements to the press, Baitullah has made his agenda frighteningly clear. He vowed, in a January 2007 interview, to continue waging a jihad against “the infidel forces of American and Britain,” and to “continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out” of neighboring Afghanistan.

From these accounts it is clear that both Mullah Omar and Baitullah Mehsud will likely continue operations, even if Omar intends to focus on Afghanistan and Mehsud intends to carry out operations first in Pakistan.  Even if there are fractures at the top levels of the organization, the loyalty of the fighters to the cause will supersede and overcome personality differences.  The fight, they say, will continue unabated, having temporarily subsided in the winter.  This emphasis is a necessary product of the extremism within the current generation of Taliban.  The New York Times recently discussed the relationship of a long-time, elderly religious extremist in Pakistan to the current generation of extremists.

“The religious forces are very divided right now,” I was told by Abdul Hakim Akbari, a childhood friend of Rehman’s and lifelong member of the J.U.I. (Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam) I met Akbari in Dera Ismail Khan, Rehman’s hometown, which is situated in the North-West Frontier Province. According to this past summer’s U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, approved by all 16 official intelligence agencies, Al Qaeda has regrouped in the Tribal Areas adjoining the province and may be planning an attack on the American homeland. “Everyone is afraid,” Akbari told me. “These mujahedeen don’t respect anyone anymore. They don’t even listen to each other. Maulana Fazlur Rehman is a moderate. He wants dialogue. But the Taliban see him as a hurdle to their ambitions. ”

Rehman doesn’t pretend to be a liberal; he wants to see Pakistan become a truly Islamic state. But the moral vigilantism and the proliferation of Taliban-inspired militias along the border with Afghanistan is not how he saw it happening. The emergence of Taliban-inspired groups in Pakistan has placed immense strain on the country’s Islamist community, a strain that may only increase with the assassination of Bhutto. As the rocket attack on Rehman’s house illustrates, the militant jihadis have even lashed out against the same Islamist parties who have coddled them in the past … For now, it is Islamist violence that seems to have the political upper hand rather than the accommodation of Islamist currents within a democratic society …

The jihadist websites haven’t given up on Afghanistan, with Jihad Unspun claiming that “The Taliban have already made it clear that despite the US troop increase in Afghanistan and the new equipment they may be using, it will not deter the increasing number of their attacks. As the harsh Afghan winter retires and the annual spring offensive gets underway, the Taliban are poised for the most aggressive fighting yet.”

But U.S. command in Afghanistan is conveying a far different message than either the Pentagon (which is deploying Marines to deal with the spring offensive) or the Taliban themselves.  Army Major General David Rodriguez has flatly stated that NATO won’t have to fight Taliban this spring.

The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is unlikely to stage a spring offensive in the volatile eastern region bordering Pakistan, the commander of U.S. forces in that area said Wednesday.

Army Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez told a Pentagon news conference that Taliban and al-Qaida fighters operating from havens in the largely ungoverned tribal areas of western Pakistan appear to have shifted their focus toward targets inside Pakistan rather than across the border in Afghanistan.

“I don’t think there’ll be a big spring offensive this year,” Rodriguez said.

That is partly due to ordinary Afghans’ disillusionment with the Taliban movement, he said, and partly because the Taliban and al-Qaida fighters see new opportunities to accelerate instability inside Pakistan. He also said Afghan security forces are becoming more effective partners with U.S. forces.

The Taliban has generally staged stepped-up offensives each spring, when the weather is more favorable for ground movement, although an anticipated offensive last spring did not materialize.

U.S. officials have said in recent days that they do expect a spring offensive in the southern area of Afghanistan, a traditional Taliban stronghold where fighting is most intense. That is one reason why Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week approved the deployment of an additional 2,200 Marines to the southern sector where NATO forces are in command.

Unstated in this account is that the Taliban didn’t need to stage a spring offensive in 2007 because they have transitioned to insurgency and terrorist tactics rather than more conventional kinetic engagements with U.S. forces.  According to the Afghanistan NGO Security Office, the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan is “just beginning.”  They further state that “We totally disagree with those who assert that the spring offensive did not happen and would instead argue that a four-fold increase in armed opposition group initiated attacks between February to July constitutes a very clear-cut offensive.”

It isn’t clear why Rodriguez is singing the praises of the campaign in Afghanistan when the recent battle for Musa Qala failed to provide proof of principle for the British strategy of trying to negotiate with the Taliban, and there are shattered illusions of peace in Kabul after the recent bombing of the Serena hotel.  “The Taliban are following a new strategy, their spokesman announced. They will go after civilians specifically, and will bring their mayhem to places where foreigners congregate.”

But what is clear is that the Taliban have safe haven in the tribal area of Pakistan, and the recent launch of a Pakistani offensive against them with approximately 600 troops – less than a Battalion sized force – will be met with stiff resistance from Mehsud, who has warned them to stay away.  Mehsud himself will avoid capture, and whether the Taliban launch a spring “offensive,” they will certainly continue the insurgency within both Pakistan and Afghanistan until the U.S. employs significant force projection.

Major General Benjamin Mixon recently reported on counterinsurgency in the Northern Province of Diyala to Fort Leavenworth officers.

Iraqis could be chiefly in control of the security in the north of their country within a year, says the general recently returned from commanding forces there.

Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon told officers at Fort Leavenworth last week that he expected Iraqi security forces to take the lead in day-to-day patrols in the northern provinces within 12 to 18 months if U.S. commanders continue to build up the capabilities of the Iraqis and the population’s confidence in them.

The first province transferred to Iraqi security was Muthanna in July 2006, followed by Dhi Qar, An Najaf, Maysan, part of Irbil, Sulaymaniyah, Dahuk, Karbala and Basra. The general thinks Diyala, Salah ad Din, Ninawa, Al Tameen provinces and the rest of Irbil could see Iraqis assuming the lead in security in little over a year.

Mixon said gains in the north came ahead of last year’s U.S. troop surge and before the rewriting of American doctrine for fighting the insurgency.

As early as November 2006, he said, his troops were setting up smaller remote bases more in touch with the lives of ordinary Iraqis and courting tribal sheikhs and provincial officials.

“I don’t know what’s new about counterinsurgency,” Mixon said.

That runs counter to enthusiasm generated among officers by a new and much-lauded counterinsurgency manual published in 2006 under the direction of Gen. David Petraeus when he was the commander at Leavenworth. It was the first revision of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in decades, and was notable for the way it valued collaboration with a civilian population and de-emphasized the use of brute military power.

The adoption of the manual was followed quickly by President Bush sending a surge of 30,000 troops into Iraq and putting Petraeus in charge of troops in the country.

“It’s a myth that all of a sudden we published the manual, then all of a sudden we got counterinsurgency,” Mixon told a handful of officers from Leavenworth’s counterinsurgency center.

Urban warfare studies at Fort Polk, La., for years have underscored the importance of winning the support of civilians in an occupied country through negotiation, he said. The military has long urged understanding local culture and improving people’s living conditions.

When Mixon was the top commander in northern Iraq for a 15-month stretch that ended late last year, troops worked to secure the region’s bountiful oil fields — although the general said exports could still be stifled by a single terrorist explosion — rebuilt schools, and repaired water and power facilities.

The effort included public relations work, from military commanders hosting regular radio call-in shows to arranging the telecasts of widows of suicide bombing victims receiving suitcases full of Iraqi currency in compensation.

“We’re not going to win by killing everybody,” the general said. “You’ve got to kill the right people — the leaders, the bomb makers and the people who just don’t want to give up the fight.

“But you can’t kill everybody. You have to win them over.”

Since the narrative carried forward matters to history for the purposes of training young officers and assisting the population to understand what counterinsurgency requires, and since I have been concerned about the lack of clarity of the Anbar narrative, I began the category The Anbar Narrative.  It is true that the success in Anbar came as a result of hard work prior to the so called “surge,” and that Marines were doing combat outposts (later combined with Iraqi Police Precincts) prior to the command of General Petraeus or the Petraeus / Nagl / Kilcullen doctrine promulgated in FM 3-24.  But The Captain’s Journal isn’t sure what to make of the claims by Major General Mixon regarding the Diyala Province, especially since this report differs at least moderately from previous reports by Mixon.

Maintaining security in Diyala province north of Baghdad will be impossible if U.S. troops are withdrawn from Iraq, according to a U.S. senior ground commander there.

“We obviously cannot maintain that if the forces are withdrawn — and that would be a very, very bad idea, to do a significant withdrawal immediately,” Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, told CNN’s Jamie McIntyre on CNN.com Live.

In September, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is to brief Congress on the progress of operations involving the recent increase of U.S. troops in Iraq — a buildup the Bush administration calls a “surge.” The briefing could determine how long the additional troops will stay.

Mixon’s troops are working with Iraqi forces fighting entrenched al Qaeda forces in Baquba and around Diyala province in an operation dubbed “Arrowhead Ripper.”

U.S. troop casualties have been high in the province, according to U.S. commanders, because insurgent forces are using the area as a base and have booby-trapped it with “deeply buried” roadside bombs that have killed entire Humvee crews.

Diyala became the home base for many al Qaeda forces when U.S. troops clamped down on Baghdad in February with increased troop levels, the military says.

Once a model of how the United States was clearing violence from parts of Iraq, Baquba, the capital of Diyala province, has become a ghost town except for the pockets of fighting between coalition and al Qaeda forces.

Mixon said the U.S. military strategy of “clear, hold and retain” was not possible when his troops arrived in Baquba last September because he did not have enough forces.

“I only had enough forces initially when I arrived here last September to clear Baquba. I did that many times, but I was unable to hold it and secure it,” Mixon said.

“Now I have enough force to go in, establish permanent compound outposts throughout the city that will be manned by coalition forces, Iraqi army, and Iraqi police, and maintain a permanent presence.

“But all of this has been made possible with the additional forces that have been given to me as a result of the surge,” Mixon said.

This kind of odd inconsistency helps neither the training of young officers trying to learn to lead their units nor the narrative of history.  The longer the time delay before a concerted effort is made to catalog the campaign, the less clear the narrative becomes.  Let’s hope that the battalion, regiment and division historians are busy about their business.

 Introduction and Background

 Regarding the resurgence of the Taliban, Lt. Gen. David Barno has an interesting perspective on his time in Afghanistan, as well as the evolution of the campaign since.

More than six years after they were toppled in Afghanistan, Taliban forces are resurgent. An average of 400 attacks occurred each month in 2006. That number rose to more than 500 a month in 2007.

“It appears to be a much more capable Taliban, a stronger Taliban than when I was there,” says retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, who was the top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 through 2005. “Just the size of engagements, the casualties reflected in the Taliban [attacks] show a stronger force.”

And Barno says that the United States may have unwittingly contributed to that resurgence beginning in 2005 — first, by announcing it was turning over responsibility for the Afghan military operation to NATO and second, by cutting 2,500 American combat troops. That sent a message to friend and foe alike, Barno says, that the U.S. was moving for the exits.

NATO commands most of the 54,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, nearly half of whom are American. Defense Secretary Robert Gates wanted NATO to send 7,000 more troops.

Appearing before Congress just last month, Gates wasn’t ready to mince words: American troops were stretched in Iraq, and NATO troops were needed in Afghanistan for combat duty and for training Afghan forces.

“I am not willing to let NATO off the hook in Afghanistan at this point,” Gates said.

By last week, Gates was ready to do just that. On his desk was a plan to send several thousand U.S. Marines to Afghanistan for combat and training duty. The proposal made him even more worried about the NATO alliance.

“I am concerned about relieving the pressure on our allies to fulfill their commitments,” Gates said.

But with violence flaring in Afghanistan, Gates had little choice but to turn to the Marines.

Meanwhile, other defense officials complain that NATO is not focused enough on the most important part of winning the insurgency in Afghanistan: Making life better by creating jobs, clinics and roads.

That left Gates in a recent appearance before Congress to question the future of NATO, an alliance created to fight the Soviets.

“The Afghan mission has exposed real limitations in the way the alliance is organized, operated and equipped,” Gates said. “We’re in a post-Cold War environment. We have to be ready to operate in distant locations against insurgencies and terrorist networks.”

Those problems are spurring several Pentagon reviews about the way ahead in Afghanistan. One option being discussed would give the U.S. an even greater combat role in the country’s restive south, now patrolled by Canadian, British and Dutch forces.

At the same time, there is talk of appointing a high-level envoy to better coordinate international aid for Afghanistan. One name being mentioned is Paddy Ashdown, a former member of the British Parliament who held a similar post in Bosnia.

That makes sense to American officers like Col. Martin Schweitzer, who commands the 4th Brigade Combat Team in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan. He says more experts are needed to give Afghans a better life.

“Specifically, we need assistance with agrarian development, natural resource development, like natural gas, etc., because there’s natural gas in the ground here,” Schweitzer said. “And we need those smart folks to come over here and help us get it out, so you can turn it into a product that can help sustain the government and the country.”

A more robust Afghan economy may help cut into Taliban recruitment of a large pool of the unemployed. But Barno and others caution that the Taliban are a regional problem. There’s a steady flow of radicalized recruits pouring over the border from Pakistan.

Analysis and Commentary

This account is pregnant with salient and important observations.  It is supplemented by Barno’s analysis Fighting the Other War: Counterinsurgency Strategy in Afghanistan, 2003-2005.  Only a short quote pertinent to our point will be cited below.

As we switched our focus from the enemy to the people, we did not neglect the operational tenet of main¬taining pressure on the enemy. Selected special operations forces (SOF) continued their full-time hunt for Al-Qaeda’s senior leaders. The blood debt of 9/11 was nowhere more keenly felt every day than in Afghanistan. No Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine serving there ever needed an explanation for his or her presence—they “got it.” Dedicated units worked the Al-Qaeda fight on a 24-hour basis and continued to do so into 2004 and 2005.

In some ways, however, attacking enemy cells became a supporting effort: our primary objective was maintaining popular support. Thus, respect for the Afghan people’s customs, religion, tribal ways, and growing feelings of sovereignty became an inherent aspect of all military operations. As well, the “three-block war” construct became the norm for our conventional forces.  Any given tactical mission would likely include some mixture of kinetics (e.g., fighting insurgents), peacekeeping (e.g., negotiating between rival clans), and humanitarian relief (e.g., digging wells or assessing local needs). 2001-2003 notion of enemy-centric counterterrorist operations now became nested in a wholly different context, that of “war amongst the people,” in the words of British General Sir Rupert Smith.

General Barno poses and answers his objections in these two commentaries.  The debate between “enemy-centric” counterinsurgency and “population-centric” counterinsurgency is old and worn, and highly unnecessary and overblown.  It has never been and is not now an either-or relationship.  It is a both-and relationship, and this truth requires force projection.  Notice what Barno tells us regarding even the intial stages of the campaign in Afghanistan; special operations continued kinetic operations against the Taliban, and the balance of forces launched into the subsequent stages of COIN.  Yet his initial analysis charged that the U.S. contributed to the resurgence of the Taliban by the quick exit and trooper drawdown in Afghanistan.

NGOs can support the effort, but if terrorist activities are perpetrated on the infrastructure, it is to no avail.  Similarly, the Taliban and al Qaeda can be killed or captured, but if they are left unmolested on the other side of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the campaign goes on forever.  Also, if the infrastructure languishes, the insurgent recruiting field expands.

Force projection is not a mere byword.  It is literally the foundation upon which counterinsurgency is built.  The circumstances surrounding commanders in the field (along with political realities at home) convince them to believe that transition to phases can occur before doctrine would suggest, and also convinces them to believe that smaller force size can succeed in what really requires a much larger force size.  In other words, the small footprint model of counterinsurgency is tempting, but wrongheaded and terribly corrupting to a campaign.  Force projection doesn’t just include kinetic operations, although it does includes it.  The notion that killing or capturing the enemy is the sole province of a few special force operators is one key reason for the failure of the campaign in Afghanistan.  Yet apologies for failures to rebuild infrastructure are inappropriate.  We need them both, we needed them then, and we need them now.  This is the way it worked in Anbar, and it it will work in Afghanistan.

Wretchard of the Belmont Club weighs in on the British -American debate over strategy in Afghanistan.  It is a lengthy and involved post, and in order to avoid republishing it here, the reader should follow the link to the full article.  His summary follows:

Robert Gates’ remarks ripped the lid off a simmering disagreement between NATO allies and the US over Afghan strategy. The differences are not simply over troop levels and counterinsurgency competencies but at the level of basic national interest. For some NATO countries there is nothing in Afghanistan worth fighting for at all for except the maintenance of good diplomatic relationships with America and the preservation of the Atlantic Alliance. But that will only go so far; and at any rate America can be counted on to carry the load alone because in contrast, the United States which directly suffered the September 11 attacks, sees a victory in the Afghan/Pakistani theater as a matter of vital interest. Therefore the US will carry on regardless. Even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama periodically declare their commitment to winning in that theater. The US and the European NATO countries may differ even in their conception of victory. For the US, victory is defined as creating and maintaining friendly governments in both Kabul and Islamabad by defeating al-Qaeda and its allies. For the Europeans it may mean bringing the Taliban to power in exchange for giving up its support of al-Qaeda.

Which side of the debate is correct I leave the reader to decide. But so far as I can tell this is what the debate is about.

The focal point of his analysis is the different conceptions of victory and what these conceptions mean to the methods and strategy by which it is pursued.  His point that the coalition is fractured is correct, and the British are looking for finality sooner than traditional counterinsurgency doctrine allows.  Thus, victory is redefined, i.e., the bar is lowered.  However, because he fails to interact with my own analyses, or at least the line of thought I advocate in this series of posts, his analysis is shortsighted and impoverished.

It is true that there is currently a clamour in Britain to jettison duties in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but this has not always been the case.  Soon after Phase 1 of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the British in Basra had a high time of it, working under the quiet confidence that regarding counterinsurgency, they had a few things to teach the Americans.  They implemented very restrictive rules of engagement, wore soft covers, had minimal force projection, and fished the waters of the Shaat al Arab on their days off.  Before too long under under these conditions, troop movement into and out of the AO was done only at night and via helicopter because travel by day was too dangerous.

The British ended their campaign in Basra by evacuating the city because they believed that their lack of presence in Basra would stop the shooting at their soldiers.  In other words, if they weren’t around to shoot at, they would’nt receive fire.  The AO was turned over to sectarian thieves, thugs and Iranian henchmen, and the Police chief in Basra has sustained seven assassination attempts.

In contrast to this, the Anbar province is pacified, and contrary to the Shi’a militia who drove the British out of Basra, Sheikh Ahmed Abu Reesha has said that the U.S. must stay in Anbar in order to help maintain security.  Force projection won Anbar and created the conditions under which it is safe for the U.S. to garrison forces there, and lack of force projection lost Basra.  Yet the British have not lost their penchant for seeing counterinsurgency through a different lens than the U.S.  The debate began in Basra before any part of the campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan became problematic and before the British public was searching for a way out.

The debate continues, and the recent deals with the Taliban are a continuing function of the strategy promulgated by the British.  It may be the case that the public pressure to disengage has become more prominent, but the strategy the British are pursuing is not a function of this public pressure.  Only the speed with which they employ the strategy needs to change in order to acquiesce to the public pressure.  The fracture in the coalition is deeper than mere public perception at home.

Prior:

British Versus Americans: The War Over Strategy

Our Deal with Mullah Abdul Salaam

A fort dating back to the British colonial period was recently attacked and overrun by a disputed number of Taliban fighters.  The Christian Science Monitor discusses:

Hundreds of armed militants stormed a border fort overnight Wednesday in Pakistan’s tribal belt, killing at least seven border guards. The militants then abandoned the colonial-era fort on the border in South Waziristan, a lawless zone that US officials say is a launching pad for Taliban and Al Qaeda attacks on Western troops in neighboring Afghanistan.

Islamic militants used explosives to breach the fort where about 40 guards were stationed, according to the Pakistan Army. Most of the guards fled, and others were reported missing after the firefight. The militants left the fort later the same day, melting back into the rugged mountains of northwest Pakistan.

The attack is a setback for Pakistan’s Army the Associated Press reports. Fifteen guards fled to safety at another Army base. Another 20 were listed as missing, but five were later found. The military claimed that 50 militants died in the firefight, a claim denied by a militant spokesman who said two had died in the assault.

The insurgents who seized the Sararogha Fort were said to be followers of Baitullah Mehsud, an Islamic hard-liner. Since December, Mr. Mehsud has been the sole leader of an umbrella group of Taliban sympathizers and is also thought to have links to Al Qaeda.

Musharraf has blamed Mehsud’s movement, Tehrik-e-Taliban, for 19 suicide attacks that killed more than 450 people over the last three months. Mehsud, labeled enemy No. 1 by the government, also masterminded the brazen capture of 213 Pakistani soldiers last August.

The Washington Post said Pakistani authorities have also linked Mehsud to the Dec. 27 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mehsud’s fighters have targeted Pakistani troops in South Waziristan with hit-and-run attacks and suicide bombings as the battle for territory intensifies.

“It really carries a lot [of] significance,” said Fazal Rahim Marwat, a professor at Peshawar University who has studied the Taliban movement in Pakistan. “This is another daring step on the part of the militants, and it seems that they are getting stronger and bolder with the passage of time.”

While an Army spokesman said the number of militants was around 200, the BBC said that local officials and other reports indicate an attack force closer to 1,000. This is the first time that militants have captured a fort in Pakistan and that is unsettling for authorities as they prepare to hold parliamentary elections next month, the BBC said.

The militants took several of the guards hostage and seized weapons and communication equipment from the fort, the Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn reported. The assault began around 9 p.m. Tuesday with rocket and mortar fire and continued during the night, the newspaper reported.

“Soldiers put up a good fight, but couldn’t hold out for long in the face of an overwhelming militant force,” a source said.

The last distress radio message, according to him, was made at around 3 am to the Ludda Fort, asking for artillery fire at the militants who had broken through the defences and begun pouring into the base.

The fort was manned by the Frontiers Corps, an 80,000-strong paramilitary force recruited from local tribesmen. The US military has announced plans to train and equip these forces as part of a strategy to counter militancy in the semiautonomous tribal region, said The Globe and Mail.

Reuters reports that Navy Adm. William Fallon, head of the US Central Command, said Wednesday that he believed Pakistan was ready for greater US counterinsurgency assistance. But he gave no details of that support, which is politically sensitive in Pakistan, where many strongly oppose the deployment of US troops. Admiral Fallon said he was encouraged by his conversations with Pakistan’s new Army chief, Gen. Ashfaz Kayani, who took over in November after President Pervez Musharraf resigned from the post.

“I was very heartened by his understanding of what the problems are and what he’s going to need to do to meet those, so we want to try and help that,” said Fallon, who plans to visit Pakistan later this month.

Wretchard at the Belmont Club observes that the Taliban and al Qaeda are acting like an army of state, and wonders whether the Pakistani military can conduct conventional operations against them.  To be clear, the Taliban are neither a regular army, nor is it to their advantage to behave as one.  Holding the fort that they took is not to their advantage.

So true to form, they abandoned it as soon as they took it.  Holding territory is the behavior of conventional armies.  The Taliban are indigenous, and live in this area.  There is no reason and no strategic value to having a border fort.  The Taliban own this area, and traffic freely across the Afghan border to conduct operations.  But this points to larger problems.  The Pakistani army is a conventional one, and doesn’t behave like it.

Whether considering regular or irregular (counterinsurgency and guerrilla) warfare, force size and force protection are critical elements of doctrine.  The Pakistani military at this border fort effected neither.  The force size was at least equivalent to a platoon, and the notion that a platoon of U.S. Marines would have been routed from this fort is of course preposterous.

I have observed before that the key to Pakistan is Afghanistan and more specifically the border region, and vice versa.  The key to Afghanistan is Pakistan.  The U.S. has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to engage in warfare against radical militants unimpeded, since Pakistan is acting approvingly of a larger role for the U.S.  NATO cannot be relied upon to contribute to the campaign.  Neither does the U.S. owe any debts to cold war thinking.  Not only Iraq, but also the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region beckons all U.S. forces to their mission.  The Marines soon to deploy to Afghanistan from Camp LeJeune are badly needed, and will fulfil their calling.

The Captain’s Journal will not endorse any particular political candidate for President, at least not during the primaries.  However, as absurd things come up in the context of the debates, we will address them.  One such absurd thing was promulgated by Ron Paul during the latest GOP debate.  It is a variant of one which I have addressed before in Attacking the Enemy’s Strategy in Iraq.  Kevin Drum sets out the scenario for us in his exercise in strategy-bashing.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that our “bottoms up” strategy of supporting Sunni tribes in the provinces surrounding Baghdad carries a number of risks. The biggest risk, I suppose, is that once the tribes finally feel safe from the threat of al-Qaeda in Iraq, they’ll relaunch their insurgency and start shooting at American soldiers again. The second biggest risk is that the Shiite central government understands perfectly well that “competing armed interest groups” in the provinces are — well, competing armed interest groups.

In response to Drum’s criticism of the strategy, I stated:

Having been militarily defeated by U.S. forces, we consider it to be unlikely that the Sunnis would take up the fight once again with the U.S.  More likely, however, is an escalation in the low intensity civil war that was ongoing for much of the previous two years.  This all makes it critical that political progress take root in the wake of the military successes.  But Kevin Drum’s concluding comment is absurd: ” … a year from now, if the Iraqi civil war is raging once again, this is where it will have started.”

Rather than an observation of the necessity for political progress, this statement follows the template of criticism set out by the left, and it has been followed with religious fervor.  Note carefully what Drum charges.  Rather than the seeds of violence being one thousand years of religious bigotry between Shi’a and Sunni, or recent history under Saddam’s rule, or the temptations of oil revenue in a land that has not ever seen the largesse of its natural resources due to corruption, the cause is said to be the “concerned local citizens” groups, i.e., U.S. strategy.

This outlandish claim betrays the presuppositions behind it – specifically, that it would be somehow better to continue the fighting than to, as they charge, buy peace with money.  But for the hundreds of thousands of disaffected Sunni workers who have no means to support their families, this criticism is impotent and offers no alternative to working for the insurgency to feed their children.  It ignores basic daily needs, and thus is a barren and unworkable view when considering the human condition.

So Drum’s charge is that if a large scale civil war emerges in Iraq, then the U.S. strategy is to blame.  Ron Paul offers a variant of this criticism.  It is that “we are arming the Sunnis,” and the Sunnis will then be able to carry on the fight against … perhaps the U.S., or perhaps the Shi’a … he didn’t say.  He just said that it isn’t over, something we can all observe for ourselves.

Regarding this charge of “arming the Sunnis,” Ron Paul ignores basic data that is quickly available to any motivated researcher.  I wouldn’t expect him to have recalled the long discussions I have had over this blog, or the Small Wars Journal folks had, over disarming the population as recommended by the Small Wars Manual.  Many observations emerged during this tête-à-tête, from the nation and population being too large for this solution to be effected, to it being culturally anathema, and so on.  But even if Paul is not a student of this blog or the Small Wars Manual, he can perform a Google search with relative ease, or so I assume.

There are too many hits in a Google search of this kind to mention, but just a few should suffice.  This Department of Defense article (and this one too), along with this Stars and Stripes article and this Telegraph article all go to remind us of what we have all known for four or more years.  The Multinational Force has continued to allow each home to have an AK-47 for self protection.  Arming the Sunnis is not something we did or had to do.  They were already armed.  This is how they carried on an insurgency since 2004.  The strategy had nothing to do with arming the Sunnis.  It pertained to settling differences with them, proving that the U.S. was the stronger tribe in Anbar, and in the end remembering that most of them never fought for religious reasons (as did al Qaeda and Ansar al Sunna).  This allowed the coalition to consider the issues of livelihood, income-earning, and support for families, basic anthropological issues that should be considered in any counterinsurgency.

But if Ron Paul has a childlike understanding of the issues, John Robb’s detailed understanding boggles the mind.  He charges the following:

The best explanation for the spike in violence between February 2006 and June 2007 is that the Askariya bombings initiated a process that was leading the conflict towards total war. Total war (Ludendorf) is a form of non-trinitarian conflict that ignores moral, political, cultural, etc rules in favor of complete mobilization to achieve total victory (global thermonuclear warfare is the ultimate example of total war). In Iraq, total war means religious cleansing via militias. Up until February 2006, Iraq was a limited conflict where US and Iraqi forces under strict modern rules of engagement, kept a lid on the scale of conflict (although they were unable to win). The Askariya bombing changed that dynamic. It so completely sundered the domestic social system in Iraq that the conflict lurched towards total war.

By early 2007, Sunni forces were suffering defeat after defeat as large Shiite militias violently cleansed towns and neighborhoods across Iraq (if measured in terms of Johnson’s coefficient, we would have seen a move towards 1.8, the coefficient of conventional warfare). This put the open source insurgency in a crisis. Sunni insurgents weren’t able to form the large local militias needed to defend themselves as long as they were in conflict with the US (these formations would be easy targets). The US military saw this opportunity and enabled the Sunnis for form local militias under the protection of the US (putting 60,000 on a US/Saudi payroll) as long as they sacrificed jihadi groups associated with al Qaeda. The US also began to target Shiite militias. The result was that the onrush to total war in Iraq was averted as the Sunnis began to develop conventional forces. The return to limited war also means that the open source insurgency can now thrive again.

Robb is a very smart analyst.  But his basic problem is one of presuppositions.  His axiomatic starting point is always that there is no solution to the problem of insurgency.  No counterinsurgency strategy can win, rather like the Kobayashi Maru.  But even a basic rendering of history proves this wrong.  The Romans successfully put down a Jewish insurgency for many years while occupying Jerusalem.  A more modern example is Vietnam.  The insurgency was basically defeated, and the South Vietnamese government fell only when NVA regulars came across the border en masse and the U.S. Congress cut funding for the war.

All of this isn’t to say that Iraq is a paradise right now.  The Sunni awakening leader Sheikh Ahmed Abu Reesha has said that the U.S. must stay in Iraq.

“Right now, any quick withdrawal will be disastrous because the Iraqi army is incapable of taking over,” Sheikh Ahmed said in an interview. “Any withdrawal must happen only when the Iraqi army is 100 percent ready to protect the country.

“The government and the country cannot afford to be without help from the Americans.”

Sheikh Ahmed took over as head of the Anbar Awakening in September after the murder of his celebrated brother Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha, the pioneer of the Sunni groups that switched allegiance from Al-Qaeda to US forces.

The movement has been a prime factor behind a sharp drop in violence across Anbar and especially in its capital Ramadi, which was reduced to ruins as US forces battled with Iraqi nationalists and tribes allied with Al-Qaeda.

Over the past year, attacks in Ramadi have dropped from 25-30 a day to fewer than one a week, and the numbers of roadside bombs have declined by 90 percent, according to latest US military figures.

Low grade or large scale civil war may indeed break out upon the decrease of U.S. forces, or in fact this may not happen.  If Robb is right about a return to an insurgency, he is so spuriously.  There is no necessity for this to happen, and since none of us can claim omniscience, we’ll wait on history to tell us whether Iraq will continue down the road to stability.  The point is that childlike objections like we are “arming the Sunnis,” and high-brow objections like Robb suggests are all variants of the same gripe.  In the end, they are just gripes; and myths die hard.

In British Negotiations with Taliban, I covered the secret negotiations between British MI6 agents and mid-level Taliban commanders aimed at splintering the leadership the Taliban.  We covered how there was an effort underway by Hamid Karzai to obtain the loyalties of the lieutenants of Mullah Omar and thus split the organization.  The price for this loyalty is a place at the table in the new Afghanistan.

But the British bypassed Karzai in their effort to make peace with the Taliban, and for this secrecy were ejected from the country.  Yet the deed had been done, and the price for realignment of one specific Taliban mid-level commander was governorship of Musa Qala, that fated city which once was handed over to local leaders, retaken by the Taliban, and then retaken again by NATO forces months later, costing both lives and blood of NATO forces.  Mullah Abdul Salaam switched sides, and was rewarded with rule over the region.

Matt Dupee at Afgha.com waxes positive about the deal, even suggesting that Salaam enabled the victory to retake Musa Qala, or at least caused it to be more timely.

Musa Qala district in southern Helmand province was the secluded epicenter of Taliban activity throughout 2007, a symbolic “crown jewel” in the Taliban’s jet-black turban, before Afghan and Coalition forces launched Operation Snake Pit last month and reestablished government rule. The highly touted operation lasted nearly a week with the heaviest fighting occurring on the outskirts of the city and areas further south. The operation’s speed and relatively tidy conclusion is due in large part from a back-door political deal hammered out between the Afghan government and a local Taliban strongman, Mullah Abdul Salaam Alizai, last October.

Mullah Abdul Salaam is a powerful and influential cleric of the Alizai tribe, Helmand’s largest Pashtun tribe, and holds sway over hundreds, if not thousands of armed loyalists throughout Musa Qala. His defection was secured after several secret meetings with Afghan and British officials during October and November. Rival Taliban factions attempted to assassinate him with a suicide-bomber, but British media reveal his body guard contingent of over 200 armed men helped foil the bomber’s plans.

The government’s deal with Mullah Abdul Salaam included his future position as Musa Qala’s governor, which he was appointed to on January 7, and allowed him to pick and choose other local authorities such as the new police chief. Afghan officials hope his prestige and influence over the locals will perk up their image in the south where many residents are sympathetic to the Taliban and deeply mistrustful of the central government. Officials also expressed optimism in bringing other “moderate Taliban,” meaning less ideologically driven fighters, into the fold of the government. For those fighters unwilling to cooperate, Salaam and his men have vowed to fight them.

But is this assessment too positive?  In a somewhat more desperate tone, The Times gives us a picture of what really happened prior to and during the battle for Musa Qala.

Britain’s last chance of securing this treacherous corner of Afghanistan lies in the hands of a piratical, black-turbaned figure with long beard, white cloak and silver-sequinned slippers with curled toes.

Mullah Abdul Salaam may not look much like a white knight. He served as a commander in the Taleban and even today his true loyalties remain suspect. The 45-year-old former Mujahidin guerrilla could, however, decide the fate of the British mission to stabilise the lawless province of Helmand, where this week he was put in charge of the key district of Musa Qala.

“He’s not just the best show in town,” one British officer remarked. “He’s the only show in town.”

Mullah Salaam’s rise to power in Musa Qala, the test case for British efforts to evict the Taleban and install central authority, is a classic Afghan tale of intrigue, bloodshed, farce and fate. In an interview with The Times the former warlord explained how last year he had severed relations with the Taleban, was courted secretly by a foreign diplomat and eventually swapped sides to join the British-led effort.

“The Taleban called a shurah [council] to attack the district centre and coalition forces there but though invited I did not attend nor fight,” he said. “It was not a good thing.”

He was then approached by Michael Semple, an Irish diplomat working for the European Union in Kabul. Mr Semple, a fluent Pashto-speaking veteran of Afghanistan, was expelled last month by the Government in Kabul for his back-channel contacts with the Taleban.

Before being ordered out he managed to put together a deal with the former Taleban commander. “We discussed reconciliation and unity in Afghanistan,” Mullah Salaam said of the first of his several meetings with Mr Semple. “I was surprised to hear of his recent expulsion.”

Mullah Salaam went to Kabul for a meeting with President Karzai last autumn. He caught the Afghan leader’s imagination with the promise of a tribal uprising against the Taleban, which could, potentially, deliver Musa Qala into government hands with barely a shot being fired. The idea led to a War Cabinet meeting in Kabul, which included the British and American ambassadors, President Karzai and General Dan McNeill, the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan.

The result was operation Mar Karadad, which had to be accelerated at the end of November when Kabul heard news that Mullah Salaam, now back in Musa Qala, had attracted the attention of the Taleban and the uprising was imminent.

There was no uprising. When Afghan, British and US units closed in on Musa Qala last month, Mullah Salaam stayed in his compound in Shakahraz, ten miles east, with a small cortège of fighters, where he made increasingly desperate pleas for help.

“He said that he would bring all the tribes with him but they never materialised,” recalled one British officer at the forefront of the operation. “Instead, all that happened was a series of increasingly fraught and frantic calls from him for help to Karzai.”

In spite of his broken promises Mullah Salaam was still one of the few credible local leaders prepared to work with the British. He also proved to be a skilled orator. This week he took his antiTaleban campaign to elders in the rainswept village of Chaghali, ten miles from Musa Qala.

“It is enough now,” he urged the 30 men huddled around him. “Our dead have been eaten by the dogs.” He gestured at a small group of British and American officers. “You can see around you these people from noble nations have come to build you streets and schools. If they should ask you to leave your religion then you have a right to fight them, but not because they come to bring you streets and schools.”

The village was in an area roamed by Taleban led by Mullah Abdul Bari, who remains at large. Mullah Salaam wasted little time in using his own past connection with the militant commander in his address.

“Abdul Bari is our brother,” he said. “He can come and sit among us . . . He is from this land. Speak with him. But don’t let him be stupid. If he is not on the right path then don’t let yourself be sacrificed for him. Tell him to take his jihad somewhere else.”

His eloquence and leadership have impressed the British, who reconsidered him for the job of district governor, not least because there were few volunteers for the post.

“The first time we heard Mullah Salaam speak he spoke bloody well,” said Major Guy Bartle-Jones, the head of the British Military Stabilisation Team. “In fact, he dominated the whole show. He gave the government message: antiTaleban, counter-narcotics, interspersed with Koranic verses. He came across as an accomplished politician, far away from the reports from Kabul, where he had been pilloried as a fraught and frantic man. So we reported back up the chain that he was a charismatic, good orator. And the question was suddenly: ‘Is this a credible governor?’.”

Today the new governor’s challenge is to navigate the dark waters of Helmand’s politics, unite warring clans and reconcile his erstwhile Taleban comrades into the political process. His very survival will be an issue in itself: he claimed that two suicide bombers have already been sent to kill him. He remains, however, Musa Qala’s best hope, and has certainly won the backing of the British, albeit with a small caveat.

“We have in him a credible governor who is making an impression upon us and the people,” an officer in Musa Qala concluded. “He is a compelling individual. But we still don’t know what his ulterior motives are.”

Because of his skills at oratory and his having spoken “bloody well” to the locals, he was given governorship of Musa Qala, despite the fact that he could not assist with any significant military presence during the battle for the very area he now rules.  It is a pitiful substitute for the “awakening” in Western Iraq, where the Anbaris vowed to fight al Qaeda to the last child of Anbar.

Mullah Abdul Salaam has talked a good game for the moment, and perhaps he means what he says.  Who knows?  But proper counterinsurgency requires force projection.  The strong horse wins in counterinsurgency because the population bets on proven winners.  Cheap imitations of the Anbar awakening won’t work in this region of the world.  In Anbar, commitment by Marines and other U.S. forces over time won the battle for the region, this battle consisting not only of kinetic operations, but also in good governance, increased water and electricity supplies, repaired infrastructure, and other amenities associated with modernity.  Al Qaeda had nothing to offer except violence.  The Anbaris made their choice.

The road in Afghanistan will be just as hard or even harder, given that the Anbaris are somewhat more secular than the Afghans, but the counterinsurgency can be won (despite the ridiculous and highly emotional British claim that Mullah Abdul Salaam is the ‘last hope’ of civilization).  It will take U.S. commitment, not artificial props to be successful.  No ostensible harm to the COIN campaign in Afghanistan has been done, but a great deal can be learned from this silly and unfortunate episode.

Prior:

Musa Qala: The Argument for Force Projection

Clarifying Expectations in Afghanistan

Review and Analysis of Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Campaign

Gates Sets Pretext for Review of Afghanistan Campaign

British in Negotiations with Taliban

Fates of Afghanistan and Pakistan Inextricably Tied

The British-American War Continues: MI-6 Agents Expelled from Afghanistan

Commitment to Iraq and Recommitment to Afghanistan

Taliban Now Govern Musa Qala