Archive for the 'Taliban' Category

An important and recent account of combat action from a friend and patriot currently in Afghanistan.

How can you not love and admire the American fighting man. Men who are sent perform pointless, thankless tasks in the service of their nation. Poorly lead, poorly supported; they still manage to perform with patience and valor. It is unfortunate that there are no words to describe the thoughts and actions of such men. I try to explain to the privileged 99% of American citizens who do not serve, just what this means. And fail miserably. They just look at me, disbelief on their faces and I’m sure, disgust on mine.

So the platoon is vehicle mounted, MRAPS and Hmmwv’s with ANA in Ford Rangers. The platoon negotiates a defile with high ground all around and the ambush is sprung when the lead and then trail vehicles are disabled with IED and RPG fire. Its a good size linear ambush; PKM’s and RPG’s. The platoon takes causalities immediately and all vehicular maneuver is initially destroyed under intense fire. The soldiers dismount to fight for their lives. Even the gunners are forced off their turrets.The Taliban forces have RPG 9’s and are trying to take the vehicles apart even as the PKM fire is pinning the dismounts and killing and wounding. C2 is a mess and the some of the ANA forces are trying to run away.

One soldier, armed with an old iron sighted M14 he found in a Conex container in a small outpost, targets three PKM gunners who have the main element pinned down. The Taliban forces intend to reduce this force to the point that they can conduct a ground assault across the ambush site and secure equipment and prisoners. Platoon leadership is massing fires and calling for Medivac and CAS, but it’s not going too well.

The RPG men are at 200-350 meters, close to their max range. They are popping up and down over various rocky berms that define the surrounding high ground above the kill zone. They know their business; target the vehicles and masses of men, hold them in place so that the machinegun fire and ground assault forces can finish the job. As they pop up and down they make lousy targets for the ambushed forces pinned down below. The RPG’s are fast and loud and leave an evil, snaking, brown smoke trail in their wake.

Its the PKM fire that is the real issue. Cleverly and with sound tactical acumen, they are positioned within their max range on a berm above and behind the RPG gunners. It is very difficult for the U.S. Forces on the valley floor to see them and fix them with their own fires. Here the M4 is not really in its element. Firing up slope from exposed positions at machine gunners with cover and concealment, the little 5.56mm round is no match for the  7.62mm rounds delivered at a high rate of fire. The soldiers are off their trucks, away from their own machine guns and heavy weapons which again are very limited due to the steeply sloping terrain. They are difficult to elevate to the point that effective fire can be delivered. The Taliban RPG and PKM gunners suffer no limitations.

The platoon leadership struggles to maintain their fires and a fighting force. Despite all the chaos they begin to get vehicles moving and their remaining heavy weapons on target. The Taliban is tightening the noose on this ambush. The balance of the U.S. forces are still dismounted, returning fire and treating casualties. The Taliban now has 360 degree fire on this tiny force. U.S. Forces are surrounded and need to get the heck out of there.

The M14 gunner has watched fire from 3 specific PKM’s who have the front, back and sides of the ambushed forces pinned down. With some assistance spotting fire, he is able to silence or slow them down. He then takes the initiative and with a fire team in tow; maneuvers on a ridge line and kills the assault commander, his body guard and other PKM gunners. This breaks the back of the assault force and the platoon is now able to take charge of their Alamo Vally and recover their tactical loses from the ambush. CAS is now on site but no one cares. It’s F15’s and they rarely drop anything for fear of civilian collateral damage. Besides, the Platoon FAC is mired in ROE as opposed to mission, concerns. He is removed from the platoon COP within 24 hours of this fight.

The ambush is defeated but the remains of the platoon have very little time to recover and remove their own dead and wounded and to police the Taliban dead. The remains of the Taliban force are quickly scrutinized. The U.S Forces need to get the heck out of this ambush site before they are counter attacked by a larger Taliban force.

The Taliban assault force commander is well dressed and equipped. His pockets are rifled to reveal papers identifying him as a Pakistani Intelligence official. Its difficult to match his identification papers to his person because he was shot in the face and not much remains. He is also caring a small black book that has identifying and contact information for all the ANA and ANP officials in this area. The platoon interpreter is on site and he suggests that the information in this black book demonstrates the complicity of all local Afghan officials.

The Platoon consolidates vehicles and equipment for evacuation. Dustoff arrives for the wounded and though full of complaints, hauls the combat dead as well. Some equipment is destroyed on site with Thermite and direct fire and the Platoon returns to their COP to debrief, refit and turn-in their hard earned combat intelligence. Its really just another day in Afghanistan.

There are many themes from previous discussions, from Pakistani duplicity in this campaign, to micromanagement of the enlisted men, to ANA cowardice and lack of discipline, to the need for additional training in marksmanship and the need to arm members of fire teams and squads with various weapons that enable them to engage in more long range fire and maneuver tactics (in Marine Corps terms, this would mean relying heavily on the DM, or Designated Marksman, or Scout Sniper for long range targeting).  It also means arming squads with M14s or some equivalent weapon.  There are tens of thousands of M14s still in armories in the U.S. waiting to be utilized.

But without rehearsing too much detail on the main themes of heroism, megalomaniacal staff level officers, weapons training and selection, and poor performance of our allies, this account takes its place among the great ones in this campaign.  God bless the U.S. warrior.

Poor Katrina vanden Heuvel repeats Captain Matthew Hoh’s arguments for a small footprint in Afghanistan.  I briefly answered Hoh’s arguments earlier.

Asking the question whether al Qaeda and the Taliban are in Pakistan or Afghanistan is like asking whether the water is on the right or the left side of a swimming pool.

The conversation on Pakistan versus Afghanistan presupposes that the Durand Line means anything, and that the Taliban and al Qaeda respect an imaginary boundary cut through the middle of the Hindu Kush.  It doesn’t and they don’t.  If our engagement of Pakistan is to mean anything, we must understand that they are taking their cue from us, and that our campaign is pressing the radicals from the Afghanistan side while their campaign is pressing them from the Pakistani side.

Advocating disengagement from Afghanistan is tantamount to suggesting that one front against the enemy would be better than two, and that one nation involved in the struggle would be better than two (assuming that Pakistan would keep up the fight in our total absence, an assumption for which I see no basis).  It’s tantamount to suggesting that it’s better to give the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan as Pakistan presses them from their side, or that it’s better to give them safe haven in Pakistan while we press them from our side.  Both suggestions are preposterous.

Further, I have repeatedly pointed out that the small footprint model, enticing and seductive though it may be, contains its own defeater.  Without adequate troops to ensure contact with and protection of the population against the insurgency – for those who want protection – there would be no lines of logistics to supply this small number of troops, and no intelligence networks.  The model simply won’t work because there will be no known targets, period, much less high value targets.

But continuing with the more current argument against heavy commitment to Afghanistan, it has been stated that al Qaesa represents only a small fraction of the insurgency.  The drone attacks, it is said, have accomplished their purpose.  This position ignores the very real possibility that the Taliban have morphed into something other than what they were ten or more years ago.

In fact, I have claimed just the condition I described above.

… they have evolved into a much more radical organization than the original Taliban bent on global engagement, what Nicholas Schmidle calls the Next-Gen Taliban. The TTP shout to passersby in Khyber “We are Taliban! We are mujahedin! “We are al-Qaida!”  There is no distinction.  A Pakistan interior ministry official has even said that the TTP and al Qaeda are one and the same.

Add to this yet another data point comes to us from the New York Daily News.

Ever since senior Obama administration advisers such as CIA Director Leon Panetta and Vice President Biden admitted that Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan  was minimal, with fewer than 100 operatives believed to be on the ground there, war critics have complained the President has little justification for escalating the U.S. commitment there.

But the inside-the-Beltway political debate underscores a fundamental misunderstanding of what Al Qaeda’s role in Afghanistan — which Osama Bin Laden’s minions call “Khorasan” — truly has been, according to Special Operations commanders and troops on the ground.

Today’s Washington Post makes hay of the fact that Al Qaeda is barely mentioned in the 76,000 pages of war files released last month by WikiLeaks. The story overlooks two key facts: (1) The voluminous files are mostly “sigact” – “significant action” – combat reports dispatched as incidents happened; and (2) troops who faced Arabs in battle fighting alongside Afghan “Taliban” rarely knew, even after they had killed them, that they were up against non-Afghan opponents.

Critics also fail to realize that a single Al Qaeda operative’s knowledge and experience in guerrilla and terror tactics is of incalculable value as a force multiplier to the Taliban.

Al Qaeda’s Arab operatives are considered a fearless elite. They have knowledge of Islam that makes them seem like religious scholars to many Pashtun tribesmen, who they have led into battle in the past. After Al Qaeda fled Afghanistan’s cities with their Taliban government allies in 2001-02, they reorganized and reconstituted their ranks in Pakistan. Al Qaeda returned to the fight in 2004, training, equipping and often leading or joining Haqqani fighters in battle along the eastern border.

Their presence was often suggested by the tactics used by Haqqani fighters, the cells’ skill at accurately firing AK-47s and RPGs, and gear such as armor-piercing ammo, body armor and night-vision devices.

Today, as they withstand CIA’s withering drone onslaught in Pakistan’s tribal belt, the Arabs are more low-key in their Afghan ops than they were in the past. The CIA’s targeted killing of Skeik Mustafa Abu al-Yazid after he left Mir Ali may also have impacted their activities on the other side of the AfPak.

Arabs from Al Qaeda still fund and train the Taliban, but no longer lead operations from the front, Army Col. Donald C. Bolduc, who leads the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, told me in his office at Bagram Airfield this month.

“They’re considered much too valuable to risk that,” said another U.S. official in the war zone.

During the winter, Taliban leaders ensconced in Pakistan send in Al Qaeda operatives to train their fighters in bombmaking tradecraft during the lull in fighting, sources said.

“The Pakistani madrassahs are still the big recruiting and training place. The Afghans go to a madrassah in Pakistan, where an Arab is typically like the dean, or headmaster, and learn how to fight,” the official told me. “Then the Afghan goes back home and teaches others to build bombs or fight — and gets paid handsomely for it.”

Again, this is yet another point of confirmation of my previously described hypothesis, i.e., that of a shift in the theological landscape within Afghanistan and a morphing of the Taliban into a more globally focused and religiously motivated entity.  These rogue elements swim in the same waters, and to use the expressions “al Qaeda” or “Taliban,” while certainly precise from the perspective of a close view analysis, misses the point of a morphing of these elements into something new and different.

From The Guardian comes what I see as a very important story, one that goes well beyond anecdotal stories about children, schools, the treatment and women, and the brutality of the Taliban – although those elements stand out as well.

This week’s Guardian article about an alleged poisoning incident at a girls’ school in Kabul reminded me of a similar incident during the Soviet occupation. I was at primary school and remember watching girls being carried over to an adjacent hospital.

The rumour that later spread at school explained the incident as follows: one of the pupils, from a family of mujahideen sympathisers, had poisoned the school’s well in protest against the communist-inspired syllabus. The story sounded plausible at the time, in the absence of free media, reliable investigation or international witnesses offering a different, perhaps more objective, take on it.

The parents’ reaction was pragmatic. The following day, pupils returned to school, carrying plastic flasks filled with water from home. But this response did not mean parents supported the government. It was true that the syllabus was inspired by communist ideology. But there was a way around that, too. Children simply learned to differentiate between useful scientific knowledge and political propaganda. To receive an education, Afghans – then as now – had no choice but take the risk of exposing children to state propaganda and its spin-off, insurgent violence.

The two incidents – with the water and the “poison gas” – are separated by decades but their similarity makes it tempting to repeat the old cliche that nothing changes in Afghanistan. But in some ways they are strikingly different, revealing profound changes in three decades of conflict and the way it is perceived.

The key difference is that in the old story the conflict was neat, involving two clearly opposite sides: a communist regime of non-believers versus an Islamist resistance of believers.

In the new story, all parties involved in the perceived incident are believers, including the Islamic Republic that is responsible for the school, the pupils who attend it and the perpetrators who allegedly carried out the attack.

Another striking difference between the two stories relates to the gender issues. The old story had a female protagonist who was a school insider. In the current story, by contrast, girls appear only as victims and the perpetrator is perceived to be an outsider. We can assume that the girls of my school were still able to sympathise with the mujahideen, since they had never lived under their command. But the current generation of schoolgirls knows better and there has been no suspicion of an insider act carried out by a girl. These differences are subtle but reveal shifts in the emotional landscape of the people, and the way they relate to the present conflict.

Judging by the parents’ reaction to the current story, ordinary Afghans expect the Taliban to break all sorts of traditional religious taboos, including the ban on violence during the month of Ramadan. The parents’ reasoning is plausible. After all, a serious taboo such as suicide has been reinterpreted and reintroduced as an act of piety without apparently raising a single eyebrow in Kabul or beyond. Judging by such precedents, Ramadan, too, could have been reinterpreted without notice and declared a month in which jihad by violent means carried on.

Be that as it may, what we see is theological chaos and various conflicting interpretations of Islam vying for power and influence in Afghanistan. The result is an Islamic Republic in charge of a Muslim people, which is under attack by an Islamist insurgency.

Little wonder, then, that parents of Totia school girls have been left wondering who is representing Islam, and who defaming it. But this type of chaos is an expected outcome when Muslim states lose control over religion. Faced with the Taliban, the old mujahideen who are in power now are getting a taste of their own medicine. After all, they too had once used Islam to legitimise violence against civilians, schoolchildren included.

Another striking difference between the two stories is content related. In the old story, the poison incident was explained as an act of protest against the school’s syllabus but not girls’ education per se. Could it be that the old mujahideen leaders were less rigid by comparison to their contemporary reincarnation, the Taliban? Unfortunately, we cannot verify this assumption because the old jihad was highly dispersed, lacking in a coherent, clearly defined political vision, providing answers to the question of gender and public education.

The current counterinsurgency campaign relies on the classical understanding of the Maoist insurgency, with all of the attendant talks about reintegration, negotiations, a “place at the table,” culling off the ten dollar Taliban from the insurgency (Taliban with a little t), and so forth.  To be sure, there may be some ten dollar Taliban, but the negotiations are happening at the highest levels of the Taliban leadership.

I have argued endlessly that exposure to globalist elements of the transnational insurgency in the AfPak region has caused much of the Taliban to morph into something that it wasn’t, something that is more in line with hard core Islamicist teaching and globalist focus that its predecessor.  The current manifestation of Taliban ideology also seems to be more in line with a group that would be even more accepting of Wahhabist teaching and Arabic influence that even its predecessor.  The assessment above is another disturbing data point that may bear out my thesis.

I maintain that other than the names of Afghans cooperating with the coalition (a dangerous public revelation), the Wikileaks publication of the so-called Afghanistan War Diary revealed nothing of substance that astute observers didn’t already know.  This includes the issue of Pakistani aid and assistance to the Taliban.  Almost two years ago I published Games of Duplicity and the End of Tribe in Pakistan where I discussed this very subject.

But just occasionally, international ne’er-do-wells can’t help but preen and posture and thereby reveal their identity, or at least put their exploits in the face of the American public.  This is sometimes a very big mistake, but it remains to be seen whether enough Americans care to make a difference in this instance.  This instance has to do with the recent Pakistani bragging over their relationship with the Taliban.

When American and Pakistani agents captured Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s operational commander, in the chaotic port city of Karachi last January, both countries hailed the arrest as a breakthrough in their often difficult partnership in fighting terrorism.

But the arrest of Mr. Baradar, the second-ranking Taliban leader after Mullah Muhammad Omar, came with a beguiling twist: both American and Pakistani officials claimed that Mr. Baradar’s capture had been a lucky break. It was only days later, the officials said, that they finally figured out who they had.

Now, seven months later, Pakistani officials are telling a very different story. They say they set out to capture Mr. Baradar, and used the C.I.A. to help them do it, because they wanted to shut down secret peace talks that Mr. Baradar had been conducting with the Afghan government that excluded Pakistan, the Taliban’s longtime backer.

In the weeks after Mr. Baradar’s capture, Pakistani security officials detained as many as 23 Taliban leaders, many of whom had been enjoying the protection of the Pakistani government for years. The talks came to an end.

The events surrounding Mr. Baradar’s arrest have been the subject of debate inside military and intelligence circles for months. Some details are still murky — and others vigorously denied by some American intelligence officials in Washington. But the account offered in Islamabad highlights Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan: retaining decisive influence over the Taliban, thwarting archenemy India, and putting Pakistan in a position to shape Afghanistan’s postwar political order.

“We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us,” said a Pakistani security official, who, like numerous people interviewed about the operation, spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of relations between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States. “We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with Karzai and the Indians.”

Some American officials still insist that Pakistan-American cooperation is improving, and deny a central Pakistani role in Mr. Baradar’s arrest. They say the Pakistanis may now be trying to rewrite history to make themselves appear more influential. It was American intellgence that led to Mr. Baradar’s capture, an American official said.

“These are self-serving fairy tales,” the official said. “The people involved in the operation on the ground didn’t know exactly who would be there when they themselves arrived. But it certainly became clear, to Pakistanis and Americans alike, who we’d gotten.”

Other American officials suspect the C.I.A. may have been unwittingly used by the Pakistanis for the larger aims of slowing the pace of any peace talks.

At a minimum, the arrest of Mr. Baradar offers a glimpse of the multilayered challenges the United States faces as it tries to prevail in Afghanistan. It is battling a resilient insurgency, supporting a weak central government and trying to manage Pakistan’s leaders, who simultaneously support the Taliban and accept billions in American aid.

A senior NATO officer in Kabul said that in arresting Mr. Baradar and the other Taliban leaders, the Pakistanis may have been trying to buy time to see if President Obama’s strategy begins to prevail. If it does, the Pakistanis may eventually decide to let the Taliban make a deal. But if the Americans fail — and if they begin to pull out — then the Pakistanis may decide to retain the Taliban as their allies.

“We have been played before,” a senior NATO official said. “That the Pakistanis picked up Baradar to control the tempo of the negotiations is absolutely plausible.”

As for Mr. Baradar, he is now living comfortably in a safe house of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Pakistani official said. “He’s relaxing,” the official said.

Many of the other Taliban leaders, after receiving lectures against freelancing peace deals, have been released to fight again.

There are two (or more) ways to take this.  Robert Haddick at the Small Wars Journal Blog hints that he takes the position that Pakistan’s interference in peace talks with the Taliban is harmful to coalition efforts.  Indeed, General Petraeus has even said that he believes that there will be no success in Afghanistan without talks with the Taliban.

As regular readers might suspect, I demur.  Talks with local leaders and elders may ensue with some success, perhaps holding in abatement or even stopping the flow of local insurgents to the cause of the main stream Taliban (the big-T Taliban) when these talks are coupled with force.  But the notion of negotiations with an avowed enemy who had previously given safe haven to globalist elements is preposterous, and all the more so since the Taliban have now been exposed to these globalist elements for around two decades and have adopted some of their globalist world view.  In this particular instance, stopping negotiations with senior Taliban isn’t problematic, since it isn’t likely that it would have yielded effective, long term fruit.

What is more problematic, however, is that Pakistan’s ISI knows where senior Taliban are located and continues to provide them safe haven and protection.  The Obama administration must now face the knowledge that the billions we are giving Pakistan is helping to wage war against our own troops in Afghanistan.  But a voice of reason and sanity seems to have appeared from nowhere concerning our relationship with Pakistan.  Afghanistan’s national security adviser points the way better than does our own.

There is ongoing domestic and international confusion in identifying Afghanistan’s friends and foes. The Afghan people are wholeheartedly grateful to the international community for its sacrifices in blood and treasure. Unfortunately, the military-intelligence establishment of one of our neighbors still regards Afghanistan as its sphere of influence. While faced with a growing domestic terrorist threat, Pakistan continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and al-Qaeda. And while the documents recently disclosed by WikiLeaks contained information that was neither new nor surprising, they did make public further evidence of the close relations among the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence.

The international community is present in Afghanistan to dismantle these international terrorist networks. Yet the focus on this fundamental task has progressively eroded and has been compounded by another strategic failure: the mistaken embrace of “strategic partners” who have, in fact, been nurturing terrorism.

Much has been said about the political will of the Afghan government, governance in our country and corruption. These are mainly domestic variables. It is true that an exhausted and desperate political elite in Afghanistan, faced with predatory and opportunistic individuals in and outside the power structures, allowed the mafia to penetrate into politics. State institutions were undermined and the rule of law weakened. Undoubtedly the absence of transparency in contracts and the presence of private security companies clearly connected to certain officials — contributing ultimately to the privatization of security and thus insecurity in our country — are matters of grave concern. But the international terrorist presence in the region is not entrenched solely because of Afghan corruption. Britain, Spain, Turkey, China, Germany and India have all been victims not of Afghan corruption but of international terrorism — emanating from the region.

It is my firm conviction that securing our people, districts and towns from terrorists; institutionalizing the rule of law; and fighting corruption are necessary steps toward building a strong and responsive state. But that is not enough. No domestic measure will fully address the threat of international terrorism, its global totalitarian ideology or its regional support networks. Dismantling the terrorist infrastructure is a central component of our anti-terror strategy, and this requires confronting the state that still sees terrorism as a strategic asset and foreign policy tool.

To be clear, Afghanistan opposes the expansion of conflicts into other countries and opposes unwarranted military interventions in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. But global efforts to counter terrorism will not succeed until and unless there is clarity on who our friends and foes are.

The conflict we are engaged in is becoming a long and expensive war for us and our international partners. The Afghan people are rightly frustrated and exhausted by a war in which the line between friends and foes is blurred. Global opinion has also turned against us. Yet surely it is understandable that we have failed to mobilize people for a cause where the fighting is in one place and the enemy is in another. How can we persuade Afghans, or the parents of young soldiers from coalition countries, to support a war where our “partners” are involved in killing their sons and daughters? While we are losing dozens of men and women to terrorist attacks every day, the terrorists’ main mentor continues to receive billions of dollars in aid and assistance. How is this fundamental contradiction justified?

This is extremely important.  Don’t miss the nuanced detail in his argument.  The “partners” involved in killing their sons and daughters doesn’t refer to collateral damage from combat, that unintentional and unfortunate side effect of war.  No, it refers to us, the U.S., as their partners, turning the other way when Pakistan behaves the way they do, and continuing the flow of largesse in spite of and not because of their help in battling the transnational insurgency which has its main home in Pakistan.

Rangin Dadfar Spanta concludes with this thought: “The aggressor understands only one language: that of force and determination.”  Just so.  One might also posit the idea that talks with the very people who have been killing their sons and daughters is the moral equivalent of funding their helpers in Pakistan.  The national security adviser is telling us that the very strategy we have chosen is sure to alienate the population, and of course, this is the opposite of what was intended.  A little more attention to the national security adviser from Afghanistan and a little less attention to our own might go a long way towards pressing forward with the right strategy in Asia.

In The Evolving Jihadist Scene in Pakistan we discussed the al Qaeda strategy of co-opting other insurgents in Pakistan, such as the LeT, to a broader war against the West with more globalist designs and intentions than mere questions over Kashmir.  The AP recently added another contribution to our knowledge with a recent report on cross border operations.

As the spotlight of the Afghan war focuses on the south, insurgent activity is increasing in parts of the east, with Arab and other foreign fighters linked to al-Qaida infiltrating across the rugged mountains with the help of Pakistani militants, Afghan and U.S. officials say …

Gen. Mohammed Zaman Mahmoodzai, head of Afghanistan’s border security force, told The Associated Press that infiltration by al-Qaida-linked militants has been increasing in his area since March.

“One out of three are Arabs,” he said, coming mostly from Pakistan’s Bajaur and Mohmand tribal areas where the Pakistan military is battling Pakistani Taliban insurgents …

A NATO official said he thought Mahmooodzai’s estimate of Arab infiltration was high but acknowledged that activity by foreign fighters was running “a little more than average” in the east. He said most of them were believed to be Pakistanis, Chechens and Tajiks although it was difficult to determine their origins.

In some cases, militants enter the country through legal crossing points such as Torkham, 35 miles east of Jalalabad. Mahmoodzai said the infiltrators carry fake passports and visas provided by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based group that India blames for the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai that left 166 people dead.

“We know it is Lashkar-e-Taiba because we have sources inside the Afghan Taliban,” Mahmoodzai said. “They said the Arabs are coming here through Lashkar-e-Taiba.”

Last month, the NATO-led command announced the capture of two Taliban commanders it said were helping Lashkar-e-Taiba (LASH-kar-e-TOY-bah) members slip into Afghanistan. In reporting the second arrest, a NATO statement referred to a “recent influx” of Lashkar-e-Taiba members into the eastern province of Nangarhar.

The mixture of insurgent groups adds to the complexity of the war in the east, often fought in terrain much more rugged and challenging than in the north or south.

The Haqqani group was believed to have played a major role in the Dec. 30 suicide bombing at a CIA base in the eastern province of Khost that killed seven agency employees.A NATO official said that if al-Qaida is in Afghanistan, it’s probably in Kunar, the eastern Afghan province along the Pakistani border where Osama bin Laden maintained bases in the 1990s. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not supposed to release the information to the media.

“The government is there by day, but by night it is the Taliban who are in control,” said Malik Naseer, who is running for parliament in next month’s election from a district of Nangarhar. “Residents say there are some foreigners among them.”The Pakistani agency helped organize Lashkar-e-Taiba, or Army of the Pure, two decades ago to launch attacks in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the disputed mountain region that lies at the heart of the rivalry between the two nuclear-armed nations.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which the U.S. military refers to as LeT, is believed to have played a role in the Feb. 26, 2010 car bombing and suicide attack on two guesthouses in Kabul frequented by Indians, and in the October 2008 car bombing at the gates of the Indian Embassy that killed more than 60 people …

“I’ve watched them since 2008 … move to the West, become more active in other countries and more active throughout the region and more engaged with other terrorist groups,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told Pakistani reporters in Islamabad last month. “So there is an increased level of concern with respect to where LeT is and where it appears to be headed.”

Christine Fair, assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies, says Lashkar-e-Taiba has been attacking coalition soldiers in Afghanistan since 2004. Fair said she has tracked Lashkar-e-Taiba operations in several eastern Afghan provinces, including Kunar, Baghlan, Nangarhar, Logar and Nuristan.

The NATO official speculated that Lashkar-e-Taiba is using Afghanistan to “get up their jihadi street credentials” among the militants’ support base.

We are watching the continuing evolution of the LeT from a home grown insurgency focused on Kashmir to one with internationalist intentions.  In the battle to make international insurgents more locally oriented when they show up, versus making home grown insurgents more internationally oriented, the globalists are winning.  Was there ever really any chance that it would have been any other way?  Was there ever any doubt?

The Jamestown Foundation reports that al Qaeda is altering its strategy in Pakistan.

President Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, by defining a goal of “disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qaeda,” on the one hand gives direction to this otherwise directionless war, and on the other emphasizes targeting al-Qaeda over all other anti-terrorism efforts (Associated Press of Pakistan, August 2). Al-Qaeda, as innovative as it is, at least in terms of inflicting terror, has clearly taken advantage of America’s narrow focus by assuming more of a supervisory role, delegating the active terrorism responsibilities to its local franchises. Another important step al-Qaeda has taken in response to America’s stepped up military approach in Afghanistan is to focus more aggressively on  the “near enemy” – Pakistan –  in order to maintain a safe haven and save its high command (and ideology) from total extinction. These two fundamental changes in strategy have rattled global security strategists in general and Pakistan’s security apparatus in particular. Not used to dealing with an enemy as unconventional in nature as al-Qaeda, the rank and file of both the political and military establishments in Pakistan has been clearly outplayed by the terrorists. Moreover, Pakistan’s controversial strategic depth doctrine, which finds India at the root of every destabilization attempt, not only results in providing cover to the terrorists but the consequential anti-India sentiment also sends more and more youth into the jihadists’ fold every day. What is more frightening than the terrorism itself is the erosion of Pakistan’s social fabric and the increasing number of people, mostly from the country’s educated middle class, who embrace extremist values..

This stepped-up focus on Pakistan as a safe haven and virtual home to international jihadists and Islamic globalists of all stripes has manifestations that apparently worry even the ISI.

In coming years, the competitive power struggle could transfigure the structure of the jihadist movement in Pakistan — and with it, the nature and scope of the threat to India. Last month, the al-Qaeda’s media wing, al-Sahab, released a posthumous audio message from Said al-Masri, also known as Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a top operative killed in a United States airstrike earlier this summer. In his 26-minute message, translated and made available to The Hindu by the Washington DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute, al-Masri urged “the youth of our Muslim nation to inflict damage on the enemies of Allah the Exalted, the Americans, on their own soil, and wherever they are to be found.”

For the first time, though, al-Masri referred to the Pakistan-based jihadist, Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri, as an official part of the al-Qaeda — and made public his role in an attack on India. “I bring you the good tidings,” he said, “that last February’s India operation was against a Jewish locale in the west of the Indian capital [sic., throughout], in the area of the German bakeries — a fact that the enemy tried to hide — and close to 20 Jews were killed in the operation, a majority of them from their so-called statelet, Israel. The person who carried out this operation was a heroic soldier from the ‘Soldiers of the Sacrifice Brigade,’ which is one of the brigades of Qaedat al-Jihad [the al-Qaeda’s formal name] in Kashmir, under the command of Commander Illyas Kashmiri, may Allah preserve him.”

From the text, it is clear that al-Masri had little knowledge of the bombing of the German Bakery in Pune. Pune is not to the west of New Delhi; it is not Jewish-owned; and no Israelis were killed there. There would thus be no reason to take al-Masri’s claims seriously — if it weren’t for the testimony of Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley.

Born in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 1964, Kashmiri fought with Qari Saifullah Akhtar’s Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami. Early in 2000, Harkat leader Maulana Masood Azhar — released from jail in a hostages-for-prisoners swap that followed the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight to Kandahar — founded the Jaish-e-Mohammad. Kashmiri, who believed that the group was too close to Pakistan’s military establishment, refused to join. From 2007, following the use of force against jihadists who had taken control of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad, Kashmiri began working closely with the jihadists opposed to the Pakistani state.

Investigators in both the U.S. and India say Headley made contact with Kashmiri after the Lashkar proved unwilling to commit resources to an attack on the offices of the Jyllands Posten in Copenhagen — a newspaper that incensed many Muslims across the world by publishing cartoons they felt were blasphemous.

Having joined the Lashkar in 2000, Headley went on to play a key role in its operations, among other things collecting the video footage that helped to guide a 10-man assault team to its targets in Mumbai in November 2008. But Headley became increasingly frustrated with the Lashkar’s unwillingness to support operations against the West — the priority, he believed. He railed against the Lashkar’s leadership, saying it had “rotten guts.” “I am just telling you,” he hectored a Lashkar-linked friend during an intercepted September 17, 2009 phone call, “that the companies in your competition have started handling themselves in a far better way.”

That competing company was the al-Qaeda. Headley visited Kashmiri’s base at Razmak in 2009, and came away impressed. “The bazaar,” he wrote in an Internet post, “is bustling with Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Bosnians, some from European Union countries and, of course, our Arab brothers. According to my survey, the foreign population is a little less than a third of the total. Any Waziri or Mehsud I spoke to seemed grateful to God for the privilege of being able to host the foreign Mujahideen”.

Headley told Indian investigators that dozens of mid-level Lashkar commanders had joined this influx. Evidence supports his claim. Earlier this month, the International Security Assistance Force announced the detention of a Lashkar leader in eastern Afghanistan’s Khogyani district. The Lashkar cadre had earlier been linked to a string of attacks in eastern Afghanistan and Kabul. They had also fought alongside the al-Qaeda and the Taliban against the U.S. and Afghan forces, notably in a massive July 2008 assault on a combat outpost in Wanat.

For the Lashkar leadership and its allies in the ISI, this poses a real problem. If the organisation conducts large-scale attacks against India or the West, it will expose the Pakistani state to intense international pressure; if it does nothing, it will risk losing its cadre and its constituency …

No one is clear just how the pieces will finally fall. It is certain, though, that the al-Qaeda seeks to undermine the Lashkar’s status as the sole agent of jihad against India.

Al Qaeda seeks to undermine Lashkar as an independent ally with Pakistan’s ISI, aligning it with a broader ideology of jihad against the West, and incorporating its elements within the ranks of the globalists.  They also are working to align various globalist groups under a singular banner, and ensure that Pakistan is safe haven into the future for such actors.

To some degree they seem to be having success.  The U.S. has stated that it has no intentions of sending troops into Pakistan to destroy this safe haven, and so there is little real leverage that we have over Pakistan at the moment.  Things have come a long way since the inception of Operation Enduring Freedom.

On Friday, five Taliban members were struck off a U.N. Security Council list of militants subject to sanctions in a move designed to smooth the way for  reconciliation talks with insurgents.  Among those, two of the five were dead. The other three – Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad Awrang, a former Afghan ambassador to the United Nations, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the last Taliban ambassador to Islamabad before 9/11, and  Abdul Satar Paktin – are no longer subject to the asset freeze and travel ban imposed on those on the list.

To get a sense of quite how significant a change this is, consider how Mullah Zaeef – who now lives in Kabul and says he is no longer an active member of the movement – describes his treatment when he was arrested in Pakistan in early 2002, according to his book “My Life with the Taliban“. The Pakistani official who arrested him told him:  “Your Excellency, you are no longer an Excellency! America is a superpower. Did you not know that? No one can defeat it, nor can they negotiate with it. America wants to question you and we are here to hand you over to the USA.”

Turned over to the Americans near Peshawar after being driven there from Islamabad, he says he was attacked and his clothes ripped with knives. “The Pakistani soldiers were all staring as the Americans hit me and tore the remaining clothes off my body. Eventually I was completely naked, and the Pakistani soldiers — the defenders of the Holy Koran — shamelessly watched me with smiles on their faces, saluting this disgraceful action of the Americans.”

Now we wish to negotiate with the Taliban, give more money to Pakistan, and hope for the best in a campaign that lacks focus.  Things have come along way indeed.

See also:

Newsweek on Pakistan’s Duplicity

The Captain’s Journal on Pakistan’s Duplicity

I don’t know how long this video will stay published, but for those who catch it before it is pulled, check it out at 42:21 through 42:29 (h/t to Bill Roggio, source SpyTalk).

Folks, this is no ordinary fellow just out for a leisurely stroll or walkabout to see the countryside.  His presence is obviously no issue for the fighters around him.  He is known by those around him, but obviously this Talib is a young, Western jihadist.  The blond Talib.  How did he get there?  Who convinced the rank and file to trust him?  Where did he come from?  Why is he there in the Nuristan Province of Afghanistan?

Has Mullah Omar been captured?  Brad Thor is saying as much over at Big Government.

Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar has been taken into custody.

According to the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program there is a bounty of up to $10 million on Omar for sheltering Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda network in the years prior to the September 11 attacks as well as the period during and immediately thereafter.

At the end of March, US Military Intelligence was informed by US operatives working in the Af/Pak theater on behalf of the D.O.D. that Omar had been detained by Pakistani authorities. One would assume that this would be passed up the chain and that the Secretary of Defense would have been alerted immediately.  From what I am hearing, that may not have been the case.

This sounds too bizarre to be believed as is.  There has to be more to it than the information wasn’t passed up the chain of command.  But in lieu of confirmation, I’ll make three observations.

First, the insurgency will not die with the capture of Omar.  While a powerful figure, his actual control over his fighters wasn’t significant.  Furthermore, the inbreeding of al Qaeda ideology, Tehrik-i-Taliban radicalism and Afghan Taliban is pretty much complete.  They all swim in the same waters.  Second, even though this is true, it is a good thing if Mullah Omar has been captured.  Third, I’ll wait on official confirmation before saying any more.  This has the distinct possibility of being a ruse or a mistake.  I lost track of the number of times that Baitullah Mehsud was allegedly killed.  Now Hakimullah Mehsud has been killed – but wait, no he hasn’t and there is evidence of his being alive.

This is why I don’t usually cover HVT killings.  In general I don’t think that they are very effective, and quite often the information is wrong.  I think I’ll just wait before breaking out the champagne.

The last U.S. Soldiers have been pulled out of the Korengal Valley.

It was as if the five years of almost ceaseless firefights and ambushes had been a misunderstanding — a tragic, bloody misunderstanding.

More than 40 U.S. troops have been killed, and scores more wounded, in helicopter crashes, machine-gun attacks and grenade blasts in the Korengal Valley, a jagged sliver just six miles long and a half-mile wide. The Afghan death toll has been far higher, making the Korengal some of the bloodiest ground in all of Afghanistan, according to American and Afghan officials.

In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, the U.S. presence here came to an abrupt end.

[ … ]

For U.S. commanders, the Korengal Valley offers a hard lesson in the limits of American power and goodwill in Afghanistan. The valley’s extreme isolation, its axle-breaking terrain and its inhabitants’ suspicion of outsiders made it a perfect spot to wage an insurgency against a Western army.

U.S. troops arrived here in 2005 to flush out al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. They stayed on the theory that their presence drew insurgents away from areas where the U.S. role is more tolerated and there is a greater desire for development. The troops were, in essence, bullet magnets.

In 2010, a new set of commanders concluded that the United States had blundered into a blood feud with fierce and clannish villagers who wanted, above all, to be left alone. By this logic, subduing the Korengal wasn’t worth the cost in American blood.

There’s more than a little hyperbole in this report.  There was and is no surprise in the difficulty of the Korengal Valley.  This is where the Battle of Wanat occurred, but in spite of the level of difficulty, Bing West points out that:

The scale of the fighting was not the reason for withdrawing. One American soldier was killed in the Korengal in the last ten months, a loss rate less than in an average rifle company. The strongest technical rationale for the withdrawal was economy of force. The troop-to-population ratio and the logistics for air support were too onerous, regardless of the level of fighting.

The troop (and air power and logistics) commitment in Korengal didn’t comport with a population-centric counterinsurgency model General McChrystal wants to employ.  When it comes to population, the Korengal Valley can’t compete with Kandahar with its half a million residents.

But is it really correct to assert that we merely stumbled into a tribal feud?  Bing West continues: “… in 2007, half the fighters were locals and half were hard-core Islamic jihadists. When I was in the Korengal in 2009, the interpreters estimated a third of the voices heard over the enemy radios had Pakistani-tinged accents, a third were Pashto and a third were the local dialects.”

The Washington Post report eventually becomes interesting with a touchstone account of attempting to persuade hard core insurgents.

Moretti’s predecessors had spent countless hours trying to persuade Zalwar Khan to rally the locals to support the road project. Three years of prodding had produced virtually no progress. Moretti sensed that the real power in the valley lay with the men leading the insurgency.

He asked Khan to deliver a letter to a timber baron and insurgent leader known as Matin, who like many Afghans uses only one name. Long before Moretti’s arrival in the valley, U.S. troops had killed several of Matin’s family members in airstrikes, according to the Korengalis. In banning the timber trade, the Afghan government had deprived him of his sole means of income.

“Haji Matin hates the Americans too much,” Khan told Moretti, using an honorific that signified Matin’s completion of the pilgrimage to Mecca. “He won’t respond.”

Instead he advised Moretti to write to Nasurallah, a colleague of Matin’s. “It is our belief that you are the rightful leader of the Korengalis,” the captain wrote. “You hold the power not only among the villagers but also among the fighters. If you want the valley to prosper all you have to do is talk with us and bring your fighters down from the mountains.”

The letter offered Nasurallah two choices: development or death. “It is not our wish to kill your fellow Korengalis,” Moretti continued. “But we are good at it and will continue to do it as long as you fight us.”

Two days later, Moretti received a response. “If you surrender to the law of God then our war against you will end,” Nasurallah wrote. “If you keep fighting for man’s law then we will fight you until Doomsday.”

As I have contended before, until the places where the religiously-motivated and hard core fighters are taken on head-to-head, his means of rest and recruitment denied him, and his largesse taken away from him, this counterinsurgency cannot be won.  While they are unmolested in their favorite places, they can continue to send insurgents into the cities – Kandahar, Jalalabad and Kabul.

We don’t have enough troops, and SOF raids against high value targets – which contrary to belief is becoming even more important that it was previously – won’t ameliorate the need for contact with both the enemy and the population.  U.S. forces in the Korengal Valley have fought bravely, but don’t be surprised if this area becomes safe haven for not only hard core Taliban, but globalist insurgents of various ilk.

In Taliban Tactics: Massing of Troops, I detailed no less than six instances of Taliban forces massing from 100 to 400 troops for engagements (approximately half-Battalion), including at the fated Battle of Wanat.  The Battle of Kamdesh is a seventh instance of massing of forces, in this case up to 300 troops.

The Germans have experienced yet another example.

Germany says three of its soldiers were killed and five severely wounded in heavy fighting with Taliban insurgents today in northern Afghanistan.

The German military said the detachment was patrolling near Chahar Dara, southwest of the city of Konduz, when it was attacked by militants.

District government chief Abdul Wahid Omar Khil estimated there were about 200 Taliban fighters involved in the attack.

See also FOXNews and their report.  The Strategy Page has a slightly more detailed account.

The German Army lost another three soldiers on March 26th, when several dozen German troops and Afghan police, as they halted to deal with some roadside bombs, were attacked by over a hundred Taliban. The fighting went on for two hours, mainly because the Taliban had set up their firing positions inside, and on the roofs of, nearby homes. The Taliban know the ROE (Rules of Engagement) all NATO troops must obey, and this means no dropping smart bombs on buildings that might contain civilians. So the Germans had to wait for troop reinforcements to arrive by road.

Whether 100 (Strategy Page) or 200 (Abdul Wahid Omar Khil) fighters, the Taliban are still inefficient and poor shots compared to U.S. fighters.  They are aware that their best hope lies in outnumbering their opponents, and they will use this tactic to their advantage whenever possible.