Archive for the 'Taliban' Category

Our friend Joshua Foust at Registan asks some salient questions concerning the Kajaki dam.

Remember that time Michael Yon bravely reported the “top secret” mission to refurbish the Kajaki hydro plant? The same top secret mission ISAF bragged about in a press release on the very same day? It seemed like a wonderful thing, a stunning blow both to the Taliban in Helmand (who couldn’t stop its transportation and installation), and to the naysayers who are convinced there is no hope for the country.

Yes, we sure do. In fact, The Captain’s Journal recalls a week before Yon wrote about the dam project when we authored:

The British Approach to Counterinsurgency, and

Defense Analysts Echo The Captain’s Journal Concerning Kajaki Dam

And what The Captain’s Journal said was important and prescient. But first, back to Joshua’s questions. He cites a recent New York Times article that updates the situation around the dam project.

It has been a rare instance of a fulfilled promise in the effort to build up Afghanistan’s infrastructure. But even with the step forward, the improvements to the dam, in an inaccessible area of northern Helmand Province, are still being held hostage by the Taliban’s growing ability to mount offensives in recent years. The overall power project has been repeatedly delayed because of the difficulty of security and logistics. And the rest of the original $500 million proposal to augment the capacity of the dam itself has not been approved, cast in doubt by the Taliban’s gains.

“In the case of the Kajaki Dam or others, the security situation impedes the delivery of the service,” the American ambassador to Afghanistan, William B. Wood, told reporters in Washington in June. “The reason that there isn’t more light at night and more warmth in winter for south Afghanistan is because the Taliban has not let us do everything, work as effectively as we’d like to on the Kajaki Dam.” …

The huge operation was criticized in the British news media, which questioned the exposure of British soldiers to such high risk to save an American government assistance project.

Yet for the Afghans employed here, and the frustrated residents of cities like Kandahar, who have lived with barely a few hours of electricity a day for the past seven years, NATO was belatedly meeting its commitment to bring development to southern Afghanistan…

Mr. Rasoul is now in charge of the next stage, with an American engineer, George H. Wilder, 62, who works for the American contractors in charge of the project, the Louis Berger Group. They work and live in a small construction camp next to the dam, protected by a battalion of British and Afghan soldiers who keep the Taliban, who hold the surrounding villages, at bay. Everything the workers and soldiers need comes by helicopters that fly high over the brown, barren mountains and then spiral down over the green-blue reservoir into the camp to avoid enemy fire.

Josh asks the following question:

This remains remarkable: a Berlin Airlift for southern Afghanistan, if you will. But the fundamental objection to it remains: is it smart to build an expensive, borderline indefensible power station when you cannot provide basic security and services to the nearby villagers? This turbine camp represents, along with all the hope and sunshine, an enormous, juicy target for militants or drug lords seeking a way to poison the entire southern effort. While it’s nice that the camp “rarely comes under [direct] fire anymore” thanks to some impressive soldiering by the British, how long will those gains stay in play once the turbine is installed and the power substations set up? Will an entire battalion be required to defend each? … Am I alone in thinking we could be spending our time, money, resources, and (most importantly) manpower in a much better way?

One commenter to Joshua’s post appears to be on drugs, when he dreams a psychedelic vision wherein Obama talks the Taliban into siding with the U.S. and guarding the dam as if they were productive members of society. But inebriated commenters notwithstanding, The Captain’s Journal pointed out in the above two links one week before Michael Yon covered this affair (and it was a brave operation indeed by British forces) that similar to the irrigation canal that was blocked by al Qaeda in Iraq by merely shoveling dirt into it, and the electricity supplies that were terminated by simply destroying the local electrical grid, the Taliban don’t have to destroy the dam or the generators. All they have to do is kill the operators or destroy the electrical grid by cutting transmission lines or blowing up towers.

It’s easy, unfortunately, and it ruins the hard fought reconstructions efforts. We also said:

The point is that in order for infrastructure to work, the enemies of that infrastructure must be targeted. The dam won’t long operate if its operators are all killed, or if other replacement parts have to undergo such intensive operations in order to be deployed at the plant. Infrastructure is good, as is good governance. But for these softer tactics in counterinsurgency to be successful, the Taliban must be engaged and killed. The softer side of counterinsurgency might win a lasting peace, but cannot win kinetic operations.

We’ve got the order wrong. We’re attempting to do reconstruction before ensuring security; similarly, efforts to rebuild Highway 1 from Kabul to Kandahar are failing due to the holes in the tarmac caused by unmolested Taliban.

The Captain’s Journal is sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there is no magic, there are no buttons to push, no deep Gnostic incantations to utter. Security must be provided to the population in order to win counterinsurgencies, and this means killing the hard core Taliban. There are believed to be on the order of 20,000 of them in the Helmand Province alone.

Riddle me this. Is the following statement by a tribal elder in the town of Garmser, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, fabricated or real?

Before the Marines came to Garmser we all believed good things about Americans. There were no Taliban here, and it was the Marines who brought them to us. Since the Marines have been here there has been nothing but killing and destruction, and we all wish they would leave us. We don’t need the Marines here, we don’t need their security. We have no problems with the Taliban, and the Taliban will leave when the Marines go.

The answer comes later. Turning our attention to a valuable report from the Telegraph entitled Troops Face a Wall of Silence from Terrified Villagers, its lessons are timely for the campaign in Afghanistan.

The American patrol had found the dusty streets of Sahak bazaar unusually quiet that morning. Most people were distant and unwilling to talk. Those who did speak insisted there were no Taliban fighters nearby.

Barely two hours later, the first mortar round was fired at US soldiers from inside the village. A few seconds passed before a machine gun opened fire from a mud-walled compound the patrol had walked past only that morning.

In south-eastern Afghanistan, thinly stretched US forces are not only hunting down Taliban gunmen. They are also fighting a counter-insurgency war among terrified civilians, who are caught between them and the insurgents and are deeply reluctant to risk death by helping the coalition.

When the men of the 1st Squadron, 61st Cavalry, part of the 101st Airborne Division, first heard they were going to Sahak, they took bets on how long it would take the Taliban to fire rockets at them. In this patch of Paktia province, Sahak has a reputation as a “bad part of town”. In May, it was the scene of an ambush and a separate attack by three roadside bombs, which injured several American soldiers …

The soldiers from 1st Platoon in Alpha Troop, popularly known as the “Hooligans”, were given the task of capturing and holding a barren hillside until an armoured convoy of engineers could arrive to build the outpost.

As they waited for the 80-vehicle convoy to crawl along the booby trap-riddled road from the town of Gardez, the Taliban duly fired as many rockets at them as possible …

… it soon became clear that the Taliban’s hold on the area around Sahak ran deeper than their ability to launch inaccurate 107mm rockets.

When questioned, not one villager had seen where the rockets had come from, nor who had launched them. Each swore they had been too busy visiting relatives, working or praying to notice anything unusual.

One or two reluctantly revealed glimpses of the brutal punishment that faces anyone caught helping the Afghan army or foreign forces.

Abdul Kadir, a 52-year-old minibus driver, said that insurgents had murdered his son for being a police officer and his body had lain undiscovered in a field for three days.

Mohammed Rahim, a 20-year-old truck driver who fidgeted with nerves, said Taliban gunmen had arrived in his village after dark, going from house to house seeking anyone helping President Hamid Karzai’s government.

We have discussed the tendency to treat Operation Enduring Freedom as a special forces campaign, mostly directed at high value targets. In fact, in the current review of the strategic approach in Afghanistan undertaken by General David Petraeus, one option being floated is a turnover of more of the campaign to special forces, with an increase in the number of SOF teams. A recent veteran of OEF comments about this proposal that it’s the only approach that will work, cites Seth Jones of RAND (in saying that the only way to defeat an insurgency is to ensure that it has no state sponsorship), and ends with this imperative:

The only way things change in A-stan is if GEN Petraeus increases SOF presence along the borders by a large amount, to include bumping SOF teams from the current number of ODA and CAT-A to a more robust package and have the entire CJSOTF focus on the border region.

The conventional guys can handle Helmand, Herat, Mez and elsewhere, including the urban areas – but totally agree with the post above that the “surge” will not work if replicated like they did things in Iraq.

The Captain’s Journal respects active duty military and gives the benefit of the doubt to their studied opinions, but several problems become apparent with this analysis. First, we are in receipt of other studied opinions from SOF in Afghanistan who claim to us that the only way to push OEF forward is to make it a “big Army” operation, since the HVT program can only carry us so far, and the operation is too large for the Marines alone.

Second, Seth Jones, who has become the author of one disappointing counterinsurgency study after another at RAND, has given one requirement for defeating an insurgency, but certainly this cannot be the only one. Otherwise the indigenous Sunni insurgency would have been defeated much more easily in Anbar since they didn’t have the backing of the government of Iraq. If the lessons of Anbar are too easily and quickly forgotten, then Colonel Sean MacFarland reminds us.

“The prize in the counterinsurgency fight is not terrain,” he says. “It’s the people. When you’ve secured the people, you have won the war. The sheiks lead the people.”

But the sheiks were sitting on the fence.

They were not sympathetic to al-Qaeda, but they tolerated its members, MacFarland says.

The sheiks’ outlook had been shaped by watching an earlier clash between Iraqi nationalists — primarily former members of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party — and hard-core al-Qaeda operatives who were a mix of foreign fighters and Iraqis. Al-Qaeda beat the nationalists. That rattled the sheiks.

“Al-Qaeda just mopped up the floor with those guys,” he says.

“We get there in late May and early June 2006, and the tribes are on the sidelines. They’d seen the insurgents take a beating. After watching that, they’re like, ‘Let’s see which way this is going to go.’ ”

MacFarland’s brigade initially struggled to build an Iraqi police force, a critical step in establishing order in the city.

“We said to the sheiks, ‘What’s it going to take to get you guys off the fence?’ ” MacFarland says.

The sheiks said their main concern was protecting their own tribes and families.

Our advocate of the SOF campaign for Afghanistan has told us that an Iraq-style surge won’t work in Afghanistan, but if the considered and studied summary of the surge and its accompanying tactics involves getting troops into contact with the population, intelligence-driven raids, and most of all providing security for the population with the increase in forces, then the advocate hasn’t given us a single reason to believe that providing security for the population won’t work to enable the population to turn against the Taliban. In fact, the report cited above from the Telegraph (in addition to MacFarland’s report) supplies us with yet another anecdotal justification for believing that the population wants security.

The reflexive tendency to deny the obvious is a skill mastered by “experts.” Many of the “experts” apparently don’t see the need for an increase in troop presence, and yet the two most recent Commanding Generals, McNeill and McKiernan, both have demanded and even begged for more troops, saying that the campaign was under-resourced.

An Iraq-style surge won’t work in Afghanistan, or so some of the “experts” say. But the recent Marine Corps operations in the Helmand Province by the 24th MEU have given us a literal laboratory of counterinsurgency, implementing the same approach they used in Anbar. Much of the combat has been heavy, with “full bore reloading” against Taliban in kinetic engagements. The Marines sustained 170 engagements over 35 days of maneuver warfare. But the Taliban sustained these same engagements, and more than 400 of them died. Following the kinetic part of the campaign the Marines transitioned immediately into security operations, payments to citizens for damage to property, constant contact, and all of the other aspects of successful long-term counterinsurgency.

As for the quote by the tribal elder in Garmser? If you guessed that it was fabricated, you might know enough to qualify as a counterinsurgency “expert.” The real exchange between the tribal elder and the Marines went somewhat different, and it was between the Marines and multiple elders who communicated the same thing to the Marines. “The next day, at a meeting of Marines and Afghan elders, the bearded, turban-wearing men told Marine Capt. Charles O’Neill that the two sides could “join together” to fight the Taliban. “When you protect us, we will be able to protect you,” the leader of the elders said.” Indeed, similar words were spoken at a meeting in Ghazni with the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan: ““We don’t want food, we don’t want schools, we want security!” said one woman council member.”

Special Operations Forces are a wonderful asset, with specialized billets that will always be required in any campaign, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism or conventional. But SOF cannot supply this security for the population, as there aren’t enough of them, and the HVT program is designed for counterterrorism rather than counterinsurgency.

Our SOF contact from Afghanistan has lamented the lack of long term effect of the HVT program, commenting that the next mid-level Taliban commander killed will cause a week or two delay and scurrying about until the next commander rises to the challenge, and then it’s the same thing all over again. Thus goes the HVT program.

With history as our guide, we can see that both the campaign in Anbar and the seven months that the 24th MEU was in Afghanistan demonstrate the same thing. Security must be implemented as a precondition for the population to turn against the insurgency. This is true regardless of what the “experts” say or how many times they reflexively contradict the commanding Generals.

In NATO Cannot Be Rehabilitated we discussed the fact that German forces had spent the last three years in Afghanistan without conducting a single combat mission. The Strategy Page followed this report up with their own:

Germany is pulling its commandos out of Afghanistan. The KSK commandos have been there for most of the last seven years. Many Germans, especially leftist politicians and journalists, have not been happy with that. This has resulted in several unflattering, and largely inaccurate, articles about the KSK in the German media. There was also an investigation of several KSK men, accused of kicking an Afghan prisoner. While the KSK were allowed to fight, they also operated under some restrictions. They generally could not fire at the enemy unless first fired upon. This led to at least one senior Taliban leader getting away from the KSK. The fleeing Taliban honcho was not firing at the pursuing KSK, so the commandos could not take him down.

Germany sent 120 KSK commandos to Afghanistan in late 2001. They were not given their own area of operation, but worked with American special forces and commandos as needed. The KSK commandos are the first German troops to engage in combat since 1945 (not counting some communist East German military advisers who may have had to defend themselves in places like Africa. German peacekeepers in the 1990s Balkans have not had to fight.) KSK’s achievement was celebrated in late 2001, when a supply of quality German beer was flown in for the troops.

The KSK were respected by their fellow special operations soldiers, and particularly liked because the Germans were sent beer rations (two cans a day per man). The KSK troops would often share the brew with their fellow commandos, which sometimes resulted in favors in the form of special equipment or intel data. Even with the restrictions, the KSK saw lots of action, but little of it was publicized, lest it generate more criticism back home.

So some of the troops are getting sauced on German beer in theater? (Someone might want to weight in on deployment rules for ISAF troops, but the alcohol prohibition for U.S. troops during deployment is absolute and nonnegotiable). The Strategy Page apparently obtains some of their information from Army intelligence, the same Army intelligence who fed General Rodriguez the absurdity that the Taliban wouldn’t conduct a spring offensive in 2008 (while The Captain’s Journal claimed that they would conduct not one offensive, but two, one in Afghanistan and the other in Pakistan). Rodriguez should have listened to The Captain’s Journal.  The Strategy Page also routinely authors analyses that discuss how swimmingly the campaign is going. The Captain’s Journal no longer uses the Strategy page as a source of information or analysis.

But the Taliban are indeed having the desired affect on Afghans, and German officials are again admitting that their troops are not contributing to the campaign (h/t LT Nixon Rants).

The growing threat is having the effect that soldiers are sticking close to their base camps and avoiding any contact to the civilian population, which then only shows increasing animosity towards the soldiers. Clearly, such a “spiral of alienation” is no help to the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The majority of Afghans in the relatively peaceful north are still amiable to the Germans, say the generals. But if even this support starts to dwindle, there will be consequences for the entire NATO mission. It may even be that the fight for a stable, peaceful Afghanistan can no longer be won (italics TCJ).

Support for the campaign is wavering in NATO countries as well.

NATO members are “wavering” in their political commitment to defeat the Taliban and the international effort in Afghanistan is disjointed, the alliance’s top military commander said.

Operations are affected by a shortfall of troops and more than 70 caveats limiting where soldiers can be deployed, U.S. Army General John Craddock, supreme allied commander in Europe, said in London yesterday.

“It is this wavering political will that impedes operational progress and brings into question the relevancy of the alliance here in the 21st century,” Craddock said in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute.

While President Asif Ali Zardari has been relatively strong thus far (at least in terms of rhetoric) regarding the Taliban, his enthusiasm for taking out the enemy apparently isn’t reciprocated in the Pakistan parliament.

An unusual parliamentary debate designed to forge a Pakistani policy on how to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda has exposed deep ambivalence about the militants, even as their reach extends to suicide attacks in the capital.

Calls for dialogue with the Taliban, peppered with opposition to fighting what is perceived as an American war, dominated the closed-door sessions, according to participants.

After seven years of military rule under General Pervez Musharraf, the new civilian government initiated the debate in an effort to convince the public and the political parties of the necessity of the war against the militants. Musharraf – who had been both head of the army and president, as well as an important ally of the Bush administration – never consulted Parliament.

The new president, Asif Ali Zardari, pledged a strong effort by Pakistan against terrorism during his visit to Washington earlier this month, and stressed the contrast between his civilian rule and that of his military predecessor.

But the tenor of the parliamentary proceedings, including criticism by politicians of a lengthy military briefing by a general on the conduct of the war, showed that members of the political elite have little stomach for the fight against the militants.

This is a very troubling sign and doesn’t bode well for the removal of Taliban safe havens in the FATA and NWFP. However, it does explain the recent stand down of military actions in Waziristan.

It appears that the U.S. will have to increase force presence and take the brunt of the campaign (along with British and Canadian troops) – and show significant progress – before Pakistan will commit itself to the campaign.

The Small Wars Journal Blog links to a report by embedded journalist Nir Rosen, who spent some time with hard core Taliban, and wrote How We Lost the War We Won: A journey into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan for Rolling Stone. It’s an interesting report, but for regular readers of The Captain’s Journal, it’s not obvious that we learn much new (Sorry here, no bragging, and no embedded report from this end, but we’ve been covering OEF intensely for almost a year, ridiculing inept Army intelligence when they fed General Rodriguez the lunacy that the Taliban wouldn’t launch a spring offensive, telling our readers how important the Torkham Crossing and Chaman were, warning of affects of the TTP and Baitullah Mehsud, warning that roads and construction were irrelevant if IEDs tore them up, warning that British work on dams would be to no avail if dam workers were killed by the Taliban or if the electrical grid was taken out, warning that NATO was hopelessly deadlocked in red tape with many European troops sitting at FOBs with candy-ass rules of engagement, and so on, and so forth, and on and on, again and again and again. Been there, done that.).

So, go and read Rosen’s piece if you wish, it’s linked above. But regular readers of The Captain’s Journal will see our warnings in real life, real time. You’ve read it for a year. Now you can read a summary of our work in 45 minutes. Not bragging – just saying. We’re more interested in the take on this whole affair by Dave at The Small Wars Journal. Says Dave:

Just call me old fashioned – I have serious misgivings respecting and tolerating journalists who embed with an enemy (the Taliban in this instance) responsible for what some call the strictest interpretation and implementation of Sharia law “ever seen in the Muslim World.” The crimes against humanity that were a direct result of their rule in Afghanistan and continue in their desire to regain that rule cannot be forgiven or glossed over in hopes of some temporary respite from increased violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Yea, yea, okay – some people’s terrorists are other people’s freedom fighters – yada, yada – save it for the think tank- or university-circle sponsored seminars, studies and white papers. There is still black and white in today’s complex environment and our efforts in South Asia should most certainly fall within that category.

If there was ever a grouping of individuals and supporters that deserved complete annihilation (yea – I said the A word) – the Taliban and their support structure would and should be up front and center. It will take quite some time (that is why it is called The Long War) and there will most certainly be peaks and valleys along the way – but we must – and will – win this one and we will write the last chapter of the history book reserved for the victors.

Cheers, loud applause from the whole stadium – and the fans keep erupting in spontaneous dancing and celebrations and more applause and cheers. Now, just to set the mood going forward with this article, see the picture below.

The woman being killed (h/t LT Nixon Rants) probably forgot to pull her burqa completely closed and some of her face was showing. Not enough, says you? Want more? How about this.

In Meerwala, Pakistan, an 11-year-old boy walked unchaperoned with a girl. This was a violation of Islam. A tribal council was called.

The boy’s father pleaded that since he was too young to have sex, the girl was safe and no harm was done. The council disagreed. But instead of punishing the boy, it decided to punish his whole family by punishing his 18-year-old sister.

In order to shame the family, the council sentenced the teenage daughter to be gang raped. Four members of the council took turns forcing themselves upon her in a mud hut, as hundreds of villagers laughed and cheered.

“I touched their feet,” said the girl to an Associated Press reporter. “I wept. I cried. I said I taught the holy Qur’an to children in the village, therefore don’t punish me for a crime which was not committed by me. But they tore my clothes and raped me one by one.”

There you have it. The hard core Taliban and people who support them. Now. We can’t kill everyone, but every time The Captain’s Journal has weighed in negatively at the Small Wars Council (handle – Danny) on negotiating with these bastards, much consternation ensues, with Danny being labeled as someone who doesn’t understand counterinsurgency.

The Captain’s Journal (Danny) has lost much sleep over COIN. We’re very close to one particular SAW gunner who stopped counting his kills (literally – stopped counting, according to independent confirmations) and asked for prayer every time we talked. We’ve killed many, many enemy (the Wikipedia entry on Operation Alljah is low in number of enemy dead). As for the rest, “we’re paying them not to shoot at us,” said the SAW gunner to Danny.

Danny nodded approvingly that night, “Good, good,” said Danny. “Good. This is the way it’s supposed to be. Kill the irreconcilables without mercy, make peace with the rest, and sooner or later they will learn to be citizens again. Pay them until then. Good, good. This is the way it should be done.” And so Danny had very good sleep that night, and made sure that there was a concerned citizens category and that we weighed in with approval. Danny has thought quite a bit about counterinsurgency.

But the Anbaris were relatively secular compared to the Taliban, and had no love for the extreme vision of al Qaeda. It’s estimated that there are some 8000 – 20,000 Taliban fighters in the South and East, and these fighters are probably irreconcilable. Peel away a few, okay. Fine. Make your silly attempts to reconcile and negotiate, and you’ll get a few come to our side. But as for the hard core fighters (the majority), they must be killed. Their vision has as its world view a radical version of Islam that is either globalist in its import, or is amenable to that vision (and thus malleable for al Qaeda fighters).

Dave says he’s old fashioned. Fine with us. We are too. As for Nir Rosen, Danny doesn’t need the embedded report. We can figure it out on our own. We may as well have had someone embed with the Schutzstaffel while the Jews were being exterminated. Just as there is nothing romantic about putting Jews in ovens to die, there is nothing good, wholesome, romantic or righteous about Taliban ideology. Nir Rosen had better watch his six, or better yet, embed with U.S. troops.

In The Talibanization of Karachi, we discussed the influx of Taliban and foreign fighters into the port city of Karachi, and the danger this poses since Karachi is the main entry point for NATO supplies in Afghanistan. We weighed in saying that the figure cited (400,000 fighters) was probably exaggerated, but that anecdotal evidence shows that Karachi is increasingly under Taliban control.

In a new report we are now learning that both the U.S. and Pakistani governments are similarly worried, but not just about Karachi. The concern now is for the whole of Pakistan.

Grim new intelligence assessments about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Pakistan were disclosed yesterday amid reports the US had deployed hundreds of military “advisers” close to the hub of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Officials involved in drafting a new, classified national intelligence estimate for policy planners in Washington said it portrayed the situation as “very bad”, “very bleak” and “on the edge”. It is said to summarise the embattled Islamic nation in three words: “No money, no energy, no government.”

Its reported tone was matched during a secret emergency session of Pakistan’s parliament in Islamabad yesterday when one of the country’s most senior leaders — giving MPs the Government’s view of the situation — conceded for the first time that a grouping of al-Qa’ida, the Taliban and local jihadi militants was seeking not just to launch terrorist attacks but to take over the country.

The gloomy assessment was provided behind closed doors by Information Minister Sherry Rehman.

Disclosure of the two assessments came as diplomats in Islamabad were warned for the first time to restrict their movements because of the threats posed by the militants and not to “go out of station” — travel too far from their embassies.

A government official was quoted as saying the directive had been issued following last month’s kidnapping of the Afghan ambassador-designate and three other foreigners.

The assessments came as the Pakistan army acknowledged for the first time the presence of US “trainers” who have been deployed at a base close to the Tarbela dam, 20km from Islamabad, the site of the main hub of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Tarbela is the site of the brigade headquarters of Pakistan’s crack commando unit the Special Operations Task Force, and reports in Pakistan have claimed a 300-strong “US training advisory group” is now based at Hasanpur, a small town 6km away.

The local airstrip has been upgraded to “war readiness” and underground shelters, bunkers and tunnels had been built, reports said.

The presence of the US group — and, in effect, the establishment of the US’s first “base” in Pakistan — follows a statement by the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, conceding Washington had deployed “trainers” in the country.

These are extremely troubling developments for three reasons: [1] Pakistan holds nuclear assets, [2] Pakistan could evolve from being a Taliban sanctuary in the FATA and NWFP to being a sanctuary in the entire country, i.e., the country itself could become “Talibanized,” and [3] Pakistan (from the port city of Karachi to either the Southeastern city of Chaman or the northern Torkham Crossing) is the supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan. India is equally concerned, and Indian security forces are monitoring the trouble.

Could Pakistan fall to a Taliban-al-Qaida coup? Is India looking at the possibility of a Talibanized neighbour to its west, one with access to nuclear weapons? If Pakistan’s senior minister for information Sherry Rahman is to be believed, Pakistan is in the midst of a serious internal security threat from a collection of Taliban, al-Qaida and J&K terrorist elements who want to take over the country.

Indian security sources said they have been receiving reports of a steady infiltration of Taliban and al-Qaida elements in Pakistan’s biggest cities of Lahore and Karachi recently. In fact, in a recent incident which rang alarm bells, there were a number of Taliban posters in Karachi and Taliban spokespersons were quoted promising a better government in Sindh.

Rahman’s statements were made during an in-camera briefing on national security and the war on terror in Pakistan’s national assembly on Tuesday.

By J&K the article is referring to Jammu and Kashmir terrorists, largely a creation of the Pakistani ISI for the purposes of undermining Indian stability and security. The monsters of the Taliban and J&K terrorists created by the Pakistani inter-services intelligence (ISI) are not just unwieldy and out of control. That was true a couple of years ago. The movement is now so powerful and ideologically evolved that it is about to engulf the country of Pakistan itself.

The Taliban recently attempted another large scale conventional-style operation in the Helmand Province. It didn’t go well.

About 100 militants have been killed in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, half in air strikes that thwarted an attack on a key town, Afghan and British forces said yesterday.

Between 50 and 60 militants were killed in airstrikes as they tried to enter the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah from three directions. British Lieutenant-Colonel Woody Page said the attempt was ”virtually unpre-cedented” in the area in the scale of the attacking force and their degree of coordination.

With the exception of the battle of Wanat, regardless of their perceived capabilities, every time they conduct major conventional operations against British or U.S. forces, they lose badly. It is tactics like this that are keeping the Taliban from gaining control any more quickly than they have. Hopefully the Taliban will continue to believe that they can engage in conventional operations against coalition forces. Working as guerrillas is more efficient for them and bad for us.

But gaining control they are, in spite of their losses due to large scale operations. The lack of forces to provide security for the population has caused the Taliban, who are in constant contact with the population, to gain control of all major routes into and out of Kabul except one.

At a gas station on the outskirts of Kabul, lounging in the shade of a transport truck, Mohammed Raza describes how he escaped death.

Last month, a U.S. contractor promised him $10,000 if he’d drive a truck full of diesel from Kabul to Kandahar, offering seven times more than he could earn by transporting his usual shipments of sugar. But the Taliban forbid drivers from carrying fuel to the foreign troops, he said, and the insurgents run checkpoints on the road between Afghanistan’s two largest cities. He rejected the offer. One of his friends took the assignment, he said, and the Taliban cut off his head.

“Many drivers now are selling their lives,” the 25-year-old said, nervously twisting the fringe of his beard.

The Taliban are isolating Afghanistan’s capital city from the rest of the country, choking off important supply routes and imposing their rules on the provinces near Kabul. Interviews suggest that the Taliban have gained control along three of the four major highways into the city, and some believe it’s a matter of time before they regulate all traffic around the capital …

But the insurgents don’t need to attack the capital; by hobbling the government’s ability to reach its own citizens beyond the city gates, security analysts say, the Taliban make the rulers of Kabul irrelevant in broad swaths of the country. It’s more than a propaganda victory; the insurgents are grabbing the same political high ground the Taliban exploited during their previous sweep to power in the 1990s, by positioning themselves as the best enforcers of security in rural Afghanistan.

The roadblocks have also started to pinch the foreign troops. Military bases find themselves running short of fuel and other supplies …

People who work for the government, or have any association with the foreign presence, now travel covertly on the main highways of southern, central, and eastern Afghanistan. They disguise themselves as rural peasants, carry no identification cards, and erase numbers from their cellphones that might connect them with the government.

Some devise even more elaborate strategies for dealing with Taliban checkpoints, arranging for friends to impersonate religious figures who can vouch for them if they’re stopped by the insurgents.

Truck drivers often leave a rear door open at the back of their tractor-trailers, securing their cargo with a spider web of ropes, so that Taliban can easily look inside and check the shipment for anything forbidden by the insurgency. The Taliban even scrutinize the drivers’ customs paperwork to certify that the goods are destined for non-military consumers …

Not only do the Afghan security forces lack numbers, but they’re also corrupt and even colluding with the insurgents, said Colonel Asadullah Abed, chief of the criminal investigation division for the 10 central provinces around Kabul.

The 40-year-old policeman says he’s no friend of the Taliban, and has a sheaf of threatening letters from the insurgents to make his point.

But he worries that his colleagues at small posts outside the city are not so devoted to the government’s cause.

Each of the four major gateways into Kabul are guarded by Afghan police, soldiers, and intelligence officers, Col. Abed said, but the insurgents easily bribe their way through. People with loyalties to the insurgents have also infiltrated the ranks of Afghanistan’s security establishment, he added: “They’re not working honestly.”

Col. Abed paused to look at a reporter’s military-issued accreditation card, and noted that the small piece of identification would be a death warrant on most highways outside the city. “You’re a foreigner travelling with this,” he said, pointing to the ID badge, “and you can travel the Shomali road okay, but any other road they will capture you after one kilometre.”

As long as the Taliban interdict traffic patterns outside of Kabul into the countryside of Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom will fail. But there is also the corollary problem of corruption within the Afghan forces, police and army.

While this corruption remains there cannot be a complete turnover of responsibility to the Afghan government. Operation Enduring Freedom is a long, long way from completion.

The Captain’s Journal has discussed the influx of Taliban to Karachi before, as well as the fact that it is an important port city through which NATO supplies flow (ultimately through two passes, one at the Torkham Crossing and the other through the Southwestern city of Chaman). But the supplies mainly come into Pakistan through the port of Karachi. There are reports of a massive influx of Taliban into Karachi and the surrounding provinces.

Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain has said that more than 400,000 Afghans and foreigners equipped with weapons have entered the city and alleged that these terrorists wanted to occupy Karachi and Hyderabad and the entire Sindh.

In a statement issued from London on Sunday, he warned that they did not want to fight anyone but added that if the MQM areas were attacked they would defend themselves in accordance with the UN Charter and Islamic Shariat.

He said that the MQM wanted to make Pakistan a liberal and democratic state and not a country governed by al-Qaeda, Taliban or religious extremists.

“The MQM is against all kinds of extremism and terrorism and wants to give equal rights to each and every segment of the society including minorities.”

This report is probably exaggerated (the total is probably << 400,000), but a much better anecdotal account of the Talibanization of Karachi comes from Richard Engel of NBC News along with his interpreter.

Many Pakistanis attend madrassas because they offer free education, supplementing the government’s lacking public school system. For centuries madrassas were the only form of education in the Islamic world. From Morocco to Indonesia, most madrassas have a similar layout, with a mosque at the center and classrooms upstairs. The vast majority of madrassas are moderate charities that teach religious values, the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet Mohammed.

But some madrassas in Pakistan have churned out suicide bombers indoctrinated in jihad and a paranoid but widespread philosophy that they must attack innocent civilians to defend their faith from the United States, Israel and other modern-day “crusaders.”

Former President Pervez Musharraf promised to reform and regulate Pakistan’s hard-line madrassas. It never happened. According to Karachi’s former mayor Farooq Sattar, there are now more than 2,000 illegal madrassas in Karachi alone. This was one of them.

“What do you think of the Taliban and their influence here?” I asked the students.

More blank stares.

“What do you think about the U.S. incursions?”

That got a reaction.

“God willing, we will fight them,” said one teenager with a purple scar on his chin. “They are the enemy,” he said and launched into a long explanation of America’s goal to occupy Muslim lands and undermine Islam. I’ve heard the same speech from Cairo to Lebanon, Baghdad to Riyadh. God bless the Internet.

A few minutes later my driver/fixer, a very tough guy from a very tough part of Pakistan, tapped me on the shoulder.

“I think you have been here long enough,” he said. It was time to go.

But I still hadn’t seen any Taliban.

Malik suggested we go deeper into the slum, to the neighborhood right under the cliffs and quarries. He was nervous about taking a foreigner, but had an idea. There was a graveyard in the area.

“We can pretend to be offering prayers for the dead,” Malik suggested. “I’ll pray over one of the graves and you can see the neighborhood for yourself.”

Malik said praying at a gravesite would give us an excuse to be in the area and raise less suspicion.

It didn’t exactly work. As soon as I stepped out of the jeep by the gravestones, I was again surrounded by a group of people. They didn’t have weapons or appear threatening, but didn’t attempt to hide their sympathies for the Taliban. One man proudly told me several suicide bombers had prayed in a nearby mosque.

But others were scared of the Taliban. A man who spoke English told me the Taliban were in control of the area.

“Do the Pakistani police or soldiers ever come here?” I asked him. “No, they can’t come here.”

“How do people feel here?”

“We are all frightened. The Taliban has taken over.”

More men, athletically built in their 20s and 30s, started to arrive.

“Who are these people?” I asked the English speaker.

“They are Taliban.”

“Do they understand what we are saying? Do they understand English?”

“No, but you shouldn’t stay here. It is not comfortable here. You should not be here.”

“Who runs this neighborhood?”

“They do.”

The new arrivals didn’t want to be interviewed.

“Stop asking them questions,” the English speaker advised.

We left a few minutes later.

“We couldn’t come here at night,” Malik said as we were driving out of the neighborhood. “Now we had an excuse to come to the graveyard. But at night, there would be no reason to be here.”

Both of these reports point to the same thing, even if in different ways.  The campaign is in deep trouble when the main route for supplies, ordnance and fuel is in trouble. If the Taliban have their way, Karachi will not be hospitable for very much longer. Causing a diminution of Taliban capabilities and turning the tide of the campaign is very important, and it’s important to do so in a timely manner.

Rosie Dimanno has covered Marine operations in the Helmand Province, and four months ago The Captain’s Journal said we like Rosie. She has it going on – she gets it. Concerning negotiations with the Taliban, Rosie tells us just what the scoop is.

There’s really no excuse, in these days of instant reporting verification, to misquote or misrepresent a quote.

Unless, of course, the intention is to manipulate and deceive.

This is what Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith, the man in charge of Britain’s 8,000 troops in Afghanistan, said last weekend: “We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.

“We may well leave with there being a low but steady ebb of rural insurgency.”

Carleton-Smith called for negotiations with the Taliban.

“If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this.”

It’s nothing that hasn’t been said before. Indeed, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has, for the past three years, urged Taliban leaders to join him in dialogue – provided they accept Afghanistan’s new constitution and denounce violence. The Taliban has disdainfully declined.

They just keep killing, both troops and civilians. In recent months, the neo-Taliban has particularly targeted female aid workers, female-owned small businesses, female teachers.

In so doing, they can pluck out two thorns with one blast: Women who don’t know their place (indoors, under a burqa) and anyone trying to alleviate the misery of Afghan civilians.

The insurgents – more closely associated with Al Qaeda than at any time since pre-2001 – do not negotiate. The militants aren’t interested in securing more Pashtun representation in government. This isn’t political.

It’s about reversing any incremental gains Afghanistan has made since the Taliban was ousted. It’s about imposing, as before, the most narrow, oppressive and isolating of Islamist theocracy on an exhausted citizenry.

This is just what we have been saying for months now. The Anbaris weren’t religiously motivated jihadists, and thus siding with the U.S. was not only in their best interests, but inevitable given the relentless Marine operations in Anbar.

The Taliban are persuaded to fight for other reasons, there is insufficient force projection in Afghanistan, and Rosie is right. Calls for negotiations are not new, and in fact, negotiations themselves are not new, if you count negotiations as effeminate pleading by Hamid Karzai. Just as there have been “talks” with the Iranians for 25 years (contrary to the claims of the surrender-ists), there have been pleas by Hamid Karzai and his ilk for several years for the Taliban to end the violence. They have declined and will continue to do so.

Regular readers of The Captain’s Journal know that we oppose negotiations with the Taliban (just as we opposed the deal with Mullah Abdul Salaam for Musa Qala). But Hamid Karzai has prostrated himself before Mullah Omar, beseeching him to stop the violence.

On the first day of Id al-Fitr, President Hamid Karzai had a great treat in store for his people. In a speech he said: “A few days ago I pleaded with the leader of the Taliban, telling him ‘My brother, my dear, come back to your homeland. Come back and work for peace, for the good of the Afghan people. Stop this business of brothers killing brothers’.” My brother? My dear? Yes, and yes again. Karzai is an Afghan version of the metrosexual man. He sometimes even cries publicly, though that’s not to everyone’s taste.

A large dose of wishful thinking has gone into this notion that the Taliban are actually negotiating with Kabul, or rather, that any meaningful representatives of the Taliban are negotiating on behalf of the Taliban. In fact, there are some fairly compelling denials that this is occurring. “Zabeeh Ullah, spokesman of Mullah Umar has said that Taliban has no relation[ship] to negotiations with Afghan government. He termed it as an attempt by Afghan government to create differences between Talibans. He said that Mullah Abdus Salam Zaeef, Moulvi Abdul Wakeel Mutawakal and Maulana Rehmani were not their representatives.” Furthermore, the idea that Mullah Omar would willingly choose to negotiate with Hamid Karzai stands in stark contrast to his history, even his recent history. In a recent al Qaeda video commemorating the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Mullah Omar’s spokesman promises more large scale attacks.

Finally, the NEA Foundation has recently translated a fairly succinct but informative message from the Taliban.

In the Name of Allah, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful … The mainstream media is reporting about a ‘peace process’ between the Taliban and the Kabul puppet administration which is being sponsored by Saudi Arabia and supported by Britain – or, alternatively, that there are ‘unprecedented talks’ taking place involving a senior ex-Taliban member who is traveling between Kabul and alleged bases used by Taliban senior leadership figures in Pakistan.

The Shura Council of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) considers such baseless rumors as part of the failed efforts by our enemies to create distrust and doubts among Afghans, other nations, and the mujahideen. No official member of the Taliban – now or in the past – has ever negotiated with the U.S. or the puppet Afghan government. A handful of former Taliban officials who are under house arrest or who have surrendered do not represent the Islamic Emirate. If our fight was for control of ministries and other prominent positions in the puppet administration, then such negotiations would have made sense – but this is not the case. Our struggle is to implement the rules of Allah in Afghanistan by eradicating the enemies of Islam.

A dialogue which is in the interests of Afghanistan and Islam will never be concealed from the nation. Our struggle will continue until the departure of all foreign troops.

In these few paragraphs not only has Omar denounced the idea that there can be negotiations with either the U.S. or Kabul, he also tells us again what his aim is. The Taliban aren’t after cooperation or even high level ministry positions. The existing government in Kabul won’t do.

While even Secretary of Defense Gates has made it clear that there can be compromise with the Taliban, Mullah Omar has said that the same kind of government that existed prior to 9/11 – and that gave sanctuary to al Qaeda – must be implemented in Kabul. Nothing less is acceptable.

Since it take two parties to cooperate, there can be no cooperation.

We’ve covered this before, but it’s time to circle back around and address it again, this time with a bit more nuance. General John Craddock is incredulous and says it’s time to give him a break.

NATO’s top operations commander hit out on Monday at allies resisting his call for the alliance to use more aggressive tactics against Afghan drug production.

“We still have a handful of nations…who have not listened to the argument but are countering with questions that have been answered over and over and over again,” NATO Supreme Commander for Europe General John Craddock told a seminar in Brussels.

The U.S. general, who has called for tougher action against drug labs and trafficking networks, rejected the idea that his proposal would worsen the Taliban insurgency and stressed it would not involve targeting farmers’ crops.

“This is not about eradication. The fear that this will make the Taliban more mad at us? Give me a break!” he said.

“What are these suicide bombs and IEDs, these terrorist attacks, all about? How can it be any worse?”

Craddock quoted U.N. estimates that the trade in drugs was bringing in about $100 million every year to the Taliban and said the trade also fuelled corruption in the Afghan government.

“If we can take away the wherewithal that they can build these bombs, the ability to buy the materiel and pay the bomb maker, the ability to buy the bullets and pay the trigger puller, isn’t that a good thing?” he asked.

“I will not rest until I have exhausted every avenue to convince the political leaders of NATO that this is a moral requirement to protect their forces.”

On a mission, he is. But not so fast. Will poppy eradication really stop the flow of revenue into the Taliban coffers? In Kidnapping: The Taliban’s New Source of Income and Financing the Taliban we pointed out how the Taliban had learned to behave like an organized crime syndicate, making protection and extortion money on everything from kidnapping to taxes on businesses and even marble quarries.

It isn’t obvious that a total eradication of poppy from the landscape would cause a diminution of Taliban capabilities. But let’s acknowledge General Craddock’s point that we shouldn’t care a whole lot how the Taliban feel if we destroy their income. If in fact there are Taliban – farmers by day, fighters by night – who are growing and making money from poppy, and we can positively identify them as being Taliban, then The Captain’s Journal is in favor of destruction of their crops.

But there’s the rub, isn’t it? If we can make positive ID of Taliban, then destruction of their crops is irrelevant since we should stalk and kill them. On the other hand, the real question isn’t whether we are going to make the Taliban more mad at us. It’s whether some heretofore uninvolved farmer or his sons become enraged at the destruction of their livelihood and then become Taliban. The real concern is stoking the insurgency with new members, not the disposition of the old members.

Finally, just in case any of this gets lost on our leadership, remember that the U.S. Marines, the best warriors on the planet, including COIN, specifically avoided poppy eradication during their tenure in the Helmand Province. They were there to kill Taliban, not crops, said they.

Indeed, from negotiating with alleged moderates to poppy eradication to [you fill in the blank _______], everyone is searching for a magic incantation to utter, a special section of FM 3-24 released only to the Gnostic special few that tells us how to do COIN, some trickery of the enemy, or some other solution to the campaign that doesn’t involve more troops. If we only do this, we can win – if we only do that, we can be successful. Alas, there is no easy solution forthcoming.