Forward Operating Base Salerno, Khost Province, Afghanistan

AS PRESIDENTS OBAMA AND KARZAI PARRY over troop levels and assistance, “retrograde” is the operant word I am hearing from US commanders in Afghanistan. A nuanced military term for withdrawal, retrograde defines operations in this insurgency-plagued land. After more than a decade of US-led warfare, American commanders are now insisting their Afghan counterparts take over the fight. One seasoned commander termed it “tough love.”

The 101^st Airborne Division’s Rakkasan Brigade is the battle-space owner of eastern Afghanistan’s restive Khost and Paktya provinces, located astride Pakistan’s anarchic tribal regions. In the Forward Operating Base Salerno’s brigade headquarters that is hardened against rocket and mortar attack, Rakkasan Deputy Commander Colonel Tim Sullivan told me, “Our mission was to go from a partnered role with the ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) to an advise and assist role. We kind of gave it the ‘tough love’ approach.”

With the announced US withdrawal of 2014, American officers have no choice but to push the Afghan security forces forward. It’s a big change for Afghan commanders used to US troops taking the lead, and accustomed to the formidable US firepower and air support. Colonel Sullivan talked of turning down a cossetted Afghan commander who demanded helicopter transport to one of his bases. “We fly them no where,” Sullivan told me. “It’s a big transition. It has to happen. It’s a clash of wills.”

Sullivan is the right man for the job. A hulking, gravel-voiced Brooklynite from an Irish Catholic family of seven boys, Sullivan is a West Point graduate who has served in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sullivan and other US officers in Afghanistan talk about the need to transition to “Afghan Good Enough,” a sustainable Afghan security force that does it the Afghan way. The US partnering strategy of “Shohna ba Shohna” (Shoulder to Shoulder) has abruptly given way to “After You,” as Afghan security forces take the lead—sometimes reluctantly. “Across the A/O (Area of Operations), I wouldn’t paint a rosy picture,” Sullivan says. “We’ve had some very good success. We’ve had some moderate success. We have not encountered any nightmares.”

Across the insurgent heartland of eastern and southern Afghanistan, US commitment is rapidly receding. There’s a palletizing fever as US equipment is packed for shipment—sometimes prematurely. In military briefings, US bases scheduled for imminent closing flicker off powerpoint maps. Already long convoys of armored vehicles are making their way down from forward bases and combat outposts being closed or transferred to Afghan security forces. Remaining US bases are groaning with the influx of transiting troops and contractors, housed in new barrios of Alaska tents and “tin-can” metal housing pods.

Some bases are being dismantled and returned to nature. Combat Outpost Tillman, named after the NFL star and special forces soldier Pat Tillman who died in an infamous friendly fire incident, was one of those closed. “We scraped it clean,” Sullivan said. US anti-IED teams traveled north to blow up the watchtowers. The base is now a soccer field, where Afghan boys play a wolfish style of football.

As Obama administration spokespersons float the big round trial balloon of zero troops in Afghanistan, soldiers here talk about the spring 2013 drawdown of 20 percent of the remaining 66,000 US troops, with another 50 percent to be gone soon after.

How are the Afghans responding to US retrograde? Among some, there is clearly denial. They simply can’t imagine a country rich enough, or foolish enough, to just walk away from the enormous investment poured into these bases, many just built during the boom that accompanied Obama’s troop surge.

Aid and development money is drying up. I listened to one Afghan government farm worker in insecure Zabul Province insist a US military development team needed to build a fence around a section of a US-financed Afghan demonstration farm. The US commander patiently told the farmer he should ask his provincial agriculture minister to do it. “We don’t do projects anymore,” the commander repeatedly said. The farmer, who sported a bright gold wristwatch that signifies inordinate wealth (and sometimes indicates Taliban ties), retorted the ministry was “weak,” so the American “friends” needed to do it.

Many Afghans tell me they are very pessimistic about post-2014 security. One Afghan who has translated for US forces in Khost Province for nine years says, “The Afghan situation right now is kind of bad. If the American forces withdraws from Afghanistan, I don’t think the Afghan army is strong enough to defend everybody.” He told me he hoped the Coalition forces would keep training the Afghan security forces. “Right now if the Coalition forces would leave, it’s going to be so hard for the Afghan people.” Like many of his colleagues, the educated interpreter, whose father was an Afghan National Police general, is applying for a special US immigration visa.

Other Afghans are getting angry. One US commander in southern Afghanistan told me about his Afghan counterpart flaring up when he learned American support was being quickly scaled back. It’s a dictum that “retrograde under contact” (withdrawal under pressure) is among the most difficult of military operations. At some point when troop levels have dropped, all a force can do is protect itself.

As US forces withdraw after well over a decade of war, the insurgents have responded in various ways. IEDs continue to be the weapon of choice. Media-magnet complex attacks, such as the spectacular attacks on Kabul and Camp Bastion when Prince Harry was stationed there, broadcast the insurgency is still thriving.

In some formerly insecure provinces such as Khost, insurgent attacks have diminished. I asked Colonel Tim Sullivan about the contention that attacks dropped because casualty-cautious US commanders ordered fewer combat patrols. Sullivan challenged the idea that US soldiers are not “out there,” saying soldiers constantly travel the roads on retrograde convoys. “We’re not finding the mother lodes of caches (insurgent military supplies) when we go out,” he says. “We’re not getting a fight.”

Then I asked about the assessment that Afghan insurgents are just husbanding their forces while the US withdraws. “Husbanding of forces,” Sullivan quickly responds, “I might buy that.”

Reporting in Afghanistan is complicated. Of course, there’s the challenge of operating in an insurgency-wracked land, where every decision has to be weighed for risk. Is that a secure location to meet? Is that person trustworthy? Is that boy hurrying through the bazaar with the pressure cooker in his wheelbarrow a suicide bomber or just curious?

Then there’s the complexity of dealing with the US military in Afghanistan. Any embed with American troops takes a spiraling nebula of approvals. And when embedded, journalists are now often so tightly hobbled by escorts that reporters probably got more candor from Soviet leaders on May Day. Public Affairs-savvy US officers in today’s Afghanistan are sticking to well-honed talking points.

Kabul-based US diplomats and USAID officials are no less wary. Press officers view interviews requests like IEDs—potentially explosive events that require much time-consuming consideration. Take a number. Get back with us.

But for some reason, the Afghanistan Foreigner Registration Card is the thing that causes me the most anxiety.  It looks simple at the outset: guidebooks counsel bringing two passport photos and a passport copy to the Kabul International Airport office just behind the baggage claim. But like most things in Afghanistan, simple never is, because the office is never open when my Dubai flight arrives in Kabul.

And if you don’t have that simple little rubber-stamped registration card when you (desperately) are trying to fly out of Afghanistan, there can be a big problem. Maybe you are going to held up by some Afghan functionary as the minutes tick down to flight time—maybe for a major bribe by selfsame functionary. Or maybe not. Last time, a older Afghan in a suit coat who was collecting the cards cheerfully told me to get one “next time when you come to Afghanistan.” But who wants to take that chance? At that point, you really want to leave Afghanistan.

The other way to get the registration card is to go to the Ministry of Interior’s registration office in downtown Kabul—a “major hassle” the guidebooks promise. Well, when I flew into Kabul in early January, the airport office was closed—naturally. But as I was headed to embattled eastern and southern Afghanistan, I had other things on my mind. Worry about it later.

But soon enough I am back in Kabul, and my lack of a Foreigner Registration Card is looming large in my fervid imagination. I need the card.

A kind Afghan at the institute guesthouse where I am staying assures me it is no problem. He will go with me. So one morning we’re off to the Ministry of Interior, a decaying ferro-cement complex with all the charm of an ancient prison. Crowds of Afghan throng the gate as cars and carts disgorge more. Inside the courtyard, a surging semi-mob pulses amoeba-like around an entrance. (Afghans have not embraced queuing as best I can see.) My Afghan guide says the Afghans are here to get the newly required universal Afghan identity card.

Dipping his shoulder to enter the crowd, my guide makes a beeline to an office off to one side, glancing back to be sure I’m in his wake. A tiny sign on the door reads, “Foreign Registration.” I can only imagine how long it would have taken me to find the office. Just inside the door, a wizened dwarf sits imperiously behind a desk sorting piles of Foreigner Registration Cards. Half-hidden by a large black turban and a red and black neck scarf that almost reaches his mouth, his wrinkled face is a mask of disapproval. He purses his lips. He glares. His tiny feet swing below his chair in barely bottled frustration. He barks Dari in a high sing-song voice at the three young functionaries crowded into the small unlighted office with him.

One points us toward a divan at the end of the room, where an older Afghan in a wool Panjshiri hat waits in the gloom. I fill out the application and hand over my paperwork. He translates into Dari, and fills out a registration card. While he carefully trims one of my photos with a pair of battered red shears, I notice a typewritten sign on the wall, addressed to “My dear esteemed foreign visitors and there colleagues,” notifying all that the Foreigner Registration Card is “free and gratis” and no one should ask for payment. No one does.

Then it’s back through the courtyard throng to a building on the other side. The hall is Afghanistan in review: Elegant Tajik women in head scarves and narrow high-heeled platform shoes, Haraza men looking like the Great Khan’s men, a team of stolid Uzbeks, Westernized young swains in suit coats, Pashtuns with cockscomb turbans, tiny women hidden beneath thousand-pleat blue burquas, an understory of self-assured, clear-eyed children. My guide sweeps into an upstairs office, where he directs me to give the bureaucrat my passport and card. I no more than hand them to him than he pushes past me into the melee. As I lose sight of him and my passport, I think, “Oh, darn—so close.” But suddenly he’s back, waving me into another office, this one with the magical sign: “Foreign Registration.” A second later, an official behind a desk takes a moment from his conversation to reach into a drawer for his stamp. Bam! It’s done.

“Let’s go,” my guide says.

WHEN I WAS EMBEDDED with US troops in insurgency-wracked eastern Afghanistan, a smart tactical commander told me the American people, cognizant of war’s fog and friction, don’t expect the military to be efficient. “But,” he said emphatically, “they do expect us to be effective.”

I thought about his comment as the media frantically investigates the alleged improprieties of the US commanders in Afghanistan, generals Petreaus and Allen. Is this brouhaha distracting us from the real question: Have these generals been effective? Have any of the eleven US commanders over the last eleven years been effective?

The US has never lacked for grand strategies in Afghanistan. Each of the eleven US military commanders in Afghanistan brought in a new strategy, along with new staff, new orders, new emphases, new Powerpoint decks of pixilated promise. It was effective execution that was missing.

Like most of the ambitious American careerists who cycled through wartime Afghanistan, the generals were mainly interested in punching their tickets and moving on. Effective oversight and long-term sustainability weren’t part of their agenda. As former ambassador to Afghanistan Robert Neumann said, “Most people complained about policy. But what we lacked was an ability to implement.”

Critics such as Thomas E. Ricks and Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer have pointed out the contemporary military’s obsession with standardized measures of individual and unit performance have supplanted essential metrics of military success—such as achieving victory.

We are now in the twelfth year of the war in Afghanistan. The failing counterinsurgency has cost American taxpayers about $600 billion, with the final bill estimated to be well over a trillion dollars. Tens of thousands of American and Afghan lives have been destroyed.

And what did Americans get for this horrific investment of blood and treasure?  Afghanistan’s government is ranked as one of the planet’s most corrupt. It is 6^th on the Failed States index. Much of the $90 billion in US development assistance has been leached away by greedy US corporations and corrupt Afghan insiders, leaving little for the Afghan people. The American aid and military logistics contracts are so poorly managed that the Taliban systematically finances their insurgency with money skimmed from the contractors. Soldiers ruefully tell me, “We’re funding both sides of the war.”

Given the dysfunction, it is no surprise the Taliban-led insurgency has grown at double-digit rates each year since the 2001 invasion, proving the Special Forces dictum that if an insurgency is not shrinking, it’s winning.

We are long past the drift point. Afghanistan is unraveling. As the country’s kleptocratic government postures and tribal leaders gird for civil war, the Taliban-led insurgents are growing in strength. In the meantime, US political leaders are essentially standing mute on the war, leaving many of the 68,000 US soldiers in Afghanistan unclear about their mission.

While enjoying the titillating tales about our randy commanders and their girlfriends, war-weary US taxpayers are enduring a US counterinsurgency so flawed it funds our enemy without accomplishing our national security goals, a story I documented in my recently published book. As politicians, diplomats, development cabals and the military-industrial complex plan further long-term commitments to the Afghanistan War, it must be enough to make the average American wonder not just who’s in bed with whom, but who, precisely, is getting screwed?

Published Tampa Tribune, November 20, 2012

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF OSAMA BIN LADEN’S DEATH, his strategy continues to work like a charm in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden explained his plan in 2004: “All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies…. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.”

Well over a decade after Osama bin Laden formulated his economic “bleed until bankrupt” strategy, the United States continues to spend hundred of billions of US dollars in Afghanistan on generally fruitless counterinsurgency operations, which do little but benefit ambitious American careerists, US private corporations, and corrupt Afghan kleptocrats—a malign network of graft and corruption that now includes the Taliban.

When I was embedded with US troops in the warzones of eastern Afghanistan, the soldiers told me the US government was wasting tens of billions of dollars each year on scandalously mismanaged development and logistics contracts. We’d be hunkered down on embattled forward operating bases and the soldiers would compare the US-backed Afghan government to the Mafia, saying everybody was in on the take, including the insurgents. “We’re funding both sides of this war,” the soldiers would wryly say.

The stories were rife out in Afghanistan: US-funded Alternative Livelihood projects, grotesquely expensive counternarcotics programs that ostensibly paid Afghan farmers to not grow opium poppy crops, but instead fattened the accounts of private development companies, corrupt Afghan officials née drug lords, and the insurgents. Joel Hafvenstein, a development official who documented the failed counternarcotics program in his Opium Season, wrote after one payday in a Helmand Province village, his Afghan colleague remarked, “You know, I think half of the people we paid today were Taliban.”

A congressional investigation verified that the US military was helping to finance the Taliban. The military gave well-connected Afghans contracts to provide security for military logistics convoys. The Afghan insiders in turn subcontracted the security to warlords, who then paid off the Taliban. The congressional report, “Warlord, Inc., concluded: “protection payments for safe passage are a significant source of funding for the Taliban.”

US-funded development projects, big and small, were perfect conduits for graft and extortion. A known insurgent leader on the US Special Operations JPEL “kill or capture” list provided security for one USAID-funded road construction project, the Khost-Gardez highway in eastern Afghanistan. The security contractor paid the jihadi  $160,000 a month to protect the road from himself. On small development projects, such as wells and irrigation projects, US officers told me the insurgents skim both the contractor and the villagers paid to do the work.

Then there was the story of the Kajaki Dam, a massive US-funded Cold War-era project in southern Afghanistan that was designed to win the hearts and minds of Afghans with irrigation and hydroelectric power. Of course, when the US invaded in 2001 the dam was a priority bombing target. And, of course, after the Taliban retreated the dam was a priority US rebuilding project. The United States eventually spent over $100 million to repair and upgrade Kajaki’s hydroelectric capacity. As power lines again snaked across southern Afghanistan, American press officers again touted Kajaki as a glittering centerpiece of American aid. But in 2010, researchers discovered that over half the electricity went to areas controlled by the Taliban. Once an icon of US assistance to the Third World, Kajaki now served as the symbol of America’s distracted aid to the enemy. “The more electricity there is,” an Afghan tribal affairs officer said, “the more money the Taliban make.”

The system in Afghanistan is so routine, there are reportedly Taliban business offices in Kabul and Kandahar where US-funded contractors negotiate with Taliban engineers to determine their take.US soldiers, development officials, and others on the ground in Afghanistan have told me the corrupt system is so entrenched that the only option is to withdraw. “It’s the perfect war,” one US intelligence officer sarcastically told me. “Everyone is making money.” It’s working out for everyone but the Afghan people, the US soldiers on the ground, and the American public.

In one of history’s great ironies, US taxpayers are funding their own enemy as the American infrastructure and safety net continues to fray. It must have made Osama bin Laden smile.

Anti-American violence has been wracking Afghanistan since Afghans discovered U.S. personnel burning Korans at Bagram Air Base. Grotesquely sacrilegious in this conservative Islamic society, the Koran-burning by Americans illustrates the divergence between the counterinsurgency policies grandly proclaimed in Washington and the on-the-ground reality in Afghanistan.

Former Centcom commander and commander in both Iraq and Afghanistan, General David Petreaus oversaw the development the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24, later famous as FM 3-24. Beginning in December 2006, FM 3-24 was widely disseminated as the US military training doctrine. FM 3-24 emphasized “protecting the population” was a key element of a culturally sensitive counterinsurgency campaign.

Counterinsurgency advocates promised the doctrine embedded in FM 3-24 would to turn door-kicking US combat soldiers into culturally respectful “hearts-and-minds” warriors, who were as ready to dig wells, build schools and nurture small businesses as they were to give battle to the Taliban. WHAM, the military tagged it, “Winning Hearts and Minds.” The counterinsurgency advocates promised the doctrine would produce “strategic corporals,” reborn counterinsurgency soldiers whose actions could impact the war far above his rank. As New Yorker writer Nicholas Lemann wrote about the ideal counterinsurgency soldier: “He’s Gandhi in IED-proof armor.” The reality, as we have seen with the Koran-burning, is much different.

The recent case of Koran-burning, ostensibly by “strategic corporals,” is even more absurd given the US military was painfully aware of the problems of Koran-burning. In late 2009, I was embedded with a unit of Kentucky soldiers, who encountered a mob of rioting Afghans protesting an alleged Koran-burning by US troops. Softball-sized rocks rained on the team’s convoy of armored MRAPs, breaking windshields and antennas. “It was kind of a hell of fire, if you will,” the unit commander, Colonel Mike Farley, told me. In spite of the counterinsurgency indoctrination, this latest Koran-burning speaks to both a failure of training and a woeful dearth of institutional memory. The US military prides itself on being a “learning organization.” Looks like they are flunking this subject.

Re-posted from The Huffington Post

The death of Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has left a giant vacuum in Afghanistan policy circles — particularly in regards to the agricultural development policy that Holbrooke championed as an essential counterinsurgency tool. He often termed agriculture “our number-one ‘non-security’ priority in Afghanistan” — going on to say non-security was in quotes because agriculture and security are inextricably related in Afghanistan, where 80 percent of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. Holbrooke was such a fervent proponent of interagency, civilian-military agricultural development in Afghanistan that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the Manhattan-born diplomat “Farmer Holbrooke.” Now officials in Washington and Kabul are unsure about the direction of U.S. agricultural policy in Afghanistan.

“We’re pretty emotionally drained over here, says Quintin Gray, a USDA official who is serving as Senior Agricultural Advisor to the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, speaking of Holbrooke’s unexpected death. “His absence leaves an enormous void, because of his ability to pull people together and accomplish things. Irreplaceable is a word that comes up — no one is irreplaceable — but he is going to be a difficult person to replace.”

Holbrooke had the gravitas and moxie to make things happen. Out in volatile Khost Province along the Pakistani border, I sat in one agricultural meeting at Forward Operating Base Salerno with an array of development officials and diplomats in khaki tactical clothes and body armor, along with a substantial number of well brass-ed military officers. They’d gathered to hear the word from Holbrooke’s ag envoys. As a few errant insurgent rockets landed on the base, Holbrooke’s ag advisors repeated his message to the officials and officers: Make it happen. Use agriculture to help defeat the insurgency. And make it happen fast.

Holbrooke’s interest in hearts-and-minds work as a counterinsurgency tool goes back to Vietnam, where he served for six years as a USAID officer. Holbrooke was an architect of the Office of Civil Operations (OCO), which was responsible for integrating the U.S. civil support for pacification. The OCO was the precursor to CORDS, short for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. Though mainly focused on development and aid work, CORDS included the Phoenix Program, the U.S.-funded anti-Viet Cong campaign that became one of the war’s most criticized initiatives.

USAID made Vietnam a showcase of development, sending thousands of American civilian experts to work there. In 1967 alone, USAID spent $550 million in aid to Vietnam out its global budget of $2 billion. Though USAID has long persisted they at least got CORDS right, the outcome of the Vietnam War certainly wasn’t the result that Holbrooke and United States envisioned in those heady New Frontier days. In an oral history of the Vietnam War, Holbrooke said, “It never occurred to me in the year 1963 that the United States could lose a war. How could it?”

In his viceregal role as Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke trumpeted the need for a “whole of government” approach to problems, handpicking people from the State Department, USAID, USDA, Treasury, Homeland Security and the military to serve on his staff. “He got outstanding, great people,” Gray says. Holbrooke’s Monday Night Shuras (Dari for meetings) in Washington became the place to be for a broad spectrum of Afghanistan policy-makers, including his multi-agency staff and top people from the Pentagon and civilian departments. In the shuras, Holbrooke turned time and again to agriculture as the key to turning the tide against the Taliban. “Ambassador Holbrooke, for a man from New York, he was always talking about agriculture,” Quintin Gray chuckled with his soft North Carolina accent.

And Holbrooke plowed some hard ag-policy ground. He railed against the USAID-funded Alternative Livelihood counternarcotics projects, telling a Washington Post reporter, “In my experience of 40-plus years — I started out working for AID in Vietnam — this was the single most wasteful, most ineffective program that I had ever seen. It wasn’t just a waste of money… This was actually a benefit to the enemy. We were recruiting Taliban with our tax dollars.” With his assistance, the U.S. managed to get an Afghan-Pakistani Transit Trade Agreement to allow Afghan agricultural exports to make it to Indian markets in expedited time. A massive juice factory for exports is on-line in Kabul. Just recently, Afghan exporters shipped their first shipment of pomegranates in thirty years to the UAE market. Afghan apples are being airlifted to India; raisins to America. It’s a small start, but a historic moment for Afghan farmers, whose centuries-old export markets were destroyed by war. Sharing the positive views of many other diplomats and international development experts, Holbrooke helped Afghanistan’s Minister of Agriculture Asif Rahimi with his plans to modernize his hidebound department. USDA recently awarded a $38 million grant to the Ministry of Agriculture for training and improved administration.

“I say our current course is the proper course,” Quintin Gray says. “We have to get the agricultural part of this right.” Of course, with the Obama administration now deep in the assessment of our current Afghanistan strategy, many of our policies will be reappraised. Even as sure-minded a man as Richard Holbrooke was concerned. According to news reports, his last words to his Pakistani surgeon were, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”