Journalist • Author • Independent Scholar
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.”
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.
PRESIDENT OBAMA BOLDLY HAILED AFGHANISTAN as “the necessary war” in 2009.[i] Based on his recent comments, or lack of them, it now appears Afghanistan is the shunned war—an elision followed by Republican challenger Mitt Romney and other U.S. political leaders.
At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, President Obama’s acceptance speech was notable for his fleeting reference to the still-raging war in Afghanistan: “We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over.”[ii] One can only imagine the late-night speechwriting sessions that eventually yielded that tortured, far from candid sentence. With 77,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of American contractors still in harm’s way in Afghanistan, President Obama chose to cite the example of a young amputee sailor bravely recovering from an Iraqi grenade attack as his military “hope.”
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?
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.”
AN OLD AFGHANISTAN HAND TOLD me about a buzzword now popular among US policy wonks in Kabul and Washington: “reify.” Ruefully laughing, he said “reify” refers to a concept being confused with reality. In the eleventh year of a failing war in Afghanistan, it’s about as good a word as any to use to describe the US situation.
Even as anti-American violence continues to wrack Afghanistan following the latest Koran-burning incident, and Taliban attacks are spiking to their highest levels in the war, Pentagon Press Secretary George Little was insisting the insurgency is “on its heels.” Mr. Little stated the ISAF leaders had “strong sense” that “we must continue to do everything we can to carry out the strategy [which] we believe has been working for some time.”
PUBLIC STATEMENTS MADE FROM PODIUMS in Washington have little correlation with the on-the-ground reality in Afghanistan. Veteran officer Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis learned that last year when he traveled over 9,000 miles across Afghanistan, spending most of his time in the insurgency-enflamed provinces in the east and south. He was shaken to discover the US military leadership’s glowing descriptions of progress against the Taliban insurgency did not jibe with the stories told to him by American soldiers on the front lines of the failing war. Nor did the optimistic assessments correlate with the negative reports he found in open-source and classified documents. In his phrase, there was a “truth deficit.”
AS AMERICAN TAXPAYERS REEL from the twin blows of Tax Day and the coordinated insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, do they know their taxes are helping to bankroll the Taliban? When I was embedded with American troops in insurgency-wracked eastern Afghanistan, soldiers began telling me that the U.S. government wastes tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year on scandalously mismanaged aid and logistics contracts connected to the war. The soldiers told me there was a toxic system that links distracted American officials, private U.S. corporations, powerful Afghan insiders—and the Taliban. One way or another, everyone was in on the take.
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.
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.