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.”

 

Re-posted from The Huffington Post

Reuters’ recent report that Afghan security forces are systematically freeing captured high-level Taliban leaders in exchange for financial and political payoffs was familiar to me — it’s a story I started hearing over a year ago when I was reporting from Afghanistan.

Emma Graham-Harrison’s article discusses a “catch-and-release” system that is so well organized that the Taliban have a standing “Freedom” committee to handle the bribery negotiations with government officials. The officials authorizing and facilitating the releases include President Hamid Karzai and his half-brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, a Kandahar powerbroker with reported ties to the drug trade, the CIA and the Taliban. To the frustration of the U.S.-led ISAF military coalition, many of the released insurgent leaders quickly resume fighting.

It was a story I began hearing in 2009 when I was embedded with U.S. troops in insurgency-wracked eastern Afghanistan. “Catch-and-release” was a phrase that could get a table of soldiers at the DFAC dining hall in a snarl. One soldier sardonically grumbled to me that captured Taliban were back fighting his unit almost before he and his buddies could return to base. Since then I’ve been absorbing the literature and interviewing civilian and military intelligence, detention and rule-of-law experts in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Afghanistan, trying to understand this capture-and-release business and how it fits into my larger investigation into the culture of corruption that is gripping Afghanistan and the U.S. war effort.

While many of my sources, particularly those still working in Afghanistan, need to remain anonymous for reasons of safety and cannot be quoted here, their information and insights have allowed me to peer behind the curtain of this pernicious trade.

The catch-and-release system has long been known to ISAF, the international coalition battling the Afghan insurgency. In 2007, Canada’s Minister of National Defence Gordon O’Connor told a national Canadian television audience that the Afghan prisons “had quite a revolving door system.”

A cable I found among the recent Wikleaks releases reveals Washington’s concerns about the revolving door. In August 2009, U.S. Deputy Ambassador to Afghanistan, Francis J. Ricciardone, cabledWashington, “On numerous occasions we have emphasized with Attorney General [Muhammad Ishaq] Aloko the need to end interventions by him and President Karzai, who both authorize the release of detainees pre-trial and allow dangerous individuals to go free without ever facing an Afghan court.”

The cable noted a dramatic increase in pre-trial releases after April 2007, when President Karzai established the Aloko Detainee Commission. Prior to the Commission’s establishment, there was one pre-trial release in 2007. By 2008, the number released from the Afghan National Detention Facility ballooned to 104, and by August 2009 there’d already been 45 releases.

Many of the insurgents released from Afghan custody were high-value detainees held by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s intelligence service. A University of Ottawa law professor and detainee rights activist, Amir Attaran, told me that selling high-level detainee releases is a good business for the NDS. “The big bad Taliban buy their way out. The NDS guys are stunningly corrupt. They simply let the high-value Taliban walk–then torture the low-level Taliban to extort money from the families.”

The Reuters article indicated Ahmad Wali Karzai (or AWK as ISAF notates him) spent tens of thousands of dollars to secure the release of Anwar Shah Agha, an important Taliban commander who directed attacks west of Kandahar to Herat. After Agha’s capture in Kandahar in May 2009, AWK got to work, getting Anwar Shah Agha transferred to Kabul, where he was released less than a year later in March 2010. The article stated that Anwar Shah Agha “has since returned to the battlefield.”

Reports by The New York Times, ABC News, The Washington Times and The Times of London on Ahmad Wali Karzai paint a picture of a corrupt kingpin in the opium-soaked Kandahar heartland of the Taliban. The recent WikiLeaks disclosures show AWK’s extensive connections to the CIA, long involved in the drug trade in the Golden Triangle, Latin America and Afghanistan, as historian Alfred W. McCoy has documented in his magisterial The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Trade.

To combat the catch-and-release system with improved Afghan detention operations, the U.S. established Joint Task Force 435 in September 2009, which became the Combined Joint Interagency Task Force (CJIATF) 435 a year later. According to a CJIATF 435 document, the task force is attempting to help the Karzai government build “self-sustaining Afghan National Detention and Rule of Law institutions that are compliant with Afghan and international law.”

Brigadier General Mark S. Marks is the CJIATF 435 Deputy Commanding General. “He has a whole plan for this rule of law,” Daphne Eviatar, Senior Associate of Law and Security Program at Human Rights First in New York, told me. “The idea is good, to promote trainers, mentors, so the U.S. can hand over some of the detention to the Afghans — though the U.S. still wants to continue to hold some of the detention.” Many of the Afghan detainees the U.S. wants to hold are on NATO’s infamous “kill or capture” JPEL list that targets over 2,000 top insurgents. Though the U.S. is trying to transform the Afghan judiciary, international observers doubt CJIATF 435’s ability to reform the deeply rooted Taliban-NDS release racket.

As U.S. and ISAF officials grapple with the pre-trial release issues, they face a complicated problem. Allowing corrupt Afghan government officials to continue the catch-and-release trade can strengthen the insurgency. But disempowering the Afghan government can prove equally disastrous. “The ultimate challenge for counterinsurgency is stuck between building the right system for the long-term — basic security forces or the judiciary — at the same time dealing with a situation where rapid demonstrable results are the rule of the day. You’re trying to do contradictory things here,” Nathan Hughes, Director of Military Analysis at STRATFOR, a global intelligence company, explained to me. He concluded, “You’re stuck with the partner you have.”

And a flawed, duplicitous partner, the current Afghan administration is indeed. The recently revealed “catch-and-release” business is just another example of the culture of corruption that has enveloped the war effort, endangering U.S. and NATO troops — and verily the entire outcome of the war. General David Petraeus has repeatedly termed the legitimacy of the host nation government as the “north star” of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. If that’s the case, we are being led far off course by a false reading.

Re-posted from Muslim Voices

As part of my reporting in Khost Province, Afghanistan, I hoped to interview an Afghan woman. I recognized early on this seemingly simple task was going to be challenging.

Khost Province is in an extremely conservative Pashtun tribal region, where Islamic women are most often isolated from unrelated males in a practice called purdah. When in public, Khosti women typically wear burqas, the enveloping shroud that shields them from gaze.

A number of years ago, I had become acquainted with Pashtun women in burqasin the adjacent tribal regions of Pakistan. Northwestern Pakistan and eastern and southeastern Afghanistan are the heartland of the burqa, particularly the chadri, the loose-fitting garment that covers the entire body, including the eyes, which are veiled with a fabric grill. Westerners often call the chadri a “shuttlecockburqa,” descriptive of the profile a burqa-ed woman presents.

While the sight of Pashtun women in burqas was unfamiliar and unsettling to me, I recognized the burqa also represented a fundamentalist Islamic communication that the woman was an inviolate spiritual creature.

‘Whose Fiat In Matters Of Fashion Was Law’

While the Koran and the hadith, the collected commentaries on Muhammed’s life, require Muslims to dress modestly in public, there is, however, no mention of theburqa in these sacred texts. The requirement for modest dress by women, calledhijab from the Arabic word for “curtain” or “cover,” is interpreted in diverse ways across the Muslim world, from chadris to no head covering at all.

For centuries, Afghan women in particularly strict households have used theburqa, though it was not in widespread use until the reign of King Habibullah, who ruled from 1901 to 1919. He decreed his two hundred comely wives should wear the burqa when outside the palace to prevent them from enticing other men.

Quickly becoming the au courant fashion, the use of the burqa spread among the ruling Pashtuns.

In the Westernizing years of the 1950s and ’60s, burqa-wearing dropped off among the upper classes in the modernizing cities, in the process creating aburqa fad in the working classes as they inherited their employers now passé outer garments. (Though there was a revival during the Soviet era of the 1980s, when some women sought refuge from the increasingly secular culture, even in the progressive capital of Kabul.) But it was the Taliban who made the burqa a symbol of female oppression, requiring that all mature Afghan women wear the garment when in public when they took Kabul in 1996.

When the Taliban fell from power in 2002, the wearing of burqas ceased to be mandated. However, it is still seen in the more liberal cities, such as Kabul and Herat. In the conservative hinterlands of eastern and southern Afghanistan, theburqa is the norm.

So given the conservative culture, I knew it would be somewhat of a cultural challenge to arrange an interview with an Afghan woman in eastern Afghanistan.

To Interview An Afghan Woman

The wild insurgency in Khost, Afghanistan’s most violent province, added another level of complexity. The insurgency necessitated stringent security. Afghan families cooperating with American forces also faced danger from the Taliban.

But I still thought I could interview at least one Afghan woman. After all, there were Afghan government officials who were women; Afghan NGO workers who were university educated. Perhaps I could arrange an interview through an American woman, and pose my questions from behind a screen. I am nothing if not flexible and resourceful. I had faith I could interview an Afghan woman.

About a month before I departed for my embed with the Indiana National Guard 1-19th Agribusiness Development Team (ADT) in Khost Province, I began making inquiries about an interview. I asked the ADT if they could arrange something. They said they’d try.

I approached CARE, a highly regarded NGO with active aid projects in Khost, to see if I might arrange an interview with one of their female workers. I researched the nascent Afghan woman’s organization, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), but quickly learned it was a secret organization due to Taliban threats.

No Meeting, No Quarter

When I arrived in Khost, I began to realize the challenge I faced. A tentative meeting with the Khost Province Director of Women’s Affairs was abruptly taken off the books. The Taliban blew up her car and said they were going to kill her. She left on a military plane for Kabul, with no plans for returning.

While there was indeed a CARE female worker in Khost City who was willing to talk to me, we needed to coordinate a neutral place to meet. Due to the dire security problems the humanitarian NGOs face, they very wary of being seen as allied in any way with the U.S. military. Given that, the CARE worker could not come to Forward Operating Base Salerno, the military base where I was embedded with the ADT. Nor could I arrive at her CARE location in any kind of military vehicle, or with any kind of military security.

Cognizant both of the extreme security risk and his responsibility for me, the ADT commander, Colonel Brian Copes, explained he could not let me travel unaccompanied into Khost City. Nor did I think it a particularly prudent thing to do. Kidnapping journalists has become almost a cottage industry in Afghanistan.

One day the CARE worker and I thought we had a plan: The ADT was going to the local Shaikh Zayed University. We could meet in a room near the ADT’s meeting with the administrators. There’d be sufficient security nearby, and her neutrality would be respected. So close. But instead the Taliban sent a “night letter” to the university administrators, and the meeting at the college was canceled. Maybe next time.

‘Let Me Look For Dogs And Women’

As the weeks rolled by with no woman interview in sight, I began to get increasingly nervous. I could see Khost Province was far more conservative than even the Pakistani tribal regions I’d seen. Indeed, I seldom even ,em>saw Afghan women, let alone spoke to them. For the most part, they were hidden in their homes.

One day I was in a remote mountain village with the ADT, on a visit to plan an irrigation project. Excited by the possibility of some help, a village elder led us through the hamlet to show us some existing watercourses. A pack of small boys followed us. The village men watched from under the shade of a pepper tree. Curs growled from the shadows. Our village guide suddenly darted ahead, dodging through a gate. “Wait here,” he called over his shoulder. “Let me look for dogs and women.”

Expats Found, And Lost

At one point, I thought I had it worked out. There were three Afghan female interpreters on Forward Operating Base Salerno. All three were long-time refugees from the chaos of war-torn Afghanistan. After decades in Pakistan, Europe and the United States, they’d each returned to serve as translators for the military, drawn by the high pay.

They were essentially Westernized women, who had grown up in Afghanistan. But I had lowered my expectations considerably. If interviewing an expatriate Afghan housewife who’d spent the last twenty years in Boston or Fresno was all I could get, that was good enough for me.

I approached the friendly women, who ate their meals together in the mess hall. They agreed to meet me after work for a group interview. I was giddy. But when I arrived for the interview, the three sat glumly on the steps to the building. As they left the offices of the private company that supplied the civilian translators, a manager asked where they were going. “To an interview with a reporter,” they told him. The manager told them they absolutely couldn’t do an interview with the media. I told them I understood, and would see if the ADT might be able to intervene. But I thought there was little hope. Drat, foiled again.

A Chorus Of ‘No’

I became reduced to asking virtually every person I met if they knew an Afghan woman I could interview. It became sort of a hobby.

A doctor told me some Afghan men interpreters brought their educated wives into the base hospital for treatment. Maybe I could arrange some sort of screened interview where I couldn’t see the woman, chaperoned by the translator husband and a female American soldier. An inquiry to the men brought stunned silence, and then a no-nonsense “No.” No.

I got so many negative responses, I began recording them. “Oh, man-that’s not going to happen,” was a pretty typical (polite) response. The less polite responses questioned my intelligence.

One veteran army captain who’d worked in Khost for a year on a development team told me he’d never spoken to a woman. Captain Bob Cline of the ADT told me the tale of his translator going into a paroxysm of fear as they approached a vet clinic. An Afghan husband was approaching with his two burqa-ed wives. The translator was terrified that the captain might see the women. They had to immediately back up and negotiate safe passage to avoid a potentially disastrous sighting.

Sharing Joy And Triumph

My relentless nudging finally paid off. When I agreed to keep the name of the female interpreters secret and not ask any questions relating to their work, the translator company finally relented, albeit with the prompting of the ADT’s Major Shawn Gardner and Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Sari. But two of the three interpreters still refused to be interviewed, fearful of losing their jobs.

With the intervention of ADT Deputy Commander Colonel Cindra Chastain, one kindly 51-year-old interpreter took pity on me, and agreed to sit for an interview. Lieutenant Melissa Gutzweiler sat as a chaperone.

The Afghan woman was tense when she sat down, her mouth a thin line of worry, her eyes flicking from side to side. I emphasized that her identity would be protected, and I’d ask no questions of her work. Soon she was cheerily telling me about her privileged girlhood in pre-war Kabul; about her father, an international businessman with contacts in London and other European capitals. Then her life as a refugee in Pakistan and eventually the United States; being part of the growing Afghan community in America. Her smile was warm and open as she talked about her large extended family; the message of peace and brotherhood her religion promulgates.

As we sat there taking in her shared joy and triumph over adversity, my long, seemingly futile quest to speak with an Afghan woman suddenly seemed all the more worthwhile.

 

Yesterday a suicide bomber in an Afghan National Army uniform detonated himself at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province, Afghanistan, killing eight American civilians and wounding many more. Reports indicated the explosion was at the dining hall or gym. The blast was so large it could be heard miles away—including nearby Forward Operating Base Salerno, where I was recently embedded as a correspondent with the Indiana National Guard Agribusiness Development Team.

When going out on missions into insurgency-wracked Khost Province, we often went to Camp Chapman to rendezvous with the PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team), a civilian-military unit also doing development work in the province. Chapman is a highly secure base. It was an open secret that the CIA and other shadowy government entities operated out of Chapman, including helicopter forays into the nearby Taliban-controlled tribal areas of Pakistan. According to some sources, Predator and Reaper drones also used Chapman’s Soviet-built, 9000-foot runway for attacks on Pakistan hideouts of the Haqqani network, one of the main insurgent groups in Khost.

As I didn’t have a security classification that allowed me on the base, the armored MRAP vehicle carrying me always had to stop at the gate—a source of some chagrin among the ADT soldiers eager to eat at Chapman’s legendary dining hall, run by celebrated “fat Navy cooks.” While I couldn’t get in, a bomber carrying a large amount of explosives clearly did.

The bombing raises a number of disturbing questions: How did the bomber penetrate the base’s security? There are elaborate biometric BAT-HIIDE identification systems to prevent unauthorized Afghans from entering the base. Was he an ANA soldier with a Taliban allegiance? Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid indicated he was an ANA soldier named Samiullah, though the U.S. military says there were no ANA soldiers on the base. Or was he one of the many thousands of Afghan “local national” workers who do the scut work on American bases across Afghanistan, including Chapman where there were reportedly two hundred Afghan workers. Or did accomplices somehow smuggle a dedicated jihadi from the adjacent tribal areas onto the base? And the ultimate question: If an insurgent can set off a bomb in the midst of one of our most secret bases, how safe are other, less-secure bases?

The latest American strategy includes dictums to always “put an Afghan face” on our efforts, whch necessitates increased partnering with Afghan security forces and government ministries. It’s a strategy fraught with complications—another of the “least worst” options that now characterize our policies. How do we determine who is friend or foe? What is the human capacity of Afghan organizations to handle the torrent of development money the Coalition plans to send their way? What will happen to the funds in a culture of endemic corruption? And in the context of the Camp Chapman bombing, how will this strategy work when the Pashtun insurgency has deep tendrils into every aspect of eastern Afghanistan, including the army, government and tribal society?

 

The Afghan insurgents’ improvised explosive devices are responsible for 80% of the casualties in this war. The bombs—buried in roads and trails, plastered into house walls, secreted in fields and orchards—cause horrific injuries. A relatively small IED can hurl dismembered bodies twenty-five feet in the air. The U.S.-led Coalition’s heavily armored MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles patrolling the IED-spiked roads don’t even offer total protection. Though they often protect the passengers from the shrapnel, the explosions are causing an epidemic of Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) from the pressure waves and heads hitting walls and ceilings. Since 2007, the military has diagnosed 70,000 soldiers with Traumatic Brain Injury, 20,000 this year. Insurgents are now building IEDs large enough to rupture even the 37,000-pound, bank-vault-like MRAPs. IEDs are the greatest threat to the Indiana National Guard Agribusiness Development Team (ADT) in eastern Afghanistan’s volatile Khost Province.

Ironically, the main ingredient of this most feared and effective weapon is a basic agricultural product: ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Mixed with a fuel such as gasoline or diesel and armed with a power source and trigger, ammonium nitrate fertilizer has the 75% of the explosive power of TNT. And it is ubiquitous in Afghanistan.

While it has been outlawed since 2005, ammonium nitrate fertilizer is still commonly imported from neighboring Pakistan, both for farming and bombs. Earlier this month, Afghan authorities raided a warehouse in Kandahar, where they seized a half-million pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, 5,000 100-pound bags, along with 2,000 bomb devices, including timers and triggers. Fifteen Afghans were captured.

After the raid, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a press conference the obvious: the ammonium nitrate ban wasn’t being enforced. He said, “If we have to pay for some of it, I’m open to that.” A U. S. State Department official at Bagram Airfield, the largest Coalition base in Afghanistan, says there is now a directive to pay $28 for each bag of fertilizer turned in or seized. “We’re finding it everywhere,” he says.

The average size of an IED is about sixty pounds, most often packed into a plastic bowl or bucket to prevent metal detectors from finding it. Small anti-personnel mines, called toe-poppers, are sometimes packed in discarded ½-liter water bottles. According to Secretary Gates, aging Soviet-era mines serve as the initiators, though blasting caps work equally well. (In the hullabaloo following the Kandahar seizure, Gates announced a major new counter-IED initiative, as he decided the multi-billion-dollar, hydra-headed interagency JIEDDO—Joint IED Defeat Organization—wasn’t doing the job, an assessment underscored by a Government Accountability Office report two weeks earlier that criticized JIEDDO for a lack of organization and reliable data.)

Pressure plates were initially the most common IED triggers, sometimes hidden in military litter, such as plastic MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) bags or even candy wrappers. In Khost Province, where the Indiana ADT is working, trip wires are the most common triggers.

On a recent Quality Control/Quality Assurance mission to Tani District, an IED blew up a few hundred meters from where the ADT were paying Afghan villagers for their dam-building work. One ADT soldier says, “We were paying them, and Boom! We could see the smoke.” Most likely a band of Taliban operating out of a village about a kilometer away had earlier buried the IED. After the ADT convoy rolled further up the mountain, the insurgents had armed the bomb for the returning MRAPs to trigger. But instead a speeding Afghan villager on a motorcycle tripped the IED. He luckily escaped with minor injuries.