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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.