How Long, General Petraeus, How long?

In the Sunday, 4 March 2012 Washington Post, Army Special forces Major Fernando M. Lugar posed the following question: "How to get Afghans to trust us once again?"

I chose to take this question as rhetorical. After all, we've been at this war in Afghanistan for 10 years. Why should we still have to prove ourselves?

Answer that, Gerneral Petraeus. If we were winning to the degree to which you always claimed, how is it that a simple error in judgment by five soldiers can cause such a furor, not to mention the cold-blooded murder of four military personnel?

These people are what they are. They are not civilized by the standard to which we apply that adjective. They are most primitive. They follow a religion that requires a father to slit his daughter's throat for being seen on the streets with a man who is not a relative.

First, it was an author whose work was deemed to be insulting to the prophet. A fatwa required his death and, as a result, a number of otherwise innocents were murdered. Then it was a series of murders following the publication of cartoons deemed insulting to the prophet. Now it's the inadvertent burning of some copies of the Qur'an that has resulted in cries for the death penalty from the Afghan people.

And these are the people we have protected from the Taliban and al Qaeda. These are the people for whom we have built schools. These are the people on whose behalf we have put up with corruption on a scale that would make Chicago blush. These are the people on whose behalf so much American blood has been shed.

Shame on them! Unfortunately, in their culture, this is meaningless. They are completely without shame.

Truth, Lies and Afghanistan

For those of you who missed it, what follows is Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis' take on the situation in Afghanistan. He stated that because he had no faith in his military chain of command forwarding his report to appropriate policy makers, he took it upon himself to distribute his report to Congress and the press. Here is his report:

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress. instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level. My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base. I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government. From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency. From Bad to Abysmal.

Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress. And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.

In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.

Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain. “What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?” As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed. “No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!” According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.

In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away. As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles. The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer. On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight. To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred. In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?” One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”

On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:

Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”

Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them. “Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition. “Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe. “And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.” That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.

In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war. As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

Credibility Gap

I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground. A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”

The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan. “Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”

How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.

I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.

A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.

If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members. A nonclassified version is available at www.afghanreport.com. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]

Tell The Truth

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it. Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start.

Khost Rethought

In my blog titled, “Time to Bring Back the Dinosaurs” I suggested that had CIA received an infusion of good, old-fashioned tradecraft, the Khost massacre might have been avoided. In light of the article titled, “A family bereaved and divided,” (Washington Post 29 Jan. 2012) it would appear that assigning full blame to the base chief, Jennifer Matthews, was most unfair.

So, where to begin affixing blame? First, I’d suggest it was negligence on the part of the Agency to permit Jennifer to apply for the posting. What was behind this? The Agency is not noted for personal consideration when making assignments. So, was it impossible for the Agency to find any operations officers to accept this job? Was this why they put an analyst vice an operations officer into this dangerous place? Granted, she was a highly trained analyst. Maybe she’d worked with operations officers in conducting debriefings, but she was not an agent handler. She had not received special operations training which should have been the sine qua non for such a job.

Next, I’d fix blame on the case officer in liaison with the Jordanian service. An Agency officer cannot accept a foreign intelligence service’s word for the trustworthiness of an agent they’d recruited. It was incumbent on the Agency officer in liaison with the service to conduct his own validation procedure. This, he clearly had not done. Why not? Had he just been remiss? Had Headquarters been so enthused at running jointly with the Jordanians an agent who claimed to have direct access to bin Laden that they told this officer, “Just get on with the program?” We’ll never know the answer to this question.

It was poor tradecraft for Headquarters to order the debriefing to take place at Forward Operating Base Chapman. Jennifer should have been ordered to travel to a more secure location maybe in the Kabul area where better security could have been exercised. When is it permitted to bring an unvetted agent into your base, to meet face-to-face with other CIA officers? Never!

Jennifer deserves praise for having agreed to undertake such a dangerous assignment. She left home and hearth to do her part to protect our Homeland by operating against al Qaeda. Her husband, her children, her family can be proud of this CIA analyst who was prepared to give up so much, to take such a risk, all in the hopes of making this world a safer place. In the end, she gave her all.

On understanding the Afghan military partnership

This was contributed by a former colleague. He knows more about the intelligence business than the whole blooming Agency combined.

Now a French trained Afghan has killed four French trainers.

To some of my acquaintances who believe that Islamists are for the most part peaceful and so on, I make the following comment. I lived in three Arab countries, and traveled in a number of others, and dealt with locals on a regular basis, but never came to the point where I felt I could really trust one of them completely. So, I posit the following to these people.

Let us assume that you live next door to a devout Afghan Muslim family. For some years you and your family have had good relations and you are in social situations essentially comfortable together. One day a Mullah comes to the male in the Arab family and says something like this.

"Your American neighbor has a close relative fighting in Afghanistan who with his military unit was responsible for blowing up a Mosque in your village outside of Khandahar. Some of your relatives were killed. It has been decreed that in retaliation you must kill your next door neighbor--even if you should later be killed by the infidels you will be a martyr."

Now here is the problem. Which will win out, your friendship with the Arab in which case he will not act against you, or he will, because of his total devotion to Islam, follow the instructions of the cleric and comply with the instructions passed to him. (I for one would not want to deal with this option.) Of course, one can introduce factors that would tend to obviate this dilemma in some way. But in its essence it is still out there.

I have never given up my strong sense of cynicism about Arabs and how, when, and where they place their loyalty. As you know, Brits said you can't buy an Arab but only rent him. Certainly in our Stations it was an attitude that was easy to adopt and act on.

We had a friend in Baghdad, an elderly but wealthy Arab who had the Carrier Air Conditioner distributorship for several Arab countries. He felt he was too old to continue to manage it and so gave the business to his son to manage. The son did so for a brief while and then disposed of it, making a lot of money. He promptly went to Beirut to live in a big penthouse, and became a playboy. Don't know the end of this since we were evacuated at the time of the 6 Day War, but such intra-family betrayals are not, I believe, unusual.

I never felt they trusted each other, and now, with factions arising in the mobs of the Arab Spring, it is easy to see that unity and loyalty does not rate high among them. Well, I guess we, you, I and others of us have fought our battles, will become victims, of the wisdom of our contemporary leaders who see good in all those things, people, and places we question.

And thus ends my colleague's offering. Are all Muslims this devious? No, not the modern ones. But a Muslim who believes in guiding his life according to Sharia,....

Is Our Government out of Control?

Is our government out of control? This is an interesting question. Rarely is such a question posed in the case of a democratic government. Kleptocracies, thugocracies and other forms of tyrannical governments, yes, it's a valid question. But let's look at ours, for a moment.

Most recently a couple that wanted to build a home on land they'd purchased were told by the government that it was believed that their land constituted a wetland. This after they'd received all state and local permits necessary. Yes, all 0.6 acres constituted this marshland (the Feds believed) and it had to be preserved. So, please restore everything as it was before you unloaded tons of earth and built footings and basement walls. Yes, this is our EPA and U.S. Army engineers at work. They aren't worth a spit in protecting a city the size of New Orleans from the ravages of flooding, but they're sure going to keep this spot of land pristine.

This is tied in with the goal of our government to foster anything and everything that is "green." So, let's start with Solyndra. That U.S. company was on the ropes of failure before it came to the notice of the White House. President Obama committed tons of cash to help it flourish. We all know how well that worked out, don't we? There is no way for the U.S. to manufacture solar panels and undersell those imported from China. Why do we permit this? Why don't we protect our own manufacturers? Go ask our Ideologue-In-Chief. All the workers at the Solyndra plant are now in the ranks of the unemployed.

The latest brilliant move was when the government required oil companies to blend 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol into their gasoline or face fines. Great idea except for one little problem. No one's making cellulosic ethanol because it's terribly expensive. Putting this product into gasoline should have a startling effect on the price per gallon.
What's the problem here? It is the natural result of a government run by an ideologue. He's not trying to save us from importing oil, he's worried about the effects of exhaust gasses upon the climate. If he's so worried about reducing oil imports, why not open up more of our proven reserves to drilling?

President Obama entered into the presidency prepared to put into effect his far-left philosophy of government featuring everything from a "greening" of the Earth to a taxation plan that would take from those who worked for their income and give to those who never worked a day in their lives. His ideologically-derived goals will - repeat - will be met, come hell or high water. The public welfare be damned.

Time to Bring Back the Dinosaurs

Bob Baer, of “Sleeping with the Devil” fame, beat me to it when he decried the apparent demise of incorporating tradecraft concepts into CIA operations today. Maybe it’s high time for CIA to consider bringing some dinosaurs back from the cold.
Let’s go back to the rendition of an al Qaeda agent living in Italy. CIA sent off its best rendition officers to “conduct” the target to CIA-controlled lodgings. The whole business set up a hullabaloo in Italian government circles. It appeared that the rendition specialists had lived like kings while awaiting the initiation of the operation. They bought everything using their personal (true-name) credit cards. It didn’t take too long for the Italian security services to identify every CIA rendition officer. A quick check of the telephone records of this witless bunch and the Italian services identified the CIA base chief, the officer nominally supervising the rendition. The violation of tradecraft principles in this operation was appalling.
We aren’t done yet. Hizballah is now claiming to have identified a number of CIA officers as well as their agents. If you’ve identified a CIA officer, it doesn’t take too long to uncover his agents. This is especially true when the officer fails to practice his tradecraft. It would appear CIA isn’t the only service to have fallen by the wayside, The Syrians, Iranians and Hizballah would appear to have identified a number of Mossad undercover officers and their agents.
Welcome to the age of high-tech. We may champion this age in our daily lives but intelligence officers should eschew this development if, for no other reason than it would appear to have supplanted the practice of tradecraft. Worst of all, one wonders if tradecraft principles are even taught to new officers. Ah, the new wonders of the world of high tech spycraft. We have unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that permit an operator thousands of miles away to send a missile into a speeding pickup truck. We have any number of different sensors that can distinguish between the foot tread of a human and a waterbuck and send the message tens of thousands of miles away, bouncing signals off satellites. We have ultraviolet and infrared gadgets. Our devices can look through solid brick walls and determine how many individuals are in a given room. We can do all these things, but we can’t keep secret the identities of our officers or our agents.
It’s time to bring back the dinosaurs. I am such a dinosaur. In my days as an active CIA officer, we had precious few such high tech devices. We were pleased to get a simple recording device that fit into a shirt pocket. What an advancement it was when we moved from spring-loaded robot cameras to motor drives. And who in CIA today would know how to prepare and conceal a microdot? Yes, high tech has, in many ways made our operational lives simpler, but they have not—repeat—not made our operational lives more secure. All right, give your agent a cell phone instead of more involved ways of communicating with him. Look out! He will be tracked hither and yon by the counterintelligence offices of the local service thanks to the locating devices built into cell phones today. And when he’s caught red-handed, the record of all calls made from that cellphone will be available. Will his case officer’s name and number appear? You bet it will!
So I end my plea; can we please go back to the dinosaur days when we worried about who might be following us? The dinosaur days when we worried about our agent communications falling into the wrong hands? The dinosaur days when we took nothing for granted and every agent was bad until proven good? Just that alone would have prevented the Khost massacre.

U.S. Troops to Uganda

The President of the United States is sending about 100 U.S. troops to Uganda to wipe out Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). But that’s all right, the White House tells us, since these troops will fight in self-defense only. I’m sure Kony will be content to sit deep in the bush and just watch the Ugandans learning those tactics that, when executed will result in the destruction of his movement.

Who is this Joseph Kony? This terrorist leader has been fighting off Ugandan forces for the better part of the last quarter century. Originally, his insurgent group aimed at overthrowing a demonstrably corrupt government. But then increasingly, religious overtones began to enter the picture to the point where Kony presented himself as receiving orders directly from the Christian God. Intermingled were elements of tribal (Acholi) animist elements. In their long history, the group conducted horrible massacres of entire villages in the interior of Uganda and southern Sudan. Kony’s principal notoriety resulted from his kidnapping children and turning them into a children’s army. Kony and his LRA are a particularly despicable insurgent group and they certainly deserve neutralization if not annihilation.

The question remains, is this mission proper? Where is the U.S. national interest in this project? President Obama made a lot of political noise when he condemned President G.W. Bush for having put us into the Iraq adventure. In the latter case, one could make the argument that Saddam’s policies threatened the entire Middle East and that region is within our national interest to protect. One might raise this point in the case of Libya. But where is the U.S. national interest in putting down a terrorist group threatening the Ugandan government? Yes, Uganda does have minerals that would be ‘nice to have’ in our basket of commodities. These minerals may be worth our treasure, but definitely not worth the blood of our military.