Kunar Shakedown

Last week, a Scottish development worker with DAI, Inc. was kidnapped on her way back to Jalalabad from the city of Asadabad in Kunar province.*

*That’s “out east” to those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Afghanistan.

According to reports, her two-car convoy was stopped by armed men on the road south of Asadabad and herself and three Afghans traveling with her were marched into the mountains at gunpoint. The official Taliban spokesman has said, “It wasn’t us,” but that’s really beside the point. If, as seems likely, she was grabbed by a criminal kidnap gang, the Taliban (assuming they want the hostage) will simply buy her off them for a small cash payment.

The ANP immediately rounded up some village elders from the area and asked them to negotiate her release, but they were unsuccessful.*

*According to one of my guys who is related to one of the proposed negotiators, the elders basically said to the ANP, “You want us to go up in those mountains with a police escort and try to save a foreign female infidel. Are you shitting me?”

DAI, Inc. is an “implementation partner” for USAID, which basically means that AID provides the funding and the scope/requirements of the project, and outfits like DAI go out and actually get it done. Or more accurately, they find local companies who can go out and get it done, since a lot of these projects are in unsafe areas (obviously) where Westerners fear to tread. DAI personnel maintain a project management and oversight role, with occasional trips to the project site. Except in this case, it didn’t seem to work out so well.

The missing woman was traveling low-profile, in a couple of Toyota Corollas, with three of her local staff and no security detachment.* Now I’m on record as being a proponent of the low-profile approach, but no security is taking it a little far.

*As opposed to high-profile, which usually means B6 armored SUVs, a scout vehicle and a chase car/gun truck, at a minimum. Basically “guns up” from gate to gate. A big fat rolling target in my opinion.

Perhaps she was in a bind and couldn’t wait for security, or maybe she got some bad advice. There’s even the possibility of some collusion from within the local staff. Either way, she’s gone and no one’s quite sure when/if she’s coming back.

Right on the heels of that news comes word that DAI is under investigation from the Inspector General at USAID concerning roughly $5 million USD that was paid for security on their projects and may have found its way to the Taliban as part of a protection racket.

Let me save the IG some time and a lot of paperwork.

OF COURSE THE MONEY ENDED UP WITH THE BAD GUYS.*

*Although whether they are Taliban, Hezb-islami or just garden-variety scumbags is hard to say.

When you pay cash for security directly to local power brokers in unsafe districts, it almost always ends up in the pocket of somebody you’d rather not know. Think about it. The powerful figures in these districts (every district has at least one) have the influence to pull together fifty or sixty fighters with weapons, and yet the district is still unsafe. That’s because the guys you’re paying for security are the same people who cause the problems that require the security in the first place. Where I come from, it’s called a shakedown.

I wonder if somebody at DAI got wind of the USAID investigation and froze some payment to the local security force. If so, it’s possible that this kidnapping is nothing more than an attempt to collect on some outstanding debts.

In fact, I hope that’s the case, because then it can be solved and this woman returned simply by paying out some cash. If instead she’s being held by hard-core jihadists, then it gets a lot tougher to secure her release.

Al-Hindustani

Lt. Srinivasan (or al-Hindustani as the ANA call him) has another good post up at the NY Times At War blog about his time down south co-located with an ANA unit.

This bit reminded me of my first couple of days, now almost nineteen months ago:

This wasn’t about respect anymore. It was about trust. I could watch their eyes retelling my every move and word since I set foot on this post. They had been sizing me up this entire time.
I felt like a lamb surrounded by a herd of wolves, teasing me by keeping their fangs at bay.

Plus, I'm curious to know where an ANA lieutenent got his hands on a chrome-plated 9mm Desert Eagle pistol when I have to get by with a crappy Smith & Wesson.

Maximizing Self-Interest

The NY Times has a good series of reports running on their website currently, written by a US Army lieutenent who was stationed in Kandahar. Unlike most of the high-level analysis offered by traditional news sources, Lt. Srinavasan's stuff is local, personal and micro-scale news, about his day-to-day challenges in dealing with Afghans in his sector. (I believe that he's writing about stuff that happened on his recent deployment, rather than posting real-time events.)

His latest column is chock full of interesting tidbits about the intricacies of dealing with locals, and neatly captures the shift that comes over an officious Afghan army officer when he realizes that he's not going to be able to take advantage of the newbies.

Unfortuately, the lieutenent's conclusions are probably spot-on:

But Captain Kalay represented to me the greatest frustration and disappointment of all: no matter how many troops, how much time, or how much money we throw at Afghanistan, no democracy can take hold and nothing will change unless this country’s leaders want it for their own nation. Captain Kalay is a powerful man — he has no incentive to want anything more than the status quo.........I was right about one thing though; this is indeed a math problem, not only to me, but also to Captain Kalay and every Afghan leader in this country. It’s about the maximization of self-interest. No matter how much Captain Kalay likes me, or even identifies with me, it doesn’t change the fact that he will act only to maximize his personal gain.

The truth of that was recently brought home to me when I was alerted to the fact that a man I considered a close friend in Afghanistan, and one of the best Afghans I had met thus far, was not as clean and as honest as I thought he was. He wasn't stealing from me directly, but he had kept certain information to himself and taken credit and profited personally from something I had worked very hard on. To make matters worse, the story of his deception was provided to me by another Afghan I had also considered to be trustworthy, but the revelation is causing me to question the trust I place in him as well.* Now I'm left wondering what kind of payment he will expect in return for revealing this secret.

*And yes, I did confirm the story through independent sources.

First installment of Lt. Srinavasan's story here. Second and third, here and here.

Gender Politics

Kabul is still on lock-down due to the latest international conference going on at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so we're a bit professionally constrained right now. The usually laughable ANP checkpoints around the city* have been replaced/reinforced by much more serious ANA and NDS guys, under orders to use force if they feel it justified in any way. So, we're spending a lot of time indoors lately.

*Incidentally, I'd like to find out who the genius was at ISAF who decided that the standard ANP checkpoints should be fixed at permanent locations, and then came up with the new slogan. Every ANP checkpoint in Kabul now has a bright blue sign with a dual-language message announcing the "Ring of Steel" and denoting the number of that particular checkpoint. Seriously? That's what the ANP needs? A cheesy slogan? How about more ammunition and a requirement not to shake people down for bribes. The Brits are the "official" mentors to the MoI, but I bet the whole "Ring of Steel" thing is the product of an American mind. Only an American could come up with something so silly.

With the city full of ANA, who are in charge of security after the ANP dropped the ball badly during the last conference, the ANP mostly stand around their blue signs and look sheepish, while the ANA strut around and wave M-16s at anyone who looks at them funny. And the deadly-serious NDS operatives lurk around and scare the shit out of everybody. In short, it's a good time to stay home. The local staff at the villa has been given a couple of days off,* and we're operating on half-staff at company HQ.

*While I don't generally rave about the skills of the locals, the ones we have at the villa are actually quite good. You never miss them until they're gone. After two days of eating meals prepared by South Africans, I'm beginning to appreciate the talents of our local cook. Plus, you'd think grown men would be able to clean up after themselves for a couple of days, but apparently not. Two days without the local cleaners and this place looks like a fraternity house after a particularly taxing weekend (minus the beer cans, of course).

Anyway, being stuck inside with lots of downtime has allowed me to catch up on my reading (and the writing that inevitably follows), so I should have a series of posts up over the next week or so highlighting some recent items.

In the meantime, ponder this bit from the NY Times about the governor of Bamiyan Province. Habiba Sorabi is the only female governor in the entire country and said this to Britain's Channel 4:

Why are they not doing the sacrifice? Always we women should do the sacrifice? Always women during the war and during the conflict, for a long period in Afghanistan, women sacrificed. So this is enough I think.

Needless to say, Governor Sorabi was not invited to Kabul to meet with the foreign dignitaries. Methinks that perhaps SecState Clinton could at least have demanded that Sorabi be present at the conference. Even better, HRC could have made a trip out to Bamiyan by chopper to meet with her personally. That would have sent a powerful message to Karzai and his cronies that shit was going to change, or else.

Not Just a Southern Thing Anymore

Until sometime last year, the insurgency here was usually described as a "southern-based" or "Pashtun-based" problem, and that was, by and large, mostly true. But although the Pashtuns are concentrated in the south and east, and although most of the Taliban are Pastun, this fight is no longer limited to Helmand, Kandahar, and the mountainous provinces of the southeast.*

*With no disrespect intended to the ISAF troops who've been hammering and bleeding in the valleys of east central Afghanistan for years. Kunar, Nuristan, Kapisa and Laghman have been shitty for a long time; they just don't get the press that the southern deserts do.

Baghlan, Samangan, Takhar and other northern provinces have been heating up for several months now. The Germans have been having a hard time in Kunduz for at least a year.* Dramatic evidence of that can be found in yesterday's attack on a the compound of a USAID subcontractor in Kunduz.

*Incidentally, the Germans in Kunduz are receiving some reinforcements from the US Army's 10th Mountain Division this summer. We'll soon know if the problems in Kunduz are because of German's inept handling of the population, or a more intractable problem.

The subcontractor, an outfit called DAI, apparently got off fairly lightly, given that half a dozen suicide attackers got in the main gate in a matter of minutes. Apparently, many of the Western staff took refuge on the roof while the security guards and responding police fought it out with the Taliban. That many attackers inside the perimeter is a recipe for disaster and it could have been much worse. I suspect that when the details come out we'll find out that both the private security guards and the ANP performed admirably. Nevertheless, at least one German and one Filipino and possibly a Brit, along with at least one cop, were killed.

Coming on the heels of the attacks on Bagram, KAF and Fob Fenty (at Jalalabad Airfield), it seems that the bad guys have a new plan to hit a variety of targets across the country and aren't too troubled by the fact that they're not usually all that successful. USAID and other developement agencies are considerably softer targets than major ISAF bases, and it won't take much to drive them out of the provinces and back to the more secure compounds in Kabul. Without development assistance, nothing in the provinces gets better for the local residents and this whole enterprise becomes "the island of Kabul in a sea of insurgents."

Like I've said about the Taliban before, scumbags they may be, but they're clever scumbags.

Update: Tim Lynch over at Free Range International has some more information on recent happenings in formerly secure Jalalabad and the activity in the eastern provinces. As always, he has photos which I never seem to have the time to do.

Update #2: Feral Jundi has more details on the Kunduz attack. Apparently, the Brit, the German and the two Afghans who were killed were security guards employed by Edinburgh International. A dark day for a fine outfit, but EI can be proud of their people today. Without their quick reaction and tenacious defense, it could have been a lot worse.

The Lone Guerilla Paradox

Over at DefenseTech, Greg Grant has a brief piece on a particular difficulty of COIN operations called The Lone Guerilla Paradox. Basically, as Grant puts it:

In a village, a single insurgent fighter represents a “monopoly of force,” controlling that village even if challenged by an entire battalion of government troops doing continuous battalion sweeps.
The only time the lone guerrilla doesn’t control the village is the few hours when the counterinsurgents sweep through, once they leave, the guerrilla’s monopoly is re-established.

The comments section of the DT post are unsurprisingly alive with a bunch of back-and-forth about current ISAF practice, the pseudo-history of guerilla warfare (complete with bullshit examples) and some partisan hackery. Oh, and a bit of Obama-bashing just for flavor.

All of the discussion about whether or not the U.S. Army (or the Marines) can effectively wage counter-insurgency warfare, or whether they have in the past, misses the basic point. I guess that's to be expected, since Grant misses the salient issue as well.

Certainly, ISAF/Army/Marines has to be better at waging counter-insurgency campaigns. There's been much improvement in the last few years, and there will be more going forward. Also true is the fact that the ANSF needs to be be better at protecting their own people and more effective in the field. Again, they've improved but they still have a long way to go.

But, contrary to what Grant (and his commenters) seem to think, this was will not be won by ISAF, the U.S. Army or Marines. It will not even be won by the ANA and ANP. No conventional security forces will ever have the breadth and depth of coverage to truly eliminate The Lone Guerilla Paradox. They cannot be everywhere all the time.

To return to Grant's quote from above:

The only time the lone guerrilla doesn’t control the village is the few hours when the counterinsurgents sweep through, once they leave, the guerrilla’s monopoly is re-established.

Not necessarily true. This war will be won when we reach a point where, in the absence of a security sweep, that Lone Guerrilla tries to exercise his "monopoly of force" over villagers and they turn on him and beat him to a bloody pile of rags. Because they believe it is in their interests to do so. That is the ultimate goal of counter-insurgency. It's not hunting bad guys with SOF night raids, it's not joint battalion-sized sweep and clear missions, it's not even improved irrigation and some reconstruction funding. It's convincing the general population to pick the right side and act upon that choice. All of those other elements are necessary but insufficient conditions for victory.

The Afghan people are not simply victims in this conflict; they are also the prize and, ultimately, the solution to the Paradox.

Defenestrations

Big news out of the Presidential Palace a couple of days ago.

President Hamid Karzai forced two of his top three security officials to resign Sunday over their failure to prevent attacks on last week’s peace council in the capital, Afghan and American officials said, creating shock and concern among Western
officials about such serious changes in crucial ministries even as the American war effort here reaches a critical phase.

As a consequence of the attack last week on the "peace jirga" here in Kabul, both the Minister of Interior Hanif Atmar and the chief of the National Directorate of Security Amrullah Saleh have been forced from their posts. Official reports say that after several hours of discussion with President Karzai, during which they were unable to offer "satisfactory" explanations about the failure to stop the attack, both men submitted their resignations which were immediately accepted.*

*That's the official line, but it's more likely that the resignations were a result of both men's refusal to accept Karzai's proposal to release several thousand Taliban prisoners as a gesture of goodwill. MoI troops and the NDS spent the last couple of years rounding these guys up (and suffered a lot of casualties in the process), and now Karzai wants to let them go because he feels like he needs more friends. No wonder they up and quit.

The official line probably understates the acrimony of the "discussions." First, I doubt that there was a lot of actual back-and-forth discussion. Tensions have been running high in the upper ranks of the Karzai administration for some time, and I suspect that Karzai did a lot of shouting while Atmar and Saleh sat there stone-faced. Second, if either of them did get an opportunity to actually present their case, it's likely that questions were raised about the comprimising of the Afghan security apparatus by Karzai's friends and relatives.

Too early to estimate the full fallout from the resignations, but it's safe to say that it won't be good. At precisely the moment when ISAF needs a set credible partners in the ANSF to properly launch the summer offensive, two key ministries have lost their experienced chiefs. Despite some serious flaws with the ANP, Atmar was well respected by both the British and Americans and had a reasonably effective working relationship with his ISAF and U.S. Army counterparts.

By most accounts (including my own estimation), Saleh was one of few truly excellent leaders in the Karzai government. Due to the nature of his job (NDS is basically the secret police, essentially a combination of the CIA and FBI), Saleh kept a lower profile than most in the government, but his organization had become quite effective at rooting out cells of bad guys around the country. It's said that even if they couldn't do anything about it, NDS knew the details on the nefarious dealings of everyone, including those within the government itself.*

*Such knowledge was probably a contributing factor to Saleh's ouster. Even the much-feared NDS was prevented from operating effectively down in Kandahar by the interference of Ahmed Wali Karzai and other scumbags close to the President. Nevertheless, Saleh almost certainly knows where the bodies are buried (literally). If Karzai was smart, he would have kept Saleh in the government just to keep him quiet.

Saleh is an ethnic Tajik, and perhaps more importantly a Panjshiri Tajik and old comrade of Ahmed Shah, the most famous and most effective mujiheddin of the Soviet days. That made him unpopular in a government dominated by Pashtuns, but he was well liked by the various Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies. His relationship with the CIA goes back to the days of the Soviet occupation and it's said that he still maintains close ties with Langley.

Both men have been replaced by their deputies, people closer to the Karzai clan and presumably loyal to Karzai personally. General Munir Mangal, the former Deputy Interior Minister, has been promoted, and Ibrahim Spinzada is the new head of NDS. Both of these appointments are desribed as "temporary" but the Karzai administration is probably not going to expend a lot of effort looking for permanent solutions.

Spinzada is Karzai's brother-in-law and the Mangal clan has been loyal to Karzai for a long time. Looks like the President is using the attack on the jirga to consolidate his control over the security apparatus and remove a couple of more independently-minded rivals.

Not exactly what this country needs heading into the fighting season, and with the Taliban becoming more active every day.

Campaign Season, 2010

Now that it's June, the campaign season for 2010 is fully upon us. Not that the bad guys waited for June, they actually got started a little earlier with a series of high-profile attacks across the country just to remind everyone that they're still here.*

*Not that anyone had really forgotten.

First up was the 18 May VBIED attack on an ISAF convoy in southern Kabul, which killed two colonels (one Canadian) and two lieutenent colonels and their two drivers. A dozen locals were also killed in the blast. From the location of the attack, it looks like the convoy was on it's way to the COIN Academy at Camp Julien.*

*Here's a tip for the Force Protection guys at ISAF: your olive-green, armored SUVs festooned with antennas aren't fooling anybody, especially when you put three of them in close proximity in rush hour traffic. If you're going high-profile, then use an MRAP; if you want low-profile, try a beat-up Surf or a Land Cruiser. You can't do low-profile in a high-profile vehicle. Choose one or the other.

Next were a pair of complex, coordinated assaults on Bagram Airbase (19 May) and Kandahar Airfield (20 May). Althougth the perimeter was not breached in either attack, the scope and intensity of the action indicates a pretty serious planning effort from Taliban-central. In both cases, there was a combination of small-arms fire, indirect fire (i.e. rockets) and suicide bombers. By all accounts, ISAF security responded well and gave the bad guys a harsh slapdown. Nevertheless, the very fact that the attacks were launched at all bolstered the Taliban's claim to be able to attack whenever and wherever they choose. Tactically, it was a disaster, but in terms of Information Operations it worked out pretty well for the bad guys.

More recently, elements of the Pakistani Taliban pushed the ANP out of the remote Barg-e-Matal district of Nuristan province. Apparently, the ANP and ABP put up a stiff fight, but withdrew when they ran out of ammunition.* An ANA Commando battalion supported by U.S. Army Special Forces is now in the process of taking the valley back.**

*What does it say about the readiness of the ANSF when the ABP, in established border forts, run out of ammunition before the insurgents who just hiked over some of the toughest terrain in the world?
**If we were smart, we'd let the Pakistani Taliban keep the valley and get used to the world-famous hospitality of the Nuristanis. The Pakis would last about two weeks before they went screaming back across the border, dragging their dead and wounded. Nuristanis are sort of like the Afghan equivalent of West Virginian mountain clans- they prefer to be left alone and demonstrate that preference with an impressive talent for bloodshed. It's said that if the Nuristanis don't have any outsiders to fight, they simply occupy their time by fighting each other until someone shows up.

Finally, there's the so-called peace jirga going on currently in Kabul. Couple thousand tribal leaders, mullahs and parliamentarians from around the country (all personally selected by Karzai) are meeting in a big tent to discuss reconciliation and the prospects for peace. Of course, none of the bad guys were invited which sort of undercuts the theme of reconciliation a bit, if you ask me.

Despite the fact that they weren't invited, the Taliban made their presence known anyway by firing a few rockets at the jirga site and briefly taking over the top floors of the nearby Kabul Polytechnic University. A combination of Afghan security forces (there are over 12,000 in the city right now) and U.S. Army helicopter support managed to contain the situation, but once again the Talibs made their point by simply being able to launch the attack in the first place. Tactical or operational success is less important than spreading the strategic message.


The jirge continues until mid-afternoon tomorrow, so things are a bit tense in Kabul right now. Still going out tonight, but we'll keep it close to home and avoid the jittery ANP at the checkpoints.

Friendly Fire?

Update to this post about Louis Maxwell and my earlier posts on the UN guesthouse attack, it now appears that at least some of the UN workers killed at the time were victims of friendly fire.*

*A particularly stupid euphemism, as if any fire that kills you can be "friendly."

The NY Times is reporting that a UN report has found that perhaps four of the five staff members killed in the guesthouse were victims of the ANCOP rather than the Taliban attackers. As a witness to parts of that attack and the security forces' response to it, I can say that there was an awful lot of firepower directed against that building from the outside. Apparently not all of it was particularly well-targeted.

As I've said in the past when talking about the ANSF, I don't fault their bravery, just their judgement.