Afstan: Up, down--and across?

1) Brits in Helmand (sounds like what we are trying to do, as well as American forces):

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Whatever grinding progress is now being made in Helmand – and there are real grounds for being optimistic – it is hard to argue that its people have been made better off as a result of the war that erupted when British troops first arrived in the province in the summer of 2006.

With thinking derived from the counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya in the 1950s, a careful and modest British plan was in place in 2006 to secure a development zone in the centre of the province to create an “ink-spot” of security within which development – rebuilding schools, roads, hospitals, etc – could take place and from which government influence could spread.

Unfortunately this was not how it happened. Soldiers told me how they were instead sent to remote “platoon houses” across the province. Initially they had only the fighting strength of nine platoons, which was completely inadequate for the fierce onslaught they faced from the Taliban. The ill-equipped British force ended up scattered and pinned down in fixed town-centre locations, living in sometimes unbearable conditions and fighting fiercely.

To beat off Taliban attacks, British soldiers defended themselves by calling in airstrikes and using artillery and mortars to smash urban areas. A T-shirt on sale at Kandahar airport, and worn by some soldiers I met in Helmand, announced membership of the “Taliban Hunting Club”. In Helmand there has been plenty of killing. You can measure the escalation of violence by the bullets and bombs. Successive deployments expended ammunition in ever greater quantities.

The grim truth, soldiers in Helmand tell you, is that much of the bloodshed has been to no effect. Although a central zone of stability in the province has been gradually expanded, whole parts of the countryside have been “cleared” time and again, only for the Taliban to return. Brigadier John Lorimer, a former British commander, bluntly called it “mowing the lawn”. A score card from all of this might read simply: “Many Taliban dead; precious little territory gained.”

This “mowing the lawn” approach unsurprisingly alienated local people. The idea then that the British were creating security to allow development was risible...

There is room for optimism, however, and from what I have seen the lessons are being learnt. Last October, when a new British brigade took command in Helmand, its commander, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, declared “a concept of operations” where the death of enemy soldiers was no longer a measure of success. “The population is the prize,” Mackay wrote.

A campaign based on counter-insurgency principles, he said, needed operations designed not so much for “kinetic effect” (inflicting physical damage on the enemy) but calibrated to “influence” the population: decreasing support for the enemy and increasing the standing of the Afghan government.

I found morale among the troops high. There is a sense that a strategy for a victory of sorts is at last evolving. Now, rather than battling the Taliban head-on, they have decided their job must be to “hold the line” and createa space where development can happen. There is a recognition that killing the Taliban and smashing towns will not help in the longer struggle to stabilise Afghanistan; the only workable strategy is to convince the locals that the coalition is there to help.

This concept, that “the population is the prize”, had its greatest effect during last December’s operation to retake Musa Qala, which had been handed back to the Taliban a year earlier. The deployment of hundreds of British, American and Afghan troops around the town achieved such an “overmatch” of forces that, after initial fierce fighting, the Taliban were forced to flee – and the town was recaptured without being destroyed.

The key moment was the arrival of the military development experts, a so-called stabilisation team. I watched as they unfolded precise blueprints for the construction of a mosque, for the rebuilding and reopening of a school and for roads and improvements to water and power.

Three months later, when I returned to Musa Qala, a small road had been built, the market was open, there was a new health clinic and a school teaching 800 pupils. On top of that a work scheme was employing 300 Afghans.

Ironically, it is in these very successes that the present danger to our troops lies. The more soldiers such as Gamble go out to talk to locals, or help them with development, the more vulnerable they make themselves to suicide bombers or roadside explosions as the Taliban – having been beaten in set-piece battles – switch to Iraqi insurgency-style tactics instead.

The main problem is that our troops can “hold the line”, creating a safe zone inside the front lines, but the government and other agencies are often not there to fulfil their part of the bargain. Despite the army’s good work in places such as Musa Qala, health and safety rules mean that Foreign Office officials find it hard to set foot outside their compounds and contractors are frequently unable to work. So at present there is a relatively safe space, created at high cost by British troops, where insufficient vital reconstruction is happening.

It takes immense nerve to take casualties yet still adopt a friendly pose to locals who could be the enemy. But if we are to stop Afghanistan once again being a lawless breeding ground for terrorists, there is no other way forward.

2) ISAF commander:

The outgoing top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan said Friday that attacks increased 50 percent in April in the country's eastern region, where U.S. troops primarily operate, as a spreading Taliban insurgency across the border in Pakistan fueled a surge in violence.

In a sober assessment, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, who departed June 3 after 16 months commanding NATO's International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, said that although record levels of foreign and Afghan troops have constrained repeated Taliban offensives, stabilizing Afghanistan will be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgent havens in Pakistan.

The Taliban is "resurgent in the region," particularly in sanctuaries in Pakistan, and as a result "it's going to be difficult to take on this insurgent group . . . in the broader sort of way," McNeill said at a Pentagon news conference.

Clashes in the east pushed U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan in May to 15, and total foreign troop deaths there to 23, the highest monthly figure since last August.

Indeed, comprehensive data released by the NATO-led command show a steady escalation in violence since NATO took charge of the Afghanistan mission in 2006, spurred in part by more aggressive operations by the alliance and most recently by U.S. Marine battalions in the heavily contested southern province of Helmand. ISAF troops in Afghanistan increased from 36,000 in early 2007 to 52,000 now, while the Afghan army grew from 20,000 to 58,000 soldiers.

Overall violence has increased and attacks have grown more complex, according to the data and U.S. military officials. The number of roadside bombs increased from 1,931 in 2006 to 2,615 last year. Attacks peaked during the months of the warm weather fighting season, with more than 400 in the peak month of 2005, more than 800 in 2006, and about 1,000 in 2007.

As violence has risen, it has remained concentrated geographically in a relatively small number of districts, the data show, in predominantly Pashtun areas. Afghanistan has 364 districts, and last year about 70 percent of all attacks took place in 40, or about 10 percent, of those districts, McNeill said. For the first half of this year, he said, about 76 percent of attacks took place in virtually the same 40 districts, with some shifts in Farah and Nimruz provinces [emphasis added--four US Marines training Afghan police were just killed in Farah].

The district data has helped drive the deployment of NATO forces, with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit focusing on a district in southern Helmand that shows extensive enemy activity. "We knew it was a dark hole and we had to get to it; we simply didn't have the force," said McNeill, noting that ISAF remains short of combat troops, helicopters, and intelligence and surveillance equipment.

Troop numbers are low compared with the size of the insurgency, which includes many part-time fighters. There are an estimated 5,000 to 20,000 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, plus an estimated 1,000 each for the insurgent groups led by Siraj Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, according to ISAF intelligence.

More worrisome than the Taliban expansion in Pakistan is the threat of more cooperation between homegrown insurgents and outside extremist groups, McNeill said. "The greatest risk is the possibility of collusion between the insurgents who are indigenous to that region and the more intractable, the more extreme terrorists who are taking up residence there in the North-West Frontier" Province of Pakistan, he said...

3) Afghan president Karzai:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai threatened Sunday to send Afghan troops across the border to fight militants in Pakistan, a forceful warning to insurgents and the Pakistani government that his country is fed up with cross-border attacks [our government is not happy either].

Mr. Karzai said Afghanistan has the right to self defence, and because militants cross over from Pakistan “to come and kill Afghan and kill coalition troops, it exactly gives us the right to do the same.”

Speaking at a Sunday news conference, Mr. Karzai warned Pakistan-based Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud that Afghan forces would target him on his home turf. Mr. Mehsud is suspected in last year's assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

“Baitullah Mehsud should know that we will go after him now and hit him in his house,” Mr. Karzai said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai after a news conference in Kabul Sunday. Mr. Karzai threatened to send troops into neighbouring Pakistan to kill Taliban militants if they continue cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

“And the other fellow, (Taliban leader) Mullah Omar of Pakistan should know the same,” Mr. Karzai continued. “This is a two-way road in this case, and Afghans are good at the two-way road journey. We will complete the journey and we will get them and we will defeat them. We will avenge all that they have done to Afghanistan for the past so many years.”..