Afstan: Headlines, stories, confusion and diplomacy

Same story, different interpretations (via milnews.ca). Ottawa Citizen online:

Canada highlights small victories over Taliban

National Post online:

Canadians troops celebrate latest Afghanistan victories

From the Post:

KANDAHAR -- Sounding much more upbeat than many of his international colleagues, the commander of Canada's Afghanistan mission insisted Friday that his troops have scored a series of important victories lately.

Canadians have eliminated Taliban commanders, seized bomb factories and broken up supply centres, said Brigadier General Denis Thompson.

Now, the soldiers plan to deny the insurgents their safe havens over the winter, helped by Pakistani security forces on the other side of the border, he said.

"We've faced some interesting challenges," he told reporters. "For every challenge, however, there are successes that we don't hear enough about ... This summer we were able to significantly disrupt the insurgents' command and control network. Many of their mid- and senior-level commanders were neutralized, including several key IED experts."

Meanwhile, the heavy-lift helicopters that Canada is expected to acquire from the U.S. by this January should help tactically [emphasis added], allowing troops to push "deeper, with a larger force" into insurgent country, he said.

A day after a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a heavily guarded government building in Kabul, Brig.-Gen. Thompson acknowledged there is a "perception" in Afghanistan that security is deteriorating.

He blamed that sense in part on the Taliban's tactical shift to more bombings and other terrorist activity and less conventional warfare, though Canadian officers have been making much the same point for almost two years now...

In another optimistic appraisal of the situation, Elissa Goldberg, the top Canadian civilian official in Kandahar, conceded that the prison break was a "challenge and a setback."

But, she said, "it also provided us with an opportunity to address a number of issues with security of the perimeter and the prison itself, and to augment training of the prison officers."

Noting that the civilian contingent here has climbed to 50 people from 19 in recent months [emphasis added], she related a "phenomenal" list of achievements Canada has made on the development front, including:

• The launch of a $50-million project to refurbish the Dhala irrigation dam;

• The establishment of a new police training centre;

• Counter-IED tutoring for officers to help them respond more safely to roadside bombs;

• Work on 50 new schools, and plans to train 3,000 teachers over three years; and

• Enrolling another 7,000 Kandaharis in an adult literacy program.

Brig.- Gen. Thompson said he was hoping to curb the usual flight of the Taliban into Pakistan this winter, saying Pakistani security forces have put more pressure on the insurgents lately near the border with Afghanistan. But he said he could not provide detail of what, exactly, is happening there.

Although Pakistan's military is involved in fierce fighting with insurgents, most of it is happening in tribal areas hundreds of kilometres northeast of Kandahar.

More here on what Brig.-Gen. Thompson said: "Taliban will lose ground: Canada's top soldier".

(Update: Yet another version--an interesting one--of what Brig.-Gen. Thompson said:

Canada's strategy in Afghanistan to change

Canada’s strategy in Afghanistan will shift this winter, using improved Afghan security forces to seize and hold more territory now under the influence of the insurgents, the commanding officer of Task Force Kandahar said Friday.

“We now have even more capable Afghan national security forces,” said Gen. Denis Thompson. “If you’re going to increase the amount of terrain you control, the ultimate garrison is a policeman.”

Recent operations by the International Security Assistance Force in Kandahar province have focused more on disrupting insurgent operations and supply lines than on extending the range of government control.

That’s about to change, Thompson said.

Five new police substations have been built across the province and eight more are expected to be added in the coming months. Those stations will be staffed by Afghan police with western mentor teams in order to ensure “the ground we control stays in that state,” Thompson said.

“In order to deepen that hold, we need to make sure that there is not only an ISAF and (Afghan army) presence, but that the police that are there are credible and that they’re established in permanent infrastructure [emphasis added].”)

And another approach by the Afghan government (cf. Pakistanis):

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Tribal leaders with authority in some of the most dangerous border regions in southern Afghanistan have been asked by government officials to consider raising their own militias to fill security gaps insurgents are exploiting, tribal elders have told The Globe and Mail.

Struggling to turn the tide in the battle with a resurgent Taliban, officials with a commission set up in the Ministry of Interior have reached out to a handful of tribal leaders who are convinced they can offer better protection against the insurgents than the stretched Afghan police and army.

At the same time, elders in some of the increasingly unstable parts of the country's interior - including the strip of highway west of Kandahar where militants recently killed 23 bus passengers - say they've been rounding up fighters to increase security even though the government has yet to invite them to do so.

"The police can't bring security; the government can't bring security. We can't keep our health; we can't keep our cities. So now this is our obligation, to appeal to tribal forces," said Ahsan Noor, a respected leader of the Noorzai tribe who is a provincial council deputy in Kandahar and has close ties to the family of President Hamid Karzai. "Give me 1,000 people," he said. "I can bring security from Helmand to half of Kandahar."

Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, Canada's senior military commander in Afghanistan, says he supports the plan [emphasis added], which if implemented would rapidly enhance security in rural parts of Kandahar province with no established military or police presence.

But he cautioned that it is "a quick fix ... fraught with risk [emphasis added]."

"We've had experiences in the past where a local defence force has been raised, it's loyal to a certain tribal chief, but it doesn't respond to anybody outside of that area. In other words, it's not really inside of a chain of command," Gen. Thompson said.

"They have to be accountable. Let's say they're not providing the security they said they would ... and we're having [explosions] and we're still having ambushes, or they enter into an agreement with insurgents to make life easier. Those sorts of things from our standpoint are unacceptable. We would need to be able to have some way to put pressure on them to fulfill the duties they said they would."..

(Another update:

The Canadian commander in charge of all 23,000 international troops in southern Afghanistan said military strategists may need to borrow lessons from Iraq to learn how to use tribal dynamics to increase security in the coming months.

In a final interview before handing over command of the post he has held for nine months, Major-General Marc Lessard said better outreach to tribes and tribal elders “has to be explored” by his successor, Dutch commander Major General Mart de Kruif [emphasis added]..

The key to breaking down that resiliency likely involves reaching out to the tribal communities spread across the six provinces of the southern command region.

“The tribal dynamic here is a lot more complex than in Iraq,” Maj. Gen. Lessard said. “The authority of the central government here in Afghanistan is not as strong as in Iraq,” he said, adding: “The tribes play an important, important role in the daily lives of Afghans.”

Maj.-Gen. Lessard said officials will have to figure out how to streamline tribal connections with the government. But first, military leaders need to develop a better understanding of tribal linkages and politics to avoid using a “cookie cutter approach” that could create more problems for the government.

“If you make a mistake and alienate some tribes, because some tribes feel disenfranchised, you can create more harm than good in this tribal outreach,” he said.

Maj.-Gen. Lessard cautioned that “outreach” does not necessarily involve the use of tribal militias, a strategy that has gained some popularity among both international and local officials of late. Tribal leaders from the part of the province bordering Pakistan told the Globe recently that they've been asked to float the idea of assembling militias in their communities to fill security gaps and block out insurgents.

“There could be some short term gain, but I really think it's more long term pain,” Maj.-Gen. Lessard said of the militias.

“We have spent a lot of effort, a lot of money, resources, on developing the Afghan security forces: the army, the police, the border police. When you arm a militia, you think that you're giving it a role for added security … They may think also they are empowering themselves and getting a greater status within the overall region in terms of the other tribes,” he said. “You have to be really, really careful. I'm not saying no, but I would be very, very leery of arming tribes [emphasis added],” he said...)

Some thoughts by Con Coughlin in the Daily Telegraph:

Now more than ever, Britain needs a plan for Afghanistan

One minute we are being told we must send more troops to Afghanistan if we are to stand any chance of securing victory; the next that the only option is to sit down and talk to the Taliban.

All the while, as our politicians and military commanders argue over how best to win the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban quietly, but effectively, get on with their deadly insurgency campaign to sap our resolve.

The Taliban might be a shadow of the military force it was when British troops first deployed to southern Afghanistan in the spring of 2006, but they nevertheless retain the ability to undermine the international campaign to restore the country to something approaching normality following three decades of incessant conflict...

But while the Taliban have demonstrated an impressive ability to adjust their tactics to suit their diminished military capability, those responsible for prosecuting the West's military operation seem to be hopelessly divided over how best to achieve their goal of providing Afghanistan's long-suffering civilian population with the security and stability they crave.

In the course of the past week alone, we have received a succession of dire warnings. First General Sir Michael Rose, the former Special Forces commander just returned from a tour of southern Afghanistan, said that the British mission is doomed to failure unless it receives urgently needed reinforcements. The following day it was revealed that the Americans are seriously considering sitting down and negotiating with the Taliban to end the fighting. Meanwhile, John Hutton, the new Defence Secretary, rebutted the defeatist attitude emanating from the front line in the war on terror, insisting that British forces will ultimately prevail.

But the fact that such differing opinions are now being aired on a regular basis suggests that, two and a half years into Britain's current deployment to southern Afghanistan, no one is any the wiser as to what our overall strategy is for achieving success.

The absence of such a clear-cut approach has been the Achilles' heel of Britain's involvement since the Government led everyone to understand that British forces were being deployed to support reconstruction projects and eradicate the poppy crop - which accounts for 90 per cent of the heroin sold on Britain's streets - rather than going eyeball to eyeball with the Taliban. There are still those in Whitehall - particularly at the Department for International Development - who believe that the main purpose of the British mission should be reconstruction, rather than confrontation.

But as Mr Hutton pointed out shortly after his appointment, the priority must be to deal with the insurgency, which, so long as it is allowed to continue, has the capability to undermine all other efforts to restore the country to normality. "If the Taliban turn up a month later," he said, "and bulldoze the school you've built, then you're back to square one." Quite.

Nor does Mr Hutton appear to suffer from the intellectual confusion that has afflicted some of his predecessors about the precise nature of Britain's commitment to Afghanistan. "It's first and foremost about UK national security," he said. "If Afghanistan … becomes a state where terrorists can roam freely, that terror will be exported to our own doorsteps [the sort of thing our government almost never says - -MC]."

Given the confused signals that the Government has given out in the past to justify the deployment of British forces to Afghanistan, it is to be hoped that Mr Hutton's plain-speaking translates into a mission statement that will define the objectives of not just British forces, but all the other coalition troops currently deployed.

While British commanders have been satisfied by their tactical success in defeating the Taliban as a military force, they have been frustrated by what they regard as an absence of government strategy about how best to achieve the overall objectives.

Mr Hutton, whose personal interest in the subject led him to write a book on military history, may be the man to provide it - so long as he steers clear of his other great enthusiasm, the creation of a Euro-army.

We already have a Euro-army, in the form of Nato: the vast majority of the 53,000 Nato troops based in Afghanistan are drawn from Europe. But the trouble with European armies is that, with a few notable exceptions such as the Danes, Dutch and British, they don't want to fight [emphasis added; Poles an exception too, and now the French to some extent--more here]. And that is one strategy that is sure to fail against a determined and resourceful foe such as the Taliban.

Finally, this does look like a worthwhile diplomatic initiative:

Turkey hosts meeting of Pakistan, Afghanistan leaders in Istanbul
The Turkish prime minister hosted the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan to discuss efforts to bring peace to their region at a conference in Turkey.

No mention in our media though.