General Stanley McChrystal the anthropologist

[waraich66]

Monday, 21 September 2009
General Stanley McChrystal the anthropologist
What a fascinating document is General Stanley McChrystal's Initial Assessment on Afghanistan, delivered to President Obama on 30 August and made public today for the first time, with redactions.
McChrystal, who is America's top military man in Afghanistan, has written a document that must be one of the most unusual ever to come from a military commander.
He often sounds more like an anthropology professor than a general as he grapples with the tricky problem of what is going on in Afghanistan. "The conflict in Afghanistan can be seen as a set of related insurgencies, each of which is a complex system with multiple actors and a vast set of interconnecting relationships among those actors", he states. This is true, of course, but it is a pity it has taken eight years for America's senior brass to work out this most fundamental of facts.
Until recently there was no recognition by the military of the importance of the Afghan tribes to understanding events in the country. It was not understood, for example, that for insurgents to move from one part of the country to another required agreement from any tribes inhabiting the land in between.
Or that some of the Pashtun tribes were only fighting in Afghanistan, while others were also fighting against the Pakistan government. Or that there are both Sunnis and Shias amongst the Pashtuns. Or, until recently, that there are at least three (according to McChrystal) different Taliban factions (others would say there are five, or even seven).
The precise relationship between opium production and the insurgency has not been investigated. Opium eradication has been seen as a public health issue, not a matter of military strategy. And no effort has been put into producing propaganda that highlights the hypocrisy of the Taliban for producing drugs that are killing thousands of *******.
And how is it that the Taliban faction in Quetta in neighbouring Baluchistan is left undisturbed in this war? Everyone knows where they are and yet they appear to be untouchable.
In a remarkable admission, McChrystal acknowledges that the Taliban is better at propaganda than the Coalition: "Major insurgent groups outperform GIRoA and ISAF at information operations...They have carefully analysed their audience and target products accordingly. They use their Pashtun identity, physical proximity to the population and violent intimidation to deliver immediate and enduring messages with which ISAF and GIRoA have been unable to compete."
This is deeply depressing stuff. There are companies and consultants being paid millions of dollars to come up with solutions for problems like these, and yet the results are risible.
Having thoroughly (and correctly) trashed the Karzai government and the international community, McChrystal advocates what he calls population-centred counter insurgency. ISAF, together with the Afghan security forces, must shelter Afghans from violence, corruption and coercion. Military officers must also gain a much greater understanding of the country and its people.
This means local language training, a remarkable turnaround, considering that the British Foreign Office, for example, does not presently have any Pashto speakers.
"All ISAF personnel must show respect for local cultures and customs and demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the people of Afghanistan," he says.
It will be necessary to build personal relationships with the local people: "To gain accurate information and intelligence about the local environment ISAF must spend as much time as possible with the people and as little time as possible in armoured vehicles or behind the walls of forward operating bases."
This is all a very tall order and the question that will be on everyone's mind is whether or not it has all come too late. It may simply make more sense for the military to think of ways they can force the Taliban - in all its complexity - to the negotiating table.

 

[muse]

Gentle forum readers, I am posting this in this thread because not only is it relevent ( we are thankful to "Fundamentalist" for the interest) , but because as the Operation in Waziristan approaches, we may be faced with many of the kinds of problems outlined below, though there are other aspects that do not apply, I encourage a critical reading by all, in particular by our military professionals:





October 3, 2009
Report Cites Firefight as Lesson on Afghan War
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The paratroopers of Chosen Company had plenty to worry about as they began digging in at their new outpost on the fringe of a hostile frontier village in eastern Afghanistan.

Intelligence reports were warning of militants massing in the area. As the paratroopers looked around, the only villagers they could see were men of fighting age idling in the bazaar. There were no women and children, and some houses looked abandoned. Through their night scopes they could see furtive figures on the surrounding mountainsides.

A few days later, they were almost overrun by 200 insurgents.

That firefight, a debacle that cost nine American lives in July 2008, has become the new template for how not to win in Afghanistan. The calamity and its roots have been described in bitter, painstaking detail in an unreleased Army history, a devastating narrative that has begun to circulate in an initial form even as the military opened a formal review this week of decisions made up and down the chain of command.

The 248-page draft history, obtained by The New York Times, helps explain why the new commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is pressing so hard for a full-fledged commitment to a style of counterinsurgency that rests on winning over the people of Afghanistan even more than killing militants. The military has already incorporated lessons from the battle in the new doctrine for war in Afghanistan.

The history offers stark examples of shortcomings in the unit’s preparation, the style of combat it adopted, its access to intelligence, its disdain for the locals — in short, plenty of blame to go around.

Before the soldiers arrived, commanders negotiated for months with Afghan officials of dubious loyalty over where they could dig in, giving militants plenty of time to prepare for an assault.

Despite the suspicion that the militants were nearby, there were not enough surveillance aircraft over the lonely outpost — a chronic shortage in Afghanistan that frustrated Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates at the time. Commanders may have been distracted from the risky operation by the bureaucratic complexities of handing over responsibility at the brigade level to replacements — and by their urgent investigation of an episode that had enraged the local population, the killing a week earlier in an airstrike of a local medical clinic’s staff as it fled nearby fighting in two pickup trucks.

Above all, the unit and its commanders had an increasingly tense and untrusting relationship with the Afghan people.

The history cited the “absence of cultural awareness and understanding of the specific tribal and governance situation” and the emphasis on combat operations over the development of the local economy and other civil affairs, a reversal of the practices of the unit that had just left the area.

The battle of Wanat is being described as the “Black Hawk Down” of Afghanistan, with the 48 American soldiers and 24 Afghan soldiers outnumbered three to one in a four-hour firefight that left nine Americans dead and 27 wounded in one of the bloodiest days of the eight-year war.

Soldiers who survived the battle described how their automatic weapons turned white hot and jammed from nonstop firing. Mortally wounded troops continued to hand bullet belts to those still able to fire.

The ammunition stockpile was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, igniting a stack of 120-millimeter mortar rounds — and the resulting fireball flung the unit’s antitank missiles into the command post. One insurgent got inside the concertina wire and is believed to have killed three soldiers at close range, including the platoon commander, Lt. Jonathan P. Brostrom.

The description of the battle at Wanat — the heroism, the violence and the missteps that may have contributed to the deaths — ends with a judgment that the fight was “as remarkable as any small-unit action in American military history.”

The author, the military historian Douglas R. Cubbison, also included a series of criticisms in his review, sponsored by the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., that laid blame on a series of decisions made before the battle.

The draft report criticized the “lack of adequate preparation time” before arriving in Afghanistan, which meant there was little training geared specifically for Afghanistan, and not even a detailed operational plan for the year of combat that lay ahead.

Pentagon and military officials say those initial criticisms are being revised to reflect subsequent interviews with other soldiers and officers who were at Wanat or who served in higher-level command positions. After a round of revisions, the study will go through a formal peer-review process and be published.

The battle stands as proof that the United States is facing off against a far more sophisticated adversary in Afghanistan today, one that can fight anonymously with roadside bombs or stealthily with kidnappings — but also can operate like a disciplined armed force using well-rehearsed small-unit tactics to challenge the American military for dominance on the conventional battlefield.

Official judgment on whether errors were made by the unit on the ground or by any leaders up the chain of command will be determined by a new investigation opened this week by Gen. David H. Petraeus of United States Central Command at the urging of Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The call for such an independent review came from family members of the fallen, including David P. Brostrom, father of the slain platoon commander and himself a retired Army colonel, as well as from a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia.

The history is replete with wrong turns at every point of the unit’s mission, starting with the day it was reassigned to Afghanistan from training for Iraq.

After having served for more than a year in other hot zones of eastern Afghanistan, the platoon arrived in the village at dark on July 8, 2008, just two weeks from the day it was supposed to go home to its base in Italy.The men wore their adopted unit emblem — skull patches fashioned after Marvel Comics’ antihero, the Punisher. They unloaded their Humvees, packed with weapons, water and the single rucksack each had kept when the rest of his kit was shipped home. They had plenty of ammunition.

But at the end of an intense tour of combat, they had run out of good relations with an increasingly distrustful population.

They named it Outpost Kahler, after a popular sergeant who had been killed by one of their own Afghan guards early that year. His last words as he moved ahead of his comrades to check whether their Afghan partners were asleep while on duty had been, “This might be dangerous.” (The shooting was ruled an accident, but relations between skeptical American troops and Afghan forces deteriorated.)

Although the 173rd Airborne Brigade had been scheduled to return to Iraq from its base in Italy, the need for forces to counter a resurgence of militant violence in eastern Afghanistan prompted new orders for the brigade to switch immediately to preparations for mountain warfare — many of the outposts were linked only by narrow, rutted trails, and some could be reached only be helicopter — and a wholly different culture and language. “Unfortunately, the comparatively late change of mission for the 173rd Airborne B.C.T. from Iraq to Afghanistan did not permit the brigade sufficient time to prepare any form of campaign plan,” the history reports.

The unit arrived at Wanat ill prepared for the hot work of building an outpost in the mountains in July; troops were thirsty from a lack of fresh water, and their one construction vehicle ran out of gas, so the unit was unable to complete basic fortifications. The soldiers had no local currency to buy favor by investing in the village economy, the history makes clear. The soldiers also said they complained up the chain of command about the lack of air surveillance over their dangerous corner of Afghanistan, but no more was provided.

Even as they settled into their spartan command post, the unit’s commanders were insulted to learn that local leaders were meeting together in a “shura,” or council, to which they were not invited — and which might even have been a session used to coordinate the assault on the Americans that began before dawn the very next morning.

The four-hour firefight finally ended when American warplanes and attack helicopters strafed insurgent positions. The paratroopers drove back the insurgents, but ended up abandoning the village 48 hours later.

 

[muse]

Afghan soldier shoots dead two American troops

KABUL: An Afghan soldier on guard at a joint base with US troops shot dead two American servicemen and wounded two others before fleeing, a provincial official said on Saturday.

Shahedullah Shahed, spokesman for the governor of Wardak province west of Kabul, said the shooting took place after a combined team of Afghan and US forces had returned from a joint operation late on Friday.

“The Americans were in the middle of sleep when an Afghan soldier on duty opened fire on them,” Shahed said. “We have no clue as to why he shot them.”

A press officer for the Western troops said he could give no further details of the incident.

Shahed said two of the officers relatives were in custody for questioning, the Associated Press reported.

The killings bring to five, the total American deaths in the conflict in the last 24 hours. agencies


The "duh" factor

“We have no clue as to why he shot them.”

 

[muse]

Swat strategy of ‘winning hearts’ hard for US to emulate

* Washington Post report says Pakistan Army succeeded in Malakand as it had popular support, sufficient troops

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: Teenagers in the former Taliban stronghold of Swat are smiling in relief, after the successful army operation against the Taliban in the valley has ended their days of forcibly working as boy soldiers.

A report in the Washington Post said the Pakistan Army had found hundreds of traumatised teenagers when its troops regained control of Swat in a violent campaign this summer.

About a month ago, the army opened a rehabilitation clinic for the war-torn teenagers.

It has been named “Sabaoon”, which is means “the first ray of light of the morning” in Pushto.

The report’s author said the military’s commander in Swat, Major Gen Ishfaq Nadeem Ahmad had warned him before he visited the facility that many of the boys were still shaken by their experiences.

But one of the youths had merrily stepped forward and shook hands with him.

The commander said the boy had been trained as a suicide bomber when he was rescued.

The report said it was the perfect way to defeat an insurgency. It said the teenagers would return home as living witnesses that the Taliban’s hold on Swat had been broken and that the army was serious about protecting the people.

“We told our majors and captains that people should fall in love with you,” Gen Nadeem said.

The author wrote that the commander’s claims became clear when they travelled through the valley without protective armour or other precautions, reflective of the fact that the army had considerable public support.

The commander said the roads were a no-go-zone six months ago, but they were now teeming with merchants and shoppers.

Some women were out in public even without burqas that the Taliban had enforced. The only Kalashnikovs to be seen were on billboards advertising a laundry soap that took after its name.

What the Pakistani army did differently was that it stopped trying to buy peace with the Taliban through deals that inevitably collapsed. In May, as the insurgency was spreading out of Swat towards Islamabad, the army finally decided to crack down, for real.

Pak plans: Gen Nadeem cited three factors in the campaign’s success.

First, the army sent enough troops to do the job – two divisions, totalling about 25,000 men, rather than the 3,000-man brigade that had failed to contain the insurgency before.

Second, to allow the use of heavy firepower, soldiers moved civilians out, creating more than 2 million internally displaced persons, who have now mostly returned, and third, the army had popular support from Pakistanis fed up with the Taliban.

The report said the execution had some lessons for US troops across the border in Afghanistan, but said a fact remained clear that the US, being an outside force, simply could not do some of the things that worked for Pakistani commanders.

“No matter how fervently Gen Stanley McChrystal speaks of a population-centric strategy, it is hard to implement if it is not your country,” the report said.

McChrystal’s strategy echoes some of the Pakistani precepts — more troops, more foccus on the population, more security.

“But even with an additional 40,000 troops, the United States won’t have the same popular support the Pakistanis enjoyed in Swat. America is fighting what many Afghans will always regard as a war of occupation. People aren’t going to fall in love with US troops,” the report added.

“The right Afghanistan policy begins with a frank admission that this isn’t America’s problem, it’s Afghanistan’s. The US needs to patiently support the emerging Afghan government, keeping our troop levels firm and reliable, until the Afghans acquire the tools and political consensus to secure their country,” it said.

 

[muse]

The role of Anthropolgy in counter insurgency is much misunderstood by many, but the Fauj sems to have gotten it right.

 

[muse]

For the full article in the Washington Post see, "A Savvy Swat Strategy" by Kidwaibhai on this board