Afghanistan: Humvees in a China Shop

Afghan Soldier
140 Oops Afghanistan
By Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung

updated

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama's strategy for winning the war is to succeed, according to senior military officials.
Such an expansion would require spending billions more than the $7.5 billion the administration has budgeted annually to build up the Afghan army and police over the next several years, and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. troops as trainers and advisers, officials said.
Obama has voiced strong commitment to the ongoing Afghan conflict -- which this year surpasses Vietnam as America's longest combat engagement -- but has been cautious about making any additional military resources available beyond the 17,000 combat troops and 4,000 military trainers he agreed to in February. That will bring the total U.S. force to 68,000 by fall.
Instead, Obama has emphasized the need to pay equal attention to other aspects of the U.S. effort, including bolstering Afghanistan's economy and governance. Announcement of any additional military resources this year would raise questions from Congress and the American public about whether his overall strategy is working as intended.
McChrystal has not yet completed a 60-day assessment of the war due next month. But Defense Department officials here and in Kabul, the Afghan capital, said he has informed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in weekly updates, of the need to increase the Afghan force substantially, as was first reported yesterday on washingtonpost.com. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss findings that have not yet been made public.
The Afghan army is already scheduled to grow from 85,000 to 134,000, an expansion originally expected to take five years but now fast-tracked for completion by 2011. Several senior Pentagon officials indicated that an adequate size for the Afghan force may be twice the expanded number.
More police, army forces needed
"There are not enough Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police for our forces to partner with in operations . . . and that gap will exist into the coming years even with the planned growth already budgeted for," said a U.S. military official in Kabul who is familiar with McChrystal's ongoing review.
Without significant increases, said another U.S. official involved in training Afghan forces, "we will lose the war." Gates would have to agree to any request from McChrystal for additional funding or troops, and recommend it to Obama.
U.S. commanders in southern Afghanistan told National Security Adviser James L. Jones late last month that additional Afghan forces are needed. But Jones made clear to them that Obama wants to give the nonmilitary elements of his strategy the time and resources to progress before considering new troop requests.
In a telephone interview Thursday from Italy, where he was traveling with Obama, Jones said, "It was never my intention to stifle anybody in the future, but to remind everyone that we have a strategy. . . . And it would be good to see how we're doing on all aspects of the strategy before we start focusing, as we always seem to do, on how more troops are going to solve the problem."
Jones and others agreed, however, that both reconstruction and competent governance cannot be achieved until the Afghan people are secure. The strategy calls for U.S. and Afghan forces to clear areas of the Taliban and then hold them. Commanders leading a Marine operation launched last week to drive Taliban forces from Helmand province in southern Afghanistan are already asking: "Where are the Afghan troops? Where's the economic plan? Where is the government?" Jones said.
Concerns about larger U.S. presence
About 4,000 Marines are involved in the current offensive, along with about 650 Afghan soldiers.
Despite concerns that too large a U.S. military presence would undermine efforts to eventually put the Afghans in charge of their own security, Jones said McChrystal is "perfectly within his mandate as a new commander to make the recommendation on the military posture as he sees it. We have to wait until he does that. There was never any intention on my visit [to Afghanistan] to say, 'Don't ever come in with a request or to put a cap on troops.' "

By Anna Husarska
Friday, July 10, 2009
KABUL -- The new commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, announced: "The Afghan people are at the center of our mission. In reality, they are the mission." The four-star general was wearing military fatigues, but his wording sounded civilian. Indeed, when President Obama explained in March how the United States plans "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan," he ordered a "civilian surge" in Afghanistan. But make no mistake: The civilian part of the coalition operations here is subservient to the military arm, and the two are known together as an "integrated approach."
The problem with this approach is that when military structures perform or oversee civilian tasks, the nonmilitary humanitarian work often gets politicized and militarized, and the difference between the two is blurred. If executed as planned, the "civilian surge" may worsen the situation here.
Integrating more civilians into military structures means further militarizing what has traditionally been humanitarian work. This is not in the interest of the Afghan people, who expect security from coalition forces and assistance from civilian aid agencies.
The main destination of this "surge" will be the U.S.-led provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), whose performance in Afghanistan has been criticized by humanitarian groups on the ground: One aid worker from a European nongovernmental organization said they behave like "Humvees in a china shop."

While working in the eastern city of Jalalabad last year, I heard many tales that amounted to such porcelain-breaking. The main victims were the communities the PRTs were seeking to help. An Afghan working for an Asian NGO recounted how 15 Humvees entered their compound unannounced and the uniformed "farenjee" (Afghan for "foreigners") began conducting quick medical examinations -- 45 seconds per patient -- while photographing the process to document their outreach. (After complaints from the NGO, the Americans said they spent 105 seconds per patient, not 45.) There was the time that armed, uniformed Americans arrived at an orphanage, I was told, to distribute pencils and notebooks. In the process, the Americans terrified the female employees of the orphanage and the young children. An Afghan doctor from an American NGO told me his concerns about the welfare of communities where the PRTs distribute medicines from their Humvees: The labels are in English or Urdu, he noted, not Pashto, the language spoken in the region.
I visited Jalalabad again in May. The aid agency I work for, the International Rescue Committee, continues to implement programs there, but even now the ever-deteriorating security environment means we mostly have to rely on our trusted staff of Afghans. I did get to visit the American PRT in Jalalabad, where I was received by a senior civil affairs officer. He told me and an Afghan colleague of mine that Americans were no longer going out to villages uninvited. I suggested that the danger still existed for locals contacted by the PRTs -- these Afghans could be branded collaborators. But the officer saw no problem. "Our presence forces them to make a choice: Either they support the government or they support the Taliban," he said. And he added, "It takes a little bit of courage if you want to be free; freedom does not come free."
My Afghan colleague later told me of recent incidents in which a mullah was killed in Chaparhar, apparently for working with government and coalition forces, and another mullah was decapitated in Khogyani for allowing his two sons to serve in the Afghan National Army, which was trained by the U.S.-led coalition.
Contact with the foreign troops, it seems, does not come free, either.
The PRT in Jalalabad has not had significant run-ins with nongovernmental organizations over the past year, but problems persist. Staff changes are frequent, and the handovers are poor, so Afghans watch the civilians who are arriving continually try to reinvent the wheel. I am confident that the civil affairs officer I spoke with and his colleagues from the National Guard have the best of intentions, but theirs is a mission impossible. The PRTs' directive to "win the hearts and minds" -- known as WHAM -- and to implement "quick-impact projects" is better suited for charity handouts than a strategy for reconstruction and development.
Simply put, PRTs are a military tool attempting to perform civilian tasks. Inherently, they undermine the necessary distinction between the development objectives of humanitarian aid workers and the political-military objectives of coalition forces.
Relief and development work is more effectively done by experienced and independent aid agencies, working in partnership with the communities they serve. Staff members at the main NGOs in Afghanistan are mostly national (99 percent of IRC staff is Afghan) and know the local languages and culture. As such, they do not require expensive protection. They are also experienced in aid delivery. Most NGOs have been working with Afghans for many years and are committed to long-term stabilization and recovery.
Civilians in Afghanistan are caught between the Taliban and coalition forces. Humanitarian groups cannot be "force multipliers" or "post-battle cleanup" teams; they are the only ones with enough impartiality to provide assistance to the Afghan people. And for the aid community there is no question: The Afghan people are definitely "our mission."


Obama's hunger for a diplomatic success, such as it is, allowed the Russians to exact a price: linkage between offensive and defensive nuclear weapons.
This is important for Russia because of the huge American technological advantage in defensive weaponry. We can reliably shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile. They cannot. And since defensive weaponry will be the decisive strategic factor of the 21st century, Russia has striven mightily for a quarter-century to halt its development. Gorbachev tried to swindle Reagan out of the Strategic Defense Initiative at Reykjavik in 1986. Reagan refused. As did his successors -- Bush I, Clinton, Bush II. – Charles Krauthammer

In my view, the word reset doesn't mean anything in real political terms. It is a word of deception, the usual soap bubble [---]. It appears on all our screens and means nothing new, but a return to the past, to business as usual. And previously, our relations with the Americans were either one of confrontation or domination - on their part, by the way. So, what will we be returning to after a "reset"? [---] Aren't they just fooling us as usual... [...]

What stands out, from these and similar comments, is how little significance is given to the outcome of the US-Russian summit. It is like simply going through the motions, whereas the real issues at hand seem to be of little consequence. So, judging from Russian blogger reactions, the Moscow 2009 Obama-Medvedev summit could hardly be seen as a reset in US-Russian relations. The question is: Was it even rapproachement? –Vilhelm Konnander, Global Voices

• Afghans: Taliban have escaped Helmand and Marines
Taliban fighters and their commanders have escaped the Marines' big offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province and moved into areas to the west and north, prompting fears that the U.S. effort has just moved the Taliban problem elsewhere, Afghan defense officials have told McClatchy.