Afghan report, with a Canadian flavor...

It’s great to be able to pass on what’s going on in Kandahar province to the denizens of Castle Arrgghhh!

In some ways, this is the most violent summer in southern Afghanistan since I started working there back in 2003. The enemy has changed how he is doing business: he has mounted a counter-governance campaign designed to inflict direct damage to the Afghan government structures-ones that are still emerging after 30 years of war. In effect, the insurgents are using Khmer Rouge-like operations and are assassinating the educated middle management in the police and the government. At the same time the enemy has dramatically improved his parallel government structures and continues to challenge an Afghanistan government that is seen more and more to be illegitimate by the population. Taken together, these are far more insidious threats than the guerrilla-type operations that we have been countering in the rural districts since 2006.
 
The mass arrival of US forces in the province to relieve the Canadian Army is welcome. The Canadian forces have conducted a nearly four-year disrupt operation awaiting reinforcement from European NATO allies that never arrived. American reinforcements are now on the ground and have pushed out into the critical districts surrounding Kandahar City. Where Canada had a 1000-man battle group (that’s a mech infantry battalion, a squadron of tanks, and a battery of artillery) and another half-battalion of infantry mentoring an Afghan brigade, there is an American division to handle the same amount of ground now. The troop density will be such that serious progress can be made towards security…BUT only if the Afghan police improve. The ongoing problems relating to the Afghan police remain. Progress remains slow in that area. There is no point in clearing an area unless we are going to stay in it. Police are critical in any stabilization efforts as are government officials. The enemy knows this and is going after them in order to ‘kill the baby in the cradle.’

I am extremely concerned that the counterinsurgency effort may be being artificially jammed into an American domestic political time-frame. I do not think success can be forced in this environment. In my view, the US needs to beware of trying to ‘Iraqize’ southern Afghanistan. Pashtuns are not Arabs. Kandahar is not Baghdad. The threat is different. Applying an Iraq model unthinkingly will generate multiple layers of bureaucracy which will slow reconstruction, development, and governance to a crawl. It will also generate enemies where don’t need them.

I have serious concerns about the nature and extent of external support to this insurgency and our (Canada, US, NATO, the so-called ‘international community’) apparent inability to creatively address it. Regional players continue to provide arms for the efforts against our forces in southern Afghanistan. Unfortunately, I see little or no public criticism or diplomatic pressure being brought to bear to attenuate that flow. Foreign jihadis continue to show up-again, not enough is being done elsewhere to deter them from doing so. This is less and less an indigenous insurgency every time I visit.

I would strongly recommend that sensitive souls think twice about giving any money to any entity professing to be involved in Pakistani flood relief . This money may be ‘tithed’ or laundered in some form and it will go to supporting the insurgency next fighting season. Some analysts I know strongly suspect this occurred before with the 2005 Pakistan earthquake-and we saw the most violent summer (then) in 2006. Indeed, I stumbled across what may be direct NGO support for the insurgency but this requires much more analysis before anybody can say anything publicly definitive about it. Anybody who has read David Rieff’s “A Bed For the Night” will understand what I am referring to. NGO’s have the ability to undermine the government by their presence and actions. Again, fainter hearts aren’t going to want to hear that. None of these NGO’s (let alone the media) have seriously reported on or effectively criticized the enemy’s substantially increased use of children as spotters, IED emplacers, and human shields.

Once again, it was awesome to see Canadians and Americans working side-by-side on what has to be one of the most politically and militarily complex wars we have fought together. I watched Canadian Leopard 2 tanks provide long-range direct fire support from overwatch positions at a FOB to an American infantry battalion that was flushing out insurgents (12 X enemy KIA with three rounds), while an American Reaper working with Canadian JTACs took out a gun team suspected of shooting down one of our helicopters (gun team destroyed via Hellfire). Now we have to get the governance and reconstruction teams working with the same high level of cooperation and interoperability. It is unfortunate that the American media have completely ignored our contribution and nobody has bothered to report on the nearly seamless hand-over of these important districts from the Canadian forces to the American forces. It is as if the American media has just discovered this war-one my people have been fighting-and fighting hard-for nearly half a decade.

On a personal note, the gardener at the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction, whom we knew as “Popeye,” was assassinated while I was at KPRT. Popeye was an innocuous, hard-working family man who had been at Camp Nathan Smith at least since I started visiting there. If he had any religious or political views, we didn’t know what they were. When I arrived by helicopter this trip, he took time out to greet me. That night, we waved good-bye to him as he went out the gates. Within 15 minutes he was dead-shot twice under the chin with a Makarov. The only possible purpose was to terrorize the locally-employed staff. The enemy didn’t succeed-everybody continued to show up for work. Popeye was declared to be a Shaheed-a martyr-by the mayor and local notables. The brave ‘knights’ of the Taliban killed a harmless gardener in their pursuit of their goals.


Secondary personal note:

I was also a beneficiary of the Charles S. Roberts vision and it was with some delight that I saw that the Castle denizens danced for him. I join you virtually. My first was “D-Day” (which I found in our hall closet in 1976) followed by “Panzer Leader”, “Squad Leader” (pre-ASL!), “Jutland” and almost all of the others that followed. Thanks for all the camaraderie, the competition, the intellectual stimulation, and just plain fun that you and your people provided me and my friends over the years Charles!