Afghanistan (48 page)

Insurgency and Response

In 2001–02, the bearded long-haired snake-eating special operations forces and intelligence operators from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and other allies that had been on the ground during the actual fighting against the Taliban and Al Qaeda had interacted effectively with the Afghans, both the more established forces of the Northern Alliance and other improvised anti-Taliban groups in Pushtu-speaking Afghanistan, of which future president Karzai was one of the leaders. When the special operators withdrew and were replaced by regular soldiers, and the optimism of 2001–02 and the political momentum of the initial successes were allowed to dissipate, the cultural shock became very real and dysfunctional. The zero-defect US military encountered total-defect Afghanistan in 2002 and there was a mutual lack of understanding and a failure to adapt.
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In Operation Anaconda, which took place in early 2002, heroic US military actions could not prevent Al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban fighting men withdrawing across the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan.
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The Afghan forces under Northern Alliance commanders and others (ethnic Pushtuns) recently recruited to their cause against the defeated Taliban were more interested in securing their position for post-war access to power and patronage. Pakistan rounded up some “foreign” Al Qaeda leaders but had no interest in moving against the Afghan and Pakistani fighting men who soon settled into the Vortex and sat around drinking tea unmolested while plotting revenge on Kabul and Islamabad alike.

The post-2001 US strategy was initially to “get” Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership and was shaped by the insistence that the US “did not do nation-building.” The US military, preoccupied with Iraq, having demonstrated its ability to help rapidly collapse the Taliban regime, believed that the reconstruction and institutional replacement could best be left to
non-governmental organizations and the troops of willing allies. This coincided with the George W. Bush administration’s political goals; in the 2000 campaign, he had claimed he would “absolutely not” do “nation building,” unlike his predecessor, and he announced in his 2003 State of the Union Address that the US exercises “power without conquest.”
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In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it was widely interpreted as a strategy that precluded a long-term commitment to the region but rather was part of a greater global objective. The US policy was seen by those favorable to it as a “global war on terrorism,” while many of those opposing it saw it as part of a “global war on Islam,” which were all attributed to US-enabled action, including the long-running crises in Kashmir and the Middle East.

The resulting 2002–03 US policy in Afghanistan stressed limiting the number of foreign troops and declining the participation of their combat units, especially from Muslim countries. The US was opposed to expanding the ISAF presence outside of Kabul. In both of these decisions the US was supported by Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, then controlling many of the key ministries in Kabul, who saw ISAF troops as limitations on their power and Arab troops as a potential tool of pro-Taliban Saudi policies. The US policy was intended to minimize the number of troops and money required and opportunities for collateral damage and Afghan resentment. During the Bonn process, few thought that Afghanistan would be free of political violence. Karzai claimed to have warned the US that the main threat was not Al Qaeda but rather an undefeated Taliban currently regrouping in Pakistan.
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But, instead, most threats to Kabul or US and coalition goals were presented in terms of warlords or the Northern Alliance. In 2001–04, conflicts between regional commanders in the north and provincial and local leaders in the east, all nominally loyal to Kabul, drew attention of the outside powers. The Afghans, perceptive of such things, explained the failure to defeat the enemies of 2001 away with conspiracy theories—the US was not interested in capturing Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, the UK was bankrolling the Pakistan Taliban through protection money for truck convoys from Karachi—and turned increasingly toward narcotics and other forms of corruption. If they could not save their country, they would, at least, save themselves.

The failure to prepare for Afghanistan’s next war, a Pushtun insurgency supported from sanctuaries in Pakistan, limited investment by aid donors—Afghanistan itself was generating minimal internal revenue—in Kabul’s security and law enforcement capabilities.
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Few foreigners, their attention fixed on Kabul and warlords, focused on southern Afghanistan before the insurgency opened, and did not perceive the mixture of ineffective rule by local nominally pro-Kabul Pushtuns and the ability of the insurgents to fill the power vacuum this created as potentially explosive. The US and coalition military presence in the south, before ISAF arrived, was limited to a few battalions and some special operations forces. In 2001–04, the US approach to Afghan security depended on eliminating foreign support for a renewed insurgency (especially from Pakistan) and the Musharraf government following up on its commitments as a major ally in the “Global War on Terror.” Instead there was the continuation of the policies ISI had backed for decades, with their continued reliance that they could control terrorists and insurgents on their territory and use them in Afghanistan for their own ends.

In 2005–06, the realization slowly came over US and Afghans alike that the lack of a unified command with a coherent strategy had created an unsustainable situation. 2006 was a pivotal year for Afghanistan’s insurgency. Only then was the situation in southern Afghanistan—a well-resourced insurgency with sanctuaries in Pakistan—taken seriously. The migration of terrorist tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to the Afghan insurgents was shown by the rise of suicide bombings from 21 in 2005 to 118 in 2006. All suicide attacks increased from 27 to 139, IEDs from 783 to 1677, and armed attacks from 1,300 to 4,542. In August 2006, NATO took over operations in southern Afghanistan. The war expanded in size and scope: an estimated 8–9,000 insurgents in the field, 1,250 Afghans killed in the three months of summer 2006. While signs of instability emerged outside the south and east, those areas remained the focus of the insurgency.

In 2007, more troops were deployed, leading to less dependency on airstrikes, thus mitigating collateral damage. However, there was still a 27 percent rise in insurgent-initiated violence, mostly in the hotbed south. In the south, the Canadians and Netherlands forces bore the brunt of
these attacks, demonstrating a sophisticated insurgent strategy aimed at fracturing the alliance. The increase in the number of insurgent actions was some 30 percent higher in the first quarter of 2008 than the comparable period in 2007. Cross-border attacks increased from 20 a month in March 2007 to 53 in April 2008. By 2008, it was increasingly apparent that in addition to the areas in the south and east where the insurgents had established control or at least had an internal presence, more areas in central and eastern provinces including Wardak, Laghman, and Logar saw increased levels of violence, making the limited headway gained by troop increases starting in 2007 unable to turn around a deteriorating security situation in 2008. In May 2008, US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte described the continued influx from Pakistan as “unacceptable,” the strongest public language directed at that country since 2001.

The US military, though it had the bulk of its attention focused on Iraq during this period, again proved to be an institution that can learn and evolve. It shifted to aiming to do what ADM Eric Olson, SOCOM combatant commander, described as “change what is currently a habitat conducive to terrorism.”
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The evolution in US COIN doctrine reversed the 2001–04 failure to engage with grassroots Afghanistan and has been described as emphasizing “the protection of the population and recognized that the only way to secure people is to live among them.”
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This led to the operational approach described as “shape, clear, hold and build,” implemented starting in 2008.
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It attempted to apply lessons from Iraq and set out in a new US counter-insurgency military field manual.
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It starts with
shaping
an area through information operations and non-military action that run concurrently through the entire campaign, followed by military action to
clear
the insurgents from the area and separate them from the population that is the objective of this approach;
holding
is provided by creating a capability for governance and
building
through enabling reconstruction and development. The new operational approach demonstrated an increased awareness that counter-insurgency was primarily a non-military process and required increased coordination with political and developmental efforts.
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The “shape, clear, hold and build” operational approach was demonstrated first by US and Polish troops moving into Wardak and Logar provinces in autumn 2008.

Making this new approach possible is an increased emphasis on “shaping” an area before coalition forces go in. In addition to the psychological operations and information warfare that will both precede troop presence and run concurrently with it, this “shaping” will aim to identify what the local population wants and see that what follows the coalition forces—the restoration of Afghan government authority—is effective, meets local needs, and does not leave a power vacuum for the insurgents to refill after only a few months. Yet the weakness of the Afghan government has meant that, even when coalition forces succeed in clearing the insurgents from an area, it is difficult for them to establish rule of law, provide governance and economic development to the locals, and help them realize their aspirations. “You can make a difference by making them safe but how can you have better governance?” asked BG Blanchette.
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This is where the final element of this new operational approach—“build”—will really come into play, the building of an effective civil society as well as providing physical reconstruction.

The insurgents responded to the new operational approach not by fighting for the population but by mounting increased asymmetric offensive operations. In January through April 2009, compared with the year before, there was a 64 percent increase in insurgent attacks,
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an 80 percent increase in the IED attacks that caused sixty percent of coalition and Afghan government casualities,
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and a 90 percent increase in attacks on Afghan officials and district centers.
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These attacks, coupled by the increased exposure resulting from getting out among the population, has led to increased casualties, with coalition deaths up by 55 percent and ANSF deaths by 25 percent in April 2009 from the year before. Rather than try to stop coalition and Afghan actions, the insurgents have instead aimed at making their presence outside their fortified forward area bases (FoBs) and among the Afghan population too costly to sustain. While seeking to protect the population, this new operational approach put more coalition forces into harm’s way. At the same time, the coalition has withdrawn many smaller outposts in remote and border areas that appeared to be offering the insurgents targets rather than protecting Afghans. Part of the rationale is also to demonstrate to the Afghan people that military operations can help their security; in 2009 polling,
the percentage of Afghans saying that US/NATO/ISAF forces had a strong local presence declined to 34 percent from 57 percent in 2006, while those saying that they provide effective security declined to 42 percent from 67 percent in 2009.
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In 2009, the “shape, clear, hold and build” operational concept was applied to the Helmand River valley, where it was apparent that even when US and coalition forces were “living amongst them,” the insurgents could use the ties of kinship, tribe, or the threat of future, violent retribution to keep their hold on the population. Repeatedly when coalition forces have cleared insurgents from an area, there was no Afghan government capability able to backfill behind them. This made it difficult for coalition forces to start providing the locals with a better alternative to allegiance, or at least cooperation, with the insurgents. It was also apparent that there would be a long way to go before the Afghan National Security Forces had either the numbers or the training to take over the “hold” or the Afghan government could provide the “build.” Thus, the numbers of Afghan National Army (ANA) and ANP personnel, minimized in the early years of the coalition presence, needed to be increased and increased again to aid the in last two elements of this operational approach. The Obama administration’s Afghanistan policy review in March 2009 led to a prolonged consideration of increased troops levels requested by US Army GEN Stanley McChrystal, which was approved in December 2009. “Shape, clear, hold and build” as an operational approach—not a strategy—provides a potentially effective way to use military and non-military assets to combat the insurgency. It does not answer the question of how best to achieve the desired end-state in Afghanistan.

Special Operations and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance

Coalition special operation forces (SOF) were a success in 2001, but when the direction of the war shifted and was seen as demanding more conventional warfare, SOF assumed a secondary role, although, since then, they have still been heavily involved throughout Afghanistan. In addition to targeting insurgent commanders by direct action and using their reconnaissance missions to call in firepower, special operations forces have proved effective when they acted as “hammer” while larger forces were
the “anvil” to defeat an insurgent presence. Using intelligence developed by the “anvil” presence in an area, the “hammer” provided maneuver, often driving insurgents out of secure areas and into the firepower of the “anvil.” This was effectively done with coalition special operations in Uruzgan before the Dutch moved in during 2005–06.
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Effective cooperation between the Dutch and SOF—especially the Australian SAS—has continued since then. For example, SOF targeted the local Taliban commander Baz Mohammed in 2007, which led to divisions within the insurgents as there were disputes over who would succeed him, making insurgent operations less effective for months thereafter.
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In 2009, increased US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) operations in Afghanistan were targeting insurgent leaders.
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