Colleagues: Back from Hawaii and now have a chance to get caught up on things national security. Today, four perspectives on the progress on the war in Afghanistan, two positive and two questioning or skeptical.
The first report summarizes the perspective of GEN Dave Petraeus, who has briefed reporters in-country frequently of late, painting an optimistic picture of the progress made in Afghanistan before he travels to Washington to testify next week.
The second post, from a solid observer, Joshua Foust, questions how much progress is really being made, what differences the tactical successes will make, and how much of a difference it will make given U.S. intentions to begin drawing down soon. The third is a strong response to Foust from Tom Lynch (COL-USA/Ret), who recently left the Chairman’s office to take a position at the National Defense University. (COL Lynch’s rejoinder is reprinted with his permission). Tom is a firm believer that progress is being made, that we have the strategy right, and that the Taliban has been weakened significantly (given his former position–and, of course, that he was a student of mine at West Point!–his views should be taken seriously).
Finally, a link to an analysis by C.J. Chivers in today’s NYT of the disconnect between what tactical progress US units have made and the lack of same at the strategic level, which gives rise to frustration that whatever sacrifices and progress US forces are making on the ground, it will be for naught if the Afghan government remains incompetent and corrupt and the Afghan Army/police are not capable of holding the successes achieved on the ground.
— Ty
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Petraeus Sees Military Progress in Afghanistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan — Besides well-reported advances in southern provinces, American andNATO forces have also been able to halt or reverse Taliban gains around the capital, Kabul, and even in the north and west of the country, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said Tuesday.
The general made his case for an improving overall picture in Afghanistan in an interview, offering a preview of what is likely to be his argument next week when he testifies before Congress for the first time since he took over command of coalition forces in Afghanistan eight months ago.
It will also be his first testimony since the influx of additional American and Afghan troops began to change the balance of the fighting in southern Afghanistan in late 2010.
Under General Petraeus, the tempo of operations has been stepped up enormously. American Special Operations forces and coalition commandos have mounted more than 1,600 missions in the 90 days before March 4 — an average of 18 a night — and the troops have captured and killed close to 3,000 insurgents, according to information provided by the general.
“The momentum of the Taliban has been halted in much of the country and reversed in some important areas,” he said.
“The Taliban have never been under the pressure that they were put under over the course of the last 8 to 10 months,” he added.
Other aspects of the war remain difficult, and progress is patchy and slow, General Petraeus conceded. There has been only modest momentum on efforts to persuade Taliban fighters to give up the fight and join a reintegration program, and a plan to train and install thousands of local police officers in rural communities to mobilize resistance to the Taliban has proved to be a painstaking business constrained by concerns that it will create militias loyal to warlords.
But security in and around Kabul has significantly improved, he said, thanks in part to specialized commando units of the Afghan Army, the police and the intelligence service, which operate in the greater Kabul area.
In 2009, Kabul was encircled by Taliban forces and there was talk of the capital’s falling to the insurgents, but now much of the greater Kabul area has been secured, he said.
President Hamid Karzai is to announce on the Afghan New Year, March 21, the beginning of the transition to Afghan control of some districts around the country, part of the plan to pass responsibility for security to the Afghan government by 2014.
The Taliban are expected to try to retake lost territory in coming months, and in particular to single out those districts in transition, the general said. But he said coalition forces would mount their own spring offensive to pre-empt Taliban efforts to retake lost territory.
“You cannot eliminate all the sensationalist attacks,” he said. “That is one of the objectives for our spring offensive — to solidify those gains and push them back further.”
Over the past four months, coalition forces have seen a fourfold increase in the number of weapons and explosives caches found and cleared, in large measure because the Taliban were forced out of territory they had held for up to five years, he said.
“The Taliban had to leave hastily, and the fighters and leaders were killed, captured or run off, and if they were run off they could not cart off all the I.E.D. and weapons and explosives that they had established over five years in some cases,” the general said, referring to improvised explosive devices.
Troops were finding more than 120 explosives and weapons caches a month recently compared with 40 a month a year ago, according to information from the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan provided by the general.
Destroying the infrastructure the Taliban had built up over the years, including field hospitals, weapons stores, bomb-making factories, safe houses and even detention facilities, would make it harder for them to regain the territory, he said. “Not having those will make their job more difficult this spring,” he said.
Many of the Taliban leaders and fighters had escaped to sanctuaries in Pakistan, he said, and coalition forces would focus in coming months on a strategy called “defense and depth,” blocking their return through strategic border regions that the insurgents traditionally used, namely in southern Helmand, eastern Kandahar and eastern Nangarhar Provinces, where Afghanistan borders Pakistan, and preventing them from regaining control of their old havens in Afghanistan.
As Afghanistan braces for an increase in fighting that traditionally occurs in the spring, however, tensions over civilian casualties have flared again, after an episode in eastern Afghanistan last week when American helicopter gunners killed nine boys collecting firewood.
A time lag between the sighting of a group of insurgents by ground forces and the relay of the information to a helicopter attack team led to the deaths, the general said, citing a preliminary inquiry. The attack team believed that the group of boys was the group of insurgents, he said.
“They thought they saw the same group but did not, and there was a gap in time before the final positive identification from the ground force until the handoff to the weapons team,” he said. “Beyond a human tragedy, it was a terrible and tragic mistake.”
That episode on March 1 came soon after a more controversial attack in the same region that the Afghan government said killed 65 civilians on Feb. 17. Mr. Karzai rejected General Petraeus’s earlier explanation that the victims were Taliban fighters, and he refused to accept his apology on Sunday for the deaths of the nine boys.
President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have also apologized to Mr. Karzai and the Afghan people for the deaths.
“This kind of event does clearly undermine the trust between the Afghan government and ISAF, and more important, between the Afghan people and ISAF,” General Petraeus conceded. The full investigation was nearly complete, he said, and a review had been ordered of the tactical directive given to troops. He declined comment on the Feb. 17 episode.
Despite the flare-up, relations with President Karzai were good, the general insisted. The two meet several times a week, including for one-on-one meetings. “We have open and forthright conversations with one another,” he said.
Over all, he noted, civilian casualties caused by Afghan and coalition forces had declined in 2010 by about 20 percent from the previous year, which he said was “impressive” given the deployment of 100,000 more Afghan and coalition troops and the increase in operations in 2010.
A United Nations report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan to be released Wednesday would show the majority — 75 percent — of civilian casualties in 2010 were caused by Taliban and insurgent attacks, he said.
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From Joshua Foust:
For my column this week at PBS, I wrote a roundup of recent stories of progress in the war in Afghanistan, and mused on what they really mean.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/voices/the-numbers-game-in-afghanistan/7838/
The numbers game in Afghanistan
Proponents of the surge point to encouraging stats, but what do these numbers really mean?
March 8, 2011
This week, Defense Secretary Bob Gates made a surprise trip to Afghanistan. His first meetings were dominated by the latest row over civilian casualties — more than 200 civilians have been killed in the past few weeks, many at the hands of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). But there was a bigger reason behind Gates’ visit: to evaluate the war’s progress.
At first glance, the news out of Afghanistan appears to be upbeat: the war’s progress has been so encouraging, Gates told reporters, that the July 2011 drawdown might actually happen — sort of. The actual numbers of troops sent home, he explained, will probably be small, since there needs to be a sizable U.S. presence left over to combat the insurgency in the south and east of the country.
The number of U.S. troops in the country will peak this year. And there is a growing body of statistics to back up what these troops have accomplished: USA Today reports that nearly 900 “Taliban commanders” have been killed or captured in the last 10 months; thousands of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), have been seized; and nearly 10,000 pounds of opium have been impounded. The numbers sound impressive, but they also raise substantial questions.
One is what ISAF hopes to achieve by arresting or killing the mid-level leaders of the insurgency. Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, thinks this effort could be a key to success there because of how it might degrade the insurgency’s effectiveness. “We will see the strategic effectiveness of those efforts, or lack thereof … when the fighting in Afghanistan picks up again in the spring and summer,” he explained.
But it remains unclear what ISAF means when it designates someone a commander — that is, what number of fighters that leader is responsible for and what the strategic effect of taking him off the battlefield will be. The Afghan Ministry of Defense recently estimated that there are upwards of 30,000 Taliban fighters active in Afghanistan. Did the 900 recently killed or detained commanders play an important role within the insurgency, and does removing such a modest number really affect the our efforts there?
The other numbers ISAF touts raise similar questions. Are we really changing the equation when we impound a few hundred RPG rounds in a country awash in weapons? And does our seizing of 10,000 pounds of opium in a country that produces almost 8 million pounds per year really amount to a significant achievement?
From a distance, it is difficult to understand what the massive escalation of U.S. troops was meant to accomplish. It’s important to remember that there will never be as many U.S. troops in that country as there are now. And this is still winter, when violence traditionally abates as Taliban fighters vacation in Pakistan. Yet the violence, mostly in the south, where the surge was concentrated, has never been stronger. According to statistics compiled by Indicium Consulting, the first two months of 2011 were 60 percent more violent than the same period in 2010 (again, concentrated in the south). A recent Washington Post story noted that violence in the east of Afghanistan, which also received a big share of surge troops, is up 21 percent.
There are other discouraging indicators. Incidents involving improvised explosive devices known as IEDs, which are the biggest killer of U.S. troops and Afghan civilians, have not been retarded by the surge. Wired recently reported that the number of IED explosions have remained more or less constant since June 2010 — despite the so-called “winter lull” in Taliban fighting. Afghan civilian casualties — touted in 2009 as the primary indicator of success in the counterinsurgency — are at an all-time high. Worse still, there is mounting evidence that both ISAF and the Afghan government are actively working to suppress reporting on civilian casualties.
In fact, it’s difficult to reconcile the official reports of “successful” operations — the growing number of detained or killed Taliban commanders, escalating opium seizures, and so on — with the larger statistical picture of the war.Some analysts have tried to explain away the more discouraging indicators as the last gasp of a dying movement (essentially accusing the Taliban of throwing a mortar tantrum because they’re losing). But the latest Afghan surge of troops is now more than a year old, if judged from when Marines were first deployed in December 2009. This stands in stark contrast to the Iraq surge: At the eight-month mark in September 2007, General David Petraeus reported to Congress that there was a noticeable and substantial reduction in violence(pdf). There is no similar trend in Afghanistan.
One is left to conclude that either the statistics we use to gauge our effectiveness in the war in Afghanistan are meaningless (because we are actually winning the fight) or that the leaders in the military are spinning the numbers to paint a different reality than the one unfolding on the ground. Neither scenario inspires much confidence in our ability to accurately define or declare victory in this war.
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Joshua:
Why this untenable claim: “…But the latest Afghan surge of troops is now more than a year old, if judged from when Marines were first deployed in December 2009…” ?
In fact, by March last year only some 12K of the 30K of US and nearly 7K in additional NATO/ISAF troop combinations had arrived. Over 25K additional troops arrived between April and November last year, and the most liberal stretch of time would pronounce this new period of troop engagement as begun in earnest only since September 2010. As you also know, these numbers have been concentrated in places like Aghrandhab, Panshwaj and the ‘hard case’ places where longstanding Taliban lodgements and well-defended and mined areas are now reporting activity where none but spotty British contact had been generated in the previous 9 years. There are still strong reasons to doubt the relevance of IEDs encountered as any kind of a meaningful metric at this very early point. There is also reasonable doubt about the absolute relevance of the metric about “IEDs and caches reported to Coalition and ANSF by locals…” But these numbers are up DRAMATICALLY in Kandahar and Helmand province, and bear watching throughout the rest of this year to see if they do mark a major change in the conditions on the ground.
Also, why no mention of the additional 70K ANSF added between Nov 2009 & Nov 2010? More of them and more capable numbers of them IS one of the key measures of success in enabling a core objective of empowering Afghan security forces to deal with the insurgeny on its own; and a large number of critics last year were skeptical that such numbers could ever be raised much less trained over the course of 2010.
Afghanistan is not Iraq, and you must know that comparisons between the two are somewhere between unhelpful and misleading. Having said that, I’d contend that there is one very different dynamic that does matter, and that’s on what happens regarding cross-border insurgency leadership dynamics. By summer 2007, Moktada d’Sadr had opted for an extended stay in Iran and saw his militias embarrased and then broken by US & ISF in Baghdad and Basra by early fall and appeared to have counseled the remainder to turn toward the Iraqi political process. The mid-to-lower level Taliban in Afghanistan have been taking a beating and their in-Pakistan senior leadership (Zakir, Omar, etc.) has been exhorting them to continue ops without serious replenishment of munitions or losses. We must wait through the summer and the spring to see whether their kinetic ops in Afghanistan will severely erode the capability and relevance of those left to do the dirty work by an increasingly distant and isolated insurgency brain trust. We can also look then to see if these senior Taliban and their Pakistani co-facilitators begin to look more seriously at options in the Afghanistan political reconciliation process.
Indeed, count me among those who see a picture in Afghanistan AND Pakistan that is far more mixed and nuanced than your short PBS column chooses to paint.
Best,
Tom
COL/DR Tom Lynch
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Finally, a link to an analysis of the disconnect between what tactical progress US units have made and the lack of same at the strategic level, which gives rise to frustration that whatever sacrifices and progress US forces are making on the ground, it will be for naught if the Afghan government remains incompetent and corrupt and the Afghan Army/police are not capable of holding the successes achieved on the ground.
Click here: Military Analysis – Translating Afghan Strategy Into Action – NYTimes.com