The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Gen.
John Allen, the top allied commander in Afghanistan told Congress on
Tuesday
that he would not recommend further American troop reductions until late this
year, after the departure of the current “surge” forces and the end of the
summer fighting season. Gen. Allen, a Marine four-star general, said that he
remained optimistic about eventual success but that it was too early to begin
shifting forces from battles in the south to the country’s turbulent eastern
provinces.

General
Allen’s testimony comes after a violent period in Afghanistan, beginning with
public protests and a series of murders of American troops by Afghan security
forces, after the burning of Korans by United States military personnel,
followed by a rampage attributed to an American soldier that left 16 Afghan
civilians dead.

He acknowledged
the current diplomatic crisis with Afghanistan, in which we will hand over
complete security control to Afghan forces, and stop the commando night raids, are
the subject of intense negotiation.

He
observed:

“Throughout
history, insurgencies have seldom been defeated by foreign forces,… Instead,
they have been ultimately beaten by indigenous forces. In the long run, our
goals can only be achieved and then secured by Afghan forces. Transition, then,
is the linchpin of our strategy, not merely the ‘way out.’ ”

We also hear
from Sens. McCain, Lieberman and Graham, or as the Wrongologist likes to call
them, the Mendacity Trio.

Today,they
have an Op-ed
in the Washington Post about staying the course in Afghanistan, informing
us that our efforts in Afghanistan have been successful to date, and that we
should listen closely to them in order to sustain that success:

 “To sustain this
fragile progress, it is critical that President Obama resist the shortsighted
calls for additional troop reductions, which would guarantee failure. Our
forces are slated to draw down to 68,000 by September — a faster pace than our
military commanders recommended, which has significantly increased the risks
for our mission…Two weeks ago, …our governments agreed on a timetable for
handing over detention operations. We are optimistic that a similar resolution
can be found soon regarding the gradual transfer of the lead for “night raids”
to Afghan forces. Already, Afghans increasingly lead these operations. The
success rate is overwhelming, and in most cases no shots are fired.”

So,
What’s Wrong?

Despite the happy
talk by Gen. Allen and the Mendacity Trio, there is a lot of bad news. Between
the Koran burning, corpse urinating and late night civilian killings by a rogue
soldier; our latest strategy of counterinsurgency
(COIN) plus surge is clearly failing. The COIN doctrine invokes the
imagery of an “ink blot”: Operations begin in a small area then spread
out to adjacent villages and districts, winning people over and detaching them
from the insurgents.

However,
in Afghanistan, routine contact with locals all too often breeds contempt.

 

 

The remarkable failure of COIN is demonstrated by the epidemic
of killings
of Coalition troops by the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the allies
we are supposed to train and work with in the transition described by Gen
Allen. Here are the data:

 

·   From
Sep. 2008 to May 2011, there were 21 incidents in which ANSF members killed 51 Coalition
personnel, with another 50 wounded

·  The
trend is worsening since mid-July 2010; 15 incidents led to 39 deaths of which
32 were US personnel

·  From
Nov. 2010 to May 2011, 16% of all
hostile deaths of our troops in Afghanistan were at the hands of ANSF
personnel

 These
sobering data come from a 70-page coalition report,
titled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility”. It is a damning
description of the current antipathy between the Afghans and the Coalition
forces. The report warns that the magnitude of the killings “may be unprecedented between
‘allies’ in modern history…and…could undermine the entire war effort.”

The report was
written by Jeffrey Bordin, PhD. a political and behavioral
scientist working for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. Mr. Bordin and similar
researchers, are part of a so-called Red Team within the military, tasked with
finding weaknesses and shortcomings that the enemy may exploit. Their job is to
develop the worst-case scenario as part of planning for the future of the war.

 

They conducted 68
focus groups, surveying 613 Afghan soldiers and police officers, 215 American
soldiers and 30 Afghan interpreters who worked for the Americans.

While the
report focused on three areas of eastern Afghanistan, many of the Afghan
soldiers interviewed had served elsewhere in Afghanistan and the author
believes that they constitute a representative sample of attitudes elsewhere in
the country.

“There are pervasive feelings of animosity
and distrust that ANSF personnel have towards U.S. forces,” the report says,
using the military’s abbreviation for Afghan security forces. The list of
Afghan complaints against the Americans ran the gamut from the killing of
civilians to urinating in public and cursing.

The
findings for Afghan soldiers were divided into 4 tiers. The Top Tier groupings
were those which had led to a least
one serious altercation between US and Afghan forces. These were
mentioned by more than 33% of the ANSF members interviewed:

· US
shouldn’t conduct night raids

· US
soldiers do not respect Afghan women

· They
set up roadblocks and will not let us pass

·  If
attacked, they shoot indiscriminately

·  They
curse constantly

·  They
urinate in public even in front of women

Some comments
included: “U.S. soldiers don’t listen, they are too arrogant,” said one of the
Afghan soldiers surveyed, according to the report. “They get upset due to their
casualties, so they take it out on civilians during their searches,” said
another.

The
Americans were equally scathing. Because of the smaller cohort, their findings
were grouped into two tiers. The top tier included comments that were made by
50% or more of our troops:

· ANSF
are drug abusers (74%+ use hashish)

· They
are thieves

·  They
are traitorous

·  They
are unstable/dangerous

·   Incompetent
on a project/mission

·   They
have poor leadership

·   Unsafe
weapons handling

·   Gutless
in combat

·   Brutal
treatment of dogs

“U.S.
soldiers’ perceptions of ANSF members were extremely negative across
categories,” the report found. Those categories included “trustworthiness on
patrol,” “honesty and integrity,” and “drug abuse.” The Americans also voiced
suspicions about the Afghans being in league with the Taliban, a problem well
documented among the Afghan police.

“They are
stoned all the time; some even while on patrol with us,” one soldier was quoted
as saying. Another said, “They are pretty much gutless in combat; we do most of
the fighting.”

The report concludes that there is a dangerous “crisis of
trust” between Afghan forces and American soldiers that is being ignored
by top commanders. It
documents MANY occasions when Afghani
soldiers say that they have aimed weapons at US troops when there is a
conflict while on joint patrol.  Mr. Bordin goes on to
characterize the shootings of Americans by Afghan troops as “a severe and rapidly metastasizing
malignancy.”

In Conclusion:

Where does
the war go from here? Reading
the horror-inducing findings in this report must call into question the Obama
Administration’s exit strategy and the assumptions on which it is based. The huge challenge facing the country
and President Obama is that we can’t trust our allies.

And it is very doubtful that this
will change in the next 12 months if it hasn’t changed in the last 10 years.
Without trust, how can the Transition proceed?

At the hearing
with Gen Allen, Rep. Walter B. Jones, (R-NC), asked:

“Over the past 10
years, I have been hearing from the administration and those who were in your
position prior to you being in here today,” Mr. Jones said. “Everything is:
‘Our gains are sustainable, but there will be setbacks. We are making progress,
but it’s — it’s fragile and reversible.’ ”

He paused,
and asked, “Why are we still there?”

Rep. Jones captures
the essence of the problem quite succinctly, if unintentionally:

Despite
today’s cheerleading by Sens. McCain, Lieberman and Graham, and Tuesday’s
cheerleading by Gen Allen; a member of the U.S. Congress with seventeen years
of service is asking the ranking General of the U.S. Armed Forces in
Afghanistan to justify to him the war we are fighting there.

Surely, it is the
other way around:
It is the responsibility of the U.S. Congress as representatives of all U.S.
citizens to provide us with cogent reasons for war. And if not to us, then to the
men and women who volunteer to serve in good faith, and if not to them, then at
least to themselves.

We built our strategy assuming at
its foundation that our two cultures could work toward a common goal in
Afghanistan. That the senior partners would turn over the job to the junior
partners as their capabilities grew.

We assumed that our troops and the
Afghan troops could work together.  

It is clear that these assumptions
and our entire strategy are WRONG!