Afghanistan: Why we should be there (or not), how to conduct the mission (or not) & when to leave

[OldSolduer]

David Bruser of The Star.

Thank you. I am not familiar with this person. Five now....do I hear six? ;D

 

[MarkOttawa]

Prof. Michael Byers:
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2008/07/at-what-point-does-he-become-partisan-i.html
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2007/02/afstan-poop-from-professor-bilge-from.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[OldSolduer]

Prof. Michael Byers:
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2008/07/at-what-point-does-he-become-partisan-i.html
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2007/02/afstan-poop-from-professor-bilge-from.html

Mark
Ottawa

Six....do I hear seven? They could be dwarves, except the dwarves were sensible and hard working.... ;D

 

[MarkOttawa]

Egregious Eric Margolis:

Spanking the MSM by correspondence
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2009/06/spanking-msm-by-correspondence.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[OldSolduer]

Egregious Eric Margolis:

Spanking the MSM by correspondence
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2009/06/spanking-msm-by-correspondence.html

Mark
Ottawa

Seven, do I hear eight??

 

[MarkOttawa]

Haroon the Magnificent Siddiqui:
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/011588.html
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/484082

Mark
Ottawa

 

[OldSolduer]

OK....

Haroon the Magnificent Siddiqui:
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/011588.html
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/484082

Mark
Ottawa

we have eight!! Do I hear nine!! (Aucitoneer type voice here)

 

[MarkOttawa]

Linda McQuaig:

Blame Hillier!
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/011197.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[OldSolduer]

Linda McQuaig:

Blame Hillier!
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/011197.html

Mark
Ottawa

Ladies and germs!! We have nine!! Do I hear ten? Ten anywhere?? ;D

 

[MarkOttawa]

Lounge Lizard Larry Martin:

"THE COLUMN I’M GLAD I DIDN’T WRITE"
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/012858.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Eleven: St. Rick Salutin:

Rick Salutin: Urbane, Sophisticated, Genteel, Vacuous, Wrong.
http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/2008/10/rick-salutin-urbane-sophisticated.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Twelve: Michael Harris of CFRA, Ottawa, and the Ottawa Sun (a good buddy of Scott Taylor's):

Bush-league writing
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/008113.html

Hard to quit ;D.

Mark
Ottawa

 

[OldSolduer]

Twelve?

Twelve: Michael Harris of CFRA, Ottawa, and the Ottawa Sun (a good buddy of Scott Taylor's):

Bush-league writing
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/008113.html

Hard to quit ;D.

Mark
Ottawa

Do we hear thirteen??  ;D

 

[MarkOttawa]

Alright --Doubting Thomas Walkom:

Afghanistan: The view from T.O.
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/010709.html

A nattering nabob of negativism
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/010172.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[OldSolduer]

Alright --Doubting Thomas Walkom:

Afghanistan: The view from T.O.
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/010709.html

A nattering nabob of negativism
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/010172.html

Mark
Ottawa

Sigh......Do we hear fourteen? Or are we getting silly!!  ;D

 

[MarkOttawa]

Torch post:

US Gen. McChrystal and the Afghan people/Brits fighting with US aviation help
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-gen-mcchrystal-and-afghan.html

Update: Based on Paul Wells' post:

Canada and the Afghan people
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2009/06/canada-and-afghan-people.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

A rather lengthy Torch post:

Afstan: Gen. (ret'd) Jones vs Adm. Mullen? Various operations
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2009/07/afstan-gen-retd-jones-vs-adm-mullen.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

The conclusion of a draft piece by BruceR at Flit; read the whole thing to see the, er, "challenges" to be faced (lots on links in final para in original):

On mentoring and the ANA
http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2009_07_02.html#006459

...In the south of the country, mentor teams are desperate to find training time to help their Afghan charges with their new vehicles and weapons, or to, god forbid, conduct a training exercise of some kind. Well the best way to do that would be to focus those kinds of efforts on the Afghans in the relatively quiet north and west of the country, in 207 or 209 Corps (where the majority of mentors are drawn from Italy and Germany respectively, with a supporting role played by a mix of other NATO countries). Which they may very well be doing up there. But those now highly-trained soldiers are not likely to come south to spell off the soldiers already in the south in order to get that kind of fighting-training rotation thing happen. Because they can't come without mentors, and their mentors can't move. Even a swap of just a kandak or a brigade between mentor teams would be extremely difficult: neither mentoring country involved would likely trust the outcome, if only because Afghan logistical administration is so appallingly poor, with most of the equipment of both kandaks likely "disappearing" in the gap in mentoring. So left unchanged, depending on which corps they are with, some Afghan soldiers in some areas will fight until they die or quit, and some will see very little action for years.

Obviously, this is to some degree the byproduct of the West's chain of command issues in Afghanistan. Oversight of mentoring remains split between the U.S. Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO's ISAF deployment [more here]. If all the Western soldiers were drawn from the same country, or a highly interoperable smaller coalition of countries, this wouldn't be quite as bad. But really right now each regional command/ANA corps (which map onto each other) is its own independent area of operations, and in most cases the ANA Brigades and corresponding Western forces within a corps can be equally isolated for the reasons above. The U.S. surge into the south right now promises to help with this, if only because a larger portion of troops generally will be drawn from one country, and a lot of these issues will be accordingly mitigated. That won't help much in Helmand though: most of the U.S.-mentored troops that could be joined up with the Marines are in Regional Command East, on the Pakistani border, and they're not without things to do right now [more].
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2009/04/americans-learning-to-work-with-ana.html
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2009/04/embedded-us-marine-trainers-in-afstan.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-border-war2-2009jul02,0,618652.story
The real long-term answer is ANSF growth, but that's also hampered right now by the lack of non-U.S. countries coming forward with new offers of mentor support. An unfortunate side effect of this has been a series of attempts to certify ANA units as fully capable combat-wise, so that their mentor support can be drawn down and reassigned or withdrawn. Unfortunately, those never seem to translate into real independence in combat settings, and one can't help feeling a lot of the pressure to draw down mentor support on the better Afghan units has very little to do with improvements in Afghan capability and a lot to do with spreading too little butter over too much bread. So I suspect the Marines are going to have to make due with the Afghan faces they have for now.

It's fair to say a lot of these challenges were unanticipated when we first decided as a military coalition to try to help the Afghans. Part of that is the unique Afghan operating environment, but I would hazard that a larger part is there aren't a lot of well-defined historical models for what it is we've been trying to do here, in terms of military-building. Saying we're beginning to "get" counter-insurgency overall, through the efforts of Petraeus and others, is one thing. But getting right the building of an indigenous, supportive permanent armed force, in the middle of a war, without compromising that force's independence or its leaders' freedom to ignore our wishes in any way, does not have much relation to the sorts of historical COIN models people usually try to drag out.

When you forego from the start any influence over the disciplinary or pay and promotion systems of an armed force; when you forego all operational control, limiting yourself to monitoring their planning and operations without ever actually taking them over if they start to go sideways; when you are attempting to use the military as an instrument of national unity, rather than the colonial practice of employing and arming one tribe or minority to oppose your will over another's; when you're fighting an insurgency for the people, rather than conducting one with them against a third-party oppressor; when you're supplying all their equipment and financing, but trusting them to keep track of it; you're in a whole different place than the British army ever was with Clive, or Lawrence, or Wingate, or all the other cliched role models we tend to trot out (Algeria, Malaya, etc.). Our real predecessors as mentors in Afghanistan would seem to be relatively less-studied figures: more on the lines of a Von Steuben at Valley Forge, or a John Paul Vann in his pre-Ap Bac days, or the Jedburgh teams in the Second World War, or even British Indian Department types in colonial America like Matthew Elliott and William Johnson: influencing military forces positively without ever exerting leadership over them. Truly, the prehistory of operational mentoring as a military art, even though it would appear to be a key component of modern COIN, has yet to be written. And it's partly because of that, that when it finally is, I'm frankly not sure yet that the current Afghan experiment is going to be its most glorious chapter...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

A post by Terry Glavin:

The Uprising Changes Everything, Part III: Exposing Iranian Treachery In Afghanistan
http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/2009/07/uprising-changes-everything-part-iii.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

More from BruceR at Flit:

On ANA officers and hope
http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2009_07_03.html#006460

Good post from yet another good ETT blog here:
http://bc235.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-06-18T18:12:00%2B04:30&max-results=5

The bright spot is that the younger [ANA] officers I’ve worked with are much better than the older guys. Afghan Army officers basically come in three varieties: the older officers who were Russian-trained or influenced; the former mujahideen fighters/commanders; and the new, younger, American-trained generation. The former mujahideen fighters make pretty good officers and are revered by their men but don’t have the education or formal schooling and don’t listen to advice. The older officers, in the words of my best interpreter, a former ANA 1stSgt, “don’t ever want to leave the base” and have an excuse why they can’t do anything about their problems or act on our suggestions. The new generation of officers is much more willing to do operations, listen to our advice, and make some changes on the fly if need be, although they’re still somewhat afraid to make mistakes. Unfortunately, for now the power lies with that older group of officers. Hopefully, once the younger, American-trained generation comes of age, things will start changing rapidly for the better.

This is obviously every military mentor's hope, too. I'm skeptical. Something I read somewhere about hope and its relation to a plan.

Yes, no question, in the ANA you've got some very promising senior NCOs and lieutenants, some half decent captains and majors, and some truly awful colonels and generals. And that's before the new Western-trained officers from the new Afghan military college started rejoining the army this spring. Old people have to retire some time, so are things not looking up? Maybe this is just a matter of time?

But...

The trouble is that the ANA has systemic issues that are at least somewhat countervailing. To excel in the ANA today you have to have the attributes your superiors respect. At present in the ANA those include familial connections, a tolerance for senior-level graft, and risk aversion. Things useful to us -- like aggressiveness on the battlefield -- are not on their list. So those who rise rapidly in the ranks in the next couple years are going to have to, to some degree, incorporate those attributes, as well. Which doesn't mean they won't gradually get better as the years go by, but we shouldn't expect they'll get better at the same rate their senior officers get replaced, either, because those same senior officers are the ones picking their replacements.

Note also the use of an ex-ANA senior NCO as a terp. That, too, is unfortunately common. The literate and brainy soldiers, by picking up a little English, can go from $100 a month to $600, and still hang with their buds. Which is still helpful, sure: better for us they work with the army than an NGO. System-wide, it does tend to drain talent from the pool, though, and one suspects is acting to limit the number of actual ANA officers and senior NCOs we can converse with directly.

Mark
Ottawa