The Times Soldiers at the Nato headquarters in Afghanistan last night said the mood was funereal. With General McChrystal having been relieved of command, many were left wondering whether his vision of victory was dead as well. “Deeply disappointed” was how one senior officer described the reaction in Kabul. Others fought back tears. Many of them have dedicated their lives to the military and, for more than a year, they have served the charismatic former special forces commander, who was America’s main architect of military strategy in Afghanistan. Many were left trying to reconcile a sense of betrayal at the way that their leader was treated with their long-held loyalty to their country, and therefore its Commander-in-Chief. Others share the disdain for their civilian leaders voiced in the Rolling Stone expose. President Obama stressed that the removal of General McChrystal was a change of personnel, not a change in policy. But troops will ask if General Petraeus, the man who is widely credited with “winning” the war in Iraq, will want to attach his name to someone else’s plan in Afghanistan — a plan that has so far has failed to show it can deliver.
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Nieman Watchdog
By Jerome Starkey in Kabul
“Tied up, gagged and killed” was how NATO described the “gruesome discovery” of three women’s bodies during a night raid in eastern Afghanistan in which several alleged militants were shot dead on Feb. 12.
Hours later they revised the number of women “bound and gagged” to two and announced an enquiry. For more than a month they said nothing more on the matter.
The implication was clear: The dead militants were probably also guilty of the cold-blooded slaughter of helpless women prisoners. NATO said their intelligence had “confirmed militant activity”. As if to reinforce the point, coalition spokesman Brigadier General Eric Tremblay, a Canadian, talked in that second press release of “criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians”.
Only that’s not what happened, at all.
The militants weren’t militants, they were loyal government officials. The women, according to dozens of interviews with witnesses at the scene, were killed by the raiders. Two of them were pregnant, one was engaged to be married.
The only way I found out NATO had lied — deliberately or otherwise — was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual. NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged.
The grim toll of soldiers coming home from Afghanistan in coffins is testimony to the brutal contest being waged in the poppy fields of Helmand. For three years, British troops have been massively undermanned, underequipped and overstretched as they have tried to convince a deeply cynical population that they are safe from the Taliban.
Most of the province was beyond the reach of British forces. When the troops did come, they rarely stayed. Far from feeling safe, the people watched as the Taliban grew stronger. But the arrival of 8,000 US Marines in Barack Obama’s surge is threatening to change the balance – and the Taliban are fighting back.
Helmand is their heartland, its opium is their war chest, and they are desperate to stay in control. When I was in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, last month many people struggled to understand why Britain and Nato, with all its might, were unable to defeat these ragtag insurgents. I met a shopkeeper selling drinks just 100 metres from the British headquarters. Afghan police had found two improvised explosive devices buried in a culvert in front of his shop.
“When the international troops first came here, they cleaned up all over Afghanistan within a month,” said Khan Mohammed. “Now I discover that there’s a mine exploding in front of my shop.”
Like many people, he had bought into the wild conspiracy theories which flourish in Lashkar Gah’s bazaars. “The British must be supporting the Taliban,” he said.
But the Taliban know different. More than 3,000 British troops are involved in an operation to clear the roads between Lashkar Gah and Gereshk, Helmand’s second largest town. It’s an operation that Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, who led Taskforce Helmand last summer, hoped to complete, but never did. Without the extra Americans it would have been impossible to succeed because too many of Britain’s fighting troops were pinned down in combat outposts dotted along the central section of the river, which runs the length of the valley. The extra US Marines are evidence of hard lessons learnt in Iraq. Senior commanders insist it will “tip the balance”. But counter-insurgency experts have already issued a warning that they may not be enough to rout the Taliban completely.
John Nagl, who was recently appointed to the Pentagon’s defence policy board, said: “We do not have enough troops to hold what we have cleared in Helmand. The additional American troops are a help, but they are insufficient.”
The Taliban have also learnt lessons. Homemade bombs have become their weapon of choice. Where they used to try to overrun British platoon houses, or out-gun them in a firefight, today they watch and wait.
They look at how the soldiers patrol and they watch how they fight. The irrigation ditches that line most of the roads have become a favourite place for improvised explosive devices (IEDs) because the Taliban know that soldiers instinctively dive there for cover when the fighting starts.
Places like Garmsir, where the Marines are deployed, and Babaji, where the British are involved in Operation Panther’s Claw, have become so-called “strongholds”. The Taliban have been all but free to manufacture IEDs, process poppies into heroin, and terrorise local people.
Students living in the districts have fled to Lashkar Gah. I met three who said the Taliban had closed their schools, the fighting had destroyed their homes, and all three had lost innocent relatives in crossfire.
For the British soldiers on the ground, it’s an impossibly frustrating and dangerous mission. They are fighting an enemy they rarely see and trying to win over a population who have suffered terribly since the foreign troops arrived.
The British and the Americans are following an old Nato doctrine of clear, hold and build, but the extra troops means this is the first time they have been able to fulfil it. Both forces have promised to stay in the areas they clear until the Afghan security forces are ready to take over. If it works, it should at least mean that British troops won’t have to die clearing these areas a second time.
The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
In many ways Afghan soldiers are better suited to complex counter-insurgency operations than either the British, whom the Afghans remember as brutal 19th-century imperialists, or the Americans, whom they see as our modern-day equivalents.
Afghan forces understand tribal dynamics and the fluid nature of village influence and they can exploit them. When, as sometimes happens, they are heavy-handed, it is marginally less galling to the people whom they hurt because they are, at the very least, fellow Afghans.
For all these strengths, the Afghan Army is perhaps a generation from taking full control of this graveyard of empires. Any date for outright transition reflects waning Nato interest in the nine-year war, rather than progress on the ground. The army and the police are growing fast. There are 30,000 soldiers in training. But the numbers are not enough to quell an ideological insurgency against a government that is seen as predatory, selfish and corrupt.