War in Afghanistan

Four explosions struck the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday night, killing at least 35 and wounding around 45, according to Al-Jazeera.

Three of the bombs appeared to be a diversion to a larger blast at a prison that had been targeted during a successful jailbreak two years ago, Reuters reported.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks and called them a "message" to NATO commanders who have announced an impending offensive in Kandahar this summer, similar to the just-completed operation in Marja.

As many as 21 people were killed today by two U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan's Madakhel tehsil.

David Miliband's MIT speech on Afghanistan yesterday spent a good deal of time on two issues: reconciling the Taliban with the central government in Kabul, and integrating Afghanistan into the region.

On the first point, as expected, Miliband urged Afghan president Hamid Karzai to accelerate his Taliban reintegration and reconciliation programs.

U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates deserves some credit for his fairly reasoned and non-triumphal public statements during this week's trip to Afghanistan. He warned against over-optimism in Afghanistan, stressing that there are "dark days" ahead and that the quick "clear" phase in Marja doesn't suddenly mean the war is won (or even that Operation Moshtarak is won).

In Now Zad yesterday, he commended soldiers and Marines for clearing the area of Taliban, but then said "you own it" -- and warned of a complicated path ahead.

One theme that's clear in a lot of recent writing on the war in Afghanistan -- particularly writing from the policy community in Washington -- is the delineation between what's good for the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, and what's good for Afghanistan itself.

Monica Bernabe, a Spanish journalist writing on the Afghanistan Analysts Network, says Badghis province is basically a mess.

'Everybody has left because of the fighting', the American Major Richard Wade said in June 2009 to justify why very few civilians could be seen in the Bala Murghab bazaar. 'The Taleban have check points outside the town and force the people to pay if they want to enter', he added. ANA captain Abbasi Ghazanfar described the brutality of the insurgents: 'When they capture an Afghan soldier, they take out their eyes first and afterward behead him. Only those soldiers who are Pashtuns have a chance to save their lives.'

The deteriorating security in Badghis could have implications for other provinces in the north, like Faryab. And the minimal Afghan police/army presence in the province isn't large enough to confront an influx of Taliban (on the contrary: a police official was arrested last month for feeding information to the Taliban).

I'm trying to figure out the logic behind NATO's latest rhetorical pivot.

I expected the Marja triumphalism -- the arrival of NATO's hand-picked governor, Haji Zahir, and the well-publicized flag-raising ceremony. Commanders said today that they've finished the "clear" phase of "clear-hold-build-transfer"; a press release from ISAF said NATO and Afghan soldiers have "cleared the last major pocket of resistance," though -- as with past Helmand surges -- the definition of "cleared" isn't necessarily what you think.

Multiple news outlets are reporting that a NATO airstrike killed at least 5 civilians in the Uruzgan province on Sunday.

According to the New York Times, U.S. Special Forces helicopters attacked a convoy of two Land Cruisers and a pickup truck carrying 42 people. A statement released by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan today said that the troops believed the convoy was carrying insurgents, but that when a ground force arrived, they found women and children and took them for medical treatment.

A statement from the Afghan government said that of the 27 dead, 4 were women and one was a child. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in keeping with NATO's rapid-response public relations policy, has promptly apologized to President Hamid Karzai and explained the strike in a video released to the public and translated into Dari and Pashto.

Dexter Filkins, who Josh Foust recently dubbed "ISAF's official spokesman at the New York Times," has a remarkably upbeat analysis of the war in Afghanistan in today's week-in-review section. Filkins mentions several times that he, personally, feels optimistic about the direction of the war -- and builds to this conclusion (emphasis mine).

At week's end, by all accounts, the Marja operation was going well. In Pakistan, Mr. Baradar was said to be talking. After four long years, the initiative, at least for now, had returned to the Americans.

The U.S. is fighting a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Much ink has been spilled over the last few months about how the war is now population-centric, not enemy-centric; how "hearts and minds" matter more than body counts.

The New York Times and the Washington Post both have stories this morning about the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. But they come to strikingly different conclusions about why Baradar was captured. Here are Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung in the WaPo, casting the capture as a sign of increased U.S.-Pakistani cooperation:

The capture of senior Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan represents the culmination of months of pressure by the Obama administration on Pakistan's powerful security forces to side with the United States as its troops wage war in Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

This is pretty much the standard narrative that has emerged since Baradar's capture was announced on Monday night: The Pakistani intelligence and security services have finally accepted that the Taliban poses a threat, and Baradar's arrest signals a new level of cooperation.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban's military commander and one of the group's "founding fathers," was captured recently by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence in a raid in Karachi.

... Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

A significant development, to be sure. Baradar is the highest-level Taliban figure apprehended to date; his capture will probably degrade the Taliban's military capabilities, at least in the short term. And it's notable that he was nabbed in Pakistan, with (presumably) extensive cooperation between the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

The coalition leadership in Afghanistan spent months publicizing the just-launched offensive to clear and hold the alleged Taliban stronghold of Marja. This intense flag-waving left us pondering the benefits of hyping such an offensive: Given the overwhelming NATO force brought to bear, wouldn't the drawbacks of a possibly prolonged, bloody fight outweigh the public-relations benefits of a victory everyone saw coming?

A British press release (flagged by the Long War Journal yesterday) offers a concise if unsurprising justification, courtesy of U.K. spokesman Major General Gordon Messenger:

There were three reasons for signalling the operation in central Helmand in advance. First, to give the Taliban a choice. Second, to make the population aware that the operation was about to unfold. Third, it allowed a much greater level of Afghan involvement and ownership, and subsequently Afghan participation.

But I think there's a fourth, unspoken reason.

Update (2/16/10 11:40 a.m.): The New York Times, quoting a NATO spokesman, says today that fighting in Marja has slowed to "sporadic" gun battles with the Taliban, and that coalition forces have not suffered any more deaths after a U.S. Marine and a British soldier were killed on Saturday, the first day of the offensive.

The Los Angeles Times' Tony Perry and Laura King, reporting from Kabul and Marja, report that Marines were "inching their way forward" on Monday, sometimes through knee-deep muck, as teams painstakingly cleared IEDs. Perry and King say that some 5,000 residents of Marja have fled town. Marja is an agricultural township with an estimated population of somewhere around 80,000.

There have been contradictory reports about the artillery fire that killed 12 civilians on Sunday in Marja. Initial accounts, including from the New York Times' C.J. Chivers, who was on the scene, said that at least one rocket fired from a base dozens of miles to the north hit a house around 300 yards away from the intended target.

But Wired's Noah Schactman says that NATO is now saying those rockets hit their intended target and that troops didn't know there were civilians inside the house.

Afghan officials said three people in the house were Taliban militants firing on American troops, but Chivers reports in today's Times story that the Marines he was with "complained to an embedded New York Times reporter that they had not ordered the rocket strike and that it hit the wrong house."

Joshua Foust has a good piece over in The National's weekend review about the folly of relying on tribal militias in Afghanistan. (I haven't touched the subject in nearly two weeks! So I'm long overdue for a post on it.)

One notable mistake: Foust writes, "Unlike the Iraqis in Anbar, however, the Shinwari do not support the central government." But folks in Ramadi aren't too fond of the government in Baghdad, as Spencer Ackerman notes.

If you go to Google News and search for "Marja," you'll find (literally) about 4,000 stories, most of which are rewrites of the same set of ISAF talking points: 20,000 NATO and Afghan troops are gearing up to attack the Taliban; Marja is the Taliban's last refuge in southern Afghanistan; the battle will be the most important military operation in eight years; etc., etc.

Very few of these bother to point out the inherent contradictions in Operation Moshtarak -- like the conflict between this enemy-centric offensive and NATO's stated population-centric strategy.

The New York Times devotes 800 words this morning to the startling conclusion that international borders are porous.

The Chaman crossing -- marked on the Pakistani side by the three-story Friendship Gate -- should presumably be among the most secure in the country: it is the sole crossing between Kandahar, the birthplace of the Afghan Taliban, and Baluchistan, which is, according to American officials, home to Taliban commanders who control many Afghan fighters. But Taliban fighters -- anyone, really -- can cross and smuggle weapons and drugs...

You could write this about literally any two countries. The Egypt-Israel border should be "among the most secure" in the world, but hundreds of impoverished African migrants find a way to sneak across every year. The border between North and South Korea should be locked tight, but defectors find a way out.

Things are already getting better in Afghanistan, according to Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

The commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, noted that last summer he believed security in Afghanistan was at risk of significant decline, but that he felt differently now. "I am not prepared to say that we have turned the corner," he cautioned. "So I'm saying that the situation is serious but I think we have made significant progress in setting the conditions in 2009, and beginning some progress, and that we'll make real progress in 2010."

Listen, I understand that there's a certain damned if you do, damned if you don't quality to McChrystal's public pronouncements about the war. But why not say to the press, listen, guys, the boss just announced his new strategy in December, Holbrooke just unveiled his civilian plan a few weeks ago, most of the surge troops haven't arrived yet, and it's too early to make any pronouncements -- but we're confident this strategy will work.

Instead McChrystal says things have improved in the last two months -- not really a defensible proposition, and also not one that helps a counterinsurgency strategy in the long term, because it cements in the public mind the illusion of quick and easy progress.

After months of hyping the latest Helmand surge, ISAF officials are launching one last PR blitz before Operation Moshtarak, a large assault on the town of Marja. Al-Jazeera reports that it will be the largest offensive since the 2001 invasion, led by more than 1,700 Afghan soldiers. The New York Times has been hyping the Helmand offensive all week. And a well-publicized overnight operation in Nad Ali killed roughly 30 Taliban fighters (of course!).

A swarm of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles launched what may have been the heaviest single bombardment in the history of the pilotless drone program today in Pakistan's North Waziristan province.

"Up to eight US drones fired some 18 missiles at multiple militant targets in Datta Khel village," a senior security official told the AFP. The report didn't say if the official was American or Pakistani. The attack "was the heaviest ever in terms of the number of missiles fired," according to Reuters. It left at least 10 suspected militants dead, including three foreigners, though that toll could rise.

Today's attack in Datta Khel, the stronghold of Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, is the 13th drone strike in Pakistan or Afghanistan this year and the 14th since a Dec. 30, Taliban-led suicide bombing killed seven CIA agents at a Forward Operating Base in the Afghan town of Khost. So far in 2010, the United States has launched a drone attack around once every two-and-a-half days.

The guys over at Democracy Arsenal are having an interesting back-and-forth over the Shinwari tribal militia strategy we discussed yesterday. Patrick Barry and Michael Cohen think it's a bad idea; Michael Hanna is more sanguine. (I'm oversimplifying; you should really read all three posts.)

Hanna agrees that burning down the houses of Taliban sympathizers -- a war crime -- is "probably not something we should be associated with." So let's put that aside and focus on the abstract idea: Should the U.S. partner with and empower sub-national actors that express an interest in fighting the Taliban?