Embedded in Afghanistan...

Sustainability

2011-06-21T13:43:00.016-04:00

After reading this article I decided to reopen this blog and make a few comments...

Honaker was part of our AO, and now it's the only one of the seven bases we had that's still open. Sad, but not surprising. During the end of 2008 and most of 2009 Honaker was more or less considered a "vacation" spot for our ANA. Our commanders saw being stationed there as a nice break from the Korengal. I'm not saying it was not a dangerous area, but the threats we faced there were slight compared to what we were seeing elsewhere...at least at the base itself. At Honaker we could always find a fight within easy walking distance (walk far enough up any valley in Kunar and things will get hairy quickly), but the base itself was not under constant attack as it appears to be now.

How did it end up this way? Well, one could point to any number of factors. The most obvious cause is the closure of the other bases in the area has made Honaker a focal point for attacks. I guess the bigger question is why the whole venture in the Pech and Korengal failed. I recall the public affairs people attempting to spin the Pech pullout as a good thing, as our presence in the area was only making the people "angry" and making the situation worse. And furthermore that the ANA would be able to do the job. Those words were laughable at the time and only more so now after seeing the success our forces are having in Helmand, which clearly demonstrates our presence, when done right, has positive results. Any positive spin on pulling out under those circumstances was simply a matter of making excuses for failure and changing the standards and goals when we simply could not meet the objective. If you can't do the mission...then the mission is not important.

The analysis of why the US forces in the area could not do the job is for someone else, but I'll sum it up by saying the will was not there, and all of us that were there bear some responsibility. It's unfortunate that a lot of good men gave so much to see it turn out like that. I do feel bad for that company commander out at Honaker now. Although the enemy his company is up against is certainly no more difficult than what so many others have seen in that area, at least in earlier years the hope existed that the mission in the Pech and Korengal was for something. Being on the tail end of a failed mission and seeing your guys get injured and killed has got to be tough.

Anyway, I digress...I meant to write a piece on sustainability and not air my own grievances about how the larger fight was run out there. The sustainability idea came to me when reading about the ANA commander complaining about not having fuel for his vehicles and generators. His soldiers do not have air conditioning and are having a hard time. It is warm at Honaker in June, but at 3000 feet above sea level, it's not that hot. Certainly not Iraq hot. And however hot it is, the notion that infantry are uncomfortable due to a bit of 100 degree heat and can't operate as a result is so farcical as to border the insane. Again, not surprising though, as that is the kind of thing we have gotten them used to by buying them air conditioners. However, our own comfort and logistical needs have undermined our ability to tell them they can't have those things. Our ability to supply ourselves with every manner of comfort item, including AC, not only takes away from our own focus on the mission, but sets a poor example for the ANA. And now we have ANA commanders complaining about being hot and not being able to work...I'm pretty sure Captain Maboob's home does not have an AC unit.

Putting the ANA in uparmored vehicles and giving them our weapons were other examples of misguided and unsustainable decisions with the aim of turning the ANA into the US Army. Why on earth would we want to put the ANA in humvees when the ANA will have no way of sustaining those vehicles? Or give them weapons that require more maintenance and expertise to use effectively? Our own Army apparently can't do the job, so why create a poorly funded and equipped little brother? I'm not sure if it boils down to business interests or what, but giving the Afghans Western style amenities and equipment makes no sense when they'll never be able to maintain them over the long term, not to mention the mindset (predictability, laziness, defensive/reactive) having armored vehicles engenders. The ANA should be on foot in the mountains seeking and destroying the enemy, not riding around in armored cars burning costly diesel fuel and distancing themselves from the populace, while also making easy targets of themselves and contributing to the decay of their fighting spirit.

The short-sighted decision-making goes beyond the stricly military sphere into the development realm. Even the buildings we're putting up are poorly designed for Afghanistan. Cinder block and concrete buildings won't last, are poorly ventilated, and are hot in the summer and cold in the winter. But that's what we build, rather than using traditional construction methods that result in temperate cave-like rock/mud structures that have stood for eons despite the harsh climate and earthquakes. Central electric grid systems, street lighting, even paved roads...I'm not sure any of it can withstand the test of time unless the international community wants to keep pouring money into Afghanistan forever. I'm not saying development efforts don't have their place, but I am suggesting the Western mind-set of painting a petroleum-product fueled society on a 12th century agrarian canvas might be a little far-fetched and ultimately wasteful. A little more adaptation please? We're 10 years in.

In any case, the ANA will continue to ask for all manner of military technology, including aircraft and artillery to help them fight, and will use the lack thereof as an excuse for being unable to win. Since giving them these things is unsustainable and costly (and would not matter anyway) the only solution is to train and motivate them to fight and defeat the insurgents using traditional simple infantry tactics and hard work. To train them to do those things, we need to be doing those things.

Pfinish

2010-01-06T19:27:00.020-05:00

"Finish" was one word our ANA knew in English. They'd been around Americans long enough to pick up that one very useful word at least. They pronounce it kind of like "pfinish", but the point is they knew what it meant. The word itself actually became a powerful camaraderie-building tool for us, as it really allowed the ETTs and the ANA to communicate directly with each other without the need for a terp, albeit in a very limited way, though one might be surprised how far that one word can go....

We might hear them say something like "Dooshman (the Pashto word for enemy) pfinish!!" when we were back at the base debriefing after the gunfights. I can recall a Marine saying "House is finish" to a couple of ANA and them returning huge gap-toothed grins after a bomb was dropped on a mud hut. Saying "Finish" after a meal meant the ANA might stop exhorting you to eat and drink more. When the ANA went to look for a blivet of fuel that we allowed to go rolling down the mountainside, they came back and pretty accurately described the blivet and its contents as "Finish". Saying "Finish" and holding empty hands in the air in reference to whatever the ANA were asking us for might get them off our case briefly.

In the end, for myself and the other ETTs I worked with, our time with the ANA was finished. Our ANA are still there, likely doing the same things, and playing the same games, that they did with us, but the reality is they can't escape from the war the way we can. Not that I feel sorry for them; they'll need to take ownership of their situation if they want it to improve, but it was always important to keep in mind that the ANA are in it for the long haul when we became frustrated at their lack of initiative.

Someday the fighting in Afghanistan may even be finished. Whatever the case may be for the future of the war, it is most definitely time for this blog to be finished. I had a few more topics on my list, but it's time to move on.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who's read and supported this blog. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it...

Getting there

2009-12-11T17:23:00.025-05:00

The events referred to in this entry happened about a year ago. Put this together based on some...memories.

You may find yourself in another part of the world...and you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here!?" - "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads

Thankfully, the worst part of all of my deployments has been the getting there. The anxiety of the unknown combined with saying goodbye to friends and family, as well as the actual travel involved in getting yourself and your gear to these places on the other side of the earth combine to wear on you mentally and emotionally. Though my personal exposure to violence has exponentially increased through each successive deployment, I still felt quite a lot of unease before even the first one simply because I did not really know what I was getting into before I got there. One’s tolerance for known dangers can increase over time, but increasing one’s tolerance for uncertainty itself seems tougher to develop.

My deployment to Afghanistan has come with a special sense of concern, and is the only time in my life thus far I have felt compelled to buy more life insurance. If the numbers involved put the probabilities in your favor you have to invest right...? Going to a place as well known for danger as the Korengal Valley, one can’t help but be a little apprehensive, although those feelings of worry are offset somewhat by the excitement for the adventure and challenge ahead. All of us headed out the Korengal volunteered to be here, and several other Marines had wanted to be out here but couldn’t be. The Korengal is likely to be a bit more dangerous than the Pech Valley where the rest of the team is stationed, but the chief difference is likely to be in the living conditions, which are bound to be much more austere with no running water.

The trip out to the Korengal began about 2 AM one morning in late-November. We had to get up that early just to get over to the passenger terminal and get registered for the flight that would take off in the late morning. Hauling a few large bags around with all of your body armor and weapons has always been my least favorite part of these trips overseas. Something about that feeling of vulnerability when you have all of the things you are going to need and rely upon with you at that same time makes you a little nervous.

Pax terminal: we showed extremely early – par for the course. Sat around for a long while waiting before anything at all happened. Check. Mid-ranking personnel working there but not helpful - unable to make decisions or give useful information. Mm-hmm. People sleeping on the floor with their packs for pillows and few chairs in the pax terminal. A bearded well-built guy in the corner with tricked out gear keeping to himself. Removing rank insignia and boot bands...won't see those again for awhile. Having to physically attach each item we’d brought with us to our bodies by strapping, stacking, and grabbing before jumping on the scale to get weighed. After a few hours in the pax terminal we finally made it out to the tarmac…just as the sun was coming up.

Tarmac: cold, windy morning. Soldiers hiding from the windblast behind the massive CH-47 smoking cigarettes…but not standing too close with those cigarettes. Been on a Chinook before, but never been this close to one in the daylight with this much time to look at it…it’s as big as a bus. We know we’re all headed out to the same place so the Marines strike up some conversations with some of the soldiers around us, who don’t appear to be new to the country as we are. A few of the soldiers are returning from leave and headed back to the Korengal. They have some interesting stories to tell about the place. Not much of it pretty. They manage to convey the impression quite succinctly that they hate the Korengal and are sick to death of getting shot at. These aren’t really the things most would want to hear on their way out there, but what can you do but laugh and say to yourself and your colleagues, “It’s all part of the adventure…” We talk to the crew chief and ask if we can get dropped off at Firebase Vimoto, or if we have to get dropped off at the Korengal Outpost (KOP). The crew chief looks at us like we’re crazy and says he doesn’t know what Vimoto is. One of the soldiers nearby chimes in that there is nothing resembling an LZ at Vimoto. We’ll have to walk down to Vimoto from the KOP.

Ride out: first first-hand look at the landscape. It’s clear day but the helo is not made for sight-seeing. Can see enough to notice mud-brick abandoned-looking homes scattered about just outside the wire from Bagram. The flat valley around the air base quickly gives way to mountains…tall snow-capped mountains…but not as green and tree covered on the slopes as I had expected. We make a couple of stops on the way out. I’m a little surprised how much time we’re spending on the ground here in broad daylight, but I suppose they know what they are doing. The last leg of the helo journey out to the Korengal only has ten or so passengers on board - the remaining few. Once we land, we’re not quite as organized as we ought to be getting our possessions and persons off the bird quickly, but we manage to get it done and the helo gets away without incident.

KOP: We're admonished by the head of the guys we're replacing for not getting our gear off the bird quicker. A Russian helo went down not far from here not long ago - no use keeping the bird around long enough for them to draw a bead on it. We chat for awhile, before we pack a bag with the stuff we need most and then take off for Vimoto.

Walking: Even the one kilometer walk over to Vimoto along a flat road is fairly difficult at the speed we’re doing it at with the stuff we’re carrying. I realize quickly my conditioning will need some work, though I thought I was pretty strong coming in. Tough to stay acclimatized to altitude when you’re not at altitude…and now we’re at about 4500 feet. Not too high, but high enough for now. At least we aren't heading up to Firebase Restrepo...that looks like a long way up.

Vimoto: Vimoto is about what I’d imagined it to be: a few mud buildings surrounded by concertina wire on the side of a mountain situated on the edge of a village. The guys we’re replacing look very lean and intense, but are confident and relaxed in this forlorn place. The ANA soldiers seem friendly enough…no doubt they’ll be sizing us up over the next few weeks. Rounds start flying around the valley a mere hour after we arrive, and a bomb gets dropped on a house a kilometer up the road. We made it here and some of the things I’ve been wondering about for quite awhile now are starting to become clear; all in all, a good first day.

The White House

2009-12-01T19:17:00.009-05:00

Our typical mission was to conduct “Leader’s Engagements” with the populace. Basically, that meant we’d go into the villages and talk to the people, typically the head man. The idea was to get the ANA out there mingling with the populace and basically showing themselves to be present and competent. Gathering information about security developments in the area and what projects the villagers would like to see done was a secondary part of those missions. We may have considered the actual information gathered to have been the most important part of the mission, and not of ancillary importance, if we’d been able to get relevant information about the security (enemy disposition, whereabouts, etc.) more often, or ever for that matter. Given the peoples’ reluctance to tell us anything about the enemy we’d usually just talk about happenings in the area in a general way, unless we had something specific we wanted to talk to them about. We’d always ask them about what small projects we could help them with. As ETTs with the ANA we depended on the US Army logistically for, well, everything really, so obviously we didn’t have control over the money for projects or humanitarian assistance to give to the villagers, but we could help coordinate with the US Army.

Often when the Army had humanitarian assistance to hand out, they’d let the ANA take the lead on the actual distribution of the goods. Those “HA drops” were always interesting. We’d usually try to hand out whatever it was, like radios for instance, in an organized way, but in the end it almost always became a scrap for whoever could grab what. A bunch of men with guns are no match for determined youngsters in the presence of what, for them, must be riches.

At any rate, we’d always prefer the ANA to do the talking with the villagers. We’d try to prepare the ANA beforehand on what topics should be discussed, or which propaganda pieces we’d like to mention, but it’s tough enough to get the ANA to patrol and conduct security the way you might want…getting them to conduct “conversation ops” perfectly was not a major concern.

Whether the ANA were taking the lead on the talking or not, if you spend enough time out there you’ll have some interesting conversations. Sometimes it’s funny stuff. Sitting down and having tea in a village I’d never been in before with an old man I’d never seen before, the old man inquired who I was and whether I was new in Afghanistan. I mentioned I’d been around a little while, but had been over in the Korengal Valley before. The old man and his friend looked at each other and said something to the effect of the Korengal being “the tiger valley” (referring to the fighters in the area). I was like, “yes, beautiful place, the Korengal, but I don’t think the locals liked us very much since they were always shooting at us.” That brought a few laughs.

Another time a village elder, when inquired what help the village needed, stated they needed a well. At the time we were sitting in a kind of small village square, complete with a fully functioning well. When I pointed out the nice, relatively new well to the old man, and asked if there were some problem with it, the elder replied that the well was fine, but the ‘village’ needed a well nearer his home, which was apparently on the other side of the square, a good 30 yards from the well. Those requests usually end with a “We’ll see what we can do” from our end, which I was fairly certain was interpreted on their end as I intended, i.e. as a “Not gonna happen.”

Some of the conversations are not funny at all though. The average Afghan has seen a lot of tragedy in his or her life. They usually don’t feel compelled to share stories that are personal in nature, but I do recall one time when it happened. The mission was to visit a particular village, known for having a huge white house. The village was not far up the valley from our base. In fact, we could see the white house from the base, though it would take a good 30 minutes to walk over there.

Upon getting into the village, we did the usual – looked around at the terrain and figured out how we were going to set up security with our sparse forces (2 Marines and perhaps a dozen ANA), before looking around for the village elder to talk to. We eventually got ourselves set up and found an elder, who invited me, my terp, and the ANA leader inside “The White House” for tea, nuts, and candies. No matter how poor, down and out an Afghan is, they’ll always have some small provisions for guests. It was a pretty gloomy, rainy day and the old fella seemed kind of down, though it’s never easy to really read people when you can’t understand a word they are saying. Eventually, his nephews, young men in their 20’s, came out and proceeded to show us pictures of their father, who apparently had been the head man in the village, but had been killed by the insurgents just a few months before. At that point, the older gentlemen teared up and had to leave the room. The story was that the Taliban killed him because he had been a powerful figure in the local area, and wasn’t showing enough support to them. It’s those moments where you really realize how alone those people are. They may have had each other, living in a huge house built of stones fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, but once we left the area that day they were really on their own. Our base may have been less than a mile away, but we didn’t really know what went on in that village at night. “Protecting the people” in Afghanistan is a tough thing to do.

We stayed there for quite awhile talking about a fair number of topics, and had quite a good time after we got past the initial sadness over the death of their relative. The young men were hoping to get jobs working on a base somewhere. In reply to their requests, I said my usual “I’ll see what I can do”, which I figured would get interpreted (by my interpreter and the young local men) as a polite brushoff, but apparently was not, as they showed up at the base the next day saying I’d promised them jobs. It can be tough to know who your enemy is, but in that case I think those guys were good. It’s unfortunate that many of the men who can’t find jobs end up in the welcoming arms of the Taliban, but there was not a lot that we could do about that situation at that time and place, so we had to send them away empty handed.

Eats, shoots and leaves

2009-11-22T23:35:00.010-05:00

Thinking back on things, it does seem strange some of the things that went on. You walk around among, shake hands with, and eat and drink in homes of people you don’t really know and may not like you. But I never felt any fear in those situations, though I knew some of these people collaborated with insurgents. Pashtuns are hospitable people, and they'll take it to the point that they're equally hospitable to some of our enemies as well.

I’d say we returned the favor and were pretty darn hospitable to local people as well, however. On one occasion the local villagers brought men to the base with bullet and shrapnel wounds. They looked like Taliban, with their beards and stares, and my interpreter was absolutely convinced that they were. And how does an innocent get bullet and shrapnel wounds anyway? There was generally enough notice given before the battle commenced (often in the form of a single shot cracking off, followed some 5 seconds later by larger barrages) to allow most people to take cover before things really got crazy. Well, we patched those Taliban up, though they may have been detained for awhile since they had to be shipped away for better care. It’s all part of the game. Patch them up and send them back out to play.

I can recall drinking tea and eating nuts with an elder when bullets from across the valley started impacting near our men outside the house. I immediately put my helmet back on and ran outside to help out, without finishing the nuts or tea, or even saying goodbye or thank you. Afterward, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the bad joke about bad punctuation regarding a panda who walked into a restaurant, had a meal, and then shot the place up...since the book on pandas stated that a panda is a four legged, furry animal that eats, shoots and leaves. Being a panda, he does eat shoots and leaves, but typically does not eat, shoot and leave. Well, Marines sometimes really do eat, shoot, and then leave the area.

Sometimes it's shocking how little we really know about the people we're fighting, but my feeling is that for a lot of these guys we're fighting, especially out in the Korengal, the insurgency is a way of life. It's just what they do, and how they gain respect. Many certainly are ideologically driven - but not all.

The only time we really got a good look at our enemy was on Friday afternoon at the local mosque or occasionally out playing cricket. All those young men that were missing in the villages during our regular patrols would appear out of the woodwork to attend the mosque on Friday, kind of like Sunday morning church for Americans. Their age, body language, avoidance of eye contact, and lack of response to our greetings told us all we needed to know about the loyalties of those young men. But did being 90% sure that these guys were the ones shooting at us from the ridgelines a couple of times a week mean that we could arrest them and deal with them? No. Not at all. We let them go about their business, only to meet again in the near future on the ‘modern’ battlefield to play our dangerous little game of long-distance target practice.

ANSF vetting

2009-11-18T19:28:00.005-05:00

It's always disturbing to hear news of Coalition trainers being turned on by their trainees. When you hear of an incident like the one a couple of weeks ago where the five Brits were killed by one of their trainees, it certainly makes you wonder how feasible the end strategy of training more and more Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF...an umbrella term to cover the ANA, ANP, Border Police, and other security agencies within Afghanistan) is. Thankfully, such incidents are rare, but with more and more ANSF out there, we're bound to start seeing more of this. To significantly increase the size of the ANP and ANA they are going to have continue lowering the already low standards for recruits...many are essentially conscripts already.

Currently, ANP members need little more than the recommendation of two local elders in order to get accepted into the police academy - and very shortly after that they are police. There are other requirements, but in a country where few people can read and bureaucratic institutions are lacking, the requirement to be a citizen or not have been convicted of a crime in recent years is not difficult to circumvent.

The ANA has a bit more of a vetting process, but both the ANA and ANP could be easily infiltrated by insurgent sympathizers...and undoubtedly have been. However, having a few bad apples within the units I was embedded with was not really a concern of mine. Not that it did not ever cross my mind, but it was kind of like if I'm going to worry about that then I'm going to drive myself crazy. And my view on it was the good ANA in my unit would protect me from the bad ones if there were any. All in all I trusted them...but, of course, I did what I could to maintain cordial relationships with my guys...not that having a undercover insurgent like you personally is really going to save you if he's dedicated, but it's another reason to develop rapport with them all the same.

Afghans, in general, are not suicidal about their cause and have quite a bit of guile. These incidents where an ANP or ANA member shoots our men are likely to result in the death of the aggressor (though the shooter in the incident mentioned above is still on the loose as far as I know). I would think an infiltrator in the ANA or ANP would be more likely to partake in a more survivable activity, like simply reporting to the insurgents on our patterns and giving early warning of operations. For many reasons, we had quite a bit of difficulty getting the initiative on the enemy during my time - I would not discount the possibility of informers within the ANA contributing to this.

The good news is we have initiatives going on that should help with the vetting and accountability of ANSF forces, and should help over time in getting the bad ones out and out for good. Before I left, we were, with the help of a civilian contractor who was a specialist in working with the biometric data (fingerprints, iris scans, etc.) collection systems in the process of collecting biometric data on our ANA and the local ANP, and putting it into a database. The ANP seemed to think we just needed the biometric data so we could give them an ID card to access the base. Well, our having that data will have longer lasting effects hopefully. I should mention that we were able to collect biometric data on whomever, during checkpoints or otherwise, and we did so from time to time. These systems can quickly link back to databases to identify the person standing in front of you. These are great systems with outstanding potential in a counter-insurgency, but are very underutilized, chiefly because of the painstakingness of the data collection process, in my opinion.

Street smarts

2009-11-05T18:23:00.006-05:00

In an insurgency, when so much of the enemy's advantage lies in the element of surprise and its ability to hide among the populace, the power of perception and ability to 'sense' trouble become of the utmost importance. It's a skill we try to acquire in training, but some will always be better than others. I do believe awareness can be developed, and that the mind picks up on much more than we're consciously aware. Some days when we went out, just a few moments in the local area and we could feel that we're were going to receive some enemy 'attention' at some point. It's was not necessarily an absence of people or dirty looks that would alert us, just...something, and in time we learned to listen to those feelings.

At any rate, the ANA have their deficiencies, and they don't often bring their "A" game on patrols that have little chance of receiving enemy contact, but the ANA do have a way of doing well when it matters and knowing when to be their best. Much like how the ANA are deficient in formal education but are experts at reading people and making-do, what they lack in military tactics and proficiency they make up for with street smarts and ingenuity. I would not be surprised if patrols with ANA in them were more likely to discover an IED rather than get hit by one than Coalition-pure patrols.

I'd been in Afghanistan for months before I went on my first convoy. (This was by design...I hate riding around in a truck waiting to get blown up - being dismounted is not only a better way to interact with the local people but safer as well). Since we were going off the paved road, we had some trepidation of the dreaded IED, a fear which would turn out to be not at all unreasonable since we would shortly discover one. So on one cold February morning, off we went. Not knowing the area and mainly just being along for the ride, I got put up in the turret, which is generally not my favorite place to be in a humvee, especially when its 40 degrees, though the wind on your face can be invigorating.

I should mention that when a road in Kunar is unpaved, and the vast majority of them are (and probably all were unpaved before we arrived here some years ago), there's generally a very good reason for it to be unpaved; often the pre-existing dirt road has been narrowly hacked out of a steep hillside, not leaving enough width to make paving the road feasible in an engineering sense, given the realities of security and available resources. On the missions along those roads, an equally great threat along with the IED is the threat of driving off the road and ending up in the river 50 or more feet below. On missions out that way we more than once inadvertently got a chance to 'spread the democratic message' while we waited for another truck in the convoy to be recovered after having nearly driven off the road into the ravine.

We got some miles down the road before the convoy had to halt due to the presence of a large boulder in the middle of road. Now, we knew we'd had some rain in the area, winter being the rainy season in Kunar, which can always potentially lead to rockslides and boulders in the road, but this particular boulder looked rather well placed so as to stop our larger vehicles, and yet allow for the local hi-luxes to pass unimpeded. By the time our vehicle, which was somewhere in the middle of a 10-vehicle convoy, had come to a halt, the ANA vehicle in front had already dismounted its soldiers, one of whom nearly immediately started pulling buried detonation cord out of the road and began following it toward the river below. The ANA can be fearless indeed.

We set up security around the site, detained a few suspicious-looking folks in the area, and waited some hours for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) to show up. In the end, EOD found quite a fair amount of explosives buried in the road, and disposed of them in the usual way by, well, blowing them up.

Balance

2009-10-31T14:30:00.004-04:00

It's a common thing to see articles in the news media about the negative aspects of war on the micro level. The dead, the wounded, the mentally and emotionally damaged, all appear to get a fair amount of coverage and exposure, so I'm going to focus on a few of the good things some of us get out of serving in combat - because many of us are getting a lot out of it.

Wearing a uniform that says 'US Marines' has always been a great honor for me, and more so when I've been able to wear the uniform overseas. Knowing you represent the ideals and power of the United States gives one quite a bit to live up to, and a lot of pride goes with that. Being out in the middle of nowhere, knowing you represent the end of the line of America's reach is quite a thing...I can remember thinking how the power of all those billions of dollars and millions of people ended right there with us at a lonely outpost in an isolated valley. Maybe the thought of our 'power' ending there in an isolated valley comes across as a bit imperialistic, but I make no apologies for what we're doing and love being a part of it.

People are good at different things. Some people happen to be good at conducting warfare. I spent months this past tour with a Marine who stated numerous times that he kept coming back over to war zones as an infantryman because it was what he was good at. He undoubtedly was very good at it...and there's nothing wrong with that at all. I believe everyone wants the chance to use his or her skills that he or she was born with or has developed and honed over time, even if those skills happen to belong to what some might call an unfortunate but necessary profession.

Undoubtedly, those that come back from combat have an increased appreciation for life generally. Anytime I'm away from friends and family for lengthy periods I miss them, but getting a real feel for the fact that everything can be gone in a moment certainly helps heighten that sense of gratitude for the times together. Having survived some difficult moments, I know I personally have more confidence than I had before. Having taken some risks, lived through and overcome things that were legitimately difficult makes life's daily challenges at home that much easier to deal with, though the flip side of that coin is sometimes daily life at home seems a bit trite. Before I was on the ground directly doing things that were in the news regularly, which kind of makes me feel underutilized today. I'd argue that satisfaction is life's best feeling, and it can come to a person in many ways, but one of the best ways to find it is to overcome a period of difficulty with a job well done.

The losses of warfare are tragic and far-reaching, but for those of us that survive, that feeling of satisfaction is why many of us keep coming back for more.

Decision Time

2009-10-28T20:54:00.005-04:00

"Try harder...try again" - Brandon Lee in The Crow

The wait continues for the president's decision on General McChrystal's recommendation. The unfortunate aspect of all of this business is that the debate is taking place in the public eye. While having a public debate on the efficacy of sending more troops certainly satisfies the exigencies of American politics, it's most certainly not beneficial to the war effort as a whole. I say this because if the decision is made to not send more troops, or even not send as many as asked for the by the general, we will be perceived by the Afghan government, people, and security forces as abandoning them and losing our will to fight the insurgents. I can confirm that the ANA leaders I habitually talked with were always worried about our ability to stick things out and did not want to see us go anywhere until the country had progressed significantly.

Perception is an incredibly important part of any counter-insurgency, as winning the support of the people should ultimately lead to victory. I can confirm that many of the people of Afghanistan don't really care who wins this war, just so long as someone wins it, and they can live a semblance of a normal life...i.e. the people will support the side that appears to be on the path to victory.

For these reasons, any action leading to the perception of weakness or lack of commitment on our part needs to be scrupulously avoided. It would have been better to avoid all of this public debate on the issue...unless the request is granted of course, in which case we may take some small benefit from all of this publicizing of our intentions on the matter.

Kandaks

2009-10-23T20:33:00.006-04:00

In Afghan languages a kandak is a battalion. I can remember visiting a base outside of our area and talking to a someone who during our conversation remarked to me, "Oh, you're with 3rd Kdk? Is that an infantry battalion?" I was a little taken aback by the question and almost remarked in Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men fashion "Is there any other kind?" But I caught myself, as I remembered that there are indeed other types of kandaks out there, just like in our military. The ANA do have tanks, artillery, Afghan Commandos, and other types of units, to include aviation.

We had a small detachment of ANA artillery soldiers at one of our bases, complete with two D30 122 mm howitzers. In the month I spent at that base, we never once fired those guns...and not for lack of enemy contact. We were firing mortars from the base nearly daily. It was a little tough for the ANA to get into the act of firing those indirect fire assets when they needed the approval of the Kandak Commander, located some 25 km away, in order to fire. Real time comms are easy to achieve out there with cell phones, and that's what the ANA use for much of their communication. Nonetheless, having to route permission to shoot through someone miles down the road, obviously does not make for efficient and timely fire support.

The ANA did apparently fire the D30's from time to time though. Since the ANA has very few people who can read maps and do whatever geometry is done to get artillery rounds on target, they simply direct fire the guns. And since most of the targets are up above them in that particular place, the technique works pretty well. The US forces would somehow mark a target with machine guns or mortars, and the ANA would be instructed to hit those impacts, which they evidently did pretty well. Unfortunately, I never witnessed it.

As for other types of battalions, we knew a few ETTs who got attached to a tank battalion. The tanks they have are Soviet-style like the artillery. They, not surprisingly, did not use their tanks very often given the logistical difficulties in supporting tanks. The ANA have commandos trained by our Special Forces, and having seen them in action as the opposition in a game of military-style paintball, I'd say they're pretty good - not light years better than regular ANA infantry, but certainly more aggressive and better trained. As for Afghan aviation, that was not something we ever saw, though they do have a few helicopters starting to fly around. I look forward to more of those ANA helos getting out there as I know it will be a big source of pride for the ANA to fly in their own equipment with their fellow countrymen at the helm.

Dealing with the ANA

2009-10-19T23:18:00.008-04:00

“Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”

— Conrad Hilton

Getting what you want out of the ANA is a huge part of the job. If you can't get along with your ANA commander, and get him to do things your way, then you aren't going to get much done, because most ANA commanders can't be relied upon to show any initiative to improve and do their jobs well. We all certainly had our ups and downs in the relationships with the different ANA commanders we worked with. Sometimes some of us, including myself, didn't always do things the best way. I definitely don't have any magic formulas for how to work with them, but I did learn a few things. I'll throw this little anecdote out there.

During my last tour to Afghanistan as an embedded trainer with the Afghan National Army (ANA), I conducted training sessions on the M-16 rifle as part of the ANA’s transition from the AK-47 to the M-16. The ANA soldiers had a habit of showing up late for my training sessions. I had tried encouragement, suggestion, and profuse compliments when they were on time as ways to try to get them to show up on time and be more professional, but I had not gotten the results I had hoped for.

Since my efforts to improve the ANA by gently nudging them along were not working to my satisfaction, I decided to try a different approach. The approach I selected was to berate them for being lazy, discourteous, and unprofessional. An Afghan soldier is not unaccustomed to being treated in this manner by an officer, and would expect such a reaction from an ANA officer in a similar situation.

However, the fact of the matter is, it was really not my place as an advisor to the ANA to handle my problems with the ANA soldiers in that manner. I should have known perfectly well that the appropriate and expedient thing to do was to talk to their officer about their behavior and let him deal with it. This approach would not only help develop leadership traits in the ANA officer involved, but would also likely engender much better results. However, on another day when the soldiers again were late for my training, I decided to direct my ire at their officer, Commander B, who happened to be standing right there. While the soldiers could not understand the things I was saying (no interpreter was necessary since Commander B speaks English well), they no doubt caught the gist that I was criticizing their commander.

After the training was completed that day, I thought about the incident. I knew I had overstepped and that my new “approach” to dealing with the ANA of being critical, negative, and worse, criticizing an officer in front of his own men, was counter-productive. Subsequent events proved this to be true, as the ANA became increasingly difficult to deal with, and I lost the trust and confidence of Commander B. I apologized to Commander B and made a special effort afterward to compliment him in front of his men, but I was not able to restore our previously amiable relationship in the limited time we had left together.

In retrospect, I should have remained consistent with the way I had been conducting things…only with more patience and with my expectations in check. Our team had a lot of different personalities, and they all did things different ways; the guys (including myself) who were dictatorial toward their ANA commanders and lost patience with them eventually were unable to accomplish anything at all...to the point where they hardly even worked together. The ETTs who were patient and encouraging with their ANA were able to slowly but surely get more and more out of their ANA. We had one ETT in particular who was always very encouraging and positive with everyone, all the time. I've never heard him say a bad word about anyone, to include the ANA. He, out of everyone I saw, was the best able to get the ANA to work more than they wanted to.

Hash

2009-10-14T16:49:00.018-04:00

"Freedom is replacing imposed discipline with self-discipline." - William Lind

Drug cultivation was not something we really dealt with in Kunar. When it comes to illegal trade funding illegal activity, Kunar is more known for the timber trade...you might say the situation with the opium in the south is analogous to the timber in the northeast mountainous provinces. Undoubtedly, some opium is cultivated in the mountainous regions, but it wasn't something we really saw or dealt with.

What we did deal with regularly was hashish smoking among the ANA. The hash smoking was something I saw much more of at the more austere bases, and not so much at the more developed bases we were responsible for. I suppose you might say the hash provided a bit of an escape from the poor living conditions at those bases.

The fact that the ANA smoked hash was not a surprise to any of us. I'd seen the same thing with the Iraqis, and we were told we'd see it from time to time, if not regularly. One night early on in the tour, I was woken up by an ANA soldier asking me to attend to a sick soldier. So I grabbed my interpreter and headed over to the sick soldier's hooch to have a look at him. When we got there, my terp informed me that the soldier was only "sick" because of excessive hash smoking. I gave him a couple of aspirin and went back to bed.

It was a common experience to smell hash burning in the early evening or at night. We understood that it's a part of the local culture, so we were never intent on eradicating the habit completely among our ANA, but it didn't seem right to completely ignore the issue, so we brought up the hash smoking with the different commanders we had. One commander denied that it was occurring at all, so we simply asked him to see to it that the soldiers standing guard were sober. Another commander acknowledged the problem and pledged to do something about it, but not surprisingly nothing changed. A third commander would not tolerate it at all, and sent a couple of guys back to the battalion after catching them indulging. That third commander turned out to be the worst commander of the group that I had during that time period, but have to give him credit for maintaining some discipline with his men.

I can't say I ever saw an officer smoke hash or look stoned, but a few of the NCOs were repeat offenders. Some of those hash-smoking NCOs were actually among the best NCOs we had. We even had an incident where a couple of ANA soldiers beat a terp supposedly for trying to interfere with their hash smoking. It's tough to know what's really going on with those guys sometimes, so that incident may have been over something else. Whatever the case may be, the incident resulted in us losing one of our best terps...the two soldiers involved were sent away for awhile but came back eventually. It's tough to get rid of even the worst soldiers when you need everyone you can get your hands on to fight the war.

As you can imagine, having hash-smoking soldiers on hand during patrols can make for some interesting moments. We often stopped in towns to talk to local leaders during our patrols. We'd often just sit there until all hell would break loose...an effective if dangerous and uncreative way to locate the enemy. During one of the first times when we decided to just stay in the town until shots were fired, several of the soldiers lit up a joint after the wait was longer than expected. We got on their case about it, but a firefight erupted before we really dealt with the issue. I will say the ANA fought particularly well that day, putting several RPGs directly into a house 300 meters away.

One of our worst hash offenders, who I never once saw without bloodshot eyes, was often our RPG gunner. One day on our way out of base, we started taking large-caliber rounds from a ridgeline across the way. Our RPG gunner proceeded to load up his RPG and get ready to fire it with his back right up against a small cliff face...a no-no since the back-blast would likely rebound off the cliff and do who knows what to the gunner in that situation. Luckily, his comrades yelled at him and got him set up in a safe place...though firing an RPG at a ridgeline 1000 meters away might not be the best use of ammo. In that same event, the ANA platoon sergeant accidentally shot a round that almost blew his foot off while loading a machine gun, and then pointed it right at me while clearing and reloading it.

Suffice to say, there are things we'd rather be doing when enemy contact is imminent or ongoing than chastising ANA soldiers for smoking hash, dodging errant ANA muzzles, and teaching the ANA how to use their own guns. The ANA certainly do keep things interesting, and as long as things don't really go wrong, it's all really a lot of fun.

Latest attack in Nuristan

2009-10-05T19:24:00.006-04:00

In my most recent blog entry, I stated that I found it laughable the idea that the Taliban and insurgents could conduct coordinated assaults and challenge US forces on the conventional battlefield...and then a day later they go and kill eight soldiers in a conventional-type attack. Everyone out there knows that Nuristan is full of insurgents. The terrain in Nuristan so severe that anyone could hide out there for years without getting caught, and Coalition forces have virtually no presence in the province. The US Army unit we were partnered was often on reserve-alert to support police stations up that way which were in extremis.

It's very disheartening for everyone to see us lose that many guys in one battle, but I stand by the assertion that with decent terrain selection and unit-tactics this type of thing will not happen. When you build a small outpost in an area where insurgents can shoot down upon you, with few to no supporting positions to help you, then the position is asking for trouble. In Kunar, we had observations posts up further on the hills, or even at the very top in some cases, and other mutually supporting positions, just to prevent something like insurgents being able to surround us and shoot down upon us.

Sounds like the plan is to remove the post in Kamdesh and other similar ones. I can tell you once an outpost like that is gone, then the area it occupied is no longer going to be visited by the Coalition, and the territory is essentially Taliban-territory at that point, although it sounds like it already was given the number of fighters they had gathered, and the fact that the US Army unit in the area didn't even patrol in the local village. They say the plan is to push those troops into the larger population centers, which sounds all well and good, but I always thought the idea behind those mountain posts was to fight the enemy in the mountains and more sparsely-populated areas rather than fight them in the larger cities and villages.

The fact is, the whole strategy in north-eastern Afghanistan is extremely predictable and reactive. Basically, the US Army and ANA tactics are to build a firebase somewhere and then wait for it to get attacked. Patrols last a couple of hours and stay within sight of the base. If an "operation" is conducted it never lasts more than a couple of days. In the past, units conducted operations that lasted more than a month...the entire time outside their bases in the villages and mountains. The Marines in Helmand keep moving and sleep in ditches they've dug themselves before moving on somewhere else the next day.

The Army might want to think about what they need to do take the initiative in this war. Simply inhabiting a firebase, waiting for it to get attacked, and then calling in fire support, does not appear to be an effective, nor risk-free, way to conduct a war. The insurgents have a nearly unlimited supply of manpower from Pakistan. The idea in warfare to break the enemy's will to fight, not just kill a bunch of guys. By allowing the insurgents to always have the initiative, and topping it off with abandoning these firebases (which will be perceived as weakness, as it should be) we'll do nothing but put wind in their sails, which will only lead to more of the same.

So yes, I'm criticizing the approach of building all these firebases, and I'm also criticizing the idea of abandoning them. We need to put more thought into where we put these bases if we're going to put them anywhere, so we don't give up propaganda victories when we close them. In Iraq, when we left bases, they were turned over to the Iraqi security forces, not just abandoned. Ideally, we'd patrol in unpredictable places for extended periods of time out of larger bases in larger population centers. Why build a base when you can inhabit local homes for a few days while you're there and then move on somewhere else? Why use all your manpower protecting something...? Better off projecting something. I criticize the Army for closing firebases because I know they don't do large-scale ops of lengthy duration, at least not the units I was partnered with. Without a firebase in an area, they'll have no almost no effect on the area (unless a paved road happens to run right to the area), and the territory is ceded to the insurgents.

Wanat

2009-10-03T15:07:00.009-04:00

Came across this article about the battle of Wanat on the internet today. Wanat was a part of our area of operations while we were out there, but we never went there - no one goes up that far any more after what happened, although that it's true that we do have "a large base four miles away" like what you read in articles. I'll just say that four miles is a very long way when there's no paved road leading up there. The previous ETT had some members involved in the battle of Wanat, which resulted in nine US solders being killed. You don't read it in the main article but all the guys that were killed were manning an observation post outside the main compound. Lots of conflicting information out there on exactly what happened, but I've heard it said that the insurgents never breached the wire of the main compound, contrary to what you read in the article.

At any rate, after what happened in July 2008 at Wanat, the battalion that came out to replace the guys from the 173rd didn't have much interest in heading back up that way, and really had their hands full with the (smaller) area they had. The proximity to Pakistan and the difficulty of the terrain out in Kunar-Nuristan means that every valley turns into an insurgent haven if you go far enough up into it. You can pick as many fights as you want out there...just go further and further into a valley and the shooting is sure to start sooner or later. The guys from the 173rd, for all the mistakes they made leading up to what happened at Wanat, certainly were not afraid to get out and mix it up with the enemy. And frankly, you keep a unit over there in an extremely difficult and dangerous environment for 15 months and it's easy to see how mistakes happen at the end of the tour.

From what I've heard and read on Wanat and seen in similar areas, I think the lesson is if you poorly select your terrain, allowing yourself to be surrounded and people to approach within grenade range of you unseen by simply staying in a village, and are unable to build it up, then, yes, perhaps the Taliban can put together a very deadly attack using conventional assault tactics. The notion that "The battle stands as proof (the Taliban) can operate like a disciplined armed force using well-rehearsed small-unit tactics to challenge the American military for dominance on the conventional battlefield" as stated in the NYT article is gross hyperbole. If that statement were correct, we'd really be getting our asses handed to us over there. I say that not to disparage the capabilities of the insurgents we're fighting. Clearly, they are giving us all we can handle and absolutely know how to take advantage of an opportunity like the one we put in their lap like at Wanat, but they don't challenge us on the "conventional battlefield" in the absence of gross negligence.

The other notable thing to me in the article was the shooting of a US soldier by an ANA soldier after the US soldier went to check on them to see if they were sleeping. Seeing in the news a similar story recently, in a case where the Afghan police officer clearly deliberately killed those guys, one might be tempted to think that this type of thing happens all the time. I can say that I never once felt like my ANA would shoot me intentionally. All the same, I made sure to keep things amiable between us, as you do hear horror stories, not of ANA shooting their embeds, but perhaps not...putting in the effort to help them when they need it, shall we say. Given that the ANA had all the security at the base where I spent much of my time, I had extra incentive to keep things smooth between us. But I never in all that time really doubted them, and they never let me down.

In any case, that the US soldier would get shot checking on the ANA at night is absolutely no surprise to me, especially given how dangerous that area proved to be. The ANA can get jumpy out there. It takes courage to approach them at night, and best if you can warn them somehow that you're there. I always made sure to shine a light or make plenty of noise and talk loudly in broken Pashto if I were checking up on them. Sneaking up on them is not a good idea. It's easy to see how a shooting incident like that would poison relations between the two parties. ETTs are there to see that a working relationship is maintained between the regular US forces and ANA, but it's not always easy to make it happen. High time to solve the whole issue by separating them completely by giving the ANA their own battlespace and making them accountable for it.

A few memorable words

2009-10-03T03:02:00.009-04:00

Bribery
- Marine: “Since we just had an IED blow up outside the base, just down there in the town, I think we should search the town down there.”
- ANA commander: “No, not a good idea.”
- “Yes, it is a good idea. We can’t let them get that close to us. The villagers at least need to know that if they aren’t our eyes and ears out there, then we’ll put them through some inconvenience by searching their homes.”
- “I don’t want to do it.”
- “I know you don’t but we have to.”
- “Couldn’t do it even if I wanted to because we already made the schedule and a search of that town is not on the schedule for this week.”
- “Right, but this little operation is based on new information. Remember what we talked about changing operations based on new information and intelligence?”
- “Can’t do it and won’t do it.”
- “Ok, I’ll give you one phone card to call your family with if you do the op.”
- “No.”
- “Two phone cards.”
- “No.”
- “Two phone cards and I’ll buy a cow for the soldiers.”
- “Can’t do it.”
- “Ok, two phone cards, a cow, and we’ll find you a new wife. Plus I’ll throw in a summer house in Nuristan.”
- (laughing) “Seriously, we’re not doing that operation.”
- “Roger.”

Thermals from the sky
- Apache Pilot: “I got a guy on my scope moving all nimbly-bimbly through the trees!”
- Air controller on the ground: “Yeah, that’s probably a monkey.”

Soviet War heroes
- Marine: “How come every officer I meet claims he was a commander during the war against the Soviets?”
- ANA mullah: “Because some of us were.”
- Marine: “Maybe, but not Commander Hanif here. He looks way too young to have been commanding anything during those times. Maybe he was the chai boy.”
- Commander Hanif: “You may be right.”

We’re ready
- ANA officer: “We’ve got intel that the base is going to be attacked tonight.”
- Marine: “Sounds like a great opportunity to kill some people…but how are we going to prepare for this?”
- “We are at stand-to.”
- “What does that mean?”
- “It means we are ready.”
- “Are there more soldiers on duty? Are they sleeping in their gear?”
- “No. None of that. But we are ready.”
- “Yes, but are we doing anything differently than before?”
- “Yes, we are ready now.”
- “Well, alright then.”

Prelude to a firefight
Unknown insurgent on handheld radio: “I am going to do something.”

We meet again
- Marine: “Hello there Haji Z. Been awhile.”
- Haji Z: “Here you are. Where have you been? I didn’t give you permission to leave my valley.”
- Marine: “Ah, yes, but I have to take orders from someone and can’t always be where I want to be.”
- Haji Z: “Let me talk to this person!”

Korengal Tank
- ANA officer: "You know what would help us? A tank! We need a tank our here."
- Marine: (egging him on) "Oh yeah? A tank? Great idea! How would we employ a tank here exactly?"
- "Easy. We'll just drive it around and the Taliban will shoot at it. Then we'll shoot them with the big gun."
- "Hmm. You sure we can drive a tank around this valley? It's kind of narrow and the roads might not hold a tank."
- "Oh, we don't really need to drive it anywhere. We can just park it out there somewhere."
- "Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of a tank?"
- "No. No. It would work great."
- (laughing) "You guys need tanks in the Korengal about as badly as you need a navy."
- (petulant) "If you Americans cared about us you'd get us tanks out here."
- (placating) "Ok, ok, we'll see what we can do."

In the media II

2009-09-24T18:42:00.009-04:00

The New York Times linked to this blog a couple of weeks ago, which explained for me why my site had taken such a jump in its number of visitors. Of course, the NYT discovered the blog and labeled it as a blog by a deployed soldier only after I'd returned. At any rate, I'm flattered by the exposure. One of the other effects of the NYT link was this blog was discovered by a reporter for NPR who then requested a phone interview with me for his story about blogging and social networking while deployed. I was happy to give him my two cents on the issue, though I wish he'd've made it more clear that I didn't want my name associated with the blog because I don't think it's right to use military service to publicize yourself. I did mention the fact that I'm going to be continuing my military service, but fear of reprisals or whatever is not why I don't put my name on the site (see below). At any rate, it was a good article and I'm glad to have been a contributor to it.

I think the blogging done by service members while on deployment is generally a good thing, and I was happy to have been put in a position where I could write about things that people would be interested in reading. I didn't see it as my duty to write positively. I just tried to be as honest with myself as I could be with it, while also keeping in mind that I did not always have the bigger picture on things.

I can see where concerns about blogging on the part of the Pentagon would come in, as they have every right to be concerned with the information that comes out of theater, given how important public opinion is in sustaining the war effort. Service members who are bloggers would seem to have a more authoritative voice on the war than an embedded reporter given their status, but then service members who blog don't really reach very many people. Even with the New York Times linking to this site recently, I've never had more than 300 unique visitors in a day and I average about 50, of whom I probably know a third personally. In short, a site like this reaches such a small proportion of the populace that it simply wouldn't be worth the effort on the part of the Pentagon to try to control it, which was the conclusion the military seems to have reached on the censoring of letters sent from soldiers home during prior conflicts.

The Stars and Stripes recently had an article about the Pentagon profiling reporters. I found the article quite lacking in substance and have no qualms whatsoever about a private consulting group being used to check the accuracy of information being presented to the public by reporters. The Pentagon claims they profile reporters on the accuracy of their reporting, not the content, which is something I believe. That being said, I'm pretty sure that if a reporter consistently reported only on the negative, though true, aspects of the war then he or she might find it harder to get an embed.

I can say that we had many reporters come and go and the stories they put out were accurate and fair in my opinion. Those reporters were treated with respect and granted quite a lot of access to what we were doing. We didn't always give them everything they wanted, but then it was often our call on whether to accept an embed or not, so we made the call, almost always based on factors that had nothing whatsoever to do with the reporter himself and what he or she might write about us (see prior blog entry). We refused to accept one reporter simply because we didn't think she could hack it physically moving up and down the mountains with us. What she may have written, I guess we'll never know.

I think the more interesting question is if the Pentagon is indeed profiling reporters for the sake of controlling the types of stories that get printed, is this necessarily a bad thing? Freedom of press is a great thing, but it doesn't mean every type of information and story is at the disposal of every reporter who wants to come out and write. If we have information that is classified and unreleasable for security purposes, where do we draw the line on war reporting? Moreover, assuming the lawmakers we've elected to make decisions and run the country have access to all the best information available, aren't they in a better position to make decisions on how far to go with this war than the general populace? Well, at least in theory anyway...? Does the public have to have a role in every decision? Do we want democracy to evolve to the level where public opinion controls every decision that's made for the country as a whole? I think ideally you have a selfless leader who makes the right calls based on unbiased thought processes and good information. We're so far from that though that maybe public opinion is the best way to reach a decision.

In the media

2009-09-14T12:10:00.007-04:00

You know it's been an interesting tour when during an hour-long layover in Alaska someone just happens to buy a Time magazine and thereby stumble across pictures of members of our team and one of our interpreters. Of course, our guys that had the pictures taken knew that eventually they might show up in the magazine, but none of the rest of us knew they'd be in there since we didn't pay attention to the fact that a reporter was with them. It might have been a nice surprise if not for the fact that two of our guys pictured were bearded and well out of uniform. Unlike the Special Forces, we're not permitted to dress and groom ourselves how we'd like.

Of course, where we could get away with it, many of us did just what we liked regarding our uniforms and beards. Generally we had sense enough to not let pictures get taken of us in such a state. In fact, for the first half of our time we didn't let reporters embed with us at all, and pretty much just kept them away from us, primarily so something like this wouldn't happen. At some point that changed though, and members of our team thereafter appeared or were mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time (twice), El Mundo, and some others. It wasn't until this last one though that some of us were published completely out of uniform. Not sure what if any repercussions our team will feel, but at any rate, I think the main pic of the story makes a helluva recruiting tool for the Marine Corps...

As for the why...why we'd be out of uniform and unshaven at times...well, there's more to it than simply being nasty and undisciplined. For one thing, the Afghan elders and people respect a man with a beard. In fact when we and our ANA would go to a village the ANA commander would always ask to talk to the "spin gheri" which translates as "white beard". Now I'm not sure if the literal translation in Pashtu for "village elder" is "white beard" but that's how my Afghan commanders got their point across, pretty much indicating that in the Pashtu language and culture a beard is synonymous with seniority and authority. We certainly never once spoke to a man of any stature whatsoever that had no beard. The elders I habitually dealt with were dismayed (nearly as much as I) when I shaved a two-month beard I had going. I'm not sure being clean-shaven was any real detriment at the end of the day, but adopting a local custom is not always a bad thing, despite what our pre-deployment training told us about "not going native". I say go native sometimes where it serves you. And frankly, growing a beard makes the Marines feel like their getting one over on the rulewriters on high and is good for morale. You just have to be sure that you've got a group that is professional enough to realize that breaking one rule doesn't mean they are not still Marines, with all the other attendant rules and regulations to follow.

As for the uniforms, most of that had to do with blending in with the ANA. Most likely even from 500 meters away an insurgent is going to recognize an American by the gear he's carrying and how he carries himself, but there's no use making it any easier for them to target the ETTs specifically by wearing a uniform that looks different.

Blog

2009-09-10T00:44:00.005-04:00

This blog is not over yet for those of you out there still reading. I promise I have more topics to explore. I've just got some other stuff I need to catch up on (like LIVING) before I get more entries posted. We did get some rough news today that 4 ETTs were killed in an ambush not far from where we were stationed during our time. That's the most ETTs ever lost in one attack.

Letter response

2009-09-09T22:05:00.003-04:00

Question from a reporter after I returned:

"I've heard from some troops who served there, as well as think tankers and other folks, that the US presence there was an "irritant" to the local population, and that they only joined the insurgency to get the US troops out of there.

I'm wondering if you've seen the same kind of insularity and isolation elsewhere in Kunar. Did you ever get the sense that the locals don't want you there, and could live fine alone, without US or ANA presence?"

My response:

True, the ETT job is not an easy one, but was by far the most rewarding thing I've done, and I think many ETTs would agree with me.

I do not want to denigrate the observations made by the individuals you talked to with experience in the Korengal, but I'm going to try to give you a bit of additional context on the Korengal before I move on to your questions. I think it's a bit of a simplification to say that Korengalis joined the insurgency to get us out of there. On the one hand, it's true that the folks out in Korengal do not like outsiders typically and will fight whoever shows up in their domain. They do want to be left alone. However, we have to keep in mind that not all the fighters in the Korengal were Korengalis. We heard a lot of voices over the radio that were from Pakistan or speaking Arabic. I think the fact was, that in the Korengal we never had sufficient combat capability (either in number or in the capability of the troops that were there) in order to provide a level of security to keep those outsiders out. So while we might say they fought us so that they'd be left alone, we could equally say they were forced to fight us by outside influence, including people that killed the local leaders when they cooperated with us. I don't believe the Korengalis wanted those outside insurgents in their valley either. The fact of the matter is we simply did not do a good enough job out there to win anyone to our side.

We can also equally argue that the locals' position on our presence was irrelevant. Part of the idea in having forces in the Korengal was to fight the insurgents there, rather than in the more populated areas. Those valleys in Kunar do eventually feed in towards Kabul, and the position at one time was to fight in the hinterlands as a way of taking pressure off the cities, specifically Kabul. Now that we've ceded that territory, it reverts to becoming a lawless region where things happen that we don't like - a safe haven if you will. We went into Afghanistan in the first place so that the Taliban would not have a place to hide unmolested to plot, plan, and train. The fact is, now that we're gone, the Korengal will not be simply a peaceful valley full of folks living a peaceful pastoral existence doing their own thing with no impact on the outside world. It will, and probably already has, become an area our enemies will use to their advantage. If the Korengalis could or would keep out foreigners and live peacefully, then we'd have no issue. But that will not be the case.

As for other areas of Kunar, my experience is with the Pech Valley, which has several large valleys branching off from it, including the Korengal, the Wama, the Watapor, the ChapaDara, and another whose name eludes me where the famous battle of Wanat took place. Go far enough into any of those valleys and we have little influence and no control. The people in the region are certainly not homogeneous, but they do share a lot of characteristics. I think it's fair to say that most do not want to be ruled by what they perceive as a corrupt regime in Kabul, and are probably tired of the US presence. I also think it's fair to say that they don't want to be ruled by the Taliban. They do want economic opportunity. They do want their daughters to go to school. They do want to live in peace. While some share an extremist ideology (and probably more so in the Korengal than other places in Kunar) with the Taliban that they picked up during their time as refugees in Pakistan during the Soviet conflict, certainly not all or most feel that way. Many of those people understand why our forces are there and what we're doing.

Odyssey

2009-09-05T05:30:00.004-04:00

Only when working for the government would you travel 21 time zones west to get to a point 3 times zones to your east. Our diplomats really need to get to work on China so we can fly over that country. If we could have overflown China, we'd have gotten home a day and a half earlier and felt much better on arrival. Instead, we flew from Afghanistan to Kyrgyzstan, spent a night there and then continued to Germany, Alaska and Okinawa. Upon arrival in Okinawa we dropped off some of our sister teams, spent a few hours at a reception and then resumed our journey. From Okinawa it was still nearly a day's trip to get back to Hawaii, stopping in Tokyo. On the plus side, it is always nice to intermingle with the Japanese, however superficial our interaction with them may have been on our short stay. And fortunately the plane was mostly empty so plenty of room to move about, although this fact is part of why we had to fly so far (We didn't have enough of our own pax to charter a flight to go exactly where we wanted in the fastest possible way.).

In all, we spent nearly 40 hours in the air between Afghanistan and Hawaii and traveled across 26 time zones.

Endex

2009-08-30T03:21:00.007-04:00

"If you teach a man anything he will never know." - Bernard Shaw

Well, it’s all over now, except the good times and celebrating together when we get home. From the very beginning it was easy to see we had a stellar group of young men in this unit, top to bottom far superior to other units I’ve been in. Today, I feel more proud than ever to have been a part of what we did. And I’m ecstatic to say we’re taking everyone back home with us. We were not without some close calls – the 21 members of our team were involved in over 300 separate troops in contact incidents (TICs...these incidents can range from a round of indirect fire landing on the base to firefights lasting hours) in our 270+ days in Afghanistan, which if averaging more than one TIC a day sounds like a lot, well, it is…but we did provide a lot of targets out there since we manned seven different bases over a wide area. We will collectively receive quite a few awards, including six purple hearts, but none of those injuries were serious enough to remove anyone from duty for more than a couple weeks. Our ANA battalion likewise received a number of injuries, but no deaths during our time with them.

It’ll be good to get back to a place where things happen normally. Things in America just make sense. In the States, people act and do things that make sense to me. Perhaps I feel that way because America is my culture, or perhaps it’s this fact that makes America so great. Put a bunch of hard-working people together who make decisions rationally without letting superstition get in their way and you can get great results. In Afghanistan, and especially so when working with the ANA, plenty of friction exists to get much of anything accomplished. The mountains, weather, language barrier, education level, the enemy, and above all the culture have a way of conspiring against you to prevent you from getting things done the way you think they should get done. While at my first duty station I can remember often thinking during my lunch break that what took me four hours to do in the morning should have only taken me two hours. Working with the ANA, what should take two hours is liable to take all week, if it gets done at all.

What we achieved other than our own survival is much tougher to measure. I’d be lying if I said the security situation in our area was much different when we left from how it was when we got there. But then, given limited resources, perhaps holding a stalemate in Kunar Province is really all anyone can hope for at this time. We could change a few things on the tactical level (like not being so ridiculously predictable) that might help and wouldn’t involve an increase in resources, but realistically we’re not going to change the way we fight in any significant way. To kill more enemy would involve more risk to our own troops, which would in turn produce more casualties, leading to more negative public opinion, which I fear would in time end the war given our leadership at the very top. Not that I don’t want to see the war end…but I’d like to see it end for the right reasons.

With no changes coming in the tactical fight, to turn it around in Kunar we’d either need more troops…or the right troops. Some of those valleys we were in have been insurgent havens for many years. A part of me says we should just get out of there and leave the local people to their own devices. Another part of me says we should double the manpower (and preferably bring the Marine battalions back to Kunar) and just clean house, even if really taking the fight to the enemy would increase our casualties in the short term. Given the eight years we have invested in Afghanistan, I don’t think we should pack up and quit without giving it a really good push, something like a surge…what an original thought, right? The surge in Iraq showed the people we were serious about winning. The low turnout at the election can be taken as pretty strong evidence that the Afghan people are losing hope on this idea of democracy. And they’re losing hope because we’re eight years now in their country and we haven’t vanquished the Taliban yet, nor have we made their lives significantly better. I hold the Afghan people more responsible for this unfortunate reality than I do my fellow Americans and NATO allies, but regardless of who’s to blame for the lack of security in the south and east, the fact is an elected government in Afghanistan is in our national interest. Now, is establishing a stable, elected government worth the mountains of money we’re spending here…? or would the money and resources be better spent in other ways closer to home? After nine months here, my gut tells me we’re better off investing in ways to protect ourselves that don’t involve creating democracies in impoverished, war-torn, ethnically-divided nations on the other side of the planet. But after all we’ve done here already, I’d hate to see us give up without a really putting our best efforts into it for at least a couple years, keeping in mind we’ve never had anywhere near the numbers of troops here that were in Iraq at that war’s height.

As for the ANA, we need to give them their own battlespace and make them accountable for it. They have the ability to fight the enemy on their own now. Partnering in one area with regular line units like they’re doing now only enables them. If the ANA were operating on their own without a Coalition unit sharing the area, they’d still need ETTs for some things like calling for fire support and medevacs and of course, all that sage advice we give them, but the absence of other regular units in the area would force them to develop or get defeated. I’m confident the ANA can rise to that challenge, but they’ll only rise to it when forced to – initiative is not a strong suit with Afghan soldiers.

As for the ETTs…well, we’re hearing rumors that the embedded training concept is going away. I’m not sure if this means the ANA are going to partner directly with the adjacent Coalition unit in the area without the benefit of an ETT to facilitate, or if this means the ANA is just going to operate independently. Either way, I’d hate to see the concept go away as I’m certain ETTs are huge force multipliers.

And lastly, for my part being an ETT was by far the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m incredibly thankful to have been given this opportunity. This was the hardest I’d worked, with the most responsibility, and most accomplished of anything so far for me. I have no doubt that I’ll always look back on what we did out here with great pride. Hopefully, 20 years from now I’ll be able to return to the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan with a walking stick and a backpack and not have to worry about getting my throat slit.

Time will tell.

Leaving

2009-08-27T03:22:00.009-04:00

"Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."

- attributed to Einstein

Eventually everyone's time to go home comes and ours finally did. At last, we're on our way out...but it's tough to get too excited about it when the process is going to take up to two weeks. We turned things over to the new team, and they'll begin going through all the things we went through. With the ANA you have to wonder if they purposely hit the rewind button when a new team arrives. By that I mean, the suspicion exists that the ANA play down their abilities for new ETTs in the hopes that the new guys will coddle them and not demand as much of them as they are capable of giving; let the new guys think you're incapable and maybe they won't ask much of you; show how pathetic and helpless you are and maybe they'll buy and give you more stuff. I won't personally say I saw much of that type of behavior, but I did hear of it from others and it would fit right in with what I know about the ANA.

At any rate, the new team will do just fine. They'll find their own way, which will be different from ours in some respects. As for the ANA, I'll miss some of them, no question. They do have some very good people. I'll miss my terps more though. It was hard not to feel like we were abandoning the terps as we said our goodbyes. Afghanistan is their country though, so can't feel too sorry for them that they have to stay. Afghanistan needs bright young men like our interpreters (who tend to see things more our way than the ANA ever did) to help reshape the country.

For now, we'll sit at Bagram and wait for a flight. The time waiting will be primarily spent sleeping, eating, weightlifting, and card-playing. We've already been here several days and we've no firm word on when we'll actually leave. Hopefully we'll be back in Hawaii in a week or so.

Election redux

2009-08-23T21:04:00.008-04:00

Our part on election day consisted of checking on the polling sites with our ANA. Unfortunately, we didn’t see as many people out and about as we would have liked, but we did see a fair number of men with purple fingers, indicating they’d voted. Since we didn’t have enough ETTs to accompany the ANA on all the missions they were doing, the ANA actually did a fair number of movements and security on their own, which was a nice culmination to our time here. The ANA proved they can operate without us and hold their own, as they were shot at from afar a number of times throughout the day. Violence in the area was much higher than normal, as was to be expected. Our main base was attacked sporadically with mortars, rockets, and even some direct small arms fire, which was something we hadn’t seen before.

After the polls closed, we went with the ANA to several different polling sites to pick up the ballots. As I watched the ANA throw the plastic crates full (or not so full) of ballots onto the back of their trucks, all the while hoping we wouldn’t start taking rounds, I thought to myself, “so this is how it (democracy and voting) happens”. Unfortunately, many of the cartons for the completed ballots were empty, but we did end up picking up some 14,000 ballots in an area that did not include any real population centers other than small villages. You’d be surprised how many Afghans can fit into those small villages though.

We almost managed to get back to the district center with the ballots without receiving any enemy contact, but…then it wouldn’t be a day in Kunar Province without someone shooting at you from up in the mountains. Normally, we’d stop the convoy and return fire, but on election day we were more concerned with getting the ballots secured in the district center, so despite the burst of machine gun fire and RPG shot our way from about 1000 meters out (much too far for an RPG, which probably why it landed 200 meters short of our truck), we just pushed onward rather than stay and fight. Running away from enemy contact felt like a bit of an ignominious way to end our tour since that was to be our last convoy, but I couldn’t disagree with the decision. Having an RPG rip through the back of one of those pickup trucks full of ballots would not have been good.

It appears the turnout for the election as a whole was low, but in any event we survived it with only a couple of ANA lightly wounded. And now we turn our full attention toward getting out of here as our replacements have arrived and are ready to take over.

Elections writeup

2009-08-19T03:15:00.008-04:00

I wrote this piece for worldfocus.org, which is why it contains elements of other posts.

Afghanistan’s election is coming up on Thursday. Here in the northeastern part of the country, conducting an orderly election will be a difficult task, to say the least. This region, due to the high mountains and its shared border with Pakistan, is a well-known insurgent haven. Our enemies inhabit the high ground and getting up there to deal with them is tough.

Nearly every engagement here involves the insurgents shooting down at us from above. When that hasn’t been the case, the enemy has been shooting at us from inside a village on the other side of a valley. Fighting an enemy while he’s inside a village presents its own set of concerns.

Conducting day-to-day operations here is difficult. Holding an election here against the wishes of our numerous enemies will certainly be interesting. Not only are we sure to see more attacks, but we’re also sure to have less support in the form of air since those air assets are likely to be needed everywhere else as well.

Coalition forces just don’t have the numbers to control much of the vast hinterland in this northeastern part of the country. Those air assets in the form of attack and reconnaissance helicopters and fighter aircraft are a vital part of how we get things turned in our favor once the shooting begins, but we’ll make do with or without them.

Generally speaking, if we don’t have a paved road leading to an area, we don’t control it. Geographically, the province sits in the middle of a mountain range. The mountains are interspersed with valleys carved by streams fed by melting snow runoff. The only flat areas you’ll see around here are the areas around the streams. Those flat areas vary in width from a kilometer to maybe 10 meters across. Given the challenging topography, road building is a difficult task. Where roads have been put in, bases and security have followed. Without a paved road, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are regular, which prevents a strong U.S. presence.

We focus on the larger population centers, which are not surprisingly generally located in the larger valleys. Of the many small valleys branching off from the larger ones, we control the terrain at most a couple of kilometers in. Far down into some of these valleys, we haven’t had Americans go in years. This fact hasn’t stopped the unnamed, unseen planners on high from deciding to put election polling sites in some of these places. Exactly how we’re supposed to secure a place we don’t ever go, in addition to all the other sites in our normal area of operations, is a question which has occurred to many of us in recent weeks.

Thankfully, as the election creeps closer, reality is beginning to set in, and numerous planned polling stations are not going to be opened. We’ll consolidate some, and others will just not be available, necessitating the local people taking a longer trip to vote. It will be the courageous family that decides to take a trip down an unsecured road while bearing voter registration cards. The insurgents aren’t always in the mountains…they do come down to the roads to conduct checkpoints, often with an IED in the road between us and them to prevent our arrival in a timely manner to deal with them.

For an election you need ballots. It’s Afghanistan’s election, so U.S. forces aren’t supposed to escort or handle the ballots. As embedded trainers with the Afghan National Army (ANA), my unit is exempt from this guidance. And so, on our way to pick up the ballots yesterday, we got in a nice little enemy engagement, which resulted in one of our trucks getting a tire shot out, two antennas blasted off and a round of indeterminate caliber (we’re still debating what size it had to have been) cracking up our windshield. Armor is a good thing to have when the element of surprise is not on your side. The firefight was a nice way to welcome our recently-arrived replacements to the joys and adventures of life in Afghanistan.

We should have good security for most of the ballots and polling sites, but a few of those ballots are going to be headed a little further up the road into country we don’t venture…and are not going to venture for this election. The Afghan National Police (ANP) refuses to escort the ballots around here without our help, and in this case we’re not helping.

If not the Americans or the ANA or the ANP, who’s going to take the ballots up there and provide security for the election, you ask? Well, in Afghanistan, when the official government representatives aren’t doing the job, the responsibility falls to the traditional power brokers, i.e. the local elders. Turning over official election ballots to citizens who hold no official capacity may not be how things were drawn up by the 10-pound heads who wanted to hold an election in a war-torn country in the midst of raging insurgency, but as someone in the news stated recently, we shouldn’t let perfection be the enemy of progress.

If even the elders can’t guarantee the security of the ballots and the ballots end up getting burned in a bonfire in the square next to the village mosque — well, at least in that case, the insurgents have clearly shown themselves to be destructive agents and enemies of their peoples’ freedom of choice. In the past, just to make a point, we’ve dropped off humanitarian aid like schoolbooks in places where we thought it would get burned by the insurgents before the local people could get their hands on it. Something similar may end up happening with a small portion of the ballots.

However imperfect, Afghanistan will have an election on August 20 and new elected officials will take up their posts sometime shortly thereafter. Undoubtedly, some of our enemies will abuse the election process and the general lack of security in this region to get themselves elected. But I reckon we’re on the right track if they’re playing by our rules and participating in the process, whatever their ultimate motives may be.

I’m just thankful I get to be here to see how this thing turns out.

Ballots

2009-08-18T00:59:00.002-04:00

Sometimes it’s really quite amazing to see the disconnect between what the unseen, unknown planners on high come up and the situation on the ground. Let’s just say originally this area was to have quite a number of polling sites. And as the election creeps closer and closer, everyone is coming to the realization that we just don’t have the manpower to provide security for all of these places. In many cases, it’s not so much the number of polling sites as it is the locations. We simply do not control much of the environment out here. Where we are we control, but it’s a big hinterland and we can’t be everywhere. And where we not…the Taliban are. Most of the little valleys out here don’t have a security presence more than a couple kilometers in. To put a polling site out deep in a valley where no Coalition forces go means we have to rely on local elders to provide the security for the ballots and the election itself.

Handing over election security to a local elder who holds no official position seems a little strange and could certainly lead to some odd results, but it’s not a perfect world and no election is perfect. Getting the people to go through the process, however flawed it may be, is the important thing. If that process doesn’t get off the ground at all because the ballots got burned by the Taliban, well, at least the Taliban in that case have shown exactly where they stand regarding peoples’ right to choose their leaders. Just to make a point, we’ve dropped off humanitarian aid knowing it would get burned by the Taliban. Something similar may end up happening with the ballots.

Elections

2009-08-16T03:16:00.002-04:00

We were lucky enough to have our stay extended here to cover the election coming up on the 20th. I’d feel a little better about staying if they’d let me vote – I reckon I’ve done enough for this country by now that I’ve earned that right, but oh well. Given that I don’t know much about the candidates or parties involved, I suppose it’s just as well that I don’t vote. What I do know is that 40 some odd persons are running for president. Such a large and divided field would seem to provide significant advantages for the incumbent, though there’s to be a runoff if no one obtains a certain percentage during the first vote. It seems pretty certain that Karzai will remain in power.

We obviously don’t really concern ourselves with the candidates or politics involved. We’re here to see that an election takes place with minimal chaos. The results are irrelevant to our purpose. I have no doubt that the people are reasonably well-informed about the candidates, but I ask myself how exactly an illiterate person votes. Whether these people really understand the process beyond a very superficial level is another question I ask myself. The other day we were rolling down the road and I saw a billboard with a woman in a burqa holding out a voter registration card. I took the billboard to be an encouragement to the local people to vote. The billboard got me thinking about the election and the compatibility of democracy and elections with a society that covers its women in burqas. You'd think that freedom from the burqa would come before the right to vote...but it's coming the other way round here.

Seems to me the Islamic world has a taste for Western ideas and goods, but hasn’t really assimilated those ideas into their culture in a meaningful way. A rich Islamic country can import the best cars, but they can’t create them. They can watch Indian movies but won’t produce them. They can even throw an election, but is it destined to be anything more than a legally sanctioned power grab? (Of course, most elections in around the world are really just that.) Is there really a debate of ideas going on here? Do they really respect differences in opinion? More importantly, does the average person here really think they can make a decision that will have an effect, positive or otherwise, on his or her own life? The whole idea of changing or bettering your state is alien to most of these people. On the one hand, Islam provides the people with some solace and contentment in what must be a difficult existence, but isn’t it primarily their religion that hinders their existence and makes it so difficult to begin with?

Well, we’ll give them their election. We’ve gone out and talked to local people about the election and asked them about voting, whether the Taliban have been around threatening them, etc. We’re often told that the Taliban have one message and we have another: two competing ideologies. The local people don’t necessarily find one or the other better. The Americans stand for personal freedom and democracy. The Taliban stand for a society ruled by its interpretation of Islam, which is unfortunately such an extremist and corrupt interpretation. Even so, frankly, given where the culture in Afghanistan is at this time, the Taliban’s message seems more appropriate in some ways, since this society is much more akin to medieval Europe than a modern democracy. The world has become a small place though, and since we do in fact share this planet with the Afghan people, it’s probably in our best interest to do what we can to drag them into the 21st century. And however culturally unready they may be for an election, I wouldn't underestimate the appeal and power of freedom and democracy once a society becomes accustomed to it.

Motivations

2009-08-12T03:18:00.000-04:00

Motivations

I appreciate the questions in the comments. I’ll try to answer them as best I can. I certainly don’t have all the answers. But I do have opinions, which albeit are based on a small part of the country and one particular unit. I’m quite certain what I’ve seen is representative of the country as a whole, but I could be wrong. At any rate, I’ll throw my two cents out there and people can take it or leave it. If anyone has facts that refute what I have to say, I’d be interested to hear them. Frankly, I’m not sure there’s anything I would enjoy more than having my opinions on the ANA attacked by someone who hasn’t lived with them and been on the ground in combat with them.

I’ve actually asked various solders in the ANA why they joined, and they all without fail answered that they did it to fight the Taliban and because they like the soldier’s life. In a few cases this may be true, but in my opinion the main reason an Afghan joins the ANA is money. The ANA pays relatively well, about $180/month with free food, a place to lay your head at night, and a good amount of leave. Moreover, few job opportunities exist in Afghanistan. If the army is the one hiring, then you take what you can get. We’ve seen an uptick in recruiting for the US armed forces over the past year, which I’m pretty sure is a result of the down economy, not a sudden uptick in patriotism or adventurism on the part of our young people.

Regardless of anyone’s motivation for joining the ANA, the important thing is how they act when they’re here. If these guys were serving in the ANA because they really wanted to be here and not for a paycheck, I’m confident we’d see a little more motivation on their part. Teaching class to them is roughly akin to teaching kindergarteners, and that goes for the officers too, not just the soldiers.

The ANA can often talk a good game, but where the rubber meets the road, they’re usually not making things happen. There is usually a large disconnect between what the ANA commanders say they want to do and what actually happens on the ground. Either the commander on the ground is unable or unwilling to make a decision to react to recent events, or excuses will be made for inactivity and blame passed around for long enough until the issue is forgotten.

So what is the ANA really? A jobs program. It’s a necessary jobs program, and a necessary part of the country, but at this point we’re not getting much return on our investment. We baby the ANA and don’t utilize them the way we should. Of course, on our level we can’t tell the ANA what operations to do or not do, but somewhere up on high those demands can be made…after all, we’re paying all the bills here. So long as we let them get away with it, the ANA are more than happy to sit back and watch the US forces do most of the work. I’ve made all these points before so I won’t rehash them anymore. Suffice it to say, I’m starting to believe local militias are the way to go. Local militias are local, and as such have a vested interest in the security of their area. The ANA come from all over the country…their vested interest is in their own security. Since the ANA leadership has little sense of duty or will to make their soldiers work, the result is an army that often does little more than occupy a base and turn food into excrement.

But they're getting better.

Pogtastic

2009-08-10T00:33:00.007-04:00

"Change hurts. It makes people insecure, confused and angry. People want things to be the same as they've always been because that makes life easier. But if you're a leader, you can't let your people hang on to the past." - Richard Marcinko

It’s funny what powerful forces habit and comfort zones are to our behavior. When I was patrolling every day, the thing I dreaded most was being sent somewhere where I’d be cooped up on the base every day. Now that I’ve grown accustomed to being confined to the base, I don’t really relish going out. I don’t dread going out, but I certainly don’t look forward to it the way I used to. The heat may have something to do with it, but I think the change in my preference is mostly due to inertia – people are more comfortable doing what they’ve been doing. The ANA remind me of this fact every day, as any change in their behavior moves at a glacier-like pace at best, despite our efforts. It takes a conscious act of will to break a habit, whether it be doing something or not doing something. I’ve never been much of a creature of habit, as I seem to have a high tolerance and even need for change and uncertainty, but even so, breaking out of my comfort zone can meet with some resistance within myself at times.

At any rate, I did go out for a couple days recently. Basically, we drove up and down a road and ‘conducted foreign policy’ by talking with different townspeople in villages we don’t normally frequent. Meeting with local people in a non-formal setting, i.e. not involving sitting down with chai etc, is an enjoyable aspect of the job. I dislike meetings in formal settings for the simple fact that they tend to go the same way most of the time, with us being asked for different economic development projects or items and our asking information in return. Suffice to say we give more significantly more than we get in those settings – a fact which accounts for my antipathy to the process.

The non-formal encounters on the street can involve much the same thing only on a smaller scale: instead of being asked for 500 bags of cement we might instead be asked for a pen, but we can usually shrug off such requests and just shoot the breeze for awhile before the novelty wears off for all parties. My policy is to give something only when not asked; no use encouraging a beggar’s culture – though this is unfortunately exactly what’s going on here on the macro scale. The results of these operations are hard to measure, but if nothing else they do give us the opportunity to "showcase the ANA".

Getting shot at

2009-08-04T15:31:00.000-04:00

“To someone who has never experienced danger, the idea is attractive.” – Carl von Clausewitz

There were a number of reasons why I decided to come back into the Marines and do this job, but one of the biggest ones was that I wanted to experience combat, and by combat I mean someone shooting rounds in my direction. I’d spent plenty of time outside the wire in Iraq, but I never had anyone shoot at me or my unit, though I'm confident that any veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan will tell you that the insidious IED threat is much more discomforting than the threat of small arms fire from a ridgeline across the way (though the days of Afghanistan being strictly a 'shooting war' with minimal IEDs are certainly gone for good). Walking around knowing you're being watched by men with machine guns that want you dead can be disconcerting, but I'll take it any time over driving around waiting to get blown up.

At any rate, my time in the Marine Corps simply did not feel complete without combat that I could participate in actively. I suppose the Marines must do a very good job of 'conditioning' us, as I came into the Marine Corps for the adventure, travel, and leadership experience - experiencing combat had nothing whatsoever to do with my decision to become a Marine, though at the time there were no wars going on.

Before coming over here, I’d heard plenty about what the ETTs were doing, and so I had a pretty good idea when I volunteered for this job that, depending on exactly where they sent us, I was likely to get as much or more combat that I could ever want. Since experiencing combat was a stated goal for me from the outset, I can comfort myself that I’ve achieved that one goal, though through all the TICs (troops in contact) I’ve been involved in, I’ve seen the enemy exactly one time and I’m not even 100% about that one.

I think I was lucky that in that I was eased into combat. My first TIC took place while I was on my first base a mere hour after I first arrived. Being shot at while you’re on a base and behind barriers or a big gun of your own is not that big of a deal, though it took awhile to get used to the sounds of rounds flying over my head. Rounds were regularly flying around the area while I was at my first base and those TICs were really pretty fun.

We got shot at while on patrol during my second day. Luckily, we were near an Army observation post (OP) when it happened, so we all ran behind the OP and returned fire. Or most of us returned fire, I just observed since we had plenty of other shooters and the incoming rounds weren’t very voluminous or threatening to us in our covered position. That TIC ended with a bomb being dropped on the house where the rounds were coming from. I can remember at one point poking my head over the barriers to look around and then hearing a round ping off the humvee right next to me. At that point, I incredulously thought to myself, “Really?! Are you serious? You guys are really going to shoot at us like that?!” I guess I was kind of offended in a way. However, we were in such a secure position behind the OP, and I had no real responsibility for anyone other than myself since we were still in the process of trading out with the previous ETTs, that the TIC was really pretty basic with minimal chaos for me personally.

The next big one came when we were hiking up a hill into the higher part of a town. When the insurgents starting shooting from the ridgeline next to us (they initiate most all engagements) I ran for the nearest cover and ended up stuck behind a bombed out house with ANA firing over my head from behind me and insurgents firing over my head from the other side. My trusty terp was right there next to me; we actually sat there shaking our heads and laughing nervously for a few moments before I got myself together and made a few contributions of my own to the noise.

I guess the seriousness of it doesn't completely set in till you nearly get whacked. Suffice to say, crouching behind a small tree and a pile of rocks as they get riddled with bullets is an experience I won't soon forget. We usually know roughly from where the attack will come from (the insurgents are every bit as predictable as we are) before it hits us, so we can respond quickly with direct and indirect fires (dismounted patrols kill and injure the enemy most often with fire support in the form of mortars, artillery, and helo support), and the ANA are very dedicated to immediately pouring maximum fire outward to suppress the enemy, so we're more than able to respond effectively to what the enemy throws at is, though they nearly always get the first round off.

Anymarine.com

2009-07-31T10:51:00.005-04:00

We've got a long and difficult month ahead and I've got plenty more to write before I close this blog, but I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those people from anymarine.com that have supported my unit while we’ve been out here. I know I sent the link to this website out to many of you, so hopefully at least a couple of you are reading this. And my apologies to those of you I couldn’t always write thank-you notes to. For awhile there I was receiving so many packages that I had many of them diverted to other guys in my unit at different places.

Anymarine.com was a great resource for us. Just sign up and request what you need and random people from all over contact you with letters and send you what they can. Guys in my unit received just about anything they asked for including: hiking boots, school supplies for local children, power saws, printers, textbooks, tool sets, floodlights, Polaroid cameras, entire seasons’ worth of DVDs, and loads and loads of girl-scout cookies. At a couple of the more austere bases the marines do in fact live on their care packages. I should know as that was me for the first four months of our tour. I’ve always known but my experience with anymarine.com confirmed for me that Americans are the most generous people in the world. And thanks to everyone for the correspondence as well. Sometimes it's nice to get items, but a good letter from home goes a long way as well.

Ups downs

2009-07-29T01:25:00.007-04:00

There are plenty of ups and downs here, and not just when you're climbing around in the mountains. They tell you coming out here that you'll come out strong that first few months - all motivated to make the world a better place. And it's true. I think we all had a feeling of great optimism upon arrival - a feeling that gradually dissipated into disgust and disappointment about halfway through our nine-month deployment. Dealing with the ANA is hard sometimes. I think I've documented that pretty well throughout this blog.... You're warned that these feelings of disappointment and frustration with the local inhabitants and culture will get to you eventually, and it most certainly did, though it never stopped us from doing our jobs and doing them well.

They say those negative feelings about all things Afghan will stay with you until near the end of the deployment when you'll hit a kind of second wind. I have to say, whoever "they" were that made all these prognostications based upon what others have experienced was right again, as I find myself trying to really savor every moment as things wind down. I'm really going to miss a lot of things about this experience, including those little moments like when the ANA were trying to laminate their personnel charts with plastic wrap, and how when we gave them some lamination paper they proceeded to laminate everything they could get their hands on, including their phones.

We've still got a ton of work left to do, especially with the elections coming up, but with the new guys starting to trickle in it's now become hard to avoid the realization that we'll be leaving soon.

Entropy

2009-07-27T11:54:00.017-04:00

Many times I've been asked to help find someone a job on a base somewhere here in Afghanistan. You'll certainly see a lot of Afghan men sitting around in the middle of the day doing nothing, but I've not found Afghans unable or unwilling to work. I suppose when the price is right people will work, and we probably pay far too much for what is delivered to us in the form of work, which would certainly increase the incentive to work for us. Whatever the case may be for the average Afghan citizen and his work ethic, I can certainly speak for the Afghan soldier, and his work ethic is by and large non-existent. Self-improvement is not a commonly sought after goal for the average Afghan soldier. Some of the younger officers and a few of the NCOs want to improve themselves, but most of these guys just do not really care (about their job anyway) and are "paycheck players".

Without attention everything reverts to chaos, and nowhere demonstrates that fact better than here. Things in Afghanistan just seem to fall apart. But then when you have a high level of apathy in the average citizen, I suppose that's to be expected. Nietzsche said that industriousness from generation to generation extinguished religious instincts. I wonder...is the converse also true? Does religiousness hamper industriousness? Seems to in Islamic societies. I was confronted many times in Iraq with the "Inshallah" (if God wills it) attitude. You don't hear that word spoken as often here in Afghanistan, but the attitude it represents is no less prevalent. Of course, if you ask your Iraqi or Afghan counterpart something and he comes back with Inshallah once too often, you can always turn it around on him and say Inshallah when he asks if you're going to provide him with something. Inshallah can be a tough attitude to get past. There's no point in aiming your rifle if the bullet is only going to hit the target if God wills it.

The "Inshallah attitude" does lend itself to a certain ambivalence on the part of the populace that is alien to an American. We tend to see things as fairly black and white...not so much as shades of gray, and especially so among members of the military. As an American, if you have something to do, you do it. Simple. Not so with these guys. That feeling of "dualism" - that something or someone can represent two potentially opposing things or ideas, is much more common in the Eastern way of thinking. Not sure if we can attribute that to their religion or not, but in any case this ambivalence of thought tends to make the convincing of an Afghan of the need to get a certain thing accomplished, whether it be cleaning the base or conducting a patrol, that to us seems self-evident in its need to be done, more difficult.

I will say that to these people the Islamic religion is like food and water are to us, and without getting into a discussion on religion, for I am surely unqualified to speak on the matter, Islam emphasizes submission. If submission to God's or Allah's will is your overriding principle, a lot of that individual autonomy and will to forge your own path through your own efforts would seem to be extinguished...and you end up with what we perceive to be apathy. I am sure that Afghans do care about results, but the disconnect lies in how results are achieved. Marines understand effort and planning produce the results you want. Things don't just happen how you want them to because you want it that way.

Oh well, I'm probably attributing my issues with these guys entirely too much to culture and not enough to experience. After all, I've spent plenty of time with people back home that just somehow expected a certain event to transpire without any hiccups, and clearly did not understand the intricacies and difficulties that inevitably arise when one is confronted with situations beyond the norm (think of a weekend away with a significant other).

Ok, I think I'll close this entry before I run afoul of another Nietzsche quote...something about forgetting what you were trying to do in the first place being the most fundamental form of stupidity. Let's just hope that idea doesn't aptly represent the whole endeavor over here...

Selling ammo

2009-07-26T11:36:00.002-04:00

We've been getting sporadic mortar and rocket attacks at the base here lately. No damages have been done so far, but if it continues it's only a matter of time. Apparently, recently a round landed next to the local Afghan National Police (ANP) station because the other day the ANA found an unexploded mortar round there and brought it up to me to show it off and ask me what to do with it. They were quite proud of themselves, and when my terp took it off their hands he proceeded to handle it a little nonchalantly for my tastes. I can't profess to being very fond of dealing with unexploded ordnance (UXO); I'd just as soon leave that job to the pros. But...sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, so I grabbed it and carried it up to the UXO pit where it was destroyed the next day by Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD). The whole incident got me thinking about the ANA and ammo. Why is it that we get reports all the time of them selling ammo, but then when they find UXO they bring it right over to me? Why not sell that damn UXO too and keep it away from me...? haha. No, but really, better if they give it to me than sell it. Even if a rocket or mortar is no good anymore as a flying projectile, it can still make a helluva an IED. Best of all if they just marked it and left it in place for us to call EOD.

It's true that we often get reports of ANA and ANP selling ammunition to the insurgents. This fact is probably one of the motivations for our changing them over to our weapons - different weapons/different ammunition and the insurgents don't (yet) have our weapons. I think in most cases it's probably the ANP doing the selling for the simple facts that the ANP has a reputation for corruption which is worse than that of even the ANA, has much less supervision, is much closer to the population, and is in general, less trained than the ANA. But it's always tempting to see the problem elsewhere than with your own. It's amusing to me that the ANP has heavy machine guns in their police stations and carries RPGs with them on patrol sometimes, and yet the ANA can't search houses under normal conditions. To draw such a legal distinction between the ANA and ANP when the country is so unstable that the police forces must use heavy guns and RPGs seems ridiculous, though I can see where they're going with it...the idea being that we're more likely to win over public support if home searches are done by the local police who are more involved with the community than the ANA and are (supposedly) better trained to do home searches.

Realistically though, legalities and such 'rights' against searches by the local army are a luxury of modern, stable countries...not Afghanistan. It's a tough enough coordination between the ANA and US elements...bring the ANP into the picture and it's only going to get more difficult. The fact that the ANP are notoriously corrupt and not often trusted by the us, the ANA, or the local people is another strike against involving them.

M16

2009-07-23T03:00:00.008-04:00

Men must be taught as if you taught them not. And things unknown proposed as things forgot. - Alexander Pope

The M16 transition is finally getting going in earnest. I'm still not sure I agree with the whole idea of replacing the venerable AK with the M16 for these guys. Seems I remember reading somewhere that we should train indigenous forces to mirror the enemy, not to mirror us. By giving them armored humvees and NATO weapons we're certainly making them look a lot like us, which would be great if the Afghan Army had any hope of supporting an army with such equipment. But I guess we'll do the supporting. Still...we've got plenty of soldiers of our own that can roll around in armored vehicles. What we need more of are lightly loaded guys that can go up into the mountains and ambush the enemy. The basic load for the Americans makes moving around in the mountains difficult to say the least. If it were me, I'd have the ANA up in the mountains with no equipment at all other than a weapon with ammo and some water...mirroring the insurgents. It takes a lot less food and water to support an Afghan...we need to take advantage of that by not weighing them down with body armor.

At any rate, we enjoy training them on the weapons systems. They're especially happy to be getting our machine guns. I usually spend the first 5 minutes of every class on the M16 'selling' it to them, as most of them are initially skeptical of why they need it. We tell them the M16 is better for a trained fighter, whereas the AK is better for the untrained guy...a not untrue statement. They seem to buy that explanation.

The rifle ranges are pretty fun with these guys. Some of the Afghans shoot better than I do, no question. We had a guy keyhole his first 3 shots at 25 meters the other day. It was easy to see he was going to shoot very well given his technique and demeanor but that was uncanny. Others...well, it takes awhile but we get them all in the vicinity of the target eventually even if they are hitting 'the four corners'. Our attached soldier from the Georgia National Guard seems to have more problems with his shooters than the marines do...a circumstance we exploit fully in poking fun at him. Coincidence? We think not. Haha. We get guys shooting left-eyed right-handed. Others close their eyes when the pull the trigger, and many like to yank the trigger. A couple of guys I've had look like they're hyperventilating when they go to shoot. If they can relax, they have some hope of hitting where they're aiming.

Certainly, the training environment is different over here. You do what you have to do to train. If a bunch of goats take up residence on the mountainside behind the range, just send a couple of ANA up there with rocks to throw at them to 'herd' them away. We try to keep the shooting going in situations that might not fly back home, but when two US Army lieutenants come out to the range to throw grenades and one of them doesn't detonate...well, you pretty much have to shut it down after that.

Taken

2009-07-19T13:46:00.005-04:00

Stumbled upon an interesting article by Michael Yon. Kind of nice to see that someone who knows what he's talking about has reached many of the same conclusions about this place that I have. It's tough to avoid the conclusion that we're being taken over here. Taken for everything we can provide, while we can provide it because developing this place is simply a herculean task. If anyone's doing a cost-benefit analysis of what's going on, I find it hard to believe they'd find this endeavor worth it at this point, though as an American I have full confidence that we can achieve anything given enough time. Frankly, I view a lot of what we're doing as enabling. And if there's anything an Afghan is especially good at, it's letting another person do his work for him and clean up his mess should such a person prove so willing. Our being here enables the local forces (the ANA, Afghan National Police) to sit back and let us do most of the fighting.

I'm not saying the ANA don't know how to fight, because I know from experience when the times get tough they are more than capable of turning it on and getting down to business. But since I've been over here I've seen the US forces in the area take a good number of casualties and KIAs. And I've yet to see the ANA lose a single soldier. Part of this is because the people we're fighting against sometimes don't target the ANA because they're fellow Muslims, but it's mostly because the ANA don't really get out there and do the kind of operations that would put them in danger...and would have more of an effect on the enemy. They like to sit back and let the US Army handle those missions. At this point in the war, the ANA should be doing the bulk of the fighting while the Americans sit back and provide fire support, medical support, and logistical help. But that's far from how it is. Allowing our absence to be felt might give the ANA the impetus to put up...or get overrun.

I will say this: the optimism, can-do attitude, perseverance, and industriousness of the Americans over here makes me very proud to be a part of what we're doing. Since I can't see our efforts magically producing those qualities in the average Afghan citizen, I foresee more of the same difficulties.

July...

2009-07-19T13:31:00.003-04:00

it's a rough month in Afghanistan. It's hot, it's humid, the mountains are teeming with enemy fighters. The fighting season has arrived no doubt about that. We've already lost more than 30 Americans this month, making it the worst month of the year so far. Our area is emblematic of the country as a whole. The new battalion has already lost a couple of guys after one month. But they keep getting out there and having it out with the enemy. The last battalion went through the same thing when they arrived last July because the summer is always the worst time - tough time to show up on the job when you're a new unit. Thankfully, our unit arrived in November and had a few quiet months to figure out how to do our jobs. And I would say we've figured out the ANA by now. We know what they're all about, and they know that we know what they're all about. And I'll leave it at that for now.

Donkeys

2009-07-18T14:57:00.001-04:00

To lengthen our stay in the mountains we decided to incorporate donkeys into a recent mission. We figured donkeys are a reasonable way for the ANA to sustain themselves...they can't exactly call on helicopter resupply the way we can. Donkeys come at a pretty reasonable rate around here - $5 a day for a donkey, with a bit extra tacked on for fodder. Afghan donkeys are small, maybe three feet at the shoulder, totally unlike the large mules we worked with briefly during training. They can supposedly carry a third of their body weight for long distances.

With donkeys you obviously can't pack them too heavy and you can't pack them unevenly, but easier said than done on the packing part. Not having a lot of experience with donkeys, we let the local donkey handlers we rented them from pack the donkeys with our supplies: mostly water and ammunition. You'd think letting the professionals pack the donkeys would be the way to go, but it wasn't long into the walk that we noticed the packs slipping to one side or the other of the donkeys. A donkey will most certainly walk crooked if he's not packed evenly. So there we were pulling the packs back and forth trying to get them balanced on the donkey as we stepped off into the night. For the most part, the donkeys would at least follow along with the program, and they were in no hurry, which wasn't really a bad thing since we were all carrying a pretty heavy load. Despite the slow pace, 30 minutes into the show the unfortunate happened...a donkey keeled over and would not get up. I actually felt sorry for the little guy as he did seem to be one of the smaller donkeys and he was carrying what seemed to be a heavy load. I learned later just how much abuse it sometimes takes to get a donkey going when I saw two donkeys handlers grab the halter and tail of the donkey, yank him to his feet, and then kick him in the balls to get him going. Not being willing to mete out quite that much abuse at the time, and not having a lot of time to deal with the fallen donkey, we just unloaded him and left him there. So basically, the donkey had his way with us...fall over a couple of times and they'll leave you be and you can skip the trip up the mountain. Let the humans carry their own stuff.

After spread-loading 80 pounds worth of stuff between four of us we were falling pretty far behind everyone else, and not looking too good for catching up given the extra weight, but we eventually caught up after a few tense moments looking around for everyone else in the dark. The rest of the trip involved one more donkey falling out (but this one could still walk...just not with any weight) and a long and difficult trip of the mountainside that ended with me nearly becoming a heat casualty - all that dragging of the donkey, running around, and extra weight didn't sit too well with me given that I was already less than 100% physically to begin with. In the end, we didn't end up making it as far as we would have liked with the donkeys as the weather and mountains have a way of just crushing your best efforts this time of year, but we managed to spend enough time out there to learn a few things.

Lessons learned:
Pack the donkeys better and lighter
Bring extra donkeys with no weight as spares
Let the ANA handle the donkeys - they are more accustomed to them

We even came up with an excel spreadsheet on how to load them, though I haven't figured out how to attach it in its original form to this blog.

Trip to Vegas

2009-07-11T16:16:00.009-04:00

I have taken a few trips to Las Vegas in my day, and even had the pleasure (or misfortune) to live there for a spell. Well, out here a trip to Vegas for us means a ride on a helicopter out to Firebase Vegas, our beleaguered neighbor when I was at Vimoto. Though we could see Vegas from Vimoto, and from Korengal Outpost as well, we never once visited it as it was a fairly difficult walk over there, and I suppose we just never had the occasion or desire to go see it or conduct an operation involving them. One time when an operation was conducted with troops from Vegas, they were brought to the KOP via helicopter.

In any case, Vegas is pretty much its own little world, more cut off and isolated than any of the other positions. At Vimoto, we at least had the Marines and Army personnel at KOP to keep us company and vice versa. And all the FOBs along the Pech are easily accessible between each other. Vegas, with its Army platoon, two Marines, and ANA platoon, is kind of on it's own. Many of the patrols those guys do involve long, difficult, uphill hikes to not-so-nearby villages such as Chitrall. FB Vegas ostensibly provides some overwatch on the road leading into the Korengal. Given how infrequently the road is used anymore for supply trips, one might wonder what purpose Vegas is serving, other than providing another nice target for our enemy. Of course, to say that a base exists only to help with re-supply to another base would make it look like we exist out in the Korengal simply to exist. Bureaucratic-type behavior invading a warzone. And that is not the case now is it?

At any rate, we had a "tourist" come out to Blessing at one point not long ago. (From time to time, we have active-duty guys visit us (generally field grade officers and senior SNCOs) from somewhere in the rear. They make excuses to come out and embed with us in the hopes of getting to see some combat. I am not sure whether we really have a choice whether to accept them or not...they are often more trouble than they are worth, though occasionally the come in handy to help man our vehicles.)

This particular tourist was an older guy, but had some infantry experience in his background, so we sent him up to Vegas in the thought that he might be useful to them and help break up the monotony. He may have helped with the monotony, but he (not surprisingly) did not prove useful. On his first (and only) trip outside the wire, he promptly sprained his ankle, which necessitated the patrol being interrupted to bring him back. Had to be embarrassing for him, so maybe I should feel a little empathy, but frankly, these are the kinds of things that happen when people come out unprepared in the hopes of getting a Combat Action Ribbon (CAR), which is something everyone wants. That particular tourist apparently spent the next couple of days convalescing while waiting for the next round of helicopters to come out and pick him up, and from there went straight back to wherever he came from without us seeing him again...probably spared him some ignominy.

On the subject of CARs, I can recall another tourist pestering us about writing him up for one after our convoy that he was a part of heard a round go off nearby. I use that phrasing deliberately ("heard a round go off nearby"), because oftentimes when driving down the main road (Route Rhode Island) we "take fire". More often than not, these rounds rounds do not impact anywhere near us, but we can certainly tell they are shooting at us. Depending on the situation, we might just ignore the incident completely without returning fire if we can not establish where the shooter is with any reasonable degree of certainty...and furthermore, once we start shooting back, the Afghans will start shooting, which more often than not results in a loss of ammo with nothing to show for it. In my experience, it is just as well to move on if it is not a serious attack, because the shooter is generally well up the hillside, well dug in, and simply trying to harass and delay us. A platoon of Marines would probably go up the hillside and eliminate the shooter, but a platoon of Afghans...no. At any rate, we told that visitor that a few rounds going off nearby, without even response from anyone, certainly did not rate him a CAR.

I digress. My one and only trip out to Vegas was to deliver them their quota of NATO weapons, so they could commence weapons training. Delivering weapons is not so simple as putting them in a box and leaving it on the LZ for the cargo guys to deal with...no, they have to be hand carried, like othe sensitive material. Since the NATO weapons training fell under my responsiblity, I got the joy of carrying a load out there, though I managed to rope others in to help at times with the deliveries, as we took more than one load out to different bases out in the Korengal.

As mentioned above, the way to Vegas was via helicopter, so a trip out there involved a late night. Daytime helo trips ended when we had a bird shot down (which incidentally "landed" just outside FOB Vegas). Helicopters were fired on fairly frequently around Vegas, whether nighttime or daytime. In fact an older Russian supply helicopter that was used to bring the ANA food was shot down just before we started our deployment.

Being on those helicopters at night was never the most comfortable time for me, at least not after my innocence was lost in January when that 47 went down. Having no control over your fate when confronting a situation with a relatively high probability of mayhem is never fun. And further adding to the unease, little was done to help make these helicopter approaches much safer after the one went down. One has to understand, the 47's are large targets, and they aren't just tapping down and dropping off a load of spec ops guys and then departing. Out in the Korengal, the 47's are delivering supplies with every run, as well as people. Supplies in the Korengal means sling loads...underneath the aircraft. Those loads have to be released while the bird is hovering near the ground. This means extra time hovering, as well as a slower approach...and sometimes they have to pick up slings too, which means more time on the way out. All of this time is important when the nearby hillsides provide plenty of decent vantage points from which to take your shot.

Before the incident in January, the 47's would come out accompanied by Apaches in broad daylight. After January, the 47's only come out at night. But their arrival is preceded by Apaches buzzing around the area, using their thermal and night scopes to look for the enemy. They do quite often shoot rockets or gun rounds. Whether sending the Apaches out first is a good idea or not, I could not say. Perhaps the intention is to intimidate the enemy. I will say that an Apache doing its thing with rockets can be a startling way to be woken up. I can only imagine how startling it would be if they were shooting at you as you are alone and dug into the side of a hill, waiting to take your shot at a helicopter. With the available communications technology, surprise is probably out of the question anyway. Word gets out.

So yes, tactics did change, but nothing was done to make things "safer" in my opinion...primarily because the guys on the ground did nothing in particular to support the helicopters. Not only did the guys on the ground seem to progressively use more and more supplies as these FOBs get more and more developed over time (It's the American way to improve your station in life...and that applies here...FOBs get better over time, but "better" often means they require more resources.), but no additional effort was made to "secure" the LZ. Of course, men were on watch during the helicopter approaches, but we did not send people out on ambushes or patrols to distract or hunt the enemy. That would have been proactive...but our entire posture was reactive...and the helicopter delivery operations were no different.

Landings in the middle of the night when you are in a hurry are always chaotic. The noise and darkness broken only by red lights add to the other-worldliness of the experience of floating around strapped to the inside of a huge metal tube. The bird finally thumps down after hovering just over the surface for what seems to be an eternity, as it must first drop off the sling loads it has underneath. Upon landing, you unbuckle and make your way out the door, struggling under the weight of all your gear and whatever it is your are bringing with you. (Unless the helicopter is supporting a tactical operation you are doing, which we did very few of, you are going to be carrying something more than yourself and your gear.) You quickly hand over a sea bag full of M16s to a sergeant from the team, noticing how he's managed to grow quite a beard in the 6 months since you have seen him. You trade hellos with your eyes and nods, give each other a clap on the back, hand off the package, and go your separate ways. You try to facilitate getting the ANA on and off the bird so you can get out of there. Finished, you strap back in, quickly take off and are back at Blessing in minutes.

Caught up

2009-07-11T04:18:00.016-04:00

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." -Abraham Lincoln

I wondered if/when it would happen, and it finally did...I got sick. In Iraq, spending a lot of time with the Iraqis, eating their food, and drinking their chai, I got moderately under the weather pretty regularly. Usually not too seriously, just gastrointestinal issues leading to repeated trips to the outhouse/ditches. I had some of the same issues in SE Asia and Latin America from time to time. Surprisingly, given how much Afghan food and boiled river water I've drank since I've been here I hadn't had the problem at all till the other day. Well, the sickness finally came and it got me good. Being 100 meters from the nearest bathroom when you're in such a state isn't much fun. Not even watching the "Training Montage" from Rocky IV was much help in getting me going. That video reminds me I've still yet to fully reach manhood since I've yet to chop down a large tree.

On the plus side, the schedule the last few days has allowed me to catch up on my sleep, and since I haven't really been eating I've inadvertently managed to knock off those last few pounds of baby fat that the heat in recent months hadn't already melted off my body. Carrying around extra weight when it's 105 degrees and moderately humid doesn't make much sense. The trick will be keep those pounds off till we're almost ready to go home and then bring them back in a more solid state to get ready for the beach in Hawaii. At any rate, I'm feeling fine now.

Drago!

New guys

2009-07-08T12:22:00.007-04:00

We've had a new US Army unit in charge of the area for a couple of weeks now. New units bring different things to the table, mostly good in this case. The guys that left had already been here for awhile when we arrived in November, and we could tell. This new unit has that optimism I remember having when we first showed up...not that we've completely lost it, but it's hard not to be a bit jaded after nearly eight months. It's been very refreshing working with them and seeing how they do business. They're much more willing to work with us and the ANA than their predecessors. They also are happy to get out of their trucks and get up into the mountains, which is nice to see. We're happy to be here to help with the transition and provide some continuity. Given that the end is in sight for us, I think the guys in my unit are starting to get a bit of a second-wind and have really been enjoying ourselves lately, while keeping very busy. We're lucky to have each other.

I learned quite a bit working with several different Army company commanders from the last unit. One of them especially really knew how to put his collection assets to work and then operate based on the things he learned. And as for the old battalion commander, well, he was a character that's for sure. During a small firefight I tripped and "fell down a little hill" (as my 3 year-old nephew would phrase it) while running toward the old battalion CO to let him know my unit and the ANA were going to move on out of the area. Falling on my sprained wrist I let out an "Ah!", and he looked at me and laughingly said, "Are you shot?" It's not every battalion commander that's out there calling fires and talking to air support during a firefight - but he was there.

Afghan Women

2009-06-29T17:28:00.012-04:00

It's a tough row to hoe for the Afghan women. Well, actually everyone's got a tough way to go over here, and you can see it on their faces, which from about middle age onwards tend to be as ridged and folded as the landscape. I often overestimate ages here by roughly 10 years, unless I'm consistently being lied to as to the true ages of the people. At any rate, the women have it especially tough. From the time they can walk it seems the young girls are treated like mules, carrying various jugs or containers on their heads or in their arms. It's a common sight to see a man walking down the road empty-handed while his young daughter struggles along behind him serving as his porter. I guess having a daughter accustomed to working may make her more marriageable - better to get those good habits started early on.

On the other hand, I've been to girls' schools that were very well attended by 5 to 12 year-old cute young ladies. So undoubtedly the people do want their daughters to learn and get something of an education. The high schools around here are boys-only though. Afghanistan actually has a fair number of female politicians in government. Those women are brave souls no doubt, as female politicians have been murdered in recent years.

In this part of the country most all women of child-bearing age wear the burqa in public. I say most all because in one particular area it was not uncommon for us to see women working outside around their home without wearing the burqa, but that was a small, close-knit community. In that area, when we saw women coming through carrying bunches of twigs gathered up or water from the river, the custom was for us to turn away and ignore them as completely as possible. This was the SOP not just for US forces but for the ANA as well. However, for the most part in Kunar Province, except for the old and withered and the very young, we see no women. We do, however, see plenty of T and A beneath those burqas...toes and ankles.

Islam allows male practitioners four wives. Women, of course, aren't allowed the same privilege. Given that I'm well into my 30's now, the ANA often question me why I don't have a wife or children yet. I often play off their questions by telling them I'm only allowed one wife, so I have to make sure I pick the right girl. I once (jokingly - I promise I was only gauging his reaction) told the ANA Religious Officer (an older guy who serves as the battalion mullah) with whom I was eating dinner, that if I were allowed more than one wife I would have already married one. I would then follow her up with a newer model ten years later or so, and then kick the old one into the back room somewhere. Repeat that process three times and you've got your four wives without ever lacking for a young one, with three old ones in the back of the house or in the yard doing chores. After he heard the translation he got a big smile on his face, clapped me on the shoulder, and said in English, "GOOD!". As if to say, "You're getting it figured out my young American friend!" Religion and my idea of morality don't always go hand in hand over here.

Relativity

2009-06-29T15:23:00.010-04:00

Haven't been feeling especially inspired to write this week so I dug through my archives, sanitized, and edited this journal entry I wrote in February. Reading over it makes me miss the little base where I spent my first four months of the tour.

"Relativity"

I’m not completely sure how many firefights we’ve been in to this point. The ones that we participate in while we’re on the base are not really a big deal to me because we’re generally not the target of those attacks due to our proximity to the village below. We get to participate because the other firebases (typically Restrepo lately) in the area are getting attacked.

However many gunfights we’ve been in, the frequency of attacks has been increasing recently. We’d gotten some intel that some foreign fighters had pushed into the area with the intention of hitting us as hard as they could for about a week or so...and hitting us they have been, though with no friendly casualties to this point.

Sometimes you get so used to the shooting you don’t pay much attention to it, and not just when you’re "safe" inside the confines of your compound. As part of a security patrol the other day, we stopped at the local lumber mill, which consists of a house with a large, partly covered porch where they do the cutting with an old bandsaw. This province used to have a thriving timber industry, which has since been shut down by the government for fear the proceeds were being used to fund insurgent operations – a not unreasonable fear given this area is considered “insurgent central”. The anthropologist embedded with us for the time being thought talking to the young men at the lumber mill would be a good chance to get some information about the lumber industry’s history and their hopes for the future. I, on the other hand, thought stopping at the mill would be a good chance to get to talk to some of the people who shoot at us in their spare time. I'll mention that our "default position" toward all young males in this specific area is to consider them as active or passive insurgency supporters.

Unfortunately, due to our ANA commander’s meddling in the conversation (I thought he would know that if we wanted his answers to the questions we would just have asked him in the confines of our base during our nightly discussions, but apparently this was another assumption I should not have made.), the domination of the conversation by the head local guy once he arrived, the ineptitude of the particular interpreter I’m stuck with at this point, and the natural reticence of the local people, I’m afraid our anthropologist didn’t get all the information he could have hoped for in a conversation lasting more than 30 minutes.

And so it was that the most interesting part of our brief stay at the lumber mill occurred about 15 minutes into the conversation when a firefight erupted at Firebase Restrepo about 500 meters west up the hill from us. The firefight was interesting not because of what happened, but because of what did not happen – namely, no one, not the local men, anthropologist, marines, or ANA made much of an acknowledgment of the bullets and mortars flying other than an occasional glance up the hill. 500 meters is not all that far away, but of the ten of us sitting and talking no one really considered moving or altering his immediate plans in any way, including myself, though I did begin to pay a bit more attention to my radio. Now that's multi-tasking when you can make sense of a garbled radio blaring in one ear, while also making sense of a translation in broken English with your other ear. One might think that we would have or should have done something, but in reality there is little we can do to support that post unless the fires are coming from an area of the valley where we can reach with our guns, which is rare, so in a situation where we're otherwise engaged we don't worry about it too much. As for our own safety, even if a coordinated attack were planned from multiple firing positions, the odds of us being shot at while on a visit with the local people are low. Part of the insurgents’ hold over the local people is due to intimidation, but they don’t normally take to shooting into crowded areas just to get at us. And so I sat there with the rest of them outside on the porch drinking chai, calmly listening in on the conversation as mortars fell about 800 meters away and the sound of heavy guns reverberated in the air.

I suppose I know now how the people in Beirut felt for all those years during their civil war. One can used to pretty much anything it seems. Just keep doing what you're doing. Maybe some day the Army will figure out how to kill the guys that shoot at them everyday up at Restrepo....

People...the difference

2009-06-24T06:29:00.016-04:00

"It's not where you are but who you're with."

The ANA tend to move around a fair bit. Some of the areas where they work are considerably 'different' from others so everyone moves around to give everyone the chance to 'experience' the different places. The ETTs don't move around with the ANA; most of our guys have stayed in the same place for our whole tour. I'm one of the few that's moved around a lot, having been stationed at three different bases, each of which is very distinct from the other two not only in the surrounding areas but also in the amenities (or lack thereof) available at the bases themselves.

Regardless of where I've been stationed, what's made the difference in my state of mind and level of satisfaction I gotten out of the job has been the people, both ANA and ETT, I've been with at the different bases. I can remember someone telling me years ago that it's not where you are but who you're with that often determines how much enjoyment you'll get out of your life, and I've certainly found that to be true in my experiences and probably never more so than here. I have a great time with some of the ANA officers and platoons, and it's when I'm working with them when I really enjoy this job. Some of the others, well, let's just say their attitude towards their work gives me the chance to practice being disagreeable, sarcastic, and occasionally downright mean. However, the cost is high for me when I act that way - I cease to have any fun at all on the job, which is why I only use that approach after exhausting all other methods of getting what I want out of them. Thankfully, more often than not it doesn't prove necessary to act that way.

The pic is of a soldier holding the bridge steady for me as I walked across.

How we fight

2009-06-21T10:31:00.012-04:00

I can’t speak for the whole country and different areas can be pretty distinct, but I’ve been in enough scrapes by now to give readers a pretty good idea of how the battles are actually fought in eastern Afghanistan. Most every engagement between the Anti-Afghanistan Forces (AAF) and us (when I say “us” I’m referring to the ANA and the US Army) is begun by them. They always know where we are and we rarely know where they are with any exactitude. In fact, I can easily count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually seen the enemy since I’ve been out here, and I’ve been involved in at least 50 different firefights by now. The AAF almost always get the first shot off, and luckily they don’t shoot very accurately or we’d take a lot of casualties. We don’t do a lot of sneaking around and we don’t go up into the mountains very often. Most of our patrols are during the daylight. We do all different types of operations, but the most common is for us to walk into a village and stay there to talk to the elders. While we’re in the village, we’ll often get indications that we’re going to be shot at. And many times, we’ll just sit there and wait until the shooting starts – this can take hours. We call many of these patrols a “Movement to Contact”, meaning we walk into an ambush in order to find the enemy, or advertise our presence to the enemy and then wait for him to do something. It may seem a strange why to fight an enemy, giving up the initiative like that, but when you're fighting an enemy who's not wearing a uniform and is difficult to identify your options are limited as to how to bring him to battle. One of my favorite things to do is sit in a village, wait for the shooting, have the firefight, and then continue to sit the village and begin to talk with the elders again after the shooting stops. Like, ok, you tried, but we’re still here; try again if you like. We often use the homes and local people as our cover and concealment, but at some point, the local people will often get the word to clear the area, and then the shooting starts soon thereafter. The AAF generally do not start shooting until the local people have cleared the area since they don’t want to lose the support of the local people.

I should mention at this point that we, well at least the ANA, rarely go far enough away from a base or observation post (OP) that we can’t be supported by direct fires from that base or OP. We certainly don’t go anywhere we consider dangerous unless bring a lot of ass (assets). By this I mean we’re not going to go walking into a firefight without one or more of the following: a lot of people; separate elements in separate places, support-by-fire position(s); and air support.

Often the shooting will start with a single shot (luckily, the ambush is not often initiated with an IED blast), followed a few seconds later by shots from a few different positions. Once the shooting starts, we find cover and start looking around to locate the enemy. Whoever the leader is gets on the radio and starts calling for fire support in the form of mortars, artillery, helicopters, or jets. Roughly two minutes after the first shot has been fired mortars are usually landing in the vicinity of the suspected AAF positions. Everyone is pretty familiar with the known fighting positions used by the AAF so it doesn’t take long to get oriented to what’s going on, though finding an exact location is always very difficult. Generally, the AAF are 400-800 meters away from us somewhere up above us in the mountains and are shooting light machine guns and AKs. From their point of view, I can understand why they bury themselves in their little caves and fighting positions – they must feel very invulnerable that way. However, their marksmanship, or lack thereof, combined with the distance they maintain means their shots are not overly effective. And given that their supply lines are a bit less capable than ours, they tend to have to conserve ammo a bit. We don’t have that problem, so we’ll keep dropping mortars, bombs, artillery, rockets, grenades, and bullets of all calibers until things calm down.

The smarter AAF will fire at us for a few minutes and then exfiltrate. Of course, we know this so we’ll often shoot mortars at those exfil routes once they stop shooting and we think they’re retrograding. The ones that hang around and continue to shoot for awhile are asking for “martyrdom”, as once the helicopters get on station the birds usually get a pretty good bead on the enemy if the enemy continues to fire on us. Martyrdom is exactly what some of these guys want but is not the wish of the vast majority of our foes.

It’s interesting that the AAF choose to engage us from afar. They would cause many, many more casualties if they fought from inside the villages. But then turning a local village into Fallujah is not likely to win them much support from the people. However, they could ambush us along our routes outside of the towns with good effect if they were close enough. By getting close to us they’d mitigate our fire support since we’re not going to fire mortars at targets that are close to us. We don’t often give them the chance to do this though. The Army tends to stay in their heavily armored vehicles when they’re moving through bad areas; the AAF have no answer for 10 ton armored vehicles other than IEDs and the vigorous road building and paving efforts have reduced IED effectiveness in many areas. The ANA doesn’t have heavily armored vehicles, or armored vehicles at all at this point, and we usually walk everywhere we go so the ANA could be vulnerable to this type of attack. But again, we don’t go walking into places where we think something like could happen unless we’ve got all kinds of support. Annihilating an ANA patrol might not win the AAF much support from the people either. Fighting an all-American convoy is different for them.

The end result of the tactics used on both sides of this war is fewer casualties. I’ve been in firefights that lasted two or more hours and likely had zero casualties on either side. We could try more aggressive tactics, like spending more time up in the mountains, attacking suspected training camps, clearing known bad villages, or trying to ambush the enemy more frequently, but in reality, while we may not be annihilating the enemy at a fast pace, we’re not getting hurt too badly by them either. And daily the Afghan government institutions get stronger and development wins the people over (in theory). Realistically, the way we’re fighting the war is the only way to do it on the political level. If this war were causing 100 deaths or more on our side each month no one would support it, even if we were killing many thousands of the enemy and thereby bringing stability. I think we learned somewhere along the line that body counts either on our side or the enemies’ weren’t necessarily a useful or desirable metric of the war’s progress (Though see WSJ article on use of body counts not as metric for progress but rather propaganda tool.), so we’re focusing much more now than in past wars on the reconstruction and political aspect of the war, though there are certainly those that would argue we neglected to reconstruct Afghanistan for many critical years due to our attention on Iraq. We’re using money instead of blood to win, which is an American tradition dating back to WWII; the trend is increased use of the former in order to avoid loss of the latter.

I have no doubt our military could create regular infantrymen (or could use the Special Operations Forces in this capacity if given the right training) with the skills to live off the land that would have the ability to go up into the mountains in small units for long periods of time in order to locate and kill the enemy while operating nearly independently of our fire support and logistical chain. One should never make the mistake of underestimating his enemy, but I believe such individuals would have great success against the AAF and would greatly shorten the timeframe for us to achieve our objectives here. Undoubtedly a highly trained force with the right skills can kill a great deal of insurgents of marginal training and capability (see Selous Scouts). Sadly, we don’t seem to have those individuals at our disposal at this time, so we fight the kinetic side of the war in a way that maximizes our strengths: logistics and fire support, and minimizes our biggest weakness: negative public opinion brought on by casualties.

The video shows a firefight that took place near a schoolhouse...with the children and local elders inside and nearby. The AAF shooting at our forces with so many civilians nearby would hopefully constitute a victory for us in the propaganda (or IO, information operations) aspect of the fight. The video is about 4 minutes long.

Pakistan

2009-06-18T09:42:00.008-04:00

Nearly every Afghan I’ve met blames the insurgency on the Pakistanis, holds a huge amount of hostility toward Pakistan in general, and resents Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. According to many Afghans, there’s not a single Afghan involved in the insurgency. While I’m quite certain some of the insurgents are Afghan, there’s truth in the idea that a difference exists between an Afghan and a Pakistani or other foreign insurgent. They have different motives and goals, and are willing to use different means. I’ve heard it said that some Afghan insurgents won’t shoot on Afghan patrols but will fire at US troops, whereas foreign insurgents will fire upon anyone. The foreigners are often here to achieve martyrdom, while the locals want to live to fight another day. Many times we've gotten information that local people that support local fighters often resent the foreign fighters because they know the foreign fighters will bring enough attention to themselves and the area they fight from that collateral damage becomes a virtual certainty.

Without question, much evidence exists that Pakistan has contributed to the insurgency in many, many different ways. Unfortunately, due to our poor relationship (or lack thereof) with Iran, we need Pakistan for supply routes and overflight rights if nothing else, and even if we didn’t need it, given that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, our hands are a bit tied on how we can really deal with it. The list of grievances from this side of the Afghan-Pakistan border is long: allowing escaping al Qaeda and Taliban fighters to enter Pakistan after the initial invasion; harboring al Qaeda and Taliban fighters; developing and supporting insurgent training camps; providing shelter and aid (and in some cases covering fire) to Taliban fighters returning from fighting in Afghanistan; encouraging extremism in the first place with their many thousands of madrassas; exporting Wahhabism (by way of Saudi Arabia and the madrassas) to Afghanistan; the list goes on. My unit has often heard insurgents speaking Pakistani Pashto or Urdu (or Arabic for that matter) on the radio and detained local Afghan individuals with notebooks full of Pakistani phone numbers.

Pakistan’s strategy of empowering their Taliban proxies in an attempt create chaos in Afghanistan and thereby secure their rear in their perpetual standoff with India over Kashmir has already backfired - witness the recent chaos in Pakistan and fighting between the Pakistani military and Taliban fighters in the Swat valley. And if Pakistan’s internal threats aren’t serious enough, my Afghan officers all look forward to the day when Afghanistan has the power to take revenge on Pakistan and take back some of their territory. The current border, known as the Durand Line, was originally drawn up principally to create a buffer between Russia and what was then British India. The Durand Line not only divided Afghanistan and Pakistan but also officially put some of Afghanistan’s traditional territory within Pakistan’s borders. An Afghan government has never accepted the Durand Line as the border. I’ve had an ANA lieutenant suggest to me that we forget about fighting the insurgency here in Afghanistan, but rather unleash the ANA to attack Pakistan with US backing as a way to end the insurgency here…an idea that probably significantly overstates the ANA’s capabilities, but is nonetheless creative. Taking the battle to your enemy’s lands rather than fighting in your own territory worked for Scipio and the Romans against Hannibal and the Carthaginians. It may come to that at some point. Who knows?

Risk

2009-06-15T14:29:00.009-04:00

"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell" - Kyle Bass

Soldiers in combat expect other soldiers to share in the risks inherent in the job. While we might not expect the air wingers at Bagram to experience the same things that those of us in infantry units experience, we do however expect other infantry units to be taking on a somewhat similar risk load, even if those units are from a different country. The risk of death in this conflict is much lower than in conflicts from the past, but all the same everyone expects everyone else to be doing their part. And the knowledge of this expectation is what makes it hard for me when I can’t get my ANA to do more than 4 or 5 patrols in a week. When I see the US Army here going out everyday, and often more than once a day, while my Afghans play volleyball, it makes it a little hard to feel proud of the job I’m doing with them. At times I’m almost ashamed at the scheduling meetings when I tell the Army guys that the ANA are taking another day off for “religious classes”. When questioned about this issue, I laugh it off and say the ANA are in it for the long haul.

We do what we can here to get them to work more, but overcoming the attitude of the culture in general towards work is tough, and overcoming the Afghan military cultural problems that stand in our way is even tougher. I’ve asked myself many times how it is that I can instill in the Afghans the appreciation and sense of obligation toward working hard. And I still don’t have an answer. I asked the question of a cultural anthropologist that came to stay with us for a week. He replied that it would take a generation at least. I’m not even sure a generation would be long enough, as the Afghans have a fundamentally different way of looking at the world as compared with Americans. I suppose one might call the Afghans Stoics at heart. Whereas Americans tend to have a can-do attitude and are ready and willing to make efforts to better themselves and their situations, the Afghans are more fatalistic, and nothing sums their attitude up better than the ubiquitous phrase “Ishah Allah” (If God wills it.) they utter so often. If everything is in God’s hands and you can’t control your own future, why bother? Initiative goes right out the window.

Afghan military culture doesn’t help our cause either. Many Afghan officers don’t lead by example. Most do not go out regularly on patrols. When the Afghan officers aren’t often sharing the dangers of their men, the men aren’t going to feel that risk is fairly distributed, and thus be less likely to believe in the mission and do a serviceable job.

Additionally, Afghan officers are afraid of making any type of non-conforming decision that might get them into trouble. The Marine Corps tries to push decision-making down to the lowest level, whereas the ANA tries to remove decision-making from as many levels of leadership as possible. For example, we have a couple of ANA artillery guns here at the base, but we can’t shoot them without calling the battalion commander 20 miles away and asking his permission. If we want to change the patrol plan on the fly due to changing conditions, or simply to make it better, we often can’t because we have to have permission from the battalion to make those kinds of decisions. Granted, I realize the ANA will often invoke the idea of permission from the battalion in order to avoid doing work, but their hesitancy to do anything different or risky for fear of making a mistake is real. Doing the standard but ineffective job is a far better course of action for an Afghan officer than the unconventional but potentially effective course of action. If something goes wrong and you were following convention, then blame lies elsewhere. If you make a decision to do something outside of what was planned or normal and then things go wrong, you are the one to blame and the punishment here can be severe and based upon the whim of one man.

In this, Afghan military culture merely reflects the conforming, authoritarian culture of Afghanistan as a whole. The Iraqis were identical in this regard. Of course, all militaries can be seen as conforming and authoritarian culturally, but as Americans we recognize that for leaders to develop, they need to be given responsibility, and if their actions and decisions fall within an acceptable range of what we’ve been taught and trained, we’re not going to second-guess those decision-makers, at least not to the point of punishment. We respect that bit of individuality. The Afghans generally do not.

The bright spot is that the younger 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.

Propaganda

2009-06-13T08:19:00.008-04:00

Since the recent grenade attack in the not-too-distant city of Asadabad, we’ve been making the effort to get out into all the local villages to put out our own version of the events. It seemed pretty clear from the start that the attack was done by someone not an American. However, given the many incidents of civilian casualties since the start of our operations here in Afghanistan, people can be willing and resilient in their beliefs in the worst about us. Basically, what had happened was a local truck had been parked in the road to get a US convoy to stop. People started gathering around and then a grenade was thrown, killing one person and injuring many others, including several American soldiers. A video was shot live of the event from a blimp that flies nearby for observational purposes. The video is about halfway down the page. The video is not that great but I’d still like to post it here, but the computer and internet situation here doesn’t really allow for me to do that. Evidence revealed nearly immediately that the grenade was thrown by a civilian and not an American. The photo above is of an American commander explaining to local elders that the pieces of the grenade that were recovered were from a Russian grenade...not something US soldiers would likely have or use.

The insurgents are very good at taking events like these and turning them to their advantage. Since the insurgents live amongst the people, they have the ear of the people. I have to say though, we mobilized our own “information operations” campaign rapidly and effectively to get our own message out. Apparently, the US military released video on facebook and youtube within hours of the event. So while we may always be at a bit of a disadvantage with it comes to the war of propaganda, at least we're focusing on it and trying some new ideas. Within a few hours of the event, we had talking points to bring up in our conversations with the local people and were making the effort to get out amongst the people. And for the most part, people seemed receptive.

For the past couple days we had mortars shot at the base – they’ve yet to land inside the wire, but they’re getting closer. We usually reply with a few mortars rounds of our own in the vicinity of our nearest guess as to their point of origin. Some of the rounds shot our way actually end up landing very close to local villages. So today we went out to a local village to see how close the rounds were coming and to make sure everyone was ok. While we were there we decided to also ask a local elder his opinion on who’s shooting the mortars and from where, etc. He stated that he didn’t know who was shooting the mortars but he knew they were coming from the western of two peaks near the base and that we should quit shooting back at the eastern peak every time it happens because he’s starting to think we’re the ones supporting the AAF (Anti-Afghan Forces) since our shots are so far off. We all had to laugh at that one.

Paradigm

2009-06-10T17:19:00.126-04:00

The constant fight to somehow better and change these Afghan soldiers sometimes feels as though we'd be better off fighting gravity or the tides. The ANA are unchanging - impervious to exhortation and good example, resolute in their tenacity to hang on to mediocrity.

Being out here doing what we are doing day after day, week after week, you begin to ask yourself some questions and eventually question some of your assumptions after awhile. First you ask yourself why. Why are the ANA so resistant to change? Thinking a little deeper, the next question is if the ANA are so resistant to change, then maybe what I'm trying to change them into is not something they are interested in? Maybe, just maybe, they don't want to be like us or don't think it's possible. Possible...?

So if they are not interested in being like me, maybe I'd better figure who I am. How am I to do that...? What do I stand for as a US Marine officer in his mid-30s? What do I believe? How do I see the world? What is my paradigm?

I have the following beliefs and assumptions:

- Hard work pays off and it worth it any in case for its own sake
- Admitting a mistake shows good character
- Most people want to have a better life...and are willing to work for it if the right incentives are in place
- Education is a worthwhile pursuit in its own right
- Long term goals should not be sacrificed for short term expediency
- Honesty and genuineness in dealing with others works in the end
- Admitting ignorance rather than covering it up shows strength
- Negatives can be turned into positives and are a chance to learn
- If you are apprehensive about doing something, you should do it for that reason
- It's worth it to trust other people until they give you reason not to
- The world is fundamentally just
...and lastly and most importantly, that I control my destiny

Your typical Afghan soldier might see the world the following way:

- Hard work will get you nowhere and simply wears you out
- Mistakes should be avoided at all costs
- A better life can be had...for some...and not in Afghanistan
- Education has value, but it is not a real or direct path anywhere
- A man does what he has to do to get by
- Guile and cleverness are the best way to get what you want
- Ignorance is weakness
- Negatives should be punished
- If you don't want to do something, you probably have a good basis for that
- The best default position is not trusting
- The world is unfair, cruel, and difficult
- A man's life is in the hands of forces beyond his control

An Afghan's soldier's experiences have taught him this. My experiences have taught me my views. Neither one of us is right or wrong. Not even my own teammates would agree with many of the things I believe, much less the Afghans. I make no judgment on any of their beliefs. And I daresay, as the world's economic outlook looks increasingly bleak over the short and mid-term, I would say more and more people may come to see the world from the Afghan perspective. Everyone has their own way of looking at the world. My beliefs are what works for me. It helps me get by to think of the world the way I think of it. For an Afghan with a decidedly more pessimistic outlook, his views are easily understood as a response to his experience. They help him get by.

How to get over that hurdle? How to teach a man to take control of his own life when everything he has experienced has proven the opposite? Perhaps we need younger, more malleable stock with which to work...hah.

Searches

2009-06-10T04:01:00.000-04:00

It’s a necessary part of counter-insurgency to search people, cars, homes, sheep, bicycles, whatever. Unfortunately, the law and the culture restrict the effectiveness of our searches. If the ANA set up a vehicle checkpoint they’ll do a reasonably thorough search of the car and its occupants…unless the car has women in it. Women are never asked to get out of the car and are never searched. Since the women are covered in burqas, we really don’t have any way of knowing if they are in fact women, and since it’s common knowledge that we don’t search women or even make them get out of the vehicle, we’ve left open a huge gap for anyone trying to smuggle contraband.

As the culture restricts our searches of cars and individuals, the law restricts our ability to search homes…i.e. we can’t. The ANA cannot go into homes and search them unless there are no Afghan National Police (ANP) in that region (as is sometimes the case in the more dangerous areas). I understand in theory it’s better to have police searching homes rather than soldiers since police are (ideally) trained a bit better in legal procedures and in how to handle civilians. But given the tenuous state of security in Afghanistan at this time, it seems a little unrealistic and idealistic to have already created such a legal divide between the ANA and ANP. When the country no longer depends on foreign troops for its security would seem to be the time to start adding legal protections and procedures at the expense of security and effectiveness. It may not seem like a big deal…just bring the ANP along to do the searches…but it really does create problems because we don’t necessarily trust the ANP, the ANP are not as well trained as the ANA, and the simple fact that anytime you add another entity to an operation things just get more complicated.

Blame game

2009-06-09T08:42:00.001-04:00

Sitting in meetings with the local elders is a necessary part of the job. The elders want to talk about local projects and things we can give them. We want to talk about security and whether they are doing their part to help us keep the security situation under control. When talking about security, it’s always hard to get very far with these guys. The elders are pros at shifting blame and responsibility. You’ll hear things like, “Those attacks were perpetrated by people from the adjacent valley – we have no control over them.” I should mention at this point that whereas in the US communities are divided into neighborhoods and municipalities, Afghan communities are divided by the landscape itself; each separate valley has its own little subculture and ruling elders. I’ll also mention that if you go far enough up any valley in these parts, you’ll run into a lot of trouble. The hinterland areas of high elevation far separated from population centers and paved roads are where many insurgents hide out, and we have little to no control over vast areas like these.

If the elders are not blaming bad guys from the nearby valleys for attacks, then they’ll blame people from an adjacent province. If that doesn’t work, then the Pakistanis are an easy target for all Afghans. It’s difficult to get anyone to take responsibility for the security in their area. While the local elders are the traditional power brokers, now that a government has taken root and a local governor or sub-governor exists and resides nearby, the elders will tell us to talk to the local governmental official about security. But the government officials probably do not really have any connections or power in a particular area. It’d be great if he did because we’re trying to develop governmental authority, but for now that’s not the case.

I wrote a similar blog entry titled “Elders” awhile back that concluded the elders probably just don’t have the power to control what’s going on. That conclusion was specific to that particular valley, which happens to be one of the worst, that is, if your concept of ‘bad’ means that there’s shooting and fighting going on every day – some of my fellow marines consider such a living situation to be ideal for them personally…. In that valley (referred to as “The Tiger Valley” by local people from nearby valleys), the US Army and ANA are the government because there are no government buildings, no police, and no civilian government officials. Now that I’ve seen some other places my perspective is broader, and the elders in the better areas would appear to have the ability to be an asset to us in our push to provide security…but it’s certainly hard to get commitments or concrete results out of them. So in the end, we do the same dance every week, where the elders come to ask for help with projects but don’t really bring anything to the table in return.

Letter of Recommendation

2009-06-07T05:46:00.003-04:00

To: Contractor Approving Agency
From: Captain K.L.N., USMC

Subj: Letter of Recommendation re: Contractor Mujeeb

This letter is to certify that Contractor Mujeeb has in fact completed his contract for building the ANA barracks at FOB Combat Outpost and recommend that he be given consideration for future projects of flexible timeframe and limited importance. Due to Mujeeb’s scrupulous attention to detail, what was specified as a 4-month project took more than 6 months.

Mujeeb is a very giving man, who is very concerned with the feelings and well-being of the ETT in charge of supervising the construction project. Because he is so giving and caring, he can be counted upon to daily present gifts of lamb kabobs, Afghani rugs, clothing, and even air conditioning units. Recommend these gifts not be accepted due to the implied quid pro quo, however, accepting one such gift and giving to Mujeeb in return a construction level, carpenter's square, and tape measure, complete with instructions on their use and express expectations that they be used, could be helpful in the project’s end result.

Mujeeb is smart but forgetful. Oftentimes, when you lend him tools he will forget to return them. Mujeeb also speaks very good English, but he often seems to forget his English during periods of tension. Mujeeb is very punctual and concerned with finishing the job on time. As such, you can expect him to start coming to you to sign off on the project every day around the end of the specified time for completion. Mujeeb is well aware that the last 10% of any construction job is half the work, so you can expect him to complete the last part of the project from the time he informs you he is “finished” in about the same amount of time it took him to do the initial phases of the project.

The importance of environmental sensitivity is not lost on Mujeeb. In these days of depleting ozone, Mujeeb can be counted on to use a minimal amount of Freon in his installed air conditioners. Mujeeb also does his best to conserve important resources like cement by using a high percentage of dirt in his concrete. Furthermore, Mujeeb uses the “natural” method of drainage in his projects, i.e. solar evaporation, thereby obviating the need for upsetting the earth with digging.

Mujeeb is an honest man, but he seems to have difficulty understanding some of the terms in the contract itself. Perhaps this is a cultural disconnect. Mujeeb seems to have believed that the terms “complete and usable” as written in the contract meant that the air conditioners need only have been put on the wall, not that they were actually wired up and blowing cold air. To Mujeeb, “complete and usable” meant that a shower facility had been built, not that the shower heads would stay on when you turn on the water. To his credit, Mujeeb is concerned with the discipline and cohesion of his nation’s Army – I’m convinced he attempted to leave the completed barracks dirty just so we’d have the chance to muster the ANA and have them work together to clean the barracks.

In conclusion, Contractor Mujeeb is a well-meaning man with many good qualities. Recommend Mujeeb’s contact information be retained in order to facilitate locating Mujeeb in the near future for repair and refit of existing structures originally constructed by said Mujeeb.

Respectfully,
K.L.N.
Captain, USMC

What is an ETT anyway?

2009-06-06T12:51:00.015-04:00

ETT stands for Embedded Training Team. We refer to the members of the team as ETTs. As for what we are…well, we’re generalists. We come from a variety of MOS's (military occupational specialties). As far as I know the job is open to any MOS, though the team leader has to have a combat arms MOS. As ETTs we have to have wide variety skills. One needs to be able to troubleshoot a .50 cal machine gun as well as have the cultural sensitivity to communicate with local elders in such a way as to not piss them off. An ETT needs to have the savvy to negotiate reasonable prices from local contractors on construction projects as well as know what pieces of information are believable or should be discarded.

A good ETT needs to be an infantryman, operations officer, diplomat, civil affairs professional, engineer, intelligence analyst, supply officer, mechanic, linguist, and communications specialist all rolled into one. Of course, we have specialists to help us in many of these skill sets, but at any given time we have to: troubleshoot communication systems; design and improve the force protection measures at the base; negotiate and supervise construction projects; maintain generators and vehicles; mediate disputes between the US Army and the ANA; and conduct meetings with local groups, in addition to the normal everyday patrolling requiring infantry skills, which are without a doubt the most skills to have in this environment.

Other helpful skills: the ability to eat rice with your hands (Pack it into a little ball and then use your thumb to shovel it into your mouth.); the patience to talk for two hours about business and yet accomplish nothing; the ability to refuse to help without alienating; the stomach to take food and drink that might not be prepared according to what you’re used to and may be covered with flies; and the fortitude to deal with the same issues and problems week after week and day after day. Having a bad day is not allowed, and if you do not care for or believe in someone or something, you'd better have the maturity to fake it.

The days are not super busy - the ANA don’t tend to want to work with us for a lot of hours during a given day. But there’s always something going on, so as an ETT you don’t often have a lot of time to yourself. The day’s patrol may be finished before lunch, but then you have lunch with the Afghan commander, followed by supervisory tasks on construction projects, coordination meetings with the Army, communications with our own bosses, normal cleaning and maintenance of our gear, more meetings with the Afghans, etc. The day may start at 0530 and not end until 2100, but we’re not busy that whole time. Plenty of 30-minute periods of freedom are interspersed in there. Put a couple of those free periods together and you get an entry like this.

Moved again

2009-06-04T04:38:00.004-04:00

I'm now settled into my new place. For a variety of reasons I seem to be the guy on our team that moves around the most. Hopefully, I'll get to stay here long enough to get to know the area and then make use of that knowledge before I have to go somewhere else. I've been on a large base and on one of the smallest - where I am now is somewhere in between, and so far I like it. The pic shows our base from up on a little hill we climbed yesterday.

The Bad News Bears

2009-05-30T11:03:00.019-04:00

Today's firefight lasted 2.5 hours. Which I know sounds crazy until I explain how it goes sometimes. We're driving down the road in an 8 vehicle convoy when we take a few shots from the ridgeline maybe 800 meters away. So we stop and start returning fire in the vicinity of where it was coming from. An Army convoy happened to be right in front of us, so they coordinated artillery and mortars on the enemy positions. But with all the rounds and explosives raining down on them, we simply could not get those guys out of their positions in the mountains. Things would be quiet for a few minutes, and we'd think they were finished, and then they'd shoot a burst our way. This went on for what seemed like forever. The bad guys would shoot a few rounds and then we'd return fire for a minute or so. Wait a couple of minutes and repeat. Finally we called an end to it and started to get the ANA back into the vehicles to push out of there...but as soon as we started driving away we'd take another burst of machine gun fire nearby and the ANA would jump out of the vehicles and light up the mountainside.

Here's a few interesting tidbits from it all:

-the ANA needed an ammo resupply from a nearby base 30 minutes into the fight since they'd shot so many rounds so fast.
-several ANA went into a local shop and drank chai during the fighting; many other ANA began eating lunch from their semi-covered positions during the shooting. The eating wasn't even the funny part - the funny part was how much they were enjoying the food and the camaraderie under the circumstances. They were a bit put off when I refused their offer of a granola bar.
-the Apaches finally showed up and showered the area with rockets (this usually puts an end to the bravado of our good friends in the mountains), but to no avail as the sporadic shooting continued. When the guy on the ground tried to correct the impacts of the Apaches' rockets, the pilot came back over the radio laconically replying, "We hit the spot the rounds were coming from."
-at one point we decided to use the vehicles as cover so the ANA soldiers, who do not yet have the luxury of armored vehicles, could run across an open area on the road. The ETTs managed to execute with our vehicles but the ANA driver drove off and left his guys in the open when three of them tripped and stumbled over each other.

Some of the stuff you really have to laugh at. The image of the ANA First Sergeant walking around gesticulating and yelling at his guys, and then after hearing a pop shot from the enemy, turning and distractedly firing a 20 round burst from his AK toward the mountainside while hardly losing a beat on his rant at his guys was absolutely priceless.

On the positive side, the ANA did keep their big guns working the whole time, and none of them were afraid to fight. They all will jump out there and start shooting, even if they don't aim and squeeze off all their rounds at once.

Once the fixed wing showed up and started dropping bombs it came to an end; this was shortly after we finally managed to get everyone on or in a truck and get clear of the area. As for a better way to fight the fight.... When guys are buried into the mountains with strong, covered, bunker-like positions from which to shoot at us, it's tough for us to combat them. Assaulting 800 meters up a steep mountainside is not really feasible. The best thing we can do is get a bomb directly on target. I've bagged on the Army in the past for using anti-tank weapons to shoot at individuals, but today something like a TOW missile complete with its infrared sights would've been handy to destroy a bunker or cave. Preemptively, we can go up there and destroy those positions, which is something we do with regularity. But not often enough apparently.

As for the title of this post...I put it there for comic relief, not because we're really that bad. The ANA have made me proud on a number of occasions - today just wasn't their finest hour. And in any case, I've learned by now that if you can't laugh a little bit at some of the ANA antics, you're bound to drive yourself nuts.

Non vi virtute vici

2009-05-28T14:55:00.017-04:00

It's hard to go more than a few weeks without seeing a headline about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Sadly, we seem to keep making the same mistakes. Whatever the reality is as far as exact totals and Taliban using them as human shields, the perception is that we keep killing innocent people.

I hadn't been in this country two weeks before I had go to the local village alone but for a handful of Afghan soldiers and explain to an angry group of 50 Afghan males why a unit in the area had shot a missile from the sky that ended up killing two adolescents. Having little information on the incident itself at the time, I stated that the incident was unfortunate, but that innocents always die in war, and that the local people should get on our side so that we can put an end to the conflict. A heated but controlled argument ensued where I heard the villagers say things like "Your technology is so good, we know you can tell if it's a child or not that your shooting" and "How can we support people that kill our children?". Thankfully, my Afghan platoon commander stepped in and calmed them down as I learned it's a losing proposition to argue with an angry mob, especially when you don't speak their language.

Whether we're killing Taliban with air strikes or not, much like the drone attacks in Pakistan, aerial strikes carry a big price tag not only because of their propensity for error either on the part of the pilot or the guy on the ground clearing them, but also because of the way killing in that manner is viewed by the people here. Pashtun people simply see no honor in an unseen killing from afar. While our enemies' planting an IED might be considered devious and respectable on some level as a way to overcome our technological advantages, our shooting missiles and dropping bombs on unsuspecting people is considered cowardly. If the bombs came during a firefight it might be different, but the targeting of the kind done by the drones in Pakistan and what was done that night leading up to my meeting with the local people loses us support. Two steps forward, five steps back.

It's not just what you do but how you do it.

The video is a bomb drop that occurred during my first patrol in Afghanistan.

The Afghan National Army

2009-05-27T12:17:00.009-04:00

"You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. It just doesn't work that way." - Warren Buffett (referring to the speed of the economic recovery post-stimulus plan)

By all accounts, the Afghan National Army (ANA) has been one of the most successful institutions we've built since our arrival in this country in 2001. The US has done almost all ANA training, funding, and fielding since the war 'ended' and the ANA were established in 2002. Other countries have focused on other things - the UK on counter-narcotics and the Germans (originally, until they failed so miserably) on training the police for example. The ethnic breakdown of the ANA reflects that of the country as a whole, with about 40% of the soldiers being Pashtun, 25% Tajik, 15% Hazara, 10% Uzbek, and 10% other. Each Kandak (battalion) and smaller unit reflects that mixture as well. Almost all soldiers speak Dari or Pashto. Many speak both languages. Estimates on the number of ANA troops vary, but at this time the ANA has about 80,000 soldiers. The size of the ANA has steadily expanded over the years, and I'm sure we'll keep trying to expand it. We may be plowing a lot of money into the ANA, but the individual Afghan soldier must be at least one order of magnitude cheaper to field than one of our own.

There's a certain amount of pride that goes with being one of the a very small contingent of Americans walking amongst the populace with local soldiers, and I've been told many times by the local people that they feel a lot of pride in seeing their Army out on patrol. For this reason, I often attempt to keep a low profile when I'm out with my guys - let them run the show and do the talking. If anyone asks, I tell them I'm only there so they can communicate with the American units. It's always an especially proud moment for me when the ANA soldiers are looking good and taking things seriously. Impressions are important, especially for the local soldiers. Whether the ANA ever kills a single Taliban insurgent or not, they can still be effective by looking competent and professional, and in so give the local people something to believe in and take pride in.

Many times I've been out with the ANA as the lone American in the group as we patrol in a town full of people that may or may not hold some degree of antipathy towards us. But it's not something we as ETTs worry about because we know the Afghan soldiers would take care of us if it came down to it. When you build that good relationship with the soldiers and a degree of mutual respect exists, then working together can be a pleasure.

To experience those moments of pride, however fleeting they may be, ETTs have to go through plenty of frustration. The laziness and unwillingness to train, the whining and harassment for comfort items they don't need, the hashish smoking, the general slovenliness, the willingness to let us do their jobs for them, the corruption and stealing at all levels, the refusal to do as many operations as they should, the painfully slow learning process, the pathetically short attention spans, the disobedience to some of our demands, and the repetition of simple mistakes all add up to weigh on you at times. And it's those times that I understand why our tours as advisers are shorter than the normal tours that many people do over here. One can only take so much. Most days we take it all in stride as we know what to expect from the ANA. Keep your expectations in check and you can't be disappointed. But then something will happen like an interpreter getting beaten to a bloody pulp for no good reason or your best local contractor getting shaken down by the ANA commander and his platoon (mob) to the point that he can no longer work for you, and you ask yourself whether all of this is going to add up to something in the end. Are the ANA really going to be any better when we leave than they were when we got here? Tough to say. Will the Afghan National Army ever be able to work without us holding their hands? The only way to know will be to kick them out of the nest at some point and see if they fly. Better sooner than later I say because at this point they have the equipment and training to do the job. Whether they have the will to do the job is the question, but I think will will come with necessity, and necessity will come when we're gone.

Nation building

2009-05-26T08:41:00.010-04:00

"If you break it, you own it." - Thomas Friedman referring to Iraq in early 2003

I'm thankful that as a member of the military I get to take part in the nation building we're doing here. Nation building is something you would think might be undertaken more by civilian agencies or the State Department, but that's certainly not how it is here, and probably rightfully so since we're building a nation in the midst of an insurgency. It's nice to be able to talk with local people about projects and construction that we're funding or supporting. It certainly feels good to help people out. But as for the concept of nation building itself...well, I'll say it's an idea that sounds good. Seems good on paper. We'll devote x amount of reconstruction dollars to y country and then eventually voila! we'll have a functioning, productive member of the international community. Certainly, nation building has become a big part of our strategy here in Afghanistan. The theory goes something like we'll set up a democracy, build up the nation a bit, and then hopefully they'll never bother us again and we can all live and peace and prosperity.

I'm all for giving the people their freedom and removing the Taliban, but I'm not so sure about the feasibility or realism in all this nation building. How do you pull a nation out of poverty? Is democracy compatible with Biblical standards of living? So few countries ever break out of relative poverty to join modern Western nations' standards of living. The few that have over the past 40 years (Singapore, Taiwan, S. Korea) were all E. Asian nations that valued hard work, saving, and education. Culturally, Afghanistan has little in common with those countries or any other rich nation save the Arab oil states. Of course, other factors beyond the merely cultural come into play when we're talking about the overall economic state of a country, but the culture and habits of a country's inhabitants have to be considered key in its political and economic development.

All of the development money that's been spent worldwide over the past few decades has had limited success, given the living standards today of those receiving it. The same regions seem to have the same problems they've always had. I'm an advocate of nations pulling themselves out of poverty, rather than having aid given to them. As developed nations we can help set the conditions for their success (free trade, without subsidizing our own industries in which they might be able to compete, namely agriculture, or by technology transfers), but no one really grows, in the developmental sense of the word, by handouts. Maybe that's why I get so annoyed with do-gooders like Bono who like to lay the guilt on rich nations to give to the poor. Poor nations have to bring themselves out of their predicament for development to catch and be sustainable.

War and rebuilding are expensive undertakings. I've seen several Javelin missiles shot; each one of those costs $80,000. Sometimes I can't help but ask myself if the 80K would be better spent on a development project rather than shooting (with often marginal success) at some guy on a mountainside harassing us. A well-aimed 7.62mm round would be much cheaper, and leave the savings for development in theory. But the idea presupposes that development can be accomplished with enough time and money, and again scant evidence exists to support the proposition. We can build roads all over the place, but who will maintain them when we're gone? We can put in power plants, but again, how long will they last in a country that can get its act together enough to keep them running? Building schools is probably a good idea, but does brick and mortar ensure the population will progress on an intellectual level? I know the people are interested in educating their children because I've been to girls' schools where hundreds of young girls were present, and I would like to think that since the desire exists to educate, and aid money is present, then the kids will end up educated. But in practice I'm not so sure where it will all end up.

One of the big problems with developmental funding is accountability. Accountability is a problem in any large agency, especially a governmental one. The head of a Civil Affairs Group gets good marks on his evaluations for spending money and building projects. But who's out there market testing these projects? I've seen numerous projects work for awhile, from agricultural replacement (substituting saffron for opium) to hydroelectric power, only to be neglected in the end because the local population did not have the know-how or desire to see them become permanent fixtures. Building a community center is all well and good, but after we're gone who's to stop the local strongman making it his dwelling?

In the end, what we need to help create is a stable political and economic system whereby the individual is rewarded for his or her efforts. Individual liberty through systemic incentives. But I have to ask myself whether individual liberty is compatible with Islamic/Afghan tradition. And how do we establish a political system anyway? It may have worked in post-War Germany and Japan, but those were modern nations. The Japanese in particular went to great lengths to modernize themselves prior to WWII without any goading or handouts from Western nations. In fact, Japan's modernization was in response to Western aggression. We may have provided the impetus, but we didn't do it for them. Expounding an ideology that requires cultural change by use of military force and engineering prowess doesn't seem workable. Afghanistan needs to modernize on its own accord, or not, it's up to them, but either way at the end of the day they are on their own. Getting the Afghan people to care seems to be the toughest challenge of all.

Granted, I agree with Friedman to an extent, when he says that if you break it, you own it. We can't leave absolute chaos in our wake. But having ousted the Taliban and established some important institutions like the army, I think it's important we start looking toward leaving, and leaving under very imperfect circumstances. I have no doubt we could succeed completely with enough time and money, however staying in this place until it's a reasonably well functioning country would probably require staying here until Islam modernizes itself...a process that I hope is ongoing, but may take many years.

So while nation building and development held a certain appeal for me at the outset of my time here, more and more I thinking we had our theory of the war right from the get-go - come in, overthrow the government, and stay away from nation building. We can always come back and overthrow another government if need be. We did it the first time with a few Special Forces and CIA guys backed up by the Air Force. The implied or overt threat to invade again would provide the proper incentive to whatever government that establishes itself that it needs to behave or risk being removed.

Salesmanship

2009-05-24T10:39:00.008-04:00

From a leader's perspective, one of the nice things about counter-insurgency operations is the flexibility to approach the problem in various ways, although everything pretty much boils down to engaging the enemy or engaging the populace. How we do either of these two things is up to us. On the kinetic side we might conduct ambushes, movements to contact, security presence patrols, cache sweeps, vehicle checkpoints, or cordon and searches. When it comes to engaging the populace we often conduct MedCaps (medical civil affairs program) and key leader engagements.

So today we (the ETTs and ANA) did a joint operation with the US Army. Basically, the plan was for the Army to head out before sunrise and set up on the rigdelines. We would then bring in our ANA later on in the morning and "engage the populace". When we're going in to the more volatile areas, "engaging the populace" often means we'll serve as "bait". But they can't phrase it that way when selling us on the op, so they'll call it "engaging the populace" and away we go. A nice bit of salesmanship in their part. We laughingly refer to our role in this type of operation as "hey diddle-diddle right up the middle".

With so many of our personnel on leave at the moment, I ended up being the driver of the MRAP since our other licensed drivers were unavailable. An MRAP is a very large armored vehicle that is gradually replacing the venerable humvee because it provides such better protection from IEDs. I've read MRAPs described as "mastodon-like" which is a very apt description. The vehicle is pretty capable, although so large that it just barely fit down some of the roads. I managed to severely sprain my wrist when the steering wheel whipped back and did a couple of revolutions as the back right tire was stuck on a rock and the front left was in a little ditch. The wrist sprain prevented me from taking part in much of the action later since I couldn't really use that hand at all, and still hardly can as of this writing. At any rate, once the pains subsides some I'll be motivated to use my handy (no pun intended) DynaFlex Pro Plus gyro, which is a fun little device to build up strength and stamina in your hands, wrists, and forearms. I'm reminded now how a sprain of any kind makes daily living a teeth-grinding experience.

The area where we went had been the subject of a "treaty" between the Coalition forces and the local elders. The treaty saying something to the effect that we'll start helping them out with projects if they'll stop shooting at us when we show up. This was our first trip out there since the onset of the treaty, and sadly, the treaty did not hold up and we were engaged in the typical manner from several machine gun positions on the ridgelines. The event was certainly not unexpected, but it was disappointing all the same. The firefight had all the hallmarks of what I've gotten used to out here: ANA shooting machine guns from the hip, the Army using anti-tank weapons to shoot at individuals, aerial ordnance dropping after the fight has stopped, and arty crashing down. In the end, we all (us and them) went home to do it again in the near future.

Test-fire

2009-05-20T10:26:00.004-04:00

I originally wrote this one a couple of months ago but didn't ever post it.

We decided to test-fire our weapons into the mountainside the other day. Much of the area up in the mountains is off limits to everyone, so there are plenty of areas you can fire into to make sure your weapons are behaving the way you'd want them to.

So several of the positions around the valley fired a good number of rounds into the mountains and we didn't think any more of it. No other firing happened that day as there was no attack of any kind. Amusingly, later that evening we received reports that the insurgents in the area were bragging to their commanders about the large firefight they'd been in and how they'd taken a lot of fire from us but had continued to fire back and draw us into wasting our ammo. The commanders apparently enthusiastically received such news. Of course, they were referring to our test-fire as their "firefight". Omissions, exaggerations, and outright lies - I guess no one is above them when telling a story.

The incident also gives some insight into the nature of some of these people we're fighting. While there are plenty of true believers, there are also plenty of others who view fighting us as a job like any other - they'll do it so long as their paid and be happy to get paid for doing nothing if they can get away with it.

Sheep dinner

2009-05-20T03:03:00.008-04:00

Today the Afghans asked that we buy them a sheep in celebration of a fellow marine's wife having a son. Good thing it was a son - I wonder how they would have reacted if he'd had a daughter...? Demand that he flay himself? I'm not sure. Slitting the animal's throat and letting it bleed out is the proper way for Muslims to kill something they're going to eat. The killing itself is not the only part of the process that's different; the meat is butchered so that nothing goes to waste - leaving you to dine on small scraps of fat, gristle, and meat attached to misshapen hunks of bone. In the States we're so far removed from the brutality that is required to prepare animals for eating, but then as Americans we're sheltered from reality in many ways these days, which I would say has helped lead to the nanny state we're living in. Or maybe I'm backward as to cause and effect. At any rate, it made a fine meal as usual.

Logistics

2009-05-15T20:52:00.006-04:00

The old military adage says that amateurs talk tactics, while professionals study logistics. It's hard not to think about logistics after having just been shipped home for 15 days along with 200 other military and civilian personnel stationed in the Middle East and Central Asia. The flight that I was on was not special - they go every day bringing 200 or more people halfway around the world to visit home briefly before bringing them all the way back.

No doubt exists that our military has mastered the logistics of warfighting. But sometimes I wonder if our logistical prowess is always being used in the best way to ensure we're successful in the war. I met a company commander on the flight who had been shipped home for a few days to accept an award. His tour ends soon, but he was required to go back to the States for the award and will end up being gone from his unit for two weeks with all the travel time. Just because we can do something, does not necessarily mean we should. It's great he got to accept his award in person, but shouldn't the conduct of the war take precedence?

I'm on a nine-month tour here, which is not long compared to what some of the Army units out here have to deal with. Nine months would have been very doable without leave, but since it was offered, most of our guys chose to take it. As a result, we're incapable of operating to our capacity for two plus months of our deployment due to lack of personnel.

I'm certainly not complaining about being a member of the most technologically advanced and well-supplied military on earth. It's great that we have such great equipment to use and rarely want for anything. Even when I was at one of the most remote outposts in the country we still had all we needed. It's great that we can build outposts in the middle of nowhere with no road access and still support them logistically. But there are costs and risks involved with supplying remote outposts. It was commonplace in our valley to receive supplies airdropped from C-17s - the term is CDS drop for control-descent system. I had an amusing morning several months ago as I was woken by gunfire and someone glibly talking over the radio, "Yeah, they're shooting at the C-17 again." I felt obligated to get out of bed and put down some suppression fire in the direction of the gunfire's origin, but all along I couldn't stop laughing at the absurdity of the insurgents shooting small arms at plane flying at 10,000 feet. While the aircraft was under no danger, and we usually managed to recover most of the supplies dropped, the expense of conducting such an operation has to be substantial. You have to wonder if that money would be better spent on the Afghan people themselves.

Since we are without a reliable road out in the valley, most supplies come in via helicopter. The helos would "sling" the supplies in by carrying them underneath the aircraft using slings and ropes. The more supplies you need, the more trips you make. And the more trips you make, the more your chances of a mishap. And in the most disheartening moment so far in my tour, at one point I saw a helo get hit by gunfire as it approached a mountaintop base with several slings of supplies. The helo went down on the other side of the valley, fortunately only killing one person. Realistically, the fact that we can supply those outposts by air has prevented us from having the urgency necessary to get a road constructed. With no road leading to the valley, the situation will likely not improve much for the Afghan people and ourselves in that place. And so indirectly our capabilities have retarded our progress.

Helicopters aren't the only ones exposed - convoys are as well. There's no telling how many individuals were wounded or killed in Iraq delivering supplies. And the fact is, that even in the most remote and difficult to supply areas, we still waste supplies because we know we can get more. I've seen a large amount of supplies just abandoned to the elements at different bases.

Not only is bringing in all these supplies dangerous and expensive, but it leads to complacency in a lot of areas. When we're logistically able to supply nearly everyone with outstanding food and bring in plasma screen televisions and internet cafes, you have to believe these distractions detract from the mission. Morale is important of course, but so is focusing on why we here.

I'm an advocate for shorter, tougher tours, with less distractions, as opposed to the lengthy tours most people serve now, characterized by slow optempo and relative comfort. Of course, being a marine, it's natural that I feel that way, since the Marines serve seven busy months, while the Army serves one long slow year. And I really can't blame the Army for their slower optempo since their tours are so much longer than the Marine Corps. I just don't think it's the way to go. If we actually had a tighter budget, reduced some of the frills and used our logicistical capabilities more wisely, I think we'd perform a little better in the end.

Honesty

2009-05-15T19:53:00.005-04:00

"The words of the Greeks are born on their lips but those of the Romans in their hearts." - Cato the Elder

Honesty or lack thereof presents itself as an issue every day when working in the Afghan culture. A delivery of humanitarian assistance to the head man of the village will often ensure that the head man and his family benefit, while the rest of the village gets nothing. If I buy a cow, gravel, or a pickax from a local vendor, I can be assured that my Afghan counterpart is going to shake down the vendor for his cut. I'm tempted to blame these types of dishonesty and the general corruption in this country on poverty, but in reality the poverty is probably a symptom rather than a cause of the disease of dishonesty and lack of fair-dealing and even-handedness endemic to this place and most other cultures and countries around the world. I'm not sure Afghans and Iraqis are capable of caring about their fellow man, as demonstrated in this article. I read the article in a military newspaper the other day about Iraqi soldiers stealing wheelchair parts destined for crippled Iraqi children. The article got me thinking about honesty and how it's viewed in different cultures. I'm now more referring to lack of manipulativeness, deviousness, and insincerity as opposed to just outright thievery like what those soldiers did. Americans are a very honest people and are recognized and appreciated as such worldwide. Americans' honesty with ourselves no doubt has been very instrumental in our country's development. The ability to honestly face and deal with problems in a straightforward manner is certainly more conducive to growth and progress than having to mollify egos and worry about saving face, as is the norm in other places. It's ironic that our citizens would be lauded for honesty, while the country as a whole is lambasted when we publicize our failings. But then it's much easier to point the finger and hide your own potential embarrassments than face your problems head-on.

I've heard it said that while we Americans spend all those years in school learning to read books, Afghans spend those years learning to read people. Guile is a highly prized characteristic in other cultures, from the Islamic world, to the Chinese and Sun Tzu, and persons lacking it are often considered naive or simplistic. I think it's true that Americans, in general, are often lacking in guile when dealing with people. Honesty is a habit for us, and habits are powerful forces on behavior.

The question is why. Why are Americans so forthright and honest in comparison with the rest of the world? I think the Christian religion has had something to do with it, though many other Christian countries are much less honest as a cultural trait. We're a rich country that doesn't need to steal to make ends meet (though certainly rich people do steal, see nearest politician for example), but our honesty goes much deeper than that, and I think it's got something to do with our individualism. Our Bill of Rights guarantees individual rights, often superseding the rights of the individual over those of the community. Constitutions in other countries don't necessarily see it the same way - the French Constitution often subjugates the rights of the individual to those of the community.

Americans are permitted and even encouraged to go their own way. We respect an individual's freedom to live life his own way. When people are free to express themselves and make their own decisions they are free to be honest with themselves, and by extension, others. Americans don't necessarily have to mold themselves to their peers in order to be accepted, as is common in cultures less tolerant of differences. Other cultures foster deceptiveness and manipulativeness by not allowing people to express who they really are.

I try to comport myself always in an honest manner, but knowing the how other cultures view the topic of honesty has certainly helped me deal with people from those places. And never more so than now than here in Afghanistan.

Time

2009-05-15T05:29:00.002-04:00

Short of travel at very high velocities, I suppose there's not much we can do to affect the rate of time's march. Doesn't always seem like time passes at a uniform rate though. Lately, I've had plenty of time to think about time.

Slow time is in transit.
Fast time is the destination.
Slow time is in the open waiting to get shot at.
Fast time is getting shot at in the open.
Slow time is meetings.
Fast time is offhand encounters.
Slow time is waiting on a medevac.
Fast time is adjusting mortars.
Slow time is behind a covered position while it gets peppered with bullets.
Fast time is behind a covered position peppering the mountainside with bullets.
Slow time is shopping.
Fast time is all those other moments with family and friends.

Goodbyes

2009-05-13T11:43:00.000-04:00

They are never easy. And they never seem to even get any easier no matter how many times I go through the process. In fact, I dread goodbyes so much that I seriously considered not coming home for leave at all. But...I'm glad I did, although at the end of the trip I always regret not spending more time with everyone.

Now I'm on my second day since I left and I feel much better after a good night's (afternoon's in this case with the jetlag) sleep. Hopefully, I won't be long here in Kuwait and I can get back to work; time seems to move fastest that way. I've got a great job as an ETT, but I can't get home too soon.

Status

2009-05-04T21:08:00.004-04:00

I've learned here in Afghanistan that the concept of status is certainly not confined to Western nations or cultures. I suppose that should be no surprise, but for some reason I thought before that a nation so precariously balanced on the edge of poverty would not concern itself with something like status, and instead would be more focused on things more "real".

For example, the Afghan battalion commander has a 12 man security detail. 12 men are nearly as many soldiers as we have at some of the remote outposts. Manpower is always an issue and we can always use more soldiers out fighting, but there we are wasting twelve perfectly good soldiers as bodyguards. Given that the battalion commander lives on a military base with us, he really does not need bodyguards at all...but he has them. Why? Status. He can get away with having them, so he has them in order to show off his power and relative importance.

It's not uncommon to go to an extremely poor village and see the village elder using a cell phone. Granted, a cell phone does have some utility (it certainly makes it easier for the village elder to report on our movements to whomever he may be reporting to...), but it's hard to imagine it being a necessity...and in a village where the people live on the poverty line it seems gratuitous. Chalk it up to status. Hard to imagine what else those fancy rims on the car would be for.

I personally have been used as a status symbol by my different Afghan commanders that I work with. It's not hard to gather from a conversation and body language that a particular Afghan commander is proud to have me as his right-hand man when we're conversing with local people. Of course, it's not so much me that he's proud to have at his beck and call but what I represent, i.e. the US government and military and most of all, money.

The desire for status can help us. A security badge given to an Afghan by a US base is often considered a status symbol. This gives us an easy way to put the badge-holder into our databases - by taking their picture for the badge we're usually getting fingerprints, irises, and other identifying data on the subject at the same time, which may become useful in the future if his fingerprints show us somewhere they are not supposed to be.

refresh

2009-05-04T20:56:00.004-04:00

I always hated the yahoo format I was blogging on...and so now I've finally changed it. Not sure when or if I will import all the old stuff.

Terps

2009-04-30T22:27:00.005-04:00

It'd be hard to fully comprehend what we're doing out here without appreciating our reliance on interpreters, or 'terps' as we call them, for even the most basic of communications. None of us really is able to speak either of the dominant languages in this country other than basic greetings and a few military-specific terms. Very few of my colleagues can even count to ten. Dari and Pashto are tough languages to learn, and tougher still by virtue of there being two of them, but the fact is most of us really don't put much effort into learning the languages. I'm guilty of laziness toward the languages as well, using the excuse that since I'm still learning Spanish (and probably will be the rest of my life) I don't want to use up all of my 'foreign language mental energy' on another language.

The inability to communicate makes the inadvertent casual conversation impossible unless a terp happens to be standing right there. After the obligatory greeting and handshake with a smile you're pretty well done communicating. I can communicate enough to schedule a meeting with my Afghan counterpart, but not being able to converse with him in an offhand way makes it tougher to really monitor him and lowers our productivity since I can't even conduct minor business without making a meeting of the event.

The quality of your terp can make a big difference in how well you understand each other. A terp that speaks English poorly will lead to quite a number of non sequiturs in the conversation - something like this is not uncommon:

Me: "Hey, tell that guy to come over here."

Terp: "Thank you."

Me: No, tell him to get over here."

Terp: "Yes, yes."

Me: (Slowly) "I need that man standing over there (pointing) to come to this place where I'm standing (pointing at ground) right now."

And that gets it done.

At times I have rephrased questions multiple times only to continue to receive answers that don't make sense. Sometimes you just have to let it go. Of course, then there are those terps that won't translate what I'm saying if I happen to be angry with the Afghans. I'll get angry about something only to have the terp try to smooth it over by not translating what I'm saying. I'll then complain to the terp about this and he'll come back with the response, "I can't repeat what you just told him because it will offend him." Yes, I know, but I've been doing this long enough that if I want to offend someone then I have a good reason for doing it. Even after that explanation I don't think my more harsh criticisms get through unfiltered.

Speaking of unfiltered, I played Opfor (Opposing Forces) against some Afghan commandos training with our SF forces one day a few weeks ago. Basically, we were playing paintball and I was holed up in a building with some other US personnel waiting for the Afghans commandos to come clear us out of the building. We gave them their lumps, but they did a pretty good job overall. After I was 'wounded' and then searched (a little more thoroughly than I might have liked), the SF trainer asked his soldiers what the deal was with me. The Afghans responded that he was their prisoner, which elicited the response, "Did he have a gun?"

- "yes..."

- "then why the $#*k isn't he dead!"

Now that's what I call being straightforward.

By now I've worked with probably 10 different interpreters for a decent length of time and have gotten to know some of them quite well. They had in common the fact that they were all Afghans that spoke Dari, Pashto, and English, but other than that they were very different people. One of our terps (who we dubbed "Baby Spice") looked to be know more than 15 years old. He was very happy after his first firefight, claiming that he was a man now. For all the fear and indecision he showed that first time, I have to say he adapted to things pretty well and seemed to enjoy going out on patrol, unlike some of the others who clearly dreaded any trip outside the wire.

My favorite terp by far was a guy about my age who had been a senior enlisted soldier in the Afghan National Army for some years before becoming an interpreter. I should mention that passing a short series of tests is enough to become an interpreter and the terps make about three times the wages of an Afghan soldier. The former soldier's insight into the minds of our ANA soldiers was very useful in helping us to know what we should and shouldn't let them get away with. The two of us got some good laughs after one afternoon when I asked our ANA soldiers to continue a patrol (after it had been 'interrupted' by a few machine gun bursts directed our way from across the valley) to the top of a hill and they refused saying, "The battalion does not let me do that." Ah yes, of course, the battalion does not allow you to do the mission you planned for.

In some aspects the terps are the continuity out here. I've sat and looked at my map and asked myself what it must be like in some of these places deep into valleys where we're always getting reports of large numbers Taliban. Many such places we don't go to anymore as we just can't get to them very easily, but we have terps that have been in this area of the country for years, even dating back to when the Marines were out here in 2005 and they've been all over and seen and survived a lot.

The other terps we've had have had varying degrees of proficiency with English and with combat situations - we tend to get the newer terps out here. Some will hide when things get interesting and others will stay attached to you wherever you go. Most of them are hoping to obtain US citizenship by spending some years as an interpreter with us. All in all they are a good group of young men, and with enough patience we can usually get what we want out of them.

I've attached an actual job description to give you an idea of what these guys sign up for.

On Leave

2009-04-30T22:26:00.000-04:00

"I have seen it, but I don't remember this part. Funny, it's like what's happening to us, like the past. The movie never changes -- it can't change -- but everytime you see it, it seems to be different because you're different -- you notice different things." - James Cole in "12 Monkeys"

I'm home now on my two week break. Once again I had the opportunity to fly anywhere in the world on leave for free, but again I chose to come back home and take it easy. I'm actually surprised we're being granted leave since our tour is only nine months. If they are offering, then I'm taking, though quite a few members of our team aren't going to bother with it. Surprisingly, it only took three days to get home from the time I was dropped off at a small base in E. Afghanistan. Those flights with the civilian-contracted Hueys really help since apparently military air hardly flies in any type of bad weather anymore.

I was one of three marines on the flight from Kuwait out of some 200 people. I'd been through the whole leave process from Iraq before so I wasn't surprised or frustrated by some of the little things like showing up 12 hours before the flight is scheduled to leave, etc.

As for being back home, can't say I have much planned. My perspective has changed on a few things, but thankfully I can't say I've been radically changed by my experiences in
Afghanistan so far. One thing I have noticed while driving around is that those hills that used to seem fairly steep now seem almost flat. The mountains in Afghanistan, much like the heat in Iraq, have made an impact on me.

"12 Monkeys" is my favorite movie by the way.

DHS memo

2009-04-30T22:24:00.003-04:00

One of my readers had mentioned to me (only half-jokingly) that I should be careful with entries like "Going Galt" because I might come across as someone likely to be recruited by "right-wing extremists" who target former military personnel. After all, according to the Department of Homeland Security those right-wing extremists are after us war vets. The link does a great job of making fun of the whole ridiculous premise.

Reading some of these other military blogs, many of which seem to be written by ETTs embedded with the Afghans like myself, has helped me come to the realization that I need to get off of yahoo as my blog service provider. I never have been very happy with it, and looking at these other sites it's clear I need an upgrade. Need to upgrade the material and writing as well actually.

Warning

2009-04-29T22:31:00.001-04:00

It's been awhile since I've put up a picture. This is the kind of small billboard you'll see on the back of the last vehicle in a convoy; the intention being to warn other drivers to stay away from us. Pictures are pretty important in a country where most of the people can't read. I'll give them credit for presumably writing the warning in a local language, as I've often seen signs directed at the local people written only in English. As for the picture part of the billboard...it seems to say something along the lines of "STOP!!! or your car that floats on a dock might run into my recreational vehicle, because I can't hear you with these earphones on nor can I see you through my extremely large hand."

My thanks to MSgt A for the pic and commentary.

NATO weapons transition

2009-04-12T22:41:00.005-04:00

You know, I don't miss being bothered constantly by the Afghans...until I'm not. It's been a while now that I've been gone, and I miss my little outpost in the middle of nowhere, where my Afghan soldiers wake me early in the morning to complain about a toothache or to ask to borrow a tool.

Until I saw how things are run with the 'embedded' trainers at other bases I really didn't appreciate how lucky I am to live in such close proximity to the Afghans. My Afghan commander lives in the room directly below me, and we see each other all hours of the day and night. We eat pretty much the same food and live in the same conditions and do the same things together. Sometimes it's a pain being so accessible and I just want some peace and time to myself, but it's much more rewarding than the sterile relationships these other guys have, where there's no shared hardship or proximity to build that bond.

As for here near Kabul, it's been a slow but relatively interesting week. Helping out with teaching the Afghans to shoot the M16 has been enlightening. Most of them actually shoot pretty well, though when they are shooting at paper targets they don't really get into it very much. Give them an armored vehicle or a steel bell to shoot at though, and they get excited. The ones that don't shoot well, really don't shoot well. We had a guy miss the entire 2x4 foot target with 15 straight rounds from 25 meters away until we figured out he was using the wrong eye to look through the sights. I had wondered why his head was cocked all weird. It took awhile but we convinced him he'd be better off shooting using his right eye if we were going to shoot right-handed.

The training done here is run by civilian contractors. I'm just here to learn a bit and then go back and train the rest of our battalion. All the trainers are former military, usually infantry or SF. They're a cocky bunch, competent and entertaining to be around with all manner of funny stories from around the world, although the amount of hours they put in working is pretty sparse given their salaries. Spending time with them has been educational for me on many levels. The contractors tend to curse and yell at the Afghans more than I do when I'm doing training back "home", but then these guys can get away with it because they don't have to live with the ANA the way I do; I'm a bit reluctant to anger my Afghans too much, considering my life is really in their hands.

Civilian contracting certainly seems like a pretty good gig if you can get it since these guys really aren't working very many hours for the ridiculous amount of money they make, though I'm not sure I would want to run rifle ranges all the time. Of course, not all these guys run rifle ranges - plenty of other opportunities exist for all manner of specialties.

Going Galt

2009-04-12T22:28:00.003-04:00

Madness is something that is rare in invididuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule. - Friedrich Nietzsche

This entry has nothing to do with Afghanistan.

With all the bad news about the economy it's been a nice time to be out of the country. But now that I have internet access and the slight market recovery has buoyed my investment accounts a bit, I'm starting to read more and more about the state of the country. Reading through a few different blogs I came across the "going Galt" concept. "Going Galt" referring to the protagonist in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged who decided that rather than work and have the government tax away all of his earnings, he'd just shut down. This article sums it all up pretty well.

I've read a lot of books in my life, but Rand's epic has not been one of them. I had no idea until now what it was actually about. Somewhere along the line I had heard it characterized as being extremely long and boring, and that's been my enduring impression of the book.

Anyway, this "going Galt" concept is how I can now explain my behavior over the past 15 years to my parents. In that time, I've spent years earning degrees I did not use, traveled extensively purely for the hell of it, and spent lots of time deployed to tax-free zones in support of (in the parlance of our celebrity in office) "overseas contingency operations". See, I was ahead of my time, I did all of this as a way to keep the government from taking any of my money. I've got principles...

Actually, I just did all that stuff because it was what I felt like doing and because it made sense to me at that time. What all those experiences add up to I'm still not sure yet, but it's been fun. At any rate, as a libertarian I'd love to see the "going Galt" thing catch on - in its essentials, the concept is about incentives and behavior, and I'm a firm believer in "incentivizing" behavior we want to encourage. Since people are likely to do what's best for them we may as well see to it that those self-interested acts add up to something good for all of us - the unselfish act in self-interest if you will. The way I figure it, the sooner the country reaches bottom (by this I mean a bankrupted and weakened country brought on by rampant socialism) the sooner we can rebuild it in the image of its former self.

Maybe I'll give Rand's book a look when I get home for leave next month.

Massage?

2009-04-09T22:49:00.001-04:00

You'd be surprised at the things you find on forward-deployed military bases these days. While searching for a post office I stumbled across a beauty salon - the two young ladies working looked to be vaguely Chinese (later turned out to be from Kyrgyzstan, which does border China) so I thought I'd ask if massage services were offered, and they were.

Seems strange that this type of service would be offered on a relatively small base here at Camp Blackhorse, but given the prevalence of officers, contractors, and higher-ranking staff around here I guess I'm not surprised. It's unfortunate we're banned from leaving base for recreation and they have to bring these services to us, because it'd certainly be more interesting to go out in town and acquire the services we desire for ourselves. But then, though Kabul may be a bit more liberal than the rest of the country, I still can't envision massage parlors being available, and danger can certainly strike at any moment.

If you're going to get a massage, Asia is certainly the place to do it, or have a massage given to you in the Chinese or Thai style. The massages I've had in other parts of the world certainly have been a disappointment in comparison (with the exception of a "Hawaiian-style massage" I had some years ago that had some unique and interesting aspects to make it highly recommendable), though I've never had a Swedish massage as as far as I can recall. Upon walking into the room, I was disappointed to see a table - since I prefer the massage as hard as possible I prefer a mattress on the floor to a table...being closer to the floor means I know she'll get ample leverage and be able to use her knees and feet for maximum pressure. Nevertheless, it was a good massage, with some good work done on my neck and head, though I could have done without the sheet intermittently covering me - all that moving up and down of the sheet while I'm lying in the prone makes me feel like I'm a cadaver lying in a morgue or something. I don't consider myself a vain person, but lying on a massage table nearly completely exposed always makes me wish I spent more time in the gym. I suppose it's because I feel like the condition of my body says a lot about how I've lived and how I live, and thus who I am exactly.

Incidently, I tried to get a massage at Bagram, but the Russian girls there didn't seem to interested in actually doing the deed - they were unfriendly and didn't bother to tell me beforehand that regular underwear would not suffice for an undergarment.

Kabul convoy

2009-04-06T22:48:00.000-04:00

Well, I did get to take a convoy to Kabul, to pick up a VIP and yet another reporter. I didn't get to interact with the city at all, but at least I got to ride through it. Kabul and its outskirts are blessed with an abundance of mud, which is still used to build houses all over this country. The roads we drove on were pretty well maintained, but one would expect this since they link the military bases - bad roads make it easier for bad things to happen to us, and with 75% of the casualties in this war now coming from IEDs, making the investment in the roads seems like a win/win. I got to see a few young ladies out and about without the traditional garb. Nice. The men were mostly dressed in the traditional way, but Western clothers were fairly common as well. Most everyone seemed friendly as I got a good number of waves, thumbs up, and smiles, most of which were initiated by the Afghans not me, which was all a nice change from the sullen stares I often get back east. Certainly plenty of other traffic was about, but they kept their distance from us, which made the ride nicer for me since I was tail gunner. As for the traffic itself, it was really pretty normal stuff with some bicycles and motorbikes mixed in with the cars and trucks, with the exception of the intermittent donkey-drawn carriage. The driving was even pretty tame with minimal chaos at the large roundabouts. I'd heard the people burn tires at night to stay warm so I was expecting bad smells, but only in a couple of areas was it really that bad.

Unknown unknowns

2009-04-06T21:32:00.001-04:00

"There are known knowns. These are the things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we don't know we don't know."

- Donald Rumsfeld

I can remember when Rumsfeld made that quote - seems he took a lot of flak for it, though I really don't understand why. I recently stumbled across the quote in a book I'm reading and thought it might provide a useful framework for writing about what it is that I do for a short time every month.

When I'm not out patrolling with the Afghans, I'm often working with their officers doing other things; our job being to try to come up with theories about enemy activity and the local populace that would be useful in planning future operations. To do this I often discuss the things we know with my Afghan counterpart (the known knowns) and then move on to the information we would like to know but don't know (the known unknowns). This information can often be summarized with the 5 W's: who are the bad guys? where are they? what type of activities are they conducting? etc. You can then apply these ideas to all the different aspects of conducting guerrilla warfare and ask yourself things like, "where do they get their money? who do they get it from? where do their supplies come from?, etc. We then can apply this framework to the other side of the coin in COIN (counter-insurgency) operations, the population, and ask ourselves what kinds of things we would like to know in order to influence the populace in a positive way.

Once we finish with the known unknowns we're pretty much done asking ourselves questions and can then start figuring out how to answer them. The problem with all of this is the unknown unknowns and a subset of the unknown unknowns, the unknown knowns, which is where I would group a lot of our information because I'm not sure it's actually correct. The Afghans love to surmise things and believe a lot of second-hand information. They'll often come up with estimates on things that are not quite believable. But on the other hand, this is their country and their culture, so they should be able to get a feel for what's going on out there a lot better than we ever could. At any rate, I characterize a lot of the information we do have as unknown knowns because we think we know things that we don't have good solid proof of.

And as for the unknown unknowns, I would characterize these as things that are beyond the scope of our thought processes. No doubt we're potentially faced with many unknown unknowns for two reasons: because insurgencies and terrorists are inherently unbound by rules and unpredictable; and because none of us in the area are conducting enough operations and getting out among the people to really know what's going on out there. You conduct operations partly to get information to use for planning future operations. When you're not operating, guys like my Afghan counterpart and I are kind of in the dark and are left to conjecture and surmise instead of analyze facts - leading to less and less situational awareness of the battlespace and more unknown unknowns.

On the move

2009-04-06T00:19:00.000-04:00

Got the word the other day that I'm going to be helping our Afghan battalion transition from the old Warsaw Pact weapons systems to NATO weapons. Whether it's a good idea for these guys to give up their AK's for M16's is something I'll probably explore more in the future, but my gut tells me this is one of those ideas that looks good on paper but in reality will not work well. We'll see. Anyway, my new role necessitated a trip to Camp Blackhorse on the outskirts of Kabul. To get over here I first went to Jalalabad Air Field and then caught a ride on a civilian-contracted Huey. Why they need to contract Canadian companies to fly people around in Hueys is beyond me, but I was happy the service existed. So I flew over here with a reporter from Leatherneck magazine and another captain from the army. It was my first trip in a Huey and I enjoyed it. It's nice to be able to fly on a military aircraft when you can actually see out the window. Not that there's much to see...the terrain between J'Bad and Kabul is desolate. With the exception of the narrow river regions and the adjacent irrigated areas, most everything is sandy and brown, although some of the hills were covered with a bit of a green peach fuzz.

I didn't see many population centers on the flight, though tucked away into the mountains you'll see the isolated village from time to time. I'm not sure how high a Huey can fly, but we didn't fly over all of the mountains - the pilots had to seek passes through the mountains to get us over here to the west. As for the bird itself, I didn't see any sophisticated navigation equipment inside...the navigation aid consisted of a Garmin GPS on the dash and a map in the co-pilot's lap. "Continue 400 feet and turn left at the craggy peak". Ok, it didn't really say that.

Camp Blackhorse is emblematic of the KBR-constructed military base with the straight lines, rocks on the ground, conex boxes, plywood-constructed B-huts, etc. If there's one aspect of military operations we're really good at it would be constructed made-to-order bases. This is just the kind of place that I hate, but I'll take good advantage of the chow and weight room while I'm here. During my check-in the KBR lady pointed out to me the "emergency laundry" facility. I guess not having clean clothes constitutes an emergency around here. Hopefully, I'll get to see Kabul on a convoy before I leave.

Media

2009-04-03T23:47:00.000-04:00

Reporters embed with the units out this way from time to time. They’ll even go on the missions, which I certainly respect them for. I had a chance to sit down with the latest visitor to our little patch of the world for about 15 minutes in the middle of the night recently as she was on her way somewhere else. She was accompanied by several soldiers and a couple of Afghan workers carrying her four different bags. Personally, I wouldn’t let any reporter into this valley that couldn’t carry all her own gear herself, as to me the large number of bags is a quick indicator that this person is going to be a pain in the ass. Anyway, after chatting for a few minutes I asked her exactly how the tasking comes down to her from her superiors on what she should write about, where she should go, etc. She told me that they basically told her to go to one of the more dangerous areas of the country and write about the good and bad things we as Americans were doing in the war effort. Of course, as a marine deeply involved in what’s going on out here and an amateur writer myself, I found it laughable that her superiors found her, a graduate of the Berkeley school of journalism, the appropriate person to spend a week or two out here and then write about “the good and bad things in the war effort”. But given the magazine she writes for I’m not sure why I’m surprised. I’m pretty sure I can count the number of decent current events written media on one hand…let’s see, there’s Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and…I think that’s it. Suffice to say she doesn’t write for any of those.

Frankly, I’m not sure why the military lets these people come out here. I just don’t see the good that’s going to come from letting people with no military background or education in the subject write and make judgments on the war effort at the tactical level. To me, you should have to be an expert on a subject to write about it for a major news outlet. Show me that you have some experience and education in the subject matter, and then maybe I’d let you write about it for my publication. Despite her ignorance on company-level counter-insurgency operations, I suppose if she could just report the facts it’d be fine, but when she’s tasked with making judgments based on limited time and exposure, then to me she is way out of her depth and therefore has no place here whatsoever. At any rate, the Army pretty much let her have the run of the place and seemed to cater to her every whim. She repeatedly bothered the marines for access to the Afghan National Army and other things and people related to us, entreaties which we repeatedly denied and have denied every other reporter who’s been here save one. In that case we were given an order from our commander to deal with a particular reporter, and we didn’t mind since he was an Afghan national. I’ll give this latest reporter credit though for at least trying to get to the ANA. We’ve had reporters in the valley that didn’t even attempt to make the ANA a part of their story. To come out here and write a story on the war and not include the ANA is only getting half the story, but half is all anyone is getting for now around here…unless maybe we see someone show up from those periodicals mentioned above.

I suppose the larger issue is the future of written media as a whole. Being someone who delivered newspapers everyday from the age of 13 until I was 18, I look upon the demise of the newspaper industry with some sadness, but the really unfortunate thing would be if newspapers let declining revenues affect their journalistic integrity. I think it's inevitable that this will happen since newspapers are a business and businesses do what they have to do to stay in the black. If this means hiring more inexperienced and less capable reporters and directing them to write sensationalistic articles in order to try and hold on to their base of readers, then that's probably what the written media companies will do.

Elders

2009-04-03T22:52:00.000-04:00

“In this valley, a man without a gun is useless” – Head Elder talking to contracted anthropologist. Was Head Elder referring to the folly of having an unarmed American anthropologist try to work in this close-mouthed part of the world? Or may he in fact have been referring to himself…?

When it comes to dealing with the populace, our intermediaries are the local elders. The elders are a group of old men, usually one or two from each town, who (supposedly) have influence over the people inhabiting those villages. Of course, even if we concluded that the elders had no influence whatsoever, I’m afraid we’d have to deal with them by default - the younger men are invisible in fact if not in influence (they’re the ones in the mountains playing their games with us and won’t voluntarily show themselves to us), and the women maintain the converse position, being invisible in influence if not in fact (and completely off limits to us at any rate)…so we really have no alternative.

We have a weekly shura (translates as ‘consultation’), where the elders, the Army, and the Afghan National Army get together to discuss the issues facing the valley. I usually sit in on these meetings but rarely say anything. My influence comes by discussing beforehand with my Afghan commander things that might be good for him to say if he’s so inclined.

The first order of business in most of the meetings is discussing collateral damage, i.e. which houses, irrigation canals, goats, and door locks have been damaged, killed, or destroyed in the past week. I will probably at some point write a piece on collateral damage, so I won’t expand on this topic now other than to mention some type of agreement is reached and we move on. Occasionally construction projects are discussed (specifically the project to rebuild/improve the road that leads to this place), but since this idea seems to be going nowhere for the time being, the only other real topic of interest is the fighting.

On the subject of fighting, a representative interchange might go something like this:

Elder: “Taliban are outsiders.”

Army rep: “Yes, but we hear them on the radio speaking the language native to, and exclusive to, this valley.”

Elder: “Ok, there are one or two locals involved, but they only shoot from the mountains.”

Army rep: “Yes, but we often see muzzle flashes coming from the houses.”

Elder: “Ok, they shoot at you from the houses in the villages, but they force their way in to those houses; we don’t allow them in.”

What to make of a conversation like that? Since the elder lied in his first two statements, you’d certainly be justified in believing he’s lying in the third statement as well. Or do the elders really lack the power to keep fighters out of their villages? I’m convinced that what happens around here happens with their knowledge – knowledge that they don’t share with us. But I suppose the question is whether the fighting occurs with their encouragement and approval, tacit or otherwise. My opinion is that these men, as the representatives of their community, occupy the unenviable position of being responsible for the safety of a population caught between two warring factions. Undoubtedly, many of the fighters are sons of these same elders, but the financing, training, and many of the fighters come from abroad. And these men that come from abroad are not likely to accept “No” for an answer when it comes to supporting them. Given that supporting the Americans overtly could get you and your family killed, the decision to offer no help to the Americans or resistance to the insurgents seems to correlate highly with their chief self-interest – survival. Even having a son fight against the Americans doesn’t seem like such a bad alternative when everyone else is doing it and non-compliance could bring grisly reprisals.

So while our elder may have not really been telling the truth in that third statement either, the reality is he’s powerless to affect the situation as it is in the valley as a whole, and is nothing more than a man caught up in larger events over which he has no control. This is all assuming of course that the elders and locals don’t just hate us and everything we stand for…a distinct possibility in a country with such a history of antipathy toward foreign invaders. Backward though the Afghans are, I’m satisfied that although our elders might not be able to fully grasp the esoteric concept of liberty that we are expounding (not that we go around proselytizing about ‘liberty’ in the streets or anything…), nevertheless now that we Americans have been here for some time, they can probably digest that our essential makeup and motives are good and rightfully supported by a good portion of the national populace and the Afghan National Army. At the end of the day, our elders might not want the situation in the valley to be as it is, but it is what it is, and until the Coalition shows more of an ability to protect the populace and defeat the enemy in this specific place, then the elders will likely counsel the population to stay safely on the sidelines, offering our enemies tacit support and giving us nothing.

Entertainment

2009-03-26T00:21:00.005-04:00

We don't have a lot of entertainment options at the base with no internet or television, but what we do have are DVDs. One of the more enjoyable ways we spend time with the Afghans is watching their pirated DVDs - generally musicals or music videos from Pakistan, India, Iran, and occasionally Tajikistan. The languages in all these countries are reasonably similar so our guys can presumably understand much of what's being said.

Something about the videos' honest, simple expression and interaction between the singers (nearly always in a romantic context) I find very appealing. In Afghanistan, the guys don't often get to see women they're not related to, but the music videos have a way of bringing women into these men's lives in a tasteful way. The women in the videos are much more than a simple prop. Frankly, I'd be embarrassed to show them an American music video given the way women are often dressed and portrayed, especially those videos of the more recent vintage.

The Afghans seem to be in agreement that the Iranian girls are the best looking, but they tend to prefer the Indian videos since those videos a bit more of the women. If there's one thing I've learned from my travels is that every culture has lots of pretty girls, which makes sense to me in a natural selection sort of way.

Watching the Bollywood videos is always interesting for the smattering of English you'll hear thrown into an otherwise incomprehensible sentence in Hindi or Urdu. You'll hear things like "Happy Birthday" or sometimes an entire short sentence like "Where are you going?" spoken in English in the middle of the Hindi or Urdu. I'd wondered about this, so I had to do some research and learned that Hindi and Urdu are more or less the same language though they don't share the same alphabet due to religious influences, although apparently the younger generations are increasingly writing both languages in Roman script due to the influence of the internet and text messaging. Furthermore, more and more Indians are mixing English words into the Hindi.

It's funny to see that 'Hinglish' is on the rise as I've been convinced for some time now that something similar will happen in the Western Hemisphere and we'll all speak Spanglish 100 years from now. Maybe sooner.

Chaiyya, Chayyai is always a platoon favorite, must be the great choreography with the train.

The Dogs of War

2009-03-24T15:12:00.003-04:00

Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.

From Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Not a very original title for an entry, but the topic deserves some exploration…

Afghanistan has its share of dogs. For the most part, they live a pitiful existence like most of the inhabitants of this land. I say for the most part, because some are lucky enough to be taken in by Americans, who certainly have a soft spot for animals. We were in Afghanistan a couple of weeks before we adopted a puppy, who was carried home by one of my guys after she refused to be led around on the improvised leash he configured. I was happy with the acquisition, reckoning a dog would be good for morale and diversion if nothing else, and given our somewhat precarious situation living within an Afghan village depending on unreliable Afghan troops for our safety at night, I thought we might accrue some force protection benefits from having an attentive dog.

The dogs here tend to all look pretty much alike – skinny and mongrelly…maybe 50 pounds when they are grown if decently fed. Not that many are decently fed; Afghans do not like dogs, don’t keep them for pets, and consider them unclean. Afghanistan is a harsh place, and harsher still on those at the bottom of the food chain, such as the women, domesticated animals, and dogs. In all my time here, I can’t say I’ve seen an Afghan treat a dog with kindness. They pretty much just throw rocks at the dogs. It’s funny though…medieval though the Afghan culture may be (and Afghans can be heartless in their treatment of the weak and helpless), I tend to agree with the Afghan conception of dogs as unclean and filthy animals, though I certainly don’t view dogs with their level of contempt. I don’t mind having a dog, but the dog should stay outside, rather than destroying the inside area with its urine, feces, claws, and jaws.

At any rate, my hopes of having the dog, who was dubbed “Bones” by the Marine that brought her home, serve as an early warning device for people approaching the back entrance to our base, were not realized, as I could hardly get her to spend a night outdoors without whining. A lot of it probably had to do with poor and inconsistent “training” on my part. And some of it surely, had to do with her receiving more lenient treatment at the hands of the other Marines on our base, especially when I was not around. I’ll let that be a lesson to me…unity of effort is helpful, if not required, for the discipline of one’s charges. I was able to occasionally take her out on short patrols through the most local of the local villages when we were on our way to the larger base nearby. On those occasions she’s often stay behind at the larger base to take advantage of the better food and accommodations available over there, but we’d see her again when another patrol made its way down to our base and brought her with them.

As Americans, generally we love dogs, and that holds even more so for soldiers and Marines far from home and loved ones. However, we don’t love all dogs, even over here. Dogs that approach your isolated outpost at night are nothing but a nuisance, and risk activating whatever measures you may have in place to protect yourself, including people standing guard. As I lie in bed trying to get some sleep it is not uncommon for me to hear over the radio one of the outposts in the area requesting permission to shoot a dog. Permission granted, everyone rogers up that they know a shot is going to ring out, and then they’ll call back in saying that they’ve completed the shooting. Sleeping right next to the radio, I seem to hear these things in my dreams, but even so, often I can’t help but snicker to myself about the uniqueness of the whole situation – a bunch of Americans and their partnered Afghans living together holed-up in their little isolated redoubts, shooting the dogs that threaten us in the middle of the night.

Taking a dog out on patrol is probably not the best idea but we often do it anyway. For one thing, the local people, as I stated, don’t want much to do with them. Given that we generally try to get the people to be friendly with us, having a dog nearby does not enhance the chances of us interacting. Second, a dog can certainly be distracting, and distraction is not what you want when danger can come at any time from anywhere. And third, having dogs with us actually makes us much easier to spot. On one of the missions I did not go on, I can recall looking for three of our guys who went off on their own up a mountainside apart from the main part of the patrol. Watching them with the naked eye and with binos, I often could not spot them when they were not moving, as they blended in with the environment pretty well to someone looking for them from 800 meters away. However, they had a dog with them. And that dog never stopped moving, which made it easy to see, and always led me to find where my friends were. Later on in that patrol they, not surprisingly, ended up getting a few shots sent their way, which in that case elicited no response on our part because we could not locate the source of the few shots that were fired.

Timber

2009-03-22T02:15:00.001-04:00

Though 80% of the land area of this country is desert, the area where we live is fairly well covered in forest. And one can't help but notice all the cut lumber lying along the roads and in the ravines...which leads one to ask himself, "What's with all the lumber lying around?"

Apparently, this region used to have quite a substantial trade in timber, but since many of the proceeds were going to fund the wrong sorts of activities, the lumber trade and felling of trees in general was banned throughout the entire country back in 2004. The lumber trade brought in a substantial amount of money to this region of the country in particular, not only in revenue to the local traders but in taxation as well, so the local people were not exactly happy to lose this revenue source, which probably helps explain some of the general antipathy the people here feel towards the government as a whole.

Not only now, but also during the Taliban time the lumber trade was officially banned, but the Taliban allowed quite a bit of lumber to be felled and exported...some 200 trucks daily left the country with wood according to sources, as opposed to much fewer today. I'm not sure why the Taliban bothered to ban the lumber trade at all, as they surely weren't concerned with the thoughts and opinions of international environmental groups, but officially banned was the lumber trade in those times.

And so the government ban has led to the sides of the roads being littered with cut lumber, which apparently has already been sold to the buyers but can't be delivered. Estimates vary as to the value of the cut but unsold/undelivered wood in the country as a whole, but the amount of money is large. Of course, given the lack of government presence where we are (the ANA I work with are the only "government" in these parts) small scale use of trees and lumber continues. We actually have a small lumber mill 100 meters from our base. We've talked to the owners about it and were informed they only cut wood for local home construction/repair, which seems fair enough to us so we leave them alone. On my base we actually rent our wood that was used to construct the base...350 pieces of lumber for $30/month. I'm not sure why we didn't just buy the wood outright, but then $30 a month doesn't seem like much. Of course, we have numerous individuals claiming the wood on the base belongs to them. These individuals often try to reclaim the wood or get some compensation for it. We tell them to show us a contract (like the aforementioned 350 for $30) saying the wood is theirs or get everyone in the area together to talk to us about who owns which wood; this does the trick in getting them to go away. Trying to get payment from one person and then again from someone else or payment for things that don't even belong to them are tricks the Afghans are very good at.

The Afghan soldiers I work with and I are banned from cutting wood just like anyone else, but since, as I stated before, we are the government here we more or less decided it would be ok for us to cut what we need to stay warm. Perhaps we're not setting the right example, but what choice do we really have? Incidentally, now that's it's mid-March the weather has already warmed up enough to obviate the need for firewood at night...it's going to be an early, hot summer....

Perhaps half the people in this province have electricity (much fewer in less-developed areas), so many depend on wood to heat their homes and cook their food. A family of 20 (the homes here are pretty big and will have multiple generations living together) will use probably two large truckloads of wood a year. Where we are, we don't see a lot of tree cutting, but we do see people gathering sticks of wood and brush all the time. This work is often done by the women, but not exclusively so.

As for taxation, as you can imagine in a society like this, tax collection is not something that is done in an organized manner. The taxation on things like lumber was done by the foot and charged at the local level - total bill often depending on who the trader was (Read: if you have money and connections you can enter the business...if not, you're frozen out either with threats, prohibitive costs, or both.).

Afghanistan surprisingly has six National Parks/Wildlife Refuges at this time. I find it hard to believe that the local tribes would allow the government to take their land for something like that, but the parks exist. Certainly, the restricted areas are a step in the right direction, for the country as a whole has lost more than half of its forests since the 1970's, but given the magnitude of the country's problems, to worry about the environment at this time seems a bit absurd. A rich, stable country can afford to worry about environmental degradation - Afghans need to worry about where their next meal is coming from - concerns like soil erosion are far from their thought processes. A step in the right direction would be to develop some type of value-added industry to the wood business, rather than cheaply selling and then shipping all the lumber to Pakistan or parts further and allowing those countries to sell it at much higher prices after it's been turned into a piece of furniture.

Dark

2009-03-22T00:22:00.002-04:00

"You only need enough light to take one more step forward into the dark" - paraphrased from Nelson DeMille's Wild Fire

Afghanistan, like any poor country, is a dark place. Darkness is really something you lose an appreciation for back home. In the States, I seem to spend more time and effort trying to acquire darkness to enhance my sleep than I do in overcoming it. Given the altitudes and lack of ambient light here in Afghanistan, maybe they'll build an observatory here in the near future...or maybe not. Down in the valley where I normally am, you'll see the occasional house with lights on in the night, but the vast majority of the area is completely dark...so the amount of moonlight and when the moon is rising/setting become pretty important things to know. The power the valley does have is produced my mini-hydroelectic generators; I suppose one might call them water mills. US forces have actually built more of the hydro plants in the area, but unfortunately they seem to keep mysteriously exploding... I'll add that the bad guys don't approve of us improving anyone's life around here, so no, it's not really a mystery what happens to our aid projects and why - the only mystery is the exact identity of the bombers. In other parts of the area we're putting in solar-powered street lights...with mixed success. Shortly after the lights were introduced I noticed a few missing. I don't think it's so much insurgents destroying them as it is people just taking them for their own use and profit. If no one cares and there's no law, then why not use your car to knock over a light post and then drive off with it? Free solar lighting for the home.

I can remember flying commercially over Iraq on my way to Kuwait some time ago, looking out the window and seeing complete darkness and thinking what a forbidding place I was going to. I think my anxiety may have been heightened a bit by the fact that I was flying alone and was told by my commander, after asking what I should do when I got to Kuwait, "I'm not sure...someone will find you." Thankfully, that worked out pretty well, though I'm pretty sure I overpaid for the local porter to help with my gear. While Iraq is pretty dark all over, a reasonably modern electrical power grid does exist. On the other hand, the telephone poles I've seen in Afghanistan are very thin and maybe 10 to 12 feet high, where they exist at all.

Given what we're doing, darkness is something you have to learn to deal with out here, and some of the tricks you learn really do make a big difference. Giving your eyes plenty of time to adjust to the darkness before moving around in it makes a huge difference...even on moonless nights, if it's clear, you'll still be able to see a little bit since starlight provides approximately 10% of the light of a quarter moon. Looking for the absence of 'something' rather than the 'something' itself or just looking a little off-center can help you detect what you're after since the center of your eyeball is not as good as the sides of your eyes at seeing in the dark.

The perception exists that we as the US military have a big advantage over our enemies in nighttime operations due to our technology, most specifically our thermal and ambient light intensifiers that can help us 'see' in the dark. While I have no doubt that our ability to see in the dark could make a big difference, I'm not so sure it actually does in many cases. This is a war where the enemy nearly always knows where we are, and the converse is rarely true. While our nighttime tech might help prevent the enemy from approaching our prepared positions in the dark since night vision devices work well from static positions with open fields of view, being able to find the enemy in the dark on an offensive operation is another matter. The enemy's intimate knowledge of the terrain, our inability to move around quietly due to the bulkiness of our gear or our use of motor assets, and our inadequate training in silent nighttime movement combine to ensure that we're hardly ever going to surprise him. The fact that the night optics we have are not ergonomically designed, take away your peripheral vision, and destroy what natural night vision you had built up also limit their applicability and effectiveness. And so our technology is most advantageous when used in a defensive capacity...and no one ever won a war playing defense all the time.

Darkness actually contributed to the only 'injury' I've sustained thus far, which ironically transpired as a result of transferring out of a volatile place, to someplace less so and thus being afforded the opportunity to take a shower for the first time in months. After spending my first three months without a shower, I flew to a larger base for a break and proceeded to take a shower forthwith. Once finished, I walked out the door into the dark in my shower shoes with no flashlight and proceeded to trip coming down the small staircase, resulting in the toenail on my big toe being torn off. Luckily, I didn't fall down in the mud though...wouldn't have wanted to have to get back in the shower after I'd exhausted the entire base's hot water supply.

FOO

2009-03-16T22:12:00.000-04:00

The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! - Tyler Durden

In the interests of writings something people might want to read, sometimes you have to break a rule or two. Though more rules were broken in the doing than the writing, writing about FOO (Field Ordering Officer) funds was something I did not think I would do. After all, our first rule of FOO was we do not talk about FOO.

And why did we laughingly come up with that as our first and only rule? Probably due to all the rule bending and breaking we had to do to make the system work. Let me explain. FOO funds are cash given to units in the field. We use the cash to buy mission essential items. Ostensibly, the funds exist to fill holes in the supply system. However, the money comes with so many strings attached that using it by the book becomes nearly impossible...and for an ETT doubly so since FOO funds are only supposed to "support US forces". Of course, you don't have to be an attorney to see the opportunity latent in a word like "support", but FOO had many other restrictions.

One of the most onerous for us was the requirement that we had to go to a different base (in Jalalabad for us) in order to pick up the money. For people far from the main lines of communication, a trip anywhere means at least a few days gone, as we have to wait for the next round of helicopters to bring us back out. If someone other than the actual FOO or his assistant the Paying Agent (PA) or could have signed for and picked up our money, it would have saved us days and trips. But no such luck.

The more interesting restrictions are on what we can and cannot spend the money on. A sampling of things the money could not be used for would include

- construction materials for permanent building structures
- food and water
- laborers for more than a single day
- gifts
- phone cards
- booze
- ammunition
- bribes
- intelligence collection
- furniture
- computers
- personal items
- interpreters
- renting or leasing real estate
- medical supplies
in addition to other fun restrictions like how the PA and FOO had to be present for each payment and how the receipts had to be signed by often illiterate "contractors".

Of course, rules exist for a reason, but with something like FOO you wonder how much bureaucracy was in place to support it. I mean, they only gave each FOO/PA $10,000 at a time, which my group only drew 3 times. Our team as a whole maybe drew 200,000, which is certainly not an insignificant amount, but over a nine-month period and in the context of the larger war effort it's nothing. Is there anyone out there doing a cost-benefit analysis on the subject...maybe not, and probably better that they don't in the context of the war in general.

In any case, let's just say the system in practice works quite a bit differently than how the guys in the rear draw it up. Most of the things were spent money on were on that list above, which isn't to say that we were cheating the system. The things we really needed out in the Korengal were things like food for our Afghan soldiers and building materials for permanent structures. So that's how we spent the money for the most part, as well as having to often pay someone to actually deliver our supplies to us. We did not carry around receipt books in our back pockets underneath our body armor.

I was told once recently by my Afghan platoon commander that the platoon would not patrol if I did not buy them some cooking oil. Did I lecture him about using the Afghan supply system? No. I gave him the money and that was that. When the platoon went over a month without eating any meat...we bought them a cow and butchered it. When we needed better lookout posts and force protection...we bought the materials locally and hired locally for things to be built. The receipts got creative, but it all went to support the mission, and that was what was important.

Stalemate

2009-03-05T02:22:00.000-05:00

“War’s objective is victory – not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory” – Douglas MacArthur

I recently read with some amusement where a leading American commander of the war effort in Afghanistan referred to the overall military situation here as a “stalemate”. I found this characterization of the war amusing because just a few days prior I had spent the better part of an evening discussing the situation on the ground here in my little part of Afghanistan with my Afghan commander, concluding the discussion using the same allusion to the famous board game invented not far from here in India (though Afghans apparently don’t play chess).

By stalemate I meant to say that basically, the enemy, whether you want to refer to them as insurgents or Taliban or whatever, does not have the power to really decimate us and move us out of areas we focus on, but we don’t have the power to hunt him down in the hinterlands, and so they control the majority of the country, if not in population then at least in land area.

How to rectify this? Certainly that’s the big question, and I was heartened to see the increase in the number of troops that will fight here. Hopefully the increased troop numbers will demonstrate to the Afghan people that we’re serious about winning, and as a result they will be encouraged to take more responsibility for what goes on here…because in reality, only the Afghans can win this war. Quite frankly, despite all our firepower, air support, and technology, a couple of sniper teams hiding among the mountains and villages are maddeningly difficult for us to come to terms with, so the solution is probably not a military one.

This was the lesson from the ‘surge’ in Iraq – the local people have to get on board with the program or we’ll only spin our wheels without ever really getting traction (And an important part of getting the local people on board is getting the Afghan Army out there providing their security, not a bunch of outsiders, however amiable we are as Americans.). Will the same ‘medicine’, i.e. increased troop numbers, cure both patients? I’m not a doctor, but I suppose if two patients are essentially alike in their makeup and have the same disease then the same regimen should cure them both. In this case, the disease is pretty much the same, [simplifying] a power struggle fought by Islamic extremists using guerrilla tactics, however the problem is the patients are different: Afghanistan is not Iraq. For all of Saddam’s depredations, Iraq remained relatively developed, wealthy, and educated when compared to Afghanistan; Afghanistan is probably one of the five poorest countries on Earth. I was dismayed to learn that roughly 10% of my Afghan soldiers can read or write…in any language…never mind the difficulties in national unity that come from speaking several different major languages and many lesser tongues. The geography alone presents manifold problems with development, and has probably led to the country’s current state as much as any other single factor. Just getting supplies here to continue the war effort is becoming more and more difficult.

Given the shattered state of the country after 30 years of war, whatever the medicine we employ, the cure is bound to take some time, especially if our heart is not in it. Upon my arrival to the country some months ago, I was surprised to see the dreary state (though I reckon anything built by the Soviets is bound to retain some residual dreariness) of our main air base here in Afghanistan, Bagram Air Field. It was not that Bagram was that bad, on the contrary I think it’s just fine for our purposes, but I had expected the main air base in the country to be nicer and more developed after eight years of being run by Americans – my expectations the result of all the infrastructure projects and improvements throughout Iraq I saw us investing in during my time in the Middle East. Afghanistan’s needs being so much greater than Iraq’s, one would have to conclude that our level of commitment in all areas will need to be at least as high here as it was in Iraq in order to achieve a comparable result.

The increase in the number of troops is a good start, but if our investment in Bagram Air Field to this point is indicative of our future level of commitment to Afghanistan as a whole, then prolonged indecision is the result we’re likely to get, and our fate here will mirror in some respects the end result of General MacArthur’s last war - where a lack of commitment and decisiveness by our political leadership ‘ended’ that war in a stalemate, bequeathing to the world a rogue state that has endured more than 50 years.

Rapport...it helps

2009-03-04T02:21:00.000-05:00

As I’ve mentioned before, we live and work with Afghans, but they don’t work for us. The Afghan commander will often have ideas about what we ought to do in a given week that are quite different from my ideas. His weekly schedule will often have more time devoted to training than a schedule made according to my whims would have; events like religious and grammar classes will start replacing patrols if I’m not able to ‘manage’ my commander. (Who would have thought locution was such a vital skill for an Afghan soldier?) Dealing with the different commanders can be difficult…we’ll sit down and talk for hours about a plan, only to have him try to back out of it the following day at the meeting with the other units in the area.

Plenty of methods exist to get what we want from the commander, ranging from threats and bribery to psychological manipulation and rapport building. For larger scale operations, threatening to tell our commander’s boss about his wanting to back out will usually convince our commander to do the plan we’d already agreed on, but threats won’t work on day-to-day simple stuff and would most certainly backfire if used with regularity. Bribing the Afghans with whatever little niceties we have at our disposal might get you somewhere temporarily, but in the end only leads to more entreaties for stuff they don’t need and that I don’t really have anyway.

When it comes to manipulation, it’s not so much what you say but how you say it. If I demand that my commander change a particular aspect of a plan, either he won’t do it just to spite me, or if he does acquiesce he will hold a grudge against me and be less likely to behave as I might want in the future. If, on the other hand, I make a small suggestion, perhaps as an aside to a discussion about some other topic, then I’m not only more likely to get what I want but also more likely to maintain good terms with my commander, as I’ve shown respect for his position, ego, and judgment.

The offhand suggestions are a good technique, and straightforward criticism is ok as well so long as it is used with humility, but lately I’m resorting more and more to relying on my personal relationship with my commander to get what I want from him - the goal being to get to the point that he’ll do what I want him to do so as not to disappoint me since he trusts and respects me. I make sure to develop a good relationship with my commander the same way I would with anyone else, mainly by spending time with him, asking questions, and always conveying sincerity and attentiveness with my body language and eye contact. (The eye contact always seems a little weird as you sit there nodding your head not understanding a word while he’s talking, awaiting translation.) Patience (something I’ve never been noted for) is requisite as well, as cultural differences and linguistic difficulties can sometimes make things maddeningly difficult to understand. I spent 15 minutes the other day trying to understand why the spring water (of dubious cleanliness) we go out and collect with our used ammo cans is acceptable for washing dishes and cooking food, but the rainwater we amass using plastic sheeting is not. If I’d been thinking, I wouldn’t have had the discussion at all: if rainwater is not good enough for whatever reason, then it’s not good enough, and I’m not going to understand or change his mind by appealing to logic and rationality. Along this vein, the flexibility to accept a decision made by the commander that might not make sense to me is valuable in keeping a good relationship…and in keeping my own frustration level low. Flattery can be a good tool as well – we’ll often spend the first 10 minutes of any conversation telling each other how great we are and how much we like working with each other.

If all of this talk of personal relationships and rapport building sounds like common sense and the same as how one would approach any business, professional, or even casual relationship, well, it probably is common sense, but let’s just say I have not always been much of a “people person”, salesman, or bull-shit artist. However, many of my best friends are professionals in these arcane arts, and watching them over the years has given me, if not the ability, certainly the appreciation for being able to interact with others in a manner that tilts the playing field towards one’s own wishes . My time working with foreign forces has certainly given me the opportunity to “field-test” the techniques outlined above.

For all my efforts, my first commander was much too seasoned (he fought against the Russians as a young man) for me to manipulate him to get him to do something he did not want to do. We got along well, but he didn’t need or care much for my approval. I’d make discreet suggestions and he would heed them or discard them based probably mostly on how he was feeling in that moment. This is not to say that my first commander did not respect me or the knowledge I have. He, as well as all the Afghan officers I’ve worked with, was more than willing to put his ego aside and admit when he didn’t know much about a particular topic. In this, the Afghans are much different than the Iraqis I worked with. The Iraqis liked to pretend they knew things they didn’t know. The Afghans at least are willing to make an honest self-assessment, and show a great willingness to learn, although their work ethic is less than you might hope for.

My second commander was much younger and impressionable, and it was with him that my rapport building techniques paid off. He would occasionally ignore my suggestions just to prove his own autonomy, but if he knew something was important to me, he’d make sure it got done how I wanted, whether it was making unscheduled patrols, doing more night operations, or picking up the garbage inside the base. (I wouldn’t allow us to pick up all those empty plastic bottles scattered around our perimeter even if someone actually wanted to do it, since even a cat can’t cross all that garbage without making noise…a low-tech, cheap, and reliable, if environmentally unsound and aesthetically displeasing, means of force protection.)

With my third commander, I realized a couple of weeks in that maybe I was the one getting manipulated a bit. The commander came in and was very personable, likeable, and concerned for his soldiers’ welfare. His men were actually soldiers rather than just warriors…the chief difference between a soldier and a warrior being a soldier’s discipline…in this case the discipline to clean up the base, do small building projects to improve things, exercise fire control, and keep their supplies organized. I therefore went a little further out of my way to do things for him from the outset, including things I’d never volunteered to do before like using myself and my guys to stand post. It hasn’t taken long to realize however, that although our new commander’s men are better than what we’ve seen before as far as what goes on around the base during the day, the commander’s attitude towards operations is pretty much the same as what we’ve seen before, meaning that he’ll do whatever, but he won’t do a lot. If it takes a lot of sustained effort, like for instance saturating an area with security patrols, then he’s probably not interested. So while the rapport he’s built with me has gotten me to do things for him that I wouldn’t normally do, I can’t really say I’m getting him to do anything for me beyond what he normally does, though overall I’m still very happy with him and consider him a friend.

As for rapport building with the local people, I most earnestly wish I had something to more to say on the matter other than that we try. Unfortunately, neither I nor my Afghans have much success in our efforts. Where we operate the people are very insular and closed-off, not just from the world or the rest of Afghanistan, but even from peoples in nearby valleys. Getting them to open up to us about much of anything at all has proven to be beyond our powers of persuasion to this point.

Incentives

2009-02-25T02:23:00.001-05:00

We get a new group of soldiers out here every once in awhile, which has its pluses and minuses. Sometimes the new guys aren’t very familiar with the area so we have to teach them a lot about our area of operations, but on the other hand new people often provide a new way of looking at things so we often get some new ideas on how to run things around here. And their ignorance often means we can get them to do things that other more experienced groups won’t be as willing to do because they are so set in their ways, meaning we can often get things done more along the lines of how we’d like them done.

I am a big believer in incentives, and not just in this context. How I deal with the new guys often depends on how much they’re willing to contribute to their own well-being. The more I see the Afghans work, the more willing I am to help them. The latest crop of soldiers came into the base and refused to put their gear in their rooms until they cleaned them…something I can’t blame them for because the rooms were certainly filthy. I took this as a good sign, and thus the purse strings were loosened from the outset with this group and their commander. The commander wants his soldiers to exercise so they’re not sitting around smoking cigarettes and doing nothing during the day…and so we built them a pull-up bar and are going to try to get some weights out here. The Afghans generally ask me for all sorts of things ranging from things they need, like money for food when we occasionally run out, to things they don’t need, like televisions. If it’s a non-essential item, I don’t provide it. If it’s essential, I provide it, but usually only after making them try to use their own ingenuity (and supply system) to solve the problem. Since this platoon has demonstrated itself to be well-disciplined I do things for them I never did for our prior units.

On the subject of incentives…the Army out here has created a bit of an adverse incentive system. Their policy is: if shooting originates from an individual’s house and we thus destroy it in self defense with bombs, RPGs or whatever, then we will pay for the house as long as the Army commander deems the use of that particular house as a firing position to be uncommon. If, however, the house is routinely used as place from which to shoot at us, then no recompense will be forthcoming. Now I understand that winning over the population is the goal in counter-insurgency, but winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace doesn’t mean you always have to be mister nice guy – we just need to persuade them supporting us is in their best interests and that resisting us is pointless. With the policy we currently have in place, we not only don’t provide the local people with any incentive to keep the insurgents out of their homes (something that would ‘enhance’ the security of our patrols), but we also psychologically influence the populace to see us as the bad guys every time one of these events occurs. It is true that maybe the owner of the home was blameless in that he was out of town or couldn’t keep the bad guys out of his home for fear for his life, and the situation is unfortunate for him, but looking at the greater picture as long as we make our position clear that any house used as a firing position is subject to destruction should the need arise during a gunfight, then the responsibility for the damages really goes to the guys that use those homes as ambush positions. Of course, we should always take care to minimize collateral damage and protect non-combatants, and therefore we should avoid taking down a house unless absolutely necessary and we’re reasonably sure the bad guys are still inside.

Temperance in the use of such destructive ordnance combined with an inflexible policy toward recompense, might influence the local people to see the insurgents for what they are – the cause of the trouble around here, which would be a monumental step forward. Our irresolution, leaving payment for damages up to a judgment call on the part of one man, influences the people to blame us for the damage to their home. If a person believes that a faint hope exists that they may get recompense for damage to their home, then of course they are going to come to us to ask for money. And by coming to us for damages, psychologically the owner of the home now sees us as the cause of his difficulties. Whether we pay or don’t pay, we’re now the bad guy that destroyed his home. If our policy is simply: if a home used as an ambush position is destroyed no payment for damages will be forthcoming, then no ambiguity exists and the owner can blame the insurgents for acting in a way that would bring our predictable response, unfortunate though it is for the owner himself.

In the end, the Army’s policy is merely an extension of 21^st century American society’s attempts to separate actions from the consequences that naturally flow from them. In so doing, we often take the easy way out today in the name of being nice and understanding, at the expense of the larger issues and the future, and of course creating adverse incentives which serve to encourage the irresponsible behavior we should be doing everything possible to prevent.

Almost

2009-02-23T14:13:00.000-05:00

For our patrol one day, we decided to move up the hillside toward Restrepo and then set up a kind of observation post on a rocky little plateau to the southeast of Restrepo...more or less in the center of a triangle between three of our positions: Restrepo, OP Dallas, and Vimoto. From our position there, we'd have visibility down into the village of Loy Kalay (a place we rarely if ever go). Given the terrain, it can be challenging to visualize what you will and will not have visibility of until you actually get to a position, despite the maps. So I decided we would go up there and get a first-hand look at what we could see from there. Along the way to and from that outcrop we would sweep the area for possible hidden weapons, as shooters had set up in that vicinity to shoot down a helicopter in January.

Setting up on an exposed hilltop in broad daylight would undoubtedly draw fire, but then, this was how we did business out there: locate the enemy by letting him shoot at us. (I use the word "at" in the previous sentence to emphasize the fact that the enemy shot in our direction...but did not often actually shoot us...thankfully, shooters in the Korengal were not terribly accurate...on most occasions.)

Of course, this is a terribly reactive tactic...but identifying the enemy in counter-insurgency can be hard, to say the least. At any rate, once we got up to our spot, we found the area to be sparsely vegetated, like most of the land at that elevation (about 5000 feet above sea level), though there were a number of hasty fighting positions available that had been constructed out of large rocks. We quickly dispersed our roughly 12-man patrol (8 ANA, 2 Marine ETTs, an interpreter, and a cultural anthropologist who was along for the ride...in retrospect it made little sense to bring him on the mission as we had no intention of talking to anyone...but then he didn't often let us leave him behind, and would later do all academics proud by popping off a few rounds with his M16).

I quickly directed the ANA to disperse around the area, oriented where we were most likely to take fire, that is from the south and potentially from across the valley to the east, though taking fire from the east would involve a long and likely errant shot. We ended up arranged along about a 50 meter long stretch of the hillside, more or less in a line oriented to the south/southwest. We had a little knoll in the middle of our position, which would make communication within the patrol itself a bit more difficult. Our setup finished, I settled in to my own little "fighting position", which was certainly not the best one...but it was the only one available after the others had taken their places. It was formed of few low football-size rocks strewn about in the form of a half-moon. A tree of about a one-foot diameter was directly in front of my fighting position, which obscured my field a view a bit. I would shortly become very grateful for the presence of that tree.

As always, while we were up there we were constantly receiving receiving LLVI (low-level voice intercept) feeds. Basically, the LLVI guys (a stationary unit back the KOP, though mobile capability does exist) intercept radio communications between the bad guys. Since the bad guys use handheld radios (we called them all ICOMs...a popular brand), we are able to not only hear what the enemy is saying (which often has limited utility due to our interpreters' inability to understand the Korengali language), but more importantly, get an azimuth (or direction) from where the signal was coming from. Extrapolating from signal strength, the LLVI guys could also give a rough distance on how far away the signal was emanating from. Distance plus direction equals location. Not an exact science, but helpful. I went so far as to draw angle lines on my map I carried with me allows, which most importantly had a list of the many indirect fire targets. So if I heard from the KOP that the signal was coming from a 190-degree azimuth I would basically trace that line from the KOP down my map until the came to an area that looked like where the enemy might be. I would then make note of the pre-planned indirect fire targets we had in that area. Once the shooting started, I would likely call in mortars on that target or a nearby one, as a kind of opening salvo.

After a short while it became apparent the bad guys knew we were there...and thanks to the LLVI teams updates over the radio, I had an idea of where they were. Figuring I would kill two birds with one stone, I decided to relay that information to the ANA, which would also allow me to check to see if the ANA had their heads in the game. After making the rounds and relaying the information, I was on my way back to my position when a shot rang out. Though I didn't hear that round buzz overhead or feel that it was close to me, I nevertheless took the sound of that shot quite personally, as it seemed they had waited until I was walking around in the open to start the shooting. I quickly scurried back to my position and began trying to get an idea of where the now steady fire was coming from.

It didn't take long to realize I was completely pinned down as rounds began peppering the tree in front of me and ricocheting off the rocks around me. I quickly got on the radio and called in a mortar strike on a pre-planned target in the vicinity of where I guessed the shooting was coming from. What I remember about that radio call was not so much where the round went or why I called for it in that spot, but rather the fact that my voice cracked as I called it in - a bit embarrassing, and can indeed be frightening to be on the receiving end of accurate machine gun fire; however, it is a testament to our training that despite the density of fire coming my way, I was able to make the radio call. I didn't freeze up or panic, and did not feel scared...at least not on the conscious level. Of course, there is certainly there is nothing heroic about what little I did in response by making a radio call, it just a reaction...but it was reassuring to know that when you get into a tight spot where you're inches from death you can still think and perform.

In any case, not being able in those moments to get eyes on the shooters (tough to get eyes on much of anything when your more or less hiding behind a rock pile), I quickly deferred the adjustments of that initial mortar rounds to the other marine on the patrol with me, who had smartly taken the best fighting position available and was well placed to control fires and return fire with his own weapons. He was able to adjust the rounds close enough to get the shooting to stop and then actually saw the shooters as they ran down the hillside away from us after taking their shots, though neither he nor our Afghans were able to shoot them. It was a nice display or working together, though I did not relish my role as the bait that drew all the fire.

In any case, that's what friends are for, and that particular incident also nicely demonstrates the advantage we have on the enemy. They unfortunately nearly always have the initiative and the element of surprise, but we have much more firepower. If they want to concentrate fire on one person and pin him down, that's all good as we have 10 other guys on patrol and multiple other positions around the valley, as well as indirect fire support that can respond. In that case they certainly came closer to getting us (me) than we did them, but more often than not we will come out on top in these little engagements.

We hung out in our spot for a bit longer (don't want the enemy to think they succeeded in determining our course of action...though of course they do in many ways) before heading home.

23 Dec 2011

I was reminded of this incident when I was recently robbed at gunpoint by two men. After they removed my bag from my person, I decided to fight the one with the gun and had nearly succeeded in disarming him when a third attacker jumped out of a car that had pulled up and began sighting in on me with another pistol. And that point, I ceased resisting, and they thankfully didn't shoot me afterwards. I had the awareness to remember the plate number and immediately called the police. The incidents were similar in my mind in that while my execution in both cases was much less than perfect (failed to disarm my opponent in a quick fashion during the robbery, and failed to effectively plan and anticipate the enemy on the patrol), I did at least show courage and the ability to operate under stress in both cases.

In neither instance do I recall being scared at that moment...the effects in both cases were more afterwards. After the incident in the Korengal, I no longer viewed what we were doing out there as a kind of high-risk game. The "risk" was just too close to home after that to really enjoy "the game" anymore. I had been in plenty of firefights prior to that, often in exposed positions while on patrol, but none of those incidents affected me the same way. The incident up on the rock that day changed my attitude...I would continue to operate the same way as before, but from that point onwards I fully appreciated the risks and the "fun" was gone. Thereafter, I went about my daily business out of a sense of duty rather than a sense of adventure.

As for the robbery, it (re)awakened me to the risks I face living in a 3rd-world country. Sometimes one has to be reminded of past lessons and relearn the same things. In 3rd-world countries there is simply less margin for error. It's less forgiving. If you get in a fight with your wife, and decide to walk a few blocks home from the office with what is obviously a laptop bag...well, someone will likely take notice and make efforts to dispossess you, whether you are in a nice part of town or not. Call it metaphysics or simply losing situational awareness, but thinking about being angry with another person and not paying attention to what is going on is always a bad idea in some places, whether it's war or a poor South American country.

Bad neighborhoods

2009-02-17T02:19:00.003-05:00

“Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.” - General William Tecumseh Sherman

There’s something I find amusing in such a blunt and forthright opinion using such powerful and evocative language. But taking his quote as truth, the future for us here in Afghanistan is anything but amusing.

I’ll elaborate. I recently have been moved to a different forward operating base, the purpose being for me to train an Afghan officer holding a specific billet corresponding to my military occupational specialty. It’s a temporary move, and I’ll soon be moved back to where I came from. Being at a very isolated place for the duration of my deployment until now has left my knowledge base concentrated in a very narrow, specific region. My arrival here has given me the chance to find out the changes, patterns, and operations being conducted in this province as a whole. And it’s been educational.

I was recently eating by myself at the chow hall when the Army battalion commander sat down across from me for a chat. He must have seen my Marine Corps uniform, and personally knowing the few marines that inhabit this place, decided he’d get to know the new guy. When the battalion commander found out which little base I’d come from, he stated to me something along the lines of how he hates it that we’re even out in that region, we shouldn’t be there, we should just leave it alone, and get out of there. I’ll mention that the area I normally reside in is known for it’s less than cordial welcome of outsiders, to include their own national army. So as we walked out of the chow hall together, the battalion commander noticed I didn’t have a flashlight and made a comment (seriously I believe) about having a flashlight after dark and how safety comes first. Let’s just say I found that statement and his motherly concern for my welfare to be at odds with what I would expect to hear from an infantry battalion commander in a combat zone.

In talks with another officer from this battalion I learned that we’re closing a particular couple of small bases because “They couldn’t get anything done out there. They were just getting shot at all the time.” I guess all that shooting out there must have gotten in the way of those infantrymen’s collateral duties and so they were moved somewhere more peaceful. In theory, closing bases can be a good idea if you don’t have enough troops to staff them properly so that you can still patrol aggressively and not be tied to the base for want of troops. But I know from experience that once these guys pull out of those regions, they won’t ever patrol there again, rationalizing it by saying to themselves, “We can’t go there enough to make a difference anyway, so why go at all?” I’ve been guilty of that thought process myself actually, albeit in a context that palatably balanced by sense of duty with my sense of self-preservation.

I’m certainly not privy to the details of the planning sessions that are conducted by the brass, but from the point of view of the guy on the ground, it’s clear that the guys calling the shots don’t want to fight the enemy is certain places, namely, the hinterlands. They’d rather just leave him alone, thinking he’ll leave us alone, and instead we’ll all focus on the population centers. And there may be a little bit of truth to the idea that the insurgents will leave us alone if we just don’t go to where they live. I know that some of the people that fight against us out at my little base are just local people that don’t like government in general and especially hate foreign infidels. But I also know that those local people are only some of the fighters, not most. And I also know that you can keep yourself safe for awhile by avoiding a bad neighborhood, but if you ignore it long enough eventually that bad neighborhood will come to visit you. That was the lesson for all Americans on 9/11 and the reason we’re here in the first place.

Anyway, I could go on with the theme and discuss required troop numbers on patrols - the theory being safety in numbers, which obviously trumps the surprise, speed, and stealth advantages of smaller units (sarcasm most definitely intended) - and discuss how this has hamstrung us in the name of safety and caution, but I’ll save those observations for a less public forum.

I understand that General Sherman wasn’t faced with an insurgency. We can’t win this war by burning the province, thereby destroying the insurgents’ supply base and will to fight. Though the tactics we must use need be different from those in the Civil War, I think what we really lack now is leadership with the Shermanesque resolve to put an end to this fight, facing the ugly realities by actively engaging the enemy and destroying him wherever he is, instead of running from him and giving him sanctuaries (Don’t they already have enough of those in Pakistan?) just to temporarily make ourselves safer and more comfortable. The best case result for this strategy is a lengthening of our military’s stay here. Worst case…

The picture is of a helo on approach to Restrepo, before a Chinook got shot down when daytime helo missions were still conducted.