McChrystal: Taliban is Winning

U.S. commander says Taliban have Afghan momentum

KABUL – The Taliban have advanced out of traditional strongholds in Afghanistan's south and east, gaining the upper hand as they moved into the north and west, the top U.S. and NATO commander said in an interview on Monday.

U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, who will soon present an assessment of the war, said the resurgent Taliban have forced a change of tactics on foreign forces and warned that record casualty figures would remain high for some months.

"It's a very aggressive enemy right now," McChrystal told The Wall Street Journal newspaper in an interview in Kabul. "We've got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It's hard work."

Violence across Afghanistan this year had already reached its worst levels since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-led Afghan forces in 2001 and escalated dramatically after major offensives were launched in southern Helmand province in July.

Attacks have also become increasingly brazen, with suicide bombers and gunmen attacking government buildings, as well as Afghan and foreign and military targets, in the east and south in the past month.

With thousands of U.S. Marines and British soldiers aiming to push Taliban fighters out of populated areas in Helmand, July quickly became the deadliest month of the war for troops in the country.

At least 41 U.S. troops were killed in July, easily surpassing the previous highest monthly toll of 26 in September last year. At least 71 foreign troops were killed in July.

Britain has also suffered its worst battlefield casualties in almost a generation, with 22 killed in July, raising questions about whether its troops are adequately supplied, how long they will be in Afghanistan, or whether they should be there at all.

There are now about 101,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, with U.S. numbers at about 62,000. Washington has been pouring in thousands of extra troops this year, in part to help secure August 20 presidential and provincial council elections.

KANDAHAR

Washington plans to increase the number of its troops to about 68,000 by year's end, more than double the 32,000 it had stationed in Afghanistan at the end of 2008.

This includes several thousand designated to help train Afghan security forces, with some U.S. and other foreign commanders questioning the paucity of Afghan involvement in the Helmand campaigns so far.

McChrystal said he wanted a "very significant expansion" of the Afghan army and police, The Wall Street Journal reported.

McChrystal said he planned to push more troops into Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban adjacent to Helmand.

He said some 4,000 U.S. troops still to arrive would be deployed to Kandahar. "It's important and so we're going to do whatever we got to do to ensure Kandahar is secure," he said.

He defended the choice of Helmand to launch the attacks against the Taliban because it is Afghanistan's biggest producer of opium poppies which help fund the insurgency.
McChrystal also said some other troops would also be redeployed from sparsely populated areas to more heavily populated areas.

"Winning in Afghanistan" It's The Tribes, Stupid !!

Going Local: The Key To Afghanistan

The U.S. strategy of building a centralized state is doomed to fail in a land of tribes

By Seth G. Jones
Wall Street Journal
August 8, 2009

The rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan is now President Barack Obama's war, one he pledged to win during his election campaign, promising to “reverse course” and defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda. One of the biggest problems, however, is that since late 2001, the United States has crafted its Afghanistan strategy on a fatally flawed assumption: The recipe for stability is building a strong central government capable of establishing law and order in rural areas. This notion reflects a failure to grasp the local nature of Afghan politics.

In many countries where the United States has engaged in state-building, such as Germany and Japan after World War II, U.S. policy makers inherited a strong central government that allowed them to rebuild from the top down. Even in Iraq, Saddam Hussein amassed a powerful military and intelligence apparatus that brutally suppressed dissent from the center. But Afghanistan is different. Power has often come from the bottom up in Pashtun areas of the country, the focus of today?s insurgency.

It is striking that most Americans who try to learn lessons from Afghanistan's recent history turn to the failed military exploits of the British or Soviet Union. Just look at the list of books that many newly deployed soldiers are urged to read, such as Lester Grau's “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” and Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin?s “The Bear Trap,” which document some of the searing battlefield lessons that contributed to the Soviet defeat. Yet outside of some anthropologists, few people have bothered to examine Afghanistan?s stable periods. The lessons are revealing:

The Musahiban dynasty, which included Zahir Shah, Nadir Shah, and Daoud Khan ruled Afghanistan from 1929 to 1978. It was one of the most stable periods in modern Afghan history, partly because the Musahibans understood the importance of local power. Many U.S. policy makers have not grasped this reality, still clinging to the fantasy that stabilizing Afghanistan requires expanding the central government's writ to rural areas.

Some Afghans had to learn this lesson the hard way. Amanullah Khan, who ruled Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, tried to create a strong central state in the image of Ataturk's Turkey and Reza Shah's Iran. This proved disastrous. The central government's attempt to push into rural areas sparked social and political revolts, first in Khowst in 1923 and then in Jalalabad in 1928. By 1929, local rebellions became so serious that Amanullah was forced to abdicate and Afghanistan deteriorated into several months of anarchy.

Masses of rural Afghans today still reject a strong central government actively meddling in their affairs. In southern and eastern Afghanistan, which are dominated by Pashtuns, many consider the central government a foreign entity. “My allegiance is to my family first,” one tribal elder from Kandahar told me earlier this year. “Then to my village, sub-tribe, and tribe,” he continued, noting that the government played no meaningful role in his daily life.

I have often been struck by the disconnect between the center and periphery when traveling through areas where, as recently as this year, some villagers had never heard of President Hamid Karzai, who has led the country since 2001. In a few cases, they even thought U.S. military forces I was traveling with were Soviets, not realizing that the Soviet army withdrew in 1989. Time has a way of standing still in rural Afghanistan.

The lessons of Amanullah Khan were not lost on the Musahibans. While they believed it was important to build a strong army and competent government technocrats, dealing with rural Afghanistan required extraordinary caution. They exempted a range of Pashtun tribes from military service and established a fairly effective tribal engagement strategy in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Zahir Shah supported village-level defense forces, called arbakai, to establish order in eastern Afghanistan. These village-level forces were used for defensive purposes and organized under the auspices of legitimate tribal institutions. But the result was clear: Law and order were established by locals, not the central government. When rebellions occurred, as they sometimes did, the government could temporarily move into rural areas and crush them.

The Soviet-backed regimes never learned the Musahiban secret, and tried to establish order from the top down. The United States and much of the international community made a similar mistake beginning in 2001, conceiving of success as emanating from a powerful central government. But this reflects a quintessential Western understanding of the nation-state, not one grounded in todays reality. “I'm afraid we are still looking for the solution only in Kabul,” a senior U.S. government official recently told me. “It is a false hope.”

After the overthrow of the Taliban regime, the U.S. and its allies began building an Afghan national army and police force. They also supported presidential elections in 2004 and parliamentary elections in 2005. But there were no systematic efforts to engage tribes, sub-tribes clans, and other local institutions. And there were no efforts to encourage elections at the provincial or district level, where most Afghan political energies are focused. The United States did, however, back a handful of warlords, usually detested by Afghans because they operate outside of the tribal system.

The Taliban and other insurgent groups are most attuned to local dynamics. In southern Afghanistan, for example, Taliban commanders have developed a fairly effective bottom-up strategy to co-opt or coerce tribal and other local leaders. They often send individuals from the same tribe, sub-tribe or clan into an area to convince locals that resistance is futile and that the Afghan government is a corrupt, puppet regime.

In some cases, the Taliban has effectively reached out to tribes that are the majority in their district but have been marginalized by the ruling minority tribes, such as the Popalzais, who are favored by President Karzai, a Popalzai. When Taliban fighters fail to co-opt local leaders, they sometimes assassinate them. But neither the Afghan government nor the United States is playing at the local level, and it has prevented them from achieving their key objectives.

America's original goal for sending forces to Afghanistan was to uproot al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Sadly, this goal has still not been achieved. Nearly eight years after the attacks, U.S. and other Western intelligence indicates that al Qaeda is still the most significant threat to the U.S. homeland. Al Qaeda's key sanctuary has moved from key areas like Jalalabad in 2001 to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan today. That's about the distance from New York City to Philadelphia.

Earlier this year, the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, noted that the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area “is the headquarters of the al Qaeda senior leadership” who are planning attacks on the United States. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also warned that “three quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al Qaeda” operating from the border region.

A litany of terrorist attacks and plots has been incubated in this area. The successful March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid, July 2005 attacks in London, foiled 2006 plot to blow up airplanes flying from Britain to the U.S. and Canada, and more recently thwarted plots in Germany, Denmark, Spain and France have a common theme. They all link back to al Qaeda or other affiliated terrorist groups operating from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

What's more, the two most successful insurgent groups in Afghanistan, the Taliban and Haqqani network, have developed a close strategic relationship with al Qaeda. In fact, some assessments indicate that their links are even closer than before 2001. If Americans should have learned anything from September 11, it was that the United States cannot accept a situation where al Qaeda and its allies enjoy a sanctuary to plan and train for terrorist attacks against the United States.

The reality, then, is that the United States is stuck in Afghanistan and Pakistan for now. But as violence levels continue to increase, it is at a critical juncture. With mid-term U.S. elections coming next year, White House officials are demanding measurable progress in Afghanistan. Now is a pivotal time to fundamentally rethink America?s strategy.

While much has changed in Afghanistan since the Musahiban dynasty, one thing has not: Politics remains a local game. Rather than banking on stability entirely from the top down, as Amanullah Khan and the Soviet-backed regimes tried and failed to do, it would be more prudent to develop a bottom-up strategy to supplement top-down efforts.

There is still a window of opportunity to do this; many Afghans detest the Taliban and other insurgent groups for trying to impose an ideology they consider alien. The objective of senior Taliban leaders is to establish an extreme version of sharia, or Islamic law, across the country. In the 1990s, the Taliban banned kite-flying and many forms of entertainment, and relegated women to sub-human status.

What would a new strategy look like? As Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the newly appointed U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has already indicated, it should be predicated on a core tenet of counterinsurgency: protecting the local population. The insurgent and future Chinese leader Mao Zedong perhaps recognized this when he noted that there is an inextricable link in insurgencies “between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water and the latter to the fish who inhabit it.” Both insurgents and counterinsurgents need the support of the population to win.

Tribal, religious and other local leaders in Afghanistan best understand their community needs, but they are often under-resourced or intimidated by Taliban and other insurgents. This is where the Afghan and U.S. governments can help. A key starting point is security and justice. In some areas, local tribes and villages have already tried to resist the Taliban, but have been heavily outmatched. The solution should be obvious: They should be strongly supported.

This may include helping establish village-level “community watch” programs centered on the jirga, the legitimate governing institution in Pashtun areas. In some places, jirgas are composed primarily of tribal leaders, who adjudicate disputes and mete out justice. In others, they include religious and other figures. Finding ways for organizations like the Afghan army to support village-level forces, such as developing a quick reaction force when villages come under attack, would give the people a reason to ally with the central government.

Strengthening security from the bottom-up also helps solve the numbers problem in Afghanistan. Some studies, including the U.S. Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, argue that 20 security forces per 1,000 inhabitants may be required to win a counterinsurgency. But with an Afghan population of nearly 33 million, this translates into approximately 660,000 forces.

There will never be enough international or Afghan national forces to reach these levels. But that?s okay. Stability in Afghanistan has only come when local communities provide the bulk of these numbers, not the central government or outside armies.

Some U.S. policy makers have pinned their hopes on negotiating with the Taliban and other insurgent groups. But this is unlikely to work with a range of senior leaders, who are hard-core ideologues and have retained a relationship with al Qaeda. A better option would be to focus U.S. and Afghan efforts at the local level by co-opting tribes and other local actors, and helping them protect their own villages. It's a strategy that has a track record of actually working in Afghanistan.

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Seth G. Jones, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation and adjunct professor at Georgetown University, is author of “In the Graveyard of Empires: America?s War in Afghanistan” (W.W. Norton).

Weaning the Afghans off Opium

U.S. to pay millions to Afghan poppy farmers
Officials hope to provide alternatives before planting season begins in Oct. By Karen DeYoung
The Washington Post
updated 5:37 a.m. ET, Sat., Aug 8, 2009

The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy, by far the country's most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan's harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest.

"We need a way to get money in [farmers'] hands right away," said a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan.

The program replaces the Bush administration's focus on crop eradication, which "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars," according to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Destroying the crops succeeded only in "alienat[ing] poor farmers" and "driving people into the hands of the Taliban," he told reporters last week.

Poor track record
But many previous U.S.-funded crop-substitution programs have failed as well, from Asia to Latin America. A similar plan in Colombia, begun in the late 1990s, has barely made a dent in the level of cocaine production, although the country began to stabilize in recent years as its U.S.-trained military adopted new strategies against armed insurgents and civil institutions were strengthened.

Officials maintain that the new Afghan plan differs from unsuccessful "alternative" plans because it is an integral part of a military-development strategy that includes tens of thousands of U.S. troops to keep the Taliban and traffickers at bay while Afghan security forces are being trained. Plans call for hundreds of U.S. and international aid experts to work directly with farmers and local officials until the Afghan government has matured.

"The way [the assistance] is offered is important," said the senior U.S. military official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program on the record. "We are not providing subsidies . . . we are not just handing out cash." Farmers will have a "stake" in the program, he said, buying vouchers for seeds and fertilizers for about 10 percent of their value. Cash will be distributed only as credit or for work performed, the official added.

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan have long debated whether they should simply pay farmers for not planting poppy, a short-term fix that experts have deemed counterproductive. Farmers probably would take the money and "grow it anyways," said another U.S. official in Afghanistan. "We would likely drive the price up," he added, "as there would now be competition between the narcotics trade and the government. More farmers would therefore plant more poppy next year."

The epicenter of the overlapping wars against opium production and the Taliban is southern Afghanistan's Helmand province, where more than two-thirds of the country's poppy is grown. Thousands of Marines and British troops are in the midst of a major offensive there against entrenched insurgent forces and are providing security in villages as they are cleared.

"By this time next year," the senior military official said, "what we want to see is decreased poppy harvest. For us, that will be a metric of success. If we don't get conditions set now, in the next 60 days, we're not going to get the results we'd like."

The timeline is daunting. A planned "civilian surge" of hundreds of U.S. aid officials and agriculture experts has been slow to arrive. A micro-finance loan program is in the planning stages, and although $300 million in aid has been set aside for "rapid response" initiatives, including voucher programs for seeds and fertilizer, distribution has been sluggish. Mohammad Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand, whom U.S. officials have praised for encouraging local communities to turn away from poppy, held the first of eight scheduled outreach meetings only last week.


The plan also includes stepped-up efforts to interdict drug shipments and destroy stockpiles. The Drug Enforcement Administration expects to increase its manpower on the ground from 13 agents in 2008 to 81 by the end of this year. The Marine assault in Helmand, a DEA official in Kabul said, has "greatly enhanced" the agency's ability to take action there, he said.

The DEA is also training Afghan police in counternarcotics investigations, and the Justice Department is developing a program for Afghan prosecutors, although those efforts are said to be moving slowly. Officials disagree over how much of the profit from Afghanistan's opium exports goes directly into Taliban coffers. According to Holbrooke, most Taliban funding comes from wealthy individuals in the Persian Gulf region. But there is widespread agreement among U.S. officials that drug traffickers, warlords, corrupt government officials and insurgents work cooperatively to continue cultivation, processing and exports.

Some of the greatest challenges to the new strategy are at the level of farmhouse economics. More than 365,000 Afghan farm households earned about $730 million from poppy last year — a fraction of the $3.4 billion earned from opium exports, according to the United Nations, but an amount nearly equal to the national government's $750 million in official revenue.



"The average annual cash income of opium-poppy growing households in 2007 was 53 percent higher than those of non-opium poppy growing households," the U.N. 2008 Afghanistan Opium Survey reported, and "farmers in Helmand reported the highest cash income," 70 percent of which came from poppy.

The average Helmand farmer cultivates less than an acre of land, with about half an acre planted in poppy yielding a gross income of about $2,000. After paying 45 percent of that in production costs, and 10 percent in local taxes, he nets about $900, more than twice what he would earn from wheat at current, albeit rising, prices.

Spring opium is harvested in May, after the plant flowers and seed capsules develop. The capsules are lanced and a latex-like opium gum oozes out and is gathered by hand. In Helmand, where production per acre is highest, capsules are lanced an average of four times in a labor-intensive process.

Extra workers travel from all over Afghanistan for the harvest, and the pay is higher than it is for virtually all other forms of unskilled labor. The average daily wage for construction work, the United Nations reported, is $3.60. Wheat harvesting earns $4.40, and opium "lancing/gum collection" pays $9.50. Wages in Helmand for lancing, $15 a day, are the highest in the country.

"What we're looking for is a way to compete with that," the senior military official said of the opium economy. "This is not easy. . . . There is no silver bullet."

Correspondent Pamela Constable in Kabul and staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.