Troops Face New Tests in Afghanistan

arsa · #1 Sunday, March 15, 2009

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Sunday, March 15, 2009

MAYWAND, Afghanistan -- Lt. Col. Daniel Hurlbut rolled into this dusty Taliban stronghold in September with a battalion of U.S. Army infantrymen and a detailed, year-long plan to combat the Taliban.

The first quarter was to be devoted to reconnaissance. The next three months would involve military operations to root out insurgents. By now, his unit should have been focusing on reconstruction and building up the local government.

But the battalion's efforts to pry information about the Taliban from the local population -- by conducting foot patrols, doling out money for mosques to buy new prayer rugs and offering agricultural assistance to subsistence farmers -- have been met with indifference, if not downright hostility.

"Nobody wants to tell us anything," Hurlbut said, sighing.

His initial plan, he has since concluded, was wildly optimistic.

"We're still in the first quarter," he said. "Our expectation for results is now a lot longer than we thought it would be."

U.S. commanders regard Hurlbut's battalion as a harbinger of the 17,000 additional Army and Marine troops that President Obama has ordered to southern Afghanistan this spring to augment NATO forces, which have been stretched thin by the Taliban's growing strength. As those troops flow into a series of new garrisons, they will confront a set of challenges that is very different from what the U.S. military has faced in Afghanistan thus far.

The southern part of the country is now regarded by U.S. and NATO commanders as the central front in the Afghan war. It encompasses the nation's second-largest city, Kandahar, and six provinces where the Taliban has built a significant degree of popular support, in part through intimidation but also by delivering Afghans a degree of security against criminals that the local police and international forces have been unable to provide.

While the Obama administration forges a new strategy in Washington to salvage an Afghan nation-building operation that is entering its eighth year, the perilous state of affairs in the south has already prompted commanders here to develop a new approach to fighting the insurgency. It may provide a preview of ways in which the overall international military effort in Afghanistan could be transformed over the coming months.

"If we're going to win, we have to fight this war differently," said U.S. Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, a deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. "For too long, we've had an economy of force. We've had a stovepiped approach to combat and to development, too. All that has to change."

The new strategy here involves a major -- but controversial -- push to better coordinate the efforts of NATO troops deployed in the south, a new focus for counternarcotics operations and the allocation of more troops to train Afghan security forces. It also seeks to apply a fundamental tenet of the U.S. Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine: Deploy the troops to create zones of security around population centers instead of mounting in-and-out raids against the insurgents.

Unlike in eastern Afghanistan, where the U.S. military had been concentrating its troops since 2002, American units in the south will be forced to work far more closely with other NATO forces. The new U.S. troops will find themselves in a swath of the country that is the epicenter of opium poppy cultivation and where far fewer resources have been devoted to reconstruction and development. And they will be forced to deal with a deep-rooted, indigenous insurgency -- the Taliban got its start in the south -- that has mounted increasingly potent attacks on civilians and security forces.

What the new strategy does not seek to do, however, is to borrow a page from the U.S. playbook in Iraq by creating tribal militias to fend off the Taliban. Commanders here said that approach could create even more warlords and new intratribal feuds. And the commanders see little benefit from negotiations with the Taliban right now, despite Obama's support for such an overture.

Military officials regard the Taliban, composed largely of ethnic Pashtuns, as both too strong and too fragmented in the south to pursue an effective deal, although they remain open to the possibility in the east, where some tribal leaders who have supported the insurgency could be persuaded to switch sides.

Senior officials at the NATO regional headquarters in Kandahar see the insurgency in the south as made up of a core of die-hard Taliban operatives and a much larger group of young freelance fighters who are motivated more by money than religious zealotry. NATO troops, as well as U.S. Special Forces teams in the region, have been seeking to target the operatives, hoping to stem the flow of funds and munitions to the low-level fighters. The officials also believe that new economic development projects funded by international donors could help to lure some of the fighters to lay down their weapons.

But U.S. and NATO officials in the region are not certain how the Taliban will respond to the new American forces moving into the south. Some may hide or simply move to parts of the country with fewer international forces. Or they may choose to fight with roadside bombs and the occasional ambush. The result could be a significant increase in Taliban attacks -- and U.S. casualties -- this summer.

"With the new troops arriving, it will bring more people into contact with more Americans," said Philip Hatton, an adviser to Nicholson on stabilization issues. "What will the result of that be? We don't know."

Ending the Fractured Approach

When NATO forces were deployed to the south in 2006, the Canadians were assigned the province of Kandahar, the British got Helmand, and the Dutch were sent to Uruzgan. The three nations developed their own battle plans and agendas for development. They established provincial reconstruction teams that report to their capitals, not the NATO regional command at the Kandahar airport.

People at the regional command now joke that the three provinces should be renamed Canadahar, Helmandshire and Uruzdam.

"It's a totally dysfunctional way of fighting a war," said a U.S. officer in the south. "You've got each of these guys doing their own thing in their provinces with very little coordination."

The fractured approach is a result of demands imposed by NATO members as a condition of sending troops to Afghanistan. Each nation wanted its own chunk of the action so it could show off what it had accomplished. That model has been less problematic in the far north and west, where there has been less violence, and in the east, where the U.S. military has established its own command.

"The big question for NATO now isn't whether members are going to send more troops or what caveats will be placed on those troops, but whether the nations who have decided to stand up and fight will actually fight together," a senior U.S. military official said.

The task of trying to get everyone to collaborate has fallen to Nicholson, who is pushing the British, Canadians and Dutch to embrace a more integrated approach to war-fighting and development. "We need a coherent regional plan for victory," he said, "not a bunch of national plans for victory."

Instead of demanding that Britain, Canada and the Netherlands scuttle their individual plans, he is trying to compensate for the differences among the individual approaches by forming a regionwide development agenda. It calls for spending $700 million on road, electricity and water projects, several of which cross province borders. He plans to take the wish list to international donors in the next few months.

Although some British and Canadian officials grouse in private about what they view as Nicholson's efforts to wrest control over reconstruction planning, they also recognize that with the addition of 17,000 troops, the United States will have the largest military presence in the south and a corresponding ability to influence policy.

'Progress Here Has Been Slow'

When Hurlbut's battalion arrived in Maywand last fall, its first order of business was to encircle a swath of dusty plain with razor wire and erect an outpost. It began as a makeshift effort, with tents and wooden latrines and meals in a bag, but Forward Operating Base Ramrod has since assumed the trappings of modern military life: a gymnasium, an Internet room and a chow hall run by the defense contractor KBR.

Although this district 45 miles west of Kandahar had long been regarded by the NATO-led military command in Afghanistan as a key infiltration route for insurgents, there were too few international forces to maintain a permanent presence here. The Canadian army, which has been responsible for the area since early 2006, came every few months to clear out Taliban fighters, but the insurgents would invariably crop back up as soon as the troops left.

Hurlbut's soldiers are trying a different tack and employing a counterinsurgency technique that has been used in the Iraq war. They are staying in Maywand. Some bed down near the municipal building and the police headquarters. Another contingent patrols the highway. Still others walk through villages every day, trying to convince impoverished farmers that they should cast their lot not with the Taliban but with NATO forces and Afghanistan's fledgling national government.

The soldiers had hoped their presence in the district would be welcomed by residents, who keep telling the troops that what they want more than anything is security -- and they will side with whomever can provide it. But it hasn't worked yet.

"The local people are completely sitting on the fence, and they're content to stay on the fence," said Hurlbut, who commands the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. "They don't really want to give us information."

After almost three years of seeing Canadian troops roll in and roll out, one officer said, "they don't yet believe us when we say we're here to stay."

Even the local officials are wary. The district governor, Hurlbut said, started becoming friendly with him only last month.

The Taliban, however, has taken the 2-2 Infantry's presence in the district seriously. Insurgents mined the roads with scores of improvised explosives devices, more than 150 of which have hit the battalion's patrols and convoys.

In some parts of Afghanistan, police regularly patrol roads and interdict people planting bombs. But in Maywand, the police spend more time in the district capital. Although they have been through a new U.S.-led training program and have been assigned a team of civilian and military mentors, the police officers generally cannot be bothered to walk the beat. And they have little interest in solving crimes. When a man came to police headquarters recently to complain that his motorcycle had been stolen, the police refused to act without a bribe.

"Fine," he said, according to soldiers who witnessed the encounter. "I'm going to the Taliban. At least they'll take me seriously."

Even efforts to hand out money here have not been without peril. Last month, Hurlbut said he sought to win over a local mullah by outfitting his mosque with new prayer rugs and a loudspeaker system. But after three weeks, the Taliban stole all of it.

"The progress here has been slow," Hurlbut said. "We shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking that everything will change when we get 17,000 additional troops in the south. They're going to be moving into places like this, where there haven't been any foreign forces for a long time. And they're going to discover that it's going to take a while to accomplish our goals."

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