thedrifter
10-14-07, 06:34 AM
Tangling With the Taliban
More American soldiers are pushing into high-threat areas.
BY MATTHEW KAMINSKI
Sunday, October 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
PAKTIKA PROVINCE, Afghanistan--Gen. John Craddock sits in Dwight Eisenhower's old chair at the head of NATO forces. A tank commander, the West Virginia native spent 14 years in Germany faced off against the Russians. The other day, half a world away from the Fulda Gap, he found himself at the improvised hilltop base of a U.S. 82nd Airborne platoon peering across a different sort of front line.
Beyond these wooded hills and ravines are the Pakistani sanctuaries for the Taliban and al Qaeda who've in recent months crossed, mostly at night, in growing numbers. The U.S. doubled the number of combat troops in eastern Afghanistan, and the 82nd Airborne--part of the 40,000-strong NATO mission here--opened three new border posts. The boosted presence partly accounts for the intense fighting. "We're more offensive, not just waiting to be hit," an American lieutenant colonel on his second tour tells Gen. Craddock.
But this is a frustrating game of hide-and-seek where the enemy is hard to spot--is that goat herder also an al Qaeda lookout?--and the insurgency leadership a jumble of names and allegiances. Southeast of Kabul, seasoned Arab, Uzbek and Chechen foreigners command Afghans, referring to them sometimes as "sheep," according to Command Sgt. Maj. Richard Weik. Further north, men loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful jihadist who joined up with the Taliban, are in the lead, brazenly kidnapping and harassing villagers and manning roadblocks not far from Kabul.
Gen. Craddock separates the Taliban--estimated between 5,000 and 20,000 strong--into "day fighters," who take up arms for money, and "a hard-core extremist leadership [that] will never change." What fuels the rising violence in Afghanistan may be as much indigence and tribal feuding as al Qaeda ideology. Hamid Karzai's government pushes economic development and reaches out to so-called Taliban moderates--with little to show for it. And the supply of fighters, foreign and Afghan, won't dry up as long as western Pakistan provides the kind of safe haven that America pledged to destroy after 9/11.
Minutes after Gen. Craddock lifts off from the border post in his Blackhawk, a rocket set on a timer hit harmlessly in the hill below. Whoever planted it, he tells me later, "didn't stick around" when GIs rushed over to investigate.
The day before, in a bare and sandbagged reception hall, Gen. Craddock sat with Ezatullah, the district governor of Sangin, which saw some of the worst fighting in southern Afghanistan. Helmand province boasts the highest concentration of Taliban, who claim to have the run of half of it. "The center of Taliban activity is in Musa Qala," Ezatullah tells his visitor, referring to a city north of Sangin under Taliban control. "That's where they make IEDs (improvised explosive devices)" which, along with suicide bombings and other terrorist tactics, were recently imported--whether directly isn't clear--from Iraq. He wants NATO forces to act.
Gen. Craddock listens politely and makes no promises. The politics are sensitive. Ezatullah, who goes by a single name, is a local strongman with a "checkered past," in the words of a British briefer, installed by Kabul after U.K. troops, at a cost of 16 men, took Sangin. The British resist pressure, sometimes from America, to move against Musa Qala. Why take it if you can't keep it, asked Maj. Gen. Jacko Page, the commander of NATO forces in the south. He tells me that Musa Qala "isn't a safe haven," but a target.
"There isn't a silver bullet to end this campaign," says Maj. Gen. Page. "We can't be seen as an occupation force. It's not about controlling ground. It's not about killing people. The primary agent is the government itself."
Afghan "ownership" is a nice idea and good P.R. Reality is another story. Gov. Ezatullah struggles alone to run his district; the foreigners recently hired him a clerk, his first employee. Police lack regular salaries from Kabul, so live off bribes.
As a result NATO troops, who claim to play only a supporting role, are forced to step in and provide basic services. The six British patrol bases near Sangin are "the equivalent of having a police station in your town," says one British officer. The troops clear irrigation ditches and get local bazaars up and running. "If we can't offer more than the enemy, we've lost from the start," says Helen Gates, the civilian deputy head of the "provincial reconstruction team" responsible for Sangin.
Musa Qala, like Sangin a district center, is on the other side of enemy lines. How it got there is sobering. NATO last year struck a deal with town elders: British troops who'd taken the town would leave as long as the locals kept the Taliban out. British Gen. David Richards, who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan then, says the British flag was a "magnet" for the Taliban and wanted to show that Afghans were ready to take over. The absence of a flag was a bigger magnet. In February, four months after the deal was struck and the British decamped, the Taliban took Musa Qala back.
Gen. Craddock tells me the "ideal is that [NATO] clears, the Afghans hold" territory. But in the south, the Taliban are proving resilient, in spite of losing thousands of fighters and getting routed in any conventional battle with British, American or Canadian forces. They're in cahoots with drug lords who give them money. Weapons, say diplomats and military officials, now also come from Iran, the Taliban's erstwhile enemies. Gen. Craddock argues NATO's decision to move forcefully into the south has been a success. "There has been a resurgence of the Taliban," he explains, "to the extent that it was there before and [NATO soldiers] walked into places where no NATO forces have been. We stirred up a hornet's nest."
A few days after we leave Sangin, the Taliban kidnap a 15-year-old boy walking home from work copying keys at the town market. They call him "a spy," beat and hang him, stuffing five one-dollar bills found in his pocket into his mouth.
I first met Gen. Craddock in 1999 when he led the U.S. 1st Infantry Division into southern Kosovo in the wake of NATO's bombing campaign against Serbia. As in Bosnia, the Kosovo mission was criticized as a distraction for troops trained to fight the next big war. Later, he was Donald Rumsfeld's military adviser during the Iraq War, and went on to lead the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo and Colombian drug-interdiction efforts. As supreme allied commander for Europe, Gen. Craddock is again preoccupied with asymmetric threats. When he rose up the ranks, he says, "I didn't expect to spend so much time thinking about drug lords, culture, religion . ." As it turned out, the experience that Gen. Craddock got in Kosovo was very useful post-9/11.
These post-conflict colonial missions take time. The outside world is trying to construct--not reconstruct--a more or less functioning state. Yet time is a scarce resource given the attention spans and patience of people back home. Still, Gen. Craddock pleads for more time "to get the Afghan police, army, bureaucracy to stand up and get the job done themselves."
"I don't think that we're losing," he says. "Question is, are we winning fast enough?"
Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
Ellie
More American soldiers are pushing into high-threat areas.
BY MATTHEW KAMINSKI
Sunday, October 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
PAKTIKA PROVINCE, Afghanistan--Gen. John Craddock sits in Dwight Eisenhower's old chair at the head of NATO forces. A tank commander, the West Virginia native spent 14 years in Germany faced off against the Russians. The other day, half a world away from the Fulda Gap, he found himself at the improvised hilltop base of a U.S. 82nd Airborne platoon peering across a different sort of front line.
Beyond these wooded hills and ravines are the Pakistani sanctuaries for the Taliban and al Qaeda who've in recent months crossed, mostly at night, in growing numbers. The U.S. doubled the number of combat troops in eastern Afghanistan, and the 82nd Airborne--part of the 40,000-strong NATO mission here--opened three new border posts. The boosted presence partly accounts for the intense fighting. "We're more offensive, not just waiting to be hit," an American lieutenant colonel on his second tour tells Gen. Craddock.
But this is a frustrating game of hide-and-seek where the enemy is hard to spot--is that goat herder also an al Qaeda lookout?--and the insurgency leadership a jumble of names and allegiances. Southeast of Kabul, seasoned Arab, Uzbek and Chechen foreigners command Afghans, referring to them sometimes as "sheep," according to Command Sgt. Maj. Richard Weik. Further north, men loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful jihadist who joined up with the Taliban, are in the lead, brazenly kidnapping and harassing villagers and manning roadblocks not far from Kabul.
Gen. Craddock separates the Taliban--estimated between 5,000 and 20,000 strong--into "day fighters," who take up arms for money, and "a hard-core extremist leadership [that] will never change." What fuels the rising violence in Afghanistan may be as much indigence and tribal feuding as al Qaeda ideology. Hamid Karzai's government pushes economic development and reaches out to so-called Taliban moderates--with little to show for it. And the supply of fighters, foreign and Afghan, won't dry up as long as western Pakistan provides the kind of safe haven that America pledged to destroy after 9/11.
Minutes after Gen. Craddock lifts off from the border post in his Blackhawk, a rocket set on a timer hit harmlessly in the hill below. Whoever planted it, he tells me later, "didn't stick around" when GIs rushed over to investigate.
The day before, in a bare and sandbagged reception hall, Gen. Craddock sat with Ezatullah, the district governor of Sangin, which saw some of the worst fighting in southern Afghanistan. Helmand province boasts the highest concentration of Taliban, who claim to have the run of half of it. "The center of Taliban activity is in Musa Qala," Ezatullah tells his visitor, referring to a city north of Sangin under Taliban control. "That's where they make IEDs (improvised explosive devices)" which, along with suicide bombings and other terrorist tactics, were recently imported--whether directly isn't clear--from Iraq. He wants NATO forces to act.
Gen. Craddock listens politely and makes no promises. The politics are sensitive. Ezatullah, who goes by a single name, is a local strongman with a "checkered past," in the words of a British briefer, installed by Kabul after U.K. troops, at a cost of 16 men, took Sangin. The British resist pressure, sometimes from America, to move against Musa Qala. Why take it if you can't keep it, asked Maj. Gen. Jacko Page, the commander of NATO forces in the south. He tells me that Musa Qala "isn't a safe haven," but a target.
"There isn't a silver bullet to end this campaign," says Maj. Gen. Page. "We can't be seen as an occupation force. It's not about controlling ground. It's not about killing people. The primary agent is the government itself."
Afghan "ownership" is a nice idea and good P.R. Reality is another story. Gov. Ezatullah struggles alone to run his district; the foreigners recently hired him a clerk, his first employee. Police lack regular salaries from Kabul, so live off bribes.
As a result NATO troops, who claim to play only a supporting role, are forced to step in and provide basic services. The six British patrol bases near Sangin are "the equivalent of having a police station in your town," says one British officer. The troops clear irrigation ditches and get local bazaars up and running. "If we can't offer more than the enemy, we've lost from the start," says Helen Gates, the civilian deputy head of the "provincial reconstruction team" responsible for Sangin.
Musa Qala, like Sangin a district center, is on the other side of enemy lines. How it got there is sobering. NATO last year struck a deal with town elders: British troops who'd taken the town would leave as long as the locals kept the Taliban out. British Gen. David Richards, who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan then, says the British flag was a "magnet" for the Taliban and wanted to show that Afghans were ready to take over. The absence of a flag was a bigger magnet. In February, four months after the deal was struck and the British decamped, the Taliban took Musa Qala back.
Gen. Craddock tells me the "ideal is that [NATO] clears, the Afghans hold" territory. But in the south, the Taliban are proving resilient, in spite of losing thousands of fighters and getting routed in any conventional battle with British, American or Canadian forces. They're in cahoots with drug lords who give them money. Weapons, say diplomats and military officials, now also come from Iran, the Taliban's erstwhile enemies. Gen. Craddock argues NATO's decision to move forcefully into the south has been a success. "There has been a resurgence of the Taliban," he explains, "to the extent that it was there before and [NATO soldiers] walked into places where no NATO forces have been. We stirred up a hornet's nest."
A few days after we leave Sangin, the Taliban kidnap a 15-year-old boy walking home from work copying keys at the town market. They call him "a spy," beat and hang him, stuffing five one-dollar bills found in his pocket into his mouth.
I first met Gen. Craddock in 1999 when he led the U.S. 1st Infantry Division into southern Kosovo in the wake of NATO's bombing campaign against Serbia. As in Bosnia, the Kosovo mission was criticized as a distraction for troops trained to fight the next big war. Later, he was Donald Rumsfeld's military adviser during the Iraq War, and went on to lead the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo and Colombian drug-interdiction efforts. As supreme allied commander for Europe, Gen. Craddock is again preoccupied with asymmetric threats. When he rose up the ranks, he says, "I didn't expect to spend so much time thinking about drug lords, culture, religion . ." As it turned out, the experience that Gen. Craddock got in Kosovo was very useful post-9/11.
These post-conflict colonial missions take time. The outside world is trying to construct--not reconstruct--a more or less functioning state. Yet time is a scarce resource given the attention spans and patience of people back home. Still, Gen. Craddock pleads for more time "to get the Afghan police, army, bureaucracy to stand up and get the job done themselves."
"I don't think that we're losing," he says. "Question is, are we winning fast enough?"
Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
Ellie