Tim Lynch just got back from Gardez, and while I think he undersells the charm of the city a bit, his main point is beautifully spot-on:
As I mentioned in my last post I do not really know what our mission in Afghanistan is. We are engaged in a counterinsurgency war but confine the troops to large FOB’s which directly contradicts our counterinsurgency doctrine. Our troops do not have sustained meaningful contact with local Afghans, cannot provide any real security to them, and due to Big Army casualty policies are forced to ride around in large multimillion dollar MRAP’s where they are subject to IED strikes which they cannot prevent because they do not control one meter of ground outside their FOBs. We also do not have the cooperation of the government of Afghanistan. President Karzai has cobbled together a coalition of Afghan power brokers and will win the upcoming election. The UN and our Department of State can make all the noise they want about a “free and fair” election but they are irrelevant because they stay isolated and unengaged in their high speed compounds. The election was decided in Dubai last month as I reported earlier. Besides Afghans have no idea what a free and fair election is – they are no more capable of conducting one than the state of Illinois. So we are fighting a counterinsurgency in support of a government who is actively hindering our efforts by not cooperating with our military, our hapless State Department, or any other organization trying to bring peace, hope, modernity and the rule of law to this once proud and beautiful country.
That almost entirely summarizes why my embed in Afghanistan earlier this year changed me from being optimistic about the war to deeply pessimistic. There seems to be no desire to actually win. But Lynch makes other points that bear repeating as well:
Early in 2002 U.S. and Australian Special Forces troops fought a pitched battle in the Shah-i-Kot Valley (the Battle of Takur Ghar) close to Gardez. One would think that the Army would have done a ton of work in Gardez to help establish a positive climate while placing maneuver units on the Pakistani border in Dand Wa Patan district to block the well developed and well known smuggling routes. In both cases one would be wrong; there is no coalition presence on the border at all and the town of Gardez remains a dirt poor shit hole all but ignored by the Army, US AID and all other NGO’s– just look at the pictures.
At first I was going to rise up in righteous fury and point to all the work that has gone on in Gardez… until I realized that is exactly what the military leadership would probably do. But Lynch is getting at something I still miss on occasion: the majority of the “spending” in these sorts of places is on the FOBs, not the community. FOB Lightning, near FOB Gardez, is enormous. Just south and east in Khost is FOB Salerno, where I spent some time—similarly enormous. In Helmand, the Marines were apparently unsatisfied with the enormity of Kandahar Air Field so they’re building out Camp Bastion to be just as enormous.
Gardez is the heart of one of those areas where there has been a U.S. presence for years, yet when an ODA team sets up shop in a nearby district, they are the first real permanent Western presence in that entire area. The Loya Paktya area—consisting of Paktika to the south, Khost in the east, and Paktya in the northwest—is about 12,000 square miles of nastiness, or about 1/4 the size of Virginia. There are over a million people in the three provinces. Yet the total security force is an Army Brigade Combat Team—maybe 4,000 soldiers total. The vast majority of them are tied up in administrative or operational tasks on their respective FOBs: running the TOC, handling construction or base security, managing local Afghan workers, and so on. In comparison, the state of Virginia—which does not have an active insurgency of any sort—has almost 12,000 state and local police officers.
In other words, and I think this is one of the big points Lynch is getting at, there is a fundamental disconnect between what we are doing in Afghanistan and what we expect to happen. And that is best exemplified by the big huge FOBs that hold far too many people compared to what needs to happen.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 06/10/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
Isn’t this sort of thing a great big reason why McKiernan should have been fired? Hopefully McChrystal can change some of this FOB-tastic crap.
Well, not necessarily—that would presume McKiernan was the problem, and not the many years of his predecessors. We don’t have the data to support that.
FYI I spent all of 2008 in Khost and we controlled more territory than that within the fob. And no one was dirving around ‘helpless’ to prevent ied’s and having ‘no’ contact with the locals. Most ied’s get spotted and disarmed or ratted out by the locals, because we spent quite a LOT of time in the little villages with the locals. OUT of the trucks, on the ground, with real Afghans none of you who pontificate daily about our failings have ever met. Salerno is not Afghanistan fellas, you haven’t been to Afghanistan if all you did was ‘spend time’ at Salerno. How about you guys go enlist, in the infantry, spend some time sleeping on a humvee in the middle of nowhere and then you can educate the world ok? Deal?