Afghanistan Watch: Thinking like an insurgent: the Army's new academy

The Wall St Journal has a front page, 2,300 word piece this morning on the U.S. Army's "Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy", which was established this April to improve tactics. Last year the Army unveiled a new counterinsurgency doctrine, but its dissemination has been slow; when one of its authors, Lt. Col. John Nagl went to Afghanistan he saw "uneven understanding of counterinsurgency principles."

Capt. Dan Helmer, the 26-year old Rhode Scholar who set up the 'school' in six weeks notes that "We're trying to win an argument that supporting the government is worth risking your life for." That's a tough sell right now, and requires an approach which is 80% military and 20% political, according to Helmer.

The Army says they've made great progress this year in giving troops Afghanistan-specific training before deployment, but current deployment patterns aren't providing enough time for learning. "There isn't enough time between being told that they're going and getting them through the training," says Lou Gelling, deputy commander of the Army's battle command training program. "That's the reality of it." Sounds like a lot of the training right now is supplemental, not comprehensive: five day courses for 60 soldiers at a time in a makeshift classroom.

As usual, one of the central problems ties back to Afghanistan's status as America's "second war":

The counterinsurgency training sometimes seems targeted more toward Iraq, according to Capt. Helmer and Col. Nagl. Of the 90 men under Col. Nagl's command, almost all are Iraq veterans and just one has served in Afghanistan. Even Capt. Helmer's orders to Afghanistan included the mistaken, but telling, instruction to take a course in Arabic -- a language spoken in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan.

The article is subscriber only content, but here are a few excerpts:

In Counterinsurgency Class, Soldiers Think Like Taliban, Wall Street Journal, By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS, Nov 30, KABUL:A natural-born insurgent, Sgt. First Class Jacob Stockdill was brimming with malicious suggestions when a group of American soldiers and Afghan security men sat down last month to plot their own defeat. MORE

"I can put a guy out on a ridge with an AK-47 and have him take a couple of shots," Sgt. Stockdill proposed to fellow students at the Army's new Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy. "The Americans will shoot back with their big guns and disrupt the whole valley.... Being an insurgent would be so easy." Capt. Chris Rowe finished his thought: "All you have to do is not screw up, and, even if you do, you just blame it on the Americans."

Six years into the Afghan war, the Army has decided its troops on the ground still don't understand well enough how to battle the Taliban insurgency. So since the spring, groups of 60 people have been attending intensive, five-day sessions in plywood classrooms in the corner of a U.S. base here, where they learn to think like a Taliban and counterpunch like a politician.

The academy's principal message: The war that began to oust a regime has evolved into a popularity contest where insurgents and counterinsurgents vie for public support and the right to rule. The implicit critique: Many U.S. and allied soldiers still arrive in the country well-trained to kill, but not to persuade.

In April, the Army gave a 26-year-old Rhodes scholar, Capt. Dan Helmer, sixweeks to get the school up and running. Capt. Helmer tells his students, who rank as high as colonel, that the important battles here are 80% political and just 20% military. He exhorts them to go to great lengths to understand local politics, culture and history, to make sure actions they take on the battlefield help convince Afghans that the Kabul government will serve and protect them.

...

Students took the roles of insurgents in an academy session late last month. Capt. Khawja Mohammed, a 38-year-old training officer for the Afghan riot police, suggested they stage a public hanging of someone suspected of collaborating with the coalition. "We can intimidate people," he offered.

Lt. Col. Sayed Najeeb of the Afghan intelligence service proposed a series of attacks on coalition or government checkpoints. "That will tell the people that the government can't take care of itself," Col. Najeeb, a 38-year-old with a thick black beard, black shirt and black pinstriped suit. He spoke in Dari, one of Afghanistan's main languages, through an interpreter. As insurgents, he said, "We can tell the people that the infidels have come to destroy their religion, but if we don't demonstrate enough force, people won't join us."

Sgt. First Class James Litchford, 43, from Hattiesburg, Miss., said he would plan a frontal assault on a major U.S. base. The attackers should grab the Americans "by the belt," he said -- that is, get so close to the base so fast that the defenders wouldn't dare use air strikes or artillery for fear of hitting their own men. Then the insurgents would swarm through the base defenses, he said.

"All you've got to do is overrun it," he said. "You don't have to hold it." The news media would do the rest, he said, boosting the insurgents' standing in Afghanistan and damaging morale back in the U.S. "We've got to bleed them out and make the coalition lose its will to fight," said Sgt. Stockdill, a beefy 33-year-old from Rural Valley, Pa., warming to the challenge.

'Clear, Hold and Build'

Academy instructors teach that counterinsurgents must "clear, hold and build" to insulate the public from insurgent tactics while demonstrating that the government has something better to offer. In the "clear" stage, Afghan and coalition troops physically force insurgents from villages and towns, separating them from the civilian populace. The military then fills the void with quick-impact aid such as emergency clinics, food distribution or free blankets and farm implements.

In the next phase, the government and its allies must maintain a constant presence to hold the villages, to reassure the public that the insurgents won't come back to punish those who collaborate with the authorities. They also should sweeten the pot by providing more substantial projects to demonstrate Kabul's competence, such as rebuilding a mosque or repairing irrigation ditches. "You lose credibility with the people if you don't hold," Marine First Lt. Jack Isaac, a 24-year-old instructor from Dallas, Pa., warned his class.

Instructors told students how in the Chalekor Valley in Zabur Province, an American-led force cleared five villages in May 2006 and inflicted terrible casualties on Taliban fighters who tried to overrun a joint U.S.-Afghan base. The allied forces provided medical services and other goodwill projects. But ultimately they didn't have enough troops to maintain a presence in the valley. When they pulled out, the Taliban returned.

The "build" phase requires long-term economic development so that "the enemy is no longer welcome and support for the government is strong," according to the academy's student handbook. That means bigger projects, such as paved roads linking isolated villages to market towns. Results ultimately will be apparent not in the number of dead Taliban, instructors say -- but in indicators such as school attendance, election turnouts, business growth and increasing tips about impending attacks.

Putting Theory Into Practice

But as the academy students discovered, putting the theory into practice can feel like building a sand castle as the tide is coming in. There's only so much aid money to go around. There are only so many soldiers to clear and hold. There are local blood feuds to resolve. There are local power structures to decipher. There are civilians to charm. And there are insurgents trying to disrupt the whole venture.

One common complaint in Afghanistan is that the coalition makes big promises, but fails to deliver. "Afghans don't understand how, if the world's only superpower is involved in a fight, it can't get them a goddamn road after promising to do so in 2002," says Capt. Helmer.

Smaller missteps can undo months of counterinsurgency efforts. Lt. Isaac and a fellow instructor arrived at the academy last month in a U.S. military convoy. The drivers, worried about suicide bombers and ambushes, sped through Kabul, honking and bullying civilian vehicles away. "We just made a thousand new enemies," Lt. Isaac told his colleague.

...

More damaging are any deaths of Afghan civilians at the hands of coalition forces. Sgt. Litchford told his classmates one day: "The military can't win this war, but it sure as hell can lose it." Capt. Ray Gilmore, a 30-year-old from North Conway, told his students about a fight earlier this year in the Zerkoh Valley, in which locals and Western media reported that U.S. air strikes killed dozens of civilians. The U.S. military says Special Forces troops came under Taliban attack and killed 136 fighters, but that further investigation found no evidence of civilian deaths. Still, the Afghan government permanently banned coalition troops from entering the area, Capt. Gilmore says.

Capt. Helmer says counterinsurgents face a paradox: "The more you protect the force, the less safe you are." When coalition troops hole up in big bases, surrounded by barbed wire and sand barriers, they risk turning the locals toward the insurgents. Small, vulnerable outposts set among the villages, such as ones the Army has erected along the Pech River Valley near Pakistan, bring troops and people closer together. When the insurgents attack the troops, they are attacking the people, too. But such exposed positions also increase the near-term risk of allied casualties. ...

November 30, 2007

Thinking like an insurgent: the Army's new academy

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