Making Afghanistan Safe

Making Afghanistan Safe
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"'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it": US Army Major to Peter Arnett 2/07/68 Vietnam

"We had to destroy them to make them safe": Muhammed Ahmadi to New York Times 11/16/10

This morning's New York Times front-pages the demolition of hundreds or maybe thousands of empty homes and farm buildings by American and other NATO troops because they have been "contaminated" by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). The vacant buildings have been "so heavily rigged that soldiers have started referring to them as house-born explosive devices."

The Times reports that, "Shah Muhammed Ahmadi [the district governor], who estimated that 120-130 houses had been demolished in his district [said] 'There was no other way; we knew people wanted us to get rid of all those deadly I.E.D.s'."

If the Afghan people really want "us to get rid of all those deadly I.E.D.s," why did General Michael Oates, the director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), tell InsideDefense on October 20th that the local Afghan population was not cooperating in our efforts to rid Afghanistan of IEDs?

Oates, who took over JIEDDO last December, developed a three-pronged strategy: one, the use of human intelligence from Afghans; two, the use of unmanned ground sensors (UGS) to detect the presence of IEDs or other explosive materials on the roads or on persons or in cars that traveled over the roads; and third, the use of fixed-wing airplanes, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, i.e. drones) for similar purposes.

Now Oates says that the Afghans not only do not inform us when the Taliban plants IEDs, but that "The local population is able to detect [our ground sensors] almost as rapidly as we can put them in" and then they alert the insurgents to the UGS and the Taliban either avoids or destroys them. Oates went on to say that "Unattended ground sensors have been of limited utility in both Iraq and Afghanistan for what may appear to be some very obvious reasons..." chief among them the reluctance of Afghans ( or Iraqis) to provide us with human intelligence.
That killed two of General Oates' three prongs -- no human intelligence, and ground sensors of limited utility. Oates now wants to concentrate on aerial sensors and wants to increase resources to develop them. In the absence of human intelligence he is forced to look to technology for intelligence. The aircraft are better because Afghans can't tell the Taliban the exact whereabouts of planes, choppers and drones. Maybe that will work, but I doubt it.

During the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary McNamara faced the same lack of human intelligence and built an electronic fence on the border between North and South Vietnam. Senator John Stennis, the Chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, asked, "How is the fence going to detect the difference between a cow and a man?" General Oates complained that, "All [UGS] tells you is something's moving but you don't know precisely what." Will aerial surveillance be any better than UGS or McNamara's fence?

If we don't win the hearts and minds of the Afghans, if we can't get reliable information from them about the doings of the Taliban, it's going to be a long, hard war.

Last week, I attended the Intelligence Squared debate titled "Afghanistan Is a Lost Cause." The gentlemen opposed to the proposition claimed that the Afghan population approved of US forces in Afghanistan -- one said it was 68 to 32 percent favorable; the other went as high as 90 percent. I asked them why, if the population regarded us with such favor, General Oates had to give up his UGS. They agreed on the need for human intelligence. They brought up the winning of hearts and minds, and suggested that the new "COIN" (counter-insurgency operations) program, instituted by General Petraeus, could persuade reluctant Afghans to tattle on the bad guys. (The more pragmatic CIA guys in Vietnam said, "If you grab their balls, their hearts and minds will follow." Neither alternative succeeded.)

Today's New York Times says that the destruction of the booby-trapped buildings in Kandahar providence "would also seem to run counter to Gen. David H. Petraeus's counter insurgency strategy, which calls for protecting property as well as lives, and to run up against recent calls by President Hamid Karzai for foreign forces to lower their profile and lower their tactics that alienate Afghan citizens." If we're relying on COIN to win over the hearts and minds of Afghans and, at the same time, countering Petraeus's counter insurgency [COIN] plans, we seem to be eating our own tails.

The things I read, the things I hear, about the war in Afghanistan are full of internal contradictions. According to the Times, Ahmadi said that they bombed the houses because "We had to destroy them to make them safe." How's that for a contradiction?

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