Dispatches from FOBistan: “Tribal” Engagement, or How We Lost Kapisa… And Are (Slowly) Regaining It

The Nijrab Bazaar, taken by a colleague, obviously, in November of 2008.

BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN — The Small Wars Journal points to a pair of essays from the latest Special Warfare (pdf). Of interest is the cover story, “Tribal Engagement in Afghanistan.”

Now, ignoring the fact that way too many soldiers write like poorly trained robots, it contains some great ideas—especially how to manage an engagement with relatively few soldiers. My only big beef with this is that they were in Eastern Paktia, which is an area renown for its especially strong, hyper-local tribal communities. The rest of Afghanistan is decidedly less tribal, and much more aptly described as “communal.” But looking at Afghanistan from as local a level as possible, which these authors argue is a Best Practice, is absolutely essential… and actually helps to highlight that what is needed in all the hullabaloo about a new strategy isn’t tribal engagement, but community engagement.

Then there was this:

Many successful examples of engagement in COIN were available, including Tal Afar in Iraq in 2005 and the Tagab Valley in Afghanistan in 2006.

I honestly hadn’t ever before heard Tagab elevated as an example of good COIN before, since it is such a violent place today (mostly when it’s warm, remember that). This needed more exploration.

Infantry Magazine, which I could not for the life of me find online, profiled the attempt to “clean up” the Tagab Valley in its 01 July 2007 issue. Much of the discussion of that operation will be summarized from that account. Sometime in mid-to-late 2005, a series of special operations raids in the Tagab supposedly chased most of the area militants away into Pakistan. The SF, however, moved on, leaving the Valley undefended against future depredations. During the summer of 2006, fighters filtered back into the Valley, and by that fall no one could tell there had been a major SF sweep the year before. In response, the U.S. launched a new effort called Operation al-Hasn to clear out the militants, destroying three suicide bomb trainer cells in the process. The Coalition touted the operation as a significant victory, given the involvement of the ANSF, or Afghan National Security Forces (the combined term for the Army and Police).

First and foremost, Operation Al Hasn was designed as a true partnership between the U.S., UAE, and the government of Afghanistan. Throughout Operation Al Hasn, SOTF-33 and TF-8 included [then-] Governor Murad in the planning, coordination, and execution as an equal partner… Second, this mission marked the beginning of a long-term Afghan and coalition government presence in the Tagab Valley. Temporary displays of military might do not lead to effective growth and transformation in Afghanistan… Finally, the partnership and the long-term presence must be supported by a responsive and flexible logistics system that are sustainable through an Afghanistan-owned system. Stockpiling all classes of humanitarian assistance and civil-military resources is essential to ensure a seamless transition from kinetic to non-kinetic operations within the valley.

What follows is a lengthy, overly detailed description of what appears to be another largely Special Forces-led sweep with a huge number of ANSF in tow, only this time it was accompanied by a huge outlay of humanitarian assistance, psychological operations, and medical services to the Valley population. If I read this correctly, and I think I do, this is when the foundation for FOB Morales-Frazier, then called Firebase Nijrab and later FOB Nijrab (FOBs are often re-named after fallen soldiers). After eleven days, future Ambassador to Afghanistan Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry declared, “This is the best example of full spectrum counterinsurgency operations. This should be the model for COIN operations in Afghanistan.” The story even made the Associated Press, which noted that, much like the previous operation in 2005, many of the fighters had simply run away.

At the time of that writing, in early summer of 2007, things had remained quiet in the Tagab. What I’ve learned since being here is that winter and even spring are no times to really measure militancy—what counts is much later in the year when everyone has had a chance to filter back into the area from Pakistan. I’m still piecing together what happened in Kapisa during 2007, but right around the time that this Infantry Magazine profile of Operation al-Hasn was published in July, the Ministry of the Interior fired Governor Murad, claiming not that he complained about Karzai to the press, but that he was “sowing dischord” and giving the Coalition faulty information about his province. By September, al-Jazeera was running segments about Taliban fighters operating openly in broad daylight and buying weapons from the ANP:

(Hat tip to that last paragraph and video go to CMB, who properly notes that all people love men with guns).

The misinformation problem is a severe one. When Matt Dupee wrote about Kapisa in April of 2008, he wrote:

Others Afghanis, including local residents, believed Murad was removed on the recommendation by Hadi Safi, a Member of Parliament from Kapisa’s Nejrab district who is seen as a powerfully destabilizing figure in the province. Safi, a former jihadi commander, is suspected of maintaining his own militia in the Pachaghan Valley, who in turn are said to be closely associated with Taliban fighters led by Kapisa’s Taliban warlord Qari Barayal.

I would be curious to know who he talked to for that information. From what I can piece together through scattered interviews, Abdul Hadi Safi was a mujahidin commander for Jamiat-i Islami in Afghaniya Valley. He was one of the many Pashtuns fighting for Jamiat who switched sides in the waning days of the Taliban reign to secure protection from aggressive Tajiks pushing down from Nijrab and Mahmood Raqi. But, according to interviewees, Safi actually switched back to Jamiat once the U.S. invaded (a common maneuver, and not by itself indicative of any malice or subterfuge on his part), and captured several dozen Taliban. By their accounts, he released most by executed twelve of them, burying them in a graveyard by the Afghaniya bazaar.

The Afghaniya bazaar and graveyard, taken by a colleague on Christmas Day, 2008.

The Taliban, naturally, are furious with Safi over this. He is indeed a Member of Parliament, and he spends the vast majority of his time in Kabul. There are rumors that the Taliban are so angry, but also afraid of him, that they try to prevent his return to Kapisa.

It is easy to get a mistaken idea of commanders, personalities, and even broad social currents. Hell, the people who gave me this information could have been lying to me.

Regardless, things in Tagab have been bad for a while. They’ve been bad elsewhere, too— Embedded Tactical Trainers, or ETTs, spent a lot of time in Alisay Valley, halfway up the Tagab, in 2007. Now, it is considered a no-go area by the French, though some elders from the area claim the danger is overstated. There are a growing number of operations up and down the Tagab, and truth be told from the very little of the Valley I saw it looks like things are improving, at least to a small degree.

My guess is the small bits of improvement in security lately can be chalked up to the persistent presence of the embedded trainers (ETTs and OMLTs train the Afghan National Army; there are similar groups called PMTs who train the police). The embedded trainers are the regular Army guys doing Special Forces work: FID, or Foreign Internal Defense. Traditionally performed by special operations soldiers, FIDs spend a lot of time with local military units and train and mentor them. Along with the long push to build up a solid corps of NCOs, or non-commissioned officers, the embedded training mission is probably one of the most vital—and under-resourced—in Afghanistan. Before 2007 or so, there was no persistent, consistent U.S. presence in Southern Kapisa. Tagab was one of those places where the Taliban (and other militants) hung out for a while to plan attacks on Kabul, and every fall intricate Special Operations campaigns would clear the Valley only to see it be reset back to its original state within months.

That didn’t happen this past year. It is true, there is more outright combat there. But that also means the Coalition—in this case, the French representing NATO as well as the U.S.—has established a constant-enough presence for such combat. In 2006, during Operation al-Hasn, there was no permanent base for the military. Now, there are at least two: FOB Morales-Frazier, near the mouth of the Nijrab Valley, and FOB Kutschbagh (I know I’m misspelling that) halfway down the Tagab. And more are coming.

While I appreciate the work the authors of that Special Warfare magazine article did in Paktia, they were actually innovating their own template for proper, sustained counterinsurgency. Rather than following the Tagab-in-2006 example, which would only require enough planning for 11 days of continuous operations, they took a months-long view of their area, and focused all of their efforts at the local level (including achieving things that would be easy to do with brute force the long, slow way through local channels). It is that model, which actually has very little “tribal” about it (aside from locals in some areas using “tribe” and “village/community” interchangeably), which is being enacted—quite independently, as near as I can tell—in Kapisa. It is just on such a small scale, the results are not yet significant enough to really compound each other and affect a sea change in the province.

Community engagement, then. Listening to the population’s needs and helping the Afghans do all the work. It’s really not as easy as that sounds. But it is a fundamental departure from the vast majority of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. To a borrow a cliche I will hate myself for using later: it is change we can believe in.

Tagged as: Afghanistan

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 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. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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