Greg Jaffe is doing a series on the Battle of Want, an impressive multimedia project with previously unreleased video and audio of the fight that left nine U.S. soldiers dead last year. I won’t summarize the entire story, as it should be read in its entirety, but there are a few things worth highlighting.
Strategic confusion over Nuristan’s valleys. As I noted the other week, in discussing the prospects of abandoning Nuristan, the Want base had been initially established when the Battaltion in charge of Nuristan declared the outposts at Bella and Aranas too isolated and too besieged to be effective. But Want is only five miles up the road from Bella—an insignificant distance by helicopter, and insufficiently clear of the geographic features that made constant ambushes at Bella and Aranas relatively easy for the militants. So, pulling back to the Waigal district center didn’t actually address the problems the soldiers had at their further-flung bases.
LTC William Ostlund. Tom Ricks first hinted at Ostlund’s complicity in running a sloppy campaign back in July, but Jaffe’s account fleshes it out more. Rather than focusing on whether or not Ostlund rigidly adhered to basic COIN principles, Jaffe notes Ostlund’s attitude toward the people of Nuristan. “It was a population I really had a hard time understanding and did not respect,” he is quoted as saying. Connecting them to the central government, Ostlund said, “would be the first step to making them better people, less of a threat to themselves.”
The arrogance of such an attitude—I don’t understand or respect you, but I’m going to force you to be better on my terms—is difficult to fully comprehend. One would also think that there is a big difference between pulling back from an indefensible position and declaring defeat, but Jaffe quotes Ostlund as equating the two—surely the opposite of sober strategic and tactical thinking.
Cultural Ignorance. There is an HTT active in the area. My information is old, but I know of at least one HTT member who spent considerable time in the Waigal and Pech River Valleys in early 2008. In other provinces, you can see how the HTTs had begun to affect Brigade leadership—the staff adopted a much more “cultural” view of their Area of Operation (for lack of a better term), viewing the locals as humans rather than statistics or Taliban. LTC Ostlund is not the only person in this story to write off everyone in the area as contemptible jackasses—1LT Bromstrom, Jaffe’s main character, who died trying to rescue his men from the OP above Want, said something similar. When his father asked him how he knew the people he bombed were bad guys or just locals burying their dead, Bromstrom replied, “They are all [expletive] Taliban up there.”
This is a much more serious problem than it appears on first glance, and it probably highlights one of the fundamental challenges in enacting a counterinsurgency campaign. In order to fight effectively, soldiers need an enemy, an unequivocally bad man who must be destroyed. COIN requires humanization, which makes both combat and non-combat missions much more difficult: it’s harder to shoot at a man you consider your friend, and it’s harder to offer peace and friendship to a man you consider your enemy.
Indeed, if LTC Ostlund had a proper understanding of the government and its role in the area, he never would have said he needed to connect Nuristan to Kabul for them to be better people. Nuristan has a somewhat contentious history with Kabul, though many generals in Afghanistan’s Army are from Nuristan thanks to Abdur Rahman’s hostage campaign in 1896. Similarly, the Taliban actually have a very minute presence in the province (they mostly ignored it in the 1990s), since most of the fighters are locals affiliated with Hezb-i Islami Gulbuddin, Lashkar-e Toiba, al-Qaeda, or a local interest.
The national government in Kabul does not recognize community claims to natural resources, which poses a major problem when resource extraction—wood, gems, minerals—is the primary method of income generation for a given area. That’s why we have soldiers going after timber smugglers, and why large areas are so hostile to a regime that essentially represents economic starvation. Again, this is a dynamic firmly based in anthropological texts, whether in nearby areas (e.g. Lincoln Keiser’s work in the Dir Valley of Pakistan), or even within Nuristan itself (e.g. Schuyler Jones’ anecdote about elders arguing over whether or not they want a paved road up the Waigal Valley in the late 1960s).
In theory, the HTT would have been on hand to offer such insights to the battalion operating in the area. Pretty obviously, if they did, it fell on deaf ears. It’s probably unfair to lay this on them, but what affect did they have, if they could have had any at all? Think of the roads bit—as Jaffe notes, the initial report recommended paving a road all the way up the Waigal Valley, something the elders were at best ambivalent about when there was no war in the area. It’s also disturbing to see how readily they seem to fall into established ways of thinking, or clever ideas by clever men, with no understanding of how their projects will actually affect the area or the people (yes, the pathetic belief that paved roads somehow cause security).
Local anger. This has been hashed over, but it bears repeating. Two weeks ago, Jaffe wrote a story noting that troops across Nuristan had very little contact with locals. The subtext of that report is, they don’t know what locals think or care about (and LTC Ostlund’s remark that he didn’t respect them enough to try is telling on this point). But it was very obvious immediately after the attack that the accidental killing of medical personnel from the only clinic in the area had driven locals to fury. The problem is, when Tamim Nuristani, the governor at the time, complained… he was fired.
But, as photojournalist David Tate recounted shortly after the attack, in the days leading up to the assault Want’s residents fled in fear, and several of them tried to warn the Americans. Tate’s informant claims the Platoon’s commander, Captain Matt Myer, said he knew it was coming. Clearly, someone underestimated what went wrong.
There are more personal and institutional questions Jaffe’s reports raise. What leaps out at me is the bizarre combination of tactical laziness and smug arrogance on the part of Army leadership, whether an LTC ignoring his men’s complaints that a base is indefensible, or the disturbing trend of internal investigations reliably clearing officers of wrongdoing. But those concerns are beyond the scope of what I’m discussing here, and quite probably beyond my ability to discuss knowledgeably.
Further Reading: David Tate pasted the entire text of the controversial report from Ft. Leavenworth (edited text thanks to BruceR). I’ve not read it all, but it appears to be meticulous. And for the record: I am (quite happily) surprised to see my work cited therein.
Photo: the village or Aranas.
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. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
{ 7 comments }
Just for the record, that’s Cubbison’s controversial draft report you’ve linked to via Tate’s site. Tate is only cited in it.
I’ve just read Greg Jaffe’s excellent article on the Wanat attack. While most of the attention has been focused on alleged U.S. failures in defence, there’s not been too much written about the tactics of the attackers.
Drowning the base in RPG and rifle fire and then trying to overrun the OP looks more like the kind of operation you would find described in a conventional army manual rather than in an insurgency. Do the Taliban use these tactics as successfully elsewhere or is it specific to Nuristan and/or to the particular groups operating there?
Well, this wasn’t the Taliban—they don’t have much of a presence in Nuristan. This was mostly likely the work of local affiliates of HiG, and maybe some AQ advisers.
I’m not sure you can ascribe their tactics as “conventional,” at least in the sense of “something a national army would do.” Trying to overwhelm small lightly defended bases with small arms and RPGs is a classic insurgent tactic throughout the 20th century.
What actually intrigues me is how banal the insurgency is. In many ways, the Taliban are classically Maoist, and HiG behaves much like a classic Marxist-Leninist political party. That is, these groups’ behavior and even organization are not especially novel, they just happen to be effective because we don’t fight them effectively.
I was thinking more about the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has a presence in Nuristan, and the other Punjabi/Pakistani groups.
So to be more specific, overwhelming a base is one thing. But to be organised enough to overwhelm a base in order to target the OP. Is that not a bit different?
I haven’t read much that indicates the attackers were terribly organized. I mean, surrounding a place isn’t too hard — the hard part is firing at it without shooting your own people. Even then, I don’t know… and I don’t think “we” know either.
Anan,
Mao said that to a soldier the worrld looks as it does to a frog looking from the bottom of a well. Indeed, tactical experience often leads to a sort of “everythig is a nail and he’s got a hammer” perspective of a carpenter. I do feel that the military that puts its life on the line suffering tremendous stress (something I know about personally, medically and scientifically), is them sort of taken out of uniform and left to hang trying to make up for lost time from the society that doesn’t need him anymore. Of course, Pentagon star status provides a protected environment; but from there one plays with the lives of patriots that enlist as if pawns on a chess board and that to me is as bad as the civilian neglect. But still, the ends of war are at yet another level and these tow articles will explain in situ why I was so disappointed with the McChrystal Reporrt and how he maneuvered it into a partisan political issue when it is so non-analytic and so vague so that you don’t know if we learned anything and thus have better ideas. But before we talk futher, I ask you to please read these two articles that enlarge the issue far beyond the common threads that we hare take for granted. It expands the issue much as eventually the Iraq Warvexpanded and and came to be judged on a regional bais. I hope that in answering my questions you will take these two articles in consideration:
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf
http://www.pacificcouncil.org/pdfs/RubinRashidFORREIGN%20AFFAIRSfinal.pdf
These are not quite the views one reads on a lot of these specialized blogs but very much worthy of consideration. I hope you inculcate them into your response to my questions. Best to you all DET
While I’m not aware of a propaganda video released detailing the Wanat attack, two previous effective attacks in the Waygal had videos released on Pakistani “jihad media” sites shortly thereafter. Two key pieces of information came out of these videos:
1. The attack leaders were very talented planners and were excellent “from the front” leaders. Detailed sketches and terrain models were produced of the COPs and thorough rehearsals were conducted. Ranger school-like precision.
2. The leaders and attackers were all identified as locals from Aranas and surrounding villages. No outsiders were shown in any video and there was no physical or otherwise tangible evidence other than reports of foreign influence.
My experience in the area suggests that only locals were involved in the Wanat attack as well. It’s constantly frustrating that the capabilities of Afghan fighters to plan and execute is always downplayed and any complex, effective and coordinated attack is automatically attributed to foreign influence despite a complete lack of evidence. Nuristanis and Afghans in general are talented warfighters and as any reading of 19th century British AF-PAK history demonstrates, it doesn’t take the mythical Al-Qaeda 055 Brigade to execute an effective attack.