Flit

July 03, 2009

On Col. Hope's new paper

I do think Col. Hope's new paper on the unity of command problem in Afghanistan is worth a read, and his recommendations part of any solution. I do wish he had something more to say about those other unity of command issues, those that arise from the Afghan and Western militaries fighting the same battlespace, though. As I hinted in the essay two posts below, the issue here may be the lack of useful historical models for operational mentoring. Hope can talk with authority about the OEF/ISAF split because we can look back at the Eisenhower or Foch coalitions and see how it could be done better.

On ANA officers and hope

Good post from yet another good ETT blog here:

The bright spot is that the younger [ANA] officers I’ve worked with are much better than the older guys. Afghan Army officers basically come in three varieties: the older officers who were Russian-trained or influenced; the former mujahideen fighters/commanders; and the new, younger, American-trained generation. The former mujahideen fighters make pretty good officers and are revered by their men but don’t have the education or formal schooling and don’t listen to advice. The older officers, in the words of my best interpreter, a former ANA 1stSgt, “don’t ever want to leave the base” and have an excuse why they can’t do anything about their problems or act on our suggestions. The new generation of officers is much more willing to do operations, listen to our advice, and make some changes on the fly if need be, although they’re still somewhat afraid to make mistakes. Unfortunately, for now the power lies with that older group of officers. Hopefully, once the younger, American-trained generation comes of age, things will start changing rapidly for the better.

This is obviously every military mentor's hope, too. I'm skeptical. Something I read somewhere about hope and its relation to a plan.

Yes, no question, in the ANA you've got some very promising senior NCOs and lieutenants, some half decent captains and majors, and some truly awful colonels and generals. And that's before the new Western-trained officers from the new Afghan military college started rejoining the army this spring. Old people have to retire some time, so are things not looking up? Maybe this is just a matter of time?

But...

Continue reading "On ANA officers and hope"

July 02, 2009

On mentoring and the ANA

(Long draft essay here, as I try to put some thoughts together. Synopsis: the current approach to operational mentoring has some inherent flaws, and poses limitations on all our other military operations, that we're having difficulty recognizing for what they are. Partly this may be due to a lack of well-defined historical models. Feedback welcome.)

A certain Afghan general I know, on his line tours in Kandahar Province, is not immune to the creature comforts. One of the things he likes to carry in one of his chase vehicles is a large blue vase full of artificial flowers. His staff are quite proud of it and were happy to pose for my pictures by their truck one day. I was amused however, to overhear two soldiers watching us: "What's that?" said the straight man. "Oh, that's the Afghan vase. Apparently we're supposed to put it on everything," was the wry reply.

Continue reading "On mentoring and the ANA"

June 29, 2009

On the KC shooting

There are some conclusions one certainly shouldn't jump to when evaluating today's reports of the killing of the Kandahar Chief of Police in a gunfight.

One would be that there's anything unusual about this. Like Leonidas of Sparta would have said... "This. Is. Kandahar." As a policing environment, it has been for years and remains to this day highly volatile by our standards, often a home for rough, frontier justice: Deadwood with AKs. There's lots of armed men, lots of small arms, and lots of scores to settle. The insurgency bears the same relationship to this baseline that Indian raids did to the American Wild West: in that not all the social violence, perhaps not even most of it, is insurgent-driven. There's no reason at this time to believe the McGuffin at the centre of this tragic incident was anything more than someone "appropriating" somebody's car, or jailing somebody's brother for something minor even by Afghan standards. One shouldn't expect a sense of proportion in Kandahar City between the offense and the outcome in these things.

Continue reading "On the KC shooting"

June 23, 2009

I've been waiting to hear these words for eight long years

"I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I'm not." --President Barack Obama

June 22, 2009

Here we go again

Just a note that, true to form, after the opium-harvest lull the insurgency thing appears to have picked up again in Kandahar Province. Reading the foreign press, I've counted 12 IED fatalities in 4 incidents since Thursday, including 2 US soldiers, 3 ANA, 5 police, and 2 civilians. Not much in the Canadian news on it yet, though.

Meanwhile, on the home front

Suggested debate or essay topic for this week: There is no one, Taliban or otherwise, in Afghanistan or elsewhere in South Asia for that matter, who poses a greater threat to the Canadian way of life than our own human rights commissioner. Discuss.

Today's essential Afghan reading

From the Telegraph:

Maj Miller also castigated senior officers for the strategy of "Clear, Hold, Build", which he stated had become a "parody of itself".

He added: "We are really only clearing the immediate vicinity of the security force bases, we are only holding the major settlements, and we are not building.
"Self-protection has become the main tactic, reinforced by air strikes that can backfire and undermine the campaign.

"Even as the Army renders itself more and more immobile with heavier vehicles and infantrymen weighing as much as a medieval knight, still the fantasy of the "manoeuvrist approach is peddled in staff courses.

"There is nothing manoeuvrist about weeks of petty, attritional fire fights within a few kilometres radius of a Forward Operating Base. The reason for all this is clear – zero casualties has become the tacit assumption behind operations.

"The Taliban are not being "coerced", "deterred", or "destabilised". They simply disperse, knowing that the British cannot sustain pressure, and they return like the tide when the British troops withdraw, after a short period, back to their bases."

Cross-applicable, dat. Overly negative? Maybe. But anyone who thinks the Canadian and British approaches, or the respective criticisms of them, are going to be substantially different is probably mistaken.

The pressures of deploying

I suppose it's incumbent upon me to at least acknowledge Christie Blatchford's piece on the untimely death of Maj. Michelle Mendes. A few points below the fold.

Continue reading "The pressures of deploying"

June 16, 2009

Salary increase for teachers coming

This is excellent news. From Quqnoos:

According to the Afghan Education Ministry, the monthly salaries of Afghan teachers in the state-run schools will jump up to 20,000 Afs ($400 US), four times higher than the current wages rate.

$100 a month when a barely passable interpreter for an NGO could make $600 minimum was proving simply unsustainable. As I've said before, the country has lots of empty schools, and no teachers to teach in them. This could help.

For reference, at 165K teachers nationwide, Afghanistan currently has 1 teacher for every 83 children under 14. Canada's ratio, by comparison, is 1 per 8. But a better demographic comparison might be India, which is currently dealing with an acknowledged huge teacher shortage itself, but still is hanging on to a ratio of at least 1 teacher to 40 young people.

(The question is going to be how long can this new teacher salaries budget of at least $780 million per annum be sustained in a country with a nominal 2008 GDP of only $12 billion. As with police, army and other civil servants' pay, clearly to be sustainable this entire program will have to remain foreign-aid dependent for the foreseeable future.)

Mentoring in Mazar

Good piece on German army efforts in Der Spiegel:

Now it's Major Dietmar M.'s turn. He is a senior mentor, meaning he trains soldiers in the Afghan national army. At Camp Mike Spann, his charges show the visitors what they have learned, which includes repairing cars in accordance with German standards, maintaining weapons and caring for the wounded. The major talks about how difficult it is to build trust.

It is a good sign, he says, when one of his Afghan partners begins taking hold of both hands in greeting, instead of simply shaking hands. It is an even better sign when he rubs his cheek against Major M.'s cheek. And when an Afghan soldier feels truly at ease with Major M., he could very well take his hand and stroll through the camp with him, holding hands. This is the custom in Afghanistan...

True dat.

One of the smart things I think I did in my job was I aggressively sought out my British and American counterparts in other ANA brigades and corps and constantly compared notes with them. I found it gave me real advantages, perspective- and idea-sharing wise. We simply haven't yet got near enough best-practice info flowing within the mentoring "community."

Flypaper update

You know, if I was an Villa fan I might be of a mind to... oh, never mind. We'll fight them there so we don't have to, etc. From the Tely:

The unnamed Muslim insurgent lost his life following clashes with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Forces.

Details of forensic investigations on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters are normally top secret.

But a British military source said that the terrorist had an Aston Villa tattoo showing he could be from the West Midlands...

Later in the article:

[Official]: "The details of Aston Villa fans in the Taliban does not shock or surprise me...

To complete the quote, you can pick from:

a) "They haven't had a good season in years..."
b) "Just be glad it wasn't Pompey, those buggers are insane..."
c) "We are concerned, however, about the reports of Cardiff scarves we've been finding on dead bodies in Ishqabad, which would of course indicate a whole new Taliban-Welsh hooligan nexus."

AWK-ward...

I'm beginning to have doubts about Prez Obama's senior AfPak diplomat's ability to deal with the locals. WashPost:

U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, red-faced and sweaty, sat on the dirt floor of a stifling tent as Aslam Khan, a 38-year-old laborer, spoke haltingly of his family's panicked flight from a Pakistani army offensive against Taliban forces in their mountain village, three hours north of here.

Holbrooke asked some questions about the Taliban but got few answers. "Are these all your children?" he asked with a smile. Yes, Khan said, he had nine.

"Your daughter is beautiful," Holbrooke continued, nodding toward a young woman who sat quietly at the edge of the family. Her head was covered in a royal-blue scarf that revealed only her stunningly dark eyes.

"That's not my daughter," Khan said abruptly. After an awkward silence, the woman explained that she was a Pakistani police officer. It was unclear whether she was there to protect Holbrooke from the refugees, or to monitor what they told him.

You know, if there is somewhere a list of things you don't use as conversational openers with Pashtun and other conservative Muslim males, I'm pretty sure "how fetching their daughter is" would be pretty high up there.

Strangest. Caveat. Ever.

From the AFP:

The leaders will also discuss the possibility of sending Italian soldiers into action immediately at the request of those leading operations.

Currently, Italian troops require six hours notice and America has repeatedly asked for this to be changed...

Hey, man, you try and get through the mandatory Verdi opera before every operation in less than six hours and see how you make out. Just getting the costumes on takes forever, then there's the lighting, the props... could put the British successes in North Africa in a new light, though.

June 15, 2009

"But perhaps they're only worried because of YOU"

Interviewing brilliance from CTV's Tom Clark.

Ezra Levant, in the same clip, makes reference to this disturbing section of the Canadian Human Rights Commission's latest report to Parliament:

Removing the truth defence

Under the Criminal Code, the offence of hate propaganda includes a defence of truth. Professor Moon recommends the removal of this defence on the basis that a hate message suggesting that a given race, sex or religion is devoid of any redeeming qualities as human beings can never be true and therefore the justice system should not give hate-mongers a platform to make this argument in a criminal trial...

As this issue has resurfaced since the original drafting of the legislation, Parliament may wish to include considerations about the defence of truth in its deliberations.