TICs

In the last post I said I would drop my laptop for four days. Well, that takes effect tomorrow. So I am still left with some time to post just one more time. This is an update to an earlier post about the September 4 Kunduz bombing.

In that post which I am updating here I wrote cautiously of accusations levelled at German officers. Critics were alleging that the Germans falsely claimed that they were in "contact" with hostile forces when they requested the bombing of two fuel tankers stolen by the Taliban, on September 4 this year. Reportedly, a German officer answered to a question by an American F-15 pilot, regarding whether they were in contact, that they were in visual contact. This he may have answered because of bad language skills, as a sarcastic view could have it. Or it may have been simply a lie, as some aggressive critics claimed within NATO. Or...

Or it may have been just what goes for normal in Afghanistan, for the coalition. The German officers perceived there to be a potential threat (of the tanker-bombing of the German base in Kunduz) and, sensing danger, they called it a (T)IC. In fact, the latter narrative would leave room for healthy scepticism of all the loud criticism of Germany by the U.S. military, by anonymous NATO officials, and others, especially given how in the German case, by now, people were removed from their positions, or have resigned, over what happened, which can be contrasted to the lack of such changes in the wake of similar incidents.

Noah Shachtman is reporting:

"... “troops in contact,” or “TIC,” has become the most abused phrase in the Afghanistan campaign. What started as a cry for help has now come to mean … well, almost anything. And that’s putting at risk troops who are really in harm’s way. “The most abused thing in this war is declaring a TIC,” says a senior Air Force officer.
Over the past year reporting on the air war, I’ve seen TICs “opened” because of rockets were fired in the general vicinity of a rather large base; the immediate danger to western forces was negligible. Meanwhile, units like Echo Company of the 2/8 Marines have grown so used to gunfights that they sometimes won’t even bother reporting a TIC — even though the Taliban are shooting right at them."

COINterinsurgency basics... and the Pentagon's new map

(You have here two posts in one. It evolved this way as I was writing it. First I planned to post something generally relevant, but altogether quite relaxed. Then I bumped into the leaked schematic plan that is apparently being used by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, forming the basis of the remaining counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. Mission creep set in: I discussed that document, too.)

Scroll down on this page for some serious fun right till where the Matrix is discussed. The Cracked team describes the bafflingly bad decision making its plot possible:

"We evil machines need a new energy source. All our mechanical lives, we've depended on solar power, but now the sun has been blocked out by our human enemies. Wait. Our human enemies... Enemies... Enemy... Enermy... Energy! That's it! We'll harvest the natural electrical energy of the only things in this world that pose any danger to us! We can just breed them by the billions and keep them docile by forcing them to play the most boring MMORPG in history! It can't possibly fail!"

(MMORPG stands for "massively multiplayer online role-player game" in there.)

Well, the machines certainly made a mistake, right? You can say they did so from a counterinsurgency point of view, let's add. They could have used lots of hamsters spinning hamster wheels to power them and then they would not have had those pesky rebel humans to deal with for the long run.

This is pretty fundamental to counterinsurgency. You don't really want to make others play your game, or play a game with you, at all cost. As the former Communist leader of Hungary, János Kádár, said, faced with the challenge of having to govern Hungary in the wake of the bloody 1956 uprising (and the reprisals that directly followed it): "who is not against us is with us." Kádár took this from a source that was not standard reading for a Communist leader: from Mark's gospel, namely.

The first thing one should carefully think of, when one has an insurgency to deal with, is whether there are people one should not necessarily be fighting. Rule number one...

Now, I am writing this while in another window, that I have just opened, I am peering at the gameplan for Afghanistan, from the office of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, but apparently prepared by a London-based consulting firm, PA Consulting (thinking of this, London as a possible location where this scheme comes from, could be explanation regarding why "tribal governance" is paid so much attention).

It is fun-tastic, but I think we would need some maps here, too.

Irony aside. If you carefully go through this, you can realise that the Plan does make sense to a degree. Important variables are indicated, key relationships between them are characterised and highlighted. It is useful to make calculations regarding a number of things. But it is all within a box. Problems include that one can't find captions such as "outside (incl. our) support given to those giving outside support" on this thing, around the part where the insurgency is schematised. Neither can "our support accidentally reaching insurgents" be found there, and many other things that sustain the need to play the counterinsurgency part of the game.

On the other hand, "narcotics" is indicated directly in the vicinity of the insurgency's area, and no arrows go from it to "government capacity" for example. Or to corruption. And "Counter Narcotics/Crime Ops" is there impacting just "criminal trafficking capability" and "illegit agricultural production." Let me illustrate, right from the Plan's visualisation, how carefully this was thought through:

See? Counter-narcotics comes in out-of-the-blue, in blue. It is so much out of context. They stuck it on top of all else, in a map where placing everything according to colour was obviously an ordering principle. It's telling, isn't it? Counter-narcotics is the only item that they couldn't place according to this principle. It is this well integrated into the whole effort, one may be tempted to conclude.

Finally, I am not sure if the sort of democracy that was invented for Afghans at the start of the game, which is the democracy of a weak king (Karzai) and a lot of quarrelling princes, one where it is really astonishing that voting irregularities ended up surprising so many, is the sort of MMORPG (= offline MMRPG here) that we want to make Afghans play; and really just for the long-term fun of it.

(Alright, I will stop here. For four full days, in fact, while I am off for a conference on a non-Afghanistan-related topic.)

Update: via Armchair Generalist, here is the full presentation (pdf) where you can watch people build up this scheme and then use it to disinguish tasks within it important from COIN, governance and development perspectives.

Meet reporter Anup Kaphle (and the Afghan National Police force)

I called attention yesterday to video reporting from Helmand, about the Gurkhas there. I was intrigued by the simple but rather important point about how well the relationship seems to function between the Gurkhas and the Afghans, Bollywood and happily sharing meals and jokes being part of it. This does not necessarily mean that the reporter necessarily said it right when he believed this was likely the culturally closest relationship you get between foreign soldiers and Afghans in Afghanistan right now. Even countries like the United Arab Emirates are involved to a degree in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless I did find the reporting sympathetic, and I looked around for who the reporter was. He is also from Nepal, and I found his blog that you should definitely check out. And also this post of his at The Atlantic. And also this slideshow. And so on. Absolutely do check out this article about the Afghan National Police, in case you missed it. Some numbers to quote here, from the article, given as of September 2009:

"Since the war began in 2001, the Americans have lost about 699 soldiers in Afghanistan; the British about 184, and the Canadians about 125. The Afghan police force has had 1,200 deaths in 2008 alone."

The article gives you a portrait of the human beings and the institution behind the latter figure.

At The Atlantic (here) there is also some great footage, from Anup Kaphle, of an Afghan policeman singing Hindi songs. I will happily embed it here, to give the Afghan police face.

The Gurkhas in Afghanistan

Just found this video, and I will embed it here before I attempt to come up again with something more profound.

So the Afghan war is one in which professional armies of a number of countries need to work and fight together with reservists and contractors of a great number of nationalities, mentored Afghan army units, police, auxiliary police, COIN-proxy militias and some of the traditional arbakai, against various insurgent factions of also quite diverse backgrounds and composition. This bewildering diversity is even compounded by the presence of special units such as the French Foreign Legion (I briefly discussed their presence in Afghanistan here). And the British Gurkhas (I wrote about them, and their kukris, here). Even some members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, technically a paramilitary force, are deployed there (you guessed, I wrote about them, too: here).

The video below is about the Gurkhas.

The Pak/Af borderland conglomerate

Something I am hearing a lot these days is that the Taliban may be moving away from al-Qaida. This is coinciding with a growing U.S. interest in partly fighting, partly negotiating a way out of Afghanistan with Max Leverage (meet Max Leverage: a plan, not a person).

Of course this is optimistic, and of course this is not so simple. This brief post here is a look at some of the complications one should probably be mindful of, in assessing the validity of the starting assertion.

I. The Taliban and al-Qaida have physically separated to a degree, post-2001. One went mostly to Baluchistan, the other to areas in the FATA and to Pakistan's major cities rather. So, in a sense, they cannot be moving away from one another...

II. Regarding whether they are moving away from one another in a strategic sense, there are various possible objections to consider. The first one is conceptual. Those who talk about a need to focus on the relationship between al-Qaida and the Taliban sometimes seem to ignore that three more distinct sets of actors need to be taken into account (and of course none of these sets represent unitary actors): namely, the Pakistani Taliban and likeminded factions + other Pakistani Pashtun factions in the tribal areas that don't openly challenge the Pakistani state and are generally inclined to wage cross-border jihad + the Kashmiri groups. So there you have five sets of non-state actors instead of two unitary non-state actors. It changes the picture a little, doesn't it?

Now, based on this, there are a few possible obstacles in the way of a clean break between the Taliban and al-Qaida, as well as in the way of critical divergence between all of these different actors. I am trying to conceptualise these as clearly as possible.

1. Similar worldview. Without going into an exotic discussion of fine differences in Deobandi and Wahhabi doctrines, without going into an analysis of the latest publications out on the worldwide web, there is a similarity of attitudes towards the West, the idea of the West, and towards those regarded as victims of the West. Or America.

2. Family ties. Once there are intermarriages and other family ties between any of these groups, and you are in one of these groups, I guess you cannot just call it a new day and ignore some of the people who are connected to you and your partners in this way.

3. Covert funding. Al-Qaida is, probably even today, a distributor of resources as well, and that is something that can give them potency. They are useful to those willing to fund likeminded organisations in a covert way, and they are able to retain some support even from pressured partners because of this.

4. Intergroup synergies. Once we claim that all the above groups are autonomous to a degree (which is a premise behind the statement this post is dealing with), they have means/assets at their disposal, and thus, to a degree, they are capable of having quasi-policies, for example towards each other. This gives them, or some of them, room to give covert assistance to each other, or to some of the members of the other groups, even if the whole world tries to pressure (and incentivise) them against this.

I am not trying to exclude the possibility of anything. The world changes all the time. But I am really interested to hear solid answers to these suggestions from those who at times appear as wishful thinkers to me, people who want to believe what they say.

Good news...

... so nobody says this is a doomy-gloomy place where you come for all the bad news. Ironically, I found this piece of good news which I am sharing here in an article otherwise promising much difficulty ahead (but that is inevitable, really). (H/t to Péter Wagner.)

"To grow the force, NATO is creating incentives, including a recent $45 raise for all police. Starting salary for a police officer is now $165 a month."

As I argued recently, if you thought of bribing the Taliban out of play, why wouldn't you think of "bribing" the Afghan police into play? This could help much with the terrible-terrible scourge of corruption.

The numbers war fail

In my last post here, which received an extra amount of attention after Ghost of Alexander had highlighted it, the message I aimed to convey was that claiming success where there is none of it will not lead to achieving success. Pretty basic. As Christian noted at GoA, a Parisian mocking Germans for marching through Paris in a silly manner would be absolument ridicule. Today is another occasion to highlight a particularly unfortunate attempt at dealing with "information warfare," but in this case with more dire consequences, and not by someone spinning news out of private conviction, but by authorities - German authorities, namely.

How the war waged in Afghanistan often seems to consist of air strikes killing exactly 30 Taliban at a time, is something that makes many observers cranky: see the Security Crank and MoA on this. In a September 4 air strike in Kunduz province, however, details and video of which can be found here, there were many more victims. Thus the magical number, 30, could not really be plausibly used, under the circumtances (although the Afghan government did state once that "30 civilians" died by their counting). After much insistence that the overwhelming majority of those killed were Taliban, the discourse seemed to settle down with 142 dead of whom dozens may have been civilians (something that predictably drew the "hey, that's not so bad" reaction from some armschair idiots on various internet fora). Unfortunately, reality tends to be quite insistent as well. And in fact there was no way of telling exactly how many died, and how many out of those were Taliban. Throwing around exact figures could not look good in any case, and the ratio of civilians vs. insurgents killed actually seemed to be "worse."

It is not surprising therefore that alternative numbers, very different ones, keep emerging:

"The defence ministry said it was in contact with a lawyer for victims of the September raid on two fuel trucks near Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, in which up to 142 people were killed, reportedly including dozens of civilians.
"We will begin talks with (German-Afghan attorney Karim Popal) about how the compensation claims will be met," a ministry spokesman told a regular government news conference, adding that Berlin hoped to avoid a court battle.
Popal is demanding payouts from the German military for 78 families of Afghan casualties.
He says there were 179 civilian victims including 137 dead, 20 injured and 22 missing, leaving 91 women as widows and 163 children as orphans."

Nuristan infowar fail, for someone

So @ the Danger Room the view is that this is a Taliban infowar fail. Really? This? Taliban playing with U.S. weapons left behind after the pull-back from Nuristan? And using the open-air gym there, at that base in Kamdesh? Illustration below, from the NEFA Foundation (pdf).

Here is video as well, from al-Jazeera:

Abu Walid al-Masri's dialogue

I don't have time for a profound post, just a chance to point out a few things in relation to the quickly spreading news of Abu Walid al-Masri's dialogue with "the terrorist-fighter beauty,"* Leah Farrall.

Abu Walid al-Masri (al-Masri = Egyptian) is also known as Mustafa Hamid, and there are also indications he has used the alternative nom de guerre Hashim al-Makki in the past, to publish some articles critical of al-Qaida.

One of his sons-in-law, Saif al-Adel, is in al-Qaida currently if Asharq al-Awsat and others have it right.

Abu Walid used to have an Australian wife called Rabiah Hutchinson, with whom you can listen to an extensive, very informative interview out on You Tube, thanks to the Grand Trunk Road.

She thinks much of Osama bin Laden based on her personal experience with bin Laden who in her account built a lot in Afghanistan. Strangely, she praises bin Laden for "building" the Kabul-Kandahar road even.

An interesting hint (if true) comes in the third part of the interview, where we are told Rabiah divorced her husband after the ouster of the Taliban because he had converted to become Shi'a in Iran. It is also interesting to think of Asharq al-Awsat's claim that Abu Walid al-Masri was under house arrest of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. How he is now a regular contributor to al-Somood (the Taliban's paper, "The Resistance") is a part of the story which I don't understand for now.

* To make it clear, these are al-Masri's words. And he keeps getting back to using the word "beauty," which is a bit strange, isn't it? Is this awkward politeness from him? A rhetorical tool? Whatever the reason, I myself don't think Steve Coll is to blame for this. Though Coll did make a mistake saying people can have a go at Farrall's posts of al-Masri's letters in Arabic (even while that clearly only** implied reading those, and not stealing or re-posting them or posting pirate translations). But he did link to Farrall's blog, at least. Meanwhile, it should be clarified that it was Farrall who contacted Abu Walid, apparently, not the other way around, as it is factually incorrectly believed, for example by Coll.

Update: This comment at Leah Farrall's blog is interesting to read. And I do, genuinely, want to thank the commenter (the author of this other blog) for taking the time to write it!

** (Update.) Well, if Steve Coll now explicitly says (as part of a formal apology) that he assumed "collaborative responses" are what people could have given after Farrall had posted al-Masri's letters, I can't continue to assume he implied only that those letters could be read at Farrall's blog.

The fetishisation of the victims of direct violence as a symptom of structural violence?

I will certainly not link to every piece of endoctrinating material seeking justification for (or comfort in) direct violence circulating out there on the internets that somebody happens to tumble over, to critically address it, but this just really made me want to get in on the scientifically appreciable side of the debate, as it is related to 9/11 and the justification of the Afghan campaign. So, if you look at the caption in the picture you can get to via the link above, what you can read there is that:

"Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of victims."

(This happens to be a quote from environmentalist author Derrick Jensen, actually, and it was taken out of context, to be used together with the image that the link went to, by someone.)

I know this is the kind of debate where arguments will not matter that much. A premise behind the above quoted statement is that we are components of a structure way larger than us. If you accept this, you cannot fight the above statements with arguments, after all you are then supposed to be basically just a structural phenomenon, and a reactionary at that. If you don't accept the above premise, you are even more of a reactionary.

But, come on, does not the fetishization of victims of direct violence occur among perpetrators and proponents of direct violence? Among those claiming to be lower on the hierarchy that is supposedly so "widely accepted" that they are violently not accepting it? Aren't they focused on (using) victims, including named victims, ones given names and faces? Isn't the fetishisation of victims (and a construction of "victims") a strong tool in the service of propaganda for any ideology or political objective, in general? Would I need to hurt the feelings of the followers of a number of religions, to give examples regarding this? Nationalist feelings basically anywhere where they can be found? And so on.

Finally, something that is truly unthinkable to me is that anything good could come from any individual who sees ideological value in a human being's choice to jump from the window of a tall building because his/her situation happens to be so desperate. In fact, while I always considered what happened in this case tragic, I did not pay so much attention to this aspect of the series of events on 9/11, in particular - well, now I do.

This is not to deny that a fetishisation of the victims on 9/11 did take place. Or to deny that it had significance, and that a desire for "vengeance," or "to use a language they understand" (as some put it) was a very basic, primitive (albeit at the same time strategically not necessarily terribly inappropriate) instinct there, affecting the decision to move against the Taliban, in Afghanistan.

Or, the tragic irony that a fetishisation of fallen soldiers and that of tax dollars sacrificed for war spending vs. health care is what is now a major stimulus to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, while many more (so-called "hopelessly corrupt") Afghan policemen, and also Afghan soldiers, die anonymously and facelessly.