The net value of network theory

Slate has a series of looong articles on network theory's application in rolling up the Saddam Hussein-centred part of the Iraqi insurgency once that declaration-of-victory thing turned out to be slightly premature - that was one network out of so many that eventually fought there (here is the link to the first part of the series). It is so long you might not want to risk finishing it by the time the "long war" already ends, so I will sum up what I think is its essence for you, with this one paragraph quoted from the third part (out of five):

"... instinct alone, no matter how well-supported by a link diagram, is not a very solid basis for organizing a raid and putting American soldiers in harm's way. Maddox had to earn the trust of the special-ops commanders with proof that his diagrams reflected behavior on the battlefield. Maddox did make his share of mistakes—recommending raids that turned up no one and opposing raids that did. But as interrogations continued to confirm what the network had predicted—who was important, who wasn't—the team's commander and analyst began to take greater risks based on the network. Eventually, Maddox became a part of the team that planned and executed raids."

In other words, using scientific (and not merely intuitive) network analysis, calculating "betweenness" of nodes for example, not just doing what even ordinary policemen do all the time when connecting the dots (when they also, at least instinctively, apply the concept of networks), was important to: 1) avoid casualties in unproductive raids; 2) speeden things up.

But even that sort of use of network theory comes with caveats, discussed in the last part of Chris Wilson's series which is most worth reading (if you are not primarily interested in Iraqi history or in examples of U.S. military successes per se). That is where Marc Sageman's insightful remarks sum up for you some of what I would have put down in my own words to reflect on network theory's use in the Afghan/Pakistani borderland.

"Sageman is a natural skeptic who insists that counterterrorism scholarship is reliant on anecdotes rather than data. When I showed him a copy of the Saddam network, he was dismissive, saying he needed more information about how it was compiled. Under Sageman's "blob" theory, connections between players in terrorist groups evolve far too rapidly for a network diagram to keep up with. Expressing all relationships in terms of nodes and edges, he further argues, cannot account for the nuances of how people are really connected. Sageman believes social network analysis might be useful for drawing conclusions after the fact, when information about a terrorist group is more complete. He remains unconvinced of its utility as a battlefield tool.

While Sageman is one voice in a crowded field of terrorism experts, his point about the pace at which networks shift is a valid one. In Tikrit, players were captured, killed, and replaced at a low enough rate that the network was able to cohere. The churn rate is likely much higher in an extremist group like al-Qaida.

Saddam Hussein's network was also fairly rigid: The connections the dictator made throughout his decades years in power were not going to disappear overnight."

In Afghanistan/Pakistan, of course another problem is that you may turn up links between people, but sometimes those links will lead into the sovereign territory of neighbouring countries where you cannot go (and do a raid for example). And you could still highlight more major deviations from this "Iraqi precedent," but this definitely ought to be kept in mind. Especially as long as Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden are over on the other side of that border.

Plus here is some intellectual whining from me, too - of the kind that can make some whine in response. But I think it is important, with a long-term perspective, and so I will not hold back.

The use of network theory, gaining knowledge about networks that can help destroy them, still fits a military-centred approach to world politics "bloody" well. Hunting down network members in often lethal raids may seemingly substitute for persuasion, and more carefully devised, long-term-oriented policies. Counterinsurgency may be the graduate level of war, but when one needs to do it, it is usually after failing an "exam" in politics in one way or another; and network-hunting is no population-centric way of acknowledging that failure. Network-centric can still be enemy-centric and narrow-sighted, if not complemented by other measures.

Investigating networks may also give a false sense of knowledge and power to the one who applies this method. Like in general when intelligence as smartness and sharpness is confused with intelligence as collecting a lot of information... Even Chris Wilson, the author of the article series, could not avoid getting comfortable referring to the various people hunted after here as the "mafia" (not to mention another analogy from the article; that of people passing on sexually transmitted diseases). Somewhat inevitably everyone looked at in this big search for pieces of the puzzle becomes likened to criminals (whether or not that person may have rather been motivated by nationalism or family loyalties). "They" want to hide and conspire unbeknownst to "us;" "we" are the legitimate side and slowly but surely "we" overcome "their" resistance, uncovering "their" (dirty) little secrets along with "their" whereabouts... these being the motives driving a process of Othering.

Finally, it is also - by now - almost hilarious to see an author start out saying,

"Who should the coalition have been going after? A careful study of Iraq's tribal structure, particularly around the Tikrit region where most of Saddam's top men were from, would have uncovered an entirely different cast of troublemakers..."

to then come to note, quoting an officer,

" 'Just because two guys are in the same tribe doesn't mean they're buds,' explains Brian Reed. "

Yep. Same tribe, yet often no buds, and with different ideas.... Even in Iraq.

Are the Taliban one of the most secretive organisations in the world?

The Taliban and mullah Omar are often described as "secretive." Below, a few examples follow from the discourse, merely to show that I am setting up no strawman here.

As to the Taliban, Al Jazeera thus reported on the Taliban's published laheya, or rulebook, back in the summer of 2009:

"The book, with 13 chapters and 67 articles, lays out what one of the most secretive organisations in the world today, can and cannot do."

Ahmed Rashid also referred to the Taliban as a secret society once, famously, in a chapter of his book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (the chapter about the Taliban's political and military organisation). Of course that was back in the days when the Taliban were fighting their pre-2001 war to become the internationally recognised autocrats of Afghanistan.

"Secretive" also appears to be an "epitheton ornans," or customary decorative adjective figuring before Mullah Omar's name, when it comes up. Again, some examples...

ABC News (title):

"Secretive Taliban Leader Mullah Omar Emerges in Power Struggle"

The Independent (recently):

"The secretive Mullah Omar conveyed all his military and political messages to field commanders in Afghanistan through Baradar."

Bruce Riedel @ the Brookings Institution goes even further:

"The intensely secretive Mullah Omar has never shown much interest in laying out a program for how to govern."

Finally, one more, from the BBC:

"... the first ever pictures of the secretive Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar..."

I could continue this, but everyone gets the point. To have some fun on your own, you may also want to try searching for "shadowy" Taliban and "shadowy" Mullah Omar.

It may be worth giving a second thought to this.

First of all, it can be argued that the Taliban, especially these days, are not really all that secretive (especially considering the circumstances). Here are some arguments to back this up - if it seems counterintuitive.

1. Their name is written in this way, from right to left:

طالبان

Now, that is a problem in any case, be they secretive or not... quite an obstacle for a Western mind. Even to one that is open to studying and understanding "secrets" of the Taliban... Even when/if those secrets are put down on paper, unfortunately.

2. The rate of illiteracy makes it, well, less likely that you encounter written documents about any subject, from them. That is also a challenge, because political analysts love working with texts. In the Taliban's case, it may be very tricky to come to reliable conclusions on the basis of texts about the Taliban (which are abundant) - but most of which are not by the Taliban of course (and even those that supposedly are, available at times also in Arabic or English, need to be approached with a healthy dose of scepticism; I illustrate here and here why).

3. In fact it is not so extremely difficult to know who a Taliban dilgay meshr in an area possibly is. It is definitely not impossible. You "just" have to be one of the local people. Or know someone well from among them. Or someone who knows someone. Depending on how many circles of trust you want to extract safe answers across, access and reliability may diminish - of course.

4. There are a number of people, former and current members and associates of the Taliban who are talking or writing or responding to the world in a broader sense... Abdul Salaam Zaeef. Wakil Muttawakil. Abdul Salaam Rocketi. Abdul Hakim Munib. And there are also others active fighting today who are ready to talk to the media. But there is a diversity of views in both camps, both within that of former members and associates of the Taliban, who may regard themselves nowadays as just taliban or perhaps as something entirely different (maybe because they never saw themselves as talibs in the first place) - and within the camp of the Taliban-e jangi who wage the war these days. You can know about differences among today's "war Taliban" for example from articles by the occasional correspondent who ventures to their areas and gets back (e.g. Nir Rosen, David Beriain, Sami Yousafzai, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad et al.). Or from those who can even regularly hang out with them (e.g. Syed Saleem Shahzad). Thus it may be tricky to establish what the "Taliban position" is, on this or that - but exactly because you may be familiar with a number of Taliban positions, not necessarily just one.

5. When there is some kind of communication going on, there are/may be attempts at deception to deal with, and that, in a sense, may be interpreted as "secretive-ness." Although often such attempts at deception may come not from the Taliban themselves, but from people looking to shape others' perceptions regarding them, in their own strategic or other interests. A peculiar example of the role of such third parties is when the guerrillas themselves would be relatively open, but then someone comes from further up their chain of command, say straight from Pakistan, and the local commander feels it is necessary to say a quick good bye to a reporter. That is what happened in the end with Najibullah Quraishi, who was allowed to ask a lot of questions freely for his documentary, up to that point when this "boss" type arrived. He could interview anyone with regards to a wide range of subjects (with the exception of Arab foreign fighters who themselves really were a rather secretive bunch of people there).

6. Finally, the Taliban may be hard to know from their words, for the above mentioned reasons (different characters, illiteracy) for an ordinary Western analyst. But at least their deeds speak for them all the time (from the past as well!). To capitalise on that, building up knowledge from this source, of course some careful analysis is required, avoiding simplifications and lazy acceptance of myths, accumulating a profound knowledge of history, reading a lot of books, even talking to any non-ordinary analyst out there etc. Say, inviting some of those Afghanistan experts to conferences where otherwise it seems much more trendy to have the all-weather, all-issue, popular talking heads entertain the peoples regardless of the actual area expertise they demonstrate.

With these considerations in mind, I think one should realise that journalists, politicians and even academics and others mean something else by "secretive" when they say it - they do not mean what is described in the word's most common definition as "inclined to secrecy." Actually implied meanings include the following, depending on context and the speaker of the "speech-act" - summed up here with a touch of sarcasm.

- "As a journalist, one cannot easily talk to these guys without being treated as a potential spy who has to be tried before he/she may be allowed to continue working - if actually found innocent of charges of espionage, which these folks tend to punish by summary execution. That's kind of scary."

- "These guys are not inclined to put information in the open source that could lead to their prompt liquidation in an air strike. How shy. A pity."

- "They are not inclined to use the internets for sharing stuff and fun with us... They are not tweeting, they are not on Facebook, hell, that's boring..."

- "Right, so actually they DO have websites and other publications, but instead of giving information that can lead to their prompt liquidation in an air strike, they mostly share only their propaganda messages with us. Uninteresting."

- "This is a group working, to varying degrees, in cooperation with other truly secretive actors, in a relationship that is difficult to fathom. That's a challenge."

- "We don't have photos of theirs. How the hell do I illustrate for my magazine that Mullah Baradar was recently captured when the best pic a Google image search gives me is this low-quality photo of some dude sitting somewhere killing time that just may be the guy himself. That's lame.... Really, these people should have always had mobile phones with cameras, even back in those 1990s. They really should have tuned into that globalisation thing more."

- "An organisation that has just published stuff, as I am reporting to you - and I want to present this as sensational news that I AM bringing to you, so I am telling you that this is ++awesome because, believe me, they DON'T publish stuff... And they just did! So this is sensational!"

Finishing off, we can also safely conclude that the question posed in the title is not an accurately formulated one in the first place. The Taliban certainly may be more secretive than the United Nations or a student organisation at a university (although it is safe to assume that those organisations will all have their own secrets as well). But then this is really no wonder, as they are involved in subversive covert action most of the time. They are insurgents. The question that would make more sense if asked is whether they are more secretive than other insurgent organisations? Even better would be to ask if they are less open than other insurgent organisations to talk to the media? Or less accessible to the media? Or ideologically predisposed to less easily accept the notion of "neutral actors" in their conflicts? And so on.

The G-chief and Mullah Baradar: Cont'd

I quoted correspondent Bette Dam (from here) in the previous days regarding how Hamed Karzai may have been spared during his initial post-9/11 forays into Uruzgan by Mullah Baradar himself - a hint she dug up during her research for a book she wrote while she was also covering Dutch operations in the province:

"President Karzai started to ask for Mullah Baradar's help in 2001. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Americans helped Karzai take control of ‘his’ region in Uruzgan from the Taliban. By talking and negotiating he convinced one tribal leader after another to support him.
When Karzai found himself in a life-threatening situation while in the Durji mountains he was rescued by Mullah Baradar, who was then the Taliban’s defence minister. In exchange, Karzai agreed not to punish Mullah Baradar for his role as a Taliban leader. Karzai assured him that he had nothing to worry about and that the Taliban would later be allowed to participate in the government. However things turned out differently. United States forces bombed Baradar’s house in Deh Rawod in spite of Karzai’s objections. Mullah Baradar fled the country and began operating in neighbouring Pakistan."

I noted, in my previous related post, that any promise made by Karzai had to be effectively broken (nothing Karzai could do about this) by a 2002 incident when a wedding was bombed where many of Baradar's relatives may have been killed, including the bride who was his brother's daugther (the U.S. military dubbed this op "Operation Full Throttle"). That sounds bad, if the above anecdote is considered on its own. Now, from page 166 of Eric Blehm's excellent book, here is a hint that may suggest that by that time, actually no love may have been lost between Baradar and Karzai. When Karzai returned with U.S. special forces (who called him the G-chief, i.e. "guerrilla chief"), to Uruzgan, Mullah Baradar may have made a profound reassessment of his importance and consequently regarding what ought to be done to him. Thus he dispatched assassins to kill Karzai; Karzai picked up news of this through his network of informants and let his U.S. escort, members of ODA-574, know about this. An important piece of the puzzle, isn't it?

But meanwhile, I should make it clear that where one reassessment could occur, many more could still happen. Therefore I don't think for a minute that this sort of past behind them might really have precluded the two, President Karzai and Mullah Baradar, from sending out feelers towards each other once again.

(A) voice of the insurgency around Marjah

This insurgent, in the video report below, who describes himself/themselves as mujahid/mujahideen, and not specifically as talib/Taliban (which may or may not have significance), gives an interview here to al-Jazeera. Describes Islam/shariat as "no corruption/when innocent people are not hassled" etc. This is all interesting and revealing. But it is equally interesting to discover, halfway through the video, the infusion kit he is attached to. Having been shot in the chest during battle. He seems to have received medical assistance quite fast.

To the south of Marjah, in 2001: (Ugly) quote of the day

C.J. Chivers, whom I otherwise respect a lot, posted some genuinely interesting stuff but at the same time no very considerate analysis whatsoever at @War (an NYT blog). The latest: rambling about unseen ties of the insurgency in Marjah to Iraq. I will get back to this, because this is probably more than simply a poster on the wall, but less than what Chivers seems to think of among the wildest possibilities he seems to have been instinctively contemplating.

Joshua Foust rightly criticised Chivers' post for asking the wrong questions, saying: "I’d be more curious why a few hundred impoverished farmers with machine guns were made the target of a 10,000 man military campaign just because they supported the wrong side of the conflict—did they really pose that much of a strategic threat to the overall war?"

This is not the first time this far south that a lot of extremely well-prepared Western soldiers show up to kick some mostly unknown ass. Sorry for the expression, but that really nails it. The ultimate example would be a British SAS raid back in 2001. It was a spectacular raid the British special forces conducted, with an advance team doing a HALO parachute infiltration to set up a landing zone in the Registan desert. Then they approached their designated target near Point 2213, in Helmand, very near the Pakistani border (south of Malah do Kand) and, with air support, wiped it out in a battle where they suffered some casualties, while their opponents chose to fight to the death (with no alternative options available for them). The target was statedly an "opium storage plant doubling as a local Al Qaeda command center." If you have some ill feelings, like, what the hell, wait till you see this quote from the book about the operation by Mark Nicol, from page 193:

"Al Qaeda looked so malnourished that Jock could barely make out a body beneath the pile of bloodstained, dirty rags. 'Smelly little bastards,' he thought. They already stank from living in the inhumane conditions of southern Afghanistan, a place where only the weapons are clean."

I really don't know what to say to that. In all of its aspects, the author's narrative may not have reflected a soldier's thinking even at that time. And the soldiers should certainly know better by now.

Decoding the Taliban: Two books (research note, updated, already)

I shall mention two books here that I have recently read, and which are equally important to understand the Taliban movement, both that of old, and that of the newer Taliban. To illustrate their worth, I will point out seven things that I learned from them. All are important pieces of the overall puzzle which we are only slowly, gradually able to put together (those who are trying). The first three discussion points are from Kamal Matinuddin's 1999 book, The Taliban Phenomenon: Afghanistan 1994-1997 (published by Oxford University Press). The rest come from the more recent publication, edited by Antonio Giustozzi, Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field - rightly praised so widely as it is for its many excellent chapters.

* * * * *

1. While the Kandahari taliban may have thought of themselves as a distinct group of likeminded people, in fact Haqqani's or Hekmatyar's recruits, as well as even Ahmed Shah Massoud's, who came from madrasas, were taliban, in the sense that they had madrasa studies behind them. That should be stressed in order to see peculiarity in how distinct the Kandahari taliban fronts' members saw themselves apparently from the rest of those fighting around them (based on Abdul Salaam Zaeef's recent book), even while they did not see themselves so distinct from other taliban (of HiG and other tanzeems) that they trained together with in Pakistan, back in the 1980s.

2. As to under whose authority the Kandahari taliban were fighting in the 1980s, the best answer seems to me to be that they were connected to several of the Islamist factions active in the south. To Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Khalis, for example. Mullah Omar may have been connected to both. At the end of his participation in the anti-Soviet jihad he is said to have handed in ammunition and weapons to Sayyaf's men, but he was also well connected to Yunus Khalis' faction of Hizb-i-Islami, as it was HiK commander Haji Isa Khan's son, Haji Bashir Noorzai (his name is often transcribed as Haji Bashar), who gave them logistical assistance and weapons to be able to take on warlords in their area in 1994. (Remember Haji Bashir's story - he is in prison in the U.S. now.)

3. My above conclusion may seem to be confirmed in that the Taliban's early top cadres were a mixture of people affiliated with either HiK or Sayyaf's Ittihad-i-Islami. Kamal Matinuddin names as key early joiners the following: Shaikh Haji Moawin Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, Haji Mullah Mohammad Shahid, Shaikh Mullah Mohammad Hassan, Mullah Borjan and Haji Amir Mohammad Agha from HiK; Shaikh Nuruddin Turabi, Ustad Sayaf, Mullah Abbas, Shaikh Mullah Mohammad Sadiq and Shaikh Abdul Salaam Rocketi from Sayyaf's Ittihad. (See an earlier post on this blog about Abdul Salaam Rocketi; on the basis of that I don't believe Matinuddin is correct in naming him as one of the founders of the Taliban, but there may have been another Abdul Salaam, also from Zabul, just like "Rocketi," among the actual founders and this may have led to this misunderstanding. Perhaps this founding-member "Abdul Salaam" was Abdul Salaam Zaeef in reality; that would make sense based on what I know.) As to the organisation of the launching of the movement, the story here is told differently than in Abdul Salaam Zaeef's book - and my suspicion is that Abdul Salaam Zaeef's book is the superior account in fact. It suggests intensive networking in advance by many "travelling envoys" of the proto-movement, while Kamal Matinuddin cites the better known (but ultimately less realistic) explanations based on accumulating grievances and even on magical dreams either Omar or others may have had, guiding Mullah Omar in his decision and attempt to collect men against a brutal warlord nearby. (Outrage over what was going on in Kandahar at the time was important in mobilisation, of course, but the organising force had to be more than just the anger of some men.)

4. All the Uzbeks settled in Waziristan may not be originally from the IMU, as it could be comfortable to imagine. Many of the Uzbeks fighting nowadays with the IMU, the Taliban or other factions seem to have come from Dostum's force. Some suggest that they may have left it at the time when Dostum turned against the "Communist" government of Najibullah, having been its ally earlier on. I wouldn't say all the details of this, or even the logic of this, are clear to me, but I have a feeling that this is plausible, and I may be missing a detail that would even make it make clearer sense. The hint, regarding this, in the footnotes, that some of Dostum's men were actually trapped in 1991 in Khost, when the town fell to mujahideen, and that they may have ended up in South Waziristan, could be part of such an explanation. (This change of sides, if it happened, is in a way reminiscent of how many former communists, people who were organised into the Taliban movement back in 1994/1995, joined it from among Pashtun (Afghan) army officers of the Khalqi faction - with some networking assistance from people like Hamid Gul and, if one takes Hamid Gul's word on this, even British diplomat Sir Nicholas Barrington, the UK's Ambassador/High Commissioner in Afghanistan in 1987-1994, and co-author of this book.) The Uzbeks' fate is ironic, again, if the above described thesis is true: on a number of occasions some of them may have been directly fighting Rashid Dostum's JeM forces during the Taliban's advance to the north later on.

5. Naseerullah Babar, Pakistan's interior minister under Benazir Bhutto at the time when the Taliban put up their first checkpoint on the Herat-Kandahar road, in Hawz-e-Mudat, the guy who was among the first to see the chance for a new policy in partnering with the Taliban (before the ISI, actually), was also part of training Afghan Islamist forces for the first Islamist (sort-of) uprising against Kabul, back in 1975.

6. Saifurrahman Mansoor, a leader of the still potent Mansoor network active in Loya Paktia, was the one leading a mix of his own and foreign fighters' stiff resistance against Operation Enduring Freedom forces that descended on their turf in Operation Anaconda, back in 2002. Time wrote about this back in 2002, but it was only after reading Thomas Ruttig's chapter on Loya Paktia's insurgency, where he devotes a long section to "the Mansoor network," that I came to understand the significance of this faction on its own (even while it may have declined by today).

7. Finally, I will also add an important detail to my picture about mullah Omar's life. Earlier on I wasn't certain (because of contradicting accounts) whether he was from Uruzgan or from Kandahar. Now the author writing under the alias Abdul Awwal Zabulwal (from Zabul) seems to clarify this for good, stating (on page 180) that mullah Omar's family was originally from Shinkai district in Zabul province, and that they later moved to Uruzgan where Omar was born. (And based on what I know from elsewhere, his birthplace must have been the Deh Rawod area there, perhaps Deh Rawod proper.)

* * * * *

These are the books that enlightened me on all of the above:

Adding to the debate: Marjah operations + Baradar's arrest

I still have a huge amount of work ahead of me today, so I will only touch upon two of the most important developments in Afghanistan and its region, and try and add to the debate regarding them.

Tactics, operations

The "battle" is (still) on for Marjah, even though the pace of the advance is not that spectacular. This very sceptical take on U.S./British/Afghan troops' performance suggests that once the "air power advantage" is gone, the Taliban gain "an edge" because they are more willing to die. Another op-ed article by somebody who seems to have woken up from a dream in the last couple of days to news of the offensive in Marjah (and with no familiarity with what's been happening in Afghanistan over the last eight and a half years) claims that the air power advantage is promptly needed (back).

My view is that both takes are mistaken. Air power is not the only tactical advantage troops can have against insurgents. Advancing slowly, or "walking the walk" on COIN as Julia Mahlejd puts it in her take on all this, is required in this sort of context, and that is what makes sense strategically.

I would put it in this way: otherwise, the standard ISAF line, that allegations of ISAF's indiscriminate destruction of villages is pure propaganda from the enemy, will only be true for intensive engagements in the sense that in fact it is the insurgents who get to choose ("discriminate") which buildings are destroyed in these instances, themselves, by shooting from those buildings at the approaching troops. Thus, the destruction would certainly not be "indiscriminate." Technically, or rather absurdly, speaking.

Just blasting compound after compound "marked" by insurgent fire cannot be the right tactic. It aggregates into flawed strategy. And it is good to see there is at least some thinking going into this nowadays, even if it is so far down the road now that it is too late perhaps, and even if it is not yet applied with real consistency. Meanwhile, one would still want to see even more innovative tactics.

You need to shoot someone running towards your position despite your warnings but doesn't seem armed? I understand you might assume he is wearing a suicide vest under his shalwar kameez. There is a chance. But can't you shoot someone in the foot then? Or try to do that? Couldn't one be prepared to use nonlethal munitions when one just needs to hold a position for example? It is nice to hear the family "understood" that, too bad, their mentally ill son had to be mowed down (though it would be a bit more credible to hear this from the family). But perhaps this could have been avoided as well.

Now, look at this photo here. Marines and Afghan soldiers there are going through a family's belongings in a deserted compound that they have cleared. They may not take anything from there, but still they are messing up somebody's home - the home of a family, members of which are likely internally displaced somewhere right now. Is that respect? Is it judged so that the intel that can be gained from this is worth it? IED materials, weapons all need to be searched for, I get it, but perhaps this could be done with the more simple and discrete use of metal and explosives detectors and not touching every single object in a house where the owners may still return.

And if a compound needs to be cleared, perhaps tear gas and other means could have some effect as well. They could be used to clear compounds, and if the insurgent body count still matters to some, they can still continue shooting once they actually do have visual contact with the enemy.

Troops involved may take this as just a clueless civilian's baseless second-guessing, and perhaps the things I am saying do not seem feasible to them for one reason or another. But they can only ignore this honest advice at their and their comrades' own long-term peril of course.

Baradar's arrest: Shaping the insurgency's prospects

Mullah Baradar "Akhund" (that is a peculiar religious/political/military title right there*) was captured. Number two in the Taliban ranks, some say, though of course Taliban don't wear numbers on either their backs or their foreheads or anywhere else. The New York Times now says it was a "lucky accident," but then it was curiously well timed up with the Marjah offensive and with other arrests of Taliban leaders in Pakistan.

There is a really intensive debate now as to how this should be interpreted for example as far as Pakistani intentions are concerned. Someone like Abdul Salam Zaeef, former Talib ambassador in Islamabad, would say that "Pakistan just removed the Taliban's address" with this - making the prospects for negotiations with the Taliban weaker. Another way of looking at it could be that perhaps Pakistan made it clear to the Taliban now that they cannot pretend to be an autonomous entity that can endlessly raise the stakes as far as it wishes.

Still regarding Baradar's capture, I would also add to the basics of COIN doctrine that just as it is not enough to "clear" territory, you have to "hold" captured insurgent leaders as well as "build" on their capture and either deliver procedural justice in the name of good governance in their case, or make some impact on the insurgents' positions by holding them. Whether holding will work here, there can be some concerns: one could quote the LWJ for example, which posted the following neatly prepared briefing on related matters:
"The (Pakistani) government has released senior Afghan Taliban leaders such as Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, the Taliban’s former minister of defense and a member of the Shura Majlis, or executive council; Abdullah Mehsud, the late Taliban commander in South Waziristan who served time at Guantanamo Bay; Mufti Yousuf, a top Taliban leader in eastern Afghanistan; and Abdulrahim Muslim Dost, a former prisoner at the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, who serves as a propagandist.
Al Qaeda leader Rashid Rauf escaped from custody in what certainly was an inside job to have him released. And Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man behind Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl's brutal murder, plots assassinations and runs his network from a prison in Lahore. Sheikh is said to have been behind the assassination of Major General Faisal Alavi, the former commander of Pakistan's counterterrorism Special Service Group commandos.
Pakistan has also freed radical clerics Sufi Mohammed and Maulana Abdullah Aziz. Sufi leads the radical pro-Taliban group that brokered peace deals in the Malakand Division, while Aziz was the leader of the Red Mosque and the instigator of the July 2007 insurrection in Islamabad. And just a few days ago, Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed was released from house arrest as the government could not find sufficient evidence to hold him in prison."

But more importantly, I would draw attention to what Bette Dam (Dutch correspondent who covered ISAF/Dutch operations in Uruzgan extensively) reported recently:

"President Karzai started to ask for Mullah Baradar's help in 2001. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Americans helped Karzai take control of ‘his’ region in Uruzgan from the Taliban. By talking and negotiating he convinced one tribal leader after another to support him.
When Karzai found himself in a life-threatening situation while in the Durji mountains he was rescued by Mullah Baradar, who was then the Taliban’s defence minister. In exchange, Karzai agreed not to punish Mullah Baradar for his role as a Taliban leader. Karzai assured him that he had nothing to worry about and that the Taliban would later be allowed to participate in the government. However things turned out differently. United States forces bombed Baradar’s house in Deh Rawod in spite of Karzai’s objections. Mullah Baradar fled the country and began operating in neighbouring Pakistan."

Karzai and Baradar are well connected to each other of course not so much by being "members" (they have no member IDs) of the same BIG Populzai tribe. But through a bunch of common contacts in the area of Deh Rawod, in Uruzgan province. That is important, as well as the anecdote above.

By the way, I will also add that it was in this area in 2002 that the U.S. military bombed a wedding, in Operation Full Throttle, during the night of June 30/July 1, where even the bride was killed. And the bride was Mullah Anwar's daughter - Mullah Anwar Akhund is Mullah Baradar's brother.

Switching off such a key node now in the sophisticated human network of contacts that is Afghanistan... a node that can very much be assumed to have been "on" with Karzai's planned renewed outreach in the wake of the London conference... I am stroking my beard.

Update (February 20, 2010): And I now realise Mullah Baradar went for the Hajj to Saudi Arabia last year, when by the way Abdul Salaam Zaeef and many others were also there...

* Originally I only put "military" there, but prof. Magda Katona has meanwhile pointed out to me that the potential religious significance of the title (meaning either someone learned in religious matters, or the descendent of a family line of mullahs, as "Ahkundzada") should not be omitted. Hence the correction - plus I also added the adjective "political." Akhund is really a concept of central importance, given the peculiar notion of "akhundism" in the past of the Pashtun regions (discussed in a sarcastic essay here for example, by Amir Taheri).

Prospects for exporting Baghlani Gouda

Dion Nissenbaum, McClatchy's correspondent, writes about Baghlan's cheese factory, delicious products of which he discovered in Kabul, where they are also marketed. Three varieties of (originally Dutch) Gouda are on offer. More than three decades ago, when it was started, the factory was a Danish- or Swiss-initiated FAO project; it came to be destroyed during the last years of the jihad of the 1980s (in either 1987 or 1988). Then it was restarted at local request by the Dutch PRT that worked in Baghlan province up till 2006, and it is nowadays operating with support from the Hungarian PRT - for example, experts from the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) provide assistance with improving the factory's livestock, and also in training local experts. MARD also donated pieces of equipment and instruments.

What caugth my interest now is this hint in Nissenbaum's post regarding why it may be difficult to export Afghanistan's cheese:

"They tried once to air ship cheese to India, but Afghan Customs held it several days, to make sure it wasn’t a concealed shipment of drugs, the Indians held it as well, and the cheese spoiled."

That's bad news. Yet another way the illicit economy hurts the licit economy, after the latter's weakness (ruined state) has given life to the former in the first place. I am wondering (by default) if there might be a solution regarding such issues of trust. And how third parties could help with this. The problem, obviously, is that any third party one can think of could, at least theoretically, also be corrupted, and thus trust would either not be there (towards the 3rd party) or it would not be risked (by the 3rd party). It is hard to say how to square the circle. Still, if medical opium production can work in India, one could perhaps work out a system for this as well.

The G-chief and ODA-574: how it all began

I am reading this recently published book by Eric Blehm, about U.S. special forces' infiltration into Uruzgan in the company of Hamed Karzai, back in 2001. They went there to organise an uprising against the Taliban, with Karzai's local allies, in provincial capital Tarin Kowt.

"The Only Thing Worth Dying for:" the book has a good title, I think, but when I first heard about it I whined about its subtitle a little. I thought "How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan" was overstating what they did, even if those concerned are all fine people, given the abundant air support they had. I also thought this sort of subtitle may reflect a kind of hubris, along the "save Afghanistan" line of reasoning eloquently discussed by Christian Bleuer in the past. But I really wanted to read the book, in any case, since I paid attention to developments in Uruzgan province for a long time on this blog. And, as documented in the book, Uruzgan was indeed where Hamed Karzai's road to climbing to the top of Afghan politics began, working together with ODA-574 of the 5th Special Forces Group (apart from a previous round of contact-building by Karzai himself which almost ended badly). Now that I have started reading the book, my preliminary complaints are gone. See the reasons below, after the book cover which I am adding here.

There are three reasons:

1) The book is a well-written, focused but also sufficiently contextualised, account of a crucial chapter of Afghanistan's recent history. Stories of SF ops as such are usually sexy for a topic, whatever their historical significance or lack thereof. Even so, often authors try to make too much of them, overly trying to sell whatever they managed to lay their hands on. That is not the case with Eric Blehm who actually did have the chance to work on golden raw material, did a good job while at it, and does not so far - towards page 80 - seem to have been tempted to sensationalise his narrative. With his work, he also offers an important addition to assessing Karzai's character (often portrayed very simplistically nowadays, over nine years down the road; I just had this argument the other day with someone who called Karzai an "incompetent nit wit," for example).

2) The second argument ties back to the previous point. The topic is really a formative moment of Afghanistan's history. Diving into the largely unknown, the Green Berets and others involved in this operation did go out there to forge a new Afghanistan. Doing their no small part in shaping the bigger picture. Internalising their perspective doesn't do injustice in any sense, to anyone.

They were working on futures. Just like those, with very different motivations, who got the late Pashtun mujahid commander Abdul Haq killed in October 2001, tipping off the Taliban about his movements. Those people were also out there to forge an Afghanistan very different from the one we have today - and they might have had Karzai get the same fate that Abdul Haq did, had it not been for his U.S. special forces escort.

Moreover, ODA-574 (and the likes of them operating elsewhere, with other objectives) also forged an Afghanistan different from the one the U.S. Air Force would have been able to "shape" (into shapelessness) on its own, in the "target-scarce" environment of Taliban country. These arguments are all directly relevant to my initial ill feelings over the subtitle.

3) Finally, the book is important in a military-strategic sense, because of what should not be thought of as conceivable on the basis of it, and for reasons that should be clear from the book's narrative itself. Namely, that while some think special forces with "tribal" allies plus over-the-horizon assets could take care of the challenges an abandoned Afghanistan could represent for U.S. national security,* in fact this would not really work so easily, given how differently the Taliban of today would behave compared to the Taliban of 2001 - compared to the fighters eagerly rushing off to kill "G-chief" Karzai and his American-Afghan escort that was building up around him, back then.

Having listed these considerations, I can't resist taking a quote from the book out of context; discover the actual page number belonging to it yourself. "For the first time, (Captain) Amerine fully understood the magnitude of his mission: There was no master plan for Afghanistan." They were forging the future of "the south" themselves; thus they were indirectly also forging Afghanistan's future themselves.

* No strawman set up here. For example, M. Chris Mason advocated an SF/tribal ally combination most recently, with RC-S' area in mind.

The HiG insurgency in Kunduz and Baghlan

Najibullah Quraishi's report from Baghlan and Kunduz, for Channel 4's Dispatches, is a must-see. Here is a link to where you can watch it in its entirety.

I will put down my quick notes.
- Commander Kalakub (HiG), interviewed in the report, says Hekmatyar's Hizb-i Islami has 3,000 to 4,000 fighters in the two provinces. (Hekmatyar's men recently held talks with members of parliament in the Maldives by the way.)
- 30 to 35 active groups in Baghlan.
- "Central Group consists of 140 to 150 members."
- Commander Mirwais is named as the overall commander in the two provinces.
- A spotter network is already up and running along the Kunduz-Baghlan highway that goes on down towards the Salaang Pass and Kabul (it is an increasingly important logistical artery for ISAF).
- Foreign fighters are present (mostly from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, it seems - but there is even one man who is introduced as Chechen).

- Training in bomb-making ongoing.

- The impression created is that the Taliban (around 4,000 of them, allegedly) come to fight there during the warmer part of the year (spring to autumn) only, while HiG is fighting there year-round.
- My overall feeling about what one can see in the report? To a degree, the Western presence works almost as a sideshow to some of what these people are going through/what they are involved in. It is something like a necessary ingredient to it. The challenge that gives sense to it all. Moving around as mujahids, learning about Islam from the group's religious scholar while moving around, accepting the hardships that come with this (cold, sleeping in uncomfortable places, being up at night, taking risks etc). And also the nicer aspects: villagers usually pay you respect when you visit, they bring you food and water. Theirs may also appear and appeal to them as an institutionalised form of life, leading from somewhere to somewhere, thus giving some comfort. Otherwise, no regular ISAF patrols in the areas concerned, and no direct contact (shown here) with the Western soldiers who the insurgents want to blow up. Watching the video only, and (inappropriately) ignoring how structural factors direct people's lives in only relatively freely chosen directions, one could be completely and hopelessly clueless as to possibly what the West or anyone could give these men, for them to do something else, instead of killing/trying to kill/getting killed. Per their own words, the one thing they want most of all is a withdrawal of Western troops, and with it, perhaps, an invitation to take the struggle to the West even (one insurgent speaking in the video does go so far).
- Meanwhile, there are the recurring statements that the government "mistreated" many of the villagers who are giving support to the insurgents. I wish Najibullah Quraishi had asked about exactly how, because it would be useful to know. Though I would stress that this of course does not deduce from the extraordinary value of his reporting.

Part One (for a taster, @ You Tube)

In "retrospeculation:" The order of battle on the Taliban fronts in the 1990s

I am posting here some inconclusive but substantial retrospective speculation about the exact nature of some key aspects of the al-Qaida/Taliban relationship in the 1990s, regarding which I will try to dig up more information, even while I gratefully accept if somebody puts pieces of the puzzle in place in the comments.

What I raise here could as well be a "tweet" for Twitter, but it might be better to articulate my proposition in this more extensive form. (Btw, this here is an addition to an earlier couple of posts looking at the "AQ/T relationship.")

Cutting to the heart of the matter: the more or less conventional wisdom is that the Taliban already started depending on battlefield support from/organised by al-Qaida by 1997, after their disastrous first attempt to conquer the north of Afghanistan. They were betrayed, trapped and slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif and elsewhere by the thousands. (Which followed earlier costly failures of theirs in war with Ismail Khan's forces in 1995 and then around Kabul, the following year.) Thus Arab (and other foreign) fighters were already much needed manpower (re)supply for them. The question is exactly how did those fighters join the Taliban front? Embedded? Or as a separate "brigade," as the name "55th brigade" might suggest? Or in several smaller but autonomous units?

As to 2001, we can more or less confidently establish the picture that Arab fighters were at that time spread out among different Taliban positions, fighting with different Taliban units, in an embed system of sorts. But this wasn't necessarily so earlier on... I quoted in a previous post an article from Time magazine which reported that Arab fighters were embedded in the autumn of 2001 so they would shoot anyone who would want to retreat from a position, being well-suited for this task given their above-average devotion to combat and to making the necessary sacrifices (including the ultimate one). My next question therefore is whether this would really have been a system in use since a while then, since long before the 2001 Northern Alliance offensive aided by U.S. and other special and air forces?

And my preliminary answer or suspicion is that the sort of "embed system" described above suited rather the one particular historical occasion of the unsuccessful defence of the northern front only. Retreat in the face of the massive force moving in to pierce the Taliban front was quite likely then, and Arab fighters might have seemed useful to strengthen the Taliban's lines. Earlier on a Taliban offensive would not really have required this. Usually, the key to such offensives would rather be a timely arrival of (say, Pakistani) expertise* in guiding artillery to well soften up targets before an attempted advance (for which "Ansar strom troops" were still quite useful, one suspects - and on their own rather than in a human wave of mixed composition; thus sparing the Taliban of some blood sacrifice of their own). Alternatively, in the case of other advances, enemy commanders might be bought off with some careful help from strategists looking to advance the Taliban's cause and having the financial means to bring such betrayals about.

Another hint that could suggest that before 2001 the Ansars may have moved more on their own, and not in the small-team dispersal format seen in the autumn in 2001, is the reference I quoted in a previous post to the "Bilal position," one of the positions as part of which Arab fighters took part in combat. In my earlier post I mistakenly concluded that reference to something like this seems to confirm the assumption of a long-functioning embed system being in place. This in itself can, and perhaps should, be interpreted differently. Perhaps it is rather confirmation that earlier on there was a separation of foreign fighter units, and the Bilal position may as well have been an Arab-only "position" (or unit).

This would also seem to be a more rationally reformed account of developments, given an old weakness of narratives about the "Afghan Arabs:" in the 1980s their role is relatively well-documented as having been rather irrelevant across most of Afghanistan, and their combat skills do not seem to have been very exceptional (to the contrary, by some accounts). But then, suddenly, as to the 1990s and 2001, there is a discourse of how awesome/awe-inspiring fighters these Arab Ansars suddenly were. Such incoherence may be abridged if one assumes that throughout the 1990s only their relative propensity to martyr themselves set them apart from the rest of the Taliban; while by 2001 the Taliban's own army was downgraded in some respects, having many truly poorly equipped and poorly motivated conscipts within its ranks, even, compared to whom "bin Laden's" by then well-trained fighters may indeed have been exceptional warriors.

I will leave it at that. I will gladly share anything here later on that further clarifies all this for me, but meanwhile, as I said above, I am equally grateful for anyone else's suggestions or references to key information/sources I have missed so far.

* Regarding how the Taliban inexplicably abruptly raised their game on several occasions see this section of a 2001 report from Human Rights Watch (the report's entire third chapter, on Pakistan's and Saudi Arabia's role, is worth reading).

The puzzling lack of consistency in the coalition's approach to counternarcotics

On an earlier occasion, I noted the following with regards to the coalition's counternarcotics activities in Afghanistan:

"... an incident was mentioned here where U.S. Marines paid compensation to an opium poppy farmer for having a C-17 airdrop land on his field, crushing some plants. Back in December last year, another incident was covered at this site, whereby a U.S.-led police team, there with an escort of Canadian soldiers, thought it the best approach to winning the hearts and minds of an outlying village in Kandahar province, to destroy all the marijuana plants that were found there. I have also written of Polish soldiers participating in destroying hashish plants in Ghazni, and of Dutch forces only reluctantly helping an Afghan Eradication Force/Dyncorp team once they got into trouble back in 2007 (originally covered by Mr. Anderson for the New Yorker). I know of countries that would not care a bit if somebody would be growing poppies right beside their main base (...) and now I learned that for the Danes, theoretically, it is cheaper to drive on poppies than it is on wheat..."

My main "anti-conclusion" there was that this sort of incoherence in counternarcotics is puzzling, when one of the things absolutely necessary to defeat a rural insurgency, even in the absence of external support to the insurgents, is to have a smart approach to how one should treat farmers' crops.

What I am not saying is that everywhere people should do the same thing. A smart approach has to mean a set of different approaches in different local contexts. Strategic rewards and punishments may be generated, short- and long-term pay-offs may be different depending on all sorts of specific factors etc. But overall it is puzzling that some think hearts and minds can be won when the Marines and/or the Afghan National Army enter villages to first of all kill the poppies. Even now, when the focus supposedly moved towards interdiction and the killing or capturing of key targets (traders).

See this picture, from the NYT. And read this article.

The caption to the pic says: "... the Marines of Weapons Company, along with Afghan government troops, confiscated and burned poppy seeds." The article claims: "In several houses, Afghan soldiers found sacks of poppy seeds, which they carried outside, slashed open with knives and set on fire."

This is happening in an area in Helmand where insurgents are in control for now. So fine, government officials, police or anyone else will not really be involved in this. Some of the money from the opium produced here definitely may go to insurgents. But otherwise, what does a raid like this achieve? If the Marines are not going to stay there, they are just leaving behind local people likely in some serious debt now, with some obvious career options such as founding an IED planting cell from the qawm of theirs. If the Marines are staying, these people could be persuaded to do something else next season (with the right incentives). So why be keen on killing the poppies this time around?

And how can some people hope that farmers will see fertiliser-based IEDs as a threat and not as a solution (or a revenge tool) in cases like that? Seriously, some recent pyschological operations aim to achieve success telling local farmers that insurgents mining their fields are dangerous. Which is true, of course, provided/when the insurgents are so clearly apart from the population. And from the farmers.

To clarify my position, I am asking open questions here. It may be that this approach to poppies is a very area-specific approach. As noted above as well, I have heard of occasions before when the Marines were tolerant of the poppies. But even if it is the case that it is specifically around Marjah, identified as a trading hub for opium, that nowadays crop eradication and confiscation is practiced in this sort of way, I still fail to see the rationale of it.