[Peace-discuss] The killing Obama wants to do

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Here's what we've gotten very little of from MSM -- an account of the "facts on 
the ground" in Afghanistan.  We need to talk about why this administration (and 
the next) are doing this. --CGE]

	The Taliban Strikes Back
	By Gary Brecher

After six years of ignoring Afghanistan, things have gotten bad enough to force 
American officials to pay attention. For the past two months, U.S. casualties in 
Afghanistan have been higher than in Iraq. And on July 13, Afghanistan 
definitely got everybody’s attention when nine U.S. troops were killed in what 
Wikipedia is now officially calling “The Battle of Wanat.” Three days after the 
battle, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the U.S.-dominated 
military force running the country, announced it’s abandoning Wanat completely.

Let’s start with a close-up of the battle, then zoom out to the overall 
situation in Afghanistan. Wanat is in Kunar Province, along the border with 
Pakistan. It looks a lot like Northern Wyoming: mountain country, steep slopes 
with pine forests running down to fast, cold rivers. Some of the photos I’ve 
seen from Kunar seem like stills from “The Sound of Music” or “Heidi,” only some 
prankster has Photoshopped in a platoon of soldiers in desert camouflage.

The outpost that the United States had just set up in Wanat was supposed to 
disrupt Taliban supply lines from Pakistan. Instead, it became a tempting target 
for the local guerrillas, just like hundreds of other remote forward bases in 
other rural guerrilla wars from Southeast Asia to Algeria. Guerrillas usually 
avoid open combat with conventional forces, but when they do attack in force 
it’s usually against the smaller, more vulnerable forward bases. The Wanat base 
was a very tempting target because it was still under construction.

It’s not so easy to be sure what actually happened in the battle there on July 
13. A big Taliban force — big by guerrilla-war standards, meaning several 
hundred — was able to mass outside the base without being detected. They 
attacked with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and rifle fire, managed to take 
part of the base, and then either withdrew or were forced back into the town of 
Wanat, where the fighting continued in the ruins. The NATO troops had massive 
air support, and faced with that, the guerrillas dispersed into the hills. Then, 
three days later, the U.S. forces, who have de facto command of southeastern 
Afghanistan, also withdrew. Officially Wanat is now in the hands of the Afghan 
police, but that’s a joke.

You can tell how ridiculous that claim is by looking carefully at the casualties 
from the battle. This is a good example of how to read war news carefully, how 
to read between the lines of standard press coverage. It’s almost like a 
story-problem for war nerds. Here are the figures: There were 70 defenders in 
that base, 45 U.S. troops and 25 ANA (Afghan National Army) troops. That’s about 
a 60/40 split. So if both groups fought equally effectively, you’d expect more 
than a third of the casualties to be from the ANA. But that’s not the story the 
casualty figures tell you. Every defender who died was American; no Afghan 
troops died. Three-quarters of the wounded were also American, only four out of 
19 were Afghan. What that tells you is that the ANA didn’t fight. They left it 
to the Americans. That’s a pattern you often see in guerrilla wars: The locals 
fight very hard against the occupiers, but not very well for them. So in 
Vietnam, the Viet Cong fought like demons and the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) 
barely fought at all, even though they were from the same ethnic background.

There are a lot of very familiar patterns in this story. If you zoom out from 
Wanat and look at the bigger situation in southern Afghanistan, you’ve got the 
classic ingredients for a long, bloody guerrilla war: a big ethnic group on both 
sides of an artificial border, difficult terrain, and dirt-poor peasants with a 
long tradition of fighting just about everyone who comes along, from Alexander 
the Great to the 19th century British. The Pakistani/Afghan border is 1,500 
miles long, and the people living on both sides of it are Pashtun, the biggest 
ethnic group in Afghanistan and the support base of the Taliban. The Taliban 
started as a Pashtun resistance to the Northern Alliance warlords, mostly Uzbeks 
and Tajiks, who took power after the Soviet pullout in 1989, and the Taliban is 
still mostly Pashtun. The reason you don’t hear so much about the ethnic angle 
is simple: Neither side wants to push that angle in its propaganda. The Taliban 
would like to claim to be defending Islam, and the Americans are happy to go 
along with that, so they can say we’re fighting Islamic terror. But the fact is 
that the Taliban stands for old-school Pashtun tradition more than for Islam. 
And the Taliban is divided even further, with complicated loyalties to local 
warlords and tribal chiefs. There are three main factions right now, and the one 
that runs Kunar Province is run by an old friend of the CIA’s from the 1980s, 
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar was always a tough guy to handle, for the CIA and 
the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, and when the foreign troops finally 
withdraw, it’s a safe bet that his faction of the Taliban will just switch to 
fighting the other two. But for now, the three factions seem pretty solidly 
united against the ISAF, the American-dominated occupying force.

When the U.S. Air Force started bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, the Taliban 
had beaten the Uzbek/Tajik Northern Alliance and controlled most of the country. 
Not all of it; the Taliban never had the strength to control all of Afghanistan. 
In fact, it was overstretched, with small garrisons scattered through hostile 
tribes’ territory. The Taliban had also managed to make itself hated by just 
about all the non-Pashtun population of the country by pushing its backwoods 
Pashtun rules on everyone else, and shooting or hanging anybody who complained.

What’s scary now, for the ISAF’s chances of holding on to the country, is that 
the Taliban seems to have learned its lesson. It never had a reputation for 
sophistication, and its hillbilly Pashtun ways weren’t exactly calculated to win 
hearts and minds. The Pashtun have always been a little strange. They have 
probably the most anti-women attitude of any tribe on earth. Here are a couple 
of Pushtun proverbs that give you the general idea: “Women belong either in the 
house or in the grave,” and “Even one’s own mother and sister are disgusting.” 
They don’t even claim to find women attractive; for the typical Pashtun warrior, 
the sexiest thing around is a little boy.

But, like the old saying goes, “pain is the best teacher,” and the pain the 
Talibs suffered when they were crushed in 2001-2002 seems to have made them a 
little more humble and flexible. This is something you see in a lot of guerrilla 
wars: After a defeat, the guerrillas come back much smarter and more patient, 
because the enemy has been acting like a sped-up Darwin, pruning the movement by 
killing off the hotheads, the sadists and the crazies, until only the smarter 
guerrillas, who had the sense to lie low, are left.

At any rate, the new Taliban has been a lot more patient and sophisticated than 
the pre-invasion model. So Afghanistan hasn’t been quiet in a good way these 
past few years; it’s been quiet like the old line in Westerns: “It’s quiet — too 
quiet.”

The new Taliban has learned to tap into the poor peasants’ grudges. And Lord 
knows the Afghan peasantry is poor, and getting poorer, with 70 percent 
unemployment.

Even USA Today, always ready to put a smiley face on total misery, admits that 
the average yearly income in Afghanistan is only $300.

So overall, Afghanistan has rotten living conditions — not a promising market if 
you’re selling the new iPhone, but perfect conditions, lab-level perfect, for 
selling rebellion. In the early stages, successful rural insurgencies don’t even 
worry about combat much. They focus on quietly setting up a local government 
that replaces the occupiers’ puppet government. If you’ve read much about how 
the Viet Cong worked in South Vietnam, you’ll recognize the pattern: The puppet 
government runs around looking busy in the daytime, but when the sun goes down 
the guerrillas go into action, collecting taxes and settling local disputes, 
even holding court proceedings in caves, barns or somebody’s hut. The idea is to 
keep the locals from contacting the occupiers, denying them basic intelligence 
about what’s going on in the villages, and at the same time making your group 
indispensable by helping to handle the local feuds, even helping them in the 
fields. The Taliban has spent the last six years doing all that, to the point 
that most of Afghanistan now has Sharia-based Taliban courts settling criminal 
cases.

Against this sort of insurgency, the only effective countermeasure is good, 
sophisticated local intelligence. And we haven’t exactly won any prizes in that 
department, in Iraq or Afghanistan. If you’ll recall, the first American 
casualty was a CIA interrogator named Johnny Spann, who got mobbed by Taliban 
prisoners he was trying to interrogate at Mazar-i-Sharif. Spann was the first to 
interrogate the infamous John Walker Lindh, our own Marin County-raised Talib, 
and what he asked Lindh — up there in northern Afghanistan, in a crowd of 
flat-hatted, sullen Talibs who were just about to rush him — was, “Are you a 
member of the IRA?” (I wish I knew what Lindh said back, in that Marin County 
stoner drawl: “Nooo, deewd, but I was in the Tamalpais High Jazz Band.”)

To make up for the big gaping hole where our military intelligence should be, 
we’ve been using William Westmoreland’s failed formula: massive firepower. 
Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of doing counterinsurgency warfare on the cheap, with 
very few troops and lots of air strikes, means that the ISAF has very little 
local intelligence and has to depend on air power, which worked well enough in 
the initial defeat of the Taliban in 2002, but just plain doesn’t work in 
counterinsurgency warfare, because that kind of warfare is about not firing 
until you know exactly who you’re shooting at. To gain that sort of local 
knowledge, you need troops settling in to the villages, getting to know people. 
What you don’t need is F-18s orbiting at medium altitude looking for targets. 
Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve been using to suppress the Taliban.

Those fighter jets can’t tell the difference between a wedding party carrying 
the bride to her husband’s village and a Taliban column moving to the attack. 
And when in doubt, they tend to assume all large groups on the move are Taliban. 
For six years, ISAF warplanes have been bombing Pashtun wedding parties and 
processions. It seems to happen over and over again. I’m not sure why. Maybe 
weddings are the only time that Pashtuns get together in big numbers, big enough 
to draw fighter pilots’ attention. Maybe it’s their habit of firing rifles to 
celebrate. But for whatever reason, we have bombed and strafed enough wedding 
parties to rouse centuries of hatred from the Pashtuns.

And it’s no coincidence that one of the worst of these wedding attacks happened 
a few miles from Wanat, exactly one week before the Taliban attacked there. On 
July 7, U.S. Air Force planes killed 47 civilians in a wedding party in 
Nangarhar. Apparently they mistook a column of relatives taking the bride to her 
new village for a Taliban force on the march.

That’s the kind of mistake that makes guerrillas very happy. If you’re a Taliban 
commander, you couldn’t wish for a better scenario than a U.S. air strike on a 
wedding party to rile the people up against the foreign occupier. The guerrillas 
don’t lose a single fighter in an operation like that. In fact, they gain huge 
numbers of recruits because everyone who hears about the air strike wants to 
volunteer to avenge the dead. By trying to do Afghanistan on the cheap, 
following the Rumsfeld Doctrine that air power can do everything, we’ve played 
right into the hands of the new and improved Taliban.

This article first appeared on Alternet.org.

Posted on: July 21st, 2008

http://exiledonline.com/the-taliban-strikes-back/#more-152