‘Salar Is the New Falluja’

A friend of mine in Basra emails me a fantastic story in Sunday’s Guardian by Ghaith Abdul Ahad, a truly fearless reporter who, if I recall correctly, was the only reporter to embed with insurgent forces in Fallujah when the Marines took the city in November 2004. This time Abdul Ahad is in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province — future home, in part, of a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team — where he embeds with a different insurgency.

Qomendan Hemmet sat cross-legged under a window of the mud-walled room. His shoulder, sunk in an old military jacket, rested against the wall and a radio antenna stuck out of his pocket. Next to him sat his deputy, wrapped in a big blanket, silent and sleepy. Around the room sat his men, their faces contorted by years of fighting and poverty, dressed in shalwar kameez and magazine pouches, eyes dark as the kohl lining them. Radios crackled, phones rang non-stop, and more fighters came, drank tea and left with orders.

“Salar is the new Falluja,” declared Qomendan Hemmet emphatically. “The Americans and the Afghan army control the highway, and five metres on each side. The rest is our territory.”

My impression from talking with Task Force Currahee in Afghanistan was, in fact, that the U.S. was going to focus on securing the road. That’s not to say that it would be an exclusive focus, and it probably won’t be. But if Hemmet is banking on that, then he clearly understands U.S. thinking in his area of the country.

What do we learn from Abdul Ahad’s piece about Hemmet’s strategy? I feel like making a list.

1. Stop U.S. and allied ground movement. Hemmet’s forces mine the roads. Heavily. The Afghan National Police have to find work-arounds. “Last week they came by helicopters, searching the area because they can’t drive their vehicles here,” he tells Abdul Ahad. If you were an Afghan civilian and you saw the police coming by helicopter, would you think they were in control? Denying a counterinsurgent force the ability to use more discriminating ground power is a way to draw it into air combat, where the likelihood of civilian casualties is greater. The greater the civilian casualties, the more fertile the insurgent recruiting ground.

2. Clear, hold, build. It’s easy to forget in the U.S. that the Taliban governed most of Afghanistan. Their well-deserved reputation as medieval religious fanatics has nurtured a dangerous perception that they’re primative, which they are most certainly not. In the places where the Taliban has cleared out Afghan government and allied (U.S., NATO) forces, it governs once again. “Each province has its own Taliban governor, military leader and shura [consultation] council,” Abdul Ahad reports. “Below them are district commanders like Hemmet, who in turn divides his force into smaller units. Many say the civilian apparatus of the Taliban-run districts operates a more effective justice system than the government’s, which is corrupt and inefficient.” A recent French report estimated that Taliban forces are present in 72 percent of Afghanistan. In the eyes of the typical Afghan civilian, who’s the actual government?

Indeed, check out what one of Hemmet’s men told Abdul Ahad:

“When we control a province we need to provide service to the people. We want to show the people that we can rule, and that we are ready for the day when we take over Kabul, that we have learned from our mistakes.”

3. The Taliban recruits from Afghans angered at the U.S. presence. Several of the insurgents quoted in the piece demonstrate that they’re religious, but they’re hardly a Taliban hardcore. “I joined the fight because I am resisting the kafir occupation,” is one typical quote. “There are old Taliban, but most of the fighters in my unit are new. We joined after the fall of the Taliban, but the leadership is the same.” Something that all counterinsurgents ought to reckon with is the idea that any foreign military presence is provocative. If there’s a law of insurgencies, that’s pretty high up there. That doesn’t in and of itself discredit a given intervention. Maybe the national interest is so compelling that the provocation of an insurgency is worth it. It’s impossible to say as a general rule. But it’s got to be factored into the matrix of considerations.

4. The Afghan insurgency decentralizes tactical decisionmaking. The insurgent who talked about governance also said, “”We get intelligence that Americans or government people are coming and we hit them. Each area has a different strategy, here it’s attacking the main road, but everywhere in this province the countryside is in our control.” Abdul Ahad reports that there are unbearded Taliban walking around Kabul unmolested. Their coalition is apparently too smart to operate in a top-down structure, which is prone to infiltration, subterfuge and disruption.

It would really not be possible to get this kind of information without beyond-brave reporters like Abdul Ahad. So let’s not have any loose talk about how he’s a traitor or an insurgent sympathizer of any of that malarkey, yeah?