IJC Operational Update, Nov. 23: Norwegian Home Guard commander visits IJC; Update on ISAF Casualties

KABUL, Afghanistan (Nov. 23) – The Norwegian Home Guard commander visited the ISAF Joint Command at the North Kabul International Airport military compound Nov. 22.

Major Gen. Bernt Iver Ferdinand Brovold was the guest of Maj. Gen. Jacques Lechevallier, IJC deputy commander. During his brief visit to IJC, the Norwegian general was briefed on the different types of threats Afghan people face and the IJC counterinsurgency strategy. Key points focused on protecting the Afghan people, synchronizing good governance with responsive development and security and partnering with the Afghan National Security Forces to accelerate the growth of Afghanistan’s security capacity.

While in Afghanistan, General Brovold will visit Norwegian troops deployed here.

ISAF Casualties

Four ISAF service members died in the last 24 hours in Afghanistan.
Three service members from the United States died in southern Afghanistan yesterday. Two of the service members died as the result of an IED attack, while the third service member was killed by insurgent’s small arms fire in a separate incident.

Another U.S. service member was killed as a result of an IED detonation in eastern Afghanistan today.

With due respect to Gen. Brovold, in journalism we call that “burying the lede.”

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the last week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise, said senior U.S. officials.

Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry’s memos were sent in the days leading up to a critical meeting Wednesday between President Obama and his national security team to consider several options prepared by military planners for how to proceed in Afghanistan. The proposals, which mark the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for between 20,000 to 40,000 more troops and a far broader American involvement of the war.

Eikenberry, of course, is no career diplomat. He commanded the Afghanistan war in 2006 and 2007 as a three-star Army general. Whether these dissents get walked back — or if they’re a ploy to pressure President Hamid Karzai — remains to be seen. But Eikenberry has a reportedly good working relationship with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the current commander, and would not file frivolous dissents — let alone two in one week.

Vice Admirals William McRaven and Robert Harward (navy.mil)

Two senior military officers from the shadowy world of Special Operations are playing a large and previously unreported role in shaping the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, a move that underscores that the internal debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive missions to provide security for Afghan civilians and narrowly tailored missions to find and kill terrorists.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Debate about a “purely counterterrorism strategy” advocated by Vice President Joseph Biden was “bounced around at one point, but that has been cast aside,” said a National Security Council staffer who attends the meetings and who asked for anonymity because the debate is still ongoing, “mostly because JSOC has said ‘We’re going to do this anyway.’ And it’s not like they’re going to be in a supporting role.” Biden’s advice, which had practically no support from the armed services, was that the military should shy away from protecting the Afghan people and helping build Afghan governing institutions, and instead focus on the JSOC specialties of going after terrorists directly.

Yet the fact that JSOC veterans like McRaven, Harward and McChrystal favor an overall counterinsurgency strategy with a counterterrorism component demonstrates that the military no longer believes distinguishing between the two is tenable in the Afghanistan war. “Special Operations Forces that were traditionally used for counterterrorism better understand how their capabilities fit into a counterinsurgency campaign than perhaps they did when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began,” said Andrew Exum, a veteran of both wars and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security who over the summer advised McChrystal in a review of Afghanistan strategy.

More directly, McRaven and Harward share a professional fraternity with McChrystal. Before McRaven took over JSOC — an entity that operates almost entirely in secret — McChrystal ran it for five years, supervising stealthy teams in Afghanistan and Iraq that tracked down and killed senior terrorists like al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. One of McChrystal’s deputies during that period was Harward, and the bonds between the officers remain strong. “General McChrystal and Vice Admirals McRaven and Harward have established relationships through the special operations community,” said McChrystal’s spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis.

In his Afghanistan review, McChrystal said that a key goal for him would be to increase coordination between his NATO command and the independent command of JSOC, which suggested that the dichotomy between using Special Operations Forces for counterterrorism and conventional forces for counterinsurgency was eroding. “One of General McChrystal’s priorities is seeking greater unity of effort across all military activities in Afghanistan, which includes regular interaction with ISAF Joint Command, regional, and task force commanders,” Sholtis said, using the acronym for NATO’s military command in Afghanistan.

As a result, McChrystal is turning to McRaven and Harward for critical tasks in Afghanistan. McRaven runs a secretive detachment of Special Forces known as Task Force 714 — once commanded by McChrystal himself — that the NSC staffer described as “direct-action” units conducting “high-intensity hits.” In an email, Sholtis said that because Task Force 714 was a “special ops organization” he “can’t go into much detail on authorities, etc.” But the NSC staffer — who called McRaven “McChrystal Squared” — said Task Force 714 was organized into “small groups of Rangers going wherever the hell they want to go” in Afghanistan and operating under legal authority granted at the end of the Bush administration that President Obama has not revoked.

In a move signaling his own importance to McChrystal, Harward will arrive in Afghanistan later this month to command a new task force, known as Task Force 435, that will take charge of detention facilities in Afghanistan, “primarily the new one at Bagram that will open this month,” Sholtis said. In his famous August strategy review, McChrystal wrote that detention operations are “critical to successful counterinsurgency operations” and need to work toward “the long-term goal of getting the U.S. out of the detention business” through transition to Afghan control — a counterinsurgency task not traditionally given to a Special Operations veteran like Harward. McChrystal’s strategy recommended creating a new command, which Harward will now lead, of “approximately 120 personnel” focused on “defeat[ing] the insurgency through intelligence collection and analysis,” prisoner de-radicalization, and working with the Afghan corrections apparatus to “employ best correctional practices [and] comply with Afghan laws.”

Last month, McChrystal delivered a request for additional troops to the Obama administration for the Afghanistan war. The request, structured as a palette of options from which the president could choose, included so-called “high-risk” options of numbers as low as 10,000 new combat troops and a so-called “low-risk” option of an 85,000-troop reinforcement. Participants in the discussions have said on background that they viewed the 85,000-troop request as an unserious option meant to clear the way for Obama to approve a middle course of around 40,000 new troops.

But while the media has typically discussed a counterterrorism approach in Afghanistan as a low-troop option, the two counterterrorism-experienced admirals are both said to favor “as many troops as we can muster,” according to the NSC staffer, who specified that McRaven and Harward were pushing for McChrystal’s largest resource option of 85,000 new troops. A senior administration official who requested anonymity said that the Obama administration was not considering a troop escalation of more than 40,000 combat troops. (It is possible that support and logistical units could increase any troop number that the administration cites as the total estimate, as happened when President Bush announced a troop surge to Iraq of about 20,000 troops in January 2007 but about 28,000 new troops actually deployed.) On Saturday, McClatchy Newspapers reported that Obama is leaning toward an increase of 34,000 troops. An announcement is expected shortly after Obama returns from a trip to Asia on Nov. 20.

The advice of McRaven and Harward to the White House strategy review, the staffer said, was to push for a “heavy, heavy, heavy COIN [counterinsurgency] presence” in select population centers like the capitol city of Kabul, while relying on new or expanded counterterrorism units like Task Force 714 for hunting and killing terrorists outside of those population centers — particularly in areas like the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a key transit point for Taliban and al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents.

“They’re focusing on the main population centers that they think they can save with manpower on the ground, and everything else will be crossborder,” the NSC staffer said. An executive order signed by George W. Bush in mid-2008 and not revoked by Obama authorized special forces to, in some cases, cross the Afghan border into Pakistan in pursuit of top insurgent targets. “JSOC is already ramping up for that. … These are what they call kinetic, direct-action task forces,” military terminology to describe intense fighting with small units. The prospect of crossborder raids by U.S. military forces has been greeted in Pakistan as an offensive violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

The two admirals are also said to be influential with Jim Jones, Obama’s national security adviser. McRaven, at least, worked with Jones in a previous assignment, commanding Special Operations Forces in Europe in 2006 while Jones was ending his tour of duty as NATO commander. “A lot of people think Jones is not taking military counsel, that he’s anti-surge, he’s this, he’s that,” said the NSC staffer. “In reality, he’s taking counsel from pretty much a purely military palette of people, including McRaven.”

Asked about McRaven’s role in the strategy debates, Ken McGraw, a spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees JSOC, said, “It would not be appropriate for us to comment on who may or may not be involved in discussions at the White House or what may or may not have been the substance of conversations at the White House.” A spokesman for the Joint Forces Command did not return repeated phone and email messages seeking comment about Harward. A spokesman for the National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment about Jones’ interactions with Harward and McRaven.

The bonds between McChrystal and the two admirals may not have been widely known because of the secrecy surrounding almost all aspects of JSOC, but the Obama administration is getting a sense of their strength. “Harward and McChrystal were running JSOC,” said the NSC staffer, “and all three of them [have been] in the nether regions forever.”

Two International Security Assistance Force service members were reported missing Nov. 4 from a routine resupply mission in western Afghanistan. Afghan and coalition forces are currently involved in an extensive search for the service members.

“We continue exhaustive search and rescue operations to locate our missing service members. We are doing everything we can to find them,”
said ISAF Spokesperson Navy Capt. Jane Campbell. “The families of these service members have been notified about their loved ones’ status, and
we will continue to keep them informed as information becomes available.”

It is ISAF policy to not release the nationality of any missing service member before the relevant national authority does so.

Further information is being withheld while the search and rescue operations continue and while the incident is investigated.

There were some complaints about media double standards after news organizations, including this one, declined to report the Taliban kidnapping of New York Times reporter David Rohde. Since NATO has released this information, I consider it fit to report. But if I independently come across additional information that could reasonably considered hazardous to the lives of these soldiers or the success of the search and rescue mission, I will not report it.

Update: Another grim release from ISAF:

During a joint operation in western Afghanistan today, initial reports indicate more than 25 ISAF and Afghan National Security Force members were wounded. Members of the joint force were searching for two missing U.S. Army soldiers.

The wounded service members were initially treated on the scene and subsequently flown to an ISAF medical facility for further treatment.

“We are committed to taking every measure possible to rescue or recover our missing service members. We continue to do everything we can to find them,” said U.S. Navy Capt. Jane Campbell, IJC spokesperson.

Operations are ongoing, and further information will be released when it is appropriate.

To find out what Rasmussen’s deal is, I turned to Martin Krasnik, one of Denmark’s leading journalists. Krasnik reminds us that Rasmussen’s style has always been confrontational, as he had “no time for long discussions and slow compromises” as prime minister. But he did “revolutioniz[e] Danish small-state security policy by joining the Iraq war on a very tight parliamentary mandate,” Krasnik emailed me, “and being Europe’s most ardent supporter of George W. Bush.” To some degree, Rasmussen reflects his country on Afghanistan. “Danes are mysteriously supportive of the war,” Krasnik says, and their 700 troops aren’t in the safer areas of Afghanistan; they’re in Helmand Province, one of the most dangerous. But “no doubt, Rasmussen personally thinks that more troops are absolutely necessary. ”

Krasnik has been doing some reporting into Rasmussen’s already-controversial tenure as NATO secretary general, which is barely a year old. “He has bypassed NATO ambassadors on several occasions, discussing budget and Afghanistan strategy with defense ministers and not diplomats,” Krasnik said. “NATO ambassadors accuse him of being ‘out of control’ and ‘over confident’ — that is: not an empty suit looking for the middle ground between the members. ‘He will last 1 to 1.5 years tops,’ as one NATO diplomat told me the other day.”

Interestingly, one of the only NATO ambassadors to support Rasmussen is Ivo Daalder, Obama’s man in Brussels and a Hillary Rodham Clinton ally. “‘Fogh does what he is supposed to do. He is leading the alliance,” Dalder told a Danish newspaper this Saturday,” Krasnik said. That has led to speculation in Copenhagen that Rasmussen’s position comes with at least the tacit approval of the Obama administration. “My feeling is that he wouldn’t take a public stand like this just before the Bratislava meeting without clearing it with the U.S.,” Krasnik said. “One argument here is that Obama needs others than the GOP and army generals to ask for more troops, so why not the NATO-chief?”

The Wall Street Journal came to a similar conclusion. In a piece today reporting that Obama is leaning toward a “hybrid” counterterrorism/counterinsurgency approach, it quotes an anonymous official speculating that Rasmussen might not be pressuring Obama, but rather providing him with political cover to escalate:

“This may be part of an effort by the Obama administration to have the suggestion come from Europe first before the president makes a public commitment,” said one person who has discussed Afghan strategy with senior U.S. officials.

It’s unclear if NATO will then provide additional resources to the Afghanistan war. One alliance diplomat I spoke to last week said that the Europeans are lamenting somewhat their love affair with Obama, as it makes it difficult to deny him the politically difficult increase in NATO troops and other resources that Obama seeks. But it’s clear that Rasmussen, at least, will push them in that direction.

Leaving that, uh, aside for the moment, it’s kind of a cost-free American position to upbraid European allies for not pulling their weight in Afghanistan. But Yglesias crunches the numbers and determines that tiny Denmark is, proportionally, shouldering a massive burden:

Denmark only has 700 soldiers in Afghanistan of whom 26 have been killed, but Denmark has about as many people in it as Cook County. Scaled up to America’s population this would be as if we had had about 1,400 soldiers killed out of a 38,000-strong deployment. Of course in a war absolute number count and Denmark is still a small contributor.

A lot of the noise around the  discussion of “nation-building” in Afghanistan has become divorced from what we are trying to achieve. Put simply, we want to  get  the Afghan people to a stage where they are able to design and maintain their own way of life which is robust enough to repel the likes of Al Qaida from taking root there ever again (and from such a foothold in Afghanistan, then to attack us). Similar objectives exist for Pakistan. Ultimately, this means a long-term relationship  between our countries and the people of both Afghanistan and Pakistan built and sustained by mutual trust. That is why the Kerry-Lugar bill is so important – it sets the foundation for just such a relationship between Pakistan and the US. We want to reassure the Afghan people too that our commitment there will be long term, although of course not demonstrated by thousands of troops for the long term.

Gates said several allies have indicated that they will, or are leaning toward, increasing their military or civilian contributions, or both. “I find that very heartening,” he said.

He also said he received “mounting endorsements of McChrystal’s approach” during his sessions here.

Gates is no blind McChrystal partisan, if he can be said to be a McChrystal partisan at all. And given his emphasis on keeping Obama’s options on Afghanistan open, it’s hard to believe he’s not faithfully representing what the NATO allies are saying. He pledged to take the allies’ view back to Washington to inform President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy deliberation. If NATO is lining up behind counterinsurgency, will the allies actually commit the requisite resources, or leave that to the United States?

Take Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s top civilian official. Rasmussen has backed McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy to the hilt. And he issued a statement that represents a nudge in President Obama’s ribs:

“To my mind, it is clear,” he said in a statement issued before yesterday’s opening session. “Hoping that Taliban extremists will never again host al-Qaida is not a strategy. They did it in the past. We can only assume they will do it in future.”

That’s a reaction to press accounts of Obama’s deliberations indicating that the U.S. might be prepared to accept some form of Taliban governing role. The reports are vague: after all, the Afghan government itself supports negotiation and reintegration of the Taliban, and has even reached out to Mullah Omar. But Rasmussen’s statement raises the question of how involved NATO actually is in a decision-making process that effects the entire alliance, however unevenly. If he had been looped in, Rasmussen probably wouldn’t feel the need to draw red lines for strategy in public.