“The insurgency in Southern Afghanistan is fundamentally different than that which characterizes the rest of the country. In much of Afghanistan insurgents are economic refugees who fight for largely opportunistic reasons and can be reconciled with concerted effort. The intensity of conflict in much of Afghanistan is relatively low, peaked with the occasional act of terrorism designed to garner attention for one group/ cause or another.
The insurgency in Southern Afghanistan is politically and ideologically motivated. The fighters are highly committed to their cause and have deep family and ethnic connections to a wide variety of armed criminal groups. As a result, many of the Pashtun warriors are irreconcilable and have no interest in the peace process. It is no surprise that the number of Southern Pashtun who join the Afghan National Army, despite desperate unemployment levels, lags considerably behind the rest of Afghanistan.”
Pass this on to your friends-read about the war from the eyes of a soldier, not a NY Times reporter.
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Turning the Tide
Location: Kandahar Airfield (KAF), Afghanistan
Relative Time Zone: +11.5 Hrs 01SEP2011
Disclaimer: This story is inspired by some actual events. In all cases incidents, characters and timelines have been changed for dramatic purposes. Many events and interpersonal exchanges are fictitious. Characters may be composites, or entirely fictitious. No classified information was used in the creation of the story, it is unclassified.
Exclusive to the California Political News and Views, 9/27/11
The remote village of Sallam in the South Western portion of Afghanistan is a humble place that boasts some five hundred citizens. The people live on subsistence agriculture, are faithful to Islam, and attempt to stay out of political intrigue. The one remarkable feature of the village is that is has a small functional school on the outskirts manned by an elder volunteer teacher.
Darmal and Elam were walking to school as usual when the men on the motorbike pulled along side them. The men on the motor bike had been harassing the villagers to plant poppy for weeks, and telling them to provide food and shelter for Taliban (TB) fighters. They also told the villagers that they should not trade with the neighboring villages and that if they travel the roads at night and get blown up by Taliban bombs, it is their own fault.
The driver of the motor bike was a dark eyed teenager, barely able to grow a beard. He concentrated on keeping the cycle steady at low speed as they paced the village boys. An older bearded man of Pakistani descent sat on the back of the bike and turned to lecture the boys. He had not washed in many days, and flaunted bandoleers of ammunition that ran across his chest in a cross. He held a pistol in his hand, and an old soviet era rifle was slung over his shoulder.
“You there boy! What are you doing?”
“Going to school Sir” replied Elam.
The Taliban poked the boy hard with the barrel of his pistol. “What have I told you about going to the infidel school?”
Supporting his friend, Darmal replied “There are no infidels in the school. We learn about Holy Qura-“
“Silence!” yelled the Taliban as he struck Darmal across the face drawing blood.
Accustomed to this harassment, the children continued walking.
Flustered the Taliban continued “The school was built years ago by the Americans. It does not matter that they are not here now. That makes it an infidel school and the Afghan who works there is an American lap dog appointed by their puppet government.”
The procession had moved within earshot of the school proper. Enraged by the lies of the Taliban the boys prepared an angry outburst in defense of their teacher.
The Taliban smiled to himself. This angry outburst would provide him the excuse he needed to make an example of them. They were close enough to the school now that the teacher, parents, and other children would be able to oversee the lesson.
“Mr. Lmar is not an infidel!” shouted both boys in unison. “He is an elder Afghan from the village and you should respect him!”
Looking menacing the Taliban raised his pistol and pointed it at the boys with his finger on the trigger. “Let me make this very clear children. If you do not stop going to the infidel school I will not only shoot you, but I will shoot your fathers as well.”
The Taliban smiled evilly as he allowed his promise sink in. He had no compunctions about gunning down the children or their parents if that is what it took to put them in their place. He was preparing his next threat when a rock struck him in the left shoulder. Outraged, he turned to face his attacker.
Seeing the Taliban about to shoot Darmal and Elam, one of the boys at the school house had picked up a stone and thrown it at the villain. The Taliban caught sight of the offender and reached for his rifle. He would teach the villagers a lesson they would not soon forget. A moment later another stone hit the driver of the bike, this one thrown by one of the parents. The bike teetered out of control and fell over dumping its occupants to the ground.
Darmal and Elam threw stones of their own at the Taliban and ran to join the other villagers. The elder Taliban was able to fire a single shot in the air as a torrent of stones struck him and his associate. Fed up with the Taliban’s depravity, every person at the schoolhouse was now throwing stones at the pair.
Soon other villagers joined in, and within ten minutes they had stoned the two Taliban to death. They hung the bodies out in front of the village as a warning to other criminals. The people of Sallam would no longer tolerate insurgent (INS) lawlessness.
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Ghulam Haidar Hamidi was a rare individual. A 65-year-old dual American-Afghan citizen he lived in Virginia where he had a successful accounting business for twenty years. When American forces recently surged into Kandahar as part of President Obama’s force augmentation, Mr. Hamidi returned to one of the most dangerous areas in his country of birth in order to help spearhead the recovery. Allowing his personal finances to take the back seat, he volunteered to become the mayor of Kandahar’s violent and divided Kandahar City.
Mayor Hamidi was a true patriot and a visionary. He was the kind of honest broker that fights corruption and takes action to ensure that positive improvements come to the Afghan people. One of the most difficult challenges the mayor had to face was the constant tribal based land disputes. Land is ultimately the only true source of wealth in Afghanistan, and land near NATO bases where all of the foreign money resides is particularly coveted. The land near Kandahar Airfield was exceptionally lucrative and contentious. In order to maintain adequate security the mayor had to make hard decisions to remove squatters and bulldoze illegal businesses. He would not accept bribes, and doing the right thing put him at odds with many of the entrenched criminal elements that pervade Afghanistan.
His ongoing efforts to end a variety of land disputes which stymied development efforts required him to actively circulate among the people in low security areas. He was constantly in meetings in his office and within the city itself. He began receiving credible death threats, but refused to back down and abandon Afghanistan—even after his family urged him to return to America.
Mayor Hamidi continued to make positive progress until the Taliban, unable to intimidate him, decided to murder him. The Taliban devised a fool proof strategy which took advantage of cultural and religious sensitivities shown by the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) who guard the mayor.
Ghulam Hamidi was conducting informal negotiations in his office hallway with a group of squatters who had refused to vacate land owned by the Durrani Tribe. He seemed to be making positive progress when one of the squatters moved to adjust his turban. Such is not uncommon, and no one thought anything of it. A moment later the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) hidden in the squatter’s turban exploded. It had been carefully packed with nails and glass fragments in order to ensure that it maimed the maximum number of innocent bystanders possible.
As the burning fragments ripped through eyes, ears, and other vital organs, everyone who had been standing or walking in the hallway at that moment fell to the ground and breathed their last. The insurgents (INS) had successfully used the same un-Islamic tactic to murder a group of respected elders in the Red Mosque a month prior. The Taliban observe no moral or religious boundaries of any kind, but like animals follow the simple laws of nature. One thing that is certain however is that a successful attack, no matter how debased, will be repeated…
The great irony in this is that the Dutch cartoonist, who had drawn a sarcastic strip depicting a terrorist with a bomb in his turban, had received death threats and sparked violent protests all over the Muslim world. He could not have known at the time how prophetic his hyperbole would become.
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The insurgency in Southern Afghanistan is fundamentally different than that which characterizes the rest of the country. In much of Afghanistan insurgents are economic refugees who fight for largely opportunistic reasons and can be reconciled with concerted effort. The intensity of conflict in much of Afghanistan is relatively low, peaked with the occasional act of terrorism designed to garner attention for one group/ cause or another.
The insurgency in Southern Afghanistan is politically and ideologically motivated. The fighters are highly committed to their cause and have deep family and ethnic connections to a wide variety of armed criminal groups. As a result, many of the Pashtun warriors are irreconcilable and have no interest in the peace process. It is no surprise that the number of Southern Pashtun who join the Afghan National Army, despite desperate unemployment levels, lags considerably behind the rest of Afghanistan.
Efforts to remove fighters from the battlefield via the official Reintegration program (amnesty process for insurgents) have also faired poorly in the South. While this is partially due to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan’s (GIRoA) lack of support for the Reintegration Program, the real issue is the often fanatical commitment of the Pashtun people who are found in equal numbers in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the insurgent cause. Indeed efforts to promote reintegration frequently backfire and cause the Pashtun insurgents to fight all the harder.
One way that insurgent groups such as the Taliban force the locals to provide material support is through a campaign of active intimidation. The Taliban threatens the lives and property of villagers until they comply with ongoing Taliban demands. If a village is particularly resistant to Taliban influence, the insurgent criminals will often kidnap one of the village elders and hold them as collateral in Pakistan.
This is precisely what happened in one village along the Pakistan border. Angry that the locals were not allowing the TB to plant bombs on the road next to the village, a group of insurgents kidnapped the village elder at gunpoint and took him to Pakistan for safekeeping. What the Taliban did not count on was the response by the village. Fed up with the broken promises of the Taliban as well as their general moral depravity, the villagers immediately moved to kidnap one of the Taliban Senior Leaders (TBSL) as he was coming across the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan.
The villagers then informed the Taliban that they had one week to release their elder if they ever wanted to see the TBSL alive again. While the Pakistani Taliban dragged their heels a bit, and they forced the villagers to release their hostage first, the tactic worked.
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Seven Pastun children between the ages of 5-8 were kicking a pine cone in a local variant of the classic game “kick the can”. They lived near a small village in Zhari district within the scenic Arghandab River Valley. Like Muir Woods is to San Francisco, or any large reservoir within a day’s travel of a major city, The Arghandab is where the residents of Kandahar City go to get away from the urban hustle and have a family picnic. For many years it had been overrun by the insurgency, but a succession of American units which were part of the troop surge, had made the region livable once more—though at the cost of many lives and much equipment.
The children enjoyed their time just out of the reach of their parents, and their game had reached a high point. In the midst of the excitement one of the kids had kicked the pine cone a little too hard and it had shot out of view. The game was momentarily suspended as all of the kids began a systematic search of the area to find the missing pine cone. As they fanned out near the road, one of the boys stepped on a cord which had been concealed under the dirt. As the cord crushed down its exposed wires contacted another set of wires which had been diabolically hooked up to a set of scavenged batteries.
The circuit thus complete, 20 kilograms of Home Made Explosive (HME) packed which sharp stones, detonated. Three of the small children were killed almost instantly. The remaining four were wounded, some of them severely. The children stumbled down the road to the nearest checkpoint. Of note, they did not approach the International Security & Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers to ask for aid. Instead they approached their own ANSF soldiers.
The ANSF soldiers rendered immediate first aid, and contacted the nearest hospital for Air Medical Evacuation. A helicopter was on its way for the wounded children within sixteen minutes of their call. While one of the remaining children ultimately succumbed to his wounds, there is no doubt that the disciplined, valiant actions, of the Afghan National Security Forces saved the other three.
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As Afghan and NATO partnered soldiers continue to experience success on the battlefield, the various insurgent elements have become progressively marginalized. They have lost so many weapons and fighters that they have turned away from the large scale spectacular attacks that characterized the first eight years of the conflict. Operations in some regions have been reduced to the occasional IED strike, or targeted murder by two men on a motor bike with a pistol (aka “chiriki” squad).
Nevertheless the enemy is crafty, adaptable, and excellent at scavenging. They reuse most of the material they capture from their attacks and murders, often times in a creative fashion. Wires, batteries, containers, cell phones and chemicals are frequently recycled into new improvised explosive devices while uniforms are used to create disguises to bypass security measures. Captured vehicles are generally turned into Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices(VBIEDs) which are employed like smart bombs to breach perimeter defenses of hard installations.
A Group of Taliban fighters in the province of Zabul near the Pakistan border stood around a pair of captured Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan vehicles. Their leader had called them out into the heat to brief them on his latest plan. As the Taliban mid level leader began his brief, he produced a number of GIRoA uniforms which they had procured from a group of civilians they had recently murdered.
The Taliban looked into the vehicles but were unable to find the explosive charge, and as they stared at the uniforms they could not detect the emplacements for the usual suicide device. They looked to their leader with growing confusion. The leader explained that the purpose of this operation was to gain money to fund the fighting season. They would not be martyred this day.
The plan was simple. Using the vehicles and uniforms as cover, they would roam the countryside collecting “taxes” for the new government. In reality they would be collecting these “taxes” for themselves (hashish isn’t cheap!) but would give a token percentage to their Taliban masters. As the benefits of this new “operation” dawned on them, the insurgents happily piled into the vehicles with their AK-47’s and Rocket Propelled Grenade Launchers (typical government issue no doubt).
Twenty minutes later the wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing arrived at a nearby village. They banged on the door of the first home. When no one responded they banged louder. When there was still no response they began to kick the door down. A moment later the sickly Patron of the house opened the door and was bowled over by the heavily armed 20 year olds who poured into the home shouting “Tax collectors!” “We are here for our ten percent!”
The children in the home began screaming and ran to their mother who was unveiled in the privacy of her home. She pulled the frightened children into a huddle around her and averted her eyes from the strange men who had burst into her home. Meanwhile the elder had picked himself up off of the ground and was asking “Ten percent of what?”
The nearest Taliban leveled his rifle at him as their leader spoke “GIRoA demands ten percent of everything! You pay!”
The elder began to protest stating that they had no harvest right now, and were nothing but poor simple farmers. All they had was some clothing, foodstuffs, and homemade furniture.
The Taliban leader grinned evilly and grabbed the man’s daughter. “Then we take this!” Understanding his intent, the other Taliban grinned evilly as well.
The “GIRoA” tax collectors smashed their way through the village like a horde of locusts fleecing the populace of everything that was not nailed down. When they were finished the ravaged citizens were on the brink of all out revolt—thus proving the old adage that the only thing more feared than a government suicide attacker is a government tax collector.
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The province of Zabul is particularly problematic for ISAF and the people of Afghanistan. It is directly on the Pakistan border, and Insurgents transition freely throughout the province. They prey on the local villages and then fade back into Pakistan to rest, recover, and plan their next onslaught. The constant presence and intimidation by the Taliban and other illegal armed groups has generated considerable tolerance for their actions among the local populace. Fully 30% of the population in this area identifies with the insurgent cause and views them as freedom fighters. As the 82nd Airborne division streams into Afghanistan to take over for the 10th MTN Division, Zabul will quickly become one of their primary battle grounds.
It was a starless night. Fifteen Pakistani Taliban slipped across the border into Zabul where they were met by five Afghan Taliban who acted as their guides. By morning they had reached the outskirts of Larzaw village in Dehchopan. Their mission was simple. The locals were not fighting the International Security and Assistance Forces very aggressively, and had reduced the number of children they were sending to the madrassas in Pakistan for training as suicide bombers. They had to be made an example of. Afghans cooperating with an Afghan government was unacceptable. It could change the entire strategic balance of the region and leave Pakistan isolated.
At dawn they struck Larzaw. They harassed and beat the local population before gathering them in the village square. With the population corralled into one location, the Taliban leader singled out a 24 year old boy and proclaimed him to be a spy for GIRoA. Despite the threat of violence, the village elder preached the boys innocence and vouched for his whereabouts over the last thirty days. The rest of the villagers also proclaimed his innocence and pleaded with the Taliban to investigate further.
Not about to waste the opportunity to instill fear in the local populace, The Taliban continued with their litany of trumped up charges against the boy. Finally they pronounced the most severe of punishments and forced the boy to the ground. Removing a rusty axe from a nearby woodshed they taunted the boy with its edge. Finally they beheaded him in front of his home with the entire village looking on. To Muslims who believe in physical resurrection this action represented not only the death of the body, but the destruction of the soul, as the boy would now wander eternity as a mindless, headless entity.
The boy’s sister who had been watching the entire affair from the roof could stand it no longer. She leveled her father’s hunting rifle at the nearest Taliban and pulled the trigger. The heavily armed insurgents responded with a torrent of lethal fire but the girl fought on. She wounded three of the murders and killed a fourth.
Finally the Taliban stormed the roof and overcame the girl. They stripped her of her veil and forced her to the ground. The Taliban leader took the bloody axe and sent it careening down her neck beheading her as well. The villagers were stunned. Among Pashtun people, their women carry the honor of their tribe. To have a mere girl treated thusly in front of them was beyond anathema. The other women in the village began to cluck their tongues and raised a great bleating sound. The men turned angry, and though unarmed, began to crowd around the Pakistani insurgents.
Seeing the crowd turn hostile the Taliban beat a hasty retreat, their mission accomplished. The elders of the village held a shura the following day. They could not condone the actions of the foreign insurgents any longer. They drew up plans to purchase weapons and hunt the evil doers. Finally the village Malik declared an official “Holy War against the Taliban” and passed the message on to his friends and relatives in the outlying settlements…
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Captain (CPT) Hancock and the PSYOPS Commander (CDR) sat in the Non-Lethal Targeting wing of the Tactical Operations Center (TOC). They sat facing one another, and between then was a vertical liquid crystal display (LCD) under a dark glass touch screen. There was a keyboard and controller in front of each officer, the entire arrangement reminiscent of a sit down arcade game in a pizza parlor.
On the LCD was a map of Afghanistan which had been zoomed in to the Regional Command South battlespace. CPT Hancock adeptly manipulated the map clicking on various icons representing Significant Acts (SIGACTS), enlarging them so that the pair could review their contents. In this fashion CPT Hancock brought up report after report which demonstrated increasing resistance by the local nationals to Taliban authority.
When the review was complete CPT Hancock shot the CDR a questioning look. The Commander nodded slowly. CPT Hancock looked at the key indicator displayed at the top of the map which depicted the Target Audience Influence Action Model. The model consisted of five distinct bubbles. The far left bubble was labeled “Target Audience (TA) Supports TB” while the label on the far right read “TB Non-Effective & Seeks to Reconcile”. The third bubble on the diagram “TA Passively Resists TB” was currently lit. It had been lit for years. In ten years of War in Afghanistan Coalition Information Operations had been unable to motivate the population to move from passive resistance to active resistance of the insurgency. Thirty years of constant war in Afghanistan had killed all of the powerful leaders and the people who were left were akin to passive sheep interested only in survival.
CPT Hancock gingerly reached a hand out in ritualistic fashion and hovered over the fourth bubble. A moment later he seized the honor and pressed down. Instantly the third bubble went dark and the forth labeled “TA Openly Resists TB” flashed to life. Both men sat in solemn silence paying homage to the moment. A few seconds later the CDR typed three words on his keyboard and hit the “send” button. CPT Hancock watched as the luminescent letters reflected off the glass. He read them silently to himself. “Execute Operation Aurora.” CPT Hancock smiled.
