Expanding Hunt in Afghanistan

[Richard]

And so it goes...

Richard

Elite U.S. Force Expanding Hunt in Afghanistan
Eric Schmitt, NYT, 26 Dec 2009

Secretive branches of the military’s Special Operations forces have increased counterterrorism missions against some of the most lethal groups in Afghanistan and, because of their success, plan an even bigger expansion next year, according to American commanders.

The commandos, from the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s classified Seals units, have had success weakening the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the strongest Taliban warrior in eastern Afghanistan, the officers said. Mr. Haqqani’s group has used its bases in neighboring Pakistan to carry out deadly strikes in and around Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Guided by intercepted cellphone communications, the American commandos have also killed some important Taliban operatives in Marja, the most fearsome Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province in the south, the officers said. Marine commanders say they believe that there are some 1,000 fighters holed up in the town.

Although President Obama and his top aides have not publicly discussed these highly classified missions as part of the administration’s revamped strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the counterterrorism operations are expected to increase, along with the deployment of 30,000 more American forces in the next year.

The increased counterterrorism operations over the past three or four months reflect growth in every part of the Afghanistan campaign, including conventional forces securing the population, other troops training and partnering with Afghan security forces, and more civilians to complement and capitalize on security gains.

American commanders in Afghanistan rely on the commando units to carry out some of the most complicated operations against militant leaders, and the missions are never publicly acknowledged.

The commandos are the same elite forces that have been pursuing Osama bin Laden, captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and led the hunt that ended in 2006 in the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader in Iraq of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

In recent interviews here, commanders explained that the special-mission units from the Joint Special Operations Command were playing a pivotal role in hurting some of the toughest militant groups, and buying some time before American reinforcements arrived and more Afghan security forces could be trained.

“They are extremely effective in the areas where we are focused,” said one American general in Afghanistan about the commandos, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified status of the missions.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is in charge of the military’s Central Command, mentioned the increased focus on counterterrorism operations in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Dec. 9. But he spoke more obliquely about the teams actually conducting attacks against hard-core Taliban extremists, particularly those in rural areas outside the reach of population centers that conventional forces will focus on.

“We actually will be increasing our counterterrorist component of the overall strategy,” General Petraeus told lawmakers. “There’s no question you’ve got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable. And we are intending to do that, and we will have additional national mission force elements to do that when the spring rolls around.”

Senior military officials say it is not surprising that the commandos are playing such an important role in the fight, particularly because Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and NATO officer in Afghanistan, led the Joint Special Operations Command for five years.

In addition to the classified American commando missions, military officials say that other NATO special operations forces have teamed up with Afghan counterparts to attack Taliban bomb-making networks and other militant cells.

About six weeks ago, allied and Afghan special operations forces killed about 150 Taliban fighters in several villages near Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, a senior NATO military official said.

Some missions have killed Taliban fighters while searching for Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, who was reported missing on June 30 in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban in July posted a video on jihadist Web sites in which the soldier identified himself and said that he had been captured when he lagged behind on a patrol. A second video was released on Friday.

“We’ve been hitting them hard, but I want to be careful not to overstate our progress,” said the NATO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to describe the operations in detail. “It has not yet been decisive.”

In Helmand, more than 10,000 Marines, as well as Afghan and British forces, are gearing up for a major confrontation in Marja early next year. Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the senior Marine commander in the south, said in a recent interview, “The overt message we’re putting out is, Marja is next.”

General Nicholson said there were both “kinetic and nonkinetic shaping operations” under way. In military parlance that means covert operations, including stealthy commando raids against specific targets, as well as an overt propaganda campaign intended to persuade some Taliban fighters to defect.

Military officials say the commandos are mindful of General McChrystal’s directive earlier this year to take additional steps to prevent civilian casualties.

In February, before General McChrystal was named to his current position, the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, ordered a halt to most commando missions in Afghanistan, reflecting a growing concern that civilian deaths caused by American firepower were jeopardizing broader goals there.

The halt, which lasted about two weeks, came after a series of nighttime raids by Special Operations troops killed women and children, and after months of mounting outrage in Afghanistan about civilians killed in air and ground attacks. The order covered all commando missions except those against the top leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, military officials said.

Across the border in Pakistan, where American commandos are not permitted to operate, the Central Intelligence Agency has stepped up its missile strikes by Predator and Reaper drones on groups like the Haqqani network.

But an official with Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or I.S.I., said there had also been more than 60 joint operations involving the I.S.I. and the C.I.A. in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Baluchistan in the past year.

The official said the missions included “snatch and grabs” — the abduction of important militants — as well as efforts to kill leaders. These operations were based on intelligence provided by either the United States or Pakistan to be used against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the official said.

“We can expect to see more U.S. action against Haqqani,” a senior American diplomat in Pakistan said in a recent interview.

The increasing tempo of commando operations in Afghanistan has caused some strains with other American commanders. Many of the top Special Operations forces, as well as intelligence analysts and surveillance aircraft, are being moved to Afghanistan from Iraq, as the Iraq war begins to wind down.

“It’s caused some tensions over resources,” said Lt. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby Jr., the second-ranking commander in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/wo...NowNy9B3nLdZGw

[Dozer523]

Originally Posted by Richard

. . . Secretive branches of the military’s Special Operations forces have increased counterterrorism missions against some of the most lethal groups in Afghanistan and, because of their success, plan an even bigger expansion next year, according to American commanders. And so it goes...
Richard

No good deed goes unpunished . . .

Murphy's Law #27: If you take more than your fair share of objectives, you'll have more than your fair share to take.

[kgoerz]

The commandos, from the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s classified Seals units

I think this author is full of himself. I lost count. How many time did he use the words Secret or classified. I'm surprised he didn't throw in the Infamous "Super Secrete Double Classified Unit" somewhere.

[Dozer523]

Originally Posted by kgoerz

I think this author is full of himself. I lost count. How many time did he use the words Secret or classified. I'm surprised he didn't throw in the Infamous "Super Secrete Double Classified Unit" somewhere.

Jeese! Don't ask questions like that . . . I have nothing better to do
Secret -- just once, embedded in 'secretive'.
Classified -- four.
Commando -- thirteen!
And -- 21 (I TOLD you I have nothing to do, except watch the snow fall.)

I do agree with you about the author, sounds like a Special Ops Groupie"

What the heck are ". . . kinetic and nonkinetic shaping operations”?

[CoLawman]

That sir is classified and secret codes used by commandos.

[Marina]

Danger Room has a good discussion of current debate re: McChrystal's shaping operations with GPF in A-stan.

In other news, Long War Journal continues to report escalating voilence in Pakistan's northwest. Sounds to me like the counter-guerrilla war is heating up. The noose must be getting pretty tight. http://www.longwarjournal.org/cgi-bi...stan&blog_id=7



Can U.S. Troops Run McChrystal’s ‘Soft Power’ Playbook?
By Noah Shachtman
December 23, 2009

America has fought in its fair share of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies — from our own revolution to Iraq. But in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is trying something different. In a rather unorthodox approach, commanders there are radically de-emphasizing the “kinetic,” bombs and bullets fight, and instead putting a premium on persuading the people to side against the Taliban. That may sound similar to the strategy General David Petraeus executed in Iraq, and helped postulate in the military’s counterinsurgency field manual. But General Stanley McChrystal has taken the approach several steps further in Afghanistan — discouraging cordon-and-search raids, all-but-banning air strikes, directing troops to consider retreat rather than attacking a town. “It’s not the number of people you kill, it’s the number of people you convince. It’s the number of people that don’t get killed. It’s the number of houses are not destroyed,” McChrystal told his troops recently.

It’s an attractive goal, and most soldiers and marines say they’re on board. But the idea runs completely counter to how those forces have been trained. So it’s been tough to break the old habits. Just look at the “operational updates” that McChrystal’s public affairs shop has issued in the last three days . . .

• 12/21: “Militants Killed in Wardak, Detained in Helmand; Soldiers Complete Mine Training“
• 12/22: “Militants Killed, Detained in Kandahar, Wardak, Khowst; ISAF Casualty“
• 12/23: “Joint Force Captures Kabul Criminal Group; Militants Killed, Detained in Patkya, Zabul, Nangarhar; ISAF Casualty“

Even General McChrystal’s publicists are having a hard time sticking to the script.

For commanders fighting in some of Afghanistan’s most hotly-contested areas, the struggle has been even more intense. How much restraint do you show, before you jeopardize your troops? How do you protect the population, if the Taliban have the freedom to roam and attack at will? When is it time to go “kinetic,” and drop the softer approach? There are no easy answers, as I saw this summer with Echo company of the 2/8 Marines. Captain Eric Meador, the company’s commander, wanted to spend more time holding shuras and swaying village elders to his cause. But there were too many Taliban in the vicinity, he felt, to allow those peaceful talks to take place. So instead, he sent the majority of his marines out on patrols that were almost certain to turn into firefights. “I call it the eye gouge,” Meador told me. “To keep the good areas here relatively calm, you have to go to the enemy and punch him in the chest, punch him in the face.”

The conundrum has become even more perplexing in Afghanistan’s Arghandab river valley. One battalion of the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division has been locked in a vicious struggle there that’s not only killed 21 U.S. soldiers and more than 50 insurgents in just a few months, Army Times’ Sean Naylor reports. “It’s led to a popular company commander’s controversial replacement and . . . caused the soldiers at the tip of the spear . . . to accuse their battalion and brigade commanders of not following the guidance of senior coalition commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal to adopt a ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency approach.”

When the 5/2 deployed to Afghanistan, brigade commander Col. Harry Tunnell “announced his intention to pursue a ‘counter-guerrilla’ campaign,” Naylor continues. That focus on the enemy seemed to be at odds with McChrystal’s emphasis on the people. But Tunnell said the militants were too tough to consider anything but kinetics.

He outlined how he intended his approach to work. “[W]hen it comes to the enemy, you have leadership, supply chains and formations. And you’ve really got to tackle all three of those,” Tunnell said… “[W]hen you degrade a formation substantially, that will stop operations. And then if you degrade formations, supply chains and leadership near simultaneously, you’ll cause the enemy in the area to collapse, and that is what we’re trying to do here.”

Asked if this was an enemy-centric approach, Tunnell replied: “The enemy informs how you gain access to the population. You cannot ignore it. We were taking horrible casualties trying to gain access to the population, and we knew that we needed to get to the population, and so if we didn’t conduct the types of operations that we’re conducting throughout the brigade’s area . . . we wouldn’t be able to get to the population. So you can’t separate the two.”

“If there is one constant in population-centric COIN it is the element of violence and coercion against a civilian population,” e-mails the New America Foundation’s Michael Cohen, using the military acronym for counterinsurgency. “Certainly, that was the case in Malaya, Algeria, Kenya and Vietnam — to name a few places often cited as COIN successes. Now granted, the level of coercion varied significantly. But whether it was the Briggs plan, the Battle of Algiers or the Phoenix program (and its precursor with the Strategic Hamlet program) coercion was endemic. This was even the case in Iraq, although the majority of violence there was perpetrated by a third party.”

He adds, “Has a population-centric COIN operation ever succeeded that didn’t rely on coercion and violence against the civilian population, which is near I understand it, is what we are trying to do in Afghanistan?”

I’m not one for predictions. But I’ll bet this issue — of whether or not to stick strictly to a counterinsurgency focused solely on the locals — continues to be the central debate of the Afghanistan war in 2010. The key struggle with be with the Taliban, of course. But to win that fight, the U.S. military will have to keep from fighting itself.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009...ower-playbook/

[Richard]

MOO - it's like reading any 'narrative' no matter who is writing it - ignore the obvious platitudinally enhanced rhetoric and pay attention to the pith of the message itself.

However - YMMV - and so it goes...

Richard's $.02

[nmap]

Originally Posted by Dozer523

What the heck are ". . . kinetic and nonkinetic shaping operations”?

If "kinetic" means shoot 'em...

and nonkinetic means don't shoot 'em...

does that mean we could put up a satellite to microwave the area until everything melted? (Evil Grin!)

By the way...there appears to be an available slot on the smilies table. I wonder if an "evil grin" smilie might be a worthwhile addition?