Ann Marlowe: Peace Later!

The friendly fire incident seems more and more
a portent of the Afghan war’s course

I had only the vaguest notion of who Pat Tillman was when he was killed on April 22, 2004, in Spera District, Afghanistan. I’ve never been a football fan, so I’d never seen the footage of the improbably handsome, charismatic young man that interlaces Amir Bar-Lev’s new documentary. The sad story of Tillman’s death by friendly fire, and the subsequent cover-up, was one of those I filed away under “fog of war” and “a few bad apples.”

But this spring, convinced that General Stanley McChrystal was doing a terrible disservice to the war effort in Afghanistan by his support for the corrupt Ahmed Wali Karzai in Kandahar, I looked up the Tillman cover-up saga once again. By that time, it had taken on the status of a leading indicator of crucial weaknesses in the American war effort.

Bar-Lev’s film unabashedly takes the side of the Tillmans, and is edited so that many of the Army brass don’t come off very well. That said, the portrait of the Tillman family is relatively unvarnished. The filmmaker passes lightly over Tillman’s parents’ separation, but otherwise shows them warts and all. Independent, outspoken, sometimes just plain ornery, Patrick and Mary Tillman brought up their sons along classic American lines, revering ancestors who went to war, spending whole days of their childhood playing in the country, then excelling on the playing field in school. Patrick, a lawyer, and Mary, a teacher, are more educated than average Americans, but they’re a long way from pointy headed intellectuals. Besides the family’s good looks, the only remarkable thing about them is their passion for truth and for doing the right thing. Pat and his brother Kevin — who gave up a professional baseball career to join the Rangers alongside Pat — doubtless expected that the Army would be filled with like-minded souls.

Unfortunately, the Tillman brothers hit a bad bunch in their Ranger unit. The men in Tillman’s platoon seem to have been as lacking in moral compass as their superiors, all the way up to General John Abizaid (ret.) and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

It’s worth focusing for a moment on the backdrop to the incident, because it reveals just how complex the Afghan war can be at the ground level. A lot of disasters in Afghanistan begin the way this one did: with a broken-down Humvee. After two days in the village of Magarah unsuccessfully attempting to install a fuel pump that had to be helicoptered in, the platoon was ordered to split into two halves, called “serials,” of about 27 men each. One would push on to a village called Manah, while one would stay with the damaged vehicle. Pat was in the first half, Kevin in the second. Kevin’s serial ended up following Pat’s, though originally they were supposed to take different routes.

Due to the terrain — a river valley surrounded by rugged cliffs — the two halves of the platoon lost radio contact with each other. Kevin’s serial knew it was following Pat’s, but Pat’s did not know Kevin’s was behind it. Kevin’s serial either believed it was coming under mortar attack or actually was. (It’s possible a soldier accidentally discharged his weapon). By this time, it was sunset. Serial 2 began firing up the walls at what was probably an imagined enemy.

Meanwhile, Pat Tillman and his team heard gunfire, surmised that the rest of the convoy was under attack, dismounted, and headed up those same canyon walls on foot to provide overwatch for their comrades. “I’m Pat Fucking Tillman!” were the last words out of the unlucky man’s mouth as he tried to alert his fellow platoon members to stop firing. Tillman was killed by a SAW mounted in a Humvee. (There are more baroque scenarios suggested in Wikipedia, including a motiveless murder.) It seems that Kevin Tillman’s vehicle didn’t arrive until ten minutes after his brother was killed; he didn’t learn of Pat’s death for 40 minutes, and he was told it was due to a Taliban ambush.

Mary “Dannie” Tillman downplays the possible fears of the second serial, and thinks the young men just wanted to shoot their weapons. But I disagree, at least about the second part; I think they were young, inexperienced, and probably poorly led, though their lieutenant, David Uthlaut, had been first in his West Point class.

Some of the problem comes down to basic soldiering knowledge. If the enlisted men don’t have this, their NCO or officer is supposed to. As Major Derrick Hernandez — a friend from a unit I’ve embedded with four times in Afghanistan — comments,

[Our battalion commander] LTC Oclander demanded that ALL his lieutenants have a working knowledge of Surface Danger Zones [the possible trajectories that bullets can fly] for a SAW. The easy answer is 40 degrees to either side to create a range fan [anything that enters that is considered at risk of ricochet] but we have formulas and tables that we would beat into the hapless [lieutenants’] heads so that they understood the effects of all their weapon systems.

Usually, a well-trained captain or lieutenant will be able to prevent a bunch of 18-year-olds from making a terrible mistake. Clearly, someone had failed to instruct the men who shot Tillman. Another factor: Tillman’s platoon had been in Afghanistan less than a month. This is not made clear in the movie or on its Web site, but does emerges on the ESPN documentary Web site. Coming from Iraq, they would have been unfamiliar with the narrow river valleys common in Afghanistan.

I’ve been very close to the area in Spera, Khost Province, where the incident happened, on an embed in 2007 with the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne. Luckily I was with well-led, levelheaded paratroopers, but we passed through many potential ambush spots. It would be natural to be worried if you heard weapon fire, and natural, though not excusable, for a young soldier to panic. According to the film’s Web site — though this isn’t in the movie itself — the driver of the lead Humvee tried to stop the others in his vehicle from firing but “couldn’t be heard above the din of gunfire.” This sounds a little strange since soldiers wear headphones while in Humvees to prevent exactly this problem, and Tillman was killed by a SAW mounted in a Humvee so the men must have been in the Humvee.

The film doesn’t mention that the first Army investigation of Tillman’s death — a matter of routine in all deaths — did the right thing. On May 4, 2004, a Captain Richard M. Scott found “gross negligence” and recommended disciplinary action. Unfortunately, his report later went missing — and remains classified. We only knew it occurred because Kevin Tillman ran into Scott at sniper school at Fort Bragg.

From here on, the record is grim. A Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich took over the investigation. He later earned deserved infamy for suggesting that the Tillman family were unable to let go because they lacked religious faith. The now-disgraced General McChrystal recommended Tillman for a Silver Star on April 27, the same day his autopsy came to the conclusion of friendly fire as cause of death. And so on up the chain of command.

Inexcusably, the soldiers whose bullets killed Pat Tillman — and an Afghan militiaman fighting alongside him — have never come forward, not even to his family. (The Army has removed their names from the documents in the investigation and they have never been identified publicly.) Also inexcusable: the Army burned Tillman’s clothes, body armor, and diary in the days after his death. That is way out of normal procedure.

So what’s the “takeaway” — as the military likes to say — from the movie?

For me, it’s the way the American military has tried hard to do the right thing at the ground level in Afghanistan but often negates its own efforts at the very top of the chain of command. The Tillman cover-up, like General McChrystal’s eagerness to empower malign actors like Ahmed Wali Karzai, undermine the hard work and courage of our troops on the ground. We have a magnificent Army whose moral record compares favorably with that of any corporations near its size — and which cannot be defeated in battle. But too often, it defeats itself.

The insurgents and the United States are both playing a negative-sum game in Afghanistan

What is strange about the war in Afghanistan is that both the United States and the insurgents appear to be playing a negative-sum game. Many wars, of course, are zero-sum games, where one side’s loss is another’s gain. And many counterinsurgencies seem to be games in which the counterinsurgents lose. But the current war is unusual in that the insurgents aren’t benefiting from our setbacks.

If we take the Taliban/Hezb-i-Islami/etc. at their word, that they don’t want foreigners/infidels meddling in Afghanistan, then they would have been better off doing nothing rather than escalating violence after 2002. If Afghanistan had been quiet, ISAF forces would have trickled down to a small number. And Afghanistan in 2010 would have looked a lot more like it did in 2002.

The Afghan economy would be far weaker, without the infusion of military spending. The roads built by the US military in the east and south would still be made of dirt. Fewer schools would have been built by the US military in the Pashtun belt, fewer foreign-backed “civil society strengthening” projects would have been funded, and fewer young Afghans would have been exposed to foreign ways. Certainly fewer Afghan civilians would have been killed by ISAF (and by the insurgents). In fact, fewer insurgents would have been killed. The Afghan National Army would likely be far smaller and less well equipped and trained. It may be hard to imagine the Afghan National Police being more feeble than they are, but they would have been a nearly 100 percent untrained, ragged militia.

It’s possible that if the insurgents hadn’t done much other than wait, then by 2010 they would have been able to easily dominate a country that would have had few foreign or national forces to resist them. Arguably, the country would be much more accepting of traditional Pashtun customs, less removed from the Taliban period.

I’ve suggested before that we may have accelerated the development of the insurgency by our mere presence. This isn’t the whole story; Pakistan, Iran, and intra-insurgent power struggles are also a part of the picture. But crudely, the more foreign troops are in Afghanistan, the more violence has grown. And it’s irrational to think that adding yet more troops, or giving the “strategy” yet more time, will produce results dissimilar from those of the past.

This argument will annoy many of my political allies on the right — and it even annoys me. I firmly believe that the American presence in Afghanistan has done the country more good than anything in the last seven hundred years or so. I don’t think the insurgents have anything to offer Afghans, and I’d like to kill every last one of the true believers. But the corollary to my argument is that the insurgents are behaving just as irrationally as we are. They are further away from an pure, undeveloped, Islamic Afghanistan than when they started.

I’ll close with a quote from Sebastian Junger’s new book, War. He’s talking about the bloody struggle for the Korengal Valley, but he could just as well be speaking to both sides about the war itself:

There’s so much human energy involved — so much courage, so much honor, so much blood — you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place. Nothing could convince this many people to work this hard at something that wasn’t necessary — right? — you’d catch yourself thinking. (p. 146)

Sounds like the definition of a negative-sum game.

Since early 2007, the US has been consciously practicing population-centric counterinsurgency (or COIN) in Afghanistan, trying to provide security or “white space” for the local population to separate from the insurgency and ally themselves with Afghanistan’s elected government. Best-case COIN in Afghanistan is armed social work—by foreign troops living among the people and aided by local security forces. General David Petraeus, the military’s biggest COIN advocate, just issued a set of guidelines for troops in Afghanistan that repeats the doctrine’s dogma: “live with the people,” “patrol on foot whenever possible,” etc.

There’s little evidence, however, that COIN is working — even though we have three times as many troops in Afghanistan as we did in 2008.

In fact, a recent report from the mainstream think tank CSIS suggests that the Afghan population has grown less and less willing to cooperate with counterinsurgents — even as we have supposedly refined our COIN tactics and increased the number of troops.

The report tracks the percentage of undetonated IEDs reported by locals from January 2004 to the present. Since May 2008 the percentage has hovered  just under five percent whereas in 2005–06 — when the official story now has it that we were not doing effective COIN — the percentage was often over more than ten. In May of this year, it appears to be only one to two.

It’s the Coindinistas themselves who consider the percentage of IEDs turned in a useful measure. CNAS, the think tank at the epicenter of  COIN, issued a report in June  2009 written by Andrew M. Exum, Nathaniel C. Fick, Ahmed A. Humayun, and David J. Kilcullen, which stated:

a rise in the proportion of IEDs being found and defused (especially when discovered thanks to tips from the local popula­tion) indicates that locals have a good working relationship with local military units — a sign of progress. Conversely, a drop in the proportion of IEDs found and cleared indicates the population is not passing on information to security forces, and is standing by while they are attacked — a sign of deteriorating security. (p. 27)

Obviously, metrics have to be looked at carefully. In some areas, Afghans have first planted and then reported the planting of IEDs in order to pocket reward money or give the appearance of cooperation. Yet in practice, it seems that more troops doing more COIN are correlated with . . . less local cooperation and less security. COIN is like a medicine that shows declining effectiveness the longer you take it and the higher doses you take it in.

Now, it could be that COIN works better with greater numbers of troops up to a tipping point at which it starts to work worse and generate xenophobia. It could also be that COIN doesn’t work at all. COIN has hardly ever worked on any insurgencies, and when it has, as in Sri Lanka recently, or in the Philippines under Magsaysay and Landsdale, it was with a measure of brutality completely unacceptable today among Western democracies. Both hypotheses should be tested before we go further with a losing set of tactics.

As Colonel Craig Collier, a former squadron commander in Iraq, recently wrote in Armed Forces Journal, “We don’t claim that our lethal missions were successful based on the number of patrols sent out or the number of rounds fired.”

Collier is the rare Pentagon denizen who is interested in measuring the effectiveness of our tactics. When it’s suggested that our practices in Afghanistan aren’t working, the generals — and too many from both parties in Congress — circle the wagons and claim that “we’ve only just begun to . . . ” — well, you can fill in the blanks: we’ve only just begun to have the right number of troops, or the right commander, or enough money. . . . Some even say it’s disloyal “not to give our tactics time to work.”

That graph of IED reporting suggests that our tactics aren’t ever going to work. And meanwhile, the US is combining the worst of our old-school realist moves — foisting a corrupt, inept thug who stole an election on a helpless country “because he’s our bastard” — with the worst of our new lack of cultural confidence — claiming that Afghans have a “different culture” where corruption doesn’t matter. Small wonder that Afghans are showing by their actions that they don’t want what we’re selling.

Our military on the ground know this well. A commander recently wrote me, “Everyone is running around scared shitless of Karzai. SO WHAT IF WE LOSE HIS SUPPORT! We hold the power cards, use them.”

We are losing the only advantage we have over our enemies: our well-known belief in democracy, justice, and the rule of law. The only way we can lose Afghanistan is by beating ourselves — and we may be doing just that.

Watch my debate with Carl Schramm and Colonel Mike Meese on PBS’s Ideas in Action tv show where we discuss the validity of "expeditionary economics" in Afghanistan.

Is DOD the New AID? Tasking Soldiers with Economic Development

If you thought what Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said about the implications of Wikileaks was depressing … well, that pales compared to his inarticulate and unclear statements about the Afghan war on Meet the Press Sunday. They suggest that we have a much more serious problem on our hands than Wikileaks: a lack of strategic direction at the top:

I don’t think that the Taliban being stronger than they’ve been since 2001 is, is news. I mean, I’ve been concerned about the growing insurgency there for a number of years. We really are at a time in Afghanistan, after the president’s review, where we’ve got the right strategy, the right leadership, and the right resources. And we really are in the second year of that aspect of Afghanistan.

Mullen uses one of the Pentagon’s favorite themes here, “We’ve only just begun.” Now — and a year ago, and two years ago, and three — we have always only just begun to implement the proper strategy, or have the proper respect for counterinsurgency doctrine or the proper number of troops or an Afghan partner properly serious about rooting out corruption . . . it goes on and on.

And what can Mullen mean when he refers to “the second year” of the “right strategy, the right leadership” when we have changed leadership on an annual basis in Afghanistan, with General David McKiernan commanding from June 2008 to June 2009 and General Stanley McChrystal from June 2009 to July 2010? Either McKiernan or McChrystal or General David Petraeus is the “right leadership,” or maybe all of them were, or, possibly, what the admiral says doesn’t make a lot of sense.

When David Gregory turns to the topic of Pakistan, whose support for the insurgency in Afghanistan is all over the Wikileaks data, Mullen founders:

GREGORY: But, true or untrue, the big fear is that Pakistan is working against us and not with us?

MULLEN: In many ways, Pakistan is working with us. I mean, their, their military, their intelligence agency. I mean, we’ve got a very strong relationship in the positive sense with, with their intelligence agency. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some challenges —

GREGORY: They are actually —

MULLEN: — with some aspects of it.

GREGORY: — supporting elements killing US soldiers.

MULLEN: But they have, they have shared intelligence with us. They’ve killed as many or more terrorists as anybody, they’ve captured them. And certainly the focus on changing the strategic shift, if you will, in that agency, so that that doesn’t happen at all, is a priority for us.

I don’t think the George W. Bush–worthy grammatical convolutions here are any accident. The admiral is at heart an honest enough man to become flustered when he has to duck a question. It gets worse when he takes on the topic of what kind of government Afghanistan would have after an American withdrawal:

Certainly, the long-term goal is to make sure that the, with respect to the population in Afghanistan, that there’s a government, governance structure that treats its people well. And I, but to say exactly how that’s gonna look, and what specifics would be involved, I think it’s just way too early.

Too early after eight years of Hamid Karzai to say how that looks and what the specific are? Or too early to say what the Taliban are like? Or perhaps too early to finally take a moral stand and say that if our men and women are dying in Afghanistan, we have the best right in the world to make sure that they’re dying for a decent government?

Mullen was a good deal more articulate — and candid — when he testified before the House Armed Services Committee on September 10, 2008:

I am convinced we can win the war in Afghanistan.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Absent a broader international and interagency approach to the problems there, it is my professional opinion that no amount of troops in no amount of time can ever achieve all the objectives we seek. And frankly, sir, we are running out of time.

We can train and help grow the Afghan security forces … and we are. In fact, they are on track to reach a total endstrength of 162,000 troops by 2010. The marines conducting this training are doing a phenomenal job.

But until those Afghan forces have the support of local leaders to improve security on their own, we will only be as much as a crutch, and a temporary one at that.

We can hunt down and kill extremists as they cross over the border from Pakistan, as I watched us do during a day-long trip to the Korengal Valley in July.

But until we work more closely with the Pakistani government to eliminate the safe havens from which they operate, the enemy will only keep coming.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Foreign investment. Alternative crops. Sound governance. The rule of law. These are the keys to success in Afghanistan. We can’t kill our way to victory, and no armed force anywhere — no matter how good — can deliver these keys alone.

But Mullen’s testimony looks like the lightweight rhetoric it is when compared to the opening statement that day by the 76-year-old committee chair, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, a conservative Democrat who supported the Iraq War:

Almost all indicators of security and stability in Afghanistan are down this year. . . . Seven years on, I still do not see a well-coordinated, comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan that addresses all aspects of the mission there, such as training and equipping the Afghan National Security Forces, counter-narcotics, reconstruction, improving governance, and regional issues including the border with Pakistan. Such a strategy needs to marshal all our resources and lay out clearly what it will take to succeed. The Fiscal Year 2008 National Defense Authorization Act required such a strategy.

Yet the [Pentagon’s] answer was delivered two months late, with four-month old data, and did not include the required strategy. It also did not include enough on specific measures of progress, a timetable for achieving goals, or required budget information.

We also must remember that we can only stabilize Afghanistan if we are able to handle its complex relationship with Pakistan. However, in April 2008, GAO reported that the US lacks a comprehensive plan to eliminate insurgent safe havens in Pakistan’s border region, and another GAO report found significant oversight and accountability problems regarding DOD Coalition Support Funds, which have been used to reimburse Pakistan nearly $6 billion dollars since 2002 for support to US operations.

Last week, Skelton was much less impressive. He attacked Wikileaks and claimed that Pakistan’s cooperation with the US has improved since the period covered by the leaked documents, which ended in 2009. He said nothing about the accounting for that $6 billion, though — or the billions we have spent since. Skelton also echoed Mullen’s “We’ve only just begun” line:

Under the new counterinsurgency strategy implemented earlier this year, we now have the pieces in place to turn things around. These leaked reports pre-date our new strategy in Afghanistan and should not be used as a measure of success or a determining factor in our continued mission there.

Both Skelton and Mullen seem to me to have been closer to the truth in 2008 than they are today. This “new counterinsurgency strategy” is only yesterday’s strategy with a new general in charge, and it isn’t likely to be any more successful now than it has been in the past.

The parts of Afghanistan that are responsible for the more than seven percent growth in GDP — the north and west — are doing well because their largely non-Pashtun population cares more about improving their families’ lives than attacking infidel troops. We didn’t need to build schools there — because Afghans built them themselves. And they don’t burn them down, either — instead they send their kids there even at considerable financial sacrifice. (Afghans have to pay for school books and uniforms for their kids.) These parts of Afghanistan are fine, and little thanks to American government spending. The Afghans did it for themselves.

The parts of Afghanistan where we’ve spent enormous sums bribing Pashtun villagers not to blow up our troops or the Afghan National Security Forces remain violent — they just have better roads and schools than they used to. And they’re still governed for the most part by thugs, drug dealers, and thieves appointed by Karzai. Some of these provincial and district governors also have a sideline in the family narcotics business run by the president’s half brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai.

I have to admit, I drank the Pentagon Kool-Aid and the COIN Kool-Aid in 2008. It was hard not to, when I saw progress in the north and west of Afghanistan, a thriving economy, and the increasing penetration of mobile phones, the Internet, and ideas from outside. And on embeds in RC-East, I saw our Army building roads and schools where none had existed in human history. Commerce was beginning to thrive in remote areas that had always been poor.

Yes, even in 2008 IEDs and suicide bombings were also increasing, but I believed the commanders who told me it was a sign that the insurgents were growing desperate, or a reaction to the forces of order entering areas that had never had a government presence. All we needed was a little more time, or a few more troops, or a few more costly American development projects, and things would calm down. Our troops were doing a magnificent job on the local level in executing counterinsurgency tactics. It was hard not to believe they’d succeed.

Now, with almost 100,000 more foreign troops in Afghanistan, and steadily growing violene, it’s clear something’s wrong with this theory. If you did a graph logging SIGACTS (violent incidents) against the foreign troop presence over time, you’d see a nearly perfect correlation. American “boots on the ground” numbers went from an average monthly level of 5,200 in 2002, to 10,400 the next year; 15,200 in 2004, 19,100 in 2005, 20,400 in 2006, 23,700 in 2007, and 30,100 in 2008. Now we are at 95,000 Americans — and southern Afghanistan has never been so violent.

It isn’t “way to early” to tell which way the wind is blowing in Afghanistan, it’s way too late. Wikileaks is a distraction. As Skelton pointed out, we didn’t have a strategy in 2008. Do we have one today? Will Mullen please explain how doing the same thing we did before could possibly produce different results now?