Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Wall Street Journal
November 30, 2007
Pg. 1
By Michael M. Phillips
KABUL, Afghanistan -- A natural-born insurgent, Sgt. First Class Jacob Stockdill was brimming with malicious suggestions when a group of American soldiers and Afghan security men sat down last month to plot their own defeat.
"I can put a guy out on a ridge with an AK-47 and have him take a couple of shots," Sgt. Stockdill proposed to fellow students at the Army's new Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy. "The Americans will shoot back with their big guns and disrupt the whole valley.... Being an insurgent would be so easy." Capt. Chris Rowe finished his thought: "All you have to do is not screw up, and, even if you do, you just blame it on the Americans."
Six years into the Afghan war, the Army has decided its troops on the ground still don't understand well enough how to battle the Taliban insurgency. So since the spring, groups of 60 people have been attending intensive, five-day sessions in plywood classrooms in the corner of a U.S. base here, where they learn to think like a Taliban and counterpunch like a politician.
The academy's principal message: The war that began to oust a regime has evolved into a popularity contest where insurgents and counterinsurgents vie for public support and the right to rule. The implicit critique: Many U.S. and allied soldiers still arrive in the country well-trained to kill, but not to persuade.
In April, the Army gave a 26-year-old Rhodes scholar, Capt. Dan Helmer, six weeks to get the school up and running. Capt. Helmer tells his students, who rank as high as colonel, that the important battles here are 80% political and just 20% military. He exhorts them to go to great lengths to understand local politics, culture and history, to make sure actions they take on the battlefield help convince Afghans that the Kabul government will serve and protect them.
"We're trying to win an argument that supporting the government is worth risking your life for," he says. It's an argument, he says, that the U.S.-led coalition isn't yet winning. "Today we control no more and no less of Afghanistan than the Soviets did," during their 10-year occupation that began in 1979.
'Uneven Understanding'
Lt. Col. John Nagl, co-author of the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine, says he was struck during a visit to troops in Afghanistan earlier this year by their "uneven understanding of counterinsurgency principles" at work in the Afghan campaign. Col. Nagl commands a battalion at Fort Riley, Kan., dedicated to training American troops to become mentors to Iraqi and Afghan forces. When he returned from his trip, he urged commanders to set up the counterinsurgency school and to put Capt. Helmer in charge.
Capt. Helmer, a West Point graduate from Mantua, N.J., originally deployed to Afghanistan as a mentor for the Afghan National Police. At Oxford, he was author of a study on Israel's fight against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, where an army with overwhelming conventional superiority found itself mired against insurgents who had the vital support of the locals. Fast-talking, with deep-set eyes, a sunburned neck and a moustache that he grew out of respect for Afghanistan's hairiness-is-next-to-manliness culture, he says he thought from the start that Army training didn't prepare troops well for the intricacies of fighting the Afghan insurgency.
Army officials say they've made great strides this year providing troops with Afghanistan-specific training before they reach the combat zone -- including counterinsurgency seminars for officers and scenario exercises for foot soldiers. But the Army acknowledges that some troops fall through the cracks. "There isn't enough time between being told that they're going and getting them through the training," says Lou Gelling, deputy commander of the Army's battle command training program. "That's the reality of it."
The counterinsurgency training sometimes seems targeted more toward Iraq, according to Capt. Helmer and Col. Nagl. Of the 90 men under Col. Nagl's command, almost all are Iraq veterans and just one has served in Afghanistan. Even Capt. Helmer's orders to Afghanistan included the mistaken, but telling, instruction to take a course in Arabic -- a language spoken in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan.
In Iraq, the U.S. has set up separate counterinsurgency academies for Iraqi and coalition students. In Afghanistan, Capt. Helmer insisted on putting troops from the 37-nation coalition into the classroom with their counterparts from the Afghan army, police and spy service. One of the school's central tenets is that foreign forces cannot win the war. Afghan security forces and government officials must take the lead in any activity, whether it's an attack on Taliban redoubts or reconstruction of a mosque, in order to increase popular support for President Hamid Karzai's government.
"Afghans have more experience in irregular warfare than anyone in the world -- full stop," says Capt. Helmer. Many members of Afghanistan's security forces fought either for or against mujahedeen insurgents during the Soviet occupation, or fought as rebels against the Taliban government that ruled from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
Capt. Helmer and his instructors, many of them pulled out of combat to teach for a few days, tell students that for the insurgents to succeed, they must discredit the government while selling the Afghan public on a cause -- Islamic purity, tribal rivalries, a simple distaste for foreign occupation, or revenge for past affronts to family and honor.
Students took the roles of insurgents in an academy session late last month. Capt. Khawja Mohammed, a 38-year-old training officer for the Afghan riot police, suggested they stage a public hanging of someone suspected of collaborating with the coalition. "We can intimidate people," he offered.
Lt. Col. Sayed Najeeb of the Afghan intelligence service proposed a series of attacks on coalition or government checkpoints. "That will tell the people that the government can't take care of itself," Col. Najeeb, a 38-year-old with a thick black beard, black shirt and black pinstriped suit. He spoke in Dari, one of Afghanistan's main languages, through an interpreter. As insurgents, he said, "We can tell the people that the infidels have come to destroy their religion, but if we don't demonstrate enough force, people won't join us."
Sgt. First Class James Litchford, 43, from Hattiesburg, Miss., said he would plan a frontal assault on a major U.S. base. The attackers should grab the Americans "by the belt," he said -- that is, get so close to the base so fast that the defenders wouldn't dare use air strikes or artillery for fear of hitting their own men. Then the insurgents would swarm through the base defenses, he said.
November 30, 2007
Pg. 1
By Michael M. Phillips
KABUL, Afghanistan -- A natural-born insurgent, Sgt. First Class Jacob Stockdill was brimming with malicious suggestions when a group of American soldiers and Afghan security men sat down last month to plot their own defeat.
"I can put a guy out on a ridge with an AK-47 and have him take a couple of shots," Sgt. Stockdill proposed to fellow students at the Army's new Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy. "The Americans will shoot back with their big guns and disrupt the whole valley.... Being an insurgent would be so easy." Capt. Chris Rowe finished his thought: "All you have to do is not screw up, and, even if you do, you just blame it on the Americans."
Six years into the Afghan war, the Army has decided its troops on the ground still don't understand well enough how to battle the Taliban insurgency. So since the spring, groups of 60 people have been attending intensive, five-day sessions in plywood classrooms in the corner of a U.S. base here, where they learn to think like a Taliban and counterpunch like a politician.
The academy's principal message: The war that began to oust a regime has evolved into a popularity contest where insurgents and counterinsurgents vie for public support and the right to rule. The implicit critique: Many U.S. and allied soldiers still arrive in the country well-trained to kill, but not to persuade.
In April, the Army gave a 26-year-old Rhodes scholar, Capt. Dan Helmer, six weeks to get the school up and running. Capt. Helmer tells his students, who rank as high as colonel, that the important battles here are 80% political and just 20% military. He exhorts them to go to great lengths to understand local politics, culture and history, to make sure actions they take on the battlefield help convince Afghans that the Kabul government will serve and protect them.
"We're trying to win an argument that supporting the government is worth risking your life for," he says. It's an argument, he says, that the U.S.-led coalition isn't yet winning. "Today we control no more and no less of Afghanistan than the Soviets did," during their 10-year occupation that began in 1979.
'Uneven Understanding'
Lt. Col. John Nagl, co-author of the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine, says he was struck during a visit to troops in Afghanistan earlier this year by their "uneven understanding of counterinsurgency principles" at work in the Afghan campaign. Col. Nagl commands a battalion at Fort Riley, Kan., dedicated to training American troops to become mentors to Iraqi and Afghan forces. When he returned from his trip, he urged commanders to set up the counterinsurgency school and to put Capt. Helmer in charge.
Capt. Helmer, a West Point graduate from Mantua, N.J., originally deployed to Afghanistan as a mentor for the Afghan National Police. At Oxford, he was author of a study on Israel's fight against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, where an army with overwhelming conventional superiority found itself mired against insurgents who had the vital support of the locals. Fast-talking, with deep-set eyes, a sunburned neck and a moustache that he grew out of respect for Afghanistan's hairiness-is-next-to-manliness culture, he says he thought from the start that Army training didn't prepare troops well for the intricacies of fighting the Afghan insurgency.
Army officials say they've made great strides this year providing troops with Afghanistan-specific training before they reach the combat zone -- including counterinsurgency seminars for officers and scenario exercises for foot soldiers. But the Army acknowledges that some troops fall through the cracks. "There isn't enough time between being told that they're going and getting them through the training," says Lou Gelling, deputy commander of the Army's battle command training program. "That's the reality of it."
The counterinsurgency training sometimes seems targeted more toward Iraq, according to Capt. Helmer and Col. Nagl. Of the 90 men under Col. Nagl's command, almost all are Iraq veterans and just one has served in Afghanistan. Even Capt. Helmer's orders to Afghanistan included the mistaken, but telling, instruction to take a course in Arabic -- a language spoken in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan.
In Iraq, the U.S. has set up separate counterinsurgency academies for Iraqi and coalition students. In Afghanistan, Capt. Helmer insisted on putting troops from the 37-nation coalition into the classroom with their counterparts from the Afghan army, police and spy service. One of the school's central tenets is that foreign forces cannot win the war. Afghan security forces and government officials must take the lead in any activity, whether it's an attack on Taliban redoubts or reconstruction of a mosque, in order to increase popular support for President Hamid Karzai's government.
"Afghans have more experience in irregular warfare than anyone in the world -- full stop," says Capt. Helmer. Many members of Afghanistan's security forces fought either for or against mujahedeen insurgents during the Soviet occupation, or fought as rebels against the Taliban government that ruled from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
Capt. Helmer and his instructors, many of them pulled out of combat to teach for a few days, tell students that for the insurgents to succeed, they must discredit the government while selling the Afghan public on a cause -- Islamic purity, tribal rivalries, a simple distaste for foreign occupation, or revenge for past affronts to family and honor.
Students took the roles of insurgents in an academy session late last month. Capt. Khawja Mohammed, a 38-year-old training officer for the Afghan riot police, suggested they stage a public hanging of someone suspected of collaborating with the coalition. "We can intimidate people," he offered.
Lt. Col. Sayed Najeeb of the Afghan intelligence service proposed a series of attacks on coalition or government checkpoints. "That will tell the people that the government can't take care of itself," Col. Najeeb, a 38-year-old with a thick black beard, black shirt and black pinstriped suit. He spoke in Dari, one of Afghanistan's main languages, through an interpreter. As insurgents, he said, "We can tell the people that the infidels have come to destroy their religion, but if we don't demonstrate enough force, people won't join us."
Sgt. First Class James Litchford, 43, from Hattiesburg, Miss., said he would plan a frontal assault on a major U.S. base. The attackers should grab the Americans "by the belt," he said -- that is, get so close to the base so fast that the defenders wouldn't dare use air strikes or artillery for fear of hitting their own men. Then the insurgents would swarm through the base defenses, he said.