Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net

"After nine years of war in Afghanistan, the United States seems no closer to the proverbial light at end of the tunnel; and in Afghanistan Journal Joshua Foust vividly explains why. With the lacerating and intellectually honest tone that has long characterized Foust's writing, Afghanistan Journal brings together four years of online dispatches that chart- in often stark terms- the many blunders that have characterized the U.S. war in Afghanistan. It doesn't always make for easy reading, but if one wants to understand why the United States military is losing the war in Afghanistan, Afghanistan Journal might just be the best place to start."

- MICHAEL COHEN

Senior Fellow, American Security Project

"Afghanistan Journal charts Foust's exploration of America's war in Afghanistan and his efforts to bring greater understanding and empathy to how Afghans experience their surroundings in a time of war. Foust's unflinching willingness to highlight the paucity of understanding of Afghanistan in much of the contemporary discourse and to confront punditry passing for analysis makes this work important reading for those interested in better understanding the conflict."

- LEAH FARRALL

www.allthingscounterterrorism.com

Joshua's writing is remarkable . . . . His critical and analytical thinking skills really help readers gain a better understanding of the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan. Based on his experience on the ground, working as an adviser to the U.S. Army, and on the passion with which he has sought to learn about the Afghan people and their culture, he presents a way of thinking about the country very different from the way it has been portrayed (or too frequently, neglected) by the mainstream media over the past few years.

- NASIM FEKRAT

Publisher, Afghanlord.org, and director,

Association of Afghan Blog Writers

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Afghanistan Journal

Afghanistan Journal

Selections from Registan.net

Joshua Foust

With photographs by the author and a Foreword by

Steve LeVine

Charlottesville, Virginia

This book is dedicated to my dog, Milo,

without whose company and silly antics

I'd never be in a good mood.

Just World Books is an imprint of Just World Publishing, LLC

All text, © 2010 Joshua Foust

Chapter 5 includes Kapisa Province: A COIN Case Study in Afghanistan, which was first published in World Politics Review, March 31, 2009. Reprinted by permission.

All photographs, including cover images, © 2009-2010 Joshua Foust Maps and all design elements (interior and cover), © 2010 Just World Publishing, LLC

Book design by Lewis Rector for Just World Publishing, LLC

Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication

(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

Foust, Joshua.

Afghanistan journal: selections from Registan.net /

by Joshua Foust ; with photographs by the author ; and a foreword by Steve LeVine.

p. cm.

LCCN 2010937124

ISBN-13: 978-1-935982-02-9

ISBN-10: 1-935982-02-8

1. Afghan War, 2001---Personal narratives, American.

2. Afghanistan--Foreign relations--United States.

3. United States--Foreign relations--Afghanistan.

4. United States--Foreign relations--2001-2009.

5. United States--Foreign relations--2009- 6. Foust, Joshua--

Blogs. I. Registan.net. II. Title.

DS371.413.F68 2010         958.104'7

QBI10-600204

Contents

Foreword, by Steve LeVine

Preface

Part I

1. Dispatches From FOBistan

A Week of CRC

The Latrine Graffiti of Kuwait

Escape from Kyrgystan

The Kyrgyz Magiciennes of Bagram

Let's Think About Kabul

Fixing Afghanistan Starts With Fixing Ourselves

This Place Is a Prison, and These People Aren't Your Friends 37

The Army's Woeful IT Policies Spoil the War Effort 39

2. Traveling through Kapisa and Khost

Detour through Parwan

Maladies of Interpreters

The Unreality of Kabul

Kapisa, in Pictures

The Importance of Political Affiliation

The Importance of Local Solutions to Local Problems

Sad

The Persuadable Taliban

Letting the Message Drive the Operation

The Garrison Problem

Part II

3. Kunar and Nuristan

What Role Do Civilian Casualties Play?

Did the U.S. Have Advance Warning of the Attack on the Wanat Firebase?

The Kunar-Chitral Region Remains a Dark Mystery

Intercepting Wood in Kunar

Withdrawal Is Not (Necessarily) Surrender

HIGs Are Pigs

Nuristan Violence Part of a Years-Long Campaign?

Maybe, Finally, Some Accountability?

4. Helmand

Selection Bias

Conceding Territory, And What It Means

Garmsir, Again

How Do You Do the Build Part of COIN in a Crashed Economy?

Garmsir, Again (Again)

Mythbusting Marjeh

Vetting Haji Zahir

How to Move Forward in Marjeh

5. Kapisa

Kapisa Province: A COIN Case Study in Afghanistan

In Alisay Valley, the Fight Continues

Tracking Progress in the Alisay Valley

ISAF Goes Social

Kapisa Teeters

Possibly, Kapisa Insurgent Figure Detained

6. The Region

Delayed by Tragedy, a New Refugee Flight

Joining Defensive Alliances

Central Asia's Loming Water Wars

Looking at Tajikistan

Are Terror Groups Faked? Does the IJU Even Exist?

Possible Proof of Iranian Support for the Taliban

Spilling Over in Central Asia?

Part III

7. Strategy

Security Solutions for Afghanistan

Macro-indicators of Afghanistan: Do They Mean Anything? Should We Care?

Maintaining Perspective

Quote of the Weekend

Attacks in Khost, Police Respond Again

Oh, the Shinwari

Means-testing the Drone War

Romancing Hekmatyar (and Other Related Monsters)

8. Policy

The Human Failure of the Afghanistan Mission

The Issue of Aid

The Problem with PRTs

A Problem More Serious Than Bias

New Data for the Shindand Bombing

Handling Civilian Casualties and Their Aftermath Is a Critical Failure

Gameplanning a Solution In Media Res

Local v. National Control

From Whole of Government to Whole of Place

The Afghanistan Study Group Report: An Exercise in Determined Ignorance

9. Counternarcotics

Can Afghanistan Be Saved? Not with the Current Opium Policy

How Opium Is Crashing Afghanistan's Economy

Peas in a Pod

How Do You Stop the Poppies?

Thinking about Alternative Livelihoods

Poppy-Free, At Long Long Last

Pragmatism, Not Idealism

The Nangarhar Swing

Opium Is an Economic Problem, Not a Cause

Can We Please Stop Trying to Turn Afghanistan into Columbia?

The Hidden Finances of Insurgency

What is Going on in the Poppy Fields of Afghanistan?

Some Tricky Numbers

10. Press and Pundits

Sloppy Logic in the Blogosphere

Dateline Afghanistan: Covering the Forgotten War

Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence

by Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls

Why We Fight

Digging Deeper into the Pashtun Tribal Areas

The Inexplicable Longevity of Selig S. Harrison

Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda

by Gretchen Peters

ABC News's Obsession with Afghan Nightlife

Glossary and Abbreviations

List of Major Ethnic Groups

Acknowledgments

Maps:

Map 1: Afghanistan: The Region

Map 2: Afghanistan: Eastern Border

Map 3: Afghanistan: The Provinces

Foreword

In October 2001, the United States responded to the massive terrorist attack per-petrated on 9/11 by striking the capital of Afghanistan, the country from which the assault had originated, and overthrowing and replacing its Taliban government. Nine years later, U.S. troops are still present in Afghanistan- with a force of an even more massive size. U.S. military counter-insurgency experts say the war was misfought for several years, and that they are only now applying the techniques that can defeat the resurging Taliban, the movement that U.S. B-52s scattered from Kabul in November 2001. Though President Barack Obama has pledged that the U.S. troop withdrawal will begin in July 2011, the American commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, suggests that no such hard-and-fast timetable be set. Given the risk of an imploded Pakistan next door, if Washington policymakers choose to identify this region's future as an American imperative, then U.S. forces could be on the ground in Afghanistan in large numbers for another half-decade or longer.

The American engagement with Afghanistan provides a microcosm of a Wonderland-like decade in U.S. foreign policy. Ideologues are not new- such individuals have been recommending the utter urgency of this or that drastic step for centuries. In the best of times, reasonable voices prevail, and hindsight then usually informs us that those were only crises of the moment. In the case of the past decade, it is still early to measure the value and cost to the U.S. and the Middle East of dethroning Iraq's Saddam Hussein. It is even more premature for a cost-benefit analysis of U.S. policies in Central and South Asia, where initially the U.S. acted to rout the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but it then stayed on long enough to seed the ground for yet another cycle of Afghanistan's long history of first embracing then spurning a foreign presence.

The Wonderland part of these wars- in terms of geography, the largest U.S. military operations abroad since World War II- has been their planners' insistent denial of context and history. The U.S., America's military and political leaders say, is not subject to the troubles that doomed its predecessors in these same theaters, and those who raise such issues are dinosaurs stuck in the past. So it is that, with the U.S. troops having now been in Afghanistan about as long as the Soviets were before their withdrawal under fire by a U.S.-backed uprising, Washington says it will force the Taliban to accept the electoral system put in place after their ouster.

Even if it no longer aims at absolute defeat of the Taliban, Washington still seeks to strike a deal with the Taliban leadership that results in an outcome favorable to the U.S. But can the U.S. achieve this? The almost certain answer is No.

The reasons why are complex enough to fill several books, but consider the Taliban's inexorable rise in the 1990s, its uncompromising approach to rivals, and its survival today. The roots of Afghan tribal- and fundamentalist-based movements are deep and organic, and the Taliban itself has no history of power-sharing; rather, the group's practice has been to take benefit from a temporary fig leaf, and then ruthlessly dispatch all those outside the movement. Gen. Petraeus says U.S. counter-terrorist forces will defeat the Taliban. Washington and the U.S.-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, say they can broker a deal with the group that leaves him in place. But the truth is that Karzai is doomed. Former Afghan President Najibullah, too, took his chances and stayed in Kabul when the Taliban originally took power in 1996, thinking he could reason with his Pashtun tribal kin; but he ended up tortured, dragged through the streets, and hanged from a post.

U.S. Special Forces acting in stealth are murdering increasing numbers of Taliban commanders- but Taliban forces have responded by retaking control of the village of Marja (just a short time previously the scene of a much-trumpeted U.S.

offensive) and re-emerging in force in the Afghan north. Like its predecessors- the British, the Soviets- the U.S. is loath to leave ordinary Afghans at the mercy of brutal local fighters. Yet in the end, only Afghans will determine who prevails; the U.S. will leave Afghanistan, and Karzai will be dethroned.

The American presence in most of the rest of Central Asia is less long-lived.

The U.S. has been enmeshed in Pakistan and Afghanistan since the 1960s, but began pursuing strategic goals in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other Central Asian nations only a decade and a half ago. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have asserted that U.S. energy and military policies in Central Asia are not assaults on Russia, but that is absurd. Moscow has exerted monopolistic great-power influence in Central Asia since the late Czarist era, and simple mathematics tells you that the presence of one or more other powers- and hence, the loss of that monopoly- is by definition a blow. That is the way Moscow sees it, in any case.

The Obama administration will have none of such observations. The Great Game is over, declare Obama's foreign policy hands; the U.S. and Russia are cooperative powers in the region! But these claims show that the Obama administration is hampered by the same slender hold on reality as its predecessor. The truth is that Russia wants the U.S. out, and much continued elbowing is going on.

In this collection of dispatches, Joshua Foust attacks Washington's daily wisdom with vigor. When challenged on the facts, Foust is not dug in on a position; he is not an ideologue. He will not agree with everything- perhaps not with anything- written in this foreword. Yet he invites the debate. That is the primary strength of his indefatigable querying.

In one of his best posts, Foust takes a well-deserved swipe at purveyors of the canard that Afghanistan's instability will spill over its northern border, into Central Asia. For those merely looking at a map, these forecasts look wholly reasonable. Why couldn't the Taliban and associated groups simply cross the Amu Darya river, or the Friendship Bridge for that matter, and spread general havoc in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and so on? After all, there have already been the occasional explosions in the region. Foust sharply- and accurately- responds that, maps aside, Central Asian states only seem interested in violating borders in order to claim water rights or murder dissidents. He rightly dispenses with these claims of imminent spillover by likening them to the warnings of a broad, anti-American domino effect during the Vietnam War.

In another post- which I consider excellent, though perhaps I should take offense at the branding of some writing by one of my Foreign Policy editors as something only an ignorant person would commit to paper- Foust takes aim at the view that all Afghan strongmen are essentially the same: the Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Tajik Mohammed Qasim Fahim, and the Pashtuns Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaludin Haqqani. But in fact they are not the same, and to suggest that they are is indeed ignorant. Hekmatyar, especially, is not a pragmatist tied to the probability of outcomes, as Foust quotes one intelligence officer as saying, but a cold-blooded destroyer who, given a chance to be on the inside of the Kabul power structure, would undermine and ruin the government in the name of putting himself in charge. Dostum, on the other hand, has a history as a marauder and a killer, but he largely distanced himself from that past almost a decade and a half ago. As we know, no one in Afghanistan is wholly free from blood.

Joshua Foust's blog posts and other writings from the past three years, as presented in Afghanistan Journal, deserve a thorough reading.

Steve LeVine

Washington, D.C.

October 2010

Preface

The coldest I have ever been in my life was in the mountains of Afghanistan. I was in a helicopter with the windows and doors open. It was dark, the middle of winter, and I wasn't wearing a jacket. But up there, something became clear to me: America is fighting its wars all wrong.

I had been working at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Morales-Frazier, in Kapisa Province, Afghanistan, just north of Kabul, as part of the Army's Human Terrain System (HTS) in Afghanistan. HTS is like most of the U.S. government's foreign projects: a brilliant idea that never really got implemented properly.

The idea was that in a counterinsurgency-we spoke of counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan before God invented the Generals Petraeus and McChrystal-the U.S. military would need to be culturally literate. That is, individual soldiers and the officers commanding them would have to understand the social and political dynamics of a foreign country in order to operate in a way that would encourage, rather than inflame, the local population.

But how do you teach an organization primarily dedicated to killing to become creative, flexible, adaptive, and even empathetic? For that was always the dark secret behind overwrought military acronyms like MOOTW (Military Operations Other Than War), SO (Stability Operations), and COIN (Counterinsurgency)- non-military operations are just not what an army is designed to do. Armies exist to defend their homeland and to execute warfare-basically, to blow things up and shoot guns. Development and governance work is for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); diplomacy and statecraft are for the State Department. But those agencies are weak and poor in comparison to the Department of Defense (DOD), so the DOD has slowly taken over their functions.

This is not a complaint about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, though that is a worthy enough subject to examine. This is about how the military refuses to adapt to the foreign missions it undertakes, and how fundamentally ill-suited it is for the vast majority of such tasks we as Americans have assigned it. The HTS

answer for how the Army can do social work in places like Afghanistan and Iraq was to embed social scientists-anthropologists if they're available, but also psy-chologists, political scientists, sociologists, and the rare economist-with the staff of Brigade Combat Teams, groups of four thousand deployed soldiers responsible for huge tracts of land. In the case of Afghanistan, these social scientists would help the staff plan better missions by teaching them to navigate the country's complex social networks.

Of course, plans are plans. When I joined HTS, on January 1, 2008, I was little more than a professional nerd who spent his days writing research papers for various government agencies. I was sent to Afghanistan to observe how the various Human Terrain Teams operated and how the research center where I worked could set them up for future successes by providing them with detailed, academic research. Instead, I found myself mostly trapped on large, uninteresting bases, confined behind HESCO¹ barriers because of a concern I might be harmed if I spent too much time meeting local people. The Human Terrain Teams faced similar frustrations: Their raison d'être was to be out in the countryside studying the people of Afghanistan, but rules of self-protection mostly confined them to their bases. The exception for me was at FOB Morales-Frazier. There, I could roam more freely than in most places.

Sitting at a base is one thing; traveling between them involves a wholly different set of skills. That chilly night, I had to get back to Bagram, the center of operations in Afghanistan, in a hurry. In theory at least, I had reserved a seat on one of the daily flights out to another FOB-Salerno, in the dusty bowl of Khost Province, which is nestled up against Pakistan-and I didn't want to miss it. A Humvee convoy would be a reliable means of getting back, but there wasn't one scheduled for several days. The military air transport system, though incredibly, soul-wrenchingly inefficient (I wound up waiting almost three weeks for a flight to FOB Salerno, as it turned out), was also an option and one that appealed to the kid in me. After all, what kid didn't want to zip around a warzone in a helicopter?

So there I was in a Chinook helicopter as it flew through the mountains of Afghanistan, at night, in the middle of winter, with all its doors and windows open, wearing a fleece jacket and a thin wool paatu-the shoulder blanket many Afghans wrap around themselves when it gets cold. By sheer luck, what should have been a ten-minute ride back to Bagram Air Field became instead a six-hour detour all the way east to Jalalabad, to the Torkham border crossing with Pakistan, and back again. By the time we landed, I was shaking so hard and my hands were so numb I couldn't even open the door to the truck that my colleague secured to help carry the fifty pounds of bag on my back.

As he hefted my bag into the back of our truck, my coworker asked very seriously if I had borderline hypothermia. Why did you make such a stupid, poorly considered decision?, he wanted to know. The truth is, I didn't realize how incredibly cold those Chinooks could get when they fly with the doors wide open. Common sense says they should be frigid, but I don't operate by common sense much of the time. Fortunately, working for the Army, I'm in good company. We prefer habits and training-and no one trained me about what to wear on a Chinook.

In fact, this kind of decision-making-tightly bound by habit, ill-suited to long-term planning, and unrelated to the reality one faces-is depressingly common, something people at all levels of government and military do. We have our normal ways of doing things, and if circumstances change we try to change our circumstances rather than our ways of handling them. Political scientists call it path dependence. I just call it bad policy.

Moreover, it's everywhere: No matter the country, no matter the crisis, our leaders seem stuck in old, stagnant modes of thinking. It's quite literally killing us, along with scores of innocent people.

The problem we run into is that most of the foreign policy crises America faces today are frighteningly complex. Afghanistan merely happens to be the most immediate crisis. The challenges there go very deep: Beyond dealing with conceptual problems at the top, America faces a problem with planning to meet those challenges. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the military's top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, complained publicly in January of 2010 in a report for the Center for a New American Security that the intelligence the government collected and analyzed didn't help him fight the war. Whenever the military identified a new problem it had to address, the sluggish bureaucracy made repurposing government employees and even contractors a frustrating, months-long process. At its core, the government is, quite fundamentally, incapable of remaining flexible enough to address the many challenges it faces.

Though tempting, this isn't the sort of character flaw that can be laid at anyone's feet: Both political parties are inflexible in their own way. Even the hope- and change-obsessed President Barack Obama has eschewed exciting, young, unconventional thinkers in favor of stodgy, old insiders from the previous Democratic administration. George W. Bush staffed his Defense Department with a bunch of holdovers from the Ford administration. Conventional thinking is comforting-

it's predictable, to a large degree based on simple numbers and easy measures, and reminds us all of simpler, better times. But when has conventional thinking ever helped us solve problems?

The first thing to realize about how the U.S. government operates: nobody cares. You might think government officials do, especially when they show up in news stories or on television saying how much they care about things. But no one really cares enough to understand what he or she is talking about or advocating.

Christian Bleuer, a popular blogger recently said, Everyone is writing everything about Afghanistan. It's true. There is a genuine abundance of information about the country-a collective outpouring of America's intellectual wealth. But we also get exercises in studied mediocrity-an endless stream of half-researched books that posture, rather than explain, for hundreds of pages at a time.

But after eight years of setbacks, missteps, minor successes, and lots of grandiose essays about how to solve everything in Afghanistan, our government still has no idea what it's doing there. At the meaningful level of politics-the ana-18 Afghanistan Journal

lytical level where all the difficult and annoying and time-consuming research gets done-government agencies continue to fill seats with warm bodies instead of hiring for experience. It was one of the major problems Gen. Flynn identified in his white paper for the Center for a New American Security. His solution was to create a new layer of bureaucracy to mitigate the bottleneck (or some similarly empty bit of jargon)-fixing a broken bureaucracy with more bureaucracy.

You see, no one in the government faces consequences for screwing things up, unless you're a four-star general with an exemplary record but supposedly poor media skills like David McKiernan (I'm not kidding, that exact justification for McKiernan's removal in 2009 ran in The Washington Post) or former commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who seemingly couldn't keep his or his staff's mouths shut. The people in charge of our nation's foreign policy, for the most part, are in charge for time served, and most of their subordinates are killing time until they can escape to the private sector.

No one cares.

A typical foreign policy analyst, having written a white paper for a very senior policymaker, might think, Wait, did I just draft an assessment that, if adopted by command, will result in hundreds of dead civilians? . Actually, that's unfair: they don't think that at all. And that's the problem! The people in charge of making and supporting policy craft pieces of work that would surprise researchers on the outside. It's common to find analysis based on rumor, or on discredited century-old ethnographies, or on mere assumption-unsourced, pandering assertions that can't withstand the slightest scrutiny. This sort of work would never make it past an undergraduate professor, yet it floods the intelligence and defense communities, who enact such things without the slightest regard for what might happen afterward.

That is, unfortunately, how the foreign policy community works. You write whatever makes your boss happy and hope to escape with a nice pension. Most motivated people in their mid-20s stick it out long enough to get into one of four Washington, D.C. graduate schools so they can eventually work for a think tank or a consulting firm (where they often return to doing the exact same thing). They don't dedicate themselves to the mission.

What's far, far worse? Those who do actually want to dedicate themselves to a particular mission are hounded out of these firms for not playing by rules written in the 1980s. Want to start a blog? Get approval first. Want to contact a prominent academic who studies the topic you're supposed to be advising a Deputy Assistant Secretary about? Not without filling out a form detailing everything you'll discuss first. Want to reach out to other agencies to coordinate your analysis with theirs?

It's probably time to seek new employment.

This book tracks, through my blog with Registan.net, my rather oblique process of discovering what I now know about America's war in Afghanistan. I began working for the DOD in the year 2000, when I was 18, building Webpages for the United States Navy. As I got deeper into the industry, I realized I needed to learn a lot more about the world around us and began trying to investigate it.

Then September 11, 2001 happened. I was sitting in my office in Arlington, VA, when a coworker poked his head into my cubicle to tell me that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Within an hour we were all crowded around his window, looking down across the highway, watching the Pentagon burn. By the time the towers were falling down, I realized that IT probably wasn't the field for me and decided to learn about Central Asia.

By 2003, I was living in Kazakhstan, learning about its ancient and modern culture, history, and politics of the region. For the first time I also saw Afghan refugees, who were essentially living in cardboard boxes in an alley, begging for food, and trying to look dignified. How had they been forgotten? I was too shocked and too scared of my assumptions about the fate of wide-eyed white boys hanging out in urban alleys to go talk with them.

At an Internet café in the city of Karaganda, where I was staying, I read about things going on in Kabul-the weird mixture of expat ennui and annoyance, the government exploitation of both the international community and the very people it was meant to serve, and the slow grind of the Taliban creeping back into the east of the country. I began to read everything I could find about the country. In those days, there was precious little written about Afghanistan, at least that you could find in a Barnes & Noble: a few broad histories, mostly rehashes