Of the numerous oral and written comments on my Afghan election blog post, ninety percent or so seemed to express a similar sentiment: that it was remiss not to mention that conducting electoral exercise alone is a worthy achievement for Kabul. As one observer colleague wrote in the Richmond Times Dispatch “[t]he simple fact that voting took place at such a scale was significant, given the Taliban’s campaign to intimidate voters or stop elections altogether…Hundreds of other small acts of violence did occur.  However, there was no single, massive attack.” 

The American-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the budding Afghan security services can point to this lack of cataclysmic attack as a positive achievement under extremely difficult circumstances. Regardless, conclusions about the Afghan election should be withheld pending the processing of the thousands of reported allegations of irregularities, affects of widespread intimidation, and the announced results. The Independent Election Commission said Tuesday it was postponing release of the preliminary election results until at least October 17.  The true test of the September election, as it is for all elections, is if a parliament can assume office and govern as a legitimate representative of the electorate.

There was some good news from Afghanistan this week. (more…)

My perspective is that of a stability operations policy wonk and pre-deployment training leader.  I’ve been working and thinking about conflict and stability since the early 1990s when I was at OSD and as a Director on the NSC Staff.  Bosnia and Kosovo were the conflicts du jour and though these are worlds apart from Afghanistan, many of the challenges, shortcomings, and frustrations we face today were just as plainly visible then.

About five years ago, I started working extensively with the military on Iraq and Afghanistan pre-deployment training.  My company provides the field experts, curriculum, and training to the military on what is essentially “smart power” — the interagency/PRT/whole of government tools in the Iraq and Afghan tool kit.  We also support the training of PRT civilians.  My company has extensive field experience in Afghanistan although I do not.  With another trip under my belt, I can pretend to be as smart as my trainers!

Let’s see if I can remember what I learned on my last visit, in Spring 2009.   That trip focused on meetings in Kabul and RC-East in the last days of GEN McKiernan’s command of ISAF.   The first Obama strategy review was still underway. (more…)

Can you hear that grinding noise? That’s the sound of an overused, overextended military breaking down.  We seem to spend a lot of our time deliberately avoiding our gaze from obvious trouble signs. But for those who care to observe reality the warning signs are plentiful.

Consider just a few news reports in the past week.

New York Times
September 30, 2010

Four Suicides In A Week Take A Toll On Fort Hood

By James C. McKinley Jr.

HOUSTON — Four veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan died this week from what appeared to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds atFort Hood in central Texas, raising the toll of soldiers who died here at their own hands to a record level and alarming Army commanders.

So far this year, Army officials have confirmed that 14 soldiers at Fort Hood have committed suicide. Six others are believed to have taken their own lives but a final determination has yet to be made. The highest number of suicides at Fort Hood occurred in 2008, when 14 soldiers killed themselves, said Christopher Haug, a military spokesman.

About 46,000 to 50,000 active officers and soldiers work at the base at any given time, making this year’s suicide rate about four times the national average, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at 11.5 deaths per 100,000 people. (more…)

Earlier this month, fears of a run on Kabul Bank – and perhaps a collapse of the country’s entire banking system – shook Afghanistan after details emerged about the bank’s management, namely its high stakes poker-playing chairman Sher Kahn Farnood and his alleged speculation in the Dubai real estate market with bank money.  Add to that the close relationship between the bank officials and major political figures, including President Karzai’s brother, and the aura of rampant corruption filled the air.  Once again, something was rotten in the state of Afghanistan.

And then there was the fallout: Depositors withdrew more than half of the bank’s cash assets.  Police and security forces, which make up part of the 250,000 government employees who receive their salaries from the bank, didn’t get paid. Concerns grew about the future of foreign investment in Afghanistan as its largest commercial bank teetered on the edge of crisis.  In response, the Afghan Central Bank took over Kabul Bank, which was deemed “too important to fail.”

The U.S., quick to rule out an American bailout of the bank, focused instead on bolstering regulation and transparency in order to strengthen the commercial banking system.  Officials called for a purge of the bank’s management and a full-scale investigation into the matter.  The Treasury Department sent a team of technical advisers to assist with the situation. (more…)

The Afghanis and the global community will be sorting out the effects of the September 18 Parliamentary elections for weeks if not months.  Reports from the Independent Election Commission, and thousands of local and international observers, including those deployed by Democracy International (of which I served as a short term observer), will no doubt be mixed.  Nine years after the U.S. – led invasion and months after the American military “surge”, much of the country remains in the control of insurgents.  For up to date election-related information check the Democracy International website www.afghan2010.com.

President Obama said he believes the “Afghans have done a commendable job in setting up as best as they can a structure for a fair and important election.”  This understated sentiment certainly does not do justice to the tremendous, and perhaps overwhelming, challenges facing the Karzai administration.  A significant number of polling centers did not open or closed early due to Taliban attacks.  I counted at least twelve mortar attacks, a firefight, and a Taliban truck blaring threats to anyone who voted in one contested provincial capital.  Even the Afghan security forces were unable to deploy to many polling sites.  Over three thousand formal complaints, allegations of fraud, intimidation, and technical problems further degraded the poll’s legitimacy in the minds of many voters. (more…)

General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is Hell”.  While that’s certainly true for soldiers, recent reports demonstrate that it has also become the reality for a number of innocent civilians.  Just a few days ago the outlook for civilians in Afghanistan took a sharp turn for the worse.  A Washington Post article described how a Stryker brigade in Afghanistan is accused of killing innocent Afghans for sport.  This gruesome and appalling story could be the Abu Ghraib of Afghanistan and the military would be smart to learn from its previous mistakes.

The United States military has gone to great lengths in Afghanistan to prevent civilian casualties thanks to Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine.  The doctrine recognizes that this war is not just about winning on the battlefield.  It’s about winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan population.  I wrote here about the complaints of some soldiers that this doctrine is too restrictive.  So far the discussion has primarily been about the degree to which lethal force endangers innocent civilians who might be in proximity to fighting between coalition forces and insurgents.  With these recent revelations, it seems that an even larger problem is at hand.

In January through May of this year, members of the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, Infantry Division formed a “kill team” and followed through on plans to murder innocent Afghan civilians… for fun.  In some cases they covered up these murders by faking grenade attacks that supposedly came from the civilian attackers.  Military documents describe three murders conducted by this group.  What is even more disturbing is the reports of bravado and pride in these killings that harken back to the repulsive photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib.  Soldiers serving in Kandahar province have been charged with dismembering and photographing corpses and hoarding a skull and other human remains. (more…)

At the same time the United States is scaling back its goals for Afghanistan, women in the country are scaling up their own ambitions. In arenas ranging from medicine to the military, from small business to civil society, women are speaking up for themselves and tackling ever-larger aspirations. While problems loom large in a country in which female literacy rates struggle to top 15 percent and rampant insecurity leads many families to keep their daughters and wives indoors, women are making progress. Though their efforts are often overlooked as the world trains its focus on the exits in Afghanistan, they are, quietly and slowly, creating change in their families and their country.

In a box of a building on an Afghan Army base, 29 young women in olive-green uniforms study finance and logistics. They are part of the Afghan National Army’s first Officer Candidate School class for women.

Coming from provinces all across the country, including those in the grip of an increasingly strong anti-government insurgency, these aspiring Army officers say they are determined to serve their country — and to prove to men that women can contribute.

“We have faced so many wars and so many restrictions on women and now the day has come where women have joined the military,” said Shima, a young woman from the Taliban stronghold of Ghazni. “We have to think about the equality of men and women just like other nations where women fight for their countries.” (more…)

If nothing else, the Wikileaks release of the Afghanistan War Diaries has had the positive effect of focusing public attention back of Afghanistan. Of course, there has increasing coverage this year, as the surge of troops ordered by President Obama last fall has been implemented. But the war there has not received nearly the coverage it deserves, given the intensified fighting and increased brittleness of American strategy and goals.

Let there be no mistake, the costs are high. The United States, as this Congressional Research Service report details will, most likely, suffer more killed and wounded this year, than in any year since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. As of July 12 that was 218 killed and 2000 wounded. In 2009, by comparison the numbers were 311 killed and 2,131 wounded. Total U.S. military deaths thus far from Oct. 11, 2001 are 1,154 and wounded is 6,773.

We should note that the deaths of at least 66 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen have made July the deadliest-ever month for American troops in the nine-year war in Afghanistan. The tally includes six American service members who died in four separate attacks in southern Afghanistan last Thursday and Friday.

One of the salutary effects of the Wikileaks documents is to illustrate the incoherent response of the federal government when it comes to dealing with the reality of its policies. As the Project On Government Oversight noted:

There is no doubt this episode also exposes the ridiculous problems created by the overclassification of government information. The Administration cannot have it both ways—they claimed that there was nothing important in the 92,000 documents, then also claimed that this was a terrible breach of national security. There is no doubt that the release produced a better-informed populace about one of our most important public policy issues, the ongoing war in Afghanistan. But at what cost?

This, by the way, is a realistic appraisal of Wikileaks, as opposed to the predictable hysteria from such rightwingers as Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute.

Maybe people think that much of this is moot; that come next year the U.S. will redeploy its troops back home from Afghanistan. If so, they should ponder this exchange from the interview that ABC’s This Week with Christine Amanpour did with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on August 1: (more…)

It has been nearly two months since I last wrote about the health of American military personnel and veterans so let’s look at it again. The news, unfortunately, isn’t any better.

First, let’s look at the past. Today the Los Angeles times reports that researchers have found that soldiers who suffered brain injuries can develop seizures decades — as long as 35 years — after the initial injury. A study published in the journal Neurology found that among a group of 199 Vietnam veterans, about 13% developed post-traumatic epilepsy more than 14 years after they had suffered a penetrating head wound, such as a gunshot injury or shrapnel that entered brain tissue. Penetrating head injuries are generally linked with a higher risk for epilepsy than other types of head injuries, such as concussions.

It is unclear how the study relates to combatants returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today, the authors said. The Vietnam veterans in the study suffered from penetrating brain injuries, which are rarer in soldiers fighting in the current conflicts because helmets have improved. Today, closed-head injuries (where the brain is not penetrated) are more common, in part because of the helmet improvements and partly because of a change in the weaponry used in modern warfare. (more…)

I was out of town when the kerfuffle about the article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine became public.

Now that I am back and have read the article I am amazed at how little it takes to get a general fired. I mean, for pity’s sake, this was not something on the order of Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur. It was not as if McChrystal was seriously criticizing Obama’s war strategy, like MacArthur did about Truman. How could he? This was the strategy, after all, that McChrystal had successfully persuaded Obama to sign off on and one that McChrystal’s successor, Gen. David Petraeus has pledged to continue.  I venture to say one hears more venomous remarks around the average office water cooler than what I read in the article.

Contrary to what some in the media write this was not a sign of a “dysfunctional civilian-military relationship.” To me it is a sign of posturing on the part of President Obama and, perhaps, an attempt to burnish his hawk credibility, and to sweep under the rug, at least for a little bit longer that his Afghanistan strategy is not working. (more…)