February 13, 2006

Lying in wait
Special operators say the Taliban is poised to wake, rejuvenated, from a calculated slumber

By Sean D. Naylor
Army Times staff writer

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — For the 18,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the appearance of victory could be a recipe for defeat. American commanders here say they are in a high-stakes race to subdue the resurgent Taliban long enough to build up Afghan security forces so they can stand on their own.

It seems simple, but there’s a catch. The Taliban forces are playing a clever waiting game.

According to Special Forces officers, the insurgents are lying low and avoiding high-profile attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in a ruse to convince military commanders and their political masters that the Taliban no longer poses a major threat to stability in Afghanistan and that it’s time to withdraw U.S. forces from the country. If that happens before Afghan government forces are ready to assume full responsibility for the country’s security, the officers said, a war that all commanders say they are winning could be lost.

Already, Special Forces officers have had to beat back a proposal to halve their contingent in Afghanistan, according to an Army officer.

Brig. Gen. Frank Kearney, commander of U.S. Central Command’s special operations component, confirmed that a drawdown of Special Forces in Afghanistan had been considered.

However, he said in response to an e-mail, further analysis by the relevant headquarters in Afghan-istan led to reduced chances of a sharp cut in Special Forces strength here.

“If there is a reduction it will be small, but it is just as likely force numbers will remain the same,” Kearney wrote.

However, the rapid expansion of the Afghan National Army means that even with no reduction, Special Forces will be spread a little more thinly across Afghanistan. Already, Special Forces A-teams have been sent to northern and western Afghanistan, which had been devoid of U.S. special operations troops, to train new ANA units stationed there, according to Kearney.

Any changes in Special Forces structure in southern Afghanistan will be implemented at roughly the same time that NATO forces from Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands assume the conventional missions in southern Afghanistan now being conducted by a U.S. airborne brigade. The handoff of Regional Command South to NATO is due to occur this year, on a date yet to be determined.

But some U.S. officers fear that the NATO troops will not pursue the Taliban as aggressively as the Americans do and that cutting or eliminating the Special Forces role in the Taliban’s strongholds in the south would only compound the error.

Indeed, a Taliban resurgence this year is a direct result of complacency spawned by an overestimation of the coalition’s success. That, at least, is the prevalent view in Task Force 31, with headquarters here and built around 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group.

TF 31 is part of a combined joint special operations task force that operates in eastern Afghanistan. A larger conventional force — Task Force Bayonet — organized around the 173rd Airborne Brigade, also is based at Kandahar and has the same area of operations as TF 31.

An enemy ‘out of reach’

Led by Lt. Col. Don Bolduc, TF 31 arrived at this airfield in June for its third six- to nine-month tour in the Taliban’s southern Afghanistan heartland in a little more than three years. The Desert Eagles, as they are known, found numerous improvements had been made to the region’s infrastructure and democratic systems in the year that the battalion had been gone. But TF 31 soldiers also found much to worry them.

“Among the most troubling changes was the state of the insurgency in southern Afghanistan,” states an unclassified TF 31 “memorandum for record” dated Oct. 7 and provided to Air Force Times.

“Exploiting the misconception that the insurgency was over, the enemy ... had expertly managed to reorganize, refit and prepare to conduct a more focused campaign against Afghan National Security Forces. Coalition forces, though more far-reaching than 12 months earlier and occupying three additional fire bases in the most remote areas of southern Afghanistan, had limited themselves to locally focused operations, allowing the enemy to remain out of reach and unmolested for nearly six months.”

As a result, the Taliban forces have emerged stronger than at any time since a combined U.S.-Northern Alliance force drove them from power in late 2001, according to a Special Forces officer here.

Conventional and Special Forces officers say the Taliban has a functioning chain of command that stretches from senior leaders in Pakistan down to foot soldiers in the provinces.

“They’re a network of networks,” Bolduc said. “They have cells, and each cell has a leader.”

Despite suffering heavy losses in a series of firefights with U.S. forces last year, the Taliban continues to recruit from the Pashtun tribes of poverty-wracked southern Afghanistan, as well as from the madrasas — Islamic schools — across the border in Pakistan’s Pashtun-dominated tribal areas. Not all the enemy fighters are homegrown, however. Special Forces and Afghan National Army officers say they continue to encounter foreigners fighting for the Taliban.

Col. Pat Higgins, commander of 3rd Special Forces Group, said his troops had fought against Arab, Uzbek and Chechen guerrillas in Afghanistan.

The coalition’s failure to establish a permanent security presence in any but the largest towns has allowed the Taliban to create what U.S. officers refer to as a “sanctuary” in Oruzgan, northern Helmand, northwest Zabul and northern Kandahar provinces.

“In this sanctuary area ... they develop their leadership [and] they foster and promulgate their ideology,” said TF 31’s assistant operations officer, a captain who could not be named according to military ground rules.

But if the Taliban’s sanctuary is inside Afghanistan, its “safe haven,” as TF Bayonet commander Col. Kevin Owens described it, is across the border in Pakistan’s virtually lawless Pashtun tribal areas.

It is there, according to Bolduc, that the Taliban’s senior leadership resides, providing the core of what he calls a “shadow government.”

And, of course, Pakistan is the presumed location of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

But at the insistence of the Pakistani government, Central Command prevents U.S. forces in Afghanistan from crossing the border to attack Taliban and al-Qaida targets.

Shadow government

The Taliban’s strategy of trying to lull the coalition into a false sense of security was most clearly evident during September’s elections for Afghanistan’s national assembly and provincial councils, according to Bolduc and his staff. Those elections passed with limited violence, a fact that Higgins, the 3rd Special Forces Group commander, identified as his “biggest success so far.”

But Bolduc and his assistant operations officer said the absence of significant violence around the elections was part of the Taliban’s strategy.

The Taliban has to conserve its resources for the time when the Americans are gone, the assistant operations officer said.

“They will use those elections to their advantage to sort of dupe the world into a false sense of victory, by showing us that the elections went off, they were a strategic victory [for the coalition] and off we can go .... then [the Taliban] will face that weakened Afghan national security force sooner rather than later.”

The Taliban forces didn’t just ignore the elections, they participated in them. The TF 31 assistant operations officer said the task force had cross-referenced the list of election candidates with the U.S. military’s target list and found several matches in Oruzgan province alone.

“That demonstrated to us that these guys will attempt to build some kind of shadow government ... through the legitimate elections so that they can have people in place to take over those positions of responsibility, if and when their way of life and their way of government is reinstitutionalized by collapsing the legitimate government,” he said.

Meanwhile, Taliban fighters are also taking advantage of the Afghan government’s amnesty program to come down from the mountains and rejoin civil society, while secretly retaining their loyalty to the Taliban, TF 31 officers said.

Taking it to the Taliban

if the Taliban is trying to create the impression in the coalition’s minds that they are finished as a threat to Afghan stability, that raises the question of why the number of firefights and the number of U.S. casualties in Afghan-istan appear to be on the rise. Twenty U.S. troops were killed in action in each of 2003 and 2004. The figure for 2005 was 66.

The consensus among Special Forces and conventional U.S. officers in Afghanistan is that there has been more fighting because the units that arrived last spring have pursued the enemy far more aggressively than those they replaced.

“We went out and were much more aggressive about where we looked for these guys,” said the TF 31 assistant operations officer. “We went to places where we knew they usually were, we went to places that were very inaccessible, we did it by vehicle and by foot.”

When TF Bayonet and TF 31 troops do encounter the Taliban, the results are always the same.

“We invariably come out on top,” Higgins said. “We’ve had a number of set battles with these guys where we’ve killed 40 or 50.”

But despite the Taliban’s losses, Special Forces soldiers said their enemy has improved markedly in several areas over the past couple of years. The Taliban forces have demonstrated a better ability to mass and then react quickly, using hand-held radios to command and control formations of more than 100 fighters. The guerrillas are also more resolute than TF 31 soldiers had experienced on previous rotations.

For instance, during a July 24 battle at Qaleh Ye Gaz in Helmand province, “we dropped 2,000-pound bombs on them,” TF 31’s assistant operations officer said. “They did not break contact. Instead, they fell into a compound and continued to fight from that compound. It wasn’t until we dropped 2,000-pound bombs into that compound that we were able to finally end this contact.”

The July 24 battle began when a combined TF 31 and Afghan National Army convoy ran into the 10- to 15-man security detail of a Taliban area commander. The bodyguards alerted other nearby Taliban troops, who joined the fight. They then fought a skillful delaying action, so that even though the area commander was wounded, his men were able to evacuate him all the way to Pakistan, according to Bolduc.

The enemies’ improved tactical prowess could be traced to the respite the coalition had allowed them, according to TF 31 officials. “They’ve had time to get organized,” the assistant operations officer said.

Winter objective; long-term goal

The Americans’ immediate goal in southern Afghanistan is to make the winter as harsh as possible for the Taliban, most of whom are expected to cross into Pakistan or otherwise go to ground until the snows melt in the spring.

“Our object now is to confront them in transit,” Higgins said.

One of Bolduc’s targets will be what he calls “the underground auxiliary” — those Taliban fighters who stay behind after the exodus of their comrades to Pakistan.

“Based on what we have planned [for the winter], I do not anticipate a stronger insurgency in the springtime,” Bolduc said. “I do not think that they’re going to come back to the same infrastructure that they relied on in the past.”

In the longer run, TF 31’s objective is to create an infrastructure suited to the needs of the Afghan National Army when the Americans depart.

one of the task force’s challenges is politely resisting moves from the Afghan Ministry of Defense to pull the ANA units out of the firebases they now occupy with TF 31’s A-teams and consolidate them on larger installations farther from the Taliban sanctuary.

Such a move would be a grave mistake, according to Bolduc and his assistant ops officer.

“They have to be in the sanctuary areas or you’re going to concede those areas to the enemy,” Bolduc said.

“We’re really lobbying very hard to allow these guys to keep these things.”

Stalled insurgency

Special operators and conventional infantry officers alike are convinced their strategy is working. By late November, TF 31 had killed about 400 enemy personnel, including several midlevel commanders. They had also captured 278 enemy fighters, 66 of whom, including several leaders, became “long-term detainees,” according to charts provided to Air Force Times.

Since being driven from power in late 2001, the Taliban have followed the classic three-stage insurgency model, according to Bolduc and his staff. They have passed through the first stage, known as the latent and incipient phase, in which they gain an influence over the target population, and are now poised on the brink of the second phase — organized guerrilla warfare with the formation of a shadow government in the sanctuary area.

The third phase would consist of a “war of movement” against the Afghan government. However, Bolduc believes the Taliban has stalled and is no longer progressing along the insurgency continuum.

But he and his men also know the war is far from over. To achieve victory, they must “separate the insurgent either physically or psychologically from the populace,” Bolduc said.

The most effective way to do that would be to establish a presence in the form of a professional security force — U.S. or other coalition military, or, preferably, the ANA or Afghan National Police — in every village. It is the failure to establish that presence that allows the Taliban to rule those villages through fear.

One of Bolduc’s A-team leaders said Taliban guerrillas undermine good will built within villages through civil affairs projects by threatening and killing locals deemed to have cooperated with the Americans.

“There’s a lot of psychological operations that we can employ to try and influence people to see things our way,” he said, “but the bottom line is, if you have people that have the will to go around killing innocent people, that’s very hard to counteract.”

U.S. commanders are careful to avoid calling for more U.S. troops. They know that none are available. In fact, Central Command cut a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division from the current yearlong rotation, according to Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya, who heads up Combined Joint Task Force 76, which includes all U.S. and coalition conventional ground forces in eastern and southern Afghanistan.

But the shortage of friendly boots on the ground means U.S. commanders at all levels must wrestle with the challenges posed by the Taliban’s ability to intimidate rural Afghans into not helping the security forces.

The obvious — but by no means easy — answer is to build up the numbers and capability of the ANA and ANP.

“The long-term solutions are a sustained and competent ANP/ANA presence in there, a sustained and competent district leadership in there,” said Owens, the TF Bayonet commander. “A qualitative change in the ANA and ANP would radically start changing the dynamics here.”

Securing the future

The government of President Hamid Karzai and its allies are expanding the ANA as quickly as possible. In November 2004, the army had 15,523 troops. A year later, the force had 26,188 soldiers divided into 40 battalions. At academies and training grounds, the new army is being schooled by a mixture of U.S. and other coalition troops, as well as private contractors.

The Americans in southern Afghanistan are making the most of their new allies. No combat mission is considered complete without ANA participation. However, U.S. officers are in complete agreement on one key point: Neither the ANA nor any other element of the Afghan government’s security structure is ready to handle the Taliban on its own.

“If we left tomorrow, Bolduc said, “this place would implode rather quickly.”

The ANA suffers from shortages of men, money and supplies.

Its units operate on a three-year life-cycle system, meaning that most troops sign up for a three-year hitch, then are free to return to civilian life or to sign up for another three years.

Unsurprisingly, given the infantry-centric nature of counterinsurgency operations, the ANA’s command, control and logistics capabilities have not kept pace with the expansion of its infantry forces.

In the meantime, the ANA does not have the strength to secure the rural villages under the sway of the Taliban. That job, said both ANA and U.S. Army officers, should really be done by the Afghan National Police.

Unlike the nationally recruited ANA units, the ANP in each government district is locally recruited. In theory, therefore, the police officers’ local knowledge should give them the edge over the ANA when it comes to rooting out insurgents.

But the ANP is viewed by all as weak, poorly trained and equipped, and, in many cases, hopelessly corrupt.

The ANP’s weakness leaves “a big vulnerability” in Afghanistan’s security structure, Kamiya said, noting that the ANP forces are “the first line of resistance” against not only the Taliban but the drug cartels and other organized criminal gangs that plague Afghanistan.

Money, or the lack of it, is at the root of many of the ANP’s problems, according to Afghan and U.S. sources.

The ANA’s pay system is under U.S. or coalition oversight and functions well, said one of Bolduc’s A-team leaders. The ANP’s pay is run by the Afghan government and channeled through provincial and police force leaders, a corrupt disbursement chain, he said.

The cops who don’t leave for other jobs are more likely to turn to crime for subsistence, he said. And they are left short on vehicles, weapons, uniforms and other job necessities.

While the U.S. State Department and coalition members are working to provide more training for the police, the government in Kabul will need to find the money to attract and retain the right people.

“That’s just the reality of the situation,” Bolduc said.

Sean D. Naylor covers the Army.