The Redhunter

GEN. CARTER: What I thought I'd do for you this evening in Afghanistan -- this morning in Washington, if you like -- is to give you a sense of where we've got to on Operation Moshtarak. When I last spoke to you about it, it was about a week after we had done the launching of the clear phase of the operation. And we now find ourselves at about D-plus-102, so some three months into that phase. ...

Now, the operations that we mounted starting on the 13th of February were designed to reassert Afghan government authority and control over much of central Helmand. They were focused principally on the district of Nad e Ali, where around 100,000 people live; on the district of Marja; and the area of Kariz e Saydi and Badula Qulp, just to the northeast of Marja on that battlefield geometry diagram. And in that area, around 80,000 people live. So we're focused on between 180,000 and 200,000 people.

Now, since the operation was mounted, things have moved on. And in Marja, we find ourselves now in a position where we have a security presence throughout Marja. We have, entirely as we planned to do, conducted a relief of place with the original Afghan National Army troops that did the operation, and replaced them with new Afghan National Army kandaks in full partnership with the U.S. Marine Corps who are based there.
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You'll find around eight of the 15 schools are open, with teachers. You'll find all the bazaars are functioning. And you'll find a good deal of cash-for-work projects going on under some of the USAID projects, under ASI. And you'll find that the USAID AVIPA Plus projects -- that's the agriculture voucher program -- is working well.

What you'll also find, which is important, is the district governor, one Haji Zahir, who's becoming increasingly assertive and is outreaching to the population, trying to connect himself and therefore the Afghan government to the population. And that's all very positive.

That said, we are not that -- not yet where we need to be. It's very important that Haji Zahir's community council, his shura, becomes genuinely representative of all of the people in Marja. And at the moment, that is not the case.
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What is also striking -- remember I said we're focusing on central Helmand, of 600,000 people -- is that we now have freedom of movement throughout central Helmand. Again, before the 12th of February, it wasn't possible for Governor Mangal, the provincial governor, to travel from Lashkar Gar to Nad e Ali or to Marja or to Nawa. He can now do that on his own, with his own security detail. Before the 11th of February, he'd have had to have done it in a helicopter to go to Nad e Ali or Nawa, and he couldn't have gone anywhere near Marja at all. Indeed, we didn't even fly helicopters over Marja ourselves.
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So we're making progress. But in counterinsurgency, it takes time, it takes patience, and it's frustrating. And that is what we see at the moment. But nonetheless, we're going in the right direction.
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And whilst that is partly a security problem, it's a problem that is political. It's involving impunity and the culture of impunity that has grown up, during the last eight years. And it's also about delivering the sort of stabilization and reconstruction projects which go to the heart of removing the causes of the insurgency.

Now, how do we get to that point? It's about connecting the population to the people, to the government. And that requires building representative governance from the bottom up.
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Now, clearly, what is needed is for the governor's capacity to increase and for the governor to become connected to his population -- and that is what is happening at the moment

On to the Q & A

The following is based on this McClatchy News article

McChrystal calls Marjah a 'bleeding ulcer' in Afghan campaign
May 24, 2010
by Dion Nissenbaum

MARJAH, Afghanistan -- Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, sat gazing at maps of Marjah as a Marine battalion commander asked him for more time to oust Taliban fighters from a longtime stronghold in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province.

"You've got to be patient," Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. "We've only been here 90 days."

"How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?" McChrystal replied.

A charged silence settled in the stuffy, crowded chapel tent at the Marine base in the Marjah district.

"I can't tell you, sir," the tall, towheaded, Fort Bragg, N.C., native finally answered.

"I'm telling you," McChrystal said. "We don't have as many days as we'd like."

The operation in Marjah is supposed to be the first blow in a decisive campaign to oust the Taliban from their spiritual homeland in adjacent Kandahar province, one that McChrystal had hoped would bring security and stability to Marjah and begin to convey an "irreversible sense of momentum" in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan.

Instead, a tour last week of Marjah and the nearby Nad Ali district, during which McClatchy had rare access to meetings between McChrystal and top Western strategists, drove home the hard fact that President Barack Obama's plan to begin pulling American troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011 is colliding with the realities of the war.

There aren't enough U.S. and Afghan forces to provide the security that's needed to win the loyalty of wary locals. The Taliban have beheaded Afghans who cooperate with foreigners in a creeping intimidation campaign. The Afghan government hasn't dispatched enough local administrators or trained police to establish credible governance, and now the Taliban have begun their anticipated spring offensive.

"This is a bleeding ulcer right now," McChrystal told a group of Afghan officials, international commanders in southern Afghanistan and civilian strategists who are leading the effort to oust the Taliban fighters from Helmand.

"You don't feel it here," he said during a 10-hour front-line strategy review, "but I'll tell you, it's a bleeding ulcer outside."

Throughout the day, McChrystal expressed impatience with the pace of operations, echoing the mounting pressure he's under from his civilian bosses in Washington and Europe to start showing progress.
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The article generated no small amount of controversy, with US military calling the headline "intellectually dishonest" and demanding that it be changed. See this story for more: McChrystal v. McClatchy

Q General, General McChrystal visited with your region a few days ago and was quoted as talking about the situation -- the public perception of the situation being a bleeding ulcer. He talked about challenging the assumptions on that.

What is your sense? Is it a bleeding ulcer right now? Can you overcome the perception in many quarters of the public that the strategy is not working? Did you tell General McChrystal any changes you'd like to see in the strategy, such as more troops?

GEN. CARTER: Yes. Last Thursday General McChrystal did come down to have a look at what was going on in central Helmand. And I think, importantly, he didn't just look at Marja; he looked at Nad e Ali and he looked at Lashkar Gar, and he looked at the context, as I set it out for you a few moments ago in terms of central Helmand. But of course, what he wanted to see was how all of central Helmand was evolving and how things were or were not improving for the 600,000 people that we're talking about.

And he asked, as you'd expect a professional commander to ask, some difficult questions about whether we were going as quickly as we can. And the answer is that, as the process we went through of all those difficult questions, we all concluded by the end of the day, that we were doing what was needed in the right way, that the strategy was appropriate and that it would deliver results.

But as I said in my opening remarks, we'll have to be patient during the course of the summer watching as the intimidation reduces and the population becomes more on side.

The point, of course, though, is that this is all about perception. And counterinsurgency is about an argument between the forces of the insurgent and the policies of the government. And what the population in central Helmand is doing at the moment is forming a view about whether it's better off with the government and whether it believes that its neighbors, which is often what the Taliban is in political terms, are also going to come across to the side of the government.

And that, I think, is the key point of this, is that it's a political movement, the Taliban. And the extent to which your neighbor is genuinely on side with the government is something that you don't necessarily know. And of course, like all political movements, it takes time for people to be convinced. So what is going on in central Helmand at the moment is people are being convinced.

Now, of course, when General McChrystal referred to Marja as a bleeding ulcer, he was talking about the perception of the outside world. And of course, in the same way that it's important that Afghan perceptions go in the right direction, it's important that the outside world also has the right perceptions. And I think his feeling was that some people in the outside world would regard Marja as being a bleeding ulcer. That's not the way he sees it in theater, nor, indeed, is that the way that the Afghans see it. It's very important, I think, that things are set properly in context.

"Bleeding ulcer." "Perception." "Patience." What do they mean?

The Viet Cong launched what has become known as the Tet Offensive on January 31, 1968. Although the VC were defeated on the battlefield, suffering casualties to the point where they were no longer an effective fighting force for the rest of the war, the perception back home was that we were losing the war. The reason for this perception is that the Johnson Administration and military spokesmen had been telling Americans that the war was going well, and so the mere fact the offensive took place seemed by belay that assertion. The Tet Offensive was a tactical victory for the United States, but a strategic defeat.

Conservatives typically complain about this, saying that "we really won and it was the media that misrepresented the situation." This may be true, but it's also irrelevant. We must live with the world as it is, not how we want it to be. Perception is therefore important, and anyone who thinks we can win wars through military means alone without regard to the information-perception-media aspect is fooling only themselves. More, this is nothing new to history. Perception and public support, even in dictatorships, has always been vital. We must win the information war as well as the war on the ground.

Back to the Q & A. There were several questions about "connecting the people to the government," and MG Carter spent some time addressing the subject. We'll quote just this one:

Q General, Luis Martinez, with ABC News. If I could ask you about the operation, the upcoming operation in Kandahar, there's been much stress put on the fact that this is going to be much less of a military operation, and a holistic operation. How do you measure progress if -- you, being a military man -- how do you measure progress of this kind of operation as the months go on.

GEN. CARTER: Well, of course, that's always our challenge, because we have to -- we have to assess it, for two reasons. One, we have to measure progress, so that we know whether or not our strategy is going in the right direction and we can touch on the tiller as appropriate. And of course, the other reason that we have to measure progress is to demonstrate to the doubting Thomas sitting in the room with you that we're going in the right direction.

And that is where it becomes really challenging, because, as I tried to set out in my opening remarks, it's very difficult for you guys and girls to visualize what life is like for the average Afghan, and what it's been like for the last 30 years. So when I talk about freedom of movement and I talk about connecting to the government, and I talk about the range of stock on the shelves of a bazaar becoming more fulsome, and I talk about prices go down, and I talk about the ability for you to take your pomegranates from your orchard in the Arghandab and send them to a marketplace other than in Pakistan, those are things that are probably quite difficult for people to comprehend. But those, of course, are the criteria against which we will judge success, because that is what population-centric counterinsurgency is all about.

In traditional nation-state wars, the center of gravity is the enemy's government and/or armed forces, with more or less weight applied to one or the other depending on the circumstances. In an insurgency the center of gravity is the population. It is not, oddly, the insurgents. Chasing them around the countryside is not the path to success.

As has been said a kazillion times on this blog because it was proven in Iraq under generals Petraeus and Odierno, the path to success lies in three things

1. Protecting the population
2. Convincing the people that the countersinsurgents will win
3. Convincing the people that it is in their best interests for the counterinsurgents will win.

Note that #3 is a cold calculation of self-interest, not some philosophical attachment to Jeffersonian democracy. While the latter would be nice, history shows it isn't going to happen and pushing that doesn't work anyway. As Gen. Carter implied, it's the economy, stupid. It's about being able to live your daily routine in a normal manner, about sending your kids to school, holding a job and being able to go the market and shop in relative safety. Achieve those things and the population will be on your side. The people do not have to like the counterinsurgents, they just have to think they're working for their self interest.

Whether all this works in Afghanistan remains to be see, but from what I can tell in this briefing Gen. Carter understands how to win.