Jake Tapper's "The Outpost" : A Must Read

Jake Tapper graduated from Dartmouth College with an A.B. in History.  This grounding in history and his story telling skills serve the reader well in his meticulously researched, compelling book, "The Outpost." At its core, the book is about scores of brave, disciplined, creative, resourceful, and committed soldiers whose lives were ended or irrevocably changed by their experiences in Afghanistan.  The fulcrum of the story is the creation, defense and ultimate destruction of Combat Outpost Keating in the remote Kamdesh district of Afghanistan.

Several American administrations have fostered continuing illusions about Afghanistan. Academics have similarly fallen under the same spell, and they still talk about defining "success" in Afghanistan.
The last paragraph of Tapper's 673 page book sums it up perfectly,

"All that I can tell you with certitude is the the men and women of 3-71 Cav, the 1-91 Cav, 6-4 Cav, and especially 3-61 Cav deserved better.  They are heroes, and they have my appreciation and eternal gratitude.  I wish they had a command structure and a civilian leadership that were always worthy of their efforts." 

The story begins with the sentence, "It was madness."  Somehow, undefined levels of the U.S. military command structure decide that they want to build outposts in the province of Nuristan in order to stem the flow of insurgents crossing over the Pakistan border.  The previous brigade commander in the region didn't think Nuristan was of any strategic value, and nothing was known about the ethnic Nuristanis, who stood removed from even the ethnic power structure in Kabul. The command decision was to place the outpost at the bottom of a bowl, surrounded by 10-12,000 foot mountain peaks.  When the sentry post was designed for the outpost, it didn't have a clear, full view of the outpost itself.

Soldiers described the experience of COP Keating as hunting deer from a deer stand---except that our soldiers were the deer.  Supplying the outpost was problematical, except by helicopter transport and even then the landing pad was dangerous.  "Sir, this is a really bad idea. A. Really. Bad. Idea. Anyone we drop off here is going to die."  (Jacob Whittaker, intelligence analyst to his superior officer in the summer of 2006)  Slowly and inexorably, the small contingent at COP Keating was overrun some five years later. 

The command structure in Vietnam and in Afghanistan proved to be remote, uniformed, capricious, subject to political whims on the part of the General staff, and their ideas were not vetted by senior officers who had some first-hand knowledge of the territory.  The Generals are supported by a foreign policy apparatus which is itself out-of-touch and dominated by NGO-types, State Department lifers and consultants. Thus, the role of Pakistan's ISI in supplying men and materiel, including sheltering them over the winter, was ignored until it was too late.  This command structure learned nothing from our war in Vietnam.  As Tapper says, our soldiers deserve better.

Our celebrity Generals like Petraeus and McChrystal are really politicians, except they wear uniforms rather than suits.  Like egomaniacal CEOs, they eventually believe their own press releases. They are too remote from their troops, and they spend their time using the media and trying to manage a President, his National Security Council, and Senators on Capitol Hill.  Seeing people with acres of medals on their chests makes the American public feel....confident that our conflicts are in good hands.  They are not. 

Even when it became clear that COP Keating should be closed, it remained open for political reasons and for the conclusion of the Afghan Presidential election.  

At some point, the Afghanistan strategy changed over to "counterinsurgency," which meant that our troops were to win hearts and minds over to the notion that an American presence was more in the economic and cultural interest of the local population.  The carrots included local development projects which were approved by the Karzai government in Kabul, like bringing mountain waters down to the villages for cooking and drinking.  Local councils, or shura, would guide and oversee the projects.  This all sounds good and is straight out of the NGO and academic playbooks.  Unfortunately, the real specifics of how counterinsurgency was to be carried out were not obvious.

In the case of Kamdesh certain commanders figured out, through their own awareness, emotional intelligence and moxie, how to make counterinsurgency work.  The stories of Lt. Col. Chris Kolenda, Captain Joey Hutto and 1-91 Cav are inspiring. They were succeeded by Captain Rob Yllescas who created the "Hundred Man Shura," and convinced his superiors that spending money to support this organization would provide returns in goodwill and safety for the locals and our soldiers. Yllescas forged great relationships with the locals. As a result, he was targeted for assassination by Taliban insurgents and their foreign sponsors. Why?  Because the opposition knew if an American soldier was succeeding in breaking down the propaganda walls about American motives and methods in Afghanistan, then the village elders would become effective partners in an alliance against outside Taliban interests.  

After the death of Captain Yllescas, both the Afghan National Army and the shuras were co-opted and compromised by insurgent infiltration.  The Taliban proposals were simple.  "The Americans will be gone soon.  After their departure, when we return we will remember those who cooperated with them and we will exact a price from you and from your families."  The way out for the locals was to look the other way when strangers infiltrated the village and when insurgents took up new positions on the mountainsides.  The book captures the fact that the fifty odd soldiers assigned to the outpost were intuitively aware of these developments.  As much as they tried to ferret out the truth directly from the ANA and the shura, they were inevitably told lies.  

After the collapse of  COP Keating, the Army inevitably called for an investigation in which it totally absolved its own highest leadership, who were not in the terms of reference of the report.  Instead, several soldiers were to be publicly reprimanded for not taking adequate measures to shore up the outpost's defenses as the threats increased.  Never mind that they didn't have the soldiers, material or time to do this, as they were under steadily increasing attacks.  The bureaucracy always moves to cover itself in its Kafkaesque world.  

In 2006, at the beginning of the book, when soldiers are entering villages introducing themselves as working in partnership with the Karzai government in Kabul, the villagers ask, "Who is Karzai?"  Time in the remote provinces of Afghanistan has stood still.  Villagers were unaware of World War II. They had never seen or felt any influence of a central government in Kabul, except around the time of the Presidential election, in which both sides wantonly stuffed ballot boxes.  

Jake Tapper has recently been elevated into the pantheon of emerging media pundits, taking a high position at CNN as Chief Washington correspondent and taking the time slot of the insufferable Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room.  It's good for Mr. Tapper and his professional career, and well deserved.  However, in this situation, it's not likely that he will be able to do the independent, in-depth work produced in this fine book.  

Pulling Out of Afghanistan

                                                                    Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

An Afghani mother brings her child to a village distribution center for drinking water.

Alexander Star's thoughtful New York Times Book Review article on recent books about Afghanistan quotes an observer who characterizes the situation as "a perpetually escalating stalemate."  This is a perfectly apt description of the situation. 

It's hard to think of a modern theater where our military leadership and the men and women under their command have done a better job of trying to understand and work within indigenous cultural and leadership norms.  Our model uses "Human Terrain Teams," working with embedded academics, who are often anthropologists or ethnographers.  The good news is that had we not pursued such an approach, we would have had to beat a Soviet-style retreat, licking our wounds.  The bad news is that for all the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, and for the billions in expenditures, the best we can hope for is a stalemate after the defanging of the Taliban.  It is time for a withdrawal.

Professor Noah Coburn spent two years in the Tajik village of Istalif working on what would become his Ph.D. dissertation at Boston University and his 2011 book, "Bazaar Politics."  Here's a link to an earlier 2009 presentation of Professor Coburn's at the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies.

Coburn found the village of Istalif to be relatively stable because no one was really in charge.  Westerners are captivated by stories of Afghanistan's maliks (elders).  Coborn characterizes the maliks as being the public faces of a village, which means that they meet with NGO representatives, for example. Their actual power and ability to command resources is extremely limited.  The mullahs exert influence which is restricted to within the walls of mosques in Afghanistan.  The merchants who form the Afghan business sector, often live in Kabul and are not respected because of the local caste system.  The merchants come from the caste of weavers, who are not of high caste.  Even government officials are generally not powerful, as the actual disbursement of funds is left to local councils. 

As long as no one set of actors tries to extend its influence at the expense of another, the system of leadership maintains a sort of "knife edge" equilibrium. 

NATO attempts to establish a centralized government in Kabul have clearly failed.  In President Karzai, the West is funding a presidency which is thought by the population and by international observers to not be legitimate.  It is also deeply corrupt.  President Karzai's public rhetoric about jumping directly into the arms of the Taliban are incomprehensible. The normal behavior would be to offer olive branches when funding is being discussed, but surely we have no reason to put any faith in the President's remarks now. 

The problem with Pakistan is something we have written about in this blog for a few years.  Their interests in Afghanistan have never been aligned with ours, and this will never change with the current Pakistani state.  Withdrawing from Afghanistan can reduce the amount of "aid" we need to pump in which is solely to buy support for our Afghan operations. 

One of the sadder comments Coburn makes is to say that no group is held in lower esteem in Afghan society than the cadre of publicity-seeking NGO's. I believe that the Central Asia Institute is an exception to this characterization.  Minnesota native Greg Mortenson's organization has had a tangible effect on helping to educate young women, at the invitation and with the support of local elders.  This kind of grass roots effort, which doesn't aim at reforming cultural norms about gender, religion or criminal punishment, has a chance of succeeding, though it is certainly not without its challenges. 

Let's see what happens with the upcoming international conference on the future of Afghanistan.  We shouldn't expect to hear anything that would undermine the benefits of a withdrawal from Afghanistan.