Center for a New American Security

Thomas Shanker writes today in the NY Times about the great pains taken by Coalition Forces in Afghanistan to avoid civilian casualties in planned air strikes.

It had taken the American military many days to identify, track and target the senior Taliban officer. But the risk of civilian deaths was deemed too high. Air Force commanders, working with military lawyers, aborted the mission. The Taliban leader escaped.

“We miss the opportunity, but the beauty of what we do is we will get them eventually,” said Lt. Gen. Gary L. North, commander of American and allied air forces in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. “We will continue to track them. Eventually, we will get to the point where we can achieve — within the constraints of which we operate, which by the way the enemy does not operate under — and we will get them.”

In recent weeks, Afghan politics has been roiled again by a series of high profile aerial bombings in which civilians and Afghan police have been killed or at least in which untrue stories of civilian casualties have gained widespread acceptance among the Afghan populace.

Perhaps what has been most troubling about these stories has been their origination from Afghan officials. In Nuristan, Governor Nuristani was fired for reporting civilian deaths at a wedding when ISAF officials argued their had been a legitimate bombing without significant collateral damage. In Shindand, ISAF emphatically denied causing civilian casualties as reported by Pajwok news, the main Afghan wire service. The original report of those casualties again came from a government official, District Chief Mullah Lal Mohammed.

Kip thinks this goes beyond the debate on Air Power in COIN and begs the question of political primacy. While Shanker's article emphasizes the restraint we take in our decisions on whether or not to utilize an air strike, it doesn't detail the role of the Afghan government. President Karzai and others will continue to use our utilization of air power to bolster their nationalist credentials at our expense unless we force them to be responsible for it. Kip recalls favorably that in South Vietnam, district chiefs were forced to green light both artillery and air strikes.

A passage from Bing West's The Village:

Hit by one of the artillery rounds, a thatched hut was blazing. Of the family of five, three had survived, although wounded. The mother and her daughter had been killed. Beebe called in a helicopter to evacuate the father and his two boys. Lam [a senior police official] told the villagers that he had been standing next to the Americans when they had called for artillery and that he would have done the same. The error had not been made at the fort. But two women were dead because of firepower gone awry, and the black ashes of the house could be seen by the patrols coming and going from the fort, a constant reminder which for seventeen months affected, if it did not actually determine, the American style of fighting in the village of Binh Nghia. The Marines saw too much of the villagers, and lived too closely with them, not to be affected by their personal grief. Besides, the Americans had to patrol with the PFs [Popular Forces, i.e., local militia], whose own families were scattered throughout the hamlets and who were naturally concerned about the use of any weapon which might injure their relatives. The rifle--not the cannon or the jet--was to be the primary weapon of the Americans in Binh Nghia.

Such is not the way we are fighting the war in Afghanistan today. I'm looking forward to your thoughts...

Over the past few months, as indirect fire rained down on the Green Zone with deadly accuracy and fighting with JAM intensified in Sadr City, the U.S. military responded with a substantial increase in airstrikes (especially Hellfire strikes from helicopters) against the teams firing rockets and mortars (see this video here). The U.S. military has fired more than 200 Hellfire missiles in Baghdad since late March--just six were fired in the previous three months

American ROE require positive visual identification of "hostile act" or "hostile intent" before firing, and U.S. pilots are diligent about following these guidelines, and war is not a video game--real people, including innocent bystanders, die. Sadr City is a slum of 2 million souls stacked on top of one another. In this environment there is no way to avoid substantial "collateral damage" even if care is taken not to directly target civilians.

Dr. iRack knows that COIN is still war and, as Charlie wrote yesterday, the kinetic piece is inherently more important in some places than others. But, as with the use of artillery for "terrain denial," the heavy reliance on airstrikes during the surge is evidence of the lingering attraction overwhelming firepower has for the U.S. military.

For soldiers and civilians in southeast England, the dominant memory of that night was less the terrible glow in the western sky than the predawn explosions as the British blew up their own bridges to slow the anticipated German advance, and the almost medieval sound of church bells ringing the alarm over the countryside in the middle of the night.

Great, haunting book review on the Blitz.

Trust me. I love the Air Force. There is nothing that gives a better sense of security to the small unit counterinsurgent than knowledge that he's got a JDAM from Uncle Sam on his side.

But, I've got to complain about the ongoing machinations to create a new Afghan National Army (ANA) Air Corps.

Now, undoubtedly Afghan President Karzai, Minister Wardak (the Minister of Defense), and General Saleh (the chief of the National Directorate of Security--NDS) want every high-faluting peon of modern airpower to carry on simultaneous conventional fights against Pakistan and Iran. That is the result of the most hard-and-fast rule of international relations: attack jets wished by a national government increases as per capita GDP decreases. Now, the kind of Air Force personnel unhappy with their relegation to an appendix of the COIN FM (and who have now published their own treatise in response) will remind you that the ANA definitely needs airlift and close air support (CAS) capabilities as force multipliers against the Taliban and other insurgent groups. But I gots to ask, at what cost?

If there is one thing that just about every pundit agrees on (excepting Rory Stewart ), it's that there are insufficient troops on the ground in Afghanistan. For an ANA force eventually slotted to reach about 80,000--a 61-aircraft force is going to require at least a few thousand troops to do everything from flying to maintenance to logistical support for the Air Corps. It will in turn rob the best and the brightest from the nascent Afghan land forces. Many of these new Air Corps officers are going to be drawn from the first class of Afghanistan's West Point, graduating this year. Given the sex appeal of being a pilot in the third-world, this virtually ensures that the very best of the very best will be in the sky supporting the fight rather than on the ground winning it.

Now, doubting Debbies (and Daves--don't want to be sexist here) are going to tell me, "If you acknowledge that they'll need an air power capability in the future, you've got to start at some point, right?" Well, yeah. But let's keep our eyes on the target. NATO countries are wavering in their support for the mission and increased casualties have curtailed the willingness of all Allies, including the US, to operate in small, remote outposts. Air support, on the other hand, comes at virtually no political cost and can continue virtually indefinitely. It seems we should be focusing our efforts to train, man, and equip the ANA to win the fight on the ground for now. Even our fickle publics can handle the fight in the air for the foreseable future instead of diminishing the ground capabilities of the ANA to build an Air Corps that they will barely be able to maintain.

After all, nothing says "legitimate government" like a Soviet-era HIND flying over an Afghan village...

But this report on the (in)effectiveness of the Israeli Air Force in the 2006 War with Hizbollah is one he'll read cover-to-cover.

Frustrated by its inability to stem rocket attacks on Israeli soil, Israel expanded its attacks on civilian targets to exact punishment on Hezbollah supporters and the government and people of Lebanon. Israel doggedly explained its action by reiterating again and again that Hezbollah fighters were “terrorists” and that Hezbollah was ultimately responsible for any damage caused, but outside of a small circle of supporters, Israel increasingly was objectified as the aggressor.