Center for a New American Security

Sometimes insurgents are the good guys, and Marek Edelman was one of the good guys. He died a over a week ago, and when I read his obituary in the newspaper after his passing, I found myself shaking my head in awe. "What a life."

I always like the back-page obituaries in the Economist because they tend to celebrate the lives of the men and women they profile rather than mourn their passing. On the heels of a highly amusing obituary for William Safire last week, the Economist then did Edelman justice this week.

The odds were overwhelming. He was deputy commander of 220 untrained “boys” with pistols and home-made explosives. Against them were around 2,000 Nazi soldiers, the pick of the Wehrmacht, with plenty more behind them. The Nazis had come on the eve of Passover, April 19th 1943, to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, from which they had been deporting 6,000 Jews a week to the death camps. For almost a month Mr Edelman helped keep them at bay, barricaded in the streets around the brushmakers’ district until the whole place was burned down round him.

Thanks to all of you who have passed along Malcolm Gladwell's fun article on basketball and insurgents.

According to the Colombian government as reported by Reuters:

The founder and chief commander of Colombia's FARC rebel force, Manuel Marulanda, has died after more than 40 years fighting the state from jungle and mountain camps, the government said on Saturday. If confirmed, the death of Manuel Marulanda, who organized the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas in the 1960s, would be the heaviest blow yet to Latin America's oldest insurgency, already weakened by a military setbacks.

Indeed, Colombia gives us a view as to the possible duration of a narcotic-funded, rural-based insurgency. Remind you of anywhere else that we are fighting?

Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov, and the Laptop: The Neo Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan is a must read for any soldier, sailor, airman, marine, or government official headed to Afghanistan. It is a good starting point for anyone else with a passing interest in the current conflict in Afghanistan.

Most important to the work are Giustozzi's first three chapters in which he differentiates the neo-Taliban from the Taliban that the United States dispersed in the final two months of 2001. This is vital as until recently it was quite common to view the new Taliban insurgency through the prism of the previous Taliban movement (the best book on which is Ahmed Rashid's Taliban). It was on this basis that writers such as Thomas Johnson argued that the Taliban insurgency was essentially a tribal movement of Ghilzai Pashtuns (and specifically the Hotak sub-tribe) against the Durrani Pashtun (and specifically Popalzai sub-tribe) dominated Afghan government.

The neo-Taliban as described by Giustozzi are a more-or-less unitary insurgency. The senior leadership operate as a franchising operation that maintains the Taliban brand name through the Laheya, a set of rules regulating behavior.

Because there are few outlets for grievances against the Afghan government, the Taliban offer their franchise coverage to various groups with local grievances in return for occasional obedience to orders directed from the Quetta Shura. The result of this franchising is a relatively flat, non-hierarchical network that allows individual branches to carry out jihad against the government while receiving resources and some direction from the central Taliban command. In Guistozzi's words:

By 2006, the Taliban had formed a complex opposition alliance comprising:

• At the centre their purely ideologically driven madrasa students (including a significant number from the NWFP)
• A second ring of genuine jihadist recruits provided by village mullahs mainly driven by xenophobia
• A third, and by 2006 the largest, ring of local allies (communities and opportunists)
• An outer ring of mercenary elements

It is an excellent, well-articulated, and well-supported breakdown of the Neo-Taliban insurgency.

In other areas, Giustozzi gets it right but is not particularly original (nothing wrong with being right but unoriginal). Giustozzi's description of the grievances upon which the neo-Taliban developed the movement have previously been discussed in Sarah Chayes' excellent The Punishment of Virtue. The breakdown of post-jihad Afghanistan into competing power bases of traditional leaders, commanders (including criminal barons), and mullahs has been discussed by several others including Larry Goodson. An excellent account of the military and political breakdown of the neo-Taliban can be found in this month's Military Review.

Originality excepted, nowhere other than in Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop, can be found in one place such a detailed description of the organization of the Neo-Taliban nor their region-by-region emergence in post-2001 Afghanistan. It is this that makes it a must read.

It is a shame then that Giustozzi did not simply stop at his third chapter (and bits of his fourth) with a major contribution to the study of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In subsequent chapters, he marks himself as a commentator on insurgency and counterinsurgency who has little practical or theoretical understanding of the subject.

In the fourth chapter he pontificates on whether the Taliban have adopted a Maoist strategy or a "war of the flea," citing Robert Taber's description of the latter. A quick read of Taber would have informed Giustozzi that the term "war of the flea" was derived from the translation of Mao rather than presenting an alternate paradigm. His study of counterinsurgency has apparently included a reading of TX Hammes' The Sling and the Stone but has not included the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, even as he discusses the supposed new approach of the US in the country. His discussion of ISAF and Coalition Forces in Chapter 6 is exceedingly ill-informed, especially when compared to that of Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian's chapter on Afghanistan in Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare.

His discussion of Taliban tactics describes a rag-tag bunch of insurgents incapable of posing a serious threat to ISAF forces while poorly describing the effects of weapons such as the RPG-7 and DShK. Complex Taliban ambushes and long-range engagements, including accurate mortar fire, are not featured in his account despite their prevalence in the country.

Such shortcomings are for Giustozzi the result not of deliberate acts of omission but of a failure to consult with those who could have provided insight into the military side of the insurgency and counterinsurgency that he attempts to describe. While Kip knows and has tremendous respect for (among others cited and thanked by Giustozzi) Massoud Karokhail, Eckart Schiewek, Michael Semple , and Barbara Stapleton, none would qualify as knowing much about insurgency per se or the specific design of ISAF's counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Neither would any, besides Karokhail perhaps, be able to describe with much sophistication detailed tactics of either the Taliban, Afghan, or Coalition forces. Had Giustozzi sought this expertise, he could most definitely have found it, particularly from Lieutenant General David Barno at the NESA center.

That he didn't leaves us with the best half-book to date on the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

PS Happy Mother's Day to all mothers, particularly to Lady Kip, Mother Kip, and Grandmother Kip.

Reports are that Mullah Naqibullah has been captured in Helmand Province.

The senior Taliban leader has played the catch-and-release program well, using corruption within the National Directorate of Security to escape accountability for his actions and to make a mockery of the Afghan Government and Rule of Law. This will mark the third time he has been captured on the battlefield.

Another escape on his part would demonstrate how uncommitted the Afghan government has become to its own cause. The case of Mullah Naqibullah also highlights the urgent need for judicial sector reform and possibly for focused use of the now mostly theoretical National Security Courts architecture within the National Directorate of Security.

Abu Muqawama was reading the religion section of the Washington Post today:

When Deacon Ken Finn is counseling prisoners, he often tells the story of Saint Dismas.

"He was the guy crucified on the right side of Christ," Finn says. "He never took a course in [Catholic doctrine], but he gets to skip purgatory and go straight to heaven." ...

Crucifixion is too harsh a crime for thievery, Bock says, so the men were probably insurgents or revolutionaries of some kind.

Canada's Globe and Mail has this week released a report on the Taliban entitled "Talking to the Taliban" in which its Kandahar correspondent Graeme Smith interprets interviews of an Afghan who he has hired as a "researcher" (based on the description in the story, "source" would likely be a better term).

The 42 interviews conducted with self-professed and Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan Taliban fighters are a must watch for any counterinsurgent in Afghanistan. These videos give us a window into the average Afghan guerrilla fighter, the men who emerge as a result of underlying causes and whose individual deaths will not resolve the conflict. These are the men that in some combination we will have to convince, cajole, capture, or kill (and compromise with) if we are to win in Afghanistan.

The most important thing to emerge is an idea of the Taliban's narrative which focuses for the most part on foreign occupation, which identifies Karzai and Musharraf as "slaves," and which underplays the role of money or opium in the motivations of the fighters. The propaganda also focuses on the importance of ordinary Afghans in supporting the fighters rather than external support. The interviews also identify subtly some areas of discomfort and disagreement, particularly as applied to the question of poppy and the Durrand line. I will personally spend a lot of time replaying them all myself as I believe it is important to understand not only the fighters but also their message (they know they're playing to an audience when the camera is rolling).

The interviews themselves are fascinating. A few of the graphics and maps are quite useful, including the tribal map of Panja-ve (Kandahar-bound or -present USMC, see Appendix B, 3-24; use accordingly--do not then write "SECRET//NO FORN"). That said, much of the reporting by Graeme Smith in the accompanying videos is unsophisticated to say the least. My main beef is that the he is using a worthy in its own right but admittedly unscientific survey to make sweeping conclusions.

For instance, in his final piece discussing suicide bombing he says, that we are "seeing a shift in the Taliban movement" away from past debates on the practice and toward widespread acceptance. Yet not only is the poll unscientific but the fighters are being watched in most cases by their comrades or minders and would be unlikely to digress from a pre-approved plan, even if they felt otherwise.

And while I agree that the Nurzai and Ishaqzai make up a substantial portion of the insurgency, the video is only coming from places where his researcher can get access and therefore are more likely to come from a small group of tribes among whom the researcher can travel. I should also point out that a number of Ghilzai tribes (as well as tribes outside of the Ghilzai/Durrani branches) are more pro-government than pro-insurgency, even as his diagram identifies all Ghilzai as insurgents.

Because the Taliban could not point to Canada on a map or identify who Stephen Harper is, Smith felt them unsophisticated. I believe (and I am really not taking a cheap shot at Canada here-you all deserve hugs) that most of the world could not identify Stephen Harper's job if asked. Moreover, I bet that an interview of Canadians would find them as clueless as to the Nuristani-speaking areas of Afghanistan as the self-identified fighters are to the French- speaking areas of Canada. Several identified the fact that the US and Canada were neighbors, which is probably better than most Canadians could do if asked to identify the neighboring countries of Afghanistan.

Smith's broader point in this is that the Taliban pose no danger to Canadian shores even if they win. These fighters are not part of a global jihad in Smith's opinion because they profess no allegiance to it. This is to mistake the foot soldiers for their leaders. One need only read Al Qaeda's propaganda of the last month to know that it would pursue global jihad from within Afghanistan and Canada would be a target--heck, just look at Mullah Dadullah Lang's second-to-last interview to see that. He seemed to have a pretty decent grasp of geography.

And, lest we forget, it is from Afghanistan that a true salafist jihadi movement of not only global aspirations but also global reach emerged.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) releases regular reporting on the opium trade in Afghanistan. They have done excellent work in analyzing the extent of the opium problem in Afghanistan.

Already in the 2007 annual survey on opium production in Afghanistan, UNODC challenged some of the claptrap from the SENLIS Council and other groups who have argued that poverty causes farmers to grow poppy and that eradication then results in those farmers joining the insurgency. (see also the very interesting, if you can take the bureaucratese, 2008 annual world report)

In a March report, UNODC methodically puts to rest the issue of poverty as the root cause for regional opium production. Instead:

...it is clear that both local corruption and the insurgency are key elements in the recent opium boom in Afghanistan. Today, the most significant factor affecting the scale of cultivation among opium poppy farmers appears to be the security situation. In areas with good security, the average opium poppy farm consisted of just 10 jeribs. In more dangerous
areas, the plots were nearly four times as high, averaging 37 jeribs. The February 2008 MCN/UNODC Rapid Assessment Survey9 showed that, in a sample of 469 villages, more than
two-thirds of the villages located in areas with poor security conditions reported growing opium poppy in 2008, as compared to less than one-third in areas that enjoyed better security. In the southern and western provinces, the link between security conditions and opium poppy cultivation was even stronger, with 100 per cent of the surveyed villages where poor security conditions prevailed having planted opium poppy this year. As stated in a recent report commissioned by the World Bank and DIFID: “Ominously, the links and
synergy between opium poppy and insecurity are becoming increasingly apparent."

Moreover, in Southern Afghanistan, where the majority of opium is grown, farmers could give up poppy and still make more than farmers anywhere else in the country (although less than they would growing poppy).

Even more importantly, in areas where agricultural assistance was provided within a secure environment, poppy production was greatly decreased. In areas without security, agriculture assistance had a far smaller impact, further suggesting that insurgency and poppy cultivation are far more intertwined than poverty and insurgency.

Now this become a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument because opium and insurgency have become mutually generative, that is they feed off of one another. You can't deal with one without dealing with the other.

The International Community and Afghan government have adopted an approach that looks to settle the opium issue after the insurgency has been dealt with. Yet, the opium issue contributes monetarily to the insurgency, creates an illicit economy which undermines any sense of government control, and de-legitimizes the government as many of its key leaders are involved in the trade.

(Such as Nangarhar governor Gul Agha Shirzai and, most Afghans believe, President Karzai's brother)

So what next? ISAF has adopted a head-in-the-sand approach to dealing with opium. (an approach it has also adopted with its economic development and reconstruction, governance, and information "lines of operation") As with the majority of our challenges in the country, the start is to develop a national strategy for defeating the insurgency.

A good place to begin would be supporting a nested security strategy within the Afghanistan National Development Strategy that includes a robust framework for dealing with opium. Kip has personally seen and heard ISAF leaders deride the Afghanistan National Development Strategy. The strategy, which the Afghan government is trying to produce, is the agreed upon framework for implementing the 2006 Afghanistan Compact between the International Community and the Afghan government. Neither ISAF nor CSTC-A (the US-led security assistance command) have robustly participated in the process of developing the strategy, nor as Australia's new government made clear last month, has it developed any form of coherent alternative strategy.

The Afghanistan National Development Strategy seeks to tie the various components of the Afghan government into a coherent whole capable of building an Afghan nation. An integral component of this will be defeating an insurgency which international forces cannot defeat on their own. And an integral piece of defeating the insurgency will be dealing with opium.

The up-and-down consultative process for developing the Strategy, while imperfect, has actually sought to engage communities that have been ostracized by either the regime or international forces. This has included beginning to tackle difficult issues such as narcotics. ISAF and CSTC-A should robustly participate in and support the process rather than strategizing in a vacuum.

At the very least, as a peon to unity of effort, the US Army could consider unblocking web access to the Afghanistan National Development Strategy and UNAMA from its computers.

Whoever becomes the master of a city accustomed to freedom, and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed himself; because, when there is a rebellion, such a city justifies itself by calling on the name of liberty and its ancient institutions, never forgotten despite the passing of time and the the benefits received from the new ruler. Whatever the conqueror’s actions or foresight, if the inhabitants are not dispersed and scattered, they will forget neither that name nor those institutions; and at the first opportunity they will at once have recourse to them, as did Pisa after having been kept in servitude for a hundred years by the Florentines.

--Niccolo Machiavelli

China is the land of the peasant revolt, numerous small scale insurgencies spread over the land of a billion people, dealt with by compulsion and compromise and done relatively efficiently for state of its size.

A half century ago, Tibetans revolted against Communist Chinese rule. The revolt was crushed, and the Dalai Lama found himself opening the wisdom eye to Hollywood stars from exile in India and lecture halls around the world.

The Chinese have made major efforts to Sinify Tibet since its conquest, encouraging a settlement policy in these occupied territories that makes Israel's efforts in the West Bank and Gaza, well, look tame.

Tibetan revolutionaries are now seeking to make one last stand in the weeks leading up to the 103rd Olympiad, which Beijing hopes will mark its emergence as a world power. The leaders behind the movement are Tibetan monks, reflecting a seeming resurgence of Buddhist assertiveness after Buddhist-monk-led protests in Myanmar.

(All that needs to happen next is monk self-immolations in the streets, and this will look much like the 1960s with burning Buddhists in Asia and books on counterinsurgency.)

Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, is now 73 years old. Last year he received the Congressional Gold Medal--he is also a recipient of honorary Canadian citizenship and the Nobel Peace Prize (Kip thought these were the same thing). There are few moments left for the Dalai Lama to convert external moral support into actual political and resource support. The Dalai Lama has limited the demands of the movement over the years, willing to accept simply his return to Tibet and the protection of Tibetan culture, Buddhism, and autonomy while acknowledging Chinese sovereignty over the country.

With the Olympics putting China center stage, the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan supporters seek to keep the pot stirred just enough to embarrass China, to have people threaten or introduce significant possibilities of boycotts of the Olympics, and to make the possibility of acquiescence to Tibetan demands more palatable to the Chinese government. It is a very wise use of intensive media coverage of China with the upcoming Olympics.

Widespread protests have erupted through much of the Chinese province of Tibet and areas that were once part of Tibet but are now subsumed into other Chinese provinces. The Chinese government has responded by a major military crackdown and by trying to entirely cut off the province from Western media. Chinese media has highlighted violent aspects of the protests in order to garner more support within China for a crackdown on Tibetan demonstrators. Tenzin Gyatso has now called for an international investigation of "cultural genocide" in Tibet.

The troops and the monks are now in the streets. We will have to see how strong the desire for liberty is in the hearts of the average Tibetan. I give them pretty good chances of making an ongoing impact if they can keep the pressure up through the Olympics rather than pull the Burma fizzle.

Update: Charlie, here. See also, "The Restless Children of the Dalai Lama," for a discussion of inter-generational differences amongst Tibetan exiles. What role might these Tibetan Tigers have played in the current uprising?

Update II: What's next, free love?

Tibetan exiles here said they had also received news of at least two Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire as an act of protest; that claim could not be independently confirmed.

here

Since Kip's post regarding the Taliban's threat to begin attacking cell phone companies unless they shut their networks down during the night, the Taliban have begun to act on their threat.

Taliban have attacked 10 cell phone powers, destroying 6 of them. In response, in parts of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and other Southern provinces as well as parts of more central Ghazni, cell phone companies have reportedly begun to shut off service at night.

(Now one caveat to this analysis. Reuters is spectacularly bad at reporting from Afghanistan, and the news report makes clear that the reporter received much of his information second-hand without ever checking physically whether a cell phone works at evening in the provinces mentioned. The linked article sites one anonymous cell phone worker as its only other source. Kip can confirm the attacks on towers, just not all of the shutdowns in service reported in the provinces where they have been reported. That said, Kip has seen a lot of reporting in Afghanistan news networks and papers that he considers slightly more reliable than Reuters and will post if he discovers faults in the Reuters report. The German press has reported similarly, as has al-Jazeera.)

This is a new and effective tactic by the Taliban. The Taliban need cell phones just like anyone else. However, because the Taliban lack the requisite training and equipment, operations at night are very difficult for them. Therefore, a shut down in service at night is not going to impede operations drastically. Also, if the Taliban are selective about the towers they attack, they can ensure that they don't so drastically disrupt the infrastructure as to truly make things difficult for them. Moreover, the Taliban do have some replacement technology that they can use for communications if they really need it.

The threat and subsequent attacks against cell phone infrastructure demonstrate the Taliban's domination of the information operations sphere. They have identified an infrastructure vulnerability in basically unprotected cell phone towers, dictated that cell phone operators ought to shut their networks down at prescribed times, carried out their threats on time and as promised, and apparently have gotten the phone companies to comply. Moreover, they seem to have done this in a district like Zaire, which is a focal point of Canadian efforts to defeat the Taliban in Kandahar.

The cell phone companies have apparently made the calculation that the potential threat of an attack on their infrastructure and cost of such an attack are too high to continue service in the evening. They have made this decision despite government pleas to keep the networks up. If I were an insurgent seeking to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the government and its inability to provide security, I could think of few better low-cost, low-risk ways to do it. This is a pretty good indicator of where our efforts stand in Afghanistan today.

The government should now make every effort to locate cell phone towers within already protected security infrastructure before the Taliban look to make headway with a couple of spectacular attacks outside of the South.

(Also, you can see an LA Times analysis from last week here, although it reveals a rather simplistic view of the aims of the insurgency and how insurgencies gain support from the people)