by Todd Greentree
Having just concluded my first month in Afghanistan, passing time is sure to disprove much premature wisdom. The one truth I am confident will remain in place here is that a foreign organization always comes to reflect the nature of its host.
The proof is everywhere. A half-hour’s drive from where I sit at TF Warrior HQ on Bagram Air Field, is a literal empire’s graveyard of Soviet tanks, BMP’s, trucks, guns, and other dead armor that stretches for miles across the skirt of the Shomali Plain. BAF itself is a zoo, filled with an infinite complexity of tribes and subspecies, all of them connected with our current Afghan enterprise: soldiers and airmen, marines and even sailors of all branches and badges; special ops types of multiple flavors, each behind their own wire within the wire; spooks and spookettes, svelte in their blue windbreakers and Walther PPKs in leather shoulder holsters with matching ammo clips. I’ve learned more flags here than I have in years, tacked to the uniforms of French Chasseurs Alpins, Romanian Special Forces, Kiwi Provincial Reconstruction Teams, Singaporean (!) medics, and so many others in this counterinsurgency by coalition that even Gulf Storm seems like simple addition. Then there are the special subclasses of contractors, where KBR reigns by virtue of quantity, but others hold their own, like the Green Beans Coffee concession, the hairdressers from Kyrgyzstan, or the Northrop-Grumman folks who skulk about on the far edges of the flight line. Of course, the second you roll to the other side of the perimeter – a Force Protection feat in itself – it becomes unavoidably pre-biblical, with camel caravans, and mud brick fortresses, and shapeless women in their light blue burqas, except for the cell phones everywhere and the need to watch for VBIEDS (Vehicle Born Improvised Explosive Devices).
The job of brigade political advisor stands at the intersection of strategy and operations, and is less ethereal than your more traditional diplomatic assignment; President Obama’s new Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke passed through recently, but from Task Force Warrior the hurricane was merely a breeze. And what an honor it is to ride with the brigade commander, Col. Scott Spellmon, West Point wide receiver class of ’86 and one of the best of the best, as we spend late nights trying to make more of civilian casualty “consequence mitigation” than throwing compensation dollars over the transom, or patrol up to 11,000 feet in the snow to figure out how in the hell to keep a suicide truck bomber from getting inside the Salang Tunnel and shutting down the main supply route that snakes its way south from Central Asia.
OK, Iraq turned Afghanistan into a lousy secondary operation, when it should have been the primary, but you really can only get so far with economy of force. Ratios definitely matter – as in which one of these four valleys would you like us to hold? Broadly speaking, I think we get it. The idea is to shape, clear, hold, and build, with the four lines of action – security, governance, development, and information –as the inevitable briefing slides illustrate – upholding the temple of strategy. But we skip steps all of the time, and am left wondering sometimes whether they really do add up. There are some curious tics, like the guidance that directs us to “consider the political effects of military operations,” rather than to incorporate the interaction of political and military dimensions, not only as consequence, but as a truly integral operating principle. After we clear that valley, when the Afghan Army reoccupies the post it abandoned last year, what else are we going to do to back them up there, not just along the main road we paved or in the new district headquarters we built, but also in the villages and among the people who may be, depending on the day, our open partners or our secret adversaries?
It did not take long to be absolutely convinced that there is no substitute for the US military, which has taken on the order to construct a new country and gotten right to the job. Road building gets planned and conducted like a combat operation. The approach to social engineering, or nation-building as the conventional wisdom terms it, is much the same, although I am less certain about its efficacy or whether we really are creating a brave new world in Afghanistan. I’ve gotten more out of re-reading War Comes to Long An, Jeffrey Race’s classic account of the Vietnam War in one province, than just about anything other than Richard Warburton’s tales of struggling against the mullahs and the Taliban in Eighteen Years in the Khyber, that’s 1872-1890. The other day, as I was participating in a staff planning session at division HQ, I kept running my fingers over the carved edges of the gigantic conference table and staring at the delicate flower patterns inlaid into the dark wooden surface. Then it dawned on me, we were planning at Soviet conference table in their staff room. To the victor go the spoils, I suppose. Certainly the spirit that invested the room that day was not of defeat, but that this is all doable. OK, that’s probably a healthy attitude, and after all I’m only on my first month here.