Afghan Army Now 0 For 1

A battalion of the ever-so-new and questionably improved Afghan Army tried to go it alone last week. In what the NYT is pleased to call for no discernible reason, "a showcase," three hundred men of the First Brigade of the ambitiously numbered 201st Army Corp went to the village of Bad Pakh in Laghman Province.

It was an operation which started off bad and went to worse. The NYT saw the mission as a "debacle" and seemed eager to convey the impression of the Afghan unit having been chewed into tiny pieces by the far more able and resolute Taliban.

A careful consideration of what is known so far about what happened to the hapless unit shows a dynamic perfectly familiar to any American who served as an advisor to a unit of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN.) It appears that the Afghan unit had all the misfortunes and internal failures which normally typified an ARVN operation during the years the Americans did all the heavy lifting in their war with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.

The idea was to insert a blocking force by air and follow up with a frontal assault on the Taliban occupied village and surrounding terrain. This approach is right out of Elementary Tactics and is both reliable and simple. It is a preferred method particularly for relatively inexperienced commanders and troops. The problem came in that the Afghans lost operational security. A person of dubious loyalty apparently revealed the plan to Taliban.

Taliban did the obvious. They ambushed the ground mobile assault force. Later, facilitated by foul weather, they surrounded and cutoff the blocking force.

Opsec is always a major problem for the army of a country under threat from insurgency. Loyalties are shallow and fungible in the extreme. As plans have to flow up the national chain of command, the places where betrayal might occur are legion. History shows that the commander should plan for the highly probable contingency that his basic plan will be in the enemy's hand before the first boot hits the contested ground.

The way in which the situation developed on the ground, particularly the apparent dissolution of the Afghan units, indicates another flaw common in armed forces developed in the high pressure environment of an ongoing insurgency--lack of command and control at the lowest tactical levels and an absence of unit cohesion. At the sharp end of the stick, it is the ability of squad and fireteam leaders as well as the ethos of mutual trust existing within the troops which allows a unit to survive an ambush and regain the offensive.

The personal experiences of thousands of Americans who served as advisors at and below the company level in South Vietnam will undoubtedly be able to reconstruct what happened in the first few minutes from their memory banks. It isn't a pretty scene, but it is one which occurs again and again until NCOs and men develop the experience and mutual trust and confidence which rolls with the unexpected punch, gets up, and gains the initiative.

There were, apparently, no US or other foreign advisors in the field with the unfortunate Band of Three Hundred. Perhaps this was due to Afghan governmental and military sensibilities. Or, perhaps it stemmed from General Petraeus' faith in the training given to the Afghans before they took the field. This consideration is probably moot as the problems confronting an advisor in the midst of unit decay are (usually, even always) insurmountable. It is enough to keep alive in the midst of chaos.

There is another glaring error screaming for attention between the lines of the reports. That error is the obvious absence of a rapid reaction force standing by to pull the hotdogs out of the fire. If the Afghan high command or the commander of the 1st Brigade (or the 201st Army Corps) had wanted to keep this an all-Afghan show, they should have had additional forces immediately available either to exploit success or prevent disaster.

Better would have been an ISAF unit tabbed, briefed, and ready to pull relief and rescue duty so as to prevent the demoralizing effect of an Afghan defeat. This was not done. Rather ISAF components are now trying to retrieve the wounded and captured. This is a classic case of too little done too late.

There are larger lessons here as well.

One is the hardest to use. This is the simple fact that indigenous forces do not fight well or vigorously as long as there are outsiders willing and able to do the killing and dying. That was a constant bane in Vietnam. The same phenomenon was seen at work in Iraq during the surge. It remains to be seen if General Petraeus can do a better job of convincing the locals to fight, to fight hard, to fight with conviction rather than standing on the sidelines while the "infidels" take the major burden.

He did not show a particular talent for this during his time in charge in Iraq. Rather, he resembled General Westmoreland with lots of praise for the locals while allowing them a pass on heavy fighting. Only by real war can the locals gain the skills and self-confidence needed to defeat the insurgents who, after all, have spent years learning the trade of the soldier and know they are good at what they do.

The Afghan Army has to learn to take casualties without disintegrating. They have to learn that being killed is a normal part of the soldier's job description. These basics cannot be taught. They can only be learned--by doing.

While the NYT would like nothing better than to use this one mission as a paradigm for the war in general now and into the future, this is unjustified. All that needs to be remembered is that the ARVN got good, damn good, once the Americans made it obvious they were leaving.

This is the power of the 2011 withdrawal start date. It is a motivator to the locals. It gives a clear choice to Army and government alike, fight or give the Taliban the keys to the presidential residence.