This article focuses on some of the operations we're doing in our part of Afghanistan….particularly Radubarq operations...

Inside The Pentagon
August 7, 2008
Pg. 1
General: Afghan Forces Leading 75 Percent Of Ops In Eastern Areas
The Afghan military is leading 70 to 75 percent of operations in the eastern provinces while coalition forces play a supporting role, the No. 2 U.S. commander of operations in that part of the country said this week.

The Afghan National Army -- which began one of its biggest missions days ago -- numbers about 60,000 to 70,000 troops, Brig. Gen. Mark Milley, deputy commanding general of operations at Combined Joint Task Force 101 in Afghanistan, told Inside the Pentagon. He came to Afghanistan in March.

Illustrating the development of the Afghan forces, Milley said the ANA headed operations 68 percent of the time in the April-May period. This is a slight jump from last October, when the coalition and the ANA each led half of the missions, Milley said. He said he has no data prior to October 2007, noting it is hard to pinpoint when they acquired capacity and capability.

At least one analyst expressed doubts about some of the numbers, however.
“I don’t know how they’re counting it, but I would be surprised to find out that the Afghan National Army forces are leading that high a percentage of operations” due to the serious shortage of western military mentors, said Seth Jones, a political scientist at the RAND think tank. But he concedes the ANA, overall, is much improved these days.

Over the last few years, Jones has visited Afghanistan several times to assess the training of the ANA including recent trips to Regional Command East (RC East), where Milley is based. “I was just recently in Paktia [province] where they’ve been begging for more Afghan National Army on patrols,” he said.

The situation is more dire in the volatile southern region of Afghanistan, Jones said, explaining the ANA simply lacks the sheer numbers to head operations particularly in rural areas.

The nature of Afghan army operations, meanwhile, is also changing, Milley contended.
The ANA has traditionally headed smaller-unit military campaigns at the battalion level (known as a kandak) involving policing and conducting routine patrols, but an operation taking place in the eastern provinces of Khowst, Paktia, Logar and Paktika is “new in terms of size and scope and sophistication,” Milley explained. “This is a big deal. . . . This wasn’t some kind of magic at Disney Land, where we’re prompting them or anything behind a screen.”

The so-called Radubarq counterinsurgency effort is a “poster-boy operation” involving multiple kandaks and brigades within the ANA 203rd Corps led by Maj. Gen. Abdul Khaliq, he explained.

The operation began about six days ago and has no end date, he said on Aug. 3. The ANA has deployed about 1,500 troops for the operation. This initiative was the brainchild of Khaliq who, along with his staff, developed the intelligence piece of the operation and currently supervises troops.

“Gen. Khaliq’s making the decisions on where to put forces and what to do in the next 24 to 48 hours, that kind of thing,” Milley told ITP. He said this is an example of a capability that was lacking five years ago or even a year ago.

The campaign has also brought together 400 NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S. forces based in RC East. Coalition forces are offering close-air support, medical evacuation assistance, helicopters, artillery and infantry forces, he said.

“If you’re familiar with the Khowst-Gardez Road, that’s sort of the center mass” of the operation, Milley said, adding the route is found in the mountains. “The Khowst-Gardez Road is a major development project, and the enemy has sworn to prevent it from being properly built.”

To this end, the Afghan army has assumed responsibility for ensuring nothing stops the road from being built, he said. “We want to see what effects we get on the enemy. We want to see how much enemy’s out there.”

A prison break in the southern province of Kandahar in June was another reflection of growing Afghan military strength, Milley maintained. At the national level, the Afghan army chief of staff and the defense ministry issued orders to reposition forces from the capital of Kabul and from RC East, down to RC South where the prison break occurred, he said.

“With very limited ISAF or coalition assistance, they were able to reposition several kandaks down there on very short notice. And they did so very quickly and they did it with good order,” Milley said.

Apart from their growing independence, Afghan security forces are acquiring more and more capabilities, he told ITP. He said this includes small-unit tactics at the level of company or below, fire and maneuver, and command and control at the small-unit level.

Moreover, Milley said, Afghan troops have improved their indirect-fire capability with artillery. They have “a limited mechanized and armored capability” at the kandak level, as well as prowess with rotary-wing aircraft, medical evacuation aircraft and fixed-wing aircraft, he continued.

In addition, they are receiving more sophisticated equipment and weapons.
During an Aug. 1 Defense Department blogger’s roundtable, U.S. Army Col. Thomas McGrath, commander of Afghanistan Regional Security Integration Command-South based at Kandahar Airfield, reported that “significant quantities of modern equipment” would be fielded to the ANA’s 205th Hero Corps later this year.

This includes some 250 up-armored humvees per brigade, giving the ANA “a much greater survivability against both ambushes, IEDs or mines,” McGrath said. There are also plans to replace AK-47s with M-16s, he said. “We’re at about 65 [percent], 70 percent of the corps that’s traded out with M-16s.”

Acknowledging that some Western-donated Afghan equipment has been sold by the ANA in the past, McGrath told bloggers it will be easier to track the M-16s since each will be assigned to a single soldier.

Afghan troops are part of six corps-level organizations spread throughout the country. Each corps has a special forces commando kandak, as well as a variety of infantry or maneuver brigades capable of conducting multi-brigade operations and shifting combat forces around the country, Milley told ITP.

As the Afghan military has grown, so has willingness to share information between Afghan and coalition forces.
As an example, the United States has attached one of its brigade tactical command posts, a small command and control element, to Afghan Gen. Khaliq’s corps headquarters, Milley said. He said this move ensures Khaliq has adequate access to intelligence information through “a pretty robust cell. . . . And I would also tell you that some of our best intelligence comes from the Afghans themselves. They have very good intelligence networks throughout all of the communities.”

Another positive sign is the emergence of a tribal uprising bent on weeding out the Taliban and other insurgents, Milley said, but added it is in an early phase.

“There are some indicators that in some specific areas, some of the tribes are actively resisting the various enemy terrorist groups that operate inside Afghanistan,” Milley said. “And that active resistance is everything from . . . providing significantly increased intelligence to the government of Afghanistan or coalition forces, all the way to forming local defense forces.

“But it’s very sporadic, it’s not uniform, [and] is not analogous per se to the Sons of Iraq,” he said, referring to a program in which former insurgents are turning their guns against al Qaeda and similar groups. “And it is in a very nascent stage as opposed to anything quite advanced that you’ve seen elsewhere.”

Milley said he was reluctant to offer more details about the initiative, fearing it would spur unnecessary speculation. He added the onus is on the Afghan government, not foreign forces, to decide the next steps.

RAND’s Jones told ITP he has not heard of the tribal initiative, and that the Sons of Iraq effort gathered steam over two years.

With violence in RC East and RC South mounting, and insurgents significantly penetrating rural areas, the success of an Afghan uprising remains uncertain, he said. “As part of the reconciliation process for the last several years, there have been a number of efforts to turn tribes, and turn Taliban, Hezb-e-Islam and other insurgent groups . . . to support the government, with minimal success.

“The question is whether this actually means anything,” he said, referring to the latest effort. “It’s too early to say.”

While certain advances have been made, help is still needed in other areas of the conflict.
Logistics has been particularly troublesome, according to Milley. A rugged terrain, the weather conditions, the enemy situation and a rudimentary logistical infrastructure with the lack of hard-surface roads and bridge networks have hampered the maintenance of Afghan security forces in the field, he said. He said Afghans are in the midst of developing and connecting their supply systems, though.

“It’s very complex in the moving of a variety of classes of supply -- from food and water to ammunition, to medical supplies, to barrier materials such as wire and force protection equipment,” he said. “Think Wal-Mart, think Fedex, but think of those things on steroids,” Milley said.

-- Fawzia Sheikh