Here is Josh's response to the colonel.
By Joshua Foust
Best Defense guest columnist
Many thanks to Tom for agreeing to host this discussion
about tactics in Afghanistan. I, too, am impressed to see how quickly LTC
Flynn responded to my admittedly heated criticisms of what happened in
Tarok Kolache this past winter. However, there are some points I feel I should
clear up:
To
clarify: I am not an orator. I am a fellow at the American Security Project and
a columnist for PBS, and before that I spent many years working on and in
Afghanistan for the Intelligence Community. It is misguided to deride my
expertise or experience in trying to evaluate what happened. Similarly, as the
commander responsible for some of the decisions we're discussing, we would all
have to agree that he can not be objective.
I'm
curious that both Tom and Paula linked to my post criticizing the decision to
burn a village to the ground with nearly 50,000 pounds of explosives, yet all
LTC Flynn felt the need to address was the decision to train an ALP cell. My
criticism of what happened in Paula's writing on it, is substantially more than
the ALP. It involves questions of clearing policies, land redistribution, the
inclusion of Colonel Raziq as a local partner, and, finally, the decision to
build an ALP cell outside MOI monitoring. I'd be interesting to see LTC Flynn
addressing either the decision to destroy that and other villages in the area.
Or, for that matter, Paula's portrayal of the event, which derided locals
complaining about the property loss as "engaging in theatrics" and claimed 25
tons of explosives were dropped on a village but somehow didn't leave a huge
smoking crater in the ground.
As
to the meat of LTC Flynn's response, he does not address my original point
about the ALP, which was that expediency inspired him to what Paula described
as avoiding the MOI vetting process in building out a local militia. From
interviews I've since conducted with soldiers active in Kandahar, it is my
understanding that this is a common practice-detail he could have provided,
were his real concern contextualizing what happened, as his opening paragraph
suggested -- but that doesn't address the fundamental problem: at the end of
the day, you are side-stepping the government of Afghanistan. And, much more
importantly, the reason the MOI wants to be involved is so that local shuras
don't use ALP cells as their personal militias -- a problem based in the
vetting process LTC Flynn still has not addressed (such as how one, as a
foreigner, performs a background check in an area that doesn't have paper
records of its inhabitants).
LTC
Flynn did not address my concern about previous local militia efforts in
Kandahar, which have all involved hired soldiers either defecting or abandoning
their posts and eventually selling their weapons to the Taliban. I have heard
good things about Nyaz Muhammad (again, with the context LTC Flynn wants), but
that still does not address how you accountably manage a group you cannot vet and
will have difficulty monitoring.
I'm
grateful to see, at the end, LTC Flynn address concerns about risk. This is the
crux of my argument, and it's possible that appropriate measures have been
taken to address them. These measures, however, have not come out in the
reporting about the situation in Tarok Kolache. It cannot be unfair to react
against the information available on hand, using experience from nearby areas
to try, imperfectly, to fill in the knowledge gaps. Ground commanders do this
routinely; it is not out of bounds for citizens to do so as well.
I
share LTC Flynn's desire to see the Arghandab return to the relatively stable
state it enjoyed under Mullah Naqib. But to do that requires a very
sophisticated understanding of the politics, power relationships, and social
networks of the area. And from what Paula has written of the area, I just don't
see any evidence of that understanding. And that, not the specific decision-making
of LTC Flynn, is what I found so shocking.
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