Counter Insurgency Blog

EXCERPT: “The vanguard of the 30,000 US troop surge to Afghanistan will arrive this week to fight a war increasingly linked to Al-Qaeda and extremists in Pakistan, the top US military(ACCP) officer said Monday.

Admiral Mike Mullen flew into Afghanistan for talks on President Barack Obama’s sweeping new war strategy seeking to turn around the eight-year Taliban insurgency, deny Al-Qaeda a safe haven and train Afghan forces. ‘The key part of that strategy was the decision to surge an additional 30,000 United States troops in Afghanistan,’ Mullen told reporters. ‘Marines from Camp Lejeune will arrive this very week,’ he added, referring to the largest US Marine Corps base on the US east coast.

A 1,500-strong Marine contingent is expected to arrive this week in southern Helmand, one of the worst battlefields, as part of a vanguard set to prepare the logistics for thousands more due in the coming months.”

Nonaligned India was perceived by most analysts to be largely in the Soviet camp during the Cold War. But the demise of the Soviet Union prompted India to recalibrate its relationship with the world’s only remaining superpower: the United States.

Another major factor assisting in this realignment was India’s embrace since the early 1990’s of free market reforms, trade liberalization and privatization measures. These changes opened up the vast Indian market to U.S. exporters and foreign investors. While millions of Indians are still desperately poor, around 300 million Indians have joined the middle class. Thus a new and expanding Indian market is opening up for a wide variety of U.S. exports, and U.S. investment in Indian industry and infrastructure has risen appreciably in the last few decades.

As a rising regional power, India is anxious to be recognized as a major player not only in South Asia but on the international stage. The importance of India to the U.S. was highlighted by the choice of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the first foreign dignitary to be accorded the honor of a state visit.

A major impediment retarding India’s quest towards great power status is its perennial dispute with neighboring Pakistan over Kashmir. The two oldest conflicts on the agenda of the UN Security Council from the late 1940’s are the Arab-Israeli and Kashmir conflicts.

Despite a number of diplomatic meetings spread over five decades, India and Pakistan have yet to overcome the hurdle of Kashmir, over which they have fought three wars. For Pakistan, Kashmir remains the unfinished agenda of the 1947 Partition. For secular multicultural India, Kashmir is a symbol of its heterogeneity.

President Obama has publicly stated that the U.S. would help India and Pakistan to normalize their relations, including the dispute over Kashmir. The U.S. can help both countries. If the U.S. can persuade India to withdraw some of its forces on its border with Pakistan, this gesture would enable the latter to commit more of its troops now facing India to its lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

While the Pakistan army has achieved encouraging gains against the Pakistani Taliban in Swat and South Waziristan, its counterinsurgency efforts need to achieve more success. Once the tribal areas are pacified, they will no longer afford a sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda elements that cross the mountainous and porous Pakistan-Afghanistan border at will, to attack U.S. and NATO troops fighting the Taliban insurgents.

So it is patently in the U.S. interest to invest more diplomatic capital in New Delhi and Islamabad. India and Pakistan have both suffered from violent extremism. They continue to be plagued by domestic insurgencies. Whether they admit it or not, they have a shared interest in combating the ravages of terrorism in their territories.

As the U.S. footprint in both Pakistan and India assumes greater depth, hopefully the U.S. will nudge both countries to consistently focus on a resolution of the Kashmir imbroglio. A mutually acceptable settlement of this issue should be placed on the same pedestal as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in U.S. calculations.

- S. Azmat Hassan
The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has been ongoing since the 1940’s and impacts security throughout the region. Worldfocus contributing blogger S.Azmat Hassan argues that settling the conflict there should be as urgent a foreign policy goal for the United States as working towards peace in the Middle East.
http://worldfocus.org/files/2009/12/th_india_kashmirsoldier.jpg”

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US Tries New Tack Against Taliban – Anand Gopal, Wall Street Journal.

The US-led coalition and the Afghan government are launching an initiative to persuade Taliban insurgents to lay down their weapons, offering jobs and protection to the militants who choose to abandon their fight. While President Hamid Karzai’s government has been trying to woo these insurgents for years, the new program marks the first time that the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces are systematically reaching out to Taliban fighters. The tactic comes as the US prepares to announce Tuesday how many additional troops it will send to Afghanistan as part of a new strategy aimed at bringing the eight-year war to a successful end. US officials also hope America’s European allies will raise their troop contributions as part of the new push.

The Afghan government has had a reconciliation program in place since 2004, and claims to have turned more than 8,000 insurgents. That program, however, is widely derided as corrupt and ineffective. Insurgents were enticed with offers of jobs but rarely received the promised assistance, leading many to rejoin the fight. Western officials behind the new reconciliation program say they believe the majority of insurgents are fighting for money – the Taliban often pay their members – or personal grievances. Luring such men from the battlefield is a central component of America’s new counterinsurgency strategy crafted by US Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied commander here…

Afghanistan hikes police salaries (AP via Yahoo! News): “Afghanistan is hiking police salaries by between 33 and 67 percent, the Interior Ministry said Wednesday, to curb rampant corruption and boost recruitment in a force that suffers much higher casualty rates than the insurgency-wracked country’s army.”

DIIG Current Issues No. 16: Contracting for Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan: ”

The U.S. government has spent $153B in 2008 dollars on contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and their neighborhoods since fiscal year (FY) 2001, according to the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS). In June 2009, 194,000 contractors were working for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to 190,000 U.S. troops. At least 1,200 contractors have been killed in the two wars.

FORT IRWIN, Ca: When the National Training Center opened here in 1981, it presented the most realistic training environment imaginable to prepare troops for a potential large-scale, tank-on-tank confrontation with the Soviet Union in Germany’s Fulda Gap.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, NTC transformed dramatically to train deploying warfighters for the fight against terrorists and insurgent groups in Iraq, and to a lesser degree, Afghanistan. The Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., conducts most Afghanistan-based mission rehearsal exercises.

Today, as the military begins drawing down in Iraq, the NTC cadre is looking ahead to what they believe will be this sweeping training center’s future role. Instead of preparing troops for either conventional or irregular warfare, they expect to train them to face “hybrid threats” that include both ends of the spectrum and everything in between.

That will require another major transformation at NTC, a post larger than Rhode Island deep within the Mojave Desert.

NTC long ago shed its Cold War focus, with a permanent opposing force that used Warsaw Pact tactics, dressed in Soviet-type uniforms and navigated the training grounds in Vietnam-era M-551 Sheridan tanks modified to look like the T-72 and BMP tanks.

The focus turned to counterinsurgency operations required in Iraq and Afghanistan. Troops deploying to the combat theater were trained in mounted and dismounted patrols, cordon-and-search missions, searches for weapons and high-value targets, bilateral talks with Iraqi officials and infrastructure missions. They also learned how to detect the enemy’s weapon of choice: improvised explosive devices.

As Iraqi security forces increasingly took the lead in security operations, the NTC cadre began training the new “advise and assist” brigades deploying to support them.

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U.N. moves 600 foreign staffers in Afghanistan (New Haven Register): “Associated Press KABUL — The United Nations is sending about 600 foreign staff out of the country or into secure compounds because of the deadly Taliban attack on U.N. workers, warning the Afghan government Thursday that international support will wane unless it cracks down on corruption fueling the insurgency.”

Obama nearing decision to send more troops to Afghanistan: “The Army’s counterinsurgency manual estimates that an all-out counterinsurgency campaign in a country with Afghanistan’s population would require about …