Ann Marlowe

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2008

1. Heroes of the Age
By David B. Edwards
University of California, 1996

David B. Edwards’s thesis in “Heroes of the Age” is that Afghanistan’s problems come from “the moral incoherence” of the country itself. Afghans share a myth of the nation, but not an idea of the state, Edwards argues. The principles of Islam, honor and state governance are all respected, but often incompatible. The conflict is vividly on display in Edwards’s engrossing essays about a three larger-than-life and arguably psychopathic men: Mullah Hadda, a saintly late-19th-century mullah from Ghazni, in central Afghanistan; Amir Abdur Rahman, Afghanistan’s brutal, unifying king from 1880 to 1901; and Sultan Muhammad Khan, who participated in Afghanistan’s last tribal rebellion, in the 1940s (he blinded his mother for denying him the opportunity to avenge his father’s death). Their stories, which unfold largely in the still-volatile eastern frontier provinces, would be useful to American soldiers in understanding the dysfunctional aspects of the society in which they are operating.

2. Caravans
By James Michener
Random House, 1963

This novel from early in James Michener’s career is the fruit of wide-ranging trips to Afghanistan in the mid-1950s. Despite its contrived plot, “Caravans” has more to teach about the country and its people than almost any later work of fiction or travel writing. Michener gets everything right, from the pronunciation of Kabul — “cobble” — to the archaeology. The protagonist, an American diplomat, travels across large areas of the country in 1946, some of the time with nomads, observing the beginnings of modernization, but also a public execution and mullahs spitting on those they disapprove of — a portent of the violent extremism in Afghanistan’s future.

3. The Hidden War
By Artyom Borovik
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990

Published when the author was barely 30, “The Hidden War” is the best-written account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This story has been obscured by a focus on the mujahedeen who ousted the Soviets. But it’s important precisely because the Soviet experience in Afghanistan was not ours: Soviet troops, many of them draftees, were sent into the country with no clear objective, and they performed — and behaved — terribly. They saw Kabul’s grimy, impoverished markets as a shopping opportunity, Borovik writes, and they quickly adapted to a place where “bribery, corruption, profiteering and drugs were no less common than the long lines in Soviet stores.” American soldiers, faced with the same culture, are influencing it in a positive direction, not submitting to it.

4. Modern Afghanistan
By Amin Saikal
I.B. Tauris, 2004

As an Afghan scholar based in Australia, Amin Saikal starts out with the advantage of fluency in the languages of original source documents and just a degree or two of separation from many of the contemporary figures he discusses in “Modern Afghanistan.” Saikal conveys some hard truths about his native land, including his broadest point: No Afghan government has been able to maintain itself in power without foreign support. He sometimes lapses into fashionable anti-Americanism, but he is right to note the many opportunities that America missed to influence Afghanistan as far back as the 1920s. Even in June 1976, with Soviet interference mounting, progressive nationalist President Sardar Daoud’s entreaties to the Ford administration for help went unheeded. Less than a year later, this flawed strongman — who looks pretty good compared with what came later — had been toppled by Afghan communists and killed. The effects of the civil war and the Soviet invasion that ensued are still unfolding.

5. A Journey Through Afghanistan
By David Chaffetz
Regnery Gateway, 1981

Because Afghanistan, despite its long history, has spurred comparatively little scholarship and serious study, books about the country can tend toward the eccentric. Certainly “eccentric” describes David Chaffetz’s vivid, loving account of a trip on horseback and on foot through remote areas of northwestern Afghanistan in the late 1970s. Chaffetz has good Persian and considerable learning, and he writes with wit and verve. It seems Chaffetz is now a computer company executive in France; he’s never written another book. But this will endure.

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal

OPINION

online.wsj.com/article/SB121340075723773801.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

In War Too, Personnel Is Policy
By ANN MARLOWE
June 14, 2008

As it becomes clear that the surge in Iraq is working – and with the Marines in southern Afghanistan succeeding where the British spent two years in a stalemate – we should beware of the temptation to congratulate ourselves on getting counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine right. In following a well-planned and executed counterinsurgency in Khost Province, Afghanistan, from summer 2007 to the present, I’ve seen that doctrine is not enough.

There are recognized best practices, such as living among the people and separating them from the insurgency. But in the societies where an army is likely to be fighting an insurgency – tribal, badly governed, poorly educated, and where politics is overwhelmingly personal – the role of commanders’ personalities may be larger than we want to acknowledge.

Experience – and the intuition it brings – may be as valuable as doctrine. The long tours of duty that the U.S. Army has been mandating in Iraq and Afghanistan are thus an excellent idea – at least for our fight against terror, if not for military families.

On three embeds – in July and November 2007 and March 2008 – I saw the American military adopting best-practice COIN strategies. The troops in question were the 619 paratroopers of the second battalion of the 321st regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. They spent most of a 15-month deployment in Khost, and all but two returned home.

As a result of their efforts, this million-population, San Francisco Bay-sized border province became known as the “model province” among the 14 under American command.

But the real secret was the decision of Khost maneuver commander Lt. Col Scottie D. Custer to move his men off the big base at Salerno, and to live, platoon by platoon, in eight Force Protection Centers around the province, providing security to the people. Also playing key roles were Arsala Jamal, Khost’s efficient 43-year-old governor, and Navy Cmdr. David Adams, an unusually gifted Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) commander.

“Key to our counterinsurgency success in Khost was that projects went hand-in-hand with our presence in the districts,” Cmdr. Adams explains. “We would respond to every attack with a new project ceremony in order to point out that the Afghan government and coalition were partnering to rebuild the country, while the enemy was just blowing things up. It seemed after a while the insurgents got tired of competing because the tribes were clearly on our side.”

As a result, 11 of Khost’s 12 districts supported the Afghan government by the end of the battalion’s deployment. (The two paratroopers who were killed died in the 12th district, Sabari.) In later 2007 and early 2008, a greater number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being called in before they could explode. Khostis were engaging with local government in increasing numbers. A network of asphalt roads crisscrossed Khost, 50 schools were built by the American military and 12,000 jobs added to the economy.

In April 2008, the 82nd Airborne troops in Khost went home. They were replaced by soldiers from the 101st Airborne. At the same time, Gov. Jamal went to Canada to see his family.

Suddenly, the successful COIN program in Khost began to show signs of strain. Within two months, five American troops and one military civilian died in IED and vehicle-born IED attacks in Sabari. A new type of IED began to appear, essentially 20 pounds of explosives in a plastic bucket. Without any metal elements, it can’t be detected by mine sweepers.
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Originally published in The Weekly Standard

An unheralded U.S. success in Afghanistan.
by Ann Marlowe
05/19/2008, Volume 013, Issue 34

www.theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/080inxsb.asp

While news reports like to speak of a “resurgent Taliban” in Afghanistan, in the 14 provinces that make up Regional Command East in Afghanistan they are a defeated military force. Not only do the Taliban refuse to engage American forces directly, they have not won an engagement with the Afghan National Army in a year. Even the unimpressive Afghan National Police have lately been winning battles with the insurgents.

RC-East is one of five regional commands in the NATO-led military and development mission in Afghanistan, and the only one under U.S. command. Colonel Marty Schweitzer of the 82nd Airborne Division has just finished a 15-month deployment commanding coalition forces in six provinces in eastern Afghanistan. Here on the eastern border and in the north of the country, the insurgency is largely a matter of IEDs and VBIEDs (Vehicle Born Improvised Explosion Devices), with the occasional suicide bomber. The counterinsurgency is what’s resurgent. The rugged terrain Schweitzer was responsible for shares a long border with Pakistan and is inhabited by 4.9 million Afghans, mostly poor and illiterate Pashtuns. But U.S. forces have made great progress in these six provinces. While only 22 of the 86 districts supported the government in early 2007 when Schweitzer took command and 58 at the end of 2007, 72 support it today. In the six eastern provinces, there were 3,400 Afghan National Security Forces in the beginning of 2007; there are now 12,450. And all of this has been at the cost of only 11 civilian casualties in Schweitzer’s six provinces.

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