Just back inside  some more civilized wire.  I haven't seen much war out there, but that doesn't surprise me.  The wars always seem worse on CNN than they are in real life because CNN and the rest of the media don't report on things that do not go boom.

For the past few days I've been with the Afghan Army and a couple teams of Americans that have a unique role in the fielding of the Afghan National Army.  There is a lot to report and even more for me to study and research, for now I'll hit some of the high-lights.

Ultimate victory over the Taliban will be won by Afghans, not US Soldiers and Marines.  US/NATO/ISAF military forces can contain the Taliban, but ultimate destruction of the Taliban will be done by Afghans, which is why I've been so interested into digging into the Afghan National Army.

My tour guides were the Validation Transition Team Kabul and VTT 201.  The latter going by the nickname 'Zombie Killers' for their firm belief that the ultimate test of readiness is being ready for the Zombie Apocalypse.

The Afghan National Army as whole is not ready for the Zombie Apocalypse, but Colonel Zalmat Nbard, a former Mujahadeen Commander in the Northern Alliance and now Commanding Officer of an Afghan Army Battalion is as close to being ready to take on the Taliban as any ANA unit gets. 

Colonel Zalmat Nbard and JD

 Colonel Nbard, an ethnic Tajik, fought against the Soviets in the 1980s.  He became an officer in the short-lived post-communist government before going back to the Panjushir valley to rejoin Masood's Northern Alliance in the civil war.  In the late 1990's up to 2001, Col. Nbard fought the Taliban to a stand-still.  After 9/11 Nbard and others swept south with US Special Forces routing the Taliban.  Nbard is a leader of Afghans and the personification of the Afghan way of war which looks nothing like the US way of war.

Last week I rode up to Bamiyan province on a road trip using a guide book from 1962 that proved remarkably accurate.

The old books on Afghanistan by Louis Dupree and Olaf Caroe despite being 30-years-old are still spot on. Even Mountstuart Elphinstone's 'History of the Kingdom of Cabul' written in 1814 is holds up more accurately than current works on Afghanistan. The current books are too coloured by the politics of our time to be of any use.

For millenia, dynasties have come and gone. Foreign empires have invaded, been bloodied and quickly passed from the scene. The Khyber and Salong passes being a rite of passage for every empire but the Roman.

Afghanistan does not change.

Whatever we have been doing in Afghanistan for the past 8.5 years has not been working that well. The Soviets proved that a modern army cannot kill its way to victory and that a puppet Afghan National Army will quickly crumble.

The error of the US Military effort in Afghanistan is that the very bright US Army officers, when confronted with a complicated problem, come up with an even more complicated solution. Most infantry officers have a keen grasp of the complexities of counter insurgency, but not the step-by-step techniques that have been proven to quash an insurgency. The US Military is hindered by its own sophistication when it just needs to get back to basics.

The problem set on the ground is that a certain subset of people in Afghanistan want to run the country again--the Taliban. There aren't that many true Taliban, but they pay well and the work is appealing to unemployed young men.

The solution is get rid of the Taliban and their hired help or dissuade the hired help. Simple. But the US Military/ISAF/NATO do know who we need to get rid of.

The problem is nothing new. Insurgency is as old as the first empire. The solution is not new either. In fact it is so old fashioned, boring and dull that most military officers over look it. But it works and every time I have a seen a census data-base built by an infantry battalion, the war promptly ends in their area.

The Talibs and their day-laborers can hide in plain sight because US and ISAF forces do not know who everyone is. (This concept shocks some Afghans who think the American surely have some gizmo that tell them who everyone is in a town.) The local Afghans know who everyone is and use that as leverage on the Americans. Relying on local intel is necessary, but you should not rely on the locals to be your phone book.

The best census is very old fashioned and does not use the HIDE system--the HIDE sytem may be used along with a mundane access or even excell spreadsheet, but is just a supplement, not a replacement for a real database. (A good iPhone App could probably do it all with the integration of the photos.)

Soldiers and Marines need hit the streets constantly knocking on every door getting the names of everyone who lives in a house. The GPS grid of the house is noted and used as a street address. A picture of the house is taken with a digital camera. Pictures of the adult males are taken with a digital camera. The file number of the picture is tagged along with the names of the residents and the GPS grid. All of this is added into an Access database. The pictures are on corresponding power-point slides.

Bingo. You now have a clue as to who is supposed to live at that house. When you go on patrol again, you can check and see who is supposed to be in the house and confirm the data. It will take an entire deployment to get a significant database, but once a unit gets enough names, the enemy will have a hard time hiding and move on.

Other info can also be gathered like age, occupation, vehicle license plate numbers, etc.

This old, slow, boring, dull approach to fighting an insurgency works every time. But I rarely see it employed in Afghanistan. Why? It is a lot of work. It is a lot boring, dull, work and a lot of commanders are too smart and sophisticated to understand how such a boring, straight-forward tactic can work. It also looks very un-sexy on a powerpoint slide. (These operations were used more often in Iraq than I have ever seen in Afghanistan.)

Using a census takes advantage of how little Afghanistan changes. Most Afghans live their whole life within a 30 mile area. Most of the extended families have been rooted in an area for centuries.

It does not take long to start putting together what families go together, what clans go together and sub-tribes. The social networks are not complicated.

Outsiders can be identified and isolated. People coming into the area who do not live there begin to stand out. In Iraq's Anbar province, the Marines and the Son's of Iraq would deny entry or passage to people who did not live in a village. (The Sons of Iraq sometimes went a little beyond denial of entry.)

The movement of the Taliban is then limited, the flow of money, drugs, materiel, weapons, etc. stops. Local rent-a- fighters cannot be paid and the insurgency is slowly strangled all by a pen, paper, clip board, digital camera and cheap database.

Everything I've written above comes from the counter insurgency field manual written by Petraeus. In the Summer of 2007 I watched a lot of very basic, boring counter insurgency operations which resulted in a sudden halt to the extreme violence in Iraq.

Afghanistan doesn't change much. The change in commanders at the top will not change things unless Brigade and Battalion Commanders exploit the fact that Afghanistan does not change. Here's hoping Petraeus has read the old books and will demand his subordinates follow his field manual.

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I will be giving a speech / presentation in Chicago at the 1st Infantry Museum on March 3rd.

The topic will be counterinsurgency in Iraq.

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Another write-up from David Bellavia (with some interesting comments.)