I would like to put this out there that this industry is ready to pounce on whatever the war effort requires. If you need more security for your civilian surge, then hot damn, the security contracting industry will jump on it and meet your needs. If you need to secure convoys and guard routes up in the north, then security contractors could totally do that. If you need to train up thousands of Afghan police and military, then security contractors can totally do that as well. Whatever the war effort needs, it could be solved by utilizing the free market power of the security contracting industry. With just one caveat though.
The government must take responsibility for contracting those services. You must manage these contracts by providing the necessary man power to watch the companies, and you must write smart contracts that give the companies everything they need to accomplish the mission yet still makes it easy to control them. This is not a difficult concept to understand, and each contract should be treated with the utmost respect and care. Give the contract what it needs to be successful, by applying quality control measures and some Kaizen. Be like the worried home owner, watching over the building of their house, and the government will do just fine with managing these contracts.
The deal is that we have been doing these jobs in the war for awhile, and the only reason they have faltered is because of the lack of oversight by the government. This lack of oversight allows the environment necessary for poor management to happen within the companies.
And what really kills me is that we have seen an increase of security contractors in Afghanistan this year, so this post is completely relevant to the discussion about what is possible. Once there is good leadership on the government’s part, the companies will fall in line. We have a chance to do this right, but it takes real effort and an application of lessons learned to get it done. The pay off will be mission accomplishment and victory, and that would be something we could all be proud of and celebrate. –Matt
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Taliban grab foothold in north
By Jonathan S. Landay
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
Monday, Aug. 31 2009
BAGHLAN-I-JADID, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents have taken over parts of two
northern provinces from which they were driven in 2001, threatening to disrupt
NATO’s new supply route from Central Asia and expand a war that has largely
been confined to Afghanistan’s southern half, U.S. and Afghan officials said.
In Pakistan, a bombing targeted a police station on Sunday, killing 16 cadets
in the northwest’s Swat Valley. And in a separate attack near the border with
Afghanistan, an insurgent bomb set a NATO fuel convoy ablaze, threatening the
supply line to international forces in Afghanistan.
The two blasts hours apart and hundreds of miles from each other came as
Pakistani officials said the Taliban were ramping up strikes to avenge recent
setbacks, including the loss of territory to the military and the death of
their top leader in a CIA missile strike near the Afghan border.
Pakistan’s military has in recent months intensified its fight against the
al-Qaida-linked extremists, who threaten stability in the nuclear-armed nation
and are suspected of helping plot attacks against U.S. and NATO troops across
the border in Afghanistan.
Insurgents operating out of Baghlan district along the highway from Tajikistan
launched coordinated attacks during the Aug. 20 presidential elections, killing
the district police chief and a civilian, while losing a dozen of their own
men, local officials said. It was the worst bloodshed reported in the country
that day.
Violence has been on the rise in recent months, however, as the Taliban and
al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters have staged hit-and-run attacks, bombings and
rocket strikes on German, Belgian and Hungarian forces in Baghlan and
neighboring Kunduz provinces.
The insurgents now control three Pashtun-dominated districts in Kunduz and
Baghlan-i-Jadid, a foothold in a region that was long considered safe. With a
force estimated at 300 to 600 hard-core fighters, they operate checkpoints at
night on the highway to the north, now a major supply route, local officials
said, and are extorting money, food and lodging from villagers.
The growing Taliban presence also threatens to aggravate long-standing tension
into violence between the region’s Pashtuns — the ethnic group that dominates
the Taliban — and Tajiks.
Many Pashtuns, descendents of settlers from southern Afghanistan awarded lands
in the north in the early 20th century, supported the Taliban’s rule of the
1990s, while many Tajiks fought against the religious militia.
Another potential danger is that al-Qaida-linked foreign extremists could use
Taliban sanctuaries in the north to stir up trouble in the adjacent former
Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, whose authoritarian rulers have
brutalized their Muslim populations.
“Al-Qaida wants to have a base there,” said retired Afghan Gen. Hillaluddin
Hillal, a parliamentarian from Baghlan.
A senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed that Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks and
Pakistanis affiliated with al-Qaida have been making their way into Baghlan and
Kunduz from Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The new NATO supply link, established after Pakistani insurgents began
attacking the main logistics route from the Pakistani port of Karachi, consists
of two roads, one from Uzbekistan and one from Tajikistan. After merging, the
highway runs south through the towering Hindu Kush mountains to the main U.S.
base at Bagram and to Kabul.
“The concern is if we don’t stunt the (Taliban) growth, it could cause problems
with our northern distribution network,” said the senior intelligence official,
who asked not to be further identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak
publicly. “A couple of years ago, (Taliban leader) Mullah Omar said, ‘We need
to open up new fronts in the north and cause a dissipation of (U.S.)
resources.’ To a degree, it’s working.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Story here.
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US ‘civilian surge’ to Afghanistan just starting
By Robert Burns, AP National Security WriterStars and Stripes online edition, Tuesday, September 1, 2009
WASHINGTON — Five months after President Barack Obama ordered a “dramatic increase” in American civilian experts in Afghanistan to undergird a new military push, the so-called “civilian surge” is moving too slowly, with fewer than one-quarter of the extras in place, U.S. officials and outside experts warn.
Members of Congress and military and political leaders who have visited Afghanistan this summer say that at this pace the United States risks losing a critical opportunity to boost the war effort amid a resilient Taliban insurgency, waning public support and the deployment of thousands more American troops.
Anthony Cordesman, a civilian military analyst who spent July in Afghanistan advising the top U.S. commander there, said the announced intention to reinforce the civilian side does not match reality.
“We need to stop talking about ‘smart power’ as if we had it. We don’t have the civilians in the field,” said Cordesman, who has been advising U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal on his revamped military strategy for Afghanistan. Cordesman’s mention of “smart power” at a Brookings Institution forum last week is a phrase often used by Obama administration officials to describe linking civilian and military tools of influence.
There are worries, too, about the slow buildup of civilian reinforcements at the highest levels of the U.S. military. “Our ability to bring civilians in and surge those civilians … has not moved at a pace that probably we would like it to,” Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in July.
Administration officials heading the civilian buildup insist the program is on pace but acknowledge they have sprawling logistics problems. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who heads coordination of the effort at the State Department, says critics do not appreciate the difficulties.
“We have hundreds of people in the pipeline,” Holbrooke said a month ago. “Many people have already arrived.” He added: “Most importantly, you can’t have civilians go out (into the field) unless there’s security.”
According to figures provided by Holbrooke’s office Monday, between 90 and 100 of the approximately 450 extra civilians expected to be dispatched to Afghanistan by the end of this year already have arrived. That includes 56 sent before the Aug. 20 elections to staff hybrid civil-military teams working with Afghans at the local and provincial levels on development and governance.
Most of the rest of the team is to arrive in October and November. They are mainly from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Agriculture.
The time-consuming process of adding civilian officials in Afghanistan, officials said, begins with identifying the expertise in greatest need, then recruiting, vetting and hiring people to fill the positions.
That is followed by weeks of training for work that poses unusual challenges, including language barriers and security risks. Their deployment to Afghanistan also must be coordinated with military advances on the battlefield, so that the extra civilians do not arrive before their expertise can be put to use safely.
When Obama announced his revamped Afghan-Pakistan strategy on March 27, he said it would take more than a reinforced military effort to defeat the Taliban and establish stability in the region.
“This push must be joined by a dramatic increase in our civilian effort,” the president said. The greatest need is for agricultural specialists, educators, engineers and lawyers, he added.
The idea is to synchronize the military push with a more effective U.S. and allied civilian effort to support local and national Afghan moves to counter the Taliban. But the military push already began last month and is intensifying in the volatile southern part of Afghanistan.
Initially, Holbrooke had planned to get the approximately 450 additional civilians there by March 2010. He has sped up that goal to December 2009. Besides the 90-100 who already have arrived in Afghanistan, many others have been hired. They are undergoing training by the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute as well as civil-military training at the Indiana National Guard’s Camp Atterbury.
“We are on track,” insisted Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
The additions by the end of the year will approximately double the number of U.S. civilian officials in the country, Hayden said.
“We will likely need even more in 2010 and 2011,” she said, but that has yet to be settled in Washington.
In the view of Cordesman and other observers, those numbers may amount to too little, too late.
“Thus far the civilian ‘surge’ has not taken place,” said Mark Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, an independent advisory group that has a full-time representative in Kabul.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins wrote in a blog on her Web site while visiting southern Afghanistan in mid-August, “It appears to me that we don’t have enough civilians from America and other countries to work with the Afghans to provide security, basic services and governance structures once the Marines clear out the Taliban.”
McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is hinged to close military-civilian cooperation, Collins noted, adding: “But it looks to me like the civilian side is severely understaffed for the mission.”
It also is true that some elements of the military reinforcements that Obama identified in March have deployed more slowly than he envisioned.
For example, in his March announcement the president said that about 4,000 additional U.S. soldiers would be sent within three months to help train Afghan security forces. That timeline quickly changed, and in fact the Army brigade designated to perform that training mission is only now arriving; it is scheduled to become fully operational on Sept 20.
John Koogler, a U.S. Agency for International Development officer who shifted in July from an office in Kabul to a civil-military unit called a Provincial Reconstruction Team in the eastern city of Gardez, said part of the civilians’ challenge is to learn how to work effectively with U.S. military partners.
“There’s a lot of room for cooperation, but that also means there’s a lot of room for people stepping on people’s toes,” he said. “There is a lot of aggravation that comes with the relationship.”
Story here.