SOS Afghanistan – Are the SAS on a doomed mission?


An interview with US Afghanistan expert Thomas Johnson
by Gordon Campbell

On August 20th Afghanistan will hold a general election that is deemed virtually certain to return Hamid Karzai and his cronies to power. At best, the opposition is hoping to win enough votes to force a run-off vote, but that seems unlikely. It will be a hollow victory. Over the past five years, the Karzai government has squandered the goodwill it originally had – and is now widely seen among Afghans as being corrupt, inefficient, beholden to foreigners, warlords and the drug trade, and to be losing its war with the Taliban.

It is against this backdrop that the Key government has signaled its intention to put our combat troops back into the fray. In a couple of weeks, Cabinet is expected to respond positively to the US request for our special forces that was conveyed a few months ago by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Foreign Minister Murray McCully. This decision will entail re-deploying SAS units – presumably to the hot spots in the south of the country, and along the border with Pakistan. It will also entail winding down our successful aid and reconstruction work in the province of Bamiyan.

The wisdom of choosing to put our troops into this combat zone – in a war that many claim has already been lost – is obviously open to question. A few months ago, Prime Minister John Key was indicating that he would need to see a workable policy with a clear exit strategy, before re-deploying our combat forces. Obviously, that is no longer the case. Key is now offering the vague goal of ‘combating global terrorism” as his rationale.

At the very least, New Zealand needs to know far more about the country whose destiny we will now be fighting – and in some cases, dying – to determine. To that end, Werewolf contacted US Afghan expert and leading military adviser on Afghanistan, Thomas Johnson.

Thomas Johnson is not some left wing academic opposed to the Afghan war on principle. Far from it. He is a senior faculty member of the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. This link makes it clear that in his capacity as the director of the Program for Culture & Conflict Studies, Johnson works in co-ordination with the Department of National Security Affairs to conduct research in support of United States initiatives in Afghanistan :

Our research provides comprehensive assessments of provincial and district tribal and clan networks in Afghanistan, anthropological assessments of Afghan villages, and assessments of the operational culture of Afghan districts and villages.

Johnson’s analyses – based on extensive field research embedded with US and ISAF forces in Afghanistan – are fed back into briefings to the likes of the Council of Foreign Relations, to military commanders and deploying troops, to academics and the general public. Last October, Johnson published in Atlantic magazine an assessment of the current policy failures of the US Afghan strategy. In a nutshell, US forces are winning the battles and losing the war :

The U.S. engagement in Afghanistan is foundering because of the endemic failure to engage and protect rural villages, and to immunize them against insurgency. Many analysts have called for more troops inside the country, and for more effort to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries outside it, in neighboring Pakistan. Both developments would be welcome. Yet neither would solve the central problem of our involvement: the paradigm that has formed the backbone of the international effort since 2003—extending the reach of the central government—is in fact precisely the wrong strategy…..

To reverse its fortunes in Afghanistan, the U.S. needs to fundamentally reconfigure its operations, creating small development and security teams posted at new compounds in every district in the south and east of the country….

Deploying relatively small units in numerous forward positions would undoubtedly put more troops in harm’s way. But the Taliban have not demonstrated the ability to overrun international elements of this size, and the teams could be mutually reinforcing. (Air support would be critical.) Ultimately, we have to accept a certain amount of risk; you can’t beat a rural insurgency without a rural security presence.

As long as the compounds are discreetly sited, house Afghan soldiers to provide the most visible security presence, and fly the Afghan flag, they need not exacerbate fears of foreign occupation. Instead, they would reinforce the country’s most important, most neglected political units; strengthen the tribal elders; win local support; and reverse the slow slide into strategic failure.

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NZ SAS special forces troops will be sent back to Afghanistan on a further three year rotation...



The New Zealand National Government decided yesterday to continue
New Zealand's military involvement in Afghanistan, and will send the SAS back to Afghanistan for another three year rotation. This is in spite of previous criticisms of their alleged involvement with torture claims of prisoners they had left with US forces. It has to be remembered that NATO is now in control of combined military forces in Afghanistan, not the US Government. This announcement came as the top US general there warned that the Taleban are gaining the upper hand. Please read further:

General Stanley McChrystal told the Wall Street Journal the insurgents were moving beyond their strongholds in the south to threaten formerly stable areas in the north and west.

Prime Minister John Key said the SAS would go back for 18 months - the first such deployment since 2005.

He said it had been a difficult decision but New Zealand had to play its part in combating the breeding grounds for terrorism.

The recent bombings in Jakarta showed this country was not immune.

However, Mr Key said, New Zealand's armed forces would be pulled out within five years under a new "orderly exit" strategy.

He said the government wanted to gradually withdraw its 140 military personnel working in the Bamiyan Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) over the next three to five years.

In their place, it would gradually introduce more civilian experts and aid workers to focus on health, education, agriculture and strengthening the Afghan police.

While Mr Key said he had hoped to withdraw the troops sooner, he was cautious, saying that leaving before Afghan administrations and police were ready to take over would waste the efforts of the PRT.

General McChrystal is preparing an interim assessment that is expected to be a sober accounting of the difficulties of fighting an entrenched and technically capable insurgency eight years into the war.

He is expected to identify shortfalls that should be filled by more forces - perhaps a mix of Afghan, Nato and US.

US National Security Adviser James Jones said yesterday that the United States would know "by the end of next year" whether the revamped war plan President Barack Obama announced in March was taking hold.

He did not rule out adding more US forces to help to turn around the war.

In a break from the traditionally bipartisan positions on defence and foreign affairs, Labour leader Phil Goff said he did not support sending the SAS back and believed Mr Key had caved in to "overt" US pressure.

The decision risked jeopardising the goodwill the PRT had built up.

New Zealand was small and "the number of people we put in in terms of the SAS is not going to make the difference one way or the other".

Mr Goff said there was a high risk of civilian casualties in fighting the insurgents and New Zealand's efforts were better used in reconstruction. That is not a general view held by the NZ public, who would be supportive of a limited time frame for military involvement in Afghanistan, subject to a future review before the rotation period was over..

The decision to send the SAS back follows a government review of New Zealand's role and requests for Wellington to send the troops to work again alongside American special forces against the Taleban and Al Qaeda.

Acknowledgements: NZ Herald, TV ONE NEWS

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION, BAD NEWS FOR NEW ZEALAND...

Guilt by its association with the Bush regime could spell bad news for New Zealand. While NZ kept their combat forces out of Iraq, they have been involved in Afghanistan for a number of years and have cost the New Zealand taxpayer millions of dollars..

Their highly proficient special forces, the SAS, apparently handed over 50-70 Afghan prisoners to the Americans from 2002, and now may be guilty by association with those responsible for torturing these prisoners. New Zealand could be guilty of "war crimes" because of that association with President George W Bush's campaign against terror.

After a two year investigation, awkward questions may now be asked of New Zealand's involvement with alleged torture of prisoners at the Kandahar detention centre in southern Afghanistan - known as 'Camp Slappy'. This could account for the apparent delay by the new conservative National Government in NZ to make a decision concerning the future of the New Zealand SAS's involvement in Afghanistan.

New Zealand has had a proud record with its highly trained and well disciplined combat troops. It doesn't have a large number of special forces troops, but what it lacks in quantity it makes up in quality. The NZ Government will not be happy campers with these allegations of torture, and may well decide against sending the troops to Afghanistan in future. However, that will not be the only criteria for consideration of the SAS's future involvement - potential terrorism within NZ will also have to be considered as well.

"Its a war crime to keep a ghost detainee; its a war crime to let them be abused. I've come to expect bad of the United States since post 9/11. But I would have hoped New Zealand which is a signatory to the (Geneva) Convention, would have obeyed the Convention".

Human Rights lawyer, Michael Ratner.

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