Kuwait Reflections...

I am in what must feel more like purgatory than any other place on earth: Kuwait.

I've spent the morning awake, in a distinctly clear haze. This is a type of haze that can only be understood by someone who has been to Kuwait or undergone America's version of non-torture torture...err, interrogation (the one that no longer includes water boarding). After 48 hours of non-stop airplane and waiting, with only short spurts of sleep to break the reading and thinking, you arrive in Kuwait, spend a few hours waiting in various lines and carrying hundreds of pounds of baggage, finding yourself in a tent with others in the same sort of haze – the middle of the night, not awake but definitely not asleep – a tent with a light that does not turn off – a base with a sun that does not turn off, provided by a mix of spotlights and florescent lights, a steady noise of generators and loudspeaker announcements and airplanes – a haze that only someone who's been to Kuwait or undergone the soft touch of American torture can understand.

Here I am, a smile on my face. Strangely, for the first time, why I am here seems refreshingly clear. But it makes no sense to start with that – at least in this haze; allow me to start with why AMERICA is here (and by "here" I mean Afghanistan, not Kuwait).

I'll start by saying I really have no idea. But the following is my best guess. 'Merica came to Afghanistan because this is the land where Bin Laden and his associates planned the 9/11 attacks, followed by the refusal of the Taliban to give up Bin Laden and his associates.

For the following seven years, we did very little other than hunt down and kill Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We did a fine job of it – by the end of Bush's presidency there were very few Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. Unfortunately for the new guys in the White House, most of them had simply moved next door to the loosely governed regions of Pakistan. In addition to this, a largely undisturbed insurgency in the form of the Taliban had metastasized and spread it's roots.

Around February 2008, a new bunch took power in Washington and decided that, while things appeared to be on the up and up in Iraq, Afghanistan had seen little progress; in fact, things appeared to be going down hill. Following a few months of assessment, the new bunch came to understand that things were not going down hill, but were falling off a cliff. Afghanistan was going to the Islamic hell in a hand basket.

What were our options? Why do we care? Why does this place matter?

Well, I think Afghanistan matters because if the current government falls, the new government to take over – some form of the Taliban or the Haqqani network or some sick hybrid – would possibly welcome back in the international terrorist movement and we'd be back in there before we knew it.

But they currently operate freely in the tribal areas, why does it matter what happens in Afghanistan? Well, if we ever make any headway with the Pakistanis, which is a necessary piece of this puzzle, then we'll need to be sure that the terrorists can't simply move back into Afghanistan. You may think that this seems silly – how can we hope to build and nurture an Afghan government that has the will and capability to keep terrorists off it's soil if we can not even achieve this with Pakistan? I'm not sure about this question...

So what's the deal here? Counterinsurgency? Is that what we're doing? Not exactly. Counterinsurgency requires huge numbers of troops protecting the population from the insurgency and would likely cost the US unimaginable numbers of dollars over a long period of time. This is something that we are in no position to do after ten years of floundering.

Ok, how about counterterrorism? Well, this isn't exactly what's going on either. The traditional idea of counterterrorism involves pin pointed strikes to take out potential terrorists while minimizing the amount of resources spent in other areas. This is generally imagined as a job conducted by special operations forces and the CIA. If this was the case, why did we have such a large troop surge in Afghan? This isn't it.

Hmm... maybe it's a combination of the two. This would make sense, given that counterterrorism is only really effective when you have the on the ground intelligence necessary to pinpoint targets, intelligence that can most effectively be achieved by boots on the ground interacting with the populace (counterinsurgency). Still, this would require huge a huge commitment of troops on the ground, and while we have increased our troops numbers, we're nowhere near the level of 40-60 per Afghan called for by most counterinsurgency theorists. To reach this, we'd be talking about hundreds of thousands rather than tens of thousands.

What I think we have been doing is an approach that gives us the opportunity to succeed, but doesn't commit our nation in a way that we committed to Vietnam. In other terms, we've committed to a limited war (limited resources) for limited objectives. So what are our objectives? I would describe it very simply: get in the Taliban's face as much as possibly, disrupt their operations, kill their mid level leaders, and generally sideline them for as long as possible. This will give the opportunity for the Afghan security forces to train up and become an effective force, allowing them to step in and provide the security that we're attempted to provide. From there, the Afghan security forces will ideally be able to conduct their own counterinsurgency over a greater period of time at a far reduced cost.

Will this work? Probably not very well. One of the main elements I've excluded from my analysis is the Afghan government, which can be accurately described as the most corrupt government on earth. No matter what we or the Afghan security forces do, if the government of Afghanistan (read Karzai) does not change it's approach (read replace Karzai), then we will get nowhere. When is the next election?

There are of course other factors. Our actions in Pakistan are extremely effective given the low amount of resources we've given them. We kill Taliban and Al Qaeda virtually daily through the use of drone strikes and on the ground intelligence gathering (go CIA). This is saving Afghan and US lives by hampering the Taliban's operations (Taliban used as an umbrella term to include groups that are related to but are by no means the Taliban). But it's not enough; our ability to do this is largely based on our schizophrenic relationship with Pakistan's government and military, and pending actual troops penetrating into the tribal areas and killing the high level leadership, this is disruption, not destruction.

So, I've gone into a little bit about what I think we're doing. I've failed to really address why it's important. Soon I'll also get into what I am doing and why it's important to me. I'm starting off slow.

Here's something. Why am I here? Because it sounds like a hell of an adventure. More to follow on that! Stay tuned. I gotta get this adventure rolling. Off I go to the flight line with 4 bags, each 50 pounds plus. Do me a favor and cross your fingers – I'm really hoping this plane has room.

Please forgive misspellings and grammatical errors. I'm usually a stickler for those, but no time ... no time. Sleeeeeeeeeeeep.