McChrystal shifts to raids - and Wali Karzai
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - General Stanley McChrystal's team once talked openly about the
need to remove from power Ahmed Wali Karzai, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's
brother and the most powerful man in Kandahar.
Last October, as reports of Wali Karzai's role in the opium trade were
circulating, McChrystal's intelligence chief General Michael T Flynn said, "If
we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we
are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves."
"The only way to clean up Chicago," Flynn declared, "is to get rid of [Al]
Capone." The parallel between the legendary crime boss
and Wali Karzai could hardly have been clearer.
But by the end of March, Dexter Filkins was reporting in the New York Times
that US officials had decided that Wali Karzai "will be allowed to stay in
place".
That complete reversal on Karzai was the result of a decision by the US
military to de-emphasize the much-touted promise of governance reform in the
Kandahar operation and focus instead on Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids
targeted against suspected Taliban leaders living in Kandahar city - operations
for which McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, needs
intelligence being provided by Karzai.
McChrystal's shift in emphasis toward the targeted raids against the Taliban
was undoubtedly accelerated by the message from the Barack Obama administration
in March that he had to demonstrate progress in his counter-insurgency strategy
by the end of December 2010 rather than the mid-2011 deadline for beginning the
withdrawal of US troops.
That earlier deadline, first reported by the Washington Post on March 31, was
confirmed this month by US General Frederick Hodge, the director of operations
for all of southern Afghanistan. "Our mission is to show irreversible momentum
by the end of 2010 - that's the clock I'm using," Hodge told The Times of
London
The Pentagon's report on the past six months of the war, written in late March
and early April, reflected that shift from governance reform to night raids. It
failed to mention McChrystal's "population centric" strategy as a factor in
putting pressure on the Taliban but touted the "removal" of many "lower level"
Taliban commanders, mainly by "special operations forces".
After a few weeks of watching the results of the Marjah operation, the
officials of McChrystal's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command conceded that the Afghan government
had taken too long to put representatives of relevant ministries into the two
key districts of Helmand province. They doubted that it would do any better in
Kandahar, as The Times reported on May 11.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who frequently registers the latest
thinking of the military leadership, wrote a column on April 1 clearly
reflecting the downgrading of governance reform in the McChrystal war plan for
Kandahar and the new emphasis on targeting the Taliban.
"Shaking up the power structure might put the United States on the side of the
Pashtun man in the street," wrote Ignatius, "but it would open up a power
vacuum that could be exploited by the Taliban."
For US commanders, Ignatius revealed, "There isn't time for risky experiments
in Kandahar."
What Ignatius didn't say is that McChrystal had already ordered a major
intensification of SOF raids in Kandahar city and that those raids are
dependent primarily on intelligence supplied by organizations controlled by
Wali Karzai.
In an interview with The Times published on May 7, Karzai boasted that he alone
has supplied "the majority of intelligence in this region", adding, "I'm
passing tons of information to them."
A former NATO official had confirmed that reality a few weeks earlier. "Most of
our intelligence comes directly or indirectly from him," said the official,
according to Time magazine on March 19.
Neither the ISAF commanders nor US SOF commanders have well-developed
intelligence networks of their own in Kandahar.
Karzai has dominated the flow of intelligence to NATO forces by gaining control
over both the police and official Afghan intelligence agency in the province,
according to a new study of the power structure in Kandahar.
The study, published last month by the pro-war Institute for the Study of War,
shows how Karzai completed his consolidation of political control over the
national police in Kandahar after using the Karzai private militia used by the
Central Intelligence Agency, the Kandahar Strike Force, to kill the province
police chief and the chief of criminal investigation, who had been independent
of his influence, in a June 2009 gunfight.
Even more important, Karzai controls the Kandahar branch of the National
Directorate of Security (NDS), which combines the intelligence and secret
police agencies, as the study reveals. NDS has by far the largest network of
informants in the province and has long taken the lead in carrying out the
raids against the Taliban in Kandahar city, because of the ineffectiveness of
the national police.
In an e-mail to Inter Press Service, a spokesman for McChrystal, Lieutenant
Colonel Tadd Sholtis, acknowledged that the command accepts intelligence from
Karzai, and said it would be "foolish" to refuse it.
Sholtis said he could not comment on how much weight the ISAF command put on
intelligence from Karzai but asserted that the command has "multiple methods
and sources for collecting intelligence" in the province, and that "we evaluate
all human sources with respect to self-interest or bias".
ISAF can presumably draw on Afghan army intelligence in the province, but its
assets are believed to be minimal compared with that of the NDS. The command
also uses information from drone reconnaissance aircraft to supplement what it
gets from Karzai-controlled networks.
Reliance on drones for targeting, however, leads to constant mistakes by US
troops. Carlotta Gall reported in the New York Times on March 26 that drone
strikes had killed farmers digging ditches and bringing goods home from market
on three different occasions in recent weeks.
The ISAF command's dependence on Karzai for intelligence allows him to use US
power against his political enemies. Time's Tim McGirk reported on March 19
that critics in Kandahar said Karzai had threatened to call down NATO air
strikes or night raids by US SOF units on any tribal elders who defied him.
Karzai is widely believed to have used raids by security forces under his
control to target a number of tribal opponents, according to the Institute's
study. Karzai is deeply engaged in intervening in tribal politics across the
province, creating new alliances and making new enemies, the analysis said.
The reaffirmation of ties between the US and Karzai ensures that the whole
military effort in the province is locked into Karzai's political strategy for
maintaining his grip on power. But McChrystal, the former commander of the
Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan, has made it clear he
is ready to sacrifice the possibility for political change in order to be able
to do what he does best.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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