ISAF: I Saw Americans Fighting

Free Ranging Afghanistan Chapter 16

The acronym ISAF stands for the International Security Assistance Force. It was established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1386 as part of the Bonn Agreement and lasted from 2001 to 2014. The initial ISAF mission was to provide security for Kabul and was headed by the Commanding General of the 3^rd UK Mechanized Division, who arrived in December 2001. The Turks replaced them in February of 2002, and in November of that year, the Germans deployed a brigade to Kabul and took over command of ISAF. You can see the problem immediately. The general officers leading this effort needed to be in command longer to learn anything useful about Afghanistan or the other services they commanded.

In August 2003, NATO assumed responsibility for commanding ISAF rotations and began expanding the international security umbrella into the Northern provinces. Over the next three years, ISAF expanded its security umbrella until it took responsibility for the entire country in October 2006. Most ISAF forces on the ground were Provincial Reconstruction Teams, which were not organized or equipped for sustained ground combat. However, ISAF was not the only military operating in Afghanistan. The United States Central Command was fighting its counterterrorism war in Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), which was independent of ISAF.

My former boss, General John R Allen, USMC, the 14th ISAF Commanding General, in 10 years showcased the proto-wokeness that led to a collapse in the prestige of American flag officers. Prestige is an emergent property of masculine competence hierarchies. When a profession becomes coded as women’s work, its prestige immediately collapses.

For example, in Jalalabad, the Nangarhar Provincial Reconstruction Team, always American, was across the street from FOB Fenty at the Jalalabad Airfield, home to the American army brigade in charge of RC East. Next to the PRT was an Afghan Army Brigade Headquarters with embedded mentors from the United States Marine Corps. The Afghan Army mentors and the PRT were assigned to ISAF with command and control provided by a headquarters at Camp Phoenix in Kabul. The American army brigade across the street from them was part of Operation Enduring Freedom, with command and control provided by a headquarters located inside Bagram Air Base. ISAF and OEF commands were technically subordinate to ISAF headquarters in Kabul, but OEF’s operational control remained with the American theater commander at US Central Command (CENTCOM).

Also on the Jalalabad Airfield was a SEAL Team 6 platoon with an attachment of Rangers in a separate high-security compound on the CIA side of the base who answered to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) headquarters in Bagram and were in support of, but not controlled by, the OEF headquarters. The same applied to the Green Berets, which had an Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) in their secured camp (with DFAC, armory, ranges, and ammunition storage and headquarters troops) on FOB Fenty’s side of the airfield. They operated independently of the Tier 1 SOF units across the runway from them, although they answered to the same JSOC headquarters as the SEALs. Adding another layer of complexity to the command environment, FOB Fenty also housed a large CIA facility on the SEAL side of the airfield. I knew the facility housed unlimited cases of sparkling German mineral water but little else about its contents or purpose.

I Saw Americans Fighting was an epithet American service members threw at the forty-two other nations that deployed troops to Afghanistan but limited their activities with caveats. There were 215 caveats —some reasonable, some not —that seemed designed to reinforce the notion that ISAF Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were not combatants. First, every other nation refused (in writing) to let their forces operate in conjunction with OEF forces. Most countries stipulated their forces would not be deployed in the kinetic areas of the South and East Regional Commands. Many countries refused to allow Afghans on their military aircraft, fight in the snow, fight at night, or send out a quick reaction force for internationals in distress. But the harsh realities of a resurgent Taliban in Southern Afghanistan required the Brits, Canadians, and Australians to operate with OEF forces and use OEF enablers (Tac Air, ISR, Medevacs, combat engineers, etc.) when heavily pressed by Taliban attacks.

By operating independently of ISAF and OEF forces, I got a good sense of how they viewed local Afghans who were suspect at best, enemies at worst, and not to be trusted until proven otherwise. When I showed up heading an armed Afghan PSD team at the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in the Western Region, I was treated as a local in Herat. Our USAID client was granted entry to the Italian PRT, but we weren’t because we were armed. In Badghis Province, we didn’t even try to enter the Spanish PRT, but ran into a patrol in the capital, Qala-e Naw, and were invited to their camp for dinner. They were super friendly and said they’d gladly come to our aid if needed. In Ghor province, there was a Lithuanian PRT in the capital of Chaghcharan (now called Firuzkoh), and their compound included a giant sauna with many attractive servicewomen walking about, including what appeared to be a customized chow hall. I hoped they would take pity on a lone American and maybe feed me some booze and let me hang out in the sauna, but we were not allowed inside the PRT.

The food assessment mission was in December of 2005, and the Afghans didn’t know what to make of ISAF units back then because they stayed on their bases and didn't frequent the local bazaars like the Soviet troops had in the 1980s. Many Afghans I spoke with found that behavior insulting and cowardly. They could not believe thousands of foreigners could occupy bases around the country without buying anything from the local economy. The thought that these foreigners were somehow bringing “security” to the people from inside these large bases was absurd. I repeatedly heard the phrase, “How can the Americans protect us when they cannot protect themselves”?

The PRTs were not designed to engage in ground combat, but plenty of nations did send combat units to fight under ISAF. Canada fought hard in Kandahar province; the UK in Helmand; Australia in Uruzgan province; the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians in Helmand; and the Poles and Georgians in Ghazni Province, as did many more countries.

American military members often slighted the French army, but from my perspective, they were one of the most efficient forces in the field. My perspective was the Afghan perspective, and for Afghans, running into American or British army convoys was a time-wasting hassle that could turn deadly in the blink of an eye. Unlike the Americans and Brits, the French never tried to keep all local traffic away from their vehicles. They allowed it to mix in with them, as did the Afghan army, so they did not impede traffic flow on the two-lane ring road.

American and British convoys tried to keep all civilian traffic away from them, causing giant traffic jams on the ring roads when they moved. Afghans are not disciplined drivers or patient people, so when traffic jams, they will fill both lanes and the road shoulders to maintain forward momentum at all costs. Being stuck behind an ISAF convoy added hours to any trip outside of Kabul.

Having a more professional counterinsurgency approach wasn’t the only reason I respected the French Army. Their response after losing their first battle in the Uzbin Valley was impressive. The French went from getting their asses kicked to kicking ass in less than three months. Shortly after the Uzbin ambush, they nailed an eerily accurate RPG gunner I had nicknamed “The Mechanic.” He consistently hit tankers and police trucks from a perch high above the Kabul River, and I often wrote about him on the FRI blog, where I posted dozens of pictures of the trucks and vehicles he had taken out. Once he was gone, the carnage on the J-bad to Kabul Road dropped dramatically.

Getting stuck behind an American Army convoy was dangerous because of the propensity of the soldiers to shoot at vehicles they thought were too close.

As a retired Marine Corps infantry officer, I had expectations about what I would see in Afghanistan. The military trained for decades in counterinsurgency, though it was not addressed comprehensively. In the Marine Corps, our maneuver warfare doctrine viewed counterinsurgency training as a valuable means of introducing friction into training events. When I taught at the Infantry Officer Course (IOC), we had the students occupy a “suspected insurgent village” that was abandoned, except for my three young children, who refused to answer any questions and were uncooperative. Nothing caused a helmet fire for a young lieutenant faster than finding a lone infant with two young girls (both under five years of age) with no other adults or villagers in sight. What now, Lieutenant, indeed! They would always ask us what they should do, and we told them we had no idea and let the problem play out. That improvisation was excellent training that forced lieutenants to make decisions for which they had no preparation or training. Still, like all counterinsurgency training of the day, it was not directly relevant to Afghanistan.

This was to be expected. Forecasting the exact nature of future conflict is a fool’s errand, but inserting friction into a tactical problem is always worth the effort. As a professional infantry dude, I knew for sure that we would never find ourselves sent into a situation nearly identical to Vietnam again.

Yet here we were facing an enemy with a safe harbor on the other side of the 1,640-mile-long border where they could rest, train, and refit. The Taliban had military trainers, weapons, and ammunition provided by our alleged ally, Pakistan, with financial support from other supposed allies in the Gulf States. The central government we installed was even more irredeemably corrupt than the Government of South Vietnam and required the presence of infidel military occupation troops to remain in power. Once again, Congress refused to do its job regarding the deployment of combat forces by declaring war. Instead, they used the emergency resolution granted to the Bush administration in 2001 as justification to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, then to bomb Libya and lord knows what other mischief over the past twenty-plus years. But unlike South Vietnam, we did an utterly incompetent job of training the host country’s military.

ISAF doing COIN in Kunar Province

Afghanistan had a feature that only some Westerners understood or considered when constructing a mission statement that reflected reality. Almost half of all Afghan marriages are consanguineous, meaning they involve first- or second-cousins. A 2012 countrywide study of 7,140 marriage certificates found the proportion of consanguineous marriages in the country was 46.2%, ranging from a low of 38.2% in Kabul province to a high of 51.2% in Bamyan province. The consequences of this phenomenon were described by Randall Parker in the United Kingdom’s Report of the Iraq Inquiry, where he noted:

“Consanguinity [cousin marriage] is the biggest underappreciated factor in Western analyses of Middle Eastern politics. Most Western political theorists seem blind to the importance of pre-ideological kinship-based political bonds largely because those bonds are not derived from abstract Western ideological models of how societies and political systems should be organized. … Extended families that are incredibly tightly bound are the enemy of civil society because family alliances override any consideration of fairness to people in the larger society”.

100 meters away from the ISAF trucks are the Taliban. The tennis shoes, short pant length, and camo vests are a dead giveaway that no Afghan will miss, but few ISAF soldiers recognize. Note that some of these enemy combatants have tunics with squared hems—that’s a Pakistani shalwar kameez. Afghans have rounded hems on their tunics.

There was never a chance—not one—that Afghanistan would function as a Western-style democracy once the international community departed. A point that was obvious by 2008 and one I made incessantly on my Free Range International blog. During my three years in Jalalabad, I watched the army expand its operations in the Kunar and Nuristan provinces with bewilderment. It was inconceivable to me that army colonels believed paving the Pech Valley road or putting a combat outpost in the remote valleys of Nuristan would help win the population over to the government’s side. The Afghans living in those provinces were not all Taliban, yet they still hated the central government because it was corrupt, predatory, and the creation of infidels. The Afghans don’t hate all foreigners. They’re more than happy to work with and befriend infidels who were not trying to inflict a corrupt central government on them at the point of their bayonets.