Afghanistan

  Insurgent Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)

  As mentioned before, the insurgents have demonstrated a capability to evolve. “The Taliban does not fight very well” was LTC Cavoli’s judgment based on his 2007 tour of duty.209 However, since then, they and the other insurgent groups have visibly improved both their actions on the battlefield and, more significantly, their ability to use a range of asymmetric tactics that give them capabilities off the battlefield. By the end of 2008, overall insurgent attacks had increased over 40 percent from the previous year.

  The Afghan insurgents, including but not limited to the Taliban, have increasingly turned to asymmetric tactics over the course of the insurgency, rather than relying on any single tactical approach including standing and fighting as they did against Operation Medusa in Panjwai district in Kandahar province in 2006 or indirect fires and the use of mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The number of IED and roadside bomb incidents increased from 307 in 2004 to 3,276 in 2008.210 The trend has continued. There were 217 IED incidents in Afghanistan in August 2007, 386 in August 2008, and 969 in August 2009.211 IEDs caused 69 percent of ISAF casualties in 2008, increasing to 77 percent in the first six months of 2009.212 This shift to asymmetric tactics was reportedly after action reviews that led to orders issued from Pakistan by Mullah Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader.213 This shift to asymmetrical tactics was seen between 2007 and 2008, when insurgent offensive actions decreased from a 50 to a 40 percent ratio of direct fire. The use of IEDs and mines increased from 20 to 30 percent. Indirect fire attacks remained at 30 percent. The number of attacks did increase overall, however, in part as a reflection of additional coalition and Afghan troops operating in contested areas.214 By 2008–10, more sophisticated ambushes, widespread suicide bombings (frequently integrated with other attacks), mine warfare, urban terrorism, and widespread targeted assassinations had all increased.

  Coordinated suicide attacks, often in urban areas, have been one type of asymmetric tactics where the insurgents have demonstrated increasing sophistication, capability, and boldness. Such suicide attack tactics were not seen in Afghanistan in the anti-Soviet conflict of 1978–92 or the 1992–2001 civil wars. “The suicide bomber is not there in Afghan culture,” BG Richard Blanchette, Canadian Forces, ISAF spokesman, said in 2008.215 Suicide bombers are frequently seen as being adapted from foreign groups, especially Al Qaeda and their allies among Pakistan-based groups; the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 is often cited as a model.216 In Afghanistan, suicide attacks as such started later, in May 2003, but increased steadily until the number of volunteers, especially foreigners, picked up to disturbing levels in 2005. By 2006, suicide attacks in Afghanistan reached an average of ten per month.217 Suicide attacks since then have increased in sophistication and damage. The coordination of attackers—both vehicle-borne and on-foot, with explosives and with rifles and grenades—and the targeting of high-value targets with political impact has been a feature of many Afghan insurgent suicide attacks. Dates with political impact have been selected for these attacks. A series of high-profile suicide attacks have had an impact on Afghan political legitimacy, showing the government’s inability to provide security. These have included the November 2007 attack in Baghlan province, the January 2008 attack on the Serena Hotel, the April 2008 national day attack, the July 2008 Indian embassy attack in Kabul, attacks on the Ministry of Information in October 2008, three sites in Kabul including the Ministry of Justice in February 2009, and a police headquarters in Kandahar in March 2009.

  The evolution of suicide attacks since they were introduced to Afghanistan has led to increased sophistication, featuring, instead of individual suicide bombers, multiple coordinated attacks, building penetration, taking of hostages and execution of prisoners (especially government employees).218 Embedding the actions of suicide attackers in a larger operation also helps ensure that the attackers retain direction and that they will not have to carry out their missions in isolation. There was considerable Afghan resistance to adopting suicide tactics in the initial years of the insurgency. The Taliban assassinated ulema that spoke against suicide attacks.219 Even in 2008, Maulavi Abd-al-Hadi “Pash Wa’l” bin-abd-al-Hakim, identified as Taliban military commander in Laghman province, was defensive about these tactics, indicating that they are still of questionable legitimacy. “We carry out martyrdom-seeking operations when needed. This happens when we cannot use other military tactics, therefore, we have used the tactics of martyrdom-seeking operations against the Crusading forces only once.”220

  The move by different Afghan insurgent groups away from direct opposition to coalition and Afghan forces applies to other tactics, not just the recent spectacular suicide attacks. “Last year [2007], we had 50 guys attack a FOB [Forward Operating Base], now 10 men each [objective], a shift to more asymmetry, more events per insurgent, less loss per event,” COL McNiece said in 2008.221 He also saw it as part of a more sophisticated insurgency, better able to apply appropriate tactics and that “someone, somewhere is learning to combine IEDs, direct [attack] and indirect [fires].” “Smaller, decentralized, and more asymmetrical warfare” was how BG Blanchette described the insurgent trends of the past year in 2008. Yet this trend did not mean the insurgents had given up a capability to mass forces when required. Groups of several hundred insurgents have made attacks, including the one that overran a joint US and Afghan National Army outpost at Komdesh in Nuristan in 2009.

  On the battlefield, despite the insurgents’ access to clandestine arms markets and funding streams, as of 2008–09 neither their weaponry nor their battlefield skills match those of the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance of the late 1980s. Yet the insurgents have demonstrated a number of considerable strengths. They have an ability to use effective cell and small unit organizations that have contributed to their resilience and ability to quickly reorganize after setbacks. They have effectively used surprise and deception in their attacks. The spread of IEDs and other guerrilla techniques suggests that the current insurgents can draw TTPs and equipment from diverse sources, such as the Chechens and Tamils.222 Many of the Afghan guerrillas today have high-quality equipment, often bought on the international market. Other equipment appears to have been bought from the Afghan security forces.223 The availability of funding and access to world weapons markets makes the absence of certain types of weapons among the insurgent forces significant. The insurgents have used no anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and few surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), even though these weapons were both used in the later stages of the 1978–92 conflict. This suggests that there has been a decision by someone to limit insurgent access to these weapons. It is unlikely that shortages of funding, training, and logistics facilities or availability of these weapons on the world market were keeping these weapons out of the hands of the Afghan insurgents in 2008–10.

  Other sources of supplies to the insurgents have also been limited. Iran has limited its supplies to a few Explosive Formed Projectile (EFP) warheads for use in roadside IEDs and Chinese-made man-portable HN-5 SAMs. GEN Petraeus in 2009 described Iran’s “malign activity” as including, “to a limited degree, arming the Taliban in western Afghanistan as well.”224

  Funding Insurgency

  Former finance minister Ashraf Ghani has described the Afghanistan insurgency in 2009. “One of the best financed insurgencies, more diverse and consolidated. They can buy a lot in a cash economy.”225 To compound an already-complex threat, the Afghan insurgency is cheap to run and has no shortage of funding.226 Like the transnational terrorism with which it shares its support network, the Afghan insurgency has access to multiple, redundant sources of funding, and narcotics cultivation and trafficking is often reported to be one of the most significant. “Powerful economic forces not run by fanatics living in caves bankroll these movements,” in the words of former AP Pakistan correspondent Gretchen Peters.227 Richard Barrett estimated that 20–30 percent of the total insurgent funding, some 60–70 million dollars
, came from narcotics, with the bulk of the remainder coming from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.228 GEN Petraeus put the percentage of insurgent funding from narcotics at about a third, with the remainder coming from donations, remittances, and criminal activity.229

  The insurgents’ non-narcotics funding coming in from sources in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, and other Islamic countries is hard to estimate but is clearly extensive, as indicated by the level at which Afghan insurgents are able to operate. The relatively few names of Saudi and Gulf state nationals on the UN sanctions lists for such activities suggests more how little is known rather than the lack of support coming from there. The Afghan insurgents’ infrastructure of financial support includes not only the hundi/hawala money transfer system that has attracted much interest since 9/11, but also networks of legitimate financial institutions, couriers, facilitators, and sources of funding that are shared by transnational terrorists, Afghan and Pakistani insurgents, and narcotics traffickers alike. In 2009, the US government estimated the Afghan insurgents’ donation income in the past 12 months at about 106 million dollars, compared to 70–400 million dollars from narcotics in differing estimates.230

  In areas such as Pakistan’s FATA and Afghanistan’s Kumar valley and Nuristan, Afghan and Pakistani insurgents alike have continued the practice of making extractive use of natural resources, especially clear-cutting forests, to feed the timber mafia in Pakistan. Some of the Afghan timber-cutting groups have been recruited, mainly by HiH, to join the insurgents when Afghan government action ended their lumber trade in the Kunar valley and Nuristan by 2008, with the unemployed Afghans and Pakistanis alike being paid to fight US forces. The cross-border ethnic Pushtun transport mafia that controls much of Pakistan’s long-distance trucking was also a long-standing ally of the pre-2001 Taliban and had links with the ISI and other Pakistani security services. While gem mining and trafficking is a relatively small percentage of the overall income, it has been carried out since the 1980s. It has now spread to Pakistan from Afghanistan as a source of insurgent funding. The TNSM took over gem mines in Swat in 2009.

  Insurgents also seek to extract money from all other aspects of daily life in Afghanistan. Cell phone companies have had their towers and facilities threatened by insurgents who demand they pay protection money. The Afghan insurgents have embraced kidnapping as a major part of their tactics of intimidation. Criminal gangs have been known to “sell” wealthy or well-connected Afghan kidnap victims up the chain to insurgent or terrorist groups to whom they may be of value as a hostage, contributing to the increased crime that undercut Afghan security in 2008–10.231

  “Greed and grievance” is a powerful force for instability in Afghanistan.232 Experiences with other insurgencies have shown that the most enduring insurgent groups are those that have access to an independent source of contraband funding.233 This also leads to conflicts over the source of such unaccountable resources.234 Narcotics cultivation and trafficking is the most significant such resource in Afghanistan.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFGHAN NARCOTICS

  “If we do not eliminate drugs, drugs will eliminate us.”

  —Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, 2006

  The global implications of narcotics cultivation are enormous. The country produced over 98 percent of the world’s illegal opium in 2008–09. Narcotics trafficking is the Vortex’s third facet of international conflict, one that may indeed have the largest global reach.

  Narcotics cultivation has greatly increased in Afghanistan since 2001.235 It has been intense in key provinces in the south. The area north of the Hindu Kush has been relatively quiet. There have been reductions in what, in the 1980s and 90s, were areas of opium cultivation, such as the plains north of Mazar-e-Sharif and Badakhshan. The UN estimated that the 2007–08 growing season produced some 8,200 tons of raw opium. Poppy cultivation in 2007–08 increased in overall yield even while the area cultivated declined 19 percent. In 2009, opium prices reached a ten-year low and more was being seized; poppy cultivation dropped by 22 percent and opium production by ten percent.236 Faced with falling world prices, in 2009 it was estimated that the Afghan insurgents have a stockpile of some 10,000 tons of raw opium that they are holding to manipulate market prices.237 Prices per kilogram of opium declined by up to a third from 2008 to 2009 and have continued to decline further in 2009–10. Yet 14 provinces in Afghanistan have no eradication program at all. In 2008, with the target goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares of land from poppy production, only 5,480 hectares were eradicated and in the southern province of Helmand, where the area used for poppy cultivation has tripled since 2006.238 Opium and refined narcotics from Afghanistan are distributed throughout diverse regional markets in Afghanistan, the former Soviet Union, and to Iran and Pakistan and throughout the end-markets in Europe, America, and Asia. Heroin from South Asia has taken up an increasing share of the market in North America.239

  Years of Afghanistan’s foreign supporters enabling the Kabul government’s efforts increased the number of drug-free provinces in Afghanistan from six in 2006 to 18 in 2008. Yet the Afghans and their foreign supporters still have a long way to go when it comes to dealing with narcotics. In 2008–09 close to 98 percent of the remaining cultivation had been concentrated in seven provinces where the insurgency is strong: Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Daikundi, Zabul, Farah, and Nimruz.240

  Opium requires instability and lawlessness for its cultivation as much as it needs labor to tend it and minimal levels of fertility and rainfall. Without these conditions, neither growers nor traffickers will make investments in both cultivation and infrastructure that assume they will make money before any outside force will take action to close them down.

  Many of the tactics aimed to defeat narcotics have the potential to help spread the insurgency. By effectively chasing opium production into those provinces where the insurgency is strong, the insurgents secured a powerful revenue stream to support their operations. But outside these provinces, narcotics are still trafficked; this has powered the culture of corruption throughout Afghanistan, including the opium-free provinces. Even “opium-free” provinces play a role in Afghanistan’s narcotics.241 Cannabis and hashish cultivation goes on in these provinces, replacing opium in many cases; in some opium-free northern provinces, the cannabis crop is reportedly yielding a higher cash return per hectare under cultivation than did opium a few years ago.242

  The Origins of the Threat

  The initial rise of opium cultivation in Afghanistan followed a US-urged campaign of suppression in Pakistan in the late 1980s. Much of the cultivation was chased over the border into Afghanistan. There was already some opium cultivation in Afghanistan, but it was largely low-intensity and small in scale. During the anti-Soviet conflict, Helmand province was one of the first areas where pro-Soviet Afghan Communists and Islamic resistance leaders, both committed to ideologies that were anti-narcotics, alike realized that the income from poppy cultivation could be vital in buying local loyalties. As so often occurred in subsequent years, ideological concerns yielded to the need for income. In the 1980s, Ismailis in Badakhshan were cultivating narcotics and, unlike other Afghans, actually using some themselves. While narcotics use among Afghans was initially rare, it expanded during the decades of war until it reached a crisis level in 2008–10.

  In the late 1980s, new varieties of opium poppy and fertilizers were introduced to Afghanistan by following trans-border trading “mafias,” mainly ethnic Pushtuns with ties throughout Pakistan, especially in the FATA and Karachi, who were making inroads across the border in Afghanistan. Once the number of Afghans with opium-growing skills reached “critical mass,” cultivation spread.

  The rise of the Taliban followed the initial rise of narcotics cultivation in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. Dissatisfaction with the increase in narcotics cultivation that had taken place in southern Afghanistan in 1992–94 helped fuel the Taliban’s initial success in that area. The Afghan Taliban was originally opposed to narcotics cultivat
ion. Their initial anti-opium positions reflected the widespread grassroots Afghan suspicion of opium as potentially falling under the Koran’s prohibition of intoxicants like alcohol.

  Yet soon after they had consolidated their hold on southern Afghanistan, the Taliban embraced opium cultivation for its financial and political benefits. Narcotics growers and traffickers who largely share the Taliban’s Pushtun ethnicity joined “mafias” as part of a pro-Taliban coalition, sharing money and credit.243 In the heyday of Taliban support for opium, it became the cash crop of choice in many areas. Even non-farmers would cultivate it for the chance of a quick profit, and in 1996–2000 the Taliban grew and exported 15 kilotons of opium.

  The July 2000 Taliban prohibition called for a stop to opium cultivation, but not export, and was widely thought to be a move to increase market prices by creating artificial scarcity. Yet its primary effect was to deepen the debt by farmers to opium traffickers who had paid them in advance for their crops and so to further the trafficker’s hold on the local population in the areas of most intense cultivation. Because of this prohibition, the price of raw opium rose some one thousand percent. Exports from existing stockpiles continued, gaining additional income for the traffickers but not for the local cultivators. Mullah Omar personally rescinded the ban after 9/11 in an attempt to rally wavering grassroots Afghan support, but his regime’s attempt to manipulate prices proved to be one of the many actions that undercut its support even among its supporters.