Washington Post July 5, 2009 Pg. 1 Afghan-Pakistani Hostility Impedes U.S. Troops
By Greg Jaffe, Washington Post Staff Writer
ON THE AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN BORDER -- Lt. Gabe Lamois's mission sounded simple: Hike down the hill to the Pakistani Frontier Corps' border post, inform the commander there that U.S. and Afghan troops were going to be moving through the area at 3 a.m., and hike back up the hill.
Before Lamois had even finished speaking, the Pakistani officer was shaking his head. "We have a lot of enemies here," Lt. Ghulam Habib explained. His jittery troops might mistake the Americans for the Taliban and shoot them.
"How about 4 a.m.?" Lamois asked.
"Impossible; 7 a.m.," Habib countered.
The haggling turned to pleading before they settled on 5:30 a.m. Lamois walked off, and the Pakistani commander, eager to demonstrate that he was in charge of the area, trained his machine guns and mortar tubes on the U.S. campsite, about 500 yards away.
"It's a strange relationship, considering we're supposed to be allies," Lamois groused.
Senior U.S. and Pakistani officials have stepped up efforts in recent months to tame the chaotic border area, used by the Taliban as a base from which to fire rockets at U.S. positions in Afghanistan and smuggle fighters and weapons. But high-level talks have not led to cooperation on the ground, where U.S. tro! ops are struggling to overcome decades of enmity between Afghanistan a nd Pakistan.
"I am not sure why the [Pakistanis] are even here, except to stick a thumb in the eye of the Afghans," said Maj. Jason Dempsey, the No. 3 officer in the U.S. battalion on the border.
When 800 troops from the Army's 10th Mountain Division moved into the area in February, it marked the first large-scale U.S. presence on the border in Konar province since the invasion in late 2001. The Americans had been in place only a few weeks when the local Pakistani commander summoned them and the senior Afghan commander in the area for an emergency meeting to discuss his fears that Afghan forces, backed by U.S. airpower, were planning to attack Pakistani posts.
U.S. officials said the Pakistanis were angry that the Afghans were building a new fort on the ridgeline between the two countries. Pakistan has long suspected that Afghanistan wants to grab Pashtun tribal lands on its side of the border. The meeting quickly became "very ugly and emotional," said Lt. ! Col. Mark O'Donnell, the senior U.S. officer in the area.
The local Afghan commander said he needed the new border fort to hold off Taliban fighters who had fired on his troops from Pakistani army positions a few months earlier, killing four Afghan soldiers and wounding a U.S. adviser. The Pakistani colonel denied the firefight had ever happened, prompting the Afghan to pull out his cellphone, on which he had saved a video of the battle. Before he could play it, O'Donnell interceded.
To break through the suspicion, the 10th Mountain troops planned to hold a series of meetings with their Pakistani counterparts. But they quickly realized that the rugged terrain, poor Afghan roads and a shortage of U.S. helicopters made frequent visits impossible. "On the map, the border looks like it's only three or four kilometers away," Dempsey said. "The reality is that it is a major operation for us just to get to there."
For the Taliban, it is much easier. Its fighters ! drive on paved Pakistani roads to the border, where they regularly lau nch rockets toward the U.S. bases from sites within just a few hundred yards of the Pakistani positions. The Americans respond with a barrage of artillery. In the middle of one recent U.S. counterattack, Dempsey's Nokia cellphone chirped with a text message from his Pakistani counterpart: "Sir, rounds are falling 200-300 meters short of our post. Plz adjust your fire. Thanx."
When they arrived in the area, the Americans assumed that the Pakistani troops were cooperating with their former Taliban allies. But after visiting the border posts, they realized that the terrified Frontier Corps soldiers were essentially prisoners in their posts. At the Karir Pass, the site of most of the Taliban rocket launches, the Pakistani troops are flown via helicopter to their border forts, each a cluster of small buildings made out of rocks, with no running water. Their food is also airlifted in every few weeks.
Although there is a paved road leading from their border post to a ne! arby Pakistani village, the Frontier Corps troops get their water from a natural spring in Afghanistan.
"We asked them why they didn't get their water from the Pakistani village," recalled Command Sgt. Maj. James Carabello. "They told us that if they went into the village that the Taliban would cut their heads off."
Every few weeks, a team of U.S. and Afghan soldiers flies up to the border area to kick over the Taliban rocket-launch sites and blow up Taliban safe houses, used to store weapons and food. In April, U.S. and Afghan troops destroyed 10 Taliban launch sites during a three-day operation. The enemy salvos slowed, only to start up again in early June. Although the Taliban fire is often inaccurate, military officials said, one well-placed shot at the main U.S. base in the valley could cause major casualties.
"We've got to figure out how to get some presence up there on the border," O'Donnell, the U.S. commander in the area, told his officers in mid-! June. "We've been really lucky so far." A few days later, about 60 U.S . and Afghan soldiers climbed into two CH-47 Chinook helicopters that ferried them up to the mountains near the Karir Pass.
After seven minutes in the air -- a journey that would have taken a full day on foot -- the troops scrambled out of the back of the helicopters, taking cover behind crumbling fighting positions from an earlier war. Snow covered the nearby peaks. Narrow donkey trails and the dry ravines known as wadis, used by the Taliban forces to hide from U.S. surveillance aircraft, snaked through the rocky soil.
A team of U.S. and Afghan scouts marched off to search for Taliban bunkers and rocket-launch sites. Dempsey and Capt. Michael Harrison, who leads a 140-member infantry company in the area, headed off in the opposite direction to meet with Pakistani troops.
In late April, Dempsey and Harrison had shared a pot of tea with the Pakistani soldiers in their dark stone fort. This time, Habib, who had replaced the previous commander three weeks earl! ier, intercepted them on the mountainside and told them they were not permitted inside his base. He sent one of his privates off to fetch a thermos of sweet green tea and wedged himself between two boulders and a scraggly tree.
"Do you know Captain Shahab at the Nawa Pass border fort?" Harrison asked brightly. "He's a good friend of mine. He gave me his cricket bat."
Habib, who wore a simple, tan army tunic and carried a rusted British rifle, nodded. In his new posting, he commanded about 30 soldiers. The Americans, trying to make conversation, asked him about his military career, his troops and his family. He replied that he had been a soldier for 17 years and had six young children back in Karachi.
"Now I know why you are at the border instead of back home," Dempsey joked, pulling out a snapshot of his children playing in the snow. One of Habib's privates studied the picture intently. "California?" he asked.
"No. It's New York," Dempsey said.After a few minutes of awkward small talk, Habib asked the Americans why they had come to his border post, perched on a rocky cliff at a place that suggested the end of the world. "Someone has been shooting rockets at us from over on that ridge," Dempsey said, pointing to a stone outcropping about 250 yards away. "We wondered if you had seen anything."
"The Taliban are the enemy of Pakistan and the U.S. Army," Habib said.
"Do you ever see people firing rockets?"
"I don't know anything about it," Habib replied.
Later, the Americans trudged back up to their campsite and spent the rest of the day searching the surrounding mountains for the donkey trails the Taliban was using to move across the border. They kicked over a crudely built stone wall with black scorch marks at its base, a telltale sign that it was used for rocket launches, and they took pictures of a four-room building being built on an isolated ridge about 50 yards from the border. They also stumbled across simple graves dating back to Afghanistan's war agains! t the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
U.S. commanders have been able to slow the flow of Taliban fighters across the 90-mile stretch of border by winning over Afghans who live in the Konar River valley, which the insurgents must traverse as they move deeper into Afghanistan. But to stop the influx entirely, U.S. officials said, they must have the support of deeply suspicious Pakistani forces. One idea is to open a border coordination center on the Afghan side where commanders from all three countries could plan operations.
"Our goal is to get everyone focused on the common enemy," Dempsey said, referring to the Taliban insurgents.
As night fell on the border, explosions from the Pakistani military's ongoing fight with the Taliban in the tribal areas boomed in the distance. Taliban radio traffic, which the fighters know the Americans intercept, chattered with threats. "Shoot the infidels," a voice said in Pashto. "Hold your position. I will be there soon," said ! another. But the attack never came.
Next morning, as the sun beg an to crest the Hindu Kush mountains, the U.S. and Afghan troops hiked down to Habib's border fort, ignoring the Pakistani officer's warning to wait until 5:30 a.m. to pass. Testily, Habib told them to detour around his outpost, prompting one of the Afghan soldiers to chamber a round in his rifle.
A U.S. adviser to the Afghan army quickly interceded. "Cut that stupid [expletive] out and keep walking," the Marine sergeant barked.
Washington Times July 5, 2009 Pg. B3 Why We Need Better Ships'Inexpensive and stealthy' combat vessel is neither
By Adm. James Lyons
Congressional testimony by the leadership of the U.S. Navy has crystallized key issues facing the seagoing service.
In making its case for its current shipbuilding plan, a mixture of high- and low-end ships, the Navy says it ! is on the right course in seeking significant numbers of low-end Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). But costs have spiraled out of control. Rep. Gene Taylor, chairman of the House Armed Services sea power and expeditionary forces subcommittee, wants to place a cap on LCS costs and, if the contractors are unable to meet the cost cap, reopen the competition.
The LCS concept when it was conceived was to be a very "inexpensive stealthy" ship that would provide the larger force structure needed for the Navy to carry out its forward-deployed mission. In execution, however, LCS has become emblematic of everything wrong in our acquisition and strategic thinking.
First, it costs nearly threefold what it was intended to cost - well toward $700 million for each of the first two ships (before adding the costs of any modules that are essential for the ship's combat capability).
In the next iteration, the ships are still estimated to cost more than twice the targeted cost - a! gain without the modules. These mission modules are also running over cost and falling short of performance requirements. In recognition of these realities, the Navy is buying fewer modules - further increasing risks.
In addition, the first LCS hull, USS Freedom, is overweight and fragile (it cannot always travel fast enough) and has stability problems.
The high-speed fuel consumption of both designs, neither of them stealthy, will sharply limit their capacity to execute their intended operations. Other problems are surfacing - such as overworked crews - that have affected retention rates. But all these problems pale next to the real issue: survivability in combat.
Aligning a shipbuilding plan with "today's environment" is precisely the problem. The Navy must have the depth of high-end-capable forces to prevail in any conflict. Instead, we are pursuing low-end ships that are too expensive to achieve a forward-deployed "presence" but incapable of surviving in serious combat.
Retired Vice Adm. John Morgan wrote in a May 2! 4 letter to The Washington Times that he supports the Navy's shipbuilding plan and praised the LCS as exactly the right kind of ship for the future Navy.
Adm. Morgan added that "presence" is the U.S. Navy's reason for being. Hogwash! Adm. Morgan does not understand that as a major power and an "island" nation between two oceans, we must have a maritime strategy that enables us - at any time - to control sea areas vital to our core interests.
The emerging threats we face in the 30- to 40-year lifetime of the ships we build today are clear and greatly exceed the capability of a fleet of LCS ships. Our forward-deployed ships must have recognized capabilities to go in "harm's way." That's the key element in deterrence. Forward presence is the beginning of the Navy's mission, not the end.
As a result of all these problems, the LCS-class ship is the wrong program on which to spend the Navy's limited shipbuilding funds. I think at this point, a far better alterna! tive would be to terminate the failed experiment.
The program sh ould return to its original target of $220 million per ship and combine with the U.S. Coast Guard to build a dual-purpose ship with a credible integral combat system that can meet limited warfare requirements. This very different ship should be built in large numbers as part of the coming Ocean Patrol Cutter Program.
Such a change would achieve huge savings for both the Navy and the Coast Guard tied to large production numbers. The funding saved from canceling the LCS could be used to procure the most capable high-end combatant ship with margins enough to allow future modernization.
If we obtain enough of them, these high-end ships will excel in the Navy's Networked Future Force - indeed, they will transform it. Further, they will give our Navy the future capacity to meet any challenge and win - and that always has been and always will be our Navy's real mission.
Retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Lyons was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, senior! U.S. military representative to the United Nations, and deputy chief of naval operations, where he was principal adviser on all Joint Chiefs of Staff matters.
