Admiral back in Afghanistan

Washington Post:

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Adm. Mike Mullen, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, sat across from Gov. Mohammad Ashraf Naseri, who nervously stroked his salt-and-pepper beard and ran through his problems. Taliban fighters regularly pass unmolested across Zabol's border with Pakistan. In recent months, they have launched a campaign to blow up the region's roads and force teachers to shut down local schools. This spring, they sliced off the ears of a defiant teacher.

"Do you have any help here, or are you all alone?" Mullen asked during a visit last week.

Naseri replied that the provincial government consisted of him and four other Afghans. There was no money coming from the central government in Kabul. The only funds in the area came from the harvesting of illegal poppies, which supported the Taliban.

Mullen had come to Afghanistan for the second time in the past month for a closer look at a war that President Obama has vowed to set on a new course. The admiral found a war effort still hampered by a shortage of civilian and military reconstruction experts, an Afghan government that barely exists beyond the capital and a U.S. military command that knows it must work hard to overcome the mistrust caused by years of aerial bombings and house-to-house raids.

In the next few months, the Obama administration plans to move more than 20,000 U.S. soldiers into southern Afghanistan in an effort to drive the Taliban from places such as the southeastern province of Zabol. To prevent the area from quickly falling back into chaos, the president's strategy places a heavy emphasis on rebuilding provincial governments and local economies shattered by more than three decades of war. "Combat operations are not the answer here," Mullen told a group of about three dozen U.S. troops after his meeting with the governor last week. "The answer is development so that people have a way to sustain themselves."

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In eastern Afghanistan, where the reconstruction budget increased 43 percent this year to $683 million, U.S. commanders said they have had to put long-planned reconstruction projects on hold because they don't have enough military engineers, civil affairs soldiers and contracting experts to coordinate with local companies and inspect their work. Last month, Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, sent out a classified message to the Pentagon asking for big increases in the number of soldiers in these specialties deployed to Afghanistan, said a military official who had reviewed the document.

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Building new combat engineer, civil affairs and military police units, which are all essential in counterinsurgency and nation-building operations, has not been as high a priority inside the military as adding large combat brigades in recent years.

Ultimately, military commanders said the United States needs to do a better job scouring the government for civilian experts in such areas as governance and agriculture to help in Afghanistan. Many of those civilian experts are in Iraq. In the largely peaceful Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, there are more than two dozen U.S. civilian development experts -- twice the number in all of southern Afghanistan, an area military officials have identified as their top priority. "We must generate a significant amount of civilian capacity on the ground in Afghanistan immediately -- this summer," Mullen said.

In areas of eastern Afghanistan, where the United States has pushed more combat troops in recent months, Taliban fighters seem to have melted away rather than challenge American combat units. In Wardak and Logar provinces south of Kabul, the size of the U.S. force has increased to almost 3,000 troops, up from about 300 in January.

"The locals will tell you that the Taliban heard that they were coming and simply left," said Maj. Gen. Michael S. Tucker, the deputy U.S. commander in Kabul. U.S. military PowerPoint briefing slides boast of having achieved "almost irreversible momentum" in the eastern part of the country.

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This is basically what they did in Iraq and for the same reason. They know the US forces will destroy them. I think it is why they are concentrating their attacks now in Pakistan where the government foolishly resist having US forces help them destroy the enemy. The story does change the message from the "deteriorating situation" theme of late.

The article goes through a blame Iraq message for the shortage of engineers and others civil affairs personnel. I think the US should have the capacity to provide people in both theaters without excuses. When you consider the current employment situation, I think a few help wanted ads would probably give them plenty of people to choose from.